#ahopefulgeneration

But the thought of that being the last time she might've spoken to him... It's enough to crack some of the ice around her heart, and to suck it up and to go visit him.

Elliot.

[ She's standing off to the side, invisible, but she knows that doesn't mean anything--that he probably felt her sneak in when the nurse left. ]

I know you know I'm here, but humor me. I can't--

[ She hesitates, looking down and nervously pushing her hair back behind her ears. ]

            or, three times josephine lewis packed a bag and left, and one time she didn’t. 

i. 

she can still feel sam’s ashes stuck in her eyelashes,  clinging to the wild curls of her hair, clogging her throat. the door to her bedroom slams open and smacks against the wall hard enough to leave a mark and she stands there  in the narrow doorway with her chest heaving and her eyes burning and she thinks the entire world is crashing down around her, terrifying and broken.

she chokes on what might be a sob and what might be a scream and digs the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to clear them. no matter what she looks at — her bed, unmade; the window, blinds hanging crooked and curtains faded; the  closet, half-open and messy — she can still see sam’s frightened face, the horrified pull of his mouth before he’d simply been  nothing at all. 

with shaking hands, she pulls a suitcase from underneath her bed. on her knees on the floor, she takes the time to suck in a  handful of deep breaths that do nothing but make her feel  dizzy and sick. she stands, knees knocking together, and bile crawls up her throat in hot, acidic licks. she swallows, hand pressed to her mouth, and there is one long moment where she doesn’t know what she plans to do at all until she finds herself throwing things into the suitcase, automatic and mechanical. 

it is ten-thirty at night, which means her mother will be home by eleven, which means she doesn’t have time to linger. the suitcase snaps shut, the latches clasped with a finality that brings tears to her eyes again. josephine swallows, chokes, and gasps, open- mouthed, in the middle of her bedroom with a suitcase in her hand and a dead boy’s ashes in her hair.

by the time the clock strikes ten-thirty-five, she’s out the window,  running.

ii.

she sits in one of the mansion’s many, many rooms, knees curled to her chest like she needs to protect herself from something.  josh is there, hollow-eyed and distant, close but so, so far. she could reach out and touch him if she wanted to, but her hands stay in her lap, hidden; against the soft wool of her sweater, her fingers curl until there are half-moon crescents in the skin of her palms. 

i hate it here, she wants to say. she feels like she’s screaming it at him every time they look at one another and he still doesn’t hear it. sometimes, i think i hate it here more than i’ve ever  hated it anywhere else. 

giselle isn’t here. they don’t know where she is. apathy leaves her feeling empty.

josh doesn’t say anything to her when she stands. she wonders when they got like this, when they became these people who  resented each other as much as they cared for one another.  she needs him and he needs her and she hates him for it because he is the tether and she is the bird trying to get out, to fly away; she wants to be like giselle sometimes, envies her for her ability to  leave in the middle of the night without saying a word. a hand reaches out before she catches herself and draws away. 

he never says a word. 

she decides that neither will she. 

that night, with the door shut tight and locked, she pulls another suitcase from underneath her bed and lays it, open, on the quilt. she has few possessions here; clothes and books, simple gifts from elliot and josh and luz. a sweater, raven’s, that she should never have kept but did. this time, she folds them neatly, sharp corners and straight lines, and places them one by one into the belly of the case before she closes it.

the next morning, she slips into the professor’s study and tells him with wet eyes and a trembling voice that she is sorry but  she can’t stay. his eyes are too blue when he looks at her, too sad, his mouth too thin. he understands. she wishes he didn’t.

it is harder to say goodbye to elliot. her suitcase hits the ground and she throws her arms around his shoulders, squeezes him tight. she hates it here, she hates feeling so trapped, but she  loves them. she loves him, with his summer sky eyes and his aching kindness, and she can say goodbye to many things and many people but she can’t bear doing it to him. i’m sorry, she says, and it isn’t enough; it never will be and she knows it even now, standing where they are. his arms tighten and she can’t see his face because she has hidden hers, can’t stand to look  at him. i’ll miss you. 

she doesn’t promise to come back. it would be too cruel. 

she hugs josh once, tight. giselle still isn’t back but she can’t be the girl he needs her to be, or the one he wants her to be;  the girl she never will be, regardless. they don’t speak.

josephine turns from them, this never quite right life, and walks away.

