#that I’m able to have a normal life and think about him minimally and painlessly

[whenthegoldrays]

Hmm

[kamandzak]

Into the Great Night - Chapter 2

I started writing this book about a year ago and finished it ~7 months ago. Performing a big rewrite and this chapter is so dismally beautiful I can’t keep it to myself.

Context: Andrew Garland’s boyfriend of eight years has passed away and he is struggling

Recommended listening: Compass and Miracle by Two Steps from Hell

     It was foolish of me to think it would be any better at Tessa’s house. Merely leaving the place Greg and I had cohabitated didn’t mean our past would leave me; that my grief would leave me.

    It was no better sitting on Tessa’s couch as opposed to my own.

    It was still lonely. It was still joyless.

    It was still too cold.

      If that was my new normal…. If that was the life of which I would be forced to live for the rest of my days, I preferred to die.

      Tessa was worried. Beth was worried. Sara and Clara were worried. They all had the right to be. Mom and Dad still hadn’t reached out. I couldn’t say I was mad about it.

      For the first month I carried the same daily, depressive routine: Wake up, shower, watch videos, eat, shower again, sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat. Nothing to disrupt the morose mentality I held from the moment my eyes opened until they closed. Even in my dreams I continued being sad. I couldn’t escape – trapped forever.

    Jake’s constant messages of concern did nothing but send me sinking deeper and deeper into hazy nothingness. Peppered with queries about when I planned to emerge onto the gaming scene, along with the occasional ludicrous statement about how he understood my stuffy brain, each message was deleted as it was read. There was no reason to have those hanging around, reminding me why I was in Reno and not where I had once dreamed of making a life for myself.

      Whenever I closed my eyes, Greg’s face appeared in the dark. Maybe I was napping; maybe I was finally sleeping fully through the night; maybe I was simply blinking. Always, he was there.

    Sometimes it was a fleeting glance of what used to be the best part of my life. Sometimes I dreamed of things that had already happened, or things I wanted to be that would never come to light.

    One night, I dreamed we got married. Waking up was almost as painful as watching him die.

      Tessa was worried I’d off myself. It wasn’t like we talked about it or anything, of course, but I could hear her and Beth sitting over tea every weekend, hushed mutterings coming from her dining room table or her room or her little porch. My grief had thrown a wrench into the lives of those around me, Beth worrying about my life when she normally would work on lesson plans for her rambunctious class of first graders. When she was feeling brave, Tessa would ask why I kept my secrets down deep for so long. That right there was why.

    I had suffered from depression before but what I was feeling wasn’t just unadulterated sadness; it was a fierce, far more complicated set of emotions leading me to exist in a far more dangerous mindset than I had ever been in before. Instead of having an urge to kill the part of me that is making me feel so unbelievably yet nondescriptly sad, I wanted death. Death, full stop.

    Mom and Dad and Sara and Clara and Beth and Tessa weren’t good enough reasons to stay alive, and all I wanted was to see Greg just for another minute. I wanted to give up a life with my own flesh and blood just to see him again. I would have given up all the time in the world for one more night of SNL and inside jokes with a man who made me feel like so much more than who I actually was; a unextraordinary nerd with awkward social tendencies and difficulty communicating. With Greg I felt like I was more than just me; without him, I didn’t know who I was anymore.

    “Andrew! Your phone!” A crumpled ball of paper bounced off my head as Tessa’s voice cut through my outer shell, the sounds of my phone following her words. My phone beeped loudly, the tell-tale sign of a Facetime call on it’s way, and I dragged my finger across the screen to accept before I read the name. Each bodily movement seemed to take ten times longer than Before. I was living seconds behind reality.

    “Garland.”

Jake’s face popped onto my screen. 5… 4… 3… 2… 1….

    “Hi.”

    “You look like hell.”

Jake’s mouth stopped moving before I even put together the string of letters that made up his blunt statement.

    “Mm,” I managed.

    “You in Reno?” I nodded. “I’m heading out that way this weekend. Never been to Vegas believe it or not. Figured I’d go explore. Have you seen anyone since everything happened?

    “Andrew, want anything from the gas station?” Tessa stood in her door frame and as I shook my head she left without another word.

    “I’ll take that as a no?”

    “Yeah, no. No, I haven’t seen anyone. I don’t want to see anyone.”

    “What if they came to you? So you didn’t have to leave where you are?”

    “I’m not about to let a stranger into my sister’s apartment.”

    “We’re not technically strangers at this point, right?”

    “Why are you so hell-bent on meeting face-to-face?”

Jake paused, inhaling loudly, wheezily, in a way that reminded me of Greg; then again, everything reminded me of Greg whether it had anything to do with him or not.

    “The best thing that came out of the worst time in my life is now I can be empathetic to other people going through the same thing.”

