Chapter 14 #2
"See you tomorrow night," Avery says, like they're going to an event rather than a murder.
Avery turns to go. Emery watches him start down the corridor and says, before the impulse can be filtered through the part of his brain that edits for self-preservation: "Be careful tomorrow."
Avery looks back over his shoulder. His expression is warm and a little wry and carrying the humor of being told to be careful by a person about to do the same dangerous thing.
"You too," he says, and walks away, and his footsteps are quiet on the stone and then gone.
Emery stands in the hallway.
The study door is still closed. Behind it, Bastian and Hask are talking, he can hear the low murmur of voices, indistinct, the specific cadence of two people who have been having private conversations for years and do not need volume to communicate.
Emery could go to his room. His room is three corridors away, with its locked door and its clean bed and the three books on the table that he has still not finished because reading them here means they belong here and he is not sure he belongs here yet.
He could go to his room.
He makes a decision that has bad written all over it.
He goes to Bastian's room instead.
The door is unlocked. It is always unlocked, Emery has noticed, which is either an extraordinary act of trust or an extraordinary act of arrogance, and with Bastian the line between those two things is so thin it might not exist. Who locks their door when their voice can unmake the person who opens it?
Who worries about intruders when the intruder's worst-case scenario is the occupant being awake?
Emery lets himself in. The room is as he left it, the four-poster bed with its plush quilts, the fireplace burning low, the bearskin rug, the reading nook in the corner with the armchair and the small table. Emery crosses to the nook and picks up the book on the table.
He turns it over in his hands. The cover is soft leather, worn at the corners, the title stamped in faded gold leaf: The Cartographer's Compass.
He opens it to a random page and scans the text, a passage about a woman who has followed a river to the edge of a map and must decide whether to turn back to the world she knows or step into the blank space where the cartographer's knowledge ends and the territory becomes something that has to be discovered rather than referenced.
Faraway places, the kind that probably do not exist. Not what Emery would have predicted for a crime lord, but Bastian himself told him he enjoys pretending he is someone else for a while, and the admission makes more sense the longer Emery sits with it.
Bastian is the most dangerous man in the Underground.
He carries the weight of that every moment of every day, the weight of the reputation, the weight of the decisions, the weight of being the person everyone fears and no one fully knows.
Of course he reads about faraway places.
Of course he escapes into stories where the protagonist can step off the edge of the map and become someone new.
The wanting does not contradict the reality.
It coexists with it, the way everything about Bastian coexists, the ruthless and the tender, the violent and the gentle, existing without seam, without apology, without the need to reconcile.
Emery sits in the armchair. He tucks his legs beneath him, the chair large enough that he can fold himself into it entirely, his bare feet beneath him and his knees drawn up and the book resting against his thighs, and he reads.
He reads the way he always reads: completely, with the total immersion of using stories as a survival mechanism for so long that the reading is less a hobby than a reflex.
The world beyond the pages recedes, the compound, the plan, the bruise on his throat, the memory of Bastian's hands and mouth and the devastating, incomprehensible tenderness of holding him against a door and not asking for anything more.
All of it recedes, and in its place is the cartographer's river and the edge of the map and the woman standing at the border between the known and the unknown, trying to decide if the unknown is more frightening than the known or just differently frightening, and whether the difference matters.
He reads until his eyes give out. The words blur, soften, become shapes rather than language, and his head drops against the wing of the armchair and the book slips in his hands and he sleeps.
He wakes to a hand brushing across his cheek.
He knows it is Bastian before he opens his eyes.
He knows it the way he knows the weight of a blade in his hand, by feel, by instinct, by the accumulated evidence of a body that has been paying attention even when the mind has not.
The touch is warm. The fingers are careful.
The calluses on the pads of them are familiar, mapped against Emery's skin in a dozen different contexts, and his body recognizes them and responds with a softening, a loosening, a release of tension that happens below the level of conscious thought.
He is warm and half-asleep and not guarded enough for this.
He shifts. The armchair creaks beneath him.
The book has fallen into his lap, pages down, the spine cracked at the place where the cartographer decides to step off the map, and Emery registers this through the haze of waking the way you register a detail in a dream, present, vivid, disconnected from context.
He realizes Bastian is lifting him.
Part of him thinks to protest. The part that is always protesting, the part that has been protesting since the first night they met, the vigilant, exhausting, necessary part of himself that insists on independence and self-sufficiency and the absolute refusal to be carried by anyone for any reason, because being carried means being held and being held means being dependent and being dependent means being vulnerable and being vulnerable means being hurt.
But Bastian is warm. And solid. And his arms are around Emery's back and beneath his knees and he lifts him from the armchair with a strength that is effortless and complete, and the effortlessness is its own kind of argument against protesting, because it says this costs me nothing and you weigh nothing and I would carry you from here to the surface and back and it would still cost me nothing.
The protest dies in Emery's throat, unvoiced, replaced by the slow, helpless act of letting himself be carried.
Bastian carries him to the bed.
He places him beneath the quilt with the care of handling something irreplaceable.
The sheets are cool against Emery's warm skin and the quilt is heavy and soft and smells of Bastian, woodsmoke and something clean and warm underneath, the scent that Emery has catalogued without intending to and which now registers as safety in a part of his brain that does not deal in logic.
Bastian kisses his forehead.
The press of his lips is light, brief, carrying no expectation and no agenda, and Emery feels it as a brand, not painful but indelible, the kind of contact that marks the place where it lands and does not fade.
He keeps his eyes closed. He is afraid that if he opens them and sees the expression on Bastian's face, the devotion, the steady, unshakeable, inexplicable devotion that looked at an assassin sent to kill him and saw something worth keeping, he will say something he cannot take back.
Bastian moves away. Emery hears the sounds of him tending the fire, the shift of a log, the soft rush of embers being stirred, the creak of the iron poker against the grate.
The warmth in the room builds. The fire settles into a steadier burn, and the light behind Emery's closed eyelids shifts from dim to warm.
The mattress dips. Bastian climbs in beside him.
He moves with the care of not wanting to disturb, understanding without being told that the person beside him is balancing on the edge of sleep and trust simultaneously.
The quilt shifts. The heat of Bastian's body finds the cool spaces of Emery's and fills them, and Emery feels Bastian settle against his back, the length of him, the breadth, the solid, radiating warmth of a body that runs hot the way all Vespers run hot, and the warmth seeps through the thin fabric of Emery's shirt and into his skin and reaches places that have been cold for so long he forgot they existed.
Bastian's face presses into the curve of Emery's neck.
His breath is slow and warm against the skin there, stirring the fine hairs, and his arm comes around Emery's waist, not pulling, not tightening, just resting.
A presence. An anchor. The physical articulation of I am here and I am not going anywhere and you can sleep now because I am between you and the door.
Emery should not find comfort in this. He should not find safety in the arms of a man who breaks fingers and boils blood and has killed people in ways that have become cautionary tales whispered in the dark corners of the Underground.
The should and the is have never been further apart.
He is safe. He feels safe. The feeling is irrational and unjustifiable and so complete that it fills him from the inside, completely, from the bottom up, until there is no space left that it has not touched.
Bastian breathes against his neck, slow and steady, the breath of having found the place he wants to be and settling into it with the unhurried satisfaction of arrival.
Emery falls asleep.