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“How are you holding up?”
Dr. Bright asks the question, but it doesn’t feel the same as it does from literally everyone else who asks it every single day. It doesn’t feel as pitying or as cloying or as dripping-oozing-concerned. It just feels like solidarity. It feels like an anchor.
Adam sighs. Shrugs.
“I dunno, honestly.” He pauses. “I honestly think I’m just… still processing.”
Dr. Bright nods. “I get that.”
And, yeah. She would.
“And how are you… adjusting?” There’s a meaningful edge to her voice and he knows exactly what she’s talking about. The warmth of it sits in his chest like a dragon gone to sleep.
She doesn’t have to be this secretive about it-- the coffee shop is bustling with the late afternoon end-of-work rush-- but if there’s anything Adam’s learned about Joan Bright in the four years he’s known her, it’s that she loves her secrets.
“I’m… adjusting,” he says finally, noncommittal. “I still haven’t told Annabelle yet. I’m honestly kind of scared to. I know she says she’d do anything to protect me, but what does that mean when I’m the thing she’s vowed to protect me from?”
Joan hums. “I can certainly understand why you wouldn’t want her to know.”
Adam’s hands feel warm. He can’t tell if it’s from the fire or from the mug in his hands.
His hands were cold.
“Adam?”
“Huh? Oh, uh, yeah, sorry.”
“You spaced out a bit, there.”
“Yeah, I, uh… I was just thinking. I’m fine.”
Dr. Bright raises an eyebrow. Adam avoids her gaze and stares into his matcha latte instead.
His eyes were closed.
The latte is incredibly similar to the color of Caleb’s eyes, he notes. A pale, warm green; soft and comforting.
He takes a sip.
He drinks half the mug.
It burns a bit, still a little too hot to drink comfortably, but he welcomes the way it sears his tongue and his esophagus. It’s a welcome distraction.
That’s probably not good, but fuck if he has time to worry about it.
Miriam had told him to be careful about slipping into “old habits” as a way of coping with his grief, had given him a list of exercises if he ever felt the urge to hurt himself again. He’d thanked her. He’d told her he’d be careful. As though I haven’t learned how to handle myself after all these years, he’d thought to himself.
He sets down his mug and feels the leftover sting as he runs his burned tongue over his teeth.
His chest...
“I guess it’s just… it’s still hard to think about. It doesn’t even really feel real. I mean, we’d been apart for so long, right? I’d gotten used to not seeing him every day and all that. I keep thinking he’ll answer if I just text him enough. I keep refreshing his Instagram. I keep thinking that maybe if I knock on his apartment door he’ll be the one to answer instead of Sadie.” He laughs, bitter and humorless and wet with tears he’s trying to hold back. “But he’s never there.”
His chest was completely still.
Dr. Bright smiles a bit. It’s not a happy smile, not by any definition of the word. Her eyes are tight. “That feeling never goes away, I’m afraid. Every time I walk into the director’s office, I keep half-expecting to see Owen sitting in his old chair. But it isn’t his office anymore.”
“Yeah.” Adam sighs. “I wish I’d recorded that last phone call with him.”
“Oh?”
Adam sighs again. Swallows around the lump in his throat. Tries to speak around the tears.
“He told me he loved me,” he breathes, wrapping his fingers around the mug. This coffee shop is too damn cold. “It was the last thing he ever said to me and I just… I wish I could hear it again. I wish I could just…”
“I love you, Adam.”
“I know the feeling.” Dr. Bright is not smiling anymore.
Nothing is worth losing someone you love.
—
The funeral is a somber affair.
Adam had said he’d say a few words. He’d written out a whole speech about how wonderful and smart and beautiful Caleb was. He’d practiced. He’d cried. He’d let Caitlin hold him while he shook with sobs so hard that he nearly thought he might knock her off the couch with the force of them. He’d thought he’d cried out everything he had in him before the funeral. Adam Hayes is nothing if not prepared, after all, and if he can pretend to have been anticipating literally any part of this, then— well.
He gets out three words— “I love Caleb”— before his throat closes and he has to go sit back down with his parents because he can’t speak anymore.
His dad holds him tight, gripping his hand with an iron strength. His mom rubs a hand up and down his back.
But his dad’s arms aren’t as strong as Caleb’s; his mom’s aren’t as understanding. They’re nice, they’re gentle. They’re not Caleb. They can’t be the anchor in the storm of his emotions that Caleb used to be. They can’t help him sort through this fucking mess in his chest.
He cries until he feels hollow and cold.
—
“Y’know, you uh… you made fire. When you passed out.” Sadie says it cautiously, as though she’s unsure how to break the news. Adam just nods.
