Chapter Nine

Doavin was beginning to realize that things rarely went as planned when you were no longer confined motionless in a dark area. He was half afraid to look into Lars' room after the night before, helplessly remembering gray rooms and doppelgängers, but when he pushed Lars’ door open there was no sign that anything from his dream had become true to life. There was also no sign of Lars. He was nowhere to be seen.

Moving a few steps further inside, Doavin worried his lip between his teeth. The bed was rumpled, sheets pushed down to its foot, but everything else was exactly as it had been the last time he’d snuck inside. Doavin turned a little, scanning for Lars and growing increasingly worried; after all, in Lars should probably still be in bed if he was bleeding. His dream had convinced him of that.

He was about to hurry back outside to tell Anai that something had happened when a voice rose up from the empty air around him. “What is it?” Doavin thought it sounded surprisingly like Lars might if Lars were tired, mildly aggravated, and completely disembodied. His eyes widened and he turned about once more, searching for where the words had come from and completely forgetting to answer the question.

“What do you want?” Now Lars sounded peevish, spacing his words as though he were speaking to someone who needed the extra time to comprehend them.

Doavin was bewildered. Not only did it seem as though everyone was angry with him, but it was extremely awkward to try to talk to someone you couldn’t see. He hesitated before speaking, his voice quiet and unsure when he finally used it. “Where… are you?”

“Close the door.”

Doavin did so, obeying the command without comprehending its relevance until he came face to face—or at least face to kneecap—with Lars. He was sitting down against the wall, long sword resting across his knees. He looked completely unlike how Doavin first remembered him; not more relaxed, Doavin realized, but instead slightly unraveled, eyes saddled with slight bags and hair in a tangled fall on either side of his face.

“Silence,” muttered Lars, and Doavin realized he wasn’t sure if Lars was addressing him, commanding him, or just describing him. Still, he shook his head.

“Doavin.”

Lars leaned his head back against the wall behind him as he looked up at Doavin, arching his eyebrows, “Doavin, then,” he shrugged.

Lars didn’t ask what he wanted, but Doavin knew he was supposed to relay Anai’s message now and then leave Lars to his wall-sitting. Yet with his head tilted up as it was, Lars had just given Doavin the first good look into his face that he’d gotten since the night before. Doavin's gaze lit on the Drow's eyes, getting the second look he'd been waiting for earlier. He could see them more clearly than he had before and noted that they weren’t quite as monochrome as he had thought. In place of the black centers he had seen in Anai and Aeneat’s eyes, Lars’ pupils were only a shade or two darker than the irises surrounding them. The darkest part of his eyes was instead around their perimeter: a thin border that marked out their circumference.

“Your eyes…” Doavin began, throat working of its own accord. “They’re—“

He wasn’t sure what he was about to say, but any number of adjectives could have worked: pale, unique, strange, beautiful. He thought they were all of those things but didn’t get the chance to say so, interrupted by Anai’s voice as it slipped, muffled, under Lars’ bedroom door.

“Well? Lars! Are you eating or not?”

Lars turned his head toward the door for a moment, cheek resting against the wall. Then he briefly closed his eyes, heaving a sigh before looking back at Doavin.

Doavin swallowed. “…Anai wants to know if you want french toast.”

Lars slightly shrugged one shoulder. “Fine.”

“Okay.” The two watched each other for moment longer, Doavin growing increasingly flustered before fleeing and nearly hitting him with the door on the way out. Lars shook his head to himself, and his hand fluttered to his ribs when he pushed himself up.

Lingering in his room, Lars carefully sheathed his sword and leaned it back against the wall by the bed. Then he sat down to change the dressings on his wound, noting with some satisfaction the amount of blood left behind on the old gauze. He made a brief detour to wash his hands before heading into the dining room where Anai was laying out two sets of silverware. She looked up at him, and her expression quickly moved from one of surprise to something far more accusatory.

“You shouldn’t be up. I was going to bring this to you in your—“

“I’m fine, Anai.”

“Like hell you are! You got shot how long ago? I know you got some partial healing done and all, but—”

He interrupted her again as he slowly eased himself into one of the chairs. “I’m fine. I’ll go lay down after this.”

Anai rolled her eyes at him but gave up. That was another thing she’d come to decide about Drow in the relatively short time she’d known Lars: they were unbearably stubborn about absolutely everything. “Fine. Whatever,” she threw her hands up and turned away, returning to the kitchen in an attempt to keep their breakfast from burning. “When you drop dead, it won’t be because I didn’t warn you first.”

Lars ignored her, shifting a little in an attempt to get comfortable. Anai returned to thrust eating utensils at him, and he spoke as he set them down on the table. “Is he eating with us?” Anai nodded, not turning from the stove where she was slipping the last of the toast from the frying pan. “He’s damn odd.”

Anai placed a plate in front of Lars, speaking as she headed toward the refrigerator. “Yeah, well. What’d he do now?”

Lars shook his head at the browned top of his french toast. “Nothing,” he muttered, “beyond generally strange behavior.”

She glanced over at him before bending at the waist, riffling through the fridge for the juice carton. “I’d be pretty fucking weird too though.” She missed Lars’ shrug but caught the noncommittal sound he made.

“You’re batshit now.”

“Asshole.” She plunked his glass in front of him.

He ignored her, beginning to eat his breakfast instead. The phone rang when he took his first sip of juice.

“I totally spit in that by the way.” She grinned as she jogged to the other room. Lars would be okay. She hadn’t managed to kill the bastard after all. They could go back to insulting each other, and she could hate him with a clear conscience. Relieved, she realized, didn’t even begin to cover how she was feeling, and she answered the phone with a smile in her voice.

When she returned to the dining room, there was no trace of it. “That was Aeneat,” she said, sighing at her cooling breakfast, “He said we have to get Doavin ready. The boss wants to meet him.”

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