"What were you whispering about?" demanded the one who had Kieran's arm. "Planning something?"
"Just --" Kieran grunted as his arm was twisted so the bones creaked. "Just doing your job for you."
"Yeah, well, next time you do as you're told. Stupid fucking natives." His legs were kicked out from under him.
Kieran heard the swish as the guard raised his baton, and had a moment to wonder whether Ash was feeling guilty for causing trouble, or too scared to care. Then came the sickeningly familiar sensation of a blow to the head, knocking his vision skewed and making his ears ring. When he felt steady enough to get off the floor, he was alone in the cell.
He wasted half an hour or so being angry. At the guard who'd hit him, naturally. At the institution of Churchrock for creating the situation, and at the whole Theocratic Commonwealth for allowing it. But mostly at Ash for turning chicken like that. It reminded Kieran of situations he preferred not to think about.
Eventually, as it always did, the anger faded. Anger was a waste of energy. It never changed anything.
Making sure there were no guards in the area, he got out Ash's book. Ash had showed him how the code worked, sort of. He'd only half listened, so figuring out how to turn gibberish into words ate up a fair chunk of time. Kieran supposed he wouldn't bother with something this tedious if he'd had anything better to do. He translated the guard schedule into his head, trying to memorize it. Digesting the knowlege that a certain guard who'd been seen with Hartnell was on their tier tomorrow morning.
When he was confident he could remember the schedule, he started flipping pages at random, translating a word here and there to guess the subject of the page. 'Talents.' 'Arrivals.'
'Speculations.' 'Syyakwt.'
Kieran retried that last one several times, thinking he'd messed up, but he kept getting the same garbage. The page was densely packed with prose; not a list or a series of notes. It was encrypted with a different key.
Anger resurged in Kieran's gut, hotter than before. Ash was keeping secrets from him. How dare he? That sneaky little fuck! After everything Kieran had done for him! Well, it wouldn't stay secret long. Kieran would shake it out of him --
He flashed on a picture of himself grabbing, looming, threatening, and Ash cringing, that fear in his eyes not for guards or tests but for Kieran alone. Kieran's stomach instantly knotted. Slapping Ash's face to snap him out of a panic was one thing. Venting anger on him, though, raising a fist to him, leaving bruises on that pale soft skin -- Never. Never.
So he'd figure the code out himself. Ash would use some word as a key, some word that meant something to him personally. Maybe something Kieran would never guess, the name of his childhood dog or something, but he'd used 'loser unity' for the rest of it, so maybe it would be something equally topical. Something... he frowned as he groped after the concept... something that felt secret. He wouldn't use something that would enforce the feeling of being imprisoned, so it wouldn't be a simple I-spy clue like 'bars' or 'guards'. Something that reminded him of freedom.
Going faster and faster as he got used to using the letter square, Kieran tried the words that came to his mind when he thought of freedom, reasoning that the same thoughts would occur to Ash.
'Sky' and 'home' didn't work. 'Freedom' and 'out' and 'death' and 'life' didn't work.
'Storm' worked. Then stopped working. Kieran chewed his lip for a moment, thinking back along the days and nights to where 'storm' came to mind, then bent to the page again.
The key was 'storm green'.
I'm going crazy, the text read. I have to write this down to get it out of my head. Or try at least.
He's driving me insane. Sometimes I think I'll scream if he comes near me; sometimes I think I'll explode if I don't touch him. He scares me senseless, and I want him more than I want to keep breathing. He doesn't like me at all, though. I think he hates me for being weak. He could never respect me, let alone love me. I never imagined anyone could be so beautiful or so broken. Last night I sat up watching him sleep until dawn...
...How could hands that have killed be so gentle? Maybe I was wrong about his opinion of me.
Could he be so kind to someone he holds in contempt?...
...It's ridiculous of me to develop a crush and nurse it in my little diary, it's absolutely ridiculous.
This is a prison, for god's sake. I'm absurdly lucky that I'm still alive, and the fact that I haven't been beaten or raped is beyond belief. I have no right to borrow pain...
...Those eyes. Those incredible eyes. I fall into them, they tear me apart. And oh his razor smile, his earthquake voice, his starless night, his terrible strength of soul, perfect proof against the arrogance of my pity...
...How does anyone survive this? I would walk a hundred miles to make him look at me, I'd bleed out for a smile, every time he touches me I have to think of snow. If the Watch take the time to decrypt this, they'll all die of disgust I'm sure. Yes, you bastards, I'm a disgusting deviant, get your hands out of your pants. Heh. Let me describe, imaginary reader, what I would do if he'd let me...
Footsteps in the hall. Kieran snapped the book shut and jammed it into its hiding place behind the mattress.
The guards let Ash into the cell and left. Ash stood where they'd put him, staring at nothing. He wasn't crying this time. His eyes were circles of blue paper, pasted on slightly wrong.
