Page 91 of Vanish Into Light

She glanced out the window, eyes sparkling. “It looks that way. I don’t want to hope, but.” She bit her lip. “Maybe…maybe this is the end.”

Something inside Beck shivered. “You said Gallo called. He’s not still here? Him and the others.”

“No, they went back.” She looked at him again, fondness etched in each line of her face. Hope. “They’re being assigned to humanitarian duty.”

“And you?”

“I’m not a Knight anymore,” she said, easily, like it was nothing, like giving up the military wasn’t a strain on her at all. “I turned in my wings. Lance, too.”

An even bigger shock. He set the tea down on the table by his elbow before he spilled it. “What…” He tried to choose his words carefully, but his head was still packed with cotton wool. “Won’t he miss it? Good little soldier that he is?”

“No,” she said, like it was the absolute truth. She smiled at him, and looked out through the window again, profile limned in sunlight.

~*~

The first floor, when he was finally strong enough to make his way down to it, bore stains along the baseboards from the flooding, but the water was all gone, and the floor warped, but dry. He spotted a shop vac in the corner of the dining room, and blinked; noted that the bodies and the ash residue from Michael’s little display of power and his own killing spree were all gone. Lance was wearing jeans, and casual boots, and bore a smudge of dirt on one cheekbone. He was letting his hair grow out. It suited him.

“You’re cleaning,” Beck said, stupidly.

“Yeah.” He swiped at his forehead with the back of his hand, and flashed a lopsided, nearly boyish smile that Beck had never seen before; it had always been a clenched jaw, and a reluctant half-quirk of his lips before, ever the soldier. “It’ll probably take friggin’ years, but. Except for the hole in the roof, the place is shockingly stable. And there’s plenty of room to spread out.”

Spread out. “You’re…going to live here.”

Lance shrugged. “Unless something better comes along, I figure, why not? It’s just sitting here empty.” He frowned as he glanced up toward the ceiling. “I mean…I guess we oughta be generous and donate it to the cause or something. Hell, it’s not even ours.”

Ours.

“But, I dunno.” He shrugged again; looked at Beck again; smiled again, self-conscious this time. “Rose and I have talked, and, well – it’s kinda nice to have the place to ourselves. At least for a while. The quiet’s nice. And we figured” – his voice went careful – “you didn’t really want to be around a lot of people right now.”

When Beck swallowed, he found a lump in his throat. “No.”

~*~

The city filled with the sound of jackhammers, of trucks, of distant, muted voices calling back and forth. Explosions still happened, occasionally, at night; when Beck couldn’t sleep, he glimpsed the orange leap of flames, sometimes, against the skyline.

Groceries weren’t plentiful, as to be expected, but Rose usually found some decent carrots, some celery; Lance came back with a whole chicken, and Beck felt sturdy enough on his feet to dice the vegetables, slather the bird in butter, and roast it all in a pan. The power was back on, the gas too, and cooking was an old, reflexive habit that soothed him, and left his partners smiling when they sat down at the table and tasted what he’d prepared.

The soil was poor, but that didn’t stop Rose from starting a garden out back: just a few weedy raised beds made from wood that looked like old wall studs and two-by-fours from inside the house. Beck sat on a petite, French country chair in maroon silk that Lance had carried outside, and watched them kneel down in the dirt to place cucumber seeds.

“I can help,” he offered, not for the first time.

“You can help me harvest when they’re ripe,” Rose said, patting dirty into place and reaching for the watering can – and where had she gotten that?

Beck started to argue, to insist – but took a sip of his iced tea, instead. Lance had made it, and it wasn’t terrible.

~*~

Lance did most of the shopping, and things began to accumulate, slowly. A TV in the den; dust cloths; new sofa cushions, and a paper calendar that got hung up by the fridge. The dresser in the bedroom was cleaned out, and Beck woke one morning, alone, to find brand new underwear, t-shirts, jeans, and shirts in the drawers; soft sweatpants with drawstrings, and even a pair of dark, men’s slippers clearly meant for him. He could tell what Rose had picked for him, because it was all black or dark blue, and knew that Lance had chosen the soft green and red and yellow flannels, oversized work shirts of a type he never would have worn in his old life.

He wore them now; turned back the green-check cuffs before he sliced into a potato at the kitchen island.

Rose sat on the other side, and held a paper bag in her lap, her grin excited. “There’s a book shop open.”

He paused. “That…hardly seems like the most necessary use of resources, given the state of things.”

“Well, it’s been six months,” she said, and his stomach lurched, because he’d had no idea, despite the calendar – he’d never looked at it. “I don’t know if things will ever be back to the way they were before the First Rift, but people are looking for distractions, now. Entertainment.”

They had just watched a new drama on TV the other night, something flippant and silly about romantic entanglement. Beck had been too sleepy to pay much attention, focusing instead on the warmth and familiar comfort of their bodies where they bracketed him.

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