Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s strange to be in the town now that he’s got his memories back.

On one hand, the awful anxious paranoia that he’d carried while amnesiac was no longer a problem. Breathing is easier now that things are out in the open. He can look Allie in the eye now without feeling as if his ribs are breaking open. There’s no immediate feeling of distrust and suspicion every time he walks into the office. On the other hand, well. Let’s just say he was having certain issues that were somewhat harder to deal with than good old paranoia.

For eight months, his entire identity had been pulled together from the bits and pieces of himself that didn’t give away the secret of his immortality, and the general fulfillment of whatever role someone wanted him to play. This had mostly worked well in creating a version of him that was…not exactly in line with who Jason is in actuality. Nevermind that at this point in his life, Jason is less of a person and more a bunch of random characteristics that people liked and considered ‘friendly’ stacked together in an oversized sweater and pants. Cosplaying a harmless hipster, as Allie would say. That wasn’t to say he couldn’t be nice, or he didn’t try to be kind in a genuine way, but. He’d admit that perhaps he’d been more cynical in the recent years. Cynical and alone and barely human.

The first time he had come back to his apartment after the near apocalypse — Allie deliriously saying some joke that made no sense into his ear; Elijah a couple paces ahead of them, jittery and worried, but chuckling along to their nonsense — multiple people had called a greeting out to him which Jason had returned with a bewildered shock. Allie had made some sly comments about his ‘popularity’ to Elijah but he hadn’t really heard their ensuing argument. Despite the fact he’d spent months in Uada Falls and the obvious knowledge that he had gone around making bonds, they still felt like they happened less to him, and more to someone else that just happened to share the same body and mind as him.

For the most part, it is fine. It is really fucking fine. It happens all the time. It’s simply a side effect of being immortal — losing himself every time he moves ‘on’ and having to scrounge up someone new from the ashes of his former self. He’s gotten used to it. He’s not mad or frustrated. Past Jason had tried his best to be kind and polite and a helping hand. He had left him with a gentle role to fill — kinder shoes to put on. He made friends who cried at his death, and neighbors who asked after his whereabouts, and the boss’ daughter — who for some reason has his phone number, what is up with that? Does that kid know nothing about stranger danger? He may not be a danger but still — asks him about impressing her friends.

Jason does not mind that. All of that is good and wonderful, etc etc.

What Jason does mind is Past Jason’s apparent taste in men. Granted, his memory-less self was more intent on getting his memories back to worry about things like standards, and was not exactly having a fun time whatsoever. Hence, can’t really be blamed for the things he did for stress relief but Jason is not forgiving his amnesiac self for the fucking crush he’s left him with.

It’s one thing to wake up in the back of a van with memories that don’t quite feel like his own; into a life that feels like the aftermath of a car wreck. It’s a whole another to wake up with budding feelings for the most insufferable person that Jason’s ever had the misfortune of meeting — and he’s met quite a few over the years. Frankly, Jason was disappointed in himself at the fact the unwanted want in his chest hadn’t simply dissipated at the realization of who it was attached to.

Of course, he understands emotions don’t work like that.

It was still disappointing.

Jason had assumed that some time would be enough to get rid of it. Time, after all, didn’t give a damn how desperately you clung onto your shit. It was going to take it away; soften all the edges of your grief and love, even against your wishes. But nearly two weeks had passed since the near Armageddon, and nothing had happened. His feelings stayed the same. He still thought of Allie as a good friend. King still made irritation rise in him. Nervous butterflies still flew around his stomach when he thought of Elijah. It was infuriating. He should be over it now, or at least be able to distance himself from the butterflies and the fondness. But nothing worked.

Turns out, feelings are harder to get rid of when you’re not allowed to skip town. Who’d have thought? Not him, certainly. Damn him for wanting to be better.

It’s all the lost memories’ fault. He’s not sure how, but it is.

Jason mulls, half-heartedly going through the papers about suspicious people that may or may not be immortal, I’ve never lost my memories before. Except that one time Daphne pushed him off of the river shore and he hit his head and straight up forgot a week’s worth of stuff happening. But that was a singular experience, and not something that ever happened again. The losing memories part, that is. Daphne never really stopped pushing him off of random things.

He can practically feel the phantom aches of injuries gained from her pushing him around.

He sighs, rubbing his dry eyes with the palm of his hands. The fact he’s started thinking of old childhood exploits told him he was well into overtime territory. He doesn’t need to look up to see that it was getting late now; the dark offices of both of his co-workers did that just fine. But he’d promised Allie they’d leave together, and she was helping Engler with something. He wasn’t told what exactly that something was, which was suspicious, and she’d threatened him with pouring ludicrous hair dyes in his shampoo when he’d tried to pry it out of her.

Jason doesn’t mind waiting, not really. There was little else for him to do in his apartment, and he’d take the repetitive job of going through papers over sitting doing nothing in his place any day. His apartment — hideously decorated; one more thing he’s severely judging Past Jason for — is lacking in anything actually enjoyable. He’d already read through the decorative books that had come with it and had no interest in putting himself through that particular torture again. Watched all the DVDs in his van, listened through the CDs. There was nothing left to do.

I need to get my stuff back from my old place, he thinks, stopping at a profile of some David Ward, skimming through it without registering a single thing. All of his stuff still sat in his apartment — where he definitely lived, and didn’t simply use as a storage unit that he slept at sometimes. The EPO had apparently kept it paid for the entire time he was bumbling about with no memories, and would keep it that way for a couple months more. How long those couple months might be, he doesn’t want to know. He needs to put it on a priority list or something. There was expensive stuff in there, and his instruments, whose expense sat in a completely different category than the other things he owned.

He was pretty sure the electric guitar he owned wasn’t even made anymore. The owner company dissolving sometime in the 2000s.

He looks back at the papers, thoroughly sick of reading through them. There won’t by much work done with only him, and at such a late hour. Where even is Allie? he wonders. She can’t have just left without him after making him wait for her! He’s been sitting here for almost two hours!

Taking his phone out, Jason slowly makes his way to the messenger app, the only thing he really used the machine for. He still likes the old Nokia phone better. That thing had survived every accident a van could get into, and it had gotten into quite a few. Allie’s contact was the first one, courtesy of late night conversations where they each told the other to get to bed, and then neither of them did. He types out the beginning of a message where are when a shadow blocks the light coming in from the common area of the unit.

Jason sighs, relieved at finally being able to leave. “Finally! Where have you — oh.” He pauses, eyeing the figure now stepping through his office door. “You’re not Allie.”

“No,” Elijah says, “I don’t think I’ve turned into her yet.” He stands at the doorway, hands in his pocket. A sculptor’s most awkward statue. The kind of thing they’d put into the end of a horror show to make other guests laugh. “She left with Engler. Asked me to tell you.”

“Did she now?” The question drips with sarcasm, though he had tried to reel it in. He’d been going for a blank tone, but it didn’t quite land between his brain to mouth filter. He leans back in his chair, looking up at the man through his eyelashes, unconvinced. “She decided that she couldn’t simply call me and had to send a messenger? The same person that would sacrifice us both for her phone?”

Jason knows full well exactly why Allie would leave without him and why she sent Elijah to pass on that that information to him instead of simply calling him. He still wants to know what excuse they come up with. Just for his own amusement. A guy has to get his entertainment somehow.

Elijah looks away from him for a moment, a minute action to think of an excuse, he’s sure. “Her phone died,” he says, shrugging to look casual. He does not.

“Right,” Jason drawls. With a quick movement, he’s pulling himself back up, slamming his hands on the desk. He tugs his bag off of the floor, hauling all the papers into it without much care. He can already tell none of these people are immortals. Anyone who’s lived over a few centuries would know how to clear their tracks better. “Well then! I guess I should leave. Bye Eli. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Can we talk?” Elijah asks, stepping in his office and closing the door. “Just for a minute?”

Jason wonders if he should tell the warlock that there’s no choice in the question since he’s more or less locked him in his own office. He decides not to. He might have, had it been the 1700s. But it’s a bit too rude for the him now. He simply chooses to glare at the other man. “Can’t we do this tomorrow?” he says annoyed. “It’s late. I’d like to be at my place —”

“We both know we won’t be talking tomorrow,” Elijah interrupts sharply.

“Of course, we’ll be talking tomorrow —”

“You’ve been avoiding me.”

Jason has not been avoiding him. It’s hard to avoid a person when you spend a majority of your time stuck in a single space.

Okay. Correction. Jason has been sort of avoiding him. Mostly he’s been using every single thing on his to-do list to not have to talk with Elijah. This includes everything from not saying no to anything Allie asks him to do, to simply leaving for his apartment as quickly as he could. It isn’t intentional. Not really. He’s just…trying to rid himself of the crush. Usually time apart is all he needs to be over something. If not two weeks, then three.

Of course, he hadn’t thought that Elijah would simply ask Allie for help. Probably should have. It was only logical.

“Since you want to talk so badly, talk then. What is it?” Crossing his arms, he leans against the desk. Doesn’t bother trying to reject the avoidance accusation. They both know it’s true.

Elijah stares at him for a moment, pursing his lips. Shifts his weight from one foot to another, a nervous movement that looks off on the normally confident man. Then says softly, “I wanted to apologize.”

It’s his turn to stare now. Puzzlement makes him squint a little. Slowly, he goes through the events of the recent days, seeking anything that might require an apology. It’s not like Elijah to go out of his way to admit his mistakes and apologize for them, even more so to damn near keep Jason trapped to do so. Nothing comes up. The past two-ish weeks have been as normal as any can be while working for the EPO.

“Apologize for what?” he asks finally, unable to remember even a faux argument between them. Jason has been avoiding him technically, so there’s been less arguments but still. “Is it about not telling me about my memories? Man, it’s whatever. I don’t care.”

It’s a lie. He definitely cares, and is definitely very resentful. But that’s his thing to walk through, not something that anyone needs to apologize for.

Elijah scowls — Jason has to wonder if the apologizing party should be the one scowling but doesn’t comment on it. See? he can be nice — and says, “Are you really going to make me spell it out? You and I both know what I’m talking about.”

He has no clue what the hell they’re talking about.

“I have no clue what you’re talking about.” He shoulders his bag, fully prepared to simply push his way out of the damn office. “Now, since its obvious neither of us are talking about the same thing, I’d like to leave.”

“You seriously don’t know?”

Jason pins him with a dry look. Elijah stares at him in bewilderment. “Are you — really?”

“Eli, listen, either tell me what the hell you want to apologize for, or let me leave. I don’t want to spend the night here, okay?”

Elijah stays quiet for a long few minutes in which Jason becomes convinced this conversation will not go anywhere. He sighs, starts to pull his weight off of the desk when the other man starts speaking again, “Before you left, we…slept together. And. It was…not as mutual as it perhaps should have been. Which was my fault, and I want to apologize.”

Jason won’t lie. It takes him a good long moment to even remember what time he’s even talking about. It has been pretty stressful, alright? Things have been hectic as all hell. Some things are bound to be pushed off to the side of his mind to make way for more pressing matters. Of course, just like that between one moment and the next, he remembers. Flashes of memory, all hazy and slightly off, of being slammed down on a table, rough hands on his person and — hm.

Okay. Jason gets what this apology is about now.

He shrugs, “It’s fine. I accept your apology, terrible as it is.”

“That’s it?” Elijah sounds distraught at having his apology accepted, which is generally the opposite of what most people react like. Jason’s starting to think if the guy simply likes punishment. “You’re not going to yell at me, or something? I — Hell, I went around your consent! You didn’t even want it!”

“I didn’t,” he admits. The vague impressions he has of that whole debacle are awful and panicked. And it’s not as if Jason enjoys being manhandled without clear consent, but eh. Everyone has bad days, he supposed. It wasn’t that bad. Maybe. Either way, his upset at the whole thing has streamlined into the river of things he’s sort of upset with but doesn’t care enough to pick up and really acknowledge. “And it was terrible of you to ever put me in a situation like that. But, honestly, Eli, I don’t really care anymore. I think I’m over it.”

“How can you just not care?! Get over it just like that? It happened like three weeks ago.” At this point, Elijah’s nearly shouting. His voice echoes against the bare walls of the office, loud against their judging silence. The awkward, nervous presence he had before breaking open to reveal genuine guilt. “You — That was a — a violation.”

Elijah said violation suspiciously like one might say the word sin.

“I think you’re far more upset by this than I am,” Jason comments.

“And I don’t understand how you’re not upset at all!”

