Work Text:
The platform smelled like metal and old newsprint and the kind of cold that finds the gaps in people. Brooklyn sighed at midnight; the streetlights leaned away as if they were tired of holding themselves upright. Shelby stood on the yellow line with the careful balance of someone who had practiced stillness for centuries and still liked the pretense of being human. The subway wind pushed under their skirt and tugged the hem of her red sweater. She pulled the sweater closer with a glove-fingered hand, the fabric soft beneath her touch, a bright, defiant color against the gray smear of platform coats.
Her iPod Mini blinked at them from the pocket of her bag like a stubborn little fossil. It was scratched and perfectly obsolete; the white earbuds were cheap and permanently knotted, the jack a familiar fight with the stubbornness of inanimate things. The left earbud had been giving her trouble all week; sometimes it died into static. They wound the wire once around a finger the way she wound small knots into everything she could not fix with force, and shoved one bud into her ear. The music filled half the space in her head—warm, acoustic, someone’s voice like wool.
In the jacket rack of her mental closet she kept a dozen small lies she told polite people: She’s cold. They're tired. They'd stayed out late because she was meeting friends. She's in New York for good reasons, all practical and paper-thin. Those lied well enough for humans. Those lies curved like the worn path animals make around fences.
She liked the pretending part best. Pretending kept the past at a distance. Pretending turned immortality into a costume. Tonight, though, the pretending felt thin as tissue. The city tasted like someone had put lemon on it; every edge was sharper. They were not in love with the city the way others were. She loved it the way a collector loves a ruined thing—for its scars, for what it had survived. The ache they carried wasn’t a heartbeat. It wasn’t even a consistent thorn. It was a map of all the places she had lost something and kept it like contraband.
The Q-train screamed into the station and folded itself around the platform like a metal beast cradling a bone. The doors opened with an impatient sigh. Shelby stepped toward the gap. People flowed through the door like a small black river: a student with a backpack yawning, a woman in cheap heels checking a face in a compact mirror, a guy with a paper bag of takeout whispering to himself, an old man who smelled like a radiator. She moved with them and simultaneously apart, a deliberate presence in a crowd that could no longer surprise her.
She moved like they were human again.
They had always liked the motion of trains. There was something about the way a metal carriage argued its rhythm with the city that claimed her attention: the steady shudder of wheels, the small groan when the track had been too long in its work. Tonight they liked it in the way one likes an old song. Familiar things were kind—predictable, comforting. They made the world legible. That was part of why she had come out tonight, walking under the chain of sodium lamps, one earbud filling the world with sound: to find a place where noise made sense.
Their skirt, a pleated mini, swished around her thighs as she walked around the platform, red sweater glowing under the florescent. Leg warmers scrunched in a careless, practiced way. Mary Janes with a heel just stubby enough to give her an inch over most city folk. There was symmetry to it: her hands of centuries worn and patient, her shoes just high enough to change the balance of a room. The miniskirt was ridiculous for the season, and she liked ridiculous things. They kept the mundane world honest.
They stepped into the train, leaving the platform blaring its fluorescent hymn behind them. The car was half empty. A cluster of teenagers laughed with that specific, breathless intensity of people who think they mad forever. A man in a suit slept against the window, mouth open, papers fallen in mercy at his side. The fluorescent lights hummed and shed color in the harsh way only fluorescent could, washing her skin and her red sweater into something slightly alien.
She moved down the center aisle like someone following a map through a house they had once lived in. Their eyes took in details—the sound of breath, the cadence of steps, the small signals people forget to hide—because the senses were the bits of life she kept, precise as a jeweler’s tool. She caught scent notes that belonged to the living: coffee, cigarette smoke, a faint trace of orange soda. Then beneath those ordinary odors she felt the subtle thrum of something older, a low-half heartbeat that cut through the cheap perfume and radiator steam.
They did not think of the name. The name would have been too human, too direct. Instead she felt a rearrangement of the air, a small gravitational tug as if the train itself recognized the moment and shifted its complaint to accommodate it.
