Chapter Text
The basement smelled like stone and old water.
Renner had been cataloguing details like that since they brought him down here. The smell. The temperature — cold enough that his breath made shapes in the air if he exhaled slowly. The sound of the door when it closed, which was less of a slam and more of a finality. A sound that didn't echo because the walls ate it immediately.
He had been cataloguing details because it was something to do.
His wrists weren't bound. That was the thing that kept snagging on him, kept pulling his attention back every time he managed to get it somewhere else. His wrists weren't bound and the room didn't have a lock that he could see from the inside and yet the thought of standing up and trying the door had not seriously occurred to him.
He already knew.
He didn't know how he knew. He just did. The same way he knew when he'd used his ability on a large scale — not the specifics, never the specifics, just the sensation of something vast having moved through him like water through a cracked wall. That sensation was sitting in his chest right now like a stone. Heavy and specific and completely without context.
He'd used it recently. A lot.
He pressed his back harder against the wall and pulled his knees up and looked at his hands.
Seventeen years old. His hands looked like a seventeen years old's. He wasn't sure why he kept expecting them to look different — older, maybe, or marked somehow, the way hands in stories always seemed to bear evidence of what they'd done. His hands just looked like his hands. Slightly too large for the rest of him still, which his mother had told him once meant he'd grow into himself eventually.
He wondered if she was —
He stopped that thought.
Cataloguing. Details. The stone beneath him was smoother than the walls, worn down by water or time or both. There was a crack running diagonal across the ceiling that he'd traced so many times in the last however-long that he could probably redraw it perfectly from memory. There was a drain in the floor three meters to his left that smelled faintly of copper if he thought about it too hard, so he'd decided not to think about it.
He was getting good at deciding not to think about things.
The sensation in his chest shifted. He breathed through it.
The last thing he remembered clearly was the courtyard. Running. He'd been running and he'd known it was already too late to run fast enough and he'd had maybe four seconds of heart shards left and he'd thought — he'd thought —
Saffie.
Her name arrived in his mind like a blow and he pressed his knuckles against his mouth and held very still until it passed.
He'd thought: I can still reverse. Four seconds, I can still reverse. If I reverse four seconds I'm back in the corridor before they saw me and I can go a different way.
And he had reversed.
And it hadn't mattered.
Because without the heart shards to push it further, four seconds was nothing. Four seconds was them seeing him again. Four seconds was arriving at the same outcome through a slightly different door. He'd reversed himself into the same pair of hands grabbing his collar and the same cold expression on the face above them and his last heart shard had crumbled to dust in his pocket because he'd already used it and reversing doesn't refill what you've spent, it just rewinds the clock while leaving the cost already paid.
He'd known that. He'd always known that.
He just hadn't fully understood it until that moment.
Renner pressed his head back against the wall and stared at the diagonal crack in the ceiling.
He was trying very hard not to do the thing his brain kept wanting to do, which was reconstruct. His brain was insisting, with increasing urgency, that if he just thought about it carefully enough he could figure out what had happened. What he'd reversed. What the sensation in his chest was the residue of. How many times he'd moved through that enormous terrible motion and what had been on the other side of each one.
He knew it didn't work like that. He knew the memories were gone. He'd built his entire relationship with his own ability around the understanding that the memories were always going to be gone, that he would only ever have the sensation and the knowledge that he'd moved something massive and the personal rule he'd made for himself: whatever caused you to reverse it, make sure it doesn't happen again.
The rule had served him well for years. Small reversals, clean logic. He'd wake up feeling the residue and look around at the context and understand well enough. A car that had nearly hit someone. A fall. Once, memorably, a gas leak that he'd smelled in the two seconds before reversing and then hadn't smelled when he arrived back, which had sent him calmly and immediately to the building's emergency line without knowing exactly why he was certain.
The rule worked when the reversal was small. When the sensation was proportional. When he could look at the context and reconstruct the shape of what had happened even without the memory.
The sensation currently sitting in his chest was not small.
He didn't know what to do with a sensation this size. It didn't fit the rule because the rule assumed he could look at the context and understand the shape of it. The context right now was a basement. Stone walls. A crack in the ceiling. A drain that smelled of copper. His own hands in a room that was becoming incrementally darker as whatever light source existed above him shifted with the time.
He had no context. Just the residue of something so vast it had restructured something inside him that he didn't have a name for.
He wondered if this was what it felt like to have used a year of his life. Five years. He had no frame of reference. He wondered if the sensation scaled linearly or if it was more like — if reversing a day felt like a pebble in his chest and reversing a year felt like a boulder, whether reversing however-much-this-was felt like being buried.
It felt like being buried.
He made himself breathe.
In the school, there had been a teacher — he didn't let himself finish that thought either. He redirected. In the school, the understanding had been that his ability was valuable precisely because of its cost. The cost was the point. The cost was what made it a last resort rather than a first response, what made him the person in the room at the end of things rather than the beginning. He'd understood that. He'd even agreed with it, in the abstract way you agree with things when you're sitting safely in the place designed to protect you.
He was not in that place anymore.
He thought about the others. Then he stopped thinking about the others because his chest did something that he recognized as the beginning of a feeling he wasn't equipped to finish, and he needed to not finish it right now. He needed to be functional. He needed to be able to think when she came, because she was going to come, that was the only reason he was in a basement with unbound wrists and a door he instinctively knew not to try, and he needed to be able to think when she did.
She.
He'd been avoiding that too.
He'd known Fay since they were both fourteen. He'd sat three rows behind her in two different classes. He'd watched her build that stupid club, the one for children of the squad that saved the world, and he'd sat with the particular quiet discomfort of someone who understood they weren't considered worth including. He hadn't been angry about it. Fay was Fay — loud and certain and surrounded by people who reflected her certainty back at her, and Renner was Renner, which meant useful in a specific narrow circumstance and otherwise largely decorative.
He hadn't been angry. He'd just noted it and filed it and gone back to being invisible, which he was good at.
He wasn't sure what he was now. Present, at minimum. Visible, clearly. Whatever she needed from him, it had made him visible.
He thought about the moment they'd caught him. The expression on the face of the one who'd found him first. Not her — one of hers. And then the moment after, when she had arrived, and he'd looked at her face and —
He stopped.
His hands were shaking. He looked at them with something close to academic interest because it was either that or acknowledge that the shaking was coming from somewhere internal that he did not currently have the capacity to address.
He pressed them flat against his knees.
Okay.
He was in a basement. The sensation in his chest was enormous and contextless. His hands were shaking. These were the facts. He could work with facts.
She was going to come and she was going to explain what she needed from him and there would be a reason his wrists weren't bound, because she wasn't careless, she had never been careless, and the reason was probably that she needed him willing rather than coerced because willing worked and coerced didn't, not for something like this, not for what he suspected this was.
He suspected. He didn't know. He was very carefully not knowing.
But the sensation in his chest was the size of something he had no word for, and she was the Blood God, and he was the only person in this entire ruined world with the ability to reverse what had already been done, and there was only one reason you put that person in a basement with unbound wrists and waited.
Renner pressed his back against the wall.
He looked at the crack in the ceiling.
He breathed.
Above him, somewhere in the distance, something that might have been a sound or might have been nothing moved through the stone.
He waited.