fangs lungs ankles

Without hesitation, Paris pressed the lit cigarette into the flesh of his wrist. He cringed, but held it still for as long as the flame was still burning, as long as-

“Paris.” A voice spoke from inside the house, on the other side of the screen door. He jumped badly, dragging the burn. The voice had been female, adolescent. He snuffed the cigarette out in a hurry, panicked.

“Sorry. Sorry, Anna. What’s up?” He’d stood up from the chair, stumbling a little as he hid the evidence.

The girl just stared back at him. One hand rested on the screen door’s handle, and she slid it slightly open to lean out into the gentle rain. Her face was a mask, in the way it usually was, in a way he always thought was impressive. But it granted him zero absolution at the moment.

“Why’d you do that?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I didn’t- You weren’t supposed to see that. It’s stupid. Don’t worry.”

She didn’t need to see it. She’d been through enough without having to witness other people’s grotesque acts of self-violence. The shame he’d meant to extinguish somehow deepened in a new direction.

Something like concern was written across Anna’s face as she eyed his wrist.

“…Do you want a bandaid?” she asked.

Paris shook his head. He wanted to erase it from her memory. “I’m okay. Thank you. It’s not that bad, I just wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

“I’m going to get you a bandaid so it doesn’t get infected.” 

Anna retreated before he could respond. Feeling defeated, Paris sat back down at the patio table. He wanted another cigarette, but he didn’t like doing it in front of her. He didn’t even like doing it in front of Jay, really. The thought of disappointing either of them was more biting than the nicotine itself could ever be comforting. And nobody wanted Anna picking up on it.

“You are the bad influence,” his father had said, over a decade ago now, hand twisted up in the boy’s blonde hair. Paris touched the spot on his scalp, feeling the phantom pain that formed. 

He was, though. It was hard to even be mad at the man.

Paris had been Anna’s age, though. She reappeared in the doorway, and he tried to imagine what it’d be like to hurt her, and the pain in his chest spiked so violently he thought the lung had finally collapsed.

“Here,” she said, crossing the threshold.

He wanted to protest further, but it seemed awkward to argue, and he knew it might make her feel better to help. That was the advice they’d given him, anyway. Reluctantly, he held out his wrist. The burns there were evident, and clearly self inflicted. Anna placed the small bandage over them a bit indelicately.

“Thank you, honey,” Paris said, trying to keep his voice neutral. He tried to mirror how Jay and Lorelai talked.

Anna nodded, using her leg to pull up the chair opposite and plop down into it. Paris pulled his arm closer to his chest, then lowered it beneath the edge of the table — out of sight.

“What are you still doing up?” he asked quietly.  “You can’t sleep either?”

Anna shook her head, folding her arms around herself. She said: “My dreams are getting weirder.”

He waited for her to go on. The silence was filled with rain. Anna slouched in the chair, and slowly dragged her legs up as well. She looked out into the dark just as the lightning lit up the sky again. Paris thought, not for the first time, that she was a bit spooky looking. Her skin was pale, and her eyes were so bright and big on her. She brimmed with a quiet intensity wholly incongruous with her age.

“Do you ever miss your parents?” She muttered.

“Only at night,” Paris answered. “I mean, yeah. Of course I do. I can miss them all I want now, because I don’t have to worry about them coming back.”

A chill ran up his spine.

“You dream about them?” Paris asked her.

“Mm.”

“Do you miss them?” he ventured.

She laughed bitterly, brushing a strand of hair back behind her ear. She said, “I just get so angry with myself.”

Paris felt the burn against his wrist. He understood.

“I wish I didn’t remember anything,” she said. “I don’t care during the day, like you said. I only remember everything at night. I remember everything.” She looked at him, a little wild. “…I wish it was all bad. That way it’d be easier, and I wouldn’t care that they weren’t here.”

Paris felt at his chest again, just to confirm his lungs and heart were still working as they should. He felt their steady pulse beneath. There was no malfunction. It was just pain. 

He hesitated a while before speaking, and he tried to be deliberate in what he said.

“Anna, you are so much smarter than I was at your age,” he settled on. It was true. He’d have never been capable of articulating something like that as a kid. Probably not even as a teenager. It was only in his twenties that he gained the language for it, and became unafraid of it. His own attempts felt clumsy by comparison. “…I don’t think you’re wrong to miss them. Like, they’re your parents. It’s normal. I can probably count on one hand the amount of happy memories I have with my dad, but I still think about him all the time. But I know I wouldn’t be any better if he was here. And you know you probably wouldn’t be better off either. Right? That’s the whole reason it hurts.”

“I know.” Anna yawned. She slumped even further in the chair. “It’s still sad.”

