#pre-wkm

“Do you work here?”

“No, I just like digging,” George answered, the sarcasm coming faster than he could be bothered to stop it. “Worked here going on twelve, thirteen years I suppose? Hard to keep track these days.”

“What do you know about this house?” the priest asked.

More than you would ever believe, if you’re lucky, George thought, but said, “That it ain’t worth going in there. Did the owner call for you?”

The priest hesitated and then nodded. “I have been called to—”

He was interrupted by the owner himself, throwing up the front door and practically running down the steps to greet the priest. He shook his hand like it was a life preserver, his distracted greeting soon giving way to dire whispers as he led the priest inside.

George sighed and shook his head.

Not his business.

Just as it wasn’t his business hours later when thunder split the air hard on the heels of a bright flash of lightning, despite there not being a single cloud in the sky.

When the doors slammed open, only one man came out. He walked in a daze, his blank, staring eyes barely registering the step his foot caught on as he dragged it and himself in a straight line to the car. There he stopped, and crumpled in on himself.

“Thought you might need this.”

He startled at the sound of George’s voice, but could not bring himself to look away from the house for long, not even as the groundskeeper sat down next to him. Without a word, the priest reached out a shaking hand and took the offered bottle, downing it so fast there was no way he could possibly taste the contents. Good thing George didn’t bother with the good stuff.

Despite the blood soaking his black clothes and staining the once neat little white-collar crimson, George couldn’t see anything wrong with him other than his probably sprained ankle. At least, nothing physically wrong.

When the priest finally came up for air, he tried to pass the bottle back to George, but he waved it off. The priest sat there, hand around the neck of the bottle, eyes still on that house as he said, “They’re dead. All of them. The owner, his wife, the staff…”

“It happens.”

The callousness of George’s voice caused the priest’s eyes to flicker toward him, briefly.  “No, what I saw in there, it doesn’t just ‘happen,’ there was—There is something in that house. Something demonic, something…But you knew, didn’t you?”

“I know dying isn’t the worst thing that can happen in that house.” That would be something walking out that hadn’t walked in before, but George kept that dark thought to himself. Better if the man didn’t know what fate he and the others had been spared.

The priest shuddered. “I saw…someone, just before I walked out. I thought it was the owner, but…it was hard to be sure.”

He took another gulp from the bottle, for all the good it did. “Hard to tell though, without his eyes, and with that—with that smile—”

The priest’s chest heaved and he turned away. George grimaced and took the bottle away, and after a moment or two gave him a pat on the shoulders.

“Yeah, best to get it all out now,” George said, trying to ignore the sounds and the smell. After all, it was nothing he hadn’t done after the last time he left that house.

He didn’t comment on the priest’s words about the owner--the former owner. George knew the signs well enough to know that whatever had happened to him in that house, whatever he had become, would not be leaving those walls. It would burn through him before it came even close. If it came to it, stopping that thing from getting out is the one thing, the only thing that would get him to go back in there now.

“We should…we should call someone,” the priest said weakly, once his stomach was empty. “The police…”

“Won’t find anything,” George answered. “Once that house has its hold on someone, it ain’t letting go. Found that one out the hard way.”

“Won’t find—No one could miss it! The bodies are everywhere, or what’s left of them. There were…some of the bodies, they were missing—”

The priest turned away again, but George doubted there was anything left in his stomach to come up at this point.

“And it’ll all be gone by the time that door opens again. Whole house, spick and span and ready to lure another set of fools in,” George said. When he saw the disbelief in the priest’s eyes, he added, “You can check for yourself, if you want.”

The priest glanced at the house and shuddered, his hand moving to cross himself but losing heart halfway through.

They sat there in silence for a while, just looking at that house. So beautiful and grand on the outside, but inside…

“I should go,” the priest said, eventually. “Whatever you think, someone needs to be told.”

George helped him up to his feet, which the priest needed. Even without his ankle, which he could barely put any weight on, he was still unsteady, still trembling so much the groundskeeper wondered if he would even be able to hold the wheel.

“Sure you don’t need to wait?” George asked. “There’s a shed on the grounds, away from that place. You can rest there, if you need to.”

The priest shook his head. “No, no I’ve been gone for too long as it is. It’s been…days, weeks?  I don’t even know anymore, but someone’s bound to start worrying, and I don’t want…”

Didn’t want anyone he knew getting too close to this place, George knew, but he said, “It’s only been a few hours since you drove up here.”

“What?” The priest paused in the act of opening his car door to stare at George. “No, no, that’s impossible, I…”

He refused to listen as George tried to assure him it had been only hours, and soon drove away. George didn’t know what happened to him after that, only that the next person to arrive at the house was not an officer or an exorcist, but a realtor with a ‘For Sale’ sign. The house didn’t even stay on the market for a week.

It wasn’t any of George’s business.

Just as it wasn’t any of his business when the couple arrived, young child in tow. He tried to warn them, but even the little kid just looked at him like he was crazy. And, as the years passed into decades, even he wondered at how long they lasted. The kid, soon joined by another, seemed happy enough, and when as a young man his parents passed away, no one could say it was more than just an unfortunate accident.

Then one day, as George saw the new young master of the house pacing around on one of the upper balconies, shoulders hunched and eyes dark with some quiet thought, it clicked:

The house had been waiting, planning. Patient.

When you thought about it, you were the living embodiment of Task Rabbit, and you didn’t know how to feel about that.

For the last six months, you’d been running errands for the various residents of the manor, ranging from delivering packages to reminding them where they were supposed to be. You couldn’t exactly call it ‘working’ for them, because that would have implied you were getting paid, but you supposed the reward for your service was a rent-free room on the first floor.

You had a thing about heights now.

That brought you to the other reason you were still there, though. Your life had quickly become a tangle of unanswerable questions and questionable answers, only muddied further by the growth of your relationships with the people you currently lived with. One moment, you were using your hard-earned college degree to sweep floors in a local café, and then the next, you were face to face with one man who had killed you and another who had stolen your body because – oh, yeah – reincarnation was a thing, apparently, and you used to be the district attorney in the 1920s, because, of course, why didn’t you assume that before—

Despite all the time that had passed between that revelation and now, that subject still touched a nerve.

You supposed you would get over it quicker had you not chose to interact with one of those men on a day-to-day basis. A wound never quite healed if you kept picking at it, and you voluntarily dug your fingers in every time that you made your way up the stairs from the foyer to the second-floor hallway.

You slid your hand up the banister alongside you, remembering to lift your hand when you got to the sixth step to avoid the splinter that stuck out like a threat. You made a mental note to sand that down later as you stepped onto the rug. There were a number of residents who had a flair for the dramatic, and using the banister as an express route to the first floor was not below any of them. Considering the message that you were on your way to deliver, it was an accident waiting to happen.

Shoes planting themselves outside his office, you lifted your hand to knock on Dark’s door. Any interaction that didn’t begin with that courtesy was off to a bad start automatically – read: anytime that Wilford appeared in the study – and you didn’t want to get him anymore annoyed than he was going to be. 

Or than he already was; the seconds ticked by, each one dragging you further into concern. Ordinarily, having a small delay was to be expected, but Dark was anything but ordinary, and those seconds meant a lot.

That was why, when the creaking bit away at the silent hallway, your first words were a refrain. “I can come back later if you’re busy.”

It didn’t take more than a second for Dark to respond, “No, it’s quite alright.”

For someone so cold and single-minded, he had never been able to shirk the manners that had been imparted onto him. You knew he had never been taught them directly, but some influence from the facets of his mind was inescapable. As such, he was going to let you in, and the only thing that changed was how far he glanced down the hallway before he closed the door behind you.

Once to the left, once to the right – repeated twice more.

You marched into the study swiftly, every part of you becoming painted with an inky blackness the moment you crossed the threshold. It was like there was a physical barrier between the hallway and the room, as though the door were still firmly locked shut with barely a slit at the bottom to let the air flow. Sometimes, you wondered if it were magic or just for dramatic effect.

Knowing the man behind you, it was probably both, but you weren’t about to have a conversation in the cave from The Descent, so you gripped the closest swath of fabric and tugged it to the side. Rays of sunlight poured in, finally letting you see your own hands and those of Dark as he pulled his chair out from under the desk.

They were always so gray. It was the first thing you had noticed about him when you met, just how surprisingly monochrome he was because it wasn’t just his hands, no, it was him. He was completely devoid of color, every pigment taken up by the waves of red and blue that surrounded him. Even his clothes were one spectrum of white and black, from his shoes to his suit to his glasses that he adjusted when he was situated between the arms of the chair.

“Thank you,” he muttered, making himself comfortable again, “I never noticed how dark it is in here.”

You decided to keep your grin at the irony to yourself, and, instead, you deigned to sit in the other chair that had been moved to the middle of the room. It was a plush, leather thing – more an obstacle than a piece of furniture – that someone had taken it from the library the first time Dark had called for a one-on-one meeting. It had taken up residency in the study after that, and you often found yourself using it for general relaxation whenever the rest of the manor got too loud.

But now was no time to be yearning for a nap. You had important business to tend to, even if you had to fight back a grimace at the mere texture of the manila envelope in your hands. In a last-ditch attempt to seem confident, you balanced it on the edge of the wooden surface while plastering a small grin over your lips.

“Now,” you sighed, “do you want the good news or the bad news?”

“Neither would be preferable, but I’ll hear the worst first.”

A pessimist at heart was Dark, but he was smart enough to hear both sides of the story before acting. No matter how much he tried to demonstrate himself as a force not to be messed with, creeping into loose-cannon territory was below him, and there was a measurable pattern to the punishments that he doled out for each transgression. According to what you’d seen, there was a good chance he’d let the offenders off with just a warning.

With a cautious tone, you said, “We lost Hee-Hoo again.” And when the corners of his mouth tilted into a frown and his fingers wrapped against the arms of the chair, you rushed to amend, “But it wasn’t the Jims’ fault this time.”

“So somebody else let him out?”

You grimaced, knowing exactly the words that he wanted to hear and that he would indeed hear if you told him the truth. You didn’t have a lot of ways out from this problem; if you stayed silent, a single house meeting would make everyone responsible, but if you ratted the resident out, you had very few methods of saving their hide. Even before you made a decision, you had to contend with Dark’s piercing gaze he knew damn well you couldn’t refuse.

The words came rushing out of your mouth before you had a second to comprehend them. “I left the gate open last time I went to check on the squirrels. I thought I closed it behind me, but I didn’t, so Hee-Hoo managed to get out.”

Dark didn’t have to say that he didn’t believe you, and you silently berated the hold-over impulses from the district attorney. You had the speed, but you didn’t have the logic.

“Bing didn’t mean to—”

He cut you off with a stern and blunt, “Bing.”

“He didn’t mean to. And he’s trying to find him right now.”

A quirked eyebrow and a slow blink.

“Google’s with him.”

At that, Dark leaned back in his chair – the material dipped ever-so-slightly behind him – and his shoulders visibly dropped in relief. Bing, alone, wandering the city in search of a wild animal was not the most comforting image, you would admit. Having someone to guide him, and to make sure he didn’t short-circuit in a fountain, gave him understandable hope that he would come back safe.

“Good,” Dark said, removing his glasses, as though getting a headache would supersede any from the stress of the residents. “At least Google will be able to bail him out if he gets into any trouble.”

“What, you think a naked caveman running through the city center will draw attention?”

The room stayed just as silent, but his hands moved quickly to drag across his face, shielding the glint of mirth you knew had grown in his eyes, like the first star in the night sky. Of course, he was much too busy being dramatic and broody to outwardly laugh at your joke – perish the thought that he experienced emotions.

Still, you ducked your head slightly to peek under Dark’s hand. “Do you want to hear the good news?” you asked teasingly.

He nodded as he ran that same hand through the curls of his hair.

“Wilford’s late-night show got approved.”

“And that is the good news?”

“Yes, it is—” You levelled him with a certain look of expectancy, “—Would you rather he try to interview Murdock again?”

You, Dark, and everyone else in the manor remembered the last time those two were in the same room. It wasn’t a shock when they pranced off to compare favorite weaponry – you, for one, had heard the merits of knives over guns too many times to count – but it was certainly a concern when the lovesick schoolgirl joined in with them, and then, suddenly, everyone was too afraid to sleep at night. 

The only ones who actually got any sleep for the next few days were the Jims because they slept in shifts.

With that thought in mind, you said, “It’d do him good to interact with the general public for once.”

“The general public is what I’m worried for.”

The second that his hand met the surface of the desk, you reached over and laid your own over the top. He was as cold as he had been the day you met, but the pressure was more than enough to make up for it. It had Dark looking directly at you, not hiding from the comfort you were trying to provide or pushing back against it. It was just you and him together in that study.

“Hey, as long as he’s happy, right?” you muttered.

Despite not needing to, Dark took a breath in and then let it out, before he responded in kind. “As long as he’s happy.”

“And he’s talking about joining the war!”

“It’s for a good cause, isn’t it?”

With one set of fingers curled around your own mug of tea, you gently guided Damien’s into his hands, making sure it was secure before you let go. The ceramic wasn’t too hot, but it was better safe than sorry, especially when the little loveseat was vulnerable to staining. Now that you thought about it, maybe eggshell wasn’t the best color to go for when half of your nights ended with your drunken stumbling with a bottle of beer hoisted high.

Although, you supposed that the little pockmarks of soaked in alcohol served to tell the story of your college career.

You covered some of them up as you dropped onto the cushion beside Damien.

“Well, of course, but couldn’t he choose something less suicidal?”

You shrugged as you took a sip from your mug. “Then he wouldn’t be Will.”

In the corner of your eye, you saw him inaudibly tut at your suggestion, but his avoiding eye contact told you everything that you needed to know – that he knew you were right.

But there were still some things that supported his argument, mostly the emotional side that you never liked to disagree with. William had been Damien’s friend since they could conceptualize friendship, and to hear that he was going off to take blind shots against other soldiers? He was bound to be upset. The most you could do was try and get him to see the positives of the situation, however hard you had to search through the blood and gore of the last three years.

“Besides,” you started with a knock to his shoulder, “it can’t last forever, and when it does end, he’ll be back home, and you won’t have to worry about him.”

“I think I’m going to worry about him until the day I die.”

His head flopped against the channel back of the couch, and you joined him when you sensed there was going to be no more talking for the moment. It was a quant silence that enveloped the pair of you, as if a bubble had formed to protect you from the outside world, but that left you to the mercy of your internal troubles.

You didn’t know it, but, for Damien, that included you – or, rather, your safety. Whether or not William skipped off with a gun in hand, war was coming. It had come for Europe, and an ocean wouldn’t stop its slow but deliberate march forward. You wouldn’t be on the frontlines, neither of you would, but there would be damage back home, and he didn’t want you to get caught in it. He didn’t want to lose someone else to the war.

He didn’t want to lose you.

Your thigh tapped against his own.

“What’s on your mind, huh?” you asked. You had been watching him from the side, saw that he was thinking about something and that the conclusion he came to was not a happy one.

“Oh, nothing.”

“Come on, there’s something bugging you.”

Damien sighed. It was just his luck to fall for someone with the stubbornness of a mule welded to the ground.

