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The crate lid clicks shut with all the finality of a coffin.
“This is it,” Jed murmurs.
Octavius doesn’t say anything; he just huffs and shifts among the packing peanuts.
“’Tavius?”
“I don’t like this,” he says quietly.
The darkness around them is all-consuming; it settles over them like a soft, suffocating velvet. Jedediah knows there’ll be more than enough air for them all in here – the crate isn’t even watertight – but he can still feel it closing in around him. And he knows he shouldn’t move in any closer to Octavius, but he figures the darkness will hide his sins well enough.
“This is the worst,” Octavius continues, and Jed can’t help but smile at the petulant tone in his voice.
“It ain’t my favorite thing, either.” He slides his gloves off, one after the other, and when he puts his hand back down, his little finger finds Octavius’s palm in a tiny point of contact.
He hears soft breath come from his side, and he would swear he could feel it warming his cheek if he didn’t know better.
“Do you know what I hate the most?”
“What?”
“I won’t even miss you.”
“Oh yeah?”
Something rustles – he must be nodding. “Yes. You deserve to be mourned, and I… I regret that I won’t be able to do it for you.”
“Same to ya, partner.” His throat tightens as he imagines it himself. “We’d have a real nice funeral for you, too.”
“Would you?”
“Mhm. ‘Course, now that I’m thinkin’ about it, all I know how to do is a Christian burial, and I reckon that wouldn’t work out too well.”
“Why not?”
“Well,” he says, “you’re a heathen, for one, and for two, there ain’t nowhere to bury anybody in the West. But I guess—”
He stops to gather himself, to fight down the dryness in his throat, but it must go on a minute too long, because Octavius asks, “You guess what?”
“I ain’t gonna have to worry about it,” he manages. Then he shuts himself up before he starts to cry.
Octavius’s hand closes ever-so-gently around his little finger.
He knows this is his chance to pull away. He doesn’t take it. In the face of death, his usual aversion to touch has evaporated like a summer mirage.
“Do you know the Roman custom for the dying?” Octavius asks after a moment.
Jed shakes his head. He won’t see it, but they’ve known each other long enough that he knows he’ll be understood.
“When a person dies,” he begins. He says it slowly and softly; it’s unusual to hear his shouty general’s voice lowered like this. It’s a privilege only Jed has really been allowed to hear. “The belief,” he starts again, “is that the soul is contained in the breath. When a person dies, someone who was closest to them should seal the passing of the spirit from the body with—”
He stops, and Jed sits up, feeling the top of his hat brush against the wooden lid. “What?”
“I can’t,” Octavius says. It’s a whisper low enough that Jed almost has to strain to hear it. “I can’t.”
God, he wishes it wasn’t so dark. He wishes he could see what Octavius’s face is doing. He’s always done better when he could read him.
When he speaks again, his voice is muffled, like he’s covering his face with his hand. The other one is still sitting under Jed’s. “You’re meant to take the last breath from them with a kiss.”
His heartbeat quickens; he can feel the sunrise coming, making his movements sluggish and his bones ache, and this is going to be his very last chance. He isn’t going to waste it.
“Oct,” he whispers. He reaches out blindly. Just following the sound of his voice, he finds Octavius’s hand with his free one, and oh, look, he guessed right. He pries the hand away from his face and leans down.
“Jedediah?”
“Sh,” he whispers, his second-to-last breath ghosting over Octavius’s face, then, “Hey.”
“What?”
“Good morning.”
Try as he might, Octavius can’t get the image out of his mind; it’s followed him like a specter since the very hour they returned home from the Smithsonian. He sees it whenever he closes his eyes. He sees it when he turns too quickly. Worst of all, he sees it every time he looks at Jedediah.
He had been expecting a birdcage. He had seen it, before the squirrel and the statue and all of that; his plan had been to rescue Jedediah from prison. He hadn’t thought he would have to rescue him from that horrible slow death. Yet if he had been just a minute or two later—
It’s not worth thinking about, but he can’t help himself. He can only see the sand, flowing through the glass, pouring down and rising higher as Jedediah talks to him like he’s already accepted that he’s dying. He says all these terrifying words. Each one blends together into nothing but syllables that go in one ear and out the other, leaving nothing in Octavius’s head but a quickly rising tide of icy fear that threatens to overwhelm him completely.
