Chapter Text
This was clearly unacceptable.
It was a blip. An unacceptable blip, and one that neither Emerald nor Mercury was willing to take responsibility for.
Really, they couldn’t be blamed. It was a clear-cut slippery-slope situation. They’d had the most professional of intentions.
It had been natural, after the day Tyrian had knocked Mercury to the floor, stinger hovering inches from his chin, and left the two of them standing side by side, both frightened and angry and breathing too hard, that Emerald and Mercury would want to stay side by side. With the attack on Haven over and failed and Cinder off gods knew where, Emerald and Mercury’s only real job was to keep themselves from getting killed, and it was much easier to not get killed when they were together, watching each other’s backs.
And if Emerald had quietly set her jaw and resolved that she would fire Thief’s Respite straight into Tyrian’s face the next time he tried to touch Mercury, well, that wasn’t something that Mercury needed to know.
And if Mercury started making a point of walking behind Emerald so that anyone who tried to ambush them would have to deal with him first, that was none of her business.
This watching-each-other’s-backs arrangement was completely professional, and it was equally professional that they figure out a way to continue said arrangement during the hours when they needed to sleep.
So, when they’d reached Emerald’s door that night and Mercury had turned to go and all the dark, winding hallways that he would have to walk alone in order to get to his own room had flashed through her mind, she’d said, “Stay.”
And he’d stayed.
That was Slip Number One.
Slip Number Two came about a few nights later.
Mercury quickly discovered that sleeping on the cold stone floor of Evernight castle was one of the most wretchedly uncomfortable experiences of his life, which, given how his life had gone up until this point, was saying a lot. The flagstones dug into his back, and the creeping chill made his legs ache where they met his prosthetics.
Note to self: When Salem’s in a better mood, bribe Hazel to ask her to look into central heating.
There was a rough voice in his head, like there always was, telling him that the aches and the chills didn’t matter, that if he was a real assassin and not just a pathetic excuse for one, he’d tough it out. That his prosthetics wouldn’t be bothering him if he’d fought well enough to keep his legs.
He didn’t understand how that voice could still be so clear, two years after he’d killed its owner.
But the lack of sleep was making him snappish and clumsy during the day, and that would make it harder for him to watch Emerald’s back if Tyrian decided to try his hand (his tail?) at actually murdering them.
It wasn’t weak to seek out better sleeping conditions. It was practical.
That was what he told himself as he levered himself up on one arm, his armor scraping quietly against the floor.
There was a little gasp to the left of him, and he looked over to see Emerald sitting bolt upright in a baggy sleep shirt with Thief’s Respite pointed at his face.
Well, at least she was taking watch duty seriously.
“You know, I’m pretty sure I started sleeping in this room so that I could avoid getting murdered,” he said.
Emerald lowered the revolver, looking sheepish. “Sorry. I’m, uh, a little twitchy.” She cradled the weapon close to her chest, like it was a teddy bear and not a loaded firearm. “Obviously.”
Now that the risk of being inadvertently shot in the face by his partner was out of the picture, Mercury sat up the rest of the way, ready to haggle a blanket or two out of her. They’d do almost nothing against the unrelenting cold of the flagstones, but Mercury had learned long ago that the difference between “nothing” and “almost nothing” was actually bigger than most people thought.
Emerald got that. He saw it in the careful way she polished her revolvers, in the way she ate every meal like she knew her next wasn’t guaranteed.
“So, uh, you couldn’t sleep?” she asked.
Mercury shook his head.
“Tyrian?” Her shoulders hunched in a little, and Mercury would deck that laughing-mad freak in the face the next time he saw him for making Emerald curl in on herself like that.
He shook his head. “Just the floor.”
“Oh! Right. Sorry.”
Half the time Emerald said, “Sorry,” it was just completely baffling, and this instance easily fell into that half.
“What for?”
“Well, we could have been trading out,” she said, that apologetic note still in her voice. Hell, he didn’t know what an apology that didn’t come from Emerald would sound like. He’d never gotten one from anyone else. “I could take the floor during my watch shifts, and you could—”
And at that point, she let out an affronted squawk as Mercury took her up on that offer before she could retract it by flinging himself up onto the narrow bed and rolling across her to land on her other side. The squawk turned into a laugh partway through, then morphed into a squeal of indignation as he planted both hands on her side and shoved.
“Hey!” Emerald exclaimed, toppling out of the bed and landing on the floor.
“My bed now,” Mercury said, burying his face in the pillow and settling into the nice warm space she’d left behind. “No take-backs.”