Kieran just sat there on the edge of the bed for a while, looking at him. Thinking: You rat. You rat bastard. How dare you fall in lust with my face when you don't have clue one what's going on behind it! But as Ash kept staring, unmoving, Kieran's anger slipped away. It was spooky, the way he looked. Shut off, like an engine in the repair yard. The way he breathed long, shallow breaths, as if sleeping, gaze fixed on something past the back wall, deep inside the mountain.
Standing, Kieran walked into Ash's line of sight. Ash's eyes tracked him, but blankly. Had Warren and his students broken something in the boy's head? Turned him into a permanent idiot?
"Ash. Hey." His voice was unacceptably hoarse. He swallowed and tried again. "Ashleigh. You in there? Come on, kid, you're scaring me."
Ash blinked several times, slowly. Slowly, awareness came into his stare. Slowly, by stages, the porcelain mask of his face crumpled, melting to helpless anguish.
He let out a choking gasp, grabbed two handfuls of Kieran's shirt and buried his face in it, bruising Kieran's collarbone with his forehead. Then he just clung there. Not crying. Just hiding.
"Hey." Kieran took Ash's shoulders and pushed gently, but without effect. It would apparently take some force to pry Ash off his shirt, and applying it didn't seem like a real good idea at the moment. "You're fucking scaring me, Ash. Say something."
Ash's voice was a dry whisper. "You said you'd keep me sane. Now would be a good time."
"Okay. Okay." Kieran wrapped his arms around Ash's tense shoulders; awkward at first as if reading instructions from a book, until fury at helplessness -- Ash's and his own -- made his grip tighten convulsively. He was thinking it might be a little late for the sanity thing. He bent his face to Ash's neck, getting a mouthful of hair when he spoke. "I've got you. I have you now."
"Tighter," Ash gasped. "Squeeze me so small I disappear."
Kieran obediently crushed Ash even more closely. Ash's clutching hands pulled his shirt all askew. It was hard to breathe. Ash was strung so tight he was vibrating, drenched with cold sweat. It wasn't right that he should feel so very good in Kieran's arms. It was sick to enjoy this.
It was wrong to let Ash's frantic heartbeat shake him this way.
It was also impossible to change. This pale, needing creature huddled against his chest was a thing like a new addiction, the first dose that awakened a craving, and Kieran had always been weak on that front.
They leaned into each other for what felt like hours, long enough for Kieran's back to cramp and his legs to start trembling. He had to swallow several times before he could speak. "Let's sit down," he offered.
Ash didn't let go or raise his head, even though it made moving less than graceful. On the bunk, he curled against Kieran's side, fists still knotted in Kieran's shirt. Kieran wrapped the blanket around his shoulders, smoothed his dirty hair. He couldn't forget what Ash had written about the gentleness of his hands, and it made him self-conscious, far more careful than he might otherwise have been about enfolding Ash's shivering body in his arms. He rested his cheek against the top of Ash's head; caught himself about to plant a kiss on Ash's brow, which would have been a bad idea even if Ash weren't playing at being in love with him. He whispered soothing nothings -- whispered nursery rhymes in Iavaian, since he couldn't think of anything coherent to say. Gradually, the tension in Ash's body began to abate, until all at once he slid down to rest his head on Kieran's thigh, and Kieran wondered if he'd fainted.
He hadn't. "I didn't cry," he said dully.
"I noticed."
"I'm not okay, though."
"Well, no. We're not going to be, while we're here."
This made Ash open his eyes, but he didn't look up. Kieran watched him frown and chew his lip in profile.
"The trick to staying sane," Kieran went on, "is to accept the pain. Not the thing that caused it, but the pain itself. You just say, fine, this fucked me up. What do I have left to work with? Don't run from it, Ashes. That never helps."
After a long time thinking, during which expressions flickered across his face like shadows, Ash rolled his head to look up at Kieran. "Ashes?"
"Oh. Sorry."
"No. I like it." He went back to staring across the cell. "It's descriptive."
"Thought you didn't like descriptive nicknames."
"I like this one. That's what I have left, you see. I'm a burned-out house."
"What did they do to you?"
"I don't know. I wasn't there." Ash lifted his hand and flexed it before his eyes. "Even when they were in my head I wasn't paying attention. I was spread out all over. More in their heads than mine. And when I came back home, I found my house burned to the ground. And all my stuff is gone."
"I know the feeling. But you've got the things you need. You know who you are, and who I am, and what we have to do."
"What we have to do..."
"We have to leave. And I know how."
This made Ash sit up and fix his faded blue stare on Kieran's eyes. What he was looking for, Kieran didn't know, but not finding it seemed to make him tired. He put his forehead down on Kieran's shoulder. "You won't tell me what you're going to do."
"No."
"Why?"
Kieran smiled bitterly. "You might talk me out of it."
"Then maybe I should."
"No. Trust me, I can handle it. I'm good at getting over things. I haven't thought about Shan for weeks..." He sucked in a breath, horrified at himself. At the things that rolled steaming and shrieking through his head at the sound of that name, at his own ability to have set them aside.
