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About a week or so into their weird ass adventure they happen across a beautiful little stream and grotto. It looks like something straight out of a fantasy story, and not the kind of fantastically fucked up one that they’ve been living, the cute kid’s storybook kind. Pretty little waterfall casting a hazy rainbow. Pond that’s still enough to swim in, but not stagnant or gross. Clear water, with no hint of any fantasy piranhas or other miscellaneous flesh eating water creatures. In short, pretty fucking perfect.
And after days of travel, combat, confusion, and general weirdness, they’re all tired, cranky, and gross. The dads all spread out to relax however they like best. Darryl starts foraging around for stones and sticks to build a cooking fire. Ron scuttles off to do… whatever Ron does to wind down.
Glenn sets himself up on a comfy rock by the water. The rock is warm from the sun, and the water is cool when he dangles his feet in. And he finally has a chance to just relax, smoke a little without Darryl complaining about the smell, and just kinda… be.
Henry’s eyes light up immediately, not at the prospect of a relaxing swim and finally unwinding, but because of the rocks. Fucking nerd. He’s been scrambling around the slippery rocks since the second they got here.
He slips almost immediately.
Glenn can’t help it, he laughs so hard tears come to his eyes.
It’s funny cause he’s so fucking stupid and also because Henry has been literally bursting with insane powers since they got to this realm (and those powers would be kinda fucking terrifying if not for the fact that Henry seems every bit as terrified as the rest of them). But here he is losing a battle to slippery rocks and his own overeager curiosity. Henry is absolutely fuming with embarrassment by the time he hauls himself out of the water, no doubt made worse by Glenn’s laughter.
Glenn feels a little bad when he notices Henry prodding at his wrist and wincing. So when he tries to walk past Glenn to get to the car’s first aid kit, he snags his arm and pulls him back towards him gently.
“Give it here,” he says.
Henry looks at him a little suspiciously. “I can do it myself.”
“You’re exhausted,” Glenn says. “You massively overdid it in that last fight.”
It’s true. This close, he can see the way the exhaustion pulls at him. He seems to be standing mostly due to sheer stubbornness. He’s still nice enough to throw him an excuse. “You said I need the practice, right?”
Henry can’t find anything to fight in that, so he allows himself to sit heavily on the rock next to Glenn. His wrist is already swelling purple, but it doesn’t seem to be broken. Glenn is suddenly self-conscious, cause he’s not really any good at this. Not yet. He really does need to practice. Everything just seems to come so easily to Henry in this world. Healing, destruction, fucking shapeshifting, everything. Massive power seems to just burst out of him, barely any thought required. Glenn meanwhile is having to struggle for every little bit of magic that comes to him. And it kinda makes his head spin, cause two weeks ago, the thought of him being able to use magic at all, the thought of magic even being a thing was… insane.
Henry usually wears a couple of bracelets along his wrists, classic crunchy munchy hippie dude attire. When Glenn pushes up the bracelets to get a better look, he notices silvery overlapping scars along his wrist. Not too noticeable from a distance, but yeah, explains the bracelets. Not like Glenn can judge. Kinda stupid to leave scars like that so out in the open, but whatever.
He takes Henry’s injured hand in his and just kind of… thinks healing vibe thoughts at it. Somehow it fucking works. The swelling going down little by little and the bruises start to fade. Glenn feels immensely satisfied as Henry starts to look marginally less stressed out. He flips Henry’s hand over to check on the bruising and notices that the silvery scars wrap around the back of his wrist as well.
“Dude, are these handcuff scars?” He blurts out before he can think of whether or not that’s an okay question to ask.
Henry yanks his hand back like Glenn burned him.
Glenn feels a bubble of laughter well up right alongside the tiniest hint of respect. “How many times have you been arrested?” Later he’ll think about all the darker implications of this, but right now the absurdity of Henry of all people being a petty criminal crashes right up against the absurdity of literally everything else in their life right now, and Glenn laughs til he can’t breathe.
