Archive of Our Own ^beta

Lamont gasps awake and his head jerks upright. It takes a minute for his eyes to adjust to his surroundings, and even then it isn’t much. A darkened room, walls completely covered with white tiles except for the heavy steel door and a light on the ceiling that is currently turned off. He tries to move, but finds his ankles are restrained with heavy chains. There's something around his throat, tight, heavy and solid, only just allowing him to breathe. A collar? He reaches up to his throat. There’s a wide, thick metal band around his neck, set at regular intervals with something, stones maybe? Resting against his spine is a padlock, the metal warm where it had been resting on his skin and cool on top. He touches one of the stones and flinches back. It’s freezing, cold enough to burn; when he pulls his hand away some skin from two of his fingertips stays stuck on the stone and the others are already starting to blister. What the hell ?

The last thing Lamont remembers is fighting someone when one of their friends had appeared out of nowhere and knocked him unconscious. The fact that they had even known where to hit was impressive, but even thugs got lucky once in a while. The fact they have the guts to try and keep him prisoner in the first place is a surprise, the few people who have got one over on him in the past have just tried to kill him, but he supposes The Shadow has a lot of enemies. All the same, usually his powers warn him of oncoming danger when it’s something this serious, but this time he’s not been given a single warning, there’s not been so much as a ripple in the veil.

Lamont drags himself into a sitting position silently, the chains around his legs not making so much as a clink; silence, at least, comes naturally to him.

He feels weak somehow, like blood loss or a concussion (both of which he's felt too many times), half dizzy, half like something is physically pressing against his consciousness and stopping him from concentrating. He closes his eyes for a long moment and holds his head, manages to drag his thoughts together into some kind of order. His coat has been taken from him, leaving him in just his pants and shirtsleeves, but they hadn’t found all of his lockpicks, and even in his state of disorientation he unlocks the ankle restraints easily. They’re not dissimilar to the police ones he’d borrowed from his uncle to practice on when he’d first come back to the city.

Lamont stands stiffly, still feeling woozy, and half-staggers over to the door. It looks new, or at least recently scrubbed to become smooth and spotless between the rivets. There is a square window at around face height, currently closed. He hasn’t got a prayer of his fingers getting enough purchase on it to open it, so he looks for a different escape. There’s the sounds of footsteps outside the cell, the kind of heavy, booted strides that he recognises as law enforcement or military.

Lamont leans against the wall by the door, half for support, and speaks softly into the crack between door and frame.

“Hey,” he says, starting to reach into the dark places inside himself. “ Come over here-”

Lamont’s neck explodes. He falls back, claws at the collar to try and get it away from his skin; he can feel the cold of the stones through the metal and it’s burning. It doesn’t help, just hurts his hands. His hands come away bloody and missing the top layer of skin.

His legs collapse under him and he falls to his knees just as the small window in the door opens and a man's face looks through for a second, then turns and shouts: "Hey, doc! Looks like it’s working!”

Lamont pushes his hands against the cold tiles of the floor, trying to soothe the burns, and tries to reach out, find out who the guard is talking to. The collar immediately gets cold again, almost chokes him. He tries to cough, tries to force a breath into his lungs even though his throat feels like it’s closing up and he can feel warm blood starting to drip down into his collar.

A light flickers to life above him and Lamont has to stop himself from flinching back from the door.

A man enters. He’s small, skinny and balding, wearing a pristine lab coat, a meek smile and, in any other situation, would probably be completely unthreatening. Here, standing above him in a room that’s half prison cell, half sanitarium bathroom, he’s very threatening indeed. The guard enters after him, if that’s what he is. His clothes place him as a construction or dockworker, the latter more likely from the naval tattoos on his forearms. He’s much larger with a nose that’s almost flat to his face from being broken so many times.

Lamont stands; they might have cut off his access to his powers, somehow, but he still has a good eight inches on the doctor and he can still fight, his training to become the Shadow hadn’t just been psychic, it had been physical too. His hands still sting but it’s not like he isn’t accustomed to pain, for now he swallows it and balls his fists.

“The Shadow, I presume?” the doctor practically purrs and Lamont sneers at him. “I’ll take that as a yes.” He turns to the guard. “Ness, if you would?”

The guard grins in response and takes a step forward. Lamont raises his guard. Judging by the guy’s stance, he’s an experienced fighter, but he probably isn’t so fast. The first punch is easy to track.

