#i am glad i am appreciated for my peculiarness. i keep being confronted with it recently

[box16]

louis wain was right. i am happy because everyone loves me

[weepylucifer]

Let’s Go in the Garden - Ch. 8

Interlude: David

“Talk to Nightingale,” Peter had said. Of course David was going to converse with Thomas, frequently and on all manner of subjects. The matter of the missing crystal ball, however... well, it couldn’t hurt for David to ask around in his spare time, and catch up with Thomas on the matter at his leisure. Perhaps when he already had something to show for his efforts. Oh, Thomas would be delighted. Certainly, he was going to try to hide it and insist on him following the rules and not interfering with investigations in the future, but beneath that, he’d be glad to have this task taken care of. Then he’d see that David could still make a valuable contribution to the modern Folly.

So, inferring that Peter didn’t want to be bothered looking for that crystal ball, David ventured out (with what he dearly hoped was Peter’s covert permission) to see if some of his old contacts from the demi-monde were still around. Certainly, he expected to find the demi-monde as much changed as everything else, but some people stuck around for a seemingly indefinite amount of time.

Oberon had apparently wed one of the new river daughters, acquired some children with her and was now hosting something called ‘art therapy’. Well, David had always loved to draw. He accepted the offer of an easel, canvas and paint and got to work.

“And I may choose what I draw?” he asked.

“Of course,” Oberon told him. “The aim of this procedure is for you to confront upon the canvas whatever you feel you must.”

David nodded.

Oberon’s place was spacious in a way that was not to David’s taste, but he claimed the minimalism was conductive to his creative process. There was coffee on for him - sweet and almost white with milk, the way he preferred it - and a plate of snacks (no obligation). The food was kosher, Oberon informed him. David hadn’t often been in a position to keep kosher (it had been unheard of at the old Folly, at Casterbrook everyone had received the same boarding school lunches, and during the war you ate what you could get) and thus couldn’t claim he had been afforded even the opportunity to miss it, but it was a nice touch.

“This looks as though you knew I would return here,” he said.

“I suspected it,” Oberon said smoothly. “Your return has made little waves already, and I assume it will only make larger ones.” Apparently the orisa Peter was involved with was a sister to Oberon’s wife, and thence the news had travelled.

“Are you glad to have me back, old friend?” David asked softly. He kept his eyes fixed on the canvas, where his sketch was coming along. It would be a simplistic little thing, compared to his usual work: his hand was quite out of practice after six years of handling his staff and rifle with nary any time for anything else.

He had kept a notebook tucked into his breast pocket, where some of the other men had carried bibles, quite worn by the end of the war. Beyond drafts for new spells, notes on troop movements and strategy, and idle thoughts of his scientific work that he had let his mind drift to during the lulls, there had been little sketches there, and snippets of poems. He had drawn most of the men in his unit at some point. His poems had been dilettantish, and they had shifted focus with the time: what had started out as paeans to sweet Phoebus Apollo, the boyish god of the eyes of sun, had turned, later, to the warlike deities. He had read one aloud once, one he’d deemed sufficiently disguised, and the lads had teased him for weeks about what a harridan of a girl he must have at home, that she must compare to Athena of strategy, while their Captain had watched on with a lopsided smile.

(”What happened to Apollo?” Thomas had asked later, when they’d been alone, the only ones awake during the first watch of the night.

“The war changed him,” David had replied.)

(He’d never shown Thomas the poems to Thanatos, the angel of death.)

“I am glad you ceased the abandonment of your post,” Oberon said. “I am glad you stopped hiding.”

“It was rather chosen for me,” David argued. “The abandonment as well as the return.”

Oberon gracefully nodded his assent. He was always rather graceful in his movement. David liked to look at him, had always rather. All the controlled strength to him, the fluid, natural elegance of him. Masculinity misted off him like a golden vapour. Perhaps he should ask... but no. A wife, children: potent obstacles to that sort of thing.

For some reason, he had to think of Peter for a second. He shrugged it off. If Thomas truly hadn’t figured that one out yet, well, what on earth was David to do? Perhaps it was best to let the young man be, and look for suitable candidates for some... little adventures later. Or perhaps he was being overly optimistic, seeing as Thomas still barely gave him the time of day.