“A couple of times,” Henry says begrudgingly, smiling in spite of himself at Glenn’s laughter.
“What’s going on?” Darryl asks, abandoning his self-appointed grill dad duties.
His confused, concerned face just sends Glenn laughing harder. He’s been wound tight enough to crack the past few days, the weed and sarcasm only just barely scratching the itch beneath his skin that’s growing worse every day. He’s needed outlet, a break, and yeah, yep, this is that. Breaking, more than a break, but he’ll take what he can get. He can’t stop laughing even as the dark possibilities burst behind his eyes. And he definitely regrets involving Darryl and Ron into this, regrets laughing, regrets asking the question in the first place. He can’t quite catch his breath. This might be a panic attack, actually.
Henry huffs a little laugh. “I was just telling Glenn about the times I’d been arrested,” he says good-naturedly.
“Seriously? Huh, well that’s… Wait, times?” Darryl asks. “Times plural?”
“All for good causes, don’t worry,” Henry says waving them off.
“Um, I’m pretty sure cops don’t arrest you for good causes,” Ron says, genuinely confused.
Glenn snorts out a half-laugh. Oh to be so fucking naive.
“Well, actually…” Henry goes off on a tangent about how that’s absolutely not true. Which, yeah, good.
He hits the highlights of the several times he’d been arrested while they all sit around to eat the lunch Darryl prepared. All classic do-gooder, protest-having, art-loving hippie shit. Henry’s not embarrassed, but he keeps flicking his eyes over towards Darryl, seems to be more than a little prepared for Darryl to take this the absolute worst way. Which tracks.
With the attention off of him, Glenn is able to pull himself together again. He’s sure the nitty-gritty details of the stories will make excellent entertainment for the next couple days of boring car rides. But.. there’s absolutely nothing in those stories to suggest a cop busted him up bad enough to leave scars like that.
They’ve all already entertained themselves by swapping the obligatory ‘here are the coolest/funniest/weirdest ways I’ve been injured, check out this cool scar’ conversations. Classic road trip shit. Glenn’s already a little pissed that Darryl’s all come from genuinely pretty badass sports reasons, even though football’s for meathead jocks who don’t give a shit about how bad they’re scrambling their brains with all those concussions. A little hypocritical maybe, since Darryl fired right back that drugs and alcohol scramble your brain, too. That little argument helped pass a day and a half on the journey so far.
Henry joined in on the storytelling sometimes. All of his stories seemed to come from stupid nerd geologist shit. Slipping on rocks. Reaching into tide pools. Climbing up unstable surfaces. Nothing major. Nothing that would explain scars like that.
The story-swapping kind of fizzled out when Glenn tried to include Ron into the conversation since he was sitting around looking all sad and not at all entertained. Ron said that none of his scar stories were fun or interesting, and he didn’t really find stories of how his friends have been hurt interesting or fun either. So that kind of took the wind out of the sails of that conversation.
The rest of the day passes in a pleasant haze. They get clean for the first time in ages, showering as best as they can in the pond and the gentle waterfall. Swim. Rest. Explore a little, just a little, since Darryl won’t let any of them out of sight in case of weird fantasy bullshit. Which, fair.
Still, he can’t stop noticing the way that Henry fiddles with his bracelets when he talks, and he can’t stop noticing the way that Henry and Darryl turn their whole bodies and attention toward each other whenever they interact. Those two have been orbiting around each other since day one and it sends a little stab of something sick and vicious behind Glenn’s ribs. Darryl’s been hiding his furtive glances at Henry underneath his sunglasses. Dude’s got one fucking move. Feels an emotion; hides behind sunglasses. Emotion; sunglasses.
Glenn is taking another smoke break, when Ron startles him.
“Do you think you can get scars like that falling out of a tree?” Ron asks.
He jumps. Dude just pops out of nowhere sometimes, and he’s not at all used to it. “What?”
“Well, you know trees, right?” Ron says slowly. “Some people try to climb them.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m familiar with the concept, Ron.”
