TITLE: “Gold”

AUTHOR: Polly Burns

WEBSITE: http://rednotebook.tripod.com/polly

SUMMARY: Middle-aged Andrew and Jonathan, ch-ch-ch-ch-changes for Dead-Warren.

SPOILER WARNINGS: None.

RATING: NC-17 for naughty swearwords, sex and one semi-disturbing image.

DISCLAIMER: For the fiftieth time, Andrew, Jonathan, Warren and Warren’s corpse, and Tucker and Tucker’s corpse do not belong to me, cos they belong to Joss Whedon. Alex Krycek belongs to Chris Carter, and that is a damn shame cos he is a sexy bastard. Alex’s sister, Theresa, is somebody I made up, but she ain’t nothin big. Lucky and Lucky’s corpse belong to me, me, me, though, so don’t. steal.

NOTES: Did not steal the title of this story from Ryan Adams’ jerk-off album of the same name. I just wanted to let that be known.

Ahhh, this is the end, beautiful friend. So concludes the Andrew-Loves-Jonathan show. Yes, I’m sad, too.

Gold

Time passed differently, Warren knew, for those of his ilk, the dead. He was still aware of time, though it did not effect him in the least; he could still tell you that there were sixty seconds to a minute, count em off, too, but something had changed- Those sixty seconds would pass far more swiftly than any sixty he had known while still alive.

Life seemed both very distant and very near. Sometimes, he could honestly say to himself, I haven’t been dead for all that long, and sometimes the boy he had once been seemed far-away, not real, like someone’s filmy, pastel-colored memories of childhood-

Alex hadn’t been around for quite some time, and frankly, Warren missed him. Mostly, they’d spent their time together in silence, nothing even passing wordlessly between them (dust motes turning to spangles in a spindle of sunlight) but Warren liked his presence. Clothing was probably no more than a formality in this dead-world, perhaps tied to the memories of their once-selves, but Alex always looked sharp, handsome in the only outfit he had. Warren often wondered if he himself looked that good, and Alex had always answered back, We don’t look good, we’re dead. As he spoke, he passed Warren that infrequent smile of his, that smile which made his small, pale red mouth pucker a bit, like the bud of a rose.

Warren missed him, wherever he was, now.

***

Dreams always found Andrew to be a willing, yielding host. Never did he question dream-reality, either because he knew right away that this was not his real life or because he saw no point to fighting, fighting anything. So, dreams had always pulled Andrew in, like a whirlpool of long white arms, grasping hands, moved him about for a time. As a child, in nightmares, he’d never even tried to run, to scream- he’d always been far more interested in seeing what would happen next than in saving himself.

The dream he found himself in now, it took him to the house in which he had been raised, grown up- he didn’t quite know what to call the processes that had occurred during the eighteen years spent in his parents’ house in Sunnydale. The house looked positively little; in the dream-light, it was out-of-focus, too bright in some places, too pale in others. The overall effect was that whatever it was that had terrified him all those eighteen years in that house had died or been driven out or simply sulked off out of boredom. What am I doing here? he quietly wondered to himself.

Then, as often happens in dreams, time slipped forward, in a sudden spill, like somebody who misses a step going downstairs and then finds themself flat on their ass at the bottom. Andrew was no longer alone in his dream, he found himself looking into dark eyes, dark laughing eyes. The blazing fires that they had once held, behind near-ebony screens, were all but quenched, now there was only a soft kind of warmth to them, like the feeling of a steadying hand on the shoulder or arm-

“There’s no subtle way to say it,” Tucker sighed dramatically, “I’m dead, little brother.”

“Nu-uh,” Andrew frowned and shook his head.

“Nope, I’m afraid it’s true- I’m dead, dead, dead, all kinds of dead…” Tucker gave Andrew a mournful look and then threw his hand over his eyes, palm up, like a lady who’s had a nasty shock.

“When?” Andrew asked, feeling more, more kind of annoyed that this was the first he was hearing of it than sad or anything.

