Chapter Text
Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home,
Your house is all burnt and your children are—
Laurent came to with a start.
“--!” he said, or didn’t say, because his throat wouldn’t work properly and neither would his mind. A name. He was going to call someone’s name. It was important.
Everything was blurry and confused. That was dangerous. It was dangerous not to know what was going on, or where you were. It felt like pins down his back, like something terrible was missing. He could feel heat rising in his face, panic clotting in his mouth. No. It was more dangerous to succumb.
He breathed in through his nose. It felt like it had been scraped with acid. The inside of his mouth, when he exhaled, felt worse. His neck felt heavy, his wrists. With great difficulty he focused his eyes.
He was in a hospital bed, curtained off. There was noise outside. That wasn’t right, he thought muzzily. He should have a private room. He always had a private room. He was on Auguste’s insurance, and doctor’s families got those perks.
Auguste should be here, he thought. That was it. He always dropped by when Laurent had an accident. That was why Laurent had never minded the hospital. Marlas General was like a home away from home. It was his absence that was making Laurent feel - confused, jumpy.
He hauled himself into a sitting position. Something beeped. Then something else. The curtain was swept back and a woman in scrubs stepped in. The ward behind her was in chaos. There were nurses and doctors running back and forth, and machines making noise and the hard, piercing sounds of human pain and misery.
“You’re awake!” the woman said. “Welcome back.” She picked up a clipboard from the end of his bed. “I’m just going to check some things... Mr Devere?”
“de Vere,” he corrected her, in a hoarse whisper.
“Okay,” she said affably, making no move to alter his chart. “Do you remember what happened to you?”
There had been - there was - a blank space. There was some - one? Thing? He had needed to get to desperately. There had been a bang - dust, dust and debris, and someone - someone had touched his face. It wasn’t a frightening memory, by the end.
“...an explosion?” he answered.
She raised her eyebrows. “Something like that.” There was a sudden scream from outside, and she winced, pulling the curtain over. “There was a disaster in central tonight, and you got caught up in it. Some sort of interdimensional threat, apparently.”
That was okay. Auguste’s insurance covered super-related injuries. “Oh, “ he said.
“A whole building fell into the Seraine,” she carried on, with the same sort of inane cheeriness that Auguste did when things were really horrible. She started fiddling with one of the beeping things near Laurent’s head, “so it could have been much worse for you.”
Laurent’s grocery bill had been imparted to him with more solemnity than that. But -
“The Seraine is in Arles,” he said. “We’re in Marlas.”
She paused, and picked up his chart again, flipping it over. Ah, he thought. That made sense. The noisy ward, the mispronunciation, the absence.
“Hmm,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
“No need,” Laurent said with a sigh. “I remember now.”
ARLES MEMORIAL CLINIC was stamped in large black letters on the clipboard hanging from her fingers. He was twenty-five, Auguste had been dead for seven years, and he hadn’t lived in Marlas since he was nineteen.
“Can you discharge me?” he asked hoarsely. “I’m uninsured.”
No, was the answer to that. He’d been out for ages, apparently, and they were concerned about possible internal bleeding, and external bleeding (several large gashes apparently having been stitched up while he was out) and - though this was hinted and not said - the fact that if he left and then needed an ambulance the city was in such chaos that one probably wouldn’t get to him in time. And his “possible concussion.” Bullshit. The edges of everything were sharp, the colours of the world were right. Laurent knew he wasn’t concussed. He’d been a teenage equestrian and a barely-legal vigilante; he’d had enough to know.
“The President is Jacques Enguerran,” he said woodenly.
The doctor, who did not believe that lived experience was a match for her asking him inane questions, said, “Great! And who’s the leader of the Avengers?”
“Adamant,” he ground out. Fucking supers, fucking lapsed insurance. Fucking Adamant and his fucking hair and his fucking inability to stop people’s apartment buildings from being blown up. Laurent was pretty sure he hadn’t ended up in the river - not that anyone had told him how he’d got to the hospital - but there was a nil chance the apartment had survived. There was a carefully curated selection of sweater vests in varying shades of navy that was going to be impossible to replace. That had been a solid week of thrifting with - with -
No, stupid. He’d gone himself on that trip to Skarva. To get away, after the breakup.
He thought moodily about the apartment - the rent controlled apartment - and contemplated finding a new one in the Artesian quarter for the same price. It had to be in the Artesian quarter, for the school - what? Where had that come from? He lived there because he liked its transit links and, shamefully, its rows of grotty bars. That was it.
“Okay,” the doctor said, breaking him out of his reverie. “All we need now is to get those scans done,” - She ducked her head out of the curtains to confer with someone outside briefly - “Might be a while though,” she concluded with the sangfroid of someone who viewed Laurent as a minor blip in her afternoon. Laurent was normally regarded as a much more substantial disruption to people’s days, but given that he was neither gushing blood from every available orifice or missing essential organs…
Scans, he thought darkly. His bank account flashed in front of his eyes.
“Right,” she said briskly. “We’ll come and get you when it’s your turn. If it starts to hurt more press the call button.” She paused and tilted her head to look at it. “Actually, that one looks a bit - you know what, just shout. Someone’ll come help.” She smiled. It was not reassuring. And then she was gone.
“Fuck,” Laurent said, and thumped the mattress.
He dozed off again. There was literally nothing else to do. He’d tried turning his phone on, which was a lost cause from the start. It looked like it had been stepped on. Then that made him think about the time that fucking Adamant had broken his phone by standing on it, and he got so annoyed that he forced himself to pass out so he could stop thinking about it.
--rent,” someone said. “I’m here, I’m here. You’re okay. We’re okay, it’s just me and you. Laurent? Laurent?”
He felt dizzy and hot with pain. His mouth was so dry.
“Laurent, look at me, okay, I’m going to pick you up-” There was a terrible strain, and Laurent screamed. Someone sobbed. “I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry! you’re going to be okay, you’re going to be fine. Just stop bleeding. I’ll stop you bleeding, I can look after you, I’m so sorry - let’s - let’s go, okay, I’m going to-”
And, then, they fell.
It was the sudden weightlessness that woke him, the stomach dropping, the hoarse gasp that ripped from his throat. His heart was pounding.
“You okay there?” a nurse asked, drawing back the curtain. “Heard some noise?”
More like she had some kind of low-level empath ability, Laurent thought. The noise from the rest of the ward certainly hadn’t abated.
“Yes,” he said, holding a hand to his chest. “Just a strange dream.”
She clucked at him. “Pain meds will do that to you. I’ll get you some water.”
As soon as she slipped out he put his head in his hands and groaned. The dream had clearly been some tragic delusion. No one was coming to save him: Auguste was dead, and he was single and alone and almost definitely homeless.
“Hey,” a familiar voice said. “I came as soon as I could.”
And he was suffering from hallucinations, to add insult to injury. He lifted his head.
No hallucination. Adamant was definitely there, holding a tiny cup of water in his hand. Actually, it was probably a regular cup and it just looked tiny: he just had that effect on household objects.
Laurent looked at him blankly. He really couldn’t - deal with this right now. “I told the nurse I could bring it in for you,” he said, like he was confessing to a murder. Another murder. Laurent extended a hand. Adamant passed the cup to him. Their fingers didn’t brush. Good, he thought. It was good to have boundaries like that.
“Guess I’m still your emergency contact,” Adamant said.
Laurent drained the cup.
“Shut up, Damen,” he said hoarsely.
“Didn’t you say you’d never call me that again?”
Laurent gave him a flinty look. “Do you really think I’m going to reveal your identity in the middle of the hospital? Sit down. You’re looming.”
Ada— Damen rolled his eyes, but sat. “Wait,” he said, looking around. “Where’s…?” He shook his head like a horse with a fly in its ear.
“What?” Laurent said flatly.
“Nothing,” Damen said with a frown. “Just seemed like something was missing.”
Join the club, Laurent didn’t say, because there was no point telling Damen that: they were nothing to each other now. His mood, impossibly, worsened. He was acutely aware that he was filthy, that he looked like shit, and that Damen, as usual, looked perfect. Almost perfect.
He beckoned Damen to lean in. Damen furrowed his brows but did it anyway. The last time they’d been this close Damen had kissed him, he thought, unbidden.
Damen’s eyes were so dark. Maybe Damen was thinking about the last time too, maybe he was remembering the — fucking stop it, Laurent told himself. “Your costume is showing,” he hissed instead. “Do up your shirt.”
The hard glint of gold at the bottom of his throat was like a little beacon. Damen took a sharp inhale, and fastened his buttons correctly.
“Why didn’t you change?”
Damen looked at him oddly. “I got a call that you were in the hospital. I wasn’t going to waste time.”
Oh fuck, Laurent hated that about him, the directness. It had always felt like standing under a heat lamp.
“You’ve seen me now,” he said hoarsely. “You can go.”
