Thanatos teleported himself to Damien’s aura once more.

Damien had drawn a chair up to the lit fireplace in the otherwise darkened library. The way he sat, his brow scrunched in contemplation, and the way the shadows licked his face, showed his true age.

With this in mind, Death kept at a distance, but Damien saw him from his peripheral and said, “I'm sor- I apologize for ruining your night.”

“I’m more concerned with how your night is going.”

Damien flashed a self-deprecating smirk.

“How is your night going?” Thanatos asked.

Damien swallowed. His mind was an ever-shifting place like a desert, and his thoughts were seldom tangible. “I’m not... I didn’t used to be like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like...” His mind was shifting from memories of darkness and broken glass and steady determination. His life had been temporary fleeting places and faces, but he and himself had always been constant as far as he could remember. Static. “Like, I’m actually losing it.” He began to massage his forehead with his finger tips.

“In my opinion, for what you’ve been through, you’re doing incredibly well.”

Damien let out a broken laugh. Death had no idea what he had been through. Only in theory, and it hadn’t been all bad. There were good times.

Thanatos continued, “Then, you were surviving. Now, you are... learning to live. The transition between surviving and living is trying. What do you feel you are losing control of?”

Damien’s jaw clenched. His vision blurred as anger set in. “I’m losing... my ability to fake it.” His gaze burned hotter than the fire burning before him. “But I guess, back then I was commanded to fake it, or... maybe, I was always like this and just didn’t notice.”

Damien’s face was usually dynamic with his eyebrows and crooked smiles, but his face was rigid, stoic. He was still for a moment, not even fidgeting. And Thanatos took in the moment, to catalog it in his mind. This was Damien being self-loathing. Death wondered if this was what he looked like when in a similar mood. When he was in this mood the only thing that seemed to help was-

Thanatos stood and walked to the side of the room. Damien didn’t move an inch in the time it took for Thanatos to bring his son a drink. He rattled the ice in the glass next to Damien’s ear to get his attention. It worked. When Damien saw the offer of amber liquor, his features mellowed. He took the offering with a grateful nod. Thanatos pulled a chair up next to Damien’s, and he produced his own drink. “To the art of faking it.” Death raised his glass.

Damien raised his glass. “It is an art.”

“Indeed.” They clinked glasses and drank. His son knew how to drink scotch, which Thanatos pretended to not be impressed by. “Why don’t you try to tell me about the hellhounds?”

Damien readjusted his bad leg and said, “They chased me through the halls of Tartarus after I escaped my cell, or whatever it was.”

“I see.”

Damien nodded. “One of them got me good in the leg.” He was rubbing his left knee.

“That scar that won’t vanish? The one that gives you problems?”

“That’s the one.”

Thanatos made a confirming noise and said, “Yes, hellhound bites are notorious for that. You have to heal them with holy herbs and oil when the wounds are fresh.”

Damien sank back into the chair, groaning like an old man. “The one on my shoulder doesn’t bother me too much, though.”

Thanatos offered, “You should be able to build that calf muscle back up with enough exercise. It’s not as bad as others I’ve seen. If anything, you can train the other muscles to compensate for its deficiencies. We’ll focus on that when we resume your courses.”

“Awesome,” Damien said, less than enthusiastic about the intense training regime he foresaw Thanatos devising. Also, he had little faith it would get much better since his own magick couldn’t heal it.

Death’s brow was scrunched in thought, remembering Damien’s panic at the ball. There was the initial panic brought on by the hellhound, but there was something else. “What was it that I did?”

“Huh?”

“I must’ve done something that perpetuated your hysterics.”

"Hysterics?”

Death rolled his eyes. “Don’t be so sensitive.”

Damien rolled his eyes at Death’s insensitivity.

Thanatos said, “I tried to center you, and you looked at me like-”

Damien searched his mind to find which instance Thanatos was referring to. Then, he remembered his complete mental collapse when Death uttered those three simple words. Look at me. “Oh,” Damien blinked, “...yeah. I don’t remember.”

Death was unconvinced. “I triggered a flashback. I cannot help you if you do not help me do so.”

Damien sighed and took a sip of scotch, rolling it over his tongue. “I was already in a bad way. You were trying to help,” he justified.

“I cannot help you if I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

Damien shrugged. “You’re not doing anything fucking wrong.”

“Language.”

Damien snorted. “For fuck’s sake.”

“Respectable people don’t swear.”

Damien flashed Death his crooked smile. “I do not believe you don’t cuss. Not for a second.” He finished off his scotch.

“Seldomly,” said Thanatos. “I have an expanded vocabulary so that I may say what I mean without the use of vague profanities.”

“We’re not related. There’s no way,” Damien teased.

Death smiled a real smile. It was small, and if you weren’t looking closely, you might have missed it. “I hate to disappoint.” Death raised his chin.

Damien scoffed, “No, you don’t.”

They both chuckled silently to themselves, and they both took the last sip of their scotch in near unison without noticing. Moments passed with the only sound being that of the crackling fire.

“Um,” Damien hazarded, feeling awkward and small, “Actually, er... could we train some? Tomorrow?”

