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chryzure-archive · 1 year

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are the memories salvation or prison?

ALT TITLE: drowning, drowning

AUTHOR’S NOTE: see, now i want to write the gala scene i referenced in this.. chryzure anguish!!!

———

Azure remembered lots of things. And that was his prison, of sorts—though it also existed as the only chink of light, the only half-semblance of comfort he could find here.

Even so, he battled his way from memories spent happily, knowing that their origin was only meant to keep him docile. Sometimes, he did it with great success. Others, he was discovered before he could properly resurface, and he’d be shoved deeper than before.

Azure tried not to think of how much time was lost to his failures. He still had not woken long enough—nor conveniently enough—to find a calendar. The only hints he uncovered were the differing shades of London grey. Pale grey for winter, dark and heavy grey for spring storms, slate grey for the in between.

That morning, Azure woke successfully—subtly enough, at the very least, though the dreams tugged at him with her fingers.

Always tempting to listen to her, even when the words were only spoken in her voice. He didn’t even bother to get her cadence right, much less her word choice.

When he opened his eyes, he found himself preening in front of a mirror.

Merde.

His eyes slid from the reflection of himself, and he instead focused on the room contained within the mirror.

It reflected the stark blankness of the room beyond.

His apartments, technically—not that it looked like it. Cold, elegant, and utterly, entirely grey. Silver bordered charcoal. The marble flooring gleamed silvery-white. Granite surfaces where it mattered, and just a glimpse of a slate-grey bedspread in the corner of the mirror. The same color of a London sky about to break open over the earth.

He lived in these quarters, yes, but still he was desperately unfamiliar with them.

Even his own face, reflected in the smooth glass of the mirror (silver-backed—grey, grey, grey) had the quality of a stranger’s.

Watching in that horrifically detached way he’d come to know, Azure’s reflection gelled his hair back in an understated, classy style he never would’ve been able to do before he’d gotten a haircut he didn’t remember getting. More stuck out to him, differences unaccounted for by his own recollections. The dark circles under his eyes, studiously covered with powder. The resulting pallor of his skin, brightened by slight cosmetics. The exhausted stoop of his body worn slightly wrong, hidden under strong, sharp clothes.

The smell of death, however, could never quite be covered up. Azure could smell the stink of it, even under the cologne. It was one of the few things he found amusing about this situation.

No matter what he did, he couldn’t escape the fact that he was rotting in the ground, and that Azure was the one that truly lived on.

But, at the moment, he couldn’t do much but watch. He watched, and he grew angrier and angrier.

He’d had only a few moments of lucidity since the first night he drowned in the darkness. Quick flashes, where he could move his hand. Where he looked out from his eyes and they were his. Where he uttered a sound from his own lips.

Where he’d opened his mouth against a familiar mouth, soft and desperate, and he’d pulled back to see her frantic eyes.

Azure thought about that one the most.

Chryseis, he thought, wanting so badly that his soul crumpled with it.

Did that kiss mean she knew? Did that kiss mean Mordecai knew?

Azure tried not to worry about the consequences that befell her after he’d sunk into oblivion again. He had to think only of the kiss, her hands sliding along the back of his neck, her slight frame folded into his. It was the only thing keeping him grounded.

Chryseis, he thought again.

His reflection’s movements stuttered, then came to a stop altogether, his hand frozen at the side of his head. His eyes grew thoughtful—more like they looked inward than at himself.

Dreamily, he lowered his arms. Placed the comb on the counter.

“You’re awake again,” he murmured to Azure.

Azure didn’t answer.

His reflection looked downward. His long black eyelashes cast a shadow over his eyes, until it didn’t look like he had any eyes in those hollows to begin with. The corners of his mouth tilted upward faintly.

“Were those dreams not good enough?” he asked.

Azure didn’t answer to that either.

The reflection turned his head, until Azure peered into the corner of the mirror instead of directly at the approximation of himself.

“Go to sleep,” commanded the reflection. “Dream of your Chryseis.”

Azure didn’t answer this—not with words.

Instead, a feeling like hissing static filled him. He already had no control over his own limbs, but the hissing stole over every inch of the body that no longer obeyed him like it was devouring him. It ate and ate and ate away at him, until he saw his reflection’s balance stagger.

He didn’t deserve to tell Azure to dream of Chrysi. He didn’t deserve to turn Azure’s want on himself.

No longer poised and dignified, his reflection’s skin paled to grey within a single seething pulse of the static. His hand flashed over the counter. He scrambled for purchase, even as Azure made his knees buckle once more.

Mouth opening and closing like a fish, his reflection sank to his knees. Fingertips squeaked over the spotless countertop.

Fire flashed in his reflection’s eyes—no, his eyes, red like they were supposed to be. Red and vibrant and—

Blackness crushed in on him.

