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Noel eyed the overcast sky, watching thick clouds amble past with the unmistakable promise of rain. There was a bite to the air that night, crisp and clear as it entered and exited his lungs in a puff of condensation. Well, as clear as New York air could masquerade itself as.
He had hoped the cold would do him some good, relieve some of the jitters that had begun to work their way through his restless feet and tapping fingers. It wasn’t the first night he had spent pacing in an alleyway and it likely wouldn’t be the last.
The sun was gliding lower, twilight mingling on the scraps of horizon barely peeking through the gaps between offices and department stores and whatever other shiny new buildings had sprouted up like so many daisies.
Noel found he quite enjoyed this time of day when the cars were scarcer and the foot traffic thinned. Yes, even those scraps of sky as they turned a deep amber, then royal blue, then dusky purple. His insomnia may have been a bitch, but at least, on some nights, it dressed itself up as something near-comforting.
Some nights.
This one, however? Debatable.
His skin still itched from years-old wounds, his mind stuck on images it had decided to kick up for the sheer hell of it, despite nothing fucking triggering them in any meaningful way. He hadn’t even seen the color yellow, for fuck’s sake.
No parts of him were being carved out, or sheared off, or broken, or bent. No one was invading his mind or body or personal space, whispering honey-soaked comforts or barbed threats. There were no cut-outs of his past or coercions from a false partner.
Or a real one…
The wound Roland had left was the deepest of all, and just when he thought it was finally starting to close, it would tear itself open all over again, blood flowing where no one else could see. If it was ever truly staunched, to begin with.
Noel released another breath. Shakier. Another puff of white spun into existence, dissipating a few seconds later and, suddenly, he wanted nothing more than a cigarette.
He slipped the silver case from the breast pocket of his coat, removing one and holding it between his lips. Automatically, his hands rifled through his pockets for a lighter, patting down trousers and coat, interior and exterior.
Just as that day in Lenox Hill Hospital, his search came up empty.
“Damn.” The word was partially muffled around the useless stick of paper in his mouth. “Every damn time…”
There came the sound of shoes on pavement and Noel’s skyrocketing heart rate was promptly soothed by a familiar chuckle.
“Trouble?”
Noel turned to meet Arthur’s smug face.
His cheeks were already reddening from the night air, his hair bearing telltale signs of slumber before he’d decided to leave the sanctuary of the apartment. At least he’d remembered a fucking coat this time, untied shoelaces notwithstanding. Noel had tried to warn him he was going to trip and break his neck on the curb one of these days.
Never one to slow down, Arthur Lester.
He made a show of tapping his cigarette against his chin as if there’d been the possibility he hadn’t wanted one and was still halfway through deciding. “No, no trouble at all. You? Thought you boys had turned in for the night.”
Arthur huffed out a small laugh at that—he always seemed to cover up such things, Noel had noticed. As if things like joy and amusement shouldn’t be any louder for fear of inviting something to snuff it out.
“John says that technically he doesn’t sleep.”
Noel nodded absently. “Wise man. Technicalities are important.”
“Spoken like a true detective.” Arthur gave a sudden hiss through closed teeth as his arms came up to clasp each other. “Fuck, it’s freezing. How long have you been out here?”
“I’m used to it.”
There was a stretch of silence, the rumbling of a sporadic vehicle.
He coughed. “You didn’t answer my question, by the way.”
Arthur squinted, then blinked, realization smoothing the lines of confusion from his forehead. “Oh. We had. Turned in for the night, I mean. But John was…” Those golden irises scanned their surroundings as if categorizing every subtle detail. “Concerned,” Arthur settled on just as those unearthly eyes met his own.
It was Noel’s turn to try to stifle a laugh, though more clumsily. “I’m flattered, but there’s nothing you need to be concerned about. Just stepped out for a smoke.”
Guiltily, he broke their gaze. What kind of ‘true detective’ couldn’t fucking lie? It was embarrassing.
“Is that what you were doing? Because it looks to me like you’re fondling your cigarette rather forlornly.”
