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It's not midnight, not yet. Sofia's got a couple hours until she meets up with everyone else. Pete says he's got something planned. Rowan even showed up from Fairy. Kug deserves as much. But there's something she needs to do first. So, a couple hours before midnight on New Year's eve, she heads down into the subway with a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich. It's from the same place Kug got for her that first time they met, back before she knew about the Unsleeping City and thought he was just a drunken hallucination.
She finds one of the shrines. Calling it a shrine feels weird, but there's no other word for it really. Homeless folks leaving pictures of a rat in a cape scrawled on scraps of paper, bits of mouldering cheese, a melted down stub of wax that used to be a candle, and an everything bagel. There are shrines like this all over the city, if you know where to look. She's not sure who started it, but they've been cropping up and even the little critters leave the offerings alone. Patron saint of New York's abandoned and destitute. Patron saint of all the creatures that roam her dark corners. That's who Kug was in life, and that's who he is in death.
"Watch out Saint Francis," she laughs under her breath, voice wobbling, "Ya got some steep competition."
She hasn't gone to Church in a long time, but she still talks to Kug and she thinks that could count as praying. She sets the sandwich down on the altar and closes her eyes, trying to sense Kug around her.
"I've been sober for almost three months now," she tells him quietly. "It's been hard, and I miss you. But I know that you wouldn't want me fuckin' up my life just cause I miss you. So wherever you are, just know that we're thinking' about ya today."
She lights the candle with a cheap zippo someone left behind, and somewhere in the cosmos a hairy baby dances on the wind.