Azure cried out. He lifted a hand to the space above his heart and clutched at it.

The hissing mounted in pressure. It screamed in his ears where blood should’ve roared, it buzzed in his hands where fingers should’ve moved, it filled his lungs like liquid.

Then it cut out—a television cord snapped.

His hand dropped uselessly at his side. The noise in his throat cut itself off.

The reflection tipped his head forward, his other hand digging into the counter’s granite until his fingers bleached to white. His eyes blazed sickly, his mouth set in a grimace.

Pressing his forehead against the glass surface, his reflection twisted his grimace into a skeleton’s grin.

“Fine then,” he said, smile in his voice. “I’ll choose a different set of memories for you to relive.”

Azure tried to call upon the hissing static again—tried to move a single finger, at the very least.

But the blackness surrounded him with cruel arms and sank into it unwillingly.

Before he went, he wondered if he would resurface from these dreams in time.

If he would resurface at all.

—

“Let’s run off together,” she’d said to him, in that frank, unafraid way of hers. Her eyes gleamed clear and she’d pierced him straight through with her gaze. “You and me, against the world.”

It was years ago by now. Her hair no longer held the color of the sunset-pink in the curls, never mind that it had since grown out long past her shoulders. He could barely manage to picture it at this stage now, even in the mire of his memories. The freckles on the bridge of her nose didn’t crowd in as numerous and vibrant at this time, either—she still worked as nocturnally as any other agent in the hunting of Visitors, and the sun she managed to get was scant. She also didn’t yet have that silvery-white scar shot across her face like a shooting star.

This was before all that. At this time, he’d still been the heir to the French silver-mining empire (a front, of course, but what cooperation wasn’t?) and she’d still been working for some rundown, half-effective agency. Before things got simpler, and even more before things got more complicated than ever before.

He still recalled his reply, as vividly as if he’d said it just moments before: “Against the world? A bit much, don’t you think?”

That was too practical a reaction for her tastes. She’d always had a sense for drama.

With a great sigh and a greater eye roll, she replied, “Have you no poetry in you? Fine, maybe not the world, but your family at the very least, and that has to be about the same difficulty as two-thirds of the world.” She wrinkled her nose and pinched her generous lips into an unamused white line. “Better?”

The simplicity of the situation through her eyes was what did it. Just leave. Run away, just us. Nothing else. We’re all that matters.

The daunting chasm meant nothing in the face of her certainty.

Run. Go. Now.

And as he’d sat there with her, it was everything all he wanted, right within his grasp.

He remembered that night the clearest, out of all of them. Dawn bright, just like the sun beginning to break over the two of them with ever-brightening grey.

He remembered the oddly-gasped, half-tearful agreement he’d choked (“Better,” all through unbidden blurry vision), and he remembered reaching for her like she was a lifeline, and he remembered how warm her skin was through her ridiculous operative uniform, and he remembered tipping the both of them off the park bench in his desperation to kiss her.

—

There was another occasion he remembered, just as clearly. After he’d carefully siphoned money off to Jacks, who’d spirited it away to an account well beyond Mordecai’s control, but before he’d moved in with Chrysi. Not yet.

He first needed to make a good impression on her family.

They were originally only an exchange family, but—and this was where the details grew hazy, though Azure would claim this to be the fault of Chrysi’s reluctance to elaborate rather than his own memories failing him—as time unfolded, they now held more sway over the legalities of being parents to Chrysi.

Either way, he’d known it would be doubly intimidating to impress them. In their semi-official adoption of Chrysi, they’d grown protective of her.

Mrs. Karim had been, out of all of them, the easiest to satisfy. Azure needed only to arrive for the lunch with a bouquet of fresh-picked lavender with bright heads of peonies between. Springs of wisteria had been an afterthought, picked by Azure’s own hand from the garden Missy forgot she kept.

“Oh, look at that,” she’d cooed, her face alight with joy. “Your favorite flowers, Chryseis!”

Chrysi, down the hall behind her, shot Mrs. Karim a wide-eyed look. Azure had done his best to stifle his laugh at the time.

“Not mine, Haniya.” She sounded horrified. “They’re for you.”

“They are your favorite flowers.” She turned to Azure with an arched brow and a wink. “Don’t listen to Chryseis. I know who they’re really for.”

Azure smiled innocently. “They’re for you, Mrs. Karim.”

She swatted him playfully on the arm. “Don’t give me that.” With that, she swept back with an open arm and a bright smile on her face. “Come in, come in. Don’t let in too much of the drizzle.”

He obliged, ducking his head as he walked in. The drizzle Mrs. Karim mentioned pricked at the back of his neck with a fresh coolness.

By all accounts, it could’ve been a much, much worse spring rain.

