Chapter Text
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“A… music hall?” Emmrich asked as they were approaching the office once again.
In the summer sunlight he looked stronger, brighter, more alive in his own skin. Light mages were always at their best in such weather. Emmrich found himself wondering, not for the first time, what the summer solstice would do to him once his gift was more settled. Whether it would sharpen him or simply set him ablaze from within.
“Yeah.” Gin loosened his collar a little, already warm. “I’ve been to proper theatre more than once. But you’ve not been in a cheap place like that. It’s still culture, it’s still fun… just less censored.”
“Well, I…” Emmrich gave a faint cough. “I haven’t been in ages. Marge always liked a good scandal, so she dragged me there more than once when we were students. To see half-naked women or a…” He cleared his throat. “A man in a dress.”
“My professor scandalising you before me!” Gin snorted. “Well... I’d love to get you there for one other reason, Emmrich.”
“Oh?”
“You’ll see. Let’s have a late afternoon and night with sailors, jugglers, and singers!” Gin flashed him one of those smiles that made caution seem a very weary habit. “And yeah, they’d love Manfred!”
Manfred, who had been trailing along in his small coat with an air of clerical purpose, perked up at once.
Can I go to place like you do?
“Do not promise Manfred anything,” Emmrich sighed. “I hate seeing him disappointed if-”
“Manfred, I promise you’ll go and I’ll make sure you see sketches and fun, so I do!” Gin announced.
That made Emmrich smile rather more broadly than he intended.
“A theatre enthusiast, are we?”
The voice arrived like an unexpected draught under a door. Emmrich did not so much as flinch. He merely turned toward the dreadful noise with a polite smile and a small tip of his hat.
“Good morning,” he said. “Well, any man of culture ought to appreciate all that London has to offer, not merely those entertainments approved by the gentry. And they serve alcohol, which would help me if the scenes became too improper.”
“I am very sure, Volkarin.” Forester turned his attention to Gin. “But a factory mechanic and later a dock worker?”
“Nothing wrong with that.” Gin scratched at the side of his nose, making no sign at all that it was deeply unfortunate Forester knew where he had worked. “You think a labourer only works and sleeps and goes proper to church on Sunday? We’ve lives. A man needs good cheer.”
“Hm. I am sure.”
Forester let his gaze remain on Gin a moment too long.
“I read your report, Mister Volkarin. Indeed, it appears much more like murder than suicide. I asked to be included in this investigation, since the deceased was... influential.”
“Won’t it be crowded?” Gin asked. “Manfred’s help enough.”
Manfred hissed in pure approval.
“I was already conducting enquiries into one of the upper clerks,” Forester said. “I shall share the details with you privately. Not in the street.”
“Of course. Is the office still closed?”
“Yes. As per your request. I agree no new shoeprints are required.” Forester paused, then looked back to Gin. “Have we met before?”
“Yeah. Yesterday.”
Emmrich had to cover his mouth and turn the movement into a cough.
“Such a charming assistant,” Forester said slowly. “Peculiar indeed. Never mind me. I daresay a man of your trade gets into bar fights and I have had to separate one or two. Perhaps that is it.”
“I am sure. No other red-headed Irish in bars.” Gin said with solemn certainty.
Forester coloured, only slightly. Emmrich, meanwhile, was in actual danger of laughing aloud.
He went upstairs before either of them, purely so he could get some air and stop smiling like an idiot. Manfred clattered after him at once, delighted by the sharper feelings in the air. Ever since Gin had entered their lives, Manfred seemed to feel more of everything and in his mind that was an improvement.
Emmrich had never doubted that Forester was an intelligent man, and a good officer besides. Even his prejudice toward the Irish had not, so far as Emmrich had seen, overwhelmed his work. He had once helped at least one Irishman to go free. Two years ago he had been in a vile mood and still done what was right in the end.
No, the trouble was not simple hatred.
It was that something in Gin irritated him particularly. Whether it was Gin’s manner, his class, his gift, or indeed some resemblance to the 'blasted Irish blighter' who had stolen Forester’s former sweetheart, Emmrich could not say.
So while Forester checked everything for himself-even to the point of examining how much ink remained in a little jar on the desk-he kept turning his attention to Gin.
“It's a bit better today. So uh... H-he knew him,” Gin said at last, touching the chair where Campbell had sat. It seems he needed long rest between readings at least for now “His… his presence gave him comfort. Campbell knew the last person he saw. He liked him? Maybe?”
“So how did we get from there to him being strangled by a noose?” Forester asked.
“I don’t think he was strangled,” Gin said. “No, uh… no pain. No fear...”
“As you would know if you had read my autopsy report,” Emmrich said. “With Jones’s addendum, he was poisoned before he was hanged.”
“I did read it. I was merely certain your assistant hadn’t.” Forester looked at Gin. “You like touching, do you? Or is it a… mage thing?”
“Irish thing,” Gin answered at once. “We like kissing cheeks and hugging a friend. Don’t fret. You’re perfectly safe. Sir.”
Forester cleared his throat and looked at Emmrich.
“Gavin, please.” Emmrich said gently.
“I’m a sensory mage,” Gin said then, giving in to a little professionalism. “I need to touch and feel to find threads of magic. Emotions and thoughts and all that.”
“But you weren’t always one. It is a rather new gift. Since winter, perhaps?”
“Say it out loud rather than circling it like a daft bloke,” Gin scoffed. “You want something with me? Fine. But after we finish here, right? A man died!”
Forester actually looked taken aback. Then, eventually, he nodded and bent again to his own work. He was examining the carpet now, near the desk, with an attention Emmrich had to respect whether he liked the man or not.
“It was lower for some time,” Emmrich said, crouching to examine the same patch. “That might explain how he was hanged. The rope was frayed, so the murderer had to hang a noose by the ceiling and push him from either the chair or the desk.”
“The desk is much more plausible,” Forester said. “The chair did not move much. Only once pushed back. So he likely stood to see the guest-or murderer-out.”
“Quite correct. I did not see it yesterday.”
Emmrich noted it down at once. Personal feeling ought not to matter here. It rarely helped. It could only make a man miss what was in front of him.
Gin was moving slowly about the room, eyes unfocused in that peculiar way he had when he was trying to sort the noise of a place from the thread he actually needed. Then he stopped and looked upward.
He considered the ceiling fixture. Then he turned to Manfred.
“Give me a proper lift, won’t you?” he asked, pointing upward. “No worries, I’m a light little bird really, but I still won’t reach, not even from the desk.”
A happy hiss followed at once. Manfred leaned down and patted his own shoulders invitingly.
Get on shoulders. Very stable!
“I, ah…” Emmrich cleared his throat. “Manfred promises he shall keep you steady on his shoulders.”
Gin looked shocked for barely half a second. Then he grinned.
“Thank you, Freddie! All righty then!”
Manfred removed his coat first - carefully, almost ceremonially. Each coat had been Emmrich’s gift after all, and Manfred treated gifts with a peculiar reverence. He folded it with exaggerated care and laid it upon the desk before returning to Gin.
Emmrich watched, arms loosely folded behind his back, as Gin-without the faintest hesitation-mounted Manfred’s shoulders. The skeleton crouched, then rose smoothly, long fingers closing firmly around Gin’s calves to steady him.
“You’re better than a ladder, you are!” Gin grinned, balanced easily despite the height. Then his expression sharpened and he reached upward toward the brass fitting of the lamp near the ceiling. His eyes closed.
Silence settled in the office. Then the thought came from Manfred. Not intention, but a thought. Clear as speech.
This is nice. Fogged thoughts of an old idiot. I can’t believe it worked! And they told me I can’t do anything with it! Look how he obeys me! Hah!
Emmrich stiffened instantly.
That was not Gin speaking but not Manfred either, even if he felt tchem from his Risen. Those thoughts were too structured, too complete - whole sentences rather than emotional fragments.
