Work Text:
BAZ
I sit and stare.
This is new. The staring. The being able to. Simon never wanted me to look at him, before.
His tail twines around my wrist, thick and warm. I rub my thumb over the spade, resting in my hand.
Simon twitches, just-waking, and his wings flutter with it. He's looking back, eyes so blue in the dim morning light of our room.
Our room.
"Mornin'," he says, and it's low and thick with sleep. He stretches and his wings flare out behind him.
"Morning," I say. I'm helpless to do anything else. Barely-awake Simon is another beast entirely, especially like this. Sleep lingers and he's relaxed, breathing deep and settled, calm eyes on me.
It's unfairly thrilling. If I had a heartbeat, it would be racing.
Simon sits and stretches again. I watch the light of dawn settle in broad patches over his bare skin and it's pale bronze, it's freckled gold.
His tail twitches again. Simon looks down, looks at it around my wrist and settled in my hand like a particularly large worrystone. I'm still running my thumb absentmindedly along the edge of the spade, and it's cooled slightly under my touch.
I loosen my grip enough for him to pull away easily, if he wants to. (I don't want him to.)
He doesn't.
He smiles instead, and it's sunlight and warmth and warm drinks on cold days. He leans forward and I meet him, and when he kisses me it’s everything I used to dream of. It's everything I thought that terrible year had stolen away from me.
…
I smooth the last corner of the apple duvet and step back. The bed is made, conspicuously neat in the disordered chaos of the rest of our room. It’s not on purpose, the mess—it’s just that we didn’t think to buy shelves or a wardrobe, so our clothes lie in piles and my books are in stacks everywhere.
I don’t mind it. The mess is real. (The mess is proof.)(I’m welcome here. Welcome enough to have my belongings scattered on the floor, tangled with his.)
When I go into the main room, it’s bright with the midmorning sun. There isn’t as much mess out here—I’ve been trying to keep it neat, and most of our living room furniture is here.
Simon is sitting on the rug (yellow, with purple edges— hideous ). His wings are spread out behind him and his tail is a coil across his lap.
I sit next to him and I don’t even care it’s the floor when we have perfectly serviceable chairs. (Recliners. Two of them, set next to each other.)(Simon didn’t want a couch. I’ve spent too much of my life on a couch, he’d said, and I’d agreed. This had been my solution. They’re big enough for us to both fit into one, and that was my only requirement for living room furniture.)
I take his hand in both of mine. Simon watches, and when I look at him his face is soft and open. The openness of it, the trust, steals my breath away.
I look down. There’s a scar on the back of his hand, long and white, and I trace the thin line it makes across his skin.
“Goblin got me with a rusty pocket knife,” Simon says quietly. I meet his gaze, strangely serious, and look back at the scar under my fingers. “I was fourteen. Had to get a tetanus shot.”
I blink. We’ve never talked about scars like this. We both have them—him more so, obviously—but it never occurred to me to ask. (It never occured to me he’d answer.)
I want to reply with my own story. I want to show him my scars.
I can’t. I’m not human enough to have many. Just the faint white spots across my chest, the fang marks in my neck. I ignore how inhuman that makes me feel. People have scars. Everyone. I try to turn that thought inside out, to embrace my otherness the way my therapist told me I could.
We match, sort of. Our monstrousness, his in scars and mine in the lack of.
I don’t say anything. He knows my scars already, on my skin and my mind. (There’s no curtains in our room for a reason. I still can’t stand complete darkness.)(I still wake trembling, some nights, with the memory of the coffin. Those are the days I can’t stand the touch of anything but hot water and Simon’s skin.)
Instead, I trace a patch of raised bumps on his wrist. I look at him, and Simon looks back.
“Biter-wort,” he says. “Got some of the sap on me and scratched through my skin.”
Biter-wort. I remember a lesson from third year or so—bitterwort plants infused with too much magic. They grow tooth-like thorns that'll trap whatever it comes in contact with—hence the name—and start leaking a sort of sap that has the same effect as poison ivy, only much worse. There’s some plants that react very badly to magic, and that’s one.
I hum and flip his arm over to trace the pad of scar tissue on his palm. I know what he’ll say before he does—there’s a blood magic class starting sixth year, and he and Bunce took it. (I didn’t. Being around blood didn’t seem like a good idea.) Most blood magic requires blood drawn from the palm, as it’s considered one of the most magickal areas of the body. Palms are a natural magickal conduit, of a sort, and powerful, disciplined mages can cast with their hands.
“Barbaric,” I mutter. Blood magic isn’t new, but classes on it are. And they don’t teach students how to properly heal themselves after, either, not like actual blood mage apprentices. I’ve seen the results—Penelope’s hands are mostly scar tissue, and she has to put a cream on it. Simon only took half a year before dropping out, but she continued through to graduation.
Simon huffs a laugh. I raise a brow, half-questioning, and he shakes his head, smiling softly. (My stomach turns over at the sight.)(Circe—he can still make me feel like a schoolgirl talking to the bloke she fancies even after all we’ve been through.)
I trace scar after scar and Simon tells me the stories behind each one. It’s like I’m being handed the keys to a door I didn’t know was there, like I’m unlocking a new part of him with every word.
Simon’s words start coming closer by the time I’m tracing the scars around his wings. There’s the tired wearyness that comes with spending hours doing nothing in him, as obvious as anything.
I check the clock. There’s still about four hours before we’re supposed to meet Ruth and Jamie for an early dinner, and we have plans with Penelope and Shepard later in the evening.
We’ve started having movie nights. It’s a double feature—Simon and Shepard pick a movie (Tonight is Sharknado)(It’s better than Twilight, which is what they picked last week) and Penny and I pick one (Notting Hill, because Hugh Grant’s attractiveness is one of the few things we agree on.). It’s nice, as much as I refuse to admit it. (Shepard won’t shut up during a movie—he talks to the characters onscreen—and Penelope always falls asleep towards the end of the second.)(And Simon sits next to me, pressed hip to shoulder.)
I’m halfway through trying to get Simon up and into bed before I realize I don’t have to. There’s nothing stopping us from sleeping here. I set an alarm for two hours and pull him down, resting my head on his chest. His heartbeat is steady and reassuring in my ear.
Simon brings his hand up, running his fingers through my hair. I fall asleep like that and it’s softer, better than anything I thought of in school.
Better than those first few weeks, even, because I know I can have this. Simon won’t turn around and tell me to leave. We’re settled into this, into dating, and there’s bumps and rough patches but it’s us and it’s familiar. It’s ours.
I have him, now, and I know he won’t leave. (I won’t either. It would kill me.)
I fall asleep with Simon the way I have every night for weeks, the way I want to fall asleep forever.
We made it through. We’re not whole, but we’re not broken. We’re together through everything that’s been thrown at us, and we’ll stay that way.
(This, right here on the floor of our flat, is more home than anywhere else has ever been. Even Watford, where our room was tainted with our rivalry.)
(Simon Snow is my home.)(And I’m his.)