“And what is it you seek here now?” Oberon asked. “Hopefully not to disappear again? Because I am unsure of whether I would lend my hand a second time.”

David shook his head. He had wanted to disappear so badly, then. Oberon had taken pity and helped him find someone who might assist in that, who would create for him a replica of a dead body - his dead body. Now, funny enough, it was the furthest thing from his mind.

“No more running,” David said. “I am assisting the Folly in an inquiry.”

“What is your capacity within the Folly now?” Oberon asked. “I hear tell from my wife that certain elements will want to know, and soon.”

David didn’t know what certain elements meant, nor the answer to the question. “It is yet to be determined,” he said. “The Folly are looking for a dangerous magical object, that might have recently been sold to someone unaware. I don’t know my way around the demi-monde as well as I used to, my friend. With whom would I begin a search for such an object?”

Under David’s hands, the canvas began filling up with landscape. Not so simplistic after all, apparently. He couldn’t recall consciously deciding what to draw, but now he had already started, and it was going to take itself to some sort of conclusion. He had drawn the snow, the overcast sky, now for the leafless trees. He added the dark trunks, tall and imposing, and a clearing in the middle.

“I will outfit you with a list of names, and places to start,” Oberon said. “The goblin market has changed little since you last visited. The faces differ, but the customs remain.”

“That is heartening,” David replied. Satisfied with the look of his painted landscape, he started populating it. The dark shapes, so still in the snow, pitiful heaps of humanity, sunken now, vacated of their souls. A corpse, a carcass, where was the difference? The werewolf, writhing in the snow. Beaten but not yet knowing it.

“Mind where you step, though,” Oberon said. “The relationship of the demi-monde to the Isaacs has hardly grown any more cordial.”

David looked up from the canvas. “What happened?” he asked.

Oberon shrugged. His tight shirt left little to the imagination, and David watched the ripple of his muscles below the fabric with appreciation. “The Starling is working on doing things a new way, reaching out, establishing relations between the community and the Folly, but the Starling is... a recent phenomenon.”

“Pardon me. The... who now?”

“Peter Grant. Nightingale’s Starling. Some interesting ideas, that one.”

Peter Grant. David hummed thoughtfully. Peter was turning out to be a more interesting person by the day. New ideas. Peculiar methods. A man after David’s own heart, it seemed, and handsome too. And... Nightingale’s Starling, really? Then he remembered the actual topic of conversation, and mentally walked himself a few steps back.

“What does Thomas say to that?” he asked.

“Not much.” Oberon rolled his shoulders. He was doing it on purpose, David was sure. “The Nightingale keeps to himself.”

There was something odd to that statement. David picked up a smaller brush, to finish off the contours of the werewolf in its death throes. “Hm? Strange. Thomas was always the social butterfly.”

Oberon gave him an expression somewhere between amusement and incredulity, which to David was entirely weird. “Is that so?”

“I can’t imagine Thomas never popped ‘round to mingle. Sure, he wouldn’t have before the war. But he is technically fae now, and it does seem like the kind of thing he’d do, barring any other society... no offense meant.”

Oberon shook his head. “The Nightingale can barely show his face in any demi-monde pubs without half the clientele fleeing through the back door. His arrival heralds emergency, and most likely combat. Nothing else. He’s not... widely trusted by anyone in my circles.”

“I don’t understand,” David said. His hand holding the paintbrush sped up a little. The outline of the soldier, the only one upright, bent over the werewolf, got a little messy, so he corrected himself. He had not forgotten this moment, even after there had started to be many like it. The bayonet affixed to the rifle, pointed forward and downward, soon to arch for the werewolf’s throat. The staff, too, strapped to his belt. And then, out of some inexplicable impulse, David gave him wings.

These were not the serene, down-feathered wings often featured in depictions of biblical angels. These wings were breaking out of the man’s shoulders in a way that should not be, wrong and painful and bloody and raw. At last, David took another paintbrush, dipped its stiff bristles into the scarlet paint and flicked it with his index finger against the canvas. A fine red mist.

“Are you finished?” Oberon asked.

David nodded.

“Well, let’s see your offering for today.” Oberon crossed the room to stand behind David, scrutinizing the painting.

“This is a scene that you witnessed?” he asked.

“Well, the wings are an embellishment,” David said, “but otherwise, yes.”

“Is this figure supposed to be you?”

