The freezing concrete presses into Darius’s skin uncomfortably. He shifts, rolls, squirms, but he cannot find relief. He wasn’t gifted a blanket or a pillow, simply thrown into this bare room. Time passes in his cell in a way he isn’t quite used to. Before, he was using time to his own advantage, using the clues of previous lifetimes to adjust and change as needed.
But now?
Now in this windowless prison he is simply at the mercy of its passage.
Has Auggie’s birthday already passed?
There is no way to measure it, no way to guess how long it has been.
But she’s alive. I know she is. It is worth it.
A rush of cold air presses into him as the door to his cell is slammed open.
“Get up.”
Darius stiffens, but doesn’t acquiesce.
He recognizes the voice. It has taken shape in his childhood, in previous timelines, and in his nightmares.
The owner of the voice is the reason Darius sacrificed himself. It is why in all the timelines Darius was never truly hurt.
It is why everything in this town is corrupt and broken and disgusting.
“Put him down here,” the same voice says.
Just a few beats later, rough hands grab hold of Darius’s shoulders and tug him forcibly off his concrete pallet. They heave him to the ground and push him onto it. Onto his knees.
Darius screws his eyes shut, head angled downwards.
He doesn’t want to see his “visitor,” doesn’t want to acknowledge him in any way.
Cold smooth fingers grip his chin, jerking his head up. Caught off guard, Darius’s eyes flash open on their own accord.
“That’s better. You never did learn respect, just like that filthy mother of yours.” The man before him flashes his teeth in a feral smile.
Hot coals tumble in Darius’s stomach at the thought of his mother. He looks anywhere except at the man. Over his shoulder Darius begins to count the bricks along the wall.
He makes it to twenty-three before the man speaks again.
“I promised her I would leave you be, that I would let her raise you. I half believed you weren’t mine.”
Darius thinks back to when he first learnedwhyhe was so different from his other brothers.Whyhe always felt so lonely around them.Whyhe seemed so secluded from them.
It was when he was eight; his mother had returned from one of her benders, amess.But Darius hadn’t cared, he’d just wanted her love, her affection. It was before he realized she had none to give.
When she passed out on the floor, he crawled onto her, wrapped himself in her arms. It was the happiest he had felt in awhile.
But then she woke up.
Screaming at him. Telling him tonevertouch her again. That he was an abomination.
That while Tripp, Axel, and Grayson were made out of love, Darius was the product of trauma.
He was unwanted, unloved. He was a monster she should have gotten rid of.
At the time, Darius hadn’t understood. He had run to Grayson with tears in his eyes. He expected Grayson not to know either but that wasn’t the case.
Grayson had sat him on the bed, watched him with his typical intensity.
