Where There Is Tea There Is Hope
I’m awake and I’m alone. Which is fine. Which is what I expected. Which is exactly what I knew would happen.
It was a goodbye shag. The best sex ever, so good I passed out. But still, I knew what it was going to be when we stumbled into my bedroom.
And I am completely prepared for waking up alone, and it is absolutely fine.
I lie for a moment, staring at the ceiling. My bed is big and cold and very empty, which makes no sense at all because apart from the early morning activities that just occurred, this bed has never had anyone else in it apart from me.
Dating is a disaster, and I haven’t bothered for a long time. The little interlude of a captor-captive situationship was just that. An interlude. Going back to single life suits me just fine.
Absolutely fine.
The flat is quiet around me in a way that feels different from before, a different quality of quiet.
Not the hum of the circle and the wards and the constant low-level magical awareness of another presence.
Just ordinary quiet. Just a flat. Just the home of a perpetually single goth witch coffee shop manager.
I get up.
The bathroom is cold in the way bathrooms are cold, and I stand in front of the mirror and look at myself, and I am fine.
I look terrible, obviously. My eyes are slightly swollen from last night, which was just the stress and the exhaustion and the events of the past twenty-four hours and nothing else.
My hair is a disaster. I look like someone who has been through a supernatural attack, an emotionally significant conversation, and a night of insufficient sleep, followed by a morning of vigorous farewell, which is exactly what I am, and it’s fine.
I brush my teeth. I splash cold water on my face. I look at myself again.
This is good, actually. The quiet. The ordinary.
This is what normal life feels like and normal life is great and I’m going to enjoy the hell out of it.
No more summoning circles humming in the living room.
No more frost on the walls when someone is displeased.
No more ancient shadow kings with devastating cheekbones having opinions about the worthiness of layered cakes.
Just me. Just my flat. Just normal.
I stare at my reflection for a moment longer than strictly necessary.
Fine.
I find my clothes on the bedroom floor and put them on because I am a functional adult with a routine and a life and I’m fine.
I shuffle toward the kitchen in the particular zombified state of someone who has slept, but not enough, and whose body is still conducting an audit of everything that happened yesterday.
There is tea in the kitchen. Tea will help.
Tea will make everything clearer and more manageable and less like the particular hollow quiet of a flat that was starting to feel like a home.
I get to the kitchen doorway.
I stop.
Dis is standing at the counter. He is wearing, for reasons I cannot immediately account for, what appears to be one of my jumpers, which fits him the way my jumpers do not fit me, i.e.
, extremely well. He has the kettle. He has a mug.
He has, I notice, put a teabag in the mug, and is now pouring boiling water into it with great focus and intent and has apparently not noticed that he chose the fancy tea and has not yet removed the teabag from its paper wrapper.
He is making tea.
He is making tea in my kitchen.
He is here.
“What,” I say, “are you doing?”
Dis looks up. “Making you tea,” he says, with the calm of someone who feels this is self-evident.
I look at the wrapped teabag. I look at him. I look at the wrapped teabag again.
“I freed you,” I say. My brain is not at full capacity, and this seems like the most important thing to establish.
“Yes,” Dis says.
“Why haven’t you left?”
He sets the kettle down. He looks at me with those blue eyes, steady and present and completely untroubled by this line of questioning.
“There is nowhere else I would rather be,” he says.
I open my mouth. Close it.
“But,” I say. “You said. You told me I needed to free you.”
“Yes.”
“So you could leave!”
“So I could protect you,” Dis says patiently, “and defend myself. There is a difference.”
I think about this. It requires more processing power than I currently have available. “What about your enemies?” I say. “The ones who were sending Wraith?”
Something shifts in Dis’s expression. It’s a shift I find extremely attractive and slightly terrifying, one that reminds me that underneath the futon and the Bake Off and the Scrabble, there is something ancient and genuinely formidable.
“They were circling because I was bound,” he says. “Vulnerable. Now that I am free, they will not dare.”
He says the last two words with a quiet certainty that resonates somewhere in my chest and also in several other places I’m not going to mention before I’ve had tea.
“But,” I say, trying to stay on track, “But I thought the circle was protecting you?”
Dis watches me calmly, waiting for me to pull myself together enough to start making coherent sense.
“Before.” I blurt. “You backed me up. When Adam came and wanted me to free you. You wanted me to keep you.”
“I still do,” Dis says quietly and with great sincerity.
“I mean in the circle,” I reply, because, nope. If I register what he just implied, my brain would melt.
“I know what you meant.” His eyes hold mine. “I wanted to stay with you.”
The kitchen is very quiet.
“Oh,” I say. “I thought you needed the protection. Of the circle,” I repeat, as if saying it again will make everything make sense again.
“No,” Dis says. Simply. Completely. “I needed you, Little Witch.”
