And If Thou Wilt, Forget

“Thanks for that.” Tim tightened his scarf and tucked the ends into his coat “You didn’t have to come with me, you know.”

“Yeah, I did. I’m not letting you go into this alone. We stick together as much as possible, remember?” Gerry bumped Tim’s shoulder with his own. “Besides, if you take your eyes off me for five minutes I’m going back to that little shop by the hotel and buying a pack of cigarettes.”

“Not at those prices you aren’t.”

There was a fog curling around them, surprisingly thick for so dense a city, but Gerry still waited until they had gone a couple blocks and were mingling with a different crowd before he reached over and took Tim’s hand. “Bit surprised you didn’t want to wait and go to the midnight one.”

“It’s ticketed. The cathedral’s world-famous, so a lot of people want to go to the midnight mass. If you’re not a registered parishioner, you have to get in a lottery for a seat, and that ended weeks ago.” Tim squeezed Gerry’s hand. “I always liked matins better anyway. Come on, let’s go see if we can find someplace that’s open for breakfast and then we can go meet our contact.”

One thing Gerry appreciated about Tim, as opposed to Gertrude, was that Tim didn’t get impatient and anxious if a lead didn’t pan out immediately, or if he came up on what appeared to be a dead end. He knew the old bat always had one part of her mind on the Archives—less when Tim had been there, but still some—and that made her anxious to get on; she would sometimes leave behind something that didn’t seem to be paying off, trusting that if it became important she would find out about it later, or maybe even that the Eye would tell her if there was anything to be concerned about. Not so Tim, who would charm and coax and wheedle to get answers and explanations, who would patiently pursue a lead until he was absolutely certain it led nowhere. Often they did lead somewhere, just not where they expected or necessarily wanted.

More than that, in the month they’d been traveling—Pittsburgh leading to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to Boston, and now to New York City—Gerry had learned that Tim had two distinct advantages over Gertrude Robinson. One was simply the charisma of youth; Gertrude might look like a harmless old woman who was more cardigan than brain, but not when you got to talking to her, and she wasn’t the sort of little old lady that people just spoke to. Tim, on the other hand, had a winning smile and a sympathetic air, and people were more than willing to tell him their problems and answer his questions, and he seldom had to apply much in the way of pressure to get them.

His other advantage, which probably stemmed from that charisma, was a truly staggering network of contacts, acquaintances, and friends of friends. Pretty much all of Gertrude’s contacts—like Mary Keay’s had been—were those who dealt in the paranormal, or more specifically with the Fourteen, and if she talked to the uninitiated it was usually only to get a statement that might lead to something. Tim just knew…people. Friends from university, people he’d backpacked with over short stretches, pen pals and professional contacts and even some people who’d done hobbies with his brother. While most of them weren’t American, nevertheless Tim seemed to be able to open doors to all kinds of things with a couple of well-placed emails or a brief name drop. Maybe it was a coincidence, but so far, it seemed like Tim could probably get them into Buckingham Palace via a network of old friends. By the front door, even.

Gerry had honestly started to feel a bit useless. Gertrude, who despite her boundless energy still had a handful of things she couldn’t do, at least needed him to carry heavy things or crawl into tight places or, more often than not, speak to people in a language he was at least passably fluent in that she had had neither the time nor the inclination to learn more of than the handful of words it took to demand they speak hers, and he could occasionally get answers out of people who wouldn’t talk to the Archivist. Tim was Gerry’s age and height, in arguably better shape even before his illness and surgery, and the dialect—or dialects—of Spanish spoken by those few who didn’t speak English was different enough from Castilian Spanish that Tim’s rudimentary fumbling and Gerry’s more academic cadence were both met with the same mix of confusion and indulgence. Since they hadn’t come up on any situations where knowledge of rare books and occult nonsense was more useful than common sense and a silver tongue, there wasn’t really any reason for Gerry to be there instead of back in London.

At least, he thought as Tim slid an arm around his waist, not really any reason that was directly relate to the mission.

“I still can’t get over the fact that it’s proper winter now and it’s still warmer than it was in Chicago,” he mused aloud, leaning into Tim’s side as much as he could without sending them both off the curb and into traffic.

