[Indigo]

Despite a considerable volume of anxious waiting and assorted phone calls placed to nebulous authority figures, the color had slowly leached back into the world after about two weeks, without further intervention from any of them. Sauvage had the feeling that Jules was disappointed, though she hid it well. She liked to be able to fix things. Hopefully that library would send another client her way soon.

For himself, Sauvage was glad to see the back of the whole business; the shadows had been unsettling, and Roman's presence alone wasn't enough to keep his nightmares at bay, though it certainly didn't hurt. And, more practically, the absence of color had made it difficult to clean the house effectively, a problem he was now remedying in great detail.

He heard Roman walk past the bathroom, where he was scrubbing the shower wall, then come back and lean in the open door. "You don't have to do all the housekeeping yourself anymore, you know."

"Oh, I know. I never did," Sauvage said. "I could do all of this with magic, if I wanted to, but I--"

"You like to do real things," Roman said with bemused fondness. "I didn't realize that extended to all the household chores."

"I enjoy them." Sometimes he was surprised, himself, at how much pleasure he took in simple, menial tasks. Cleaning grounded him in the world, and it made the house feel more his, more permanent.

"Mm," Roman said. "Well, let me know if you ever change your mind." He reached out to ruffle Sauvage's hair, and left.

Impossible to have any sense of passage of time, in a room with no windows and absorbed in his task; but eventually Sauvage became aware of the distant sound of an argument. It was coming from the front of the house. He set aside the brush, washed his hands, and went to see what all the fuss was about.

Kettle was standing just inside the front door. Beside her an akail poked its head into the room--probably the same one, but it looked so different in full color that he couldn't say for sure. Roman was pacing the living room a few feet away. Most of the argument was, in fact, coming from him.

"--can't believe you would have the gall to come back here after the damage you did the first time--"

Sauvage did his best to tune this out. Shouting was...a problem, generally, but this was clearly in his defense even if unnecessarily, which made it easier to will away the tension. Nobody seemed to have noticed his presence in the room.

Well. Only one way to defuse this situation. He clapped his hands together and cleared his throat loudly, theatrically, and couldn't help smiling a little when all eyes went to him. "Is everything all right in here?"

[Indigo]

Fury curdled on Roman's face into something like embarrassment, and he looked away. Kettle, who seemed entirely unfazed, said, "I don't think your boyfriend likes me very much."

"I...had noticed," Sauvage said. He found himself briefly entangled in the semantics—boyfriend did not seem a suitable word to apply to Roman in any circumstance, but the acknowledgment was nice—and quickly moved on. "I think he blames you for encouraging my bad habits. but really, they are my responsibility." It sounded harsher and more dismissive than he'd meant it to, and he remembered Roman, worrying about him. Unnecessarily, undeservedly—but telling Roman he shouldn't feel something wouldn't stop him, and Sauvage didn't want to hurt him any more than he already had.

He moved to stand beside Roman and added, "I must say, though, I'm not inclined to produce any more colors for you just now. There are plenty to go around, and that particular magic is not a toy."

"Huh. Fortunately for you, that's not why I'm here. Which you'd know," Kettle said, jerking her chin toward Roman, "if you'd given me more than a second to explain."

Roman mumbled something unintelligible, and followed it up with, "You've given me very little reason to trust you."

"Trust." She snorted. "We don't know each other. Trust doesn't come into it. Are you going to listen to me or not? Because I'm already in your house."

"Then I suppose we might as well entertain you," Sauvage said.

"James," Roman said softly, and touched his arm.

"I'm not agreeing to anything," he whispered back. "There's no reason we can't at least hear her out. I won't..." He swallowed. "I won't do any unnecessary harm to myself, all right? I promise."

"You have a different idea of unnecessary than I do, sometimes."

"I have debts to pay." To the world, for the things he'd done. It mattered that he hadn't known any better, and that he hadn't been able to stop it, but it didn't matter so much that he could forget it, wipe it away like none of it had happened.

"In blood? And how much blood will it take? What will you have to do to yourself before you feel it's enough? I don't want to see you—"

"You two do this a lot?" Kettle raised an eyebrow disdainfully.

