To Be Free (10 page)

So I manage to catch the man
before he can embrace the ground, lying him down on his back and
lifting his head onto my lap so I can press my fingers to his neck
and check his pulse.

"I'm... I'll survive," he
snaps, trying to brush off my hand from his neck, but he's as weak
as a kitten - and I'm not saying that for no reason. His feeble
attempt at moving my hand has just about the same strength.
"Really, Quinn. I'm just tired... though I sent up a flare with
that. We got to keep moving."

He tries to stand, failing
hopelessly and clinging to my side with grim reluctance after I
catch him again, holding his side against me to keep him
upright.

"You can't walk anywhere like
that," I comment, and he swears.

"I know that!" he snaps,
turning an icy glare on me - his eyes are back to normal, leaving
me to assume that that was a physical attribute of his gift. "We
still need to go! They know where we are now, and if we don't get
underground soon, we're dead men."

I return the glare just as
easily, and that seems to surprise him. He looks genuinely
surprised a second, boneless in my hold as I turn to face him
fully, my anger flaring.

I'm sick and tired of him
treating me like he's on his own. One moment he acts one way, the
next another, and he doesn't even seem to trust me one iota despite
the signals I was getting. I hate how he's trying to be a friend
and a stranger at the same time.

"You listen
here,
Sebastian
,"
I hiss, so close to his face that our foreheads almost touch. His
eyes are wide as saucers, rendered speechless. "I've had it up
to
here
with your
attitude! You act one way and then act an entirely different way,
and I can't even tell if we're friends or foes in your eyes. Yeah,
okay, you've lived through hell and I genuinely feel like shit for
you, but it's as if
I'm
the only one trying to be openly honest
here!

"If you don't trust me at all,
I'd really fucking appreciate it if you'd tell me right now, Nine,
because I'm so fucking done I'm overcooked. If you don't want me
around, fine; I'll fucking leave, I swear I will, and you can go
around hopping through time as much as you want to." His lips have
parted, while my eyes have narrowed and my fingers have dug more
and more into his biceps. He looks almost terrified. "Tell me right
now whether not you trust me enough to protect you, Seb. If you
don't, I'm walking out. I don't need this."

Then, his features contort into
genuine pain, the emotions in his eyes conflicting between fear,
pain and defiance.

"If you knew what I lived
through," he starts, his voice shaking remarkably as he tears his
eyes away and lets them fall, "you'd understand."

"Then
make
me understand!" I
snap, shaking him enough to make his teeth rattle. His eyes are
watering and the pain is winning above all else. "I want to help
you!"

"I know you
do!" he shouts back, looking back up. A stray tear rolls down his
left cheek, and he doesn't wipe it away. "I want to do the same
with you, but trusting someone like that isn't easy for me anymore!
She
destroyed me
,
Quinn; she left me
broken
and
bleeding
and
terrified
, left me all alone in a
world with billions of people! No one understood what it was like,
no one believed me!

"Those I
turned to thought I was making excuses, even my fucking
family
! Do you have
any
idea
what
that's like - don't say you do, because I know you don't!" He's
crying openly now, salt water streaming down his face. His
exhaustion is written as plain as day on his face, and his agony
even more so. "I
trust
you, okay?
I don't want you to go
away
! I want you here with me, right
here!"

His shaking hands grab my
shoulders just as tightly as I'm gripping his arms, and he swallows
thickly.

"I want... I want you to know
that I can't stand the pain of the memories. That I'm trying so
hard to forget my past and live my present - I like you, Quinn.
You're an amazing guy and you calm me, you really do and you're the
first person in over a decade to be able to do so. You've even
managed to turn me into a blubbering mess," he laughs once dryly,
without humour, before his eyes fall downcast and his grip loosens,
threatening to fall. In a small voice, barely a whisper, he
finishes his thought. "Please don't go, Quinn. I don't know what
I'd do if you left me."

The way he says my name, almost
as if it's something precious, makes all the anger evaporate. My
fingers relinquish the painful grasp they clung with, and his
words, every last one of them, the echoes of his monologue bounce
through my skull.

My hands, of their own accord,
find his hair and push it from his face, making him look up at me,
tear-stained face painted with pain. The kind of pain that shatters
a soul, and the picture of agony that I've, to this day, never
forgotten.

I use my thumbs to wipe the
trail of water from his eyes, and the man shakes his head with a
small sound of protest before he buries his face in the crook of my
neck, clinging to my shoulders again and sobbing. When I wrap my
arms around his waist and hold him against me, the broken man in my
arms wraps his around my neck and pulls himself closer, if that's
even possible. You couldn't fit a hair between us.

We stay like that for a few
minutes, my hands on his back rubbing soothing circles that
carefully coax him to calm down, and he only parts with one last
piece of knowledge about this event in his life as he attempts to
regain his composure.

"Her name was Sarah," he tells
me quietly. "She was my girlfriend."

Finally, once he's exhausted
himself, Seb pulls back enough to look at me in the eyes, offering
a tired smile. A smile that speaks volumes about his experiences,
and how he's tired of dragging them around as if they define him. I
return the gesture, and he frees a hand to wipe his eyes.

"You're important to me," he
admits, the warmth of his underfed body comforting in ways no fire
could be. While my hands rest easily on his hips, the gesture as
natural as breathing, his left hand remains behind my neck, teasing
the hair on my head with a single finger as he smiles. "Don't
forget that, okay Quinn?"

I nod, and he looks down to
where his hand lies, the smile melting away.

"...I got scared this morning,
when I saw how close we'd already gotten," he informs me, and the
question I'd been wondering to myself is finally answered, to my
relief. "I'm sorry. I just... it's hard for me to trust
people."

