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It’s nine in the morning when she steps into the general shop in South Soffit and says to Tony’s little brother, “Marry me. They killed him and now they want to sell me to the pig that did it. You need to marry me.”
She hasn’t taken her hat off, it’s sewn as intricately as the embroidery in her sleeves and all of her is too expensive to be seen next to Joe’s five-cent gum and seven-cent bog rolls. Straight as a board, generations of good breeding and etiquette lessons built into a monument of pain. Not the pain that strikes you down, but the pain he’s seen in soldiers who fight harder when they’ve been stabbed, who spit and bite because they’ll probably be dead from infection in a week but by hell they will rage before they’re too tired to. A monument and a reminder. It scrapes away the smirk he hasn’t felt since he killed those things that were meant to be monsters. He can’t look at her, so he looks at the floor and keeps sweeping.
“Look Miss Wyndemere, I’m sorry you didn’t get to marry my brother but I ain’t got nothing for you. My ma’s in Grayslate and Casey’s head got blown off after a court martial.” He scoffs at the ground like he doesn’t care.
“But now if you’d asked me while I was juiced up at the victory parade a week ago…”
It’s a poor joke. The smiles had cracked off of him like rotten paint with her demands and they don’t come back now, so nobody laughs at all.
She steps forward and the broom handle slaps into the floor when it falls, bouncing twice.
“Tony is dead because I loved him.” And this close, he sees eyes red from tears weeks and months old, before he got back to Newfaire and learned everything that happened. The grip on his shirt collar is nothing he can’t shake off, she is a lady brought up with soft hands and he is a soldier. He doesn’t move.
“I won’t give Clyburne what he wants. Do you understand me? That family will die screaming before they put a baby in me over Tony’s dead body. They can’t put me in the sanatorium for running away if I’m marrying you. I don’t care if you don’t have anything for me, if I can’t take care of his little brother after what happened because of me-”
The letting go of his shirt is almost violent, but the tremble in her hand is unmistakable. He can tell she’s trying to gather herself to say something else. It’s suddenly unbearable to watch.
“Yeah, alright.”
She blinks.
“I’ll marry you, lady. Since you put in all this work to woo me.”
He does snort then as her face jumps from relief to acceptance to exasperation in lightning-quick succession.
“And just so you know,” he says later when they’re walking away with marriage license in hand, “I won’t blame you for running off when your hands start cracking to hell in the winter. Only job you’re gonna get around here is washing, and the broads on my street are always complaining about it when the cold comes around.”
He’s half joking, but he hears the documents crinkle in her fist.
“I’m not running off.”
“Good man,” he grins just to have something to grin about. “Let’s go pawn off this jewelry you were talking about.”
It’s both jewelry and dresses, and between her knowledge of seasonal fashion prices and his bartering, they come out with more than he expects. They find a tiny single apartment high up to the Eaves with soot-stained walls and a mess of wires right above the door, but Sean knows the owner and it’s far away from where he grew up.
After everything is settled and they’re looking at the bare walls with the one thin cot by the window, night long since fallen, he offers to take the floor.
“Oh, and I see you’ll be sleeping on the floor until we can afford another bed to put in space we don’t have? Wash up and get in, Mr. Finnerty.”
“Sir, yes sir, miss romantic.”
It’s uncomfortable and awkward, with her sandwiched between the wall and him half-hanging off into the cold. They hadn’t gone out for coal yet, and the creaky furnace stood empty as they huddled under the bedraggled blanket Sean brought with him.
“So Miss Wyndemere,” he says, shifting so his leg doesn’t cramp, “is married life working out to be everything you wanted?”
“I’m not a Wyndemere anymore. Just call me Jane.”
“Oh thank god, I think I would have an aneurysm if I’d had to call you Missus Finnerty.”
He knows he’s said the wrong thing when he feels her stiffen behind him. It’s strange to remember she might’ve wanted to be a Missus Finnerty once, when he’d only meant he didn’t want to talk about his ma. He wonders for a brief disquieting moment if she’s going to cry.
“Tony said you’re the funny one,” just Jane says eventually, dry as a bone, “you know people are going to be calling me that all the time, now.”
He groans theatrically until she carries stubbornly on, “It’ll have to be that way, because if my father senses an opening for a second that he can take me back without public disapproval, he will. People in The Soffit talking might not mean much, but talk travels. They’ll gossip about me wasting myself, but it means everyone will know I’m taken.”
