Not outside the tank now.
19
Tobias
Nothing was as it had been before, and pretending otherwise would have been an insult to both of us.
Cove no longer moved through the house as though he belonged there by choice. He no longer entered his office with his bag slipping from one shoulder, easy excitement radiating through his body. He no longer forgot himself in my presence with the same unguarded ease, no longer turned to me when a thought struck him, no longer looked at me without first remembering that he was meant to be afraid.
But he still looked at the fish.
And that mattered.
It had become our compromise, if such a word could be applied to anything so unequal. Each morning, after breakfast, after the bathroom, after whatever new argument we had over whether his captivity could be softened enough to stop beingconsidered captivity, which he said it could not, though I continued trying, we would leave the secure room and make our way through the halls toward the aquarium wing.
At first, he had required the cuff.
He still required the cuff.
That was what I told myself, even on mornings when he was too tired or sore to manage more than a slow, resentful limp beside me. The cuff remained because the alternative was risk, and risk had already dragged him to the edge of a cliff once. I would not permit it a second opportunity.
Cove hated the cuff.
He hated it openly, creatively, and without any of the politeness he had once tried to preserve around me. The first time I fastened it around his wrist, he cursed me out and leveled me with a piercing glare. The second time, he grunted and huffed and tugged. The third, he only held out his wrist without looking at me, and that had been worse.
Anger, I could endure.
Quiet compliance disturbed me.
It suggested erosion.
I did not want Cove eroded.
I wanted him adapted, perhaps. Acclimated. Reoriented around the new limitations of his life until he could understand that I was not his enemy, even if I had become his captor.
But not diminished.
Neverdiminished.
So I gave him the fish.
Not completely, not with the freedom he wanted, but enough that he could breathe easier. Enough that, for a short span each day, he stopped looking like a dead man walking.
He would stand beside the tanks with his cuffed wrist linked to mine, and I would watch him come alive by increments.
The first morning, he had only looked.
He leaned against me more than he wanted to because his ankle still pained him, and he stared at the puffer tank as if the animal had become a friend he had been forbidden to call.
The puffer had rushed the glass the moment Cove entered.
Cove had cried.
Not loudly.
Not in the way he had cried on the cliff or in the room that first night, fractured and frightened beyond language. This had been quieter, more humiliating to him, I think. His eyes had filled, his mouth had tightened, and he had looked away quickly, blinking hard as though tears could be dismissed if one refused to acknowledge them.
I did not speak.
