Chapter Text
The Fool, The Magician, Two of Cups
We’re the only two left in the round, the pot sitting glittering between us like a small island of gold coins and pocket watches and tie pins and even the folds of a lush, richly coloured cravat, offered up by one player who’d gotten truly desperate and then truly depressed about half an hour ago.
I take a moment to size this guy up again, now that he’s my only opponent. I’m guessing we’re about the same height, with me maybe being a bit taller, and him having at least three weight classes and seemingly a couple of years on me. His clothes don’t speak of any kind of prosperity — or any kind of taste, for that matter, guess his tailor also outfits scarecrows as a sideline in lean times — but the gun leaned against the side of his chair is enormous and appears well-made and scrupulously maintained to my inexpert eye. Not too hard to guess where he invests his money. Maybe not quite as dumb as he looks, then.
The few times during the game he’s spoken more than a few words at a time his voice has been thick with Bilgewater, dripping from every syllable like day-old seaweed.
I pretend to take a larger swig of my glass of wine than I really do — I don’t drink enough to get tipsy while I work, but it never hurts to let people think that I do, if it makes them lower their guards. There are a lot of them watching. It’s a fine enough parlour we’re all gathered in, certainly the finest Mudtown has to offer. The owner and host of the highly illegal evening is some bigwig Piltie who fell from social grace back in the city after some… economic indiscretions, and then moved out here to oversee the brickmaking industry as if in penance. The wallpaper is a deep luscious green shot through with gold thread, fine enough that you certainly can’t buy its like around these parts, but the moist sea air and smoke have wreaked havoc with it, just as the provincial boredom had crumbled our host’s resolution to stay away from the gambling tables for good this time. The furniture is similarly shabbily fallen from grandeur, the stink of old cigar smoke and desperation clinging to everything. You could say the same for most of the clientele, apart from me and this last guy — neither of us seem to have had much grandeur to fall from in the first place.
“All in,” I say conversationally, watching for my opponent’s reaction.
Huh. He is kind of handsome, I guess, in an unshaven, rough-hewn, nose-broken-in-three-separate-bar fights sorta way. It’s getting harder to see him within the haze of cigar smoke as the game goes on, though, and he sits leaned far enough back in his chair that the light from the oil lamp and candles around the room can barely reach him. The lit end of his cigar is a dull glow in the shadows, flaring periodically.
It only takes a few moments for him to answer my call. “I’ll see you.”
Bold move, if nothing else he’s not a coward. What little I can make out of his face doesn’t show much of what’s going through his head, though it’s hard to tell whether this is a practiced skill, or if there’s just not a whole lot going on in there. He’s a big man, and big men sometimes don’t feel a need to cultivate much beyond arm strength and a lack of imagination.
The other people around the table who’ve folded or played until they had nothing left to bet are following in rapt attention, the sting of loss forgotten for a moment in the thrill of the game. This is what some people play for, the tense silence before the glorious release of the storm. Personally I play to win, of course, but I do find witnessing that sort of dedication to the spirit of the game quaintly charming, in its own way.
My opponent here strikes me as a more down to earth type too, but you never know when you’ve got a secret romantic on your hands. Guess it’s time to find out.
I take my last card from the dealer, not too bothered that it’s nothing to write home about. Only a fool plays the hand he’s dealt, as the saying goes, and I came prepared — I’ve got aces, literal and figurative, up my sleeve and another few places besides; I ain’t particularly worried.
“Well, then, big guy,” I say, smiling my brightest, most insufferable smile as I exchange the disappointing newcomer for a more fitting replacement from my sleeve, so smoothly with long practice that I know it’s unnoticeable. “The moment of truth approaches. It’s been a good game, I’m almost sad to see it end.”
His eyebrow raises without anything else in his expression changing around it. Wow, that’s kind of impressive, that’s a level of stoneface I haven’t seen in a long, long time. Even my aunt would probably give a single nod of approval. Wonder if he can keep it up once he realizes he’s lost. “You do enjoy the sound of your own voice, dontcha.”
I keep my smile in place and the door in my peripheral vision, making sure I’ve got a clean shot at it if things get out of hand. I’m not staying around for a taste of those giant scarred knuckles if it turns out he’s a sore loser. “Just making conversation. Or trying to, at least.”
His only answer is a non-committal grunt. Ouch, tough crowd.
He really does seem remarkably confident. It would make me a bit uneasy, truth be told, but it’s just as likely he’s too dumb to realize he’s screwed. No need to lose my head over it. The cards thrum under my fingers, but with excitement rather than warning, more elated all through tonight than I can ever remember feeling before; we must be onto something good here. They haven’t steered me wrong yet; I tend to be the weak link in our — for lack of a better word — partnership.
Well, it has been fun, but it’s time to wrap this up.
I make a show of glancing down at my cards, the smile still sunny on my face, and without letting it leak into my body language I keep myself braced for violence. Or, more precisely, for getting out of range of violence, should it be unleashed. I have a card already sparking with magic up my sleeve, the biggest ace I’ve got — even in the worst case scenario I could be out of here before any of these idiots have the time to blink, and that with enough gold stuffed in my pockets to keep me for weeks.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” I say, as I put down my cards with a flourish.
A hushed sigh of awe moves through the room as if through the congregation in a church at the appearance of an angel. It’s the sort of hand men dream of, the one you might get once in a lifetime and then chase after forevermore, hungry for the high of it one more time before you die; the hand whose promise, however elusive, keeps you playing just one more game. Me, I tend to get it about once or twice a month. Sometimes more, if I’m planning to move on soon and don’t have to worry too much about word spreading through town. What can I say, I’m a lucky guy.
I lean back in my chair and take another drink from my glass, victory and wine mingled sweet on my tongue as I keep grinning.
I’m not sure what I’d expected — some sudden outburst of violence, maybe, he looks the type, or threats, or accusations and possibly furniture hurled at me over the table. None of it would’ve been anything new. Instead he calmly gazes down at his cards with the cigar resting at the corner of his mouth, his bottom lip sticking out contemplatively as he rearranges them, moving one card a few places over.
Wait. Wait, why isn’t his face changing? What’s he playing at here? There’s literally nothing he could play to match what I just…
Seemingly pleased with the order he’s got them in now, he clears his throat and leans closer, into the circle of the lamplight, to put his own cards down in a perfect mirror of mine. Perfect, because it’s that same miraculous hand, that gambler’s dream twice over, painted cardboard shimmering like fool’s gold in the candlelight. A coincidence astronomically unlikely at the best of times, and physically impossible when playing with the deck we’ve been dealt.
We somehow seem to have managed to put eight aces on the table between us.
Time stops, the world narrowed down to just the two of us. He meets my gaze steadily.
Now that he’s leaned into the light I notice his eyes are an unexpectedly bright shade of blue, like when the sun hits the Serpentine at just the right angle.
Normally I’d be out and half-way to the next town over by now, except… Except between my aunt’s clear-eyed sardonic tutelage, years on the road and natural talent, I am good at reading people. And there’s no menace in his face right now, no sense of danger coming off him. Just a good-natured if still sharp sort of amusement. I start to smile once more, and the corner of his mouth jerks with an answering grin that slowly spreads across his face.
We both burst into laughter at the same time, the tension breaking open like a fireworks display. The rest of the room stares at us in confusion as we’re mutually wracked by it, until we can barely stay upright in our chairs; my new friend here has to brace himself against the table to keep from sliding under it.
Man, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed like this in my entire nineteen years of life, it just keeps welling up in my chest like a fountain of mirth. It’s been a long time since I laughed with someone.
“We callin’ this one a draw?” I ask once I have enough breath back, extending my hand to him over the table.
“Sure, works for me,” he manages to get out between chortles, taking it. His hands are huge and callused, surprisingly warm — his handshake is firm enough to teeter on the edge of being painful, though seemingly more from a sort of cheerful heedlessness than any intent towards intimidation. “We’ll split it fifty-fifty, how ‘bout it.”
“Excellent idea.”
A few of the other players still gathered around the table start muttering darkly between themselves, the sort of murmur that tends to end in a murder. The guy moves a hand to his gun and gives them a look that speaks many, many volumes in the language of broken fingers and bruised ribs, though he’s still smiling. They take one look at his overarms and scarred knuckles and shark grin, then seem to suddenly remember they’ve got somewhere else to be and hurriedly start gathering up their things. Damn, that must come in handy, I’m almost jealous. Though maybe the reputation I’ve managed to gain around these parts is doing some work in how quickly they’re scurrying off, as well. Most people get nervous about magic out in the wild, like they do with anything they don’t understand, even when it’s only spoken of in whispered rumours.
As they all file out of the room — even the host of the evening, I note — with a few vicious glares over their shoulders promising future trouble as they go, I glance down at our cards once more and it sets me off again, pulling him down with me into what’s more or less a helpless fit of giggles now.
“Well, well, well,” he manages finally, drying his eyes with the back of his hand. “What a curious twist of fate we’ve found ourselves caught up in here, friend.”
“By the looks of things you don’t believe in fate any more than I do,” I say, nodding at our cards. The mirth is still tickling in my stomach, like the sun playing over a shoal of small bright fishes in the wake of a barque when someone drops food over the side.
“The gods help those who help themselves and so on,” he says philosophically, his face still pink from laughing. “And I ain’t never seen a god help anyone, so I’m doin’ double duty on this one, really.”
I realize he’s younger than I initially thought, definitely around my age.
“It’s not that often I meet someone else like me out here,” I say. Certainly no one who could play me to a draw, though to be fair that’s more on me for being overconfident and not paying attention. He wouldn’t catch me off-guard like that again.
“Eh, you’ll find liars and thieves in every port, if you know where to look,” he shrugs.
“Not many who do it with such style, though.”
He chuckles. “Might be you’ve got a point there, pal.”
Finally freed from the giggles I reach out and pick up the cravat I’d been eyeing before, twining the smooth fabric between my fingers and admiring the color in the candlelight. I raise my eyebrows at him in question. He waves a magnanimous hand, signalling that I’m free to take it. With a pleased smile I fold it neatly and stick it in my pocket.
“This has been a delight, but I do believe it might be wise to continue this conversation somewhere else,” I say, starting to gather up the rest of my half of the winnings — or at least as much of it as I can comfortably carry, it’s a bit of a waste, really — and tucking them safely away in my coat.
“Huh?” he says, blinking.
“Turns out we’ve got some sore losers on our hands, and they’ve gone and fetched a few friends,” I say, tilting my head towards the window that faces the street, where the outlines of the small crowd seemingly deemed necessary to safely take on my new friend here can be seen against torchlight, moving restlessly on the spot in preparation to go in. At least one of the figures carries something that looks suspiciously like a club with nails in it.
“Oh. Good call.” After a moment of thought he decides against counting out his earnings and instead folds everything up in the tablecloth, stealing one of the curtain tiebacks from the room’s other window to tie it closed and creating a makeshift bag for himself.
“Huh,” I say. Damn, how come I didn’t think of that? “Neat.”
“Thanks,” he says, seeming genuinely touched by the compliment as he slings the bag and his gun over his shoulder. Standing up, it turns out he’s shorter than he’d seemed sitting across the table, though no less solid in any other way. “Meet me by the big oak tree up on Mudtown Hill in half an hour or so, and we’ll split it up more properly, seems only fair.” Then he squares his shoulders, kicks out the window in a shower of glass and starts to climb out. “Now, then, you sorry sons of bitches, you somehow still feelin’ lucky tonight?!”
“See you there, then,” I say, realizing that I’m grinning even as I’m activating the card to teleport. The half of the angry mob not currently in the process of being pummelled into incoherence by my new friend starts spilling into the room just as I take my leave.
On the off chance my new friend survives and that he’s not planning to ambush me, this night might turn out to be a lot more fun than I’d expected.
— —
I hold the card between my fingers and focus, and once the magic surges and crests in my chest, I smile — and then I’m gone.
For a moment I can see everything and go anywhere, and the thrill of it never gets old. I take the time to appreciate the look of wide-eyed astonishment on Graves’ face as he stares at the spot on the grass I just disappeared from, then glance around for a suitable place to reappear and complete the trick.
In the end I settle down on one of the middle branches of the nearby oak tree, leaning back against the trunk. Once I’ve arranged myself in a suitably nonchalant posture and folded my arms over my chest, like I might have been sitting here for hours, I glance down at the ground and the top of Graves’ head. I grin at the sharp turn of his head this way and that as he looks around for me.
“What in the blood-shitting — T.F.? Where the fuck did you…”
“Up here, hotshot,” I chirp, dangling my leg cheerfully for effect as he wrenches his head around to stare up at me.
“Okay,” he says eventually, easing out of the braced fighting stance he’d fallen into, but shoulders relaxing only slightly. “Okay, so you can do that, point proven. Consider me convinced.”
“You seem a mite troubled, my friend,” I observe. Well, if that was too much for him this wouldn’t have proven a very durable partnership anyway, better to figure that out right away.
“Nah, it ain’t that, ‘s just… you should be more careful with that stuff where people could see, some folks get weird about it,” he says. Does he look a little worried behind his frown? That’s downright adorable.
“What kind of mageseeker is gonna trek all the way out here? Unless you’ve got an irrepressible hankering to go to Demacia, I think it’s safe to say we’ll be fine.”
After another moment of considering me somberly, he shrugs. “Hey, your funeral. So what more have you got, aside from the hocus pocus shit?”
“What, magic ain’t enough for you?” I ask, jumping gracefully from my branch back down to the ground. “You’re a hard man to please, Graves.”
He shrugs again. “Didn’t mean it like that. Just gettin’ familiar with what we’ve got to work with here.”
I pretend to think about it, and then tick each point off on my fingers as I go. “I never lost a game of cards I didn’t mean to, I’m a great conversationalist, I can talk a man out of his shirt and his purse both without him ever even noticing, I’ve got impeccable dress sense, I’m pretty sure I could steal anythin’ in the world given time to prepare, and I can tie three knots in a cherry stem with my tongue. What about you, what do you bring to the table?”
“I punch things ‘til they don’t get up no more, and I shoot a gun real good,” he says. After a while he adds: “And I’m told I mix a mean Sailor’s Warning, but I tend not to remember much of that the morning after, so I can’t vouch for it myself.”
“Capital!” I say, clapping my hands together as if in delight. “I can already tell we’re going to complement each other wonderfully. With my brains and your brawn… we’ll be unstoppable.”
“Dunno about brains, but I can already tell you’ve got more than enough mouth for us both,” he says dryly, and I grin. He is fun, in a grim bluff sort of way.
He leans his meaty forearms against the heavy black-painted iron railing that runs along the edge of the cliff where it overlooks the town, and I saunter over to stand next to him. From up here you can see all the sights of Mudtown, such as they are — crooked run down houses and narrow streets between them shambling down towards the harbor. Through the haze of smoke from the brick kilns forever hanging in the air, there’s a hint of dawn over where the ocean meets the horizon; we’ve been talking for a while.
“It always feel like that, standing close to you when you do the…” He makes a gesture with his hands as if to mimic a puff of smoke.
I stick my bottom lip out, puzzled. “I don’t know, what did it feel like?”
Grimacing at the memory, he says: “Like bein’ at the bottom of the ocean and the pressure was about to squish my brains into paste. Only for a moment, but a moment was more’n enough.”
“Huh. Well, this is the first I’ve heard of it, but then I tend to not stick around afterwards for long enough to take note of any complaints. Sorry, I guess.”
“Eh, it’s fine, I’ll live with it. Just… gimme me a heads-up next time, would ya?”
“Sure thing.”
There’s a moment of quiet between us, companionable enough. I fiddle with the edge of the cravat that I’d called dibs on when we divvied up the haul — it’s exquisite fabric and a nice deep red, I’m sure I’ll find some way to make use of it.
If we are going to try this working together thing it might be a good move to get to know more about him, figure out what I have to work with here. I’m never going to be able to take him on in a straight up fistfight, but I’m smart enough to run circles around him long before that should be necessary, and if it turns out he’s planning to screw me over, it behooves me to gather ammunition as soon as possible. Hey, in this business you stay paranoid or you get dead, it’s nothing personal.
I cross my legs at the ankles where I’m leaning my hip against the fence post and glance over at him, tuning in to the right tone of amiable but not overly insistent curiosity. “You’re a Bilgewater boy, right? So what’s brought you all the way to the continent, gambling in Mudtown of all places, when Fleet Street was right there? You’re a big guy, it’d be easier to try your luck on the hunting ships or get steady work with one of the gangs, even if the cards didn’t go your way, surely.”
He scratches the back of his neck. “Yeah, sure, guess I could’ve done that, technically. Mostly a whole lotta blood and guts and blubber in all of that, though. No… adventure, I guess.”
For the first time since I’ve met him he’s almost looking a little bashful. Guess there are some hidden depths there after all. “So that’s why you’re doin’ this? The adventure?”
He shrugs. “Hadn’t given it that much thought before you asked, to be honest. Just got the idea, and did it. But yeah, I guess that’s sorta why. Not a lot to keep me at home.”
I’m none too keen on opening the subject of family for discussion, so I don’t follow him up on that. Instead I say: “Yeah, that’s about the long and the short of it for me, too. Look at the two of us, just a couple of birds of a feather bumping together in the air. What’re the chances, right?”
“I mean, I see what you’re sayin’ and I agree with the sentiment of the thing, but if you were a bird there ain’t no way you’d be anythin’ but a peacock. ‘N me, not so much.”
I haven’t had a lot of cash to spare recently on my outfit; it’s nice to have my efforts to do the best with what I’ve got to work with recognized. “Fair. Think of it more as a… spiritual thing, if you will.”
“Sure, sure. Now, before we go and get things all twisted — don’t get me wrong, I like money. A lot.”
“Never trust anyone who tells you they don’t, they’re invariably up to somethin’,” I agree. “But… no man can live on gold alone, either.”
He glances over at me and nods his big head, just once. “Just so. So what’re your ground rules?”
I blink at him. “Huh?”
“Everyone’s got their rules, stuff they won’t do. What’re yours?”
“Oh. Uh.” I think it over — I’ve never had to subject it to any methodical thought before, I’ve mostly been making things up as I go. Guess you do need to be a bit more specific when you’re working with someone else, though. “No killing unless it’s necessary, and it usually ain’t if you’re smart about things. I don’t care for it — it almost always makes a mess, and all it does is rile the law up, most of the time. Self defense or stopping things from going south is fine, though. And I don’t like stealin’ from people who don’t have a lot to begin with, it feels sort of… dirty.”
“Ain’t no coin nor fun in stealin’ from poor people,” he agrees dismissively. “No sport in it neither. If I wanted to take money from the poor I’d go be in government in the Twin Cities, and if I wanted to cash in on protection fees I’d have stayed with the gangs. Or vice versa, I dunno.”
I chuckle at that, secretly a bit relieved. “Well put.”
“And no, like. Goin’ after old grandmas or working girls or kids or anythin’ like that. That’s just asking for bad luck. And kinda shitty.”
It might not be any incisive treatise on the origins and complexities of morality, but I believe it’ll do more than well enough for our purposes. “Sounds like we’re on just about the same page here.”
He scrunches his brows. “Oh, and while we’re at it, no ghouls or ghosts or shit, neither. The living are enough trouble as it is, no call goin’ around pissing off the dead too.”
That startles a proper laugh from me. “Deal. We’ll leave the hereafter to the priests.”
He gives a grunt of acknowledgement, like that’s that sorted. “You got a proper name, or did your ma run out of ideas at the initials stage?”
“Sure I’ve got a name,” I say. “Might even tell you what it is, if we end up sticking together for long enough.”
He snorts. “Fine, be like that.”
“Thanks, I will. Just one more thing.” He lifts his eyebrows at me expectantly. I affect a look of genuine concern. “I hate to have to ask, but… you do know how to read, right? ‘Cause I could help you learn if you don’t, I’m sure I could track down some kid’s books with big letters and short w — ow, hey!”
He looks at me flatly for a few seconds, then punches me in the arm, not putting any force behind it but still hitting hard enough to make me wince even as I snigger. “Counter question: y’do realize just how easily I could pick you up and throw you down those stone stairs over there, right? You’re awfully uppity for bein’ so scrawny.”
“What’s life without a little risk?” I posit, gesturing smoothly with my hands before rubbing the sore spot on my arm. Okay, so not more of a temper than I can easily work with, then. Good to know. “And besides, you’d have to catch me first.”
A smile plays around his mouth as he reaches into his jacket pocket to take out a cigar. “Well,” he says as he lights it. “You’re several orders too slick for your own good, and that mouth is gonna land us in a world of trouble one day. But hey, I like trouble. I’m in. Provisionally, like. If you try to stab me in the back I’ll still take your head off, no offense.”
I sling a companionable arm over his broad shoulders, giving him a winning smile when he glances over at me dubiously. “None taken. Don’t think I ever caught your first name, by the way.”
Seeming to decide that his best play is to not give me the satisfaction of a reaction, he looks back out over the town to say: “‘S Malcolm.”
“Malcolm Graves. Well then, Malcolm — may I call you Malcolm?”
He lets out a long even breath of smoke. “I’m already gettin’ the feelin’ that there ain’t no earthly power that could stop you from sayin’ exactly whatever you damn well please at any time. So sure, whatever.”
Pleased at his accuracy of assessment, I gesture at the dawn-touched horizon as if to indicate the grand future ahead of us. “Malcolm, I do believe this could be the beginning of a beautiful, and more importantly lucrative, friendship.”
“Whatever you say, man,” he says, taking a deep pull at the cigar as the sun rises. “Just show me what needs shootin’.”
— — — —
Wheel of Fortune, The Sun, The Lovers
Sleep is eluding me like a slime eel slipping between the fingers of a fisherman. I’m pretty sure I’ve been staring at the same damn spot on the ceiling for hours now.
Graves, who clearly hasn’t had the same problem, is snoring loudly over on his bed at the other end of the room. We’ve taken to sharing a room most of the time, for the sake of convenience when we need to skip town in a hurry in the middle of the night — which comes with the tradeoff that there’s no wall between us to take the edge off him sawing logs like an overachieving lumberjack.
I sigh and fold the pillow around my head to shut out the noise, but it’s futile. And besides, his snoring isn’t really what’s keeping me up anyway, I’ve gotten accustomed to sleeping right through the drone of it by now. No, this is an older affliction come back to haunt me once more, drawing the nights out into senseless misery and dulling the following day. Used to get a lot of those nights the first few years on my own, but it’s been a while since my last bout of it. Long enough that I had naively thought it was a thing of the past.
Wonder if Graves ever gets like this. Thus far I’ve only seen him sleep like a stone from the second his head hits the pillow. Guess Bilgewater engenders a certain insensitivity to most of life’s little disturbances that way; better be able to sleep through anything short of a Harrowing if you want to catch any prolonged shuteye in that place. It’s more of an ongoing bar brawl than a town, to be honest.
But Graves is asleep, so I can’t ask him about it. I stare up at the ceiling, kicking my legs restlessly beneath the covers.
Eventually I reach out and run my fingers over the backs of the cards lying on the nightstand, familiarly, almost like you might with the hand of someone you’re close to to get their attention. Been a lot of nights when they’ve been all I’ve had for company, and I’m not so sure they ain’t more agreeable that way than most people I’ve run into. They’ve always got time to talk, even if it’s in a strange enigmatic language of their own that it’s hard to truly follow unless, I suspect, you’re irrevocably high on something. Maybe the sleep deprivation can mimic that enough to be helpful. Been a while since I caught up with them properly, we’ve been keeping so busy.
I push myself up to sit cross legged on the bed, lighting the small oil lamp on the nightstand and then draping the covers around me like a cape or a small cosy cocoon as I stick only my hands out in the colder air to handle the cards. They seem to hum questioningly under my touch, like they’re wondering what brought this on. The connection feels clear tonight, at least, meaning passing between us without getting caught up in eddies or muddled by lack of clarity like silt swirled up by a current.
Now, what to ask them about.
Well, to be honest there’s only been one big change in my life recently. Graves shifts in his sleep and scratches at his shoulder before he settles again with a grunt and a sigh, and I gaze at him thoughtfully, his unshaven profile clear in the lamplight.
We’ve done a fair few jobs together now, and it’s been working out pretty well. I mean, he’s stubborn like a mule with a bad tooth and smokes like a chimney and has an unfortunate tendency to do his thinking with his gun and his fists if I don’t get to him first. But on the other hand he’s got a wicked right hook and a certain shrewdness you’d mistake for smarts every now and then if you didn’t know any better, and we’ve got the same ethos, more or less. Pretty sure I’ve laughed more in the last six months or so than in all twenty years before them put together. He’s fun, when he’s not gettin’ carried away by his temper. Most importantly, he hasn’t stabbed me in the back yet, even though he’s had plenty of opportunities to, and that’s the sort of thing you can’t put a price on in our line of work. In life, maybe.
I’m not sure I’ve ever had a friend before. I used to have family, but that’s different, a bit. And besides I don’t, anymore, not for a long time.
The cards sing softly under my fingers. Huh. I hadn’t realized quite how much this would feel like introducing him to my folks or something. Here’s my new friend, what do you think? He seem okay to you, do you like him? For what it’s worth he’s probably just about the best that I could hope for, let’s be real. He seems to tolerate me.
I take another long look at him and then start consulting the cards, letting them move my hands as they will, following the ebb and swell, feeling out the currents moving beneath. Every now and then I get a flash of something, a brush of meaning against my mind like a whisper in a mother tongue beyond words, and I put the card that caused that spark aside until I’ve got enough to make a reading with. Just the well-known process is already making me feel better. There’s a rhythm to it, a quality that’s almost like a lullaby to me in terms of its familiarity and comfort. You have to let go of yourself, a little bit, to get them into conversation, and maybe that was exactly what I needed right now.
Once I’m done I’m left with three cards, face down against the bedsheets.
I flip the first card over. The Fool, traipsing merrily across the cardboard with his knapsack and bright, cheery colors, unheeding of where he puts his feet.
“Got that much right in one,” I mumble, grinning to myself. Graves manages a particularly impressive snore, as if on cue.
Next one — Strength. Fair enough, that makes sense. There’s a kind of drive in him I’ve never seen in anyone else, I’m pretty sure he’d sock death itself in the jaw if it came collecting before he was ready. A stubborn vibrance there. Y’know, like a weed. A dandelion, planting himself in place whether the world wants him there or not, the will of irate gardeners and uncaring nature alike be damned. Kind of funny, though, seeing the picture on the card of the beast resting its head contentedly in the maiden’s lap, flowers braided into its mane.
I always liked this one; the girl looks so pleased with herself and her pacified prize, and the beast looks like it ain’t mad about how things shook out either. Hard to imagine Graves with flowers in his hair, but highly diverting as a thought exercise. Though, I mean, I know where he sleeps, and I know how to make a flower crown. No inevitability in letting dreams remain dreams. I snigger to myself — maybe if we get real drunk sometime, we’ll see.
Then I turn the third card over, and the smirk slowly fades from my mouth.
Two naked figures tightly entwined, the act depicted with such artful tastefulness that it verges on euphemism but still unmistakeable.
The Lovers.
I glance over at the other bed again, where Graves is snoring loud enough to shake the walls and sprawling inelegantly, his shirt riding up and the sheets sliding down to display a hairy stomach.
“Yeah, haha, very funny,” I tell the cards quietly with a roll of my eyes, shuffling them back into my hand and then the deck. “Let’s try that again, shall we?”
Don’t know how cardboard and paint can manage to radiate such silently knowing smugness, and yet here we are. I usually prefer to be the one holding all the cards, but I guess even I have to bow down to the cards themselves. Including when they’re being smart with me.
I shift the framing a bit before I get started again, pulling myself into the image as well, him and me, a partnership. That’s different from a man on his own. I’m starting to get that.
Once I’ve fixed that question in my mind I let the cards speak through me once more, twirling and flicking around and between each other like it’s a spring dance, until I have three cards face-down once more.
Taking a deep breath, I turn the first one over.
The Wheel of Fortune. Well, yeah, it does feel like an uncanny stroke of good luck some days. Me and fate, as a general concept, have a complicated sort of relationship at the best of times — in the sense that I trust it to do its thing, and hopefully it forgives me my counting cards and loaded dice, no call to go calling up the good Lady herself at all hours of the day and night if the luck you made for yourself will do — but it feels unsatisfyingly flimsy to think it a mere coincidence to have met him. What are the chances of just running into someone you resonate with so easily by coincidence, both of us ending up at the same table, same town, same night? Well, to be fair it probably pulled up the probability that we were both there to scam and swindle our way along the coast. It’s been a big change, anyway, fate or destiny or pure fluke and accident of the universe as it may have been.
Alright, that’s enough meditating on metaphysics at three in the morning. Moving on.
The Sun, bursting with the joy of yellows and gold, the light bright enough that it seems to almost spill over into my fingers as I touch it. That’s a good sign, at least. Hard to construe that card as being anything but a cause for optimism, it’s refreshingly unambiguous like that. If our paths crossing and meeting up were a mere accident, it was a happy one.
Resting my fingers on the last card I pause, a suspicion that’s more like a burst of inexplicable foreknowledge taking root within me.
I narrow my eyes at the cards. “This better not be goin’ where I think it is.”
You get the sense that if they could make a sound anywhere but in my mind sometimes, when I listen just right, they’d be tittering.
With a sinking sense of inevitability, I turn the third card over. Yeah, there we go. I stare at the two figures, their faces so close together.
Someone’s clearly having a laugh somewhere, and I’m pretty sure it’s on me. Guess there’s two jokers to every deck, and some of the shit we’ve been pulling does beg that ancient question of ‘who is the more foolish — the fool, or the fool who follows him?’. Angels may fear to tread where Malcolm Graves rushes in, but I have no such luxury of wise timidness because it’s my job to rush in after him and ensure he makes it back out. If that makes me a fool by association… hey, I’m starting to think I can live with that, if it means he also lives to rush in unwisely again another day. I just, uh. I hadn’t considered it extending to that kind of fooling around. Not — seriously, anyway, never with any intent behind it; surely a man’s fleeting fancies aren’t to be held against him or mistaken for his better judgement. I’m realistic about the eternal hazards of combining business and pleasure and also pretty sure I’m not his type, not dead. It’s not like it’s possible to ignore how broad Graves’ chest is every time you look at him. I’m only human. But that doesn’t mean I’ve ever thought about it like…
Cards can have lots of different meanings, I remind myself. Doesn’t have to be literal in what they’re putting across — usually isn’t, actually. It’s all a matter of context, sussing out the meaning behind the meanings. As a kid I could sit whole afternoons with my grandpa while he showed me different ways of interpreting a single set of cards. It’s an art, not a science, and while he always said I have a natural touch for it he’d never seen before I’m not as practiced at it as he was, not by a long shot. And yet… surely the cards would know that and not be as convoluted with me as they might with him. It always seemed to me they know these things, know the people they reach for.
(I used to wonder about that, after… everything. If my grandpa saw it coming, if he and the cards knew what was about to happen and didn’t tell me. Well. Not like it matters now.)
All I can really gather for certain is that the cards seem to think this partnership’s a swell idea. And who am I to argue, when we’ve already come this far and made so much money. So much money; my new coat has fine gold thread at the seams and pockets in places no sane person would ever think to look, and it’s so perfectly tailored that putting it on feels like slipping into a second skin. Graves keeps laughing at me over it, but we can’t all be content walking around in rags — I am tired of looking poor, of people’s eyes snagging on fraying seams and trodden-out boots and seeing someone without the power to fight back. Being underestimated isn’t always bad, being deemed safe to trample on often is. Graves may have overarms the size of his head to warn anyone off before they get any ideas, but I’ve got nothing but my wits, the cards, and a good eye for people to make a shield out of.
Though, I mean. I guess I kind of have him, now. Maybe. Just as he has me to do some forward thinking for him, to stop him from throwing hands with the entire world.
I spend some time gazing down at the three cards, worrying at the edge of the blanket with my thumb.
Graves makes a waking up sort of snuffle and starts to push himself up. I hurriedly pick my cards up and shuffle them back into the deck, then reshuffle them twice more for good measure, pretending it’s taking all my attention as he opens his eyes.
“Hey,” he says, blinking at me blearily as the cards dance between my fingers, then glancing over at the still-dark window. “How come you’re still up?”
I sigh and lean back, gently thumping the back of my head against the wall a few times. “Can’t sleep. Just happens sometimes, dunno why.”
“Man. Sucks,” he says, with more sympathy than eloquence. “Still got a bit of that Noxian brandy, if you’d like some. Knocks me right out after a few glasses, usually. Foolproof, my ma always swore by it when I was a kid. Ain’t got that much left, but you can just owe me a drink or somethin’, ‘s fine.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say, inexplicably touched. I keep shuffling the cards, but I can feel the three of them easily, different to the touch and still regarding me warmly.
He pushes himself all the way up and sits on the edge of the bed, idly scratching his stomach. “Well, guess I’m awake too now. Wanna play a couple of hands?”
“For what stakes?” I ask. “‘Cause if it’s strip poker you’re thinking, it’s gonna be a short game, hate to break it to you. We ain’t even wearing socks.”
“For fun, you wiseass. And for the practice, mostly. I mean, I expect we’re both gonna cheat, it’s just a matter of gettin’ better at gettin’ away with it at this stage. We could spot each other, sorta thing.”
A grin tugs at my mouth. The cards have gone back to their neutral state in my hands now, keeping their secrets once more. “Well, then, when you put it like that. You’re on. I don’t have any tells, though, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“You blink a bit too quick a couple of times when you’ve got a bad hand, and you hum under your breath sometimes when you’re about to try for somethin’ clever.”
I think about it. Damn, he’s right, I do do that. “Or — that’s just what I mean for people to notice. You ever think of that?”
He gives me a flat look that tells me exactly how impressed he is with that as he slips into his pants and shrugs his jacket on before he comes over to sit at the other end of my bed. “Uh-huh. Just deal me in, T.F.”
“Besides you bounce your leg when you’ve got something good, and that’s way easier to spot,” I murmur, shuffling the cards one more time, just to be safe, before starting to deal them out. Of course I am already cheating, but that’s on him for letting me do the dealing.
“Or maybe that’s just what I mean for you to — ” he begins mimicking in his terrible — awful, I don’t sound anything like that, no matter what he claims — impression of my voice, grinning as I groan and roll my eyes.
“Shut up and play the game, Graves,” I say, and fan my cards out in front of me to hide my smile.
— — — —
Three of Pentacles, Page of Swords
“It’s Tobias,” I gasp out against the grass, winded from both the impact with the ground and Graves’ weight resting half on top of me. It’s hard to begrudge that weight, though, considering that that explosion probably would have taken my head off, had Graves not tackled me to the ground and covered me in time.
Graves turns his head on the ground to blink at me. There’s a smear of grass and dirt over his nose. “Huh?”
“My real name. It’s Tobias.”
“Oh. Huh. ‘Kay.” Pushing himself up with a grunt and surprising speed for such a big guy, Graves gets up, then leans down and all but lifts me straight onto my feet. My head spins. Then he picks up the huge canvas bag containing our score and slings it over his shoulder. “C’mon, time to clear off, I’m gettin’ the vibe we’ve outworn our welcome.”
From the sound of extremely angry voices and gunshots from where the glow of torches is starting to creep around the corner of the nearest building, he might be onto something.
Setting off at his loping sprint, Graves tugs on my arm to get me moving and I follow, grateful to be able to go along with the general momentum rather than having to get on top of anything on my own.
“So what’s the ‘F’ stand for, then?” Graves yells over the general mayhem as we run.
“Felix,” I admit wretchedly, chest burning with exertion.
He thinks this over as he dodges a musket shot from behind us. “Well, it ain’t the worst I’ve ever heard,” he allows, which is honestly better than I expected. “If you weren’t goin’ for the whole mystery angle, I don’t reckon anyone’d think twice ‘bout it. Knew a fella once back in Rat Town who — shit, duck! Through here, we’ll shake ‘em down by the — ”
I glance behind us and only have the time to yelp and tug on Graves to get him out of the way of the trajectory of another bullet, then hurl a card towards the guy who sent it — a flash of gold in the dark, and he’s no more trouble to us.
Graves flicks his eyes over his shoulder to follow the action, not missing a step. “Thanks!”
“Anytime! You were sayin’?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah! Knew a fella once called ‘Ignoramus Pecker’. Now there’s a name you ain’t gettin’ away from, no matter how far or how fast you go. You got off easy.”
Even in the dark and the mud and amidst the rain of bullets, I have to fight down the urge to laugh like I might never stop. “Y’know, I’ve never thought about it like that before!”
“‘S a service I provide! Here, hold this for a moment, I’m gonna try to blow ‘em up,” Malcolm adds, shoving the bag at me while he fumbles around in an inner pocket for one of the new grenades he’s been itching to try out.
“Ain’t this whole place built of wood?” I remember to point out, a fraction of a second after the grenade has left his hand.
I mean. It wasn’t like it was a particularly nice town, anyway. No one died. Well, no one who wasn’t shooting at us at the time. We did get away successfully. On balance I think we did okay.
— — — —
Ace of Swords, Eight of Pentacles, Page of Wands
The hum of the bar rises and falls languidly around us where we sit at one of the tables closest to the back door. It’s a slow night, people huddling over their drinks and speaking quietly.
Weaving the card I’m holding between my fingers once more, I sigh in frustration. By all rights I should be in a great mood. No feeling quite like a rich man’s gold weighing down your pocket, especially when the rich man in question went out of his way to be a real prick, and we’re having drinks to celebrate — on the other side of town, just in case any sore losers are still hanging around. We’ll probably be moving on tomorrow, and then there’ll be nothing much to worry about until we get to the next town, and find the next mark.
Except the cards are whispering to me and that restlessness has wriggled its way into my spine again, like an itch I don’t know how to scratch.
I spin the card, around and around it goes. It’s maddening, the way my mind keeps almost falling into comprehension but leans back at the last minute, like I’m listening to a language I used to know long ago but don’t speak anymore, only the occasional word sparking fleeting remembrance.
“Uh-oh, I know that look,” Malcolm says, eyeing me over his drink.
“Hmmm?”
“I swear, if you send me slumping to the mud again, I’m emptying this whiskey over your head and takin’ off for the night,” he threatens, suspiciously keeping watch on my hands.
I sigh. Admittedly I do still feel a little bad about that one. At least I couldn’t make the stun last very long back then, if it’d happened now he might’ve been out of commission for the better part of a minute — I should probably try to figure out if there’s a way to reverse the effect, huh. “One, that was an accident, and I already said I was sorry.”
“I mean, you didn’t.”
“I bought you a drink that night, that’s basically the same thing. Two, it never would’ve happened if you didn’t get in the way like that, I had a clean shot at the guy before you came crashing through like a blind bull.”
He splutters indignantly. “Oh, that’s how you’re gonna play it? Well, I’m sorry for trying to watch out for your dandy little backside, you ungrateful — ”
I continue on undaunted, card still flying effortlessly between my fingers: “And three, that ain’t what I’m workin’ on, so don’t you go worrying your big head about it. We shouldn’t put it to work beyond its intended use as a blunt weapon, after all, you might strain somethin’.”
He kicks my shin under the table, hard enough that it’ll probably leave a little bruise. I could easily have moved out of the way before it connected if I wanted to, but in all fairness I probably deserved that. That’s the thing about having a partner, it keeps you honest. Well. Honest-ish. Honest adjacent, at the very least, it’s a relative sort of thing.
“Keep that up, and I’ll take a moment to introduce your nose to the ‘intended use of my head’,” he mutters, but he seems mollified, looking away from my hands and back out over the room. “You’ve been at that for a while now, though. Doesn’t usually take you this long to figure it out.”
“Aw man, you didn’t have to point it out,” I moan, letting my head fall back in despair. I have been working on this for a while now — I have the teleport and the stun down pat, but from watching Graves in action I’ve seen that sometimes there’s use to be found in pure brute force too. Turns out that it doesn’t come particularly naturally to me, though.
“Just sayin’,” he says, holding his hands up placatingly. “You’re pretty quick on the draw usually, it ain’t like you.”
Morosely balancing the card on its end on my finger, I mumble to myself: “Well, I’ve figured out the other stuff on my own, you wouldn’t think this would be so fucking hard to —”
Something shifts in my mind, like someone just gave a twist to the great kaleidoscope of the world and sent everything into new patterns. The path I’ve been struggling to find seems so obvious, it’s really only a matter of reaching out and asking for… Yes. I remember now.
I give a gasp at the feeling — like a spark being lit not just in my mind but somewhere deeper, right in the center of my soul. For a moment that’s all I can feel, and when I manage to open my eyes again it’s because Graves has leaned in to grab my arm and is looking at me with concern. The card’s slipping between my dazed fingers, falling so that it wedges itself upright between the floorboards.
