Page 22 of Changeling
“Do you remember anything from when it happens?”
Again Jim looked sheepish and hesitant, like there was so much he wasn’t saying, even before he opened his mouth. “I don’t…remember much. Just what I dream. And that’s vague too. It’s…it’s nothing.” Jim started to get up.
Nathan reached out and forced Jim back down to stay on the floor with him. “You gotta tell me, Jim. You gotta. This isn’t…this isn’t just sleepwalking. I think you know that.”
The silence that followed was all Nathan needed to know he was right. “It doesn’t mean anything,” Jim said again, but his tone told Nathan differently. “The dreams are just…just me, like…like I’m drowning but there’s no water, just darkness everywhere and I’m trying to find some kind of surface, some kind of light, but I can’t. And I can almost see…almost tell what I’m doing, what’s going on, but I…I can’t…I just…I don’t know, Nate. The only thing I really remember is those…those…”
“Eyes?” Nathan finished.
Jim blinked at him in horror.
“Red on black eyes. I know, Jim. I’ve seen them too. I heard you and Sasha talking in the library yesterday. I know you’re starting to remember about the Veil. And it’s slipping into your dreams, it’s…making you do things, changing you. I have to tell you…”
“Nate? Tell me what?”
It was almost a comfort to Nathan that Jim seemed just as afraid as he was. It made it easier for Nathan’s hand on Jim’s shoulder to move up to Jim’s face and just hold there for a moment. Then he pulled away, took a breath, and tried to think how to tell Jim everything.
“Nathan…? Jim?” called Sasha’s voice from above them in the bed, foreign and quiet against the silence that had overtaken them. “What’s going on?”
Itwasfourinthe morning and they were nowhere near ready to head back to sleep. Nathan was sitting next to Sasha on the edge of their bed, and Jim was sitting across from them in a chair he had pulled over from the corner of the room. None of them had said anything for a solid minute, and a minute that tense always felt more like five. Like ten. Like an hour.
“This was…this was thethirdtime?” Jim finally said, too loud for the middle of the night. “You saw me like that three times, Nathan, and you’re just telling me now?”
“The first was while I was still in the hospital," Nathan admitted. "And I didn’t…I didn’t say anything earlier because I…I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d imagined it. But...Walter disappeared when it happened.” He glanced around the room, but of course Walter couldn’t be there now.
“Nathan,” Jim said with a snarl on his face. “You tell me anyway! You tell me! You don’t lie right to my face! I don’t…I don’t care if you wanted to convince yourself it wasn’t real, you should have told me.”
“Like you told me about remembering the Veil or all this sleepwalking?” Nathan shot back. “Pot,” he said, pointing at Jim, and then pointed back at himself with a firm, “Kettle. So shut up. We’re both idiots. The end. Now can we get back to the issue here? What the hell is going on, Jim? What else aren’t you saying? Are you…are you losing yourself to these powers or what? Are you Awakening because you're using them too much?”
“It’s not…it’s not like that,” Jim tried to say with confidence but ended up sounding like a frustrated child. “I’ve never really ever given in to the powers. I’m always keeping them in check,as much as I can, so that giving myself over to them completely never happens. If I thought I was losing that control, Nathan, even a little, I’d…I’d tell you.Immediately. Of course I would. And God, I’d stop. I’d push them out and never use them again. I don't want to Awaken.”
A humorless laugh fell from Sasha’s lips. “Push them out?” the incubus said skeptically. “Jim, these powers aren’t something you can turn off. They’re in you. And maybe…maybe trying so hard to cap them is what’s manifesting these dreams and episodes while you sleep. I'm not saying you have to just give in and Awaken, but...if fighting it is causingthis...”
Silence fell between them again, and Jim stared forward like he was being crushed by the weight of it all.
“We just...we need to calm down," Nathan said softly. “This doesn’t mean you’re Awakening, Jim, or that you’ll for sure turn out like other changelings.”
“You don’t know that,” Jim said miserably.
“I believe it. You’re still Jim.”
“Nathan…”
“You’re still my brother.”
“Nathan.”
“Jim,” Nathan said with just as much warning because he knew what was coming; he knew what Jim was going to do.
The misery on Jim’s face didn’t waver as he said very clearly, with all of his power behind the words, “Tell the truth.”
Nathan couldn’t not tell him then, much as he tried. “I’m terrified of you,” he said, falling prey to Jim’s control. “I think you were going to hurt Sasha tonight and I don’t know why. You don’t know what’s happening, and we can’t stop it, and you can’t control it, and I’m so scared that one day there’ll be those damn amber eyes like the Messenger and no you, and I don’t know how to fix it.” A lump rose in Nathan’s throat as he finished, hatingthat those words were in him at all, forced out of him as they were.
Jim sagged into the chair as if his sentence had been given and that was it—he was doomed.
“Damn it, Jim,” Nathan said, his eyes as wet as the blue ones in front of him. He wanted to get angry with Jim for mojoing him like that but he couldn’t.
Slowly, Nathan got up and moved to stand next to Jim. He could still show in some small way that, even if he was afraid, he wasn’t giving up.
