29

Later that day the mist had cleared somewhat and the skies appeared to be bulging with a fresh pack of snow. Thick, grey clouds were threateningly hovering over the inhabitants of Sweet Lake.

That didn’t keep Lieke from insisting on leaving the house immediately after hearing the edited version of what had happened to Gene. She had been informed of that nights harrowing stories by the means of her schoolmates on social media upon waking up. Those posts had puzzled her, but the news of her father had spurred her into action. There was no school that day anyway, since half of the students were either death or admitted to various hospitals.

Lieke found herself on the threshold of the lake house, looking into the smug, pale face of Samuel, within an hour. Nick had dropped her off on his way to the convenience store. He was making things right with Jonathan, who deemed his apologies highly unnecessary, especially because Nick had barely been able to hurt him. As a rule of thumb, humans were no more in any position to bring serious harm to a Rebirthed soul than a goldfish was to a shark, a wet blanket to a nuke or essential oils to any illness at all. Jonathan had not been impressed by his resistance to be locked into his own garage, but he accepted Nick’s repentance gracefully.

“Are you one of the German girls that used to live here?” Samuel asked Lieke camp.

A strange echo recoiled through her skull, before she repacked herself, with an internal shake of the head. Where had she heard this voice before?

“Nope, I am very Dutch,” Lieke giggled.

“In that case I am very sorry. Please, come in and accept my apology.”

Europe, Samuel thought. If there was ever a continent that needed some good old carpet bombing it was fucking Europe. With their enlightenment, their advancements in art, philosophy and medicine, their science, their freedoms. He had been gone too damn long. He was making things right, now that he was back. Better late than never, he reckoned, closing the front door behind Lieke.

“What can I do for you?”

“Do you know what happened last night?”

“No?” Samuel mustered to answer and swallowed, eyeing her intently.

He attempted to give her an innocent and questioning look, but Lieke thought it was a creepy glare and went on with it quickly.

“The strangest things, I’ve heard. Have you not noticed anything?” She wondered surprised. “You live right at the waterfront.”

“Well,” Samuel tried, “there was a lot of mist this morning, but I did hear sirens and saw flashing lights, now that you mention it. Please,” he urged, with an involved frown, “tell me more.”

He guided her into the kitchen with his hand hovering behind her lower back, not quite touching.

“It has happened to me as well. Just not last night. People have been drawn to the lake, I guess, and tried to drown themselves,” she explained as she sat down.

“That’s insane. How is that even possible?” The Kid wondered, while preparing tea for them both.

“I don’t know.” Lieke shrugged. “It’s just that my dad was one of the people that… you know…”

“I am so sorry to hear that. You must be heartbroken,” he sympathized with big eyes, shaking his head.

“I was wondering whether I could check upstairs for some old family albums to bring to the clinic?”

“The clinic?”

“Yes, I thought it might cheer him up, while he’s recovering,” she replied, peering into the tea box, that sat opened on the table, to pick a flavour.

Samuel interrupted his movements for a second. So, the bastard didn’t die?

“That… is sssuch a nice idea,” he managed to say, walking over to the table with two mugs and a kettle of boiling water.

Marith sat next to the hospital bed and stared at her father. Such an old and familiar face. Not just familiar to her, but to the entire town. She wondered how many people he had helped with the deed of their house, arranging the paperwork for their divorce and helping them get their insurance money after a car accident. It must be quite a few, since Gene was only about a decade away from retirement.

He had loved his job. Helping people, working with others, connecting with the community. What on Earth had happened? When had her father gotten so old? Or better, maybe, how had he gotten so bad, so fast again? It had appeared to everyone he had been doing better lately.

Once so strong and wise, now as fragile as dried flowers. The intelligence and the wisdom had to still be in there somewhere, Marith figured, but she just couldn’t see the strength and vigour that once were.

