Chapter Text
“They’re not my most powerful urges,” Baz said under his breath.
“Do you know,” Simon said, “that half the time we’re together, you’re talking to yourself?”
- Chapter Thirty-One, Fangirl
★
SIMON
The therapist I see tells me that when it all gets to be too much, I can begin with one small thing. My days have become a measure of small things. Penny and I make our lists. Hers are thorough, everywhere, papered to the fridge, crumpled at the bottom of her bag, ruined in the wash, turning up pulpy and unintelligible. I hold mine in my head. Tea and toast. Shower. Brush teeth and hair. Usually one and not the other. (One small thing, I tell myself, spitting toothpaste into the sink.)
I don’t suppose Penny or Dr. Groenewold would encourage the listmaking half so much if they knew how many of them have to do with a subject I try not to bring up. To Penny, out of habit, and to my therapist, because I don’t like the questions she asks me after.
But for all my efforts to think more—or to not think less—the list of Ways I Thought I Would See Baz Pitch Again takes me unawares. It is folded up and tucked alongside an inventory of my worst fears. Penny leaving for America. Horses. Seeing him. Him seeing me, right at the top, and I wonder when I learned to be afraid of that.
Probably around the time Penny came home from her first uni lecture. She had tomes of Victorian literature heavy enough to kill a worseger and went breathlessly on about Dickensian coincidence. Like any good English schoolchildren, we read A Christmas Carol every winter. Watford tradition, though the only dead useful spell is God bless us every one. For allergies.
Penny didn’t plan to read the first volume of Great Expectations aloud, busy as she was with Medieval History and Linguistics and Global Health and all the rest of it. But the words seemed to do me good, on days when my thoughts roared back to the harsh cold of the White Chapel. The night I killed the Mage.
“Then what happens?” I remember asking her when she stopped. She startled, forgetting I was there, I think. For the first in a long time, so had I, my head full of Pip and Joe and Miss Havisham, my heart alive with the serendipity and coincidence that Penny hated so much she wrote a paper. But I think there is something comforting about the neat, tidy ways people seem to find their way back to each other in Dickens.
My list began idly, in the knowledge that I could be anywhere and Baz might suddenly appear, Crowley forbid. The last I heard from Mrs. Wellbelove, he was at the London School of Economics. Practically right around the corner. Doesn’t help that I’ve imagined running into him at every turn, popping up behind every bin and Greggs display case.
I have considered the possibilities.
1. a lift
2. Tesco’s
3. pub toilets
I could be at any coffee shop between here and Hammersmith. Waiting for Penny to finish class. Taking up a drink only to find his name on it. Baz. Or maybe Basil. Never Tyrannus. I wouldn’t wish that on any barista. Then he would be there. See the cup in my hand and sneer. Say he suspected I couldn’t read, but here was his proof. We would both like our coffees syrupy, and I’d buy him another. Because my mouth would have already touched the rim of his cup and tasted vanilla. I can hear him, scornful and familiar.
A meet-cute. Though it wouldn’t be like that at all. A so-we-meet-again-cute.
Maybe I watch too many movies. On my couch days, as Penny calls them, it’s all I can do. She thinks I should read more. Reckons I would like David Copperfield. (“The magician?” I asked. She was generous enough to only roll her eyes.)
Dr. Groenewold has been more forgiving. Says that it’s good of me to leave the flat, even if only to go to the studio and to the library to return DVDs. Romantic comedies these last months. Enough of them that the librarian who reminds me of Ebb smiled when I presented this week’s choices. Wondered what I made of Notting Hill.
There’s something I don’t trust about Hugh Grant, but I promised to watch Four Weddings and A Funeral for her.
There is nothing particularly romantic or comedic about the Underground during rush hour.
I try not to take the Tube—or anything—if I can walk. Less chance of my wings breaking free of Penny’s spellwork, however clever it may be. I groan under their phantom weight, and although I could go into any loo, pull up my shirt and see only freckled skin, I still feel the need to make myself small.
