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Sometime around four in the morning, Morgan rolls over to face him. “Static Man?” she asks, voice scratchy and low. “You there?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” he says, floating from the corner towards her. “What’s up?”
She rubs at her eyes and pushes herself up onto a forearm, glancing back across the hotel room to the other bed where Nicholas is curled up on his side, snoring softly. “I wanted to ask you something.”
“Sure. What’s up?” he asks again.
“I wanted to ask you something, and I needed Nicholas to be asleep for it.”
“Dude, you’re kinda freaking me out right now,” Static Man says, and Morgan winces.
“Sorry. It’s been a while since…” Since I talked to people about things that matter. He gets it. She trails off and waves a hand. “Anyway. Listen, do you wanna move in with me?”
“I—uh, sorry, what?”
She pushes on. “After we get back to the city, I mean. Like, I’m going to stay at Nick’s for a while to get my feet back under me, considering I’m probably legally dead and all, but I’m getting my own apartment as soon as possible. No way am I living with that man for the rest of my life.”
“Hey,” he says, suddenly defensive, “I know you’re not, like, his biggest fan, but he’s a good guy, okay? You don’t know him, y—”
“I’m not—” Morgan starts to protest, then lowers her voice back down to a murmur after another nervous glance in Nicholas’ direction. “I’m not saying he’s bad or evil or… whatever. I like the guy, I honestly do. He’s—he could be my friend. But I’m not willing to live under his thumb forever. I owe him a favor. That’s it.”
“I didn’t expect you to stay with him,” he tells her. “I’ll be fine, though.”
“Well, I can’t stop you,” she says, then just looks at him, jaw set. The silence draws itself out.
Finally, Static Man sighs. “But?”
“But if you’ve got some kind of weird psychosexual thing going on with him or feel like you owe some kind of shitty life debt or whatever, those maybe aren’t the best reasons to live with a guy?”
“What the fuck.”
She grimaces. “That was... out of line for me to say.”
“Yeah, you fucking think? Jesus!”
“My point stands, though.”
“What the fuck?”
Morgan sighs, shifting under her sheets. Motel 6 bed, it can’t be comfortable. “It’s fine if you don’t want to move in with me. But I really think you should consider it. Plus, I’ll be growing your body, and I won’t turn off the tape recorder unless you want me to, and I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. I’ll, you know, treat you like a person. Trans solidarity or whatever. We can catch up on the pop culture we’ve missed over the last three years together.”
“Nicholas treats me like a person,” Static Man says quietly.
She looks at him. “He’s trying to,” she says, and he can’t read her expression. “He just isn’t very good at it.”
Because Nicholas is trying, he honestly is, he takes the news well.
Or, you know, as well as somebody like Nicholas is capable of taking this kind of news.
They’re valiantly trying to make breakfast again, back at his apartment. Omelets this time, which Static Man is even worse at than pancakes, which just makes Nicholas grin in a way that’s a little shitty but would probably still make Static Man’s stomach flip if he still had one.
“No, no, you can’t actually flip an omelet like that,” Nicholas tells him, all fake exasperation. “At least not when it’s this big. And when you haven’t even figured out how to do it with a spatula yet.”
“Oh, c’mon, if anyone’s gonna figure it out it’ll be me, dude,” Static Man says.
“You can’t even handle pancakes.”
“I’ll figure it out,” Static Man insists, and he fumbles with the saucepan and flips the omelet. Sort of. It collapses into itself because it’s still half-raw, but he did technically flip it.
“Sure,” Nicholas deadpans, and Static Man wishes he could flip him off so bad.
“I wish I could flip you off so bad, dude,” he says.
Nicholas shakes his head and chuckles under his breath. “You’ll figure it out. We have time.”
“Probably not,” Static Man blurts, and Nicholas physically takes a step back, eyebrows furrowed. “We probably, uh—I’m moving out. When Morgan gets her life back and buys an apartment, I’m going with her,” he says before he can talk himself out of it.
