Dark Magic AU pt2

[emony]

Part 1

*

When Warren wakes up, seconds minutes hours days weeks later, his whole body aches, his feet are dirty and sore, he’s wearing a long, black coat he’s pretty sure didn’t used to be his, and he remembers only Meg’s dirty teeth and the soft, dizzying pull of unconsciousness.

He isn’t surprised to find her long gone when he opens his eyes, and it takes a few seconds before Warren recognizes his own bedroom. Warm morning light pours in through the open curtains, not the hazy afternoon sun he left, and silence beats at his shattered mind until he pulls himself upright and runs to the bathroom to throw up.

He lies against the cool white tiles of the bathroom floor, shifting slightly this way and that in a vain attempt to find a comfortable position, and pulls a damp towel down off the rail to throw over his pounding head as he tries to recall something, anything from the darkness between Meg and morning.

Brightly colored flashes of memory hover just outside his reach, familiar locations, familiar people, but it’s like watching a movie – it’s all too Technicolor to possibly be real, and there’s no sound. A rush of air, the feeling of motion, like being flung about on a fairground ride, but people’s mouths move, cars drive past, doors open and close, and no sound is made. Just the rushing air and a buzzing undertone.

He’s not even sure what day it is, and he wonders idly if he went in to work while he was .. what, tripping? Who the fuck knows what the right language is for whatever Meg did to him. Whatever it was, he’s pretty sure his boss wouldn’t appreciate it.

His fingernails are tinged with black, like the remains of scratched off nail polish, and as the world grows clearer and perhaps just a little softer, Warren starts to feel a different kind of ache. It starts in his shoulders, for some reason he doesn’t really know, a gentle pressure that at first he simply attributes to lying on the floor and everything.

Later, as he crawls down the hallway and into bed, cursing Meg, women, and all forms of magic, he wonders if maybe he did something crazy while he was out of it, like getting a huge tattoo across his back or paragliding or something else shoulder-straining. But the ache has started to move, both up and down, and while the ache in his head has become a just-beyond-reach tingle, there’s a feeling of vast emptiness in his gut that he tries not to think about too much.

After a night of restless sleep which involves more staring at the ceiling than actual sleeping, Warren stumbles downstairs and discovers, by checking the date on his computer, that it is Tuesday. Meg was at the house on Saturday, and Warren decides he’s probably fairly lucky he got away with only losing two days of his life to her.

His inbox is full of email, which he flicks through far more slowly than usual, stopping to read twice the one from his boss demanding to know where the fuck he is. He calls work, tells a blatantly see-through lie about how he’s been really sick all weekend with some horrible gastric thing, which he describes in so much detail the poor secretary doesn’t ask any questions, and crawls back to bed for the rest of the day.

*

The ache is still there. If anything it’s got worse, and Warren can’t pretend he doesn’t know what it is. Magic fucks you up, it gets inside your head, inside your body, under your skin and deeper in than it’s even possible to measure, and it does stuff to you, changes you. It’s not quite so addictive that you get hooked by just looking at it, but it’s not far off. One little taste, like the one Meg gave him – forced, not gave, forced – and you feel it for weeks, months, who knows.

Warren’s not so experienced with this stuff that he can really tell. It always feels worse when it’s happening to you, and he tries to tell himself it’s psychological and shit, but that doesn’t stop him waking up in the night shivering, shaking, and planning a way to get a hit before he’s even fully conscious.

He finds himself wondering, in idle moments sat behind his desk, when spider solitaire just isn’t doing it, how Tucker managed. He’s been into the stuff since he was, what, fifteen? Okay, it hadn’t got so heavy until he hooked up with Meg and her crowd in Tulsa, but it had been in his system for years and years, and he’d still managed to detox. Okay, not forever, but that was Meg’s fault.

No it wasn’t, a traitorous little voice whispers. He was never going to stick around, not forever, and you know it.

At this point, Warren’s hands start to itch and he has to hide in the bathroom, sitting on the stall floor, fists clenched as his arms wrap around his knees, waiting for the shaking to subside.

He refuses to let himself look for them. The plans, the thoughts, the pain, Warren pushes it all down and will not let it break him. This is Meg’s fault, he tells himself several hundred times a day. I won’t let that bitch win.