“Well, I was thinking, maybe if you were at the top of the tree, and you slipped, and all the branches hit you on the way down, maybe that’s how you get scars like that.”
Glenn follows his gaze over towards where Henry and Darryl are fussing over a fire. Darryl is trying to make dinner for them around his little makeshift grill, while Henry hovers and does his best to pretend like he’s not trying to micromanage every last little thing.
“How the fuck could falling out a tree give you handcuff scars?” He asks Ron.
“I don’t… think that’s possible, Glenn.”
The two of them just stare at each other. He knows they’re talking straight past each other, but he has no idea what to do with that information. Luckily Ron figures it out and says, “Oh! I thought you meant the long scars on his back. Yeah, I also do not think falling out of a tree could give you handcuff scars.”
Glenn takes another look. Henry’s half-dressed but still has his shirt off. They’re not super visible, but clear enough between the light from the fire and the setting sun.
“You could always just ask him,” Glenn says. Which would be great cause now he’s wicked curious, too.
“Well, you know, sometimes people don’t like it when other people know how they’ve been hurt in the past,” Ron explains patiently.
And oof. Yeah. Glenn feels kinda like a dick now.
He’d noticed Henry throughout the day. Of course he did. He wasn’t blind. But he also wasn’t Darryl, who was alternating between red-faced staring, refusing to look at anyone or anything, and macho man hit the showers it’s not gay just guys being dudes.
And okay, look. He had a plan. A couple of months ago one of Glenn’s buddies very loudly announced that he’d hooked up with the Oak-Garcias, and it blew his fucking mind. And honestly, it’s about the only thing that’s been on his mind for the past couple of carpools.
It was already an open secret that the Oak-Garcias were swingers or ‘in an open relationship’ or ‘polyamorous’ or whatever they call it. (And just to be clear the air-quotes are because Glenn’s feeling salty and jealous and petty and pent up and frustrated, not cause he’s not cool with it. Cause he is very cool with it.)
Point is, they fuck. And specifically, they fuck grungy musicians. And they are, apparently, really fucking good at it. Plus they clearly had excellent taste since his buddy never got a call back from them again. So, he had a plan. A great plan (once he figured it out) for how to get the Oak-Garcias into his bed. Or, more actually, how to wriggle his way into theirs. And absolutely none of it involved alllll of this. Or Darryl fucking Wilson.
So yeah, he’d noticed. And he’d noticed that Henry had a fair few scars. More than he’d expected, but maybe that was standard for such an ‘outdoorsy’ kind of dad, what the fuck did he know?
Lark and Sparrow were absolute feral gremlin children, always sporting new scratches and brightly colored bandaids. Which he respected. You could look away for half a second and they’d be scaling whatever vertical surface they were nearest, screaming elaborate taunts and challenges, trying to fistfight a brick wall, while Henry shouted gentle cautions after them, only half aware at best how weird everyone found their family. It was nice to not be the weirdest dad at these things. Plus, his wife is… stupidly hot.
They seemed like they lived in their own weird little word, and Glenn couldn’t fault them for that. He envied it actually in some weird subconscious way he could only access when he was high and had been stewing in his thoughts for too long. When Morgan was alive they’d lived in their own weird little world too, them and Nick. But now? Now he was just… weird.
They set up for the night in a surprisingly comfortable camping situation. It’s nice to stretch out under the stars, instead of sleeping curled up in the minivan. Henry entertains them all over dinner with a few more stories about his arrests that have Darryl belly laughing and looking at Henry with that bright, curious, kinda impressed look that makes something weird buzz beneath Glenn’s skin. He also clocks Henry fiddling more than usual with his bracelets and his wrists. He wonders if they still hurt, if the scars get stiff when the weather changes.
Henry offers to take first watch, which is a little odd since he usually prefers to take the last pre-dawn shift since he’s up so obnoxiously early anyway. The others drop off pretty quick, but Glenn can’t sleep. Raw energy is still buzzing through him.
