Atlas Six (Atlas Series, 1)

Part 2 – Truth

Nico was fidgeting. He was very often fidgeting; he was the sort of person who required motion, unable to sit still. People usually didn’t mind it because he was perfectly likely to smile, to laugh, to fill up a room with the buoyancy of his personality, but it cost him quite a bit of energy, resulting in a somewhat pointless burn. Traces of magic were known to spill, too, if he wasn’t paying attention, and his presence already had a tendency to reshape the landscape around him, sometimes forcing things out of the way. 

Libby shot him a warning look as the ground beneath them rumbled, slate eyes reproachful beneath what he could see of her furrowed brow beneath her fussy bangs.

“What’s going on with you?” she muttered to him after they were released, referring with spectacular lack of subtlety to what she probably considered an irresponsible disruption. 

It was always such a marvelous thing how habitually she remarked on his tremors of agitation; no one else would have identified such an insubstantial change to their environment, of course, but then there was darling Elizabeth, who never failed to bring it to Nico’s attention. It was like having an ugly scar, something he couldn’t hide, even if she was the only one who saw it. He remained uncertain whether her delight in reminding him was a result of her insufferable personality, her alarmingly too-similar powers, or their longstanding history of forced coexistence, but he assumed it was some magical combination of all three, making it at least 33% her fault.

“It’s a big decision, that’s all,” Nico said, though it wasn’t. He’d already made it.

They’d each been given a twenty-four hour waiting period to decide whether they would accept the offer to compete for initiation to the Alexandrian Society, but rather than being transported directly via charm as they had been for their arrival, they were deposited through their respective portals of public transit. Unfortunately, living in Manhattan a mere matter of blocks from Libby Rhodes meant that she and Nico had the same transit point, and were now moments away from arriving at Grand Central’s magical port of entry (near the oyster bar). 

He glanced at her, conceding to ask in a mostly inoffensive tone, “What are you thinking?”

She slid him a sidelong glance in exchange, then flicked her grey-green eyes to the pulse of his thumb against his thigh. “I’m thinking I really should have gotten that fellowship,” she muttered, and because buoyancy came naturally to him, Nico smiled, letting the shape of it stretch broadly across his lips.

“I knew it,” he said triumphantly. “I knew you wanted it. You’re so full of shit, Rhodes.”

“Jesus.” She rolled her eyes, fussing again with her bangs. “I don’t know why I bother.”

“Just answer the question.”

“No.” She turned to him with a scowl. “I thought we agreed never to speak to each other again after graduation?”

“Well, clearly that’s not happening.” 

He beat his thumb against his thigh a few more times at the precise moment she remarked to nobody, “I love this song,” which was another customary difference between them. He had felt the presence of the rhythm first; she had heard the melody sooner and identified it more quickly.

Again, there was no telling whether they had always been this way, or if they had learned it over the course of their unwilling inseparability. If not for her, Nico might not have noticed most of the things he did, and probably vice versa. A uniquely upsetting curse, really, how little he knew how to exist when she wasn’t there; his only mode of pleasure was in knowing she probably felt the same whenever she could bring herself to stomach the admission.

“Gideon probably says hi,” Nico said, which was an offering of sorts. 

“I know. He said hi when I saw him this morning.” 

A pause, and then, “He and Max both love me, you know, even if you don’t.”

“Yes, I know. And rightfully, I hate it.” 

Their shoes tapped along the floor and they emerged on the sidewalk, where they were free to transport themselves magically if they wanted; conversation over. 

Or, possibly, not. “The other candidates are older than we are,” Libby noted aloud. “They’ve all been working already, you know? They’re so… sophisticated-looking.”

“Looks aren’t everything,” Nico said. “Though that Parisa girl is extremely hot.”

“God, don’t be a pig.” She half-smiled, mostly-smirked. “You have absolutely no chance with her.”

“Whatever, Rhodes.” 

Nico slid a hand through his hair, gesturing down the block. “This way?”

“Yeah.” 

Necessity required that they entertain certain détentes in their unending war for supremacy. They paused for the usual half-second to be sure no taxicabs were flying through the intersection before crossing the street, engaging the brisk walk-run that New York City taught its residents by virtue of experience.

“You’re going to do it, aren’t you?” Libby asked him. All her usual flare-ups of anxiety were on full display; she twirled her hair with one hand, chewing her lip absently.

