Chapter Text
Minds work in a very strange way.
Guy has understood that very early on.
He has been forced to adapt from a very young age because of that.
People’s minds unfolded around him like fragile paper. It is, in fact, a very sweet and delicate thing. Invisible and impossible to encompass for others, it is fascinating and so easy to barge in without the recipient ever knowing and leave unnoticed, like a successful thief after stealing their precious wares.
He does not really do it voluntarily. But it is so tempting, it is so simple, so natural, for his mind to link to others. It is, in some ways, as unavoidable as having droplets of water dripping out of an overfilled cup. He could always try to close his mind, screwed shut with a top lid, but it would always overfill. Or worse… the pressure of slowly closing the lid tighter would only make the water compress itself inside the malleable cup, eager to come out but unable to, imprisoned in a too-tight space.
Headaches were a very common occurrence for him. When he was younger, he had been unable to understand what was happening other than feeling a vicious pressure at the back of his head, so hard and so painful he would suddenly burst into sobs. But then he’d revel into his mother’s embrace (whoever that was, whoever permitted his ugly cries and snot dripping down his nose to soak her light-coloured top and clavicule).
He’s always feared crowded places and preferred the sanctity of tight spaces, where only he could fit inside. He’d avoid looking at others’ faces and their eyes, just so he could ignore the open door which opened when they presented their mind to him, like a sinful invitation to take a peek inside.
It was an unpleasant sensation, bearing your mind to the other, much like someone would wrench their ribs open. It was not truly painful and felt more like a pinch to the back of his head, but the damage was already done.
He would dive into the consciousness of another being, washed ashore by the sensation of emotions caressing his own mind, drowning him in feelings and thoughts that weren't his. And then, it was a harrowing task to tear himself out of someone else. Much like he invaded (accidentally or not, consciously or not) the privacy of one's mind, it was even more difficult to understand where he began and where he ended afterwards. Such a dreary, difficult task... It became almost impossible to understand who he was when he'd been unceremoniously dipped and tainted by the very being of someone else.
He hated as much as he craved this sort of connection as well.
He hated how he lost himself in the mind of another, until he wondered who he was when he wasn't surrounded by thoughts of others. Who was he after he was painted to the colours of someone else's eyes, to the colours of those he accidentally looked at?
But then, he also yearned for the kind of understanding he got from experiencing the thoughts of others: by attaching himself in such a way that he felt even closer in spirit, than with a simple hug. He wished to graze someone else's mind like the touch of a finger against his own. He would shiver, slight goosebumps rising on his skin, because of this brief contact.
As he grew up, he managed to understand how to avoid merging himself entirely with someone else’s mind. He later compared it to the sensation of him as a child sticking himself against his mother. When he laced his small arms around her waist with the innocent but jealous possessiveness only a child could feel, before he reigned those emotions down to a more appropriate level. He got better at it, especially when he discovered the meaning of boundaries and understood what he should and shouldn't read or to what extent. He would also try to distance himself from the onslaught of flying thoughts which converged into his unwilling mind whenever his curse got out of control, when he felt like a broken dam of screams endlessly pouring inside his brain.
He mastered, as best as he could, the act of only brushing the upper layer of thoughts of a person’s head, and only gazing at a mind instead of immersing himself from head to toe into their consciousness, as if he wanted to become them.
But that was much later, when he grew up, when he matured, when he grew older.
As a child, he had no such restraint.
.
Perhaps he would forget about it like all memories of childhood stories, fuzzy and blurry lines now, only leaving an emotion and impression of a vague déjà-vu.
He would maybe frown and try to recall the finest details, but wouldn’t get anything better than the murmur of London’s name during a short school trip when he was younger, when he was a child thrown into the den of wolves and early teenagehood.
He doesn't remember much more, simply the idea that there had been a few places across the English streets that they'd visited amongst the screaming minds of a gaggle of children, which three monitors tried to frenetically control.
But right now, here he stands as a child, lost and overwhelmed by too many thoughts as he tries to re-piece himself, to remember how to be Guy Anatole, and not Amelie the businesswoman, who thinks about the keys she's just lost and her absolute rage against her boss who sets her back for the sake of masculine supremacy. He tries not to be Kevin the shop owner, on the other side of the street, currently wondering if his small building is worth everything when he could go somewhere else where bigger opportunities awaited.
He doesn't see the difference yet between an adult's mind cursing the world, or the wonders of a child's mind. One sharper and more cynical, while the other is a shamble of colours and exclamations, of images and petty arguments.
