Chapter Text
SIMON
It feels like I’m seeing Baz in a whole new light right now. (Pun not intended. It’s still dark as shit.) (Which makes sense. I guess being a vampire is still a biggest secret than this which is why the spell hasn’t broken yet.)
I never thought of Baz as someone who could get scared. Even during the Humdrum’s attacks, he always looked cool and collected. I certainly wouldn’t expect him to be afraid of the dark.
And now that I have my arms around him, I’m noticing just how thin he is. Surely the last time I saw him, he had a bit more muscle on him? How did I not notice this before? How did I not notice any of this?
He was kidnapped and kept in a coffin for six weeks. And I didn’t know. I had no idea—I just thought he was off plotting somewhere. If I knew…
He’s here now. And he’s okay. Or well, as okay as he can be in this moment.
“You can tell me you’re a vampire,” I say. “I already know anyway. And I won’t tell anyone. Then all of this will be over.”
Baz makes a sound that sounds like a mix between a scoff and an exhale, but doesn’t say anything. I don’t think he believes me.
“Baz, I’m serious.” I feel around, trying to find Baz’s hands again. I’m not sure why I feel such a strong urge to touch him, but this darkness is so suffocating that I feel like if I don’t hold on to Baz, he’ll slip away from me again. I need to make sure he’s still here. I just do.
(And I’m a tiny bit pleased that he hasn’t called me an idiot or pushed me away yet. I understand that this is probably because of his fear of darkness, but it feels good nevertheless. That he needs me. That I can help him.)
“I won’t tell anyone,” I repeat. “I can swear it with magic if you want.”
“Don’t cast any more spells in the dark, Snow. You might start a fire that we won’t even see.”
“And that’s a concern to you because you’re a vampire and therefore flammable,” I say.
“It’s a concern to me because I am a human being and therefore flammable.” Baz’s voice sounds strained, like he’s saying it through gritted teeth.
“Oh, come on!” I throw my hands in the air in frustration, letting go of Baz’s hand in the process. “Baz, I really, really promise I won’t tell a soul. I already know. It’s not going to change anything.”
Baz sighs, and I hear the sound of skin against skin, as if he’s rubbing his face. “It’s not that,” he says quietly. His hand falls back on the blanket, close enough to mine that our pinkies are touching. “That’s not my deepest secret.”
BAZ
This is driving me mad. Simon in my bed. So close to me, hugging me, holding my hands. I could hear his heartrate quicken every time I moved my fingers against his skin. He was probably very uncomfortable with touching a vampire, but braved through it because of his hero complex. Because that’s just the selfless idiot that he is.
And the darkness. I’d do anything for it to end. Anything except…
It’s bad enough that I just told him being a vampire isn’t my deepest, darkest secret. (Well, maybe it’s my darkest secret—being gay for your roommate isn’t exactly dark.) (Being in love with your nemesis is, though, so I guess it still counts as a dark secret.)
He’s quiet for a few moments and I can practically here the cogs turning in his head.
“Oh,” is all he manages to say. “What is it?”
I roll my eyes so hard that I’m surprised they don’t actually fall out of my skull. “If I wanted to tell you we wouldn’t still be in this mess, would we?”
“Right, yeah.” I hear him swallow. (It's still a whole show, even if I can't see it. I can see practically see his Adam’s apple hitching.) “I could, uhm, I could put my fingers in my ears and go lalalala and then you can say it and I won’t hear it.”
That makes me laugh. Really laugh. Something about Snow’s high-pitched lalalala in the seriousness of this situation is truly absurd.
“What?” Snow asks, also laughing.
“You’re an idiot.” My words don’t come out as sharp as I intended them to. I can feel Snow shifting forward and he places his hands on my biceps. (Maybe I’ll die before I have to tell him my secret. He’s certainly well on his way to giving me a heart attack.) (Maybe I’ll never tell him my secret, if it means he’s going to keep touching me like that.)
“Come on,” he urges me. “It might actually work.”
I shake my head, even though he can’t see me.
“I’m fairly certain you need to hear my secret in order for the spell to break.”
“What if you say it in another language? You can say it in French! I don’t understand a word of French anyway.”
I don’t know how to tell him that even he would understand the words je t’aime, so I just shake my head again.
