Chapter Text
Talbot drove.
Her mind was buzzing, flying from thought to thought, memory to memory.
The gunshots. Matthew on the ground, bleeding, the blond man with a sword standing over him. Shouting, reaching for a radio she wasn't carrying on the weekend. Pressing her hands over the gunshot wound in his chest, trying desperately to staunch the bleeding that had already stopped anyway.
Hands around her arms, pushing her away. Matthew on his feet, fine, his blood all over his clothes, all over her clothes, her hands.
She kept running back over it in her head, looking for the trick, looking for the reason behind what she'd seen.
Because it couldn't have been what it looked like. He couldn't have been dead, and then not dead anymore. She must have missed something. She must have imagined the worst when she'd heard the gunshots, when she'd seen the blood. She must've missed his heartbeat, somehow.
She knew what a dead man looked like, she argued with herself. And heartbeat or no, a person didn't lose that much blood and then just stand up again. She hadn't imagined that.
She could feel it, the drying patches of blood on her shirtsleeves, under her jacket. She should do something about that, find someplace to change, but there was no space in her mind for taking that step right now.
She tightened her hands on the steering wheel, not sure if the sticky feeling against her palms was water from washing off her hands, sweat, or lingering blood. She took one hand off the wheel, wiping it against her pants, then did the same with the other.
Go home, Talbot.
Matthew's voice played like a skipping record over her looping, scattered memories.
No, she hadn't imagined anything.
He hadn't been surprised about what had happened. He hadn't even tried to deny what she'd seen. He'd known it was impossible, and he'd acted like it was normal. It hadn't even been important to him. Not as important as chasing after the blond man.
She wiped her hands off against her pants again, one at a time, eyes fixed on the road ahead.
I can't explain right now. Go home, Talbot.
How was she supposed to do that? How was she supposed to just go back to her life and forget what had happened?
Are you ever actually going to explain?
A lot of that will be up to you.
She actually laughed recalling that, a bitter, ugly sound. He'd been not explaining things to her for months now.
Was this why? All this time, had he been. . .
What even was he? What was she supposed to call a person who could rise from the dead?
An alien? An angel? Some sort of X-Men style mutant, or crazy government experiment?
She wiped her hands off again, shuddering as the dried blood on her clothes scratched against the skin of her arms. Finally, it was enough to break through her spiraling thoughts. She got off at the next exit she saw gas station signs at, pulling into the parking lot of the nearest one, not registering the exit number or name of the nearest town.
She changed into clean clothes from the go bag she kept in the car, but only after standing in the bathroom in her underwear and scrubbing hard at the blood that still clung to her arms. She found patches on her knees, too, from where she'd knelt in it, and scrubbed that off too, until she smelled so strongly of cheap soap that her eyes almost watered.
She put her clean shirt on inside out and then backwards before getting it right.
When she got back outside, it took squinting at the nearest highway road signs to tell her where she even was. She'd been driving completely on autopilot, too consumed with. . . with everything to register where she was going.
She'd bypassed DC completely. She'd have to backtrack
She leaned against the side of her car and rubbed her hands over her face.
What the hell was she supposed to do?
Should she do what Matthew had said? Go home, go back to work tomorrow, pretend nothing was wrong? Hope he'd actually follow through and explain what the hell she'd just witnessed?
She scoffed, pressing her palms against her closed eyes hard enough that her vision flashed and pulsed. He'd been hiding things from her for a while. Maybe for their entire time working together. She had no idea when this had begun.
She had no idea how deep it went, either.
She dropped her hands to her sides and let her head fall back against the top of her car, staring at the cloudy sky above.
If she went back to work, what would she be walking into? The one thing she was certain of was that she shouldn't have seen what she had. It had to be a very deep secret, something like that. The question was, was it Matthew's secret alone, or did it go further? How big a security issue was it, that she'd seen his miraculous return from the dead?
Something that big, it seemed like the kind of secret that could land her in very deep trouble. The kind where she disappeared into some off-the-books prison and was never seen again.
Okay, maybe that was a little hyperbolic, but if this was some sort of. . . of big experimental government secret or something, she could definitely lose her career over it. She knew she'd heard rumors, at least, of people being quietly let go after digging too deep into something they shouldn't have.