He was there before she had time to decide and she saw him properly—the dark jacket that swallowed his shape, the hair that had fallen a little past the ears, half white and half a rich ebony, the angle of his shoulders that tensed at every loud yell. He was shorter than her, only by a mere inch maybe, her Mary Jane’s giving her enough height to see the top of his head. She noticed the way his hand curved around the metal rail, how his fingers kept a certain, private tension as if the world required him to remember not to let go.
Shelby allowed herself to inhale. It was an old, private thing to do when something felt the way memory did—complex and warm and sharp all at once.
The car shuddered. Trains jerked for reasons cities kept to themselves. Her glove slipped, and the world entered the kind of movement that didn’t wait for thought.
She fell.
Not dramatically. Not like some practiced actor catching light on a stage. They pitched forward, the world skewed by a fraction, the strap in their hand trimming her trajectory like a half-hearted anchor. Her Mary Janes skittered on the floor; the thin heels betrayed traction. Gravity was indifferent; it did not care who you were.
They crashed into his chest.
His hands were there before she could register fingers and bone and breath as separate things. They met her waist, held her, settled her with that mix of force and gentleness that is the only honest kind of touch. He braced her as if he had been waiting for this moment and yet astonished by the fact that it arrived.
Shelby’s cheeks pressed into the fabric of his jacket. They tasted his scent in the small space of her mouth: cedar, metal, a drywinter smell that time had made honest. In that closeness the fluorescent light shrank her world to the small, intimate geography of someone’s chest beneath fabric.
“...Abolish?” Her voice was smaller than she expected, an animal sound. The name felt ancient in her mouth and new at the same time. It made the whole car stutter like a dropped glass.
His head tipped, the movement a fraction slower than she remembered, as if he kept watch over his gestures to avoid giving away too much. When his eyes found theirs, the time between them condensed to something nearly impossible to describe. He looked older at the edges: the hollows beneath the cheekbones more pronounced, shadow lines that had not existed in fond memory. Yet his eyes—dark, dark as pronouncement—held their same quiet. They had been places she had once lived, rooms she had once learned to enter and leave without being noticed.
“Hey, Shelbs.” He said it like an apology and a blessing.
Shelby’s knees almost trembled. They did not. Her hands tightened where he held her, just enough to anchor herself to him and the present. The sensation of being caught—of being steadied by someone else’s hands—was something fragile, almost unbearably intimate. She had existed for centuries with a dexterity practiced to evade contact, to move through crowds as shadow. The unwillingness to be touched had been a survival skill. Now, in the lit, humming interior of a city train, she found herself sheltering into a human gesture she had not permitted in years.
She hugged him.
Not a quick, reflexive hold but a deliberate folding in, arms drawing around him with the unselfconscious conviction of someone who wants to live in that moment as long as possible. Her head rested near the base of his skull. Her cheek pressed to his throat through fabric. His breath warmed her ear with the brief, panicked urgency of someone who had not expected to be important enough to steady.
For a lengthened minute—or a contracted century—he was entirely still. The subtle architecture of his face softened the faintest degree. Those hands tentative at first, then settling, moved from bracing her back to wrap around her waist as if to complete the embrace. There was a hesitance to the motion, a reverence, like someone connecting to an organ they had been told to keep silent for too long. He closed his eyes briefly and the world, in that sliver, felt as if even the train had grown polite.
“You’re colder than I remember,” he said. The words were low; they barely filled the space around her head. They were not an accusation; they were an assessment. A statement of fact like weather.
They wanted to correct him—the automatic response would have been to tilt her head and offer her vampiric knowledge: I don’t get sick; cold doesn’t touch me like it does you. But those kinds of declarations were clumsy in an embrace. She inhaled instead, not for oxygen, but because the world tasted better when she let the small habit unwind into the sensation of being held.
“You always say that.” Her voice was a rough song against the fabric of his shoulder. When she placed the name like that, she meant it both as a tease and as an apology to a younger self who had once believed those words could fix anything. “And I always say I like the cold.”
He made a small sound that might have been a laugh. It left him like a paper boat untethered and drifting. “So do I,” he murmured, and the line between truth and something more fragile cracked open.
