"I suspected when the Coven's attacks escalated. I confirmed it three days ago, when I spoke with Newt about the nature of the binding."
Three days. Sidney counts back. Three days means Erath knew before the park, before the conversation with August, before the evening on this couch where he saidI've already let you inand touched Sidney's face and took him to bed and held him through the night. Three days of holding this information behind his teeth while Sidney made toast and played cards with Penny and fell further and further into something he was already too deep in to climb out of.
"You should have told me," Sidney says.
"Yes." No excuse. No justification. Just the admission, clean and unqualified, and the way Erath meets his eyes without flinching tells Sidney it's real. "I was trying to find a way to undo it before I had to tell you there was nothing to undo."
"And is there? A way to undo it?"
"No."
The word sits between them. Sidney breathes around it. He thinks about standing up, about walking to the kitchen, about doing the thing he always does when information gets too big, which is put physical space between himself and the source and pretend the distance helps. He doesn't move.
He thinks about Penny's hand in his. The subway platform. The way she looked up at him and chose him, and how he chose her back without understanding what that choice would cost, and how he would make the same choice again right now, this second, knowing everything he knows, because the cost of being bound to her is nothing compared to the cost of her being alone.
The fear is there. He can feel it, sharp and present, the animal recognition that he is in more danger than he understood five minutes ago. But underneath the fear is something harder and older and angrier, and it is the thing that got him through every bad night and every bad man and every moment where the world told him to be small and he refused.
"Okay," Sidney says.
Erath blinks. It's the only sign of surprise he gives, but on Erath it's seismic.
"Okay?"
"Okay, I'm a conduit. Okay, the Coven can use me to tear open the boundary between life and death. Okay, the bond I chose put me on a hit list I didn't know existed." Sidney ticks the points off on his fingers, brisk and deliberate. "What I'm not going to do is sit in the underworld and wait to be collected. If they can use me, that means I'm a liability as long as I'm passive. It means protecting Penny isn't just about keeping her safe, it's about keeping me out of their hands too. And the best way to do that is to be part of the plan, not hidden away from it."
Erath is watching him with an expression Sidney can't fully read. There's something in it that's proud and something that's afraid and something that's resigned in the way of a man who knew exactly how this conversation was going to go and had it anyway because Sidney deserved the truth.
"You're asking me to let you walk into danger knowing you're a target," Erath says.
"I'm not asking," Sidney tells him. "I'm telling you I won't be the thing they're hunting while everyone else fights. I've spent my whole life being the person things happen to. The person who survives by staying still and getting small and waiting for it to be over. I am done waiting for it to be over."
The fire cracks. The underworld hums. Erath holds his gaze for a long, measured beat, and then he nods. Once. The kind of nod that isn't agreement so much as acknowledgment, the recognition that Sidney is not someone who can be kept safe by being kept away, and that trying will only build walls between them that neither of them can afford.
"Then we plan for both of you," Erath says quietly. "Every contingency accounts for the possibility that they come for youas well as Penny. You do not go above ground alone. Not for any reason."
"Deal."
They sit with the information for a while, the fire popping in the grate and the underworld humming its low, constant hum beyond the walls. Sidney processes what he's been told and files it and tries not to think about the fact that a woman he's never met wants to use a little girl he loves as fuel for a blood sacrifice, and that he's now on that same menu. He tries and fails and his jaw tightens and his hands ball into fists on his knees and he stares at the fire until the flames blur.
The hour grows late, or what passes for late in a place without clocks or sunlight. Sidney's body is telling him it's late. His eyes are heavy and his muscles are unwinding and the couch is doing that thing where it slowly absorbs him into its ancient cushions, and he catches himself listing sideways. He sees Erath move from the armchair to the couch, but doesn't register it fully until lips press against his hair.
Erath murmurs, low and close, "You should move to bed."
Sidney hums something noncommittal. He should. He knows he should. The couch is comfortable but the bed is better, and the bed will have Erath in it, and he's discovered over the past few days that sleeping next to someone who doesn't sleep but holds you anyway is a specific kind of comfort he didn't know he needed.
But the question that's been sitting in the back of his mind all day, the one he's been chewing on since the hallway, since the kiss, since the look on Erath's face when he said I've already let you in, is pressing against his teeth and it wants out. It wants out now, while his defenses are down and the dark is around them and he can blame the late hour if it goes wrong.
"Why don't you ask for more?" he asks quietly.
Erath is still beside him. "I don't know what you mean."
Sidney hesitates. He's warm against Erath's side and his eyes are half-closed and the words come out before he's decided to say them, pulled from somewhere deep and unguarded. "I've never been with someone who didn't want to fuck me."
The silence that follows is not empty. It's full. It's full of everything Erath isn't saying and everything Sidney is trying to say and the distance between the two, which is smaller than Sidney thinks but bigger than he can see.
Then Erath says, quietly, "There's a difference between wanting and taking, Sidney."
Sidney stiffens. The sleepiness burns off in an instant and he turns his head to look at Erath, much more awake than he had been a moment ago. Erath is looking down at him. His expression is open in a way that Erath's expression rarely is, the stoicism set aside, the composure loosened, and what's underneath is not desire, though Sidney can see that too. It's care. It's the deliberate, conscious choice to put what Sidney needs above what Erath wants, and the fact that it doesn't appear to cost him anything, that it doesn't look effortful or strained or begrudging, makes something crack open in Sidney's chest.