She groaned softly, earning herself a confused look from a middle-aged woman on her way into the gas station. Talbot offered her a strained smile, not really even processing the encounter. It wasn't like it got her any closer to a solution.
What she needed, more than anything else, was time to think. She couldn't do that, if she was trying to navigate work politics and potentially dangerous secrets in DC.
She couldn't go back. Not now, not until she had some sort of game plan.
She glanced toward the highway sign again. A few more hours along this road would take her straight home, to Bridgewater. The urge to just jump back in the car and drive until she hit her parents' driveway was so intense, she almost did exactly that.
But she couldn't just turn up on their doorstep with no warning, and she couldn't just bail on work with no explanation. That would draw attention she couldn't afford right now, not until she had time to make sense of this and come up with some sort of plan.
She pushed away from the car, taking a deep breath before marching over to the payphone tucked in beside the gas station. She picked up the receiver and fished for some coins, and hesitated only a moment before dialing Chase's personal number. Normally she'd never have done that, she'd have called the office, but she needed a quick response on this.
The phone was already ringing when it occurred to her to wonder just how much Chase herself might know, and if Matthew could have already alerted her to what had happened that morning. What would happen, if—
"Hello?"
Talbot started slightly at the answer, mid-ring, scraping her thoughts back together. "I. . . Hi. It's Talbot, Ma'am. Sorry to call you at home." The polite response was automatic, fortunately, and gave her a minute to get herself in order.
"Agent Talbot?" came the surprised reply. "Is everything alright?"
That response made sense, didn't it? Maybe Chase didn't know anything. Or maybe she was fishing. How was Talbot supposed to know? "I uh. . ." she stumbled. She should have come up with a story before dialing. "Uh, no. I have a. . . I need to take some time off."
She could almost hear Chase's frown. "Talbot, what's wrong?"
She sounded. . . normal. Worried, confused, but not suspicious at all. That had to be a good thing, right? "I've got a. . . a personal emergency," she explained, "I don't really know any details yet. I'll. . . I'll let you know, when I know more, but I need some time."
For a second, she expected Chase to refuse. She would've been within her rights, for an unofficial request on such short notice. "Okay," Chase said after a moment, though, still sounding worried. "Yeah. I'll make arrangements. Talbot. . ."
Talbot tensed at the hesitation, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
"Take care, okay? Tell me more when you can, and let me know how much time you'll need soon, alright?"
She let out a hiss of breath, relieved. "Yes, Ma'am, of course. I'll let you know, as soon as I know more. Sorry again."
She hung up before Chase could respond, then winced. She shouldn't have been so rushed, she should have worked out what she was going to say before ever making that call. Now she needed to come up with some sort of story to give Chase about her absence.
She scratched her thumbnail over a rough patch of plastic on the phone receiver. She'd bought herself some time, at least. She'd come up with something.
A lie. She'd never lied to Chase before.
She shivered and picked up the receiver again, feeding more coins into the machine and dialing home.
Her mother, Serena, answered. "Hello?"
"Hey, Mom."
"Francesca?" Her mother sounded surprised. "Is everything okay?"
"I uh-" She scoffed quietly to herself, tugging restlessly at the hem of her jacket. Trust her mother to know instantly that something was going on, even if it wasn't odd for her to call on Sundays. "Work's just been. . . it's been a lot, the last few weeks."
She heard a quiet sigh. "You probably can't talk about it, can you?"
For just a second, it was on the tip of her tongue to tell everything she'd seen that day, and damn the consequences.
But that might put more people than just her in danger. People she cared about. Her mind provided her unbidden with images of her parents, alone in a stark, unwelcoming interrogation room.
She bit her lip. "No," she said quietly instead. "No, I can't. I just. . ." She took a deep breath, tilting her head back. "I was thinking I might come home, for a little while."
She could clearly picture her mother's concerned but almost calculating expression in the silence that followed. "Sounds like it's been pretty bad lately," she finally said. "When were you planning to come up?"
"Uh. Tonight."