When he gets out of his car one morning, at least two weeks from The Day, he decides that it’s his victory. After all, it’s not like he went to her.

They regard each other across the parking lot, Meg sitting on the low, brick wall outside Warren’s office building, kicking her heals back against and scuffing her boots with red dust as Warren stands by his car and fights the violent urge to stride over and push her backwards into the bushes.

She smiles, toothy and perhaps attempting flirtatious, which Warren finds slightly repellant, and cracks her gum loudly. One of the small group entering the building, a large, middle-aged woman from Human Resources who smells faintly of sour perfume and gets drunk at every office party, looks over at Meg, scandalized that someone so dirty and obviously up to no good would be anywhere near her prim, proper life. Warren feels a surge of hatred for his workplace and everyone in it that he hasn’t felt in years.

He gives up and crosses the parking lot.

Meg doesn’t wait. As soon as he moves, she does, echoing his progress as they leave the grounds, walk down the street, cross the park. Moving through the city like this, on foot, Warren usually watches people. He thinks it’s probably a left over reaction to high school, watching everyone so that you see them before they see you, judging them, testing them, who’s a threat and who’s safe, who to avoid, who to move closer to, and who to run in the opposite direction from. The city’s the same, but on a grander scale. In high school it was jocks and locker room beatings. In the city it’s muggers and murderers. Sometimes Warren thinks that maybe high school was better training for the real world than he ever realized at the time.

On this day, though, his entire focus is on Meg. He watches her back, the casual sway of her hips, the shushing of her pants, the clunk of messy steps in heavy boots, and the slight bounce as her fried, deadened black hair absorbs the motion of her body. He could catch her up, it wouldn’t take more than a dozen steps, but he knows, somehow, that that would just break the spell. Something is going on here, and going against the pattern is not the way to get what he wants.

They move through the city for what could be minutes or hours, Warren closes down his mind, reciting electrical formulae, periodic table, TNG episode names, whatever it takes to fill the empty space where the questions might appear if they have the chance.

He’s halfway through Babylon Five, season 3, when Meg stops at a house. They’re in a disarmingly suburban neighborhood, filled with SUVs and nicely trimmed, but toy-strewn front lawns, and Warren almost misses her change of direction completely.

“Hey, genius,” she calls, and he looks up, caught off guard by the noise, which breaks through the gentle rustle of leaves on the trees like a chainsaw. “Over here.”

Warren blinks and tries to think of something witty to say in reply, but Meg’s already turned away, knocking sedately on the door.

The house looks a lot like all the others on the street. The van Warren saw before must be in the garage, and the car from the supermarket is parked in the drive. It doesn’t look horribly out of place here, and Warren feels a bit cheated by it all, until the door opens and a wash of dark magic flows out, so strong even he feels it.

Tucker is on the other side of the door, eyes wide and slow as he blinks against the light. He squints at Warren for a second. “What?”

Meg smiles and reaches back to catch hold of Warren’s shirt, tugging it gently. “He followed me home. Can I keep him? Huh? Can I?”

She grins widely and kicks the step softly with the toe of her boot as Tucker stares at Warren.

“I don’t get it,” he says, eventually, slow and careful like he’s not quite sure the words are the right ones for what he means to say.

Warren shrugs. “Me neither,” he says, and it’s like taking a step back from his own body. Watching someone else going through it all. Giving over any control he ever had over himself, giving in.

Meg smiles to herself, neither of the boys is looking her way, and pulls Warren into the house, closing the door behind them.

*

Warren is lying against the ceiling, staring down at himself lying in Tucker’s arms on a dirty mattress in a room that was a kitchen once. A few empty cabinets line two of the walls, and an old pine chair, lined with damp, sits in one corner.

Tucker is sitting upright, leaning back against the stained wall and stroking Warren’s hair. His lips are moving, and Warren thinks he might be whispering something – a spell maybe, or perhaps something more personal. He can’t hear it, whatever it is, but up here, on the ceiling, it doesn’t bother him. Nothing bothers him up here.

The whole room is under a blanket of absolute silent, like a little oasis of bloody death in the middle of a rioting crowd. He hears the commotion outside though. All the sounds of the house whisper through his ears, as loud as screams. Painful and violent and desperate.