The door closed out the elements with Mrs. Karim’s efficient one-handed slam.

Azure’s body flinched before he regained control, whereupon he flushed. Glancing at Chrysi, he found her grinning at him with a cocked brow.

He wrinkled his nose at her, but the corners of his mouth twisted upward without his permission.

Ah, curse his Chryseis and her ability to make him smile, even at his own expense.

Mrs. Karim flowed down the hallway, the bouquet cradled in a single arm. Upon passing Chrysi, she plucked out a peony single-handed and tucked it behind Chrysi’s ear in a single movement.

“Show him to the drawing room, would you?” Mrs. Karim tweaked a white curl fondly. “George can keep him company while you help me finish up.”

Chrysi lightly touched the flower nestled in her curls, her mouth closing in a much sweeter smile than the one she’d shot Azure.

“Sure thing,” she mumbled. Then, stronger, she added, “And those flowers are for you.”

Mrs. Karim shrugged, her eyes closing briefly in an innocent expression of saintly motherhood. “The peony suits you.” She turned back to Azure, her dark eyes sparkling slyly. “Don’t you agree, Azure?”

Azure thought everything suited Chrysi, including nothing much at all, but he decided to agree with a simple, “Of course.”

The look in her eyes seemed to read straight into all the words Azure hadn’t said. “Hm. That settles that, now doesn’t it, Chryseis?” She patted her adoptive daughter on the cheek. “Drawing room, yes? And tell George he’d better not think of helping—we get to see him calm so rarely.”

Chrysi beamed until Mrs. Karim passed the corner. Her bright smile twisted into something more sardonic as soon as she walked out of earshot.

“Doubt Georgie’s much calm,” she said. “He’s always got something going. But whatever Haniya says.”

With that, she spun on her heel, distraction forgotten. Her eyes lit up as she skipped the short distance between her and Azure. She took his hand in hers.

“You made it,” she said warmly.

The idea of him not making it was laughable. Chrysi’d reminded him three times a day for the past month, and she’d looked one step from marching into his photography studio to scribble it all over the scheduling billboard he had up. And, besides that, Azure wanted to meet her family—the one that actually mattered.

Laughing wryly, he slid his hands around her waist. “I could’ve decided otherwise.”

“Be glad you didn’t. I assure you that we’re going to need your help working through what Haniya made.”

“Oh, gods. Should I be worried?”

“Definitely. You’re probably going to be full before you get the chance to try everything.”

Azure considered this. He also considered the last family meal he had to go to. “That’s a much better problem to have than I initially thought.”

Her mouth hitched at the corner, as if she could peer right into Azure’s past. “Don’t worry. Never again.”

He laughed again.

“Now, come on.” She tugged on his arm, drawing him away from the front door and further down the warm, neatly decorated hallway. “Time for you to meet my favorite brother.”

“John’s not going to be very happy to hear that,” chimed an unseen voice from the first doorway down to the right of the hallway.

Then Chrysi tugged Azure far enough to peer through the doorway, where the owner of the voice sat burrowed deep in a dark leather couch—a curly-haired boy with round spectacles in front of cautious dark eyes. A comic book splayed open in the boy’s hands, but it dangled there, forgotten. The boy looked far more interested in studying Azure. And, if Azure had to be blunt, he wasn’t studying him with much kindness in his eyes.

Either Chrysi didn’t notice the suspicion in the boy’s eyes, or she didn’t care. She slid her hand into Azure’s and entwined their fingers.

“John can shove it,” she announced boldly, and she led Azure to a chair positioned opposite the boy’s couch. “He’s an engineer, cool! But who else likes talking ghosts with me?”

At this, her mouth tilted into that wild smile that Azure knew so well. Gods, if he weren’t here to prove he was a perfectly respectable boyfriend, he would’ve reached over and pulled her face to his so he could kiss her.

The boy’s eyes caught on Azure once more. His brows came together in a stormy look.

“And who’s this?”

Azure took a step forward, hand already outstretched—but Chrysi made a noise and indicated the chair.

He glanced at her uncertainly.

She rolled her eyes, indicating the chair with more ferocity.

Raising a brow, he took her hint and sat.

The boy ran a hand through his hair, making the dark curls stick out wildly, and he frowned.

“Don’t give me that look,” Chrysi said. She crossed the room and flicked his forehead.

“Hey—”

Chrysi ruffled the boy’s hair into further disarray, then she reached down to squish his cheeks as one would with a particularly cute puppy. A normal, if touchy, sibling thing to do—though made less friendly by the semi-headlock she’d put on him in the process. Azure knew that didn’t make it any less affectionate in Chrysi’s terms, but the boy tried to fight her off anyway.

As if on cue, the boy choked on a cry of dissent.

