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Sticky and humid. The windows are open in Nacht’s apartment. The tattered screens and barely-working air-conditioning unit click and hum in time with each other.
Three sharp knocks against wood ring out into the cramped apartment. ”Nacht,” calls a hoarse voice, followed by a cough. “Nacht, I know you’re in there,” they rasp.
Nacht shrugs, rolling his shoulders back. Probably not important, he thinks, stretching in the near-stifling heat.
Avery slams their fist into the door again. “Open the fucking door, Nacht, I’m not messing around,” they say. Their voice cracks open, desperation pooling in the spaces between the door and its frame. “ Please, okay, this is bad, just let me in. Open the door, just…”
They pause. Take a shaky breath. “Open the fucking door, Nacht. What the fuck.” A whine, pitched high and wheezing, followed by another bangbangbang on the door.
An audible thunk against wood, and a soft groan that Nacht almost misses in the whirring of the fan.
Silence.
“Avery?” Nacht calls. Suddenly, the air feels heavier, so much so that Nacht chokes on his breath when he twists the doorknob. “Avery, that’s not fuckin’ funny—”
Their nose is bloody and crooked, Nacht realizes, probably broken. Red drips warm and lazy across Avery’s cheek and mouth like summer, restless. Magic — dark magic — clings to them like a thin film. The taste of it permeates the air around them, acrid and slimy on Nacht’s tongue.
“Nacht,” Avery mumbles, their mouth half-open against the doorframe. They try again and get caught on the first syllable, nnaahh, taking a ragged breath and curling in on themself.
He coughs and pulls his shirt up to cover his face as he loops Avery’s arm over his shoulders and drags them into the kitchen. “Shh, hey,” Nacht murmurs. “I gotcha, I gotcha. Let’s get inside, yeah?”
He sees the rest of the damage in tiny starts and stops: the fingers of Avery’s left hand, which haven’t quite recovered from being snapped sideways despite the healing spell that Nacht can smell on them. Warped purple and blue bruises spread below the neck of the shirt that Nacht had let them borrow. They make a small sound in their throat and grab at the edge of Nacht’s shirt. Their palm is scorched raw.
“Hell,” Nacht hears himself say. It’s far away, somehow, his own voice ringing in his ears. “What happened t’you?” His hands work on autopilot, reaching into the cabinet under the sink and pulling out the battered home first aid kit, sorting through neat stacks of bandages and alcohol wipes to find anything usable.
Avery half-laughs, hoarse and choked. “Wha’s it look like happened?” Their tongue slips between their teeth and flicks over the dip of their barely-there cupid’s bow, smearing red red red over their lip. “Got fucked up real bad.”
“Obviously,” Nacht says dryly. And then: “Who?”
Avery doesn’t say. They don’t say anything, really, just lean against the counter. Press their arm against their face. Pinches their nose and tilts their head just at the right angle so that Nacht can see their throat work. It gives him just enough time to imagine the taste of blood in Avery’s mouth — this is not the damn time, you freak — before his common sense kicks in and he sets the kit and his thoughts of red red red aside in favor of holding his hands up, palms open like he’d seen the volunteers at the local animal shelter do with distrustful strays.
So now they’re a stray animal, huh?
He shakes his head and sighs. “You look like shit,” he says.
Avery laughs at that, a choked-out, bubbling thing. “You think I don’t know that?”
“Think you’re bleeding on my carpet,” Nacht says, popping the lid of the first aid kit. “C’mere.”
Avery does.
They make their way into the kitchen slowly, their head bowed, the sleeve of their jacket stained a muted red. Their nose is still dripping; a trail of bright little splotches marks their path across the tile. They move like they’re being followed— or hunted.
He’s suddenly and uncomfortably reminded of a wounded dog in the way that Avery grabs the counter to steady themself, in the way they flinch when Nacht touches their arm. In the heavy fear that clings to them even when their forehead is an inch from Nacht’s nose.
Nacht lets his fingers hover over Avery’s jaw. “I can’t clean you up if you don’t look at me,” he chides. There’s something terribly soft in his voice that snuck into his mouth the minute he opened the door and saw the wreck of Avery’s face; it’s curled up and knitted itself into Nacht’s chest. Won’t leave. “Avery, look at me,” he murmurs.
Nacht gently pushes on the bottom of Avery’s jaw and tilts their head back. They swallow thickly. Starburst bruises follow their cheekbones and their lip is split, the edges of the wound wet and red. Maraschino cherry hemorrhage. Part of it is already scabbing back together—
or it would be if Avery would stop licking over it and getting fresh blood all over their stupidly agile tongue.
They clear their throat and swallow again, their fledgling Adam’s apple bobbing directly under Nacht’s fingertips.
“I got into a duel on my way to work today,” Avery rasps. They blink, their eyelashes slicked together with blood, struggling to keep their eyes open.
Oh.
Oh.
“Hell,” Nacht breathes.
Avery huffs, their warm breath hitting Nacht’s neck. “Didn’t know where else to go.”
