But even with all that, I think my worst memories are when my mum would come. I was always taken to a room that looked like a teachers lounge and we’d sit at a little table to eat the food she’d made me. Sometimes I was too banged up to eat, like when they’d stick a tube down my throat for another surgery and rip open my stomach to prod at my genetically mutated insides.
She wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t meet my eyes, barely let herself glance in my direction. On the few occasions when she did, it was a shitshow, an absolute car crash of conflicting emotions. There was so much fear in her eyes, naked and exposed, and not all of it wasforme. Some of it was definitelyofme. It was an ugly fear. Weak, maybe. Justified, probably.
I never blamed her for not fighting to keep me out of the lab. I scared her, and I hated that, because my dad scared her too and I didn’t want to be anything like him, even then, before I knew how deeply his moral decay ran, right down to the root of him, like a tree with infected bark. Mum used to tell me he had good in him once, that it corroded over time until he became what he became, but I’m not sure I believed her.
I don’t get much time to examine the bedroom before my mind fades away into the black again. I slip in and out of consciousness a few times, alternating between coming awake violently and ripping at the IV line stuck in my arm and laying there gasping, trying so hard just to breathe through the panic of not knowing where I am each time.
Most times I wake up, Aaron is there. He stops me from tearing up my arm and coaches me through my panic attacks, soothing them away like a gust of wind blowing at dust. He doesn’t touch me much, his large hands hesitant as they push back my hair and trail along my shoulder, he stops himself fromgrasping my hand at least two dozen times, as if he’s afraid of hurting me with his softness. To be fair, he might be right to think so, because I’d sooner take a smack to the mouth from him than another kiss. His last few fucked me up enough as it is.
Still, he sits by my bed, watching me with the kind of intense fear that doesn’t remind me of my mum at all. There’s nothing in Aaron, not his gaze or his body language or his fucking life choices, that say he’s afraid of me, and that scares me twice as much as my dad ever did.
When I break into consciousness for about the tenth time, things are different. My entire body aches like I went three rounds with Godzilla, but my mind is clear of drugs and the IV line has been safely removed. I wouldn’t say that I feel good, or even ok, but I can inhale without trigging every pain receptor attached to the places where I was shot, so that’s something.
Getting out of bed takes more of an effort than I’d like, but once I’m on my feet and walking I don’t feel too bad. It doesn’t help that I have to stop and fold up the bottom of my jogging bottoms to stop myself from tripping over them. The blue t-shirt I’m in is at least three sizes too big as well. They’re probably Aaron’s clothes, and no, I don’t want to analyse how that makes me feel at all, thanks.
I make my way out into the landing and then down the stairs. It’s a relatively large house, possibly a cottage, rustic and quaint, like one of those homes you see in small British towns. If I’ve been taken somewhere beyond the city limits, then I’m going to file a kidnapping complaint and watch Liz cackle maniacally as she throws a rainbow of forms at me.
It’s open plan downstairs, the conjoined rooms decorated in earthy tones. Despite the old bones of the house there’s a cool freshness to the aesthetic that feels deliberate. Whoever picked out the furniture and paint was trying to create a calming atmosphere. I’m trying very hard to resist the urge to rip openone of my bullet wounds and bleed all over it, to ruin the illusion by tainting it with the black toxin running through my veins.
Aaron is sitting at the kitchen island, a bowl of cereal uneaten in front of him and a cup next to it that probably contains tea rather than coffee. He looks up at me as I amble over to him and lean my forearms on the opposite side of the island, placing myself directly across from him. It feels vaguely confrontational and I don’t make any effort to lessen the impact of that, a low buzz of hostility prickling at the underside of my skin.
It’s the first time I’ve seen him this close up since the safehouse and I wasn’t prepared for how deeply it would affect me. Maybe I should have anticipated it, but to be fair to me it’s absolutely ridiculous that it would affect me at all. Sorry for assuming my mental state had more decorum than this, holy fuck.
Aaron is the softest he’s ever been, dressed in a plain white vest that shows off his thick, muscular arms and broad chest. In the light of day his scars are more visible than they were that night at the safehouse, each of them stark white against his skin. He has one harsh slash on his bicep, probably from a knife, and another mottled knot of scars on his chest where a bullet chewed through him at some point. He looks vulnerable, with his messy dark hair and sleepy brown eyes, his mouth slightly chapped, a dry patch of toothpaste at one corner. He must have gotten up quite recently.
