Fletch stood straighter in challenge to what he'd just heard. "Shouldn't have been anybody," he corrected before he caught himself getting prickly and backed down. "And...I'm glad you're alive," he added a little more softly. He didn't say the rest of it: that if Theo had died, he'd never forgive himself. That if it was Theo instead of Ash, it would serve as a violent echo of the last time he'd lost someone so close to him, and he might not recover from it a second time around. That he preferred, in this way, that it was Ash and not Theo. And what a fuck-awful thing that was to realize, let alone say aloud to a man whose opinion of him mattered very much.
"Anyways, I'll...I'll see you around."
That week passed in a blur of grief and survivor's guilt. Ash's body went home. Fletch couldn't bring himself to tell his mum how it had happened. How senseless it had been. But they helped bury him with the promise that his family would be cared for. They buried the highwaymen, too, in an unmarked grave along the side of the road, and cleared the rubble of the carriage. This order came from the Baroness, who couldn't allow Lady Obower to lay eyes on such a horrible sight.
Priorities. Everyone had their priorities. Not two days had passed when the Baron came to him and ordered him to find a replacement. He should have argued. How could anyone expect him to replace a friend, let alone put another man in harm's way so soon after he'd let Ash die? How could he go out and vet someone new to ensure they'd be safe for Theo if he couldn't even remember to eat? If, between his own nightmares and Theo's cries in the night, he wasn't sleeping at all?
And then there was Niles. Fletch didn't blame him at all for sitting him down to talk it through, but he wished the man had waited. Fletcher's behavior at the ball was dangerous, he'd said. And while in his opinion it was nobody's fault that they were ambushed, him and Tiff and Barty had had to take the lead afterwards. It made him anxious. He asked, in the kindest and politest terms, if Fletcher needed a break. If he wanted to step down and let Niles or Tiff take over. It earned him a harsher rebuke than he'd deserved. "Fuck no," Fletch spat. "It was one bad day. Come back and say it to me when it's a pattern." Whether it was a gut reaction to dig his heels in and hold onto power, or whether he was afraid of losing something else, he didn't know. He didn't look too hard for that answer. He'd do better, and that was that.
Winter deepened into frost and short, miserable days and nights that stretched on forever. His wounds finally healed, but the nightmares never ceased. Instead they grew strange, with Ash intruding on Ven's funeral pyre and Ven on Ash's burial. He tried to shut them out with whiskey, but these days it took him until he was blackout drunk to forget, and that habit was getting expensive. Still, he had more coin now than before. Whether it was grief or anticipation of midwinter or just what he and Theo had admitted to each other, his appetite for visiting the Siren had waned to nothing.
They'd found a tenuous balance, he and Theo. Gone were the days of banter and innuendo, but the tension had eased as well, and they could be as comfortable around each other now as any two people who pretended not to want the other. It made their days together quieter, and there was always a careful dance to leave considerable space between them. It was easier, somehow, than denying it altogether. And, when Lady Obower came to visit, it gave Fletch the cold satisfaction of knowing that she, a trained and pedigreed noble, would simply never measure up. And oh, how he clung to that haughty contempt.
She would arrive this afternoon, as it happened, and Fletcher had prepared his flask for it. Now all there was to do was wait. He lounged in the corner with a particular sourness etched into his features that had nothing to do with Theo's playing and did precisely what he had teased the man about months ago: pretended to read. Every so often, his eye wandered off the page and over to the piano, and he'd drink in that sight before catching himself, shifting, clearing his throat, and going back to not reading.