“Play nice, Georgie,” Chrysi warned, “else I’ll think twice about that mint comic I’ve got waiting for your birthday.”

Ah, so this was George. Pretty obvious, but it was nice to get the confirmation.

“Oh, get off me,” he’d shot back—or tried to, at least. His words came out garbled by the unforgiving hold Chrysi held over his head. “Mom needs you, doesn’t she?”

“Oh, and I’ll bet that you don’t?” she teased.

She did as he asked, though not without a fierce chuck of his chin as she released him.

George rubbed his newly-freed face, but rather than glare holes into Chrysi, he trained his dark eyes on Azure. They glittered with distrust.

Smoothing her skirt, Chrysi shot Azure a quick smile.

“Tell me if he gives you trouble. I’ll set it to rights if need be.”

Oh, Azure didn’t doubt that in the slightest. He’d heard some horror stories of Chrysi and the four boys that had adopted her as a sister.

“You’ve got it,” he murmured softly.

With a sunny, innocent look that belied her implied threat, Chrysi flowed from the room.

As she left, the easy air in the room abandoned it.

George coughed. He closed his comic book and placed it on the arm of the couch, then took off his spectacles. He set to polishing them on his shirt—a ratty band tee that Azure recognized from Chrysi’s own music collection.

“What’re your intentions with my sister?” George asked, more to his glasses than to Azure.

He didn’t need to think hard about this. He’d known the moment he’d run off with Chrysi.

“To make her happy. That’s all there is to it.” Azure paused. “Well, I’m not that selfless. I also want to be happy. Being with her, making her happy…. that just so happens to make me happy too.”

George finished polishing his spectacles in time to perch them atop his nose and fix Azure with a blistering grimace.

“Disgusting.”

But as George reached for his comic book once more, Azure recognized the slight relaxation of George’s shoulders.

He’d won over the most difficult of Chrysi’s family members, he estimated.

The rest of the lunch, he recalled, went much, much smoother than that.

—

Then there was the time they’d found their apartment together.

“Not much,” Chrysi said, throwing open gauzy curtains that did less work blocking the outside world than the window itself. Even open, with the typical grey London beyond, the window’s light straggled in reluctantly, like a schoolboy dragging his feet into a class late. Dust poofed outward with the movement, cloaked Chrysi in silver motes.

Coughing, she turned from the window with a hand over her mouth.

Azure leaned against the narrow doorway (the first of many narrow rooms and passages, he’d come to find) and smiled at her.

“No,” he agreed. He cast an eye over the apartment.

Bare of any furniture, it looked cramped even still. By the time they’d shoved a coffee table and a couch in there, they’d have no room to walk by without brushing past each other. The hallway (short as it was) didn’t need to have any furniture shoved into it to have the same problem. Its narrowness provided that issue all on its own. Good thing they were fine with such matters—Azure thought that if the living arrangement had been like this when he’d lived with Jacks, he would’ve attempted murder much, much sooner than he did.

But, dust motes and grey light and cramped confines all taken into consideration, all Azure could preoccupy himself with was the future in his hands now transforming itself into the present.

And he wouldn’t deny the appeal of being forced to be close to Chrysi.

“No,” he said again, finally breaking from his position at the door to cross the room and wrap his arms around Chrysi’s waist.

She hummed and leaned back into him.

The dust clouding around her tickled Azure’s nose, but he held back a sneeze. He instead kissed the crook of her neck, below her choker necklace.

“But,” he continued, then pressed another kiss below her jaw, “it’s ours.”

He punctuated this with yet another kiss—this one encroaching upon her face, at the edge of her cheekbone.

Between all his kisses, Chrysi laughed. It warmed his lips, and it sank into him.

Fingers threading through his hair, she said, “For now. Let’s hold off on the ‘ours’ until we get a place a bit more worthy, why don’t we?”

But despite her hesitation to call it theirs, she’d allowed Azure to help her christen their new home-to-be.

—

They’d been living in that narrow apartment for a year when he got the news, same as everyone else—in the papers, a day after the funeral and a week after the death itself.

Somehow, Azure had known before he found out. Something undetected in the air, a nearly-forgettable frission. He hadn’t the words for it, but the pieces clicked into place the moment he glimpsed the paper George had left open on the kitchen table before he’d been dragged off to the store by Chrysi.

LaFaye Silver’s Legacy at an End?

Mordecai was dead.

He should’ve been… Well, he didn’t know. But he knew that his reaction to the news certainly didn’t fit within typical reaction parameters. Even those most estranged from their family felt something. Relief, maybe, or some misplaced sense of loss. Guilt, even.

But instead, Azure got up and called Jacks to meet him at the silversmith’s.

“Why?” had been Jacks’s annoyed response over the phone.