The tiniest part of me wanted to know what he’d been through but the larger part didn’t have the brain power to care because what actually mattered didn’t exist anymore. I didn’t think Jake was purposely jabbing at open, festering wounds for the sake of cruelty; he was just caring for me.

    I didn’t want his caring. I only wanted one person’s caring and couldn’t get past the knowledge that I'd never have it again.

    “Let me know if you want someone to talk to. I’m only in Nevada for a couple of days. I won’t mind stopping. Really.”

    “Mm.”

    “I gotta go. Message me.”

The screen went black. Please Rate the Quality of your Call, a prompt stated, with the outlines of five stars beneath. I did no such thing.

    I wasn’t about to message him, even if I had a reason to do so. I wasn’t going to be messaging anyone because all conversations led back to Greg. How was gaming going? Was I still in Los Angeles? Was I still going to be on YouTube? All questions would eventually wind up being about him and the more I talked, the more I would have to remember. The more I would have to remember, the more I would have to feel, the more I would hurt.

    It started happening when I arrived at Tessa’s; my need for answers led me to the internet and introduced me to the term dissociation; I would simply leave my body. Up to the ceiling I seemed to float as if filled with helium, watching what was taking place below. Tessa waking up and making breakfast before going to her gaming room; her video editor Reese chatting with her about her upload schedule; Beth coming and going; myself sitting in the same spot on the same couch day in and day out.

    I didn’t know why it was happening, the only reasonable explanation being that I so desperately didn’t want to exist but was too much of a damn coward to kill myself. In the end, dissociation seemed like the best option. Just remove myself painlessly from my surroundings. Was certainly better than the alternative. It was peaceful, exiting the current plane and living somewhere else if only for just a few minutes.

    Live. That was the key word. I was still technically alive, my heart still beating and my stomach still digesting and my eyes blinking and lungs expanding with each breath. The human being my brain commanded was still moving. My mind was developed enough to operate on autopilot, doing the dumb things it had to do to keep everything in stasis. I ‘lived’, for lack of a better word.

    When I did gather the courage to look up what I was feeling on the internet, nothing made sense. Nothing could be remotely tailored to fit my situation. I could relate to none of it. These people with their inspiring stories and memoirs written in loving memoriam, and benches dedicated to loved ones… their experiences seemed to minimize what kept me awake at night. How were they able to do that? How could those strangers make me and my emotions feel trivial without even knowing me and without me actively posting in detail what was happening in my head? As hard as I tried to imagine those brave widows and widowers and left-behinds feeling the way I did, their stories always wound up being of getting over that tremendous loss.

    I didn’t want to get over it. If I got over it I would lose Greg forever. I’d already lost him once.

    The grocery lists of things I could do to help myself mocked me as I read the advice of people who claimed to know how to recover from the un-recoverable. Write them a letter, authors would write in silly, curly-cue fonts before giving me a whole page to write the letter, as if I was going to sit down and put pen to paper and tell Greg about something I saw that reminded me of our first date. List all the good times, one said, with bullet points for me to fill out five moments, as if every moment we had together wasn’t the best of my life. Find someone to talk to, another whimsically suggested as it reminded me that keeping my feelings inside was dangerous. As if I didn’t already know it was ripping me apart from the inside.

    They didn’t tell me how to start a letter to Greg where all I could do was say how much I missed him. They didn’t tell me how to find someone to talk to when I didn’t want to talk to anyone about anything. They gave me five fucking spots to talk about good times as if our six-year relationship could be reduced down to that many moments and no more.

    They said all of it was doable; they said that when the lost their husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend or best friend or grandparent or dog or whatever, those were the steps they took to recovering and moving on.

    They weren’t me, though. They weren’t me and they weren’t Greg and they weren’t the set of circumstances under which we had lived. Even if half of the equation was there, the other wasn’t. Maybe their loved one was sick. Were they sick with the same ailment, or one that carried similar stigma? Did they purposely risk illness for the sake of their significant other or family member or friend? Did their risk become reality because fate can be an unnecessarily cruel mistress? Did they love the other person so much they shortened their own life?

    The door opened and couch shifted as Tessa’s hands landed on the sides of my face.

    “Andrew”

I cracked at her voice, her icy hands wrapping around my head and pushing me against her. Worming my arms under hers, I clung to her small shoulders, weeping into her jacket sleeves. Eyes screwed shut I gasped for air, seeing Greg in the darkness as he mirrored the same breathy sounds. While mine were of sadness, his were of death – the only sound of him I could manage to remember despite being together for so long. Tessa pulled at my non-resisting body and we sat together, tangled in a heap of coats and scarves and unwashed hair. Much like when we were young – when we didn’t understand what the world was about or why we were with the people we were with – and Tessa would protect me, we sat close, her love drowning out the pulsing drone of fear and hatred and sadness and anger rushing through my mind as it struggled to comprehend the incomprehensible.