“Yeah, I know. It, uh, happened at the tower too.”
—
Alice punches him in the arm when he sits down on the Michaels family couch. It doesn’t hurt at all, which is rare for Alice— her “light taps,” as she calls them, tend to feel like most people’s genuine punches. This doesn’t have any of her usual gusto behind it.
“Hey, emoface.” She sounds tired.
“Hey, jerk.” Her face falls a bit when he calls her that and he figures out why almost immediately. He’d picked the name up from Caleb. “Shit, sorry, I didn’t mean to—“
“It’s fine, Adam. Routines and all that. I get it.” She snorts. “Believe me, I get it.”
“...Yeah.”
“Sooo…” she draws the word out, leaning forward on the couch a bit. “What brings you here?”
Adam shrugs. “I dunno, I just wanted to visit, I guess. Sadie said I wasn’t allowed to mope around their apartment anymore, so.” He grimaces. “ Her apartment, I guess.”
“Right.”
“Yeah, so, I didn’t wanna be at home anymore— my parents keep looking at me like I’m some glass that’s about to fall off the table and shatter. It’s just way too much like when I—“ he cuts himself off, shaking his head. “No, never mind, you’ve probably got enough you’re dealing with, I’m not gonna bog you down with my own bullshit too.”
Alice grimaces. “Yeah, the pity thing… it sucks. I keep getting it from my classmates. Like, oh boy, here comes the girl whose brother got murdered, time to look as sad and comforting as possible lest she combust from the flames of your happiness when she walks by.” She rolls her eyes. “Like, I barely know how I feel yet because it was all so fucking sudden that my brain hasn’t even caught up with the fact that he’s—“ she swallows. “That he’s gone, and then there’s just all these people making me feel guilty for not being sad enough.”
And, holy shit, it’s like she’s opened up some window into his soul, because that’s literally exactly what it feels like, isn’t it? He’s been walking around feeling numb and empty and yet, strangely normal, like nothing’s changed. The earth hasn’t fallen out of orbit, the sun and moon still continue their endless dance, the chilly November rain falls and evaporates and falls again. The world continues to spin. His chest continues to be whole. He has not caved in.
Which would be fine, he’d be okay with the ceaseless emptiness and the unsettling normalcy, he’d be fine with never processing anything if it meant he didn’t have to feel the way he did upon finding Caleb ever again, if it meant he didn’t have to feel like he did at the funeral ever again, but the problem— the big, glaring, shiny red problem that keeps staring him right in the face— is that everyone expects him to be worse.
It feels like he’s doing something wrong.
He wants to say all that to Alice, but all that makes it out is—
“Yeah, I feel that.”
—
“I love you, Adam.”
Caleb hangs up.
Adam runs.
—
He’s back on campus.
The whole school had shut down for a bit over Caleb’s death— he may not have been a student there, but a death on campus would rattle anyone, not to mention the security risks of allowing classes to take place shortly after a murder.
So, classes paused for a week.
Adam had taken a few extra days off. His professors understood when he emailed them saying the student who’d died was a close friend of his. Caitlin did the same.
They’d gotten a ride to Boston with Sadie, Frankie, and Ben. They’d taken a Greyhound back.
Being back feels… something. It definitely doesn’t feel good. After the commotion of the last month and a half, being back in his apartment with just Caitlin, going to school, trying to focus on just getting through these last few weeks of the semester so he can mope for all of winter break, it all just feels… too quiet. Far too quiet. He needs distractions and the only thing he can think of is trying to make the fire happen on purpose, sitting in the middle of his living room with all the furniture pushed to the sides while Caitlin stands by with a fire extinguisher.
The fire licks up and down his arms. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as he’d have expected it to-- and, though he buries the admission deep down the moment it arises in him, it doesn’t hurt as much as he wants it to. In fact, it doesn’t hurt at all. It feels warm, it tingles a bit, but it’s nothing like the searing heat that had burst out of him when he’d found Caleb.
No, what hurts is the sight of the front door of Harkness Tower. The candles burning sadly down to little puddles of wax on the steps, the photos of Caleb that are starting to curl with water damage from the last few days’ rain, the drooping bouquets, the prayers and “gone but not forgotten”s and the way Caleb’s name has been spelled out in candles that have long since melted down.
Adam hadn’t attended the memorial the first night, couldn’t bear the sight of all the students of Yale gathering to mourn a boy they’d never even fucking met, let alone heard of before his face was plastered in all the local news stories about a death on Yale’s campus-- “Breaking news, this evening. A young man named Caleb Michaels, age 21, was reported dead in Yale’s Harkness Tower this weekend. The cause of death is unknown as of right now…”-- they knew nothing about Caleb. Absolutely nothing.