Eh, it’s not the worst thing to ever happen to him. Doesn’t even make it to the top fifty — a list he keeps a track of for grudge purposes. On particularly terrible nights, he uses it for self-pity purposes, though those are far and few in-between. Perhaps Jason has just distanced himself from the whole event in a way that makes it hard for him to feel upset by it, the least destructive coping mechanism on the market. He was hurt by it. Still is, to some capacity. It’s not some great kink of his to be used as the stepping stone in someone else’s turmoil. But it’s not the worst thing ever. At least, he doesn’t think so.

Worst of all, he still has feelings for the man in front of him. So, how upset could he even be about it, really?

“Listen, you used me as a ragdoll for your own shit, and then I ran away and started the apocalypse. I think we’re even,” he says, throwing his arm in a wide circle.

“Those are two completely different things!” Elijah yells. “You starting an apocalypse didn’t happen as a straight point from — from that!”

“Maybe it did,” he shrugs, “You don’t know that.”

Elijah glowers at him. He says, accusingly, “You say it as if this is boring you,”

It is boring him a little. In his defense, it is nearing ten. He loses the ability to give a damn about anything by nine, including conversations about the violation of trust he may have suffered during sex. Deciding whether he wanted to eat dinner or not — usually not — and going to bed to have his daily dose of nightmares. Not having a one-sided yelling match. Trying to scrounge up some version of himself that might actually be able to verbalise his hurt, and only succeeding in feeling embarrassed at the whole mess. This is messing up his routine.

Not even the minuscule crush on the other man is making this any engaging.

“Okay.” He takes a deep, deep breath. The basic plan that his brain comes up with is more than a little stupid, but he’s kind of sick of having to see Elijah stare at him with sad puppy-dog eyes. It’s sort of disgusting — even more so with that pale blue color of his eyes. He likes the guy better when he’s being an asshole. With an exhale, he pulls his bag higher on his shoulder. “Okay, fine, since you’re being so annoying over it.”

In four large steps, he’s making his way into Elijah’s personal space and pulling him down with that incorrectly knotted tie of his, tipping him over to push their mouths together. It’s less of a kiss, and more their lips simply pressing together. Elijah makes a startled sound, trying to step away, but Jason keeps him there. Just as the other relaxes a bit, Jason pulls back, adjusting his bag strap. His hand stays on the tie, gripping still.

“See? Not upset. You’re forgiven. I’m leaving now.” He sways over to open the door, still being slightly blocked by Elijah. Just as the swatch opens, and he’s about to slither his way out — freedom at last! — he’s being hauled back in by his waist and slammed against the wall. Irritation rises before any ache due to the slamming does. “What do you want? I’m —”

Mouth over his again, cutting his words off. In the jostling, his bag falls on the floor. Once again, it’s his turn to be shocked at the contact.

Elijah pushes, pushes, pushes him back into the wall as he kisses him, keeping him still and cornered. For someone who was near sick with the idea of forcing someone, he sure does that a lot. Jason thinks of mentioning that to him, but decides against it. He’s used enough to the other man’s personality to know it won’t go anywhere expect another argument. Anyhow, it is the version of him that had the bumbling fool of his amnesiac self falling, and it’s the version of him that he prefers. He reaches his hand up to take hold of the warlock’s tie, pulling him in closer, deepening the kiss.

Elijah pulls away just as the lack of oxygen starts to become a problem. He makes for his neck, nipping at the skin there. “There is,” he pants between bites, “something wrong with you.”

“Yeah?” Jason laughs, breathless and soon-to-be-bruised, tilting his head to make space for the other man. “How astute of you.”

“Astute,” Elijah repeats. “Learned some big words when you got your memories back?”

He opens his mouth to retort back but falls silent at the other pressing a bite at a sensitive point. Asshole. “That’s cheating,” he whines, “You can’t just bite me when you know I’ll comment back.”

“Can’t I?”

“No, you can’t, you jerk.” Jason pulls Elijah away from the juncture of his neck with a firm hand. Stares him down, keeping his jaw in his hand. Presses his thumb down on his bottom lip. “Don’t forget you’re apologizing. You’re going to listen to me tonight, yeah?” He feels the exhale that Elijah lets out on his thumb, a rush of air before he nods. Nodding, he continues, “Good. Come on. The camera may not have worked then, but it definitely does now.”

The rest of the night is a blur of movement, as far as his mental abilities go. Office to home; home to bed; hands and lips and teeth; going to sleep much later. The last thing his conscious brain even registers is someone slipping in his bed, before sleep drags him under.

His mind only comes back online next morning, waking up far later than usual. Strangely rested for a night of too much…physical work. As he lays there, feeling the odd sores in his lower body, the warmth of another person keeping him pinned where he is, Jason tries to go through what he remembers. He remembers the feeling of giddiness that Elijah falling over his own pants had brought. The smugness of not touching where he’d been asked to. Desire burning low in his gut. Going to bed far too late for two men that had a day job, but sated and thoroughly tired. Sleep coming easier with another by his side.

He twists to see Elijah still asleep, curled against his back as if Jason was a particularly loved stuffed animal, an arm around his middle. It had a far too intimate emotion rising in his throat — something suspiciously close to longing. The kind that makes you do stupid things. Granted he’d already done the stupid thing of bringing him home.

Strike number one, Jason voices in his head sarcastically. He squints his eyes a little, making out a small wet spot on the other pillow. Is that drool? Ew. Unfortunately for his mental health, he can’t exactly muster the right amount of disgust, instead stuck with humiliating fondness. Rolling his eyes at himself, he turns back to his original position. Wonders if he should try to wiggle out without waking Elijah up. Wriggles a bit only to hear a discontent groan from behind him, and the arm thrown over him to tighten its hold of him. Alright, can’t get up without waking the other man.

He settles down at last. Unlike some people — namely his two co-workers — Jason can be respectful of other people’s rests. It’s not as if he had anything to do so early in the morning, apart from…stretches or something. Idle around the house until it was time to go to the office, then marvel at the fact that he didn’t even notice the time passing. At the very least, Elijah was warm. It…is nice to not wake up alone. Makes him feel less off-center.

That thought has the potential to be dangerous. Scratch that. It actually is dangerous. He doubts either of them were in any place to do anything more than…whatever it was they were already doing.

Even if he didn’t remember all the fights they had in the last eight months, he could tell with one look that nothing would work with Elijah. If he’s learned anything in thousand of years, it’s stepping away before something becomes big enough to hurt. Leave before there’s a chance to hurt each other. There was no point in going into something destined to break; to simply let himself be devastated for the sake of some affection. Not that Elijah was affectionate, for that matter. All that guy did was scowl and frown and grunt about things. Jason might as well just date a gorilla, at this point.

At the very, very least, Jason comforts himself in his tired mind, Elijah has no feelings whatsoever about him. He knew exactly how the warlock saw him — what happened at Ayana’s was still fresh in his mind — and a potential partner was not it. Though, he had to wonder what it said about Elijah himself that he was okay with sleeping with someone he considered a monster. A naive one, sure, but a monster nonetheless.

Finally, he turns his gaze to the alarm clock. 5:35. Too early to be thinking about doomed unrequited feelings and his bed partner’s apparent view of him. He can do that after lunch. Instead, he tries to remember when exactly he promised to see Allie today. Nine-thirty? Ten, maybe? Plenty of time till then, at least. Elijah most likely won’t wake before seven and they don’t need to be in the office before nine. Since he can’t get up, he might as well try to doze off some more.

With a slow sigh, he lets himself relax fully into the bed. Elijah shuffles even closer, pushing his face into the hollow of his neck and shoulders. The entire other half of his double bed is surely empty and cold, what with the warlock having decided to stick to him like glue. Any closer, and Jason will fall off the bed for sure. He’s annoyed but not a lot. Much like before, it’s hard to muster up anything that isn’t tinged with some affection. Butterflies in his stomach, half of nervousness and half of giddy fondness. Some, perhaps, of a quiet melancholy.

Embarrassing.

Jason closes his eyes, counting Elijah’s breaths on his shoulders. Sleep is too far away for him to catch it again. But dozing off is easy, wrapped up like this with another person.

It’s the sudden lack of a heat source that wakes him up, the lightest rustle of the bedsheets. He’s turning over far too quickly for someone asleep a few moments before, instincts ingrained from years of wars hard to drop in the years of relative peace. His hand reaches under his pillow. Jason realizes he no longer keeps a dagger hidden there in the same breath that his eyes land on Elijah staring at him wide-eyed, half out of the bed. He deflates back into the bed, letting go of the anxiety that had taken over him the moment he woke up.

“I…didn’t mean to wake you up,” Elijah says, walking over to where his clothes laid.

“You didn’t,” Jason croaks out. He coughs lightly, getting some feeling back in his vocal cords. He hadn’t meant to fall back asleep. Didn’t even remember when it happened. “I just sleep light. Sorry.”

“Right. And you jump out of the bed on every small rustle too, I assume?” Elijah asks sarcastically, straightening his pants with only the smallest frown. Probably not the best garment to wear in the morning when you’re still sleep warm.

Jason rolls his eyes. “Fuck off.” Finally, he gets up, dragging his eyes over his room. Light streams in from the balcony, along with the sounds of people from the road below. EPO arsenal making their way to their jobs at the agency. His clothes sit in a heap next to the bedside table. Thinks of re-wearing them. Decides against it. He has specific casual wear for mornings; wearing anything else will preordain the day to be worse than it might already be.

Routine. It keeps him sane. It always has.

“I’ll shower and leave,” Elijah says, now in a shirt and pants, both garments wrinkled. He points at the rest of his own clothes, also in a heap, no doubt just as wrinkled. Maybe they should’ve thought a bit more about the morning before throwing their clothes around last night. Oh well. “I need a new change of clothes anyway.”

Jason looks at him looking down at his clothes as if they’ve done him a great deal of disservice by gaining wrinkles. He breathes through the warmth that rises in his chest at the scene, and turns to look at the time. 6:55. Too early to be acting like a schoolgirl with a crush. Also too early for Elijah to start frowning already, at clothes or anything else. “Stay for breakfast,” he says, looking up again. Strike number two. “I’ll feel bad about kicking you out without feeding you.”

Elijah frowns, “I need to see Felicia for a case of hers. Staying’ll make me late.”

“You say that as if Felicia will eat you alive if you’re a little late,” Jason says, finally getting up and walking to his closet. He pushes Elijah aside to open the doors. Reaches inwards to bring out a t-shirt. Starts to throw it on, and continues, “Consider it a part of your ‘apology’.”

“Think the apology ended when I did everything you asked last night,” Elijah’s eye-roll is very, very audible in his voice, “very nicely, might I add.”

“You say that as if you hated it,” Jason murmurs, putting on the morning sweatpants. He remembers very well the speed at which Elijah had done what was asked of him. Taking an extra shirt and pajamas, he closes the door, coming face-to-face with the warlock. “You can leave, if you want. But! You’re not allowed to complain during lunch. None of that ‘oh I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday’ shit.”

Elijah glares at him. Jason, used to being glared at by a multitude of people, shoves the clothes into his hands and brushes past him to the kitchen.

The sounds of someone else petering around his apartment get subdued under his own petering around his kitchen. Jason rarely ever eats breakfast, but he still has enough things to make one. It’ll be a lackluster meal, but eh. A meal’s a meal, lackluster or not. Elijah should be happy Jason’s even bothering to go and torture himself with the smell of eggs this early in the morning for him. He doesn’t even do it for himself.

He’s putting the plated food down when the other man walks in, wearing the clothes Jason had given him. They’re small on him. A difference of a size or two (and the lack of two very distinct chest tissues). Elijah stands in the living room, looking around, a bit lost in the bizarrely decorated place. Noticing him staring at him, he slowly walks over to the kitchen.

Taking pity on him, Jason calls out, “Hope you don’t mind eggs and toast! It’s all I had.”

“I don’t care,” Elijah says. “Free food’s free food.”

Well. They agree on something, at least.

With a stilted thanks, the other man digs in the food, eating as if he’s expecting some latent poison to kick in when he’s least expecting it. Jason wonders if he truly believes he’ll use poison of all things to kill him. He’ll prefer to do it with his hands — the only way to kill a lover. The blood will be a reminder of all the things that went wrong to land them here. It always returns to blood, after all. He swallows, repulsion rising. It’s hard to tell whether that’s at the thoughts or the scent of food still high in the air.