“Yeah,” Damen said thoughtfully, leaning back in the chair and stretching out his legs. “No.”
“No?”
“Uh huh. You know, even after you’ve had your scans - the nurse told me, don’t make that face - they aren’t going to want to let you go without someone to observe you. So unless you want to stay in overnight—”
“I’ll call Jord,” Laurent said immediately.
“Nice try,” Damen said. “We both know Jord’s in Bazal.”
He fucking was, wasn’t he.
“Ancel.”
“Hates you? And he’s off-planet.”
Ancel didn’t hate Laurent, Damen just didn’t understand the dynamic. Ancel would hate him if he called up Berenger to look after him while Ancel wasn’t there to loiter meanly whenever Berenger put a hand on Laurent’s back though, so that was out of the question.
“Fine,” Laurent said through gritted teeth. “I’ll stay in overnight, and then I’ll go to a hotel.”
“You’re uninsured,” Damen said calmly, leaning forward to swipe Laurent’s chart from the end of the bed. He didn’t even have to get out of his chair. “How about instead, you get your scans, and then I’ll take you home, and stay and keep an eye on you for at least 24 hours.”
“My apartment building got blown up, Damen.”
Damen put down the chart and looked at him. “Who told you that? You haven’t moved, have you?”
Laurent shook his head. As if he had the money or the wherewithal to move. Fucking Damen. “Well then,” Damen said, completely ignorant to the diatribe in Laurent’s head, “It’s fine. Whole building got wrapped up in spider silk like a present. You’ve got good neighbours.”
“Oh,” Laurent said. A wave of gratitude washed over him. He sniffed. “I guess some supers are useful.”
“Sure,” Damen said, dry. “Nik just texted me. He did a flyover to check.”
The idea of Falcon knowing that Laurent was in the hospital and was unaware of the plight of his own apartment was so incredibly aggravating that Laurent allowed himself to close his eyes, very briefly, just so he could stop thinking for a second.
“I’m sure he won’t hold it against you,” Damen said, amused.
“Can you please message him,” Laurent said woodenly, “to thank him on my behalf.”
“Why,” Damen said teasingly, “Lost his number?”
“My fucking phone got a building dropped on it, Damen.” Laurent did not want to play, and he didn’t want Falcon getting to shit on him by saying that he hadn’t thanked him. Not that he was planning on ever seeing him again, but it was the principle of the thing.
“What?” Damen replied with a frown.
Laurent gestured at it on the bedside table. “It won’t turn on.”
Damen made a face. “How did the hospital get my number then? Unless you’ve finally started carrying ID.”
This had been a long running argument when they were together. Laurent was firmly of the opinion that it was better to not carry identifying documents on you, in case the wrong person got hold of them; Damen thought he was paranoid, and liable to get hurt, and die alone as a Jean Dupont in some grim hospital ward.
Ah, Laurent thought. “I don’t actually know,” he admitted. “I haven’t been awake for long.”
Laurent saw the cogs moving in Damen’s face, but whatever the outcome of this was was lost to the arrival of the nurse. “Time for those scans,” she said. It did not escape Laurent’s notice that she addressed this to Damen, and that she was blushing. The pang of familiar jealousy was frustratingly hard to suppress.
“I’ll be waiting,” Damen said as he was wheeled away.
“I didn’t ask,” Laurent snapped back.
Damen drove them back. Laurent had said - again - that he didn’t need anyone to watch him, but the nurse had frowned and Damen had frowned and then there they were, in Damen’s shitty saloon with the chipped gold go-faster lines.
Damen had the money to buy a new car, but he didn’t. There were lots of things Damen could do, but didn’t.
Traffic was the classic post-incident patchy with extreme road rage, and Laurent wound down the window to inhale as many fumes as he could in the hopes of passing out before Damen tried to talk to him. It was nighttime, but the lights of street lamps and torches and signs made it bright and strange. He ignored the holes in the pavements, and the smouldering, slumped spaces where buildings had been, and the man in the car behind holding down his horn and calling the car that cut him off a fucking piece of shit fucking alien looking motherfucker, and considered instead the immense speed with which the Arles clean-up team worked. He had his suspicions that there had been some sort of rapid survey and restoration power developed in the labs of the city sanitation department. Or maybe practice made perfect - how many times had the 9th arrondissement been flattened, by now?
It was strange, sitting in Damen’s car again, the threadbare seats and rattling frame. Damen didn’t like leather car seats, complained that his thighs stuck to them; Laurent had always contended that were he ever to wear shorts with more than a four-inch inseam this might be less of an issue. Damen was wearing trousers today anyway, in deference to human norms about autumn, so it wasn’t even relevant. It had been stupid to think of it at all.
“Okay?” Damen said, at the next red light. He wasn’t looking at Laurent, but at the lights, and his hand flexed on the wheel. Laurent stared at it, and then moved his head back so fast he made himself feel a little sick.
The argument behind them started up again before Laurent could answer. The alien-looking-motherfucker was now alongside his critic, and they were trading barbs. Got something against aliens, shit-dick? And if they look like you, I fuckin’ do! Arles, he thought grimly.
“Could do without the commentary,” he said.
“And the fumes,” Damen added absently. “Want to close the window?”
Laurent looked at him askance. “Really?”
“I finally got the smell out,” he said with a laugh. There had been an incident with a large tub of tzatziki, improperly sealed, that had choked the car first with the smell of garlic and dill, and then, upsettingly, with the smell of rotten yoghurt. It had been detailed at least three times since then, but it still lingered at the back of your nose if you were in there for long enough. To roll the windows up was to take the integrity of your nasal passages into your own hands.
“Oh,” said Laurent, actually quite - impressed, despite himself. He looked around. “And the stain too, I guess.” He had been the one holding the tub. Hypermenestra had pressed it into his hands after a family dinner one night, and there had been many recriminations in the time following about who, exactly, was culpable. Her, for not sealing it right; Laurent, for holding it too loosely, or Damen, for taking that corner too quickly. It had splashed everywhere, but largely in a huge pool over his lap: there had, for a long time, been a dark vee in the seat, marking his shame.
“No,” Damen said, “if only.” The lights changed, and he pulled forward. He was never very talkative when he drove. It was always these staccato sentences, the quick bursts of information. The first time he drove Laurent somewhere, it had made him feel safe. Like Damen was so focused on the road that he was going to get them there no matter what, that this was his domain, rattle and road and all.
The seat that Laurent was on was uniform in colour, if balding. “Looks fine to me,” he said, after worrying for a split second that he’d lost his ability to distinguish colours in the accident.
“Back seat,” said Damen. “Remember?”
Laurent frowned, and twisted around to look at the back seat. Sure enough, there behind him, the stain still set in, years later. “Weird,” he said. He remembered that drive. He was embarrassed and angry already and not showing it to Damen - dealing with Jokaste was hard enough on its own without Theomedes glowering in his seat, making his disappointment in everyone - and everything - very clear. Making an excuse to leave early, and then the corner, and the yoghurt everywhere, and getting out of the car looking like he’d swung by to film a group scene in a porno on his way back from dinner. There had been yoghurt on the windshield, hadn’t there? Wait.
“Why would I have sat in the backseat?” It’s not like they’d given anyone a ride. Jokaste had waved them off, radiating pregnant serenity. Kastor wouldn’t even look Damen in the eye.
“What?” Damen was turning a corner, neck craned to the right to check the road.The angle made the muscles in his neck stand out.
“Why was I sitting in the backseat? With the tzatziki?”
“Tzatziki,” Damen said absently, correcting his pronunciation. “Nicaise was on meds that were making him carsick, remember?”
Of course, he thought with a rush of relief. Laurent had spent that whole summer inspecting the back of the passenger seat headrest. It was Nicaise that had told the joke that made Damen laugh, take the corner too hard. “Is Nicaise meeting us at the apartment?” he asked. The normal worry that came with not seeing Nicaise for over twenty-four hours surged back. Where had he been this whole time?
Damen frowned. “Who?” he said.
The pain came like a blow to the head, a staggering, thudding strike. It doubled him over in his seat, stung sharp behind his eyes.
“Laurent!” Damen said with alarm, and that was the last thing he heard before he blacked out.
Everything hurt. There was blood in his mouth, his nose, thick in his ears.
“You’re going to be okay, you promised me you’d be okay,” someone said, desperately. “We’re almost there, just one last—”
The ground rose up to meet them, impossibly smooth. Bile surged in his throat.
“I’m going to fix this,” the voice said, desperately. “I’m going to make it better, I promise. I—”
He woke up in Damen’s arms. It wasn’t unfamiliar, but it was a surprise.
“You’re awake,” Damen said with relief. “Are you okay?” There was an arm under his knees and another under his shoulders. Princess carry, he thought blankly, and then brutally suppressed it.
