don't just exist ; live.

Magnus remembers that snort. She always would push her hands in his face when he pointed out her little snorty laugh. It makes his heart ache to see her like this, happy with their son, oblivious to who he is. His son who already idolizes him despite never knowing him, despite Magnus’ absence. The guilt is overwhelming. His hands shake a little as he pours out two mugs of coffee, one for him and one for Julia. With the ichor-laced water it was boiled with, one sip is all it’ll take for her to remember.

Lucretia swore it wasn’t that, but he has to try. He cuts thick slices of his bread, still just a tiny bit warm, and spreads a generous amount of butter over it, handing off a slice to Val. It’s like everything moves in slow motion as he waits for her to sit down, watching her perhaps just a little too closely as she makes some kind of smalltalk that he can barely hear, like he’s underwater, and she takes a bite first of her bread. He sips his own coffee, desperate for her to take a drink.

Val seems to enjoy the bread, and even loudly questions whether he can have coffee too, since he’s a big boy now. Magnus doesn’t answer, he’s too busy staring at Julia, waiting for the second she’ll pick up that mug and remember him.

Val does enjoy the bread. It’s not often they get fresh baked loaves like this -- usually Julia is either too busy to make her own, or too ashamed to go into the local bakey to pick it up. It’s not easy being a single mother in a town like this. It never has been.

Magnus, for what it’s worth, almost seems on edge while they sit at the tiny little dining table. His chair isn’t built for him, Julia notes, and she makes a mental note to go and procure bigger chairs somehow if he’s going to be making visits like this. It’s just something to focus on, something to distract herself with that isn’t the large man who feels like he’s taking over her kitchen.

Finally, after shushing Valor and telling him that no, he could not have any coffee, she lifts the mug to her lips and takes a sip. It doesn’t taste any different than the coffee she sometimes splurged on herself -- and nothing out of the ordinary happens.

Magnus can’t help but laugh at the boy’s comment. He certainly does look like he’d be the biggest kid in town, and he looks like a boy who’d be proud of that fact. When Julia leads his son inside- their son, he reminds himself- he follows after.

“I wanted to apologize for…” he trails off, unsure of how much Valor knows, and how much Julia wants him to know. He clears his throat. “Uh, well, I brought breakfast. To make up for my bad manners last time we met. It’s good stuff, my very good friend is one he–ck of a chef and he says my bread is the sh–tuff.” he keeps having to catch himself in the middle of curses.

He sets the basket down on the table, desperate for Julia to drink the coffee. Even if she has just one sip, it would be enough for her to get the ichor. Lucretia had reassured him that she hadn’t fed him to Fischer, and furthermore reassured him that even if she had, ever since Fischer and Junior broadcasted the entire story to every corner of creation, she would have remembered.

But, well, those things just plain aren’t reassuring, so he has to at least try.

He best remember it takes two to tango, after all.

Julia eyes him warily as he holds up the basket, and then nods. She goes back over to the newly cleaned dishes and picks out a couple of plates, coming back to the table soon after. “Go wash your hands,” she hums to the boy, leaning down to press a kiss to the boy’s forehead.

She sets the dishes out on the table, trying to ignore the way her hands were shaking. It wouldn’t do to get nervous now -- though she couldn’t deny how oddly familiar it felt to have this large man in her home. To see him bringing her breakfast and meeting her child.

“Well, I s’pose since you brought us breakfast, it wouldn’t exactly be polite to turn it down. Are you going to sit with us or are y’gonna awkwardly hover by the chair all day?” The chairs aren’t quite big enough for someone of Magnus’s size, but it’s not like Julia usually has guests that look like him.

Valor bounces back over to the table once his hands are dry, beaming at Magnus as he slides into his usual seat right next to his mother’s. “Is Magnus staying with us for breakfast, Momma?” She snorts in response, smoothing her hand over his hair.

Magnus can only stare, equally as awed and dumbstruck for several moments as he takes in the detail of the boy. He was only turning eight? He easily looks like an eleven year old, tall and hefty and strong. With his dark skin and constellations of freckles and his dark dark auburn hair, nearly black, in a puffy cloud like Julia’s- it makes his heart ache.

