miles to go before i sleep
The June after he turns thirteen, Leopold Fitz leaves his mother a note with an apology and a poor explanation and runs away. He just hopes the monsters follow him.
A few weeks later in London, he meets Jemma Simmons at knife point.
He’s running from a dog the size of a car, and he ducks into an alleyway to find a knife at his throat. In one of those moments he has every so often, where his reflexes leave his brain in the dust and save his life, his hand shoots up, fingers wrapping around a thin wrist. It belongs, Fitz finds when he can finally take his eyes off the knife itself, to a girl about his age, smaller than him, looking up at him with big brown eyes. There’s an identical knife in her other hand.
“Oh, god, I’m so sorry,” she says, lowering the knife point as much as she can, and Fitz releases her wrist, taking a step back to be out of range, “I thought you were a mons-” she cuts herself off, sounding embarrassed, but his eyes shoot up from the twin knives in her hands to her face.
“You can see them too?” he asks in disbelief, and her eyes widen. Fitz assumes it’s because of what he’s said, but then he hears the growling behind him, spins just in time to see the enormous dog he’d been trying to escape leap towards him.
He does the only thing he can think of; he lets his fist burst into flame, swings it toward the monster’s open mouth. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the girl rush at the dog, knives up, sink them deep into its side as his arm connects with its face. It disintegrates into a cloud of dust with a yelp, and Fitz watches the remains of the monster settle before turning back to the girl, who is staring at him with wide eyes. It takes him a few moments to realize that it’s probably because his right hand is still burning; he shakes it out, and she immediately steps forward, grabbing his hand and pulling it up towards her face to examine it.
“There’s no damage,” she says, and Fitz rubs at the back of his neck with the hand she’s not holding.
“Um, no. I’m sort of, um, fireproof.”
The girl pushes up the sleeves of his shirt, “And there’s no outside ignition source. You’re pyrokinetic? You can start fires with your mind?” she continues, at Fitz’s blank look.
“Um, I like to think of it as starting them with my hands, but I guess so. If that’s what, um-”
“Pyrokinetic.”
“Yeah, if that’s what that word means.”
The girl studies him for a few seconds more before smiling and holding out her hand, “I’ve never met anyone else who can see the monsters.”
“Oh,” says Fitz, shaking her extended hand. He hasn’t either, except maybe his mum.
“Jemma Simmons,” she says, dropping his hand and studying the pile of dust that had, just a minute ago, been the giant dog that was chasing him.
“Fitz.” She looks up from her search with raised eyebrows. “Er, Leopold Fitz.”
“Nice to meet you, Fitz,” Jemma says, pulling something out of the monster dust, “I think these are probably for us. Spoils of war, or something like that.” She holds up what looks to be two of the dog’s teeth, suspended from identical leather strings; Fitz has seen monsters leave parts behind before, but nothing quite like this. Jemma slips one over her head before offering him the other with an expectant look. He fumbles it on as she makes her way to the end of the alley they’re in, glancing first one way, than the other, before turning back to him.
“Aren’t you coming?” Jemma asks, eyebrows raised once again, and Fitz, half curious and half overwhelmed, follows her out of the alley and along the sidewalk. Jemma keeps glancing back at him over her shoulder, like she’s afraid he’s going to disappear. After the fourth time she does it, he moves up to walk next to her, earning a smile he nervously returns.
They end up at an apartment building, and Fitz tenses when she opens the door to one on the third floor, but all that’s revealed is a large room, clean, empty except for a small pile of blankets on the floor by the far wall and a reading lamp sitting next to it. For the first time since she’d nearly stabbed him, Jemma looks nervous.
“This is where I’ve been staying for the past few weeks. It’s clean, and there’s a shower, and hardly anyone ever stops by, and even when they do, they never do more than just peek inside the doorway and then leave, so we can just hide in one of the other rooms.”
“It’s, um, nice.” She grins at that.
“So you’ll stay?”
“Well, I don’t really have anywhere else to go.” Her face falls slightly, and he scrambles to reassure her, although he’s not entirely sure why. “And I’d, uh, like to. I’ve never met anyone else who can see the monsters either.”
