#more sadder than sleepy deprived

[hi-avathisside]

Song Of The Day

(Kyonki humse koi khafa hai)

I think this song should be sung or sent to our fav person who is currently angry with us due to our arguement/stupidity... it does makes things better idk

Kahe khafa aise chulbul se bulbul

Kahe na tu maanenge baatiyaan re

If someone sent it to me when i am angry i would literally melt...

All i wanna say is am sorry

[the-gay-in-the-way]

“Why be Sad When you can be Even Sadder?”, Part one

So this is a fanfiction I accidentally wrote that revolves around a particular headcanon of mine based off of Thomas’s short, “My Remedy for the Blues!”.

The headcanon is this:

Virgil and Patton are the sides that really represent Thomas’s emotions, both good and bad. 

Patton represents a lot of the main ones, including sadness.

So sometimes, just like I’m sure many people do, he just feels the need to be sad for no apparent reason.

Since Virgil is also an “emotional” side, he understands this better than the others.

So he and Patton had gotten into the habit of meeting up in private sometimes and just... letting themselves be sad together.

They watch sad movies and eat ice cream and listen to sad music and talk about whatever just generally makes them sad.

And then they eventually say goodbye and part ways, feeling a lot better after letting all of their emotions out, until the next time they meet up to be sad again.

I honestly love this little headcanon a lot and I was really just gonna write all of that down really quickly and go to sleep cus it was midnight when I started making this post and I was actually pretty tired at that point so sleep sounded GREAT, but then I really started to get into detail with the little fanon universe I intended for the headcanon to take place in and then suddenly I was writing an entire fic that’s probably gonna need a second part for the actual headcanon bit and it’s already four in the morning now and I’m SO sleepy but I have to finish this now because I’ve committed at this point and stopping would now be considered blasphemy to literally everything I represent as a human being.

So here we are.

I present to you a headcanon and a fanfiction that I had absolutely no intention of writing but ended up writing anyways.

I hope you enjoy.

(Or just ignore the rest of this post and only read the headcanon)

(It’s your choice)

(Btw this fic is purely platonic)

(But it is specifically platonic Moxiety at the moment)

(That will change in the future if I decide to write more for this little universe but it is what it is right now)

(I just love platonic Moxiety a lot ok)

(I need to cherish and protecc my soft beans)

(I’m crying now)

(I’m so tired)

(Anyways, whatever, do what you want)

(I’m just gonna go now and suffer from sleep deprivation tomorrow)

Virgil appears one day as a surprise to the others when he just suddenly runs into the room while they’re watching Thomas on the tv and shouts at Thomas with his warped voice to make him stop when he almost walks in front of a moving car.

Patton is delighted by the new addition of a side that seems to have the ability to save Thomas from harm simply by shouting at him.

Logan and Roman, however, are not.

They are upset that there is a side that can control Thomas at will.

So they quickly learn to hate him and try to keep him away from themselves, each other, and Thomas.

Patton isn’t ok with that but Virgil leaves before he can say anything to defend him, and the others use that as extra evidence to argue against Patton on the matter.

So Anxiety becomes an outcast and Patton is incredibly sad about losing the opportunity to befriend the new kid.

Until, one day, he runs into him in the kitchen.

Or falls into him, as the case happened be.

Patton is tired and it’s late but he’s also thirsty so he finds himself in the kitchen drinking some water.

Once he’s finished with his drink he goes to leave the room but ends up tripping over air and falls onto something that is a lot softer, warmer, and higher up than the ground.

As it turns out, Virgil had been going around the house to make sure nothing was wrong with the others(he always does this. Every night he waits until everyone goes to bed and then walks over to each side’s bedroom to check and make sure that they are alright. Sometimes they’re not and whenever that happens he tries to leave out little treats or gifts and finds ways to make the sides day easier the next day to help them feel a little better(all without them noticing it’s him doing it, of course)) and had noticed that Patton’s door was open and the side was nowhere to be seen. So he’d focused for a second and just barely heard someone shuffling around in the kitchen downstairs and had gone to check on the moral side, just in case there was somethjng seriously wrong.

By the time he reached the kitchen, Patton was putting his empty glass into the sink to be cleaned the next morning and was walking towards the entrance where Virgil was silently standing.

Virgil had planned on simply waiting until Patton left and just quietly watching him from the shadows as he returned to his room, but then Patton tripped and he found himself reacting without thinking.

Patton looked up after his fall and was surprised to see the new side, who he still didn’t know the name of yet, looking down at him with wide eyes and holding him carefully against his chest.

Not knowing what else to do in this situation, Patton spoke.

“...hello.”

And Virgil found himself responding without even meaning to because, what else was he even supposed to do in this kind of situation?

“...hi.”

“You caught me...”

“Yeah...sorry?”

Patton’s face scrunched up.

“What?”

And suddenly Virgil could move and think again and his brain was rapidly devolving into a panic because, oh my god I just caught morality I am holding morality I am holding one of the sides he is in my arms what is going on what just happened oh my gOD IM STILL HOLDING HIM I HAVENT LET GO YET WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME HE PROBABLY HATES ME LIKE THE OTHERS I JUST GRABBED HIM LIKE IT WAS NOTHING LET HIM GO NOW!

So Virgil quickly let go of the moral side and tried to step back.

Except Patton was also holding Virgil around the waist.

So, while Virgil stepped back, Patton simply ended up being dragged forward alongside him.

There was a very quiet moment of silence as Virgil looked down at the side still attached to him with shock and Patton blinked a couple times in surprise as he found himself becoming a little more horizontal to the ground while he continued to look up at the one supporting him.

And then Patton started to lose his grip and slide down Virgil’s body and onto the ground and Virgil did the only thing he COULD do in that situation.

He picked up Morality.

He did his best to be careful and quick as he grabbed the side from under his armpits and pulled him up off the ground for a moment before carefully placing him onto his own two feet.

Patton was still loosely holding onto Virgil and blinking rapidly in surprise as he was placed down again.

And another moment of quiet occurred as Virgil looked at the hands holding onto his shirt, seemingly on reflex, and tried to figure out if he should simply try to break away from them and run or if he should ask Morality if he was ok.

In the end, he ignored his own fear and decided that making sure the other side was alright took priority.

As always.

“Um...”

Patton blinked, still simply dumbfounded by being picked up by the side that didn’t actually look like they had the strength to do such a thing so easily, and Virgil continued talking.

“Are you...ok, Morality?”

The moral side blinked a few more times in silence as Virgil waited with some concern slowly building in his chest.

Then it was like a switch had been flipped and suddenly Patton was alive again.

“OH!”

