Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Diana had never been one for poetry.

It was too feathery; dripping with synonyms that meant nothing except that the guy who put them there really wanted to get in some girl’s pants. Details, Diana got; trivialities, she didn’t. She’d hum along to the radio, sure – she wasn’t a monster. What could all the good old boys with their quills and their parchment have in common with a lanky redhead from Queens? Springsteen was the closest she’d ever come to Shelley.

And then –

Then.

She got it.

The Cathy Chandler case brought poetry to Diana Bennett the way a bullet is brought to a skull. Unusual circumstances, a frantic DA, and a thousand unexplainable things – unexplained things, rather; Diana knew there was always an explanation for those with keen enough eyes or deep enough pockets. It consumed her, as all things did, eventually. In the thrall of a case, she was iron under rust, lumber under flame; ever at the mercy of mystery.

And this one was the riddle to end all others. A thirty-three year old ADA with a cushy upbringing winds up dead in her own swanky apartment – but she wasn’t killed there. That would have been enough to puzzle the tomb makers of Jerusalem, but for Diana it was a clarion call. She tried to fight it when Joe Maxwell showed up at her loft with sad eyes and an even sadder story. Diana had sensed the love coming off him in waves; desire gone fallow, unspent and irrecoverable. Joe was all love and bluster. It’s why she’d let him talk for so long in the first place. Cathy Chandler must have been one hell of a dame.

Diana resisted. The case she’d been on when Joe called was gruelling, gruesome stuff. Diana liked to tell herself that the Chandler case wasn’t why she failed to solve it, but she could never quite convince herself. Maybe it had been beyond her reach. Maybe no-one on the planet could have found that kid. She tells herself what she has to.

Cathy Chandler’s name thrums through her subconscious that night, and she can feel herself being taken over slowly, inexorably. She tosses and turns, resisting the pull and going with it anyway, until she slips inside the skin of the story as neatly as she slings on her worn and trusty jacket the next morning.

In the devouring weeks that come after, Diana follows the yellow brick road Cathy Chandler walked, but what she finds at the end of it ain’t no Oz. Instead of an Emerald City, she stumbles into an underground world of amber and quartz that lies below the streets of New York. Its inhabitants aren’t magic folk but wounded people looking for a fresh start. And the Lion that guards them is far from cowardly.

She finds him curled up on Catherine’s grave, a living monument to grief. She knows it’s the name from the book, the legend lovingly scrawled in the margins.

Vincent.

She paid the guy in the cemetery the sixty-two bucks she had on her, and he grudgingly helped to heave Vincent’s ragged form back to her loft. He waved off her concerns – “I don’t want nothin’ more to do with this sideshow, trust me” – but took the money. She hopes it’s enough to keep his mouth shut.

Still, it’s a variable and Diana knows it. The guy seemed decent enough, helping a stranger in need (for a price, sure – though who doesn’t have a price in this town?) but Diana doesn’t like loose ends. She’ll have to try and check up on him, keep some tabs, look over her shoulder for a while. At least she stopped a few blocks away from her apartment, so unless he followed her (and she’s pretty sure he didn’t), he doesn’t know where she lives. But it’s close enough for discomfort.

Speaking of which, Vincent groans raggedly in his stupor, clearly pained though still unconscious. How she managed to get him the rest of the way, into the elevator, through her apartment, and onto the bed, she’ll never know. Adrenaline, probably. A miracle, maybe. She wasn’t accustomed to those, but she sort of thinks she must be looking at one right now.

He’s something to see, that’s for sure. A thousand words flit through Diana’s mind – strange, bizarre, fantastical – but they each glance off him in turn, none quite seeming to fit. Even his clothes – handmade, coarse, anachronistic – give him a displaced, uncanny quality, like a man out of time. He defies categorisation, classification, description, but Diana is an assiduous assembler of evidence, of quantifying the unusual. So she gives it her best shot.

Tall and broad, he reverberates with a quiet power even in sleep. His features are leonine, arched browbones tailing into a proud nose above a cleft mouth. Sloping cheekbones and a carved jaw give the impression of a Romanesque statue, like something you’d find in City Hall – and also like nothing she’s ever seen before. It gives the impression that he’s a sculpture brought to life by a spell, Pygmalion in furs, but also of that princess who was cursed to sleep for a hundred years. Maybe he too could be awakened with a kiss, but Diana isn’t going to risk it. She’s hasn’t yet figured out whether his bark is worse than his bite. Who knew Dorothy had it so easy?

As Diana gently daubs the blood from Vincent’s wounds, she sighs and murmurs, “We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore.”

He awakens the next morning in screeching terror, snarling and feral. His disorientated rage burns out fast, but Diana gets her gun all the same, holding it with the same white-knuckled penitence with which a sinner might grip a rosary. Her spine is rigid, her eyes wide; even when Vincent passes out, she barely blinks, let alone sleeps, all night.

Mark calls by in the morning. She’d forgotten their plans, as usual. He’s pissed; she’s contrite but not sorry. She likes Mark: he’s understanding, kind, and way too patient with her. He’s not bad to look at either. But right now he’s at best a distraction, at worse a danger – to himself and to Vincent. She sighs. It was the right call, but that usually means it’s far from the easiest.

When she returns to the bedroom, Vincent is waking. He calls her Catherine, and the sound of the dead woman’s name in his mouth gouges a hole in Diana. She tells him her name, if only to remind him there’s someone looking out for him, but she’s not sure if he hears it.

Turns out he doesn’t remember what happened to him, how he got hurt, how he came to this place. She tries to tell him, as gently as she can though gentleness has never come easily to her. He’s startled by her knowledge of him, of his name and of Catherine’s murder. He’s ragged with grief, and Diana gets the impression that he is perpetually living within the last moments of Catherine’s life. She’s never seen a person so split open by grief. It moves her.

Diana recuses herself from the case the next morning. Joe rankles, rages; even without the claws, he looks just as ferocious as Vincent. She knows it makes zero sense for such a fastidious investigator to abandon such a mystery unsolved. It’s suspicious and nonsensical, a rookie mistake but one she can’t help making. She’s got someone to look out for other than herself, now, reputation (such as it is) be damned. Vincent is an anomaly, not only in her line of work but in her former understanding of the world and what it could hold. She’s has no roadmap for a world with Vincent in it, so her only shot is to cut the ripcord and throw caution to the wind, even if that particular zephyr is a relentless DA with a Chandler-sized chip on his shoulder.

Once she’s alone and unwatched, she huffs out a sigh, and slams her curled fist into the nearest wall. It stings for several hours afterwards, but it does the trick. The pain takes her mind off of tunnels and poems and promises for a hot second. But Vincent is there when she gets back, and the sight of him throws her for a loop. Her loft has become some liminal space between dreams and reality; a book that’s part police procedural, part fairy tale. How dare he look so goddamned unfazed, perusing her case board while she’s still trying to frantically work out what genre her life has become.

Vincent tells her his story, and Diana tries to keep up. Something about a star-crossed love, an empathic bond, a baby – it’s a lot to take in, but Diana lives her life from case to case, and she’s used to immersing herself in the details. She shares that part of herself with him, a meagre exchange for such an epic tale as his, but if you can’t be honest with the half-dead lion man in your loft, who can you be? Besides, Vincent doesn’t seem like the type to judge.

Joe comes to her place with threats and thwarted hopes, and leaves unsatisfied. A part of her wishes she could tell him, but Vincent’s trust in her is already so fragile, their whatever-it-is so new, that the thought of sharing the secret of his world feels like a betrayal akin to turning him in to the fuzz herself. He repays her nascent trust by disappearing on her, like so many before him – who knew the magical lion man was just like every other guy she’d ever met? She wonders if Cathy ever felt that way.

Mark ends things, because of course he does, though they’ve been running on fumes for a while now. Worse still, he tells her a truth about herself that she can neither justify nor deny: she doesn’t let anybody in. She’ll immerse herself in another’s life almost to the point of possession, but when it comes to herself, she’s a locked room. Dammit if he ain’t on the money. To know another person is to be vulnerable; to love them is to be utterly defenceless and exposed – an outstretched hand, an open vein. To let someone in would be to accept how completely they could destroy her if they wanted, because Diana only knows how to give everything. She’s never found anyone she could trust enough to destroy her.

She thought she hadn’t, anyway. Now, holding Catherine’s book of Sonnets like a holy tome, smoothing the inscription as though the imprint of her fingers linger there, she wonders. She turns the pages of Shakespeare’s verse, attempting to decipher the flowery lines as she would BASIC. The words glance off her like rain on a steel roof – but, she reminds herself, they meant a great deal to Catherine, and to Vincent. The words shed light on the impossible situation they’d found themselves in, gave words to their unique situation.

So Diana vows to try. For Cathy’s sake, if not her own.

“Go easy on me, Cathy. I’m a stranger in these parts,” she says to herself, turning the pages and praying for a half-understandable opening line to latch onto. And then a word catches her eye, and she half-smiles at the sight of it.

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,

And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;

Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,

And burn the long-liv'd Phoenix in her blood;

“This one sounds juicy,” she says, nodding appreciatively. “But it’s too gory to be one of your favourites.”

She skims through page after page, searching for a hook, or a resonance, anything that would summon Catherine – until she stumbles on one that hits a little closer to home. She doesn’t quite understand every phrase, but the meaning hits her full in the chest.

What is your substance, whereof are you made,

That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

Since every one hath, every one, one shade,

And you but one, can every shadow lend.

Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit

Is poorly imitated after you.

It’s as if Will had been down in the tunnels and met its strange prince himself. Vincent held so many shadows and facets: strange and beautiful and terrible and wondrous and a thousand more conflicting things all at once. Diana recalls how his presence had seemed to fill the whole loft, magnificent even in mourning, bearing the kind of nobility that seemed to come from another time and place. He is incongruity personified, and Diana can’t help it: he captivates her. There’s no greater mystery; perhaps there never would be. And she has to follow it, follow him, to the end.

Chapter Text

Diana comes by the DA’s office in the early hours the next day, when most people would be long gone. She stops by Cathy’s desk: not to snoop, but to check in case there are any personal effects left hanging round that she could squirrel away to Vincent.

She doesn’t find anything. Not even a stray flyaway, nothing to memorialise the woman who worked there. She hears a noise to her left; carefully, she pads through the office until she finds the source: Joe, of course, burning the midnight oil.

“Joe,” she says softly. He doesn’t look at her, but there’s a slanting tension to the way he leans over the desk that tells her he heard.

“I worked with Cathy Chandler for nearly three years,” he says, quiet like a panther is quiet before it strikes. “Like to think we knew each other pretty well. But she didn’t tell me nothing about her life. So how do you know so much?”

“I can’t tell you, Joe-”

“You’re killin’ me here, Bennett!” Joe yells, locking eyes with her, and Diana backs off. She’s heard him plenty angry before but never this… unhinged. “I oughta have you locked up for obstruction.”

“Do what you gotta do, Joe. It’s not my life I’m protecting.”

Joe’s wild eyes narrow. “It’s Vincent, isn’t it?”

Diana keeps her mouth shut. Joe huffs out pained laugh and shakes his head.

“What a goddamn Svengali this Vincent guy is, huh? He had Cathy tied so tight around his little finger, she went and got herself killed. And now he’s done the same to you.”

He wipes a hand over his face, looking old beyond his years. “Well, you know what’s coming for you, Bennet, and if you’re too stupid to walk away while you still can, then I ain’t gonna stop you.”

Diana swallows thickly. Joe’s hunched over his desk, looking simultaneously ancient and so very young. She wants to rest a hand on his shoulder, hold him in her arms, kiss his forehead and tell him it’s all gonna be okay, as if he were a little kid. But he’s not a kid: right now, he’s a wounded animal. One touch and he’s liable to lash out.

“I can’t because telling you would do wrong by her,” she says, her voice a leaden weight crashing through the silence in the room. “Believe me, it would. I know you don’t trust me, and I don’t blame you. I’d be suspicious of me too. But if you were in my shoes, you’d do the same. I promise you would.”

“Must be nice,” he mutters, spite slicing at his voice. “To feel so goddamn noble.”

“I’m in the gutter, Joe. But I’m looking at the stars.” She turns to take one last look at one of the last good men in this stinking town. “I hope you get to see them too, one day.”

“If you see me again, it’ll be ‘cause I’ll be serving you,” his words are cruel but his voice is just weary. “Get out.”

She does.

Diana resolves not to call him again, not even if her life depends on it.

And then her life does depend on it, and of course she calls him. When Gabriel’s goons had stormed her apartment, Billy’s Grill and Coffee Shop had seemed an unlikely sanctuary – but a sanctuary none the less. The waitress had done her a real solid covering for her, until the goddamn dial tone gave her away. (She’ll have to drop by at some point, thank her).

At least Joe hadn’t put the phone down on her in her time of need. Sure, he hadn’t been particularly quick on the jump – Tied up in court? What a lame-ass excuse – but he had mobilised the Joint DA-NYPD Task Force (who names this shit?) once Diana had come to him with the name of Cathy’s murderer. Most guys would have taken ne look at that floor tile she’d sketched and laughed her all the way to Queens – but Joe had taken it real serious. Even Father had gotten in on the action, along with a number of other brave souls from the tunnels; if it hadn’t been for those guys in the museum – and Joe – she’d have been a goner. (She starting to realise she owes a lot of people her life).

Above and Below, working in harmony to get justice for a woman who was part of both worlds. Cathy would’ve been proud.

Cathy would’ve been pissed. If she’d heard Gabriel waxing lyrical about his empire, his legacy, the plans for her son – she woulda shot him between the eyes long before Diana did. But Diana did shoot him in the heart, which had its own poetry: he’d as good as ripped Vincent’s out in front of him, so Diana had put a bullet through his.

Vincent could’ve ripped the guy to shreds, but he was already so saturated with grief and death, she didn’t want to add another one to his soul – even if the fucker deserved it.

So Diana had pulled the trigger.

It hadn’t done anything, not really. Hatred is a hydra: one cruel empire falls, two more spring up in its place. The mob would recover quickly, Vincent would not. It seemed a paltry offering for all Vincent, Joe, Father and the others had given Diana: her life least of all. But she hopes it brings them a sliver of comfort, if anything can.

*           *           *

At the Naming Ceremony, Diana meets two Jacobs: Vincent’s son, and his father. While Vincent coos over the former, Diana converses with the latter: a stern-looking man, with cautious but kind eyes, who walks with a hardened sort of grace. There’s a natural elegance to the man that makes Diana think of a king of old, like the color-plate King Arthur in her mom’s picture books.

He’s also kinda stern, but in a comforting, familiar sort of way. He draws her off to one side, before the ceremony starts.

“I want to express my… gratitude,” he says, as if he’d rather have used any other word. “For what you have done for my son and for this community.”

“It was nothing, really.”

“You’re wrong about that, Ms Bennett.” Father’s eyes soften almost imperceptibly. “You put your life and your career on the line for people who owed you nothing. Now we owe you a great deal.”

Diana shakes her head. “I’m the one who owes you. If it hadn’t been for Vincent, or your friends at the museum, or you going to see Joe, I – well, there’s not much I could’ve done alone against him. That man, Gabriel – I don’t say this often, but he was evil.”

Father sighs, and when he looks at her next, she feels like she’s looking right into her soul. “I don’t believe in evil, Ms Bennett: I believe in greed. I’ve seen how it poisons men, turns them into hollow vessels of want. ‘Legacy’ was the word Gabriel used, Vincent told me; but what he truly wanted was what all men who think themselves gods want: power, and control.”

“Obedience,” Diana adds. “For someone as strong as Vincent to submit to him, to bend the knee.”

Father nods, and it might be a trick of the light but Diana swears she can see respect – or the beginnings of it – in his gaze.

“You know how it feels to have people depend on you, Ms Bennett; even to stake their lives on you. That is something we share. What we may not share, however, is fear; at least, not to the same degree.”

Father leans heavy on his walking stick, as if a twinge of pain had cut him to the quick. She reaches out instinctively, but he holds up his hands, as if there is more he has to relay before he can rest.

“I have lived in fear above the ground and I have lived in fear below it, and the feeling is always the same: it is a gnawing, scraping thing and it never sleeps. It was my companion long before I came to this place. But now it clings to me even more tightly. We are utterly dependent on pity and chance, Ms Bennett. Trust the wrong person, and this world will be snuffed out quicker than a candle. Do you understand me?”

Diana nods. “You can trust me, Jacob. I swear.”

His answering look seems like an initiation; like she’d passed the test. “I know. I know because Vincent does. He was sure you would not betray him, or Catherine's memory.”

As he makes to turn away, she suddenly says: “You know, my dad always you can never outlive bad people, only outrun them.”

“Then your father was very wise indeed. That is something you share.”

Diana half-laughs, caught off guard by the compliment. She worries she’s made some sort of rash error in etiquette, but Father’s eyes are twinkling. He rests a hand lightly on her shoulder before walking away to start the ceremony.

It’s beautiful, because of course it is, and Diana feels giddy, lighter than she has in months, as she walks back through the tunnels with Vincent at her side.

“I wanna thank you for making me feel so welcome.”

He seems to fill the whole tunnel, and also as elusive as a shadow. “You felt welcome because you are welcome. If you ever need a home, or a place to rest, these tunnels will be kept watch for you by friends.”

Maybe it’s Merlot, or maybe it’s the way the creamy golden light of the tunnels is hitting his profile just so, or maybe what Father had told her about Vincent's unswerving faith in her, but Diana feels bold enough to ask.

“When will I see you again?”

She’d almost stopped herself from saying it, and now Vincent looks as though he’s keeping a dozen different responses at bay. He settles, at last, on the vaguest.

“I don’t know.”

It’s a brush-off, clear as day. She’d heard enough of them in her time. So why does it make Diana feel as though fireworks are shooting through her veins? Catherine Wheels, as it happens; how ironic, or maybe fitting.

“Goodbye, Vincent.” Her voice sounds smaller than she’s ever heard it, limper than a whisper.

“Goodbye.” She wonders why it lashes through it that he doesn’t use her name.

Chapter Text

Diana goes back to Billy’s Grill and Coffee Shop about a week after everything goes down. Gabriel’s thugs really did a number on it: it looks even shabbier than before, and the atmosphere’s fizzled out of it like air out of a balloon. It kinda reminds Diana of the trenches after a gas attack in World War I; quiet people leaning on each other, or sitting silent and alone, with a dazed look in their eyes.

The reason she’s still standing is leaning against the counter, cleaning a glass with a dusty-looking rag. She looks up as Diana approaches, eyes guarded.

“I wanted to say thank you,” Diana says – no preamble, no niceties, just straight to the blood debt. “For saving my life the other week.”

The waitress shrugs. “You would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for that goddamn phone.”

Diana stuffs her hands in her pockets. “Yeah. Shoulda hung up the second those guys came through the door.”

“Turned out okay in the end,” she says, warmly. “You’re still breathin’, aren’tcha?”

“Just about.” Diana holds out her hand. “I’m Diana, by the way.”

She takes it. “Mandy.”

“Like the song?”

Mandy tilts her head to one side, eyes narrowed. “Y’know, that’s the first time I ever heard that.”

“Sorry. Can I get you a coffee – to say thank you?”

“Honey, you owe me a Cadillac for what I did.”

Diana weighs her options. “How about I add in a slice of pie?”

Mandy winks. “Sold.”

*           *           *

In the weeks that follow, Diana gently falls into a very particular new routine. She wakes early, gets her morning cup of Joe at Billy’s and shoots the shit with Mandy for however long it takes for the manager to catch her goofing off. Then she orders a black coffee for Joe and joins him in the DA’s office for a morning run-down of New York’s finest felonies. She grabs a donut for lunch from a street vendor, and spends the afternoon on whatever case she’s getting paid for that week – whether she’d pulling together another board back at her apartment or following leads in the city.

The nights, of course, belong Below. Vincent had told her she was welcome, so like any excitable houseguest, she takes him up on his offer and then some. Vincent himself is hard to pin down, like the shadow he’d seemed that night. He’s rarely Below when she is, though sometimes their paths cross – like ships in the night.

No matter; Diana’s never liked the company of those who’d rather be anywhere else. Instead, she spends her Below time with Laura and her interpreter, Rebecca, the curly-haired blonde Diana’d met at the Naming Ceremony. Laura’s a riot, sweet and wild and funny as hell; Rebecca is demure and unassuming, and the first person Diana would ever describe as ‘lovely’. Together, they’re pop rocks and molasses. Not everyone in the tunnel world is as au fait with ASL as Vincent – but as Diana is, Rebecca can take a backseat on her official duties and be a part of the banter for once.

It’s not long before Diana realises Rebecca isn’t just Laura’s interpreter: the way they occupy the same space, how they hold each other’s gaze like you’d hold porcelain, how they touch each other like the brush of paint on canvas. They’re so obviously, unabashedly in love with each other that it baffles Diana she’s taken so long to catch on. She wonders, with a pang, if this is how Catherine and Vincent were together, and it strikes her anew how wasteful, how careless, Gabriel was with their lives. A waste of potential, of serenity, and for what?

At least some people get to be happy and in love, and the thought comforts Diana. Poor Mandy was having trouble with her man: an ex-con who’d been on-and-off parole and on-and-off with her for seven years. He’d promised her a ring and a reformation, and neither, it seemed, was coming any time soon. Diana thinks of Cathy’s friend Edie, who’d fallen in love and moved to the Keys. She thinks of Cathy, stolen from this world on a whim. And she thinks of herself, because Vincent’s been avoiding her and it’s tearing her apart.

She’s never been a big sleeper, but with her early mornings and late nights she barely gets her head to a pillow these days. The circles below her eyes get a little darker, her hair a little wilder, her clothes more crumpled (which is really saying something). Joe seems to notice, ‘cos he slips her cases now and then, as if to give her something to focus on. He’s mellowed towards her a little since the whole ‘being kidnapped and held at gunpoint’ thing – who knew attempted murder was the quickest route into Joe Maxwell’s good books? She appreciates that Joe’s been gentler with her, because some days she’s close to breaking under the strain of it all. Sometimes he skirts around the elephant (or lion) in the room, but doesn’t pry too far: he seems to know that’s off the table, for now.

Then a serial killer strikes: on Thursdays, every week, with no connection between the victims. A serial killer with nothing linking the kills: it’s got Joe stumped, it’s got his old pal Jimmy Faber stumped – hell, it’s got Diana stumped. She’s been poring over police reports and photographs all day and into the night, and the cogs in her brain feel like they’re about to grind to a halt.

Of course, that’s when he shows up. Took him long enough, but she doesn’t have the energy to spar tonight. She doesn’t even know if she’s got the energy to form coherent sentences.

“I’m remembering how I once loved this city at night,” he whispers in that magnificent, melancholy murmur of his; tenebrous and taut. “Imagined myself a part of it, saw stories behind each and every light.”

She joins him at the roof’s edge, arms folded across her chest. “And now?”

“Now I’m a stranger here.”

He seems suddenly big and small at the same time, as if the great, tall form she’s standing next to is being projected from far away. She aches to hold him, but she feels that won’t be a comfort to him.

So she goes for the thing she feel will: words, and her. “You found Catherine in one of those lights.”

“And lost her in another.”

She sighs shakily, as if feeling the pain of those words within her chest. He’s still sitting in grief, and she knows the feeling only too well. Her dad’s death had carved a great yawning gulf in her chest, a bottomless pit into which she poured all her anger and shame and bitterness. Like Catherine’s, it too was needless: he’d stopped at a bodega for cigarettes when some guy pulled a gun. The check-out girl had told her afterwards that her dad had been real heroic, that he’d tried to disarm the guy only to get two in the stomach. Turned out, the gunman was a local vet who’d been scheisted out of his pension. He’d only been trying to survive, she supposes. On her darker nights, she wonders what she’d do to him.

She wants to tell Vincent that the grief, though it will never pass, will coalesce into something else; transmute, in time, into something easier to carry. She wants to tell him that she sees her father in picture books and Marlboros, in stop signs and 7/11s. She wants to tell him that, as a garbage man, he saw all the things that people threw away: all the parts of themselves they couldn’t face, all the strange and crooked things that only he saw the beauty in. That every time she solves a case, it’s like she’s disarming the guy in the bodega, and making sure some other father makes it home to their kid.

But she doesn’t tell him that; not yet, anyway. Instead, she stands beside him in the cool silence, and watches the lights across the way slowly, one by one, go out.

*           *           *

They solve the case; something Vincent said on the roof later that night unlocks the connection between the victims. Jimmy’s suspicious, starts calling her all kinds of Cassandra bullshit (she never liked him much anyway), but her ‘hunch’ as she calls it comes off. Gregory Coyle, the killer, had watched his dad die in a cave-in, and felt that Father and others Below hadn’t done enough to save him.

She feels his pain, and it makes her grip his hand all the tighter when he hangs off the edge of the abyss. Even when Vincent joins her, it’s not enough to save him: Gregory slips out of her grasp and he’s gone. Jimmy isn’t comvinced the killings have stopped, and when Diana is, gets back on his Ouija Board bullshit. He storms out of Joe’s office more harried than ever.

“You’re not gonna make this easy are you?”

She deflects, rising to her feet – but Joe moves over to her.

“You know the killings are over. You know that, don’t you?”

“I guess-”

“No, you don’t guess, you know. How do you know, Diana?”

“Ouija board.”

It would be easy to tell Joe. To guide him through the tunnels Cathy had walked and show him the world she had fought so hard to protect. She could imagine him clutching the back of his neck, looking from Father to Mouse and back again, sighing in that disappointed big-brother way of his. Can even imagine his faltering step as he’s finally confronted with the sight of the man Catherine loved, watch realisation dawn in his wide eyes, try to hide his shock under that ragged braggadocio he’s cornered the market on. Maybe it’s what Cathy would have wanted; maybe it’s what he deserves.

It’s only then Diana realises she doesn’t want to. She wants to cup that fragile world like water in the palm of her hand.

She’s so goddamn selfish. Joe’s probably crying his eyes out in his office right now and here she is keeping all the toys to herself. She makes her mind up that second: she’ll have to ask Vincent, and the others. She doesn’t know how this thing works; she only lucked her way into the exclusive club because she’s too damn stubborn for her own good. Maybe they have a formal vetting procedure, maybe they draw straws – either way, she’s gotta tell them. Then, it’s up to them to decide.

Vincent speaks for the first time in many long minutes. “Do you trust him?”

“I do,” she says with a shrug. “He’s not my biggest fan right now, but I think he’s an honourable man, and that’s a rare enough beast in this town. Plus,” she says, with a pointed look at Vincent, “He loved Catherine as much as you did.”

She turns her attention to the assembled group, their eyes full of wariness and hope. “As you all did. I’m not saying one man’s love is enough to jeopardise everything you’ve built here. Plenty let love drive them to do crazy things and I can’t say for sure how Joe would take this whole thing. But his love for Cathy ties you to him. It’s your decision – but I think he’s worth the risk.”

Chapter Text

“Maxwell, open up, would ya?”

Diana paces outside his door, biting her nails. Sure, it’s so late that Cinderella’s carriage would be turning back into a pumpkin about now – but Joe’s used to irregular hours, practically invented the concept.

She’s about to knock a seventh time when the door opens. A woman’s standing there, wearing a hastily-tied dressing gown that’s clearly too big for her, and also clearly a man’s. Her hair falls about her face in loose chestnut waves, and her eyes are bleary – but Diana recognises Cathy’s publisher friend, Jenny Aronson.

“Sorry, I didn’t-”

“Do you know what time it is?” Jenny asks, trying to smooth her flyaway curls into something presentable. (Diana thinks they’d looked nice just the way they were).

“I’m real sorry, Jenny, but I need to speak to Joe as soon as-”

She looks spooked. “How do you know my name?”

“I, uh, Joe’d asked me to look into why Cathy Chandler…” she doesn’t know quite why she’s unable to finish the sentence, even now.

Jenny’s expression goes from spooked to sympathetic. “You’re Diana, right?”

“Uh, yeah, I-” She manages before Jenny propels herself into Diana’s arms. Diana’s hands hang limply at her sides for an awkward moment before they hold her right back, gently.

When they part, Jenny sniffs and tries to surreptitiously wipe her eyes.

“Thank you. For all you did. I don’t think they’d ever have solved it without – without-”

“Ah, Joe would’ve figured something out.”

At that, another voice calls out from the room: “Joe woulda what?”

The man himself pops his head round the door. He’s in slacks and a white tee, suspiciously casual given Jenny’s get-up.

“You forget your way to the office, Bennett?”

“Uh, no. Joe, I’ve got to talk to you about something important. I can’t explain it here, I’ve got to take you, uh, someplace else. Someplace… off the books.”

“You’re really selling this, Bennett.”

“I know, but you gotta trust me. Just this once.”

“Joe, I think you should.” Jenny says, surprising everyone (including, probably, herself). she turns to Diana. “This place you’re taking him to, is it dangerous?”

“No more so than sixth street after dark,” Diana shrugs. “There’ll be others there, too. Good people, who can look after us.”

Joe looks at her for a long, silent second, as if trying to figure out if she’s working an angle, or if she’s trying to prank him, or if she’s just gone plain mad. Finally, he turns tail, and comes back holding a jacket and his keys.

Diana looks away as he places a sweet little kiss on Jenny’s cheek. “Don’t wait up for me,” he says softly.

“Be careful,” she whispers back.

As Jenny disappears behind the door, Diana and Joe start walking down the corridor.

“Tactful, Bennett,” Joe grouses, slinging on his jacket. “Real tactful.”

“You know I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t urgent.”

Joe grouses all the way to the tunnels, especially when Diana refuses to tell him anything about where they’re going. It’s only when he sees Father standing there, looking stern and yet hopeful, that he finally shuts his mouth.

It doesn’t last.

“Hey," Joe says, eye narrowing. "You’re the guy from the taxi, and the office – Jacob, isn’t it?”

“It’s good to see you again, Mr Maxwell,” I apologise for the somewhat abrupt nature of our first encounters, but I can assure you it was all for your own good.”

Joe points an accusatory finger. “You know, I’m getting pretty tired of people telling me that. Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining, okay?”

“As you wish.” Father says, taking a step closer to him. “What you are about to learn, if you choose to, was the deepest held secret in Catherine’s heart. To betray it, even on pain of death, would be to betray her. If you cannot keep the secret as she did, tell me now. Be comforted by the fact that what little justice could be found for her has been delivered. And leave without a second glance.”

“I ain’t leaving,” Joe utters with a martyr’s sincerity. “And if you think for second I’d go against Cathy’s wishes, you got another thing coming.”

“Would you stake your life on it, Mr Maxwell?”

Joe’s eyes blaze. “Mine, and yours, and everyone in this whole lousy town. Even hers,” he says, jerking his thumb at Diana, who has to batten down a relieved smile.

Father looks at Joe for a long, quiet moment. The three of them are frozen, like outlying apostles gesticulating wordlessly in Da Vinci’s margins. And then, Father smiles. His eyes go all twinkly, and then dart to Diana’s.

“Well, Miss Bennett?” Father says, an unspoken question in his voice. Joe turns to her with furious, naked hope in his eyes. She briefly considers letting him squirm, but he’s such a ferocious little puppy she can’t bear to torture him any longer.

“I’d say he’s earned himself a tour.”

Joe looks as if he could kiss her. Instead, he presses his lips together and nods once at her, as you would to a comrade on the field of battle.

Father pats him on the shoulder. (He’s got a soft spot for the guy, Diana can tell). “Follow me, Mr Maxwell.”

They start walking through the tunnels, and get to the part where they start furling outwards like veins, or roots.

Joe lets out an awed whistle. “Quite a place you got here.”

Diana bumps his shoulder. “You haven’t seen the half of it.”

“Jeez Louise, this is crazy. I mean, I played in these tunnels as a kid, but I never thought…” He tails off, looking up and around wildly, like a little kid at Disneyland.

“How could you?” Diana says, eager to tease him just a little bit. “That would’ve taken imagination.”

Joe snorts. “How about I imagine all the charges I could get you on for this. Obstruction of justice, perjury, disposing of evidence-”

“Ah, quit your bellyaching, Maxwell. You’re gonna miss the best part,” she says, just as they round the corner that leads to the underground waterfall. She hadn’t thought Joe’s eyes could have grown any wider – just wait til he sees Vincent – but grow wider they did.

As he soaks in the scenery, Diana nudges Father and says, “Taking the scenic route, eh?”

Father looks, for a fleeting moment, something bordering on mischievous. “We have such beautiful sights Below that I thought stumbling on a few of them… couldn’t hurt.”

“How the hell does this place even exist?” Joe says, running a hand through his hair.

“Hard work, Maxwell,” Diana grins. “And a little imagination.”

