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The thing about being a Key for a hundred and some years is that a body doesn't age. It also doesn't hunger, doesn't ache, doesn't remember what it means to be tired in the marrow instead of just in the mind. Nox had gotten used to that. He'd built a whole personality out of not having to feel things.
So when the jar broke — cracked clean in half on the floor of the Ex-Libris archive, green light spilling out of him instead of into him, Chase's hand fisted in the front of his shirt like he could physically hold him together — Nox had assumed the worst part would be over the second his feet hit solid ground as a person again.
It was not over. It was, as it turned out, only the overture.
He came back to himself in the Hollow farmhouse's attic, and for about four hours he thought he'd gotten off easy. Human. Warm. Real. Chase kept finding excuses to touch his arm whenever they were in the same room, like he needed to check every twenty minutes that Nox hadn't dissolved back into teal light. Deacon hovered in doorways with a stack of old or library books on "spontaneous human transfiguration," which did not exist as a field of study, and which he was clearly making up as a cover for just wanting to be nearby too.
It was almost nice.
Then, somewhere around one in the morning, his skin started to crawl like it was trying to leave without him.
He didn't say anything at first. A hundred years of being furniture for other people's stories teaches you not to announce discomfort — nobody had ever cared before, why would they start now — so he just lay very still on top of the quilt and watched the ceiling fan go around and told himself it would pass.
It did not pass. It got worse in waves, each one cresting higher than the last, like the tide was learning his shape and adjusting.
By two, he was shaking hard enough that the bedframe of the guest chambers knocked softly against the wall.
By two-thirty, Chase — asleep on the floor beside the bed on a pile of blankets because he'd refused, point blank, to leave Nox alone his first night as a person — woke up because he heard his teeth chattering.
"Buddy?" Chase's voice went from thick with sleep to sharp with fear in the space of that one word. "Hey— Hey, look at me. What's wrong?"
"Cold," Nox managed, which was true and also nowhere near the whole truth. His skin felt too tight and too loose at the same time, both things, wrongly, at once. There was a sensation crawling up under his ribs he didn't have a name for because he hadn't had a body to feel it in for over a century. "I don't— I don't know what this is."
Chase was already up, already pulling every blanket in the room onto the bed, and it wasn't enough, nothing was enough, Nox's whole body had turned into a live wire with nowhere to ground itself.
"Deacon!" Chase didn't so much call out as detonate the word down the hallway. "Deacon, get in here!"
...
Deacon arrived in pajama pants and his dead maternal grandfather's cardigan, hair sticking up on one side, and took one look at Nox — pale under pale, sheened with sweat despite the shaking, pupils blown wide in the low light — and every ounce of sleep left his face at once. Medical school does that to a person. Turns panic into procedure, because procedure is the only thing that keeps the panic from winning.
"Talk to me," Deacon said, crouching by the bed, two fingers already finding the pulse point at Nox's wrist. "Where does it hurt?"
"Everywhere," Nox bit out, and hated how small his voice sounded. "It's not— It isn't pain, exactly. It's like my skin doesn't fit."
Deacon's brow furrowed. He counted the pulse under his breath, timed it against the clock on the nightstand, frowned harder. "That's tachycardic. And you're diaphoretic — Chase, hand me that towel — has he thrown up?"
"No," Chase said, and then, a beat later, in a much smaller voice: "Not yet."
As if the room had been waiting for permission, Nox's stomach rolled over hard enough that he had to slap a hand over his own mouth. Chase had the wastebasket under his chin half a second before it happened, which meant he'd known, on some animal level, exactly what was coming.
It was ugly. It was loud and it hurt and it didn't stop after once, it kept going in ragged waves until there was nothing left to bring up and his body kept trying anyway, kept heaving on empty, and through all of it Chase held his hair back with one hand and rubbed slow circles into his spine with the other and murmured something low and steady that wasn't quite words, just noise meant to be a lifeline.
"I'm sorry," Nox gasped, when he could talk again, forehead against the cool rim of the wastebasket. "I'm sorry, I don't— I don't know why this is happening—"
"Don't you dare apologize to me," Chase snapped, fierce in a way that cracked right down the middle. "Don't you dare."
Deacon had gone very quiet, the particular quiet of a person doing math they don't like the answer to.
…
He waited until Nox had been coaxed into a few sips of water, until the shaking had dropped from violent to merely constant, until Chase had wrung out a washcloth and laid it over the back of Nox's neck like that alone might hold him together. Then Deacon sat back on his heels and asked, very carefully, the way you ask a question you're afraid of answering yourself:
"Nox. Before you were the Key. When you were… human, the first time. A hundred-some years ago, in the city. Were you ever given anything? Medically, I mean. Something for pain. Laudanum, morphine — anything like that."
Nox's eyes, glassy and exhausted, still found something sharp enough to go to in that question. "Why would that matter now? That was a lifetime ago. Longer."
"Because I think your body doesn't know that," Deacon said, gently, the way he might break bad news to a patient — and God, wasn't that exactly what this was. "It's been frozen. Preserved, exactly as it was the night you opened that jar. Which means whatever was in your system that night — however small a trace — it's still in your system. You've just been a person again for six hours, and your body picked up in the exact same place it left off. This isn't something new happening to you, Nox. This is something old, finally catching up."
