I wrote this last summer, but I wasn't particularly happy with it then, so I left it. Coming back to it, I'm still not especially, but I figure it's as good as it's going to get, and there's hardly any fic for this pairing anyway.
It wasn't a bad room: bigger than the one he'd had on the Queen's Corsair and lighter; better for drawing. But the window refused to budge more than a couple of inches, so it was hot and humid, and it was never long until sweat started pooling at all the sharp junctions of his body. The worst was at his fingertips, often getting to the point when his pencils slipped through his hands over and over until he had to give up for the moment.
But there was not much else to do while trying to avoid people. To his shame, Seb had found himself afraid of the suspicious Market folk, who had far from forgotten his part in an earlier attack, not to mention Nick Ryves the demon, who had once kind of hung around with him, and even Jamie.
It would have been easier if Jamie had still been avoiding him. But he always seemed determined to do the opposite of what Seb wanted, wearing lavender shirts when Seb was looking for a reasonable excuse to leave him alone, or spelling the door shut whenever Seb came to talk to him. And apparently when Seb wanted to stay away from him, Jamie was everywhere: brushing past him unnecessarily close for the wide corridor, or sprawling out, catlike, in a large armchair with enough room for two, granting Seb constant easy dimpled smiles.
Maybe it would have been easier if he didn't have the memory of Jamie being kinder than Seb deserved, or Jamie's mouth against his, open in shock for one brief press of lips until Jamie jumped back like he'd been stung, like there was little worse than Seb wanting him in any way at all, like there were few people worse than Seb for a boy who was friends with a demon. Either way, it was maddening.
Everything in Seb's life had seemed reversed for a while, Jamie's contemptuous comments mirroring the ones Seb had once spat out at him, so it seemed perversely logical that Jamie would be knocking on his door like heartless echo when Seb had nothing to say to him at all.
"It's open," he made himself call out because he was not so secretly a masochist and kind of always wanted to talk to Jamie.
"Hey," said the boy of his dreams, with a characteristically crooked smile that made Seb's heart skip a couple of beats. "Is this a bad time?"
"It's fine," Seb answered, looking down at his sketchbook to avoid staring at Jamie. Celeste had been right: he really should have given up on this long ago, but he didn't know how, couldn't stop himself from wanting and hoping and loathing himself for it, all in a vicious, tangled cycle that hurt him ore every day.
It didn't help to know that the only way he could ever have Jamie was as part of a pretence, or something as momentary as pushing him out of the way of a shower of falling glass shards, Jamie's body warm and firm and familiar from a thousand furtive looks underneath him, and hearing Jamie sneer, I don't want anything from you.
But he had, in the end, or at least agreed to give something in return for a faithful slave. That wasn't much better, but Seb had been so desperate; miserable, useless and as alone as ever, and he had wanted Jamie too much.
He was paying for it now, when every conversation they had was more loaded than ever, making previous hate seem like common pleasantries exchanged upon an unexpected meeting on a street corner.
However, he had never been able to look away from Jamie for long, so he still saw the other boy look hesitantly at him and then down onto the floor, and finally at the door, which closed shut with a tired he marched over to Seb's bed with an assurance Seb had wanted, shuffling across a messy wagon to perch by Jamie's feet, I hate you, running through his mind and his heart practically tearing apart his throat, and sat down.
Seb couldn't bear to look away then; Jamie Crawford leaning back on Seb's bed like he belonged there outside of Seb's imagination and tiny, hurried drawings hidden away where no one would ever find them.
"What are you drawing? Can I see?" Jamie asked, already leaning forward.
Following someone around and drawing silly little pictures is so unappealing, Jamie's voice snarled in Seb's head. "Just, um, general stuff. The house," he stammered out, blushing. "There are some interesting things around here. Antiques." He was pretty sure this sketchbook didn't have any pictures of Jamie, but he was hesitant to show it to anyone anyway. Keeping his art a secret was a hard habit to break. "It's not finished yet."
"There are vials of human blood in the cellar," said Jamie flatly. He did not even sound surprised. Then he smiled, a little crooked and too fond for it to be anything but Seb's imagination. "All your drawings are amazing."
"They're really not," Seb said, cheeks burning. "The bone sculptures are interesting, though. Original."
"So, you actually like the creepy decorations," Jamie commented, laughing slightly. "Perfectly normal." Seb couldn't stop himself from smiling down at him, with just a hint of nostalgia for something he'd never truly had. He looked happy, though even paler than usual, like hate or the general atmosphere had seeped all the pigment from his skin; the only colour on his face the warmth of his eyes and the startling lines of the demon's mark. "Actually, I hate this house." Actually, I just hate you.
"Too many bad memories?" Seb ventured, who couldn't shake them off. He could hear the sound of his own heartbeat, loud and steady in his ears, reverberating like the sound of the beach supposedly hidden in seashells.
