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They play a game on the bad days, called Where Were You. Taako likes to think of it as a game, anyway, because he might go nuclear if he takes it too seriously. His memory is fucked, so fucked still. Real layered on false layered on real, and there are days when he can’t believe any of them because he can’t tell the difference.
“Where were you,” he says to Lup as she carefully braids his wind-mussed hair, “when I dropped Auntie’s big cookpot on my foot and broke three toes?”
They’re sitting back to front on a sand-dotted towel in Bottlenose Cove, in the shadow of a huge red beach umbrella. Taako feels good with the shape of it over him. Even better with Lup at his back. The soft murmurs of the ocean remind him of the beach year, but there are the shouts and squeals and general chaos of people on top of it, some of them his people.
Out in the gentle surf, Mookie and Angus are bobbing in a clump of other kids. Carey is stretched out on the sand a few feet to Taako’s right, asleep and basking like a lizard on a rock. Magnus and Davenport are walking Mags’ new puppy somewhere far down the shoreline; in the distance, a modest single-handed yacht is anchored just at the cove’s edge.
Lup ties off the end of the braid and presses her forehead against the back of his skull. “ I dropped the cookpot on your foot. You didn’t speak to me for two days.”
She slides her arms around his, covers his hands where they’re picking at the hem of his coverup. Taako lets her. “We were making cassoulet.”
“Yup,” she affirms, resting her chin on his shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the slope of her nose.
“I can’t picture you there,” he murmurs, and she squeezes his hands.
“That’s okay.” She says it with such confidence, and she holds him so familiarly; he trusts her, even though he can’t quite see her face through the static. He lets go of the memory that was troubling him, lets it float. His eyes slide closed as she hums a quiet tune in his ear.
“You play the violin,” he recalls, like a jolt, and then his eyes pop open again. “Where’s--”
“Barry’s back at the bar, chatting with Merle,” Lup reminds him. “Ghost Rider’s probably still there too.”
Of course. Everything slots back into place as soon as she says it. “They’re getting along okay, right?”
“Barry and Krav? Like a nerd house on fucking fire.”
“And you like him?”
“Bro, if I didn’t, you’d have known about it a long time ago.”
Taako sighs, and relaxes a little further back into Lup’s hold. “Good.”
Then she smiles, and he can feel the curve of it against his cheek. “Why, you gonna put a ring on it or something?”
“ Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution ,” Taako replies, and Lup snorts.
“Are you quoting your fucking aphorisms book at me?”
“That, Lulu, was a Taako original, fresh off the dome.”
“You’re full of shit, that was Mae West.”
Taako grins. “Mae West doesn’t exist on this plane, so I’m taking up her mantle.”
Lup laughs into his shoulder, and everything is right with the world. Taako soaks it all up, the heat and the briny air and the moment of clarity, until a shout of his name rises over the rest of the noise.
“Taako! Taako!! Look what I found!!”
Angus is making his way toward them at an excited trot, holding a blue plastic bucket carefully in front of him. His hair is heavy with water and sparkling with sand, and he’s squinting without his glasses. When he finally reaches them, he kneels at the edge of the towel and thrusts the bucket out. “Look!”
Taako peers inside, and Lup leans over his shoulder to look too; at the bottom of the pail, immersed in ocean water and a settling layer of sand, is a pinkish-red sea star.
“It’s alive!” Lup exclaims. “We used to find dried up ones on the shore, we used them for target practice. Remember that, babe?”
Taako touches his finger to the surface of the water. “I remember. I could magic missile three at once from my surfboard. But this is bigger than those were.”
“It’s a Nepanthia belcheri,” Angus says excitedly. “They reproduce by fission—when a female grows large enough, it splits into two smaller males, which will become female when they get large enough.”
“Like you, Lulu,” Taako says, patting her knee, and Lup laughs.
“I’m the twin that grew big enough.”
“We’re the same height!”
“You just keep telling yourself that.”