Her smile returns in full force, and she pulls him over to divide the pile of blankets in two. Fitz is still slightly worried that it could be a trick of some kind, but he’s mostly just glad to have some place to stay out of the elements, since he’d really had no plan beyond putting as much distance between himself and the monsters and his mum as he could manage. Plus, for some reason, Jemma Simmons seems to want him around, and with the exception of his mum, not many people have ever seemed to really want that. It seems worth a shot.
—————
The ease with which they fit into each others lives should probably startle them both much more than it does. But Fitz has felt out of place his whole life, like he didn’t quite belong, and from what Jemma tells him about her own life prior to running away, he isn’t the only one, so maybe it makes sense that they get along so well.
Talking about his mum and his life before he came to London eases some of his homesickness, and Jemma seems to feel the same. He’s surprised when she reveals that she, like him, is dyslexic; one of the few things in what he can’t help but think of as their apartment aside from the piles of blankets they usually sleep on is a stack of books, well-thumbed through volumes on biology and chemistry, as well as a slim book of Greek myths, which initially puzzles him.
"What kind of knife names are Sophia and Allie anyway?” Fitz asks one night, about a week after they’d met in the alleyway. He’s studying one of her knives, which she’d insisted on giving him when she’d realized he didn’t have a weapon of his own besides his flames.
"Well, that’s really Aletheia,” she says, pointing at the knife in his hands. He has no idea how she tells them apart, since they look identical to him. “It’s an ancient Greek word meaning truth. And Sophia,” Jemma gestured to the knife she had kept, “is the ancient Greek word for wisdom. Wisdom and Truth.”
“Huh. Why Greek names?”
She shrugs, “Well, most of the monsters that I’ve fought are similar to monsters found in Greek mythology. And, I don’t know, it seemed right. I found them in my book, when I was doing research on the monsters.”
“Huh,” Fitz repeats, then, “How come I got truth and you got to keep wisdom?”
Jemma rolls her eyes, which is something he’s beginning to notice she does a lot around him, “Because you don’t have any wisdom.”
He sticks his tongue out at her before settling back into his blankets and closing his eyes. They try to spend as little time in the apartment as possible, leaving as soon as they wake up in the morning and only returning as the sun sets, not wanting to bring monsters to their doorstep, and it can be exhausting at times. Some days they just wander the neighborhood by their building, and others, usually days when it’s simply too hot to be outside or they’re tired of walking around, they go to one of the near-by libraries.
It’s far from a normal situation, and they get plenty of strange looks, but it works for the two of them.
———————
“Fitz?” Jemma says one night, and he hums in acknowledgement without turning over or lifting his head from where he’s face planted into his pile of blankets. It’s been about a month and a half since they’d met, and they had been running short on the money they had both brought with them when they’d arrived in London, so Fitz had made some that morning doing tricks for tourists with his fire, juggling it, striking matches on his arms, holding items and keeping them from burning; it makes them a fair amount, which is good, since it seems to attract monsters at a faster rate than normal and he doesn’t like to do it more often than necessary. Fitz and Jemma had faced three today alone, and it was exhausting.
“When did you figure out you could, well… with the fire and everything?”
He rolls over to stare at the ceiling, “My seventh birthday. I got excited while I was opening my presents and my fingers started to smoke,” he pauses for a moment before continuing, “It was the only time I can ever remember my mum mentioning my dad when I was growing up. Said it must be his doing.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Never did understand what she meant by that.”
“Well, maybe your powers are genetic. Maybe your father’s some kind of superhero or-”
“My father is a jerk who abandoned my mum and me before I was even old enough to remember him,” says Fitz, voice harsher than he means it to be, and Jemma, excited at the prospect of possibly figuring something out about their situation just a moment before, sinks back down into her pile of blankets. He sighs, “Sorry. Why do you ask about my pyrokinesis?” he asks, knowing she likes when he uses the word she taught him when they first met, and wanting to talk about anything but his father.
“No reason,” she responds, but even without seeing her he can tell she’s lying, and they sit in silence for a few minutes before Jemma speaks again, voice soft, “It’s just that I can’t do anything like that. And I thought that maybe, because you can see the monsters too, we might be the same, but-”
“We are the same,” Fitz says, and he’s a little surprised at the force and confidence behind his statement, “We are. I don’t know what we are, but we’re the same. I know we are.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Jemma reaches across the space between them to grab his hand. Neither of them let go until the next morning.
