The Bargaining Path

by T. Rudacille

  ***

  Dr. Miletus, the best doctor on all of Pangaea, according to Adam, had been the one to treat me. She was standing right beside my bed and yet I heard her voice as though she were in an adjacent room speaking to them. She was telling James and Adam that the salve on my back needed to be rinsed off, as some of the venom was still clinging to it, not to mention the bacteria from their mouths that had transmitted when they had sucked the venom out.

  She was telling them that because I was lying down, and my body was not in a state of stress, I had not yet experienced the “aftershocks.” However, once I stood, there was an eighty percent chance that I would begin to suffer through milder episodes of what I had experienced earlier.

  As James and Adam eased me into the bathroom, my heart began to beat rapidly. At first, I was only whimpering, and then tears were falling from my eyes, and I was sobbing weakly.

  “It is alright, darling.” Adam was telling me as they walked me along. “It is only for a few minutes that you must stand, and then you can rest. I promise you. This will not be for long.”

  The sound of the shower startled me almost cruelly. Adam was holding me by himself while James moved about the bathroom, gathering up towels for us both and opening the bottles of cleaning ointment the doctors had given him. The sound of the water banging deafeningly against the wooden tub made me press one of my ears against Adam's chest and cover my other ear with my hand to stifle the sound. My entire body trembled; when I thought of water, I thought of Lucien.

  “Sit her up on the sink.” James told him, and Adam lifted me gently.

  “They're going to find us. And we won't get away again.” I was telling Adam desperately, “We won't get lucky like that again. And he hit me with it... and maybe if I hadn't fought like that, he wouldn't have... and they were laughing... They were encouraging him, Adam... And you saw it... Oh, God, you saw it... But I wouldn't have wanted to be alone, either.”

  “We are home, darling. We are safe. Look, James is here. You are back home with him.”

  “I don't know if this is real or if I'm still in the house... I don't know what's real...”

  “This is real, Brynna.” Adam told me. “I will be just outside. Be quick about this, Maxwell, but do not cause her any pain.”

  “You think?” James spat at him, “Thank you for your assistance.”

  I squeezed Adam's hand and held it to my face for a minute. Then he left, and James gently removed my clothes. I was covering myself, unsure if it was him there with me, or if Michael was wearing his face. When I looked at him, sometimes his eyes were his own, and other times, they were Michael's; they wore looks of worry and lust, respectively. I could not look at him when his face changed so menacingly.

  “Look at me, baby.” He lifted my head gently. “Open your eyes, Brynn. Look at me.”

  “I don't want to do this again.” I muttered, “It hurt the last time...”

  “It's me, sweetheart. Baby, it's me.”

  My delirious mind recognized his voice, and I opened my eyes again.

  “Oh. I thought...”

  I shook my head and let him usher me towards the shower. After he had taken off his clothes, too, he stepped inside the small wooden tub and then helped me step inside, too.

  The water streaming quickly felt like a relentless assault of tiny burning daggers. Immediately, I jumped away, crying hard, feeling that pain and associating the sound of the water with the sight of the swimming pool that had been in my backyard. The physical trauma, however unreal it might have been, coupled with the recalled mental trauma left me a broken, sobbing mess in James's arms. So delicately, he cleaned off my back with a soft washcloth, allowing me to squeeze his back in my hands even when my nails dug into his skin.

  “I don't like it in here. It's too small.”

  Now, the tiny space was closing in on me, and I felt sickened by the sudden idea that we were enclosed. I believed wholeheartedly that the shower curtain was actually a wall, and there was no escape.

  “I'm right here with you, baby. I'm right here with you.” He told me softly. “Look.”

  He opened the shower curtain enough that I could feel a rush of cool air on my face and breath it into my lungs.

  “I just want this to stop, James. When will this be over?” I murmured, knowing somewhere in my mind that there was no way he could know that. Still, he lied, or rather, he reassured me through assuming and speaking out loud some truth he could not possibly know in certainty.

  “Only another hour or so, baby. Most of it is out of your system. These are just the after-effects, and they don't last for long.”

  When the shower turned off, I was much calmer. In fact, I nearly lapsed into a waking stupor similar to the one that had taken hold of me while Lucien was in the pool. However, this stupor was not populated by demons from my past. It was not populated at all. It was just a quiet, empty space. In the presence of such stillness and silence, I wanted to sleep forever.

  “My mother liked strange names.” I told James completely randomly. “She found all of our names in baby books, but she wanted no names that were similar. We all had to have different sounding names with different themes. For me, she liked 'Brianna' but said it was too common. So she found another name like it. Still had the 'br' but she loved that it had a 'y.' She said not a lot of names had a ‘y.’ With Elijah, she went the Biblical route, and with Violet, she chose her favorite flower. That's a risky route to go; one time I was joking around with her, and I asked what she would have done if her favorite flower had been a chrysanthemum. She thought that was funny; this conversation happened before Lucien died. With Penny, I mentioned once that I loved the name Penelope. I know that she didn't name Penny 'Penelope' for me, though. The most interesting thing is that the strangest name of any of my siblings was definitely Lucien. And yet she, with her love of different names, wasn't the one who picked it. I always thought from a young age that it sounded evil. But he wasn't evil, James. His name didn't fit him. I hate that name. That's why in my mind, I always call him Luc. But I never talk about him out loud. He was only five when he died, and Penny's five. Do you think that means something?”

  I was sitting on the sink, and he had just finished dressing me, pulling up the zipper of my hoodie that smelled like him from the many times we had embraced while I was wearing it. His eyes rose to look at me as his hands rubbed my arms slowly, almost impulsively.

