Chapter Text
The Oak-Garcia family was the last to leave the Wilsons’ house, that first night back.
Darkness had fallen, the air long since faded from warm into the chill of almost-winter night, and even Lark and Sparrow were struggling to keep their eyes open, and still Henry lingered. Morgan and Nick (Nicholas? Nicky? Who was he in this new recreated world, in this timeline off-kilter from the one Henry knew, with these people he was supposed to remember?) had departed first; Ron and Samantha had said their regretful farewells, a sleepy Terry Jr. leaning on his mother’s shoulder; even Carol had said her goodnights to the other moms and gone upstairs to bed. Henry had never been a huge believer in the wordless conventions of society meant to replace open communication, but it didn’t mean that he couldn’t read that it was time to go.
And he had every reason to go, himself. He was still filthy from their fight, sweat and blood tacky on his hair and his skin, even if they’d healed themselves as much as they could while still in the Forgotten Realms where magic was so ready at their fingertips. He was home with his wife and his boys – and his mom, someone he’d never imagined he would see again; he had a lifetime’s worth of memories to share and a wife eager to hear them –
It was clearly time to leave, but somehow, Henry couldn’t bring himself to be the one to say goodbye.
The Wilsons had a large sectional in the living room, taking up the full wall opposite the large flat-screen TV (Henry could imagine the parties they must hold on big sports game days). It was big enough to hold everyone who remained – Grant lying nearly asleep across one of the shorter ends while Lark and Sparrow wrestled halfheartedly on the other, and the rest of them seated on the long middle against the wall. Henry was sandwiched between Mercedes and Darryl, the radiant energy of his wife blazing against him on one side like a sun, like the pulsing aliveness of a willow tree – and on the other side the solid steadiness of his friend, a wall of strength he could lean on, could hurl himself against until he was spent and shaking and still be held up all the same.
His boys were nearly asleep; his mother had gone still and quiet in the corner in a way that meant he owed it to her to extract her from this situation; and he had so much to tell Mercedes, for her ears alone – but he couldn’t remember if he had ever felt this safe.
The conversation had faded into silence as Henry pondered, and at long long last Darryl cleared his throat, jostled Henry gently with the arm pressed against his. “Looks like the boys are falling asleep, Henry,” he said. “I think it might be time to call it a night.”
And as abruptly as that, the ease was gone; the reminder of his own lack of consideration for what Darryl might want sent the usual spike of guilt and anxiety surging in Henry’s stomach. “You’re right, of course, I’m so sorry,” he found himself babbling. “We’ve overstayed, and you haven’t seen Carol – you’ll want to spend time with your family” –
Before he could finish, Darryl had clasped his arms and pulled him into a tight hug, rough and strong and safe. Henry’s insides flooded with warmth at the feeling of his head tucked against Darryl’s broad chest, Darryl’s arms holding him tight. “Hey, you’re family, too,” Darryl said firmly. “Just – maybe think of yourself as, like – tier two of family. Like cousins, or something.”
Henry scoffed a little, even as he pressed his ear to Darryl’s chest, centered himself to the sound of his heartbeat. “I don’t categorize my family like that,” he mumbled, muffled against Darryl’s body. “But you’re right. We are all family.” He let himself stay like that for one more breath, stamped the sensation onto his whole body, then squeezed Darryl hard and released him at last. “But we’ll get out of your hair now, right, Mercedes? Mom? Boys, it’s time to go; let’s leave Darryl and Grant alone, and it’s time you two went to bed anyway” –
But even amidst his fussing, he could feel Mercedes’s eyes on him as he pulled away.
It was already after midnight by the time he found himself alone with Mercedes at last: the boys settled in their rooms, his mom set up on the futon. (They would have to find a more permanent space for her, but that could wait until tomorrow.) After midnight, but still their night had only just begun.
Henry was not generally a fan of showering – and perhaps he understood that part of himself a little better simply after his brief stay in Oakvale, the flood of memories of a land where everything seemed to keep itself neat and pristine and perfect, where his own appearance could be nothing short of the same. There was a lot about himself that made more sense now, that he was still only starting to piece together through the frantic rush of the last several days, memories all resolving themselves into a jumble he couldn’t bear to look too closely at yet. But tonight the hot shower felt nothing short of magical on his sore muscles, water sluicing away weeks’ worth of grime from his tired body.
