HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Thanks to: Shadow914, P.S. Sword, 6000j and Hartemis Shipper (times a dozen, welcome along. And if you're worried about The Major dying at any point, go read Dead in Absentia, I fixed that little issue ;] )
WARNINGS: Long chapter. Could've been two short ones but there was an even enough break. So here you go, if you can make it through it. Contains. Gruff!Fluff and some explanations. Sort of. Also, Theresa making Myles awkward. Because that's always fun for you guys to read (sorry Mylo).
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AWAKENING
Definitions: 1) Rising from sleep 2) Taking on new knowledge which changes one's opinion on a matter
Fowl Manor, Dublin
When he awoke, quite some hours later, and his eyes flickered open, he was pleasantly surprised to see the familiar ceiling of his own room, rather than that of a hospital.
Wait…
He had been in hospital?
Yes.
His head felt like it was trapped between a vice. There was a strange ringing in his ears he would normally associate with an explosion.
Was there was an explosion?
No.
Couple of bullet wounds, that was it.
Yes.
He closed his eyes as the ringing intensified. He felt almost as though his thoughts were not his own. Which was ridiculous. Who else's would be in his head?
But he did remember being shot…
Not 'a couple' of bullets – it was seven…
No.
Miraculous he wasn't more seriously injured, actually…
I was!
No.
The hospital must have let him out in time for New Year.
Yes.
They didn't! I…
The ringing in his ears intensified and his mind raced to find a solution; to make it stop.
Why was he here?
Wait.
The hospital had let him out, right? Hadn't they?
Yes.
Here he was, at the manor, after all…
Yes.
That must have been it.
Right?
Wrong...
He scowled, squeezing his forehead in one hand.
He must have had some sort of head injury to be this confused, surely?
He couldn't focus on anything beyond his immediate position.
Although it'd be easier to think without this damn headache…
Head injury. Definitely.
Going with that excuse, he sat up slowly. On his bedside table there was a note, handwritten in blocky capitals.
MY BOY,
WE HOPE YOU SLEPT WELL.
WHEN YOU'RE READY, COME AND FIND US.
I HAVE CLEARED YOU TO STAY HOME BUT YOU ARE OFF DUTY UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE – THIS IS A NON-NEGOTIABLE CONDITION OF YOUR RETURN.
TAKE IT EASY ON THE STAIRS!
PA & MA
This is bizarre, he thought.
It was as though he had been transported back in time. He tried to remember the last time his father had left him a note and signed it off from both his parents.
His brain wouldn't even focus on that concept.
Why was his mother here?
Why did he need clearance to stay home?
Why did his father feel the need to use a five syllable hyphenation when he clearly knew full well what his mental state would be when he woke up?
All of these were vague considerations in his head, overlayed by a more prudent wondering:
What the hell had his mother put in his tea?
Their tea, he remembered, all thoughts of what had landed him in hospital – or got him out of it – fading from his mind as he swung his legs off the bed and began to contemplate getting up. Although doubtless Theresa and Bates, with their much lower tolerance for Maud Butler's concoctions, would be asleep a fair few hours more.
He yawned and stretched, halting in a preemptive wince before his arms reached their full wingspan. But the crippling pain stayed vanished.
Wait.
What pain?
It was though it was a memory of a memory he could not quite grasp and the more he tried, the less he could hold it. He was teetering on the edge of recall, like snatching at a dream in the few seconds after you wake up.
But he was a rational man. And the rational explanation here, was very clear:
Bloody drugs.
He dressed casually – he was off duty, after all. Apparently.
Quite the rarity.
The corridor was empty and quiet. He decided the most likely location for his parents at this late hour of the morning and his feet took him automatically to the stairs. But as he reached them, he snatched at the handrail at the top, breathing out deeply before he took the first step as a wave of vertigo hit him; not a useful condition when one's head already hovered some seven foot in the air.
"I didn't expect to see you up yet."
He opened his eyes. It was his father, stood at the bottom of the flight, looking up at him.
"Well, I like to…" he took the second step, then the third without hesitation. "Exceed expectations."
He made a solid effort at making the rest of the descent looked controlled and casual, but the last step almost broke the façade. His father's hand was on his elbow before his massive frame could fully unbalance.
