He remembered his lush, green lawn where she had found out how they felt when they were twelve. He had had a huge crush on her that summer and had been sitting on the sidewalk, burning their initials into a piece of wood. She started toward him on roller blades and he dropped the wood and ran into the house. She had picked it up, looked at it, and thrown it into the trees on her way down the street, never actually bringing it up to him.
She kept it, he thought to himself. Smiling, he bent over and reached under the bed, producing a photo-album he’d given her for her birthday last year. They’d picked out the pictures to go in it together. He placed the wood safely in the album, then walked back toward the window and climbed out onto the ledge before dropping away into the shadows.
Cathy squirmed on the couch as she waited, huffing as a rigid piece of lumber dug into her side from somewhere inside the arm of it. She grabbed the pillow from the other side and from the love seat and added it to her own, making it poof out in comedic fashion before she threw herself back onto it.
She stared at the ceiling for a moment, watching the spot where the reflection from the lamp burned the brightest. Slowly, she reached out and danced her fingers along the light trail, making odd but elegant shadows.
“Shadow puppets?” came a thick, raspy voice from the hall as Xander came around the corner, rubbing a towel into his hair violently.
Cathy jumped back up to sit, clutching her pillow close to her chest. “Jesus Christ. Don’t do that,” she said, letting out a long breath.
“Sorry,” he smirked, rolling his eyes at her. He rubbed the towel one last time until he was convinced that he was clean, then laid it across the opposite arm of the couch before flopping onto it.
She bounced up a little from his weight, making her pillows shift back into an uncomfortable position. She turned, glaring at him, then drew back and slapped him on the arm.
“Ow,” he frowned, touching the spot with his hand. “What was that for?”
“What the fuck is wrong with you? Sic’ing the Womb on those two idiots like that?”
“They had it coming. And I do not just mean lately.”
“You can’t do this. They could have seen you, or--”
“What would they have seen? Darkness? Shadows? At most, a pair of eyes in the dark? Come on, Cat,” he snorted.
She reached over and took his face between her thumb and forefinger, forcing him to look at her. “You can’t do this. You can’t use the Womb like this. We’ve seen what happens when you try. Jesus, Xander, you’re acting like you’re high.”
He wrenched his face away from her, sneering slightly as he leaned back against the stiff wooden arm of the couch. He twitched slightly, then lifted one foot and laid it on the coffee table. He turned and stared at the fabric of the couch, watching her only out of the corner of his eye.
After a moment she frowned and got up, walking toward the stairs. “I think it’s Mike’s turn,” she said bitterly, slapping his arm again as she walked by. “And it was shadow dancing, by the way.”
He didn’t turn and watch her go, and winced when he heard the door upstairs slam shut.
“Why the hell does she stick up for those two?” Xander huffed, stuffing a handful of potato chips into his mouth. At first there were too many for him to even get his lips closed, crunching down on them slowly and swallowing what he could. He turned the page of the folder he was looking at, taking a long sip of his cola as he did. He gasped, spitting it back into the glass along with several waterlogged sour-cream and onion chips. “What in Christ’s name is this?”
Mike looked up from his own folder. “Cherry Cola,” he said, then turned back toward the document. He frowned and tossed it aside, grabbing for another in a green folder. “When are people going to learn that cherries don’t go in soft drinks?”
Xander frowned, putting the glass down on the table and then slowly nudging it away from him with one finger, as if afraid to touch it again.
“And I don’t know why she sticks up for those jerks,” Mike admitted, scanning down through the cover-sheet of his folder and then closing it again, deciding there was nothing of relevance there. He threw it onto an ever-growing stack of papers that they had deemed the ‘nothing useful’ pile. “But to be fair, I don’t know why you torture yourself day and night, I don’t know why you eat and drink when you probably don’t have to, and I really don’t know why you’ve got me going through the most boring literature in the world to help Adam Genblade, of all people.”
Xander held up a finger, waiting until he was done swallowing. “I do it to keep myself sane. To keep some humanity in all this mess.”
“Maybe it’s the same for her,” he shrugged, grabbing three or four chips himself and dropping one into his mouth.
Xander did not respond right away, his brow coming down thoughtfully.
“Personally, I think you’re both nuts. But that’s just me,” he sighed, running his fingers through his hair. “Where the hell did you get these, anyway?”
“Hmm?” Xander hummed, not even looking up from his document. “Mm. That lawyer’s office today. Wanted to see what we were up against.”
Mike watched Xander read his file, his pupils moving faster and faster