I’m hit with the sudden, intense urge to bite his dry mouth, to scratch at his scars like I can claw them open, expose the fire-red blood and flesh beneath. I want to rip the white fabric off his body, destroy it so he can never wear it again and throw him onto the kitchen island, hard and violent, hold him down by the throat, to tear and mark all that softness and replace it with my destruction.
It’s like my bones are quaking, the vibrations travelling through the muscle and sinew encasing them, and I don’t understand what I’m feeling or why. It’s as if any second I’m about to fly apart or implode, at risk of being torn open and collapsing inward at the same time.
Aaron has to realise something is wrong. I can see it in how his eyes track over my face, watchful and resigned like he’s aware of how tenuous things are between us, exactly how easy it would be for this moment to deteriorate into something worse, but also has no intention of backing away or shutting it down no matter how bad it gets. He doesn’t say anything, not good morning or asking if I’m ok. He seems to understand that the morning is far from good and I am most certainly not ok. Aaron North isn’t a man made for pointless questions.
I’m the one who breaks first, probably because I have more practice at it. I’ve been broken so many ways so many times I’ve lost count of the fractures. I’d need some kind of scan to map them all out. Maybe I’ve found that x-ray image already, in the reflection of Aaron’s eyes.
“Please tell me,” I demand acerbically, incredulous, “that you did notabduct meto your fuckinghouse.”
Am I more or less likely to burn this house down if Aaron has insurable interest in it? The question of our time, for sure. The sort of thing I’ll only know the answer to when I’m in the middle of doing it, when my hands are soaked in gasoline and tendrils of acrid smoke lick at the inside of my nose in warning.
Aaron exhales slowly, pushing more carbon into the room, filling up the space with his personal supply of ozone killer. It isn’t a sigh, which is lucky because if he showed any deeper emotion than this placid acceptance he’s got going on right now then I’d attack it with everything I have in me, ravage that cancerous mass of vulnerability until it lies bloody and dying at my feet.
“Please tell me,” Aaron counters coolly, “that you did not go into anest of OI agentswith your comm unit fuckingturned off.”
I ignore the implied reprimand because I can and jab a finger at the stairs. “Did I just wake up in your bed, North? Like, the one you used to sleep in with your dead wife? Should I feel special, or should she feel offended from beyond the grave?”
“My wife isn’t dead, Rohan,” Aaron says, like that’s the crux of what I just spat at him. This man’s priorities are insane. He’s insane in general for bringing me here, to what has to be his family home. His son probably learned to walk two fucking feet away from where I’m standing, what the fuck?
“Oh, well, congratulations,” I say, slapping the countertop. “Or not? Did you want her to be dead? Is that what this is? Mrs North comes home and sees this teenage boy you’ve fucked sleeping in her bed and she keels over from the sheer audacity of it all?”
Aaron just gives me one of his top ten mildly exasperated looks, nose wrinkled at the bridge and eyebrows drawn tight together. “Myex-wife is perfectly alive and, trust me, does not give a single shit who I sleep with.”
Not that I care what box he’d check on any possible tax returns, but it makes me feel some kind of way to have it confirmed there’s a random, faceless woman out there who knows what the inside of Aaron’s mouth tastes like. I think I preferred it when I assumed she was dead and had already taken that knowledge into the dirt with her.
“Why’d she divorce you?” I can’t help but prod, the acidic pain in the back of my throat rising like the build up of bile. “Did you cheat on her with another junior agent with daddy issues? Am I part of an insidious pattern of behaviour? Am I abad coping mechanism?”
Aaron gets down from his seat and walks over to a yellow teapot sitting on the side. It has fucking daisies on it. I am in a house where Aaron’s marriage broke down and presumably he got to keep the teapot in their divorce. What a world. What a time to be not-dead. Holy fuck.
I need to get out of here as soon as possible before I lose my actual mind and start wanting to embroider pillows or some other such evil.
Aaron takes out a plain white mug from one of the cupboards and pours coffee into it. He shoves the cup in my direction and waits until I take it from him. He stands far enough away from me that I don’t feel boxed in by his very existence in my proximity, but our fingers brush when the mug passes from him to me. Small electric shocks spark along every inch of skin he touches. It’s too fast for me to react, which is good because if he’d lingered I would have been forced to use my power against him. I still might if he bridges the distance any more than he already has.