Any other time, Lamont would have dodged, but even though he sees it coming and knows exactly what he needs to do, he can’t move, can’t access the reflex. He feels cold on his neck, not the freezing, burning cold of a few minutes ago but enough to be noticeable, almost soothing before the fist crashes right into his jaw. The second comes quicker, a left hook that collides with his temple, and he doesn’t even see the next blow coming until the fist is buried in his gut.

He staggers back, his knees fold under him and he falls to the tiled floor hard, hitting his head, blacking out before he can even think about throwing a punch of his own.

His neck is burning again. He tries to get the collar off again before he’s fully aware of what he’s doing, and in the second it takes to become conscious his skin is frozen to the metal, he has to tear his hands away.

When Lamont opens his eyes they’re blurred with tears, and he doesn’t dare move his hands away from where they’re balled into his shirt, doesn’t want to look. He blinks the tears away as best he can, trying to ignore the way the light burns.

He rolls onto his side. This close to the floor, he can see the orange-brown bloodstains in the grout from whichever poor bastard found themselves in here before him, see his own, still fresh and red.

If he didn’t have a concussion before, he certainly does now; he can barely focus and that’s not the worst of it.

He’d been dreaming, he can’t remember what about, but he’s sure that’s what made the collar freeze to his skin again. Premonitions while he sleeps aren’t new or even all that unusual and he has nightmares of the past and the potential future every night, but he remembers them, he always remembers them. It’s like they’ve been taken from him, stolen before he could wake.

He finally gets the nerve to take his hands from where they’re buried in his shirt, and he can feel the bloody material against his chest. He doesn’t look, there’s no point in shocking himself. He tears off his left sleeve, rips that in half and ties the strips tightly around his hands. Maybe that will stop him from touching his neck with his bare hands too, as well as stopping the bleeding.

God, he’s tired. He needs to clear his head before he can even start to make a plan to get out of here, but laying on the cold tiles, no bed, no blankets, nothing that could provide him with the slightest comfort, it takes him long enough to even start to fall asleep...

Then he’s awake again and his neck is freezing again, and he can see the blood starting to spread in the gaps between the tiles.

It’s going to be a long night.

Lamont doesn’t know how much time passes. It gets harder to sleep every time he awakes, hurts more every time he dreams. It’s over a day, though, because eventually someone pushes a tray of cold food through a hatch in the bottom of the door that he hadn’t noticed before, and that happens three times more. He tries again to persuade whoever it is but ends up on the floor again. He tries everything he can think of, his physical and supernatural abilities, but all it seems to do is cause the blood dripping from his neck to come faster.

The blood loss and lack of sleep is getting to him, forcing cracks in his usually unbreachable walls, but there’s nothing he can do about that, not here, as he is.

It’s after what he thinks might be a day or so that the door opens again, fully this time, not just to deliver stale bread.

Ness and the doctor are there again, but they’re standing behind another figure, a woman, he realises when the light is turned on.

Her clothes and her poise speak of money, more than even his family have, her shoes probably cost the same as his uncle’s car and he’d seen the bill for that thing.

She looks at him from under short blonde waves of hair with barely disguised disdain.

Ness steps into the cell around her and hauls him up to his knees to face her.

“That’s not the Shadow, that’s a high-society brat. They don’t even have the same face , you damn idiot.”

“His face transforms , morphs into something different when he’s putting on the persona of the Shadow,” the man, the scientist? Stutters out quickly. “Now he’s in contact with the mundanitite, he can’t access his powers of disguise.”

The woman smiles. “Is that right?”

“Unlock this collar and you’ll find out,” Lamont says with something that’s half grin, half snarl, managing to stitch together enough cockiness for it to sound half convincing.

A backhanded smack to his bottom jaw snaps his head back. The collar bites at his skin, pinches where one of the sharp metal edges meets the other and where the hinge is closed at his throat. He tries to stand but Ness easily keeps him on his knees.

“I recognise that voice,” she purrs, still looking down at Lamont but talking to the scientist. “He is the Shadow, although I had no idea of the extent of his power. I’m surprised your little stones can even contain him like the others.”

“The ones on his collar are larger than the others, and there are more of them. I anticipated this, it’s what you pay me for.” He looks a little irate, but it doesn’t seem to come anywhere near how pleased she is.

