#feat. lowkey dad erik lehnsherr

[cryhavok]

i.

the prison gives him back his clothes.

alex didn’t even know they had kept them, but they give them back in a wide plastic bag that says summers, alexander on it in black sharpie.  for a long moment he just holds the bag in his hands, staring at the blue denim peeking out from under the soft grey cotton of the t-shirt he was wearing the day they arrested him.

DANVILLE HIGH SCHOOL, the front reads in faded black letters.

alex’s numb hands pull it over his head.  they must have laundered it.  it doesn’t smell like his cold fear sweat.  It doesn’t smell like the gardenia perfume haley was wearing, or the blood-ash of the garage he destroyed.

just fabric, that’s all.

ii.

the outside air on the other side of the prison fence tastes subtly different than the outside air of the yard.  the sun is brighter.  the colors are more vibrant.  without the shackles that usually come with being outside, his wrists feel too light, and he keeps them very close to his sides and squints against the too-muchness of the world.

“how does it feel, alex?” says charles, behind him.

alex tries to say, good, i think.  but the words get stuck in his throat.

“why don’t you go pull the car around, charles?” says erik, as alex stares wordlessly into the fenceless space ahead of them.

iii.

three hours in the car and alex is beginning to get a headache.  there’s too much movement.  there’s too much sound.  he’s gotten so used to his world being 80 square feet of concrete that the constant bombardment of information from all of his senses has set his nerves to jangling.  mercifully, instead of talking to him, charles and erik have been arguing for about two and a half hours about something so far over his head he hadn’t bothered to listen past the first five minutes.

he sits in the backseat, and closes his eyes, and leans his head into the side panels of the car so that the rhythmic hum of the engine drowns out most of the soft music on the radio and the voices from the front seat.

iv.

at a diner in springfield, ohio, alex orders a club salad because he doesn’t remember the last time he ate a vegetable that he could recognize.  it leaves him still hungry, but he’s so fucking happy it’s not meatloaf that he almost doesn’t care.

erik catches him eyeing his leftover fries.

“get something else,” he says.  “charles is paying.”

alex realizes it’s been maybe four hours since he spoke, except to order.  “---uh,” he says, and looks past him to charles, who he catches in the middle of rolling his eyes, but who nods once he realizes alex is waiting for permission.

he gets a chicken sandwich.

he remembers to say thank you this time.

v.

charles puts a hand on his shoulder once.

alex is immediately overwhelmed with a screaming sense of wrongness, and jerks away like he’s been stabbed.  all of a sudden he doesn’t feel human; like he’s too big for his skin, like he’s tearing out of it, like his lungs can’t pump air fast enough to keep him steady.  “don’t,” he says.

“i apologize,” charles replies, and doesn’t touch him again.

vi.

at the cia compound is the first time alex has talked to anybody his age in over a year.

hank uses the word “penultimate” in their first conversation and alex wonders if hank is weird or if this is a thing people normally say and he’s just forgotten.  darwin claps him on the back, doesn’t apologize when he flinches away, doesn’t give him anything like a wide berth.  when alex stares too long at angel’s tattoos she gives him a smile over her shoulder that makes him blush and then steps hard on his foot.

raven says, “high school?” and raises her eyebrows.

alex looks down at his shirt, which is grass-stained from lying down on the grass outside after the cia officers had given him the talk about the terms of his release.  “oh,” he says.  “yeah.  i---need new clothes.”

“anyone know where the mall in this town is?” darwin asks.

vii.

“well,” says hank, “at least it smells clean.”

alex gives him a look.  it’s not his fault he had to wait; he’s not allowed to go outside without the cia’s say-so and charles wasn’t here with the money, anyway.

he also gives darwin the look, because he’s laughing so hard he’s doubled over.  “oh man,” darwin wheezes, once he’s gotten his breath back, “you look like erik lehnsherr’s closet threw up on you.”

angel and raven walk in and their eyebrows go up on almost perfect sync, raven’s pulling together in the middle and angel’s arching high and unimpressed up her forehead.

“oh baby,” angel says, after the two of them have been quiet for almost thirty seconds, “what did you let him do to you?”

“they’re just clothes,” alex protests.

“terrible clothes,” raven agrees.

viii.

when sean arrives four days later he brings two six packs and a wide white grin.  alex is settling enough that he manages to smile back, although it probably looks stupid and painful on his face, stretching muscles he’s not used to using.

“better than prison, isn’t it?” charles asks him, smiling.

alex guesses maybe he doesn’t know that he hasn’t mentioned that to anybody, or that maybe he doesn’t understand why it’s the sort of thing that he would rather keep hidden, but it still feels a little bit like a blow to the stomach, the sudden silence that falls behind him.

“obviously,” erik says, when alex fails to respond, his voice bone dry.

he can tell by the look on charles’ face that he knows he’s fucked up, but it’s kind of too late for that, so he just says, “yeah,” and goes to sit down on the couch again.

“so what’d you do?” asks angel.  hank and sean look relieved somebody else asked.  darwin is watching his face.  raven is looking at charles.

“fucked up,” he replies.

“that’s a shitty answer,” she says.

alex puts his coke down on the table with a loud clunk. “---well, it’s a shitty question.”

ix.

“hey,” says raven.

“hey,” he replies.  he’s getting better at returning greetings.