He turned to Manfred at once. Manfred’s aura hummed with its usual steady warmth and safety. But something else stirred beneath it. Manfred knew.
Red feels it!
The words rang through Emmrich’s mind with Manfred’s unmistakable emotional cadence. That was Manfred for sure.
So the connection ran both ways. Fascinating. Perhaps even useful. Emmrich barely had time to consider it before Gin swayed slightly atop Manfred’s shoulders.
“He felt… happy when he was hanging him-”
Gin’s voice wavered. Manfred hissed sharply in alarm. Before the skeleton could even react further, Emmrich stepped forward and caught Gin firmly around the waist as Manfred lowered him. Gin landed on his feet but immediately dropped to sit on the floor.
A thin line of blood appeared beneath his nose.
“He felt justice” Gin murmured, breathing unevenly. “He knows him best… so he was… entitled… to give him justice…”
“It's a man?” Forester asked immediately, notebook already open.
Emmrich had his own notebook out almost at the same moment. The synchronised movement irritated them both slightly.
“Yes” Gin said, wiping his nose with the back of his sleeve. “Not a woman. A... a man... And… his thread made my head hurt. A LOT, like touching a hot metal.”
“Hm.” Forester’s pen scratched briskly across the page. “A mage perhaps?”
“Plausible” Emmrich replied calmly. “But as per regulation-”
“I know” Forester cut in. “No magical accusations without proof. Prevents mobs with torches.” He glanced up briefly. “I do know the law, Volkarin.”
Emmrich handed Gin his flask with the infamous concoction. Charged salt crystals dissolved in bitter tonic. He insisted Gin carry it at all times so now a young mage had his own.
Salt would do in a… pinch.
Emmrich rather enjoyed that joke.
Gin drank obediently and grimaced. Forester watched them closely as Gin finished the draught and patted Emmrich’s sleeve.
“You usually didn’t like being touched” Forester said quietly.
Emmrich lifted an eyebrow.
“Am I expected to recoil from my own assistant in training?” he replied evenly. “Mister Forester, you speak as though either of us carries a disease.”
“Hm. Apologies” Forester said, though his tone suggested little remorse. “Didn’t mean to imply anything.”
He flipped another page in his notebook.
“So. We are looking for a mage.”
“Sorry… Not much...” Gin muttered.
“No, no” Emmrich said gently. “Quite all right. We learned something useful. Campbell trusted the visitor. That narrows our field considerably. A relative perhaps. A nephew… or even a brother. Someone made him climb the desk, actually.”
Forester frowned slightly.
“…We do know that?”
“Yes” Emmrich continued. “Manfred heard coherent thoughts while holding Gavin steady. What he read through Gavin implies that Campbell climbed voluntarily. The murderer merely prepared the rope. He was shocked he was able to do this in fact.”
Forester paused mid-note.
“Curious.”
Emmrich turned to Manfred.
“Can you repeat the thought?”
Manfred shook his skull slowly.
Just words. Can't recreate them.
“A pity. Manfred can't repeat them.” Emmrich sighed softly. “Still… remarkable. It appears Manfred can perceive what Gavin reads through contact more clearly than Gavin does at this moment.”
Gin raised two fingers in a lazy salute.
“I’m full of surprises.”
“Indeed you are” Emmrich replied fondly. “And eventually you will stop collapsing after every small reading.”
“I should hope so. It hurts like hell.” Gin muttered.
Forester closed his notebook with a firm snap.
“Well then. Not two hours passed and we have progress. All accounts noted down.” He adjusted his gloves. “I believe I shall depart. You two still have… theatrical plans, I believe.” His eyes slid briefly toward Gin. “I had thought, Mister Doyle, you were attempting to become a gentleman.”
Gin shrugged.
“Nothing wrong with Southwark.”
Forester’s lip twitched.
“Gentry folk go there often enough, not only 'us' lower class” Gin added mildly. “Nothin' to get prickly about it.”
Forester left without another word. He just tipped his hat and left them.
Outside, the sunlight seemed almost like a medicine working wonders. Gin, finally on his feet again, tilted his face toward it like a cat.
Light mages truly did thrive in summer.
Emmrich remembered Margaret waking him at dawn during their student years - banging on his door at five in the morning because the sunlight was 'optimal for experimentation'.
“Need food!” Gin announced suddenly. “Proper food. We go Lambeth anyway so let's grab a bite!”
Emmrich raised an eyebrow.
“I thought we were meeting in South- Ah. You lied.”
“He’s sniffing around like a hunting dog” Gin said, wrinkling his nose. “Good thing about my gift? I feel sparks. If I know someone’s spark I can tell when they’re nearby. That’s why I bumped into him earlier. Touched his hand for a moment. Actually Manfred showed me that!”
“You sly fox” Emmrich chuckled. “All right. Proper dining or what was it… on the hoof?”
“I NEED fried fish.”
“…Right” Emmrich sighed, though a smile betrayed him.
Paper-wrapped fish it was, Gin’s absolute favourite. Along with chocolate with too much milk and sugar. And that strange Indian cheese dish that set Emmrich’s mouth on fire and was very eager to try it again soon.
They leaned against a wall while Gin devoured his meal enthusiastically. Manfred leaned beside him, mimicking the exact posture despite holding empty paper cone. Emmrich watched them both fondly. Then something occurred to him.
“Manfred” he said thoughtfully. “You describe people by emotions. Margaret is 'Determination'. I am 'Wisdom' for example.”
Manfred nodded.
“Then why is Gin… Red?”
Manfred tilted his skull. Simple answer came after a moment.
First time seeing Red... You thought he was beautiful Red.
Emmrich blinked... and felt his ears warm. Gin’s eyes sparkled immediately.
“That something improper?” Gin asked through a mouthful of fish.
Emmrich sighed and quietly explained Manfred’s meaning. Gin’s smile softened.
“I... like that” he said gently. “I like being Red.”
He glanced at Manfred.
“He really thought that the first time?”
Manfred nodded enthusiastically.
Emmrich rubbed his temples. Between Forester’s suspicions and Gin’s bright, disarming warmth, his life had become considerably more complicated.
And yet…
He could not quite bring himself to regret it.
It was exactly as Emmrich remembered from his student days. Loud. Warm. Full of laughter and badly hidden impropriety. And, as then, he had been dragged there - originally by Margaret, who came from proper noble stock and yet adored a scandal with the appetite of a dock labourer and the vocabulary of a chemist.
A man on the stage was singing something so cheerfully obscene that half the room was bent over their beer mugs wheezing with laughter. The chorus was taken up badly by the back of the hall, improved by the middle, and positively murdered by two sailors near the front who had clearly begun drinking before noon and never seen a reason to stop.
Then came a strong man. Not merely broad, but theatrical about it. He flexed like a Greek statue brought to life and announced that he could lift anything in the room.
Three young women, already flushed with drink and delight, called from a bench that he might lift one in each hand.
The Great Theodore placed his fists on his hips and beamed at them.
“Such beautiful ladies? I can't pick! Then I must carry all of you!”
The crowd roared. And to his credit, the fellow did exactly that-he lifted the bench with all three women still perched upon it and held the whole wobbling arrangement above his head while they shrieked with laughter and kicked their boots like schoolgirls.
The applause was thunderous. Improper. Glorious.
In a proper theatre one would have Molière, perhaps, or Fredro in translation, and all the correct places for amusement would be clearly signalled. Polite chuckles. Refined wit. A handkerchief lifted to the lips to hide a smile if the joke pressed a bit too much for an audience.
But this- this was real laughter and Manfred hissed with absolute delight. He had been admitted like any other patron, ticket bought... though with a good deal more staring. Still, it was not cruel staring. Curiosity, yes. A little fear. But not malice.