But to Guy, it's all the same: Pat the whiny little girl, horribly described in Matthew’s mind, while Jane tries not to think about the tarts his father liked to bake and would surely make once she came back from her months-long world tour. Then there are Millie, Frank and Katie, a group of friends complaining about their bleeding feet and busted blisters, looked down by Julie the monitor, who hates children but agreed to come anyway because it would perhaps land her in the good graces of her boss, and perhaps, get a positive comment on her CV.
All of those people come barging into his mind and continue to dig inside Guy's brain like hammers smashing into the weak window shutters he’s tried to close, until it breaks and he becomes Vince the jogger, who wants to develop muscles and thinks about the meagre diner that waits for him at home.
Guy the small child, who is lost in his own world. One that is not his but others'. He is lulled and shaped by the hands of many, but all he wishes for is the silent susurrations of his mother. The gentle caresses against his hair as if to slowly erase the wounds inside his bruised mind. The same kindness and gentleness of a mother's kiss against his prominent forehead, filled to the brim with others' thoughts and of the world's. He doesn't see the world yet, but the world definitely shows him something so potent in meaning that his childish mind is unable to comprehend.
As he grows older, he still won't be able to understand anything, but he would be able to stare back at the world and scornfully spit at it.
It wouldn't feel like revenge, but like a rebellion.
But here he is right now, in this city park, while their school group is resting amongst the grass and autumn leaves during lunch, replenishing energy before they go to another historical marvel to witness.
They are all seated on the floor while they eat their fill. The monitors are huddled together on the side, speaking about things, thinking about others. The other children are chatting about anything and arguing about happy useless things that collided with the way tourists and passersby looked at them fondly, angrily, jealously, with love and joy and with tiredness.
Guy takes it all in despite himself with unseeing eyes. He could see the blue sky and the grey buildings around him, but everything is muddled with the thoughts of people all around him describing it in every different way. He doesn't understand the intricacies of how they see their beloved city, but it doesn't matter when the emotions bleed and blend to become an amalgamation of colourful words and sounds.
He has tried to isolate himself a bit away from his classmates and kept his eyes grimly and firmly on the ground, refusing to acknowledge anything while he swam around thoughts after thoughts, trying to reconstruct himself in the sea of people's images. However, the monitors had had enough of their charge’s rebellious side (they had had enough of their “hormonal dumbshit” as Brian, the second monitor, disdainfully called them in his mind while affixing a plastic smile on his face). Thus, Guy is unceremoniously crammed between a tree and another classmate (Mattis), who was relatively easy to talk to, if not a bit forceful in his way to start and maintain a conversation despite having his mouth full.
It is far less pleasant when his mind brushes against the other’s and, with the force of a bull and the curiosity of a nosy rat, he discovers that the other child is more interested in being friends with someone for the sake of collecting medals, rather than being friends with Guy.
Still, he has indulged as much as he could, slurring words that didn't feel too much like Mattis' forced cheerfulness and overall high-pitched demeanour, his voice not having changed yet. He quickly eats his food and dumps it all in his bag to stop copying Mattis’ mannerisms too. The other child has taken the habit of fidgeting with the crinkling paper around his sandwich, rolling the edges with thick fingers until it is the size of a cigarette, ripping them out and tossing them on the side afterwards, regardless of the trash bin 10m away from where they sat.
Thankfully for Guy, they quickly packed their stuff back and were on their way to an art gallery focused on expressionism and the musings of mankind while they rediscovered their emotions through sharp colours and diluted strokes of paint, as if everything was smudged around the edge of a lens.
Guy has been looking forward to this exhibition. The paintings from the promotional ad had somehow struck him deeper than expected. With the colours and the lines, the smudges and the uncertainty of the human soul etched on the canvas, it had hit a bit too close to his own fragile and unstable home. The one he's tried to build inside his mind for years, desperately warding himself against the world when his mother had left him to survive on his own, without her soothing hands cupping his ears in a deadly world of silence.
Now that he is inside the rows of grand paintings hanging on white walls, he doesn’t feel any more at home, but at least it feels a bit more personal, a bit closer to what he wishes to relate to.
How pathetic it is for him to try and connect with a painting, but what else can he do? At least paintings talked silently, unlike someone's mind that not only projected their words into his head, but screamed at him to change and to morph until he became them. At least, what is painted on the canvas is forever fixed in time; it has been since the century it was painted by its original creator and did not wish to change over the years.