"If you didn't expect me to be up yet, then why were you waiting for me?" Myles grumbled, pulling away the moment his vestibular system was back online with the gradient of the ground floor.
"Because, my son, I know you," Xandr sighed, folding his arms. "How do you feel?"
"Fine," he stated stoutly.
"How do you feel, Myles?" came the firmer repetition.
He'd asked that before.
Days ago?
A lifetime ago.
When his body was wracked with a torment of pain.
How do you feel?
Like shit.
Obviously. Specifics?
The specifics were a multitude of fractures and bullet holes, organ damage, nerve damage. Some of it definitely permanent. Life-changingly, career-endingly, definitely permanent…. right?
No.
"Confused," he settled on.
His father's lack of response told him he wanted to hear more.
"I've got… some memory loss, I think," he admitted, hesitantly.
"What makes you think that?" Alexandr asked, gesturing for his son to follow him to the staff kitchen.
"I don't know. I just keep having these… blocks. Like my brain is rerouting around potholes. Only when I stop and look down into them, I just see myself reflected back."
"Very artily put. You should write poetry," Xandr said, amused. "Are you sure it's not just the effects of whatever your mother put in your tea?"
"If it is, she's using something new," Myles frowned, ignoring the jibe. He and Beckett had uncovered as teenagers that their father himself was prone to the odd piece of creative writing. "I've never had psych-effects this bad before."
"Ah, you know her; she's always developing some thing or other," his father shrugged.
Myles 'hmmed', unconvinced.
"Where is she?"
"Your mum? Out in the gardens," Xandr told him. "Harvesting for her next trick, most likely. You know she uses the grounds to plant things she wants growing correctly. Brew?"
"Only if it doesn't happen to be Mother's 'next trick'," he muttered, sitting down at the wooden table.
He traced his finger around the water-ring Bates' mug had left earlier, the thought of Bates bringing yet more flashes of disjointed images…
"Myles?"
He opened his eyes with a sharp inhale, as though his father's voice had lifted him out of a pool of water, rather than her memories.
"Let it go, syn."
"Let what go?" he scowled.
"You know what. Some things…" he paused, sighing as he looked out of the window. "Some things are better left unexplained."
"I don't like unexplained things," he said, sullenly.
"I know. But do you trust me?"
"What?" he scoffed. "Of course I…"
"Do you trust me, Myles?" his father said, turning his steely eyes on his youngest son. "Completely?"
Myles thought. His father had raised him from birth. He had nurtured him, guided him, chastised him, trained him. He had taken bullets for him. And taught him to take bullets for others.
"Of course I do," he said at last. "With my life. With everything."
"Then let it go," he said, leaning back on the counter.
Myles took a breath. This wasn't something he could just ignore…
He stood, somewhat stiffly and followed his father's previous gaze out of the window. Although he already knew what the outcome would be if he pressed his mother for an answer.
"What's bothering you the most?" Xandr said, holding out the mug for Myles to take.
"I just don't understand…"
"Incoming," Xandr mused aloud, pulling the mug back out of reach.
"What?" he frowned, eyeing the removed tea as though it had suddenly occurred to his father that it, too, was drugged.
"I said…" the older man began to repeat, inclining his head at the door to the hallway beyond.
Myles turned, but by then it was too late to do anything but stand and bear the brunt of the attack.
A streak of untameable energy flew through the kitchen door at high speed and leapt into the air from a distance of about five feet, attaching itself around his neck with wiry arms, burying its face in his chest.
Oh. That kind of 'incoming'.
"Hey, kiddo," he said, with a sigh and an exasperated glance over his shoulder at his father. Their conversation would have to wait. Resisting the urge to shrug his nephew gently to the floor, he threw his arms around his back and instead drew him closer to his broad chest. The boy's fingers wound into his shirt, tightly as he buried his face into the cotton.
"I knew you'd come back," he mumbled, voice cracking from lack of use and the emotion strangling his throat. "I wished it. I mean, I knew you'd be ok… but I wished it anyway… and… and…"
He knew, even at that age, that he couldn't ask for an impossible promise; that he'd never leave him like that again, that he'd never put himself in that much danger, that he'd never scare him like that again. It was his job. It would be this boy's job too, one day.