Or perhaps that was his wife pressed against him, her curves soft and familiar beneath his hardened palms and fingers, her hands tenderly rubbing soap over every inch of him, scrubbing shampoo into his scalp until he nearly slumped boneless against her. She touched him easily, intimately, with years of knowledge of his body and hers, and her gaze was hot and heavy and wanting on him, and they had not gone so long without touching each other since before they’d met – but still, neither of them made a move towards anything more than that touch, than the comfort of being in one another’s space again. Not now, not yet. Not before they had talked. Not until he had told her –
Not everything. He couldn’t tell her everything when he didn’t know it all for himself. But everything he could share.
Their bedroom felt almost foreign to him now, even as it was so familiar it brought tears to his eyes: the tapestries Mercedes’s grandmother had given them as a wedding gift, the way the night breeze rustled through the bead curtains on the windows, the faint smell of dog and incense. The sheets were almost unbearably soft beneath him after weeks of camping or rough inn bedding. He sat crosslegged on the bed, Mercedes across from him, wrapped in silence – the first silence Henry had heard in what felt like forever.
“So,” she said at last. “My heart, what do you have to tell me?”
“So much.” Their hands were clasped between them, her callused artist’s fingers hooked into his own like a lifeline. What had she been painting, all this time he’d been away? Or had she had a chance to touch her brushes at all, in all the chaos that her timeline must have been? “But you must have just as much to tell me, especially since you already know so much of what went down on our end. What happened with you when the boys came back?”
“You don’t need to worry about giving me space, Henry,” she said – direct and gentle, as she always was with him. “I’ll tell you everything, and we have plenty of time for it. But I don’t have anything I need to tell you before I can touch you. Can you say the same?”
Oh, but it had been so long since anyone had spoken to him like this – responding to the layer beneath what he wasn’t saying, the base part of him that he fought so hard to suppress, that she told him he didn’t have to hide. He didn’t have to be a better person than he was with Mercedes, didn’t have to wish everything about himself away. At least, he never had before. But it was alive in him again, grainy black chaos surging beneath his veins, crawling from his gut to his chest – alive in a way he had started to recognize, since first learning what it was that roiled inside him. He hadn’t known it for what it was when he first met Mercedes, when he gazed at her through dry eyes and forced cracked lips to speak, closer to dead than alive – hadn’t known it for what it was when she took him by the hand and led him into the world he had chosen for himself. He had forgotten his past and let her lead him into the present, her sculptor’s hands helping shape him into the person he was, and now –
Now he was someone else, and how could he be sure she would still love the person he was?
But she was right. He couldn’t touch her until he could tell her the truth, politeness and consciousness of his own airspace be damned, because she deserved to know the person she was making love to. Deserved to know his heart at least as well as he knew it – and, knowing her, most likely better.
“How much did the boys tell you?” he sighed at last.
“They told me you met your dad,” she said. “And saw your home. Do you remember it, then? Where you came from?”
“Not perfectly,” he said. “Not – all of it.” The memories were still flooding back to him in stilted bursts, often patchworking together in dreams he had to sort through every morning, wondering what was memory and what was invention. The images of himself in that film – the isolation and desperation he had so often remembered without a cause to attach them to – felt wrong when viewed from the outside, a truth of his life told as a fiction, and he still couldn’t remember what he'd been thinking, what he’d been craving, all those sleepless nights and failed spells. What had he hoped he would find on the other end of his efforts? “But I know – I went back to the commune where I grew up; this perfect world my dad had completely under his control. But he couldn’t – Did Lark and Sparrow tell you about the – the chaos demon, the Doodler, whatever it is?”
“That there’s something inside you all?” she said. “Something powerful and angry?” She chuckled a little. “They weren’t very clear on most of it, but they were very interested in the powerful part.”
“Of course they were.” He managed a weak laugh of his own, though it faded quickly into something sad and choked. “But – yeah, that about sums it up.” It made him want to turn himself inside out, to rip himself open – or maybe to wrap himself up, layer clothing over that fragile veneer of skin that kept the thing from bursting out and devouring the world whole. “I feel out of control of myself, Mercedes; I can feel it in me, like it’s eating me alive. I’m so afraid of myself – and I’m so afraid of what I’ve done with the boys, that I’ve let something run wild in them without trying to get it under control” –
“Get it under control,” she said back to him, repeating his own words in a way that made him want to curl away from the shame of what they meant. “Like what your dad tried to do to you?”