“What?” His voice is dangerously quiet and calm, like Static Man can’t read him like a fucking book at this point, like the stoic straight man front has ever done anything to hide his actual emotions. It’s the eyes, the big stupid brown cow eyes that can’t hide jack shit. He’s hurt. Somehow, Static Man hadn’t really seen that coming.
“I’m going to live with her.” Static Man sets the pan back down on the burner.
“Why?” Still that flat, emotionless tone. He wants to shake him. He wants Nicholas to ask him to stay. Neither of those things are going to happen.
“It’ll be good, dude,” he tries. “For both of us.” He makes a valiant attempt at a grin. “Like, I know I can be kinda annoying. Now you don’t have to worry about wanting to turn off the recorder whenever I start pissing you off, you can just tell me to go home.”
“We agreed you’d stay with me for protection.”
Static Man snorts. “When was the last time you actually needed it?”
“I don’t—that isn’t the point,” Nicholas snaps. “I need—fine. Never mind.” He takes a breath, smooths out the lines in his face bit by bit. Finally: “I’m happy for you two.”
“We’re not dating,” Static Man clarifies, probably unnecessarily. “Like, she’s a lesbian, dude.”
“Yes, obviously I know that,” Nicholas mutters.
“Just figured I’d check. In case your gaydar was totally busted.”
He doesn’t even get a pity smile for that. He hadn’t really expected one, but it still stings. Nicholas has turned away from him fully, ostensibly busying himself with omelet fillings, but really he’s just holding a kitchen knife in his perpetually shaking hands and staring at already-diced onions. His shoulders are tense, and his mouth is pulled tight at the corners.
Static Man gets it. They have something here, the three of them. Had something? Still have, for now. A DVD of Over the Garden Wall on the bookshelf by the TV. The closet in the guest bedroom filling up with Morgan’s denim jackets and band t-shirts and job interview button-ups. A photo of Nicholas and his mother, pulled from the bottom of a cardboard box somewhere, worn with age and bent at the corners. A photo of Nicholas and Chris, Starting the grand ritual with the bro!! scrawled on the back in Chris’ chicken scratch handwriting. A photo of Nicholas and Morgan and Static Man, all three of them grinning, propped up against the reading lamp on Nicholas’ nightstand.
Static Man stares at the omelet on the stovetop. It’s starting to burn.
Nicholas helps them move in despite it all. They agree to turn off the tape recorder so they don’t have to deal with transporting Static Man across New York City in secret, but once they’ve gotten into the apartment, he gets to watch Nicholas struggle to help Morgan carry a couch up a flight of stairs. Nicholas is clearly sort of miserable throughout the whole two-day-long process, but he tries to grin and bear it, which is a kindness neither Morgan nor Static Man had expected. He jokes with them. Unpacks cardboard boxes. Fusses over the decor. Cooks a lasagna for their little three-person housewarming party and only bitches a little bit about the already-malfunctioning oven.
When it’s time for him to leave, almost at midnight on the last day, he crosses his skinny arms over his shitty little white tank top, stained with sweat from the day’s work. “Will you two be okay?” he asks quietly, mouth pinched like they’re forcing him to eat a whole lemon instead of just awkwardly standing with him by the front door.
“Yeah, we’ll be okay, Nicholas,” Morgan says, unexpectedly gentle. “Don’t worry about us.”
“Will you?” Static Man butts in, and Nicholas’ mouth pinches even more.
“Yes,” he says shortly. “I’m fine.”
Are you sure? Static Man wants to ask but, of course, will not.
“You’re welcome at our place any time, man,” he says instead, a little more desperate than he’d like. “Seriously.”
Nicholas nods curtly. “The same goes for you two as well.” He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “Well. I’d better leave.”
“Okay,” Morgan says. “Text us when you get back safe.”
Nicholas doesn’t say anything, just nods, turns on his heel, and walks out the door. He closes it behind him, and Morgan slumps down on the couch— their couch now, in their apartment, Static Man realizes with a sudden jolt of excitement—and swings her legs up onto it, dropping her head back to thump against the cushioned arm.
