He needed to text to cancel his sessions tomorrow. Lee nodded. Good. That did still need to be done, she thought as she turned her attention back to her plate so she could finish her eggs.

“But…you know…maybe I don’t need to cancel.”

Lee’s head jerked up probably in a similar manner to how TJ’s had just moments before. “I would cancel tomorrow,” she said gently. “Play Tuesday by ear, but canceling tomorrow would be a good idea.”

Suddenly, it appeared that he was finished eating, though he had been eating quite quickly just before her question. Lee frowned. Lee had a very good idea what the reason for that had to be.

And then he was saying that she could leave whenever. Yeah, that was not happening today. Lee knew that he hadn’t even started into the bad part of the post-merge period. Considering he had asked her for the knife so he could ‘take care’ of his mess, TWICE, there was not a chance in hell that she was going to leave him alone for that. Not that she would have anyway…

“Honestly, no,” she replied before putting the last bite of egg into her mouth, only continuing once she had swallowed. “Normally I would have Kevin, but my sister took him up to see h-our parents for a few days, so I really have nothing to do today.”

Leaning back in her chair, Lee thought for a minute. Like with the fire escape comment, he seemed to be doing everything he could to get rid of her short of actually telling her to leave. But his last merge had been decades ago, and in so many ways she knew that this spirit made everything after the fact so much more difficult. She honestly didn’t think that he had a clue what would be hitting him soon. Possibly at any moment…

Then she had a thought of something that shouldn’t be much of an issue, but that would be impossible for her to do herself. “What about going to the Empire State Building?” she asked, her head tilting slightly as she looked across the table.

Lee thought it was a good idea to cancel things tomorrow and play Tuesday by ear. Tarin shrugged his shoulders, setting his fork down and standing up to take the leftovers of his food back to the kitchen. The damn spirits were still there. Wanting attention. Tarin scraped the remaining food into the trash can and dropped the plate into the sink. He’d wash it later. Along with the pan he’d used to cook the eggs.

Returning to the table, Tarin sunk down into the chair and sighed. For the first time since the other night he tentatively reached out for his powers and to send the spirits away. The expected bombardment of their feelings, death images, and emotions was too much though and he instantly snapped his mental walls back into place. He’d just have to deal with their traitorous presence.

Lee pointed out that she had nothing going on today and Tarin clenched his teeth just a little bit. Staring off across the room for a few moments. Lee was absolutely relentless.

Then she was suggesting that they visit the Empire State Building.

Tarin blinked. He’d been there in his world a few times. It was one of those things that tourists did for the pictures and locals did every once and while to remind themselves what it meant to live in New York.

The whole time he’d been here though…he’d never gone. This was so silly though. So weird.

So pointless.

“You can’t babysit me forever.” he said, frowning at her in earnest now, “What if I just told you to leave? I get that you’ve got some weird sense of responsibility because you’ve seen this before and you know you can stop it…but you did your part Lee. You don’t owe me anything. Like we’ve established. I’m not him ”

“And you obviously don’t know how determined and stubborn I can be when I set my mind on something.” It was factual, she wasn’t going to just leave. But she didn’t say it with any harshness in her voice at all.

But as he continued to speak, Lee frowned. Then frowned deeper. “I know you’re not him,” Lee whispered, her eyes dropping to the table for only a moment before looking back into his green eyes. No matter how similar this Tarin might be to the man she had fallen in love with, she knew they weren’t the same. The eyes were different. Even when it had been Tarin’s brown eyes looking at her, she had been able to tell whether it was actually him or not based on how those eyes looked at her.

And these were nowhere close to being the same eyes.

“Yes, I did come because I knew I could stop it,” she continued, her voice only a little louder than it had been as she looked straight into his eyes. “But I’m not just staying because of ‘some weird sense of responsibility’. I’m here because I’m pretty damn sure what’s still coming, and no one, no matter who they are, should go through something like that alone.” It probably was not a great time to let him know that there was more coming, but with how hard he was trying to get her to leave, how else could she explain her insistence on sticking around?

“If you’d rather go or do something else instead of the Empire State Building, we can do that instead. But I haven’t seen her in over a decade, and she’s normally the only one up there…”

Well. Lee was right about one thing, she was stubborn. She was also convinced that he was headed for some kind of catastrophic reckoning that he wasn’t anticipating.