Although he opened his mouth to explain, only the vaguest of noises came out when he turned to look at you. You were smiling. Damien was wondering if you would make it through the war, and there you were, with a lopsided grin that barely showed a tooth peeking out from the edge. What was more, you were planted firmly against the crook of the loveseat, in the process of pulling a leg up to sit more comfortably. You weren’t moving, come hell or high waters.

Maybe, just maybe, he didn’t have to worry about you if you were with him.

He grabbed your ankle and tugged you down so that you slid awkwardly against the arm. Your squawk of dismay was only met with a quiet, “Nothing.” And if you had any ideas about asking anymore questions, they were trampled by the lazy play fight you would be caught in for the next ten minutes.

Back then, everything was different – everyone was different. The man who ran off to the trenches was more William than Wilford, and most of the lucid time you spent with Damien was helping him up onto a keg or down from a hangover. The only thing that didn’t really change was the frequency with which you found yourself pouring over documents with the man in front of you. Your identities might have been molded by experience, but your pastimes were not.

And that gave you pause.

Absentmindedly, you squeezed Dark’s hand tighter, having wrapped your fingers around his palm sometime in your memories.

“Y’know, you could take a break.”

“A break?” The bleakness of his tone only made you want to push harder.

“Not a long one. Just…” you trailed off into a sigh. You didn’t remember a day that he spent outside of the manor, and you were well aware of the years between your presence – even getting into the hallway was a miracle. “You need to get out of here at some point. It’s not healthy to stay cooped up in your office for days on end.”

You leaned forward despite the look he sent you. You were well aware that he wasn’t human.

“You still take on stress like everyone else does,” you said, “and, right now, you’ve taken on too much.”

In a fraction of a second, Dark’s eyes shot away from you, and, although they returned soon enough, he was too slow for you not to notice. He was cracking, and that was just what you needed to see.

He reached for the files that you had placed down earlier as he muttered, “It won’t kill me.”

He was an inch away from getting it, too, when you pressed your spare hand down on the top, securing it firmly against the desk and receiving a huff from him for it. 

“It’ll make you miserable, though. If you keep going like this, you’ll just keep breaking down until you don’t have a choice.”

Dark worked like a machine. As efficient, constant, downright surgical as he might have been, he also required upkeep. At the start, he was a chainsaw of a man, teeth bared at every little thing, whether he would bite into the soft remnants of a garden or the debris of a wrought iron fence. However, as he started to get worn down, rust invading his muscles and atrophying his veins, he remolded himself into a clock. The hands would go around and around and around, spinning endlessly in a routine of management. Not a second early and not a second late, lest everything fall apart. But that wasn’t the problem, no, it was that the rust was never removed, and it spread just like before. At this point, where the ticking was a distant whisper and the numbers were half-scrubbed off, there was very little of him left.

It wasn’t hard to figure out what was keeping him going on like that.

“They’ll be okay.” It was an undebatable statement that had Dark looking from the office door back to you.

“What makes you think that? Weren’t you telling me about our escapee not thirty seconds ago?” Still, he let the file go and dropped back into his chair. “If no one’s here to look after them, they’ll burn down the manor or die trying.”

You knew Dark was – collectively – over one hundred years old, but the air of tire had never been so strong. It was no longer a case of wanting him to take a break, shoddy personal opinion, it was now a need. He was so clearly on the cusp of toppling over the edge that you resolved to take drastic action, which just so happened to be utilizing one of the district attorney’s old tactics.

“Don’t you trust me?”

Emotional blackmail.

There was a stab of guilt in your chest that you ushered away as he leapt to say, “Of course I do.”

You chose not to say anything else, wary of pulling at his heart strings too much. He was smart, he’d figure it out – and he did, but he was also smart enough to protest, despite the warping of the bi-colored waves around him.

“You can’t keep them in line all by yourself.”

“Hey, you said you trust me.”

“I do trust you. Them, not so much.”

The rhythm of your fingers tapped on the file produced a dozen small thumps. There was little evidence to combat that, and Dark was gradually regaining control of the red and blue lines. He didn’t have the upper hand yet, but if you waited any longer, you’d surely lose your advantage.

“What if I make them all promise to behave?”

A light scoff. “I’d applaud you,” Dark replied with an underlying amusement. “It’d be the first thing they have ever agreed on since two of them were put under the same roof.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” was your offering. While you didn’t expect it to have much of an effect, the combined weight of your promise and stubbornness appeared to give you the break in his wall that you needed.

Meanwhile, Dark was trying not to let anything give. It wasn’t that he had lied; he did trust you, that wasn’t the issue at hand. He had seen what happened when someone tried to wrangle the residents of the manor – he was the unliving consequences of that – and he would do anything possible or impossible to make sure you didn’t fall victim to that same fate. What you were suggesting was just a small break, but if he gave an inch, you would take a mile, and then he’d be sent on day, week, month-long vacations with nothing to do except watch you bow under the weight, and then he’d be in your place, begging you to take some time off, and then you’d refuse because you felt like you were saving him from the work, and then you’d bow deeper and deeper and deeper until you broke, and then—

And then what was he supposed with the shattered pieces of you?

What was he supposed to do without you?

That explanation wasn’t going to fly with you, so, instead, he simply said, “I don’t want you wasting your time on this.”

“It’s not a waste.” Your assertion came with a confidence Dark could never hope to match, and he followed your eyes as you rose to your feet, that surefire smile playing on your lips.

“Give me twenty-four hours, and I swear, I’ll have their agreements, signed and dated.”

It was your final bid. If this didn’t work, basically telling him that you were going to do this, then you would leave the issue alone. For today, at least. Maybe until dinner. Probably just an hour or two.

Oh, who were you kidding? You would wait outside his office and tackle him the moment he opened the door.

But fortunately, Dark sat up straighter in his chair and sent you a weary look that nearly had you bouncing up and down on your feet.

Before he even opened your mouth, you knew you had won.

“Do you really want to?”

“Yes.”

“And can I change your mind?”

“Nope.”

He gestured to the door with one hand and used the other to give yours one last gentle squeeze.

“Good luck, dear.”

In every other room of the manor, there were cameras. Theoretically, it was for safety. Practically, it was to fuel Google’s megalomania. The line that had been drawn was laid at the threshold of Dark’s office, and that meant it was just the two of you who were privy to the look you shared. It was something more than intimate, it was an undeniable and unbreakable confirmation of belief in one another – that you would get those signatures, and that Dark would follow through with the break.

The corners of Dark’s mouth tilted upwards ever so slightly, propping up his cheeks and returning the twinkle to his eye. You responded in kind, a slight chuckle and a playful wink, before you opened the door and ventured out with a plan of attack.

While that moment stayed contained in the office, your giddy sprint down the hallway was not as protected, but you were too hyped up on adrenaline to care about who saw you.

The energy you wore like a second skin was unexpected, but the stubbornness was no surprise to Dark. Even though you were in a new body, had lived years of a double life that you didn’t know was a double life, that was a trait that stuck to you. It wasn’t a bad thing. In some ways, it was a survival tactic because, as nice as some of the residents of the manor were, nearly all of them had a tendency to push boundaries. Sticking up for yourself and your ideas let you keep your head above water.

It wasn’t too often that it was used against him, though. Only you and Wilford were able to get that far without being thrown through the nearest window. Both of you were a soft spot, but you were one he deigned to keep hidden. You were open with everyone, and you did your best to get along with them. Wil was too erratic for people to get close to, but you?

Unless there was evidence to suggest otherwise, you helped. 

You always had.

As soon as class ended, students ran for the doors like bats out of hell, or, more accurately, like a flood because it was incredibly easy to get swept up in it and pushed to the other side of campus before you could escape the stream. Even the professor tended to duck out in the chaos of it all. It was much easier to just wait the extra few minutes before it was relatively calm again, so that left you, Damien, and a handful of other classmates milling around the room.

As you shoved out your chair from your desk, you made idle chat with your friend about upcoming assignments and visits back home for the holidays. You knew Damien wasn’t excited to return to the white-knuckled grip of his parents, so you tried to keep the positive in his mind – it didn’t have to just be networking and arguments, it could be seeing his sister and relaxing after months of college stress. He tended to lament the fact that you would be staying after you said these things, but a pat on the back and a shared cup of tea never failed to make him smile.

In that moment, you were debating a complete reconstruction of your organizer when a voice broke through the mumble of the classroom.

“Oi, Whitacre!”

You stuffed a sheet into your bag – adding another reason to reorganize to the list – as Damien whirled around to see who had spoken.

It came from one of the boys in the middle of the room. A clump had formed around a table, all of them old-money and none of them with respect for the tables they were sitting on. They still acted like teenagers, and it made you grimace when you thought about them in the legal profession or in any sense at all.

Damien had no such qualms. He called back in a less abrasive tone, “Do you need something, Jameson?”

“Wanted to know if you’re coming tonight!”

Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced at you. You shrugged and collected your papers. No matter your reputation as a live wire, you didn’t like to frequent wherever Thomas Jameson went. You were on opposite sides of the university by design, and you wanted to keep it that way.

With no option, he asked, “Where?”

“Bunker’s place, a party. His father’s out and his sister won’t tell.” Although he trailed off into a laugh, the man beside him, the aforementioned George Bunker, attempted to shove his friend off the table. He wobbled, shot him a dirty look, and then returned his attention to Damien, who, ever the Victorian gentleman, sent back a small smile.

“Thanks for the invitation, but we’ve got things to do tonight.”

“Come on, it’s only one night. There aren’t a lot of chances to let loose like this.”

In the background, you heard another conflict between Bunker and Jameson – which ended in the thud of someone falling off a chair – but you didn’t pay any mind to it. Instead, you glanced towards your own friend, whose expression told you everything you needed to know, if his body language wasn’t already screaming it. The slight twitch of his fingers on the desk, the sliver of his lip that had been pulled into his mouth to be worried by his teeth, the practically invisible raise of his shoulders. 

“I have plans with my friend already.”

“Just blow them off, Whitacre, they won’t care.”

“I think they will, Jameson,” you piped up, though you didn’t bother to connect the dots for him.

His head lolled backwards, and he spoke to the ceiling with the whining of a toddler, “I wasn’t talking to you, was I?”

Your mouth opened to snap back as soon as he started, but Damien laid a hand on your shoulder, an old grounding method from your first term, before saying, “We have exams to study for.”

“The next one’s in two weeks, you’re not going to lose your perfect grades over one bash.”

Why was he trying so hard? Was it a power play or just him being a jerk for the fun of it? It was certainly getting on your nerves, but the thing that got to you most was the sight of Damien beside you. His hand carded through his hair, and his eyes flickered to the sides of the room, to the door, to you, and back to the door like butterflies in a jar – Jameson was a kid shaking it for his own amusement.

After the fact, you realized it would have been wiser to just take Damien by the hand and leave. It would have been easier, too, because the boys would have moved on to some new sadistic entertainment by the time you saw each other again. However, it would have been less satisfying, and the absolute disgust on Jameson’s face when you stormed up to him and poked him in the chest was gold.

“If he says he doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t want to go.”

His mouth curled into a sneer. “Didn’t you hear me when I said I wasn’t talking to you?”

“Didn’t you hear him when he said he doesn’t want to go?”

You didn’t know how many times you had to say it to get it through his thick skull, but you would write it on paper and stick it to his forehead if he would finally understand.

But that would have been too simple; he leaned around you to make eye contact with Damien again, saying, “Look, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to—”

“Which he doesn’t.”

“But wouldn’t it be nice to hang out with someone else for a change?”

You turned on your heel to see Damien getting closer, and now that everyone still in the classroom was looking towards this spectacle, you imagined you were supposed to feel worried. He was slipping between the desks, intently marching towards you and the group, a plan in his mind that he was going to go through with. Yes, you should have felt worried that he would choose them over you.

But he was content with what he had. He locked eyes with you instead of the boy behind you. He grabbed your hand.

“No.” His voice was so blunt that you stifled a laugh. “I’m happy with my friend.”

And just like that, Damien guided you back to your table, picked up both of your bags, and then headed for the door, barely giving you long enough to make a face at Jameson before you were out into the hallway.

In a burst of energy, you let loose all the chuckles you had stuffed down your throat. You started alone but soon you coaxed your companion into a fit. The noise danced down the corridor like a spring breeze, but you leaned your head against his shoulder to calm yourself down when you reached the more populated section.

“I love you, Damien.”

“I love you, too, dear.”

While both of you picked up on each other’s darkening, the color too vivid to be blamed on the laughter, and the tiny grins that were only ever the product of combined nerves and excitement – neither of you were able to say for certain what kind of love that was, for fear of being wrong or for fear of simply saying it aloud.

Still, you both seemed to decide that this moment, as you stumbled over each other out the building and onto the main center of the campus, was enough for now.

Having such a variety of characters living in the manor meant your days were full of entertainment and excitement and adventure and all manner of other good feelings. But, damn it, did they have to be so widespread?

You had started your search for signatures around when everyone would be waking up. Most of them weren’t cosmic deities or cthulu-esque monsters, which meant a knock at their bedroom door when the clock struck eight was the easiest way to find them – and that had indeed worked for a handful of the residents. Hell, Eric had even offered to help you out, but you waved him off in favor of letting the poor guy get some more sleep.

The problems you faced fell into two categories. Either the person you were looking for had apparently disappeared completely off the map, or they realized that the contract you had drafted was suspiciously lacking compensation. It was easy to figure out who was who.

That meant, as you practically collapsed against the backdoor with scratches and grass stains, it was almost seven o’clock at night. Illinois had been the trickiest to track down, not because you didn’t know where he was but because figuring out how caving gear worked was the world’s most boring hassle. Luckily, there weren’t many requests you were following through with, but you knew the hardest part would be dealing with Wilford’s nitpicking as you polished his guns, if you were able to hear him over the sound of Yancy’s tap-dancing for a week straight.

But it was all going to be worth it in the end. The only ones left on your list were the ones that had started this whole ordeal. Google, Bing and Hee-Hoo were on their way back to the manor, and you had finished up in time to wait for them with the most stereotypical-disappointed-parent face you could muster. They were signing that contract the moment they stepped through the door. While you didn’t think Hee-Hoo had a signature – or was able to write or even knew his own name – you were going to make him. Somehow.

You didn’t get long to think about how you were going to do that before a pair of figures were fighting their ways through the darkness. They were still caked in darkness as they got closer, until they were marching up the cobblestone path to the door.

You slid it open for them, receiving a barely noticeable nod from Google, but it was when Bing shut it behind him that you peered out into the night again.

“Where’s Hee-Hoo?” you asked, suspicions rising. If they didn’t find him, they were going to deal with a lot more than just your contract.

However, Bing just wiped his shoes off on the mat and replied, “Don’t worry ‘bout it, dude. We sent him to get cleaned up with the hose.”

Slowly, you blinked, turning back to him. “We have so many bathrooms.”

“You do not want him in the house.”

“…Okay.”

You weren’t going to argue about it. You’d had too much running about for one day that getting into a fight would surely send you over the edge. That, and you still needed them to make their promises.

You caught them as they both started in the direction of the door, producing the paper from its plastic wallet alongside a pen. You might have died, but you still valued an unfolded sheet.

“I need you two to sign this.”

With one hand, Bing took the contract from you, while he used the other to remove his sunglasses. Why he wore them at night, you didn’t know, but it only mattered to you that he slid them over his shirt before he started reading.

