Work Text:
Honourably, they guard the borders of things. They do their best. They never do enough.
A thing to remember: his body was always a border.
36° East
Bod is nearing twenty. He's grown up tall and rangy, his muscle stretched, eyes large in a lean face. There's still something of the Graveyard about him, if you know how to look. He may not be able to fade but, sometimes, he's so quiet that it's like he's not there at all.
At midnight, the souk is loud and bright. He imagines keeping watch from above, and this place would bleed light in an otherwise dark city. Bod wears grey. He stands out against all of the bright colours like smoke against a blue, blue sky.
He watches as Bod fills his pockets with presents for the family that he will never see again. For his parents, he buys silks to decorate their cosy little tomb. For Scarlett Amber Perkins, the living girl, silver things for her hair. For the Witch, there's incense and there's a tiny alabaster dog for the memory of Miss Lupescu. He smiles when he sees what Bod has picked out for him, in case they ever see each other again.
There's a girl following Bod through the market, dressed in black and gold, insubstantial as smoke.
Bod never sees the dead anymore.
151° East
He pauses and watches Bod watching the jellyfish pulsing under red lights.
He is put in mind of a beating heart.
Fascinating, if long unfamiliar.
15° West
Bod has spent days with dead men. He talks. They do not talk back. There is a statue of a colourfully dressed man sprawled in a park; Oscar Wilde has never heard of Nobody Owens, and Bod's never heard of him. While Wilde is smartly dressed, Bod still wears different shades of grey in layers; worn leather and denim, wool with holes worn by his thumbs. For a while in the park, sitting on a curb, Bod gets distracted by the spray of stars overhead. The irony is not lost on his guardian. He imagines that, in sunlight, Bod sparks.
But he'll never be sure.
Of all the many things which the world has given him over the many, many years to regret, perhaps it is this that he feels the most keenly; the fact that he'll never see Bod in sunlight, where the living people go.
The next evening, there's late opening in a tall townhouse, cluttered with maps and literary artefacts. They call it "The House of the Dead". This may or may not rise a smile.
On the way out, to one bar or another, Bod stops and writes on a wall in marker pen. In copperplate handwriting which he has seen go in and out of fashion, Bod writes, Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. Hello Silas. Love Bod.
After he's got, he stands and studies it for a long time. He presses his fingers against the now-dry ink.
Somehow, resistance ends.
"Yes," he says. "Yes, I will. Yes."
79° East
The Ghat at dusk. The flat slab of marble where they burn the bodies. When love came to India, his name was Mahatma Gandhi. They cremated him here, and it's as though the river remembers the loss. Yamuna, Ganges' sister, was always Krishna's favourite. Bod sits on the bank of the river, sneakers on his feet and dust in his hair, thin silver bangles on his wrists.
He doesn't look around, but he does smile.
"Hello, Silas," he says.
"Hello, Bod," says Silas.
"How long have you been there?"
"How old are you?"
"Nineteen, according to my Passport."
"Then I have been here for a long time," he says.
Bod nods. His hair tumbles across his forehead. Silas' hand comes up as though to brush it away from his own eyes but Bod is facing the wrong way to notice.
"I kind of hoped you would be," he says. "I missed you."
Silas has been long accustomed to not feeling; a reward for his trials had been a heart made stone in his chest and, still, to hear Bod say something like this causes feeling. It is a feeling like someone has taken a tiny hand and pushed with all their strength against the inside of his ribs.
It is not an entirely unpleasant sensation.
"I was rarely away from you for long enough to miss you," he says.
"Come on," says Bod and picks himself up off the dry, dusty grass. Silas remembers how, once, it was him saying stay and Bod always fighting to go along. Push and pull, pull and push. Little human lives rushing on to myriad inevitable ends and that much never changes and probably never will. On the other side of the river, someone floats a candle on a paper boat and the light catches flickering in the rainbow sheen on the water. Which is like some sort of metaphor for human existence, when he thinks about it. Fragile. Grimy. But beautiful and casting a little warm light.
"Perhaps I will go again," he says. There's a Naga called Nipa that he should spend some time with; he remembers fondly the tumble of her glass-green hair and the delicate iridescent scales at the corner of her never blinking eyes. She was in Shimla the last time he heard anything of her and for years, he's been meaning to carry the news of Miss Lupescu's death to her by hand.
Bod manages to entirely derail that line of thought when he reaches out and snags Silas' fingers with his own. Once, they shook hands as gentlemen parting, but Bod had only been fifteen years old, at the time. Now they stand there on the bank of the river, a cold hand enfolded in one much warmer and Bod is a grown man and Silas has still been guarding him, all of this time.
"Come on," says Bod, quietly insistent. "I've got things to show you."
Well, then.
Well.
There is a narrow bed in a narrow room, which almost puts Silas in mind of one of the tombs in the cemetery, if tombs were lined with green glass tiles and had wide windows, wooden-shuttered, which do not block out the sound and the furious heat of night in the city beyond. They sit side by side on the bed, a jumble of items between them. The things which Bond collected; the things which he has kept; a stuffed camel, a silver lamp, an empty scent bottle, a pebble shaped like a stone. A hundred things, a hundred places and, if looked at correctly, they make a map of where he's been. Bod explains each item and, in turn, Silas takes every thing and tucks it into his case with all the reverence which such a thing deserves.
"I was never far away from you," he says.
"I kept one more thing for you," says Bod, and that is when he leans across the rumpled sheet and catches his weight on one hand, and then he kisses Silas, sweet but somehow sure and his mouth tastes of things recently eaten; of tea and floury bread and the bursting sweetness of very nearly too ripe fruit.
There are some things about being human that he never forgets, even though it sometimes feels like he's come close.
There is always a brink to be drawn back from.