He didn’t lose his sister because he joined the FBI—he joined the FBI because he lost his sister—but he can’t bear the thought of endangering his parents, or the various aunts and uncles and cousins he still keeps in contact with.
Today, though, when he’s spent the entire day staring at paperwork that will probably fill the rest of the week, he can’t help but realize that the place he calls home is downright sterile.
Changing out of his suit, he settles down on the couch with a box of takeout. Vic’s wife and mother, saints that they are, have offered many times to teach him how to cook properly, but the best he can manage without mayhem is ramen and blue-box mac and cheese. Contrary to Ramirez’s mockery, it has nothing to do with being male and everything to do with getting bored halfway through preparations.
He’s pretty sure the landlord would not be pleased to paint over smoke stains on his kitchen ceiling again.
His personal photos, anything with him or a loved one or a location connected to him, are packed away in shoe boxes hidden in a crawl space in the bedroom closet. There when he wants to look through them, hard for anyone else to find. A few photos are safe to put up, though, and he looks at them rather than try to find a game on the television.
He doesn’t remember telling Priya why there were no pictures displayed when she and her mother came to pick him up for a barbecue at Vic’s house those months they lived in D.C. He almost remembers mentioning it to her mother, though not any of the reasons. Then again, Deshani Sravasti is a formidable woman with a keen (and somewhat terrifying) ability to read people. She probably noticed the lack of photos even before he said anything about it, and made a fairly accurate guess as to why. So maybe she was the one to mention it to Priya.
Thus began the adventures of Special Agent Ken. He’s not sure where Priya got the Ken doll—he suspects one of Vic’s daughters—but she sewed it a suit and a little navy blue windbreaker with FBI in big yellow letters on the back. Now wherever she and her mother go, Special Agent Ken goes along with them, and gets his own photos with famous or interesting backdrops. The handful Eddison has framed are arrayed in an arc over the television.
His favorite is from Berlin; the doll is bent almost in half, facedown on a table next to a quarter-full glass of beer bigger than Ken would be standing. He can just see the tiny lederhosen peeking out from under the windbreaker. He’s pretty sure Priya is the only person he knows who would be completely comfortable making a doll look drunk for a photo session in a public space. She doesn’t sign or date the backs of the photos, just writes in a location for the more obscure backdrops. Personal in sentiment, impersonal in appearance.
Safe.
His phone rings, buzzing and dancing against the coffee table. He eyes it warily until he remembers that Priya was going to call. “So is your new town full of interesting things?” he asks instead of saying hello.
“Interesting is a good word for it,” she agrees. “The plazas are the weirdest mix of good intentions and resignation.”
“I finally got a chance to read the profile on your mother in December’s Economist,” he says. “It’s an impressive write-up.”
“The interview started out a bit rocky; he kept asking about Chavi and Dad, and Mum was less than pleased.”
Less than pleased for Deshani Sravasti normally means her victim is lucky to escape without pissing himself. Clearly the Economist sent someone made of sterner stuff, given how the rest of the interview turned out.
“It got better once he got less personal,” she continues. “Mum loves talking about putting out fires in the different branches.”
“I’m glad they’re recognizing her for it.” It had been startling to walk into the bookstore and see Deshani on the cover of the magazine, her gaze direct and challenging even in a photo. More pictures accompanied the article, one in her Birmingham office, the other with Priya on their couch.
He wasn’t surprised to see the tiny print that credited Priya as the photographer for the ones she wasn’t in.
There’s a pause then, less a second of silence than a hesitation, and the one thing Priya has never done is hesitate. This is the girl who, within ten minutes of meeting him, threw a teddy bear at his head and told him not to be such a fucking coward. They’ve been friends ever since.
He generally prefers not to examine what that might say about him.
“What is it, Priya?”
“Are you guys okay?”
The question makes him cold, for no reason he can name, and he jabs the plastic fork back into the noodles. “What, the team? We’re fine.”
“Are you? Because I got cards from all three of you today.”
Shit.
He had no way of knowing that Vic intended to send a card, but he should have remembered Ramirez. Would it have been less noticeable if only two of them had arrived?
But this is Priya, and she is her mother’s daughter, and neither of them has ever needed all the facts to get correctly from point A to point M.
“You don’t have to tell me what’s going on. I know you might not want to, or might not be able to. I’m just worried.” That hesitation again, that testing the ice before the step. “Mercedes glittered over the butterflies on her card.”
Fuck.
But last Tuesday—the day he’d sent the card—was a bad day for all of them. He shouldn’t be surprised.
“So let me rephrase slightly,” she continues. “Will you all be okay?”
Eddison sits on that a moment, lets it sink down to his bones as if there’s an answer to be found there. Priya doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t push or prod or rush him to a response. She’s gotten good at waiting.
The Butterflies were good at waiting, some better than others. Most of those who are left aren’t good at it anymore.
He wasn’t at the Garden when they pulled out the bodies of the girls who’d died in the moments leading up to the explosion, or in it. He was on his way back to Quantico, rage seeping into the places hollowed out by what he’d seen.
As they learned what had happened to those girls, he’d been filled with the horrifying realization that this case would never go away. Not that it wouldn’t be legally resolved; it would. Eventually. But this wasn’t a case to solve and put away, move on to the next. It wasn’t even one to idly look back on while reflecting on the course of one’s career.
This was a case to ruin you, to utterly wreck you for the rest of your life because how can people do this?
And because this is Priya who’s asking, Priya who knows better than most what it means to not be okay—knows that it’s all right to not be okay—he considers the limits of what he can and cannot tell her and decides it’s going to get out in the news anyway, but she won’t be the one to share it.
“One of the Garden survivors killed herself last week.”
She makes a small sound, thinking rather than responding.
“It wasn’t really a surprise,” he continues. “Not with this one. We were more surprised that she hadn’t done it earlier.”
“Family?”
“She broke while she was still inside there. Her family broke her the rest of the way. But she makes . . .”
She says it so he doesn’t have to. “Three,” she says simply. “That’s three suicides in less than four months.”
“There are two others the psychologists have issued warnings for. ‘More likely than not’ was how they put it.”
“And the others?”
“Time will tell.” He hates that phrase, hates its truthfulness more. “A few of them will be . . . not fine, I guess, but as fine as they can be. Anything tries to destroy them, they’ll burn the world to take it down with them.”
“Four months isn’t much time.”
“Less than four.”
“Less than four,” she agrees peaceably, not because the correction is important but because he’s still raw, and she knows it. He should be less okay with that than he is. He’s an FBI agent, damn it, and if he must be vulnerable he doesn’t need anyone to see it.