And yet there they all were, singing songs for him and crying over him while Adam was left picking up the pieces.
The thought of the overly-saccharine ceremony turns his stomach even after nearly two weeks.
The bells stay silent for a while— probably because the tower is still being treated as a crime scene— and it’s eerie. Everything feels too quiet.
And then, one day, the bells burst back to life again.
It happens while Adam’s in class.
He quietly stands up, walks out of the lecture hall, and slips into the nearest bathroom to hide while he cries.
—
“Hurry up, we’re gonna miss the sunset,” Caleb laughs, looking behind him. Adam huffs, trying to walk faster.
“Oh my god, your legs are like, twice as long as mine, asshole,” he pants, rolling his eyes. “Why couldn’t we have left earlier in the day again?”
“I wanted to, you’re the one who took forever to get ready, dude.”
“Don’t dude me.” Adam stops. “Okay yeah, no, I need a break. Maybe we can just look at the stars when we get up there or something.”
Caleb squints at him, considering, before grinning deviously. He takes a few long strides back to where Adam’s trailed behind him and scoops him up in his arms, laughing as Adam yelps in surprise.
“Oh, my god, put me down!”
“Nope, don’t think I will,” Caleb says, breaking off into a sprint. Adam yelps again, flinging his arms around Caleb’s neck as he suddenly feels significantly less secure.
They make it to the top of the hill just as the sky begins to turn pink and the clouds turn to cotton candy tones-- soft pastel yellows, purples, blues. Caleb finally sets Adam down, gesturing out at the forest below them, painted in golden tones by the fading light. There are lightning bugs beginning to dance around them and as the sun dips deeper in the sky, everything looks like it’s on fire-- deep golds and reds taking over the soft glow.
“Holy shit,” Adam whispers, awestruck.
“I told you this was the best place to look at the sunset. I used to come up here with my family a bunch.” Caleb can’t stop smiling and it’s just like in high school-- Caleb’s smile makes Adam happy and Adam’s happiness makes Caleb’s smile bigger and they just keep swirling around and around until--
When Adam wakes up, his pillowcase is wet with tears.
—
They’d taken Caleb’s body to the AM.
It had initially been because there was the possibility of a normal coroner finding something strange about Caleb— the brain injury they were going to examine might show something they couldn’t explain and that would not go over well. But after Caleb had been picked up, it was about... well. How the fuck do you explain it when the body of the boy who died yesterday looks like it’s been rotting for a month without revealing the existence of atypicals? Without explaining everything that had happened with the book?
The answer is simple: you don’t. Certainly not when you have a facility around that is able to accept that explanation.
The autopsy report had said the cause of death was blunt force trauma.
Adam could have told them that. The pool of blood seeping into the stone of Harkness Tower beneath Caleb’s head had made that pretty fucking clear.
But still, he can’t help but feel just the slightest bit relieved at the confirmation that it was, in fact, a murder.
Adam can’t stop replaying that last phone call in his mind.
“I can fix this— I can fix me.”
There had been this small, nagging voice for the last couple days, asking him what if this was what Caleb meant by that. Asking if this was all on purpose after all.
Caleb’s parents break down at the report. Alice leaves the room.
Adam, guilt roiling in his gut, just feels some of the tension in his body finally uncoil.
—
“He’s what?”
Mark stumbles when he gets the news, slumping into the nearest chair. Adam feels his heart sink. Please don’t make me repeat it, he thinks. I don’t want to have to say it again.
He doesn’t have to.
Beck and Mark both go pale at the same time. Adam can only assume they’ve seen Caleb.
“I’m sorry,” Adam whispers. “I tried to get there in time, I tried to—“
“It’s not your fault,” Frankie soothes, pulling him into a half-hug. “There’s no way you could have predicted this would happen.”
And, god, Adam wishes he could believe that, but, well—
When it comes right down to it, Caleb would still be alive if Adam had never called him that night.
—
Adam unlocks his apartment door and is met with the concerned faces of Sadie, Frankie, Ben, and Caitlin.
“What’s going on?” Ben asks, leaping to their feet. Sadie’s not far behind them.
“Yeah, what’s up, did you find him?”
Adam tries to speak. Can’t. He doesn’t know how to say what he saw. Putting words to it means it’s real and it’s not— he can’t—
He takes a breath. Another.
His hands are shaking.
“Woah— Adam?”