“You’re not eating,” Eli says, jerking him out of his mind. At his startled look, he repeats, annoyed, “I said you’re not eating.”

“Oh,” Jason says dumbly. He shakes his head, getting the image of blood out of his head. “I don’t eat breakfast.”

“Why not?”

“Makes me nauseous.”

Elijah looks at him doubtfully.

“Oh, come on,” Jason cries. He reminds himself that everything he does is a lie in Elijah’s eyes. Knowing doesn’t mean that it doesn’t feel ridiculous. “Why would I lie about that? It’s not something worth it.”

“You ate breakfast when you stayed over at mine,” Elijah says, pointing his fork at him. He’s frowning at him. “So, which one is the lie?”

He shrugs. “Felt impolite to refuse after you asked,” Jason tells him. “You don’t exactly allow people inside your place, and I doubt you offer anyone breakfast. I didn’t wanna give up the opportunity.” Also, he had a crush. More time spent together used to be fun before his logic caught up to him. He shrugs. “If it makes you feel better, I ended up vomiting everything when I reached my place.”

“How — how is that supposed to make me feel better?”

Jason shrugs again.

Elijah makes an aggravated sound, stabbing his eggs with far too much force. “You could’ve just said it made you sick.”

“And then you would’ve kicked me out,” he pouts, pitching his voice higher. Putting his head on his hand, elbow tucked on the chair arm, he continues, “How is a guy supposed to stick close to his lover, aside from accepting his breakfast invitation? That’s Austen one-oh-one, Eli.”

“Jesus Christ,” Elijah mumbles under his breath, glaring down at the toast now. Red tints his ears from irritation. “You fucking idiot.”

Jason leans back in his chair, smirking.

In the next few minutes, Elijah finishes eating, putting the plate in the sink himself. Jason stares at him the whole time, feeling like a creep and an idiot. It feels too domestic. Like they might just be two guys talking their way through something. “I should leave now,” the warlock says, looking at his wristwatch. “If I hurry, I can get to Felicia in fifteen minutes.”

Jason walks him to the door, checking to make sure he didn’t forget anything. Not as if he can’t give it back at the office, but still. He leans against the door while Elijah fumbles around to get his shoes on. His amusement must’ve been noticeable since he gets glared at when the other man straightens up.

Elijah opens the door, stepping outside. Doesn’t walk away just yet.

“See you in,” Jason checks the time, “forty minutes. Try to not bitch too much to poor Felicia, yeah? Be nice, I know you have it in you.”

Elijah rolls his eyes. “I’m only doing this because it’d be shitty not to,” he says gruffly before leaning down to brush their lips together. He waits until Jason melts into the peck before kissing him fully. The taste of eggs and coffee sticks to Jason’s tongue when he pulls away, a bit dazed.

Elijah smirks. “See you in forty minutes, Jason. Try not to lose the last of your braincells.”

A wave later, he’s gone. The sound of footsteps on the stairs loud amidst the otherwise quiet apartment building.

Shit, Jason thinks with feeling, this is bad. Then goes to rinse the taste of eggs off of his tongue.

જ⁀➴જ⁀➴જ⁀➴જ⁀➴જ⁀➴જ⁀➴જ⁀➴જ⁀➴

Jason’s head hurts.

It’s hard to tell whether it’s because of any injury he might have sustained, or just the migraine that’s been coming and going since he got his memories back, or simply grief physically hurting him. Knowing his luck, it’s probably all three.

The sword is heavy in his hands, dripping with a liquid too dark to be blood. After years of degradation, he doubts the fluid running through Crispin could be considered blood, at all. It could technically belong to a random soldier, the sword, but Jason knows in his heart that it’s Crispin’s. If not for the oh-so-familiar script engraved in the handle — a prayer for safe returns — then simply the muscle memory of holding it would’ve clued him in on it. It might have been over a thousand years now, but Jason’s body isn’t ever going to forget the feeling of this sword.

There’s slight hubbub in the museum now, the muffled sounds of EPO agents working around to…do whatever it was they did for clean-up. He can’t quite pay attention to it despite his senses automatically tuning into the noise, trained to pick up anything out of the ordinary as they are. Jason stays in the corner with the Sylvan portraits of the royal family — the queen, her parents — alongside some landscape sketches of the castle. He absentmindedly traces the lines of the castle with his eyes, as he reaches for the object sitting in his jacket.

He found the ring on the floor of the van yesterday. It must’ve fallen out of the box of sentimentalities — a small decorative box of things that he takes everywhere — when he was taking it out of the van to put in his apartment. He’d just put it in his pockets, and forgot about it until they were already in the museum. But, really, Jason should’ve known something was going to go wrong. Seen the bad omen for what it was.

There was nothing particularly special about its make. A simple bronze ring with an engraving on the inside. ēower ǽr þæt ende. yours till the end. After all this time, the engraving was more than a little unreadable, and the round shape had more than a few dents. A wedding band, technically. Nevermind that the ‘wedding’ had been simply Crispin presenting him with the ring as Jason laid on their bed, thrumming from sex and too tired to be logical about it. Vows whispered into the crook of his neck, as a hand made its way back between his thighs. Somedays, Jason could still feel the vows pressed into his skin, a brand made of lips and teeth and words.

“Did you wait until I was too tired to say anything?” Jason had asked the next day, amused by the prospect of his lover waiting until he knew there was no way he’d be scolded for this.

“Yes,” Crispin had said shamelessly, fidgeting with the ring that sat on his finger. “I didn't want to risk you saying no.”

And barely a week later, before Jason had even gotten the chance to gift Crispin a ring in return, the idiot went and got himself killed. Just like Jason had told him not to. Just like he’d been worried the entire time they’d known each other. For a thousand years, he had lived with the weight of the grief, keeping the ring like a reminder of the death he brought everywhere. Physically tied down to it. And now. Now, the dirt’s been upturned to reveal the bloody, barren rot underneath, worse than he’d thought it was at first.

All his fault, at the end. Should’ve known.

Jason swallows down the lump in his throat. He’s never been much of a crier, and for all the tears in his eyes making vision blurry, none of them fall down. Good, really. Crying publicly is not something he ever wants to do. The world does not get to see him flayed open and breaking down, and neither will the EPO agents working around. That’s just going to make people awkward at work. It’s hard enough to get people to like him, considering the bad reps of his co-workers.

“Hey,” a voice says from behind him, pulling him back from his head, “Got a minute?”

“Sure,” he says without much inflection, already knowing that saying no wasn't really an option. Jason takes a long breath to get his bearings back, rubbing a hand over his eyes before turning around to see the resident pain in his foot. Elijah stood with his hands in his pockets, for once no longer doing his usual scowl-frown combo. He rests the sword against the wall gently. “What is it?”

Elijah opens and closes his mouth for a moment, apparently not having planned his speech. Jason mourns the fact that he can’t even take some kind of joy in watching the man flail around like a fish. “I just wanted to say you did good,” he says finally. “It couldn’t have been easy.”

Jason runs his finger on the engraving inside the ring, having taken it out of his pocket now. He feels Elijah zero in on it but can’t bring himself to care enough to hide it. What would be the point? They already knew. Being a bit of a heartbroken, grieving mess was well within his rights. “It wasn’t.”

“I…don’t know if I could’ve done the same.”

“I hope you never have to find out.”

Elijah pushes his hair back, messing it up slightly. Jason’s eyes follow his hands against his will, distantly finding the movement attractive somewhere in a corner of his mind. Nervousness exudes off of him in waves. He wonders why that is. “If you ever wanted to get a drink,” he starts, voice low, “and — I don’t know — tell me about Crispin, I’m available.”

A smile breaks out on his face before he’s aware of it, amusement rising through the throes of his grief. Look at his most stand-offish teammate trying to cheer him up. It was, he could admit, a bit sweet. “Aw,” Jason says, unable to help himself and unable to have a conversation about himself, “are you asking me out? I don’t think I’m emotionally available.”

Elijah rolls his eyes, the nervousness evaporating off of him in a second. “I was trying to be kind, but if you don’t —”

“No, it’s not that,” Jason says giving up the joking front just as quickly as he’d donned it. It was too much work for today. “I just don’t think…I’ll be good company any time soon.”

“I didn’t ask because I care about your company, or like it, for that matter,” Elijah emphasizes. No, Jason thinks, you just magically appear in front of my door everytime you want company or sex. It’s an uncharitable thought, not something Jason truly believes, but it’s there all the same. It’s hard to tell whether the thought is just his irritation growing, or if it exists in some crevice of himself he doesn’t look at. Either way, it’s not something he ever wants to say outloud. It’ll ruin the nice teammate thing he’s got going on. But thoughts have always been hard to school for him. He learned that at fifteen. “I asked because you happen to be my teammate, and I need you to be okay for this team to work.”

That's one way to put it.

Jason thinks about the offer. On one hand, he really isn’t in the mood for an outing of any sort. On the other hand, he knows that Allie will probably follow him to his place, so being alone is already out of the question. On the other other hand, he’s sure Elijah is never going to ask him out for drinks ever again, and despite his wishes, he’s a weak man with a mild infatuation. On the other other other hand, this is just adding fire to feelings he needs to get over as soon as possible for his own good. On the other other other other hand, the grief he grew around and learned to live with is doubling in size with today’s revelations, and Jason’s allowed to be a bit stupid about things today. On the —

This thought process is getting away from him. He doesn’t even have that many hands.

“If you promise not to take me to that damned bar near the thrift shop,” he says finally.

The warlock nods.

True to his promise, Elijah does not take him to that shit bar he’s so fond of visiting. That place sucks. Bad music, bad drinks, just bad in general. He doesn’t see what joy the warlock finds in sitting in a terrible place. Sure, he’s just trying to drink himself into a stupor, but still. There are better places to drink oneself into a stupor in Uada Falls.

Like the one they’re in right now.

It’s cleaner, for one. The music playing is one that Jason recognizes — a Jazz record from a band he once played the piano for in the 90s. He wonders what happened to them. There’s sounds of conversations taking place amongst friends, gentle laughter ringing out every once in a while. It wasn’t as filled as it might be on a weekend. Jason is abnormally glad about the sparseness.

Next to him, Elijah flags down the bartender, a young person just out of their teenage years. He distantly listens to the man order a whiskey, keeping his sight on the art wall to his right.

“And you, sir?” says the bartender, startling him despite already knowing they were there. Gods, he needs to get his head back in the game. Elijah’s knowing pitying looks aren’t helping. Then again, nothing the warlock does is any help, even on his good days. Points for trying, though.

“I’ll take a gin and tonic, thanks,” he says quickly. The bartender nods before walking away. He turns to Elijah, fidgeting with his ring, once again on his finger. He’d put it back on while coming here. Hadn’t known what else to do with it. “This is a nice place.”

“I know,” the other man replies grumpily, averting his eyes from where they’d been set on his ring before noticing the look on his face. “What? Do you think I just haunt shady places?”

Yes, Jason thinks but doesn’t say. He’s trying not to start a fight. It’s not worth it on a good day. It’s even less worth it on a bad one. He tries to think of some response to that but comes up empty handed. Instead, already regretting ever saying yes to this hang-out, he shrugs, letting Elijah put whatever meaning he wants to the action, and goes back to staring at the corner where the music speaker sits. He tries to remember which album the particular songs came from. It’ll pass the time if nothing else.

If he doesn’t think about the multiple elephants in the room, he doesn’t have to address even a single one.

The bartender comes back, putting down two drinks in front of them. He tilts his head to send a smile their way which they return before walking away. He turns back to his corner of zoning out.

“So,” Elijah starts, after a long moment of silence, “a Sylvan knight, huh?”

Jason wonders what it is about this man that only makes him want to be communicative when Jason himself has no interest in it. Would it kill him to learn to read the room? It would’ve saved them the headaches of many, many arguments with victims and families. For a singular moment, he thinks of saying that exactly before his brain catches up to him. Instead, he says, “Yeah. Not a great gig, mind you.”

“No? I would’ve thought being a knight would come with some perks,” Elijah replies.

“Health insurance didn’t exactly exist back then,” he shrugs, trying to settle back into himself. It took effort to keep himself anchored enough for this conversation, especially when he already felt like floating away. Alas, Jason had already agreed to hanging out and anything wrong might just get reported to Allie which would lead to more trouble than he wants to deal with. “It was supposed to be a short time thing, but. Well.”

“You met Crispin.” Elijah takes a drink of his whiskey.

