He pressed his hand flat over his eyes. “I don’t,” he said, vicious. “I don’t care. I hate him.”
Fox sighed. “Well, for one thing, hate isn’t the opposite of care. Hate requires lots of caring, actually. And for another, you don’t hate him.”
He waited, giving Tenny the chance for a much-needed confession. But instead he wiped his eyes, composed himself, and lit another cigarette.
“Not that you’ll admit it,” Fox said, “but you’re as ill-adjusted to regular life as him. You’ve had better training, and you can fake it in a way that he can’t. You pull on accents and personas the same way I do. Aside from him, I’m the only one you know who’s anything like yourself. But I’m your brother, and you do hate me, a little, and don’t want to jump my bones, besides.”
Tenny graced him with a dark look.
“He understands you, in a way that no civilian ever could, or ever will. He’s a version of you: a distorted mirror image, and you don’t have to pretend with him. Anyone else you sleep with is getting a carefully-crafted mask. An identity that you can pull out of your wallet alongside the condom. But it isn’t the real you. You can’t show the real you to anyone, not even when you want to.”
Tenny’s brows lifted, and kept climbing.
“But he sees right through all the bullshit. And he knows that killing a man on orders is the simplest, easiest, freest thing in the world. And sometimes it’s even fun.
“You’re having real, human feelings all of a sudden, on top of a lot of other feelings, and it scares you – almost as badly as thinking about going back to being alone scares you.”
The light had shifted, silver on the river, the first rosy glow teasing below the tree line.
Tenny took a drag, and his gaze came to Fox, blue, and earnest, and heartbroken; a boy at war with himself. “He’s better than me,” he said, and his voice cracked. “Not at fighting, and killing, and talking to people–”
Fox placed his hand on top of his head, and he fell silent. “He is. I know.”
“I am so – I am so angry. I amfurious, all the time. They made me,they made me, and they fell apart and threw me away, and they should have just put me down like the others, but they left me alive –why did they live me alive?And you brought me here to this place that I hate –I hate it here. It’s small, and ugly, and backward, and there’s nothing to do, it’s laughable howpatheticall this is, these aren’t even ops, I’m working with petty, small-town drug dealers, and I hate – I hate–” He was hyperventilating.
Fox took a firm grip on his biceps, and though he was taller, and yes, as much as he hated to admit it, stronger than Fox, he was kitten-weak now, and he came when Fox towed him in and enfolded him in a tight, bracing hug. Gripped the back of his neck and let his own body absorb the hard shakes of his. Rocked him a little, side to side.
Abe had done this for him, more than once, when he was a teenager, and the rabid, uncontrollable fury at Devin had come boiling out at the eyes and nose, pathetic, wet dribbles that made him feel helpless and babyish. “This is normal,” he said, because that was what Abe had told him. “You are normal, and anger is normal, and you can’t hold it. You have to let it out. Good lad.”
Tenny shuddered.
“Life is hard,” Fox said, in as soothing a voice as he could manage. “It’s hard enough for ordinary people, but it’s harder still when you’ve been given the kind of knowledge that you have and then dropped like you have. I won’t lie and say it gets easier – only that, over time, it’s easier to pretend. The anger gets less bitter on the back of the tongue.”
Tenny sucked in a ragged breath. “He’s not angry.”
“No, he’s not. But haven’t we already established that he’s better than you?” Fox teased.
“He’s sweet.”
“He is.”
“He gave me my name.”
“I know he did.”
“I love him.”
“I know you do.”
Another breath. “What am I supposed to do?”
“You could try telling him.” That earned a hard shiver. “Or maybe start by trying to be less of a massive dick to everyone all the time.”
That earned a snort, and Fox smiled, as the sun faded blue and gold across the water in dancing crescents.
Forty-Two
Albany, NY