He doesn’t know who said it. The concern is turning into alarm and his legs suddenly can’t support his full weight anymore. He falls back into the front door, sliding down to the floor clumsily as his hands fly to the back of his neck and his hands start to burn again and his nails dig in— anything to keep him grounded, because right now, he’s floating untethered, head fuzzy, and he can’t breathe—
He wakes up on the couch, blinking slowly as he takes in his surroundings.
Sadie’s sitting by his side with a firm grip on his hand, and Adam circles the worry on her face back to him, and wait, why is she—
Oh. Right.
Caleb.
“Are you alright? You just kinda… keeled over.”
Adam licks his lips. They feel too dry. His throat feels too dry. Everything hurts.
“I… uh...”
What the hell is he supposed to say? No, he’s not fine because he just found Caleb’s fucking dead body in Harkness Tower? Sorry, none of us will ever see our friend again?
“I… I found Caleb,” he decides on, after a painfully long silence. “In Harkness Tower.”
“So then… where is he?” Frankie sits down on the other end of the couch, near Adam’s feet. He lays a comforting hand on Adam’s shin.
It’s far too kind a gesture. Adam just stutters.
“I— he— he was—”
Rip it off like a fucking scab.
“I… found his body.”
—
Adam’s lungs burn.
Maybe deciding to fucking run from his apartment back to campus wasn’t his smartest idea ever, but he needs to get to Caleb, he needs to know that Caleb’s okay, that he’s safe and that he isn’t— that he hasn’t—
He runs faster.
He wishes he had Caleb’s legs-- even running feels excruciatingly slow and his own legs aren’t long enough to take the Harkness Tower stairs two at a time like he wishes he could do.
He bursts through the doors at the top and finds Caleb lying on the ground.
Exhaustion be damned, he sprints to Caleb’s side, skidding along the floor when he comes to a stop and wincing as the rough stone rips into his jeans and scrapes his knees. He doesn’t have time to worry about that right now. He reaches out and grabs Caleb by the shoulders, shaking him, trying to wake him up.
“Caleb? Caleb, answer me.”
Caleb doesn’t respond. He doesn’t move.
His hands are cold.
His eyes are closed.
His chest…
His chest is completely still.
And, in the dim dawn light filtering into the tower, Adam notices something he hadn’t before-- a bloom of dark red spreading out from the back of Caleb’s head, seeping into the stone floor of Harkness Tower.
Adam can’t stop the small whimper-yelp that rips its way out of his throat, choking him on its way out. This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, this isn’t--
Adam stumbles backwards, landing hard on his backside, and screams.
The sudden roar of fire nearly drowns out the sound.
—
“I just wish I’d gotten closure,” Adam says finally, not trying to hide how his voice is breaking anymore. “Frankie, he’s—was— one of Caleb’s friends, he told me what was up with Caleb’s ability, the reason he broke up with me in the first place. How he’d been scared he was forcing me to love him.”
Dr. Bright just stares at him. She says nothing. Adam continues.
“...And I think if I’d known that, I might have forgiven him. I think we could have stayed together. We could have been something. I just… I don’t think he knew how much I loved him when he died. I never got the chance to say it back. I never… I don’t know if I even knew how much I loved him, not really. It was all buried under a bunch of absolute bullshit but I loved him so fucking much and I don’t know if I’ll ever feel okay again.”
He doesn’t really mean to say that last part, but it’s true when he says it.
Dr. Bright reaches out and gently touches his hand.
“I think, with these kinds of things, ‘better’ is hard to quantify. Some days I think that I’m alright, that I’m ready to get out of bed and live. Those days happen more and more often with time. But there are still the days where I get hit by the grief out of absolutely nowhere. There are the days where I only want to stay in bed all day because the idea of having to walk by the place where he died is too daunting to handle.” She stops. Takes a shaky breath. Pushes forward. “But the good days are starting to outnumber the bad ones and I think that’s just what we have to strive for.”
Nothing is worth losing someone you love.
Adam glances up at her.
“Did you love him? Agent Green, I mean.”
Joan stops to consider. “I honestly don’t know. You know, Mark asked me the same thing, years ago, before… everything, and my answer was the same. I think, maybe, there was still some love in there, but… years of anger make it difficult to sort through all that. It’s hard to tell if there was actually any love left in me.”
He thinks of Annabelle.
“Right. Yeah, that makes sense.”
“And even now… I still don’t know. I can’t tell if any love I still feel is because it was there all along, or if it’s only because he’s gone now.”
She changes the subject. Adam lets himself be carried along, thankful to be getting away from this. He’s cried in public enough in the last month and a half, thank you very much.
—
When Annabelle gets to Yale, spearheading the group from the AM that had swooped in to investigate and to try and find Blackwell and the other cultists, she pulls Adam into a giant hug, years of animosity set behind them as she smooths his hair down and tries to comfort him.