"Hush," his uncle said, softly, when he crumpled into a hitched-breathed silence instead. "Easy, easy there. It's alright; I'm here. I'm here now and…"
He glanced back at his father again, who smiled gently at them.
He couldn't promise he'd never leave again. He couldn't promise not to get shot or injured. But that didn't matter. Right now, mattered.
"I'm here now and I gotcha," he murmured into his thick head of hair. "I've got you, Dom."
And although he didn't say the words, that was as much of an 'I love you' as the boy ever needed to hear.
Servant's Quarters Sitting Room, Fowl Manor, Dublin
"So is your mother Russian, then?" she asked.
"Mum?" Myles said, the word sounding strange out of his mouth. "No, no. She just speaks it. Learnt it so she could talk to Pa's side of the family. Not that they don't speak English, obviously."
"Oh right."
They were sat in one of the many, lesser-used sitting rooms, dedicated to the staff of the manor. Earlier in the night, they had been sitting with the three generations of Butlers and Theresa. It had been a nice evening. Pa had told war stories, his wife had corrected the more exaggerated details mercilessly, Dom had listened in awe and Myles had chipped in where the tales involved him and his brother;
"We were three actually, when you had us crawling through air vents – at four we would have been too big."
"Three, four – whichever," Maud Butler waved his comments away. "You were small. And ultimately more useful."
"Useful for laying toxic gas cannisters into ventilation systems, perhaps – but four-year-old me couldn't exactly hold a gun!"
"Four-year-old you didn't ever get himself shot, either," she told him with a tut. "Besides, both you and Beckett were handling weaponry before you could hold a pen - you most certainly picked up a gun before you were four."
"How am I in competition with my infant self?" the bodyguard asked, exasperated.
"Now, now My-boy; you know everything's a competition with your mother," Xandr rumbled, amused.
"Exactly," his wife said with a glance at their grandson who was sat at their feet cleaning a disassembled handgun his grandfather had given him. "You, for example, boy; you're going to beat your dad and uncle's record when you graduate from Ko's, aren't you, my little house demon?"
"Yes, Granny," Dom smiled up at her and she patted his head with something akin to affection.
"Little demon indeed," his uncle grumbled. "Damn right you better beat us. You've got two generations of the best of the best training you, after all."
"Well, if you remind me to visit more often, he will," his mother said with a rare smile. "Now then, Boggart Boy; bedtime. I want you well rested for training at dawn, understood?"
Dom looked a little miffed, but he knew better than to argue with his grandmother. Besides, the promise of a dawn training session was more than enough to chivvy him along to bed. She got up, walking around the back of the sofa and placing her hands on either side of her husband's head, rocking it back to lock eyes with him as she looked down. It looked just short of uncomfortable and it was certainly strange to see the usually guarded man allow his throat to be exposed like that. She murmured something in Russian to him that made him smile in a way that could quite possibly have been described as adoring, had it not been adorning the face of an otherwise terrifying giant.
"Goodnight, My-boy. And you, Autumn-girl," she said, inclining her head to each of them as she left the room.
Theresa felt oddly pleased she had received some sort of nickname from the Butler matriarch and decided to try to fathom the reason behind it later.
"Come on, Kingdom," Xandr said, pushing himself up off the couch cushions with a barely concealed groan of looming joint pain; he was not as young as he once was and all this lugging around half-alive carcasses had taken its toll on him. Although unlike others his age, he would be a fine after a couple more days of stretching and recovery - and perhaps a potion or two from his wife. "Babulya has spoken and we menfolk must do as we're told; that gun is clean enough for now."
Dom scrunched up his face a little, but obediently stopped what he was doing, hands flying across the pieces until the handgun was once again as one; in thirty seconds. He would never falter again – not for as long as he lived. He handed it over almost reverently and Myles was pleased to see he seemed to show no fear of the weapon, despite so recently seeing what it could do close-up.
"Can I stay up for five more minutes with Mam and Uncle?" the youngest Butler said, pleadingly as he offered the weapon over.