The dark is cold and heavy with the future.
“Nice family you’ve got,” he mutters.
“No. That’s yours.”
“Well, Jane,” he grunts as he throws a hand over his shoulder at an awkward angle to shake. “Guess you’re part of it now, technically. I don’t need no one looking after me, but I appreciate you fucking over those bastards best you can. Just Sean, at your service.”
It feels like a sort of alliance when she actually takes his hand and shakes it once, twice. The next nights are easier as they get used to the close quarters, Sean perhaps quicker from his time crowding around in trenches. A bigger blanket certainly helps when Jane wrangles together scraps and begins quilting as fast as she can.
Because she was right about letting people know, they let themselves be seen together. The gossiping neighbors coo at her runaway story without knowing the rest and call them darling as Sean lets her hold his arm going up the rickety stairs to their floor. It’s more for safety’s sake than anything, this high up in the apartments falling is a death sentence.
Two days after moving in, he caves and calls in Auntie Bea. Jane’s cooking is atrocious, to her absolute frustration more than his, and Beatrix helps get it to edible so they aren’t wasting hard-bought potatoes. She pinches his cheek for not telling her he moved out of the boarding house and got married, Jane watching in bewilderment.
“Aw, Auntie Bea, there wasn’t any cake, you didn’t miss anything.”
“No, but I’m glad you’ve got someone making sure you change your pants, now. You need to get those suspenders cleaned, even if you aren’t rolling in mud. I’ll make sure to tell Peggy you’re doing well next time I see her, hm? The rest of the neighborhood’ll be glad to hear young Sean’s gone and got married.”
They look at each other, and he can tell even as she’s smiling that Auntie is still as sharp about things as always. When he comes back from fetching them milk for the cornbread, he overhears her holding Jane’s hands in the kitchen.
“You’re very brave,” her hushed voice travels, rough with emotion as it reaches him at the crack in the door. “It’s going to be hard and nothing you’re used to, living out here. I’ll teach you as much as I can, there’s jobs for washing and I can rustle up a good board for you. The new stuff they’re trying to sell snaps after a hundred good washes.”
He pauses long enough to let Jane say thank you, then kicks the door as he walks in to be obvious.
“Did you miss me?” He asks grandly, presenting the bottle like a prize. It helps with forgetting how subdued the ‘thank you’ had been, like smallness in the face of safety. They eat the cornbread crowded on crates meant for the junkyard. It’s as good as any he’s had.
A week later when the cops come knocking, Jane smiles angelically at the door like a trained aristocrat, somehow entitled and apologetic at the same time. Commanding their attention away from Sean, she says,
“I’m sorry to have worried my family, but I’m not missing. The note I left explaining my departure must have been misplaced— you see, I’m married now.” She holds up a hand shyly, the ring he picked up in the pawn shop as an afterthought glinting dully in the lamplight. After that they apologize for the disturbance, unsure as Jane holds her husband’s elbow, demure and concerned.
“Thank you, officers. Please let my family know I’m alright,” she waves as they depart, confused to not be dragging in a man for kidnapping.
He whistles, low and impressed, as they watch the two struggle their way down the landings a safe distance away.
“You didn’t leave a note, did you?”
“No.”
He shakes the waiting fight from his arms as they close the door.
“You’re a menace, Jane Wyndemere.”
Their first fight a week later is over Auntie Bea getting Jane a job at the sanatorium.
“It’s a shitstorm in there, you hear about doctors fucking nurses and patients that can’t say otherwise. You’re not some big-time lady anymore, nobody’s gonna say dick if anything happens to you.”
“I’m not going to even see any of the doctors, Sean,” she retorts hotly, hand clenched on the back of a chair as they face off across the uneven table they managed to scavenge. “I’ll be washing sheets and things underneath where the patients live. The last girl they had passing notes got sick, and Auntie Bea can’t be there every shift. What if your mother had something to say to you and couldn’t get a letter out?”
“That’s not any of your damn business,” he shouts instead of speaks, sees red instead of her face, so damn stubborn he wants to shove the things that happen to good people in her face and make her understand. It’s the fight inside him that gets through the red, first. And what he sees with that distant cold part of himself that knows how to beat a man into the ground, is that Jane Wyndemere doesn’t know the strife of violence. She isn’t afraid of the way he’d slammed his hand into the table, the way he’d shouted. She won’t back down from this because unless he’s going to make her afraid, she’s too privileged to know she should be. In the moment of knowing, he hates himself more than anything in the world.