“Dude,” Morgan whispers. “We did it.” She’s got a dazed smile on her face as she stares up at the ceiling. It’s stained, sure, and Static Man can already tell that their upstairs neighbors are unreasonably loud, but who cares, who the fuck cares.
“Hell yeah,” Static Man grins.
“You know,” she says. “I didn’t think I was ever going to get out.” She isn’t talking about Nicholas’ house, he realizes with a start. It was the Blacktop. It was always the Blacktop. “I thought I wasn’t even going to die. I thought I was going to have to live there forever, not living.” Her voice is still neutral, still deadpan as always, but he can hear the shake behind it, the quiet, terrified joy.
“And now you get to worry about rent again,” Static Man says.
“I don’t care. I literally do not care.” She levels a grin at him. “Anyway, you’ll chip in once you have a body again. I don’t mind you freeloading for now.”
A realization finally hits. “Oh fuck, how am I gonna get my life back? Like, the body won’t even be mine! I don’t know if I even have a fuckin’ social security number anymore!”
“Yeah, and your credit score’s probably fucked for good at this point, but the apartment’s under my name for a reason. I’ll help you,” Morgan says flatly, like it’s obvious. “That’s why we’re living together.” She pauses, and Static Man lets out a shuddering breath, finally drifting away from the door to hover just above the couch next to her. “You’ll be fine. Plus, you’ll have input on how your body looks, so really you could be anyone.”
“I mean—” He sighs. “Like, I joke about wanting to look like Tom Hardy, but if I do manage to find an old ID of mine, I want it to match me. I’m sure at least one of my old friends reported me missing, so I’ve gotta be in the system somewhere. It shouldn’t be too hard.” They had to have reported him missing. Somebody had to have noticed he was gone. “So, like, me but sexy?”
“I’m sure you were already sexy,” she tells him dryly.
“I was,” Static Man says anyway. “I was sexy as fuck, dude.”
Her mouth twitches like she’s hiding a smile. “I believe it.”
“I could do with a sharper jawline, though. Ooo, wait, crucial question, can you give me a big dick? Nicholas banned me from talking about it around him, but—”
She wrinkles her nose. “I do not want to know about your future theoretical sex life, but—yes. I’m growing your body. I can make anything as big as you like.”
“Hell yeah,” Static Man says, and he can feel himself grinning. “Thanks.”
“No problem. I look forward to it.”
“So, like, how’s it gonna work?”
“What, your dick? Didn’t you take sex ed in middle school?”
He snickers. “No, I know what happens when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much. I mean you growing my body. In general.”
She shrugs. “I dunno. I’ve only done instruments before. I’ll figure it out as I go. It can’t be that hard.”
“Well, if I do come out looking like an instrument, make sure it’s a sexy instrument. Like a bass.”
“Cello or guitar?” she asks, corner of her mouth tugging upward.
Static Man laughs incredulously. “Guitar. Obviously bass guitar. I’m sorry, dude, but there’s nothing sexy about a bass cello.”
“There’s plenty sexy about a bass cello,” she complains. “I hate men. None of you have any taste.”
“Well, you’re stuck with me now,” he says. “Bad instrument opinions and all.”
“I’ll set you straight eventually,” Morgan grumbles, kicking at where his head would be with her foot. It goes through him, obviously, but he jerks back anyway, laughing, and she laughs too.
It takes them a bit to fall into a routine. Not as long as he expected, though. Morgan takes a day job at a Starbucks ‘til she can figure out a job in musicology that’ll pay the bills, but she refuses to work the register, just stays in the back making increasingly complex drinks. Her hours are long, and he can tell she’s carefully avoiding complaining about it so he doesn’t feel guilty. Which makes him feel even more guilty.
Static Man—well, Static Man takes some jobs so he doesn’t go fucking bonkers. People are dicks to him, but he’s kind of used to that. At least Payphone’s gone. At least he’ll have a body soon—
And that’s Morgan’s night job.
He generally has to force her to go to bed at, like, 2 AM, because she’s liable to fixate on it, the body she’s growing for him in the bathtub.
It’s kind of horrific. The body, he means. She does the bones first—less creepy that way, she explains, but it’s creepy as all hell regardless. Like, let’s be real here.