“Last week. I got hit by a car, it threw me about ten feet. Broke my back, snapped a couple of my ribs loose, one of em broke in two and part went through my lung and then kept going, into my heart.”

“Ouch,” Andrew said and flinched.

“Oh, it doesn’t hurt now. Nothing really bothers me all that much anymore. It’s weird- y’know, I always let everything get to me so much, I went through life being such a, such a… ah, help me out, Andy.”

“Such an asshole?” Andrew shrugged.

“Well, that’s a start. Major antisocial tendencies, wouldn’t you say?” He winked.

“I’d say that.” Andrew smiled and Tucker smiled back.

“I loved you, you know. I always did.”

“Really?”

“The dead don’t lie, Andy. Once you get to be where I am, it leaves kind of a bad taste in your mouth.

“I loved you, always. I was real funny about showing it, but, I mean, there’s really no excuse for it, but, y’know- I was twisted up inside,” he pantomimed wringing out a wet towel, “I tried to fix it, later, that last time I saw you, but, well, I know I did it all wrong.”

“It wasn’t all your fault,” Andrew said, and meant it.

“It wasn’t not my fault, though. Warren had his hand in my head, stirring up the shit, but mostly, it was me. I wanted to feel you again- I don’t know if I ever told you, but those days with you, when we were young, those were the best days of my life. After that, nothin would work for me. I just wanted you to know, and to say that I’m sorry.”

Andrew bit his lip, needled the flesh with his front teeth. “I stopped thinking about it all a long time ago. You don’t have to apologize.”

“It’s as much for me as for you. Though, I do owe you a lot- you know, I only exist because of you.”

“How’s that?” Andrew turned his head to the side a bit.

“You were my weakness, my sin, whatever the hell they call it- I dunno. You were where I fucked up, though- I hurt you, worse than I realized, but you turned out all right. You don’t hate me, you wouldn’t want to hurt me, so, here I am. I get to exist now cos of you.”

“That’s kinda trippy.”

“From what I’ve seen, this whole death thing is pretty trippy. Not like I had it any easier while I was alive, not like the people who still are have it any easier. The only benefit to being dead is that you can, I dunno, like, understand how crazy everything is. When you’re alive, you can’t see any of it, cos, well, you’re too busy living it.”

“Oh.” His head heavy, he lowered his gaze to the pinkish-coffee-ish carpet. The hair-soft, matted carpet still held tight to the elliptical dark brown stain- Andrew’s blood, spilled when he had been six and Tucker eight.

“Sorry about that,” Tucker said sheepishly, “I always did take those games too seriously. What was it we used to play?”

Andrew smiled. “You used to pretend to be some kind of wild animal and you’d, like, stalk me around the house. I had to pretend to not see you, and then, when I’d actually forgotten that you were following me, you’d jump out from somewhere and pounce on me.”

“And then I’d beat the shit out of you until Mom came and smacked me in the head.”

From someplace low in his chest, Andrew let out a little bit of dry-sounding laughter. “And then Dad would yell at me for letting you hit me.”

“Old bastard.”

“He’s been gone for a while, huh?”

“Yep. Ten years. Heart attack. But let’s not talk about him.”

Andrew shook his head. “No.”

“Hey, do you remember what animal I used to be when I’d chase after you?”

“A tiger,” Andrew smiled again, “You’d go, Tucker’s a tiger. And then you’d make me be a rabbit or something.”

“I was a fucked up little kid.”

“You were a monster,” Andrew said, affectionately. Tucker pulled him close, held him in arms that felt a lot stronger than Andrew had remembered.

“I’m not that to you anymore. I’ll be that to anybody who tries to hurt you.”

Tucker’s hand came up, brushed over the back of Andrew’s head, his hair was soft as much-handled velvet from sleep. When Andrew spoke, Tucker was thankful to be able to feel the vibration of his vocal chords amplified through his chest, thankful to be able to feel any of him at all… Sounding sleepy, Andrew murmured, “Tucker’s a tiger.”

