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Halfway down the block, you realize you’re still wearing Whitley’s peacoat, hands rubbing along your belly as you focus very hard on keeping your knees steady with each step. It’s soft under your fingers, and the warmth that bled into you when Whitley buttoned it up to your chest is still here, flickering like an ember-lined hearth, now seated cozy between your ribs.
If you told him that, he’d shake his head and call you a lightweight. Again.
But he’s walking like always, just with a hand in one of his black jean pockets, and under the dim streetlights you can barely tell he’s not wearing slacks. He has on a cabled pullover that someone must have knit just for him, his button-up shirt’s collar is tucked underneath the light fuzz of his sweater, and you think he had a tie on earlier in the night, but you can’t really remember.
You wonder if the cables along his sweater are as soft as the wool and cashmere of his coat. Static purrs in your thumbs as you aimlessly circle them on the fabric.
Whitley stops.
Your head turns to follow him, and you realize you’ve spent most of the walk not looking where you’re stepping at the same moment you get your shoe caught in a crumbling break down the sidewalk.
The world doesn’t stop rolling when you land. In fact, it tremors and rings between your ears, colors bursting in your vision, and you want nothing more than to rest your head on the pavement.
You are ripped away from the spinning concrete and lifted to your feet, groaning, leaning into his soft shoulder as he swipes at your forearms. It is soft, his sweater. Soft like a blanket, a pillow, the cove of your bed.
“Oscar,” Whitley hisses.
You freeze. Your eyes snap open.
You’re up straight as if Ozpin took over, except you shooed him away at the first drink, and you smile and lift a hand at the car lingering down the block still.
You can’t see Jaune or Ren behind the tinted windows, but you know Ren is rubbing at his temples, Jaune grumbling under his breath.
“You’re such a mess,” Whitley whispers, as if to himself. “Oh, my jacket.”
“Sorry,” you say, sheepish.
“Did you not notice?”
“What?”
Whitley, adjusting the too-long sleeves over your arms, points his chin behind you.
You look over your shoulder at the suburban home you’ve been staying in these past few months. The living room window facing the front is illuminated, colorful television lights flickering between the shades. The frosted glass set in the front door also glows with the ceiling light above the stairs.
Qrow might as well have set up a searchlight pointing toward the only way into your room without climbing.
“Shit.”
“I was going to say act casual, but—”
“My—my semblance. I can…”
You trail off at the look in Whitley’s eyes. You realize that traveling through space and time when you are drunk for the first time might just be the worst idea you’ve ever had.
“Actually no I see your point.”
Whitley exhales loud through his nose. His cheeks are a little splotchy, but nothing you think would raise any red flags. “You’re an absolute mess,” he says, flatting the lapel down to your chest. That thought strikes you, not for the first time tonight, that he has the careful hands of a pianist.
You smile. “A good mess?”
“You certainly have some competition.” Whitley takes a step back, looks you up and down, and crosses his arms. “There, now. Presentable.”
“Thanks.”
You look over at the house, a temporary solution to lodging while the Academy is being cleansed by the hazard units. James offered to have you and Ozpin stay at his rooftop condo — I still think it was a waste of a mortgage, Ozpin grumbled when you summoned his input, even before James admitted he usually only spent the nights in his apartment within the Academy — but you wanted to be closer to your friends.
And you didn’t like seeing the rubble of the Schnee manor from James’s windows anyway.
“Qrow is gonna be so...” You grind your heels into the unsettled pavement. “I just hope he won’t think I’m trying to upset him, you know?”
You turn to Whitley. Realization does not set in his eyes, but he dons a weary, tired frown. “…I hope Clover isn’t here. I’d rather not be subjected to another thirty-minute pep talk he inevitably throws my way.”
The two of you step toward the front door. You glance down the street before the car is out of sight. It’s finally revving up again. “Qrow makes more jokes when he’s around. He’s not that bad.”
“He called me buckeroo last week. I don’t even think he was being sarcastic,” Whitley adds as you miss the keyhole because you’re giggling too hard.
“Lucky! I get slugger.”
