I still hadn’t slept, but I was getting more and more tired.
“You should take a shower,” Angie urged me.
I looked down at myself, realized I was wearing combat clothes from the beach, that I probably had sand inside my underwear and shirt and bra, and in my hair. I tried to think back on how long I’d been sitting there, drinking the occasional beer and eating food when someone handed me a bowl with rice and veggies in it. I was still thinking about it, when someone knocked on the door again, hard that time.
I could feel him there, and something told me that this time, I wasn’t going to be able to just wish him away. I had my light shielded, just like I had pretty much since I’d gotten here, but I knew that wouldn’t help me, either.
That time, he scarcely bothered with Angie at all when she answered the door.
I heard him say something to her, something I couldn’t make out, then he raised his voice.
“Alyson!” he said. His voice came out harsh, close to a command. He put light into his voice that time, enough that I felt myself tense where I sat on the couch. “Alyson! Come out here. Now. Or I’m coming in there.”
He didn’t have to tell me he meant it. I could feel that he meant it.
I saw Jaden frown, right before he started to regain his feet.
That time, I got up before he did.
They all froze when they saw me stand, staring at me. Even Sasquatch looked over, without pausing his game, so that his animated avatar got pummeled by the zombies he’d been fighting onscreen. I stared, weirdly fascinated when they began chewing on the avatar’s different body parts. Then I blinked, looking back at the rest of them.
I stood there, fighting for equilibrium, then I met Jaden’s gaze.
“It’s okay. I should go.” I looked around at all of them. Frankie, where she sat next to Sasquatch on the couch, looking almost like a kid where she huddled next to his big form. Jaden, with his long hair and his wiry frame from being on the ship and probably from working crazy hours with Dante and all of the rest of them. Angie, where she stood by the door, watching me with a worried expression on her face.
“Thanks,” I said, not sure what else to say.
“If he’s an asshole, come back,” Frankie said. She’d paused her player, and it stood in a strange waiting pose, swaying slightly as the game waited for her to return. “Seriously,” she said, her dark eyes mirroring the seriousness. “You can stay with us anytime,” she said.
Sasquatch nodded, his brown eyes holding sympathy as he looked up at me. “Like, anytime, Allie-potali,” he said, gripping the game console in one hand as he frowned towards the door. “He seems like a dick, seriously,” he added, his voice lower. “...A real ass-munch fuckwad.”
I nodded, fighting to smile, and just nodded again.
“Thanks,” I said again.
Then, not sure what else to say, I turned and walked towards the door.
I felt more or less like I was in my body again, even if I didn’t exactly feel normal. More to the point, I didn’t feel like I had in the cafeteria with Jon and Wreg, where I had no idea where I was or what was happening. I felt like I knew who I was, where I was, even if I didn’t really care about any of it. Even the thought of dealing with it made me feel sick.
I was really fucking tired, though.
My whole body hurt when I walked across the common space to the door. When I saw Revik standing there, the look on his face felt closest to a punch, although I didn’t stare at him long enough to figure out what his expression meant, precisely. Looking up at him, I could only hold his gaze for a few seconds before I looked at Angeline, and fought with words.
“Thanks, Angie,” I said finally.
She threw her arms around me, wrapping them around my shoulders and back. She stood there, as if trying to make me feel better through the sheer force of her own will. As she held me, she also rubbed my back with one hand, gripping me a few seconds longer than a normal goodbye. It touched me, enough to break through some of the fog that still seemed to be strangling my light. When she let go, I found myself clutching her arms, and it took me a few seconds longer to release her.
She looked at Revik then, frowning.
“You’re a real asshole, you know that?” she said, her voice cold.
When I turned, Revik wasn’t looking at her, though, he was looking at me. His eyes studied my face, even as I felt his light skirting around me cautiously, as if trying to read me without getting too close. I couldn’t hold his gaze that time, either.
“Come back anytime,” Angie said, louder. It still felt like she was talking to Revik, maybe more than she was talking to me. “Anytime you want, Allie. You can stay as long as you want, too.”
Revik gave her a hard look that time.
I felt anger on him, even as his fingers closed around my arm. He tugged at me gently, trying to get me out of that doorway, and when I glanced behind me that time, I felt as much as saw the real source of his anger. Jaden stood there, his blue eyes cold, staring at Revik.
He stared at where Revik held my arm, his face a pale mask.
“Yeah, Allie,” Jaden said. He raised his voice, even more than Angie had. “You can come live with us if you want. Just say the word. We have room. Fuck. We’ll make room...even if it means sharing beds. You can be sure of that...”
I felt another hard pulse of anger off Revik, even as he enveloped me in a cloak of his light, pulling me closer to him.
That time, it felt almost protective.
Before I could think about that, either, we’d started walking.
Or really, Revik started walking, and I followed him.
We were at least fifteen or so steps further down the hall and away from that door, when the door closed behind us. I felt Angie there again, briefly, indecision in her light.
She thought she’d given me to an abuser. She’d let my husband come and collect me, and she couldn’t decide if she’d done the right thing.