Sauvage made a noncommittal sound. "You were much friendlier last time." Beside him Roman laughed, and leaned against him, a little. He could never be sure if Roman was going out of his way to touch him so often because he knew Sauvage liked it, or if he would have done it anyway, if he hadn't known; but he tried to ignore this particular quandary when it occurred to him. It was becoming apparent that he needed to get used to people doing things just to make him happy sometimes, and at least this one was relatively harmless.

"Yeah, nobody yelled at me last time. I'm not in a great mood at the moment." She rolled her eyes. "Now, listen. I have it on good authority that you guys are monster hunters, right? And don't act all shocked this time, that kind of information's easy to find. As you might know, I picked up this guy here—" She gestured to the akail, who shrugged awkwardly in response. "—from the people organizing the big color collecting operation. Well, after the colors started coming back, they called me again. I guess they want me to use this akail to fight the things that caused all this. But I'm not much for finding monsters."

With incredible restraint, Sauvage refrained from pointing out that she'd found him just fine. "So you want us to...hunt the monster for you, with your akail, is that right?" No use pointing out that he'd never been a hunter himself, not really; whether or not he'd been part of the group was a matter of debate these days and thinking about it too much made him feel off balance.

[Indigo]

"More or less," Kettle said. "You can send him back to the people who made him, after. I won't be needing him."

"That's a rather callous way of looking at things," Roman said.

She shrugged. "It is what it is. Are you helping or not?"

Sauvage was, he had to admit, sorely tempted. He still had something of a taste for battle, even if there had been no opportunities for some years--the fight with Barker had been different, more desperate, unevenly matched against him--and here was a chance to do something useful with that desire. To use his skills for good, for once. And to really be a monster hunter, as he'd once craved, though it would be foolish to think he could undo those mistakes.

To his surprise, Roman said, "Don't be absurd. Of course I'm helping."

"I thought you were retired," Sauvage said, although his moment of shock was already fading, seeming foolish, because of course Roman would help when help was needed.

"Yes, well, I think our friend the necromancer has rather thoroughly disabused me of that notion." Roman touched his hand and added, "You don't have to come. I know you moved here to get away from this."

Which was true on the face of it, if oversimplified, but what came out of his mouth was, "If you think I'm going to let you walk alone into danger then you're a lot less intelligent than I thought you were," rather more vehemently than intended.

Roman blinked, startled, and then kissed him. "Well, I can see you won't be talked out of that, will you?" He said it without a trace of exasperation, just an indulgent kind of affection, as if he'd hoped for this all along. To fight together. It had been a while since they'd tried.

A faint growl issued from the doorway, and they turned to see that Kettle had left. There was only the akail, watching them with head cocked to one side, as if not sure what to make of them.

Roman sighed. "I suppose she wasn't planning to leave us much choice in the matter after all. Let me go get my rifle."

"I'll drive."

"You absolutely will not."

[Indigo]

Despite Roman's protests, Sauvage made it to the car first, and once he was in the driver's seat there was no moving him. He made an effort to drive more slowly and carefully than he normally would to appease Roman's sensibilities, but only met with limited success. "Don't look at me like that. This car is meant for roads, there's only so much I can do when we're chasing a mysterious creature through the hills."

"I don't recall anyone saying anything about chasing," Roman muttered, directing his glare at the scenery whipping past instead. "Or any particular urgency whatsoever."

"Is the presence of a monster not a call for urgency in itself?"

"Mm," Roman said, which meant he agreed but didn't want to concede the point. Sauvage chuckled and let the subject drop.

The akail sprawled across the backseat, sticking its head out the open window—which splattered the car's interior relentlessly with rain, not an incredibly comfortable experience—and occasionally growling out directions. It seemed to be able to sense whatever they were looking for, though it hadn't given any more details than that. In fact it had barely spoken at all, hadn't even given a name or any other personal information, which was why Sauvage was reduced to the somewhat troubling construction of it when referring to it. It wasn't...unfriendly, exactly, in its demeanor, but it was all business.

"Do you miss it?" Sauvage said, after a while. No need to explain what he meant.

"Sometimes," Roman said slowly. "More than I should, I think."

"What do you mean? You were good at it and you were helping people, why shouldn't you miss it?"

"I...don't know, sometimes," Roman said. "Did I enjoy it because I was helping people, or because it gave me an acceptable way to get into fights? Do you know, when Barker showed up, I wasn't happy to be fighting for my life, or yours, but there was something about the action itself that felt...good. Not the circumstances themselves, but fending off those little creatures, trying to understand what was happening to see if it could be stopped, in the moments I could think about that instead of being terrified for you—it was almost pleasant." He sighed and took off his glasses, wedged one of the arms between his teeth. "He who fights monsters..."

