--XVI--

I looked from the obsidian black sky above us- an unrelenting endless darkness, it seemed, not with any clouds that I could make out- and down to Malcolm's face. I remember that was difficult to tell my tears from the rain, or his tears from the rain- or whichever tears were from his eyes or the ones which were my own. They were falling onto him; I didn't care.

Perhaps, enough water to drown in. I know I drowned.

The dead bodies of both Skittles and Crayon were just yards away. White fur. White fur that protected hearts that were no longer beating. I refused to look. Too much.

"Chris." Malcolm's voice was almost as ragged as mine. Almost. He wasn't poisoned- at least not that I could tell. I wondered what else happened; at times Malcolm couldn't use his abilities. Was it just the aftereffects of the Vystir incident? Maybe that was the case, or Joe incapacitated him early, before Malc could do anything. I'm calling the attacker Joe now, I thought. That makes things easier. The un-colored liquid from my eyes, that was starting to run down onto my nose and onto my lip and into my mouth, was no longer water. Not for the first time, I tasted my blood. I am in such a happy place. Happy place, happy place. Happy happy. I didn't want to know who the attacker was anymore. I couldn't care about that. It felt as though I couldn't care about anything. I heard Marie's voice, calling my name. Calling me.

Asking me to save her.

But Joe is a nice friendly name. Let's call the attacker Joe.

A strange wave of nausea and very uneven gravity washed over my entire body. An invisible shockwave of grief and exhaustion. Searing hot.

Joe is going to be sitting in a chair.

Wyatt is going to set the chair on fire.

I am going to personally tie Joe to the chair myself.

My left hand twitched.

I didn't mean it. I could never tie anyone, to anything, after the horrors that were inflicted upon me... at an age much too young, in places that were beyond miserable, by "people" that were beyond wretched, beyond cursed, beyond totally evil.

To even call them people at all: a severely undeserved compliment.

I shut my eyes for just one moment, the barrage of memories like explosions in the sky; towers and castles coming down onto the earth, all coming down, in pieces. Many times, I was forced to swallow fear like it was water.

I was forced to swallow a lot of things.

So.

Many.

Different.

Things.

Because those "people" did not stop at chemicals.

Painful: an understatement.

Traumatic: an understatement.

I will be the one to tell you:

Monsters are real. They just look like people.

There, in the rain, under the darkness, and under the storm clouds that I practically couldn't even see, I began to hum one of the songs I wrote; I wrote hundreds of them.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

The pain told me where Malcolm's injuries were.

I can't think anymore

"It's too much," Malc said to me, in the same voice that he used to tell me I wasn't being kidnapped or harmed, the day I woke up in his house for the first time, after I jumped off Century Spire. "Chris, please." Somewhere between our heavy breaths mixing and the thousands of raindrops hitting concrete, I heard him sniff. "I don't want you to hurt."

What-

Shut the EFF UP Malc

Idiot needs to lie to me when I am in SO MUCH PAIN

What did he say?

It took me a second to process. I felt my lips move, almost automatically.

"When did anybody care if I was hurting?" I whispered, without any thought or tact. Literally without thought entirely.

I shook my head.

HE IS NOT LYING

No, he wasn't.

But it took me a while to figure that out.

ORBI

PLOSIONSSSSSSSS

Black spots started to obscure my vision. He cared... he did care. I had to believe it. Sometimes, I did.

Happy place

Sometimes, I couldn't.

Happy place...

I remembered Belinda Klein's snake tattoos, the ones that glared at me, staring as the sheets of forged contracts, covert and overt operation proposals, investigations, facial composites, instructions, and crime records flew all around me and down onto the floor. Seething. Their red eyes trying to brand into me that I should not get involved.

Not to get involved. I was told not to get involved.

This...

Was this all... my fault?

I repeated myself. "When did anybody ever care, if I was hurting?" It was still soft as a whisper. I closed my eyes again. It never happened.

I blinked my eyes open and forced myself to look at Skittles. A pool of slightly darker gray surrounded the dead, wet body. I later learned that it was blood.

Malcolm snarled and growled in his gruff Port accent.

"When Kaylee got you the drive. When Caleb manipulated computers for you." He was begging me to stop, yet I felt nothing, apart from the completely shattered bone in the wrong place and the warmth that I somehow always felt with him. "When James saved you." He paused. "When I saved you."

Did he save me? He did- or he probably did. He did, I remember thinking to myself. And I knew it. But there was not one good thing that I could call to mind at that time; not one good thing existed in that place and in that moment. If I had any good memories at all, from anywhere at all... they were nowhere. Why did these people waste time on me? In spite of all of the gratitude I usually felt toward them, I felt only like a weight, an abhorrent thing, a waste- something ugly and awful; something nobody should accept, something that should be destroyed.

It was on his face, the pleading. His hair was some color between russet and chestnut brown, with just a few strands of silver every here and there. Like coffee. It was the color of his mustache and beard, too. His eyes were blue, but not like Scott's or Caleb's- it was deep blue. Ultramarine.

A color I didn't know existed until I met him; it was the color that, at that moment, my eyes could no longer pick up on. I said nothing. I was shivering and it wasn't the rain; it was the memories.

I was a marshmallow tossed into a jet engine.

"Chris!" he insisted, as the rain grew stronger; as the rain became an almost-welcome distraction. "I can't see you like this."

I kept expecting Crayon to bark at me. To tell me it was time to pack up and go, like he would on my Thursday workouts running in the woods- where he would follow me- to tell me it was time to call it a day, get him a bagel from Pacifico, take a shower, have a hot dinner of potatoes or mushrooms or artichokes, on the sand beside the seawater- with Malcolm beside us; with Skittles beside us. Skittles. The adorable white Husky. I heard her little yips in my head; I heard the way she always greeted me after a high-level target takedown mission or after an SRA.

"Then don't-" I inhaled a sharp breath, held it, and breathed out as slowly as I could.

The pain was beyond blinding; more than an open drain underneath your bathtub of sanity, and yet still more than the pain... were the memories.

I saw streaks of black appear under my eyes. Little memories- of the tortures Kaylee and I endured- swam in my befuddled mind.

I felt my eyes go from gray to something else, something maybe close to white, close to transparent, close to invisible, close to nonexistent.

I had nightmares when I slept at night; when I walked past the ruins of that destroyed school- the one in the Lowdown and not the one in the Suburbs- flashes of blood and rope and smoke and dead bodies swam in front of me.

I can't see you like this, was what he said. Strands of my hair- black and simultaneously more black than usual- guided the rainwater and tears down my face, down my neck.

Down onto the ground which I was lower than.

"Then don't look."