“How much d’you think he’ll bring in?” Ness says from just behind him, and Lamont clenches his teeth. Is that what they’re planning? To sell him off like their tacky smuggled antiques? The woman answers his question and Ness’s at the same time.

“Oh no, this is The Shadow, not another cursed trinket or possessed amateur to auction off to the highest bidder,” she says, running the tips of her fingers along the curve of his jaw, and Lamont can’t fully suppress a shudder.  “He’s the ultimate collector’s piece. I won’t be selling this one.” She pauses, then turns to him and smiles cruelly. “At least not until he starts to bore me, and you wouldn’t want to do that, would you?”

“I don’t plan on sticking around that long.” He shrugs. The woman nods and Ness’s fist hits the back of his jaw. This time he steps back and lets Lamont fall.

“You’ll be ready to co-operate in no time,” she says with another one of those smiles, prods his aching jaw with the toe of her shoe. “Lock the door behind you, Ness, it’s time for the grown-ups to talk.”

The woman and the doctor both leave the room and he’s alone with Ness, who offers him a shrug.

Ness frowns. “I don’t enjoy beating men while they’re down, but orders are orders, yeah? Don’t take it too personal.”

“I won’t,” Lamont manages before he’s dragged up by his hair and a kick is launched at his ribs.

Lamont is missing for over a week before his uncle finally decides to open an investigation. Margo has been telling him since the second day. He might disappear and avoid his arrangements with his uncle on a pretty regular basis, but he doesn’t do that to her. They live together, and sometimes he might spend the night working or turn up late for a date with a black eye, but they have an understanding; he’ll always let her know, whether that be with a note, a message with Moe or Russell, or a telepathic apology.

This time, he seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. He was only supposed to be doing some observation of a smuggling ring he suspected were bringing cursed artifacts through shipping channels in the city, some of which had ended up with the mob, but instead she hasn’t so much as felt a thought or feeling from him.

Lamont’s uncle Wainwright being the commissioner has occasional advantages; he can use his… suggestion to make sure the police never look too far into the Shadow or any investigation that might put a normal person in too much danger, but in this situation it’s only working against him. The Commissioner has refused to let his officers open an investigation until now because he’s certain that it’s just Lamont being the playboy he pretends to be, that he’ll turn up hungover whenever he’s spent all his money. He still doesn’t like her, thinks she’s naive to Lamont’s ways at best and just plain odd at worst, and that has hardly helped her pleas. Lamont has started training her to use her gifts, but so far it’s mostly been protection and self-defence in case anyone like Khan tries to use her like that again, she wouldn't even know how to start using them to convince someone, to alter their perception the way he does.

Instead, the Shadow's Network has been hard at work looking for any rumour, any sign of their boss. Moe was the last one to see him, although if anything he knows less than her; he might use their services, but most of the Network are just ordinary people who are safer for not knowing the details. Burbank is the only one other than Lamont who usually knows the full extent of what’s going on, and the last she heard he was still looking into the smugglers and their customers as a potential lead. Most of the dockworkers of them are happy to talk for a few dollars or a drink, but none of them know much about the leadership of the company, just that the owner is a well-dressed woman, and as it’s a less-than-legal operation, it isn’t as easy as just looking into a company.

Burbank shows up at the house on the fifteenth evening, which is rare enough in itself. He usually stays in his base of operations, wherever that is. The only other time she can think of him turning up here was just after the first time she met Lamont, during the business with Khan and the bomb.

They’re both a little awkward around each other, being very important but very different parts of Lamont’s life, but she invites him in out of the cold and the rain and offers him a drink, and gestures at Moe waiting out in his cab to do the same when she sees how serious his expression is. Moe still doesn’t look all that comfortable in the house; Lamont had always done his best to keep him separate from his personal life, but she isn’t going to leave him outside on a night like this, and honestly, she thinks Lamont could do with letting people getting a little closer sometimes, especially after they’ve proved themselves as trustworthy as he has.

Margo can barely restrain herself through the small talk and pleasantries, but she manages, somehow. Her mother would have been proud, her father would be baffled. “Did you find something? Do you know who took him?”

“Better. I have an address,” he says, and hands her a piece of paper with curled edges where it had been rolled up in one of his tubes.

The address is a house close to theirs. It’s a slap to the face; weeks talking to everyone they can find at the docks who might even have a vague connection to the smugglers, tracking down the dealers themselves all over New York and Jersey, and the people who took him were a distance from where they live barely even worth driving.

