homecoming × so that i can strip search your eyes to check for any hidden feeling
After he gets off the phone with John - who hasn't heard from her in a week or so and was beginning to get worried - Anders leans back in the desk chair and runs his hands through his hair, staring at the ceiling with an expression of truly, genuinely irritated frustration. He's not surprised and that's got to be the most annoying part of this mess, that he's so fucking used to her bullshit he catches himself reaching for the laptop and bringing up flightplans before he's even decided what to do.
"Oh, for the love of Christ," he says, disgusted, and shoves away from the desk. He's so unspeakably sick of this - from her, from himself, this fucked up holding pattern that they pretend doesn't exist all the other weeks of the year. They do this over and over and over again and there is a good excuse every time, there's something she needs or there's something he can do or she vanishes and suddenly he's Dashiell Hammett's next protagonist, like that makes sense at all. It's his fault as much as hers and he decides, firmly, that he's done. Shit happens and he drops whatever he's working on to hop on a plane and go halfway around the fucking world for this woman like he thinks that she's suddenly going to turn around and decide he's done enough and stop looking at him like-
No, he's done.
...and his flight is Tuesday morning.
When he hits Dunedin there's no hotel booked and this is standard operating procedure; he's done this often enough to know that it's wasting money on a pretense because he never sleeps in any bed other than hers when he's in town. If it were just a case of 'she tripped and fell on my dick' then it'd be easier to explain, easier to box up and define, but instead it's like getting all the perks and pitfalls of a relationship without actually having one. Except for now, since she's not here and it's just Anders on his own in her space, drinking her beer and hating her absence while he tries to figure out where the hell she is now. Her flatmates are used to this - Thalia suggests he could go through her nail polish collection and she'd probably turn up to bean him for touching it and Timothy just seems like he's used to everything - but he has a much more painfully clear idea of the kind of trouble that she walks into with eyes wide open and he can't be so sanguine.
Saying Enfys will be fine because Enfys has always been fine before is bullshit; Enfys has been lucky, time and again, and he's just killing time until she's not fucking lucky any more. The thought occurs to him that he still hasn't figured out where the hell she is or what it was that she wanted from him in the first place and if he can't even get that far then how would he know if she was-
-he shouldn't touch her journals, because he knows she could snap his spine for it without breaking a sweat, so he just looks at the most recent and he only skims. (Enfys never kept a diary; her journals have more in common with the Watcher's records that he never became a part of.) On the most recent page - dated to about a week ago - there's a sketch of a hamster and a note 'call Anderson', and not for the first time he wishes for some kind of Enfys-to-reality cheat sheet.
Unfortunately there's no such thing, so he has a beer and takes a break from deciphering a madwoman, long enough to drive the rental car out to St Kilda and scream down the beach like it'll make him feel better about something he knows, he just knows will be locked up and forgotten as soon as it's over. He'll put it in the same box he puts everything they do to each other in, the one in his head marked 'do not touch' that he keeps touching anyway, because he's human. Not that being a fuck up is restricted to one boring little species; he drives back to the house with his fist against his mouth and mostly he just feels like an idiot.
If they were living different lives, then it would be the sound of a window being levered open on the other side of the room that wakes Anders up, late into the night when a familiar mass of hair is silhouetted on the other side of it by the street lamp - but they're not, so by the time Enfys is boosting herself through the window with her foot precariously balanced on whatever it is she must have dragged over there (that was the sound that roused him, he's been waiting) he's already sitting up, his arms loose over his knees, considering the darkness.
"You're not serious."
Enfys startles, hits her head, and tumbles the rest of the way through the window; Anders observes this dispassionately. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" she demands, rubbing the back of her head and glaring myopically into the vague direction of the Englishman-shaped shadow on the other side of her bedroom.
"What the fuck is wrong with me? Is that how we're going to do this tonight? You tell me I have to be on a plane, you disappear, and after you've been missing for at least a goddamn week you're pulling some James Bond stunt in your own bedroom window and I am the one with a problem?" It's late and this is an old, old house with two other people living in it, so his voice comes out in a low, angry hiss instead of the screaming row he'd really like to have with her about now.
