Then I slide the Scrabble board into the circle, because I can reach into it, but he can’t reach out.
I pour my own glass of wine, settle cross-legged on the floor in front of the Scrabble board, and distribute the tiles.
We play.
Dis takes to Scrabble the way he takes to everything, with an unsettling combination of intensity and pride. His first word is DOMINION, landing across a double word score with the satisfaction of someone planting a flag. I put down SPITE and feel that this is appropriate. He respondswith FRACTURE, and I start to suspect he might be very good at this.
The wine helps. It usually does. The first glass smooths off the sharp edges of the evening, and somewhere in the middle of the second, I stop feeling like I’m managing a situation and start feeling like I’m just sitting with someone. Playing a game. Drinking cheap wine in my cramped living room while rain gently patters against the window.
Dis plays SCORN and I look at it for a moment longer than I need to.
“Was it always scorn?” I ask. “In the Shadow Realm. If you failed.” He kind of hinted at that, while watching Bake Off, and now I find myself needing to know for sure.
He rearranges his tiles carefully in his rack before answering. “Not always scorn. But always consequences. I was trained from the moment I was formed to be useful. Effective. To serve a purpose greater than myself.” He picks up his wine and studies it rather than me. “Sentiment was a weakness. Hesitation was a weakness. Attachment was a weakness. These things were... removed, when they appeared.”
“Removed how?”
“Punished out of me.” He says it simply, without drama. That almost makes it worse. “I learned quickly that it was easier not to develop them in the first place.”
I put down HOLLOW and score fourteen points and don’t say anything for a moment.
“I know something about that,” I say finally.
Dis looks at me. Not the cataloguing look this time. Something quieter.
“I was born into a coven,” I say. “A kick-ass, feared and respected coven. Very traditional. Serious. Dark leaning.” I pause. “Both my parents are powerful, high-ranking witches. It should have been great, right? Nepo baby, magic family, built-in community, people who understand what you are.” I pick up my wine. “Except magic isn’t just hereditary. The strength of it varies. And mine was...” I pause again, looking for the right word and not finding it. “Mine was disappointing. To them.”
“You have power,” Dis says. It’s not a compliment exactly, more like a correction to an error.
“I do. I’m clever about it. I can find ways to do things that should be beyond me. But the raw strength just isn’t there, not the way it was supposed to be. Not the way they wanted.” I turn a tile over in my fingers. The letter E, worn smooth. “I wasn’t what they needed. What they’d planned for. And a coven isn’t...” I stop. “A coven isn’t really a family. Not when it comes down to it. It’s a power structure. And I wasn’t capable of pulling my weight in the power structure.”
“What happened?” Dis asks.
“They kicked me out.” I say it easily, because I’ve had years to practise saying it easily. “I was thirteen and had nowhere to go. They said I could come back when I’d developed my abilities to an acceptable standard.” The laugh that comes out of me is small and not particularly funny. “I’m still waiting for the invitation.”
Dis is quiet. I refill my glass. The Scrabble board sits between us with its words, DOMINION and FRACTURE and SCORN and HOLLOW, all radiating out from the centre like a map of a very specific kind of damage.
“I have a coven now. Sort of. But it’s not the same, you know.” I gulp down more wine, unsettled by the fact that Dis does know.
“I understand,” he says. Not in the way people say it when they want you to feel heard but don’t really know what you mean. He means it in the way that comes from the same place.
“You were never a person to them either,” I say. “Were you.”
“I was a weapon,” Dis says. “Weapons are not loved. They are maintained. Sharpened. Kept useful. And when they are no longer useful...” He makes a small gesture that encompasses everything. “Well. Here we are.”
I should fight this. I know I should. This is the part where I remind myself who he is and what he did and why I summoned him here. This is the part where I put the emotional distance back in place and stop doing this.
But god, it’s nice. It’s so unexpectedly, desperately nice to sit here with someone who understands the specific flavour of growing up unwanted. Not abandoned through necessity or tragedy. Deliberately discarded. Looked at and found lacking and set aside.
Most people, when I try to explain it, get that careful, sympathetic look. The one that means they feel sorry for you but can’t quite reach where you actually are.
Dis doesn’t look at me like that.
“You should have been loved,” I tell him, and I’m not sure why I say it out loud. Maybe the wine. Maybe just the dark and the rain and the strange intimacy of words on a board between two people who both know what it means to be only a tool to the people who should have loved you.
Dis looks at me for a long moment. Something moves in those blue eyes that I don’t have a name for.
“As should you,” he says quietly.
