Chapter Text
Fourth night on this floor, and I still haven't named the pigeon.
He shows up every evening on the ledge, gray and judgmental, looking at me like I owe him money. Neither of us pays rent here, buddy. Take it up with the building.
The unit's six floors up, across from the hospital. Somebody started renovating and gave up. Plastic sheeting, empty paint cans. The floor's dust and promises. There's one vent, low on the far wall.
I sit with my back to it.
Below the window, the city's holding a vigil for a man it doesn't know. Candles the whole block, and a kid's drawing of the mask taped to a bus shelter, curling at the corners. Six hundred minds down there, all humming the same note.
There's a word for that note. I'm not using it.
Here's what I know about this city. It gave Spider-Man a key. Big ceremony, brass band, a key to a city that never once asked where he sleeps. That's hero worship for you. Fireworks. Nobody stays to sweep.
A candle by the bus shelter goes out. Comes back on. Wind must've thought better of it.
The thread runs from my chest, out the window, across the street, into Heaven's loudest room, and into him.
There's no chart for the thread. The surgeons fixed what the bullet touched. The rest of him kept trying to drift off, and minds that drift that far don't come back on their own. So I hold the door. Four days, no sleep, both hands on a line nobody can see.
Night one I worked from the roof, in the rain, because I hadn't found this place yet. Surgery ran nine hours. The lead surgeon's mind is a metronome, tick, tick, no lyrics, and I hung on to it as hard as I hung on to him. Hour six, his heart tried to quit. The metronome didn't skip, so I didn't either.
By dawn my knuckles ached. I blamed the rain.
The hospital never shuts up. Two hundred minds begging in two hundred flavors.
His is the only quiet one.
I should say something about his mind, since I've been living next to it all week.
Most minds have a lobby. Doesn't matter how nice the person is. There's a front desk, a bored guard, a pat-down you don't get a vote on. You learn to wait in lobbies. You learn which ones keep cameras.
His doesn't have one. You're just in. Kitchen table, warm light, a chair already pulled out. Even in a coma. Even shot. I keep looking for the security and there isn't any. I have opinions about that. None of them survive the chair.
Mostly the job's boring, which nobody tells you about psychic vigils. Twice a night the dream goes dark, the rooftop, then the crack. I smooth it flat before it finishes loading. Apparently I hum while I do it. Unpaid overtime, for a guy who's never seen my face without a fight attached to it.
I eat when the pigeon shames me into it. There's a bodega on the corner that never sees me come in, which isn't the same as stealing, except it is. I leave crumpled bills under the door anyway.
Call it rent.
Across the street, one floor up from the candles, a man stands at a hospital window wearing a face that isn't his. Gun oil and apology, all the way down. Frank waves like the arm's borrowed too. The crowd cheers itself hoarse for him.
I could charge admission for what I know.
Thing about holding a thread this long. Your hands start remembering other threads.
Frost on a window that wouldn't open. Her voice with static in it, thin, thinning, two syllables pushed through concrete and—
The pigeon slaps the glass with a wing. Idiot bird.
I breathe out, and the window's just a window again. Candle wax and rain drifting up from the street.
Back to work. Hold his line, smooth his dream. I'm fine. Ask anybody within a kilometer, they'll say whatever I want them to.
He starts surfacing on the fifth floor's schedule, not mine.
Around four a.m. the machines get chatty. A nurse leans in and her mind does a small bright thing, disbelief with sugar in it. Doctors arrive in a clump. The building changes key.
And him. Climbing. Hand over hand up his own dark, toward the noise.
I let the thread pay out. Little more. Little more.
Slack.
Slack means dead. Last time it was two syllables and frost on a window—
Breathing. He's breathing. Sixty-two a minute and climbing, eyes open, a nurse laugh-crying into her elbow.
Slack just means finished. Means he doesn't need holding.
I sit there with four days of nothing in my hands.
The tired clocks in the second the job clocks out. Four days awake, holding a stranger's mind shut with mine, and my body files it under Tuesday. Someone should probably be scared of that. Jury's out on whether it's me.
I pack. Packing's one bag, and the bag was never unpacked, so mostly I stand up and put on a strap. Four steps to the door.
That's when it comes.
Down the slack line, faint and on purpose. Not a leak. Addressed.
Thank you.
The humming. The smoothing. Four days of me sitting in his walls. He knew, and he waited till he could aim it at me.
Took you long enough. I think it half a second too late for it to count as a comeback.
My hand finds the back of my neck. Flat skin. Nothing there anymore.
I could answer. Forty feet of street, a kilometer of range. I could set it down on his kitchen table with the light still on.
I put the bag down instead.
The candles below are still doing their one note. The pigeon shuffles along the ledge, gray, unimpressed, staying anyway.
Tomorrow I'll name him.