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It was always little things that caught him off guard. A food or drink he remembered from back home, a scent or a texture, the sight of poppies, the intricacy of expensive cloth.
A couple of times, he'd heard about poppies symbolizing the futility of war, serving as a means of remembrance for soldiers who were killed during combat, and sometimes, when he glanced back at Morphine—not a relic of the past, but his anchor through the present—he thought of their corpses out on the fields and piled over the crushed flowers. He thought of how any one of his teammates, all gunslingers, military men, could have been among the bodies, how instead, it was their friends and families who were reduced to nothing but carcasses. They all sat together, now, the remains. Lyserg would always think back to his family after that.
Expensive cloth, the touch of his father's coat as he lifted his son up and into the sky, letting him feel like the brightest and most powerful thing in the world, even as the little, scrawny thing he was back then. His mother's dresses, fabric thick and well-woven, a pale tangerine color against her dark hair. When she held him against herself and he had the long-cherished privilege of breathing in her scent, unforgettable between any mother and child—those were the things he cursed Hao for the most, for tearing them away from him and everyone else. She would wash his hair, he remembered, and dry it off with a towel, white and downy, wrapped around his head, the same way she dried her own.
Now he was alone, kneeling in the shower, attempting to work his fingers through his hair the same way his mother used to, but they were too short, and the shampoo carried a sharp sting when he breathed it in, nothing like what he used to have at home. Well, there was no substitute for perfection. He stood up to rinse his hair under the showerhead, but stopped; he sensed someone nearby. He turned around, and Marco was there, standing in the doorway. Did I really leave the door open?
"You sure chose an inopportune time to shower, Lyserg. You're supposed to be out for dinner in…" Marco checked his watch, then met Lyserg's eyes again. "…five minutes." Right, everything was on a schedule here. It was one of the perks of being a member of the X-LAWS: predictability, consistency, reliability. But acting contrary to his words, Marco himself stayed put, and they continued to stare at one another. "I hope you're not trying to run out on us." The air was heavy.
"No…"
"The rules are clear, aren't they?"
This was one thing about Marco that Lyserg had found difficult to adjust to: his tendency to probe. It was either that he could read Lyserg's mind somehow, figure out exactly what he was fearing, wanting, abhorring, desiring, or that he would find out, and lying didn't often work, either. It was impossible to hide from him. "Yes. I'll be done soon." I'm not trying to run out on anybody. I just got lost in thought. He said it in his head, first, and it sounded convincing enough. But before he could say it out loud, Marco had already spun on his heel and left, keeping the door open. He always does that. Lyserg remembered all the shut doors of his childhood home, and to say he had privacy, even as such a young child, would be an understatement. Then again, anything was better than being alone.
But the second time this sort of thing happened, Marco's probing really came into play, because for some reason, he just couldn't be lied to—not by Lyserg, anyhow. He was just too good at detecting squeamishness, it seemed. But he didn't punish the lie with a slap to the face or even a scolding—apparently, that wasn't the appropriate response to a false "I'm fine" in his book. Instead, he knelt in front of the tub, Lyserg still craning his neck to watch him, hands in his lap, and took a dime-sized portion of that stinging shampoo. Then, his hands were in Lyserg's hair, combing through the strands and massaging his scalp. It was surreal, to say the least, and if he hadn't known better, Lyserg would have assumed Marco was drunk, something like that. He had his gentle moments, sure, but this was something else: it was that clairvoyance, the so-called mind reading. How could Marco have known Lyserg thought about his parents when he washed his hair? What gave it all away? But Lyserg dared not question it; he wanted this to last, so he closed his eyes and relaxed his shoulders, slowly, until he had to force his hands to keep him propped up. Marco was unpredictable, after all, albeit in spite of his rambles about keeping consistency and always following the law. He was someone who could flip from raving to crooning, then back again, before finally landing on an emotionless tone he was more or less unaware of, all in a span of five minutes. This was nice, the crooning, so Lyserg was determined to enjoy it. Marco still sounded drunk, of course, but then again, he always looked a bit strange when happy, because he, too, was aware of how temporary that feeling was.