Azure pressed a hand to the table. Not on the newspaper, but on a forgotten sketch of Chrysi’s—one that she had clearly meant to toss out when she was done. In it, their neat kitchen rendered itself with basic shapes, with George at the table reading the paper and Azure at the kettle. His fingertips tingled, like he could dive into that drawing as well as a doorway, the feeling Chrysi infused into the paper as effective as a Source.

Without his father looming overhead, the possibilities were endless. He wouldn’t be tracked down. Not again.

He stroked the page with his thumb.

“I’m thinking of getting an engagement set for Chrys,” he murmured.

—

He regretted many things, but the trip to the silversmith’s was not the point of regret altogether. It occurred there, yes, but it was later in that day, when his defenses lowered too, too far.

The visit itself was perfectly normal.

Acceptable.

“You’ve got all her ring sizes written down.” Not a question, but the disbelief dripped from Jacks’s words all the same.

Azure held his notebook out to the silversmith impassively. The man scribbled notes down onto his own notebook furiously. “Yes.”

“In a notebook dedicated to her,” Jacks further clarified. Once again, not a question, but he wanted to have it be one. Azure could tell.

“Yes,” he said again.

His brow folded, but Azure turned away from Jacks before he could ask any further questions cloaked in declaration.

The silversmith’s looked a bit more rundown than the sort of place Azure would’ve frequented before he’d run off. Those places glinted as much as their wares, down to the glossy hair and gleaming smiles of the attendants. Even their nails had glittered.

As if in direct contrast, this place—Smithson’s Silversmiths, and no, that hadn’t been a joke, as Jacks had initially thought when Azure dragged him out—had a dark, crowded, hole-in-the-wall look to it. Tarnished silver objects balanced atop each other, one blow from toppling into other precarious piles in a truly spectacular domino effect. The scent of the trade—cloying and metal—pressed in like a sentient beast. Those jewelry sets with stones could barely be picked out, so thick the dust upon them lay.

But Azure chose this place for a reason, and that had to do more with George’s endorsement of the place than anything else. If he looked at the recommendation George gave him at a certain angle, it appeared that Chrysi’s brother was encouraging him to propose to Chrysi. Or, at the very least, tolerating Azure’s relationship to her a bit more than he had prior.

He knew Chrysi would appreciate a silver ring set made from an independent artist more inclined to make rapier blades, anyhow.

A flicker from the corner of his eye. Azure studied it from his periphery, only to find Jacks toying with trinkets, boredom seeping from his every pore.

Merde.

He’d also known Jacks wouldn’t appreciate being dragged out to wait for Azure to buy a gift for Chrysi. But he’d done it as some form of celebration—only one person knew of the whole ordeal Azure went through, and only one person had taken up the battle of escaping Mordecai LaFaye right by Azure’s side.��

A telltale clatter sounded behind him.

Azure groaned internally.

Though the gods knew that Jacks wouldn’t have the same sense of poetic freedom about the situation.

“Knock it off,” he muttered from the corner of his mouth.

“I’m not doing anything,” Jacks muttered back.

Something click-clicked in his hand.

Azure had to take a deep breath, for fear of throttling Jacks the moment he turned to face him. He twisted his head slowly, his brows arching in unison with the tiny, unamused smile tightening his lips.

Jacks returned his gaze from the corner of his eye. In his hand, he opened and shut the click-clicking trinket to blame—a pocket watch, from the looks of it. An old one, much like the type Azure’s father used to carry.

Gods, he didn’t want to think about that. He instead focused on how damned childish Jacks was.

Not for the first time, Azure wondered why they were still friends.

Knock it off, he mouthed, a hiss of annoyance breathing underneath his silence.

Jacks scowled. He turned annoyed, bored eyes on the front window—the Smithson’s Silversmiths etched itself in a backwards arch against a suitably grey London day—but he didn’t click-click the pocket watch again, and that was good enough for Azure.

“Sorry about that,” Azure said, smiling a bit too forcibly as he turned back to the silversmith. “What were you saying?”

All in all, it didn’t take long to square away the details—every time Azure revisited this moment in his mind, he still found Jacks’s schoolboy boredom baffling, for it couldn’t have lasted longer than ten minutes overall.

Engravings and secret engravings decided upon, ring sizes recorded, prices discussed and details written, Azure reached for his wallet and handed the silversmith more than a couple banknotes to pay for his troubles. The man grinned at Azure gamely, though with a hint of a flush about his ears.

Ten minutes. In and out. Azure didn’t know if that would’ve changed anything. Maybe the end would’ve started when Azure came back for the engagement set. Maybe he would’ve gotten a strange package in the mail the next day. Maybe it would’ve happened later that very same day.

But maybe nothing would’ve happened at all, if he had avoided the trap.