  “I don't know, baby. But I do know that Penny's going to be alright. Everything is going to be alright. I promise you. I’m going to take care of you, and I’m going to take care of her, always. You know that.”

  “I do; I do know that.” I looked up at him, and the tears continued to stream from my eyes as I whispered, “Things have been so hard.”

  I could not even harshly criticize myself internally for sounding so childlike when I said it. I was just too tired to be self-critical.

  “Things were so easy before, and now they’re not. It’s been weeks since we’ve had sex. We’ve never gone this long.”

  He was quiet for a long time, but worse than that, he avoided my eyes. When he finally looked up at me, and rested both of his hands on my legs, I had prepared myself for some dark confession or some proclamation that despite all that had happened over the previous twelve hours, he simply could not reconcile with me.

  “I want to be with you.” I told him, “Do you know that? I know I haven’t proven it, but I want us to be us again, and I can’t do it.”

  “You don’t have to prove that, Brynna.” He told me, and his hands grasped my face now. “I know you want to be with me. Things have never been easy, I don’t think. They’ve just never been this… discombobulated, either. But that’s not your fault, and I have patience in unthinkable quantities, remember?”

  I actually smiled ever so slightly.

  “I know. Do you think I control you?” I asked him, my mind jumping ships, so to speak, very quickly. “Did you like taking the Peace Fruit? If it weren't f
or what happened with me, do you think you would still be doing it?”

  “No,” He shook his head and kissed my cheek, “to both of those questions.”

  “I killed Donovan. I have no right to judge you for what you did to me. You were on drugs. I was sober. The Peace Fruit turned you into something no one could recognize, which is why you hurt me. I don't have that. I was completely sober. And I never felt guilty. I still don't. On Earth, I think I might have felt guilty. You feel guilty about what you did to me even though it wasn't your fault. It wasn't you doing it. You've never done it since. It wasn’t my fault, either, but it wasn’t yours. I don't feel guilty about Donovan, and his death was my fault. It was me doing it. And I have killed people since. Violet told me on the ship that I was evil. Maura wondered it in her head and didn't think I could hear it. Adam knows it. Do you think that's true?”

  He pressed his forehead to mine and put both of his hands on my face.

  “Of course I don't!” He whispered firmly, “No one does. You killed Donovan because Donovan hurt Penny. You killed those other people because they were attacking us. I would kill anyone who tried to hurt you, Penny, or Violet. And I wouldn't be sorry. You don't have to be sorry for that. You are not evil.”

  “I feel like something is taking over me sometimes, James. I'm feeling it now really strongly because of whatever was in my blood. Whatever that venom did to me, I should say. I feel like it's out of control. They say crazy people don't know they're going crazy, but I do know it.”

  “So you're not going crazy, sweetheart. Brynna...” He kissed me softly, “Violet told you that because she was angry. And maybe her anger was justified, but she doesn't feel that way now. And Maura is not the best judge of these things. Forget what they said, and just remember what I said. Do you remember when we were in the hall on the ship, and what you said to me?”

  “That I'm toxic? Yes. I remember.”

  “And do you remember what I said?”

  “You said...” Tears began to leak from my eyes when I remembered it. “You said I was one of the best people you knew.”

  “And you are. You still are. I love you.” He told me almost firmly, as though he did not want me to mistake his words as being half-true or not true at all. Not only that, but he wanted me to understand that his love for me was evidence of the argument he was making. “So many people love you. How many evil people do you know who have so many people that love them so much?”

  “Not many.” I shook my head and wrapped my arms around his neck. After a few minutes, I whispered, “I love you, too.”

  And I did. I loved him so much. Too much, even. The heightened perceptive state was not immune to positivity, I found. While all those fears and regrets tangled with such great sadness and potent fury, the lightest parts of my heart were merely trapped behind barred doors but not lost completely. If one has ever had a dream during which a person is met who perhaps has died or left indefinitely for some other permanent reason but nevertheless is missed terribly, then one recognizes that soaring feeling of tear-inducing joy that accompanies the actual physical touch of that person; truly, you can feel them in your arms when you embrace them, feel their lips on your skin or on your lips when they kiss you, and hear their voice with perfect clarity. In those dreams, when I have them, I am always crying with no shame and confessing many things that I would never say aloud in real life; I am aware that it is a dream and that I am safe there, that all admittances will go unjudged and all my sins will be erased. Weakness does not exist and sorrow is lost forever. It is only that person or people whom I lost and me together, and it is real. For those glorious moments, from the darkest parts of sleep, come the lightest, most joyous realness imaginable.

  I could feel James in my arms because he really was in my arms. But that feeling that filled me up as he held me tightly and kissed me gently were exactly what I have just described. The tears that poured from my eyes were tears of happiness, not sorrow, fury, or fear.

  He was lying me back down in bed, and I was so tired. My eyes were closing but my arms were staying locked around him as he laid beside me. Adam was elsewhere, so I felt so shame or guilt in holding James to me with no thought of ever letting him go. He was so warm, so I nestled against his firm body and closed my eyes completely as all that fear erased itself.

  “I don't ever want to lose you, James.” I murmured as sleep began to weigh heavily down on every part of me somewhat perfectly.

  So gently, he kissed me, and it was just like in the most beautiful and most painful of those nostalgic dreams.

  “And you won't. We’re going to be alright. You hear me?” He asked, and I nodded. “We’re going to be okay, Brynna.” He said, and then he kissed me again. “Everything’s going to be alright. And if the world doesn’t let it all be alright just naturally, I’ll make it alright. You got it?”

  “I got it.”

  He kissed me just as my eyes began to close.

  “Good. Now go to sleep, my love. My love,” He kissed me, “My love,” And again, “My love.”