    For several minutes, we sat in silence.

    “Andrew.”

    “Mm.”

    “I love you.”

    “I know.”     “And,” she finally pushed me off her body, holding me in front of her. Cold air hit my hot face, adhering the salty wash of tears to my skin, “And you can talk to me about anything you need to. I know you don’t want to. I know you think you’re strong enough. Maybe the only way to become strong is to not be.”

    “Where do I s-start?” I hiccupped.

    “Let’s get the team together,” she began, rising slowly and pulling me up with her. “Maybe they can help.”

    “But-.”

    “No one knows you like we do.”

      Hours later, beneath the door of Tessa’s bedroom, I heard her. I heard them.

    “You guys have to get here as soon as you can. Please.”

    “What’s the matter, Tess?”

    “I think it’s happening…. I think the numbness is wearing off. He’s starting to feel things again. It’s not that I don’t want to be here when it happens. I just don’t want to not have you guys here with us. I don’t know what do to.”

Greg’s death wasn’t supposed to be affecting my sisters as the sounds of their video call trickled through the under-crack of the door. It wasn’t supposed to be affecting Jake or anyone else but me and the Davis’.

    It was a stupid thought and their voices continued, muffled by my sense of inadequacy. Of course it would be affecting other people. It started doing so the moment Tessa posted my video. It started affecting the girls the second I told them I was having an emergency and they needed to come see me. What I hadn’t wanted was exactly what I had dug myself into when I welcomed other people into the hell-circle I was stuck in.

    I didn’t want them to come see me. I didn’t want Beth to take time off and Clara to leave Frank and Sara to leave Duncan to come take care of me. I was twenty-four. I should have been able to take care of me.

      The front door opened several hours later and I looked up with a faux look of surprise. Out, I sent them telepathically. Please go.

    “Why are you here?” Tessa rolled her eyes at my question.

    “Boy, don’t pretend like you weren’t listening on my Zoom call with them,” she cracked a smile before reading the room and immediately coming back to our reality. “You know why.”

    “We’re just afraid that there’s more to address than just your changing grief,” Beth began and bile began rising in my throat. It was only a matter of time really, before they put two and two together. I guess I had thought it would take a little longer. Her hand landed in the middle of my back, leading me to the same sofa where Tessa and I had broken down together.

    “Don’t worry about me,” I began confidently. “I’m just-.”

    But then I coughed. I coughed and coughed and the more I tried to regulate my breathing, the harder it was. Choking; gasping.

    Hands rubbed my back while others pushed me down and a another lowered a glass of water into my field of vision. Sip, choke, swallow, repeat until I could finally shakily inhale with difficulty.

    Looking down at me were four sets of beautiful, worried eyes with which I could barely stand to keep contact.

    Clara spoke,

    “Stage three.”     “What?”

    “That’s what you’re in, isn’t it? Frank just… just lost a patient and when I asked him, especially when Tessa told me about all of your shakes and fevers, he said he thinks it's stage three. I think I believe him.”

I was at a complete and utter loss. In my molasses-filled, sloths-paced brain, grief at the loss of Greg drifted beside my own secrets and the suffering of my sisters, bouncing off of one another like oil and water.

    “You don’t understand,” I finally said.

    “Don’t understand what, exactly,” Tessa asked pointedly, further questions and opinions trapped behind pursed lips. I could practically see them stabbing her mouth, begging to be released.

    “Everything!” I exploded. I hadn’t been truly angry yet; up until then anger had taken too much effort. What energy grief didn’t zap from my system the HIV stole for its own selfish purposes. “It’s all connected, isn’t it?” I asked, huffing out laughs like a mad scientist whose madness had taken over the scientist within. “I can’t tell the world about me and Greg because I’m afraid of people finding out I’m not straight. Then I’m with Greg and he’s so afraid of never having love and I love him more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life, so then we take a risk and guess what? Protection fails. The risk becomes reality and I get HIV but I can’t talk about the love or the disease because it’s been ingrained in me since I was a child that people who get sick with this illness get it as recompense for their actions. I don’t believe it when I look at Greg but when I stare at myself in the mirror all I can hear is Dad’s voice. I go to clinics occasionally but only outside of town and without people I even sort of know because I’m afraid subscribers who have never seen my fucking face will recognize me and assume I’m going there for a reason I don’t want anyone to know about and guess what? They’re right! I don’t want them to know about going to get HIV treatment because I’m afraid of people finding out I’m not straight.”

    “Andrew-.”

    “We keep loving each other because hey, once I’m sick, we might as well, right?”

    “Andrew-.”