“Maybe it’s not,” she’s hissing, unaware, “maybe you think it’s stupid to risk it, but I can’t do nothing if doing something is going to help. I can’t do a lot of things, I didn’t do a lot of things. But I can do this.”
He scrubs a hand over his face, growling under his breath.
“Fuck,” he says, quiet, “fuck.” Jane is still staring at him with fire when he croaks out, “you sound like Casey.”
“I’m not Casey. Nothing’s going to happen to me, Sean.”
“This is really stupid,” he says at the table, but they both know he’s giving up.
“Sometimes you have to do something stupid.”
“Now that’s stupid.”
“It’s not.”
“Is.”
Without looking up he can see the exasperation already in her brows and her mouth, the ‘are you seriously arguing like a kid right now?’
“You couldn’t have done anything about Tony,” he mutters instead of lifting his head. Across the table, he knows she’s freezing.
“I’ll reserve my own judgement for that if you don’t mind, Mister Finnerty.”
“Alright alright, don’t have a conniption. Just wanted to get that out there, since he would’ve knocked me over the damn head if I didn’t say it. And don’t go ‘Mister Finnerty-ing’ me when you’re mad, will you? I’ll get hives.”
It’s her that has a conniption, or at least as close to a lady with aristocratic manners drilled into her since ten years old can have a conniption, when she finds out he hasn’t written his mother. They fight again, and he storms out to have a smoke. In the middle of the night, all alone on the street, he should’ve seen it coming after what happened to Tony for the crime of trying to marry Jane Wyndemere. And here he is, the lucky bastard that went through with it, he thinks, laughing as he brings one of the thugs’ faces to his knee and hears a crack. It’s the most alive he's been since he doesn’t know when— and then one of the bigger ones hooks an arm around his neck and he can’t laugh anymore. He’s choking around it when he hears her eighty feet away and closing.
“You let go of him, you dirty, ratbag, cowardly scoundrels, or I’ll- I’ll-”
They never find out what she would do, because the sight of a raging half-hysterical woman with a frying pan out in her nightgown is enough of a distraction for Sean to get out of the grip and start knocking teeth out.
Easy as pie, he thinks as the last one’s face is smeared across the sidewalk.
“Easy as pie,” he pants around what he realizes is a split lip. Then he remembers that he's been smashing a man’s skull in in front of Jane for some time, and she looks frightened. He swallows, his harsh breathing suddenly the loudest thing in the darkness.
“We have to go back inside,” she says, voice unsteady.
He gets off the ground and is surprised when she gasps like she’s seen the devil. Whirling to see if anybody got up, he’s utterly disarmed when she snaps at him for moving.
“You’ve been stabbed, stop it.”
He looks down to see blood blooming at the side of his waist, just far enough back to be a pain to stitch.
“Oh this little thing? Not bad for beating three guys, yeah?” There’s the taste of blood on his teeth when he grins and his lip hurts as it stretches against the cut.
“Hey hey hey, easy on the goods,” he can’t help but laugh, still high from the fight as she grabs the front of his ripped shirt to drag him towards the stairs.
“You’re an idiot, Sean Finnerty,” she says when they’re inside and she’s closing the curtains, low and deadly serious. Always serious.
“Eh, far enough from Mister Finnerty,” he chuckles until he turns and sees her wiping away furious tears.
“I’m alright,” he says, suddenly feeling like he’s under some horrible disadvantage. It should be Tony here, not him.
“No, you’re not. You got stabbed. They were going to kill you.”
“Well, nothing I’m not used to, then.” There weren’t even any guns, he was going to say, except he can already tell the first bit didn’t help. Jesus, he thinks instead with a kind of panic he suspects his brothers might’ve felt when they made him cry right before ma was coming back. He suspects they’d also tease him for not knowing how to talk to a girl.
“Well,” he says again, sounding lame even to himself, “let’s have your needle and thread. I’m gonna need help with the whole being stabbed situation.”
He teaches her the right stitch for flesh instead of cloth, and she does a remarkably steady job. Without complaining about the blood, even. It does still hurt like a bitch, and he swears about it while assuring her it’s fine. He’s fine.
Afterwards, when they’ve cleaned themselves as best they could in the washbasin and lay drained in bed, she talks into his shoulder. They’d exhausted the awkwardness of being close weeks ago in favour of being able to relax after a long day.
“If you died, I’d never forgive myself.”