The hospital, maybe, Nacht wants to snap. Or your workplace, which has much better protection wards than my apartment. Hell.
“You drive all the way here?” is what comes out instead.
Avery sucks in a breath through their teeth when Nacht picks up a gauze pad and presses it against the weeping edges of the wound on their lip. “Walked. Hurt like hell, though.” They dig their teeth absently into the torn flesh again when Nacht moves the gauze. Bright blurts of dreamlike red already drying on freckled skin.
Pain makes Avery a tender thing, treating touch like a wound and wounds like new entrances to the body. Nacht almost wants to treat them like one, too.
He presses his lips to Avery’s cheek against his better judgment, smudging away some of the magic that clings to their skin. Part of him still thinks he must be asleep — must be napping on the couch in the summer sun in an old t-shirt and boxers — because this, putting gauze from a medical kit he’d never used against Avery’s mouth while they stare through him as if they can’t see at all, is more nightmarish than anything that had happened in the past few years.
(Not that he hadn’t done this before. The nightmarish part is that it’s Avery, his Avery, with the broken nose and the split lip. That Nacht knows exactly, intimately, where those injuries came from. What someone would have to cast, what kind of punch they would have to throw, to open those wounds.)
They hiss when Nacht presses his fingers against the sides of their nose, realigning the bridge with the center of their face. “ Fuck, ” Avery spits, reedy and strained. “Warning would have been nice, god—” They cut off, taking a long breath that rattles quietly in their throat. “Fuck. That hurts.”
“You’d’ve felt it worse with a warnin’,” Nacht says, taping another patch of gauze over their nose and securing it. “Least now it’ll heal straight.”
Avery flinches when Nacht grabs their hands; they’re as cold as the rest of them. Empty. Bloody nails and broken fingers. Their palms are dry around the edges, cracking open and dripping terrible red onto the couch cushions. Their knuckles are glass in Nacht’s grip. Velvet bleeds into the grooves of his fingerprints.
They let Nacht reach up and push the rest of their jacket off their shoulders. Let Nacht’s hands hook up under their shirt and pull it over their head.
The bruises are worse underneath: ugly smears of purple and red pattern over Avery’s torso, sharp little marks that shift with every ragged breath that they take. “Oh, Avery, ” Nacht murmurs, running a hand over their stomach.
Their top two ribs bend outward at awkward angles, giving the illusion of their chest opening up like the wings of a butterfly. Nacht could touch the protrusion and split Avery’s skin along a fragile, unseen seam. Do it, something in his mind whispers. Press down; touch bone.
He leans down and presses his lips to the top of Avery’s head. Their hair smells of smoke and sticky, dark magic. Even like this. The thought winds its way around his throat and squeezes. They’re still beautiful.
Avery goes almost too easily when Nacht hooks his thumbs in their belt loops. Their eyelashes, bright little things edging their eyes, brush Nacht’s shoulder. He shivers. The fan in the corner of the room whirs, the tiny strips of paper Nacht had taped to it fluttering in the sticky air of the apartment.
The paper, and Avery, sunlit things, swaying in the emptiness of Nacht’s kitchen. The splash of light across Avery’s nose shimmers into orange at the edges, like someone had thrown a brush covered in golden paint at their face and the streak had covered up the bruise.
(For a terrifying heartbeat the light is just too-orange and Avery’s face is bisected by a stripe of rust. It screams something deep and untouchable and curses curses curses and he tries to let go but he can’t jerk his hands away— )
Avery presses the heel of their hand into their head, over the light and the bruises, and the rust is gone. Nacht feels his lungs seize and unseize in his chest.
Their hips are flush against his, now. He tries not to think about it. Fails. Tries again.
He rubs his thumbs over the faint tan lines on Avery’s stomach. “Stay,” he murmurs. Going home will eat you alive goes unsaid.
Avery lets out a weak, hoarse chuckle. “You think I could go anywhere else?”
“No,” Nacht whispers. His hands move to rest at the slight dip of Avery’s waist. The tips of his fingers brush the outer edges of their broken ribs. Do it.
They press a kiss to his neck, a fleeting thing. Nacht is sure he must taste like dirty coins. Avery doesn’t seem to mind it. Across the room, a pair of flies are flinging themselves against the glass of the window, smack-smack-smack, like they’re trying to see how hard they can run into it before they bash their tiny fly brains in. They’re probably not thinking that far, Nacht muses. They don’t know the glass will kill them. They just want inside.
Their mouth stills. Their voice, when it works past the rasp of their throat, is small. Almost fragile; glass only in name. “It hurts, Nacht.”
Nacht wishes, not for the first time, that he could reach through Avery’s sternum and crumble the shell of their chest — that rough, battered chrysalis — to pieces. Press his own heart to the absence.
“I know,” he murmurs. “I know.”
Their nose hooks itself into the space between Nacht’s collarbone and his neck. He imagines the beat of two pulses against each other. Do it!