"You're making a reference I don't understand." This was a frustrating side effect of suddenly being a real person in a world full of people who had lived in it much longer than he had. Though he'd always forgive Roman for forgetting. But then, he'd forgive Roman for almost anything.

"Sorry. I mean I'm not as good a person as you make me out to be."

[Indigo]

"Hmm." Sauvage drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. This was somewhat more grounded than their philosophical discussions tended to be, but he was on familiar ground here, more or less. "What about Argent and Asher? They always loved the battles, or so it appeared to me, and I've never heard you say a word against either of them."

Roman snorted. "Against, no. They're rather strange people, and I don't always understand their priorities, but they're all right. But I'm not sure it's the same."

"Because they're not you?"

"Mm..."

"You can't slip a double standard like that past me, Roman," Sauvage said in mock-stern tones. "I've been living on them since before you were born."

"God, don't say it that way, I never know what to do with that." But he was smiling, a little. "I don't know. We take all these steps, as monster hunters, to ensure that we're protecting people, that we're only attacking creatures that do harm, but as an individual I can't help but question my motives for getting involved in the first place."

"I can't know that," Sauvage said. "I wasn't there. But I think..." He paused, frowning, trying to find the words. There was a moment he held in his heart, that he would never let go of, that was in a very real way the moment he began to be Sauvage and not just a thing rampaging meaninglessly through an empty world. "Do you remember when we met?"

"It was quite memorable," Roman said. "I think you were the first hrraktha we ever fought, for one."

"First, but not only?"

"Well, there were your cousins—"

"Right. Right." Sauvage paused again, to shake off the creeping dread of that particular memory. "But I was trying to make a point. That day, you...spoke to me. You didn't have to. You couldn't have killed me, but you'd won, and I'd done considerable damage to that little town. There was no reason for you to care what happened to me after that, or why I was there in the first place. But you...well, I don't know if you cared, but you asked. And you came back, again and again, and you tried to help me. Even if I wasn't always...easy to deal with, you kept coming back." Unaccountably, there were tears in his eyes; he did his best to force them back.

"Anyone would have done that," Roman said.

"No one ever had before," Sauvage said, quietly.

He wasn't looking at Roman, because he really didn't need anyone to see him cry twice within the same month, but he heard the rustling of fabric that heralded a shifting of position, and then Roman's hand was on his shoulder. "You deserved better than that, James," he said. "That doesn't say anything about me. It says something about your family."

[Indigo]

Holding onto his composure was becoming increasingly challenging. "Maybe not," he said. "Or it may say something about both. I can't say with any certainty whether you're a good person, Roman. I think you are, but there's no objective measure, or—it's complicated. You know that. But you worry about it. You care. That counts for something, doesn't it?"

Roman withdrew his hand and sat in silence for a little while, as if giving this serious consideration. Well—he probably was, no "as if" about it, because he'd always taken Sauvage's contributions seriously in these discussions, even at the very beginning when Sauvage had barely known what he was talking about.

"Thank you," he said eventually.

"Did I do something?" Sauvage said.

"Yes. Don't be like that."

"I don't know what you—"

The akail cut him off with a sudden loud snarl that startled him enough to briefly lose control of the vehicle. It skidded through a patch of mud and spun around in a circle before he managed to get ahold of it again, braking sharply and turning around in his seat. "What was that about?"

"See, this is why I didn't want you to drive, you absolute—"

"Shut up. You don't think that would have startled you?"

"I wouldn't have been driving fifty miles per hour on wet grass!"

"That's a you problem," Sauvage said, undoing his seat belt. The akail was looking meaningfully at him, or at least he thought it was—it didn't have eyes, per se, that he could see, just a strange domed panel on its head where such organs would normally be. As he watched it stuck its head and neck back through the window, as far as it could go, and then pulled back in to stare at him again. Its shoulders were too wide to fit through the space.

They'd arrived. Or they were close enough to satisfy the akail, at any rate.