"Don't we have to be out, soon?" Lyserg murmured, but Marco shushed him, a quiet crescendo, and he didn't ask any more questions.
"I'm the one who's to decide that," he assured as he stood up, a hand on Lyserg's shoulder, and guided him under the water. It was all beginning to feel a bit contrived, now—why would Marco do this for him, anyway? Wasn't he the one most worried bout Lyserg being "soft", as he called it? His eyes started to scan for the nearest exit—an instinct he'd been trying to dull as of late—and his heart was buzzing with every thump, dizzying and quickening, but the sinister motivation he'd expected to be made known simply never revealed itself. He really must be drunk. But he didn't look the part, not one bit.
Later that night, after an avoidant, quiet dinner—on Lyserg's end, at least—that humming, buzzing sense of panic rose up in him again, because Marco wanting to speak with him "in private" never meant anything good. But he knew better than making side-glances towards the others in hopes that he could telepathically communicate to them his fears. If I could somehow come off as even more of a pansy to them than I already do, that's the way. And even if he wouldn't be mocked, it wasn't as if they didn't already know. That's just how things are around here, he reminded himself.
"Apparently, you've been waking up screaming in the middle of the night."
Lyserg paused locking Marco's door behind them. "I…what?" He made a quick sift through his memory, but nothing came up. Then, a second spike of anxiety hit him. "I'm sorry," he blurted out. "I won't do it again." That was a lie, because doing so would require having an awareness of the screaming, which he did not, but in his heart, he felt otherwise: maybe he was being earnest.
Marco seemed to disagree. "And there you go again," he mused, voice somewhat breathy. There was no hiding the truth. "Come, sit with me."
It was always little things, little details he never imagined he would have found importance in, that made their way into his dreams: how the wind would sweep the beret he used to wear to school right off his head, and beside him would be Wat, barely holding back a fit of laughter; the breakfast tea they used to share, bitter but not too strong, colored but not too dark; the sight of Wat's dead body hung limp and gangly in Oknox's arms; the internal thump of dread and disbelief at trailing down and down, watching his spirit fade out; hearing such an eerie calm in his voice postmortem. It'll make you far happier to love than to hate. Lyserg shifted under the pressure. God, what rubbish. But he otherwise kept himself still. So, the only way to win a battle like this is to not fight it at all? His nightmares remembered everything his conscious self wouldn't and sent him back and forth, screaming all the while, but what right did that give him to whine and moan about it? None! They'd all said it themselves. It was the plain truth.
"Lyserg."
He could almost feel the bullet wound again, reconstructed to perfection by his subconscious mind. His hand drifted down to his stomach. It isn't real. But the scar was there.
"Oh, wake up! Would you get ahold of yourself for just one minute?" A half-reproachful, half-soothing shake of the shoulders from behind, the telltale shake of a man who only knew how to soothe through reproach, eyes two angry glints in the darkness. The mattress and bedframe shook with them in a delayed tandem. "Nobody's dead." That was a bold-faced lie; not long ago, they had lost three of their own.
"I don't get it," Lyserg said in place of a response, vague on purpose. "Why me? Everyone's got all sorts of issues here. We've all lost something, so why put all this attention onto me?" Marco was holding him from behind, an apparently calming gesture, petting his hair and watching him closely, because if smacking him around like a rag doll wasn't on the table, then what else was next? "Please, just let me go."
"No, Lyserg, we need you firing on all cylinders, and if these nightmares of yours keep on getting worse—"
"They won't." He wanted to add, "I'd say you're making them worse," but that would sting too hard, more than hard enough to sting him back with the sulfuric bite of his own impudence. No, that's right. I really am being an insolent brat. He was stunned by his own audacity, all of a sudden. I can't believe I tried to fight him off in the first place. All he's doing is holding me. Marco sensed it, too, when Lyserg froze against him, a heavy, leaden sense of realization washing over this boy trembling in his arms, trembling until he was perfectly still, scrambling internally for a way to express gratitude that just wasn't there.
"Good, that’s better. Just stay like that," Marco whispered against the top of Lyserg’s head, pulling his limp body in closer, and it took every ounce of strength Lyserg had to let him. At least the sound of Marco’s heartbeat was more soothing than the grazing of his hands.