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Some days, one or the other of them will receive a message that simply reads: Talk.
The time, spelling and reason vary. The meaning does not.
It means; I need your voice as you tell me which of your houseplants is growing best, while I gather the strength to pull my body from the depths once more. The answer is always the spider plant you bought your first week here, spilling untamed across your windowsill. Tell me anyway.
It means; I need you to bemoan the latest Smarmy Eton Dickhead paying you to plagiarise an essay for him on Fundamentals of Economics while I work to peel phantom fingers from my skin. I told you not to take the job, that you’re working too much already. Tell me anyway.
It means; a thief has come for my breath and left only an earthquake behind, and I need you to still the ground beneath my feet for a while.
–
Kaz had, for once, shown his hand first. A gasping admission, back against the door of a disabled bathroom opposite a lecture hall he’d fled, that talking helps - just keep talking, Inej. She’d barely heard him, underwater as he was, but the confession had cut her a path towards reaching him. Back to back, wooden door between them, she’d listened to him retch and wheeze and, clutching at straws for a suitably one sided conversation topic, had given him her opinion on every panini sold at the Crow Club Cafe on campus. She’d sat on the floor reeling off fillings, from soggy tuna to chicken and pesto, worst-to-best like some Saints-damned food critic, like he cared, like it mattered , and she’d known it only did because she was there, and talking, and not leaving.
(And, weeks later, when she was snowed under with reading and he’d bought her lunch from the same cafe to make sure she ate something , he’d appeared with the goat cheese and red pepper panini she’d declared to be the best, leaving the plate at her elbow with a quiet this one alright? and the scratch of a smirk on his lips as the only sign he’d remembered).
–
Later, when he’d watched a person become a body in the middle of the library, he’d turfed a group of second years out of the private study room they’d reserved, in an attempt to give her somewhere to sit and breathe. It had been his first time seeing her vanish before his eyes - close-up magic of the sort he never wanted to see again. When ghost hands had released her tongue, he’d asked what to do when it happened again ( when, never if - they both know haunting is rarely a one-time affair).
He isn’t one for empty platitudes - he’d stared at her like a string of code he couldn’t quite iron the kinks out of, and wanted solutions, a sequence of keys to hit and make it better. Not forever-better - they’d both taken on enough damage that they knew they’d have to keep fixing on the fly - but a stop-gap. Not how to reverse the rot, but how to stop its spread.
She’d pressed his own words back into his palms; talking helps - you talking to me helps, even if I can’t talk back. Reminds me that I’m real - that I’m here, not there. He’d nodded, and spent the following thirty minutes until she was ready to leave their small stolen sanctuary explaining how he and a flatmate had hacked their way into the university database, relocating each of his lectures to buildings with lifts or ground-floor lecture halls, after Disability Services refused his request.
(She’d apologised to the displaced second years when she’d run into them the following day. Kaz had sat glowering from three tables over, and these boys, six-nine if they were an inch, had shrunk away from her, eyes wide as they told her It’s no problem - no bother at all, and It’s not like we needed it and Our fault, in the way like that . It had been hard to keep a straight face when she’d returned to the corner table where Kaz waited, levelling him with her best glare as she asked what on God’s earth he’d done to get rid of them, to make them so scared of not just him, but her . He’d seen fit to provide no more detail than I did what I needed to get what I wanted, Inej , on that day or since).
Talking helps them both through the fog, so they keep talking.
–
It goes like this.
She only texts him after checking three times that her car is locked and she is alone within it. He is calling by the time she has checked twice more and cranked the air-con to what he persists in calling braille-bollocks fucking freezing (mostly, she knows, because he enjoys how his gratuitous cursing riles her).
She doesn’t tell him about the man at the petrol station. Folded as small as the driver’s seat will allow, body creased up in the palms of her own terror, she couldn’t form words if she wanted. She doesn’t tell him how the man who’d rung up her petrol and coke never frequented The Menagerie, but that he may as well have, when he’d called her a pretty young thing and asked if she was travelling alone, if she wanted any company , hairy knuckles bumping hers a second, two, three, longer than necessary when he’d returned her change.
