“Now that we’re in a more secure area, Captain Silkaria, it’s my due diligence to remind, you again that I have a previous relationship with Sunny.” Echo gave a canting tilt toward Sunny as they all piled into the nearest crossroads inn. “If I need to recuse myself as the forensic technologist-”
“We’re in the field. You work with what you have.” Captain Silkaria was a wood elf, visibly old and brusque. “Not like it’s a murder investigation.” Captain Silkaria waved Echo off, and the younger elf retreated into one of the larger downstairs meeting rooms with his suitcase kit.
That it wasn’t a murder investigation didn’t ease the tension, but at least they weren’t being treated like criminal suspects. The death of the cutters would go all the way up to the top, and there’d be an investigation into procedures and safety precautions. As long as no one was found negligent, it’d be a civil case, at best. Sallah had expressed a pretty solid certainty that this was simply a terrible accident. He’d seen things like this before in the field. A cutter getting too comfortable and forgetting that they were scything back the jungle vegetation for a reason.
The real issue for Thresh, and subsequently the rest of them, was the Inter-world Science and Research Coalition. They set all the safety regulations for fieldwork and how to handle any new research information that affected inter-world historical social relations. They were the only thing regulating Latolan. If they submitted for it, which they would, Science and Research would get immediate full access to all the video information from the constabulary interviews that were about to take place. They would use those as part of a broader investigation and series of interviews to determine if Thresh faced any sanctions.
Lidea had the Thýlalykófoton to run interference and represent em at a lower level. Sunny had the Mercenary Guild, and, from another angle, the Interworld Artificer Council. Everyone in a mage or mercenary position had a small list of regulations they had broken without facing any punitive measures, and, as a pair, they were among the better-behaved. At worst, they’d probably be banned from taking Research Coalition jobs for a little while. Yet Sunny was more nervous next to em than ey’d ever seen before.
Ey touched his hand, and Sunny startled. He had been tracking Echo, his eyes constantly falling back toward the wood elf since he had shown up at the site with the constabulary, right until he disappeared around the corner. Echo had barely aged since college, but then that was the aesthetic appeal of elves. He was still so fucking pretty it almost hurt. That same prettiness that made Sunny question how they had ever been a thing for even the brief moment they had. The same golden blonde hair that he kept up in the same, haphazard, coiling bun to hide that it was just a touch shorter than elven custom typically preferred. His eyes were darker, it felt like, but that just made them greener.
When Sunny looked into that space, though, where the physical attraction to Echo sat, that was the only thing he found: aesthetic delight and the lingering memory of a fleeting romance. Fondness for the version of Echo that lived in his nostalgia. Not the same consistent, holistic burning desire that he felt for Lidea. That was almost refreshing. He didn’t think he was the sort to fall for an old fling, but then this was the second time he’d run into someone from the same old friend group in the last few months. It felt like an omen.
They couldn’t talk to each other, yet, aiming for objectivity between all the parties involved. It was impossible, of course, to maintain that perfect distance, but they could at least pretend to try for the sake of the investigation.
“Sunny, are you okay?” Lidea gripped his hand tighter, looking down at him with furrowed brows. Sunny squeezed eir hand back. He had been avoiding this for so long, it took actual effort to start opening the doors.
“I went to college with Echo. The technologist.” Sunny folded his hand into Lidea’s a little deeper.
“Oh. Okay.” Their hands clutched to the each other. “I wondered. You seemed to know each other. You haven’t introduced us, yet.”
“Not allowed.”
“Right.” Lidea nodded, feeling eir body tense from the shoulders down. Why did ey feel this creeping suspicion in eir bones? It hadn’t happened when ey met Phyll. That hadn’t felt like anything until Ajax said something.
“The Archmage should go first,” Captain Silkaria said somewhere behind em.
“Kýriolykós. I’m a kýrio.” Ey turned on him sharply.
“Sure,” he said blandly. “Officer Dane.” He gestured to one of the other police officers, a young ariesian man in field uniform. “Come with us to the interview room.”
Dane guided them through the tavern to a wing that had only been added in maybe the last decade. Three, large, nondescript meeting rooms, each with a wooden table and chairs for maybe a dozen people. The inns on Latolan didn’t have quite the same organic personality as ones on other worlds ey had visited, the offspring of tightly controlled urban planning. They were still products of their time, though, crafted with some of the minor flourishes of the era. These mini-conference rooms didn’t even have those.
