Logically, Val was able to step back from his own nerves and understand that he was being irrational. If he was his own client, he’d be able to say, in a steady voice, that he was being unreasonably anxious. He understood, intellectually, that with the loss of so many people he had cared for, that the reminder of the fragility of human life was simply pushing him toward a panic attack. There was no denying that he was starting to care for Trist and the phobic fear of loss had him creating a hundred horrible images in his mind and driving him to fidget on the bus ride home. It was pure separation anxiety, he was being controlling by thinking that his presence would hold anything ill from Trist.

Logic didn’t still the unhappy thudding of his heart. He needed to get home, he needed to show his unstable emotions that everything his logical mind had said was true. He needed to run fingers across Trist’s hair and feel the tension he was carrying melt away. The bus traveled far too slowly and if Val hadn’t clung with tooth and nail to the last of his logical control he would have gotten off and run the distance home.

The apartment building was still standing and looked just the same in the thin winter sunlight. The doorman sat behind his desk and nodded to Val as he went inside, everything was just as he’d left it, there was no reason for his panic. It gave Val’s logical side a touch more ammunition with which to shoot down his irrationality. That didn’t stop him from bouncing his weight from foot to foot in unease and he had Trist’s apartment key out in his hand before the elevator doors could shut.

It was a good thing that the hallways were empty for their neighbors might have been pushed aside if Val had to circle around them to reach the apartment. He felt his shoulders unknotting at the sight of the door and he raised the key to the lock, and his heart froze and stopped beating. There was no sign of damage to the door, but when Val touched the lock with the key, trying to shove it in to open the door, the door slid an inch inward. He’d locked the door behind him and even if Trist had woken up and unlocked it, the door would have been latched shut.

In his mind he was seventeen again and finding his uncle’s study door ajar. Val had been the one to find the man, laying there, dead. The memory chilled him and filled his stomach with lead. It was illogical, Trist wasn’t laying inside dead. At worst, the man had fallen into a bad voice of vision and had wandered out of the apartment but most likely he’d just glanced out into the hallway and not pushed the door tightly shut behind him.

Val lowered his keys and pushed the door the rest of the way open. His eyes saw nothing out of place so he stepped carefully inside. “Trist?” He called out. “I’m back.” But he didn’t drop his keys on the countertop, he clutched them tightly in his hands.

He stopped, across from Trist’s office door. It was ajar as well and that never happened. Trist always kept it shut and normally locked too. Val felt his breath freeze over but he crossed to the office. “Trist?”

The doorframe was splintered. Inside was a mess, the notebooks and journals lay scattered across the floor, the neat table was pushed aside, a chair lay on the floor. That was more disturbing to see then the broken in door, Trist was obsessive about keeping order in the apartment and Val had guessed he was doubly so with his office.

“Trist!” His voice was getting panicked now but he stepped into the office and checked the corners, checked under the pillows, checked everywhere and found no sign of the other man.

“Where are you?” He shouted, feeling the fear clawing at him.

The bedroom was next, but the door was open, undamaged but open, and inside was empty too. The blankets lay scattered, the pillows tossed off the bed but that wasn’t unusual and Val didn’t know if he should take it as a good or bad sign. Still, he gathered them up, checking even under the bed in case Trist had panicked from some voice and picked there to hide. The bedroom was empty, as was Trist’s bathroom.

Val nearly ran across the apartment to Gavan’s room. Hoping that maybe Trist was taking refuge there but inside was not only empty, it was undisturbed. He searched closest and bathrooms and found nothing. No note, no Trist, nothing and no clue as to where he’d gone.

It was the sound of his rasping, short, breaths that broke into Val’s world. He was starting to hyperventilate. He’d be passed out on the floor, too lost to his own panic attack soon, if he didn’t get control. It had been years since he’d had a panic attack, not since he’d read in the newspaper about Matt’s overdose, before that, not since the day he’d found his uncle dead. It was something he’d thought he’d outgrown, when he’d been able to hold it together when Violet had died.

“Think, think about it, think.” He hissed to himself, in the center of the very empty apartment. “Think.”

It took forcing several slow breaths to get his brain to function. When it did, he was snatching up the phone. It rang twice before the doorman answered.

“Yes?”

“Hello, this is Val York from 622. I’m looking after Tristram Maddocks from 854 while his cousin is in the hospital. Could you tell me if Trist has left the building this morning?” He actually managed to sound calm.

“No, sir, not on my watch.”

“When did you come on?”

“Five, sir. Is there a problem?”
Five, so before he’d left and he’d left Trist in bed. “Maybe, I’ll call you if I need your help but if you see him, don’t let him leave.”