Then a painted actor came on in a very tight corset and enormous wig. He proceeded to perform a farce about an upper-middle-class wife who was in hysterics because the neighbours might see that her windows had not been properly cleaned before Easter. Her husband, played by a woman in a false moustache of astonishing size, scurried around the stage like a whipped spaniel, nodding, bowing, apologising, fetching cloths, polishing glass, and praying aloud for deliverance.
It was, Emmrich had to admit after one particularly sharp monologue, actually clever.
That was the danger of such places. One arrived expecting vulgarity and left remembering that vulgarity was often only wit with its gloves removed. Manners civilised people, certainly. But where did manners end and become a sort of invisible chain?
The scene concluded with the lady’s outrage being revealed not as piety at all but sheer temper, all because her marriage bed had become unsatisfactory. She and her husband being so proper they slept in separate bed, separate room and fully dressed with boots included- yet somehow, for mysterious reason, still he couldn't grant her a son!
That earned a greater laugh still.
Another woman entered in trousers-actual trousers-though with careful powder, neat lips, and a proper bun arranged behind one ear so that the audience might not forget she was still, in theory, respectable woman. She strutted across the stage, planted her cane, and pointed dramatically at Emmrich.
“Oh no! A gentleman with a silver cane topper! Such a fine gentleman but look at that! His son’s so thin he’s not even skin and bones any more!”
The hall burst into laughter. And Manfred, to Emmrich’s secret pleasure, was delighted to be part of the joke rather than its victim. He looked from the stage to Emmrich and back again, clicking his jaw as though applause was suddenly the best sound he ever heard.
Emmrich himself chuckled too. Politely, still. He could only go so far.
The woman on stage wagged her cane at Manfred.
“Oh don’t pout, little Risen. At least he bought you a coat!”
“Only t’ cover that poor empty stomach of his!” Gin shouted back at once.
That got an even bigger laugh, and the actress gave him an approving look as one professional mischief-maker recognising another. She turned then to her next target, an unfortunate gentleman whose beard was so thick and unruly that she declared it looked as though 'a proper forest had taken root in his chin!'.
He was a good sport and called something back about false rouge on cheeks, which pleased the room immensely. For a good while, all was noise and mockery and songs and applause.
Then, gradually, people began to leave, when elegant small cherry glasses and pints were drinked. The benches emptied. The smell of beer settled deeper. Some musicians packed away with the air of men long used to ending joy by routine.
One of the actors, still painted and half in costume, came over to them while wiping his face with a rag.
“No more shows tonight” he said. “Or are you staying in?”
“Staying in” Gin answered before Emmrich could. “Both of us.”
Emmrich turned to him.
“Gin, should we-”
“Come now.” Gin smiled. “Patience is a virtue, innit?”
That should have alarmed him. It did alarm him. Not enough, apparently. Because Emmrich stayed where he was, Manfred beside him, with whole body leaning toward the stage as if entertainment might resume if he hoped hard enough.
Then Emmrich noticed movement near the back. A few more people came in, though not the sort who had been there for the performance. Not rowdy. Not laughing. Not even looking much at the stage. He recognised one of them, and that startled him more than the place itself had done.
A librarian from the university. Oliver... something-thin, neat, always smelling faintly of dust and polish, a man who handled books as though they might bruise. Olivier the book-keeper. No surname, apparently.
The moment Oliver recognised Manfred, he also recognised Emmrich. And paled. He actually started to back away at once, but the painted actor caught him lightly by the arm.
“It’s all right, Ollie” the actor said easily. “Gin says he’s fine to be here.”
Oliver swallowed, looked from Gin to Emmrich to Manfred, and then made the peculiar face of a man forced to choose between social terror and private necessity.
“Well… ah. Then. Fine.”
And before Oliver could think better of it, the painted man leaned in and kissed his cheek. Emmrich, who had suspected much and known very little, sat utterly still and finally HOW the hall had changed. Not loudly. Not with some dramatic revelation. Only by degrees. The noise had gone out of it. In its place came a different sort of life-quieter, watchful, threaded with caution and familiarity both.
Gin looked at Emmrich then, a little sideways, a little shy despite all his bravado, as though waiting to see whether he would recoil, understand, or ask the wrong question.
And for the first time that evening Emmrich understood that Gin had not simply brought him to a disreputable entertainment. He had brought him somewhere else. Somewhere layered beneath it. A place that had been there all along, invisible until one knew how to see it.
“Well, for staerters Harry’s about to recite his poetry, but he needs a moment to feel tragic enough first” the actor said at last, now scrubbed free of lipstick and rouge and looking much more like an ordinary young man. He came straight to Gin with the ease of old familiarity. “Haven’t seen you in ages, Ginny boy.”
“I’m a proper gentleman now, I am.”
“No. No. Not happening.” The actor slung one arm around Gin’s shoulders and stared dramatically into the distance as though announcing a national disaster. “They can dress you up, teach you every blessed thing in the world, make you eat politely and sleep on linen and talk like Queen Victoria herself…” He looked back at Gin with theatrical sorrow. “You’ll still be my handsome devil dressed as a dockhand!”
Gin laughed and shoved him away.
“This is my friend Noah” Gin said.
So this was Noah, his best friend.
“The… bank teller?” Emmrich said before he could stop himself.
Noah immediately straightened and transformed into a very proper young man.
“Quite right, sir. A low cashier, but one who represents the First Bank of England, where your money shall be safest.” He bowed very slightly. Then he ruined it by smirking, fluttering his lashes, and altering his voice into a flirtatious lilt. “But on the stage I prefer Nicole.”
“You look like an idiot in either clothes!” Gin said with affection, already dropping onto a chair at one of the tables. “New girl serving drinks?”
“Yeah. Cathy’s marvellous, don't get cheated easily with money!” Noah pointed toward a dark-haired girl behind the bar, laughing while she poured drinks for two women standing entirely too close together to be accidental. Polite person would think they locked their arms because they were being silly. Or sisters. But ambiance said it was something else.
There were far more people here than Emmrich had first realised. Forty perhaps. Fifty. Possibly more. Enough to make the room feel not secret, but hidden in plain sight.
“Is that a Risen?” a red-haired girl asked, stopping dead in front of Manfred. He waved at once. She gave him a shy little wave back.
“This is my fiancée, Willow” Noah said with a smile.
Emmrich stared at him.
“But… you kissed the librarian.”
Noah barked a laugh.
“To make him nervous.” He pointed toward the stage, where Oliver-the librarian-was now speaking in low tones with the very muscular performer. The large man had somehow acquired a rose, which he offered with painful solemnity. The next second he had Oliver in his arms entirely and lifted him clean off the floor in a hug. The muscles mattered very little now, the man looked soft as pudding.
“Not all of us are 'improper', Emmrich” Gin said gently. “Some just don’t care. Like Willow. She doesn’t mind Noah likes a corset and better rouge than most girls. But…” He looked at Emmrich more softly still. “There are people like me. And like you.”
“That like both” Noah added.
“Or neither” Gin said.
“Or are just-”
“Like Henry” Gin and Noah said together.
Willow sighed and adjusted her sleeve.
“He’s the most feminine creature in the whole universe.”
“And the most dramatic” Noah said gravely, nodding.
Emmrich glanced away then, because two actors had spotted Manfred and were admiring him with delighted horror. Gin hopped up at once to join them. The woman in trousers, who evidently did not know him, seized his hand and shook it vigorously while he explained charades with Manfred and, with charming casualness, described Manfred not technically at all but simply as 'a very good mate' and 'smarter than some men what do sums for a living'.
Emmrich went to the bar and ordered brandy. The girl there poured it for him with a smile and not the slightest flicker of surprise at his presence. He stood a moment and looked around properly.
Some people were dressed entirely normally. Respectably. One could have passed them in the street and never guessed a thing. There was a young man in evening clothes leaning too near another man in stage paint while they shared beer. There was a couple who looked utterly ordinary, man and woman both, except that they kept bumping noses and dissolving into giggles over their wine as though the world beyond their table did not exist.