“You know, that You-Getting-Murdered option is starting to sound pretty good right now,” she grumbled, and Mercury found himself smiling into the pillow. Em was cute when she was grumpy.
And that was a sentence he needed to add to one of his (worryingly numerous) Boxes That Should Not Be Opened Under Any Circumstances. The box of Emerald-related content in that designation was starting to get… unwieldy.
Attachments made you stupid. Mercury knew that. But every time he managed to cut one off, Emerald would do something else that made a hook catch under his ribs.
So even as he rolled onto his back in that nice patch of warmth, his armor slowly starting to feel less like ice, a part of his mind was still hooked, still reaching toward Emerald where she sat hunched against the wall.
She was shivering. Her voice rattled a little every time she exhaled. He could almost see her hugging herself, rubbing her hands up and down her arms.
That wasn’t his problem. It shouldn’t have mattered. But his brain wouldn’t switch off when all it had to picture was Emerald looking small and cold and miserable.
“Would you cut that out?” he said, looking over at Emerald. He was right. She had been doing that hugging-herself thing. She’d always done it when it was her turn to take watch, even back in Vale.
She glared at him. “Oh, I’m sorry, is the fact that I’m freezing to death disrupting your beauty sleep?”
“Yeah,” he said, smirking. “It is. If I go another night like this, all my hair’ll fall out, and I’ll become a wrinkled old geezer.”
Emerald tilted her head to the side. “You sure going bald wouldn’t be an improvement over wasting twenty minutes and an ungodly amount of hair gel every morning just to give yourself slightly different bedhead than you already wake up with?”
Ah, so she was shooting to kill.
And the problem was that on this topic, Mercury had no ammunition to fire back, no ammunition that was true, anyway. What was he supposed to say? “Oh yeah? Well your hair is always shining and perfect no matter how long we’re on the run”?
Shit, that was more material for the box. Time to change the subject.
“Fine, you can have your bed back.”
Slip Number Two.
“Oh, thank gods!” Mercury had to scoot over some and abandon the warm patch as Emerald scrambled up over the side of the bed and cocooned herself in the blankets, her eyes shining before sliding shut in contentment.
That… that definitely wasn’t the cutest thing he’d ever seen. He definitely didn’t have a mental register of cute things he’d seen on which all the entries involved Emerald.
He almost forgot to be annoyed that she’d stolen all the blankets even though it was his turn to sleep.
Almost.
Before he could say anything, though, Emerald sat up, looking at him funny. “Aren’t you gonna… go back to the floor?”
“Gods, no.” It had been weeks since his legs had bugged him so little.
“But, if I’m in the bed and you’re not leaving the bed, isn’t it kind of…?”
Shit. Shit. It was definitely kind of. But he was too tired to move, and he needed Emerald not to be cold, so he threw on a smirk.
“You wish.”
I wish. I know I shouldn’t.
“Jerk,” Emerald muttered.
“Correct,” he said. He needed her to keep that in mind before she gave him a chance to screw anything up.
“Just take your greaves off, alright? They make me nervous.” The fact that she was still holding Thief’s Respite made that seem a little ridiculous.
Mercury’s eyes flicked to her weapon, then to her face. He raised an eyebrow.
Emerald scowled. “Thief’s Respite won’t go off and blow a hole in the wall of our tent if I sleep-kick.”
Mercury groaned. “Em, it was one time—”
“Off.”
He sat up grumbling and swung his legs over the side of the bed, half-expecting her to pay him back by shoving him onto the floor. But she just sat there, watching him with an intent look that made him think too hard about what he was doing and screw up undoing the clasps and the laces.
His boots came away with his greaves, and his feet clanked against the floor. He shivered a little, his armor cold and heavy around his shoulders. With his greaves and boots on, it was easier, even with the aches and the clanking, to let go of the fact that the only thing connecting his knee to his ankle on each side was a plain steel bar with a pneumatic tube running down it. He’d never tell anyone, but there were times when he looked down at that spare metal and all he could think of was the feeling of Marcus's knife digging into the struggling muscle that it had replaced.
If I'd been faster...
“You’ve been sleeping in your armor.”
Mercury started, kicking his boots aside. Emerald seemed closer than she’d been when he’d zoned out, and she was leaning forward, biting her lip with a frown of—he was going to guess concern.
He didn’t like how good she was getting at knowing when he felt weak.
“Yeah,” he said, “real keen observation there, Em.”
But she didn’t lean back or flinch away like she would’ve before that fight they’d had in the hallway.
“Don’t be a dick,” she said. “It just—no wonder you spend all day shambling around like a Creep.”
