AN: to kick off nine months of pining...

Rest the Savage Day

The god Nereus' week-long festival is a massive fish fry-up: mongers have hauled in high season, and stalls overflow the bazaar, carts and barrels tendrilling into side streets like roots. Below, a boy whose voice has not yet deepened screeches like a gull, advertising sardines. Atlantis reeks fish. Air oils Jason's skin when he stills, stink clinging in his nose with no salt to push it away. Hopefully night will bring respite; dusks have become livelier this week, carrying the chill and rot of ocean farther inland, and Jason ties the shutters open for the breeze.

Jason steps onto the balcony where he has set a jar of honey to run thin in the heat. The sun has been up for a couple hours: just above the line of the roof, and meat is in full decay and flies in full buzz. The boy below will go hoarse within the hour. He lifts the linen from the jar's top and swirls the honey. Sun fingers the trapezes of his shoulders, sinking heat through his shirt. The honey is viscous. He should have set a larger pot out at dawn rather than wait on these little as-needed batches. He knocks a horsefly from its path.

A cough bursts harsh as a slammed door (Jason's eyes flinch shut), then a whoop, a hack, a thin whoop, a hack, a wheeze. Jason hides in the black, but breathing settles into waves grating over sand. His eyes feel stretched; he splits them and lines blur at the blaze, eyes weaker in their weariness. He blinks into focus the washing that the woman in the flat across has strung over the line between buildings, quadrilaterals of faded reds and blues and browns.

Jason sighs. Dead fish sour the inhale. The honey will have to do; he retreats from the stinking weight into their home. Dark now, his eyes adjust while he tips honey into hot sheep milk. A small part of his mind is devoted to listening to the wave-breathing: it would be soothing if not for the crackle of sickness; for now, its presence stalls panic. He scalded the milk a bit, but they cannot afford to dump it. It barely steams in the day's scorch.

With the shallow dish in both hands, he does not knock. Nudging the curtain aside with his shoulder, he says with the obnoxious brightness of the sun, 'This air is foul.'

Pythagoras is twisted in bed, one foot hung sole-up over the end and his head over the side, a hand clamped around the side board of the frame. His long fingers hook over the bottom. He rasps, and the sea-rhythm evaporates. (Steady, Jason tells that part of his mind.) 'You get used to it.'

Jason kneels, setting the bowl on the floor. 'Need a hand?'

'No, no.' He heaves onto his back. Hair is pasted behind his ears and sticks weird from his forehead; damp darkens it brown. A breath clatters like dragging a nail down the slats of a shutter—Jason's hands half-lift, but it steadies. Pythagoras opens his eyes, shining bright as fish scales, and they find Jason's. 'You shouldn't be here still.'

Jason closed the shutters at dawn, but sun still stripes through. Pythagoras no doubt tells the time by the angles of light-lines and wall. Jason says, 'I've brought more milk.'

With two fingers, Pythagoras pokes Jason's shoulder. 'Go to work.'

'Sit up.'

'Jason.' One end of his mouth curves and falls. 'I will last.' Another prod; his hand catches the neck of Jason's tunic during its drop. 'You need to eat. You need money to eat.' He swallows. 'You need work to—'

'Hush, you,' Jason says, returning the hand to the bed. The blanket, striped white-blue like high waves, skews across legs and over the side. 'You'll set yourself off, if you keep nattering.'

'But—'

Jason drops his palm over his mouth but does not clamp—that would interfere with breathing. Pythagoras' eyes widen and he pushes at Jason's wrist, but it is like a nudge of tide. Still, Jason sits on the bed, bowl in his lap (listen: each sush), and says, 'Don't worry about me. I've got things sorted.' Well. Not showing up at the construction site is message enough; he'll beg for his spot back tomorrow (hopefully tomorrow. Optimistically). 'Now sit up.'

He balances the bowl between his knees, but Pythagoras clips, 'I can manage.' It is the kind of pride that goes rigid when tested; Jason lets him rise unaided, though he snakes an arm behind to tilt the pillows (all three of theirs) steep. Pythagoras sinks back and says, 'Thank you.'

His tunic is navy under his arms. Fish-oil air precipitates acid in Jason's gut, but in here—there is a tang under his tongue. Passing over the bowl, he breathes honey into his sinuses. 'Here. You're sure there's nothing more I can do?'