***

It was strange, to see Jonathan’s hair faded to the flat shade of bittersweet chocolate, shot through with gray in some places. It was strange to hear a creaking sound to Andrew’s breathing, to notice how he got tired a little bit more easily than he used to. Jonathan was forty, Andrew was thirty-eight; they had lines on their faces, fine as a track of ant’s footprints, they often looked a little bit weary. This was all unbelievably odd to Warren, who, even though he had been dead for about twenty years, could still be shocked- even if he did not like to admit it. He still thought of the two of them as kids, and although he knew all about the passage of time, understood inevitability, the way the world worked, he still sort of expected them to stay preserved like brandied pears in the haze of post-adolescence forever.

Oh, they didn’t look bad. They looked radiant, actually- had done for years. Jonathan was still gently picking on Andrew in a way that made it clear to the whole world that nothing Andrew did escaped him, that he was fixed, perched on every word out of Andrew’s mouth, that he’d spent the past twenty years studying him, loving him. Warren saw it, the way Jonathan went all the way inside of himself, only bothering to come out and join the world when Andrew was there. And for every bitchy little turn of phrase, there were an equal amount of verbal caresses- and the other, less ephemeral kind as well. Andrew was still sweet, sweeter than he had perhaps been in his youth. His sweetness had changed, become stronger over time, fermented perhaps, because in middle age, he was intoxicating. It had always been easier, for some reason, to think of Andrew as Warren would think of a woman, perhaps it was simply his softness, Warren did not know- but like many women, Andrew did not hit his prime until thirty-five, thirty-six. Warren could see why Jonathan still seemed to come alive at the sight of him, at the sound of his voice, at his touch.

The alien feeling did not fade, though. It seemed that Warren was losing his memories, mislaying them like a clumsy magician fumbling with his playing cards, his handkerchiefs, so that he missed the gradual progression of things, of time, and suddenly found everything to be new and unsettling. Sometimes it felt as though Andrew and Jonathan had gotten old all of a sudden, like Warren had slipped into a very deep sleep and lost twenty years… Perhaps time was playing evil tricks on him, perhaps this was yet another mystery of life-after-life. He wished that Alex were around to explain it to him. Though he’d only been dead about a year when Warren had died, he still seemed to have all the answers, because he was constantly thinking, coming up with new theories.

Warren sat on the highest of the two small steps in front of Andrew and Jonathan’s house, like love locked out, and leaned forward, his elbows pressing into his knees, his hands on either side of his face. All of a sudden, things were all weird, like when he’d first been dead. He was feeling new things, swirling within him like steam, he didn’t know what they were called. For perhaps the twentieth time, he opened his mouth, and though he knew nobody could hear him, said I miss Alex.

***

Time just doesn’t touch him, it’s like it’s afraid of him. Jonathan rested his head in his hands, watched Andrew going through the mysterious motions of painting. Jonathan had never understood art, but Andrew had some kind of natural talent for it. By accident, in some long-ago home of some long-ago friend, he’d come upon some paints and begun moving little clots of the oily paste around with his finger, and found that he’d made half of a face, eye, nose, lips.

Lucky, that was her name- sometimes inconsequential details came to Jonathan that way, like miniature revelations, cap-gun spark of memory doing its thing. He was too young to be this absent-minded, sometimes it was scary; Andrew’s memory was perfect, however, so he was in charge of things like shopping lists and phone numbers. I’m useless without him, Jonathan thought, smiling sloppily to himself.

Lucky had died in a plane crash, some, what, fifteen years earlier, wasn’t it? Most of Andrew’s Las Vegas friends were dead, Jonathan’s only friend from that place had simply vanished about the same time that Lucky had bought it. Life sure was strange.

“Like it?” Andrew asked, his voice coming on like the sky blue around a spear of lightening. His hands trembling a bit, he held up the canvas he had been working on.

“Lemme get closer,” Jonathan said. The chair made a sound as he got up, perhaps calling him a rude word in chair-talk. The house had come furnished, and the house had been around for at least thirty years, so God only knew how old the chair and its cohorts were.