Malcolm’s hand tightens on my arm, his eyes searching my face. “Tobias?”
“Ah,” I say, watching as the card starts giving off a faint but rapidly growing light.
The card glows red, like it can barely contain the strength of the flames dancing within, pressing against the boundary of where the real world meets the magic I’ve called up inside it, and growing swollen with light until —
“Holy shitting fuck,” Graves swears and topples our table over, grabbing me by the lapels and pulling me down with him into cover right before the explosion goes off.
It’s not much of a bang — not this time, anyway, I’ve got ideas now that I found the trick to it, I could make improvements easily — but the burst of light is bright enough to force every eye in the room shut in self defence. There’s a stunned silence afterwards, and I blink up at the dusty rafters before pushing myself up to take a peek over the edge of the table. Malcolm makes a sound of discomfort as my weight shifts half on top of him and he gets an elbow in the stomach. I absently pat his side in apology.
The card is gone, but its effects still linger in a light haze of smoke over the room. It has left a small scorched crater in the floorboards and set the leg of an overturned chair merrily alight, but no one’s looking hurt. An unmitigated success, all things told.
“HAH!” I crow, a nearby woman whose eyebrows just got singed off shifting her unblinking gaze to me slowly. “See, Malcolm, I told you I could do it! All in the wrist. And to think you doubted me.” Raising my voice, I address the room at large: “Sorry for disturbing your evening, gentlefolk, me and my companion here are gonna be gettin’ out of your hair right away, don’t you worry, pardon the inconvenience.”
“Yeah, wow, good job, T.F.,” Graves says where he’s still prone on the floor, disconsolately lighting a cigar from the burning table leg before he pats it out with a gloved hand while I get my legs under me. “I wasn’t even done with my drink, you asshole.”
“I’ll owe you one,” I promise, hauling on his arm to help him to his feet as the owner of the place unfreezes from his initial shock and turns a funny shade of red. The man’s got the height and build of a hefty oak tree, and we’re not sticking around to find out how well he knows how to make use of that.
“You always say that, and I always fuckin’ forget!” Graves laments as we start to run, head over heels into the night, laughter and smoke trailing after us as we barrel down the street. He never stays sullen for long.
— — — —
Seven of Cups
Through incorporeal eyes, in that strange blue-tinged in-between space of the world the cards take me to while teleporting, I finally find the room of the prison containing Graves. He is lying down on the bunk behind the bars of the spare stone room’s only cell, arms folded moodily over his chest as he scowls up at the ceiling. I sigh into the silence. He’s a sight for sore eyes, even if it’s only been a little over a day.
“Well, hello there,” I say, materializing in a flash of blue light and leaning casually against the wall by the door with my arms folded over my chest. “Fancy meeting a strapping young man like you in a place like this. You come here often?”
“Took you long enough, you flashy bastard,” he grumbles as he sits up on the bunk. “Where’d the guards go all of a sudden?”
“Apparently they had a mass breakout and a little fire going on near the evidence lockup at the same time. And tonight of all nights. Such rotten luck.”
He grunts as he gets to his feet, stretching so his spine makes that worrying series of popping noises it does. “Thought you didn’t believe in any luck, ‘cept the kind you make for yourself.”
“True, in the essentials. But I do believe in moderate acts of arson.” I reach into my pocket and fish out the key ring I’d lifted from a hurriedly passing guard on my way up here. “Ta-dah.”
“T.F., if you could take a break from bein’ pleased with yourself for long enough to get me out of here, that’d be much appreciated.”
“I don’t know, I think you look good in stripes,” I say absently as I look through the keys. Damn, there’s a lot of them. Maybe I should just pick the lock. “This is a step up from what you usually wear, anyway.”
“There’s gotta be some kind of medal I could get for puttin’ up with you every day, I oughta ask around,” he says, but he has wandered over to the other side of the bars and is studying the keys along with me. “Think it’s the big silver-y lookin’ one.”
I try it, and wouldn’t you know it, it turns smoothly. “Even a broken clock is right twice a day, I suppose. There we go, Mr. Graves — the jailbreak you ordered, coming right up.”
I bow deeply as I open the door, ushering him out like I’m the doorman at some fancy Piltover hotel.
He snorts a laugh and kicks me gently in the shin on his way past. “Always did say you were a loss to the stage.”
“The stage’s loss was your gain, so you should really be a lot more grateful. Did you get it?”
“Yup.” He pulls out a folded piece of paper from his back pocket and shakes it out to show me. “Had to start a small riot to get close enough to the Warden to swipe it from him, but other’n that it was smooth sailin’. Not sure what to make of it, though.”
I slip a card out from my sleeve to use for reading light as I glance over the note. I do know what to make of it, I recognize the code from that other message we’d intercepted last week. It’s a list of names, times and sums, each neatly underlined. I click my tongue disapprovingly as I scan through it. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Looks like our friend’s been a naughty boy. Taking bribes, unlawfully confiscating property from inmates, extortion… almost too bad he’s not our target, there’s blackmail material in here to last us centuries, and it ain’t often you get someone simultaneously dumb and committed to fastidious paperwork enough to keep all their misdeeds neatly listed in one place like this. Hm. Another time, maybe.” I glance up at Graves. Now that I’m close enough and there’s more light, I can see the spectacular black eye he’s sporting. “Wait, shit, are you alright?”
“Huh? Yeah, I’m fine. Why? It say anythin’ freaky on there about things they do to prisoners?”
“No, I’m talkin’ ‘bout this. Your eye.” I lean closer to anxiously peer at his face for any further damage. Him getting caught had been set up as a ruse the whole time — I hadn’t meant for him to end up actually hurt.
Malcolm seems unfazed. “Oh, that. Like I said, I had to start a little riot, but thankfully none of these landlocked fools know how to throw a proper punch, ‘s nothin’.”
I relax a little, but looking too hard at the bruise still makes me feel oddly uneasy. If I didn’t know he’d just be annoyed by the fussing, I’d try to find something cold to press against it or something. “So that’s why you got the VIP cell all to yourself up here. I wondered about that.”
“Yup, probably. But this is what we needed, right? ‘Cause I ain’t keen on stayin’ here any longer than I have to, the food fucking sucks.”
I give the list a little flourish and fold it to tuck it into my pocket. “This is precisely what we needed, now we know where the good Governor goes every other month and why he’s so keen on no one finding out. All that’s left is to intercept him on the way, and the payday is ours. Nice work.”
He gives a modest tilt of his head at the compliment. “Nice rescue.”
“Hey, it’s what I’m here for. Let’s get out of here before they manage to put out the fire, huh? I’ve got new threads stashed for you outside, if the monochrome look isn’t doing it for you.”
“Always playing more than one angle, huh.”
“No idea what you’re talking about. I accidentally burned your gods-awful mustard yellow shirt while you were gone, by the way.”
“Yeah. I bet you did.”
— — — —
Four of Swords
There’s only one bed.
The bed — the one bed — is a double bed, but it’s not a big double bed. Malcolm is a big man. There’s no way we could arrange ourselves in a way where nothing is touching.
The innkeeper had not said anything about there being only one bed. Am I… going to have to do something about there being only one bed, spirits and all beings of good fortune forfend it?
“There’s only one bed,” I tell Graves helplessly, gesturing. I’m so tired I don’t think I could even cry if I wanted to.
“Tobias,” Graves says, in graveyard tones, the dark circles under his eyes like bruises as he first locks the door behind us, then rests his hands on my shoulders as if leaning in for some deep confession, though I think it might also be to stay on his feet at this point. “Tobias? Tobias. We’ve been runnin’, shot at, drowning, or mildly on fire for three days and nights straight, no time for shuteye. I’d sleep right next to a fucking berserker shark on fire right about now. I could not give less of a fuck. Either get your scrawny ass in bed or go make a fuss about it downstairs, but don’t bother me about any of it, I’m clockin’ out.”
As it turns out I am in fact still capable, at least, of tearing up. With a shaky breath, I lean my head against his shoulder, rendered utterly unselfconscious by exhaustion. There’s a big hole burned in his shirt, so my forehead mostly meets warm skin. We’re staying upright purely by counterpoise at this point. “Gods, you’re the smartest person I’ve ever met,” I say thickly as I blindly work to kick my boots off in that same position.
Malcolm makes an indecipherable yet vaguely supportive rumbling sound and pats my back. “Attaboy.”
We collapse onto the bed in a heap together, neither bothering to remove any piece of clothing, and I think we’re both asleep within seconds.
I would worry more about how much I like waking up in the morning with his arm heavy across my waist and his snoring close by, but, well. I’ve made a deal with myself not to think about these things.
— — — —
Three of Pentacles
Malcolm’s been pacing back and forth over the roof tiles for so long he ought to have worn a groove somewhere at this point, and my patience is officially at the end of its rope.
“Oh, would you just sit down?” I ask testily where I’m leaned back against the second story wall, just up the slope of the roof from him. “I’m gonna go nuts if you keep pacing around like a bear in a cage. You’re gonna slip and fall down and break your neck, at this speed, and then where would I be? Having to do my own heavy lifting?”
“I’m bored,” he complains, shoulders slumping in dramatic emphasis.
“Yeah, you’ve mentioned. Only five times or so in the last half an hour. Just… simmer down and be patient, we know for a fact the transport passes through here. It’ll come along any minute now, we need to be ready.”
He lets his head fall back and groans loudly, because he’s always been about as subtle as a wild hog rampaging through a high-end restaurant. “That’s what you’ve said five times already, and I don’t see any transport wagons yet, smart guy.”
“We’ve literally scouted out the route for two weeks, and they’ve never gone any other way than this. They’ll be here. Soon.” Probably.
It’s not like we haven’t prepared. We’ve looked at every document we could hunt down and kept a close enough eye on the stage company’s movements along this route that we probably have a better handle on their business than any of their secretaries do. This abandoned stage station hits the sweet spot: up on this roof we can see for miles but aren’t visible from the main road, and the narrowness of the road means they’ll have to slow down to get through. Which means that for us it’ll be merely a matter of timing the jump right when the wagon comes through. It’ll be guarded, of course, but that’s hardly an issue for the likes of us.
To be honest I’m a mite uneasy about the whole thing. It feels uncomfortably close to stooping to common highway robbery, and I like to think we’re above that sort of thing. We haven’t found any other way to get it done, though, and if we do this right, they won’t even notice we were ever there until someone opens their package at the end of the line three weeks from now and finds it empty, which adds a certain style to it to elevate it beyond your humdrum ‘your money or your life’ scheme.
I take out one of my cards and start playing around with it while I think, because I am not giving Graves the satisfaction of seeing that I’m getting worried too.
Eventually he stops his pacing to watch with some interest as I toss the card spinning into the air and catch it again right at the height of its arc without interrupting the spin of it even slightly, flipping it between my fingers a few rounds before repeating the maneuver.
He says: “You’re pretty handy with those.”
“Well, yeah. Been practicing since I was a kid, I kinda oughta be.”
“...so how d’you do it, exactly? And don’t you say ‘magic’ in that chirpy voice at me, ‘cause I know that’s a load of bullcrap.”
Having, in fact, been about to say exactly that, I instead spin the card a few more times before stilling it. “Honestly? Most of it’s pretty boring, and only works because people’s eyes are a lot worse at trackin’ movement than they think they are. It’s a lot of doin’ things smoothly enough and only lettin’ certain angles show, or adding distractions to lead the attention, so people don’t think to look where you don’t want ‘em to. Add some style and some confidence and it’s hook, line, sinker time.”
He makes a face. “Really?”
I roll the card between my fingers, slowing it down enough that he can see how simple the movements of my fingers really are, without the panache. “Yeah. Spent a lot of time as a kid alone practicing a shuffle over and over again until my hands knew how to do it on their own. That, and picking up a bunch of scattered cards when I got it wrong.” His huff of amusement at that pleases me, somehow, I’d angled for it with the delivery and he didn’t let me down. Then for some reason I add: “Takes a thousand times of messing up where no one can see you before you can make a trick look effortless in front of an audience.”
Tilting his head he regards me pensively for a few moments. I fight the urge to squirm; he doesn’t need to know that I feel uncomfortably… exposed, after admitting all that.
“Y’know, now that you say that, I can see it,” he says finally, and I keep myself braced for mockery. It never comes, though, he’s still just watching me with an uncharacteristic mild sort of thoughtfulness. “How about the way you throw them?”
I shrug. “Same deal. Takes a hell of a lot of practice to get right and it looks flashy, but if I couldn’t make ‘em, y’know, explode on impact, there wouldn’t be much strictly practical use to it.”
“As if the lookin’ flashy part ain’t enough for you any day of the week.”
“You got me there. Wanna give it a try, just to fill some time?” I ask.
He glances down the road where the coach is stubbornly refusing to show up, then shrugs. “Yeah, sure. Ain’t got nothin’ better to do for the duration.”
“Here,” I say, picking out a slim stack of cards and handing them over to him. I’ve brought enough to last even the clumsiest of gamblers for weeks, it won’t make a dent.
“So… how’re you supposed to hold ‘em, exactly? You do this — thing with your fingers, when you do it.”
I reach out to guide his fingers to the right position instead of trying to explain it. Like I said, it’s a thing you have to learn more in the body than in the mind, words get in the way after a certain point. “Like this. So you can release it with a flick of your wrist at the end and put a spin on it, helps it stay steady in the air. There, give it a try.”
He frowns in concentration and lets the card fly towards a side building to the carriage station, where it won’t be visible from the main road if it misses the mark. Seeing how much heart and soul he’s putting into it, I almost feel bad when the result flies as straight and true as a one-winged chicken. Never one to be easily disheartened, he moves on to the next card undaunted while I offer corrections from the side.
“Try using a bit more strength in the forearm. Well, a little less forearm than that. Just, uh. Imagine your whole arm’s a whip of some kind, and you’re trying to transfer all the energy to end up in the card. Good. And then use the flick of the wrist to add the spin to make it fly straight. Yeah, something… something not entirely unlike that, you’re sort of on the right path.”
He pauses, suddenly looking dubious. “Hold on. They won’t, like. Suddenly blow up between my fingers or anythin’, will they?”
I shake my head, tipping my foot back and forth idly as I shift my gaze to watch the road. “Never seen them react properly to anyone but me. You should be fine.”
“What, no one?” he says, aiming another card with care, only for it to flop uselessly to the roof tiles. “Not even — aw, shit, this is harder than you make it look — not even anyone in your family? Guess I sorta figured it was a thing among the river folk.”
“Nah. Some of it, sure, the reading and a few things like that. But even among them I never met anyone else quite… like me,” I admit. I don’t know why I’m telling him this, I don’t like talking about home if I don’t have to. And you never really have to, when you’re as practiced at redirecting people’s attention as I am.
“Well, I ain’t never gonna complain ‘bout you bein’ you, it’s worked out real well for us,” he says blithely. I feel something funny that tastes almost like panic wind its way behind my breastbone and up my throat. “Hey, that was a good one, right?
I clear my throat. “Better, at least. Not sure you’d be able to hit the broad side of a boathouse still, but…”
“Sure I could.”
I quirk an eyebrow. “On purpose?”
He sucks a breath in through his teeth as the next card he throws does a jaunty twirl in the air and flops to the ground two inches from his feet. “I mean, that’s a big concept, T.F.. ‘On purpose’. Can we ever really do anythin’ on purpose in this world, when so much of it is outside of our control?”
I give an exaggerated bow of my head. “Ah, my student, I see you have already picked up on my most important lesson: that bullshittin’ is the most crucial element of The Path and will cover a multitude of your sins for long enough that you can skip town and grift another day. I have nothing more to teach you.”
“You’re such a smug piece of shit, dunno why I put up with you,” he laughs, affection in the way he wrinkles his nose at me.
“My charming smile and winning personality, I’m sure. Bet you two victory drinks later tonight that you won’t be able to nudge that thing down to the ground,” I say, pointing at an old abandoned bird’s nest perched right on the edge of the building he’s been aiming at.
“Oh, you’re on,” he grins, squaring his shoulders in preparation.
Hey, he’s not pacing anymore. Mission accomplished. Yes, thank you, I am pretty darn good, if I do say so myself.
I cross my legs at the ankles and keep half an eye and ear on the road while I entertain myself with watching his long line of stubborn failures.
“Put more of a spin on it,” I advise, and he sticks his tongue out the corner of his mouth and does. “Bit more flick in the wrist. There you go, you’re gettin’ it. Now just keep doin’ that for, say, twenty years or so, and then we can have a proper competition sometime.”
He sniggers. “Asshole. ‘S kinda fun, though, I can see why it calms you down so much.”
I glance over at him, surprised as well as a little alarmed — it does calm me down, always helps me keep level to have something to do with my hands, but I hadn’t thought he would notice. He’s focused on his task and doesn’t seem to register my gaze on the side of his face. Probably for the best.
While I’m busy watching his profile one of his cards finally hit home, toppling the old bird's nest from its perch in a small shower of twigs and faded feathers and dried out guano. We both stand there blinking for a couple of moments; it’s hard to say which one of us is more astounded.
“If you ain’t gonna be named the patron saint of pure dumb luck in your lifetime…” I say faintly.
“Hell yeah!” Malcolm shouts as he snaps out of it, punching the sky triumphantly. “Told you I could do it, nothin’ to it!”
I open my mouth to respond when I finally hear the sound of horse hooves and wagon wheels, distant still but rapidly approaching.
“There it is,” I say, standing up properly and trotting over to the edge of the roof, ready to jump.
“I won, though,” he says, following right on my tail. “Let’s remember that I won. You owe me two drinks after this. It’s on the record, right?”
“Sure, sure,” I say vaguely as I kick off from the roof and land smoothly on the roof of the carriage, two golden cards at the ready. “Sorry about disturbing your evening, gents, but we’re gonna need to borrow your uniforms real quick.”
“Have we got anythin’ to write it down on, maybe,” Graves insists as he lands next to me with a considerably less subtle thud as his boots hit the roof, and it’s only at my extremely old-fashioned look that he holds his hands up in surrender and gets on with the job.
— — — —
Knight of Cups (reversed)
When Graves returns to our room in the inn from his rendezvous, he is wearing a ring of smug hickies around his neck and a satisfied little smirk. My stomach feels like it’s full of rancid coffee grounds. But other than that, I’m totally fine and not worried about anything. For the record.
I pick at the sheets of my bed where I’m sitting cross-legged as he flops onto his own bed across from me, stretching out with a contented grunt.
We manage a few rounds of aimlessly shooting the shit in greeting even while my heart races behind my ribs, before I broach the more pressing subject. “So, uh… are you gonna set up with him long-term, then? This guy you’re seeing, I mean. Durglen, or whatever it was.”
“Huh?” His eyes slide open and he stares at me. “When did you ever get the vibe that I’m ready to settle down and get hitched and all that jazz, T.F.? Durzen is great ‘n all, but we’re just havin’ fun. Pretty sure we’re on the same damn page about it too, he’d start to sweat something awful and run if I broke out that kinda talk.”
“It’s just… you’ve been seein’ a lot of each other the last few months. I figured you might like to, you know. Make something more permanent of it, given the chance.”
To my surprise, he huffs a thoughtlessly dismissive laugh. “What? Nah, ‘course not. I don’t got time for none of that, I’ve got professional goals to meet ‘n shit. People to rob, places to see. And there are plenty of hot guys in the world, but I only got one partner for that stuff.”
“Oh.”
“If I’m anythin’ like married to anyone, it’d be to you, when you really think about it,” Graves says, sounding like he finds this idea faintly hilarious.
“That’s me,” I say hollowly. “The ol’ ball and chain.”
“Chains and balls, huh? Damn, T.F., didn’t know you were the kinky type! You think you know a guy.” Graves grins and lets his head fall back to rest on his folded hands against the pillow. “Anyway, what I’m sayin’ is — pretty faces and fun times, dime a dozen, they come and go, but a partner’s a different kettle of hagfish, far as I’m concerned. More akin to, yanno… family, I guess,” Graves postulates, waving his hand vaguely. “Permanent. Like a brother, or somethin’.”
“Ah.”
“I mean, I ain’t got no brother, so I don’t have anythin’ to compare it to directly or nothin’, but that’s gotta be sorta what it’s like, I figure.”
“Yeah, somethin’ like that,” I say, wishing one could simply fall over dead on the spot by desiring it hard enough. Maybe a meteorite could descend with surgical precision through the atmosphere and strike me down where I’m sitting, leaving the rest of the world untouched, as an act of mercy.
Sometimes, in the beginning, there had been moments here and there where I thought… but, well, clearly not. And from observation of the many and sundry beds Graves has fallen into along the way, I suspect I really wouldn’t be his type anyway. Partly by build, and partly through the dubious distinction of possibly being too sane and normal to register on his amorous radar. Graves falls in love like an ox running full tilt into a brick wall of adrenaline every time at the waving of enough red flags, no matter how many concussions he weathers as a result, and seemingly without learning a damn thing. Anything else aside, I don’t think I provide the right kinda crazy to set that chain reaction into effect.
Malcolm peers at me a little worriedly. “...are you feelin’ okay, T.F.? You look a bit green, the fish stew for dinner last night not agreeing with you? I feel just fine, but I didn’t get any clams in mine, so maybe that’s…”
I sigh. There’s no point in dwelling on things that won’t ever change. “I’m fine, Malcolm. Just. Tired, a bit.”
“Oh. Yeah, heard you rattling about until the early hours last night when I got up to piss, that checks out.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead, and not a moment before, I guess.”
“That ain’t gonna be for a long time yet, if I’ve got anything to say about it, I reckon you could get some in before that. Wait, hold up, do… do you have someone else lined up you’d rather be working with?” Malcolm says, suddenly pushing up on his elbows and looking at me with wide eyes. His shirt is open almost to his navel and shows me that the hickies go all the way down, the lowest one peeking up above his belt line. “Is that what you were tryin’ to…”
With a snort of laughter, I shake my head and fish a deck of cards out of my pocket, so I have something to rest my eyes and hands on as I start shuffling. “Nah, no such luck, big guy. I’m used to you now, way too much bother to break in someone new after all this time. You’re stuck with me, I’m afraid.”
He sniggers and lets himself fall back on the bed, idly scratching at his chest hair. “Don’t I feel special. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m takin’ a well-deserved nap, at least. You wanna go grab somethin’ to eat afterwards? Bet you ain’t even gotten around to having breakfast yet, left to your own devices all day.”
“Hey, you don’t know that.”
“No, but I know you. Was I wrong about it, then?”
“Was your da a lawyer, or does this unstoppable urge to ask leading questions come from some other dark and sinister place in your soul?”
“Hah, fuck you, I’m tellin’ Ma you said that. You two are gettin’ way too chummy for my liking lately, gotta employ some split ‘n conquer tactics to stop you from ganging up on me so much. Hoisted by your own damn petard.” He pauses thoughtfully. “How come I hardly ever get to meet any of your supposedly numerous conquests, anyway? You’ve gotten to know plenty of mine.”
“And what a collection of absolute winners they are,” I murmur.
Malcolm dramatically lifts a hand to cup his ear. “You hear that? Sounds like the familiar tones of a T.F. tryin’ to dodge the subject again to me, folks. Is it ‘cause you always go for the fancy types, and you’re too embarrassed to bring ‘em home to your disreputable partner? ‘Cause I could keep the filthy language down and pretend I care about Ionian poetry or what fork to use if you think it’d get you laid. If you’re prepared to bribe me with booze and cigars for the service of course.”
I make a show of thinking about it, flicking the deck of cards from one hand to the other. “Hm. Yeah, why don’t we keep runnin’ into the people I sleep with? Probably because unlike some, I don’t tend to keep mine kickin’ around until they inevitably stab me in the back or get me in some other kinda trouble.”
“Love ‘em and leave ‘em, huh.”
“Well, ‘love’ is a very big word to use in this context, Malcolm.”
Whistling under his breath, Malcolm says: “Wow. That’s cold, man.”
“Is it? It’s not like I’m giving them any false ideas going in, the deal is pretty clear up front. Usually they’re there because that’s the deal they want.”
Malcolm yawns hugely and grins. “You’ve got no romance in your soul, Tobias, I’ve always said it. If you ever do lose your head over a pretty little thing, I’ll have first rights to laugh my ass off, though, for the record.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” I say, yearning for the meteorite with renewed force. “And go the fuck to sleep already, Graves, you’re always unbearably chipper after you get laid, and it’s more than a man should have to deal with.”
“Ooh, someone’s jealous,” Malcolm smirks. “Y’know, that Piltie girl down in the bar was makin’ eyes at you, you could be out there makin’ your own fun instead of giving me grief about mine, just ‘cause you’re tangoing with the green-eyed beast.”
“Maybe I will.” Malcolm yawns again, which gets me going as well, covering my mouth as my jaw cracks. “...or maybe I’ll have a nap too. Stranger things have been known to happen.”
“Sounds like the right idea. We’ve got a bank to rob tomorrow, gotta keep you sharp,” Malcolm murmurs, closing his eyes and wiggling himself into place the way he usually does before falling asleep.
“Yeah,” I say, looking over at him. “Yeah, we do.”
While he has his eyes closed I swallow down the fragile yet seemingly unkillable little dream that’s been haunting me — nothing real, nothing more concrete than a scent on the wind in spring, just this one fleeting feeling or image or impression or… or I don’t know. Just this sense of him close, somehow, his cheek pressed to mine, his big calloused hand gently pressed against my stomach. The fevered tenderness of it goes through me like a thousand knives even now as I push it down, down, down, into some dark rarely-visited corner of my soul — if, as it seems, I cannot drown it outright, I can at least banish it to somewhere everyone is spared the pathetic sight of it.
It’s almost annoying how fast I fall asleep with the sound of his snoring to soothe me.
— — — —
Ace of Cups, Nine of Wands
The afternoon sunlight is livening up the already cheerful bustle of the streets of upper Zaun, when I make my way up towards the Skylight district from the Entresol level. It’s always rich pickings in the border markets, but the lingering haze of Zaun Grey down there forces you to come up for air every now and then, as it were.
I whistle under my breath as I enjoy the blessed early summer breeze brushing my face and count out the earnings — not half bad at all for a day of honest work. Well, most of it honest, and some of it arguably work. Graves had walked through the room as if coincidentally on his way somewhere else at one point, to sneak a glance at the other guy’s cards and give me the secret sign to back off before drifting on, but if you ask me that’s team work, which has ‘work’ in it right there. The gambling halls and casinos of the twin cities are a little harder to get around than the ones back in Bilgewater, but then that’s not saying much; I’m sure there must be levels of hell that are more organized than your average Bilgewater gambling den, and chaos always leaves openings for those with the eyes to see them. I like the challenge, though. And besides, we probably need to let the heat die down in Bilgewater for a while longer before we try to go back. Things got a bit… explosive, the last time we were there. Some captains have a surprisingly long memory for how much rum they regularly put away.
Besides, we’d wanted to check out the fabled Twin Cities, and so far it’s been everything advertised and more. Gilt covering carrion, of course, a place like Piltover is always going to be built on top of someone’s bones. But damn, they have good tailors around these parts, and the richest plumpest pockets to pick. And even the Zaun Grey can’t hold a candle to the Slaughter Docks on a summer day in terms of stink, the rot it reveals is more of the figurative kind than, you know. Sea monster gall bladder that has to be smelled to be believed, and you’ll never long for being returned to the agnosticism of ignorance more earnestly than after you have smelled it. Malcolm claims you get deadened to it through enough exposure, but if that’s true I hope it’s a lesson my nose will never have to learn.
There’s a prickle at the back of my neck, an instinct finely honed by years alone on the road. I keep whistling the jaunty tune and saunter along the footpath exactly the same as before, but out of the corner of my eye I look around, searching for the threat among the normal afternoon revelers ambling by. It doesn’t take long to spot him — the guy is not being subtle, skulking along in my wake like an iceberg with a grudge. I recognize him from earlier, we’d played several games together over the hours.
He’d been drunk even before the game began and only kept at it all through the rounds. His jaw had tightened with each loss, but he’d still clung on to the table like a barnacle, always sticking around for the next round after getting outplayed. You see one or two exemplars of the type in most every gambling hall — there’s a peculiar sort of joylessness to them, a grim tenacity untouched both by the elated highs that lead most people back to the game even after a long chain of lows, and by the unwholesome hunger feeding on itself until there’s nothing left of those who have it in them but that sickness. Sadly for him he didn’t have much in the way of skill or sense to back that tenacity up, so he’d been on a steady downward trajectory the whole time, in parallel to my gentle, airy just-stumbling-enough-to-not-be-suspicious rise to the top.
Well, well. How to best handle this one.
Damn the thoughtful methodical Piltovan approach to city planning leaking into upper Zaun; not a lot of winding narrow alleyways in this part of town that I could slip down, no little thoroughfares where it would be easy to lose him. This is close enough to Piltover proper that a public scuffle, especially one involving magic, would probably draw attention where it wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow closer down to the chem pits, and what with… one thing and another I really don’t need the eyes of the law turned in my direction. When I say we’ve kept it mostly clean for our stay here so far, it’s with the understanding that it’s more of an ‘a little dirt swept under the carpet here and there’ thing, and that the Piltovan police force might have different ideas about what constitutes pristine moral conduct.
So probably best to get to somewhere more discreet where I can take a moment to focus, and teleport far enough away that he’ll lose the trail.
I slip into a tiny dead-end alleyway next to a mostly empty café, isolated enough that it won’t cause a commotion through the crowd when I vanish into thin air. Letting out a long breath, I start to get the card out and build my focus, feeling it rise from somewhere deep inside like a tidal wave. I’ll only need a moment to —
“Stop right there, you little shit,” says a harsh growling voice discomfitingly close by. I glance over my shoulder to see my pursuer having caught up and standing in the opening of the alley, blocking my way as surely as the brick wall opposite him.
Uh, not to say, oh.
He’s huge, about my height but almost as broad as Graves, with bloodshot eyes and a muscle jumping in his cheek as he steps closer — close enough that I’m not sure I could teleport away in time before he’d reach me. From his build and state of inebriation I hadn’t expected him to be so fucking fast, barely a breath behind me.
“Hm? Hey, friend,” I say, affecting a friendly but not overfamiliar air, like I only just spotted and recognized him. “I think we met earlier tonight, right? Those were some decent games, well played.”
“Nothing decent about any of it,” he says, face grey and hard like granite.
Hm. Tough crowd. I open my mouth to say something, but he breaks me off.
“Save your fucking words. You think I don’t know how your type operates?” he snarls, and if I’d been any less practiced at this, my smile would’ve gone wooden around the edges at that. Fuck, I hate this type, the ones who try to follow you home to figure out where your boats are tied up so they can come back later with a couple of buddies and some torches. “You think I’m stupid, huh?”
He moves a few steps closer, still blocking me from leaving the alley the conventional way. Okay, no need to panic. He’s not listening, but I’ve got plenty of tricks left. Without letting my smile falter I use my fingertips to nudge the card I’ve got tucked up my sleeve out until I can hide it in my palm.
“Not at all, not at all,” I lie soothingly. “There’s clearly been some kind of misunderstanding here. Listen, I can hear you’re a clever man, if you think there was something off with the game, I don’t see any reason why we can’t both team up to figure out who might’ve — hngh!”
In a flash he slams me up against the wall, and the breath is knocked out of me at the same time the card slips out of my hand and tumbles, unnoticed, to the ground. Fuck, fuck, shit. I crane my head back and scrabble to pry his hand away from where it’s gripping my collar, pressing uncomfortably against my throat so I can barely breathe. But he’s a big man and I can’t get him to budge an inch. His breath stinks of cheap booze and mutton where it gusts against my face, and his grip is like iron.
Might be time to start worrying and indulge in a little bit of panic.
“Not so smooth anymore now, huh, river snake,” he hisses, an ugly sort of triumph I know all too well shining in his bloodshot eyes. He’s drunk enough that it’s giving him the strength of mindless emotion without making him irreparably clumsy, which is just my fucking luck. “Where’s your accomplice, huh? I wasn’t born yesterday, I know your lot travels around in packs, like any vermin.”
Oh, the ‘vermin’ card already. It takes everything in me to give a conciliatory smile and open my mouth to hopefully lead him astray in words for long enough to get an opening. Before I can do or say anything, he moves one of his hands away from my collar to wrap around my throat properly. Squeezes down, hard, and with that he removes my second best card — being able to talk.
I barrel straight through panic and out the other side, at least for now, everything suddenly sharp and clear, a plan forming in my head as the world falls starkly into focus.
There’s another card in a hidden pocket at the side of my waistcoat and a knife at my hip — I’m going to need him distracted for a moment to get at either one, so I ready my knee to jam it up somewhere that’ll be very distracting indeed, hanging on to the cold clear focus I need for the maneuver through the mounting dread of not getting enough air and the feeling of his bulk shoved up against me. If I move just so, I’ll get enough leverage to hit him where it’ll hopefully both hurt and snuff out in one blow any hope of further generations born of these particular —
Before I can get to it, there’s the blunt smack of something solid hitting flesh really, really hard and the guy gives a gurgling sound, his hand loosening on my throat before he collapses limply to the ground at my feet. I gasp as I can finally draw in enough air to fill my lungs, and would probably have collapsed to all fours if Malcolm didn’t swoop in to catch me and keep me upright. The sensation of him pressed up against me doesn’t trigger that same panic again, like my body can tell on its own that it’s him this time, but the adrenaline already in my system is making me dizzy, the shaking starting in my fingers and moving all the way into my core.
“Shit, you okay?” Malcolm asks, angling his head as if trying to meet my eyes as he holds on to my shoulders.
“Fine,” I manage, somewhere halfway between a wheeze and a bark. I’m angry, all of a sudden, like I never get, heedless and uncalculating with it. “Fine, just — get off.”
I push at his shoulder and he nods and moves away, like he’s realized it might be better not to crowd me right now. His hand leaves my arm, and it feels cold without him there suddenly, even though I feel weird and hot and flustered otherwise. That only makes me angrier, somehow, makes it rise in my throat like bile — I don’t want him to make me feel better, so he can just… just take it away with him again whenever he pleases, that seems like a fresh attack on top of everything else.
“Thank the Bearded Lady I tracked you down in time. Fucking asshole,” Graves murmurs, kicking the recumbent figure in the ribs and forcing a groan out of him, then again for good measure. “Got a bad vibe off him right away, ‘s always the sullen ones you gotta watch out for.”
“What the fuck was that for, I had it,” I snap, rubbing a hand over my aching throat.
He looks at me flatly and shakes out his hand a couple of times as if to ease some life back into it. The force behind that punch would’ve probably broken the knuckles of most lesser men, but Graves’ have years of practice behind them and have held up against much worse. “Sure you did.”
“I did, until you came rushing in like an idiot!”
Malcolm’s eyebrows knit together. “The hell’s gotten into you? I was watching your back, that’s basically half of my fuckin’ job, Tobias.”
“Well, I sure as hell didn’t ask you to!”
“What the fuck was I supposed to do? All that shit he was sayin’ to you — ”
I scoff. “That’s hardly anything new and they’re only words, it doesn’t give you the right to just barge in while —”
“They sure as hell ain’t nice words, it’s not like I enjoy standing around listenin’ to people talk to you like — ”
“It’s none of your business either fucking way!” I say, my voice nearing a shout. “Especially not when I had the situation under control and you — ”
Malcolm throws his hands up in exasperation, still seeming more confused than angry. Why isn’t he angry? “Under control? He had you by the throat and up against the wall and you looked scared, pardon me if I weren’t willing to take my damn chances with it!”
A grating yell of frustration forces its way up my throat and I shove my hand against his chest — infuriatingly, this doesn’t cause him to shift at all, but it does send me stumbling unsteadily a couple of steps back. As if my dignity hadn’t taken enough of a pummeling tonight with me losing my temper like this on top of everything. It really hasn’t been a good day. Malcolm reaches out quickly as if to help steady me before he catches the look in my eyes, and then he prudently lets me regain my balance on my own, even if it’s less than elegant. The dizziness won’t let me go.
Still covering my throat with my hand, I snarl: “I don’t need you to bail me out like some — I don’t need you looking out for me, okay? I can get on just fine without you, you don’t have to hound my every step like some — some oversized attack dog I picked up in an alley somewhere!”
At that his jaw tightens and his eyes go hard, a sharp impassive blue as he looks at me.
I regret the words even before they’re finished leaving my mouth — where the hell did that even come from, that’s not something I’ve ever… but I’m too shaky and off-balance with adrenaline to come up with some way to take it back, so I just breathe too quickly and curl and uncurl my fingers, like that will somehow release everything that’s roiling through me like a thunderstorm.
The hell kind of world is this, where I’m the one losing my head and he’s the one keeping it together? We must be working on some sort of strange mirror logic.
“I’m gonna go take out the trash and deposit him somewhere he won’t be able to come after us right away once he wakes up,” Malcolm says flatly, nudging the toe of his boot into the ribs of the fallen asshole, who has regained enough consciousness to groan pitifully. “Gonna take everything he’s got on him of any value that ain’t his undies, and then put him on a boat to somewhere unpleasant, probably. You go do whatever the fuck you want, you’re right that it ain’t none of my business.”
And with that he leans down and picks the still-limp body up, hefting the weight easily over his shoulders before he walks away without looking back, leaving me alone in the alley with my thundering heart and my unspoken regret.
— —
The whole rest of the afternoon I’m too fucking restless to get anything done. I play a couple of rounds of cards at a nearby gambling hall that I’ve been scouting out and that seemed promising, but it does nothing to burn away my nervous energy. The cards only hold quiet unease in my hand, reticent to speak and seeming no less unsettled than I am. I lose a round in one game because I’m too distracted to even pick up on the lady who kept tugging at her earlobe whenever she had a good hand — in, as I recognize in hindsight, perhaps the most blatant tell in all of history. Fuck. I learned the hard way that it’s smart to lose a hand here and there for the look of the thing, and the pot was nothing to write home about anyway, we could afford to part with what I lost. But it’s not like I planned for it to go like that. My mood, already abysmal, sours even further while I at least manage to lead her into trying her luck on just one more round, and then win everything back off her while she’s overconfident. I’ve got enough pride in my craft left for that much, at least, thank… well, whatever the hell out there might still be willing to listen to me. Lady Luck clearly isn’t interested in gracing me with any of her coy smiles today.
Deciding to quit while I’m… if not quite ahead, then at least not yet on a full tilt like some godsdamn amateur, I spend about half an hour pacing along grimy streets and sidewalks until I finally give the whole thing up as a bad job and go back to the hotel we’re staying at. We’re sticking mostly to the Promenade this time around — less heavily policed than Piltover proper, less likely to kill you from the lungs out or leave you face down in a chem puddle than the Entresol level or the real depths of Zaun. Business is always bustling here in the border areas, as much as each part of the city likes to pretend they’ve got nothing to do with the other.
I’m in no mood to talk to anyone, so I use a card to teleport into our room, after first scouting it out and making sure Graves hasn’t come back yet. He hasn’t; the room is empty, the few belongings we lug around between us from town to town left where they were this morning. Landing myself directly in a chair with my feet up on the table and my arms tightly crossed over my chest, I scowl into thin air as the light changes from the self-satisfied gold of late afternoon into the fragile pink tinge of sunset, visible up here over the worst of the smog.
Then it’s dark outside, and he still hasn’t come back.
My anger dies down as the hours pass, leaving me with no kindly irate buffer between myself and the hollow fear that’s taken root in my chest.
...I wonder if this is it. If he’ll leave after this. I wonder even more why that thought makes me feel like the world’s ending. It’s dumb and overdramatic and… dumb. I survived fine on my own all those years, before him. I’ll manage.
I don’t want to have to do it again, is the thing. Not while he’s still out there somewhere.
Oh, now that’s dangerous thinking. That’s… maybe it’d be better to take the opportunity to cut and run now, rather than travelling further down that road. Get out ahead of it. That would be the smart move.
I drum my fingers nervously against my arm before taking out a card and playing absently with it, letting it calm my hands. Is he even coming back to the hotel first? Was that the last time we… no, surely not. He’ll be back to fetch his things, at the very least, and that means I’ll have a chance to make my case. And either he’ll be inclined to listen, or he won’t be and — hm.
It ain’t like we’ve haven’t said much worse to each other over the last few years, I don’t get why this one should make everything feel so… but I do know. It’s not the words themselves, it’s that he could tell that I meant them. I mean, I didn’t really mean it, even half a second later. But right in that moment, I did.
I still don’t understand what in the world made me so angry. Actually, that’s a lie too, I do know, kind of. It’s really fucking rare that I don’t manage to get myself out of a tight spot before someone gets close enough to lay their hands on me physically. I must have been fourteen or fifteen the last time something like that happened. Malcolm was right before, I was scared. The lack of air had made me feel like I was drowning on dry land, and the relief surging through me when he got there had hit me with a viscerality that had seemed almost like a second threat. Man, it’s probably just as well that I’m not a guy much given to introspection, that seems messed up when I say it like that.