“Yeah, probably.” Definitely. “Aren’t you?”

“Well—” She hesitated. “I mean yes, of course, I’m not stupid. I can’t pass this up, it’s even better than the NYUMA fellowship. But…” She trailed off. “I suppose it’s a bit intimidating.”

Liar. She already knew she was good; she was filling the social role of modesty she knew he wouldn’t deign to play. “You’ve really got to work on your self-esteem, Rhodes. Self-deprecation went out as a fashionable personality trait at least five years ago.”

“You’re such a dick, Varona.” She was chewing her thumbnail now. Stupid habit, though he detested the hair-twirling far more. “I hate you,” she added. A gratuitous conversational tic established between them, akin to an ‘um’ or a thoughtful pause.

“Yeah, yeah, understood. So you’re going to do it?”

She finally abandoned a spare inch of pretense, rolling her eyes. “Of course. Assuming Ezra’s fine with it.”

“Jesus. You can’t be serious.”

Every now and then, Libby achieved a look that successfully withered his balls, and this was one of those instances. It was the kind of look that reminded him she’d set him on fire the first time she’d met him without even batting an eye. 

He’d like her more if she did it more often.

“I live with him, Varona,” Libby reminded him, as if Nico could possibly forget her absurd selection of Ezra Fowler, their former R.A. and human wet blanket. “I think I should probably tell him if I’m planning to jet off to Alexandria for a year. Or even longer, I guess. Assuming I get initiated, that is,” she said, with an air of unsaid and I will be.

They exchanged a look of agreement that required no translation.

“I mean, you are going to talk about it with Max and Gideon, aren’t you?” Libby prompted him, arching a brow that disappeared once again beneath her bangs. “You guys haven’t been apart for longer than an hour since freshman year.”

“You say that like we’re surgically attached. We have our own lives,” Nico reminded her.

Libby’s brow remained annoyingly lost to the span of her forehead. 

“We do,” Nico snapped, and her lips twisted up, doubtful. “And anyway, they’re not up to anything. Max is independently wealthy and Gideon—” He broke off. “Well, you know Gideon.” 

She softened at that. “Yeah. Well, um.” 

She toyed with her hair. It occurred to Nico, not for the first time, that he should really start playing Libby Rhodes anxiety-habit bingo.

“See you tomorrow,” he said, pausing as they arrived at her block. “Right?”

“Hm? Yeah.” She was thinking about something. “Right, and—”

“Rhodes,” he sighed, and she looked up, frowning. “Look, just don’t… you know. Don’t get all Rhodes about it.”

“That’s not a thing, Varona,” she grumbled.

“It’s absolutely a thing,” he assured her. “Just don’t Rhodes out on this.”

“What the—”

“You know,” he cut in. “Don’t spend all this time like, fretting or whatever. It’s exhausting.”

She set her jaw. “So I’m exhausting now?”

She really was, and how she didn’t already know it remained an eternal mystery. “You’re good, Rhodes,” he reminded her, leaping to cut her off before she got needlessly defensive. “You’re good, okay? Just accept that I wouldn’t bother hating you if you weren’t.”

“Varona, that presumes I care at all what you think.”

“You care what everyone thinks, Rhodes. Especially me.”

“Oh, especially you, really?”

“Yes.” Clearly. “No point denying it.”

She was agitated now, but at least that was an improvement on weak and insecure. “Look, whatever,” she muttered. “Just… see you. Tomorrow, I guess.” She pivoted away, heading up the block.

“Tell Ezra I say ‘sup,’” he called after her. She flipped him off over her shoulder.

All was well, then, or at least the same as it always was.

Nico managed the handful of blocks on foot before waving himself up the stairs of his building, fiddling with the wards and barging in without a key to find Gideon seated on the cramped sofa beside a dozing, outstretched black lab.

“Nicolás,” Gideon said, glancing up at his entry with a smile. “Como estas?”

“Ah, bien, más o menos. Ça va?” 

“Oui, ça va,” Gideon replied, giving the dog a nudge. “Max, wake up.”

After a moment’s pause, the dog slid groggily from the sofa, stretching out with a heavy-lidded look of annoyance. Then, in a blink, he was back to his usual form, scratching idly at his buzz cut to glare over his shoulder at Gideon. 