——————
It’s Fitz’s birthday, and they’ve spent the last three days at the library, so it’s fairly easy to convince Jemma to spend the warm August day wandering the alleys and side streets near their apartment, especially since soon it will start to be too cold to spend many days outside at all. He doesn’t mind spending time at the library, especially since it makes Jemma happy; there, he usually settles down with a book featuring lots of engineering diagrams and pictures, but he much prefers this, because it means he can pick up scrap metal to work with, put his fidgety hands to good use.
He’s digging through a promising pile when he spots it, and he can’t believe he ever missed it in the first place. It’s clearly a sword hilt sticking out of the top of the pile, and Fitz glances at Jemma before giving it a few firm tugs. On the third, it comes loose with a rather incredible sound and he’s holding a full length sword in his hand, the same bronze as Jemma’s knives.
It’s in pretty bad shape, scrapes and dull patches down the whole length, nicks in both sides of the blade; one of them is deep enough that a spike of metal is almost entirely separate from the main body of the sword, a gash more than a nick. But it feels right in Fitz’s hand in a way that Jemma’s knives never have, balanced and solid, despite the damage. Jemma is quick, and she moves easily, fluidly with one or both of the knives in her hands, but they’ve always felt too short to him.
He hands Allie back to Jemma without a word, and she smiles at him, “It’s like a birthday present from the universe. You’ll need a name for it.”
Fitz rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling as he steps down from the pile, sword in hand, to stand next to her, “Something Greek, yeah?”
“I’ll look in my book to see if I can find something appropriate.”
—————-
“Fitz?” says Jemma, and he looks up from his work on the sword, eyebrows raised. He’s been working on it for about a month and a half now, and he’s managed to smooth over some of the rough patches and smaller nicks; it’s still rough and it always will be, but it’s gotten a lot better, especially in the last week, when they’ve been cooped up in the apartment as the weather grows colder. They’ve been running the heater, but as low and as little as they can bear, trying to avoid drawing attention to themselves. He doesn’t know what they’re going to do as the temperature continues to drop, but they’ll need to do something.
“It’s just that, well, I’ve been having these dreams,” she starts and he nods, turning back to work on his sword. They’ve discussed a few times the dreams they both have, the ones that seem more real than normal dreams, like they’re trying to tell him something. “I think we need to go to America.”
“What?” Fitz says, looking up in shock, “America? As in the United States of? As in the country an entire ocean away from here?” Jemma nods and Fitz gapes.
“I know it’s crazy, but I’ve been having the same dream for a week now. There’s a flight number, and a gate, and there’s this voice. I swear it’s familiar, but I don’t know why, and it’s saying that they need us.”
“Who is they? The voice?”
Jemma shakes her head, “No, the voice is just the messenger. Or, well, they’re only part of it, if they themselves need us. There’s someone else. A group of people, or several groups.”
“And they need us?” Jemma nods, “Why?” she shrugs, and Fitz runs a hand through his hair, “This is nuts, Jem.”
“I know,” she sighs, “I wouldn’t have said anything, but it’s been going on for a week, and I don’t think it’s going to stop until we do something.”
“What can we do? We don’t have enough money for plane tickets, and even if we did, I don’t think they’re just going to let two kids get onto a plane, especially not two kids with weapons.”
“I know!” Jemma says again, pushing herself to her feet to pace across the apartment, “It’s insane. But we have to go somewhere, and we don’t have anywhere else to go, unless we want to just go home. And we’ve walked around a good part of London and nobody has ever said anything about our weapons, or found out that we were living here.”
“What’s your point?”
“Sometimes, the monsters, before they attack us, they look normal, right? Like people or animals? And haven’t you wondered what keeps other people from seeing them? I think whatever it is, it keeps people from seeing us properly too, or at least our weapons. Maybe if we hide our weapons as best we can, whatever it is will help us.”
“That doesn’t solve the problem of how we’d pay for the tickets, or how we’d get them to let us on the plane with no parents and no ID.”
Jemma sits down in front of him with a sigh, “It’s crazy. It is. But I think- well, I won’t go without you.”
Fitz rubs at the back of his neck. He believes everything he’s saying, that what she’s suggesting is crazy, but he also knows that he’s pretty sure he’d follow Jemma Simmons just about anywhere she asked him to, and that thought only terrifies him a little bit.
“We’ll need a plan,” he says, and Jemma smiles, leaning across his lap, careful of the sword, to wrap her arms tightly around his shoulders.