“I do not shamble. I might, from time to time, meander, but—”
He stopped talking, then, because Emerald reached out brushed her fingers against the buckle that fastened his armor to his forearm. They hovered there, waiting, so light he could barely feel them, and killed every coherent thought in his head.
“You’d sleep better,” she said, and there was a look in her eyes that was almost defiant, like she was daring him to push her away.
He didn’t want to push her away.
Slip Number Three.
“You make a point,” he said, looking down at his knees.
“I do,” said Emerald, and then her quick pickpocket’s fingers were moving up the inside of his arm, undoing the fastenings that held the cold metal against his skin.
He wasn’t sure when he’d gotten so okay with Emerald touching him. Cinder had tried that creepy face-stroking thing she was always doing to Torchwick on him pretty early on, and he’d nearly bitten her hand off. She’d tried a different angle after that, sneaking up in his blind spot to run fingers down the scars on his arms and coo over them in that creepy, cloying way she had.
Boy, did he not miss her.
The third time she’d tried that, he’d stormed out of camp and come back with his armor, and that had put a welcome end to Cinder trying to use anything but brute force to control him.
There was none of that in the way Emerald touched him. She didn’t gloat over peeling layers of him away. She just did it—quiet and methodical with a little frown of concentration on her face. Her hands were gentle in a way that made Mercury feel light-headed, but they were doing a job.
He could’ve done that job himself, with a little more fumbling and effort. He probably should have done it himself. He was slipping.
But he was too tired to give a damn, and there was something soothing about watching Emerald work, the way she gritted her teeth when a buckle gave her trouble and smiled like she was proud when it finally gave way.
“Other side,” she said, pulling the last plate from his right shoulder.
Instead of arguing, Mercury turned, offering her his left arm to work on without saying a word. Sleep was starting to drag on his limbs now, and he found himself leaning, just a little, into her hands. He was used to holding his ground, to not flinching when someone drove a punch at his face, but apparently he wasn’t capable of keeping up that same unwavering posture when Em’s fingers were skimming up the inside of his arm, making him shiver even as they pulled him free of the things that were making him cold.
His arms weren’t used to being touched lightly. None of him was. The feeling was so unfamiliar it almost scared him.
And he wanted more of it.
Shit.
He was going to need a bigger box.
“Hey,” said Emerald, her hands almost up to his shoulder, and he startled, suddenly scared that she might have heard the stupid, unprofessional things he was thinking.
Gods, if her Semblance ever evolved so that she could read minds instead of just giving them a spin, he’d need to swan-dive into one of the Pits, Salem-style.
“Yeah?”
“I’ve… been meaning to say sorry.” Emerald looked away for a second, her fingers stumbling. “About the whole attacking-you thing.”
And Mercury actually let out a tired laugh, because that sentence probably had Marcus Black rolling in his shallow grave.
“I’d’ve attacked me too, Em,” he said. And it was true. He’d been right, but he’d been a jerk about it. When he was younger, if anyone had told him the truth about Marcus the way he’d told her the truth about Cinder… he probably would have done the exact same thing Emerald had. “It’s no big deal. ‘M used to it.”
“Yeah, but—” Emerald tugged the last piece of armor from his shoulder and looked down at it—“the things you’re used to kind of suck, and I don’t—I’d like to be different.”
He looked at her, at those bright red eyes that always lit up with hope and excitement when Cinder approached only to fall into disappointment. There was a little sliver of that hope in them again, for the first time since Haven. And it was for him.
Something tightened in Mercury’s throat, but he swallowed it down and kept his voice from shaking. “You’re different, Em.”
Emerald’s eyes lingered on his face a moment longer before she sat back and took up her post at the headboard. “Good.”
With the heavy chill of his armor gone, it was easy for Mercury to sink under the blankets. In the minute before his eyes slid shut, he looked up at Emerald, Thief’s Respite clutched to her chest, her eyes anxious and alert.
He wondered how many nights she’d spent that way, holed up in a corner of an alley with no one to watch her back.
The thought floating in his head when sleep claimed him was, I’d like to be different for you, too.
If questioned, Emerald would feel perfectly comfortable laying the blame for Slip Number Two squarely at Mercury’s cybernetic feet. Slips Number Three and, most disastrously, Four, though, were not entirely not her fault.
She wouldn’t admit it even at gunpoint, but… she kind of liked sharing a bed with her partner best friend least horrible co-worker. She could scrape together at least a couple of sensible reasons for why she felt that way, but underneath those reasons, things got… concerning.