Now that pulled a genuine laugh to the forefront. Noel shook his head. “Jesus. I don’t know which is worse: fondling or forlornly.”
“Probably the fact John thought those were the most apt descriptions.”
“Touche.”
Even so, he couldn’t seem to stop rolling it between his fingers. Back and forth. Back and forth. So much so that it had gained tiny indents from his fingernails.
There then came a hand on the crook of his arm.
The rasp of metal against metal.
The soft popping of flame.
He looked up to see Arthur’s hand on him, putting a gentle stop to his fidgeting, John’s holding out a familiar golden lighter, expectantly.
After a moment of reluctance, Noel slipped the cigarette between his teeth once more and leaned in. The flame soon set alight the tip of it and he took a long, satisfying drag of tobacco, held it in his lungs, let it build a barrier over the pain he had been trying and failing to stifle all night, then expelled it.
The cold, night air that rushed in next tasted all the sweeter and the smallest bit of tension evaporated from his shoulders.
God, had he needed that.
“Thanks, doll,” he sighed, and just because he could, “You too, Arthur.”
The lighter snapped shut. “Very amusing. He’s going to get a big head if you keep doing that. You know that, right?”
Noel flicked his wrist as though waving the words away with the smoke. “So let him get a big head. He deserves it, especially after saving my ass all those months ago.”
Another long drag, this one turning sour.
He thought he’d finally begun to accept what it was like to live without being under his influence, and then his mind had been broken into like that. Like it was nothing. Like it was child’s play.
He could almost feel the remnants of that piercing headache, the pressure so intense he thought his eyes would burst from his skull, not unlike that shithead Larson’s. He hadn’t been able to maneuver his own limbs, his own muscles, not even as they’d forced him to walk nearer and nearer to that goddamn balcony.
He’d never been one to fear heights in the past, but, these days, craning his head to catch the roof of a skyscraper was enough to send him tumbling into a spiral of vertigo.
He watched Arthur’s mouth open and close a few times, hesitating. “Are you supposed to be smoking with your…?”
Instinctively, Noel’s hand snapped up to his throat and the scar forever etched there. It wasn’t as obvious as Arthur’s—that jagged line across the entire length of his jugular from left to right—nor had it been magically healed, but it certainly wasn’t the prettiest thing to look at. He was used to turning up his coat collar even in the sun—anything to avoid the stares that walked a fine line between pity and horror.
He shrugged, the action too stiff to communicate the level of nonchalance he was hoping for. “‘Time heals all wounds,’ they say.”
Another fucking lie.
Most of the time, he felt like nothing but one big hodge-podge of wounds. More than just Roland. More than just the King. Even his goddamn name wasn’t anything besides another fucking lie to futilely cover up another fucking wound.
And wasn’t that the entire reason he was out here in the first place? To trick his body and brain into forgetting what he knew he would never fucking forget as long as he lived?
“Noel.”
He met golden eyes again, and they were closer, now, glinting in the dim light of the lampposts. The color of amber. Of honey. Bright and predatory and a part of him, not as buried as he would have liked, coiled in on itself, reeled back as though expecting some sort of blow.
He stumbled over his own two feet, nearly cracking his skull on the ground in a knee-jerk attempt to flee.
He felt like he was choking. Perhaps the smoking was a bad idea, after all—
“Woah.” Arthur’s hands shot out to steady him. “Hey, hey. Easy. Are you alright?”
He wasn’t.
He could hear them.
He could hear them.
The whispers in his ears, the infestations of his thoughts, his dreams, clawing at the walls of his mind, digging, burrowing, controlling.
The Great Deceiver.
The Unspeakable.
The Bringer of Madness, Madness, Madness—
“Hey,” Arthur gripped him by the shoulder. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
He was shuddering. He was in the grain terminal again. The Dreamlands. The King, hovering over him in all his intoxicating, maddening glory, pulling memories from him like teeth, his eyes boring into his, sickly and inhuman and yellow, yellow, yellow—
Noel wrenched himself away—pressed his eyes shut so tightly he was surprised the blood vessels didn’t pop.