——————
They don’t end up with a very good plan, but it’s not really a situation that allows for a good plan. They’ve both got a backpack and gym bag, filled with all the clothes they own and the blankets they’d been sleeping on. Jemma has her stack of books and Fitz has a collection of his gadgets that he couldn’t bear to leave behind; he knows they probably won’t make it through security, but being forced to give them up seems somehow better than just choosing to do so. His sword is at the very bottom of his gym bag, where it barely fits lengthwise, and Jemma’s knives are hidden in her backpack.
Fitz keeps waiting for someone to spot them and ask them what they’re doing as they wander through the airport, looking for the gate that Jemma had seen in her dreams. He’s not sure how they’re planning on actually getting on the plane, since they don’t have enough money to buy one plane ticket, let alone two, or anything else they would need to buy them, even if they had the money. Eventually, they end up loitering outside the gate until the final boarding call is made and Jemma takes a deep breath, grabbing his hand and tugging him forward to stand in front of the woman taking tickets.
“Can I help you?” she asks, and Jemma’s courage fails her or maybe she just thinks that speaking would cause more problems than it would solve, leaving her standing silently, her hand still wrapped around Fitz’s, “Do you kids have tickets? Are you parents here?” The woman is beginning to look at them suspiciously, and they’re about to be in trouble, considerable trouble, and Fitz can’t believe he let Jemma talk him into this and-
“There you two are!” says a voice behind them, and they both turn to see a tall blonde woman walking towards them. Her hair is swept up and she’s got dark glasses on, and overall she gives off a feeling of elegance and power, but Fitz has never seen her in his life. She gives three tickets and a dazzling smile to the woman behind the podium.
“Have a nice flight, ma’am,” the woman responds, and then the tall woman places a hand each on Jemma and Fitz’s shoulders, guiding them towards the gate. They’re both too stunned to say anything until they’re on the plane; the woman, who still hasn’t actually spoken to them, guides them to two empty seats, and then turns to leave before Jemma manages to speak.
“Thank you,” she stutters, and the woman turns, studying Jemma over the top of her glasses with grey eyes for a few seconds before she smiles.
“You’re welcome. And good luck.”
“You’re not, uh, sitting with us?” asks Jemma, while Fitz wonders why she would feel the need to wish them good luck.
The woman laughs, settling her glasses back into place, “Oh, darling. I don’t fly coach.” She gives them one last smile and then disappears up towards first class. Fitz stows their bags in the overhead, wondering how, among a hundred other things, they were able to walk onto the plane with two fairly large bags each, and then settles down next to Jemma, who is still staring at where the woman had walked away.
“Something wrong?” he asks, and Jemma shakes her head.
“No. It’s just… there was something familiar about that woman.”
“You know her?”
Another shake of her head, “I’ve never met her before, but she still seemed familiar, somehow.”
Fitz shrugs, and eventually Jemma relaxes, rests her head against his shoulder. He can feel her sigh of relief as the plane takes off. They’d made it.
The past few days have been exhausting, trying to get ready to leave, and Fitz is starting to doze when Jemma speaks again, “I figured out a name for your sword.”
“Yeah?” he asks, glancing up towards where their bags, and the sword, are stashed. He feels exposed without it, and let’s the hand farthest from Jemma heat up to reassure himself that he’s not defenseless. Fitz isn’t sure how they’d exactly fight a monster on a plane, but crazier things have happened in his life.
“Pyrrhos. It means flame-like in Ancient Greek. I thought, because of your powers and everything, and it sort of looks like a flame, with the nicks and all.”
“Pyrrhos,” he says, trying it out, and he smiles when Jemma looks up at him, biting her lip, “I like it. Pyrrhos and Aletheia and Sophia.”
She just smiles at him, pushing up slightly to kiss his cheek before settling back against his shoulder. He lets his head fall back against the seat and closes his eyes with a sigh. It’s a long flight.
——————-
They end up in Atlanta, Georgia, and Fitz is looking around for an idea on what to do next when he hears Jemma gasp from beside him; glancing over, he watches in amazement as she pulls two small, banded stacks of money from her bag before turning to him with wide eyes.
“Where did this come from?” she asks, and Fitz shrugs, “Did- Do you think that woman put it in there?”
“Why would she give us money? I mean, there has to be almost a thousand American dollars here.”