The sight of her unresponsive parent pained her and she decided to clean up a little bit, as long as he was asleep. She started with the foldable tray table attached to the trolley on the other side of the bed. It carried an empty water bottle, a cup with cold tea and some food wrappings. She brought the tableware to the kitchen in the hallway and tossed the rest away in a bin she found there as well.

She got rid of a rotting bouquet of old flowers, watered some plants in the windowsill and worked her way to the little table against the wall behind the bed.

It was filled with the mail that Nick had been bringing over every once in a while. He had been handling Gene’s financial affairs and to do so he regularly emptied his mailbox in the Bellevue building.

Marith shifted through the envelopes to find any cards or letters to hang up on the pin-up board attached to the wall above the bed. She had never understood why those boards hung above hospital beds, where the patient had no way of seeing the cards, letters and drawings.

Nick had clearly taken any letters from all possible branches of the government and every medical bill out of the equation, so he didn’t have to be confronted with any of that. She came across some ‘get well soon’ cards from distant relatives and old mates from law school, who probably weren’t aware of the nature of his hospitalization, but had bothered to buy and write a card anyway. Which, Marith thought, was nice.

Then she came across the only card that had mattered. The envelope was opened. Marith unfolded the little, blue card, decorated with lace and a tiny bow, with trembling hands and a spasm in her heart.

It was her mother’s baby card. How could she do that? What had she been thinking? What a…

She stopped her thundering mind and read the contents. It was a boy this time. Poor thing, Marith thought, shaking her head. Having to grow up in a socialist hellscape in the arms of a narcissist. Better fates had befallen a lot of babies.

He was named after some ancestor of Kjell and had been born about ten days ago.

She put it away. This card was definitely not going up on the board. She slipped it into her purse and made a mental note to force it through the shredder in Nick’s study later. Not because she hated the baby - she would probably love it as much as she loved Lieke - but because her mother’s behaviour didn’t deserve any form of attention or recognition whatsoever.

Gene had been drifting in and out of consciousness all morning. Marith suspected most patients had been sedated the previous night to keep them inside the clinic. Judging by his breathing and a quick scan of his elevating heartrate he seemed to be awaking now.

“How do you feel?” Marith asked compassionate, standing at his bedside in the blink of an eye, touching his arm, trying to get his attention.

Gene blinked at her. Red lines branched across the white parts of his eyes.

“Empty,” he whispered back, with a dry mouth.

He rubbed his eyes and then the rest of his face. He leaned back into his pillows. Her father looked weaker than the day he had been admitted into that place. The wounds of his arm were the only things that had decently recovered, since that day, Marith realized.

“You don’t look so great, to be honest.”

“I feel drained. I keep falling… back into darkness.”

“You probably need a lot of sleep to recover,” Marith answered.

“Jonathan helped me… and his own parents. Did you know?”

“Yes, he told me.” She pressed her lips together into a tight smile.

He kept shifting his focus to the television, bolted to the ceiling, above his bed. Marith followed his gaze and her eyes landed on a black flat-screen.

“Are you… watching anything?” Marith dared to ask.

“Yeah, I am sorry, you’re right,” he stammered confused. “It’s not as important as my daughters,” he managed to say loud and cheerful when he saw Lieke and Samuel come in behind Marith.

Marith looked over her shoulder with big eyes. Two things were bothering her and she felt like she couldn’t say a thing about either one of them. Was her father hallucinating now? And why in heaven’s name was that idiot with her sister?

Lieke walked into the room, enthusiastically waving some albums through the air. “I’ve got something that might make you feel better,” she said exuberant.

“What did I ever do to deserve you girls?” A modest smile came and went. He perked himself up on the bed and raised the base of the bed with a remote control.

Marith could see he was really trying, despite the scruffy beard that covered half his face.

“Beard looks good on you, Dad,” Lieke said, dragging a chair to the side of the bed.

“Makes you look distinguished and wise… like a philosopher,” Marith added, to make conversation. Nobody dared to touch the fact that the only reason he had grown a beard was that he wasn’t allowed to possess or wield sharp objects.