I stare at him.
He sighs. It’s a patient sigh, the sigh of someone who has considerable reserves of patience and is accessing them now. “Is it really so hard to comprehend,” he says, “that someone wants to stay with you?”
“Yes!” The word comes out before I can stop it, loud and honest and completely unguarded. “Yes, it is extremely hard to comprehend, actually, yes!”
Dis looks at me for a long moment. Something moves across his face that is neither amusement nor frustration but something that contains both and goes beyond them.
“I see,” he says quietly. “Then I must teach you that this is not remarkable.”
I narrow my eyes. I’m not sure what I’m about to receive, but I have the instinct that I should brace for it.
Dis sets down the kettle. He turns to face me properly, and the quality of his attention shifts into something total, something that makes the kitchen feel smaller and the morning feel more significant.
He’s looking at me the way he looks at things he considers important.
He’s looking at me the way he looked at the Great British Bake Off when he was deciding the fate of each contestant’s honour and glory. Except more so.
“You,” he says, and his voice has dropped into something resonant and serious, “faced a shadow king with nothing but preparation and nerve and the sheer audacity of someone who refuses to be afraid of things larger than themselves.” He takes a step toward me.
“You have never once used your size or your power as an excuse. You built what you have out of what you were given, which was insufficient, and you built it brilliantly.”
I open my mouth.
“I am not finished,” he says.
I close my mouth.
“You are funny,” he says, like this is a significant finding.
“Without trying to be. Which is the only way to be actually funny. You are kind when you think nobody is watching, and you think nobody is ever watching, and you are always wrong about this.” Another step.
“You laugh like you’ve been given something unexpected.
You love the people in your life with a ferocity that you have never once turned on yourself, which is something I intend to correct.
” He’s very close now. “You summoned me for revenge and you couldn’t do it.
Not because you’re weak, but because you’re not.
You simply refused to become something lesser than you are. ”
My throat is very tight.
“I have existed for longer than most of your civilisations,” Dis says.
“I have seen power and beauty and courage in many forms. All humans are made from stardust, but I am telling you, Felix, that you were forged in the brightest of stars and you have spent your whole life being told otherwise by people who were simply wrong.”
The kitchen is completely silent.
I can’t speak. Something has happened to my voice. Something has happened to all of my normal defences, my deflection and my sarcasm and my habit of turning things into a joke before they can become something real. They appear to have left the building.
“I love you, Little Witch,” Dis says. “This is not a small thing. I do not say small things.”
I believe him. I believe him completely, in the way you believe things that are said by people who have never once told you what you wanted to hear just to make you feel better.
He has been honest with me since the beginning, with the particular brutal honesty of someone who doesn’t know how to be anything else, and he’s being honest now.
I gulp.
“I love you too, Disney,” I say.
It comes out slightly strangled and my eyes are doing something embarrassing and my voice is not entirely steady but it’s true, it’s completely and entirely true, and I’ve been not saying it for so long that saying it now feels like putting something down that I’ve been carrying for miles.
When I thought I was about to die, not saying stuff was my only regret. Fixing that error is a wonderful relief. As well as absolutely terrifying.
Dis looks at me. For a moment his composure does something I’ve only seen it do a handful of times. It cracks, just slightly, just enough to show what’s underneath it, which is something vast and warm and so genuinely relieved that it makes my chest ache.
And I’m relieved too, because even on my best days I would not be capable of putting my feelings into words the way he just did. He just gave me poetry. Sentences that I’m going to cherish and remember forever.
Blurting out three little words and a nickname, seems like a poor thing to give in return.
But he is Dis, and he sees me like no one else ever has, and I don’t think it’s merely a connection from feeding.
It’s just Dis. He can hear everything I can’t put into words.
And it’s enough. He accepts that I love him and he won’t ask me to prove it.
Suddenly, he closes the remaining distance between us and kisses me in a way that makes the love declaration seem almost an understated warm-up act.
When I eventually remember that I have lungs and they require air, I pull back slightly and look up at him.
“You know,” I say, “the teabag is still in the wrapper.”
Dis glances at the mug. Then back at me. “I am aware,” he says, with great dignity. “I was getting to it.”
“You absolutely were not.”
“I was.”
“You were going to give me hot wrapper water and say nothing.”
“I would have noticed, eventually.”
I laugh. He’s watching my face when I laugh, with that expression I know now, the one that started all of this, the one that means he finds my laugh pleasant and has never pretended otherwise.
I reach past him and fish the teabag out of its wrapper and drop it in the mug properly.
“Right,” I say. “I’ll teach you to make tea. You teach me I’m worth staying for.” I look up at him. “Deal?”
Those blue eyes, warm and steady and completely certain.
“Deal,” says Dis.
I’m quite certain this is the best deal I’ve ever made.