Before he'd joined the Circle, Seb's family – his real family – used to go to the beach for a week every year. It was the only time of the year they actually seemed relatively happy; the only time his mother wasn't drunk and his father doped up.
He didn't remember any loud shells, but then he couldn't remember ever being truly happy either. He wondered whether he had ever really been, or if he had always kept on wanting unreasonable things, like proper pencils, an actual family to belong with, or people he could never hope to have.
Or maybe he had always been just a parasite, feeding off power and emotion and want, and deals made with boys who couldn't possibly care, just like any other magician.
Maybe Gerald had been right all along; maybe power was all they had, all they actually wanted. Maybe they just disguised it as other desires in shame, to deceive their own selves.
Seb used to think that he knew himself inside out, that there was nothing he thought or did that could ever surprise him.
He hadn't known anything at all.
You're so jealous of me you can't stand it, something that should not even have been able to talk had told him once. Yes, he had thought then, though he didn't think he would ever want to swap lives with Nick Ryves.
."Yes," Jamie answered. He looked comfortable there, on Seb's bed, in Seb's room, Seb's life, but if it involves you and me in a room together, you can be pretty sure it's not my idea. "I keep thinking Gerald will come around the corner, or Black Arthur."
"Jamie," he said slowly, wrapping his tongue carefully around the word, as if that made it any more real, gave him any more right to reassure Jamie of anything, "they're dead."
"Technically, Gerald's possessed. We don't know how long he'll last."
"But he won't be bothering us," Seb reminded him. "It's safe."
"Not from the other Circles, though."
"Haven't you laid down the stones?" he asked Jamie, who gave a tight, unhappy smile.
"I don't know whether they'll work against all those who left," Jamie explained, "Like Laura."
"She was pretty devoted to Gerald," Seb agreed. I'm still pretty devoted to you.
"He had a way of making people like him," said Jamie quietly, looking down as if Seb's bedspread had suddenly become so much more interesting. "I'm sorry."
"For Gerald?" he asked hesitantly.
Jamie shook his head, looking up at him again. His eyes were like black holes in his head, and for a second Seb panicked, drawn into them with a sick breathlessness until he realised that they looked too alive for his fears to be true. "For doing what Gerald did to me to you."
Jamie and Gerald? "I didn't do anything I wouldn't have, anyway."
"But you could have - "
Seb cut him off. "I think you're overestimating the effect my feelings have on my actions," he lied, want still thrumming through his veins like illicit alcohol, and tried not feel regretful about it.
"Oh," said Jamie softly, and then he was looking at Seb with a sudden, terrible awareness written all over his face, and Seb felt his heart plummet because Jamie finding out things about him had never gone well for Seb in the past.
"It's alright," he said, trying to put Jamie off, because if anyone was at fault when it came to that bargain it was him, for wanting it too much and being too weak not to take what he knew Jamie could never have truly meant. "I told you, it doesn't matter."
Jamie reached out then, his one remaining hand hovering hesitantly over Seb's for a minute before he laid it down. The warmth of his touch was a shock, jolting Seb enough to make him look up at Jamie again, half-expecting, half-dreading, but Jamie didn't say anything.
They sat like that for a while, Seb's heart in his throat no matter how much he tried to choke it down. He tried to force himself to breathe normally, but his thoughts were a mess, running over each other each other like hopelessly tangled strings.
"Come with me to the next Market night," Jamie said suddenly, but Seb couldn't do anything but stare blankly at him, tongue-tied.
"Um, sure," he said finally, feeling blank and fuzzy and not quite real.
Jamie smiled, warm and impossibly bright, in a way Seb had wanted directed at him for so long. He smiled with his whole eyes lighting up, and his lips stretching wide across a slightly flushed face.
It made Seb wondered how the rest of the Circle had been taken in so easily, until he remembered Jamie's fingers curling mockingly over his wrist until Seb had caught his breath, and shuddered.
"What?" asked the boy with an abundance of power, even if his eyes no longer shone with it.
"It doesn't matter," Seb answered, because he had deserved it for everything he had done back at school when Jamie was just an alluring, deliberately provoking boy who came in wearing bright, girly shirts and was secretly powerful enough to have blasted them all to smithereens.
He had known, though, even then, could feel it deep down in his bones, a sharp and painfully insistent pang, like finally discovering someone who breathed air just like you, surrounded by the faint shadows of those still stuck underwater, choking beneath the waves on cold seawater, and having them take your breath away by virtue of something you couldn't hope to understand, fourteen years old and staring at a boy.
It felt like hope, crushing and eternal, the last exhale of a broken breath, like power thrumming through his veins and the temporary illusion of being absolutely invincible.
Maybe this time, it could last.