I remember how he said my name right before I killed him. His wide eyes as they stared up at me. How he wasn’t afraid.
“He has a right to be angry,” Leo says finally as if it’s some kind of concession. He looks at me, really looks at me, and it’s bizarre how similar the expression is to ones that Director Snow has wielded at me before.
Yet it invokes completely disparate sensations. Snow makes me feel like I’ve been shoved into a pool of freezing-cold water, raising bumps along my skin and temporarily disabling the instinctive process of taking in and expelling air.
Possessing Leo’s rapt attention, on the other hand, stokes heat in my gut. It fans the flames I keep desperately trying to douse with liquid common sense. With bucket after bucket of self-preservation. But it seems, no matter how hard I try to stamp it out, my insides have become flammable, coated in the oil-stained blood I was given as a child.
I’ve had that spark in me since then, constantly waiting to ignite.
Usually, I have a firm grip on my emotions. If nothing else, I always had more control over them than my brother did.
These past few months have tested the strength of that hold, reins slipping through increasingly arthritis-riddled fingers. Part of that is my mind, I’m sure, struggling to process all the changes I’ve gone through recently. But another part of it is Leo. He’s somehow managed to snare my curiosity, when I can’t remember caring about anyone else other than my brother in a very long time.
“He has a right to not want to be around you,” Leo goes on, seemingly oblivious to his effect on me. “But,” he adds with emphasis, “that doesn’t mean he should be able to hurt you. You don’t deserve to bear the brunt of anyone’s hurt for what his father made you do.”
A quick flare of fury rises up in me, vicious and cutting. I brandish it like a flaming sword at Leo.
“Stop trying to pretend I’m some lost little boy.” I glower at him, allowing the full breadth of my frustration to play out across my face. “It’s demeaning, and I’m sick of people treating me like something I’m not.”
Leo is silent for a few, long moments. He doesn’t look shocked at my outburst or particularly apologetic either, which is both intriguing and somewhat offensive.
He sits forward and leans his arms on the dingy plastic table, bringing himself closer to me. He lowers his voice, tone almost brittle. “I don’t think you’re a little boy. I’m fully aware you’re a grown man who can make decisions for himself. But don’t be an arsehole to me just because you want to stew in guilt no one is asking you to feel. You want to live out some fantasy where you’re the villain and we all hate you, then fine. But it’s not reality. I care about you. You’re my partner, and I’d be your friend if you’d let me. Rohan doesn’t hate you; he just hates what you remind him of. He knows it wasn’t really your fault. The agents who keep running from you, they’re not worth caring about. They treat me like crap sometimes too because of Anabelle.”
Unlike Leo, I am stunned by his unexpected eruption. It takes me a second or two to drag words to the forefront of my mind and put them to use. “Your aunt—”
Leo cuts me off with a swipe of his hand.
“My aunt,” he says crossly, “can say all she likes about you paying a debt back to FISA to make up for what you’ve done in the past, but I know her. She went to bat for you with her bosses, with the fucking government officials who wanted you dealt with. Just like she did for my uncle Alex when he defected from OI, or Rohan when he did the same.”
There’s no pretence over what he means by “dealt with.” I assume there must have been plenty of people in the British government who wanted something like me put down as soon as possible, lest I create more trouble than I already have simply by existing in the first place.
“I don’t know how to be anyone’s friend,” I tell Leo honestly because it’s true. I don’t. There were times when I was sent on undercover missions where I would need to pretend to be friends with people, to get close to a target. But I can’t believe that counts. They weren’t real relationships. I didn’t care about any of them, and they didn’t know me, not really.
But Leo knows me, at least a little, and he said he cares about me.
I’m not sure what to do with that.
He shouldn’t expect too much from me. He shouldn’t expect much at all. I can be his partner. That’s something I can take on. But being someone’s friend is a whole other level of social interaction and emotional exposure I am simply not capable of.
“Once, I had to befriend some politician’s son at a private school in Scandinavia,” I tell Leo, unsure why it matters, or why I want him to know this.
The boy’s name was Victor. He was tall and blond, top of his class in everything. But most of the other boys bullied him for having a stutter as well as his general awkwardness. He was one of those people who move around like they’re constantly afraid of bumping into something and breaking it.
Befriending Victor was astonishingly easy, and I was invited to his house to stay over less than two months into the undercover op.
He and I spent most of the time upstairs in his room, which was the size of some people’s entire flat. We played video games and danced to 90s Swedish pop music. Victor refused to listen to anything outside of that era. His mum was a singer, and Victor inherited her music tastes.
We spent hours watching horror films we were supposedly too young for on the TV he had in his room. He used to bury his face in a fluffy cushion every time there was a jump scare. We ate oven pizza his housekeeper made us and far too much ice cream. Victor’s favourite flavour was bubble gum because it made his tongue turn blue.
Then later, when Victor was asleep, I snuck out of his room and went down the hall to his father’s at-home office. Once I’d rooted out what OI had tasked me with finding, some file that meant nothing to me but was apparently very important to them, I completed the rest of my mission.
I don’t know what Victor thought happened to me. The boy who disappeared the same night his father was killed in his bed.
Victor wasn’t the first friend I deceived. He certainly wasn’t the last either. It would be a lie to say I feel guilty about every single instance of betrayal. You become numb to it, after a while. Or at least I did. I told myself, when I allowed myself to briefly reflect on my own lack of empathy, that I had to stop caring to survive. I had to become what OI wanted me to be for my own sake.
I tell Leo all of this, and the way he looks at me afterwards makes me want to hide behind my hair. I’m startled by the old urge. I haven’t wanted to use my hair as an extra layer of protection since I was little.
It was a habit I quickly learnt to break when one of my handlers got so annoyed with me hiding behind my fringe that they had my hair shaved off as a punishment. I cried about it for literal days, which was stupid. It was just hair. I only stopped crying when Dan bit the handler who gave the order hard enough to severely damage tendons in their hand.