Maybe… maybe he went and found someone he’s fucking, and is telling the guy all about what an awful godsdamn partner I am, so he’s got someone he can laugh with over it and feel better. I haven’t heard much about anyone yet — and it’s a rare time I don’t get to hear about whoever it is, at length, whether I want to or not — but he moves quickly like that sometimes. He picks up new flames like a forest fire.
From the bar downstairs come the familiar sounds of escalating merriment as the night proceeds. I desperately want a drink — but it’s probably better to keep my mind clear for now. I might only get one shot at this.
Could he be in trouble? Did the guy who attacked me have friends out there, is that why Malcolm’s not back yet? How the hell would I even go about tracking him down in the bustle of the twin cities in the middle of the night, with nothing to go on and…
Finally I hear the sound of his boots coming up the stairs. I’d know the precise rhythm of that heavy heedless tread anywhere, it’s him. Relief and pure, unadulterated terror mingle in my veins, hot and icy cold in turns.
I stroke my thumb along the edge of the card to steady myself, trying to pretend this is just another high stakes table I’m sitting myself down at. It doesn’t work.
Once he opens the door he pauses on the threshold, measuring me up with absolutely no expression on his face. I’ve grown so used to seeing him when he’s wasting no energy on hiding what he’s thinking. Seeing the tough guy poker face return is somehow more unsettling than any lingering anger I’d imagined.
“Hey,” I say, giving a meek little wave.
He closes the door behind him and takes his jacket off, throwing it carelessly to drape over a chair. “Hey yourself.”
I scratch at the back of my neck as he kicks his boots off and goes over to the bed on his side of the room — I always take the left and he takes the right, we’ve got a system. (Ah shit, I don’t want that to become past tense after tonight, for it to become something we used to do, something I used to have before I fucked it all up once again.) He settles on top of the covers, leaned back against the headboard with his arms folded over his chest, not really looking at me. The silence hangs over the room like leaden storm clouds.
He hasn’t left right away, at least. There’s a hole in one of his socks I’d be making fun of him for, if this was a normal night. It’s not like we don’t make enough cash these days for him to replace them before his toes gnaw right through.
Okay, Tobias, time to get your act together for a couple of minutes. I bite my lip. “Listen, I — I’ve got some stuff I have to say, and I sorta need you to let me get the whole thing out there before you interrupt me. Okay?”
His only response is to lift his eyebrows in a bland gesture of ‘go ahead’.
I take a deep breath. “So I know things got a bit heated back there, and… listen, I’ve never worked with anyone before. Not long term, certainly not like — like what we’re doing. I don’t always know how to handle that there ain’t just me anymore. I — I don’t want to go back to doin’ this on my own, to be clear, not unless you don’t… Running with you’s been — been okay, so long as you’re still in I’d like to keep…”
Oh wow, this is off to a great start already. I close my eyes for a moment and try to line it up better in my head. Man, I’d planned this, why is it so hard to…
“You were right, I got a bit rattled at him forcing me into a corner like that. But it’s not like any of that was your fault, and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I could’ve sorted it out on my own too, but I’m glad you were there so I didn’t have to. That’s… that’s the whole point of being partners, I guess, I was just too out of it to, uh. To remember that. I suppose.”
Is that a slight softening in his eyes? Oh please, sweet Lady Luck, you’ve been sending me nothing but kicks to the crotch all day — give me this one, I won’t ask for anything else.
I shrug helplessly. “So, y’know. I’m sorry. All that dumb shit I said, it ain’t really how I think about things. And... thanks for having my back.”
He looks at me for a few seconds and then nods. “Okay, then. Apology accepted.”
Relief and disbelief flood through me; I hadn’t realized how tensely I’d been keeping myself until my shoulders drop down of their own accord. “What — just like that?”
“Sure. Not like I’m aiming to have you crawlin’ on your knees or anythin’, you already said you were sorry. You got a bit snappy there for a moment, weren’t that big of a deal. ” He pauses, a certain glint entering his eyes. “Though if you wanna engage in a little bit of groveling then by all means, I ain’t gonna stop you, please feel free to prostate yourself before — ”
“Oh, fuck off,” I groan as I let my head fall back, and he’s grinning at me. The heaviness in the air from before has dissipated like morning dew in the sun. I can’t help but be tinged with incredulity — everything was so strained before, but I explained myself and he listened, and now things seem okay again. I wasn’t really aware that was a thing that could happen, I’d been prepared to walk on eggshells for another few days at least. “And also it’s prostrate you’re looking for there, Malcolm, please never say what you did say to me again.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Y’know, it’s kinda weird to hear you stumble over your words,” he says. “Usually you’re so damn smooth glue wouldn’t stick to ya but that was a fuckin’ mess.”
I shrug, noting to my dismay that my cheeks are heating. That’s it, I’m officially writing this whole night off as a fluke, there’s gotta be something weird in the water in this place getting to me. “Well, that other stuff is. Different, I guess. And ouch.”
“Eh, it don’t have to be a masterwork of poetry or nothin’, you managed to get at everythin’ you needed to. For what it’s worth, I like workin’ with you too.” He grins and leans back with his head supported by interlaced hands. Gods, this man’s biceps. “We’ve got a good rhythm going. If you wanna get rid of me now, you’re gonna have to work at it a lot harder than that.”
My heart does a strange little roly poly in my chest at that, for some reason. I start playing around with the card again. “Ah, darn. I’ll keep grinding away at it, then.”
He snorts. “You ain’t got the stamina for that, skinny boy.”
“I’m not responding to such undisguised and misinformed slander,” I sniff.
He looks thoughtful — or at least wears the slightly strained expression that is his equivalent. “Well, in the interest of avoiding any future confusion… I ain’t gonna not help you out if it looks like you’re in trouble, but maybe we could come up with, I dunno. Some kinda sign you can give if you’re running a con or somethin’ and really want me to stay outta it, or vice versa if I was onto something good. Same as when we’re pulling a scam normally, just with more, y’know. Graduation.”
“Gradation.”
“Yeah, that. Expanded for more situations, like.”
I let the card roll across my knuckles in a bright cheerful tumble. “Huh. That’s a good idea, actually.”
“I know you find it hard to believe, but I have ‘em sometimes,” he says wryly.
“Yeah, well, at some point the stars might all shift into one perfect line across the sky too, but it ain’t like I’m gonna be holding my breath for that eith — hah, nice try but no cigar,” I crow, as I dodge the pillow he tries to throw at my head.
“I’ve got plenty of cigars already, thanks, and you’re gonna be out of of places to run sooner or later,” he declares, diving for the pillow on my bed while I swoop down to collect the one he already threw, holding it before me like a shield as I close on him. As the saying goes everything’s fair in love, war and pillow fights, so I get him on the back of the head while he’s turned away and then dart away as he laughs and makes a futile attempt to swing at me in retaliation.
“First blood!” I yell as I shove a chair aside on my way towards the table.
In hot pursuit, Malcolm says: “Oh, pummeling a man with his own damn pillow while his back is turned, and then dancin’ away like a butterfly after? That’s low even for you, Felix.”
“It’s your own fault for handing me the ammunition,” I pant, rounding the corner of the table and watching his body language carefully for which way he’ll try to follow so I can still keep it between us. “Besides, you’re trying to come after me with mine, that’s just the height of hypocri — oh, too slow, hotshot, way too slow, I can do this all night!”
He’s starting to get the giggles, which means that it’s going to turn into an endurance game: if I can hold him off until he runs out of breath from laughing, I win by default, because he’s absolutely useless in that state. It’s a method I have used many a time before to great success. “Stop — stop running away like a coward and face me, Tobias, hidin’ behind that dinky lil’ table like it’s your mama’s skirts can’t protect you from my rightful revenge!”
“Oh, if your mom had four legs that’d make a whole slew of things make a lot more sense to m — aaah!”
In a display of his characteristically forthright problem solving skills, Malcolm stops trying to round the corner of the table to get to me and instead bounds straight over it in one surprisingly graceful leap — it ain’t right that a man his size should be so damn quick to boot but it’s undeniably true, and it’s all I can do to throw myself to the side, the pillow missing the tip of my nose by less than an inch.
That moment of imbalance leaves me open for his next charge, though, as he abandons all finesse and full-body tackles me. His momentum topples us both onto my bed, a tangled mess of feathers and laughter and limbs as we go down.
“You okay?” he asks eventually, his hand fumbling to pat the first part of me he can reach, which turns out to be a point on my hip dangerously close to my butt.
“Yeah,” I manage to get out between gasps of laughter.
In hindsight, I should have seen this one coming.
“Good, because that means I don’t hafta feel bad about doin’ this,'' he announces triumphantly and pounces on me, pressing me into the mattress as he unleashes a flurry of ineffectual pillow blows against the back of my head. The laughter gets me again, leaves me helpless to put up anything but the weakest resistance.
“Mercy, mercy,” I wheeze, as I try to cover my head with my hands, his weight resting over me, warm and solid.
“No mercy,” he rumbles, and at least he can’t actually get much done when he needs to use most of his focus on his balance to keep me awkwardly pinned beneath him, he’s mostly mussing up my hair at this stage. “You deserve this, if you’d just owned up to your punishment honorably like a proper — hey!”
Having found a split second to squirm out from under him for long enough, I flip over onto my back and wrap my legs around his waist like a stranglevine, managing to keep him somewhat in place like that and leaving him unable to get enough movement in his upper body to put any force behind his assault.
“Take — your — medicine,” he pants, ruffling my hair against the pillow case because he doesn’t have the leverage like this to make it a proper blow. Feathers are spilling everywhere like the first snowfall of winter.
“You don’t look like any sorta doctor to me, show me your medical licence,” I gasp out between chortles, tightening my legs around him and feebly thudding my pillow against his solid midriff in a vain attempt to ward him off.
He gives a rather evil chuckle and puts more weight on my shoulder to keep me in place. “Oh, you ain’t in Piltover anymore now, sonny, this is Bilgewater medicine you’re gettin’ a taste of, and it comes with — oof, good one — with eels bitin’ onto some private places.”
This actually makes me stop struggling for a moment from sheer horrified fascination. “What, really?”
“Yup,” he says. “Secrete a venom or somethin’ that numbs the skin, helps a lot with amputations and shit. Ugly little buggers full of teeth, but ain’t no denyin’ they’re useful.”
“Then why would you put ‘em, y’know. There?” I ask, not prepared to let it go just yet.
He waves an airy hand. “Hm? Oh, I ain’t got any experience with it personally, but apparently it’s meant to help for, ahem, stamina, plus it starts tingling once the venom starts to fade out. Knew of a couple of boys who worked the quay at night who swore by it, but as you can imagine I wasn’t too keen on testin’ it for myself.”
I nod faintly. Damn, the world is a strange, beautiful and horrifying place, especially in Bilgewater. “Yeah, I can see why you wouldn’t be.”
I blink my eyes free of tears to look up at him, his weight pressing me down into the bed, and in a distant sort of way I realize that it doesn’t make the panic return at all — that my body still knows it’s him. It feels — nice, actually, to be pinned in place like this, sweaty and out of breath and — wait, no. No, this is the danger zone, abort mission, think about something else, quick.
“So — which one of us is gonna have to go down there and tell the innkeeper why we need two new pillows?” I ask.
Malcolm grunts, unconcerned. “Tellin’ people bad news in a way that makes ‘em think you’re doin’ them a favor is your job in this partnership, slick guy.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I admit. He conscientiously picks a feather from my now gloriously messy hair, then twirls it between his fingers with a thoughtful look on his face before his gaze slowly transfers to me. “Oh no,” I say, levelling a warning finger at him. “Oh no, you better not be planning what I’m thinking you’re planning to — aaargh!“
“Never shoulda divulged to me that y’re ticklish,” he says serenely, running the feather down the curve of my neck and across the underside of my chin. They say you should keep your friends close but your enemies closer, but whoever came up with that one never had Malcolm Graves for a friend, they had no idea what they were talking about. “An unusual oversight on your part, but it’s served me well. Hm. Alright, I think you’ve had enough, I guess I’m ready to be the bigger man and let it go.”
“Get your bigger man self off me, before I get out a card and stun you,” I giggle, drying my eyes with the side of my hand.
He shifts away, and I honestly miss his weight for a couple of seconds, I’m almost about to — well, it’s a moment’s confusion, that’s all. “Oh, I’m quakin’, anythin’ but that.”
“Mmmhm. Well, I’ll let you off this one time,” I say, taking a moment to flop against the bed before rolling off it and onto my feet, so I can straighten my clothes and hair into something approaching a presentable state. Malcolm helpfully fishes another feather from my hair, then wrinkles his brow.
“Hey, one of your braids gotten all messed up, lemme just…”
I incline my head to him to make it easier for him to work as I do up some buttons on my shirt that had worked themselves loose in all the excitement. “Thanks.”
“Hey, what are friends for, if not to help you prepare for a con,” he posits as he undoes the braid with practiced fingers to redo it.
What indeed.
— — — —
Six of Cups, Six of Swords
“What — all of ‘em left? Even your ma and pa? Your grandpa?”
I shrug, the movement making me list dangerously where I’m sitting leaned back against the wall. I’m pretty sure I’m more thoroughly, disreputably drunk than I’ve ever been before in all my twenty-three years of life put together, which is probably the only reason why I just told him what I did. “My dad was already long dead by then, I never really knew him. And my grandfather was too sick by that point, I didn’t even get to see him before… But yeah. Everyone else who was left.”
We’ve installed ourselves in the attic of some absurdly rich family’s winter home, left empty for the season — I find the custom obscurely tasteless, like some perverted upper class parody of nomadism, except that these guys get welcomed with pomp and fanfare wherever they go, rather than suspicious looks and dark mutterings. There’s unused furniture gathering dust in corners and sumptuous paintings left carelessly leaned against the walls, covered with sheets like the ghosts of conspicuous consumption past, each item probably worth more than most people earn over an entire lifetime. Forget sleight of hand or counting cards, the best trick of all is being born rich so you can stay rich.
“Wow, that’s… some cold shit right there,” Malcom says, and if I didn’t know any better I’d say he looks troubled.
“Huh?” I stare at him, surprised. That… wasn’t the reaction I’d expected. I’d told him about this so he’d know the truth of who he’s teamed up with — that when I mess up I mess up big. We’ve been doing this for almost four years now, he deserves that much. I hadn’t planned for the conversation to go like this.
“Kids are dumb; you don’t send ‘em out there on their own without expectin’ ‘em to make mistakes. That’s like, the whole process of bein’ a parent, making sure your kid survives it. You want them to understand consequences and shit, you gotta teach ‘em, or it ain’t their fault they messed up or died or got eaten by somethin’ or whatever, when you didn’t keep an eye on them. That’s reflectin’ more on you than the kid, their brains are only the size of like, an orange yet, there’s only so much you can expect.”
My shoulders have crept defensively towards my ears. I don’t know why it’s making me so ill at ease, hearing him question how they reacted, but it makes me want to squirm out of myself like a snake shedding its skin and run the fuck away. “...it wasn’t that simple.”
He eyes me. “How old were you?”
“Twelve. Or just turned thirteen, can’t remember anymore,” I say. That first year on my own is a blur in my head still, foggy and strange. There are moments I remember too sharply, craggy islands of unshifting recollection — the sadness in my aunt’s eyes, and the feeling of her gently pressing the old worn deck of cards into my hand before she walks away. Realizing that was all my grandpa could do from where he’d been slowly dying for more than a year, if he’d even been awake to know what was happening, my aunt might’ve done it because she knew it’s what he would have wanted. That first night I realized they really weren’t coming back for me, and didn’t know where I could go to sleep. My mom not even looking at me, no matter how many times I desperately tried to meet her eyes, until the boats were past the horizon and out of sight. But between these glass shards of memory there’s just a cold numb haze, like fog over the river.
“So you were a kid runnin’ away from a bunch of drunk grown men wanting to beat the shit outta you? I mean, prob’ly not your finest hour or anythin’, but I don’t see how it’s an excommunicable offense to not wanna fuckin’ die,” Macolm says, skeptical. “Where I come from we call that common sense, it’s kinda encouraged.”
I sigh and take a fortifying swig from my bottle. I’ll need it, to try to explain this to him. “A lot of people got hurt over it. I could’ve warned everybody first, and I didn’t even think to. And — not sure it was the running away itself that really did it, it’s… it’s complicated.”
He makes an unconvinced sound. “Don’t sound all that complicated to me.”
“Yeah, well, nothin’ seems that complicated to you, you’ve got a brain that’s all like… the thing about the hammer and nails. Y’know?”
“Dunno that I do know, I ain’t no carpenter, Tobias.”
“No, no, no, not actual — ‘s a figure of speech. When you’re hammered, you look like.. everything’s... Hm. Anyway, not important, my point is — you don’t do ‘complicated’ much.” Lucky him. I wish I did complicated a little less, sometimes.
“What’s any of your folks got to do with me bein’ hammered and looking at nails? ‘Sides, I’m barely even tipsy,” he says, mystified. I wave him off and he shrugs, gamely prepared to let it go. “Well, if it’s so damn complicated you can try to explain it to me in small words, then, smart guy.”
“It’s just — I think I understand it better now, why they did it,” I murmur, fixing my gaze on the bottle as I spin it between my palms. “It’s… everything’s so fragile, when all people’ve gotta do to take everything from you is set fire to your ships, and no one really wants you anywhere. So when someone goes and invites unnecessary danger in, like an idiot, it’s… It’s safer to make sure they never get the chance to do it again. Cut them loose, before they take everyone down with them.”
“Still seems pretty harsh to me. First offense ‘n all. Even old Jenks who used to take care of the money stuff for the Barnacle Boys down in the warf rat alleys didn’t try to chop off my hand until the fourth time he caught me tryin’ to make away with the petty cash.”
“I’d fucked up real, real bad,” I admit, keeping my eyes on my hands twiddling the bottle around. I must have, for all of them to leave like that. And sometimes when I can’t sleep, I still get flashes of how old Grandma Leya’s round, cheery face had looked, all bruised and swollen that morning where those bastards had knocked her to the ground while they were looking for me. Makes me think they might’ve been right to send me away.
To my surprise, Malcolm gives a dismissive snort. “Hell, I’ve fucked up plenty over the years, but Ma wouldn’t’ve, like. Rowed me over to the mainland and just left me there over it. A spanking here ‘n there when I was smaller, and a backhand across the face when I got older, and she sure had lungs to yell at me, but nothin’ like — like that.”
I squint at him — or at least the one of the multiple versions of him I’m seeing that I think might be the real one. “Well, no one at home ever hit me,” I say. “You do know that’s real shitty too, right?”
He shrugs. “Sure. Ain’t sayin’ it was all great or anythin’, just that if I went back, even now, she wouldn’t turn me away at the door or nothin’. I mean, I’d get the haranguing of the century, probably, but she’d still let me stay.”
“I’m never lettin’ it come to that,” I say, and it comes out more vehement and unequivocal than I’d meant it to. He gives a huff under his breath and looks away, a small, bashful smile playing around his mouth.
“Y’re making it sound like you’re volunteering to be my new mom or somethin’,” he scoffs. “You fuckin’ weirdo.”
That sends me into a helpless fit of giggles. “Yeah, ‘cause you’re like — likhe-he-he — like a cuckoo.”
“Huh?”
I wait until my laughter subsides enough for me to speak again, after a few false starts. “You’re all… big and ugly and eat a lot and I’ve got no idea how you ended up in my nest, but I’m stuck with you now so I guess I gotta feed you, kinda thingy.”
He groans and shoves at me, but it’s only for show; he hurries to catch me before I topple over from being too drunk on laughter and liquor both to right myself in time. “Anyone ever tell you that big mouth’s gonna get you in trouble one day, when you flap it at someone less patient and magna — magni — mangi... ”
“‘Magnificent’?” I suggest helpfully.
He waves this aside, deep in thought. “No, no no, ‘s got a ‘moose’ in it. Tip of my tongue.”
“What, like — big elk sorta thingy?” I ask, puzzled. Not sure I can help him with this one.
“MAGNANIMOUS!” he shouts, triumphant in recollection, snapping his fingers. “Someone less patient and magni-animous than me. Uh. What was I… what were we talkin’ ‘bout, again?”
“Can’t remember.” I grin at him, listing to bump my temple against his shoulder. “Was just a joke, though, I ain’t your ma. I’m y’r partner.”
“For my sins,” he agrees, but he’s grinning back at me. His eyes are so nice, blue and sharp. I think about that, sometimes, except when I’m sober that seems like a bad idea, and I make myself think about something else. Don’t know what sober me’s on about, I’m feeling great contemplating it. “I did wonder a bit ‘bout why you were on your own back when we met. Always heard it that the river folk stuck together pretty tight. Well, their loss and my gain, I guess. If they don’t know a good thing when they’ve got it, that’s on them.”
My vision is blurry, suddenly, his face swimming as my throat starts to feel funny.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I say thinly.
“‘Kay,” he says easily, leaning over to look through our stash of bottles as I gather myself again. “Hey, did you try this one yet? Think it’s all the way from the Freljord. Tastes like elnuk ass with some caraway thrown in, but it hits you like an avalanche.”
“Thanks, I’m good,” I say, brandishing my bottle of… of something Ionian with, I’m starting to dimly suspect, a higher proof than you’d expect from the deceptively clean, delicate, slightly sweet taste.
The client who hired us for that last job only saw fit to hand over half of the sum we’d agreed on beforehand upon delivery, so we made up the difference by stealing the contents of his jewelry box and also raiding his extensive liquor cabinet, making away with most of it. A stingy and unwise man in many ways, obviously, but one with excellent and eclectic taste in booze, it can’t be denied.
Malcolm pours himself another glass of what turns out to be the wine he’s been working his way through all night, pursing his lips thoughtfully as he rolls it around in his mouth before swallowing it. I’m just glad we’re no longer talking about… all of that anymore.
“Y’know, this Demacian swill ain’t that bad once you’re on your fifth glass or so,” he says happily. He’s always been a cheerful drunk, just one who won’t let it stop him neither from finishing nor starting a fight if he feels the situation calls for it. “Don’t see why rich folks lose their heads over it, though. It’s been sitting around bein’ useless for a hundred and fifty years or somethin’, and it’s still nothin’ but glorified grape juice, if you ask me.”
“Think it’s because it’s been sittin’ around uselessly for over a century that they think it’s so great. It’s, like, hm. A drink of leisure. It’s just for having, and knowing no one else gets to drink it while you do.”
He shakes his head wonderingly. “Never know how you can follow how these bastards think. You’re like a posh people whisperer.”
I gesture airly with my bottle. “‘S like they say, ‘know thyme — thi — your enemy’. Can’t trick someone until you know how they think.”
“It sure comes in useful from time to time, I ain’t complaining. Kinda a hoot to watch, sometimes.”
“Well, one does like to put on a show for a good audience. I’m glad you’re there to watch my back and make them uncomfortable too. Nice to see them squirm, for a change.”
He holds out his hands palms-up in a gesture of modesty. “Of all the services I can provide, walkin’ up to rich assholes callin’ you shitty names to loom is a nice intersection of business and pleasure.”
I’m so jadedly used to expecting the various and sundry words people spit after river folk — even seemingly benign individuals appear to lose that restraint once they’ve bet enough gold on the wrong hand, it’s a funny thing — that the first time Graves smashed his elbow into a guy’s throat over it, there was a certain thrill to it for me. Usually he’ll leave it be unless I give him the sign, but among the things no man can ever truly control, the tides and Malcolm’s temper reside together right at the top of the list.
I want to lean in and press my face into the strong curve of his neck. It’s probably the booze talking, but I have, in fact, never wanted anything more in my life, except for the barques to turn back around and for my mother to tell me it’d all just been to scare some sense into me as she reached out to help me aboard.
Before I can think better of it I lean in and do, in fact, press my face against his neck. Gods, my drunk brain is a genius, that was easy, I should do this all the time. He’s warm and solid and smells like cigar smoke and gunpowder and… and home.
“Heeey, now, I think this is the sign that you’ve had enough,” he laughs, winding his arm around my shoulder and using it to steady me as he pries the bottle from my fingers with his other hand. “I’m officially cuttin’ you off for the night.”
“Awww, you’re no fun,” I whine against his neck, but I let the bottle go. I’ll just. Get it back later, when he’s not watching. And when the room stops spinning quite so badly, when did that start to happen? Like one of those Piltovan carousels with the horses and stuff that move on their own. Whee.
Having leaned to dispose of the bottle somewhere — I list dangerously along with him, until he goes ‘oop!’ and tightens his arm around me — Malcolm grins and says: “Wow, you’re properly sloshed, huh. Comes of you bein’ all skinny and lithe and shit, I suppose, the booze ain’t got nowhere to go but straight to your head.”
I consider this for a while. “...I don’t think that’s how it works?” Shit, it might be, at this stage I’d be hard pressed to tell my right hand from my left, what do I know anymore.
He chuckles and squeezes my arm. “You ain’t this much of a lightweight normally, I guess that Ionian stuff is stronger than it looks.”
I nod enthusiastically. I thought about that too. Just now. Didn’t I?
It’s nice and warm where I’m half-slumped against him. I’d drift off to sleep, except that I’m having a good time and I don’t want to be alone yet, not when he’s still here and awake with me. Oh, and I have some misunderstandings to clear up.
I pick at the lapel of his shirt, my head resting against his shoulder. “Hey, Malcolm?”
“Yeah?”
“I lied. Before. You are fun. The most fun. You make everythin’ else in the world more fun, just… just bein’ here. With me.”
He laughs again, patting my shoulder comfortingly. “And here I thought you talked a lotta nonsense when you were sober. Probably just about time for bed for you, Tobias.”
“It’s true,” I insist, struggling to sit up enough so I can look him in the eye. It seems like the most important thing in the world, suddenly, that he knows it’s true, that I mean it. “I mean it. Never thought I’d have a partner, but I’m glad it turned out it’s you.”
He shakes his head at me, but he’s smiling, and his eyes are very blue. Scratching the back of his neck with his free hand, he mumbles: “Yeah, well, I’m. The same. With you. So. ‘S all good ‘n all.”
“Also you’re not ugly, I just said it because it was funnier like that. Y’re just. Big and stuff.”
“Y’know when girls get drunk and start cryin’ at each other and calling each other pretty? We’re gettin’ awful close to that territory here.”
“Nonsense, you have never called me pretty even once. But since you’re gettin’ your knickers in a twist about it… is this your card, Mr. Graves?”
I produce an ace from my sleeve, making it seem like I fished it out from where his shirt is carelessly unbuttoned far enough to show off luscious plains of chest hair. What I really want to do is rest my entire face there for the rest of the night, but I suppose that might come across as too forward. I wasn’t raised in a barn. (I was raised mostly on a boat, to be clear. And my mom and my grandpa always taught me you gotta ask first before you spring stuff like that on someone. Gotta operate on vampire rules if you’re fixing to be allowed into someone’s cleavage.)
“I suppose it is my card now, T.F.,” Malcolm says, like he’s humouring me, taking the card — ace of hearts, I’m not feeling subtle tonight — and tucking it into his breast pocket as if for safekeeping, without seeming to register the significance of it in the slightest. Good old Graves; you can always count on him to miss even the bluntest allegory unless you literally spell it out for him, and even then he’s liable to ask whether ‘allegory’ is some kind of dish from Demacia. I get away with a lot of shit just because his usual answer to metaphor is ‘for what now?’.
That straightforwardness is part of what makes him so great — he’s great and I’m very, very drunk so I can admit it — but it means I sometimes feel like we’re trying to communicate across two entirely different language families.
I slump back down against him, satisfied. “...wish there was music here.” So we could dance. Not that we would, I just… want things.
“Yeah? Well, I ain’t no singer, but I know a couple of shanties, if you’re game.”
“Yessss!” I exclaim, snapping my fingers in sudden recollection. “There was that one you said you’d — about the girl who did the thing. Chorus had somethin’ to do with eating oysters, but it’s really about fucking, that kinda deal.”
He sniggers. “That’s one of the dirty ones, Tobias, where the hell did you hear that?”
I poke him in the stomach with my finger. “From you, you dolt. You said you’d teach it to me when I was older, which I know was just you bein’ an asshole, but I’ve had two lines from the chorus stuck in my brain for years now and I don’t know any of the other lyrics and ’s been driving me nuts.”
“Oh. Rings a faint bell, actually, now that you say it. Guess it’s basically charity on my part to teach you the rest, then.”
He’s right, he ain’t no singer, but I’m contented resting against his side and listening to his voice anyway, joining in on hollering the chorus once I get the gist of it.
It’s a strange thing, being happy. I hadn’t really planned for it.
— —
The rays of the morning sun through the grimy skylight are filtering in, even through my closed eyelids, and each scratch across my brain like needles and knives.
I moan weakly and try to turn my face away, but there doesn’t seem to be enough strength anywhere in my aching body to carry out the movement. Every breath is agony. This is one hell of a way to find out there’s an afterlife and that there’s a price to pay for a sinful life. Honestly, I didn’t think I was doing that bad, this seems out of proportion.
“Mornin’, sunshine,” Malcolm says somewhere nearby, sounding obscenely cheerful and so, so, so loud, surely even the creation of the stars themselves couldn’t have created such a godsawful din. I give a mewl of unhappiness and try to curl up on myself, like that will keep the noise out. “Oh, that bad, huh.”
Words. Words are. Too much work. I whimper until I’m pretty sure I’ve answered him adequately.
“Ah. Okay. Just, uh… you stay here and rest up, I’ll be right back.”
His footsteps move away across the floor and then fade.
After a while I decide that it might be best to confirm I’m not actually reclining in a fiery hell pit somewhere. I slit my eyes open just enough to carry out some tactical reconnaissance. Results: I am lying on the floor, but someone’s stripped the dust sheets from a divan and draped them over me like a blanket, and have also conscientiously taken my boots off and folded my coat up to pillow my head. It looks to be a bright sunny day outside. I vaguely wish I had never been born.
I manage to crawl over the floorboards to a red leather armchair facing the darkest corner of the room, taking a five minute rest to lie there with my arm slung over my eyes and whimper softly, before finishing my harrowing journey by pulling myself into the armchair until I can sit in it, curled up on myself like the world’s most miserable armadillo. It’s impossible to say how long I exist in this agonizing blur of half-wakefulness and nausea, except that suddenly Malcolm is there, bringing a bucket and a glass of water he’s procured somewhere.
“Let’s start to get you sorted out,” he says, in a mercifully lowered voice. He holds out the glass of water to me, then puts it down on the dusty surface of a nearby rosewood table when I don’t take it. “Okay, baby steps. Bucket’s right here if you need it.”
“Graves,” I say, in the faintest of whispers, because even the sound of my own voice is like the merciless blows of pickaxes and warhammers against my ear drums, sending the world into dizzying, unmitigated suffering. “I wish. That I was dead.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t. So drink your water.”
I fumble for his hand and bring it, feebly, to my throat. “End it. Please. If you have any mercy in your soul at all. Put me out of my misery.”
“Well, you’ve got enough spark of life left in ya for theatrics. I’m guessin’ you’ll live.”
“Do I mean so little to you?” I ask, as the warmth of his hand leaves my throat. “Is your… aaaaaaaaaah. Hngh. Heart. Truly fashioned from cold hard stone? I thought... we were friends.”
“Oh, rest assured, it’s precisely ‘cause we’re friends that I ain’t never gonna let you forget this,” he says, confirming with the glee in his voice what I have always darkly suspected: that he is in fact a heartless and soulless man incapable of feeling pity or remorse. You think you know a guy.
“Oooooh, I’m never drinking again,” I wheeze, clutching weakly at my head.
“Ah, that old chestnut,” he grins. “The cry of the lily-livered and the weak. I’ll be sure to remind you next time we go out for drinks, I’m certain you’ll stay true to this principled stand then.”
“Never,” I repeat, with as much vehemence as I can put into a raspy whisper. He pats my shoulder kindly before he pushes the glass a bit closer towards me and starts to move away.
“Drink your water and sleep it off, I’ll be over here if you need someone to hold your hair back or somethin’.”
It’s not pretty, or pleasant, or particularly dignified, but I survive the morning somehow, drifting into shallow slumber between patches of beaching myself onto the rough and unkind sandbanks of consciousness. Finally, when — judging from the change in the light — we’ve reached late afternoon, I open my eyes, and my first instinct is no longer to beg for the sweet release of death.
I make a rumbling noise and lean over the arm of the chair to look for Malcolm, who’s sitting leaned up against a sofa and whittling something while humming under his breath. He seems to have broken into the mansion’s larder while I was out of commission, a variety of pickles and cheese and a haunch of dried meat of some kind set out around him. When he sees I’m awake, he waves cheerfully with the hand holding the knife.
“You about ready to join the land of the living?”
“Provisionally,” I croak, sliding off the armchair and finding to my surprise that my legs can support me, at least for long enough to let me collapse next to Malcolm on the floor.
“Eh, as soon as we get some food in you you’ll be right as rain,” he assures me. “The cheese is some stinky rich people nonsense, but it ain’t half bad if you put enough marmalade on it. Pickle?”
He proffers the jar to me, and my stomach doesn’t immediately rebel at the idea. “I’ll give it a shot. How come you’re in such shamelessly good shape today, anyway?”
“My incredible constitution and strength of character. And probably ‘cause I spent most of the night gettin’ to grips with sissy Demacian wine, while you did away with damn near half a bottle of hard liquor.”
I fumble the jar open and use my knife to fish a pickle out, keeping it speared on the blade as I lift it towards my face, leerily. “Yeah, okay, I guess that’d do it.”
He waves his hand amiably. “I tried a sip of that stuff you were drinkin’ and I don’t blame you for not noticing until it was too late, no bite to it at all. You ask me, a proper drink’s meant to burn a bit on the way down, to give you the heads-up, like, but that might be the bein’ raised on Bilgewater hooch in me talkin’. Rat Town rum is where it’s at. Does run a slight risk of leavin’ you blind, of course, but you know it’ll probably do the job.”
“A town with its priorities in order, as always,” I say, eyeing the pickle like we’re about to face off in honorable combat and it’s a formidable opponent. It’s a pickle, but I have no experience whatsoever with honorable combat, so I’m considering this an even match.
“Eh, as long as you steer away from the rotgut they make from the seaweed near the White Wharf, you’ll probably be fine.”
I grimace, the pickle growing ever more threatening to my eyes. “Could we… not talk about seaweed corpse booze right now?”
“Forgot about your delicate state, sorry.”
Tentatively, I risk a bite. As my body does not immediately try to return the sliver of pickle to sender, I continue to nibble carefully on it. Over the next few minutes, a growing sense of doom creeps over me, and I don’t think it’s because I’m going to need the bucket again.
Vague, shadowy flashes of memory are beginning to resurface now, emerging from the sea of Ionian booze that had until now enveloped the finer details of the previous night. Oh no. Oh no, I didn’t… I wouldn’t have. Surely. Why do I seem to remember that I told him about…
“Hey, Malcolm,” I say, trying to not let on that my sanity is currently hanging only by a thin, thin shred of denial as I put the pickle down on the jar lid; I don’t trust myself to hold it steadily. “Did I say anythin’... weird, last night?”
“Hell, three quarters of the shit that comes outta your mouth seems weird to me, T.F., you gotta be a helluva lot more specific than that.”
I pierce the pickle with the knife again and again, giving it all my attention like I’m performing some form of delicate surgery on it. “What did we talk about, then?”
“Well,” he says, counting them off on his fingers as he goes, “you were awfully set on makin’ me think I was a carpenter for some reason, but I think that might’ve been an attempt at one of them metaphor whatits you’ve been tellin’ me about. You said I was ugly and then that I wasn’t, and there was somethin’ in there ‘bout a bird, uuuh, let’s see… we talked about our folks some, I taught you that drinking song from Bilgewater you asked about, the one about the mermaid — ” that does stir some recollection for me, actually, I think it ended with her eating her suitor after they’d done the deed, in true Bilgewater spirit, “and you showed me some card tricks and couldn’t remember the name of any of ‘em even though you could still do them perfectly. Pretty sure you actually fell asleep in the middle of one of them. Hm. Think that’s pretty much it.”
“...so you remember all of it.”
“Probably a damn sight more of it than you do, at least, you got pretty sauced there towards the end. Hey, wanna try some of this flatbread stuff? Should be pretty easy to get to stay down, at least.”
I take the flatbread numbly, my poor abused brain trying to get on top of things as I eat it mechanically, not even noticing what it tastes like.
That lonely day on the river bank has been sitting like a red-hot coal of shame in my gut for almost a decade now, burning away at me in the way secrets do sometimes, when you’re afraid they tell too much of the fetid inner truth of you. You get used to keeping it boxed off, out of the perfectly reasonable assumption that anyone catching a whiff of it would turn on their heel and march the other way.
But I told him, and nothing awful happened. I mean, I’m not about to do it with anyone else, that was more than enough, thank you, but… he knows, and nothing is really different. Except that he knows. He knows, and he doesn’t mind — he didn’t leave.
He holds out his hand to me. “Send me that jar of marmalade, would you? Much obliged. I’m about to try for an experiment here. Some exploratory culinary construction work, even- I’ll tell you how it works out.”
I watch the stubbled edge of his jaw as he focuses on heaping jam, pickles and roughly cut cheese between two pieces of flatbread, his brow furrowed in concentration, and a different sort of warmth lies cradled in my stomach now than the liquor had brought — that same bright newness as when the sunlight starts holding real heat in the spring, like it’s making the promise of summer.
The card’s still tucked into his breast pocket, one corner peeking out.
I look down at my empty hands and smile a little, helplessly. Then I square my shoulders and grimly continue my work on the pickle, my foot close enough to Malcolm’s that they brush together now and then, easy and comfortable. He ends up with jam and pickles all down the front of his shirt and elects to fix this by taking the shirt off entirely, which helps my mood no end.
— — — —
Nine of Wands, Ace of Swords
“Tobias, you can’t blame me for this,” Malcolm says, the chains currently wrapped around us both from neck to toe jangling ominously as he moves his head to fix me with big puppy eyes.
I don’t say anything. I’m pretty sure my expression says everything that needs saying currently.
“Only it kinda feels like you’re blamin’ me,” he says, pathetically plaintively, his whole meaty body sagging against the chains. Even his hair is flopping miserably without the headband to keep it back.
Okay, Tobias. Deep breaths. Yelling will not help this situation. “Oh, so it must all have been a big misunderstanding, then. Someone other than your psycho boyfriend is workin’ real hard to sacrifice us to the Great Old Ones of the Deep Waters. Silly me, of course none of this is your doing, I’m so sorry for even suggesting such a thing.”
“‘Boyfriend’ is a big word to start with, but he sure as fuck ain’t any such thing no more anyway,” Graves says, with feeling. “I like to think of myself as a broad-minded, live-and-let-live kinda guy when it comes to lettin’ the other fella have his own view on things, but attempted human sacrifice crosses a line even for me.”
“Malcolm,” I say, “you cannot imagine my relief at hearing that.”
Malcolm’s crazy boyfriend — oh, sorry, Malcolm’s insane cultist ex who I’ve been fucking telling him gave off sinister vibes from day one but hey, who am I to say ‘I told you so, you peabrained pigheaded himbo’ just because I’m always, ALWAYS right about this kind of thing, and if he’d simply trust me when I tell him something’s off about someone, our lives would be so much… where was I. Oh, yes. Malcolm’s insane cultist ex keeps chanting ominously in the background, laying out a disconcerting array of bladed weaponry in a series of precise motions.
“Ok, so I get that you’re mad. Honestly I’m kinda mad too, what the hell is his deal, anyway?” Malcolm adds, glaring in the general direction of the chanting, or at least as far as the chains allow him to turn his head. If I look at the swelling around his black eye for too long, I’ll start to get worried instead of annoyed, so I don’t.
“Human sacrifice,” I say tiredly, working as I have been for the last ten minutes to get my fingers just those last few millimeters towards the small of my back, so that I can fish out the card I’ve tucked into the seam of my shirt there. “Human sacrifice in exchange for dark powers is his deal, Malcolm. You gonna tell me there were no warning signs? No red flags some helpful friend may or may not have pointed out to you?”
“If collectin’ knives is a warning sign, half of Bilgewater ain’t nothin but red flags.”
“Yeah, I know, your dating history is like a Noxian army parade. Tell me again why we keep comin’ back here?”
“The rum’s cheap. Ma would kill me if we didn’t check in from time to time. It’s a stinking hellhole, but it’s home. I could keep going, if you’d like.”
I give a grunt of concession. “Neh. You have a point.”
