[Indigo]

Valentine's Day. Wonderful timing, from a certain perspective. When he'd arranged this meeting that detail had escaped him—he'd been so jittery about talking to Lance at all that he'd blurted out the first day that had come to mind, and Lance hadn't said anything about it. Encouraging. Maybe.

Skip had always expected that when things went bad, it would be a mistake on his end, because there were only so many times you could fleece someone down to the skin and scurry back to the same bolthole before somebody put two and two together. Lance couldn't hide him forever, even if he'd had intelligible motives for hiding Skip in the first place, which...he did, and didn't. They had rarely talked about the thing that had grown between them in explicit terms, first out of hesitation and then habit, though that assumed he understood why Lance did anything. Which he did, and didn't.

Anyway, what a surprise when something went hideously wrong at the manse while Skip was on a "business trip"—a joke that had ceased to be funny immediately and he knew it but that wasn't going to stop him—and next thing he knew Lance was "dead" and he had to find a new safe house in a hurry. Dead in quotes from the start, because Lance had never faked his death before and while he'd done a decent job for an amateur, you had to lie pretty hard about most things to fool Skip. Should've faked being psychic instead, that would have worked much better. Now there was another awful joke he'd have to keep from bubbling to the surface while he was in there.

It had taken years to track the man down, though—Lance might have been a poor liar but he was always phenomenal at covering his tracks. And of course there was the simple matter that Skip would never have guessed someone that attached to luxury would go to ground in a place like the one he was now approaching, a houseboat that hardly seemed large enough for one drifting around a swamp where it never stopped raining and always seemed to be dark. That was the problem with faking your death, you lost all your assets, which was one of the reasons Skip had always done his best to avoid it. Not that he usually had that many assets to lose.

The door creaked open before he could knock, which was creepy, in a reassuring way. He ducked inside before he could overthink it. After all, he'd worked years for this moment.

[Indigo]

There was no hallway or cloakroom or other barrier between out and in, only a little square room, dimly lit, with comfortable-looking armchairs and a window that showed a stormy sky. Stepping into that room was like being dunked in cold water. On some level he hadn't really believed anything could have changed—he'd walk through a door into a space that was bigger than it ought to be, full of hidden delights, expensive rugs and filigree and a painting he'd once lifted from a museum and then thought he'd lost in a fire, like the first time he'd walked into that shed on the edge of the Norwood estate.

But not this time. This place was exactly what it appeared to be, or almost. The sky through that window was lighter, less obscured by trees than the one outside, but that was Lance's only concession to the way he'd lived before.

Lance. A hand resting on the arm of one of the chairs, faint tracery of scars across the knuckles in the half-light. They'd have been invisible if Skip didn't remember them from the video call. Whatever had happened at the house, and he still didn't know, it had been bad. Fingernails painted red. If that was an acknowledgment of the date...

"I would recommend closing the door, old friend," Lance said. "I know how you feel about rain."

Skip closed the door. "Old friend?" He stepped into the narrow triangle of space between the chairs, more of a half-step given the size of the space, and peered down into the occupied seat. It was too goddamned dark in here. "That's not fair."

The lights went up a little, and the fake-psychic joke tickled the back of his throat again, but he forced it down. He'd seen Lance already, of course—the video call—but it was different to be in the same room, look down at the man he'd been searching for and see a version of him that was almost the same but not quite, longer hair but the same tired eyes, different clothes with the same sensibility, legs folded under him in the chair like he was trying to hide from someone peeking under the door.

It didn't feel right to stand over him. The wrongness of it made Skip hold his position. If there was one thing he'd known from the moment he'd made that call, it was that things couldn't be what they had been.

[Indigo]

"It's...no, it's not," Lance said. "Bad start. You didn't give me enough time to prepare myself for this."

"You had almost nine years." Skip was good at what he did, and when he'd set this up he'd rehearsed those words, knowing they'd come up in one way or another, practicing in the mirror to ensure no bitterness crept into his tone or his face. Saying it now he was surprised to find that he didn't feel it either, anymore. He'd nurtured that feeling for years and years, and when the time finally came he'd turned it over and over on his tongue until it wore through and left only—things he didn't like to feel. Things that were harder to live with.

Things that had to come out.