“Well, I happen to be very wise,” he said, opening the first photo album.

Lieke put the other ones on the trolley next to his bed.

“Shall I wait in the hallway?” Samuel asked in a feigned attempt to not be rude or invade a precious and private family moment.

Marith wished he would just go, because now she felt like she was supposed to say ‘No, don’t be crazy. Stay!’

Which is unfortunately exactly what Lieke then said.

“Dad, this is Samuel,” she continued. “He rents the house now,” she muttered with a smaller voice.

“Ah, nice to finally meet you,” Gene responded amiable, offering his hand.

Samuel shook it.

“How has the house been treating you?” Gene wondered.

“Amazing, mister Merryfield. I could not have wished for a better location or a warmer design.”

“That’s good to hear.”

Marith swallowed some vomit back. She hated people that slithered and sucked up to be accepted when it served them and treated others as ‘less than’.

They continued to make awkward and forged attempts at friendly conversation, until Gene started to have difficulty keeping his eyes open and a nurse send them away.

Marith had noticed the visitation took a toll on him, so it was probably for the best if the three of them went along with their day.

The nurse flattened his bed again, so he could lay down, and gave him another dose of whatever was in the IV-bags hanging from the stand next to the bed, attached to the tubes leading to his hand.

Upon discussion they found that none of them had even eaten a decent breakfast yet and it was now practically lunchtime. Samuel had, of course, sucked the soul and the will to live out of many people that morning, but his stomach was empty and that counted as hungry. They left the albums with Gene and decided to head to the cafeteria.

Marith was cold, hungry and foggy of the mind and couldn’t wait for something to land in the deep pit that appeared to be her stomach. The only eatery in Sweet Lake’s hospital was a buffet. Luckily, it was a big one. They could choose between all sorts of sandwiches, buns, bagels, croissants and wraps, but also many soups, salads and pasta dishes were offered, under glass displays.

They filled up their trays, sped past a cooler with bottles of water, milk and soda and practically leaped towards the check register. Samuel had offered to pay, while Marith was out of earshot. Lieke had naturally accepted this and now Marith had to courteously accept as well, and, worst of all, thank him like she meant it.

An unoccupied table under a palm tree in a massive terra cotta pot was soon found and they sat down. Marith shot Lieke some dirty looks from across the table, but she was either ignoring those or she was oblivious to her older sister’s feelings towards Samuel.

Marith dove into her croissants, filled with herbs and cheese, barely tasting any of it, while flushing it down with fresh orange juice. Lieke poked mindlessly at her omelettes on rye, deciding whether or not it was a smart idea to eat it. Instead, she drank some of her cola, which usually helped against upset stomachs she had come to learn.

Samuel had been wearing fake glasses to look more human and approachable, but since his anchor was brutally ripped away from him by these self-important peasants it seemed like he was starting to actually need prescription glasses.

He poked at his warm pasta with spinach, pesto, olives and cherry tomatoes, realizing he could barely tell the pieces of penne apart from each other, especially under the melting cheese. He blinked at it and his mind filled with frustrations.

“I think I have to throw up again,” Lieke groaned.

“Again?” Marith wondered as her sister stumbled out of the eatery.

Good, Samuel thought. His devious masterplan of fuckery and deception was working. He was surprised to notice things were actually looking up for him.

“Yeah, she was sick earlier as well,” he explained manner-of-factly, lacking any hint of emotion in his voice.

He focused on the naïve Mage in front of him and eyed her, while she munched away at her croissant.

“I lied to you, earlier. You know?” He started deceivingly.

“What?” Marith asked confused as if she was waking up from a daydream.

Her mind had turned into a nasty, dark void. Words entered, but did not escape. Didn’t she have her Rebirth to see clear, to be able to gaze beyond all this mental misery and pollution?

“Hell is not other people.”

Marith tore her gaze away from their food to look at the guy her sister had brought in with her. He was staring at her, in the most predatory way possible.