“I think you need to hear me and understand me in order for the spell to break.”
“It doesn’t hurt to try. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like I’m going to understand you.”
Phah!
I suppose I could reword it in a way that he wouldn’t understand.
“Alright,” I give in. “Here it goes; La vérité est que je suis désespérément attiré par toi.”
The room remains dark. I suppose that makes sense. Even if the spell wasn’t dependent on Snow understanding me, what I said wasn’t the full truth anyway. I’m not just desperately attracted to him—my feelings run much deeper than that.
“Well, it was worth a try,” Snow says. “If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t understand a word of that.”
“Yay, I feel so much better,” I say flatly. The severity of our predicament is really hitting me now. Who knows how long we’ll be stuck here if I don’t tell him? I only have about 24 hours left before I’ll really need to hunt, and if Bunce doesn’t come up with a counter-spell by then… well, then I truly don’t have any choice but to tell him. Or bite him and let him put me out of my misery.
“We’ll figure this out,” Snow says encouragingly. “There has to be a way.”
“We? May I remind you that it was you who got me into this in the first place?” I burst out. “You could’ve just minded your own business, but no, you had to cast a fucking truth spell on me! And now you expect me to compromise my privacy to clean up your mess? Can’t you see how hard this is for me? How embarrassing?”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Get out of my bed,” I snap at him.
He stays quiet for a second, as if he’s in shock, but then I feel his weight shifting on my mattress, and then lifting off. I can hear his footsteps across the room, then the creak of his own bed as he sinks down into it.
And then I’m left in the darkness again. Alone.
SIMON
I don’t know how long it’s been. Baz hasn’t said anything. I’ve been listening to his breathing carefully, just to make sure he wasn’t having another panic attack, but I haven’t heard anything.
Penny showed up with dinner for both of us. She said she spent the whole afternoon in the library, but couldn’t find anything to reverse the spell.
After she left and I ate my dinner, I found my wand in the dark and decided to try to crack the problem myself. If Penny couldn’t find the right spell with a whole library of resources, then I have serious doubts I could do it on my own, but sometimes I can make the word magic even if they aren’t a spell. My magic just leaks into them.
“I take it back,” I say, trying to pour as much magic into it as I possibly can. Nothing happens. I don’t even think I managed to say it with magic.
“I take it back!” I repeat, more determined. The room remains pitch black. “I take it—”
“Snow, stop.” Baz’s voice cuts through the dark. It’s the first thing he’s said in hours. “You can’t fix this. You can’t make a spell out of thin air.”
“I can, sometimes. Sometimes if I’m upset my magic does whatever I want it to do.” As I say this, a brilliant idea shoots through my mind. “Baz, make me upset!”
“What?”
“Make me upset. Then I’ll go off and my magic will fix this!”
Baz is quiet for a moment, like he’s thinking about it. “Snow… no.”
“What do you mean no? You’re practically dying to call me an idiot, I know it.”
“I’m not going to make you go off,” he says firmly. “I refuse.”
I am well and truly baffled by this conversation. Is Baz truly so shaken up by this that he won’t even insult me? Usually the tosser is just dying to antagonize me. If he can make my magic stir and leak, he considers it a successful day. I’m pretty sure that’s his criteria for a successful day. And we’ve been in this situation before, with the chimera. He had no problems making me go off then. So why is now an issue?
BAZ
I’ve been around Snow enough times when he went off that I know very well what it looks like. Magic courses through him like he’s just a vessel between the magical atmosphere and his sword. (Or his wand, if he happens to be holding it when he goes off.)
I don’t think Snow really recalls anything after he goes supernova. He just blinks out and wakes up on the other side of it, not having much recollection of what happened. But I know. When I made him go off on that chimera, it was the closest I’ve been to him when it happened. And I still remember his face…
It was twisted in pain the whole time. Going off hurts him. Even if he doesn’t remember it afterwards (or if he does and just doesn’t want to say anything), I remember.
I know I’ve caused Snow a lot of pain. We’ve gotten in countless of fights, I’ve given him a bloody nose, a black eye, he even fell down the stairs because of me.
And I’ve seen Snow after a fight, I’ve seen him with horrible injuries, covered in blood, broken bones… And not even once, not in all those years, have I seen his face twisted in pain like it was when he went off on the chimera.