For Guy, this feels like salvation: he is unable to interpret much of what is shown, but the thought of a painter trying to represent something as ever-changing as their emotions and their identity… It is the closest he's been to his wish, his desire for anyone (anything) to hear him as much as he sees them all.
He has stayed a very long time looking at those paintings with wonder in his eyes.
He looks at a quote painted on a decorative plate and he cries silent tears of loneliness: “L'odeur du sang humain ne me quitte pas des yeux...”
The scent of human blood won't leave my eyes…
He is lost for a long time inside the meaning between two brushstrokes before the monitors and the museum guide hail them further away from the current room he is in, and onto another, droning about the painter's mastery of the arts or the way the painting was preserved.
Then, they are out of the museum as quickly as they have entered, the masses of bodies packed and rubbing against his, too many people inside the lobby and waiting outside to be let in.
It is a harrowing task to navigate amongst the throngs of tourists, the hum of the streets and the roars of the cars. Amidst all of it, Guy looks at everything while closing his mind, broken shutter after destroyed wooden boards, trying to block out how she is trying not to spill her coffee everywhere, how he wishes to be someone better, how they are looking at someone else with interest, and so on, and so on, and so on…
As they swim across the other street, Guy keeps his eyes down and lets the lull of everyone around him guide him towards his next destination (that and how Kelly, the third monitor, is stressfully mapping their route in her mind and hoping they aren't going to be late for their last visit, and oh how about the hotel rooms and the...).
His eyes are focused on the pavement under him, how the sound of hundreds of feet moves in a chaotic tandem, how everyone talks to his ears and inside his ears.
Then suddenly, he bumps into someone.
He grunts and bounces back from the impact hard enough to stumble and nearly falls on his back. It had looked as if he had just crashed against an unmovable object despite the speed at which he and his unlucky encounter both walked.
On instinct, and mainly because he is tired, frayed around the edges and, above all, frustrated by the world around him, he forgets himself and lifts his eyes before mumbling a high-pitched apology.
He only catches a glimpse of a chin and the end of grey hair, stylistically tousled before…
He still doesn’t have any way to successfully block the barrage of thoughts that comes into his mind. And it is what he expects to happen when he looks at those sharp features and those striking eyes that go beyond those of human likeness…
But instead, there’s only silence, and this sudden absence of noise brings him a sort of vertigo so strong it makes him feel lighthearted and instantly nauseous.
He had expected anything. The scream of an angry man. The sob of a wretched soul. The mock of a haughty person. Or even their frustrated, tired sigh.
Instead, when he looks into those luminous, eerie, inhumane, untethered blue eyes and dives into the mind of the other…
...He violently crashes against a solid barrier of silence that has him reel back in a gasp of his own.
And then, suddenly, he feels it. He can feel hands grabbing, claws screeching, fingers grabbing and holding onto the molasses that is his mind and squeezing with such force that it brings tears into his eyes and makes him barely swallow back a cry of pain. This is the first time his mind has ever grazed against something that moves, and here it is brutally shaped and beaten to the will of someone else. It is like brushing against a muscle he has never realised was ever able to move, to be touched, to be seen and taken.
The feeling of those paintings had been one-dimensional. They had given him the illusion of a connection; they poured into him without the claws of emotions wafting inside his mind. But right now, it feels like someone trampled over the remains of a stiff limb, one that had been atrophied for so long (since his birth) that he's never known it was there in the first place. This trembling, shaking, fragile, sensitive little thing that was the connexion he yearned for, for so long, is now harshly squeezed inside a merciless hand and wrought as it searches inside his head with the ferocity and violence of a man unbothered by the consequences of his own actions.
And yet despite the pain, Guy revels in it.
He recoils from the sudden onslaught, the physical attack of someone not giving, but searching and taking from his mind instead. He doesn't truly understand what is going on, but like a lonely puppy learning the love of a caress from a hand gripping and pulling at his fur, he cannot help but stretch his mind in hopes of seeing more. Of returning the sensation, only to be met with a cold, wet and indifferent barrier.
Well, what do we have here?
Each word slices the bloody remains of his mind like a death sentence and reverberates within each of his human cell.
The sensation is so bizarre, so foreign and so wrong in the best ways possible that Guy cannot do much more than feel overwhelmed, tears pooling in his eyes, then spilling like the sudden teacup he's always represented his mind as, suddenly overfilled and dripping with bloody water from the soaking remains of his brain, harshly unearthed from the recesses of his mind.
He suddenly begins to sob.
It starts with a shake of his shoulders, then a tremor of his lips that turns into a full scowl disfiguring his face, and finally, the dam breaks, and he begins to scream his sobs.