“Hell is mental agony. Hell is the kind of pain that changes people forever. I sense you father has it... you’ve had it too. I always thought pain was people. People judging me, hurting me, people not capable or willing to understand me, but that’s just not it. Not entirely, at least.”

“What do you mean?” Marith frowned.

Why was he even here? What was going on between him and her little sister? Were they having sex? Why did she just think about that? She tore her mind away from the subject before it could become an image. It was none of her business, but she was hoping Lieke was as repulsed by him as she was herself.

“The way I see it, there are two sorts of pain,” he continued wisely. “There is mental pain on the one hand and physical pain on the other. For most people those two are separated, but stuff happens, life happens… Sometimes mental and physical pain start to crawl towards each other. Eventually they will go hand in hand… and then there is just that. Pain. Swerving and cutting through the mind and the body as one entity.”

Marith was annoyed by his wiseacre demeanour, but couldn’t refrain from eyeing him with a glimmer of newfound admiration and suspicion.

“The moment, the event, that will start the crawling, is different for everybody, of course. For some people it is surviving cancer or a gruesome car accident. For other people it is returning from a war or being separated from a loved one…” His voice trailed off and he glanced at Marith.

He felt that his words were making her feel guilty. He could sense it in the vibrations of the air in between them, hovering above the cafeteria table.

Gene’s mental state had more to do with his own influences than with anyone else’s, but he knew this was what his operation needed. He needed to kick this cunt back into the shadows of her past. His shadows.

When had her father’s substance abuse started? This was the first time Marith wondered about that. She had just assumed his mental state had gone downhill after he couldn’t make a living anymore and keep his finances above water.

Maybe she was all wrong about that. Maybe it had started after her mother had left him and had taken his daughters with her to the other side of the planet, away from him. Sure, they had visited him during the summer holidays, but it obviously hadn’t even been remotely the same.

Marith’s stomach filled with guilt again. She was full of questions, but none of them were important enough to march back to the ward and wake him up.

“But, as I said, most people will never experience that kind of hollowing pain. They just live their uneventful, blissful little lives to the bitter and boring end. The mental and the physical parts stay separated.”

“God knows Gene would sign up for that,” Marith replied with a sigh.

“Do you think there is ever a coming back… from that?” She asked after a short silence.

“Sure,” answered Samuel, “but you will never fully recover, once you’ve experienced that pain. You will carry it within you, everywhere you go.”

Marith nodded curtly. She figured it could change people in a positive way, in a negative way, or it will be just that: change.

Emptiness clung to her in the same way cellophane would cling to a mouldy sandwich or a rotting apple pie, which is unfortunately exactly what Samuel was aiming for.

Marith knew that pain all too well. It did change you forever. It makes you suspicious, overthink to the point of mental implosion and keep to yourself, by shutting others out and sabotaging possible relationships.

You will feel more passive from that time on, to protect yourself from the lows that life tossed around, but it took away the highs, preventing you from ever experiencing true happiness ever again.

Lately Marith had felt there truly was no limit to the mayhem and misery the Universe could hurl at humans, but there was a limit to what the human mind could process and handle, before going either numb or insane.

“You seem to have an affinity for the darker side of things,” Marith remarked to diffuse the topic of their conversation somewhat.

“Some days I feel like I am the darker side of things,” the sanctimonious Kid answered anointing.

Tell me about it, she wanted to say, but something was holding her back from oversharing in his presence or bonding with him.

That morning Marith had been kicked back into the mental cage her mother had wanted her to be in so badly, when she grew up, and it felt horribly wrong.

“I need… to get outside for a minute,” she said, shuddering.

She put the second, but half-eaten, croissant back on her plate. She shook her head, trying to shake off the shivers, the chills and the rebellion of her stomach.

Marith was apparently stuck with a brain that couldn’t let her depressions go, just like many other stuff that clung to her. Her mind was spiralling and she couldn’t focus in the company of Samuel. He was too weird. His vibes and his energy were wrong in the strangest ways.