He shakes his head at her, but she can see he’s fighting a smile. Father resumes his measured pace and soon Joe can cross the Chamber of Winds and the Nameless River off his bucket list. As they walk, the gentle, comforting tapping of pipes grows louder, until they’ve reached the main dwelling places of the World Below.

Joe looks a little dazed when Father introduces him to the inhabitants – all but one, Diana realises. A big one. Joe’d asked her about Vincent on the way, and she’d kept it vague, because how do you even begin to tell someone about Vincent? You kind of just have to learn for yourself, ‘cos you wouldn’t believe it otherwise. She had told him, though, that while Vincent might seem unusual at first, he was a good man – because how would Cathy have loved him otherwise?

And then the big moment comes. Vincent steps out into the light.

Joe does a double take – Diana thought those only happened on TV – and takes a shaky step back. He looks Vincent up and down, then back again, then darts a glance at Father, who is looking calm and measured, with just a hint of defensive pride.

“She never mentioned you were so…” he gulps. “Tall.”

And in that moment, Vincent does something Diana has never seen him do before.

He smiles.

“Catherine always admired your courage, Joe,” Vincent says, “and your candour, but it was your heart she prized above all else.”

“All things considered, I think yours ranked a little higher.”

Vincent shakes his great, magnificent head, and even Joe looks entranced. “Catherine was a woman of singular kindness, even for one so unworthy as myself. To have been held in such regard by her is a thing to be treasured. She would rejoice to know you were here with us at last.”

“Thanks,” he says sheepishly, head bowed. “I don’t deserve it, but thanks. Look, Vincent, I’m grateful for your hospitality and all, and I don’t mean to be blunt, but Bennett here says you and Cathy were… an item. Is that right?”

Vincent bows his head, as though Joe had struck him. “We were in love.”

Joe takes a deep, shuddering breath. “How long?”

“Since the night she first disappeared from your world,” Vincent murmurs with a weary sort of pain.

“Four years, then” Joe mutters. “Give or take.”

“All those times Cathy knew who the perp was,” Diana says suddenly, so suddenly her voice might as well have been a gunshot. She’d heard the pain in Vincent’s words and wanted desperately to stymie the open wound of his voice.

“All those times she had to leave without notice, or skirt around the details of her life – she was here, Joe: protecting this community, or being protected by it. It’s how they survive down here, by trusting in good, brave people like Cathy. It was only with their help that we finally got her some closure.”

Diana rests her hand on his arm. “She can rest now, Joe.”

Joe stares at her for what feels like a century, and Diana feels her heart beating in her throat. For a moment, she wonders whether Joe is about to whip out cuffs and march her down to the nearest station; the look in his eyes says as much (and she did shoot Gabriel, after all). And then she notices that his eyes are glassy, almost shimmering at the edges, and then she can’t see them anymore because he’s barrelled himself against her and is hugging her so tight she’s afraid he’s gonna pop a vein.

It lasts maybe three seconds all in all, and Diana’s still processing it happened when Joe releases her and wipes his face across his sleeve, and sniffs in the way men do when they’re hiding tears.

“Ah, screw it,” he says hoarsely. “I hate that she’s gone. It’s not fair and it sucks and I wish I could’ve emptied some bullets into the bastard who took her from me, but I can’t. Remembering her won’t be enough, but I guess it’s all I got, right?”

Diana steps closer and rests a hand on his shoulder. “Not by a long shot, Maxwell.”

He looks at her with softness in his eyes for the first time in months, and weakly grabs at her hand.

Vincent walks forward and Joe gazes up at him with wonder and not a little intimidation.

“Those who loved Catherine will always have a home with us,” he says, in that glorious, gentle voice of his. “We have trusted you with our lives, Joe: trust us in that.”

The rest of the night is something of a blur to Diana. At some point, Pascal – Pascal the Pipe Guy, as Diana calls him so’s she remembers – opens a bottle and they toast to Catherine’s life, and Diana learns that a tipsy Joe is a sweet Joe, and a weepy one. The antique clock chimes midnight, but Joe’s too woozy to move and Diana doesn’t want to leave him even though he’d be in safe hands, so the tunnel dwellers fetch blankets and pillows and make up makeshift beds for their guests.

“Do you have everything you need?” Vincent asks as Diana sinks down into the sheets.

“Sure I do,” she says, all coy and rosy from the liquor. She reaches out her hand and taps Vincent’s forearm. “There he is.”

If he could blush, she’s sure he would have then. He takes the hand that rests on his arm, and gently maneuvers it so that he holds it in both of his palms. “Are you sure you are alright, Diana?”

“Pssh.” She’ll remember that with regret later. But now she just looks at his pretty face as she slowly descends upon her pillow, and hopes she dreams of him. “I’m swell. Night, big guy.”

“Good night, Diana,” he says, and gently places her hand upon the pillow. The last thing she remembers before she slips off is the sound of her name in his mouth.

Chapter Text

Diana wakes with a pounding in her skull, as if the roadworks on fifth street just took up residence in her frontal lobe. Yikes. Must’ve drunk too much. She stretches, catlike, and takes a great shuddering breath.

Her temple throbbing steadily, she hears a rustle in amid the pulsing of her own blood, and the swirl of voices in the aether nearby.

“You’re not drilling something next door, are you?”

“That will be the hangover, Mr Maxwell.”

Joe sounds just as worse for wear as she does. Father, of course, is as composed as ever. Diana keeps still, wanting suddenly to hear what these two oddballs have to say to each other.

“Thanks, Jacob – or do you prefer ‘Father’?”

“What do you feel most comfortable with?”

“Never even called my old man ‘Father’. Not that he warranted the term.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Maxwell.”

“While we’re on the subject, why don’t you call me ‘Joe’?”

A pause. “It’s a strange thing we share. The name ‘Father’ summons a ghost in your past, and the name ‘Joe’ summons one in mine.”

“What, Stalin?”

“Someone a little closer to home.” Diana hears the sound of a mug being placed on a cloth-covered surface. “A little before your time, perhaps. But the wounds run deep. Sometimes, even deep below the earth’s surface, I can feel him watching.”

Diana shifts silently, turning slowly and softly enough to get a slanted view of the conversation. Joe looks unusually pensive and seems unusually quiet, as if he’s slowly working out exactly which ghost is haunting Jacob. Diana senses fragments – red scare, blacklist, treason – and her heart skips at the realisation. No wonder Father was always so guarded.

“‘If you’re afraid, I can help you’”, Jacob says, and Joe turns to look at him. “That was what you told me the first time we spoke. Well, I am afraid, Mr Maxwell. I live in fear every second of my life, because the lives of everyone here depend on trust, and I know that to be a very fragile thing indeed. It can be blown away by the breeze, by any one of a thousand things, at any and every moment. I live in fear so that my people, my family, can live in peace. Do you know what it’s like to live like that?”

“I have an inkling,” he replies, but Father shakes his head.

“Then you don’t. You don’t know what it’s like to live each second as though the next will be snatched away from you. How it feels to be beaten into the dirt by men you once called friends. To leave home with the clothes on your back and scurry below the earth’s surface like a burrowing insect.”

He stops suddenly, and grips Joe’s arm as if for dear life. “To those who bear us ill will, Mr Maxwell, we are but termites. One slip and we are crushed beneath their heel. Now do you understand?”

“I do,” Joe says earnestly, and Diana thinks that – along with Vincent – he really is the most sincere guy on the planet. “You know, my ma always taught me to stand up for the little guy. Hell, til junior year, I was the little guy. Still am, I s’pose, in here.”

He rests his hand over his heart, like he’s about to start reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

“You’ve got my trust, Jacob. I hope I can earn yours.”

He lifts his hand from his chest, and holds it out. Jacob takes it, and Diana can sense the warmth and the weight it even from across the room.

“That means a great deal… Joe.”

“Same here… Father.”

*           *           *

Diana’s never breakfasted in the World Below, but she’s gonna have to make a habit of it. It’s not like the table’s groaning under the weight of some fabulous bounty, but the atmosphere is completely different to the more sombre, sensual feel of the tunnels at night. There’s a brightness, even miles below the sidewalk, she hasn’t experienced yet; a lightness, even, despite the heaping sorrow of the last year.

Joe’s an instant hit, of course. Mary’s mothering him already, making sure his plate’s filled and he’s swaddled in enough knitwear to climb Everest. His eyes meet Diana’s over the table as Mary drapes another shawl over him, and she stifles a laugh.

Once they’ve broken bread with their hosts, Joe says he’ll have to make a move soon, else Jenny’ll worry. Joe gently extricates himself from the woollen strait-jacket Mary had spun him in – “It’ll be waiting for you on your return,” she assures him, to which Joe looks decidedly unassured – and Diana looks around for her coat, only to notice Vincent holding it out for her.

She looks up into his eyes and takes it slowly from him; their hands brush, flesh and fur, and the jolt that goes through her is like the time she tried to hot wire a car. She felt the burn for weeks, afterwards; she has a feeling this one will linger even longer.

Vincent holds her gaze for a moment, inclines his head, and then he’s gone. She wavers on the spot, as if he’s taken her sense of equilibrium away with him; she can’t see anything to steady herself, so she stumbles about, through the archway, and finds herself holding a rocky sort of balustrade with views of a spiralling gorge.

She’s still leaning on it when Joe, comfortably back in his slacks and jacket, sidles up.

“This taken?” he says, pointing to the empty space next to her.

She shakes her head, and he fills the space, mirroring her stance.

“Look,” he says, after a time. “Cathy might not have trusted me enough to tell me-”

“She did trust you, Joe,” Diana cuts in. “She just didn’t want to put you in danger.”

“Tended to hoard all that for herself, huh?” His eyes are those sad-little-boy eyes again, and Diana has to fight the urge to coddle him like Mary had, even though coddling don’t come natural to her.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is: ‘thanks,’” he says, in that gruff, earnest way he’s really cornered the market on. “For bringing me here, telling me the truth. Jacob said you vouched for me.”

What an enigma that guy is, Diana thinks. “Don’t sweat it”, she says.

He pivots quickly, as if to clear his head of all the doubt and indecision.

“Hey, whatever happened to Cathy’s friend? Gal who worked in the computer division?”

“Edie King?”

Joe nods. “That’s the one.”

“Living with her husband in Palm Beach; some big-shot hockey player.”

He frowns. “What’s a hockey player doing in Florida? Don’t they make a living on ice?”

“I don’t judge,” she laughs. “Why’d you ask, anyway?”

“Hadn’t seen her in a while, is all.” It sounds like the finished façade of an unfinished thought, so it’s no wonder when Joe carries on, a little more introspective than before. “Guess I just wanted to make sure someone from the old days was doing okay.”

They lapse into a companionable silence, and stand there for a time without words, watching the rippling light on the cavern walls, listening to the soft clatter of the pipes and the sound of rushing water a couple tunnels over.

“I get it, you know.” He says, finally.

“What?”

“Why you wanted them all to yourself,” he says, not unkindly. “It’s a rush. No wonder Cathy kept it up so long. But it must have been hell, too.”

“Tell me about it,” Diana nods. “Glad we’re on the same page now.”

“Sure,” he smiles that generous smile of his that makes you feel like you’re in on a private joke. “But we’re not quite on the same page, are we?”

“I don’t follow-”

“When did you fall for him?”

Now it’s Diana’s turn to try out a real-life double take. “Who?”

Joe snorts. “Don’t play coy with me, Bennett. Ren Faire Fabio back there.”

A laugh escapes her lips. “You can’t be serious.”

“Look, he’s not my type, but I get it. He’s never gonna lose that hair and he’s always gonna look that good. I mean, the guy quotes poetry, for Pete’s sake.”

“You sure he’s not your type?”

“Easy,” Joe says with a grin, hands in his pockets. “Be careful, okay? I just started to like you.”

“Jeez, you must be one nightmare brother,” she says, bumping his shoulder; he must have seen our little exchange with the coat, she thinks. But her eyes turn pensive, and she wonders just how transparent her affection must have been. So transparent that anyone – that Vincent – might have noticed it too?

*           *           *

She’s at Milano’s with Mandy, on a rare night out. Diana’s treat, of course (“Least I could do, after the whole ‘saving my ass’ thing”.) Mandy’s in a glittery cocktail dress, Diana’s in black tee and matching jeans which is probably the dressiest outfit she has. They’re sipping Mojitos and checking out guys across the bar when Mandy must notice Diana’s grown pensive.

“You’ve got someone, haven’t you?”

Mandy’s voice jolts her out of her reverie. A guy with flowing blonde hair had made her think of you-know-who, and her neurons (or something further south) had taken it from there.

“Define ‘got’”.

She pats Diana’s hand understandingly. “He already taken?”

“He was. She died.”

Mandy rests her hand on Diana’s arm. “When’d she pass?”

“Six months, give or take. They have a baby, too; a little boy.”

“Yikes, Di. That’s… a lot. There are tons of guys out there without that kind of baggage, you know.”

“He’s… special.” Diana says slowly, seeing Vincent so clearly in her mind’s eye he might as well be standing by the jukebox. “I’ve never met anyone like him. I think… I think I‘d be good for him. And I feel like this is my last shot at finding someone who could understand me.”

“I understand you.”

Diana rolls her eyes, but she can’t keep the smile off her face. “Sure, but do you wanna take me to bed and talk until sunrise?”

“Sheesh, at least buy me dinner first.”

They start to giggle, and Mandy bumps her shoulder. “Just don’t sell yourself short, Di. You’re a goddamn catch and he better know it. Else I’ll have to tell him myself, okay?”

They hug for the first time that night. Diana’s never been one to show affection so openly, but with Mandy it comes easily. She’d have gone into battle for her right then and there; would have taken a bullet, covered her bail, anything to keep Mandy safe. Diana realises, then, that she loves Mandy; that she’s loved her since the moment she covered for her that night at the diner and every day since, more and more with every cup of Joe and stolen conversation.

But not in the way she deserves. Mandy’s heart belongs to a man who’s stomped on it without a care, and who Diana would like to roundhouse-kick him into the next century. Diana’s belongs to a man to who she will always be second best, even if through some miracle he ever grew to care for her as more than a friend.

At the end of the day, Mandy’s an open book while Vincent’s a shuttered tome. He’s a mystery; Diana can never resist one of those. Never could.

*           *           *

The underground waterfall helps to keep the noise in her head at bay so Diana finds herself drawn to it more and more these days. She looks straight ahead at its rushing wildness, but she doesn’t see it. Her mind is elsewhere, and her fingers toy with the ring she’s taken to wearing on a chain around her neck: Snow’s ring, the Black Opal inscribed in Latin. Even though it belonged to someone she hated, she finds herself drawn to it, as if it’s part of an ongoing mystery and not the defunct token of a dead man.

It’s that damn inscription more than the object itself. She’s never had time for most anything that she couldn’t grab in a hurry, but she can’t bear to part with this one. Maybe it’s because she feels her old man would disapprove, even knowing who its previous owner was. Things – objects – aren’t bad, Diana: only the people who misuse them.

“You carry it still.”

The voice is familiar, achingly so, but as it’s unexpected, it cuts through her reverie like a katana. Vincent stands in the archway, framed like a Byzantine king. Diana wishes the sight of him didn’t make her feel like that waterfall over there: rushing and tripping and falling over herself, always falling.

“Veritas te Liberat,” she reads, as if the inscription hasn’t burned itself into her soul. “’The truth will set you free’.”

Vincent hasn’t moved, and he seems even more like a painted image frozen in time. “Will it?”

“I’ve searched for truth my whole life. But ‘setting you free’? That always felt like something that happened to other people.”

He moves, smooth and silent, but does not take the empty space beside her. Instead, he stands like a sentinel, eyes on the waterfall beyond.

“The inscription is in Latin.” It’s more a statement than a question. “My name, too, has such origins. Are you familiar with its meaning?”

She shakes her head.

“From the Latin, ‘vincere’: to conquer.” He lowers his gaze to the floor, not quite looking at Diana but not not looking in her direction either. “When I was Gabriel’s prisoner, he used this knowledge as a means to recruit me.”

“He didn’t succeed.”

“He did not. But,” Vincent continues, eyes meeting Diana’s again. “It made me think of another who spoke of such things: another man questing for control, for dominance. His name was John Pater, but you may know him as ‘Paracelsus’”.

A shudder of recognition coils through Diana. She’d heard the name whispered Below, tracked the scanty details its people were willing to share. If she had an evidence board, there would be just be a name and a post-it with ‘Real Bad Guy’ tacked to it.

“He helped build this world. He was also my father.”

Diana’s eyes widen. Of all the things she thought he might have said she hadn’t expected that.

“He used the last years of his life to draw out my darker, baser instincts. To unleash everything I have striven to starve and conceal. And he succeeded.”

His cloak sweeps the dusty ground as he lowers himself gracefully beside Diana. Not so close that they could easily touch, but close enough for her to feel the air move about him and swirl the tendrils at her temples.

“Now, as I look at my son, I wonder whether I have gifted him only with a curse; the curse my father, my real father, passed on to me.”

“Vincent, even if you do share DNA with that Paracelsus guy, that still means you owe him nothing more than you’d owe a test tube. Your real father is the person who gives you all his time and love and doesn’t ask for anything in return. Something tells me you got someone like that.”

He fixes his sapphire eyes on her, and she has to dig her nails into the sediment just to keep upright. Does he know the power of his gaze?

“Your words are a balm, Diana. Thank you, for gracing me with them.”

“Sure,” she says, trying to keep her voice level. Then a thought occurs to her. “You know, my dad woulda loved it down here. He was a garbage man, helped pick up trash from the streets. Important work, if not glamorous – and he adored it. He’d always say, ‘look after the little things, Diana, and they’ll look after you’.”

She smiles, turning excitedly to Vincent. “He’d bring home little trinkets at the end of the day, broken toys and busted frames and engine parts that couldn’t work on their own. But he’d never talk about these things as if they were useless, or ugly: he always said that something that was once loved, can love again.”

Something flickers in those blue eyes; something that goes bone-deep, that has no words, or none that Vincent can muster, which is a feat indeed. She wonders if he hears the affection seeping through her voice – she sure can – or if that is lost in the roar of grief. She wonders if he is thinking of Catherine, of the indignity and the injustice and the inconceivable thought of the years that lie ahead without her. And she wonders if he is thinking of her, of whether the soft honeyed light is playing on her features as it plays on his, making something that he, too, will see when he closes his eyes that night.

Chapter Text

Jacob’s a little restless tonight. Diana’s walked him round the room and the winding corridors beyond a dozen times, but he just won’t settle. Vincent’s had no luck either; Jacob mumbles so grumpily at one point that Diana has to stifle a laugh. And then she feels sad right after, ‘cause she knows what the restlessness must mean. Must miss his mom.

“That makes three of us, little guy,” she mutters, kissing his forehead. I got no right to miss you, Cathy, but I do. God knows I do.

She glances at Vincent, who is watching her gently, but intently. Another evening of gently sharing the same space and Diana still finds it hard to read Vincent. She doesn’t find it impossible: after all, she knows when the wall goes up, that’s for sure. Now she gets why Mark was so frustrated. Poor guy.

Vincent looks at her as though attempting to solve a riddle whose answer eludes him – but he keeps trying. Her eyes, as always, catch her off guard. His is a strange beauty, but beauty nonetheless – though his eyes are something else.

Eyes of China blue, just like the song. “This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.”

“What kind of poetry is that?” Vincent muses.

She hadn’t realised she’d spoken aloud. “A different kind of poetry than you’re used to, that’s for sure.”

“Tell me,” he urges, his sonorous voice shimmering off the walls.

“Guy called Don McLean. He’s like a modern poet, I guess, but he puts his verses to music.”

“Would you… play it for me?” He asks falteringly, almost shyly.

She smiles, caught off guard by the request. “Do you folks have a record player down here?”

Vincent shrugs, and it’s so casual and mundane a gesture it almost makes Diana laugh. “Mouse would know better than I.”

“You could always come to mine,” she ventures, placing her words as carefully as she would her feet on a high wire. She senses a tension within him; a rope pulled taut.

“It would be too great a risk, not least to yourself, Diana. We cannot chance it.”

She looks at Jacob in her arms, and then back at Vincent. He’s never been young, she realises. Young in the sense of being carefree, reckless with possibility. He’d assumed a mantle of responsibility so heavy it’d sapped all the unruliness out of him. Sneaking out for midnight jaunts with Catherine must have been the closest he ever got to the whirlwind of youth.

It’s a gift she wants to give him, suddenly; that sense of mischief and promise.

So she says, “Why can’t we? We’re both adults – I’ve got my gun, you’ve got them,” she nods at his claws. “What’s to stop us?”

“Prudence, Diana!” Vincent says in an outraged whisper, clasping his hands together. “That is what must stop us.”

“Only if you let it.” She sighs. “Look, there’s a time and a place to be careful – but I find the best thing to do with caution most times is to throw it to the wind.”

Jacob gurgles and coughs, and Vincent moves forward, catlike and quick. She carefully passes Jacob to him, and goes to get her jacket.

Slinging it on in one fluid motion, she says, “My place, tomorrow at 9.” And with that, she’s gone. That’s usually his trick, she knows – but she wants him to get used to the fact that two can play at that game.

*           *           *

Well, it looks like prudence took the night off, ‘cause Vincent appears on her roof, as if by magic, at 9 o’clock exactly.

Diana’s never given much thought to what she wears beyond utility – she wears slouchy layers that she needs to be able to sit in it for hours, to move freely in when needed, to hunch over papers and pace in front of boards and to walk the NY streets in all weathers. She’s never cared for what glossy mags call ‘fashion’, though she’s got spruced up once or twice – mainly to break into galas on a case or some such. She wears makeup to cover zits and dark circles, puts a balm in her hair to tame rather than style it.

Tonight, she did give it thought. A lot of thought, actually. She hadn’t wanted to go too dressed up and frighten the poor guy off – but not had she liked the idea of hanging around in sweats when Vincent’d show up looking like a medieval prince. So she’s gone for something in between: a casual but elegant belted shirt-dress and leggings, hair swept over one shoulder and tied with a ribbon – she had to go and buy that goddamn ribbon from a craft store, Jesus – and even got herself a new lipstick for the first time in years. What an indulgence, right?

It doesn’t seem like an indulgence, though, when she looks at herself in the mirror. She catches herself in mirrors more often these days, finds herself brushing errant tendrils from her face, smoothing her eyebrows flat. Not bad for a tomboy from Queens, she thinks. And then another face swims before her in the glass: Catherine Chandler’s.

She was so goddamn beautiful. Not cover-girl pretty, the kind of beauty to drool over and pass by. Catherine’s was a beauty to drink in and dream of. Even in photographs, there was a vibrancy to her; a spark that shimmered like a naked flame. No wonder men had fallen at her feet. She was a goddess.

Diana sighs, and buries her face in her hands, but Cathy’s image swims through the darkness all the same. A man who loved a Cathy Chandler would never settle for a Diana Bennett, no matter what lipstick she wore.

Yikes, is she really going gaga over some guy? Well, she corrects herself, Vincent isn’t just some guy. He’s a one off. But he’s still a man, at the end of the day. Men know when a woman yearns for a glance, for a word. They know how to drop those morsels of affection like crumbs, and they never lead anywhere pretty. She hopes Vincent is better than that.

She hopes she is too.

And then he’s there, at the balcony doors. The thrill of it goes through her like electricity; like an echo.

Diana barely registers what they say, what happens next. All she knows is that she’s setting up the turntable, and then they’re sitting on the floor like teenagers, backs against the sofa, listening to the songs wash over them.

At first, she bites back a laugh at how captivated Vincent is by the music, like watching Lancelot pick out groceries at K-Mart. When the track that shares his name starts to play, her eyes dart over to him, as if worried it will lay bare the deepest-held secrets of her heart.

She gets so anxious at one point that she slides down until she’s lying on the cool floor, if only so she’s spared the embarrassment of having to look at him. She does peek at one point, when she senses movement in her peripherals, only to realise that he’s mirrored her. There’s a new sort of intimacy in sharing the same space, the space only lovers and lost things know.

He doesn’t speak until the last track fades into silence.

“‘The world was never made for one as beautiful as you’.” He recites it as if it’s poetry. It’s her poetry, anyway; the closest she got before she entered his world. “When you spoke this man’s words last night, you were thinking of my son.”

“Yes,” she says softly. “And I was thinking of you.”

Vincent sighs, as if it causes him physical pain. “Beauty is something which has always eluded me, in every way that matters.”

“You’re wrong about that.” Her voice is so calm, so clear and strong, that he turns to look at her. She closes her eyes, because she can’t risk seeing his expression when she confesses something she’s felt since she met him. “Beauty is something you want to look at until your eyes dry up; but not ‘cause it’s pretty. Pretty is something that glances off you like rain off a roof. Beauty is something that sticks in your gut and your heart and your soul, becomes a part of you. True beauty hurts, 'cause it's like a supernova.You're lucky if you see it once in your lifetime. I've seen it, though, Vincent. I see it whenever I look at -”

As she expects, when she opens her eyes, he’s nowhere to be seen.

*           *           *

It’s sweltering outside, the traffic smog and the thick crowds driving Diana down into the cool tunnels for some respite. At least, that’s what she tells herself. She hadn’t known for sure that Vincent would be here (though where else would he be?)

When she rounds a corner and sees him standing there, she suddenly feels warmer than she had in direct sunlight. He inclines his head in greeting, and she tries to do the same, but is fairly sure she looks more like a bobblehead on a dash. It's taken her a week to get over the embarassment of Vincent sneaking out halfway through her romantic overture - but she's a big girl, she can take it.

That's what she tells herself, anyway.

She doesn’t get much of a chance to be maudlin. Today, it’s as busy Below as it is Above: people zooming around like couriers, carrying laundry and food parcels and bundles of god-knows-what here and there. Even Vincent is whisked away to help Mouse and Pascal fix a burst pipe, and so he asks if he may leave Jacob in her care.

Of course she agrees – she loves the little guy. He’s so full of joy and wonder, she thinks as she rocks him in her arms that it’s hard to think how traumatic his coming into the world was.

Something floats to the front of her mind: a steely-faced nun in Sunday School talking about original sin. How we all come into the world stained from the juice of Eve’s apple or some shit like that, and how we must live a pure life to purge ourselves of such evil. Diana snorts. As if a little kid can bear the weight of its parents’ bad decisions. Jacob doesn’t carry no original sin: he’s beautiful, he’s hilarious, he’s perfect.

She starts humming a little tune her mom would sing to her, something from an old Doris Day movie. She only remembers half the words, but if she closes her eyes she can remember her mom’s voice crystal clear, even more than her face. Diana barely understood when her dad came home from work one day with a scrunched-up face, and held her and Suzie’s hands, and told her mommy wouldn’t be coming home from the hospital. She’d thought at the time that mom was just having a holiday. She hadn’t realised ‘not coming home’ would be a forever thing.

Diana sighs, smoothing the fine hair from Jacob’s forehead. He skrinkles up his face and giggles, and she does too – but it dawns on her that this little guy’s mommy wouldn’t be coming home either, and her eyes start to sting, and –

No. She will not cry in front of Jacob, not when he’s gone through so much already. Original sin isn’t something Jacob could (or should, for that matter) inherit – but trauma is. Diana knows how grief can settle into the bones of a person, and she hates to think of this cheery little creature being weighed down by the legacy of mourning that has so clearly sunk its teeth into Vincent.

She wishes she could make it right; turn back the clocks, race to the rooftop and kick the morphine shot out of that doctor’s hand before it got near Cathy. If only she’d known her then, if only Joe had called her the moment Cathy went missing –

But it was no use. For all the magic of Below, no-one could turn back time. It was a useless exercise, and one Diana usually had no patience for. But looking into Jacob’s eyes, eyes that were so much like his father’s, she wishes she could do more.

Diana, you’ve done so much for both of us. She remembers Vincent saying, shortly after he’d been reunited with his son. Why?

It’s funny, she’d replied. When it was happening I never even questioned it. I don’t know, Vincent; you make everything so possible, I couldn’t help but wanna help you.

He had paused before responding. Then Jacob is not my only blessing.

You’re thinking of Catherine. Because of course he was – wasn’t he?

Always. And I’m thinking of you.

Sometimes I wonder how all of this can be happening and whether I even belong here or not. She remembers looking at him then, as if willing him to tell her that she did, that she was part of this strange world she’d stumbled into defending. He didn’t. She’d carried on.

Your world is… I don’t know where I’m going anymore, where I’ll be tomorrow. She wants him to say that she’ll be here, with him; beg her to stay.

Tomorrow will come, Diana. We can only live each day as it comes to us, with its pains and its joys, and all of its gifts.

She’d held Jacob in her arms then, and looking over her shoulder at Vincent standing there, she’d been caught – as if by a bullet – by how right it all felt. How, moments after she’d questioned where she belonged, she felt like she fit, somehow.

Caught in the maelstrom of such thoughts, she barely hears Father enter the room.

“How is he?”

“Perfect,” she replies, and Jacob bursts out into an adorable little smile at that, as if he understood her words. “I’ve never seen such a happy little soul.”

“I wish I could say the same for his father.” Jacob leans heavily on his stick as he crosses the room, and sits shakily down in the armchair. “He has become... quieter of late.”

And flightier. “Have you talked to him about it?”

Father shrugs. “I’ve tried to, in my way. I did wonder if speaking to someone his own age – his brother, perhaps – might help, but there’s no way for us to contact him."

Diana had heard stories of Vincent’s brother – of Devin, that was his name, right? – largely from Jamie who seemed to be nursing a crush on the tunnels’ prodigal son. It seemed that Devin was a bit of a rascal, but a reformed one, having left to care for his friend Charles, a man with a deformity that had made him a pariah in the World Above.

“Is there anyone he could speak to?”

Father’s eyes dart away from her. “I had wondered if he might open up to you.”

“I've tried, too. But I’m tied to his grief. He sees me, he sees her die. Someone from before all the pain, would remind him of better days before.”

“And those to come again.” His tone is meaningful, layered, and it gives Diana pause.

“You sure Devin didn’t tell you where he went?”

“He left no phone number, no address. He said only that he and Charles were going somewhere south of Oz, and north of Shangri-La.”

Father reaches into his pocket and retrieves a bundle of something papery. He holds it out to her; when she takes it, she can see it’s a stack of telegrams which are starting to curl at the edges. Father must have read them over and over.

Sydney is doing well Stop He misses the city but is enjoying the fresh air and temperate weather Stop His health has improved immensely Stop Send our regards to father Stop

The next is practically identical, only bearing the name ‘Nicholas’. Another is signed ‘David’, and another still ‘Oliver’. All Dickens heroes.

“Devin expressly forbade us from sending any messages, in case it put a target on their backs. I’m afraid we may have to wait for him to contact us.”

Diana nods, but she’s never been good at waiting – or, at least, waiting without a plan. So, later, when Vincent returns for his son, she goes Above and buys a map of the US from some tourist kiosk in Queens. It’s the same map she slams on Joe’s desk later that evening.

He looks up from the file he’s been reading. “Planning a road trip, Bennett?”

“Something like that. You know the name ‘Devin Wells’?”

“Sure. He’s Vincent’s brother, right?”

She nods. “He’s also the Jeff Radler that worked in your office for a hot second.”

Joe’s eyebrows shoot up almost to his hairline. “For real?”

Diana shrugs. “He was kind of a jack of all trades, ‘fore he found his calling.”

“Jacob said he went away to look after a friend.”

“He did. But he didn’t leave an address, a number, anything to contact him.”

“Gone AWOL?”

She shakes her head. “Not quite. He sends a telegram on the first Sunday every month, but always from a different location.”

“Jeez, this guy’s harder to pin down than Hoffa. So, why is he on your mind?”

She exhales, and the sound of it seems to give her away more than words could. Hell, Joe already knows how she feels about Vincent - what's the use in hiding it now? “His father thinks Vincent needs him. Vincent’s struggling, more so than he has in a while.”

“So you wanna track the untrackable?” Joe runs a hand through his hair. “Seems like this guy doesn’t wanna be found, Bennett.”

“But he’d come home in an emergency, right? He doesn’t even know Cathy’s dead, for Chrissakes!”

“Alright, slow your roll.” Joe rises to his feet, joining her on the other side of the desk. “If it’s that important to you, we’ll do some digging.”

“Already have,” she says, nodding to the map. “Devin said he was going someplace south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.”

“So we’re looking for the sweet spot between Australia and China?” Joe scrunches up his face, not unlike baby Jacob had. “The Pacific?”

Diana rolls her eyes. “Charles couldn’t fly anywhere, he’d be too noticeable. So Devin must be somewhere in the US.”

“Why not Canada, then? Or Mexico? He wouldn't need to fly there, necessarily.”