"Tonight? That's. . . Yeah, of course. Do you know when?"
Talbot glanced toward the highway sign again, though she couldn't actually see it from here. "Four hours? Four and a half?"
"Okay," Serena said, "We'll see you soon. Drive safe."
"Yeah, Mom. Thanks. See you in a bit."
She lingered on the phone until she heard the click of Serena hanging up, then slowly hung up herself.
She ran her finger over the rough spot on the receiver again, wondering just how she was going to explain everything when she actually got home. Her parents would never directly ask her about her work, not when they knew so much of it was sensitive, but that didn't mean they wouldn't want to know in more general terms what was going on with her.
She made herself step back from the phone and turn back to her car. She had hours to think of something to say before she arrived. She needed to get moving, if she wanted to make it before dark.
She did arrive before dark, but only just. She didn't go in right away, instead sitting in the car in front of the house and staring at the sunset glow that stained the siding orange, turning the windows into gleaming mirrors.
It felt so normal. How could it feel normal, after what had happened that morning? How was she supposed to pretend everything was ordinary, when she'd watched a man rise from the dead?
She clenched her hands to fists in her lap at the thought, the snapshot memories from that morning flashing through her mind again. Her nails dug into her palms, only barely overriding the phantom sensation of hot blood on her skin.
Of Matthew's hands closing around her wrists, when she knew he was already dead. Of being pushed away, left to try to make sense of something impossible, with no way to get a grasp of it.
She shut her eyes tightly, not that it helped. Those images flashed through her mind again, again, and again. Gunshots, blood, pressing her hands over the wound, movement-
A tap on the window made her start so violently she banged her knee against the steering wheel. She twisted around sharply, meeting her father Anthony's smiling eyes where he'd leaned down to peer at her.
She let out her breath in a rush, slumping back in her seat for a moment before finally getting out of the car. "Hey, Dad," she said, and came around the car into a tight embrace.
Her father was a short, broad man, a couple of inches shorter than Talbot now. His hair had gone mostly iron gray years ago, but it was still thick and still tickled her ear as she leaned into him.
He squeezed her more tightly for a moment, then pulled back to peer at her. "Doing okay, kiddo?" he asked quietly. He did almost everything quietly. "Your mom told me what you said to her."
Talbot sighed, staring down at her toes for a minute.
Her father squeezed her arm and took a step back. "Grab your stuff," he told her, gesturing back toward the house. "Dinner's still warm. Come on and tell us about it."
Talbot woke slowly the next morning to the faint droning sound of radio filtering up from downstairs. She opened her eyes gradually, and for a minute, her surroundings made no sense to her. Not her apartment, not—
The events of the day before hit her like a truck, and the details all fell into place.
Not her apartment, no. Her old childhood room, long since redecorated and refurnished as a guest room. She'd had the walls plastered with movie posters, the shelves jammed with CDs and novels and soccer and track trophies, the bed haphazardly arrayed with stuffed animals. Some of that had come with her, some had gone into storage somewhere, but the shelves were mostly extra storage for her parents' books now, and the walls held small, innocuous imaged of landscapes and wildlife.
She was home, and nothing was resolved.
She blinked blearily, turning her head to stare toward the curtained window.
She hadn't said a thing about what she'd seen, not any of it. She didn't want to inflict visions of jarred, disembodied heads or curtains of blood spatter and gore on her own parents. She'd told them she was having some trouble with her partner, and hadn't dared say any more than that. All she knew for sure was that she hadn't been meant to see what she had. She couldn't know what kind of consequences that would bring with it, and she would not drag her parents into that. Better if they never heard the details.
Which got her no closer to knowing what she was supposed to do about it.
She shut her eyes again, fisting her hands in the sheets, those snapshot memories of the day before flashing through her mind. For just a second, she could smell the blood.
She breathed through her nose, focusing on the sounds of birdsong outside and the radio downstairs, and only when her heart rate had slowed again did she roll over and glance at the clock on the nightstand. She'd managed to sleep until almost nine in the morning. On any normal day, she and Matthew would have been at the office for an hour already, and deep into whatever they were working on for the day.
