Who: Nic and Lem When: afternoon, early May Where: Lem’s house, then out and about Status: complete
Things were not going well for Lem. Vex had been gone for over three months, and she felt like she’d just unraveled more and more as time went on. She had tried, she really had, for Nic’s sake more than her own, but Lem couldn’t seem to dig herself out of the mental hole she’d slipped into. Some days she felt like there were answers just out of her reach, that if she read the right thing or talked to the right person, it would all come together. Other days she just stayed in bed and cried until she went back to sleep, rinse and repeat. In an ironic twist, Nic had started taking care of her the same way she’d taken care of Vex for so long. He often had to remind her to eat and shower. She’d gotten skinnier, more hollow, and she’d taken to constantly wearing Vex’s t-shirts, which hung off of her small frame like nightgowns. She was illegally squatting in the house by this point, she was pretty sure, but there was nobody else to come and claim it. The lights and water were still on only by the grace of Nic and Zania.
Lem knew somewhere in her mind that she needed to let it go. She needed to figure out how to move on. But she was so sure Vex was still alive over there. Sometimes she got flashes of him, felt his presence and had dreams of dense fog and thick air and the musky smell of wet fur. She didn’t know what it meant, if it was just coming from her own head, or what. But it gave her a continuous thread of hope that he might come home someday. She wanted to be ready for him. She couldn’t let him go -- he would never let her go.
Lem had lost all track of what day it was. Time had ceased to matter for the most part, only how long it had been since Vex disappeared. She was tracking that. After waking up from a five hour nap -- when did a nap just become sleep? -- she shuffled downstairs to the kitchen. There was a Sharpie hanging from a string tacked up on one of the walls where a calendar would normally be. Lem uncapped it and drew another tally mark onto the wallpaper. It was the only calendar that mattered anymore, counting the days since Vex had been taken. Blearily, she moved to start up the coffee maker.
Nic was fairing better than Lem, though not by much. It was hard enough to watch her unravel, but knowing that it was his fault made it so much worse. He’d sunk into a depression of his own and the only thing that kept him going was the knowledge that if he didn’t take care of Lem, she might just wither away. He came over daily to make sure she’d eaten something, usually bringing whatever they’d had for lunch or dinner the night before. He couldn’t take credit for cooking it himself, that was all Zania and Gabriel, but he could deliver it. This afternoon it was last night’s jambalaya, plus some chicken salad that Lem would probably forget about instead of eat. Nic knocked on the door, then let himself in, half expecting Lem to be sleeping. “Lem?” he called out, just in case she was awake. “It’s me. You up?”
Lem was used to Nic’s daily visits now, so the sound of the side door opening didn’t startle her. It was hard to be paranoid about her own personal safety when she didn’t give a shit about herself. If someone wanted to come in and murder her, let them try -- she would either rip their faces off or accept her fate and be relieved that it was all over, it depended on the day. It was just Nic though, and Lem didn’t mind him coming around. “In the kitchen,” she called back as she watched the black liquid drip into the coffee carafe. On some level Lem knew she was being a fucking terrible girlfriend to him lately, but she couldn’t fix it. She’d never been well equipped to deal with much turmoil in her life, and now it was all upside down and fucked up. She was barely a person anymore, how could she be a partner?
Nic knew their relationship was all kinds of fucked up at this point, but discussing it was pretty low priority. She was in a bad place, he was in a bad place, and depressing conversation wouldn’t be good for either of them. He wasn’t going to leave her in this state, so it really didn’t matter what they were to each other at this point. He followed her voice into the kitchen, mildly hopeful that she’d taken it upon herself to eat something. That wasn’t the case, but he supposed making coffee was better than nothing. “Hey,” he said, giving her a small smile that he didn’t really feel, but he had to try. “I brought you food. Gabriel’s jambalaya. Have you eaten yet?”