Pythagoras shakes his head, winces. 'No.' He rasps like saws. 'Too much already.'

'Pythagoras.' He frowns, recognising the prelude to an apology—in the past day he has heard more sorrys than the sum of the month. Pythagoras focuses on the bowl and slurps. Jason tugs the blanket free and shakes it out. 'Hercules is at work. It'll keep us fed.'

Pythagoras blinks over the rim, then lowers it. He quirks humour. 'Hercules, an honest day's work? I must be dying.'

It'd be funny if the world wasn't rotting. Jason forces a smile. 'The world's ending, actually.' Pythagoras lifts the bowl, the white shivering circles; Jason starts to reach out, then retracts. Instead he turns, blanket folded in half, and lays it across Pythagoras' legs and feet. It will keep them fed for another couple days, but their labour gigs are nearly up. And honey is costly.

Pythagoras sighs. 'Thank you. It does wonders.' He swallows and does not flinch as if struck. Jason takes the bowl. Still half-full, and only a half-pint to begin with, but he knows better than to fuss over little things.

'I'm glad it helps.' The light is drifting near, striping Jason's feet gold.

Pythagoras exhales, soft and nearly normal. He settles lower in the pillows, and murmurs, 'I'm sorry. I kept you awake.'

'Pythagoras,' he chides. He sets the bowl on the floor. Pythagoras blinks, blue and gleaming as faience. Jason says, spine straight, 'You are ill. Stop apologising for it.'

His bouts of coughing came regular as tides and far more often: every hour, waves of them, until Jason gave up returning to bed and dragged his blankets in to lie on the floor. His presence made no real difference, but he hated feigning unconcern with a curtain between, even if Pythagoras did waste so much breath begging him to go back to bed, to not fuss, to ignore.

Pythagoras has dozed off, or at least acts it. This is the salt-sweat lull in fever, treading the shallows of drowning lungs. Jason scowls, nudging the bowl with a toe to watch the surface shudder. Honeyed milk is no cure.

He goes days with no thought of modernity, an alternate life he barely fathoms. But sometimes reminders strike him ringing like a pan to the head: this is one. In one half-dream last night, he'd planned to get a cab to A&E. Antibiotics, he'd thought. That's all it'd take, a few days. Jason's exposed himself, though he's long wondered at his thick skin: he can count childhood illnesses on one hand, and none warranted hospital. Mac once called it unnatural.

Pythagoras slurs, eyes half-shut to semicircle irises, 'You are t'kind.' This breath drags fingers through a gravel beach. His eyes shut fully, but his voice is strained: 'Ill a lot, I'm afraid. Runty child.' Air chafes down his throat. 'Gave me time to study.' Pain etches two arcs on his face, rippled from the corners of his mouth. Smiles do the same but also push crescents under his eyes.

It was a short respite. Jason says, 'This is no fault of yours.' It is the price of last week's heroism: Jason dragged dazed into the sea by a water-nymph, and Pythagoras hauled them dripping to the shore, sand pasted in their toes and clothes clung like kelp. The return took hours in the night, muscles stiffened cold, Jason's teeth chattering thanks. Pythagoras carried the ocean in his lungs.

Pythagoras does not bother answering. Jason says, 'Want some more? I can reheat it.'

Pythagoras' face twists, eyes still shut. On an exhale: 'Thank you, but no.' Last night, he coughed so hard spasms spread to his gut to end in dry heaves. Jason lays a palm on the side of his neck, but at the brush Pythagoras flinches aside, eyes slit and torso jerks—Jason grabs his shoulder, afraid he might scramble right off the edge, and says, 'Sorry! Pythagoras. Don't mo—' but it catches something, and he lurches up coughing. Jason wraps an arm around back ribs, the other still at the tip of a scapula wing, and Pythagoras whoop-coughs, caving like punches to the gut (one, two, three—), and Jason shuts his eyes again (coward, coward) while Pythagoras' hands fist the back of his shirt below shoulder blades. By the time he settles, jaw on Jason's shoulder, Jason has cursed the name of every god(dess) of healing he has picked up (admittedly few), and prayed to them in turn, and wished for a bottle of penicillin to wash up on the shore. (Can he not just eat mouldy bread?)