“I’m just so glad you’re safe,” she says softly. “You could have come to me, you know. I’d have handled it.”
He hugs her back tentatively.
He wonders how she’d handle him, if she knew. If she knew what he’d tried to do.
He doesn’t think he wants to know the answer.
—
“You killed him.”
Adam feels something surge up inside him-- anger, white-hot and blinding. The fire rises with it. He stalks towards Blackwell slowly, watching him cower. In the end, all he’s become is a scared old man. He’s shaking. He looks pitiful.
Adam takes no pity.
He stares Blackwell in the eye and aims for the head.
“No!”
The fire misses, hitting the wall inches from Blackwell’s head. The smell of singed hair fills the air and Blackwell, seeing an opening, scampers off into the catacombs, fleeing and following in the footsteps of the other cult members who’d disappeared into the shadows one by one.
Beck holds Adam close in a vice grip, preventing him from moving his arms. Adam’s hands spark a couple more times before he gives up, sagging against Beck’s chest.
“I had him,” he whispers, voice cracking. “Why would you do that? I had him.”
“It’s not worth it,” Beck says, softly. “I understand wanting revenge but I’ve seen what that can do to a person. You’d have to live with that the rest of your life.”
Adam’s sobs shake his whole body and his legs give out from under him. Beck lowers him slowly to the ground, kneeling with him and not letting go. He buries his face in Beck’s shoulder, and Beck shushes him, running a hand up and down Adam’s back. It feels almost like when his dad would hold him after a nightmare when he was a little kid.
“It’s alright. It’s over now,” Beck soothes.
But it’s not.
This will never be over.
This isn’t a nightmare. Adam’s not going to wake up from this.
Caleb’s never coming back.
—
Adam sits on Sadie’s couch, trying to process everything Frankie’s said.
Caleb broke up with him because his ability had evolved. Because he was scared he might be forcing Adam to love him, because he didn’t want to keep Adam under some emotional spell like-- well, Frankie hadn’t known the name, but it was pretty damn obvious to Adam that Caleb was terrified of being like Damien.
He’d been scared of hurting Adam.
Whole lotta good that had done.
—
Adam sits on Alice’s bed as she tells him how much Caleb still loved him.
It’s a lot of rehashing what she’d told him at the AM-- that he had been it for Caleb. That Caleb would never love anyone else. It hurts more now, though, because Caleb really never would have the chance to love anyone else. Not now.
—
Adam sits cross-legged in front of Caleb’s grave.
It’s January. The snow soaks into his jeans and the cold stings his legs, but he can’t be bothered to care.
He gently brushes the snow off the top of the headstone with a gloved hand.
“Hey, Caleb.” His voice breaks, and he clears his throat, tries again. “I, uh, wanted to visit you. I know I haven’t done that yet, not since-- not since the funeral. But I, uh… I needed to talk to you. Frankie told me some stuff about your ability, and how scared you were, and how you’d thought you were protecting me, and I just… I wanted you to know that I forgive you.”
He blinks away tears.
“I just… I wish you’d told me. Maybe then, everything could have worked out. Maybe then you’d still… we’d still…”
Adam shakes his head.
“And I’m sorry I made you feel like I was pushing you away. I just… I wanted you to make friends with more people your age who understood you and what you were going through. I just wanted you to be happy. I thought I was doing the right thing and I didn’t realize how much I was hurting you. I’m sorry I made you think I didn’t love you anymore and I can see how that could have been misinterpreted especially with your ability acting up.”
His tears are falling freely now, freezing against his face and forming little crystals of ice in the snow beneath him. He takes a deep breath, steeling himself against the weight of what he’s about to say.
“I just… I loved you. I love you. I love you so much, I need you to know that. And it’s real. It has to be, it can’t be you influencing me, because you’re… you’re dead. You’re gone. You’re not here. It’s real, you meathead, it’s all real, and it’s crushing me, and I wish you were still here with me so I could hold you close and feel how warm and real you are when I need an anchor, but now…”
He swipes his sleeve over his eyes. It doesn’t help.
“It’s just me alone in the universe here, Caleb.”
He sets down the bouquet he’d brought-- bright yellow tulips and roses with vibrant green leaves sticking out. He smiles, shakily, and the effort just makes his tears fall faster. He shakes with his sobs, pressing his forehead to the freezing cold stone where Caleb’s name is engraved with delicate care.
As he speaks, the snow begins to melt in a circle around him, the heat of his ability radiating outwards and revealing the wilted green grass beneath him.
“I love you.”