The door swings sharply open and Tucker looks up slowly. The dancing, swirling creatures that live in the walls swim casually around the room, going from wall to wall to wall, ducking and diving to avoid the quick, snapping obstacles before them, and electricity, black and shining, flickers and crackles between Tucker’s fingers.

His eyes are completely black, and Warren wishes he could fly down there and swallow him whole.

Andrew halts in the doorway, staring down at his brother and Warren. Warren on the ceiling smiles, but Warren on the floor stays utterly still.

Jonathan hovers just over Andrew’s shoulder, the way he always does, and Andrew slowly steps into the room.

Their mouths move - Andrew’s is fast, snappy and as furious as he can be with the brother he’s still mostly just afraid of, Tucker’s slow and considered as words form under the influence of the powerful magic he’s tapped in to right now. Warren can’t hear the words, but he feels them trickling through his blood as they pass through Tucker’s mind. That’s how it works, this thing they do. It’s all about being connected.

Meg appears in the doorway, making Jonathan jump and shuffle quickly off to one side, out of harms way like a tiny mouse fleeing a python. She stretches an arm up against the door frame and looks up at Warren on the ceiling. He waves down at her and she smiles.

Then there’s a pull, something akin to how Warren imagines it might feel to be sucked down a drain, and an overwhelming dizziness that makes him clench his eyes tight shut. When he opens them again, he’s looking up at Andrew, Jonathan and Meg, and he can feel Tucker pressed up against him.

“See?” Warren hears Tucker saying with a kind of casual arrogance as Warren curls over to one side to throw up. “He’s fine.”

He hears Andrew cough out his disbelief at this statement, and wonders what the kid’s problem is. Then he wonders when he started thinking of Andrew as ‘the kid’, which has always been Tucker’s term for his brother. ‘It’s a deep connection,’ one of them thinks, and the other agrees, although neither can say which was which.

“You.. just, just let him. We’ll take him home and everything will be okay,” Andrew says, his voice slightly shaky.

Tucker laughs as Warren pulls himself back up to a sitting position. “Let it go, kid. He doesn’t want to leave, and you can’t make him.”

One of the wall-demons hovers just above Andrew’s head, posing to strike. Warren thinks Meg or Tucker must be controlling them, for it to be poised just there just now.

Andrew moves, crossing the room to kneel down by Warren’s side, and the demon melts back into the plasterwork.

“Warren?” he says, quietly, as if it’ll stop anyone else from hearing them. “Warren, I want you to come home.”

Warren smiles and reaches up tentatively, not sure his arm’s still working, to pat Andrew’s face. “Give up, kid,” he says, surprised by how much stronger his voice sounds than he feels. “You don’t always get what you want.”

Andrew stands, sudden and unnaturally sharp in a place like this, and walks out of the room. Warren watches him go, watches Jonathan’s little flinch of surprise, watches Meg cross the room and curl up next to Tucker.

He pulls himself to his feet and pushes past Jonathan, out into the little hallway where Andrew is leaning against the wall, arms wrapped around himself.

He walks slowly, step by step, until he can reach out and rest a hand against Andrew’s back. Then another, and he traces the lines and swirls that only he can see, smiling to himself as they move and radiate.

“It won’t last,” Andrew says, after some indeterminate amount of time that could be days. “He’ll leave again.”

“They’ll leave,” Warren agrees, “and I’ll go with them.”

“No.” Andrew turns now, facing Warren and watching him so intently he feels honor-bound to pay just as much attention right back to Andrew. “He’ll leave, Tucker. He doesn’t leave because they leave, they leave because he leaves, and he leaves because of you, to get away from you. You know that. You must know that.”

Warren blinks. “No,” he says, looking away, and the dark lines that criss-cross the bare floorboards begin to fade back into the wood. “No, that’s not..”

“Look,” Andrew reaches out and puts a hand on Warren’s chest. “I wouldn’t lie to you, would I.”

Warren looks up at him for a few seconds before shaking his head. Andrew doesn’t lie, Andrew’s not like that. Andrew’s the good one. Well, mostly.

“So, it’s,” Andrew looks around the dirty hallway, drawing his words together. “It’s just delaying the inevitable, you know? Putting it off, but it’s still going to happen.”