Angus giggles, and presses the bucket into Taako’s hands so he can dig his glasses out of their beach bag. Once they’re back on his nose, he peers into the water again, then up at Taako with the widest eyes of any human ever and an even wider smile showing the missing space where his last baby tooth came out. “Can I take it home? I’ll get a tank for it and everything. Maybe we can see it split!”
Taako’s going to say yes. There’s no question, when the kid looks at him like that. He’s going to say yes, and make a special trip to get the right supplies and the right books, and levitate the damn tank through a rift every time Angus spends a school break at Hammer and Tails or on the moon base or wherever he wants to go when he’s not busy being the youngest professor at Taako’s Amazing School of Magic.
He’s going to say yes, but it’s not quite Taako’s style to give in immediately. He regards the sea star, dips a finger in the water again to stroke along one of its nubbly points. He thinks about it pulling itself in half, one part with three limbs, the other left with only two. Lup is solid and warm at his back, but inside himself he is still two people, his edges asymmetrical and overlapping.
Angus is waiting for his permission; he tries to picture this strange creature fracturing apart in a tank in Angus’ bedroom in Taako’s house. It’s appealing. It’s terrifying. Taako’s not anything like a parent ought to be.
“Taako?” Lup murmurs in his ear, interrupting this internal spiral.
“Where were you,” he murmurs back, “the day Auntie sent me away?”
Hands pull the bucket from his hold and nestle it into the shady sand off the edge of the towel. Then Lup squeezes him, almost too tight, arms twined around his waist. “I stayed until she fell asleep, and then I ran away to find you.”
Taako nods slowly, turning the memory over in his mind. “I remember a cot. I couldn’t get comfortable. I couldn’t sleep alone.”
Outside the memory, he registers a small warm body crawling close in his lap; he opens his arms automatically, and little hands slide into his. “Why did she send you away?” Angus asks, quiet. The bald empathy in that makes Taako’s chest ache.
It’s Lup who answers. “She was very old. She couldn’t keep up with two kids anymore, but nobody else would take us both.”
“I offered,” Taako remembers. “I offered to go, so that you could stay.”
“Dingus,” Lup replies. She said the same thing when she broke into Father’s cousin’s house and crammed herself onto the cot with Taako, spooning him like she is right now. He can hear it, can see it in his mind’s eye without static.
Then, like waking from a trance, he slowly pulls himself out of that memory and blinks at the bright world in front of him. Angus is in his lap, twisted around to watch him, and the kid smiles when Taako’s eyes focus. “Okay,” Taako declares. “Let’s keep it. The Nanny Belly.”
Angus giggles. “Nepanthia belcheri! But I’m gonna name them Caleb.”
“Of course you are,” Taako teases, then waves a hand at the beach bag. “Now fetch the sunscreen so I can slather you some more. You hungry for lunch? I made cucumber avocado rice balls this morning.”
“With faces?” Angus asks, digging through the bag, and Taako scoffs.
“What am I, a fucking amateur? Of course they have faces.”
Lup relaxes her hold on him as he reaches for the Cooler of Holding, instead draping herself over his back like a hungry sloth. “What do sea stars eat?”
“Mollusks, mostly,” Angus replies, handing Taako the sunscreen and planting himself between him and the food. He pulls out a rice ball to pass into Lup’s grabby hands, and then takes one for himself. Lup bites the face off of hers immediately, Taako can tell by the satisfied way she chews in his ear; Angus takes a careful bite of the undecorated side of his own. “Clams, oysters, mussels...and sand dollars, but they’re not mollusks, they’re echidnoderms.” He nibbles his way through the rice ball, leaving the face for last, and smiling at it before he pops it in his mouth. “Sea stars actually pull the mollusks’ shells apart, and then eject their stomachs out through their mouths to eat the contents whole.”
“Disgusting,” Taako proclaims, smearing sunscreen across Angus’ shoulders. “If it splits, we’ll give one to Magnus.”