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He has always known these things leave a mark. Pain, betrayal, abandonment.
He can see as much, every day, in any mirror or even a slightly reflective surface around him. Any blade. The water of the river, which he likes to contemplate before making a difficult decision. The glass of Singed’s equipment or the one glistening in Jinx’s protective goggles.
But he has never expected the mark could be self-inflicted.
So, when he sees her tremble, her hand around a screw he has just seen her stab herself with, at first he only feels shock. He isn’t sure whether he ought to let her know he is here – that he witnessed it. But then she turns, sensing his presence, and opens her mouth to scream.
No sound comes out but a strangled sob. There’s blood on the screw, a tiny bead that stains her fingers when she grasps the metal tighter, as if afraid he is going to tear it away from her.
The second thing he feels is fear for her. ‘Worry’ could perhaps be a better word. Yet it is not it that, because it is all-consuming, much more urgent. He wishes to rush to her, to help and soothe, yet he stays put, unsure how.
“Powder,” he says softly. It’s her name for today.
Or rather – it was, because now she snarls back, “Don’t call me that!” And, in the same ragged breath, “I’m a jinx, I jinx, I jinx everything I touch—”
Not Powder, then. He does not want to use Jinx either. Not now, when she’s coming apart at the seams because she feels like one. “My child,” he tries instead.
It’s enough. She stops glaring at him like he’s a threat, and instead curls up on her chair, gathering her knees to herself in a rather breakneck position. She hides her face behind them. The hair she’s growing out falls around in disorder, a wild blue halo around her little head.
“My child,” he says again, looking for something – anything – to add to it, and finding himself awfully ineloquent. She is perhaps the only person able to reduce him to that.
Though he approaches her, he stops a couple of feet away from the chair, assuming she might not want him any closer right now. She always asks for touch when she wants it, anyway.
They stay like that for a longer while – he, frozen by her side in case she needs him, and she, gulping away at tears as her shoulders tremble, wound tight around her legs.
It gives him enough time to think. To consider the troubling phenomena he has witnessed. Apart from thoughts on the necessity of disinfecting her wounds, it also brings a sort of understanding.
***
He switched her music off; must have started pissing him off after a while. It hasn’t been long since that when he starts to speak.
“I have noticed you were hurting yourself,” he says, tone careful and measured. It always is. He always is – composed and cautious, and able to bear the mess that she is. She hates him for it. HATES. He doesn’t even reach out her way, as if he knows she doesn’t want him to. Not right now. “I know what you’ve been through—”
He thinks himself so smart, doesn’t he? He thinks he knows everything. He thinks he knows what it’s like.
“I don’t want to talk about it!” she yells, and hides her face again, feeling hot tears pour down her cheeks.
“I understand.”
And oh no, he doesn’t, HE DOESN’T, there’s no way he could, so she tells him exactly that.
“No you don’t!” She wants to jump, she wants to hit something, shakes her head furiously. “You don’t! You only think you do!”
He just stands there, like the statue of Vander that she’s afraid to be around. He just stands. Like he could not care less. Maybe he can’t. HE DOESN’T. Or none of this is true. Oh, there’s so much noise in her head, and she just wants it to cease. Where’s the screw, where’s the stapler, where’s—
He catches her wrist. “Please don’t. Let’s talk this through, first.”
She doesn’t want to talk it through. She doesn’t want to talk. She just wants it to hurt less. No, not less – different. To hurt more, for a little, so that it can fade away, like a scar.
She tears her hand out from his grasp. Metal sinks into her skin in a new place, not breaking it this time. The pressure allows her to gather her thoughts.
“—You think you get it, you think you get everything, ‘cause it’s all like what happened to you and all that, but it really isn’t! And what now, what are you going to tell me now, that I shouldn’t be doing this, that I’m stupid, that it’s sick…” She takes a breath. She needs to breathe. Or to reach for the compass’s needle—
“No.”
She thinks he’s protesting her plans again, but it doesn’t look like it. He can’t read her mind, after all. Lucky you, or he’d be terrified. “Huh?”