"You can
trust me," I press, bringing my hands up to hold his face in place
so I can see his eyes. They widen slightly. "I promise you, Seb,
I'm not here to hurt you; I just want to protect you and help you,
if you'll only
let
me help you. I don't want us to be strangers."

He nods a little, the skin of
his cheeks darkening a little as his eyes flicker across my
face.

"Okay," he whispers, "okay.
Alright. I... thank you, Quinn."

Once that's settled, we both
quickly realize that he's in no shape to walk anytime soon,
completely exhausted in more ways than one. So I offer to carry him
on my back, and after a brief debate we decide we have to leave one
of the packs behind. He pulls one onto his shoulders once we sort
through it and bring the bare necessities, and then I haul him onto
my back.

To tell you how much he weighs,
I'd say no more than forty pounds wet. Sixty with the pack - he's
so underfed it's not even funny anymore, bones protruding from his
skin and poking me as he grips me as tightly as he can.

"Dude," I grunt, getting used
to the weight. He rests his chin on my shoulder, looking at me, "we
seriously need to get some meat on your bones."

"Why, so you could eat me like
the big bad wolf you are?" he teases, and I flash him a grin as I
walk in the direction he points me to, towards the east.

"So I
can
ravish
you,"
I shoot back, laughing at his expression afterwards. I don't think
he knows what to make of that statement, and I pull away in the
opposite direction of one of the clones.

He's using a bit of his energy
left to make paradox doppelgangers of us, copies of us from an
alternate time line where we've headed in another direction. He
says that'll distract Recon One long enough to get us to the
tunnel, and scatter their troops completely.

The moon has risen by the time
I find it, and with a grateful sigh Seb stops the whole paradox
clone thing and slumps forward in utter exhaustion, mumbling
directions at me so I can find the hidden entrance. It's concealed
behind a seemingly impassable wall of bushes and trees, and when
I'm through it's a steep decline into the earth, old railroad
tracks beginning in the gloom when the light of the moon no longer
filters through.

I use the light of the
macromite of our suits to see, and when the land flattens out he
makes me walk for a while longer, turn a left into a dead-end, and
tells me to set up shop here. I leave him behind long enough to get
some firewood - sneaking back up to do so and gathering enough for
the chilly evening - and once I get a good fire going there, and
we've eaten and drank our fill, Seb curls up in our one sleeping
bag and is knocked right on out.

For a while I stay up, watching
the man sleeping in the orange glow of the firelight that is giving
his skin a rosy hue and the blue glow of the macromite, before I
slip in beside him and fall asleep to the sound of the firelight
and his light snoring.

• Close Your
  Eyes and be damned by what you see
  

SEBASTIAN

I wake in a panic, feeling as
if I'm still trapped in that nightmare for a moment, tensing when I
feel arms stronger than mine wrapped around my waist and holding my
back to their owner's chest. Then I recognize the warmth and the
presence, relaxing back into the embrace Quinn has pulled me into
during my sleep.

Honestly, the man's quite into
physical contact.

"It's only me," he whispers,
the tunnel we're in as dark as the darkest hour of the night save
for a small beam of blue light peeking from under the blanket and
cloak piled over our bodies every once in a while as we breathe. I
nod, closing my eyes and letting my other senses guide me
instead.

The thick scent of the dirt
around us, as well as aged wood and undisturbed air; the sounds of
the night barely reaching us in this infinite darkness; Quinn's
breathing near my ear, his breath fanning over my skin and raising
goose bumps over it; the warmth his body and mine have provided,
trapped between the blankets and the ground.

"I know," I breathe back, my
hands finding his resting by my navel and covering them, squeezing
lightly. He laughs once quietly, really close to my ear, and I
smile into the darkness.

This is okay.
I like this - so unlike what I'd been subjected to, more
loving
than what she'd
done...

Apparently I'd been saying that
aloud, because I feel him press his lips to my spine at the base of
my neck and I can feel his frown. A shiver threatens me, but I keep
it in check.

"What did she
do to you, Seb?" he asks, the tone of his voice pleading. Begging
might actually be a better word, full of curiosity and concern and
pain - as if not knowing is actually
hurting
him. "...please?"

This time I shiver, his breath
ghosting the very spot his lips still linger on, for more than one
reason. I'm torn between two cardinal desires - to lean into the
embrace, more intimate than what I've ever known and a thousand
times less forceful, leaving me all the room in the world to
escape; and to pull away from this man, this man who's cyanide
personified and is holding a dose of that very poison for me to
take. His sultry voice is promising protection and pleasure and
happiness, at the price of pain.

I lean in.

I let him hold me, fingers
tightening on his hands before releasing them, and his arms cradle
me fully, pressing me against him. And I let him.

My biggest desire, beyond all
else, has always been to be wanted. To be accepted and loved.

"...we met in English class," I
start, and I can hear my voice threatening to fail me, my throat
tightening. With those first words, my fear escalates and I tense,
and I shiver at the memories that assault me. I force myself to
breathe deeply and calmly.

He doesn't rush me. Quinn
simply keeps his lips against my skin for a bit, then tucks his
chin on the top of my head and hums that same lullaby at me,
whispering the lyrics until I regain my composure.

I continue, and my story - the
one I've divulged to no psychiatrist, family member, friend or
anonymous stranger - tumbles out eagerly while still giving me a
challenge. As if the story was waiting for the day I'd meet the one
I'd be willing to trust, to trust so openly and so fully in so
little time that I'd finally come clean.

I'd finally begin to heal.

"I was
thirteen years old, and in Germany that's about the age people
start looking for lifetime partners - we're a lot like the N.O.
that way, though without the capital punishment for being gay.
It
is
frowned
upon, yes, but people just don't practice it openly - and we hit it
off pretty quickly. Sarah was... well, she was the girl of every
boy's dream.