While she managed to find her way out of the cafeteria, stumbling back into one of the many hallways of the hospital she bumped into Lieke.

“Are you feeling better?” She asked worried.

Lieke nodded, but she looked green. “I guess.”

“I am just stepping outside for some air. Would you like to walk with me?”

“No, I feel like I need to finish that cola.” She shook her head. “And maybe put something else in my system. I am hungry and nauseated at the same time. How strange is that?”

“Pretty weird, I would say,” Marith answered.

Marith had never intended on actually going outside with these temperatures. The fact that she wouldn’t freeze to death as fast as the average human didn’t mean she enjoyed the cold.

She trailed the hallways for a while, admiring the artworks on the walls, until a morbid curiosity made her wonder how the drownings had affected the children. Jonathan had briefly mentioned them. They hadn’t been able to leave the clinic at all last night, but it probably hadn’t gone over their heads entirely.

After looking for Etienne in the classroom, the playroom and the dining room she finally found him in his bedroom. The door was open. He was, unsurprisingly at that point, engrossed in a drawing.

She knocked on the doorframe. “Can I come in?”

His face lit up when he saw the Mage in his doorway.

She walked over to the low table he was working at and squatted next to him.

“How have you been?” She asked, fixing the collar on his red polo shirt.

“Good,” he said timidly.

“Have you… slept well, last night?”

Etienne nodded, not making eye contact.

“Glad to hear that.”

“He didn’t have to lock the doors,” Etienne suddenly said, continuing to scratch markers over pieces of paper.

“No?” Marith asked, knowing he meant Jonathan.

“The clockwork protected us.”

“W-what?”

He walked over to his bed and got it from under his pillow. He hurried back and sat down again. He put the smooth, shiny object on the low table in front of them and eyed her waiting. There was a peculiar glimmer in his young, dark eyes, that Marith could only recognize as pride.

“Can I?” She asked.

He nodded joyful, moving restlessly and expectantly over the surface of the chair. Marith flipped it open with a hopelessly un-manicured nail and gasped for air.

Swirling arms of dust spiralled above the simple face of the clock. Colourful, glittering clouds, that was. She saw purple, pink, blue and anything in between. They sparkled like the countless stars that embellished the night sky of Oregon. It looked like the Milky Way from above. It was beautiful and she hadn’t seen it for too long. The clouds were an exact copy of the wefts that hovered over every watch the Pupils carried, after being Rebirthed and before the Kid had awakened.

Marith didn’t know what to do, to say or to think, apart from triumph and some kind of pride, even though Etienne wasn’t her child. They truly had found the new Watchmaker.

This was it. The ultimate proof that Etienne was a creator, an influencer, the next concierge of the Web. These clockworks, the ones that Jonathan and Marith had been handed on their trip to the shore, months before, had never had clouds to begin with.

Etienne’s abilities defied both the Kid and Watchmaker.

“Etienne, will you promise me that you won’t show this to anyone else, except dr. Sybling?” Marith urged.

“What about the others?”

“What others?” She squinted her eyes.

“The friends you brought. The ones that were like you?”

“What do you mean? Like me in what way?” She thought she knew what he meant, but she wanted to be sure.

He raised his right hand up in the air and let his fingers dance around her face. She smiled patiently at him, even though she had no clue where this could possibly be going.

“The dots that go like this,” Etienne said. His left hand joined his right hand, making circular movements around her face as if he was going to give her a massage, except he was not touching her skin. His fingers kept dancing, alternating, in little, rapid waves.

“You can see the particles? Of the Web?”

He nodded shyly and dropped his arms again. “They go like that around you and around your co-workers, but not around other people.”

Marith swallowed and thought she might cry, that everything that had happened that morning would burst out of her and rain down on the innocent kid. She contained herself and hugged him instead, for the first time.

He hugged her back. “I like you,” he whispered.

“I like you too,” Marith answered softly, sniffing behind his back. “A lot.”

She sighed and let go.

“What now?” Etienne asked.