It did make keeping watch easier. Knowing that Mercury, the most ridiculously light sleeper she’d ever met, would feel it if she dropped off during a watch shift and would never let her live it down made it easier to press through those lonely, wakeful hours. And having him right there… made those hours feel a little less lonely. Also—and the fact that she’d noticed this enough to add it to the list was probably creepy—Mercury looked softer in his sleep. Without his armor and that permanent scowl he’d worn since they’d gotten back from Haven, he looked a lot less like a professional hitman and a lot more like just—a boy.
It made him look like someone who could get hurt if she failed to keep a watch on that door, so Emerald kept her hands braced on Thief’s Respite and her eyes open, because that was what the boy sleeping beside her trusted her to do.
As for the non-watch shifts, it was maybe a little mercenary to think of her only remaining ally in terms of his efficacy as a space heater, but that didn’t change the fact that Mercury was an excellent space heater once she’d pried the armor from his arms. Curling up with her back against his side was so much better than feeling the cold, drafty air of the Keep creep up her spine in the night. In a life of scrounging, that kind of luxury made her feel like she’d carried off a truly nefarious heist.
The other reasons were smaller.
She didn’t have to say good-bye to him anymore. She’d always hated “good-bye.” Too many people had thrown it in her face like a smoke bomb and vanished into the mist.
During her watch shifts, she did maintenance on Thief’s Respite, keeping the blades sharp and the chains neatly stowed and the metal polished to a shine. The routine kept her hands busy and her mind alert, and she attended to it every night with a diligence that would have made an Atlesian Specialist weep for joy.
And by the third night of their bed-sharing arrangement, when Mercury had gently prodded her awake for her watch shift around three, she’d opened her eyes to see all the tiny screwdrivers and bottles of finish laid out neatly on the nightstand, exactly how she liked them.
He’d already been asleep—or pretending to be—by the time she said, “Thank you.”
She guessed it was his way of repaying her for helping him out of his armor each night, which—Emerald liked that part of the arrangement a lot. And that was troubling.
But there was something about the way Mercury exhaled when she was done, eyes sliding shut for a second, shoulders relaxing into her hands, that she wanted to repeat.
So, she repeated it. Shamelessly.
And they started to talk to each other like they had at Beacon again, before the drawn-out darkness of the Evernight. She rolled her eyes at his jokes, and he made fun of her, and she sniped back, and the world started to feel a little smaller. No matter how miserable Tyrian and Watts managed to make her waking hours, Emerald had somewhere warm to go at the end of them. Life wasn’t a long nightmare now, just a series of days, parts of them pretty okay, and that was enough.
On the fifth night of the new arrangement, the day before the bullhead was slated to arrive to take Watts and Tyrian to Atlas, Slip Number Four took place, and it took place on Emerald’s watch.
It had been a shitty day. Tyrian hadn’t outright attacked them, but the creep’s respect for personal space was completely nonexistent, and he was acting even more freaksome than usual.
The real problem, though, was Salem. They never saw her, but they heard her. Far up in the highest towers, continuing to throw the tantrum that had begun the second she’d found out her ex’s latest incarnation had entered the picture.
And breaking glass.
That wasn’t a problem for Emerald. But it was for Mercury.
She’d never said anything about it, but she’d noticed, from time to time. The night she’d dropped a plate while they were cleaning up a failed cooking experiment in their dorm at Beacon and Mercury had startled back like a bullet had grazed his head—the way he’d bolted out of the great hall the second the windows had started to spiderweb.
Sometimes, Emerald thought about what Mercury’s father must have done to him to make him flinch and shake that way at something as small as a piece of glass hitting the floor. And then she bit the inside of her cheek to keep down a scream of rage.
And that godsdamned sound had rung through every corner of the castle for hours. That meant that Mercury spent most of the day clenching his hands into fists and staring off into the middle distance, and that Emerald spent most of the day thinking about how satisfying it would be to dig up Marcus Black and shoot him again.
When she took Mercury’s armor off that night, there was no sigh. His shoulders stayed rigid. He tossed and turned for a long time before he finally rolled onto his back and went still.
Emerald was about two hours into her watch and had just finished up the last of her maintenance on Thief’s Respite when Mercury made a sound that scared her.
It wasn’t a loud sound. If the room wasn’t so creepily silent, she probably wouldn’t have heard it at all.
It was a small, animal whine of fear and pain, and Emerald knew, instantly, that something was shattering inside her partner’s head. She tossed Thief’s Respite onto the floor without a second thought and turned toward him.