“Jane.”
“We were arguing, I didn’t tell you not to go out there, they already murdered Tony, I should’ve known-”
“Jane, you gotta quit your worrying. I’m fine and now that we know what to look out for it’ll be fine. It’s gonna take more than a few guys to get me.”
“No, you shut up. If you can’t accept that people worry about you, think about what happens to me if you’re gone and they win.”
“Auntie Bea-”
“Auntie Bea is the sweetest woman in the world, but she can’t keep my family from taking me if my husband is dead.”
In the silence, his stitches ache.
“I won’t go back to them,” she whispers, harsh with emotion, “so you better not die.”
“Yeah,” he replies eventually, swallowing the protests, the reasons why she shouldn’t want him to live.
“Yeah, alright.”
By the time he's fallen asleep with her against his arm, he still hasn't come up with a way she’d be better off with him dead.
Aquiessing somewhat, he’s more careful. Only public spaces when he can help it, checking to see if anyone’s tailing him, letting Jane drag him to a photographer for his birthday he never told her about.
Auntie Bea, he thinks, smiling ruefully as he sits stiffly in front of the camera. When the developed photo is handed back to them in an envelope a week later, he takes one look and complains that he looked like he had a stick up his ass.
“That’s just good posture. Now at least sign your name as I tell your mother for you how you’ve been doing.”
“Geez, you couldn’t lie a little bit?” He winces, reading her perfect cursive on the back of the picture. It’s a straightforward account of when he was attacked and his enthusiastic eating habits.
“Should tell her you came out with the good pan we spent extra on. Would’ve sauteed those palookas right into submission.”
“Well I don’t know,” she says, entirely serious as she seals the envelope with a finger and some washbasin water. “I haven’t written to my family much, and when I did it was very simple.”
“Yeah?”
“My father wanted to know how my studies were progressing while he was away. With my brothers, it was more part of being a lady than really knowing what the other was up to. Seasonal courtesies and such.”
“You have brothers?”
“Yes, they’re both much older than me. We never spoke much, I don’t think we knew what to do with each other.”
“That’s shit.”
She looks up from the envelope, surprised at his seriousness.
“They’re older than you and they didn’t help you when Tony died?”
“We aren't siblings like you and your brothers, Sean,” she tells him matter-of-factly, “I honestly didn’t think family could be close at all until I met your brother. I’m not hurt for not knowing them well.”
He looks at her like she’s grown another head.
“Give me that stupid photo.”
“What?”
“The photo, give it to me.”
“I’ve sealed it-”
“I’m gonna write something alright? Now give it here.”
In cramped lettering at the margins of Jane’s cursive and taped up in a cut envelope, Margaret Mary Finnerty reads the first words her youngest son has given her since he was sixteen. It reads, ‘write to Jane about cooking.’ Short and irritated like he’s snitching on his brothers when he’s seven and can’t bear to talk about what he’s done wrong. She cries and smiles and cries some more. Her baby boy, still trying to help people. The photo is hidden in the dresser, and she takes it out to picture him as the man he's grown up to be, not the boy waving from the boat taking him off to war.
Sean wrote the words, he knows that. So it's his own fault then when Jane calls him over to the stove saying, “taste this,” and he ends up standing there with tears down his cheeks over chicken noodle soup.
She does a genuine double take, looking as alarmed as he felt when she'd cried during the stabbing incident. He has the good courtesy to snicker at least, if a little wetly.
“Never seen a man moved by your cooking?”
“It's your mother's,” she explains unnecessarily, shoving a piece of paper towards him like an excuse. Sean scans over the familiar writing for a moment, the same that used to write the grocery lists he peered over his brothers’ shoulders to read, before he remembers he doesn’t deserve to be comforted by it yet. He hands back the letter and laughs at Jane’s apprehension until she’s frowning at his jokes again.
That night they eat the same soup that fed three hungry boys a decade ago. Sean feels at first sick at the reminder of who isn’t there, and then full and heavy in a way that invites sleep. It’s against his will, then, when he’s drying the cutlery for Jane that he realizes his ma is still taking care of him. Even if it’s with Jane’s help, even if he’s been useless at getting her out of that hellhole for months now, even if he left ten years ago to become a monster and hasn’t spoken to her since in case she could somehow tell from his writing.
He is sated and warm, and he cries at the unbearable softness of it. He cries so hard he nearly throws up and has to stop if only to keep it safely inside, his ma’s love that managed to reach him despite everything.