"No, no, you're coming with me, ditya," Xandr rumbled as he took the gun with one hand and with the other, grabbed his grandson by the wrist, slinging him upwards so that he could hang from his shoulders like a cape. The boy made a short noise of delighted surprise, all protest at 'bedtime' dropped in favour of a piggy-back ride up the stairs from his grandfather. It had been a favourite of his when he was a few years younger. A rarity now, though. Replaced by more 'proper' behaviours. Theresa smiled at him. Her little boy was growing up too quickly for her liking.
"You two can stay up though, if you like," Alexandr said, as he shrugged Dom higher around his neck. "Half an hour or so, mind."
"Well I'd like to see you carry us up the stairs," Theresa jested.
"Don't tempt me," Xandr chuckled. "I might just have to prove I can."
She laughed and looked to Myles, who shrugged in a way which suggested 'I'm not arguing with him'.
"On a more serious note," the Butler patriarch added. "Myles, you're still off duty – understood? I don't want to see you up until you've had a good eight hours at least. Rest is what you need for now."
Theresa almost chuckled at her giant friend being given a strict sleeping schedule, but she kept her comments to herself. Myles himself sighed.
"If you insist."
"I do. And you, aren't you going to say goodnight, boy?" he prompted, jiggling his grandson's wrists.
"Night Ma, night Uncle," the boy said, albeit somewhat muffled into his grandfather's broad back.
"Night darling, have a lovely sleep," Theresa said, blowing him a kiss.
"And a good training session. You'll have to train for me too, since I'm on enforced bed rest," his uncle added.
"I will," Dom grinned in answer to both of them, as his grandfather ducked him under the doorway.
It had not been a long period of silence before she had started to ask him about his mother and Myles could see Theresa wanted to ask more. But she knew how cagey he could be with information. He sighed, predicting her quest for knowledge once more.
"It's Pa's mother's side that the Russian stuff comes from," he said, by way of explanation. "Obviously the Butler name is predominantly Irish – and that's carried down on the patriarchal side from Gramps and so on – but Babushka has a strong influence on the family. Hence Pa's name. And Dom too, I guess."
"Has? Not had?"
"Well, she's still alive and ruling a small village in rural Russia with an iron fist, so far as I know."
"Jesus, you people are like rocks…" Theresa muttered.
"Genuine iron fist too, actually," he told her, honestly. "She lost a hand saving my great-uncle from a grenade when he was a kid."
"What, was he playing with it?"
"God no," Myles exclaimed. "Someone was trying to kill them. They didn't manage, of course."
"I see," she said, as though that had been the obvious answer. "So what happened with you two getting landed with your names then? They aren't exactly Russian."
He didn't need to ask which 'two' she was referring to. Despite having never seen the pair of them in the same room, Theresa still used terms like that to refer to the Butler twins. Myles wouldn't tell her, but he liked it. It made him feel like Beckett was not so far away as he might be.
"Again; maternal influence," he shrugged. "It would seem we Butler males are only attracted to strong-willed women."
"Apparently so," she smirked, raising an eyebrow. "Although I think that's the nicest way anyone has ever called me a 'stubborn bitch'."
"Well, not all Butler males. I mean, I have a second-cousin who tricked a vicar into marry him and his now-husband, who as far as I hear disguised himself with a wig and a dress and convinced my relative to go along with it."
"Butler ancestors at the forefront of same-sex marriage," Theresa raised an eyebrow. "Who knew, eh? Good on them."
"Not that good, actually. Pretty sure they had to kill a few people for their 'happily ever after' once someone found out. But needs must," Myles shrugged. "Anyway; Butler males and their history of requiring strong guidance from their partners aside, the names come from..."
"So what about you Myles? Bertha keep you inline alright or is that someone else?" Theresa smirked at him.
Don't make me think about my poor Bentley when she's lying under a sheet in the garage waiting for me to come and fix her... And who told you I call her... it... that? Domovoi, you little shit...
"Anyway," he said, coughing to avoiding the awkwardness. "The names are of British origin. Mum's a Brit. Probably explains a lot."
"English?"
"A mix, as far as I know, but essentially, yeah."
