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At the grocery store, Wylan catches the scent of the expensive cologne his father wore—wears, still, probably— on a passing stranger. He lingers in the produce isle, turning every fruit over in his hands to find the ones that are completely unmarked, completely without blemish, before he places them in the shopping basket he’s dragging along with him.
“Hurry up, kid.” Kaz says as he passes behind him, working off a long list the others have written of the things they wanted. He’s gotten everything from milk to pasta to cleaning supplies to dog food, and Wylan’s still looking at the fruit. “It doesn’t matter if it’s bruised, it all tastes the same.”
Wylan wants to say it does matter. It’s always mattered. I feel like he’s still watching me.
“It’s not worth it if it’s damaged.” He says instead.
He wants to ask Jesper if he can love damaged goods; if he’d bite into bruised fruit and still taste its sweetness. He wants to ask him if he’s ever been scared of his father.
Kaz looks at him quizzically. “It’s just fruit.” He replies.
…
“Keep your eyes peeled.” Kaz says, about fifteen minutes before the job. “We're dealing with a volatile situation. The less attention we draw, the better. Stick to the plan, and don't improvise unless you want to get shot.”
Wylan and Jesper nod quickly at this grave advice. Neither of them what to get shot. Kaz turns to the crowded square to leave them to the racing of their hearts, and then stops like he’s remembered something else he needs to say.
“Keep safe.” He tells them, as if it’s an afterthought, and then he is lost to the masses.
“How does one keep safe?” Wylan asks skeptically, glancing up at Jesper. The indigo eyeshadow dusting his eyelids glitters in the low neon of the shopfronts, and his grin is bright and shocking.
“Like right now, or just in general?” Jesper replies, slinging an arm around Wylan’s shoulders that makes him shiver. He’s burning where they touch. It’s winter; why is Jesper always so warm?
“In general.” Wylan says, mostly because he’s interested to know what Jesper would say, to that. He isn’t sure he’s ever felt safe.
Jesper shrugs with the arm that isn’t slung around Wylan. “Look both ways when you cross the road, in case a car hits you, and both ways when you open the windows, in case a bullet hits you. I don’t know. I don’t really care whether I’m safe.”
Wylan laughs, and leans into him, just slightly. Jesper smells like the solvents and acetones of the nail polish he’d applied that morning, the lingering scent of gunpowder at his sleeves, the liquor of the shots they’d all taken before the job. Wylan thinks I care if you’re safe. I want us to be safe.
…
Kaz questions Inej on how she can forgive a deity who remains daily an indifferent spectator to her suffering, how she can truly embrace a divine presence that has seemingly turned a deaf ear to her pleas for years. He’d been half teasing her, but Wylan could not help but silently contemplate.
He isn’t sure whether he can forgive God for ignoring him for all those desperate years, either.
God can’t just magically stop bad things from happening. Inej had replied curtly. He can only ask us to endure it, and grant us the strength to do so. He isn’t our puppeteer to make do what we want Him to, Kaz.
To Wylan, God remains an enigmatic figure of guilt and pain, forever shadowed by the stern visage of his father breathing down his neck, cast in the stark confines of a Catholic Church that seemed to judge him with every silent step he took.
Those are the times when I hold onto my faith the tightest. Inej had told Kaz. When everything seems lost, or terrifying. It's not about begging Him for help, it’s about finding strength and peace and purpose in your own heart.
Wylan thinks. Are you there? Are you still watching me?
…
“For fuck’s sake, Wylan.” Kaz says. “Just let your father die.”
“What?” Wylan blurts.
“You won’t leave him behind. You carry him with you in the way you bow your head and the way you smile, like you’re worried someone will get mad at you for it. You’re halfway across the world and yet you’ve never left the house you grew up in. When you look in the mirror his face is glaring back at you. So let him die.” Black gloved fingers tap a far off tune against the polished surface of the kitchen table. Wylan wonders if Kaz does it consciously or not.
“It’s what he did to his father, and it’s what he’d do to you.”
“You’re one to talk.” Wylan says, a bit coldly. There is a sickening feeling of familiarity when the wrong person knows you too well, and you know them too well, and they turn out to maybe not be the wrong person, after all. Kaz was the first to know the truth about Wylan’s father, about his biggest shame, about his past mistakes. And whether he wants him to or not, Wylan knows a lot about Kaz, too. Whatever gripe Kaz has with Pekka Rollins, it’s dangerous for both himself and the others.
If there was a list of people who didn’t know how to just let things die, Kaz would be at the top of it.
Kaz just raises an eyebrow. “If I had let my grievances go, we’d all be dead.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a difference between letting things go and letting things make you sick.” Wylan tells him.
“Inspiring.” Kaz replies dryly.