    “And then Greg dies. Greg fucking dies and I can’t tell anyone because I don’t have anyone and the only reason I don’t is because I spent the first seventeen years of my life having it ingrained in my mind that if I don't date, marry, and have a family with a beautiful woman, I’m damned to a life of eternal suffering.”

    “But we-.”

    “I can’t tell the gaming community because then Dad could find out. I can’t tell you guys or Mom because I feel bad that I kept it a secret for so long but I had to keep it a secret so I could stay safe and love the man I loved because I knew he didn’t have all the time in the world. So now I’m one serious infection away from dying because I didn’t do serious enough treatments to start with because I was so afraid of people finding out I’m not straight,” I nearly screamed, throat raw, standing up and spinning around to face my audience. “How the fuck am I supposed to deal with all of this?”

From all four sides, warm sweaters hit my torso as each sister came from a different angle and held on tightly, two of them shaking against me with emotion. Long nails raked through my hair, hands rubbed my back and arm and nape of neck; hair tickled my nose. Cold, dry lips pressed against my forehead.

    When I dared to observe who was directly in front of me, Sara had tears running down her slim cheeks.

    “This is why I didn’t want to tell you,” I whispered. “All it’s doing is making you sad.”

    “I would have been sad when you first told me, Andrew. Nothing keeps human emotion from happening. But you’ve kept it in for so long, and the longer it builds up the more explosive it is when you finally release the valve. If you told me six years ago that you were in love with a boy and were scared, I would have been so proud. I would have supported you in whatever you wanted to do… however you wanted to live your life. If you told me whenever you found out about being sick that you were sick, I would have been devastated. I still am. It’s just… complicated now,” she petered off as the others nodded in agreement.

    “I’m not mad at you, in case you think that,” Clara spoke. “I don’t think any of us are. In a way it’s nice to finally know all your dirty laundry so we can be here as a family. I know you have your reasons for doing what you did. We all do. There’s a lot to sort out. A lot to do. A lot of catching up that has to take place.”

    “There’s no timeline for this stuff,” Beth began and before I could stop myself, I opened my mouth,

    “AIDS, Beth. A. I. D. S.”

    “Grief, Andrew. G. R. I. E. F.”

    “Awesome,” I mumbled. “How am I supposed to do this?”

    “Not alone. We need to get you a doctor here,” Tessa said with a sad expression that, for a brief moment, I wanted to smack off of her face. “I haven’t seen you go since we moved. You don’t want to, but we don’t want to lose you.” I wanted to lose me but that was beside the point so I kept the words inside. “I can’t lose you,” she managed and faint sounds of stifled sadness cut through the quiet.

    “I know you want to go,” Beth said as Clara and Sara ushered Tessa away from the scene. “Not to the doctor, but to him. You want to go to Greg. Right now what we say won’t change that. Nothing we say will change how you feel. Nothing feels worth living for right now and I know that. When you go through something like this, you can tell other people you really do know what they’re going through. We aren’t worth living for right now and I understand that. There isn’t much we can do, but what we can do is make sure you’re eating and at least taking some medication. There isn’t much more to do right now than sustain yourself. Let us help.”

    “Okay.”     “You loved him. I understand that,” Beth whispered, wrapping her arms around me. “And you both did what you could with the time you had. Life’s unfair. I don’t know why things happen to people the way they do. I’m sorry.”

    “Why wasn’t my best good enough?”

    “Oh, Andrew. It was. I promise. There are just some things we can’t control. It’s horrible, isn’t it?”

[wee-chlo]

Everything Is Going To Be Okay: A Villain AU AU, Part 1

Inspired by @im-fairly-whitty and @slusheeduck ‘s  Villain AU, a heartwarming tale about family and love and- hahahaha I’m kidding, it’s tragedy.

When Miguel Rivera, the great-great-grandson of esteemed and beloved musician Héctor Rivera, was twelve, he was cursed and went to the Land of the Dead. There, he discovered the truth about his family’s bloody, crime-speckled past. Convincing Hector that he intended to keep the secret, he was sent home… and now, fifteen years later, he’s back.

This is a happy ending, but happy endings aren’t necessarily good ones.

Rated PG13 this particular chapter for mentions of suicidal ideation it’ll cool down to something closer to PG/G in coming chapters.

Miguel Rivera, great-great-grandson of the esteemed and beloved musician Héctor Rivera, died alone in his sleep when he was twenty-seven. He hadn’t been a public figure for nearly a decade and had been estranged from most of his family. Friends were relatively few, and so it took almost two days for his body to be discovered in his apartment in Monterrey, Mexico.

