Chapter Text
She's already there when Gerry turns the corner, perched on a ledge that borders the rowhouse next door to their coffee shop, legs crossed at the ankles and swinging impatiently like a little kid.
“You know, you’re pushing 60,” he calls out, grinning. “Surprised you haven’t learned some patience in your old age.”
She turns her beautiful face towards him, long auburn hair shining in the sunlight, and sticks out her tongue. Gerry hoists himself up next to her and passes her a cigarette, lighting them both.
“So your girlfriend tried to kill me on Friday,” Gerry offers. He always wants to get Agnes to ask “which one?” and she never will—one of the many games he plays that he knows he’ll never win. She just blows out a stream of smoke and waits.
Gerry sighs. “It was Jude.”
“Doesn’t seem like it quite took,” Agnes comments, looking him over. Aside from some singed hair, she’s right.
“Hasn’t so far,” Gerry agrees.
Agnes leans against him, threading her arm through his and nestling her head into his shoulder. He feels her warm exhales against his neck as they sit in silence, smoking and thinking.
It’s hard not to feel protective of Agnes, for all that she’s older than his mother and basically a god. It doesn’t help that she looks like a lost teenager, in her little mod dresses and Mary Janes, as if fashion stopped moving when she stopped aging. Add to that the fact that she’ll suddenly open her mouth and say the saddest thing you’ve ever heard. Like,
“You’re the only one who I can touch like a person. Everyone else, it’s just…” She trails off, unwilling to put words to the reverent caresses of those who love her like a god and the agony she unwillingly inflicts on anyone foolish enough to see her as mortal. And then Gertrude. The complex tangle of pain and love that make up any interaction with Gertrude.
Gerry lifts his head from hers, untangling a strand of her flaming hair that twisted in his eyebrow piercing, so he could look at her. She gives him her signature half-smile, a little upturn of the left side of her mouth that feels more like a tic than an expression.
“I know,” he says, trying to keep the pity that he knows he would despise, were he in her position, out of his voice. And he does know, without her having to say it.
He leans his head back on hers and they sit together, quiet, watching the sun dip low over the treetops and houses, glowing orange streaks painting the sky.
***
It's Gerry who's early this time. By a few hours. It had been an exhausting night that included a stab wound from a Slaughter avatar, 8 stitches in A&E, and a full hour of bullshit from Mary for losing the book. He had fallen into bed for a few hours of fitful sleep before his alarm went off to get him out of the house before Mary got up to continue her tirade.
And he had nowhere else to go. So here he ws, at their coffee shop, curled up in the sofa against the far wall, on his third cup in two hours and picking listlessly at a scone.
Agnes practically waltzes in at 10:00 on the nose, wearing a daisy print dress and a straw hat, smelling of the sunshine that is making Gerry’s red-rimmed eyes water. She drops her bag and plops next to him, tipping her movie star sunglasses down her nose to look him over.
“You look terrible,” she says brightly, slinging one arm around his shoulders and pulling him in to plant a kiss on his cheek. “Another one?”
He nods grimly and her other hand plucks his empty mug from the table in front of them, sweeping away to the counter and taking her warmth and sunshine with her.
Gerry pushes through the haze of misery that surrounds him like the cloud of dirt that follows Pigpen around in the Peanuts cartoons to watch Agnes flirt with the barista. She's honest to god twirling her hair as the other woman blushes over their drinks. She has been watching a lot of romantic comedies lately, he knows, and it wasn’t unusual for her to get caught up in a sort of extended daydream that she enacts with the rest of the world.
What's unusual is for her to seem so happy doing it.
She leaves the bar with a little twirl, mug in each hand, and sits down next to Gerry again.
“D’you want to talk about it?” she asks, passing him the coffee that is sure to push him from awake to jittery.
Gerry thinks about it, then says, “Nah. Tell me something nice instead.”
So she does.
***
In October, shivering on the sidewalk café tables that were just this side of too chilly, both of them are resolutely determined to enjoy the changing leaves and the scent of burning firewood wafting through the air. Instead of going inside, they push their chairs together and curl up under a blanket, watching busy Londoners bustle up and down the street.
“I don’t think I can kiss men,” Agnes says out of nowhere, sipping her coffee.
“You kiss me all the time.”
“No, properly, I mean.”
“I don’t want to kiss you “properly,” Agnes. You’re like a million years old. And it’d be weird.”
“No, I don’t mean you. I mean human men. I think I could probably kiss you, but yes, you’re right, it would be weird.”
“Leaving aside the fact that I am human men, okay, agreed, no kissing. You’re bringing it up why?”
Agnes shifts uneasily next to him and when she speaks, her voice is soft. “I didn’t want to hurt him. Jack, I mean. I didn’t really care about him, but I never wanted that. I just thought…” She hesitates.
“Thought what?” He levels his voice to match hers, quiet and neutral.
“Well. It’s what girls do, right? Find a nice man who looks at them like they are special, but not that special, still attainable. Go on dates with him, kiss him, wait for him to love you like you’re a person. Isn’t that right?”
Her brow is furrowed and her dark eyes are wide, looking at Gerry as if the question isn’t rhetorical, as if he holds the answers of humanity, as if he is something more than a fuck-up twenty-year-old who barely knows what it means to be a person himself. Wasn’t like he’d had a ton of examples.
“Some of them do,” he reminds her. This is not the first conversation they’ve had where he tried to unpack her compulsory heterosexuality. You’d think as both a minor fear deity and a lesbian, she’d be above such things, but her bizarre life had ended up with her tying up wanting men as a part of being human. They were working on it.
Meanwhile, Agnes has warmed to her topic. “And when I let him kiss me, I thought, this is it, this will make me a real girl. Like a sort of fairy tale. And I know it was cruel, I mean, I “know” in the way that you know that 2 and 2 is 4 or that London is the capital of England. It didn’t feel cruel, to kiss him right there in front of Jude and everyone, or to kiss him because I wanted out.”
“I think that’s the most human thing there is.” Gerry comments. “Wanting out.”
She gives him a rare real smile, eyes warm and crinkling a bit.
“A human desire that’s enough to make one embrace the monstrous?” She raises their entwined hands to look pointedly at his tattoos, still healing and glowing red at her touch.
Gerry shrugs. “Whatever works.”
She nudges him with her shoulder. He nudges back.
“Okay, okay. Yes, it is. God, her face when I came home with them. You should have seen it.” He grins at the memory, eyes gazing off into the distance, faking nostalgia for a couple weeks ago. Well, mostly faking. He had felt more powerful then than he had in ages.
“Lesser men would have dropped dead from it,” she offers, smile in her voice.
“Well, you know, us Keays are made of sterner stuff. As she never hesitates to remind me.”
“So did it work? Will it get you out?” Her tone was hard to place. Hopeful, but with a thread of fear. He turns to look at her.
“Nothing will get me out. I know that well enough.” He sighs. “All I can do is get a little more control, carve out something that’s just mine.”
“And the Eye lets you have that?”
“Not exactly. There’s a line I have to walk, to keep it at bay I mean.” Gerry shrugs again. “I can’t do it forever. Dunno that I’ll live long enough for it to matter either way. But it makes a difference right now.”
Agnes makes a hum of disapproval and Gerry chuckles at it.
“Not even you will live forever, you know.”
“Perish the thought,” she says, making a face. “But you deserve more than that.”
“Maybe. Maybe we both do.”
This is enough, though. A warm blanket and a hot drink on a cool night with some who loves and understands you like you want to be loved and understood.