“’Any persons’ – that’s not right—”

“’Any persons to be present in the mansion on April twelfth,” Google said, peering over Bing’s shoulder with the most inconvenienced expression he was programmed with, “are to sign on their individual dotted lines, pledging to conduct themselves in an appropriate manner from zero hundred hours to twenty-four hundred hours.’”

“I was getting there!”

Bing’s protest went ignored as Google read on, “’Appropriate manner is defined as causing no destruction or harm of person or property, nor causing any sound above fifty-five decibels, including gunshots, shouting, or any attempt at cooking.’”

As expected, both of them looked at you like you were insane. You would admit that you went slightly overboard on the terms, but precautions had to be made. You only got one shot at this; if Dark left for a break and then came back to an empty patch of land where there should have been a building, he would never step foot outside again. It had to be exact, with no room for loopholes.

“What’s it for, anyway?” Bing asked.

“Dark needs a break, and he’s only going to take one if you all promise to stay in line, so I really, really need you to sign this.” Your explanation finished with a pleading expression. Although they were androids, they had been programmed with emotions – even if one of them only had the ability to feel annoyed with your puppy-dog eyes.

Bing didn’t seem to show much resistance, but he did take the opportunity to probe, “Why does he need a break?”

“Have you looked at him?”

This time, Google cut in. “Dark is an entity beyond human comprehension.” Obviously, only when it was time to poke some holes into your logic did he decide to speak up. “He has looked the same as he has for his entire existence.”

“No, he hasn’t,” you asserted as a headache crept up on you. “He hasn’t been out of his office in days, he doesn’t even show up to the house meetings, he doesn’t talk to anyone unless they go to him, he—”

Was wearing his glasses more often to fend off the eye strain, he only noticed how dark his office was when you opened the curtains, he hadn’t touched a book in months, he had once asked for the worst combination of Advil and Tylenol you had heard of in your life that he swore was for an experiment but you knew it was because his hand was cramping from writing so much – his neck unconsciously twisted, his lips were bitten in the corners, and his eyes weren’t just black, they were dull, like someone had sanded down his irises. 

“—he’s tired.”

A second ticked by on the clock.

“Alright then.”

Before you realized that he had said anything, Bing took the pen from your hand, clicked the top, and scribbled a vague drawing of a skateboard on the dotted line next to his name. When he finished off a wheel with a flourish, he tossed the pen back and slapped the contract onto Google’s chest.

And then he was walking out of the room, spots of mud that he had failed to get rid of trailing after him. With a peace sign thrown over his shoulder, he called out, “See ya later, dudes.”

While he rounded the corner and disappeared into the body of the manor, you were left with Google.

All you could say was a simple, “Please.”

However, you should have known by then that, if given the opportunity, Google would go back to his power-hungry programming – and hell if this wasn’t the goldest of golden opportunities.

“Who will be in charge while you are gone?”

His tone didn’t give anything anyway – not that you needed it to – but you pulled back in surprise at his suggestion.

“Oh, I’m not taking a break, this is just for Dark.”

“Do you want him to actually relax?”

“Of course.”

“Go with him.”

You opened your mouth to argue. Your entire proposition to Dark had relied on you being there to take care of the manor. Going back on that would let him go back on his promise as a whole, and that wasn’t an option. You also weren’t the one who needed some time off. You ran errands. You kept the residents from being at each other’s throats every second of every day. You did not try to protect the entire manor while tracking down who you were defending it from. You did not spend every waking moment in a cramped room with no sunlight and no socialization, working through the massive pile of lawsuits from misadventures. Dark needed a break. You didn’t.

And yet you closed your mouth because there was a simple way out of this. After all, if you could trust people on their word and integrity you would not have spent the last eleven hours chasing them through caves and sacrificing your future energy for a little inked line.

So, you held the pen out and said a blunt, “Fine.”

Before he took it, though, he stopped to look you in the eyes. Despite his deadpan expression, there was an aura of smugness that permeated the air. “And my question?”

“You can be in charge, but just for that day.” What did you care? You weren’t going to honor this promise, so he could have the plastic keys to the kingdom.

“This is satisfactory.”

You didn’t think he would notice if you were a little casual, too wrapped up in his pride and too busy signing the contract that supposedly gave him the power-trip he wanted.

He handed it back with a barely contained smirk, the lights in his eyes whirling with anticipation. You took it gladly. Just one more to go, you were almost done, so close to freedom you could taste it.

You nodded at the android, too excited for words, and leaped to the backdoor and shoved it open, ready to search for that caveman. 

In your haste, you left the door open, but that only meant you were able to yell a quick, “You’re not getting admin privileges!” before you got too far.

You didn’t hear Google’s reply, but you definitely felt his anger burning into your back.

The evening was always the most flexible in regard to the activity of the manor; some days, everyone would be too tired out to get up to any real mischief, but others would see the residents bouncing off and through the walls. There was something more about tonight, though, a certain expectation that hovered in the air like fog over a lake. It hid reality. Of course, you could assume that everything was tranquil and still from the undisturbed layer, but it was never a certainty.

Dark supposed it was because he was waiting. The manor tended to reflect his emotions the most, the people and the place equally, and he caught himself glancing towards the office’s door more than usual – and this time, it wasn’t out of apprehension of another fight breaking out or the old ceiling crashing down. It was, rather, an anticipation that gripped his unbeating heart and squeezed the few drops of blood left into his dusty veins.

A knock at the door practically crushed it into a mess. He’d fix it eventually, remold it like he always did for the next time you paid him a visit.

He moved quickly to the door and pulled it open even quicker. You were there, as he expected, with that damn grin and a prideful twinkle in your eye and that contract you had made clenched between your hands.

Silently, trying to fight back his own smile, he stepped to the side and gestured for you to enter. You followed his order, he followed you, and then he was sitting at his desk again with you standing in front of him, triumphant and gorgeous.

Even with the strange spots of dust and water that hadn’t been there the last time he had seen you.

You didn’t explain, despite his raised eyebrow, and simply slapped the paper down onto the wooden surface. Dark adjusted his glasses to peruse the signatures, skimming them but not doubting the authenticity. You had said you’d get all of the residents to sign it, and there was never a time you failed to deliver.

You watched his eyes trail down the page, saw his lips slightly tilt up at the corners when he got to the bottom, heard his scoff at the messy dirt thumbprint you had improved for the caveman. The sound was almost silent but nonetheless amused, so you didn’t worry when he put the sheet down and peeled off his glasses entirely. Instead, you beamed at him, absolutely ecstatic.

“You got them all.” It was a statement that you relished. If you were feeling confident, you might have said there was a tone of reverence.

“Yep, every single one.”

“And they really all agreed?”

Your prepared response died on your tongue. You didn’t want to mention the huge amount of favors you owed, or the hell the manor would be put through in the coming weeks, so you just said, “I got the signatures.”

Dark stared at you.

You felt sweat pool at the back of your neck and blood rush to your face.

He continued to stare at you.

But then he nodded and pushed his chair back from the desk. “Alright.”

Your feet melded to the floorboards at that one word, and, for a moment, you wondered if you had been actually remade as a robot because you felt like you were short-circuiting.

You barely managed to get out, “Alright?”

Poise radiated from Dark as he crossed one leg over the other, seeming to look straight into your soul with not so much as a care that you were so shocked.

“Alright,” he repeated, placing an elbow on the armrest, “I will take a break.”

That was easy. Well, obviously the lead-up had been torture and offering the idea in the first place was a stress-test, but this little moment? It was too straightforward. Everything about Dark had told you he would resist a little more than that, if only to set an example to the other residents, but there he was, ready and willing to go through with your plan.

Seconds ticked by on the clock.

Realizing he was waiting for you to say something, you shoved the sentence out of your mouth as if it would kill you to keep it in any longer. “Great, great, I can, uh, find a nice café locally or I can ask Wilford to take you if there’s somewhere you have in mind—”

You stopped short as soon as Dark cut you off, saying, “As long as you accompany me.”

There it was. The resistance. The search for an advantage. The addendum to the original idea that gave him more of what he wanted, that was what you expected from Dark, and it gave you comfort to know you hadn’t gotten him wrong. He was an opportunist at heart – not that it was a bad thing, you liked a good deal, too – and it was familiar for him to stay true to his nature.

Only after the thought calmed your heart rate down did you acknowledge what he had actually asked for, at which point the heat of the Earth’s core flooded back along the bridge of your nose. After all, you’d never gone out with Dark as a group, much less one-on-one, and you didn’t see any reason he would ask you specifically that didn’t have consequences of one sort or another.

As a last-ditch attempt to save face, you asked, “Google didn’t put you up to this, did he?”

“No, he did not.”

“Right, okay—” Your arms dropped uselessly to your sides, “—so why?”

How he managed to look you in the face as he spoke was beyond you. How he managed to say anything at all in such a controlled voice made you jealous. “I would feel more comfortable with you at my side.” He was blunt but not rude – hell, the tone was so gentle that you became suspicious.

“Then who’s going to, well, babysit?”

That suspicion grew tenfold for other reasons as Dark paused for a millisecond too long. It didn’t help that he averted his gaze over your shoulder before it returned with a cracked in his coolness.

Now was your turn to stare him down and his turn to crumble.

“Google did talk to me,” he admitted slowly, “and he would be willing to take on the duties for the day.”

“Did you…?” you trailed off, making a vague gesture with your hand.

“I did not give him admit privileges.” ‘No, he wasn’t stupid’ was the unspoken comment there. “If anything does go awry, he can contact me, but everyone has signed this contract, so that would be extremely likely.”

An unspoken comment that you didn’t pick up on was the general consensus that whoever disturbed them would be absent from house meetings for the foreseeable future. While Dark wasn’t a loose cannon, pre-meditated murder was just as painful as voluntary manslaughter, and it was an experience too familiar for many of them. The punishment fit the crime.

You would have likely been more jittery if you knew that thought was jumping through the minds of the residents, but you were blissfully ignorant, so you just stumbled through saying, “Great, yeah, that sounds great, I just have to figure out where to go.”

“You mentioned a café?”

An awkward chuckle forced its way out of your throat. You were starting to have doubts about everything – the carefully selected spot for relaxation was gradually degrading in your opinion. “Yeah, it’s on the outskirts of town, opens at six and closes at eleven, only one barista, serves coffee so black you might as well be eating the beans. It’s normally dead on a Thursday.”

It was adorable when you resorted to your roots, laying out the evidence and letting him be judge, jury and executioner. You somehow managed to break through the barriers he thought would have stopped him from feeling anything like this; air invigorated his discarded lungs, his stomach flipped in each direction almost methodically, and he could have sworn his skin got warmer, as though an early sun laid itself on the surface.

Dark leaned forward and placed his head on layered hands. “You know me so well.”

“It’s- I’m just doing my job.”

“This is more than your job.”

You watched, frozen where you stood, as he rose from his seat and glided over to you. Once a ghost haunting the same room for decades, he was now a man, solidifying more and more every step he took towards you. He stopped when he was a foot away.

The eye-contact returned, and the breath was knocked out of both of you.

“Thank you,” he whispered – did he whisper – softly – or was he talking normally, and you were losing yourself in the proximity?

You didn’t expect him to lean closer or take your hand in his or have the effect that he did on you with not much more than his simple being there.

However, when you caught sight of the spark in his eyes, the burst of sincerity and a slight awkwardness, you did expect the buzz in your skin where he placed a soft kiss. The electricity seemed to transfer between you, lighting up your skin enough to rival Times Square, before it dissipated through to the rest of your face. 

Between your last life and this one, you weren’t sure you had ever been treated with such gentleness. Maybe it was a shift in the power dynamic – you were human but Dark was notably different – or maybe it was just the consequences of taking such a risk, which, really, wasn’t a risk because both of you knew your reaction.

Almost silently, you breathed, “No problem.”

When he pulled back, you almost missed him, but you were comforted by a moment of understanding; Dark was watching you with that glimmer of openness. Calmness. If you wanted to, you could copy him, and, if you wanted to, you could take a bigger not-risk. Doing neither was fine, doing both was welcome.

So, you opened your mouth to say something, your hand still held securely in Dark’s, with a helpfully clear mental image of what his break would look like.

Until the mood was shattered by a crash, yell, and yet another crash from downstairs. The noise practically shook the foundations of the manor, reminding you just where you were. You were still in the depths of the woods, and the thought of getting peace was growing more and more attractive every second.

You shared a look with Dark. It was anyone’s guess as to who caused the mess, but both of you knew who was going to clean it up. 

“Welcome, welcome, one and all! My name is Mark Iplier.”

The lights burned as he planted a foot on the curve of the staircase, and, for a moment, they blinded him. The foyer of his manor was washed in white, all details pushed out of view so that there was nothing but the chandelier’s spray of void. And yet, just as quick as it happened, the light flooded out again when he put his other foot down.

“Thank you for joining me on this auspicious evening.”

It took Mark a moment to remember where he stood. His mind was foggy, thoughts moving at a snail’s pace, but they steadily dripped into his head. It felt like he’d woken up from a dream – the vision of what came before, the question of if anything came before, faded as his eyes drifted over his environment. As if it were muscle memory, his mouth started moving before everything was able to click into place.

“So good to be surrounded by such close and trusted friends.”

His own words were giving him the context clues that his eyes followed in supply, not that this one was welcome. Out of all the people, the first Mark noticed just had to be him. Yes, he understood that William had to be there. That was the point, after all. Did he have to stand so close to him, though? He was waving a bone in front of a dog, a frothing, rabid dog that easily had the power to savage his hands, his throat, his blood bag of a torso. Didn’t he get it? Did he think he would hold back?

Of course, he would hold back, but not out of any deeply buried affection. His only restraint was the plan. There was meaning behind the madness, which he planned to present as madness but really was the meaning itself. Each moment had a reason for being there, or else it was a waste of time and could be replaced by something better. Everyone had their parts to play, and he would never jeopardize the beauty of a play like this.

“Now, this evening, it’s not all about the poker. It’s not all about me. It’s about you.”

Mark’s hand pulled itself in front of him, gesturing vaguely to his audience. His attention, however, was thrown onto his witnesses. Damien and his District Attorney. Neither of them he held any particular resentment towards. They were convenient, and, as much as he hated to reduce them to their roles, the mayor and the DA were titles to be trusted. A testimony from them would do wonders against William. He didn’t have anything against the latter, but seeing the trust Damien placed in Will crumble like his own had was a bonus.

As they talked between each other in hushed voices, Damien trying to cover up a smirk with the hand that held his glass, a slight pang of guilt shot through his heart, like a piano wire snapping. It stopped once it had made its mark, though, and that was a mark he was never going to see.

“So drink up and be merry! Life is for the living.”

It was Abe who arrested his attention next. He stood at the edge of the room, like always, watching everyone else. He could have bothered to be a little more social, appear less suspicious. He’d worked with Damien before, but he acted as though he were simply a security detail. Technically, he was, but he didn’t know that yet. It wasn’t a strenuous role that Mark had given him. A contingency, that was all, in the increasingly more likely situation that things went wrong. If the right people started pointing fingers at the wrong people, Abe would be there to contain the mistakes.

He always had been helpful like that.

At the back of his mind, the facsimile of a memory knocked, but then Abe moved and then his attention shifted and then he lost track of what it had been and then he wondered if it had mattered in the first place and then he looked where Abe looked and—

“And who knows?”

