Chapter Text
SIMON
Because we’re so close to the summer solstice, when I wake up the morning after the leaver’s ball, the first slanting rays of sunlight are already coming in through the East-facing windows of Mummer’s Tower. It’s just half five and I’m wide awake because I’ve been getting up for the early morning shift at Waitrose the past few weeks. Even on my off days, now, it’s hard to sleep in.
I’m also awake because Baz has rolled onto his back in his sleep, pinning my arm and my left wing at a painful angle underneath his shoulders. He’s sprawled half on top of me, wheezing gently the way he does when he’s slightly congested.
“Hey,” I say, hearing my own voice slightly gravelly from sleep, shoving at his shoulder, “Baz, I need you to--” and with grumpy sleep noises, he rolls back onto his side -- pulling most of the not-really-large-enough duvet with him.
Now my arse is getting cold.
I sigh and lean up on one elbow, experimentally, to see how much circulation Baz managed to cut off in my limbs. The answer seems to be “not much,” and I’m able to pull my wingtip back from underneath his pillow and fold it in against my back again without too much trouble.
Baz, buried now beneath the duvet, is showing no signs of waking up. And I’m awake enough myself now to appreciate what a victory this is -- that Baz actually trusts himself (or at least the Anathema) enough to let down his guard and sleep with me in the bed beside him. He’s tried to hide from me the fact he wasn’t sleeping, at Easter and on other weekend visits, but I’m more observant than he gives me credit for. I’d noticed the dark circles under his eyes and the catnaps he’d steal mid-afternoon while I was making dinner or watching a television show or helping one of the Bunces with something that needed a second pair of hands.
I feel like I probably had nightmares (I always do) but if I did I don’t remember them in any detail. Having Baz with me doesn’t make the nightmares stop, or even make them less nightmareish. But at least when I wake up from a dream where I’m chasing him and the Mage through the catacombs, or a dream where Baz has decided he wants to kill me after all, I can just roll over and there he is: safe and scary and mine.
It’s probably not what the Mage expected, when the Crucible paired us. I’ve wondered, sometimes, since December, what the Mage would have thought about Baz and me. It’s a weird thing to think about. The Mage and I never really talked about … that sort of thing.
My stomach growls and I realize I’m hungry. I roll into a sitting position and drop my feet to the floor. I rummage in my discarded clothes from the night before for my phone and then shuffle over to Baz’s desk for a piece of shortbread while I thumb in the code to unlock my screen.
It’s 5:57 now, and there will be food down in the dining hall in another half hour, a breakfast buffet like there always is on the last few days of term, when the graduates are packing up and the students from the lower forms are slowly trickling away by train or bus or in the family car.
I go into the toilet for a piss, and to brush the sour sleep taste out of my mouth. I borrow Baz’s toothbrush and hope he doesn’t mind; I forgot to pack one in my overnight bag.
Baz hasn’t stirred when I go back into the main room, so I try to be quiet as I pull on pants and the jeans, tee shirt, and hoodie I’d crammed into my messenger bag.
In January, Martin had figured out how to modify some of my clothes so I could wear them without spelling my wings or tail insubstantial; sometimes it’s nice to be able to bum around the Bunces on my days off without being magicked. Penny had been as surprised as I was that her dad was so clever with the sewing machine, but in the end I had tee shirts, hoodies, and several pairs of jeans with tail and wing holes tidily added.
I grab the last shortbread biscuit when I’m dressed and my phone, then slide my bare feet into my trainers and slip out the door and down the four-and-a-half flights of stairs to the front door. It’s quiet on the grounds, and the grass is wet with dew. I wander down the gravel path to the courtyard just as a bus is pulling away through the gates, half a dozen people scattered in the back seats. I realize it must be the new Watford shuttle that Penny told me about, on our drive up from London yesterday, the one Mitali had had purchased to run students back and forth to the nearest rail and coach station at the beginning and end of school sessions, and on Fridays and Sundays during term.
