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It’s day five of Layna’s cold-shoulder treatment when Magi finally manufactures a way to stumble upon her.
Layna’s in the library. It’s dark enough there for her yellow shirt and yellow eyes to look dusky and orange. She sits in one of the big chairs, one that’s squat and wide with green corduroy worn soft by thirty years of people falling asleep in it. But not Layna, no; she’s awake even as she sinks into the soft upholstery. Her legs angle up, knees forming a cliff’s edge with how they rise and then bend sharply, her calves longer than the chair is tall. And Layna reclines, in a sense. There’s a forced-casual air to it, the way she almost pushes herself into the seat back. Her head lolls on the edge of the cushion, eyes half-lidded but no less keen.
A muted crashing sound fills Magi’s ears. It’s the sort they get when they’re at the deepest part of a yawn, where exhaustion overrules senses and makes their eyes water. Her vision is clear, though; those polymath’s eyes of hers note Layna’s increased respiration, the tiny rips in the armrests from their claws, the hair on Layna’s arms standing on end. Little bits of Magi — the ones that aren’t drawing cold conclusions from Layna’s sympathetic nervous system — wilt as she realizes what that means.
“You’re not mad at me,” Magi says, despising the way their voice creaks and breaks. “You’re scared.”
Layna goes stock-still.
“Of me.”
They just look at Magi through half-shut eyes, still playing at dozing off even though Magi hasn’t slept a wink in almost a week and she doubts Layna has either — and then they blink, and look away.
“Layna,” begs Magi. “Layna, please.” They shuffle forward and don’t miss the growing tension in her shoulders. But Magi presses on; that’s all she knows how to do, these days. And then she’s standing in front of Layna’s chair. Even sitting, even in a low seat that sinks another six inches when someone’s in it, Layna’s still eye-to-eye with Magi.
It’s embarrassing, what happens next. Magi sniffles, just once. She’s close enough that her knee brushes their thigh, and Magi just acts the way she always does — without thinking. That brush turns into support, Magi bracing one leg on Layna’s thigh, and then the other, and, carefully, crawling onto Layna. She’s kneeling in their lap, a tiny little thing with lilac hair who grips the lapels of Layna’s jacket and stares into their eyes.
“Layna,” they say, well aware that Layna has been half of their vocabulary for the last week — Layna, do you have the guitar ready, Layna, I’m starting the ritual, Layna, you have to keep going, Layna, it worked, Layna, I’m sorry, Layna, please — and they don’t care. They need her to see, to look them in the eyes because Magi can’t handle another day of this. “Layna,” Magi says again, placing a gentle hand on her chin, pulling just enough for her gaze (wide awake, wide-eyed, now) to meet their own.
Words flee her. A doctorate in half the sciences known to humankind could be hers, if she wanted, and she’s invented a few others just for fun, but all the brains and books in the world have never given Magi the facility with words that people like Layna seem to possess. She’s left breathless, broken, staring into the eyes of someone just as hurt and just as hurting. “I’m sor—” Magi chokes on the word.
She tries again. “I’m sorry. Layna, please, just talk to me, just tell me how to fix this and I’ll do it, I promise — don’t look at me like that, I can do it, I — I’m—”
It’s like their brain skips seven-tenths of a second. One instant, Magi’s voice is cracking again as they beg forgiveness from the only one who can give it to them, and the next instant they’re kissing her, desperate, desperate, desperate. Layna’s only frozen in surprise for a second, then she returns it, pushing back with that effortless strength. Like Magi, their whole body weight on top of her, is as light as a feather.
The kiss stirs something in Magi’s stomach with the shape and texture of broken glass. Memories flood like immateria waves — late nights of PsychoAcoustic debugging interrupted by Layna, who always brought coffee and a kiss to Magi’s temple and the right question to get her rambling for twenty minutes, with Layna smiling that fond smile and watching Magi talk the whole time.
That smile’s only there as a shadow, a tiny, faded ghost of itself that drops back to placidity when the two of them pull apart again. When the two of them remember who they are, where they are, and what happened.
Magi doesn’t — can’t — look Layna in the eyes any longer. They drop their head into the crook of Layna’s collarbone, tip to the side so their hips find a spot between the armrest and her waist, and they just lie there. A little lilac clinging to life, amid a field of sunflowers.
She comes back to the library every day, but doesn’t find Layna there ever again.
