Britannia, NY

By the time Mike gets home, Gary has finished the shopping and is sitting at the kitchen table drinking a beer and sketching. He's been missing the sex--missing, at least, the way that when Mike didn't know any better he didn't understand why Gary might be hesitant, and his lack of hesitation led Gary to overcome his own discomfort (in the end he always felt better for it). After the last nearly-five-years, especially given Mike's particular passion for him, it feels weird and distant to have barely touched since Mike remembered.

He's decided that possibly it's a night to get buzzed and try to turn in early; it used to work well when in the before-Mike era, and it might suffice now.

Clearly it has to be done at some point. For all their sakes, Mike waits until Gary has gone out to do the Saturday grocery shopping. Then he has a small drink to quiet his nerves, and dials Jim's number.

Nissa has been seeing a therapist. This helps, at least a little, but every little is important, Nissa tells herself.

Nissa has tools for helping herself. She's made a place on the lawn of the manse, right across from the church, where she can write and work in the leafy green sunshine, away from walls and the isolating effects of windows.

It is, she thinks as she sits there, mug of tea at her elbow, a pity her dreamself doesn't seem to ever be able to remember the things she learns while she's awake.

Around ten o'clock, Gary emerges from the studio and goes into the living room, shedding his clothing, paint streaked into his hair, up his forearms, and a smear of green on his cheek. He's a little bit hoping that Mike won't talk to him, or that Mike will, or something, he doesn't know what but he's not feeling bad, just a little shaky and uncertain in his stomach.

"Hey," he says, quietly. "You want a beer?"

Karen's dreams have always come in strange waves, and this has intensified somewhat since she moved to Britannia. She'll have a few nights that are tolerable, or even free of the dreams altogether; then a rash of the bad ones, the really awful ones, full of fear, of grief and desolation and a kind of angry loneliness that she never wants to admit to feeling when she's awake in her own life.

The worst of these is always the one where they come to fetch her out of her rooms, and she's heard all the commotion so she already knows where they're taking her, and they take her to that strange, cold little room and show her his corpse. And the only part of any of it that makes her feel strong is that she is so angry, so brokenly angry, that she feels if she were a man she'd take their blades from them and drop them all where they stand. But all she can do is be the harridan they all know her for, and flash and rage at them, and drive them out of the room so they'll leave her alone with him. Leave her alone with him and he isn't even there anymore.

It's this one she wakes from, and Karen feels it can't have been more than twenty minutes since she lay down, exhausted, to go to sleep, even though the clock tells her otherwise. She's doing that weird crying thing she hates where she can't get her breath and she feels like someone's taken everything out of her chest. It's an emptiness that's vicious, and she is alone in this house that's too big for one person, and for just a minute, she fucking hates it here.

But then she thinks, no, he's here and I can go and see him.

After a little while, it's almost morning, and so she puts on her coat and goes into town. She gets some coffee (she's off today) and goes to the park and lies down on a cold bench wishing that she had a stupid, self-destructive hobby to shorten her life with. Smoking, maybe, or base jumping. After she's finished her coffee, she gets up and walks to Gary's apartment building.

She would really much rather see him alive.

Gary bangs open the door when he gets back home, shutting it too hard behind him, and throws his coat down on the kitchen chair. His nose is broken and his mouth is nicely smashed, and he's shaking with anger.

Without even bothering to wash off he gets a bottle of Wild Turkey out of the cabinet and sits down at the table to drink, eschewing a glass. The liquor burns when it gets into the open cuts, and he hisses and swears. "Fuck!"

Gary gets home from Cecilia's around seven o'clock, which is good for him--before midnight!--considering he doesn't abide by ordinary schedules most of the time. He isn't wholly settled by their conversation, and he slips into the studio, the first sign that he's arrived the door slamming shut behind him and locking.

He works for a couple of hours, frantically, before he finally feels in control again; but when he does he emerges, much quieter, with a slick of blue paint in his hair, gets a beer from the fridge, and goes looking for Mike.

