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The door to Killahead lay open. All around him the Darklands, its green luminescence, shattered in great shards of glistening white, and he realized: Gunmar had built the Darklands, had molded it with his essence, until the two were so entangled that one destroyed the other. The matter of the Darklands dripped from Jim, clung to clothes and armor, to metal and mesh, scraped across his face, left him wounded and consumed. The great caverns seemed to cave in around him, in chunks of white, in volatile shards of crystal, and Jim understood, for the first time, why Blinky had said one could not hope to escape the Darklands without killing Gunmar.
The first thing he knew was this: it was dark, and for an awful, tumbling moment he feared he hadn’t escaped at all, had only woken into some new nightmare. The bundle in his arms lay terribly still, its eyes closed.
And then it yawned, and all the world reordered itself in the shape of this tiny voice, in the shape of Jim’s victory. Enrique nestled in the crook of Jim’s elbow, Enrique alive, Enrique returned. Somewhere, Jim knew, the changeling had become a troll, forever, incapable of coexisting with his familiar in the light.
How the light damaged. How the light burned, how it turned them inside-out. How only Enrique would know what it was like to crawl through the dark, and he was a child; his memories would fade in time, and then Jim would be alone.
Exhausted, Jim lay on the cool stone of Trollmarket, in the hidden chamber, holding Enrique close, and he waited to be found, or to die. All hung silent around him, his own breaths and Enrique’s as they took in the air of a world that had wanted to forget them.
Eventually, he stood. Eventually his voice came back to him, lullaby-soft in the Darklands if he dared to speak at all, and he murmured to Enrique, “I’m gonna get you home. You have a sister waiting.” And as he spoke, Jim knew who he had waiting, himself, a boy who had lit a beacon in the dark to call his beloved home.
He stood on shaking legs, staggered down the steps from the great chamber, into light so brilliant it burnt him. The Heartstone throbbed like a sun, and Jim had to throw up an arm to block it out. Enrique wailed, a soft sound – he, too, had lived too many months in the consuming dark. Jim did not know whether they would ever again be children of the sun.
It was Blinky who found him, stumbling across the stones, flinching away from the crystalline glow of this subterranean sanctuary. It was Blinky who let him cling, and tremble, and weep. It was Blinky who told him that every day Toby had come back to Killahead, the great bridge erect and momentous, a sinister presence hanging low over Trollmarket. Toby had held the amulet in his hand, the amulet that would not wake for him, that would not spare even a spark of its glow for a boy in mourning.
“Go to him,” Blinky said. “He needs you more than anything.”
Jim lies awake in the cool California dark and hears babies crying, or laughing, the two feeding off each other. In the long dark, he followed the sound of babies wailing, used their laughter to chart his course, huddled small against their crying as if it were an assault. As if it would swallow him before the beasts of the dark could manage. For he had been trained to face combat, so bruise and to bleed but to emerge victorious, and it was the mundane, the insidious sounds of babies, of humans shifting their bodies in a space that was never meant to belong to them, that pulled shivers from his body.
He goes over to Toby’s, early morning. He wakes and can’t fall back to sleep, just lays and imagines birdsong as babies and can’t do it, can’t lay there and let the Darklands swallow them both.
The birds raise a cacophony in the distance between their houses. After the silence of the Darklands, where he made his body so silent, where he pressed his back to jagged rocks and breathed so soft he thought it would kill him, it burns Jim’s ears.
Nobody answers the door. He rings and rings, and it reverberates through the rooms, their walls like gravestones. This is a ghost house.
This is a place where once lived the boy who meant more than the world to Jim, and now it is a place where Toby is not answering the door, and Jim begins to wonder why he ever pushed his way back into the light.
Jim tries the door, and it swings open, the sound of it echoing, prying at his bones. He walks through ghost corridors, through empty rooms that once held such warmth. He barely recognizes the arrangement of the furniture, the arrangement of his second home.