“How long was I out?” It was the first time they’d touched in fourteen months. Damen’s body was as inhumanly warm as ever. After they’d broken up, Laurent had had to go out and buy a tube of deep heat: his was three years out of date.
“Not long,” Damen said reassuringly. “We were just turning into your parking lot when you fainted, so I thought the best thing to do was just get you inside.”
They were headed towards the apartment building, Laurent realised: he hadn’t recognised it, thick with the silver webbing of super-spider-silk. The structural strength of that stuff was incredibly high, provided it bonded against itself. He’d read a research paper on it, once. Why, he couldn’t recall.
“We can definitely get in, don’t worry,” Damen said confidently, even though Laurent hadn’t asked. “I stepped out while you were getting your scans and called Arnoul.”
Arnoul was the super. He’d been upset when they’d broken up. He might be Achielon, but he’s a nice young man, he’d said. You sure? Yes, Laurent had said, and avoided eye contact for a week.
“Why do you still have his number?” Laurent said sourly.
Damen shrugged. This had the unfortunate effect of pulling Laurent in closer to his pectorals. “What if I needed to get hold of you?”
You have my phone number and my email and you know where I live, Laurent didn’t say, but only because they were getting closer to the building now and he didn’t want the people clustered outside to hear them.
A lot of them were neighbours he recognised but didn’t know, discussing the spider-silk in depth with fulsome hand gestures to indicate tensile strength, the state of the rest of the city, and sheer damn good luck. Some of them he didn’t recognise at all. One of them was pretty short, he thought. A kid. What time was it, anyway?
Kyrina, who ran the residents association and had attempted to sleep with Damen twice when they were together, gave him a nod, a raised eyebrow and a “you okay?” as they passed. “Fine,” he mouthed back. After the second time, Laurent had poured bleach over her wet clothes in the laundry room: they got on okay now.
They passed other concerned residents - Radel, who lived directly below Laurent, and Estienne, who lived across the hall, both stopped to check in. Everyone studiously ignored the princess carry in a way that let Laurent know, without a doubt, that the building’s whatsapp group was already rife with pictures and speculation. Everyone, that is, with the exception of Arnoul, who waved at Laurent, and, when Laurent waved back, waggled his eyebrows enthusiastically and shot Laurent -
“Is Arnoul making finger guns at you?” Damen said, puzzled.
“No,” Laurent said quickly, and then: “Will you put me down?”
“No,” Damen said pleasantly, nodding thanks to a skinny kid that had darted from the onlookers to hold the door open for them.
“What do you mean, no?” He said in a warning tone.
“I mean,” Damen said, shifting Laurent in his arms so he could have a hand free for the banister, “no. I’m not going to put you down. I’m going to carry you into the apartment and put you down somewhere you can’t fall off if you faint again.”
“Stop being ridiculous,” he snapped. He was getting tired again, felt achey and cross about it. The pain meds were wearing off.
“No,” Damen said, as he started to climb the stairs. Laurent made a noise of protest, but he cut him off with a dimpled, aggravating smile on his face. “Why? What are you going to do? Break up with me?”
Laurent lived on the fifth floor. The building was about a hundred years old: there was no lift. Damen didn’t even break a sweat. Laurent kept his feelings about this - and how good Damen still smelt, all hay and hot concrete - to himself. It’s not like they’d broken up because the sex was bad, his traitorous thoughts suggested.
Damen unlocked the door one handed and deposited Laurent on the couch before standing up and stretching, arms above his head. It untucked his shirt from his trousers, and Laurent saw again the gold flash of his costume. He’d come straight from the field, he’d said. “You can shower,” Laurent said abruptly. “If you want.”
“In a minute,” Damen said, turning to look around him, like he was cataloguing the things that Laurent had and hadn’t changed.
Laurent sank back into the couch with a grunt. Damen had bought that for him. It didn’t look as good anymore. Laurent worked fifty-five hours a week and didn’t have Damen’s time management skills when it came to cleaning; there was an ominous turmeric stain on one arm that had been there for a month. Whatever. He was so sore. The aches were turning into pains now, pains that slid and stabbed around the stitches holding him together. He winced. Damen made a sympathetic face. “It’s only another hour until I can give you some more meds, okay? I’ll get you a glass of water.”
Laurent flopped a grateful hand at him, and sank back into the couch.
“You moved the glasses,” Damen said, reappearing with a glass of water for Laurent, condensation beading on the side.
“Yes,” Laurent said, accepting it. Damen’s fingertips brushed his, and he almost started at the heat of them. “You weren’t here to complain about hurting your back anymore, so.” He attempted a shrug.
“Ha,” Damen said. And to Laurent’s surprise, he sat down next to him. The couch wasn’t that big. “I’ve got something to show you,” he said, suddenly serious. He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a crumbled bit of paper, carefully smoothed and folded in half. He handed it to Laurent.
“This was in your pocket. At the hospital.”
LAURENT DE VERE
APARTMENT 23, 50 ACQUITART PLACE, 75005
CALL DAMIANOS D’AKIELOS
030 689 106 4135
+33 7 86 15 84 94
The handwriting was shaky, and the pen had been pressed unevenly to the surface - a blob of blue ink obscured the space between the DE and the VERE. There were other blotches on the surface too. Ash. Something that looked like blood. Very distinctly - a tearstain.
“I didn’t write this,” he said quietly, looking up at Damen.
“I know,” Damen said grimly. “It doesn’t look anything like your handwriting. But it does look like-”
“One of my pens,” Laurent said, wondering. Auguste had had a doctor’s particularity about what pens he used, and he liked these dreadful imported Vaskian fountain pens an ex-girlfriend had put him onto. They were the only pens Laurent ever used: he’d found a box of them under Auguste’s bed after he’d died. The ink was this peculiar, distinctive shade of blue - past prussian and into peacock.
There was no mistaking it. They both stared at it.
“A couple of people know my mobile number,” Damen said, very intently. “But the second one is my Avengers direct line. I’m really lucky I had my phone on me. If someone had tried the second one, and put two and two together…”
Fuck, Laurent thought. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Damen’s identity was a closely guarded secret. Most supers held their cards pretty close to their chest; they might have broken up but - he wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t put Damen in danger like that. He stared at the note. Something was nagging at the back of his mind. The stroke of the T, the heavy lobe of the C.
He felt very queasy, all of a sudden. The words swam in front of his eyes. “Doesn’t it seem… familiar?”
Damen paused. He reached out to trace the shape of Laurent’s name. His hand was warm through the paper. “Yes,” he said. “Yes it does.”
Somehow, he knew to expect the pain this time, braced against it. Damen choked on thin air, wheezed for breath. Laurent bit his own tongue, curled up against the spike of it. “I think I’m going to be sick,” Damen said, and put his head between his knees.
“They’ll look after you in there, Laurent, I promise, okay, and I - shit, shit, why don’t you ever have a normal pen?” A sob. Something pressed to his chest. Everything was jagged and rough. The sky, the breath in his mouth.
Someone dropped to their knees beside him. “I know how I can fix this,” they said. “But you’re going to hate it. That’s okay though. I don’t think you’ll -” Another sob, and another, ragged tears splashing on his face. “-I don’t think you’ll… after. But I- I love-”
He tried to touch their face. His hand was so slow and clumsy, and it was beyond pain, into agony, the metal-hot smell of it, but he had to, he needed to touch them, to tell them-
They caught his hand, and pressed it between their own. “I’ve got to go now,” they said, like they were convincing themselves. And with one, final sob - “I’ve got to go and find a witch.”
The feeling subsided, eventually.
“It was only a minute,” Damen said, looking askance at the slip of paper. “Let’s put that in a drawer. Even looking at it makes me feel queasy.”
Laurent nodded his agreement - gently, to prevent the nausea from barrelling back in. It seemed like there was something deeply wrong: it also seemed like an issue for the Laurent of tomorrow.
“Ugh,” Damen said. “Will you be okay if I go and shower now? Want to wash that off me.”
“Yes,” Laurent said, and then when he’d gone he yanked his tablet out from underneath the sofa cushions and did what had become reflexive, almost muscle memory, from their time together - when Damen showered, post-fight, Laurent went on twitter, looking for the inevitable shaky cam footage had been uploaded this time. Damen wasn’t really a fan of this habit, which was unfair. Laurent wasn’t an easy person, he knew that was true: had proved true for Damen too, in the end. But he’d never been - possessive, like how Ancel was with Berenger, or jealous, like Aimeric over Jord. It was just… concern, really. He had only ever got a little wound up.
Four years earlier
“It would be nice,” Laurent said, pissed beyond measure, “if your costume was made of adamant.”
“What do you mean?” Damen said, wandering over to the couch, towelling his hair. He was shirtless, and the low slung band of his grey joggers was making Laurent’s eye twitch.