He can’t stop thinking about Henry. It’s so stupid. How the fuck can a guy that literally cannot stop running his mouth, also manage to be mysterious. Unfair. The thought immediately sours in his stomach. Yeah, no shit life isn’t fair.
Once Darryl and Ron are asleep and snoring, Glenn watches the easy-going smile slip off of Henry’s face as he gets a far away, troubled look to his eyes and zones out staring at the fire. He’s always so fucking high-strung and jumpy. It’s weird to see him looking so subdued.
And okay, yeah it’s a little creepy that Glenn’s just watching Henry watch the fire. He could pretend that it’s because Henry looks distracted and somebody needs to be watching their back, but…
Henry curls into himself looking into the fire all moody and shit, and— God, he must be thinking about how much of an asshole Glenn was today. And now that Glenn’s thinking about that…
Those scars were bad. At least some of them had to be deliberately inflicted, and that combined with the sheer number of them, means… well, nothing good. The likeliest explanation has to be that somebody at some point tied him down and hurt him bad enough to leave scars decades later, right?
His stomach feels cold and knotted, and he has absolutely no fucking clue what to do with that information. And maybe there’s nothing worse than the alternatives that Glenn’s cooking up in his brain. Maybe he’s gonna wish he’d never brought it up in the first place. Maybe it’s even more of an asshole move to keep dwelling on it when Henry clearly wanted to brush it off. But Glenn’s already spiraling brain has latched onto this, and now he can’t stop thinking about it. His mind wants to wander down all sorts of dark routes. And maybe there’s a perfectly reasonable, non-awful, possibly kinky explanation, and Glenn’s working himself up for nothing.
God, he’s such a fucking asshole.
Glenn heaves himself to his feet with a sigh. He gets a drink of water and takes a piss just to give himself some kind of excuse for why he’s up so late. He almost thinks better of it and lays back down, but instead he grabs a joint and joins Henry, even though his knees ache cause Henry’s sitting cross-legged on the ground instead of on the very sensible logs that they’d all been sitting on earlier.
The fire’s burned down to a soft cozy glow. He uses the embers to light his joint and settles down beside Henry. The night wind smells sweet and wild as it rustles through unfamiliar trees, and maybe it’s that or the weed that finally loosens his tongue enough to say. “I’m sorry. About earlier.”
Henry looks at him confused.
“I didn’t mean to like, laugh or make fun of your scars or whatever. Just caught me off guard is all.”
Henry nods, looking into the fire. “Thanks. I didn’t think you were being mean spirited, but…” He trails off for a while. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“Cool. Cool,” Glenn says awkwardly. He should feel better. He got his ass up and apologized. But he doesn’t.
He takes a long draw from his joint and offers it to Henry, and is probably way too surprised when he accepts. Henry coughs a little on his first inhale, and Glenn laughs when he hands it back. He doesn’t know why it catches him off guard. Hippie shit, etc. “Heh. Guess I had you all wrong. You’re a regular petty criminal, huh.”
Henry huffs out a short but genuine laugh that makes something warm bloom inside Glenn’s guts. The smile slides off his face faster than Glenn would like, and he’s surprised once again when the next words out of Henry’s mouth are, “It’s okay. You can ask.”
At Glenn’s startled look, he shrugs and says “I’d be curious too.” He takes the bracelets off and shows his wrists to Glenn. His other wrist sports the same scars, every bit as bad, maybe worse on his non-dominant hand.
The conversation is verging on getting a little too real for Glenn, but the only way out is through, so before he can talk himself out of it he asks, “Those scars didn’t come from a cop, did they?”
“No. They didn’t,” Henry says simply.
Somehow that confirmation burns something deep in him, and he feels something awful and raw swirling in his stomach and starting to knot up in his throat, and goddamn fuck this, he’s not going to cry. The world is just so much more weird and fucked up than he thought, and that’s saying something coming from someone as cynical as him. And he misses Nick like hell. And if he lets himself think about any of that for more than a second then he’s gonna really fucking lose it. Fucking smoke is getting in his eye, and they’re high as it is. Red eyes are to be expected.