“I don’t have wings.” David shook his head.

Oberon crossed his arms. He chortled. “Oh, but you do. False wings, of wax, and the foolish hope to boot.”

“I’m Icarus,” David surmised, “my hubris caused me to fly too close to the sun and I plummeted. Very on the nose, my friend.”

“Oh, not at all. You’re Daedalus. You made these wings, you gave them to him, and you are watching all you ever loved take a nosedive off a cliff, and you’re asking yourself what you have done.”

There wasn’t much David could say to that. He wondered where Oberon had received that information. He wondered how Oberon knew what he had done.

Oberon cocked his head and gestured again at the painting. “This is the Nightingale, then.”

“I do wish everyone would stop calling him that,” David said. “The Nightingale is a construct that served to maintain troop morale. I am told that over seventy years passed since then.”

“A blink of an eye to some of us,” Oberon stated. Of course, David thought, he was much older. But that wasn’t the point.

“The point is,” he said, “I want to know what happened. I want to know how almost eight decades went by and this...” He gestured at the painting. “...is still the reality.”

“Maybe,” Oberon said, “I am not the person to ask this question.”

----

It really was a nuisance, David reflected, to be without his own vehicle. In town, it would do, but not outside of it, and as far as he remembered, his new destination was quite a drive out. He had only been once or twice, but he was certain that, outfitted with the navigation device on his new phone, if he figured it out correctly, he might get there without much trouble. But the problem of the car remained.

Well, Thomas and himself had had an agreement, back in the day, to share everything they owned between them. What’s mine is also yours, it had run. They never reneged on that agreement, and David figured this was important enough to infringe upon Thomas’s Jaguar again. At least this time around, Peter couldn’t possibly get caught in the crossfire.

As he was leaving London, he switched the radio on. Modern music was something he hadn’t gotten around to discovering yet, but he expected it to be as changed from what he remembered as everything in this new age. What he got was a mellow-voiced man singing (he would only later learn that the song was about as old as the car he was driving),

Try to see it my way Do I have to keep on talking till I can't go on? While you see it your way Run the risk of knowing that our love may soon be gone We can work it out We can work it out

While the lyrics were a little bit somber at times, the melody was upbeat and had David humming and tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. It was repetitive and by the second iteration of the chorus he was singing along. His singing voice wasn’t anything to write home about, not at all like that of Thomas, but it raised his mood a few notches and that, he supposed, was rather nice to have.

The melody stuck, and still coursed through his mind when, hours later, he arrived at that strange little tower. He got out of the car and stretched his stiff limbs expansively before walking up and ringing the doorbell.

The door was opened by... oh boy!

The door was opened by, there was no other word for it, a fuzzy young woman. Owing to the rather warm weather, she was in shorts and a black-and-gold top of some sort that, David observed, cut off an inch or so above her navel. It was very plain to see, because of this, that the whole of her was covered in a fine golden fuzz, like... like the fur of a bee, if the hairs on a bee were indeed called that. A single tendril of a glamour beckoned, almost probing, testing the waters out of routine rather than genuine interest, telling of the taste of honey and the steady buzz of the swarm and a... fuzzy embrace. As per usual with fae of the female persuasion, this left David largely unaffected.

“Yeah?” the young woman asked.

“I am looking for Hugh Oswald,” David said. “Does he still live here?”

“Sure, grandad still lives here,” the young woman replied. “Why, what do you want from him?”

Grandad. Indeed, David thought. Hugh always did ensure us rather too profusely that he was interested in beekeeping a normal amount.

“I’m come from the Folly,” he said.

“Oh,” Hugh’s granddaughter said. “They have another guy now?”

“They’ve had me for a while, in fact. Long story.” For once picking up on his opposite’s reluctance, David said, “He will want to see me. I know him quite well, we served together.”

The young woman - just now it occurred to David that he hadn’t asked her name, was it awkward doing it now? - cocked her head in a deeply sceptical way. “But you’re not the Nightingale.”

So she too knew that moniker. The Nightingale. David felt anger bubbling up within him. He took a deep breath to contain it. “No. But he is why I’m here.”

“I don’t know about this,” Hugh’s granddaughter said. “I don’t want to stress him out.”

“He will very much want to see me,” David insisted.

“I’ll go ask him if he’s up for it,” the young woman said, and slammed the door in David’s face.