"For some of that time I was too busy surviving to think about you," Lance said. Something distant about his tone, there, that Skip couldn't place. "I flatter myself that I understand some things about you that I didn't before. But that's neither here nor there. Did you really know I was alive the whole time?"

"We've been over this," Skip said.

"But it took you this long to find me?"

"Because you hid from me," Skip said. "Can't pin that one on me, Lance. Everything I have done in the last nine years has been with the goal of finding you. It would have been a lot easier if you'd wanted me to."

Let all those ugly things come out, the hurt and the disappointment, the fear and the wondering what he'd done to be cut off like this—were they really so ugly in the light? Maybe not, if you knew what was underneath, and he knew, and he knew that Lance knew. The two of them had always lived in the space between said and unsaid. It was a hard habit to break.

"You wouldn't have liked what you found," Lance said. "I haven't had the same resources, and I still don't, you can see that. I'm not sure I ever will again. One has to make a lot of sacrifices for this kind of anonymity, it turns out."

"I could have told you that for free," Skip said quietly. "And on that subject, if you really think resources are what I want from you, I can walk out that door right now and you'll never lay eyes on me again. If that's what you think of me, I'm sure it will come as a relief."

[Indigo]

One breath of silence, two, he'd taken a gamble on those words just as he'd taken a gamble coming here at all, making that call, hoping that he could remake this into something newer and better. But being a con man was only two steps away from gambling on a good day, and Skip was good at what he did.

Lance put a hand over his eyes. "I'm fucking this up, aren't I?"

"Yeah," Skip said, and smiled. "That's how I know you haven't changed too much."

A short bark of a laugh, and Lance dropped his hands and turned his face away, toward the window. "All right," he said. "You want the truth. You said so yourself, before, and I'm just delaying the inevitable."

"It is a talent of yours."

"It's not," Lance said, the laugh breaking through again. "Because I'm fucking it up. I knew you'd probably figure out I wasn't really dead, because I am a rank amateur at disappearing and you're the expert, but I thought there was a good enough chance that the, um—the people looking for me—would be fooled for the whole thing to be worthwhile. But in order to make that work I'd have to cut loose everything I had, and you—"

Skip cut in sharply. "Think very carefully about what you say next." As much as he'd had an idea of what to expect when he rolled the dice on Lance's view of him, there was a chance he'd gotten it wrong. There was always a chance. He was good at lying to himself, too.

"I don't mean it that way. But without my resources, you have to understand—I couldn't protect you anymore. And I couldn't have either way, but if I'd told you what was happening, let you find me, then you would have been dragged down into the mess with me. Cutting you off was the last, best thing I could do to keep you safe for a while." A subtle change in posture, slumped shoulders, like the final release of something he'd been holding in for a long time. Which was exactly what had happened, no need to get all metaphorical about it.

It was so simple, and so—predictable, almost, that it brushed up against some of the scenarios Skip had spun up in his own head during that first year of hunting, trying to guess at what had happened. Still, he felt better knowing it. Even as it was another of those things they needed to leave in the past.

[Indigo]

"I could have helped you, you know," Skip said. "If you'd told me. I wouldn't say I'm the expert at disappearing, but I'm more of one than you, and maybe those nine years would have been easier on you if you'd had me on your side. Did you ever think of that?"

"Sometimes," Lance said. "Not initially. I was too used to the way things were to imagine that the world could be otherwise. And then later—first of all, I had no idea how to find you. I'm not good at these things and I haven't had people to do it for me in a long time. But that might be another excuse. I don't...I wouldn't have known how to ask you for help."

"And I suppose you were too busy to remember I was out there, some of that time."

"I...was lying when I said that."

"I know," Skip said. "You're a bad liar."

Brief silence, while the horrendous rain drummed on the roof and made all the hair on the back of Skip's neck stand up, while they looked at each other and each tried to guess what the other was thinking.

"If you really didn't want me to find out the truth," Skip heard himself saying, "you should have just pretended to be psychic." God damn it. It was such a horrible line. But it did make Lance smile, maybe because it was so awful, and he hadn't actually come here to pick a fight, just to pick apart what had knit itself together wrong, so he let himself enjoy that smile.