Simple enough here when no one pays me any mind, but there are still too many people on this line for my liking. I will myself to think of anything but my wings, anything but the horror of them unfurling in front of these Normals (and me the most abnormal of them all), anything but the way they would span across the width of this car to touch the doors on either side.
I freed a genie once, but it was nothing like Aladdin, and he did not appreciate the comparison. If he had been of the wish-granting persuasion (I only asked for the one, and I still don’t see what’s so hard about a backpack full of mint Aeros), I would swear this was his doing, years too late. Seems fitting that the ungrateful prick, or a gaggle of pixies loitering around Picadilly, or something has conspired to distract me with the sight of Tyrannus Basilton Grimm-Pitch.
I can’t think of any way this could be worse. Well. We could be on a bus.
This isn’t the first a man with his height and his hair has uprooted me, only to make me feel even more like soil turned up on finding, with a closer look, that his eyes were too green, nose too straight, lips too thin. Today, though, today is like falling down the stairs in fifth year because the details are right, and something is knocked out of me to see him. If I close my eyes, I can still picture how he looked then, back at school the summer after I turned fifteen. I returned to our tower to find he had stopped being a boy. Taller. Hair longer than I’d ever seen it, at his shoulders. The lines of them drawn broader under the green of a new blazer. Perfect, I remember thinking, furious.
Baz is still infuriatingly perfect.
It’s the only thing that has made its way out of my imagination into real life. Him. All tailored seams and legs and buttoned shirts. He may have stopped being a schoolboy to me then, but to call him anything more was beyond me. Somewhere in the last year and a half, though, he has crossed some threshold into manhood, his hair longer still, wisps falling into his face where they have escaped from a knot at the back of his neck. The elegant hand I remember best at the hilt of his wand now curved around a rail pole, a book in the other.
Perfect even in the way he is perfectly unaware of me, thank Morgan’s tooth. I can look at him all I like this way. Penny will not be glad to know I’m still top of the class in my study of him.
I remember he could read through almost anything. The library could be burning down and he’d be there, unbothered, smiling when he supposed no one to be looking, his mouth soft with it.
The longing comes with a suddenness that makes my breath catch. There is no looking at Baz and not thinking of home, no untangling him from my memories of Watford, something that might have made me resentful any other summer, but only makes me sick with the missing now.
He looks up. For a moment I wonder if he has somehow heard the painful beat of my heart, but it is only the announcement of his stop. Even though the station nearest our flat isn’t for another five, I slip through the closing doors onto the platform and follow him. For old time’s sake.
The fluorescence of the Underground is a welcome change from the dark of the Catacombs, a glimpse of inky black hair blotting against the way these tunnels are tiled and endless. A set point to fix my eyes on, even as my body spins away from me. I can only offer clumsy apologies over my shoulder as I stumble through the crowd.
He still walks as though he knows he is being followed, with an animal quickness, stopping only to step onto an escalator. I feel more myself than I have in months at his heels, with him in my field of vision.
I want to shout his name. For people to turn to see who is being so ungodly, boundering about. I want the way his name leaves my lips to be much the same, loud and unmistakable as I walk up to him, but it’s low and strangled. Like I’m lying in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.
Baz.
He shouldn’t hear me over the din of voices that echo throughout the station, carried along the walls and ceiling as sound to human ears and a plea to his, because he turns.
He looks down at me from a height of twelve steps and three inches, staring, like he can’t decide how to torment me further. Doing precisely that when he smiles so suddenly I have to steady myself on the handrail to see it.
“I thought you gave up following me after fifth year,” he calls.
I can’t help but grin because somehow, his voice is a little something of home. The way I felt sinking into my old mattress, me and it both held together by magic. I have to look everywhere but his face, the feeling overwhelms me. Somehow doesn’t seem proper to be smiling this much on a Tuesday.
I try to think of something to say, anything, as I close the distance between us, one step and then another. “Since when do you take the Tube?” I blurt. Dumb. Looking at him this close dumbs me down. Always has.
“Since I gave the driver his one day off this month.”
I can never tell if he’s taking the piss when he isn’t laughing at me. Seeing that arched brow of his, maddening, I think this is why him looking at me is something I have come to fear. Because I’ve missed him looking at me, even if it is like this.