Jane’s hand is at his elbow when he finally raises his head long enough to stop smearing snot all over his sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” she says, looking dreadfully uncertain. The same smallness he’d heard through a crack in the door as Auntie Bea showed her kindness and safety.
He tries to bark a laugh, and it comes out more of a splutter.
“You didn’t do nothing,” he manages thickly.
“You don’t have to laugh if you don’t feel like it,” she replies, retrieving her hand as a part of that petulant seriousness comes back.
“See, if I didn’t, you wouldn’t take up the slack and then we’d be stuck here staring at each other with zero humour.”
“Go wash your face, Sean.”
The rest of the evening passes quietly, and there aren’t enough words between them to make any jokes at all. That night he sleeps so well Jane has to shake him awake in the morning. He writes to his ma about that Michael dropping a crate on his own foot and scaring half the cats on the street with the resulting scream.
Marion and the Lieutenant return the same week. Or at least, it seems that way. One day Marion is running down the street and enveloping Sean in is arms, and the next a crisp letter shows from The Eaves with ‘Nathaniel Trapp’ on the back.
“I’m not quitting,” he says as Jane inevitably finds out where he’s been going. It at least stops the utterly painful conversation they were having of her assuring him if he’s off courting Marion, she wouldn’t object except that it had to be quiet or her father might find grounds to force a divorce. And she’d sounded apolagetic about that too, until she’d seen his look of red-faced mortification and frowned in confusion. It’d all come out then, about the eldritch horrors and how it’s completely fine, even Auntie Bea is there.
Her eyes had widened furiously until they were almost more white than brown, and her voice dropped to a hiss like it does when she’s very angry.
“You’re doing this voluntarily?”
“And now you’re gonna tell me I’m an idiot again.”
“I wouldn’t have to if you weren’t acting like one!”
“Listen, sometimes you have to do something stupid. I’m not sweet-looking enough to pass notes under Grayslate, but I can shoot and fight.”
She scowls at her own words, hard.
“You're an ass.”
“So the lady does swear.”
“Don't change the subject.”
“But you love it, though.”
She makes a sound somewhere between a sigh and a growl, breaking to glare at the table. With a now practiced efficiency, she begins to clear the dinnerware.
“You remember what I said, Sean. You can't die.”
“You should probably take that up with god.”
“I'm serious. Promise me.”
They're looking at each other, and the smirk slips from his face by inches until it's gone. He doesn't say, ‘you're always serious.’ He doesn't say, ‘death do us part not enough for you?’
He says, “yeah, alright.”
And when she demands he repeat it back to her like an oath, he does that obediently too. No matter how much he doesn't want to. No matter how much she shouldn't want him to, if she knew the things he's done.
It's after a night of pummeling squid dogs to death and nearly dying himself that he notices the state of her hands. There really isn't any reason he should've noticed then, being bone tired at three in the morning when he's nudging her over to share the cot.
“Welcome back,” she mumbles into the pillow, voice slurred with sleep. It's unavoidable he should brush against her with the bandaged arm.
“Are you hurt?”
He snorts at how awake she suddenly sounds until he feels her hand in the dark, the touch off somehow.
“Why are you wearing your sewing gloves?”
She takes a beat too long to answer and he knows there's something being kept from him.
“I thought you wear them so you don't get the fancy fabric dirty,” he says and is already realizing of how pointless that is when Jane isn't working with some aristocratic silk anymore, now that he isn't just taking her casual explanation for granted.
“I do,” she replies defensively, until Sean catches her hand in his and she tenses as if in pain. He lets go but demands an answer that she reuctantly gives. Underneath the gloves, her hands are cracked and spotted with blood as she puts them back in his.
“I thought there's a rotary washing machine at Grayslate,” he says numbly.
“It broke last month. They just hired some more washerwomen, we're handling it until they buy a new one.”
“Fucking hell.”
“Don't start, it's not any different than this.” A prod in his injured arm.
“They're not gonna get a new one if it's been this long.”
“Like I said, it's no worse than you going out there and fighting monsters. I'm not going to die from a little pain.”
And he thinks he might’ve let it go then, if she didn't sound so distracted. Like it's not just her hands she was hiding.
“Did they touch you?” And he's holding her wrist suddenly, the place it wouldn't hurt to touch, the only place they hold each other when they're not sleeping so he can help her up the stairs.
“No- no, Sean, calm down. It's not that.”