Abe accepted the whiskey glass with a nod. Mark felt his heart give out. You took a sip of your own drink, naturally, casually, as if you were meant to be there. You weren’t, you weren’t, you weren’t. Why were you there? Why was it already going wrong? Why couldn’t he move to get you out of there before it was too late – his mind raced with questions and orders for his legs to go towards you, but they wouldn’t listen. His head refused to turn. 

 “I could be dead tomorrow.”

You stayed right in his peripheral the entire time that he was forced through the words, a script on paper that he desperately wanted to change. He strained against his movements, all of them so small that it should have been easy, but his will buckled under the weight of what was meant to happen. The plan.

Laughter rang out through the manor like a cathedral’s bells. His own or someone else’s was something he couldn’t discern, but it lodged in his throat. He choked. The laughter continued, vicious cackles that warped and warbled and twisted, and he could have sworn that you looked at him like you knew what he was trying to do.

Then you turned and walked away, leaving Mark’s vision to go fuzzy.

“So you’re sure?”

The office appeared around him at the first sound of his voice. Abe had taken it over and used it like a nest to harbor all the evidence. Personally, Mark thought the board was tacky and too obtrusive, but he wasn’t about to complain when he was so close. After everything was done, he could throw it all out. Burn it, maybe. Or he could stash it in a box and keep it in the attic to collect dust amongst the paintings and pottery.

Again, his mouth opened on instinct, and the words came streaming out, foreign and unexpected to his own ears. “Of course. I’m the one who invited him. He wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want him to be.”

Abe didn’t know his plan. He’d try to convince him that there was a better solution, and, when that inevitably failed, handcuffs were in the cards. The only thing he knew was that this was a party. What was going to come was just something he would have to deal with on the fly.

“But after all the stuff I found,” Abe huffed, hand pulling at his cap, “I just don’t get it.”

“I’m hoping that this night will… fix all of that. Make it right.”

Mark didn’t like lying to his friends, especially those who had helped him, but omission wasn’t below him. It wasn’t his fault if the person didn’t ask more questions, how was he to know if they were making incorrect assumptions?

Luckily, Abe did indeed leave it at that. Mark’s completely relaxed posture, his award-winning smile, his sheer confidence were all the reasons he needed to trust him. Though he made sure to mutter a warning, “Just don’t end up doing something you might regret.” 

But Abe had always been skeptical. Optimism wasn’t in his blood, and Mark didn’t hold it against him, but he needed to have some faith in his life. Not everybody was out to get him, not everything was going to go wrong. Of course, this was going to go wrong, but it would all be fixed in the end. 

He kept his grin up as he assured him, “I know what I’m doing, Abe.”

After clapping him on the shoulder and receiving a withered look, Mark turned to leave. The party was just getting started, and it was poor form for the host to disappear so early on. Initially, he planned to head back to the foyer, try and find one of his guests to drag into the first card game of the night, but his idea was harpooned by the sight of you in the hall.

A sliver of you was visible through the doorway as you talked to someone in the vagueness behind the wall, but Mark had no qualms about interrupting a conversation. This was the time to get you out. He would politely steer you away from whoever it was and send you on your way. He would tell you to come back the next day, when this mess would be gone, and you’d be safe from the crossfire.

“You just have to trust me,” he called over his shoulder, not taking his attention off of you, before he stepped forward.

His second step landed him not in front of you but Benjamin, in the kitchen instead of the corridor, with a bottle in his hand where your own should have been.

“Are you sure, sir?”

His bones seemed to vibrate with the energy of movement, but he had been standing still for ten minutes now because he was stuck in an argument with his employee about a decision that he didn’t have any sway in.

“I signed for it myself.”

Drinks. They were talking about the drinks. The alcohol that he’d been serving for the last three hours.

“As much as I trust your judgement, two detectives, the district attorney, and the mayor are in the building. Is it wise to serve them alcohol? I fear it may put you in a precarious position.”

“I know for a fact that some of them have drank in recent years.”

He had been the one to give you that whiskey what seemed like decades ago. Back then, you hadn’t known each other. You were an obstacle, a bother, a little thing he needed to deal with, and he was a homicide case. Why had you bonded? You weren’t compatible, but you’d forced yourselves together, like two puzzle pieces that made a nice picture but didn’t fit.

You weren’t meant to be together.

He didn’t know when it had gone wrong, but it had. He knew that it had.

“Regardless, it isn’t the drinking that’s the problem, and they’re not buying it from me,” Mark continued.

Still, Benjamin looked at him with that concerned tilt of his head and downwards pull of his mouth, the kind he had when he didn’t want to be outwardly judgmental but couldn’t help it.

Gently, Mark handed the bottle back. He caught a glimpse of the label, simple champagne, a libation of celebration for the night ahead, and then some kept behind for the morning. Day drinking wasn’t a habit he liked to indulge in anymore, but exceptions could be made for times like this.

“Everything will turn out just fine,” he said. He would admit to a sterner tone with Benjamin that he had with Abe, but he needed him to listen. He was one of the people closest to his daily life now, a mouth that he couldn’t afford to let blab. Though a gossip as he was, he did know when to keep quiet, especially when it concerned the master of the house. He’d done well with Mark’s scrapes with death so far.

And, as if summoned by that thought, a bout of laughter sparked from outside the room. Your somewhat muted chuckle was overlaid with someone else’s, a more boisterous, explosive sound, like a cannon fired in the midst of battle. 

Maybe you would share a drink with him. One last time. Just like how it started.

Unlike before, however, that laugh made his heart thrum just as his stomach filled with the fluttering of butterfly wings. Time may have pushed you closer and then pulled you apart, but the feelings stayed. Giddy, he started to walk towards you, faster with each click of his dress shoe. Tap, tap-tap, tap.

Thud.

“You’re sure you want to do this?”

Going from standing to sitting down within a single second was an awkward stutter of motion, but, apparently, he was now at a table, where he had been for five minutes as the DA set up a poker game in front of him.

They looked at him curiously, and his furrowed brow mirrored it. Why were people asking him that? Did everyone suddenly decide to doubt him, that he was untrustworthy, that he was just so poor at making decisions and had to be questioned at every turn?

“Definitely,” Mark responded, taking his selection of cards.

“Okay, but don’t get all dramatic with me when you lose your savings.”

They shuffled the remaining deck and put the pile between them.

“You’re very confident, aren’t you?”

“I know what I’ve got. You know what you’ve got.” They placed an elbow on the table and leaned against their fist, sporting the sly smile that he only ever saw after winning a grueling case. “Play the game.”

They were so sure of themself. He almost felt bad for them, but this was how it had to be. Collateral damage they would have to be. Besides, they would make it out alright. Nobody but Will would be hurt too badly. They would surely get over it.

And, for now, they were having fun. The game went smoothly – though it was a strange blur of cards and chips and groans and cheers – until Mark threw his hand down and his head back.

“Damien’s right, you are a force to be reckoned with,” he commented as he collected up the cards to reshuffle. How much money he had bet was lost to him, but the small pool of irritation stirring in his gut hinted at the damage.

“Damien only says that because he’s never beaten me.”

“And what if I say it, too?” he said with a lopsided smile. Damien was known for his softness towards his colleague, so allegations made towards one by the other often needed to be peer reviewed. Mark’s opinion held weight, therefore, as he said, “You’re dangerous to play against.”

A shared laugh tapered off when the archway was darkened by someone – you, as Mark immediately noticed – walking by it. One shadow concealed by the wall absorbed yours, a shape of darkness flicking out like the spit of a fire as you handed that other stranger a glass of champagne. His shoulders fell as he wondered if you’d just missed one another in the kitchen, but that didn’t matter anymore. If you were outside, he could talk to you, make good on his plan to get you out of there. Your stubbornness would make it difficult, but an argument could spur you to leave if he were smart about it.

He'd make it up to you tomorrow.

Nerves set alight beneath his skin, Mark said a quick, “Believe me,” before he threw the flimsy stack towards the DA, scattering them across the table, and moved to stand.

The cards splashed as they landed in a cup opposite him, only to pop back up as a single white ping-pong ball. Amongst the disposable cardboard that he swore he had never owned, the one that he had managed to hit seemed to glow.

“Are you sure?” Damien sighed at his side.

Everyone was asking that – it was getting on his nerves, this joke that he wasn’t a part of – but he didn’t know what to do with it. He was just saying yes, over and over again, because what else was he supposed to say? He had come this far, he couldn’t back down, everything would have been for nothing, and then where would he be?

Replying this time was more force of habit than a genuine thought. “We’re not changing the rules now, Damien, you don’t get out of it that easy!”

“It’s six in a row, can’t you give me a break?”

He plucked the cup from its brethren and stared into the beer. They had run out of champagne at some point and resorted to the cheaper stuff. Mark only had a few bottles, kept around for the sake of a full collection, but nobody cared at this point. Alcohol was alcohol, and it was serving all of its purposes.

“What happened to your tolerance, eh?” Mark asked, nudging his friend with an elbow. “I seem to remember someone being quite the entertainer in his university days.”

“Yes, and then prohibition struck, and I became the mayor, and now—” He downed the drink, “—I can’t stomach as much as I used to.”

As it settled in his stomach, he made a face that pushed Mark into childish giggles. It was the exact expression he had made the first time he’d drunk anything, all those years ago. Their youth was almost unfathomable now, all the recklessness and curiosity and damage they did to other people on a whim, just because they could.

“Or understand how I did.”

“We’ve just got to build you back up. With how much you’re losing by, it won’t take long.”

“I have work in the morning.”

With a roll of his eyes, Mark sized up another shot into the abyss of drinks. At this point, there were very few targets, but he had impeccable aim, especially since he was the only person in the manor who was still sober. Benjamin had thrown back a shot of wine in the cellar a few hours ago, at his own behest, and the chef had been peer-pressured into a cup of his own by the group’s immature hollering.

Damien was only second to the DA, who was off singing poorly to Louis Armstrong on the phonograph. As he thought about it, an inkling of suspicion bubbled in his stomach. Singing alone wasn’t as fun as with friends, but what if…

Where were you?

Where was Will?

No. No, he couldn’t think like that. He had no reason, and besides, what would it mean if you were? You weren’t together, you weren’t married, and neither was Will, and he wouldn’t put it past him to stoop so low, and his hands were getting so clammy that he almost dropped the ball in his hand.

Damien was still staring at him, hopeful after his hesitation. 

“No, you don’t,” Mark said. He tried to keep his tone teasing, but it came out slightly short.

Luckily, Damien was too inebriated to see beyond the surface level of having been caught in a lie. He huffed and crossed his arms, swaying side to side from his own movement, like a boat pushed by waves.

“How would you know that?”

“A reliable source informed me that you’ve called out for the next two days.”

“Your detective told you that?”

Mark shrugged his shoulders, still trying to line up the shot. It wasn’t going well with the thoughts running through his head, all distractions from what was really going on, but he couldn’t help from saying back, “Abe is a private investigator, not a detective.”

Damien was aware of the times that Abe had used him in the past, except for when it concerned his sister. Mark wasn’t stupid, he stopped at the affair. He wasn’t even certain if he knew about the two of them sneaking off together; he’d certainly tried to tell him, but Damien’s trust in Celine was unwavering. In earlier years, it had been sweet to see them stand with each other through thick and thin. Now? It was painful for everyone involved.

However, when Mark finally threw the ball in the vague direction of the cups, Damien said, “I wasn’t talking about Abe.”

Apparently, fate was on his side, and, as if to accentuate his point, you walked by the room. Just a glimpse made his eyes chase after you, heart beating and breath quickening with the possibility of finally saving you, the hope that you wouldn’t walk away from him again that was almost dashed when you went a step too far.

But then you came back and smiled at him and started walking closer – he didn’t look to see if he got another cup before he was rushing to meet you in the middle. All he needed to do was get you out of the building. Each step was a tick of a clock, the countdown to the final moment when everything came together that you couldn’t be there for. 

He didn’t need you there, he didn’t need you for the plan, he didn’t need to sacrifice you to get what he wanted—

The cellar.

Sitting at the table, he looked at the man opposite him, who in turn was looking at the gun Mark was holding out towards him.

“There’s no going back now.”

And then the gun was taken from his hand. His brain refused to acknowledge what was happening as he watched Will look it over, flipping it in his hands as though it held the secret to the universe somewhere in its grooves.

“But I suppose there was no going back when I accepted your invitation.”

Following the script, Mark’s mouth moved to say, “I don’t think there was any other way this could go.”

“No, I guess not.”

Grinning, Will pressed the muzzle to his head and fired.

Click.

His grin turned wild.

Russian Roulette was not a game that they used to play, for many reasons, but chief among them being that neither wanted to die. In their childhood, it was all hide-and-seek and tag. They pretended to be kings in the backyard, sticks for swords and imaginary horses, as they fought pretend wars over the old tree stump near the fence. When Will signed up for real war, which wasn’t fought with sticks but guns that killed people when they fired, it was all left behind – and when he came back, they were adults with their own lives. The games they played were with the pieces of one another’s hearts. 

“Unless it had gone right the first time, of course,” Will continued where Mark had left off. Casually, he tossed the gun onto the table, the barrel spinning to face him.

“Right?” he asked. He was holding the venom from his words.

Waving his hand, Will tsked. “Oh, you know.”

“No, I’m not sure I do.”

“Ah, well, the whole situation with Celine. If I hadn’t gone off to war, if I had stayed behind for her, if we had spent all our primes together,” he trailed off, attention drifting for a second before it snapped back and met Mark’s eyes. “Everything would have been different.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Absolutely! But, hey, maybe you should be thanking me for it.”

“What?”

Mark could ignore many things about Will. Some of his traits, like his carelessness, got on his nerves, but they were easy to dismiss. It was just how he was, and there was nothing to be done about it.

But that single comment had concentrated wrath boiling beneath his skin, the blue of a sun burning so bright that it threatened to eat him up from the inside. He had the presence of mind to hide his hands beneath the table before his white knuckles caught Will’s attention, but there was a small part of him that wanted to wrap them around his throat, which went ignored for the sake of the plan.

“Had Celine and I not gone on our little detour, you wouldn’t have met your detective,” Will explained. “And wouldn’t that have been a loss! They’re a damn riot, Mark.”

The mere mention of you both cooled the flames and stoked them into a roaring blaze kept barely contained by the grate of his ribs. He shouldn’t be talking about you, you’d only just met, he didn’t know you. Right? The only reason you were in the same place was because of Mark, and you knew about the strained relationship between them.

Didn’t you?

Had he ever told you what happened?

Will was still looking at him, waiting for a response, but the words weren’t flowing like they had before. When he had spoken to his friends, it was impulsive but perfect, all according to plan. Now, he was floundering, flicking through the script but finding the pages blank.

“As much as I appreciate their dry humor,” Mark said, each syllable like pushing a boulder up the hill, “I wouldn’t consider them a riot.”

“Sure they are! We were talking the whole night, and a moment hasn’t gone by where I’ve been bored.”

His knuckles went from white to red as they practically split through the skin. You had always been just out of sight, talking to someone, but to find out that the vague shadow was the man in front of him was enough to nearly crack his teeth. A sharp pain and the taste of metal flooded his mouth when he bit down on his tongue.