"I thought the English were a bit more..." she waved her hand in an approximation of the 'royal wave'. "You know - posh and stuck up."
"Have you met The Queen?" Myles asked her, raising a brow.
"No – surprisingly, I haven't," Theresa scoffed and then paused; "Wait, have you?"
"I'm not suppose to disclose that information," he said with a haughty sniff. "But apparently she's quite the badass."
"Myles! You can't call The Queen a badass!"
"Just did," he shrugged.
"Right," she snorted. "So your mum is basically like The Queen."
"Well, she's definitely a badass who rules the roost, for a start."
Theresa smiled, punching him on the arm. He gave a dramatic wince and she shook her head.
"I missed you, you prat."
"Of course you did," Myles drawled, cockily. "I'm a big part of your life."
"Well you're a great big something," she said.
"Yeah; idiot, if what you tell me so often is the truth," he mused.
"Yes, well you are," she told him. "A complete idiot. Don't you ever do something like this…"
She gestured roughly at his torso in several stabbing motions with her forefinger.
"… to me ever again, alright?"
"Ah-ah," he warned. "Come on, now. You know I have no way of promising that."
"I know, just…" she sighed. "Just be careful. Alright?"
"I was!" he protested. "If I hadn't have been, I wouldn't be sitting here now!"
"I don't know how you are, to be honest," she admitted. "And every time I start trying to think I…"
"You get it too," Myles said, looking up at her sharply. "The buzzing. And the h…"
He paused, scowling as at even the notion of the word, the pressure began building in his cranium.
"The headache. Yep."
"I don't know what it is. I don't like it."
"Did you speak to Pa about it?"
"Of course. He just said to let it go."
"Same thing as he said to me," she said, frowning. "I thought it was pretty odd. Not like him to let anything go, is it?"
"I think it's orders from Mamochka, to be honest."
"Your mother?"
"Yes. She's being… cagey. Cagier than usual, I mean. Obviously I think the world of the woman, but there's a reason me and Beckett found following orders from Ko so easy."
"She hasn't really spoken to me," Theresa admitted.
"Oh she won't," Myles shrugged. "Don't worry about it."
"But I do – what if I don't give a good impression or something?" Theresa said, worriedly. "I want her to like me."
"She does," Myles said simply.
"She's told you that?"
"Well, it's obvious really; you're not dead."
Theresa laughed but then stopped.
"You're serious?"
"Well… she'd have probably have given us some fair warning to get rid of you less permanently," he said, rubbing his hands over his freshly shaved skull. It had been something he had made a priority of. It made him feel ready for anything again. At least he looked like he was. Besides, The Fowls had been surprised enough at his appearance at the manor, they didn't need to be alarmed by the appearance of him too.
"But you think she likes me? What's she said about me?"
Myles paused his hands halfway down his face. "Trust me – she thinks you're ok."
"Oh come on Mylo, you can tell me! You know I won't get offended or anything," she laughed. "She thinks I should work out more and learn Russian better, right?"
"Well, that too…" he said, keen to steer the conversation away. "She gave you a nickname, didn't she?"
"Yeah, why is that? What's autumn got to do with me? I mean, I don't mind, I'm just curious."
"Have you ever looked up the origin of your name, or the meaning? It'll be something to do with that. She's into her etymology and so on."
"And what else did she say about me?" Theresa said, relentless and unswerving as always.
"Ah… I don't remember. Something about thinking you weren't bad, anyway."
"Oh come on My-my – tell me!"
"Urgh – don't call me that," he scoffed. "Where've you got that from? Mum only ever really calls me 'Soldier' and 'My-boy' like Pa."
"Well I heard your mother call Pa Xan-xan, the other day."
"Hmm. She normally calls him Sasha," he mused. "Or, you know, just 'dolt'."
"Just like I call you idiot or oaf, really."
"Yep."
There was a short pause where Myles (stupidly) dared to hope Theresa had dropped the subject. And then;
"So what did she say about me?"
"Goddamnit alright," he muttered. "She said if…"
He sighed and she rotated her hand encouragingly, amused as always at his awkwardness.