David waited a minute that felt approximately like a thousand minutes, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet with pent-up energy, picking at his collar as always when he was agitated. He’d never known why very little other people tended to have these little nervous habits, but to him they seemed natural as breathing. One plucked at one’s clothes when one was nervous, and one flapped one’s hands at about chest-height when one was in extreme happiness. That was how feelings were appropriately expressed. Curtailing these expressions could feel grating to the point of extreme discomfort, so he had never put much effort in trying, even when people stared sometimes.

The door opened again, revealing the bee... woman. “He says you can come up.”

David nodded. “Splendid.” She waved him to come in, and in he went. Not much had changed from his vague recollection of Hugh’s weird tower. Some furniture had been replaced or positioned differently since, but it was still much the same place.

“Out back,” Hugh’s granddaughter waved a hand in the direction of the staircase. “He’s in the garden.”

“I know my way,” David said, and yet still she followed one step behind him. Should he ask her name now? He did not.

They stepped out into the garden and David registered the omnipresent buzz of the swarm, the many bee-friendly flower arrangements and fruit trees before he registered the old man in the wheelchair. “Hugh Oswald,” he said, “We’ve much to discuss.”

The old man made a startled sound and recoiled so violently he almost toppled his chair over. David winced in sympathy and started towards him hands raised, not sure what to do to help but needing to do something, but Hugh’s granddaughter beat him to it. She rushed to her grandfather’s side and steadied him, stroking his back soothingly, then turned her head to throw David a look of pure venom. For a moment, he felt a prickle down his arms, like the painful little stings of a myriad bees.

“See,” she exclaimed, “this is why I didn’t want to let you in here, moron!”

“Mellissa...” Hugh Oswald gasped. His voice sounded as frail as he looked, god, he looked wizened, he looked like he’d disintegrate into dust at a careful touch, this couldn’t be, this wasn’t Hugh, Hugh was twenty and strong and full of the brimming vigour of youth, Hugh wasn’t old, couldn’t be old, and David was beginning to tremble- “Mellissa, you see him too?”

“What?” Hugh’s granddaughter snapped. (Mellissa, she was Mellissa, that was her name.) “Of course I see him. The idiot! I had no idea he was going to scare you!”

“But...” Hugh raised a shaking hand, pointing in David’s direction. He had trouble catching his breath, and his other, gnarled hand clawed into the armrest of his chair as he gasped. “David Mellenby is buried.”

“No, Hugh,” David said softly. Oh, he was still trembling, he felt like he should faint, but he couldn’t now. “No, I’m quite alive. Please, we can sit together and I can explain.”

“Nope,” Mellissa said. “You’re leaving. Right the fuck now, or I’ll have the hive on you.”

The bees seemed to buzz louder. David began to retreat.

“Wait,” Hugh Oswald said, sitting up a little straighter with a small amount of struggle. “Wait, Mellissa, let him stay. I want to hear...”

“Grandad, I don’t think you should...”

“If he’s really here and not dead, I want to know why,” Hugh Oswald said, his voice a tad firmer now.

Mellissa seemed extremely reluctant to agree to this, but she relented. “I’ll be close by.” She glared at David one last time as she went back inside the tower. “You pull any shit at all and I’ll see you chased out, Mr. Folly.”

David could do nothing but nod.

He picked up the spare chair and sat across from the old man. When he looked into his face, he could just about see, beneath the fine net of wrinkles and the wisp of thin, white hair, the boy Hugh Oswald he had known. It sent a shiver down his spine. He hadn’t realized...

He hadn’t realized until that moment what ‘eighty years’ really meant. At times, it felt like he had simply been transported into a kind of fairyland, a place where up was down, being... the way he was was legalized and celebrated with parades, but his lover was determined to never let him near again. A dimension of opposites. But Hugh, here, like this, showed him plainly that it was the same world, although having turned times upon times without his active participation. Hugh Oswald had grown old in his absence, so very old it seemed a miracle he was upright still. How many survivors of Ettersberg had died in those long interim years, simply from a too-long life? How had David not thought to ask?

“Yes,” Hugh said, “it’s not looking too well, is it?”

It took David a second to realize he meant himself. “You look fine,” he muttered, drawing patterns on the tablecloth.