He sort of hovers over her shoulder as she works, literally and figuratively. He has to. So that she’ll go to sleep eventually, but also because he has to. He’s grotesquely riveted by it, the slow building of him, riveted as much as he is repulsed. She’s always asking him questions: What was your physical build? Were you stocky? Skinny? Do you think your thighbone was this thick?
“Dude, I’m sorry, but I have no idea how fuckin’ thick my thighbone was.”
Morgan shoots him a profoundly annoyed look. “You have to keep track of this shit, Static Man.”
“Yeah, I’ll be sure to note the width of my bones for the next time somebody has to rebuild my body,” he snarks, and she rolls her eyes at him.
“Don’t be an asshole or I’ll give you erectile dysfunction.”
“No way can you do that,” Static Man says confidently. She stares at him. He shifts. “Uh. Can you?”
“I will give you fucking IBS, Static Man. That is a promise.”
“Please don’t,” he mumbles, and she smirks. He rolls his eyes. Or, you know, would roll his eyes. “You’re enjoying this way too much.”
“Like you wouldn’t.”
“Well. Touché.”
She sits back on her heels and wipes some sweat off her brow. “How’s this look?” She gestures down at the skeleton.
“Well, it’s certainly a skeleton,” he ventures cautiously.
Morgan snorts. “Obviously. Does it look like your skeleton?”
“How many x-rays of myself do you think I’ve seen in my lifetime? Like, total?”
She shrugs.
He heaves out a long breath. “It looks fine. Can you make me like four inches taller than this, though?”
She looks at him curiously. “How tall were you before you got static’d?”
“That… doesn’t matter.”
“It’s okay if you were a manlet.”
“I was not a manlet.”
“I accept you either way.”
“I wasn’t a fucking manlet, Morgan!”
She laughs at him. She has a nice laugh when she lets it out fully, loud enough to echo through the cramped bathroom and bright. It’s the kind of laugh that you have to work for, but when he can pull one out of her, he knows she means it, knows she thinks he’s actually funny, knows it isn’t out of pity. Morgan is a lot of things, but condescending isn’t one of them. Even when she is a 6’4 woman bullying him about being a [HEIGHT REDACTED] man.
Anyway, it’s good to see her happy.
“Don’t kill the messenger.”
“You have no way of knowing if I was a manlet,” Static Man whines.
“If you weren’t a manlet you wouldn’t be so pissy right now,” she points out, still giggling, hand over her mouth.
He groans. “Fine, maybe I wore lifts. Jesus. So do a lot of people.”
She’s already bending back down over the body. A gentle tug at the bones of his legs, a slight pull at his spine and ribs. Moving them so they’ll grow right. It’s weird to think of the bones as his. But they are.
Morgan turns her head to look back at him. “Do you wanna try and do some of it?” she asks. “I’ll guide you through it. And if you fuck it up, I’ll just go back and fix it.”
“I dunno. It seems kind of complicated,” he hedges.
“No shit. I’m building a whole body.” She hesitates, idly tracing fingertips over the exposed sternum. Static Man shivers. “I just think it’s nice to feel like you’re creating yourself.”
“Even if you’re doing all the work?” he jokes, a bit unsteady.
“Do you know how much I would give to touch my own bones?” she asks him. Her voice reveals as little as ever, but he’s pretty sure she means it.
“For real?”
“Yeah,” she says, unblinking. “For real.” She glances back down at the skeleton, seems to realize she’s touching it, and pulls her hand away. Looks back at him. “I’m not saying I’d change much. But if I could build it all over with me in control?” Morgan blows out a long breath. “I don’t know. It would be nice. To feel like my body was mine.”
“It is yours,” Static Man reminds her quietly.
“Well, yeah.” She shakes herself. “Of course it is. But you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” he says, “I do.”
“So, do you wanna try? Nothing too complex, like the hands or the facial structure, but I think I could show you the legs. I’m learning, too.”
“Sure,” he says. “Yeah. Sure.”