There was no way to know now.

He only knew what had happened.

Azure had turned to Jacks, still feeling a bit uncharitable as he snapped, “Done now. Happy?”

The gaze Jacks had trained on the window grew foggy. His brows drew together. In his hand, cupped like it was almost delicate, lay the pocket watch.

Azure had tilted his head, but it was an innocent curiosity at the time. Azure had stopped yelling at his past self—it only caused a headache when he couldn’t change anything anymore.

“What’s wrong with you?”

His voice must’ve broken through some thoughtful haze—a single piercing, straight through, because Jacks wound up turning to him, the pocket watch cradled in his hand like a treasure.

His eyes still distant, Jacks handed off the trinket to Azure.

“What about this? Think Chryseis would like it?”

That was when Azure wished he could go back in time. To the moment before he accepted that artifact.

But he couldn’t. The past set itself in stone.

Azure had taken that pocket watch, eyed it (missed the warning signs, missed the details, missed the electric cold that shot up his arm and nestled into the space around his heart), and handed it back with a raised brow. “Chryseis now, is it? She’s not much of a pocket watch person.”

And that was that. The beginning of the end.

—

The oddness started shortly after that. Fleeting thoughts, at first. Disturbing, but enough for Azure to banish them if he put his mind to it. Easier still when Chrysi was by his side, his perfect distraction.

The day he first noticed it was like any other—a weekend, Chrysi off from her work at DEPRAC (George, Azure noted, was not entirely pleased with his sister’s occupation, even though it was more like she worked as a consultant than anything else), and Azure had been taking a week off from his own studio, anyway.

It was typical London overcast, with enough precipitation for it to rattle quietly against their sliver of glass that constituted a window. Azure curled up on their small couch whilst reading, and Chrysi had curled up atop him with her own book in hand. The quiet hiss of music filled what little space they had between them, spilling over from the one earbud Chrysi didn’t have in her ear.

Azure wrapped an arm around her waist and kissed the crook of her neck, all while he read the next line in his novel.

(He couldn’t remember what it was anymore—even when he struggled to sharpen his memory, all that remained was a blurry mess of words. He revisited this memory so many times that he’d burned away the details, like a CD pushed to its limit.)

They’d been sitting there for hours, he thought. The feeling in his legs had long since fled, but he wouldn’t dare say a word to Chrysi. He preferred the weight of her leaning back against him to the ability to walk any day.

But Chrysi wasn’t known for ability to sit sedate for too long. He knew he’d have to let her get up eventually.

It didn’t stop his disappointment from souring the enjoyment he was having when Chrysi finally stretched back against him, then stood unceremoniously.

Cold swept in and took her spot.

Azure frowned and looked up.

“Come back,” he said, his eyes lingering on the stretch of her side as she bent from one side to another.

She turned, eyebrows raised.

“Childish,” she chided.

Azure reached out for her. His hand caught on her sweater. Reeling her in, he tried to slip an arm around her waist and pull her back onto his lap.

Chrysi pressed a kiss to his temple, then she stepped out of his grasp, despite his reluctance to let her go.

“Tea?” she asked innocently.

Azure tried to stop her by gently leveraging his leg against the back of her knee, attempting to make her topple into his lap all over again.

She danced away from his range. The smile on her face sparkled, far brighter than the reluctant straggle of the afternoon’s dying light in their sliver of a window.

“Tea?” she asked again, but the innocence dropped away with a savage edge to her smile.

Stretching back, Azure shot her a narrow-eyed look. What he’d rather have was Chrysi curled up in his lap while he read a book.

Out loud, he drawled, “Depends. Will it be your extremely American tea?”

“Hey—that’s not ever what I offer to others, for one, and for two—”

“Iced. Who has cold tea?”

“That’s a no, then.”

“Not necessarily.” He raised his brow. “Will it be iced?”

Chrysi rolled her eyes.

“Chryseis.”

“No. Hells, Blue, it’s impossible with you.”

Azure innocently tilted his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Yes, I would love tea.”

This eye roll was far more impressive.

“Yeah, yeah.” Chrysi slid in the tiny space between the worn couch and the coffee table once more, quick enough to tangle between Azure’s legs and kiss him chastely on the lips. When she pulled back, her eyes flashed with electric gold amusement incongruous with the annoyance the rest of her face read. “The cherry blossom blend?”

Azure hated to be so predictable to her, despite basking in how intimate her knowledge felt.

He leaned up into her mouth again. Her long curls tickled his skin.

“Surprise me,” he said against her mouth, more a breath than words.

She pulled back to shoot him a narrow-eyed look.

A smile flitted across his face. “I want to try something new.”

“Huh.” She added a curved brow to her suspicious glare. She didn’t elaborate.