If Will noticed, he didn’t care; he joked with a raucous, grating laugh, “Might even enjoy their company more than the drinks.”

Outwardly, Mark kept his composure. He was an actor, after all, he knew how to keep up a façade. Inwardly, though, aborting the plan and sending the gun’s only bullet into Will’s face was becoming increasingly attractive. He would deserve the pain, but it wasn’t enough. Death was too good for him.

With a scribbled smile, he replied, “They’re a detective through and through; I’m surprised I managed to get them here in the first place.”

“Married to the job, eh? That’s an easy fix.”

Mark grabbed the gun and fired.

But then, next to his ear, he heard the click.

No bullet. Empty. The cylinder was empty, and he froze, the metal suddenly freezing over and paralyzing him.

“Eager, aren’t we?”

He had been eager to get this over with. In the second after his death, Will was supposed to have screamed, someone was supposed to have come down to check on him, he was supposed to have been arrested and kept in a cell for the rest of his life, away from everyone he loved. But he was still sitting in front of him. Grinning. Talking.

“Are we making up for all the time you spent away?” he asked.

Mark was strangled by his thoughts – there was definitely a bullet in the gun, but he didn’t know where it was. He couldn’t just fire and hope he struck gold, the plan was falling apart, no, the plan was finished already, that was the end, it was done, and he didn’t know what to do because he wasn’t done alongside it.

“No,” he muttered, “I just don’t want to still be here when the sun comes up.”

Unblinking, he slid the gun back over to Will. Fine, he would just have to kill himself. It wasn’t the best idea and was so short-term that it was pitiable, but it would have to do. The next shot, surely, would be the one.

If only Will would pick up the goddamn gun.

“Now what’s got you in a mood?” he asked. As he planted an elbow on the table to balance his chin on, he pushed the weapon back into the center. “You can’t blame me for wanting to talk! This is the first time we’ve managed to have a conversation in years.”

“And whose fault was that?” His words weren’t practiced. They were rough and raspy and all too raw for the man in front of him. Vulnerability was dangerous, and Mark was showing too much of it.

“I will admit that I should have reached out more, but I was busy—”

“With my wife.”

“She’s not your wife.”

“She was.” When Mark looked into Will’s eyes, he saw a strange mix of adrenaline and nonchalance, like a tightrope walker who had done the act hundreds of times before. “When it all started, she was my wife.”

“Time passes,” he scoffed. “Things change. Celine made her choice, I made mine, and you made yours.”

Her name seemed to echo in the cellar, batting against the wine bottles and straight back into his chest.

“I wasn’t given a choice.”

Will’s voice seemed to get louder, and yet there was no change in volume; the only indication that he did was the faint ringing in Mark’s ears. Maybe he was just about to pass out, maybe all of the deaths had caught up to him, but Will spoke all the same with the high-pitched background static. “You chose to lock yourself in this house. Nobody made you isolate yourself from everyone around you.”

Tears tried to force themselves out of his eyes as he shouted back, “I tried to fix everything!”

“But you didn’t fix anything!”

The ringing got louder, blocking every sound besides it. Their voices became just another layer of its scream, and then their actions were added to it. Mark’s hands found the gun as he shot up from his chair, all without input from his brain.

“If you and Celine hadn’t run off, or if Damien had just listened to me for once—!”

Will stood eye to eye with him.

“It’s not our fault! Everything that happened, everything that is happening, and everything that is going to happen is entirely your fault. You chose this. You were given so many chances to back out, but now you have to deal with the consequences—”

And then the ringing cut off, like a dropped phone put back on the hook or a stomped-on mouse. It was replaced, instead, by the dull thud of Will’s body hitting the floor and the silence that followed. He was crumpled on the ground, torso bent awkwardly over his legs, so Mark could only see the damage he had done in the pool of blood slowly leaking into the grout.

He had shot him, killed him with his own two hands. The tears finally started to flow as a sob wracked his body. He tried to wipe them away – he shouldn’t have felt sorry for such a man – but gave up when they just wouldn’t stop, resorting to clamping a hand – one that had killed his childhood friend, his brother – over his mouth.

It tightened in fear as a voice called out from the staircase, “Mark?”

His eyes flashed to yours.

You looked terrified.

“Mark, what did you do?”

Neither of you said anything for the next few seconds. It was just you, him, and the body with a bullet lodged into its chest. It lay between you, attracting your attention like a fly to a corpse. Realization poured over your gaze when you flitted from Will to Mark to the gun in one shaking hand.

“You shot him,” you said.

“No, I- I didn’t mean to.”

“You killed someone. You’re a murderer.”

Distantly, thunder roared, barely masking the sound of Mark’s heart speeding up to a dangerous beat.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” he rushed to say. “I didn’t mean to shoot him!”

“Mark, you killed him!”

“I didn’t mean to!”

The gun only had one bullet. Mark had put it in himself. Of course, he had thought he’d put it in the second chamber, but he must have counted wrong or pushed the cylinder when he threw it – but there was only one. After it had been fired the first time, he didn’t cock it again, not a single thought towards it as he panicked. The gun was empty and unprepared, and he wasn’t sure he was even aiming at you.

But none of that mattered when a bullet buried itself in your heart, painting a crimson rose on your shirt and sending you tumbling down the last step on the staircase.

The gun clattered to the floor and was swallowed up by the darkness.

“No, no, I didn’t mean to,” Mark gasped as he dove to your side. 

You were breathing heavily, your body focused on keeping you alive, but your eyes, your eyes, they met his. Accusatory and questioning, mimicking the same things he had wondered himself so many times over. Simple ‘why’s and ‘how could you’s, matched with the desperation of wanting to stay alive that he never quite got the hold of. He had tried once, almost got there, but whatever happened to lose you had put a stop to that.

Now, he was losing you forever with no way to get you back.

At your side, one of his hands bent to cradle your head away from the cold of the floor. “No, you have to wake up,” he pleaded. “You can’t be gone—you said I wouldn’t lose you. You promised.” He leaned his forehead against yours, as though it would help you remember. “You promised.”

The house creaked around him, laughing. That ringing started up again, but whether it was the thing living there or his own screams, he wasn’t certain. All he knew was that this was his fault. He had killed you. You were gone, and everything was messed up, all because of him. The plan had ended wrong, but what made his heart ache was that his plan, the one with you, had ended at all.

On the cold tiles of the cellar, two bodies laid at his sides, completely still and seeping blood into his clothes. 

You didn’t wake up.

But Mark did.

He snapped to consciousness in his bed, the bright light of daytime replacing the sheets that he had been swathed in before. A pool of sweat soaked into the mattress around him, but he didn’t notice; his hands were too clammy, his chest was too tight, his eyes were too busy flittering around in their sockets to notice much of anything.

It had been a dream. All a damn dream.

A brief spark of irritation was wiped out by the realization of something – it spurred him to jump out of the bed, shake the tangle off his feet and sprint into the hallway. If that was all a dream, a sick fantasy that had no bearing on real life, then none of it had happened, and you weren’t dead.

It made no sense for him to be as panicked as he was, but that didn’t stop the adrenaline pushing him into a near heart attack as he raced down the stairs. The phone was in his hands before he recognized that he was in front of it, and the number of your office was dialed without a single thought.

Mark never begged, but he pleaded and prayed for you to answer.

One second passed, and then another, and then the static cut off.

Relief flooded him as the line was picked up, and when your simple, blunt but somewhat concerned, “Hello?” fell from the receiver, he had never been surer of anything than this his next words.

“I love you.”

There was a moment of silence before you asked, “What?”

He could have laughed, but he stayed quiet so that he could hear you speak.

“Mark, is that you?”

“Yes, I just woke up, and I need to tell you that I love you.”

“And, uh, what… what makes you say that now?”

He couldn’t exactly be honest about what had happened; he’d decided to host a poker party as a reunion for his friends in order to frame one of them for his own murder as part of a lengthy revenge scheme, only he himself killed that friend and then you, which made him realize he had never admitted his true feelings. There was a high chance you would brush it off – it was only a dream, after all – but he wasn’t willing to take that risk.

So, he said, “It feels like the right time.”

You chuckled lightly in the way that told him you were trying to hold it back. Good, you weren’t pushing.

“Couldn’t agree more. Looking for a woman’s missing head is so romantic.”

He spared a quick glance back to his bedside table, the clock showing it was nearly half-past ten, and he flushed with embarrassment. It wasn’t as though he had much planned for today, but getting caught for waking up so late was slightly shameful in his mind. You hadn’t pointed it out, though, and he wasn’t about to bring it up.

“I’m sorry, I forgot you’re working. I can—” He coughed, “—we can talk when you get back.”

“No, no, I can talk now.” A noise, shuffling paper, and the smack of a book against a table, crackled through the phone. “I think we should. I won’t be able to focus with this on my mind, anyway.”

“In a bad way?”

The adrenaline of Mark’s impulsiveness was draining out of him, leaving space for fear. Telling you how he felt was, apparently, the easy part – the hard part was hearing your response.

Fortunately, you didn’t leave him in suspense for long.

“In a good way,” you said.

He sighed in relief. He was really putting himself through the wringer.

Softly, you continued, “But this is big, Mark. It’s important. You said you love me?”

“I just had to tell you. You don’t have to say anything back.”

A part of him didn’t want you to; it wanted to stay in blissful ignorance for the rest of the day, for the rest of his life, if it meant keeping you around. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about your feelings, it was more than he thought he would crumble if you left as a result. He wouldn’t trade the time he spent with you for anything, and he was okay living in uncertainty if it meant that he could live with you.

As if you sensed his spiraling, you said, “Hey, it’s alright. I…” Taking a deep breath, you adjusted the receiver in your hand. “I have feelings for you, too.”

He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t say anything. The words lodged in his throat, and his heart went wild. After everything, those words felt like a reward that he wasn’t sure he deserved.

“I don’t know if it’s love, but I definitely…” You laughed again, this time, to yourself. 

Mark wasn’t aware of it, but you were leaned back against the wall, memories flipping through your mind like the pages of a book that showcased all the best ones and the worst ones and everything in between. All his stubbornness, his dramatics, his vulnerability right there for you to peruse. You weren’t the best at feelings. All too often, they got in the way and made your job harder. But this wasn’t your job, it was your life, and a warmth poured into your veins at the idea of caring for Mark.

You liked the sound of it.

“I definitely feel something for you,” you finished. It would have been easy to hide and say nothing, getting back to work because you were still on shift, but he didn’t deserve that.

Mark’s voice came out soft as he said a, “Thank you.” It then switched into a flustered stumble, “I mean, good, yes—it’s me, of course you do. I mean—”

You couldn’t help yourself. You chuckled, caught up in the moment, and the gravelly, semi-raspy sound through the phone, sound had him smiling ear-to-ear.

“With how much you’re laughing, I’m starting to think this is a joke.”

“Hey, you said it yourself. It’s you. I could never joke about having feelings for you.”

“I appreciate that.” He truly did, and he wanted nothing more than to keep talking to you until it was time for you to come home, but his eyes wandered to the sight of the city. “Oh, but I should let you get back to work. That woman isn’t going to find her own head, after all.”

“Sure, Mark, I’ll see you this evening.”

“Remember, no overtime.”

He could practically hear you roll your eyes, but it was all in jest. “I’m clocking out exactly at six, don’t worry.”

“I’m not worrying.”

You both knew he was lying.

He didn’t resist muttering, “But, well, call me if you go over.”

“I will, I will.”

A pause followed, in which neither of you wanted to be the one to leave. Even the sound of each other’s breath over the phone encouraged you to stay. You had the distant thought that this was going to be a problem, when added to the difficulty of leaving Mark this morning, but you were assured by the following thought that you would always come back.

After figuring you’d have to say something eventually, you murmured a gentle, “Goodbye, Mark. I’ll see you when I get home.”

“Goodbye, my dear detective.”

Putting the receiver back on the hook was slow, and walking back to his room was even slower, but his mind was having a hard time catching up. It waded through water after him, sea waves batting against it and pushing it back – he wasn’t able to process what had happened until he was sitting down in his vanity’s chair.

He carded a hand through his hair. He had yet to apply any product to it, so, disregarding the few specks of sweat, it was relatively fluffy. You’d left it like that after the night before, and he still felt the phantom touch of your hands playing with the strands.

In the mirror, he was completely red. Of course, he had felt the heat in his face for the last ten minutes as he jumped from fear to passion to fear and back to passion. He still had hours before you were going to be back, but he wasn’t sure if he would calm down even by then. Everything was aflame, and he could only think to get a glass of water to extinguish what he could.

Pushing out from the chair, he strode toward the door and into the hallway, glee propelling his legs so effectively that they were nearly swept out from under him when he made to stop next to one of the tables.

“Benjamin!” he called out as he ran a hand over a flower petal. The gardenias were starting to wilt, and he couldn’t have something dying in his house, not anymore. “Switch the flowers. Salvia or something!”

Just as you’d promised, you clocked out at six on the dot, much to the chagrin of Rider and the shock of every other detective in the building. They stared and whispered, one even going so far as to point at you like you were some circus act, but you didn’t spare them a thought. You were too busy unlocking your car, throwing yourself in the driver’s seat, and turning a half-hour journey into 20.

Working in law enforcement had its perks.

You stumbled out of the car seconds after you pulled up to the manor, nervousness and excitement intertwining to give you an odd fight-or-flight reaction. You pushed through it all as you marched to the front door and rushed past Benjamin, whom you managed to say a brief greeting to over your shoulder. You took the stairs two at a time because any more time spent on them risked sending you running from the manor altogether.

Assuming that Mark was in his room, you diverted to his corridor but stopped at the edge of the runner. This was it. Your nerves popped like electricity, so you forced yourself to take deep breaths, each left foot forward an inhale, and each right foot forward an exhale. The exercise landed you in front of his door in record time.

Trying to keep your hand steady, you lifted it to knock. You’d never been in this situation before, what were you supposed to do?

All of that worry faded away when the door opened to reveal just the man you wanted to see.

“Yes, Benjamin, I’m still alive—oh.”

He was beautiful. You would never say it to his face, his ego didn’t need it, but he was gorgeous. And steadily growing more and more red.

“Hello,” you said.

“You knocked.”

“I did.”

He nodded; you nodded.

And then you broke. A smile fissured across your face, and Mark huffed as though your levity was a burden, but he didn’t bother to hide his own growing grin. No, instead of smacking his hands over his mouth, he placed them on your hips, securing you in place for the moment.

Your light laughter trailed off into a hum. Mark was usually a touchy person, and it all felt the same, it was just bathed in a new light. The pressure wasn’t enough to pull you towards him, and, with an impulsive thought, you stepped forward to leave the smallest gap between you.

With a lowered voice, he said, “Please kiss me.”

Who were you to deny such a request?

In the doorway to his room, you closed that gap and pressed your lips to his. You hadn’t thought much about what it would feel like, but somehow, nothing surprised you. They were smooth, traces of lip balm and liquid courage, just the same as his cheek that you reached up to caress with a thumb. He leaned further in, his grip tightening to now push your torso into his, as if he feared letting you go would mean letting you go forever, which he did.