The passersby on the sidewalk startle and look around, their panicked gazes land on this small child loudly bursting into tears all of the sudden while a man with inhuman eyes watches with disinterest, though his claws are still possessively gathering the remains of Guy's mind into a bloody paste and toys with it with the wonder of a man untethered from the chaos of the human world.
Guy continues to sob. He doesn't feel hurt, not really. The feeling of his mangled limb surely is a strange sensation, but in his mind, everything is distorted. It is similar to when he has to cut himself into small pieces so he can reconstruct himself after wrenching himself out of someone's thoughts. And the fact that someone else has casually entered the deepest part of a mind he's long thought dead is, in fact, deeply cathartic. It feels as if he's seen and been touched, acknowledged for the first time in years. It reminds him of the gentle touch of his mother when she soothes him and lulls him to sleep. Or how her round, pale, gleaming nails, shaped like sweet almonds, dig into his lower back when he has to behave or centre himself as he drifts off to a world unseen and which she cannot join.
Now those same sharp, pointed nails, kneading and slashing at his mind, feel like someone is finally seeing him back. By the simple fact that the man's eyes are trained on Guy, he feels grounded again to the bottom of the world, where his mother left him.
The man in front of him, with sharp features, an apathetic expression on his face and hands in his pockets, stares at the child unblinkingly. Some people around them look at him, giving him a stink eye, probably wondering why this adult doesn’t take care of his charge. Surely, this was just bad parenting! Others frown at them, at the noise Guy is making, and those jabs are aimed and shot straight at the small child’s heart, but if normally he'd have recoiled from the stinging wounds, this time he doesn't even acknowledge them.
Instead, he lets out more tears.
Not of sadness, not of hurt or not even of fear and anger. But of a realisation. A childish wonder, which he doesn't know how to control, when he finally realises that someone notices him.
Perhaps minutes have gone by while he continues to empty his tear ducks and rip his throat out in his cries, or maybe it is only a few dozen seconds. Time is not a very reliable notion for his frayed mind. But the next thing Guy knows, he's been moved. He isn’t in the middle of the street, nor is he standing anymore. He is seated at a table at the café just across from where he was previously crying, now with a small cup of hot chocolate, with a big dollop of cream on top, in his hands. He doesn't even register the heat he feels through the cup and seeping into his skin. His mind is oversensitive, and the tiniest movement of his head is enough to make something at the back of his head twinge, like the echo of a distant bell.
He doesn't have snot dripping down his nose anymore, but he does sniffle every so often.
Then suddenly, his unseeing, misty and red-rimmed eyes snap to the manicured hand he sees placed on the table, which belongs to the man who is seated in front of him across the table. His other hand is tapping at his temple and supporting his head. He is an old man, with white hair that only belongs to grandparents, but the way he looks at Guy with a raised eyebrow and an amused smile does not give him the same feeling as that old man from the apartment next door, who had loved to give him candies and headpats an age ago, when Guy still had his mother.
At the same exact time, he goes impossibly rigid with fear and apprehension when he realises with a twist that he's in front of a stranger, with a cup of chocolate in front of him, in a place he doesn't know, and he doesn't remember sitting there or even getting to this café at all, as much as the sweet beverage smells delicious in his hands. He recalls the whispers of his caretaker (of his second mother) sternly telling him never to follow a stranger. Her mind had flashed with images of missing children posters, of TV news with presenters wearing weary, grave and sad faces, and of flashing red and blue lights across the street while sirens howled in the background.
It had terrified him.
Is Guy getting...
"You are not," the man says indulgently, but with a huff and a roll of his eyes in voice. If I had wanted to, you would be long dead by now, trust me on that.
Guy startles again, he jumps on his seat and bangs his knee against the lower side of the table with a painful whine. Despite the loud noise and his jerky response, the man in front of him doesn't even bat an eyelash. His face switches between lazy amusement and calculated boredom.
"You're like me!" Guy cries while trembling in happiness, so eager in his exclamation that the cream sloshes inside the cup and threatens to flop down on the table.
Instead of being bothered by the idea of wasting his hot drink, his face splits into the most blissful, shining smile he's ever given to anyone in a long time.
He fumbles with the figurative cogs of his brain, trying to slap them into motion, kicking them if needed and winces at the strain of his sore mind, but he doesn't care anymore.
It does make a muscle at the corner of the tall man's lips to twitch.
You're like me!
"You are somewhat different from the others,” the man answers instead. The tap on his temple has not missed a single beat at the loud voice Guy uses to scream in his mind. “You should know better than to let yourself so open to others," he only adds.