Marith knew that, despite his possible learning disadvantage, he was wise beyond his years. He knew what was going on. Marith started to realize he might know more about the Web than any Pupil or Elder, without being aware of it.

“Eh,” Marith started clumsily. She decided to be honest. “We wait, until we know who to fight and then we bring you to the pretty ladies and the old man.”

“In the sky?” He asked hopeful.

“Yes, those.” She smiled at him.

They said their goodbyes. She had to get back to Lieke, Samuel and her lunch. She actually felt like she could finish it now.

She re-entered the hallway and closed the white door behind her. When she turned around to go back to the cafeteria she stood eye to eye with Samuel.

Her breath faltered and her heart failed to beat for a painful moment, before it started to squeeze blood into her system again.

That scare almost knocked the live out of her.

“What were you doing in there?” He inquired.

He had snuck up behind her. She had been too engrossed with Etienne to notice any people roaming the corridors outside his bedroom. She blamed herself for that. She briefly deployed her strings to see why.

He had a low, but steady, seemingly healthy heartrate. Very healthy indeed. She estimated it to be around 48 beats per minute. She figured he must work out a lot, although he didn’t look like it.

“Looking for a restroom,” she lied, pretty convincingly, even if she thought so herself.

For some reason her lower consciousness warned her about sharing any detail regarding this issue with him. She trusted Samuel with kids as much as she trusted the government with public money, which was not at all.

“Doesn’t Gene have his own bathroom?”

“He’s sleeping, so I wanted to use a guest bathroom.”

“Lieke wants to go home. Would you like a ride?”

She couldn’t possibly say that she wanted to tame the wilderness in these temperatures and with the recent snowfall, so she said yes.

Samuel had this supercilious air around him, that irked Marith to not end, but the fact that he seemed to speak from a genuine kindness and a will to make the world a better place made others accept him as a trustworthy person. This puzzled the sensitive Mage, but there was nothing she could do about it, so she tried to give it a rest.

After the drownings Marith left Vanessa, Lieke and Nick with the task of visiting Gene every day or every other day. She focused on herself, her calling and the music. She deserved that. Nobody had been there for her, when she had been all alone in the Netherlands or freezing on that shoreline, so she decided to learn how to be there for herself. As it turned out that was much harder than anticipated.

In the days that followed Marith wasn’t sure if she was depressed. She could smile during conversations, but felt sad and alone afterwards. When she was in bed at night – thinking about all that was happening – she forgot how to feel.

Sometimes this felt like a nice change from feeling all the little details in her life so ferociously. It was like taking a holiday from having a mind that seemed to function like a beehive, always worrying, analysing and feeling, feeling too damn deep. The life she had always wanted to live was slowly, but most certainly, taken away from her, and not having to deal with that was a relief.

The next morning she would feel defeated and would wake up sad. Marith would then struggle through the day anyway. She would realize again that her depressions had influenced practically every aspect of her life so far, and not in a positive way. It became hard for her not to see her mental illness as a personal failure.

It shocked and worried her that all the progress she had made since her Rebirth seemed to have evaporated. Marith realized how vulnerable and susceptible she still was, and would probably always be, to the excesses of her mind and the influence of the Kid. She felt fragile and alone.

Since her Rebirth she had been able to hold her emptiness under water and suffocate it, only to find out now that it had survived after all. The Kid was working his ways and the devil within was surfacing. The idea that she would never fully recover started to sink in.

She knew she couldn’t fight or repress that part of her any longer. She had to embrace it and let it all in. Everything that had once plagued her came gushing back to her like a river after the breach of a dyke: the nightmares, the death, the blood, the puss, the slime, the tumours, the creatures that crawled and slithered.

After her Rebirth Marith had wanted her past to be over so she could leave it behind. She wanted to genuinely feel again, let new experiences in and enjoy them, without her mental scars brooding in the background. Now she learned those cuts and seams would always be with her, regularly marching by like a Gestapo to shed light on her troublesome past.