Noah drifted back to him, now carrying two glasses of something pink that looked medically inadvisable.
“We’ve A Midsummer Night’s Dream after Harry’s reading” he said. “Though I see Gin brought you to the special performance. Closed doors. Chosen company so one can meet a proper soul.” He cleared his throat and leaned one elbow against the bar. “So. What brings you here? Are mages improper now too and need to meet people like that?”
“I-”
Emmrich actually stuttered. Noah watched him kindly.
“I… well…”
“It’s all right” Noah said at once, gentler now. “You needn’t say a thing. Keep all the improper things you see in your own head and you’ll always be welcome.” He tilted his glass toward the Great Theodore, who was now blushing harder than Oliver as the librarian fussed with his rose. “Theo would cry if word got out, you know. He’s a lovely soul.” He clicked his tongue softly. “They suit one another dreadfully. But Lord save us, they’re both so shy they won't kiss till the kingdom come.”
“Manfred might get a part one day!” Gin said, reappearing as if conjured. “So this cheeky girl’s the new manager?”
“Officially her husband is.” Willow replied, smoothing her dress. “Practically, he only owns the hall. She's his accountant and managing all. Making sure beer is not watered down and we don't have fights inside.” Then she turned to Gin and frowned faintly. “You still haven’t introduced your companion.”
“Uh… yeah. Sorry ’bout that.” Gin gave her a sheepish grin. “This is Emmrich. As ye guessed, a necromancer. And my friend.”
He did not say it either. Emmrich could not decide whether he was relieved or disappointed. Perhaps both. Gin gave him a small smile.
“I’m his part-time assistant” he added. “We do spooky mage stuff.” He waggled his fingers so absurdly that Noah and Willow both laughed.
It was improper. Absolutely. And yet it all felt so very natural here that Emmrich, with his hand shaking only a little, reached for Gin’s hand and took it in his own. Not briefly. Not accidentally. He intertwined their fingers.
Gin looked at him at once, his eyes going wide. For a second he only mouthed almost soundlessly.
“Are you sure?”
“Y-yes” Emmrich said. “I ... I think I am. It is only… difficult for me to say such things aloud. You are rather better at it.”
Gin looked at him as though he had descended in glory from the heavens. Then he grinned so widely it transformed his whole face.
“Noah” he said, breathless with delight, “Emmrich’s my… suitor.” He exhaled as if he had been holding that word in his chest for months. “Only he’s very stiff and very gentlemanly.”
Noah assessed Emmrich at once and frowned with comic severity.
“You’d better be good to him, d’you hear me?” He poked Emmrich squarely in the chest. “He’s an angel.”
“I ah... I shall do my best” Emmrich said, and hated that his voice still came out lower and quieter than he intended.
Willow, who had been watching this with her head tilted, gave a satisfied nod.
“Good” she said. “Because if you break his heart, Noah will make a scene and I shall help. We are very good at that.”
Across the room, someone banged on the stage floor with a cane and cried out that Harry was finally tragic enough to begin.
The room quieted by degrees. Chairs scraped. Glasses clinked softly. Theodore sat with Oliver half hidden behind his shoulder, and Manfred, after being encouraged with scandalous enthusiasm, was settled on a stool near the front as though he had every right to be there.
Which, Emmrich thought, perhaps he did.
Gin’s hand stayed in his. And for the first time in all the years Emmrich had spent feeling that whatever he was must be hidden under discipline, under elegance, under careful language and even more careful solitude, he stood in a room where none of that seemed extraordinary at all.
Only ordinary in a way society refused to admit.
He squeezed Gin’s hand once. Gin squeezed back at once, still glowing from having said the word suitor aloud. nd Emmrich, though still shy of speech, found that perhaps he could learn this new language after all.
The poetry reading was given by a man who had already begun to cry before he had spoken a single line.
Rather promisingly, Emmrich thought. In the end, once the fellow had managed to breathe through his first bout of feeling, he proved himself a rather good poet. There was a good deal of Poe about him, to Emmrich’s private delight- it seems mister Henry developed an alarming interest in the exact stages of decomposition. The imagery was morbid, thick with allegory, mould and one especially committed passage on the progress of a rotting body, larvae included. Yet the room did not mock him for it. Quite the reverse. He was granted complete silence while he read. No mugs thumped. No one shouted. No one even coughed overmuch.
And when he finished, he was rewarded with respectful applause that seemed all the warmer for being freely given rather than forced by decorum.
Noah, who had listened with one arm looped behind Willow’s chair, sighed and said that if he ever found a wife like that, then by God they should probably drown together.
That made Gin snort into his drink.
And there it was, Emmrich thought.
This was what struck him most. It was not only the rich here, nor the artistic in the grand and self-important sense, nor men and women determined to scandalise. There were working people too, tradesmen and clerks and creatures from all levels of London, and still they listened-properly listened, enthralled. More than that, Theodore, with no shame whatsoever, asked Oliver the meaning of one word he had not understood, and Oliver, blushing only a little, began to explain the metaphor in a hushed and earnest voice.
Emmrich smiled at that.
He had always liked when Gin asked him what a word meant, though it happened less and less now. Gin read more. Thought more. Reached for books he would once have called 'too grand for the likes of me' and then devoured them as if he had merely been waiting for permission. The moment he had got his hands on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, he had not stopped until he reached the end, baffled and delighted in equal measure (Margaret called it too useless. Alfred called it inspiring.).
Emmrich sat through the first part of the play in a mood near contentment.
The actors were actually rather good. The production itself had been put together with surprising care. The costumes were poorer than one would find in a respectable West End house, certainly, but the fairies were quite clearly distinguished from the mortals by clever use of powder, paint, and bits of shining fabric. It was not polished, but it was imaginative, and perhaps that mattered more.
People drank, certainly, but they did so in low voices. They whispered, nudged, passed comment, laughed in the right places. Even impropriety, it seemed, had its own house manners.
During the interval, Gin rose to fetch more drinks. Emmrich, left for the moment with Noah and Willow, found himself speaking simply because it seemed rude not to.
“I had expected, I confess, that theatre people might be… more accepting.”
He heard himself and winced inwardly. It sounded stiff even to him. Noah, however, only smiled.
“It’s all right to be nervous.” Willow returned with his beer and put it into his hand. “Thank you, darling” he said.
Then he looked back at Emmrich.
“We all are. I was arrested twice for improper conduct.”
Emmrich blinked.
“How are you… Why? You are acting and looking... ah...” He stopped. He did not want to use the only word that came to mind.
Noah rescued him with amusement.
“Normal?”
Willow laughed and rested her head on his shoulder.
“He’s not normal in any sense of the word.”
“That is quite unfair!” Noah said.
“It is entirely fair, dear.” she replied. “We met because we were both trying to catch the eye of the same man.”
Emmrich chuckled despite himself.
“That is an absurdly charming story. Though of course, entirely improper.”
“Noah was arrested after leaving a back room near the docks” Gin said, returning with the drinks and setting them down. “Actually was very sinful there, too.”
Noah turned scarlet.
“Willow does not need to hear every detail.”
Willow took her beer and looked at him sidelong.
“I know you’ve been with men. But arrested twice?”
Gin leaned his chin on his hand with great relish.
“He got curious about an Indian fellow. Got arrested in the same place. Who does that, eh?”
Noah looked as though he wished fervently for Gin's death. Gin cackled.
“But yes. Never convicted, so…”
Emmrich, after a brief pause, asked the question that had apparently been waiting in him for some time.
“Have you never tried to suppress it?” he asked Noah. “This… unacceptable part of yourself, in society’s eyes? You like women as well. You could, in theory, ignore the rest.”
Noah did not answer at once. He looked at Willow first, then down into his beer, then back at Emmrich.
