epilogue: float on
“I can’t define myself through irony and self deprecation.
I can’t deny myself being alive through my alienation.”
- Say Anything, “Mara and Me”
Austin looks out at the parking lot of the diner, and turns away within seconds, blinking away the light of the sun. The window is, luckily, on his bad side, the glare glancing off his eyepatch as he looks down at his menu. He turns one plastic covered page, then another, pretending to read them as though he doesn’t already know what he wants.
“Can I get you a drink?” a waitress asks, stopping in front of the booth. Austin looks up at her, expecting, for a split second, to see one of the waitresses he recognizes from the Antlers diner. But this is a different state, a different town, a different waitress. A face he’s never seen before.
“Yeah,” he says quickly. “Two cups of coffee.”
Across the table, Jacob makes a noise in the back of his throat. Austin stares at him.
“You don’t want coffee?”
“It’s one in the afternoon,” Jacob says pointedly.
“Okay,” Austin concedes, and looks back at the waitress. “Two chocolate milkshakes.”
The waitress gives him a strange look, but mumbles something about having the milkshakes out right away, and drifts away from the table. Austin stares back down at his menu, the words blurring together the longer he looks at them.
Just say something, he tells himself, idly picking at the peeling, laminated edge of a page. It shouldn’t be that hard to have a conversation with your own fucking brother that isn’t about work. You’ve barely talked since he got back from the hospital, and now’s your last chance.
“You should thank him for driving you to the airport,” Richard says, suddenly, making Austin jump. He’s in the booth next to Jacob, leaning slightly forward to look at the mini-jukebox attached under the window. “He’s probably really behind on his paperwork, and he still took the time off to do it.”
Austin rolls his eyes. “Okay, Dad.”
“Dad’s here?” Jacob asks, his eyes suddenly darting around the booth.
“Yeah,” Austin says, snapping his menu shut. “He wants me to thank you for driving me out to catch my flight.”
Jacob laughs nervously, his hands worrying at his napkin as though he’s unsure of what else to do with them. “It’s fine. I’d rather be here than going back and catching up on my paperwork.”
“Don’t you have, like, people to do that for you?” Austin asks, raising his eyebrows.
“More or less,” Jacob says, “but I still have to file reports on, uh…” He trails off for a moment, then continues, in a hushed voice. “Everything that happened at the house.”
“Right,” Austin says, stretching out the word, letting it roll around in his mouth. He can’t even begin to conceive of how Jacob is going to manage that cover-up, and he doesn’t envy him the job. He lowers his voice to match Jacob’s, as another waitress passes the table. “What’s the official story on that going to be?”
“That he attacked you, and vanished,” Jacob says. “He’ll still be on the Department’s radar, but I’ll push to give up the investigation once it seems like he’s gone completely off the grid.” He reaches for his water glass, and gulps down a good third of it, considering Austin carefully as he swallows. “How are you, uh, feeling, by the way?”
“Kind of like my eye got scooped out,” Austin says dryly. Richard laughs, maybe in spite of himself.
The waitress, choosing this exact moment to return with the milkshakes, gives him an odd look, and he shoots her one in return. She straightens up quickly, taking a pen and pad out of her breast pocket.
“Can I get you boys anything else?”
“Two eggs, scrambled, with bacon, please,” Jacob says, sliding his menu politely across the table so that the waitress doesn’t have to reach across to grab it.
“Gravy fries,” Austin says, stacking his menu on top of Jacob’s. “Please.”
“You should eat better,” Jacob says, as the waitress walks away again.
Austin grunts in acknowledgement, taking a very long sip of milkshake before he responds in full. “Landis and Otter say that too, but none of us know how to cook. So it is what it is.”
“Do they know?” Jacob asks. “About your eye?”
“No,” Austin says, stirring his straw around in his milkshake glass, “I figured I’d let it be a big surprise for them.” He pauses just long enough for Jacob to open his mouth indignantly, and cracks a grin. “Yeah, I told them. Otter was hysterical. Read me the riot act over the phone. Landis just said he’s glad I didn’t die, going up against - well.”
Up against Crocell, he finishes in his head. He had to break the news about that to Landis and Otter, too, of course. Their reactions were significantly more subdued than their reactions to him losing his eye, but Austin could tell that the three of them were all of the same mind about it. Crocell’s back, and we’re the only ones who were able to stop them before. So, like it or not, it’s probably our responsibility to try and stop them again.
Unless the demons can do something about it. Landis had said he would pass the message along to Naberius, but judging from the fact that most of the demons think Crocell is dead for good, Austin is willing to bet that a demon being shattered into fragments is nigh unprecedented. Which means that, for the moment, everyone is exactly in the dark as everyone else.
“Right,” Jacob says, just as slowly as Austin did before. He takes a few sips of his milkshake before he goes on, stalling. “I wanted to talk to you about that, actually.”
“About the fight?” Austin settles back in his seat, the booth cushions creaking in protest. “I already told you everything I remember.”