“Of course, sir, anything else?”

“No, thank you.” But his eyes were on the broken office door, uncertain if Trist had done the damage himself.

He hung up and tried to keep his mind working. Trist hadn’t left the building, he was still here. Val could search all the floors, maybe Trist was sitting outside someone else’s door, waiting to deliver another cryptic message to them the way he tended to do. Maybe Trist had slipped past the doorman in the comings and goings of the people headed out to work?

First thing was first, he had to go get the list of phone numbers Gavan had left him for the weekend. If Trist had wandered away, he’d have to call some of the folks on that list for help. He’d filed the list in his own apartment, so he’d have to go there first before searching the building. His mind whirled in circles, trying to think ahead to what could have happened and how Trist might have gotten past the doormen. While in the elevator he remembered the service entrance to the building, it wasn’t a comforting thought but he could have the doorman check the security cameras to see if Trist had gotten away there.

The elevator crawled down the two flights and Val wished he’d just taken the stairs. In fact, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to walk the stairwells, they were quiet sheltered places and a good start in searching for Trist. He’d pick up the phone numbers, start looking over the building and if he hadn’t found Trist by the time he reached the lobby he’d start making phone calls from there. It was all very logical, with no need to panic, with no need for the cold fear that had curled around his spine.

Until he found his own apartment unlocked and he knew he’d locked it behind him. In fact, he’d double checked the door, knowing it might be a day or more before he came back down. Yet, when he slid his key into the lock, the door opened without him having to unlock it. It was unusual enough added into the mornings conversation in the park and Trist’s disappearance that Val hovered outside, uncertain about going in.

In the end, the need to know what might awake him inside outweighed the fear of what he could find. He pushed the door open and found lights turned on. His sofa was pushed to the side and there was an odd scent to the air. In his hand, he gripped his keys, jagged edges outward and ready to be used as a weapon. On his counter he spotted another set of keys, Kelly’s set. The set he’d left up in Trist and Gavan’s apartment.

Hope flared. “Trist!” He called out and rushed toward his bedroom. “Are you here? Trist!”

The bedroom door pushed open and Trist stood in it. He had pink rubber gloves on and was holding a scrub brush in one hand. His hair was tightly braided back, a few strands had worked free to tickle forward, but there was a flush to his face. As soon as he stopped in the doorway he smiled lightly.

“Hey, you’re back earlier than I thought.”

The relief was crushing. Val felt the color drain from his face and his mind froze in place with the sudden consuming sense of rightness.

“You okay? You look like ya saw a ghost.” Trist asked, cocking his head to the side a little in the way that meant he was looking with all his senses. “How’d the meeting go?”

Val moved across his small living room and before Trist could react, gathered the man into a tight embrace. “You’re safe. Thank God.”

That only made Trist more confused, he let Val pull him close, let the taller man bury his face into his shoulder but he kept his damp, gloved hands off to the side. “Val? What’s going on?”

“What’re you doing down here? You scared me silly!”

“You left the spare set of keys, I’m doing what I always do when nervous, I’m cleaning. Christ, have you ever wiped down the back of your toilet? And the dust under the sofa, the bunnies had teeth.” He tried to joke it off but Val only pulled him tighter.

“You’re okay?”

“I’ll be better if I can breath. What the hell is going on?”

Val forced himself to loosen his grip and step away just far enough to trace his hands over the confused face. He searched the eyes but found only sense and logic in them, not the wild, lost appearance he’d seen when Trist was having a bad day.

“You should have left me a note. What happened to your office?”

“What do you mean, what happened to my office?” Trist felt himself frowning and wondered if Val had hit his head while he was out.

“The door was kicked in and your books were tossed everywhere. When I came back and your apartment door was open and you weren’t there I thought that something bad had happened. Then to find your office like that?” He shook his head. “You should have left a note.”

“My office was locked, so was the apartment, I know it was.”

Val shook his head and pulled Trist tight against him. The feel of the slender body, the hard lines of another man in general and the bony edges of this man in particular, made him feel better. The scent of Trist and bleach flitted up to tickle his nose and make him want to sneeze but he inhaled it deeply.

“It doesn’t matter, you’re safe, that’s all that matters. I was so worried, I, God, Trist, I was so worried.” That was it, Val decided that for the near future, Trist wasn’t leaving his sight unless he knew someone trusted was watching over him. It wasn’t that Trist couldn’t take care of himself, because it was obvious that even at his lowest points he found the will and way to survive, but it was because Val needed to know he was okay so desperately that it was a pain.