Chapter Text
Baz
Simon Snow is telling me about my mother's ghost, and I want to set something on fire.
Not him. Not this time. Something else. The curtains, maybe. The bed. My own hands, for shaking.
He's sitting on his bed with a notebook, reading me messages from the dead like they're grocery lists, and every word out of his mouth is a knife I didn't see coming. Nicodemus. Killer. Peace. I don't know what any of it means yet, and I can't think straight enough to figure it out, because Simon is looking at me with those eyes — too open, too warm, too something — and I keep getting distracted by the shape of his mouth.
"Who's Nicodemus?" I ask, and I sound like her. I hate that I sound like her. I hate that he heard her voice and I didn't. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.
"She didn't say."
"What else?" I'm leaning forward now, elbows on my knees, close enough to smell him. Soap. Sweat. Something sweet underneath, like he's been eating those disgusting cereal bars again. "Was there anything else?"
"Well…" He looks flustered. Simon Snow doesn't get flustered. He gets angry. He gets righteous. He doesn't get this — uncertain, shifting, avoiding my eyes.
I don't process what happens next. I don't process anything, because Simon is moving, shifting off his bed, crossing the narrow space between us like it isn't a border, like it isn't a line we've spent seven years drawing in blood and spite. He's close. Too close. His knee bumps mine and he doesn't pull back.
What is he doing?
He kisses my temple.
It's barely anything. A press of warm lips, a breath against my cheek, gone before I can catalogue it properly. But I feel it everywhere — in my fangs, which ache and threaten to descend; in my chest, which has forgotten how to function; in my hands, which have grabbed his shoulders without my permission.
I push him away, because that's the right thing to do. He's breathing harder than before. His eyes are confused, worried, like he's just done something he doesn't understand and is waiting for me to explain it. I can't explain it.
"Your mother kissed me," he says, looking away, "and told me to give it to you. So. There. I gave it to you."
I stare at him.
I want to shake him. I want to bite him. I want to push him back onto his bed and find out if his mouth tastes the same on my tongue as it did on my skin. I want to cry, which is the most humiliating want of all, because I haven't cried since I was twelve, and I'm not starting now, not in front of him, but fuck I missed her. I missed her twice. While I was trapped underground, starving and bleeding and talking to rats, she was here — in this room, with him — and I wasn't. I wasn't here. I'll never be here. I'll never hear her voice again or smell her perfume or have her look at me like I'm something precious.
And Simon Snow just kissed me because she asked him to.
"What," I manage, and my voice sounds like someone else's, "the fuck, Snow."
He blinks. "What?"
"What is wrong with you?"
"I'm delivering a message! Your mum said—"
"I know what she said!" I'm shouting now. I never shout. Shouting is for people who've lost control, and I am always in control, except I'm not, I'm not, my hands are still on his shoulders even though I should've let go by now and I can feel the heat of him through his shirt and I want to— "You don't just—you can't just—"
"Just what?" He's getting angry now, his jaw setting, his shoulders squaring under my grip. "I did what she asked! She wanted me to give you the kiss, so I gave you the kiss! What's your problem?"
My problem.
Ha! Yes. What is my problem?
My problem is that I'm terrified and I want to do it again, slower, with his hands in my hair. My problem is that he doesn't know. He has no idea. He thinks this is nothing, a chore, a favour, and I'm standing here with seven years of want burning through me like a fever, and he's looking at me like I'm the crazy one.
"You don't understand," I say, and my voice is shaking, and I hate it, I hate him, I hate everything. I want to lunge at him. I want to grab him and shake him and make him understand what he's done, what he's doing, standing there looking at me like that. But I don't. I can't. Because if I touch him again — if I let myself touch him again — I won't stop. I'll do something that can't be undone. Something that would ruin us both.
So I turn away. I press my palms flat against the wall and I breathe, I breathe, I breathe, and I try to remember who I am. What I am. Not someone who falls apart because Simon Snow kissed his temple. Not someone who wants to cry in front of his enemy.
"You're right," I say, and my voice is flat, controlled, the voice of someone who isn't dying. "I wasn't here. I missed her. Twice, apparently. And now I'll never—" I stop. Swallow. "I'll never hear her voice again. Is that what you wanted to hear?"
Simon is quiet behind me. I can hear him breathing, too loud, too close, too there in the room that's suddenly too small for both of us.
"Baz," he says, and he sounds different now. Not angry. Not defensive. Something else. "I didn't mean— I was just trying to tell you what she said. I thought you'd want to know."
"I did want to know." I turn around. He's closer than I expected, his eyes wide and worried, and I have to look away before I do something stupid.
Simon hesitates. He sits back down, on the edge of his bed, facing me. "She called me her rosebud boy the second time. Said we were stars." He pauses. "She seemed sad. Like she knew she was running out of time."
Rosebud boy.
We were stars.
The words hit somewhere old enough to still be soft.
I can see her saying it, even though it sounds wrong. Not as a ghost. Not pale and cold and fading at the edges, but alive — lounging across a velvet chaise with one shoe half-off, smiling at me over the rim of a teacup like I’ve just said something absurd and wonderful.
And Simon heard it.
Simon heard her say it in this room, to him, while I was gone.
“She never used to call me that,” I say.
Simon looks up. “What?”
“Rosebud boy.” I let out a short, humourless laugh. “My mother was dramatic, not sentimental. She’d never call me that.”
“She sounded like she loved you,” he says quietly instead.
I laugh, and it comes out wrong. “What a stupid thing to say.”
His brow knots. “Why?”
“Because of course she loved me.”
“I know,” he says, and now there’s something flinty in his voice, enough that I look at him properly. “That’s not what I meant.”
No. I know it isn’t.
He meant it was obvious. Immediate. Fierce. That even dead and dragged up through the Veil and running out of time, she’d been full of me. Looking for me. Calling for me. Reaching through him to get to me.
My throat tightens again. It’s becoming a problem.
I turn away before he can see too much. There’s nowhere useful to look in his room. The fire’s burned low. His stupid notebook is still on the bed, open like a wound.
“She said,” Simon starts, then stops.
I glance back. “What?”
“She said, ‘I never would have left you.’” His voice is low now, careful in a way that scrapes against my nerves. “Like she needed you to know that part.”
I stare at him.
That does it, somehow. Not the ghost, not the message about Nicodemus, not even the kiss. That. The plain certainty of it. My mother, still trying to explain herself from beyond death. Still trying to get to me. Still trying to say I wasn’t abandoned.
Something ugly and hot rises in my chest.
I sit down because my knees have abruptly become decorative.
Simon shifts like he wants to come closer, then thinks better of it. The fact that he thinks better of it is, frankly, offensive. If he’s going to ruin me, he ought to commit. He opens his mouth to say something — to argue, to defend himself, to make this worse — but there's a knock at the door, and we both jump.
"Simon?" Bunce. Of course.
I arch an eyebrow. Snow looks at me, waiting for me to raise the alarm, to make a scene, to be the Baz Pitch he expects me to be.
Instead, I stand up. I walk to the door and open it. Bunce is crying, her face crumpled, and she rushes past me into Snow's arms without even looking at me.
"I'll leave you alone," I say, sliding past them out the door.
Snow looks up at me, surprised, his arms full of sobbing Bunce. I don't wait for him to say anything. I can't.
I lean against the wall outside our room and I close my eyes and I breathe, I breathe, I breathe.