Ethan came home that morning with the sun at his back and his body still tingling with the casting. Chaos trembled in his veins and expanded his senses. He could taste the sunlight, sense the life around him, even in the scraggly excuses for trees around their neighborhood. It was glorious, left him feeling alive, awake, in tune with everything.
And hungry.
He laughed at that, into the still morning mist, as he fumbled his key against the lock of their flat. Unsteady, his hand still shaky from the ebbing power, it took him a moment to slide the key home and turn it. Anyone would think he was drunk, but gods, this was ever so much better.
Compared to the bright morning chill, the inside of the flat was heavy and somber. Ethan kicked the door shut behind him and Ripper lifted his head and glared. Still at the desk. *Still*. As though he hadn’t even moved all night. Big, boring books and reams of paper, all lit by just a desk lamp, the curtains drawn tightly shut.
“Good morning to you too,” Ethan snapped. Then he managed to regain his humor and said, “Lovely day outside.”
Ripper only muttered.
Ethan decided to ignore him before he managed to kill his buzz, and headed for the refrigerator. Only to find that the lone item in said fridge was-- milk. Old, suspect-looking milk.
Mostly undaunted, he turned to the cupboard.
Which contained bread and Marmite.
“Bugger that,” he said, and turned toward Ripper. “Where’s all the food?”
“That’s it,” Ripper said, hardly looking up, “You’ll have to make do.”
“Hardly likely.”
He snagged the cash can off the counter and peered inside. A single coin rattled at him.
“Oh, you have to be joking.”
“No.”
The voice was closer than he’d expected, and he jumped, and turned around, to find Ripper standing in the middle of the flat, dressed in that awful stodgy tweed and corduroy get-up he’d been wearing like a hair shirt the past three months.
“No joke,” Ripper said. “We’re broke, Ethan. I’ve been telling you that for a good long while now.”
That seemed like it had to be rubbish. It didn’t make sense and that irked him. They’d never gone hungry before Ripper had decided to run back to his duller-than-dry-toast destiny. Always been a pocket to pick or someone else to pay or a bar tab that could be handled with a quick chant and a bit of Lethe’s bramble.
“Don’t they pay you for all that drudgery?”
“A small stipend, yes. A stipend that assumes I will be living in college, and supplemented by other means.” Ripper sighed and went to the counter, leaned against it, and pulled off his glasses. “My next check doesn’t come in until next week, and our rent is already past due.”
Ethan frowned. He didn’t want to eat Marmite. This was idiotic. He blamed Ripper entirely.
“So? What are you going to do about it?”
“I-- I don’t know. I--” Ripper shook his head. “I don’t have time to work longer hours in the library.”
“Why don’t you just beg your old man for a few quid? I mean, surely the old bastard wouldn’t let his own progeny starve.”
“Never,” Ripper said, and he was suddenly halfway into a fighting stance, his hands curled almost into fists, his weight settled differently, lightly. For a moment, he was himself again, and that stirred something in Ethan’s chest.
But then the violence left him and it was only more obvious how tired he looked. Dark circles under his eyes, lines on his face that made him look twenty years older, and yet, somehow, very young. Ethan leaned against the counter and glanced away with an air of apathy.
“Oh, come on,” Ethan said, “What’s a little pride compared to cold, hard cash?”
“After what he said about you? No. Never.”
Ethan’s heart clenched a little, but he said, flippantly, “Really, Ripper, that’s very touching, but has it occurred to you that your defense of my honor is actually leading to my malnourishment? Rather defeats the purpose, don’t you think?”
Ripper wasn’t meeting his eyes. He was looking down at a small slip of paper in his hands when he said, “There’s-- there’s a woman, who owns a bookshop I occasionally patronize. It deals mostly in everyday books, but there is some occult dealing done there. She’s getting on in years, and looking for an assistant.”
Ethan was a bit suspicious of Ripper’s formal tones, which didn’t seem to bode well. He said, a bit cautiously, “Wonderful, sounds right up your alley.”
Ripper didn’t look up.
“I was actually thinking it might be something for, for... for you.”
Ethan laughed. Then stopped.
“You’re serious.”
Ripper didn’t say anything. His arms were folded again, tightly across his chest.
“Oh, Ripper,” Ethan said, fighting off another laugh.
Ripper’s reaction caught him completely, genuinely off-guard.
“Damn it, Ethan. What do you think? Do you can just gallivant about for the rest of your life?”
“Well, that was the plan,” he said, his words casual even as he did take a small step back in the face of this sudden fury. “Since you seem so fond of being a tiresome bore.”
“You think I fucking enjoy this, Ethan? That I want to spend the rest of my life working my fucking arse off?”
Something that had only been lurking before lunged up inside of Ethan.
“Could have fooled me,” he shouted.
“What?” Ripper snapped.
“You. You spend all your time with this. All of it. Work and sleep. Nothing else.”
“Ethan--” His voice had dropped in tone. The anger had slipped away. It had drained, it seemed, into Ethan. Ripper’s sudden acquiescence only made him angrier.
“We haven’t even fucked in weeks,” he said, and then it hit him: Why was he even still here? This wasn’t fun anymore. The magic was, literally, gone, the sex was gone. Hell, the bloody food was gone.
