Because that's it. That's the whole thing. The piece he's been missing, the piece they've both been missing, circling each other in the dark with their hands up and their walls high and their damage on full display and somehow never quite seeing that the other person was doing the exact same thing.
And Sidney sees it now. Sees him. Not the god, not the lord of the underworld, not the ancient and powerful being who tore a woman's heart from her chest tonight. The man who flinched. The man who grabbed a wrist in the dark because someone touched his throat and his body remembered what that meant the last time it happened. The man who is afraid.
Erath turns his face into Sidney's palm. He presses his lips there, against the cold skin, the trembling fingers, and kisses it. Not a passionate kiss. Not a romantic one. A deliberate one. An answer.Yes. I'm afraid. I've always been afraid. But I'm here.
Sidney holds on.
His fingers tighten against Erath's cheek and he holds on, and Erath holds his other hand, and the dawn comes through the broken windows and turns the warehouse from gray to gold. Neither of them moves. Neither of them needs to. They are on the floor of a warehouse that smells of blood and frost, forehead to forehead, hand to hand, two people who have spent their whole lives building walls against the same thing and who have, against all odds and common sense, found the one person whose walls match their own.
The warehouse brightens.
Eventually, minutes later or an hour, time having lost all meaning, Vale appears at the edge of Erath's awareness and says, quietly and without urgency, that they should go. That the Order will be here soon to clean up and secure the site, and that Sidney needs rest, and that they can debrief later.
Erath nods. He releases Sidney's hand and stands and reaches down and Sidney takes his offered grip and Erath pulls him tohis feet. Sidney's legs wobble, they buckle on the first step, and Erath catches him. Arm around his waist, steady and firm, and Sidney leans into him without protest, without pride, without any of the defensive independence that typically characterizes every move he makes. He leans into Erath and lets himself be held upright, and that surrender, that willingness to be held up by someone else, is something Sidney has never allowed before and Erath receives it carefully, the way you receive a gift you didn't earn.
They walk.
August is on his feet, barely. Vale has an arm around him and August's color is terrible, gray and drawn, the look of a man who has expended more power than his body can sustain, but he's walking, and his eyes are clear, and when they pass him he looks at Sidney and then at Erath and nods once. An acknowledgment. Awe did it. Ahe's alive.
Newt is standing with Malik near the warehouse entrance. The predawn sky behind them is streaked with pink and gold, a sunrise, improbably beautiful, the kind of sky that doesn't know or care what happened beneath it, and Newt looks small and tired. He looks at Erath as they approach and his eyes move to the place on the floor where Angelica's body had been, which is empty now, which is in the underworld, which is gone, and something in his expression shifts. Settles. A door closing that was never going to open again.
Malik's arm is still around his shoulders.
"I'll take him home," Malik says to Erath, and it's not a request for permission. It's a statement of fact. The incubus's voice is low and steady and there is no room in it for argument.
Erath looks at Newt. "If you need me—"
"I'll call," Newt says. His voice is rough but his gaze is steady. "Go take care of him."
His eyes move to Sidney, to the bruise on his jaw, the raw wrists, the bare feet, and something passes through his expression that is softer than anything Sidney would expect from someone he barely knows. But Newt is not a stranger. He is Penny's brother. He is Erath's stepson. He is someone who knows what it means to be used by Angelica, to be made into a tool, to have your body treated as a means to someone else's end. He looks at Sidney and sees something he recognizes, and the recognition is its own kind of kinship, the kind that doesn't require explanation or history, only the shared knowledge of what it costs to survive someone who should have loved you.
Sidney meets his gaze and nods, once, and there is an entire conversation in that nod. A conversation they will have later, when there's time, when the adrenaline has faded and the wounds have closed and they can sit across from each other and speak plainly about the things they have in common. For now, the nod is enough.
They leave the warehouse.
The sunrise is absurd. Pinks and golds and a deep, bruised purple at the horizon, the kind of colors that belong on postcards and not on the worst morning of Sidney's life, and Erath guides him through the streets with an arm around his waist and Sidney's head on his shoulder and Sidney's bare feet on cold pavement. He should carry him. He wants to carry him. But Sidney is walking, slowly, painfully, with a stubbornness that borders on heroic, and Erath knows him well enough by now to know that walking matters. That moving under his own power matters. That being held upright is not the same as being carried, and Sidney needs to know his legs still work even when the rest of him doesn't.
They reach the subway entrance. They descend the stairs into the underworld, and the dark closes around them, and Sidney's breathing evens out against Erath's shoulder. The house is aheadof them. Penny is with Xela. The bed is waiting, and somewhere in the quiet of the underworld, in the space between one breath and the next, Sidney's hand finds Erath's and holds it, and the grip is not desperate this time. It is not clinging. It is the steady, deliberate hold of a person who has decided to stay.
Penny's going to need us,Erath thinks.Not me. Not you. Us.
The word settles into his chest next to the keystone, next to the possessiveness, next to the small bright thread that Penny wove between them, and it holds.
Erath takes Sidney home.
Chapter 25
The next few days pass in a blur of exhaustion and aftermath.
Sidney sleeps for fourteen hours the first day. He doesn't mean to. He means to shower, eat, check on Penny, be a functioning person. But Erath takes him to the bedroom and sits him on the edge of the bed and Sidney's body makes the decision for him. He lies down and the dark takes him and he doesn't dream.
When he wakes, the house smells like food that has not been burnt, which means someone other than Erath has been cooking. He finds Penny at the kitchen table eating pasta and Vivi hovering near the stove. Literally hovering. Three inches off the ground. Sidney decides not to question it.
Penny sees him and abandons her pasta and runs to him and slams into his legs with the force of a small, braided missile. She wraps her arms around his thighs and presses her face into his hip and says nothing. She just holds on. Sidney puts his hand on her head and holds on back, and they stand there in the kitchen while the pasta gets cold and Vivi pretends to be busy and neither of them lets go for a very long time.
The days blur together after that. Sidney and Erath return to a routine that feels different from the one before, quieter, more careful, shaped by something that neither of them is ready to name. Sidney holds Penny and reads to her and makes her meals that are progressively better as Erath somehow manages to acquire actual groceries. He doesn't ask where they come from. He assumes Vivi is involved, because Erath has the domestic capability of a housecat and someone is clearly running errands on his behalf.
Erath heals the bruise on his jaw first. He comes to Sidney on the second morning, when Penny is napping and the house is quiet, and cups his face in both hands and presses his lips against the bruise. The warmth spreads through the damaged tissue and the pain dissolves and the skin knits, and Sidney stands there with his eyes closed and his hands on Erath's wrists and lets it happen. Then Erath takes his hands and turns them over and lifts one wrist and presses his mouth against the burn marks the magic left there, and they fade under his lips, the angry red smoothing to pink and then to nothing. He does the other wrist. He's thorough and unhurried and his mouth lingers on each mark longer than it needs to, and Sidney doesn't pull away. The ghost of contact stays on his skin for hours afterward.
