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The night had been steady rain and streetlights. The windows blurred into amber smears, and the safehouse breathed with the faint, metallic sigh of old ventilation. Down the narrow staircase, nails squealing, wood swollen from the damp, Jonathan’s laboratory sprawled in a careful chaos that only he could understand: glassware in neat ranks, stainless trays like surgical altars, papers weighted by wrenches, a single desk lamp casting a tight cone of white.
He preferred the hum of an empty room. Chemicals didn’t lie; metal kept its promises.
He set the canister body on a felt pad and nudged it into the light. The new trigger assembly, if you could dignify something so small with the word, glimmered, all precise angles and coiled potential.
A diaphragm, a spring light enough to sneeze away, a gasket shaved thin as onion skin. Everything balanced against everything else. The difference between control and chaos could be measured in fractions of a millimeter.
Jonathan steadied his hands over it. Inhale. Align the threads. Modulate pressure. The little screwdriver turned with a polite click.
"And there we are" Jervis Tetch said brightly from the stairwell, as if completing Jonathan’s thought. "A rabbit hole for the senses"
Jonathan did not jump. He refused to jump. He only set his jaw a fraction tighter and adjusted his grip on the screwdriver.
Jervis’s shoes appeared first, polished black, just beginning to show the scuffs of city miles, then the neat line of his trousers, then his hands, one holding the rail, the other balancing a porcelain cup on a saucer. No one should be able to manage a tea service down that treacherous staircase. Jervis did it nightly.
He crossed the room with light, near-silent steps, something of the stage magician in the way he floated over obstacles. The lamp drew a gleam from his hat ribbon and the silver at his cuff.
Up close, he smelled like bergamot and starch and paper, like the inside of an old book someone had kept immaculately pressed.
It was almost addictive, the way the man smelled.
"Don’t–" Jonathan said, without looking up, "–put that anywhere near the acetates"
"Perish the thought" Jervis murmured, coming to stand just over Jonathan’s shoulder. His voice softened, the way one lowered it in a museum. "You’ve changed the valve"
"The old housing bled pressure" Jonathan explained, adjusted the loupe against his eye. The metal brightened; the world beyond the circle of magnification faded to a harmless blur. "We’re encouraged to learn from experience"
"Third person" Jervis said, charmed. "As if there were three of you at the bench and one of them might at last admit he’s tired"
Jonathan seated the diaphragm with tweezers, resisting the urge to throw a blanket over the entire workbench to protect it from errant teaspoons. "Some of us learned long ago not to show our throats"
"And some of us–" Jervis murmured, "–learned that a throat only stays safe if someone else watches it, too"
Jonathan’s fingers hesitated, the smallest stall, and then he slid the gasket into place. Precision returned like breath.
He could ignore Jervis when he stood across a room, when the hat and the riddles and the terrible jokes lived at an angle to his work. He could even ignore him at a nearby table, turning pages, muttering at the news.
But not close. Not leaning in, not warm at his shoulder, not humming some nonsense melody under his breath while his tea slowly perfumed the air. Not when the music of him threaded itself between the clicks of Jonathan’s tools and tugged at rhythm itself, at the pulse he kept so precisely regulated.
"Careful" Jonathan warned when the saucer shifted perilously near the reach of an elbow.
"It hasn’t fallen" Jervis replied, all innocence. He slid the cup an inch along the table, like that solved anything, and peered down into the lamp’s tight circle of light. "How brave the spring is. All that tension. All that yearning"
"It’s a spring" Jonathan said, and because he was unwise enough to be human, he heard the rest of that sentence in his head: it behaves.
The spring skittered free.
A glint, a sound like a mosquito, and the coil leapt from the tweezers and disappeared. Jonathan felt the absence hit like a skipped heartbeat. He lifted the loupe, forced his gaze to widen. Don’t move his elbow, don’t breathe too sharply, don’t—
"Ah" Jervis said, and then knelt, hand flicking out with a conjurer’s grace. "Naughty thing"
Jonathan wished, for a moment, that Jervis would use such a tone towards him. He immediately banished such a thought.