“Why would she buy us plane tickets? And make sure we got on the plane? Why would she do any of this?” Jemma asks, and Fitz can tell that something about the woman had unsettled her. He takes one of the piles from her, running his thumb across the edge, catching a slip of paper wedged between the bills. There’s an address written on it, which Fitz assumes is close, although all he can really tell is that it’s in the state of Georgia. He shows it to Jemma, who sighs.
“I suppose we should check it out.”
They get a taxi and end up at the edge of the city, right before it turns into sprawling suburbs. The address is an apartment building, sharing a block with a large gas station, what looks like some sort of outdoor supply store and a few other non-descript buildings. Jemma insists that they pay the cab driver with their own money instead of the crisp bills she’d found in her backpack, and then they lug their bags to the front entrance.
“Is there an apartment number?” Jemma asks, not sounding very enthusiastic.
Fitz nods, as a man, trailed by two children, holds the door open for them, “Top floor, I think, if I’m counting right.”
Jemma is silent on the elevator ride up and the trip down the hall to the corner apartment, and when Fitz pushes open the unlocked door, she drops her bags to the ground with another sigh; Fitz does the same, glancing around the barren room.
“You think this belongs to her?” he asks.
“Doesn’t really seem like Ms. ‘I don’t fly coach’s’ style.”
“Well, I guess it’s as good a place to stay as any. We can’t exactly get a hotel room, even if we could afford it, and it’s not like we’re inexperienced at squatting.”
“I suppose,” Jemma says, moving to peer into the other rooms. Fitz knows she’s not upset with him; there’s nothing Jemma hates more than not knowing the answer to something, and now she’s got more questions than ever when she thought she was finally about to get some answers. He unearths his sword from his gym bag and digs her knives out of her backpack while he waits for her to finish her inspection of the apartment; when she finally turns back to him, he holds them out as a sort of peace offering, and she smiles softly at him.
“Thank you. I’m sorry I’ve been… Well, I thought that…”
“I know. But we have to be closer than we were before, right? If whoever it was in your dreams wanted us to come here, we must be getting closer to figuring things out. To getting answers. Right now though, I think we should get some food. I’m hungry.”
“You’re always hungry.”
“That’s not true. Sometimes I’m asleep.”
Jemma just shakes her head.
——————
The first few months aren’t too bad, but in the middle of January, the cold drops on them like a bomb, and their apartment doesn’t have any heat outside of what manages to leak in from the rest of the building. Fitz can hear Jemma shivering next to him, and see her breath blooming white above her, even nestled in her pile of blankets.
“Jemma, come here,” he says, because he knows he runs warmer than she does and he has an idea, “Bring your blankets.”
She hesitates, and Fitz just lifts his own blankets in invitation. Three white puffs of breath later, Jemma crawls over to him, dragging her blankets. She curls up next to him, and Fitz tugs her set of blankets over them before wrapping his arm around her shoulders and squeezing his eyes shut. He concentrates on letting his skin heat up as much as he can manage without actually catching fire or burning Jemma.
“Fitz, you can’t sleep like that,” Jemma says, but she curls closer to his warmth and he smiles.
“I’ll just produce some heat and then let the blankets keep it in. Then I can get some sleep.”
“Good,” she mumbles sleepily, and then tilts her chin up to look at him, “Have you had any dreams since we got here? Like I had before we left London?”
Fitz shakes his head, concentrating on maintaining his temperature, and Jemma sighs, tucking her head in against his neck. He waits until her breathing evens out before he lets the heat drop off and falls asleep himself.
His dreams that night are disjointed: a campfire with a small figure sitting next to it, a mansion in flames, a huge man wearing golden armor, fire running down his arms, a glittering expanse of dark water and the smell of strawberries, the golden man again, this time screaming in anger and frustration, tugging at something hidden by darkness. Fitz jolts awake, heart racing. He can feel Jemma shivering next to him, forces himself to take a deep breath and concentrate on over-warming his skin again, pulling her closer to him.
The next night, Jemma crawls into Fitz’s pile of blankets without prompting, even though it’s not nearly as cold as the night before. When he raises his eyebrows at her, she shrugs.
“You’re warm.”