He heard Arthur let out a small noise of surprise, then another, more puzzled. “What?” he asked, and, even with his head buzzing, Noel knew he wasn’t talking to him. “That’s not— He didn’t mean it like that.” A stutter. “John, would you just—”
There was a long stretch of silence. A resigned sigh.
“…It’s the King, isn’t it?” Arthur asked quietly. “Why you’re out here so late. And don’t say I have nothing to be concerned about.”
Noel kept his back to him, taking another trembling drag of tobacco. Held it. Longer, this time, partly an excuse not to talk, and partly in the hopes of fumigating the memories currently scrambling for purchase.
Sooner or later, however, he had to breathe.
He coughed the remaining smoke from his throat, trying not to wince at how frayed he sounded. “I’m used to it.”
Did he really need to admit that wasn’t the truth? He sure as hell wanted to believe it was.
“This isn’t the fucking weather,” Arthur scoffed. “Will you stop acting like you’re untouchable?”
“Why?” Noel met with equal heat, still not quite meeting his eyes. “So I can lose my fucking mind in an alleyway in the middle of the night?”
“You’re not losing your mind. The King didn’t win that.”
Noel opened his eyes to stare at the sky again. “Sometimes, it feels like he did…”
A droplet struck the tip of his nose. Then his forehead. Then the clouds finally burst open, rain promptly pinning his hair to his skull and striking the pavement in rapid percussion.
There it was. The cold, soaking through cloth and nipping at his bones. Noel tipped his chin high so he could feel the landing of each and every icy drop.
That was another thing he’d missed about Earth: patterns one could predict. Clouds that heralded rain. A sun that rose in the east and set in the west. A night that lasted more than a minute or two. A sky that only changed fucking colors because of natural law and nothing else.
How many days had felt like weeks in that place? How many years like centuries?
“You’re not in the Dreamlands, Charlie.” A voice, reading his thoughts. The sound of his name almost didn’t register, lost as it was beneath the rainfall.
Noel didn’t want to admit he wasn’t entirely sure of that any longer.
God, if Roland could see him now…
No. He knew he would take one look at him and all he would feel was sadness. Disappointment.
What happened to you, Charlie?
He inhaled another lungful of smoke.
Charlie.
Arthur had said his name, one he hadn’t divulged to another soul in what felt like lifetimes, yet it had come to him so naturally that day outside Marie’s place as if it had just been waiting for the right company in order to make an appearance.
Hearing it made him feel like a kid all over again. Little Charlie Dowd sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. His mother had always said he’d grow up to be a journalist. He honestly didn’t know if ‘detective’ was a step up or down.
He was beginning to think he didn’t help many people.
That permanent wound deep in his chest bled.
“You know,” he rasped. “Sometimes I wonder what my life was meant to be like if I hadn’t left Roland to do fuck all in Egypt for over a year. If I hadn’t been so goddamn focused on that stone. If I had just spilled my guts to the King instead of being so stubbornly defiant, then maybe, just maybe, he would still be—”
The words got stuck somewhere between his vocal cords and lips. He crushed the significantly smaller cigarette in his fist, relishing the nip of embers, a reminder of all the pain he’d experienced and all that he had so unjustly avoided.
Unlike so many others.
He let the wilted remnants of tobacco fall to the quickly forming puddles at his feet.
Ashes to ashes.
Dust to fucking dust.
There came a long pause, enough for him to feel self-conscious about an outburst that was seeming more childish by the second.
Arthur’s voice came, then. Soft.
“He would never have spared Roland. Even if you had given him every last scrap of information you had on file, or learned on the job, or heard whispered about from those who follow him—even if you’d given the King everything he’d wanted, he never would have let Roland go.”
Noel snorted at that, not because it was funny in the conventional sense, but because that meant he wouldn’t have been able to do anything. That he had never been anything other than completely and utterly powerless.
“You don’t know that, kid.”
“No,” Arthur admitted. “But I know the King. And he…” His breath seemed to stutter in his chest. Noel knew that sound, too. What it felt like to have your past try to crawl straight out of your marrow and up your windpipe. “You know firsthand that mercy is not a quality he is capable of.”