Maybe it wasn’t going to come though. Maybe he had it together just a little bit better than the Tarin here had. Maybe despite the fact that the Tarin here had done so many amazing things in his life and had all the answers…just maybe this Tarin would be fine. After killing four innocent women. With his bare h…no. This was exactly the line of thinking he needed to stay away from.

“If you know I’m not him, then you should know that maybe what you’re waiting for isn’t going to happen.” Tarin said, hands balling into fists on his knees as he spoke.

Lee also explained that no matter who they were a person didn’t deserve to go through whatever this was going to be alone.

Yeah. That didn’t make Tarin feel any better.

She was still pushing the Empire State Building. Tarin wanted to be mad, but suddenly he just didn’t have the energy.

“I cannot possibly imagine why you’d want to bring me to a reunion with a friend.”

Yeah, she had been right. Telling him about what she was expecting to come did not go over well. And he looked like he was getting upset. With her.

“Honestly, I really truly hope that it won’t happen,” She told him. “I would be so happy if it didn’t.

“And why I’d want to bring you for this ‘reunion’?” Lee asked, her head tilting as she looked across the table at him. Was this spirit not at the top of the Empire State Building in the world that he had come from? “I’m not exactly able to see her without you there.”

But he just seemed to be getting more angry with everything that she was saying, and had made it more than clear how he wanted her to leave, how uncomfortable he was with her there. Maybe she was just making it all worse.

“If you really want me to leave that badly, though,” she finally said, her voice slow, soft, as she stood up and made her way over to the counter where she had left her purse. Rather than put her purse on right away, though, she pulled out a scrap of paper and a pen, jotting something down as she continued speaking. “I won’t force my presence on you. But if you need anything, even if it’s just to not be alone in here, please call.”

As she finished speaking, Lee walked back over to him, holding out the paper with her name and number on it. “I mean it. If there’s anything, T-” she hesitated, remembering how he hadn’t seemed happy when she’d called him TJ. “Tarin. You can call. And you don’t need to feel like you owe me. That’s not why I did any of this.”

That said, Lee turned toward the door.

Whelp. He’d done it. She was leaving.

Congrats Tarin, you got your way. The literal only person who gave a shit was leaving.

She wasn’t going to force her presence on him if he didn’t want her there.

Lee held out a piece of paper with her number on it and Tarin reached out mutely to take it. There were words, lots of words that he wanted to say, but his mouth simply wouldn’t form them.

She was going to leave him alone the way that he’d been so desperate to be alone since she’d found him in the park. She’d found him in the park. She’d seen what he’d done. She’d made him safe so that it wouldn’t happen any more and cleaned up the mess. She’d brought him back to her home when she had seen just how bad his mental state had been last night. She was still trying.

And she’d called him Tarin.

Goddammit. Goddammit. Goddammit.

“I don’t know how to do this…” he said, almost whispering as Lee headed for the door.

“All I’ve ever known was that if something like this happened, if I let something like this happen it was my job to clean up the mess and never let it happen again.”

Tarin set the paper with Lee’s number down and let his head drop into his hands, voice muffled as he continued. “Then you came along and just started doing everything…helping just because it’s the right thing to do.”

Tarin dropped his hands, but left his head hanging, elbows propped on his knees, “I don’t know how to do this…but I’m sorry…”

His voice was very quiet, but Lee was able to hear him in the silence of the shop. She was going to hear what he said before turning around; she knew this was very emotional, everything since she’d found him really was, but she had a feeling that he might be able to get the words out, whatever they all were going to be, easier if she wasn’t looking at him.

She wasn’t going to turn around until she heard him talking about letting a merge happen. She spun around, but by now he had his head in his hands. Walking slowly back to him as he continued speaking, Lee frowned as she shook her head.

As he finished, and apologized, he still didn't look up. So instead, Lee knelt down in front of him, trying to get eye contact without actually moving his head to do so. “You didn’t let anything happen, Tarin,” she said, her voice emphatic but still quiet. “He was smart. He knew how to hide from you. He learned from the last two times. Him managing to get in your head and you not knowing is. Not. Your. Fault. Not with this spirit.