The shout startled Virgil so much he ended up pulling the other against his chest again in some sort of protective act of instinct and Patton let out a surprised squeak and a giggle before wrapping his own arms around the new side once again as well.

Virgil stared at him with surprise after darting his eyes around to check their surroundings for danger.

“Morality?”

Patton giggled a little more before settling again and sending Virgil a smile that made him kind of want to just curl up on the floor and cry a little.

“Sorry, kiddo. I was just surprised is all. I didn’t expect someone to catch me when I was falling earlier and I definitely wasn’t expecting you to pick me up either so I just couldn’t figure out what to do with myself for a minute there.”

“Oh, ok then.”

Virgil was now blinking at the cheerful side with some more surprise and confusion.

He had no idea what was even going on at this point.

It was at this point though that he realized he was still pretty much hugging the other side and he quickly released him once again.

And, thankfully, Patton let go as well.

“Thank you for that, by the way.”

Virgil scrunched his own face up, confused.

“What?”

Patton, if anything, only seemed to grin wider.

Virgil was pretty sure his soul was going to slowly leave his body if this kept up.

“For catching me. It probably would have hurt a lot if I’d actually fallen, so I really appreciate you being here to help me. So, thank you!”

Yup, his soul was now leaving his body and he was going to just collapse on the floor in front of the kitchen until someone finally came by to toss his corpse into the abyss where he belonged.

Maybe Morality would be so kind as to do it himself.

“Um...yeah. No problem. Don’t mention it. It wasn’t a big deal. I just didn’t really want you to fall and get hurt or anything...”

Virgil trailed off as he realized he was starting to ramble and Patton continued to smile at him.

There was a moment of very awkward silence.

Then Virgil remembered that the other sides actually hated him and he was supposed to be staying away from them not talking to them and touching them and being smiled at by them and he did what he probably should have done as soon as he put Morality down the first time.

“Well...bye.”

And the anxious side sunk into the floor and disappeared before Patton could even ask him his name.

“Oh...”

But that wouldn’t keep him down too long, Patton decided as he held up a fist with a determined expression on his face.

The new side was a lot nicer than the other two seemed to think, as Patton had been quite sure to be the case since he seemed to be here to protect Thomas to begin with, and he was now determined to make up for not giving him a proper welcome before by befriending him now.

So Patton got to work.

He kept an eye out for the side, watching his door whenever he had the chance and trying to keep an eye out for a flash of black or purple anywhere.(I like the idea that Virgil started off with a simple long sleeve purple shirt and black jeans when he became a side and the hoodie was something he decided to wear later.)

He even tried to spend more time in the common area at night in the hopes of catching him.

And he knew that he’d been there at some point.

Because, sometimes, he’d fall asleep waiting and would later end up waking up tucked into his own bed.

And when he’d asked the others how they’d slept that night, they never said anything about waking up, finding him, and taking him to bed.

So the new side was definitely coming out at night but Patton still couldn’t find him and the other simply refused to come out when he called and talk to him.

It took two weeks before Patton finally came up with an idea he thought would work in getting the side to finally speak to him again.

He came down that night and waited for a while, as he always did.

And then he got up from his spot on the couch, hopped up onto the banister, and let himself fall.

There was a terrifying second or two where he thought that maybe he had miscalculated and the new side wasn’t around to catch him tonight and he would end up falling flat on his back and cracking his skull open or something, but then there was a blur of black and purple in the corner of his eye and he was suddenly resting in a set of very gentle arms that held him close to a chest that had a VERY fast heartbeat.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”

Virgil had almost just died.

If his soul hadn’t left last time, then it definitely did just now.

He’d been so confused when the moral side had gotten up and climbed onto the banister but he had never, not even once, thought that he would just fall off of it like that.

He’d been all the way in the kitchen one second and right beside the stairs in the next and his heart was pounding so hard from the adrenaline pulsing in his veins that he was pretty sure he was about to pass out from fear alone.

This wasn’t fair.

Why did he have to be the one to do this?

Why couldn’t he be like the others and just go to sleep at night?

And suddenly Morality was laughing and Virgil really just wanted to cry and go to bed because this was all just SO unfair.

“You caught me!”

Patton threw his arms around the other side’s neck and couldn’t help the delighted laughter that fell out of him in that moment.

He’d finally found him again!

The other side sighed and gave Patton the smallest of squeezes.

“Yeah...but why were you falling in the first place? What were you doing standing on the banister like that?”

Virgil wasn’t sure what explanation he was expecting the other to give, but it was not what he ended up receiving.

“I was trying to get your attention again.”

Morality seemed slightly embarrassed but mostly just obstinate as he stared Virgil down.

The new side blinked.

“What?”

Patton looked away.

The embarrassment was really starting to take over at this point and it was getting a little bit more difficult to insist, even in his own mind, that this had been the best course of action.

“Well, I wanted to talk to you. But whenever I tried to find you, you weren’t around and I couldn’t get you to come out. So I thought that, maybe, you’d catch me again if I fell. So I figured I should fall from the banister to make sure that you saw me falling and had time to react.”

By the end of the explanation, Patton couldn’t actually look at the other side anymore and was instead staring down at his purple-clad chest.

For a moment, there was silence and Patton was pretty sure that the new side was gonna think he was an idiot now, but then something miraculous happened.

Virgil’s chest started to shake, then his shoulders, then his arms, and then he couldn’t contain it anymore and laughter bloomed through the common room like a boom of thunder in a storm.

Patton looked up in shock and would later tell anyone who listened that this was the moment when he had promised himself that he would do whatever it took to protect his strange dark son for the rest of his days because Virgil’s face was lit up with the biggest grin and his eyes were squeezed shut as he laughed a full belly laughing guffaw that shook his entire body, and Patton by extension, and filled the room with one of the nicest and purest sounds Patton had ever had the joy of hearing.

He was pretty sure he had stars in his eyes as he watched the new side laugh until he couldn’t take it anymore and fell surprisingly gently, probably for Patton’s sake, onto his knees on the floor.

The laughter continued and Patton remained in the side’s shaking arms as he ended up doubling over and laughing into Patton’s shoulder.

Not that he minded.

If anything, he was delighted.

This was amazing.

Not only had he gotten the other side’s attention at last, he had also made him laugh so hard he didn’t even seem capable of controlling himself anymore.

But, eventually, the laughter faded off and the other side finally calmed down.

Virgil hadn’t really meant for any of that to happen and was reluctant to take his face away from where it was hidden against Morality’s shoulder.

So, for a moment, a just let himself take a second to really calm down and catch his breath again as the moral side remained perfectly still against him.

But he had to face everything eventually, so he finally took his head away from the side’s shoulder and only glanced at him for a moment before looking away with a blush quickly seeping over his face and ears.