"You probably would have found me sooner that way," Lance said. "You have a gift, sort of. Skip, I...I'm sure you could tell, you took me by surprise with that call, because I'd more or less assumed that if you hadn't found me yet you were never going to. And then I thought you'd just want to ask me a lot of questions, but you wanted to meet. On Valentine's Day."

"That part was an accident. I wasn't looking at a calendar or anything."

"A dangerous game, with all your clients."

"I cleared my schedule for the whole month when I found your contact information. Just in case."

"In case of what?" Finally Lance looked him in the eye. "Why are you here, Skip? I'm glad to see you again, but I'm—I mean, I don't have much to offer you anymore. I'm still mired in things that are going to take me a lot of time and work to get out of, and I'm still hiding."

[Indigo]

Skip sighed. "You look at everything in such a transactional way," he said. "It took me a long time to realize that about you—I don't think I could have noticed while things were the way they were before, so maybe it's a good thing you fucked off like that, although it doesn't make me any happier about it. Because you're generous, and you don't get weird about it. But you think of it as some kind of, I don't know, violation of the natural order."

"I'm sorry, is a con man lecturing me about transactional relationships right now?"

"First of all, this isn't a lecture, and second, transactional relationships are my job," Skip said. "But they're not my life. My personal relationships aren't like that. I'm not here for your money or your protection or whatever other external thing you've made up."

"So we've established," Lance said. "I don't mean...it's just that this isn't a stable situation. Getting back in touch with me is a liability for you, and I don't think we—what we—it's not worth it to—"

They were talking around it again, both of them, refusing to bring out into the open something they both already knew—Skip had wanted to avoid this, but there was that sense of inevitability here. So what if they hadn't seen each other for nearly a decade? There had been plenty of time before that to settle into a pattern, and the way things had been a decade ago, between them and in the world, it had been safer for both of them to leave everything unspoken. Quiet nighttime comings and goings, a shared glance, a lingering touch in the mansion's shadow. Maybe that had been enough, then, although he didn't entirely think so. Either way it wasn't now.

Gods, it was so hard to make himself say it. He had to imagine himself spinning a character, a lie, to make himself look Lance in the face and smile and tell the truth. Later they'd laugh about it, with any luck. "Look," he said. "I love you. It's not a secret. I don't know where you are on—that, it's been a long time and you weren't expecting to see me again, but it's why I'm here. And I think you know that, actually, but if I'm going to ask you for the truth I ought to offer some of my own."

Lance had tensed up when he said the words, shoulders flattened against the back of his chair, and he didn't relax now. Didn't break eye contact either, though. That was something. He was quiet for a while, and then he said, "We can't go back to the way it was before. You must know that."

[Indigo]

"Of course I do," Skip said. It was easier, having this out in the open, and now he didn't have to lie to himself about telling the truth to get the words out—like everything else, it wasn't so ugly when you looked at it in the light. "I don't want to go back. The way it was before was fucking terrible, Lance, let's be honest about this. We were always lying to each other and we were never equals—you always had to protect me, and you didn't mean to hold that over my head, I think, but there was no getting around it."

"No," Lance murmured, "there wasn't. You don't think that will cast a shadow on anything else between us, no matter what we do?"

"Not if we make the effort."

He expected the tension to stretch out again the way it had earlier, because so many of their arguments in the old days had ended in stalemate and one of them going somewhere to cool off. But it had been a long nine years, and this room was just a little square room on a tiny houseboat in a swamp, and Lance looked up from where he was curled in his second- or third-hand armchair and said, "All right. All right. I don't know if it will work, but it's worth it for me to try. I...I love you enough to try." He grimaced. "Force of habit is a terrible thing, isn't it?"

Skip, sinking sideways into the unoccupied chair, nodded. "So," he said. "Now that we've gotten the hard part out of the way, care to tell me why exactly we're here in the middle of a swamp and not somewhere with more palatable weather?"

"You don't like any weather," Lance said. "Your natural habitat is an air-conditioned room. But...yes, I do owe you a lot of explanation. Although I'm not sure exactly how much. You never got involved in anything especially magical when we were at the estate, but I don't know what you've been up to since."

"I dabbled in a few magical communities over the years. Like I said, I've been looking for you almost the whole time—you were always very cagey about your magical activities, but I knew they were happening, so that seemed like the best place to start. But I had to cast a wide net, and I probably took some wrong turns. It wasn't how I found you."