He'd forgotten the scar that cut his eyebrow. The sound and smell and hot wet slap and sting of a large-caliber bullet demolishing his lover's head not twenty inches from his face. He had a scar from a piece of his lover's skull, and here he was cuddling with another blue-eyed white boy as if Shan could be replaced --
But the shudder that went through him was a solitary twitch, not the beginning of a shaking fit.
That's not how it is, he said to himself. Shan was my friend, and I miss him, but he never needed me like this. I offered Ash my help, and now I have to follow through.
"Let it slide," he said at last. "All you have to do for the next couple hours is breathe. I'll stay here if you want, but, uh, your head's kind of on a bony place."
Ash hauled himself away. He lay down, pillowing his head on his arms. "I'll be okay. It's enough to know you're near."
"Guaranteed," Kieran said with a nod to the bars, getting the ghost of a smile for it. Released from the role of comforter -- and its attendant sneaking temptations -- he got up and started stretching out. "I'll try not to make too much noise."
"I don't care. Make noise. So if I fall asleep I'll still dream you're here."
So Kieran made a point of slapping his feet against the floor as he did some forms, feeling a bit of an idiot, but at the same time oddly glad. That puzzled him. It wasn't a good time to be glad.
But there was an unfamiliar joy in being trusted so much, untrustworthy as he was. Either Ash was a singularly trusting soul, or his crush was based on something real. Kieran chose to believe the former. The latter would mean it was already too late to keep from wrecking what was left of Ash's life.
Chapter Eight
I don't like the way my head feels.
I don't like it.
Ash was peripherally aware that his thoughts were simple as a child's; a vague nauseous ache of the mind. He didn't have the strength for it to matter.
I don't like what happened to my head, to me, going outside myself. In other people's heads. It was all so loud. Some of me is missing.
His own panic had embarrassed and unnerved him, when the guards had come for him. He'd been well aware that it was pointless, that he'd save himself humiliation by going willingly, even as he'd been utterly unable to do so. Then Kieran had saved and damned him with one breath.
'You are not here.' The same mantra he'd repeated through his first few days. Coming from Kieran's lips it had become the truth. He'd felt Kieran's breath on the skin of his ear, and been drawn into that sensation, even while it lost its meaning. Sounds echoed and distorted, the act of walking had absorbed him, and when he'd passed through the intangible membrane of the ward he'd flown apart.
If Kieran's voice had not recalled him, he didn't think he would ever have come back. He would have become one of those peripheral prisoners who were moved around like stiff-jointed dolls, waiting to die. But... he had come back, gathered into himself by Kieran's enfolding arms and sawtoothed voice. He knew that memory would make his heart ache later, but the feeling was lost in the general soreness now. Sensation was muffled. Where he lay with his head on his arms, blanket tucked around him, he wasn't sure if he was cold or warm, bleeding or whole. He looked past the small mountain of his knuckles to where Kieran flowed through a series of mock-fights, underwater-slow.
That grace soothed his eyes. Kieran's heartbeat still echoed in his head. Just yesterday he'd been pleasantly miserable debating with himself whether he was in love or merely infatuated. Now it was obvious that none of those words had any real meaning. He knew one simple thing, and of that he was certain beyond the need to think about it: I'll die without him.
He meant it without metaphor; literal death waited beyond Kieran's protective shadow. Whether his mind or his body broke first, it was clear he lacked the strength to survive the damage without Kieran's help. It should have frightened him, but instead it seemed to help a little, knowing what it was he needed.
I know how things are for you, Kieran. I know how you can swallow emptiness and hold it inside. What I still don't understand is how you draw strength from that void. Are you unhappy like I am? Or are joy and sorrow two more of the things you don't perceive?
The dinner bell filtered through many layers of detachment and reached him after it had stopped ringing. It took a moment to remember that he had to do something in response to the noise.
Leaving the cell made his skin crawl. The sight of tan uniforms worried him. He dealt with it by copying Kieran, doing what Kieran did, and by this means managed to line up with the others and march to the mess hall, and did not panic and bolt. He got his tray, allowed food to be put on it, went to a table and sat down where he could see Kieran's face. Nothing else was quite real.
Kieran scooped up a chunk of overcooked potato on his spoon, so Ash did too. But when he considered putting food inside himself, in his mouth, chewing, feeling it slide down, he thought he might vomit.
"Eat," Kieran ordered.
He almost said 'I can't' again. But the sound of those words in his head was
more disgusting than the thought of food in his mouth. He ate. It tasted like wet paper.
Outside, it seemed offensive that the sun was shining. I'm in the desert, he reminded himself.
That's what the sun does here. It shines with a hard high-pitched whine and burns away everything soft on the ground. I am a soft thing being burned. Kieran is not.
"Square stance," Kieran said.
Ash frowned, trying to make these words make sense.
"First one I showed you. Feet apart and parallel."
They were going to practice fighting? Ash didn't think there was much point. "The thing I need to fight is in my head," he murmured.
"So show it you're a badass. Square stance." Kieran waited a moment, then barked, "Today, Trine."
Because it was easier to obey Kieran than argue with him, Ash did as he was told.
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