“And honestly, I’m glad you don’t know how to do this,” Lee continued, her voice growing softer. “Because it means you haven’t had to deal with this. I wish I didn’t have so much experience of things going wrong.” Lee knelt there quietly for a few moments as she swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat.

“But you don’t need to apologize, Tarin,” she whispered.

As Lee turned and came back, Tarin almost wanted to move away from her. He almost didn’t want to hear what she had to say and the eye contact she was making almost broke him all over again.

None of that was nearly as bad as the absolution of guilt that Lee was trying to bestow. That was the hardest thing to swallow. It was somehow easier to lay the blame at his own feet than to acknowledge the violation that had taken place to bring him to this point. It was so much easier to take all of the blame than admit that he had been a victim too.

“They’ve all been here the whole time…” Tarin said, gesturing vaguely around the shop and knowing that Lee would know what he meant.

“They all knew…and none of them did anything. One inkling of what was going to happen and everything would have stopped. They’d still be alive”

Pulling in a shuddering breath, Tarin looked at Lee again knowing he had absolutely no right to say what he was about to say, “Please don’t go.”

They all knew. He said that the spirits in the shop had all known what was going on. Lee hadn’t even thought about that. For some reason, and Lee didn’t understand why, but the spirits had generally left Tarin alone in their apartments. There hadn’t been spirits who would have seen what was going on and could have told him.

Then something else that he said clicked in. Everything would have stopped, he said. Lee couldn’t stop her eyes from widening slightly as she realized what he meant by that. Some of the women may have still been alive if he had found out sooner, if even one of the spirits in the shop had told him. But he wouldn’t have been.

Lee shook her head. “I won’t leave,” she said softly. “But I’m sorry I didn’t figure it out sooner. There was something that bothered me about them in particular, something nagging, important. But it didn’t click in what it was until the other night. I should have figured it out sooner…”

“Don’t you dare…” Tarin breathed as Lee began to, of all things, blame herself for not seeing what was happening to him sooner. It made him want to reach out and physically shake some sense into the woman. Instead, his hands twisted into his sweatpants, the last thing he needed was to have his ass handed to him today. Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

“If you’re trying to convince me that somehow this wasn’t my fault, there’s absolutely no way it could be yours.”

It made it all make sense though, why Lee was willing to do everything she’d done over the last couple of days. She had said otherwise, but nobody was that altruistic. Nobody would clean up that amount of blood on a stranger, pull them out of the literal bloody hell she’d found him in.

His hands were shaking again, his whole body threatening to follow suit as he took a few more deep breaths to try and disperse the elephant sitting on his chest. Had this been what Lee was talking about earlier? Another thing she’d known about him that he hadn’t even known about himself? Tarin wondered for a moment as he looked at Lee, what it would be like for someone to know him that well.

Suddenly uncomfortable, Tarin pulled his gaze away from Lee’s and looked up through the front window of the shop, watching people mill by as they went about their daily tasks. There was another question he needed to ask, that had been nagging at the back of his mind and he had refused to acknowledge.

“Someone…found her, right?” He said, a shudder rolling through his whole body, “Someone found all of them?”

“Don’t you dare…”

His voice was even quieter than hers had been, and her bottom lip found its way between her teeth. She knew it wasn't her fault, but that didn't stop her from thinking that she could have, should have figured it out sooner.

But because she was still looking at him looking into his green eyes, Lee didn't see his hands clenching. She ended up just nodding, nodding her acknowledgement of what he had said, that it wasn't her fault, as she continued to worry her lip between her teeth.

Then his eyes left her, looking past her now, and Lee sat back on her heels as she continued to kneel in front of him.

At least until he asked the question. Leaning forward again back up to kneeling in front of him as she nodded.

“They did,” she whispered back, close enough that she could see his shudder. “They did find her. Find them.” Hesitating just a moment, Lee reached a hand out, placing it on top of one of his.

“Okay….” Tarin breathed out, nodding his head slowly, eyes still fixed on a point outside the shop. “That’s good…that’s…” Was it? Was it really good? It didn’t really seem like a good thing. “Better…”

Gentle pressure on his hand made Tarin look down again, Lee’s hand was there over his. How could she stand to be this close to him? The impulse to drop his head onto Lee’s shoulder and cry his eyes out beckoned becomingly from the edges of Tarin’s emotional abyss, but he forcibly reigned in his emotions. He kept asking more, and there had to be a limit.