Echo was already set up at a table in the farthest room down the hall and patted the chair next to him. He rolled his eyes toward Silkaria, then lifted his eyebrows in silent annoyance that they had to remain so formal.
He was beautiful in an annoying way. Full-blooded wood elves always looked weird to eir half-elf eyes. Hell, even wood elves tacitly agreed with each that the longer you spent with humans, the weirder your fellow elves looked in comparison. But Echo was pretty. Just downright pretty, blond bangs framing his sculpted face, eyebrows not so blond they faded into his pale face, a common problem for light-haired wood and stone elves. His mint eyes flicked over a mic and tape recorder as he set it up, thin fingers ending in neatly cut nails painted in ceramic pink polish.
“I’ll need to put a cloth pad on your collarbone and back of your neck,” he said softly, gesturing to eir shirt. Ey pulled it away from eir skin a little for him. He slipped the sticky cloth pad over eir chest and neck, clipped another cylindrical monitor to eir finger, then ran all the leads back to a boxy machine tucked into his suitcase.
Ey had only been in any kind of formal inquiry once before, and that was during the kýriolykós process. The microphone setup was the same. The suitcase machine was one of the better-kept secrets of forensic investigation, but ey was a high-ranking mage. Ey was an insider. It tested for the presence of magical memory and perception manipulation. It only worked consistently within the first ten days of the suspected incident, but it had a negligible rate of false positives. Ey wasn’t aware they were concerned about perception manipulation, but ey didn’t have a solid grasp on what this sort of thing looked like at an administrative level.
“If you’re ready to begin,” Captain Silkaria said, sitting across the table. “Can you start from when you were first aware there was a dead body?”
“How’d it go?” Lidea held out eir arms for Sunny to settle against eir chest. Sunny dropped onto the ratty sofa and practically crawled up into Lidea’s lap. The couch was up against the wall in the far corner, hidden in an alcove off the main tavern. Sunny was the last one to get called back into the room, and he’d taken the second longest after Thresh. Sallah was wandering around the outside of the inn somewhere; Thresh and Beni had already retired to their assigned room. That left just Lidea on one side of the room, police officers on the other side, and a handful of confused travelers.
“They kept pressing what we saw down there. They didn’t like ‘I don’t really know’ as an answer.”
“At least it’s over.” Lidea kissed the top of his head.
“Yeah.”
“Okay! Sunny! Now we get to talk properly?” Lidea felt Sunny tense at Echo’s voice. He appeared around the corner of the alcove, three drinks balanced in a triangle over his fingers. “You still take a whiskey?” He set down the largest of the glasses on the small side table nearest Sunny.
“Got the light stuff for us.” Echo glanced over at Lidea and set smaller, thick-stemmed glasses on another small table. He dragged over a chair and sat across from them. “So fill in the last…however many years. Time is an illusion. Come on.” He rolled his hands forward, begging Sunny to talk.
Sunny groaned and rolled his face down into Lidea’s chest a little more.
“Oh, okay. So you’re still like that. Neat.” Echo leaned back and took a sip of his wine. “You could at least give me a formal introduction to your…”
“Fiancé,” Lidea finished for him, leaning forward to offer eir hand, palm up. He pressed his fingertips to it briefly before pulling away, one of the more traditional wood elf greetings. So he kept to some formalities, but he wasn’t weird around em as a half-elf. If “a guy I knew at university” could be taken at face value, then Echo at least took a few classes at Giddington. Being a magic-technologist was a check toward “not being shitty toward a greenwitch,” but having a few more pieces of supporting evidence didn’t hurt.
“And, honestly,” Lidea said, “it’s good to know he’s always been like this. Not just since I’ve known him.”
“The quotient’s gone up,” Echo said, crossing one knee over the other. He took another deep sip. “We used to have sex.”
“Echo.” Sunny snapped up, immediately shifting forward to the edge of the couch.
“What? Ripping off the bandage. We’re all too old to be dancing around it, and you’re not exactly a prude.”
Sunny couldn’t actually deny that. He was just suddenly, starkly aware of the fact that he hadn’t any kind of conversation with Lidea about past sexual partners. At all. They hadn’t even had sex, yet, themselves. It felt like a joke. A farce. And ey still didn’t know. He still had to tell em what happened. What he did to Echo’s college boyfriend.