“He’s gonna be in so much shit once the Buhru priestess hears about this. I know enough about how they do things to say that this is a big no-no. Y’know, dark magic and human sacrifice and shit, they take a dim view of that sorta stuff.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I’ll make sure to enjoy watching him get his comeuppance from six feet under. Or sixty fathoms. However you want to see it.”
Malcolm makes a frustrated sound and starts struggling against the chains, to no avail since each link of the chain is as thick as the width of one of his fingers and kept in excellent condition, untouched by rust. “What do you always gotta be such a huge drama queen about stuff for, Tobias? We ain’t god food yet, that defeatist attitude ain’t helpin’ any, and — ”
My sheer allconsuming annoyance is such that when I finally get the card out, I very nearly hurl it at him, just for the satisfaction of seeing the bright sparkle of gold and shutting him up already. Thankfully at least one of us bothered to cultivate a minimum of impulse control and self-restraint— yes, I get it, the dude is hot, the tattoos perfectly compliment the bulging muscles of his arms and broad span of his chest, and his smile does hold that spark of sharp charming danger you’d probably go for if you don’t have that little voice in your head going ‘ruh-roh’ at the warning signs. Sometimes I don’t know what’s worse: Malcolm’s abysmal taste in men, or the indignity that it apparently does not extend to include me. It’s one of the few crowds where I’d objectively be the least objectionable guy along almost every axis.
“You are buying the drinks tonight,” I hiss, as I sparkle up a teleportation card and get ready to do what I’ve yearned for the last three weeks and punch this guy square in the jaw.
“Yeah, fair ‘nuf,” Malcolm allows, wincing a bit at the change in pressure in the air as I slip out from between the chains.
— — — —
Six of Pentacles, Justice
The mansion is gloomy, heavily built and steeped in history until the stone walls themselves seem darkened with it, as if it were centuries of accumulated soot. Outside there’s a charming summer day, but it’s hard to imagine that in here. Noxians, man. No culture has ever loved a spike half so much. I walk over to the window and draw the wine-red curtains aside enough to peek out, just to remind myself the sun exists. Graves keeps his position close to the door, but clearly feels similarly uneasy, shifting his weight restlessly and keeping his shoulders taut and ready.
They’re old time nobility, this lot, withered on the interbred wine and not much like the brutally efficient warmachine crashing across continents of the modern Noxian state. Just as merciless in their way, though, and no less thirsty for expansion for having held on to what they have for centuries, even if the lord of this house does most of his conquering via clever bookkeeping rather than steel. If I know his type — and trust me, I do — I’m guessing he’ll find some way to use the considerable sum he just paid us to get his son and heir home safe to claim some sort of tax benefit, and leave himself with a net gain somehow. The lord himself only stuck around for a couple of hours to verify that the boy was in one piece before he set off again to a meeting somewhere half-way across the country, handing us a small fortune each almost in passing, like it was a mere afterthought. I’d say he was downright aspirational to watch for a humble humdrum crook like me, but I don’t think I’ve got enough of a cold dead void where my heart should be to follow his methods — call me soft, but I don’t have the stomach for sending children into unsecured mines for the sake of profit. It’s one of my many faults. Give me an honest bank robbery any day of the week over that, it’s easier on the soul.
The heir of the hour, duly rescued from his kidnappers by yours truly with considerable chaos left in our wake, has settled into an armchair in front of the fire, his lanky body ungainly as he sprawls back against the upholstery.
“So when did Father tell you he would be coming back?”
“Didn’t say,” I say, uninterested. “Gotta be a few weeks at least, though, accounting for the travel time.”
I wouldn’t want to spend much time at home with a son like this around either, but there’s no need to mention that part of it. We should get going too, nothing much to gain by hanging around. I mean — unless… I lock eyes with Malcolm for a moment, and a twitch of his eyebrow says he’s entertaining the same line of thought as me. There are times when he is a total mystery to me, in ways that no number of words of explanation could illuminate, and others where I know we share one crook’s soul between us and no words are needed. I’ve heard second hand that marriage isn’t an entirely dissimilar experience.
“I suppose I am the lord of the manor for the duration, then,” the kid says, a self-satisfied twang to his voice.
I glance over my shoulder at the sound of a servant — a harried-looking girl of about twenty, with a shock of curly tow-coloured hair that her bonnet can’t quite keep in place — entering the room. She seems startled to find the room occupied, almost dropping her armful of folded tablecloths.
“Oh,” she says meekly. “I didn’t realize there’d be — apologies for interrupting you and your friends, m’lord.”
I let the curtains drop to walk back over to stand next to Graves.
“Friends?” the kid scoffs. “Do these two look like they’re from a class of people that could ever be considered ‘my friends’?”
I can feel Graves barely holding himself back from some stunning if probably non-lethal display of violence next to me. I’m so proud; he’s gotten much better at it over the years. Getting him to occasionally think even once before throwing a punch was an ordeal, having him think twice on his own initiative is nothing short of a miracle.
The kid waves a dismissive hand. “Bah, nevermind, just do whatever you were sent here to do and then get out.”
The girl gives a jerky nod of her head and a courtesy before she hurries over to a chest of drawers at the other end of the room. She frantically works to put the tablecloths away while the heir takes another sip of what I’m pretty sure is his third glass of brandy of the morning — he didn’t waste much time in getting started after we got here.
He’s somehow managed to be even more insufferable since we arrived than he’d been on the journey here, something I had frankly not thought possible. I’ve never seen a more convincing argument against the rights of primogeniture. The man’s got the inesacapable air of someone who used to torture ants for fun as a kid.
In a way I guess it’s not really his fault he’s turned out the way he has — there’s always something rotten at the core of places like this. Centuries of secrets and blood made into power, loveless marriages and inbreeding and the endless paranoia that someone will finally take you down and build their fortune on your bones, just like you did to some poor fucker before you — it all makes for poor soil for anything pretty to grow in, I suppose. And I wouldn’t give a crap about any of it, if it weren’t for the unfortunate fact that the richest people are the ones who can offer the best pay for people like us. Who’d’ve thought, huh.
“Should’ve just sold him back to that rival family when we had the chance,” Malcolm mutters darkly, giving word to our mutual understanding, and I give a grunt of glum agreement. Technically I suppose their offer would still stand, but it’d be a bit of a hassle to drag him off all the way there again, now that we’ve finally got him back to the family seat. “Can we either do that, or get out of here already? This place gives me the heebie jeebies somethin’ fierce.”
“Yeah. Let’s get going while the going’s good.” I pick up a few little trinkets on my meandering way towards the door, considering it a well-earned extra payment for having put up with sleeping in the same room as the kid for over a week.
The heir fixes his pale watery eyes on the servant as we ready ourselves to leave. “Actually — hey, you. Yes, you. I don’t think I’ve seen you before, are you new?”
“Yes, m’lord,” she says, curtseying nervously. “I started last — last week.”
“Did you, now. You two — you’ve performed your services adequately and been paid, you may leave now,” he says, waving his hand at us like we’re a pair of gnats. I sense more than see Graves’ hands curl into fists, and I reach out to put my hand on his arm, calming.
“Let’s just get outta here before we burn any unnecessary bridges, huh?” I tell him quietly, and his brow stays furrowed but he grunts grudging acquiescence. The old man did pay up, and added a bonus on top for his offspring having all limbs attached by the end of it, for all that he’s been a condescending bastard about the whole thing.
The young man gestures imperiously at the servant, who is looking increasingly trepidatious. “As for you — come over here so I can get a good look at you. Yes, I’m talking to you again. Pay attention.”
“Ah — Her Ladyship told me to return with the cutlery as soon as possible, m’lord,” she quavers, clutching a folded tablecloth before her like it’s a shield.
“Mother can wait, she must be too deep in the claret to even notice at this time of day. Put that down and come. Over. Here. Before I stop asking so nicely.”
I look at Graves, who’s already looking at me.
“My Lord, I don’t think — ” she begins meekly, a spark of panic in her voice.
“Think? I don’t need you to think, you’re not paid to think, you’re paid to do as you’re told,” he drawls. “And I’m telling you to get over here.”
Well, he’s been a vile little shitstain the whole way, I don’t know why I expected that to change once he got home. He is the kind of man who’d process the humiliation of his capture and worse yet, the humiliation of his father’s disdainful welcome home, by paying it forward to someone else in no position to fight back. I watch his chinless profile with distaste — I have half a mind to ask Malcolm to throw him head first out a window and be done with this whole creepy place.
Malcolm has, as usual, rushed a few steps ahead of me, his hand landing heavily on the kid’s shoulder.
“Hey, little Lord Shithead,” Malcolm says, in a less than friendly tone — it’s the one he uses to start and finish bar brawls. “She already told you no. You deaf as well as stupid, Yer Lordship?”
The kid gapes, like his brain refuses to process what his ears just picked up. “I — that’s — you — you can’t talk to me like that! And she can’t say no to me, she’s a servant!”
I meet Malcolm’s eyes again, seeing my own thoughts reflected there. He raises his eyebrows in blithe question, and I give him the go-ahead sign.
“Bridges are overrated anyway, I’ve always said,” I muse, as Malcolm discreetly gets out of the way and gives a contemplative nod of agreement. “Bottom tier of infrastructure, in many ways.”
The young man raises his voice even further in indignation.“What ARE you two even talking ab — ”
I get him straight in the chest with a golden card and he only manages a small croak of surprise before he stiffens and then goes limp as a ragdoll. Graves swoops in to catch him before his head hits the ground, handling his weight effortlessly, like it’s nothing more than a sack of grain.
“Well, he ain’t much of a gift, but probably best to wrap him up all neat anyway,” I say lazily, availing myself of a few more valuable-seeming knicknacks from the mantlepiece. When Graves wrinkles his nose at me in confusion, I add: “Wrap him up in something, so we won’t cross the courtyard with him out in the open like that.”
“Oh yeah! Good idea. Anyway, this piece of shit would like to say he’s sorry for bein’ so impolite, Miss,” Graves says, in the closest approximation he ever gets to courteous. Kicking aside the armchair, he deposits the heir’s body on the carpet beneath and then rolls it up around him. “Or he would, if his ma had raised him right. Anyway, we’re off. Take care now.”
“Um,” the girl says, eyes wide as saucers but her body relaxing slightly from the startled deer stiffness she had held herself with before. “Thanks. You… you too.”
With a cheerful mock-salute, Malcolm bundles the noble’s boneless form over his shoulder and idly kicks the door all the way open, leaving a muddy boot print there with relish before he sets off.
Since I’m feeling generous and it’s sort of her doing that we’re about to be paid twice for one job, I produce a couple of gold coins from my pocket and twirl them between my fingers before tossing them to the girl. It’s nothing to me right now, after that paycheck, but it has to be at least half a year’s worth of pay for her.
“Use ‘em to go find yourself a better job somewhere else,” I advise before I follow Malcolm out the door. “This place ain’t right.”
“Uh, thanks,” she says, having dropped the tablecloth to catch the coins and clutching them tightly. “I will. And you don’t even know the half of it, Mister. They’ve got… things, down in the cellar. Fuckin’ rich people.”
I wink at her. “Good luck out there, kid.”
Graves is waiting for me at the end of the darkly ostentatious corridor, and I lengthen my stride to catch up to him to fall easily into step with him as we head towards the exit. Should be no hurry — like I said the lord himself isn’t expected back again for another week, and the household are busy preparing for the night’s banquet — but it never hurts to show some initiative.
“Can you believe this little barnacle’s ass of a brat?” Malcolm asks, tilting his head towards the limp shape over his shoulder.
“Well, to his credit I guess he never tried to pretend to be anythin’ but what he is,” I reflect. “Even if what he is is a sorry waste of life.”
“If my ma had heard me talk like that to a woman, she’d have broken every bone in my body and sunk me to the bottom of Bilgewater bay with an anvil tied to my neck herself,” Graves says, shaking his head in disbelief. “They’d never find my body, and rightly so.”
His being so scandalized over it is kinda cute, though I’m not gonna be the one to tell him that. And I’ve met his mother a couple of times now, and sadly I have to agree with his estimation of her likely reaction. She’s liable to fly into rages over much less. He had to get it from somewhere, I suppose. “Guess some rich folk think you can use gold as a substitution for manners or decency. Ain’t the first time we’ve seen it, and it won’t be the last, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, guess you’re right. At least we got paid,” he reflects phlegmatically. He’s a man of clear and unimpeachable priorities, it’s one of the reasons I like him so much.
I reach out to pat his arm and use the other hand to make a sweeping gesture, as if to indicate all the world open at our feet, full of glorious possibility. “And we’re about to get paid again, my friend.”
He glances over at me with a bright grin, the sunlight catching at the blue in his eyes as we make our way out into the great outdoors and away. “Awww shucks, T.F., you always know just what to say.”
We’re overtaken on the road half an hour later by the servant girl — well, ex-servant as of now, one must assume, from the horse clearly stolen from the lord’s stables and the cheery grin and wave she gives us on her way past, curly hair tangling in the wind.
We might be thieves and liars, but it’s always nice when we can leave something arguably better than we found it as well. And if we can make a double payday of it by hook or by crook at the same time… all the better.
— — — —
The Empress
Malcolm’s mother is always smaller than I expect her to be, in a way that makes it seem comedically incongruent that someone that petite somehow produced Malcolm Graves. She must have been a looker once upon a time, but a lifetime of hardship, work and drink have worn away at her and given her hands like dented iron and a face like a bullmastiff about to deliver some bad news.
Every cigarette she’s ever smoked, which is a daunting number indeed, somehow seems to turn into a dogend within seconds and stay that way for hours longer than what should be physically possible.
She’s lighting a new one right now, watching with me as Malcolm swears expansively where he’s lying on his back and trying to loosen the rusty pipes of her kitchen sink, so we can work out what’s been clogging the drain. Bilgewater plumbing ain’t like the kind you get in Piltover, all orderly and neat and interconnected, and with conscientious hardworking people coming around to maintain it regularly; it’s more like the infected bowels of some great beast, where the best you can hope for is that whatever you pour out eventually ends up in the ocean, or at least a gutter, with only minimal detours. It’s a not uncommon practice to have your pipes set up in such a way that whatever you throw out ends up in your neighbour’s house somewhere, because that makes it by definition someone else’s pressing issue to deal with. It might cause said neighbour to turn up in your living room with a grudge and a loaded weapon, but hey, that’s a different problem altogether, with a different set of solutions. The people of Bilgewater have a straightforward approach to these things.
“Fuckin’ piece of shit bastard son of a serpent butcher of a godsdamn…” Malcolm mutters darkly to himself as he keeps wrestling with it.
“Language, Malcolm,” I tut, mostly to distract him, because his face is slowly turning that shade of red that might mean he’s dangerously close to just shooting the damn thing to pieces with a shotgun and calling it done. He doesn’t even take a moment to flip me off, which seems a dire sign.
“Nothin’ wrong with his language, ‘s got all the words goin’ in the right order and shit,” Ms. Graves says phlegmatically, knocking ash off her cigarette onto a plate she’s kept around for the purpose for as long as I’ve known her, and which I’m always afraid to study too closely, lest I might actually see.
I crane my head a bit to get a better view of what he’s doing under there. He’s been going at this for half an hour now with little sign of progress. “You sure you don’t need any help?”
He gives a negatory grunt. “Ain’t enough space under here as it is, we’d just be gettin’ in each other’s way.”
Well, he’s got his bullheaded look on, no point arguing with him when he gets like that. Despite my doubts, I lean back against the wall I’ve been lounging against with my arms loosely crossed over my chest as I watch.
“You sure you’re unscrewing it in the right direction, Mal?” Ms. Graves demands.
He groans and lets his head fall back against the floor with an audible thunk. “Oh, for fuck’s — yeah, I’m sure, Ma, for the thousandth goddamn — ”
“Don’t you try bein’ smart with me unless you wanna feel the side of my hand, young man,” she snaps. Graves rolls his eyes and holds his hands up in mock concession, returning to the pipe with renewed and increased grudge. “And how should I know, you clearly ain’ t makin’ any progress with whatever it is you’re doin’, and — ”
Malcolm grunts and wrenches harder, like he’s imagining wringing someone’s neck, and the tortured rusting metal giving a screech of agony.
“There we fucking go,” Malcolm growls, triumphant as the pipe finally starts come away.
“Maybe make sure to move your head away before — ” I hurriedly begin and start to move towards him, spurred by the burgeoning catastrophe unfurling itself within my imagination. Sadly my warning comes entirely too late; the pipe slides off, and the indescribable sludge that’s been pooling in the drain for gods know how long follows the pull of gravity towards inevitable tragedy.
It’s an unpleasant experience for everyone involved, but at least the drain’s unclogged, and after fifteen minutes of intense scrubbing Malcolm emerges from the wash basin looking, and at least mostly smelling, as good as new, if still a little green around the gills. So I suppose you can note it down as a victory, in the end.
“You good?” I ask him, as he closes the door behind him with his foot.
Graves finishes drying his face and neck with the rag, the skin rubbed red and raw from the washing brush. “As good as I’m gonna get,” he grunts. He’s wearing a shirt I don’t recognize, too tight for him over the shoulders and the colour slightly faded from washing and time. With a sting of surprise, I realize it must be an old one from when he used to live here — I glance discreetly over my shoulder at Ms. Graves. If you’d asked me five minutes ago I would have thought it a pretty sure bet that she’d sold off anything like that long ago for drinking money.
Ms. Graves studies her son for a second, cigarette safely ensconced at the corner of her mouth, and clicks her tongue in exasperation. “Oh, by the Bearded Lady’s tits, boy, didn’t I teach you how to dress yourself?”
“What now?” Graves barks back, throwing his hands up. I deftly fish the towel from his hands before he knocks something over with it in the narrow space of the kitchen. He gives me a half-nod of acknowledgement, but keeps his frowning attention on his mother.
She shuffles over to him. “You’ve gotten the buttons all wrong. Here, stand still for a moment. And wipe that scowl off your face too, before I do it for you.”
There’s no real bite to her voice as she reaches out and undoes the — misaligned, she’s right — buttons, though. I pretend to spend all my attention on folding the towel to hide my smile at Graves slouching and submitting to her ministrations with the air of a sullen teenager. The effect is only heightened by his hair still floppy and damp where it’s falling into his face and the odd too-tight fit of the shirt that must have fit him properly when he was sixteen.
As far as I know, it was only ever the two of them, back in the day. Ms. Graves says she doesn’t know exactly who Graves’ da is, because it’d apparently take a lot of quite exacting maths to pin it down and she hasn’t had the time to sit down with it — clearly she hadn’t considered any of the candidates a viable long-term project, though. Malcolm has never seemed to mind, so I suppose it’s fine. In Bilgewater logic I guess he counts himself lucky that he grew up with any parent still alive, even if she wasn’t home that much. Things work differently where I’m from — even with parents dead or disappeared, the child still belongs on the boats, someone’s still gonna be takin’ care of them along with the rest of the gaggle of kids runnin’ around. One of my cousins grew up like that, after her parents were taken away by a fever sweeping through. In Bilgewater… not so much of a safety net to catch you.
Over the years Graves has sent enough cash home to get his mom a decent little place to live, lifted out of the worst sewer pits of Rat Town — comfortably beneath the Eeries, though, because as Malcolm says it’s doubtful if either she or the Eeries would survive that experience unscathed. It’s only two rooms with an attic, and a tiny little outcrop of rocky ground outside doin’ its best at pretending to be a garden, but the building is sturdily built and far enough up that it might hold up against a Harrowing, and it’s out of the way of the most active gang territories. It’d be a lie to say we visit regularly — and thank fuck for that, honestly — but whenever the fancy strikes us to go back to Bilgewater and our wanted posters are sufficiently well hidden by the newer ones on the bounty board, we’ll pay our respects briefly and then swan about town as we please after that.
Visiting for an entire day is a pretty recent development. Malcolm used to get pretty twitchy within an hour of entering the house, and I never needed anything but the subtlest hint from him to announce our departure and get us the hell out of there. I suspect she drinks a whole lot less these days than she used to. That, and she’s gettin’ older. It softens some people. And I think she saw my face the first time I saw Malcolm — champion of a thousand nasty bar brawls, three times her size, a virtuoso of violence whose cheerful symphonies have left men whimpering across two continents and several island chains — flinch, simply at her drunkenly raising her hand for a strike that thankfully never fell, once she caught my eyes over his shoulder.
I certainly hope she did see. I hope she realizes the exact conditions of the deal we’ve got here, and how quickly I would stop being civil if she broke them.
Finishing up with the buttons, Ms. Graves tugs at the lapels of his shirt a little as if to neaten them and nods in satisfaction. “There we go, nice and smart. The Harpooners’ve been sniffing around tryin’ to angle for protection money and that sort of stuff again, by the way. Get the feelin’ they’re about to make a move soon.”
Graves glances at her sharply at this. “Can’t be, Rastan with the Stingfishers have been in control of this neighbourhood for decades, everyone knows that. No one’d dare fuck with him after what happened with the dogs and the bag full of warf rats that one time.”
“Yeah, well, the dogs’re long dead, Rastan’s gettin’ old and lost an eye in a bar brawl last year, and the Stingfishers? Ain’t what they used to be back in the day. Other players startin’ to sniff around for new territory to see if they can budge the hold young Gangplank’s been getting on the whole town. Ya know how it goes.”
“You sure it was the Harpooners this time?”
She bristles and gestures aggressively with her cigarette. “Sure I’m sure! Two big lads turning up — one of them was Marsha’s youngest, y’know, the one with the eyebrows. Tried to come in here and loom, talkin’ about how these old houses are real fire hazards and that you need a friendly neighbour looking out for you in this day and age. But I chased ‘em off with the frying pan and I ain’t seen hide nor hair of ‘em since. Clobbered Marsha’s kid in the arm so that his forearm ended up facing the wrong way after he tried raising his hand to me too. Well. Never liked Marsha much anyway,” she adds, reflectively. “Judgy old bitch.”
“Oh, for — I’ve told you not to mess any more with those guys, they’ve got that lady at the top who’s proper sharkhide crazy,” Malcolm groans. “They’re dangerous people, Ma!”
“And I’ll leave ‘em alone once they stop messin’ with my flowerbeds,” she shoots back, unrepentant. ‘Flowerbeds’ is a bit of a misnomer: she grows her plants in some rusty old tubs I think might have been used by the slaughtering crews to hold serpent spleens back in their day. Certainly smells like it still. “You know the amount of shit I went through to get the gardenias to that size?”
“Literal or figurative?” I chime in, aiming to keep her in a good mood and thus avoid a shouted argument between mother and son, because I’ve had to witness that before and, on balance, I think I’d rather chew my own leg off than repeat the experience. She gives a bark of laughter, her eyes twinkling as she takes a drag on her dogend.
“Always ready with a quick line, huh, smart boy. Well, a lady never tells, ‘specially when it comes to her prize-winning gardenias. Trade secrets ‘n all.”
Ah, I seem to dimly remember something about an upcoming competition last time we visited. “Oh, so you won that? Congratulations, ma’am.”
She snorts at the ‘ma’am’, like always, but doesn’t make any comment. “I did, once I stabbed Ber Hellows in his thievin’ little hand before he snapped up the medal to run off and melt it down for drinking money,” she says, with grim satisfaction. “He might’ve spared himself the trouble, everyone knows the medals are just lead with some paint on it. It’s the spirit of the thing, though, I’d beaten him fair and square. His dinky li’l pea plants sure as hell weren’t winning anythin’, I’m pretty sure he waters ‘em with seawater and piss.”
“Rookie mistake,” I agree, shaking my head mournfully.
Malcolm looks between us with his hands resting on his hips, seeming slightly baffled by the turn in the conversation, but not unhappily so. “So — when’s the last time they showed up here? You know where they hang out?”
“Couple of weeks ago. They’ve got their base in an abandoned boathouse, down by the quay.”
“Well, then. Guess I’ll go have a talk with ‘em. See if I can’t, heh, convince them to let it go.”
“You need any help with that?” I ask, half pushing myself away from the wall I’ve been leaning against.
He waves me off. “Nah, I’ll handle it, you stay here with Ma just in case trouble comes knocking. Maybe get started on dinner or somethin’. If you hear any explosions that don’t sound like it’s me making ‘em, you can come back me up, if you’ve got time.”
Well, ain’t that comforting. When he starts saying shit like that, I usually end up frantically getting us out of whatever muck he’s plunked us straight into.
Graves’ mom and I both watch him from the window as he walks down the street and away, with the swagger of a man who knows he’s got the overarms, firepower, and sheer heedless disregard for danger to face whatever gets thrown at him. It’s an attitude that’s gotten him — read: us — into a world of trouble over the years, but it’s quite a thing to watch all the same.
Among other things to look at as he walks away.
“You look after him, now,” Ms. Graves suddenly barks as Malcolm turns a corner and disappears from our line of sight, glaring up at me with piercing blue eyes, one of the few things about her that age hasn’t washed out completely. “I’ve tried my best to knock some into him over the years, but that boy still ain’t got the sense he was born with.”
Me and her have some longstanding and fundamental differences of opinion as to what ‘trying one’s best’ constitutes in that regard — I don’t find trying to knock anything into a kid to be a particularly noble pursuit, in any context — but there’s really no point in getting into that at this stage, I doubt that would be a particularly fruitful line of conversation for either of us.
“Always do, ma’am,” I say instead with my best smile, which at least has the benefit of being the truth. It is my unavoidable lot in life to make sure Malcolm doesn’t get himself killed because he doesn’t know how to think before he acts.
She softens a bit and pats my elbow, which is about the highest part of me she can comfortably reach between our height disparity and her bad shoulder. “Ah, I know you do, I know you do. I’m just bein’ silly. You’re a good boy.”
I give a breath of laughter at the sheer baldfaced absurdity of that. “Would it surprise you to hear that I don’t get that a lot?”
She gives a cackle, raspy and rough and heartfelt in her thirty a day for forty years habit voice, and while we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of stuff, there are moments when I see where Malcolm gets certain things from. “No, I don’t reckon you do. I mean it, though. When he up and left for the mainland as barely more’n a boy, with nothin’ but a note, I just about shat myself. Means a lot to know he’s got someone sensible watchin’ out for him out there.”
“Believe it or not, I don’t tend to get ‘sensible’ that much either.”
Waving an unconcerned hand she takes out a new cigarette, already rolled, and lights it, leaving the previous dogend extinguished and half-smoked behind her ear. “I know you ain’t gonna just leave him behind when he rushes in without thinkin’, and I know you ain’t askin’ him to do anything nasty like breaking people’s arms over missed protection fees just ‘cause he’s big and strong and kinda dim. That’s ‘nuf for me.”
That seems a low enough bar that I’d have to do some real inventive limbo moves to get under it, but I suppose life has taught her to aim low or else miss. I find myself bristling a bit at ‘dim’, though. Listen, I get to call him dumb because I’m the poor fucker who has to live with him every day, it’s my right and prerogative as the guy who has to get us out of the problems he lands us in... but it’s not the kind of thing a mom should be saying.
Then again, my mom always managed to say the most with everything she wasn’t saying. What do I know.
I glance back at the street corner where Malcolm just disappeared, not knowing what to say, exactly. “I…”
She waves her hand again and takes a deep drag on her dogend. (Told you. Seems to happen in seconds, and stay that way for hours.) “You boys watch out for each other out there, that’s what matters. Whatever else you wanna get up to I shan’t pry, he’s a grown man now and it ain’t none of my business unless he wants to make it so.”
I’m fairly sure Ms. Graves — “Quit it with the ‘Mrs.’s, kid, I ain’t been married a day in my life — well, one day, but I got that annulled, turned out he was a crab; I stopped drinking for a while after that” — has a slightly sidewise idea about what exactly our partnership is. It’s almost too bad it ain’t like that, really, seeing as I suspect she’s one of the very few people in the world who’d consider me decent son in law material.
Rubbing my palms together, I say: “So, uh. What do you need me to do, in this whole dinner situation?”
She snorts and tucks the dogend into the corner of her mouth as she goes over to the kitchen bench. “Kid, I’ve seen you try to cook before, you ain’t gettin’ within arm’s reach of the pot. Here, dice this onion, that’s more your speed.”
She tosses me the onion and knife in one careless throw, and I somehow manage to catch them both without losing fingers. “Yes, ma’am,” I say, giving a polite mock salute, like I’m a lowly midshipman addressing a captain.
With another snort, a deep rasping cough, and a shake of her head, she starts cutting up the fish with worrying efficiency, the chop chop chop of the cleaver against the cutting board like a war drum. “At least he found himself one with brains as well as looks this time, even if he is a little weasel,” she murmurs to herself, as she tosses slices of fish into the pot.
Pretending, for several reasons, that I didn’t catch that, I go about peeling the onion, which goes quickly more because I know a bit about how to use a knife than because of any skills in the kitchen.
Cooking’s never interested me any. Malcolm’s usually the one who takes on that job, the few times we’re forced to fend for ourselves completely. He says it’s because I’d burn tea water given half the chance, which I’d call outrageous slander if it weren’t completely true. What he comes up with is at least perfectly edible — even pretty good sometimes, he’s got an undeniable knack for grilling fish to just the right level of crisp — if not anything particularly fancy. In being asked to chop vegetables my culinary competency is being stretched to the very limits of its usefulness.
After ten minutes or so, there’s an earth-shaking boom from outside, quickly followed by the distant din of a lot of people airing their grievances at the top of their lungs and the crackle of gunshots. I pause with my knife hovering mid chop, leaning to glance out the window. Ms. Graves follows suit, her hand instinctively clutching the handle of a frying pan as she peers outside suspiciously. I’m almost sure one of those bellowing voices is Graves.
“Well, now,” I say, wiping onion juice off my knife with a kitchen rag and putting it away. “I do believe that’s my cue. Don’t worry, I usually get him back in one piece.”
She snorts and nods at me to go, going back to stirring the pot with one hand while the other still grips the frying pan, and I set off at a light trot to pull Malcolm’s bacon out of the fire once more.
— — — —
Five of Cups (Reversed), Nine of Wands, The Devil (Reversed)
When I finally find him, Malcolm is sitting at the edge of the pier in some godsforsaken tucked-away Bilgewater cove, and the first light of dawn is scattering over the ocean. If I hadn’t known about the place from the times he’s pointed it out when we’ve walked past it together, I might not have found it, even with the acquaintances who had spotted him heading this way and given me directions. Malcolm always said it was a good place to lie low if you’d pissed off the wrong people and needed to let the heat die down, and I can fucking believe it — I walk right past the entrance to it three times before I finally spot the narrow gap between a tumble-down boathouse and the craggy rock wall and squeeze myself past, scrambling down the rocky path beyond towards the water’s edge.
When I spot him sitting on the old pier with his feet dangling, smoke hanging in the air around him in drifts like he’s been smoking continually for an hour, my breath of relief leaves me all in a rush.
“There you are,” I say, the tension that’s been building up inside me finally snapping into anger in the wake of the torrent of relief. “What the fuck, Malcom, you said you’d be back before sunset, where the hell have you been? I’ve been out all night, lookin’ all over town for y — ”
He turns his head to look up at me, and before anything else I register the complete lack of expression on his face — the hard, blank nothingness that distracts me for a moment. Then I see the ugly dark bruise around his eye and the split lip that looks like it’s only just stopped bleeding. Everything goes cold and sharp inside of me.
I’m going to fucking kill him. I’m going to peel his skin off and feed it to him bit by bit. I’m going to slice his guts open with a knife and shove a card inside and detonate it while he’s still awake to feel it. I knew this guy was one of the sketchier types Graves has stumbled into, and his questionable air had only grown meaner and more openly jealous and less disguised over the weeks they’ve been hooking up, but even I hadn’t thought he’d… Not in a way that would make Malcolm wear an expression like that.
“What happened?” I ask, my voice sounding like a stranger’s to my own ears, an eerie icy calm to it even as I hear it as if from far away.
He looks away sharply, shakes his head with that same lack of expression. “He’s gone and he ain’t coming back,” is all he says, finishing the cigarette and flicking it into the water. “It’s over and done with, and I made my point back to him in a way he’ll feel on rainy nights for the rest of his life. I don’t wanna talk about it, Tobias.”
I look at the set of his mouth, the tiredness of his shoulders. He’s smoking cigarettes instead of cigars. He only does that on the worst days, to suit his foulest moods, returning to the boyhood habit from before he had enough cash for the good stuff and had to steal out of his mother’s stash instead.
“Okay,” I say, swallowing down my own impulse to commit grisly murder to leave more room for whatever it is Malcolm needs from me right now. “Okay. Then we don’t have to talk about it.”
He nods.
I sit down next to him on the pier, and the breath that leaves him sounds a bit like relief. He kicks his feet, rolls himself another cigarette with hands sporting bruised knuckles. Before he has time to fumble for his lighter, I hold out a card faintly flickering with flame. For the first time, a smile flits over his face, there and gone again.
“Thanks,” he murmurs, sticking the cigarette in his mouth and wincing slightly at the movement of his split lip as he leans in and lights up.
“Any time.”
“...yeah.” He takes a drag on the cigarette, knocks some ash from it into the water, gazing down at the grey flakes as they hit the surface and dissolve. The edge of his idly kicking foot brushes mine. “Yeah, I know, T.F.”
We sit in silence for a while. Malcolm’s shoulder presses against mine comfortably as the sun slowly rises over the water.
“You know what, fuck that guy, anyway,” Malcolm says finally. “He wasn’t even that hot, he doesn’t get to fuck up my day. Let’s go do somethin’ fun today, just me and you.”
“Sounds like just what the doctor ordered. One somethin’ fun, coming right up,” I agree, even though I’m ready to nod off after rushing through town in a panic all night. If all of those sleepless nights have prepared me for anything, it’s being able to provide this, though. Getting to my feet, I offer him a hand up. “The world’s our oyster, my friend.”
He grins as he takes my hand, even with his eye still swollen half-shut. “And brother, I’m about to crack its shell right open to get to the good stuff. Let’s go.”
— — — —
Knight of Wands, King of Cups
I have no idea what started the fight off — earlier in the evening I had, in fact, left Graves to his Noxian brandy at the bar for what had seemed like a very promising conversation with a strikingly handsome Shuriman merchant with dark eyes and a smile that could light up a room, whose good looks and sardonic charm sadly turned out to be married to commendable prudence when he cleared off immediately the moment the first punch was thrown across the room and all hell broke loose. Ah well, it probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway; I wouldn’t know what to do with a wise man, nor he with me, I suppose.
In the wake of him clearing off, I click my tongue in exasperation and I get up from my chair to saunter over to the farthest end of the room away from the main melee so I can survey the situation. It would be correct to say that I am resigned rather than surprised to find that Malcolm does seem to be the eye of the storm of the hurricane of inebriated violence and aggravated property damage currently rocking the building. I flick a card into my hand but hesitate to throw it — I can barely even see Malcolm clearly in the general commotion, only as a blur throwing punches in there somewhere, and I don’t want to risk accidentally hitting him.
From what little I’d caught before the full pandemonium broke out, a whole group had gathered around Graves before they jumped him, the way some sorts of men do when they’ve drunk enough and see a big tough guy who looks like he won’t take any shit — it’s a weird kind of instinct some people (men, mostly) seem to have, something small and mean that wants a group to join and a target to throw itself at and tear down. Not that Graves is the type to answer that sort of prodding with a civil outstretched hand of peace either, to be fair. I squint at the whole mess, unsure of what approach to pick to get him out of there.
See, this is the problem when he gets himself into bar brawls; I’m not really built for close combat neither temperamentally nor sartorially.
A wiry sandy-haired man stumbles out of the fray, looking like he’s freshly emerged from a meatgrinder. He stares around with haunted eyes until he spots me and then shambles over to me, like he’s got the horrors of the black mist hot on his tail.
“Please,” the guy wheezes, grabbing onto my lapels and in the process smearing blood and soot and beer and gods know what else over the fabric there. Glancing down at it, I wrinkle my nose. “Please, talk to him.”
I snort in surprise. At the other end of the room someone gets thrown through a table, and it sure ain’t Graves. Ah well, at least it looks like he’s winning. “About what? The weather? The latest in Piltovan doodads?”
“Tell him to stop,” he whispers between broken teeth, fingers scrunching up the line of my shirt even worse. Well, this one’s a lost cause until I can get it to a decent launderer anyway, no point in shaking him off at this point.
I level him with a friendly sort of smile and exactly as much warmth as I feel for him in my heart in that moment shining through my eyes. This was a nice shirt. “Yeah? And what on earth makes you think he’ll listen to me? Seems to me he’s plenty busy right now, probably not the time for light conversation.” Graves grabs two people by the neck and smacks their heads together, both flopping limply to the floor.
“He’s your — ” the guy flicks his eyes back over his shoulder nervously, just in time to watch Malcolm tear a leg off an overturned table and use the resulting hunk of wood to send one of the guys coming at him to the floor with a final-sounding thunk. The poor unfortunate currently ruining my shirt whimpers and shivers all over. “ — friend. He’s your friend, you’re buddies, pals, I — I saw the way he looked at you bef — ” He breaks himself off and turns an even paler shade of fearful green at whatever he sees in my eyes, then scurries to change tack with: “Just — if anyone can make him see reason — ”
That one makes me burst out laughing outright, though the sound is drowned out by the sound of a window breaking on the other side of the room because Graves just shoved someone clean through it. “Oh, you do think highly of me. If I knew the trick to that, I reckon I’d be the most powerful man in the world.” Over the guy’s shoulder I watch Graves lift one opponent up over his head and hurl him down onto an unfortunate comrade, sending them both crashing to the floor with some discomfiting cracking noises and a chorus of pained screams. I affect a sympathetic wince. “Oh, ouch.”
“Come on, man, come on, please.” He tugs at my lapels jerkily.
Under different circumstances I might possibly have been moved to pity by the glint of wild pleading in his bloodshot eyes; as it is and considering the state of my shirt I, well. Am not. “Seemed to me you and your, hm, ‘buddies’ decided to try your luck ten on one and still pulled an unlucky card, pal. Lady Luck may let herself be courted but she ain’t a common strumpet either. I’d just cut my losses and run while he’s busy, if I were you.”
Something in his gaze hardens, shifting from begging to the mad feral frenzy of a cornered weasel. Yup, right on time. Like I said, I know this type of man.
“Okay, I didn’t want it to come to this, but you leave me no choice here,” he hisses, his grip on me tightening with purpose as he tries to heave me around, clearly meaning to cast me in the role of human shield.
“Bad call, friend,” I murmur, gently tapping the golden card I’ve kept in my palm this whole time against his chest. He only has the time to stiffen, wide-eyed in shock as he’s frozen in place, for about three seconds before Graves comes in from the right, still wielding the broken table leg as a bat, and slams him to the ground in one mighty strike and a snarl, finishing a movement started the second the guy started trying to rough handle me.
After the crash of the guy’s body hitting the floor the room is suddenly, shockingly quiet, the only sound Malcolm’s heavy breathing and the drip drip of an overturned bottle of wine relinquishing the last of its contents onto one of the few still-intact tables.
In the silence Malcolm drops the table leg to the ground with a grunt and a clatter, shaking out his hand like he’s easing out the absorbed shock of the strike.
“You okay?” Malcolm asks between heaving breaths, gazing at me and my blood streaked shirt.
“Yup. This ain’t mine.” I gesture to my red-spattered shirtfront. “Well, the shirt is, obviously, but not the blood. You?”
“Yeah, ‘s just a scratch,” he pants dismissively, dripping copious blood from his nose and a cut on his arm and squinting through his rapidly swelling right eye.
I sigh. “Let me be the judge of that once I’m patching you up. Here, your nose is bleeding.”
I get my clean handkerchief from my pocket and wipe his upper lip with it, then take his hand and guide it to keep the cloth in place against his nose.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you mother hen, you can play nursemaid if you absolutely gotta. Got all of ‘em, though, right?” Graves asks, looking around while still curling and uncurling his free hand into a fist, his scratched-bloody knuckles cracking.
“Think so. Sorry I didn’t pitch in more, hard to get a clean shot without hitting you in all the excitement.”
“Eh, it‘s fine, you kept this one occupied. Thanks for providin’ the distraction.” Malcolm says, pushing at the recumbent figure at our feet with his boot. His sides are still moving with his breathing like those of a worked up bull, but his eyes have lost the hard heedless sheen of the fight.
“No problem,” I say, pulling my shirt out a bit to assess the damage and sighing when it turns out it’s just as bad as I feared. “Well, I’d say you could pay me back by washin’ this for me, but since we’ve been down that road before I’d rather you just pay the bill to have someone else do it properly. Pink ain’t really my colour.”