“Sorry about that...”

Patton had to blink back into reality again before quickly speaking.

“Oh no! It’s fine! It was pretty funny and you have a really nice laugh so I don’t mind.”

Patton hadn’t really meant to say that last part, but it was true so that was fine.

Virgil blushed a little bit more and had to fight against the instinct in him that simply screamed to run away now that Morality was safe again.

Because the side had done all of this to talk to him again and if he left now there was a very high possibility that this would keep happening until Morality finally had the conversation he’d wanted to have in the first place.

“Right, well...anyways, what did you want to talk about, Morality?”

Patton twitched, apparently the new side had an impressive pair of big purple puppy eyes(this fanon Virgil has purple eyes, deal with it) and it was a struggle not to just let himself squeal and pull the side back against his shoulder again.

“Oh. Right. Yeah, that. Oh! Yeah, I wanted to ask what your name was!”

Morality wiggled a little in Virgil’s arms and he would have put the side down if he wasn’t worried about him not letting go again like last time.

“Oh, it’s, um...Anxiety”

The cheerful side blinked and looked into empty space for a moment before a look of realization came across his face.

“Oh, yeah! I remember Logan mentioning that word before. It’s like being scared and nervous about things, right?”

Patton felt it when the other side twitched a bit in what seemed like an aborted sort of flinch before he responded with his head down.

“Yeah, basically.”

The words, “kicked puppy”, repeatedly cycled through the moral side’s brain like a sad little siren.

Roman and Logan were in so much trouble, Patton decided then.

Because it seemed like the new side thought that he was a bad thing.

It probably really got to him when the others immediately got angry at him upon his arrival.

And having the title of Anxiety, which Patton remembered Logan calling an illness at one point, definitely wouldn’t have helped him feel better about himself.

But that wasn’t important right now.

Right now, Patton had a new friend to help feel better about themselves.

“So you keep Thomas safe from all of the bad things?”

Anxiety’s head shot up so fast his neck cracked and Patton could almost feel the whiplash second hand.

“what?”

His voice was small and breathless and it kind of made Patton want to cry, but he stayed strong and continued on with as cheerful a voice as he’d been using the entire time.

“You protect Thomas. You make him nervous and scared of the things he should avoid and can even make him directly avoid them. You’re like his knight in shining armor or something!”

And Patton was pretty proud of himself for a moment.

He was pretty sure that he’d actually said the right thing this time and Anxiety was gonna feel a bit better about himself and maybe be more willing to spend time with Patton now and they would be friends and it would be great!

But then he was met with a sight that made his heart feel like it was falling to pieces.

Tears, tainted black by the dark smudges Patton hadn’t even noticed under the other side’s eyes, fell silently from Anxiety’s wide purple eyes.

And Virgil was trying so hard to figure out what was happening, again.

He didn’t understand.

Morality was being nice to him he gave him a compliment multiple compliments he was smiling and had jumped off of a banister just to talk to him who did that what was this why was he doING THIS WHY DID HE SAY SUCH NICE THINGS WHY WAS HE ALWAYS SMILING HE HATES HIM THEY ALL DO HE’S ANXIETY HE’S BAD HE HURTS THOMAS NO MATTER HOW MUCH HE JUST WANTS TO KEEP HIM SAFE AND NOW MORALITY KNOWS WHAT HE IS AND WHAT HE DOES BUT HE SAID ITS GOOD HE THINKS HE’S GOOD AND HE CALLED HIM THOMAS’ KNIGHT LIKE HE WAS ACTUALLY DOING WHAT HE TRIED SO HARD TO DO AND THERE WAS SO MUCH AND TOO MUCH AND IT’S SO WEIRD AND STRANGE AND HE JUST. CAN’T. DEAL. ANYMORE.

And suddenly Anxiety is gone and Patton finds himself sitting on the floor beside the stairs.

Alone.

And that’s the end of the first chapter.

*flairs out tired jazz hands*

Ta-da.

Man, this took a turn near the end that I feel makes sense and is necessary but it was very much not my intent.

Then again, this entire thing was not my intent but it happened anyways so I should really just accept that I have absolutely no control over what is going on in my life at this point and try to be happy about whatever ends up happening.

So most of this was fluff but we ended up with something vaguely resembling angst at the very end.

Don’t worry tho, I’ll eventually do the second part and we’ll see how all of this eventually gets sorted out.

...probably.

Anyways, I hope whoever reads this actually likes it a little and doesn’t find this to be a waste of time and space because that’s just my entire life in a nutshell and I could kind of do with at least a little bit of gratification for the things that I spend my time doing.

*sighs in asexual*

It is four in the morning and I’m dying a little every second.

Anyways, I’ll just leave now and maybe sleep before I have to do things in the morning.

Later, I guess.

*falls onto floor and kind of just sighs in resignation as a cat comes over and sits on my back*

great...

Here’s a link that leads to the next part of the CAP Series.

A Bed of Links:

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Cerillen

Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerillen/pseuds/Cerillen

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPz4p5XdoRESDKZeMDnWXFQ

Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/cerillen

Discord: https://discord.gg/FsUhc5f

[femslashy]

begin again | chapter one

 two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight | nine | masterpost | ao3 | playlist

It’s been three years since Baz left the sleepy Isle of Mage to attend university in London, and he hasn’t regretted a thing--except maybe leaving Simon behind. Convinced he’ll never be forgiven, Baz refuses to even visit until a frantic phone call from his stepmother sends him running home. Once there, Baz is forced to confront his past, question the future, and maybe, just maybe, get that second chance he’s always desired.

genre(s): angst+fluff+smut (in later chapters)

chapter length: 3163 words

triggers/warnings: none for this chapter

author’s note: a giant thank you to @amandaisnotwriting & @rainbowbaz for the beta/britpicking! full acknowledgments will be posted with the last chapter

The Isle of Mage is six kilometres long and six kilometres wide. It’s home to a mere 1,078 citizens who inhabit its three villages--Salisbury, Thistledown, and Watford. The island relies on tourism as its main source of income, and every year people flock here to see the various sights. There’s no shortage of those; everything from the natural tide pools on the rocky beaches to the castle that looms on top of the hill. It’s the type of idyllic place everyone fantasises about living in.

Everyone who isn’t me, of course.

I hate this place. I’d hated it then, and I hate it still. I hate how small everything is, how everyone seeks to know everyone else’s business. I hate the near constant stench of fish that never seems to go away--despite the fact that the fishery shut down close to a decade ago--and I hate all the fucking sheep.