She nods at him and smiles. He reaches out and touches his bones, and she puts her hands over his, and together they grow him.
Nicholas comes by to visit sometimes. He looks like a fucking mess. There’s no nice way to put it. He’s got bags under his eyes and his cuticles are oozing blood and he’s horribly scrawny, even more than before. Skeletal as the half-body in the bathtub.
They don't really visit him. It isn't anything personal, and they hope he knows that. They don't ask him about his new ritual either. He'll tell them when he's ready. When he needs them again.
Static Man does his best to feed him whenever he’s over—he can't help but worry—but he can’t cook, not the way he is right now. He’s too clumsy to even do any of the detailing on his own body, but Morgan was right; there’s a good physicality to the work anyway. Makes him wish he’d taken a sculpture class in high school. Or an anatomy class. Or, like, a musicology class, if high schools even offer those. Wherever the hell Morgan learned how to do this well.
Anyway, Morgan bullies Nicholas into eating, and they finally watch Over the Garden Wall when fall begins in earnest, all piling onto the couch together. When it’s over, Nicholas tells him he really liked it, and he seems to mean it, smiling at both of them tentatively. That night, Nicholas sleeps on their couch, and he makes breakfast for them the next morning. Static Man misses him. He tells Morgan that after Nick’s left again, and she doesn’t laugh at him, just asks if he wants to watch a movie or a TV show or something. They still haven’t seen Into the Spiderverse yet, which is probably a capital crime from what she’s heard. He asks her about work, and she says she’s taking the day off.
They move on to nerves and internal organs. Systems. Morgan does most of the work there since it’s way more delicate than the bones, less room for error, but he gets to hold his own heart for a few seconds, slick and red and fist-sized. He could cry. Why does it feel precious? Why does it feel so important, so world-ending? Morgan watches him from her position seated cross-legged on the tile, forearms resting on her knees. He can feel her itching take it back and smooth out some of the creases that shouldn’t be there, coax some arteries back into the right place. It’s so hard to get a heart right.
“What if I ate it?”
“Please don’t eat it,” Morgan says wearily.
“It would be so fucking metal though.”
“Do not eat your heart. I know the Stephen Crane poem is cool, but do not eat your fucking heart. I worked hard on that shit.”
“What Stephen Crane poem?”
“‘In The Desert’? You’ve read it at some point, I guarantee it.”
He has not. “Yeah, for sure. Whatever. I just think it would be cool to eat my own heart, dude.”
“Static Man.”
“Fine,” he says, and hands it back over.
Into the Spiderverse is fucking awesome.
Morgan teaches him how to cook with way more efficacy than Nicholas ever did. Not that he can actually do the recipes—no opposable thumbs yet, just static appendages that can sort of approximate tentacles at most—but he watches, and she explains it in a way that actually makes sense, and she knows a shitton of Caribbean recipes and some South Indian ones too. He loves Nicholas, really he does, but man did the pasta get old after a while.
“You know, once you have a body again, you’re gonna have to eat less fast food or you’ll fucking die,” Morgan points out to him one day as she’s washing dishes. “Like, I’m gonna have to ban Popeye’s from this house.”
Static Man leans back against the counter. “Dude, I don’t even care. I owe you so many home-cooked meals for this shit.”
“Yeah, you kind of do,” she grins, then looks down at the plate and frowns, scrubbing harder at a bit of grime on it. “I mean, I wasn’t gonna say it, but.”
“I owe you money, too. You’ve been buying food for two people for months. Well, one person and a non-Euclidean monstrous form, but—”
“Two people,” she corrects over her shoulder, and his mouth clicks shut.
"Sometimes I'm scared that I'll wake up and I'll be back in the Blacktop. Like none of this is real."
"Trust me, dude. This is real."
"No, I know. I know. Just..."
"I promise. It's real. I'm real. You're never gonna have to call anyone a hepcat again. Unless you want to. Then, you know, I guess it could happen."
She laughs. Shakily, yeah, but she laughs. "Bet you never thought you'd have to say that to somebody in any serious capacity."
"Well, friendship is all about new experiences, right?"