“It’s closer to the ocean. And about a hundred miles further south. But for what it’s worth, I agree with you,” Tim said. “Hey, this place smells good.”

Gerry glanced over his shoulder and gave the fog a hard look. It looked—and smelled—ordinary enough, though. Not the Lonely, then. With a mental shrug, he turned and followed Tim into the diner.

Tim was right. It did smell good. And judging by the accents, it was popular with the locals. A woman with a pencil stuck behind her ear grabbed two menus and led them to a booth by the window. As they followed, Tim pulled off his coat and stuffed it in his pocket. Gerry did the same, more slowly, even though he knew nobody was going to care about what his head looked like.

“You look good,” Tim said, once they’d agreed with the waitress that coffee was what they needed on a morning like this (Gerry had never been much of a coffee drinker, but one of the places they’d stopped in Chicago had had a notation next to it that said you’re in a diner, you gotta have a cup, so he’d taken the directive to heart) and settled back to look at the menu. “I mean, you always look good, but you look a lot healthier than you have for a while.”

Leave it to Tim. Gerry gave him a crooked grin. “Helps that I’m not actively dying. And that I’m off the steroids.”

“And that your hair is growing back in. How long’s it been since you actually looked at it before dyeing it, by the way?”

Gerry blinked at him. Before he could say anything, though, a new waitress, this one with two pens jammed into her bun like hair sticks and a third sticking out of the spine of her order pad, dropped off two thick, heavy mugs of dark liquid and a small dish of creamers. She took their orders, promised it would be out in a minute, and was gone in a blink. Once they were alone again, Gerry had to ask. “How did you know that?”

“You don’t get the kind of coverage you usually get if you can see what you’re doing when you’re doing it.” Tim pulled his ankle back to avoid Gerry’s halfhearted kick. “Besides, you wouldn’t have told me it was going to grow back in red unless you hadn’t actually looked at the roots for a bit. Or unless your perception of color is way different than mine.”

“It’s not red?”

Tim pulled out his phone, touched something, and then handed it over. Gerry took it and found himself looking at his own face. It was the first time he’d looked at it, really looked at it, in a while, not since Tim had taken a selfie of the two of them on the Chicago Observation Deck, which was now his phone wallpaper. He’d filled out some, probably for the first time in his life, and he’d lost the hollow, empty look in his eyes he felt like he’d had since he was twelve years old. What surprised him, though, was his hair. As Tim had said, he’d expected it to come in the same carrot orange it had been when he was young, before he’d started dyeing it in the first place—the same color his mother’s had been before it got thin and white. Instead, the centimeter or so of fuzz atop his head was a soft ash brown.

He ran his hand over it a couple of times, then looked up at Tim. “That’s not a trick of the light?”

“Nope. I haven’t really noticed it much because you’ve had the hat on so much, but it’s pretty obvious now.” Tim grinned. “It suits you. I understand if you still want to dye it, but you look good au naturel, too.”

“Isn’t that some kind of potato dish?”

“No, that’s au gratin.”

“I thought that was on fire.”

“That’s en flambé.”

“That’s definitely getting caught having an affair.”

“Now you’re just fucking with me.”

“What do you mean, now?”

It was Gerry’s turn to dodge Tim’s kick. He wasn’t as good at it.

Once they had finished breakfast, they set out into the still-foggy morning to head for their destination. They didn’t stand out much; this time of year, New York City was swarming with tourists, and they blended right in, despite—or maybe even because of—Tim’s relentlessly rainbow toboggan. Gerry had teased Tim about the fact that everywhere they went, small children and some young adults stopped to tell him how much they liked it, but he had to admit, if only to himself, that he kind of enjoyed it nevertheless. Gertrude exuded an aura of do not fuck with me the size of a small city, and Gerry had over the years cultivated the ability to be invisible and unnoticed that usually failed only around bullies and general assholes. People treating him like just another part of the crowd was a rather pleasant change.

“This probably isn’t going to take more than an hour or so,” Tim said casually as they strolled along the street. He reached over and took Gerry’s hand, as naturally as always. “What do you want to do for the rest of the day?”

Gerry gave the matter serious consideration. He still wasn’t used to having actual downtime. “I take it moving on isn’t an option.”