When the man rose again and laid the spring in Jonathan’s palm, his breath hitched. The contact was nothing, a brush of glove and skin, but Jonathan’s pulse jerked.
He could catalogue the physiological responses as they occurred: elevated heart rate, warmth under the sternum, narrowing of focus to a point that was emphatically not the work. But, of course, observation did not blunt sensation.
"Thank you" He managed.
"Don’t mention it. I’ll only make it rhyme" Jervis coughed delicately into his fist, a flourish that hid how pleased he was to have been useful, and then leaned again, nearer than before. "Have you chosen a name?"
He ignored the way he was suddenly hyperaware of his skittish breaths. "For the trigger?"
"For the canary in the cage" A tilt of the head at the canister body. "For the sweet song it sings when opened"
"It doesn’t sing"
"Everything sings" Jervis said, softer. "Some of it we only hear late"
Jonathan’s hands, obedient hands, returned to their task. He set the spring again, more carefully, like handling a thought so skittish it might bolt. The screwdriver turned and set the screw without complaint. A tiny seam aligned. The diaphragm sighed into its seat. The whole thing came together under pressure, control locked into place with a click so light only the person waiting for it would ever notice.
He exhaled.
"I’d like–" Jervis said, "–to propose a test"
"Without agent"
Jervis’s mouth tilted. "I suppose one must occasionally allow one’s beloved to keep his lungs"
Jonathan could not track the leap from ‘a test’ to ‘one’s beloved’ without his thoughts colliding. He drew in air, steady, flattened the tremor in the line of his shoulders, and secured the last two screws. "Stand back"
"Oh, I’d rather not"
"Then stand to the side"
Jervis complied with theatrical obedience, half a step, like a cat that shifts when you ask it to move without ever admitting the request applied to it.
He set his teacup, the dangerous, sloshing thing, on a stack of journals weighted with a bolt, which would have made Jonathan’s teeth ache had he not already expended his allotment of reaction on the word beloved.
He locked the canister into the cradle. In place of an ampoule, he had fitted a saline capsule; in place of needles, a perforated plate that whispered air rather than menace. He twisted the dial to prime the chamber. The needle rose. His blueprint held.
Jervis watched him with a softness that made concentration both easier and harder.
"Valve’s shallower" Jervis observed. "You’re not forcing the door; you’re… suggesting it"
"Less volatility" Jonathan explained. "More control"
"Like moving a teacup farther from the edge" The man sang, maddening and disarmingly earnest all at once.
Jonathan flicked the switch before he could lose himself in the other's voice.
The canister exhaled. A clear, obedient mist breathed from the ports, precisely measured, precisely brief, and dispersed as designed without lingering. No hiss, no cough, no treacherous eddy in the air, just the gentlest ghost of breath.
He felt the success down his spine like something uncoiling.
"It sings" Jervis whispered, delighted. "Do you hear it?"
Jonathan reached to close the assembly, and Jervis’s hand, fool that he was, settled, feather-light, on his sleeve to stay him. Not enough pressure to command. Only a question.
Jonathan stilled.
Jervis’s eyes flicked up to his. Up close, the blue of them was less bright than it seemed at a distance, softened by the lamp to something almost grey. His lashes stuck together where the damp had kissed them on the walk over; a smear of rain darkened the hat ribbon. He had a small cut on his cheek, probably from some jagged cup or thoughtless nail. He carried so much gentleness into such a sharp world.
"Tell me" Jervis said, not a rhyme, not a riddle. "How do you intend to build terror when you can’t even assemble a thought with me at your elbow?"
Jonathan had, at various points in his life, been asked questions with scalpels in them. He recognized the incision here: not cruelty. Clarity. The sort that sliced clean and left a stern opportunity for honesty.
"This is–" He broke off, set his mouth, tried again. "...difficult"
"Which part?" Jervis’s voice had gone quiet in a way that made the rain seem louder. "The part where the spring behaves as asked? The part where the mist obeys your will? The part where you pretend that keeping your throat alone is the same as keeping it safe?"
"You’re very fond–" Jonathan said, and hated the hoarseness of it. "–of the sound of your own voice"
Said as if he didn't love it all the more. As if he dreamed endless dreams of that voice.
