#i just. time. death. cleo. scott. grief and love and insufficient substitutes. hrghhhhhh i am shaking them around in a glass jar like bugs

[erstwhilesparrow]

the papers from the bankers say they doubt you’re coming home

So Cleo wins. Of course they win.

—

Scott has a garden. He used to tend it with his own two hands. He doesn’t anymore, but the garden finds its ways of being self-sufficient. It’s not witchcraft; Cleo doesn’t care and Scott drags decay in his wake like a wedding dress train. Gave up, at some point, trying to keep it in check.

That there’s life at all in the garden is nothing short of miraculous, so Scott hauls himself upright and down the stairs every afternoon to see the miracle for himself again. His old lizard-like friend—reanimated after an accident, and then what might have been sabotage, and then what definitely was spite—doesn’t keep names very well these days, but he roams the garden, and seems comfortable enough that Scott finds himself relaxing in his presence.

“Hello,” Scott says, voice rusty from disuse. He doesn’t need to talk much these days—whatever he’s about to say, Cleo reacts just the same, as if they’ve already heard it. “How are you doing?”

His friend flicks his tongue in Scott’s face, and the smell of rot—always there to some degree—intensifies. Scott’s had time to practise, to study. But a dead thing brought back has already split its self with death. There are points past which there is no return.

It could be worse. Scott and death are old lovers these days.

He tells his friend, “I haven’t seen Cleo since… two days ago? Two days ago for me.” Scott coughs. He gets two sentences before his throat gets dry, and if he cared, he’d be sad that this is the improvement. For all her power, it’s no wonder the Supreme Witch had to die eventually.

“Maybe I’ll ask where she went,” Scott laughs.

He won’t. He hasn’t. Nothing touches them out here. Cleo always comes back, swaggering or exhausted or sweet or fearful. Scott and the garden and death stand guard. It has been a long time since she let him fold her into his arms, but maybe Scott’s too hopeful for his own good. Someone, somewhere, keeping watch for her. He can do that while he waits.

—

“Okay. We can try again.”

Scott stumbles into Cleo’s study—library, really; it has long outgrown being a study, but Scott calls it such out of habit and Cleo can adapt—carrying a stack of books, a bundle of charred sticks, and a satchel round with shapes that Cleo is certain are familiar.

“What’d you find this time?” they ask.

“Golden apples. Enchanted ones.” There’s an exhausted gleam to his eye, and fiercer than that, pride. It is uncomfortably recognizable.

Cleo makes mistakes, okay? If their reputation is what it is in this world, it’s only because they’ve had the experience from a hundred prior failures. They don’t catch themself in time.

“Scott—” Cleo starts.

Instantly, Scott’s expression crumples. He recovers fast enough, lips pressing shut and eyes narrowing, but this other half, this ghost he’s carrying around, is like an open wound, and he has none of a time witch’s ability to let things scar over.

“We haven’t even tried,” Scott hisses. “Don’t look at me like that! How—”

It’s only the second time Cleo has seen this turn of events, so it still pierces them, quiet, as precise as if aimed. They shake their head. “It doesn’t work. I—We tried.”

“You’ve done this before? This exact thing?”

“Yes,” Cleo says, and nothing more.

Scars can still ache, and Cleo still feels it, like the remnants of a bad cut tearing from their sternum down to their guts. Despite the scar tissue, she had hoped too. She had forgotten she could hope like that. She had watched Scott retch in the garden afterwards and decided it wasn’t worth it.

“That’s—” Scott drops the supplies with a growl, and in perfect unison, he and Cleo flick their hands to catch everything before it hits the floor. “Did you—”

“Nothing yet,” Cleo interrupts, then winces. If Scott’s magic keeps him sallow and starving-eyed, keeps him a half-dead thing cannibalizing itself, hers layers over her like thin coats of paint. It’s the loneliest thing in the world to watch Scott reach for the book she’d been annotating and know exactly how the motion goes. She flinched, the first couple of times. Now, some wild, living part of her breathes, Catch it. Hold him. Please.

But it’s not Scott Cleo’s after, and it’s not Cleo that Scott’s after.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. We’ll… We’ll try something else.”

“Of course we will.”

Scott smiles as if that’s a new joke, and—Oh, it is, isn’t it? Cleo likes his smile, but it’s the same as being offered a handful of berries when what she wants is a feast.

Cleo has painted over their own past a hundred, a thousand times now. They wonder, quietly, privately, if they’ll know how to give up their time witch powers when this is all done, and worse, they wonder what they’ll be when they can’t.

—

“So,” Scott rasps. “We could test them out. Your new powers.”

