He doesn’t answer. Vivi watches him not answer with the patience of someone who has known him for several hundred years and understands that his silences are more informative than his words.
“You know,” she says, “the last time she did this, it was with someone you loved.”
“I’m aware.”
“And now she’s done it with a mundane.” Vivi tilts her head. “Children aren’t subtle, Erath.”
Erath looks at the river. The souls drift. The water moves. Somewhere beneath the surface, another soul-eater is probably forming, another piece of vermin that will need to be rooted out and destroyed, and there will be another after that, and another, because the work never ends and the dead never stop coming.
“What she sees,” he says, “is a man who protected her from something scary. She’s a child. She sees kindness and decides it’s permanent.”
“And you? What do you see?”
He sees a man standing in his kitchen with shaking hands and a voice that almost didn’t waver. He sees the space he’d created when he stepped back and the expression on Sidney’s face when the push he’d been bracing for didn’t come.
He doesn’t say any of this.
“It’s complicated,” he says.
Vivi makes a ‘hm’ sound, turns and walks back toward the eastern crossing, list in hand. Erath stands at the river for a long time after she’s gone. The water moves. The souls drift. The cold wraps around him, familiar and constant, and he thinks about what Vivi said about children not being subtle.
He thinks about the plan. The correct, responsible, strategically sound plan. The one where he severs the bond and lets Sidney go and resolves this through proper channels and never walks a bartender home from work again.
It’s a good plan.
He doesn’t believe for a second that he’s going to follow it.
Chapter 9
Xela has had as much of his shit as she’s willing to take.
“Go home,” she says, when Sidney is doubled over at the sink after having tried to carry a rack of glasses and discovering, for the third time today, that his ribs have opinions about this. Strong opinions. Opinions that express themselves through a pain so specific and so total that his vision tunnels and his knees go soft and the rack nearly ends up on the floor along with every pint glass in it.
“Go home and do what?” Sidney straightens up. The straightening takes longer than it should. It involves a sound he will deny until his last breath. “Lie on my couch and stare at the ceiling?”
“Yes, Sidney.” Xela is behind the bar, arms crossed, black hair pulled back, wearing the expression she reserves for situations in which she is right and he is wrong and she is rapidly losing patience with the distance between the two. “That’s called resting.”
“I don’t rest. So I might as well be working.” He braces his hand against the edge of the sink and breathes through thelast of it. “Either I’m going to spend the afternoon reorganizing my apartment or I’m going to make drinks. Which one do you prefer?”
She grumbles. The grumble is a living thing, mostly consonants and partially in a language that hasn’t been spoken above ground in several centuries. Sidney has worked with Xela long enough to know that her grumbles have gradients. This one is somewhere between “you’re an idiot and I love you” and “you’re an idiot and I’m going to let you suffer the consequences,” which is about where most of their interactions land.
She doesn’t make him go home. She never makes him go home. She just makes sure he understands how she feels about his choices and then watches him make them anyway, which is the Xela equivalent of unconditional support.
He hobbles through the rest of his shift. His regulars give him sympathetic looks but don’t ask questions. They know better. The supernatural community in Haven is good at minding its own business, or at least at pretending to mind its own business while keeping a very close eye on things, and Sidney appreciates both the pretense and the reality. Gerald raises his glass from his permanent post at the end of the bar, which could mean anything from “hang in there” to “I acknowledge your existence” to nothing at all, and Sidney nods at him and keeps moving.
He figures he’s safer at the bar than he is at his apartment. The Coven already knows where he lives. They’ve already sent people. Whether those people are still alive is a question Erath hadn’t answered, which Sidney takes as an answer in itself. But if the Coven has resources, and they clearly do, then nothing stops them from sending more. Willow’s at least has Xela.
The thought of Erath arrives without invitation, the way it’s been arriving all day, at odd moments, while he’s pouring drinks or wiping down surfaces or counting the register. Notthe thought of the kiss, or not only the thought of the kiss, but the thought of the man himself. The dark eyes. The steady voice. The way he’d accepted Sidney’s rejection and walked out of the apartment without negotiation or complaint or the silent, punishing withdrawal that Sidney has come to expect when he tells a man to leave.
Sidney doesn’t know what to do with any of it. He doesn’t know what to do with a man who leaves when asked and lets the leaving be just that, an exit and nothing more. He doesn’t know what to do with the fact that he’d kissed that man and wanted that man and his body had shut the whole thing down and the man had just gone. He doesn’t know if Erath is angry, or hurt, or relieved, or indifferent, and the not-knowing is sitting in his chest alongside the cracked ribs, a second ache that the bandages can’t reach.
He finishes his shift. Leaves Xela to close up. She gives him a look on his way out, and says, “Call me if anything happens.”
He walks home in the last of the daylight. The streets are quiet, the early-evening lull between the end of the workday and the start of the nightlife, and Sidney moves through it with his hands in his pockets and his head down and his ribs flaring at each step. He makes it to his building. Punches in the code. Climbs the stairs slowly, one hand on the railing, and lets himself into his apartment, and the apartment is dark and quiet and exactly the way he left it this morning except for the kitchen light, which is still on because he never turned it off. He’d left it on last night, after the coffee and the kiss and the freeze, and he’d left it on again this morning, and he’s starting to wonder if the kitchen light is ever going off again or if it’s just going to stay on indefinitely as a monument to the worst evening of his recent life.
He takes a bath. Careful. The bandages stay dry, which requires a technique involving strategic towel placement and arefusal to submerge past mid-torso. The hot water helps. His muscles unclench, his ribs settle into a lower register of pain, and by the time he gets out and dries off and changes into pajama pants and a t-shirt he feels almost functional.
He makes cereal. Cooking would require bending, reaching, and the use of his arms in ways his body has vetoed, and cereal is the food of people who have given up and Sidney has given up. He eats it on the couch. He finds the remote. He turns on something that requires no attention and watches it without seeing it and thinks about nothing.