I wished I could tell her it would be all right, but I knew how that would sound, too.
I don’t remember telling them anything, truthfully, about why I was there...but I could guess how I must have looked, showing up at their door. They knew Revik as Syrimne, as a killer. They knew him as someone who would probably hurt his wife, since he’d killed so many before. I hadn’t wanted to talk to them when he came for me.
Jon might have said something to them.
Hell, I might have. I wished I could remember. I had no idea what I’d said to them, when I first got there, or even in the few hours after that.
I remembered Angie at the door, yelling at someone not long after I got there.
Someone who, in my slightly less foggy memories, now sounded to my mind like Jon. But of course Jon would have come here first. Revik would have asked him to come. Balidor might have asked Jon to try and talk to me, too. They would have sent him, because Jon knew Angie and the others...but they hadn’t let Jon through that door, either.
Thinking about that, I felt a sudden flood of warmth for my old friends, for their attempts to protect me from the harm that they saw. They’d been trying to keep me safe, in their own way, if only by keeping them from coming in the door.
I thought all of that, even as Angie finally shut the door behind me.
As soon as that door shut, the anger on Revik seemed to dissipate, like a cloud torn apart by wind. He stopped walking in the corridor at once, looking me over with his eyes and light, maybe twenty yards away from the door to the room that housed what remained of my old life, and the people I had known before I met him.
As Revik looked me over, his eyes turned openly cautious once more.
I saw him noticing my clothes, and probably how I smelled from the look on his face.
When he spoke, he said the last thing I expected him to say, though.
“Are you stoned?” he said, still looking me over.
I tried to remember when I smoked that joint with Sasquatch, and frowned.
The others had been smoking too, so it must have been on my clothes. I knew the smell might be there from later joints they smoked, Sasquatch and Jaden and Frankie. It could have lingered in my hair and clothes, long after it left my system. I couldn’t think through everything else in my light well enough to decide what would be the most truthful answer to his question, though. I thought maybe I had been stoned the night before.
I know I stopped accepting joints when I got dizzy. I waved all of the offers off after that, but I couldn’t remember how long ago that really was.
Subjectively, it felt like days.
When I didn’t answer right away, Revik exhaled. I felt another pulse of anger leave his light, although again, it didn’t feel aimed at me.
I don’t know if he read my light for the answer to his question, either, or if he just made up his own mind, based on my silence and maybe the expression on my face. In the end, I felt him decide to let it go, although it seemed to take him more than one try. Clicking under his breath, Revik shook his head, seer-fashion, as if pushing it once and for all from his light.
He took my hand then, his fingers firm.
“Come on,” he said, his voice gruff.
He tugged on my arm gently again, his light asking me to go with him down the green and gray corridor, back towards the middle of the ship.
I didn’t try to fight him.
The thought of fighting him never crossed my mind, really. I didn’t feel angry, or anything much at all, not towards him.
I didn’t ask him where we were going.
HE BROUGHT ME back to the tank.
We passed people on the way who stared at us. The seers manning the security station outside the tank itself stared at us, too, and I took in their faces and eyes without really tracking any one of them.
Revik spoke to them, but I didn’t really listen to that, either.
Mostly, I heard him tell them to leave us alone.
I felt them resist that request, although I didn’t probe that very deeply, either.
I heard Revik talk to at least one person on the comm on the way there, too, but I only heard a handful of those words. I heard him say to someone, “Yeah, I have her,” not long before he clicked off, glancing at me, as if to make sure I was still the one holding his hand. I don’t remember him saying anything to me directly, though, as he led me down the corridor and to the stairs leading to the lower floors.
I think the lack of sleep was seriously catching up to me by then.
Even so, when we finally got past all of the security protocols to get us back inside the locked down construct of the tank, he didn’t let go of me after he brought me inside and they swung the heavy door shut behind us. Instead, he led me straight to the washroom, through the door that stood to the left of his desk.
Tugging me in there with him gently but insistently, he didn’t let go of my hand as he leaned down to punch in keys to turn on the water and then to adjust the temperature controls.
He didn’t say anything after he got the shower water on, either.
Frowning slightly, he just turned to me, and made a motion with one hand, a seer’s shorthand for asking permission.
Seeing him looking at my clothes, I nodded.
He didn’t wait, but started undressing me right there.
I found myself flinching slightly, feeling pain on him, and on myself, but I didn’t shy away from his fingers. He got the combat shirt off me and started unbuckling my belt, tugging my pants down past my hips and then squatting down to take the last of my clothes off my feet and ankles.
I saw sand fall to the floor from when we’d been on the beach. I saw it from the pants, and then from my underwear, too. I saw him look down at that, as if stuck on that single fact for a few beats of time, even as more pain left his light.
He still didn’t say anything, though.
Instead he regained his feet, after stuffing my clothes in the chute in the wall. He remained in front of me as he started to undress himself, beginning pretty much the instant he had me naked. Realizing he intended to shower with me, I tried to decide how I felt about that.