He squats down, desperate to touch the boy, to grab him and squeeze the life out of him, hug him until they both just collapse with exhaustion is almost too much. He has to grip the basket he brought with him just to keep from reaching out for the boy, for his boy.

“Yeah, son,” he says, his voice a little hoarse. Now that he knows, he can’t not say it. Now that he’s looking him in the face, recognizing Julia’s soft lips, his ridiculous slab of a nose and golden yellow eyes, all represented in this one perfect boy. “Yeah, it’s me. Sorry it took me so long to meet you.”

“It’s not polite to stare, Mr. Burnsides!!”

Valor learned from the best, after all, what his manners should be. But he’s so excited to meet Magnus that really, it doesn’t matter much. He’s grinning ear to ear, though, when Magnus speaks next.

“Well, I’m kinda the biggest kid in town, so it makes sense that you’d want to meet me,” he says, nodding very seriously. There’s a warm laugh from Julia as she walks up behind him, curling a hand around Valor’s shoulder lightly.

Magnus barely even had time to take in the sight of what was before him, let alone draw the conclusion that he was looking at his own son, before the door was slammed right in his face. He just stands there, stunned, trying to recall the image of his face burned into his eyes, the impression left behind like when he looked at a light for too long, and a bright echo of it flashes in his vision. 

He saw him, he saw his boy. His own boy, his own son, bright-eyed and in the flesh, a person, an entire human he hadn’t even taken the time to mourn because he’d been so caught up just missing Julia. It isn’t that he ever forgot Julia was pregnant when she died (she didn’t die, he reminds himself, he still has to get used to that) it just was never at the forefront of his grief. As much as it would pain him to think, he would have freely given up his unborn child if he thought it would have saved Julia.

“Uh- it’s Valor, right?” he says, fighting the tremble in his voice. “You wanna- open up the door there, son?”

It slipped out without him even thinking about it, he meant it more as a colloquial term, something he picked up from Merle, who called everyone ‘son’ including him and Taako, but as soon as it leaves his mouth he feels it like a brand on his tongue, and he can’t quite tell if he regrets it or not.

Honestly, if Magnus had come any other day at this time, he wouldn’t be having this experience. That’s all Julia’s thinking as she slowly finishes the washing up. Of course, he comes right back the next day -- what was she thinking? She sighs, picking at her nails for a moment as Valor stands, stunned, by the closed front door.

Valor’s looking over at her desperately as he tries to comprehend everything, though, so Julia reluctantly reaches for the dish towel she keeps near the sink to dry he hands.

“Well? You hear the man, Val. You know we don’t slam doors in this household, either, don’t let me catch you doing that again.” With her words, Valor nods, dumbfounded, and slowly pulls open the door again to stare up at Magnus with wide eyes.

“So big,” Magnus’ heart swells. Such a healthy boy- god, he should have been there. His heart hurts for his name- Valor. It was a name he’d picked out himself, she promised him that if it was a boy he could pick the name, and if it was a girl she could pick. She forgot him, but she still remembered the name he suggested. 

He finally stops at her door and memorizes her house, bidding her good night. It feels surreal, watching her walk inside after saying good night, and watching her close the door felt like another little death. A panic tightens his throat and for a moment he’s afraid everything was just a daydream, but then he sees her silhouette against the drawn curtain a moment later and his heartbeat slows.

He can’t honestly fathom the idea of walking away now, just the idea of going back to his own home makes him feel ill. He’s so close to having Julia back, so close to healing from the grief that has made him sick for so many years, so close to beginning to make it up to her for leaving. Just thinking about turning his back on this house now makes him shake with fear. He’s so afraid to take his eyes off it and find out later it was all an illusion.

But he has to get ahold of that ichor. He calls a pod from the bureau base for the first time in months, and waits exactly there until it comes. He stays pressed to the glass to watch her house until the darkness of night consumes it, and he spends the rest of the ride shaking with grief and terror. He rushes to Lucretia’s office after that and frantically relays everything that’s happened over the last few hours to her. She’s just as shocked as he is, and then heartbroken when he asks her if she still has any of the ichor left, and she has to tell him no.

Until Davenport reminds her that they still have that flask from so many months ago tucked away somewhere. It’s not much, but all Julia would need is a drop. Lucretia reassures Magnus that she never fed his information to Fischer after his faked death, she never had any time, but it’s the only thing Magnus can think of, and so he takes the flask gratefully.