“South of Oz and north of Shangri-La, Joe.” Diana repeats, eyes glimmering as they do when she’s onto something big.

She grabs a ruler and pencil from his desk. “Oz as in the Wizard of Oz, right? So we’re talking Kansas,” she says, drawing a straight line across the map, right across the southernmost point of the state.

“Where the hell’s Shangri-La, then? Someplace east?”

“It’s fictional.” She ignores Joe’s exasperated sigh, and ploughs on. “But it was inspired by this place on the border of Tibet and Yunnam.”

She draws another line right across the map, right across to the US, shading in the gap between them. Joe’s watching her carefully, half as if she might have gone mad, half as if she might be on to something.

“That’s still a wide margin of error, right?” She says, before pulling a few wrinkled pieces of paper out of her pocket. “But see these telegrams? They all have a different outgoing zip code, but they’re mainly from Kansas and Arizona. So he’s definitely not there. Then there’s a couple sent from Texas, Oklahoma. One from Utah. What’s missing, Joe?”

He consults the map, then looks up at her. “New Mexico.”

“Bingo. He must be there. It’s North of Tibet, south of Kansas. It’s one of the least populous states, plenty of sunshine and mountains. Plus it has a nice symmetry: New Mexico, New York. How far d’you think he’d get in a day by foot?”

Joe shrugs. “The Romans marched 21 miles a day in 800 pound armour. I’d guess a real athletic type could do 30-40, maybe. If he wanted to do a return trip, leave less of a paper trail, that’s maybe 20 miles each way.”

She nods, and stabs the pencil into the centre of the state’s northern border. “That means he must be somewhere in the northern part of the state, somewhere he could travel across multiple state lines.”

“Look Diana, this is impressive and all – but even with that range, we could spend months looking and never find him.”

“You’re right. But we don’t need to find him, we just need to work out where he's gonna send the next telegram, and go there.”

She spreads them out on the desk, over the map, and has to bite back a laugh at how annoyed Joe looks at her flagrant disregard for his filing system.

“Western Union haven’t got many offices left. Devin’s used the Kansas one more often than most, probably ‘cause of the Oz connection. And he hasn’t tried that one in a while – so I bet that’s his next port of call. He’s due to send a message tomorrow. I say we leave tonight.”

“On a whim?”

“On a trail.” She stuffs her hands in her pockets. “Look, if I’m wrong, you lucked yourself into a holiday. If I’m right, we’ve got our man.”

“You think I can just up and leave for a week?”

She shoves him playfully. “Come on, Joe: the city won’t fall apart. And if it does, then you’ve got next year's election speech in the bag.”

“And I suppose I’m paying for this?”

“You’re getting that cushy DA check. Put it on the company dime.”

“And say what, Bennett?”

“You’re tracking a person of interest. It’s not even a lie.”

Joe grouses all the way to the plane, and most of the flight, until he finally dozes off. Diana has never been an easy sleeper, and never when she's got a mystery on her hands. She scours the map for any trace, any hint that she could be wrong. Of course, Devin might double back and try the Utah office to cover his tracks, or he might go to Texas to shake things up a little. Oklahoma was the next most likely, but Diana has a feeling about the Kansas one. The same feeling she had when she followed that map down into the tunnels for the first time.

When she saw the name ‘Vincent’ scrawled in a book of poems in Cathy’s apartment.

Chapter Text

They touch down in the Sunflower State in the early hours, grab coffee in the airport café and head off in a rental. Joe drives, blinking sleep out of his eyes, while Diana consults the map again.

Diana’s actually got two maps on the go: the one she brought with them from New York, one she nabbed at the airport on their way through. It’s a map of the county, but with all these cutesy little drawings of log cabins and farms on it, and she thinks that it would be pretty neat to explore the area on their own time, if they weren’t on a mission. Hell, Diana’s always on a mission – but can’t a mid-week break to the Midwest count as one too?

She puts a pin in that for the moment, and turns her gaze out the window. They’re cruising down a winding country road: on one side, a forest spreading green like the sea; on the other, a sheer drop a thousand feet down. Not to be dramatic, but it kinda feels like her life; safety and sureness on one side, danger and promise on the other.

“We’ll need a cover story else we’ll draw suspicion, and that’s the last thing Devin needs.” She says, returning to the map. “So I figure we just got married and-”

“Woah, slow down a sec-” Joe says, slamming on the brakes. “If you’re gonna spring a proposal on me, at least wait ‘til I’ve pulled over.”

“Sorry I’m not more romantic,” she laughs, looking at Joe’s weary outrage. “How ‘bout if I buy you lunch?”

“That’s your definition of romance, Bennett?” Joe shakes his head fondly, then starts up the engine and pulls away.

They reach a quiet little stretch of mom and pop joints and hardware stores; a real authentic western town. It’s bracketed by mountains on each side, and the sun hits hotter than in New York, even with all the traffic smog. There’s a peacefulness here, too, that’s she’s only yet found Below. No wonder Devin likes it here.

As they walk down the dusty street, she feels Joe reach for her hand, curl his fingers through hers.

She grins up at him. “You really commit to the bit, huh?”

“It’s called a relationship, Bennett. You should try it sometime.”

She laughs, but it feels – nice. Joe holding her hand like that: easy, carefree. Yeah, it’s a cover. Yeah, he’s with someone else and she’s – well, whatever the hell she is. And it’s not Joe himself. He’s the annoying, wonderful older brother she never had, she could never see him as anything but. But she wants to chase the feeling. She wants to know what it’s like to hold hands and walk through town with someone she loves.

Over a thousand miles from New York, and she’s never felt closer to Catherine Chandler.

They make a beeline for the telegram-turned-post office which, lucky for them, has its own little café. It’s run by an elderly couple who look like the picture of ‘Midwestern nice’. The wife – Nella–Mae, they soon learn – rushes over to them. Turns out she runs the café while the husband, Earl, runs the post office.

“I’m Johnny and this is my wife, Frances,” Joe says, wearing a boyish smile that makes him the very picture of the kind of guy you’d bring home to meet the family. “We just got married last week.”

“Oh, how romantic!” Nella-Mae gushes. “Earl! Didya hear that? These two are on their honeymoon!”

“’Gratulations.” It seems like the only multi-syllable word Earl has uttered in quite a while.

Nella-Mae shakes her head at him. “And what brings you to our little town on your honeymoon?”

For the briefest moment, Joe hesitates. So Diana steps up to the plate.

“The Wizard of Oz. I’m sorry, I know it’s a stereotype – but, growing up in the city, this place always seemed like heaven to me.” She looks at Joe, trying to swoon as much as humanly possible without gagging. “It’s how Johnny proposed, actually.”

His eyes widen as Nella-Mae turns expectantly to him. “Oh, I love a good proposal story.”

“Well, I took her to see the movie one night,” Joe says, remarkably lucid. “There was a fancy screening in Central Park, and when the movie finished, I turned to her and I said, ‘Frances, there’s no place like home. That’s you: you’re my home. Whaddaya say we make one together?’”

“Isn’t that romantic?” Diana says, threading her arm through Joe’s – a nice touch, if she does say so herself.

Nella-Mae’s eyes are shining. “That’s the most beautiful thing I ever heard. If that ain’t the only thing that matters in this life: finding someone to make a home with.”

Diana squeezes Joe’s arm, but the cogs in her brain are turning. Nella-Mae’s words gather there like engine oil, clogging the machinery – or maybe making it run a different way. She’s always lived within other people’s lives, and even made a fine one for her own – but ‘home’ is something that has eluded her ever since her dad passed. Sure, she had Suzie, then Alexandra, even Mark – but her father’s death fractured the concept for her, ruptured the Pangea of her life into archipelagos, floating separately and alone.

Still floating in that distant ocean, she vaguely feels herself being ushered towards a cosy little booth by the window. The table is laid with a red-and-white gingham cloth, and the table has views over the ridge that solidify Diana’s plan to return one day and explore the place at her leisure.

As Nella-Mae bustles off, Diana tries to hide a smile.

Joe rankles. “What’s so funny, dear?”

She rests her elbows on the table. “Frances and Johnny?”

“Yeah?”

“Dirty Dancing, really?”

He snorts. “I’m surprised you’re familiar with it.”

“I’m more surprised you’re familiar with it.” She rests her chin on her hand. “Isn’t it a little risky?”

“I don’t think it woulda made its way down here,” he shrugs. “Call it a calculated risk.”

“I think you should let me calculate the risks from now on,” Diana mutters just as Nella-Mae returns with a huge pot of coffee.

“Trouble in paradise?” she coos, clearly sensing the tension.

“Not at all, ma’am.” Joe flashes that meet-the-parents grin again. “My wife’s always right.”

“Smart boy,” Nella-Mae nods appreciatively. “Not every man’s as quick a study.”

As she walks off to prep the waffles, Joe pours a cup of black coffee and takes an appreciative swig.

“What you said back there,” Diana says, dropping a couple sugar cubes into her cup. “It was nice. Beautiful, actually. I hope you’ve found that. ”

“Thanks, Ben-Frances,” he corrects himself, in case Nella-Mae’s somewhere close by. “You know, I think I have.”

“Jenny really cares about you. I could tell.”

“It’s pretty special, that’s for sure. Coming home at the end of the day, and there’s someone who’s happy to see you. Haven’t felt that in a while; maybe ever, tell you the truth. She’s… something else.”

Diana downs her coffee in one go. “You gonna talk about another woman on our honeymoon, Johnny?”

“Hey, you started it-” Joe cuts off suddenly as they hear the tinkling of the doorbell. Diana turns.

A man walks in. He’s tall, with dark hair and cheekbones you could use to sharpen a switchblade. There’s an ease about him, and also a caginess, as if he’s wary of whoever might be around the corner.

Today, he’s right.

“Morning, Earl,” he says. Maybe it’s the voice, Diana thinks, but he reminds her of Mark, in some searing, gutting way she can’t explain and certainly can’t deal with right now. Only, Mark didn’t have scars like Devin does: three parallel lines, as though made by claws. Diana realises with a pang who must have bestowed them.

She nods meaningfully at Joe and they rise as one.

“Well, look who it is!” he says with a boyish grin, clapping Devin on the shoulder. “Long time no see! Hey, hon, this is my roomie from college.”

“I’ve heard so much about you.” Diana says, as sweetly as she can muster. Devin looks like a dog trying to escape from a muzzle. “Vinny says hi, by the way.”

His eyes widen, almost imperceptibly. This guy must be a pro.

“Vinny, huh?” He says carefully, as though stepping over a landmine. “How’s he doing these days?”

“He was asking after you, actually.” Diana says, trying to convey I’m safe, we’re fine, you’re not in danger with her eyes. “Could we talk? We got a lot to catch up on.”

Nella-Mae walks up, holding a stack of waffles almost as tall as Vincent. “You’re not leaving already? You haven’t even had your breakfast.”

Joe looks tempted. “Actually, can we take those to go?”

*           *           *

“Don’t run, Devin – or is it ‘Jeff’?” Joe says, smiling through gritted teeth as they walk back down the dusty street the way they came. “Nella-Mae might get suspicious, and that’s the last thing any of us need, right?”

Devin lets himself be practically frogmarched towards a bench overlooking the gorge. As they sit down – Joe guarding the doggy bag with his life – he directs that piercing gaze at Diana. “You mind telling me who the hell you are?”

“I'm Diana and this is Joe. We're friends of Vincent.”

“Yeah, I got that from 'Vinny'. How on earth did you find me?”

“’Cos Bennett here’s a goddamn genius, that’s how.” Joe flashes a look of unrestrained pride in her direction, and Diana couldn’t have felt more honoured if he’d hung a medal around her neck. “You couldn’t have left a forwarding address?”

Devin rolls his eyes. “That would sort of defeat the point of being ‘off the grid’, wouldn’t it?”

“It’s one thing to be off the grid to the world.” Diana says, suddenly annoyed with this Mark-looking son-of-a-bitch. “But to your family?”

“I contact them regularly, as you must know-”

“Yeah, but what if they need you?”

Devin looks down at his feet; kicks idly at a clump of grass and weeds. “Never have before. No-one has – well, not until Charles. And even then, I think it’s more the other way round.”

“Family’s a two-way street, Wells,” Diana says, trying to be gentle now that he’s opened up a little. “Look, I know you got priorities here, and I respect that – but you’ve gotta be able to answer a call, somehow. Ever heard of a burner phone?”

“I considered it. Thought it was too dangerous.” He tilts his head, looking her up and down as if he’d be able to detect maliciousness like an airport scanner detects a gun. “Why go through all the effort to find me now? Something’s happened, hasn’t it?”

Joe steps in. “You knew Cathy Chandler.”

“Sure, she’s my brother’s-” He stops before finishing the sentence, as if it’s all clicked into place (as if he could’ve given their relationship a name, anyway). “Wait, has anything-”

“She’s dead.” Diana says it as calmly and as kindly as she can, reaching out to rest her hand lightly on Devin’s arm.

He looks as though his heart just plummeted off a cliff. “When – how – ?”

“Six months ago,” Diana continues. “The man responsible is dead now, though I know that’s little comfort. There’s something else, too, Devin: she has a son.”

Devin’s head snaps around. “Vincent’s son?”

She nods.

He sighs raggedly, buries his face in his hands. Joe and Diana share a look over his bent form: half-concern, half-hope.

“I’m sorry, I know this is a lot to handle.”

Devin’s eyes are wild, and Diana recognises the look in them: Vincent had the same look in his eyes that time he woke in her apartment and the last thing he could remember was collapsing on Cathy’s grave.

“I wasn’t there. All this time, he’s been handling this alone, and–”

“Not alone, Devin.” Diana says assuredly. “But Father’s worried. He thought it would be good for you both, if you came home for a while.”

A veil seems to pass over his face. “He said that, did he?”

“Yes. But he didn’t know how to contact you. So,” she nods over at Joe. “We gave it our best shot, and hey presto.”

“Hey presto,” Devin says, and his eyes are soft and searching as they look into Diana’s. That look reminds her of Mark again, but here’s the thing: he only looked like that when he was about to kiss her.

She puts a pin in that, too.

*           *           *

They hop on a bus back across to New Mexico and then walk the rest of the way to Devin’s place. He doesn’t give much away about its location until they’re practically at the front door.

It’s a nice little cabin in a sheltered valley gorge, its wooden boards almost the same colour as the canyon walls. Camouflaged – nice touch, Diana thinks. It gets a lot of sun, but never direct enough to give away its location, and there’s a cool breeze through the valley that’d be refreshing on extra warm days. Best part is that you’d never find it unless you knew what to look for: perfect for a couple runaways who don’t want to be found.

Before they approach, Devin conducts a few rituals which Diana assumes are – several layers of Morse code, semaphore and most likely a secret language Devin and Charles have developed over the last year.

“Charles, I’m home.” Devin calls once they finally enter, hanging his jacket on a hook in a charmingly domestic routine. “Now, don’t be alarmed – but I’ve brought some friends to meet you.”

A shadow edges around the doorframe; a shadow which coalesces into a person, a man. He’s tall and broad, but with a stooping gait, as if he’s trying to seem as small, as invisible, as possible. His face is swollen with what look like tumours, and which seem to give him no inconsiderable amount of pain – but his expression, though wary, is sweet, and his lovely eyes are wide, giving the impression of one eager to trust if somewhat unused to the concept.

“Dev,” says the man – Charles, Diana reminds herself – and she is surprised by the timbre of his voice, which is both gentle and grand. It’s a voice meant for opera, for Shakespeare. Hell, he could even have done well in politics if the world wasn’t so fucked up.

“Charles, meet Joe and Diana. They’re friends of Vincent’s.”

“Vincent?” Charles repeats, his voice going up an octave or so. His eyes sparkle, as though the mere mention of Vincent’s name brings him joy. (Diana knows the feeling).

“It’s good to meet you, Charles,” she says, stepping forward. “Devin – Dev’s – told us so much about you.”

Charles speaks in ellipses, haltering almost, and Diana surmises that the act of speaking causes him both pain and joy – it’s an effort, but one he’s willing to make because of how much he seems to treasure words. When he speaks, he makes the words count, as if they’d never been valued before now.

“He… has been known… to exaggerate,” Charles replies, with a mischievous gleam in his eyes. Diana struggles to hide a laugh, but fails – and it breaks the ice, even some of the frostiness between Devin and Joe. Devin shows them round the cabin, which is just spacious enough to feel luxurious and cosy enough to feel like home.

Charles, it turns out, is a real gentleman. He reminds Diana of Shakespeare in the Park – Polonius or Falstaff, only sweeter; grander, too. He asks often of Vincent, and Diana’s only too happy to indulge him.

After they’ve been introduced to all the hiding places, booby traps, and emergency exits, Diana and Joe are ushered to a table – Nella-Mae would’ve been proud – and two mugs of coffee are placed in front of them. They share the waffles from this morning, and Diana's never been more grateful to whoever invented the concept of food 'to go'.

It’s not longer after when Devin says, gently: “Charles, I’m going away soon.”

His eyes, which seem so used to horror and pain, flare up with those emotions again. “You are… leaving?”

“Only for a little while, I promise. And you won’t be on your own. Would you go and check the back porch tripwire for me a sec?”

Charles does as he’s bid. When he’s out of earshot, Devin turns back to Joe and Diana. “Someone will need to stay here, look after him while I’m gone.”

“I’d be happy to-”

“That’s kind of you, Diana – but I think it’s better if you go with me. You’re more incognito, and-”

“Hey, I can be plenty incognito, pal.” Joe says, squaring up to him (not easy when you’re sat down, but he manages it).

Diana holds her hands up. “At this rate, I’m leaving you both here.”

“No offence, Bennett,” Joe says, more than a hint of ‘offence’ in his voice. “But isn’t it more likely for you to go MIA for a couple weeks? Not to blow my own trumpet or nothing, but I am the DA.”

Diana can’t help but laugh – and to tease him a little bit, too, for his trouble. “Wow, Maxwell. Really? Pulling rank at a time like this?”

“I’m just saying-”

“Look, Joe.” Devin cuts in. “I’m taking a huge risk here. I don’t know why, but I feel… safer, with Diana. Allow me this indulgence, would you?”

That silences Joe, ‘cause of course it does. He backs down like a chastised puppy. Devin looks at her as though he just won her hand in marriage in an old timey duel.

When Charles gets back, Devin takes Joe to see where all the rations, tripwires and emergency weapons are stored. Diana watches them go before turning to Charles.

“You and Devin have made a real nice home for yourselves, huh?”

“He is my… friend,” Charles says proudly, and Diana’s heart breaks a little.

“Finding one true friend will make you rich beyond measure,” she says, after a swig of coffee.

“That is… beautiful. Who… wrote that?”

“My dad, actually.”

“Your father… was… a poet.”

“You know what, Charles?” She says, bumping her shoulder with his. “I think you might be right.”

“You are… one too.”

“A poet?” She shakes her head. “I’m useless when it comes to all that.”

“‘No one… is useless in… this world who… lightens the burden… of it for… anyone else.’”

She makes an educated guess. “Dickens, huh?"

“Our Mutual… Friend.”

“Like Vincent?”

Charles eyes gleam. What a sweetheart.

*           *           *

They don’t wait until morning to head off. The quicker they get back to New York, the better. Travel light, leave fast: on that, Devin and Diana are more than agreed. Joe’s hands are on his hips, which means he ain’t happy – but he’s a professional, so he doesn’t grouse in front of Charles. He knows where the emergency rifles and revolvers are stored (bookshelf and bureau), but Joe’s more concerned about the fact that there’s no TV – though there’s an ancient-looking AM radio that he might be able to use to listen to the baseball. (Diana suggests he try getting into reading instead, much to his chagrin).

“Now, there’s enough supplies in the house to last a month-”

“Don’t be that long, for cryin’ out loud.”

“We won’t.” Diana says, handing him one of the burner phones she’d brought with them. “But if you haven’t heard from us after a week, call.”

As they head for the door, Charles calls in that majestic, sweet voice of his:

“Do not… worry, Dev. I will be… good.”

“It’s not you I’m worried about,” Devin nods at Joe, who looks suitably affronted.

They catch a red eye to JFK and get to the tunnels before the early morning rush. The journey back to NYC had felt longer than the one out of it. Then, her nerves were fraying at the seams and she’d been hopped up on the adrenaline of the hunt. Now she was returning with her bounty, and that meant there was time to enjoy it. But she’d never been good with the end of a case, ‘cause that familiar itch would start up again for the next one.

Distracted, she doesn’t notice Devin trying to get her attention until he nudges her – lightly – in the side.

His eyes twinkle. “‘Vinny, huh’?”

Diana cringes. “Don’t tell him I called him that.”

“Oh I will. Can’t wait to see his face.”

They’re putting up decorations for Laura and Rebecca’s wedding when Devin and Diana round the corner. Jamie is the first to notice, nearly breaking an ankle as she clambers down from the ladder and flings herself into Devin’s arms. Everyone else turns to watch her go, and the synchronicity of the movement gives the impression of a baroque painting – Rembrandt, maybe. She’d come across Belshazzar’s Feast in one of Catherine’s books, and the effect here is the same: frozen in motion.

Vincent sure looks as shocked as Rembrandt’s king had. He stills, before moving across the room with a panther’s grace, and embraces Devin as though he’d returned from the frontlines of war. Diana stands, almost awkwardly, to one side, as a wave of people washes over them. Father catches her eye across the room, and nods once, as if to a comrade on the field of battle. She returns the gesture, feeling a swell of pride rise within her chest.

Amid the sea of people she sees someone she doesn’t recognise. A man: dark skin, broad shoulders, and a million-watt smile that lights the tunnels up like the fourth of July. He makes his way over to her, takes up that empty place at her side.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” he says. His voice is gentle, especially for such a tall guy – though, with Vincent, that’s par for the course Below.

“No, I don’t think we have.” She doesn’t know why she feels so playful all of a sudden. Maybe she’s travel drunk. Maybe she’s tired. Or maybe she’s just happy that a nice guy with a sweet voice wants to talk to her. Christ, she needs a hobby.

He holds his hand out. “I’m Isaac.”

“Diana,” she responds, before something clicks in her mind. “Isaac Stubbs, the self-defence guy – right?”

“How’d you know?”

“You knew Catherine Chandler.”

His eyes flicker to the ground, a sadness palling his features. “Did you?”

“Wish I did. I only got involved in her case after…” She can’t say it, can’t bring herself to will those words Cathy’s dead into being.

Now Isaac looks like something’s clicked for him too. “You’re the profiler. The one who brought her killer to justice.”

She snorts. “Some justice. But I shot the bastard, yeah.”

“It doesn’t make it right. but thank you.”

She glances at him. “Hey, how’d you get involved in all this?”

“I’ve been a Helper for a couple months now,” he says, leaning back against the cavern wall. “Few years back, Cathy’d asked me to help a friend of hers. She couldn’t – wouldn’t – tell me more.”

“Vincent?”

Isaac nods. “I saw him, too, before Cathy bundled him off someplace safe. I did what she said, though: I didn’t ask questions, but I kept an ear to the ground. You listen long enough, you’ll hear something.”

“Impressive,” she grins, just as Vincent appears in her peripheral vision and inclines his head to Isaac in greeting. “Look, it was nice to meet you, Isaac, but I gotta head off-”

Vincent moves toward her. “Diana, I-”

“I’m needed somewhere else.”

He bows his head low, but Diana can sense that she’s wounded him. “I will come to you tonight.”

“I’ll try to remember to be in.”

She doesn’t.

*           *           *

Remember, sure she does. But she doesn’t try to stay home: in fact, she does everything she can to be out. She stays with her sister and niece that night; said a pipe burst in her apartment.

The second she’d got out of the tunnels that day, she’d leaned heavy against the brick wall, panting as if she’d just run a marathon. She didn’t know why she couldn’t bear to be around him then, even though everything she’d done over the past few days was for him and him alone. Wasn’t this the happy ending to the story, a story she’d been instrumental in? Maybe it was because he’d embraced Devin and not her – not that she’d given him a chance to. Either way, she’d run out of that place as quick as she could.

As a distraction, she brings groceries and news of Joe to Jenny. Apparently he’d told her he’d be gone a couple weeks before he left, so she hadn’t been worried. They chat for a bit over coffee, and then Diana swings by Billy’s Grill and Coffee Shop with a bunch of flowers for Mandy. When she gets to her sister’s that evening, she orders pizza (Alexandra's favourite) as a thank you, and then runs herself a bath – candles, flower petals, the works. She never does this shit, but it feels good to ease her aching muscles, to emerge from the water smelling like sweet peas instead of sweat for a change.

The tunnels seem a little brighter with Devin in them, she has to admit – even if she tries to keep her distance. Well, ‘tries’ is the optimal word there: the next day, Devin seeks her out at her loft, coaxes her down to the tunnels so that she’s got stories for Joe when he gets back. (“Plus, can you imagine how pissy he’d be if he heard he stayed in New Mexico for nothing?”)

So, for the next week, Diana bears witness to the return of Below's very own prodigal son. She listens to Devin’s stories of his misspent youth, complete with infrequent interjections from Vincent, and finds herself laughing almost against her better judgment. She’s glad to hear Vincent had a rebellious phase, largely thanks to Devin’s machinations. He's fun, open, warm – no wonder everyone down here loved him. In the chill of the long nights underground, you need a person like Devin to light the match.

Best of all, he takes to being an uncle like a duck to water. The second he lays eyes on baby Jacob, he damn near tears up. Vincent always holds his son as though he could break like glass - but the second Devin has him in his arms, he's flying him around like an airplane and throwing him in the air, and running around with him around his shoulders. Vincent couldn't look more alarmed than if Devin had dangled him off the top of the Chrysler Building - it's kinda sweet, actually - but Jacob looks like he's having the time of his life. She's never seen the kid giggle so much.

Jacob's unbridled glee seems the only thing preventing Vincent retrieving him from Devin. Sighing, he moves across the room to stand at Diana's side.

"You were not at home last night."

"Sorry," she says, trying not to sound shady as all hell. "I was at my sister's. Her little girl - my niece - just won the spelling bee."

"I understand," he replies. "There is little more important in this life than time with the ones you love."

Vincent folds his arms across his chest, nods over at Devin. "I feared I would never see my brother again. But you brought him home to us."

"Honest, it was nothing-"

"It was everything," he turns, his eyes seeming to bore into her soul. "Thank you, Diana."

For some reason, she can't bring herself to accept the compliment. "I couldn't have done it without Joe. And, besides, Father thought it would be good for you to see him."

He considers this for a moment. "Father expressed a wish. You - and Joe - made it come true."

Diana allows herself to bask in his words, as a treat. And why not - she had done her part, right? 

Vincent's looking at Devin again, who's now swooping Jacob through the air like he's Superman. "I have not seen my son so joyous, so unburdened."

"I see it, every time you hold him."

He inclines his head in that slow, lordly, way of his, sincere and gallant like a knight in her mom's picture books, and Diana hates that so mundane a gesture has her unravelling, spiralling, wanting.

*           *           *

Laura and Rebecca finally tie the knot a week into Devin’s stay. They look happier than Diana’s ever seen them. The brides sign their vows, and kiss like teenagers. The celebration goes on long into the following night. By the early hours, when the candles are trickling stumps and the music has faded into memory, all is calm and sparkling. Laura and Rebecca are swaying gently in the corner; Mary dances demurely with Jacob Senior while Junior is rocked to and fro in Vincent’s arms.

Diana and Devin, meanwhile, find themselves sitting on a stony ledge overlooking the dwindling embers of the party. She’s on his left, which means she’s got a front-row seat to the scars only Vincent could have left there. That old instinct itches at her, longs to collect the pieces of the story behind them – but she fights it, pushes it back down.  You don’t ask someone about their scars: you leave it to them to trust you with them, or not.

"You can ask me, you know."

"About what?" she says, looking up.

He taps his scarred cheek, and she feels herself blushing. Did he read my mind, or what?

"I'm sorry - jeez, I wasn't staring, was I?"

He shakes his head. "You weren't. But you're always looking for answers, right? I assume you must want to know."

"I had an inkling," she replies, eyes drifting over to Vincent. Their eyes connect before his dart away, because it seems he was already looking at her. Or maybe at Devin - of course at Devin. He seems to sense that her mind is elsewhere, so he abruptly changes the subject.

“Not much of a dancer, I take it?”

Heat blooms in her chest. “When the mood takes me.”

He leans in, so close that she can count his eyelashes. “And where’s it taking you now?”

“To the emergency room, with this much alcohol in my blood.”

“Another time, then,” he says, casting his eyes back on the dancefloor. He nods at Father, who’s slow dancing with Mary in a tentative, yet undeniably tender, fashion. “Who’d have thought the old man had it in him?”

“He’s a dark horse, alright.” Diana snorts, taking a swig from the bottle between them. “You don’t talk about him much.”

“Not much to say. It’s been rocky between us for… well, ever, really. My, uh,” he clears his throat. “My mom died giving birth to me.”

That explains a lot. “I’m sorry. My mom died when I was young, too.”

“That’s got to have been hard.”

She shrugs. “I had my sister. You had your brother.”

“It’s so hard to read him sometimes,” Devin sighs. “Well, both of them. You must know how they get, by now.”

Diana considers that for a moment. “I guess so. But you could always ask them, you know.”

He laughs, as though caught off guard, and then adopts a tone of brazen sarcasm. “Wow, I wonder why I never tried that before.”

She elbows him in the ribs – playfully, though – and then she’s laughing too. “I don’t wanna tell you how to handle your family – god knows I don’t know how to handle mine – but if I could offer you one last piece of unsolicited advice?”

“Sure.”

“Family can be a pain in the ass, but they’re the only thing worth giving a damn about at the end of the day.” She sighs, and turns to face him in the most direct way she’s attempted since they landed in JFK.

“I wasn’t joking about the burner phone. They need a way to contact you somehow. ‘Cause when you left, it was like cutting off a limb. It’s out of sight but the phantom pain’s still there, and–”

He kisses her.

No fanfare, no warning, no nothing – one second his lips aren’t on hers, and the next they are.

She considers kissing him back. After all, why shouldn’t she? He’s good-looking, he’s sweet, and by all accounts he’s really turned his life around. And he likes her; wants her. She hasn’t felt that since Mark, the feeling of another person thrumming with need, looking only into her eyes, touching her like they’d been starved of it for so long. She feels drunk on it, that gorgeous power she forgot she had.

But it dissipates just as quickly. A hot stone of guilt drops through her; she doesn’t want these hands, this mouth. She doesn’t want Devin. She wants fur and talon, copper hair and sapphire eyes, and the heart and soul beneath it all-

She pulls back as though burned.

“I’m in love with your brother.” Jesus, where did that come from? Still, it was a relief to say it out loud.

Devin sighs, not unkindly; understandingly. “Does he know?”

“I haven’t been subtle about it. But I haven’t come out and told him.”

“You should.”

“I know. But I also know what the answer’ll be. The world’s shitty enough as it is without me making it shittier.”

“But you don’t know what the answer’ll be. You at least owe it to yourself – and to him – to tell him the truth.”

“And what about what I owe to Cathy, huh?" She can feel heat rising in her cheeks, an anxious knot forming at the base of her throat. "Poor gal’s not dead a year before I’m moving in on her guy?”

He shakes his head. “It’s not like that and you know it. Things are complicated Below. Life there can be tough, not to mention short. You have to grab happiness while you can.”

“Are you happy, Devin?”

He considers this for a moment. It gives her a moment to consider him, too; all the shades and angles of him.

“Yes,” he says, after a long while. “I don’t think I’ve ever been truly happy until now. I never felt like anyone’s favourite, Above or Below, until Charles. He doesn’t need me, not really; he could live in that little cottage very well by himself. But he chooses to live with me, and I choose to live with him too. That feeling, of being chosen – it’s like nothing else on earth.”

She sighs. “I’ll bet.”

“Have you ever felt that?”

“Almost. I was with this guy Mark for a couple years. You remind me of him, actually.”

Devin’s eyebrows raise. He affects an exaggerated swagger, runs a hand through his hair. “Rugged good looks?”

“Nice smile. Kind eyes.” She shrugs. He looks kinda... flattered. “The thing is,” she continues. “I’m not good at letting go: of people, of cases. Stories, really. It always comes down to that.”

“That’s how you found me, right?”

“Right. Thing is, I hold on to a story so tightly I tend to let go of other things in the process: names, birthdays…”

“Relationships?” he offers.

She nods. “Occupational hazard. Mark knew all that before we even got started, and then two years later he tells me that’s why we’re through. He said I never let him in; just gave him glimpses. I thought so too, for a while.”

“And now?”

“Now? I don’t think he ever really saw me at all.”

Devin places a hand gently on her shoulder. “You deserve to feel that too, Diana. You will.”