Hugh Oswald made a wheezing sound. David grew worried, but then realized it was laughter. “Still a miserable liar.”

“I’m not...!” David started, but was there any use in denying anything now? Hugh looked frail, and that was obvious enough.

Hugh waved it off. “Do tell, old friend,” he said, and while he was trying very hard to put a calm face on it, the tremor was still present in his voice, “what brings you here, back from the grave? I found your body...” His voice caught, and splintered on the last word, and for an endlessly, agonizingly long moment, he fought to maintain his composure.

David felt like dirt. What had he done to the boy? How could you do this to Oswald, Thomas had asked him, a few days ago in that cave, and he had been right to ask.

“Never, in fact, in the grave.” In short, David summarized what had happened to him, his heedless flight into the countryside, the faerie he’d met, the long sleep. “I’m dearly sorry,” he said, something he seemed to be saying often these days, “of course I should’ve remembered that my sudden appearance would startle you. Only, I assumed Thomas had already told you I was back. You would’ve been the first to call, no?”

Hugh Oswald wheeze-laughed again. “Thomas? Hah! The Nightingale hasn’t spoken to me in over twenty years.”

David blinked.

David blinked again.

David blinked back to the year 1944, to Arnhem, Private Hugh Oswald’s first engagement. The boy had barely been of age. After the dust had settled, he had broken down weeping, and David had found him later cradled in Thomas’ arms, head resting on his shoulder, both hands clutching his Captain’s jacket, tears and snot leaving a growing stain on Thomas’ uniform. Thomas had shushed him, muttering that yes, he knew, yes, he understood. Oswald had become one of Thomas’ boys, a favorite, maybe. Thomas had always had a way of almost obessively mothering the youngest recruits. And David, of course, as Thomas’ lieutenant and partner (although no one would have known about that latter part, obviously) had, as a matter of course, shouldered his part of the weight.

They hadn’t talked for twenty years? Why? How?

“What happened?” he asked.

At this point, Mellissa came back out with a cup of tea which she placed in front of her grandfather, and nothing for David. David decided not to mind.

“What happened?” Oswald carefully took a miniscule sip of his tea, testing the temperature. “Time passed. I grew older. Thomas grew younger. It... pains him, I suppose, seeing me this way. It pains you right now.”

David waved it off. Yes, it... shocked him seeing Hugh like this. But that shock was his own thing to overcome. “People grow old. Surely Thomas is not so thin-skinned as to break contact with one of his closest friends over this alone.”

Oswald shrugged. “I don’t know what else it might have been. We used to meet fairly regularly up until the late sixties. I can’t recall exactly when, but he broke contact fairly shortly after the rejuvenation event. We didn’t see much of him after that.”

“Who else is still standing?” David inquired.

“Ah. Arkwright is still alive, Patterson, Simpkins, Gerald and Mercier - John, not Edwin, obviously. Giles the younger and Rooney, although he’s been having heart problems. Blaine and Gardiner. A few others. Thomas doesn’t talk to them, either.”

David began drumming his fingers on the tabletop. “Have you fellas asked him why? Has he ever explained himself?” It seemed impossible that Thomas should, for any reason, leave his ducklings behind. A world of opposites, again.

Hugh Oswald looked out at his garden. “We weren’t going to make demands of him. He’s... he’s the Nightingale.”

The flat of David’s hand hit the table so hard it smarted. “No!”

Oswald winced. “Wh- what...?”

“Perhaps Thomas stopped talking to you because you insist on doing this!”

“Doing... what?” Oswald cocked his head, confused at David’s sudden ire. Oh, yes, they all tended to forget he could be angry. Had always tended to forget that. Lieutenant Mellenby had always been the soft, pale shadow attached to Captain Nightingale, until they’d learned that he had been made Lieutenant for a reason, that he held ferocity within him rivalling, and sometimes surpassing, that of Thomas.

“The Nightingale. You really kept that up all these years, hm? He is still going about his life like that, isn’t he! The war has been over for such a long time! How old are you now, Private Oswald, hm? You must be pushing a hundred. Did you lads have him carry you all on his shoulders for the entire duration? And then you did not even have the common civility to reach out and inquire whether he was struggling?”

Because Thomas was having troubles, as much was clear. David remembered the other night in the reading room in stark detail, remembered how something had been revealed to him there in its sudden vulnerability that he could not categorize.

