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Heathcliff swaggers into Outis’s office with the usual disaffected snarl that dares anyone in the Syndicate to mouth off to him. He takes one look at the hospital papers in Outis’s hand, notes the way her brows raise at him, and prepares his defense.
“Iffin you’ve got a lecture,” he starts, “I ain’t gonna listen.”
“No lectures. Only questions.” Outis sets the bill down, taps it twice. “Simple ones. You go off with Ishmael and end up in the hospital overnight.” She notes the way his face flushes. She also notes that while he sets a hand on the chair before her desk, he doesn’t sit down. Quickly, she adds, “I do not need explicit detail.”
“Wasn’t gonna give none. I don’t ask you nothing about Rodya.” His eyes narrow.
“Rodion has yet to put me in the hospital.”
“Emphasis on ‘yet.’” Heathcliff rolls his eyes.
“And if she did,” Outis continues, “I would hope you would have the common decency to be concerned. Or is your loyalty to be called into question as well?”
Heathcliff’s jaw shifts, his brow knitting. “You know bloody well where I stand.”
“And then you know that this is hardly judgment.” Outis folds her hands on her desk. “I am privy to what the creations of G Corp can do. If she is hurting you…”
“It ain’t like that!” Heathcliff’s hand tightens on the chair, his other hand balling into a fist. “If she wanted to hurt me, I’d be dead!”
“Then what of the insurance billing?” Outis keeps her gaze locked on his, cool and stern to his storming snarl.
And she respects him all the more for not looking away, for taking a step forward. “And what, you’re gonna say she’s bad for me? Tell me she has to go?”
“No. I need to know that it won’t happen again. Because if it does, then perhaps I will begin to take an active interest in your safety.”
The flash of his teeth again. The way his nostrils flare. He gives everything away, and Outis reads him like an open book. He’s scared of losing that moth girl. Would he feel the same if he knew who she was? “…We were careless, is all.”
“Be careful, then.” Outis spreads her hands and sits straight up. “Whatever you’re doing with her, think it through better next time. If I have to use a charge of your Life Insurance on something frivolous and avoidable, I might think it better to not bother at all.”
His glare remains firm, but his upper lip drops and his snarl turns to a scowl. “Yeah, whatever. If it gets you off my ass.”
“Believe me, I’m not as interested in that as Ishmael is.” Outis can’t keep the smirk off her face. Heathcliff’s eyes widen and break from Outis’s gaze. That confirms at least some suspicions, and Outis isn’t sure she hates knowing or not. “Make sure you’re ready for our run, by-the-by. Bike checks are your task, but I shouldn’t need to tell you that, should I?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Heathcliff shifts from foot to foot. “I’m off, then. Unless you got more?”
“Go.”
As he leaves, Outis leans back in her chair and pulls her watch from her pocket. Broken still. She turns it over in her hands, sighs, and clicks it twice. No response. She slips it back into its spot and closes her eyes.
Another year, Penelope.
Sometimes, when Outis looks at Heathcliff, she feels a childishness about her that makes her feel weak. There are no such things as miracles, and serendipity is for twee movies about true love and destiny and happy endings. She knows damn well he’s four years too young to be the son she never got to hold. But, her foolish heart says, what if? What if, what if, what if?
The first time she saw him, that weakness is what made her spare his life. The leader of their gang gave the order to kill or recruit the rest of the Dead Rabbits, and Heathcliff stood defiant, a child no older than seventeen, ready to fight to the death.
Outis took one look at him and knew exactly how to disarm him. He carried a metal club that could have caved in a careless soldier’s skull, but his stance was dogshit, and she wove through his swing with ease. She didn’t even need to draw her blade to knock him onto the ground. She drove her boot into his stomach, then rolled him over with her heel.
There, with her boot on his throat, she gave him an ultimatum. “Death or vengeance,” she said. She hated this boy’s face, hated the way she looked at it and thought back to a babe barely able to leave Penelope’s arms for fear of him wailing.
“I’ll kill the entire bloody lot of you,” he spat, clawing at her leg, using his last gasps of air to hiss defiance.
She offered him her hand. “Then follow me, and I promise you will.”
The blood of his comrades still clung to her jacket. He looked at her with hatred in his eyes, this boy with a face that wasn’t Telemachus’s, but what did she know of that boy’s face? Of her son’s face? And yet, the boy beneath her heel made a choice that would be the first of many that made Outis proud: he took her hand.
To say she’s ever been soft with Heathcliff is incorrect. Outis doesn’t know how to be soft. She’s a mother that’s never known her child, and the ghost she could have raised lingers so closely behind her that she’s started to see him in the face of a boy that’s never known his mother.
Four years too young, and yet when he told her of his history, she felt a pang of longing so deep in her bones that she wanted to reach out and mold his face to one that mirrored hers more closely. That night, she’d drawn him into her office and named him Road Captain. She even poured him a glass of the good brandy, which he took with a surprising hesitation given his usual brash demeanor.
His mood soured as the night went on, and she kept filling his glass as she wrenched the story from between his jaws. Making people talk was her specialty, and a mix of curiosity and concern kept her asking questions. At the end of it, he sobbed drunkenly into her shoulder as she sat stiff and tried not to think about the implications of an orphan child brought from the Backstreets into a rich man’s home. She tried to ignore the specter clinging to Heathcliff’s back and tried to deny the rage blooming in her gut.
She did not ask what Heathcliff’s name was before the Earnshaws named him. He likely didn’t know it, and she knew better than to hope. She’s kept her jaw wired shut on that matter, because if she ever calls him “Telemachus,” it’s over. The dream would be dead. She’d have accepted that he’s the closest she’ll ever have to going home.
He’s not her boy. She’s not his mother.
This will be the last year.
And she means it as much as she always does. She opens her eyes and returns to work.