“We’ll definitely have missed checkout time, and if we’re going to have to pay for at least one more night anyway, we might as well stay for it,” Tim pointed out. “Besides, I said this isn’t going to take all day. I didn’t say we were going to get all the answers we’ll need, and if we don’t, we’ll be here until Friday, maybe longer.”

“I find it extremely difficult to believe that Americans will work the day after Christmas,” Gerry said dryly.

Tim flashed him a grin. “It’s not a state holiday. Not saying they’ll get much done, but it’s up to individual companies to decide if they’re going to be open or not.”

They turned right at the next corner, and Gerry returned to Tim’s earlier question. The fact that it was Christmas Eve made a difference. In most places, things would likely be shutting down early so people could spend the evening with their families, but there was a lot of money to be made off of the out of towners and people chasing nostalgia…which actually likely meant everything would be extra expensive. Supply and demand and all that. They could afford it, even if the Institute definitely wouldn’t reimburse them, but neither of them enjoyed spending a lot of money on something just to say they’d done it, or more accurately just to say they’d done it in New York City.

“Well,” he said finally. “I hear there’s a skating rink at Rockefeller Center.”

Tim let out a surprised laugh. Then he wrinkled his nose and squinted up at the sky above the fog. “If there’s going to be precipitation on Christmas Eve, it ought to have the decency to be snow.”

Gerry was about to ask what Tim meant when he felt it, too—drops of cold water, but not cold enough to freeze, dotting his cheeks and the back of his neck, the only exposed parts of his body; it wasn’t really cold enough that he needed gloves necessarily, but the tattoos on his hands stood out a bit and he’d learned that, at least in industrial cities like Pittsburgh, people assumed they meant he’d been in prison. He had, obviously, but he really didn’t want to talk about it.

He let go of Tim’s hand long enough to turn up the collar of his coat and tug the hat a little lower. “Ugh. Let’s pick up the pace and get out of this.”

“Why, worried you’re going to melt?”

“Shit floats before it melts,” Gerry shot back.

Tim came to a dead halt. Gerry stopped, surprised, and turned around to find Tim staring at him with laser focus, his expression solemn and slightly sad and infinitely tender all at once.

“Hey,” he said in a low, serious voice. “Quit talking about the man I love that way.”

He’d been joking. It was only a joke. But looking into Tim’s deep blue eyes, Gerry saw for the first time how often he made jokes like that—little self-deprecating comments, teasing put-downs, a general sense of his low worth. Maybe he’d seen it as reclaiming the way his mother had made him feel…but maybe he was just reinforcing it. And for the first time, he realized how much it hurt Tim when he said them.

“I’ll try,” he said, just as seriously. “It’s not going to come easy, but I’ll try.”

Tim relaxed and smiled. “That’s all I ask. If it gets hard, just remember that I love you, and I have excellent taste.”

Gerry laughed. Leave it to Tim.

Their destination was a bibliophile’s wet dream—the New York Public Library’s main branch, which was at least a hundred years old. A few tourists were taking pictures of it, despite the fog that lingered around the rain. Gerry had wondered if, from what he’d heard about the building, it would make it seem more ominous, but surprisingly, it didn’t. Mysterious, maybe, but especially with the giant wreaths of greenery around the necks of the lions on either side of the wide stone steps and twinkling white lights lining the door, it was hard to find the building frightening. The lobby they stepped into was awe-inspiring, yet somehow welcoming at the same time. All in all, it seemed like the perfect place to while away a morning like this. Or would have, if they hadn’t been on a mission.

Tim consulted a map on the wall, then turned to Gerry. “Third floor. Stairs or the lift?”

“Let’s take the stairs. I’m feeling athletic today.” Gerry spotted something else on the map. “Check our coats first?”

“Not a bad idea.”

Gerry wasn’t at all surprised that Tim took the thick leather folio Gertrude had given him out of his inner coat pocket before they headed upstairs. The information in it was literally worth their lives, and they risked a good bit more than that if it fell into the wrong hands. Even if Tim didn’t bring it up, Gerry was fairly certain it hadn’t left his side since Gertrude had given it to him. Certainly he didn’t leave it in the hotel room. Besides, it lent an air of legitimacy to their being in the research rooms of a major metropolitan library.