Shelby felt absurdly protective of the way he looked tonight: rumpled hair, coat worn at the sleeves, the earrings that hung from his ears, two stars, then center gem, a blood-red crystal. There was an intimacy to the observation that felt illicit. It was a claim she made without words; she catalogued him like a beloved book she kept in a place where only she could reach.
He answered them with a habit he carried like a relic. He slipped the jacket from his shoulders. It was black, corduroy-leaning though it was not entirely convincing in texture; it was heavier than it looked and lined in a way that would take the bitter teeth out of night. It smelled like wood-smoke and an altogether different winter than the one they shared. He draped it around her shoulders with a casualness that sought to disguise the tenderness of the gesture.
Shelby could have refused. They could have said "my chloric cold is not the same as yours, I do not need to be wrapped in your wool" and meant it. But the jacket fell on her shoulders and the difference between that useful, practiced defensiveness and the part of her that longed for warmth was too great to hold.
They let it be.
The sleeves swallowed her hands; the collar came up to press against her neck. For a second she laughed, an involuntary, small thing. It sounded like a dog wagging its tail and then trying to remember what its name was.
“Abolish,” she said into the fabric of his coat, “this is yours?”
He nodded. “It’s mine,” he said, then added, after a beat, like someone marking a gravestone with a name, “It’s been mine for a long time.”
She felt the meaning of the phrase like a weight. Not because the jacket held years, but because he had kept it—seemingly small, seemingly trivial—as if the past was something one could stitch into fabric and carry. It made them realize how the world kept its trophies: not all of them were pointed pieces of memory. Some were soft, and made a sound when you touched them.
Her iPod screen glowed faintly in the pocket of her red sweater. They tugged the cord and the right earbud answered obediently with a thread of warm sound. The other bud hung dead, a small thing that always made her smile with a private pity. For a ridiculous, human second she thought of the earbud as proof of the present—half broken, still functional. Their hands were in the sleeves of his jacket, finding a new place of quiet.
“When did you come back?” she asked finally, lifting her head so their faces wavered toward each other in the flicker of the fluorescent lights.
He hesitated as if the question were a puzzle he had been given before. When he spoke, he gave her a small, complicated answer. “Not long,” he said. “Been everywhere.” The words were as slippery as the tracks; he spoke them with the careful restraint of someone who carried miles on a map and didn’t want to give away the roads.
Shelby let the answer sit like a pebble in a glass of water, watching the rings settle. It told them nothing she needed to know and everything she had been longing for: he had been moving, and he had, finally, arrived.
The train hummed on and the city rolled by in a blur beyond the windows. They were in the tunnel now and the world outside was a radioactive smear of forgotten things.
Shelby’s arms were still around his shoulders. For the first time in a long stretch of nights, she liked the tiny hardness of his back press beneath her palms. It made the centuries feel less monumental, less like an archive the way they normally did. Contact reduced time down to the small units of human warmth and the ephemeral tug of breath.
“You smell like cedar,” she said, sensing it more as a cadence than a need. “Like the trees of Oakhurst before the... ash... do you remember?”
He blinked, then smiled in a way that avoided his eyes and revealed a scar along his lip—small, like a punctuation mark. “I remember,” he said. “I remember you, sitting on a stump with that ridiculous green sweater. You got up to quick and fell, then, too. I caught you.”
His words were a belt of warmth and cold at once. She liked that memory; it was small and human and therefore impossible. Maybe she had told him that story and maybe she had not. Memory and time braided between them like an intricate rope.
Shelby’s laugh this time was quieter, edged with something like a confession. “You always caught me,” she said. You always cared about me too much…
He regarded her for a long second, like a man puzzling through pieces of an old painting. Then he said, “I stopped keeping tricks a long time ago.” There was a tremor behind the sentence. She felt his hands tighten on her, an unvoiced fear that the world might ask for both of them in the same breath.
She leaned into him. She let herself feel the small frivolous joy of being taller by an inch—the small advantage that made their faces tilt in a new choreography. It allowed her to tuck her chin near his ear, to speak there with a voice intended for secrecy.
“Stay a while,” she suggested almost childishly. The tone made it an invitation and nothing more. She did not say stay forever; they had learned not to say forever. Instead they offered something softer, more reasonable.