“How did—“ He cuts himself off, hating himself more than a little. “Shit. Sorry. Fuck. This is none of my fucking business, I didn’t mean to…” He starts to pull himself to his feet, and is so surprised when Henry reaches out a hand to stop him that he flops back onto the ground gracelessly.
“Wait, Glenn. It’s fine,” Henry says with a soft little smile. “I said it’s okay to ask, and I meant it. It’s… probably something you guys should know anyway.”
Glenn settles back down and hands Henry the joint that he accepts. His mouth opens and closes a few times while he figures out what to say next. The joint is burning down in his fingers half forgotten, but that’s fine.
“The truth is…” Henry starts but then falters, trying to find the words. He remembers the joint in his fingers and takes a another hit before handing it back to Glenn. “The truth is, I don’t know. I have no idea where the scars came from or what happened or… yeah. Your guess is probably as good as mine.”
Well fuck that, cause none of Glenn’s guesses mean anything good. “What, like amnesia? Or you just woke up like this one day? Or like, what is it, trauma induced memory loss?”
Henry shrugs and gives him a little smile, probably surprised by Glenn’s therapist speak. “I guess. I… There’s a lot I don’t remember actually. I— Shit.” He takes off his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose. “I need to tell the other guys, too. It might be relevant at some point, but I—”
He pauses, trying to find the right words again, and Glenn is a little proud of himself for overriding every instinct telling him to figure out a way to nope out of this conversation as fast as possible. Hell yeah, bare fucking minimum human decency. Go him. He’s actually not sure if he should be offering Henry an out here, asking him if he would rather wait til tomorrow to tell them all together whatever information it is he thinks he owes them, so he doesn’t have to dig through these memories more than once.
Henry takes a deep breath. “I don’t… actually remember a lot of my life. Like, almost nothing from before I was, I don’t know, twenty? Ish?”
“Holy shit dude.” Glenn sometimes wishes he didn’t remember as much as he did from his own childhood and teen years, but to not have anything… “So are you like, still in contact with people who knew you then? Or…”
Henry looks a little surprised at the question. “Um, no,” he says with a nervous laugh. “I mean…”
For a guy who never shuts up and nervous babbles all day, the long pauses are a little disconcerting but not unwelcome. Henry sighs deeply and runs his hands through his hair, thinking. He has nice hair. Kinda wild, but it suits him. And nice hands. Glenn wouldn’t mind letting him— and oh fuck no. Glenn slams the lid shut around those feelings right the fuck now. Cause this is serious deep shit time now, not the time for Glenn’s weird half-crush.
Henry carries on, wrapped up in his own traumas, oblivious to the chaos going on in Glenn’s head. “I mean I have nothing. No records. No memories. Well, no helpful memories. I just… Mercedes found me half dead in the middle of a forest in the absolute middle of nowhere. Even after all these years, we still have no idea how I got there or where I came from or… yeah, nothing.”
“Shit," Glenn says again. Real fucking eloquent Close.
“Yeah. I know that I grew up in some kind of commune… or, well, cult. No. Well yeah, it was almost certainly a cult,” Henry babbles. “I know my father led the cult, and I know he was… I know I wanted to get away from him.” Henry takes a deep shuddering breath and moves on in a quiet voice that Glenn can barely hear over the fire, and the way his ears are kinda ringing. “I know it wasn’t my first time trying to run, but… that’s it.”
“That’s fucked up,” Ron says out of absolutely fucking nowhere.
Glenn startles so hard he drops the joint. He swears as he pats out sparks that landed on his skin through the holes in his jeans. Henry also jumps.
“Sorry,” Darryl says, also wide awake but at least having the sense to look ashamed of himself. “We didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”
“You were talking kinda loud,” says Ron who does not look embarrassed.