I hate how everyone is content to stay here, to waste their lives in this mediocre village on this mediocre island where no one has ever actually accomplished anything noteworthy. At all. Ever. (If you don’t believe me, check the Wikipedia page.)

The thought of living here forever--of being stuck--had terrified me as a teenager. I’d always known I would leave when I could, that I had no future here. For most of secondary school all I focused on was getting out. I worked hard to stay at the top of my class, and had my eyes set on uni (any one, really, as long as it wasn’t here) as long as I can remember. It had been the perfect plan; I wasn’t attached enough to anyone on the island to miss them. Not enough to stay.

(Except maybe Simon.)

“I’m going to bed,” Daphne says once she turns off the car.

Her voice sounds remarkably different than it had when she rang me in a panic yesterday afternoon to let me know that she was at the hospital with my father, and that he’d had a heart attack. She hadn’t explicitly asked me to come, but the expectation was obvious. So I did. I came back, like I said I wouldn’t, to play the role of the dutiful son, standing by my father's bedside and consoling my stepmother as she cried.

I nod to show I’ve heard her, but make no move to exit her SUV. I’m not ready to enter the house just yet. (Or at all, really.)

Eventually the lights inside shut off, and I crack my neck before I climb out, slamming the door harder than necessary. The empty space where my car used to sit makes me sadder than it should. I’d only had it for a short time, but it was long enough to grow attached.

The fact that my father sold it is old news—he wouldn’t allow me to take it to school unless I went to Oxford like he’d wanted. Which I didn’t. So I left it and he sold it. (Bastard.)

My gaze flicks to the right and a slow grin spreads across my face, because on the opposite side of the garage is my father’s most prized possession: his forest green Jaguar, kept in perfectly pristine condition, with the top down and the keys still in the ignition. Growing up I’d barely been allowed to look at it, never allowed to ride in it. Definitely never allowed to drive it.

Taking that car would be a spiteful, juvenile thing. Petty. Immature. Unnecessary.

I do it anyway.

* * *

Once I’m far enough from the house, I slow down and just let myself enjoy the drive. The car hugs the line between the road and the grass, and I feel my shoulders relax. This is nice, this is familiar. I feel grounded now, like I might actually be able to make it through this in one piece. (And then proceed to get properly pissed with my best friend on the beaches of Ibiza once I get home.)

A rabbit darts out onto the road, and I swear as I swerve to avoid it.

And that’s when I notice Simon.

He’s running along the side of the road in my direction, and I groan. Because of course it is. Of course I couldn’t slip on and off the island without seeing him.

(I must be cursed. It’s the only explanation.)

I speed past Simon, and he double takes so hard I swear I hear his neck crack. I don’t look back, and I think I’m in the clear until I glance in the rearview mirror and see that he’s turned around. He’s fucking turned around and is now jogging in the opposite direction. Towards me. After me. I speed up, and so does he.

(Cursed. I’m definitely cursed.)

***

I only stop because I have to there’s no more road. Or, more accurately, the bridge in front of me is blocked off, with a large orange sign declaring it to be “IN REPAIR” hanging from heavy-looking chains. I park, and wait for the inevitable.

When Simon finally catches up, he only looks slightly out of breath as he approaches the car. He’s smiling. (Why is he smiling? I wish he wasn’t smiling.)

“I’m not here to see you,” I say coolly, cutting him off before he can say anything, because we’re not doing this. We’re not going to talk.

His smile falters. “I didn’t think you were.”

“I’m not here to see you.” My tone is harsher than before.

“I know.” He steps forward, “I just wanted to...”

“Did it ever occur to you,” I sneer, “that I don’t want to?”

Confusion flickers across his face, followed by hurt. Good. Maybe he’ll leave.

“I just thought--”

“That must have hurt.”

His hands ball into fists. “Shut up.”

I smirk, because I’m getting to him. “I don’t remember you being so sensitive.”

“I don’t remember you being such an arsehole.”

“We were enemies; I hated you.”

“Not the entire time. Not at the end.”

“And yet,” I remind him, “I still left you.”

He’s glaring openly now. I’m playing with fire.

And I can’t stop.

Simon’s eyes widen as I throw open the door of the Jag and stalk towards him, forcing him to back up until his back hits a tree.  I get right up in his face, and chuckle as he flinches.

“Don’t you remember that day, then? How I told you I was leaving? How you practically got down on your knees and begged me to st--”

The pain is a shock, and then it burns , a throbbing ache spreading steadily outward from my nose. It hurts like hell, and I’m bleeding; it’s running down my chin. I lick my lips and taste copper. Fuck. I can’t believe he just punched me.

“Typical Snow,” I tut, “resorting to violence. You never were good with your words. A pity, really. Maybe if you had been, you could’ve actually convinced me to stay.”

He lunges forward at that, causing me to stumble until I’m the one backed against the tree. There’s a second punch coming my way, and I only just manage to duck in time. The resounding crack is satisfying, especially considering what he just did to my bloody nose.

(Pun very much intended.)

“What the fuck!” he yells, curling his arm into his chest, “You broke my hand!”

“You did that to yourself, you idiot.”

Simon growls, and yanks his white t-shirt off. The world stops for a moment as I catch a glimpse of his bare torso, and I have to swallow a few times before I manage to snap, “Christ, Snow, what’s with the bloody striptease?” with any sort of convincing indignation.

Simon snorts, covering his mouth with his hand like he’s trying not to laugh.

“What? What is it? What’s so funny?”

“It’s literally…” he lets himself go, almost wheezing too hard to answer. “It’s literally--literally a bloody strip…a bloody striptease.”

My jaw drops, and this sends him into another fit of hysterics. The situation has become so ridiculous, and I’m so fucking sleep-deprived, that I find myself laughing along with him, all the tension from earlier gone.

“I’ll drive you home.” It’s a statement, because I’m afraid that, if I make it a question, he’ll say no. But I want him to say no. Don’t I? Christ, this is confusing.

“Here”, Simon says, holding out his shirt, before climbing in, “so you don’t drip on the seats. I know how you get about your car.”

“It’s fine,” I say, “it’s not my car.” I still take the proffered shirt and use it to wipe my nose. Simon appears unbothered, even when I hand him back a significantly bloodier shirt, as I sit down in the driver's seat. (To be fair, Simon is unbothered by most strange things, so I’m not concerned.)

Simon’s eyes flick around his surroundings, and it’s like he’s only just realised where he’s sitting.

“This is…”

I turn the key. “Yes.”

“And he let you…”

“Nope.”

Simon nods like he gets it, and goes quiet. He starts to fiddle with the radio, and I don’t stop him. Eventually he settles on a station-- one of the mere three available on the island--and turns his head to look out the window.