A soft sound rumbled from the back of his throat as he brought you a few steps back into the room. A doorway was no place for you to stay for a long time, and leaning you against the wall was surely more comfortable. For a second, he pulled a hand away from you and scrambled blindly to close the door. Before it could even click shut, he had returned his touch to you, situated on your waist while his other arm moved up to cradle your jaw.

If it hadn’t been for the stupid human necessity for air, you would have gladly stayed like that for the rest of the night. If it hadn’t been for his promise to you, Mark would have gladly given your separation another thought – his compromise was to trail kisses about your face, from one cheek to the other, as you caught your breath.

“So, what actually brought this on?” you asked. Mark couldn’t help the surge of pride he felt at your tone.

He hummed, questioning, against your skin.

“I mean, why does it feel like the right time?”

“Horrible impression,” was his hurried mutter.

“Horrible diversion.”

That prompted him to slow down. Face buried in the crook of your neck, he took a moment to listen. Your breathing, your heartbeat, the sound of the house around you. It was quiet. He could lie, but not to you. He could ignore it, but he’d have to answer one day, and it may not be in a situation like this one. He could tell the truth.

A puff of air hit your collarbone.

“I had a nightmare.”

One of your hands tucked itself into his hair, gently swimming through the fluff and occasionally scratching pleasantly against his skin.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“Are you sure?” 

You weren’t trying to push, you just needed to know that he would be alright. Supporting him was just part of your life now, a responsibility you were glad to have.

“Maybe later, I just…”

He was facing a difficult choice, one that pulled his heart apart. One side wanted to spill everything and let you in, while the other wanted anything but. Shutting you out was the ‘safe’ option, the one that pushed away the consequences into oblivion for him to deal with later. He was happy right now, so why willingly threaten that?

But then he looked at you, and you smiled encouragingly.

You weren’t going anywhere.

“I thought I lost you,” he said quietly.

He didn’t know in what sense he was talking. Obviously, you had died in that dream, you were lost to whatever came after, but how Will had talked about you…

He shoved the thought out of his head. It was just a dream, and there was no use dwelling on potentials when you were a definitive, pressed against the wall in front of him with your lips partially swollen from his own.

“Hey, what did I say?” You moved your hand down to direct his attention to you. “Dead or alive, love.”

“Love? I thought you didn’t know.”

“Keep talking like that and I’ll change it.”

“No, no, I’ll be quiet.” He pressed another short kiss to your forehead.

You went to mutter something else – “That’s a first,” with a playful lilt – but Mark swallowed the words, and then a chuckle, and then a gasp as the minutes passed by. 

Outside of the room, things continued on just as they had before. Benjamin called up the driver for the following morning, Abe scoured over photographs in a dingy office, Damien prepared speeches, the DA launched cases, William and Celine shared a coffee on the porch of an old ranch house. Everything was just the same, nobody was aware of what was happening in the manor besides you and Mark. Your relationship was muted but no more subdued – it was all kept for the two of you to cherish, for however long you had it.

You both hoped it was forever.

Even though you were roommates, you and Damien didn’t really know each other at the beginning of your tenure at university. You knew of each other, you knew that someone else slept in the same room as you, but you didn’t hold conversations. The maximum number of words you had exchanged in one interaction was a question about a fire drill, and, even then, it was less an exchange and more a statement of fact and an agreement. Needless to say, it wasn’t indicative of a budding friendship meant to last a lifetime.

In the present moment, you were sitting in your lecture hall, hoping that the wooden pew wouldn’t do any more damage to your spine than it already had. The need to listen to your professor’s monologue was nestled somewhere deeper in the back of your mind, but you weren’t overly worried about missing something. Half of your class were asleep, and the other half were on the way there. A seven o’clock talk on the differences between tort law and contract law wasn’t the most riveting thing out there, after all, and you found yourself glancing around the room to avoid knocking out then and there.

Your gaze landed on just the man you had been thinking of earlier. Damien was sitting on the opposite side of the lecture hall, head in his hand and a distant look glazing his eyes. Whatever was on his mind, it wasn’t optimistic. Had you been paying more attention to him when you were in your dorm at the same time, you might have known, but you hadn’t, so you didn’t. Your best guess was the mountain of work your class had been assigned over the weekend, mostly because that was the thing plaguing your own thoughts.

That mountain only grew as the class dragged on. New packets of questions to attempt and fail at, new chapters of your textbook to muddle through late at night until your eyes inevitably give up on you, new test dates to dread because working on your current subjects sucked up all the energy that you had so that you had none left over for revising the old stuff. In summary, you had half a mind to leave the hall and never step foot back onto campus again.

Fortunately for your education, it was only half a mind, and the logic center of your brain firmly reminded you that it was a bad idea. That left you silently thinking up ways to keep yourself sane before the clock hands finally ticked to eight-thirty and everyone scattered like rats before the professor had finished his last sentence.

You were one of the last to pack up, your limbs flailing about ineffectively. It seemed that the effects of too little sleep and too much coffee were working against you at the same time. Brain foggy and body energized, the only solution you could manage to come up with was a quick walk around the grounds. Autonomous but physically tiring.

It was as you were stumbling towards the old wooden doors of the lecture hall that you saw Damien headed in the same direction. You would have thought he would rush off amongst the other fellow students – what with his tendency to spend every waking moment at the library – but there he was, slow on the draw and lagging behind.

Something must have really been bothering him.

From your place a few rows away from him, you watched as he struggled with the door. It was a difficult thing to get open, and it was awkward to be the first person there because then you’d have an audience. It was always best to be in the middle of the pack, able to walk through without having to shove the whole weight of your body against it.

You unconsciously grimaced at the thought of doing that yourself when you’d get there after Damien had already gone through. At least no one would be there to see you and the door could be as uncooperative as it wanted, though in your state that might have ended with there being no door at all. Your grimace deepened with the thought of explaining that, too.

Except the possibility was wiped from your mind when you caught sight of Damien still standing at the doorway – or, more specifically, in the doorway. One of his arms kept his satchel close to his side while the other was stretched out to keep the door open. Briefly, you made eye contact with him.

He blinked.

You blinked.

And then you realized that he was holding the door open for you, so you tossed yourself over one of the pews and dashed to meet him. Knowing how heavy that door was made your arm ache in sympathy, and you didn’t want to make him wait longer than he already had been.

“Thank you,” you managed to get out in between light huffs. A law degree was not an easy thing to schedule an exercise routine around. You could only hope it wasn’t obvious.

If Damien did notice, he didn’t say anything. The only thing that came out of his mouth was a soft, “Of course,” before he was walking down the hallway. Although his manners might have played a part in it going unmentioned, you weren’t about shoot yourself in the foot by bringing it up. 

The ensuing silence was only slightly better. The corridor wasn’t long, but it was a misfortunate feature of life that walking beside someone without talking made time pass infinitely slower. This was especially so given your complicated relationship with the man whom you had fallen into step with. Were you supposed to strike up a conversation? It could only be surface level – something about the weather or the work or the campus – so was it worth it? You only had a minute before you’d be separating, anyway, which meant there was no real reason to get stressed about it even though you already were, and you could have been using that time you were worrying to actually talk to him, but there was a slim chance of him continuing the conversation, which would only make the interaction more awkward, and could you even call it an interaction—

“After you.”

You were torn out of your thoughts by Damien once again holding the door open for you. This time, it wasn’t the stubborn mule of the lecture hall’s door, but the exit to the entire building. You held back from glancing over your shoulder to confirm that you had actually crossed the entire hallway, and, rather, you shot him a small smile and ducked out into the fresh air. In your peripheral, you saw him return it with a nod.

You waited for him to close the door behind himself, figuring that it would be rude to leave without a goodbye, even though you weren’t certain what it was that you would be leaving. That, and you were planning to walk in the opposite direction of him, no matter what. The route you were planning on taking for your little equilibrium session was a circle around campus, after all, which meant it hardly mattered which way you went.

What surprised you was the fact that Damien didn’t make to leave when the click of the door signaled it was safely closed. Instead, he stayed put to say, “I’ll be seeing you tonight, then?”

Unprepared for the assumption, your grip on the strap of your bag tightened momentarily, and you swallowed before replying, “Yeah, you will.” It felt too stale to leave it at that, and you felt the impulse to continue. “Are you heading to the library?”

He hummed in affirmation. “I’ll be back late, so leave a note on the door if you’ll be asleep so I don’t wake you.”

“Will do.”

That felt a better place to end it, so you took a step on the brick path round the campus. Damien appeared to have no objections, and there was a small part of you that swore you saw him sigh in relief. You were in the same boat, though, and you forced yourself to give him a small wave that he returned before you were walking as casually as you could past the building’s wall and out of his line of sight.

There were only two thoughts in your mind. The first was that the last five minutes had been absolute torture. The second was a spark of horror at the idea of seeing him later that evening that made you stifle a groan.

You liked Damien. He was nice. But the fault didn’t lie with him, no, it was with you.

During the class debates, the pretend court cases, the mock bar exams, you paraded the personality of a charismatic litigator who knew the loopholes of a law like the back of their hand and could argue a client out of triple homicide with sixteen eyewitnesses and their head left at the crime scene. Only, the façade was a crime in and of itself because you stole it from the people you learned from. Nothing about it was yours, and it didn’t carry over to the outside world. Being able to prepare yourself propped up your confidence, leaving you in shambles when it fell. Case in point, Damien now knew you were an awkward mess, and there was a voice in the back of your mind that told you it was best to ask for a room transfer, or, to be safe, a university transfer.

At the side of the path, you spied a bench and rushed over to it. The walk had been an objective failure so far. The only thing it had managed to do was flip the states of your body and mind around; aches were developing behind your knees and your thoughts were bouncing around your skull like a ping-pong tournament. Not even mashing the heels of your hands into your eyes did the trick in getting them to shut up.

Sighing, you pushed up your jacket’s sleeve to inspect your watch. Only fifteen minutes had passed, and you had five hours to kill until your next lecture rolled around. Your muddled brain offered to return to your dorm and attempt preparation for the next test. It was poor, given that there was a seventy-five percent chance that nothing would take, but it was the best, and only, idea you had, so you would have to make do.

You sent a wistful glance towards the scenery, and then forced yourself to your feet to make the journey back to the sleeping quarters. You wished you were able to spend more time outside, but motivation was a cruel mistress and never struck when you were comfortable. Instead, she favored the unforgiving rigidity of your desk chair and the stuffy air that came with a window that didn’t quite open all the way. 

It was only after the last time you pulled an all-nighter that you understood why.

With dread settling into your heart, you realized that was going to be your future, so you hastened yourself in order to give yourself as much a chance of getting sleep as possible. You mulled over a plan in your head as you snaked between two buildings, worked your way across the stretch of grass, and clambered up the stairs to your dorm room. Solidifying your first goal of getting an hour of pure study in, you fished your key out from a pocket of your bag and then pushed it into the lock.

A frown pulled at the corners of your mouth when you realized the key wouldn’t turn. Pulling it out and retrying didn’t work, but you found that you didn’t need it in the first place. A lightning strike of fear flashed down your spine when the realization dawned on you that the door was simply not locked.

Explanations cut off questions in the shadowy corners of your mind, but they were to be replaced by more concerns like some mental hydra. You barely managed a deep breath to steel your nerves before you brought the door handle down and pushed inwards.

“Oh!” you yelped in surprise. Undignified, yes, but warranted considering that the man before you had told you he’d be in the library, not at his desk in your shared dorm.

A nervous grin spread on Damien’s face, as though he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, but you were the one to turn beet red with embarrassment.

“Damn, I’m sorry,” you hurried to say as you closed the door behind you with more force than necessary, “I- I thought- well, you told me, you know, you’d be the library, I just didn’t expect you to be—” you noticed how loud you were being and made an effort to soften your voice, “—here.”

You didn’t know whether his laughter was a good sign or bad one, but some of your fears were quelled when you risked meeting his eyes. They held no offence, only a slight bit of amusement at your expense that you could have done without.

“No, no, I’m sorry. I should have warned you.” He put his hands up in a gesture of acceptance of guilt. In his fingers, he twirled a pen that looked well-used, if the few spots of ink and bite marks were anything to go by.

You waved off his words with the hand that hadn’t slung your bag onto your desk and begun digging through it for your books. All manner of textbooks and lined pages were spread across the actual surface, but the notes that you needed were somewhere in the depths of your bag. Admittedly, you weren’t the most organized person, and you began to regret not nurturing the skill at the ten second mark of searching.

You cursed under your breath as you pulled open pockets and spread apart any files that might have contained a trace of it. This is what you got for trusting future-you to figure it out, when you knew damn well that they were just as bad as past-you at sorting.

“Are you,” you slowed down at the sound of Damien’s voice, if only to hear him better over the rustling of sheets, “are you alright?”

“Yeah, no, I’m just… looking for something.”

“I can see that.” Then came the scrape of a chair against wood, and then the light from the window was blocked out by him getting to his feet. “What do you need?”

You didn’t answer immediately, too focused on working open the little tear in the bag’s wall that tended to swallow the smaller pieces of paper, but when there was nothing in it save for random stationary, you stilled your hands. A single huff permeated the air as you offhandedly said, “My notes from the cohabitation contract lecture.”

How you managed to lose them, you had no clue; the only places where you ever took anything out of your bag were your dorm and the lecture hall, which only made it more concerning. If you had left it in one of the pews, then it was at the janitor’s mercy, but there was only a slightly better chance of finding it amongst your loose documents on your desk. That meant you either had to waste more time on a search through your textbooks for the relevant section or hope to wing it in the test, and neither appealed to you.

“Are these what you need?”

Your head snapped up at the sound of Damien’s voice breaking your concentration, and then it snapped to the side to see the open notebook that he had placed in the single empty space on your desk. You momentarily considered that he had found your notes, unknowingly knocked to the floor or some other likely scenario that made you look like an idiot, but you quickly noticed that it wasn’t your handwriting nor your book.

He looked almost bashful as he drew his hand away to straighten the lapels of his jacket, and, despite your attempts, he refused to make eye contact with you while he explained, “I copy my notes out into a separate book after the lectures.” A blush was rising on his face like the tide. “It helps me to consolidate information.” It crept from his cheeks to the bridge of his nose to his ears. “And having multiples means I’m less likely to, well, lose them.” It was though you could feel the heat emanating from where you were standing.

Considering how kind he’d been today, you decided to step in before he drove himself into a fever. “Thank you,” you said, slipping a blank sheet from your pile, “do you mind if I make my own copy?”

“Go right ahead.”

A genuine, non-nervous smile spread over your lips, and he was quick to follow suit. Good, he didn’t deserve to be so anxious, and you didn’t want to feed into it when there were much more daunting things to be worrying about.

You dropped into your seat and uncapped a pen, tossing over your shoulder, “You’ve been a lifesaver today, Damien. Really, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”

“It’s not a problem. I’m just glad to have been in the right place at the right time.”

That made you stop mid-sentence to ask, “Why are you here? You said you were going to the library.”

With your back to him, you weren’t able to see the blush that he had fought down struggle back up with a vengeance. He didn’t like being caught out, even when it hadn’t technically been a lie.

“Oh, I was, but I got there and found out that it will be shut for the rest of the week. A sign on the door said the lower levels were flooded due to a burst pipe, so the whole building has been closed.”