“I was comfortable, you massive fuck,” announced the man who was sometimes Maximilian Viridian Wolfe (barely domesticated under the best of circumstances) and sometimes not.

“Well, I wasn’t,” Gideon said in his usual measured tone before setting himself on his feet, tossing aside the newspaper he’d been reading. “Should we go out? Get dinner?”

“Nah, I’ll cook,” Nico said. He was really the only one who could, seeing as Max was mostly uninterested in picking up practical skills, preferring instead to sleep on the couch and ponder his existence, while Gideon… had other problems. Right now Gideon was shirtless, stretching his hands overhead past the usual wayward glints from his sandy hair, and if not for the bruising below his eyes, he would have looked almost perfectly normal. 

He wasn’t, of course, but deceptive normalcy was all part of Gideon’s charm.

Eternal sluggishness aside, Nico had certainly seen Gideon in poorer states than this one. Hastily avoiding his mother, for instance, who had a tendency to show up in public toilets or the occasional gutter of rainwater, or skirting his foster family, who were less a family than a bunch of bloodsucking Nova Scotian leeches. Gideon’s condition had been worse than usual in recent weeks, but Nico was pretty sure that was the inevitable result of graduating NYUMA. For four years Gideon had gotten to have a mostly normal life, but now he was back to… 

Well, whatever life became, Nico supposed, when you had nowhere to go and a serious case of something a less-informed person might call chronic narcolepsy.

“Ropa vieja?” Nico suggested, saying nothing of what he was thinking.

“Yes.” Max smashed a fist into the side of Gideon’s arm, heading into the bathroom. He was, as he always was when he shifted, completely nude. Nico rolled his eyes and Max winked, not bothering to cover himself as he strode past.

“Libby texted me,” Gideon remarked to Nico in Max’s absence. “Says you were your usual dickish self.”

“Is that all she said?” Nico prompted, hoping it was.

Ah, but of course not. “Said you guys got some sort of mysterious job offer.”

“Mysterious?” Damn it.

“In that she wouldn’t tell me what it was, yes.”

They had been warned not to, but still.

“I can’t believe she told you already,” Nico grumbled, disgusted anew. “Seriously, how?”

“Messaged me just before you got here. I like that she keeps me informed.” Gideon reached up, scratching the back of his neck. “How long would it have taken you to tell us if she hadn’t?”

That sneaky little monstress. This was Nico’s punishment, then. Forced communication with people who mattered to him, which she knew he loathed, all for implying that her boyfriend was precisely what he was.

“Ropa vieja takes a while,” Nico demurred, retreating hastily to the kitchen. “Has to braise.”

“Not a good answer, Nico,” Gideon called after him, and regrettably Nico stopped, sighing.

“I,” he began, and pivoted back to Gideon. “I… can’t tell you what it is. Not yet.”

With a pleading glance Nico enacted the faultless trust built on their four years of shared history, and after a moment, Gideon shrugged.

“Okay,” he conceded. “But you still have to tell us things, you know. You’ve been on eggshells with me lately, it’s weird.” He paused. “You know, maybe you shouldn’t come this time.”

 “Why not?” Nico demanded. 

“Because you’re babying him,” came Max’s drawl as he emerged from his room, clipping Nico’s shoulder with his. He had deigned to put on an incongruous mix of sweatpants and a cashmere sweater, which was at least an improvement on the apartment’s state of sanitation. “You’re fussing, Nicky. Nobody likes a fusser.”

“I’m not,” Nico began, but at Gideon’s look of skepticism, he sighed. “Fine, I am. But in my defense, I make it look very appealing.”

“When did you even have time to grow maternal instincts?” Max asked him, sniffing the air as Nico began sifting through food in the kitchen.

“Probably during some class you didn’t attend,” Gideon told Max before turning back to Nico. “Hey,” he cautioned in a low voice, nudging him. “I’m serious. If you’re going somewhere, I’d like to know about it.”

“You won’t even notice I’m gone,” Nico said with a sidelong glance. 

“Why, because you expect me to come visit?”

Nico reached over, backhanding Gideon to remove him from the path to the fridge. “Yes,” he said, pretending not to see that his answer had left Gideon with some relief. “In fact you could come, actually. Could put you in a nice drawer somewhere, you know? Stand you upright in my closet.”