The truth in that statement rang through the air, born from being beaten down by the same hand.
“Roland is not your fault. None of it is your fault. It was fucked up and it wasn’t fair, but it’s not your fault. Alright?”
Yeah, right.
“Look at me,” Arthur pleaded. “Please.”
Slowly, Noel did, unsticking one eyelid at a time. He turned around.
Arthur’s face was resolute, the picture of cool reason, his brows downturned marginally, his lips thin and firm. Rarely had he looked so much like a PI talking down a blubbering client. More memories of Roland, unbidden.
But his eyes.
Any words Noel possibly could have said vanished.
While Arthur’s expression was one of restrained concern, his eyes shone with far too many to name: fury, regret, despair, sorrow—all clambering over each other to make it to the finish line first and earn a nonexistent prize.
John’s eyes, damp with tears.
Arthur’s smile was delayed and small, but no less genuine. “We’re in New York City. Not the Dreamlands. Not the Dark World. You feel this fucking rain? This isn’t some facsimile of reality—it is real. And that cigarette you just crushed? You can smell it, can’t you? Taste it? We defeated the King. I highly doubt he will be whole ever again, not unless Yellow finds a way to rend himself from his sorry excuse of a vessel and John...”
Arthur’s words seemed to trail away on the wind.
“…He’s not after you, Charlie. Not anymore.”
The truth, bright and tantalizing and oh-so fragile.
“You don’t have to believe me right now. You don’t have to believe me today or tomorrow or fucking years from now, but you are safe.”
Noel shivered again, though that could have been from the mere fact his coat and trousers were drenched to the last thread.
He hadn’t been safe for a long, long time. So long, it was starting to feel like a concept promised to young children without any actual evidence to support it. And he needed evidence. He needed evidence, and patterns, and quantifiable data.
Then again, Arthur had never been one for baseless mollification.
Noel released the breath that had been trapped somewhere in his ribcage for the last hour or so. With not inconsiderable effort, his pulse slowed.
“Y-you’re right,” he said at length. Released another shaky breath. “You’re right. Sorry, kid, I—"
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Arthur cut in, sincerely. “Though… Perhaps you could talk to John?” It was then Noel’s eyes flicked down to Arthur’s right hand and his solid grip on his left. “He thinks that you’re— I tried to tell him it wasn’t intentional—”
“What wasn’t intentional?”
Silence.
“Arthur?”
Arthur turned his head away and, from this angle, the streetlights made the ends of his wet hair glow a reddish-gold.
“The King,” Arthur said, as though that explained anything. “You were terrified you were with him again, right? That he’d found you?”
Noel’s thoughts halted in their tracks. The color of John’s eyes in the dark, even now, produced an instinctual fear deep within him, but that’s all it was. Instinctual. A fading phosphene. A Pavlovian response he wished to fucking God he could claw out of his psyche.
John thought he was afraid of him.
Why shouldn’t he? Noel was the one who had flinched so hard he’d nearly split his head open. And wouldn’t a fucking alleyway be the perfect place for him to finally kick the bucket?
No. He wasn’t scared of John. And if his tattered body had convinced itself he was, then, damn it all, he would choose not to be.
Noel took a few steps closer until he and Arthur were the same distance apart as they had been originally.
“John.” He extended a hand toward him, palm upward, but kept it hovering in the space between them without drawing too close. An invitation to touch. An olive branch. “May I?”
A flurry of emotions swept over Arthur’s face, and Noel found himself pondering, not for the first time, just how much his and John’s emotions bled into the other. Or maybe they were simply feeling the same thing.
In increments, a hand reached out in return, slender and dark-veined, lightly pressing the tips of its fingers to the center of Noel’s awaiting palm, bringing to mind a cat slowly reaching out a paw to prod at whatever had garnered its attention. The twist of maroon-tinted wood should have felt cold, alien, and, overall, John’s fingers were a bit chilled from being exposed to the elements with no protection, but there was an undeniable warmth embedded beneath.
Noel’s own hand curled inward, moving to interlock their fingers.