But she's not telling him what's wrong, and she sounds so heartbroken he can feel the impotent rage already beginning to cloud his vision in red.
“I saw,” she says finally, gripping where he holds her wrist so hard it must be hurting her. He waits, limbs coiled as fight and violence and destroy, until a million years later she continues.
“The patient. They were- I think she's one of the more incoherent ones. They had her head attached to this machine, and it was hurting her.”
The fight recedes into helplessness inside him as she begins to cry, holding his good forearm between them.
“I think she looked at me through the door. I just walked away.”
“When was this?” He asks after a minute of Jane slowly gathering herself until she isn't sniffling anymore. It feels stupid and pointless, but he couldn't hold her properly while she kept his arm between them.
“A few weeks ago,” she says, voice thick.
“Fuck,” he mutters again, “we need to get you out of there.”
“No.”
“No?! You said there’s lots of new girls being hired to do laundry now, they can find someone else to pass notes for them.”
Still half-plugged by tears, her voice hardens unforgivingly as she lets go of him.
“If I can’t do this much while you’re saving the world, what use am I?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snaps, taken aback and trying to bark his way out.
“I know exactly what I’m talking about. You going out there and fighting something evil, all of you going out to fight. What did I do all my life except sit at home as people die? And apparently the- the kind of coward who will do it again, walk past a woman being tortured just because she sees things that aren’t there.”
She interupts him before he can say anything, angry and desperate in a way he’s beginning to recognize. “They’re not going to stop screaming if I’m not there to hear it. Why do I deserve not to be upset if they have to live through it? I’ll be fine. As long as you don’t die and my father doesn’t come looking for me, I’ll be perfectly fine.”
He doesn’t argue. Eventually, she goes slack next to him and he knows she’s gone to sleep. Alone in the darkness, he recalls swinging at squid dogs in that train tunnel forever, until the Lieutenant called him up the rope.
They don’t speak of it, but he fights her about letting him do the dishes from now on and eventually wins, though it takes him threatening her with both Auntie Bea and his ma. It feels stupid that it isn’t obvious, when he’s got two working hands.
“Just sit down, for crying out loud,” he shoos her towards the chairs afterwards, irritated. Five minutes later, when hes distracted ranting about Candela, he drops a plate flat side down and splashes suds and water all over himself.
She laughs for what seems like the first time. He’s almost smug, even as he protests about how anyone would yelp if they suddenly got doused. It only makes her dissolve into giggles, girlish like there is space for her to be soft. He thinks he’ll remember it for a long time.
The sleeve of Sean’s bitten shirt is repaired in neat, even stitching, and the blood ends up looking like a nasty ketchup stain, faded enough to be ambiguous. He has to walk around pulling his pants up every other minute for a day when Jane confiscates his suspenders. They come back shades brighter than he knew possible. She makes him rest, too, under threat of telling his mother.
Perhaps it’s how he’s caught off guard when she brings up inviting Marion around for dinner. She doesn’t take it when he says their place is too much of a shithole for hosting.
“I was serious, when I said it’s alright if you wanted to see him.”
“Jesus, Jane, and I was serious about never talking about that again.”
When she still doesn't look convinced, he huffs and stares determinedly out the window, jaw working.
“He likes this lady in our circle, Jean. Nice girl, a doctor.”
“You're modern adults, I don't see why you couldn't ask anyway.”
He coughs violently, trying to dislodge the coffee that shot up his nose.
“I thought the point was not to have me die, Janey,” he mutters grudgingly.
“You should tell him, if you love him like that,” she says, ignoring it. “I always think about how I should've told Tony more times before he was gone.”
“Don't bring him into this. If I messed around and gave your dad an inch he'd kill me himself.”
They're silent for a while, her sewing and him glaring at a train in the distance as it made its way slowly across the horizon.
“It was selfish of me, to ask that you marry me.”
“What?” He feels somehow like he'd been dropped into the ocean with no preparation or warning.
“You're still twenty-six, you could fall in love and it's not fair to ask you to wait until I'm barren before you can do anything about it.”
“You're only two years older than me!”
“Enough to know it was unreasonable.”
“Shut your face, Jane,” and because that's too harsh he tempers it quickly with, “alright, so I love that little idiot, maybe I'll get around to it someday, but it's not more important than your life.”
“What about your life, Sean?”
“What about my stupid life?”
“You deserve to be happy, too.”
“I don’t deserve shit.”