“what’s your favourite colour?” she asks.

“blue, i guess.”

she smirks.

“why?”

“because we need to get you different shirts, and apparently you’re not allowed off the grounds without an agent or charles.”

“yeah.”  he holds up his beer, which sean handed him but which he hasn’t drunk from.  “i’m... not supposed to have this, either.”

“what size are you?”

“---medium?”

“okay.”  she pauses.  “you know, he didn’t mean to tell everyone like that.”

“i know,” alex says.  they sit quietly on the back steps for a while, looking at the cia agent standing thirty feet out, watching them.  he tries to synthesize his thoughts into one complete sentence and comes up with:  “he still did, though.”

x.

“i’ve read your trial proceedings,” says erik, casually, when they’re alone in the sparse white room with a microwave and a refrigerator that serves as a kitchen.  “most killers i’ve met tried harder to escape justice.”

alex tries to decide if he hates or appreciates the bluntness of killer.  “i did what they said.”

“did he deserve it?”

does anyone deserve to be turned into a haze of blood droplets and bone fragments?  even if they were out to kill him?  even if they were out to kill haley?  what deserves the death penalty? alex wonders.  what is worth becoming the executioner?

“i don’t know.”

it was an accident.

erik raises his cup to his lips.  “next time, be sure.”

 xi.

“hey, alex,” raven says, “come here.  i need a partner.”

alex looks up from the pinball machine.  “what?”

she throws a pool cue at him, which he only barely catches before it hits him in the face.  “charles and erik are trying to hustle me.  i want to teach them a lesson.”

erik grins widely at him when he appears in the doorway and says, “alex, why don’t you break?”

the first game goes so badly that it’s clear everyone is trying to throw the game or just really bad at pool---alex sinks the winning shot after nearly 45 minutes.  the second is faster, but only barely.

the third---best out of three, charles had said cheerfully---takes barely ten minutes and quickly turns cutthroat when the shooting on the eight ball begins.  “don’t these have metal in them?” charles asks, weighing the cue in his hand.

“are you really accusing me of cheating?” erik replies.  “we’re on the same side, charles.”

alex clears his throat. “---do they?”

“no.”

“good,” says raven, and neatly whacks the last ball into the left side pocket.  “because if there were it would be really embarrassing when you lost.”

“uh,” says alex. “raven, you---”

“you forgot to call a pocket,” finishes erik.

raven drops her cue on the table.  “fuck,” she curses.

charles smiles at her.  “you’ve flown a little too close to the sun, darling.”

“that’s big talk from someone who won on a technicality, charles,” erik points out.

xii.

alex has gotten used to working out every day, because it was one of the only things to do in the cell, and the cia gym is better than the barbell he had.  so now he runs in the mornings and visits the gym in the evening.

“hey,” says darwin, sitting on the bench across from his, “throw me that.”

“throw it?”

darwin just holds out his hand, so alex heaves the weight at him, then grins when his arm blurs out of sight to catch it before it hits his chest, muscles turning to grey steel to stop the momentum and then quickly turning flesh-colored again.

xiii.

sometimes when alex can’t sleep (because everything is too loud, or sometimes too quiet, or too much or too little like prison) he goes to sit in the hallway.  that’s where he knows angel or darwin will come along eventually, in or out of their rooms.  if it’s darwin he’ll sit down on the floor across from him and talk about something pointless; if it’s angel she’ll stand up against the wall next to him and tell him it’s time to go to bed and get the fuck out of the corridor.

sometimes he goes to sit in the main room, which is where sean or raven might be still hanging out if it’s not too late---him with a pack of cards, her with a grin and a hand patting the cushion next to her.

infrequently erik can be found in the kitchen late at night.  alex doesn’t try him very often, but sometimes just sitting in silence with somebody is what he’s looking for.

he knows where to find charles and hank, too.  he mostly uses the knowledge to avoid them.

xiv.

“i’ve seen other guys who were in solitary way longer’n you turn out fine,” says darwin one evening in the gym, although it sounds like a lie to alex.

in the first few weeks after solitary, he finds himself uncomfortable with mostly everyone except erik and darwin---erik is an exception because he appears to expect exactly nothing of alex in the way of social interaction, and darwin is an exception because he doggedly insists on treating alex like a person even when he doesn’t really feel like one.

at the breakfast table in the morning after alex grabs two apples and only eats one of them, erik doesn’t put down his newspaper or look up.  “you’ll adjust to this.”

xv.

the truth is, it does get easier.  it gets easier in leaps and bounds at first---after the first day when speaking is too hard to comprehend, the first weeks where being accidentally brushed against feels like getting hit, it gets easier.  all of it.  dealing with charles, who is still overwhelming on the best of days.  dealing with people in general.  not having a bolt on his door keeping him in.  he gets used to these things so quickly that he almost doesn’t remember how it unnerved him in the beginning to be in a shower that wasn’t built for a crowd.

the easing plateaus eventually.  things like talking at a normal cadence are still hard.  being touched still makes him want to crawl out of his skin, mostly.  but after a while he doesn’t need erik to talk to charles so he doesn’t have to.  he doesn’t need raven and angel to tell him when they’re being sarcastic anymore.

alex throws the DANVILLE HIGH SCHOOL t-shirt in the trash.

he tugs on the blue plaid raven got him instead.