You’re both still chuckling when you step inside. You notice Whitley needs to lean against a wall to get his boots off, and you’ve got your coat – his coat – off and added to the two hanging off the wall while he’s finishing unlacing the left one, and the world feels a bit less waterlogged as you kick off your sneakers and emerge from the narrow mudroom.
“Hey Oscar.”
Your socks are definitely the reason your other foot slips on the low step into the house.
Whitley grabs you by the middle, accidentally dislodging the staff from your belt, and it clatters unceremoniously outside of your vision. He has his hand on your back as you right yourself and glance around, needing to turn nearly you whole upper body to focus your swimming vision.
Clover, sitting on the couch, which of course faces the entranceway, smiles tightly and lifts the retracted staff caught in his hand.
His other hand is on Qrow’s knee, Qrow’s arm tucked behind him, over the sofa’s back. They’re in sweats. Clover’s hair is loose over his forehead. Qrow has pumpkins on his socks and a halting look on him.
“You, uh. Brought your friend back in one piece.” He glances between you and Whitley.
“Good evening, Mr. Branwen. And you, Captain Ebi.”
“Qrow is perfectly fine, kid,” Qrow tells Whitley at the same time Clover says, “You know you can call me Clover.”
You and Whitley stand at the foot of the stairs.
Qrow and Clover sit on the couch.
It sounds like they’re watching a vintage detective movie, all grainy voices and deep bass. You hope it drowns out how heavy you’re breathing.
“Oh—!” You remember to speak, but it cuts over even the whine of a saxophone on the TV. Your tongue is a fat muscle where it once formed words. You swallow, feeling very, very stupid. “It—um, c-can Whitley stay over? I mean—he’s already here, so—”
“That’s fine, kid.” Qrow doesn’t look angry. At least, you don’t think so. Even though you showed up shitfaced and interrupted his date. “You asked me yesterday, remember?”
Oh.
Clover doesn’t offer up the staff, and really, you kind of deserve it. “How was the party?”
“Radical,” you say. You don’t know why you say it. You don’t know what it means.
Whitley pats you on the back. You forgot his hand is still there, and the weight of it presses warmth through your shirt and into your skin. “It was a pleasant change of pace. I ran into a few familiar faces, we met several students from the Academy, and neither of us were roped into karaoke, so I’d say it was a success.”
You try not to gape at him. He’s got that smile he gives most of your friends when he has to make small talk.
“Good,” Qrow says. He and Clover slowly nod a few times. “Good, good.”
“We’ll just…” Whitley points to the stairs.
“Yeah.”
They exchange goodnights.
Except you.
You accidentally say “Good, nice,” and instead of correcting yourself you aim finger guns at Qrow and Clover.
Whitley all but shoves you up the stairs.
And that’s easy enough, with the railing right there, but Whitley is following so close behind you, you have to pause to look back at him. His face scrunches up, he mouths, keep going, and pushes your back lightly again.
You both go for the bathroom off the hall. You get a new toothbrush for Whitley under the cabinet, and he picks out a floss pick for each of you.
You wonder if you should feel weird about this. About brushing your teeth next to your best friend and having him spend the night with you in your room. About getting drunk with him at your first real party. About still being torn up deep inside by what he said by the piano, and how easily he said it, like it hurt less than the ache breaking apart in your chest for him.
But you don’t. Not with you shoulder to shoulder beside him, the fuzz of his sweater sticking to your bare arm, so close you can smell the alcohol on his breath behind the mint toothpaste.
Not in the car ride back, when you could feel the worry behind Jaune and Ren’s frustration and still didn’t tell them why you two wandered off.
Not even when you took that first drink because you felt so small lingering at the walls watching everyone else talk so easily, and you didn’t want to chain down Whitley when he probably knew so many more people here than you just by living in Atlas his whole life, but then he came and said he was looking for you, and he looked between your face and the red cup in your hand and rolled his eyes and took it from between your fingers and finished the rest.
We may as well both get into trouble, he told you with a grin bordering on a smirk, a look that somehow eased that coil in your gut.
Whitley leans forward to wash his face. You’re close enough to see his eyelashes sticking together. Granite-colored, you realized back at the party, not white like his bangs.
You splash water over your cheeks too, because you don’t want to get caught looking.
“Do you have any extra blankets?”