A young woman with blonde hair and a round face met them at the entrance to the rooms on the third floor with a smile. “Hi!” she said in a soft, modulated voice. Her accent didn’t sound like she was local. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

Tim gave her his most charming smile. “I certainly hope so. We’re looking for a Ms. Rebecca Miller?”

“I’m Mrs. Miller.” The emphasis on the Missus was subtle but present, with a note of pride. Gerry guessed she hadn’t been married long. “Oh—are you Evie’s friend?”

“That’s right. Tim Stoker.” Tim held out his hand. “This is my partner—”

“Gerard Delano,” Gerry offered before Tim could introduce him. Using his father’s name instead of his mother’s seemed safer, both from anyone connected to the Fears who might remember her and from anyone who might connect his name to his mother’s death. Besides, it was easier for people to spell…and, potentially, to forget.

“Good to meet you both.” Rebecca shook Tim’s hand, then Gerry’s. “Nice ink…so, what can I help you with? Evie said you were looking into circuses?”

“Yes. I’m doing a paper on circus superstitions,” Tim said smoothly. “I understand you have some of the best records in the country.”

“Yes, we acquired a whole bunch of papers from Ringling’s early days. If you’re interested in the superstitions, I can definitely show you what we’ve got.” Rebecca hesitated. “Um, I should probably let you know that we close at one today. You know, it’s Christmas Eve. But if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can always come back on Friday.”

“Thank you, we appreciate that.” Tim caught Gerry’s eye and smirked. Gerry rolled his eyes and, theatrically but silently, conceded the point.

Rebecca showed them into one of the rooms, lined floor to ceiling with shelves and papers, then set them up with several stacks of documents. After she had promised to check up on them later and left, Gerry said quietly to Tim, “None of these are recent.”

“I know. I’m trying to see if I can trace other incidents of the Stranger outside of the Circus of the Other,” Tim said just as quietly. “Or if the circus ever gets used by one of the other fears.”

“You think it’s possible?”

“I think superstitions happen for a reason. Do you know why it’s bad luck to say ‘Macbeth’ in a theater if you’re not actually putting it on? Or to whistle backstage, or to wear new makeup on opening night, or to use real mirrors on stage?”

“Because theater people are like children and theatrical performances only happen because an astonishing number of things fail to go wrong?”

Tim smiled at the reference. “Mirrors are reflective, Ger. If they catch the stage lights just wrong, you’re likely to fall off and hurt yourself. You don’t wear new makeup on opening night because you don’t wear makeup on stage without testing it—what if there’s something in it you’re allergic to? The whistling thing is because a lot of the stage hands in early theater productions were sailors, and they used whistle codes to move scenery about, so if you whistled and they didn’t know it wasn’t you, you might get a sandbag dropped on your head.”

Gerry stifled his laugh so he didn’t disturb the quiet of the reading room. He’d actually thought Terry Pratchett had made that one up. “And the Macbeth thing?”

“It was an easy play to put together quickly if the one on the bill wasn’t doing well enough. Most people knew it, and the scenery and costumes were usually in stock in most theaters. If you heard someone reciting lines from Macbeth backstage and you weren’t already doing it, it was a sign that the play you were in was about to go belly-up.”

Gerry hummed, intrigued. “How did you know that?”

Tim grinned. “Plot point in a murder mystery short story. Want to help me look through all this?”

“Mm, creepy clowns and train wrecks. You do know how to show a guy a good time, Mr. Stoker.”

They only had two hours, but they made the most of them. When Rebecca came back to tell them it was time to go, Tim had even identified a promising line of investigation that might help them. Unfortunately, it was in Hartford, Connecticut. Not far away, all things considered, but still somewhere they would have to go.

Later, though. Like Tim had said, they couldn’t leave until the next day anyway. They had all of today to relax. It was a nice thought.

“So,” he said as they reemerged onto the streets, having reclaimed their coats. “Rockefeller Center? Or lunch first?”

Tim laughed. “Lunch. Maybe it’ll have stopped raining by then.”

“Yeah, that’s fair.” They were both ungainly skaters as it was. Adding in the rain would only make it worse.

A hopeful vendor along the street called out to the passers-by, most of whom didn’t stop. Tim did, though, and bought a bag of hot roasted chestnuts. Gerry hadn’t had one since he was a very small boy, and all he remembered was his mother snatching them out of his hand and throwing them in the trash because he didn’t deserve them. They tasted much better shared with his partner.

