Chapter 32 #2
I finally lift my gaze to him. His face has changed; not softened, exactly, but rearranged, as if the word dead is a piece he has to fit into a puzzle he didn’t expect. He doesn’t offer consolation. He doesn’t say I’m sorry. That would be too easy. Too human. Instead he asks, “How?”
My stomach twists. The question shouldn’t hurt, but it does. Maybe because it’s the kind of question journalists ask. The kind of question I used to ask strangers with my recorder in hand, as if grief was data.
“Accidental drowning,” I say. “At least, that’s what the report stated.
That’s what everyone agreed to call it.” I laugh once, sharp and ugly.
“But he was… he was not well before that. Mentally. People said he got on the wrong path. That he was too dark. Too fascinated with what he created. With—” I stop again, because my tongue wants to say himself and I don’t want to put my daddy issues in the spotlight.
Vapor’s eyes don’t leave mine. “And you think you inherited it.”
I flinch because he says it like it’s obvious.
“Yes,” I admit. “I think it’s in me. The same hunger. The same… shape.” My fingers tighten around the pencil until my knuckles whiten. “I tried so hard to turn it into something acceptable. Something useful. That’s why I wanted to be a scientist.”
He tilts his head slightly. “Toxicology?”
The fact that he knows makes my pulse jump. Maybe I’ve mentioned it before. Maybe he read it somewhere. Or maybe he just understands me better than I want him to.
“Yes,” I say. “Toxicology. I wanted to study it. The cellular mechanisms, the antidotes, the thresholds. How much it takes to tip the body from normal into irreversible.” I exhale slowly.
“I thought if I could understand the line between life and death, I could… control it. Or at least not be controlled by it.”
He says nothing. He doesn’t interrupt. That in itself is a kind of intimacy; being allowed to finish.
“But I didn’t,” I continue, and my voice thins. “I didn’t become a scientist. I became a journalist instead because writing offered a softer kind of danger. One that let me observe without touching.” I look down at the page again, at the careful petals and veins. “I thought that would be safer.”
I hear myself laugh, and it’s almost hysterical. “It wasn’t.”
This time he actually laughs. It’s low, brief, and it does something unsettling to my skin.
I’ve heard him amused before, but laughter is different.
Laughter feels like a crack in the wall.
Like a glimpse of something human behind the architecture of him, and that is somehow more frightening than the monster.
“Safer,” he repeats, savoring it. “You chose words instead of chemicals.”
“I chose distance,” I say. “And it still brought me here.”
His gaze drops to my drawings, then back to me. “You don’t want distance,” he says, and the certainty in his voice makes my stomach drop. “You want to get close enough to feel the heat without burning. You want to press your finger to the edge of the blade and tell yourself it’s not cutting.”
My mouth goes dry. The bunker seems smaller suddenly. His words feel like fingers under my chin, turning my face toward something I don’t want to see.
The room falls into that charged quiet again, the kind that makes my bones feel too loud inside my body.
My eyes drift, almost without permission, to the gas mask lying on the chair beside him.
He must have set it there when he came in, black rubber and glass, the filter canister like a fist. It’s such a familiar object, and yet I’ve never examined it up close.
It has always been the thing between us. The barrier. The symbol.
I reach for it slowly, watching him for any sign of refusal. He doesn’t stop me.
That’s the problem with him, with us, he rarely stops me.
The mask is heavier than I expect when I lift it.
It smells faintly of chemical and something else; his skin trapped in rubber, his breath’s residue.
I turn it in my hands, tracing the edge where it seals against the face.
The glass lenses catch the overhead light and reflect my eyes back at me, warped and doubled.
“Can you breathe in this?” I ask, and the question sounds too intimate in the bunker air.
He watches my hands on it like I’m touching him. “Yes.”
“Easily?”
A pause. “Yes,” he says again.
I turn the mask over again, looking at the straps, the buckles. “Do you ever take it off because you want to,” I ask, voice careful, “or only when you have to?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. His eyes are on my face now, not the mask. “Why do you want to know?”
Because I want to know what you look like when you aren’t protected from me, I think. Because I want to know if there is a version of you that exists without the monster costume. Because I want to know if you feel relief when you put it on, or if it feels like suffocating.
Instead I say, “Because it’s you,” and the simplicity of it makes my stomach twist. “And I’m tired of guessing.”
The bunker hums. The plants sit between us like witnesses.
I set the mask down gently on the table, like it might bite if I’m rough. Then I lift my eyes to him and let the questions I’ve been holding finally rise.
“What was your first kill like?” I ask.
The words hit the air hard. They make the table feel colder. I don’t know if I’m brave or stupid or both.
He doesn’t look away. He doesn’t pretend not to hear. He just… stills. The way a predator stills when something moves in the grass.
“That’s what you want to talk about,” he says, voice low.
“I want to understand,” I reply, though the truth is messier.
I want to know where the line was, if it was always there, if he stepped over it or if he was born on the other side.
I want to know if there was a moment where he hesitated, because if he never hesitates then what does that make me for sitting here, drawing flowers that can stop a heart?
He leans back slightly, as if giving the memory space. His eyes unfocus for a fraction of a second, not dreamy, but distant. When he speaks, his voice is flatter, as if he is reciting from a file.
“I was young,” he says. “Not a child. But not grown.”
“How young?” I press.
He looks at me again. “Does it matter?”
“Yes,” I say. “It matters to me.”
A beat. “Late twenties,” he says.
My chest tightens, I didn’t expect that. “And… who?”
His jaw flexes. “Someone who thought they could take something from me.”
I wait. He doesn’t give more, and I don’t push for gore. I don’t ask for blood. I’m not here for spectacle. I’m here for the shape of him.
“What were you like as a kid?” I ask instead, and my voice shakes despite my effort. “Before all of this.”
He considers me for a long moment, and I can’t tell if he’s deciding what to reveal or deciding if I deserve anything at all.
“Quiet,” he says finally. “Observant... obedient.”
The answers are not what I expected.
“Did your family know?” I ask.
His eyes go colder. “Families don’t know the things they should,” he says. “They see what they can live with.”
The words hit too close to my own life. My mother pretending my father’s darkness was just eccentricity. Teachers praising my intelligence while ignoring my hunger for the macabre. People choosing the version of us that lets them sleep.
I look down at my sketches again, at the careful petals and lethal berries. My father’s voice echoes faintly in my memory, or at least what I can remember of it.
“I’m scared,” I confess, and it tastes like metal in my mouth. “That I’m like him. Like my father. Like you.”
Lucan’s eyes soften in a way that isn’t gentle, but attentive. “Good,” he says.
My head snaps up. “Good?”
“Yes,” he says, calm as ever. “Fear means you’re watching yourself. It means you still have a line. You just don’t know where it is yet.”
My throat burns. “And do you?” I ask, and I hate how much I need the answer. “Do you know where your line is?”
He looks at me for a long time.
“My line,” he says quietly, “moves, has blue eyes, and a beating heart.”