I was homeless at thirteen. I know something about carrying things that are too heavy to carry alone. I know something about what it means to have someone simply stay.
So I stay.
The grief ebbs, slowly. Not gone, not resolved, not fixed by any means, because it isn’t the kind of thing that fixes. But it ebbs. The flat settles around us. Outside, Bristol continues its morning. Pigeons. A bus. Someone laughing loudly on the street below.
The shadow is still in my hand. Warm now, or my hand is warm, or the boundary between those two things has blurred in some way I can’t quite account for.
Eventually Dis reassembles himself. It happens gradually, form coalescing out of shadow, blue eyes coming last, finding mine across the small distance between us.
I haven’t moved my hand. Part of him is wrapped around it.
We look at each other.
“That sucks,” I say quietly. “Losing everything. That genuinely, profoundly sucks.”
“Yes,” Dis says. His voice is rough at the edges in a way I’ve never heard it before. “It does.”
I nod. I look at his shadow-self still curled around my fingers, my hand across the line of the circle. The grief is still in the room, quieter now but present, and I’m turning something over in my mind that I’m not entirely sure I want to ask but am going to ask anyway.
“Was it...” I pause, trying to find the shape of what I want to say. “You said everything. Is that... was there someone?”
Dis is quiet for a moment. “Before I was made into what I became,” he says carefully, “there were things. Yes. A long time ago.”
“And then Hex took the throne from you,” I say. I’m not proud of how flat my voice comes out, but it’s the truth and we both know it. Hex defeated him. That was loss two, whatever loss one was. And then I summoned him. Loss three, and that one’s on me specifically.
“And then your shadow prince,” Dis confirms. There’s no accusation in it. That almost makes it worse.
I sit with the weight of that for a moment. Three losses. The old one he won’t name. The throne. And then me, summoning him here and taking his freedom, taking him away from his home and everything he has.
That thought adds a particular quality to the guilt sitting in my chest.
“Is there anyone,” I ask, “who’ll be missing you? Family? Anyone?” I pause. “Someone special?”
Dis makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “Only enemies,” he says. “I have accumulated a considerable number of those.”
Only enemies. Nobody wondering where he is. Nobody who would notice the absence of him except people who’d be glad of it. No one waiting for him. No one who…
I become aware, with a creeping horror that I feel all the way down to my toes, that something in my chest has gone very warm and relieved at that answer. Warm and relieved in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with guilt about imprisonment and everything to do with the fact that I just asked if there was someone special and then felt something lift when the answer was no.
Oh no.
Oh no no no.
I am such an asshole. That’s what this is. That’s the only explanation. I’m vindictive and spiteful, and he’s my enemy, and that’s why I’m pleased he doesn’t have anyone special.
I’m also an asshole who has spent too long in close proximity to someone unreasonably attractive, and my brain has done something extremely stupid as a result. It’s not feelings. It’s proximity. It’s the feeding connection messing with my emotional wiring. It’s the hot guy effect operating at an unprecedented and frankly inconvenient level.
It is absolutely not feelings.
“Well,” I say, and my voice comes out slightly rougher than I intend. “You’re stuck with me for now. For whatever that’s worth.”
Dis looks at me. Those shining blue eyes, reassembled and present and still carrying something raw in their depths, study my face for a long moment.
“It is worth more than you know,” he says quietly.
I look away before he can see whatever my face is doing. I focus on a point somewhere above the television. I breathe.
“Okay,” I say, to nobody in particular. “Right.”