Would he be there, this morning? If she'd gone in, would he have walked in a little after her, as he almost always did, acting as if nothing had happened? What would he do, if she'd confronted him again with what she'd seen?
He'd never said he'd explain. He'd implied, sort of, that it would be up to her how much he did explain.
Would he, if she asked?
Did she want to ask? What would she learn, if she did? What would it mean for her life and her career?
But if she didn't, could she live with not knowing? Could she just go back to her normal life, and pretend nothing had happened?
She snorted softly, finally pushing herself upright and kicking the blankets away. She knew the answer to that. There was no way in hell. This would eat her alive, if she tried to pretend it hadn't happened like that.
She brushed her teeth and washed her face, but didn't bother to change out of the oversized t-shirt and slightly-too-short sweatpants she'd borrowed for pajamas before heading downstairs. She found her father at the dining table, coffee in one hand and pen in the other as he bent over a crossword puzzle, NPR droning in the background. "Shouldn't you be at work?" she asked, glancing at the clock on the wall as she wandered toward the kitchen.
Her father was a paralegal. Normally, he would've been at his office long since.
He looked up at her over the rims of his glasses, smiling in greeting. "I took a few days off."
"Dad, you didn't have to-"
He waved vaguely to cut her off. "No, no, it's fall break. I offered to babysit some of your horde of cousins for the week." His smile widened, and turned just a touch wicked. "Since you're here, you can help."
She blinked, then gave a dry chuckle. "Guess my timing's perfect, then."
Maybe it would do her some good. 'Horde' was a good description for her cousins. She was the oldest among them, by a decent margin. Two of them were in college now, one only very recently, but that left fifteen others, ranging in age from four to sixteen, distributed unevenly between her father's two siblings and her mother's five. Hanging around all her cousins wasn't exactly conducive to deep thought, but right now she'd welcome the chance to not think about anything beyond keeping track of a circus of kids.
The thought abruptly made her uncomfortable, and she clenched her jaw as she reached for a coffee mug, pouring from the half-full pot on the counter. This wasn't a vacation, and she didn't think she could afford to lose sight of that. She didn't think she could afford to take more than a few days, either, especially not without giving Chase a better reason than she had.
It wasn't like she'd say no to helping wrangle her cousins, but she also needed to figure out what she was going to do.
She added sugar to her coffee without really processing her actions, retrieving a bowl and a box of cereal from the cupboards. She opened and then closed the box without pouring any, getting halfway through putting it away before realizing she hadn't poured, and trying again. Then she tried to put the box in the fridge, and forgot to grab the milk.
Her father caught hold of the fridge door handle as she started to close it, making her jump. She hadn't realized he'd gotten up. "That's not where that goes," he said, pulling the door open again and retrieving the cereal.
She stared, then scoffed to herself and took it from him, managing to put it away in the right place this time. When she turned back, he was offering her the milk and watching her with concerned eyes. "You doing okay?" he asked. "Things must be pretty bad at work, huh? I don't remember seeing you like this since you went through that break-up with what's-his-name in high school."
Talbot flushed, busying herself with taking the offered milk and adding it to the bowl of cereal. She didn't really appreciate the embarrassment of remembering a failed high school relationship, but she supposed it wasn't a bad analogy.
He'd been keeping secrets from her, too, if less earth-shattering ones.
She didn't respond immediately. She carried her coffee and cereal over to the table, dropping heavily into her usual chair next to her father's spot. She drained a third of the coffee mug in one go, making a face when her tongue tingled from the heat.
Her father settled back into his seat with his own coffee refilled and picked up his pen again, saying nothing and merely watching her from the corner of his eye.
"My partner's been keeping things from me," she finally said, stirring her cereal idly.
Her father tapped the end of his pen against the newspaper, making it rustle. "Important ones?"
She hesitated, then nodded.
"Dangerous?"
"I. . ." She set her spoon down and leaned back in her chair. "I don't know."
"Is this something Matthew could get in trouble for?"
She bit back an incredulous snort. She hadn't even thought about that. What would that disciplinary hearing look like, anyway? Sorry, we have to suspend you, rising from the dead's not allowed here?
