Chapter 2 Present
Present
Leo
Blood like arsenic burning through pulsing veins
throat raw from screaming, wet flesh cracked like chasms in quake-torn Earth
head muffled by a fog of black toxin, mind vibrating with manic energy, brain a mass of irradiated tissue flaring aggressively
body ripped and shredded from the inside, the gouges left behind drowned in a ravaging contaminate and sealed over, skin and muscle fusing back together, every cell corrupted and reformed
there’s no sound. no light. no feeling in existence other than the chemical tearing through my system, igniting each nerve as it goes and goes and—
That. That is my world for more beats than my frantic heart should be able to survive.
But I do. Survive.
When reality shifts and shudders back to life around me, terror takes hold, stripped bare, naked and pure.
It takes my congested psyche a moment to register FISA’s medical as nonthreatening.
The smell hits me first, acidic and sterile.
My stomach roils, the same bile rushing up to wash against the back of my throat.
I gag on the nasty taste, choking it back so it doesn’t come spewing out of my mouth.
Then my eyes snap open, and things gets infinitely worse.
Shining pale light is everywhere, overwhelming in its intensity.
I squint, pain plucking at the receptors in my corneas.
When I shift on the medical bed, my body stages a hopeless rebellion, bombarding me with violence, looking to start a war it can’t win.
My entire being seems to ache, bones too sharp beneath my skin, muscles pulled taut and crispened along the surface like they’ve been scorched by an unforgiving heat.
Even the thin sheets on the bed feel like they’re rubbing my hyper-sensitised skin raw. I want them off me, but I can’t move to rip the fabric away.
Noise hits me next, and I immediately wish my eardrums had remained soaked in silence.
It’s so loud in here, a constant bombardment of machines rhythmically beeping, and LED lights buzzing incessantly, and the shuffle of people rushing everywhere, shoes scuffing the floor and clothes rustling every time they move.
My senses go into overload, and the closest beeping sound gets louder and more frenzied. People—doctors—gather around my bed like a plague of locusts. They try and talk to me, but I can’t make the words sound right. It’s just more noise.
A rush of cool bliss hits my nervous system, and I understand, somewhere in my mind, that they’re drugging me, but I can’t make it matter.
I’d do anything, accept any consequence to force consciousness to back the fuck off, for these feelings to drain away like fluid from a ruptured lung, to scrape them out as you would pus from a wound.
As reality fades and the darkness snatches me back with frostbitten claws, I can hear the faint sound of someone—him—shouting a word that could be my name.
An indiscernible amount of time later, I wake up again, and this time the world is only slightly less agonising to deal with.
I blink up at the persistent glow of light smothering medical’s ceiling, lying there for a while, working up the courage to try and move again. A daunting prospect, to be sure, given how badly it went before.
This time when Jack says my name, I can hear him clear as a bell in an abandoned tower, loud and echoing through the empty space between us.
Turning my head is easier when I have a goal worth risking it for.
Jack is sitting in a chair beside my bed.
He looks, to be blunt, like shit. There are dark circles under his eyes and a redness around them, indicating a lack of sleep, which is a real feat because Jack doesn’t need much to stay functioning in the first place.
His hair is a blond mess and clearly unwashed.
He’s wearing his FISA gym gear, looking a bit like he’s gone ten rounds with a group of professional fighters and then tried to run a marathon afterward.
Cautiously peering around, it seems as if I’ve been put in a private medical room. Jack and I are alone for the moment although I imagine the medical agents—probably led by Rex—will be invading my room soon enough.
Jack is watching me with an intense stare, the green of his irises so much more vivid with my newly mutated eyesight.
“Leo?” Jack’s voice is a sonic boom that vibrates across the small amount of space between us.
I realise belatedly that he isn’t shouting like I thought; my ears are just interpreting it that way because they’re enhanced now.
The thought makes me feel vaguely disjointed, the intellectual knowledge of how I’ve changed grating up against the inherent belief that I shouldn’t be capable of these things. That no human should be.
Guilt slices through those thoughts, cutting them cleanly in two. I can’t think that way. After all the times when I told Jack he wasn’t the inhuman monster OI tried to turn him into, the idea that I’m now mentally backtracking on that, just because it’s me we’re talking about, is absurd.
