40. Spiritually Disharmonious Uses of a Mirror
Chapter forty
Spiritually Disharmonious Uses of a Mirror
Riot
“Put away your shit with Honey,” Riot whispered to Sage as they left the commissary. “Right now she needs to agree to leave and you’re the only person who is going to be with her all day. Tighten the fuck up.”
Sage pursed her lips. “She doesn’t know about the scars—”
“No. And you don’t tell her. The scars are Cass’s. You do not take that from him.”
She glared.
“You have until this evening,” Riot said. “Make it count.”
On the walk back to the house, Riot tried to talk. Once, twice, a third time. Cass said nothing. He looked at Riot, kept walking, kept checking his robes at the collar, looking at the gardens, breathing the scrubbed air like everything was fine.
The gold crept in. The greens got too bright.
The whites went sharp. His peripheral vision expanded until he could see his own pulse in his temples and Cass’s braids caught the light and hurt to look at.
He was getting mad. The pressure valve inside him was beginning to lose its integrity and he needed it to stop, but Cass wouldn’t fucking talk to him.
Mine. Ours. He’s going to touch ours. That man is going to come to the house and—
Shut up. SHUT UP.
—and we’re going to STAND there—
Control. You are in control.
The moment they stepped inside the house, he stopped trying to control it. It came out of him like a cough. “You can’t!”
Cass turned from the door, his eyes wide as he played with the beads in his hair.
“You can’t ask me to do this, Cass!”
“I already—”
“I know what you already did. I was right fucking there holding your hand!” The volume was wrong.
He could hear it—too loud for the room, too loud for the man standing six feet away in white robes looking scared.
“I was holding your hand while you looked that man in the face and volunteered to let him—while you just—like it was fucking nothing—”
“It’s not noth—”
“DON’T.” His hand came up, not toward Cass, but the motion was sharp and the room was small and Cass flinched with his whole body, ducking his head and looking at the ground as he kept turning a bead in his hair.
You did that. You. Congratulations.
“I’m sorry—” Riot started.
“Don’t stop.” Cass’s voice was thick and he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand in a rough, fast motion like someone who was used to crying and resented the inconvenience of it. “If you stop now you’ll just…it’ll sit in you. Say it. Whatever it is. Say it.”
“You’re asking me to do nothing while he comes in here with his—his fucking torture tools and his voice and his I’m proud of you Cassiopeia and I just—what? Count fucking ceiling panels? Listen to it? Pretend I’m—”
He paced. Four steps and turn. Four steps and turn. The gold made the walls swim.
“I have been a monster for ten years. That’s—that’s the job. That’s what they built. A thing that kills. A thing that people cross the street to get away from. And I was—I’d made my peace with that, I’d figured out how to be that and still—to still get through the day without—”
Four steps. Turn.
“And then you’re there. In a fucking alley and you don’t know me and you don’t know who I am and you just took my hands and you bandaged them like I’m a—like I’m a person and not a—”
His voice cracked with the sound a structure made when a load-bearing wall gave out.
“You make me feel human. Do you understand that? You are the only person in ten years, Cass, ten years nobody has touched me without a weapon hidden on them— and you just—you touched me like I mattered and now I—”
Four steps. Turn. Cass was blurry through the gold.
“I don’t care if it’s selfish. I don’t fucking care. You make me feel like a person who exists for a reason other than breaking things and it terrifies me and I am not going to lose that because your best friend is busy sorting fucking fruit while the man that r—”
The sentence was going somewhere. It was going to the place Riot had been holding behind his teeth since Lilac’s bathroom floor—the thing Cass had described without understanding.
He could feel the words forming. I know what he did to you.
Not the scars. The OTHER thing. The thing you can’t remember.
He looked at Cass.
Cass was crying. Not the held tears—the real ones, streaming, his face blotchy and crumpled with his good hand pressed over his mouth and his body curved inward like a thread was pulling on him from the inside.
Riot’s mouth closed.
The silence was enormous. It filled the little blue house from floor to ceiling and pressed against the windows, and Riot stood in the middle of it with his fists at his sides, his eyes burning gold and the knowledge that he had just come within a single word of shattering Cass’s world.
Monster. Weapon. Thing that breaks things. Even when you’re trying to protect him, you break him. Even when you’re trying to help. Even now. Even here.