Warren nods sadly. Can’t argue with that. Tucker’s always left before, and he knows this time won’t really be any different.

Andrew tugs on Warren’s shirt a little, clenched in his fist, and Warren finds himself leaning in and resting his head against Andrew’s shoulder.

The taste of magic is still strong in his skin, and Warren isn’t sure if he’s thinking at his most or his least clear, but it all seems to make perfect, desolate sense.

“So you’ll come home,” Andrew says, not quite a question, in a tone he must have learned from his brother.

Warren shuts his eyes and nods against Andrew’s shoulder.

*

Months of sleeping in Andrew and Jonathan’s guest room melt into one big blur that Warren labels “recovery period” and immediately discounts whenever he has reason to think about it.

Andrew is at his best when he has something definite to do, and Jonathan is miserable and passive. It’s painful and impossible and there’s a gaping, hollow space inside that Warren knows will never ever be filled. It’s only the knowledge that whatever he tried, even if he went back to them, it still wouldn’t be enough that gives him the strength to keep going. That and being locked in the house for two screaming, swearing, crying months of torture.

But it’s over now, done, and he’s not going back. He’s finally back in his own house, working again, and there are at least two hours each day when he doesn’t think about Tucker, Meg and their little magical crack den.

No matter how hard he scrubs, a grey stain remains, embedded in his fingernails, and the scars from where Tucker decided to carve his name into Warren’s arm are as vivid as the day he did it.

Meg’s sitting on the hood of his car one morning, examining her own fingernails and shivering in the heat of the summer morning.

Warren’s not surprised to see her, and briefly considers just getting in the car and driving off with her still sat there.

“We’re going,” she says without preamble as he reaches the car door.

“So?” Warren says, running through prime numbers and the element table to distract himself from the pull she exerts on him now.

“So,” she says, looking up and smiling. “Circus is leaving town, kitten, and you’re not invited.”

Warren blinks. “Uh, good?” he says, turning back to the car and shaking his head. “It was great, really, but you need to learn to move on.”

“Oh, we have,” she says softly, almost dreamily, and Warren hates her more than ever. “I just..”

Meg pauses and slides off the hood onto the sidewalk. She looks serious for once, and Warren wonders if she’s always looked so tired and he just hasn’t noticed before.

“He misses you,” she says, quiet and not at all like the woman Warren has come to know.

“Is this where you tell me that we have a pure and beautiful love, and to meet you by the railway tracks at midnight for a daring, last second rescue? ‘Cause, I’ve got to say, I’m a little busy tonight,” Warren says, rushing through the words and trying not to think too hard about what Meg actually said.

“No,” she says, reaching up to pat his face. “This is where I tell you that if you ever come near Tucker again, I’ll snap your neck.”

Warren’s silent for a second. There’s something in her eyes, a dark desperation that he recognizes, that says she’ll do it. “And if he comes near me?” he asks, eventually.

Meg smiles. “Same applies.”

Warren shakes his head. “If you don’t want us together, why the whole,” he waves his hand back toward the house. “That thing? With the magic? Why not just leave back then?”

Meg shrugs, not as casually as she wants to, and Warren wonders if maybe he just knows her better and can see these breaks in the façade now, or if maybe they’ve fallen apart too and are still trying to put themselves back together. “He needed to work through it, get you out of his system. Now you’re out.”

“If I’m so out,” Warren says, “why are you here threatening me?”

Meg scowls. “He always left us, left us and went running back to you.”

Warren holds up a hand. “No, he always left me and went running back to you.”

“Whatever,” Meg says, disregarding him. “He wanted us, and, God knows why, he wanted you, and at the back of his mind he always thought he could have both. Now, he knows he can’t, and he had to choose.” She smiles broadly. “And you lost.”

“Whatever,” Warren says eventually, breaking the moment and turning back to his car. “I have to go to work. Some of us have actual lives, you know.” He doesn’t believe her for a second. Maybe Tucker thinks he’s chosen, but even Meg can’t fool herself into thinking this is it. If she had, she wouldn’t be here.

“I mean it,” she says, a new lightness creeping into her voice. “Come near him again and I’ll kill you.” She gives a little laugh before turning and walking away. “See you,” she calls, and a little chill runs down Warren’s spine that doesn’t shift until well past lunchtime.

