Chapter Text
“This isn’t fucking working,” Adrien snapped. He slammed the textbook shut and shoved it away from him. It slid across the table and tumbled to the floor, paper scattering. Adrien tossed his notebook after it with a noise of disgust and levered himself out of his chair.
“Adrien,” Justine said, reaching up, but he’d already got his crutches under his arms and was swinging himself out of the room as aggressively as possible. The door slammed behind him.
The sideways looks of the other students in the library were palpable, and the low whispering that followed Adrien out of the room wasn’t subtle enough. Justine stood up, gathering the scattered materials into her arms; she met the eyes of a group of upperclassmen at the table directly across the room; their whispers were the loudest, but they died as she gazed at them. They looked like nervous penned animals, shuffling in place.
Justine turned and followed Adrien out. She found she didn’t have to work very hard to be left alone now. Halfway into the second semester, and Adrien was just out of the wheelchair, Justine’s cheek had finally faded from an angry red knot of fresh scar tissue, and Alex was two weeks into a long prison sentence. The video of Alex and Justine at the party was still circulating, she knew, and gossip moved fast, but what had happened was more than gossip: it had become an inextricable part of the social landscape of the school. Everyone knew what had happened. Sometimes Justine hated them for it, deeply. Sometimes she wanted to kill everyone who had ever looked at her or Adrien sideways or said a word about them when they thought she couldn’t hear, or didn’t care, and she knew that she would be able to.
She found Adrien smoking in the parking lot outside the medical campus, where her parents had dropped her off months ago. He wordlessly handed her a cigarette, lit it for her. They stood together smoking in silence for a long time; Adrien dropped the butt and ground it under the foot of a crutch, and then said, “This fucking sucks.”
“Yeah,” Justine said, tipping her head back exhaling a cloud of smoke into the overcast sky. Gray on gray. Adrien handed her another and she lit it off the end of her first before crushing the butt, something else she’d never used to do before this year. It helped calm her down some, she had found. It was a bad habit getting worse, but she preferred it to the others.
“Help me sit,” Adrien said. He situated himself in front of the curb and set the crutches aside, keeping the weight off his mangled leg. He would walk on it again one day, in theory. Justine stood in front of him and grabbed his hands, and braced herself against his weight as he gingerly lowered himself to the ground. “Thanks.”
She sat down next to him. “Want to tell me what that was about?”
Adrien shrugged, his shoulder bumping into hers. “Nah.”
Neither of them was very talkative anymore. No one was talking to them, and they didn’t always have much to say between the two of them either. Justine felt empty a lot of the time. Not hungry and hollow like she’d been before, or numb like cleaning Adrien’s blood off of her sister’s face. Just empty. And Adrien was the opposite, so tangled up inside that nothing got out. Until it did, like it just had.
They smoked together a while longer, and Adrien started breathing a little harder, struggling with the smoke and the wound in his chest and some ugly feeling Justine could already tell was too big to keep to himself, until at last he said, waving his hand with the cigarette clenched in his fingers as if to scatter the words as he said them, “Justine, I’m always scared.”
“I know,” Justine said. She picked up his left hand and rubbed it between hers, put her head on his shoulder, careful not to lean against him too much. Someone pulled in on the other side of the lot. A bird cried and distantly, a siren began to wail. The air was cool and Adrien was warm and smelled nice, like cologne and smoke in a way she associated mostly with sex now, and hunger, except for the moments when it just made her tense, waiting for the smell of blood to hit her. She could lie awake all night waiting to smell his blood, and it never helped that they didn’t sleep together anymore. Lying awake and paralyzed in the dark, the phantom scent could fill the suite even with Adrien safe behind two walls and a locked door.
“Plus,” Adrien added, “I’m definitely going to fail the quiz on Monday.”
“I’m going to fail the practical,” Justine said gloomily.
“The fuck are you talking about? You could spin a practical in your sleep, Ju,” Adrien said.
“I can’t do it. I’m not going to go.”
“Right,” Adrien scoffed. Justine braced herself a little, seeing it coming, and Adrien said, mean and sly, “Afraid you’ll take a bite out of the cadaver?”
Justine hit him hard in his good leg, but he doubled over like she’d kicked him in the lame one. “Fuck you,” she said. “Fuck you.”
“Ah, Ju,” he said, laughing, “Who gives a fuck about it anyway?”
“I do,” she said, defensively. Her cheeks were burning. She took a long drag to do something with her hands, and to turn her face away.
“No, you don’t,” Adrien told her, authoritative; Justine softened to him a little unwillingly, pleased and interested to hear herself discussed. “You just wish you did. You give a fuck that you don’t give a fuck anymore.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, flicking ash off the end of her cigarette. Without heat: “Study that, asshole.”
“Study you? That’s all I study anymore,” Adrien said. “I have to stay on my toes if I don’t wanna get bit.”