"I am" Jervis agreed mildly. His hand slid down to Jonathan’s wrist, a touch light enough to withdraw without embarrassment should it be unwelcome. "But I can be fonder. Of other sounds. Like the one you make when the piece aligns and you know you have the world under your thumb again" He tilted his head. "Or the one you almost made just now, when I said beloved"
Jonathan could have laughed; the muscles of his face even twitched toward it. He did not. Laughter in a room like this was far too vulnerable. He had trained his reactions into narrower channels, built levees against old floodplains. They held, mostly.
Until the wrong hand brushed his knuckles retrieving a spring. Until the wrong voice threaded itself through the metronome of his work and tugged the beat off-center and called him, with ridiculous certainty, a thing no one had ever called him without consequence.
He shut off the valve. The canister stilled.
"You smell like rain" He said, which was, honestly, not much of a defense.
"Do I?" Jervis lifted his chin, sniffed the air as if trying to catch himself. "I thought I smelled of bergamot"
"Your cheek..." Jonathan said, unable to focus properly. "Is bleeding"
Jervis blinked, startled, as if the cut had started existing only after Jonathan named it. "Oh. That’s inconvenient"
He could only nod, eyes catching on the other's lips, cataloguing the movement with each syllable.
Jonathan turned from the bench. He hadn’t needed the first-aid kit for himself in months; planning had become its own prophylactic. He pulled the drawer, set the kit on the cleared corner, snapped the latch.
Jervis watched him with an expression Jonathan had no skill for interpreting in other people and had less in himself, some bruised tenderness that made him want to put the kit back and run a block in the rain and return with nothing changed so he could start again and choose better.
"Come here" Jonathan murmured.
Jervis obeyed as if the request were holy, leaning forward with a breath that made the room feel very small.
Jonathan carefully removed a glove before swabbing a pad with antiseptic. "This'll sting"
"I trust your hands" Jervis whispered.
Jonathan’s jaw tightened. He stepped close, too close, closer than he ever allowed anyone, and lifted the pad to Jervis’s cheek. The antiseptic bit; Jervis flinched only faintly, then stilled, eyes half-lidded.
Jonathan could feel his breath, warm and steady, ghosting against his own wrist. His thumb, bracing Jervis’s jaw, felt the fine line of bone beneath skin, the twitch of a smile threatening to rise.
He smoothed the bandage across the cut with exquisite care, fingers lingering longer than necessary. When it was done, he should have stepped back. He didn’t. He could so easily tilt forward and—
"There" Jonathan announced at last, voice low.
When he looked up, Jervis’s eyes were dangerous. Not with anything Jonathan knew how to counter. His gaze met Jonathan’s with something that felt far more dangerous than any toxin Jonathan had ever crafted
"You don’t show your throat" Jervis said, almost conversational. "But you look at mine like that"
Jonathan let go of his jaw, slowly, too slowly, and forced his fingers back to his own side. His chest felt tight. His thoughts, usually precise, stuttered like a skipped heartbeat.
"You are… a distraction" He said, as much to himself as to Jervis.
"Entirely" The man replied, and for once he didn’t rhyme, didn’t deflect. He simply smiled, small and knowing, the bandage stark against the pale of his skin.
Jonathan huffed, the ghost of a laugh at last, and immediately felt robbed by how grateful Jervis looked to have earned it. He closed the kit. The canister waited, complete, behaved and behaving; the mist had done what it was told; the spring had stayed. He could end the night there. Record the results. File the blueprint. Build five more before morning, each a little better than the last until the part of him that wanted perfection quieted enough to sleep.
Jervis touched the sleeve of his coat again. "Come have tea" He said, as if he were offering a sedative. "Away from your caged canary. I promise to keep it miles from your acetates"
"Teacups have a migratory instinct" Jonathan returned dryly, but he went. He flipped off the desk lamp and let the room widen back into itself, the safehouse returning to damp walls and weary floorboards.
He followed the man back up the stairs, watching the velvet waistcoat move with each step. a table Jervis had colonized with all the confidence of an invading kingdom.
