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“Karen,” says a voice from the door.
“Fucking hell,” hisses Karen, jolting awake and narrowly missing hitting the crown of her head on the backboard.
She recognizes the voice and sits up where she lies between the duvet and the sheets, careful not to jostle Will as he sleeps like the dead at her side.
“Grimsley? Is that you?”
“Karen,” the voice says again, voice thready. “Will? Are you there?”
Karen squints in the darkness, trying to make out the familiar thin silhouette of Grimsley in the doorway. He appears to be leaning against it, somewhat limply, like he’s dead on his feet with exhaustion, or perhaps utterly subsumed with despair.
“Come here, sweetheart,” she says, trying to be soothing—something’s wrong, she thinks, or at least isn’t right. She hears Grimsley’s breath hitch wetly, and slides up out of bed on instinct, reaching out to him. "Where’ve you been?”
“Out,” comes the answer, quieter and farther out in space than it should be. “Been—been out. Went to a bar.”
She steps closer, flicking on the light so she can see him—he looks disheveled and off-balance, a far cry from his usual slickly polished self, hair a mess and shirt untucked.
A bead of sweat slides down his pale temple. She can see even in the dim light that his eyes are as wide as saucers, pupils dilated into black holes.
“Christ,” she says, half with concern and half with exasperation. “What are you on?”
Grimsley doesn’t reply, just shakes a little bit and swipes a hand above his brow, interrupting the path of another thin trail of sweat as it travels down his forehead.
He’s looking right at her, but she can tell he can’t really see her, at least not as she really is—the distance in his gaze is so starkly reminiscent of Will’s that it almost frightens her, a familiar permanently unseeing stare that looks utterly alien on the face of another.
Karen’s concern overtakes her exasperation, just by an order of measure, and she takes another step forward so she can take hold of his trembling shoulders. He makes a weak little noise and takes a breath through his teeth, and now she knows that he knows she’s there, at least, by the way he leans into her touch the way he always seems to do, subconsciously or not.
“Sweetheart,” she stresses searchingly, lifting a hand to the side of his pallid face. “What did you take?”
“I love you,” Grimsley says, instead of answering. His voice wavers hard, like she’s never heard before—he sounds like he’s about to crumble to pieces, or maybe just burst into tears. He sways forward a little bit, curling his own clammy hands over Karen’s bare forearms. “I—I do, really.”
“Grimsley,” Karen starts, but Grimsley’s on a roll.
“I don’t tell you enough, either ‘a you, but—you two’re it for me, y’know,” he says—sobs, really, because even though he isn’t really crying, his voice is still thick and wobbly and cracks in the middle as if he were. “You’re it for me. I love you so much. You ‘n Will—you’re so good to me. I’on’t deserve it.”
“Baby, you know that’s not true,” says Karen, abruptly alarmed.
“Love you, love you lots,” Grimsley wheedles, letting go of her arms and curling closer even as he stands, like maybe if he scrunches his shoulders up enough he’ll be able to crawl into Karen’s chest and take up permanent residence behind her heart. His breath and pulse are quick and warm against her.
Karen moves to extract herself from his arms, just so she can see his face again, but he makes a horrible, choked noise and holds her closer, shivering hard.
“Sweetheart,” Karen begins, and Grimsley whines into the top of her chest, hands clutching at the planes of her bare back. “Grimsley, you are—very high, right now. Do you remember what you took?”
“Mno,” says Grimsley, muffled. A moment later, he appends, “No—no needles. ‘S a pill.”
Ecstasy, then, most likely, as he doesn't seem to be hallucinating. Could be worse.
“That’s good,” Karen says, absently stroking his head, fingers slipping through his mussed dark hair. The back of his neck is still slick with cold sweat, and she feels his breath stutter against her. “Who were you with?”
“Sidney ‘n Dahlia.” He isn’t kissing her, exactly, but his mouth is open a little bit, chapped lips pressed against her skin so hard that she can sort of feel the outline of his teeth behind them. His breath smells like alcohol, sour-sweet tequila still coating his throat, but the scent is comforting in a bizarre sort of way.
“Alright, baby. I’ll give them a call tomorrow.” Karen spares a moment to thank whoever’s listening that Will is such a deep sleeper, because she doesn’t think she wants him to be awake for this.
