#anyway. i havent posted fic on tumblr in years and this is a deeply embarrassing ordeal for me!!! thank you everyone for witnessing

[baodurs]

“nick wiseman has collapsed!”

button & nick, with some button & glitch. 3.9k words. set late chapter 5, on a hypothetical extra day before returning to aeon.

Good morning! For you: a question and a clue.

‘How funny you are today [Chicago]…’

There’s your clue. Guess the question?

Glitch’s texts arrive six minutes after their recipient steps into the shower. Phone silenced and hair lathered, Sabrina lingers obliviously behind the curtain, amid the warm water and warm vanilla scent of her soap. She emerges eighteen minutes later and smiles at her flashing screen, but decides that Glitch’s mystery can wait until she gets dressed.

Thankfully, Nick waits too. But as soon as she is dried and clothed, avoiding full body mirrors until she can at least throw on a robe, the fraternal voice in her head pipes up.

More poetry games? She can’t see his face, obviously, but she can feel his psychic nose wrinkle. How did you get “coffee date” from that?

Nick had done such a good job pretending not to exist for half an hour that she almost forgot they shared every thought now, and she had unwittingly dragged him along on her half-unconscious poetry explication.

“She’s quoting Frank O’Hara,” Sabrina explains, unsure why she says this aloud. She’s alone, though, so she keeps going: “The end of that poem is something like, ‘getting out of bed and having coffee and cigarettes, and loving you so much.’ I don’t know. Point is: coffee.”

Ah, yes. The famous lines from one of O’Hara’s finer works, thinks Nick, faux snootily. Love poetry, though? How do you know she wants to get coffee and isn’t trying to woo you? Or maybe she wants to smoke too many cigarettes with you. You’ll have to let her down easy—about the smoking, I mean. I like Glitch; you’d be cute together! But don’t start smoking.

Sabrina is parting her hair now, with a wide tooth comb and surgical precision, and she rolls her eyes in the mirror. “I just know. Poet’s intuition.”

You’re not a poet.

“Critic’s intuition, then.”

Another flash of her phone screen halts any further defense of her close-reading skills: The question is actually time-sensitive, so I hope you’re not asleep. Then, another repurposed O’Hara quote: ‘Oh [Sabrina Wiseman] we love you get up.’

Sabrina Wiseman, already up, replies: Coffee sounds great! Primping as we speak.

As Glitch texts back with more details, the idle whirl of Nick’s thoughts becomes too vague and unvoiced to follow. Sabrina gets ready as slowly as punctuality will allow, basking in the late morning’s quasi-normalcy. Braiding her hair, picking out her favorite boots, making plans to meet… a friend?

Admittedly, the growing social circle and coffee plans are less familiar prospects than her morning routine, but it all feels normal. An utterly unremarkable day awaits her, it seems, and promises to leave her with that elusive sense of neutral contentment. Her psyche heaves a sigh, half-bemused and half-relieved, before she can suppress it, and it mingles with the soft hum of Nick’s presence in the back of her mind. She feels a guilt she doesn’t recognize, until she realizes that it’s his.

Sharing a mind with her brother is not as difficult as she thinks everyone imagines it is. Nick has always been here, stepping gingerly among her thoughts like a house guest through their host’s messy storage room. Steps light, smiling ruefully at his intrusion, arms braced to catch any fragile trinkets that his passage may send tumbling. The only difference, now, is that she can’t sit in the next room and pretend not to hear the crash behind the wall. Sabrina feels her own guilt, at making Nick listen to how convenient it is for her that he is without a body, and Nick’s guilt, at making her feel guilty for feeling her own emotions inside her own head, and their regrets mingle and multiply like so much shattered ceramic at their feet, making the tiny storage room even more treacherous than before.

Nick hesitates. She feels him like a slight pressure against the wall of her skull, straining to give her room to think.

“It’s fine, Nick.” Sabrina finds a mirror and holds her own gaze. “And I really don’t want to talk about it.”

We just did, Button. Don’t worry about it. Just have fun today.

