Highmauve: The Quad

Tobi watches the inky dark figure in a daze. Thoughts in his mind don’t quite connect as he watches the lazy patterns trace over the figure’s form. Swirls and trailing smoke, like the times he had seen Noelle use her powers. It had been beautiful then, something to admire. Something that made him pause and look, something that made him wonder.


Just like her.


His eyes look between the puddle and the figure as his mind tries to parse what he’s seeing. There’s an awareness of the onlookers behind him and he can hear their chatter; bright white noise filling the spaces between the snow. His head turns and he glances wide eyed at the assembled students, recognizing some of their faces, others not. There’s the frat boys that he knows have been stirring up tensions on campus. There’s a handful of students from the dorms, both Noelle’s and his own. And then there’s students from the program, looking wide eyed at the figure and the mess and him. They’re scared. He knows the feeling.

Dark eyes flick back towards the figure and lock with slate white as the creature’s mouth opens. Tobi can feel the noise around him, knows from how the figure’s ink parts open that it screams, but nothing’s louder than the voice in his head right now. It drowns out the supernatural screech with its own overwhelming, consuming mess of static. It hurts, lord it hurts, but there’s nothing on his face that betrays what he’s feeling. No one can see the hummingbird beat of a heart pushed almost to breaking just as no one can see the lightning rush of nerves burning almost through themselves. No one can see blood pooling in his ears from just the cacophony of noise inside and out and he can’t escape it, can’t turn anything off, can’t make anything stop.

He blinks, and just like that, the students are gone. The screaming has stopped. The figure stands in front of him, tilting its strange head. Eyes dark as the pitch it’s made of track the movement. Tobi stands, still waiting for his answer. As if sensing his impatience, the figure reaches out one hand to point at Tobi’s feet. The figure melts with that final motion, leaving Tobi alone in front of Noelle’s dorm.


Well. Not entirely alone.


Snow collects on the little cat’s black coat as it mews tiny sounds at the larger man, leaving little footprints in the snow. He remembers hearing about this little cat, remembers meeting him in the bushes and in Noelle’s sweatshirt pocket. It had been early in their knowing each other; he had offered to look the other way and given her a warning as to when her RAs did their ‘random’ room checks. Last she had told him, she had gotten the little cat registered as a therapy animal. His body folds in on itself as he bends to pick the cat up off the ground.

The cat’s mouth opens in a plantative mew, but the sound doesn’t register to the man holding the little furry beast. The world around him has faded into a steady static; the only sounds that register are the vicious thrum of his heart against his rib cage and the steady screams pounding against the thick bone of his skull. He can’t hear the way his breaths come out in shuddering gasps, can’t feel the way his nerves flicker to blinding brilliance. There’s no way he could see how the lines along his spine bleed from where they were previously contained out into his skin and spread like rot up and around his neck and shoulders as his thoughts finally come crashing back in with a brutal resolve.


I’ll find her, he thinks.


I’ll find her, he thinks, the sentiment echoed by the empty world around him. So familiar now, he reaches out, taking hold of strings, following their lines of sight. A million perspectives flash by him as he searches, eyes focused on something past the snow and brick of the building in front of him. He can feel himself sink deeper, feel phantom hands tug at him, wrap around him tighter than they ever have been. Fingers tug beneath his skin to tear at makes him whole, to lend him power, to lead him. It’s dizzying.

COME. WE’LL FIND HER, they think as they pull and tear at him. The voices take his nerves, coat them in fire and flame and light, stuff his veins with borrowed power that pushes at the blood already there. They fill his body with gifts he does not ask for in words but in rising panic and cold desperation. They feel his need, and they respond in kind. Anything for this child, they coo to one another like a fond family doting on one of their youngest. Anything.

Light flickers under his skin as his heart briefly stutters. One foot lifts silently, then another. He trudges resolutely forward following strings, heart leading more than his overtaxed mind. One foot, then another find their beat before he’s running, sprinting across campus towards town.

FOLLOW US WE FIND WE FIND HER

I’ll find her, he thinks with narrow, wild eyes as he passes landmarks at a breakneck pace. The hands underneath his skin pull him forward, pull him back, pull him in every possible direction as they look for the girl that left him on the ground in front of the dorms but he ignores all of them in favor of what his heart knows is the nearest source of help. To the kid he met in a time of crisis, to the kid who took them away from the trouble and chaos. To the only other place he can really think of in this moment.


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Lazarus wipes his bloody nose on the back of his shirt cuff. He hadn’t wanted to ruin the thing, but here he was; standing at the top of a set of concrete steps in the falling snow with blood still seeping down his lips and chin. This had been such a nice shirt too, one of his favorites. A rich blue, soft with age. He’d mourn its loss.

A moment more he stands in the cold. The world is quiet and he’s so curious, but he doesn’t dare try to listen to what might be going on under the surface. If that word had been able to break through when he wasn’t even trying to listen, he can only imagine the immense sort of screams that must be lurking just under his awareness. Bright blue eyes flutter closed as a hand comes up to rub at his temples and the cresting migraine that rolls against his skull.

God, that had been a hell of a shot, he thinks as he turns to walk back inside. There’s a buzzing in his pockets; he lets it ring for a few moments before reluctantly picking his phone out and answering.

“Sam?” he winces even at the other man's voice. “No, I’m fine, it’s just a headache.” A pause; he uses the space to wipe blood still softly trailing from his nose. “Samael, I am not sick.” He argues into the phone. His head whirls at the sudden rise in tone though, and he has to take a moment with a hand against one of the hall’s cool brick walls. Sam says nothing, but the knowing look that he gives him through the phone is loud enough to carry. Lazarus dips his head to join his hand against the brick and sighs out long and low through his nose.

“I don’t think I can drive.” He finally admits. A moment later and Sam agrees to pick him up. Lazarus hangs up the phone and stuffs in back into his pocket before sinking onto the bench he hadn’t seen earlier through the blurry haze of the migraine. His back leans against the hard brick as he closes his eyes and waits for his husband to come around.


He just misses the broadly built student sprinting past the history building’s windows.