“No, I wasn’t going to say any of that. You may as well let me finish, if you want to know what I have to say about the matter.”
“And if I don’t?”
“We will talk about this some other time, if you’d prefer.”
“Can it be ‘never’?”
“No, that isn’t an option. I wouldn’t forgive myself if I did not at least try to do something about this. Although I do admit I’m not certain I will be able to help you. But I will do my best to.”
No, he can’t mean it. He doesn’t mean it. He must think she’s stupid. He must think she’s weak. Everybody does.
“Would it be alright if I sat here with you? Now?”
She looks up at him and can’t help thinking he seems as sincere as he sounds. But then, she’s seen him lie to people – and he is a good liar.
“I don’t know.” She hides her head between her arms again. It’s not that she doesn’t want to see him – there’s something calming about the concern on his harsh-carved face, even in the scarred red eye. But she doesn’t want him to see her like this.
“It’s okay.”
She doesn’t want him to leave, either.
“I don’t know,” she says again, letting go of the screw. It rolls down her thigh and onto the floor, clinking and clattering.
“It’s okay, my little girl.”
She knows he only calls her that because she banned him from using any of her names, but it still makes her feel warm. She leans towards him, and he understands – puts his arms around her as she’s still on the chair. Safer now. Better now, because it hurts, and because he’s here, that too.
“Do you need a disinfectant?” he asks as they part. She sees him glance at her thigh, then focus back on her face, a small quiver to his lip like he felt her pain.
“No. I just pour alcohol over it. Usually.”
“Usually?”
Shit. “I don’t do this that often, I swear.” She shifts in her chair, legs hanging down so she can reach the floor. She kicks the screw on it with her boot.
“It’s okay, even if you do; you must have your reasons for it. Let’s start with them, then – why do you feel like doing this?”
She reaches for a swab and wipes her skin with it, wincing at the smell of alcohol more than the way it bites into her wounds. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you?” He doesn’t buy it, damn it. “You can tell me, whatever it is.”
“Even if it’s about… them?”
“Even if.”
He sits down on a stool he brought for himself from the other part of her ‘lab’. Then reaches out to her – and she has to catch his hand, because she knows he’s not gonna do that on his own. She places it on her knee of the leg that’s still hurting, a little bit. Exactly enough.
She starts telling him, and it feels like a long time before she stops. It’s them, and it’s her, and it’s that she can’t do anything right, and it’s that everyone will leave, and that bad things happen to her and—It’s so much stuff she’s sure she stops making sense halfway.
But he is still listening, even after that half.
He tells her he understands; that it must feel better to have a scar to match the pain; that his works like that. He tells her that he wishes she didn’t have to do this, that as well. Not – that he hopes she’ll stop. Not – that it’s dumb she does. Not – to promise him not to.
Even Vi thought it was dumb, whenever she would hit her head after messing something up. And she knows now it’s worse than it ever was with Vi.
“I understand the need for it to hurt,” he repeats. His voice is soft and very serious. He looks right at her, his black-and-red eye glinting golden in the light of her lamp as he suggests, “Have you considered it doesn’t have to hurt you?”
“But it does. It does anyway.” She twirls a lock around her hand, then lets go of it. “No matter what I do, I’ll jinx it. I jinx everything. Whatever I touch, it blows up.”
He puts his hand over hers. It covers it whole.
“That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”
***
She has been faring better since she discovered the freeing effect of unbridled violence. She’s learning – to reforge her emotions into something less hurtful for her, though equally destructive.
He doesn’t hold delusions that this healed her completely. He knows there are still scars on her skin, fresh ones too, though less of them than he saw that one day he caught her creating new ones. And this poses new problems too, as Sevika keeps complaining the girl is hard to tame.
But she seems better now, like she has stopped hurting some.
She fares better. He fears for her less. He knows she’s on the frontlines, so perhaps that is the opposite of what he should be feeling, but he believes she can take care of herself, there. He believes in her, and she shows him that is right, time and time again; shows them.
Her designs have started working, as well. It might just be that he was correct about her – which surprises her, though not him – she will grow into greatness. She’ll leave her mark on this sorry world. She will show them all.