"That's very impressive," Sidney tells her.
"I want a cat," Penny says.
"Talk to your dad."
"Daddy will say no."
"I guess the answer is no then."
Sidney tells Xela they're heading back to the underworld and she can return to the bar. Xela glares at him with the full force of her disapproval and says, "Why? So they can jump from the rooftops and grab you on the way there? No. I'm walking you there, pretty boy."
Sidney opens his mouth to argue. He looks at Xela's face and closes it again. There are battles worth fighting and then there is arguing with a banshee who has decided she's doing something, and the difference between those two categories is absolute. He nods and says, "Okay."
August heads south toward his apartment. Sidney, Xela, and Penny head east toward the subway entrance.
The walk is quiet. The city is settling into late afternoon, streetlights flickering on while there's still light in the sky, shops pulling in their sidewalk displays and locking up for the evening. Penny is on Sidney's back again, cheek pressed against his shoulder, the energy of the playground finally catching up withher. Xela walks beside them with her hands in her pockets and her jaw set and her eyes moving across every alley and doorway and shadow with the crazed attention of someone who has been doing this for a very long time and does not intend to stop.
They reach the entrance to the underworld. The barred-off subway stairs sit at the mouth of a side street, unremarkable to anyone who can't see them for what they are. The cold drifts up from below, steady and familiar, and the darkness at the bottom is absolute. Penny shifts on Sidney's back, pressing her face into his neck, and he can feel her fingers tighten on his jacket.
Xela stops. She stares at the entrance for a long moment, her expression unreadable, and then she looks at Sidney.
"I don't like this," she says.
"The entrance? Or the situation?"
"All of it." She pushes her sunglasses up onto her head and her eyes, pale and sharp and older than anything else about her, meet his. "I don't like you going down there. I don't like that I can't follow. I don't like that I can't reach you when you're on the other side."
Sidney adjusts Penny's weight on his back and faces Xela fully. She's standing with her arms at her sides, fists clenched, and there's something in her face that he almost never sees. It's not vulnerability, because Xela doesn't do vulnerable. It's the closest thing to it she'll allow, a fracture in the surface just wide enough for him to see the person underneath who loves him fiercely and absolutely and would burn the city to the ground if she thought it would keep him safe.
"I'll be okay," he tells her.
"You don't know that."
"No," he agrees. "But I know you'll be here when I come back up. And that's enough."
Xela stares at him for another long moment. Then she steps forward and puts her hand on the side of his face, brief and fierceand gone almost before he registers it, and says, "Don't make me come find you, Sidney."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
She drops her hand. Steps back. Crosses her arms.
"Go," she says.
Sidney goes. He ducks under the bars with Penny on his back and descends the stairs into the dark, and the last thing he sees before the light disappears is Xela standing at the top, watching, making sure they make it down safe before she turns away.
The tunnel closes around them. The cold settles in. The sounds of the city fade to nothing and are replaced by the low, distant hum that Sidney has started to associate with the underworld's version of silence. It's not quiet. It's the absence of living noise, filled instead with the murmur of things that are no longer alive and the ambient thrum of a place that exists to process the end of everything.
"Sid?" Penny says against his shoulder.
"Yeah, kiddo."
"Sophie said her mom makes her pancakes every morning."
"Is that so."
"Every morning, Sid. Every single one."
"That's a lot of pancakes."
