Chapter Text
Adeline is over 300 years old, yet certain subliminal parts of her remain, against all odds, human. She still rises with the sun, arranges her infinity around the movement of cosmic bodies, still looks up to what few stars are possible to see in the city and wonders at their cold light. It is a human thing, this marvel. She is aware of this, of course. Meaning she knowingly lied when she told Luc she was no longer human. She can never be anything but. She is, however, just the tiniest bit more, in the way only she can be.
Luc knows humans. Humans are his customers, his product, and his profit. What sort of salesman would he be if he did not understand them, inside and out, back to front, every shadow-filled crevice they try so desperately to hide from prying eyes? He has had centuries to study their mannerisms and habits and centuries to be disappointed in the deals they offer. So many lack the knowledge of what a soul is truly worth. So yes, Luc knows humans, which puts him at an advantage in this game Adeline plays, because he knows humans, and Adeline only thinks she knows him.
Another thing that is human, so terribly, importantly human. Error. Flaws. An event ushering in an unforeseen and perhaps unwanted conclusion. Adeline is still human after 300 years of the world doing its absolute best to expel her, and so she errs.
It is a little mistake. Not one Luc would normally notice, but this is Adeline, and every word that comes from her lips has a quality unlike anything he has heard before. She moves with the grace of immortality and yet speaks as though time were leaking through her fingers. Luc supposes he has made it so. And so he notices.
I will be yours, as long as you want me by your side.
She says she is no longer human, and yet she speaks of want as only a human can, as if want is some ephemeral thing, as fleeting as the pale sunlight that lingers on the edge of summer. How could she know that want, for Luc, for whatever he is, is not seasonal. It is not the tide, keeping schedule with the moon. It is always and endless, and sometimes he believes the word want does not cover what amounts to something more akin to hunger, to need.
Whatever Luc is, whatever elements make up the shadows broiling beneath this gossamer skin he wears, he is nine parts hunger and one part boredom, and the latter only serves to feed the former.
Still, Luc understands her dilemma. He is not entirely cold. Somewhere among the darkness that convalesces into a mock heart flickers emotions (as he knows are reflected in his gaze, for there exists no other reason Adeline might bring herself to make such prolonged eye-contact). He understands that after the salve that Henry Strauss brought her, Adeline would be desperate to keep it alive, so that her world in flames might at least offer some warmth to the one who filled it so prettily for those brief months.
It is easy, as one’s love lays dying and a heart too soon found begins to break, to misinterpret a human face as human, especially when Luc has chosen his so expertly. He does not blame her in mistaking her definition of want as his.
So Adeline, although she does not know it yet, will lose.
She cannot win. Neither will Luc, of course, as Adeline’s descent into hopelessness will surely make his own life miserable, but it is possible for two to lose a game when the rules have been set so haphazardly.
As long as you want me by your side.
Luc will never stop wanting her, and Adeline will never stop making herself unwanted. Even Henry Strauss, as he reaps the rewards of telling the invisible girl’s story to the world, will feel a dull ache when he remembers. Because that had been part of the deal; let him remember me, she had said, and so Strauss will, and he will never be content. Every part of the world he visits, every town he sees, every photo he takes will be less, simply for the fact that they do not have her.
Adeline has single handedly created a situation in which a devil, a human, and a pseudo-immortal find themselves trapped, miserable, and entirely too stubborn to have a productive conversation.
If Luc was not in the process of losing his mind, he might almost be impressed.
***
There are good days, and there are bad days, as is to be expected. There are days when New York is too loud, too chaotic, and time moves so quickly Henry almost feels the minutes rustle his hair as they fly past. There are days when the elevator seems to take an eternity and he wonders whether he has become ancient at some indeterminable point between floors five and six.
And then there are the days when, as he walks through Central Park, his nose pressed into his grey scarf, he catches a glimpse of the book that has become the strings tying his fragile heart together, the name that has become his center of gravity, and everything feels a little more right.
Cairo was too bright, London too dreary, and Los Angeles too sprawling, a concrete spider stretched under the palm trees. The only one that had felt real was, of course, the one that felt too much like her, but an unfamiliar her, a her he had only known through stories, and therefore Paris and all its little villages was scratched off the list.
Back to New York, then. Where the Addie he knew lives in the pages and minds of enough people to put him on the Bestsellers list, and he can see an echo of her in the buildings and the streets and the museums. New York is less of a city and more of an outline, an enhancement of the negative space she used to fill.
Bea’s nearly finished her thesis. It’s all she talks about now, this muse splashed like droplets of paint across the canvas of history. Henry thinks it’s wonderful, even though she might never remember meeting her subject, all those second-first-introductions.