It’s hard, not seeing Layna. It’s worse because Magi can’t stop trying. Sleepless nights of mapping the Big Garage and trying to crack Layna’s routines blend into one another. She homebrews caffeine pills to keep herself awake enough to pitch, because she doesn’t have the time to go get a diagnosis and a prescription.
Seattle floods with immateria, streets crack under an invisible pressure, and soon the lethean waves run dark and red with hungry malice.
As days roll by, bandages wrap around person after person. A leg here, a shoulder there, a crop top with fifteen strips of bloody gauze creeping out from under it. Magi doesn’t get a scratch. Some mercy, they think, wondering if losing a chunk of flesh would at least get Layna to speak to them again.
Magi pitches her assigned games. She chews her thumb to the quick every eclipse. She grows numb to the screams.
It’s over two weeks before she manages to find Layna after a game.
The blooddrain, hot and heavy all day, makes Magi’s cleats slick. She skids on the concrete and catches herself. Red-brown footprints lead her to the showers. It’s all harsh fluorescence and off-white tile and taps that drip-drip-drip, and there’s Layna, kicking off one shoe, bloodied jersey crumpled on a bench. She’s in a black tank and baggy pants tucked into high socks. Thick drops of blood have dried on her arms, and the ruddy flakes fall away as Layna drags claws through the coating, leaving behind lines of irritated skin.
Layna glances Magi’s way; those yellow eyes aren’t dim and shaded any longer, but bright, piercing their heart with a hunter’s precision.
Then the eyes flick away. “Hey, Magi,” Layna says, and just the sound of Layna’s voice sends a shock through her. They sit on the bench and work at their shoelace, all gummed up and sticky with blood.
“May I help?” Magi asks after a few seconds. Layna stiffens again, which floods them with a whole mess of unpleasant emotions. There’s a little mental kick, reflex more than anything, that says what do you have to be scared of, it’s just me, I’m not a threat, and they feel all the worse for it after. Because, despite her best efforts, Magi is a threat.
A nod. Layna shifts, leaning back on her hands, and looks off to the side. Magi sits across the bench and works at the shoe with nimble fingers; their hands are the sort that can pluck out the right wire from a spaghetti-mess of cables, tap the right button on a panel with eighty others. A scientist’s hands, bloodstained, with grave dirt under the nails. Hands that are, all of a sudden, shaking far too much to untangle a shoelace.
It’s embarrassing, like it always is, that Magi always does this in front of Layna. Caffeine and the mania of invention have staved off breakdowns so far. Why does it only catch her at the worst times? Why is she shaking? Why?
Why does Layna, in all her inscrutable beauty, pull her in?
Magi’s brow rests in the hollow of Layna’s throat, warm and slightly sticky where they didn’t clean all the blood off. Their leg is still up on the bench — a wall, almost, that wraps around her, except walls keep the bad out, and it’s a bit late for that.
But Layna pulled her in, and Magi clutches at soft fabric and a warm body like she’s a drowning woman. She never wants to leave. She wants to stay like this, feeling Layna’s heartbeat, close enough to smell the sunflowers under coppery rain’s remnants. Layna kisses the top of Magi’s head and Magi cries into them.
“I’m sorry,” comes the whisper; one that Magi doesn’t hear so much as they feel. It’s vibrations, ideas, love. They can’t bear to hear Layna apologize again, so they blindly lift their head up and find the edge of her jaw and kiss her, and they kiss her, and they kiss that spot again and again every time Layna tries to talk until finally she turns her head to meet theirs and Magi doesn’t stop kissing her because if they do then that might be the last one they ever give her and—
Layna’s hands slip under Magi’s, and they realize they’ve been gripping her too tight. But she doesn’t push Magi away — she doesn’t push Magi away — no, she just twines her fingers through their own. In steady circles, her thumbs stroke the backs of Magi’s hands.
In the heat of that moment, Magi makes a reckless decision. They’re her specialty. They’re the only decisions she makes. She decides, quietly and to herself, to break her promises. They’re all still fresh in her mind: a half-dozen faces and voices asking-demanding-begging to never do that again and let the dead stay dead and no more when all she could manage was a mute nod or hysterical laughter.
But Magi would do it again. If it was Layna, someday, then she’d do it again.
Layna kisses the bridge of Magi’s nose. Every point of contact between them is fire, smoke, love. The blood dries on her hands where Layna rubs it in, and Magi doesn’t wash it off until the next morning.