Jason sips his own gin and tonic, barely managing to hide the twist of his mouth at the taste. He should’ve ordered a Derby, nevermind that the drink is the reason behind his whole thing with Elijah. At least, it tasted better. Also blaming a drink was the kind of low he refused to go to. He throws the glass back like a shot, ignoring the exclaim of disgust from the other man.

“Yeah, I met Crispin,” he says, wiping his mouth before starting to fidget with the ring again. He twists it around his finger, feels the engraving on his skin. ēower ǽr þæt ende. yours till the end. ēower ǽr þæt ende. yours till the end. ēower ǽr þæt ende. He has to wonder if Crispin would know how true the statement would turn out to be. That he’d written down a prophecy on the ring, instead of a declaration of love. He sighs, small, sad and soft. “Kind, loyal Crispin. When we met, he was trying to ride a horse that just hated him. It threw him off into a bucket of water. I was charmed from the first moment.”

“Love at first sight?” Elijah’s voice carried something that he’s too tired to unravel.

“More like knowing at first sight. We met, and I knew that he’d be trouble.” He pushes the glass away, and waves the bartender over. This time, he orders a Derby. “Granted I didn’t bother to heed my own advice.”

“I guess love makes you stupid like that,” the warlock comments. He leans forward to ask the bartender for another glass of whiskey. “Stupider than usual, anyway.”

“Yeah, let’s be rude to the guy in mourning.” Jason rolls his eyes. “What if that was my final thread? Hm, hm? What then?”

“Then, you’ll kill yourself, and come back a couple hours later.” Elijah doesn’t even bother to sound a bit dismayed at his apparent suicide. He sounds amused. Of all people to like, Jason had to choose this asshole. “Not a big loss for anyone.”

Jason glares at him. “I don’t feel very supported here,” he says dryly. “Did you just bring me here to bait me into killing myself? I can assure you that won’t work.”

“Of course not,” Elijah says, giving him an amused look. “I brought you here to bait you into not killing yourself.”

“Well, you’re not doing a good job of it.”

“Never said I’ll be good at it.”

Jason laughs at that despite the mess of emotions in his chest, giving the other man a withering look. Elijah simply sips his drink, raising a single smug eyebrow in response. Fucker, he thinks with the same fondness usually only afforded to Allie. “Now I’ll have to kill myself just to fuck with you.”

“Be my guest,” the warlock says, giving him a sidelong look. “It’ll afford me a few hours of peace.”

Jason snorts, resting his head in his hand. He gulps his drink down instead of continuing the banter. It’ll go nowhere, funny as it might be.

Silence settles down between them again, though without the abject awkwardness of before. Simple and easy, even if nothing about his situation was simple nor easy. Oh well. He turns with his seat, about to say something when his eyes land on a bruise peeking from his shirt. Abruptly, he remembers how hard Crispin had thrown Elijah around. Shit, was he okay? Should he be drinking? Should Jason check for bruised ribs or a concussion? In a slight rush, he asks, “I forgot to ask before. Are you okay?”

Elijah blinks at the sudden change in topic. He answers slowly, “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? You were passed out for a good few minutes there.” He was passed out for a good few minutes! How did Jason forget that? “You never know when you sustain a head injury. The after-effects can hit after a day.”

Some emergency doctor am I, he thinks hitting himself mentally.

“I’m sure,” he shakes his head, “I had healing sigils and talismans on me. The bruise is just superficial.” Oh, that makes sense. Jason feels stupid for not thinking he might have just magicked the pain away. Before he can stew in that stupidity, Elijah says, the smallest smile on his face, “Thanks for asking, anyway.”

He blinks at the smile, feeling his face warm just the slightest bit. Damn his stupid fucking heart. Out of all the people to latch onto. We’re literally supposed to be grieving, he yells inside his mind. “I should’ve asked earlier,” he says, desperately trying to hide the blush. “I…just forgot, with everything going on.”

Elijah waves his worry off. “It’s fine,” he starts, “You had bigger things to worry about, I get it.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” He looks the man up and down, trying to use years of knowledge to see if there was something odd about his posture. There wasn’t. But still, he doubts he could look for an internal bleed just by a quick once-over. He didn’t have X-ray vision.

Great, now he’s worried despite being told everything was fine. Caring is a pain. He should’ve fucked right off the moment his memories came back. Licked his wounds somewhere alone. But no. Jason had to decide to be better than before. Now he’s stuck with centuries old grief, and an affection he can’t get rid of.

Should’ve stayed inside last Christmas, he thinks.

“It was a brutal hit, though,” Elijah admits, rolling his shoulders as if feeling phantom pain.

Jason winces. “Yeah, Crispin was really strong. Not so much a swordsman, but” — he chuckles, then — “one really good hit from him tended to put the enemy soldiers out of action for a good while.”

“And yet you somehow still won against him in spars.” Elijah gives him a once-over, as if sizing his lean body with that of Crispin’s near hulking one. His voice holds disbelief, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.

“Hey, they weren’t a fight in strength, alright? They were swordsfights, and I was — still am, mind you — better than him.” Jason puffs his chest out slightly, playing up his offense. He knew full well that his looks didn’t quite belie his skills. Elijah huffs out a laugh. Satisfaction fill him at the sound. “He was stronger, sure. But I’d been fighting a lot longer, so. Y’know. Didn’t really have a chance, poor Crispin.”

“It…was nice to see.”

“What?” he asks. Was that a compliment? He can’t tell. Everything’s always so muddled up when it comes to the other man.

Elijah makes a face, averting his gaze to the rest of the bar. “Nevermind,” he fires, face twisted as if regretting every word. Jason blinks long and hard. He can’t seem to comprehend what the hell the other man even means by that. “How did Crispin even find out about your problem?” he asks, changing the topic quickly.

Jason exhales at the memory the question brings up. A good memory, at last. “Ah, it was sort of my fault. I misjudged the distance between me and the other guy. Ended up eating shit. It was embarrassing. I kept thinking ‘I can’t believe I’ll have to face him after that’.”

“I doubt he cared about it,” Elijah replies.

“Yeah, he was more worried about the whole coming back from the dead thing. He took it like a champ, though. Gotta give him that.” He looks down at his drink, smiling sadly. “He went on to just yell at me about all the other times I made him scared. ‘Oh, Jason, I can’t believe you were angry at me about the tree thing —”

“The tree thing?”

“— You wouldn’t even have died!’”

He leans back from the table, looking at the painting of two dancers above the bar. “Oh, but Crispin was kind. A lot kinder than I deserved. I hadn’t realized how,” his voice wavers a little, “how much I had put my roots down until he was gone.”

His fingers find their way back to the ring. The biggest proof of the roots he had in Sylva. It had been the last time he had dreamed of a soft epilogue for himself. It had hurt far too much to lose to ever try again. Sylva had been the last speck of proof in a lifetime of evidence that he wasn’t a creature meant for good. Nothing to it. Just the cards he’d been dealt.

Elijah follows his sight to him fidgeting with the ring at his finger. He knew that he understood. It didn’t take a genius to understand the implications. “Promise band?” he asks, voice as kind as he could probably manage.

“Wedding,” Jason replies, bringing his hand up to make the bronze band visible. He takes it off, setting it on his palm so the other man can see the engraving. Elijah glances at him before taking his hand and pulling it forward in his sight. Maybe it’s the grief making him reckless, but he allows the touch. “Gave it to me in the middle of the night, then fucked off to die barely two weeks later.”

His voice was bitter with the resentment suddenly. A dam opened finally, near bursting with weight.

Elijah turns to stare at him, their hands still connected.

“I really loved him, you know,” he laughs mirthlessly. Once again, the sadness comes back like a tsunami. He can barely even breathe over it. “I should’ve known the moment I figured it out. I’m not —”

He shuts up. He’s already said enough.

Elijah switches his hand for his wrist, his touch gentle, before slipping the ring on his finger again. No questions. No snarks. Helps the only way he knew how to help: getting blackout drunk. “I’ll buy the next round,” he announces, gesturing at the bartender again.

Jason breathes in. Stares at the profile of their young bartender, and tries not to think about history repeating itself. “Tell me about Revenants.”

Elijah hesitates for a long, long moment.

“Please,” he implores, voice wavering for a second. “I want — I need to know.”

The warlock makes a face. When he starts to speak, it’s with a low, uncertain tone, like speaking to a spooked animal.

Some of what Elijah tells him, Jason had known to some capacity. He’d lived through the times; had listened to the local folklores; seen the precautions people took. But the knowledge didn’t exactly hold a candle to the one from an actual expert. He swirls the alcohol in his glass as the other man tells him of the torture to turn a man to revenant. Orders another when the information ends. Then, another. And another. And another.

They get out of the bar late. Well, it’s not really that late. But they’re two grown ups with a grown up job that does not care about whether or not you killed your late lover. Jason misses being unemployed now. He was pretty good at being unemployed. Like really good. Everyone kept trying to make him a permanent member of their staff, and he’d just say no. Just shimmy his way out with his imaginary hat on.

I want a taco really bad, he thinks unbidden and without any prior thought. He looks down at the ground, the gravel seeming a lot darker in the night. He can see someone’s Mickey Mouse earring lying dirtied on the ground. Poor Mickey Mouse. His line of thought is broken by a hand steadying him when he stumbles. “Wha —”

“Who told you to drink that much?” Elijah asks sounding far more sober than Jason. Which wasn’t fair. They literally drank the same number of drinks. How was he the only one feeling the effects?

“You were the one who bought the drinks, jackass,” is what he says when he gets his tongue back working. He straightens up, one arm wrapped around Elijah’s and other on his shoulder. “I told you we should stop by the fourth round.”

“And then you said you could easily drink me under the table.” Elijah side-eyes him. A small flush sits on his cheeks, the only evidence to his own inebriation. He averts his gaze quickly. “I wasn’t about to let that slide.”

They start walking again. Elijah doesn’t let go of his arm. Jason zeroes in on the warmth of it against his body. Even through his sweater, he can feel the heat radiating from it. He has to wonder if the warlock uses spells to keep warm, too. Jason hasn’t been warm in centuries.

“I could definitely drink you under the table. I drank more than men thrice my size back in the day.”

“Was Grecian liquor that weak?” the warlock retorts sharply.

“It felt strong enough, alright,” Jason slurs out. He’s never been a lightweight, or at least he thinks he’s not. It’s just been a while since he’s drank around like this, without inhibitions. Sobriety might be overrated, but it keeps him in check and away from doing anything too stupid. “It had some real flavor, too. Everything’s too — too full of those fake stuff now.”

“Preservatives.”

“Yeah.” He stares ahead, squinting to see the outline of his building. A three-storied place that was technically supposed to be temporary. It’s not anymore. Much like something else. “We made wine at home, back then. The other two sucked at it” — he laughs, amused now but he used to just be annoyed back then — “I had to do all the work. I didn’t even get to drink it.”

Elijah steadies his grip around him, turning to look at him in confusion. “The other two?” he repeats.

Jason nods sagely. “The other two,” he says, not providing anything more than that.

The warlock sighs out aggrieved, as if he didn’t get the answer he wanted. Nevermind that Jason has no idea what answer he even wanted. The other two were just that — the other two.

Daphne and Damon. Damon and Daphne. As important to him as the ribs and lungs in his chest.

They walk the rest of the way to his building in silence, though he has a feeling that Elijah’s no longer in a good mood. It’s hard to tell when Jason is a bit too drunk to be his usual observant self. Either way, he doesn’t feel like analyzing the other man’s moods tonight. He feels like giving up self-control; like doing something stupid he’ll regret when morning comes up.

If it weren’t for his companion, Jason might’ve just tried to jump off of the building. There wasn’t a better way to get rid of unwanted thoughts and feelings and grief like jumping off of high place.

Finally, they’re in the place that Jason calls home. For now, at least. The walk back sobered him enough to walk up the stairs by himself. Elijah follows him nonetheless for some reason. “I can open my door without supervision,” he grumbles, fumbling in his pockets for his keys.

“I bet you can,” Elijah says laconically.

Jason tries to not remember the other times the warlock has been here, especially the night before he left. The memory makes him cringe slightly, just like tonight will some day. He’d been too open. Had left his wound visible to another person. He suppresses the shudder of not-quite-embarrassment that runs through him. Yapper’s regret, as his friend Stella used to say.

“I didn’t ask before but is the…cursed thing still here?” Elijah asks when the door opens. He steps in behind him, looking around as Jason turns the lights on.