Lidea found emself snickering, though. Ey had always suspected this about Sunny. That he was closed off because some part of the person he used to be embarrassed him. Now, his body was hot, blushing, hands twitching.
“So how much did Sunny get around in college?” Lidea asked outright, sipping from eir own drink.
“Oh, a lot,” Echo said.
“Fucking hell,” Sunny muttered.
“He was the only one in our friend group who stayed…I guess you could say single? The rest of us all seriously dated someone, if only just for a short time.” He swirled his glass. “Even if it went weird at some point.”
The room lost some color and sound. It was just Sunny and Echo in that moment, lost in a repeat of that stark moment where everything had fallen apart. The memory of Echo’s wailing reverberated through the back of his head. He felt the dead body under his hands, fingers clutched in a bloody shirt.
But that didn’t seem right; the order of events scrambled by the decades between them. Echo wouldn’t have been at the apartment, yet, never would have seen the worst of it.
“So what about now, Echo? Married? Kids?” Lidea dragged them back, sensing the change in atmosphere and trying to correct it. Echo visibly snapped back into the present, and Sunny dragged himself in behind.
“Oh, I’m one of those unfortunate male elves with a perfectly functioning reproductive system and absolutely no interest in the female body.”
“How are you getting away with that one? Sperm donation?” Lidea clasped eir hands around eir knees.
“Yes, super convenient. Got a smattering of kids, but I don’t really know them.” He shrugged. Lidea had a handful of half-siblings emself under similar circumstances.
“Do have a boyfriend, though,” Echo continued. “Human. Telekinetic. Graduate student in magicology. If having different lifespans doesn’t freak him out, it’s a good age gap long-term.” He kicked out the foot that was hanging off his knee and tapped his toe against Sunny’s leg. “I’m still living here. We should double-date when you’re not traveling.”
“Yeah,” Sunny sighed. “Maybe. I might like that.”
#####
“He was nice.” Lidea laid in bed in their shared room. “We should take him up on the double-date thing. I would say you need more friends, but I think you actually have more than me.”
“Hm.” Sunny sat on the floor, refolding their clothes in their bags just to have something to do.
“You’re embarrassed because he’s an ex,” Lidea said, rolling to dangle over the side of the bed upside down.
“He’s not really an ex,” Sunny objected. “Just…I don’t know…”
“A friend with benefits?” Lidea suggested then tsked when Sunny didn’t respond. “You’ve always seemed blasé about sex. I’m a little surprised to find out you were so promiscuous in college.”
“Sides of the same coin,” Sunny said with a hint of his usual dry humor. “I was trying to figure out what I liked, so I cast a wide net. Didn’t fully take.”
“How wide are we talking?” Lidea asked, thinking of his goblin friend.
“Not quite that wide,” Sunny replied, knowing exactly who ey was thinking of. “Not for lack of curiosity. Phyll’ wasn’t into it.”
Lidea chuckled, then slid down onto the floor next to him.
“What’s our long-term plan for sex?” Lidea said quietly. “We’re affianced, and we’ve only really just started kissing. Been living together for six weeks, and we’ve somehow managed to not even see each other without clothes. Genuinely impressive.”
“I’m sure you’ve seen me shirtless, at least,” Sunny said absently.
“I don’t know that I have,” Lidea said, touching the hem of his shirt. “You don’t like walking around uncovered.”
“You’re apathetic about that kind of thing, too,” Sunny diverted.
“Well, yeah, but I feel like my husband should be comfortable being naked around me. And I guess… the inverse.” Ey realized as ey said it that ey had also been lightly avoiding being naked around him. After sharing a bed off-and-on for so long, it was weird, wasn’t it?
“Well, now’s not the time. Things are weird. When we get back to Tomar.”
“Okay, but why is it weird, actually?” Lidea pressed. “Echo seems nice. Why did you drop contact?”
Here it was. The moment stretched long in front of Sunny. He had to do it.
“I killed his boyfriend.”
He waited for the room to go cold, for Lidea to draw back. When he looked up, ey was still sitting across from him, head tilted in confusion. Ey rolled eir hands.
“Okay. Well. Explain.”
“What?”
Lidea clucked.
“I know you well enough to know that you didn’t just murder some guy in cold blood. What’s the full story?”
