Home used to mean a tin roof beneath her back, the metal still warm from the day, while she basked under the magic of a starlit sky overhead, stretching as wide and endless as her little-girl dreams.

She doesn’t know what home means now. Hasn’t known for a long, long time. All she knows is that it’s not home that she’s going back to.

The phone call had left her feeling frozen, even though she remembers that the voice on the other end of the line was warm, kind. “Miss Shepherd, I’m calling because you’re listed as Suhaana Shepherd’s next of kin…” Anushka’s hearing had clouded over at that point, a thunderclap buzz that’s still not quite gone, even if it ebbs and flows, seemingly at random.

She had been five hours away from the hospital her mother was in, and she was being called to claim her body.

She is two hours away now, the distance steadily fading at 70 kilometres an hour, and not a kilometre over. Anushka is driving more by the Avanisthali road rules than she ever has in her adult life. She’s basically on autopilot right now; the model driver that she hasn’t been since her driving test years ago. But, she thinks, her conscientiousness, despite her feeling a lack of steady consciousness, must be going a long way to calming down the man in the seat next to her.

Cyrus Finlay Brennan has never quite seemed comfortable in any moving vehicle, much less her little blue car of questionable reliability. Anushka finds that Cyrus still seems far too lanky to even fit into the cramped interior of the contraption. To add to things, being the nervous passenger and even more panicked driver that he is, Cyrus has often nagged at her about the safety of her beloved piece of undead scrapmetal. That it gets all too regularly repaired by a mechanic who, according to Cyrus, is deemed more of a necromancer at this point, doesn’t help the situation.

Cyrus has never been an easy thing to get into this car.

And yet, there he is. Long limbs and neurotic demeanour all buckled in and folded, neat as anything, into her well worn front passenger seat. She doesn’t quite know what to make of it.

There’s a lot about him being here that’s not as simple as a friend being there for another friend, one roommate supporting another. There’s a lot about him that leads to her thoughts drifting in ways that they really, really shouldn’t. But, his presence brings warmth with it, and after the ice bath shock of the news she’d received, she takes that warmth without examining its nature too closely. She doesn’t have the capacity for it right now, too full of strange emotions, packed so tightly into her skull that she can’t pry her fingers into the pile to examine even one of them. And if she tries, she knows, everything will fall apart in her clumsy hands.

Her too full head is throbbing.

She’s trying very hard not to think about that either.

She notices a road sign as it races past: Rest Stop. Ten Minutes. She can make it ten minutes, she thinks. Anushka forces her attention back to the car, back to the road, back to the present and not stuck somewhere inside her own cranium.

That’s usually Cyrus’ default mode anyway. Her resident genius, child prodigy and ‘professor younger than his students’ extraordinaire, who always seems to be stuck in his head. Except that’s not exactly true, she acknowledges. Cyrus has the wonderful ability to withdraw into his thoughts for brief sojourns, but brings out new discoveries and ideas that he’s passionate about sharing with the world.

Whether they want him to or not.

He’s been quiet on this trip though. The car is filled with music that leans more towards the middle to her side of the spectrum of their musical tastes, even though it’s his phone hooked up to the audio system. She notices now that he’s been glancing over at her periodically this whole time; realises it when she catches him looking at her briefly. He looks away first. A warm affection flares deep in her chest for a moment, and the heat bleeds into every corner of her body, softens her flesh, thaws her lungs, and she breathes deep for what feels like the first time in hours.

“Gonna stop to refuel soon,” she says. “We’re making good time, traffic shouldn’t get too bad even if we take a break.”

“That would be ideal,” Cyrus says, prim as ever. “You have been driving for over three hours. Ideally, drivers ought to take a fifteen minute break after every two hours in order to keep their focus and responsiveness at a peak. This avoids the increased risk of motor vehicle accidents that advanced states of exhaustion in drivers creates. Given that you have exceeded the recommended drive time, I would suggest taking an extended break. Purely for your benefit, of course,” he glances at her quickly.

A side eye if there ever was one, Anushka thinks. Though, she can see a hint of a smile on his lips that wouldn’t be discernible to anyone who didn’t know Cyrus as well as Anushka did, and she can read it for the invitation that it is. An answering smile, wide and true, finds its way onto her face, and it genuinely seems like light fills the car, fills her world, after the passing of more than an exceeded recommended drive time. It is summer after all, and yeah, she can come out and play.

“Agar aap ki salah hai doctor saheb, toh hum nacheez kya hi keh sakte hain?” Well, if you’re recommending it, oh learned Doctor, who am I to argue?

“Main medical doctor nahi hoon,” he deadpans. I’m not a medical doctor.

“Lekin baatein aise karte ho jaise saare doctors se zyaada jaante ho,” she retorts. But you talk like you know more about medicine than any medical doctor. “Dr. Hypochondriac,” she adds as a finisher, goading.

“Medical science is a fascinating subject Anushka.” Faux affront. She indulgently pretends to be chastened. “My knowledge of medicine has been acquired based purely on the admiration I have for the scientific achievements in the field.” He throws a snarky look her way, “Hypochondria nahin.” Not hypochondria.

But you throw tantrums like a toddler when you’re sick, she doesn’t say. She notes that he didn’t refute that he claims to have more knowledge about medicine than most medical doctors. Typical. But at least he’s honest, in an oblique sort of way. She keeps that to herself as well.

“What’s the most fascinating thing you’ve learned about it lately?” she asks instead.

Given the opportunity to impart knowledge to a willing and interested audience, Cyrus has a tendency to bloom. It’s fascinating to Anushka: nothing seems to have really changed about his posture, no physical movement you’d be able to see. He’s still neatly folded into his seat and too lanky for the confines of her small car, but something about him seems to unfurl somehow, his awkward angles now acquiring a numinous grace.

She lends him an ear as he speaks about advancements in endocrinology, and with the glances she steals occasionally, she notices how animated he seems now. Enchanted, she lingers on the hills and valleys of his voice, contemplates the spark in his eyes. She loves it when he’s like this, speaking about something that has his gigantic mind enthralled. That childlike enthusiasm she finds so endearing, because he’s so unabashed about the things that he truly loves. Things that bring wonder and starlight to his eyes.

It’s a little niggling thought in the back of her mind that he hasn’t been quite as lively speaking about his intellectual interests for the past couple of months. Like something is holding him back, or rather, is forcing him to hold himself back. Whatever it might be, it doesn’t seem to be here right now between them. And she’s glad for it.

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