#flammom

She answered on the second ring. "Mr. Anwar," she said, clearly weary about what the man she had cursed with a thoughtless curse that had landed him ass over teakettle in his foyer, getting impregnated by his husband and stepson, had to say to her.

"You knew I'd find out," Robert questioned, looking up her profile in the probationary files that SDN kept and Robert occasionally pilfered through.

"Your husband described you fairly thoroughly, and I knew exactly who you were. Hard not to recognize when a Mecha Man gets summoned after all," she replied. "I gave it a month."

"Six days," Robert said. There was a brief silence that he interpreted as respect. "I'd like to hire you for something."

"I am not bringing that man back up. He used up any remaining good karma he had, and I am just not powerful enough to drag him by force and then shove him back. He'd come through as a demon if I did, and I don't think you want that. He was not the kindest when back on the surface for his chat with your husband after all."

"Different direction than last time. Different person, too," promised Robert, already trying to shove the image of his late father as a demon out of his mind.

Another pause. When she spoke again, her voice had shifted — still professional, but with something underneath it that was warmer and more careful. "Tell me what you have in mind."

Robert told no one. This was, he was aware, slightly hypocritical given the entire architecture of the last two years and the lessons he had internalized about not carrying things alone. But this was different. This was a gift, which meant it had to be a surprise, which meant it had to be kept, which meant Cirus specifically could not know.

Chad, he told. He had to tell Chad — partly for logistics and partly because Chad's reaction to the idea was something Robert needed to see, and it did not disappoint. Chad had gone very still, and then his face had done several things in quick succession, and then he had put his hands over his face and said nothing for a long moment.

"Yeah," he said, eventually, into his hands.

"Yeah?" Robert asked with a bit of trepidation that he hadn't realized was weighing on him until this moment.

"Yeah." Chad lowered his hands. His eyes were bright with his usual orange fire. He looked at Robert with the expression that still occasionally caught Robert off guard — the one that had nothing of the prickly first weeks out of prison in it and everything of who Chad had become in the house, in the firm, in the arrangement, in the specific and particular shape of the last two years. "Yeah. Let's do it."

Jami, he also told, because when he called her, he wanted her, her husband, and Moska to be there. Jami had been silent on the phone for a long moment and then had said, in a voice that was very controlled and not at all controlled: "When?"

"The anniversary," Robert answered. "If my contact can manage it."

Yasmin could manage it. Yasmin, it emerged, had been waiting for someone to ask. Nobody apparently had ever thought to ask a witch to bring somebody down, not up. She'd been hoping and waiting and practicing her arameic.

It was Jami who told Cirus, the morning of.

Not the specifics — just come home early, baba. Robert has arranged something. Cirus had looked at his calendar and looked at the date and understood the first part of it. He came home at noon to find the sitting room rearranged, candles placed, and Yasmin seated at the cleared dining table with the focused calm of a professional; his entire family arranged around the space.

He looked at Robert, who pushed his glasses up his nose. "I found the retainer," he said, preemptively.

"I know you found the retainer," Cirus commented, not surprised but pleased at his boy's cleverness.

"Six days." The smugness was there not just for show.

"I know." He looked at the room. At Jami, who had her husband's hand in both of hers and was looking at the candles. At Chad, who was sitting beside Robert with his arm across Robert's shoulders and his jaw set. At Moska, seven years old and solemn, who had been told enough to understand that today was important and had dressed in her best without being asked. The sparkly tiara and the glitter crocks were non-negotiable. The twins, too young to understand any of it, resident in their bouncy chairs in the corner.

Cirus looked back at Robert. "You did this," he whispered, marveling once again at the wonder that was his husband.

"Yasmin did this," Robert insisted, not humbling himself to brag, but rather insistent on stating a fact. "I just asked."

"Robert."

"You went one direction," Robert drawled, "I thought we could go the other one." He paused. The amber eyes behind the glasses were steady and warm, and doing that thing they did when Robert meant something very seriously. "She should know them," he said. "The babies. She should — she should get to know what her family is now. What it became." He paused again. "And I wanted her to know that it's good. That they're looked after. That you are."

Cirus looked at him for a long moment.

Then he gathered Robert up, which was the thing he did, and Robert let himself be gathered, which was the thing Robert had learned to do, and neither of them said anything for a moment. The smaller of the two could feel the other's chest expand and stutter just enough to let him know that the thought was deeply appreciated and would be processed when there were fewer eyes around. "Thank you," Cirus rumbled, into the top of Robert's head, long hair cascading around them.

"Don't thank me yet," Robert said, muffled against his chest. "I've never done this before. She might be difficult."

"She was never difficult," Cirus said. "That was always me." From across the room, Jami made a sound that was definitely not a laugh.

The witch worked with focused efficiency of somebody given one chance to prove themselves: the candles, the preparation, the specific materials that Robert had sourced without fully understanding their purpose, but had sourced correctly because Robert researched things until he understood them. The room went quiet. Moska, who had been fidgeting, went still. The twind gnawed on their teething rings, content for the moment.

And then.