Morgan is appalled by modern pop music. Static Man suggests that maybe she’s just getting old, and she throws a fork at his head. It goes right through.
He laughs. “You’re going to get out of that habit when I actually have a head again, right?”
In answer, she throws another fork at him.
Muscle and cartilage and internal tissue come next, then skin. She smooths it over him with incredible care, thins out the little webs between his fingers with her thumb and index finger. Rubs the skin flat against his jaw, attaches his earlobes to the side of his head. His body lies there, hairless and naked.
“I look weird without nipples. Or nails. Or eyes.”
She rolls her eyes at him. “They’ll all grow in soon. I think. I planted the seeds, anyway.”
“No offense to your craft, dude, but I’m not coming into this world nippleless.” He looks at his body uneasily. There aren’t any freckles either. No scars.
“It’s not done yet,” Morgan reassures him. Like she already knows what he’s thinking. Who knows, maybe she does. They’ve spent long enough around each other that she probably doesn’t need to see any body language to understand him. “And then I still need to teach it how to be a body again. Like I had to teach the naverlee how to be an instrument.”
“It’s okay, man. I know it takes time.”
“Everything worth doing does,” she tells him absentmindedly, digging her thumb into the meat of his collarbone and pressing the divot in deeper.
“Aw, you think I’m worth it?”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
“You like me.”
“Of course I like you, you dipshit, why else would I ask you to move in with me? Not to mention grow your fucking body. I’m doing this for free. In case you’ve forgotten.”
There’s a long pause, and Morgan turns back to his body. Arthur. It’ll be weird to go by his human name again.
“You’re going to add the.. imperfections too, right?”
Blessedly, she doesn’t argue the semantics of what qualifies as an imperfection. “Yeah. Don’t worry. It’ll be you.”
“I kind of had a lot of freckles,” he says. He doesn’t know why. Maybe he wants her to push back, cut corners. Draw a line somewhere for him, like well, tough fucking luck.
She doesn’t, though. Won’t even look up. “Then you’re gonna have a lot of freckles, Static Man.” He has to admire her steadfast refusal to get legitimately frustrated with him. Nobody else has really managed that one before.
Static Man watches her bring him into existence for another few minutes in silence. Then: “Does this make you my mom?”
“Absolutely not. Ugh. But you’re still going to have to clean your room if I tell you to.”
Smiling with all his teeth, he finally relents and snaps off an incorporeal salute. “Aye aye, captain.”
He gets to be the one to put his old scars back, with Morgan handling just the finer details on her own. Top surgery scars here. The time he broke his leg and the bone jutted out of the skin there. It feels weird to mark down scars that this body hasn’t earned, but it does settle something inside him.
Morgan also makes him add the freckles himself, which is fair. He really did have an unreasonable amount of them.
“Okay, the dick doesn’t have to be that big. Jesus. I look like a goddamn tripod, Morgan.”
Eventually, Morgan tells him about herself. Static Man didn’t want to push her into it—he got it, you know, the self-defense, the walls. He can’t imagine what she went through, but he gets why she doesn’t talk about it.
But one night, she’s wine drunk on the sofa, and the credits of Portrait of a Lady on Fire are playing in the background, and she turns to him and starts talking about high school. Talks about her best friend Callie and the music teacher who let her eat lunch in his classroom and playing on the varsity basketball team (“Yes, Static Man, I was a jock, I don’t know why you’re surprised—” “Well, what was I gonna do, ask ‘ wow, dude, you’re so tall, do you play basketball’ when we met?”). Talks about the books she used to like back when she had more time to read them.
Talks about taking years to figure out she was trans. Talks about barely even being surprised when it finally clicked, like oh, duh. Talks about her college goth phase (Static Man begs her for pictures, and she denies that any exist, but as soon as he has thumbs again he is downloading Facebook and going on a fucking deep dive, no question).
Talks about learning the banjo, then the guitar, then the violin, then the drums, then the piano, then the cello. Talks about being a musical prodigy. Talks about singing with a new voice. Talks about the godssong.