Though you did conveniently forget getting patched up by Dallas, the little, traitorous voice in his head reminds him. And you did lie and say Abbott’s body disintegrated into dust after you chopped his head off. Do you think Jacob knows you lied? Maybe he went to take a bath and found clumps of hair and bone dust stuck in the drain.
“About whatever was possessing Abbott,” Jacob says, and Austin feels half of the tension instantly seep from his body.
“Yeah,” he says. “Crocell. What about them?”
“Well, you and Landis are the only active agents who know how to…deal with that problem.” Jacob’s eyes are darting around the booth again, this time anxious, unfocused instead of searching for one specific thing.
“And you were hoping we would,” Austin finishes for him. “Deal with it, I mean.”
“Well,” Jacob says, dropping his gaze to the table almost shamefully. “Yeah. I mean, it wouldn’t be full time work, since we don’t know how to, uh, track those fragments or predict when or where they’ll turn up. But I was thinking, maybe - maybe whenever we do find one, I could give you a call.”
“So Landis and I can fly cross country and do some other agents’ job for them,” Austin says, lightly teasing.
Jacob frowns. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.” Austin takes a noisy sip of his milkshake, thinking. Jacob’s right - it probably would be better to send him and Landis in to deal with any fragments of Crocell that pop up, provided anyone’s even able to identify them as such. They have a history with Crocell. Hell, Crocell will probably be looking for them anyway, if they’re as petty as Austin thinks they are.
And if Austin could stop Crocell-Abbott on his own - while, granted, sustaining some damage in return - he and Landis could probably take down someone possessed by a fragment twice as fast. Maybe Otter could even come along sometimes, though he’s not a DPR agent and Austin doubts he would want to be. Walker, too. And Naberius. They could make it into something fun, instead of a burden.
“You’re allowed to say no,” Jacob says, watching him. “I know you don’t like being an active agent, but like I said, it wouldn’t be full time work.”
“It’s a good deal,” Richard adds offhandedly. “Depending how you and Landis both get paid for it, you all could probably afford to get a bigger apartment.”
“So we’d constantly be on call,” Austin says. “Are we getting paid to do that, or just getting paid to chase down the fragments and deal with them?”
Jacob’s lips twitch into a smile around his milkshake straw. “I think we could work out some kind of salary for while you’re on call.”
“How are you going to know when one of these fragments turns up?” Austin asks.
“I’m, uh, I’m hoping to get people working on that, based on the descriptions you gave.” Jacob rubs the back of his neck, looking a little sheepish. “I was thinking maybe you and Landis could help with that, too. We could use all the information we could get on this…on Crocell.”
“This better not be some convoluted plan to get me to call you more,” Austin says, as the waitress comes back with their food.
Jacob snorts, spearing a piece of bacon on his fork. “Has that ever worked?”
It’s hard to tell if he’s joking. Austin frowns, pulling a gravy-smothered french fry off his plate and popping it into his mouth, chewing contemplatively. He eats a second fry, then a third, still thinking.
“I ran away from home because I didn’t want to work for you,” he says, finally.
“I know,” Jacob says, “but -”
Austin holds up a hand to stop him, using his other hand to shove more gravy fries in his mouth. “I wanted to do whatever I wanted to do, without getting held down by the whole…family legacy thing. But I ended up basically doing DPR work in Antlers, anyway. If you want me to be an official agent stationed there, I don’t think it’d be the worst thing ever.” He swallows, takes a gulp of his water before continuing. “With Walker and Landis, I’ve basically got a squad. Obviously I’ll have to talk to them before we decide on anything for real, but…I’m in, at least.”
Jacob’s entire face lights up, and he straightens in his seat. “You’ll do it?”
“Yeah,” Austin mutters, looking away, desperately trying to keep the smile off his face. He can see Richard beaming at him out of the corner of his eye. “As long as I don’t have to go on any more investigations with Cillian.”
Jacob laughs. “Somehow, I think we can manage that.”
The two lapse into silence for a time, both eating their respective lunches. Austin steals glances across the table between bites from time to time, watching Jacob eat his eggs and Richard look out the window. Coming home isn’t so bad. Maybe I could stand to do it once every couple of years.
“Your flight’s at three, right?” Jacob asks.
“Three thirty,” Austin says, draining the last of his milkshake.
“Thank you, for, uh,” Jacob falters, scraping his fork around on his plate to scoop up scraps of egg. “For considering my offer.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Austin says, and shrugs. “You know, if you ever want to get out of here for a while, you could come visit.”
Jacob looks taken aback, and doesn’t bother trying to cover it up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Austin says. “It might be nice.”
“It might,” Jacob agrees, and finishes his milkshake, too.
Elsewhere, in a small apartment in Antlers, two men and four ghosts crowd around a laptop, checking flight times.
Elsewhere, in the tunnels beneath Havenwood, a doctor studies the notes of his predecessor.
Elsewhere, in a boarding house in Hell, a demon stripped of his title sleeps restlessly, dreaming of the one he betrayed.
Elsewhere, in a strip mall in New Jersey, two hired assassins make a wager.
And still elsewhere, the ocean beats against the tide cliffs, pushing something strange and sinister closer to shore.