“Yeah,” you tell him. “Qrow keeps stuff like that in the closet down the hall.” As Whitley steps out, you remember to add, “Oh, uh, just watch out, it’s a little dusty. Sneeze dust, not, y’know. Elemental.”
Whitley stares at you for a moment and nods. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
He shuts the door behind him.
You stand in the bathroom and close your eyes. The world stays steady like this, and your eyelids are warm, so you lean on the bathroom sink, coaxing yourself back into the real world without that watery filter around you.
Even after your first leap through time with your semblance, you didn’t feel this displaced, as if every part of you was submerged. Saliva keeps building in your mouth. You look at yourself in the mirror, cheeks hot, eyes half-lidded.
You reach into your soul for Ozpin, not even really aware that’s what you’re doing, but you only hold his heartbeat for a second before he fades away. You feel hesitance from him, a brief once-over of your shared body that doesn’t strike immediate alarm or even concern beyond what looks—what feels closest to your mom’s expression back when she called you inside for the day and you had dirt under your fingernails and twigs in your hair.
You’ve never called him with Whitley around, you realize, and when you’re with him, annoyance always surged through you each time Ozpin prodded at the back of your mind to remind you of an upcoming meeting or training, so you figure he must be trying to give you privacy as best he can. And, anyway, you don’t think Ozpin was the type to get so drunk he had his cane confiscated, so he can’t really give you any advice on this.
When you’re done with the bathroom, you see a pile of fleece and quilts on the wood floor of your bedroom.
“Can I borrow something to change into for the night? I knew I had forgotten to pack something…”
“Sure! Sure,” you tell Whitley, and your focus shifts. He has his sweater off already, vegan leather backpack leaning on the wall, tie and belt looped in taut spirals on your dresser. Your gaze keeps flitting back up to them as you shuffle through your drawers to get nightclothes.
The two of you face away from each other to change. Your shirt still smells a little sour like the drink you sloshed on yourself, but your chest isn’t sticky or anything after cleaning up during the party.
“Oh, um. Where’s my sweater again? And my jacket?”
“I think Ren and…Jaune, was it? I know they took the sweater. Jaune’s bag was big enough that I’m pretty sure they got your jacket too.”
“Ah, okay.”
Fabric rustles in the silence. You swap out your pants for plain, tangerine-colored pajamas as quickly as you can. You hope you’re not breathing loudly still.
“All set?” He asks.
“Yeah. You?”
“All dressed down.” A pause. “Well, ah, I am dressed, just down instead of up because…flannel.”
You snort. “Gotcha.” And you turn.
He’s got your green-black shirt buttoned up to the second from the top, and where your arms fill out the sleeves, he has to fold them up his wrists almost to the Hound Grimm scars to free his hands. Your gray sweatpants aren’t long enough for his legs, but even with the drawstring knotted, the waistband is still sagging a bit down his narrow hips.
You meet his gaze. The corner of his mouth flickers upward, and an odd sense of urgency sets upon you. “Never seen you wear green,” is the first thing you can think to say.
“You have. Well, accents. Neutrals make more sense for everyday wear.” He buries his hands in his pockets and nods at your shirt. “You, on the other hand. I can’t believe you’re sleeping in a Henley; you can easily find a way to wear that outside.”
You blink. He gestures at his own collar and down the middle of his chest, starts saying something about necklines and number of buttons, then probably sees how stupid you look and trails off.
“How you know all this about clothes?” You get to your bed and sit at the corner, knee bumping at the footboard. Whitley steps backward to your desk and leans against it, folding his arms, probably to hide how the sleeves keep unraveling.
He shrugs a shoulder. “Most of Father’s work events had people at least Clover’s age. It was one of the few...unassuming topics I could reasonably discuss with them.”
“But...you do like it, right?”
“Yes.” He nibbles his bottom lip, barely a fragment of a movement, then lowers his chin. “But, Father would call me… Well, he said it’s a waste of time, dressing up like a doll. So I just wore white shirts and gray vests or jackets for the longest time. Acceptable attire for a Schnee.” His fingers thrum against his elbow, the one furthest from you, as if he can’t realize you can see. “...I had ten identically hemmed pairs of the same slacks I used to cycle through, because they were safe to wear until someone noticed.”