Arthur is taking a walk, while Adia is still at work. For the first time in a long while, he has some sense of what he's supposed to do. Or at least what he's supposed to do next. But, as ever, it's directly at odds with what's best for someone he loves.

Part of him wants to fight someone. To yell at the sky that it isn't fair. But he's older than that. He should know better than to expect fairness. From anything.

But he's hoping something will come to him. What to say to Adia would be helpful. But so far, nothing's occurred to him.

He'll have to go home eventually.

It's been a while since anything interesting happened to Jim. He's been living solitary, and very quiet, doing his teaching as usual (few As, as always, are ever awarded in his class). Sheila is comfortable with the town, and he's getting more comfortable with her, hardly noticing now that she comes with him, hovering under his hand.

That changes when he starts to dream again. He's thrown off-balance by it, by the feeling that he's hovering between two worlds and the battle in the heat of summer, his body fallen among a hundred other fallen bodies, his blood leaking out under the burnished sun.

Suddenly he's taking more aspirin than he should, and skipping his meds without noticing it. The real evidence of a problem comes Friday afternoon, when his head is splitting and the smell of blood is dizzying, and he lets the class out twenty minutes early, sitting in the classroom with his face in his hands until he can regain his composure.

His walk is almost staggering as he goes to his office to put his things away and start the trip home. Sheila whines unhappily at his side.

( more nightmares )

He wakes choking, racked with deep shudders, his fingers clenching the edge of the mattress. After a moment he struggles upright, and braces himself to sit on the side of the bed, fighting back something halfway between a sob and a dry heave. "God," he whispers to the blank dark. "God, O God."

Nissa dreams of kingship.

In her dream she is the lord of a city, a bright city on a hill, and in the morning the light touches first on her window in the high tower of the palace at the top of the ridge, and slips down to light the harbor by the time she stops working to take the time to break her fast. In the dream she rises, takes the heavy, rough mug that holds her morning cider, and goes down the hill.

The city is built in half rings on the hillside. She follows them down. A beggar stops her. She stands and talks to him, and touches him and he says he feels lighter. He will not take her cider. He laughs at her, calls her a good child, sends her on. There are people crying and she follows them, a child takes her hand and says her mother is sick please help please and she cannot tell where the ground is, or where her feet are. It is a wonder she does not fall. But she goes to the mother. She prays. She prays and she takes the hand the mother holds out to her, and then the mother is pulling back, using her grip to raise herself to her feet, laughing, saying, “What a king we have,” and Nissa feels as lost in that small room as she felt in the palace, where there are many rooms, and the floors are smooth, and she makes very certain to breathe deep on the stairs and always brace one hand against the wall, because it is a sin to wish to stumble.

It is awfully difficult to make yourself breakfast when you’re afraid to touch your knives, or your stove, or your oven, and that is why Nissa is sitting in Sanford’s Diner in the early morning, nursing coffee while she waits for her eggs and pancakes. She is hoping the food will make her feel better, and so will reading both the Bible open on the table in front of her, and the NAMI pamphlet open in her lap.

He's conscious of how it affects Mike when he has a bad day, so he's avoiding the apartment, he can't help it. The most obvious solution seems to be the one that always worked back in New York, to find someplace selling beer cheap and see how quick he can get drunk. He's aware, however, that that's not a terribly good idea, so he's trying to stave it off by taking a walk.

It's warmer than usual to-day, the snow, which is dirty by now, is starting to melt. Gaheris is a worn and tired-looking man with his jacket wrapped close around his body, walking against the light.

Clara, walking with great purpose, is going to the library. She's keeping an eye out as she does so. For what, she's not exactly sure.

(She had a dream last night-- because that seems to be the only thing that can force her to make decisions lately, but she doesn't want to think about that. She had a dream.

It's a dream about coming home.