“Um…okay…” Sunny cleared his throat. He wasn’t a storyteller, but he owed this one to Lidea. “Our junior year, Echo started dating this human guy, Sam. He was a piece of shit, almost right from the get-go. But Echo was having some terrible self-esteem issues. Didn’t think he’d find ‘anyone better’ which is fucking stupid. But then elves are immature and dumb at that age. Present company excluded, I’m sure.”
“No, half-elves are just as bad.”
“Right…well…Sam kept threatening to kill himself if Echo left him, so I really think that’s what it was. Echo was afraid Sam would do something to hurt himself if he left. But then Sam escalated. Smashed Echo’s head against the counter. He came running to my apartment, screaming and crying. Stayed the night. Then Sam called and said if Echo didn’t come back, he’d kill himself. I made Echo stay back at my place. Told him I’d go over to Sam’s and talk to him. Get some things of Echo’s.”
Lidea already saw the story unfolding, could see the shape of it even as Sunny was laying out the pieces.
“I got there, and he was on his kitchen floor. Passed out with a pill bottle nearby. Checked his pulse, and it was thready. Barely breathing. And I thought…well…what if he wasn’t around anymore? Yeah, I could get Echo away, maybe, but then what about the next person? I was using knuckle dusters as my magic focus at the time. So I just…” Sunny splayed his hands out across an imaginary scene, a fictive dead body on the floor.
“You don’t have to say it,” Lidea said quietly. Ey knew what he must have done. Every mage knew, and politely didn’t talk about, how surprisingly easy it was to stop a heart between beats. How a weak enough heart would never restart.
“No, I do,” he gulped. “I pressed a pulse of magic into his heart at just the right time, and it stopped beating.” He sat with the truth of it, mesmerized by the simplicity of the facts. He had stopped a man’s heart.
“Then I called emergency services. Told them I couldn’t find a pulse. They instructed me in rescue breaths and chest compressions, but…yeah…it was too late even before the paramedics got there.
“If they suspected me, I didn’t hear anything about it.”
“Apparent suicide with evidence of threats. They wouldn’t have looked. Even if they did, chest compressions would have covered it. They’d have to specifically look for it.”
“Yeah…I’m… I think I’m going to need you to be less cool with this.”
“It’s a lot,” Lidea admitted. “But I think I would have done the same thing.”
“No, you wouldn’t have.”
“You think more highly of me because you met me after my worst.” Lidea pulled at him, dragging him into eir lap. Ey kissed her top of his head, wrapping eir arms around him and pulling tight.
“I love you Sunny. More importantly, I know you. More than you know yourself sometimes. You protected someone you loved by helping someone else finish the job they started.”
“I’m a murderer,” Sunny whispered.
“Only technically,” Lidea replied softly.
Ey rubbed his back, noticing but not remarking on the way eir shirt got damper and damper where Sunny’s face was pressed against it.
The truth was, ey didn’t care. Ey had always known Sunny was probably capable of things ey couldn’t imagine. That the central core of his person had something dark wrapped around it. It would have been a surprise if he’d never been adjacent to someone’s death, considering his closeness to mercenary work So this was just the unrolling of his person in front of em. Ey maybe even fell a little more in love.
Lidea would have to process that later.
#####
“Echo.” Sunny had decided last night while lying on Lidea’s chest that he had to tell Echo. If this was going to be the start of their friendship renewed, he needed to know. The timing would never be better as they gathered for a quick debrief in the tavern. And if he got the police involved, so be it. Sunny maybe needed to pay the legal price at some point.
“I didn’t want to bring this up, but Sam-“
“Don’t,” Echo said sharply but didn’t change his naturally affable demeanor. “I’ve always known, Sunny.”
“You…have…”
“Yeah, I’m not an idiot. Though you might be if you’re about to do this around police. Or maybe just a masochist.”
“I-okay. I just…I don’t know.”
“You always had such a way with words,” Eco chuckled. He dropped a hand on Sunny’s shoulder.
“I was madly in love with you when we first met, you know. Then I realized that I didn’t get you. There was this little unreachable part I would never understand, and frankly, I was too lazy to dig it out of you. The way you act around Lidea, though”—and he glanced where ey had come down the stairs—”ey’s cracked you a little. Don’t make em have to work so hard, yeah?”
Echo patted him on the shoulder again, then moved over to rejoin the rest of the constabulary.
Sunny watched Lidea approach and let em put eir arms around him, pressing his face to eir chest.
Echo was right. No more holding back.
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