She wasn’t surprised that he’d brought her food, but it was difficult to be grateful for it too. Lem didn’t really have an appetite anymore, even though she knew she had to eat and all that. Gabriel had moved in next door and always seemed to be cooking something tasty for all of them, which Lem appreciated on some level ... but at the same time she didn’t, because she was struggling to find joy in anything for the past few months. She didn’t know if it would get any better with time, or if this was just her life now. Eventually Nic would get sick of her and stop coming over, and then maybe she could just shrivel up and disappear. “No, not yet,” she answered Nic’s question, not returning the smile. She was worse at faking anything than she was at taking care of herself. “I just got up. You want coffee?”
“Um… yeah, sure,” Nic answered, though he wasn’t sure it would do much to wake him up. He felt like he was always tired these days, a result of the funk he’d sunk into, and caffeine wasn’t going to make a dent in his recovery. But it felt normal to accept a cup and drink with her and Nic was still clinging to anything that felt even remotely normal, even if it was the middle of the afternoon. “Doing anything today?” he said, though he really hated to ask. He knew the answer, but he found himself struggling with conversation with Lem and nothing else came to him. He couldn’t ask if she’d slept well when he knew the answer was no. He couldn’t ask how her day was going—she’d just gotten up and he doubted it was any good anyways. Every day seemed like the last and sometimes he wondered if she’d be doing better if he’d been trapped in the other world instead of Vex. That always made things worse. He knew the answer was yes.
Lem was both grateful and annoyed by the lack of ‘how are you’ type questions lately. Nic knew she was awful, she knew she was awful, and she was glad she didn’t have to tell him that every day ... but part of her still wanted him to inquire. Reliably showing up to check on her and make sure she ate probably said enough about how much he cared. Lem just was unhappy with everything under the sun and Nic was unfortunately part of all that. She still had mixed feelings about his involvement in Vex’s disappearance, even if she didn’t outright blame him. Vex had been killing her -- not purposefully, she was convinced -- and something had to be done about that, but he’d been gone for so long now it was hard to remember the urgency of all that. Lem just wanted him back. “Don’t think so,” she answered Nic’s question, her eyes still on the coffee machine. “No plans. Are you?” The machine burbled that it was done, and Lem started to pour them two mugs. Coffee was about the only thing she remembered to ingest on her own these days.
“No, not really,” Nic said, though he kind of wished he had something to do. The days were passing, yet they all ran together, one seeming just the same as the next. The only way he knew for certain that time had passed as that the snow had all melted and spring was here. He normally enjoyed this time of year, but he was having trouble finding the energy to enjoy much of anything lately. “I’ve got some laundry to do, but otherwise… I’m just hanging out. Maybe we can… do something?” He didn’t expect her to say yes, but he was still hopeful that she might snap out of it. The problem was that he couldn’t force her to move on. She had to be ready to do it for herself and Lem didn’t seem like she was anywhere close.
Moving on was something that Lem technically knew she needed to do, but she just couldn’t wrap her head around how that was even possible. She couldn’t imagine moving out of this place, getting rid of Vex’s stuff, trying to live her life without him. Not when she wasn’t one hundred percent sure he was dead. How could she go on and have fun with her days and live like a normal person when Vex could be suffering somewhere? She’d posed that unanswerable question to Nic more than once in the heat of the moment, and she still didn’t have an answer. Sometimes she wondered if she was punishing him without being consciously aware of it. Lem stayed quiet for a moment as she dumped some cream and a ton of sugar into her coffee mug. As she started to stir, she finally turned to look at him. “Want to walk somewhere? The beach or something?” she suggested. She didn’t really want to, but the fresh air would probably do her some good.
Whether she was punishing him or not, Nic felt like he deserved it. He had no answers, no way to help her move forward, and he’d been the one to put her in this position in the first place. He knew deep down that it was the right move, that Vex would have killed her otherwise, but sometimes he doubted that this was any better. They went through the motions, eating and sleeping and repeating, with his own difference being that he attempted to work as well. He knew Zania was worried about him, but he couldn’t shake the weight of what he’d done from his shoulders. It had hurt too many people, regardless of all those saved. It was hard to see beyond that when he saw the wreckage every day. “Yeah,” he said. “A walk on the beach would be nice.” Maybe the water would calm him. It was worth a try.