It's the end of that quest-- the one she's dreamed about since the beginning with Lynet and Lyonors and all that nonsense. But in this dream it's finally over and he's coming home. And his brothers are with him and he rides in the midst of them, not a pace behind like with Lancelot. And they come home, to Camelot, and King Arthur is there and even though Gareth has seen him before, it was like seeing him for the first time. He looked then, more than ever, the way Gareth had imagined him from the stories, his famous sword at his hip and his Queen at his side.

And his brothers are there. They don't care that he ran away, that he did not come to them, that he lied. They're there.

It's the first time she wakes up and doesn't feel alone.)

So she's going to the library, because she feels like she has to do something and it's the only lead she really has. And she's keeping an eye out. True, she's been more or less an utter failure at recognizing anyone thus far. But today, maybe, she thinks she could do it.

The run-in with Lancelot didn't do him any good, especially not as bad as he already feels to-day. As soon as he's gotten home and put everything away, he shakily pours himself a drink and curls up on the couch.

He stays there for the rest of the day, until Mike gets home, the glass of icemelt faintly flavoured with bourbon sitting on the coffee table (He needs to get up and start dinner so it's ready by six o'clock, he needs to do some work so he can send it in to the gallery. He needs to focus on something everyday and easy, some tiny saving detail) (but all he actually does is stay in one place, watching his hands shake, and wondering what you do with bread made by the man who killed you).

( live your life the way you wanted to... )

The holidays have treated Gary fairly well. The therapist visits still go on weekly, and they still make him nervous and uncomfortable, but he's managing, and the medicine the psychiatrist prescribed keeps his nightmares away. For the most part he's been well enough to leave the house and do errands, with only one or two days where he had to stay in bed watching the light patterns on the wall, his heart to heavy for the rest of his body to move.

He's still waiting, like Patience on a monument, for Mike to wake up and remember; he doesn't say anything about it, he hasn't said a word about his dreams or his memories or the two halves of a self that are in him, which has kept things quiet.

The revolver is still in their room untouched, buried at the bottom of his sock drawer.

He doesn't really expect either of his models to come during the Twelfth Night stretch, so he's not very busy, his studio a little put by for the moment. There are some half-finished paintings, a multitude of sketches, and a table set up with a large wodge of clay on it; he's been experimenting with sculpture lately.

At the moment, though, he's at the kitchen table, doing sketches of himself and Mike in his workbook in soft, elegant charcoal lines.

The therapy sessions have been going well, or at least as well as can be expected. Gary is still twitchy about the whole thing, but managing better than at first--he tends to proceed in little inchings-forward, suspiciously.

But things are well enough for sure that he can go back to doing his usual chores, the grocery shopping, getting his art supplies from the little crafting store. On this particular day he's splurging, and on his way back from the store he stops in at the second-hand films-and-games store and rifles through their collection of pretentious indie films curiously.

Then he heads back home.

A few hours after the disastrous conversation with Nathan, Jim manages to rouse himself enough to get out of his chair and dial Mike's number, his hands shaking considerably. He's already going into a slight withdrawal from his medication, and mixing it with alcohol wasn't the best idea anyway.

He waits and listens to the rings, sinking back into the chair because his knees don't seem to want to work.

( when heroes go down they go down fast / so don't expect any time to equivocate the past )

Life has not been spectacular for Jim lately, and he is feeling it noticeably. Although the new medicine is working wonders for his spasticity, it makes him feel tired and light-headed, and his heart races faster than usual. But his cane is really only for the good feeling it makes in his hand, a kind of magic feather that he prefers over suspicious little capsules.

Also, the last argument with Nathan has unsettled him more than he thought it would. Part of him wants to argue that it doesn't mean anything, but Nathan's insistence that he doesn't know him, and his own lingering doubts and insecurities, aren't helping him put it aside.

He hangs in Mike's door in anticipation of their Friday-afternoon coffee outing looking rather inconsolable, although he doesn't realise it.