A few more deep breaths and Tarin pulled his hand back, simultaneously scooting back the chair and scrubbing his hands over his face and through his hair.

“TJ is fine, by the way.” He said, looking outside again. He’d wanted a new start when he’d come here, but had gone out of his way to make sure that things had stayed almost exactly the same…just with a different view. Maybe this was a start.

“What was it you were saying about the Empire State Building?”

It wasn’t a good thing that the bodies had been found. Not a good thing because there were bodies. But the fact that they had been found was good.

Lee understood what Tarin was saying, and she nodded.

Then when she put her hand onto his, Lee saw him look down at it. And just stare at it as he took some deep breaths. She just stayed there, not moving, not saying anything. If she wasn’t mistaken, the fallout was starting. But before he said anything, he pulled his hand away, scooting his chair away from her.

And rubbed his hands over his face in a very familiar way.

He really looked like he could use a hug, but the fact was despite the familiarity of the situation and many gestures he made, they really didn’t know each other. So instead of pulling him into a hug, Lee stood after he moved the chair back and went to sit down again herself.

“TJ is fine, by the way.”

“If you’d like,” she said, looking across at him as he looked past her. “It’ll be weird for me to start, but I can call you Tarin if you’d prefer.”

Then he was asking what she meant about the Empire State Building and her head tilted in confusion as she looked at him. “She’s not there in your world? She’s how he found the shop so I just assumed…”

Maybe it was wrong to assume that basically everything had been the same there as it was here. The man sitting in front of her looked very different than the man she’d known as Tarin Brooks, after all.

“There’s a spirit up there. One of the more…I’m not really sure how to describe it. Relaxed?” Lee tried to explain. “She’s the one who directed Tarin to the shop here. And she’s normally the only one up there. I thought it would be a good alternative to keep you out of the shop for a while.”
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“If you’d like. It’ll be weird for me to start, but I can call you Tarin if you’d prefer.”

“Totally up to you. It’s probably easier.”

Lee explained why she wanted to go to the Empire State Building and Tarin shook his head, “As far as I know she isn’t there on my side.” This was easier to talk about than the previous subject and Tarin continued to shove all those other emotions back into their little box in the back of his head.

As for the shop, “I found the shop in an online ad.” he explained, “It had been a clock shop for a really long time, some kind of family business passed down for a few generations. Demand for smart watches was kind of the nail in the coffin and they were looking to get out of their lease.”

He shrugged. “It was a cool place, and wildly inexpensive for the area and location by the park.”

Getting out of here seemed like a good idea. It was feeling dark and claustrophobic in the shop and even if chatting with a spirit didn’t seem like it should be at the top of anyone’s list Tarin had to admit he was a bit curious.

“We can go.”

Whichever name was fine. He hadn’t been very impressed this morning when she’d called him TJ, though he was right, it would probably be easier. Especially since she doubted he would be through the aftermath of everything before Kevin was back. TJ would be much easier in that case.

Then he was explaining that the spirit hadn’t been on the top of the Empire State Building as far as he knew, yet he had still managed to find this exact shop location. That was…

Maybe some things were fate after all, Lee thought.

But he was ready and willing to go over and see her. So Lee stood, waiting while he moved around the shop gathering his things, and she couldn’t help but think just how eerily familiar this was. Despite it being with a different person and 10 years since she’d last done this.

It didn’t take long for them to get out of the shop at that point, Tarin holding the door for her now, and they were off, walking toward the Empire State Building. Hopefully this would be ok and wouldn’t completely backfire on her.

But the walk was silent. And she couldn’t exactly ask questions like how he was holding up, not out on the street, not when he appeared to be holding it together. So as they walked, Lee bit her bottom lip in thought. She didn’t really know him, afterall, so it was hard to know what would be a safe topic in public right now.

She didn’t know him.

That was the key. Both the problem and the solution. Her lip slipping out from between her teeth, Lee looked over at Tarin. Over and up. “So what do you do for fun?”