“You couldn’t turn into a bat instead?”
“What has it been?” he says. “A year?”
And a half.
“But that’s the best you could do?” he says, lowering his voice. “It is my understanding that Vampires don’t turn into bats. Bram Stoker was a shit mage and an even shittier writer. Which you would know if you ever paid attention in Magickal Literature.”
“I paid attention.”
To him mostly, wondering how he would be anything but cool and collected with so much mention of garlic in class.
“Not nearly enough,” he tells me.
“No,” I agree. “How are you?”
“You didn’t stalk me here just to make small talk, did you, Snow?” He steps off the escalator, and I trail after him into the late afternoon.
“I’m not stalking you,” I say, thinking that this is not at all what was supposed to happen when I caught up to his long strides. What did I think would happen? Thinking, all this thinking, I would sooner not be, and as though on command, my mouth forms the mindless words. “I was hoping I could buy you a coffee.”
BAZ
I must be out of habit unsettling Simon Snow. Because he smiles at me and I am woefully out of habit being unsettled by him because I smile back, unable to bite it down. Hold it back the way I hold back all of my teeth.
I should have known, hearing my name. His name for me. The syllable forever on his tongue, caught on his lips like a prayer, maybe a curse. Surely, I told him my name was Basil our first day at Watford, but in that sweet, incoherent way of his, he gave me another, baptizing and christening me Baz. I shouldn’t have turned, sure I could only be dreaming his voice, the way I dream everything about him.
But he is here and so are those eyes. They are spellwork in the way that the most powerful of hexes are placed on the most ordinary of things. All the more startling in the danger they present.
I have taken to buying a lot of blue, anything that makes me think of him, that can be taken home and worn close to the skin. Called mine. I have too many blue shirts, and Crowley knows they can be the right shade, down to the hue and still feel wrong, cold silk, too fine to the touch. (But damn me if I don’t look good in them.)(I am wearing one now.)
He is a loose thread I worry at, a thought wound around my fingers and pulled worn. Everything about him unravels me, and I am threadbare. Fraying around the edges to see how freckled he is with summer. Ever the alchemic discovery of bronze and gold, the magnum opus if ever it existed, transmuted into a boy who smiles. At me.
I haven’t been able to picture him in any place with magic in the air, in any place without it, in any place at all outside of my thoughts. Never once did I fantasize about meeting him on the longest damned escalator in the whole of the Underground, a Jacob’s ladder of a construction. If I believed in heaven, I think we could be halfway there.
“Coffee,” I say carefully.
“Or tea, if you rather,” he rambles. “I don’t remember you drinking very much coffee.”
I swallow a need to ask what else he remembers about me.
“I could always use the coffee these days,” I say instead. This is true. I’ve grown to have a taste for it, to long for its bitterness the way I long for the burn of whiskey and cigarettes and blood.
“Really?” he asks, startled.
I’ve half-forgotten the ways I lived to taunt that wide-eyed look out of him. I think it is some predator’s instinct in me, the satisfaction of cornering something I would like to bring to my mouth. But I feel like the one caught unsuspecting as I nod. “Where did you have in mind?”
He shrugs, shoulders tight against a shirt faded with the name of a band I’m sure he doesn’t listen to. “I didn’t think you would say yes.”
Rolling my eyes at him is a habit that comes willing. He laughs, and forget coffee, the sound of him could fill me up.
“There’s a cafe around the corner,” I tell him.
We fall in step, and I feel his eyes, the way I did in school when I was in his line of sight.
The shop is not very crowded, and he watches with interest as I describe a pumpkin mocha breve to a dead-eyed barista who rings up all of my demands.
“And you called me a nightmare,” he says, the smile never once faltering as he orders an iced coffee with enough vanilla and sugar it can hardly be considered a coffee. (I am not one to talk.)(I said yes when the barista asked if I wanted whipped cream.) He pays with crumpled pound notes, and I let myself look at him, taking in every line of his wrinkled shirt and his curls, grown longer than I have ever seen them.
