His smile is wide, so wide. “God, I love that.”
“Your name?”
“Only when you say it.”
“Aaron? Or Warner?”
His eyes close. He tilts his head back against the wall. Dimples.
Suddenly I’m struck by the reality of what I’m doing here. Sitting here, spending time with Warner like we have so many hours to waste. Like there isn’t a very terrible world outside of these walls. I don’t know how I manage to keep getting distracted and I promise myself that this time I won’t let the conversation veer out of control. But when I open my mouth he says
“I’m not going to give you your notebook back.”
My mouth falls closed.
“I know you want it back,” he says, “but I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep it forever.” He holds it up, shows it to me. Grins. And then puts it in his pocket. The one place I’d never dare to reach.
“Why?” I can’t help but ask. “Why do you want it so much?”
He spends far too long just looking at me. Not answering my question. And then he says
“On the darkest days you have to search for a spot of brightness, on the coldest days you have to seek out a spot of warmth; on the bleakest days you have to keep your eyes onward and upward and on the saddest days you have to leave them open to let them cry. To then let them dry. To give them a chance to wash out the pain in order to see fresh and clear once again.”
“I can’t believe you have that memorized,” I whisper.
He leans back again. Closes his eyes again. Says, “Nothing in this life will ever make sense to me but I can’t help but try to collect the change and hope it’s enough to pay for our mistakes.”
“I wrote that, too?” I ask him, unable to believe it’s possible he’s reciting the same words that fell from my lips to my fingertips and bled onto a page. Still unable to believe he’s now privy to my private thoughts, feelings I captured with a tortured mind and hammered into sentences I shoved into paragraphs, ideas I pinned together with punctuation marks that serve no function but to determine where one thought ends and another begins.
This blond boy has my secrets in his mouth.
“You wrote a lot of things,” he says, not looking at me. “About your parents, your childhood, your experiences with other people. You talked about hope and redemption and what it would be like to see a bird fly by. You wrote about pain. And what it’s like to think you’re a monster. What it was like to be judged by everyone before you’d even spoken two words to them.” A deep inhale. “So much of it was like seeing myself on paper,” he whispers. “Like reading all the things I never knew how to say.”
And I wish my heart would just shut up shut up shut up shut up.
“Every single day I’m sorry,” he says, his words barely a breath now. “Sorry for believing the things I heard about you. And then for hurting you when I thought I was helping you. I can’t apologize for who I am,” he says. “That part of me is already done; already ruined. I gave up on myself a long time ago. But I am sorry I didn’t understand you better. Everything I did, I did because I wanted to help you to be stronger. I wanted you to use your anger as a tool, as a weapon to help harness the strength inside of you; I wanted you to be able to fight the world. I provoked you on purpose,” he says. “I pushed you too far, too hard, did things to horrify and disgust you and I did it all on purpose. Because that’s how I was taught to steel myself against the terror in this world. That’s how I was trained to fight back. And I wanted to teach you. I knew you had the potential to be more, so much more. I could see greatness in you.”
He looks at me. Really, really looks at me.
“You’re going to go on to do incredible things,” he says. “I’ve always known that. I think I just wanted to be a part of it.”
And I try. I try so hard to remember all the reasons why I’m supposed to hate him, I try to remember all the horrible things I’ve seen him do. But I’m tortured because I understand too much about what it’s like to be tortured. To do things because you don’t know any better. To do things because you think they’re right because you were never taught what was wrong.
Because it’s so hard to be kind to the world when all you’ve ever felt is hate.
Because it’s so hard to see goodness in the world when all you’ve ever known is terror.
And I want to say something to him. Something profound and complete and memorable but he seems to understand. He offers me a strange, unsteady smile that doesn’t reach his eyes but says so much.
Then
“Tell your team,” he says, “to prepare for war. Unless his plans have changed, my father will be ordering an attack on civilians the day after tomorrow and it will be nothing short of a massacre. It will also be your only opportunity to save your men. They are being held captive somewhere in the lower levels of Sector 45 Headquarters. I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you.”
“How did you—”
“I know why you’re here, love. I’m not an idiot. I know why you’re being forced to spend time with me.”
“But why offer the information so freely?” I ask him. “What reason do you have to help us?”
There’s a flicker of change in his eyes that doesn’t last long enough for me to examine it. And though his expression is carefully neutral, something in the space between us feels different all of a sudden. Charged.
“Go,” he says. “You must tell them now.”