You don’t think you’ve ever heard the word hemmed until you met Whitley. You’ve sewn loose shirts closer to your body at your aunt’s farm, snipped fabric from old, too-tight clothes to layer around you when the fall nights grew cold, but even when you got your new outfit, you don’t think you’ve ever thought about seeing a tailor, let alone having people do that for you.
Whitley ducks his head to the side, for a second you think he’s about to scratch his chin like that even though both his hands are free, but then he coughs into his shoulder. More of an awkward cough than a sick one.
You hiccup and in the awkward moment when you taste alcohol and wonder if that can make you drunk again, you realize it took a decent amount out of him to tell you that, and you say, “I like the way you dress. I get kinda, um, excited, I guess? I-I mean, I wonder what you’re going to wear when we go out. I’ve never gotten it right, but, you know, it’s…always something new with you.”
After a second, he breathes out a chuckle. “I could offer my tutelage, if you really think that.”
“Yeah, sure.” You blink. “Is it…something fancy, like a tweed vest?”
“Is what like a tweed vest?”
“A tutelage.”
He stares at you, expression flattening.
Your ears get hot. You cringe at yourself.
Whitley’s mouth twitches, and you can’t help but grin at yourself, and then he’s laughing, hiding his teeth behind his hand and snorting with how hard he’s trying to keep it back.
“That,” he says as the giggles fade, “is my cue to go to sleep.”
You smile at him. Your body is warm down to the soul, more than the alcohol, more than the powerful heating common to every Atlas home. “G’night.”
He nods. “Good night.”
You scoot back until your tailbone is near the headboard and dive your legs under your blanket, then kick around a bit to get it loose from being tucked in. Usually you just smooth down the sheets and blanket when you get up, but you knew Whitley was going to come over, so you watched a few videos on your scroll to figure out how to tuck your bed, except fancy, which actually isn’t that useful since you didn’t remember you did that until now and you think Whitley might not have noticed either.
You yawn and rub at your eye. You glance aside, then lean your head over the edge of your mattress.
Whitley is cocooned in at least four layers of quilts.
“Hey, wait.”
He raises his eyebrows at you.
“You don’t need to sleep on the floor.”
“Shall I join Clover and Qrow on the couch downstairs?” Whitley gives you a look, but because only his head is emerging from the multicolor chrysalis he wrapped around himself, you don’t feel all that silly. “Oscar, I’m not so elite I’m going to ask you to surrender your bed.”
“We can share.”
“…Share?”
“Yeah,” you say, then pause to consider the size of your bed, the number of pillows: two, and luckily you haven’t used the second one since last week, when you changed the case and washed your bedding. “Yeah. There’s enough room. But probably get your own blanket? So we don’t steal from each other.”
He looks at you. He looks at your bed. He looks at the lump of fabric he has encased himself in, and he nods with a shrug. “Okay.”
You almost say really? but you’re afraid it’ll come out rude, or weird. You slide closer to the wall, and Whitley eases himself up, takes a few hopping steps in his cocoon, then glances down and rolls his eyes. You smile as he molts from it and picks out two blankets. One of them is the cozy fleece with a map of the solar system that Ozpin mailed to James as a Wintermas gift and reclaimed after a long lecture when he saw it in James’s closet with the tag still on after five years – all the while Glynda and Qrow tried very hard not to laugh in the background.
You smell hints of sweat on Whitley, the earthy tinge of the outdoor wind, lemongrass and lavender from the fancy shampoo he likes.
“Sorry,” he says, in a whisper, and you lean in as if he’s telling a secret. “I usually shower at night. I’m just…really tired.”
You blink. “Oh.”
“I—I showered before the party, though.”
His blue eyes are wide. Even when Jaune called your names from across the sunroom, anger flooding over the notes of panic still in his voice, he was unphased. More annoyed than anything. Not like this, with his cheeks coloring.
One of you still smells like alcohol.
“No, no, don’t worry. Same here. It doesn’t bother me. So, uh, don’t feel weird.”
“Right.”
You look at each other.
“...Good night, again.”
“Yeah,” you say as he turns away to shut off the bedside lamp. Remnants of moonlight stripe across your legs from the shuttered windows. A line falls across the side of Whitley’s jaw; luminescence from the shattered side of the moon scatters down his back.