Lem had considered breaking up with Nic on a more official basis, telling him to fuck off forever and leave her alone, but ... she couldn’t. He didn’t deserve that on top of everything else he was carrying, and sometimes she still craved his presence. He still always held her when she cried, and she didn’t want to lose that, even if they were just hanging on by a thread. She cared about him a lot, with what little capacity for caring remained in her. Besides, she thought he probably wouldn’t listen anyway and keep coming around to check on her. He cared too much too. Lem didn’t like making him so constantly unhappy though, and now that she’d slept for a while, she thought she could muster a walk. She hoped, anyway. “Okay,” Lem said, sipping once from her mug before she put it down again. “There’s um ... cups with tops, in that cabinet,” she said and pointed it out. “Put the coffee in some while I go change?” Lem needed pants, at least. She started out of the kitchen.
“Yeah, sounds good,” Nic nodded, moving towards the cabinet. He knew their whole kitchen at this point, had gone through binges where he’d washed dishes and cleaned house, needing to feel like he was making progress with something. Nic hated yard work, yet he’d found himself tending to her yard as well as his. It made him feel useful, even if Ludlow didn’t exactly have an HOA to worry about. He hoped Lem didn’t mind too much, though it was possible she hadn’t even noticed. Once he had both their coffees made, he popped a bagel in the toaster, just in case she wanted something to nibble on. She needed more than that, but he’d be happy if she ate something period.
She forgot now and then that Nic knew where everything was already. She often slept through all of his cleaning, when she wasn’t in the basement poring over the scant information Vex had collected about the AIR kids. Well, adults now. In these later days, she had more or less given up on continuing the work he was doing. After her encounter with Neil in the library, she didn’t really want to pursue any of the rest of them. She wasn’t a leader like Vex was anyway, didn’t have any ideas about what to encourage them to do. The Mal guy had seemed more like the one who could carry the torch, so she’d left it to him. Lem made short work of putting some clothes and shoes on, and went back downstairs to Nic, slipping her arms into the sweater he’d given her. It was May, but it still got chilly by the water, and she got cold fast these days. “Ready?” she murmured.
Nic was waiting for Lem when she came back down, her coffee made the way she liked it. He didn’t think it was cold enough to warrant a sweater, but then Nic was rarely cold and a bad judge of it. He wouldn’t have said anything to Lem regardless. He liked it when she wore the sweater coat. It reminded him of happier times. “Yeah,” he said, offering her her cup. “I made you a bagel too, just in case.” He couldn’t make her eat, but she needed more in her stomach than coffee. She’d been small when he met her, but these days he worried about her withering away. Nic led the way out to his car, silently wishing they had more to talk about. A good part of that was his fault. He’d been doing little himself and had nothing to add to the conversation. He knew she’d been looking into Vex’s work regarding AIR, but that was a conversation topic that frustrated them both. It was probably better if she let it go.
“Thanks,” Lem murmured as she took the coffee and bagel. She followed him outside, taking a deeper breath as they stepped out. It made her realize how stale the air was in the house, but she couldn’t bring herself to care much. More and more often, she was randomly caring about things, but it never lasted very long before she was sucked back into the black hole of depression. The sun made her squint, but felt good on her exposed skin, and she reluctantly thought this was a good idea. Lem climbed into Nic’s car and settled in, sipping on her drink. Conversation was hard to come by these days, so she was quiet too while they got on the road. Eventually Lem glanced over at Nic and asked, “How’s it going over at your place?” Maybe it was a lame question, but at least it was an effort.
Nic appreciated the effort, even if he didn’t feel like he had all that much to contribute himself. He wasn’t as far down the hole as she was, but his life had virtually come to a halt, stuck in the moment where they’d sent away the fog infected people. He had as much trouble getting past it as she did, though his reasons were different, the guilt all encompassing. Getting out of the house was probably as good for him as it was for her and he left the windows cracked a touch, appreciating the fresh air as he drove them towards the beach. “It’s okay,” he said. “Gabriel’s all settled in. I think the biggest change is having the animals around all the time. They’re cool, though. I like the cat more than I thought I would.” He’d never had a pet, so having three animals in his living space was a definite change. They weren’t his, but they were around, and he found he didn’t mind them as much as he thought he would.