“Yup,” he replies, taking his jacket off. “It doesn’t want to kill me anymore. So, I don’t care. Really, I think it’s starting to like me.”

“Right.” Elijah does that thing with his face, where he presses his tongue to his teeth whenever he decides he doesn’t want to know more about something. He turns to check the time. 11:40 post meridiem. “I should get going.”

Jason stares at him for a moment. Suit rumpled and hair mussed, looking more human in the dim lights of his apartment than he ever does somewhere else. The part of Jason that’s sort of in something too similar to love with him makes his throat close up for a second. Once again Jason takes the time to curse his amnesiac self for going and falling for the jackass.

It’s a bad idea, Jason, he thinks.

But Jason’s never been good at following his own advice. And he’s too drunk to come up with his usual reasons. All his emotions swirl together to make a messy unsteady tower, and Jason doesn’t feel strong enough to walk away. Not today, when there’s already an re-opened wound festering under his heart again.

He’s allowed his stupid decisions sometimes.

“You could stay,” he slurs out, shrugging to give off a casual vibe. Like his heart isn’t about to burst out of his chest. “It’s late. Your place is far.” He pauses, thinks of what to say to reel it in. “I don’t want to hear you bitching about me messing up your sleep tomorrow.”

“I…wouldn’t want to impose,” Elijah says carefully. The words seem less about him apparently wanting to be a good guest, and more about Jason’s obvious lack of ability to be a good host at the current moment. Still.

“I wouldn’t have offered if you were.”

A moment’s pause before the warlock sighs, and takes his suit jacket off. “You better get me something to wear. I’m not fucking up my suit,” Elijah grunts out, the aggression in his tone a contrast to how gently he hangs his jacket.

Jason exhales, swaying off to his room to get some extra clothes.

Their nightly routines merge together into a single, odd thing. For all that they’ve stayed over at each other’s before, there has been little in the way of routine, mostly it’s simply the animal need to fuck and sleep.

Jason cleans his one unwashed dish — the mug he’d taken his coffee in the morning — while Elijah changes in the living room. He brushes while showering, and the other man looks at him with barely concealed confusion. He throws extra blankets and pillows to the couch while Elijah draws over one of his tattoos with a pencil he took out of Jason’s sketchbook. Eli lays down at the couch, and the routine ends.

Jason sits on the couch, crisscrossed in between the other’s legs. He’s not sure if he’s sober, though he doesn’t feel drunk anymore. He can’t feel the usual sober awareness either. Mostly, he feels drained, like someone had scooped his insides out and left behind only slimy emptiness. “Would it be a bad idea to have sex right now?” he asks, biting a hanging nail off. It hurt.

Elijah gives him a sharp look. “Yes,” he says.

Jason hums and sighs, leaning back into the arm. He should get up and leave. Go to his bedroom. Doze off. He doesn’t want to, by any means, but he should. It was the correct line of actions. He stays. “What if I just stay here?”

“Stay here?” Elijah asks, “What do you mean? You want to sleep here?”

He nods.

“You have a whole bed in your room right now.”

“Still want to stay here.”

“Jason.” Elijah pinches the bridge of his nose, as if trying to stave off a headache. “You’re drunk off your ass. Go to your room, and sleep. This couch isn’t even big enough for both of us.”

He pouts. “You don’t want to have a sleepover?”

“This is not a sleepover, you idiot.”

“If you love me, you’ll have a sleepover with me.”

“Good thing I don’t, then.”

“Boohoo, we’re having a sleepover. I’m having a terrible fucking day; you’re legally obligated to listen to me.” With quick, unsteady movements, he gets up from the sitting position and throws himself over the other man.

“Jesus Fucking —”

He ignores the other man’s apparent ire, instead stumbling and shuffling his way into settling over him. For once, Elijah doesn’t complain more than his usual grumbling over things, instead shifting to help him get comfortable. The couch isn’t built for two grown men to lay down, but it holds the weight well. By the time he stills, their legs are intertwined and his head rests on the other’s shoulder. It’s not sex, but it’ll probably bring more regret than fucking, so it’s better.

“Happy?” Elijah asks sarcastically, tone not as poisonous as it could be.

“Not at all,” Jason replies.

“If my back is fucked in the morning, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”

“Don’t talk dirty to me while I’m trying to sleep.”

“That’s not flirting, you pervert!”

“Eh, it’s better than flirting, I’d say.”

Elijah makes a frustrated noise not unlike a particularly annoyed old dog. Jason snorts into his shoulder. “Sorry,” he murmurs out amusedly. “I’ll keep your vanilla ways in mind.”

Elijah exhales, annoyed probably, and pulls him closer for a better position. “I’ll show you vanilla,” he grumbles.

“Now, that is dirty talk.”

“Shut up, and go the fuck to sleep.”

He shuffles closer, digging his elbows in the other man’s stomach — just to be a jerk — and leans up a little. He looks down at Elijah’s glowering face, the regret of asking him out for drinks as clear as day. Jason would’ve found it amusing if he didn’t know he, too, was going to regret this come tomorrow morning.

Oh whatever. He might as well enjoy it while Eli’s still here. He can rue his choices later.

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It’s damn near midnight by the time they reach a motel.

From where he parks the van, the motel looks much like the one from that one horror movie, though it might just be the late night and his own tiredness giving it a darker look. At least, Jason hopes so. After twenty-four hours of dealing with a particularly restless ghost, he doesn’t want to deal with a serial killer too. There has to be an end to the bad day, right?

“Jason!” Allie shouts, knocking at the window of the van. “Come on! Do you want to sleep in this thing?”

“Don’t call my van a thing,” he says automatically before jumping out. Elijah walks ahead of them, presumably to check whether there were even room available. He hopes there were. While sleeping in the van isn’t necessarily a bad experience, that only exists for one person. Three people couldn’t sleep in it without a civil war breaking out. “And don’t be rude. We might still have to sleep in the van.”

“Ugh, I’ll rather sleep on the road.” Allie side-eyes his baby as if it had done some great injustice towards her. She leans back on the backdoor of the van next to him.

“You’re very welcome to,” he quips back. “Sleeping will be loads easier without your incessant complaining.”

“Of course, you’ll be happy without me in that van,” she snorts gracelessly, “it’ll give you more time with your little crush.”

“It’s not a crush,” Jason says quickly.

Allie gives him a look. “Try that again.”

“Okay, it’s a bit of a crush,” he corrects, feeling annoyed at having to say that in the first place. Just because he didn’t bother to deny it to himself doesn’t necessarily mean he liked to say it outloud. Even to Allie. Saying things outloud made them real. More solid. He’d heard enough people tell him the difference between thoughts and actions to know that. It didn’t matter as long as he didn’t speak about it.

“I knew it!” She pumps one fist up in the air. “Oh, I wish I had someone to make a bet with! I’d have just won.”

“Glad to know my misery-filled infatuation is giving you such joy,” Jason says dryly. He wasn’t particularly mad at her, really. He’d reacted much the same when she’d finally called Perdita her girlfriend, though Allie had the fortune of throwing a TV remote at him for it. He couldn’t do that; the only thing in his vicinity was his phone and that was more important than the remote. “Some friend you are. Cheering at my unrequited feelings. I’m wounded.”

“My condolences.” Allie bumps their shoulders together, smirking mischievously up at him. “It must be so hard for you. Your crush is so unrequited. It’s not as if you two haven’t been fucking for months. Most people can’t even get their crushes to look at them twice.”

He glowers tiredly down at her. “Fucking is different. You don’t exactly need to be romantically involved for that.” Side-eyeing her playfully, he continues, “Which you’d know if you actually got laid on a semi-regular basis.”

“Excuse me —”

“You’re excused,” he says in a posh tone. She punches him in the shoulder. It barely hurts. He cackles lightly at her glare. “Am I not right?”

“Fuck you,” she spits out, crossing her arms. “I get laid now. You know why? Because I have a girlfriend, unlike you.”

“I’m very glad about that, Allie. Honest. Congratulations.” He mimes clapping his hands. “It only took you about twenty five years to get one.”

“Fuck off! Back to your oh-so-unrequited crush,” she says pointedly, cheeks slightly red as they tended to get whenever someone pulled up Perdita into a conversation. Jason lets her change the conversation topic. He’s not enough of a jerk to spook her away from talking about it in her own terms. “How do you know it’s not mutual? Did Eli say so?”

“He doesn’t need to,” he shrugs. “I have eyes. I can tell when someone might be open to a relationship and when they’re not.”

“I wasn’t aware you could read people’s minds with only your eyes.” She rolls her eyes before pinning him with an exasperated look. “Did you ask him? Because I don’t think friends-with-benefits arrangements last as long as yours have.”

“I haven’t really tried to,” he says, kicking the dirt on the ground with his feet.

“Why not?” Allie asks, hand thrown up in irritation. “What? Are you waiting him to do it? We both know he’s not emotionally regulated enough for that.”

“Not really,” he shrugs.

“Then, why not?” she badgers, poking his cheek with her finger over and over. He swats her hand away, glaring at her from the periphery of his vision. “Come on! Tell me why not! I told you about my relationship problems.”

“Uh, no, you didn’t,” he points out, shaking his head, “I came to you and talked until you opened up.”

“And you want to replicate my mistakes? I understand that I’m a very exemplary person, but you don’t need to do that.”

“Exemplary? You? Really?”

“Yes,” she punches his shoulder again, “And I’m pretty sure he likes you back.”

“Do you, now?” he quips. “Just like you knew you liked Perdita, I guess?”

Another punch to his shoulder. At this point, he might actually get a bruise. “I know because I’m his friend, and he’s terrible at hiding shit like this. Remember last year? With that liquor shop? I don’t think people get that jealous over a simple fuckbuddy.”

“Sometimes they do,” Jason says, not exactly hearing himself. His face feels hot suddenly at the mention of the shop. He couldn’t even touch himself for a while after that night. Sometimes, he can still feel the bruises Elijah had left. They’d slept together after, of course. But, if Jason had to make an educated guess, that had been the point the mindless infatuation he had held before had turned into an Infatuation. Something that was hard to define, and even harder to ignore.

But still. He’s lived on the sidelines of enough relationships to know that people are far more likely to get possessive of something they do not own. It doesn’t mean much — not in terms of Elijah’s feelings anyway. The man isn’t exactly known for being in touch with his feelings. (There’s something to be said about the unit that Jason of all people is the regulated one here. Him.)

Sure, he remembers the shop.

He also remembers other things. It’s complicated for a reason.

“Jealousy doesn’t mean anything,” he says at last. “And you thinking he likes me back doesn’t mean anything either. You’re known for getting emotions wrong.”

“Well, excuse me!” Allie puts a hand on her chest. He can’t help the smile that takes over his face at her offense. “Everybody gets emotions wrong. And I know he likes you because —”

Whatever she was about to say is interrupted by Elijah walking back to them, face set in a scowl worse than his daily scowls. His spirits plummet. The simmering annoyance at the conversation rises with a vengeance. Whatever hope he had about actually getting to rest going down. Next to him, Allie falls on his shoulders dejectedly. “I don’t like that look on your face,” Jason says. “Do they not have any rooms?”

“They do,” Elijah says, brandishing two keys.

“Then what’s the problem?” Allie asks. “Why do you look like they killed your dog?”

Elijah glares tiredly at her. “They don’t have enough rooms for all of us. I’ve got two single rooms.” Jason and Allie share a relieved look. Two rooms is a good deal. Better than one room or no room, at least. “I’m going to assume you’re taking one for yourself,” Elijah continues, looking at Allie.

“You know damn well I am,” she replies, taking one of the keys for herself. Jason leans over to see the number printed on it. 45. “Well, enjoy your night, boys. I know you will,” this she says while pointing at him, “I’m off to get some sleep.”

With one badly-done wink at him and a wave of her fingers at Elijah, she walks off to the side of the motel where her room is supposed to be. Jason makes a mental note to put salt in her coffee for a week.

“What was that about?” Elijah asks, staring at her receding form.

“Nothing,” Jason says, hoping with all his might that there were stones in her shoes for days. “Just Allie being Allie. You know how she is.”

“Didn’t seem like nothing,” Elijah says dryly. “Was it something you talked about?”

He turns to give the warlock an annoyed look. “Mind your business, Eli.”

“So, it was about something you talked about.”