Andrew’s painting was a landscape, a long strip of beach, right where the froth of water met the ribbon of paste that was the shore. The brush strokes were small, giving it a crystallized, blurry look, as though the scene were being glimpsed through a piece of broken glass. Andrew always painted this way, and he always painted beaches. Jonathan didn’t get it, kept asking him to try something new, a portrait maybe, cos he knew Andrew had it in him, but it was always seashore after seashore. The paintings were hung up all around the house- Jonathan stood on the ladder with a hammer and nail because Andrew was afraid of heights.

“It’s beautiful, dove,” Jonathan said, unclamped one of Andrew’s hands from around the perimeter of the canvas and kissed it. He didn’t know how he’d gotten the idea to call Andrew “dove”, but it just seemed to suit him so well. As he always did when being referred to by that pet-name, Andrew looked down and his cheeks were glazed pink. There were others as well, “honey”, “sweetness”, even “bunny”, for Chrissakes!- Jonathan knew that they were enough to throw a person into diabetic shock, but he couldn’t help it- Andrew made him sweet. And now, he wanted to be sweetened some more.

Still holding onto the canvas, gripping it like a faulty wing that needed reattaching, Andrew was kissed, slowly and steadily. Clumsily, in mid-kiss, he felt around with the edge of the painting, for a solid place to set it. For a second, Jonathan let him go, and he half-tossed the wet canvas back onto the easel-edge, quickly, so as to have more time to be kissed. Like a curl of ribbon that was stretched straight snapping back to its natural spiral, they re-embraced, Jonathan holding him tighter.

“Bed?” Andrew asked, it did not sound so much like a word as a random utterance.

“Why not here?” Because it was conveniently level with his mouth, Jonathan lifted Andrew’s shirt and worked his lips over the place just below Andrew’s nipple where he could feel his pulse beat crystal-clear.

“Back hurts my floor,” Andrew murmured, letting his head tip back, “Uh, floor hurts my back.”

“Couch?” Jonathan said against his bath-of-milk skin.

“Couch…” The word was said like a dreamy invocation. The two of them moved to the sofa- foresight or something had told them to buy wide, screw the way the thing looked, it had to be big and sturdy. First Andrew and then Jonathan fell upon it, unlike most of the furniture in the house, it had nothing to say in response.

Off came clothes, in a series of wide, awkward movements that neither of them saw, being too wrapped up in each other, in the velvet darkness of shut-eyed kisses, in the silk train of hands on flesh. Jonathan spit in his hand, ran it up his cock. Slowly, he pushed into Andrew, feeling him open around him, hesitantly almost, shyly- almost. He got the mental image of a flower’s petals unfurling in elapsed time, the petals dropping to the ground the way Andrew’s wafer-shaped sighs seemed to fall from his parted lips.

“Good?” Jonathan asked.

“Mm, better than that.” Andrew turned his head to the side, showed his bone-smooth neck, the suggestion of a big vein or artery laden with heartbeats. Jonathan kissed his mouth, ran his tongue over parchment-dry chapped skin which gave way to unspeakable softness and delicacy within.

Everytime, Jonathan was amazed that he lasted as long as he did. By the time Andrew wet the air with its own blood, his small cries cutting into the dense silence around them as surely as a broken bottle into flesh, holding on was painful. But when that pain cracked, for a moment before it was transmuted to undiluted pleasure, even the pain was sweet.

“What did you feel?” he asked Andrew, placing a hand against one cheek and kissing the other.

“The ocean,” Andrew exhaled.

“Where it hits the shore?” Suddenly something made sense to Jonathan, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was he that had been so puzzled about.

“Like that, over and over. It’s my whole life…”

Jonathan kissed him again, then steadied himself as he withdrew from Andrew, trying not to leave him feeling empty, used. “You still make absolutely no sense,” he replied, sweetly, fitting his body between Andrew’s and the back of the couch.

“But you don’t mind.”

“How could I? Anybody can make sense, but you…”

“What was it you used to say?” Andrew turned his head weakly, Jonathan met him half way and kissed him.