It’s been three days, but the memory hasn’t faded a bit. Somehow, it’s actually clearer; the pictures have crystallized into something too bright and too sharp to fit behind his eyes without stinging.
He reaches out blindly and finds the wall with the palm of one shaking hand. It guides him softly to the floor, where the tile is ready to catch him as he collapses unsteadily to his knees. It does hurt to fall this way, but it doesn’t really matter – in fact, it’s almost grounding. At least the tiles here are stone and not the cold concrete of the Smithsonian building where—
where—
He can still feel the glass against his palm. There’s a thin raised mark where the leather straps of his helmet had rubbed the skin raw in his haste to remove it. It had been his last hope to break open the glass prison. The cord burn doesn’t bother him. He’s only grateful that it worked.
Even though he tries to control it, his heart refuses to slow down, pounding to a mocking beat of what-if, what-if, what-if, so he forces himself to sit still against the wall and focus his wandering mind. He stares at the wall and thinks about counting each stone brick that makes up the opposite side of the hallway, but instead, his mind forces him to relive the memory in full for what could very well be the millionth time.
He bursts into the room with a dramatic declaration, but the cage prison is nowhere to be found – instead, there’s an hourglass in Larry’s hands with a familiar dark hat visible in the dead center. A fight breaks out, and to his horror, the glass falls, bounces, and starts to roll away through the feet of giants. He sprints toward him with no care for his own body, only changing course enough to avoid being utterly crushed, and his mind races faster than his feet as he calculates the odds of success. Listening to Jedediah’s defeated final speech, he makes a silent vow that he will do his best to save him. Then, he realizes two things: horribly, that doing his best might still not be enough, and inconveniently, that dying here with him would be preferable to living without him.
When did that happen?
He doesn’t know. He certainly can’t afford to spend too much time worrying about it now. So, as he removes his helmet, he shouts something about living – it’s more of a prayer than a mark of confidence – and the metal meets the glass.
It gets a bit fuzzy after that. He knows they joined the battle. He knows he handed his own sword to Jedediah in an impulsive move that he can’t explain even now, but the rest of it? It’s all blurred with the sheer relief that came from watching Jedediah fight, agile and strong and alive.
But then they got home and now… now, it’s not so simple. Because the memory is burned into his mind. He doesn’t want to think about it anymore — he wants to put it far behind him and never think about it again as long as he lives, however long that ends up being — but it seems he’s not so lucky. He can’t so much as look at Jedediah without his stomach flipping and his heart pounding. To his eternal shame, he’s actually been deliberately avoiding that stubborn, beautiful man. In the time since they came home, he’s taken one of these extended walks through the museum halls every night. If anyone asks him why, he’s prepared a lie about using the time to consider improvements to the Roman defense strategy, but no one has even questioned his absence yet.
He doesn’t have a good reason for it. He just doesn’t know how to talk to Jed without losing his own head in the current.
It feels horrible. Because he knows Jedediah knows he’s been avoiding him – he heard the cheerful shouts of greeting as he walked away from the dioramas just today, and he knows that Jedediah’s not an idiot. He must have figured it out by now. And the fact that he hasn’t come to seek him out?
Well.
Octavius can’t help but think that it’s what he deserves.
Because they haven’t talked about it, either. At the other museum, they’d been too busy trying not to die to have any more dramatic, emotionally-charged conversations, and they’d sat in separate pockets on the plane ride home. He can’t decide which would be worse: talking about the hourglass, talking about the kiss, or never talking about either of them at all.
The memories are interspersed in his mind, which doesn’t help a bit. He remembers everything. He remembers rough lips, pressing against his own with unbearable tenderness, and he remembers the feeling of warm breath slipping over his face. He remembers the coldly impersonal glass against his fingertips. He remembers his mind slipping away at sunrise and the hissing of the sand through the hourglass and the sheer panic rising up his throat, threatening to make him say something even more stupid than offering to kiss Jedediah as they were about to die.
