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He sees her everywhere, when he first arrives at Lambda. A flash of auburn hair outside the testing room’s glass walls. Her smile, sunlight, illuminating a crowd of children. Her customary “good morning, Norman!” when he wakes; her high, uncontained laughter echoing down the halls.
He sees her everywhere in the corner of his eyes, and every time his dumb hope picks at his heartstrings like an off-pitch harp, each note crying out into silence when he turns and Emma is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
Sometimes, he sees violet eyes and dark hair, and the way his heart twinges there is something he is still working out. Of course, Ray is nothing but a figment of his imagination as well.
Lambda has been kind to him so far, on account of his worth. He is able to keep track of the days, lucid, unlike some of the other children here, and he counts them down like sheep while he feigns sleep.
Then, on a serendipitous night, the sirens ring, and the calls of men outside his room are loud and frequent enough that Norman can deduce what happened.
His family did it. They escaped, all of them, and the demons haven’t found any kids yet.
“You did it, Emma,” he whispers into the night, and he thinks he can see her, beaming back at him, fierce eyes reflecting warmth and victory and pure love, all the things he loves her for. He doesn’t care that she’s not real this time, he laughs (he sounds a little crazy), giddy, and so, so relieved. “You didn’t give up,” he says like a caress, and she replies, “Your plan worked perfectly.”
Emma smiles, breathes the night air with the rest of her family, and that night Norman sleeps easy for the first time since his arrival.
Happy birthday, Ray, Norman thinks in his dreams, are you enjoying your gift right now?
—
Emma tells him about the shelter they’ve arrived to, and all the defence measures and resources they’d gotten from it. She tells him that, but also about Anna’s new hairstyle; about the folktales that Phil has been reading to Carol at nights to lull her to sleep; about the hare Jemima and Alicia had managed to trap alive and were trying to convince Ray to let them keep as a pet. Ray had wanted to cook it, instead, and Norman chuckles because he had always thought that multi-talented Ray would be the best cook of them all.
Of course, Emma isn’t real, because if she were and she knew he were alive, she would be recklessly breaking into Lambda to rescue him, and that is the very last thing Norman could wish for. The relief he had felt at their successful escape was short-lived; exhaustion made him sleep but upon waking he had immediately fell back into worry about their journey ahead into the unknown world.
Ray is with her, Norman tells himself. They have Krone’s pen, and undoubtedly they would have figured out its clues by now.
They’ll survive. And for sure all three’ll meet again.
—
Norman is spending his allotted free time studying a record of demon hierarchy, that Smee had smuggled in under the guise of an early Greco-Roman literary text, when Ray breezes in. Eagerly, Norman puts down his book and slides out their chess game from last week, setting up the pieces from memory.
“Pawn to A-10,” Ray says, by way of greeting, and Norman teases him for his lack of manners but moves Ray’s piece anyway. They delve into easy conversation after that, comedic re-tellings of Lani and Tomas’ new pranks, sober discussion of a possible agriculture system, an especially lively discussion on the merits of snares v deadfalls when setting traps. It stands that Ray’s next thoughts come quite suddenly, but, well. It is hard for Norman to be surprised.
“Don’t you ever wonder,” Ray muses, “if all along we’d died in the escape, and this is my ghost coming back to life to haunt your selfish ass for messing up my life’s plan? Knight to D-20.”
Norman moves the black Knight, then slides his white Queen to knock it over and claim it for himself. Then, he laces his fingers and waits until Ray looks up at him, because this was important. He says: “You deserve to live, Ray.” and Ray rolls his eyes but doesn’t protest, which is honestly an improvement so Norman doesn’t push it.
They return to the game in companionable silence as Norman mulls over Ray’s hypothesis. Ray tch’s when Norman doesn’t fall for the Bishop’s Gambit Ray had so carefully set up over the course of the game.
“I promised Emma to never lose hope. I owe it to her to do the same,” Norman finally decides on. He speaks as he thinks, even though the two mediums are advancing at entirely different cadences. His thoughts circumvent each other endlessly, but the way Ray watches him—from behind his fringe, adopting an uninterested stance that betrays the sharp spark in his eyes—Norman is confident he is following along wordlessly.
Here are all my reasons, Norman thinks helplessly, and it all comes back to you, you, and you. Please understand, and the way Ray tch’s again, Norman thinks he does understand, even if he doesn’t like it. After all, Ray had tried to do the very same thing.
Heart lighter, Norman knocks over Ray’s King mercilessly. “Besides,” Norman teases, leaning in, “didn’t I tell you my plans never fail?”