She casts her eyes around for Vincent, and finds that he is already looking up at her. She swallows involuntarily, as he hurriedly looks away, turns his back to her - but she saw him. She saw the flash of guilt in his eyes: the guilt of someone who'd been caught staring.

“I hope so,” she says, and she doesn’t know if she’s meant anything more in her life.

*           *           *

Diana drives Devin to the airport the next morning. He takes little with him: a couple burner phones, for emergencies, and a first edition Our Mutual Friend for Charles (Vincent insisted). He’s arranged to call from a payphone every week at 7pm Eastern, and he’ll even look into getting a PO box, or several, so they can write to each other. The prospect of hearing his brother’s voice so often seems to imbue Vincent with new life. It looks good on him. (Jamie, meanwhile, was distraught. Diana'd asked her to teach her how to use a crossbow when she got back, just so the girl'd have something to focus on, to distract her - and god if Diana don't know all about distractions). 

Before Devin leaves the tunnels, she catches him whisper something in Vincent’s ear, something which compels Vincent to gaze in her direction for a moment that feels like a century. She imagines Devin say something like, Hey Vinny, the girl’s got it bad, so tread softly, okay?

At the departure gate, Devin turns and asks if he may kiss her.

“On the cheek,” he clarifies hurriedly, as if he’d seen the flash of concern in her eyes.

“Sure,” she says, and he does. The whisper of stubble against her cheek, the scent of pine and cigarette ash, almost makes her yearn to learn in and claim the kiss she’d denied him. But it’s just a ghost of a dream.

“Thank you, Diana. For everything,” he says, his dark eyes gentle on hers. “I hope I get to see you again.”

“Me too,” she says – and then he’s gone.

Devin hasn’t left her empty-handed, though. He’s left her with a revelation – or, in truth, set in motion what she needed to discover it herself: she wants to be wanted. Even at the bitter end, Mark had always made her feel like that, back when they were high school sweethearts and when they reconnected years later. Somewhere down the line they’d grown into two different people, and while Diana knows most of her tectonic shift had happened once she’d gotten to know Vincent, the cracks had been showing for a while.

Devin had reacquainted her with that feeling. And she’d been tempted – but you can’t enjoy a burger when you’re holding out for a steak. Fuck, that’s mean, she chides herself. Devin’s a whole-ass steak, you’re just picky. And whipped, let’s not forget that. She’d appreciated his obvious attraction as one might appreciate a stolen painting: it makes you feel fancy, beautiful, important – but it’s not yours.

She takes the long way back to the tunnels, which means that she spends most of the day sipping coffee in Central Park and thinking deep thoughts about the universe. She drops home to water Cathy’s roses and type out a (coded) reflection on the events of the past few weeks, but mostly she keeps to the outside. She needs to feel the fresh air on her face, the sun and the smog and the sense of freedom in being able to choose where to spend her days.

She’s leaning on the ledge of her roof when he appears, silent as a shadow.

“Do you know what my name means, Diana?”

Wow: no preamble, no fuss – just straight in with the disambiguation. It’s disarming: his honesty, his ease. She shakes her head.

“Gabriel did.” A shudder goes through her spine at the name of a man who had taken so much from Vincent. His eyes are distant; no doubt gazing upon the distant shore of memory. “Names have power, he told me. Mine, he said, means ‘conqueror’. He wished me to become one; he offered me a kingdom; that we would rule together until my son – our son, he said – came of age. He claimed to want a partnership, but in truth he yearned for dominance, as all tyrants do.

“But since he spoke those words I have thought of them each day.”

She exhales unsteadily. “You want companionship?”

“I want Catherine.”

Diana nearly stumbles, though stationary. “She’s here,” she says softly, placing her hand over his heart.

“Yes, always.” Vincent’s hand comes up to rest on Diana’s, warmer than she thought possible. “But she is not here with me now, as you are.”

“If I could trade places with her, I would.” Her voice is unshaking, even as she offers her own life up as sacrifice; even as tears cling to the back of her throat. “For your sake, I would.”

“It is fitting that you bear the name of a warrior.” God, does he know the power of his voice, what it does to her?  “Diana. She is the goddess of the Moon, of hunters, of crossroads.”

His hand is warm on hers, and the heat of it travels through her, through her veins and her bones and her skin until she feels like she's drowning in it; going down in a lava flow at the centre of the earth. She breathes when he breathes, a mutual movement that makes her liquid, molten and golden and held in place only by the point where they connect. Fuck, this feels a thousand times more intimate than any sex she's ever had; it's fucking spiritual, it's transcendent, it -

- Makes her bold; bold enough to say: “What d’ya know, looks like we got ourselves all three.”

She barely sees him move, cannot pinpoint the change. All she knows is that one moment she can see his blue eyes like stars above her, and the next she can see or hear or sense nothing save his mouth on hers.

His kiss is a sigh upon a mirror, a gasp in a storm; a drowning, a saving, a revivifying bolt from heaven’s bough itself. It is little more than a brush of his mouth on hers, and yet it is everything: a cosmos bursting into being within her.

She hears comets colliding in her mind, oceans raging and mountains crumbling – but amidst it all, as she would were they on opposite ends of the earth, she hears his voice.

 “Goodnight, Diana.”

Chapter Text

Diana stands at the rooftop for a time; frozen in place from the moment he disappears into the night. She doesn’t know how long she stands there, or how much time elapses until she can even bear to open her eyes, but when she does, she laughs.

Actually goddamn laughs; properly, for the first time in months, maybe years.

It’s not a manic laugh, or a greedy one, but a sonorous sigh of relief, and of joy and hope. She hasn’t sounded this unburdened, felt this giddy, in forever. She wants to eat the sound; drink it and drown in it and dance in it, all at the same time.

She barely sleeps that night.

She’s like a teenager with a crush; hell, she was never like this in high school. It’s embarrassing how full she seems, brimming with sparkling, shimmering glee. She lies in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking of how warm and soft and beautiful he’d felt, how gentle his mouth and his hands were; how she’ll get to feel them again and again, now. Maybe forever.

A girl can dream, right?

The next day, she decides to wear her hair out. It tumbles red and wild across her shoulders and down her back, as though she’s framed in flames. She likes it. It makes her look wild and tempered, young and ancient, a woman of Above and Below.

He’s never seen her with her hair down before. She wonders if she’ll look different to him, or if she’ll just look like herself, only more in focus.

Diana opens her wardrobe and pulls out a dress she’s never worn. Mark bought it for her, even though she told him redheads couldn’t wear red. (He said it was more salmon, anyway). It’s real pretty, kind of medieval-looking, with a sweetheart neckline and rouched sleeves. It falls just below her knees, so she pairs it with a pair of brown suede knee-highs she got on sale at the Gap, and cinches it at the waist with a thrifted brown leather belt.

Not bad, Bennett.

The mirror, for once, is in her favour, and her reflection turns this way and that like a prospective bride. Jeez, don’t get ahead of yourself, Diana. It was one kiss, not a goddamn proposal.

Even if it was, well, Diana’s never been the type to dream of marriage. Even now, love-drunk and stupid, she doesn’t imagine walking down the aisle, not even if Vincent was the guy waiting at the other end. A wedding ring was one more thing to throw on a coffin lid, or to be discovered in a ditch. A spouse meant an easy motive, and she’d investigated enough people who’d killed for love, or jealousy, or revenge, to be put off the institution for good.

Love, on the other hand, she longed for. True union: a partner at your side in bed and at your back in battle. She’d long thought she was destined for solitude – it was the nature of her work, her vocation, after all. The unravelling of a mystery was a solitary affair for Diana: meticulous and deliberate, weaving the threads of a person’s life the way Arachne wove her tapestry.

And yet.

The thought of partnership, true partnership, entices her. And if anyone understands that, understands her – or could understand her – it’s Vincent. She knows it in her bones and in her blood. She knew it the moment she saw him and she knows it now, firmer and clearer with every step that takes her further down into the underworld.

Jamie actually does a double take as she approaches. “You look lovely today, Diana.”

“Don’t sound so surprised, kid,” she grins.

“You know,” Jamie says, looking at her piercingly as she might as a fine painting. “Vincent called you ‘a Rossetti brought to life’, once. I can see it now.”

“Is that a good thing?”

Jamie chuckles. “It’s a compliment, believe me.”

I gotta get myself to the Met one of these days.

She rounds the corner into Vincent’s chamber, and stills as he comes into view. He’s holding Jacob in his arms, and the amber light refracting through the glass arch above his bed turns him golden. He stands in the centre of the room, tall and regal and completely unaware of his lordly mien, focused only on the little bundle in his arms.

He’s never looked more goddamn beautiful.

The force of it hits her like a wave, and she reaches out to the cavern wall to steady herself. The sound, though infinitesimal, alerts Vincent – ‘cause of course it does – and he glances up at her.

For a moment, she’s not sure if he recognises her. And then it’s clear that he does; clearer still that he registers the change in her, the unexpected glamour. It makes her realise how shabby she must look on the regular, which sends a spike of shame through her – but she waves it away. She wears what she wants to wear, and today she wanted to look nice. Pretty, even. And she does.

“Diana.” It sounds almost like a question.

“Vincent,” she echoes, walking towards him. “Hey little guy,” she coos, as Jacob’s pudgy little finger closes around one of hers. “I got something for you.”

With her free hand, she opens the satchel that’s slung over one arm and pulls out a book.

“My mom used to read this to me when I was your age,” she says, as if the baby can understand her.

Jacob reaches out madly and takes hold of the book, giggling adorably. She holds a steadying hand on the spine, ‘cause the way Jacob’s going it’ll be flung across the room in about two seconds.

Vincent peers at the cover. “King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.”

“It was my favourite story when I was a kid,” she admits, almost shyly. “My mom would tell me about all these brave knights going on daring quests – and that’s how I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

The ghost of a smile passes across Vincent’s features. “That is apt indeed. Your courage, your valor, is why my son and I are alive today.”

His words make her feel all sparkly and warm, like champagne. “And because of hundred other people who’d do anything to keep you safe.”

One of those hundred people – Mary, it turns out – enters the room at that moment. She locks eyes with Diana briefly, as if she senses the purpose behind every step that had brought her there that morning, and then swivels them back to Vincent.

“Might I hold him for a little while, Vincent?”

“Of course, Mary.” Vincent carefully, ever so carefully, hands Jacob over to Mary, who walks him out of the room, talking to him in her sweet, gentle voice. Diana and Vincent are alone in the room, and though it is only the first time they have been alone since the night before, Diana feels as though she’s been waiting a hundred years for this moment.

The room is heavy with something invisible and unspoken; velvet and smothering, it drapes over them, encasing them in some sphere outside of space and time. She could reach out her arm and touch him – she wants to, but she wants to ask permission first, and – while she’s never been lost for words before – she doesn’t know where to start. Luckily, she doesn’t have to.

“You have given us a rare gift today, Diana,” he says, reaching for the book in her hands. He sweeps a gentle hand across its embossed cover, trailing down to the knight on horseback and his lady love.

“You’re the gift.” The words seem to stream from her subconscious, and they escape without her notice. “You brought me into this amazing word, this community. You trusted me, when you had every right to doubt. You made me feel like I… belong.”

He tilts his head, as if he doesn’t quite get what she’s hinting at, which of course he doesn’t. She’ll have to get her point across another way. So she lifts her hand to touch his hair, trailing her fingers down the honeyed waves from brow to tip.

He recoils as though her touch burns. Her hand is still suspended in the air, and he looks at it in fear, in dismay, in – she hopes she’s wrong – disgust.

She half-laughs, ‘cause it’s so absurd. “Do I gotta hit on you in Iambic Pentameter?” She says, dropping her hand. “Come on, Vincent – you’ve got a kid, for crying out loud. You know how this works. I mean, you kissed me.”

“That was a mistake.”

It couldn’t have hurt her more if he’d ripped off her arm. “Do you mean the kiss, or me?”

“I mean myself, Diana. I should not have acted as I did.”

“Why did you do it then?” A memory surfaces, and she goes cold. “Wait, did Devin say something?”

“We spoke of you, yes.”

I knew it. Well – play it cool, Bennett. “And what did he say?”

“He said that you had done a great many things for our family; things you need not have done, things that put you at great risk, all in the quest to bring me happiness.”

“So you kissed me out of – what? Gratitude? Pity?”

“A great many have lost their lives for love of me. I cannot risk-”

“I’m a big girl, Vincent. Don’t break this off because you think I’ll get hurt. If you’re not interested, just say so-”

“Diana, I cannot give you what you seek!” He cries, turning his back on her. “I have loved once, and it nearly destroyed me. It did destroy-”

He draws a ragged gasp of air, and falls silent, as though her name is a spell that would conjure her very corpse.

“The memory of her is fragile,” he rasps, clutching at his heart. “It is leaving me in fragments even now. Time’s wingèd chariot hurries ever nearer while she grows further away. To even think of another would be a betrayal too terrible to comprehend.”

Diana rakes a hand through her hair. She’d felt so pretty ten minutes ago. “Cathy would want you to be happy. It doesn’t have to be now, and it doesn’t have to be with me, Vincent; honest, it doesn’t. But opening your heart to the possibility that you could have that again-”

He doesn’t permit her to finish the thought. “I am honoured that so noble a woman as yourself would find it in your heart to care for me. Before Catherine, I thought such regard impossible. But, though she lies somewhere I cannot reach, my heart will always be hers. The least I can do is honour her memory.”

“You’re not honouring her: you’re punishing yourself.” Diana shakes her head. “And if you think she’d want that, then you never really knew her anyway.”

He moves towards her then with lightning speed, a snarl on his lips; for a moment his gorgeous eyes, blue as the sky which he can never see, are like shards of ice. The sight of them pierces Diana as he towers over her, every inch a Beast. Her heart is pumping but she isn’t afraid: she’s alert, every nerve a quivering flame as Vincent gazes down at her with animal intensity. They stare each other down, sizing each other up, like jaguars on the savannah; his chest is heaving, her pulse is racing, their faces so close all she’d have to do is raise herself just a little, and –

“Vincent, Father calling!”

Mouse darts into the room and Diana and Vincent part like a rock-face in a storm. Mouse’s eyes dart between them, wary and confused; he must sense some of the tension, but he’s too young at heart to read the nuances of what he has seen. Or maybe it’s just wishful thinking on her part that he’s missed whatever the hell passed just between her and Vincent. Whatever it was, it’s something Vincent is keen to run from, and run he does – out of the room, through the tunnels, quicker than a flash.

Diana’s hands are shaking. She’s yet to meet a man who made her tremble with fear. But the tremor has another origin; closeness, intimacy, the promise of a precipice. She knows he felt it too; she saw it in his eyes, desire and disquietude mixed like ink in water.

For a second, she considers running outta the joint like she’s Cinderella at midnight. But she’s got more respect for herself than that. Instead, Diana walks slowly, measuredly, as if her heart’s not crumbling into ash within her chest.

Unlike Orpheus, she doesn’t look back.

Not at Jamie, who asks when she wants their next crossbow lesson to be; not at Mary, who looks at her with recognition and sympathy, knowing the ache gnawing at the pit of her stomach; not at Father, who’s looking at Diana as if he’s seen it all before and hoped never to again.

“You’re fighting a losing battle, Diana.” She says aloud, leaning against the cool rock at the tunnel mouth. How can you be with a man who’s in love with a ghost? Then she shakes the thought violently away; Diana doesn’t think of Cathy that way. She can feel her in the rocks, in the air, in Vincent’s eyes. Maybe Diana loves her as much as she does Vincent. She doesn’t know anymore. She just knows that she wants, and she wants, and she wants.

*           *           *

So begins The Great Vincent Purge of 1990.

No pining or moping – Diana replaces all that with planning. First, she takes a month off, takes Suzie and Alexandra to Disney World on her dime. She never spends her paycheck on anything more than rent and basics – but they put up with a lot of her shit, and she wants to treat them. She buys Mandy a new dress, the pretty taffeta one in the shop window across the street she’s been gushing over since it first appeared. She reserves a table at the fanciest restaurant she knows, for Jenny and Joe (who’d returned from New Mexico a Hemingway fanatic, as she’d predicted).

But even the Happiest Place on Earth can’t make her forget. Suzie knows something’s up, keeps looking at Diana out the corner of her eyes. Diana keeps her firmly in her peripherals, and distracts herself by hiking Alexandra up on her shoulders, running around the place like a kid herself, and getting them the front seat of every ride and rollercoaster in the place. When Alexandra laughs, she looks just like her dad: you know, before he stopped laughing and started drinking. She’s talkative like him; charming, too, and she’s inherited that raven-black Irish hair that had first caught Suzie’s eye across the bar.

Point is, Suzie knows The Look, and she knows Diana, and that means she senses that Diana’s going through trouble of the romantic variety, but she also knows Diana won’t talk about it unless she wants so. So she waits. She’s like Diana, like that: could wait out a vampire if the need arose, mortality be damned.

“Look,” Diana says on Day Four, when they’re keeping watch on Alexandra from a distance. Alexandra’s made a friend on the Minnie Mouse-themed swing set, a little redhead with a helicopter mom who waves over at the Bennett sisters every ten seconds or so to let them know everything’s A-Okay.

The tableau sparks a memory of Diana’s. “Hey, remember when Dad used to push us on the swings?”

Suzie snorts. “I remember you trying to climb up the goddamn set and scraping your knee. You’da thought you went down in ‘Nam, the fuss Dad made.”

“Hey, I was incredibly brave for a five year old.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Suzie says, nudging her. “I woulda screamed the block down.”

They fall silent for a moment, until Suzie drops an emotional bombshell. “You’ve always been the brave one, you know.”

“Give me a break,” Diana nudges back, harder. “It takes balls to be a mom.”

“You’ve always had a way with words,” Suzie shakes her head, failing to hold back a laugh. “I just hope you find someone who appreciates that, is all. Who knows how lucky they are to have you in their life, like we do.”

The back of Diana’s throat gets all fuzzy and her eyes start to itch and, whaddaya know, Diana Bennett is the closest to tears she’s been since Dad died. It takes a sister, don’t it?

“Sheesh, Suze,” she sniffs. “Give me a warning before you break out the schmaltz, wouldya?”

Suzie’s eyes look just like Diana’s do after she’s cracked a clue. “It’s that guy, isn’t it? The one you couldn’t talk about.”

Why fight it? “Yeah, it’s him.”

“Did something happen?”

Where to begin? Diana thinks. “Let’s just say, I thought he was interested, but it turns out he’s not. Or maybe he’s just not ready, or – it’s complicated.”

Suzie looks down at her feet, scuffs the toe of her boot against a tuft of grass. “Is that a ‘give him time’ kind of complicated, or a ‘throw out all his shit and move on’ variety?”

“Is there a middle option?”

Suzie slings her arm around Diana’s shoulders, hugs her against her side. “Why not give yourself some time, huh? Then see how you feel.”

“Suze?”

“Yeah?”

“I ever tell you how smart you are?”

“Not nearly enough.”

*           *           *

So, for maybe the first time in Diana Bennett’s life, perhaps for the first time in the whole history of sisters, she takes her sister’s advice.

Every weekend, she hops on a train going someplace she’s never been before – and that’s a long fucking list, ‘cause she’s a New Yorker born and bred, and that means she’s rarely been further than Poughkeepsie. She goes on long hikes upstate, thinking: about Mark, Devon, Vincent. About none of them. About herself.

She meets a cute guy in a bar in Vermont one night and he takes her back to his place. It feels good, being desired without shame, without having to wait for the other shoe to drop. The last year had taught her to scan for stolen glances and loaded words, and she doesn’t want that anymore: she wants courtship, honesty – even some enthusiasm, for crying out loud. Vermont checked all the boxes. He gives her his number in the morning, but she’ll never dial it.

The same happens with a lumberjack in Washington and a cocktail waitress in Nevada. It’s fun, sure – but they’re just buoys, floating idly in the ocean of her life. She wants an anchor, even if that particular anchor had run aground and left her adrift. So she enjoys the flashes of connection she finds with other lonely people down the road, Route 66 or otherwise.

Diana’s a firm believer in playing the cards you’re dealt, and she’s been given a pretty good hand, all things considered. She’s got everything she could want – except companionship, true partnership, with someone who understands. Mark did, to a point; knew all her idiosyncrasies, called her out on her bullshit. But he didn’t get to that place, that slow Eden in her soul to which no-one had yet cared to learn the way.

Hell, she nearly loses the way herself, when she hears the news that Cathy’s apartment had been sold, and on December 11^th of all days: the eve of her first anniversary. It had to happen sometime, she’s not stupid – but that don’t mean it don’t hurt. Plus, it went to a good home: a couple of newlyweds with a baby on the way. Cathy would’ve liked them. That’s what Diana says to the rose bush, anyhow.

*           *           *

She talks to it all the way down the tunnels the next night, the night of Cathy’s vigil. Maybe it’s stupid, carting the thing down miles underground only to have to take it back up again – even stupider to be chatting with the damn thing – but she’s long stopped measuring her life in absurdities.

The mood is sombre Below, naturally. It’s the largest gathering Diana’s seen there since Winterfest, with many Helpers in attendance. Diana spots Isaac there; Peter Alcroft, the stately doctor who always reminded Diana of an old movie star; even Narcissa, who tended to keep to herself these days, and of whom Diana knew little beyond reputation, was there to honour Cathy’s memory.

Joe’s here too, and his presence calms Diana, as it had done in New Mexico. He catches her eye, and they nod once at each other. She’s sure that pain is scraped across her features as it is over his, over everyone’s in that chill room, simultaneously the fullest and emptiest it’s ever been. Rebecca’s been working overtime on the candles, and it seems as though there’s more lights in that room than in the night sky.

Diana shuts her eyes real tight, maybe ‘cause they started burning a little. Cathy, wherever you are, I hope there are lights.

When she opens her eyes, she rests them – as she so often does – upon Vincent. He stands a little apart from everyone else, little Jacob in his arms, so filled with joy and so unaware of the grief that surrounds him like a cloak. Or maybe that sorrow is already within him; not an original sin, as those goddamned nuns had tried to drill into her, but an inherited grief.

It’s their first Christmas without Catherine, and Diana’s relieved that the little guy won’t be able to remember it. There’ll surely be many more sombre Christmases to come, so why not keep them at bay for a while? She wishes she could forget her first Christmas without mom.

Words are spoken, remembrances are made, and after a little while, people start sharing their stories of Catherine, of all the people she’d helped and the lives she’d touched. Most of the stories are joyous, if tinged with melancholy, but Joe manages to raise a few laughs with his – he’s like Devin in that way, she concludes: able to bring a little light into the darkness. Devin had called earlier that day, and his presence is felt even miles away.

“I wouldn’t even be here without Cathy.”

The woman who’d spoken stands off to one side, holding hands with a little girl. Their hair is the same sandy blonde, so they must be related. The look in the woman’s eyes – affectionate, warm, and with the hard, protective edge of an eagle hovering over its nest – means they must be mother and daughter.

“She was one hell of a person,” the woman’s saying, a sob in her voice. “I owe her so much; I owe her everything.”

As someone in the crowd picks up the thread of another story, Diana shuffles over to the woman.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, hon.” She sniffs, wiping her eyes. “Honest. It’s just… such a shitty situation. She didn’t deserve what she got.”

No truer word spoken. “Wish I could bring her back.”

“Me too. But I carry a piece of her with me.”

“Here?” Diana rests a hand over her own heart.

The woman shakes her head, and pats her daughter’s shoulder. “Here. This is Catherine.”

Diana’s eyes widen just a little. The daughter smiles up at her, all baby teeth and corkscrew curls. “I’ma Cah-Cathy.”

“Is that so?” Diana says, holding out her hand all formal-like. “Nice to meet you, Cathy. I’m Diana.”

“Dye-eeh-na?” Cathy giggles, picking up Diana’s hand and waggling it madly about, before dashing off with only a maniacal laugh.

“That’s Cathy,” the woman smiles, half-apologetic, half-proud. ““A real chatty Cathy, ironically. And I’m Lena, by the way.”

Turns out Lena works at a women’s shelter in the Bronx and temps as a hospital receptionist at night. They even let her bring Cathy with her, who’s a real hit with everyone in the ward.

“She’s special,” Di says, looking fondly over to where Cathy is holding court with Vincent, Father and Mary, like Shirley Temple gearing up for a musical number. “She could be anything she wants to be: reporter, actress, president.”

“I’m hoping for poet,” Lena shrugs. “Well, actually I’m hoping lawyer so she don’t need to rely on anyone to have a good life. But she loves words. Vincent helped deliver her, how could she not?”

Diana nods, glances over at Vincent again, who’s speaking softly to his son. It’s a calm, beautiful little tableau, even though pain lies just beneath the surface.

Catherine’s never felt so near. Diana closes her eyes, and breathes her in.

*           *           *

By the time New Year’s rolls around, Diana’s crossed 49 states off her bucket list (she ain’t in a hurry to see Alaska any time soon: Jersey’s cold enough this time of year). Hitchhiking and hitching rides had their charms, to a point. Diana’s keen to reacquaint herself with the City, so she starts planning. Throws herself back into The Work, as she calls it, like it’s capitalised and trademarked.

She gets back into her cases, nearly makes it into the paper for a particularly daring rescue in an aqueduct. She doesn’t like her name in print; makes it harder to be a shadow when you’re in the spotlight. So she passes the credit onto the DA’s office, his new ADA: Cicely Woods, a young scholarship kid on the rise. It doesn’t bring Sally Rogers back – but it does mean Diana’s brought one daughter back home, and that’s gotta mean something, right?

She resumes her previous routine: coffee with Mandy in the mornings, hanging with Joe at the office in the afternoons, helping out Below at night. Yeah, yeah, she knows it might not be the best idea – not least for her sleep routine – but what other choice does she have? She can’t go cold turkey on Vincent even if she wanted to, not when she’s got ties to the community Below that stretch beyond him. She owes it to Cathy. And she owes it to the people there, who have become important to her.

Laura and Rebecca have set up a sort of school there, where Laura teaches ASL and self-defence and Rebecca teaches sewing and candle-making. (It’s a specialist school, sure – but how could it be anything else?) Diana’s even helped out on a few occasions (with the self-defence, ‘cause she’s always been crap with a needle), and she even makes a candle under Rebecca’s watchful eye and patient tutelage. It comes out looking like a Picasso, but hey, she made something! If only Rebecca gave out gold stars.

She even hangs out with Pascal the Pipe Guy a couple times. He sorta reminds her of her middle school math teacher, a stern little guy who was crazy into algebra and always flipped out when she failed to work out the value of x. Pascal’s not so stern when you get right up close, and Diana does: sitting next to him for hours sometimes, watching him tap out messages on the pipes, listening to the tinkling clatter of the responses from far away.

“How’d you know Morse Code, anyway?” She asks him one night, when curiosity gets the better of her.

He sort of jumps at the sound of her voice, as if anything louder than a distant tap hurts his ears. They sure must be sensitive enough.

“My dad taught me.” He answers, and then he’s back in Pipe Mode; distant and intent. But Diana needs the story, so she keeps going.

“How’d he know it?”

Pascal gives her the stink-eye, and for a second it looks as though he’s going to ask her to multiply the coefficient variable or whatever. But then his brow softens.

“He was a codebreaker in DC during the War,” he says, and his voice is soft too, even softer than usual. “He didn’t talk about it; he didn’t talk about anything much, but he could always express himself in dots and dashes. That’s how we used to talk to each other: we’d be sitting in the same room, deathly silent, and we’d tap out messages to each other on the radiator.”

He smiles, huffs out a sweet little laugh at the memory. “When the world Above got too much for him, for us, and we came down here, it was like he’d found purpose again. Even now, when I hear that sound, I hear him.”

“Do you think he’d mind,” Diana says softly, “If you taught me?”

“Well, if he saw that candle you made,” Pascal grins, “I think he might.”

That night, you might just have heard the peal of laughter through those pipes – but then again, it could have been a trick of the acoustics. Who’s to say?

*           *           *

Remembering Jamie's words, Diana gets herself to the Met in the early days of January '91. Whaddaya know, there’s a Rossetti season on, with a whole bunch of stuff on loan from the Tate in London. Fancy. There are a lotta redheads in this gallery – the same one, it seems, ‘cause ol’ Dante was sweet on a gal called Lizzie Siddal. (Buried her with his love poems, dug them up post-mortem – you know, the usual). But Diana’s drawn to one in particular.

Proserpine, or Persephone: the goddess of spring who was lured to the underworld to wed its lord, the god Hades. But this woman doesn’t look lured; pensive, maybe. Melancholy, contemplative – but also captivated by something, or someone, outside the four edges of the frame.

The little card by the painting suggests Persephone is caught in a moment of regret, but that’s not what Diana sees. She sees anticipation, promise. In her hand, she holds the pomegranate, of which one bite had been enough to enchain or enrapture her. Did she really eat the fruit unwillingly? Or did she swallow those seeds one by one so that she’d have to return; to bind herself forever to the underworld’s haunted prince?

On the way home, she stops in the market and buys herself a pomegranate. She tells herself it’s a coincidence.

Chapter Text

Diana’s tending to the roses on her balcony when Vincent appears like a shadow, as usual. Well, it was usual once, but since the whole Diana-baring-her-soul-and-getting-totally-knocked-flat thing, he’s kept his distance.

So when she clocks him in her peripheral vision, she does what she does on the nights when he doesn’t show up unannounced: she gets on with her goddamn life. Clips a leaf here, spruces a couple petals there, and all-out refuses to acknowledge the intrusion.

After a few moments, Vincent’s voice cuts through the gloom.

“I do not believe I thanked you. For King Arthur and His Knights.”

Silence.

“I read it to Jacob often.”

Diana sighs. He played the Jacob card, so of course she has to engage. Smart guy.

She turns her head. “He’s becoming quite the talker, huh?”

Since turning one, Jacob had been talking ten to the dozen. Course, like with most toddlers, it’s all adorable gibberish, but the kid’s got the bug and he shows no signs of slowing.

“He wishes for tales of Camelot. He wants you to be the one to relay them.”

She raises an eyebrow. “He said all that?”

“Not… entirely.” Vincent accedes. “But when I read to him from the book, he reaches out his hands and says your name aloud, as if he alone could command you hence.”

She rises to her feet, brushing stray dirt off her jeans. “Consider me commanded.”

Vincent seems appeased. He turns his head to survey the balcony. “There are more flowers than when I was here last.”

Diana follows the line of his gaze. He ain’t wrong: there are roses flowing over the ledge, trailing up the outer wall, spilling in every direction.

“They’re Cathy’s roses.”

The words seem to slip through his ribs, right into his heart. “You have tended to them all this time?”

Diana nods. She leans against the outer wall, arms folded across her chest. “I can sense her in them, somehow. I talk to her a lot.”

“As do I,” he says.

“If you ever want to talk,” she murmurs. “I’m here. You know that, right?”

He seems to sigh then with his whole body, and rests a steadying hand on the ledge, fingers twining through the curling vines.

“I envy you, Diana.”

She doesn’t ask why, even though the sentiment stuns her. Instead, she waits until he gifts her the answer in his own time.

“I envy you because you sense Catherine still, and I cannot. The places she once walked are barren; her scent and her laughter and her voice, and everything that she left behind are gone.”

Diana pads softly over to stand at the rose-trellised ledge where Vincent now stands like a sentinel; like Merlin watching over his dead Arthur in Avalon, waiting for him to return.

“Not everything.” Standing a little apart from him, she mirrors the placement of his hands, as though they are images reflected in glass. “You have your son.”

Vincent sighs, wistful and delicate; brittle as a breath on a cobweb. “His life was woven in pain before he drew his first breath. It is a tapestry I cannot help but weave even now. My presence, I fear, casts a pall of grief upon him.”

She can’t believe what he’s saying; more so, that he seems to be buying into it. “Vincent, Jacob’s the happiest kid I’ve ever seen. It’s your own grief you’re weaving.”

He turns to her and his eyes are wild now; helpless and desperate. “Diana, what I am about to tell you I have not spoken aloud even to myself. It is shameful, and you will despise me for it.”

How could she have been angry at him two minutes ago? “Well I’m about to tell you that you’re wrong on both counts. One: it’s not shameful to grieve, or to hate, or to think bad things – what matters is whether you choose to act on those feelings. And two: I could never despise you, Vincent.”

His chest is rising and falling so rapidly you’d think he’d just run the Manhattan Mile. But his eyes, though guarded, seem almost comforted.

“I look upon my son and I see pain.” His voice is trembling in a way she’s never heard before. “I see horror and wretchedness; hateful men with hateful hearts, and the wreckage of my life and all my dreams. When I look at my son, before love, before promise or joy, I see hatred, Diana. And that is not the father Jacob deserves.”