“I could” he said at last. “But I fell in love once with a man.” He shrugged one shoulder, but there was nothing careless in it. “And after that it stopped feeling improper. It became painfully... human.” He smiled a little, not unhappily. “I didn’t want to hide from the person I’d be with. Why it's condemned by people, by church? Because tell me, would the Lord truly condemn us if He sent me a girl like Willow?”
Willow looked at him with such open affection that Emmrich almost had to glance away. Then she kissed him, only briefly, but there was enough feeling in it to make the thing impossible to mistake.
Quite the sort of kiss that would have drawn hard looks in the street.
Emmrich turned his head and looked at Gin. Gin was keeping a perfectly polite distance, as he always did in public. They had not been together long, barely a month. Hardly enough time, in theory, to grow so accustomed to someone’s nearness that one felt their absence like a missing limb. And yet Emmrich did. Very much so.
It would have been nice, he thought suddenly and sharply, to hold Gin’s hand again. Or to kiss him. Not greedily. Not indecently. Simply because affection, if sincere, seemed to seek expression by its very nature. Why was this all called wrong, when it sprang from tenderness? Why was love to be hidden while war, blood, violence, and legal cruelty could all stride through society in broad daylight and be called orderly, manly, civilised?
And at the same time, as he looked at Gin’s hand resting idly near his glass, Emmrich hated that even here, even now, he could not naturally reach for it again even if he touched it just less than hour ago. Still frightened. Still trained too thoroughly by years of caution. Still unable, even among these people, to act as if happiness might belong to him without consequence.
That thought cluttered his head through most of the second part of the play.
The actors went on, the lights flared and softened, (a mage actually prividing some light and sparks) laughter moved about the room, and still Emmrich half-watched the fairies while his mind worried the same sore place again and again: that he wanted something so simple, and still could not quite take it in his hand.
╔═════ ❖ ═════╗
They left as one might leave any ordinary establishment. That, perhaps, struck Emmrich most of all. People emerged in pairs and little groups, hats set straight, gloves tugged on, scarves gathered properly at the throat. They had bought tickets, paid for their drinks, applauded at the end of scenes, and now drifted out into the London night as if they had merely attended some modest theatrical diversion and not crossed, for a few hours, into an entirely different world.
Emmrich had half expected something much more lurid from a place when people 'like that' met. A den of debauchery. A place not so very far removed from a brothel. And instead it had been… normal. Perfectly normal people, or near enough. A clerk kissing a strongly moustached man goodnight did not, in the end, make the sky split open. The world had not ended because an actor wore paint and called himself Nicole, nor because a woman cheerfully accepted that her fiancé liked a corset, nor because a room full of human beings had chosen not to lie about themselves for a single evening.
Manfred, of course, understood none of the social distinction. He only felt that the place mattered to Emmrich. More than that, he had understood one thing with perfect clarity: he had not merely been allowed to enter. He had been allowed to belong. To sit among the others, watch the play, be laughed with rather than at, not wait outside like a pet or a porter. For Manfred, that was enough to make the place important forever.
“Told you Manfred would get in” Gin said as they walked. “Picked tonight because of the play. Meant to bring you last week, only they’d not finished all the practice for Shakespeare.”
“And there are places like that in London?” Emmrich asked quietly.
“Mhm.” Gin loosened his collar slightly as they turned down the street. “Special evenings. Different places. Nothing regular as clockwork, but there’s more than you’d think. Some’ve back rooms too, if folk want more… interestin’ company. Not this one but just so you know.”
He smiled a little. Emmrich very much did not wish to enquire whether Gin had once visited one. Not that it mattered now. They were together, and Gin had promised not to look improperly at any other man. ('Unless it’s me in the mirror' Gin had said once, with complete shamelessness.)
“Seems like a good place. No one minds” Emmrich said after a moment, “if an actor kisses your cheek, or behaves…” He hesitated.
“Uh… all ninny?”
“Flamboyant” Emmrich supplied. “Overly enthusiastic. Overly dramatic, let us say.”
Gin grinned.
“Yeah. That’s the one.”
They came at last to the point where they must part for the night. No kiss or embrace. No hand lingering too long in plain sight. And Emmrich wanted both with such sharp force that it almost surprised him. Wanted them enough that it hurt a little, like an old bruise pressed unexpectedly.
“See you Saturday, Mister Volkarin” Gin said, and tipped his flat hat as he always did. “G'night, Manfred.”
“Good night, Gavin” Emmrich answered gently, leaning on his cane.
Gin turned away then. Walked a little distance. And Emmrich, because he could not bear the separation to remain quite so absolute, made a link before Gin had gone too far... Gin accepted it at once. He slowed, bent very slightly, and pretended to adjust his shoe.
Clever boy.
And through the link Emmrich sent him warmth. Nothing improper. Nothing one could ever point to. Only gratitude for the evening. For the trust. For the time. For the fact that such a place existed and Gin had wanted to share it with him. It was all they could safely give one another there in the open street. Emotion. Truth without words. And Gin answered. Longing came back through the thread as he straightened and walked on without turning round. He did not look back because he knew Emmrich too well now. Knew how frightened he still was of being seen, of wanting too much, of reaching too far beyond what safety allowed.
So he did not turn but his mind had clear shape now : I understand. I am here. I want you too.
The link dissolved slowly as Emmrich turned toward his own house. That was still more than many could manage in public. A mage’s link was honest. Unmistakable. And no one in the street, no matter how observant, could see what passed between them there.
Only that two men had paused in the night and then gone their separate ways. Only that. And yet Emmrich carried the warmth of it all the way home.
╔═════ ❖ ═════╗
Emmrich still felt, at times, like a coward.
The feeling had not gone simply because Gin smiled at him when they could afford it, or because at home Emmrich more than once caught him by the waist, hauled him clean off the floor, and held him close while Gin laughed against his collar. Manfred no longer called him coward. That had softened, eventually, into something else.
Not trusting! Manfred decided, but thought it's way better.
Margaret, for her part, said not a word. Exactly as promised. She did not pry, did not arch a brow, did not remark upon who looked at whom too long when she and Alfred arranged a proper Clark family outing with picnic baskets and far too much jam. Emmrich and Gin were both invited as if there were nothing in it but friendship and appetite.
The investigation, meanwhile, had reached a miserable standstill. Especially magic work could take months, but Emmrich was used to the case closed within 2 to 3 weeks. He had standards to uphold.
Unless Gin made progress with his gift, they had very little to go on, and that put a strain on him. The novelty of magic had not worn off. Nor had the joy of discovering what he could do. But that joy now had to share space with repeated failure, and Gin did not fail quietly. When his gift refused him, he cursed. Loudly. Often inventively. And sometimes, when truly pushed beyond patience, the English gave way and Gaelic spilled out in a furious muttering string of defeat and blasphemy and pure stubborn refusal to be bested by his own magical limitations.
That had fascinated Emmrich more than he cared to admit. The schools had tried to beat it out of him, clearly. Gin had once listed, in great detail and with tremendous satisfaction, what he had wished upon every nun who had struck him across the knuckles with a yardstick for speaking the wrong tongue. Several punishments had involved frogs. One involved lamp oil. Another, if Emmrich recalled correctly, involved the nuns’ clean robes and a kind of revenge only a truly furious boy with full bladder could conceive.
It had all been most improper but deeply admirable. Emmrich, who had obeyed rules since he was young and only broke them in carefully selected directions, found Gin’s sheer defiance oddly splendid.
Margaret was now increasingly occupied with the German scientists who had discovered that she was useful and therefore delightful. They dispensed with almost all English pleasantries, did not discuss the weather even once, and came to her with equations and terrible enthusiasm. She adored that.
Which... meant Emmrich stole Gin whenever he could. And tonight was one of those nights. Not a proper walk but public house. After all, what were they but two gentlemen sharing an evening?