Silence, except for the fan ticking around and around.
"I was a thief," Nox said finally, to the wastebasket, to his own knees, to anywhere that wasn't Chase's face. "You know that part. What I didn't tell either of you is that thieving doesn't feel like much of anything, when you're fourteen and living under a bridge and somebody offers you something that makes the cold stop mattering for a few hours." His laugh came out wrong, wet and humorless. "I thought I'd escaped it. I thought becoming a Key was the worst thing that to ever happened to me. Turns out it just put the bill on hold."
Chase's hand, still resting between his shoulder blades, went very still.
"Buddy—"
"Don't." Not sharp. Just tired. Bone-tired, a hundred years of tired arriving all in one night. "Don't look at me like that. I don't need pity, Chase, I need it to stop."
"It's not pity," Chase said. "It's never been pity. Not once, not from the second you told me you were starving in that book and I offered you my junk food even though you were, at the time, actively trying to ruin my life."
That got the faintest twitch of something that might have wanted to be a laugh, perhaps a remark about how that hadn’t been quite true, before another wave hit and stole it away.
…
It went on like that for three days.
Deacon, to his eternal credit, did not leave. He canceled a study group, texted his mother some excuse about a cold he definitely did not have, and turned the guest room into something that looked embarrassingly like a real recovery ward — electrolyte packets from the pharmacy in town, a cool mist humidifier borrowed from Grandpa Ralph's allergy season stash, a legal pad where he tracked Nox's heart rate and temperature every hour like his life depended on the data even though he kept insisting, quietly, to Chase in the hallway, that there wasn't a textbook for this. Not really. Nobody's body had ever needed detoxing from something a hundred and some years old before.
"I'm making this up as I go," Deacon admitted once, at four in the morning, both of them slumped against the wall outside the guest room while Nox slept — actually slept, finally, for almost forty minutes — inside. "I don't know if I'm helping or just watching."
"You're helping," Chase said. He didn't look up from his phone, where he was googling withdrawal symptoms with the kind of grim determination usually reserved for finals week. "You're here. That counts as helping, Deacon. That's basically the whole job."
Deacon's mouth did something complicated. "He hates that I'm the one taking care of him. You know that, right? A year ago he'd have rather died than let me see him like this."
"A year ago he was pretending not to need anybody." Chase finally looked up, and his eyes were red-rimmed, exhausted, furious in the specific way that only comes from loving someone who's hurting and having no way to fix it. "He doesn't get to do that anymore. Neither of us are letting him."
…
The worst night was the second one.
Nox stopped being able to keep down water. His temperature spiked and then crashed and then spiked again, and there was a stretch of maybe twenty minutes where he didn't seem to know where he was, calling out for people whose names neither Chase nor Deacon recognized — old names, city names, names that belonged to a childhood two hundred years gone. Chase held him through it anyway, arms wrapped tight around his shoulders from behind, chin hooked over his shoulder, murmuring his own name over and over like a tether. You're at the farmhouse. You're with me. It's Chase. It's just me, I've got you, I'm not going anywhere.
Somewhere around three, Nox surfaced enough to recognize him again, and the first thing he did, humiliatingly, was cry — not from the sickness, or not only from the sickness, but from something that had clearly been sitting behind his ribs for a hundred years with nowhere to go.
"I don't know how to be a person," he whispered, wrecked, into Chase's collarbone. "I forgot. I forgot how loud all of it is. Being alive. I forgot it hurts this much just to exist— "
"I know," Chase said, because he didn't, not really, not the specifics, but he knew enough. He knew what it was to want to stop feeling something so badly you'd trade almost anything for the quiet. He just hadn't known, until this week, that Nox had actually made that trade once, a long time ago, and was only now being asked to pay it back in full.
"You don't have to remember how all at once," Chase told him. "You get to relearn it slow. I'm not going anywhere. Deacon's not going anywhere, God help both of us. You've got time now. That's the whole point of getting it back."
Nox laughed, or sobbed, or some wrecked combination of both, and didn't let go of Chase's shirt for another hour.
…
By the fourth day the shaking had eased into something closer to ordinary exhaustion. Deacon pronounced him, in his best imitation of clinical authority, "still a disaster but a stable one," and went to actually sleep in an actual bed for the first time in three days, and Nox — pale, hollowed-out, but present in his own skin in a way he hadn't been since the jar broke — sat up against the headboard for the first time without help.
Chase brought him dry toast and weak tea and sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed like he had every night, except this time Nox reached out first, caught his wrist before he could pull away, and just held on.
"Thank you," Nox said. It came out rough, unpracticed, like a language he was only starting to remember how to speak.
"Don't thank me," Chase said. "Just— Stay. That's all I want. Stay a person. Stay here."
Nox looked down at their hands, at the toast going cold, at the ordinary yellow morning light coming through the guest room curtains — the kind of light he hadn't been able to feel on his skin in over a century — and, for the first time since this whole nightmare started, let himself believe he might actually get to keep it.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. I'll stay."