“About what?”

“About me?”

“Oh, um… Oh, yeah. Ahem,” then he cleared his throat for real, “You are so weird.”

“That’s the one.”

“And you still are.”

***

“Hey. Is this a private club or can anybody join?”

Warren looked up and his eyes widened involuntarily. “Dude, what the hell are you doing here?”

“I should think that would be obvious,” Tucker said and scratched his head, looked up at the storm-whitening evening sky.

“You’re dead?”

“You don’t get where we are if you’re not. Can I sit down?”

“Not my house,” Warren said feebly, looked around, “Ah, sure. I don’t think that they’ll mind.”

Warren swept himself aside a bit so that Tucker could have some room on the stoop.

“It’s a nice house,” Tucker said, wide, like he were yawning.

“Yeah. They have good taste. The inside’s pretty all right, too. Lots of paintings, Andrew’s.”

“Didn’t know he painted,” Tucker nodded his head, impressed.

“He started pretty recently, but yeah, he’s real good.”

“Sweet boy.” Tucker smiled in a way Warren had never seen before.

“I know,” Warren sighed, let his head sink down into his hands again.

“You miss him?”

“Andrew? Well, yes and no. I think I really miss what could have been, y’know- but there’s no way we could have been remotely happy, with me being the way I was before, well, you know.”

“Well, actually I was talking about that Alex guy, but it’s good to know you realized the error of your ways with my brother.”

“Oh, yeah, Alex. How did you-”

Tucker tapped a finger to his head and smiled.

“Yeah, sometimes I forget, about the, you know. You’d think it would be easy to remember, but, I dunno, maybe I take it for granted, being able to read peoples’ minds.”

“I think it’s pretty cool.”

“Oh, yeah, me too. And, yeah, Alex. I just wish I knew where he was, but somehow, I just, y’know, don’t. It’s frustrating, cos I could tell you what that guy over there,” he waved his hand toward the house across the street, “is thinking, but there’s still some stuff I don’t know, or I don’t get.”

“How can you be frustrated? You’re dead.” Tucker leaned forward, sat as Warren was sitting.

“I still have feelings, just, I don’t feel anger or, like, fear, hate, jealousy- And it’s weird, cos those were pretty much my defining characteristics when I was alive, but I don’t even miss them now.”

Tucker nodded. “I know. I don’t miss the anger, either, and I had so much of it, too. Where do you think it all goes?”

“Hmmm. I really have no clue. I’d think that it doesn’t, like, just disappear. No, it can’t, cos of conservation of energy- it’s a type of energy, right? It probably gets changed into something else. Maybe it becomes oxygen or something.”

“How does it become oxygen?” Tucker asked, wide-eyed.

“Well, I don’t know that it actually becomes oxygen, per se, but I’m thinking it turns into something good.”

“Maybe somebody else gets it, and that’s why there’s never a shortage of assholes on earth.”

“That’s a good theory.”

“So, uh, you and this Alex guy…”

“I don’t think dead people have sex,” Warren shrugged, then looked at Tucker, “Wow, hey, I never actually thought about it.”

“Wanna find out?”
Puzzled, Warren frowned. “Aren’t we supposed to not have earthly desires? I mean, technically speaking, we aren’t actually here, don’t have bodies.”

Tucker put his hand on Warren’s knee, just high enough for him to feel something. “I dunno. You seem pretty solid.”

Warren breathed in deeply, as though preparing to jump into a pool. Tucker patted his knee, moved his hand up a bit higher, but then took his hand away. “It’s okay. If he’s anything like what I see behind your eyes when you talk about him, well, y’know, I can’t really mess with that.”

“No,” Warren looked up, over the roofs with their pasted-on layers of scabby shingles, to the washed out sky. He willed the daylight to stay just a little bit longer, to draw out dusk, which had always been his favorite time of day.

“I always liked night the best, when it was really, really dark-that was so like me, huh?”

“You were pretty dark,” Warren said, still looking at the sky. He brought his gaze back down and looked at Tucker. “So what have you been doing for the past twenty years?”