It was one of Emmrich’s favourite places. Quiet enough in one corner, lively enough in another, and the beer better than average without the company becoming unbearable. Gin, who had once entered such places with only a labourer’s confidence and a mage’s uncertainty, was now greeted there with the kind of fond recognition that bordered on local fame.
The moment the brothers behind the bar saw him, one of them called out from the counter:
“Red singer’s back!”
Gin grinned as though he had just been awarded a title by the Crown rather than remembered by men who pulled ale and wiped tables.
“Care for a song, Emmrich?” he asked, taking his beer and closing his eyes for a blissful second after the first swallow. “Mm. Lovely.”
“By all means. Something cheerful?” Emmrich said, chuckling, and one of the brothers leaned over the bar at once.
“Aren’t you forgetting to ask the owners?”
“Course I did” Gin replied at once. “Where’s your mum, then?”
The room laughed immediately. Gin never won by vulgarity, because he did not need it. He won by boldness. By being just outrageous enough to make people feel he had insulted them and charmed them in the same breath. He only teased those he liked. That was the thing of it.
They were still, regrettably, only on the verge of allowing Manfred in. Not there yet. But close.
Gin finished half his beer in three heroic swallows, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then got up as the brothers began banging a rhythm on the counter for him. Someone in the back whistled. Someone else shouted for 'the fish one', which Gin ignored with the dignity of a man who intended to choose his own stage death.
He planted himself in the middle of the little clear patch near the fire.
“All right then” he said. “If I sing, and sing proper, I expect no rotten fruit and no comments from married men whose wives are still disappointed!”
That earned a howl of laughter. A dockworker from the corner shouted:
“Start with one about drowning!”
Gin pointed at him at once.
“Oh, I shall. Seeing as you look like a man what’s survived it twice!”
More laughter.
Then Gin tapped the side of his mug with one finger, found the rhythm, and launched in with mock-grave seriousness:
“’Twas on the deep Atlantic,
Mid Equinoctial gales,
This young farmer fell overboard
Among the sharks and whales…”
He had the room at once. Not only because he sang well-though he did, very well-but because he understood exactly how to hold a tavern by the throat. He made the dramatic bits bigger, the ridiculous bits solemn, and the chorus hearty enough that half the room joined in by the second repetition:
“Singing Rule Britannia,
Britannia rules the waves,
Britons never, never, never shall be married to a mermaid…!”
A sailor at the back interrupted during the next pause.
“Farmer, is it? He sings like a fishwife!”
Gin never missed a beat.
“Better a fishwife than your lot, my lad, you sing like cod that gone bad!”
The room pounded tables. Gin went on, broadening the performance now, making great tragic gestures during the verse about lowering the boat and finding not a corpse but a bridegroom of the deep.
“When up to the top he came with a bang and a shout,
And sang in a voice so hoarse-
‘My comrades and my messmates,
Oh, do not weep for me,
For I’m married to a mermaid,
At the bottom of the deep blue sea!’”
He drew mermaid out just enough to make it absurd and affectionate at once.
Then a woman near the hearth shouted:
“And what sort of mermaid took him, Doyle?”
Gin pointed to her with mock accusation.
“One with finer taste than yours, miss! I courted you a fortnight and not even a kiss!”
One of the brothers banged a mug hard and shouted:
“Give us a rude one about champagne!”
Gin put a hand over his heart.
“I am a gentleman now!”
The whole pub booed him. He grinned and relented.
“All right then- but one more verse of this one. For the refined company but still improper.”
He cleared his throat theatrically.
“When first I kissed my mermaid fair
She said, ‘Now don’t be slow-’
For lads what blush above the sea
May still burn bright below!”
Gin winked at the ladies near him and they giggled, one whispered 'rude!' with a smile. Of course there had to be a penis joke somewhere, and Emmrich just sighed.
“So if you’ve found a proper heart,
Don’t let the poor thing pout-
Just take her in your arms, my mate,
And shout your feelings loud!”
Gin continued with a bit more improper version, veiled neatly behind metaphores, but Emmrich barely heard it. Because on 'proper heart' Gin had looked directly at him with a smile. Only for a moment. Only long enough for a suggestion. Perhaps no one else would have marked it as anything but banter. Perhaps Emmrich himself ought not to have marked it at all.
And yet warmth spread through him so suddenly it felt almost like being struck. He looked down at his glass as if brandy might explain the matter.
When he glanced back up, Gin was already turned away, finishing the chorus with the whole room behind him and a laugh in his voice.
Emmrich sat very still, smiling into his drink like a fool. The song ended in applause and shouted demands for more. Gin bowed far too grandly for the size of the room.
Then someone near the fire called:
“One about the gentleman with the cane!”
Gin laughed and pointed toward Emmrich without actually naming him.
“This gentleman?” he cried. “No, no. He’s far too respectable.”
“Looks it, huh?” shouted another.
Gin lifted his mug and winked.
“Oh yes. But... Looks can be deceiving. A man who raises bodies? What else he can raise, ladies?”
That was all. Only that. But Emmrich's face brned a little. The room laughed again, but not at him. Merely because Gin had made a joke and jokes, in his mouth, always caught.
When Gin came back to the table flushed and pleased with himself, the brothers sent over another beer unasked.
“You are quite impossible” Emmrich murmured.
Gin leaned in a little, still glowing from the singing.
“And yet that is why you’re fond o' me.”
Manfred, who had been made to wait at home - and had therefore been denied art, emotional chaos, and beer- would certainly hear all about it later. Emmrich took a sip of his drink. He was still not entirely sure whether the verse had been meant for him.
But he rather thought it had. And the thought made him warm to the tips of his ears.
╔═════ ❖ ═════╗
It was properly night by then, when they left, and Gin was still nowhere near tired.
If anything, Emmrich had his answer at last to what the summer solstice might do to a light mage still so new to his gift: it filled him with far too much energy and far too little restraint. Gin had sung half the evening and never once gone hoarse. He had laughed at every jest as if it were his first good one. And now, as they crossed the bridge, he sprang up onto the railing and began walking along it as if it were a broad pavement laid there for his sole convenience.
“That is troublesome, Gin” Emmrich said with a sigh that could not quite hide his smile.
“Oh yeah?” Gin called back over one shoulder. “Fear I’ll fall in?”
“No, no. That you will be arrested and fined!” Emmrich replied, only glancing up once as Gin hopped lightly down in front of him to manouver around the lamp-post and then back onto the narrow rail. “You have entirely too much energy to spare. Even after sundown.”
“My fingers are just-”
Gin held up one hand with great ceremony, and sparks danced between his fingertips.
“I could take on the world!”
Emmrich sighed again, this time with unmistakable fondness, as Gin promptly decided this was an excellent moment to resume singing. Even with drink in him-and Emmrich was still not wholly convinced how much drink there truly was, given the state of his magic-his voice remained beautiful. Noah had once claimed Gin was fit only for the tone-deaf, which was either a lie or a friendship of the particularly savage sort. Emmrich liked the sound of him. So had the public house. More than that, Emmrich loved the way Gin had begun, now and then, to sing only for him. Little love songs. Old ballads. And when the original version had a young woman, Gin would sometimes-quite shamelessly-change the gender.
“You are living on borrowed energy, courtesy of the sun being at its highest point today” Emmrich said, lengthening his stride again. “In two days you shall likely sleep for a week. Next year, however, you will hopefully be much more in tune with your gift.”
“Is that right?” Gin said, hopping down again and walking backwards for several paces so that he could watch Emmrich’s face. “You think my dark-haired beauty’ll still be with me by then? Or will she get tired of me?”
Emmrich felt his heart knock hard once against his ribs.
“I think” he said, keeping his tone as even as possible, “that she is still a little afraid. Shy, you know. Young relationships are often like that.” He glanced at Gin and looked away again before his own smile betrayed too much. “But next year she shall be much more acquainted with you. More used to your… quirks. And, I hope, still with you.”