“It was just his way. You don’t...” Oswald interrupted himself, but David could guess at the end of that sentence. You don’t ask the Nightingale whether he’s struggling. Goodness but he wanted to drop his head into his hands and stay like that for a while. Thomas had gotten that nickname when he’d joined the school choir. In this moment, David wanted very much to chuck a fireball at a few of Oswald’s pretty flower arrangements, and was almost thankful for the inhibitor cuffs.

“Well, you didn’t know him before the war like I did.” David sighed. And how indeed would Oswald know? He was much too young. “I see how it all changed him. And it’s not improved a bit, it seems, in all the years. He doesn’t seem to have one true friend in all the world. He secludes himself even from me, and I’m his lover.”

Oswald shifted in his seat. “You...?”

“You heard me right, his lover.” He didn’t originally come here to unload this on Hugh, but now that he’d started, he couldn’t seem to stop himself. It was allowed now, the law was on his side now, and there was nothing Hugh could do but sit and take it. “Do you understand me? We are as Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroclus, we are as Wilde and Bosie Douglas, we are two Alan Turings. We are Friends of Mrs. King. We commit acts of buggery upon each other, and we do so extremely well. We-”

“I know what a gay man is, Davey, you can quiet down,” Hugh Oswald said with a tired wave of his hand. “Look, none of us knew this for certain about the two of you, but a fair few of us suspected. We thought it best not to pry at the time. What makes you tell me now?”

“I’m...” David rubbed his eyes. They stung a bit. “I’m telling you in part because I can, I suppose. And because I need to impart to you that Thomas is a man who bleeds red. He lost everything too, you know. He lost me, and that is my own shame to bear, but he would have needed a friend, and what he got appears to have been a gaggle of mouth-breathers chorusing ‘If the Nightingale can do it, so can I’. Yes, you lads needed something, too. But you went back here and lived out a life in peace, and Thomas has kept on fighting the war every second since. And you’re surprised he didn’t show at company reunions? You gave him notice of my ‘death’, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” Oswald gripped the edge of the table with both hands, attempting perhaps to keep his calm. “He sort of nodded, and dismissed me from the hospital room. ‘Thanks for telling me’, he said, ‘Dismissed, Private’. And he did that blank face of his. And that was it, that was all of it.”

David ran his hands across his face. He couldn’t begin to imagine how they both had to have been hurting. I’m such a bloody idiot. “This is a mess,” he groaned. “This is a mess and I’m not equipped to fix it.”

“Well, well.” Oswald patted his hand. “You’re back now, isn’t that enough?”

“No,” David said. “It’s too little too late. I fear we all broke Thomas, and there’s no unbreaking him.”

----

Back at the Folly, David parked the Jag, snuck in through the back door and collapsed on a couch in the drawing room. He felt drained. Driving from Herefordshire had taken a while. It was late, darkness was beginning to fall, and he was tired.

He felt more than saw Molly enter. When he turned and beheld her, she was carrying a tray with tea and small sandwiches. The small dog they had here now was following on her heel, hoping to catch a bite. David noticed just then that he had missed lunch and dinner, and he was quite hungry.

He gave Molly a small smile. “Oh, are these for me?”

Molly nodded, and set the tray down on a coffee table. The Folly was full of these rooms, David thought idly, rooms of artfully arranged armchairs and little tables, rooms that nobody now used. What a waste, what a tremendous waste. He took a sandwich. The dog - his collar said Toby - immediately begged, and David bent down and stroked his fur. Good boy.

“I still don’t understand it, Molly,” he said. “I saw Oswald, but he gave me more questions than answers. Why were things permitted to get this way? Yes, Hugh is old now, and frail, but he had a life, in his way. He continued doing what he loved to do. He fucked a bee, somehow. Why was this not a possibility... here?”

Molly tilted her head to the side. The look in her eyes was... calculating, somehow. Do you want to know? she seemed to be asking. Can you bear the knowing?

“I want to know anything anyone can tell me,” David told her. This was his penance. And more, he couldn’t stay his natural curiosity. He had to empty this cup to the bitter dregs.