Kaz knows the shapes of the shadows these hands form against her walls; she does not need to peel this darkness from her tongue.
He doesn’t bother with Hello - never does, on nights like this, knowing she won’t ( can’t ) respond from the Somewhere Else this takes her.
He doesn’t call her lovely or darling or treasure, even once he lets himself admit that she is all these things and more to him . She’ll only hear the words, spoken now, as an echo of other tongues on other nights who’d sung the same hymn. He swallows their chorus instead.
He does not tell her You’re okay ; she is, clearly and demonstrably, not, and he will not lie.
He does not tell her You’re safe ; he is mean with his promises, allowing only those he can guarantee, and he cannot guarantee her this.
He does not tell her that Nobody will hurt you ; too many already have (he knows, though never like Them , his name is somewhere on that list, and he aches with that knowledge), and there is too much glass in this world for her to live her next fifty years and never bleed again.
Instead, he narrates the trip around the supermarket he’d been in the middle of when she called. He tells her which biscuits are on offer, that he can’t find any bread with a decent best-before date, that there are no red grapes, only green, and that this is a personal affront to him.
He asks and answers his own questions, talking himself into knots as he hopscotches his way across the silence, filling both sides of the conversation.
Will Jesper notice if I get sugar-free yoghurt? Yeah, probably, but fuck it, it’s better for him .
Which kind of apples do you like, again - is it the Fuji or Pink Lady ones? I’m getting Fuji - you can throw them at me if I’m wrong.
Do you need butter? I’ll pick you up some, I know Zenik used yours for waffles last week.
This earns him lingering stares and furrowed brows from several middle-aged mothers in gym-wear, and he returns their stares with a touch more malice than necessary, just for the satisfaction of watching them scuttle away like lycra-clad beetles.
He weaves her name into every second sentence, arming her with the blade of an identity that’s been carved from her time and again. Pours the Suli syllables he knows he butchers more often than he doesn’t down the phone like they’re liquid gold. Like they’re the closest thing he can find to cement, to hold the bricks of this refuge together.
Did you know they sell ketchup-flavoured crisps, Inej? How grim - I bet Helvar would love them.
I know you said we should do pizza this week, and who am I to argue with Inej Ghafa - I’ll get one cheese and a pepperoni.
Inej, I’m down the fish aisle and they’re looking at me with their little googly eyes - if I disappear, assume they’ve got the jump on me.
It’s the most he ever talks at once, like this, about anything that isn’t at least borderline illegal.
He talks, and she watches herself shiver, and slowly she crawls back towards her own skeleton. She can’t pull apart which word does the conjuring but he has, by increments, spirited her back into the world, and yet he keeps talking while she settles herself fully into her limbs once more. He tells her to clean her face, knowing sight unseen that it’s salt-stiff from tears and sweat, and reminds her of the wipes she keeps in her glove box for this purpose, then offers to pick her up. She refuses, as she always refuses, and instead he insists that she share her location until she is home. Until she is safe.
They both know that tomorrow morning, he will contrive a reason for their paths to cross that’s as weak as she drinks her coffee. That he will lay a hand on her shoulder as he hands her the cup of tea he’ll buy, regardless of how much his fingers shake. That he will spend two months feigning reasons to join her whenever she refills her car at this particular station, white lies pulled like rabbits out of hats as though she hasn’t mastered his every trick by now.
–
They don’t always answer.
Asleep, or in the shower, or away from their phone. Talking helps, but they aren’t beholden to the other - are under no illusions that the other will be on call at all hours to serve as the shelter they seek.
That doesn’t stop them both from having a unique text tone for the other. From walking out mid-seminar to find a quiet corner in which to call. From letting the other know if they would be unreachable for a while.