Guy frowns and tries to extend a metaphorical hand towards the mind in front of him, but he only crashes against a cold barrier again. He does try to knock, but the only thing he manages to do is to leave a bloody handprint on the hard surface of the walls erected in front of him. While feeling a wave of frustration at being denied something, he is also filled with wonder and happiness.
In a way, it is the first time he's been denied access to someone else’s thoughts. That had never happened before, and the feeling of novelty, of something so rare and precious as this new event, is enough to make him want to cry again.
His eyes are stinging, and he sniffles even louder than before.
"Ah ah ah, I can't have you cry on me again. That woman over there isn't going to be happy otherwise. She has been thinking of calling the police for a few minutes already."
Guy's eyes drift to the side, where indeed, there's the barista glaring daggers at the back of the man’s head. Her mind is wide open, and her thoughts (tasteless, dull, flaccid and absolutely defenceless it is boring) ring inside his mind: a strong sense of suspicion and wariness, of worry for a child she's seen bump into a man who's definitely a stranger and not a relative, she should call the police but for now, the man hasn't said anything increminating yet. He might have been too shocked to act as the child barrelled into him. Oh, the poor child, he's been crying and sobbing for his parents, lost as he was. She would give the old man the benefit of the doubt, she supposes, for now at least. Well, she's got a picture of him too. It's blurry as hell for some reason, but it's enough to recognise him should she ever need to provide a piece of evidence. Oh, the poor small baby, he seems so lost but also happy now! The huge spoonful of cream mixed with dark chocolate definitely works wonders on children; it had been her special recipe as well! And so on, and so on, and so on.
"Now tell me, where were you going, walking all alone like this and bumping into strangers?"
"You're no stranger,” Guy shakes his hands and pettily slurps his cup, still a bit miffed at his question being ignored, “you're the same as me. I may be different, but you are too!"
The man’s eyes shine a little more brightly as they narrow. "Boy, my patience has its limits, and I have places to be." Where were you heading? Show me, or I will search it myself.
It is perhaps because of the warning tone inside the man's voice, which demands respect and obedience, that Guy shuts his mouth with a sharp click and looks at the man in wonder as he hears the words reverberating inside his mind. He cannot stop staring at those sharp eyes, and he sees there a depth inside that seems bottomless. So fathomless and infinite, he doesn't dare delve into them more than what he is allowed. Which is… Practically nothing, in fact.
Although he may not have the consciousness or the maturity of an adult yet, his instincts still scream at him to behave, to stay put, to obey and to follow.
Thus, he doesn’t snipe back and instead reluctantly follows the man’s orders. He fetches the image of the building they were supposed to go to, taken right from Kelly's erratic thoughts, filled with maps and data and guides and flyers and numbers swirling in her mind. He grasps onto the images and tentatively waves them just in front of the dark walls stretching infinitely from left to right across the fragile connection formed between the two of them.
Then, he can feel it. A shift in his mind as it touches something else. Something alive, something threatening, something moving towards him. The ‘air’ around them is frigidly scalding, like a fire that has burnt for so long it has nourished an endless heat, which only grows exponentially in destructive power. The mere feel of it, not even touch or see, but the sense of it, is enough to make Guy recoil in apprehension.
However, the dark light only brushes against the images he still cradles inside his mind and snatches them before the walls slam close with a sound of finality.
"Good boy," the man says with a satisfied smile that tears his face in two.
Guy doesn't know if the man means it by the way he's not glimpsed inside the ominous doorway he has seen inside the scalding light, or if it’s because he's obeyed the man's orders, presenting the images on a silver platter while trembling in fright and awe.
No matter what, Guy cannot help but preen under his raspy voice.
And then...
And then...
And...
.
.
.
And then he doesn't truly remember.
He remembers the visit to the museum, he remembers the guides and the paintings and the yearning, the emptiness and the void of his mind screaming for someone to see him as he sees and feels the world, but only gets a gaping silence in return for his pleas. Then he remembers walking with the others out of the museum and to the next destination.
Nothing is as exciting as the art gallery afterwards.
He supposes that he's seen everything London has to offer, and they fly back to the US the very next day.
As he looks into the airplane window and sees the stretch of infinite white and blue, he thinks he's found something back there, but he doesn't really know or understand what.
All he knows are those final wounds that stick inside the back of his head, those two little bloody holes left in his mind.
Those two small words that carry a meaning he's forgotten as soon as he's formed it…
Little thief.
.
.
.