“Maybe.” He let go of her hands to hide his face in his own, twisting his fingers into overgrown hair until it hurt. “He – no, I don’t want to be like him, but I can’t – I feel like I can’t be trusted to be like me, either. I feel – I feel so fucked up, mi leona. I don’t know how to be myself when I don’t even know who I am.”
She didn't touch him, made no move towards him, but he swore he could feel the air change, the warmth radiating from her aura. Was this another aspect of his new-old identity, a druid talent reawakened? Or had he always been like this, sensitive to the world around him – and to her in particular? "You didn't know who you were when we first met, either," she said. "But you found your way. You'll do it again, my brave lion. And the boys will find their way as well. We'll learn together, like we always have."
Like we always have. And they always had. The boys didn't only have Henry in them, didn't only have the chaos passed down from his too-restrained father, not held back by their own too-lenient one. They had Mercedes's independent ferocity, her artistic brilliance, her adventurous spirit. They had their grandparents and their uncle and their cousins. And they had –
They had Darryl, with his strength and discipline and determination, someone who could teach them to be better in a language they might understand; they had Ron, with his clumsy honesty, his determination to tell things as they were and make them better when he could; they even had Glenn, with his defiance, his knowledge of how to temper rebellion with tactics. If he couldn’t love away the anger that ran in his veins, in the veins of his boys, maybe they could at least learn how to use it well. Maybe that was a lesson Henry himself still had to learn.
"We will," said Henry aloud, and then – because he had to tell her this too, could not pull her into the sheets with him, however badly he wanted to, until she knew this last piece of him – "And we'll have others to learn from, too."
"Others, mmm?" said Mercedes, and her tone was just the right combination of sly and playful, the same teasing linger as her eyes on him in Darryl's living room. "Please tell me about the others."
She knew him too well to be surprised by this – she’d just been waiting for him to say it himself. "The other dads I was whisked away with," Henry said, "Ron and Darryl and Glenn – or, I guess, Jodie, but – I need to explain the timeline to you, don't let me forget to tell you what went on there. I want to know what you know about Morgan, too" –
"We'll compare timelines in a minute," she assured him. "I want to be on the same page about everything, but don't interrupt yourself when you were about to get interesting."
"You think timelines aren't interesting?" Henry protested. "It's like in Sliders; it's an interesting story, even though it doesn't have a happy ending. Well, I guess it sort of does. It’s . . . it’s not as sad as it could have been, I guess.” It wasn’t up to him to decide how Glenn should feel about things, how his story should end, even if he still found himself wishing something – anything – could have been different.
"You're right," she said, and he looked up at last to see that she was smiling, the indulgent curve of her lips clearly visible in the low light – the night vision he’d always had yet another oddity now slotting into place. "Tell me everything in the order you need to tell it, then."
He wasn't trying to avoid the subject he knew she wanted to talk about. Indeed, maybe he was looking forward to it, wanted to save it, savor it – the experience of talking to his wife about his ever-expanding heart. But this was important, too, somehow: he couldn't go to sleep without telling her the truth of his reality, piecing out the places it didn't sync up with hers. They might never be from the same timeline again, but they could still reach across the gap to learn each other again.
And so the story came pouring out of him: the way Glenn's trial had been forced upon them in a justice system every bit as corrupt and arbitrary as the one in America; their fight against the law itself, relentless and unceasing - and then being whisked away into a reality incongruous with all their memories. Henry, Darryl, Glenn, and Ron had vanished into that portal, and reality had been rewritten under them. He told her about the appearance of Jodie, a man he had never met but was supposed to remember, and she told him about her conversations with Morgan after the boys' return. She told him about her memories of chatting politely with Morgan at soccer games, sharing glances with Jodie but nothing more – Glenn was not the only one of their band with a distrust for the law – and he layered them with truths about Glenn's presence at the games: weed-reeking and only present half the time, but cheering wildly for Nick whenever he was there and high-fiving him at halftime. She told him about reaching out to Carol and Samantha and Morgan, connecting with them in search of their lost husbands, and he told her about seeing her mummified body beneath the pyramid, recited the letter from her that he had read until it was burned into his mind. He wondered if he would be able to find it in his bag, if he went looking.
She held him back when he would have gotten up, would have struggled free of the covers to search through everything he’d brought back with him. "It's not important now, love," she said, and kissed the tears from his cheeks with lips he could hardly believe were real. "I don't exist in the reality when I wrote the letter, but I still mean every word of it."