A million other thoughts lurk behind the ones he voices, and they both ignore every single one.

As she leaves the house, Sabrina mentally recites the few snippets of O’Hara that she remembers verbatim. Nick tries, only once or twice seriously, to guess what the missing words might be. Her expression doesn’t shift as she walks down the street, but in the back of her mind where no one else can see, they share in every silent laugh and hidden smile.

...

The morning with Glitch is not—and Sabrina feels she should have anticipated this—the epitome of lazy normalcy.

She arrives to find that Glitch had already claimed seats and ordered for them both, which is nice. Two identical mugs are still warm on the table, next to the poetry anthology that Sabrina had plucked from the lending library on her last visit. (“Who do you think I should quote in my next selfie caption to start the most fights about pseudo-intellectualism in my comments?” She had asked, pondering O’Hara and Ashbery while taking advantage of the venue’s excellent lighting. Glitch nominated Ginsberg.) The book is open, but at the sound of the door opening, Glitch looks up from its pages, grins, and makes a show of closing it to give Sabrina her full attention.

You know, Button, Nick muses as they approach the table, I’m surprised you agreed to meet her again.

How are you surprised? You’re in my head. You know every decision as soon as I make it.

That’s true! Nick concedes. Another thing about being in your head, though? I can tell when you’re trying to avoid a conversation by pretending to miss the point.

I don’t have time for a conversation, Nick. I’m talking to Glitch instead, because I agreed to meet her a second time, which is perfectly in cha-

“I said, ‘Hi Sabrina!’”

She blinks at Glitch, then looks awkwardly around herself at the table, where she had sat without quite realizing. Glitch laughs at her. It reaches her eyes, which gleam with humor and something else, more like the glint of a knife. She holds Sabrina’s gaze as if she can see behind the curtain of her eyes and recognize the second mind within her skull.

On instinct, Sabrina stares back and thinks of frog guts, then remembers just as Nick tells her: She can’t read your mind, Button. Not even without me here.

I know.

And you told her about me, anyway.

I know.

“Left speechless by my thoughtfulness?” Glitch grins, sweeping a hand towards the mug on Sabrina’s side of the table. “I can’t blame you. Failing words, though, tears of gratitude are an excellent substitute. Maybe a hand over the heart?”

Matching Glitch’s grin, Sabrina comes back to herself. She reaches for her coffee, disguises a steadying breath as an appreciative sniff of its aroma, and takes a sip. Glitch raises an eyebrow when they lock gazes again over the rim of her cup, but neither speaks until Sabrina has replaced the drink and slouched back against her chair, eyes closed and arms dangling.

“I cannot yet speak, struck dumb as I am by your thoughtfulness, and now also the taste of coffee, which is always sweeter when you buy it for me.” She cracks one eyelid to look at Glitch again. “Good enough?”

“Good enough!” Glitch confirms, with a wave of her hand. “I wouldn’t have minded a quote, honestly. And you probably should have said that coffee is sweeter because of my company, not because I pay for it. Actually, maybe you should just leave the poetry to me.”

“With pleasure.” Sabrina mimes the burden of poetry falling from her shoulders as she sits up. “I mean it, though; it’s good coffee, and you’re very nice to me. I’m sorry for being distracted when I sat down.”

She takes another sip. Glitch reclaims the poetry book she’d been reading and, without opening it, drags a thumb along the fore edge. That curious glint returns to her eyes, but this time Sabrina is present enough to suppress her discomfort at being scrutinized.

“Not your fault.” Below Glitch’s voice, there is still the drumming of her thumb along the pages. “‘My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.’”

Sabrina blinks. “That’s… O’Hara?”

Glitch pretends to roll her eyes hard enough that her head is thrown back with the force of it. “Sabrina, I’m going to start a fight about pseudo-intellectualism in your Instagram comments.”

“There’s no room for intellectualism up here!” Sabrina taps her head—carefully, mindful of the pleats of her braid. “The man in my quietness is not very quiet.”

Hey!

“And it’s more like I’m carrying him.”