“You see these things because they come from love.” Her voice is strong, strong enough for the both of them, she hopes. “What happened to Catherine was wrong and horrific and needless. Jacob, through no fault of his own, was the fulcrum of Gabriel’s fucked-up plans – it’s only natural that seeing him brings all those emotions to the surface.”

A single tear drops from Vincent’s bowed head, and on to the ledge. It reminds Diana of mercury, or the liquid heart of a crystal. It happens so suddenly, so swiftly, that it could have been a trick of the eye, a stray headlight or the flickering neon above a convenience store.

But it wasn’t any of those things. It was a drop of pure, distilled grief, and it moves Diana; moves her so fiercely the old ache returns: the yearning to hold this titan of a man within her arms and shield him from the world.

She doesn’t do any of that, except for the yearning.

“But I’ve seen how you look at him, Vincent. You look at him like he’s a miracle; I never seen anyone have such love in their eyes. Kids can sense these things: and I can tell you, Jacob knows he is loved – not just by you, but by Cathy, and Father, and Mary, and me, and everyone Below.”

There’s hardly a gap between them now. Diana doesn’t want to broach that last frontier just yet, wants Vincent to have space as much as he has closeness. So, just as if walking a high wire, she must move carefully.

“You know, I spoke to Gregory Coyle’s psychiatrist tells a little while back. You know why he did what he did? He never got the chance to grieve properly, ‘cause he carried everything by himself.”

Diana reaches out and rests a hand on his arm: gentle, unobtrusive, but present. A weight to tether Vincent to the waking world.

“You’re not carrying this alone, Vincent. We all got your back, okay?”

Vincent looks at her out of the corner of his eye, almost shyly. Slowly, like a bud in Spring, he unfurls himself around her – and she weaves herself right back. They breathe into each other, standing there like the pillars of Pompeii, strong and defiant as the world burns around them. Maybe a millennia passes, or maybe just a minute does, but whatever it is, it feels like a new era when they part.

What do you even say, at the dawning of a new world?

“Let me know when Jacob wants to hear about Camelot, okay?”

Turns out, Jacob wanted to know that very night, ‘cause twenty minutes later she’s got him on her knee and is telling him about the time Arthur first pulled the sword from the stone. Jacob’s huge blue eyes are almost as wide as his smile, and every time he giggles toothily and claps his hands together, she just about melts. Alexandra always got a kick out of her impressions, and Jacob seems to too, so she dials it up to eleven: so what if her version has Sean Connery as King Arthur, Fran Drescher as Guinevere, and William Shatner as Lancelot? It works for Jacob, so maybe Hollywood could learn a thing or two.

Shockingly, even Vincent seems to be enjoying her theatrics. He’s sitting across from her, his eyes crinkling with amusement, even if she’s yet to make him full-on chuckle (don’t worry: it’s on her bucket list). Over the next week, they make their way through Arthur’s life, to meeting his evil son Mordred (Gilbert Gottfried) to the Lady of the Lake (Holly Hunter) and Merlin (Al Pacino). By the end of the week, she’s earned quite the audience: all the tunnel kids and most of the grown-ups, too. Even Lena and little Cathy show up for the grand finale (word must have got to Brooklyn).

And Diana’s reward? Jacob wants her to read it all over again, from the start – or at least, that’s what she gathers from him grabbing the book and repeating “Deena Deena Deena!”

So of course she reads it again. And again, and again, and again, until for her and Vincent’s sanity, they move on to another book: this time, it’s Robin Hood – and if you haven’t heard the Merry Men speaking like the cast of ‘Taxi’, you haven’t lived.

*           *           *

Valentine’s ‘91 sure woulda been a bust without Mandy. As it turned out, it wasn’t so bad. Hell, Diana might even have called it ‘fun’. Mandy let her borrow (by which she means ‘practically forced her to wear’) a sparkly bronze dress that was so skimpy could probably have passed for a swimsuit, and a pair of heels that Diana could barely walk in. A few shots later, you would’ve thought disco hadn’t died.

It felt good, moving her body to music, using her muscles in a way that wasn’t power-walking to the DA’s Office or running after a perp. Or making the slow descent into the Tunnels. It was primal, this glitter crowd swaying to a rolling, thumping beat. Even as she belts out the lyrics to dance tunes she hadn’t realised she knew, even as she laughs with Mandy in a tumbling cacophony, she doesn’t forget Vincent. Like the imprint of a camera flash on her eyes, he lingers there. The thought of him doesn’t make her sad, though, and it doesn’t make her stop. It makes her hope: hope that he’s felt this unbridled joy in his life; that he will again, somehow.

They stagger out of the club at 3am and grab a burger at a diner where Mandy’s cousin’s friend’s sister works. They eat themselves sober and Diana hails them a cab. When they get back to her place, she puts on Stevie Nicks’ latest, and they talk until they fall asleep.

It might be the most fun Diana’s ever had. She doesn’t know whether that’s real beautiful or real sad. But when she wakes the next day, curled against Mandy’s side, she decides it’s the former. Diana cuddles closer and breathes her in: Malibu Mist and Aqua Net, cigarettes and sweat, and a hint of caffeine from her day job that she never can seem to completely scrub away.

When they can bear to get vertical, Diana makes Mandy coffee while Mandy tries to copy some new-fangled hangover remedies she found in a magazine (each one worse than the last) and they sing some horrendously off-key renditions of the songs from last night.

Diana’s still humming one of them when she gets Below, to find that everyone’s started decorating for Winterfest.

“That’s a beautiful tune, Diana,” Mary calls from the corner.

“Thanks,” Diana says, running a bashful hand over her hair.

“Donna Summer, huh?” Joe says as she approaches.

First Dirty Dancing, now Donna Summer. What the hell is Jenny doing to this guy?

“Mm-hm.” She takes up the space next to him. “I went dancing last night.”

He gives her a once-over. “Didya come straight from the club?”

She shoves him. “I might look tired, Maxwell, but at least I don’t look old. Is that a grey hair I see?”

He bats away her outstretched hand, and turns back to his work chuckling. Well, she’d better do something useful herself. Casting her eyes around, she zeroes in on some crepe paper in the heap Joe seems to have corralled for his own, and starts making a paper chain. She takes it real serious, too: concentrating on it like a precocious middle schooler, trying to remember how she and Suzie used to do this way back when.

Out of her peripherals, she can see Joe move away to talk to Father. More crepe for me, Maxwell. Diana tears off a strip of paper with her teeth, feeling just a smidge feral, and loops the last link in the chain.

It’s not much better than her candle, but it’s something. She holds it up over a mantelpiece, kicking herself for not checking the dimensions before she started. The chain’s a little longer than her armspan, too, so she stretches herself out, almost too far –

“Need a hand?”

She turns round to see Isaac standing behind her, a bemused grin on his face. She realises she’s still holding the tape between her teeth, like she’s a Golden Retriever or something. She drops it like one, too.

Jeez, he must think I’m a freak. “Save me from myself, wouldya?”

“Of course,” he says, easy as that. He takes one end of the paper chain as Diana keeps the other, and with his help and a couple tacks, they have it draped across the mantle.

They stand back and appraise their handiwork.

Diana sighs. “You know, I thought it’d look grander than that.”

“Aw, it just needs a little TLC,” He leans in, as if he’s about to share state secrets, and adopts a suitably conspiratorial tone: “They got glitter guns, you know.”

She snorts. “Glitter guns? They don’t even got indoor heating.” For some reason (she knows the reason), her body chooses that precise moment to shiver.

Isaac doesn’t waste a second. He slings off his jacket and drapes it over her shoulders, not unlike the way they’d draped that paper chain just a minute ago. It means he has to get real close, so close she has to tip her head back to look up into his eyes; she can see every one of his eyelashes, can see how the amber light Below turns his brown eyes gold and gleaming –

“Better?” he asks, practically purrs.

“You could say that.” She feels hot enough to boil to death, simmering over until she’s more liquid than solid. Jeez, when did she get to be such a light touch?

“Isaac.”

The voice comes from behind them, from another world it seems. Diana knows the source before she turns, but it’s still somewhat jarring to see Vincent standing there.

His eyes look wary, sorrowful and – unless Diana’s mistaken – jealous. She files the thought under ‘No chance’ in her mind. ‘Course he wasn’t jealous. He’d made his feelings abundantly clear. He’s had a lot to deal with, more than most. It was probably just all catching up to him.

“Rolley has asked to speak with you.”

“Of course.” Isaac looks a little befuddled, as though he’d been yanked out of a dream. Gee, I wonder what that feels like. “I’ll, uh, catch you later, Diana.”

“See you ‘round,” she says, keeping her face impassive but letting her eyes glimmer a little.

Vincent bows his head in that stately way of his that she usually finds so charming.

“Devin sends his regards,” he says, but it sounds as if he’s saying something else. “Charles as well.”

So she bows her head right back, and mimics his tone. “Tell ‘em I said hi.”

They stand across from each other, saying nothing, conveying everything, until Vincent turns and walks away into the darkness.

Diana shivering, but she’s not cold. She pulls Isaac’s leather jacket closer around her, and turns back to the paper chain, and smiles.

*           *           *

At a certain point in the day, the people Below realise Joe and Diana are more hindrance than help, and gently break it to them that they’ve got things covered. So they take off for the day. Once they’re Above, they grab coffee and head up to Joe’s office.

They amble up to Joe’s office, clutching coffee and donuts. What a cliché, right?

The second he closes the door, he turns to her and – out of nowhere – says: “Bennett, you look like crap. And I don’t mean ‘cause of the hangover.”

“Gee, thanks Joe.” She flings herself in the chair across from his, crosses her ankles on his desk. “I was hoping for a pick-me-up.”

“Well, pick this up instead.” He perches on the edge of the desk, hands in pockets. “Believe it or not, I know a thing or two about pining for the wrong person.”

“How’d you cope?”

“I buried myself in my work and found someone else. I’m not saying it’s the healthiest approach, I’m saying it’s the one that worked for me.”

She takes a sip of coffee so hot is half-burns her throat. “So you think I should just find someone else?”

He nods.

“Who, Joe?” She throws her hands wide. “Who in the whole city, the whole world, could ever come close?”

“No-one. And that’s the whole goddamn point. You need a clean slate, Bennett.” He pauses, as if trying to sound casual, like he hasn’t thought about this shit before – which he clearly has. “What about the self-defence guy? You looked… cosy, this morning.”

She snorts. “‘Cosy’, Maxwell? What are you, a Midwestern mom?”

Joe nods over at her. “That’s his jacket, right?”

“No wonder you made DA.”

“Actually, I made DA ‘cause I can always tell when somebody’s stalling. Just like you are, right now.”

They stare each other down across the desk, before Diana decides that she was gonna have to talk it through with someone, and Joe was a better option than the bathroom mirror.

“He seems like a nice guy,” she muses, folding her arms across her chest. “Handsome. Good sense of humour.”

He shrugs. “Give him a call. See what he says.”

“I gotta return this, anyway.” She brushes imaginary lint off the collar.

“See? You don’t even have to make something up.”

“‘Joe Maxwell, Matchmaker’: Got a nice ring to it.”

“That’s ‘District Attorney Matchmaker’ to you,” he grins, trying to sound tougher than he looks. He isn’t fooling anyone, though.

*           *           *

It must be a cold day in hell, ‘cause Diana actually takes Joe’s advice. When she calls by the gym later, Isaac’s wiping the back of his hand across his brow. He must’ve just finished working out – and boy, was it working for him. That tight white tee’s clinging to every glistening, finely-honed muscle. Shit, Bennett: stop staring, wouldya?

She doesn’t, though, Isaac lifts his head at that very moment and flashes her that million-watt smile, the one that makes her feel like jello in a tumble dryer.

Diana pops the collar, revelling in his undivided attention. “Heard you were looking for this.”

He saunters across to her, slinging a towel over his shoulder. “Sure was.”

Keeping her eyes on his, she slips out of the jacket and holds it out. As he reaches to take it, their fingers brush – and a jolt like a live wire goes through her. By the look in Isaac’s eyes, he felt it, too.

“You know, it’s a shame, actually.” He looks down at the floor, running his free hand over his close-cropped hair.

She cocks her head. “How so?”

Isaac’s eyes flicks up to her again. “‘Cause it looks much better on you.”

His voice is honey-smooth and just as sweet. She swallows, and hooks her thumbs through her belt loops, just to have something to do with her hands.

“You shoulda told me.” Jeez, did she ever smile this easily, this sappily, before? “Woulda saved myself a trip.”

“Then I wouldn’t have got to see you again.”

The mood between them is syrupy, and Diana has a mind to just cut the crap and kiss him already. Instead, she attempts to sound casual. “Hey, you heard of Winterfest?”

“Sure,” Isaac says slowly. “We were both helping out with the preparations, remember?”

Great, now he thinks I’m nuts. “Right. Would you, uh, like to go with me? You’ve probably asked someone, but-”

“I’d love to.” His eyes are gleaming.

“You would?”

He moves closer, so close she has to tip her head back to look into his eyes. “Fact is, I was gonna ask you.”

The corner of her mouth quirks up. “Pick you up at 8?”

“I’ll be waiting.” Isaac’s eyes are sparkling; they’re such lovely eyes, Diana thinks as she holds their gaze just a beat longer before turning away. She doesn’t even try to stop the smile that spreads across her face. She probably looks dopey as hell, but she doesn’t care. She asked out a cute guy and he said yes: where she comes from, that’s call for celebration.

*           *           *

She wears a green dress one of Mandy’s: deep green velvet number with a slash neck and an asymmetric hemline. Diana loathes anything spindly so she opts for a dressy pair of long, kitten heel black boots that look like they were made to go with her dress. And the dark emerald of the velvet really sets off the coppery red of her hair, which she wears down loose for the first time since – well, that doesn’t bear thinking about.

Combing her fingers dreamily through the tumbling waves, she remembers how Isaac’s eyes had sparkled when she asked him to the dance. Something warm had sparked behind her ribs, licked up the column of her throat, at the sight of his eyes, and the rise and fall of his chest. If she laid her head against it, would she hear his heart beating as fast as hers is now?

The woman in the mirror is unfamiliar; she looks pretty, content – happy, even. Diana likes the look of her; hopes she sticks around.

Isaac’s jaw damn near hits the floor.

He whistles. “Hell, did I underdress.”

“You clean up just fine,” she smirks, smoothing down his lapel, catching her fingers on the crisp white shirt beneath. “Shall we?”

“We certainly shall.”

She’s got to hand it to the folks Below: they sure know how to party. Everyone’s dressed to the nines, with the Tunnel folk looking like medieval royalty and the Helpers looking like they got lost on the way to the Met Gala. A strange historical displacement, as if the room’s stuck somewhere between 1285 and 1985 – it’s trippy and crazy and magical all at the same time.

It’s a shame Joe’s missing out on this. Jenny’s taken him home to Connecticut for her folks’ 40^th, so he couldn’t get out of it if he wanted to. There’s always next year – and in the meantime there’ll be leftovers and stories to greet him when he gets back.

Arm in arm, Isaac and Diana descend the stone stairs amid the buzzing throng. The tunnels are thrumming with excited whispers, the swish and rustle of fine fabric and the tap and clatter of fancy shoes. The assembled watch with bated breath as Vincent, with no small amount of ceremony, opens the great oak doors. As the wind whistles through the tunnels, tugging at the lighted torches and swirling through the masses like a twister, Isaac curls his arm around her pulls her gently against his side, and she lets herself be held by someone who isn’t ashamed to.

And the drama! Man, the World Below would kill it on Broadway. They start, as they always do, in darkness. It’s a metaphor, of course – but the last two years, it’s felt a little close to home. Now, though, with Jacob giggling and cooing all the way through the monologue, in total obliviousness to Vincent’s efforts to calm him, the mood lifts as surely as if sunlight rather than candlelight had broken through the room. Jamie’s the first to giggle. Pascal breaks soon after. Then Mary. And, slowly but surely, everyone (save perhaps Vincent) begins to laugh – Jacob, the ringleader, most of all.

She meets Vincent’s eyes across the table, and within them is all the joy and pain of a life lived half in happiness and half in grief. The laugh dies in her throat, though she gets it, she really does. It’s been three years since his last Winterfest with Catherine. The last two had been a sombre affair for everyone, who, with loss so fresh in their minds, had forgotten their mantra that sharing the light defeats even the greatest darkness.

Below the table she reaches for Isaac’s hand, and nearly sobs with relief when he takes it.

 “Well,” Father says, looking like a man who’s had his fill of being Stern Dad and can’t wait to be Fun Grampa. “It seems that Jacob wants us to get on with the festivities. Who are we to deny him?”

And deny him they did not. Before long, the tables are stacked fit to buckling and the once-sombre room is filled with the clink of feasting and conversation. Afterwards, a motley band strikes up a tune, and Diana hasn’t seen so many musicians in one place since Springsteen played Madison Square Garden in ’88. Now that Mandy had awakened in her a love of dancing, Diana just can’t stop – so you better believe she leads Isaac onto the floor and that they don’t get off until they’re gasping for breath (and rum punch, apparently William’s best vintage).

As she takes a sip, Diana casts a look around the room. She sees only joy: laughter and song and freedom, unburdened and hopeful. There’s a thrumming in the room as of a heartbeat, as if the place is a breathing, blooming thing.

Below is starting to come to life again.

She slots her arm through Isaac’s, trying not to think about how natural it feels, and they go for a stroll about the room, past jugglers and fire-eaters and a couple jesters on stilts, eyes wide and remarking on every strange and beautiful new sight. They pass Mary and baby Jacob, who’s transfixed by a ventriloquist and seems to be trying to work out how a puppet can speak. As she and Isaac pass the mantlepiece, Diana excitedly points out their paper chain like a proud mom at a science fair. She even manages to rope Pascal into a half-hearted compliment about their craftsmanship, before he excuses himself to go check on the pipes.

The next corner they round, they find Vincent talking earnestly to Rolley, the young man who’d gotten inadvertently tangled up in the sprawling roots of Gabriel’s enterprise. The kid was some sort of musical sauvant; a modern-day Amadeus. But now his hands are trembling too violently to hold a glass, much less knock out a sonata.

Isaac claps Rolley on the shoulder, effortlessly genial and comforting in a way that Diana wishes she could replicate. She’s always been a little too withdrawn, too focused, to bring comfort in that sort of way. It’s something she admires and likes about Isaac, his way with people.

“Will you play something for us later?” he says, taking a swig from his glass.

Rolley runs a shaky hand over his head, eyes darting from Isaac to Vincent. “Uh… I – I’m not sure.”

“Hey, don’t sweat it, tough guy,” Isaac beams. “There’s always next time.”

A nervous laugh escapes from Rolley’s lips, and he shyly nudges Isaac as if in thanks. Vincent, as ever, inclines his head, as Isaac and Diana resume their stroll around the room.

“Poor kid,” she sighs. “I never seen anyone look so lost.”

“I grew up with boys like him,” Isaac replies, glancing back over his shoulder. “The fuzz, the drugs, the streets: one by one, they started to disappear. Once you learn the whole thing’s rigged against us, it’s easy to want obliv-”

Bang.

The sound of a gunshot cuts through the buzzing crowd like the crack of a whip. It cuts right through Diana’s spine, and she grips at Isaac, heart pumping, eyes casting wildly about for the source.

A group of wiry young men are pouring through the crowd like petrol through paving cracks. There are ten of them, all armed, and all with the wiry, hungry look of a pack of coyotes. They’re clad in battered leather, like they slunk out of the primordial ooze via an oil slick. The man at the front of the pack, clearly their leader, a tall white guy with a shaved head and a gaunt, wild look about him. He’s slinging a sawn-off shotgun over his shoulder with the practised nonchalance of a man who could kill a dozen ways with it.

His goons point their guns into the crowd as they pass, a hostile Exodus, parting the crowds until they come to a standstill in front of –

Rolley.

The kid looks fit to disintegrate from sheer terror. Vincent stands protectively at his side, looking ready to pounce at any moment.

Diana’s head is spinning. She didn’t bring a gun – why didn’t she bring a gun? She could’ve put one in her boot for sure; she doesn’t even have a knife, for fuck’s sake. She glances at Isaac, who’s positively rigid with rage.

“We got your invite, Roller.” The skinhead’s voice sounds just as oily as its owner looks. His teeth look as though they’re rotting from within his skull, and his skin is ashen and clammy – from the looks of it, he’s a user too.

“You said you wouldn’t make a scene.” Rolley’s voice is high and tremulous, like the fluttering of wings. “You promised.”

“And you promised to pay your tab.” The skinhead spits on the floor at Rolley’s feet, before affecting that genial yet sociopathic grin once more. “So here we are.”

Father’s voice rings through the hall. “What is the meaning of this?”

“Cool it, gramps.” The skinhead leers. “We got this covered. And if you say another word, Razor over there’ll pop so much lead in you we could use you as a pencil.”

The man who must be Razor, nods at Skinhead in agreement. He must be the second in command. He’s got tattoos snaking up his neck and down his wrists, and when he smiles, he’s missing a few teeth. Meth head, most probably. Diana files that away.

A sudden movement at her side; Diana looks round in time to see Isaac sucker punch Skinhead. Skinhead reels, staggering back. The next second, he’s whipping the shotgun at Isaac’s head. Isaac falls, and Diana mirrors his descent, checking his vitals, his breathing. Knocked cold, but still breathing. Thank fuck. She shrugs off her jacket, and gently slips it under his head.

She looks up to see the barrel of the shotgun an inch from her face. Skinhead tuts his disapproval.

“I didn’t say you could do that.”

She raises her hands. A shotgun’s still a shotgun, after all. “You want to explain a dead body to the cops?”

“Honey, I know how to cover my tracks.”

“Not down here you don’t.” Her mind is spinning, but she hopes it doesn’t show. Isaac’s out for the count, Joe’s a couple states away, and Vincent’s got a gun pointed at his temple. They got past Pascal somehow, and she hopes that means he’s not wounded or worse. She’s gotta strategise and she’s gotta do it fast. These guys are obviously dipshits, but a dipshit with a gun is as dangerous as mastermind. Multiply that by ten, and wow are they all in the shitter.

She carries on, hoping she sounds remarkably calm for a non-cop (and hoping that that particular lie sticks for the next few minutes at least). “You use water in NYC, any kind of water, this is where you’re getting it from. The aqueducts down here lead straight into the Hudson. Whatever you dump here, washes up there.”

Skinhead actually looks like he’s taking that in. And wouldn’t you know, she’s only about halfway wrong – but say anything confidently enough, and someone’ll buy it.

In the lull that follows, Rolley’s voice, thick with tears, is the only sound that can be heard. “Vincent – I’m sorry, I’m so sorry-”

“It’s alright, Rolley.” Vincent’s voice is calm and level, an undisturbed sea. “The fault is not yours.”

Skinhead points the shotgun at Vincent. He’s left his side exposed – rookie movie – and Diana could so easily tackle and disarm him right now – but that would leave the other nine free to start shooting randomly. No, this’ll take some tact and a little diplomacy, otherwise they’ll have a bloodbath on their hands.

“It is his fault, whatever-the-fuck-you-are,” Skinhead scoffs, giving Vincent the once over. “Where we come from, your little friend there calls himself the High Roller – fitting, ain’t it, for a no-good junkie? He led us right to you. Said you were good for the money.”

“We got money,” Diana interrupts, drawing attention back to her. Vincent’s eyes meet hers, fear flitting through them. A nod might give the game away, so she hopes her eyes convey trust me, I’ve got this better than words or actions could.

Skinhead turns back to her, like an anaconda rearing its head, deciding whether or not to strike.

Diana moves a step closer. Razor raises his gun, and she lifts both hands. “You can have it. Everything you want. As long as you leave and never come back.”

Skinhead saunters forward, cocksure and confident. Too confident: that sort of hubris is a chink in his armour. Diana files that away for later, too.

“You calling the shots now, slim?” He stops right in front of her, close enough to let her know that her personal space is as much his now as his own; that he can cross that threshold whenever he likes. She raises her chin and stares him down.

She also knows that he wants her fiery and brash; her rage is something he can grab on to, so she refuses to give it.

He nods in that uber-macho way that means he’s about two seconds away from hitting something. Her, most likely. “Cat got your tongue, huh?”

“I’ll take you to the storeroom. You can take whatever you want, and then you can go.”

His eyes flash, like a snake about to strike. “I can take whatever I want?”

He runs his knuckles down her cheek, lower still, grazes her breast –

A sudden commotion to her left; her head whips round and she sees Vincent being pushed to the ground, two of Skinhead’s goons restraining him. Something warm and lovely blooms in her chest; throat dry, she nods to Vincent, trying to thank him with her eyes, warn him not to do anything stupid to save her, to look after himself and Jacob first – but most of all, there’s solidarity and relief in her gaze, and she can see the same in Vincent’s.

Skinhead grabs Diana’s jaw and yanks her head round. His horrible, dead eyes are on hers, but it’s Vincent he addresses. “Another move, tough guy, and I snap her neck.”

Silence descends on the room. She’s never heard the place so quiet, though her heart is pounding so loudly in her ears she wouldn’t be surprised if everyone could hear it.

“Steel, Hawk – you’re with me. Everyone else, stay here. Shoot anyone who moves.”

“Wait.” Diana says. She jerks her head at Vincent. “I need him.”

Skinhead stares at her. “Why, so you can overpower us?”

“There’s a boulder at the entrance to the storeroom.” Nice one, Bennett. “He’s the only one strong enough to lift it. Without him, you’re leaving here empty-handed.”

This guy clearly thinks himself an alpha, so she decides to try some ingrained misogyny. She adopts a softer tone; not full Patty Hearst but somewhere on the road to that. “Look, you could leave me here and take him instead – I’m not stupid enough to go up against you.”

“No,” Skinhead curls his arm around her waist and pins her there. “I think I’ll keep you right here. Lead the way, princess.”

*           *           *

Diana remembers reading about the circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, how they wound down and down and down through one sin after another: rage and greed and gluttony and so on. She remembers the illustrations in Vincent’s ancient, leather-bound copy: the spiralling road to the underworld coiling ever downwards.  

That’s the road she feels she’s walking now. The World Below has never seemed frightening and cold before now, but as she descends further and further beneath the surface of the earth, she finds herself expecting demons and ghouls around every corner.

Skinhead tightens his grip on her, and she restrains herself from rolling her eyes. He’d left Razor in charge above, and brought down another goon with him now that one hostage had turned into two: a lanky kid who looks like he barely graduated high school, who she mentally dubs ‘Pimples’. Steel and Hawk look au fait with guns, but Pimples doesn’t. He’s probably the kid brother of one of the others – Hawk, she surmises, given the way that Hawk walks ahead of Pimples, motioning things to avoid, and treating him in that half-tough, half-worried way of all older siblings. She almost feels sorry for him, or would have if he didn’t have an AK-47 pointed at her head.

She can’t even look back at Vincent, for fear that Skinhead will sense collusion and take matters into his own hands. Even with Vincent, there are too many for them to take on with guns. She can practically feel him thinking, working out how to overcome the intruders, and most of all, trusting her instincts. He can sense she has something of a plan, and she doesn’t mean to let him down.

At last, they reach her target: the Chamber of Winds. It’s like an M.C. Escher painting in here, all railingless stairways that lead everywhere and nowhere. Any step can be treacherous, if you know them well enough, especially with a helping hand – or foot, as it were.

Steel stumbles first, but it’s Hawk who falls – all Diana had to do was leave her foot directly in his path. ‘cause she’s been eyeing the knife in his boot for the past ten minutes. The gun tumbles out of his hand as he staggers – one down, three to go – and disappears into the abyss. His knuckles grip on to the edge, white and straining, eyes bulging, as gravity tugs at his dangling feet. Pimples looks frozen to the spot with fear.

“Give me a hand, boss!” Hawk splutters.

Skinhead crouches down, glaring at the sobbing man. “Why should I?”

“Let me help him.” Diana pleads.

Skinhead looks from her to Hawk and back again. “Fine,” he says eventually.

Diana crouches, reaching out a hand. The guy’s pretty lean but with gravity pulling on him he feels as heavy as a ton. She strains, until she feels Vincent at her side. They nod, and together they have the strength to heave Hawk back onto the ledge. In the scuffle and strain, Diana manages to slip the knife from Hawk’s boot and up her sleeve. Only Vincent – she hopes – seems to have spotted it.

“Hey.” Skinhead presses the barrel of the shotgun to Vincent’s chest. Vincent, of course, doesn’t even flinch. “Did I say you could help?”

“Look, boss,” Steel cuts in. “We got Hawk back, didn’t we? He won’t do it again, right?”

Vincent inclines his head in that elegant, noncommittal way of his that could mean ‘hell no’ or ‘hell yes’, and that seems to appease Skinhead somehow.

Pimples, of all people, is the first to recover. “S-s-should we go back?”

“We’re getting what we’re owed.” Skinhead growls, brandishing the shotgun. “Turn back and it’s the last thing you’ll do.”

As they set off again, Hawk grabs Pimples’ gun and trains it on Vincent, but there’s a softness in his eyes now that wasn’t there before. Pimples mouths a ‘sorry’ at Hawk – yep, definitely related – at which point Hawk shakes his head and looks away.

“Are we there yet?” Skinhead seethes, more than once.

“Just a little further.” Diana replies, every time.

Diana doesn’t know how much time passes, but it feels like aeons before they hit the Nameless River.

“I don’t feel so good,” she groans, slumping against Skinhead’s side.

“Gotta keep your energy up, slim. I ain’t done with you yet, not by a long shot.”

“No, really, I feel kinda woozy…” The next moment, she lets herself drop like a stone into the river – only she keeps hold of Skinhead as she does so. They plunge into the silty waters, and she lets herself float for a moment before she’s dragged bodily onto the riverbank.

Vincent kneels beside her as she coughs up half the river. His hands are gentle as they smooth the hair from her forehead, though his eyes are softer still, even with Steel’s gun still pointed at his temple.

“Diana…” he murmurs.

“Hey, break it up, you two.” Skinhead barks, but he’s more focused on his gun, which is dripping silt and riverwater. “Aw, shit. Fucking useless!” Two down, two to go. He doesn’t give up the ruined gun, though, even though it’s more dangerous to him now than to his hostages.

“Get up,” Skinhead growls, hauling her to her feet. “If this goddamn storeroom is more than five minutes away, I’m gonna start cutting off one of your fingers for every minute you lead me round in circles.”

Yikes. “It’s just round the next corner, I promise.” And she takes the chance to signal to Vincent. Two guns, four guys – those are pretty good odds.

The first thing Vincent does is to roars right in Pimples’ face, at which point he turns tail and flees without even a second look, not even at his brother. And then there were three.

Diana flicks the knife out of her sleeve and starts swiping at Skinhead. Diana huffs out a cocky little laugh as she jabs at Skinhead. He dances back, and pulls a knife out of boot – jeez, another one? – and starts swiping back.

Meanwhile, a momentarily stunned Hawk remembers he has a gun and starts to fire wildly, but Vincent is too quick. He drops at once to the floor, leaving only one target: Steel. Hawk’s loaded two rounds in him before he realises what he’s done. Steel, bleeding from the mouth, looks blankly down at his bloody chest, and topples to the floor.

Vincent hits the gun out of a stunned Hawk’s hand and kicks his legs out from under him. Hawk jabs his foot into Vincent’s chest. He staggers back, and Hawk scrambles to his feet, gun in hand, ready to fire – only for Diana to jam her knife into his shoulder blade. It gives Vincent the moment he needs to recover, to wrench the gun from Hawk’s grasp and twist it into nothing – but it also distracts Diana from Skinhead, who lunges at her from behind.

She screams as he digs the knife into her bicep, tearing her sleeve and sending a steady stream of blood gushing down her arm.

“You fucking bitch.” He growls in her ear.

“You fucking idiot.” She jabs her non-bloodied elbow into his face, and he recoils. “Why didn’t you go for the gut?”

Groaning as agony throbs through her, she scrabbles for purchase on the rocky wall just as Vincent breezes past her and sinks his claws into Skinhead. She looks away, and her gaze falls on Steel, whose eyes are wide and staring and blank. He could have killed them – would have, no doubt – but he was a person all the same. He probably had people who loved him, or maybe he never had the chance to surround himself with those who could.

She looks over at Vincent, who’s standing over a bloodied Skinhead. He’s alive, but won’t be for much longer if Vincent carries on. And, somehow, she doesn’t think Cathy would want him to deal even a cockroach like Skinhead the final blow.

So she stumbles over, Steel’s gun clutched in her good hand, and pulls weakly on Vincent’s arm. “Vincent, come on, we gotta go.”

