"Might," Sidney repeats.
"No one's certain how much longer. The bond Penny created doesn't have a precedent, at least not one I've been able to find. But the thread between you and the underworld is sustaining. It's feeding you something. Energy, vitality, whatever you want to call it. Your body is receiving input from a source that isn't food or sleep or anything biological, and that's going to have an effect on your lifespan."
Sidney is quiet for a moment. His expression is still, the way it gets when he's processing something large, not blank but held, everything contained, every reaction cataloged and filed for later examination. Erath watches him from the doorway and tries to read the silence and can't.
Then Sidney says, "So I'm going to be alive for a very long time, stuck with a man who can't cook and a child who cheats at cards."
August blinks. A beat passes. Then the corner of his mouth twitches, reluctantly, the expression arriving before he's given it permission.
"That's one way to look at it," August says.
"It's the only way I know how to look at it."
August looks at him the way he does when he's trying to determine if Sidney is deflecting or coping or genuinely okay, and whatever he finds must satisfy him because he doesn't push. He shifts on the couch and pulls Sidney into him, one arm around his shoulders, and holds on. There is nothing tentative about it. August does not do tentative. He holds Sidney with his whole body committed to the act, and Sidney lets out a breath and settles against him and they stay there for a while, two men on a couch in the underworld, and it's comfortable and easy and entirely unremarkable, which is what makes it remarkable.
Erath watches this from the doorway. He doesn't enter the room. He doesn't interrupt. He leans his shoulder against the frame and crosses his arms and watches Sidney with his bestfriend and feels something settle in his chest that has been restless for a very long time.
Centuries, maybe.
He's not sure when it started, the hollowness, the sense that everything he was doing was maintenance rather than living. That his existence was a function rather than a life. He governed the dead and maintained the boundary and closed the rifts and managed the spirits and it was necessary, all of it, vital work that held the fabric of the world together, and he did it well and he did it faithfully and he felt nothing. Not nothing, that's not accurate. He felt purpose. He felt duty. He felt the grim satisfaction of a job done correctly. But he didn't feel alive, which is an interesting problem for someone who exists at the threshold between life and death, and the hollowness grew so gradually that he didn't notice it until it was the only thing he could feel.
It's easing now. Slowly. Not a dramatic thaw, not a sudden transformation, but a gradual softening. A warmth that creeps in at the edges. A day where the dark feels less dark. A morning where the silence feels less empty. A night where holding someone in his arms doesn't feel borrowed but feels, for the first time, permanent.
Sidney did that. Sidney and Penny, together, the bartender and the five-year-old, the most unlikely pair of people to crack open an ancient being's chest and plant something growing in the cavity, but they did it. They walked into his house and his life and they stayed, and the staying is what changed everything. Not the grand gestures, not the battles, not the warehouse. The staying. The breakfast. The bath time. The cards. The couch. The steady, daily accumulation of a life shared with people who choose to be there.
August leaves eventually. He hugs Sidney at the door, properly, both arms, his chin on Sidney's shoulder, and holds onfor a beat longer than usual. When he pulls back his expression is fierce and fond, the look of someone who chose to be family and has never once wavered on that choice, and he says, "I'm glad you're here, Sid."
He means alive. He means in the underworld. He means both.
Sidney's eyes are bright when he nods, and August squeezes his shoulder once and turns and walks into the underworld with the easy, practiced stride of someone who has been navigating this place for years. He doesn't look back. He doesn't need to. The checking has been done.
Erath talks to Penny that evening.
Just the two of them. In her room, while Sidney is taking one of his long baths, the kind where he fills the tub to the brim and sinks in until only his nose is above the water and stays there for forty-five minutes, not sleeping, not thinking, just existing in the warmth. He started taking them after the warehouse, and Erath hasn't commented on the frequency, because he understands the impulse to submerge yourself in something that can hold you without holding you down.
Penny's room has evolved. When Sidney first arrived, it was sparse, a bed, a dresser, a handful of toys. Now it's covered. Drawings are taped to every available wall surface, Lego structures occupy the dresser and the floor and the windowsill, stuffed animals are arranged in a complex social hierarchy that Penny has explained to him three times and he still doesn't fully understand. There is a blanket fort in the corner that Sidney helped her build and that has become a semi-permanent fixture. Her stuffed bear occupies the pillow of honor on the bed.
Erath kneels beside her bed. She is under the covers, freshly bathed, Sidney handled bath time before his own, with her braids still slightly damp and her pajamas on and her face scrubbed clean and glowing. She looks up at him with dark eyes that are too perceptive for her age and always have been.
"Can I ask you something?" Erath says.
"You just did," Penny says, which is something she learned from Sidney and deploys at every opportunity.
"Can I ask you something else?"
"Okay."
He looks at her. This child. His child. The small, fierce, impossible person he made with a woman who tried to use her as a sacrifice and a bridge between worlds. She is five years old and she has seen more than most adults and understood more than most adults and she is lying in her bed with a stuffed bear and she is okay. Not undamaged, no one comes through what she's been through undamaged, but okay. Whole. Growing. Reaching toward the light the way all living things do, stubbornly and without permission.
"Do you think about your mama?" he asks.
Penny considers this. Her brow furrows, the same furrow she gets during cards, during stories, during any question that she deems worthy of serious analysis, and she chews her lower lip.
"Sometimes," she says. "I know she's gone."
She says it simply. Not with grief, not with bravado, but with the matter-of-fact clarity of a child who understands death in a way that most children don't, because she has lived at the intersection of it her whole life. She has always been able to feel the boundary. She has always known, on some level, where the living end and the dead begin. Her mother is on the other side now, and Penny knows it intuitively, completely, without the adult need to process the details.
"Is mama in the underworld now?" she asks.
