Chapter 55: Proper Introductions.
"Keeping the sick company?"
Amari had gone back to the living room, and interestingly enough, had found Regulus sitting next to Silas with a book in his had. A new novel, she noted, a fiction that had only been released this last decade.
The Aureate stiffened when he heard her voice, visibly caught off-guard. He only relaxed when he looked up from his book to see Amari walk over.
"If anything, i ought to have him booted out of here."
"I don’t think the poor soul will survive a day in the wild."
Silas who was comfortably asleep, made no comment on the assessment.
Amari walked over and sat down on the seat she’d vacated earlier, glancing at Silas’s chest once more to confirm the steady rhythmic motion of it. Regulus had already gone back to his book with the air of someone that was too invested in the pages than what was happening in the real world.
The book was in his left hand, Amari noted. His right—the reconstructed one—was carefully rested on his knees, not quite relaxed, it had the particular quality of someone who was still negotiating with a limb that was not quiet theirs yet.
"How is he?" Regulus asked without looking up after a moment, trying to fill the silence.
Amari considered the question, not quite understanding if he was talking about Silas or Aris. Then ended up settling on the former one.
"He’ll be fine, he’s just sleeping" Which in her opinion, was the correct activity of someone who barely escaped from getting their heart torn open. "Medicine has come a long way since you were active in the field, especially for awakened, he should be up and about by tomorrow."
Regulus turned a page, still reading.
"He wasn’t sleeping when i came down."
Amari raised an eyebrow.
"Oh? What made you come down?"
"I heard him moving, through the floor." He turned the page back. "He was trying to get to the kitchen apparently."
"Was he."
"He’d gotten as far as sitting up, I helped him back down." Another page turn, this time forward again. "He objected."
"I can imagine."
"At some length."
"Also predictable." She looked at Silas. At his face that was slack and tired in his unguarded sleep, the easy quality of someone who had spent themselves completely and had stopped arguing with the fact.
"Did he thank you?"
"Eventually." The corner of Regulus’s mouth did something brief. "After he established that he didn’t need help and could have managed perfectly well on his own, and that this was a voluntary cooperation rather than an admission of necessity."
"Completely within reason."
"Yes." He closed the book on his finger to hold the page and looked at her directly, the amber eyes doing the assessment thing she’d noticed he did—thorough, unhurried, the look of someone who had spent a long time being the most significant person in any given room and had developed the habit of understanding what he was in a room with before committing to anything.
"How’s Aris."
"Upstairs, also sleeping."
"That’s good."
Amari nodded.
Regulus looked at the ceiling briefly, as if he could see it through to the upstairs. "He was slightly out of it when he came back." A pause. "I didn’t really know what to do."
"It happens, you can only do so much with the little he gives out."
Regulus didn’t reply, going back to his book. Amari herself, pulled up one of the reports of a topic she had been studying recently on her phone, quietly absorbing the information as the time passed by. Outside, the afternoon was doing whatever afternoons did in the crown district—quiet, impeccable, the particular restrained sunlight of a neighborhood that had collectively decided even the weather should conduct itself with propriety.
It was another hour later that Regulus spoke again.
"Amari Stormborne," Regulus said, without looking up.
"Mm." She looked up from her phone, pulled back to reality by the use of her full name.
"You’ve been visiting regularly."
"Yes."
"More than the other two."
"Virginia has obligations. Silas comes and goes whenever he pleases, which counts differently." She picked up the glass of water she had fetched earlier, which was still cold. "I have flexibility."
"Is that what it is."
She looked at him.
He was still looking at his book with the expression of someone asking a question they already had a hypothesis about and were testing for confirmation.
"He talks to you," Regulus said. "More than the others. I’ve noticed."
"I’ve noticed that too," she said.
He turned a page. "I find it interesting."
"Do you now?"
"He doesn’t talk much. To anyone." He glanced at Silas briefly. "This one gets more than most because of his straightforwardness. Virginia gets history, which was easy to figure out. I get—" he considered. "Proximity, currently, and the occasional dry comment that I’m choosing to interpret as warmth." He looked back at his book. "You get something else."
Amari set her glass down.
"What do you think I get," she said.
Regulus was quiet for a moment, in the way of someone giving a question genuine consideration.
"The real version," he said finally. "Or something closer to it than the rest of us."
The living room was quiet around them. Silas breathed steadily on the sofa, deeply unconscious, entirely unbothered by the conversation happening two feet from him. The early evening light shifted through the curtains in the particular way it shifted when the sun was tired, long and golden, and slightly melancholy.
"You’re observant," she said.
"I’ve told you." He turned another page. "I notice most things."
"Is that a warning."
He considered this with the same genuine attention he had been giving her since the start of this conversation.
"No," he said. "I think it’s closer to an introduction."
He looked at her directly again, the amber eyes steady.
"We haven’t properly introduced ourselves."
"We know each other’s names."
"Names aren’t introductions." He held out his left hand, the gesture deliberate, old-fashioned in a way that sat naturally on him.
"Regulus Au Nyx. I’ve been dead for an indeterminate amount of time, I’m missing an arm that has been competently replaced by someone i don’t know, I’m currently living in the house of the most interesting person I’ve encountered in what may be several decades, and I’m reading a novel about a detective that I’m finding surprisingly good."
Amari looked at the hand.
Then she took it.
"Amari Stormborne," she said. "I document things, a scholar as much as I’m an awakened, and the detective novel you’re reading has a very good third act."
Regulus looked at her with an expression that was, she noted, the closest thing to genuine delight she’d seen on his face since he’d woken up in the medical wing.
"Don’t tell me how it ends," he said.
"I wouldn’t," she said.
He went back to his book.
She picked up her glass.
From upstairs, faintly, came the sound of movement—the particular quality of someone getting out of bed, crossing a room, opening a door. Then footsteps on the stairs, unhurried, the tread of someone who had made a decision.
Aris appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
Still in yesterday’s clothes. Hair still disheveled. Carrying the donut box, which now had two donuts missing.
He looked at Regulus.
He looked at Silas asleep on the sofa.
He looked at Amari.
His expression communicated nothing specific and a great deal simultaneously, which was, she had come to understand, simply how Aris communicated most things.
He crossed the room, set the donut box on the table, and sat down on the floor beside the sofa, his back against it, close enough that if Silas shifted in his sleep his hand would land on Aris’s shoulder.
He picked up a donut.
Looked at Regulus. "What are you reading."
Regulus held up the cover.
Aris looked at it. "The third act is good."
"Amari said the same thing."
"Don’t tell him how it ends," Amari said.
"I know how it ends," Aris said.
Regulus looked at both of them.
"I’m surrounded," he said, with the dignity of a man accepting his circumstances.
Aris ate his donut.
The afternoon settled around all four of them, Silas sleeping and the rest of them quiet in the particular comfortable way of people who had stopped needing to perform in each other’s presence, and the crown district did its impeccable thing outside the window, and for a while nothing was required of anyone