The last I looked at him, really looked at him, was over my shoulder in the turret we shared in Mummers, going home for Christmas holidays. Not knowing I would come back to an empty room that would lose its greenwood smell, as though the tower itself had forgotten him.
All the world has.
There have been murmurs of what happened that night at the White Chapel, whispers of his mundanity, and as far as everybody at the Club is concerned, his obscurity. For a Chosen One prophesied for thousands of years, it takes less than one to tear him from the record.
My father was triumphant through the telling, a faithful account of how the Mage’s Heir had been struck from the Book of Magic, a cigarette burn on the page, a name blackened to soot. I nodded, betraying nothing, but wept all the drive back to Fiona’s.
Perhaps if the Coven had magicked the pages white, pristine, rather than open a wound, I wouldn’t feel as though I am bleeding. Because there is no forgetting Simon Snow. Try as I might to tell myself otherwise, there is nothing mundane about him, not the blue eyes that I see whenever I close my own.
I can’t smell his magic anymore, only the sweat at the hollow of his throat, the vanilla on his breath, and the hint of something earthy on his hands. He rambles on about the weather, shy in his glances, as though he can’t believe I haven’t disappeared. I refuse to look away, afraid he might if I do.
What a picture we make, two boys at a rickety table in the corner, having coffee as though there isn’t a long history of cruel words and deeds between them.
“Why did you ask me here, Snow?”
“It’s only that I—well—that I wondered,” he begins, incoherent as ever, and I hang onto every word. “There aren’t many things I wonder about—having to do with—”
“Magic,” I say quietly.
“Okay, maybe that’s not true, but I try not to think about it,” he says with a breath. “Sometimes though, wondering what you’re plotting is the only thing I still know how to do.”
“What I’m plotting,” I huff. “The only thing I’m plotting is how to make it through the end of the semester without dying.”
“Stop being so dramatic, you’re brilliant,” he says. “Always have been.”
“Dramatic?”
“Brilliant.”
“Careful, Snow, I’m beginning to think you’re complimenting me.”
He is rolling his eyes, but smiling into his cup. For all the methods we have of antagonizing each other, he will never know how his lips will always be the surest madness.
“Would you rather I call you a swot?”
“If the shoe fits,” I say, without magic.
“Swot,” he says. “LSE is nothing to sneeze at.”
I wonder if he realizes we are talking in spells.
“How do you know where I’m studying?”
“Oh,” he laughs, and I think I can say he spends as much time looking away from me as he does looking at me. The boy I knew was never afraid to meet my eyes, jut that chin of his, and open his mouth without thinking. (I suppose that hasn’t changed.) This boy is sheepish though as he offers an explanation. “Agatha’s mum.”
Wellbelove is the spitting image of her mother, a woman who undoubtedly has joined the other society wives and whole of my family in wondering why I didn't go to Oxford.
There were nights when the distance between two beds proved too much, to say nothing of the summers and lonely miles of country besides. But I had the hope, a drying well full, that I might still come back to the sound of his heartbeat and trust the rhythm would steady my own into its half tempo.
“And how is Wellbelove?” I ask because it seems polite. (When were we ever polite?)
Snow wasn’t the only one who didn't return after the Christmas holiday. Penelope Bunce made it entirely too easy for me when she didn’t come back to place second in our year. Wellbelove, though, if her Instagram is anything to go by, brought a one-way ticket to California.
“She barely responds to our texts,” he says.
“Doing well then.”
“I think so.”
I try not to feel too gratified by the fact that he only thinks so.
“She has a dog,” he adds but seems more interested in my course schedule than in Lucy the cocker spaniel.
“Do you want me to tell you where the classrooms are?” I ask. “So you can wait for me by the door?”
“I was more subtle than that,” he insists.
“Standing in the middle of the hall then.”
He has never smiled at me before. I would have hoarded up the shape of his lips if he had, wallpapered my daydreams with them. I crumble with every quirk of his mouth, my foundations coming slowly apart at the honey warm of his laugh.
“Shouldn’t you be revising for finals or something?”
He shakes his head. “I start uni in the fall.”