He breathes in salt-sweat and rot and fish and death, like low tide. The boy squawks below: sardines, best price in Atlantis, salted sardines, Thera's finest! A donkey brays. Pythagoras drags air to the bottom of his lungs, rattling pots against each other. He wheezes, 'Sorry.'

Jason's hand drifts up his spine, and it rises-and-falls with breathing. 'What have I said about apologising?' Pythagoras hums, but it skims high as a whine. Jason adds, 'I didn't mean to startle you. I should know better.'

'I should not startle at all,' he rasps. 'Sorry, Jason. I was... nearly asleep. That is all.'

His hands release Jason's shirt, bunched so it pulled at his armpits. When he lifts his head, Jason's arm stiffens against his back to hold him still. 'Your breathing is better this way. Is it uncomfortable?'

'No.' He still unwinds his arms, braces on Jason's plexus to push back. In, out, in, out. Days of sickness have given him breath of soured sugar; Jason bunches his nose, and the fever-pink on Pythagoras' cheeks mottles. Jason grins. 'You need the baths.'

'You need sleep.' He thumbs an arc under Jason's left eye. In, out. 'You have semicircles.'

Pythagoras' hair is kinked wild-angled. With eyes big as sea dollars and a neck knotted with veins and trachea ridges, he looks a human incomplete—the last layer, the sanding, the varnish all scraped away. Jason's hand spans furrows between ribs, his forearm poked by a vertebra peak. Eyes holding Pythagoras', Jason lays his free hand on his neck, over the muscle strung between clavicle and ear. This time there is no panic. He presses fingertips against the vein and counts. Quick, as are shallow cuts of air, darts of his pupils, swallows, light flowing across the floor. Each wave of blood, Jason counts. Even inside, heat has begun to weigh: he removes his fingers and the skin shines brighter there.

'I'm going nowhere,' Jason tells the angle of shoulder and neck. 'If it helps at all, stay like this.' He presses, ever so faint, against his back. The spine just goes rigid.

'I could not,' he whispers. His mouth is dull, scabbed at the lower corner. 'I am fine with pillows.' This time, the lines appear with those beneath his eyes: a smile. 'I have never been so spoiled.'

Jason matches the grin, and says, 'It's nothing. Gets me out of hauling stone for a day.'

Pythagoras' eyebrows rise at the false excuse. He flops back, and his whole body scrunches at the shock of pain: face twisted into spirals, knees pulled up into triangles, arms lifted—Jason snags his hands and tugs him right back up. 'Breathe, Pythagoras. It's okay. Not too deep.' Miraculously, there are only two weak coughs.

'Maybe not,' Pythagoras whispers into his neck. Jason huffs and hoists his feet onto the bed, toes tucked under the pillows: he and Pythagoras meet at the hip.

He hears breaths, measures their depth. Life rankles obnoxious outside; he traces whorls in the walls to soothe his prickling skin. Pythagoras settles one muscle at a time. Jason murmurs, 'Try to sleep.'

'No, no,' he whispers. 'Just until—I can lie down, I promise.'

'Pythagoras.' So much chiding. Jason props his chin on the ridge of his scapula. 'I am perfectly happy not moving. Actually, here, if it will make you stop fretting: Don't move. It would massively inconvenience me.' He taptaptaps a fingertip on his spine. 'It would disturb my rest.'

Pythagoras chokes down his laugh (it would spark another fit), and it shimmers down the muscles of his back. 'As you wish.'

Bars of sunlight have slid onto the bed, fingers creeping over Pythagoras' tunic and Jason's elbow. Jason says, soft as smoke, 'You will get better.'

Pythagoras has already drifted out of waking. Though Jason's own words, they do not reassure; his heart quickens as if to pump the blood of two. Below someone shouts, Oi! Look where you go! Then, to his surprise, scraping like sand dried to skin: 'There was—before, I would be relieved, to be let alone. In peace, so I thought. I am glad for your faith.'

Such stuttering thanks. Jason cannot help but say, 'Sleep. I'm here if you need anything.'

This time, his breathing steadies like the sea after a storm. Jason, wrapped around him, finds his own eyes sinking into depth, cool and dim. He drifts, and the savage day lingers on the shore.

End