He nods gruffly at that, then again, slower, like he’s acknowledging some great wisdom in what I just said. Then he gives a funny sort of shiver and almost collapses face first onto the floor, only stopped in that sudden descent by me hurrying to swoop in and support him. I cannot claim to shoulder that burden with much in the way of grace — it’s a near thing that I don’t snap in half like a dried reed — but thankfully I only have to hold him up for a split wheezing second before Malcolm gives a surprised snort and gets his legs mostly under him again, shaking his head like a huge wet dog getting dry.
“Whoa,” I manage, his arm still slung over my shoulder, and he rumbles something that sounds vaguely apologetic but mostly dazed and stands up under his own power again, only leaning on me for balance. “Malcolm?”
“S’rry, floor’s gettin’ uppity,” Malcolm slurs, his face pressed against the side of my neck as if to steady himself by it and thus probably getting noseblood and worse on my collar and in my hair. I have to close my eyes and exhale slowly for a moment to not scrape the bottom of the well of my patience only to find nothing there, then sigh — well, there’s no course correcting this evening anyway, might as well pick up the pieces and go with it as cheerfully as the circumstances will allow for the rest of it. Never call me anything but an opportunist.
I pat Malcolm’s back, hot and damp with sweat and probably mostly someone else’s blood there at least; he doesn’t turn his back on anyone in a fight. “Okay, let’s get you up to the room before I have to drag you there. Hey, barkeep,” I add, directed at the guy only now sticking his wary head up over the edge of the bar, like a lone survivor on a battlefield coming to grips with their own unlikely survival among the wreckage. I nod at the figures strewn all over the floor. “Ah. Sorry about... all of this. If any of ‘em wake up, just tell them we already skipped town or somethin’ and send them on their merry way, would you? We won’t be any more trouble to you, I promise. Won’t even know we’re here.”
The barkeep’s shellshocked eyes slowly make their way across the room to us, stark incredulity in every line of his body. Yeah, even with my powers of persuasion I hadn’t really expected that one to go through smoothly without liberal application of that most universal of lubricants: cold hard cash.
Slightly awkwardly from having to move around still half-supporting Graves, I manage to retrieve my coin purse from an inner pocket and toss it onto the bar. “For the inconvenience.” And for the major refurbishment you’re probably gonna have to pull on the place after this. “Half now, half when we leave tomorrow,” I add to sweeten the pot, when he only gazes flatly at the purse to begin with.
Some inner ancestral spirit of business sense must rouse itself within his barkeep’s breast, because he slowly tugs the purse open and lets the contents spill onto the bar, some semblance of colour returning to his cheeks as he takes in the pile of coins, realizes most of them are gold, and starts counting them out silently.
Yup, got him. “And again, I am very sorry about this,” I say, which to be fair I actually am, especially since I’m not gonna follow through on paying him again in the morning. What I already parted with was the better part of what we had left after our last heist, but it couldn’t be helped — I doubt he’d be willing to overlook this little incident for anything less, and if I’m going to get Malcolm anywhere I can assess the damage and start to patch him up it’d be the height of hubris to try to haul him anywhere much further than up the stairs and three doors down to the left.
As I thought, the barkeep nods. “Sure. No idea where you went. Probably halfway to the next town over by now. Hell of a thing.”
I watch his demeanour carefully to decide whether he’s the type to realize he could just try to take the rest of it now by force, or that I might not follow through on my promises, but no. Looks like he’s either dumb, cautious or honorable enough to simply take this unexpected boon even without the follow up and at the same time grab the excuse to send these drunken louts off in some other direction once they wake up. This is not the kind of neighborhood where you’d want the law waltzing in and looking around either. Cautious, then, I’m guessing, which is fine. Cautious people are admirable and, even better, predictable.
“Good man,” I grin, as Graves mumbles a blurry “Good one, Tobias” into my neck, still clutching my bloodied handkerchief in his hand. “I’ll get the rest of it tomorrow and we’ll settle up before I leave. Oh, and, uh. You couldn’t boil some water and get me some clean rags, could you?”
— —
Safely up in our room again and with Graves deposited in a chair, I lock the door behind us and wedge a chair under the handle — y’know, just in case, never hurts to hedge your bets — then start in on the laborious process of patching him back up.
Graves takes his shirt off at my signal and idly kicks his foot against the leg of the chair like some overgrown schoolboy as I get the stool from over by the window and settle in front of him, arranging the water bowl, the bottle of high proof booze and everything else I’m gonna need on the table before we start. When I look him over I notice the reddened patches of skin that are definitely going to bloom and darken into some spectacular bruises along his ribs tomorrow. Thank the gods he’s built like a fucking barrel and probably did more damage to the fists of whoever was behind those hits than they did to him. The bulk ain’t just for show. I mean, not that it fails that way either, when being lightly tenderized isn’t drawing the attention off it.
Glancing hopefully over at the bottle while I wipe the worst of the blood off, Graves ventures: “Anythin’ gonna need stitches? ‘Cause if so, I want another drink first.”
He’s swaying gently in his seat, still drunk enough from earlier tonight that when he looks around it’s with a sort of beatific vagueness, even as he’s bleeding all over both himself and significant parts of me. My drinking had been rudely interrupted and I only barely glimpsed my buzz before it went down again, but considering how it all turned out I guess that was for the best after all.
“Nah, you got lucky. And we’re gonna need the booze for this, so don’t go and get any funny ideas.” I give him an old-fashioned look as I dunk a rag in said booze and use it to start to clean around the thankfully shallow cut on his upper arm — one of the attackers had had a knife, very briefly, after which he had only had a broken wrist and a lot fewer teeth.
Malcolm grunts, unenthused, but sits still for me to do my work in peace. He watches my hands with the placid entertainment of either a toddler or a drunk. I have to admit he’s always kind of cute when he’s like this, while the booze and aftermath of adrenaline conspire to mellow out his habitual background grouchiness.
After a minute he seems to almost startle a little at something that occurs to him and scratches at the back of his neck with his free hand. “Oh, by the way, I, uh. I forgot in all the excitement, but you were kinda gettin’ somewhere with that flashy Shuriman fella before, weren’t you. Sorry ‘bout spoilin’ your chances for the night, man.”
Taking one last moment to mourn the brevity of my acquaintanceship with the sweet dark curls and dry yet good-natured wit of said flashy Shuriman fella, I shrug it off. At least Malcolm has the courtesy to look a little shamefaced about the whole thing. “Eh, I don’t think we could have lasted. Turns out he was sensible.”
Graves gives a gravelly laugh at the conspiratorially appalled bafflement I imbue the word with. “Yeah, that’d set a stopper to things pretty quick once he got to know you, I reckon.”
I drop the act and smile a little as I finish cleaning up the cut, then reach for a length of improvised bandage. “Exactly so. Well, we were always gonna move on soon anyway and there’s plenty of fish in the sea, as they say. It’s fine, don’t sweat it.”
He gives a sound of acknowledgement and lets me guide his arm into the right position so I can start to wrap the bandage over it, tucking the ends in securely once I’m done. Malcolm barely even gives a wince during the whole process, only hums tunelessly to himself. You can say what you want about him, but he’s a tough son of a bitch. If the end of the world came for us all that’d be left would be Graves and the cockroaches afterwards. And I’d have to figure out a way to survive too, I guess, so I could keep an eye on him.
I’m glad to have the wound cleaned and covered up; it’d made me feel kind of queasy to look at. I prefer to approach the idea that it takes only one nut with a knife catching someone by surprise to do serious damage at a sort of casual sidewise angle, rather than have to face it head on.
“There,” I mutter to myself as I trail my finger along the edge of the bandage, hooking it under a little to test the give. “This okay? Not too tight? Try flexing your arm a bit. Well, the gun show is nice too, but I was mostly thinkin’ about if it was slipping or anythin’ like that,” I add on a laugh, as he wiggles his eyebrows and flexes his — in all fairness very impressive — biceps at me like a strongman showing off to the crowd.
“Feels fine,” he states.
“Looks fine too,” I agree, and then, at the woozy grin he shoots me at that, laugh helplessly again and manage: “I was talking about the bandage, you — gods, just — just stop that before you start bleedin’ all over the place again, you dumbass.”
“I can do the other one too, Doc, if you need the comparison,” he offers gallantly, demonstrating. Having to lean my elbow against the table to stay upright through the giggles, I reach out and try to gently pull his arm down before he causes himself a mischief or accidentally topples everything on the table somehow, though I’m finding it extremely hard to actually be discouraging in the face of that glimmer in his eyes that comes out so rarely, and never unless it’s just the two of us — that small moment of unselfconscious silliness, seemingly for no other reason than to make me laugh.
A glint of what, if you didn’t know any better or in anyone else, you’d almost call innocence. Like the sun peeking through turbulent clouds briefly, and feeling all the sweeter for it.
I trail my hand from his forearm and up to his shoulder as I thankfully manage to get him to let his arm sink and stop the bandage-threatening flexing (with only a slight sting of regret, despite what evil tongues might have you believe of me and my character). He grins, seemingly satisfied, and lets me rest my hand on his chest to steady myself while I catch my breath.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re damn right, T.F., no more freebies. If you wanna see the full show you better pay up first,” he announces, affecting the air of a carnival barker and rubbing his fingers together in the universal sign for ‘money money money, my friends’. That sets me right off again so much that I’m forced to gently collapse against him until my forehead rests against his shoulder, though I’ve still got enough presence of mind left to not lean too much of my weight against his poor battered torso.
“Considering that you’ve already got your shirt off, I’m afraid to ask what the ‘full show’ entails,” I gasp out against his chest. He smells like blood and sweat and smoke and spilled brandy right now, and my body doesn’t seem to mind it at all. Which should tell you all you need to know about the wisdom of bodies.
Graves gives a rumbling self-satisfied chuckle and pats me companionably on the back. “You couldn’t handle the full show, buster.”
“If you say somethin’ about being too much man for one set of eyes to handle, I’m out of here,” I threaten ineffectually, flopping bonelessly against him.
“Like I said, I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ without the sweet tinkle of some silver serpents between my fingers, Tobias.”
“Yeah? That’s a funny change of heart you’ve got there, ‘cause normally I get front row seats to the clown act up close and entirely for free, whether I want to or — waah!”
He pokes me mercilessly between the ribs and I shoot up straight in my seat to avoid the tickle of it. When we’re face to face again he’s grinning from ear to ear, which should look decidedly disconcerting with the way his face has been beaten to a pulp tonight.
“If I’m a clown then so are you,” he says brightly.
My chest is a late summer day, warm and sweet. “Well, for some godsforsaken reason I do put up with you, so I guess there’s an argument to be made that I’m the bigger clown between us.”
“Let’s split the difference and say we’re like one of them double acts I hear folks talk so much about. I’m the handsome sensible one stuck dealin’ with all your silly antics, of course.”
It really is incredible, just how badly you can want to kiss someone without ever making the move to actually do so. Sometimes, in moments like these, I… wonder if he knows. But then he’s never brought it up directly and, whatever other gracious parts he might contain somewhere in there between all the blunt violence and grand larceny, Malcolm Graves is not a man of great circumspection; I reckon I would know pretty damn quick if he had somethin’ to say on the matter. I suppose that if he knows he doesn’t mind it so long as I keep it to myself, which is fair enough.
“If patchin’ you up even though I know you’re just gonna go out there and get busted up all over again right away is silly, I guess I’m guilty as charged.”
Blinking to clear the tears of laughter from my eyes I move on to the picture of ruin that is Malcolm’s face right now. Patience clearly starting to wear thin or booze starting to wear off, his eyes keep twitching over the the cigar box on the table, and I fix him with a look that tells him exactly how much that’s not gonna happen until he’s been sitting still like a good boy so I can get all the cuts cleaned out. He grumbles and slumps in his seat but stays in place, tipping his head slightly back to make it easier for me to work.
With a grateful hum I tap my finger against the back of his hand where it’s holding a wet cloth that should, theoretically, provide some chill against the rapidly purpling skin around his eye. At the gesture he obediently moves the cloth away to let me see how his developing shiner looks underneath it.
“Yeah, no, that’s gonna swell no matter what we do. Man, I’m gettin’ deja vu here. Are you ever gonna learn?” I sigh, moving his hand away to indicate he can stop holding the cloth. Dropping it onto the table he looks supremely unconcerned and shrugs.
“Hey, they started it.”
“Oh, did they, now? That’s all fine, then, I’m sure that’s gonna unbreak your nose in a hurry,” I say sourly, gently working my way around a tricky cut on his cheek.
“What do you care anyway, it ain’t your nose,” he says, making what I have to grudgingly acknowledge as a frustratingly reasonable point.
I rinse the cloth in the water again; the blood is starting to colour it a dull rust red. “...your snoring gets much worse while it’s healing up. Call it enlightened self interest on my part.”
He huffs a laugh at that, grimacing as the grin pulls at his split lip, then grunts and holds his face deliberately still as the grimace sets some of the cuts to bleeding again. “Ouch, fuck, hah. No one else has ever complained about me snoring, for all I know that’s just somethin’ you made up.”
“I can assure you that it is well beyond the powers of my imagination to conjure up.”
“Now that just sounds like a fancy-schmancy way of sayin’ ‘bitch, I might be’ to me.”
I chuckle despite myself. “Y’know, if you worked half as hard at stayin’ out of trouble as you do at talkin’ nonsense to me…”
“Look who’s fuckin’ talkin’,” he says, without rancour. He’s still clutching my handkerchief between his fingers, his thumb playing idly with the edge of the fabric.
“You got me there. Here, gimme your hand, would you?”
I bandage his hand with practiced ease — it’s far from the first time. Once let a Noxian army medic pay off a gambling debt it turned out he wasn’t good for after all by teaching me the basics of this stuff, just enough to know what the fuck to do whenever Graves came back from a night on the town bleeding from several places and with a couple of broken fingers to boot. It’s only scratched knuckles today though, thankfully, so I clean that up and wrap the improvised bandage lightly around it.
“Well, I’ve done all I can, I think,” I say finally, helping him shrug his shirt back on to ease the goose pimples that had broken out in the colder air of the room while I worked. “Now we’ll just catch our breath and let you sober up a bit, and then it’s time to seek greener, less actively on fire pastures, I think.”
“Real circle o’ life shit,” Graves nods, with the placid sageness of the mildly soused.
“You said it, partner.” I gaze at him for a moment, then sigh. “Your nose is bleedin’ again. Here, hold this in place.” Gently pressing the cleanest end of the handkerchief I can find to his nose with one hand I use the other to guide his hand to keep it in place there.
“Oh. Danks,” he says thickly, glancing down to see that it’s dripped down to stain his shirt with blood afresh, a brighter red than the rest of the smears that have faded to brown by now. “Aw, hell.”
“Don’t sweat it, that shirt was a lost cause anyway. Gotta find some reliable laundry service in town tomorrow.”
He wrinkles his brows, uncharacteristically pensive. “Yeah? You think we oughta stick around that long? Only I reckon some of those bastards might be the petty type, if any of ‘em’ll be in any shape to stand upright tomorrow. Also, I think this shirt has more holes in it than it’s meant to now. Don’t know that any amount of washing’s gonna fix that.”
“...good point. Okay, we’ll steal some clean new clothes on our way out of town later tonight, then.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Malcolm edges his hand over the tabletop towards the cigars. “Well, then, if we’re done here — now can I have one, Yer Majesty?”
With a snort I wave my hand vaguely. “Sure, knock yourself out. Only don’t come cryin’ to me if your lip starts bleeding again.”
“I’ll be sure to keep the wailing to a minimum, just for you,” he says dryly, already lighting up. I probably shouldn’t reward his bad behaviour but my mouth still curls with a smile he can probably see as I empty the basin out of the window, then fill it once more with clean water so I can wash my hands and forearms. No point in changing my shirt until I can have a proper bath and avoid the risk of transferring any unnoticed smudges onto clean clothes, so I keep my shirtsleeves rolled up to my elbows as I dry my hands.
“Is that any way to address your sovereign, by the way?” I muse, dropping onto my side of the bed — we’re sharing a double bed again, it was the only room available when we checked in and neither of us minds as long as it’s only for a couple of nights — and crossing my legs at the ankles. “I mean, you said it, not me. Kinda backwards to commit treason pretty much as soon as you’ve crowned me.”
“Yeah, true, my bad. Fuck right off, Your Splendiferous Highness,” he says cheerfully, breathing in a contented lungful of smoke. I laugh, which makes the corner of his mouth quirk up almost imperceptibly even though he doesn’t glance over.
“I’m only lettin’ you get away with such a callous display of lèse-majesté ‘cause I’d feel bad bullying an invalid,” I tell him.
He chuckles and gets up from the chair to settle on the bed as well. “Keep up those reins nice and loose and you’ll have a coup on your hands in no time.”
These threats to the crown lose some of their potency from how he proceeds to grunt and wince uncomfortably as he gets down — those bruised ribs complaining, I’m guessing. “From all the creakin’ you’re doin’ right now I’ll take my royal chances, hotshot.”
“Shuddup,” Graves says amiably as he settles.
I reach out for the book I’ve left on the nightstand on my side of the bed and push myself up to sitting against the headboard, my pillow supporting the small of my back.
Eventually Graves finishes the cigar and puts it out on the ashtray on the nightstand, the process made mildly comical every step of the way by the way he has to navigate around the handkerchief he’s still holding against his nose, all without letting anything catch fire. He glances over at me, and like always in this situation I pretend not to notice.
“Whatcha readin’?” he asks, studiously offhanded but with the precise practiced intonation of ritual, and I grin a little.
“Oh, still same thing as last time,” I say, holding the book up to show him the cover, though I know damn well he knows. “Haven’t gotten much further in it, tell the truth, what with how busy we’ve been keepin’. Wanna pick up where we left off last?”
He stretches his arms over his head to fold them behind his neck, though the nonchalance is undercut somewhat by how he has to wince and grit his teeth halfway. “Sure, not like there’s much else to do right now anyway.”
It’s a funny little routine we’ve gotten into, this pantomime where he pretends not to ask me to read whatever I’m working my way through out loud, and I pretend it’s not something we’ve already been doing for months now.
The first few times it was because I was reading and had gotten to a particularly funny part of the story, and Graves had come over and confusedly demanded to know why the hell I was laughing so hard. Since it was hard to explain the humour without the context, I’d just blink my eyes free of tears of laughter to read the offending paragraph or two out loud, and felt disproportionately accomplished whenever he’d snort a laugh or, even, on a few occasions, give an honest-to-the-gods chortle, instead of rolling his eyes at me and leaving me to it like I’d half expected.
(I don’t know why, exactly, but sometimes making Graves laugh so hard he goes faintly pink in the cheeks makes me feel like the king of the world like nothin’ else can, not even the best heists we’ve pulled off. I try not to think about it too closely.)
Graves does read and write well enough himself — I mean, if you count his careless scrawl of a hand as ‘writing’, I basically had to get a degree in cryptology before I got a handle on it — which is frequently enough to start you out several steps ahead in this line of work and that’s probably why he bothered sticking with it. I don’t think he’s ever voluntarily opened a book for any other reason than to see if the gold leaf illustrations might be worth enough to bother making away with, though. Or, I suppose, occasionally for wiping usage when no other materials were at hand, but to be fair most people have been at that point of in extremis once or twice in their life, and few have the moral fortitude and pure love of the written word to take the high road in such circumstances.
Books aren’t that easy to get a hold of, much less to produce in numbers, but as with so many other things the twin city have figured out their clever little ways, and if you can find your way there there’s a decent range of literary productions to be sampled now, without having to pay half a year’s wages for it, either. (I mean, I assume, I have never had half a year of wages paid to me in what you might call the conventional way.) It means the paper quality is often kinda crap and the whole thing doesn’t keep together too well if you jostle it around too much, but that seems like a small price to pay for such a small price to pay, if you see what I’m sayin’. A more farsighted guy may take a moment to consider and shudder at what might happen if the improved printing presses caught the interest of some of the brighter and more future-oriented minds within the Noxus military, for example — but thankfully I’m me, and can just stock up whenever we swing by the Sun Gates and enjoy my penny dreadfuls in peace.
At first I’d only read out the funny parts so we could both have a chuckle at the expense of the rich twits in the series I’d been working my way through at the time, but eventually he also began to get invested enough to start asking baffled questions about the situations and characters leading up to the punch lines, which occasionally took a whole lot more reading aloud to clarify.
(“So, wait, what’s the big idea with that slimy guy making the servant barge in on ‘em in the act while carrying the love notes, then? Just to embarrass his sister? Ain’t her business what her mother gets up to in her private time, surely.”
“No, see, slimy guy and her are cousins, and the old Duke is dyin’ and has no other heirs. So it might behoove him to sow doubts about the legitimacy of her, ahem, immediate ancestry to get himself into a better position when the will finally gets written.”
“But his own ma was fucking that other servant all those years too, anyway!”
“Yup. Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure she’s about to turn it around on him with exactly that. I doubt the author planted that clue with the pig mask and the lipstick on the half smoked cigarette for nothin’.”
Graves had thought this over with a furrow between his brow. “Wow, rich people are fucked in the head.”
“Well, I mean, I think this is meant to be satire, but you ain’t wrong.”
“Two silver krakens say the guy pretending to be the visiting Demacian soprano to steal the flamingo statue thingy walks away with it all in the end. I like his style.”
“Oh, you’re on. My bet’s on the butler, she’s got a mind like a scalpel and she’s up to somethin’. ‘Kay, chapter 12, then.”)
Truth be told I’d also like to keep him awake for a little while longer, just to make sure it wasn’t a proper concussion that almost sent him to the floorboards back in the bar, so I clear my throat and put on my reading voice — it’s kind of fun to come up with voices for each of the characters, and even though Graves always rolls his eyes at me for it he’ll sometimes get so caught up in the moment that he’ll swear at an unexpected setback in the story or roar with laughter if I deliver one of the jokes just right. In our line of work there’s a surprising amount of sitting around waiting for the right moment to strike anyway, and having somethin’ entertaining to while away those idle hours has been nice.
Malcolm twiddles the clean-ish end of the handkerchief between his fingers as I read for an hour or so, a strange lamp-golden island of calm between the mayhem that was before and the ruckus that will surely be once we’re leaving. I know how our life works.
Honestly, I don’t mind either of them, though, the calm or the storm. I suppose that depending on the company, anything can be right.
— — — —
Eight of Cups (Reversed), Eight of Swords, Ace of Cups (Reversed)
“Seems like it’s still standing, at least,” Malcolm says, bending to pick up the door he just kicked clean off its rusty hinges. The interior of the dilapidated little hut looks better than the exterior, but if that’s not damning with faint praise nothing is. “It’ll do for the night. Kinda a stroke of luck we found it before it got properly dark.”
I give a non-commital grunt. I ain’t feeling particularly lucky in any way right now — I’m so cold I can barely breathe for it, my clothes still sodden through and heavy with lake water.
“Watch your head, the doorway’s pretty low,” he says, bundling himself and the door he’s still holding inside after some false starts.
Taking out a card to use for light I follow him, mostly because the idea of staying outside in the darkening forest with its strange noises and looming trees alone is even worse.
It’s small and dingy, just one unadorned room. Probably an abandoned logger’s cottage or something, only meant to house a few workers a night or two at a time. There’s a small fireplace with a haphazard stack of wood next to it, at least, though the cots in the corner look janky enough that Malcolm, at least, shouldn’t try his weight on them.
I’m pretty sure I hear something skittering off under the cupboards as we enter. Great. This day just keeps getting better all the time.
Malcolm puts the door back after us, propping it shut with the room’s one table, which is roughly made and sturdy enough that it doesn’t even seem to have noticed the passing of time that has brought its surroundings to sag sadly around it. Then he drops our bag to the floor and puts his hands on his hips, giving the room an approving look. “Hell, I’ve paid good money for worse back home in Bilgewater. This ain’t so bad.”
Shivering, I murmur: “You’re in an awfully good mood, c-considering.”
“What’s there to be gloomy about? We’re still alive, the guys who tried to kill us ain’t, we got what we came for, and once we get paid this tiny delay’s gonna be only so much water passed under the bridge. Just ‘cause you’ve decided to be in a sulk, for some — ”
I bristle at that. “I am not in a sulk.”
Well, obviously I am. But he should know better than to mention it.
“Eh, either way, I’ll just keep spirits up for the both of us,” he says, in as close a tone as he ever gets to diplomatic. I still hate absolutely everything, but I am grateful for the sheer indomitableness of his presence. In an annoyed, still hating everything sort of way. “Anyway, as long as we keep a brisk pace tomorrow and the day after, we’ll make the rendezvous with the crew fine anyway. The Brick won’t let ‘em leave without us, you know what he’s like. And then it’s smooth sailing and a nice heavy pouch of gold ahead.”
I do know what the Brick is like. Huge, dwarfing even Malcolm when they stand side by side, with a poet’s soul and a basically good heart, which is an unusual set of traits for someone who’s survived this long in our line of work. Makes a man more likely to look out for him every now and then, though, like you might check in with an aging parent. If your parent could and would still crush a man’s skull with their bare hands, given the right motivation.
“Yeah, you’re p-probably right,” I have to admit, dripping despondently onto the grimy floorboards and shivering. We’ve worked with these guys often enough now that there’s a sort of loyalty there. Or at least the closest you get to it in this business. Anyway, me and Malcolm have got the diadem… thingy the client wanted — there’d be no point in going without us, unless they gave up on the job completely. Not that I’d put it past Wallach to wander off just because they got bored or started thinking about something else.
Malcolm glances around the room again. “Think you could get a fire goin’? I wanna check this place out a bit, see what we’ve got to work with.”
I shrug assent as well as I can with my freezing muscles cramping up and take off my coat — it’s not like it’s doing much except weigh me down and leeching the last vestiges of warmth from me, at this stage. The sound of it slapping wetly to the floor adds to my bad mood. I liked the cut of that coat, and if it isn’t completely ruined by this debacle it definitely won’t ever be quite the same. One of the sleeves is hanging on by nothing but a few stubborn stitches, flopping particularly pathetically on the floorboards.
I fish another soggy card out of my shirtsleeve and do the work to get a small fire going, my hands almost shaking too badly to stack the dusty logs into some sensible shape before I light them. At least they’re dry, after sitting untouched in here for what must be years.
Malcolm’s still searching the room, looking under the beds and going through the drawers.
“Still can’t believe you managed to fall in the lake, man,” he chuckles, clearly finding the whole thing a whole lot funnier than I do.
“I didn’t ‘fall in’, the guy pushed me,” I mumble. It’s a weak protest to my own ears. Normally I would’ve just dodged out of the way, but ironically I’d been so focused on not falling in that I didn’t see the fucker coming. I shudder at the memory of the cold water closing over my head, the stab of complete panic moving through me again like my brain’s not ready to believe it ain’t still happening. Thank Luck and every spirit of fortune that Malcolm’s quick on his feet, that is not the way I want to go out.
“We really need to get you some swimmin’ lessons already,” he says, shaking his head, still laughing.
“Sure. Over my dead body.”
“Yeah? That’s a real fuckin’ possibility, Tobias — what are you gonna do if I ain’t there to fish you out again next time, huh?”
I give him a dirty look. My teeth are chattering and my spine seems to be making a spirited attempt at shivering itself right out of my body; I am so not in the mood for this conversation right now. “What, you p-plannin’ to take off somewhere?”
He snorts, still rummaging through the cabinets and cupboards. His inexplicable yet unshakable good mood is incredibly annoying. Comforting, but annoying. “Obviously no. But I can’t always be babysittin’ you whenever we go somewhere the water gets more than ankle deep, we won’t get nothin’ done. Hah, there we go.”
Apparently finding what he’s been looking for, he’s retrieving a stack of folded woollen blankets, so faded and full of dust you’d be hard pressed to say what color they used to be.
“How long have those been in there?” I say, fighting distaste.
“Pr’bly best not to think about it.” He shakes one of the blankets out. It creates a small cloud of dust and old cobwebs and other assorted detritus I don’t want to consider, falling slowly to the equally dirty floorboards.
“That’s nasty,” I murmur, but I know it’s a losing battle. Man, this day has been nothing but one stroke of bad luck after another, apart from Malcolm fishing me out of the lake like some drowned rat in time. And I’m still so fucking cold.
“How’s the fire coming along?” he asks, unfolding another blanket. I think there’s actual moss growing on this one.
“S-s-surprisingly slowly,” I manage to get out. I stare dismally at the small fire that’s barely even thawing my fingertips when I hold them dangerously close to the flames. Never figured this for how I’d go out, but it’s looking more and more in the cards here. Not like I’d really expected an ‘at ninety-five, in my sleep, surrounded by grieving friends and great-grandchildren’ scenario or anything, but I’d hoped for something a bit more glamorous than this. I don’t think silk sheets would have been too much to ask, under the circumstances.
Suddenly Malcolm’s by my shoulder, peering down at me. “Hey, you hear me just now? Uh. Look at me for a sec.”
“Huh?” I say, turning towards him.
“Hell, your lips are goin’ blue,” he says, pushing my collar down to touch the skin of my neck. “That can’t be — shit, Tobias, you’re cold as a corpse.”
I glare at him, teeth chattering. “Well, y-yeah. As I’ve been f-f-fucking t-tell — t-t-telling you the whole w-walk over here!”
“I thought you were just whining, like usual!” he protests, though he looks slightly shamefaced about it, and his hand doesn’t leave my neck. The touch is almost too warm, like a brand against my cold clammy skin, and yet I find myself turning into it, seeking out more of the heat with a patheticness I would disavow if I were any less mindless with freezing. “Guess that lake was colder than I figured, huh.”
“P-p-probably some meltwater f-from the mountains that ends up in there,” I observe idly. I’m starting to feel a little strange, light headed and floaty, almost like I’m tipsy. Haven’t been drinking anything but mouthfuls of lake water all day, though. Strange. “Y’know, I s-sound a little like Wallach after a few drinks right now.”
Malcolm gives a sigh, his thumb brushing over my throat. “Problem is you ain’t that easy to follow and kinda weird at the best of times, I’ve got no idea if you’re goin’ loopy on me here or not.”
It takes a while for me to parse that before I go: “Hey!”
“Well, better safe than sorry, I guess.”
He moves his hand away, and I remember to check back with the fire. Seems to be going okay now. Pretty, too, all reds and yellows dancing.
“Hey, slick guy. Stay with me here.” I turn to him at the sound of his voice, then blink. I blink a lot. He’s taking off his shirt and for a very disorienting moment I’m sure I must be dreaming. Screw silk sheets, I wouldn’t even have dared to aim for this. “No need to look at me like that, I refuse to carry your frozen corpse through the woods just ‘cause you decided to have sensibilities all of a sudden. C’mere.”
I stare at him where he’s standing with one arm expectantly extended, like he means to wrap it around me. “I — excuse… me?”
“Gotta get you warmed up before your delicate constitution succumbs to a chill and sends you to an early grave,” he says, rolling his eyes like I’m being frustratingly dense. My eyes slip down to his bared chest and seem unwilling to move on from there. Absolutely nothing is going to happen anatomically for me right now, but a man still has his soul. “C’mon now, I ain’t telling the rest of the crew you froze to death on my watch when we meet up again.”
His nipples are always unexpectedly neat and round and pink among all the chest hair, almost sort of cute.
“Hey!” he says, snapping his fingers to get my attention. “Oh, for the love of… Guess I’m stuck playin’ nursemaid for the night, then.”
“Bet you’d p-pull off the outfit wonderfully,” I say absently, and then he’s suddenly very, very close.
He’s unbuttoning my shirt, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrates on the task, and yeah I am definitely dreaming, this must be the last merciful hallucination before the hypothermia takes me away. Maybe the gods are kind after all, despite all previous evidence to the contrary.
“Why… are you doin’ that?” I manage, looking down at his hands slowly moving down my chest.
He glances up at me like I just asked him if the Shuriman deserts get a lot of rain. “Won’t do much good to warm you up if you’re wearing this to chill you right down again, will it.”
I knew that, of course, but my brain’s really not on the top of its game right now, between the freezing and the… well, present situation. His knuckles are resting against my chest as he’s paused in his work on the buttons. “Oh. Yeah.”
“You hit your head out there as well, T.F.?” He clearly means it to be mocking, but he’s also leaning in to peer closer at me with worry in his eyes.
I click my tongue in exasperation and push his face away with my hand. “Always said you were in the wrong line of work, you shoulda been a comedian.”
He rolls his eyes. “Well, if you’re fine enough to be a little smartass about it I guess we’re good. ‘Kay, let’s get this off and let it dry. And, uh...”
He pauses as his hands reach my belt, looking up at me a bit awkwardly.
“I ain’t taking my trousers off for you, Graves,” I say immediately, the panic raising my voice more than I’d really meant to, because while the cold is still taking care of it for now I do not trust myself to lay plastered against him from shoulder to thigh buck naked and not have certain things become distressingly, irrefutably clear very quickly. Death can come claim me if it wants, I’m not going through that one.
He eyes me dubiously and for a moment I’m terrified he’s going to insist — I’ll slither out of it somehow anyway, I’m good at that and he’s easily distracted if you know where to lead him, but my brain isn’t doing so hot right now and I’d rather not put it to the test. Then he glances over at the fireplace, where the flames are starting to really gain purchase, and shrugs as his hands move away from the top of my trousers. I can finally pull in a full breath again, and it’s definitely not one of disappointment.
“Sure, if you’re gonna be precious about it. Should probably be fine, between me ‘n the fire,” he says, tossing a few more logs in as if to make sure. “I always ran hot anyway.”
Grabbing the room’s two rickety chairs, he hangs our clothes over the backs of them and places them at a safe distance from the fire. Should be okay to wear again in the morning, hopefully. If not with style.
Malcolm sits down close to the fireplace with his back against the wall and holds his hand out impatiently for me to follow. He pulls me in once I get close enough, until I’m basically draped all over his side, safely tucked under his arm on the side closest to the fire. Then he leans to get the edge of the blankets and pulls them around us, a bit clumsy with one arm. I help to tuck them in place properly on my side — they’re moth-eaten and dusty and smell dank as all hell, but he’s right that it’s better than nothing.
There’s some awkwardness over where to rest my head, but finally I settle with my temple against his shoulder and just breathe for a while. It’s already starting to work — I can feel the life beginning to return to my body, pins and needles at first and then a sort of heavy exhausted peacefulness as it starts reaching my core.
“That’s better, you don’t look quite so much like you’re gonna croak any minute no more,” he says eventually, running his hand over my back like he’s trying to rub some warmth into me. “By the way, the other reason I was so cheerful is that I’ve got an almost full bottle of whiskey with me, figured we could share it to kill time. Probably better not, though, with you in this state.”
“‘This state’?” I echo, grimacing against his collarbone. “What am I, some Demacian noble? You’re makin’ it sound like you’re one step away from fetching me smelling salts.”
“Ain’t such a bright idea to drink when you’re cold like that, I’ve seen what happens. Makes you feel better at first, and then it makes you real dead. You’re not doin’ that on my watch.”
“Yessir, Mr. Graves, sir,” I drawl, my head lolling against his shoulder.
He pokes me between the ribs, and I jerk and snicker.
“None o’ your sass, I’m tryin’ to look out for you here. In your weak, delicate, helpless state.”
“Tickling’s a certified treatment for this, then, is it?”
“Sure. Cuttin’ edge. Read a book sometime, Tobias.”
I chuckle. “We’ll save that drink for another time, then. I ain’t complaining, but how come you know so much about this stuff?” I add, snuggling in even closer. Damn, the man is a furnace. A blessed, wonderful, lightly furry furnace. And I thought I appreciated the broadness of his chest before.
“I was raised by the ocean, if you’ll recall,” he drawls, his arm still around me. “Sometimes people fall in, ‘n the water can leech the warmth from a body real quick like, always faster’n you’d expect. Sometimes it even gets you before the sharks can. Everybody learns how you deal with it. Kinda surprised your folks don’t do the same.”
I shrug, not keen on talking about it. “Might be they do and I wasn’t paying attention. Besides, the Serpentine doesn’t get that cold unless you go right where it meets the ocean. Huh. I think I’m starting to be prepared to believe I have toes again, this must be working.”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t you be goin’ anywhere just yet. Gotta get you properly thawed out.”
With a sigh to indicate how this is a great hardship, I rest my head more comfortably against his shoulder. “Fine, have it your way.”
“Thanks, I will.”
I let my hand brush against his chest, as if by accident as I shift position. He’s so solid, bulk built for use rather than show but not exactly unsightly that way either. If it ever came down to a wrestling match between Graves and a wild bear I’d have to hedge my bets and put money on both. Probably a bit more money on Malcolm, though. Even if there’s no honour among thieves, there can still be loyalty.
He snorts. “It’s what you get for bein’ so damn scrawny. Can’t even fight off a little chill.”
“I ain’t scrawny. I just tend to stand next to you, and we can’t all be built like an ox.”
I can hear the sound of his heart under my ear when I rest my head right.
Is this weird? I’m fairly sure this should be weird. It doesn’t feel weird. He doesn’t seem to think it’s weird. I’m not gonna make it weird by pointing out that it should be weird.
“Mmm, whatever you say. ‘S been a while since it was just the two of us,” Malcolm yawns, burrowing himself and by extension me deeper under the covers. “Kinda nice to have the peace ‘n quiet for a change.”
“Yeah, this job did drag out a few weeks longer than planned, didn’t it.” Honestly it’d sounded like an easy gig, stealing back an heirloom that had apparently gone to the wrong branch of the family after those disgraceful snakes falsified the testament of old Great Uncle Terran, gods rest his soul and so on — I never listened closely enough to the client’s labyrinthine explanations of generations’ worth of betrayals and inheritance squabbles to know if we’re actually on the righteous side here, but then again I don’t really give a shit, I’ll pretend to listen sympathetically to a lot of rich people nonsense if it gets us paid in the end. Turns out rich people nonsense also includes being willing to chase a couple of sorry bastards across half a continent and repeatedly attempting murder to reclaim the engagement diadem of Great-Great Grandpa Filliam. The more you know. It’s been a boon to have the added numbers of the rest of the crew bolstering us through the wild chase, but Malcolm’s right, this is a nice change of pace.
“How much of your cut are you willing to part with for me to not tell Kolt about how you went and stumbled into this lake, by the way?” Malcolm says, in what he must fondly imagine is an approximation of innocence.
I snort. “Oh, you do not want to get into a humiliation blackmail war with me, I’ve got a decade of dirt on you and I won’t hesitate. There will be no survivors.”
“And if I’m willing to take my chances?”
“Remember that dancer guy back in Noxus?”
He pauses. “Ah.”
I press on with relish: “Remember the unholy amount of shit I had to pull to get you outta there before he handed you over to whatever bounty hunter came up with the highest bid, while all you could do was lie there trussed up like a turkey?”
“Well, now,” he says, holding up a finger tentatively, like a man who’s not entirely secure in his own argument but realizes he has nothing better to play, “I seem to remember you had to don his friend’s lingerie to get away with that?”
“And I absolutely rocked that look, I ain’t got nothin’ to be embarrassed about,” I declare, and he makes a noise like he’s forced to grudgingly agree. I was barely twenty-one at the time, dancer guy’s lady friend had been tall and slim with dark hair, strong features and impeccable taste in fabrics, and the corset had been unexpectedly comfortable, actually, even if figuring out the lacing on my own gave me a bit of a headache. It’d probably take a lot more finagling — as well as an intimidatingly thorough application of hot wax — for me to pull that trick off these days, but hey. I’ve never been one to balk at a challenge. Especially if it means I get to tell Malcolm ‘told you so’ by the end of it.
“We’re fallin’ back on a stalemate of mutually assured destruction here, then,” Malcolm allows.
“Unless you’re happy to take your life and your dignity into your own hands, yeah.”
Graves laughs quietly and shifts his arm around me. While he can’t see my face I smile against his chest at the low gravelly rasp of it, fondness blooming in my chest.
Malcolm’s breathing slows and evens until I’m pretty sure he’s asleep, and then he starts snoring as if to dispel all doubt. I snort a laugh and rub my face against his shoulder. It’s probably the exhaustion finally catching up with me, but I feel more relaxed than I’ve done in… well, ever, maybe. Certainly since I was a kid. I feel so warm now, not just where we’re pressed together, but in that place somewhere deeper down, like somebody’s gone and lit a soft glow in my soul and it’s shining through.
Somewhere along the way as the years went by, Malcolm’s snoring has gone from mildly annoying to comforting, and there’s the familiar smell of cigar smoke and gunpowder. My eyes start to want to drift shut every time I blink.
It’s been a long time since I slept with anyone, skin to skin. Well, I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve been in a lot of beds with a lot of charming and interesting people, but I haven’t been sleeping next to them after, is what I’m trying to say. That’s a dangerous sort of habit to get into when the bounty on your head is rapidly approaching the annual budget of a small yet thriving city state. Even the most delicately expert performance between the sheets and the winsomest of smiles are unlikely to engender enough sentimentality to outweigh that kinda coin. And even besides that we move around a lot, never seemed much point in getting too complacent.