He doesn’t tell me how he spent the last year, only that he lives with Bunce who is studying enough for the both of them. That he follows her around as much as he ever did and sometimes sits in on some of her larger lectures, doodling on her notes.
“How is it that we never really did this?” he asks suddenly.
“What, drink overpriced coffee?”
“Talk,” he says.
SIMON
“I think it was all the trying to kill each other,” Baz says.
He has an answer for everything. I hate it. (Why don’t I hate it?) Would he have an explanation for why this is the most alive I’ve felt in weeks? Though I’m beginning to think I have answers too, even if I didn’t know how many questions were left hanging between us. I understand this feeling. The dots waiting for the lines. We are the third gate. The sixth hare.
“I wouldn’t have hurt you,” I tell him.
“Tell that to my nose,” he mutters.
“I wouldn’t have hurt you badly,” I insist, seeing the furrow of his brow above the unevenness of a poorly set bone. “I could never have done you in.”
“How can you be sure?”
Because I dreamed of it those eight weeks. Woke up to the sight of his empty bed from nightmares where he bled from a gaping wound I made. But I can only shrug, the words I find his. “I was the worst Chosen One to ever be chosen.”
“You remember that?” he says, and I remember too how he looked in Les Tombe des Enfants, sleeves up to his elbows, flask at his lips, hair in his eyes.
“It was the meanest thing you ever said to me, of course I remember it.”
“I was drunk.”
If that’s his apology, it’s shit.
“Besides, I think I called you orphan all of first year.”
“I am an orphan, shut up. You were right.” Saying the words take nearly everything out of me. “I think I knew it—that I wouldn’t be able to do it—any of it.”
When I chance a look at him, his eyes are wide with something halfway to desperation, his hand open on the table as though he is reaching for me.
My hands are so close. We could touch if we wanted. I think of that one painting. The Creation of Adam. The spark of life, isn’t that what it’s called, the moment when their fingers touch?
“If I had never been the Greatest Mage—though maybe I would never have been at Watford—never mind that,” I say, fevered by the thought. Of Baz never shaking my hand the first I knew magic to be aching and real. “If things had been different and there were no wars and I was only me—would you still have hated me?”
“One conversation where we haven’t drawn blood and you’re rewriting history,” Baz says. “Snow, there is still time for us to get banned from this Costa for brawling.”
“If I were a magician and not a Normal—“ I start.
“No,” he says fiercely.
“Why not?” I ask, not sure why this is the question I need the answer to, looking at my hands, the way I have all this conversation, all the moments I didn’t know how to look at him, and the others still I didn’t know how to stop. “Why did you hate me?”
“Don’t.”
He stares at the table between us, his jaw working around what he doesn’t say. Until he does.
“I hated you because I didn’t hate you,” he breathes, taking my hand with more care than I thought him capable. Well. Everything Baz does is measured, careful, except for the strands of hair that fall into his eyes. “Because you have done me in.”
He raises my palm to his lips, ghosting along before he presses a kiss to my wrist, at my pulse, his eyes closed. The shock of understanding is warm and sudden where the touch of his lips is cold—and tingles all the same. I can feel it from the tips of my spelled wings to my toes. I swallow.
“I wanted nothing to do with you,” he says, not meeting my eyes. “Your shaved head, your baggy jeans.”
“Right thuggish, I reckon,” I say, feeling a little light-headed.
His smirk makes me ache in the way it used to, but with my hand still cradled in his, I suppose this is nothing like before. “The red ball ruined the effect.”
“What happened?” I ask, my voice a whisper, as though anything more will startle him out of touching me.
He traces my heart line. “There was an unusually warm day in January that year, and I noticed how curly your hair had grown in,” he says softly. “How brighter you seemed than even that winter sun.”
I untangle my hand from his, and he starts. But my fingers are brushing the loose hair I have been studying, the strands like silk.
“That long?” I breathe.
His cheek is cold beneath my fingertips, my thumb tracing the curve of his jaw below his ear before I come to myself as he admits, “Maybe longer.”
Baz Pitch could have anything in the world, and to understand that he once thought to want me—my heart is breaking, I think. To know that I am not that boy. I have none of whatever magic he saw in me.