Somewhere on the move, Vincent tears off a strip of his tunic and ties it around Diana’s bicep. She squawks from the pain, but it’s not a deep cut or a dangerous one it seems, just a fucking sore one. When they get in sight of the main hall again, everyone’s sitting in silence, as the six gunmen prowl around with their AKs. She sees Isaac sitting next to Father, who’s holding Jacob; while he looks a little worse for wear, he’s conscious and alert.

“There are too many, even now.” Vincent whispers.

“We could rush them, but they might start firing into the crowd and-”

“-We would be no better off than when we began.”

Diana nods. “So I’ll be the distraction.”

“It is too dangerous, Diana.” His gaze drops to her arm, which has started bleeding through the bandage. “You are wounded.”

“S’just a scratch. Look, you get as many people as you can out of there as you can – get your son, and Father, make sure Isaac’s okay. And send someone to check on Pascal.”

He inclines his head. “The southeast corner seems the least guarded. I will start there.”

She nudges him with her good arm, smiling through the pain. “Sounds like a plan.”

Vincent’s gaze is heavy. “When this is all over…”

Diana nods. “I’ll come to you.”

He reaches out a hand, and their fingers tangle together, clumsy and sincere and perfect. “Be careful.”

And then they’re moving away from each other, debris parting in the tide.

She peers round the corner, darting back whenever one of the gunmen turn vaguely in her direction. Her adrenaline must be spiking because the pain is a dull twinge at the edge of her consciousness. A good plan always does that for her – well, this is definitely sort of a plan; whether it’s a good one remains to be seen.

Casting about on the floor, she picks up a couple rocks and stones, and starts throwing them at intervals. It makes the gunmen jumpy – Razor especially, who seems to be taking his delegated leadership very seriously. She persists, varying the length of intervals, keeping an eye on the Southeast corner. The crowd seems to be thinning ever so slightly, subtle enough not to catch attention.

She manages to catch Father’s eye, and signals to the corner. He ever so slowly starts walking little Jacob over in the direction she pointed to, only for Razor to aim his gun their way.

“Hey, where d’you think you’re going?”

“My grandson needs the bathroom.”

“Potty potty potty!” Jacob squeals. God bless that kid – he’s already game to go along with the bit. Or maybe he really does need the bathroom. Either way, the plan’s working – she hopes it lasts.

“Boss said no-one was to leave.”

“I’m sure it would be more unpleasant for you gentlemen if we didn’t leave on this occasion.”

“He’ll have to go in the corner.”

“Very well. Come, Jacob. Let’s find a corner.”

“Potty corner! Potty corner!” Jacob giggles as Father walks him over to the Southeast corner.

Diana leaves enough time – she hopes – for Vincent to make sure they’re safe, before moving to the second phase of her plan. And so she fires a single shot into the floor, and gives her best evocation of Skinhead's voice. “Razor, over here!”

Sure enough, Razor peers around the corner, gun in hand and quite alone. “Boss?”

He moves forward, looking around, allowing enough time for her to slip out from behind a tapestry and press the gun to his back. “One word,” she whispers, “And it’ll be your last.”

Razor nods.

“Drop your weapon.”

He does. She kicks it away.

“Good.” She tears off the rest of her ruined sleeve and uses half as a gag and the other half to tie his hands together.

“Hey boys,” she cries, appearing around the corner with a gun pressed to Razor’s temple. Five guns are pointed at her immediately. “Uh-uh-uh. One more move like that and I blow your pal’s brains out. Stand down.”

The guns are lowered, but not dropped. She can deal with that, for now. It’s a start. It also means that all eyes are on her, which gives even more leeway for Vincent to get the others to safety. And it allows her a moment to look at Isaac, and see his eyes brighten at the sight of her and know he’s okay.

“Thank you. I thought we could work this out. Now,” she says, walking Razor a little closer to his comrades. “The guys who held me and my friend at gunpoint – they’re gone. We won’t be seeing them again, unless they wash up in the Hudson next week.”

The gunmen exchange a few guarded looks, unsure whether to trust the word of the crazy woman with the gun. So she decides to ramp it up a little.

“Here’s my proposal: the rest of you can walk outta this joint right now, alive and well, as long as you never come back and you keep your mouths shut.”

“What about the money we was owed?” One of the others pipes up.

“I’m offering you an even better price,” she says, watching more and more people . “Your lives. No strings attached.”

One of the gunmen starts moving towards her. “But the Boss said-”

She can’t have that – so she fires the gun above her head. That stops him in his tracks. But it does also have the unfortunate side effect of removing her threat to Razor. So he elbows her in the gut and stomps on her foot, and swipes the gun out of her hands.

Then several things happen at once.

One, Isaac wrestles one of the gunmen to the floor.

Two, Vincent leaps out of nowhere and tackles two in one fell swoop.

Three, Rebecca, Laura, and Jamie dogpile one gunman while Mouse and William jump on another.

Diana, meanwhile, is wrestling Razor hand-to-hand. They’re both exhausted and injured and have absolutely no more fucks to give, so their fighting is sloppy and inelegant and brutal, but no less intense. Diana jams her thumbs into his eyes but he knees her in the chest and she rolls off him, winded. He grabs a fistful of her hair and yanks her head back, whipping out a switchblade and lowering it to her exposed neck when –

– Vincent roars, diving across her and sinking his teeth into Razor’s throat. They fall; Razor screams, and then is silent. Diana’s breathing is ragged, her heart fit to burst. She crawls over to where Vincent is still crouched over Razor’s body. There’s a spill of red at the man’s throat, a crimson spatter on Vincent’s clothes. He’s breathing hard, his head bowed, hair covering his face.

She whispers his name, and, after a moment’s hesitation, softly rests a hand on his shoulder. He starts at the touch, peering around. Slowly, falteringly, he glances up at her. His mouth is red and dripping, almost vampiric in mien; quickly, bashfully, he wipes it with his sleeve.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she murmurs, brushing back his bloodied hair. “He was gonna kill me.”

Diana doesn’t know who helps who get to their feet; maybe they help each other, like the eaves of a house propping each other up. They’re still holding tightly to each other when a seething, rageful shriek cuts the brittle peace like a guillotine.

Skinhead, bloodied and limping, appears at the tunnel’s mouth. His clothes are torn and wet, and his face twisted in something between pain and fury. His eyes are fixed on Vincent and Diana, and so is the barrel of the sawed off shotgun.

“Nobody gets the drop on me!” he spits.

How he made it back up, she’ll never know – maybe he followed the trail of blood? – but what she does know is that she’s going to fucking die. She’s going to die in her best friend’s ruined dress, in a tunnel miles below the earth. But she’s going to die with Vincent at her side and Cathy in her heart, having tried to do something good before the end.

And then, she doesn’t. Die, that is.

But Skinhead does, ‘cause that gun of his – the one that she toppled into the Nameless River – explodes right in his face.

*           *           *

A gentle lull has fallen over the hall, like a field after battle – which, Diana supposes, this was. Father is tending to some of the wounded, while Rebecca, Jamie and the Helpers work to undo some of the wanton damage the intruders had caused. The denizens of Above and Below work side by side, mission in microcosm.

Isaac is knelt at Rolley’s side, speaking softly the boy, who’s rocking back and forth, tears silently streaming from his tired eyes. Isaac had started running to Diana the moment Skinhead appeared, had got to her just after the gun exploded. Vincent had squeezed her hand, and then gone off to find his son. Isaac had hugged her close and she’d rested her head on his shoulder and watched Vincent from across the room, holding Jacob in his arms; found that Vincent was watching her right back.

Razor and Skinhead are the only casualties they know for sure. Pimples must’ve got lost, or at least must not have been careful about his footing, ‘cause they never find him after that night. Hawk, too, must’ve gone looking for his brother and met the same fate.

As for the survivors: one of the Helpers, Con McCrae, who retired from the force a couple years ago, offers to take the five gunmen in to the station. Nothing they could say about Below would stick in court – Miracle under 59^th Street? Gimme a break, pal – especially ‘cause they only found out about the place in the course of a felony. If they needed any extra convincing, Joe’d handle it when he got back in town – but, as Diana looks at the sorry faces of surviving gunmen, she thinks the loss of their leader might have done all the convincing they’d need already. They seemed untethered without him, and fuck if their faces didn’t look a whole lot little kinder already. Guy was a bad influence.

Thankfully, Isaac didn’t have a concussion, but he might have a headache for a couple days. Once diagnosed, he took the chance to go to speak to Rolley, calm the poor boy down. that meant it was time for Diana to get triaged. Both Father and Peter Alcroft had offered to do the honours, but Vincent had insisted. They move to a small antechamber off to the side, with a bowl of warm water, fresh bandages and a candle await them.

“I wish I could make one that pretty,” she nods at the candle while Vincent busies himself with the equipment Peter had set up. “Mine’s a little… strange.”

“It is merely beautiful in its own way.” Vincent presses a cloth damp with ethanol to her cut; she sucks in a breath through her teeth. “Besides, a candle’s purpose is to bring light and warmth, in the darkest of times. That is its own beauty, is it not?”

“All I know is, it makes me happy.”

He turns away, preparing needle and thread, and she looks down at the ruined dress. Mandy’s gonna kill her when she sees it – the right sleeve is gone, the corset’s torn, and there’s blood and dirt and sewer water on the rest. Somehow, Diana doesn’t think a gift basket’s gonna cover it.

“Ah,” she winces, drawing a breath through gritted teeth, as the needle pushes into her flesh, and the thread along with it.

“I did not mean-” Vincent begins, but she cuts across him.

“Don’t stop,” she murmurs. “I can take it.”

The breath seems to catch in his throat, and he swallows thickly around it. His eyes are gleaming in the light of the candle, as though there are living flames within them. It’s as if she can feel their heat, ‘cause that little candle ain’t what’s making fire bloom in her chest, that’s for damn sure.

Vincent does as she bids. His hands are gentle, and she’s half-mesmerised by the gentle up and down movement of the needle. She’s breathing slow and methodical, too, when she remembers to do so. Vincent’s so close, his blue eyes focused on the task, so quiet she can barely hear him breathe. Thank god it’s not a deep wound, but it’s still a little sore, even with William’s rum punch flooding through her system.

He knots the thread and cuts it with his teeth, and fuck she can feel the heat of his breath and the lightest, gentlest scrape of his teeth against her skin and Christ how hot is that candle, surely that's against safety regulations?

She tries to control her breathing as Vincent wraps a bandage slowly around the wound. She wishes she could see this in reverse, watch him unravel every thread until there’s nothing between them but want and candlelight, but she’ll take this moment, enjoy his closeness while it lasts, so that she can dream of it later.

He knots the bandage in place, but does not remove his hand. It rests gently upon her arm, half on cloth and half on flesh, as though he cannot bear to withdraw his touch.

When he speaks, he does not meet her eyes. “This is the second time you have saved my son.”

“You saved your son, Vincent.”

“I could not have done so without you, Diana.” His right hand he rests his palm gently on her cheek, brushes her hair behind her ear. It’s the closest they’ve been since they kissed; she feels the points of his talons against her neck, like thorns, and wonders how they would feel in her mouth. “There are many things I could not have done without the thought of you by my side.”

His hand is in her hair now and he’s close, so close she can see every fleck of blue-green-gold in his eyes. God, she can feel the warmth of his breath, and feel the heat of his skin, and can almost taste those lips –

But, this time, it is Diana who pulls away. Isaac is outside, bruised and hurting, and she can’t bear to hurt him anymore than he is already. She flinches away, standing so quickly it makes her dizzy.

“Vincent, I – I’m sorry.” And she half-runs out of the room, Cinderella at midnight, as she swore she'd never be.

His fingers ghost through her hair even now, trail down her arm, tug at her wet clothes until they burn, until she feels fit to tear them off herself. She’s throbbing, her pulsing so hard and so fast she can actually feel it under her skin, even if most of her blood seems to be rushing South.

Isaac spots her, moves across the room. She scrabbles for his hand, grabs it, and brings it to her mouth.

“You wanna get outta here?” she murmurs against his knuckles. She’s not sure which one of them moves faster, but somehow they’re up those stairs and out into February chill before Diana can take a breath. She doesn’t know who pushes who against what, but eventually she finds herself with a brick wall at her back and Isaac kissing the ever-living fuck out of her.

Diana eases her legs apart and groans as his knee comes between them, pinning her there like the thumbtacks on her wall, like a butterfly on a board, and Christ has she ever been this turned on? She licks into his mouth and digs her nails into his skull, scores them down his neck, his shirt, lower, lower, until he’s groaning too.

Her want is a slow stretch, taffy pulled taut, dripping caramel and toffee apples and sugar and candy and fuck she wants to unwrap him now but they’re still outside, how are they still outside, ah fuck it they can’t wait, this can’t wait – do you wanna, she asks – yes, diana, Jesus fuck, he says – and then she’s easing down his belt and he’s up easing her dress and –

*           *           *

They make it back to her loft for round two (well, three, if you count what happened in the elevator on the way up). The whole last block they must’ve looked drunk as shit, but it was just the giddy, fluttering stumble of two people who can’t wait to unwrap each other like candy. Diana hadn’t gone this hard and this long in a while, not even with Brandy from Reno. Best of all, they kept smiling and laughing through it all, ‘cause sex is stupid and fun and stupid fun, even when it can be simultaneously the most serious thing in the world.

They fall asleep laughing, and damn if that ain’t the sweetest thing.

Chapter Text

Isaac wakes her with espresso and homemade waffles from a recipe his grandma taught him, and if Diana believed in the institution of marriage, she might well have proposed on the spot. They play-fight over the whipped cream and settle the dispute in a very sexy and creative way, so creative that they decide to just stay in bed all day and order in and watch stupid movies.

Maybe this is the most fun she’s ever had. No, dancing with Mandy takes the cake. Okay, it’s a tie.

So what if it’s nice have cologne in the bathroom cabinet again, to have men’s socks in the drawer and a stupidly macho jacket folded over a chair. It feels, as Joe might say, cosy.

They go to the movies and get popcorn and heckle the characters’ poor life choices until they get thrown out. They hit the kookiest bodegas and swankiest bistros and order the weirdest thing on the menu every time. They take Mandy out dancing and they see the Knicks play. They go drinking with Isaac’s gym buddies and play pool with her pals from the 210. They even go to a costume party dressed up as Shaft and Sarah Connor.

Diana watches her life unfold in this gorgeous new way with no small amount of bemusement and gratitude. She’d forgotten how good it felt to laugh, and fuck, and walk hand in hand, all with the same person; to collect shared memories like seashells, watch them accumulate on the windowsills of her soul. All she knows is that, whenever he turns and their eyes catch, she feels something sweet and sparkling in the pit of her stomach, champagne bubbles whenever he smiles at her.

And he’s such a good guy. After the Winterfest debacle, they were in two minds Below as to how best to deal with Rolley in the aftermath. Their usual mode of punishment had backfired on them a while back with Mouse, but Rolley had put them all in danger, after all. It was Isaac who offered to look after him – “If he stays with me for a month, I can keep an eye on him. The boy’s fragile: a month’s silence could tip him over the edge.”

With Isaac as his sponsor in all but name, Rolley flourishes. He even helps out at the gym now, and when he plays for them Below, his hands don’t shake as much.

*           *           *

A few months in, they decide to get candyfloss in Coney Island with Alex and Suzie.

“Is he your boyfriend?” Alexandra coos, and Diana is so proud of that kid, she’s gonna be a great detective or a really overbearing boss one day.

“Isaac?” Diana turns, trying to hold back a smile. “Care to comment?”

“Why, yes, I would. And why yes, I am.” Totally unfazed, what a pro.

“Does that mean you love her?”

“Alexandra!” Diana cries, at the same time that Isaac says: “Yes.”

Alexandra, appeased and happy now that she’s wrecked the whole day, skips ahead as Suzie flashes Diana an apologetic grimace.

They walk a little way in silence, before Diana can’t hold back anymore. “Sorry about that. I love the kid but she’s gotta learn to read the room one of these days.”

“Ah, don’t sweat it. I’m sorry, though, if it freaked you out.”

“You think that’s the first time she’d tried that shit?” Diana clears her throat, running a hand over her hair. “First time a guy said ‘yes’, though.”

They lapse into a thoughtful silence, until Diana can’t resist it anymore. “Did you mean it?”

Isaac glances up at her, suddenly looking young and fragile. “I know it’s a little early but, yeah. I did – I do.”

She feels a blush creeping up her face, and she suddenly feels all trembly, as if her atoms can’t keep together.

“Isaac-”

“Look, let’s not let this get weird.” They turn into the Amusement Arcade. “We’re having fun, we enjoy each other’s company – that’s what matters, right?”

“No.” Her eyes sparkle. “What matters is that I’m gonna absolutely crush you in Kickboxer.”

He scoffs. “You know I run a gym for a living, right?”

“Mm-hm.” She slots her arm through his. “Then it’ll be super embarrassing for you when you lose.”

*           *           *

She doesn’t realise how little she’d been Below until Below comes to her.

She’s on the rug in front of the fire, Isaac lying between her legs. The sweat is cooling on their skin; her cheeks are rosy-damp and so is her hair, and their breath is still coming heavy and fast. Isaac brushes his mouth across her clavicle, licks the column of her throat, kisses the corner of her mouth. She teases, moving her head just as he hovers over her lips; squirms below him, tightening her legs around him –

A tap at the window.

She starts, and Isaac stills. The moment clings to her, that slow, sparkly feeling – but it’s fading fast, ‘cause she knows who’s waiting outside the door for her.

“I better check that out.”

She slings on Isaac’s t-shirt, which falls halfway down her thighs, and moves over to the balcony door. The shadow gives him away before anything else does; a great mountain of a man, a living precipice, cloaked in the night itself. The sight stirs something in her, where the sparkles were seconds before. The feeling is slower still, deeper, like the pulsing throb of lava deep below the surface of the earth.

Fuck. Here we go again. “Is everything okay? Nobody’s got hurt, have they?”

He shakes his head. “No. We are all quite well.”

“So…” she lets the unspoken question hang in the silence between them. Why are you here?

“It has been many weeks since last we saw you Below.”

Diana folds her arms across her chest. Really? “I didn’t realise you were keeping score.”

Vincent actually has the good grace to look sheepish. “Jacob has something he has been meaning to ask you. He asks after you often, in fact. I… merely wished you to know that you are missed..”

For a moment, she remembers candlelight, the brush of his talons against the flesh of her arm, the heaviness in the air between them. She wonders, for a moment, what her life would look like now, if she’d leaned into him that night like she’d wanted to. The thought lurches in her.

Then she’s steady again, remembering his words so many months ago. That was a mistake, he’d said. Well, it’s one he won’t get to make again. She’d rarely left her heart so open to attack – but she also wants him to cut the crap, so she asks him something she’d not have dared to ask before.

She gazes at Vincent with the softness of one whose heart wasn’t trampled on, and it might be a shield but it’s one whose weight she’s long used to carrying. “Do you miss me, Vincent?”

He pauses, but not for as long as she’d thought he would. “Yes, Diana. I do.”

Her eyes glimmer. “I’ll get my coat.”

She throws on a pair of jeans and her trusty boots, slings on a jacket, and makes up some bullshit excuse – Jacob asking after her, something not far from the truth – the last of which, it turns out, was the easiest of three.

The second they get into the main hall, Jacob comes barrelling out of a tunnel and launches himself right into her arms.

“Woah! Where’s the cavalry, kid?”

“Dee-na! Dee-na! Dee-na!” he coos, his pudgy little arms around her neck. Jeez, is he getting more adorable by the day? He’s also getting heavier, but the kid’s nearly two years old, for crying out loud.

“Jakey! Jakey! Jakey!” she echoes, bouncing him in her arms. It’s then that she notices that Jacob is wearing something that looks suspiciously like-

“Hey, is that chainmail?”

He giggles. “Wanna be a knight.”

Okay, so it’s not the real stuff, but it’s tightly-knit grey wool that’s been spray-painted with sparkly silver paint, and baby Jacob looks as proud as if it had been bestowed by King Arthur himself.

“You’d be a crazy awesome knight. Arthur’d be lucky to have you on side.”

Vincent’s been standing by the archway a ways off. He steps forward into the light, arms clasped behind his back.

“Jacob.” Vincent prompts. “I believe you had a question for Diana?”

A bemused smile crosses her features. “Go ahead, little guy.”

Jacob clambers off her and scampers over to his dad, who produces from behind his back a little wooden sword, roughly but carefully cut. Jacob grabs it and bounds back over to Diana.

“Wanna be a knight,” he repeats, and hands it to her. After a second, her mind calibrates. She assumes a noble mien and a valiant approximation of RP.

“Do you swear to defend the defenceless, and to always speak the truth?”

“I do-do-do.” Close enough.

“Do you swear to show courage in the face of fear, and kindness in the face of cruelty?”

“Yep-yep.” Okay, he must be messing with her now.

“Do you swear to look after your dad, and your grampa, and anyone in the World Below who needs your help?”

“Dada-dada!” he squeals.

“Then,” she says, tapping the blade on each shoulder in turn. “I dub thee Sir Jacob Wells, second of his name.”

Jacob positively cackles with delight and does a sort of victory lap before chasing little Cathy around the room. (Lena looks on with a wry smile, and waves over to Vincent and Diana as if to say Don’t worry, I got this)

“Thank you,” Vincent murmurs. “He has spoken of little else for a week or more.”

“Well, Special Crimes don’t often confer knighthoods these days, but I think it’s about time we brought back the tradition.”

Cathy and Jacob, both wearing the woollen chainmail and brandishing small wooden daggers, start play-acting a duel while Lena keeps watch.

A sigh from beside her. “He has been asking after his mother of late.”

“What do you tell him?”

“That she loved him with all of her heart. That, though he cannot see her, she is with him and always will be.”

She glances up at him. “That’s beautiful. And it’s what he needs, after what he’s been through; what you both have.”

“I thought that, for us, there would be no such thing as ‘after’.” Vincent crosses his arms across his chest, as if bracing himself for such painful memories. “A life beyond the loss is a thing I can barely envisage.”

Diana exhales, slowly and pensively. She can sense the great yawning gulf that Vincent carries with him; he walks as though his chest is carved open.

“No-one ever heals from loss; not really. You just gotta find ways to live around the hole it leaves, like the way you have to be real careful about where you step down here.”

He looks at her in his soft, sorrowful, impenetrable way, and wonders if it’s she that should be stepping carefully. Seeing him in this incremental, cumulative way makes each time seeing him less painful, in the way that a once-broken bone only aches when it rains.

*           *           *

“Play nice, Cathy!”

Lena and Diana are sitting on a park bench in Queens. It’s still cold in April, cold enough that their breath is clouding the air.

Diana nods at the swing set. “I used to play here as a kid, with my sister.”

“Were you as reckless as that one?” Lena nods at little Cathy, who’s currently crawling over the top of the monkey bars.

“Nope,” Diana smiles. “I was way worse.”

“I nearly left her once, you know.” Wow, that was out of the blue. “Thought it would be better for her than if I stuck around.”

Lena’s honesty is disarming; refreshing, and real endearing. She doesn’t fuck around with words or sugar coat them – she cuts right to the core, with those kind eyes and that wry, seen-it-all smile.

“But you didn’t. That’s what matters.”

“That’s what I tell myself.” She shudders, pulling her jacket closer around her. “So you and Isaac.”

Lena switches between topics so quickly Diana’s almost got whiplash. But it’s just an extension of Lena’s natural curiosity, that self-effacing, warts and all honesty that doesn’t come easily to someone so young.

Diana sniffs, clutching her bodega coffee a little tighter. “Yeah. He’s a great guy.”

Lena takes a sip from cup. “You’re in love with Vincent though too, right?”

Diana’s head whips around. “What-? How-?”

She shrugs. “I know the signs.”

Diana sees the flicker of recognition, the healed-over sadness, the sparkle of fondness that remains. “Did you – do you – ?”

“I did once. We might’ve been good for each other, in a different life, maybe. But it wasn’t meant to be.”

She must’ve had a face on her, ‘cause Lena sort of half-laughs in a sweet, reassuring sort of way and rubs Diana’s arm. “It’s okay, Di. Sometimes it just works out like that. But… with you, I have a feeling it’ll go a different way.”

Diana shakes her head emphatically. “He’s not interested. Well, maybe that’s not the right word. I think he’s interested. He kissed me, or I kissed him – we kinda kissed each other, I guess.”

Lena’s eyes go wide. “Diana, that’s huge. He wouldn’t just do that. The man is a goddamn monument to self-sacrifice.”

“It was last summer, Lena. The next day, he told me it was a mistake. We’ve sorta kept each other at arm’s length since. But at Winterfest, when all that shit went down… something happened.”

“Somethin’ sexy?”

Diana scoffs. “Well, ‘happened’ might not be accurate. But he was bandaging my arm after the attack, we got real close and I thought… Well, I don’t know what I thought.”

Lena nods, as if she can see the action replay. “Is this your first time? Being in love, I mean.”

“I’ve been in love before: my high school sweetheart, my roomie in college. Guy called Mark, just before all this happened. But like this? Never. Maybe it’s just ‘cause he’s just the sort of mystery I’m drawn to solve.”

Lena’s looking at her with care – not the pitying kind, but pure empathy. “He’s not a mystery, Di. He’s a person, like you or me. He wants love and companionship just like everyone else. That doesn’t mean he wants romance, but it doesn’t not mean that.”

Diana breathes out a misty cloud of regret and hope and melancholy. She thinks she gets know why folks get addicted to nicotine: inhale the bitter tobacco and exhale all the bitterness clogging up your brain. She wishes she could roll him up and smoke him out of her.

“You know what,” she says at last. “I think I’m happy to just be his friend, if that’s what he needs.”

Lena nudges her shoulder. “What about what you need?”

Diana considers this for a moment. She remembers what it had felt like to walk into Winterfest with Isaac’s arm around her waist; how it had felt like an anchor until she’d locked eyes with Vincent across the room. Then it had felt like a wisp of air; like nothing at all.

“I’ve never measured my worth by a guy’s interest in me, Lena. But now, it’s like I’m living my life just fine, and then he looks at me and it’s like I never existed ‘til he did; like I’m a ghost. It makes me feel so… alone.”

“You’re not alone, Diana.” Lena wraps an arm around Diana and pulls her gently against her side. “And for what it’s worth, I think he does care about you. He’s fighting it ‘cause he still loves Catherine and he always will. If that’s true, would you still want him in your life?”

Diana exhales shakily. “Yes. He’s changed everything. And I want to be there for him and Jacob, I want to pour everything I’ve got into this, you know? If there’s more to come than what we are, I’ll run straight at it. But if not, then I’ll be happy to walk through life with him just as we are now.”

“Fuck it – marry me, why don’tcha?”

“In another life,” Diana says, echoing Lena’s own words. They laugh, and Diana kisses Lena’s temple, hugs her closer. Meanwhile, little Cathy plays on, oblivious to the crazy messes grown-ups get themselves into.

*           *           *

The next morning, she props her head up on her hand and watches Isaac for a long time before he wakes. Isaac. He smells like a man should smell, the cool stinging scent of pine, iron and sweat and leather, and those words don’t sound good but they sure smell good, at least when it comes to him.

He’s all anyone could want in a partner: good sex, a kind heart, and laughter – but no mystery. And fuck if that ain’t a deal-breaker for Diana. It’s why she’s sitting here, at five in the morning, finding faults with the perfect guy. What they have is great – comforting, even, the way it is when you get used to a new apartment and get to know which stair is the squeaky one.

Diana wants a mountain to climb, a ravine to navigate. She wants to earn it and build it and tend to it, like she tends to Cathy’s roses. It’s why she’s gone with Vincent each time he’s called by, each time with a more paltry excuse than the last.

“Can’t he ask someone else?” Isaac would say each time, as she gets onto the elevator, or through the diner door, or leaves him standing on the platform.

And each time she shakes her head, and smiles, and says, “I’ll be back later, okay?”

Love is an explosion: you run or you implode.

And if she’s being honest with herself – ‘cause what else can you do at five AM but be honest? – she’s been running for a while: to someone who can’t be with her, from herself, around in circles, again and again. Isn’t the definition of madness picking faults with your perfect boyfriend while pining for a man who could never give you his whole heart?

So, of course, when she’s on the precipice of ending things, she gets an invite that means she can’t: an invite to Joe and Jenny’s engagement party. ‘Cause of course they’re getting married. They’re fuckin’ perfect: textbook, you could say. They certainly look it, when Isaac and Diana turn up at their apartment a week later with an ’85 Cabernet.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Jenny says to her. “A friend of a friend got us on the list for the Rockefeller Halloween party this year, and we were thinking we’d go for a Wizard of Oz theme. We think you’d be the perfect Glinda.”

Diana snorts. “The broad in the bubble?”

“Only to her close friends,” Joe mutters, trying not to laugh.

 “And,” Jenny enthuses. “I thought your boyfriend here could be a great Tin Man.”

Diana slides an arm around Isaac’s waist. “Sexy woodsman, I could see that.”

He winks at her, but Jenny’s a woman on a mission and seems as intent on outlining her plan as a battle commander. “I’m gonna be Dorothy and Joe’s gonna be the scarecrow-”

“Missing a brain? Perfect casting.” Diana’s having way too much fun. Shit, did I huff some of the Cabernet on the walk over?

“– And Joe says he knew a guy who could play the Cowardly Lion. Goes by ‘Vinny’?”

“Did he, now?” If Diana raises her eyebrows any further, they’ll be in her scalp. “Well, this all sounds incredibly thorough. I got a question, though: why the Wizard of Oz?”

Jenny’s eyes turn doe-y. “Well, it’s the sweetest thing actually. They were screening the movie in Central Park, and when the credits rolled, Joe turned to me and said, ‘Jenny, like they said in the movie, there’s no place like home. You’re my home’. And then he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.”

Diana raises her eyebrows at Joe, trying to keep the shit-eating grin off her face. “Who knew Joe Maxwell was such a romantic?”

“Guilty,” Jenny says, smiling shyly at Joe, and he smiles shyly back, and it’s so sweet Diana can feel her blood sugar levels skyrocketing. A Joe Maxwell in love is a strange beast, but an adorable one nonetheless.

Jenny suddenly waves over their heads at a lady across the room – maybe a friend from college, judging on the age and the sorority-esque squealing – and Isaac squeezes Diana’s hand before moving over to the open bar, as if sensing Joe wants a word.

“Well, well, well, Maxwell,” Diana tuts.

“Yeah, yeah.” He takes a swig of beer. “Do your worst. I deserve it.”

“What a putz, using the same proposal speech on two gals.” She giggles into her champagne.

“Well, it was such a good speech I thought it would be a shame to waste it. And,” he looks around, as if checking for eavesdroppers, and lowers his voice. “I’m gonna bring her Below.”

“That’s huge.”

“I want her to get to know you all a little first, ease her into the whole thing.” He spots her across the crowded room, and there’s a vulnerable fondness in his eyes that seems as far a cry from the jaded Joe she’s known.

“And don’t worry,” he continues. “I’ve talked it through with Jacob. And, let’s face it, if she wasn’t the kind of person I’d trust with all this, I wouldn’t be asking her to marry me in the first place.”

“Well, speaking as your one-time fake fiancée: I’m happy for you, Maxwell.”

Joe clicks his tongue. “Well, that ain’t gonna last, ‘cause I got a favour to ask of you: would you break it to Vincent?”

*           *           *

The next day, Diana lugs a projector, a battery pack, and a VCR player down into the tunnels to much consternation and excitement. Some of the kids and of course most of the adults had seen a movie before – but to some of the younger ones, it was like Diana had invented the art form herself. Like the runaway train in Paris, she thinks.

She’d found an old VHS of The Wizard of Oz in a thrift store (they might graduate to LaserDisc one day, who knows?)  She removes it from her back pocket with much ceremony, as Moses might have done the tablets of stone.

From the second the music starts, the assembled watch in awe. There is laughter, and there are tears, and there’s a genuine collective gasp the moment the sepia turns Technicolor. Jacob and little Cathy might be the most mesmerised of all, but even Vincent looks moved when Dorothy, given all that she could possibly want, asks to go home.

There was much chattering and singing and recounting lines from the film afterwards, but before long Vincent and Diana are the only ones left in the cavern.

”Thank you, Diana.”

“Ah, don’t thank me just yet.” It occurs to her that that might have been his first movie, and she doesn’t know what to do with the information - maybe let him say it in his own time, if he wants. Or maybe he and Catherine had snuck into a movie theatre? Who knows. “I sorta had an ulterior motive in showing it tonight.”

She starts rewinding the VCR by hand. “So I assume Joe’s told you about Jenny?”

Vincent inclines his head.