Right, the animals. Lem had only been over to the Castells’ place a few times since Vex had disappeared, and not since Gabriel had moved in. She didn’t have anything against the guy, he’d seemed nice when she met him, Lem just wanted to hide in her dirty burrow and block out the entire world. Fortunately for her and her eating habits, Nic wasn’t allowing her to completely disappear into herself. She wasn’t oblivious to the fact that this was incredibly hard on him too, but it was so difficult for her to see outside of the bubble of her own pain sometimes. Being out in the sunshine and fresh air helped with that, and Lem felt her own guilt gnawing at her stomach. She tried not to dwell on that though, not sure how to even express all her tangled thoughts. Instead she pictured Nic petting a magic cat and had to smile faintly. “Does it chase around your little skeleton bird?” she asked, tearing off a pinch of the bagel to pop into her mouth.
"Yeah," Nic said, a little smile forming on his lips. "I guess it still looks like a bird. Or still has its essence. Or maybe cats just like to chase anything smaller than themselves that move." He didn't really know, but he thought Gabriel might. It would be interesting to ask him, but it wasn't something that had come up before, probably because Nic hadn't been the most social creature as of late. He was an easy enough housemate, like living with a ghost that occasionally ate the leftovers. "I started working on a skeleton rat," he said. "I thought a snake would be cool, but... I dunno, it'd be weird with Gabriel having one for a pet, I think."
Lem thought maybe cats just liked to chase stuff -- alive birds, dead birds, paper balls and laser pointers. Who knew. Well, Gabriel probably did with his Dr. Doolittle talents, but she wasn’t curious enough to ask him personally. The thought of Nick having a little animal skeleton menagerie to match Gabriel’s pets was kind of fun, and it made her smile faintly. “Maybe they could be friends,” she said, nibbling on another bite of bagel. She hadn’t thought she was hungry, but the food was easing a gnawing in her gut, so maybe she was. “I’d hang out with a sentient person skeleton, wouldn’t you?”
"Maybe," Nic said, glancing over at Lem. "Thing is, creating something like that requires blood and a commendable life force. I typically use a soul that matches the creature with the promise that, after a certain amount of time, I'll release it. Rats and birds are usually game. Trapping their soul in the land of the living won't do much harm. I don't even have to be there when they die to summon it. But a person's soul is a bigger deal." There were a couple ways to do it, but all of them required a good deal of power and even then they were dangerous. And the most straightforward way would have required human sacrifice, something Nic just wasn't willing to do, especially not for fun. “Maybe if someone else created it, it’d be interesting. I’d love to know what they had to say. But I don’t know if a skeleton can talk without a tongue.”
It was kind of cute, the way Nic immediately nerded out about it, when Lem hadn’t been thinking about the magic behind such a thing at all. She definitely didn’t want any human sacrifice to have to happen so she could chat up a skeleton, it had just been a silly passing thought. Lem was smiling a bit as he talked, chewing slowly on her bagel and sipping her coffee. “I think that like, my brain is a lot more cartoony than yours,” she murmured, sounding vaguely amused. That was okay with her, she kind of liked how serious he was about almost everything. There was a lot of sincerity there that Lem wasn’t used to in other people. “Can your little creatures not make any noise? I thought sometimes spirits could speak.”
Nic had to pause for a second to see what she meant, then realized she might not have intended for him to take the comment so seriously. it probably wasn't normal to take a comment about a talking skeleton and jump straight into the process of how to create such a thing, but that's how his brain worked sometimes. He liked knowing how things worked and it was easy to latch onto something technical when everything else around him felt so out of control. "Depends on the strength of the spirit and the level of their manifestation. I don't have a lot of experience with ghosts, but I've often heard that if you can see a ghost, you can also hear it. But that's something that's tethered itself to our world. I dunno. Most of my creatures are pretty quiet by nature, but it'd be interesting to see if there's a spell that can help them communicate better."