(The sense of relief is almost as annoying as the fact she seems to think she gets to be offended right now.)
She dusts herself off and - to his intense irritation - leans back out the window to snag her backpack instead of answering him immediately. "Yes," she says, straightening and shoving the window closed (it always takes a couple of tries, he knows from experience). "Something came up! Which is why I didn't have my key, although if I knew you were up I'd have knocked-"
"Enfys." His voice has a certain edged quality to it that appears to give her a momentary pause, because she stops and sighs.
It's not exactly what he was looking for, but it'll do. "Ask me what came up."
"...I'm going to regret this," he predicts for the benefit of a hypothetical unseen audience, "but sure. What came up?"
"Cthulhu." The triumph in her voice is really, incredibly obnoxious.
"You did just say what I think you just said, didn't you."
"He came up. From the deep." He can tell from her tone that she thinks she's extraordinarily funny, and summarily ignores her in order to attempt processing the fact that despite how amused she is by herself, she doesn't appear to be...kidding. How like her - as soon as he thinks nothing she does can shock him any more, she turns up with battlescars from Lovecraftian horrors like it's no big deal at all. "Were you worried? You're doing that thing, I can tell."
"No, Enfys, don't be ridiculous. Why would I worry? Nothing could possibly go wrong with you urgently demanding my presence because something's going on and then vanishing. Cthulhu wasn't my worst case scenario, but I'll remember that for next time." There's a beat, and then - knowing full well that he'll probably regret this, too, "What 'thing'?"
"The thing!" And what he regrets most is giving her something to use in order to bypass all the rest of that, he thinks, watching her dump her bag and sit down to start unlacing her boots. "Where you get all sarcastic and tense and you're really secretly wishing that I would just be spontaneously struck by lightning."
"You don't give me nearly enough credit for creativity. Do you mind if we skip the banter and get right to the part where you explain what the hell has been going on?" The thread of frustration is not as thin or as controlled as he wants it to be - she's ignoring it, which is just fantastic and not helping him keep his temper even slightly; his voice raises without his permission and she ignores that, too.
"I was enjoying the banter part," she protests, fluffing her hair out with her hands and dropping them behind her to - he thinks - work her bra undone beneath the slip she's wearing. (Yeah, there it goes.) "I promise I'm going to explain everything, but I'm tired and I want to sleep in my own bed so it's going to have to wait, all right? You're going to thank me when I'm done."
"Unless your explanation includes a blow job, Enfys, I really doubt that."
"Speaking of things that turn you on, sweetheart, my explanation will definitely include you getting first shot at publishing on this mess."
Anders pauses, and the thought does occur that he'll probably never get a better opportunity to get straight answers out of her than couching it in work. (If it's work, he doesn't have to think about why he needs those answers and she doesn't have to think about why she's giving them; everybody wins.) "I'm willing to listen."
"Good! Because I have about a thousand things to tell you - I mean, I didn't call you about this whole mess in the twenties with Tom, that just happened, I wanted to talk to you about this kidnapping business because I'm thinking maybe it's a pocket dimension and- what?" Enfys, standing at the end of the mattress with her hands on her hips, comes down to her knees and mercilessly pulls his hands away from where he'd been resting his head in them with a particularly resigned expression.
"I wish," he says, "I wish you'd just do drugs or something, Enfys, for Christ's sake."
Her expression softens, for a split second, and then she shoves him backwards (he lies there, staring at the glow in the dark stars she put on her ceiling and the indistinct shadows on them where she wrote names he already knows). After a few beats, he asks, "Who's Tom?"
"Ask him yourself tomorrow," she replies flippantly, crawling underneath the covers and sighing when his hand on her skin runs over a bruise that hit deep enough to still be there now, fading; her back rests against his chest and she laughs, quiet and still and he remembers thinking once upon a time that the little psycho would just walk into traffic one day. "You were worried," she says, sounding obscurely satisfied; he chooses to interpret it as more of the same and pinches her accordingly. "Go on, inventory my parts. They're all there."
Anders kisses the curve of her shoulder like the apology she consistently refuses to accept, and he hates her a little bit.