You drag yourself around to face the wall and pull your pillow closer under your head.
His breath is soft behind you. Yours is still coming in puffs, and it takes a moment to realize you’re trying to be quieter to hear him.
Your head is still hazy. Flashes of the night roll through your thoughts like grain, pass between your fingers before you can get a solid grasp on most of them, especially after you started drinking.
Jaune said the Hemlocke family had a kid in each Academy year and a vacation home in Argus the parents were staying at, but he didn’t mention the whole estate thing, and when you started seeing garages nearly the size of horse stables and the street signs listed only surnames, dread clogged up your insides. As the car pulled up, it felt like all of Atlas Academy was there, but Whitley didn’t look scared or impressed, just a bit tired, but he smiled when you messaged him panicked emojis on your Scroll, and he was still smiling when he caught your stare.
A little later in the night was this team on the karaoke stage that was really, really into it, and you think you remember this whole choreographed dance to an overplayed Wintermas song, and you know you remember Whitley laughing so hard his breath was whistling, and your cheeks hurt, and you had never seen Whitley smile so wide his eyes crinkled up.
You and Whitley, sitting with your legs tucked on the cushions of a window nook, and you were waving your arms telling him a story about one of Ruby’s wild cooking experiments when the team was on the road, and though he was balancing his chin on his palm his eyes never left you.
You and Whitley, digging in on the veggie pizza that barely anyone else touched. He looked maybe surprised or amazed, and you asked, and he told you that he actually never had pizza, and your jaw dropped and you brought him back to survey the rest, but the plain cheese and the mushroom and spinach were gone and everything else had meat on it. But he smiled at you and said it’s fine, the two of your can try it next time.
You and Whitley, and it’s so easy, talking to him, but you spilled a drink on your front and he took you to one of the upstairs bathrooms, you were sitting on a toilet lid and leaning back against the tank because sitting up took too much out of you, he was quieter as he helped you out of your sweater and shirt and handed you warm, damp washcloths to sponge the smell and residue away as best you could.
You told him you weren’t that drunk, but he didn’t say anything, and there was something in his face that made you feel cold and small, but you don’t remember why, and you don’t think you were able to pick it out then either.
You had him leave you there to sober up, and he made you promise to call if you didn’t feel good. You sat there with the door locked for a decent while, then you looked hard at yourself in the mirror and practiced the words and then—then you felt like you needed to tell him before the moment passed, and that led you all over the house, from the bedrooms on the third floor to the smoky basement.
A greenhouse lined the far side of the house, where the hanging pots were empty and the winter wind cut sharp through your aura. You heard the piano, and at the end of that desolate stretch was a sunroom, a white piano.
Whitley was sitting, head bowed, and you stood at the archway as he played.
You must have made a sound when he finished, because he whipped around, but when he saw it was you, there was still something wary in his eyes, and you looked at him and said—
“Oscar?”
You blink into the dimness. You wonder if you should roll over to look at him. “Yeah?”
“You’re breathing hard.”
“Uh. Should I…breathe less?”
A pause. “You—Smartass.” You hear him shuffle.
“Guess you’re rubbing off on me.”
A longer pause. You wrinkle your nose. Maybe not the best choice of words.
“Whitley?”
“Mmhm?”
“Are you still up?”
“No, I’m completely unconscious.” But he shifts again, and you feel his weight redistributed, the fabric rustle.
You roll gently on your back and look over.
He’s mirroring you, except with his pale arms over the layers of blankets, blue eyes blinking slow. His hair had fallen backwards in rivulets up his pillow. You turn your head the rest of the way to look more easily. For the first time you notice he has a widow’s peak.
Your searching eyes meet his. And the corners of his mouth quirk, and maybe it seems so much like a smile because it is. “What?”
“Huh?”
“You called my name as I was within reach of sleep. So it must have been important.”
“I think, but I forget.”
“Sure.”
You squint at him. “Didn’t you call me first?”
Whitley closes his eyes. For a moment you think he’s about to fall asleep, but he yawns and readjusts his hips, stretching. You hear joints popping, and he huffs out a breath at your grimace. “I thought we were going to sleep.”