It’s… not bad. Familiar, in a strange sort of way; back on the river that’s how we kids used to sleep half of the time, piled up against each other in one haphazard huddle for warmth and comfort both. Malcolm and I share beds when we need to, but not without barriers like this.
I drift off with the sound of his heart close against my ear, the steady stubborn beat comforting like a lullaby.
I can’t tell how long I sleep, but when I blink my eyes back open again it’s dark outside and the fire’s still going, even if it’s burning low. I’ve drooled a little against Malcolm’s chest, and dry my mouth with the back of my hand and a wrinkle of my nose. The warmth of him feels so good against the side of my face, though. I close my eyes, almost ready to fall back asleep, except…
Except there’s a hunger in me that’s loath to be ignored, and that takes its chance while my mind hovers between sleep and wakefulness to fill my mind with things I would shut down immediately when fully conscious. It makes me feel too safe, being skin to skin with him, is the problem. It’s giving my body ideas it shouldn’t entertain.
I wonder what he’d do if I finally did what I’ve longed for for years and straddled him properly to kiss him awake.
Probably shove me off right away, for starters. You gotta be careful with sudden movements around Graves when he’s asleep; some habits get ingrained real deep when you grow up in the most rat-infested alleys of Bilgewater. But after that, once he realized it was me, what I was doing — would he be more confused or more put off? Surprised, dubious — curious?
Maybe… maybe if things were different, if I offered it first, put it on the table, if I started putting my mouth down there, willing and eager — would he really push me away? It’s an exceedingly rare man in this world who would, I’ve found. If I went slow. If I gave him the time to stop me and say no, and against all odds he somehow didn’t. Just looked at me and waited and… and stroked my hair while I undid his trousers and finally got my mouth on him.
My imagination is pretty good, but I wouldn’t even need it for this, I’ve seen him naked plenty of times — kind of hard to avoid it, when you’ve been running together as tightly as we have for closing in on a decade now — and it’s why I can’t even tease him about the size of the shotgun being compensation for somethin’. All the sketchy guys he’s bedded in inns with thin walls sure haven’t sounded like they’ve had any complaints. Not that I’m jealous, that’d be stupid. And irrational. And not my usual style at all. And I’m not willing to consider the implications of that, now or ever.
I could ride him like this, straddling his hips and sinking down with his big square hands at the small of my back and my thighs to steady me. Or he could turn us around and take me up against the wall and fuck me long and good like that, he’s strong enough for it. Those same hands hungry at my hip and waist as he presses close, close against me, his mouth hot on mine as he pushes his cock inside me and says my name. Feeling in the hitch of his hips and his voice how much he wants m…
Grimacing to myself as I startle awake enough to realize what my brain is getting up to, I shift my body, angling my hips away enough to be safe even though it ends up in a slightly uncomfortable twist. Damn me and my overactive brain, I really don’t fucking need this right now.
And in the end it’s even worse, because more than any of that, what I’m really thirsting for is small, soft stuff. Stupid things like resting my cheek against his without thinking, or putting my hand on his chest without hiding what it means, no more need for bluffing. Having him look at me and see what’s actually there.
I stare into the darkness, appalled at myself and even more appalled that it does nothing to quell that quiet unending aching at the core of me. Usually it’s easy to put it out of my mind, to keep myself caught up in misdirections like a particularly easily-led mark. None so blind as they who will not see, and all that. It’s been working well for me so far.
It wasn’t a method meant for this kind of stress testing, though.
He sighs in his sleep and his head rolls a bit where it’s leaned back against the wall. His profile is soft and warm with the last of the firelight, so fucking close to me. Gods, I wish I had a card on me, I need something to do with my hands, even more than usual. I think I’m losing my mind a bit.
Finally I bite my lip and wrench hard into the decision to go for broke.
I’m pretty sure he’s fast asleep. And it’ll only be this once, just to see what it’s like, and then I’ll have it out of my system and I can forget all about it. If I do it right now I won’t even have to think about it first. Genius, if I do say so myself. Just one chaste kiss, one time, no funny business.
I lean in and brush my lips lightly against the side of his neck, soft and quiet. It feels like everything.
“Hey,” he says, and shock shoots up my spine until I’m pretty sure I see my whole life parading in front of my eyes. Man, looking back at it all like this I have regrets; I really should have bought those boots back in Piltover, they’d go perfectly with the hat for when I’m gonna have to go throw myself into the ocean after this. “I’m glad you’re havin’ a nice dream ‘n all, but I ain’t one of your fancy paramours, Tobias.”
I’m still waiting for my heart to settle back into my chest after its extended sabbatical up in my throat, but he doesn’t sound angry at all, just sleepy and a bit amused. Well, thank Luck for small mercies and his remarkably thick skull. “Uh. Shit. Sorry.”
He gives a ‘don’t worry ‘bout it none’ sort of grunt and shifts a bit, getting into a more comfortable position.
“How the hell do you manage with all this hair?” he asks, blowing a few strands out of his face. “Gets everywhere.”
“Well, it doesn’t get this messy normally,” I mumble, my cheeks reddening a little from the many sordid paths my mind chooses to traipse down after that innocuous statement. Somebody, anybody, any passing god or spirit sympathetic to basically well-meaning con men and liars, stop my stupid brain from barrelling along like this. “Haven’t got a tie with me, I lost it after the lake.”
“Fair ‘nuf,” he murmurs, clearly not that interested.
The fire’s burning low, but I don’t want to get up and do anything about it just now.
“Still cold?” he asks after a while, sounding like he’s about to nod off again.
“Yeah, a bit,” I lie smoothly, because fuck me I clearly can’t help myself.
“‘Kay,” he murmurs, tightening his arm around me. A few moments later he’s snoring once more.
If anything it’s getting a bit on the toasty side where I’m closer to the fireplace, but I mitigate it by sticking my feet out from under the covers rather than moving away. His chest moves under my cheek, rising and falling slowly with his breathing, his heartbeat steady against my ear.
I close my eyes and listen. It’s not exactly everything I want, but it’s close enough that I can almost pretend. And that’s enough. I can go through life like a man in the desert chained just out of reach from a spring of cold clean water, if it means things won’t get weird and he won’t walk away to leave me standing there like a bad hand waiting to be put down on the table with no recourse. Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t. maybe the strangeness would fade on its own over time if so.
But at the end of the day the first rule is that you never gamble with anything you’re not prepared to lose. And I won’t take my chances with those odds.
— — — —
The Hierophant, Four of Cups
“So, Doc, uh — how’s the prognosis lookin’ for our patient here?”
“He’ll be fine,” the healer says, closing her bag with a decisive snap and a businesslike toss of her thick iron grey hair. “The man has the constitution of an ox. This fever has been tearing through these parts since early autumn, and I haven’t lost anyone to it yet, so I highly doubt he’ll be the first. Just make sure to get some water in him whenever he wakes up and maybe some broth if you can get him to sit up long enough, and he’ll sleep it off by himself.”
Where I’m leaning cross-armed against the doorframe I glance over at Malcolm’s slumbering form on the low bed. From here I can mostly see a few tufts of brown hair and the bulk of him beneath the blankets.
Briskly washing her hands in the washbasin she’d prepared earlier she adds: “The coughing has mostly died down too, right?”
“The worst of it, at least. A couple of days ago I thought he was gonna break a rib or something.”
“Yeah, it seems to take some people that way. He should be on the right side of it by now, though, and if you were going to catch it off him you probably would have by now. You still seem worried, though. Was there something else you’ve noticed, or…”
“The last time he woke up, he, uh. He didn’t recognize me,” I say, having to keep from squirming under her gaze at how exposing it feels to admit it, how revealing that that was what cut through all my weighing of the pros and cons with terror and made me go find her.
“No, he wouldn’t recognize much of anything, with his brains half boiled like that,” she agrees, only her companionable pat to my elbow revealing she picked up on any of that.
The nonchalance of her manner is at the very least somewhat reassuring — it’s not the airy disregard of an amateur or someone who just doesn’t give a shit, it’s the blasé breeziness of someone who’s seen it all and then some and knows how to deal with most of it. I’m not going to go prying too deeply for fear of causing offence I can’t afford, but I’ve got her pegged as a retired Noxian field medic or something along those lines. Something about the scarred, callused hands and briskly fearless manner — Noxus never really paid any heed to that ‘First, do no harm’ stuff, even their healers carry axes and morning stars and what have you. (Graves has done enough waxing lyrical at me about firearms over the years that I at least know some basic terms and makes, even if it’s against my will, but nothing in this world could induce me to show an interest in crude chunks of metal whether they’re meant to inflict harm through blunt or edged means.)
She holds up a small glass flask filled with a fine red-brown powder that she’d previously produced from her bag. “If the fever suddenly grows much worse, give him half a teaspoon of this dissolved in water and come find me again. But like I said, I highly doubt it’ll be necessary, he seems to be well past the worst of it already. Should be up and about in a couple of days if you can get some more water and solid food in him.”
I take the flask and nod, moving away from the doorway to let her pass. “Will do. Thank you for your help, ma’am.”
The ‘ma’am’ gains me a snort of laughter, but of the gruffly endeared grandmotherly type. That’s good. I really, really want to maintain some goodwill here, in case I’ll need her to come back. I already paid her — generously and unhesitatingly — up front, which should at least gain me some points that way.
She wasn’t the easiest person to track down in the first place, but probably by design. There’s been no names involved on either side of the transaction — definitely by design. After some asking around in the shadier corners of the town, she came recommended both for her skill as a doctor and for her capacity for discretion – just about the last thing I’d want to tangle with right now on top of everything is a gaggle of bounty hunters bearing down on us. I suppose I could try to draw them away from here if they did show up, but I don’t like the idea of leaving Graves alone for any length of time in this state. Not for the first time I curse the way that despite every effort I’ve ever put into it, I can’t seem to figure out a way to take anyone with me when I teleport. What’s the fucking point of any of it, if all it would take is one asshole to get through while I had my back turned for a moment? I glance over at where Malcolm’s head is barely visible over the edge of the blanket and worry at my bottom lip with my teeth until I almost taste blood.
“Well, I’ll be off. Keep him warm and get some sleep yourself,” she advises, patting my arm again. “You won’t be much use to him if you’re all but falling off your feet, right?”
With a practiced smile and some pleasantries shaken out of me by that show of sympathy — turns out I do not like it when my face snitches on me, it’s been so long I’ve forgotten the feeling — I see her out and lock the door behind her once she’s gone. For a moment I stay there with my forehead leaned against the coarse wooden surface of it, listening for the rasping of Malcolm’s shallow breathing. I thought it was shitty when he was coughing his lungs out with a sound like someone was taking a cheese grater to them; turns out startling awake whenever I manage to nod off for more than fifteen minutes because I’m not sure whether he’s still breathing is worse.
Then I gather myself and stand up properly. After refilling the oil lamp, I settle back into my post of the last few nights, a rickety uncomfortable chair by the room’s one table pushed next to his bed. My own bed is across the room, but lying down just makes the restless itch under my skin grow until I can’t stay still and have to pace around the room for a while to burn it off.
I’ve seen him sick before, of course — not often, the healer wasn’t wrong that he’s got the constitution of a Noxian war elephant, but considering the way we constantly move around it’s basically impossible to completely avoid whatever’s going around when we come through. For that matter he’s seen me through my share of flus and colds and other assorted maladies; he makes for a gruff but not ineffective nurse when he wants to. He persists in his claim that he always knows when it’s getting real bad because I wilt pathetically like a tropical plant in the cold, which I personally take as slander and exaggeration, as he is prone to both. On a few infamous occasions we’ve even been sick at the same time, which is why I know with all possible clarity that he’s the one true whatever of my life, partner-wise — there ain’t a lot that can stress test a relationship quite like both of you having the runs with only one chamber pot between you. I wouldn’t want to go through that ever again, and I would want to go through it with anyone else even less.
But he’s never looked quite like this before, and he’s certainly never opened his eyes and not known me.
There’s something uniquely disquieting in seeing Malcolm so quiet and still and drained of colour, the deep aching sense of displacement and wrongness that might accompany a dislocated limb or broken bone. He’s always so… solid. So much realer than everything else around him, so unapologetically loud and big and present, like he’d cheerily fistfight the universe given half the chance and less than half the provocation.
Seeing him reduced is somehow unnerving on a level I don’t have the words to describe.
My own powerlessness clings to me like heavy shrouds underwater, pulling me down towards the depths with it. I find air hard to come by, stretching my neck this way and that as if it’ll help. For something to do with my hands I take out my favourite deck of cards — the one that used to belong to my grandfather, worn soft and faded with use and time — and start shuffling and moving them around in intricate patterns mechanically, with no other purpose than flat occupation.
My mind drifts too much to ask the cards anything precise, so I can only query danger? in the clumsy subjectless way of an anxious toddler, unspecified and untethered.
Always, the cards whisper back like an elder who knows more than you ever will, kind in their lack of dissembling, in taking even my quivering child’s inquiry seriously. I get snatches of meaning, of other people’s dangers all around — a young woman trying to arrange her long brown hair so it will cover the ugly bruised eye her husband left her with last night and cried over even as he sobered up and the never again, I promise she by now knows means nothing. A small child playing happily with a bucket too close to the back legs of a nervous horse. Rot eating through the rafters of the house next door that might, if it’s not discovered and under the right kind of stress, send a big chunk of the roof collapsing into the room below. The couple nearby meeting each other’s gazes over the realization they won’t have enough food for all their children tonight even if they themselves forego food altogether. I flinch away from each of them before they do anything but brush against my mind — normally I’m much better at tuning it out, it’s only the raw skinlessness of lack of sleep and too many hours with only my own mind for company that has left me open like this. I probably shouldn’t be delving too deep in this state, but I keep picking at the cards like a scab until the blood starts welling up anyway because I don’t know what else I can do.
Something in the undercurrents of the cards guides me away from it, though, like a cool gentle hand laid over mine to still them mid-shuffle. I fumble to a stop, blinking in the low light of the oil lamp.
Always, the cards repeat, no words yet all meaning. But in here: none but the fear you took with you in your own heart. Look elsewhere tonight.
My breath shudders out of me in one long sigh. I let my hands move away from the cards and rest my face in them instead, using the silent dark behind my eyelids to try to find my equilibrium again. Mostly it makes me feel adrift on an endless ocean at night, distant and lost.
“Tobias?”
My head snaps up at the rusty hinges sound of his voice. Malcolm is squinting around the room and spiritedly trying to push himself up on his elbow, to a limited success I would have found faintly hilarious under any other circumstances.
Dizzy with relief, I hurry over to the water barrel and fill a cup before moving to the bed, helping him to sit up. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Malcolm, it’s about fuckin’ time.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. What’s this thing?” Graves asks once he’s mostly vertical, poking at the small glass flask of brown powder on the nightstand.
Mostly in a bid to reassure myself I smooth my hand over his broad back even though it’s damp with cold sweat through his undershirt. “The doctor left it.”
He shoots me a puzzled frown. “What doctor? I don’t remember no doctor.”
“You wouldn’t, you were solidly out cold while she was proddin’ and pokin’ at you. Here, let’s get some water in you.”
“I told you you shouldn’t go sending for a doctor or make a fuss or anythin’, ‘s nothin’, I’ll just sleep it off,” he murmurs, even as he tips his head to drink from the cup I’m holding to his lips like the world’s scruffiest and most pathetic kitten.
“And since when have I ever done anything just because you told me to, huh?” I say, discreetly keeping my hand on his shoulder to support him until I’m sure he’s managed to get all the water down safely, and then keeping it there a while longer after to steady my own tattered nerves.
He chuckles woozily at that. “Well, you got me there. Got anythin’ stronger, doc?” he adds hopefully, which more than anything the healer could say reassures me that he’s well on his way back to his normal dauntless self.
Too relieved to imbue my voice with any of the sternness I’d intended, I say: “Not until you can get up and pour yourself some your own damned self, Graves. What am I, your page boy?”
He sighs deeply and rests his great sweaty, messy-haired head against my side. “What’s the point of gettin’ a hot nurse if he’s as boring as you, T.F.?” I think – I could swear… I must have misheard him say, which does make a lot of sense because while I’m still standing there struggling to decipher what the hell he did just mean to communicate, then, he starts snoring gently while still sitting upright with my hip as his only support.
I laugh despite myself and put the cup down on the nightstand. For a while I stand there with one hand cupped around the back of his neck, indulging in stroking the hair at the nape there while no one can see me, while I won’t have to meet his eyes and lie about why. He’s fever-heated and sweaty and has been for days, and he smells like it, and I couldn’t mind it less. I let myself drift in that clandestine comfort before guiding him down safely to the pillow. He grunts a half-conscious protest at the change in position, his hands grasping ineffectually at my waist and shirt before I gently shush him and take his hands in mine to tuck them back under the covers. Briefly blinking awake to see it’s me, he acquiesces to being positioned like that, curling up under the blanket with a shudder as I draw it up better around his shoulders. There’s still the hectic red clinging to his cheeks, but the rest of him has lost that terrible grayness from before.
In the days before he’d fallen ill he’d already been due for a shave, and by now the lower half of his face has been solidly overtaken by tangled undergrowth with no sense of order.
I chuckle quietly and run the backs of my fingers over his bushy cheek. “You gotta get better soon, you look like a wild Freljordian mountain man like this.”
“Watch yer mouth, or I’ll run off to one of them scary chiefs they’ve got up there and join her harem like that fella I was fucking suggested, find someone who’ll appreciate me,” he slurs, one slitted blue eye glittering up at me.
“I never said I can’t appreciate a little bit of wild Freljordian mountain man,” I protest. “And you’d do terribly in a harem. You’d fuck your way through all her husbands, and then I’d have to go get you out before you got politically assassinated or whatever.”
“Get some godsdamn sleep, Tobias,” Malcolm says, his eye slipping back shut.
I sit on the edge of my bed for a while with my elbows resting on my knees, watching him breathe. Then I finally snuff out the oil lamp and settle back on the bed, pulling the covers over myself. I’m out before I have time to know it’s happening.
— — — —
Ten of Cups, Four of Wands (Reversed)
Graves and I are eating a belated dinner together in the run-down wing of a mansion we’ve been using to plan this latest and most spectacular heist, waiting among run-down furniture and dusty curtains and dirty cracking portraits for the rest of the crew to trickle in for the night. The street food is too greasy and salty to suit my queasy stomach while I check and double check every stage of the plan, turning each step this way and that in my head to check it for flaws I hadn’t spotted yet. We’ve still got a week to go and most of the pieces are in place, but this job… this job is going to be a step above anything we’ve ever tried before. If this goes off smooth, it will be one for the history books.
“You gonna eat any more of that, or…?” Malcolm asks, leaning in hopefully and eyeing my half-finished plate.
“Nah, you go ahead,” I say, pushing the plate over towards him. He beams and pulls it in front of him, picking his cutlery back up and digging in. I smile absently and return to my papers, looking over the guard duty roster one more time even though I know it by heart at this stage.
“You’re lookin’ a bit worse for the wear,” Malcolm says between bites, eyeing me. “You been havin’ trouble sleeping again?”
“Hm? Oh. No, not more than usual, it’s just… a bunch of moving parts going on with this one. A lot to keep track of.”
“Eh, you’ll get it on the day,” he says confidently. “You always fret for days before, and you always figure it out.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose and chuckle. “Well. Thanks for the vote of confidence, at least.”
The cards have not been as unmitigatedly confident on this one, whenever I have consulted them — they have been uncharacteristically reticent to convey much of anything, good or bad. Whenever I ask, there’s only this great unresolved, nearly ominous sense of… potentiality, without much distinction as to the positive or negative charge that potential might hold. It’s why I’m so set on examining all the details, understanding where the fulcrums might be that could help tip the outcome from one to the other. Even after all this time I don’t think Malcolm really believes the cards hold any special magic or wisdom; at the end of the day he believes it’s something akin to a confidence trick, a tool of distraction, or at most something to rest your eyes and mind on while your subconscious does all the real work behind the scenes. So I don’t confide in him about the sneaking sense of doubt that has settled over me like a fine layer of snow. I just keep poring over the papers while Malcolm polishes off the last of the food and then lights a contented post-meal cigar. Even through the agitation and the doubt, there’s something about the solid immovable presence of him that’s unspeakably comforting, stops me from spinning out into overreaction.
The rest of the crew trickle in one by one — Wallach first, then the Brick, then Kolt, swearing up a storm but carrying the last few components she’ll needed to finish the device that’s going to bring the alarm system offline.
Kolt is in her mid-forties somewhere, wears an oversized leather overcoat and her hair cropped short to show off the bold geometric tattoos swirling along the sides of her head, and is perhaps the angriest person I’ve ever met, which should tell you somethin’ considering I’ve known Malcolm since we were both eighteen. The difference is that Graves’ anger comes out swinging and then quickly breezes over into his habitual general grouchiness, which can even be quite amiable in its own way, while Kolt has the sort of trapped-deep-in-the-bone rage that can smoulder inside a person quietly for years until they suddenly bash someone’s brains in with a brick and make the career change into becoming a devoted arsonist. Guess growing up in the worst chem pits of Zaun will do that to a person. Thankfully for us she has so far channeled this anger into producing all manner of clever doodads and explosive devices that ruin peoples’ days, and kept them pointed away from us.
“Who’s a girl gotta kill around here to get a decent drink?” she demands in her crow-hoarse voice, carefully putting her crate of parts down and then throwing herself into a dusty armchair with abandon, taking out her pipe.
Graves rubs his hands together. “We’re ready to party, then. Did someone get drinks sorted already, or is that on me?”
“I can hardly think of anyone more qualified, Malcolm,” I say. “Won’t you use your big strong arms to carry some in for us? Should be a crate of the good stuff in the wood shed, I stashed it there.”
“Naked flattery ain’t gonna get you everywhere with me, T.F., but in this case it is gonna get you at least to the woodshed and back if it means I get a decent drink,” Graves allows, and heads for the door while I grin after him.
“Hey, T.F., just for the record,” Wallach says, as Graves slips out the door.
“Yes, my nervous little friend?” I say mildly, turning to him when he doesn’t elaborate. He’s fashioned himself into the image of a dapper young man today and for most of this month, but Wallach habitually moves through genders and names and personalities like other people do underwear, and with no less disenchantment with them once he considers one used for too long. Most people get more use out of a pronoun before cycling through again, but hey, it seems to work for him. Them. Her. Him, for now, I guess. The only thing all of Wallach’s identities have in common is a certain central little shitness that always shines through, when you know where to look.
There’s a story there, and from what I’ve been able to puzzle together — hey, everyone needs a hobby, mine just so happens to be recreational pickpocketing and nosing around in other people’s business — that story goes something like this: Piltover bigwig picks up young Zaunite sumpsnipe with a talent for music and doing impressions to show off her vast capacity for charity and entrepreneurship both. Raises them as something halfway between a circus act and a pet she forgets to feed from time to time. Reacts badly to them trying to break out of the gilded cage she’s built around them in a desperate attempt to know something like freedom — noble lady ends up stabbed in the chest in a Promenade side alley, to general alarm and minor scandal, the kid was never heard from or seen again. At least not in a form recognizable as their own skin.
Wallach’s a twitchy, shifty-eyed young person when he’s not playing a role, but damn if it isn’t a joy to watch him ply his trade. Me and him have a couple of double acts we pull when a distraction is needed, and he never misses a beat. The slight stutter he’s got always goes away when he’s playing a role, and it always comes back once he stops. For someone who’s got so few other tells it’s a rough one to have to work around, but he makes the best of it.
More than anything, Wallach’s got one hell of a poker face when under pressure — better than me, even, much as it pains me to say it — and he could probably make a killing of it at the tables if he could only remember the rules of Krakenhand for more than about two minutes at a time. Which is how I know it’s entirely intentional when he looks up from the dusty sofa now and fixes me with the grimmest look I’ve ever seen over the edge of his book. “If you d-d-d. Hm. Don’t talk to him about it soon,” he says, in doomsday tones, “I will. And this is a threat.”
“Dunno what you’re talking about, kid,” I say breezily.
“I’m serious. If I have to watch one more day of this, I’m going to s-shoot myself in the fucking head,” he says savagely.
“Kid’s got a point,” Kolt drawls from her seat over in the corner, blowing out a leisurely smoke ring before taking another puff on her pipe. At my mock-wounded look she shrugs and adds: “Listen, you know I usually prefer to stay a thousand miles away from anything that might force me to have to think, for even one benighted second, about Graves being naked. But watching the two of you beating around the bush is just sad, man. It’s getting ridiculous.”
“Every time I think it can’t get worse, no two people can be this f-fucking stupid, you find new ways to astound me,” Wallach says. “I say this as your friend.”
“Damn, I’d hate to know how you speak to your enemies.”
He shrugs. “I l-like to, ah — keep the distinction a fluid one.”
Before I can answer, Graves comes crashing back in with his arms dangerously full of bottles, struggling to put them down on the table without them all crashing to the floor, before I swoop in and rescue him from his precarious juggling act. “Worry not, folks, I got the provisions. Any chance we could get a tune going, kid? I think it’s just about time for a dance.”
Wallach lets his head fall back on a groan, but at the same time he lets the book fall closed in his lap, and his long slender hand disappears behind the arm of the couch to fish his lute out by the neck. “Again? Can’t any of you learn how to play an instrument? I’d like to get to dance sometimes too.”
“Excuse you, I can play an instrument,” I protest.
“You can make a violin sound like a cat fucking a hedgehog, that don’t count,” Graves says.
“Hey!” I poke him in the side with a retaliatory finger, though that does more damage to my finger than his side. By the river beyond and all it flows through, beneath the immediate warm softness of the skin and comfortable pudge, it’s like hitting concrete. It’s enough to make a man think — any number of things.
“Yeah, fine, you’re okay on the ticklin’ the ivories front, but you got a piano neatly tucked in your back pocket and ready to hand right now?”
I nod my head sadly. “Alas, you are right, we do seem to be critically short on pianofortes. Sorry, kid, I guess it is on you after all.”
“Forgot the two of you moonlight as a f-fucking comedy duo. I used to be a concert violinist, you know,” Wallach says dismally as he tunes up. “I played for the finest crowds in Piltover. And now I’m peddling cheap tavern tunes for you lot.”
“Yeah, we know, pipsqueak,” Malcolm says cheerily, slapping his shoulder hard enough that the lute gives a discordant twang mid-tuning. “Thanks to us you’re movin’ up in the world, finally, makin’ somethin’ of yourself. Oh, no need to thank us.”
“Gettin’ to do our part corrupting the youth is payment enough,” I supply. “Makes a man feel like he can really leave a mark on the world.”
Wallach scowls and turns a tuning key vindictively. “You’re, like, seven years older than me at most, you prick.”
“Language, Wallach!”
“Stop ganging up on the poor lad, you two,” the Brick says, uncorking one of the bottles with his teeth and pouring out a glass of something that can sear the nose hairs even at this distance.
The Brick is half Buhru and a Bilgewater man of the classic type, in that he’s the closest I’ve ever seen to someone reaching the goal of being as broad as they are unsettlingly tall, with more scars and tattoos than I’ve had hot dinners in my life. He also makes some of the most tender and masterful little water colours of birds I’ve ever seen and knows an obscene amount of art history. The rest of the team have been tryin’ to discreetly nudge him more towards that side of his expertise than the one that requires him to take and dole out punches in equal amounts — he’s not as young as he used to be, for all that he’s still shaped like the brick wall that gives him his nickname. (I actually have no idea what his real name is — not for lack of nosing around either — and neither does anyone else in the business, as far as I can tell. Which, as far as I’m concerned, means that if he wants ‘the Brick’ to be his name that bad, it is.)
I’m more of a dabbler myself, any forgery I try my hand at is usually only one step in a larger job, but I always run anything I make past the Brick before I try to pawn it off on some Noxian count with more money and hunger for prestige than taste.
“Aw, you’re no fun,” I sigh.
The Brick says peaceably: “I can live with that, T.F.,” and starts handing out the drinks as he finishes pouring them.
Kolt lights the oil lamps placed around the room — night is falling outside of the grimy windows as Wallach finishes tuning up and indulges in some mock-sullen scales to warm his fingers up. The golden glow of the lamps half-hides a multitude of sins across the room, faded textile and shabby breaking down furniture gaining new life.
It’s not the grandeur these halls must have known back in their heyday, but there’s a worn and weathered stylishness to it nevertheless, a warm feeling of time temporarily and gracefully suspended for one night, cobwebs and moth-eaten hangings and all.
Graves is usually the one to call out the changes and moves of the dance, both because he grew up with it in the Rat Town taverns and knows the beats of them in, out and by heart, for all that he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, and because the Brick’s hearing has suffered the blows and bangs of time to the point that he can’t always pick out the music anymore.
Malcolm is surprisingly decent at dancing for such a big man, the Brick dances it well enough that it makes you think there must have been something to all that talk about the good old days when people had style, and Kolt merrily clomps around in her big boots with nails in them like that’s a you problem to solve, not hers, which is very in character for her and an added challenge that keeps you on your toes. Sometimes literally.
“Figured the heartbreaker of Fleet Street would be lighter on his feet, honestly,” Kolt says unconcernedly as I wince upon failing to avoid a steel-toed boot to my non-steeled ones. “You disappoint me, Mr. Felix.”
“Nah, T.F.’s got aspirations, he always goes for the hoity-toity types, ain’t none of them dancing a good old Bilgewater jig before they get down to business,” Malcolm says, spinning by. “‘S all waltzes and quad-rilles and marionettes for that lot.”
“Minuets,” I say as we whirl past each other again, slightly out of breath.
“Yeah, them things,” he agrees. “T.F. can bullshit his way through one of them minutes like nobody’s business, trust me. Ain’t his fault he didn’t grow up in the Rat Town taverns and ain’t got what it takes to keep up when the real fun starts. Sad, really.”
“Oh, you’re fucking on, Malcolm,” I say darkly around a grin.
On the next round we involve the bottle, letting it pass from person to person along with the turns, which does wonders for the already buoyant mood, and less good things for the form and coherence we can bring to bear.
“Aaand switch partners!” Malcolm calls, and I let Kolt’s hand go and send her spinning across the floor towards the Brick’s hulking form and capable hands. She’s cackling the whole way, coat flapping around her, and I grin too as I move along in the pattern to meet up with Malcolm, finding his outstretched hand with mine in a burst of warmth. Malcolm squeezes my hand and smirks a challenge. “Okay, then, here we are — show me your moves, fancy boy.”
“Yeah, come on, T.F., be sure to keep up, now,” Wallach calls out, noticeably speeding up the music.
“Hey, come on, kid!” I laugh, my feet dizzy with drink and speed and the solid familiarity of Malcolm’s body close by as I try to keep up with the ever-quickening beat.
“What, too lively a pace for you old wizened men?” Wallach asks with sugared malice. “I w-wasn’t thinking, let me slow it down to something you geriatrics can keep up with, hang on.”
As might have been expected, the little bastard speeds the tune up even more, and between that and the booze and the infectious boom of Malcolm’s laughter, the world turns into a breathless joyful whirl — a whirl only broken by way of a wayward divan suddenly in the way, and the tumble as we both go down, crashing to the floor in one still-laughing heap. Malcolm ends up on the bottom initially, thankfully for my ribs, but after the initial impact the momentum makes us roll one more time and leaves his weight resting on top of me, his warmth so comforting even as my lungs are struggling to get enough air.
From very close by my ear, Malcolm says: “Were those the moves you were gonna show me, or did I miss ‘em, somehow?”
“Fuck you, Malcolm,” I manage through my laughter, my face buried in the crook of his neck.
“In your dreams. You alright?” Malcolm asks, starting to lift his weight off me. Without leaving time for thought or prudence to kick in, my hands reach out and pull him back down, until we’re very nearly nose to nose.
He goes easily, yielding to my hands moving him without protest, though not without an endearing look of tipsy befuddlement. “Uh… what…”
“You’re warm,” I breathe, like that explains everything. “You’re not allowed to leave.”
“That so?”
“Uh-huh.”
Malcolm breathes a laugh, but distractedly — he’s looking at me searchingly. Without the headband to hold it back, and tousled by the dancing and the tumble, Malcolm’s hair is falling into his face a little, loose and sweet; it makes him look boyish all of a sudden, in the soft light of the oil lamps, the way he only looks when he’s surprised. His eyes are wide, blue and familiar but new with something like awe. It makes me think strange silly things, like Maybe if I’d met you earlier, before they left me, everything would have been okay. As long as you were there with me, it would have still been okay.
“I — ” Malcolm says, his breath warm against my lips, his eyes fixed on mine. “Tobias?”
I make a vague sound of agreement — “Yeah, it’s me” — and for once that doesn’t seem like such a terrible thing to admit to. My hand moves by itself to stroke his cheek, to guide his head until our foreheads rest together.
My heart feels bigger than the whole world in my chest, thrumming with some immensity I don’t understand — or maybe it’s his heart I’m feeling. The distinction seems meaningless, chest to chest as we are, like there’s only one pulse, one heartbeat and one breath between us. There’s only one river, in the end, my grandfather once told me. It flows through everything. I don’t know about everything, but everything that matters is right here, and Baba was right.
Malcolm touches my hair, brushing it away from my face with tentative fingers, stroking through it so carefully while his nose bumps my cheek. It’s such a small gesture, but it undoes me from the core almost as much as when I hear the small sound he makes as I helplessly tilt my chin for him, offering up — my mouth, my stupid incorrigible heart, whatever sad but earnest scrap of me he’ll have. There’s no way he can’t tell I’m already half-hard with his thigh pressed between my legs like that, but he doesn’t seem to mind, instead shifting to make it easier for me to grind up against him minutely.
His pupils have gone wide enough to only show a sliver of blue around them as he watches me.
Our mouths brush for a moment — or maybe they don’t, maybe we only get close to it, blood is humming too loudly in my ears to hear reality through. A further sense of unreality settles over me, blurring me at the edges and disorienting me more than our tumble had. This is finally happening. Is… is this happening?
I come back to myself with a shock that shoots up my spine and neck and freezes my head in place. What the fuck just…
Malcolm sees the change in my expression and stops, blinking. “What…”
“Let me up,” I hear my voice say, coming out strange and distant, like I’m talking to some random person on the street. My blood has been replaced with electricity, coursing through my veins in ruinous surges.
“Tobias?”
“Get off me, let me up, I can’t breathe,” I wheeze, scrabbling at his shoulder, shoving, struggling to get out from under him. Graves lets himself get pushed to the side as I scramble to get to my feet, staring at me from the floor as I wipe my sweaty palms against the thighs of my trousers, grey with dust.
“Are you alright?” the Brick asks, appearing around the side of the divan like a friendly iceberg and looking worried. “Nothing broken, I hope?”
“Nothing too bruised but my pride,” I say, with forced chipperness. My hands shake. Routine kicks in and makes me press them flat against my thighs to hide it, pretending to wipe away the dust. “How about you, Malcolm?”
Malcolm gets to his feet too, standing turned a bit awkwardly away from the rest of the room as he dusts himself off too, presumably to hide the bulge tenting the front of his trousers. His cheeks are flushed, and he glances over at me with near plaintive confusion. “‘M fine, don’t get your knickers in a twist.”
“Sorry about that,” Wallach says insincerely from over on the sofa, pouring himself a drink and lounging back with the lute resting in his lap. “In my defense I thought you b-boys would be quicker on your feet. Saving it all for the hemp fandango one day? Only the hangman gets a show?”
I flip him off, feeling like a marionette — like someone is pulling all the right strings and making me move in the ways I’m supposed to, without my body making the active choice to. The room spins around me like I’ve stepped onto one of those Piltie carousels — smears of lights and movement, a sense of being unmoored.
Wallach looks at me more closely, and a tinge of guilt steals over his features. “Hey — are you… are you sure you’re —”
With something that seems to pass for a proper smile (get away get away get away) I say: “All good, kid, think it’s just whatever this swill is catching up to me. I’m gonna go get some air, you guys keep going in the meantime.”
“If you’re gonna hurl, d-don’t do it in my boots this time,” Wallach calls after me as I walk out the door into the darkened entrance hall. We’ve been coming and going through the servants’ entrance past the kitchen, not the main doors, and I’m halfway to the kitchen when —
“Tobias,” Malcolm says, almost crashing into the doorframe in his haste to follow me out of the room. “Tobias, wait up.”
Oh, gods. “Not now, Malcolm.”
“If not now, then fucking when, T.F.? You always —” An unexpected ferocity of frustration rips through the seams in Malcolm’s voice, making me pause despite myself. Malcolm seems a bit surprised himself, and less sure when he takes the last few steps to catch up. He’s acting like he’s approaching a spooked horse, or wounded animal. Normally I’d be offended at that, but right now that’s not too far off how I feel.
I look at him and look at him and look at him. As if looking could be enough, as if I could stay here forever and never have to reveal my bad hand, never have to know the depths to which I’m broken.
I want to touch him, and I want to run, and I want both of these things with such equal artless desperation that I end up just standing there frozen on the spot, staring at him mutely, my heart pumping lightning through all my veins.
Whatever he sees in my face makes something soften in Malcolm’s eyes. He scratches at the back of his neck and looks big and real and like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands.
“I know you don’t like to… I mean, we don’t gotta talk about it if you don’t… but it wasn’t just me, right? That wasn’t just…” Malcolm looks at me uncertainly, half opening his mouth as if about to say something more and then faltering again. I can feel my own mouth too much.
For a split second I touch my fingers to it, and see his eyes dart to follow the movement avidly. Then I blink back to myself and laugh a bit, shaking my head at myself. You know what? My bluff is well and truly called. What the fuck do I even think I’m doing here anymore, might as well take the chance and go with it now. I reach out and rest my hand on his chest, brushing my thumb gently over the dip and arch of his collarbone.
“After the job,” I say. The unexpected joy, even marred by terror, has made me daring. “We can talk about it after the job. We’ll have all the time in the world, then. For now, we need to keep our heads in the game, right? Let’s just… get back in there right now.”
“Right,” he reluctantly agrees, though a grin breaks over his face when I stroke his arm reassuringly. “Right. Uh, hang on, you’re all — lemme just…”
He brushes the dust from my clothes with a peculiarly endearing awkward focus, small clouds of crushed dust bunnies hanging in the air in his wake. “Can’t have you go back in there like this, the kid’d never let you hear the end of it.”
I lean forward and let my forehead rest against his broad solid shoulder and close my eyes. After a moment of hesitation, his hand comes to land on my back, stroking up and down soothingly.
“Malcolm,” I say softly, helplessly, burrowing my face against him. His palm lands at the nape of my neck, comes to rest there.
“‘S alright,” he says, his voice so deep I can feel the vibrations of it where my chest is pressed to his.
I move away enough to meet his eyes. “...I’m sorry. Sorry, I’m just…”
“After the job,” Malcolm says, reaching out and gently stroking his rough warm palm over my cheek and then ruffling my hair with playful awkwardness, snorting when I kick him on the shin in retribution. “After the job, even if I gotta sit on you the whole time.”
“Yes!” I say, fervently. “Yes. Or, I don’t know, tie me down or something. Just… don’t let me get away.”
He wraps his big meaty arm around my shoulders and starts to walk us back towards the room with the others. “Hell, you always hafta go and make it kinky on me, T.F., but I’ll ask some fellas I know for advice and practice my sailor’s knots in the meantime, and we’ll see what we can do.”
The team greet us back like nothing had happened in a way that says they’ve talked it through while we were out, and eventually Wallach starts playing again. We dance the night away like there’ll be no tomorrow, and that seems only right.
“May I propose a toast,” I say finally, lifting my bottle. “This time next Thursday, we’ll be the richest people in Runeterra, and the fools none the wiser. To the crew, and to robbing the world blind!”
“To the crew!” they all echo, and it’s like the music sticks around in the shadowed corners even with the lute strings quieted, jubilant and bright and expectant in the face of the future.
— — — —
The Tower, Death, The Moon
In a way I’m grateful that it’s raining. It’s an indifferent sort of rain, dispassionate over the grass of the riverbank and the calm surface of the water. The river moves at a stately pace here, ponderous and thoughtful, in no hurry.
I sit curled up on myself, leaned back against a tree as I watch the thousands, millions of droplets hitting the water to leave no mark more lasting than the rings of the initial impact, smoothed away in the blink of an eye and then forgotten. I’m wondering a bit if that’s what mercy is.
Riverwater still soaks my clothes, all of it hanging off me heavy and dead like great sheets of sloughed-off skin.