She had a sudden and vivid mental image of the witch-burning scene from Monty Python, only with Matthew in place of the witch, and her urge to laugh only increased. She took another hasty sip of coffee to conceal it.
She sobered again quickly, though. She'd wondered, yesterday, how much trouble she could get into for seeing what she had. If she'd stumbled upon some top secret matter that she did not remotely have clearance for.
But what if that wasn't the case? What if this was Matthew's secret alone, somehow?
What would happen, then, if the federal government were to find out he could come back from the dead?
She bet the answer amounted to 'nothing good'.
"Ches?" Her father leaned over and touched her hand lightly.
She straightened abruptly in her chair. "Yeah, sorry," she said hoarsely, taking another sip of coffee. She'd added too much sugar, but she couldn't bring herself to care much just then. "I don't know about that, either."
She supposed it was kind of moot. Something like this, she wasn't sure it was something she wanted to bring it to her superiors. Either it would endanger her, it might endanger Matthew, or she'd be laughed out of the room, and ruin her credibility. Unless they already knew, who would even believe her about what she'd seen?
Her father touched her hand again. "And now you're agonizing over what to do about it."
She huffed out a weak scoff of breath, shoving a bite of cereal into her mouth without tasting it. She supposed it wasn't hard to figure out, given her tendency to pick any quandary just about to death. "What would you do?" she asked abruptly as soon as she'd swallowed her mouthful of cereal.
He gave an explosive sigh, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his chin. "Hard to say for sure, without knowing more about the situation, but-"
A knock on the front door cut him off, and a second later they heard it open, accompanied by a tangle of children's voices. One other voice, her aunt Alice's, rose above the din to call a greeting into the house.
"The hordes descend," Talbot's father commented, his expression grim but his eyes twinkling as he pushed himself to his feet.
She smiled and rose as well, bracing herself. Alice's heart was in the right place, but Talbot found her to be. . . a lot. At least if she was just dropping off the kids, she wouldn't be here long enough to grill Talbot on every detail of her life.
She shoved her cereal and coffee back from the edge of the table in the hopes that it wouldn't all get spilled in the pending stampede, and followed her father.
Alice was her mother's youngest sibling, not even a decade older than Talbot herself, and had the same wavy dark hair and dark eyes so much of their family did. She was kissing Anthony on the cheek when Talbot followed him into the main room, and as she pulled back her face lit delightedly. "Francesca! I didn't know you were coming!" She swooped in, wrapping Talbot in a tight embrace, but pulling back quickly enough that she'd only just begun to return it. "I wish I'd known you'd be here!"
"I didn't-"
"Ches!"
The nickname came in a chorus from at least some of the small swarm of children who'd already scattered about the room, but converged again as soon as Alice had moved away from Talbot. Her youngest cousin, Amy, wrapped her arms firmly around Talbot's legs. Angelo, only a year and half older than Amy, did the same slightly higher up around her hips. Their oldest sibling, Ava, at nine, hung back a little, but still rocked excitedly on the balls of her feet. Next to her hovered Luca, about the same age, the youngest of Talbot's uncle David. Luca's older sister Carla hung back further, arms folded. She was twelve and, Talbot had been informed on various phone calls home, was reaching an age where overt shows of affection—especially with family members—were 'gross'.
She did her best to hug the two wrapped around her legs, laughing at the enthusiastic greeting and trying to sort through the constant babble.
"Can you play Mario Kart with us?"
"No! We should go to the park!"
"Can we see your badge?"
"Can we play water guns?"
"Can we see your gun?"
"Whoa! One at a time!" Anthony stepped forward, laughing as well as he waded in to settle the kids down. "Come on, have a seat. I'll get some snacks, alright?"
Talbot was still chuckling as she squirmed free of Amy and Angelo's determined grips, ruffling both their hair until they squealed and flailed at her hands. "Let me at least finish my breakfast and get some real clothes on first," she told them all, "And then we'll figure out something to do today, alright?"
Assuaged by her promise and drawn by the lure of snacks, the kids quickly turned their excitement to Anthony as he led them back toward the kitchen, waving over his shoulder at Alice.
Alice let out a long sigh, smiling ruefully, and checked her watch. "I need to get going. How long are you staying?"
