“I need to go out,” Rebekah said, in the doorway of the study, “and you’re coming.”
He looked up from the letter he was composing — a Bastien follow-up, some property matter the body apparently had ongoing opinions about — and he looked at Rebekah, who was in a coat that was doing what all her coats did, which was making an architectural statement about the wearer’s relationship to being trifled with, and she had her bag on one shoulder and the expression of a woman who had decided something and was informing him of the decision rather than proposing it.
“I have correspondence,” he said.
“The correspondence can wait.” She was already leaving the doorway.
“We’re out of three things I’m not willing to do without, and Klaus will eat whatever I ask the kitchen for and refuse to admit he did it, and I would like a person to accompany me rather than going alone.”
He set the pen down.
The old Elijah, by his understanding, would have declined with the particular courtesy that made a refusal feel like a concession.
Would have indicated that the compound’s household needs were surely manageable through entirely adequate alternative channels.
Would have stayed with the correspondence.
He wanted the afternoon.
Not because it was strategic.
Not because accompanying Rebekah would yield useful data about her anomaly-tracking, though it certainly would.
He simply wanted an hour of something that wasn’t a negotiation or a performance or a test held in the register of high politics.
He wanted to walk through the Quarter beside someone who was exasperated with the ordinary world, which was a specific Rebekah mode he’d loved watching from a couch.
“All right,” he said.
She paused at the door.
A half-second pause, the kind that was too brief to be a dramatic reaction but carried one anyway.
“I’m sorry?”
“All right,” he said again.
He folded the letter.
“Where are we going?”
The pharmacy on Royal Street was a building that had survived the Civil War and several subsequent disagreements about what New Orleans should be, and it had emerged from all of them with the mild persistence of a very old, very practical institution.
It smelled of floor polish and something medicinal that had apparently decided to become part of the structural atmosphere circa 1940.
Rebekah navigated it with the efficiency of having once managed a household staff of forty across multiple centuries and currently found a single pharmacy mildly beneath her dignity, which she expressed by moving through it quickly and with tremendous authority.
He followed her, carrying the basket.
“The French quarter had this entirely sorted in 1850,” she said, examining the shelf with a specificity that suggested the products were personally failing her.
“One went to the apothecary, one stated the requirement, one left.
Now there are seventeen varieties of the same thing and they’re all wrong.”
“The variety is theoretically an advantage,” he said.
“The variety is,” she said, picking something up and putting it down, “an enormous lie dressed in packaging.” She found what she was looking for on the third shelf from the bottom, which required her to perform a minor act of physical dignity-management, and she did it with the particular composure of a woman who had been six feet tall in a world built for shorter people for a thousand years and had stopped noticing the inconvenience.
“There.
Three of these.”
He put three of them in the basket.
They stood in the queue — a real queue, four people deep, an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in the ordinary city that ran under the supernatural city like a second city that didn’t know about the first — and Rebekah was quiet for approximately forty seconds.
He counted.
He was standing beside her in a pharmacy queue carrying a basket with three boxes of something in it and a comb she’d found on the second pass, and the sun was coming through the front window at the angle that made the dust motes visible, and the woman ahead of them was having a conversation with the pharmacist about a prescription that was apparently a saga.
“You’re enjoying this,” Rebekah said.
Not an accusation.
An observation, in the tone of a clerk who’d expected to file an anomaly and found it more interesting than that.
“The queue?” he said.
“The outing.” She kept her voice down, which was its own kind of tell — she’d lowered it because this was a real conversation, not a performance.
“Elijah doesn’t — the old version of you doesn’t go on outings.
He’s sent for things.
Or he asks Hayley very politely to acquire things on the household’s behalf, which is somehow both more and less useful than sending a housekeeper, I’ve never quite worked out why.”
“Perhaps he’s been sending the wrong person,” he said.
She looked at him.
The look lasted slightly longer than a casual assessment required, which was Rebekah’s equivalent of stopping in the middle of the street and staring, given that she had a thousand years of controlling what her face did.
“Look at you,” she said.
Something dry and warm at the same time, the double-register she used when she’d decided to be fond of something before she’d decided whether she trusted it.
“Actually being Elijah.”
The phrase landed in him like a dropped key hitting stone.
Not because it hurt.
Because it was — the phrase was — she’d meant it lightly, a small verbal jab dressed as an affectionate observation, the Rebekah way of saying you’re surprising me and I haven’t decided what that means yet.
She’d heard herself be fond of him, disapproved slightly, and compensated with the irony.
He understood all of that.
He’d spent five seasons learning the grammar of how she protected herself by making affection into wit.
But the phrase itself.
Actually being Elijah.
He stood in the queue with the basket in his hands and the sun doing what sun did on Tuesday afternoons through pharmacy windows, and he let it settle into the right place, which was the place where questions lived that he hadn’t had time yet to properly examine.
Is that what I’m doing?
he thought.
Or am I learning to be someone who fits into his shape?
The queue moved.
He moved with it.
He put the basket on the counter when the time came and watched Rebekah handle the transaction easily, the ease of long practice at domestic negotiations in a dozen countries across a dozen centuries and currently had strong feelings about the correct way to acknowledge payment.
Outside, the afternoon was doing the New Orleans thing where October felt like the city had exhaled slightly and was remembering that summer didn’t actually last forever.
Cooler under the oaks.
The dust of the street in the specific low afternoon light.
“Thank you,” Rebekah said.
Brisk.
Already redistributing the bag to her preferred shoulder.
“For coming.”
“Of course,” he said.
She studied him a moment longer, and whatever she was looking for she either found or decided not to reach for directly, because she turned and walked, and he walked beside her, and neither of them said anything for the better part of three blocks, which was, he had come to understand, a Rebekah expression of something warmer than anything she’d have admitted to aloud.
hey — quick one before you close the tab.
if the cliffhanger is killing you, the future already exists.
you just need a ticket through.
every chapter the second i finish writing it.
see you in the next loop.
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P.S.
— in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com.
just saying.
that timeline also has more chapters.