She took a step forward, reached out her hands, and suddenly was touching him. In all this time, she had never touched him--

He blinked his eyes, and a brief bout of blackness enveloped him, and he was suddenly elsewhere. He was in his own bedroom. How had that happened? It was night, not dusk. He quickly cycled through, and dismissed, half a dozen hypotheses. He had certainly not sleepwalked, and Molly certainly hadn’t carried him here. This felt too strange to be any of those. And the room was different, clothes and books and magazines lying about that he didn’t own anymore and hadn’t in a long time. What...?

There was someone in his bed.

When David went closer to investigate, it felt like he was floating rather than walking. It took him a few seconds to identify Thomas there in his bed (where he had every right to be) because so much was different. This was not Thomas of present days, except if he’d fallen very grievously ill very quickly while David had been away. He was gaunt and sickly pale, messy, unwashed strands of his hair hanging into his face, his jaw littered with chestnut-coloured scruff. He was fully dressed, down to his combat boots, and clutching to his chest a piece of fabric - a jumper, one of David’s own old favorites.

He waved a hand in front of Thomas’s eyes and got no reaction. Just a vacant, empty stare fixed at the ceiling.

The door was cracked open, slowly, carefully, and Molly entered. She was carrying an empty laundry basket under her arm.

Oh, this had to be a memory, David thought. A memory that Molly was now sharing with him. How fascinating. How did she do that? Had she always been able to do that?

Molly approached the bed and gestured with her free hand in the vague direction of it. No reaction came from Thomas. He seemed catatonic, wholly somewhere else, or maybe nowhere at all.

Molly hitched the laundry basket higher up her hip. Still no reaction.

She gestured again, perhaps a bit frustratedly. When there was still no movement in response to this, she bent down and carefully, with the very tips of her fingers, reached for the jumper in Thomas’ hands.

“No!”

Immediately, Thomas snapped to, curling protectively around the bit of fabric. One of his hands twitched and his shield came up, with the same intensity as on the battlefield, with a whoomph of raw energy that, as always, even just in this second-hand memory, felt like it made David’s teeth rattle.

Molly threw up a hand almost in exasperation, and gestured again at the bedsheets, the jumper - a cream-coloured one - then at her laundry basket.

“No... no. You can’t... can’t.” Thomas looked up at her out of wild, red-rimmed eyes. His voice sounded like he’d screamed it hoarse. David thought of his boyfriend as he’d met him, with that easy grin and the sun on his face, thought too of his revered Captain, sure as a rock in every crisis, a force of nature when unfettered on the battlefield. This iteration of Thomas looked feral.

“It smells like him,” Thomas muttered. “It does, still, a bit. Nothing else does anymore.”

Molly shook her head, enveloped by deep pity.

“Do you understand, nothing else... Molly...” He began rocking himself back and forth, cradling David’s jumper to his chest like a mother her baby, like a child a favorite doll. “Please don’t take... please, please don’t make me...”

Thomas Nightingale, pleading.

Molly stepped back, and the shield broke apart, and Thomas buried his face in the cream-colored wool, and David could hear his flat, hitched sobs, like they were being torn out of him, and he wished to never have been born to cause such grief.

Beyond the window, the light changed. It changed rapidly, light and dark and light again, and David watched as Thomas remained still and unmoving on the bed, barely changing position, watched in fast-forward as his hair and beard grew, as he got ever thinner, as Molly came and went and tried and more often than not failed to force some food upon him, and the days turned to weeks turned to months--

“Stop,” he cried, “Stop, Molly, stop, I can’t see any more!”

Seemingly Molly had heard him and was complying, as David felt a huge, yanking tug and was back in the drawing room, breathing heavily and slightly nauseous and... still... holding a sandwich. He put it down for Toby. He wasn’t hungry now.

“Damn,” David said. He pulled up his knees and wrapped his arms around them, not caring if it didn’t look proper, there was no one here but Molly to witness it. “Was it like that all of the time?”

Molly vaguely waved a hand.

“But it’s better now. It is better now.”

Molly shrugged. She had always been able to communicate much with sparse gestures. She then lowered her hands, and looked at the floor.

“Listen, don’t you think that. You’ve done more than enough, I’m sure. You’ve given your all. You still do, don’t you?”

There was some movement at the door, and David looked up to see the second fae had appeared, the new one - Foxglove. Molly’s... sister?

She moved - in that gliding way the high fae moved - closer to Molly and opened her arms. Molly stood still as a statue for a second, then she accepted the comfort, hugging her sister, resting her head on Foxglove’s shoulder. Even amidst all the misery, David’s heart felt a flush of that comfort, too.