You hissed in sympathy at both the thought of those wrecked books and Damien’s tone of disappointment. You didn’t spend much time there yourself, but you knew a lot of other students and some faculty considered it like a second home, your dormmate included. Hopefully, it would be in full working order when they reopened, but, in the meantime, you didn’t want him getting upset about it. You’d seen many emotions on Damien late at night – annoyance, elation, a near constant wash of fatigue – but distress was not one that suited him.

“I guess you’ll just have to put up with me for the next week,” you tried to joke.

To your relief, you heard a chuckle.

“What a terrible punishment.” His chair squeaked as he collapsed into it. “I’ll have to request a room divider.”

“I’m not that bad. Not bad enough to warrant a physical structure built in the middle of our room, anyway. Besides, I think you should be paying more attention to the upcoming test.”

“Please don’t remind me. I’m ignoring it as long as I can.”

As mentioned before, you liked Damien, and that opinion hadn’t changed – if anything, your opinion of him had improved from having more interactions in the last hour than you had your entire year of sharing a dorm – but neither had you, and you tended to show your affection through needless teasing and relentless mischief for your own amusement. Therefore, your copy of Damien’s notes was abandoned on the table as you spun around in your chair to look at him.

“We have five days to prepare for writing three essays in two and a half hours without break.”

“No.”

“It’s on the relationship between the legal profession privilege and the legal disciplinary practice, and the obligations of attorneys for their clients as organizations and individuals.”

“Stop it.”

“It’s also taking place at eight o’clock at night because the people who make the schedules hate us specifically.”

“You are awful, and I am considering wading through the flood to get away from you.”

In an attempt to contain your chuckles at Damien’s deadpan expression, you feigned offence and gasped as dramatically as you could stomach. “You don’t mean that.”

He didn’t even blink. “Don’t test me.”

“Speaking of which…”

He tipped his head into the back of his chair and let out one final groan that launched you into a bout of laughter. Despite his theatrics, he didn’t last long before he was joining you with a surprisingly deep sound that seemed to vibrate your very bones, like the chiming of bells inside a church. You quite liked it, in fact, and you were slightly disappointed when you both trailed off into a long, albeit comfortable, silence. You also noticed that your sympathy about the state of the library had waned – if you were going to be under permanent stress, it was pleasant to hang around someone in a similar situation. Besides, what was wrong with enjoying it while it lasted? You were only going to be forced together for the next week, and it wasn’t as though it was going to have any permanent circumstances.

Right?

The sound of books clattering to the ground was one you steadfastly ignored as Damien nudged you into leaning against your desk with the weight of his body. His hands rested on either side of your waist, one absentmindedly rubbing circles that you could feel even through the layers of your uniform, while yours caressed his jawline to guide him closer. The only parts of you that weren’t touching were your mouths, but that was quickly rectified with a light tug on Damien’s tie. Immediately, your senses were doused by everything about him – the smell of his cologne, the sound of his breathing, the taste of his lips.

This wasn’t your first kiss, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. You found yourselves in this kind of situation regularly; sneaking a moment together in your dorm right before you had to rush off to class. All too often did one of Damien’s hands trail up from your side to card through your hair in a move that he had perfected, much to your chagrin given how weak it made you feel. He was aware of that, too, and you were sure it was half the reason he did it in such a risky position.

You caught a glimpse of your watch as you parted for breath, but you pushed it to the side in order to focus on diving back in. Damien accepted your silent proposition eagerly. 

The logical part of your brain tried to bring the image back to your attention because it was clear evidence that you were going to be late to class if you continued on your current endeavor. Both you and Damien had ten minutes to make a fifteen-minute journey from your dorm room to your lecture hall, so if you stopped immediately and booked it with your bags, you would get in without drawing much attention.

The emotional part of your brain wanted you to take this opportunity to bring Damien impossibly closer and melt into his embrace. A safe feeling of comfort and care enveloped you when you were with him, and willingly putting an end to it felt like a national offence. The press of his fingers and the swipe of his tongue against your lower lip teased a possibility that you wanted so badly to let happen.

However, no matter how much you cursed your law degree in that moment, you were forced to cut it short with a press to Damien’s chest. He acquiesced with only slight resistance, but he shot you a look of confusion with a furrowed brow and concern swimming in his eyes.

“We have to get to class.”

He huffed and snuck a kiss to your cheek. His mouth positioned next to your ear, you reigned in a shiver as he whispered, “Do we have to, though?”

Your breathy, “Yes,” wasn’t any more convincing than the look in your eyes, but he shifted back on his feet nevertheless, just far enough to make you immediately regret creating that space.

A puff of air battered against the nape of your neck. Ever the cuddler, Damien buried himself between your collarbone and your shoulder, slotting perfectly into the dip. There was no question about his stance on leaving, but you knew it was the responsible option to attend the lecture – you knew, but you didn’t have to like knowing.

In a bout of movement much like pulling a tooth, you twisted in Damien’s hold and slipped off the desk. If you had thought much more about it, you would have stayed on that desk until graduation, and those puppy-dog eyes gave you half a mind to jump back on.

“Come on,” you muttered, plucking your jacket from the chair, “we need to get going.”

You watched Damien right himself out of the corner of your eye. First was reknotting his tie, next was adjusting his cuffs, and, as you expected, was the flattening of his hair with a comb to get it just so. When there was little trace of recent events, he turned to you, your bag in hand. “We’ll come back, though, right?”

“Of course, it’s our dorm, after all.”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about, my little monster.”

You exchanged a grin as you took the strap from his hands, and, slinging it over your shoulder, you tried to fight back the flare of red on your face. You didn’t say anything, but he must have gotten the idea from you proceeding to slightly tighten his tie closer to his collar.

You waited for Damien to get his own bag, then opened the door and locked it behind you when you were both in the corridor. One more glance at your watch meant you barely registered the click before you were off to the races – calculations ran through your head, possible shortcuts you could take to save the extra second, all manner of obstacles that would be best to avoid like the club members who stood outside the gymnasium – and, all the while, as you sprinted to the end of the hallway and down the flights of stairs, you hoped Damien was behind you. Every sharp corner you took, you fought the urge to move your head that inch further to look back at him, and the thought before choosing another direction was centered around grabbing his hand to bring him to your side.

But you couldn’t. You stayed staring forward and your hand remained empty throughout your journey across the campus grounds because they were the campus grounds; you weren’t in your dorm anymore, you weren’t alone anymore. Clumps of people meandered along the pathways that you pushed through, each with a pair of eyes that could catch you in the act.

As if fate were playing a cruel trick, the two of you dashed past a couple walking the edges of the flowerbeds. First-years, hand in hand, lovesick grins on their faces and eyes only for the other. Free. 

Regretfully but inevitably, your thoughts turned spiteful. Why wasn’t it a risk for them, why did expectations fall on your couple, a relationship forced underground, instead of them? 

Your thoughts turned guilty. Why hadn’t you interacted with Damien at the beginning of your year, why didn’t you try harder when it was easy? 

Your thoughts turned to an acceptance supposed to only come at the end of grief. This was how it was, and you were going to be late to class.

Huffing and puffing, you and Damien slid to a stop at the lecture hall door. Fixing your outfits after that moment alone was a moot point because rushing through the halls had done much worse for your state. Besides, you were going to draw attention anyway because, if the emptiness of the hallway was anything to go by, your classmates were in the room already. 

It was just you and Damien.

You exchanged a brief smile that was marred only by the reminder of the rarity of this situation.

“You go in first,” he said, nodding towards the door.

“Okay—” you settled your shoulder against the wood but didn’t apply any force so that you could whisper, “I’ll see you after class.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

And, with that dramatic goodbye that felt as though it suited one of the drama departments’ plays, you pushed through the door, grimaced at the alarm of creaking, and scurried to your seat before the professor could call you out for your lateness.

Sitting by yourself on one of the benches never used to be so disappointing. During your first few lectures, you had actually preferred the space. You used to pray under your breath when someone new entered the room, and then curse even quieter when they sat down next to you. You enjoyed being able to spread your equipment out, and elbows jammed into your side or knees edging slightly too close to you set off the fight or flight instinct in you.

That changed when your relationship with Damien began; the two of you would enter the hall as a pair, laughing over your jokes all the way to your seats, making bets on the number of times the professor would reference his divorce as you removed the materials from your bags. At the time, it was the highlight of college career – in the present, where you were shifting to get comfortable on the unyielding wooden pew, it was a memory you cherished in the silence and chill of the room.

No matter how much time you spent with Damien, no matter how much joy you got out of every interaction with him, no matter how much you loved him, you were both at risk every time you demonstrated those feelings. You saw the way your professor squinted at your bouts of laughter, and you saw the subtle shake of their head as you walked out hand in hand. You used to think you could handle it – it didn’t matter if anyone liked you as long as they stayed unbiased, and you would gladly trade a positive relationship for the better one you had with Damien. The problem didn’t lie with the staff themselves, no, the problem was with who they spoke to. Specifically, Damien’s family.

While you had officially flown the nest the moment you were accepted into the university, Damien was another story entirely; being the prodigal son of the definition of ‘upper-class’ meant that his leash was pulled tighter than a horse. He was trotted around like one, too, whenever he found himself back at home during the holidays. Every social event was used as an excuse to network, and the children of anyone who attended were little more than bartering chips.

Had your relationship started at the beginning of your studies, you might have gotten away with it, managed to slip under the radar and carried out your days in uninterrupted bliss. However, certain recent family events meant that all eyes were on Damien, and his parents circled above him like hawks, because God forbid both of the Whitacre children went astray. They would have been the laughingstock of the city if the golden boy went courting a commoner after their darling daughter ran off with that actor – and that was a fate worse than death for them.

As a result, Damien was given no leeway, and so neither was your relationship. You couldn’t afford to take the risk of public affection, you couldn’t afford to take the risk of public anything. For all your professors and Damien’s family knew, you were roommates, and that was all there was to it.

But you knew. There was never any doubt in your mind about your feelings for one another. You loved Damien, and Damien loved you. Your heart raced every time he looked your way, and those milliseconds of eye contact showed you unquestionable peace. You both understood the situation you were in, and you were there regardless. Loving the other in private was just what it took to be able to love, and you were willing to stick with him, despite the pain of walking into rooms alone.

Nevertheless, you did have to choke back a laugh when the creak of the door broke through the lecture like a shot from a gun.

“Mr. Whitacre, you are late!”

And the vicious red that spread across his face at getting caught let the laughter win as it overwhelmed you. Damien could only spare a faux-threatening glare your way and a mouthed ‘you little monster’ before he threw himself onto the closest bench, trying to keep his head and blush down. You supposed there were some benefits to turning up separately, after all.

Your rushing through the halls of the law offices sounded like a tap dance to the people milling about at the edges. It was a gait very specific to you, and anyone who had been there for more than a few days knew what it meant. The first thing was that you were very busy, but the second thing was that you were very nervous. There would be days when you had a full schedule – meetings and cases and trials and investigations – but that would produce a one-two-one-two clicking noise of your dress shoes. Sometimes you would have only a few important events, which would fill the building with a skittering pulse. Now, however, at nine forty-five in the morning, it was a frantic rhythm that initially appeared to skip beats and combine steps, but it repeated every couple of doors to create a false sense of chaos and rationale.

Nearly everyone that you passed knew that today would be a stressful time for you, but not one of them knew why, until you got further into the labyrinth of offices. The rooms of assistant district attorneys were gathered here, and they were in a similar state to you. Questions of how prepared everyone was punctured the air, calls for an estimated time of arrival split the little silence there was left over, and the only source of calm was from the district attorney himself.

You tried your best to avoid the hurricane of panic that swelled where the group stood. You skirted around the edges, trying to get to your own office without someone asking anything of you. The documents in your grip were of greater concern than the temperature of the water cooler, though nothing could top the thought that reigned supreme over your mind as you rounded the corner.

There were only three people who had a key to your office. Yourself, the district attorney, and Damien – and, considering that you had already seen your boss, Damien was supposed to still be in the city hall, and you were yourself, you had no clue who was pushing open your door and walking inside without your permission.

You quickened your pace, disregarding the rest of the prosecutors and beelining it towards your door. There were important cases in there, you couldn’t afford to let a member of the public see them withyour permission, let alone accidentally. You would be in serious trouble, and that was not something you could afford today. Really, you should have been excited, but this security issue was top priority; you could get demoted, you could lose your job entirely if someone off the streets, unknown to anyone there, completely random and without knowledge—

The mayor.

It was the mayor who was standing in your office.

Damien was standing in the middle of the room without having broken in because he had a key that you had given to him personally.

There was no need to worry.

“Good morning, Mr. Mayor,” you greeted, nodding slowly.

“Good morning to you, too,” he said in response, tone as welcoming as the rest of his interactions with the public.

You placed a hand on your door’s handle. “What brings you to my office?”

“I have a meeting with the district attorney in half an hour, and I have some questions that I feel would be better answered before it begins.”

Your blinds were already down from the night before, so all you had to do was push the door closed, register the click, and turn back to Damien.

For a moment, the two of you waited, staring at each other as you ran through the checklist in your mind. Everything was as it should have been, with you inside your office and the public outside.

It took just a second longer for your façade to fracture like ice on a lake – the crack spread across your lips, bringing a grin from ear to ear, while Damien took the few feet forward to bridge the gap. He left his cane leaning against the desk, and his steps placed just him in front of you, but he threw his arms around your waist to tug you closer.

Face to face, barely enough space for you to freely breathe, you couldn’t help but laugh airily.

“What are you really doing here?” you whispered, noting how the corners of his eyes crinkled at your voice.

“I know, I know.” His tone showed that you had much the same effect on him as he did you, and you didn’t miss him glancing down at your lips. He tried to redirect his focus to speaking, but the little huffs in between his words made it obvious it wasn’t working. “I’m early. I just… had to see you – before we got into legalities.”

As much as you should have reprimanded him for showing up before his scheduled appointment, you simply didn’t have it in you. Instead, you laid your hands on his shoulders, padded by his suit for the sake of the meeting, and leaned forward to swipe your mouth against his.

It was a sweet, gentle, infinitely too short kiss. Some part of you wanted to take the day off and drag him back to your apartment to savor the time you had available, but you were at work. You both were.

That was always the problem. After graduation, you were thrust into the world of work unceremoniously. No grace period, no gap year, no moment to spend together before you were once again in the public eye, except, this time, with more of a strain. Now, it wasn’t just Damien’s parents circling above: it was also the press, your bosses, the expectations of adulthood to get settled down but with no leeway to get to know someone. It was supposed to be a business transaction, not a relationship, and that wasn’t what either of you wanted.

So, once again, your relationship went underground. You shared glances in the hallway, clipped greetings over the meeting table, nods at exits and entrances – but, when you were alone, you made every second count in the dim lighting of candles, only the moon and stars knowing your secrets.

It was times like these that you never anticipated, when both of your schedules aligned just so, and Damien was able to surprise you right when you least expected it.

You supposed he had never truly escaped the manners of his aristocratic upbringing; he looked embarrassed to have shown his cards, his grip on your waist tightening and a redness spreading to the tips of his ears. You couldn’t have that, no matter how much you once would have teased him for it.

Pressing a risky kiss to his cheek, you muttered a quick, “Thank you for coming.” You then pulled out the closest chair from the desk before rounding to your side, doing the same so that you could fall into it. With the blinds closed and door shut, you had the freedom to be laxer in every way, not only with your affection.

