Bros before…
This is my second day of domestic bliss, which is an odd thought.
We’ve been sitting on the sofa for the better part of an hour, Dis and I, doing very little and finding it entirely satisfactory.
He’s reading, which he started doing yesterday with the focused absorption he brings to everything, working his way through my meagre bookshelf with opinions about all of it.
I’ve been drinking tea and listening to his critiques, and feeling, in a quiet and slightly bewildered way, extremely content.
The tea is better today. We’re improving.
Suddenly, the door bursts open.
Not knocked on. Not politely opened. Bursts, with the specific energy of someone who has been worried for a significant amount of time and has reached the point where social niceties are no longer relevant.
Adam comes through it like a small determined force of nature, his hoodie on inside out, his hair slightly dishevelled in the way it gets when he’s been cycling fast, his face carrying the particular expression of someone who has been managing their anxiety about something for as long as they can stand and has abruptly stopped managing it.
Behind him, moving with considerably more composure but with slightly less grace than usual, is Hex.
Hex, I notice, has the look of someone who has been trying to intercept this exact situation and has narrowly failed.
“Felix, it’s been two days since your father…” Adam says, and then he stops.
Because Dis is on my sofa. Free, clearly, visibly free, not in a circle, not bound by anything. In my jumper. With a book. Sitting beside me with the easy, settled quality of someone who is exactly where they intend to be.
Adam’s eyes go to our joined hands.
They’ve been joined for most of the morning, mine and Dis’s, in the quiet way that has become ordinary remarkably fast. I become aware of this at the same moment Adam clocks it.
I don’t let go.
“Adam,” I say.
Adam looks at me. He’s running through something, I can see it, all the things he wants to say stacking up behind his eyes. His gaze moves to Dis, then back to me, then to our hands, then to my face.
“How long,” he says quietly.
And there it is. Not the anger, not yet. Just the question. The one that means he already knows the answer isn’t going to be recent.
I take a breath. “A while,” I say. And then, because honesty is apparently my thing now and I might as well commit to it fully, “I’m not sure, if I’m honest. I didn’t want it to be. It just... was.”
Adam is very still.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “For lying. For keeping you out. I know that’s not...” I stop. Start again. “You came and checked on me, and I told you I’d been watching Bake Off and that wasn’t... I mean it wasn’t entirely untrue, but it wasn’t what you were asking, and I knew that and I’m sorry.”
Hex has closed the door behind them. He’s standing slightly apart, watching with those steady red eyes, and I can see him calculating, choosing his moment.
“He was going to kill you,” Adam says. Not accusing. Just saying it. The fact of it. “He used you as bait. He tried to kidnap me. He tried to…” He stops. Looks at Hex. Looks back at me. “Felix, he nearly killed Hex.”
“I know,” I say.
“You know.”
“I know. I haven’t forgotten any of it.” I look at Dis. He’s very still, watching Adam with the careful attention of someone who knows they have no right to defend themselves and isn’t going to try. “I know what he did. I know what it cost. None of that stopped being true.”
“Then how…”
The raw pain in Adam’s voice makes me wince. Dis’s grip on my hand tightens.
“I did not personally choose to pursue the throne, it was not a plan born of greed,” Dis says.
His voice is low. He’s looking at Adam, and there is something in his expression I’ve rarely seen there, something stripped of the usual composure.
Honesty, plain and unarmoured. “I want to be clear about that. Not because it excuses anything. But because I need you to understand that I did not set out to harm people. I set out to survive. Everything else was in service of that.”
Adam looks at him steadily.
“What was done to me,” Dis continues, and something shifts in his voice, something careful and controlled that suggests there is a great deal beneath the surface that he is choosing, precisely, not to show.
“From the very beginning of my existence, carved one truth into me above all others. That the throne was the only worthy objective. That power was the only currency. That attachment was weakness and sentiment was failure and anything that did not serve the singular goal of dominion was to be excised.” He stops. “I was not taught this gently.”
The silence that follows is a different kind of silence.
Adam’s face has changed. I watch it change, the anger and the hurt shifting into something more complicated, something that is trying to accommodate new information about a person he had already categorised.
Hex’s expression is its own kind of eloquent. He knows, I think. He knows more than he’s saying about what it means to be made into a weapon, about the specific cost of being something ancient and powerful with nothing to hold onto except the thing you were built to want.
“That’s...” Adam starts. Stops.
“Horrible,” I say quietly, because it is, and because someone should say it plainly.
“Yes,” Dis says. Just that.
Adam looks at me. “You knew this.”
“I found out. Gradually.” I think about the Scrabble board. The hand through the circle. “He doesn’t talk about it easily.”
“No,” Dis agrees. “I do not.”
Adam looks at Dis for a long moment. Then he looks at Hex, and something passes between them that is private, and I don’t try to read it.
“The things I did,” Dis says, to Adam specifically, with the gravity of someone who has thought carefully about what needs to be said and is saying it precisely.