“You literally can’t help it, can you,” he said, disbelieving.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s the third time this week!” Laurent exploded, shoving his phone under Damen’s nose. “Do you have it repaired with tissue paper?”
Damen took it from him in an act of such casual proprietariness that Laurent had to bite the inside of his cheek.
“Oh,” he said, scrolling the Twitter tab that had Laurent seething. “You mean my costume?”
Said costume had ripped again, that day - a deep tear that had split the fabric from just above Damen’s hip to his knee, exposing the glowing brown skin, the almost structural musculature, and, to Laurent’s furious jealousy, the deep V-cut of his abs.
Laurent had seen this when Damen had got back to the Avengers tower and facetimed him; the rest of the world saw it on live video filmed by onlookers with no sense of self preservation.
“Laurent,” Damen said in an indulgent tone that got Laurent’s back up and made him furiously horny in equal measure, “what have I told you about namesearching?”
Una K @admantinebemine: adamant is ssso sexy!!!! im foaming at the mouth rn besties
slutty slim jim @bobbybenner: avengers member adamant i am dming you my home address. it IS an emergency and i WILL let u hit it raw.
George @georgebek: 30th time asking Adamant to drop the leg day routine
h0ezone layer @hausofheroes: god i hope next time it rips we see full dick, paging @avengersinitiative @ adamant i am begging
CARA @carayeun: i am inviting adamant to wreck this pussy no take-backs
Remy || Ancel stans DNI @clownfever182: yo if u put the adamant clip in slowmo you can like see it basically the whole thing
So Adamant was shamefully bolded, so what. Sue him. “Fuck you,” Laurent said, in a tone that had felled lesser men.
“Hmm,” said Damen, who was not lesser in any sense of the word, and started typing.
“What are you doing,” Laurent said with alarm, grabbing for his phone.
Damen held it out of his reach, unconcerned. “Someone asked for my leg routine. It’d be rude not to.”
“You’re on my account,” he said. Are you fucking serious, he wanted to say, but there was a bead of water inching it’s way down Damen’s back and he got distracted.
Damen paused, and said, carefully casual, “Well, I could stop…” Laurent could see the corner of his mouth twitching in amusement, and felt his stomach get hot in response. Fuck, he thought despairingly. He’d been conditioned. It was basically pavlovian at this point. “...if you distracted me, I suppose.”
“Oh?” Laurent said, and if his tone was a little breathy then that was between him and himself alone.
“I mean,” Damen said, lowering the phone, “You’ve seen a lot of me today--”
“And so has everyone else--”
Damen kept speaking, “--And I just think that it would be thoughtful to let me see a lot of you. Or you could look me over for injuries..”
“You’re invulnerable,” Laurent pointed out, but he couldn’t keep the smile from creeping onto his face.
“Better return the favour then, Sunstrike,” Damen said teasingly, and swept him up in his arms, and Laurent forgot all about it until later, when he wandered out of their bedroom, and saw his phone smouldering gently on the floor, with a perfect indentation of Damen’s toes crunched into the screen.
Present day
The footage he found on the internet was stuttering and jumpy, but he could to glean the facts from it. Some sort of rift cracked across the sky, with things falling from it, fuzzy round the edges and glowing faintly, almost see-through, not quite real.
Get a load of this, the man filming said. A fucking sandstorm just fell through that hole!
He moved the phone - and yes, there on the street, several storeys below, was a tornado of dust and sand, sparking and solidifying.
Someone’s hand extended across the screen, and pointed excitedly. The video zoomed in. Was that - Laurent paused it. A rhino? A bipedal rhino? He pressed play.
That’s a fucking rhino, someone else said, laughing. No way!
That is waaay too big to be a rhino, are you kidding me? No, look at that thing -
A mile long tentacle extended from a crack, pulsing and crackling with energy: it seemed to be seeking purchase to drag whatever the rest of it was through, and suddenly Damen shot across the screen in a gold blur, dislodging its grip. It recoiled, and then whipped back, smacking him at full force into a wall right next to the person videoing.
Holy shit . Adamant, man, you okay?
Damen staggered to his feet and exhaled hard. He had his mask on, at least. You should be inside, he said, in his Adamant voice, which was deeper, with more of an Isthiman burr to it. It’s not safe.
Sure, sure, the man filming agreed, making no move to do so. Good luck!
Thanks, Damen said drily, and launched up into the air again.
“What are you watching?”
Laurent did not jump. He just twitched a little, which anyone would have done, and immediately stuffed the tablet back down the side of the sofa. “Just seeing what I tore you away from,” he said coldly, willing his heart to go a little slower.
Damen had emerged from the shower respectably buttoned up, almost entirely dry. “I gave as good as I got, don’t worry.”
“I wasn’t,” Laurent said.
“Hmmm,” said Damen, and went and got himself a drink. He returned with the sole beer Laurent had had rolling around the back of his fridge for two months now dangling between his fingers, and lent up against the wall. “We should talk about that note. Are you,” he cleared his throat, “seeing someone? That might know that information?”
Laurent stared at him. “If I was, do you not think that I would have called them?”
“No,” said Damen bluntly. “I don’t. That’s not what you do. It’s okay though. I don’t mind.” He smiled, but not with his eyes, and took a swig. The long line of his throat drew Laurent’s eyes helplessly.
“I don’t talk about you at work, either,” Laurent said prissily, because he didn’t want to examine that too much right now.
“At the firm?”
Laurent laughed bitterly. “Really? You didn’t read about it in the papers? DE VERE & DE VERE heir disinherited?”
“I did,” Damen said evenly, “but the papers say a lot of things.”
Laurent shook his head. “I don’t work there anymore. I do two days a week at Berenger’s gallery” - Ancel loves that, he didn’t say - “and then I average about thirty, thirty-five hours at the Community Hub. Doing their finances, sometimes helping with the kids.” They were the only place that would take him on, after. They were desperate.
“Huh,” said Damen, and sat down across from him. “I wouldn’t have expected it.”
“I like it,” Laurent said truthfully. Working at the fund had been - difficult. Tense and sour. The stifling weight of the name on the building, the gossip about his performance explicitly, why he wasn’t a board member, why he was in on that board meeting. And there had been his uncle, always watching, waiting. He could do the accounts for the Hub in his sleep, really. But that wasn’t such a bad thing.
Damen smiled, properly this time. “Pays okay?”
“No,” Laurent said, which was true. And then, in a moment of mad justification - “But I learnt a magic trick,” he says out of nowhere. So much for not being concussed. “Do you have a coin?”
They’d got an entertainer in for the daycare, and after the third time he tried to cop a feel Laurent had sat him down and explained in great detail what was going to happen if he did it again, and once he’d finished crying Laurent had told him he wouldn’t call the police as long as he helped him out with something. The kids had really liked the coin trick. Even the scrawniest of them had laughed, and said, again!
He did the trick - and then again, because Damen had laughed too hard the first time and he’d dropped it. The second time went so well he got cocky, and tried it a third. The coin fell from his sleeve with a fat plunk onto the table. That was just because his shakes were getting worse, though.
“Okay,” Damen said, stifling his laughter. “You should probably eat now, and then we can get you some more meds.”
“I’m not hungry,” Laurent responded automatically.
“Sure,” Damen said, which wasn’t part of the ritual. Damen was supposed to hover with concern, to push him to eat and then they could have a fight about it when he didn’t want to, and then fuck to make up. “You don’t have to be hungry. But you have to eat, or I can’t give you any medicine.”
Oh, Laurent thought. Damen being here, in the apartment, was doing weird things to him. Like he was regressing into old thoughts, old patterns of behaviour. It had been a year, more than a year, he told himself harshly. Get over it already. “Fine,” he said. “Nothing too-”
“Heavy,” Damen answered for him. “I know. I had a look in the fridge, I’ll just use what’s in there, okay?”
“...Yes. You can cook now?”
Damen dimpled. “Seemed about time.”
He disappeared into the kitchen, closing the door behind him. Thoughtful. He’d remembered some things, then, like the fact that the smell of most things cooking made Laurent nauseous to the point of being unable to eat. He wondered if he should tell him he’d been working on that - that he’d made a full three course meal last week, and hadn’t retched once.
Stupid, he thought, and pulled out the tablet again.
The video started playing again immediately.
Oh fuck, haha, the man filming said. He swung the phone round to capture a second tentacle slithering from the rift. Laser beams were blasting somewhere, and Laurent saw Falcon hurtle past, wrestling in midair with what appeared to be a huge lizard.
Should we go inside? Adamant said… Dude!
A tentacle came swinging back sharply, filling the screen - and then it went dark. As quickly as it happened, the light came back, but the video had changed angle sharply, as if the person filming had been knocked off their feet. A concerned face appeared above them.
Are you okay? You’re covered in… space stuff. Laurent shuddered. Interdimensional shit always came with weird goo. He didn’t miss that at all.