This particular morning she was driving between big banks of snow, under a greyish sky, through the endless forests of the Pacific North-West.

Her skin was pale, the look in her eyes lacklustre. She glanced at her hands holding the steering wheel, down to her wrists. She could see her bones starting to stick out under her skin. Was she losing weight?

For the last week or so she had sensed herself slipping into a depression coma. She couldn’t be bothered any longer by chewing and swallowing an nurturing herself to the degree that was necessary to maintain the same body. She hadn’t even washed up until she had decided to visit Nate.

All she seemed capable of was lying in bed for large portions of the day, for non-refreshing sleep. Which made her feel worse about herself.

Nate had a bed. She figured she could absolutely lay around there.

Marith felt continuously like she was on the verge of a mental breakdown. She had suffered that particular sensation quite often over the course of her life, but her anxiety was worse than what she had ever experienced living on her own in the Netherlands.

Hot flashes were alternated by cold shivers. She either felt like breaking something delicate and expensive or falling on the floor, curling up and crying until she would cease to exist.

Her mind was scattered, thinking of everything at the same time and, since she was unable to focus, being monumentally unproductive.

The mental mists this creature, the sum of all horrors, was emanating were haunting her. The demons from her past were ganging up on her. She needed each and every piece of wiring in her brain to fire and to focus to make it out of the tri-lake area without causing an accident.

Deep down she knew she was happy to see Nate again, but the slivers of happiness that existed within her refused to surface.

Why wasn’t she at home? Where was her actual home at this point? Why wasn’t she working a fulltime job? Why was she sleeping in someone else’s bed? Why couldn’t she be having a little place of her own in Sweet Lake, preferable with Nate?

The trip to Nate was a haze. She didn’t hear the music coming from the sound system in the car and she had barely registered other vehicles on the road. She had arrived at the doorstep of whatever cabin he had rented this time before she knew it, even though it had been a several hour drive.

Having sex with him felt like something she just had to get over with, so she could go back to sleep again. After some mindless, mechanical love making she was lying naked and exhausted in bed next to him.

“My god,” Nate uttered, with wide eyes. He had perked himself up on one arm and let his eyes wander over her bare skin.

“What?” Marith muttered, half asleep.

“Look at you. Are you losing weight?” He cupped one of her breasts with a warm hand, for measurement purposes. His hand then went down, softly squeezing her right hip. The thin layer of isolation that had resided there was definitely gone.

“I don’t know. I haven’t really been paying attention to superficial nonsense like body image,” she said warningly, more awake now.

“Okay, I am not criticizing,” Nate started cautiously. “You’re still gorgeous. I am just worried.” He shrugged meekly.

“You promised me you wouldn’t worry anymore,” Marith muttered, once more slipping away into the blissful darkness of unconsciousness.

He let her sleep. She looked as if she needed it more than anything else in the world. He tucked her in, read a book in a chair by her side, occasionally glancing over at her. Eventually he joined her in the bed again.

“Sometimes I wish I could just come to you,” he told his sleeping Mage. He meant it. Their situation right now was miserably complicated.

Everything felt like a chore for Marith: getting out of bed in the morning, staying clean, eating something, interacting with her environment, practicing the cello.

By the end of the day she knew she had barely accomplished anything and guilty and defeated she would go to bed again, so that after a couple of hours of tossing and turning she could fall asleep.

The worst thing was that this was how she had felt in high school. This is how a lot of people felt in high school. Why was she still feeling like this? That part of her life should be long behind her.

She was a teenager again and she heard her mother yapping about non-issues in the back of her mind without even taking a pause to breathe. The constant nervousness had dissipated after her Rebirth, but the drownings, the Kid taking control of her just like that, reminded her of her mother interfering and taking over the lives of her children.