I can feel my eyelids growing heavy as I drive, but, luckily for us, I’ve made this particular journey often enough that it’s basically muscle memory. With Simon in the seat next to me, it’s as if I never even left.

I hate it.

* * *

“This isn’t my house.”

I look from the house in front of us to Simon and then back to the house.

“What do you mean this isn’t your house?"

“I mean I don’t live here anymore.”

“What, did you move?”

Simon acts as if he hasn’t heard me. “You need to get back on the main road and make a right instead of a left by the school. I’ll direct you from there.”

I bite my cheek to avoid asking the questions that are threatening to spill off my tongue, and check to make sure the street is clear before reversing and driving off towards Simon’s mysterious new place.

***

I recognize it instantly, even though I’d only visited a handful of times.

“You live with Ebb?”

Simon shakes his head, and pushes the car door open. I quickly do the same when it becomes obvious that he’s not going to wait for me, and it’s only the burning curiosity that convinces me it’s a good idea to go with him.

We climb the steps side by side, and I watch as Simon digs his hand around in his pocket, wincing a bit as he does--presumably from the drag of denim across his scraped knuckles. He produces a key that requires a complicated set of manoeuvres to open the lock, and then he’s pushing the door open and I’m following him inside.

(It occurs to me that I haven’t actually been invited, but when have I ever cared about that?)

Simon kicks his trainers off and nudges them with the side of his foot so they line up with the wall, then looks at me. “Tea?”

“Please.”

He brushes past me to get to the kitchen, and I drift towards the lounge.

The interior hasn’t changed much since I was here last; the furniture is still sparse and mismatched, and there are knick-knacks covering every inch of available space. The only new thing that stands out is the sofa I’m currently staring at. It’s a terrible pea soup green, and it’s fucking corduroy, of all things. It screams charity shop. Severely discounted. It’s absolutely something Simon would buy without another person around to stop him.

Which means Simon must be here alone.

“When did Ebb leave the island?” I ask, making sure my voice carries so he can’t pretend not to hear me this time.

The sound of the mug shattering seems to echo off the walls, and I flinch. Simon’s still facing the window, but I can see his shoulders starting to shake. I stand up to help clean the mess and Simon holds up a hand. “I’ve got it.”

I don’t listen, and approach his now crouching figure. He’s scrambling to pick up the broken pieces, and one grazes the side of his hand. It’s not large, but blood still begins to stream.

“Shit!” I jump up and grab a dishrag, rushing to run it under the tap. Simon doesn’t fight back when I hold it to the cut; he just sits there, looking at the wound like he has no idea how it got there.

My knees start to hurt after a moment, and I pull back the rag to inspect the cut. It’s stopped bleeding, and looks a lot shallower than I’d expected. Definitely not deep enough to require stitches. Simon is still staring at it, looking bewildered, and I’m half-tempted to leave him there on the floor. (I would too, if I didn’t feel like it was my fault he dropped the damn thing.)

“Come on, Simon. Up you get.” I haul him to his feet, and guide him (push him along, really) over to the ugly sofa. The kettle begins to whistle, and I push Simon back down when he starts to stand. “Stay. I’ll handle it.”

(Miraculously, he listens.)

I prep the tea in record time, and even remember how Simon takes his--no sugar, lots of milk. Our fingers brush as I hand the mug to him, and I almost drop my own; it feels like I’ve been electrocuted.

Simon drinks his tea, his throat working as he swallows. (I’d almost forgot how ridiculously long he takes to swallow. It’s a whole ordeal with him.)

My own cup sits neglected in front of me. I couldn’t find any sugar, and I don’t have the energy to pretend I like it any other way.

After what seems like an eternity, but in reality is closer to five minutes, Simon finishes drinking. His cheeks are noticeably rosier as he leans forward to set the mug on the coffee table next to my discarded one, purposefully not looking my way as he says, “I am happy, you know. To see you. I know you’re not, but I am.”

I blink. I wasn’t expecting that.

Before I get a chance to respond, Simon’s mobile buzzes on the table in front of us. He grabs for it, answering it immediately and leaving the room with a quickly mouthed sorry. I hold up a hand to let him know it’s fine, and rest my head against the back of the sofa, closing my eyes and trying not to think about how many hours it’s been since I last slept. Leaving the house was a mistake, and I should really go before I do something mental, like fall asleep on Simon Snow’s sofa.

(As if that would ever happen.)

***

The door to my room opens, and someone’s moving around with no regard for the person (me) sleeping in here. I don’t open my eyes before snarling, “Mordelia, leave.” But she only continues to make noise, finally prompting me to lift my head and glare at her. Except it’s not Mordelia, I’m not in my room, and I’ve been lying on the world’s most uncomfortable sofa.

“Sleep well?” Simon asks.

I’m up and off the sofa as soon as I realise what’s happened. “Did you leave me alone in your house? Are you mad?”

Simon shrugs. “I had to. Someone phoned in sick at work and I had to go in.”

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“I tried, but you kept pulling my hair.”

(Okay, so maybe Andrea wasn’t lying when she accused me of doing that to her. I’ll buy her apology chocolates once I’m home, the fancy kind with the lavender and sea salt.)

(Speaking of chocolate…)

“Why did you bring me cake?”

Simon looks down like he forgot what he was holding. “I didn’t bring you cake. This is my cake.”

“Alright, why do you have cake?”

“Because it’s my birthday,” he says, like I should have known.

“It’s your birthday,” I echo, because of course it is. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Simon shrugs (again) as he sets the box on the kitchen counter. “I didn’t think you’d care.” He seems to realise what he’s said, because he quickly follows it with, “I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just...well it’s not like you’ve acknowledged it at all since--”

The since you left hangs in the air, a topic neither of us want to touch--especially not after what happened earlier. Suddenly, I can’t be here anymore; it’s too much.

I clear my throat. “I should go. My stepmother will be wondering where I am.”

Simon looks like he wants to argue, but I don’t give him a chance before I’m stalking past him and walking out the door.

I hadn’t expected him to follow me,  and he nearly crashes into my back when I pause to take in the night. It’s later than I thought; the sky is pitch-black, but clear, and littered with stars. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed seeing them until this moment.

That thought unnerves me; I don’t want to miss anything here. But it’s only the stars, only the sky. It’s normal to long for those things;  I'd be ridiculous to think it meant I missed anything else.

Like the island. Like Watford.

Like Simon.

Simon, who’s moved to stand beside me now, hand next to mine, barely centimetres away. It feels strange not to be holding it. (We did a lot of that when we were together. Handholding. Almost more than kissing.) There’s a chill in the air, making me even more hyper aware of how close we’re standing. Simon’s body is warm (so warm) and it’s coming off him in waves.  

