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If only we did not need to face the past to obtain the future…
Castor
“I thought you were here to make amends,” Pollux grumbles, seated at his desk in this creepy laboratory-slash-therapy-office of his. Like a proper patient with approximately all his screws loose, I lay on the metal table, fingers laced atop my stomach.
The bitter scents of magical agents being processed enter my lungs. I free them. “I am. Am I not doing that properly?”
“You’re treating me like your therapist.”
Well,sorry. I thought that was what yournew friendsdid. “Don’t be ridiculous.” I turn my face from the big grumpy dream eater. “If anything, you’re apsychiatrist. Mere therapists are not regularly licensed for the administration of drugs. Anyway… Where was I?”
“You think you’ve found a cure for turning people to stone.”
Aw, so heislistening. I’d expect nothing less of my dear Polly. “Right. Yes. That. I believe I’ve found the cure, and I’d like to test my theory. On you.”
“What?” he grunts.
“Someone—and I’m not naming any names because you don’t know them and it’s better that way—recently told me that this thing that has plagued me my entire life is all in my own head to an extent that suggests I am at liberty to be my own cure. They supplied that Pila didn’t survive my gaze because she is a being of unfettered love, but because I myself had no interest in harming her. To that end—” I clear my throat. “—would you be willing to conductsciencewith me via peering longingly into my loving gaze?”
Pollux rises, to hit me I suspect.
The last thing I anticipate is for him to rip off my blindfold.
Eyes firmly shut, I launch myself upright on the table, away from him. “What are you doing?”
“Science.” His hefty presence corners me, and his hand shackles my wrist. “Open your eyes, Tor.”
“Are you insane?” I keep my eyes squeezed together.
“If you open your eyes, you’ll be able to see what Kassandra calls mymad scientist lab,” he taunts, like I’m achild.
“Have you no fear of death?” I blurt.
“Xios says your eyes don’t kill. Worst case scenario, I turn to stone and trust the two of you to figure out how to fix that.”
Worst case?I scoff, because he must bemad. “And what of your mate? Your daughter? You’d condemn them to life without you until such a time as wefigure it out?”
“You wanna know a secret, Tor?” he asks, voice kinda too deep for comfort—given that he’s just pinned me to his crazy metal lab table.
I hiss, “Sure.”
“I’ve seen your eyes once already.”
The fight leaves me. “What?”
“I convinced myself I hadn’t, because I didn’t turn to stone. You didn’t seem to realize, either, so I thought I was delusional. But this makes sense. It was when we first met, before you bothered to cover your eyes. You were being haphazardly careful, and I was probably being idiotically curious. We weren’t friends then, but you knew I was unseelie. One of the first you’d met with half their brain in use. You were already lonely by that point. You wouldn’t have wanted to hurt me.”
I choke on my words. “Don’t you understand what all this means?”
“It means,open up.” His hand lifts, reaching toward my eyes.
I dodge my head away from his threat. “It means that every single life I have put on pause, every statue I have created, I did by my own will.” Breaths saw through my lungs. “The years I’d just…gointo human lands and watch flesh turn to rock… You were there. You know. Myfitsof violence like that were eventually what drove you and Cael away from me. I was angry. Alwaysangry. And I hated those strangers who seemed to have things I couldn’t find. I felt so lost in my rage, and I took it out on innocents. Over and over andoveragain.”
As gentle as he is firm, Pollux says, “You’re a basilisk, Castor. You were born of nothingness. Your existence came to be in emptiness. All of us have done things we’re not proud of. All of us have faced a past that’s unforgivable. All of us have long since outgrown those moments and become something new. I believe you’ve changed. I believe in you.”
I bark a laugh to cover the knot in my very soul. “What haveyouever done that’s so unforgivable? You’ve always been truly soft, truly kind, trulygood. The love I’ve felt from you has always exceeded what Cael has managed to offer because your love has never come laced in the shame of his.”