*

Andrew thinks he’s won, and Warren wonders, not for the first time, just how much of this is simply a battle for attention between siblings with him playing substitute parent. But that introduces a whole new level of disturbing, and Warren’s life doesn’t need any more of those.

Months pass and life settles down to the staid, dull routine it always adopts between the brief periods of fury. It’s like the quiet between aftershocks, although that would make the first time - their first meeting maybe, or the first kiss, he’s not sure – an earthquake, and that only makes Warren laugh.

More often than not Andrew sleeps at Warren’s, and while his eyes have taken on the sheen of cat-adoption and white picket fences, Jonathan looks permanently miserable. Warren shuts his eyes and tries not to think of anything at all.

The call comes as Warren sits at the wide oak desk in his always too cool, air conditioned office, his cell phone vibrating violently against the wood like a giant silver beetle having some kind of seizure. He knows from the number that it’s a dirty payphone somewhere, and there’s never any doubt that he’ll pick it up, listen, feign disinterest, and then travel halfway across the country and back, but he tries to picture it for a few seconds as the cell starts to chirrup its distress.

There might be a second call in a day or two, then a third, and then it’d be over. He’d settle down, forget it all, maybe go for coffee with the pretty girl who always smiled at him over the copy machine. They’d get married, have some kids and a dog. Andrew would cry himself to sleep every night, and one of the children would have Tucker as a middle name, although the copy girl would never, ever know why.

But then a tiny gasp of fear catches in his throat, and Warren grabs up the phone to answer it before it stops ringing. The vision disappears, and Warren thinks it’s probably best for the kids anyway, because he knows what growing up in a dysfunctional family can do to a person and he doesn’t see why he should inflict that on anyone else if he doesn’t have to.

The call comes from New Jersey, and Warren leaves a note on his boss’ desk to say he’s been called away and he’ll be back in a couple of days.

*

“No.”

It’s such a quiet word, Warren almost feels a slight stirring of sympathy for the kid. Almost.

“You, you’re supposed to be gone,” Andrew says, rigid and damp-eyed. “You weren’t going to come back this time.”

“What,” Tucker looks up from the couch, “you thought you’d won, kid?” His hair is longer now, like some kind of Jared Leto mid-90s retro thing, and it swings like a stupid shampoo commercial as he shakes his head and smiles a smile that makes Warren’s heart skip. “You could never win this one. You know that.”

Not long out of the shower, where he stands for hours, scrubbing at the blackness under his fingernails that just won’t shift, he slips his feet up under the hem of the robe – Warren’s, dark blue, a present from his mom, he thinks – and turns his attention back to some TV show about a group of women in bikinis living on a island.

Andrew just stands and stares, not quite knowing what to say. Warren wonders for a second how he might be feeling right now, but he’s never been very good at that kind of thing, so he decides to just ignore Andrew until he goes away.

He glances back as he hears them leave, and Jonathan is smiling just a little as he follows Andrew out of the house.

“Was that too much?” Tucker asks vaguely, with just enough sincerity that Warren suspects he might actually care. “I mean, was it too mean? He is just a kid.”

“He’s twenty-six, I think he can take it,” Warren says, unsure of the direction of the conversation. It doesn’t normally go this way, and Andrew’s wellbeing is never at the forefront of Tucker’s thoughts.

But then, he has been different this time. He reads the newspaper now and then, and spends a lot of time staring out of the window, into the garden, thinking. He even watered the plants once – with actual water. Warren had pinched himself to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating.

Warren knows that everything that happened to him over the last few months, the last year really, since he went and picked Tucker up from Vegas – it changed him. He sees things differently now, his life, his work, Andrew and Jonathan and everything that surrounds him. There was some kind of link, some kind of bond between Tucker and him, and he thinks maybe part of Tucker leaked into him, corrupted his system and left him questioning everything he’d taken for granted before. Maybe, he thinks, as he watches Tucker rubbing his hands together and picking at the loose fluff on the robe, maybe it changed him too.

Tucker smiles. “Do you remember that plan I had?” he asks, pulling his hands up into the sleeves of the robe and wrapping his arms around himself. “We should do that.”

