Feelings Suck
Iwake up gradually, which is not how I usually wake up. Normally consciousness arrives all at once, sharp and immediate, like a switch being flipped. This morning it comes in layers, slow and reluctant, like something being dragged up from deep water.
Last night was something.
We didn’t technically fuck, he ate my ass for hours until I pretty much passed out. Physically, it was a lot. Emotionally even more so. I’ve bottomed for guys and not felt anywhere near…
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling and I am absolutely not thinking about it.
I’m not thinking about any of it. Not the way the feeding was different this time, softer and more complicated and charged with things neither of us said out loud.
Not the way Dis looked at me afterwards.
Not the specific quality of the silence that followed, which was nothing like the silences we had in the beginning.
Nope. Not thinking about it. Moving on. Not thinking about anything until I’ve had my morning cup of tea.
I sit up. My whole body has the heavy, wrung-out feeling of someone who has used more of themselves than they intended to, which is physically accurate and emotionally accurate in ways I’m not prepared to examine before tea.
I find some clothes. I scrape my hair back into a loose bun, and pad to the kitchen.
The kettle is the most important relationship in my life, and I will not hear otherwise.
I stand in the kitchen while it works, then I breathe in the smell of freshly brewed tea and I let my brain do its slow, sluggish morning startup sequence without rushing it.
Outside the kitchen window, Bristol is getting on with its day.
Pigeons. A delivery van. Someone arguing on the phone.
Normal things happening in the normal world outside my extremely abnormal flat.
I pour milk into the mug and wrap both hands around it and take the first sip with the reverence it deserves.
Right. Okay. I can do this.
I carry the mug into the living room.
Dis is standing in the circle.
Not sitting on the futon. Not watching television.
Standing, in the middle of the circle, and the shadows around him are doing something I haven’t seen before.
They’re moving, slow and restless, curling and uncurling like smoke in a wind that isn’t there.
His form is present but slightly unstable at the edges, like he’s having trouble holding it together.
Those burning blue eyes are fixed on the middle distance, seeing something I can’t see, somewhere far from my living room.
I stop in the doorway.
I’ve seen Dis angry. I’ve seen him cold and proud and imperious and quietly amused and carefully gentle. I’ve seen him completely absorbed in Bake Off and gravely formal about a second-hand futon and honestly rather sweet about meerkats.
I haven’t seen him like this.
He hasn’t noticed me yet, which is unusual in itself. Dis always notices me. He tracks me across the flat with the automatic awareness of someone for whom monitoring their environment is a deeply ingrained reflex.
I take a sip of tea. Lean against the doorframe.
“Something vexes you?” I say.
He focuses. His gaze finds me, and for a moment the shadows still, and there’s a quality to the way he looks at me that I don’t have a name for. Something raw underneath the composure, something he hasn’t quite managed to put away.
“It has become apparent,” Dis says, with the careful deliberateness of someone choosing each word as though the wrong one might detonate, “that I do not totally despise you.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Look at him.
“Wow,” I say. “Thanks.”
“You are welcome,” he says, which would be funny except his voice has something in it that stops me short. Something that isn’t quite steadiness. Something that is steadiness’s exhausted, struggling cousin.
I look at him properly. The shadows are still moving at his edges.
Those blue eyes are doing something complicated that has nothing to do with the mildly sarcastic exchange we just had, which likely went right over his head.
The air in the flat feels different, thick and heavy, the way it sometimes gets before a storm.
And then I feel it.
It comes in slowly, like a tide rather than a wave.
Grief. Not sharp and immediate the way grief usually is when it hits, but old and vast and bone-deep, the kind that has been carried for so long it has become part of the landscape.
Pain threaded through with loss, loss threaded through with more loss, and underneath all of it something that might be longing or might be the memory of longing, the ghost of a feeling that belonged to a self that no longer exists quite the same way.
It fills the flat the way cold fills a room when a window opens. Inevitably and totally.
My chest tightens. I set my tea down on the side table very carefully because my hands have gone slightly unsteady.
We’re connected, Dis and I, in ways that have been building since the first feeding.
I’ve felt his emotions bleed into mine before, flashes and edges of things.
This is different. This isn’t a flash. This is everything he usually holds back, flowing out of him unchecked because whatever is happening with him right now is too big to contain.
I look at him. At the restless shadows. At the effort I can see him making to hold himself together.
And I understand.
Not-despising someone, makes you vulnerable. It’s a weapon you carve out of your own heart and give to them. For them to shatter and destroy. Or simply to discard.
Even if they cherish it and treat it tenderly, they can still be taken away from you, along with the piece of your heart.
Dis doesn’t not-despise me enough for it to really hurt. Just enough to stir old memories.
“Dis,” I say quietly. “Did you lose someone?”
The shadows surge. His whole form shudders, and for a moment he loses it entirely, dissolving at the edges into something less than a shape, less than a presence, all of that vast and ancient power coming apart at the seams.
“I lost everything,” he whispers.
The words are so quiet I almost don’t hear them.
But the grief that comes with them isn’t quiet at all.
It crashes into the room and into my chest simultaneously and my eyes sting with tears that aren’t entirely mine, that belong to centuries of carrying something that was always too heavy to carry alone.
I stand very still and let it move through me. I don’t try to redirect it or diminish it or fill the space it leaves with words, because there are no words. There have never been words for this. Anyone who’s ever lost everything knows there are no words for this.
After a moment I set down my tea and I walk up to the circle.
I sit down on the floor at its edge. The chalk runes are invisible under the carpet but I can feel the magic of them humming against my awareness, the boundary between his world and mine, the line I drew that has been both prison and protection and something else entirely that I don’t have a name for yet.