The darkness had ebbed around them; the sky outside was cool gray now with the impending dawn, and they had shifted from their seats to their sides, warm and close beneath the covers as they laughed and cried and slotted their timelines together, sought to match up their realities as best they could. And the longer they lay there, the more their hands wandered, until there was more than reality that Henry wanted to fit together.
And so, finally, it was time to tell her the last piece.
"Then there's just one more thing you need to know tonight," he said softly. "Although I think you've probably already guessed what it is."
"I think so, too," she said coyly. "But I think it'll sound better if you say it than I do."
He laughed. "Darryl," he said. "My friend. I – he – I know I wouldn't have held myself together if not for him. I don't know if any of us could have." He'd been put off by Darryl's energy from the start, his determination to take charge, bring the situation under control, carry them all on his back if he had to – and yet, could Henry ever have carried himself through that, let alone anyone else? "I'm sure you could see it already, even just today. He's one of the strongest people I’ve ever met; he got us all through this and he still had room to really care about us. He’s the best dad” – He nearly choked up at those words, but this potential for joy didn’t deserve to be tainted with guilt. “I know I never cared much for him before, but I fell in love with him out there, Mercedes.”
"I can see it," she said, and kissed the corner of his mouth. "You're radiant with it. I haven't seen you in new love in years."
"I haven't felt new love in years." Maybe not since he'd fallen in love with her, though Matthias seven years ago had been a glorious infatuation while it lasted. "I don't know if I'd forgotten how beautiful it can be, or if it's just beautiful in a new way every time."
"Maybe both."
"Maybe." He kissed her this time, a little deeper, a tantalizing flash of tongue that sent heat racing all through his limbs. "He makes me feel safe." And if anyone could understand the full meaning of that sentence, it would be her, who had seen him at his worst, who knew better than anyone the fear that had always run through him – of himself, of his family, of all the things the world could do to them, of what he could do, if he lost control of himself. With Darryl, he felt enclosed in a protective wall, as if he could let that part of himself out, even if in a small measure, that he could let his anger burn itself out and not have destroyed anything irreparable. Had he ever felt that way before?
"Good." Her hand wandered down his side with more intent, tracing the angles of his body that she knew so well. "You deserve all the safety in the world."
His eyes nearly rolled back, and he couldn't tell if it was the bliss of her touch or the knowledge that he was so completely loved, so accepted for who he was – that of all the people to find him starving and lost and confused in a world he didn’t know, it had been by someone who loved as expansively as he did, who had recognized his heart with her own and been willing to marry them together. “I can’t ever tell you how much I love you.”
"Good thing I already know." She kissed him again, long and soft and open, until he was breathless with it, alive inside with a fire bright and hot enough to drive back the rot. "What does he think, then?"
"He knows I love him," Henry said. "At least, as much as he loves me. I don't think he knows – ah." Her hand had wandered lower still, and he had not known that perfect blissful sensation in far too long. "Knows what it could mean," he managed to pant. "His marriage is more – traditional than ours, I suppose, and I didn’t want to say anything that might make him feel pressured or uncomfortable. So he doesn’t know what more I might mean by it, and I haven’t said anything to make him wonder.” The lines between friendship and love and attraction could blur together for Henry in a way that most people seemed to find unusual; the warmth in his heart and stomach for Darryl could be kindled into something more if he let it, but if Darryl never wanted it, he would be happy to keep his feelings at affection and tenderness for as long as they were welcome. “I don’t know what he feels, but I can’t imagine he’s considered the possibility.” Nor could he imagine Darryl having a conversation like this in bed with his wife, agreeing on a marriage more expansive than the traditional definition. "And I know he cares about me, but I don’t think he wants me.”
"But you want him." Those words were breathed against his neck, stirring his hair, sly and mischievous. Her fingers were on his inner thigh now, tracing the sensitive crease of his hip in a way that made his breath twitch, his body jerk. “Don’t you?”
“I want – ah.” How was he supposed to talk coherently with her teasing him like this? “I love him.” That, at least, was simple. “I want – I want him in my life, whatever he wants that to look like. And I want you to” –
"Want me to what?" she said, and then her hand was between his legs, and his hips were canting forward, and there was only one answer he could give.
“Want you,” he gasped at last, and then they were both lost for words, leaving the talking to their bodies as the sky bloomed light around them.