Hey, the man said, getting to his feet. Where’d they all go? The sky, when he turned the phone around, was clear, and lit only by sunset.
The video ended, and Laurent just stared at the screen. That had been - unexpected.
In the doorway, Damen cleared his throat. “Told you it was nothing major.”
“They just disappeared?”
Damen nodded. “Yeah, far as we can tell. White Witch did some light tracking, but there were no traces. They were just gone.”
Laurent frowned, reflexively, at the mention of Jokaste. “I didn’t realise she was off maternity leave,” he said.
“Alexei started preschool last month,” Damen said with a shrug. “Anyway,” he said, changing the subject, “how are you feeling? Dinner won’t be ready for ten minutes.”
“Pretty sore,” Laurent said, too tired to be anything but honest. “Stitches hurt a lot. Feel quite warm, actually.”
“Nurses said they’d guessed you had some sort of rapid healing power,” Damen said, walking over to the couch, and feeling Laurent’s forehead. “But they said that can cause its own issues, when it's inconsistent.” His voice went up a little bit at the end, like it was a question. Of course. Damen had always been so hopeful about it.
Of all the powers that Laurent had lost, that had been the most annoying. The fragments of it that remained often caused more harm than good: he’d got a splinter, a few months ago, and the surface wound kept healing before it could expel anything. He’d had to have a minor surgery to have it removed: they said he was going to get sepsis otherwise.
“Still inconsistent,” he said to Damen grimly, without explaining.
Damen sighed. There was this guilty, queasy look on his face. Laurent hated it. “I wish…” he said.
Something in Laurent’s stomach twisted. Under the blanket, he closed his hands into fists. Not that it mattered, anymore, but it was a force of habit. Closed palms, no shocks! Auguste’s mantra. He didn’t want to think about it. Not right now.
He wet his lips. “Can I have an icepack?” he said.
Two years earlier
Laurent had briefly fallen into the space-time rift, and there was this purple-green slime clinging to him in deeply unfortunate places. His hands were on the fritz, too: he could make the bathroom lights flicker but they didn’t even glow. It was annoying. At least Arnoul had fixed the water temperature.
The shower dissolved all of the alien gunk and about one third of the tension in his neck. When he emerged, damp, into the hall, Damen clearly heard the door click and called out to him.
“Thanks for the ice pack, sweetheart!”
Laurent accepted the praise with equanimity before realising with a jolt that he hadn’t got out an ice pack for Damen, which meant -
“That’s the salmon,” he said, rounding the corner to the living room, “that I’m defrosting for dinner.”
“Ah,” said Damen, guiltily. The wrapped packet - which he had been pressing against his lower back - was now steaming slightly. After exertion Damen’s body heat was about four times that of a human. Sometimes more. They went through a lot of ice packs.
That salmon was the expensive, wild-caught kind from a luxury grocer in the 6th arrondissement.
“How long have you been using it for,” Laurent demanded, beckoning for Damen to hand it over.
Damen winced. “Since just after you got in the shower? Ten minutes?” The salmon, when he dropped it into Laurent’s hands, was soggy and limp. They observed it together.
“I did think,” Damen said sadly, “that it was getting a bit squashy.”
Laurent thought furiously of the asparagus languishing in the fridge, the runner beans painstakingly slivered, the pastry - the pastry - that he had made by hand. “I was going to make salmon en croute,” he said, coldly.
Damen didn’t reply, but the tone of the silence changed. As if to cover it up, he started unwrapping the salmon.
“What?” Laurent said sharply.
“I didn’t say anything,” said Damen, unfurling the leaves of packaging around the fish. One layer was stamped with the logo of that fucking grocers, Laurent saw, which sent a fresh pang of annoyance directly to his wallet.
“Well you were thinking it,” he said back.
Damen finally opened the package, and revealed the fish. Despite feeling like a human furnace at times, Damen actually would have made a terrible oven: there was no consistency in his body heat. The abused salmon was just - all over the place. Some parts were raw and dripping, while the skin of the fillet - which must have been closest to Damen’s back - was so dried out and shrivelled it looked like some depraved attempt to make salmon jerky. The whole thing was still steaming, and starting to smell.
“I was thinking,” Damen said, staring at the fish, “that you don’t usually cook.”
It was true. Laurent’s normal relationship with cooking was combative at best, but like Damen ‘used to just eat eggs raw because he didn’t know how to boil them’ D’akielos could talk. He took a calming breath in through his nose, and regretted it. A fat bead of condensation rolled off the side of the packet, and onto the table.
“I cannot believe you,” Laurent said with frustration. “The ice packs are blue!”
Damen scowled. “Okay,” he said, “I fucked up. But they used to be white! And I did ask you to get me out an ice pack, I told you I was having trouble bending.”
He had got an energy beam to the lower back, actually, Laurent remembered. And he had forgotten to get out that ice pack… then he looked down at the table again and saw the salmon. The anger returned.
“Maybe,” he said spitefully, “you could have actually practiced your telekinesis and got one out for yourself.”
Damen put a hand over his eyes. The telekinesis was a recurring argument. “That is Kastor’s thing,” he said to Laurent, like he always did. “Do you have any idea how fucked off he’s going to be if I start doing it too?”
“No,” Laurent said, sour and increasingly pissed off. “I guess I never got to have those grown up sibling rivalries.”
“For the love of…” Damen said, and snatched up the salmon to slam it into the food waste bin.
“Salmon en croute was Auguste’s favourite, you know,” he said, because he’d never been able to stop twisting the knife once he got it in. “He taught me how to make it.”
Damen slapped his hands on the counter. “Okay,” he said, mouth tight. “I understand. I’m a monster. Can I get you some more salmon? Or are we going to fight?”
“How exactly, are you going to get me more salmon,” Laurent said, raising an eyebrow. “You’re going to take the train? Over to the 6th? On a Sunday night? So we’d eat in…” he made a show of checking his watch. “Oh, three hours?” It was already 7pm.
“I could fly,” Damen said stiffly. He raked a hand through his hair - dislodging one perfect curl to fall across his forehead. It was like he was being a fucking idiot on purpose.
“On a cloudless night,” Laurent said sweetly, “after a week of incidents? Social media is going to go crazy.” He was right. A super out and about, using their powers, when people were already on high alert - that could only end with a furious call from the Mayor to the Avengers HQ about inciting mass panic and damn civilians clogging up the emergency lines.
“Right,” Damen said, fixing his gaze somewhere behind Laurent’s ear. “So we’re going to fight, then.”
Present day
The next morning, Damen woke Laurent with tea and plain toast, portioned out his tablets and sat there peaceably as he took them. The soreness and stiffness had caught up with Laurent now: he felt like he’d had a building dropped on him. Which he might have done. No one had managed to figure out what exactly had happened yesterday, Damen said.
“We’re looking. Well, Gladiator is combing the camera network around here - seeing if we can track down whoever wrote that note.”
Laurent flinched. Even mentioning it snapped a curl of sickening discomfort through his mind.
“Yeah,” Damen said sympathetically. “It makes me nauseous too.” He reached out as if to put his hand on Laurent’s forehead and then thought better of it. Laurent watched him fold his hand back onto his lap and concentrated intensely on the wooziness from the tablets instead, so he didn’t have to think about it.
His body’s inability to regulate its healing abilities had a bunch of strange knock-on effects. He’d been asked to take part in at least four medical trials since that whole thing had happened, but - he’d spent enough time being displayed and inspected, thank you. So he had to take the really old fashioned, tranquilizer style painkillers, made for a man twice his weight. Made for Damen, basically. Not that Damen needed painkillers - or that human ones really worked on him.
They made the world all hazy, wavy at the edges. Damen said something else to him. That he was going out? The door closed behind him, certainly. So it must be right. Laurent’s head was still pulsing, his body aching. He thought that was it. A strange interlude. And now they could go back to never speaking or touching or thinking about each other.
Fine.
He fell back asleep for a little while, had one of those sickening dreams where electricity crackled in his hands and Auguste was still alive. When he woke up, the painkillers had kicked in. Or kicked in enough, at least, that he could get out of bed, wincing at the strain, and shuffle to the kitchen.
There was a covered plate in the fridge, and a note in Damen’s handwriting on top of it: “LUNCH”. Which was nice.
He used the landline to call in sick to the gallery, and Berenger was very understanding: that makes sense, because he and Laurent are both aware that he doesn’t really need Laurent to work there, that it’s the closest thing to a favour Laurent will accept. Calling the hub was a bit worse.
You know we can’t pay you if you call out, his manager said, apologetic.
“I know,” he said, and thought about the waning numbers in his checking account. “I’ll be back Friday,” he promised, and ended the call with the familiar doom-laden feeling of telling a lie.