Death noticed Damien’s eyes were on the ground. He seldom looked people in the eye when speaking. It was something Thanatos wanted to have him work on, but when Damien did look him willingly in the eye, it was because he was saying something he found critical. So, this gave Thanatos some insight on Damien’s priorities.

“Obviously, if you have errands to run then-”

“I’ll see what I can shuffle around,” he said easily.

And Damien nodded and cleared his throat to say, “Cool. Okay.”

If Damien openly admitted there was something he wanted, Thanatos would move heaven and earth to make it happen. Slowly, he could gain Damien’s trust and teach him it was normal to want and to need.

Coffee and Hypnos were two things Damien wanted that Death was hesitant to give him, however. Both were things that aggravated Damien’s sleep, which he already had trouble with without the help of caffeine or Hypnos’s games. Which, sometimes, included being buried alive- an incident which took a week of sleep away from his already claustrophobic, nightmare-prone son. But Thanatos also never promised anything as a general rule, in case he could not come through on his end. He especially wasn’t going to promise anything to Damien, because one broken promise could destroy any trust between them irreversibly. “All right. Off to bed.” Thanatos stood. “If I don’t make you, you’ll just sit here and stare into the fire all night.”

Damien stood. “Are you going to go back to your party?”

“No. Loki can handle it. I’ll use this golden opportunity to get some work done.”

Damien gave him a humored expression. Thanatos never stopped working.

But, Thanatos also wanted to be here to protect his son from nightmares, terrors, flashbacks, or intrusive thoughts.

“’Night.” Damien nodded, and he slipped out the library door. His room was the closest to the library. He shuffled down the hall thinking to himself that... was a good moment. He had found his bank of good moments locked away in his mind. This bank worked like a flip book of photographs. He could flip through the book, pick a random page, and fall into the memory as if it were happening all over again. He put the photograph of their conversation by the fire in the later third of this mental flip book. It took the place of a memory that had been torn out.

That happened sometimes. Good memories would become tainted with the bad memories which had followed. So, the page was removed. There were photographs that were faded, some distorted, some had been photoshopped and filtered, but all of them were good moments.

Damien saw the tail of a leather trench coat slip behind his open bedroom door, and he laughed to himself. Damien stopped and leaned against the door frame as he entered the bedroom.

Hypnos was lying on his bed, holding above his face the teddy bear Damien had shoved in the closet the night before. “Cute,” Hypnos teased.

“It was a gift. From Thanatos.” He paused. “I made a deal with him.”

Hypnos grimaced and sat up. “That’s usually bad news, mate.”

Damien pressed his lips together and nodded. “If I don’t go running off with you for two weeks... then I get coffee in the mornings.”

“You’re selling me out for a cuppa?”

“You sold me out for... Fuck, I don’t even know why. So, as far as I’m concerned, mate, fuck you.”

“Now, hang on. If you go running off with me to say... me Dream Castle, I can get you all the coffee your black heart desires.”

Damien thought about this.

Hypnos continued, “We can have coffee whenever you want. I can make you a coffee fountain, a coffee ocean! And maybe we can taste test something stronger than caffeine.”

Damien bobbed his head side to side as he contemplated. “You make a tempting offer... but-”

“But, you’re scared of big bad Thanny. Yeah, yeah. I get it.” Hypnos stood, tossing the teddy to the bed. His shoulders slumped. With a dramatized, pitiful expression on his face, he said, “I s’pose I’ll spend me entire Yuletide all alone in a big empty castle. Go on awesome adventures all by meself, all for you to have a cup of coffee, and knowing him, It’ll probably be decaf...”

Damien perked up. “What?”

“Yeah,” Hypnos said. “He said he’d give you coffee. He never said it would be caffeinated, but not like him to trick you like that, am I right?”

Damien realized Hypnos was right. Every time he made a deal with Death, Death found a way to still walk away without having really compromised. This talent was reflected in the way he played chess and wrote business contracts. Damien had read the newspapers, and they hailed Thanatos with both admiration and trepidation. Countless legitimate and gossip columnists had recounted stories of how clauses in his contracts had screwed people over.

Damien remembered vividly his first three months with Thanatos. He was kept like a mental patient in the basement. The brick and mortar walls were transformed into a plexiglass examination room. Thanatos had put him under scrutiny and experiments that had given him recurring nightmares. This was all because Thanatos had bargained to help Damien the hard way- to teach him, to protect him. Damien knew it was within that time that Death discovered he was his son. He assumed it was the tests which revealed, or at least confirmed, paternity.

But Damien could be tricky too. He had been a Jinni for time untold, which is why he took this decaf trick as a particularly damaging insult to his pride. He should have realized. He felt so stupid. There had been so many other times when Thanatos had made similar maneuvers. Damien had his good-memory bank, but he also had filing cabinets filled with offenses, and this sinful caffeine trick, minor as it may be, was filed away with Thanatos’s other manipulations. “Okay. Fuck it. But, you’re not off the hook for the Krampus bit.” That shit that Hypnos pulled was definitely in the filing cabinet of offenses as well.

“Yeah. Alright. C’mon.”

Damien followed him into the closet.