I tilt my head back. “There’s so many stars. London doesn’t have stars like this.”

“Do you miss them?” he asks, and I know he doesn’t mean the stars.

“Yes,” I say, because neither do I.

“Enough to come back?”

“London has stars too, Simon.”

“But not like this.”

“No, not like this.”

We’re silent then. The night is still, and the air feels charged with something both familiar and new. I fight the urge to indulge, reminding myself that I left and there was a reason, and that I really should get home and pack because I’m leaving first thing tomorrow.

“I really do need to leave.”

Simon hums in acknowledgment, and I push off from the rail, standing up straight until I’m taller than him again. He doesn’t move, or even turn his head towards me. Feeling my way across the porch, I make my way down the stairs.

“I’ll see you around then,” he finally says as I climb into my car, and I wave before driving off.

***

I’m halfway home when I remember he won’t.

chapter two 

[kane-and-griffin]

“I Put a Spell On You,” Part 2

A Kabby Halloween fic in three parts for the AU The Woman That Fell From the Sky, in honor of @brittanias‘ birthday!   

Part 1 here

PART 2: “Fox-Trot Time” (Halloween 2009)

“The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.” -- Dashiell Hammett, from The Thin Man

When Abby left New York nine years ago, she left it for good.

She and Jake had built a life there, one they’d believed would last.  She’d moved there young and made it her home and loved it with the same fervent intensity as all the city’s Midwestern expatriates.  But all of that meant nothing without Jake.

There was nowhere she could run to escape the crushing sorrow of loss.  Every bodega, every hole-in-the-wall wine bar, every bench in Central Park, every subway station, Jake was there.  The bank where he’d been shot was on her way to work.  The hospital cafeteria on the third floor looked out over the police station where she’d sat, cold and numb and dry-eyed, filling out form after form while Marcus attempted to comfort the confused and tearful Clarke on the bench in the hallway outside.

She could not stay in this place.

The job in Massachusetts had been offered to her a month before Jake’s death, and she had declined it.  They were New Yorkers, she’d explained to the hospital recruiter.  Their daughter would be a New Yorker too.  The city was their home, and they couldn’t imagine leaving it.

The job was still open six weeks later, something that seemed to Abby to be a kind of miracle; they couldn’t find any other surgeons of her caliber willing to move out to the middle of nowhere – leaving behind every modern amenity, from Korean barbecue to decent theatre – to take a job in a small sleepy town with only a few thousand residents.

But Jake had never set foot in that town.  She had never even told him its name.  It felt, in that moment, like the one place in the world she could go to escape.

So she packed up her car, strapped Clarke into the backseat, and off they went.

And she never went back.

Nine years ago, watching the New York skyline disappear in her rearview mirror as steel buildings turned into green forests, she hadn’t been able to imagine ever returning.  She hadn’t thought the pain would ever fade.

But Clarke is a freshman in high school now, and they’ve made a life for themselves, and it doesn’t hurt to remember Jake the way that it used to.  She’s changed.  Marcus has changed her.  She’s older and sadder than she was when she and Jake were reckless urban twentysomethings together, but she’s also steadier on her feet.

It’s because Marcus knows this – because Marcus can sense this – that he even dares to ask her the question.

It starts with a senior citizens’ cruise to the Bahamas.

Abby’s parents come to Massachusetts for Christmas every year, to flagrantly spoil their granddaughter.  But this year, they have, improbably, entered some grocery store sweepstakes and actually won, which means they will be spending the latter half of December aboard what Marcus describes as “an unfathomably enormous maritime shrine to capitalism, with liquor”, thus depriving them of their best opportunity to buy fourteen-year-old Clarke hundreds of dollars’ worth of things she doesn’t need.  Abby suggests Thanksgiving as a compromise, privately hoping they’ll decline it; her parents have very particular views on proper Thanksgiving food, and with her mother there to appraise it she will never be able to relax about the turkey, even though Marcus has never messed it up once. 

But they have an entirely different solution in mind.  They want to take Clarke to Disneyland for Halloween.

Clarke, of course, is over the moon, and says yes immediately, only afterwards pausing to realize that Marcus – now the fall festival’s most devoted attendee – will be crushed.  It’s quietly become a tradition over the past few years, and if his fans have noticed that he never takes Halloween concert gigs, no matter how good the money, they’ve certainly never put two and two together.  He would never dream of missing a Halloween with Clarke and Abby, and Clarke is afraid she’ll hurt his feelings if she tells him that this year, she’ll be the one who isn’t coming home.

Like a chicken, she makes Abby break the bad news to him.  Ordinarily her mother would protest this uncharacteristic abdication of responsibility, but the tradeoff is a promise to clean her room without being reminded every day from now until the trip, an offer Abby can’t refuse.  She approaches the topic gingerly, and Marcus is predictably disappointed, but brightens almost immediately, that endearing lift in his voice she knows means he’s just had a great idea.

“Come to New York with me,” he says, startling her into silence.

“What?”

“For Halloween.  Come to New York this year.”

Abby has always thought she would never go back.  But she loves the fall festival because Clarke and Marcus love it and she can’t imagine enjoying herself there without them; so, surprising both of them, she says yes.

“You used to love throwing Halloween parties with Jake,” he says, his voice gentle, cautious.  “Do you think maybe . . . we could have one?”

She pauses for a long moment before responding, the magnitude of the thing hovering between them apparent to both.  It sounds like such a small thing, but it isn’t.  It’s massive.  It’s a real question.  It’s a decisive relationship step.  Can she not only return to the city she left behind, the city where she was Jake’s friend and then lover and then wife, but return there for the purpose of being a couple in public with somebody else?

The last time she did this, it was in the tiny Brooklyn apartment she’d shared with Jake since they were college students.  He’d stood on the kitchen table to drape orange and black crepe paper along the ceiling and replace the bulbs in the light fixture with ones that glowed green, and they’d handed out gummy snakes and spiders to all the trick-or-treating kids in the building.  Clarke had been three and told her parents she wanted to dress up for Halloween as a cup, a bizarre notion from which they could not dissuade her (“Clarke, why do you want to dress up as a cup?” “I like cups.” “We could go to the store and look at other costumes –“ “NO A CUP A CUP A CUP”), so Jake had sighed and gone down to the basement and dug through the piles of recycling in the trash room to find a cardboard box, which he cut into a cylinder and covered with a red plastic tablecloth, pleated at the top and edged in white, like a red Solo cup.  He had written “DO NOT DRINK” on it in black Sharpie, which Clarke found hilarious.