I look at him. He has drawn himself in. The vast, restless shadows have contracted, pulled close, and what’s left of him in the circle is small.
Startlingly small. No face, no form, no burning blue eyes.
Just a dense concentration of shadow, coiled on the futon, still radiating that presence that is unmistakably and entirely him, ancient and blazing and absolutely, heartbreakingly real.
As small as a kitten.
As present as a star.
I reach my hand across the runes.
I push it through the boundary of the circle, past the humming, invisible edge of the binding, into the space that is his. My hand sits there in the air, open, palm up, not asking for anything. Just there.
Stepping into his space, into the circle, would be wrong right now. But this offering feels gentle, feels right.
For a moment, nothing happens.
Then the shadow moves.
It comes to my hand slowly, tentatively, the way something small and hurt approaches something it isn’t sure it can trust. It touches my fingers first, cool and strange, and then settles in my hand the way smoke settles on a thing, without weight but with presence, absolute presence.
Every particle of attention and awareness Dis has, focused entirely on this one small point of contact.
I don’t say anything.
I know he can still speak like this. I know he’s capable of language and understanding and sharp dry observations about television and baking shows and the structural integrity of layered cakes. I know the intelligence and the will are all still there, banked down under the grief, waiting.
But words aren’t what this is.
I sit on the floor of my living room with my hand across the boundary of a summoning circle and an ancient shadow king curled in my palm, and I don’t say anything, because there is nothing to say.
Some things are just true and terrible and old and the only honest response to them is to stay.
To not move. To not flinch from the weight of them.
I was homeless at thirteen. I know something about carrying things that are too heavy to carry alone. I know something about what it means to have someone simply stay.
So I stay.
The grief ebbs, slowly. Not gone, not resolved, not fixed by any means, because it isn’t the kind of thing that fixes. But it ebbs. The flat settles around us. Outside, Bristol continues its morning. Pigeons. A bus. Someone laughing loudly on the street below.
The shadow is still in my hand. Warm now, or my hand is warm, or the boundary between those two things has blurred in some way I can’t quite account for.
Eventually Dis reassembles himself. It happens gradually, form coalescing out of shadow, blue eyes coming last, finding mine across the small distance between us.
I haven’t moved my hand. Part of him is wrapped around it.
We look at each other.
“That sucks,” I say quietly. “Losing everything. That genuinely, profoundly sucks.”
“Yes,” Dis says. His voice is rough at the edges in a way I’ve never heard it before. “It does.”
I nod. I look at his shadow-self still curled around my fingers, my hand across the line of the circle. The grief is still in the room, quieter now but present, and I’m turning something over in my mind that I’m not entirely sure I want to ask but am going to ask anyway.
“Was it...” I pause, trying to find the shape of what I want to say. “You said everything. Is that... was there someone?”
Dis is quiet for a moment. “Before I was made into what I became,” he says carefully, “there were things. Yes. A long time ago.”
“And then Hex took the throne from you,” I say. I’m not proud of how flat my voice comes out, but it’s the truth and we both know it. Hex defeated him. That was loss two, whatever loss one was. And then I summoned him. Loss three, and that one’s on me specifically.
“And then your shadow prince,” Dis confirms. There’s no accusation in it. That almost makes it worse.
I sit with the weight of that for a moment. Three losses. The old one he won’t name. The throne. And then me, summoning him here and taking his freedom, taking him away from his home and everything he has.
That thought adds a particular quality to the guilt sitting in my chest.
“Is there anyone,” I ask, “who’ll be missing you? Family? Anyone?” I pause. “Someone special?”
Dis makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “Only enemies,” he says. “I have accumulated a considerable number of those.”
Only enemies. Nobody wondering where he is. Nobody who would notice the absence of him except people who’d be glad of it. No one waiting for him. No one who…
I become aware, with a creeping horror that I feel all the way down to my toes, that something in my chest has gone very warm and relieved at that answer.
Warm and relieved in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with guilt about imprisonment and everything to do with the fact that I just asked if there was someone special and then felt something lift when the answer was no.
Oh no.
Oh no no no.
I am such an asshole. That’s what this is. That’s the only explanation. I’m vindictive and spiteful, and he’s my enemy, and that’s why I’m pleased he doesn’t have anyone special.
I’m also an asshole who has spent too long in close proximity to someone unreasonably attractive, and my brain has done something extremely stupid as a result.
It’s not feelings. It’s proximity. It’s the feeding connection messing with my emotional wiring.
It’s the hot guy effect operating at an unprecedented and frankly inconvenient level.
It is absolutely not feelings.
“Well,” I say, and my voice comes out slightly rougher than I intend. “You’re stuck with me for now. For whatever that’s worth.”
Dis looks at me. Those shining blue eyes, reassembled and present and still carrying something raw in their depths, study my face for a long moment.
“It is worth more than you know,” he says quietly.
I look away before he can see whatever my face is doing. I focus on a point somewhere above the television. I breathe.
“Okay,” I say, to nobody in particular. “Right.”
I stay a little longer. Then, when it feels right, I gently withdraw my hand. His shadow relinquishes it slowly, like it’s making a decision.
I pick up my tea from the side table. It’s gone cold. I don’t particularly care.
“I’m going to make more tea,” I say. “Do you want me to put the TV on?”
Something shifts in his expression. Not quite a smile. Something softer than that, and quieter.
“Yes,” he says. “I think I would like that.”
I put the television on. I go and make more tea.
I come back and sit on the sofa and we watch something neither of us will remember later, something gentle and inconsequential, and the flat feels different than it did this morning.
Not better or worse. Just different. Like something that has been held very tightly for a very long time has been allowed, just briefly, to open its hand.
I drink my tea and don’t say anything else. Some things don’t need saying.