It’s not needed, per se. They both can tease the monsters’ fisted grip finger by finger from their chests alone, if need be. It’s not expected, or even articulated.
They both do it anyway.
But they don’t always answer.
There’s Jesper, and there’s Nina - Wylan and Matthias, too, later - to catch them if need be. There’s the greying Dutch lady Inej has seen weekly since her return to university mid-way through first year, in an office that smells of oranges. The red-haired Irishman Kaz had quietly contacted almost two years later, telling nobody but Inej.
They don’t always answer. That’s okay.
But more often, they do.
–
They’ve refined the practice over time.
The first few times he tried to coax her back into her body, he’d talked to her as he always did. He’d recounted in infinitesimal detail various recent jobs she’d had no hand in, until she’d told him to stop making me a witness to your crimes after the fact, when I’m in no fit state to call you an idiot for them, shevrati.
He’d been forced to change tack .
Her rejection of these stories stems less from some convoluted scriptural or moral objection, he’s learned, and more of a frustration at her inability in these moments to interject her own arch and acerbic commentary, or inform him how she would have done it better.
He saves these particular tales, now, for Good Days. On Good Days, she can lay bare his schemes’ every perceived flaw. On Good Days, he refutes her criticisms as fucking asinine nit-picking , and then tucks them away to bear in mind next time. Not because his jobs do not run broadly smoothly without her input - not because he needs her. But because she is…shrewd, and competent, and (he can admit, on his own Good Days) the only magic trick he still covets that he is yet to master.
She’s grown wise to this pattern, because of course she has, and she laughs whenever she notices that his latest plot has tied off some small thread she’d tugged loose in a previous tale. She rolls her eyes when he roundly dismisses this as entirely coincidental ( which it is , it’s not like he wouldn’t have identified the flaw; he will concede only that, perhaps, she has expedited the process somewhat). The day she sits still spinning in his desk chair an hour after he’s asked her to stop, grinning at the latest oversight she’s detected, the only reason he reminds her to drink the tea he’s brewed her before it gets cold is because it’s much harder for her to be smug while she’s drinking it.
Not because he’s noticed her throat seems sore, this week, and he hopes the tea will soothe it.
Not because the way she presses the warmth of the chipped mug to her chest and thanks him makes him feel like he’s supine at the feet of something holy.
Not because she deserves the tea, and the chair, and twice the credit he has the balls to give her, and at least four-and-a-half times anything he’d ever be able to offer.
He’s learned to hoard his shop-talk for the moments she can talk back, and fill the silence with something else when she can’t.
In turn, she’s learned to bite down on the urge to tell him to take a breath , wise to the futility of half-coax-half-dragging him through grounding exercises that he rejects out of hand. Asking him to echo her own slow breaths - to count each exhale with her, as her therapist does - only hones his attention to the one command he can’t get his body to obey. The awareness that he can’t quell his lungs’ rebellion with a well-placed blow, the queasy ripple of powerlessness that that knowledge sends through his blood, only tightens the choke-hold this has on him.
She knows that, now. Would that she had known it sooner.
He has only ever fainted twice whilst on the phone to her. You’re hyperventilating, Kaz, you need to slow your breathing down, with me, listen, see?, until, slap of skin and skull on tile, and he wasn’t hyperventilating - wasn’t anything. The first time, Jesper - then still ‘Kaz’s flatmate, the tall one who gets lunch with us sometimes’ - had received a phone call from an unsaved number, requesting in a tone that brooked no argument that he make his way to the bathroom right now, no I don’t care that Drag Race is on, and confirm to her, please, that his friend was not dead. Jesper had put a sizeable hole in the bathroom door in order to do so, fire extinguisher come makeshift-battering-ram splintering the wood. The rest of the year they’d lived in the flat, neither Kaz nor Jes, burgeoning criminal masterminds that they were, had thought to actually fix the door, and any visitors disinclined to piss in semi-public view were forced to hang a towel from the doorknob to obscure the hole at least a little.