He doesn’t sleep at all that night. He’s frantic when he returns to his home, and when he finds Julia’s cooking still there on his table, he breaks down crying again. It’s not terribly flattering to sob into a plate of cookies, but he couldn’t stop himself. They tasted like home.

Come the next day, he has everything put together. He’s exhausted, but he can’t waste a single minute on sleep, he has to get back to Julia’s house, confirm she even existed at all. It all felt too good to be true, it didn’t seem possible that e could go to her house and still find her there, let alone his son. The closer he gets, the larger his fear grows that it was all a fabrication of his lonely, broken mind. But still, he brings coffee with the ichor hidden inside it and a loaf of raisin bread, one of the only things he knows how to make successfully, lumpy as always with the way he hand kneads dough to the perfect consistency, and a fresh square of soft butter. He knocks on her door, and holds his breath, and waits.

Honestly, the moment she’s inside she just gathers her son up into her arms and shakes. She’s crying a little, which isn’t really helping Valor being worried about her, and Annie comes up to them to lay across their legs as well. It’s a heartwarming scene. She doesn’t know when she’s gonna see Magnus again, but, if he is who he says he is? She figures it’ll probably be soon.

Which is honestly why she’s not surprised to hear a knock on the door the next morning around brunch time. Normally, Valor would be in school by this time of day, but Julia kept him home. She claimed it was just to give him a day off, but really she just... needed to have her family around him. When the knock comes she’s elbows deep in washing up in the kitchen, and she barely notices that Valor is the one who heads for the door.

Usually, she wouldn’t think anything of it -- their village is small enough that Valor would know everyone who would be coming to visit, and no one usually visits with malicious intent -- and then she realizes that Valor has yet to meet Magnus. She freezes where she’s standing in the kitchen because yep, she can hear Valor opening the door.

“Y’know, it’s sorta early for Mom to be getting visitors lookin for her bre--” And then Valor freezes, realizes who he’s looking at. His eyes widen. The door is slammed shut in Magnus’s face, and he’s raising his voice, hollering. “MAMA! Magnus Burnsides is at our door!!!!” Starstruck.

He wants to help her to her feet, but doesn’t. He still doesn’t feel like he’s earned the right to touch her, not even so much as her hand, after making her collapse like he did. He does hold the door for her, though, he can’t not. His dogs bound out of the house after them, but he scolds them gently and sends them back inside. He doesn’t want to be herding them while he’s trying to get Jules home safely. 

God. Get Julia home. To a different house. Every time he spirals back into reality it gets harder than the last moment. Julia is going home to their son and she’s going to lock the door behind her, and Magnus is going to just have to deal with that. He can’t break in or he’ll scare her off, he can’t let her think he’s a creep or a monster. He has to get that ichor, but- the idea of walking away from her house now, of taking his eyes off her for a second, the idea of it all being a vivid waking nightmare and he’ll go back to the house tomorrow only to find a mysteriously crumbling shell where he was so certain the night before he watched Julia walk inside to kiss their son goodnight…

There are tears in his eyes again as he walks her down the street of Raven’s Roost, and he’s thankful for the setting sun casting shadows in the hollows of his eyes, too dark for her to see them. “You said his name is… Valor?” he asks softly as they round the bend to make their way down the road to her home.

The dogs surging around them as they leave the house is cute. It reminds her of Annie back at home, and her heart swells for a moment thinking about what all she has to return to. Her boy and his dog. She smiles a little at the dogs’ antics, giving each a stroke on the ears before Magnus sends them back inside. She could comment on him holding open the door, but she bites the inside of her cheek. It isn’t the right time.

The basket she brought with her was carefully picked up before they left, but she made sure that the contents were safely inside the house. No use having her lemonade go to waste, after all. It now rests comfortable on the crook of her elbow once more, bumping up against her hip from time to time as she walks. The contrast is heavy in between her and the man next to her -- him, muscular and tall, and her, frail and short. She should be afraid of him, afraid of the raw power he has in his body. But she’s not.

