Chapter 24 #2
The possessiveness of that thought should concern him. It doesn't. It is the simplest, truest thing he has felt all night, and it settles into his chest with a weight that is not heavy but structural, foundational, the way a keystone settles into an arch and makes the whole thing hold.
Erath crosses the warehouse floor and kneels in front of him. The concrete is cold under his knees and there is still frost on the ground and the first gray light of dawn is coming through the broken windows and everything is quiet and everything is over and Sidney is alive.
Erath takes his hands.
Both of them. He wraps his fingers around Sidney's, carefully, gently, enclosing the trembling in his grip without squeezing, without restraining, and holds them.
Sidney's hands are cold. Not underworld cold, not death cold, but the cold of someone who has been lying on a concrete floor in a warehouse with no jacket and bare feet for hours, and the human fragility of it, the sheer biological vulnerability of a body that can't regulate its own temperature under these conditions, hits Erath with a force that nearly sends him back on his heels.
He has spent eternity around the dead, who are past all harm.
He has forgotten, in some deep and fundamental way, how breakable the living are, and Sidney is alive and breakable and cold and shaking and Erath is holding his hands and it is not enough and it will have to be enough.
Sidney opens his eyes.
They find Erath's face immediately, without searching, as though he knew exactly where Erath would be.
They're bloodshot and glassy and there are dark circles beneath them and they are the most beautiful thing Erath has ever seen, because they are open, and they are looking at him, and they are alive.
"Hi," Sidney says.
His voice is wrecked. Destroyed. Scraped raw by screaming and rough from the chemical they used to drug him and thin from exhaustion.
It's barely a voice at all. It's a rasp, a whisper, a sound held together by stubbornness and nothing else, and it's so Sidney that Erath's chest does something he doesn't have a name for.
After everything, kidnapped and drugged and used as a doorway between worlds, his body torn apart by magic and his veins set on fire and his bones used as scaffolding for a rift in the fabric of reality, Sidney opens his eyes and looks at Erath and says hi.
As though they're meeting at the kitchen table. As though this is just another morning.
"Sidney," Erath says, and that's all he can say, because words are so absurdly insufficient for everything he's feeling that the attempt to find them is almost comical.
How does he begin. How does he explain the last few hours, the shaking hands and the cold bed and the terror and Penny's vision and the walk through the city and the frost and the warehouse doors and the barrier and the chanting and Angelica's heart in his hand.
How does he apologize for what happened in the bed.
How does he explain that his body reacted to a touch on his throat the way Sidney's body reacted to being pinned down, instinctively, violently, from a place so deep and damaged that consciousness doesn't reach it in time to intervene.
How does he say I'm sorry when I'm sorry doesn't begin to cover it, when the thing he needs to apologize for is not a choice he made but a wound he carries, and Sidney carries the same wound from the other side.
Sidney's hands tighten in his grip. His fingers curl around Erath's and hold on, not gently, not lightly, but hard, with a desperation that has everything to do with the need to touch something solid and real and present.
"I'm sorry," Sidney says.
His voice cracks. It breaks on the second word and his face breaks with it, the careful composure fracturing, the control slipping, and he's gripping Erath's hands with the desperation of someone who is afraid Erath will leave.
"I panicked. I shouldn't have left, but I panicked—"
He's apologizing. He's sitting on the floor of a warehouse where he was kidnapped and drugged and used as a doorway between worlds and he's apologizing for running from a man who pinned him to a mattress in the dark.
He's apologizing for a survival instinct that has kept him alive through things Erath doesn't fully know about and cannot begin to fathom.
He's apologizing because he thinks his fear is the thing that caused this, because he thinks if he'd stayed, if he'd been braver, if he'd been better, none of this would have happened, and he is so wrong, he is so catastrophically wrong, and Erath cannot let him carry this.
Erath presses his forehead against Sidney's.
He leans in, closing the distance, and rests his forehead against Sidney's and stays there.
Their faces are inches apart and Sidney's breath is warm and ragged against his mouth and the trembling in his hands transfers through their joined grip into Erath's steady ones and he holds it.
He holds Sidney's shaking. He takes it in and lets it pass through him and doesn't flinch from it and doesn't try to stop it, because the shaking is not weakness.
The shaking is the body processing what it survived, and Sidney survived, and Erath is going to hold his hands while the processing happens for as long as it takes.
"Don't," Erath says, quietly, into the small space between them. "You have nothing to be sorry for. What happened in that bed was mine, and I will spend the rest of your life earning back what it cost you."
Sidney's breath breaks. His forehead presses harder against Erath's and his hands grip with a force that would bruise a human's fingers, and he doesn't speak, and the not-speaking says everything.
The warehouse is quiet around them. August and Vale are somewhere behind him, two living presences close together, still holding each other.
Newt and Malik are near the far wall, Malik's arm still around Newt's shoulders, and somewhere in the warehouse the unconscious coven members are beginning to stir, groaning softly, and they are no threat.
The dawn is coming through the windows. The frost is beginning to melt.
Sidney breathes. In and out. In and out. The rhythm steadies against Erath's forehead, slowing, deepening, and the trembling in his hands lessens by degrees. Not stopping, not entirely, but quieting. Moving through.
Sidney's hand detaches from Erath's grip.
It rises, trembling, and cups Erath's cheek.
His palm is cold and his fingers are unsteady but the touch is deliberate, chosen, intentional, an act of will rather than reflex, and his thumb brushes Erath's cheekbone and his eyes are open and wet and very close.
"All this time," Sidney says. His voice is barely a whisper. "I should have realized I wasn't the only one afraid."
The words land in Erath's chest and the feeling they generate is so precise and so vast that he can't hold it, can't contain it, can only let it move through him the way he let Sidney's shaking move through him, absorbing the force of it without resistance.
Because that's it. That's the whole thing. The piece he's been missing, the piece they've both been missing, circling each other in the dark with their hands up and their walls high and their damage on full display and somehow never quite seeing that the other person was doing the exact same thing.
And Sidney sees it now. Sees him. Not the god, not the lord of the underworld, not the ancient and powerful being who tore a woman's heart from her chest tonight.
The man who flinched. The man who grabbed a wrist in the dark because someone touched his throat and his body remembered what that meant the last time it happened. The man who is afraid.
Erath turns his face into Sidney's palm. He presses his lips there, against the cold skin, the trembling fingers, and kisses it. Not a passionate kiss. Not a romantic one. A deliberate one. An answer. Yes. I'm afraid. I've always been afraid. But I'm here.
Sidney holds on.