“How’s this?” Wylan says, “I try to kill mine, and you try to kill yours.”
Kaz just nods his assent.
Wylan doesn’t speak to God often. But when he does, he says, you were there when my father hit me in the bathroom and I smashed my head on the corner of the ceramic sink. You were there when the housemaid stitched up the gash above my eye. You were there when it healed into a thin white scar.
So you must know about the boy I love. He’s tall and beautiful and acts likes he’s made of sunlight. And you of all people must know that just the thought of his hands gesturing as he talks, gold and silver rings glinting in the light, illuminates me from the inside out until I’m burning crimson like a pyre, so in love with him that I can feel it when I breath. You must have watched how he buries his face into my neck, and when he laughs, how his eyes look like grey pools of stormwater. You must see how I take every chance I can get to tap my knee against his, how each moment we catch each other's eyes his gaze lingers like the sun on your back when you’re swimming in the river in summer. Like you’re caught in a memory that’s good and you never have to leave it.
Falling in love with Jesper is like getting struck and falling, except now there is no jagged wound, no bout of pain, no stark white line above my eye—not from this. There is only healing.
…
The preacher standing on the busy street corner offers Wylan a church flyer as he passes. Almost fascinated by his graceful sense of goodwill, Wylan takes it from him, giving him a smile.
Kaz rolls his eyes and mutters something about the naivety of the people and the hypocrisy of the church that is probably true.
“A person who doesn’t forgive others will not be forgiven by God.” Jesper reads. “Matthew 6: 14-15”
Kaz snorts. “If He wants our forgiveness, He shouldn’t have given us memory.”
I’d love to tell you that he doesn’t mean it. Wylan tells God. But he does. He has a habit of saying what he means and not being sorry about it. He’s not a forgiving person—but you know that. Who was he, before he named himself? Before he became this boy who feels like thunderstruck seawater? Do you mourn who he was or are you glad for what he’s become? Is anyone? Are you there? Are you there?
…
It’s the middle of the night and Wylan can’t sleep. He sits hunched over the kitchen table, working on equations and sketching inventions by lamplight. He tries to fill his mind with anything—anything—else. The air is heavy with the scent of ink and graphite.
He tinkers with gears and wires, adjusting and readjusting components with precision and care. When a spark or puff of smoke rises into the air, it is distinguished with a wave of his hand.
Wylan hadn’t noticed the hours tick by, but soon his silence is broken by the sound of footsteps down the hall. Kaz pauses in the doorway, and looks at Wylan with a mixture of curiosity and concern.
“What are you doing?” He asks.
“I couldn’t sleep.” Wylan replies simply.
Kaz steps closer, examining what Wylan is working on, and as if he can sense the jittery energy radiating off Wylan, he asks, “Want to tell me about this?”
And so Wylan tells him about the projects and the circuits and the theories and the stars. He explains the parallels he’s looking for between scientific progress and divine intervention. Kaz doesn’t scoff or brush him off. He just boils the kettle and joins Wylan at the kitchen table. The lamp casts long shadows on the walls, elongating everything it touches and forming a cathedral-looking dome around the room.
“There’s a star.” Wylan blurts, when Kaz gets up to make himself another cup of coffee. “They named it GJ1002, and it’s fourteen light years away. Which means that right now, it’s still watching my father reading to me. I’m still four years old, and nothing bad has happened yet.”
Kaz doesn’t respond.
“My mother is still alive.” Wylan says. “I haven’t made any mistake yet. I haven’t failed anyone. I don’t know that I’m doomed.”
“So?” Kaz says. “You were four; most four year olds don’t even know bad things exist, yet. You were lulled into a false sense of security and now you’re not so guileless, and all the more knowledgeable for it. You’ve made some mistakes, you can always make better ones.”
Wylan blinks at him. Kaz turns back to making coffee.
“What does drowning feel like?” Wylan blurts.
For a moment, there is silence. Then Kaz turns and looks at him, his black eyes vacant.
Wylan expects to be met with a simmering anger, or a mask of annoyance, or simply to be shut down in the way Kaz does best, brushed over, told he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Instead, Kaz says, almost softly, “Not everything feels like something else.”
Wylan thinks of how being hit feels like freezing cold water. Of how falling in love with Jesper feels like the sun on your back. Of how being known, in the way Kaz knows him, feels like nothing else.
“I’m sorry.” He says.
“Get some sleep, Wy.” Kaz replies.
…
Wylan doesn’t speak to God often, but when he does, he says, I’ve been safe lately. And I’m kind of scared to let myself be safe, because it feels like I’m being eased into a trap that will shut at any moment and tear everything good I’ve built apart. Like everything will be snatched away from me the second I take it for granted. Please, God, please let it last. Let it last.