32. Water under a bridge (part 2)

In her hurry Beverly became the wind once more.

Flesh breaking down into drizzle, dew, fallen snow, through which she cloaked the city at her ankles, her fingertips. She draped along New York like a mantelpiece. She dissipated into the moonlight and flew and expanded and her weightlessness terrified her.

Peter, don't you dare. Don't sink on me.

She touched her earring, heard the sharp glint as she greeted the starshine. A tremulous sting in Peter's chest, under the weight of his soaked coat.

If his own harness remained there, if it hadn't joined the bottom of the river, it would not greet her own unless he took it out of the shadowy crevices of his clothes and let her touch it. Allow the moonlight to glimmer back.

Beverly wished to join him in her completion, by the water, so that she could search for the earring herself and be free of this regained discomfort.

To be so light. To feel so alone in her vessel in the sky.

I'm not alone. I'm not. I have you with me.

But Cecil walked underneath her, soundlessly molding into the variety of shadows cast along the city, and she couldn't forsake him.

"Cecil-"

"Don't concern yourself with me," he said, smiling a little. He looked exhausted, but his pace never faltered. "You'll keep me safe."

He winked and Beverly bounced off the white of his eyes and the grey slivers of moondust that managed to dash along the top of his bunnet.

"With what, my chatting?" she asked.

She was only half-joking. Cecil chuckled quietly.

"Chats always help. I like talking to people… I missed being able to do so, these last three days."

It gets dull, this endless peace. I want more friends to talk to.

She sent a chilly breeze, a stroke of her fingertips, caressed the glass of Willa's window with a silvery glow. She slipped in through the creaks, glinted off the glossy black leather of her father's chair.

"I understand that," she murmured to Cecil. "Quite well. Not as well as you, probably… But I do."

"Yes, I know."

She breathed down on Peter as he frowned in his sleep. The black water draped over him, released him, then returned. Ravenous arms slipping around him before untangling and drifting back into the mouth of the river.

It horrified her, the theories she reached in regards to this. That, in death, still, Peter belonged to New York. Or, at the very least, the city still considered itself Peter's keeper. Its strict and loveless parent.

He'd been a gift to this place, an abandoned child entrusted to its care. And now it wouldn't let him go.

A gift is never demanded back.

"You shouldn't go out without your coins."

"The sun is yet to rise. And… I do not worry. I've taken greater risks."

Beverly could understand Peter's tenderness for Cecil. In just a handful of hours, he'd become a beacon of peace for her. He radiated tranquility, in spite of his difficult state.

Beverly wondered if he was so used to being quiet that he'd forgotten how necessary it was to grieve one's misfortunes.

"Why am I so light?" she asked him. "Why did these roads reopen for me?"

A gust of wind. New York was a cave of echo and Beverly was now curled up into the faintest whisper. She wouldn't be loud or bold, as to not alert Pearly and his fiends.

Peter was under the bridge.

The city was reclaiming him, after finding out that he'd returned…

"I don't know," Cecil responded.

"You don't know."

"I told you, honey. Had I been able to reach out to Peter, had I kept him away from that bridge, I would know exactly what's in store for all of us. But I was robbed… My coins nicked, my light whisked away. Like how your life ended differently than how it was originally meant to occur."

"Thanks to Gabriel," she whispered.

"Yes. This happens all the time, mind you. With… mm, the Pearl, and his little gang of demons. They keep erasing roads and spilling ink on the maps. Preventing miracles and the vessels they form. Luring other starfolk into giving up their light, in exchange of long-lost gazes and embraces and caresses… They are a pain in the ass, if I may say it bluntly."

"They're monsters."

A pause, before Cecil concluded: "But, hey. You've got your own vessel, in spite of their efforts. You're hidden away with Peter, unlit, unnoticed… So we'll find a way. We always do."

How was my life supposed to end? If not in Peter's arms, naked, content with myself for the first time in years?

Invisible hands crawling up invisible arms. Green fabric pregnant with moonlight. Beverly and Cecil were now webbed by silver embers of a sinking moon. They were the final strokes of the night, dripping paint along New York, drying into amber at the rise of dawn.

How could color be feasible from their eyes anymore?

You're impossibly beautiful. Peter had once told her this…

How could she still believe that something was impossible?

"I really want to listen to you, Cecil, I do."

"I know."

"You've been here for much longer than either Peter or I. You've helped him long before I had been capable of doing so… But I am impatient. I wish it were all clearer to me. To both of us."

A slow, deliberate breath. Cecil licked his lips after releasing it.

Willa stirred in her sleep as Beverly brushed a stroke of moonlight across her smooth white forehead. Peter was opening his eyes and the water pulled back at his hair. Beverly glimmered in pearls of dew as they dripped down his face. She hoped he knew that they were on their way to him.

There was a sweet pleasure in the practice of breathing, Beverly realized, then. To breathe under this ocean sky, a shape of memory, even when blood had been all but spent, and the need for food or water disintegrated.

Like back in the sky. That ocean of magic and loneliness.

How Peter had said that he was glad to still be able to make love to her, even when all else was gone. These were the final threads that tied them to the life that'd been stolen from them.