Sauvage got out of the car and opened the akail's door, and it surged out of the backseat and across the grass with remarkable speed for a creature of its size. They were a ways out from Bristlecone now, in an area where the hills were beginning to turn into proper mountains, the grass becoming patchy, increasingly giving way to rocks and mud. The land sloped sharply upward in the direction the akail ran. It paused a few times to look back at them, as if to see if they were following, but didn't actually stop. Though between the smell of Kettle and the car still clinging to its metal hide and the gouges its claws left in the mud, they'd have no trouble catching up to it, anyway.

He whirled at a loud slamming sound behind him, and saw Roman with one hand on the trunk, holding his rifle in the other. "What?" Roman said. "You're awfully on edge today."

"So I am." Residual effects from the shouting match in the living room, maybe, but really he couldn't begin to guess. "Come on, if we don't hurry up the akail will be done with whatever it is before we even see it."

[Indigo]

It seemed vaguely inappropriate, under the circumstances, to take Roman's hand, but he did anyway and was received with the same gentle squeeze as usual. Or as was becoming usual. A wordless reassurance: this is allowed, this is okay, you're not doing anything wrong. He wished he didn't need it so much, that confirmation that everything between them hadn't evaporated overnight; but Roman was always willing to give it.

The akail had stopped them a considerable distance from the thing it had detected, possibly for their own safety—Sauvage didn't know how much of their conversation it understood, so it might assume it was on its own in terms of combat. He found himself getting caught up in calculations of distance, trying to convert his defaults into human measurements, to even remember what any human unit of measurement was called. Inches were...probably not appropriate.

After a while, he realized these gymnastics were a form of mental self-defense. Underneath, subtle but becoming less so as they walked, there was a humming, buzzing discomfort, a sensation of wrongness with no apparent source. A feeling he'd experienced once or twice, after the—during a later phase of his parents' attempts to mold him into something they could be proud of, before they'd given up and tried to recoup their loss by selling him into marriage. A sense of being out of alignment with the universe, or, as he suspected was true in this case, the local fabric of the universe being out of alignment with him.

"Do you feel that?" he said.

Roman frowned. "I don't feel anything."

"Perhaps that's for the best." Familiarity brought him no comfort, here, and it was not a pleasant sensation.

They crested a small rise, the last of the greenery dissolving into rock and mud, and saw a thing.

It was not a thing that wanted to be seen, or that his eyes wanted to see, even with the preservation of their more unusual faculties in this human shape. It flickered in and out of existence and yet remained continually visible. It seemed to be overlayed on top of itself, the subtle offness his eyes had in photographs, but with distorted edges, like torn paper but blockier, trailing fragments as it moved. And it did move, though his eyes refused to follow that movement; he simply knew that it occurred. It was colorless, as the world had been, and yet there were flashes of color, every time it moved and didn't move, which was to say that his perception of these flashes was somehow separate from time.

The akail was doing something to it, but it was completely impossible to follow any action that involved the thing. The discomfort had transformed into outright dread, vibrating within him, possibly literally; it was hard to differentiate the physical from the psychological, when it came to this sort of thing. In short, it was not promising.

He turned to Roman, who had removed his glasses. "Seeing it clearly will only distract me," Roman said, in explanation, and there was no hint of fear in his voice. He was good at that; fear would come later. "Are you ready for this? It is rather...unprecedented."

"Many things are unprecedented," Sauvage said, and then, impulsively, he seized Roman by the shoulders and kissed him hard. "Stay well away from it, will you? I think the akail's supposed to do most of the work anyway, but—"

"You know, of course, that this thing must have far-reaching magical abilities, and my standing back won't have much of an effect."

"Yes," Sauvage said, "but it will make me feel better." He waited for Roman to nod, and then he started toward the akail and the thing, and as he walked, he reshaped himself.

[Indigo]

When asked, he could never describe the sensation of shapeshifting, which was as much a part of him as any other physical process—might as well ask how it felt to think. He was aware and yet not aware of directing the process in the same way as moving as limb, and though the shifting must take up time, he wasn't aware of that either, or really of the change in his perception, which was minimal anyway.

He was always himself. Now he was a larger, furrier self, with an extra set of limbs, but he had always been that self even when he was the smaller humanlike one. This part had just been...underneath. Or far away. It was not something he could explain to people who had learned shapeshifting, rather than being born to it, and trying to put it into words just left him frustrated and his audience confused.

