He held Justin for a while, the two of them entwined on the floor. Lamplight kept the living room bathed in gold; kept burning against the knowledge of darkness. Time burned away too, and he kept holding on. Justin cried a little, seemed to get better, started shaking again; Kris held him through that too, more than once. Talked to him, even when he couldn’t answer. Started singing: fifty-year-old pop songs, lullabies, his own chart-topping hits. Justin almost laughed and curled a hand into Kris’s shirt. Safe in the light.
Eventually something shifted, lifted, altered: intangible as the evaporation of tears, as the recognition that nobody’d followed after to cause more harm. Justin swallowed, sat up but stayed under Kris’s arm, breathed, “Thank you.”
“No need.” He touched that cheek, the
