21. Chapter 21 #3
The third one. The kind one. The one who was patient and gentle right up until he wasn't. He'd done this.
Not with Erath's strength, not with the force of a god, but with the casual, proprietary weight of a man who believed that Sidney's body was a space he was entitled to occupy, and Sidney had lain beneath him and gone quiet and stayed quiet and waited, and the waiting had taught his nervous system a lesson it never unlearned.
When you are pinned, you are prey. When you are prey, you are still. When you are still, it hurts less.
Sidney goes still.
His breath stops. His muscles lock. Every system in his body shuts down to the place where there is no thought and no feeling and no Sidney, just the animal reflex of a person who has learned to survive contact by leaving his body entirely.
He is not in the bed. He is not in the underworld.
He is in an apartment in Haven with hands on his wrists and a voice in his ear telling him to stop making a big deal out of nothing, and the disconnect between where he is and where his body thinks he is is total and absolute and the sound that comes out of his mouth is not a word.
It's a breath. Caught and broken and barely audible and it sounds like the words please don't.
Erath's eyes clear.
It happens in an instant, the transition from wherever he was to where he is, and the recognition that floods his face when he sees Sidney beneath him is worse than anything Sidney has ever seen on a living or dead thing.
Erath's hands release. His weight lifts.
He pulls back so fast that the absence of him is a physical event, a sudden rush of cold air where his body had been, and he's sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to Sidney and his hands in his lap and he's trembling.
Erath is trembling. The god of death, the being who carries the weight of every soul that has ever crossed the boundary between life and the absence of it, is sitting on the edge of a bed in the dark and shaking with the memory of whatever he saw when Sidney's fingers touched his face and his sleeping mind told him it was someone else.
He is not in a state to apologize. He is not in a state to do anything except sit there and shake and try to breathe through whatever is happening inside him, and his shoulders are hunched forward and his head is down and he looks, for the first time since Sidney has known him, small.
Sidney doesn't give him a chance.
He doesn't think about it. Thinking would require being present and Sidney is not present.
Sidney is operating on the same autopilot that got him through every bad night in every bad relationship, the emergency protocol that fires when conscious thought is too dangerous and the body takes over and the only directive is go.
He is out of the bed and across the room and in the hallway before he registers that he's moving.
He doesn't stop for his shoes. He doesn't stop for his coat.
He doesn't stop for anything because stopping means being in the room and being in the room means being in the bed and being in the bed means being pinned and the chain of association is so fast and so total that his body will not allow him to be still.
He passes Penny's door. It's cracked and the soft sound of her breathing drifts through and some distant, submerged part of him registers it and aches, but the ache is buried under the noise of his own pulse and the ringing in his ears and the frantic, animal need to put distance between himself and what just happened.
He leaves the house. The underworld stretches around him, dark and vast and green-lit, and the cold hits his bare feet on the cracked earth and he doesn't feel it.
He walks toward the tunnel leading up, past the river where the spirits drift and murmur, past the stone structures and the dead landscape, and the spirits that have grown accustomed to his presence part around him the way they always do, but something in their movement suggests unease, as though they can feel the distress radiating off of him in waves and it's disrupting the carefully maintained order of the dead.
The tunnel is dark. The stairs are cold under his bare feet, stone worn smooth by centuries of passage, and he climbs them without thinking about where he's going because he's not going anywhere.
He's going away. The direction is away and the destination is anywhere that isn't the bed and the dark and the weight and the sound of his own voice saying don't to a man who wasn't trying to hurt him and hurt him anyway and isn't that always how it goes, isn't that always exactly how it goes, the ones who aren't trying are the ones who cut the deepest because you can't even be angry about it, you can't even blame them, you just have to absorb it and keep moving and pretend you're fine.
He surfaces in Central. The city air hits him and it's cold and wet and alive and his feet are bare on the pavement and his arms are bare to the night air and he's shivering before he takes three steps.
The streets are empty. Late enough for the bars to be winding down, early enough that morning hasn't started, the dead hours when the city belongs to no one.
A streetlight buzzes above him, casting a yellow pool on the wet concrete, and Sidney walks through it and out the other side and keeps walking.
He should go back. He knows he should go back.
Erath didn't mean it, and Sidney knows Erath didn't mean it, and the fact that he's walking barefoot through Haven in the middle of the night because a man had a trauma response in his sleep is irrational and unfair and Sidney is both of those things right now and he can't stop being them.
He can't reason his way out of the place his body has put him.
His mind is already building the case for going back, assembling the evidence that Erath is not the third one and not the second one and not the first one, that Erath was asleep and didn't know what he was doing and was responding to something that happened to him years before Sidney existed.
His mind knows all of this. His body doesn't care.
His body is four blocks from Willow's and still running, and the pavement is wet and rough under his feet and his teeth are chattering and he is so tired, so goddamn tired of being someone whose first response to being touched wrong is to flee.
He doesn't see them coming.
There's a cloth over his mouth and something in the cloth that burns his nostrils and turns the edges of his vision soft and liquid.
His body, already in flight mode, already flooded with adrenaline, fights before his brain catches up.
He kicks and twists and bites the hand nearest his face and tastes copper and hears someone curse, but his limbs are already heavy from the cold and the adrenaline crash and the chemical in the cloth is pulling him under fast, faster than it should, because his defenses are already shredded and there's nothing left in him to resist with.
Hands. Several of them. Dragging him off the street.
The wet pavement scraping against his bare feet as they pull him sideways into an alley.
He tries to reach for the bond, for Penny, for the tether between them that should be sounding every alarm in the underworld, but the chemical is wrapping layers of static around the frequency, dampening it, muffling him, and he can feel himself going dark the way a radio goes dark when you drive too far from the station.
The last thing he sees before the black comes in from every side is the face of a woman he doesn't recognize, pale and sharp and looking at him with the clinical detachment of someone inspecting a tool they're about to use.
She says something he can't hear over the roaring in his ears.
Then the dark takes him, and the last coherent thought he has is not about Erath or Penny or the Coven or the danger he's in.
It's about the look on Erath's face when he realized what he'd done. The devastation in it. The way he'd pulled away so fast. The way he'd been shaking.
Sidney thinks: He was scared too.
And then nothing.