At first, the common theory was suicide. Rumors about what had happened to him on that Día de los Muertos fifteen years ago still churned and rumbled despite the family’s attempts to quiet lingering doubts about the official story. Word in the tabloids was that Miguel suffered from night terrors, panic attacks, and fits. There was a rumor that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, that he’d attacked his family and been disowned for it, that he was a dangerous predator that the family was trying to protect. No matter how many magazines and paparazzi were sued for libel and slander, another would crop up with something new, something even more salacious and hurtful.

Coco knew better.

She knew her brother, even if the calls had become more infrequent and the visits to the Rivera home had stopped when she was twelve. Her brother wasn’t dangerous, wasn’t crazy. Just… scared. She didn’t know why. He never talked about that night he disappeared and then reappeared at dawn, hysterical and sobbing. No matter how many therapists their parents had sent him to, no matter how many times the topic was broached, he remained tight-lipped about it, allowing people to come to their own dramatic conclusions.

He’d left home when he turned eighteen. Coco had been six, but had very dim, half-baked memories of her brother and parents arguing about it. He visited on her birthday, Christmas, and up until she was about twelve, he visited for Día de los Muertos. Then, one year, he said he wasn’t coming back.

The memory of that argument wasn’t vague or half-baked. Sometimes she thought her ears still rang with her Abuelita’s outraged yelling. The phone had been slammed down so hard it cracked and after that, Miguel was the black sheep. Coco, Mama and Papa had received calls, letters, emails, but no visits. Sometimes, he’d call the house and ask to speak to Abuelita, but she’d never take the call.

In the last year before his death, he, Coco, and his parents had engaged in a long and complicated game of phone tag. Instead of direct conversations, they’d leave messages to each other. Coco got the impression that Miguel did it on purpose, deliberately calling when he knew they wouldn’t be able to answer so that there wouldn’t need to be a conversation. In the weeks afterward, she listened to his last voicemail over and over and over.

Hey, sorry I missed you. Uh, everything’s fine up here. Keep an eye out in the mail, yeah? Your birthday present should be getting there soon. Tell Mama and Papa I love them, and, uh… tell Abuelita that too, okay? Love you. Bye.

When they first got the news that he was dead, it had sounded like a suicide note. Apparently, they’d found quite a few in his apartment from varying times. The autopsy said otherwise. Miguel had been on medications: Valium, Ambien, fentanyl, and lexapro. He’d had alcohol in his system, not a lot but enough to indicate that he’d drank some the night before. And he’d had a genetic heart condition. The mix of long-term anxiety and insomnia, combined with the medication and alcohol, had killed him silently and painlessly in the night. A freak accident. A tragedy.

The landlady had sent Miguel’s things to the Rivera household. Most of it would be given away or donated: clothing, bedding, kitchenware. But among the rubble of her brother’s life was a little box of evidence proving every stupid mumbler wrong: notebooks full of songs and music, old photos, a laptop with a family photo as the lock screen.

A shoebox filled with printouts and copies of every email and letter that the family had sent to them. Every Christmas card, every birthday letter. Clippings of the things that Rosa and Abel had been doing, the review of Rosa’s first play and Abel’s second album.

They hadn’t sent the suicide notes. Apparently, those were being kept until suicide could be officially ruled out. But buried in the box of letters sent to him was a letter he’d written but not yet sent. It made the bottom drop out of Coco’s stomach.

I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore, he wrote, his handwriting shaky and cramped. I feel like I’m just wasting time for nothing. I could be with you all, and instead, I’m doing this. And it’s pointless because I’m not even going to do anything with it.

Just destroy that stupid laptop, would you? Nothing in there worth talking about anyway.

--

Miguel Rivera woke up dead.

Slowly, things came into focus. He was warm, bundled up in soft blankets. He heard something very distantly: voices, muffled and soft as if through water at first, then crystallizing.

“Should it take this long? I feel like it shouldn’t take this long.”

“The doctor said it’s normal for people who die that way. Calm down, mi amor.”

The voices were familiar. One he’d only heard from video clips and old newsreels but the other…

Pepita? Take care of him, will you?

He jerked away with a gasp, the memory knocking him out of the in-between state and back to… back to…

Oh.

His brain seemed to work in sections, processing things bit by bit, clunky even after the sudden rush of emotion that had hit him like electricity. He was in bed that wasn’t his, in a room that wasn’t his. The walls were sage and pastel yellow, the decoration minimal and sterile. Sunlight flushed in from an open window to his left, and to his right were two well-dressed skeletons, greying dark hair immaculately styled, their clothing tasteful, their expressions equal parts concern and shock. One was a woman with long hair, dressed in elegant purple, who could only be Mama Imelda. Sitting next to her…

“Hola, Papa Héctor,” Miguel said, the words sounding thick and clumsy to his own… ears? “Been awhile.”