But I didn’t really...feel about it. Not right then.
Not enough to have a strong opinion. So I just stood there, watching as he shoved his shirt and then his pants through the same hole in the wall that he’d used to get rid of mine. I watched as he unhooked the hose from the shower then, and washed the sand into the drain on the tile floor with warm water. I watched it go, still not moving.
Then he took my hand.
He led me into the cubicle and under the hot water. I stood there as he washed me off with soap, then with the same hose he’d used on the floor. He washed my whole body twice, then stood behind me and shampooed my hair.
He still didn’t really talk to me. I heard him as he muttered a few times, mostly about me smelling like smoke, but I couldn’t tell if that was directed at me particularly, either. I felt pain on him, too, but he seemed to be trying to control that, or at least to keep the worst of it out of my light. The third time he started muttering under his breath, that time in Russian so I couldn’t understand him, I glanced up and back at him.
When he didn’t meet my gaze, I just looked at his face, then his body, then down at his erection. He didn’t try to hide it from me, not exactly, but he took hold of my chin, and moved it gently away so that I wasn’t looking at him there, either.
Then he went back to scrubbing sand and smoke out of my hair with his fingers.
He shampooed it three times before he seemed to think it was enough.
After he’d rinsed off all of the soap and turned off the water, he wrapped me in one of the big towels. He steered me into the other room, his hands still light on my shoulders and back, but holding a denser purpose again.
I felt better. A lot better. But yeah, still pretty weird.
And now I felt like I was supposed to talk to him, too, and I wasn’t sure how, or even if I had anything to say. I wondered if he’d let me sleep first, but when he sat down next to me on the bed, also with a towel wrapped around him, but only his waist, he didn’t lay down, or move in such a way that would have made it easy for me to lay down, either. I would have had to climb over him to the other side of the bed, essentially, and pull back the covers on that end.
I didn’t, though. I could feel him wanting to talk to me, so I just sat there instead.
After another pause, he motioned for me to turn around again, and I realized he was holding one of those spiky brushes for my hair.
I just sat there again, while he combed the tangles out of my long hair.
I was thinking again, though...as well as I could, anyway. That pain had come back to my chest, but everything else still felt pretty numb. Maybe that’s why it seemed like a good idea to talk then, before the rest of my light came back for real.
“I need to sleep,” I told him, facing the wall as he sat behind me.
He didn’t answer.
Feeling that pain in my chest worsen, I exhaled again, fighting to think about what to say, the words that had been in my head off and on for the past few days.
“I’m sorry I left,” I told him.
He stopped brushing my hair. He didn’t say anything, though, so I swallowed, still not looking back at him.
“I’ll do whatever you want, Revik,” I said. “I just...I don’t know how to...end this.”
“End what?” he said.
I glanced back at him that time, in spite of myself, frowning. “This,” I said, a little at a loss. “This...thing I created. Leaving like I did.”
He only looked at me, wearing his infiltrator face.
“You think that’s the problem?” he said. “That you left?”
I looked down at his body, at the dark towel he wore around his waist. I had a sudden impulse to ask him to turn around, so I could see his back, so I could look at what Ullysa had done to him. I didn’t, though.
Instead I looked up again, meeting his gaze.
“I want to talk about it,” I told him. “Just not now.”
“Talk about what?” he said. “What do you think we need to talk about, Allie?”
I blinked, then looked down at his chest, thinking about his back again. Not wanting him to hear that either, I shook my head, bringing my eyes back up to his face again.
“Maybe she could show me,” I said finally. “...Next time. Maybe I could go, and she could show me how. We could talk about that.”
Pain flickered over his expression.
It hit him suddenly...intensely enough that he winced, looking away from me. I felt him fight to control it briefly, right before it worsened. After a few more seconds, when he didn’t speak, I laid a hand on his leg over the towel.
“Revik,” I said, at a loss again. “It’s all right.”
He shook his head, gripping my wrist in his hand.
“I’m just tired,” I said. “Too tired to talk about this. But I will. I promise I will. We’ll figure it out...okay?”
For a long time, he just looked down at where he held my wrist, his expression unmoving. I felt him fighting with his own feelings. I felt him thinking, too, even as those feelings grew more intense. I couldn’t untangle any of it, though. I couldn’t even be sure if he was thinking about me, or if something else was bothering him about what I’d said.
I didn’t want to deal with his shame though, or any of the crap we’d already been over and over again in the tank.
I wanted to help him with this, though.
He let out a strangled laugh.
When I looked up that time, he wiped his eyes with his free hand, gripping me tighter around the wrist with his other fingers. He didn’t meet my gaze, but I felt something go through his light again, what felt like anger. He still didn’t aim it at me, at least not directly, but I felt the frustration wound into that, and a denser want.
“You’ll do anything I want?” he said then, his voice gruff.
I felt my chest clench a little.
A flicker of Ditrini slid through my mind and light, there and gone.
I couldn’t fight him anymore, though. I knew I couldn’t.
Allie's War Season Four Page 103
