I shift to get a better look, but it only reminds me I’m injured. Pain screams up my left side from my hip to my shoulder, and then it seems to echo through my body like a bell being rung.
A whimper slips out of me, and my first thought is to look for Father, in case he can hear me. It’s bad enough that I nearly got taken out by our mortal enemies. If he sees me whimpering and whining about it like a child, he might be tempted to finish the job himself.
Father hates displays of weakness and submission more than anything. He says it goes against everything we stand for. Andright now, I feel weaker and more fragile than I knew was possible.
My entire body aches and weighs me so heavily into whatever rough fabric I’m lying on that I’m threatening to dissolve through to the floor. But it’s heavy in an unstable way. Like those ships at the bottom of the ocean covered in rust and barnacles. They’re still a thousand tons of dead weight but look like one well-placed hit could cause them to shatter.
There’s a rustling noise somewhere, but I can’t turn my head far enough to see. It sounds like someone moving toward me, which makes me tense defensively. Not that I would be able to fight even the most meager threat at this point. Why bother trying?
My stomach cramps painfully while the wound in my hip throbs, and I wonder if it would have been easier if the Aryans had just shot me in the head.
“Tadhg?”
I hear a voice but still can’t make out a face. And I’m not sure who would be speaking, because no one’s called me anything but Savage in years.
Unless… Did Father use my real name before? Or was that some kind of fever dream?
Everything hurts too much to care.
Warm, soft hands touch my face. I flinch back at first, but the grip is too strong and I’m being turned to look into a pair of big, dark blue eyes. As soon as I see Micah’s face again, the other memories filter back, and I realize this isn’t the first time I’ve woken up since they dragged me away from the courthouse.
The fog inside my head clears. We drove for a long time, while I gradually felt sicker and sicker. I must have had a fever, because everything I remember from the drive is distorted and unreal.
I was dreaming about me and Micah when we were kids, and I thought it might be a sign I was dying. Or already dead and had somehow snuck my way into something passing for a decent afterlife.
Then I woke up feeling mostly lucid, and Micah was here. All grown up and moving around me with a level of self-assured confidence I barely recognized.
Father was here too, along with Colm and the others. But now, everything’s quiet.
Micah’s eyes search my face as he touches me, pressing on my skin in different places like he’s looking for something. At some point he must have turned on a lamp, because a soft orange light is casting deep shadows on his face. I don’t know what to say, so I take a look at him while he’s feeling my face, peeling back my eyelids, and pressing his fingers against my throat over my fluttering pulse, like a horse about to be sold at auction.
He’s lost the softness in his face, although his eyes are still just as big and bright. His cheeks used to be round; now he has the kind of cheekbones you see on models or TikTok stars that look like they could cut glass, and his lips have that kind of permanent pout everybody wants as well. He looks beautiful, in a delicate, sophisticated sort of way. The total opposite of everything I’m used to looking at.
He looks grown up.
“You’re really here?”
Those are the first words that actually make their way out of my mouth. They come out a little slurred, but I’m a lot more with it than I was any of the other times I woke up. Micah smiles a little, and I see the hint of a dimple that makes him look more like the boy in my memories.
Which makes me want to put a real smile on his face, but I don’t know if I have that in me right now. I blink a few moretimes to snap my brain back to reality and then try to shuffle myself up into a seated position, but the pain stops me before I get anywhere.
“Stop that,” Micah hisses, putting his hands on my shoulders to keep me in the same position. “You’re lucky to be alive, you great big buffoon of a man. Do you have any idea how scared I was? Your scumbag father darkens my doorstep after all these years, only to put me in charge of saving you from whatever disaster he got you into. I swear to god, Tadhg, if you crawl back into my life now only to die on me, I will never forgive you. I will fucking hara-kiri myself and follow you to the afterlife so I can scold you forever. Do you understand?”
He’s staring at me, and his big Bambi eyes are so wide and serious I can’t look away. It’s like a wall in my mind comes crashing down, and I remember exactly what it feels like to have someone in the world give a shit whether you live or die. Not because of what they need you for, but because they care about you.
I haven’t had that since the day he left, and I think I forced myself to forget.
Now he’s holding my face in his tender hands and looking at me like he wants me to live. The small, slithering thing inside my chest that had been steadily whispering to me how much better it might have been if I’d died is retreating in the face of all that warmth.
“Tadhg?”
His voice is soft and earnest, and the sound is so real and close to me it makes my chest crumple like a soda can being stepped on.
My throat tightens, heat rushes to my face, and suddenly, every breath I take feels like it’s a whole-body process, until I’m rocking forward, like I’m rolling on the ocean. My brain fills with static, and my thoughts are an indistinct jumble I can’t pickthrough. The only things I’m able to focus on are the way my breaths are speeding up, rolling through my body one crashing wave at a time, and Micah’s face.
I’m not really aware that I’m crying. Crying isn’t something I’m supposed to do. Ever.
Of course, like everything else that Father expects me to be‘better than’, it’s something I do all the fucking time.