She arrived differently from Robbie — no containment circle, no rage, no bullet hole. She simply appeared. Privately, Robert was hoping for something with more pomp and circumstance. Like Casper's mom in the movie. Oh well...

She was tall. Robert had known she would be tall — Jami had her height — and she had Jami's eyes and Chad's jaw and the bearing of someone who had spent a significant portion of her life making things blow up and had been entirely comfortable with this. Her hair was down. She was smiling.

She looked at Cirus first. The way she looked at him was the way you looked at someone you had loved for a very long time and continued to love past the point where loving was possible, which was apparently further than most people thought.

"Azizam," she said.

Cirus, who had faced down the Brave Brigade for fifteen years without flinching, sat down.

What happened after was not the seance Robert had prepared for, which had involved a great deal of mental rehearsal about what he would say to the dead wife of his much older husband and how to manage the occasion. What happened instead was considerably louder and considerably less managed and infinitely better.

Jami cried immediately, which she had clearly been waiting to do since the phone call, and her husband held her and she held Moska and Moska, to her credit, did not cry — she looked at her grandmother and then said: "Baba said you were very pretty. He was right."

Which broke the tension entirely.

Chad laughed — the gap-tooth laugh, his mother's laugh in a different key — and she looked at him with the expression of a woman seeing the proof of something she already knew, and said: "Azizam, you look just like your father," and Chad said, helplessly: "Everyone says that," and she said: "Good. He was very handsome," and winked at Cirus, who covered his face with one hand. Robert thought he could see his cheeks shining wetly in the candlelight.

She asked about the firm. She asked about Jami's husband, whom she assessed. She asked about Moska's tooth, the missing one, and when Moska showed her the gap with great pride, she laughed and said she had the same gap at the same age, and Moska should know it was a sign of excellent character.

She asked about the twins.

Robert brought them. He was not sure, exactly, when he had become the person who brought the twins places, but he had been doing it for months with the instinctive ease of someone who had turned out, despite his considerable concerns, to be the kind of person children were simply comfortable with. He was baffled by that. People around him were indulgent.

He brought them, one on each arm, to where she was and held them out.

She looked at them for a long moment. At the freckles that were Robert's and the eyes that were difficult to assign and the general appearance of two small people who had been made by several people at once and looked entirely like themselves.

"Oh," she said, softly. "Oh, they're perfect."

"Everyone says that too," Robert said, which was not what he had planned to say, and she looked at him.

He had not been prepared for her to look at him. He had arranged this for everyone else — for Cirus, for Chad, for Jami and Moska — and had not fully reckoned with the fact that she would have things to say to him specifically. Dreaded it in the confines of his mind.

She looked at him for a long moment. "You're Robert," she stated.

"Yes," he confirmed, the knot in his stomach tightening.

"Cirus wrote to me," she said. "When I was — he used to write, when he needed to say things to me. Still does, sometimes. The letters go somewhere even if he doesn't send them." She looked at him steadily. "He wrote about you for a long time before he met you. He didn't know it was you he was writing about. He just wrote about being ready to love someone again and not knowing if he was allowed." She paused. "He was allowed."

Robert's throat did something inconvenient. "I didn't know that," he said.

"No," she confirmed. "He wouldn't have told you." She smiled, and it was Jami's smile. "He's like that. He does big things quietly and waits for people to notice." She looked at the twins, still held in Robert's arms, and then back at him. "Thank you," she said. "For looking after them. Both of them."

"Chad looks after himself mostly," Robert said, because his brain had apparently decided that deflection was the appropriate response to being seen this clearly by a woman who had been dead for several years. "He has a best friend that keeps him mostly on the straight and narrow if the straight and narrow was a club scene and a backstage pass"

The woman laughed. It was, Robert discovered, very close to Cirus' laugh in a way that a couple with many years shared between them also shared habits and quirks.

"He doesn't," she said, warmly. "He never has. He needs someone who doesn't let him get away with things." She looked at Robert with the expression of a woman making an assessment and finding it satisfactory. "You don't let him get away with things."

"Somebody has to," Robert shrugged, carefully pulling a small fist out of another equally small mouth covered in drool.

"Yes," she said. "I'm glad it's you." She looked at him for another moment — taking him in, twins balanced in his arms, a smudge of milk on the shoulder, glasses, auburn messy hair, freckles and all— and then reached out and touched his cheek. Her hand was warm. This surprised him.

"He's happy," she said. "Cirus. I could see it from — it's visible, from where I am. He's happy in a way I was hoping he would be after... After." She glanced across the room to where Cirus was sitting with Jami, both of them talking in low voices, and something moved through her expression that was private and vast and entirely love. "Take care of him," she begged, to Robert. "He doesn't let people take care of him. You've figured out how."

"I'm still figuring it out," Robert tried to deny.

"That's how you know it's real."

She stayed for two hours. The twins fell asleep, passed around to various laps, and ended up one each on Chad and Jami. Moska appointed herself official tour guide of the house and walked her grandmother through it with the same running commentary she provided everyone, and she listened to all of it with the focused delight of someone who had been given the best possible gift. No picture on the wall went unnoticed, and no picture of the fridge went unremarked on.

