40 Lifeboats & Motherships
Lifeboats that’s the thing. An unstoppable trolley car with victims I love on every track.
“I left everyone behind because I found out I was a monster. After you left, all the hope I had died. I gave up, Luca. And when I broke out of that haze, it was too late.” I tentatively step closer to him.
He doesn’t move away, so I continue. “I’d done terrible things, exactly what I promised you I wouldn’t.
I created a weapon. She turned me into a weapon, used my own magic against me and my sisters.
Her clone, I am her clone. And then I willingly used the Gauntlet because it hurt less than fighting it. I was ashamed.”
It hits me how much I hid behind the mask I wore. Never before have I had to face Luca directly. I want to hide, to look away, but I force myself to keep meeting his eyes.
“How on earth could I face you after that?” I say.
Luca’s eyes soften. Something like weariness replaces the tension in his posture.
“When I finally, finally clawed my way back to the surface, I found out I was an experiment. Created and shaped by a monster. The same monster that I was becoming.”
I don’t realize I’m shaking until Luca reaches out and steadies me. I let myself lean into him for a moment before I continue.
“So I did what I thought was right. I removed myself from the equation; I couldn’t ruin anyone else. And it still didn’t work. Eldi, Calvin, Zara, Meredith, you.” My voice cracks. “I still hurt you all. I still wasn’t good enough.”
“That’s your mistake, Reggie,” Luca says.
“I was never waiting for you to be good enough. Love isn’t perfection.
” He paces as he speaks, with a restless desperation for me to understand.
Like he used to do from the other side of a cell wall.
“That’s not where love grows, in some sterile lab under perfect conditions.
It grows in the dirt like a weed. From the stinking, rotting mud.
Creeping into every crack like moss, wrapping like a vine so tight around your bones you can never escape.
Love is time and shared trauma, the sticky, messy parts; cementing you together, for better or worse.
” Luca comes to a stop abruptly, his face inches from mine, no longer separated by any barrier, no more masks.
“Do you love Calvin any less after his role in Eldi’s kidnapping?
How about Zara for staying behind all those years?
Do you love Eldi any less because she struggles to communicate with you?
Do you love any of them any less for any of their mistakes or imperfection?
” Luca grips my head in his hands, and I feel the soft scratch of claws against my scalp, gentle rather than threatening.
“I fell in love with a monster in a mask. Why would I love you less when you bared your face?”
I knew; of course I knew he loved me. But we’ve never spoken of it.
“Do you love me any less for not figuring out how to save you before it came to this?” Luca whispers.
“No,” I say. “I never stopped loving any of you.”
“Then why would you believe we would ever stop loving you?”
And I get it; I finally get it, what they’ve all been trying to say to me for ages.
Why Calvin loves me after everything I’ve done.
Why Luca ever started loving me in the first place.
Why my sisters and Eldi still love me like family despite the times I’ve failed and hurt them.
The faces of babies and toddlers race through my mind.
That’s the thing about love and parenthood that I’m finally understanding.
It’s messy. It leaves you raw and uncomfortable.
That complex mix of tangled resentments and obligations inextricably intertwined with unconditional love for another imperfect human. It’s messy, and that’s the point.
Eldi, she saved me when I had no one. She cracked open that armor I’d spent years building after I left my family.
Calvin slowly chipping away at my defenses, never deterred by any of my faults, until I couldn’t possibly pull away from him without losing a part of myself.
My sisters, hand in hand, reaching out to save me when I fell into that dark abyss after Luca left.
I love them so much, but I’ve never been self-sacrificing, so I need to make contingency plans.
“Do you remember the promise I made?” I ask.
“You mean that you would kill me before you let her make me into a weapon?” Luca says. “Of course I remember. That isn’t the kind of thing you forget easily.”
“I need you to make a similar promise to me this time,” I say. “I have a plan, and I’m not sure what it will do to me. But if it comes down to all of us or just me, I need you to let me go to save them.” And I tell him what I have planned.
Luca swears quietly. His eyes when they meet mine are too knowing, red-rimmed. He puts his face in his hands like he wants to scream. But when he looks up, he considers me with a detached gaze. “Why not Calvin? Why not ask Calvin to save them?”
“Because Calvin will go down with the ship, fighting until the end. That’s who he is.
But sometimes you need to know when to cut your losses and abandon ship.
And I need someone to man the lifeboats.
I can’t do what I know I need to do without knowing someone will be there to keep him from drowning with me. ”
“This isn’t the fucking Titanic, Reggie,” Luca says with a bitter laugh.
“You won’t even have to kill me. Just let me go; keep anyone from going down with me.”
“Oh, I won’t have to kill you,” Luca says, acid dripping from his words. “Just let you die. Huge difference. In that case, no big deal.”
“Please, Luca,” I beg.
Luca kisses me. Soft and sweet and slow. It’s everything that first kiss was not. And we’re both trying to forget that it might be another goodbye.
“You have no idea how hard it is, trying not to love you.”
Oh, but I do. “Promise me.”
“I promise, Reggie.”
We head for the agency first thing in the morning, leaving Wolff and Gemma behind to coordinate with the media, the government, and the assorted supernatural societies and clubs reaching out since the live stream. I’ve never seen so many people traipsing through the desert.
Our Winnebago trundles by, mostly unnoticed.
We slide into a line of cars headed off the back roads full of tourists in search of Agency 51.
Next to a cop car with a popped tire, an officer who appears to have surrendered to the maelstrom doesn’t even bother to look up as a group of half a dozen people with tinfoil hats, Crocs, and large water bottles walks past him.