& ʟᴏsᴛ/ʙᴏʏ

“You’re not alone in this,” she said, her voice low and steady. “None of us are. But you don't get to carry everything for me, George. Some things are still mine.”

She rested her cheek against his temple. He smelled like sleep, the soap from the bathroom cabinet, and beneath it all, George. Her first baby.

He hated it. Hated that his body refused to heal like theirs. Hated that George was stuck out here patching him up when he could have been doing literally anything else.

“I fell,” Malcolm said. The lie tasted like air. “Slipped on the rocks near the cove. Cracked my head on the ledge.” He looked at George. “That's what happened.”

It wasn't even a good lie, only the first one that sounded ordinary. Malcolm caught the look that crossed George's face, the one that meant he wanted to argue but had decided not to.

He pressed them flat against George's chest, trying to still them. It didn't work. The shaking climbed through his wrists and into his arms. He hated it. Hated that his body couldn't stay still for one goddamn moment when it mattered most.

Because you’re you.

The words didn't fit. They had nowhere to settle among everything he'd spent years telling himself. He'd built the case against himself for so long that hearing anything else felt like standing in a room with the walls suddenly gone. There was nothing left to brace against.

Harry's vision blurred. He blinked hard, but something warm slipped down his cheek anyway. He didn't wipe it away. He couldn't spare either hand. Both were still pressed against George's chest, holding on as though letting go meant falling.

Harry's forehead slipped against George's as his knees threatened to give way beneath him. He stayed upright through sheer stubbornness. Slowly, his hands left George's chest and rose to cup his face, his thumbs brushing George's cheeks as though anchoring himself to something real.

“Mo Chrìdhe...” The words had lived inside him for years. He had never been brave enough to say them aloud. His voice barely held together. “I need ye to be sure. So sure that when I wake up tomorrow and convince myself this wasnae real, I'll have something to hold onto.”

He lifted his head and looked into George's eyes. Forest green. The eyes he'd spent years trying to convince himself he didn't love.

What a curios word. Curiosity peaked in his mind even if George decided to push it back. Not knowing made the endearment more appealing to him.

“Then I’ll reassure you. Again and again and again. Every day I’ll find the words and when those run out then with actions” it was an oath as he stared back into those ocean eyes. He would stumble, being only human.

And maybe somedays would be definitely harder than others. No rose tinted glasses on that, but they were both terribly stubborn to give up on something they wanted- like they wanted each other

“That’s actually the most honest thing anyone’s said to me since the curse broke,” she said. “Which is either a compliment to you or an indictment of everyone else.”

Probably both.

She pushed away from the wall and turned back to the mural. The crown stared at her, split down the middle by blue, its horns curling upward at the edges. It wasn’t finished. She wasn’t sure it ever would be.

Maybe that was the point.

“The can of fucked up,” she said, mostly to herself. “That’s one way to put it.”

She crouched and turned the empty blue can once in her hand before setting it back down. The habit was getting embarrassing.

The weight had been there from the moment the curse broke, before she had words for what she’d lost.

Mallory Mills had never carried it. She’d had a window seat, a favorite mug, and a mother who looked at her like she made sense.

She didn’t say any of that.

“For what it’s worth,” she said instead, “you’re better at this than most people.” She gestured vaguely between them. “The listening thing.”

She picked up her bag and slung it over one shoulder. The cans shifted and knocked together inside.

“Most people hear something like ‘my parents are Maleficent and Hades’ and start talking, like they have to fill the silence before it gets weird.” She glanced at him. “You just kept smoking.”

She almost thanked him, but the words stopped somewhere behind her teeth.

“Well it was a good company for a smoke break” George shrugged off again, perfect picture of nonchalant “takes one to know one” had they been bonding? His knee jerk reaction was to say no, even if knowing there was some sort of understanding between them wasn’t so bad.

He wasn’t much for connection, less so for superficial ones like he had noticed during the curse.

This was new.

“House-wrecking disaster is putting it mildly,” she said, letting her hand trail down his chest before she stepped back. The distance felt necessary, though no less painful. “Nyx got into my war paint yesterday. She made Freya look like she'd been mauled by a particularly artistic bear.”

His eyes crinkled at the corners, amusement breaking through the exhaustion. It was a small thing, but small things had always mattered between them.

“You should see the kitchen,” she said, turning toward the door. “Orion's been teaching himself to cook from YouTube videos. I think he's been trying to keep us all fed while...” The words caught in her throat.

While you were gone.

Another beat of silence grew in the room next to them as a reminder of the situation. It couldn’t be erased so easily but they would get there

“Mom would call that more of a liability than a credit,” she said, her voice softer than she intended.

The diamond pulsed again, stronger this time. Freya pressed her palm over it and felt its steady warmth answer her touch, falling into rhythm with her heartbeat. Sometimes she wondered whether it was only an anchor for her magic or whether her parents had left pieces of themselves inside it.

“Remember when I was nine and tried to prove I didn’t need the necklace anymore?” The question escaped before she could stop it.

He didn’t claim to have a favorite, never would, but there was not denying that out of the three children he and Freya were too much alike. Similar enough he could see that her thoughts were going down a certain path

He didn't stop walking or look back. The runes along his forearms hummed beneath his sleeves, a dull warmth instead of pain. Whoever it was meant no harm.

Or hadn't decided on it yet.

The whispers coiled through his mind in broken fragments.

Green eyes.

Lost boy.

Father's legacy.

Son of—

“You’re following me,” Adam said.

Adam leaned against the kitchen counter, nursing a glass of water he’d been holding for the last twenty minutes. Eve had told him to hydrate. He'd learned that disappointing Eve carried a weight no command Hel had ever given him could match. The water had gone warm. He didn't mind.