Warren frowns slightly. “What plan?”

Tucker looks a little hurt that he doesn’t remember. “Mexico, dude,” he says. “We should go there. You and me, somewhere they can’t find us.” Warren isn’t sure if he means Andrew and Jonathan, or Meg and her friends. He isn’t sure if Tucker is sure either.

“I think they could probably find us in Mexico,” he says, slowly. “It’s not even that far away.”

“There are places though,” Tucker tells him, gazing darkly off into the ether. “Places so dark you can’t see anything. Or be seen by anything.”

Warren doesn’t know what to say, and the silence stretches until Tucker turns and looks at him, tilts his head, smiles, breaks the moment.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” he asks, and Warren feels a tiny shiver inside. “We could disappear, slip off the radar for a couple of years, a couple of months even.” There’s just the lightest touch of desperation, and Warren can’t help but admit it’s an attractive plan.

“It’d never work out,” he says, breaking eye contact and looking back to the TV. “It.. It just wouldn’t.”

Tucker stretches out and one foot appears from underneath the robe. “Don’t you want to at least try?”

Warren stares blankly at the screen, trying to picture how things might be. It doesn’t seem possible. Tucker’s always promising things like this, and they never work out, or more usually they never even get started. However Warren pictures it, it always ends with Tucker leaving, or Meg showing up at the door one day and slitting his throat.

Recently-scrubbed fingernails brush lightly over his arm, and Warren looks over slowly, reaching down to catch Tucker’s hand in his own.

“You’re sure they won’t find us?” he says, although he knows full well that Tucker will tell him whatever he has to to get Warren to agree to his plan.

Tucker nods, utterly certain. “Absolutely. They’re a bunch of powerless wannabe losers without me anyway.”

Warren can’t help but smile at that. “And no magic?”

Tucker rolls his eyes. “Right, no magic, of course. So? Are we going to Mexico? Should I start packing?”

“You don’t own anything,” Warren points out. “All ‘your’ stuff is mine.”

“Still got to be packed,” Tucker says, matter-of-factly.

Warren looks around his living room, at the books and computers and plants and random pieces of paper from work. None of it means anything. None of it’s worth anything. When did I stop living, he thinks to himself. When did I die?

Tucker flicks him on the arm. “Hey, don’t zone on me, man,” he says. “I need an answer. I need confirmation. Confirm me!”

Warren blinks. “Sure,” he says. There are a million reasons why it’s a stupid plan in the first place, and another million why it will never work out. It won’t be the first time they’ve tried it, disappearing into the wilderness where “no-one” can find them. They’re always found. Or failing that, Tucker always gets itchy feet – itchy hands, itchy eyes, just itchy – and one day he’s gone and Warren’s stuck out in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere. All his cash and cards are missing, clothes shredded in an addict’s pre-high frenzy, car or truck or whatever it was gone, or at least broken beyond repair. Last time Tucker had taken out the tyres. Warren isn’t sure why. He thinks maybe it’s an instinct; he doesn’t want to be followed and stopped, so he leaves Warren stranded and powerless. Sometimes he thinks it’s because Tucker wants to pretend that if Warren is stuck there, he’s got someone to come back to when he’s got that one little hit he needs to feel good again.

Whatever it is that happens to ruin things, they always get ruined somehow. Life’s not a song, and you don’t always get what you want.

But then, if Tucker’s pattern of using him and leaving is that predictable, Warren’s pattern of taking it like a bitch is written in stone. “Why the fuck not,” he says, finally. “Let’s go.”

Tucker looks surprised for a few seconds, which Warren thinks is stupid really because he always agrees to whatever Tucker suggests, then punches the air. “Yes, Mexico! When?”

Warren shrugs, “Right now?”

Again, Tucker looks surprised, eyebrows raised and slightly suspicious. “You sure?”

Warren smiles. “Not much of a disappearance if we wait around to say goodbye, and leave a forwarding address,” he says.

Tucker stares for a second, then grins widely and stands up, leaning down and kissing Warren soundly. “This is why I like being with you,” he says, before turning and padding upstairs silently to throw things into a bag.