"She said… She said if Beckett doesn't turn up in the next couple of years we should… erm…" he stumbled around the admittance again, then deciding that the longer he took the worse it would get. "Well, you know she likes Dom a lot? She wants another copy. For insurance purposes."
Theresa snorted – although at his embarrassment or her own, Myles wasn't sure.
"And what did you say?!"
"I told her she could fuck off!" he said, hotly.
"Did you really?"
"Does it look like I'm missing an ear?" he asked, sarcastically. "No; of course I didn't actually tell her to fuck off, I just told her that would be weird and she should stop trying to set up a breeding program. Dom is good enough by himself. We're lucky she hasn't kidnapped him actually."
"They do seem to get along," Theresa said. "But she's not having him. Not my boy. Not our boy."
Myles smiled a little despite himself at that. Theresa would 'share' Dom with very few other people in this world and he was honoured to be one of them.
"It's ok – Pa's told her she can't. About the only argument he's won with her in about thirty years, but she's happy so long as Dom goes to Ko's and trains with her. They're quite good friends, actually; Mum and Ko. Not that that's a surprise; if you met Ko, you'd know why."
Theresa made no comment to that. Originally it was always going to be her decision whether or not Dom went to the prestigious Blue Diamond Bodyguarding Academy. But as he got older, she began to realise that if she told him he couldn't go, she would only be pushing her son away in the long run.
She sighed. "Well I'm glad she likes him, I suppose. Wouldn't want my DNA to have negatively diluted your gene pool."
"Oh no, like I say she loves the kid. As much as she does 'love', anyway. Says he's a perfect mix of me and Beckett – take from that what you will."
"Imagine an experiment where that worked out. A couple of centuries from now we could have some clones of the pair of you."
"Well why not?" he smirked. "Can't improve on perfection; may as well just repeat it."
"Idiot," she said, rolling her eyes.
"Besides, we are just natural clones; technically," Myles continued. "Our genetic material is identical. I'm not sure you can clone… whatever is on the inside that makes your personality."
"Souls, Myles. 'Souls', is the word you're looking for."
"Alright then, souls," Myles shrugged. Theresa was usually more scientifically-minded than spiritual, but beliefs were complicated things, he supposed.
"Do you believe in that?"
"'Resa, I just basically woke up from the dead. And not only that, as much as Pa frets; pretty much fully functional. I don't know what to believe in anymore."
"Dom said something to me…" she started.
"Go on?"
"He told me you were dying. Before you came home, I mean."
"I thought he wasn't speaking whilst I was... you know, away."
"Well, no. He drew a picture. It's here somewhere..."
She rootled in her long, cardigan pocket and produced a carefully folded piece of paper, flattening it out to reveal a crayoned drawing and handing it to him.
Myles physically leaned back at the sight of it.
It was of two identical stick men, holding hands in front of a horizontally-stretched oval, scribbled in blue. The colour stretched up to the top right corner of the page, winding a thin path between scrawled, dark green trees...
"I asked him about it again this afternoon and he told me that's supposed to be you and his dad. Fuck knows why he drew that," she shrugged. "Kids are weird, I guess. You OK, Myles?"
"Yeah," Myles said, off-handedly, passing the paper back. "I just... I don't want him to think Beck's dead, is all."
"I don't know if he does. I asked him where you were supposed to be and he just said 'by a pond near a forest'," she said, nonchalantly. "He's lost interest in it since you've come back. He said you were definitely dying and it must have been… Don't laugh at him, ok?"
"'Course not," he assured her, still feeling very unsettled by the drawing.
"He says he thinks it was his Christmas wish coming true. That you were going to die and you miraculously got better because he wished it on a piece of metal that Pa stuck in a Christmas pudding a month ago. Yes, I know – silly. But he's seven. What's my excuse for believing in some sort of miracle? Some sort of… magic?"
The word was like a match being struck in the dark. Images flashed in his mind's eye and he forgot about his nephew's drawing for a moment.
The buzzing started up in his head and he closed his eyes. She did the same, pinching the bridge of her nose and making a small hiss of pain. He merely scowled, images rushing through his head.
Blood pouring from holes in his chest.
His father's face looming down over him, his mouth moving but the sound distorted and far away.
Beckett.
The pool.
And Beckett.
And the pool...
