“If,” I say.
“When,” he concedes. “But you’ll be ready. Probably.”
I have had enough of this sassy shadow twink.
I don’t entirely mean to say this out loud, but apparently I do because it comes out before I can stop it, clear and heartfelt in the quiet of the morning flat. “I have had enough of this sassy shadow twink.”
There is a silence.
Then Fiend laughs. It’s a genuine laugh, surprised and delighted, nothing like the theatre of the rest of him. He presses a hand to his mouth, and his eyes crinkle at the corners, and for a moment he looks considerably younger and considerably more real than the performance usually allows.
“I like you,” he says, when he’s recovered. “I told Adam I liked you. I meant it.”
“Thrilled,” I say.
He wanders further into the flat, apparently having decided the diplomatic portion of the visit is complete and we’ve moved on to tourism. He inspects a poster on my wall and then straightens it. He glances into the kitchen from the doorway. He comes back and examines the broken window, still covered in plastic, with interest.He looks at the Scrabble board, which is still on the floor from the last game, and his expression does something complicated and knowing.
“Scrabble,” he says.
“What about it,” I say.
“Nothing,” he says in the tone of someone who means several things by it. His gaze moves to the futon. To the blanket, which I notice is still slightly arranged around where I was lying, which Dis must have done. The purple eyes slide to Dis, then to me, then back again.
“You know,” he says, conversationally, “you make a rather sweet couple.”
“We’re not a couple,” I say.
“We are not,” says Dis, at exactly the same moment.
It comes out in perfect, terrible unison. Both of us. Immediate and definitive.
There’s a silence.
I don’t look at Dis. I look at the floor. At the Scrabble board. At the letter tiles still laid out from the last time we played, and I think about the first time we played, all those words we laid out while drinking wine and talking about things that cost something to say. There’s a feeling in my chest that I’m not going to name, something that arrived the moment Dis said, we are not, with such complete conviction, such immediate certainty.
It’s fine. It’s the right answer. We’re not a couple. The situation is what it is.
It’s absolutely fine.
Fiend looks between us with those purple eyes. He sees everything, I’m quite sure of it. He sees the Scrabble board and the blanket and the both of us not looking at each other and all the things we just said and didn’t say.
He rolls his eyes.
“Whatever,” he says, with the serenity of someone who has seen this particular form of self-deception many times before and has strong opinions about it that he’s decided not to voice today.
He drifts back toward the centre of the room. He looks at the ceiling once more, then at Dis, with something underneath the theatrics that might be genuine.
“Take care of yourself,” he says. “For once.” It’s almost exactly what he said to Hex, I remember it from what Adam told me, and I wonder if this is just what Fiend says to people he’s assessed and found worth something, this particular instruction, as if taking care of oneself is radical enough to need stating.
Then he looks at me.
“And you,” he says simply.
Then he’s gone. Not through the door. Just gone, the space where he was, empty in the particular way that spaces are empty when shadow beings have decided to stop occupying them. The only evidence he was ever here is a faint smell of something dark and expensive and the crystal on the windowsill, which he’s put back in slightly the wrong place.
The flat settles.
I sit on the edge of the futon and look at my hands.