As they walk, she can practically feel him trying not to ask more questions, so she’s not surprised when he finally does open his mouth to speak again. “Yessir,” she hums, glancing over at him for a moment. She doesn’t see the tears, of course, and looks back to the road soon after. “Valor Steven Waxmen. Born in the little healer’s building on the outskirts of town.” She pauses, thinking just how much information she wants to tell him, and when she finds she doesn’t actually have much she feels the need to keep hidden in this regard, she continues. “He was twenty-three inches, weighed ten pounds even.” Valor was -- and still is -- a big kid.

Magnus’ shoulders droop, devastated that Julia won’t let him meet his own son. He wants to protest, to demand, to insist, it’s his right as his father, his right as Julia’s husband to meet his own fucking son-

But the anger that sparks in his chest isn’t towards Julia. It’s towards himself. He never would have to be in a situation where he had to beg to meet his own son if he hadn’t mistaken that broken body for Julia, if he’d just spent a little bit longer looking for her, asking around for her.  The grief over the loss of her and their unborn child of the last several years is coming back now all in the form of crippling guilt. His throat closes up tight, and he can’t even bring himself to make a sound for several moments.

“Okay,” he finally says, and picks up her tiny shoes. Fairy feet, he always said. She would walk on his back on the floor sometimes when he overworked himself. Soft, featherlight fairy feet. He shakes his head and hands her shoes back to her, already plotting how he’s going to fix this problem he made, how he could possibly make it up to her for abandoning her and their boy.

“He’s… seven now, isn’t he?” he asks as she puts her shoes back on. He can’t quite meet her eye.

It’s probably a good thing that Magnus held his tongue about meeting Valor.

There are few things scarier in life than an angry mother, and he would have been on the receiving end of it real fast. She watches him for a long moment, until he finally agrees, and then she nods. Good.

She reaches out for the shoes when they’re handed to her, carefully pulling them up onto her feet. As she ties up the laces, she wonders a bit as to how much she trusts telling this stranger. It only takes a few moments to realize she trusts him a lot more than she’s trusted anyone in the past.

Magnus stirs with the pressure on his shoulder, and shoots bolt upright when he realizes it’s Julia waking him. “Jules I- god, god, I’m so sorry,” he pulls his chair forward, reaching out for her, but shrinking back before making contact, he can’t bring himself to touch her, he feels like he doesn’t deserve to touch her. “I didn’t meant to- I never would have- fuck, I’m so sorry, Jules.”

He wants to help her up, but his hands are frozen at the side of the bed. She seems so fragile now, so much different from the Julia he knew, strong and powerful and unstoppable. Even when she was sick, he never knew her like this.

“Can I take you home?” he offers, too afraid to ask if she’d let him stay, “Your boy- I have to know him, Jules, I have to, I didn’t know- I need-” he hesitates, afraid to overload her again. He couldn’t bear it if he made her collapse again.

It’s a little amusing to watch him bolt upright. Just a little.

She raises her eyebrows as she watches him, watches the way that he reaches out and then shrinks back. She doesn’t think it was the touch that got her – of course it wasn’t, it was the thoughts, the memories – but she can tell why he’s being a bit hesitant.

Julia sat up carefully, waving a hand in his vague direction as if to say he should shut up. She carefully moves her feet over the edge of the bed, feet dangling slightly. It’s a tall bed, she thinks, probably made for the large man in front of her.

Panic didn’t even begin to describe Magnus in that moment. Terror grips him worse than it ever has before in his long, long life. He sweeps her up in a daze and runs her inside, lays her out on the bed, crying and begging for her to be okay. He lovingly wipes away a nosebleed with shaking hands, tears dripping on her face full of all the apologies she can’t hear anymore.

Magnus is inconsolable. He knows she’s alive, he checked right away to make sure she was breathing, but the grief that consumes him is like fire, and if emotions could kill, he would be dead on the floor. He grips her hand in both of his, peppers it with kisses, begs her to wake up, apologizes for everything, for everything.

He wants to meet his boy, he wants to know him, he wants his family back- he remembers June then, trying to pitch the chalice to him, and wishes harder than ever that he’d accepted that offer, gone back in time to spare Julia from this, from whatever happened to her.

At some point he must have passed out in the chair by her bed, his head folded on his arms beside her, red-faced from crying and exhausted with grief.

In Magnus’s defense, his care doesn’t go unrecognized nor unappreciated.