Well, it’s no gondola ride up here, Nick thinks wryly.

“Lucky you have me, then! Feel free to outsource all intellectualism right here,” Glitch advises, tapping her own head. “I’ll happily lend my brainpower to a worthy cause. My first act of charity: yes, that was O’Hara. I was reading it when you came in.”

Glitch opens the book—finding her page on the first try, and it hadn’t been bookmarked—then slides it across the table. The words “quietness” and “gondola” are nowhere to be seen upon inspection. Sabrina looks up, confused, but Glitch redirects her attention to the book with a shooing motion before she can question whether it was the right page, after all.

“‘Just Walking Around,’” she reads aloud. “‘John Ashbery.’ This isn’t O’Hara.”

Glitch downs the rest of her coffee and pushes out from the table, braced to stand up. “No, it’s another clue. Do you want to go on a walk with me or not?”

With a snort, Sabrina reaches for her own drink and takes a few gulps. That’s answer enough for Glitch, who smiles wide and turns away to replace the poetry volume on its shelf.

...

The stroll begins both silently and aimlessly. Glitch had explained as they walked out the door that, if Sabrina had bothered to read the Ashbery poem, she would have realized that the last three lines of the second stanza made the invitation especially clever. Something about repurposing “the secret smudge on the back of your soul” as a metaphor for the secret brother inside your brain, and something else about silence and preoccupation and wandering. Regardless, they both seemed content to live briefly in the spirit of those things and simply walk beside each other.

Sabrina amuses herself by trying to subtly attract the attention of passersby. Glances that cross each other, the blink-and-miss-it motion of a braid thrown over the shoulder, the scrape of a boot toe on concrete. Her eyes are normally straight ahead, expression blank, to ward off even fleeting interest. But now, when a stranger meets her eyes, she smiles blandly and looks away as if her attention has been caught by something in her periphery. Do they wonder what she is looking at, even for a moment? She lifts her head towards the late morning sun and openly basks, thinking all the while how much she hates the heat, hoping all the while that someone will see her pretending to love it and believe it. There is a stranger, who loves the sun.

Preoccupied as she is by building her own shroud of mystery, Nick’s presence fades once more to an indistinct hum, after a period of dutiful but conspicuous silence. But Glitch, still beside her, catches onto her game. The next time Sabrina meets someone’s eye, Glitch slings an arm around her shoulder. She leans towards her ear and whispers, “Take a left here, towards the station. I have to catch a train,” then pulls back and laughs. Sabrina laughs, too, pleased to have been placed at the center of some secret joke. But the fantasy ends when she realizes that Glitch has read her with a glance, tearing through her paper-thin secrets.

Sabrina stares straight ahead. She shoves her hands in the pockets of her denim skirt, but doesn’t shrug off Glitch’s arm.

“What are you going to do the next time you want to hang out, but you can’t find a line of poetry to make the invitation for you?” She asks.

The hand resting on Sabrina’s shoulder reaches awkwardly around to her face and swats at her forehead. “If I can’t find it, it doesn’t exist. If it doesn’t exist, I’ll write it! Don’t insult me, Sabrina.”

She laughs. Her shoulders relax as she removes her hands from her pockets, and Glitch lets her arm slide from its perch. Before it rests back at her own side, though, she loops it through Sabrina’s and swings their elbows back and forth.

“It wouldn’t kill you to brush up on your New York School, you know.” She disrupts the rhythm of their elbows to nudge hers lightly into Sabrina’s side. “I’ve been learning O’Hara and friends ever since you said you liked him, and you can’t even recognize the quotes? Thankless work.”

“You can’t convince me you needed to ‘learn’ them.”

“Right you are!” Glitch says, cheerfully squeezing Sabrina’s arm. “Casual quotation is an art, however, and requires not only a perfect memory, but excellent conversational skills and a sense of drama.”

“I don’t see how any of that relies on me being able to-”

“-And an appreciative audience. A poet cannot bloom in barren soil.”

“I’m very appreciative,” Sabrina assures her, grinning. “Just not genuinely intellectual enough for poetry, as you might remember.”