Her tone is still so reverent when she says the word. Godssong. “I don’t think I could do religion,” she tells him. “Not because of magic or because I think the world is too unkind for it or whatever. I just think… I don’t know. I think maybe this is as close as we get.”
“What is?” Static Man asks. She shrugs, giggling and holding up her hands in an exaggerated I don’t know! pose, and he laughs too. “Dude, you are so drunk.”
“Yeah, ’m gonna be feeling it hard tomorrow. I shouldn’t’ve done this on a Sunday night. Make me coffee in the morning, okay?”
“I’ll do my best, but no promises,” he sighs, and Morgan nods, understanding. “Seriously, though, what is?”
“What is..? Oh. Right, yeah.” She nods again. Bites the inside of her cheek. “I think the godssong is as close as I’m gonna get to holiness. But I think this is too.” She gestures loosely, and Static Man takes it to mean everything: the houseplant in the window, the lights of the city outside, their pawnshop television from the early 2000s that somehow still works, the body in the bathtub, him across from her on their couch.
Tomorrow the eyes will be done growing. Tomorrow, Morgan will begin to teach his body to work again. Tomorrow, his lungs will learn how to breathe, and his brain will learn to send messages to his muscles, and his throat will learn how to speak. Tomorrow, his heart will maybe get to beat again.
He hadn’t really understood the phrase “miracle of life” until now.
Morgan: “Are you ready?”
Static Man: “What happens if this doesn’t work?”
Nicholas: “It’ll work.”
Morgan: “It’ll work.”
Static Man: “Okay.”
Static Man: “I trust you. And, um. Thank you. Both of you.”
Morgan: “Okay. Just say when.”
Static Man: “Yeah. Yeah.”
Nicholas: “...Are you going to say it?”
Static Man: “Yeah. Okay. I’m ready.”
He’s ready.
When it’s over, Morgan throws herself down to the tiled bathroom floor to hug him rib-crushingly tight. Damnit, Morgan, I worked hard on those ribs, but he wraps his arms around her, his arms, and buries his head in her shoulder. He cries. He cries. Nicholas stumbles over, smoking slightly, and hesitates, hands held halfway up like he doesn’t know what to do with them. Arthur nods and squeezes his eyes shut again, and Nicholas joins them on the floor, warm against Arthur’s spine.
Neither of them leave his side for a long while after that. Morgan and Nicholas help him walk to the kitchen, and he drinks a glass of water and cries some more. He feels fucking ridiculous and embarrassingly in awe at the same time. Tears drip into his mouth, salty. His nerves are on fire.
“Can I call you Arthur now?” Nicholas asks awkwardly, when he’s mostly stopped crying. He’s got a hand resting nervously on his shoulder still.
Arthur nods shakily. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re good. It just felt wrong to—I mean, while I was—” He huffs out a frustrated sigh.
“I get it,” Nicholas says, one hundred percent not getting it. He smiles, and it’s kind of lopsided. “Welcome back, Arthur.”
“Thanks,” he says, feeling even more ridiculous. “I’ve always been here, man. But thanks.” Morgan stifles a laugh, and he does too, with markedly less success than her.
“You know what I mean,” Nicholas mumbles, and Arthur takes pity on him. He’s trying. He’s getting better at it.
“Yeah. I’m glad to be back.”
The next morning, Arthur wakes up early to make Morgan breakfast before she has to go to work. The eggs are a little overdone, not as runny as she likes, but the coffee is fucking fantastic if he says so himself, and the toast is, you know, toast. It’s hard to mess that one up. He spreads some raspberry jelly on it and licks the excess off the butter knife and brings the plate to her room.
She gets crumbs on the sheets within about three seconds, and he sits down on the bed next to her and feels the mattress dip under his weight. They talk as she eats. She bullies him about his eggs but hey, at least he made them, and she laughs at some of his jokes and rolls her eyes at others and either way he smiles until his cheeks hurt. Morgan nudges her shoulder against his and offers him a bite of toast. He’s still getting his appetite back, readjusting to having a stomach again, but it’s good toast.
The sun comes in through the bedroom window, and it is warm against his face.