Magi stands deep in the Pines. A dim orange sun laps at the heavy trunks. Light doesn’t often make it to the darkest parts of the woods, and this bit of sunlight will soon be gone, once the sun sinks the rest of the way past the horizon.
“What do you call a body?”
The voice slips between trees and makes the needles quiver.
A sick fear rolls over her. She needs to get out, Magi realizes. Out of the Pines, before the sun goes out. The darkness will swallow her whole. Beneath her feet, twigs snap. Pine-straw rustles.
“A body is transient, resurrector. It is cupped hands bearing water. The water is still itself when the hands part, even if its form is new.”
Magi keeps running, even though the voice doesn’t get further away. The shadows of trees grow longer, then start to fade into the growing darkness. Or maybe the sun is so low in the sky, and the trees so tall, that their shadows go on forever. Maybe Magi will run that whole forever and not find the end of the Pines. She sees shapes in the corner of her vision: black, red-eyed, only there in the gaps between massive trunks.
“The water can recollect. It can find an old shape, or a shape like its old one. So long as there are hands that will cup and hold it, the water can always return.”
The shapes multiply, oil spills racing across the night, the red eyes as stray embers, the spark that will light the whole thing up. Inferno. Like Hell, like a forest fire, like dying under the sunless sky. Magi races her death and feels herself losing ground.
“A body is hope, grave-robber. In the old form found again, there is a promise. Spilled water is promises broken. If two hands do not fit together, the water leaks out.”
They break free of the Pines and stumble. After so long jumping roots and skidding on a carpet of pine needles, the smooth grass of the outfield trips them up. Magi tumbles, rolling down the steady slope with impacts that force the breath from their lungs. As the dim world spins around them, they see a tidal wave of red-eyed darkness surge after them.
Dirt scrapes their knees as they slide to a stop, lying on their side just next to second base. Magi struggles for air in hungry gasps.
“How do the hands knit back together? How do fingers interlock, to make the vessel perfect? When cupped hands break apart, who mends the cup?”
Magi pushes herself up. The heel of her hand grinds against the hard dirt. After her mad sprint, the strain makes her muscles cramp. The shapes from the woods have followed her, and now they fill the outfield. Each one is a wolf. Her vision is shadows, a thousand red eyes, and nightshade sprouting in the spaces between wolves.
When they look down, there’s chalk. It’s chalk lines that the floods and the bloody downpour should have washed away. Magi’s kneeling at the edge of a mistake with an army of wolves watching them. It feels the same as it has for weeks.
Her ritual is like this. There, behind home plate, the platform with all her sensors and computers and dials. The conductor’s platform, from which she twirled an electrical baton and made the universe sing and dance to her delight. And there, right over the plate, a spot for the other half of the equation. Every dance needs music. A resonator guitar is scuffed and dirty. Two strings coil, broken. The shoulder strap has a rip.
“A body is a home, magician,” says the voice. A shape on the pitcher’s mound, where the once-dead collapse when they return. Magi staggers to their feet and walks.
“The hands may change. They will still hold water. But what happens to a cup when the water boils away?”
The body is a wolf. She is larger than the others, and sunflowers tangle in her fur. There is no sun; they wilt and grey. Her eyes, once bright and yellow, are dim. Her eyes are dying.
“The body is an empty cup.”
Lightning strikes.
Magi screams.
And then she is awake, and Layna is shouting her name, a death-grip on Magi’s shoulders as she shakes her back to the real world. The haze of nightmares still roils over her as a stormcloud. Magi thinks she sees red, lupine eyes peering between the wires in her lab. But they’re nothing next to Layna’s eyes, bright and full of life and tears and worry, yellow like the morning sun and the flowers that always face it.
Magi sobs and laughs and lets Layna lift them up, burying their face in her shoulder, legs wrapping around her waist. They cling to Layna and breathe in the smell of sunflowers. They kiss her neck and her cheek and say, “Layna. Layna, Layna, Layna.”
Layna listens. She laughs through her fear. She squeezes Magi close. It’s all real. They’re both alive.
In quiet words that she knows Layna will hear, she says, “I love you.” And: “You saved me.” Vibrations. Ideas.
Magi always has so many ideas.
Layna runs a hand through Magi’s hair and whispers, “I had to return the favor.” When she tries to protest, Layna kisses her. “You were scared. I was, too.”
Magi wilts, fingers curling against the flannel around Layna’s shoulders. “I’m sor—”
“Love is always scary, Magi,” says Layna, and kisses her again.