Lem thought maybe that ‘opposites attract’ thing was really true. Sometimes Nic was like a walking magic textbook, sometimes she was nothing but a bundle of chaos and nonsense. Lem happened to think that being a book was probably more appealing to most people. At least Nic was easier to understand. Lem knew she had been particularly difficult since Vex had gone away and there was part of her that wanted to apologize for that, but she didn’t really know where to start. She couldn’t make any promises on it getting any better or how fast, so maybe it was better just to keep her mouth shut about it. They were almost to the beach, and she was ready to get out and feel the breeze and stretch her legs. “I don’t have a lot of experience with ghosts either,” Lem said, a touch of regret in her tone. “I don’t see a lot of stuff on my own, just ... through Vex. Used to be. I just wanna know what it’s like to be dead.”
Nic wanted to point out that she’d seen things through him too, but those had all been nightmares that had led up to Vex’s demise, so he thought better of it. Knowing that she wanted to know what it was like to be dead didn’t help. His greatest fear was that he’d come to check on her one morning and find her with her wrists cut, or having swallowed a bottle of pills. Some days that felt like an eventuality, while others were better. This one seemed better, to an extent, up until now. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “I think… most of the ghosts you come in contact with aren’t exactly happy. That’s why they’re ghosts.” Whether they were tied to this earth through unfinished business or an extreme emotion, they didn’t seem to live a peaceful existence. Nic hoped Vex wasn’t a ghost. He hoped he’d passed on to a better place, or at least had found some peace.
Suicide had crossed Lem’s mind a few times since Vex had been gone. She felt aimless and lost without his guidance, and she had thought about just slipping off into the dark herself ... but something always pulled her back. She didn’t want Nic to have to find her. He didn’t deserve that kind of trauma on top of everything else. Besides that, Lem sometimes thought she could feel Vex, that their minds were touching across the distance. The moments never lasted long, flashes quick enough that she might’ve just been imagining them, but it was another reason to hold on. Her current musing about what death was like was more idle curiosity than ideation, but she didn’t really know how to tell Nic that. Maybe part of her liked being worried over too. Lem just hummed a bit at what he said -- she’d never talked to a ghost, so what did she know? If there were other ways to be dead, she wanted to know about those too. But Nic didn’t sound happy talking about it, so Lem let it drop. They were almost to the beach anyway, and she was ready to get out and into the fresh air.
It had been long enough now that Nic was certain Vex was dead, but occasionally, when he let his mind drift or he was just about to fall asleep, he thought he could sense Carson. It was the faintest voice in his head, all jumbled and mostly static, but he knew without a doubt it was the wolf. That first time Carson had shifted after their minds had been connected, Nic had made the mistake of being too close. He hadn’t quite learned how to not hear the others yet and in that case he’d gotten the wolf instead. It was that Carson that was in his head, just… not as angry. Scared. He’d thought to tell Lem, but he knew it would give her hope that he was almost certain was false. Maybe a werewolf could survive in that world, but he didn’t know about a person. He didn’t know about Vex. And even if he was alive, they still couldn’t risk bringing him back. It all felt so hopeless that Nic tried not to think about it anymore, which meant it was always in the back of his mind, lurking. “Hard to believe they’re opening the beach for swimming at the end of the month,” Nic said as he pulled into the parking lot. “It doesn’t seem like summer yet.”
It was hard for Lem to feel very excited about anything, but as they pulled up and parked the car, she felt her spirits lifting a bit. She’d always loved the ocean, and up here in Maine it was tumultuous and wild and beautiful. She was eager to stand on the sand and face the wind and feel small and insignificant. It was soothing. “It came up fast,” she agreed as she opened up her door. Lem had no idea what the summer would have in store, but she had to admit that all the sunshine would be good for her, good for the world. Vex had been locked away in the dead of an ugly winter, maybe the change in weather could encourage a change in her heart too. Lem wasn’t going to hold her breath, but a tiny bit of hope was better than nothing, right? Lem waited for Nic to join her outside the car and started walking with him toward the wooden planks that led to the beach. After a quiet moment, she slipped her hand into Nic’s while they walked. It wouldn’t be the best day of their lives, that was a given, but maybe with the sun and sand and ocean in front of them, it would be better than most of the days they’d been through lately.