(Inej berates herself, still, that it had happened a second time. Hates that it took her twice to put together that even his lungs are insufferably contrary, and when told to breathe will do the opposite just to spite her, and send him sinking deadweight to the seabed.)
Now, when she is tempted to tell his body its business, she wraps her words in silks and does it in Suli. The words themselves - his ability to understand them, even - are inconsequential. Her voice - familiar to him even when little else is - seems to be the thing to stop the tumble, orientate him back to the surface, and let his head break through the waves once more. (He admits this, sloppily, the first time she sees him drunk, then resolutely denies it like his own comfort is heresy for weeks.)
When she wants to tell him to breathe, she’s learned to tell him in Suli, so his traitorous lungs are none the wiser.
–
The texts appear less, over time.
But also more, sometimes, too.
Birthdays. Anniversaries.
Bad Days that happen for no fucking reason either of them can think of.
Sometimes, it’s months.
Then it’s eight times in nine days.
Sometimes one shatters, while the others’ demons slumber awhile.
Then, they’re acting as a harbour for the other by turns, even when their own grip on themselves is balloon-thin.
It ebbs and flows.
But the texts appear less, over time.
–
It goes like this.
He’d known a beach trip was a risk the second it had been suggested. He’s fuming at himself for drowning, anyway.
He’s already heaving, squat amidst pale beachgrass, by the time he thinks to text her. He knows the word is spelled wrong, but he’s blind with the salty waters stinging at his eyes, and knows she will understand regardless. He misses her first two calls, fingertips too bloated with terror to swipe at his screen. By the time he fumbles his way to her voice at his third attempt, his skin has shrunk too small around him, and the waves are beating his bones to beige dust, and he is lost to the dark, unreachable depths of it all.
She pitches her voice louder than she otherwise would, clear as a bell against the roaring at his ears; thanks him for texting. Thanks his pride for abating enough to let him text, today.
She takes him as far from the beach, and the water, and the sun-hot sand, as she can. To a grassy enclave, flanked on all sides by trees, where small bronze children run barefoot and kiss their teeth at gravity.
She takes him somewhere he’s never been, because that’s the only place he’s never been hurt.
The Suli would never make camp on ground liable to flooding - such oversight is unfathomable. She will guard Kaz from the waters here.
She brings him to the high-wire, the second horizon high above the shoreline, pulled fragile and thin as a gaze held a blink too long. Talks him through routines still burned into her retinas years after her muscles last flamed with the strain of executing them. Seats him front and centre in the billowing canvas tent and tries to swap the churn of the waves for the arc of her limbs as they circle in the sky. Lets him bear witness to all that she was before she became a fading bruise on London’s skylines.
She stands him by the firepit where a clutch of wrinkled buas, some her blood but more of them not, sing Saints’ songs on Holy days. Waits for its smoky sighs to dry him. Hopes the hymnal lilt of people coming together to put their trust in something more balms his subconscious, as it does hers, while he’s too deep to tell her if it isn’t.
She sits him on the steps of the caravan whose threshold slavers breached, that morning that seemed too normal to hold what it did. Fills his nostrils with curried spices and incense and herbal teas steeping in pots, until the scent of sea-salt and flesh-rot begins to ebb by degrees.
She waits until he has enough air in his lungs to gasp complaints about sand in my fucking trousers, before she starts to needle him, digging well-placed jabs at his ribs to force him to parry, to wick the sweat from his forehead and raise a singular brow.
Then, she recounts Nina’s latest suggested amendments to his haircut - most verbatim, some hyperbolised to goad him into grounding himself firmly enough on solid ground to swing.
She says at this point, you’d probably be better off shaving your head, but she has some concerns that you may be, and I quote, ‘one of those people with a funny-shaped skull’.
At least I can be relied upon to keep my hair the same colour for more than a week, and with the rate at which Zenik changes her appearance, you’d think she was in witness protection.