Ray startles into a derisive snort, but he doesn’t deny it, not even when he gets up and leaves Norman to his lonesome.
—
Ever since he’d arrived at Lambda Norman has been weighed by a phantom guilt. See—he’s an outlier. Kept in relatively nice conditions; treated well, talked to like a particularly intelligent pet, at worse. On the flip side of this spectrum are rooms full of children whose brains were too heavy that their heads would crush their necks without support equipment.
Emma, he knew, would not have turned her head to the sight. Eyes wide in horror but feet shoulder-width apart in conviction she would not have let these horrors go unnoticed. Norman feels her presence when he turns his head a fraction away from the glass enclosures, so the reflecting light shielded them from view.
Instead Norman thinks of spindly legs and even spindlier necks. How painful such an existence was. He turns instead to the right and looks at rooms full of walking, talking children instead: what Lambda considered their successes. Engineered, genetically-modified, to be stronger, faster, better (food)—
—and dying. He knows this because every other week someone will cough blood and then the next day they will disappear. One day, he has the misfortune of crossing paths with a guard demon coming out of the room lugging a canvas bag behind him. Body-sized. Dead weight.
Emma would save them, he knows, and that stops his train of thought right there.
“Emma,” he asks, just to be sure. “What would you do?”
And she says, like it was obvious: “I’d ask everyone to come with me. All the cattle children deserve to live happily!” Norman nods, satisfied, but Emma doesn’t stop there. He smiles as he catches her figure just out of the corner of the eye, racing him down the opaque glass of the long corrider. She runs into the light, almost, but never quite out of reach.
“If there’s no world for us, then we’ll just have to build one!”
What can Norman do but agree?
—
Smee intends to smuggle just Norman out, but Norman has other plans. He will leave with an army fit to build Minerva’s paradise and enough occupants to make it a home (not a family, yet; not his, anyways).
Ray dials back Norman’s plans, because Norman will do whatever it takes even when he doesn’t have to. Norman’s moral compass tilts towards “the ends justify the means”, but he always makes an exception for Emma’s happiness (that is a constant; there is rarely a reason for Emma to be sad that is worth it).
Ray tells him he is reckless, that is not Emma, and that there was too much collateral left uncalculated in Norman’s plan.
Norman tells him he’s willing to do whatever it takes. For certainty.
“It’s unnecessary,” Ray stresses, and pinches the bridge of his nose. “At least contact them first, so they don’t mistake you for the enemy, too.”
That’s not a bad idea. Norman nods, and plans for sure victory.
—
Emma, Ray, he thinks. Let’s do this. And he throws the match.
—
He thinks it is Ray at first; violet eyes and dark flowing hair, standing triumphant in the red-hot blaze with arms thrown eagle-spread for the world to see. His heart seizes like an astronomical crash in slow-motion, then the figure turns, and the crash ignites in a roaring inferno.
“I told them my children were special,” Isabella says, and her tone is vindictive and prideful and so foreign to Norman. She sounds hurt, the shattered kind of hurt, where the glass is tempered by hatred and the edges are sharp. He thinks, is that what he sounds like that now?
“Mama?” Norman calls out, tentatively.
Isabella looks startled to be seen, and all at once her face shutters back into the perfect mask. Her violet eyes cut across the hallway till they meet his, and the lines soften into familiarity as she walks out of the flames, perfectly unsigned, and approaches his hiding spot. “My dear boy,” she whispers-says, when she is close enough to kneel in front of him and caress his face like back at the House, “You are aware you’re talking to a hallucination?”
Norman smiles placidly. Isabella smiles back, and slides into Mama again.
“You know everything I’m about to tell you, but I will say it aloud to ease your worries. Emma and Ray and all the others are alive.”
Norman heaves a sigh. “And you?” he hedges.
Isabella only smiles back, frozen in time, and Norman selfishly stays with her until the burning blaze forces him out of the hall.
—
Hide your weaknesses, Sister Krone had said.
You must survive, Smee had written.
Stay safe now, darling. Do whatever it takes, Isabella had mouthed before the flames took her, and Norman knows what he must do.
Emma, Ray, I’ll see you soon, he thinks, and then he lets them go.
He picks his way through the wreckage of the facility to the children’s dorms—safe from the worse of the damages as planned. 20 yards from his destination, he spots a lone figure sprawled on a chunk of ceiling, evidentially have crawled all this way on a bad leg. Well. That won’t do. He makes his way over to the injured child immediately.
Bending down, backlit, he offers a hand and a promise: “Come with me if you want to make them pay.”
The teenager frowns at him through bleary, but calculating eyes. Though clearly in pain, the bald boy makes no move, and he thinks he has made a good choice. “Who are you?” the child wheezes out.