“She’s shy, all right!” Gin said happily. “But I don’t recall when I was ever happier than with her. She’s a marvel, Emmrich.” His voice softened and brightened at once, all at once sincere in the way only Gin managed. “She’s clever, but charming too, and kind, and she…” He pressed a hand over his heart with ludicrous melodrama. “She makes me a better man. I only hope I make her happy as well. I want to sing only for her!”
He flung both hands out in a flourish, and harmless sparks and little wisps of light streamed from his fingers in a display that was quite beautiful and wholly useless, save in so far as it made him look like a child too enchanted with his own magic to be ashamed of it.
Then Gin stopped dead in the middle of the pavement.
“I need to go to her” he declared. “Like… right now.”
“You are coming to my house. It is closer, and I am deeply concerned by your intoxication” Emmrich said, lying with the smoothness of long practice.
“I’m not drunk!” Gin protested. “That’s the point!”
“You are coming with me, mister.”
Gin flashed him a grin. Good. He understood.
When they reached the house, Manfred was in the middle of one of his own solemn investigations. He sat in Emmrich’s office-without lamps, of course, because he had no need of them-leaning over a wooden puzzle as though national safety depended on its resolution. For Manfred, puzzles were matters of principle. He was curious in the purest way possible and hated an answer given to him outright. He wanted to find it himself. No emotional residue, no trace of memory to help him, only shape, space and patience. Which, Emmrich suspected, made such puzzles far more difficult for him than finding a person.
A happy hiss greeted them the moment Manfred looked up.
You feel happy. You need help? Puzzle is hard!
“No, no, it’s quite all right” Emmrich said with a smile. “I can manage. You may continue with your puzzle.”
He flicked his hand and the lamps on the upper floor sprang one by one into light.
Gin, already halfway to the stairs, waved excitedly at Manfred as if they had not seen each other in days. Then he ran upstairs.
“Have you got something good for me here?” Gin asked, already halfway to the liquor cabinet. Then, with sudden delight: “Ohh-sherry. Sweet sherry! May I open it?”
“You know I keep it for you” Emmrich said, smiling despite the tightness already gathering in his chest. “Come here. You have been teasing me all evening.”
Gin came at once. No ceremony or social hesitation. He simply crossed the room and flung himself into Emmrich’s arms as though that were the most natural thing in the world, and kissed him deeply, eagerly, with none of the shy uncertainty of their first kisses.
It became difficult almost immediately. Freckled hands caught at Emmrich’s arms, then his shoulders, fingers curling as if he meant to keep him close by strength alone. Kisses had long ceased to be those brief, careful pecks stolen at the edge of parting. These were full-bodied things now, warm and intent and entirely too... revealing.
Emmrich felt a flicker of mortification. Gin, curse him, noticed it at once.
“I’ve beer on my shirt” Gin said at last, though he stepped back with evident reluctance. “Could I borrow one of yours, Emmy?”
“…Yes. Yes, of course.”
For one absurd second Emmrich was grateful for the diversion. Good Lord, he was alone with him. Truly alone. No one to see. No one to interrupt. Nothing improper to be seen from outside!
So why did every nerve in him still jolt when Gin grew more passionate? Why did the old caution still rise in protest when his whole body was clearly of another opinion?
He fetched him a shirt. A plain linen one, far too long on Gin, as he suspected.
“Thank you” Gin said with a small smile. “I’ll have a quick rinse, then.”
While Gin disappeared into the washroom, Emmrich straightened things that did not need straightening. Smoothed the fabric on the small table by the window. Checked that the blinds were quite properly closed. Put the candle down. Picked it up again. Set it somewhere else.
He was ashamed of how plainly his body had taken its side in the matter. His mind argued caution. His pulse argued otherwise.
Then the evening became even more dangerous. Gin came back from the washroom wearing only Emmrich’s shirt… And nothing else.
It was long enough, technically. It covered what decency demanded be covered on a male. Which somehow made the whole thing... worse rather than better.
More suggestive. More intimate. More… erotic.
Gin stood there barefoot on the carpet, toying idly with the bottle in his hands as if he had no idea what picture he made. As if he had not just turned the room into something far more perilous than any battlefield Emmrich had ever crossed.
“Found almond oil in your washroom” Gin said conversationally. “Good for the skin, yeah?”
“Indeed.” Emmrich’s voice sounded thinner than he wished. “For dry hands. Mages tend to ruin theirs.”
“I like yours.” Gin’s eyes lifted straight to his. “Maybe because you look after ’em. Oil smells nice and is uh... slippery, you know?” Then, a little lower, a little more serious: “Emmrich… please. Open a link.”
“Well… why-why don’t you try?” Emmrich looked away, then back again. “I was never able to teach you properly because of the difference in our alignments. But it is still only finding the shape of a thread. I follow the spirit side of it. So I imagine you must find my… my spark. Reach into it as if you were dipping your hand into water. I think. I am not entirely sure how you find ah... objects. Or people. ”
Gin gave him the bottle. Emmrich held it as if it were some kind of anchor. Then Gin relaxed. His posture softened. His breathing steadied. And for a long moment the room felt strangely peaceful, despite everything. Bare feet on carpet. The whisper of linen against Gin’s thighs. The faint soap-clean scent clinging to him after washing. Why did he smell so intensely of himself now? Clean, yes. Pleasant. But more than that-simply, entirely, Gin.
Emmrich swallowed. Then felt it, a small opening. Like a question in the back of his mind. Searching. A faint, prickling sensation, not painful, more like the delicate awareness of fingertips brushing the surface of something living.
He let his thoughts ease open. And suddenly Gin was there. The young mage smiled in triumph.
“Got it” he whispered.
And Emmrich nearly lost his breath. Gin’s feelings poured through him with a force that was almost overwhelming. Love, first of all-clean and absolute and warm, without bargain, without fear of mockery, without reserve. Trust so deep it was almost frightening. The knowledge that Emmrich might have done anything at all and Gin would still have leaned toward him.
And under that-
Longing. The ache left on skin when a hand stops touching you. The memory of warmth in its absence.
And then want. Carnal. Heated.
Emmrich exhaled sharply, half startled by the sheer force of it. He knew now sensory mages could have stronger emotions than other mages, but Gin was probably beyond any scale that was included in any book.
Gin came closer with a delighted smile.
“You’re terrified, you are” he whispered. “But I can feel your answer. You want me. Like a newly-married man seeing his love for the first time.”
“Gavin...” Emmrich said in a low, trembling, uneven voice, “you are a demon. An incubus sent to ruin me and carry me to Hell.”
“Yeah?” Gin asked, smiling. “And what if I am?”
“Then you know” Emmrich murmured, pulling him close, “I should let you take my soul and body.”
He kissed him again, Urgently now. No room in either of them for anything but the simplest hungers, the body’s old and honest language asserting itself with ruthless clarity. Emmrich kissed Gin’s throat and felt him shiver and exhale against him, the sound half laugh, half plea.
“Mister Volkarin” Gin purred near his ear, “we’ve known each other a fair while now… and you still haven’t shown me your bedroom.”
That was enough. Emmrich bent and lifted him clean off the floor, and Gin laughed again-that bright, shameless laugh of his-and put his arms round Emmrich’s neck as if being carried were the most reasonable consequence in the world.
Emmrich took him through to the bedroom and set him down carefully on the duvet.
The link made everything worse and better at once. Every feeling doubled by being felt in return. Love and desire moving between them in one breath, one pulse, one bright current.
“I’m yours, Emmy” Gin said, looking up at him. “I love you.”
“I love you too, Gin” Emmrich answered. “For… rather longer than I ought to have admitted.”
For one small moment the warmth of love rose above everything else and quieted them both.