“The office is nervous, you know,” you commented, tugging open one of the drawers.

“The whole office?”

You hummed. “Everyone except the DA.” Fishing around in the depths of your mess, you pulled out items you had meant to sort out later – ‘later’ being two to twenty working days.

Damien watched you do it from across your desk. Even after all these years, you hadn’t perfected the art of organization, and he found himself barely containing his laughter at your gradually increasing franticness. He’d give you a chance to realize, see if you could figure it out on your own, before he dusted off his shining armor.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen the district attorney in a panic.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him exhibit any emotion—” You unfolded a notepad but came back empty, “—I guess that’s what it takes to be a district attorney.”

“Now don’t say that.”

“Why not? It’s true, isn’t it? There isn’t a lot of room for feelings when you’re supposed to be completely objective.”

“I think there’s plenty of room.”

In glancing up to respond, you caught sight of something that Damien held out towards you, and, with a bashful smile, you took it. However, it wasn’t only the fact that he had given you exactly what you were struggling to find – the meeting summary and checklist – but the affection he looked at you with. Nestled beneath the amusement and restraint for teasing was a certain glint that made you flush from your cheeks to your neck. It was something you often saw, but, being simultaneously faced with your future, you were granted a sense of calm that only came in the soft spots between your work, and you wondered, briefly, if he were right.

But even though you doubted your love for Damien would ever fade, that wasn’t the only problem that faced you.

A knock sounded at your office door, cracking the bubble you had created.

Instantly, you shot up from your seat, while Damien pushed back his seat to follow suit in a much more sensible manner, grasping the top of his cane in the process. You willed the color in your face to disappear as you wrapped your hand around the handle and pulled.

Behind it was one of the other prosecutors in the office, and, behind them, was the DA talking to a secretary. Everyone else had vacated the area, likely to the meeting room where you were supposed to be.

They opened their mouth to tell you just that but stopped short at the sight of Damien standing in front of your desk.

“Mr. Mayor!” came their gasp, and you watched as their spine straightened like a soldier called to attention.

“Good morning, prosecutor.” Ever the humble gentleman, Damien nodded at the newcomer and stepped forward to shake your hand. A single movement up and down was all that was allowed before he was striding out of your office and towards the meeting room.

You counted yourself lucky that the persecutor hadn’t questioned you as to why the Mayor of Los Angeles was in your office before his appointment, but you also didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, so you snatched your keys from your pocket, ushered them out the way, and locked the door behind you.

You and the persecutor walked in rhythm next to each other, as if on parade, down to your shared destination. You were a few seconds behind Damien, but at every corner he took, you saw the heel of his shoe raise in a step and then disappear behind the wall. This was the precedent set all the way to the room, until you were outside the door that he had just entered.

“Are you not coming in?” the prosecutor asked, looking at you with curiosity but no suspicion.

You shook your head. It was your turn to wait outside, so that time could give you a better divide than distance could – give you a better chance of staying secret. These precautions were less necessary now, but neither you nor Damien were willing to take that risk.

With a light shrug, they pushed open the door and went in, letting it drift closed behind them. You just barely caught sight of Damien through the steadily waning crack.

One second. Two seconds. Three. Four. You counted each breathe in and out. Thirty seemed enough. With the final burst of air caught in your throat, you stepped through the veil.

There was no punishment for showing up slightly later now. You weren’t students sneaking around behind their college’s backs anymore, liable to be yelled at if something held them up in the corridor or prevented them from arriving at nine on the dot. You were adults. But, again, there was the matter of adult responsibilities and expectations of the public for the both of you.

Over the course of the meeting – which was on some business that the Mayor’s re-election campaign had with the legal branch of Los Angeles – you sent many a glance towards Damien. Anytime that he wasn’t speaking, he was sat up in his chair, listening attentively and even jotting down a few notes for his personal use. You were situated at one of the corners, and he was at the head opposite you, meaning that you had one hell of a time trying to be subtle. Luckily, you had done this many, many, many times before. When he was speaking, it was easy because – as much as you liked to tease him – manners weren’t unheard of to you. When someone else took the lead, however, you only managed to catch glimpses before you were forced to redirect your attention. You were working. You needed to pay attention.

As soon as the meeting started to slow, matters set aside for the follow-up session next week, you scribbled down the rest of the notes, frantically trying to create shorthand in the moment so that you could finish quicker. You felt every second drip by like a broken faucet, the unhurried march of time seeming to choose to make your life harder. Your fingers tapping on the table matched its pace.

“Very good, Mr. Mayor,” the DA said, rising from his seat to shake Damien’s hand.

You punctuated the end of your written word.

“Thank you for attending this meeting.”

You capped your fountain pen.

“We look forward to working with you in the future.”

The moment that the DA’s hand disconnected from Damien’s, you shot up from your chair alongside the rest of the prosecutors. You knew you had to wait to talk to him, but being the only one sitting would have been unprofessional. Waiting there awkwardly was just the same, so you busied yourself with sorting through your paper, tearing the most important piece out, until the room had mostly been vacated after shaking Damien’s hand.

When you were the last two people remaining, everyone having filed out, you stepped in front of him. In your behavior, there was nothing unusual. The two of you were what everyone saw: a prosecutor and the mayor. While one title held more status, your being in the same room alone was nothing to gawk at.

Much like when you had left your office, you clasped Damien’s hand with all the formal respect you could muster and shook it. He played along with an almost mechanical lift, his cane planted on the ground keeping him perfectly balanced and still. A silent goodbye and an exit to follow.

But before you let go, both of you took the too brief moment you had been gifted and made eye contact. In his, you saw the waves of affection stirring beneath the surface of the color, that shade that glinted like syrup in the light of the office window and was shaded by the feeling of twilight itself. In yours, he saw a crackle of flame that threatened to consume the whites but was kept at bay by the sheen of calm spread from one corner to the other. In both, you each saw love and devotion neither would ever part with.

He took a step back, and your hand returned to your side.

“Good day, Mr. Mayor.”

With a nod and a smile, you made sure that you had everything with you and then returned to your office. Although Damien had returned the actions, he was only able to keep the latter up for however long it took for the door to close. Meetings were tiring, but you made the longer ones worth it. He only wished he were able to get more time with you during them, sit just a chair closer, joke about the comments made afterward. Like how you did back in university post-lecture, whether that was from the professor or the Dean.

That period obviously wasn’t all smooth sailing. The secrecy he could have done without, but you were together, and that was enough. Now?

He turned to look at the door and sighed. Trying to revive the past was a fool’s errand, he knew that, but it didn’t stop him instinctively moving to worry the stick of his cane between his hands.

His eyebrows furrowed and the corner of his mouth dropped as he stopped himself short. Instead, he opened his hand, the one you had shaken before your departure, and looked curiously at the little piece of paper that you had left behind.

“Oh, my little monster,” he muttered to himself, trailing off only as his attention was stolen by the note.

You had folded it up into a neat square – sometimes he marveled at how disjointed your organization skills were – but the message was short anyway. ‘My house. Seven. Dinner.’ 

If someone, a prosecutor, a secretary, the DA himself, were to notice Damien leaving the meeting room with a grin stretched from one side of his face to the other, none of them would have raised an eyebrow, nor would they have connected it to you leaving at five o’clock on the dot with a smile much similar to his seemingly inseparable from your lips.

The knock at your front door startled you from staring straight at the stove. You had been waiting for it to explode, for flames to lick at the edges of the metal door, but nothing of the sort had happened so far. No, luckily, you had managed to make it to Damien’s arrival, right as the clock ticked to seven o’clock. Knowing him, even after years of being in a relationship, he had been waiting outside for fifteen minutes. Too many decades of training to be a gentleman prevented him for breaking decorum for the smallest things, and daring to timidly announce his presence a brazen minute early was one of them.

You took your attention off the stove for long enough to rush to the front door, swing it open, and practically drag Damien inside. The leaping of his eyebrows to his hairline was entertainment enough, but you were quickly distracted by the mental image of your stove melting. It pushed you to drop him into a dining chair and jump back to the kitchen.

“I’m sorry I haven’t set the table yet,” you called back through the doorway. You weren’t going to expand on why, not because it was out of laziness, but because you really didn’t want him to know about your half-hour battle with your sink.

As you searched for your gloves, you heard him respond, “It’s not a problem.” A moment passed in which you found and slipped them on before you barely picked up him muttering, “In fact, if I remember correctly…”

It was out of the corner of your eye that you saw Damien emerge from the dining room and head straight to the cutlery drawer. He held two placemats and coasters to his side, cane grasped in his hand, and pulled the drawer open to retrieve the knives and forks.

“You don’t need to do that,” came your protests, but they fell on deaf ears. He took them regardless and marched back to the table to set it up. You, being preoccupied with the hot tray you had pulled out of the oven, were powerless to stop him or the affectionate tut that escaped you. The most you were able to do was push the food onto a rack and say, “I thought you were supposed to be the guest.”

“And I thought you just cooked a whole meal—” He ducked back into the kitchen, “—so I should be helping you prepare.”

He wouldn’t admit the real reason why he was so eager to do something; he loved you and wanted to make things easier on you in any way that he could, but there was also a part of him that was so pitifully nervous at the prospect of having dinner together that he had to keep moving. This was not a common occurrence. In fact, he was certain you had sat through more meetings than meals together, and it was a sad inevitability that your letters drifted towards more pressing matters, even in private correspondence.

His heart pounded against his chest like a trapped bird, and the audible thump was its song that he hoped only he could hear. Stopped at the table to make sure everything was in place, he tried to put out the fire growing beneath his skin by shedding his jacket and rolling up his sleeves. There were few times he wore anything different to his suit or made alterations to it.

On your part, there were also few times that you saw these alterations, and the sight of Damien’s exposed forearms through the dining room doorway made you grip the two plates of food just ever so slightly tighter.

Still, you managed to keep your nerves intact long enough for the both of you to settle down at the table, sitting across from each other with the meal you had somehow made without burning the house down. Really, you were quite proud of yourself, but it wasn’t the thing that held most of your attention.

“Thank you for inviting me tonight,” Damien said, looking straight at you.

“Thank you for agreeing to it. I—” You took a deep breath in, “— I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you, too.” His shoulders dropped with the admittance, and your own accentuated grin dropped into a much more comfortable smile. “I can’t tell you how giddy I was when you slipped me that note.”

“How else was I supposed to ask you? I don’t trust your secretary.”

That last bit was, technically, untrue, so far as to say you didn’t trust her any less than anyone else when it came to your relationship with Damien. Regardless, it didn’t stop him from fiddling with his cuffs as he averted his eyes from yours.

Quietly, almost as though his words were the biggest secret in the room, he muttered, “We could always arrange some meetings.”

“What, so we can go over the best way to style your hair that doesn’t differentiate you from the working class?”

You followed it up with a chuckle, but Damien didn’t follow. Instead, he burned a hole into one of the paintings on the wall, a completely unassuming one that had been there for the past few years. If that hadn’t raised questions in you, the tops of his ears turning red would have done it.

“Not as such.”

You thought for a moment and then let out a faux-affronted gasp. “Mr. Mayor, you’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, are you?”

The very concept of fake meetings coming from a man as honest as Damien made you want to explode with laughter. Mayor Damien Whitacre? The man who put a little tree on his desk because he didn’t leave his office even during the holidays? That Damien Whitacre was thinking of boldly betraying the integrity of his job?

“While I do try to stay humble,” he began with a roll of his eyes, “I must admit I thought I’d be given more leeway once I became the mayor.”

“But you know why you haven’t.”

He paused.

Your suspicions grew.

“Do I?”

“Yes. We both do.”

His eyes snapped back to yours. “What if we changed that?”

While you tried to prevent your frown, you weren’t able to recover from your shock before it was bending the edges of your lips. “I never took you for the ignorance is bliss kind of man.”

“It wouldn’t be ignorance, per say, just…” Damien’s eyes drifted off to the side, glancing out the window into the pitch black of the night. “What if we pretended it didn’t matter. It does, of course, God knows it does or else we would be much further along by now.”

With a quirk of an eyebrow, you silently asked what that meant, and in a tilt of his head, he silently answered dates, a proposal, marriage, a family. His gaze never wavered from yours.

“And what happens if it goes wrong? If someone makes us acknowledge that it does matter?”

“There is nothing wrong with us loving each other.”

You hated arguing like this because you didn’t know what you were actually arguing about, but you also didn’t know if clarifying would be any better. The pressure of your teeth grinding against each other only served to make you more unsure. You had so many problems acting against you, you couldn’t afford to become one of them.

“We can’t lose our jobs,” you said, “I have aspirations, and I know damn well that you love being the mayor too much to let it go.”

“I love you more.”

Slowly, painfully slowly, you brought your hands together under your chin, as if to give you time to prepare for your own words. “You can’t.”

“Alright.” A moment of silence. You hoped it wasn’t mourning. “I understand.”

Maybe if you were talking to another man, someone else who hadn’t gone through what you had together, you would have been right. He might have been getting up to gather whatever miscellaneous trinkets he had left scattered around your house throughout the years. He might have been searching for his key to your office. He might have walked straight out the door.

But Damien was not ‘another man’. He was him, and the only reason he was getting up was to round the table to kneel in front of you.

“But what if we make it so they can’t get rid of us?”

You could have made a joke – something about that being a dictatorship and how you didn’t know if that could apply to a city – but you held your tongue because there was a spark of hope in Damien’s voice, a little optimism that made your eyes widen, which you would be damned if you washed away. “What do you mean?”

“I know that we can’t do anything right now. I’m up for re-election, and you’re not the district attorney yet, we don’t have a leg to stand on. But if we were able to get such approval from our colleagues and the public that they can’t remove us from our stations, we could relax.”

You both knew what he meant by ‘relax’, the dates, the proposal, the marriage, the family, but you also both knew that it would be difficult – and even that was an understatement, it would be a nightmare to balance opinions of people while making tough choices. Your future wasn’t destinated to be easy for you – if it were, you wouldn’t be sitting in the house where you lived alone – but, then again, neither was your past. To expect it all handed to you on a silver platter would be a rejection of what made you you. The struggle, the strife, the sleepless nights stressing over every little detail your mind could supply you with.

When you were at university, you had made a promise that you would stick by Damien, and you weren’t about to give up now. Not when you had come this far, not when the man himself was looking at you as if all the joy in the world had been presented to him wrapped with a bow, not when you loved him and he loved you.

“We’ll try.”

“We’ll try?”

You nodded. 

“We’ll try.”

You didn’t have enough time to move even if you wanted to before Damien launched himself forward and collected you in his embrace. From this position, his hand on your jaw guided you down into a kiss that was laced with the excitement of a brand-new start. An agreement to try. You’d try. And you’d do it. As he leaned in closer and you brought your fingers through the hair near the nape of his neck, you thought that this might just work. He made relaxing sound easy, and, while you knew that was optimistic, the passion shared between the two of you had you thinking it wasn’t as outlandish as you once believed.

No more waiting.

[Thank you so much for this request! Since you mentioned another poster, I went and tracked them down so, @marinecanary, this is the one that I messaged about! Could I have technically just zoomed in on them as the DA and mayor? Probably. Should I have? Probably. Did I? Nope :D! Again, thanks for requesting, and I hope you've enjoyed reading this!