“Migue,” Papa Héctor said warmly, reaching out and taking Miguel’s hand in his. “Oh, m’ijo, it’s so good to see you. I wish you’d taken a bit longer though…” He sighed, giving Miguel’s hand a squeeze. The feel of it was strange, bone rubbing on bone. The sight made old memories dredge up again, and he had to fight down the urge to wrench his hand free.

“But you’re here,” Mama Imelda said, sitting on the bed next to him. “You’ve been here for almost a day now, recovering. And you’ll need to recover for a while longer still.”

“A day?” Miguel’s head felt like it was full of gauze and cotton, even as his thoughts began to move at a steadier pace.

“You died in your sleep, chamaco,” Papa Héctor said quietly, shaking his head and looking so sad, like his heart was breaking. “Ay, Migue… It’s good to see you, but it didn’t have to be like this. It didn’t have to be this soon.”

Miguel couldn’t bring himself to say anything. It was too surreal. Dying in your sleep is what old people did, people who’d lived until they were in their seventies, eighties, nineties. It’s how Mama Coco had died, and Papa Julio. You don’t die in your sleep before you’re thirty. That’s not how it works.

“We’ve been so worried about you, m’ijo,” Mama Imelda said, cutting through the fog of confusion. “You stopped coming home for Día de los Muertos, you didn’t have an ofrenda up. No one knew what was happening. There was talk about you hurting yourself. We didn’t know what you would do…” She trailed off, and when Miguel looked up, she was giving him a rather pointed look. It took a moment for Miguel to realize what she was getting at but when he did, he almost laughed in their faces, it was so ridiculous.

“Go ahead. Ask. I won’t get mad or anything,” he said.

Héctor and Imelda shared a glance, and then she said, “The book.”

The words fell between them with all the delicacy of a pair of rocks. Miguel gently pulled his hand free of Héctor’s and peered at it. Funny, the joints didn’t look like they did in the biology books.

“Wasn’t much of a book,” he said, his voice sounding funny and distant. “Mostly notes. Newspaper articles. I got a couple of autopsy reports, but I had to be careful, you know? I didn’t know how picky the curse was and if I popped up back here… might have been a little awkward.” He couldn’t make eye contact with them. He didn’t know what they’d do, or say, or think. He’d had this whole speech prepared for years, worked on it every single spare moment, but now here he was and instead of something mature and reasonable, words just came out like vomit.

“You were good, I’ll give you that. Damn good. I mean, once I knew what the thought process was, I could catch the names. But then it just opened this whole new thing. I mean, how many victims, for instance? Don’t even know. Depends on how generous you’re feeling, I guess. Might be ten. Might be dozens. Sure, you might not have killed every one of them but it’s not like people didn’t throw themselves off of bridges or drink themselves to death after you dragged their careers so far into the muck that they couldn’t break out.”

“Miguel-” Héctor’s tone was almost pleading, but Miguel had been waiting for this moment since he was twelve and no one was going to stop it now, not even Héctor Rivera. He still couldn’t look at them, but there wasn’t much else to look at. He flopped back onto the bed and focused on a crack in the ceiling.

“But you know, I could never prove anything. You were damn good. I could never prove a thing. I just… knew enough to keep me up at night. Enough to make me feel sick. I couldn’t stand to be there anymore, in that house. I had to get out of there, but hey, can’t say anything because if I do, poof,” he made a tiny explosion gesture with his hands, the bones clicking together. “Back here. With you. So what else was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to do? Just pretend I didn’t know and everything was fine? Pretend like Ernesto De La Cruz didn’t exist-”

“That bestia doesn’t deserve your pity, Miguel,” Imelda said firmly, standing up from the bed. “He’s gone and done with now, and the world is the better for it.”

“Maybe,” Miguel admitted. “I wish they were all like that, I really do. I wish it was all that easy, but they didn’t all have to die. It’s like you just… got used to it.”

“Miguel,” Héctor said, his voice quieter now but firmer. “We never did things like that lightly. It was never for lack of trying anything else or going different routes. We did what we had to do for our family, to keep our children and their children safe.” He sighed. “You said you understood that.”

“I was twelve,” Miguel snapped back at the ceiling. “And I’d just watched you gloat about murdering someone and then watched that some person get snatched by a giant glowing cat monster. I lied.”

The silence that followed was heavy and dark. Miguel didn’t know how a heart that didn’t exist could still be pounding but he could feel it rattling his ribcage, felt himself tremble despite the blankets tucked around him.

“Miguel, look at me.” Miguel gritted his teeth, gaze fixed upwards. “Miguel.” The note of warning reminded him so much of his own father that he turned instinctively.

Imelda was standing behind where Héctor stood, her hands resting on his shoulders. They made a striking pair, he had to admit. Like something out of a Gothic romance, stark and dark and resolute. Like a painting of a king and his queen standing in judgment.