Then the heat came back, unrelenting. Emmrich became absurdly aware of clothes. Their ridiculousness. Their stubborn layers and buttons and fastenings and folds. All these civilised... wrappings men hid themselves in, as if a waistcoat or chain or clever tailoring could truly alter what a body was underneath. Strip away silk, polished boots, neat collars and all the rest-and there was no class there, no poverty or wealth, no trade, no rank, no gentleman or labourer.
Only skin. Bone. Blood. And hearts beating hard enough to shake the chest.
He stood looking at Gin there on the bed in his borrowed shirt, hair still faintly damp, mouth softened by kisses, eyes sparkling with mischief and invitation and that impossible warmth which had changed Emmrich’s whole house and, very likely, his whole life.
Emmrich leaned in, one hand tracing the line of Gin’s hip through the borrowed shirt. Gin shivered at the touch and began undoing Emmrich’s buttons one by one with a concentration so intent it was almost reverent.
“I saw all in the bathhouse” Gin murmured against his throat. “And still I want to see it all again. That was Investigator Volkarin then. This is my lover, Emmrich.”
“I tried not to think of you in this manner” Emmrich confessed, kissing the hollow above Gin’s collarbone. “But it proved… rather difficult.”
“I’m grateful then” Gin whispered with a grin. “For me youthful face. Short height. All that made you have improper thoughts.”
Gin tugged him down beside him with surprising strength and then, with no patience left in him whatsoever, climbed over him at once. He removed Emmrich’s waistcoat, then his shirt, then every stubborn layer still separating them, eager as though he were unwrapping a gift he had already dreamt of. He bit his lower lip while he worked, eyes bright and fixed on Emmrich with such open hunger that Emmrich almost laughed from the sweetness of it.
Sex was not happening with great polish. Not with any of the effortless grace love stories promised. With fumbling hands and breathless little laughs. With Gin's hair catching in sleeve's button and the other muttering something scandalous about Victorian tailoring. With a pause when Gin, all flushed and bold, looked at Emmrich as if to ask whether he was still truly wanted, and Emmrich answered by touching his face so tenderly that the whole room seemed to soften around them.
It was not elegant. It was Gin laughing softly when Emmrich almost broke the almond oil bottle. It was Emmrich smiling into Gin’s neck because this impossible, beloved creature kept saying his full name just to make him uncomfortable in following days when someone calls him 'inspector'. It was the strange intimacy of learning one another in fragments-where Gin trembled, where Emmrich sighed, what made one go quiet and the other grin.
And beneath all of it, under the teasing and the want and the sheer relief of finally yielding to what had been gathering between them for so long, there was love. Not abstract, not noble and distant. Human love, with awkwardness in it, desire and all the clumsy tenderness of two men who had imagined this in different ways and now found the truth far better than imagination.
Gin was mischievous even here, of course. He kissed Emmrich breathless and then smiled against his mouth as though pleased with himself for the effect. He whispered things that would have made any respectable parlour faint dead away. He looked delighted each time Emmrich lost composure and stopped sounding like a gentleman at all.
And Emmrich-
Emmrich, who had spent so long trying not to think about the moment when restraint would finally fail him, discovered that this was not failure at all. It was surrender, yes. But not to shame. To happiness. To trusting someone once again. To being wanted by someone he loved and loving him in return without caution strangling the life out of it.
At one point Gin laughed into his shoulder and said, very softly, with breaking voice:
“There now. Knew you wanted me.”
And Emmrich, flushed and helpless and full of feeling too strong to be borne quietly, answered by holding him closer still.
Afterwards the room felt changed. The blinds were still drawn. The lamps still low. Their clothes still in a disgraceful heap where they had been abandoned without any respect for social order (or good wool). But something in Emmrich had gone quiet at last. Full in a way that left him dazed.
Gin lay curled close against him, still smiling that private, crooked smile of his.
Outside, London went on being London.
Inside, for a little while, the whole world had narrowed to warm sheets, tangled limbs, the sound of Gin breathing, and the almost unbearable peace of knowing that what Emmrich had feared for so long had finally happened-
and nothing about it felt wrong.
“Rather liked that, so I did...” Gin purred, hugging himself close against Emmrich’s chest as though he meant to settle there for as long as he could. Exhaustion had softened his speech and pulled it a little back toward home, the Irish thicker now that he was no longer trying to mind it. “I’d imagined you’d be shy, like. All hid under covers with the lamps out… and yet you took me twice without any o' that... gentlemanly politeness.”
“Is that so?” Emmrich exhaled, entirely content in a way that made him feel almost boneless. The link had dissolved of its own accord when neither of them had enough sense or concentration left to hold it. It scarcely mattered. It had already given them more than most people could ever share, and the warmth of it still seemed to linger over skin and in the chest. “I imagine it is your dreadful influence. I could not seem to help myself.”
Gin made a satisfied little sound and pressed a kiss against his shoulder.
“I’ll have to awaken that part of ye more often” he murmured. “’Specially the bit that pushed me over and got me on me stomach and raised me hips and told me-”
“Quite enough” Emmrich said, laughing despite himself.
He did not mean it in the slightest.
There was, now, a stubborn male pride in him that he had not the least intention of pretending away. He had satisfied his lover. That mattered to him more than his own pleasure ever quite had. He could pass for decent society if required-and he was decent, mostly-but he had not been innocent for many years. Even with women, before broken engagements and disappointments and London wore grooves into his habits, he had never been one to wait upon marriage if the lady wished otherwise. He had only ever waited for consent.
Gin muttered something into Emmrich’s arm then, wholly incoherent, and Emmrich smiled down at the crown of his head.
“Once we’re outside” Gin said after a moment, voice lower now, trying to speak slower and correctly “I’m only your assisting mage. Still in training under Professor Clark. An’ everyone’ll just see a gentleman helping a younger mage find work once he’s done with his studies. All… proper.”
“Yes” Emmrich sighed, though it was not unhappily. “Exactly so.”
There was so much foolishness in the world about indecency that even with his former fiancée he had walked out in public as if her skirts might burn him to touch. In private she had let him put his hands wherever he pleased. In public he might not so much as brush her sleeve.
“Though” Emmrich added with a small chuckle, “you have a very respectable excuse for touching more than most because of your gift.”
Gin lifted himself onto one elbow and looked at him with that grin-bright, wicked, and only half-tired.
“I don’t want to brush yer sleeve or bump your shoulder, Emmrich. I want to kiss ye till you’ve no breath left and ride Saint George.”
“What do you-oh!”
Gin’s grin broadened shamelessly.
“I’ll straddle ye proper next time” he promised. “Only ye didn’t exactly give me time to think tonight, yeah?”
Emmrich looked away, smiling despite the heat that came into his face. Gin’s straight-forwardness was still quite capable of undoing him entirely. The man could be exhausted to the marrow and still find the energy to say the most ruinous things in the calmest tone.
Gin stayed close, tracing idle patterns against Emmrich’s skin with one finger.
“There’s nothing improper in me staying the night, right?” he asked more quietly. “I could always sleep on your couch.”
“That is the official version” Emmrich said with a sigh.
Then a terrible thought struck him.
“Dear Mother Mary. Manfred!”
Gin blinked at him.
“Hm? He didn’t come in.”
“I shall have to explain all of this to him” Emmrich groaned, dragging one hand over his face. “He has been behind the door. Waiting patiently.”
There was a beat of perfect silence. Then Gin began to laugh.
Not politely. Not delicately. Violently enough that the bed creaked almost as badly as it had earlier, and Emmrich had to put a hand against bedframe as if to hold himself together from falling from the mattress.
After a good while Gin managed, still breathless:
“I can explain it to him. No trouble, Emmy.”
“Absolutely not.”
That only sent Gin into another fit.
In the end, though, there was no explaining done that night. They only lay together, Gin drowsing against him and Emmrich with one arm round his waist, the room soft and entirely theirs.
And outside the door, patient as moonlight and just as enduring, Manfred waited.
He did not mind.
Something good had happened.
That much he knew.
And he, unlike the living, had all the time in the world.