You flatten your lips into a line. You lift your hands as if to shrug, but there’s no way he’d see that under the blanket. “I just…have a lot on my mind.”
He smirks. “Like how much you adore parties?”
“Like…”
You nibble at your lip. The music back in the living room made your ears ring, but you didn’t need to struggle to talk to him.
“Like how I’m fourteen and I…don’t think I’ve ever been around that many people before. Especially not when I barely know anyone. I just wondered…how everyone else can just go and have fun instead of watching from the walls.”
“Trust me. You’re not missing out on anything.” Whitley adjusts his weight again.
You get the feeling he wants to go on his side. You start turning, but something goes unsteady in your gut. Lying flat again, you try to hold back a burp. It doesn’t work.
“Are you okay?”
“I want to turn over but I might throw up.”
“Truly a dilemma.” But he doesn’t look bothered.
So little seems to bother him. And if it does, like being around his sisters, or talking about his mom, he just doesn’t let it happen.
You don’t think you can do that, but the closest you think you’d get is…reversing time a few days, every couple of weeks. Not to change anything, but to make it happen slower. Make it easier.
For so long, it was like things either drifted by glacially or avalanched all at once with to no chance to get your bearings. Months ago, within twenty-four hours, you inherited Oz’s magic and unlocked your Semblance. General Ironwood both shot you and took your guidance, like you were really had the wisdom of the infinite lifetimes you are destined to be. You saw Salem in person for the first time in this life.
You met Whitley.
“Ever since the siege on Atlas—the second one, the one in this timeline—do you ever feel like everything is the same until nothing is? I mean, it takes so long to get a handle on things, and when you finally have a grip on a couple, a bunch more just flood in, bigger and faster and just…more, like it’s overwriting everything you knew.”
His stare is heavy on you. “I…suppose so. But in a different way. I’m not one of you Huntsmen, after all.” He glances aside for a second and frowns. “Day to day life is the same. But when I remember months ago, even just weeks, it’s as if a completely different person went through that.”
“I get it. Sometimes I feel…like I’m a kid and a million years old, all at once. All these new things keep coming up, and a part of me is excited for everything I would’ve never gone through otherwise, but another part of me wants to just sleep until the hard things are done with.”
His eyes are steady on yours.
You wonder if now is a good time to tell him.
You wonder if there ever will be a good time.
“…That probably sounds so dumb.”
“No. That’s not dumb at all.” And the thing is, he looks like he means it. You don’t think you’ve seen him give this look to anyone else. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Are you… Do you really want to follow your relative’s footsteps and have a part in these big decisions? And not because the kingdom needs to be restructured and the world needs to be saved, but because you want to follow them?”
“…I think so. I mean. I guess the alternative was working at my aunt’s farm.”
“And if you had more alternatives? If you weren’t related to Ozpin?”
The lie prickles along your collar. “…I don’t know.” You look to him, wanting to ask, not sure if it’s okay.
He bites his lip. In the stripes of moonlight through the blinds, his hair is silvery, eyes bright, the lines on his face drawn the barest bit deeper. “…I don’t think I want to inherit the company.”
“Because you have other dreams?” you ask, gently.
“Because…I feel like I’m upholding the legacy of a man who died long before I was born,” he says, voice low and deliberate. “My grandfather’s company was his life. He was foolish enough to entrust it to Father. And my father squeezed out every bit of humanity he could from it. Bloated it beyond any good it could still do. And I want to let it go. But my sisters have their own responsibilities. And my mom—” His teeth click together. You watch the knot of his throat bob as he swallows hard. His gaze moves forward, to the ceiling, blinking so evenly it almost unnerves you.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can try.”
You bite your lip. And you ease yourself onto your side, ignoring the unsteady give in your chest and stomach as your face him, trying to ignore the cautious hardness in his eyes. “…Why don’t you ever talk about your mom?”
He takes a deep breath. Closes his eyes. You watch him draw his bottom lip into his mouth and exhale, slow and controlled, through his nose. He rolls onto his side, tucking a hand under his cheek, the other close to his chest, and his eyes are ice when he opens them.
“Because I have nothing important to say about her.”