“Your saviour,” he answers. “My name is William Minerva.”
.
-
—
There are sounds of a squabble coming from their base, which Minerva would be worried about if it were not so deeply hidden in abandoned lands. Instead, he worries about property damage, and lengthens his strides for the entryway. He starts the tedious process of punching in the code to the door, and sighs because from there he can hear every single word of the ensuing argument.
“I love him more than sugary tea,” Barbara yells. “Like bashing in demon heads and tasting their blood when it splatters!”
“Oh yeah? Well I love him mor—SHITTTT SHUT UP EVERYONE!” Cisco bellows, when they spot Minerva and Zazie entering the room. Zazie closes the door behind him, slinging the wild demon carcass down on the table that the three had been having their argument around. Barbara is already salivating, but with great effort rips her eyes away.
Vincent is the one to stand, palms towards him like the picture of innocence. “Boss, what you just heard—”
“I wasn’t paying attention,” Minerva says, shortly. “I need to make some revisions to the grand plan. Please do not disturb me for the rest of the evening.”
They all snap to smart salutes at that, unquestioningly obedient, though Vincent mutters something about him missing dinner again. Minerva ignores it to slip down the hall.
In the privacy of his bathroom, Minerva lets his robe slip off, and Norman tries to calm his stuttering heart. I love him, Barbara had said, and then Cisco, too. Based on the stiffness of his footing, Norman would bet Vincent had also contributed to the conversation.
“I love you,” the Norman in the mirror mouths at him, but it feels clunky and unwieldy and not at all genuine, not like—
“I love you!” Emma bubbles from behind him, bright and cheery and innocent in her boundless love.
“I love you, too,” Norman responds, feeling his face flush, and this time the words feel right, like a promise, and he lets the weight of it sink into his heart like an anchor holding him home. And,
“Ray too!” Emma continues, then pouts. “Even if he won’t admit it yet.”
Norman laughs, agreeing. “Yes. I love him back, too. And you love him, of course.”
Emma beams up at him. “I love my whole family!” she crows, throwing her arms out wide. Her eyes glow with genuine love and Norman would give everything to keep this lightness on her face.
He already has, really. He does not plan on stopping.
—
He thinks it might be a little bit romantic, gifting Emma the world of her dreams, a fresh start and all of her beautiful, impossible hope wrapped up in one master plan, with him alive as the ribbon tying it all together. To Ray, he will gift the last laugh that Norman had robbed him of that night two years ago, a childhood home gone up in smoke without the child inside. Norman’s own gift will be seeing the two of them again, alive and in the flesh.
He has imagined their reactions a thousand times. Soon, he will see them again, in the flesh.
He thinks he can make Emma smile. He thinks Ray might be mad, a little, like he was two years ago because this one, the real Ray, has yet to blow up at Norman. Norman fidgets with his shirt cuffs and rereads the same line on Cisco’s patrol report three times without really taking it in. Instead, he thinks of Jin’s report from the morning: Mission accomplished, Boss! Gracefield escapees & co. acquired. 96 total; 2 injured. ETA 4 hrs.
Emma perches on his desk and tries to calm him down. “Stop fidgeting,” she says, “I’m coming!”
She tucks her bangs behind her ear as she leans forwards to get into his face. “I mean it, Norman!” she puffs, and he laughs softly, capitulating as always. He puts his quill down and pushes his chair away from the table with both hands, standing up and stretching. Just as he raises both hands up, a knock sounds on the door.
It’s a blur what Minerva says to Hayato. The messenger leaves just as fast as he appears, and from behind him—
Emma, he breathes. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
There’s a teary gasp from the door, and suddenly she is there in flesh and blood and she’s running and he’s running and she is flesh and blood and warm, underneath his hands—
“Your ear,” Norman says, because that wasn’t part of the plan and it’s been there all this time in his head—oh, in his head—oh, oh, but Emma.
His next exhale leaves his body in a boneless shudder. She’s here, and they’re together again. Norman weeps in relief. Minerva dries his tears.
—
Norman knows that two years can change a person.
That the Emma-with-both-ears in his head is not real, and that the Ray in his head smiles a little too sharp for the Ray who had just slapped his cheek and then held him in the tightest embrace, in the span of seconds.
Norman gives Emma her gift and on the outside she smiles, but it’s only been two years and Norman still knows what Emma looks like when she is elated, and this is not one of those times. It hurts; Emma deserves a world where she should not have to make that expression. Norman will do anything to give it to her and their family.
Even if it means he’ll have to be away a little while longer.