[Indigo]

He didn't, except in his most drunk and maudlin moments, think of Lance as someone who would always disappoint him—why come here at all, why invest so many resources in the search, if he had so little hope for success? But when Lance broke off mid-explanation to yelp and look wildly around the room, Skip had to admit that for just a moment he thought of all those other misdirections of years past.

Those had always been subtler, though. For all Lance's faults he'd at least never stooped to the "What's that over there" school of deception.

"Something wrong?" Skip said.

"Something bit me," Lance said, voice barbed with alarm. He flung himself from the chair and crouched down behind it, in shadows Skip could no longer see from his current angle, only a faint suggestion of frenzied movement and the requisite muttered cursing. None of that perfect composure that characterized his public face, a detail Skip noted mostly because he didn't have enough information to react, to panic or not panic, and a jumpy con man didn't get much of anywhere. Unless, of course, that was his game, but never mind that now.

Strange how often he found himself dwelling on his profession in Lance's presence, even now. Maybe because the gulf it created had always defined them.

"How—" Lance stood abruptly, one hand resting on the back of his chair, and fixed Skip with a strange look, a kind of wild-eyed bewilderment that didn't belong at all in this cozy little room. He raised his other hand, which cupped, rather improbably, something that looked very much like a baby penguin.

Absurdly, he said to Skip, "Is this yours?"

Skip could only stare blankly for a moment, two, three, struggling to make sense of this question enough to reply. "What? No. I've never been much for pets, you know that..." And this too was a completely absurd response, he realized as soon as he closed his mouth, but there wasn't much he could do about it now except shrug extravagantly in acknowledgment of the fact. He did so.

The penguin gave a soft, satisfied peep.

[Indigo]

"I don't understand how it got in here," Lance said. His hands shifted, holding the bird more securely, though it showed no inclination to escape at the moment anyway; his eyes flicked from it to Skip and back again, as if there might be some hidden connection between the two.

"We are on the water," Skip offered, since his input appeared to be necessary.

"That doesn't explain anything."

"No, but I thought it might break you out of panic mode. It's a baby bird. You look like you've just foreseen your own death."

Lance shuddered. "I see you haven't become any less morbid." But he did seem to relax, if only just, coming back around to sit in the chair again with the bird in his lap. For a moment his hands hovered around it like he was going to put it on the floor, but he seemed to rethink it, fingers knitting themselves into a cage around it— "Skip, really."

"I'm keeping an eye on it," Skip said, in a parody of defensiveness. "It already bit you once."

"Right." He was smiling again, at least. "I do wonder—did I tell you why I came all the way out here to hide?"

"Lance. You haven't told me anything." Skip meant to stop there, but somehow the words continued without much input from him. "I begin to think this is some sort of elaborate scheme to keep from having to explain yourself to me, considering the timing. And considering—I mean, yes, of course I wondered why you came here, but I figured it was because it's just about the last place anyone would look for you. It's not even close to the most pressing question on my mind. Stop lying, stop evading. What is so hard about this?"

[Indigo]

"You're one to talk."

"I've lied to you exactly once, and it was a long, long time ago. Don't start with me."

"You used to be—ow!" Lance let go of the penguin, which had taken this opportunity to bite him again. Now freed, it made no attempt to escape, just looked pleased with itself. He stared down at it for a few seconds, brows knit thoughtfully, and then he sighed and swiped at his bangs where they were beginning to fall into his eyes, and looked back at Skip. "I suppose that wouldn't be fair of me either. You have waited almost a decade, after all. I owe you more than that."

"I know." Gods, he hadn't wanted to be like this. Sharp and bitter and almost angry wasn't his style, and he preferred to forget the handful of times Lance had provoked it from him in the past. Skip didn't fight, in any sense of the word. That wasn't the kind of reckoning he'd come for.

"The bird worries me," Lance said. "Because it could be nothing, or it could be a sign someone's broken through my defenses. This is relevant, although I understand why you're skeptical—I came to the swamp specifically because the constantly moving water makes an excellent shield against anyone trying to spy on me. But only as long as they can't get an agent inside, so to speak."

[Indigo]

A brief pause while they both eyed the bird again. "It doesn't look like a spy," Skip said.