The water must have washed Wallach’s blood off my hands, but I still feel it there, as slick and thick as the moment it made my grip slip and he fell — he… he fell for so long I’m so afraid he had time to… that he knew, before it…
Half-heartedly my stomach tries to empty itself again, but there’s not even river water left down there to bring up, and I just retch unproductively until it passes.
The bag I’d filled with rocks had been an improvised one by necessity — just my coat tied up as best I could and filled with the biggest stones I could find along the riverbank, until I had thought it would do the trick. Some seam must have ripped, or one of my knots been too sloppily tied. Without the weight dragging it down my idiot body hadn’t known how to let itself drown; that first breath after it dragged itself onto land and coughed up all the riverwater had been the sweetest and most sickening thing I’d ever tasted, shame claiming that breath and every one since as war spoils, honey laced with bile. I’m never getting the taste of survival out of my mouth now.
A riverman who can’t swim, a coward who couldn’t even figure out how to drown. The river wouldn’t even fucking have me, and it’s supposed to take everything in the end. I wanted it to take everything I was and wipe it out.
Beyond pain there is a place where nothing lives. I thought I’d forgotten — but I haven’t. An arid peace settles within me, barren and dead as a salt flat.
Yes. I remember this place. I’ve been here before. It feels unreal, and like the only thing that’s ever been real, and everything else is just a dream.
I was a child back then, and all I’d felt at finding this place inside was relief that the pain and fear and shame that had become my entire world the moment I realized the barques were not coming back for me wouldn’t last forever — I had no way of understanding it as such back then, what thirteen year old would, but the relief that the mind has ways to kill itself so you won’t have to.
This time there is a part of me that protests, though — the part that’s still looking for him, that hasn’t moved on from that moment I glanced over my shoulder and realized he wasn’t right behind me, like I’d thought, a voice inside that’s still calling out Malcolm? over and over, as if he might answer.
Some snarling feral part of me that holds on to him even as it burns along with everything else on that same bonfire of shame — if you take him, just take all of me, I don’t care anymore.
He’s gone, some other part answers back, quiet and stark and clinical like the bleached bone white of the plains of nothingness inside. There’s nothing left to take with you. Either try the river again, or get up and put it behind you. He won’t be here either way.
“But the river doesn’t want me,” I say helplessly, my voice like a ghost to my own ears. “It wouldn’t… it wouldn’t take me back.”
There are — other ways, though. I look at the soft skin of my wrist peeking out from under my clumsily rolled up sleeve. I look at the knife at my hip. I… consider. I decide. I take the knife from the sheath and hold the edge of it against my forearm. My veins are running ice and fire — I’m almost surprised when the knife digs in and what leaks out is blood.
In my head Malcolm says: “Tobias?”
I jerk to a stop. The warm trickle of blood keeps going, only a small ribbon of red slithering down my forearm, quickly diluted by the rain.
“I can’t,” I tell him, my voice like shards of glass in my mouth. “Malcolm, I can’t, please. Please, just let me leave. I can’t do this alone.”
It feels like — I could swear — for a moment I feel hands gently closing around my wrists, familiar broad square fingers, the warmth of his callused palms carefully stilling my movements. The knife falters from digging further into my flesh.
It’s nothing but a form of delirium, it has to be. But for just that one moment it’s like he’s really there, like if I turned my head I’d see him there, brow scrunched and troubled.
The merciful madness only lasts for a moment, though the afterimage stays imposed on my mind like the shapes in your vision after looking directly at the sun, diffuse fields of certainty blotting everything else out.
“No, don’t go, please, come back — Malcolm! Malcolm, please…”
But there’s just me, and the water.
You left him, you fucking coward.
“I didn’t mean to, I didn’t know, I thought — he said…”
The sense of unreality fractures enough to let the last few days shine sickeningly through the cracks. Oh gods, Kolt is dead. She died. They shot her in the head, and she died. They’re all dead. Malcolm’s gone. We didn’t get him back, he’s still in there. He’s still in there, and I just ran away without him.
This time I do manage to throw up, somehow, bringing up nothing but bile and brackwater that coats the inside of my mouth afterwards, lingering.
My fingers curl into the grass and tear chunks of it out, like I have to claw onto the ground to not just drift away. Reality becomes distant again, a high thin tone ringing through my head and blocking it out, and I can breathe.
While that lack of clarity that allows any clarity at all lasts, I realize that as obscene a mistake as I am, I still have final duties I can’t shirk away from like I did all the others. I tear a strip off my shirt and fumble with rain-chilled fingers to make a tourniquet-bandage thing to stop the worst of the bleeding. Probably didn’t get around to nicking anything really important in there, and frankly I don’t give a fuck if it turns out I did, but I have something I need to do first before I potentially bleed out. Once I’m done with the bandage, I stumble over to the riverside and fall to my knees just where the shallow water hits the land.
I dip my hands into the water. They’re shaking still, but the water moves smoothly around them all the same. The current slowly carries away the last of the blood, and I feel a keen sting of loss at seeing it happen, even if it’s just what rivers do. They wash things clean, and move on.
It ain’t the Serpentine, precisely, but that’s fine — my grandfather used to say that all water everywhere’s connected, that in a way it’s all part of the same river, all of it eternally returning to the ocean. I don’t think I really got what he was telling me back then. Lots of stuff I didn’t understand, not until it was too late.
I get it now, though. I tell the water here, and one day it’ll fall as rain back over the river, or it’ll flow until it meet the ocean somewhere. It’ll carry my words to where they need to go, sooner or later.
Now how to… are there words you’ve gotta say? I never saw this part up close. There were only a few funerals in my time, and I was too small to help out, watching from the side with my mom’s arms wrapped around me like she was afraid I’d be carried off by the water too if she didn’t hold on tightly enough. Hah. Ironic, really, since it turned out pretty quickly the water didn’t want anything to do with me. And neither did she, in the end.
I haven’t been through any of the old traditions, the stuff you do to mark that you’re an adult. I guess as far as the river’s concerned I’m still a kid.
“I… don’t know how you do this, exactly,” I say, wiping rainwater from my face ineffectually with my sodden sleeve. My throat is raw like a wound. “I was just a kid when I left, they hadn’t gotten around to teaching me the deep things yet, the really old stuff. But I figure… I figure you’ll be able to tell that I mean it. I — I-I’ve got a few souls to ask safe passage for, even if they weren’t born to the river, if that’s the sort of thing you can… can do.”
It’s hard to get the words out through the sobs and my chattering teeth, but I set my jaw and close my eyes to concentrate.
I fumble in my head for the prayers of my childhood, but I can only find odds and ends of them, a handful broken links of chain I can’t quite get to fit together anymore into coherence. It’s been so long since I spoke anything in the tongue I learned from my mother; at some point while I was looking the other way, it’s become the language of some stranger I barely knew long ago and, looking back, didn’t much like.
I remember the first few phrases fine, the old prayers, the ones you always open with. After that I flounder, lost between the forgotten words and half-remembered constructions. It’s a poor offering, but the only one I know how to make, so I grit my teeth and stick with it until I get to the most important part.
One by one I give their names to the river — it feels patchwork in some places: I don’t know what Wallach’s middle name was, just that they found it embarrassing enough to try to keep from me what the G. was an initial of. I’m pretty sure I don’t pronounce Kolt’s given name exactly right, she said no one outside the part of Ionia her father came from ever did. The Brick — is just that, and somehow with him I don’t feel the same fear. The Brick had more than earned the right to be just The Brick, if that’s what he wanted to be. The river will find him and know him by that.
All of that, and when I get to the name I’m the most responsible for, the one I’ve spoken so many times before, the closest to my own, to family… it won’t come. I can’t put him down. The idea of feeling him sink beneath the waves and letting go of him is — I can’t, it doesn’t… I can’t. Weak to the last, a failure to him in every way I could have been, even to his memory. I drop my face into my hands and go blank again for interminable minutes.
“Mercy, please,” I whisper. “Mercy. Look out for him, even though I’m too weak to do what’s needed. That’s not his fault.”
I can’t reach for the knife without feeling the phantom touch of big square fingers against my wrist, but I can’t… I can’t live like this either.
My voice seems to know what to do before I do, coming out cracked and hoarse but steady as I lift my face from my hands. “I’ve got someone else to give back, and I hope you’ll take him. Maybe you’ll find a use for him, he hasn’t been much good to anyone else.”
Tobias Felix slides beneath the water without a protest or regret, and, Luck willing, is heard from no more.
Then I sit there by the riverbed, listening to the rain hit the water and not thinking about anything.
I remember this, too, from the last time. The world can end, and no one cares. The world can end, and the world goes on, dragging you along even though you’re a stranger to it now. At some point I will have to get up and let myself be carried along by the stream of time. But not yet.
The river keeps its secrets and offers no answers, and doesn’t ask me for any answers of my own. That’s more kindness than I could ask for, really. That’ll have to be enough.
END OF PART 1
Chapter Text
PART 2 — Ten Years Later
— — — —
The Hanged Man, The Star, Nine of Swords
“Ah. So the rumours about the mansion were true, then.” I keep the card spinning between my fingers, to and fro, out of sight and back, indulging in the comfort of muscle memory.
“So says every source I’ve managed to track down, at least.” Behind his plain desk, Hersh leans back in his chair and takes his neat wire rimmed glasses off to clean them on the edge of his waistcoat, worn fabric stretched over the slight paunch of his belly. Short, starting to tip into the far side of middle age and with the inescapable air of low-level accountancy, Myrddan Hersh an information broker, and eminently reliable in his seemingly unimpressive way. People talk more around men who look like they’re no threat to anyone. We’ve always gotten along fabulously, probably because I’m one of the few people tactful enough to not comment on the toupee. Everyone has their funny little ways, and an enduring inability to color match a wig is one so supremely innocent in the large scale of things that I actually find it quite charming.
“You’re a lifesaver, Hersh,” I tell him, tossing a small coin purse onto his desk. He might be literally so in this case; I could’ve ended up blundering into the middle of a tank full of sharks both literal and figurative there, if I hadn’t taken the precaution to double check.
He puts his glasses back on and takes the pouch with a nod, not bothering to count out the coins while I’m there. Me and Hersh go way back, and there are people you’re better off not short changing because it’ll cost you more in the long run. “What can I say, I do my best. If anyone asks later, you never saw me, and I never saw you. Hey, Fate, just one more thing,” he adds, looking troubled.
I glance up, attention sharpened by the tone of his voice. “Hm?”
“You watch your back out there, okay?”
Uh-oh. Sounds like trouble. “Always do,” I say breezily, not letting my unease show. “But I’d still like to hear what brought this on, if you don’t mind.”
“Word is that someone you used to run with is out for your blood. In a big way.”
“Huh? Used to run with? Who…” I wrinkle my forehead, trying and failing to match that up with anyone I’ve joined forces with recently. It’s not a long list, I work alone most of the time. Less fuss, less obligatory jailbreak duty when they inevitably mess up. I do just fine on my own. “Winstable? The hell did I ever do to him? ‘Cept that thing with his sister, I suppose,” I amend, conscientiously. Though in my defense his sister really, really hadn’t wanted to marry that guy they had slated for her, and she paid me a small fortune to smuggle her over the border. Not my fault that she just so happened to have a taste for tall men and an adventurous disposition as well; we had some fun along the way and parted as great friends. Last I heard she’d taken up with a lady who does some of the finest art forgery in the business. Recognized her lovingly rendered ass in one of the wife’s creations one time, undercover as a bone fide ‘newly discovered’ Petichesco nude on display in one of Piltover’s finest galleries. It’s nice to see things work out okay sometimes.
Hersh shakes his head, threatening the stability of the toupé precariously. “No, no, not Winstable. Further back, properly good old days times. That one, oh, what was his name now… big guy, brown hair, bit of a temper, Bilgewater man originally. You two used to be thick as, well, thieves back in the day, never saw one pop up without the other… right on the tip of my tongue...”
“Graves?” I ask, hearing my voice as if from a very long way away. “...Malcolm Graves?”
Hersh snaps his fingers appreciatively. “That’s the fella, alright. Fresh outta prison and firmly on the warpath, or so I hear.”
There’s a silence, long and sharp like it’s balanced on the edge of a knife. The card has stilled in my hand. I barely dare to breathe.
“He’s alive?” I say.
“Alive enough to be hollering real loud about breaking every bone in your body, at the very least.”
He’s alive.
I burst out laughing, and then I just can’t stop, helpless to it even when Hersh looks at me like he’s worried I’ve gone off my rocker for good.
“That stupid stubborn sonofabitch,” I manage eventually, drying my eyes on my sleeve. “He’s like a force of fucking nature. I can’t believe — well, if anyone could, it’d be him, I guess, but… huh. Huh.”
Another wave overtakes me. And they say Lady Luck distributes her favour randomly; clearly she’s just indulging her peculiar sense of humor.
Hersh squints at me over the rim of his glasses. “You did pick up on that part where I said he wanted to kill you, right? Like, with his bare hands, he’d set heaven and earth ablaze to track you down and end you, this ringing any bells? I did mention that?”
I shrug, the last of the giggles finally letting me go. “Admittedly that is less than ideal. But lots of people have wanted to kill me, and none of ‘em have succeeded so far. It’ll be fine. I just can’t believe he…”
I break off, the grin on my face unbanishable by any force. Malcolm’s alive. That’s — huh. That… changes things.
“I take it whatever grievance he’s got ain’t mutual, then.”
I shake my head absently. Does Graves know what actually happened back then? He was certainly too distracted to listen to me at the time — I doubt he was getting much of anything, except whatever he’d gotten into his thick skull and I couldn’t get out in time. Sounds like his temper’s up, it’ll be hard to get through to him with much of anything before that changes. Maybe I’ll just… lead him on a merry chase until he calms down enough that there’s a chance we could talk. He’s tenacious as a shark scenting blood, but hey, I’ve got all the time in the world, and even Malcolm can’t stay angry forever. Or at least so I have to gamble.
The card starts dancing between my fingers again, and I feel it humming against my skin and my mind, more subdued and thoughtful than the wave of emotion currently crashing through my mind.
Hersh folds his hands over his stomach and leans back in his chair, deceptively casual. “Sounds like there’s a story here.”
“Hm?”
“You two used to be all buddy-buddy back in the day, two peas nicking the same pod. Never saw the like. So why’s he after your blood now?”
I sigh. “A misunderstanding, I’d wager. He’s, uh. Given to jumping to conclusions, sometimes.”
“Must be some misunderstanding.”
I’m not about to explain the whole sad story to a man who lives off of selling secrets. Hersh must be losing his touch to fish so shamelessly. Or he might be under the illusion that we’re a lot more buddy-buddy than our professional connection, however long standing, warrants. Which is just another way of losing your touch in this business. “Tell me ‘bout it.”
For a moment he looks at me shrewdly, and then he softens. “Well, you know him better than I do, I’m sure you’ve got a handle on it. Just… watch yourself out there, kid.”
I get up and straighten my clothes before tossing him a piece of silver. “Will do. Thanks for the heads-up, anyway.”
He catches the silver and holds it up in a gesture of graciousness. “You’re a polite young man and haven’t skimped out on a payment yet, which is nothing to sniff at in this day and age. I’d hate to lose your customership just like that.”
“Oh, you and your sweet-talkin’ ways, Hersh. I’ll see you around.”
I saunter down the stairs and through the door into the brilliant summer afternoon outside. The card whirling between my fingers still hums its pensive little tune, a hymn of unease.
“Quit it with the doomsaying, you worrywarts,” I tell them under my breath, running a comforting finger down the edge of the card I’m holding. I know that man better than I’ve ever known myself; it’d be a sorry state of affairs indeed if I couldn’t predict the movements of Malcolm ‘The Quickest Path Between Two Points Is A Straight Line Even If I Gotta Smash Through A Wall To Make It So’ Graves. He ain’t gonna catch me unless — until? — I let him. “This is good news.”
Good news is an understatement. In all honesty, it seems nothing short of a miracle. After three years or so I had decided, on a shitty, shitty night I only half succeeded in forgetting despite the truly copious amounts of alcohol I employed specifically to that end, to give up that last little glowing ember of hope I’d been pretending I wasn’t clinging to, because at that point I couldn’t have told you what would be worse — that he was dead, or that he was still alive in there. But here he is, popping up like Lady Luck pulled him out of her tophat with a flourish and her unreadable grin, and clearly he’s stayed sound enough of both mind and body to rush straight into action, like always.
“This is good news,” I repeat to myself, as I head straight to the nearest bar.
——
“This is good news,” I insist to the bartender, who correctly takes that as his cue to fill up my glass again. Good man. Good, good man. Good news.
“I’m sure it is, friend,” he says, with the imperturbable air of a man who’s seen everything and then was dragged backwards over broken glass to see everything once more in reverse.
I cover my face in one hand and sigh. Maybe drinking was a bad idea. It was much easier to just immediately repress everything Hersh had said before I started on my first sip of hard liquor. It was easier to pretend nothing had changed, that the one thing that could change everything hadn’t…
My head is so fucking heavy, and crowded, I can barely hear myself think over the clamour; it’s like I’ve got fifteen parallel battlegrounds playing themselves out in there, and I’m not in the winning side of any of them.
With the gravitas of an ancient tree finally relenting to time and gravity, I slowly slump forward until my forehead rests against the bar top.
“He wants to kill me,” I tell the bar top, which is cold and unpleasantly sticky against my forehead and smells like decades of spilled beer. “He came back. Because he wants to kill me. That is why he came back. And maybe he’s right to.”
“That’s how it shakes out sometimes,” the barman says with muted sympathy. “Reminds me of that whole thing with my third wife. No one walked away from that one gracefully, lemme tell you.”
Stuff is floating to the surface in my mind that I thought dead and drowned a long, long time ago. I try to flinch away from them, but they stick to me like my shadow, follow me, mimic my movements like they’re mocking me. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to make it stop. I find myself very afraid that nothing can. They say you can run from everything but yourself, but I’d thought I’d been given that old truism the slip along with everything else.
Time turns odd and viscous around me with drinking and confusion. It’s mostly quiet in the bar, here in the middle of the day, apart from the squeaking noises of the bartender diligently distributing dirt more evenly around the glass he’s drying off. I’m pretty sure it’s been the same glass the last hour or so, at least.
For the first time in years I keep seeing the shape of him that night, just a shadow in the distance that didn’t turn to me no matter how much I shouted for his attention. Why wouldn’t he listen? Why couldn’t he have really listened to me, just one fucking time?
“Why do we even bother?” I whisper against the sticky wood.
“With life? With love?” The squeaking takes on a pensive quality. “Hell if I know some days, son. Good for business, though. You want a refill for that rhetorical question, or just sympathy?”
“You’re a good man,” I tell him earnestly and blindly push my glass towards him so he can top it up.
“See where you stand on that one tomorrow morning, huh,” he advises, and gives me back my glass. “If you can stand by then, that is. I don’t often say this, but I’m cutting you off after this one, I do have a heart somewhere in here still.”
Big square hands trying to give me a glass of water, holding my hair back with surprising gentleness while I’m busy emptying my guts. Marmalade towers and pickles.
I start laughing, because the only other alternative is crying in front of a total stranger — a good one, though, a very good one, even if his drinks do taste like paint thinner — and my brain decides on one over the other only as if by a coin toss that wasn’t even rigged.
He did come back. No one ever came back before. I was so sure he was just — gone, like everything else. The world forever, irrevocably reduced. Does it… does it matter so much why, at that point? Does it matter if turns out yet again that that resplendent, restored world exists, you just don’t deserve to live in it yourself? Do you haggle on a miracle?
Yesterday he didn’t exist, and now he does again.
“This is good news,” I decide with finality and sit up woozily, grinning at the barman. “Hey, friend, you ever had your cards read?”
— — — —
“T.F. It’s been a long time.”
— — — —
Five of Swords (Reversed)
Bilgewater is currently on fire so thoroughly that it turns the night sky orange and my shoulder hurts like a motherfucker, but at least we’re alive. I work to pick the lock to the small fisherman’s hut one-handed while Malcolm stands watch right behind me, keeping an eye out for any stragglers from the open warfare in town who might somehow manage to stumble all the way out here.
“Sorta wish we could get a bit further away from the water,” I mumble, eyeing the incoming tide where it laps at the barnacle-encrusted rocks a dismayingly short way away from our feet.
Graves makes a gruff noise. “It’s out of the way enough that I doubt anyone’s gonna trek out here even with the whole harbour burning, and I know for a fact Ol’ Shasha ain’t comin’ back from the mainland for at least another week. It’s the best I can do you for right now, princess, so suck it up.”
Malcolm knows this town in that way only someone who grew up in the bowels of it could. If he says this is the best place to lie low until we can get on a ship or figure something else out tomorrow, it likely is.
“Didn’t mean to complain about your choice of accommodations, I’m just — I’ve had enough of the water to last a lifetime.”
“Guess that’s fair enough,” he allows, softening a little. “You gettin’ anywhere with that, or should I just kick the whole thing down and call it a day?”
“If you’d have an iota of patience for once in our — ah, there we go.”
He gestures for me to stay behind him as he peeks into the hut, squinting at the darkness. I take out my last card — the one he’d slipped me back on the ship, that blessed million-to-one last shot we somehow managed to get through on; I’m thinking of getting it framed or finding some way to keep it close to my heart from now on — and let some magic flow into it, making it give off a low glow to see the room by. Graves looks sharply over at the sudden appearance of light, then says: “Oh. Yeah.” He gives the illuminated room another lookover and then says: “Okay, looks clear in there. Let’s go.”
It feels — strange, and strange in how much it isn’t strange. It’s so easy to be around him, and so hard. Moments slip in where it’s like the last ten years didn’t even happen, and then we brush against it like it’s an exposed nerve and we both remember, and flinch.
I follow him into the dark of the hut — it’s small, just one room with a bed, a table and chair next to a small stove, and a sink hooked up to some creative type of Bilgewater homemade plumbing, probably dumping the waste water into the ocean outside somewhere.
I make sure the curtains are all completely drawn before I put the card away and light the oil lamp on the low rickety table, placing my poor battered hat down next to it. Then my legs decide it’s finally time to give in for the night, and I half-collapse onto the chair next to the table. Somehow I get my coat off, groaning and leaning my temple against the wall as the movement jostles my shoulder. Son of a bitch, that hurts.
Malcolm comes over. “...that all your blood?”
“Hm? Oh. Yeah, think so. Someone got me in the shoulder before I hit the water.”
He runs a hand tiredly through his hair, stiff and unruly with saltwater and ash, and probably other things we’re likely better off not thinking about too hard before we reach somewhere we can have a proper bath. “Should take a look at that before we settle in for the night, I guess. Kinda dumb if we survived all that only for you to be taken off by the sore fever straight after.”
“Probably a good call. You got anythin’ that needs looking at?” I’ll probably make for a poor surgeon with only one fully functioning hand at my disposal, but we’ll get it done somehow anyway. We always have before.
“Nah, nothin’ time won’t fix on its own, don’t sweat it,” he says dismissively. In the lamplight I can see the damage left by Gangplank’s men, his left eye swollen almost shut and his face starting to take on more shades of red and black-purple and the brown of drying blood than even the most fevered artist could ever dream of. It’s almost enough to make me wish we could bring those fuckers back to life, just to get to kill them myself all over again. That feeling’s not a particularly frequent guest for me, I don’t enjoy killing; most times I’d rather run before it comes to that. But Malcolm looks tired and bruised and bone-weary right now, and I’m not doing that hot either, to tell the truth. I’m not feeling quite like myself.
There’s a barrel of fresh water over in the corner, seemingly rainwater gathered through the same inventive kind of pipe system as the waste water going out, and Graves gets a couple of bowls and fills them, using one to wash his hands over by the sink with a shrivelled and dried up bar of soap before shaking his hands somewhat dry and pouring the rest of the water into a pot to boil. The stove starts to give off some blessed heat pretty quickly, and I scoot myself closer. While we wait for the water to boil, Graves sets off hunting through the hut, starting with what might generously be thought of as the room’s kitchen. It’s got an iron pan hung on the wall next to where the pot had been, a shelf high up with some dusty jars on it, a narrow bench with a homemade cupboard tucked beneath, and that’s about it.
Graves quickly gives a triumphant sound as he searches the shelf and comes up with some dried fish and a half-full jar of nuts and preserved fruits. Popping a handful of the nuts into his mouth, he extends the jar towards me with his eyebrows raised.
His appetite always was damn near unassailable. Guess it comes from growing up within smelling distance of the slaughtering docks. Lucky him — just the idea of food sits queasily in my stomach.
“Hm. No thanks,” I say, and he shrugs in a ‘suit yourself’ kind of way and pops a piece of dried fish in his mouth as well. “Nice to have some supplies for the trip, though.”
“Mhm. Should probably get some water in you, though, at least. You’ve bled out half your liquid contents already.” He rummages around until he finds a cup up on the shelf and fills it from the water barrel, downing it himself twice before filling it again and handing it to me. I take a careful sip, and thankfully find that it stays down okay. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was.
“Thanks. Think they’ve got any booze on hand?” I ask hopefully, taking another sip of water and letting it roll around in my mouth to wash away the leftover taste of brine and ash and worse from the ocean before I swallow.
He chuckles absently as he finishes his piece of dried fish, going through the cupboard semi-methodically. “You do know where we are, right? The fever and confusion ain’t settin’ in already? Yup, here we go. Good ol’ Bilgewater priorities.”
When he opens the cupboard door fully he reveals a whole shelf of bottles, each a different shape and size and proclaimed proof. He looks through them swiftly, sniffs a few, takes a grateful pull on one, and then seems to settle on one as the best choice for medical purposes. The water starts to boil, and after pulling it aside to cool some he pours some of the booze over his hands, rubbing it over them as he continues his hunt.
While I continue to carefully work away at my glass of water he rummages through the low chest he drags out from under the bed, before he makes a pleased noise and fishes something out. Looks like a shirt, and clean enough, as much as anything in Bilgewater ever can be. Malcolm effortlessly tears it into strips, ripping it like it’s so much Ionian rice paper. “Okay, I think we’re set. Time to start operatin’.”
“Yippee,” I murmur, steeling myself.
“Here. You might find this helpful,” he says dryly, taking the emptied water glass from my hand and replacing it with a bottle of rum.
With a weak grin, I say: “Now there’s the sort of doctor’s order I can get behind.”
I get a couple of swigs in while he unbuttons my clothes — vest first and then the shirt, all done with the mechanical patience born of exhaustion. His hand brushes against my stomach as he finishes up, and I find it in me to curse the fact that I’m too fucking tired to even feel too much about how it’s the first time he’s really touched me again, and that it’s not to strangle the life from me like I’m pretty sure he was about to at one point back there. A man has to count his blessings sometimes, even if he has to commit to a lot of cloud gazing to find that silver lining.
...he never did put his hands on me, though, did he. Not even when he had me cornered and there was nothing to really stop him. Oh man, I’m not nearly drunk enough yet to start thinking through what that might be about, putting that riiight out of my mind for now and the foreseeable future.
He tugs on the sleeve on my uninjured side, and I collaborate to shrug out of it. He pulls it half away from my back before it catches on something that makes me hiss under my breath.
With a grunt of dissatisfaction, he says: “Shirt’s stuck around the edge of the wound here. Might sting a bit. I’d keep the booze handy, if I were you.”
“Already done,” I manage around the mouth of the bottle, the burn down my throat blessedly numbing.
He starts to ease the fabric away from where it’s stuck on drying blood and frayed skin. “It ain’t bleedin’ too bad anymore, at least. Can you still lift your arm okay, anyway?”
“Yeah. Not — hng. Not happily quite yet, but I don’t think it hit anything too important in there. I can move it, it just hurts like hell.”
“Looks like the bullet went through cleanly, too. You always did have the luck of a fuckin’ devil,” he says, sounding like he’s shaking his head in mild disbelief behind me.
I grit my teeth against a groan as he finishes peeling the shirt away. “It’s a — aaah — a peculiar sorta luck.”
“Bet Gangplank would’ve killed to have some of even that kinda luck tonight.”
“As if Gangplank ever needed any excuse to kill.”
He gives a snort. “Got me there. There we go.”
“I can’t believe my vest is ruined,” I say despondently as he balls it up and tosses it over onto the modest woodpile next to the stove. “And it’ll take ages before we reach anywhere I can replace it with something decent, too.”
“Good to see your priorities haven’t improved any over the years,” he mumbles.
I start to turn around to look at him, then stiffen as that wrenches at something near my shoulder that isn’t pleased about being moved right now, and I think better of it. “Listen, time can heal a wound or a broken bone, but it ain’t gonna suddenly provide me with a new waistcoat in Ionian silk from thin air, is it? Besides I really liked the color of that one, it’s gonna be a bitch to — ow! — track down one exactly like it again. Fuck.”
He’s started to wash the worst of the blood and grime away from the wound, the water in the bowl slowly turning red. The cold sweat prickles on my skin and makes my hair cling to my forehead as he moves on to my front to get at the entry wound, which is thankfully smaller and neater.
Not sounding terribly sympathetic, he says: “Take it you parted with a lotta coin for it, then?”
“Well, someone did, anyway,” I mutter. He barks a proper laugh at that, the sound of it rusty, like he’s gotten out of the habit and has to ease back into it.
“Bet we can find someone else who can be prevailed upon to be... generous along the way, I wouldn’t worry.” Moving to stand behind me again, he gathers my hair up in his hand and moves it to rest over my other shoulder and out of the way, his fingers brushing against the back of my neck and forcing me to suppress a shiver.
Then he reaches expectantly over my shoulder, and I take one last swig from the bottle before handing it over, grimacing as the burn slides down my gullet and aches in my torso. Well, if it’s strong enough to steal the breath from a grown man even when prepared, it’ll probably do a decent job at killing off anything unwholesome jostling to join my bloodstream too, at least.
“The hell did you go and get yourself shot for, Tobias?” Malcolm demands, accusing like he’s been brooding on this one for a while, as he picks up one of the rags he’s made from the shirt and dunks his hands in the booze once more.
“To stop your stubborn ass from becoming shark food. For which you remain welcome, by the way.”
“I told you to get out of there,” he says, shaking his head in my peripheral vision as he gets the rag soaked in the alcohol.
“And since when have I done anything — ah, fuck, ow — just because you told me to? This one’s on you for expecting anything else, partner.”
He mutters something darkly under his breath, but his big rough hands are surprisingly gentle working around the wound in my shoulder. Between the booze and the pain and the tiredness, my mind goes strange for a moment, past and present flowing into synonymity like tributaries of the same river until I can’t quite tell where or when I am, just that he’s here too. Maybe it’s the familiarity of the situation playing a trick on me. I haven’t really been hurt like that a lot over the years — because unlike some people, no need to name names, but someone in immediate proximity undeniably comes to mind, I have the good godsdamn sense to get out of the way when something tries to hit me, instead of meeting it head on like an angry bull. But when I have been hurt, he’s been the one to patch me up.
Once he has finished washing the wound and zealously covered my shoulder in makeshift bandages, he moves to stand in front of me, extending his hand to me in a demanding sort of way.
“Gimme your hand.”
I glance at him. Man, they messed him up good, no way he can see much of anything out of that left eye right now. “Huh?”
“Your hand,” he repeats, like he’s talking to a particularly slow child. “Might as well straighten that out as well, while we’re at it.”
Oh, the place I cut myself trying to pick the lock. It’s not that deep, but he’s right, better to not give it the chance to fester. I offer him my hand and he takes it, dumping a decent amount of booze over the palm. I hiss at the sting, but the pain is becoming more distant, my nerves thrumming tiredly along like they’re just phoning it in until they can get off shift.
His hands are still big and square and callused, familiar to me like a childhood song. They’re covered in new scars I know nothing about.
He holds on to my hand for longer than I expected him to after he’s finished wrapping it up, and I glance up at him questioningly to find him looking — tired, maybe. Older, in a way I can’t pretend not to see, no matter how much I might like to.
“You taken up palm reading in your spare time without telling me about it?” I joke, my heart doing some things in my chest I don’t understand. My voice comes out weaker than I’d meant it to. “‘Cause you know the many shades of artful charlatanry is my vocation, a bit rude of you to infringe on it without as much as a heads-up.”
“Tobias,” he says, meeting my eyes. I smile. It feels brittle on my mouth even as I keep it in place. He’s emerged from behind the almost mindless rage and hurt from earlier tonight, his gaze familiar once more. I forgot what it’s like, being looked at like this, by someone who actually sees you.
“Yup, last time I checked,” I quip. Well. Not so much anymore, I haven’t heard that name in so long, but that’s a conversation for another time.
He doesn’t let himself get derailed — just my luck that he seems to have figured that one out at some point during the last decade, he used to be so much easier to distract — only keeps looking at me with his tired eyes. “...about what I said, before. I — ”
Oh-ho-ho-ho no, there are limits to what I am prepared to deal with tonight, and that sort of talk is very firmly past them and straight into dangerous territory. I’m ill equipped for it at the best of times, if I have to deal with it right now I might actually lose my mind for good; I’d rather have the fucking ocean again.
“Woah, hey,” I say, breaking him off with a shake of my head as I shift our hands so mine slips out of his grasp. “Don’t. No need for that. We both said some stuff, no point in dwelling on it.”
Besides, he was only telling the truth, just a decade and change too late. He always was a bit slow on the uptake. At the end of the day, I always will be a coward.
He keeps his hand where it is for a good long while after my fingers slide out of his grip, standing very still. It’s strange, seeing him look lost. It’s worse not being able to give him an out, because I’m no less lost myself.
Finally he seems to decide to give it up as a bad job and squares his broad shoulders, movement returning to him. He glances behind him and goes to pull the blanket from the room’s only bed, returning to drape it over my shoulders.
“Gotta keep you warm somehow, and you ain’t undoin’ all my hard work by trying to get that arm back into a sleeve and opening up the wound again,” he says brusquely at my questioning look, adding a few more logs to the stove to keep the heat of it alive.
I breathe a laugh and gather the blanket better around me with my good hand. It’s old and faded and stinks undeniably of old cigarette smoke and fish oil, but it’s also warm and worn comfortably soft from long use, and besides I suspect I smell even worse right now. I can’t even tell anymore. “Aye aye, doc.”
He rolls his eyes and takes one last look at me before he says: “Well, this is about the best I can do for now. It’ll have to do until we can get someone to look at it properly back on the mainland tomorrow.”
“Much obliged,” I say, cold sweat still pearling on my forehead. “I’ll take the first watch, I’m not gonna be sleeping for a while anyway like this. You grab some rest.”
He gives me a narrow look for a moment before he nods, handing the bottle back to me. Guess the paranoia’s not cowed enough by the exhaustion to completely withdraw. I suspect we’ll be working on that for a while yet. Maybe… maybe it’ll never go away completely, no matter what I do or say.
I rub the fraying edge of the blanket between my fingers, gazing into thin air for a while as he gets rid of the bloodied water in the sink. Then he scratches the back of his neck and heads for the bed.
“Hey,” I emerge from my thoughts to say, lobbing my coat at him one-handed. He catches it, blinking at me. “Use that as a blanket if you’d like, I think it’s decently dry by now.”
He stares blankly at me a few moments longer — his brain’s clearly decided it’s time to call it a day — before he glances down at the coat, blinks at it, too, for a while. After that he proceeds to drape it over himself as he slumps onto the bed and, from the sound of it, falls into a dead sleep before his head has finished hitting the ratty pillow.
I extinguish the lamp to save on the low store of oil and take out the lucky card to use for light instead, the low blue glow of it barely reaching into the dark corners or across to Malcolm’s slumbering form. His bulk makes the bed look almost comically undersized, like it was built for a child. I smile despite myself, watching the dark shape of him huddled under my coat as he breathes slowly.
It’s… it’s been a long day, and night, and almost day again.
We’re sleeping in the same room and we’re on the run together once more, and everything’s different, and maybe I won’t ever find a way to make him trust me again like he used to, but — but it’s something, right? He’s here, and we’re alive. That’s enough. More than I ever dreamed I’d have again, and probably more than I deserve. It’s a shot.
A shot at what, exactly, I have no idea, but it’s infinitely more than nothing. I’ll take it.
...I’m not sure I really believe in any of the spirits of fate and fortune watching over us that my grandpa talked about when I was a kid, but I take a minute to close my eyes and call out a mental thank you note of sorts anyway. Ingratitude is not a good look at the best of times, never mind after something like this.
Then I lean my head against the wall and just breathe for a while, the smell of burning barely noticeable in the air all the way out here. From what I’m starting to puzzle together, Sarah Fortune played us all for fools and nearly sent us to the depths along with Gangplank and his ragged court, like she meant to pay the tithe to the Bearded Lady in blood, all to usurp the strange and uneasy throne of Bilgewater. And you know what? She can have it, the whole stinking ever-roiling cadaver of it. I can’t help but wonder which of us is going to consider tonight a bigger win in the long run — there’s no amount of gold you could offer me to try to keep some kind of rule over that place, I’m a man who knows his place in the world enough for that, at least. But clearly she wants to give it a shot. Seems like enough of a punishment to me.
I brandish my bottle in an ironic little salute and take another swig as Malcolm shifts in his sleep. Good luck to you, Fortune, I’m outta here.
We’re outta here.
— — — —
Some things are still the same as the old days, I learn as the days and weeks go by. A lot of things are different.
There’s a different set to his muscles these days, ropier and tougher, hardened, the sort that happens with too little feed and too much work over too long a period of time. He’s got scars in places and numbers I do my best not to think about, most days. He doesn’t talk about it, and I don’t ask.
The fear still clings to the edges of my mind — that I’ll turn to him one day and find him lost under years of hatred again, out of my reach. It comes over him in fits, sometimes; it reminds me a bit of that look I’ve seen in some old soldiers, the way their eyes drift over at the sound of a shout or a clang of metal, like whatever they’re seeing is something — somewhen — different than the present. But most of the time it’s alright. Not the way things used to be, and not how I'd like it to be, but alright. I’ve got a lot of trust to earn back, and it’s the only honest work I’ll ever willingly dedicate myself to with no reservations.
He looks at me sometimes and it’s like he’s asking me something — falteringly requesting an answer in a language I’m not sure I speak anymore, if I ever did.
He says my name and it’s like he’s raising the dead, dredging him back up from the river where he’d very much meant to stay drowned.
I try to answer in the ways I still can.
— — — —
Six of Swords, Six of Cups
Piltover’s… well, Piltover, ticking away like one of their hextech machines: clean, ordered, bright, clever, full of neatly interlocking parts and systems pulling each other around and around, and obscurely unsettling for all of it.
We went back to the gunsmith this morning, and now we’re holed up in the hotel room we’re renting while she’s making the last adjustments and a few finishing flourishes. I neither know nor care too much about firearms — if I have to use one, I like for it to work when I pull the trigger, and that’s about the extent of my interest — but she’d seemed frighteningly competent in that cheerful, airy way old craftsmen sometimes get when they know their trade inside and out like other people might their own pockets, and she and Malcolm have spent countless hours in excited chatter over the whole business while I did my very best not to nod off in a corner of the workshop. Holding the near-completed thing for the first time, Graves had looked the very image of a man cradling a firstborn in his arms.
The gun should be ready to pick up tomorrow, and then — I don’t rightly know, actually. Guess we’ll have to figure out what kind of job we’re taking on next, where we’re going in a longer term sort of way. It’s been strangely comforting to have a definite, unquestioned goal in mind all this time, it makes me uneasy to face the prospect of opening the subject of the future for discussion, leaving that safe simplicity of purpose behind. Enough so that I’m finding sleep hard to come by, sitting up long after Malcolm’s asleep and snoring over on his own bed. (We’ve made some tidy profits on the scams we pulled on the way over here, but not enough to be getting separate rooms in fancy Piltovan hotels for a month.)
Moonlight washes in through big gilded windows, and I sit by the table with my shirt half unbuttoned and my shirtsleeves rolled up, listening to him breathe. In some ways it makes me feel better, and in some ways it’s making it all so much worse.
I know from bitter experience that there’s no point in trying to even lie down in bed yet, so to kill the time I consult the cards in the half-darkness — not about anything important, just conversational stuff, the equivalent of idle gossiping, keeping each other company. I don’t really need to see the cards to be able to read them, so I don’t even keep the lamp lit. The meanings thrum through my fingers and my mind on their own, a comforting hum that both steadies me and fuels a restless yearning in my chest that only seems to grow more pronounced with age. The longer I listen to them the more the call gets to me, all the more unbearable for how I still don’t know how to answer back fully, the knowledge forever barely out of reach.
I’m used to it, though. It’s been all I’ve got for a long time, but it’s a hell of a lot more than nothing.