Partner. Gerry turned the word over in his head a few times. Gertrude had put that on the paperwork, but they’d never really used it out loud, not until Tim had said it to Rebecca. It was a convenient label to get them through the door, of course, but…

“You okay?” Tim asked gently as they stepped into a restaurant on an out of the way street. From the decor and the smell, it was obviously some kind of Asian restaurant, which was fine with Gerry. “You look lost in thought.”

“Yeah, just…considering things.” Gerry thought about leaving it at that—he knew Tim would let him—but it seemed too important to ignore. “What are we?”

Tim didn’t answer right away. He waited until they were seated at the table before he asked, “What do you want to be? And I’m not trying to be funny. It’s a genuine question. I can tell you how I feel about you all day, and I’m sure you can do the same, but the thing is that how we feel doesn’t automatically put us in a box or a category or a label or whatever. It’s not like there’s a DSM for relationships. In the end, it’s about us and what we want to call ourselves. We can be boyfriends, or partners, or friends with benefits, or lovers, or just people who are very important to each other. It’s up to us. It’s up to you. So I’m asking you, straight up, Gerard Albrecht Keay. What do you want?”

“I want…” Gerry paused. What did he want? He wanted a lot of things he couldn’t have. He wanted to be an artist, not a rare book dealer. He wanted to live somewhere that wasn’t the middle of a crowded city where he could just breathe. He wanted to have met Tim in a café or a farmer’s market or a library, somewhere ordinary, and to have built up a friendship and then…whatever they had now without the specter of the Fears looming over them. He wanted to be defined as himself and not as his mother’s son and heir. He wanted…

Actually, no, he realized as the waiter came over. He picked something at random off the menu while his mind turned over the startling conclusion he’d just come to. He didn’t want any of that. He didn’t want to change his past, because it had made him who he was…and if things had been any different, he might never have actually met Tim. And however much he wished he he’d never had to go through what he had, it was worth it just for this. For this moment, this life. For the first time in his entire existence, Gerry was considering the possibility of a future—not just the next moment or the next mission or surviving to the end of the day, but weeks, months, even years ahead—and he was looking forward to seeing what it might hold.

He reached across the table and took Tim’s hand. “I want you to move in with me.”

Tim blinked. “What?”

“When we get back to London.” Gerry didn’t know why the conviction was suddenly so strong in his mind, but it was. “I—I like this, Tim. Not the constant traveling—well, okay, yeah, I do kind of like that—but not the, the research and the Unknowing and the horrible nasty things that might happen, but just being with you. I like waking up and knowing that if you’re not still in bed, you’re just, you know, reading a book or brushing your teeth or something not too far away. I like seeing your shoes next to mine on the floor and your shirts next to mine in the drawer. I like holding your hand while we’re out walking and making you laugh. I like knowing where you are, and frankly, I like not being alone. And I like that it’s you doing all that. So. You asked what I wanted? I want to keep that. As much of it as I can. So—when we get back, whenever that is—will you move in with me?”

Tim’s eyes softened, and he smiled. He laced his fingers through Gerry’s and squeezed. “Yeah. I’d like that. I’m sure I can find a buyer for the house pretty quickly. Unless you’d rather move out of your mother’s shop.”

Gerry considered that for a moment. He couldn’t really give up the shop, since that was what paid the bills, but he didn’t have to live in the flat over it. Or they could redecorate it, make it theirs. Either way…he said yes.

“We can talk about that when we’re ready to head home,” he said, tasting the word on his tongue. It tasted like snow and sugar and herbal tea and…Tim. Or maybe Tim just tasted like home. “We don’t have to decide now.”

“True.” Tim grinned. “Something to look forward to, anyway.”

“I haven’t had that,” Gerry confessed. “Not in a long time. Maybe not ever.”

“Truthfully, it’s been a while for me, too,” Tim said. “I’d almost forgotten how much I liked the feeling. And I really like that it’s you giving me that feeling.” He raised his glass of water in a toast. “Here’s to us.”

“To us,” Gerry echoed, clinking his glass against Tim’s. “Happy Christmas, Tim.”

“Happy Christmas, Gerry.”