“Good. What he hasn’t told you is that he wants us all to dress up like the characters in the film we just watched. Like, she wants me to be Glinda and Father to be the Wizard and all that.

“Now,” she carries on, like the Lumière Brothers’ speeding train. “I know it’s a weird request, but it’s important to Jenny, and I think Joe’s trying to ease her into knowing you all before dropping the whole ‘Below’ thing on her.”

“Diana-”

“If it’s too much, I’ll tell Joe to find someone else-”

“Diana,” Vincent says firmly. “I trust you. And I trust Joe. If he wants me to assume the mantle of the Cowardly Lion, I will do it gladly.”

Yikes, how’m I gonna spin this? “Remember, Halloween’s about being who you’re not.”

He tilts his head. “I don’t know about that. There is magic about you, Diana.”

And just when she thinks Well, what the fuck am I gonna do with that?, he has the gall to walk away.

*           *           *

The dress, it turns out, is the hardest thing to source. Fortunately – or unfortunately – Jenny’s brother is dating a tailor, and he helps her source yards and yards of pink tulle and sheer, sparkly stuff, and even the silver for the crown. The only thing he fails in is convincing her to wear a pair of sparkly silver dress shoes. They’d be hidden by the petticoat anyway, so why not be comfortable?

Even though she’s Glinda for the evening, she feels very much like Dorothy in the Oz Makeover Chair, with Suzie poking incessantly at her with lipsticks and mascara and blush. Alexandra, meanwhile, is biding her time until Suzie takes her trick ‘r’ treating. She’s dressed as the latest Disney princess, which comprises a cute gold dress and a book as an accessory (“For accuracy”, she explains).

Having burned through the Disney soundtrack, Alexandra’s now fluttering about singing “Auntie Di’s a princess now” to the tune of the munchkins’ song.

Diana rolls her eyes fondly. “I’m a witch.”

“You said it,” Suzie mumbles, releasing another corkscrew curl from the flat irons.

“Hey!”

“Nah, you look gorgeous.”

Diana huffs out a sigh as her reflection comes into view. “I look ridiculous. I can’t even walk through doors now, I gotta go in sideways like a crab.”

“Embrace the ridiculousness, Di.” Suzie grunts through a bunch of hairpins held between her teeth. “It’s a Halloween shindig, not the Met Gala.”

Diana feels even stupider when Isaac rolls up on a motorbike, in spray-painted leathers and silver shades. He has at least (artfully) daubed some silver paint on his face, though it only serves to accentuate his cheekbones, and twirling an axe that makes her dollar store wand look even more foolish.

“Oh, fuck you.” She half-laughs, half-groans, as he saunters over, looking hot enough to set her highly-flammable skirts on fire.

“You promise?” He kisses her on her rouged cheek, and makes an attempt to hug her, or pat her hair, or something, but doesn’t seem to be able to find a way through all the lacquer and tulle.

She shakes her head. “I know – I’m a hostile environment.”

“I thought you had to dress as something you’re not for Halloween.”

“And you’re dressed as someone in need of a heart – so what does that make you, smart guy?”

“Touché.” He brushes a kiss to her temple. “You look incredible, Di. I’m gonna have so much fun getting this off you later.”

“Good luck with that,” she grins, and takes his proffered arm, and they walk off in the direction of the Rockefeller Centre. Diana’s just thankful she doesn’t have to get on a motorbike in this get-up.

Seeing the inhabitants of Below standing there, on a perfectly normal street, is enough to make her think she’s walking through a dream. It’s uncanny, watching her two worlds collapse into one, like the way the fairies in Sleeping Beauty smashed Aurora’s pink and blue dresses together. They might be very much ‘on theme’, but to Diana it might as well be ‘Halloween ’91: Above meets Below.’

Joe makes for a surprisingly on-point scarecrow – his brown flyaway hair strewn with straw and with an expression just baffled enough to pass for brainless, while Jenny’s Dorothy is somehow both accurate and more glamorous than the original. Father strikes a cutting figure as the Wizard, while Lena has gone all out on the green face paint as the Wicked Witch of the West. Cathy and Jacob, meanwhile, are the cutest munchkins.

But it’s Vincent who draws the eye, because of course he does. He’s drawing a lot of eyes, it turns out, ‘cause he’s a dreamboat with the body of a football player and the hair of a rock star. He’s wearing something cool and Renaissance-adjacent, complete with a cape. The one vestige of his counterpart (other than the whole ‘lion’ thing) is the red ribbon, only he’s tied it as a sort of dignified bolero instead of a hair tie.

“We’re all here!” Jenny squeals. “Diana – you look stunning!”

“I sure am stunned,” she mumbles, but Jenny’s so goddamn earnest she can’t help but smile; even blush a little.

Father has his fretting hat on. “Are you quite sure our home will be safe?”

“I’ve cordoned off the whole area and put my best guys there,” he mumbles then, in a louder voice: “They’ll tell anyone who gets close that there’s a potential gas leak in the area, so no-one’ll go within a mile of it.”

“And what of us?” Father continues, leaning heavily on his stick. “I feel more than a little… exposed.”

“No harm will come to us,” Vincent says, warmly. “Not with Diana in our company.” Good luck in this dress, Diana.

“Uh, I’m here too, pal.” Joe grumbles.

“Let it go, sweetie,” Jenny says, giving him a peck on the cheek. “You’re off the clock.”

*           *           *

Diana had thought of Vincent back on Valentine’s, when she and Mandy had hit the club scene like an atomic bomb. Even then, she’d never quite got to the point of picturing him on the dancefloor – and now she wouldn’t need to, ‘cause here he is, bathed in the technicolour strobe lights, gently swaying to the tinny beat of a drum machine.

It’s surreal, and a little unnerving, and absolutely delightful – like the time they listened to records in her loft, only stranger. Now, he doesn’t just seem like a man out of time, but out of this world; an extra-terrestrial touching down on earth’s weirdest collective day. (Not as weird as watching Father waltzing with Mary in the corner – what a player).

“How are you doing?” she half-shouts, ‘cause the music’s so goddamn loud.

Vincent inclines his head, but his eyes look a little wary – no, not wary: pained. Shit. Of course the music’s probably killing him right now. She’d been too swept up in the glamorous oddness of the whole night, she hadn’t realised what a number that house music must be doing on Vincent’s sensitive eardrums.

“You wanna step out for a minute?”

He nods, his shoulders dropping with relief.

“Back in ten,” she whisper-yells in Isaac’s ear. He nods, and kisses her on the cheek without missing a beat or a step.

Diana finds Vincent’s hand and leads him through the swaying crowd of costumed dancers in various stages of being hammered out of their minds.

The chill of the late-October air hits them like an iceberg. Thankfully, Diana’s got about twenty layers on and Vincent comes equipped with his own central heating system, so they’re good.

Her hands are a little chilly though; she rubs them together, but the next moment Vincent’s cupping his hands around hers, and whaddaya know: they feel hot as hell.

“How does it feel, being up here?”

“I lingered this long in the World Above only once before.” No prizes for guessing who with.

“I’m guessing house music ain’t really your scene, huh?”

He considers this, even though the answer is clear. “It is pleasant to be among so many people without fear of reproach. But I would prefer to dance to the works of Rachmaninov, or Mahler perhaps.”

A lightbulb goes off in Diana’s head. “Hey, Carnegie Hall isn’t that far from here. Whaddaya say we see what they’re playing tonight?”

“I suppose even the weakest symphony would be an improvement.” Did Vincent just crack a joke? Or at the very least make a snarky aside? “Lead the way.”

She does.

But she takes the scenic route: past Public Library (okay, and a little bit through Public Library), Bryant Park on 34^th, and then past the buzzing, glittering hive of Times Square. She wonders what Vincent sees there, the antithesis of the pulsing quiet of Below. His eyes are affixed to the thrum and the hubbub, the cars and the people passing and the lights glimmering, a cacophony and a symphony and a surrender, to the beauty of newness and strangeness, and of (re)discovering it together.

They make it to Carnegie Hall, eventually (they breezed past Radio City, ‘cause some shock jock stand-up is playing tonight, and they’ve got Mahler on the mind). It’s lit up like a chocolate box; the building’s the type you could walk past and not look twice, unless you knew what it was, or if you saw it illumined. Vincent’s eyes are wide as he looks up at it. The faintest strains of something sweet and string-y (look, she’s not good with classical, okay?) drift past them on the breeze.

They must have been loitering, ‘cause the security guy out front sidles over. “Tonight’s performance is ticket only. And-” he looks them sneeringly up and down “-we do have a dress code.”

“Yeah, and you have a potential security breach.” She pulls her badge out of her boot and holds it up. “We’re undercover.”

The guard inspects the badge intently. His eyes flicker up to Diana, then to Vincent.

“Are those prosthetics?”

Vincent bridles.

“Sure are.” She snaps.

“For an undercover op?” The guard shakes his head. “I thought they only did that kind of thing in the movies.”

“Whatever they use in movies are a decade behind the tech we use on the streets.”

He shakes his head. “Sorry, ma’am. You’re going to have to call your commanding officer.”

“Fine. But I’ll be lodging a complaint with your manager.”

“You do that, ma’am.” Totally unfazed. She’s almost impressed. “Stay safe, now.”

“It was a lovely thought, Diana,” Vincent assures her as they meander away.

“It was a little ethically dubious, I guess.” Her eyes flash. “So let’s break in instead.”

She rummages under her skirt and – bless him – Vincent, clearly startled, looks quickly away. She unhooks the torture device of a hoop skirt she’d worn under here, and flings it into the gutter.

“Ah, that’s better.” There are still too many petticoats for her taste, but at least now they hang down by her side like a normal dress would. “What? I can actually move now.”

She looks up at the building, hands on hips. There must be a back door somewhere.

“Do you trust me?” Vincent says, unprompted.

“Sure I do.”

“Will you hold on tight?”

“What are you-?” she begins, then follows the line of his vision. The roof. She looks back at him.

“You’re crazy,” she huffs, but her eyes are wide with excitement.

“I believe it was your idea.”

Well, there’s no arguing with that. Following his instructions, she stands facing him, and wraps her arms around the breadth of his torso. He waits for the right moment; to the rest of the world, they might look like lovers stealing a kiss.

A double decker passes in front of the Hall, and Vincent leaps.

She can feel the power of his muscles, the effortless strength and leonine grace as he claws his way up the side of the building. He’s not even panting, not even with the added burden of a second bodyweight – and an awkward crown – to carry up. It’s like being shot out of a canon, and finding out you have wings.

Diana barely registers that they’ve made it up to the roof terrace, which the wintry cold has cleared of any stragglers, until Vincent sets her feet down on solid ground.

“Are you alright?”

“That was… incredible. To feel like that every day, every moment…”

“It can, at times, feel like a curse.”

She reaches down, curls her fingers through his. “Tonight, let it be a blessing.”

And he holds her back, and they drink in the constellations of lighted windows, and hand in hand they sprint across the neatly-manicured lawns and the bitty sets of stairs, and then somehow they find themselves in the shadows at the back of the dress circle.

The music washes over them like a tide, and perhaps it’s because they’re buffeted by the waves, but they hold on tighter all the same.

“Symphony No. 5., Adagietto. Mahler wrote it for the woman he loved.”

“You know,” she murmurs, feeling the skimming, trailing swoon of the music seep through her. “I think I could’ve told you that without ever knowing it. His love… it’s everywhere in it.”

One of the well-coiffed heads in front of them turns around with a shush on his lips that turns into indignant surprise. “You’re not supposed to be up here!”

More heads turn, and the murmurs grow in urgency and volume. An usher moves towards them, and Vincent and Diana – with only a single split-second glance – start to run down the stairs. Like teenagers caught playing truant, they tear down the stairs, avoiding the furrow-browed ushers, and running out of the building right past the guard who’d caused them to take the long way round. Diana blows him a kiss, and his astonished face is going to be with her for a long time after, that’s for sure.

When they’re safely a few blocks away, they collapse against each other – not from fatigue, but with laughter. It’s the first time she’s ever seen Vincent actually laugh, and boy is it intoxicating. His face lights up like the dawn, like a bud in spring, like a symphony all of his own – and it feels glorious to chase that sound, that feeling.

“Well, that’s the last time they’ll ever let us in there.”

Vincent’s still smiling, and he looks kinda like he’s surprised that he still is but still wants to go for it. “That was magnificent. I feel…”

“Kinda naughty?” she offers.

“Very,” he says, and then they’re laughing again.

“Hey, cool costume, dude!”

They turn at the sound of the voice, and Vincent comes face to face with another lion man. This one’s fur, though, was clearly bought at Party City.

“You too!” Diana replies.

Their Dorothy peers at Vincent. “Woah, is that makeup?”

“He’s pals with Rick Baker.” Diana covers quickly.

As the hours of night slowly dwindle, they find themselves in Central Park. Vincent has often wandered here in the night, but never so freely, so openly. He’s had to live so long in the shadows that it’s difficult even now to shake the feeling of flight, of needing to stay close to cover in case of discovery.

It gives them time enough to drink in secret corners and hidden beauties of the park. Conservatory Garden, a sliver of serenity scored with the sound of running water. They amble through the Ramble, catching slow glimpses of the lake through the trees. They wander through Strawberry Fields, and as they pass Diana could swear the flowers turn into poppies before their very eyes.

Their adventure must have taken more out of them than they’d realised, because they soon find themselves sprawled on Umpire Rock watching the hazy light of dawn start to peer over the skyscrapers.

Vincent’s voice is just as hazy, near-dreamlike in its fragility. “The dawn is nearly upon us. I should go-”

“But do you want to go?”

A shy smile ripples across his features. “No.”

“Then stay. We’ve got time.” Her voice is surer, but still tinged with the feathery down of dreams. “All day, if you like. People will think we’ve been partying all night at some Halloween shindig. Watch the sunrise with me?”

He looks at her with the deep slow gaze of a cat, and nods. They settle back on the rock, and it’s only when the heat of the sun begins to burn that they realise they’d fallen asleep, curled around each other like cats in front of a hearth.

“Hey! You can’t sleep here.” A Ranger approaches in their peripherals; Vincent and Diana look at each other, nod, and sprint away. It’s shorthand for them now; a night running wild in New York City will do that to you.

They get breakfast at a bodega and the cashier shakes his head at them in that gruff-but-genial NY way.

“Cute,” he grumbles.

As slip into the busy press of the morning foot traffic, Diana asks “Where would you like to go?”

“Wherever you will take me,” Vincent replies.

And so they barely leave a stone unturned that day. Diana hates the word ‘staycation’ but it turns out she’s a fan of the concept. Nobody’s gonna let them into a fancy concert or gallery in the state they’re in, and certainly not by light of day – so they hit every outside attraction instead. By late afternoon, they’ve seen the Empire State Building, the Met, Wall Street, the Lincoln Center, and looked at the Statue of Liberty from the Brooklyn Bridge.

On their way back to something resembling their normal lives, they pass Grand Central Station, and she just can’t resist it. It’s the closest thing to Pascal’s network of pipes, and she wants Vincent to experience it for himself: commuters rushing like blood through the veins of the station, lovers parting and reuniting, dreams broken and remade.

Vincent’s eyes are wide, as if trying to absorb every new sight and sound and sensation all at once. People are staring at them at they pass, but then they move on as New Yorkers do, having likely seen weirder on the way in.

There’s a violinist busking near the entrance. Diana doesn’t recognise the melody, but she can tell it’s a waltz. She turns to ask him if he knows the tune, and sees him standing there, hand outstretched.

“May I have this dance?”

She takes his hand without thought or hesitation. They move slowly, carefully, around each other. Diana starts fretting about her crown and her skirts and whether she’s gonna step on his feet – and then she stops, because Vincent’s face is inches from hers, and the rest of him is flush against her, and all she cares about is drinking in the moment like wine, memorising the feel of him, and how it feels to move and breathe with him.

Diana doesn’t realise the music’s stopped until applause echoes through the atrium. Vincent bows to her, and she attempts a curtsey, wishing her legs didn’t feel so shaky.

Eat your heart out, Fisher King.

*           *           *

The blue palette of twilight is sweeping across the city when she gets back to her loft, carrying her battered boots under her arm as if they’re Cinderella’s glass slippers. (She dumped the crown in a trash can a while back) – she never wants to see that thing again.

She hums all the way up in the elevator, and she’s mid-Over the Rainbow when her eyes fall on Isaac sitting at the kitchen island.

Fuck.

He’s got most of the makeup off, but there’s an errant sweep of silver on his cheek. His jaw is set, and his eyes are like steel, and he has the mien of a man who’s about to deliver a death knell.

“That was a long ten minutes, huh?”

She can see it in his eyes. Now I know I’ve got a heart, ‘cause it’s breaking.

Diana deposits the crown on the side table, and walks over to him, her tulle petticoats swishing ridiculously about her legs. Of course it would end this ridiculously, with her in the most undignified costume known to man.

“Isaac, I am so sorry-”

“Whenever he calls, you run to him.”

She could deny it, but she’d be lying. “I know.”

He nods, as if expecting it. How could he not?

Diana moves closer. “Look, I’ll make it up to you”

“It’s my own fault, really.” His voice is colder than she’s ever heard it; sadder, too. “I saw the way you looked at him before you ever even noticed me. I just thought…”

He huffs out a sigh, rubs his forehead. “Hell, I don’t know what I thought.”

“I’m sorry. You don’t deserve that.”

“You’re right, I don’t. But neither do you. Don’t torture yourself, Diana. Be honest with him.”

She swallows hard. “I was. He turned me down.”

“Then draw a line under it, move on.”

He crosses the room, gets in the elevator. She’ll remember how he looks in this moment most of all. “I want you to be happy, Diana. Take care of yourself, okay?”

In another life he would have been the love of mine.

She doesn’t know how, but somewhere between ripping off the stupid pink dress and downing half a bottle of something she shouldn’t, she ends up at Cathy’s grave.

“I messed up, Cathy.” Her voice is thick, shaky; it doesn’t even sound like her voice. “Isaac’s a good man; we coulda built a life together, or at least had a little more fun before it all went to hell.”

She starts tearing at the grass, shredding it into confetti. “You know, I used to pity women like this, women who change themselves in hundreds of small ways to be someone else’s ideal. But they just ended up making themselves into something unrecognisable.”

Something slices at her finger; she cries out from surprise. A razor blade in the grass: a goddamn razor blade is lying in the grass by Cathy’s grave, and fuck if it ain’t a perfect metaphor for this whole goddamn shitshow.

Shoving her bloodied hand in her jacket pocket, she leans her head on the other, suddenly feeling very small and filled with salted blood and saltwater tears and salty bitterness on her tongue and in her soul.

“I thought I was ironclad. But I’m rusting, Cathy. Fuck, I wish you were here.”

*           *           *

She sprints home, throws a few things into a duffel bag, and heads out; rents a car, and drives down the New England coast. She takes a bunch of cassettes with her, mostly of women who know how both to paint pain and to look beyond its borders. Kate Bush accompanies her to Greenwich; Tracy Chapman takes her to Bridgeport, Carole King to Cove Island.

But it’s Joni Mitchell she comes back to time and again. Whatever shit Di’d been through, Joni would sketch it in microcosm; a four-minute portrait of a man and a moving on. Diana wishes she could weave Vincent into song and be happy with just the tapestry. The songs assure her it’s possible, but Diana’s never been a creator: she’s a discoverer, a weaver of the ‘already there’.

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling… Looking for something, what can it be?

“You and me both, Joni,” Diana tells the cassette player, one hand on the wheel.

Joni’s accompanying her to New Haven today. The weather’s nice for November up here, all green and blooming. Somewhere on the road, she goes on autopilot, and doesn’t even register how far she’s gone until she gets to the last song on her tape.

Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine

You taste so bitter and so sweet

Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling

And I would still be on my feet

“That reminds me: get wine,” she tells no-one in particular. The liquor’d be out of her system in a couple days.

But Vincent wouldn’t.

*           *           *

She gets back in time for Thanksgiving, cause Suzie woulda killed her otherwise (plus, she’d got a ton of presents for Alexandra on her travels). Last Diana heard, Suzie’d gone on a few dates with a guy called Dean who worked in the same office block. Thanksgiving was going to be her way of introducing Alexandra to him – but by 8pm (aka bedtime), he was nowhere to be found.

“That schmuck?” Suzie says, when Diana mentions his name. “No, that’s over.”

“Sheesh, what did he do?”

“Look, he was fun for a while. It was nice to get dressed up and go somewhere nice with someone pretty. But I don’t want some guy making Alexandra think she’s my ‘baggage’. She’s my goddamn world.”

Diana raises their second glass of champagne. “Then I think he’s earned a toast: fuck him!”

“Fuck him!” Suzie laughs, and for a second they’re seven years old again.

But she also swings by Below later that evening. It’d be rude not to, and she’s gotta rip off the Band-Aid at some point, and now’s a good a time as any. They’ve just finished cleaning up, and Mary starts trying to thrust some (delicious looking) leftovers her way, but she’s distracted looking for the face that’s conspicuous by its absence.

So what if she goes meandering in the tunnel near his chambers? It doesn’t mean anything, okay?

And then she hears another familiar voice coming from Vincent’s chambers: Father.

“It means that you must ask yourself a very important question, Vincent: do you put your trust in the stars, or in your heart?”

Diana keeps close to the wall, barely breathing. She’s clearly walked in on the end of one hell of a conversation. She should walk away, she absolutely should – but she doesn’t.

“You chose this life, even when happiness awaited you Above,” Vincent says softly, but there is something else beneath it – regret? Envy? “With Jessica.”

Father’s light steps sound softly in the room; he must be walking over to Vincent.

“Do not take the wrong lessons from that, my son. I made the mistake of dissuading you from a great many things to spare you pain, and yet pain found you still. All I have ever wanted for you is happiness, my son. And should you find that path, know that I would help you follow it – no more and no less than you once promised me. Do you understand, Vincent?”

Okay, that’s when she makes a move. She scampers lightly back to the mouth of the tunnel, and then walks a little heavier than usual, down to Vincent’s chambers.

She rounds the corner, and feigns surprise. “Sorry – I didn’t mean to intrude.”

Vincent’s eyes are sparkling; if she’s not mistaken, he looks happy to see her – not just happy, but as if he’d been waiting for her to arrive for days, months, centuries, and had finally got his wish. Fuck, Bennett – what did I(you) tell you about getting your hopes up?

“Not at all,” Father says, making a beeline for the exit. He looks at her, and then back at Vincent, with meaning heavy in his gaze, before turning the corner and disappearing.

“I hope they weren’t too mad at you - you know, for disappearing on them like that. I hope you told them it was my fault.”

He shakes his head. “They worry. It is only natural, though I did not go unwillingly. Quite the contrary.”

She nods, looks down at the floor. “Isaac and I broke up.”

From the look in his face, this isn’t the first he’s hearing of it. “I am sorry, Diana. Are you…?”

“I’m okay. It’s sad, but it wasn’t meant to be.”

“I looked for you,” he says, after a long moment. “On All Soul’s Day, and every day since.”

“I went for a drive down the coast. Spur of the moment.” She considers him for a moment before adding: “But I’m here now.”

He moves towards her, and there’s something different in the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head. Vulnerability, and a sense of purpose; of assurance. “I wanted to thank you. For letting me see the world as you do: in the daylight, in all its glory.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I have never seen the city in sunlight. You cannot know what it meant to me.”

His eyes drop to the floor before flicking up to hers again. “I wanted to talk to you about something. Something important; to me, at least.”

Diana leans back against the tunnel wall. “Shoot.”

He turns away from her. “I wished to know if a person could love again after such a loss as mine.”

Attention piqued. She keeps quiet, and wrestles down the box in her mind labelled ‘hopes’.

“I asked my Father if such a thing were possible. He told me that the human heart is a miraculous thing; that it contains multitudes. That it is capable of healing, and of loving anew.”

“Really?” She presses down harder on the box in her mind, but it doesn’t quite make its way into her voice.

“Then I asked my Father if he believed in destiny.” Vincent moves a step closer, and her heartbeat steps up a couple notches.

“What did he say?”

Vincent’s eyes glimmer – with hope or otherwise, she cannot tell. “He said that he believed in choice. That we choose the lives we lead, in a thousand ways each day, which gives it value beyond measure. That a life that is chosen is far more precious than one which is fated.”

“And what do you believe?”

“I once believed it was impossible.” Slowly, he raises his clawed hand and trails it down the curtain of her hair, as she had once done to him. “Now, I dearly hope that it is.”

She closes her eyes and inhales, breathing in the culmination of several years of want and ache. It feels sweet and it feels bitter, and it feels like falling and drowning and flying all at once.

And then she opens her eyes, and the weight of those years of wanting nearly crushes her.

“I’m tired, Vincent. I can’t do this dance with you anymore.”

He couldn’t have looked more shocked than if she’d shot him. His hand falls limply to his side. “Your feelings have – changed?”

She sighs, runs a hand through her hair “No. But-”Cards on the table, Bennett. “Look, I want to be with you, Vincent. What you had with Cathy, that was once in a lifetime stuff. If you’re not ready, or you just want to be friends, that’s okay – I’m not trying to persuade you otherwise. But I want to be loved for who I am. I don’t want to be a memory in my own love story. It’s not fair on you, or me, or Catherine.”

Diana knows it’s the end, the end of something at least; it feels monumental in miniature. She wants to leave him in hope and friendship, but there’s too much to convey and she’s never been as good with words as she is with a gun.

“Cathy would want you to be happy. I want you to be happy. I hope you find what you’re searching for.”

As she makes to leave, he catches her hand in his.

“I already have.”

“You made it very clear that you weren’t interested.”

“It was not the right time, then.”

“Why is it the right time now?” She wrenches her hand back – any longer and she’d be defenceless. Distance let her frustration flare free. “Why do you even want me?”

He pauses. Long enough that she decides go first.

“I’ll tell you why I want you… I want you ‘cause you’re kind and gentle, and you make everything sound like poetry, and you always see people soul deep. I want you ‘cause you could rule this world like a king, and you spend your life defending the people you love. I want you ‘cause you’re the best father I’ve known since my own and you don’t seem to see it yourself. But most of all I want you ‘cause I can’t figure you out and I wanna spend the rest of my life trying.”

And as the last word leaves her, he crumbles, right into her arms. And she holds them open to him because that’s what she’s been doing ever since she found him curled up on Cathy’s grave, ever since he shattered what she knew of the world and then gave her a beautiful new one. Diana holds him in her arms, clutches him tightly to her as though she alone could be his shield in battle and his flame in the dark.

He lifts his great, glorious head from her shoulder, and great, molten tears spill from his eyes and on to her face, mingling with her own.

“I want you,” he says, and his voice is a ragged husk, as though ragged from hauling the words from deep within. “Because you are unlike anyone I have ever known. Because thoughts of you keep me from sleep and walk with me in my waking hours: thoughts of your strength, your valiance, your extraordinary mind…”

As he speaks, their hands move together as though magnetised.

“Protecting this community has been one of the greatest joys of my life. That does not mean it has not, at times, been a burden; that a moment’s error, my error, could be the end of us. And then we fought side by side at Winterfest, and I felt something I had not felt in a long time, Diana: I felt safe.”

Her eyelids flutter, and he moves closer, closer than she thought possible with their hands so entwined.

“In my life I have felt cared for and loved and defended, but true safety has eluded me. Long have I lived with the knowledge that a careless word, a stray glimpse, could be the doom of both myself and of my home. But that night, when it felt as though our world was on the edge of ending, mine was on the brink of beginning, because you held my life in your hands and I felt cherished, and guarded, and safe. More than that, Diana, I felt free.”

Vincent lifts her hands to his mouth and kisses them, and she’s never put much stock in religion but right then Diana feels atoned, absolved, goddamn fucking ordained by his touch. She wants to drink him like communion wine, throw herself on his altar, pledge her life in a vow.

“I felt then, as I feel now,” he murmurs against her trembling flesh. “That I belong at your side, Diana; better still, that I choose to be there, if you wish it.”

“I do,” she says, and then they’re kissing, and his hands are in her hair and his mouth is on hers and nothing matters so much in the world as that they stay there.

And they do.

Chapter Text

They awaken in each other’s arms.

It a slow, sweet awakening; slipping from a dream as if through shallow waters, sleep clinging like sea foam. And when Diana opens her eyes, is it to the crystalline blue of the ocean; even in the dim of Below, Vincent’s gaze is marvellously bright, so vivid that it seems a source of light in and of itself.

She smiles, and lifts her hand to stroke it through his hair, because she can. Before it reaches its destination, it is gently intercepted and brought to Vincent’s mouth; he presses a kiss to her palm, places it upon his cheek, and anchors it there.

The breath catches in her throat, so tender is the touch. It recalls the first time they held each other, kissed each other, on her balcony, over a year ago. It had been the most intimate moment of Diana’s life then, but it may have just been knocked off the list. Hell, there wasn’t even a list anymore: there was just him, and her, and one moment to the next.

And then it starts: the slow coiling of want in the pit of her stomach. No: it’s more of an ache than a swirl; a steady, pulsing burn, like when you cup your hand around a naked flame. She’d thought only guys got morning wood, but as with everything Vincent-related, it looks like she’s gonna have to re-evaluate what she once thought possible.

Thinking can take a back seat for now, though, she decides. She curls in close against his chest, slots her head into the hollow of his neck, and starts idly running her fingers through his hair. He breathes out slowly, contentedly, and draws her gently against him.

And there they stay, for a time neither can measure, simply breathing and being together.

*           *           *

“You look happy, Bennett.”

Diana’d walked home in the dappled light of dawn, less a person than a splash of joy. She must have less of a poker face than she’d thought, ‘cause from the second she walked into the DA’s office, Joe had been giving her that Concerned Brother Stare, as if she stayed out too late on prom night.

She’s now curled up on the spare chair in his office, idly tracing the rim of a coffee cup and humming softly to herself. “Mm?”

Joe raises an eyebrow. “This got anything to do with a certain, uh, mutual friend of ours?”

Diana takes a sip, and shrugs. “Maybe.”

His eyebrows nearly disappear into his hairline. “You’re official?”

“I don’t know. But we’re… something.” She downs the rest of her coffee in one go. “So: you and Jenny Aronson, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know it’s crazy.”

“Maxwell, I’m dating a lion man who lives in a tunnel. Crazy is relative.”

He points a finger at her. “A-ha! That didn’t take long, huh?”

Diana rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t bother fighting it. She’d worried that putting it out into the universe would burst the gorgeous little bubble she’d found herself in, but it actually sounds kinda nice, saying it out loud.

But she’s gotta say something awful out loud, too, before the day is out.

The gym door is open, as usual. There are a few guys sparring, a couple working out, but Isaac isn’t anywhere to be found. She walks through the room, nods at a couple fellas who stop what they’re doing to watch her pass, and tries to look nonchalant and contrite at the same time.

She finds Isaac in the back office, filling out some paperwork. He looks up as she approaches, eyes a little guarded but also, somehow, soft and open.

Diana holds her hands out. “I won’t be long, I swear. I just wanted to come here to apologise – for real, this time, and also not while dressed in a stupid costume.”

“I don’t know,” he says, folding his arms. “Those slacks are kinda last season.”

She snorts in spite of herself, and thrusts her hands into her pockets. “At least they ain’t made of pink tulle. If I never see that fabric again, it’ll be too soon.”

They chuckle, in that way that people who once found each other charming do. She scuffs the floor with the toe of her boot, and sighs. Here goes nothin’.

“I treated you so bad, Isaac. It was shitty, and uncalled for, and I won’t blame you if you don’t forgive me – I sure wouldn’t.”

She pauses. “Look, I know it’s too much to ask if we can be friends, but-“

“Diana, we’re good.” He rises to his feet. “Truly. It’s in the past.”

He holds out his hand. She and that hand have history: it knows every part of her, just as she knows every part of it. The man it belongs to is someone she had once pictured a life with. She would have watched that hand grow older, maybe frailer, held it on walks and at funerals and maybe even slipped a ring onto its finger.

Now, the hand falls to Isaac’s side as hers does to her own. She may never hold it again – and that’s okay, because it was never hers to begin with.

“You’re a great guy, Isaac. Don’t need me to tell you that, but sometimes it’s the kinda thing that’s gotta be said out loud.”

“Di?”

She freezes mid-turn, a flicker going through her at the casualness of the name, the old intimacy it holds.

“You look happy.”

She shimmers with relief. “I am. More than I deserve.”

Isaac’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “Let yourself deserve it, wouldya?”

*           *           *

So she does. Or tries to, anyhow.

Her first order of business: to spoil herself with a long weekend Below. A weekend that becomes a week, and then two, ‘cause she just can’t bring herself to leave ‘em. Can you blame her, when you think what she’s got waiting for her Below? Vincent, and Jacob, and Father, and a hundred kind people with all the time in the world and twice the heart – all to herself?