The beeping of the machines.
The rush of adrenaline.
The scratchy sheets of the hospital bed.
Theresa, Dom, his father, the Fowls…
Falling to the floor when he tried to walk…
The pain.
The pain!
Then the mirrored walls.
The eerie lighting.
His mother.
The stranger.
The sparks.
Blue sparks…
The buzzing became a thin whine and he gritted his teeth against it.
"You were dying," Theresa said, suddenly. She remembered the paperwork. Remembered trying to contact her old mentor – the one she had been practicing medicine illicitly under – mostly on various underworld bodyguards; bodyguards like Beckett had been when she met him. Long before she knew Myles. Long before she had Dom. Her mind grasped onto the alternative subject instantly and her head filled with images of Beckett and their son, the pain fading as they whirled and flashed by, like scenes on the other side of a train window. But something snagged, the photo reel juttering and sticking on an image of Dom flopped down over his uncle's chest – bandaged and bleeding – on a hospital bed…
"Ah! My head!" she groaned, pressing her palms to her temples.
Beside her, Myles was doing the same, his breathing coming in short, sharp bursts as he fought it.
"Think of something else," she said, quickly. "Anything."
"Like what?" he growled.
"What did you get Dom for Christmas?"
"Gun holster. I told you," he said, through gritted teeth. "And a suit. But that's fucked now. I'll get him another one."
"I got him trainers… oww… god…"
He reached for her hand suddenly and she grasped his tightly – as tightly as she had a little over seven years ago when he had sat, not quite willingly, with her in the maternity ward.
"What else did you get him?" Myles asked her.
"Gloves," she growled. "For his Saturday class."
"Thought he wasn't going to that anymore?"
"Ah yeah. Probably can't show my face in there after what you did the other week."
"Not my fault," he demurred.
"No, it wasn't actually," she said, the room steadying around her as the high-pitched whine faded away in face of her distracted thoughts.
"Can I get that on paper?" he said, letting out a sigh as his brain began to grudgingly believe he was no longer in pursuit of his missing memories.
"Me? Saying something wasn't your fault?" Theresa asked. "Never."
They suddenly realised their hands were still entwined and she silently thanked him for squeezing her fingers gently before he let go and not ripping his hand back as though he had been burnt. They had changed over the years; changed together. She didn't want to imagine a life without him and if that meant not trying to fathom what had happened so that she didn't have to face that prospect, she was just going to have to do as Pa had said and 'let it go'.
"I don't think we're going to remember this in the morning, are we?"
"No," he said, as the thoughts he was trying to focus on swirled and vanished like mist in a breeze. "But maybe we're not supposed to."
"We'll just believe in magic for one night then, agreed?"
"I'll believe in anything so long as I can keep on doing what I do."
"And what's that then? Jumping in front of bullets?"
"Protecting," he said. "Artemis, Dom… you. The only thing that kept me going. The only reason I fought to live."
I could have stayed, he thought, staring at the picture Dom had drawn. I could've stayed with Beckett...
For some reason that thought was immune to whatever was causing the pain in his head.
"Sappy git," she said, the buzzing fading the further they strayed from the subject of unexplained miracles. "Must read too many schmoozy novels."
"And who's fault is that then, I wonder?" he accused.
"Hey, I merely provide the opportunity; you chose the action."
Myles restrained himself from rolling his eyes. "I'm going to bed before my head explodes."
"From the buzzing or the constant onslaught of teasing?"
"Both!" he groaned, pushing himself up off the sofa.
"Wait up, I'll come too," she said, leaping up much less stiffly than his muscles could currently manage and beginning to turn off the lights in the room.
"Not to my bed you won't," he grumbled. "I want a good night's sleep without you wriggling around every five minutes, snoring in my ear…"
"Myles, Myles," she drawled. "And how would you know I do that, eh? Same way I know you're a sucker for cuddle, little spoon?"
"Oh can it, would you?" he muttered. "You'll get Mum's hopes up carrying on like that…"
She laughed and they took the stairs together, leaving the fathoms of miracles for another night.
Well, it's New Year all around the world now, so here's to it. I hope 2019 is good to you.
Wolfy
ooo
O