“You think it’s going to be any easier with a stranger? And fuck off with the excuses. I don’t see you skirting work anywhere else in your life. Don’t start the lazy now, and certainly not about this.”
Whatever, Qhuinn thought. He didn’t want to fucking talk to anyone. But he was too tired from the crying jag to fight the point.
“What else can I do?” he prompted.
“Do the hardest thing first. Whatever you think is the hardest… get it out of the way.”
After a moment, Qhuinn took the toy that was being offered to him. “Where did you get this? It has small parts, so I know it didn’t come from the playroom.”
“I ordered it off Amazon.” As Qhuinn looked surprised, the brother shrugged. “I can do things like that, you know. I’m not just a brooding cloud.”
“So you planned this.”
“Five nights ago. I figured I’d give you a week. Seemed as arbitrary an anniversary as any other, and it was a helluva lot better than a month or a year.”
Qhuinn looked at the brother’s slave bands. “It was you. You were the one who was holding me back from Lassiter that night I went after him. I saw your… you know, tattoos… out of the corner of my eye.”
“That fallen angel’s the only savior we’ve got, son.” Z went over to the door. “Besides, if he’s a trend? We lose him and the universe is going to send us Bozo the Clown next.”
“But that’s the problem. Lassiter isn’t in the savior business.”
“I think the question is more… who was he supposed to save that night.”
“FYI, it was the one who went out in the blizzard,” Qhuinn said bitterly.
Z just shrugged and pointed to the airplane. “Anytime you doubt yourself, look at that. And you can always come and find me, day or night.”
After the brother left, Qhuinn stared at the toes of his shitkickers. He hated to break the news to the fighter, but he hadn’t been all that helpful.
Figure out how to cope.
Yeah, like that was a map with clear markings. It was as specific as someone standing on the shores of the Old Country, and pointing west to say, Yeah, the New World is over thataways a little bit.
Qhuinn went across to the chair, took a load off, and spun the propeller on the toy plane. As the thing fell into a blur, he thought of the nature of travel and destinations. Then he thought of all the things a person could buy on Amazon. Luggage. Extra socks and underwear. Hiking boots, hats, and gloves.
You couldn’t buy a real airplane, but who knew what the future might hold. Maybe in another decade, a person could have an eco-friendly bi-wing land on their front yard. For seventy-five thousand easy payments of $12,798.99. Free financing if you pay it off in under fifty years—
Qhuinn frowned as he realized the weird riff his brain was going off on was normal for him. It was the kind of shit his mind did whenever he had downtime, his thoughts just making up little stupid hypotheticals about absolutely nothing important.
Maybe it was a sign he was coming back some.
He glanced over to the bed and remembered curling in on himself and wailing. Man, he’d fucking lost it.
So no, absolutely not—he was not going hard into the therapy. Or even lightly. Z could keep all that shrink-couch bullcrap with the Kleenex box and the stories of Mommy and Daddy and how everyone had been mean to him because of his fucked-up eyes. He was not going to talk about that shit—and certainly not going to… what was the term?… oh, right, “unpack” the night of his brother’s death and how he’d felt as he’d gone from place to place, each time expecting to see the male and being let down, the ever more violent spikes of fear bungee-cording him around in his own skin.
Nope. He wasn’t cracking again.
But he was willing to buy in to Z’s cope stuff. The question was where to begin, and maybe it made him a pussy, but he couldn’t start with the hardest thing. That… he just could not manage. He did know that the brother was right, though. He couldn’t just stay in this limbo.
As he considered various possibilities, it was hard to know exactly when the plan hit him, but he took out his phone and—
Blay had texted him. To let him know that he’d gone to see his parents.
Qhuinn let his head fall back against the armchair’s cushioned contours. With a fresh wave of sadness, he pictured that lovely house Rocke and Lyric had built after the raids, the one set all the way in the back of that human development, by a pond. It was a new-built designed to look old, and Lyric had made it clear that she wasn’t thrilled with that part of things. Rocke, on the other hand, loved having all of the mechanicals under warranty.
In a lot of ways, the couple was old-fashioned, the traditional sex roles not just embraced years before, but lovingly maintained: Rocke earned the money and paid the bills; Lyric cooked and cleaned; and their home, no matter what house it was encapsulated in, was always warm, inviting, and serene.
He thought of the twins. The good news was that they could choose who they wanted to be. After all, traditional roles were fine, if they weren’t forced. He didn’t want either of his kids locked into any kind of social rules or expectations. He’d had plenty of that growing up—and the failures he’d racked up, though in large part nothing he’d had any control over, had nearly killed him.