Sometimes it didn’t bother her when he joked like that. Sometimes the hunger felt so far away it was like she’d imagined it, like it had all been a horrible dream or a story on the news that had nothing to do with her, and she bared her teeth at him in a wide grin and he smiled back, his face pale and his mouth mocking and his eyes dark and sweet. And sometimes it brought her slipping back to that morning, to yanking back the covers and feeling her body flush cold with horror, her brain rebel hysterically against what she was seeing, what she was understanding, why didn’t you hit me, why didn’t you fight back! And, sometimes, the words caught at something in her and tugged, and she would look at his bare wrist or the smooth slope where his shoulder met his neck and feel an animal terror at herself. Lust deeper than fear, fear deeper than hunger, hunger deeper than lust. Those moments were why Adrien said things like that; she knew she couldn’t hide what went though her mind from him.
“Fuck you,” she said, harsh.
“Fuck you too,” Adrien said calmly: he wasn’t sorry and never would be.
She finished her cigarette in three deep drags and lit another one. Adrien’s wary gaze was like a light turned on her, heat on the side of her face and the urge to squeeze her eyes shut and turn away. Her mouth was watering like she was going to be sick. It had a faint metallic tang to it, like a little bit of blood still lingered in the far corners of her mouth. She spat onto the asphalt between her legs and put the cigarette back in her mouth. The paper was wet with drool. She forced herself to think about anything other than what she wanted to think about. She imagined putting it out on her tongue, but the scars on her arm itched, skin longing to be broken.
“I’m going home on the weekend,” Justine said, a sudden confessional gasp. She swallowed and spat again. “My parents want me to visit Alex with them.”
For a moment it was so quiet that Justine could hear the tiny hiss of Adrien’s cigarette as it burned in his mouth. “Jesus,” he said, eventually.
The feelings that Justine felt about Alex were too complex to name. All she knew was that they sat in the pit of her stomach like a brick.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I’m really… I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“It’s alright.” Adrien was so quiet Justine was sure he would say nothing more about it. Even before it wouldn’t have surprised her. Taciturn, reserved, handsome and untouchable. That was Adrien. Until she had made him talk to her, until she had touched him, until she’d scarred him. It didn’t matter that Alex had done it. It was and always would be Justine’s fault. So it didn’t surprise her as much as it maybe should have, that Adrien took a breath and said, “I still read through her texts on my phone sometimes.”
“That’s pretty morbid, Adrien.” No matter that Justine did the same thing.
“I know. I can’t help it,” Adrien said. He picked at a fallen leaf, crushing it into a tight green ball, grinding it into a paste on the asphalt like a medicine-woman’s poultice from a long-ago age.
Maybe in a time like that there would be a place for something like Justine. In the Middle Ages they would have burned Alex and her as well, probably, and now they locked Alex away and sent Justine to counseling sessions that were nothing so much as twice-weekly hour-long blocks of tense silence. She spent so much time staring at the ugly clock on the wall of her therapist’s office that she was starting to see it in dreams. That printed watercolor texture, the kitschy red flowers it described, black hands moving slower than God. But in a pagan prehistory maybe they would have worshipped her as some kind of conduit to the divine, making sacrifices in her name. Or maybe they would have just killed her. Either way it seemed better that this.
“I’m so hungry,” Justine admitted. She’d lost weight, she was nearly skeletal. Adrien kept bringing her doughnuts and eclairs, piles and piles of the sad limp fries from the dining hall, putting full-fat milk in the fridge and heavy cream sometimes when he thought she wasn’t taking the hint. It was so kind it made her ache, but it didn’t help. It wasn’t what she wanted.
“Well fucking keep it away from me,” Adrien said.
“I try. I just don’t know what to do.”
“Go visit Alex,” Adrien said. “Skip your practical. Eat your veggies.”
“Right, because that’ll fix me. That’ll make all this alright.”
“You’re such a fucking drama queen,” Adrien drawled, gesticulating with the cigarette. “Just go through the motions, Ju. It’s all anyone does. Either it’ll be alright, or you won’t be able to stand it anymore and you’ll have to kill yourself for the safety of the general population.”
“Thank you Adrien,” Justine snapped. She stubbed out her cigarette and jumped to her feet, stamping out the numbness in her butt. “Very uplifting.”
“Happy to help.” Adrien held his arms out to her. “Help me up, Ju. I’m going to make risotto tonight and I want to get started on it soon.”
Justine scowled. “With mushroom?”
“Obviously.”
“Fine, then. I guess I’ll pick you up.” She grabbed Adrien’s hands and pulled, leaning her entire body weight back as he rocked himself up and forward with his good leg braced under him to push, the other stiff and useless in front of him. The first time they’d tried that maneuver Justine had overbalanced and fallen right on her ass, and so had Adrien, with an awful animal howl of agony. It had put him back on bedrest for two more days, and he’d been furious and hadn’t spoken to her for nearly a week. But of necessity, they’d tried again. That time they’d balanced each other right, and but for a few close saves and near misses they’d caught each other every time since.
Justine held onto him until Adrien had his balance, and then he braced a hand on her back while she leaned down to pick up his crutches. When they were situated under his arms, Justine picked up his backpack and they started back towards the dorms. They walked in silence; there wasn’t really anything more to say.