Jason rolls his eyes, snatching the other key from Elijah’s hands before starting to walk away. He looks down to see the room number, 42, and takes the same turn Allie had. At least, they were in the same hallway. Footsteps thudded behind him, a simple notice of Elijah following behind him.

“What were you talking about?” Elijah asks again when they finally reach the room.

Jason pushes the key into the door lock, twisting until there was the opening click. He pushes the door open and walks in. “I don’t remember you being one for gossip,” he says.

“I’m not,” Elijah says simply, throwing his bag off on the single chair in the room. Why did all motels have a single chair in their rooms? “But whatever it was, it annoyed you.”

“I’m not annoyed,” he lies, not looking back at the other man. Instead, he chooses to take their room in. A double-bed; a door that probably leads to the bathroom; a window facing the other side of the parking lot. As good as a motel room ever was.

He doesn’t see it, but he feels the disbelieving look Elijah gives his back. Not one for gossip, sure.

“Yeah, and Allie’s not a genius,” Elijah says, sarcasm coating his every word. Finally, Jason turns to glare at him. He raises his eyebrows, a faux apologetic look taking over his face. “Did I lie?”

“Jeez, Eli,” Jason says, “So what if I’m a little annoyed? It’s of no importance to you.” He sits down on the bed, bends down to take his shoes off. Thinks about falling back on the bed, but something in him feels strangely self-conscious to allow it right now. Okay. He’s definitely annoyed.

Once again, Elijah makes a face. “You don’t sleep well when you’re annoyed,” he says, in a matter of fact way. As Jason opens his mouth to oppose that statement, he continues, “You sleep worse when you’re annoyed.”

Jason shuts his mouth, scowling.

“So now you know all about my sleeping patterns, do you?”

“I know enough,” the warlock says dryly. He takes the bag off of the chair and throws it at him. Jason catches it with an oomph. He walks towards the bathroom door. “I’m going to freshen up. You should change. You’ve got blood on your shirt.”

The door opens and closes. Jason’s alone in the room.

With an exhale, he opens the bag. Rustles around in the mess to find something simple enough to wear for a night. The universe, for once, decides to be on his side. He manages to find an extra t-shirt and shorts in the thing, apart from work clothes.

Allie’s words stick in his mind, unfortunately.

They revolve inside him as he pulls his shirt and binder off, both tacky with blood on the underside. He sighs. At the rate he was going, more than half of his pay was just going towards new binders. He throws on the clean t-shirt and shorts. Pokes at the cut on his leg, already healing. It had been far bigger some hours ago.

Stretching, he makes his way to the left side of the double bed, laying down on his back. He listens to the sound of water running in the bathroom, eyes nailed to the window. The night sky was clear, though the stars were hidden away from his sight.

Allie isn’t right this time, not really. It’s not that Jason thinks Elijah will eat him alive or something if he asked. At most, the rejection will be swift and without any insult, which was as kind as any rejection could be. Nor was he waiting for the other to ask him — there was nothing to ask since there were no feelings on that side.

It was just…hard to put into words.

What they had right now — it was simple, no? Sure, it wasn’t the most fulfilling of relationships he’d ever had, but as far as purely physical relations went, it was great. Jason got what he wanted from it; Elijah got what he wanted from it. Why ruin that? Catching an infatuation was the first step towards ruination. He didn’t need to bring down their tumultuous camaraderie by bringing his stupid emotions into the game.

That’s what it was, at the end of it.

He hopes so, at least.

Jason wouldn’t know what —

The bathroom door opens. Elijah walks in, now only in his shirt and pants, suit jacket and vest in hand. He lays the extra garments down on the back of the chair, with extra carefulness. Because they were important. Jason huffs amusedly while remembering that particular speech.

“I assume you’re not pissed anymore,” Elijah remarks, sitting down on his side of the bed, bending to take his shoes off.

“Not really, no.”

“Good.” Elijah lays down next to him. “You’re sleep deprived enough as it is.”

“You do realize this is kettle calling the pot black, right?”

“I also realize that not every little sound wakes me up,” Elijah retorts back. “You woke up once because you heard an owl a few miles away.”

Jason makes a face at that, but doesn’t comment back. There’s nothing to comment on, since it’s the truth. He’s always been a light sleeper. Years and years and years of being a soldier didn’t help. During their infancy, even the smallest sounds from Lysander or Theodora woke him up, which woke Daphne up. All things considered, he’s never been more sleep deprived than the first few months of parenthood, though that is perhaps true of most new parents. “Well, I’ll try not to wake you up with my bad sleep,” he says, at last.

Tiredness clings to him, so does the dizziness of revival. He can already tell sleep will not be coming easy tonight. That’s without his conversation with Allie sitting in the front of his brain.

“Sure.” Elijah doesn’t seem to believe him. Jason sympathizes. He doesn’t even believe himself most days. Elijah stretches over to turn the sidelight off, drenching the room in sudden darkness with only the moonlight bringing some visibility. Finally, he settles down on his side, his back towards Jason. The white of his shirt seems to glitter in the dark. “Good night, Jason.”

“Good night,” he hums back.

To his credit, Jason tries to go to sleep. Really, he does. He changes sides as calmly as he can, without jostling his asleep companion. He counts sheep. He lays as still as he can. Hell, he even starts going over the old prayer they used to put kids to sleep. Nothing works.

He lays there, tired but no closer to sleep, and wonders if it’ll really be so bad to say everything outloud. He knows logically it will; that nothing will be simple again. But fantasy is fantasy for a reason. It doesn’t wait for logic. It’s just the idle desire that sits low in his ribs making itself known in the only way he’ll ever allow it.

With every shift of his body, he feels Elijah wake up a little more; feels his ire rise a little more. Until eventually, the man gets up on his elbows and pins him mid-shuffle with an annoyed look.

“Sorry,” Jason says sheepishly.

Elijah exhales. Stares at him for a long moment; his face half in darkness and half bathed in the moonlight. He looks…not-annoyed. Disconcerted, maybe. That specific furrow of his nose — barely visible, but he can just make it out — belies some mild concern. Finally, he lays back down, this time facing him, and beckons Jason forward.

Jason stays exactly where he is.

“Jason. Come here,” he says, voice hoarse from sleep. Something pools low in his gut at the sound; heat rising in Jason. When Jason doesn’t move still, Elijah simply pulls him forward with his shirt.

“Hey!” he whisper-yells. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to get you to sleep,” Elijah says, as if that’s not a threat and a half.

“That does not make feel better,” Jason chuckles nervously. “Listen, I’ll go sit in the chair, kay? You can sleep just fine then.”

“You’re not sitting in a chair for a whole night. Allie will kill me for making you do that.”

“Who’s going to tell Allie?” Jason makes to get up, only to be pulled back to the bed by his arm. Though he can’t really make out the subtle motions of the other man’s face, he feels as though there’s exasperation all over it.

“Lay back down,” Elijah says tiredly. Now that he pays attention, he doesn’t sound as if he slept either. Jason feels bad even more than before. “I’m trying to help, you idiot.”

“Yeah?” Jason shuffles closer to him. It’s free heat for him, if nothing else. “And how are you going to that?”

“Fuck you, obviously.”

Jason chokes on the saliva in his mouth. “W—what?” he sputters.

“Didn’t you hear me? I said —”

“I heard you fine the first time,” he snaps. A pause. Jason stares at Elijah, looking at him with genuine, tired eyes. He softens, just a little. With a soft snort, he says, “Your plan is to fuck me to sleep?”

“It’s worked well enough before,” Elijah shrugs.

“Sounds like you just want to fuck me,” Jason teases, stepping into the joke flirting with ease. This is familiar land. He knows how to steer a conversation like this. He’s done this a million times. In a thousand different eras.

“I do.”

“Wait, what?” Did he hear that right? Are — are his ears malfunctioning? This doesn’t seem right.

They’re close enough now that Jason can see Elijah roll his eyes in exasperation. “Is it so strange that I might be attracted to the pretty guy in my bed?”

And there goes Jason’s familiar land, plunging him back into uneasy distant fields he doesn’t like to look at. For a moment, he tries to sparse if the other man’s joking, which seems more plausible right now than the last few minutes of conversation. He blinks. No. Elijah’s tone was as serious as ever. His heart rises in his throat. Everything feels twisted. Upside down. Then, finally, in a tone that sounds flushed even to his own ears, he asks, “You think I’m pretty?”

“Jason,” Elijah sounds even more exasperated, if that was even possible, “You know you’re pretty.”

Jason thinks he might actually already be sleeping. There’s no way this bizarre conversation was anything but a result of his dreaming. For all that Eli had a terrible brain-to-mouth filter when tired, this seemed even more pronounced. Like he was specifically saying things Jason wanted to hear. It didn’t seem right to him. Elijah was supposed to say things he didn’t want to hear, things that were either too cruel or too honest. This was stepping out of a boundary they stayed in always.

He tries to remember if the warlock had gotten hit during the assignment. His recollections come up empty. His hand moves without permission, finding Elijah’s bicep and he pinches the flesh.

The warlock slaps his hand away. “What the fuck? Why would—”

“Just checking you didn’t get possessed on the way here,” he says blankly.

“I’m not fucking possessed,” Elijah gripes.

“You sound possessed. Since when do you go around calling me pretty?”

“I thought you liked praise.”

“Yeah — well, I — it’s not…” Whatever he was trying to say doesn’t make it to his mouth, so Jason simply closes it. He doesn’t not like it. But it feels too much like toeing a line he shouldn’t be toeing. Too risky. He’s halfway in love against his wishes, and against his better knowledge, and Eli’s most probably just trying to sleep. This is where danger sat.

They stare at each other then, twin bewildered looks stuck to each of them. Eventually, he sighs. The sigh turning into a small laugh at the end. He can’t help it. It is terribly hard to keep some affection out of his voice when he speaks next. “Just go to sleep, Eli. Promise I’ll stay squeaky still.”

“Squeaky still isn’t a saying,” Elijah says, matter-of-fact. Then pauses for a long moment before continuing, “Did I make it weird?”

“No,” Jason mollifies gently. There is a certain thrill in the question. Something about Elijah worrying about ‘making it weird’ was amusing, in a strange way. It felt juvenile. Like sneaking around as a teenager, not that Jason sneaked around in his teens. Was too scared of his then-general. He likes it, sort of. “I just…don’t want to. Think I’ve got a headache or something.”

The warlock doesn’t say anything. For a moment, Jason wonders if he actually took his advice and went back to sleeping, until he feels fingers around his wrist, pressing. Checking his pulse. The amusement rises ten-fold.

“I don’t think you can check my health by checking my pulse, Eli.”

“Guess not.” The fingers stay wrapped around his wrist nonetheless. Something in him settles lightly at the touch. He lets his body relax back into the bed, exhaling a breath as he does it. Elijah stays right next to him. “Good night.”

“Sure,” Jason quips. “Try to dream of more innocent things than fucking me to sleep.” The grip around his wrist tightens a bit, a pinch of hurt, before it goes back to the previous pressure. Unyielding, but harmless.

Minutes pass. Elijah’s breath softens. His body relaxes.

It’s hard to tell whether or not Elijah’s actually fallen asleep, or if he’s simply pretending to. For the other’s comfort, Jason closes his own eyes, though he does not pass out. It might not be easy to actually rest with someone’s gaze pinned on you, though he knows Elijah doesn’t really care. Still. It’s the only thing he can do for the sake of his rest.

And also because he doesn’t feel like having a conversation after that...whatever it might be called. He feels more than a bit undone by it. Like someone had unspooled the threads of his being. Less edgily, he just felt really, really flustered. The control he had over himself had watered itself down the moment Allie had opened her mouth in the carpark. It diluted more with every word Elijah said.

Dangerous.

Fun, but dangerous.

Jason goes back to counting sheep. This time in his mother tongue. He’s far better at counting in Greek of the ancient variety than he’s ever been in English. As a child, he used to spend his time counting the bricks in the temple steps, something that was very normal to do and he refuses to admit otherwise, no matter how much Daphne teased him for it. She didn’t know what it was like to have a brain that didn’t shut up. Eventually, somewhere between 237 and 238, his tiredness finally catches up to him. Morpheus drags him down to his domain of unconscious.

The last sensation he feels before his awareness goes down is an arm pulling him closer to another body

When he wakes from slumber, it’s to light shining on his face.

Jason opens his eyes, squinting at the headlights streaking in through the window. A groan cuts itself off with a yawn. Somewhere in the middle of the night, his tiredness must’ve really caught up to him. Even some hours of rest don’t feel refreshing. Not like they ever do, these days. His head hurts. His body feeling weighed down with it. This isn’t really the time for a migraine, he feels like. There’s never a time for migraines but this even less so.