The delivery is off, but it’s something. He’s rallying.
Then, she makes him list the covert entrance and egress points for every building on campus by order of the buildings’ ages, oldest to newest. It’s the sort of thing he used to make her do, back in the early days of their professional dealings when he was still testing her mettle. Her reversal of this habit now is half revenge, half awareness that his grip on these sands is tenuous yet, and the rhythm of mindless recall will steady him some.
He forgets two entrances and one exit of thirty seven. Swaps the dates of completion on two adjacent buildings. It’s a testament to the state of his still-waterlogged mind, but she hounds him laughingly for it anyway. Knows how he would rail against her pity upon spotting his errors later, as he inevitably will, if she didn’t.
She doesn’t ask before ordering a cab to retrieve him from the beach - Nina is his ride home, and will not be impressed upon to leave early without the reason which Kaz will refuse to provide.
He doesn’t thank her for it. Grumbles at her, voice still hoarse with bile, for always bloody mithering , as he hauls himself back to his feet.
He takes the cab without sending it away. Spends the drive home sending her ciphered instructions for an upcoming stakeout, though he briefed her in person two days ago, for the sake of something to focus his mind on. A point on the horizon to row towards.
He doesn’t slam the door in her face when she appears outside it an hour later, despite him never having buzzed her into the building, with kebabs in orange styrofoam boxes.
She understands the thanks. Knows his every cipher, by now.
–
Mundanity works best for the both of them.
Once, she tries for shock-value, repeating back to him the most colourful and creative curses she’s heard him utter over the years, tossing in a few of her own for good measure. If the Saints are going to sweep the ground away beneath this boy’s feet, then she can, she reasons, take up Their names and use them in vain until They deign to pull him from the waves. Even Deities don’t get to take something from her for nothing - nobody does, never again - and this is the best approximation her brain can make of a fair trade at 2:37am while he’s sobbing down the phone, still so lost to his nightmare that she’s not sure how he managed to message her in the first place.
The cursing isn’t… not enjoyable. And let it never be said that Inej Ghafa is not a quick study.
But mundanity. Ordinarily, mundanity helps.
They steady one another’s pulses against the metronome of monotony that is daily life.
You are here . Nina wants to know if we’ll come by for a movie night next week - I’ve already said you’re coming. You need to remember to ask your professor for a reference for that internship, remember? Next time you take your stuff to the dry cleaner’s, you’re taking one of my shirts with you - I’ll pay for it, but I’m not going over there for the sake of one shirt.
You are alive . Whose turn is it to buy lunch before our seminar today? I wonder how much our water bill is going to go up this month, after Jesper flooded the kitchen? I need to go to Sainsbury’s on my way home - they’re the only ones with good pastries.
You survived . Can you bring a phone charger when you come to campus? What’s the name of that banker you were trailing a month back - the one with those awful gaudy ties? Did the book you stayed up to read last week end how you thought?
Jesper swears there’s nothing like the rush of a bullet an inch from your ear to tether you to a moment. That it’s the second of almost losing everything that makes you see the cards left to play. But they’ve both had their fill of terror, these days. Don’t need to reach far to feel the graze of cool metal against the pulse at their throats. Don’t struggle to remember how quickly they can be made to bleed.
It isn’t the high risk moments that make them feel most alive. Rather, the relentless drumbeat of things to do , commitments to uphold, and tasks to complete bind both of them to this world and their place in it like nothing else.
So they anoint one another with mundanity.
The waves closed over your head this morning, but there’s a birthday cake to bake this afternoon, and I’ll burn the place down without your supervision.
Your skin is too tight around your bones and yet not tight enough to keep you inside it, but we have a Netflix show to finish, even if we sit on opposite ends of the sofa.
We haven’t both managed a night of uninterrupted sleep at the same time for a week, but the sheets still need washing, so come and help me strip the bed.
Go on. Finish the story.
You have built a life, here, and it demands you return to it.