The room is suddenly flat and empty, meaningless without Tucker to lend it context. Colors seep and run until everything stares back at Warren in watery shades of black, white and grey. There’s no life, no depth, and Warren feels nothing but absence.

Whatever happens in Mexico, however long it takes for Tucker to leave him, or however long it takes Meg to find them and slit his throat once and for all, it’s worth it. Even if it wasn’t, he’d still go. He can’t not.

*

end

*

Nothing

It’s not like he’s in love with Warren or anything. He isn’t. Never will be. Never could be.

Warren drifts in and out of his life from time to time, but it’s not like he’s that important. Not really. He’s not even that special. He could be anyone, anyone who’d fill the function of being someone, somewhere that Tucker could go when he needs a break. The fact that he goes to Warren every single time doesn’t mean anything. Warren’s just convenient. He’s just there.

So he doesn’t really care when Warren leaves.

He doesn’t care that Warren chooses Andrew over him.

He doesn’t care that they’ve spent weeks, maybe even months, pretty much literally joined at the brain, only for Warren to up and disappear the second Andrew drops by and shakes his ass.

He doesn’t care that Warren barely even thinks of him as Andrew and Jonathan lead him away from the house.

In fact, he barely notices Warren’s absence from the house, and when he lies back on the bed and opens a vein for Meg to pour her magical liquid relief straight into his soul, it’s got nothing to do with Warren. Nothing at all.

*

Blood Ties

The school yard isn't so different from another she remembers dimly from her own past - girls in uniform, running and falling, tugging hair and playing with jump ropes, it's all familiar. A girl with mousy brown hair and knees that stick out too much sits in one corner, eyes moving over the other children in constant risk assessment, and it could be a vision of her own past if it weren't for the group of friends that surround this girl, laid around her feet like a royal court.

The others would've been surprised, if she'd ever told any of them, to learn that she came from a safe, stable home. Parents married for twenty years, three kids and a dog, good schools and pony riding lessons from the age of four. But her pony club friends had grown up, and she along with them, until one day Marianne brought along a book she'd found and they'd decided to form a coven.

The others, they'd been playing. Meg hadn't.

She left home at fifteen, packing a bag one day, patchouli and hair dye, and sleeping in the filth of the floor of her dealer's house. One night at a party she'd met a guy who showed her just how much fun magic could be, waking up two days later in New Jersey with a group of strangers and a tattoo across her left shoulder.

The guy, she was never really sure of his name, he gave her whatever she needed, and months passed in seconds. She doesn't remember turning sixteen, doesn't remember heading across the border to a new squat in New York, sure doesn't remember getting pregnant. There are moments, brief black-and-white pictures like movie stills, but those can't be her life. They just can't.

She remembers a hospital room, white and screaming, and a tiny grey-skinned creature held in front of her face by a well-meaning nurse. She remembers turning away, and she remembers signing forms handed to her by a social worker. After that, she just asked for more drugs and the walls blurred into a field of flowers.

When she left the hospital, one small canvas bag tucked under her arm, the guy was long gone. She was alone, and every step made her legs ache.

It didn't take long to hook up with a new crew - New York crawled with users, both magical and more mundane - and her life moved on.

Sometimes she looks at Tucker and wonders if he'd just dump her at a hospital too. But the nurses had told her softly, as she lay staring at the dirty ceiling of the public ward, that she couldn't have any more children, so it didn't really matter.

She reaches up and curls her fingers around the wire of the chain-linked fence as a teacher calls the girls back into their lessons. The mousy child from the corner, not more than eight or nine, stands imperially and strides across the yard to her classroom, her posse following her every move.

Tucker appears around the corner, looking as out of place as he always does in daylight, cigarette in his mouth and hands deep in his jeans pockets. Meg turns away from the children, leaning back against the fence and drawing her knee up so one booted foot presses back against the wire. She wonders what they called her daughter.

"So?" Tucker says, stopping just out of her space and taking one final drag on the cigarette before flicking it into the school's yard. "You done with .. whatever?"

He never asks. Meg doesn't know if it's because he knows, or because he doesn't care.

She nods, and with one final glance back over her shoulder, they leave the alleyway behind the school.

"Hit me, for fuck's sake," she says, as soon as they're out of earshot of the children, and after that life once again becomes peacefully blurry, for a little while.

*