It’s dusk by the time Julia’s eyes flutter open, and it’s only the pain in her head that stops her from launching to her feet immediately. A hand comes up to press against her forehead, and a soft whimper slides past her lips as she assesses the damage. A bad headache, and… it’s late. It’s so late.

Should she wake him? Probably. She can’t bring herself to sit up, so she just sort of reaches out with a foot and presses the toe of her boot into his shoulder gently, trying to shake him a little.

And just like that, the world drops out from under Magnus’ feet a second time. He didn’t thought- didn’t even think, didn’t dare to hope- he couldn’t even conceive of the fact that Julia was still alive, let alone…

All the grief he’s felt over the years, losing his pregnant wife, feels pointless now. He feels weightless, motionless, frozen absolutely in place. All he can do is just stare at her for several long, long seconds. He can’t even bring himself to breathe. He has a son.

The spell breaks when he feels her pull slightly against his grip, and his composure comes crashing down around his ears. He pulls her closer again, frantic now.

“Julia- please I- your middle name is Grace, you’re- you’re 27 years old, your father’s name is Steven, he taught me how to woodwork, you like warm baths and wearing shirts that show your belly, you like daisy crowns and bull riding and kisses on your shoulders, you’re powerful and impossible and you had my son and you know me, Julia, Juju, you know me.” he gasps a breath and the tears come again, this time for his boy he’s never known. “I’m so sorry I left, I didn’t know- I didn’t know, I thought I buried you, I don’t know who that was, I didn’t- I never would have gone, I’m so sorry.”

Hearing his words sort of feels like opening a massive floodgate. It’s a gush of memories one right after the other, colliding with each other and melding into one and another and another. It’s too much. Way too much.

Of course, any doubt she had about whether this man… knew her or not sort of melted away with the sheer amount of information he tells her. No one in her village would have known about her wearing shirts that showed her belly, seeing as she hadn’t worn them in years. Or the bull riding, or the warm baths.

It was too much. Too. Much.

“Yes- yes, you know me,” he says, pulling her a hair closer by the arms. He couldn’t bear to let go of her now, too afraid to lose her again. He really looks at her now, at the faint spiderweb of a scar winding up into her hairline from the side of her forehead, at the dull confusion of her beautiful eyes, at how frail she’s become in his hands- he can remember when he couldn’t reach all the way around her soft, strong arms, and now his thumbs overlap his fingers. He wants to take care of her so profoundly it makes his chest hurt. 

“It’s me, Juju,” he whispers, desperate but afraid to kiss her. He slides his big hands up her arms to her shoulders, rubs his thumbs over the lines of her collarbones, so much more prominent than he remembers. He can’t even think of what to say, he’s just so absolutely consumed with grief.

More than anything he just wants to bring her inside, give her a warm blanket, ask her where she’s been, what happened, whose mangled, unrecognizable body it was that he buried so many years ago. He wants to give her food and kiss her until she can’t breathe anymore, but he can barely even stand to look at her, it’s like staring into the sun- beautiful and heartbreaking and painful to behold.

Honestly, as warm as the man’s hands were, she was starting to get the feeling that she maybe wasn’t in the best situation. She feels like she was being studied, like he was looking over her and trying to decide something, which wasn’t exactly the best feeling. She doesn’t pull against his grip, though, almost afraid of what might happen if she did.

Julia swipes her tongue over her lips for a moment, and a shudder rolls over her body as his hands move up to her shoulders. She’s never let a stranger touch her like this before – as far as her memory is concerned, she’s never let anyone touch her like this. Of course, she knows that whoever fathered her child would have touched her in such a way, but… she can’t remember that, and doesn’t like to dwell on it.

He pulls back, still holding her by the arms, terrified to let go lest she float away. His face is red and his eyes are puffy and his dogs are whining, but he’s pulled himself together a little bit now. 

“Jules- Julia, it’s me,” he says, rubbing his thumbs over her arms. “It’s- I know it’s been a while, but come on- it’s me, Jules, I-”

It hits him, then, that this could have something to do with the voidfish. He did die, sort of, part of the plan was to make the director think he died, had she sped up the process of his rites of remembrance in a panic over the looming apocalypse? Fischer is long gone, can he even get his hands on any ichor anymore? Fischer and Junior projected his story everywhere, shouldn’t that have canceled it out?

