Chapter Text
…and my body-house lies upon the earth
and earning all the pain I called forth.
— “The Judgment Day II,” Anglo-Saxon poem, trans. Dr. Ophelia Hostetter
Like this: spied from the hall, the elder Lynch hunching over his kitchen counter, spine sprung in a sour and private bow. Pent up, penitent, unsoothable. This, Mr. Gray understood, was the reckoning after any long crisis, but Declan didn’t seem to know that he owed, much less how to pay his body’s bill. He looked fatherless. There would be no settling up or settling down, no locked ladder of ribs slacking rung by rung. And it wasn’t at all the first time Gray caught an offstage martyrdom. Nothing, so far as he knew, was newly or urgently wrong: Declan lived like this underneath.
Gray took him to the woods. Persuasion was only a matter of blunt brevity, which tended to smell like truth among bastards, and a slender lie—a mountain, an artifact, Ronan in mild imminent peril. Then there they were in green, in deer tracks and meadow and shushing understory. Other than brutal steep distance Gray had no set destination.
A bit of a shock that the boy went along, that he'd taken Gray at his word. After all Declan hadn’t misplaced any fury. It just wasn't relevant at the moment: the point was to keep Lynches alive, although that seemed to apply only to other Lynches. Dutiful Declan, performing his essential function, incurious; something had deteriorated past suspicion or self-preservation; he would endure regardless, so might as well get on with it. Gray made him walk in front.
Declan let him weigh down a pack with all but a few things. Besides the gun hid under his vest, Gray carried only a map and compass in case his phone died, and what he'd need for Declan later, and a thin backstory for the bluff. Declan, though, didn’t ask. He rarely spoke at all, didn’t work to breathe much even on scrabbling shale, bore left and right when told: he was an efficient machine with bulletproof posture, and they weren’t friends.
But the trail, such as it was, cut almost vertical for the better part of each hour. Declan was many things; a mountaineer wasn’t one of them. Near fond—no, fond—Gray forced them north and up, tracking the stains of sweat in their seeping tracts down Declan’s flanks. Gray would find the limit for him.
By midday Declan’s whole shirt was dark, his hair dripping. Hectic red flared over the nape of his shining neck. Proud thing; he’d collapse before he’d call a halt, and did, faltering up a ragged scramble and scraping plenty on the crash down. What a sound he made, strangling his pain—a stone had cut him from cheek to temple. Blood welled showily in the way of head wounds.
Wet and mauled reclining against the rock, and yet the look of a good suit hung about him, the license of capable hands and a chivalric jaw. The blood had the air of a temporary embarrassment. A life ago Gray had traced this boy’s own gun from his kidney to the rigid muscle of his thigh, hadn’t he, had beaten him raw and swollen.
They’d hike another few miles. But Gray could start him off, sure, prod and rile to get him fuming up the mountain. Flint now, smoke soon.
“I’ll—let me,” he said. Soothing and charitable, as though compassion weren’t a taunt between them. Declan’s stomach thickened with a belly breath.
Gray bent him forward by the shoulder and unzipped the pack for peroxide and bandages; he knelt, placing a water bottle by Declan’s hip, and began to dress the scour outside his forearms, then the palms, nudging gravel out. Declan held a white pad of gauze to his cheek with each free hand. For the chipped skin of his knees where it glistened through the rips in the nylon, Gray cajoled each pant leg up to the thigh and laid neat bandaids over the worst of it. He drew the cuffs back down. Declan sipped and didn’t twitch, but he watched.
“Anything tweaked or strained?” said Gray. “It’s another hour, maybe two.” Doing nothing with his face, he babied Declan's knee and ankle, squeezing each between thorough thumbs and forefingers.
“No.” Declan held his own face like blank paper, except for the lavish blood smeared down his neck, leaching into the sweat-soak of his collar.
“Your cheek is already clotting.” He removed his hands and leaned close. With the water bottle, he rinsed the wound in careful pinking runnels that strayed under Declan's earlobe. Declan opened the new gauze himself to dress his own cut; Gray took it out of his hand.
He soaked the gauze down with peroxide and set it to Declan’s cheek, neither hard nor softly, holding it for a long minute. Gray knew it burned like hellfire. Declan's only reaction was breathing through parted lips. He had a high clear forehead and his father's fine prow of a nose, his brother's, and his breath was a cyclic warmth against the inside of Gray's wrist. There were no birds, or they’d quieted them; wind stroked the pines to a swelling murmur. The blood came easy when Gray wiped it away.
There were butterfly closures in the kit, and it took six to seal the cut. It was more of a gash. A red-blue threat of a bruise budded under his cheekbone. Gray straddled Declan’s knees and shone his phone flashlight into Declan’s eyes, and they'd do a balance test in a minute. “How long do you need to sit?” Gray said. “Don’t worry about daylight, we have some buffer time. Follow my finger.”
Declan didn’t, and said, “No nausea or dizziness. I’ll stand on one foot when you let me up. Could you get the light out of my face, please?”
In general, eyes slid over and past Mr. Gray. Declan looked at him and saw.
Gray let him up. Declan stood on both feet to shuck the backpack, into which he collected their debris. The boy’d done a damn fine job raising himself, if anyone asked Gray’s opinion. Turning and donning the pack, Declan said, “Let’s go.”
Gray caught him by the bicep. Ungentle. “Sit. Stop trying to hurt yourself. You got that already.”
There it went: the first writing across Declan’s empty page of a face, faint and rageful. This would go well, the day, the purging. Declan patted his bandaged hand twice over Gray’s clamp on his arm, and started to climb.