He’s not shouting, but he feels suddenly too much to think. How dare she be frightened for a monster. How could he have tricked her.
“You don’t know what I’ve done. You don’t know me.”
“Maybe I don’t,” she says slowly, and it cuts to the marrow. “But I think I’ve proven I’m more selfish than that. Maybe all people are, or maybe it’s something else, but I know there’s more than me who would hate to hear you saying that.”
He scoffs like it doesn’t hurt, wanting to make her see so that she’d stop talking.
“You wouldn’t if you knew. They wouldn’t if they knew.”
“You don’t know that unless you tell them.”
“What if I did something fucking unforgivable? What if I killed kids? What would you say about that?”
She stares at him steadily and his skin crawls, breathing heavily in forever and waiting for judgement. He can’t tell if she knows.
“I’d tell you the next time you see a kid in danger, you better save them. You better not hesitate.”
He sneers, dismissive.
“Thanks, but that wouldn’t bring the theoretical kids back.”
“No,” she says, brutal. “Whoever you hurt didn’t deserve to be a lesson for you to learn, but if you learn nothing from what you did then you’ve done worse than waste their life.”
“I’m sleeping at the chapter house,” he snarls on the way out. When she shouts to take the busy street he grits his teeth but shouts back that he will. There was Candela business the next day anyway.
LT is sleeping there, strangely enough, and later they stop fake Kingsley from pulling his spine clean out. It’s pretty terrible business, though not as terrible as seeing Lucas cowering in the corner of the tub. It’s good that there isn’t a gun in is hand. It would’ve been best if he wasn’t the one doing this, he thinks, telling the kid about the old vent trick.
There’s not even any time to breathe when Auntie Bea shows up, because the boy slaps him with a question so frightening he takes a few steps back. It would’ve been more steps straight out of the house if it weren’t for Jane in the back of his head, cold and serious.
You better save them, he thinks to himself bitterly, bile churning inside as he remembers the way his trigger finger had twitched. You better not hesitate.
“I’ll take the kid to Jane,” he hears himself saying. “Sorry to say, LT, but we don’t know how much your dad has to do with this after we found that stuff in the station. Likely he’s just keeping away the monsters, but someone who’s out of the loop might be safer.”
It’s how he shows up half-an-hour later, Lucas on his back as he climbs up to the apartment. Turns out he laughs a lot easier than Jane. It helps too that when he’s back there, Sean doesn’t have to look at is face.
“Need you to take care of the squirt while I go fight the horrors, sweetie.”
He gets an exasperated look for his trouble, but she grabs the front of is shirt before he can turn to leave.
“Don’t you dare die,” she whispers, the severity and helplessness of a lady left behind. He’d given away the danger of the situation somehow, after all.
“Yeah, alright.”
Surprised, he lets her yank him over for a kiss on the cheek that lands like a punch.
“Aw, well now I can’t die. Might be more where that came from.”
“Go save the world, idiot.”
He flashes a wink, and goes.
***
Unfortunately for his promise, he does die. It’s only thanks to Marion that it doesn’t stick, he’s told later as they hobble from the house-of-fucked-up-shit with the man’s unconscious body. He’d done a lot of soul plucking that took a bit of explaining for Sean to understand. Something to do with time and something to do with seeing the moment his had started to leave and snatching it out of the air to shove back in his body.
All he remembers is the monster that looked like him. Was him, wanting it’s mother and wanting revenge. In the darkness of what seemed like a dream, where the five evils of his life had been offered as payment. And he’d looked at them and said, I should kill you. You deserve to die more than anyone. He looked at them and he looked at them, imagining the way their brains would splatter on the wall and the way their screams would echo as he beat them to death.
And then he said, but I’ve got someone to go home to, and the missus already has a lot on her hands to be handling a husband with five murder charges.
Then he woke up.
Four people walk away, carrying the one who can’t, and they lived.
What happens afterwards is hard to say, but Sean will tell you it begins with a lady answering the door with the good cast-iron frying pan held aloft, and not even caring when it gets dropped on his foot because she’s thrown her arms around his shoulders.
Or maybe it begins when he, Marion, and Jean leave their badges with Candela, snickering like schoolkids over what they said to the walrus-like official.
Or maybe it’s when LT keeps to his promise and his ma is released with a wave of patients after public backlash.
Maybe it’s moving into a lower apartment, two pairs of married couples learning what they want to be to each other.
It’s hard to say. But the sun rises soft and quiet with the future.