And Ripper was gone. In his place was this tweed-clad creature, who spoke softly and read books and wore glasses and, and said things like: “I’m sorry. I am. I’ve... I’ve been tired.”
“I don’t even know you,” Ethan said.
Ripper--or whoever he was--finally looked up at that.
“No,” he said, “That isn’t true. You do.”
“No, I don’t. The man I knew would never-- this isn’t you. Not the you I knew.”
Ripper stepped towards him, then lowered his hands, but not his disconcerting gaze.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I think that all that’s left of me is you.”
This statement was strange and unsettling, abnormally honest and stripped of pretense. Ethan recoiled. For some reason, he felt another echo of the tingling magic of the previous night.
“This is pointless,” Ethan said.
“What does that mean?” Ripper said. “Are you leaving?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” he asked, and found himself truly waiting for the answer. If there was one.
Ripper just said, quietly, “Please don’t.”
It wasn’t enough. Ethan started to turn for the door. A desperate voice stopped him, a voice he’d never heard from Ripper before, broken and needy.
“What do you want from me, Ethan?”
What did he want? He thought, for a moment, then said, “I want you, Ripper. I want what we had. Not this nonsense. What is this?”
He knew what Ripper would say. Knew the speech he’d give about destiny and repentance and Good and Evil. Knew it as though he’d heard it before, although Ripper had known better than to try to explain. He’d heard it in all those careful silences whenever Ethan tried to talk about magic. Heard it whenever Ripper declined to smoke or go to the pub. Heard it every time Ripper didn’t laugh at certain jokes. He waited for it.
Waited as Ripper walked across the room. Waited as Ripper stood over the desk.
Then stopped waiting as, with one violent sweep of his arm, Ripper shoved everything on it--papers, pens, texts, everything--to the floor.
And turned around.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. It’s gone. Are you happy now? Fuck it, anyway. My father already hates me, this is just one more reason for him to disown me. I can get a job at a library, or a grocer’s, or, hell, I could be a fighter pilot. Always wanted to fly.”
Ripper looked at him across the tiny flat, his arms folded again, the empty desk behind him, and Ethan was...
Afraid.
Not for himself. Not at all. It was the look in Rupert’s eyes at that moment, that look that seemed to be the kind you’d see in the eyes of one who had just stepped off a cliff, or onto a busy motorway. Wanton, dangerous, not quite sane.
“I want you, Ethan. The rest of this, I can give up. I gave up the magic, and I gave up drugs, and I gave up my bloody freedom, but you... No. I can’t. I won’t.”
It *hurt.* Ethan didn’t know why. Didn’t understand any of it, his own feelings, rising up in maelstrom, but none of them sensible. Pain, and joy, and fear, and... just too much. For a moment, he groped for words, but he found none, so he fled for the door. Not running, just walking, but panic dogged his heels.
But when he reached for the handle, the locks snapped shut.
“Don’t you dare leave.”
His heart galloped in his chest as he turned. Ripper’s temper may have been a legend he’d helped create, but it wasn’t all just talk.
But by the time he’d turn, Rupert still stood by the desk and the anger was gone.
“Please. Don’t leave.”
“Let me out,” Ethan said, even-voiced, masking the fear, the pain.
The locks released, and Rupert turned away, ducking his head, gripping the back of the desk chair.
Ethan escaped into the morning.
***
He rode the Underground for a while, just watching the pipes and concrete flash past his window. Eventually, he got off. It had begun to rain, and he wandered through it until he found a set of steps and sat down.
It had been raining the night they met.
Not that that was so unusual in London, but the scent of rain still brought it back. The memory. Ethan curled in on himself and shivered in the wet.
He thought how strange it was that small things made all the difference. Small things, like not hearing a speech one expected to hear.
***
Rupert was asleep, sitting upright on the couch, when Ethan let himself back in. He shut the door quietly and went to him. For a moment, he looked at him, just looked. Rupert’s hand rested on his thigh. That hand that had splayed across Ethan’s skin, wrapped around his cock, clenched in anger, that had sometimes, in quiet moments, just twined with his own, their fingers interwoven. Ripper’s lips were lax with sleep, lips that wrapped around long-dead languages as easily as grammar school words, that felt so good under Ethan’s own. Ripper loved to kiss. He had taught Ethan the simple pleasure of it. None of this could be masked by the corduroy and tweed.
Ethan stooped and tugged Rupert’s feet up onto the couch, wrestled him gently until he was stretched out across the cushions. He pulled off his shoes and his glasses.
Then Rupert’s eyes opened, and he said, “Ethan?”
“Shh,” Ethan said, as he knelt beside the couch. “Go back to sleep,” he added, and put a small push of magic into the words.
He stroked Rupert’s hand, lightly, with just the tips of his fingers.
It was all gone, now. The magic, the revelry and violence, even the sex, at the moment.
And yet, something remained. He cared.
And that was, oddly, enough.
He stood up and went over to the desk and picked up the fallen books and papers and pens, then went to the kitchen and found the slip of paper Rupert had dropped, with the name of a bookshop and a phone number and address on it.
After that was done, he sat on the floor beside the couch again, his back against it and his skull just lightly brushing against Rupert’s arm. He dozed and watched the clock. Rupert had a lecture at nine and he wouldn’t want to be late.
The End