He shrugs, curves his lip in what might be an aloof smirk but looks like a grimace instead.
You swallow, but you realize, dimly, that this look is not meant for you.
Still, you wonder if your voice was as soft as his, back when you told him about your mom. If you were as gentle as he was when you said what happened to her out loud for the first time in years and doing that somehow made it more real and broke your heart all over again.
He blinks fast now. You watch the Whitley you know better come back.
And his stare flickers down at your neck.
You instinctively want to reach up, as if you think there’s dirt smudged there or something, but by now you know what that kind of look is usually about.
A part of you is somehow both touched and annoyed that he hasn’t even mentioned it before.
“Go ahead. You can ask.”
“…Why do you wear those bandages all the time?”
Even though you trust you won’t find any, you search his eyes for anything other than curiosity. Just apprehension, a bit of fearfulness either at how you’ll respond or what he’ll find.
You reach behind your neck. With you left arm under your body, it’s a bit awkward, but you’ve done this before, and your fingers navigate under the first layer to unclasp the safety pins you can place as easily as tying your boots or writing your name.
The fabric goes the barest bit slack. You trace your fingers between the layers on each side of your neck to loosen it more, then, when you can’t feel it flush to your neck anymore, reach for the front.
Whitley’s fingers catch at the dry skin at the back of your hand. You still as he soothes his palm over your knuckles, his fingertips light on your calloused palm. His bangs have scattered across his pillow. “If you wouldn’t normally show me, you don’t have to.”
His fingers are warm.
You remember his fingers on the keys, the cords on the back of his hands working, his body beside yours on the narrow bench, his coat swathed around you, how warm you were down to your heart until he slowed to a stop and started talking.
“It’s fine. I want you to be the first to see anyway.”
You look at him, and he brings his hand back, brings both hands close to his chest, and you try to give him a reassuring smile as you shake the front off your neck and collar. The loosened fabric pools in ribbons in the space between the two of you.
It takes a moment.
Whitley’s eyes widen. He flinches and crushes them shut. After a few seconds he opens his eyes again, flickering between your face and the base of your neck before he stills. You see the moonlight reflect in his wet eyes.
“They’re not as bad as they look,” you tell him.
“…I’m so sorry,” he whispers, barely more than a breath.
“Don’t be. It was a long time ago. And you didn’t, you know, say it was gross or anything.”
You wait a few seconds, and when Whitley says nothing else, you put the bandages back in place. You prefer sleeping with it covered anyway, even back when you lived with your aunt. The few times you don’t are when you think you catch the smell of trapped skin, and no one has ever pointed it out to you but you scrub hard at the taut flesh when you’re washing, let it dry either alone in the open or with a towel or loose wrap hiding the worst of it. Ozpin told you that when you finish growing, they’ll be less noticeable, but you never even meant to share that memory with him, and it’s already been years since that happened.
Whitley’s breath is hitching. He must be trying really hard to hide it, because even now the rise and fall of his chest is steady, only a bit more labored than usual, and his cheeks are dry.
You look at him. Your clothes don’t feel like they fit right anymore, and you shouldn’t say it, but you’re starting to recognize the tightness in his mouth, the way his hands clasp close to his chest, almost under his chin, and you’ve only seen it, layers deep, four times before.
The day Jacques Schnee was arrested, and you cleared your hospital room because you could tell he needed it, and you got him to pull the recliner beside your bed to watch some dumb show whose ten-year-old reruns you had been stuck watching for days. Just before you fell asleep, you heard his breathing scatter, and you kept quiet. You owed him that much.
The dawn of the siege’s final day, where you were by his bedside this time, and the Grimm-soiled blood draining from between the stitches on his arms was only part of the reason you were shaking. Ruby’s silver eyes got the worst of it, but Whitley still pressed his fingertips around the wounds, and you watched for movement under the flesh each time you changed his bandages.
A couple of nights after the siege, when James told you Winter was going to be okay. You were both in the café in the hospital, and you remember how easily he retracted his hands from under his chin, crossed his arms instead and looked hard at his cooling coffee and said he knew she would be fine, she’s resilient after all.
He didn’t cry, but when you reached out and touched your fingertips to the back of his wrist, he didn’t move away.