The last time she’d experienced Halloween in the city, she’d been a wife and the mom of a toddler and a big-shot surgeon on the rise, shooting up through the ranks at Sloan-Kettering, destined for greatness.

The last time she and Marcus were alone together in New York, they were drinking coffee and flirting and very nearly holding hands while Jake was being raced in an ambulance to the hospital where she worked.

It’s not just about the party.

She thinks for a long time, and he waits patiently, quiet at the other end of the line, letting her have her space.  She turns it over and over in her mind before finally speaking.

“Can we compromise?” she finally asks.  “Yes to New York, and yes to a party, as long as it’s very small and you can promise I won’t get my face in a magazine or something.  I don’t . . .”  She pauses, unsure how to say what she wants to say without hurting him.

“You don’t want to go out in public with me in the city,” he finishes for her, and the sadness in his voice isn’t directed at her, but she feels it anyway.

“I can’t,” she says heavily.  “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize, Abby.”

“I’m just not quite ready to end up on a Worst-Dressed List,” she jokes weakly, but neither of them laugh.  It’s just a little too close to being true.  

Marcus is very careful about deflecting attention away from Abby and her town.  He’s friends with a lot of beautiful women and he usually takes one of them to the red carpet events Abby finds too terrifying to even consider.  He has a nice comfortable arrangement with a young actress friend of his named Lexa, a rising young romantic comedy star whose agents have been very blunt with her about not coming out as a lesbian until she’s “more reliably bankable,” so she and Marcus are often each other’s red carpet safety net.  Abby likes Lexa.  They had lunch once when Abby was in L.A. for work.  Every time an awards thing comes up, Marcus always asks Abby if she’d like to go, and she always suggests he take Lexa instead.  All it would take, she reminds him, is one sharp-eyed music journalist, and the whole house of cards would come tumbling down.  Which is everybody’s nightmare.

So Marcus goes on appearing in public with scores of different lovely women and journalists keep breathlessly speculating about who “The Woman” might be and Abby continues living the calm, quiet life she built for herself, which Marcus gets to share when he comes to visit.

But it doesn’t go both ways.

Abby’s town will always protect her.  New York City never will.

“I’ll come,” she tells him, “if we can be normal people for the weekend.  If you can be Marcus, and not Marcus Kane.”

“I’ll do the best I can,” he tells her, but then she hears that little lift in his voice again.

“What?” she demands.  “What are you plotting?”

“A small private party,” he insists, and she can hear him grinning through the phone.  “Just like you asked.  I promise.”

Jake never liked black-and-white movies.

This was a fight they had many times.  “Casablanca is a classic!” Abby would insist, causing Jake to roll his eyes.

“No, Rocky is a classic,” was his inevitable rebuttal.  “Casablanca is just old.”

“It’s considered one of the greatest films of all time.”

Jake would dismiss this with a handwave.  “It doesn’t even have any explosions in it.”

“It’s a war movie, of course it has explosions,” Abby would retort, though she had not seen it in so many years she could not always reliably remember whether or not this was true.  And so on and so forth, ad infinitum, until Jake would smack her on the ass and make her laugh and they’d forget what they were arguing about because kissing was a much better use of the couch than watching a movie anyway.

But Marcus loves old movies as much as she does.  Just one of the many small constant reminders that this relationship is profoundly different from her last one.  Not better or worse, not more or less, but endlessly, constantly, impossibly different, in ways she is still discovering.

They’d watched The Thin Man together on the couch one night, three or four days after he’d first arrived on her doorstep, the whole world still reeling.  He’d been clicking through the cable channels, trying to find something that wasn’t another replay of the same sickening footage of the plane smashing into the towers, and had landed on a marathon of Myrna Loy films on one of the classic movie networks, The Thin Man just starting.  “I love this movie,” he’d said absently, almost to himself more than to her, and Abby turned from where she sat beside him to rest her forehead against the soft blue cotton of his sweater, and began to cry.  He cupped her cheek in his hand and tilted her face up to regard her with confusion and a degree of worry that teetered on the edge of panic.  But through the tears she was smiling.

“You sounded like you,” she said softly.  “Just now.  When you said that.  It was the first time since you’ve gotten here that you sounded like yourself again.”

He didn’t say anything.  He knew exactly what she meant.

So she rested her head on his shoulder, curled up into the cradle of his arm, and they watched Nick and Nora Charles quip and banter and toss back oceans of champagne and solve murders in glamorous 1920’s New York, along with their faithful dog Asta, and for an hour and a half they forgot about everything that wasn’t the movie and each other, and Abby fell asleep in bed that night with her head pillowed on his bare chest, listening to his heartbeat and thinking to herself that maybe such a thing as happiness was really possible.

They’ve watched it dozens of times in the intervening years, and it has lost none of its charm, which makes it perhaps inevitable as Marcus’ suggestion for their Halloween costume.

“Why are we dressing up? I thought we were just having a small, casual party,” she asks suspiciously, when he calls to make the suggestion, and she hears him hesitate on the other end of the line for just a moment before carefully answering, “ . . . You never said ‘casual.’”

“I definitely did.”

“Small. I agreed to small.”

“Marcus – “

“Clarke will never forgive me if I don’t make you wear a costume this year.”

“Marcus –”

“Is that Marcus?” asks Clarke, strolling in from the other room as if on cue (which she might be; it’s entirely possible that he texted her).  “He showed me your costumes and they’re so cool.”

So that, of course, is the end of that. Nick and Nora it is.  (He’s even managed to locate a stuffed wire fox terrier.)

Marcus has opted for the costumes from the Christmas party scene, with Nora in a floaty tiered confection of black-and-white striped chiffon, hair curled into sleek Marcelle waves, and Nick in a dapper pinstriped suit and white pocket square, hair slicked back, beard shaved off once again into a perfect tiny handlebar mustache. (“You could just recycle your Gomez costume,” she’d pointed out when he sent the photos, which he rebutted with indignation.  “Abby, this is a completely different suit.”)

He’s also decided the party should be held in one of the private banquet rooms at the old Sutton Club Hotel, where Dashiell Hammett wrote The Thin Man, a decision he plays off to Abby as merely aggressive commitment to the theme, but she knows better.  It’s to protect her, and their guests, from being seen coming in or out of his apartment, which is never free from the watchful eyes of paparazzi. 

If they’d had the party at Marcus’ apartment, Abby would never be able to let down her guard, too worried about being spotted.

But anyone can enter a hotel and get into an elevator and go up to the sixth floor and give their name to the pair of unsmiling security guards (incognito in hotel uniforms) outside Event Room C, and close the door behind them, without People Magazine being any the wiser.