“Jules, please,” his voice cracks now. “It’s me- you have to remember me- it’s- it’s Magoo, please you have to remember.”

The first thoughts that pop into her head when he finally pulls away from her shoulder are along the lines of ‘wow, he’s a really unattractive crier’. Of course, immediately afterwards she’s considering how damp the shoulder of her shirt must be, but. Fabric could be washed.

She tries to focus on the fact that it’s… oddly comforting to have those big hands rubbing over her arms. Which, that thought’s weird, and gets her to frown a little, staring at the center of Magnus’s stomach for a moment. A stranger’s hands shouldn’t… feel this familiar on her.

Magoo, though.

Magoo gets her something.

Magoo, in combination with that gruff voice, gets her a flash of a thought, a memory, she realizes, of a red flannel bandana, her own laughter, dark brown eyes that practically drown you in love. Her head is throbbing with pain almost immediately once she sees these, though, and she has to take one of her hands off his side – when had she put that there? – to press against her face.

“I- I don’t- I know who you are, you’re—You’re Magnus Burnsides, I don’t know you, what—” She’s babbling. Why does he feel so familiar? Why does his voice sound so comforting? Surely, it was just from the song.

Honestly, he barely hears a word she says. The first instant he sees that flicker of recognition on her face when he says her name banishes the last little stormcloud on the horizon of his mind that had just been whispering that this is a crazy coincidence, it’s someone who looks like Julia, an old cousin or something he never met. It couldn’t be Julia, because he knows Julia’s gone, he buried her- 

Who the fuck did he bury?

Tears well up in his eyes and breath doesn’t come easy. He grabs her by the arms, maybe just a little too tight, and crushes her into an embrace that makes her drop the nails again. The dogs are circling them, sniffing and boofing softly in worry over their distraught master, and Magnus unloads.

He cried when Julia first died(?) and he cried hard and long and honest. He’s never been the sort to keep from crying, sometimes he’ll cry just over music or a particularly good dog. But it’s been a long time since he cried for Julia, a long time since he put away the tears and focused on the good memories, or he’d never stop crying. And now he can’t. He shakes and shakes and holds her, maybe too tightly, and screams his grief into her shoulder. She feels so real in his arms- and maybe he’s just finally losing his mind, but if he is, he’s going to fucking lean into it.

Did she not say the words ‘you need to explain’ out loud? Maybe she’s the one imagining things here, now. Or maybe this is all a dream?

Surely any second now she’d wake up at home and not, y’know, being hugged in a crushing embrace by a stranger. Or… was Magnus Burnsides really a stranger? After the lights, she knew so much about him that it was hard to refer to him as such.

The grip he puts on her arms has her making a sharp noise of pain, not necessarily because it was the most bruising strength in the world – any other day before the accident she would have been able to take worse, but she’s been weak. Not nearly as strong as she was before.

The hug is, of course, unexpected. Her brain barely has enough time to catalogue the fact that there are two dogs circling around them as this happens and the large – oh, holy shit, he was so much larger than her – man began to openly weep.

Maybe he’s just finally broken. Maybe he’s been out here on his own for so long that he’s just—breaking down because he hasn’t seen another human being in a while. That has to be it.

Julia awkwardly brings her hands up to curl around the man’s back, realizing belatedly that her face is sort of crushed into his chest. It’s not the most comfortable position in the world, and frankly all she wants is answers, but she couldn’t wriggle out of this embrace without potentially hurting herself, so for the moment being she would just have to, er, embrace the situation.

Over his crying, though, she raises her voice and just, “Listen, sugar, I’m sure you’re going through... Something rough, whatever it is, and I’m all for being a shoulder to cry on, but you’re startin’ to scare me and it kind of hurts now.” Maybe her words would get through to him this time?

Magnus can’t move. It isn’t that he doesn’t want to because he does more than anything he’s ever wanted in his life, but he can’t actually bring his body to move. It reminds him of when he was frozen as a statue by the justices so long ago, but he’s not dead this time. And apparently, neither is Julia. 

He realizes he isn’t breathing, either, when he feels dizzy, and taking in a big gulp of air and gripping the ladder before he falls off it backwards seems to be what snaps him out of it. He doesn’t even bother climbing down, there’s no time. He just grips the sides, and jumps off, sliding down effortlessly to the ground. He turns to look at her, and she looks a little amused and a little confused and perhaps a little impressed and she looks like Julia.