"Mm," Lance said. "No. But it shouldn't have been able to get in here. As a matter of fact, it shouldn't even have been able to see the boat. There are only a handful of people who can, if the wards hold, and as far as I can tell they're still working."

"That does make it more troubling. Am I to understand that you were expecting me to find you at some point, then? Because that kind of destroys any argument you could make about being unprepared to talk to me about this."

"It was more hope than expectation. I...didn't really think you would. And if you did, I..." He made a helpless gesture. "I didn't think you'd be so...angry, I guess."

"I'm not angry," Skip said, and hoped he was telling the truth.

[Indigo]

Lance's fingers were moving lightly over the bird's head and shoulders now, petting it absently, and it seemed to be enjoying the attention, settling itself more comfortably in its lap like a cat. Probably like a cat. Skip had never spent much time around animals.

"Look," Lance said, after a moment. "I want to tell you...everything. It's just that it's a lot to go through, and I don't really know where to start, and I keep getting lost in the weeds. Or hiding in them, if you prefer. It's probably a more appropriate metaphor. The short version is that when I was a lot younger and not very smart I decided I wanted to read people's thoughts, because I was tired of never understanding what anybody wanted from me, and because it didn't come naturally to me I had to go through a lot of unpleasant back avenues to get the information I wanted. Or I thought I did.

"I was easy to manipulate and I got pulled in a lot of wrong directions and I got tangled in a big magical mess, and I just got deeper and deeper the more I tried to get out because I had the money and connections to facilitate..." He swallowed. "I don't know. Things I didn't have a problem with, at first. They just ate up all my time, getting my help at odd hours in exchange for teaching me magic that wasn't even what I'd asked for, telling me it was a stepping stone. All this was already going on by the time I met you. You won't be surprised."

"No," Skip agreed. He remembered Lance's unexplained absences and calls from strange places, the handful of times he'd shown up at the shed on the edge of the estate without warning and in obvious distress and refusing to explain. He remembered.

[Indigo]

"I wasn't concerned about the legality, and I don't even really regret everything—some of it was work that needed to be done, even if the people doing it had ulterior motives. It was just that they wanted so much from me all the time and they never gave me what I'd asked for. And then...well. A couple of years after we met, some of the things they wanted from me started to get more...unsavory. I didn't agree to any of it," he said quickly, "but once or twice they manipulated me by telling me I was doing something different, and then..." A long, heavy sigh. "I started getting threatening phone calls, people started muttering about insufficient return on investment...eventually I turned one too many things down, or something, and they came after me. You know the rest. Ow!"

"I think it likes you," Skip said. "Or maybe it's hungry."

"What do you suppose penguins eat?" Lance said. "It's never occurred to me to research the subject, oddly enough."

"Fish?" Skip hazarded. "I don't understand why you never mentioned any of this to me at the time. I've never exactly been a criminal mastermind, but I've dealt with these kinds of organizations from time to time. Not magical ones, but still—we could have developed a, a strategy, or something." Although what kind of strategy he'd have been able to come up with, the way he'd been back then, was hard to imagine.

"Like I said before," Lance said. "I had this grand dream of protecting you. You were the best thing that had happened to me in a long time, you know? I couldn't just..." He trailed off uncertainly.

[Indigo]

"There's something that's been bothering me this whole time," Skip said.

"Yes?"

"Why the red nail polish?"

Lance gave him a long, hard look, and he returned it with all the innocence he could muster. To tell the truth, he was still digesting the rest of it, the questions it answered and the other questions it raised—he should have known this wouldn't be as simple as one conversation that explained everything, much as he might hope otherwise.

There was a lot he'd never known about Lance. And of course he had always been aware of that, and felt that he'd known some deeper truth than any of it, that he knew the man even if he didn't know every detail about him. Was that true, or just another grand dream?

"It is Valentine's Day," Lance said. Quietly, so quietly. "I thought a nod to the occasion was appropriate. Even if it was only chance that made you choose the date, I had some hope of making more of it. Or, if all else failed, having a little joke with myself."

"Jokes are usually funny," Skip said, "although I can see how you might have gotten confused, hanging around me as much as you used to." And he smiled, because he'd been right, and so he did know something after all.