Burbank volunteers to come with them, but no matter what his mysterious past might have been, he’s getting old, and if something goes wrong someone needs to know where they are.

Moe asks if he can borrow their phone to call his wife, spins some yarn about his bowling club, then heads out to the cab. Margo goes to the upstairs study and takes one of Lamont’s Aunt Rose’s handguns out of the cabinet above the desk.

Margo has no idea what to expect, what they’ll have done to Lamont to keep him locked up for this long. The most she can hope for is that wherever Lamont is, he’s alive.

In the cab, Moe offers her a wrench and she gladly accepts and hides in her coat. A gun is good, but sometimes it’s more of a comfort to have something heavy.

It only takes a few minutesThere are no vehicles to be seen, and the report Burbank made says that the owners have at least one car, so she hopes that means that no-one is home.

The house is opulent, excessively so. The furniture is beautiful, fashionable and well made, and completely uncomfortable, unsuitable for any kind of real use. It’s spotless, no real signs of life. It’s hard to imagine that anyone actually lives here.

They cover the ground floor together and it’s all the same expensive, decorative style straight out of some glitzy catalogue.

“I thought the Boss’s place was fancy, but these guys’ couch probably cost more than my house,” Moe mutters through his teeth.

Margo nods. It was probably worth more than the one she grew up in before her dad got his first defence contract too.

The top floor is empty except for more obvious displays of wealth. She resists the urge to shoot holes in all of it, that could alert someone to their presence, which is the last thing she wants to do. She does smirk a little when Moe ‘accidentally’ knocks a vase off a sideboard, though.

The bottom floor is empty, but in a library of completely untouched books she feels a breeze from behind one of the shelves, and Moe goes back out to the car for a crowbar from his toolbox and pries it open with a splintering of wood.

On the other side of the book shelf is a set of stairs, and it’s colder than the rest of the house, about the same as it is outside. Other than the electric lights, it’s completely bare of any decoration or obvious wealth; the walls, floor and ceiling are covered with spotless, square white tiles. The hairs on the back of her neck stand on end and her hand tightens on the polished wooden grip of the gun. Whatever this is, they’re not supposed to be here.

She glances at Moe; his knuckles are white on the crowbar but his face is stoney. She wonders if he was ever in the military, if he’s ever been in another situation where he had to face something like this.

At the bottom of the stairs is a corridor she reckons must run underneath the rest of the house. At regular intervals it’s lined with polished steel doors. She approaches the first.

There are two smaller slots in the door, one at the bottom, presumably for pushing something into the room (the cell?) it leads to, and one at about head height for looking inside. She realises Moe is looking at her, and knows she’s going to have to be the person to look through.

She slides the metal across with a squeak, and stands on her toes to look through. The room is empty, but she was right, it does look more like a cell.

Margo swallows, squares her jaw, and moves on the the next one.

This one isn’t empty.

The door is barred, and that’s easy enough to remove, but it also needs a key, and it seems like the metal would be too thick to open with Moe’s crowbar. 

“Stand back,” she says, and levels the gun at the padlock.

The gunshot echoes down the corridor, and she wonders if that’s why it was tiled like this, to alert whoever is watching to any intruders, but that’s not important now. The lock has shattered, so she presses the gun into Moe’s hand and rushes inside the cell.

She wasn’t wrong, it is Lamont on the floor. He blinked awake when she shot the lock from the door, and now he’s looking up at her in pure wonder. He hasn’t moved.

“Are you… really here?” His voice is weak, hoarse like he hasn’t spoken, hasn’t had a drink in a while.

Margo crouches on the floor in front of him, noticing the blood on the tiles, then gives up, sits right next to him, and it takes him a lot of visible effort to push himself up enough to lean against her. She can’t hear him, can’t feel his thoughts, and that makes her nauseous for reasons she can’t place.

Lamont has ripped one sleeve from his shirt and tied it around his hands as makeshift bandages. The white fabric that remains is stained with blood and sweat, especially around his neck. He’s thinner too, has lost more weight than he rightfully should have done in the time he’s been gone, even if they’d totally starved him. She can feel his ribs through his shirt and not even half as much muscle as there had been before.

He flinches as her fingers brush against his bare skin and Margo pulls back just as quickly. She could feel his pain when she touched him. She's never seen him so weak before, but every time he'd been hurt in the past it had been obvious to her before they were even in the same building. As unfortunate as his phrasing might have been the first time they’d spoken about it, Lamont was right, psychically he’s very well endowed and for her he’s impossible to miss. His absence has almost been like she’s missing a part of herself in knowing he’s there.