Ugh.
His head hits the wall behind him. “Why am I such an idiot?” he despairs aloud.
“Well, that depends. What’d you do now?”
It shouldn’t startle him – he should have expected it, really – but it does. “Jedediah!” he says, turning and trying to hide the look he’s sure is painting itself on its face. “I didn’t think I would see you out here.”
I had hoped I wouldn’t, he doesn’t say.
“I didn’t think I’d find ya.” Jedediah stuffs his hands in his pockets and looks down at him with a critical eye. “Where’ve you been, partner?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve hardly seen you since we got back. If it wasn’t for our little plane ride, I’d’a thought you hadn’t made it home at all.”
Damn.
“I spent all of yesterday askin’ around Rome, but nobody’d seen you there, either. It’s like you just—” he gestures vaguely “—disappeared.”
Octavius shouldn’t ask. He knows it’s a terrible idea, but it slips out before he can help himself. “Only yesterday?”
“Yeah, I got sucked in helpin’ everybody get resettled back the way we were. You know I’m the only one around town that has a head for maps.” He shakes his head fondly. “It’s a good deal we never go outside, ain’t it? Some of those folks couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” he says lamely.
Jedediah glances around the cavernously empty hallway. “You’ve been doin’ a little exploring of your own, though, I see. What the hell brings you all the way out here?”
Do I tell him the truth? No, of course not. I can’t. But I don’t think I can lie to him, either. He always sees straight through me.
“Clearing my head,” he says after a too-long pause.
“For three days?”
“I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
“You don’t say.” Jedediah shuffles over and sits down against the wall. It might just be Octavius’s imagination, but he seems to sit a hair closer than their usual carefully-maintained space. “Better out than in, you know,” he says casually. “What’s goin’ on in there, kemosabe?”
He sighs. Where does he even begin? And is there even a way to tell Jedediah enough to assuage his concern without giving too much of himself away?
“You’re thinkin’ too much,” Jedediah says sternly.
Octavius smiles. “Perhaps. This is why I came all the way out here, you know.”
“Sure.” He nods. “And it’s why you hit the ground earlier, too, I bet. And why you were shakin’ like a leaf in a Wyoming wind.”
“You saw that?” He says it too quickly, destroying any chance he has of denial.
Jedediah shrugs. “It’s a long hall. You’re a lot of things, partner, but subtle ain’t one of them.”
“Thank you… I think. I appreciate your concern, truly, but I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me.”
“Maybe, sure. But that don’t mean I’m not going to. ‘Cause see, you might be dramatic, but even you ain’t that good of an actor. I know something’s up with you. You’re avoiding me.” His brow creases. “Is it somethin’ I did?”
“No,” he says, then, “Yes,” then, “No.” He shakes his head. “Not really. It’s complex. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just—look. You’re my best friend, alright, partner?” Jedediah cracks a grin. “If you can’t tell me, who can you tell?”
Octavius does his best to return the smile. “No one, I suppose.”
“Damn right. But hey, this whole week has been a real ride. I don’t blame you for wantin’ to stay tight-lipped.”
Several indecent thoughts flash through his mind, but Octavius is a Roman general. He does not make a joke about Jedediah’s tight lips.
“Believe me, there’s been some things on my mind too,” he continues. “But just tell me when you wanna talk, alright? That’s what I’m here for. It’s the whole point of—” he waves between them with an ungloved hand as he gets to his feet “—this. Now, c’mon, up. I think Rome might be about to invade us again if they don’t get a handle on ‘em soon.”
Octavius takes the proffered hand. “Thank you,” he says, and he’s grateful that it’s not clear if he’s thanking him for the hand up, the conversation, or something more. “Shall we go?”
It’s the coward’s way out, he knows, but he just can’t bring himself to raise the conversation tonight. It’ll happen eventually. What’s the rush?
In his distraction, he doesn’t even notice that Jedediah’s hand is still holding on to his.