Allie's War Season Four (13 page)

It is Revik.

Jon knows this, even before he knows.

Revik doesn’t look at anything but her. He doesn’t look at his feet as he walks, at the water, at the sky, at the rock and its small forest sticking out of the sand. He doesn’t look at the birds, or the dolphins that weave through the waves, circling him in concentric rings.

Already, Jon can feel the other man’s grief.

Grief mixes with a relief so palpable that the relief is somehow worse...the feeling Jon glimpses there closes his throat, cutting into his skin like sunlight bent through glass. Revik appears to be walking towards her, from what Jon can see with his Barrier eyes...but everything about him, everything Jon can feel on Revik or see in him, makes it clear that he is running.

He is running towards her...he is running towards his wife.

Jon understands now. He understands too well.

He shouldn’t be here.

He thinks it, even as Revik reaches her, as his long arms encircle her from behind, holding her tightly, but gently, as if she were porcelain or glass instead of skin and bone. He pulls her against his now-wet clothes, and Jon looks away, with whatever part of himself that watches this. Even so, he almost feels it when Revik leans down to kiss her neck and bare shoulder.

Pain expands out of the other man, a dark, dense cloud, discordant in this perfect land of water, sun and light. It is intense enough that it buckles Jon’s Barrier-created knees.

He might have fallen to the sand. He might have fallen, then and there...

...but Revik pulls on him.

Demands him.

For Jon, there is no dramatic walk through Barrier ocean waves to greet her.

Jon is simply there.

He blinks, and then he is somewhere else. He stands next to the two of them, waist-deep in crystal blue water. His Barrier body adjusts to the change––or really, his mind does, even before Jon can think about his own mind consciously. His subconscious supplies him with appropriate dress, too, the same blue and white flowered swim trunks he bought in Hawaii in his mid-twenties, when he’d gone there with his then-boyfriend Brett, and Allie, who’d brought Jaden, paying for her slacker musician boyfriend out of her own meager tip money from the crappy diner where she worked.

Feeling a strange guilt at the memory now, Jon looks up to see Revik staring at him with clear, colorless eyes, reproduced almost exactly in the Barrier as they are in the physical world, but for the added light that make his irises glow strangely.

They reflect Barrier sunlight, even as they narrow down at him.

What can you feel?
Revik asks.

It is less a question than another demand.

Revik doesn’t let go of his wife as he asks it. He seems unable to let go of her, unable to stop touching her, caressing her hair back from her face, holding her belly and hip with his other hand, even as he pulls on Jon almost angrily––even as he seems to resent Jon’s presence here in the first place. Jon feels all of these things, and wishes he could be elsewhere, too.

Goddamn it, Jon...
Revik snaps.

He jerks roughly at Jon’s light, and Jon winces in pain, closing somewhat.

He looks reluctantly at Allie’s face.

Immediately, pain slams his own light. It mixes with Revik’s enough that he has to fight to disentangle it, to pull them apart once more. He feels anger on Revik, too, impatience, a desire to be alone with her, to kick Jon out of his space.

Gods, grief.

So much grief...

I’ll fucking kill you if you don’t help me with this,
Revik says, gripping her tighter. Jon can hear the fear in his words now, a near panic, a longing so twisted that it’s ceased to be hope, but feels closer to some kind of prayer.
Jon, please...she’s never been this close. Forget about me. Look at her. Please, gods, look at her, and tell me what you feel...

At the end of this speech, the longest Jon has heard from his brother-in-law since Cass did what she did, the grief and fear are winning out over his anger. Revik is begging him, Jon realizes. He is begging for Jon’s help, and something in the reality of that simple fact pulls Jon’s own light and mind sharply into focus.

Jon steps towards her. This time, he doesn’t avert his gaze.

Allie...?
he sends to her, tentative.

His Barrier fingers reach up, and although Revik flinches, his light exuding threats, exuding protectiveness, Jon touches her face, which looks so much like Allie’s face in the physical that it takes his breath. Only the eyes are different. A brilliant, jade green, they are as clear as glass, but there is a vacancy there that Jon doesn’t recognize. It occurs to him how full of life she is, how completely there and present she has always been, and again he has to fight to keep back his own emotions, his own feelings about the woman in front of him.

Allie,
he sends, softer.
Where are you, Allie? Can you hear me?

She looks at him.

Her dark head turns, and she looks straight at him, that vacancy even more unnerving as she looks through him to the waves and the endless horizon through Jon’s Barrier form. She looks at him, and for a bare instant, Jon imagines that she might see him...that perhaps she recognizes his voice. A rush of feeling hits him as he thinks it, feeling that morphs into anger, perhaps because he doesn’t know what else to do with it.

Al!
he shouts at her.
Goddamn it, Al! What the fuck are you doing?

He feels Revik tense, gripping her protectively.

That time, Jon barely notices, because something in her stirs.