——————-
It’s warm enough now that they can spend more time away from their apartment, which is probably good, since they’d been starting to go a little stir crazy from being cooped up most of the winter. While there are more monsters in Atlanta than there had been in London, they also seem less able to sense Fitz and Jemma, and they don’t appear to like the apartment building at all.
Jemma hasn’t had any dreams since they’d arrived in the States, but Fitz has been having the same disjointed dreams for a few months now, since that first cold January night. They’re not sure what any of the images mean, which is making it hard for them to decide what to do next, since it’s becoming obvious that Georgia is not their final destination.
There’s a diner a block from their apartment building, and they go there for lunch or dinner a few times a week. No one ever comments on the fact that the two of them always eat alone, or how often they come in; there’s a school fairly nearby, and it seems that everyone just assumes they go there.
The restaurant is crowded today, and Fitz and Jemma end up sitting at the counter next to a woman wearing a pink dress that looks more suited to a formal party than the diner. Fitz can feel her watching them as they order, and she keeps casting significant glances between him and Jemma and smiling softly, knowingly; he tries not to fidget too much, glancing towards Jemma to see if she’s noticed the woman, which just seems to make her smile more.
“Interesting accents. You two aren’t from around here?” she asks, smiling at them.
“No,” Fitz answers, as Jemma shakes her head. She’s an awful liar, and while Fitz isn’t much better, she usually lets him do the talking when it’s necessary.
“Where are your parents? Surely you’re not so far away from home without any supervision.”
“They’re still out in the car, trying to figure out where we’re going next. Family vacation,” Fitz says, trying not to shift nervously. The woman’s plate is clean, and he hopes that she’ll leave soon enough that it won’t be suspicious that the parents waiting in the car that he’s just fabricated haven’t come in.
“How nice. Well, if your parents need any suggestions, I hear New York is excellent this time of year,” the woman says, paying for her meal before standing, casting one last significant look between Fitz and Jemma with a smile, “Have a nice day.”
Fitz waits until the door closes behind her to turn to Jemma. “Well that was strange,” he says, as the waitress drops off their food.
She’s still watching the door as she nods. “Was there something- Did she seem familiar to you?”
Fitz considers her question while he chews on the first bite of his sandwich, turning to look at the door. “Now that you mention it, she kind of- well, she reminded me of the woman from the airport, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Jemma says, turning back to her food finally. They eat in silence for a while before she turns to him, “Fitz?”
“Hmm,” he hums, stealing a few fries off her plate.
“How do you feel about New York?”
—————
They decide that a train is their best option; they don’t think they can get lucky enough to get on a plane again, and while getting on a train is still tricky, it’s certainly easier than trying to make it through airport security. Jemma’s not happy about it, but they finally have to dip into the money that she’d found in her bag when they’d first arrived in Atlanta. Fitz isn’t quite sure why she dislikes the idea of it so much, but he trusts her and they’ve never needed it until now.
The man at the ticket office gives them a strange look when two kids pay for their tickets in cash, but he makes the sale anyway. They wait nervously for their train to be called, and pick seats as far back in the car as they can manage. Jemma clutches their tickets nervously, her foot bouncing, and Fitz takes her free hand, squeezing reassuringly as the car begins to fill up. She smiles at him and squeezes back as the guy checking tickets reaches their row.
He raises his eyebrows as he looks over their tickets, “You kids traveling alone?”
“Yeah,” Fitz says, slipping into the American accent he’d first practiced watching American television with his mother and has made much better in the past months, “Our parents travel a lot, and we’re going to stay the summer with our grandparents.”
The man smiles, looking over their tickets, “Have a nice trip, and a nice summer.”
Jemma visibly relaxes when he turns his back, her head dropping to Fitz’s shoulder. He smiles, taking the tickets from her hand to slip into his backpack for safekeeping as the train starts moving.
“Fitz?” she asks after a few minutes of silence.
“Yeah?” he asks, sleepily. He hadn’t been as openly nervous as Jemma had, but he’d been plenty anxious in his own right, and now he just wants to sleep for a while. It’s a long train ride to Newark, their final destination.
“Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?” She turns her head to look at him.
“Yeah. You said we should go to New York, and I agreed with you.”
“But does that mean we’re doing the right thing?”
“It means we’re doing the best we can. Together.”
“Together,” she says, with a smile, reaching up a hand to tuck the leather string holding the hellhound tooth back into his collar before tracing the outline of her own necklace under her t-shirt.