I realize it’s quite comforting, actually, to see all of the small ways that Watford has changed already. For years, I’d looked forward to coming back to Watford every autumn for all of the ways I hoped it hadn’t changed. It loosens something in my chest to realize that Watford is changing and I don’t actually have to hold desperately onto the way it was, before, in order to have friends, stay alive, be loved.
I cross the courtyard and walk between the chapel and the tower toward the stables, where I know they’ve planted a thornapple tree in memory of Ebb.It’s there, a scrawny seedling surrounded by still-dark earth and secured with wires and stakes, behind a circle of fencing to keep keep the first-years from trampling it during a game of ultimate frisbee.
“Hey, Ebb,” I say. And then I’m not sure what else to say. So I sit down in the wet grass and let myself cry, for a bit, because I’ve been trying to be okay about that and because I remember how Ebb used to cry, and never seemed ashamed about it. So it seems like an okay thing to do, to cry and think about how much I miss her.
I hope someone is taking care of the goats.
When I’m done crying, I pull my phone out of my pocket and snap a picture of the tree for Penny, because I know she wanted to see it even though she wasn’t ready to come back to Watford yet.
I text it to her.
06:13: sitting with Ebb this morning
06:13: weird to be here without you
And then, because I’m ready to think about something happier -- and because I know she’ll be happy for me -- I add:
06:17: also I did some research for you last night
06:17: it turns out vampire-human sex IS possible
06:18: and really brilliant :-D
06:18: at least with Baz
She must still be asleep because she doesn’t respond immediately. Which doesn’t surprise me because Penny normally isn’t up before I leave at 6:40 for my 7:00 shift.
It’s still too early to go looking for breakfast at the dining hall, so I open my email and read the message from Rayshauna that’s the only new mail. (Rayshauna is the only person who really emails me anyway; Penny, Baz, and I mostly text.)
Dear Simon,
I am writing to let you know that I had a very useful conversation with a colleague of mine, Orn in Grindavik (Iceland), who has done some ethnographic work with an isolated community in northwestern Iceland where mages, humans, and vampires have coexisted for several centuries. It is one of several such pockets of peaceful coexistence that are known to the Western magickal community, but which have been able to avoid persecution primarily by not being of any strategic use or threat to the powerful magickal families.
Orn has some online resources that might be useful to you and Baz, and has also offered to work with Baz -- he is a licensed therapist as well as a sociocultural anthropologist.
Let’s talk about this on Thursday - and in the meantime, I hope you will pass this news on to Baz. I think perhaps it would be appropriate to schedule a meeting for the three of us, so I can tell you both what Orn told me?
Be well,
Rayshauna
I thumb the email back to the top and re-read it through a second time, although I don’t really have to. The last time we’d talked, Rayshauna had asked my permission to email some sort of group of magickal psychologists, sociologists, and other researchers who might be able to help Baz and me.
After last night it all feels a little silly, how worried we were, Baz was, how determined Penny was to fix our worry with research (because with Penny everything always starts and ends with research). But I know Baz still has questions. I probably do too. I just can’t think what any of them are, right now, sitting next to Ebb’s tree in the bright morning sunshine and feeling the seam on the inside of my jeans rubbing against the bruise where Baz’s fangs left their mark.
It hits me, then, that I’m not a virgin any longer. I mean, probably not -- right? Does it count if your boyfriend almost gives you a blow job? If you come all over his fingers? If he ends up retching in the toilet but you fall asleep cuddled up next to him, with his hair tickling your nose? Somewhere between the first time I kissed him and last night, I’ve definitely -- we’ve definitely -- crossed that line. It’s just hard to know exactly when.
But as of this morning, I’m pretty sure the carnivorous unicorns that occasionally pass through the Wavering Wood wouldn’t count me virgin enough, any more, to make a tasty midnight snack.
I shift on the wet grass so that my jeans pull against the bruise, again, and think about Baz nosing into the curls between my thighs, think about his cheek pressed against me, there , and his hand where no one else’s hand had ever been.