I think going off must really hurt him. And I vowed to never cause him this pain again, unless his life was in danger.
“Why?” Snow asks, still baffled.
“It hurts you,” I say quietly. I wouldn’t normally say something like this, but it’s dark and he can’t see me and it feels useless to try to be evasive now, when I’ll have to tell him my biggest secret soon anyway.
Snow is quiet. Really quiet.
“You don’t know that,” he finally says. He sounds almost defensive. It breaks my heart. Clearly he doesn’t want people to know.
“I do,” I say. Softly. And before I can stop myself, I’m walking over to his bed. I sit down on the edge of it, keeping my distance. “I’ve seen you when it happens. I’ve seen what it does to you. And I don’t want you to go through that for me.”
Snow swallows. “I didn’t know it showed. I… People weren’t supposed to know that.” His voice is crumbling at the edges. He sounds like he’s trying not to cry.
I find his hands in the dark and give them a squeeze. I don’t want him to feel alone right now. I want him to know that I’m there.
“Snow… Is that your secret?”
The few seconds of silence stretch like centuries. Then: “Yes.”
His voice sounds so small it breaks my heart. All of this time, he’s been going through unimaginable pain, just to save the World of Mages, to fight against Humdrum’s attacks, and he didn’t want anyone to know. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to worry. Maybe he felt like he had no choice but to suffer, because the World of Mages counts on him. Either way, it’s the perfect example of Simon Snow’s relentless heroism.
“Well, then I guess it’s only fair that I tell you mine,” I say after a few seconds of silence. My heart feels like it’s going to beat out of my chest and words can’t describe how much I don’t want to do this.
“Baz, you don’t have to,” Snow quickly says.
I swallow. “I do. It’s the only way to fix it.”
“I’ll find a different way, I’ll—”
“Shut up, Snow, I’m trying to be brave right now,” I snap at him. It feels like it restores the equilibrium of the room a bit—as much as it can when we’re both being extremely vulnerable.
“Right, I’m sorry,” Snow fumbles. He squeezes my hands. “Whatever it is, I promise I won’t judge you for it.”
I bark out a laugh. “You will.”
“I won’t. It won’t change anything, I promise.” He sounds like he really believes in his words, which makes it even worse, because I know it’ll change everything.
“It will.”
“Baz, whatever it is that you’re plotting against me, I—”
“I’m not plotting anything against you!” I burst out. “Crowley, don’t you get that? If it was something as miniscule as a plot to bring you down, I’d have told you this morning already!”
Snow takes a deep breath. “Okay, so you’re not plotting against me. I mean, then it doesn’t really matter what the secret is, right? I was really only worried that the secret is your plan to kill me.”
“I don’t want to kill you,” I say. “It would be much easier if I did.”
“I don’t understand…”
“I don’t want to kill you.” I repeat. The words because I’m desperately in love with you hang on my tongue but I can’t bring myself to say them. My heart starts beating faster and my chest starts feeling tighter and I’m worried I’m going to get another panic attack.
“I don’t want to kill you either,” Snow says and it shocks me right out of my state of panic.
“Yes, you do,” I say before I even have the chance to think about it.
“No, I don’t. I…”
SIMON
I thought I wanted to kill Baz. But I never really thought about it.
I thought Baz wanted to kill me. I thought that was the whole point of our antagonism. But apparently he doesn’t want to kill me. And I never really thought about that option. I never really thought either of us had a choice in the matter. We were meant to kill each other… that’s how it was always meant to be.
But something changed today. Seeing Baz tremble in the dark, how scared he was, how much weight he lost, and how much his secret is weighing down on him… it flipped something inside me. I’ve never felt protective about Baz, but today made me realize that he’s not a monster. Or a villain. He’s just a boy.
He’s just a boy, like me, who’s been thrown into this war against his will, and he’s suffering because of it, just like me. He was held in a coffin for six weeks. He was bitten as a child and now has to spend his whole life hiding this secret, or he’ll get stricken from the book for something that wasn’t even his fault. And that’s not even the biggest secret he’s harbouring.
My words hang in the air. I’ve started the sentence, but I can’t find the right words to finish it.
He’s just a boy. And he doesn’t want to kill me. And I don’t want to kill him.
I’ve always been shit with words anyway, is my last thought before I lean forward and kiss him.