Toby meets him at the bedroom door, his eyes dull, in his pajamas. He stares for a long moment, and Jim worries that Toby no longer recognizes him. He hardly recognizes himself in the bathroom mirror. His hair has grown long and tangled, as if the night sky built itself into a halo around his head, his eyes brushed with charcoal, hollow and blank, his trembling warrior’s hands. He does not recognize the shape of his body.
But Toby pulls Jim close, and Jim closes the hug, closes the circuit, closes the bond between them.
“You’re home,” Toby says. “You’re here. You’re back. You’re safe.”
How can he make it up to Toby, who he tore away from his chance to resolve his grief? How can he say that he emerged, but he did not emerge unscathed, that he is just the shape of Jim Lake Junior standing against the dark? How does he say that when he held his blade over Gunmar’s breastbone, when he carved out Gunmar’s heart, he whispered, over and over, This is for Toby. You will never hurt him again.
Toby reaches up and touches the purple bloom of a bruise against Jim’s jaw, and though it aches, Jim presses his face against Toby’s hand.
“You asshole,” Toby says, and Jim manages a smile, thin and crooked.
Jim sits on the end of Toby’s bed, one hand worrying tousled hair still water-slick from the shower. They sit very close, and slowly Toby tips his head, until they are forehead to forehead, and Jim cannot remember the last time he knew a gentle touch, the last time he turned his body to tenderness. When he was young, and in love, perhaps, and every touch was monumental.
This is a promise, strung here between the two of them.
Toby reaches for his hands, says, “I missed you,” and there is fury in his voice. “Fuck, I missed you.”
Jim nods. “More than anything.”
“But there are some things we need to talk about.”
Jim closes his eyes, takes a long breath. “I thought about what I did to you every day. I cheated you out of closure.”
“You shut the bridge,” says Toby.
“Yes.”
“You went back on your promise.”
“Yes. It was awful, Tobes. It was every nightmare I’d ever had and more. It’s inside of me and I can’t get rid of it. I would never want to put you through that.”
“What if something happened to you? Right after ARRRGH!!!, I couldn’t bear it. It ripped me apart, Jim.”
“I know,” Jim says, and fierce melancholy strings through his voice. “I know. I did some things—to you, to all of you, but mostly to you—that were so wrong, and there’s nothing I can do to make it up to you.
“But I love you,” Jim says, and it is almost a plea.
Toby has grown in the months Jim spent in the Darklands—how long, now? Jim’s ice-bright eyes stare unfocused. He is a different boy, now, forced to live moment to moment, with muscles tensed beneath his white T, with a vacant face—and now Jim has to incline his head to kiss Toby’s forehead.
“You know that, don’t you?” Jim imagines pressing kisses to Toby’s cheek, his chin, his hair, the corner of his lips soft as a promise. He imagines offering himself up, bird-light, as a way to span the chasm between them, a way to halve the distance.
But he doesn't, and Toby remains impassive, statuesque, a work of art that, no matter how close Jim gets, remains untouchable.
“You don’t get to say that, Jim,” Toby says, and his voice is dull. What has this grief done to Toby? Tore him apart. Swallowed him whole. Made him into a boy Jim hardly knows, but Jim is unrecognizable himself. “Not anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” says Jim. “I’m sorry. I know.”
He draws back, looks from Toby to his own hands, scarred and bruised. “I guess we’re too much alike, huh? All we want to do is save people. And that’s all I was doing, Tobes. Saving you.”
Toby’s eyes seem to stare right through Jim, as though he were just a ghost of a boy, as though they have both become ghosts.
Jim says, “You were always more important than any of it. Being a hero. Saving Enrique. Hell, even defeating Gunmar. None of it would have meant anything if I’d lost you. I couldn’t lose you. And yet here you are, and it’s like you’re more lost to me than ever.” He reaches out, and rests a gentle hand on Toby’s arm.
Toby’s gaze, dark as muddy water, flickers.
“I’m not saying it will be okay, or even that it’ll be like it was before,” Jim says. “I’m not sure I want that. I know I hurt you. And I know that if I did it again, I would make the same choice, and I’m sorry.”
Toby nods, and his lip trembles. Jim takes Toby’s hand in his own.
“Please. I am trying to come home. Please let me come home.”