Diana blazes through a dozen more books and umpteen impressions she never knew she had in her (who knew she could do a pitch-perfect Pesci in a pinch?) and, before the first week is out, she’s acquired a name for herself as the Bard-in-(almost)-residence. They actually use that word, too, ‘cause the whole joint is one big Ren Faire and they’re so goddamned earnest that Diana’s seriously considering printing business cards.

“A most impressive performance,” Vincent remarks, as they set about clearing the room that the tunnel kids had wrecked in their attempt to re-enact the siege on Camelot.

“You think so?” Diana re-shelves a few well-worn books, trailing her knuckles fondly across the threadbare spines. Marks of love. “I don’t know if I really nailed Mordred’s voice.”

And then, without a sound or a word, he’s at her side. She’s getting use to his speed and his strength, his panther’s grace; more than used to it, really. A thrill spirals through her flesh where his arm rests flush against hers. They stand side by side, as two people might when admiring a painting at a gallery. The shelves in front of them are pretty, sure, but not enough to gawk at silently like they’re doing now.

This is a different appraisal; a trialling of closeness, getting used to each other’s space and warmth and presence. She swallows thickly, and tries to focus on the crooked spines on the shelf, her hands where they’re bunched in her pockets, and not the steady rise and fall of his chest or the smatter of golden hair that’s tickling her neck.

“Then we must agree to disagree.” His voice shatters the glass moment, but it also releases the coil of tension tightening within her chest (okay, lower than her chest).

She feels bold; wants to push a little. “What d’you mean?”

His fingers plunge slowly into the pocket of her Levi’s and retrieve her hand from its confines. It’s a strangely intimate gesture, foraying into a part of her he’s not dared to explore yet – a pocket, so inconsequential, so mundane, and yet so not. He brushes his mouth across her knuckles, not unlike the way she’d stroked the spines of the books a moment – a lifetime – ago, and then holds her hand between both of his. Can hands get drunk? She thinks, wildly.

“I mean,” he says, eyes glimmering with that subdued mischief she’s come to associate with him. “That you were a marvel tonight, as ever you are.”

“Careful, Vincent,” she replies, sounding more nonchalant than she feels. “Hollywood might come a-knockin’ and whisk me off to LA.”

“They may certainly try.” And he draws her close to his chest, and she moulds herself to the curve of his body, to the bulk and the breadth of him, and she hangs on like she would to a cliff over a sheer drop.

Maybe it’s the closeness of him, or maybe it’s ‘cause he’s being so open and flirtatious, or maybe she just wants to get a rise out of him – but whatever the reason, she stretches up and murmurs in his ear: “What can I say, Vincent? The movies need me.”

He settles himself around her, as if turning in for the night. “There are others who need you more.”

She smiles against his neck. “Then I guess I could be persuaded to stick around.”

*           *           *

“Diana!”

Diana’s head snaps up, and she blinks, dazed. She’s sitting at Billy’s Grill and Coffee Shop, with a very pissed off-looking Mandy sitting across from her. “What? Where’s the fire?”

Mandy’s frowning “You were giggling. To yourself.”

Diana snorts. “Yeah, right?”

Mandy’s eyes widen. “You’re with that guy, aren’t you?”

She can feel her cheeks redden. (Goddamn Irish DNA). “Is it that obvious?”

“So when do I get to meet him?”

Diana takes a sip of tepid coffee. “Mand, I don’t think you can-”

“He in witness protection or something?”

“Or something.”

Mandy takes a sec to reapply her lipstick. “I did that once, honey. Sure, it was fun at first – all the sneaking around, the thrill of maybe getting caught. But he’d gone through a lot of shit he couldn’t tell me about, and it came between us. Those things tend not to last.”

“I have a feeling this one might.”

The operative word, there: feeling. She’s all feeling all the time right now. This sexy, sexless honeymoon period might just be the hottest and longest fucking foreplay she’s ever had – now she finally understands Sting.

The gentle knowledge of being wanted, of her presence being yearned and planned for and accommodated, is a luxury a long time in the making. But come it does, ‘cause it’s Below after all, and those folks never do anything without giving it their all – and no-one gives more ‘all’ than Vincent.

She acclimatises to the light Below within a fortnight; to its darkness in a week. While Diana tends to join Vincent in his chambers in the early hours – only for sleeping, okay? They ain’t talked about anything more than that just yet – she’s been crashing in Laura and Rebecca’s room, as they’re the only ones with a spare bed.

Diana had fought it at first. “You practically just got married. You need your privacy.”

Laura shakes her head. “If we need that, we’ll tell you,” she signs. “We want you to have a place here that’s yours, too – until you have space of your own.”

The latter, it seems, is already underway. Turns out that Father and co had been sourcing a few more caverns for living quarters, but they’d wanted to make sure they’re safe. One, it turns out, has been put aside for Diana’s use, even though she ain’t there full time. She’s touched by the gesture; by the thought that she can come and go when she likes.

It feels kinda like moving in, when she hauls a little cabin case down one day with a capsule wardrobe and some choice reading material. She also brings down a spare hairbrush and a selection of toiletries, plus a pair of heavy duty boots in case she goes wandering in the caves. She puts the weirdly-endearing, misshapen candle she made on her bedside table (Mouse swears he had one going spare anyway, but she doesn’t quite believe him). She calls the candle ‘Picasso’ and never lights him: he’s family now, for Chrissakes. Ironically, he’s the first thing she’d save in a fire.

As for fire, she’s got enough of that to spare. Time now seems to be her greatest ally: time with Vincent, and Jacob, and Laura and Rebecca and everyone in the World Below. Before, the moments she and Vincent seemed stolen, snatched from the ether: now, they stretch before them like the horizon. And the more they chart that course together, the more the fire within her burns.

*           *           *

Christmas ‘91 is, of course, a sombre affair still. But it’s tinged with hope, and new beginnings – not least because Joe arranges a way to get Vincent, Jacob, Father, Lena, and baby Cathy to the cemetery for Catherine’s anniversary (what can’t that man do with a police cordon and a smile?)

Diana stands a little apart from the rest, arms folded across her chest to ward off the cold. It’s chilly tonight – of course it is, ‘cause Cathy’s not here. Diana’s stomach jolts, and she feels the pressing weight of that loss bearing down on her like an avalanche –

“Diana.”

She starts at the sound of her name; even more so at its speaker.

Vincent is standing in front of her, holding out his hand. “Would you... stand with us?”

“Are-” She starts, near-stuttering. “Are you – sure?”

“It would mean a great deal to us; to me.”

A memory surfaces: she’s ten, red with rage and tears. The metal chain of the swing cuts into her palms, a cold scrape like a blunt razor, and she grabs harder, hard enough to imprint it on her skin. The swing beside her starts to creak. Dad’s sitting there, staring straight ahead, swaying gently like a fern in the breeze.

Don’t grieve alone, he’d said softly.

Vincent’s trembling when she gets to him; perhaps it’s the cold, ‘cause she’s a lot warmer when he curls his cloak and his arm around her, the other around his son. The small group huddles before the headstone, as Father says a few words. There are more, much more, that remain unsaid, but the small vigil itself conveys more than any words, any speech, ever could.

The walk home through the park and the tunnels and the winding corridors Below have never felt so long as tonight. But she can feel Cathy in the walls again, in the rock and stone, in the warmth of Vincent’s hand in hers.

And she can feel her in the air, when everyone starts sharing their own stories of how Cathy changed their lives, no matter how glancingly she’d passed through them. Two years since she’d passed – since she was stolen from them – and people were still coming out of the woodwork to pay their respects, people Diana’d never seen telling tales she’d never heard. Even the ones she’s heard before are a comfort; she loves them like she loves family stories you tell around the table every Thanksgiving. The ones you know by heart; the ones that keep long-gone relatives alive, known, remembered.

Jacob giggles along with the anecdotes, still unburdened by the weight of them. He’s not old enough to understand exactly what he’s lost, but he is old enough to enjoy the stories. Cathy is like Guinevere to him: beautiful and good, existing only in the tales of her bravery and kindness, like in the book he’s asked Diana to re-read a dozen times.

Diana clears her throat suddenly, not realising a lump had risen there until it’s on the verge of choking her. She looks affectionately over at Jacob, remembering the girl who had gripped the swing until her hands bled, and hopes he never knows the helpless rage of loss; hopes it even as she knows that path is almost certainly waiting for him to walk it one day.

In that moment, Diana wishes she were the knight in the picture-book, able to shield Jacob from dragons and despair. An enchanted sword might dispatch a dragon, but despair was a far craftier adversary. The only way to battle it was to face it by the side of those you love.

Vincent seeks her eyes in the dim light, just as the thought of him passed through her mind. His hand finds hers in the darkness, and he laces their fingers together. And with that simple touch, she sees clearly again. Even when she and Suzie and Dad had clung to each other after the funeral in a house that seemed like a mausoleum, even when only it was only she and Suzie clinging to each other over Dad’s little plot in Glendale, they’d got through it. Below would too – even if she’s gotta slay a couple dragons along the way.

*           *           *

Diana collapses through the elevator into her loft in the early hours, limbs aching from the cold. She hadn’t come home this tired from a shift since her beat cop days in Brooklyn. Shit, am I getting old?

Diana stretches, hops in the shower, hops out and into a baggy jumper and sweats. Toweling her damp hair, she wanders over to the balcony door – only to nearly jump out of her skin.

Vincent’s standing in the doorway, looking near-concussed. There’re no visible signs that he’s been in a fight, but he has that dazed look some boxers get in the ring just before they give in.

She flings open the door, slips under his arm and guides him on to the sofa.

“What happened?”

He looks up at her with that dazed prize-fighter stupor again, and a tear spills down his cheek. “She… she is gone, Diana.”

Diana closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them again, another tear has joined the first.

“I know, Vincent.”

“I had not wished to come here, to burden you with this.” He draws a trembling hand over his face, but his tears are now flowing too freely to be erased by the movement.

“It’s no burden,” she assures him.

“But,” he sniffs. “Diana, I could not bear to face this with anyone else.”

“Come here,” she murmurs, and he propels himself into her arms. She soothes him with words snatched from her past, from the swing set and the cemetery and old movies and Suzie, who’s always been better at this stuff than her.

Vincent’s sobs cut right to her core; Diana traces circles on his back, strokes his hair, keeps talking and talking and talking in those hushed, soothing tones, god knows what she’s saying ‘cause she sure don’t, but the stream of consciousness susurration seems to be helping, even when she feels tears of her own slipping down her cheek.

“You held it together for Jacob’s sake, I know you did – and you did so goddamn well, Vincent. That little boy of yours is the happiest kid I ever seen.”

Vincent makes a sound halfway between a sob and a laugh. “He gets that from his mother, no doubt.”

Diana turns her head to kiss his temple. “And his father.”

He breathes out a great, shuddering sigh. “I could not bear him to see me like this.”

“You don’t always have to be the strong one, remember?” She rests her chin on his shoulder, and as she does a thought occurs to her. “Forget that, this is being strong. It’s strong to feel so deeply; to let yourself remember, even when remembering hurts.”

He pulls back for a moment, far enough to rest his forehead against hers. “Diana, you are valiance itself.”

She snorts. “I’m a loudmouth from Queens, Vincent – don’t get it twisted.”

He laughs weakly, as if caught off guard by the sound of it himself. He strokes the damp hair from her face, his hand warm and heavy on the back of her head. And then that same hand is pulling her gently towards him, and then they’re kissing, only this is different; this is warm and wet and desperate, and there’s so much of him all at once that she could choke on him if she wasn’t devouring him as much as he is her, and Christ is that his tongue, and oh fuck he’s hard and –

She doesn’t know who springs away from who, or if it’s just the sheer magnetisation turning in on itself, or if the universe is calling a time out, but suddenly there’s a gulf like a chasm between them, as if the freaking space-time-continuum just opened up on her couch.

“I… I am sorry.” He pants. “I merely wished to-”

“I know, Vincent. You have nothing to apologise for.”

“For my cruelty, I do. I must.” He averts his head, unable to meet her eyes. “I come to your home, grieving another woman, and then I take from you such wanton amorousness-”

“Hey, I was all for the wanton amorousness,” Diana interrupts, unable to conceal her amusement at Vincent’s formal turn of phrase for a sexy lil’ make-out. “Fully consenting participant over here.”

They lapse into an easier silence, though she knows she must address Vincent’s other concern.

“As for Catherine: look, I know I don’t have the right, but I’m not sure I don’t love her too, you know.” Diana says plainly, and Vincent turns his head suddenly, eyes full of wonder and confusion.

“She’s in my head, Vincent. I think of her, I dream of her, I even talk to her sometimes. Okay, more than sometimes. She doesn’t reply, but it feels like she’s smiling, you know? S’why I keep her roses. Maybe this is how I honour her, too.”

Vincent nods, pensive. His eyes are distant, gazing – no doubt – into the past; into a life not lived, a life that was stolen. Her love for him gnaws gently at her, aching, incessant, like a hunger she can’t sate. So she crosses the space-time-continuum, and bumps her shoulder gently against his. “I’m not trying to be her, Vincent. I like being me – I think I’m a catch.”

A miracle occurs: Vincent smiles. Not a wan, brave smile either, but a dazzling beam that moulds his strange beauty into something even more exquisite – and infectious, because Diana is smiling now too. And when she reaches up to stroke his golden mane, he gently catches her hand in his, and kisses it. He does not take his eyes from hers for a second.

“Don’t grieve alone, Vincent.” She says, in a tone gentler than she thought herself capable of. “Promise me?”

She knows from Catherine’s writings that being held by Vincent was their most cherished and intimate act before – well, before the most intimate. And when Vincent holds Diana now, curling himself around her body, it feels intimate in a way that it hasn’t before. This a threshold of another kind: mutual mourning, comfort and compassion as equals, partners.

It is the opening of a door; one they step through together.

*           *           *

Diana had fallen asleep in his arms; she wakes alone.

Tucked into the pillow that rests beneath her head, is a note written in Vincent’s elegant, sloping script:

May we speak tonight? If you will it so, meet me Below at midnight.

V

She’s never been able to resist that clarion call and she doesn’t intend on starting now. Her day passes restlessly until the hour mentioned in his note, when she finds Vincent waiting at the mouth of the tunnels.

He watches her in that gentle, intent way of his as she approaches, but there’s a different kind of intensity there tonight. There’s a weight to his silence, of heavy words waiting to be spoken.

Diana takes his outstretched hand and follows his slow gait through the tunnels, stopping only at the ledge overlooking the Nameless River. It’s never looked more beautiful. Neither has he. But there’s something in the furrow of his brow and his stooping mien that rings an alarm bell.

“Something on your mind?” she asks.

He breathes out, and nods.

“Would you like to talk about it?”

There is a pause as his hand slips out of hers. “I mourn for Catherine. A part of me lives still within the life I planned with her; perhaps it always will.”

Diana rests her hands on the cool stone ledge. “That’s how it should be.”

“But what we have, Diana,” he continues, “is more important to me than you know. I do not know when – if – I will be ready to walk the path that lovers have walked before us.”

“Then we make our own path.” She licks her lips. “It’s natural to want the physical – but it’s also natural not to. Look –”

Diana reaches out and gently slots her fingers through his. “If this is what you want, and what you’re comfortable with, no more – then it’s what we’ll do. It’s all we’ll do, okay?”

She wants more – of course she does, have you seen the guy? – but this is enough; it’s everything. If this is what Vincent wants to do for the rest of their lives, she’ll die happy.

But then he does something she doesn’t expect. He brings their entwined hands to his mouth, brushes his lips across her knuckles, and looks up at her with – no mistaking it – hunger in his eyes. If she hadn’t have already been standing still, it would’ve stopped her in her tracks.

“I yearn for more. For that… closeness, with you.”

Fuck. That means he’s thought about it. “I do, too,” she breathes. His eyes glimmer, and there’s that hunger again. How could Diana have ever thought him hard to read? He looks like he’s about to swallow her whole.

She can feel her heartbeat in her throat, her tremulous breathing, the molten fire pooling between her legs, Jesus Christ–

A scrape of talon, pinpricks like thorns against her palms, and then he’s backing away from her, his face twisted in anguish. She holds her hand up to her face: there’s no blood, but there are the indents of his claws on her palm, red against her white flesh. Some mad, fervent impulse urges her to lick them, to feel the imprint of him against her tongue – she manages to hold back somehow.

“You know of Lisa, and of Devin.” His voice is breathless with worry; he’s backed against the tunnel wall, hands gripping the red rock behind. “People I love, I leave… marked. I fear that, should we carry on down this path, it will leave you marked in much the same way.”

She crosses the distance between them.

“You’ve marked me in here,” she says, placing his hand over her heart. “But you won’t mark me anywhere else.”

His eyes are wild. “How do you know?”

“‘Cause I know you, Vincent. I trust you.”

He drops his head; looks away from her understanding eyes. “I wish that I could trust myself, Diana. Trust that I could… touch you without fear of bringing you pain.”

More than thought about it, then. She feels a tremor move through her flesh at the point where their bodies connect, and emanating from it is a cord of want and promise that weaves itself through her body, rushing and spiralling and filling every part that makes her who she is.

“Then we take this as slow as you want,” she murmurs.

“Diana,” he says. “I am… unversed in the ways of love. I cannot promise…”

“No promises.” She cuts in. “Just honesty, okay? Tell me what you want to try, and what you don’t. How it feels; when you want me to stop and when you don’t.”

“Gladly.” He inclines his head; ever the gentleman. “Will you…?”

“I’ll be honest with you, alright.” She points at herself. “Loudmouth from Queens, remember?”

He envelops her in his arms and she gets the sensation of being embraced by Below, by its darkness and its mystery and its beauty. Diana had once felt she could cup the world Below in the palm of her hands; now she can hold it in her arms.

*           *           *

They don’t talk about it for a while, after that.

She spends a lot more time Below, yes, but she ain’t a stranger to her loft either. She likes her own space, her own things around her. She’s moved a bunch of her stuff Below, sure – but her loft is familiarity, and sanctuary, and it’s still home for her, for now.

And it means that, when she goes Below, it’s cause she’s got a reason. She’s soaked up the power of her aloneness, absorbed it like a sponge, ‘cause Diana’s gotta work alone. Her buddies in the 210 got that, and so does Vincent – for now, anyway (who’s to say how he’ll feel down the line, if they even have a line to go down?) She’s always liked her own company; she absorbs so many voices and stories and pieces of truth that sometimes everything else has to be siphoned away to make room.

For months, they don’t even go past small touches: Vincent’s hand on the small of her back; her arm slotted through his; the warm span of him against her back when they fall asleep together. That don’t mean Diana ain’t thinking about it: what he looks like, feels like, under all those layers. What he tastes like.

But it does mean that they can learn to be partners long before they’re even thinking of being lovers (well, I’m thinking about it, so sue me). They can get used to being in each other’s space, reconceptualise their private space as (at least a partially) shared one, now. So much of Mark’s animosity had come from rushing into each other’s space. Diana realises now that it had felt like an invasion to her on some deep, subconscious level; that Mark was setting up camp in a territory he didn’t understand. He’d claimed to know her – and there’s a part of her that still reels in shame from the claim she can’t quite refute, of not letting people in – but he hadn’t, not really. And when the going had got tough, he’d got the hell outta there.

But the ‘not letting people in’ thing isn’t quite it, either. If anything, Diana lets too many in too often – it’s just that she does so for a purpose. To solve a conundrum, connect a thread. She also has a really great disposal system for those who no longer contribute directly to that purpose – and maybe that is, in itself, another problem to keep an eye on.

So, she draws thread of her own between Vincent and herself, between her Above and her Below: she starts leaving notes. The first one she leaves is a Stevie Nicks lyric scribbled from memory:

Has anyone ever given anything to you?

In your darkest hour

Did you ever give it back?

Well, I have

I have given that to you

If it's all I ever do

This is your song

When she returns that night, she finds a reply written in his elegant sloping script:

And you, Diana, what should I give you?

So many things I would give you

Had I an infinite great store

Offered me and I stood before

To choose… If I could choose

Freely in that great treasure-house

Anything from any shelf,

I would give you back yourself,

And power to discriminate

What you want and want it not too late,

Many fair days free from care

And heart to enjoy both foul and fair,

And myself, too, if I could find

Where it lay hidden and it proved kind.

It’s Edward Thomas, of course – but it came from Vincent’s soul, and his hand, and his voice, too, when Diana asks him to read aloud later that night.

And so it begins: an exchange of letters to rival that of Cyrano and Roxane. Writing requires stillness, slowness; it’s a wildly intimate thing, to make marks on a page, to impress your skin and your mouth and your words upon it. Words can drop through a moment like lead, but on the page they can soar. At its best, a letter is a missive from the soul. Letters can help you ease into love – that’s what Rostand shows us, right? (Okay, there’s a flipside too, Diana knows, but she thinks her and Vincent’s letters are the good kind).

Diana keeps to the song lyrics for a while, ‘cause they’re the closest thing to poetry to her; she even hauls her trusty Marconi down the tunnels. She’s got her Walkman now, her headphones and her well-worn cassettes, and she thinks the vintage feel of the record player suits Below somehow. Now, when Vincent leaves her missives, she leaves him music, each time a different record. Her collection Above slowly dwindles, as more and more dusty sleeves and the treasures within make their way Below.

She trawls thrift stores for things she’s never heard of, things she’d long forgotten, things that spark a memory from her past. Sometimes it’s a cover that catches her eye: something baroque or renaissance or of ages past – Roxy Music’s Avalon, Kate Bush’s Lion Heart, Led Zeppelin IV. (That last one got so loud that, Vincent told her, Father marched down to his chambers and demanded he turn it down).

Vincent, for his part, is real caught up in it, like poetry and chamber music combined. Anything with an acoustic guitar and a nice turn of phrase, he’s right there. In a month they’ve blazed through most of her collection: so far, he’s tended towards the Joni Mitchells and Joan Armatradings, though he does have a soft spot for The Boss. As if she couldn’t love him any more than she already does.

“She'll let you in her heart

If you got a hammer and a vise”

The words remind me of you, Vincent writes. I recognised the armour you wore long before I knew who were beneath it. It is the same armour I wear. But with you, I feel… unclad, uncaged, unbound. Your strength needs no steel, your beauty no gilding.

Sometimes he leaves them on her pillow, or in the pocket of her coat. One time, he tucks it into the buckle of her belt. Sometimes, though, she wants a live reading.

“All of them,” he responds when she asks him for his favourite, because of course he does. “Each paints a shade of its own hue that is to me irreplaceable.”

“What’s the one that comes to mind here, in this moment,” and, she hazards, “with me?”

“Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

“Yeats, huh?”

“How did you know?”

“They got libraries in my world, you know.” She grins, wrapping her arms around his neck. “Even in Queens.”

*           *           *

Notes become poems, which become letters.

The next morning, she wakes before he does. He looks peaceful when he sleeps; younger, and unburdened. She wants to stroke his hair, kiss his forehead, but she doesn’t want to disturb his serenity. Instead, she looks at him for a little bit. In the muted light, his fur kinda reminds her of a teddy bear she’d had as a kid, one she’d accidentally dropped in a puddle and ruined. She remembered how the stuffing had poured out of him like wet sand, the once-shiny fur all matted and muddy; how she’d cried about him all the way home. Don’t worry, Vincent: I’ll take better care of you, she thinks with a smile.

She leaves him sleeping, and tucks a folded parchment below his pillow, so that it will be the first thing he sees when he wakes:

My dad’s job was to collect trash from the street, she’d written. Well, it was less a job and more of a calling. He’d come home to our poky little basement apartment, where the faucet always leaked and the electricity cut out every couple hours, with his arms full of trinkets and knick-knacks that no-one else wanted. It wasn’t that we were giving them a second chance, he said: it was ‘cause we saw the beauty in them, beauty that others might have overlooked or forgotten.

When she gets back that evening, she finds something propped up against her Picasso, though she can’t quite work out what it is at first. It broadly seems to fit in the cutlery genus, but it’s sort of chunky and ungainly and a little rough around the edges – but beautiful in the same strange way as her oddball little candle, making it a perfect companion piece. On the parchment slipped under it, Vincent had written:

I carved this for you some time ago, but felt it an unworthy, unsightly gift. Your missive gives me hope, however, that you will find it beautiful, as you do many unworthy things.

When she turns, she finds him framed in the archway; he looks as though he’s waiting for her to either accept his invite to the prom or crush his carnation beneath her feet.

“I love it,” she says, holding the whatever-it-is to her heart. “Uh, what is it?”

“A love spoon: an ancient Welsh tradition,” he says, crossing the space between them. “Lovesick young men would craft these for their sweethearts, to convey how they felt without words.”

He reaches out and touches the twisted stem of the spoon, where it rests in her hands. “This signifies togetherness; the wheel, that I will toil for you. These flowers here will grow as we will together, and this is – or rather, is meant to be – a lock.”

She trails her fingers over the wood, skimming its rough edges and unevenness. Vincent had pored over this piece, moulded it with his hands and carved his care and affection into it. It’s as if she holds his soul in her hands, all its jagged loveliness.

“Where’s the key?”

Vincent cradles her face in his hands, and whispers: “Isn’t it obvious?”

*           *           *

It itches at her after that: the yearning to make something for Vincent with her two hands. She can’t carve or draw or sew for shit, so it’s gonna be a pretty short fucking list. But she keeps making one.

One particularly cold night, Diana thinks of Rebecca’s candles, how she pours such time and care into crafting and sculpting the tallow – something which will burn into nothing once its light is spent. A candle gives its whole self into providing light and warmth for others, to bring comfort.

So she ties her hair back, gathers wax, wicks and oil, and spread them on the workbench in Rebecca’s studio (with her blessing, of course). She knows the theory, has studied Rebecca at work, but somehow the method – the skill – escapes her.

A familiar voice sounds suddenly from somewhere behind her. “Burning the midnight oil?”

She starts, and very nearly scalds herself with hot wax (thankfully, her reflexes came through at the last moment). “Was that your first pun?”

“I believe it was.” He moves closer, close enough to peer over her shoulder without quite making contact. What a tease. “Would you care for a hand?”

More than you know, sweetheart. “What makes you think I need one?”

“I saw your first creation. I could not in good conscience allow that to happen again.”

“How dare you,” she scoffs. “Picasso is a beaut.”

“He has his own… charms, I grant you.” Okay, he’s really playing now. Has she ever witnessed him so light, so unburdened? “But I wondered if we might make one together.”

“And who gets custody?”

“Well, your Picasso has Gwen.” He says. That’s what she’s named the lovespoon, after a Welsh artist she’s been getting into lately. (Who knew The Met was such a treasure trove of good stuff? Probably everyone, but she’s got a lot to catch up on, okay?)

“You want this one for your own, huh?”

“Even a candle might yearn for another's light.”

“Touché.”

They begin. He is close enough to touch now, the span of him warm against her back. His hands are on hers, leading her through the steps as if they are in a ballroom and not a chandler’s forge. (‘Chandler’ calls Cathy to the front of her mind – as if she’s ever far from it). Diana saw something like this in a movie, once: hands on hands, spinning wet clay on a wheel.

Her head tips back and his tips forward, and they meet somewhere in the middle. The sight of him leaning to kiss her is something magnificent and otherworldly. His beauty isn’t something which is stumbled upon. It works slowly, like the gentle butting of the tide against a cliff-face. It didn’t take that long for Diana, but the thought comforts her somehow: if it’s good enough for the cliff, it’s good enough for her. The cliff and the tide seemed to have a good thing going, right?

The thought makes her laugh into the kiss. It doesn’t save the candle, but it wasn’t really ever about that.

*           *           *

She meets him here often, in their liminal space below the ground. There’s little privacy here, where there are no doors and everyone knows each other’s business. Their only recourse is to create a haven of their own, and Vincent likes it best beside the waterfall, where the undulating cavern walls and the steady roar of falling water provide a measure of seclusion from prying eyes.

They’re both leaning against the cavern wall tonight, as they are wont to do. Vincent is watching the waterfall, but Diana is far too captivated by the way the gentle honeyed light of Below has painted him golden. Down here, the light is always somewhere between amber and quartz, making everything look like it’s straight out of a Renaissance painting. (She’s been visiting the Met lately just so that she can say shit like that for real).

His clothes, too, look gilded in this light; perhaps it’s the way the rushing water and dim light turn anything flaxen, but his clothes – already grand and out of time – look especially so now. He’d make rags look fit for royalty. She feels positively shabby in comparison, until she realises that there isn’t much difference in what they’re wearing. She don’t got no cloak, but other than that, they’re in layers of wool and drapery, in earthy, subdued tones. Okay, so hers is from the thrift store while his is bespoke, but still there’s a synergy there; like she’d been waiting for symmetry. A mirror waiting for its reflection.

She wants her hands on his clothes, on him. So she does just that: reaches out and touches the swell of his shoulder. He turns; she swallows. In the hush that follows, as if in the breathless moments before an eclipse, she starts languidly stroking the honeyed hair at his temples. The coiling want in her stomach is like a fizzing, sparkling fuse tonight; she squirms at the sensation, more so when Vincent turns his body to face hers.

Something weights itself upon her belt. She casts her eyes downwards and sees Vincent’s hand resting heavy on her buckle, and the fuse goes nuclear. Needing something to anchor her, Diana grabs onto his cloak where lapels would be if he was anybody else. (She’s glad he’s not anybody else).

“May I…?” he says at last.

“Yes,” she breathes.

He brushes his lips behind her ear, down to the dip of skin between her neck and her jaw that has her shivering pleasantly in his arms.

“Can I kiss you there, too?”

He nods. So she does; softly, lightly.

“How ‘bout here?” she asks, sweeping her knuckles across his jaw. He nods, again. So she does, again.

“And here?” Her finger brushes the groove that spans nose to mouth, the one that underscores the strange, feline beauty of his face.

“Please,” he murmurs against her skin.

They move closer, hands curling into each other’s clothes. Like anchors, Diana thinks distantly as their mouths meet.

Warm, is her first thought. That’s what it is, sharing breath with another person. They kiss slowly, learning the shape of one another. brushing their mouths together, like the flutter of butterfly wings. Above, life is a babbling rush; Below, though, things can take their time. They kiss, and they kiss, and they kiss. Exploration in its simplest form: how do we fit together?

She wonders when she last did something this slowly. Diana can be slow when she wants – when she’s poring through archives, reading case files, drawing a red thread across her board and pinning it in place – but most of the time she moves fast, like a shark, never looking back. New York moves like a shark too, and anyone who can’t keep up washes up in the shallows.

But now she wants to do everything this slow so long as it feels this good. Diana hasn’t even opened her mouth yet, hasn’t kissed this chastely in maybe twenty years, and it feels so fucking good. Feels even better when he pushes her gently back against the cavern wall, pressing himself closer to her body, and she can feel all of him, and holy fuck she does mean all of him –

He breaks the kiss but does not pull back. “I… I possess little skill in such an art as this, Diana.”

“You already have all the skills you need,” she says softly, carding her hands through his hair. “You’re kind, attentive, and patient. All you need to do is be who you are.”

He ripples with pride at that – if he’d had feathers, he’d be preening ‘em – and it seems to give him the confidence to press against her in one firm, fluid movement. The movement – his strength, his closeness – goes right to her G-spot, and she’d have moaned out loud if he hadn’t pressed his mouth to hers before she had the chance. Even that doesn’t stop her a minute later, when his hands roam a little lower than usual.

“Ah, fuck-”

He pulls back, breathless with concern. “Diana, are you hurt?”

She grins, and draws him closer. “Baby, if this is pain, play on.”

And oh what music he makes. As she deepens the kiss he makes this gorgeous little keening sound; it’s the sound of discovery, and newness, and it brings home to her just how new he is to this. He’d had the one amazing night with Catherine, yes, but there seems to have been nothing before or since – until now. It excites her, to think that sex is something they could discover together.

“You want me to touch you?” she says when she pulls back, tracing her fingers down his chest and stopping just above his belt. Slowly, as if waking from a long slumber, he nods, gaze flickering from her eyes to her hand and back again. She resumes her descent, fingers circling the cool bronze buckle and dropping lower still, until – he draws in a ragged breath as she touches him through the rough cloth of his trousers. He whispers her name on the crest of a breath, like a prayer, like a hymn, and she feels the sound of it thrumming within her like a creature fluttering awake within her chest.

Gently, like easing open a door long closed, she slips her hand into the waist of his pants, and touches him, skin to skin. The next moment, his eyes are wild – not the wildness of desire but of animal instinct; a conqueror unleashed. She stops, moves back a step, and looks directly into the eyes of the beast.