“We need to know that you can be trusted, Miguel,” Héctor said, folding his hands in front of him. “You’ve… spent a lot of time on this. And we know you never said anything when you were alive. But we need to know that that’s going to continue.”

“And if it isn’t?” Miguel asked, knowing the answer, and knowing his own. Héctor sighed again, and Miguel thought he saw Imelda’s hands tighten their grip on his shoulders.

“Then it’s the same as before, Miguel. You stay with us and we keep an eye on you until we know you understand.” Miguel blinked. “We’re not going to hurt you, Miguel,” Héctor said, sounding absurdly exasperated, as if he wasn’t talking to someone who knew exactly what he was capable of. “You’re our family. We love you, and we want you to be happy. We want you to be here, with your family. We want you to come home. But we can’t let everything this family built-”

“I’m not going to say anything.”

Héctor stuttered to a stop.

“I’m not,” Miguel said again. “I wish I was lying. I really do. I wish I never met Ernesto De La Cruz. I wish I never knew anything about all the things you’ve done. I wish…” He felt a lump form in his throat, which was so stupid because he didn’t even have one anymore, and when he spoke again, it came out a cracking croak. “I wish I could love you the way everyone else does. I wish I was going to…” Miguel whispered. Before he couldn’t bring himself to look at Héctor, but now he couldn’t bring himself to look away. He wished it didn’t feel as good as it did to finally get to talk, because it was Héctor, but Miguel had been alone for so damn long…

“I wish I was going to say something. But I’m not. Because… because I don’t want anyone else to feel the way I do. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand how dirty I feel. I couldn’t do that to anyone else. I couldn’t. I’m not…” He closed his eyes, covered his face, blotted out the horror on Papa Héctor’s face, the grief on Mama Imelda’s. “I’m not strong enough.”

“No, no, Migue, no,” Papa Héctor said, all the sternness and firmness gone like fog to sunlight, and Miguel felt him slip an arm around to pull him up into a sitting position. Papa Héctor’s hand gripped Miguel’s shoulder, pulled him closer so that he was in a half-hug, and it was enough to make Miguel shatter like so much glass.

“I just wanna go home,” he sobbed, curling into a ball against Papa Héctor’s chest. “I don’t wanna do this anymore, I don’t, I don’t-”

“It’s okay, m’ijo,” Mama Imelda’s hand touched his back, ran up and down his spine soothingly. “You don’t have to. You’ve been so strong, Migue. This isn’t weakness. It’s the right thing. You’re protecting your family. You’re home now.”

Home. With family. People who cared. People who’d loved each other.

People who’d killed for each other.

“It’s over, Miguel,” Papa Héctor said, tucking Miguel under his chin. Miguel felt Mama Imelda press closer, wrapping her arms around him and Papa Héctor both, a secure embrace. “It’s done.”

There was a time when Miguel thought that those words would be a gavel coming down. He hadn’t expected them to be a promise, aching with apology and forgiveness and love.

Papa Héctor’s hand smoothed back his hair carefully, and Miguel felt a distinctly foreign sort of drowsiness fall over him like a blanket. He relaxed by inches until he was putty in their arms, listening to Papa Héctor hum something aimless and soothing.

He wished he was stronger. He wished he had more of a backbone, more guts. He wished he was strong enough to make the hard choice, the painful choice. But really, it had never been a choice at all.

“Get some rest, Miguel.” Mama Imelda’s voice was warm and loving. “We can talk more later.”

[ferociousqueak]

Okay, so @bloomingcnidarians asked about how my Cassandra Shepard and Thane got together, and I have criminally little written on them, so I decided it was time to rectify that :D

#

It doesn’t happen right away.

In all honesty, there’s something about Thane that bothers Cassandra at first. He’s so . . . still. In her experience, the only people that still are predators, killers. But then, he admits it, completely unabashed. He’s a killer. Just like she is.

So why does that get to her?

It would be cliché to say he’s a mystery she needs to solve, so she doesn’t say it. Also, it’s not true. Thane is many things, but a mystery isn’t one of them. He’s open. Honest. Forthright. She could ask him any question and trust the answer he gave her, even—especially—if it’s not something she’d prefer to hear.

After a while, it’s like she goes to Life Support out of muscle memory. She stands for only a moment as the elevator door opens. To the left: a stoic warrior who would kill her without remorse if she knew even half the things Cassandra had done. To the right: a stoic warrior who would kill her without remorse for a sufficient paycheck.

It wasn’t so easy in the beginning. The first time she went to see him, it was an exploratory mission. She would be able to tell if he was lying, and if he didn’t meet her standards of trustworthiness, she’d kill him herself. Cassandra had already died once. She preferred not to do it again.