“Um. One thing that helps me-“ Paris blushed a little as he said it, humiliated by the vulnerability of the statement. He didn’t want to seem stupid or useless to her. In a real way, he was still so embarrassed at needing help in the first place. He pushed through it valiantly. “-has been, um, writing letters. To people that I miss. It just helps to organize my thoughts a little bit, and gives me the chance to think about what I would say to them if I could.”

“And that helps?” Anna tilted her head. “You don’t send them?”

“Most of the people I want to talk to are dead,” Paris admitted. “I know I won’t get the closure I want. So this is the next best thing. And I don’t have to worry about messing it up, or about anybody actually reading it, so I can be as honest as I want. Yeah, it helps.”

He had a whole folder. He added to it all the time. 

Paris felt his wrist again and said, “You’ve got to find some way to deal with it.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ii.

A collection of old newspapers protected the carpet from any paint spilling onto. Paris lay prone on the soft interface. One arm halfheartedly shielded his canvas until he was happy with how it looked. Not too far away, Jay sat up against the couch, composing in peaceful harmony.

“I’ve been getting back into classical lately,” he said, without really expecting a reply. “Makes me nostalgic.”

“Are you classically trained?” Paris raised an eyebrow without looking up.

“Uh, kinda. My school had lessons. My teacher was classically trained, but we had a weirder curriculum. I had to seek a lot of it out myself. Still have perfect pitch though.”

“Yeah, I know,” Paris smirked.

“The imperial schools have a specific method of teaching it, right?” Jay asked innocently.

“You could say that,” Paris answered without elaborating.

Jay got the message and winced in sympathy. Cautiously, eyeing the page, he asked: “What about art?”

In that instant, Paris gave up his weak attempts to conceal his painting. He set the brush down in the palette, and sat up a little bit to observe it from a new distance. It took him a while to think back on the question, his own experience in school. He hadn’t cared much about it then. He’d barely considered it. There was simply way too much going on for it to even register as important.

“It wasn’t like this,” he recalled. “I think there was a classic tradition, generally, but that wasn’t something they pushed on my grade. They did not respect the arts very much at that point. And that’s not what I’m doing here.”

He knew enough to recognize his style was jot classical, and did not resemble the strict realism that any of the imperial classes might have offered. The look was self taught, and quite contemporary looking. Paris’s art was not always brutal, but the style had to allow for brutality when the time was right. He’d made several passes at the WolfHead already. He didn’t like drawing gore, but he needed to draw what he remembered. Some sights were seared so vividly into his memory that he didn’t need to or want to reference anything else.

Old visions came back to him the more that he practiced, the more attention and effort he gave to their recollection.

“Can I see?” Jay asked. He tilted his head a little, and Paris thought he looked cute. He obliged, flipping through the notebook.

Paris was always honest in the paintings. He couldn’t even begin to think about how he might lie. It was impossible.

A bright yellow sphere against a pink, regal pattern of moulding. Little spires emerged from the brightness, the vaguest impression of a chandelier.

“This was the view of my bedroom ceiling on the ship.”

A more ambitious piece showed a constrained landscape, a small pond beside a willow tree, almost generic looking if not for the detail. Empty beer cans had been painted into the foreground for good measure.

“This was the grotto behind our school, we used to have parties there.”

A still-life of a bag of coke and some diplomat’s credit card, which spoke for itself.

The view of the back of a driver’s seat, and black space visible in the windshield. One long purple braid trailing down off the side of it, forming a small coil on the floor. A gloved hand.

Paris frowned a little. “Um. Johanna. This was what I saw when I was in withdrawal.”

A landscape of an ocean as seen from far above.

A mock-up of the website he’d used to manage logistics, back when he was still prince.

An earnest attempt at the songbirds on their perch upstairs.

In full clarity, a boy with long, black hair. He leaned one elbow candidly against a marble surface. His clothes hung loosely off him, the material looking soft and well-worn. His expression was neutral, looking off to the side as if unaware he was being watched. Naturally. How could he have known in that instant that this was one of the views Paris would remember?

The grief twisted in his heart like a knife. Paris swallowed painfully.

“Um. Delta,” he managed. It was stupid. He knew he didn’t need to explain that one to begin with.

Jay nodded. He didn’t react too dramatically to the way Paris was choking up, which Paris found himself immensely grateful for. Jay only hummed a little, taking it in. The sketchbook tour ended there, obviously. 

“…It’s sweet,” Jay said. “He looks calm there.”

Paris shrugged, “We were off-duty. I’d ask him to come smoke with me when we had nothing else to do.”

“I didn’t know you two hung out like that. It’s kind of funny.”

Paris nodded silently. It was. 

He’d betrayed Delta in a way he could never forgive himself for. It made him so ashamed to admit it:

“I miss him.”

“I know, Paris.”

~~~

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