Something in her is seeing him briefly, like a flicker of spark from a flint struck on rock. Jon imagines he sees a flash of anger there. Anger and what has to be grief, a kind of
fuck you, Jon
that he almost recognizes. It turns Jon’s own anger into joy briefly...then abruptly back into rage, a kind of helpless fury. All of the feeling he has been suppressing for days and weeks, for months now, ever since they found Allie in their mother’s bed at that run-down purple Victorian on Fell Street, everything he’s said and done, the way Wreg’s looked at him, the way no one will blame him to his face about what happened while he knows how they must feel behind his back.

The way Revik looks at him. The way Revik looks like he wants to kill him sometimes, even though he won’t blame him directly either...

All of these things, the anger and guilt and self-hate surge in Jon’s chest like hot flames, blinding him to everything but those blank, green eyes, staring at him.

So that’s it?
he says.
You’re just done now, is that it, Al?

Those green, eerily vacant eyes don’t blink.

Things hurt too much for you to come back, so you’ll just stay here?
Jon says.
Hang out until the rest of us are dead?
His anger sharpens, coming from so far inside him he barely knows what he is saying.
This is it, isn’t it? Your happy place. What Revik told me about in the tank...where you go when the going gets rough. The ‘golden ocean’...isn’t that what Revik calls it? Must be nice to be able to just check out...

It’s not her fault,
Revik says.

It comes out closer to a snarl, even as his fingers curl protectively around her shoulder.

Jon ignores him, staring only at Allie’s face.
Goddamn it, Al,
he says.
I will fucking hunt you down and kick your ass, if you leave us like this...

Jon...
Revik warns, gripping her tighter.

What about your daughter?
Jon snaps.
If you don’t give a fuck about Revik and me...what about her? Do you really want Feigran and Cass raising your kid?

Allie’s face doesn’t move.

Jon sees nothing in her, nothing.

Reaching over, he slaps her across the face. Hard.

Fuck!
Revik says.
Jon! I’ll fucking
kill
you...

Revik stops, mid-sentence, staring down at where she grips Jon’s wrist in her small fingers. Jon’s hit is a Barrier slap...not a real hand, not a real face...but her grip on him is strong. He can’t withdraw his arm from it. The not-Allie stares up at him, and the fury he sees in her, the hatred that shines there briefly, sings through his blood like music.

Fuck you!
he screams.
Fuck you, Allie!

Jon,
Revik warns, his voice holding more pain that time.
Jon, stop. Please––

Jon doesn’t care.

You want to blame me?
he says. Jerking his hand free, he grips her by the shoulders, shaking her, trying to hurt her, to reach her, even where Revik holds her firmly against his chest.
You want to blame Cass? Revik? Me? So do it! Just come back here and do it! Stop hiding here in la-la land, and just
do
what you came here to do...

Jon isn’t finished. He wants to yell at her some more, to scream into her face, call her a coward...hit her until she answers. Before he can, her arm reaches back. She moves so fast he barely tracks the motion, can’t make sense of what she’s doing...

...and she punches him, right in the face.

JON’S EYES SNAPPED open.

The change happened faster than his mind can comprehend.

He could only lay there, feeling dizzy, desolate, painfully raw.

His body sprawled in a red leather recliner; he panted, his head still throbbing from the blow he’d gotten from that Barrier Allie in her ocean paradise. He could only grip the armrests at first, fighting to breathe, to control the sickness he felt...

He looked up then, and saw Wreg over him, gripping his arm, his eyes holding a sharp panic. It hit Jon how afraid the other male looked, but Jon couldn’t handle that either, because as soon as he thought it, as soon as he let the emotion in, a dense wave of pain completely blanked out his mind. He fought to move out from under Wreg’s hands, writhing to get away from him, but the other man worked frantically over him, fighting to unhook straps while Illeg and Jorag helped on the other side.

As soon as Jon had an arm free, he shoved Wreg’s hand away from him. He did it almost before he knew he intended to, felt the sharp pulse of hurt on the other seer as he did it.

Then Jon turned his head, staring at the man on the recliner next to him.

Revik stared back at him.

His clear eyes held so much light, Jon barely noticed the tears standing there.

It occurred to Jon then, what he had done.

He felt the blood slide out of his face, his heart start to thud in his chest. Inside that Barrier space, he hadn’t been able to make himself care what Revik thought. He hadn’t been able to make himself care about anything but getting Allie to answer him, to snap her out of whatever fugue state she’d retreated into. But now, looking at Revik, it occurred to Jon for the first time that the Elaerian might actually kill him.

Others felt it, too.

Wreg slid his muscular form between the two of them, even as Revik struggled to free himself from his own straps, what still tied him to the chair.

Wreg held up a tattooed hand. Garensche and Loki grabbed hold of Revik on the other side. Revik elbowed them off without looking at them, even as Jorag vaulted past Jon and Wreg to help them, followed by Illeg once she’d finished untying Jon’s last leg.

“No!” Wreg shouted. He held his hand higher. “No... Illustrious Sword.
Laoban
... my friend. Calm yourself...! Fucking calm down!”