He sat on the couch heavily and waited to take the next dose of meds. He even got out a notepad and started carefully reallocating his budget. He could sell the TV, probably. If anyone was still in the market for thirty-inch screens.
And then the door opened.
“You’re up,” Damen said, pleased. He shouldered his way in, a large duffel slung across his back.
“You’re back,” Laurent said stupidly.
“Yes?” Damen said, with a creased brow. “I told you earlier I was going to head out to get some clothes? I’ve only been gone for two hours.”
It had seemed much longer than that. He didn’t want to say that out loud. “Oh,” he said instead. “Did you take my keys?”
“No,” Damen said, turning away to hang up his coat. Another part of his ‘disguise’. I’m Damen, I’m a human man - look, I even wear a coat! I too, am subject to the elements! It wasn’t particularly effective. “Arnoul came by earlier to ask how you were doing and said he still had the spare if I needed it.”
Laurent squeezed his eyes closed. What the fuck. “I did move to this building due to its state of the art security features,” he said as calmly as possible. He needed to have a serious talk with Arnoul. Maybe get him a pamphlet or something. How to not expose your tenants to severe risk of physical harm and/or theft.
“Ha,” Damen said, huffing a laugh. “I told him he shouldn’t do that.” He paused. “But I took the keys, so I don’t think it was very convincing.”
Laurent hummed in agreement, and carefully closed the notebook: he didn’t want Damen seeing the pathetic state of his finances, the chickenscratch columns balancing his grocery shopping. The black hole that the ‘minor’ surgery had left in his finances was still threatening to devour his whole life in its path. The prospect of getting his most recent hospital bill he placed, very carefully, behind a mental wall.
Damen, never the best with laces, had almost finished unpicking the knots on his boots. He hadn’t been wearing those yesterday. When are you going to stop noticing every single thing about him, he thought. Pathetic. He looked at the duffle bag. It seemed rather… full.
“How long are you planning on staying for?”
“Hmm?” said Damen, straightening up quickly: the sudden movement made his hair flop forwards, and he pushed out of his eyes one handed. His tee rode up. There was a line of dark hair that led down from his navel. Not that Laurent was looking at it. Laurent was staring fixedly at the duffle bag.
“Oh,” Damen said, following his gaze. He quirked his eyes back to Laurent, and hardened up his mouth in the way he always did when he was expecting an argument. He cleared his throat. “I’m going to stay with you until the end of the week.”
Laurent blinked at him. “Sunday?”
“Yes,” Damen said firmly. Then he paused. “Well. Monday.”
Six days? That was... No way.
“No,” Laurent harshly. “Don’t you have a home of your own?” A low blow. Damen had moved into the Avengers tower after the breakup. He was still there. Jord had told Laurent, which was the only reason he knew. He hadn’t asked.
Damen didn’t react visibly. “I spoke to the hospital,” he said woodenly. “Given the potential complications of your healing factor, and the possible head trauma, there’s no way you can be left alone unsupervised until you’ve had a follow up scan.” Laurent imagined him practicing it on his way up the stairs.
“No way,” Laurent spat. “Twenty-four hours, that’s what I agreed to. You need to leave tonight.”
“Do you want an omlette or a boiled egg?”
Damen had stayed the night. And won the argument. Whatever. It was fine.
“Scrambled,” Laurent said in a moment of petulant annoyance. Laurent didn’t eat scrambled eggs. Laurent had, in fact, once choked down a lovingly prepared plate of them only to throw them up on Falcon’s feet two hours later— Damen didn’t take the bait.
“Poached it is then,” he said, and ducked back into the kitchen. Kitchenette, really.
Laurent didn’t want a poached egg. Laurent wanted to chew on some glass and smoke a cigarette and for his head to stop fucking hurting. He wanted an ice bath. He wanted to tell Damen to fuck off and go home and he wanted Damen to tell him he loved him and stay forever and for his hands to light up electric gold and he wanted to feel his powers sparking in his throat and—
He wanted someone to step from the corner of the room and put a cold hand to his brow. Damen’s hands were never cool: it wasn’t his fault. He was simply incapable of it. He wanted someone in his apartment that was there not because they’d loved him, once, when he was shinier and better-looking and more powerful, but because they always had been. He wanted someone who knew everything and didn’t care, where he didn’t care that they knew everything either. He couldn’t help but care, with Damen. He’d never be able to forget the look Damen had on his face when he first found out. He’d thought about that too much when they were together. But he wanted…
His brother. He missed his brother. That was it. That was always it. There was a brother-shaped hole in his life, and his powers had filled it for a little while, and the hub had filled it for a little while, and now they were both gone.
Now he was a has-been hero, a freak who couldn’t even heal properly, another under-employed twenty-something with bills he couldn’t pay. Damen turned the radio on in the kitchen. Laurent could never tune it properly: it had lain embarrassingly untouched since Damen had tossed his keys on the counter and left for good. No money no family sixteen in the middle of Miami, the radio warbled. Absolutely not. Laurent was not going to experience pathetic fallacy through the medium of a fucking Igg—
Damen emerged with a plate of eggs in his hand and a careful cheeriness, like he’d practiced his pleasant smile in the shiny surface of the stainless steel fridge. It hadn’t been shiny until he arrived.
He set the plate in front of Laurent. It contained a perfect slice of toast and two raggedy, overdone poached eggs.
He ate the eggs. He took his meds. He went to sleep.
They’re spelling it wrong, Nicaise said petulantly. It should have a hyphen!
Laurent glanced at the newspaper. SPIDERMAN SCRAMBLES IN DOWNTOWN! There was a large picture accompanying the headline.
Oh hey, front page! Nice! Damen said, high fiving a scowling Nicaise.
The hyphen’s a bit fussy, Laurent said distractedly as he poured his coffee. Then he looked at the picture more closely. You fell off a building? What the— Why am I just hearing about this now?
Nicaise rolled his eyes. It was fine. He checked his phone. Anyway, I have to go now, I’m meeting Aimeric—
Absolutely not, Laurent said swiftly, You fell off a building and didn’t tell us, that’s a category three strike—
Damen knew! Nicaise said hotly.
Damianos! Laurent scolded, turning on him, Fucking - Seriously?
Damen put a hand on his forehead, Oh shit, Laurent, I forgot to tell you - but I got in so late last night, and you were asleep, and honestly, everything was fine. I heard him, I went to check, but he’d already caught himself. That’s on me. Nicaise, you can go out, it’s okay.
Laurent slapped a hand on the newspaper. It doesn’t look fine! He hated this. Not being able to keep an eye on Nicaise himself. Languishing in the belly of corporate Vere while electricity and light burned through the world without him. His kid, falling off buildings by himself. What happened to your web? He demanded, turning back to Nicaise.
Nicaise wasn’t there. He was already half out the window, a piece of toast clenched in his mouth. Heading out, he said, muffled by the toast. Bye! And with a wave he flipped backwards off the fire escape, which he did every time, just to piss Laurent off.
He’ll be fine, Damen said, placating. He put his hand over Laurent’s. He knows what he’s doing.
No, Laurent said, snatching his hand back. He doesn’t. And what the hell were you thinking, telling my kid he can leave like that?
Your kid? Damen said, taking a step back.
Yes, Laurent said, ugly. Nicaise was very small in the photograph, a blue-red blur against the endless mirrored windows of the building. His fall, reflected over and over. His hand, reaching.
“Laurent?”
He woke up. There was a hand on his shoulder. A broad, brown hand. His eyes traveled up the equally broad, brown arm, all the way up to where Damen’s perfect face hovered over him. He sat up with a start, and only Damen’s sharp step back prevented their foreheads from colliding. Lucky for Laurent. They didn’t call him Adamant for nothing.
“You fell asleep,” Damen said gently. “Were you having a nightmare?”
Laurent grunted, disoriented. He cleared his throat. “I didn’t dream,” he said hoarsely.
“Okay,” Damen said, in the standard disbelieving tone he used when Laurent denied that anything might possibly have upset him. Laurent believed he thought it sounded conciliatory. “I just didn’t want you thrashing around and opening your stitches.”
He didn’t like the idea of thrashing about in front of Damen. It had been bad enough when he’d witnessed the night terrors first hand. “I should go to bed,” he said hoarsely. Thrash in private. He rolled his neck and thought about standing. He wasn’t looking forward to it.
“I changed the sheets earlier,” Damen said quickly. “So they’re fresh.”
“Right,” Laurent said blankly.
“Because they were dirty,” Damen continued briskly, eyes fixed somewhere just past Laurent’s left ear.
“Dirty,” Laurent repeated. He’d changed them that week. Had Damen developed super-olfaction in the past year? It wasn’t impossible. The telekinesis had come out of nowhere too.
Damen cleared his throat, which meant he was stalling.
“Say it,” Laurent said suspiciously, in the same tone he’d once used to tell Auguste’s dogs to drop it.