It’s hard to make heads or tails of anything. The light is gone now.

Awareness is a thing some ways from his grasp. He has no idea what time it is. If he’s supposed to be waking up right now, anyway, or if he can snag some more hours of restless, aching sleep. He shifts, just a bit, only to feel an arm tighten around him. An arm, resting under his shirt, on his skin. Someone else’s legs over his own, pressing him down.

What —

“You think too loud,” Elijah groans in his ear, voice barely a voice and more a hoarse cough with some meaning to it. His arm around Jason tightens even more before releasing a bit. The warlock shuffles a bit, flattening himself even more over Jason. “Go back to sleep.”

Jason wanted to say, “You’re awake?”

What actually comes out of his mouth is a series of intelligible groans. Elijah may be awake, but Jason’s certainly not. Not yet.

“Sleep,” the warlock orders. It sounds strangely gentle, despite his demanding tone.

Jason follows the order nonetheless. Some more hours won’t kill him.

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“How have you been, Jason?” Dr. Bailey asks, her voice kind.

From his own work as a medic, Jason knows that it is very, very important to keep your patients calm and soothed. Granted most of his patients were under his care due to being physically messed up in one way or another, and not because they were fucked in the head like him. But still. Secrets of the trade were secrets of the trade all the same.

Dr. Carolina Bailey is very good at it. Her office is the definition of the word ‘soothing’. Walls painted a light pastel blue, plants set next to the walls, white frame windows letting natural light in. She plays music for her patients, usually nondescript piano pieces that he hears while waiting outside. Always classical instrumentals for him, from when he accidentally admitted to being an orchestra player once. It feels a bit like psychological warfare, if he’s honest.

All in all, a stellar doctor, to her other patients, at least. The kind with the perfect patient satisfaction scores. Unfortunately for her, Jason happens to be a bad patient. He’s always been. It’s simply a core thing that happens to be wrong with him.

“I’m…good,” he says slowly, tapping his fingers on the couch with the music. He's played this piece before. “How have you been?”

Dr. Bailey smiles, “I'm very good, Jason, thank you for asking.”

Another fun fact about Dr. Bailey: she uses her patient's names a lot. That, too, is probably meant to comfort him. It doesn't. Not really. Something about it irks him.

“What would you like to talk about today?” she continues, kindly not mentioning his obvious agitation today. “Hopefully, not about my perfume. Again.”

Well, there goes his main lead. Jason leans back into the soft couch, exhaling out a long breath. He goes through his list of things-to-talk-about, simple conversation starters that had yet to fail him. But he doesn't feel like mock flirting or gently ribbing Dr. Bailey about her crush on the receptionist.

“Um, Allie and I went to watch a movie?”

“And? Did you like it?”

Did he? He can't remember. It had been something about superheroes — not his favourite genre honestly. He’d have prefer comedy. He shrugs, feeling only the slightest bit awful for wasting the doctor’s time. This is going great, he thinks bitterly. They're never taking me out of here at this rate.

Dr. Bailey taps her notepad, smile melting into a frown. “You seem troubled,” she says at last, giving up the pretense of everything being fine with him, “Is everything alright? Did a mission not go well?”

Their last mission was fine. Jason and Elijah had to go undercover at a wedding as a couple — it was dreadfully boring — while Allie did all the cool shit. He’s honestly starting to think she does it on purpose. Pair them together as if that’s going to make him do something. It won’t. If Jason had wanted to ‘confess’, as she’d so put it, he’d have done it by now. He doesn’t want to, least of all just because he already knows the unrequited nature of it all.

So, nothing happened.

Except a fight. He doesn’t even remember what started it. He only remembers the sharp tang of all the awful things he said. Jason feels the regret like an ache in his side. It’s not like he goes around trying to start fights. That’s stupid. It just…happens. Elijah says something, he says something back, and before he knows it. They’re fighting over something that could’ve been a simple conversation.

Despite what one might think, Jason does not enjoy fighting with people, let alone people he cares about.

Sure, he and Daphne fought through the entirety of their friendship, then their engagement, then their marriage. But there hadn’t been anything bitter and cruel in it. They were idiots who liked to annoy each other, and under it all, he knew that they would’ve died and killed for each other. That is not the truth for him and the warlock. Frankly, they’re more on the path of killing each other than anything else. Sometimes it feels like the more he allows Elijah in, the more it sours their connection.

And people want him to confess.

As if it won’t be the most disastrous relationship in his history. As if it won’t hollow them both out.

“It was fine,” he says, then sighs. Checks the pros and cons of actually talking about it to his therapist. On one hand, she’s far more likely to give him good advice than Allie. On the other hand, opening up. If he wanted to open up, he’d have done it by now. “We had to go to the most boring wedding. I swear I fell asleep like ten minutes in.”

“Did you?” she chuckles. For some utterly senseless reason, it makes irritation turn to anger in his veins. There’s four big steps worth of space between them. Snapping necks is very easy. Jason, suddenly, wants to be here even less than before. “It must have been some wedding. Tell me about it. All pastels?”

“Yes,” he bemoans. “I had to wear this hideous green suit. Green’s not even my color!”

“What color would you have preferred?”

“I don’t know.” He whooshes his hand in an arc. “Maybe blue? I like blue. It would’ve matched Elijah’s —”

“You and Agent Long went together then?”

Jason shuts up, realizing he’s been had. Damn, Dr. Bailey is good. He should’ve known the moment she decided to let him go on.

The thing is he knows that Dr. Bailey knows about him and Elijah, about the feelings that become more and more a part of his background thoughts each passing day, even if he never talks about it and she never forces him to. It’s obvious, he supposes, if you know where to look. The same way he can tell an injury from a distance. And the doctor’s not a stupid person. She is, after all, an EPO agent in her own right. He glowers at her, before quietly admitting, “Yeah. Allie didn’t agree to go with either of us.”

“I’m assuming it didn’t end well?”

“It was fine,” Jason says with a little too much force. It gives him away, he knows. But. He doesn’t want to talk about it. “We had a little disagreement. We talked it out. Everything is fine.”

The look on Dr. Bailey’s face is not much different from the one he used to give his friends when they tried to nice talk their shitty partners. In Elijah’s defense, Jason is probably no better than him. It’s mutual awfulness.

“Okay,” she says, kindly. “Tell me more about the disagreement.”

“We talked it out. That’s it.”

“Jason.” She leans back into her chair with a shake of her head. Strands of her dark hair pull out of her tight bun, framing the side of her face.

“We really did talk it out!”

“I’m not saying you didn’t,” she says calmly, “I’m just saying that perhaps pretending nothing is wrong is not exactly how you might want to fix things.”

“I…don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lies, averting his gaze from her sharp eyes. “And I’m well aware of how to fix my problems as they come, Doc. It comes with the years.”

“You cannot claim to be able to know how to fix ‘it’ if you won’t admit why you want to fix it.” She pushes her glasses up her nose with two fingers. Even his therapist has started to talk in circles to talk to him. That’s probably not good for his sanity. But he can’t help the relief that rises in him at not having to speak about it. “I understand that you believe that nothing good will come out of…being honest with Agent Long.” Before he can agree with her, she continues, “But do you not think you’ll feel better with things out in the open?”

“No.”

“Are you worried about being rejected?”

He shrugs. “Not really.”

“Are you worried you won’t be rejected, then?”

Jason’s not blind. He can see things clearly. There’s some honesty in him, and he uses that sometimes. The issue wasn’t the rejection, despite what people assumed. It was the opposite. He makes a face.

Dr. Bailey raises an eyebrow. “You are worried that Agent Long will not reject you?” she asks, kindly. “Want to tell me why?”

If he confesses, and if acceptance is the thing that meets him, well. That’d be worse. He can’t remember how to not be a character, and he can’t open up without ten degrees of separation. Personhood is not a thing he has, these days. It’s more of a persona upon a persona that he can’t pull off, anymore. And, even if he does it, he knows what Elijah think of him without it. He doesn’t want to know what he’ll think after. What if, he thought during night, the warlock looked at him without all the pretenses and found him lacking?

What will he do then?

Dr. Bailey sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. “What do you think will even happen? The world will not end if you —”

The sky is darkening with clouds by the time Jason gets back to his apartment. It’s going to rain soon. He can practically feel it in his bones. The building is quiet as he climbs up to the second floor to his apartment. Saturdays are always the quietest days in the building; the few others that live in the building all out.

He’s just taking his keys out of his pockets when he realizes the door must’ve been opened while he was out. He can see the lines it made in the floor, the opposite direction from when he closed it to leave. He isn’t worried — it’s either Allie or Elijah. Who else it’d be? Since he knows that Elijah had been helping Felicia with something today, it’s most likely him.

Jason stops, leaning his head against the door. If he tries hard enough, he can practically see the figure on his couch. He wonders if he still has lavender tea in stock. It’s the only thing that helps Elijah’s magic induced fevers, though they are rare. They may be fighting but he has never been one for needless cruelty, especially to a friend-slash-partner.

Dr. Bailey’s words echo in his head.

Inhale. Exhale.

He opens the door.

As he thought, Elijah lays on the couch, blankly staring at the TV. He barely moves even as Jason walks in, only glancing at him before going back to watching the screen. His suit jacket is thrown on the back of the armchair, alongside his tie. He looks tired.

“Bad spell?” Jason asks, walking over to sit at the edge of the couch, taking his socks off. They’re different colors. Closer now, he can see the side effects of whatever ritual the warlock had to do — light sheen of sweat, the dark circles, the paling skin. Sympathy rises in his chest. He’s always hated being sick too, an unfortunate trait to have no matter the year. “You’re not going to die on my couch, are you?”

“You wish,” Elijah rasps. He shifts to look Jason in the eyes, staring him down through reddened eyes. It’s not intimidating. Really, it just looks like he has an eye infection.

“I really don’t,” he says, truthful. He thinks he’ll actually be very, very devastated if Elijah died, though he doesn’t say that. Sometimes in the middle of nights when he can’t sleep, which is usually every night, Jason thinks, usually unbidden, about their deaths. He doesn’t really want to, and nothing good comes out of thinking about they numerous ways Allie and Eli could die, but he can’t help it.

Most likely, the apocalypse will happen before old age hits. Said apocalypse will also probably end his existence one way or another. He has no need to worry. And yet, he worries.

“Don’t you?” Elijah asks, snide and sneering. Mad still at their earlier fight. A bit ironic considering whose couch he came to be sick on, but Jason lets it go.

For a long moment, Jason thinks about their fight. He still doesn’t remember what he said, or what started it. Except that he hadn’t apologized the way he should’ve. He can’t really say anything else. Is no longer that kind of person. Isn’t really a person at all, not in a way that matters. Still. He probably should.

Knowing that his chances of being cursed by the warlock are low on account of sickness, Jason decides to be reckless. What’s the worst that could happen, anyway? They're already fighting. Putting one knee on the couch’s edge and throwing the other over Elijah, he straddles the other man. Hands come up to rest on his own hips, steadying him as he settles down on the warlock’s body. Like this, Jason sees the way Elijah raises his eyebrows, the widening of his blue eyes, the way he composes himself again, the smallest shift of him underneath.

“Is there a reason you've decided to sit on me, or…”

He takes one of the hands on his hips in his own, interweaving their fingers. Stares at the tattoos visible at the wrist, etchings twisting upwards into the shirt. They all mean things; things he doesn’t understand and never will. He swallows down a stone of pungent desire. “I wanted to apologize,” he says finally, putting their hands down to look at Elijah.

Elijah shifts under him, just a smidgen but he feels it like a tidal wave. His face twists in that ever familiar frown, but he doesn't snatch his hand out of Jason's. That's something, at least. “Did Dr. Bailey give you homework?” he asks curtly. “Go apologize to your teammates, or else write hundred lines”

Jason shakes his head. “No, Dr. Bailey has nothing to do with it. I want to do it. I wanted to do it since the mission. It wasn't right of me to say all that to you. So. I am sorry.”

The one hand still on his hip tightens, but the warlock’s face doesn't budge from the light frown. Moments pass. Another small shift. Elijah breathes, and maybe Jason's just kind of going insane with fucked up longing, but he feels it in his own chest. “Apology accepted,” Elijah responds calmly.