Henry’s face is red and his shoulders are up around his ears. “Ah, jeez. Sorry guys,” he says in voice that squeaks with anxiety and false cheer. “Sorry for being so loud. Yeah, no worries. This is fine— good! I would have needed to tell you guys in the morning anyway. So yeah. Good. Sorry!”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Darryl says. “We’re sorry. We didn’t mean to eavesdrop on your conversation.” Glenn can practically feel Darryl’s confused jealousy radiating towards him, probably wondering why the hell Henry would choose to share this with him first instead of the others. No reason beyond that Glenn’s a nosy motherfucker.
“No, this is good!” Henry insists.
Panic is cracking behind his smile, so Glenn does the only thing he can think of and slings an arm around his shoulders and says, “So you’re like an actual real life Jason Bourne!”
Henry laughs a little at that, jittery and nervous, but his shoulders stop trying to crawl up behind his ears, which Glenn counts as a win in his book.
“Yeah, I guess,” he says. “I know this is really unusual, especially considering the… everything of the last couple weeks.” He takes a deep breath, his speech starting to come at a slightly more normal pace. “So I’m happy to answer any questions you have, as best as I can.”
“So you really don’t know how you got any of your scars?” Ron asks quietly.
Henry shakes his head. “They were all pretty faded by the time Mercedes found me,” he says with a rueful smile.
“It looks like they hurt,” Ron says. He’s always so simple and direct, and Glenn has become unreasonably fond of the guy over the past couple weeks, but right now he just wants to slap him upside the head.
“Yeah,” Henry’s voice cracks around the word. “It probably did.”
A long moment passes before Darryl speaks up and says, “Wait, Mercedes, like your wife Mercedes?”
Henry nods with a fond smile, blond curls bouncing around his head. “Yep. Mercedes and Ricky, that’s her brother. They found me, took me to the hospital and from there we just kinda… pieced together what we could. Which wasn’t much. Obviously. Sorry, I know this is all a lot!”
“Did you have to get the police involved?” Ron asks.
“Yeah, the hospital did. I was pretty… banged up.” Glenn cringes, sure that ‘banged up’ is code for in really fucking bad shape. “They tested me for every drug and mental illness known to man, but didn’t come up with anything. When it became clear I wasn’t going to remember anything any time soon, they treated it like a standard John Doe case.
“And you and Mercedes have been together ever since?” Darryl asks.
“Not exactly, but yeah. Pretty much. We were still pretty young when we got married, but we’d already been through so much intense stuff together, and… we just knew.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Darryl says. “I actually met my wife in middle school.”
“Wow, I didn’t know that,” Henry says turning towards Darryl with a sweet smile.
Glenn rolls his eyes. Like those two needed one more thing to bond over.
“Plus we didn’t feel like we needed to limit our options or explorations just because we got married,” Henry carries on, back on a favorite, comfortable topic. Well, comfortable for him. Darryl turns beat red again. “We were already pretty odd to start with, so a nontraditional marriage works great for us.”
Score one point for Glenn.
Ron’s been listening with a furrowed brow. Hard to tell what’s running through the guy’s brain while he processes this. “Nontraditional? So do you still believe in like… soulmates? And love at first site?” he asks.
“Of course I do!” Henry says brightly.
Damn. Point one against. Something coils tight in Glenn’s chest.
“I just believe that you can have more than one soulmate, and that true love is something that you choose at every sight, not just first sight, you know?” Henry continues.
The coiled thing releases. Another point for Glenn. Where’s he at now? Wait, doesn’t matter.
Something is bugging Glenn still, needling at the back of his mind. “So you never found any record of the commune you grew up in?”
Henry shakes his head. “Mercedes and I researched cults in the area for years, but never found anything that matched what little I remembered.”
“You don’t think that you maybe…” Glenn starts. He trails off, hoping that Henry will pick up his meaning. He’s not sure if it’s an asshole move to bring this up. “Maybe you came from, I don’t know, here? I mean we accidentally drove straight through a portal on the way to a fucking soccer game, so it can definitely happen.”