“Aside from being dead? We-ell… I was married for a while,” Warren raised his eyebrows, nodded, “And what a mess that was. She wanted kids, I was, well, I was afraid I’d ruin em somehow. Maybe they’d end up as fucked up as I was, maybe I’d just do something bad to them. I told her so, and that was that. It’s a shame, she was a sweet girl. Aside from that, not a whole hell of a lot. I did two years in state prison for aggravated assault.”

“You did not!” Warren laughed, even though he knew that Tucker, in fact, had.

“That is not something I care to talk about,” Tucker said, exhaling the words like cigarette smoke.

“That’s cool,” Warren said, pushed back the tide of images and thoughts and sensations that tried to submerge him. If Tucker didn’t want to talk about it, he wasn’t about to find out through the back door.

“And now I’m here,” Tucker sighed, “I don’t know why, but I think I’m supposed to take over for you.”

Warren blanched. “Why? Where am I going?”

In a comically exaggerated way, Tucker shrugged and shook his head. “Don’t ask me, I’m just a dead guy.”

Maybe I got it wrong, maybe there is a Hell. Maybe I failed, didn’t do my job. Maybe I could have done something to prevent what happened to Andrew, in Mexico- but that was so many years ago. And I could never talk to him, just Jonathan. Maybe I should have said something to Jonathan…

“I don’t think it’s anyplace bad, where you’re going,” Tucker said softly, placed his hand on Warren’s knee again. This time his touch was smooth and bright, like mint mixed with cream.

“I’m dead,” Warren laughed in two little coughs, “I’m not supposed to be afraid of stuff. That’s the magic of being dead.”

“I think we can still get afraid, but for some reason, we can’t act the way we would have when we were alive. I think being dead just stops us from hurting people.”

“God, I’ve been dead for twenty years- isn’t it supposed to get easy?”

“If it was easy, I don’t think we’d be doing it. I think we’re supposed to do a little, what was it the warden said that one time, penance. There’s no Hell, no forever-punishment, but we aren’t supposed to be having a good time, either.”

Warren sighed. “I certainly haven’t been having a good time. I mean, nothing against Jonathan and Andrew, but they can be so tiring! They don’t really have normal emotions, they feel everything so deeply, and I get to feel what they feel. At least they have each other, to cry to, to hold onto- who comforts a dead guy?”

“I hope you find him again.”

“I hope I do, too. I’d tell him, I don’t know what I’d tell him. After a while, we didn’t speak all that much, we just kind of were together. What was there to say?, anyway, we knew everything about each other. I can close my eyes and still see the house he grew up in, just like he showed it to me, twenty years ago…” Warren closed his eyes, let the image flood into his mind.

“Nice house,” Tucker nodded.

“His sister’s still alive. She’s not that much older than Jonathan…”

“Ouch.”

“Ouch, what?” Warren looked at Tucker like he were insane.

“Whatever it was you just felt, I felt it, too, and Ouch.”

“I didn’t feel anything.”

“Well, I did.”

“What was it?”

Thoughtfully, Tucker turned his head to the side, looked up and to the left. “Like if lightening had arms and it punched you in the gut.”

“That doesn’t sound too nice.”

“It was, it didn’t really hurt all that much, just, it was weird.”

“This death-thing is pretty weird.”

Tucker looked up. The sky was like the negative imagine of a bathtub full of milk- nothing but black milk… “So weird…”

***

Eventually, they got off of the couch, Jonathan laughing at the little cricket-music of their bones as they moved.

“We aren’t that old!” he said, a bit maniacally, “We shouldn’t be making those kinds of noises.”

“My knees always popped when I bent them,” Andrew shrugged. He was standing, Jonathan was still seated at the edge of the couch. Neither of them had made the effort to pick up their clothes, let alone put them on again.

“God, you’re beautiful.” Almost reverentially, Jonathan raised his hand and swept it over Andrew’s side, down his hip.

“I hope you never stop saying that,” Andrew sighed.

“I don’t think I ever will.”