It’s a cruel thing to say, after tonight.
But you have to.
“Does it hurt to look at them because you imagine how much it must have hurt to get them? Or because it’s me that got them?”
His mouth trembles, a flicker of a movement. “Both. But mostly the second. Because it’s you that—that got that.”
“That’s like how I felt. When we were at the Hemlockes’ piano.”
He freezes all the way down to the rise and fall of his chest. Muscles in his jaw flutter. He unlaces his fingers and tucks one hand under his head, shaking in the sparse distance travelled between there and the pillow. His other hand closes tight against the sheets.
“…Did you really mean it? What you said back there.”
His eyes search yours. This close, you can see the folds in his irises, the flecks of gray in his eyes. “I would’ve thought you’d have forgotten that by now.”
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” you tell him. “It’s not the kind of thing I’d forget about. Not in a few hours. Or overnight.”
He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. You see the shifting under his eyelids. When he opens them again, there’s something to his expression, a combination of what might make sense in individual pieces but you can’t find a word for when it’s all together like this. “Do you feel sorry for me?”
You think about it. “No. But I do feel sad.”
And you do recognize the clench in his jaw, his lips firming to a line. “Sad,” he repeats.
“Yeah,” you say, fingertips firming into your palm, “because friends get sad when their friends are hurting. And you—you’ve been hurting. And it makes…it makes me sad, knowing you’ve been thinking—”
“Please. Don’t let drunken rambling occupy your mind. That never does any good.” He rolls to his back, staring resolute at the ceiling. The sheets he moved from are barely wrinkled in the slivers of light. “You have other obligations to attend to, anyway.”
“You’re not an obligation, Whitley. You’re—” Your breath hitches, eyes dry, and you breath in until your heart hurts a little less. “You’re my friend. My only friend I’ve made on my own in a long time.”
In his profile you see it. Something almost desperate in its calmness, a faint echo of how he looked when he said what he did at the piano.
“If I knew you’d react like this I never would have told you anything.”
Ice rises up your face, your throat.
He glances over.
The triumph in his eyes hurts worst of all.
“Do you have anything else to say before we sleep?”
You want to tell him about Oz. About Salem. About how scared you are all the time, about losing yourself and how you were really starting to accept that your life was no longer your own.
You think this feeling, the blooming ache of your heart when you’re with him, the one feeling that you know is yours and uniquely yours, is falling in love.
Loving him doesn’t scare you, it’s how much time you have left to give him.
If it was up to you, you’d be here for as long as he’d let you.
But it’s not.
And you know how much it will hurt him.
That’s why it’s the one thing you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to tell him about.
So you don’t say that you think you’re more scared of losing this than he is, that sometimes you feel like he’s the only one who would truly miss the person you are right now, that every time you think it might be okay for your consciousness to melt into a hundred more you think of him and that if he’s here for you, then you’re becoming a little more like someone worth staying in this world because he wants you here, with him, but what you fear most is losing this, losing him.
Sometimes you think you think of him too much, but you don’t need to tell him that.
Whitley shuts his eyes and huffs out a breath. He rolls to his side, away from you.
“Goodnight, Oscar.”
Your heart pulses cold and sore up to your neck. His hair is silvery. The tag of your flannel shirt is sticking out against his neck, and you’d usually tell him and tuck it in yourself if he said it’s okay because he would hate to be seen like that, but your unspoken words have sealed you inside yourself, sealed glass around the world and made it hazy and muffled.
You turn around.
His breaths are light and even.
Pain beats hard in the cell of your heart.
Along the wall, the shadows are still. Mint has washed away the sourness on your tongue. Your pillow has sunken under your head, your eyelashes scraping at the fabric as you tilt your forehead into it. The room still smells faintly of alcohol and sweat but also lemongrass and lavender.
You hear him breathing.
“...G’night.”
The mattress is firm underneath you, the threads of your blanket coarse.
You remember the peacoat he wrapped around you.
You remember the warmth flowing from his hands to yours.
You remember the look in his eyes when you told him you love the way he plays piano. Like you were enough to convince him to stay.
“I’m really glad you’re still here, Whitley.”
Your voice only meets the night.
But you hope one day you can have him believing that too.