She stopped in the kitchen doorway as though the sight of him had startled her. Adam set down the glass.

"Sorry," he said. "I forget how quiet I am around humans."

That was the best to describe how it felt to be around the newest acquaintance of their family sometimes. Even though his sister had explained in rich detail how it wasn’t something adam did on purpose, and her own twin's discovery that it was a reaction to their own magic, being jumpy only came naturally to her.

It didn't mean gia wasn't trying to fix it

The door to the stillroom swung open, and George stepped out with his sleeves rolled to the elbows and dirt smudged across one cheek, as though he'd been wrestling the earth itself. Harry had the absurd urge to brush it away with his thumb.

He stopped dead in the corridor.

He'd been looking for him. That was the stupid part.

He'd come under the thin pretense of checking whether the medicinal stores needed replenishing after last night's incident with Dougal's horse. The truth was he'd spent the last hour tracking George through the castle like some lovesick hound.

And now he'd been caught flat-footed in a corridor that smelled of dried rosemary and old stone. George was looking at him with those green eyes that always made Harry's chest tighten in ways he refused to examine.

"Don't look so unhappy to see me, Sassenach," Harry said with a crooked smile.

And yet

There was something in the particular word said by that particular Scotsman that got George’s teeth grinding, never failing to set his temper off.

Footsteps crunched over the gravel. She didn't look up. She knew the rhythm of her father's walk as well as her own heartbeat. George settled beside her without a word. They sat in silence, and she was grateful he had never treated it like something that needed fixing. What she didn't appreciate was the way he kept glancing at her, as though expecting to find wounds she hadn't mentioned.

“Stop looking at me like you can hear my thoughts.” She glanced over at him. “Only Nyx gets to cheat like that.”

A smirk tugged at the corner of her mouth.

Eve kissed him back. It wasn't forgiveness. But it was a promise. They had found their way through everything else. They would find their way through this too.

When she pulled away, she studied his face one more time. The exhaustion was carved into every line, deeper than she'd seen in years. Whatever had happened in Neverland had taken something from him. She could see it in the shadows behind his eyes.

She set the can on the ground and shoved her hands into her jacket pockets. The leather was warm from her body, worn smooth where her fingers always went.

“What about you?” she asked, turning toward him. “How are you handling the whole ‘waking up from a curse and realizing your entire life is a lie’ thing?”

She leaned back against the brick wall.

He probably had it coming when her question took him by surprise, the aforementioned vice still dangling from his hand. It wasn’t so much she was prodding at his smoking habits but making him question his own way of dealing-or lack of

“Ye want me,” he repeated softly.

His hands were still pressed against George’s chest. He could feel the steady rhythm beneath his palms, grounding him while everything else felt like it might slip away.

George’s eyes stayed on his. Green and clear, not looking away, not giving Harry the out he’d always expected. Harry swallowed hard.

“If I’ll have ye,” he said, and the laugh that escaped him was wet and broken at the edges. “As if that’s ever been in question.”

He tightened his grip on George’s shirt. “I’ve wanted this for so long I forgot what it was like not to want it.” His voice came out rough, scraping against something raw. “I convinced myself it was never going to happen. That I was seeing things that weren’t there.”

He pressed his forehead harder against George’s. “And now ye’re standing here telling me ye want this too, and I don’t—” His voice cracked. He closed his eyes. “I don’t know what to do with it. I keep waiting for ye to take it back.”

Harry’s hands trembled against George’s chest, and he hated himself for it. Hated the way his body betrayed a fear he’d spent years burying. He had built walls around this particular want, and now George was offering him exactly what he’d denied himself. He was terrified.

Not of George. Never of George.

Of himself. Of the darkness he carried. Of the legacy written into his bones.

“What if I’m not worth it?” The question slipped out before he could catch it, small and raw. “What if I can’t be what ye need?”

His eyes opened, finding George’s. Searching for the lie he was certain must be there somewhere. The hesitation. The doubt.

“I don’t think there’s taking back from here” A sigh conveyed all of his emotions, the weight of Harry’s forehead against his own and the pressure of their bodies against each other spreading a new kind of warm all over him “my heart poured out of my chest and straight into your hands. Do what you want with that”

“Harry” he managed out to whisper the name with that tone he seemed to be only able to speak when it came to the pirate “listen to me”

“Like hell,” Malcolm said, and meant it. The swelling had already started. He could feel it through the fabric of his trousers, hot and tight, throbbing with every heartbeat. Nibs had put his whole weight behind that swing. The kid was getting stronger. They all were.

Malcolm let his head fall back against the blanket. George's fingers pressed carefully around the joint. Malcolm bit the inside of his cheek and stared at the crack in the ceiling. He'd counted every fork and split often enough to know them by heart. Sixty-three branches. Like a tree frozen in stone. The cut above his eyebrow had stopped bleeding. Small mercies.

Malcolm closed his eyes. His mother's face appeared anyway. The way she looked at him sometimes, as though she were trying to solve a puzzle she already knew the answer to.

“We need to come out with something” came his reply after a few beats of silence. Even if he had energy to argue, both knew their mother would find out and her reaction would be tenfold over their -small, completely justified- white lie

“It's not fair,” she agreed softly. “But fair has never had much to do with our family.”

She came around the counter and wrapped her arms around her eldest son, holding him the way she had when he was little. For a moment, he was just her boy again.

“George.” She stroked his hair. She knew him well enough to recognize what this was. George collected his family's burdens as though carrying them himself could somehow make them lighter.

It still had the same effect on his short fuse as well