departed the wicker squall

(Written in memory of Michael Flores, who not only let Jay guest star in a few stories but dared to get Jay drunk. Our serial story will never see completion now, and I'm going to miss his words a lot)

“I sent a message last night that I won’t get a reply to and it was a really good one you know!”

I turn. Jay is walking beside me, and no one notices his arrival because it doesn’t occur to him that they would. I’m used to that, but there is something different in his tone.

“You won’t?” I ask.

Jay shoves his phone up into my face. I read a post. Another. Oh.

“The Cult of Aeon incident, with Mikey. I remember that,” I say, because I’m never going to forget the person who got Jay drunk. Jay hasn’t been able to hide his nature quite as well recently: that was part of it, I think. Sometimes even adventures are more than they seem.

“The cult is hiding. I went looking,” Jay says as he puts his phone away. I suspect it is best for this cult that Jay couldn’t find them. “And! you didn’t like him, Charlie!”

“Jay. He got you drunk. No one should have done that. No one should have been able to get away with it.”

“And and and I said we’d meet him again cuz ‘Michael is a vessel’ and now we won’t because he’s gone and –” there is a hitch to his breath – “and I want to know why you did it!”

The last words are screamed with all the fury of a boy of eleven who isn’t eleven at all. I’ve seen Jay obliterate monsters with such a scream, destroy every binding that holds a hotel room together. Other things I try not to think about, and never to dream of. This time they’re only words, their fury only – only! – hurt.

“Jay.” I hug him, tightly. He could escape. He doesn’t, trembling against me. “That was nothing I did.”

“But he’th gone, Charlie,” Jay lisps.

A small part of me almost wants to laugh. In Jay’s mind, I am the scariest person he knows. Even in grief, his logic is jaysome.

He hasn’t lisped in years. “People go to places where they can’t come back from. Adventures even a Jay can’t have with them,” I say.

“I wanted to. Honcho says it would be a bad idea.” He sniffs.

I imagine ‘bad idea’ were hardly the words the wandering magician used. “And it would be a very bad binding to – bring someone back from those adventures,” I say. Normally I’d like to think Jay wouldn’t think of that, but he’s had adventures in Mikey’s stories before. And grief isn’t something he is good with.

As if anyone of us are. As though grief could be something one gets good at.

I let go gently. Jay sniffs again. “It’s not right or fair and and I’m not allowed to fix it?!”

“There are fixes that always cause more dangers,” I say. “The universe is –.”

“I know all about that. And we’re going to have words about that someday,” he says firmly.

I have no idea what ‘we’ is he talking about. I decide it’s safer not to know.

“I bet he is busy saurusing and being a T-Rex in a tiara just like White Jesus was!”

I stare at Jay longer than usual. I’d like to pretend this is Jay just being his literal self, but Mikey did successfully get Jay drunk and somehow avoided dealing with me after, properly. “I bet he is. And sometimes people need their own jaysome adventures, but the memory of you is part of them too.”

“Oh. Okay.” Jay is quiet a few moments. “It still doesn’t – it isn’t –.”

“I know,” I say as gently as I dare. “There is time to be sad, and time to be other than sad. And all of which is jaysome, even the sadness.”

“Oh!” Jay gapes at that. “I didn’t – oooh,” he says.

I brace myself, but nothing terrible happens. Yet.

“Thankth, Charlie,” he says with a huge grin, then vanishes.

I text the wandering magician, to make sure Jay went and joined him. Then I check Mikey’s blog, and walk into a bar. Jay isn’t allowed to drink, so I have one for him. In memory, for memory. Because adventures never end the way anyone intends, but that changes nothing at all that matters.