“You are…” he whispers, and his eyes start to close again.

She pulls him closer. “Stay awake. I’ve got you, we’ll get you out of here.”

Moe steps through the door before she can speak. "I can hear sirens. Either the cops finally started taking your calls or someone saw us breaking in."

Lamont looks between them, seems shocked enough that Moe is even here. "Where… are we?"

"The basement of a very flashy house about three streets from yours, Boss. Nice to see you too."

He tilts his head like he doesn't understand, looks up at Margo like she has the answers. God, she wishes she did.

When she doesn't answer, he tries to straighten but his arms won't take the weight to push himself fully upright and he falls back into her arms.

"You're safe now, Lamont, sweetheart, don't move," she whispers, rubs his shoulder through his shirt to comfort him without touching his skin again, without feeling his pain or making it worse. "They'll find us."

He curls up into her, buries his head in her coat.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he whispers, as she hears the door upstairs splinter and a man’s voice yelling “Police!”

It takes too long for an ambulance to arrive, even longer for the officers to stop questioning her for long enough to let her get in with Lamont.

At the hospital, an orderly removes the collar from Lamont’s neck with a set of bolt-cutters from a maintenance cupboard, only for it to mysteriously ‘vanish’ before the police come to collect it. Moe had had to be the one to handle it, when Margo had tried to touch it, just to see what Lamont had been dealing with, the stones had hurt her hands again. They don’t seem to affect him. He tells her he’s going to take it along to Dr Tam, a scientist who is part of The Shadow’s network and has helped them out several times before with identifying things like this. Even if he, personally, can’t help them, Moe says, he knows who to ask and how to keep it private, the latter of which is why she doesn’t even suggest giving it to her father.

The skin around his throat where the collar had been is bruised in deep grey-blues and purples, blistered where the stones had sat the same way it had burned her hands but deeper, worse. His neck starts bleeding the moment the collar is removed and the blood seeps through the bandages the doctor wraps around his neck. She can’t even imagine how much it must have been hurting him.

His hands are in nowhere near as bad a shape as his neck, but they're still burned deeply and painfully. There are bruises from restraints on his ankles and a few marks on one arm that look like cigarette burns.

Margo doesn’t need telepathy to sense that the medical staff don’t want her in the room while they do this, but she isn’t leaving, not now. She needs to be here for him, especially if he wakes up or if he starts to dream in the way he did when something bad was coming.

Nothing happens. They clean him up, stitch up a cut on the back of his head, then apply bandages to all the open wounds. His neck is wrapped in padding to stop the blood leaking through. The dressings on his hands are thinner; he needs to keep moving those if he's going to keep his full range of motion, and the wounds aren’t as bad, if only by a small margin.

It’s a long time before a couple of orderlies push him into a recovery room and they’re left alone, and Lamont doesn’t wake up from the heavy sedatives until even longer after that. It’s getting light outside by the time he opens his eyes. She can feel how the light burns his eyes, how much slower his mind feels than usual, the relief at knowing she’s by his side again, close enough to feel, to know she’s not just a hallucination.

It’s another week until Lamont is finally free from the hospital, but he’s still going on bed rest for a while, and he can’t find the energy to violate the doctor’s orders.

Moe is still taking care of a lot of the things the city might need The Shadow for, so he doesn’t have to worry about that, at least. As it turns out, a surprising amount of those problems can be solved by just being six feet two inches and brandishing something heavy, in Moe’s case a piece of rebar he’s kept in his cab since before he and Lamont even met. It’s important for New York cab drivers to be able to protect themselves.

In the basement where Margo and Moe found him, the police opened the other cells, mostly empty but a few containing prisoners in an even worse state than Lamont.

The owner of the house, smuggler, slave trader, and all round terrible person is Helen Elliott, and they arrest her just outside the very expensive social-club-slash-cult she owns where they’d just finished auctioning off the stolen and smuggled items that Lamont had been looking into. The doctor is found at the docks about to board a ship for South America. Ness disappears into whatever hole he came out of without a trace, and honestly, Lamont is too tired to care. Maybe he’ll track him down when he’s recovered. Maybe he’ll even force him to be a part of the Shadow’s network somehow. Until then, he’s going to try to forget.