“Oh, I won’t forget,” Glitch laughs. “The comments section of your next selfie, starting fights, 7:00 PM sharp. You can’t miss me!”

They’re coming up on the station now. Glitch takes a step back but hasn’t dropped her hand yet. “Well, I hope you and your brother had a good time.” She walks backwards towards the stairs, not relinquishing Sabrina’s hand until both their arms are extended and they’re being a nuisance to fellow pedestrians. “See you!”

...

I like Glitch, says Nick, a ways down the block from the station. Sabrina nearly jumps, but keeps walking.

Instead of responding, she hopes he can feel her agreement. There is a warm sense of acknowledgement and a general contentment—if she can ignore a foreign, simmering anxiety. He’s working up to saying something, so Sabrina relinquishes as much of her own brain space as she can to give him time. A few more moments of steeling himself, and then-

I’m sorry for earlier.

She is surprised enough that she physically furrows her brow, as if he could see. Sorry for what?

What I said about you meeting Glitch. At the coffeeshop, before you sat down. I think I- He wants to say that he thinks he knows why she was upset, but hesitates, knowing that voicing how well he knows her often just upsets her more. Her treacherous mind confirms it, fear and frustration prickling in some dark corner, but she does her best to dampen it. She thinks, without voicing it, that she’s sorry. Please keep talking.

I didn’t mean to imply that it was weird, or anything, that you were seeing her again. You’re allowed to spend time with friends who aren’t me, Gray, and Salomé.

It’s very generous of him to count Gray as her friend, but—

It’s not. We all care about you. Glitch does, too, and I’m glad you had a good time. I was just… pleasantly surprised. To see you encourage a new friendship. Maybe that’s patronizing. Sorry if it is, but it’s true.

She does feel a little patronized, but it’s a feeling she is so used to that it barely registers. Before she can take offense, she’s thinking of frog guts again, then wincing at the drastic measures against her brother (again), then grasping for half-remembered shreds of poetry to fill her spinning mind.

My quietness has a man in it, and I carry him through the streets like a gondola. What is all this vessel shit anyway. Nobody saw me through the gates. Now I am alone and hate it. I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly—

I would leave if I could, Button, comes Nick’s voice, both gentle and frustrated.

She knows that. Her mind falls eerily silent, as both of them try not to think anything that would upset the other. She breathes deeply, tries to get three different songs stuck in her head, and wishes she had memorized as much poetry as Glitch. By the time Sabrina has carried them both to the front door of Nick’s home, neither has thought another word. The silence is fraught, but the tension eases as she crosses the threshold.

It’s barely noon, and Sabrina is exhausted. She leaves her boots at the door and sinks into the couch, stretching horizontally across its cushions.

Glitch isn’t my friend. It’s her first coherent thought since they retreated to their own respective corners of her brain.

Button, that’s-

I don’t mean what you think. She hugs a pillow across her stomach. I wouldn’t hang out with her if she was my friend. That’s what I think every time we meet. Not because I don’t like her, I just- You and Gray and Sally know me, you know? Especially you, and I hate it sometimes, and I know you know that, too. And I like Glitch, because she’s smart and fun to be around, and because we just met this week, so she doesn’t know me. Except she’s too smart, because it feels like she already does. Like she can see into my mind, in a way that I can’t even blame my zero for. Just once, I want to make inane small talk with a vague acquaintance who doesn’t really know anything about me.

She places the pillow over her face and contemplates screaming, but doesn’t. I wouldn’t be telling you this if you weren’t trapped in my head, you know. So don’t… I don’t know. I don’t even know what you could do with it. Never mind.

What happens if Glitch knows you? Nick asks. He feels more than he thinks—love and guilt and sadness, a thousand unvoiced thoughts behind the one question he asks.

I don’t know.

You cut off the friendship because she cares about you too much?

Knowing and caring aren’t the same thing, Sabrina tells him, fingers worrying the edges of the pillow. Maybe she does both, but they’re still different.