He can feel heat welling up in his face and in his throat and behind his eyes as he scans her face desperately, his mind working so fast to try and put together exactly what he’s seeing. All he can manage past the dull roaring in his ears is a single bitten-off syllable, caught halfway down his throat.

“Jules?”

She’s standing there expectantly just watching him when he finally makes his move. It’s dramatic, is what it is, when he jumps down from the ladder in the way that he does. Julia sucks at her teeth for a moment, smirking a bit.

“Now, that was a mighty fine display of athleticism if I’ve ever seen one myse—” And she cuts herself off, because he’s looking at her and there’s a type of desperation in her eyes, almost like a man who’s searching for God.

She doesn’t know why that look is so haunting, and so heartbreaking at the same time.

“I’m not sure if you think your hero ways have afforded you some personal rights, but there’s only one man who’s allowed t’call me Jules, Gods rest his soul, and he’s got a headstone over in the cemetery.” She frowns, though. Because there was no reason he should be able to know her name.

Magnus had been working alone on the corridor for some time now. He’d originally come here after the final battle for the world with the intent to do some deep spiritual cleansing of the darkness in his heart. At first he’d just intended to take a short sojourn there, and lay eyes on the carnage he’d tried to put at the back of his mind for so many years just to survive emotionally. He felt ready.

It hadn’t been until he found himself subconsciously sorting rubble that he realized he could fix this place. It would take time- a lot of time. But time was something he’d come to have a strange relationship with in all the decades he’s lived, and even though now he knows his years are limited for the first time in a long long time, he doesn’t feel like rushing, for once.

It’s slow going, just getting through the rubble takes him days spent camped on the outskirts of the town until he managed to get into the first building. Everything was leveled almost to the ground, it’s a miracle the entire corridor didn’t just collapse, or there’d be nothing left to save. The whole thing is a little crooked now, but as long as nobody put wheels on any furniture, this place could hold people in it again someday. He knows factually that he lost the memory of whoever did this, he can remember agreeing to lose it in wonderland, but he hopes that everyone else can find the same sort of peace and eventually people will live here again.

When he first sees Julia coming down the road, he smiles faintly to himself, but doesn’t react, turning his attention back to his work, at the top of a ladder, nailing the trim back on the roof of a building. It’s far from the first time he’s seen Julia. He sees her sometimes doing the most mundane things, he’ll see her slumped over in a chair barely holding onto a book with her fingertips, he’ll see her knelt in a garden somewhere with a bandana holding back her wild cloud of hair, he’ll see her sitting on a fence sipping her famous lemonade from a glass. He’s not surprised to see her coming down the road holding a basket.

But when he hears her voice.

That one’s new.

He turns back to look, and she isn’t gone, like every other time he’s double-taked over the years. She’s still there, and she’s still walking down the street. His mouth drops open, and all the nails he was holding between his lips fall 10 feet down and clink on the cobblestones. He’s frozen at the top of the ladder, just watching her as she approaches, every muscle locked up tight, afraid to even breathe and disturb the illusion.

Admittedly, Julia was actually surprised to run into another human being in the abandoned town.

Even though she knew logically that someone was there – there were no stray dogs left, after all – it didn’t really strike her as being true until she was standing right in front of the man. Or, at least, standing in front of the ladder he was perched upon.

There were the faint crinkle tinkles of nails hitting the cobblestone, which she realized after a moment was the sound of the nails that the man had between his lips previously. She huffed a little in response, glancing down at where they’d fallen in a messy pile at the bottom of the ladder.

“Now, if you’re truly Mr. Big Hero, Magnus Burnsides, I know you were not raised in a barn where your mama decided it was fine for you to be droppin’ nails everywhere.” She clicked her tongue, setting her basket down on what looked to be the flattest nearby stack of rubble.

After just a moment, she returned to the bottom of the ladder, kneeling down to scoop up the nails that had fallen. Julia bunched up the front of her skirt, hiking up the topmost layer of fabric to have a safe home for the nails she dropped inside of it. Once they were all gathered up, though, she stood back up, glancing up at him with a smirk.