Azure’s smile turned puzzled. “What?”

Another ambiguous hum served as her reply. She turned and made for the kitchen.

He flipped his book up as she went. He stretched his legs out over the coffee table.

Azure watched her unsubtly from behind his book as she put the kettle on.

It was the times like these that he couldn’t believe he could be here—with her. Reading, drinking tea, living in a tiny apartment and reveling in the closeness of it. How could he have been allowed this?

You never deserved it.

The thought flashed in and out of his head like a whizzing bullet. The impact slammed against his rib cage. Azure shot up to a proper seat, spine ramrod straight.

Chrysi didn’t notice. She grabbed two mugs—both cat-themed—and placed them at attention on the tiny counter at the stove’s side, the kettle beginning to steam gently.

He groaned internally. Merde—he’d gotten better about thoughts like that in recent years. But every once in a while, they would come back swinging, in the voice of his father, and with them they always brought the same sick feeling.

His focus on his book shattered, and so he placed his book on the small coffee table and got up. He followed Chrysi into the kitchen.

When he got there, he tapped the top of her head.

“Hey, bunny.” She turned to him.

Azure took that as all the invitation he needed.

Wrapping his arms around her, he pulled her to the sick part of his chest like a balm.

“Got too antsy waiting?” Chrysi asked conversationally into his collarbone. “Or” —she twisted her face up to him, a tight smirk on her face— “were you trying to steal the tabby cat mug?”

Azure shook his head. He didn’t want to tell her the truth.

Lightly, he kissed her forehead. “Just felt like getting up too. I couldn’t feel my legs, you were sitting on them for so long.”

“Well, no need to be ungrateful.”

He opened his mouth to reply at the same time the tea kettle shrieked.

The whistling of the tea kettle pierced at Azure. He narrowed his eyes over her head, at the white plume of steam erupting from it. The sound penetrated right through his skull and it hurt.

How much more would it hurt Chrysi if he’d poured that boiling water on her head rather than those mugs?

And, for a moment, it was like he’d done it. The distinct, tinny scent of boiled water poured over her head, Chrysi screaming and her skin burning, turning red, then blistering.

Like he’d touched a live electrical wire, Azure jerked back. Chrysi’s arms jerked with him, her chin biting into his chest.

“Jesus!”

Hissing through her teeth, Chrysi released him to rub at her jaw. “What?”

Azure didn’t answer. He didn’t think he could. His heart skittered faster through beats than he could count, and the air in his throat refused to enter his lungs.

The fuck was wrong with him? It was never that bad.

(Nothing, nothing that was him, but he hadn’t known that at the time. If he had, maybe that would’ve helped.)

“I’m—I—I’m—”

The tea kettle shrieked on.

“Oh, fucking hell!” Chrysi shouted.

In annoyance, she whipped around and tore it off the burner. The whistling careened to a stop. The steam petered off into a thin white stream.

The silence that followed had the same thickness as the breath that refused to leave Azure’s throat.

She flicked off the burner and turned to him. The concern on her face made him feel sicker.

“I’m going to bed,” Azure announced in the newborn silence.

He ran off before Chrysi could say anything else after him.

—

The end came on a normal night. Lights all out, save the ghost lamp out on the street and the glow-in-the-dark stars Chrysi had put up in the proper constellations on their ceiling. Their bed warm, blankets tucked around the two of them.

Azure had woken up slowly. A dream that didn’t want to let go of him tugged on him (the first dream of many that held fast with Chrysi’s fingers, but not her proper cadence) but he’d forced his eyes open anyway.

Without his glasses, Azure could hardly be considered a seeing man at all. Once he and George had discussed their prescriptions, and though George had once famously survived a horrible ghostly death by his poor eyesight, they’d found Azure’s eyesight to be more lacking. He could only see blurred shapes in the middle of the day when he had no glasses on. At night, they were barely more than shadows.

But that night, his eyesight worked well enough to give him his worst nightmare in blurry, pale shapes.

Azure woke up to his hands around Chrysi’s neck.

His heart dropped quick enough to give him vertigo. For a tiny moment (small, but in it eternity lay cradled, airless and unending), he felt his fingers flex, then tighten.

Throat knotting up, Azure shoved himself off her. The world spun around him, breathless and dizzy and worsened by the blurs of grim light closing in. Nausea writhed in his stomach like a living thing.

He crashed to the floor—the sound of his bones cracking against hardwood the first thing noticed, and the second how cold the room felt. Heavy as a graveyard shroud, draped over the room. His breath plumed in front of him, glimmering in the same way ghost fog did—sickly and green-tinted in the dim night.

His left shoulder and hip pulsed angrily at him. The echo of noise faded and left behind a vacuum.

Azure couldn’t move.