Okay. He’s not trying as hard to hide his frustration anymore, but it softens in the mingling with his other emotions. So they are. But what then? You just stop?

Why not? She thinks. I always had you, so I never cared who I left.

A warm, deep affection crawls out from beneath his sadness and leaves her so full that she holds back tears. If she cried, would they be hers or Nick’s?

It’s not a choice between me and other people, Button. Glitch and I can both know you and love you a whole lot.

I don’t want to talk about Gliiiiitch. She draws out the single syllable of Glitch’s name as petulantly as she can psychically communicate, then tosses the pillow away. It’s complicated, and I’m trying to tell you you’re a good brother.

I know. I love you, and I hope you’re appreciating the restraint it takes to not start bawling like a baby and leaving tears all over your brain.

“Don’t you dare,” she laughs, finally breaking the silence of the living room. “I will go through the cabinets and cry in your vanilla extract.”

Aww, and then my next batch of cookies will be filled with extra love!

Sabrina rolls her eyes and, eventually, makes her way upstairs to her bedroom. She contemplates another shower, to fully reset from the morning she’s had, but lacks the energy. Instead, she lets her hair down and changes into pajamas, in spite of the early afternoon. Nick’s constant mental presence even feels normal—as if he’s just downstairs, popping into her brain to chat rather than brave the climb to her room.

Nestled comfortably as she is beneath her sheets, she doesn’t have the heart to walk over to her bookshelf. Glitch will have to be content with a review of the first three poems produced by googling Frank O’Hara’s name.

‘Poem?’ Nick reads the first search result. Come on, no title? I hate when they do that.

From what I remember, he does it a lot. Sabrina taps the offending text, trying to guess which untitled poem it might be, and nearly drops her phone.

“God,” she mutters, rolling onto her stomach. “Of course it’s this one.”

Which one? Nick pipes up.

“Just look.” She focuses on the portion of her screen occupied by the capitalized text, ‘LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!’ “That’s a headline. It’s about… I’m not a poetry professor, okay? But it’s about a celebrity collapsing in some freak emergency and people gossiping about it. Sound familiar?”

You can read it if you want, he is quick to assure her. It won’t bother me.

“That’s not the point. The point is… it’s just stupid! ‘Oh Lana Turner we love you get up?’”

Hey, Glitch quoted that this morning!

“Yeah, to get up out of bed. Not up from the hospital.” She’s too incensed to keep lying down, and she’s pacing around her room, ranting before she can stop herself. “Do you know what that nurse said to me? ‘Chicago won’t lose our Justice.’ Just imagine, ‘oh Justice we love you get up.’ Isn’t that stupid? Who’s ‘we,’ anyway?”

Sabrina. Please, it’s-

“And it’s not even mine to be mad about. I know. And people love you, and that’s great. But I- Lana Turner was fine, you know? And she got up. But they didn’t love her.”

I really don’t care what some random nurse said about me, Nick says. I’m sorry that people are talking to you like they know me; that pisses me off. But the rest is fine.

“Could you let me be selfishly angry for a minute before talking me down, please?”

You’re not being selfish. You’re working yourself into a rage on my behalf, and you should stop. Sabrina flops back onto the bed, phone on her stomach, but kicks the air a few times in protest. Pick up the phone. I want to read the poem.

“I really don’t.”

Okay, is all he says, until moments pass and Sabrina’s anger is replaced by embarrassment. She wants to use her phone again, to find another poem, but she doesn’t want to face the capitalized text that nearly launched her into a grief-induced tantrum.

Well, if Frank O’Hara won’t, Nick says, and she can feel the overwhelming mental energy of his smirk, I need you to tell me how my people love me.

His tone is intensely dramatic, and clearly satirizing all the pomp and ceremony Chicago has devoted to mourning the concept of a comic book superhero. A validation of her bitterness without fueling it, another ploy (like so many others) to make her feel better. She pretends not to notice as unlocks her phone.

I can’t speak for Chicago, she thinks, closing the “Poem” tab. I love you, though. Get up soon.