They sat. The rain pressed its face to the window like an eager child. Gotham’s sirens braided together and unbraided again. Jervis poured. He poured for Jonathan first and then for himself, and if some vestigial part of Jonathan waited for the teacups to escalate toward disaster, they did not. The tea steamed a nonthreatening gold. It smelled like a citrus orchard imagined by a poet who had only ever read about sunshine.
"Eddie says" Jervis mused, "that some puzzles solve themselves when you look at them slantwise"
"Slantwise" Jonathan repeated, a prompt disguised as an clarification.
Jervis’s mouth turned up at one corner. "He rarely gives anything contextually, but he was right about slantwise. Courage lives there. So does truth"
Jonathan wrapped his hands around the cup; the heat sank into his fingers, up his wrists, through his bones. "You think I’m afraid"
"You govern fear, dear. I'm merely echoing words I've heard"
Jonathan sipped. The tea was strong, not nearly sweet enough. He sat with the taste. He sat with the thought.
Outside, a car sent a wave of water kissing the curb. Somewhere close, the pipes sighed. Jervis watched him with the attention of someone who wanted to memorize the minute a choice began.
"I have outlasted worse things than a question" Jonathan set the cup down, a gentle sound. "Just ask"
"I should hope so" Jervis only murmured. "You’ve been outlasting worse things since you were small enough to be carried away by the smell of a library"
Jonathan stared at him. "Don’t do that"
"Do what?"
"Learn me"
Jervis’s hands folded around his own cup. "If you didn’t want to be learned, Doctor, you’d have shut me out"
The word sat between them like a third cup. Jonathan could have refused it. He had practice. He’d learned to be sharper than anyone’s reach, to make a weapon of quiet, to keep himself inviolate by keeping himself unloved.
The mathematics of that had never surprised him: zero risk, zero comfort. He could do it. He could ask Jervis to leave, he could draw a line in the floorboards, he could set a canister between them like a guard dog and name it Good Sense.
"Jonathan" The man said, and it wasn’t a plea. It was only his name, spoken with a longing that took his breath away.
And Jonathan could only very simply say: "Stay"
They didn’t reach for each other, nothing so dramatic. Jervis did move, Jonathan did not fold into someone else’s coat to hide from rain and sirens and old stories. The safehouse breathed. The tea cooled. The canister at the bench downstairs did not sing.
"Will you" Jervis said after a little while, "let me be near when you test it live?"
Jonathan’s head turned. In the window’s reflection, they were but two smudges of light. "No"
"Of course" Jervis’s smile widened a notch, as if Jonathan had said far more words than he’d used.
"You are..." Jonathan said slowly, "not an asset to my efficiency"
"I should hope not" Jervis said, delighted. "I should like to be an asset to your inefficiency. To your abnormalities. To your deviations from murderous monologue in favor of tea"
Jonathan felt the shape of a future night then: the bench lamp, the spring, the breath that went obediently where it was told. And over his shoulder, the hum, the tapping spoon, the voice that invented a rhyme for everything except the things that mattered most.
The tea wasn't sweet enough, but his shoulders had stopped trying to remember how to tense. He could feel his heart without resenting it for beating.
"You are–" He repeated, as if stating a result in a lab book, "–a distraction"
"Entirely" Jervis parroted back, sincere to the point of solemnity.
Jonathan's gaze moved, observing every molecule of the man's face. He catalogued every breath, memorizing every flicker of a smile. It wasn't a grasp. Wasn't a claim. Just the smallest, most unscientific observation.
His eyes slid, dipping down across Jervis's bandaged cheek and to his lips. It could have been accident. It could have been design.
"Good" Jonathan said, barely more than breath.
"Good" Jervis echoed, like a man signing his name to a grant he never thought he’d win.
The rain steadied. The safehouse exhaled. Neither of them spoke. Somewhere adjacent to the world, a spring held its tension with perfect, faithful grace. If anyone were to ask him later what changed, Jonathan would not be able to diagram it. He would not be able to pin it to the board with clever words and name it.
He would only be able to say that control, properly understood, was sometimes the same thing as seeing things slantwise.