Jackson Holmes—Jacky to everyone who knew him—had precisely three things in common with his namesake: an obsessive attention to detail, an apartment cluttered with papers, and an unfortunate addiction to late-night wandering. The resemblance to Sherlock Holmes ended there. Where the great detective was tall and imposing, Jacky stood at a modest five-foot-eight. Where Holmes commanded respect, Jacky commanded... well, mostly deadlines.
At 2:47 AM on a Thursday that refused to end, Jacky saved his latest comic book project—Nebula Knights Volume 12—and felt his spine crack in three distinct places as he stood. His studio apartment in downtown Portland looked like a paper bomb had detonated: character sketches pinned to every available surface, digital tablets scattered across his drawing desk, and enough empty coffee cups to constitute an art installation titled "The Descent into Madness."
"Ramen," he declared to his cat, Moriarty, who looked supremely unimpressed. "I need ramen."
Moriarty yawned, revealing all his teeth, which Jacky took as agreement.
The 24-hour Asian market six blocks away knew Jacky by name at this point. The night clerk, Mrs. Chen, didn't even look up when he stumbled in, still wearing his ink-stained "Don't Talk to Me Until I've Had My Coffee" t-shirt and plaid pajama pants.
"Miso or tonkotsu?" she called out.
"Both. And those little fish cakes shaped like cats."
"Living dangerously tonight, Mr. Holmes."
Jacky grabbed his usual haul, added some convenience store onigiri because he was feeling fancy, and headed back into the Portland night. October had arrived with its typical passive-aggressive drizzle—not quite rain, but enough moisture to make everything slightly damp and miserable.
He was three blocks from home, mentally composing tomorrow's email to his editor explaining why the space backgrounds in panel forty-seven needed to be completely redone, when he nearly tripped over something on the sidewalk.
Not something. Someone.
"Oh, hell," Jacky muttered, adjusting his grocery bags. Portland's streets always had their share of rough sleepers, and he'd learned the hard way not to get too involved. He started to step around the figure slumped against the brick wall of the old Paramount Theater.
Then the figure moved.
"Help," came a voice, surprisingly clear despite the obvious distress. "Please... help me."
Jacky hesitated. He wasn't a complete monster, despite what his editor claimed after missed deadlines. The figure tried to sit up, failed, and then—with what seemed like tremendous effort—reached out and grabbed Jacky's ankle.
"Okay, okay, I'm not going anywhere," Jacky said, crouching down while trying to keep his ramen bags from tipping. "Are you hurt? Should I call—"
His words died in his throat.
The person looking up at him shouldn't exist. Couldn't exist. Not outside of the pages of Jacky's own comic books or some high-budget anime production.
Blue hair. Not dyed-blue, not blue-tinted-under-certain-lights, but blue. The color of deep ocean water, flowing past the person's shoulders in waves that seemed to shimmer even in the ugly sodium streetlight. The skin was pale—no, pale was too mundane a word. Porcelain? Alabaster? Every romance novel cliché Jacky had ever rolled his eyes at suddenly seemed inadequate. The stranger's skin looked like moonlight made solid, smooth and luminous.
But the eyes. God, the eyes.
Green. Bright, brilliant, impossible green, like someone had captured the aurora borealis and condensed it into irises. They tilted slightly at the corners, giving them an almost feline quality, and they were staring at Jacky with an intensity that made his stomach do a complicated flip.
"You can see me," the stranger said, and yes, that was definitely a masculine voice, deeper than expected. "You're not... running away."
"I'm too tired to run," Jacky managed, his artist's brain already cataloging every impossible detail. "Are you okay? Are you... is this cosplay? Is there a convention I don't know about?"
Portland had its share of dedicated cosplayers, especially around the waterfront. Jacky had seen Spiderman buying groceries and once watched two Sailor Scouts help someone change a flat tire. This wouldn't be the weirdest thing he'd encountered.
Except.
Except something about this felt different. The stranger's outfit wasn't the usual convention fare—it looked like actual clothing, not a costume. Fitted pants in some dark material that absorbed light, a shirt that might have been white once but was now dirty and torn at the shoulder, and no shoes. Those impossibly pale feet were bare and bleeding.
"I need..." The stranger swayed, and Jacky had to drop his ramen to catch him before he face-planted on the concrete. "Need to charge. The sun, I need the sun."