Henry looks a little wild-eyed at that. “I don’t know what to think,” he says. “I mean, I can’t lie, I’ve been wondering the same thing. Some parts of this world, the rocks and trees and… some part of this is so horribly familiar. Like something out a dream. We— Mercedes always joked about it, but obviously that wasn’t possible. And now that actually it is possible, I… Yeah. I don’t know.”
“Shit,” says Darryl.
They all stare into the fire after that, until this new weirdness kind of starts to blend into all the other weird shit slapping them in the face day after day. Glenn offers to take the next watch. It’s almost his turn anyway. Soon everyone is blinking slowly, and Ron starts snoring lightly. Henry and Darryl drop off soon after that.
He’s grateful for the quiet. He needs to figure out how to file all this information away in his brain so that he can still be a mostly functional human being in the morning.
……..
Henry bolts awake gasping for air. He’s caught and tangled up in a way that makes panic thrum through his body with the need to run. There’s a hand on his shoulder that he shakes off, stumbling up and away until he can brace himself with a hand against the rough bark of a tree, bent half over with the effort to catch his breath.
His heart is beating rabbit fast in his chest, and he’s terrified of something. He needs to run, or hide, or… He can’t remember. All he knows is that something is deeply, viscerally wrong, something dark and foreign running in his blood. He digs his fingernails into the bark of the tree to keep himself from trying to claw that wrongness out of his veins.
The way the soil smells, the way the breeze sounds as it ruffles through the trees. It’s all so horribly familiar, and he is fucking terrified. It took him years to put his curiosity about himself to rest. Years of wanting and wondering and fearing. It feels like he just put it behind him.
He needs Mercedes; his whole body aches with it.
She always said it like a joke, but he knows that some part of her still holds space for the possibility that he really did come from some kind of different world, dimension, whatever.
There are so many missing pieces. So much of himself remains a mystery. No answers. Just the absolute bone-deep certainty that there is something dark and wrong inside him, something that is burning with the need to lash out, a certainty of power that made no sense until they crossed into this world. And he knows that if he ever lowers his guard even a little, he will hurt the people he loves most in ways he will never be able to return from.
Mercedes says that it’s just a lie that his parents fed to him until he believed it. But he knows, it’s something more than that. Something worse. Something deeper.
He becomes aware of soft guitar music floating through the air, unexpected enough to ground him. He brings his breaths back under control, lulled into the rhythm of the music.
“Sorry. Did I wake you?” Glenn asks. He’s sitting by the fire with his guitar, strumming quiet chords that blend in with the crackle of the fire.
He knows damn well that his gentle music wasn’t what had Henry gasping for air, and fighting his own sleeping bag.
Henry shakes his head, and just breathes until he can ask, “Was I sleep talking?” It doesn’t happen often, but it’s freaked Mercedes out enough times that he knows to dread it.
“Nah,” Glenn says, looking as neutral and relaxed as can be. “Just looked like you were maybe having a nightmare or something.” He’s a good liar. It’s kind of him.
“Yeah,” Henry says, hating how broken his voice sounds.
He and Mercedes decided a long time ago that whatever past was buried in Henry’s head was better off staying hidden. If his body wouldn’t allow itself to remember, maybe that was just his brain’s way of protecting him. Early on they realized that pushing into Henry’s past only ever brought pain and even worse confusion. When Lark and Sparrow were born, as they grew, some memories leaked through of his own childhood. He had thought, hoped, that he’d get back good memories as well. And he did. But those are so few and far between, and the bad is so bad. So much worse than he thought.
Glenn turns back to his quiet guitar playing, giving Henry the space to pull himself back together. It’s kind of him. Glenn is a better person than he realizes.
He’s scared to return to his dreams, but he’s exhausted, and the music is so gentle, so relaxing.
He drifts into a dreamless sleep.