Lamont is not sure he’s ever felt this bad before, the closest he can compare it to coming off opium in the Tulku’s temple, sweating and disoriented and alone. At least this time Margo is here, ready with gentle hands to rest a cool cloth on his head or provide words of comfort.

His powers are such a big part of him that the collar hadn’t just suppressed them, they’d shattered an important connection to part of his being, his soul. It has left him weakened and shaking so much he can barely hold a glass of water without spilling some. God, this might be the longest he’s even been able to think straight.

One of his few surviving friends after the war had ended up with a bad case of shell-shock, and it feels like how he’d described that, but Lamont was there for the artillery and the guns and that didn’t do this to him.

The look in Margo’s eyes tells him that she knows what he’s thinking, which after so long is almost a relief. For the week he was in hospital, in and out of consciousness for half of it, she told him she only got vague feelings, nothing precise. Something must be healing, albeit slowly.

“Hey,” she whispers. “Stay still, I’ve got to change your bandages.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he answers with a wan smile. She’s still being quiet around him, and he appreciates that. Sound is overwhelming, and the only reason she’s turned on a light is so she can see what she’s doing. At least he can stand to be touched now, after a week of shivering whenever a nurse so much as looked at his wounds.

She starts with his hands, unwraps the bandages slowly and kisses his knuckles one by one. The burns on his palms and fingers are healing well, but it still hurts to look, and he has to force himself to block her out when she’s doing that. It’s easier said than done, and mostly only possible because Margo chooses to back off. He’s lost control of his power, has a lower guard than before he had any training, a shorter reach than since he was a teenager.

The wounds sting when she cleans them, he has to work hard to stop his fists clenching on reflex, which wouldn’t be a good move. Margo is quick but gentle, though, manages to get the fresh bandages on before he’s in too much discomfort from it.

He holds her hand for a while, so much smaller than his own, and she doesn’t move away until he does.

She cuts through the bandages on his neck and peels them away as carefully as she can. Lamont flinches when her hands make first contact with his skin, but then leans into her touch. For some reason, this doesn’t bother him as much as the others. Removing the bandages pulls at his wounds, but he knows she would never hurt him, not intentionally, not of her own accord. He forces himself to sit still, not to wince as she starts to clean the wounds.

She pours more disinfectant on a cloth and starts to clean the wounds. She’s so careful, but it still stings. The sensation is different enough from the pain the collar caused him that it’s almost a comfort, he smiles when Margo looks at him to see if he’s okay and it almost feels real. She wraps fresh bandages around his neck, tight enough to keep the wounds compressed and for him to feel just a little restricted when he tries to breathe. She drops the old bandages and the cloth into the garbage, then turns off the light again. It takes a second for him to find his voice and even then it’s weak, hoarse.

“Thanks,” he whispers, and she reaches for his hands again and smiles. It still feels strange to be touched like this, by someone who cares, after weeks where every contact was hostile. Margo doesn’t even seem to mind, she just wants him to be okay. She’s done everything from changing his bandages to helping him shave. Just ‘thanks’ isn’t enough, it can never be enough.

Instead of trying to speak again, he leans forward and kisses her.

Margo pulls away from him after a second. “If you don’t feel ready for this…”

“I want this,” he promises. “I love you.”

“I’m serious. Tell me if you need to stop.” Like she wouldn’t know either way. The sensation mostly just heightens the experience for both of them, no clear thoughts get through, but feelings are more powerful.

She shifts further onto the bed, one leg on either side of his hips. She sits there for a long moment, her expression unreadable as she looks at him, but her thoughts are as loud as they’ve always been, even more so now they’re touching; how much she’d missed the sight of him from this angle and how much it hurts to see him this way. She kisses him back, wraps one arm around his back and reaches up with the other to cradle his jaw and he flinches so hard he almost headbutts her.

She felt it too when he flinched, the memory of Elliott doing the same.

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologise. I know.”

He closes his eyes tightly and nods.

“Do you want to try again?”

"Not yet." He shakes his head, finally has to force himself to give in to his limitations and Margo touches his hand where she knows it won’t make him flinch then climbs off his lap. He curls into her chest, just like when she’d found him, and Margo holds him close.

At some point, his uncle is going to want to talk to him about all this, at some point he’s going to have to rebuild his wards and start training again to get back into shape. For now all that pain is in the future and he can just stay here, be held and know that he’s safer than he ever thought he’d get to be again.