This is good to see, he thought. And he knew what he had to do next.

----

The light was still on in Thomas’ bedroom, pouring out under the door in a warm, golden sheen, so David knocked and then let himself inside.

Thomas hadn’t undressed for bed yet; he was seated at his desk, pen in hand, finally correcting Peter’s homework. It was good to see him, not whole by a long shot, but at the very least not driven frenzied by grief.

Thomas put his pen down. “What is it, David? Come to apologize for disappearing with the Jag a second time?”

“I’m sorry,” David said. He couldn’t bear to look at Thomas’s face and see that cold disapproval there now, so he hung his head, and scrutinized the carpet.

“You do realize you cannot just go off like that?” There was a small scraping sound as Thomas pushed his chair back and stood.

“What’s yours is mine,” David muttered. “What’s mine is yours.” He felt so very tired.

He felt the sigh more than he heard it. He knew without looking up that Thomas was rolling his eyes now. “Look, certainly it annoys me that you keep spiriting my car away, but there is more to this than me feeling territorial about my property. I didn’t know where you were all day. You only recently got back. We’ve not gauged yet how deeply you’re affected by what you’ve experienced, you might endanger yourself going off alone, you might be volatile...”

And now Thomas was stood before him, and David felt his hands resting on his shoulders - Thomas had such beautiful hands, fine and graceful, he had always loved them - cupping his face, combing through his hair, like Thomas was reassuring himself that David was really here. Searching. David laughed.

“I might be volatile? I? Me?”

“You’re something, that’s for sure.” A hand lifted his chin, gentle but unyielding. “Look at me, Davey. What’s going on?”

And David met those clear, grey eyes and something in him bubbled over. He threw his arms around Thomas with abandon, and pulled him close, and held him there. “Oh, Thomas. Oh, Thomas.”

A hand was carding through his hair, and it felt so good after the day he’d had. “David...”

“I went to see Oswald.”

Thomas’ hands withdrew, and he took a step back, disentangling them again. “You...?” For a moment, something flashed in his eyes, and was suppressed too quickly for David to decipher. “How was he?”

“He was old... very old. His granddaughter is a bee. But Thomas, I understand now. I understand it all.”

David laughed again. His head spun. “I understand why you are this way now. And you’re not mad at me because I ran away, you don’t even bear a grudge against me because of Ettersberg. Or perhaps you do, but that’s hardly the point, is it? You’re not angry, you’re scared.”

And there it was again, something flashing in the depths of those grey eyes, a flicker of uncertainty, ruthlessly smothered. “I beg your pardon,” Thomas said.

“For all these years you’ve had to go it alone,” David replied. He felt fevered in that way that resembled emerging from a week-long series of gruelling and time-intensive experiments crowned at last by success. How everything fit together so smoothly at last! Hypothesis, experiment, conclusion. “Letting no one close was where your salvation lay. You stopped contacting the lads because they couldn’t see that you were struggling with them starting to age past you. That you felt some sort of way about it. You’ve been Hugh’s Greek hero for so long. You don’t know how to step off that plinth and be human again. You have reason to fear that it will get bad... very bad, if you try it.”

David grinned, and seized Thomas by the lapels, and would have picked him up and spun him around the room if he didn’t feel so light-headed, so very drunk on the exhilaration of everything coming together at last. “But that’s all right now, my sweet songbird. I’m here! I will take good care of you. I understand you, fully. You’ve had to build these walls, but me going past them is a good thing. You can finally put that all down - that sword and shield, all down and away. And I will stand guard. Won’t that be good?”

Thomas tore himself away.

The exhilaration shrivelled, all joy in David took a fatal plunge at the cold rage in Thomas’ face.

“Lieutenant Mellenby,” Thomas said quietly (oh, he never raised his voice when he got angry anymore, he grew quieter), “What the fuck did you just say to me right now?”

David felt tears threatening to spill at last. He was no longer light. He was miserable and anchored to this carpet, his body a lead weight. “Thomas...”

“You have no right. No right at all. How dare you? How... dare you? After Ettersberg? After all you’ve caused to happen?”

“I only meant...”

“There’s the door. Leave now, before I start throwing fireballs.”