Talbot shook her head. "I don't know. A couple of days at least."
Alice raised an eyebrow, but didn't comment. Instead she swooped in again to give Talbot a brief, one-armed hug. "Well, it's great to see you. Thanks for helping out, I'll see you tonight, okay?" She turned toward the kitchen, raising her voice, "Thank you, Anthony! See you later!"
The front door closed behind her as she left, and then Talbot was alone in the entryway, feeling a little dazed, and strangely unsettled.
The unsettled feeling, at least was a familiar one. She remembered experiencing it when she'd come home for a few days, after she'd finished her training at Quantico. She remembered being struck, hard, by how surreal it felt that something so calm and pleasant and normal could even exist in the same world she'd been preparing to dive into for a career.
It was one of the few times she'd had doubts, about her job with the FBI. One of the few times she wondered if she really wanted to take that step, into such ugliness as she knew she could expect to find in her work.
She felt the same now, perhaps even more powerfully, standing in the familiar entryway with sunlight streaming through the narrow windows on either side of the door, the sounds of her cousins chattering away and arguing over snacks filtering back from the kitchen.
How could this life even exist, after the things she'd seen and experienced? How could she live in a world where she got chased by a mob, saw the horrible things people could do to each other, and watched someone important to her die and then return from the dead?
And how was she supposed to react, when those children were so excited about what she did, the life she led?
She rubbed her hands over her face.
"Ches?"
Her father's reappearance in hall from the kitchen made her jump slightly, and she looked up to catch his concerned gaze.
"Your cereal's getting soggy," he said, and lowered his voice so the kids wouldn't hear. "You okay?"
She forced a smile. "Yeah, yeah," she assured him, taking a step closer, intending to go back to the kitchen herself. "Just thinking. Let me finish my cereal and get dressed, and I'll help you wrangle the hordes."
He pressed himself back against the wall to let her pass, but she could feel his eyes on her as she returned to the kitchen.
However all-consuming her concerns were, they were nonetheless pushed to the back of Talbot's mind under the onslaught of keeping track of five excitable kids on fall break, even with her father present. Especially since her cousins were much more focused on her, than on Anthony. They saw him all the time. She, on the other hand, was their cool grown-up cousin with an exciting life in another state, who they only got to see a few times a year at most. She was mobbed and pestered with constant chatter and questions up until they actually got to the park probably an hour and a bit later, and the draw of the playground finally pulled the attention of at least the younger kids away from her. Even Carla wandered off to hop on the swings, though without the wild enthusiasm of the other four.
Keeping track of them all and joining in the play where she could was a good distraction. Despite her resolve not to forget that she wasn't on vacation here, it was easy to lose herself in that, and she thought she probably needed it. She couldn't remember the last time she'd done something outside in the sunlight just for the hell of it like this, and especially without the backdrop of grim memories and nagging worries she'd been dealing with.
Lunch was fast food burgers and chicken nuggets followed by soft-serve, with stage-whispered instruction from Anthony that nobody tell anybody's parents, accompanied by an exaggerated wink. It was getting on into late afternoon when they finally straggled back home, Talbot carrying a drooping Amy piggy-back through the front door. Talbot thought she could have used a nap herself, after the running around that day and the kind of weekend she'd had prior to this, but instead she let Ava and Luca drag her over to the Nintendo her parents kept on hand for the various cousins and picked up a controller, letting them beat her over and over again at Mario Kart.
"You still gonna be here tomorrow?" Luca asked, somehow able to focus on both conversation and the game as his little cartoon car shot past Talbot's yet again.
She caught the tip of her tongue between her teeth as she tried to wrestle her own little car back onto the proper track. "Yeah," she said distractedly, not nearly as able to split her attention here as Luca apparently was.
"Cool," he said, flashing her a grin. "Can you stay all week?"
Talbot twisted awkwardly to one side, fighting with the controller and then giving up with a sigh when her car rocketed over the edge of the track and fell into emptiness. "Probably not, Luc, I told my boss I'd only be gone for a couple of days."
