The Watcher’s Claim

Chapter Six: Kept

I didn't tell anyone.

What would I have said? *My building's gargoyle came to life and is currently taking up most of my kitchen while I make coffee?* My best friend Priya would have had me evaluated. My neighbor Mr. Okonkwo, who already thought I was eccentric, would have had me committed.

Instead I made eggs. Dorian stood at the kitchen window — had to stand because the chairs were not built to his scale — and watched the street below with the same quiet attention he gave everything, and I thought about the profound strangeness of this and found that I didn't care as much as I probably should.

"The building needs the boiler replaced," he said.

I almost dropped my spatula. "I know."

"I know you know. I heard the estimates." He didn't look away from the window. "I've been here for four hundred years. I've accumulated some resources."

"Accumulated—"

"Old coins. Some materials. Things that became valuable while I wasn't paying attention to value." He glanced at me sideways. "I own no property. I have no identity. But I could solve the boiler problem, if you'd let me."

I stared at him. "You're offering to fix my boiler."

"It's my building too," he said. Simple. Direct. "It has been for longer than anyone alive can remember."

I thought about my grandmother, who had left me a money pit of a brownstone and a love for it so deep I couldn't imagine letting it go. I thought about her calling them *the watchers* with such particular fondness.

"She knew, didn't she," I said. "My grandmother."

"She suspected." He turned from the window to look at me fully, and the morning light on his face was doing something that made it hard to concentrate on eggs. "We never spoke. But she used to bring tea to the roof at evening, leave it near the parapet. She'd talk. She didn't know if I heard." His expression shifted into something careful. "I always heard."

"What did she say?"

He was quiet for a moment. "She asked me to look after you," he said finally. "Specifically. She'd had three grandchildren, but she—" He stopped. "She said you were the one who felt the building the way it was meant to be felt. Like it was alive." His eyes came back to mine. "She wasn't wrong."

Something tightened in my throat. I turned back to the stove.

"She'd think this was hilarious," I said, after a moment.

"I think she'd be pleased," he said, and the simplicity of it broke me open a little.

---

He stayed through the day. Through another night. Through a morning where I worked at my desk and he settled near the window with a book pulled from my shelves — a biography of someone dead long enough that he might have known people who'd known them — and read in silence that was somehow not silence because he was in it.

I had not lived with anyone in three years. I had not realized how loud the alone had been until there was something else here.

On the second evening I went to the roof. He was already there — he'd slipped away while I was on a call, and when I came up through the roof door he was at the parapet, looking out over the city in the falling dark, stone-still in a way that was different now, because now I knew the warmth under it.

I crossed the roof and stood beside him, and looked out at the city the way he did.

"What does it look like to you?" I asked. "Four hundred years of watching it."

"Faster every year," he said. "And lonelier. The longer something watches life pass by, the more certain it becomes that passing by is not enough." He looked at me. "I was content, for a long time. And then I was not. And then you were born, and content became a word that no longer applied."

"That's a long time to be discontent."

"I had reasons to stay." He looked back at the city. "Reasons that kept growing."

I leaned against his arm — which was approximately the size and temperature of a load-bearing wall — and he put his wing around me, slow and deliberate, the way he did everything, and the weight of it was extraordinary and warm and like nothing I had ever felt before.

"My grandmother's grandmother," I said. "What was she like?"

"Stubborn," he said. "Same jaw as you. Same tendency to work too late." A pause. "She was the one who started leaving things for me. Before her it was just the building. After her, it was the family." He paused again. "After you were born, I understood why."

"You knew from the beginning," I said.

"Not the specifics. Just — that you were the reason I was here." He looked down at me, and his expression was the most unguarded I'd seen it. "I've thought about how to explain this in a way that doesn't frighten you."

"I keep telling you I'm not frightened."

"I know. It frightens me."

I looked up at him. "Why?"

"Because I don't know how to be careful with this," he said. "I've watched over your family for generations and kept my distance and that was endurable because I had to endure it. And now—" His arm tightened around me, a degree of possessive that was entirely unconscious. "Now I can't remember why distance seemed reasonable."

"It doesn't," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment. His free hand came up and tilted my face toward his — that familiar gesture, that certainty — and he kissed me slow and deliberate and thorough, in the last of the light, with the city spread out behind us and his wing warm around my shoulders.

"Dorian," I said, against his mouth.

"Mm."

"I want to go back inside."

He pulled back just enough to look at me. The warmth in his eyes was something that took years to build. "Yes," he said.

He picked me up. Carried me to the roof door. Ducked through it. Carried me down the stairs and into my apartment and through to the bedroom while I held onto his shoulders and thought about the particular absurdity and rightness of this, this enormous ancient creature treating my building like it was built to his scale because it was, because he was part of it the way the walls were part of it.

He set me down on the bed and stood over me, and looked at me the way he always looked at me — like I was something he'd decided on a long time ago and was only now collecting.