“Using Felix. Using you. It was not personal. I want you to know that, for whatever it is worth. You were not people to me then. You were variables. Elements of a strategy.” He pauses.
“I am aware that this is not the comfort it might seem. I am not offering it as comfort. I am offering it as truth, and as the closest I can come to an explanation that does not excuse.”
Adam is quiet for a long moment.
“You were horrible,” he says finally.
“Yes,” Dis says.
“You nearly killed my fiancé.”
“Yes.”
“And now you’re in Felix’s jumper on Felix’s sofa and you’ve apparently been cosy this whole time and Felix has been lying to me about it.”
“Yes,” Dis says. “I am sorry for my part in that. Felix was protecting something that mattered to him. I could have made it easier for him to be honest, and I chose not to, because having him keep my presence secret served my interests.”
I look at Dis. He meets my eyes briefly with an expression that says far more than words could ever hope to.
Adam waves his hands around in a gesture of pure exasperation. I can see the conflict in his eyes. He is listening. He is horrified by Dis’s past, but he can’t forget the terror Dis caused him. “Felix, how can you trust him?”
“Adam,” Hex’s voice is quiet. The room attends to it the way rooms attend to Hex when he uses that particular tone, the one that carries the weight of what he actually is underneath the ordinary Bristol life he’s built.
He moves to stand beside Adam, close, and Adam’s shoulders drop slightly just from the proximity. “Will you let me explain something?”
Adam looks at him. Nods.
Hex is quiet for a moment, in the way he’s quiet when he’s choosing words carefully, when he’s trying to translate something that doesn’t have a clean human equivalent.
“Shadow beings,” he says, “do not love the way humans love. It is not a feeling that comes and goes. It does not diminish. It does not transfer.” He pauses.
“When we love, it is complete. Total. It is the whole of what we are, directed at one thing, one person, and it does not answer to reason or circumstance or the wars we have fought or the wrongs we have done.” His red eyes find mine briefly.
“It is the most powerful force in all the realms. More powerful than thrones or magic or old grievances. It is reverent. Sacred. In the Shadow Realm it is treated as such, because it cannot be controlled or commanded and it is always, always respected.”
Adam’s eyes have grown enormous. His mouth has formed into an O shape.
Colour is flushing across his cheeks. I strongly suspect that this is the most openly Hex has ever talked about what love means to his kind.
Because the prince is charming, affable, and often shameless, but he’s rather constipated about emotions.
“So…” Adam stutters. “Dis loves Felix so…” he trails off.
“There is no one in all the realms I can trust more,” I supply.
The room is very quiet.
Adam sighs. It’s a long sigh, the kind that carries a lot of weight and sets some of it down. He looks at me with those kind, exasperated, completely seen-through-me eyes that he has been directing at me since we first became friends.
“I know you, Felix,” he says. “You’re prickly and difficult and you lie through your teeth when you’re scared, and you keep everything at arm’s length until you can’t anymore.” He glances at Dis. Then back at me. “And I know you wouldn’t have fallen in love with him if he was a jerk.”
Something loosens in my chest. Something that has been very tightly wound for a very long time.
“He’s still a bit of a jerk,” I say. “Objectively.”
“I am not a jerk,” Dis says, with considerable dignity. “I am direct.”
“He’s direct,” I tell Adam.
“Apparently,” Adam says, and the corner of his mouth moves, just slightly, in the way that means he’s decided something. He looks at Dis again. “You’re going to have to earn it. My trust. It’s not going to come for free and it’s not going to come quickly.”
“I would not expect otherwise,” Dis says. “Nor ask for it.”
“Good.” Adam nods once, the way he does when he’s settled something internally and is ready to move forward. Then he looks at me. “I’m still annoyed with you.”
Despite everything, pride blooms in my chest. When I first met Adam, he was such a doormat. Now look at him. My friendship has done him wonders. As has Hex’s love, I suppose.
“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry. I actually am.”
“I know you actually are.” He sighs again. “Right. Are you going to offer me tea or what?”
I look at Dis. Dis looks at me. There is a very brief pause.
“I’ll make it,” I say.
“I will assist,” Dis says, standing with the gravity of someone who has decided that tea-making is a skill worth acquiring and is approaching it as such.
Adam watches Dis follow me to the kitchen with an expression that I think is going to take some time to fully resolve into something he has a name for.
Hex comes to stand beside him. I hear him, very quietly, say something I don’t catch. I hear Adam laugh, surprised and genuine.
In the kitchen, I put the kettle on. Dis stands beside me, close, and I lean into him slightly and he lets me, which is all I need right now.
“Thank you,” I say quietly. “For what you said.”
“It needed saying,” he says. “I should have said it sooner.”
The kettle boils. I make four cups of tea, properly, with the teabags out of the wrappers, and Dis watches with focused attention and I know he’s filing it all away for the next time he tries to do this on his own.
We take the tea back to the living room.
Adam is on the sofa. He looks up when we come in, and his eyes go to me and Dis and the tea, and he makes room.
It’s enough. For now, it’s enough.