“Love you,” Grimsley repeats. “Promise. So much. Dunno where I’d be without you.”
“I love you too, sweetheart,” Karen replies, petting his hair again. She backs up towards the bed, letting herself sit back down on the soft mattress. Grimsley follows, sinking down beside the bed, leaving his arms loose around Karen’s middle and his head resting in her lap with his cheek against her thighs.
The position is somewhat familiar, but in a context so far from sexual, it just makes a strange soft feeling well up in Karen’s middle like gently rising water. She lets the pad of her thumb trace softly over the bone of Grimsley’s cheek and he raises a hand to her knee, fitting the ball of it into his narrow palm.
“Will you marry me?” he asks after a moment.
Karen blinks down at him, taken off-guard, but Grimsley doesn’t seem to register the out-of-pocket absurdity of what he’s asked, just staring off into the left distance with his widened eyes and gently pulling the tips of his fingernails over her lower thigh like a million skittering Centiskorch legs, as if he’s simply marvelling at the feeling of her skin.
He did get down on one knee, Karen thinks to herself.
“What?” she asks, once she gets her bearings. She’s changed her mind—she suddenly really, really wishes Will was awake for this.
“I want—“ Grimsley sniffs a little, and it’s pretty wet and gross, but Karen’s tragically gone enough on him to find it kind of endearing. “I jus’ don’ wan’ the two ‘a you to leave me. I don’ wanna be alone again. I don’ wanna go back to Black City ‘n be all by myself, I’on’t like it there. ‘S not right.”
“Oh, baby, we aren’t going to leave you. You don’t—you never have to go back to Black City,” Karen says, placating, scratching soothingly behind one of Grimsley’s ears like he’s a particularly affectionate Purrloin and muttering, “I thought molly was supposed to be an upper.”
“Mmph,” says Grimsley, tilting his face into the wide part of Karen’s upper thigh, squashing his sharp nose and browbone into the soft muscle. He stares waveringly at a mole on Karen’s leg, about a centimeter from his eyeball. “‘S a real question.”
“Grimsley, we love you. We’d never leave you all alone, you mean the world to us. Where's this coming from?”
“I know, I know,” Grimsley moans, not currently sounding like he knows much of anything at all. She feels the flutter of his eyelashes as he blinks carefully, and she can tell that he’s sobering up, however slowly. “I just—I dunno. Get worried you’ll get sick of me. If we’re married you can’t get sick of me.”
That’s not even remotely true, but Karen holds her tongue, replying instead with, “Will and I aren’t married. It’s been two and a half decades, and we haven’t gotten sick of each other. What makes you think we’ll get sick of you?”
Grimsley forces a limp little shrug, finally fully jostling his jacket off from where it’d been stubbornly clinging to his right shoulder. His arms are up, so it doesn’t slide to the floor, but it sags a bit to bunch up around his forearms and the dip in the middle of his back as he raises his head to tilt his forehead against her abdomen. “I came later.”
“That doesn’t—oh, sweetheart, it’s just luck,” says Karen, feeling her heart break a little at the plaintiveness in his voice. He only gets like this when he’s really plastered, which is less often nowadays, but it makes her chest ache every time. “It’s just chance, that Will and I met earlier, and you know chance better than anyone. Just because we met you two years ago instead of twenty-five doesn’t mean we love you any less.”
“So you would marry me?” Grimsley asks, small against her stomach. He smells cleaner, now, less like liquor and smoke, but his breath is just as warm and his mouth is just as soft, and Karen tells him the truth before she even realizes it.
“I might.”
Grimsley tilts his head back to look at her, really look at her—that unnerving blankness is gone from his pale eyes, now, the drugs and alcohol finally working their way out of him, but he still blinks up at her as guilelessly as he would if he was still completely wasted. “Really?”
Karen lifts her hands from his hair to cradle his sharp face, feeling his angled jaw and pointy chin beneath her touch. He’s still down on the wood floor and it’s got to be Hell on his knees, but he seems perfectly content to stay exactly where he is, skinny arms around Karen’s waist, letting her hold him like some sort of fragile blown-glass thing.
“Maybe,” says Karen, “if you asked me very nicely, and you really, really meant it, I would marry you. And maybe I would even put on a dress.”