Robbie is harder. He always has been, very much in character for an actor. So full of light, but a harsh light. Blinding, if you look too long. Burning, if it comes too close. That’s why it hurts so much to see the fog over his eyes. So Henry tries not to look too hard and probably ends up looking like an asshole, instead.
Better an asshole than a manipulative, lying devil, twisting promises into currency and love into… competition?
As long as you want me by your side.
He can’t ever forget those words, no more than he can forget the girl who said them, although the world seems to insist on him doing so.
But she had asked, had sold her soul for the second time (her living soul and her undead one now both belonged to him, Henry’s dark benefactor; surely there is a conflict of interest in there somewhere) for him to remember her, and so he will.
Addie gave him his life at the cost of hers, and Henry is not sure his life is worth so much. To Luc, of course, it is nothing. Which is not quite fair, something Henry is fairly sure deals are meant to be.
It had been raining when the shadow whom he calls Luc, thanks to Addie, had appeared from nothing, and it is raining again now. One moment Henry had been alone, and then he was not. He is rarely alone anymore. Robbie and Bea offer happy company, and his curse that cost a life provides any amount of manufactured love, if he were to ever accept it. He never will, though, and he sometimes asks whether it was worth the price.
For Addie, the answer is always yes.
The rain tends to remind him of Luc, but not only because of that first meeting. Rain is the great cleanser, the revealer of secrets hidden beneath dust, and Luc is nothing if not an old, dusty, heaping pile of secrets.
Draped in a beautiful skin, of course. But dusty and old nonetheless.
There had been other nights after he was given the power to be anyone except himself. Nights when Luc was only visible because of the indentation he left between the raindrops, nights when the mist encroached upon the street-lamps everywhere but for a stretch of shadow in the rough shape of a man. A man who is not a man, but that’s a secret for Henry to keep. So that when he strolls down Broadway, the shadow at his side, he’s the only one who knows what he walks with.
It’s raining now, but Luc doesn’t appear.
Of course he wouldn’t. He has his prize. Why would he visit his bait, alone in a room of photos and memories?
(There is some part of Henry that feels left behind. Tossed out. Used up. He has served his purpose. He has forced Addie back into the hands of her demon and lost his own in the process, lost the two people who saw him without that fog over their eyes.)
He should feel happy. Addie has given him his life; he should love it as she wanted him to. He had her for a time and was hers for longer, the only one (not anymore) who had. Addie belongs to the world now, as she should, as she perhaps always had. The world is bruised with her marks.
And maybe, Henry is coming to realize that her memory and the world isn’t enough. Not when it’s a greying memory and a world without her.
At the cost of her immortal soul, Addie has bought his dissatisfaction.
Will she forgive him?
The quiet room illuminates under a tumultuous flash of lightning, and between the dying of the light and the roar of thunder, Henry remembers.
It had just been an idea, the faintest outline of plan, back when he had been running low on hope and high on righteous anger. The green-eyed darkness hadn’t been Luc, then. It had just been Him. In moments of weakness, it was his shadow.
And so Henry, drop-out PhD student and bookshop employee, went to ground in the only way he knew how. He read. Countless hours, words unintelligible streams of history and theory, physics and witchcraft, theses on God, on the lack of God, on the old gods. And he came to the conclusion that this conglomeration of darkness made tangible, given the face of royalty, must be a demon.
And to think he had been studying theology.
Books on the old gods are few and far between, and generally unreliable. But Henry found a pattern and he grabbed onto it, and that was the name. The green-eyed demon had to have a name, and he would find it, and it would give him the power to reverse his curse that he had not intended to be a curse.
And then Addie called him Luc, and Henry began to doubt that the demon had anything more than a nickname given by a young French girl. For all intents and purposes, his shadow was Luc.
Yet Addie had also provided his face, and Luc had admitted himself that it was changeable. Who’s to say there isn’t a truer name hidden somewhere? Here at last is Henry’s chance. His chance to free Addie from a game she cannot win because she and her partner are dancing the same steps, mirrored.
Maybe, some part of him wonders, she does love him. Love born out of necessity is love nonetheless, and three hundred years is a bond he can’t even come close to matching.
Henry knows all this, but he also knows, with the intensity of one so recently in love, that his bond was separate but equal, is equal, to that which she shares with their demon.
Luc has a name like he has a form, hidden under that sharp, cold facade. A form that reaches into a person’s chest and rips out their soul, a form that is the reason humanity has always had a primordial fear of the dark and what lives in it. It must exist (Henry has to believe it exists, or he doesn’t think he’ll be able to continue).
Bea had begged for an ending. Henry intends to make one.