BAZ
Snow’s words hang in the air. I can hear the cogs turning in his brain. I can feel my secret on the edge of my tongue, and the weight of it is killing me. I can’t bear to hold it back much longer, not now when I’m so close to saying it, but I can’t bear to say it either. It will kill me before I say it.
Maybe I should just kiss him, drive my point home and let him figure it out himself afterwards. Would the spell break if I did that? Or would I still have to tell him? It would be easier to tell him if I kissed him first.
Maybe I should kiss him. He’s not going to speak to me ever again after I tell him anyway. And if he kills me then I’ll at least die kissing him. What a charmed life that would be.
Maybe I should kiss him.
But then he kisses me.
SIMON
Baz doesn’t kiss me back for the first few seconds, but he doesn’t fight me either. He just lets me kiss him. His lips are cold, but he’s steady. He doesn’t give in, not even when I push into him.
I’m kissing Baz Pitch. The realization makes me almost giddy with excitement.
I’m kissing Baz Pitch and it feels so good.
Fuck. How long have I wanted this? I push my hand in his hair. How long have I wanted this?
He’s kissing me back now. I think he just needed some time to catch up. I wonder if he’s ever kissed anyone before. I wonder if he ever kissed anyone before and it felt like this. I wonder if his skin feels like it’s buzzing with electricity, like mine does right now.
I’m kissing Baz Pitch.
And I don’t ever want to stop.
BAZ
Snow has done this before. He’s pushing into me, moving his chin up and down and his lips are so warm. The smell of him is all around me, overwhelming me, and his cross is killing me, but I’ll be damned before I stop this and ask him to take it off.
Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe this is all a weird fucked up dream that my depraved sub-consciousness came up with because I’m so hung up on Snow. Maybe there was no spell in the first place.
But Snow pushes his hand in my hair and tugs and it feels so real that it can’t be a dream. This is really happening.
That’s all it takes to flip the switch in my brain and I realize I haven’t kissed him back yet. I don’t know the first thing about kissing, but I know I’ve wanted this since I knew how to want.
I grab him by his shirt and pull him closer to me. His hands grab my face and his heartbeat is drumming in my ears and his kisses turn more urgent. He’s so alive.
He’s so alive he almost makes me feel like a living being too.
He pushes at me more and the force almost makes us topple over. I fight to keep our balance, which results in Snow backing away slightly and pulling me further on the bed with him.
I open my eyes and that’s when I realize the room is still completely dark.
Fuck. I’ll still have to tell him. If anything, I have to tell him even more now that he kissed me. (Aleister Crowley. Simon Snow kissed me.) I don’t want him to feel like I’m taking advantage of him if we’re going to continue this. He has to know how I feel so he can decide if he really wants to do this.
“Snow, wait,” I manage to choke out before he pulls me to his lips again. “Wait. We still need to break this spell.”
“Can’t it wait?” he growls. It effectively makes my insides turn to liquid.
“No, it can’t,” I say with every ounce of self-control I have left. “Snow, I… I don’t want to kill you.”
“You said that,” Snow says, reaching for my cheek. “I don’t want to kill you either.”
“No, I… I don’t want to kill you because…” My voice is shaking. Snow might still not want to talk to me after he finds this out, kisses notwithstanding. “How long have you wanted to kiss me, Snow?”
I can feel him shrug. “I dunno… I’ve never really thought about it.”
It’s a work not to roll my eyes. Of course he doesn’t know. “Well, I’ve wanted to for a long time. A really long time,” I say quietly. My hands reach up to stroke his cheek.
“Baz…”
“I never wanted to kill you, Simon. I’ve only ever wanted this. I love you. I’ve loved you for years. I thought it was going to kill me.”
The lights come back on with a pop, but I don’t see them, because in that moment, Simon pulls me in for a kiss again and I close my eyes and lean in.
His kisses are much softer this time. He’s not pushing me, he’s pulling me in. Like he’s trying to tell me that it doesn’t change anything. That I was ridiculous for thinking it ever could change anything.
He’s holding me fast, not letting me budge even a millimetre away from him, as if I could ever do that. As if I could ever stop, now that I know that he wants this too. Now that I know what it feels like.
His lips are on mine and it’s sweet and it’s soft and it’s perfect. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.