Jason stares at him for a long moment, trying to figure out if the words are genuine or just an attempt to get him off the warlock's back. They seem genuine as far as he can tell. “You're not just saying that?” he probes, “Trying to get me off of this topic?”

Elijah shakes his head. His thumb rubs the back of Jason's hand, the motion soothing some odd anxiety inside his chest. “No,” he repeats. “I am not ‘just saying that’.” Jason sighs. He lets go of the frankly too tight grip he had of the other's hand. “And, for what it's worth, I apologize too.”

He shakes the apology off. “Eh, it’s fine. I started it. I can’t start fires then pretend surprise at the burns.”

“That…is surprisingly mature.” Elijah puts his now-freed hand on his hip again. It is where he prefers to keep his hands when they’re fooling around. Apparently hand-holding is too much for him but not holding someone’s hips.

“I can be mature,” Jason pouts. “I’m always mature.”

“Right. Sure.”

Jason glowers down at him but doesn’t rehash the usual argument. He’s not in the mood for anything that might just slide into something genuinely uncomfortable. He sighs, “We good, then?”

The warlock hums, the closest thing to a smile on his face.

Giddy with forgiveness — he understands why Catholics are so obsessed with it — and satisfaction, Jason wonders what would happened if he said it. He can’t really imagine it; has spent too much mind power in never doing it that he’s unable to even cook up a fantasy. But. Really. What could happen? If the only thing at the end of the tunnel was rejection, he thinks he can deal with it.

And if it’s not rejection. Well. He can try to deal with it. Maybe. Somehow, rejection was a better option.

Jason thinks of something to say, and then Elijah shifts again. He frowns. What was he shifting so much for? Jason’s not that heavy — if anything the doctors the Technomancy Unit see sometimes wish he had more weight on him. He squints down at the man. An injury, perhaps? But he would’ve felt it by now. “Why are you shifting so much? You’re going to throw me off,” he complains.

At the words, Elijah stiffens. “Nothing,” he says quickly. Far too quickly. Suspicious. Jason presses against the man’s middle, trying to find anything amiss. “I told you it’s nothing. Now, get off me.”

“That’s not what you said last night,” he murmurs, still focused on finding anything he might not have noticed. He shuffles down, despite the tightening grip of the other’s hands trying to keep him still. “Seriously, what is it? Did you break your —”

Oh. His brain screeches to a stop. Warmth runs through him like molasses.

Well, Jason knows why he’s been shifting so much now. A grin makes its way over his face without his realization. He looks down. Elijah averts his gaze, the whole of his now-red face shifting away from his grinning features. He puts his hand on the side of the warlock’s face, bringing him back up to hold eye contact. “Well, don’t hide from me now,” he jokes. “I’ve been pulling open my heart to give you an apology and you’ve just been getting off of it? That’s sick, you jerk.”

If looks could kill, Jason might’ve been six feet under from the glare Elijah throws him, even through the bright red blush covering his face. It’s a good thing they can’t, and even if they could, it’s a good thing that he can’t die anyway. “I wasn’t — this wasn’t because of you.”

“No? What, does Monty Python turn you on? Is that it?” It’s his turn to shift now. Just the smallest downward movement to put pressure on the half-hard erection that the warlock has apparently been trying to hide this whole time. Elijah sucks in a sharp breath. “Were you even sick? Or is this just some great ploy to get in my pants?”

The loosely curled hands on his hips tighten immensely, pulling him down fully. He could simply not go but he allows the movement. He sort of kind of likes it. “I don’t really need a ruse to be in you,” the warlock says.

Jason leans down to brush their lips together, grinding down on him. “Yeah?” he murmurs into the corner of the other man’s mouth.

Elijah nods, following his lips when he leans back up. Jason pushes him back down. For once, the warlock goes easily enough, cross-eyed and flustered. Ah, the joys of having someone’s arousal in your palm. At the very least, he can always brag about this, even if he never says it and nothing more comes out of it. Unfortunately for Elijah, he does not have any interest in having sex with a sick person. The doctor in him would rather shrivel up and die.

He pats the other man’s shoulder before getting up. Elijah groans as if shot. Rolling his eyes at the dramatics, Jason picks up his bag from the floor. “You’re getting some tea then sleep,” he declares.

“Fuck you.”

“Maybe later,” he smirks at the scowling man on the couch. “For now, you’ve got a fever and I’ve got medicinal training. You will not distract me with sex, you pervert.”

Jason makes his way to the kitchen, falling into the age-old habit of playing the healer. Elijah’s mutterings and curses of his name play a nice symphony as he prepares the lavender tea. He gets out the basic fever medicine he carries everywhere — you never know when and where one might catch a bug. Carrying the goods back to the living room, he calls out, “Get up! I’ve got the goods!”

Elijah gets up with a long sigh, though a scowl still sits on his face and the previously unnoticeable bulge in his pants was definitely very noticeable now. He takes the tea with a murmured thanks. Jason swats the side of his head as acknowledgement before putting his hand on his forehead. Warm, but not extremely so. Light fever. Nothing some tea and rest won’t fix.

He picks up his own cup of simple tea — he’s not too fond of lavender — making his way to the armchair. “And, just saying, coming to my apartment sick is cheating. That’s bound to make me act nice. Like, you’re breaking rule number one of fighting with someone.”

“Didn’t want to walk over to my own.”

“I bet. All that cigarette scent probably won’t help a fever.” He pulls his phone out to a long string of texts from Allie.

“You’re not going to make me quit.”

Jason rolls his eyes, “Don’t cry when you get lung cancer then.”

“Believe me, I won’t.” Elijah sips the tea with a relaxed posture. At the very least, he can claim that his prickliest teammate finds his apartment safe. After a long moment of silence in which Jason tries to make sense of Allie’s long list of messages, he says, “Thanks.”

He looks up, then back at the string of emojis that are harder to decode than the hieroglyphs on the pyramids. Ignores the hoard of emotions that rush into his head at the sincerity in the thanks. He writes back a generic message that is hopefully what Allie had wanted. “Don’t mention it.”

Elijah looks like he might’ve actually wanted to mention it, but he nods, going back to his cup. Jason stares at the near silent Monty Python re-runs on his TV and wonders how long it’ll be before something inevitably goes wrong.

“Will you spend the whole of your life not doing things because it’s easier to not want things?” Dr. Bailey had said at the end of the appointment.

Jason had repeated an old joke about anxiety and patterns that a bandmate had told him once, trying to squirrel his way out of it. But he knew she was right. He has a history of ruining good things. And though, there was precious little to ruin here, he still felt it — that ever-present knowledge that all it’ll take to ruin the equilibrium would be him.

Everything feels like an ouroboros to him. Repeating cycles over repeating cycles.

“Go take a shower,” he orders, taking the empty cup from Elijah’s lax fingers. “I’ll give you some clothes. Then it’s rest for you.”

The warlock glowers up at him before heeding the orders.

His bedroom’s not that messy, courtesy of having spent the night at a hotel. Still, he tidies it up for the sake of it. He’s looking through the small bookshelf, wondering about dinner and work, when Elijah walks in, dressed in the only clothes Jason had that fit him. Technically speaking, the sweatshirt and pants belong to an old friend from college, but well, finders keepers. It wasn’t as if Yusuf would come back after twenty years to get his shirt back.

Elijah takes the bed, grumbling something as he lays down. Jason grimaces at the wet splash on his pillows, but keeps the snarky comment to himself. Wet pillows are a sacrifice he could make, he supposed.

He gets on the other side of the bed, shuffling forward a bit to put his hand on the warlock’s temple. Still warm. Still not that big of a problem. Elijah takes hold of his wrist, pressing into the pulse point. Though the touch was gentle, more the other man simply being idle, it felt as if a brand being pressed into the most fragile of his veins. I’m losing it, he thinks.

“You okay?” Elijah asks, hand still around his wrist. Thumb still pressing, pressing, pressing into his pulse. “You’ve been…weirdly quiet.”

“I can’t be quiet sometimes?” he says, raising an eyebrow. “You got an authority on silence now?”

Elijah rolls his eyes. “No, you dumbass. You can be as quiet as you want. Be even quieter for that matter, so I won’t have to hear you run your mouth.”

“It’s nothing you need to be worried about,” he says eventually, uncaring about the insults hurled, “I’ve been…thinking about some stuff.”

“Like?”

Jason’s not sure how much help Eli can be in any emotional capacity, let alone the mostly non-discussed relationship they share. Today is not the day he wants to find out either. “Like getting some of my things back from my old apartment. My old landlord’s been asking me to leave if I’m not coming back. I’m just…thinking when I can go back to pack up.”

It wasn’t the truth. But it was a truth. It wasn’t lying. Not really.

“You had an apartment?”

He frowns at the genuine surprise in the other’s voice. He should be offended at that, probably. “Yes? Did you think I just lived in my van? In the 2020s? Seriously?”

“You gave me that idea. Yes.”

“Well, I didn’t,” he shrugs, playing up his offense. Relaxes his wrist in the other’s hold. “And I need to get my shit back eventually. Hence. The thinking.”

“Huh.”

Jason looks at the Apollo figurine again. Daphne had given him a matching Aphrodite one — smaller than her Apollo, but just as ugly. It was a good thing that the Gods didn’t immediately smite them for it considering they were all well-known for their vanity — as an apology when they were seventeen. He can’t remember what she was apologizing for; some fight that no longer matters. They fought so much growing up.

He wishes she were here. Not even as a lover, but simply as one of his best — and one of his two only — friends. She understood people better than he ever did; understood him better than he had ever bothered to. Made him look at the world in its color instead of the blacks and whites, yes and no’s he was used to. She’d know what to do. Granted she’d make fun of him for three whole hours before helping him find a solution, but she’d help all the same. He shakes his head. Can’t believe I’m actually thinking she’d be helpful. What has my life come to that Daphne would be more forthcoming than myself?

Absolute ruins, of course.

“You could come with me,” he says carefully, pulling his eyes back to Elijah.

“What?”

“To get my stuff, I mean. I’ll probably need help. There’s a whole lotta stuff there.”

“How much of is it trash?” Elijah asks rudely. Jason swats his head again. Did no one ever teach him manners?

“None of it,” Jason says dryly. “It’s sentimental.”

“Right.” Elijah rolls his eyes. “Sentimental. Like that random newspaper article you keep from the 1920s?”

“Yes,” he retorts. Wrenching his hand away from Elijah’s grip, he lays down beside him, fuming slightly. Looking up the ceiling with the painted over glow-in-the-dark stars. “Forget I even asked. You —”

“I’ll go with you.”

“— don’t. Wait, what?”

Elijah shrugs, or well pulls his shoulder up in a facsimile of a shrug. Shrugging is hard when you’re laying down. “I said I’ll go with you.”

“Oh,” he says lamely. It takes a moment for the information to process in his brain. Shifs on his side to look at the other man. “What?”

“Okay,” Elijah says amused, taking great amusement in his floundering. That’s apparently something all his partners have in common, it seems. Does that mean he has a type? Thought for another time, Jason decides. “Do you need a minute to get your head working?”

“Fuck off,” he replies, smile contradicting the insult. Thinks about doing it; actually decides to do it. He leans forward to press a mocking kiss on the warlock’s cheeks with a loud ‘muah’. “Thank you.”

Elijah turns his face to brush their mouths together again, taking him by surprise again. Soft presses that feel far too intimate. Far too much like Jason might just reveal every bit of his affection with just some presses of lips.

With one last, significantly longer kiss, he finally pulls away, flushed and pleased. Elijah stares up at him through half-lidded eyes, his hand now holding Jason’s arm. “Now, take a nap.” He smacks the fingers that try to run over his arm. “And keep your hands to yourself. You’re not getting in my pants today.”

Jason gets up shakily, ignoring Elijah’s defeated sigh. He’s dealt with enough people to no longer feel anything about defeated sighs and puppy looks. He picks up a book at random, taking a cursory glance as he walks back to the bed. Rien ne va plus. Eh, it’ll work. He really only needs to pass the time. “I’ll wake you an hour and a half later,” he declares.

A half-hearted grunt of agreement from the lump on his bed. He sits down next to it, providing some solidarity. He opens the book without much of a fanfare — it’s not his favourite by any means. The narrator lied too much and was too melodramatic about the consequences of her own actions.

Yes, he understands the irony.

Jason’s focus on the book is flimsy. With a more than aggrieved sigh, he puts in back on the bedside table, instead laying back down on the bed. Elijah’s leg presses against his own.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep.