Chapter 24 #3
His fingers tighten against Erath's cheek and he holds on, and Erath holds his other hand, and the dawn comes through the broken windows and turns the warehouse from gray to gold.
Neither of them moves. Neither of them needs to.
They are on the floor of a warehouse that smells of blood and frost, forehead to forehead, hand to hand, two people who have spent their whole lives building walls against the same thing and who have, against all odds and common sense, found the one person whose walls match their own.
The warehouse brightens.
Eventually, minutes later or an hour, time having lost all meaning, Vale appears at the edge of Erath's awareness and says, quietly and without urgency, that they should go.
That the Order will be here soon to clean up and secure the site, and that Sidney needs rest, and that they can debrief later.
Erath nods. He releases Sidney's hand and stands and reaches down and Sidney takes his offered grip and Erath pulls him to his feet.
Sidney's legs wobble, they buckle on the first step, and Erath catches him.
Arm around his waist, steady and firm, and Sidney leans into him without protest, without pride, without any of the defensive independence that typically characterizes every move he makes.
He leans into Erath and lets himself be held upright, and that surrender, that willingness to be held up by someone else, is something Sidney has never allowed before and Erath receives it carefully, the way you receive a gift you didn't earn.
They walk.
August is on his feet, barely. Vale has an arm around him and August's color is terrible, gray and drawn, the look of a man who has expended more power than his body can sustain, but he's walking, and his eyes are clear, and when they pass him he looks at Sidney and then at Erath and nods once.
An acknowledgment. A we did it. A he's alive.
Newt is standing with Malik near the warehouse entrance.
The predawn sky behind them is streaked with pink and gold, a sunrise, improbably beautiful, the kind of sky that doesn't know or care what happened beneath it, and Newt looks small and tired.
He looks at Erath as they approach and his eyes move to the place on the floor where Angelica's body had been, which is empty now, which is in the underworld, which is gone, and something in his expression shifts.
Settles. A door closing that was never going to open again.
Malik's arm is still around his shoulders.
"I'll take him home," Malik says to Erath, and it's not a request for permission. It's a statement of fact. The incubus's voice is low and steady and there is no room in it for argument.
Erath looks at Newt. "If you need me—"
"I'll call," Newt says. His voice is rough but his gaze is steady. "Go take care of him."
His eyes move to Sidney, to the bruise on his jaw, the raw wrists, the bare feet, and something passes through his expression that is softer than anything Sidney would expect from someone he barely knows.
But Newt is not a stranger. He is Penny's brother.
He is Erath's stepson. He is someone who knows what it means to be used by Angelica, to be made into a tool, to have your body treated as a means to someone else's end.
He looks at Sidney and sees something he recognizes, and the recognition is its own kind of kinship, the kind that doesn't require explanation or history, only the shared knowledge of what it costs to survive someone who should have loved you.
Sidney meets his gaze and nods, once, and there is an entire conversation in that nod.
A conversation they will have later, when there's time, when the adrenaline has faded and the wounds have closed and they can sit across from each other and speak plainly about the things they have in common. For now, the nod is enough.
They leave the warehouse.
The sunrise is absurd. Pinks and golds and a deep, bruised purple at the horizon, the kind of colors that belong on postcards and not on the worst morning of Sidney's life, and Erath guides him through the streets with an arm around his waist and Sidney's head on his shoulder and Sidney's bare feet on cold pavement.
He should carry him. He wants to carry him.
But Sidney is walking, slowly, painfully, with a stubbornness that borders on heroic, and Erath knows him well enough by now to know that walking matters.
That moving under his own power matters.
That being held upright is not the same as being carried, and Sidney needs to know his legs still work even when the rest of him doesn't.
They reach the subway entrance. They descend the stairs into the underworld, and the dark closes around them, and Sidney's breathing evens out against Erath's shoulder.
The house is ahead of them. Penny is with Xela.
The bed is waiting, and somewhere in the quiet of the underworld, in the space between one breath and the next, Sidney's hand finds Erath's and holds it, and the grip is not desperate this time.
It is not clinging. It is the steady, deliberate hold of a person who has decided to stay.
Penny's going to need us, Erath thinks. Not me. Not you. Us.
The word settles into his chest next to the keystone, next to the possessiveness, next to the small bright thread that Penny wove between them, and it holds.
Erath takes Sidney home.