Grimsley’s thin eyes have gone all big and shiny, not with tears but with a strange, hazy happiness. He smiles up at her—not the sort of slightly smug neutrality that he’s so famous for, but a real smile, one that pulls both the corners of his mouth up sweetly and lets the tips of his pointy teeth poke out over his bottom lip, making him look about a decade younger.
Karen would lean down to kiss him, but her back doesn’t quite bend that far anymore, so she pulls him up to meet her so that she can get the angle right. He sags against her like he can’t help it, the force of her affection just too much for him to possibly withstand, and she graciously takes the liberty of holding him up so he doesn’t fall on top of her. His chest presses against hers and she feels the scratch of all his shirt buttons on her bare skin, just in front of the thudding pound of his heartbeat.
When they part, Grimsley’s standing again, with one knee on the bed to steady himself. Karen works on stripping off his jacket as he stares behind her—she wonders for a moment what he’s looking at, before she turns to see his lidded gaze resting fondly on Will’s soft, sleeping face.
“If you and I got married,” he says quietly, “you and he would get married, too, right?” He asks it almost hopefully, like he wants her to say yes.
“Do they let you do that?” Karen asks, only half-joking.
Grimsley, though, just gives an absent nod as she slips his scarf off and begins unbuttoning his shirt. He reaches out to carefully remove a lock of hair from Will’s face, where it’d been dangerously close to falling into his slightly-open mouth, and places it back behind his ear. “In Unova, they do. Alola, too. Recent thing.”
“Then, yes,” Karen replies, not particularly surprised to find that she doesn’t even have to think about it. She and Will might as well be married anyway, she reasons. Not all that strange to think of themselves that way—in, you know, a legal sense.
She pauses a moment, as she reaches the last button. “And—you and him?”
Grimsley pauses, too, a little longer than Karen had, before giving another nod, a single sharp jerk of the head.
“Yes,” he answers decisively, and then, again, with even more conviction, “yes. Of course we would.”
The last little bubble of worry in Karen’s throat pops, and she abruptly pulls Grimsley back to her for another kiss, smiling against his mouth when he gives a pleased, warm little sigh in return.
He seems alright, now—she knows from past excursions (as well as personal experience) that come morning he’ll feel like he’s been flattened by a bunch of Graveler, but for now, his eyes are clear and his voice is strong, and color has slowly returned to his pretty face.
“Will and I aren’t Unovan citizens,” she says eventually, and Grimsley kisses her a little harder at the implication before sliding his mouth over past her reddened lips.
“You could be. If you wanted,” he mumbles against the side of her face. “I could do that for you both.”
Karen moves to kiss him again, one more time, before pulling his shirt off of his arms completely and dropping it to the floor on the side of the bed. She doesn’t bother with his slacks, and even in his haze he’d remembered to take his shoes off by the front door, so she shimmies down the bed enough to lay back down and motions for Grimsley to follow suit.
He does so promptly, burying his face in Karen’s cloud of hair and breathing her in. She muses idly, as Will’s endlessly grasping arms immediately curl tight around her waist, that the three of them definitely should spring for a wider bed.
“We’ll talk,” says Karen. “In the morning.”
“I think it is morning, technically,” Grimsley says lowly, somewhere by her left ear.
“Oh, you know what I mean.” Karen shifts a bit, getting as comfortable as possible—Will’s embrace is furnace-warm, as always, tempered by Grimsley’s ever-present slight chill, and the both of them curve around Karen’s shorter frame like a pair of protective parentheses, keeping a shield between her and anything else. Maybe she’s imagining it, but, wouldn’t you know it, she doesn’t think she’s ever had a nightmare this way.
Forget the bigger bed, actually. This is perfect.
As she’s about to drift off again, surrounded and content, she catches Grimsley’s tired mumble of, “Would you really wear a white dress? With lace and everything?”
“If you wanted,” Karen answers, not bothering to turn her head or even open her eyes, floating in the half-asleep in-between. “You’d get us Unovan passports? Do that paperwork?”
“I would,” comes the answer.
“You’d do it in a church? Go to church for us?”
“Maybe so.”
“And you’d buy rings?” asks Karen. “Gold ones, with rubies?” She’s too tired to squash the affection from her voice.
“I’d buy rings,” Grimsley replies, and he doesn’t sound put-upon at all.