I blink back down at Rayshauna’s email: … have been able to avoid persecution primarily by not being of any strategic use or threat to the powerful magickal families ...
It’s not like I didn’t know racial prejudice and everything existed, but sometimes it just makes me feel so stupid and ashamed that, like, I never questioned vampires were evil all those years I was living with Baz and falling in love with him. It’s so mad to think that, for centuries, there have been people -- humans and vampires -- living together and maybe, probably, doing things like what Baz and I did last night. And just because the people in power hated them, the vampires and the humans who loved them, they had to go into hiding.
It also makes me really angry, when I think about it for too long, that Baz’s family never tried to find him people who could help him. I know they thought they were trying to help, keeping it a secret and pretending Baz was just a normal mage, that he’d recovered from the vampire bite, but -- what they did made it easier for all of us, including Baz himself, to go on hating vampires.
I push my phone back into the front pocket of my hoodie, and then pull the hood up over my ears, before I open my wings and let them carry me up into the air. I circle the grounds a few times at a leisurely pace, enjoying the sun on my wingspan even if the wind thirty feet up is a bit bracing. My endurance is getting better, since the weather has warmed and Penny and I have made it a point to go out regularly a few afternoons a week to parkland where I can exercise enough to build strength in my new muscles. Penny casts It’s a bird! It’s a plane! for me, each time, which should make sure that anyone who looks up and sees me in the air will just see whatever makes the most sense for them to see: a seagull, a kite, a hang-glider.
From my vantage point, I see the shuttle bus winding its way back up the country lane about a mile away, back toward the main gates. Circling lower, I can smell coffee and bacon and the unmistakable scent of my favorite cherry scones wafting across the courtyard, so I skid to a landing next to the fountain just as the bus is pulling into the yard, and throw a salute to the startled shuttle bus driver, before settling my wings (burning just a bit from the exertion) and heading into the dining hall for breakfast.
The clock at the front of the hall reads three minutes to seven and it’s still pretty quiet, with maybe half a dozen kids and a couple of teachers seated at the long tables around the hall, talking quietly or reading on their phones.
I pick up a tray and start by piling food onto it -- scones, sausages, pancakes, fruit salad -- then make my way to the large silver urns of coffee and hot water for tea, flanked by carafes of orange, apple, and grapefruit juice, and milk for cereal.
“Simon,” Mitali says in greeting, coming up behind me while I’m filling two mugs with fresh-brewed Yirgacheffe to take back to the Tower along with breakfast. Baz hasn’t texted me yet, but we have the 9 o’clock shuttle to catch for the 10:13 to King’s Cross. Maybe some coffee and scones to go along with his morning blood will help ease him into wakefulness.
“Hey, Mitali,” I say, feeling slightly awkward, suddenly. Not that she hadn’t known I was coming to Watford. I’m just used to hanging out with her as Penny’s mum, not seeing her as Headmistress Bunce.
“Penny said you were staying the night with Baz,” Mitali says, reaching for a mug herself and adding cream and sugar before filling it from the urn. I’m glad she’s focused on getting her coffee, just making distracted small talk, because otherwise I’m sure she’d be able to tell immediately that we’ve been having sex.
It’s not that I think we’d get in trouble or anything -- the Bunces let us share a room when Baz came over, and I know Penny and Micah have -- but it would still be weird, having her know.
“We’re catching the shuttle to the station, later,” I say. “I’m -- he’s going home to see his parents for a few weeks before moving to Fiona’s flat.”
“Mmm, yes, I remember.” Mitali sips her coffee and lets out a happy sigh, like she always does. “Let him know he’s always welcome, won’t you? And remind him to call if he needs any … help. With his family.”
I know she’s told him this herself, probably more than once, but I nod anyway.
She sips her coffee again and wanders back toward the door, probably back to her office and waiting laptop.
In my pocket, my phone vibrates. I set the laden tray down on the nearest empty table before pulling it out to check the messages. From Penny, of course.
07:11: !!!
07:12: TMI Simon!! but I am so happy for you guys
07:12: tell Baz I said so ;-)