Visiting Nate made her feel guilty, for not doing homework, cleaning a bathroom, toilet or kitchen or going grocery shopping or preparing a family meal. She was her old self again, expecting her conniving mother behind each door and around every corner, to attack her on everything she did or didn’t do. Having to sneak out of her bedroom again, as her mother went out for a massage, a facial or a combined manicure and pedicure, to quickly get something to eat or do a load of laundry without criticism.

She was stuck in flight or fright mode, questioning her purpose in life with scrutinizing agony.

The pure anxiety of just existing came crushing in on her. The limitations of her own mind started to feel like a prison more and more. She doubted she would ever be able to climb out of this depression.

Marith had never been particularly religious, but lately she had found herself hoping for an afterlife. So she could have another shot at existing, just in a happier, less burdened form.

How pathetic was that? She was so profoundly unable of being happy during her one and only shot at life that she was praying for another one, after her inevitable death, which she increasingly expected not to occur in old age.

They hadn’t left the bed all day, all night and then all day again, except to use the restroom or have a light snack.

Marith’s own tossing and turning had woken her up. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. A time nobody should be in bed in the first place.

Nate held her firmly, but careful. She felt delicate, like he could crush her with one wrong movement.

“It does make me wonder what his parents were like,” Marith said, staring at the dormant ceiling fan.

“What do you mean? First Oracle and First Watchmaker?” Nate frowned.

“Yeah, they couldn’t have been saints if this is their spawn. To the outside world, maybe, but in private? I highly doubt it…”

“Are you blaming his parents for his behaviour?” Nate asked testy, letting go of her and rolling onto his back as well.

“Well, not directly, of course,” Marith answered, slightly surprised by his tone. “After a while kids are supposed to grow up and break the cycle, which the Kid obviously didn’t,” Marith started her defence, “but parents can sure as hell ruin your life, before you’re able to pick it up again.”

Nate was quiet. He had lost his parents at a young age and blaming them for anything just seemed cruel and pathetic to him.

Marith was quiet too. The loneliness that most abused children experienced washed over her. That, and disappointment. She would have thought, would have hoped, that the amazingness of her bond with Nate would be so irrefutable he wouldn’t doubt her.

“Some parents are quite passive or aggressive… or both, behind closed doors, and behave like they’re raising a picture perfect family in public.”

Growing up without parents must have had its shortcomings, but growing up with one abusive and one neglectful parent was, at times, horrific as well. There shouldn’t be a competition, in any way, shape or form, between them.

“But what about being grateful for the fact that you at least had parents?” With that question he stirred up old and forlorn feelings of fright, despair and misunderstandings in his Mage.

“I am sorry,” she started, taking his hand. “I didn’t mean to be insensitive to you, but some children just suffer without anyone else knowing about it.”

Nate swallowed and nodded weakly. “But they raised you nevertheless.”

“Well, barely,” Marith answered, belligerently. “And why should I owe them for any of that? It was their choice to have children. I had no say in the matter. I didn’t choose to be fucked into existence.” She knew she must have sounded harsh and angry at that point, but she didn’t care. She had to make him understand.

He shrugged, probably thinking he won the argument by staying on the moral high ground of gratefulness and blood ties, but Marith wasn’t having any of that. Not from him.

“You seem to be under the impression that there are laws in this world that prohibit bad people from multiplying. Well, I can tell you with absolute certainty that there aren’t and some kids really do have bad luck in that department.”

Marith felt him nodding on the pillow next to her, but a tsunami of incomprehension hit her nonetheless. It was hard to explain to people who weren’t abused what it does to a person. How it stunts any form of natural, healthy development, physically and mentally. How it follows people around for the rest of their lives, through their education, their careers and their love lives.

Their fingers entwined and they let the subject hang there until it got bored and then annoyed and flew away. After that Marith wanted to leave as well, which she promptly did, after making an excuse about expecting her period and not having brought pads or tampons products.

Nothing good ever had ever come from the endless love she had to give, she thought bitterly.

She was visiting Nate to forget herself. This didn’t help. That day Marith found out that, despite their superhuman abilities, one mind could never truly know another. At least, not in a human lifetime.