“You need to shower,” Damen said in a rush. “You still have ash in your hair.”
Laurent froze. He looked down at his hands. His nail beds were still ingrained with dirt. There was a smear of what looked like dried blood on the back of his arm.
“Why are you just mentioning this now,” he said faintly. He wanted the ground to swallow him up. So much for all those unfunny standup routines about running into your ex at the grocers on laundry day. How many people had been forcibly exposed to their ex after having a building dropped on them and then had to be told by said ex to shower because they were - “I’m filthy,” he said, with an unpleasant thread of panic he could hear in his own voice.
He didn’t like to be dirty and he could feel it on him now, like something you only see when you pass a mirror and then can’t bear, the flyaway hair, the stained shirt, the major accident’s worth of dirt caked into your skin and hair.
“Laurent,” Damen said, consolingly. He actually did put a hand on Laurent’s arm then. His hand landed right on top of the dried blood. That was worse, actually, and he hadn’t thought it could get worse. “You were barely conscious. Eating and sleeping were more important, okay. Look, you can shower now and then go back to bed, okay?”
Laurent nodded mutely, numb with humiliation.
Damen’s hand moved to the small of his back as he started guiding him towards the shower. Not that that was necessary. It was a small apartment. And Laurent lived here. He knew where the shower was.
“Do you want me to come in with you,” Damen said, faux-casually. “Just in case—”
“No thanks,” Laurent said swiftly, focusing intently on stopping his shoulders from reaching his ears. “No, I’ll be fine, actually. I mean, we — I still have the shower seat.”
“Oh,” Damen said, opening the bathroom door. “The shower seat.” Laurent fucking knew he was raising an eyebrow, the bastard.
“For if I get dizzy,” Laurent said with as much dignity as he had left. Not the other function of the shower seat. It had been Damen’s idea. Laurent had been talked round to it, after a demonstration of its helpful properties. Damen had installed it himself, in a thin white tank that Laurent thought about at 2am and other unhelpful times.
“Well,” Damen said, leaning on the doorjamb, “just shout if you need an—”
“Yes,” Laurent said, and closed the door in his face. After a moment of hesitation, he turned the lock.
It took about ten minutes of cold water before he got the blush to go away entirely.
So Damen stayed. He slept in the guest bedroom. Why did Laurent even have a guest bedroom, on his budget? He’d never even thought about it before: it had slipped his attention - and his spreadsheet - somehow.
Damen fed him, gave him his medicine, stood a careful distance away when Laurent phoned up the hub and agreed to unpaid leave, just so he could stay on the books. He phoned out of the gallery too, but Berenger was very understanding. He made the offer, again, to bring Laurent on full time. It was nice of him. But at the gallery… Laurent looks like he should work at a gallery. The guests certainly seem to think that he was on display. And that the no-touching rule was limited to the art.
Then of course, there was the crossover. The fact that the people who frequented galleries like Berenger’s, who bought tasteful prints from limited runs by up and coming names, who laid down as many lei on a single dazzling canvas as a normal Veretian earnt in a year were the people that Laurent had known before. The glittering hard-eyed millionaires he’d grown up alongside, the court of his Uncle’s society kingdom.
He could deal with them. He just didn’t want to deal with them more than he had to. And Ancel would be upset, and Berenger couldn’t really justify another full time employee. He was rich, but not that rich.
“No,” he said. “Thank you.”
No problem, Berenger replied, crackly down the line of the ancient house phone. Let me know if you change your mind. Get well soon.
“Thanks,” he said, “Bye.” And then he hung up.
On the third day, Damen agreed that Laurent could leave the house to get a smoothie, on the condition that he came with him. Laurent begrudgingly accepted this.
And then Damen’s phone went off. It was the tower. Laurent knew that because of how the muscle in his jaw tensed when he saw the [WITHHELD] lighting up the caller ID. Laurent had bitten him there, once. He’d been so tense and Laurent had tipped him back on the sofa and clambered into his lap and set his teeth against his jaw, and told him he had to relax or else, and then Damen had said or else? with a raised eyebrow and Laurent had raised his right back and said, say it in the voice and we’ll see.
Damen accepted the call. “Adamant,” he said, in his Adamant voice. Laurent’s spine prickled. “Yes, I can be there in five.”
“I’m still going out,” Laurent said swiftly. It was always better to get ahead of Damen on stuff like this.
“No chance,” Damen said, pocketing his cell.
“Light exercise promotes healing.” Laurent tried to project an air of good health.
Damen hesitated. He was, at his core, a jock, a weakness that Laurent intended to exploit mercilessly.
“I don’t think—”
“I won’t be hungry later,” Laurent said. “And you were saying. That I needed the calories.”
Laurent had refused a third egg at breakfast, which had made Damen pinch his brow together worriedly. He was doing that again now, but in a way that meant he was considering it.
Laurent sighed, and prepared to bring out the big guns.
“I’ll even get one with protein powder.”
Obviously, he wasn’t actually going to get one with protein powder, he told himself as he walked down the street. It was disgusting, all gritty and with that chalky aftertaste. Worse than a third egg. No thank you.
Damen had acquiesced, with strict instructions to simply call for him if Laurent had any trouble.
Call you, got it, Laurent had said, shoving the old brick cell he’d managed to resurrect into his pocket. Calling was just about the only thing he could do.
No, Damen had said intensely. Just call for me. I’ll hear you. I’ll come back.
Right onto the street, hmm, Laurent had said quellingly, because it was that or swooning right there and then.
Which wasn’t helpful, or productive. Not that he’d do that anyway. Shout Damen into the sky and have Adamant show up, chipping away at the foundation of an identity that was secret by necessity? No, Laurent didn’t need that on his conscience. He had enough to deal with.
Like trying to get to the goddamn smoothie shop in the first place. Laurent was a strider by nature. He would have been there by now, normally, but there was a shock of pain like a cage around his body, an aching fatigue that clung to him. It was only one more block.
Fucking soggy Arles autumn. It was so much nicer in Marlas, closer to the Skarvan ridge, a little higher, a lot crisper, so much more comfortable. Here the Seraine kept the air swampy, so moist it could freeze at a seconds notice.
When he finally dragged himself in the door of the shop, there was a welcome blast of crisp recycled air. The door clanged as he opened it, the bell a familiar annoyance that nonetheless made the blue eyed kid behind the counter look up.
It was just the two of them in the shop. Laurent had no idea what day it was, but it seemed likely that most people were at work. Or in school. That kid looked like he should probably be in school, actually.
He felt a bit dizzy, a bit weak. The kid was looking at him very intently. His eyes were very blue. Maybe Damen had been right.
“You okay?” The kid said. He had a cap proclaiming JUMBO JUCERIA jammed down onto his head, but there were brown curls escaping.
Laurent shook his head. “No,” he said. “I mean yes. I’m fine.”
The kid just stared at him. He chewed on his lip for a bit. Don’t do that, Laurent wanted to say. You’ll chew it off. Auguste always used to say that to him. Snap out of it, he told himself. You’re probably freaking him out.
“I’ll have the Carrot n’ Ginger Go-Getter,” he said, clearing his throat. The kid cocked an eyebrow at him. “With extra sherbet,” he added, like he wasn’t closer to thirty than twenty. The kid did this weird side-smile.
“Yeah,” he said. “Thought so.”
And before Laurent could ask him what the fuck that meant, a voice bellowed from the back of the shop. “NICKI, WHERE’S THE FUCKIN’ PAPAYA? YOU STOCKED IT LAST, RIGHT?”
“Oh my god,” the kid - Nicki, presumably - said, slamming the blender with Laurent’s ingredients in it onto the stand. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and ducked into the open door. “I TOLD YOU IT’S BEHIND THE CANTALOUPE, OF COURSE I FUCKING STOCKED IT! IT’S DANNY’S STUPID FUCKING IDEA, HE WANTS SHIT ORGANISED BY COLOUR—”
Laurent tuned it out. He didn’t particularly care to hear about Danny’s organisational ideas. He leant on the sloped glass case on the counter instead, appreciating the cool hum of it against his face. He was feeling pretty warm, actually.
He could see the other side of the desk like this. There was an old-fashioned, Patran-made film camera back there. Laurent recognised it because Auguste had had one just like it. There was a copy of the Arles Announcer there too, with a full colour picture of Spiderman on the front page. WORLD WIDE WEB, the headline read, because the Announcer was staffed by hacks who were even worse at headlines than they were at journalism.
There was a phone too, with a cracked screen. There was a stream of texts coming in. First and last, N, need it today, and You can’t pay you don’t stay! That sort of thing. It made Laurent’s gut ache. Poor kid. He stared at the menu instead, and then at the blender, willing it to stop.
It was only when it did that he noticed the kid was back in the doorway, watching him.
“You have a bruise,” Nicki said, gesturing to the place where Laurent’s cowslick swept his hair away from his temple.