BAZ
Simon Snow isn’t the only one allowed to be stupidly brave. But touching my lips to the inside of his wrist, I have to wonder if I’m just stupid.
Our Magickal Science units on Palmistry were always my favorite, though I didn’t think the story of a life could be told in a palm. Maybe I was wrong.
I take advantage of his astonishment to study the hand in my own. Pretend he is mine. That we are lovers and I am looking for the future of myself in the lines. I will settle for one. A notch. Anything marked by the universe onto skin that I can almost taste.
I tell him how it began for me, a month shy of twelve when he came into our room, pink with life and cold. There were snowflakes in his eyelashes. We had one of our glaring contests, fraught with a tension I thought was hatred. I was still winning then. Sometime in fifth year, he learned to hold my gaze, but that day, he was first to look away. I found myself with the humiliating urge to touch my mouth to a mole on his cheek.
I told myself it was the vampirism. Every want of mine explained away by the part of my nature that needed blood. (By the summer before sixth year, I found it wasn’t the only part of me that demanded blood.)
That long, he says part-question, part-answer and reaches for me.
To strangle me, I think.
But then, his fingers are on my cheekbone. I try not to close my eyes. His are open skies of blue, and I feel vast beneath them.
“Maybe longer,” I whisper. Already, I am tallying up the sum, an arithmetic of years I have wanted him to touch me this gently. Nearly half the time I have been alive. Have been something halfway dead.
He straightens, taking his hand back where it falls uselessly to the table.
I want to light myself on fire. It would be so simple. A cigarette burn. I thought I would be bleeding out when I finally showed him the meat of my heart. In some of my dreams, he touches my face as I tell him, as he tears metal out of me.
“I’m sorry,” he says. (He says that in my dreams too.)
“For what?”
“Not knowing.”
I want to laugh. To cry. “What would you have done?” If you had known I was cruel because I didn’t know what would happen if I was anything but.
“Probably would have pulled my sword on you less,” he admits.
“I admire your restraint, not running me through before I’ve finished my coffee.”
“I can’t summon it anymore,” he says. Hearing himself. “Not that I—if I—I—I would never have hurt you,” he stammers. “More than I already have.”
As though he isn’t unmaking me still. If looks could kill can be a spell. The way he tilts his head and stares. Looks at me with something I can’t name, with a heat that makes some insensible part of me whisper maybe not so hopelessly.
I made myself sick with daydreaming all fifth year, making the intensity in his stares out to be want. Only for him to follow me into the Catacombs holding a torch. How am I to believe him, when he says he wouldn’t have hurt me. When we learned our hatred as children.
I drink my fill of the freckle on his top lip and lukewarm mocha, stand, and Simon Snow blinks up at me, brow furrowing. (I still wonder what it would be like to kiss him there. Kiss it smooth.)
“Thank you for the coffee, Snow.”
Perhaps it is the way he looks at me or the possibility I may never see him again that makes me whisper, “I never would have hurt you either.”
Then I flee out of the cafe into a world that feels stopped on its axis. As though I could live in this endless sunlight. If only there was truth to the myth of vampires burning in the daytime. I hardly know what my life was before hearing him say my name.
Baz.
I turn, startled once more by the sound of his voice, and he is still more beautiful and breathless. “Baz,” he pants, “I wanted—to ask you—before.”
“Yes?”
“What were you reading?” he asks with his blush and stammer routine. “On the Tube,” he says, like this makes his question any less incomprehensible.
“Persuasion,” I say dumbly, holding out the book I forgot was in my hands.
“What is it about?”
I swallow, and his gaze drifts to my neck. “Second chances,” I say. Our eyes meet for a moment in another one of our old staring contests. I lose.
I don’t have anything but my fountain pens, and Snow laughs when he sees it.
“Shut up.” I hold the metal nib to him with the barest touch. Now that I have pressed my mouth into his skin, I have to restrain myself from doing it again. Tasting the ink. I only have time to put my phone number on the back of one of his hands, the ink shining wet as he brings it to his lips and blows.
“Let me know when you’ve finished the book,” I tell him. “I want it back.”