Little claws of guilt pulled at her with that thought. She really needed to come up with something to tell Chase, and call her to let her know how long she'd actually be gone. She needed to decide how long that would actually be soon, too, and knew she really shouldn't linger more than a couple of days.
How much time would she actually need, she wondered, before she was confident in facing going back to work?
Was it even possible to get there, after what she'd seen, what she'd learned?
"Hey, you spawned back in," Ava said insistently, nudging Talbot with a sharp little elbow. "We've still got two more laps!"
She picked up her controller again, pointing her car in what looked like the safest direction and accelerating.
"Have you arrested a whole bunch of people?" Luca asked eagerly, effortlessly swinging his car around a sharp turn.
"I. . . some," Talbot said, trying to focus on the game and not on the bitter thoughts of the recent cases where they'd failed to arrest anyone at all. Her hands tightened around the controller, sending her careening into a cliff. She wasn't even given the satisfaction of her little car exploding, she just bounced off anticlimactically, and had to struggle with the controls again.
"Have you ever shot anyone?"
Talbot's head snapped around, and her car careened over the edge of the racetrack again, this time into water. "What? Luca, you shouldn't ask things like that."
She had. Once. About a year ago. To her eternal relief, he hadn't died, and since he'd been going after another cop with a cleaver, she felt pretty justified.
"Have you ever seen a dead body?" Ava piped up eagerly from her other side, apparently just as adept at both focusing on two things at once as Luca, and at shocking Talbot into crashing her little car yet again.
A dead man, shot in his own living room. Heads in jars, wired to play music when hooked up just right. A decapitated boy in a ruined building by the river.
Matthew on the ground, not breathing, blood all over him, all over her hands as she tried to keep him alive, knowing it was too late.
She dropped the controller, digging her fingers into the carpet beneath her and gripping hard enough that the fibers started to burn against her skin. "Hey, I gotta go to the bathroom, okay?" She pushed herself to her feet, doing her best to keep her voice steady. "I'll be back in a minute."
"D'you want us to pause?" Luca called after her, eyes still on the screen, apparently not noticing anything was wrong.
"No, I was gonna lose anyway," she said back over her shoulder, already mostly out of the room. She couldn't bring herself to care about the game just then.
She went upstairs, locking herself in the bathroom there, ignoring the half-bath on the first floor in favor of more space, of greater quiet. She sat down heavily on the edge of the bathtub, clasping her hands tightly together between her knees and breathing deeply.
She just needed a minute, she told herself. She just needed a minute to work through those memories, through the phantom itch of drying blood on her skin.
It wasn't the first time her cousins had asked her questions like that, on her visits home. It would be a lie to say it hadn't bothered her even then, but it had never gotten under her skin like this. It had made her uncomfortable, it had caused some awkward lapses in conversation or abrupt changes of topic, because she wasn't about to talk about serial killers with her kid cousins. This was different, though.
No surprise, she supposed. She'd seen and experienced some hard things that year. Any one of them would probably be enough to hit her like this, to drive home so starkly the contrast between her cousins' innocently-intended questions, and the world she actually lived in.
Except she didn't even know what sort of world she lived in anymore. Not after what she'd seen. . .
Yesterday. It had only been yesterday.
She prodded tentatively at the memories, prepared this time for the visceral nature of them, healf-heartedly considering again that she must have imagined some part of what she'd seen, that it couldn't have been what it looked like.
There was no ambiguity here, though. It was burned into her mind, what she'd seen, what she'd felt, and the conversation that had followed. She almost laughed at the absurd idea of telling her cousins that yes she had seen a dead man, just yesterday, and then he'd stood up and started living again.
The doorbell rang, and a second later she heard the front door open, and the indistinct sounds of her father talking and laughing with someone, interspersed with the higher voices of the kids.
Probably Tamir, her aunt Alice's husband, here to pick up the horde of cousins. If she didn't go down and at least say hi, somebody would wonder what was up and come find her.
She stared down at the fuzzy bathmat for a minute more, then took one last deep breath and rose to her feet. She splashed some water over her face, keeping her nose buried in the towel she used to dry off for a moment before unlocking the door and making her way back downstairs, no less troubled than she had been the day before.