His face was tensed in a pained grimace, brows knitting together, lips pulled back so that his teeth glinted in the dim light, jaw shifting and clenching, like he was trying to talk but couldn’t.
The sight lodged in Emerald’s chest like shrapnel, and she reached for him in a panic, scared she’d hurt him but sure down to her bones that she had to find a way to make this stop.
She caught his shoulder and shook it, trying to be gentle, but the muscles under her hand felt locked into place.
“Merc!” she whispered. “Mercury, wake up! Merc, it’s me, wake up!”
He made the sound again, and she thought I’m glad you burned his house till it was nothing but ash, and she shook him harder because she didn’t know what else to do.
Mercury gasped, his eyes flashing open, his shoulders loosening a fraction. Emerald let out the breath she’d been holding, but something still wasn’t right. Mercury’s gaze was vacant and confused, his breathing heavy, like she’d only partly succeeded in dragging him out of a place that was much, much worse than Evernight Keep.
“Merc?”
Still with that muddled look, he stared up at her, his eyes tracing over her face. “Em…?”
“Yeah,” she said, relief welling up in her chest and threatening to drown her.
Mercury exhaled shakily, like he had the same drowning feeling that she did, and then, so quickly that she barely realized what he was doing, he rolled up onto his elbow, flinging an arm over her middle and burying his face in her side.
Emerald’s hands flew up in confusion, then lowered slowly. Mercury’s arm tightened around her waist, pulling her close like she was somewhere he wanted to hide and something he wanted to protect all at once.
No one had ever held her that way before. Her hands hovered over him, uncertain. He was still breathing too heavy, too fast, his fingers pressing into her waist. The one eye she could see was shut tight.
If he’d surfaced out of sleep at all, he hadn’t stayed above water for more than a second or two. And wherever he was, he was still fighting. Before she could think it through, she let one of her arms sink onto his, holding him to her so that he wouldn’t have to cling on alone.
His breathing was still ragged, but it slowed. The arm over her waist softened a little.
Okay. Okay. That had helped.
She let her other hand settle in his hair, carefully smoothing it away from the places where a cold sweat had glued it to his forehead, trying, in the smallest way, to put him back in order.
Emerald had tried to do this for Cinder, after Beacon, haunting her bedside like a ghost, but it wasn’t long before her good hand learned to slap again, before it became clear that all she wanted Emerald for was a mouthpiece.
Emerald had been okay with that. It meant that she was needed, and being needed was something like being loved, right?
This felt different. Warmer. Scarier, but not because she thought he’d hurt her.
When she was twelve, she’d pulled off her first big jewel heist, a pretty purple amethyst that glittered in the cupped palm of her hand, unfathomably valuable and fragile as glass. Watching the sunlight flicker around its edges, she’d felt rich and powerful and unspeakably terrified that she might drop it and see it shatter into nothing.
That was how holding Mercury felt.
Gods, if he ever found out she’d thought that, he’d probably sue her for defamation of character.
But that couldn’t stop her from thinking it, and it didn’t stop her from moving her fingers through his hair, keeping his head tucked against her side as his breathing slowed and grew quiet. She kept him close, and they rode out the nightmare together.
Maybe it would have made sense to pick up Thief’s Respite again and turn her eyes back to the door once Mercury’s face had gone still and tranquil. But Emerald couldn’t help feeling like this watch was more important than the one that kept Tyrian at bay.
She spent the rest of her shift with her arms around her partner, standing guard against a ghost.
When it was time for her to wake Mercury up for his shift, she found she couldn’t do it. As the hours had ticked by, he’d grown heavy and warm, molding himself to the shape of her so that they curled neatly together—his head to her ribs, her arm over his, his chest rising and falling against her hip, a metal knee flung over her shin.
Emerald felt held for once, and she couldn’t make herself ruin it. So she told herself she’d keep watch just a little longer, let Mercury catch up on the sleep the nightmare had stolen from him.
It wasn’t long before that unfamiliar feeling of peace made her eyelids heavy, made her fingers go clumsy, then still, in the softest patches of Mercury’s hair, the warmth and the weight of him pulling her towards sleep.
Screw it.
She wouldn’t be any use against Tyrian, not as bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived as she was. And Mercury wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her.
She let herself sink down onto her back, sliding under the blankets and smiling as the Evernight cold released her. She was conscious, vaguely, of Mercury’s head sliding up to her shoulder, his arm gathering her closer against his chest, and then a dreamless sleep carried her off.
Slip Number Four.
Emerald really should have known that when they woke up five hours later, tangled in each other’s arms at the foot of a slippery slope of their own creation, the result would be utter pandemonium.