He stayed.
He stayed for the length of the tunnel between stations. He pressed his cheek lightly to the crown of her head, an exceedingly quiet gesture that felt like confession. For the first time, she saw openness in him—not a flood, but a small crack where light could come in.
There was a lull then: a kind of small domestic silence that felt almost sacramental. The fluorescent lights hummed, the teenagers’ laughter had moved into the far end of the car, the train hummed like an animal that knows exactly which path to take. She felt like she was inside the center of a map and that map was finally unlabeled in the way she wanted it to be.
Her iPod ticked through a song and she pulled the surviving earbud free with a gentle, practiced motion. She paused for a moment, watching the way the light fell on his face. There was granite in him and also something decidedly breakable. Her fingers—palms callused from lifetimes of gesture and Art—found his wrist in an impulsive, human measure.
“Here,” she said, offering the earbud to him. It felt foolishly intimate, like passing a bowl of soup. She could have kept listening alone. That would have been sensible. That would have been solitary and quiet and safe.
He accepted it as if the world had not taught him to refuse kindness. He moved his chin the smallest amount so she could thread the earbud into his ear. For a second the air smelled of metal and warm wool and the city. She watched the line of the cord fall against his collarbone like a small white seam.
“What are you listening to?” he asked, a private question that meant he wanted to be in the small, particular place of her ears.
“Something garbage and soulful,” she said. “Something that makes you think of late night diners and cheap tea.” She wanted to make him laugh; she wanted to make him small and a little foolish. She wanted him to be human again.
He smiled into the music and for half a second she saw a face that had not been any of the terrible masks he had worn: open, amused, surprised to let something soft in. He leaned in toward her, not to kiss but to get closer in the way that people do when they want to share warmth.
They rode that way for two stops and then three. Time blurred into the steady, repeating drum of the train. People moved in and out of the car opening and closing like curtains. The teenagers scattered at some point and a man with a violin case took their place. A woman with an oversized tote left the car, leaving her perfume as a faint, ghostly note.
Shelby and Abolish said almost nothing. They traded fragments: the names of bands, an apology for leaving, a noncommittal explanation of where he had been. Those kinds of answers are often insufficient and she knew that. They are the sort of small lie that keeps the more complicated truths at bay. But in that car, the small things were enormous. A shrug could be a confession. The pattern of his fingers drumming or the way he watched the tunnel could be the shape of a life.
At one point the train hit a slow patch of track and jolted, and she realized she had been so wrapped in the moment she nearly let herself topple off balance again. He steadied her without looking away from the window; his hands were alert and practiced and he moved with the fluid economy of someone who still expected the unexpected.
When the car finally slid into a crowded station and the doors opened with their ritualistic exhale, she felt the sudden exposure like stepping out of a warm room into a blizzard. The city air rushed in a different way. People poured into the car with the brisk, necessary energy of commuters. They moved around them with a polite disregard that felt strangely intimate—no one crowded their cluster of attention.
She pulled the jacket closed around herself awkwardly, aware of how it hung, how it made her look smaller and more domestic. She liked the way the fabric held the scent of him. It felt like a hug: he had wrapped himself around her. It felt like a private furniture placed in her body.
At the platform they let one wave of commuters move through, and then they stepped down together. The station was a ribcage of tile and fluorescent light and the smell of hot metal. She kept her head near his shoulder by habit and pleasure; the jacket had become a physical, warm map telling her where she belonged in that moment.
“Where are you going?” she asked at last, because the world had to catch up to the small kindness he had given her. She wanted to know: Would he vanish into the paper-thin version of the city that hid vampires and half-vampires and ghosts? Would he go back to the spaces he hid in—the narrow, quiet houses with thick curtains, the alleys with lanterns, the abandoned libraries?
He looked at the ceiling for a second, thinking, and then at her. “I’m staying around,” he said. “Barely. I have reason to be in the city for some time.”
"Will you come visit? Scott's better now! And Drift has her own-"
"Maybe." Maybe.. was that all she was to him. A maybe in a field of absolutes. They didn't know him, not even at Oakhurst.. so why were tears forming. Why was her visions turning to fractures of lights and crystals.. So why did she feel like she was the one being left behind?