Andrew let his hand fall slack onto Jonathan’s shoulder. At this touch, he shivered.

“Whoa, that was weird,” Jonathan looked around the room.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, just…” Jonathan’s eyes did another tour of the living room.

“Did you hear something? You know we’re the only ones here.”

“Yeah…” And for once, Jonathan knew that they were, in fact, the only ones there.

“The only ones here,” Andrew said again. He closed his eyes, his smile was luminous. He got a flash of his brother sitting out on the doorstep, looking in his pockets for cigarettes. The only ones…

***

What the hell am I doing here? Warren asked himself. It had been quite a while since he’d been in that white room, that white space, that white whatever the hell it was supposed to be. He kicked his leg against the velvety mist that made a thick sauce over the ground. Once Alex had gone or disappeared, Warren hadn’t been able to stand being there alone, so he’d mainly hung around Andrew and Jonathan’s house. Sometimes, Jonathan would speak to him, when Andrew wasn’t around. I don’t want to upset him, he’d told Warren a long time ago, If he knew you were here, that would upset him. Warren had felt bad- he didn’t like to think that his presence would upset Andrew.

Now, though, he was back in the white room, feeling just as new and fragile and jittery as he had twenty years earlier. Even though he knew that he was dead, and technically, invulnerable, he was still frightened, and inexplicably, felt like falling to the floor, letting the mist wash over him until he vanished, and crying his eyes out. Steadily, something like pain was spreading through him, splitting him it felt like. He closed his eyes and he saw red and gold, like the sun setting.

Come on, it’s all right, you’ll be all right, he told himself, as though he were two different people. He felt like two different people- and he was fairly certain that one of them might be dying.

He opened his eyes, and saw that there was what appeared to be a rent in the membrane of white all around. The rift got bigger and bigger, until Warren realized that it was a person making their way over to where he was. Oh, who is this now? he moaned out loud.

It was a guy, dressed in black. Warren could make out, bit by bit, dark hair, the greased shine of black leather, two black-gloved hands, the left arm held at a bit of a distance, awkwardly, as though it hadn’t been used for a while. Warren knew that this man’s eyes looked brown, but were more like amber and gold than anything else. He knew that he had a sister named Theresa, who had joined the Army after he’d left home, taken a bullet in some foreign war and now taught military history. He knew that he had once loved a man but nearly killed him several times all the same. He knew that he’d died with one arm, and though the amputated left arm had been replaced, there was still a ring of scar tissue like soldered metal around the point of severance.

“Where did you go?” was the first thing Warren said to Alex. Strangely, and with unbelievable clarity, Warren recalled having been separated from his mother in a supermarket when he was six years old; he knew what time and place it was because when he’d found her again, he’d said those exact words to her, and they had sounded that same way.

“Something changed. I think, I think what it was was that she, she forgave me.”

Warren suddenly saw a woman whose hair had once been red before she stopped dying it. “Oh.”

“And the baby’s all right. The baby’s in college,” he laughed a bit.

Everything seemed very clear, just then. “And Tucker will watch out for Andrew and Jonathan.”

“They’ll be all right. They still have a lot of years ahead of them.” Alex touched his shoulder.

“So what now?” Warren looked up, because Alex was slightly taller.

“Now, I think we go that way.” Alex pointed to the left.

“What’s that way?”

“West.”

“And what’s in the West?” Warren asked, though he was beginning to know.

“Summer.” Alex turned his head and smiled. That was the happiest Warren had ever seen him look.

“And it’s always summer.” This was a question, not a statement.

Alex lifted his hand from Warren’s shoulder and took Warren’s hand in his own. The black leather was luscious against his skin, an unspeakably lovely sensation- as though he were feeling that, feeling anything, for the first time.

“You are feeling it for the first time,” Alex said, then, “And where we’re going, it’s always summer.”

It were as though a picture were being projected onto the mist, because Warren could now see the vague shapes of trees, tall and stately in their suits of black bark, and beyond that, a sheen of red and gold that was the setting sun.