They stood there in silence, side by side, hand in hand, their backs leaning against the brick-laid wall of their apartment building. How odd was that to think about? The fact he not only had a place to call his own, but people to share it with? People. Plural.
People who would go out of their way to climb from their bed just to make sure he was alright.
“John,” he said again. “You with me?
“…Yes.”
It took a moment for Noel to detect the shift in tone, of Arthur taking a step back to allow his friend to fill his shoes, if only briefly.
Noel squeezed his hand with what he hoped was a comforting pressure.
“You’re not him, John. I’m sorry I reacted the way I did. Believe me, I’m a real piece of work sometimes.”
“Noel—”
“Let me finish, yeah? Have you really forgotten that day in the Order already? Don’t you remember what I said?” He felt as John’s hand tried to slip free and held on all the tighter. “You’re a good person, John. No bad one I’ve ever met would retreat so quickly for fear of causing harm. I take it that’s what happened?”
A heavy pause.
A gust of ice-cold wind.
Then—
“I saw the way you looked at me…”
“You’re not him.”
“Part of me will always be him,” John snapped, the admission breaking on his tongue.
And maybe Noel couldn’t argue with that.
He had seen both of them, the two halves, manifesting, extending tendrils and teeth into this plane with a thunderclap, towering infinitely high with more power than any mortal could comprehend.
He remembered that cultist bashing his skull into a bloody pulp, remembered seeing Yellow slither out of Larson’s feeble frame, crowding what felt like every conceivable inch of that grain terminal like smoke, but far more tangible. Far more deadly.
And he remembered John’s golden fury, his tattered cloak whirling, his newly-acquired form crackling as he smothered that other piece of himself, slowly but surely draining whatever strength remained in Arthur’s limbs. To save him. A man he had only met a couple days prior.
Because John considered Charlie Dowd someone worth saving.
And, for some inconceivable reason, that was the most irrefutable truth of them all.
“Do you honestly think I would do this if I thought you were him?”
Noel indicated their clasped hands.
“Or this?”
Without letting go, he slowly brought the back of John’s hand to his lips and pressed a light kiss between two of the knuckles. He drew away after a few short seconds, rubbing a thumb over the same spot as if to work every last bit of care and gratitude into the pores.
“You’re not defined by someone else, John. Least of all that yellow prick.”
John didn’t say anything. He had long gone ridged in his grasp.
A slight chuckle escaped Arthur’s chest, his cadence returning to normal.
“You’ve really done it now. He rambles about you enough as it is without him holding the fact you kissed him over my head.”
“Oh? Is that jealousy I’m hearing, doll?”
A flush dusted Arthur’s cheeks almost immediately, finally bringing some much-needed color back into his face and making his freckles stand out all the more. “What? N-no, I only meant—”
But Noel was already lifting Arthur’s hand to leave a lingering kiss on the lines of his palm.
“There. Problem solved.”
“Great.” Arthur’s face was definitely red now as he tugged his hand away with an embarrassment all too clear and endlessly endearing. No matter how hard he tried to budge John, however, the latter clung ever tighter. “John.”
Noel grinned. “I don’t mind. It’s actually grounding, in a way—as odd as that sounds. Having something to hold onto.”
When was the last time he had held anyone’s hand? There were no luxuries in the Dreamlands, and Roland hadn’t been the most touchy-feely type, nor had they been the sort of people to kill a few hours in a speakeasy or bar, unless it was to benefit some case.
He continued to rub a gentle thumb over each knuckle, warm and scarred and real. Not illusion. Not a dream. Nothing besides human skin and human touch.
Arthur gave a sigh akin to an exasperated parent, but seemed to stop his fruitless battle, nonetheless. “We should at least head back inside before one of us catches hypothermia.”
“After you.”
When they entered their apartment again long after sunset, Noel found that sleep came easier, yellow-tinted memories painted over in gold.
And if he happened to keep hold of John’s hand until consciousness faded around the edges, and if John happened to keep hold of his throughout the night until the sun broke through the last wisps of rainclouds…
Then it certainly wasn’t anything to mention.