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He opens his eyes at the end of a long and familiar hallway. Everything is where it’s supposed to be — blankets folded at the foot of the bed, closet closed, the painting on the wall straightened out. It’s early, so the light from the window is gray, but not exactly cold. Someone is making coffee and humming in the living room, evidently unaware of him.
He slides out of bed as quietly as he can manage, folding the duvet back up and smoothing it over. Old habits, though something tells him a made bed hardly matters at the moment. Maybe it’s the song in the hallway — the one that warms the room as he rises, but stops as soon as the floorboards creak under his feet, halfway to the source of it.
And the singer blanches as soon as she sees him, fear sweeping in to take over the music. It would break his heart, were he not so utterly certain that he’s no longer walking in a world sharp enough to shatter the things that fall to it.
“You can’t be here,” she chokes out, her voice strangled as she closes the book in her hand and pushes it as far away from her as she can, all the way across the table. “How did they — how did you get in here?”
“This is my home,” he answers, shrugging and opening his arms.
But she seems welded to the couch, eyes wide and terrified, barely blinking.
“I can’t do it over,” she admits, her mouth twisting into a grotesque, toothless smile. “I’m so sorry. I don’t have it in me.”
Grace drops his hands back to his sides, a narrow line darkening between his brows.
“Eva,” he tries, uneasily, but one step closer at the end of her name than the start of it, keeping both his palms open and facing her the entire time. “Eva, there’s — what do you mean, ‘do it over?’”
“Don’t mock me,” she spits, and it would hurt him if she didn’t flinch and immediately follow it up with a strangled, “please.”
He crosses the rest of the room in three long strides to kneel at her feet. There’s more silver in her hair than he’s ever seen, but it looks healthy, like it belongs there. Strong enough to stay a while, he thinks, as if the color is something she asked for.
“I want to stay with you here,” he admits, the truest thing he’s ever said. “Will you let me?”
He’s worried she’s going to cry, and something about the look of it on her face, the tremor clinging to the new lines carved into it, almost makes him nervous. Almost, but the shaking in his hands now is so muted as to be virtually undetectable, as if the air itself will not admit his fear.
“How do I know you’re not here to send me back?” she whispers, staring hard at the ceiling.
She thinks I’m tricking her. He can’t say he understands exactly what she’s scared of — he’s never known, not really, though he can tell that whatever is pulling all the color out of her face now, at the end of everything, is the same as what did it during her life — but he’s certain that it cannot hurt her here, wherever they are, in this apartment that’s not quite the same as the one he fell asleep in last night.
Gently, because he doesn’t know what else to do, he covers her knees with both his hands. Even through the fabric, she feels cold. Wordlessly, frowning, he unfolds the blanket draped over the arm of the sofa and smooths it over her legs.
“Look at me,” he says, because he missed her, and maybe if she gets a good look at him she’ll see that he doesn’t have it in him to be anything but honest with her now.
She listens, though it’s not really an order.
God, but I missed the fog out there, he thinks, studying the blue of her eyes for the first time in so many decades.
“But you don’t believe in anything,” she hisses, squeezing her eyes shut after the briefest glance, like the sight of him burns. “You can’t be here if you don’t believe in anything. It doesn’t work —“
“I love you,” he interrupts, by way of explanation. His thumbs have taken to tracing lazy, quiet orbits around her bones of their own volition, which seem to remind her that he exists. “I love you,” he repeats, because he can, and he was too late the first time, “and I kept your medallion. With the saint on it.” He chuckles, bringing a hand to her hair. “Maybe that was enough for God.”
“That’s not how God works.”
“Whoa,” he says, raising one of his hands in the air in mock surrender, though he keeps the other tangled stubbornly in the silver-red hair at the base of her neck, completely unwilling to let go of it now that he’s held it in his hands. “Take a seat, religious leaders of the world. Eva Stratt has arrived to tell God how to do His job.”
She tilts her head at that, furrowing her brow for the briefest moment. Making up her mind about something. He hopes she decides to trust him.
He hopes God will let him die properly if she doesn’t.
“Your hair is the same,” she comments at the end of it, reaching out to brush some of it off his face. “Mine went gray, but yours is the same as it was when you left.”
He squints at the faint reflection of himself visible in her eyes. She’s right, I guess. He’s back to being a blonde, the dusting of snow that defined his later years apparently replaced with the mop of a man several decades younger.
“I promise it looks better this way,” he explains. “I did not pull off the octogenarian Santa Claus look very well.” Grace combs the hand that had been resting at the nape of her neck through the rest of her hair, raising his eyebrows just slightly and allowing the corners of his mouth to pull into a tiny grin. Longer than it used to be, too. “You, on the other hand —“
“Oh God.” She rolls her eyes.
“I was going to say that it suits you,” he laughs. “The silver. It matches your eyes; it suits you.”
She looks at him strangely, her expression unreadable for a split second before it softens into something approaching a smile. An attempt.
He wants to look at nothing but this, forever.
“Can you answer my question?” he asks, dropping his voice so as not to spook her again, bringing his hands to both sides of her face and tracing the lines of it carefully, comparing them to the constellations he named after her. He presses his lips into the corners of her eyes, the wrinkles wrought there from almost-smiling, delighted by how much the bags underneath them seem to have faded through the years. Well-rested at last. “Will you let me stay?”
She turns it over in her mind as he watches, the fog in her eyes breaking the gray light from the window into a thousand tiny rainbows. They dance there, prismatic, and so bright that they almost seem fearless.
Even here, Grace thinks, she earns her name.
“Stay,” she decides, nodding. Then specifies: “That’s an order.”
And he loves her, so he follows.