He stared up at the bed, all a blur. The shape that had to be Chrysi didn’t stir.

Why didn’t she wake?

He knew his girlfriend—she awoke easily. It would make an unpleasant jolt, what noise he’d made, much less the pressure of his hands against her throat.

And yet, she didn’t move an inch.

His breath plumed again. It sparkled in the dark room.

It looked greener than before.

The lightheadedness of before swept over him.

He couldn’t move either.

The realization didn’t tear him from his spot. In fact, it iced him down harder, tying him to the floor with unbreakable bonds.

Ghostlock.

It was obvious. Of course it was obvious when it was too late. What did George always say about it?

Cold bit at him. Sharp incisors tore into his bare skin, and it slithered under his clothes, and it penetrated straight through him.

A tear tried to form in his eye, but it froze too.

He couldn’t think. He couldn’t think!

Every part of him pleaded with him, tried to tear open the film freezing over his vocal chords, a cry urging for Chrysi.

All that came out of his mouth was a choked nothingness.

Merde.

It’s frightening, isn’t it? whispered a voice in his head.

Azure flinched.

That same voice of his father—the one he heard in the plague-ridden thoughts that jolted through him. He knew what his therapist would have to say about it. But this—?

The voice grew closer, colder, until Azure felt the frost crystals crowding within his own skull.

Less frightening than what I can do, the voice of his father said, just as sharply smug as he always did, if you decide to make this difficult.

He choked again. The breath he exhaled had the same consistency and color as ghost fog.

From his own mouth.

No, he moaned silently. No, no, no.

Desperation opened his throat, prying it open with shaking arms. “Chryseis…”

This time, his tear’s heat kept it moving long enough for it to trickle down his face. The ghostlock-cold frosted it over somewhere down his cheek, cold enough for it to burn into his skin.

Displeasure iced the blood inside Azure’s veins.

No, this couldn’t—it couldn’t happen. Azure had seen hundreds of horror movies with Chrysi before, and even in a world troubled by ghosts, they’d laughed at the countless premises of possession.

You’d die of ghost touch, had been Azure’s most common refrain.

You never know, was always Chrysi’s response—always with that wry tilt of her mouth that belied her serious words.

But—if Azure believed it, and he most certainly did, with the ghost fog curling in front of him with each breath—he hadn’t died of ghost touch. How?

“Chr-Chryseis,” he chattered out, more a moan than her name. Each syllable puffed out a tiny cloud of ghost fog.

He tried to tear off the ground.

A sickening resistance of his skin answered the pull Azure levied upon his hand. His palm glued harder to the floor with frost crystals. Nausea coiled in his chest.

Only a layer of skin sloughing off meant his freedom.

Gods.

He tugged again.

His skin pulled thin, fighting against the movement of his muscles.

“Oh, gods,” he hissed.

Squeezing his eyes tight, he wrenched at it one last time.

The ice retreated. His arm shot up.

Azure’s eyes snapped open.

Help. Help, help, help.

Only Chrysi’s shape in the bed—not far away, not at all, not in this tiny apartment, never in this tiny apartment—meant anything to him. She was so close. She was right there, and she knew so much about ghosts.

He reached out to her. He reached, leaning his whole body into it, and pouring even more of himself into that.

“Chrys,” pleaded Azure, a fraction of hope buzzing in the hollow of his throat, even though he knew better. “Chryseis, Chrys, wake—”

Ghost fog spilled from his mouth in great waves, so thick that he almost didn’t see it.

The ghostly hand, pulling out from his own blood-and-bone one, outstretched just further than Azure’s grip. It would touch her first—unprotected by the insulation of whatever was wrong with the inside of Azure’s body.

Ghost touch.

Instant death.

His eyes widened.

“No!”

He snapped his hand down.

Ice swallowed it again, frost swirling prettily over his skin.

The voice in his head didn’t even laugh. Quietly, smugness perforated Azure’s chest, along with more emotions that were not meant to be housed inside Azure’s body.

Do you understand now?

Azure screamed wordlessly—loud enough, it should’ve woken Chrysi. Loud enough, it should’ve woken all the goddamned neighbors on the floors below and above.

Whatever Mordecai had become in death swallowed up the cry before it left the room.

Cloying ghost fog wreathed Azure’s head instead. His eyes burned. Tears froze atop tears, creating an icy patina around his eyes.

“What do you want?” he sobbed.

Mordecai didn’t answer. He never did like explaining things.

Instead, Azure spiraled off into darkness, with the image of Chrysi sleeping fragile and unaware in a room cloaked with arctic ghost fog burned into the despairing blackness as his only company.

#w.mine #s.chryzure #i was yelled at every time i got distracted while editing so everyone say thanks juno i guess….#okay good night!!!

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