They’ve had a total of one night’s sleep over the past four days, collapsed exhausted and shouting on Cleo’s couches as soon as the signal came through that she had won, that it had worked, that Scott’s death hadn’t needed to be permanent for a victor to be declared. 

The jubilation seems to have vanished with the sunrise. They’ve woken up too early and are standing in the kitchen in a facsimile of domesticity.

“We could,” Cleo says. Closes their eyes. Spits without looking into one of the buckets on the floor—blood and rotted meat and inky-purple residue. “We… Yes.”

“Does anything… feel different?” Scott keeps his arms crossed; can’t lean on the counter because there’s buckets of offal and basins shimmery with amethyst dust and ugly smears all over. Neither of them have eaten. Neither of them are eating.

“I think I’ve been here before,” Cleo says, quiet, confessional in a way they haven’t been until now. “I had—I have nightmares.”

Scott thinks about making a joke. Looks again at the buckets of blood, and the fact that he stopped going back to his house after a while. Cleo caught him sleeping on their couch the first time and only said, “It’s fine. You can take my bed here if I can take yours at your place.”

“I know,” Scott says. 

Cleo looks, briefly, surprised. It sparks some kind of surprise in Scott too. Maybe he shouldn’t be. There is no danger in being surprised once you’re untouchable.

“You too?” they ask.

Scott just nods.

They’re the same thing from two different angles—so they recognize each other, but can do no more than that. He’s thought about reaching over and wiping some of the rusty blood off their mouth. Can’t do it for the same reason he can’t go home yet.

Cleo’s hand comes up, hesitates, goes back to draw her wand and gesture with it. The buckets begin a slow, careful orbit around her. “Let’s clean up first? This place feels disgusting.”

“Whose fault is that?”

“Yours.” A wry grin and no hard feelings, just like that.

“The all-powerful Supreme Witch doesn’t have a spell for that?” Scott flutters his fingers. “What do you need me for?”

“It’s better when I’m with you,” Cleo says simply. 

They don’t elaborate. Scott doesn’t ask.

—

It’s the same thing from two different directions. Of course they help each other out. Doing favours, owing favours. 

Neither of them have named this thing, but each repaid debt has a little extra to it, a leash if you’re cynical, a promise if you’re too hopeful for your own good. They keep count, each separate, private ledger book a see-saw or a double pendulum, tracing out the shape of something others might think to call a type of love.

“That’s cheating,” Scott complains, when Cleo tells him how they’ve learned to loop time and get three times the amount of studying in.

“It’s winning,” Cleo corrects smugly.

Scott scoffs.

“Don’t be a sore loser,” they murmur, teasing-sweet.

“Can you cast it on me too?” he asks. The bags under his eyes have never been just for show.

A different Scott once asked the same question, and the same Cleo agreed until they could both spit curses with as much ease as most people breathed. 

The memory of sitting in the same room, up late poring over spell tomes and stepping out onto the balcony to attempt new hexes, is carved into Cleo’s memory.

Similarly carved, though they don’t like reaching for it, is the memory of how the two of them made themselves too dangerous too soon, how the other witches whispered behind their hands about them, how the two of them barricaded Kairos and settled in for a seige.

“They’re just meat,” Cleo had snarled, pacing the room.

Scott’s fingers had twitched. Each word heavy and sure in his mouth, he’d agreed, “They’re just meat.”

That’s the kind of philosophy that causes trouble, that gets you hunted, questioned, locked away. That’s the kind of philosophy that has no room for love.

The same thing from another direction, then.

“Time witches only,” Cleo sing-songs instead, in the here and now.

“I’ll curse you.”

“You won’t.”

The look Scott shoots them is so, so familiar. They’ll get to know that look, and then they’ll forget it. It’s a little scary, how sure they are of this.

“Fine, but can you help me with this? I can’t get it to go the direction I want it to…”

Cleo gets the funniest feeling suddenly, like they’re a child playing with dolls again.

—

Scott gets back home and shuts the front door behind him and puts away his materials all nice and neat in the too-big upstairs and that’s when it hits him.

A time witch. A time witch who hesitated a moment too long before dipping their head in some loose imitation of a bow. A time witch who was still picking glow lichen off their dress, but a time witch nonetheless.

Scott shuts his eyes and is suddenly, viciously glad he agreed to work with them. Fine. So maybe he doesn’t have to win this contest to get what he needs from it. His magic is already rot and horror; what’s a couple more pieces of himself for the meat grinder?

They seemed willing enough to extend a hand toward him. He gets the strangest feeling he would like them even without the competition, without the promise that they’ll help one another. Maybe he hadn’t realized how much he missed having company.

Absurd. Something about the way she looked at him like they already knew each other.

“Better study up on some curses,” Scott murmurs.

—

And so Cleo wins. Of course they do.