As frustrating and unexpected as it was, he was unerringly honest. He admitted to his role in his wife’s death. He didn’t try to justify his absence from his son’s life. But something still ate at Cassandra.

“How can you say it’s not your fault,” she said one day.

Thane tilted his head at her as his secondary eyelids blinked. “What is supposed to be my fault, siha?”

“Don’t call me that,” she sneered. “You’ve killed more people than you can count. You haven’t even bothered to count them. How can you say their deaths aren’t your fault?”

He nodded. “Their deaths are not your fault, Commander.”

She shook her head and rubbed two fingers against her temple. “I’m not talking about me, Krios. I’m talking about you.”

“Of course, Commander.” He paused and hummed, considering his next words. “The hanar trained me to kill effectively. Mercifully. I fulfilled my first contract when I was twelve.” He took a deep breath. “Looking back, I was too young for that assignment. But I didn’t know better. All I knew was that the people taking care of me needed me. Even if the way they needed me wasn’t . . . conventional.”

Cassandra snorted. “Even a kid knows what’s right and wrong.”

Thane nodded again. “They do. A child also knows what’s necessary. He knows what he needs to do, not just to keep his room and board, but to maintain the affection of those who keep him. And those who keep him know this much.” He paused for a long moment before continuing. “If the ones who keep him direct him to behave in a way he wouldn’t have normally . . . the responsibility is with them, not him.”

“That’s bullshit,” Cassandra said, almost without pause.

“Is it, Commander,” Thane said, tilting his head further. “If a child is about to starve and she does something unfortunate to stay alive, who is at fault? The child, or the person who asked the child to do the unfortunate thing, knowing full well what the stakes are?”

Cassandra pushed away from the table and stood, pacing the small space. “Of course the child isn’t responsible,” she said. “But eventually that child becomes an adult. They can make decisions for themselves.”

“Yes,” Thane agreed. “They can make decisions. Including taking contracts that kill people.” He leaned forward and pressed his mouth against his clasped hands. “There will always be people who can’t do their own killing. I can offer a service that both achieves the inevitable and affords the target minimal pain and discomfort.” He turned his gaze toward Cassandra. “I might kill professionally, Commander. That does not mean I enjoy it.”

Cassandra continued to pace. How could he . . . how did he think . . . no. If you killed a person, you were responsible. End of story. Trying to say otherwise was an equivocation. A justification. She was responsible. No. He was responsible. He’d been paid to kill people and he’d done it.

“You could’ve said no at any point,” she said, her arms crossed as she carefully looked away from him.

“That’s true,” Thane agreed. “And I could’ve starved at any point. I could’ve alienated myself from anyone who meant anything to me at any point.”

Cassandra finally looked at Thane. “Yeah? Do you think Kolyat would buy what you’re selling.”

Thane started, visibly taken aback by her words, and she immediately regretted them. “That’s not,” she shook her head and looked away. “I mean . . .”

“You said what you meant, Commander,” he said. Already, she felt a twinge in her chest that almost felt like she missed him calling her siha. God, why did she want to hear him call her that? “It’s a fair question.” He paused as he considered his answer. “I suspect Kolyat would be as suspicious as you are. That’s not something I can control.”

Cassandra wanted to take the question back. She didn’t want Thane thinking that . . . she wasn’t sure what she didn’t want him thinking. She’d upset him, that much was clear, and she didn’t like how that made her feel.

“What I mean to say,” he said after a moment, “is that it’s not your fault, Commander.”

Cassandra stopped and turned toward him, unable to move toward the empty chair across from him.

“You have spent a significant part of your life . . . what is it humans say? Taking out the garbage for people who had no respect for you,” he said. “But just because they had no respect for you, doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it.” He paused again. “You deliver death, that’s true. But you do not relish it. It is something you deliver quickly, cleanly, and painlessly. That’s something to be admired, siha. I apologize. Commander.”

She sighed. She could get used to the nickname, if she was being honest, and didn’t correct him.

Cassandra couldn’t look at Thane. She wanted to sit across from him and look him in the eyes, but she didn’t want to sit. She needed to bleed off the energy building up inside her. “I just need to . . . I need to think.”

Thane caught her hand as she moved past him. He didn’t lean forward. He didn’t look at her with any kind of smoky gaze. He just ran his thumb down her palm and across her wrist and focused anywhere that didn’t meet her eyes.

“That’s good, Commander,” he said, his eyes still on the hand he held. “Taking the time to know one’s own thoughts is important.”

“Siha,” she said before she realized it. Thane looked up at her and she felt her heart jump. “It’s okay if you call me siha.”

Thane nodded and pressed his thumb against her palm before leaning back again.

After a moment, she slowly pulled her hand back. Without a word, she headed toward the door. Something inside her was . . . still. She hadn’t felt that before.

She needed to figure it out.