"Buddy, it's three in the morning. Sun's not coming for another few hours." Jacky awkwardly adjusted his grip, shocked by how cold the stranger felt. "You're freezing. Do you have somewhere to go? Someone I can call?"
Those green eyes focused on him again, and Jacky felt pinned, examined, assessed in a way that made him deeply aware of his ratty pajamas and the fact that he hadn't showered since... when had he showered? Tuesday?
"No one," the stranger whispered. "I have no one here."
And that's how Jackson Holmes, comic book artist and generally sensible human being, made the worst and best decision of his life.
"Come on then," he said, hauling the stranger to his feet and immediately regretting every missed gym session. "My place is close. You can... crash there. Figure things out in the morning."
The stranger leaned heavily against him, and Jacky tried not to think about how good he smelled despite clearly having been through some kind of ordeal. Not cologne or anything artificial—more like ozone and something else, something that made Jacky think of thunderstorms and vast open spaces.
"Thank you," the stranger murmured against Jacky's shoulder. "You are... kind."
"I'm an idiot," Jacky corrected, but he didn't stop walking.
Getting the stranger up three flights of stairs to his apartment turned into an adventure. By the time Jacky managed to unlock his door—one-handed, while supporting what felt like six feet of limp, blue-haired confusion—he was sweating and seriously reconsidering his life choices.
Moriarty took one look at their guest and fled under the bed.
"Smart cat," Jacky muttered, half-dragging the stranger to his futon couch. "Okay, let's get you horizontal."
He deposited his unexpected guest onto the futon, which groaned under the sudden weight. The stranger immediately curled onto his side, those impossible eyes already drifting closed.
"Wait," Jacky said. "Your feet. They're bleeding. I should—"
"Tomorrow," the stranger breathed. "Just need to rest. Need to... charge."
"You keep saying that. Charge what?"
But the stranger was already asleep, his breathing evening out into something slow and steady. In repose, he looked even more otherworldly, like something Jacky might have drawn for his fantasy series. The blue hair spread across the pillow like a waterfall, and his features had a symmetry that felt almost mathematical in its perfection.
Jacky stood there for a long moment, holding his bags of probably-crushed ramen, staring at the impossible person on his couch.
"This is fine," he told himself. "This is totally normal. Just a random gorgeous cosplayer who's really committed to the bit. In the morning, he'll wake up, we'll have an awkward laugh, and he'll leave."
He grabbed a blanket from his closet and draped it over the stranger, careful not to touch that luminous skin again. His fingers still tingled from the earlier contact, a strange pins-and-needles sensation that wasn't entirely unpleasant.
"Welcome to Casa del Holmes," Jacky whispered. "Try not to murder me in my sleep."
The stranger didn't respond, but a small smile curved those too-perfect lips, and Jacky felt his heart do something complicated and inadvisable.
He retreated to his bedroom, left the door cracked open in case the stranger needed something, and collapsed onto his bed without even bothering to change. Moriarty eventually emerged from under the bed, leaping up to press against Jacky's chest with an aggrieved meow.
"I know, I know," Jacky soothed, scratching behind the cat's ears. "But what was I supposed to do? Leave him there?"
Moriarty's expression suggested that yes, that would have been the reasonable choice.
"You're probably right," Jacky admitted, staring at his ceiling where he'd stuck glow-in-the-dark stars years ago in a fit of nostalgia. They glowed weakly in the darkness, a poor imitation of the real thing. "But you didn't see his eyes, Moriarty. They were like... like something out of one of my comics. Like nothing I've ever seen before."
The cat kneaded his chest, unimpressed by poetry.
"Tomorrow," Jacky decided, closing his eyes. "Tomorrow I'll figure this out. Maybe call Maya, see if she knows about any conventions. Or maybe he'll just be gone, and this will turn out to be a hallucination brought on by too much caffeine and not enough sleep."
But even as he drifted off, Jacky knew he was lying to himself. Those eyes had been too real, too present. Whatever had just walked into his life, it wasn't a hallucination.
And deep in his artist's soul, the part of him that created worlds and characters and stories, Jacky felt something shift. The same sensation he got when starting a new project, when the blank page held infinite possibilities.
His life had just become a lot more interesting.
He just didn't know how interesting yet.