Past
Rohan
It tastes like metal and salt, that distinct bite of sodium and iron flooding my mouth in a violent torrent. I run my tongue along the front of my teeth, smearing the black across the white, and bare them at the bathroom mirror.
As with most things in my dad’s opulently decorated house, the mirror is grander than it needs to be, easily more than three times my size, taking up the entirety of the wall behind the sink. I look small standing in the middle of all that spotless glass.
“You shouldn’t provoke him, beta,” Mum sighs, placing her hands on my shoulders, her slim fingers lightly squeezing them in reprimand.
I smile at myself in the mirror, less feral this time, but still showing off teeth stained by my black Liquid Onyx blood. My lip is split from where my dad’s wedding ring bit into it. I canalready feel the cut healing, skin knitting back together, blood clotted and preserved before more can escape into my mouth.
“But then how else would I get him to lose his temper and hit me?” I ask guilelessly. “It’s our whole father-sonthing.”
Mum frowns, her delicate, pretty features contorting into an expression of displeasure. She doesn’t like it when I talk that way, which is a real fucking shame because it’s the only language that fits around my tongue. Anything else just comes out sounding garbled and broken, like I’m trying to speak Spanish from a travel guide.
We don’t look much alike. I’m my father’s son, really. We have the same black eyes and sharp, aristocratic facial features. The only things I have of my mother’s are my dark complexion and possibly her ability to smile with a split lip and not wince at the sting.
Mum sighs again, long and weary, like she’s already done arguing with me about this despite the fact we’re not ten seconds into it. Maybe it’s because we’ve had this exact interaction at least a thousand times before. Although to be fair, sometimes she’s the one with the blood on her teeth, flaming red, not charcoal black, and I’m the one standing behind her trying to make it better.
Either way, this is how it goes. We’ll do something to bother him—whether it seems rational or not is irrelevant—then Dad will go off on one. He’ll take a swipe, and we’ll bear it as we’ve trained ourselves to do. Brace for more, disassociate the emotions from the pain. Do not run. Do not cower. Do not fight back.
In the end, when the rage abates, and the white noise recedes, there’s nothing left to do but a quick cleanup job in the nearest bathroom. Easy. Almost boorishly so these days, a point no one makes when they talk about getting hit. What do you do when fear gives way to resignation? It takes all the anticipation out ofit, and I don’t want to sound like a brat, but I depended on that hiked-up, sickening anxiety to keep my mind occupied.
When I’ve got nothing to focus on, my mouth goes to work at filling the void, and that just leads to more archaic violence.
Mum squeezes my shoulders again, except this time she doesn’t let go. Her fingers dig in harshly, and she turns me around to face her. I let her because I’m not petty on my better days, and I love my mum even if she is half the reason I’m here, dealing with all this shit.
She gives me a small shake back and forth, staring hard at my face. I keep wondering if she sees as much of him in me as I do. Except she can’t, because if she did, she would be morally obligated to do something about it. I’m thinking that’s how I’ll go one day. Someone who doesn’t love me will see the vestiges of Ian Stone that sit too close to the surface, and they’ll do the responsible thing. When the time comes, I can’t decide if I’ll fight to keep the life I didn’t choose, and most days, can’t bring myself to want.
At least my survival instincts, or lack thereof, will be a surprise for everybody. I, unlike a lot of people it seems, enjoy a good shock to the system every now and then.
“You’re eighteen now, Rohan. Too old to act like a rebellious teenager,” Mum says on the tail end of another sigh.
I tilt my head, pretending to consider the statement. “Is there a particular brand of teenager you’d prefer I inhabit? I’ll do anything but sporty. I don’t look good in the uniforms, and I don’t run recreationally unless there’s something significantly terrifying chasing me.”
Mum raises one of her hands and slaps me upside the head. Not hard, just a quick scold. She looks disappointed in me, which is to be expected when I refuse to read off the same script as her. She took a long time writing that thing, and improv is not appreciated. I get it.
She opens her mouth, perhaps to tell me off again, but seems to rethink it. She lets go of my shoulders and steps back, putting some much-needed space between us.
“I’m going to make dinner. Can you stay to help me, or are you expected at the lab this afternoon?”
I’m always expected at the lab. If it weren’t for Mum demanding I come home and pretend like we’re a family rather than too-friendly inmates at a very exclusive prison, Dad would have me sleeping in one of Obsidian Inc.’s labs, an idea I wouldn’t be opposed to under different circumstances. But Obsidian Inc. labs and facilities are as much prisons to me as my childhood home. There’s no sanctuary to be found, no place I can go that wasn’t built by my dad to contain the things he needs to control, which is everything.
“No,” I lie to her. “I can stay.” She deserves some good lies every now and then, to combat the truly monstrous ones she tells herself.
Mum smiles at me, lips spread in jagged relief, like a glass bottle with the head cracked off. She grabs my hand and drags me toward the kitchen as if I didn’t just agree to go there of my own free will. I suppose she’s used to promises that slip and dissipate from her grasp like smoke; better to hold on to something when it’s still solid and never let it go.
For the rest of the afternoon, Mum teaches me how to make a series of new dishes, the ones her mum didn’t teach her. She only cooks those on good days, so the reminder of the bad doesn’t get stuck together with those memories. Mum doesn’t need to cook. We have enough money for a restaurant’s worth of chefs, but she says she likes to do it, and she thinks I should learn how to make my own food. Just in case, she says.
In case of what, I don’t ask. I just do what she wants because it’s easier, and because she occasionally looks peaceful doing it. I soak in that peace like it belongs to me, and on the very, verygood days, when there’s the two of us alone together for hours on end as we cut vegetables and mix spices and stir food in steaming hot pots, I think maybe it really does.
Present
Leo
Blood like arsenic burning through pulsing veins
throat raw from screaming, wet flesh cracked like chasms in quake-torn Earth