“No, thanks.” Gideon sank to the ground to lean against the cabinets, yawning. “Do you have more of that—”

“Yes.” Nico dug through one of the kitchen drawers, tossing Gideon a vial that was caught with one hand. “But you’re not using it,” Nico warned with a spatula, “unless I’m allowed to come tonight.”

“I can’t decide if that’s a reflection on your concern for me or just your massive fear that something exciting will happen without you present,” Gideon muttered, draining the contents of the vial. “But yeah, sure, fine.”

“Hey, you need me. That stuff doesn’t come easily,” Nico reminded him, though in truth he would never tell Gideon just how easily it didn’t come. He’d had to do a lot of things he didn’t want to say aloud just to make sure the third year alchemical had left her mind blank enough for him to steal the formula. That he’d even managed that skill—which had taken nearly the entire four years at NYUMA to learn and had depleted him so thoroughly that for four days Libby Rhodes thought he was either dying or trying to trick her into hoping he was dying—was already more than he’d do for anyone else.

The trouble with having Gideon for a friend was the constant possibility of losing him. People like Gideon, who was not technically a person, were not, by most laws of nature, supposed to exist. Gideon’s parents, an irresponsible finfolk and an even more irresponsible equidae (a mermaid and satyr respectively, by colloquial terms), had always possessed the 25% chance their offspring would look perfectly human, which Gideon did. They, of course, had not cared that their human-looking child would not be technically anything at all that could be registered, and that while he would have medeian abilities, he would not be afforded the class of species to which all medeians were required by law to belong. Gideon wasn’t entitled to any social services, couldn’t be legally employed, and unfortunately couldn’t spin straw into gold without considerable effort. That Gideon had been educated at all was mostly an accident, along with an instance of wide scale institutional fraud. 

It all basically came down to one thing: the opportunity to study a subspecies like Gideon was not something NYUMA had been prepared to pass up, but now that he was no longer enrolled as a student, he was back to being nothing.

Just a man who could walk through dreams, and Nico’s best friend.

“I’m sorry,” Nico said, and Gideon glanced up. “I was going to tell you, I just…”

Felt guilty.

“I keep telling you,” Gideon said. “You don’t need to.”

If Libby Rhodes mocked that Nico and Gideon were attached at the hip, it was only so that Nico could personally assure Gideon’s survival. Libby would not understand that, of course; she was one of the spare few who knew that Gideon was not what he seemed, but she didn’t know what it meant. She didn’t know how often Gideon ended up in harm’s way, unable to secure himself corporeally in a single realm, or how often he got swallowed up inside his own head, lost to the intangible spaces of thought and subconsciousness, and couldn’t find his way back. She didn’t know that Gideon had enemies, or that those who knew what he was and intended to use him for it were most dangerous, above all.

Libby didn’t know, either, that while Nico didn’t underestimate her, she relentlessly underestimated him. He had perfected skills in multiple specialties outside his own, all of which had cost him greatly. He could change his shape to follow the other two into the environment of dreams (animals had fewer restrictions on their boundaries than humans), but only after learning to manipulate each element of his own molecular structure; something he only did once a month, because it meant a full day’s recovery afterwards. He could brew something to bind Gideon’s physical form more permanently to the reality he currently stood in, but only after backbreaking effort that left Nico throbbing and sore for a week.

There had been no way Nico was turning down the Society’s offer. Power? He needed it. An obscure cure? He needed that, too. Money, prestige, connections? He needed all of it, and Gideon would be better for his access. Two years away was hardly too much to ask. 

“I never expected you to put your life on hold for me, Nico,” Gideon said. 

No, he didn’t, and that was the only reason Nico had done it to begin with; or thought he had no choice but to do it, anyway, until today.

“Look, the moment you became my friend, you became my problem,” Nico told him, and then, realizing what he’d said, he amended, “Or, you know, mine. Or whatever.”

Gideon rose to his feet with a sigh. “Nico—”

“Can you guys stop whispering?” Max yelled from the sofa. “It’s hard to hear you from here.”

Nico and Gideon exchanged a glance.

“You heard him,” Nico said, figuring it wasn’t worth continuing the argument.

Gideon, who had obviously decided the same, plucked some carrots from the produce drawer for a side dish, nudging Nico aside with a motion of his hip.

“Shall I grate?”

“You’re grating already,” Nico grumbled, but he caught the evidence of a smile on Gideon’s face, deciding the rest of the conversation could stand to wait.