“Oh,” Laurent said, glancing a hand up towards it.
“I didn’t notice it before,” he said, striding forwards and grabbing the sherbet. He dumped four heaped tablespoons in, which was exactly how much extra Laurent liked. He didn’t even need to ask.
Laurent shrugged. Something was strange. “Arles,” he said. “What do you expect?”
The kid snorted. “Yeah,” he said. He paused, like he was going to say something else, and then he coughed instead, shook his head. “Twelve lei.”
Laurent pulled the bills from his wallet. He didn’t trust card payments. Too traceable. Nicki handed him the drink, and there was a microcosm of contact. The tiniest glance of their fingers against each other.
There was something fizzing in Laurent’s ears, his fingertips. His mouth dried out. Nicki’s eyes were blue like a gas flame. “Have we met?” he said slowly.
The pain came like a hammer-blow. Nicki blanched. “No!” he said, and the dark came up over him like a tide, and Laurent’s hands crackled a warning—
—and Laurent fainted.
When the taxi dropped him back at the apartment building, Damen was waiting outside impatiently.
“Laurent!” he said with relief, helping him out of the cab door. His feet were on the ground for approximately a second before Damen swept him up into his arms. “Are you okay? I’ve put the taxi on my tab, don’t worry,” he said, and turned back to the driver, “thanks man, see you.”
Laurent felt overheated and stupid, like his skin was going to make him sick it was so tight. His throat ached.
Damen shouldered open the door to the building and started up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Insanity overcame Laurent and he burrowed his face into Damen’s shoulder, like a cat, like a boyfriend. “You look awful, sweetheart, I think we should take your temperature—”
Laurent froze. Sweetheart, he thought. Sweetheart.
And then because Damen was literally superhuman, literally not-human, they were inside the apartment in minutes, and Damen was setting him gently down on the couch and pressing a hand that felt deliciously cool to his brow. Laurent arched into it, unthinkingly. On some level there was something embarrassing about this but it was too much to remember right now. The world slid greasily around him. Something was missing, that would fix everything. The texture of the world would be set right.
“Damen,” he said blurrily, “Damen, something’s missing.”
“Shhh, sweetheart, don’t talk, I need to take your temperature.”
That was twice now. Laurent accepted the thermometer with good grace.
“Shit,” Damen said gently. “You’re getting hot.”
“You’re always hot,” Laurent said. He tried to blink, but it was like his eyelids weighed a thousand pounds. “Both ways,” he said.
“Is that right?” Damen said, with a funny voice. Laurent reached up and put a knuckle into his dimple, because he’d missed doing that.
“Yes,” he said solemnly, and let feverish sleep claim him.
So Laurent was bed bound with a fever for the next two days. The hospital even sent a nurse out to him, a pretty Kemptian who was blonder than Laurent and made eyes at Damen. Laurent hated them, even when they were speaking professionally about how his healing ability meant that an infection had formed under the skin and was festering.
So they gave Laurent some frankly enormous antibiotics and Damen their number and then they left again. Damen carelessly left it on Laurent’s bedside table, and Laurent took great satisfaction from ripping it into a thousand pieces when his back was turned.
He also heard Damen arguing on the phone with Nik, Falcon intelligible on the other end but Damen, clear as day, saying - I’m not leaving and he needs me, which mostly made Laurent feel strange, strange and tensed up and - well - feverish.
He got better gradually. He was still a bit wobbly on his feet, but Damen was attentive, always there with a helpful arm. And it would have stayed that way, at least for a while, if a guest hadn’t shown up quite literally out of the blue.
“Ancel’s back on planet,” Damen said, striding into Laurent’s room. He never knocked.
“Okay?” Laurent said unenthusiastically, not looking up from his book.
“Well,” Damen said, “he’s sending me voice notes as he re-enters the atmosphere and from what I can make out, he’s planning to drop by here first.” He paused, and lifted the phone to his ear again. Something high pitched and largely unintelligible came through the speaker. “It’s not that he likes you more than Berenger, he says, but he’s letting the— no, actually, I’m not repeating that.”
Laurent closed the book. “Are you blushing?”
“No! I’ll go… out. To the tower,” he said, blushing.
“Uh huh,” Laurent said, amused.
Ancel arrived twenty minutes after Damen beat his hasty retreat.
“Laurent,” he carolled from the fire escape. “Let me in, it’s fucking freezing!”
Laurent shuffled over, and unlatched the window. “Why do you even lock that?” Ancel said, ruffling his feathers.
“Because we live in a city filled with people that can fly, Ancel.”
Ancel rolled his eyes. “There are like seven of us. Anyway, hello, how are you, I hear you have had a little reunion while I’ve been away?”
“Yes,” Laurent said. “A reunion with some super-shit.” He rolled his neck to let Ancel see the tail end of one of the lacerations.
Ancel smiled with his teeth. They were unnervingly bright. “Damianos is staying with you,” he said.
Laurent stilled. “He just let me know that you were dropping by because my cell is broken.”
“Bullshit,” Ancel crowed. “But no, don’t tell me. Ugh,” he said, striding over to the couch, “space flight always makes me so hungry.”
“Well,” Laurent said drily. “I got you snacks.”
“Oh!” Ancel exclaimed. “Emeralds! My favourite!”
There was, in fact, a bowl of loose emeralds on the coffee table, some rough, some polished. Ancel picked one up and looked at it critically. “B grade,” he said. “Not bad.”
He popped it in his mouth and started crunching away. It was sort of like hearing a person with human teeth eat tortilla chips but… glassier. It was lucky for Ancel that Berenger owned those mines. Who knew what his grocery bill would be like otherwise.
Ancel talked his ear off about why he was off-planet: some trade protection racket that the Ver-Vask Empire was pushing, and how the UN delegation got so annoyed that they were going to need a third party mediator and wouldn’t Berenger be such a good fit? Ancel thought so. Laurent let it wash over him, occasionally interjecting to clarify things, like - “Berenger owns an art gallery, he can’t act as a mediator between a galactic empire and the UN.” Ancel replied, snippily, that Ber could do anything, actually. But it didn’t matter because they were going to go with the sentient telepathic slime-mould that had recently colonised Mars instead, which Ancel thought was a better idea than asking the Shi’ar, because they got feathers everywhere and Ancel thought it was disgusting. Ancel didn’t go around dropping his.
“Ugh,” he said, flapping his hand. “You know what they’re like. I prefer the slime mould. It’s gross, obviously, but the colours are nice.”
Laurent didn’t really know anything about slime moulds, so he just hummed noncommittally. Mars had always given him a headache, anyway. Dusty.
Ancel’s hand rattled at the bowl of emeralds. He’d seized one from the centre, and cracked at it with his teeth so Laurent saw it split in two and fall into his mouth. “Mhmmm!” Ancel exclaimed. “You can taste the spark in that one.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Laurent said automatically.
Ancel rolled his eyes, but swallowed the emerald. “So about your house guest,” he said, slyly.
Laurent, already on high alert, tried not to let a reaction show on his face. Ancel was a gossip with the nose of a bloodhound. “Mm,” he said. “Did Berenger say? I had to call out of the gallery.”
“Uh-huh,” Ancel said, narrowing his eyes. He was grinning, which sort of spoiled the effect. “But that was what… five days ago?”
“It was one night,” Laurent lied. Ancel started humming One Night Only under his breath and cast his eyes, meaningfully, to the open door of the guest bedroom. Laurent followed his gaze. A duffel bag was open on the floor. This could perhaps have been explained away but for the unmistakable gleam of Damen’s suit spilling out of it.
“Want to try again?” Ancel flipped an emerald into the air, caught it in his mouth, and winked.
Laurent snapped. “The hospital says I have to be under supervision!”
“Close supervision?” Ancel said, crunching away.
“Impersonal, abstract, supervision,” Laurent said. He scowled.
Ancel laughed. “I knew the second I got in,” he said smugly. “No way you could afford a snack like this. And,” he said, meditatively, or as meditatively as Ancel got, “Ber told me. Estienne told him. Don’t know who told Estienne, though.”
Laurent resisted the urge to put his hands over his face. “Ugh,” he allowed himself to say. “He really is just staying to help out while I heal.”
“Yup,” Ancel said and swallowed a stone whole. He stretched his arms above his head and settled into the sofa. He looked like a self-satisfied cat. “What does the bug think about him being back?”
Laurent blanked. The bug? Was Erasmus trying out a new moniker or something?
“Lauuu-reeeentt,” Ancel sing-songed. “Where is the bug, actually?” He pulled himself up on the sofa and looked around.
“What?” Laurent asked, perplexed. He had the strangest feeling. The inside of his ears felt itchy. His injuries throbbed.
Ancel narrowed his eyes. “Er, Earth to Laurent, you freak. Your kid? Who else?”
— gone.