I screw my eyes shut and try to block out the instinctual fear, the sense of abject wrongness gnawing at my insides like bugs with razor-sharp teeth.
Jack speaks again, quieter this time. “Hey, it’s a lot, I know. Just take a breath, okay?”
I try to do as he tells me, breathing in deeply through my nose and then expelling air from slightly parted lips. My mouth is as painfully dry as my throat, which makes breathing more difficult.
“Water?” I croak at Jack, keeping my eyes tightly shut so I won’t see whatever face he makes at the sound of my damaged voice.
Jack must have been holding the water already because the rim of a plastic cup is immediately pressed to my lips.
I part them and tip my head at the right angle to avoid spilling water everywhere.
Jack is careful, gentle in that way he pretends to be incapable of, letting me take sips from the cup.
Ice-cold water spills down my abused throat, and the relief is instantaneous.
When I’m done, Jack takes the cup away, and there’s the rustle of him moving around, probably to put the cup on the floor since there are no tables nearby. I can feel him watching me.
I crack my eyes open, skating a gently probing gaze over him again. He looks strung out, and it makes me wonder how long I’ve been in medical.
Jack leans in closer, resting both of his arms on my bed. His eyes catch mine, and we stay like that for a while, just staring at each other. Breathing together.
Even exhausted and beaten down, Jack is still beautiful.
His dark lashes are too long, and his jawline is ridiculous.
I raise my hand, ignoring the pins and needles that prickle all the way along my arm at the movement, and brush my fingers lightly along that perfectly cut jaw.
There’s blond stubble on his face that feels unnaturally rough against my mutated skin.
I’ve touched him like this before, but the difference is stark and undeniable, like everything’s been hewn into sharper focus, my senses crystal clear and brand new as if I’m discovering touch for the first time all over again.
Jack leans into my fingers, letting me cup his face with one hand and softly brush my thumb over his cheek.
He shivers when I move my hand into his tousled hair and begin lightly carding my fingers through it, trying to make sense of the madness.
A light groan of approval tumbles from his mouth, seeming to have been drawn from some great pit of despair and grief buried deep inside him.
“You tried to leave me,” he accuses, outraged that I would dare.
It makes me want to laugh because I could never have expected anything else. That’s been Jack ever since we met. Intractably protective. Feral in his desires. My heart squeezes so tightly in my chest it feels close to bursting, the monitor’s beeping picking up speed.
My memories of what happened at the house are out of focus and fragmented, but I vividly remember telling Jack that I love him. It plays out in my head like a carefully preserved piece of film from decades ago.
“Told you to—” I have to stop halfway through the sentence because my throat still aches, like I spent hours choking back razor blades, but I’m able to push on after a few steadying swallows of spit. “Told you not to let me run from you.”
In the midst of sex, I begged for him to snare me, like a wild animal caught in a vicious trap. It may have been said in the heat of the moment, but I meant it all the same.
Jack’s expression darkens, taking on a decidedly dangerous edge.
He leans in even closer to me and presses a large hand to my ribs, above where my heart rests caged behind them.
He looks me with an unrepentantly arrogant possessiveness, his hand clenching like he wants to punch through my chest and curl his fingers around the clump of bloodied, pulsing tissue that I offered up to him.
“This is mine,” he tells me in a low, warning growl.
“You don’t get to treat something that belongs to me with the disrespect and lack of care that you did that night.
If you ever put yourself at risk like that again, I’ll tie you up and lock you in a tower so you can live the life of a fucking fairy tale princess that you’ve always dreamed of, got it? ”
A torrent of heat rages through me. He looks so fucking serious about it; I can’t do anything but nod in agreement, croaking a painful, “Okay, babe.” Then, “I’m sorry.”
Jack’s eyes narrow into furious, pale-green slits. “Fuck you and your sorry,” he sneers. “I wouldn’t trust your sorry to carry scissors.”
That gets an amused snort out of me, which only seems to incense Jack further.
“You’re lucky we’re in medical right now,” he tells me, “because otherwise I’d be smacking the shit out of you.”
“Liar.” I grin at him, teasing. “I’m all special and super now. Could take you, probably.”
Jack pulls a face at the grating scratch of my voice. “Oh, so intimidating, froggy.”