Would these one day, too, be cut for good? And, by extension, their pleasure in partaking in these acts that were so very… alive?

To breathe? To sleep with the person you love?

I'm glad, too, darling…

"I've grown to be patient," Cecil said, then. He always took his sweet time, before coming up with a reply he deemed appropriate for the moment. "Flexible, as well. That is the only thing this job truly gifts you. It isn't wisdom, really. I am a very old man… and there are things in this world that still strike me as preposterously wonderful. I will never stop reacting to humanity's performance. I think that is another reason why I was chosen to be here."

"We are cursed and blessed to care," Beverly murmured.

A late echo. Cecil nodded.

"Yes. And I'll tell you something else, honey. A massive component in the efficacy of miracles is human intervention. Hence why… we're needed."

"I figured, yes."

"So, trust your instincts. You salvaged Peter from sinking. You woke him up and rekindled his future. You did that, a newborn star, without giving it a second thought. You were brave."

You'll be seen again, but not by him.

Beverly clenched her jaw in embarrassment. She couldn't stop spinning Cecil's old words in her head.

What use had they, now? None whatsoever. A map was ruined, roads pooled in black, names scratched out, and their new paper was blank.

Is your doubt always this heavy, Peter?

Cecil scrunched his nose slightly. Claw-like strokes of silver rushed across the darkness of his flesh.

"There was nothing else you could have done," he murmured, as if he'd heard her thoughts. "You were the only one who could have saved him. I was cornered and Athansor was hopeless… I have salvaged many before. I've been doing this for a long time. So, from experience, I'll tell you that, in most cases, a fork in the path merely elongates the journey, but it doesn't cut it short. Not at all."

"So… I made his journey longer?"

"Most likely, you did… This, I may tell you. It wasn't only your doing, either. It all started with Gabriel at the New Year's Eve party, of course. Cause Pearly is incorrigible."

But his gang is not. Peter Lake got away. And he wants to help the rest follow in his footsteps.

"And then, there was the theft of my coins. The bridge. And, at last… you. Even before your intervention, I knew that Peter's journey would be much, much longer than yours. His transition from place to place, so to speak."

Silence, for a little while. Then Cecil spoke once more.

"I told you that… his inability to travel through light is a denial by the universe to allow him to hide. He is meant to be found. But I wasn't completely honest with him, when… Mm."

"Please talk to me. We're both here now."

"He isn't… light. Not Peter Lake. He's swallowed so much seawater on his way up. His soul is still heavy with regrets. He will not fly until he's lightened his cargo and repaid his debts."

"His debts?"

Peter, do you feel me? Do you feel my confusion? My desperation?

Beverly hadn't minded his pauses, but now the wait irritated her. In the moment she decided to beg him to answer, Cecil responded, in the same soft, calm voice.

"The stars. Pearly's treasures. Most of them haven't forgotten where Peter Lake came from… Who he belonged to."

"Pearly," Beverly breathed harshly.

"Yes."

"Always Pearly."

"I told you, a pain in the ass."

Cecil's dark eyes rolled up at the skyline for a brief second. They were almost at the bridge. Beverly crawled along windows and glossy metal storm drains.

"He is the first of them… The first of the magpies to fly away. And the first to be welcomed into a vessel. It'll take most of these fine folk some more time, before they are able to see him as one of their own. This is my personal theory, of course… but I have been among them enough time to understand their language."

He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, and he skipped a bit in his step.

What was his reason for deciding what the stars thought? What had they thought of him? Questions to questions.

Feel me as I feel you.

"A miracle is a quick way to convince them and his fulfillment of one was bluntly prevented. Or, at the very least, halted… Now he is stuck between these two places. Distrusted by the dead. Denied to hide in the world he was ripped from. Yes, he will be seen again. He's being given a chance. But there is cynicism to how the city treats him. It'll take more convincing, for stars and men alike."

Beverly grit her teeth. She breathed: "Peter's a good man."

Cecil looked at her, then. He found her eyes against the sky, welcomed her glow against his face. She was moonlight and fresh frost and new breath to inhale.

"I promised you all would be well in the end, and even now, blinded, I can make you the same promise. To both you and your man."

Your woman. Your man. They belonged to one another.

"You'll both be alright. I swear."

Stars.

She'd listed them all. She'd envied them. She looked up at them now. Her cold, glittery neighbors. The fabric she'd been webbed into.

And Beverly was afloat, held aloft by strings of silver. She was ready for the fall, in the case she was cut loose for her recklessness.

But her fury and her pity for Peter was too great, and her head ached from all this talk of debts and promises, and she saw her father, on his chair, and her mother, a blaze, and her sister, afraid in bed, and her lover, her friend, in the water, asleep, dead.

"Peter Lake is no magpie," she muttered, quietly.

Author's Note: To whoever is here today, thank you for reading.

Hello! I am in a huge hurry so I will write an elaborate note on all the things I wanted to do with this chapter when I return from my vacation in a week. I literally cut THIS one in half too XD Just to give it to you today.

So I'll talk at length when I am back. Until then, thanks for being here!