They spend the nights before and after the party in the hotel.  It feels like a sinful indulgence to share a king-sized bed with Marcus after so many nights curled up together in the center of the full-sized mattress she’d bought for a house she thought she would always live in alone,  and which she has always felt superstitious about trading in for a roomier one now that an extremely tall man who sometimes hogs the covers is sharing her bed on a semi-regular basis.  It feels too much like tempting fate.  So they’ve simply gotten used to it, sleeping tangled up together in the center of the only-just-big-enough mattress.  The gleaming white linens and pillow-top  at the Sutton Place are an unimaginable luxury.  Though they still sleep tangled up together in the center anyway.  Old habits.

Marcus will not let Abby help with, or even see, the decorations until it’s time for the party.  He has not even shown her the guest list.  It’s impossible to shake the worry that he has perhaps adhered too strictly to the letter of the law (“small”) while entirely discarding the spirit of it (will they be drinking thousand-dollar champagne? Is she going to have to make small talk with Sting again?).  She dresses alone in their room (he put his suit on hours ago and is downstairs with the caterers), and realizes she feels oddly vulnerable without Clarke.  It’s only Halloween, it’s not Thanksgiving or Christmas, she knows that, but it’s the first holiday they’ve ever spent apart.  She would feel safer walking into a room full of strangers in a 1920’s movie costume if her daughter was there to zip up her dress and pin up the back of her hair and hold her hand.

But Clarke’s not here, she’s at Mickey’s Halloween Ball with her grandparents, wearing a pair of orange neon light-up ears and beaming with joy and texting her mother picture after picture of the parade and the rides and the alarming number of shopping bags slowly accruing in her Cinderella-themed hotel room, which means Abby has to make an entrance on her own into a room full of famous strangers, which is basically her nightmare.

Her heart pounds in her chest as she puts the finishing touches on her bright red lipstick, closes the hotel room door behind her, takes the elevator down two floors, says hello to Marcus’ security guards, who wave her past, and then opens the white and gold door.

“Surprise!” says Marcus, and Abby’s heart stops when she realizes she knows everyone in the room.

Marcus didn’t throw a fancy Halloween party for all his famous friends to meet his girlfriend and shove her uncomfortably into a spotlight she doesn’t want. 

He threw a fancy Halloween party as a gift for her, and filled it with all the friends she left behind when she moved out of the city.

He kept his promise; by Marcus standards, 30 people counts as “small”, so she’s willing to allow it.  Because every single one of them is a person that she loves and misses and thought she’d never see again.  The elderly Italian couple who lived next door to her and Jake for six years, who babysat Clarke when the daycare was closed and brought pans of meatballs in Sunday gravy over every week so the broke young parents could eat at least one home-cooked meal.  The two nurses who worked under her the whole time she was at Sloan-Kettering, who’d become her right and left hand, and who had been devastated when she left.  The priest who’d married them and said Jake’s funeral.  The parents of Clarke’s best friends from day care.  And more than a dozen others, friends of hers, friends of Jake’s, people she has missed since the day she left but couldn’t quite bear to face again for fear of reopening old wounds.  People she’d thought, so often, about calling, or visiting, or emailing, but hadn’t, because what if it turned out she wasn’t ready to spend time with anyone who had their own memories of Jake?

But they’re here, they’re all here, and they’re mingling with friends of Marcus’ who she actually likes, the ones who don’t terrify her.  No Cynthia Nixon, no Thelonious J.  But she recognizes his drummer and bass player and road crew, she recognizes his old roommates from the shitty Queens apartment he was living in when she first met him, she recognizes the bartender from the East Village dive where he used to play every Thursday and who always snuck him a free beer when Marcus was too broke to pay for it himself.

These are their real people.  These are their real friends.  This is Marcus Kane’s real New York.

She’s so overwhelmed by the sea of smiling faces in front of her that she doesn’t notice until a few minutes have passed and she’s been hugged by everyone in the room how perfect everything else is.  The decorations, simple and elegant in black and white and gold.  The food, indulgent but not so expensive that it makes Abby uncomfortable, and no pretentious hotel waiters; just trays heaped with crab cakes and spinach tartlets and chocolate truffles all over the room, for everyone to graze to their heart’s content. 

No bartender, either; Marcus has taken on this job himself.

“’The important thing is the rhythm,’” she hears him quoting Nick Charles cheerfully to her old neighbors as she approaches the bar.  “’Always have rhythm in your shaking. Now a Manhattan you shake to fox-trot time, a Bronx to two-step time, a dry martini you always shake to waltz time.’”

The neighbors are unimpressed enough with Marcus Kane’s fame and fortune to roll their eyes at this ever so faintly as they take their dry martini, and Abby feels the tension in her spine unknit for the first time since Marcus said the words “Come to New York with me” a month ago.

Her friends are talking to Marcus Kane as though he is a normal person.  As though he is simply the man Abby loves.  A man wearing the costume of a film noir detective, a man who cut decorations out of gold paper himself and taught himself how to shake a Manhattan to fox-trot time and who has spent so many years listening so carefully to everything Abby has ever said to him that he knew every single person she would want to see in that room.  Marcus is already a star by now, Marcus has opened for U2 all over Europe and “The Girl Inside the Mountain” is already piling up an awful lot of zeroes in that bank account that will pay Clarke’s way to college in a few short years.  But nobody mentions this.  They let him leave all of that on the other side of the door for tonight.

And none of them have forgotten Jake.

On the contrary, he’s everywhere, everyone mentions him, everyone tells stories about him, everyone asks if Clarke still has his eyes.  Does Abby remember the year she tried to make Jake hand out raisins instead of candy because it was healthier, so he retaliated by purchasing an industrial-sized bag of king-sized Snickers bars.  Or the time they’d made a green Jello mold full of gummy eyeballs and it had worked flawlessly as a Halloween decoration but looked too weird to eat, sitting untouched in the center of the snack table until everyone went home and Jake threw it away, but left one gummy eyeball in the bottom of Abby’s coffee mug to make her scream the next morning.

It has never occurred to Abby how deeply it would heal her heart to talk about Jake, to hear other people’s stories about him, to know how much he was missed by people who weren’t her lover or her child.

She needed this, and she didn’t even know it.

But Marcus did.

She’s wondered, from time to time, whether her old friends, the people who shared her life when she shared it with Jake, would look on her relationship with Marcus as a betrayal.  Perhaps it’s this, in part, that’s kept her from coming back to the city. 

But she needn’t have worried.

All of them see it.

When they look over at Marcus in the corner, brushing a loose curl out of Abby’s eyes, they smile, every one of them.

“Good for her,” they’ll all say to their spouses in the taxis on the way home.  “I’m glad she’s happy.”