Malcolm makes a sound in his sleep, a small strangled one like he’s biting back pain, and then again as he starts to move fretfully under the covers, his breathing gone quick and sharp. I pause and put the cards down, my teeth catching on my bottom lip as I glance over at him. He’s a much lighter sleeper these days, I can tell from his breathing that he returns to wakefulness constantly like your tongue would a sore tooth.
The tells are easy to read by now; it’s a nightmare. So far he’s had one at least two times a week, and he sounds like he’s gazing into the depths of hell each time. When I carefully asked he said, in a curt, exhausted sort of way, that he’d prefer it if I wake him up whenever I see it happen, so that’s what I’ve been doing.
It doesn’t feel like enough, most days.
I pick up a card and pour magic into it until it glows with a golden light, peaking even a bit brighter than I’d intended from my urgency and forcing me to squint against it for a moment. He stirs at the sudden brightness illuminating the room but doesn’t wake, just turns his head away with another pained noise.
“Malcolm,” I say as I stand up, fighting the urge to go over and shake him awake. It’s always been a bad call to try to wake him that way unless you’re real good at dodging, and that’s only more true now that he habitually startles awake with a half-strangled shout and eyes wild with half-remembered pain. It sucks to have to watch him struggle and barely breathe until my voice or the light finally reaches him, though. I wish I knew some better way to do this. “Hey, c’mon, wake up, it’ll be okay. Malcolm.”
He startles awake with a gasp and every muscle in his body tensed, not seeming to register where he is for several moments.
“Hey,” I say, giving a small wave. His gaze shifts to me standing there in my shirtsleeves, and after a moment he seems to come back into focus, recognition returning. The fires of anticipatory rage, like he’s expecting something to hit him and is prepared to fight back, slowly fade from his eyes.
With a sigh he sits up, runs his hand over his face and through his hair, his shoulders slumped with a weariness so deep I feel it weighing down my own bones just watching.
“Thanks,” he mutters, rubbing at his eyes with the base of his palm.
I make a ‘don’t mention it’ sound under my breath and dim the light from the card slightly, and the silence falls back over us like a thick blanket of snow, stifling. I don’t know if it’s my previous disquiet colouring the moment or just the way we’re both aware he has no choice in whether he wants to show me this or not, when we’re sticking so close together again.
So far he hasn’t struck out or pulled away or asked me to leave. I don’t know what to do with that. We don’t talk about it.
He pushes the covers aside and turns to sit hunched over on the edge of the bed; he clearly isn’t planning to go back to sleep.
I never know what to say when this happens. Sympathy seems like it wouldn’t be welcomed, and jokes feel wrong in my mouth. What I really want to do is to go over and wrap my arms around his shoulders, kiss the top of his head — but that’s not what we are even when things aren’t strange and heavy and unsaid at three in the morning, and this certainly isn’t the time to spring it on him out of the blue.
I guess the best I can do is offer him an out.
“If you’re up anyway — wanna grab some fresh air?” I ask eventually, gesturing at the window. “Easy to get up on the roof from there, I checked.”
For a moment he studies me. Then he smiles slightly and gets to his feet heavily. “Always got an eye out for the exit route, even after all these years, huh.”
“What can I say, it’s an occupational injury.” While he gets dressed, I grab my coat and shrug it on over my half-buttoned shirt before I get the window open — it’s locked, but since when has that ever stopped me — and duck through it to stand on the ledge outside. “Careful where you step here, it’s a bit narrow.”
I swing myself up first and then reach my hand down to help him up after me, until we can both sit at the edge of the roof and look out over the city. He’s brought a bottle of something cheap but tongue-numbingly strong with him, and we share it wordlessly between us for a while. There’s a breeze up here, just cold enough that I’m glad for the warmth of the booze and Malcolm’s shoulder close by.
“Y’know, whenever we come here I always keep thinkin’... it’s so clean ‘n tidy ‘n gilded all over like a nobleman’s fuckin’ toilet seat, but there’s a rot at the heart of this place even Bilgewater can’t match,” Malcolm says eventually, watching the dazzling lights that taint even the night sky with their brilliance, like they’re trying to outshine the stars and the nearly full moon above, the duller lights of Zaun smouldering in their unhealthy shades in the distance.
I kick my legs idly. “Ain’t no one puttin’ this much effort into looking good unless they’re trying to cover up for something. And enough gold in one place brings a decay all its own. Rich pickings for people like us, though. We’re kinda the carrion birds of men that way.”
He hands me back the bottle after taking a swig from it. “True.”
The moonlight outlines his profile in blue silver, cold and clean. It makes him seem further away from me than he actually is, like my hand wouldn’t be able to find him if I reached out.
“When was the first time we came here, anyway?” he asks eventually. “Seem to remember it was pretty quickly after we met.”
“Yeah. It’s one of the comforting constants of the world: the sun rises and sets, and money’s always moving through Piltover like prunes through a man’s — ”
“Aw man, you ain’t wrong, but I really wish you wouldn’t put it like that,” Malcolm breaks me off, sounding pained.
I shrug cheerfully. “Suit yourself. But you’re right, I think we drifted over here pretty soon after Mudtown, once we’d worked our way up and down the coast some.”
“Huh. Can you believe we were nineteen once?” he says. “Seems so damn long ago now.”
“No idea what you’re talking about, I don’t look a day over twenty-three,” I say airily, satisfied by his grudgingly amused hum.
“Well, you act all of twelve sometimes, so I guess you wouldn’t know the feeling, no.”
I chuckle and drop the vacuous act, taking another sip from the bottle. “Wow, wow, that’s some pot and kettle nonsense if ever I heard it. Who, exactly, was pelting who with grapes during lunch this morning, just to get attention?”
“‘Cause you weren’t lookin’, even though you said you were, you were just fiddlin’ with your cufflinks,” Graves says, entirely, triumphantly unrepenting. “And you gotta admit it was an impressive sandwich stack. My best work yet.”
“You’re an artist whose genius is unappreciated in your own time, Graves.”
He makes a cheerful ‘good of you to finally fuckin’ notice, T.F.’ noise and kicks his legs a little.
After a moment of silence I say: “Yeah, nineteen, huh. Feels like it was only yesterday and three lifetimes ago at the same time. We were so gloriously young and dumb.”
“And now we ain’t even young anymore,” he observes philosophically.
Elbowing him gently in the side I say: “You’re not fooling me into thinkin’ you’re some kind of wise venerable whitebeard, Malcolm, you ain’t even properly middle aged. We’re barely even hitting our stride, we’ve got our best work ahead of us yet.”
He gives a breath of laughter and looks up at the stars. “That’s the problem with you. I know you’re the biggest liar I ever met, but when I hear you say shit like that… I always fuckin’ believe you.”
There’s a wistfulness to him in the moonlight, a tired, battered sort of wonder. I don’t like to admit it, but the years have changed both of us, and they’ve been rougher on him than they have on me, for… obvious reasons. It’s weird; we still fit together as naturally as we used to in so many ways, it feels all the stranger to have these aching places where we don’t, having to learn anew after so long.
“Good,” I say, not letting any of those thoughts into the chill night air. “Listenin’ to me’s a smart call, you could stand to try it more often.”
He snickers, some of the exhaustion fading out of focus for a moment. “You little shit.”
It takes time, healing from the kind of hurt he’s been, I know that. I… want to help. And I want to stay as long as he’ll let me. Maybe that is a good enough place to start.
The stars twinkle overhead as if jealously trying to make a point to the city lights below.
“You never did strike up with another partner,” Malcolm says. There’s a question at the heart of the statement, and not one I’m prepared to answer right now.
“No,” I agree.
I can feel his gaze at the side of my face for a long, long time as I take a sip from the bottle, but if he wants me to call on this one, he better be willing to put the fucking bet on the table first.
The years really have changed him; he doesn’t rush us blindly into it. Malcolm Graves backing down gracefully for once. What has the world come to?
He holds his hand out for the bottle and I pass it to him, our fingers brushing for a moment. Instead of taking a drink he taps the side of it absently against his knee, clearly lost in some difficult train of thought.
“I was sorry to hear ‘bout what happened to the rest of the crew, by the way,” he says finally. “Don’t know if I said that before.”
I nod, not sure what I could really say. They all volunteered immediately; in hindsight that feels like the worst part? The truth, but not much good to anyone anymore.
He looks down at his big hands resting between his knees. “I get it if you’re not keen on talkin’ about it. It ain’t a cheery subject. But I’d sort of been wondering… how they went. Y’know.”
Normally I might have tried to wriggle out of continuing on the subject, but… but there hasn’t really been anyone to talk to about them since they died. No one who’d care, no one who knew enough of them to get it. I take a breath, take the bottle and one more swig from it before I put it down.
“With Kolt, it was — well, at least it was quick. Don’t think she ever got a chance to notice what was happening, the shot went clean through her head. Not the worst way to go, I guess. The Brick went and got himself shot to give me and Wallach a chance to get away. You know what he was like.”
Malcolm huffs a breath that’s a distant joyless cousin of laughter and nods slowly, his head tilted towards me like he’s trying to show that he’s listening.
I dangle my legs a bit and keep my eyes fixed on the distant lights, glittering and clean. “And Wallach… we were nearly out, but then he lost his footing and… I’d almost managed to haul him back up, except he’d been hit in the arm and the blood made my grip on him slip and he fell. I hope — I think he didn’t have time to feel much either.”
And then there’d been just me and the rain, and nowhere left to go but away.
“Well, shit,” Malcolm says after a while, and in his blunt, inarticulate sympathy he sounds so much like… like himself that I have to snort a laugh, fondness rising like a wellspring behind my breastbone, washing away some of the old leftover grime from when it happened. “Hell of a thing.”
I shrug. “Like you said, not a cheery subject. But there you have it.”
He gazes back out over the city in silence for a few long moments. “‘S weird. I always imagined them still runnin’ around out here, goin’ on with their lives. Used to taste real bitter. And they were dead all along.”
I shake my head at the tinge of tired guilt in his voice. “You had no way of knowing what happened. They all, uh. They all volunteered to come along to get you out. If that makes any difference. Not their fault it went like it did.”
I was the one who didn’t plan enough, was too panicked to take a moment to think — who lead them all to their doom. Ran away without them.
“Hey now,” he says, elbowing me in the side and startling me out of my thoughts. “If we’re gonna play that game, none of you could’ve known what you were walkin’ into. That was the whole point of the Locker. Ain’t nothin’ ever gets out from there, not even word of what’s in there.”
I look at him. This is the first time we’ve ever talked about — well, any of it, really, without it going dark and nasty at the corners real quick and forcing us to stop. Maybe it’s just the chill wind and the moonlight lending us some peace for the duration, before we fall back into that. But still: “You did.”
“And it’s all a bit of a blood tinged haze, tell you the truth. In hindsight I ain’t sure I could tell you how I did it.”
Gently kicking my foot against his I say: “Don’t see that the how matters so much. Doesn’t change the fact that you did. Guess that’ll be one thing you’ll always have to one-up me with now — that you broke out of somewhere I couldn’t break in.”
“You and your silver linings, T.F.,” he says, half-smiling along with the gallows humor even as he still looks exhausted. Then he sobers. “I get that you didn’t have any bodies to bury or anythin’, but is there, like… A grave of some sort anywhere we should pay respects at, or…? Is there a funeral thing you oughta do, when there ain’t no one else to do it?”
I bite my lip. “I did — well, something, right after. A river folk thing. I had no idea what they’d want or what kinda traditions their peoples had, but it was… the best I knew how to do.” I asked the river to look out for your soul too. You’re still here. I’m still not sure I understand what that means.
He nods slowly. “Good enough, I reckon. So long as the spirit of the thing is right, it oughta count, if you ask me. Good. That’s — good. They... weren’t a bad crew to run with. We had some times.”
A memory stirs faintly in my mind and makes me chuckle. “We sure did. Remember that job when you ran out of cigars, and you and Kolt had to share her awful pipe tobacco a whole week?”
“Man, that stuff smelled foul, dunno what the hell they put in it,” he agrees. “She was a lifesaver there, though, I was just about ready to throw myself against the walls or go out into the woods to fistfight a wild basilisk or somethin’.”
“You wouldn’t have gotten a chance to, because I was a split second away from stunning you and leaving you trussed up until we got back to civilization and tobacconists. And for the record… Wallach was in on it with me, so you wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
“That little traitor,” Graves says fondly.
“They always were smart enough to see which way the wind was blowing, and making like a weathervane to suit it. Ain’t no shame in that. Just because you’ve never tried to lay low and play it smart even once in your life doesn’t mean no one else has figured it out. And you really were drivin’ all of us nuts.”
Smiling a bit, he scratches the back of his neck. “Guess I was, huh. I’ve, uh. Been thinkin’ of quitting for good, actually. Just psyching myself up to actually get started.”
I turn to him, not sure I’m believing my own ears. “Excuse me, I think my hearing went a bit off there for a moment. As ludicrous as it may seem, I could swear I just heard you say you’d quit smoking.”
“Yeah, yeah, har har, get it out of your system. I mean it, though. After not doin’ it for so long, it’s — well, for one my lungs are sorta makin’ a point about how they won’t put up with that shit no more, and besides it just doesn’t… it doesn’t feel the same anymore. Dunno why. One of the first things I did after I got out, and it didn’t hit like I expected it to.”
Well, I’ve been trying to coyly convince him to quit for over a decade and now it seems like it could be happening, but somehow I don’t feel like making a fuss about it to tease him, like I would have once. “Huh. Well, if you’re serious about it, I guess I... support you in your choice and all that.” After a moment I add: “Just give me a heads-up when you’re about to start, so I’ll know to stay at least a couple of towns away for the next few months.”
“Your support is touching,” he says wryly. “Anyway, since we were talking ‘bout it — I was just thinkin’ the Brick would approve, he was always givin’ me doleful looks over it, sayin’ I was wasting my youth ‘n all that.”
I soften. “...yeah, he’d approve. Well, guess I’m stuck nursing you through the cravings in his stead, then. Nothin’ for it.”
“Nothin’ for it.”
“I reserve the right to knock you the fuck out if you really start getting on my nerves, though.”
“You’d have to hit me first,” he grins, taking out a cigar from his inner pocket and shrugging at my pointed look. “‘S my last one, I’ve been savin’ it. One for the road. You got a light?”
“Always.” I take out a card and give it just enough magic to light a small flame, and he leans in to light the cigar from it, giving me a nod of gratitude as he sits back up and breathes out a plume of smoke. Snuffing the flame out with a flick of my wrist, I do my best to ignore the quiet swell of longing in my chest when he moves away. I may not, if we’re going to let ourselves be needlessly weighed down with excess accuracy here, be quite young anymore, but my capacity for senseless folly hasn’t gone anywhere. I still find myself wanting things even when I should know better.
After a while Malcolm reaches out to take the bottle again and raises it.
“To the crew,” he says, and takes a long drink before handing it over to me.
“To the crew,” I agree, and drink too.
——
The first thing that tips me off that something’s wrong is the crowd of uniformed Piltovan police gathered around the hotel we’re staying at with the definite air of a prolonged siege; the second one is that all the windows are blown out, used shotgun shells litter the cobblestones, and small fires are still being put out in the courtyard outside. I don’t really need a third clue. If any scene has ever had ‘Malcolm Graves’ written all over it, this is that scene.
I stand where I’ve frozen mid-cheerful whistle, soft packages still tucked safely under my arms. My wardrobe had taken a beating back in Bilgewater, and during our stay here I’ve taken steps to remedy that, hitting up a number of tailors I already know know their business, as well as a few new ones that intrigued me. Truth be told I’d been quite pleased with my haul and in a wonderful mood — at least until I got back to this.
No one seems to have noticed me yet, so I hurriedly get behind a corner and peek out from cover. From the set of the shoulders of the gathered cops I don’t think I’m looking at a fully resolved situation here — they’ve got the tensed, eager energy of hunting dogs waiting to be let off their leashes, some of them weighing their cudgels in their hands and pacing in anxious anticipation.
With a low frantic swear, I rearrange the bundles of clothes in my arms until I can get a card out and spin it between my fingers, taking a moment to build my focus until I feel the magic welling up and then disappearing in a flash of blue light. Bypassing the cop parade outside unseen, I land myself right where I left Graves when I went out this morning: in the fancy hotel bar to one side of the grand marble staircase up to the second floor.
My instinct proves impeccable; Malcolm is there, sitting on a small throne of broken furniture and rubble with the lazy triumph of a king by conquest, leisurely resting his foot on a fallen chandelier as he takes a swig on a bottle. There are. Bloodstains. On him, and all over the walls and the floors and the wreckage of chairs and tables. A number of unmoving bodies lie arrayed on the floor around him, and the bartender is pale as death and only barely peeking over the edge of the bar. The room looks like some stampeding herd just went through it, if oxen knew how to handle a shotgun.
“Are… you okay?” I ask. There’s a lot of blood, I’m not sure how much of it is his.
“There you are!” Malcolm says happily, brandishing a wine bottle in welcome. “Took you long enough. Yeah, I’m fine, we’ve been drinking. Well, I’ve been drinking, he’s been cowering,” he adds, nodding over towards the bartender. “I was thinkin’ of saving a glass for you, ‘cept, uh…” He squints into the bottle, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he tries to gauge how much remains in there. “Don’t think there’s enough left in here for that.”
I see the bartender’s face catch in a rictus of pain even through his wide-eyed shock. Not his cheapest bottle, I take it. Perhaps his last bottle, considering the general look of the room.
Malcolm shrugs expansively. “Ah well, not that much of a loss, honestly, this Demacian swill is still a waste of time, if you ask me. Gimme honest Bilgewater rum over this fruit juice any day of the week.”
“And… who are these people?” I transfer my gaze to the heap of bodies at his feet — most of them completely, fatally still, but one or two still groaning faintly.
“Bounty hunters, they said. Didn’t stop to ask for names, as you can imagine.”
I whistle under my breath, distracted despite myself. “Damn, that didn’t take them long.”
“I know, right? They couldn’t shoot for shit but you gotta hand it to ‘em, they’ve got initiative.”
Silence descends on us while I take in the carnage all over again, as if for the first time. Malcolm finishes the last of the wine with a long drawn out slurping sound and then tosses the bottle absentmindedly over his shoulder afterwards, not even looking as it shatters and adds to the heaps of broken glass strewn about.
“I was gone for two hours,” I say faintly after a while.
“Yeah, well, a lotta shit went down in those two hours, man, what can I tell you,” he says, shrugging again.
“I can’t take you anywhere!” I complain. “I turn my head for one second, and — ”
He gives a sound of protest and throws his hands up in a gesture of wounded innocence. “What? What am I even supposed to have done this time?!”
I wave my arms around in turn — not the most dignified response I’ve ever given, but what can you do when your partner up and commits a massacre the first time you leave him on his own for an afternoon. “I look away for one moment, and you blow our cover and kill seven people in one fell swoop!”
“Dunno about ‘killed’, maybe some of ‘em will pull through, if they really put their minds to it. Besides, they were enthusiastically tryin’ to kill me first anyway, and you know that don’t count.”
“Yeah, okay, fair enough,” I admit, rubbing at my forehead. I’m starting to get a headache. “Guess we at least got confirmation the gun works like it should.”
“Damn right she does. She’s a marvel,” he says, stroking his hand lovingly along the side of it. “Back and better than ever.”
“I’d ask if I should give the two of you some alone time, except we kinda gotta skip town before the law gather their meager wits about them,” I say sourly. It’s probably not very reasonable to be jealous of an inanimate hunk of metal and wood, but then I never signed anything that said I gotta be reasonable. It’d be an occupational hazard.
“Oh, I’m sure we’re gonna have a ton of fun together in the future. Siora’s a fucking genius, I told you.”
Seeing how happy he is about the whole thing — and I don’t think it’s just the wine talking — I have to soften a bit. “Yeah, well, I’ve gotta admit she seemed to know what she was doing. You okay to run?”
“Huh? Yeah, ‘course, I’ve just been drinking wine, it’s all that was left.”
I rest my face in my hand for a second as I head over towards the window, approaching it from the side so my silhouette won’t be visible. “I meant if you’re hurt anywhere.”
“Oh. Nah, nothin’ to write home about, just scrapes, most of the blood ain’t mine. You see anythin’ out there?”
I pull the curtain aside just slightly to glance outside, where the long arm of the law is in the process of bunching itself into a fist.
It’s mostly the collection of stiff suits and bullies with a badge you’d expect, all fiddling nervously and talking quietly among themselves. The only surprising outlier is a young lady with startlingly pink hair and a pair of huge mechanical gloves on, pacing impatiently while she talks with a far more collected colleague — yeah, little Miss Punch might not look the type, but my inner cop detector is impeccable, and she’s making the pig alarm blare out in warning just the same as the rest of them. Well, we’re not sticking around to inquire any deeper into what that’s all about, it’s time to leave town in a hurry. Again. At least we’ve got experience in this, it’s practically a routine.
“Hey, Cupcake, you better give the go ahead soon or I’ll go in there on my own, I’m still pissed we’re missing lunch for this,” pink hair shouts over her shoulder as she paces, loudly enough that her brash voice carries through the broken windows.
“Oookay, time to get movin’,” I say, ducking away from the window and hurrying back over to Graves.
“Naaaaaw, lookit us skipping town together again,” Malcolm says as I help him to his feet, his cheeks slightly pinkened with the wine. “It’s makin’ me all nostalgic. Oh, this the new one? Looks pretty much the same as the old one to me, but I guess it suits you.”
He pokes at the edge of the waistcoat. I sigh. He never did have any appreciation for color or cut or — well, anythin’ to do with style, really, it’s an aspect of him as a person I’ve just had to come to terms with over the years. “Yeah, it’s the new one. Don’t get blood all over it, please.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Fancypants, I’ll try not to bleed on anythin’ expensive. Went up and got our things ready before, by the way, I knew I’d never hear the end of it if you had to leave your new boots behind.” He bends down with only a bit of a wobble and lifts our bag from behind a shattered table, slinging it easily over his shoulder.
“Nice thinking,” I say, inexplicably touched by his thoughtfulness. Those boots were hand stitched and supple like something out of a dream. Can’t completely take the sting out of losing the old ones to sea beast spleen and brine, but it’s close enough.
He gives a one-shouldered shrug, smirking a bit. “Yeah, well. We, uh. We should get gone before — ”
And that’s when there’s a shout from outside and all hell breaks loose. Graves and I are halfway to the back door before anyone has the time to blink, moved by unified instinctual purpose and years of experience both.
“We’ll just be gettin’ out of your hair, officers, don’t mind us!” I call as Malcolm kicks the door down.
“You have the right to remain SILENT!” Miss Punch-a-lot bellows as she smashes through the wall, rubble and plaster flying as the bartender gives one last groan of anguish before passing out.
“Good luck with that, he ain’t exercised that one a day in his life, even when you’d really fuckin’ want him to,” Malcolm shouts over his shoulder, though to his credit he’s not letting it get in the way of the objective du jour, i.e. legging it like crazy. I hook my fingers into his shirt to haul him along even faster, and we slip out the door and down the street like two bullets, hell and a good third of the entire constabulary force of Piltover on our heels.
Malcolm’s right, it’s just like old times.
— — — —
Three of wands
“Y’know, in hindsight… tryin’ to even the score with Missy Fortune might be punching a bit above our current weight class,” Graves observes thoughtfully back in our hideout, once the sea witch has been shaken off our trail and all the excitement is done with for now. He’s cleaning the disassembled parts of his shotgun — ever since he had to swim out of the cave without wrapping it up properly beforehand, he’s been fussing over it as scrupulously as a mother tending to her tender babe at every free moment. I’m shamelessly watching his hands while he works. They’re so big, and still handle all the fiddly little pieces so effortlessly. “Seemed like a good idea at the time, I won’t deny it, but considering how it went last time… maybe biting over more than we could chew there.”
“Well, maybe it wouldn’t have been if you could manage to keep your eyes on the prize for once in our godsforsaken lives,” I lament, flicking cards between my fingers where I’m sitting across the table from him. I’ve missed this. I’d forgotten how much fun it is to argue with him.
“Seems to me you could stand to take your eye off the prize every so often, maybe you’d have glanced around and not gone and gotten yourself caught by such an obvious trap,” he says, utterly unconcerned.
I splutter indignantly. “Oh, is that how you’re gonna play that? As if it wasn’t just sheer dumb luck that stopped you from waltzing straight into the same damn — ”
“All I’m sayin’ is that some of us spent half of today involuntarily dangling upside down like a bat after a hard night on the town, and some of us didn’t.”
“And some of us didn’t decide that right in the middle of a job would be the ideal time to start to renegotiate the arrangement we’ve had literally since the day we started working together!”
He shrugs as he finishes reassembling the shotgun, tossing the rag he’s been using aside to rest on the table. “Can’t blame a man for havin’ the good economic sense to try and grab a chance when he sees it.”
“I absolutely can, and I am.”
Leaning back in his chair, he folds his hands behind his head and says: “Suppose we didn’t get to cash in that bounty anywho, so. Moot point now, really.”
“Let’s look at it this way: In the end Sarah Fortune got her quartermaster back, we got paid and not sunk to the bottom of the ocean, the Prince got his crown, however briefly, and the sea witch… actually, let’s not think too much about how the sea witch is probably still out there somewhere bein’ all creepy. But aside from that and all in all, things turned out for the best, I guess. From a certain point of view.”
“Yup, just about.” With a yawn that cracks his jaw, he stretches and adds: “Think I’m turning in for the night, I’m wiped. Should I get all the lights, or are you stayin’ up a while?”
“Eh, I feel kinda restless, think I’m gonna head over to The Crusty Kraken and play a couple of hands,” I announce, getting up and brushing my hands down the front of my trousers, settling the fabric.
Graves glances out the window and then lifts his eyebrows at me. “It’s half past the middle of the fucking night, T.F.”
“Yeah, well. I’m not gonna fall asleep right now anyway, might as well get some cash in. Someone’s gotta keep this operation afloat, when best laid plans go horribly awry for reasons we don’t need to relitigate at this junction.”
Still eyeing me a little strangely, he eventually shrugs and says: “Fair enough. Good luck, I guess.”
“As if I’d leave it to luck,” I scoff. “That’s disrespectful to the good Lady herself, to go a-courtin’ her at all hours of the day and night and expect to keep her favour.”
He snorts and lobs the cleaning rag towards my head. “Then go rob ‘em blind and come back with enough to buy the good stuff in Cutpurse Square tomorrow, you little shit.”
I sweep my hat off in a mock bow as I dodge the rag and swan out the door. “Aye, aye, Cap’n Graves. Don’t burn the house down while I’m gone.”
— —
When I walk back into the hideout several hours later, with my wallet heavier and my heart lighter by way of parting some fools from their gold and the professional satisfaction that goes along with it, I’m surprised to find an oil lamp still burning and Graves sitting by the table in his shirtsleeves, playing a listless game of solitaire with tired eyes.
I close and lock the door behind me as I glance over at him. “Hey there. You still up?”
“Can’t sleep,” he grunts. “And I’d fucking kill for a smoke, except I’d have to break in somewhere to get anythin’ at this time of night, and that seems like a lotta hassle.”
“You will do no such thing,” I say, leveling a warning finger at him. “We both survived the cravings last time only by the grace of whatever god looks out for fools and liars, I’ll fucking go over there and lie down on top of you to stop you.”
He blows a dismissive raspberry. “As if that would even slow me down, I could sling you over my shoulder and carry you with me down the stairs and get on with it like nothin’ happened. Simmer down, though. Like I said, I ain’t doin’ it.”
I study his face, greyish pale in the low light, and notice more of the details this time: the clench of his jaw, the drawn look around his eyes. “You sure that’s all that’s goin’ on?”
With a sigh he scratches the back of his neck, looking away. “...I’d forgotten you do that.”
“What, use my eyes?”
He breathes a laugh, but still won’t look at me. “It’s my back,” he says finally, like he’s admitting something, flinching a bit as he shifts. “Something’s gone and locked itself right the fuck up back there, close to the shoulder. Hurts like the blazes.”
“I could try giving you a hand?” I offer. He stares at me and I add: “I’m offering a massage, not to slit your throat, Malcolm, don’t look at me like that. I’m not suggesting euthenasia as our first port of call.”
“A… massage?”
I roll my eyes. “It was just a suggestion. No need to — ”
“You know how to do that?”
“Yeah, sure, enough for most stuff. It ain’t like it’s complex hextech computation or anything.”
He’s still staring at me. “Since when? Where the hell did you learn that?”
“I’ve picked up bits and pieces here and there through the years,” I say, shrugging. The truth is more or less ‘a very enjoyable week spent mostly in bed with a Shuriman guy with strong hands, admirably laidback manner and a lot of patience’, but somehow I don’t want to bring that particular fact into the room with us right now. That had been at a time when I’d frankly assumed Graves was dead, but something still stops me from bringing it up when he’s — well, I’m not going to think too deeply about it. I might be able to help at least a little, that’s enough.
Still looking uncertain, he rolls his shoulder just a little and winces. I know for a fact that he can normally stubbornly muscle through pain more readily than anyone else I’ve ever known. It must be pretty damn bad.
“I mean, we could give it a shot and if it doesn’t help we’ll just stop pretty quick,” I say, when he still hasn’t made his mind up. “Doesn’t have to be any more dramatic than that.”
“Okay then, Mr. Magic Hands,” he says finally, rolling his eyes. His mouth is doing that thing it does when he’s fighting a smile, though, even as his eyes stay creased with pain. “Do your thing.”
He sits on the edge of the bed and I kneel awkwardly on the mattress behind him, trying and failing to find some way for my hands to get good purchase. He keeps tensing up at my touch, and jerking away instinctively when I get close to the knot in his shoulder.
Under my hands his skin is clammy with cold sweat, and this close I can see the tense set of his jaw, the shadows under his eyes.
“You know what brought it on?” I ask, just in case it’ll give me any hints on what range of movement exactly is the problem.
He snorts. “Dunno if you’ve noticed, but I ain’t twenty anymore. Sometimes when I go and do somethin’ dumb nowadays, like gettin’ myself all bundled up in a crate with you, my body sees fit to remind me what a bad idea that was for a good long while after.”
“Ah. I see.” I came away from that experience largely unscathed but for a few bruises to my ribs, my pride and my dignity, and as for those… ribs heal, I’ve never found much use for my dignity, and my pride is sturdy enough to take it on the chin. “Hey, try to stop squirming around all the time, I can’t get any traction here.”
“Easy for you to — ah — say,” he growls, flinching away from my hand again. “Can’t say this is helping much so far, T.F.”
I click my tongue thoughtfully and ease up the touch so I’m basically just brushing my fingers over his skin as I think.
“This might be easier if you were lying down,” I say finally. He gives me a look over his shoulder and I add in irritation: “What, d’you think that if I really wanted to stab you in the back I’d be fussy about whether you were horizontal or vertical at the time?”
I’m still a little sore over his resurgent paranoia back at the serpent shrine, though I’m not gonna admit as much to him. I guess he can’t really help it when it comes over him, it just — well.
He huffs a frustrated breath, like an ox stamping in its pen. “It ain’t like that, I just — fine, whatever. Move over a bit.”
I make room on the bed for him to lie down on his stomach, then kneel over him once he’s settled. It is easier like this, but he’s still tense all over; I vaguely feel as if I’m trying to ease some life back into unyielding rock. He still squirms, turning his head this way and that like he can’t decide which cheek to rest on.
“Could you, uh. Could you say somethin’?” he asks after a while, muffled into the sheets.
I pause where I’d been deep in concentration trying to get his shoulder blade to yield some, any movement without jostling anything bad in the process. “Huh?”
“It’s weird, havin’ you so be quiet back there. Normally a man couldn’t pay you to shut up.”
With a chuckle, I say: “Sure, if hearing my dulcet tones makes you feel better. What do you want to talk about?”
He tries to shrug, then gives a sharp intake of breath like the movement agrees with neither his prone position nor the ache in his shoulder. “Doesn’t matter, just… Anythin’. So I know you’re still there.”
I have many, many years of experience talking engagingly about nothing while my hands do their own thing, that won’t prove much of a challenge. “That I can do you for. You do realize you’re makin’ yourself sound like a spooked horse, though, right? What’s next, I gotta keep a hand on your rump every time I pass behind you so you won’t startle and kick — ”
“I take it all back, please shut the fuck up,” he groans, rubbing his forehead against the bed, but he relaxes under me, some of the stony inflexibility leaking out of his muscles.
“Too late, you asked for this,” I coo, moving my hand more towards the small of his back to see if I can coax something loose starting from there and work my way up.
“I’m gonna have to make an insanity plea on that one, I clearly weren’t in my right mind. What are you doin’ all the way over there, by the way? That ain’t where it hurts.”
“This might come as a surprise to you, but all that muscle and bone and stuff does actually connect back here. You just lay there and let me do the thinking for now, huh?”
He’s got a multitude of scars criss-crossing his back — some are old ones I recognize, could even pinpoint exactly when he got a fair few of them because I was the one to patch him up afterwards. But a lot are fresher, their origins unknown to me, and with the ragged look of not having been cared for properly before they healed. I keep my hands from betraying my unease at not knowing and frankly not wanting to know, endeavoring instead to imbue my fingers with intent, like when I’m handling the cards, writing my wish to help and soothe into his skin with my fingertips. Hey, it’s not how the magic works for me, usually, but it’s not doing any harm and you never know, right? Might still be something kind out there willing to listen, if we’re real lucky.
He keeps tensing up at my touch for another few minutes, clearly not entirely comfortable with the situation, but after a while of responding to my deliberately mindless chatter something about it eases and he starts almost pushing up against my hands, like he’s chasing after the touch when it moves on.
I don’t think he realizes he’s doing it — even at the best of times self-awareness isn’t his strongest suit — but I follow along with the requests of his body anyway, lingering over one of those spots until he shudders, a breath almost like a sob stumbling out of him as it fades and he goes slack for a moment. My thumb catches against one of the ragged scars across his side.
I wonder how long it’s been since anyone touched him kindly. Then I flinch away from that thought, glad he can’t see my face, and keep my focus on what I’m doing. “Hurts?”
His voice is a low warm hum from his chest and he wriggles a little under me, comfortably, the way you might as your body unwinds the tension of the day on its way into sleep. “Kinda, but like. Differently. And then it’s better. Think you might be on — mngh. Onto something.”
“Okay. Shout out if something starts hurting in the bad sort of way, that’d be counter productive.”
I get a couple more of the long breathy shivers as I work my way gently across his back, which seems like a good sign from how he starts melting more into the bed with each one, but the bad shoulder remains resolutely stiff. Of course I’d rather not have him be in pain, but there’s something comforting about the simplicity of purpose of this sort of closeness. Homey, almost. I don’t tend to get that close to people unless it’s for a tumble in bed or to lift someone’s wallet, it’s not something I’ve had a lot of experience with in my adult life outside of him.
Suddenly he makes a sound that is sharp and high like a whimper and then straight up stops breathing, tensing up under my hands until he’s trembling all over.
“Hey now,” I say, not letting my alarm shine through in my voice only through long practice. “Breathe, Malcolm, you know I won’t be able to haul you down the stairs if you pass out on me here. Just relax and breathe for me, okay? There you go, that’s good, just like that.”
He finally manages to gasp in a breath, resting his forehead against the bed as he struggles with another one.
“Maybe we should give this a break,” I say, rubbing my hand soothingly along his side without thinking. To my surprise he shakes his head vigorously, his jaw set.
“No, don’t stop,” he grinds out. “Don’t stop, ‘s the right — the right spot, that’s it. Don’t go.”
I pause, but I can feel the slight give under the tension now, the promise of finally letting go thrumming at the edge of the muscle. “Okay. Okay, I ain’t goin’ anywhere, don’t worry. Just keep breathing, I’ve got you.”
I wait until his breathing is at least something like steady before I start again, using as little force as I can, just working gently around the knot in his shoulder and putting more pressure into it only in response to his movements when he turns into it.
“There we go,” I murmur as I find an angle that seems promising. “I know this is easier said than done and all, but just try to relax as much as you can.”
He doesn’t answer me in words, only gives a rumble and then a sigh, another small increment of tension seeping out of him.
Then, finally, I feel the give and softening under my hand, something releasing in there, and Malcolm groans long and deep and goes completely boneless beneath me.
It’s a sound of relief that comes straight from the pit of his stomach, and I suddenly realize I have heard a very similar sound through thin inn walls several times before, and have to swallow down a sound of my own that’s thankfully drowned out when he gives another, softer moan and turns his face dreamily into the pillow.
“That do it?” I ask, caught between being glad the pain seems to have eased up, and becoming extremely aware that I’m essentially straddling his hips, my crotch just over the curve of his ass.
“Hell,” he breathes, shifting languidly under me. “Yeah, I think it just about did.”
In a different world I would have leaned down and kissed the back of his neck, wrapped my arms gently around his shoulders and stayed there for a while. But since we’re in this one I just stroke my hand lightly over his back one last time. “Good. I’m not gonna mess around with it any more for now, then. Let’s give it some peace and quiet.”
With an unwarranted pang of regret I move away from his hips and hop down to the floor, taking in the fruits of my labour. His face has slackened from the tension of pain into something heavy-lidded and breezy; he almost looks like he does when he reaches the cheerful stage of tipsy. I laugh a bit and move to get ready to for bed myself.
“Hey, T.F.,” he says as I turn around.
I turn back to him. “Hm?”
He blinks at me slowly. “Thanks. That was… uh. Thanks.”
I smile. “Hey, don’t mention it.” He smiles back, still soft-eyed with relief. “Now grab some shuteye, Graves, you’re not gonna be much help to anyone tomorrow in this state. Everyone knows I do most of the work anyway, but you should at least be able to look like you’re making yourself useful.”
“Smarmy little…” he mumbles as he turns his face into the pillow, but it’s an affectionate sort of grumble. He fumbles for the sheets and carelessly gets himself mostly under them, eyes already slipping shut. Once I’m sure he’s all the way out, I get up and tuck the covers around him better, saving his calf and hip from a cold night.
I sit for a while on the edge of my bed and watch him sleep deeply and peacefully for once. Okay, so maybe it’s not just the cards that know how to light that restless longing within me, you got me. It seems too big for me to hold, too old and vast; it must be something akin to whatever made the first person look to the horizon and keep walking towards it without ever quite knowing why.
I wonder if that first wanderer was alone, or if someone walked next to them. If that was part of the point. It takes me a long time to fall asleep.
Notes:
First of all I would like to give a huge thank you to Inversway on tumblr for all love, support and headcanon development along the way while I was writing this, and for reading it through and telling me it wasn’t actually irredeemable trash when the night was at its darkest and my self-doubt at its most neurotic ❤️❤️❤️ This would never exist in this semi-publishable state without her.
This fic, man. I have loved this fic for all five years I’ve been writing it – and I have in fact been writing it all that time, in fits and starts and with grim determination. I’ve homoerotically mudwrestled with this fic and felt weird and tingly and mad but like in a kind of good way about it. I have filed taxes with this fic. I have called this fic tearily in the middle of the night to yell ‘I love you so much but you always do this and I don’t know how to keep going like this, you’re no longer the story I knew when we met’. I’ve taken this fic with me on holidays, spent Christmases with it. I have lived with this fic. I’ve certainly from time to time felt like I was going to die by this fic. I have woken up to and fallen asleep with this fic. It’s been there with me through creative project honeymoon joy and through the much longer stretches of depression and its listlessness, and not once in all of this have I ever considered abandoning it. So please believe me when I say that its unfinished state does not reflect in any way a lack of care about it, or a lack of having given it my all to get it over the finish line hahaha. At this point I’ve just had to look in the eye that I don’t know how to finish it yet, and I’m not willing to give it an ending I find anything less than satisfying so until I know how to do it right… I won’t. I think I am trying to understand something in this one I haven’t figured out for myself yet, and I have to get there the honest, long way through like. Experience and life and shit. Yeah I know, I’m not happy about it either.
It is as done as I know how to get it right now! One day hopefully I will find the way to get it actually done, but please do not hold your breath waiting for it, I can’t be responsible for you passing out like that.
Title is from the song Achilles Come Down by Gang of Youths.
This story has been a good friend, an excellent adversary and a constant companion, and I hope I get to return to it one day. And even if I don’t, I’m proud of us both for having gotten this far. If you’ve also gotten this far, I’m proud of you too and thank you so much for reading :)
If you want to find me elsewhere on the internet, my tumblr can be found here, and my TFGraves tag specifically is here!
puso (dust__motes) on Chapter 1 Sat 06 Sep 2025 05:05AM UTC
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Etiketten (Guest) on Chapter 2 Wed 03 Sep 2025 08:24PM UTC
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Calliblurbs on Chapter 2 Thu 04 Sep 2025 02:49AM UTC
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InversWay on Chapter 2 Thu 04 Sep 2025 09:53AM UTC
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