“I have to see if my work allows it,” he added, softer, head tilting just slightly to the left. A familiar gesture. A catlike one—curious, wary, waiting for her reaction. The way he used to tilt his head at her when she said something he wasn’t sure he had permission to laugh.
It almost made her laugh.
Almost.
Instead, a tiny, startled giggle escaped her.
And he smiled—small but real.
“Good,” she managed, breathing out the word like it was warm enough to survive the winter air in the car. She wiped at her eyes with the cuff of his jacket, swallowing the tremor in her throat. “Good.”
He watched her wipe her tears away with his sleeve. Something flickered across his face. Something that looked a lot like regret.
Then the train slowed.
The doors shuddered open.
Cold air pushed in like a warning.
“That’s me,” he murmured, though there was no station announcement, no reason he should know except the way he always moved like he could hear the city thinking.
He stepped toward the door.
She didn’t follow.
She didn’t call after him.
She didn’t beg for more.
She just stood there in his jacket, drowning in black corduroy and the ghost of his warmth, watching him step into the chilled station lighting like a man who’d been gone far too long and was already halfway to leaving again.
No promise.
Just a cut in the night where he used to be.
"Wait!"
The doors shut behind him.
"You didn't give me your number!"
He just smiled, a twist of lips, "Don't worry. I'll find my way back to you."
Then, the empty reflection of the car swallowed her—pale skin, red sweater, white turtleneck, his jacket hanging wrong but feeling right. A vampire alone on a train car that felt too big and too bright and too suddenly hollow. They exhaled sharply. She fished her iPod from her skirt pocket to distract herself, ignoring the feeling of regret flood her stomach like hunger, thumb brushing the click wheel, screen flickering with its last bar of battery. The cold bite her as she tucked her hand into the jacket's pocket, the gloves too thin for NYC winter.
Her fingers brushed something inside the pocket—small, stiff, colder than the lining around it. For a second she thought it might be some forgotten ticket stub, a receipt, the usual clutter a man like him might accidentally carry. But when she pinched it between two fingers and pulled it free, the whole world seemed to tilt with the train’s sway.
Cold.
Paper.
Folded small.
Her breath stilled.
Slowly, with a tremor she pretended wasn’t there, she pulled it out.
A torn scrap of notebook paper, ripped unevenly. His handwriting—messy, slightly slanted, familiar enough to make her eyes sting again.
call me :)
xxx-xxx-xxxx
Shelby stared at it, and the inside of the train seemed to soften around her. The overhead lights hummed like distant bees. The windows blurred with passing shadows. Her reflection in the glass looked almost human with the jacket swallowing her shoulders, hair mussed, cheeks flushed from emotion she shouldn’t even be able to feel so sharply anymore.
Their heart didn’t beat.
But if it did, it would’ve stuttered here.
It wasn’t just a phone number. It was the proof that he hadn’t walked away empty-handed. Proof that he had thought of her even in the leaving. Proof that maybe—just maybe—he wanted her to find him again.
She thumbed the paper once, lightly, the way someone might test the ripeness of fruit before taking the first sweet bite. The ink smudged faintly under her touch, lifting into her skin—his handwriting branding itself onto her. God, it felt like him. Not the version she saw on the train. But the version from before—the one who had looked at her like she was sunrise even though he could never stand in it.
The train rattled, swinging her gently.
The note fluttered faintly in her hand.
A maybe.
He had given her a maybe.
But in the soft, honey-thick glow of the train lights, in the warm cradle of his jacket still holding the echo of his body, the word didn’t feel uncertain at all. Didn't feel as if she was walking the edge of life's tightrope.
It felt like a promise that hadn’t decided its shape yet.
And Shelby—ancient, undead, dressed like a girl in the wrong decade—felt something warm bloom in her chest. Slow. Quiet. Sweet in a way that hurt.
She slid the paper back into the pocket, tucking it deep, like a seed she fully intended to water later.
She wasn’t going to lose it.
Not this time.
Not him.
Not when he’d given her something that felt like a beginning.
It felt like hope..