She asked Cirus to play something — the piano in the living room, the red grand that had been there since before Robert, which Robert had never heard Cirus play and had not known he could. Cirus played. She sat beside him and listened with her eyes closed.

Chad, watching from the doorway, had his arm around Robert and was not managing his expression even slightly. Robert absently patted out a few licks of flame that were traveling up and down the fireproof shirt.

"Did you know he could play?" Robert asked, quietly.

"She taught him," Chad said, equally quiet.

Robert looked at Cirus at the piano. At the way he played — not performing, not for the room, just playing, his hands moving over the keys. He thought about letters Cirus had written to a person he didn't know yet, not knowing it was Robert he was writing about. He thought about a website called Kindred and a profile with a photograph taken mid-laugh and forty minutes on the phone to Jami after the first date.

He thought: I was supposed to be the last Robertson. I was going to die in the suit. He thought: Look at what happened instead.

When Yasmin began the process of closing the connection, it was not sudden. She gave them time — had clearly learned, in her practice, that the closing was its own part of the ritual and deserved its space.

She said goodbye to Jami, who held her for a long time without speaking. She said goodbye to Moska, who told her gravely that she would take very good care of Nonno, and received this promise with the gravity it deserved. She kissed the twins' heads, both of them — still asleep, entirely unbothered, having spent the afternoon being held by everyone including a woman who was technically not present and having not found this remarkable in the slightest.

She held Cirus' face in her hands.

Robert did not try to hear what she said. That was not his. He looked at the window, at the garden, at Beef conducting his evening review of the flowerbeds with the senatorial thoroughness that the task required.

And then she came to him again. "One more thing,"

"Yes," Robert answered.

"Your fathers failed you," she said, simply, without ceremony. "Both of them. They were not what you deserved, and I want you to hear that from someone who has the perspective to say it clearly." She looked at him. "You are a good man, Robert Anwar. You are a good father — yes, you are, I've been watching, I know you don't believe it yet but I've been watching — and you are exactly who my family needed." She paused. "I needed to say that to you. I've been wanting to say it for some time."

Robert looked at her. His throat was doing the thing again. "I'm still working it out," he said. His voice was not entirely steady. "The father part."

"I know," she said. "That's how I know you'll be good at it." She smiled at him one more time — warm and certain and carrying in it some quality that Robert associated with Cirus and Chad and Jami and which he now understood was simply the Anwar family, this very special combination of warmth and certainty and the particular fire that ran in all of them — and then she was gone.

The candles stayed lit for another few minutes, burning steadily in the quiet room, before going out one by one on their own.

Later — after Jami and her family had gone home and the twins were in bed and Chad had fallen asleep on the sofa - Robert found Cirus on the pool deck.

He was sitting in the dark with a glass of something he wasn't drinking, looking at the garden. The pool light made long blue shadows. Beef, who had come back from his evening review, was at his feet. Robert sat beside him and leaned into the arm that wrapped around him without Cirus even looking up.

"She liked you," Cirus muttered, eyes locked onto something in the distance.

"She liked everyone," Robert muttered, head pressed against the warm chest as his fingers played with Cirus' hand.

"She was precise about liking," Cirus shook his head. "She didn't like Jami's first boyfriend. Or my second cousin, Farhad. Or the board member who used to make comments about my age." He paused. "She liked you." Robert sat with that.

"She said you used to write letters to someone you didn't know yet," he probed.

Cirus was quiet for a moment. "Did she."

"She said you didn't know it was me. You were just writing about being ready."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"I didn't know it was you," Cirus said. "And then I saw your photograph and I — knew. Something. Not that it was you specifically. Just that the thing I'd been writing about was real and was possible and was not as far away as I thought."

Robert looked at the pool. At the blue light moving on the surface of the water.

"I was going to die in the suit," he said. "That was the plan. No family. No—" he gestured at the house, at the warm windows, at the faint sound of Chad snoring from the sitting room. "None of this."

"I know," Cirus said. "I'm glad the plan was wrong." He pressed a kiss to the top of Robert's head. The warmth of it was enormous and steady and entirely familiar, which was — Robert thought — its own kind of miracle. That something could become familiar. That home could become a place you stopped noticing because you'd stopped expecting it to leave.

They sat on the pool deck in the dark for a while longer, while Los Angeles did its indifferent evening thing beyond the garden wall and the house behind them held its sleeping contents — Chad on the sofa, the twins in their room, Jami and Moska and her husband somewhere across the city probably still talking about it, and all of them carrying something new, something that was warm and would stay warm, that had been given tonight and would not be taken back.

Beef looked up from Cirus' feet and stared at Robert, little pink tongue lolling out without a single thought. Robert scratched his ears. "He approves".

"He approves of everything you do," Cirus snorted, feeling a little more in the present.

"He has excellent judgment! Just maybe... don't let him decide anything too important. You know. Chihuahua and all..."

Cirus laughed — the full, unhurried laugh that Robert had first heard across a restaurant table and had been quietly helpless against ever since.

Robert leaned into him.

The pool light moved on the water.