He hovered above the thing, not quite subject to the same laws of physics anymore, and tried to strategize. Roman was already shooting at it, those purple bolts of light hitting the surface of the thing and dissipating over it, and he couldn't tell if that meant they were doing something or not. The akail...he didn't know what the akail was doing, the tangle of motion below him still too unreal to process, but it was doing it well, whatever it was. He picked up a sense of distress from the thing.

Empathy. Interesting. But not surprising, that something which could drain the color from the world could get hooks into him in other ways. He ignored the intrusive emotions in much the way he ignored his own, when they crept into his head accompanied by bad memories, in the dead of night, or when somebody dropped something loud, or any number of other times.

Using magic against such a creature seemed foolish; magic had not dispelled its effects, before, and it didn't quite occupy the same plane as him, he could feel that now. He couldn't predict what his more esoteric skills would do. Fortunately, he had plenty of teeth.

The thing was slippery, not like it was wet but like it was a dream he was having, but he managed to get tooth and claw into it anyway. Its not-there flickering was reasonably well matched by his twists and turns in and out of real space, though he never stayed out for more than a second, since reality was still where he belonged. Something sent a burst of pain through his shoulder, searing a white streak across one field of vision—the three layers of sight separated now, with advantages and disadvantages both—but he'd had much worse, and he pressed on without even reacting.

[Indigo]

It wasn't clear to Sauvage which of them struck the decisive blow, though he'd put good money on the akail, which after all had been designed for this exact purpose. All he knew was that the thing seemed to dissolve, or disintegrate, or perhaps be absorbed by something—some kind of strange motion he, unsurprisingly, couldn't follow. He hovered another moment until he could be sure it was gone, and then he collapsed himself back into human shape, and waved to Roman to show he was all right.

Roman jogged over in the midst of putting his glasses back on and said, slightly breathlessly, "I was hoping not to see you covered in blood again this year, but it seems that was in vain." Now there was fear, lurking, but not much of it, because they'd won pretty handily and Sauvage wasn't visibly distressed.

He looked at his shoulder. There was, indeed, a lot of blood. The wound didn't correspond to any kind of attack he thought the thing could have made—it was like something huge and sharp and mechanical had sheared through him, right in the middle between neck and shoulder joint, carving a good way down through his ribs before stopping. It hurt. But it was, all things considered, a relatively minor injury.

"Relatively minor," Roman repeated in disbelief, when Sauvage explained this. "You know, I've seen you after a battle before, but I never...what do you consider serious?"

"It varies." He tried to shrug, with predictable results. "Ow. This will heal up in a day or two, if I'm not mistaken. It's already closing." Or at least the volume of blood had decreased, which could have a variety of causes, but he felt fine apart from the pain itself, so probably it was that. He had plenty of blood to go around, although he would be careful not to put it that way to Roman.

"You are...exhausting," Roman said fondly. "I never know whether to worry about you or not."

"I think," Sauvage said, "that you could stand to pick not more often. I'm fine." But when Roman slid an arm around his shoulders he leaned into it a bit, because, well, an injury like that could leave you a little unbalanced even if it couldn't kill you.

Of course, there was still the matter of the akail, which stood watching them as if waiting for something.

[Indigo]

There was a long pause in which they stared at it and it gave the appearance of staring back at them, and then Roman said, hesitantly, "Would you like a ride somewhere? I know Kettle said to return you to the...whoever the people are organizing all this, but I daresay you ought to have some input on the matter."

The akail tilted its head to one side, and made a noise that sounded like a dog trying to approximate human laughter. It repeated the sound a few times; then it walked over to them and nudged Roman's chest with its face, which seemed like it might be intended as a friendly gesture, though in practice it nearly knocked him over. Sauvage had to grip his arm uncomfortably hard to keep them both upright.

Then the akail turned and sprinted off, in the opposite direction from where they'd left the car, and this time it left no tracks for them to follow.

Sauvage said, "I confess I'm not really sure what to do with that."

"I suppose we can only let it make its own choices, the same as anyone else," Roman said. "This has been...interesting. I can't say it has quite scratched the monster hunting itch, for me, but perhaps that's for the best. Shall we go home?"

"Mmm, yes, we probably should. I hope this stops bleeding before we get back to the car," Sauvage said, glancing again at the wound. "My generally positive opinion of cleaning does not extend to getting blood out of upholstery."

"We can only hope," Roman said. "And by the way, this time I'm definitely not letting you drive."