“I’m sorry,” Riot said, like his throat had been taken apart and put back together wrong. “I’m sorry. I went too far. I—”
“Are you done?” Cass asked from behind his hand.
“Yeah.” Barely a whisper. “I’m done.”
“I’m sorry too,” Cass said as he wiped his face with the sleeve of his robes. His voice was small and it was the worst sound Riot ever heard because it was an apology from the one person who had nothing to apologize for. “I know you don’t like him. I know.”
“It’s not about—”
“I don’t like the way he makes me feel now.
” Cass said it fast, like the words might not come out if he gave them time to reconsider.
“Since I came back. Everything feels wrong. The way he touches me and the way he says my name. It felt like—before, it felt like he was the only person who liked me other than Honey. He said I was like a son.” His voice cracked on son.
“Nobody else had that. Nobody here has parents. And now I’m back and it feels like—like a copy of something that was never real. And I don’t—”
He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes as if he could push the tears back in by force. It didn’t work.
“I’m really scared,” he said. “I’m not scared of the session. I know what it feels like. My body knows what to do. I’m scared for you. That your eyes are going to—and then he’ll know. And Sage. And Honey. And I just—”
He couldn’t finish. He pressed both hands over his face, gasping as his shoulder moved, and let out a small squeak from behind palms like he was choking off a sob.
Riot crossed the room, desperately wanting to hug Cass, but unsure if he was allowed to do that after what he’d just done with his voice in this room. He stood in front of Cass with his hands at his sides and hated himself with a thoroughness that bordered on professional.
“Are you mad at me?” Cass asked from behind his hands.
“No. No, princess. I’m not mad at you.”
Cass’s hands came down as he walked towards Riot, and even through the tears and hurt and fear that was still there in his body language like a bruise, his face was one of concern.
“You’re still gold.” His hand came up to Riot’s face anyway, shaking and warm, settling against his cheek.
“Riot, you’re still—you need to calm down. If he sees this tonight—”
“I know.”
“You need to—”
”I know.”
Riot turned his head and pressed his mouth into Cass’s palm. “I’ll go splash some water on my face and cool down.”
He went to the bathroom.
The mirror showed him what Cass had been seeing.
Green eyes ringed with gold, but not the solid, flat brightness that turned the world into a targeting system.
This was worse in some ways. The gold was leaking, seeping into the green like ink into water, flickering with every heartbeat, visible enough that anyone looking at his face for more than three seconds would see it and know something was wrong.
He splashed his face. Once. Twice. He pressed his wet hands against his closed eyelids until the pressure made his sinuses ache.
Still gold.
Come on. Come ON.
The bathroom was small. White tile. A window made of frosted glass that let in light but no view. A sink with a ceramic basin and a huge mirror above it and his own reflected face staring back at him with eyes that wouldn’t cooperate.
He tried the breathing. The four-count in, seven-count hold, eight-count out that Lilac taught him in the first months of living at the Collective, sitting on her porch with her scentless void anchoring him while he fought against faulty suppressants and Orion being in heat again.
It usually worked. The void was the key—the absence of input, the blank space his nervous system could rest against while it recalibrated.
Lilac wasn’t here. There was no void. The air was scrubbed clean of everything except the ghost of lavender and Cass’s scent and the faint smell of slick
Don’t.
The Berserker instinct always had opinions when the gold was up and his body was flooded with a cocktail of rage and fear that turned every synapse into a lit fuse.
The options it presented were straightforward: violence or sex.
Destroy something or fuck something. Two channels for the same pressure, and since there was nothing in the bathroom to destroy that wouldn’t blow their cover, the Berserker was increasingly enthusiastic about option two.
No. We are not doing that. We are getting the gold out of our eyes before tonight because if Matthias sees—
And then the door opened and Cass was standing in the doorway.
His cheeks were flushed pink with a warmth that had nothing to do with crying and everything to do with the thing Riot’s body had been tracking since the cellar—the low, persistent heat that hadn’t fully broken.
Option two, option two, you want option two—
“Can I help?” Cass asked softly, a little rough from the crying, and he began to pull at the tie on his robes.
“Cass, I—” The words came out too low, filled with the gold-edge that lived in his chest instead of his throat. “You don’t have to—”