(her heart breaks, and she’s glad none of them have to see.)

iii.

jack sleeps in the next room over, shoulders curled tight and  angry, mouth set. the silence of the apartment is smothering,  still electric; josephine, standing alone in the dim kitchen,  feels like she is suffocating. she drinks a glass of wine that stains her mouth blood red and then another, hands shaking;  floors and floors below, she can hear the noise of the street, cars and people and the wail of a police siren moving through the heavy dark of night. 

she hates him. she hates it here, hates the artificiality of it, of him. his wolf smile and expensive suits and dinners at restaurants she  doesn’t care for, galas and benefits where he leads her around  with his hand heavy on the small of her back and his voice low in her ear. she hates that she ever allowed herself to be dazzled by something like this. 

there is a familiar cagey feeling growing in the swell of her chest. it’s been weeks since she found kes and although she hasn’t ever really been alone, she’s felt it; it’s been lessened now, dulled by  the familiarity in his eyes, his face. they are not friends but there is a certain amount of relief in just seeing him and knowing that he  knows westchester as she does, that there is a part of her past now in her present. 

her decision is surprisingly easy to come to. easier than it had  been last time, when she’d left another place; it is as simple as turning a light switch on and off. one moment she is standing in  jack’s kitchen and the next she is packing her things, the few that she has here. she doesn’t leave a note. she doesn’t look at him. 

she just goes.

iv.

she thinks of leaving once, in the very beginning. homesickness clogs her throat and settles in the empty space in her chest that she will soon realize will always be there no matter how many times she tries to fill it. she aches for westchester, for the people she knows, even if it means going back to josh’s silence and giselle’s closed door and elliot’s undeserved forgiveness. 

she pulls the same suitcase out from the closet in her bedroom and shoves as much as she can into it. it barely closes; her life is fuller now, brimming with things that are hers and hers alone. standing in the middle of her bedroom, josephine counts to ten, once and then twice.

she can go back. she can.

the suitcase is heavier than it ever has been before. indecision lengthens her steps. she can go back; she can catch a bus as she did before, she can step through the gates and knock on the front door and she can go back. it won’t be home, but it will be somewhere and maybe that is where she belongs.

she makes it to the front door before she stops. the phone in her pocket buzzes and she makes the mistake (a mistake which will, later, not be a mistake at all) of looking at the screen and the name displayed there, right over a photograph of her and kes and caleb. ONE MESSAGE: LANCE ALVERS.

another tether keeping her here, in this new life; here, with this new family.

josephine swallows thickly and realizes, in the front hallway of her apartment, that she can’t go back.

this is where she’s supposed to be.

Approaching him wordlessly, she hesitates before carefully wrapping her arms around him, afraid to cause him any addition pain. But once she's hugging him, she finds herself burying her face in his shoulder and clutching the back of his shirt.

It's more difficult than it should be to pull away, to look into his eyes.

"Elliot. When I heard--" Paige has to steal herself against another too-tight embrace, but it's hard because suddenly she's too young and too scared all over again. "I thought we lost you."

[ When he returns to the base, Adrian is greeted by a stone-faced trio of Purifiers, all more highly ranked than he is, and all are impossible to read. They beckon him to the elevator and tower over him with how small he feels in their presence. ]

You are not efficient enough, Luca. You’ve been wasting time in there. You're too soft.

[ He bows his head slightly, lets his eyes fall from the speaker’s face out of respect and humility just as another speaks up. ]

You do understand that this is as much as test for you as it is an information retrieval mission, don’t you? This is important, boy.

[ Adrian just nods, and the third Purifier—who, upon closer inspection, has blood under and surrounding her nails, and blood over the slopes of her knuckles—butts the handle of a knife against his chest. Her gray eyes are harsh, cold as the steel she’s handed over. ]

You will do better, you will show no more mercy for him and his kind. I’ve gotten him started for you, today.

•••

[ Their words are still ringing loud and clear in Adrian’s head as he lets himself into the interrogation room, eyes on the newly acquired blade. It’s made for precision, lethality; the blade is thin, slightly rounded, and sharpened to a razor’s edge. Meaning to pull his thumb crosswise over the blade to get a feel for the edge, he slices it open when he looks up.

The young man before him is a bloody shadow of himself, and if Adrian didn’t recognize a few of the cuts he had delivered—which were minor in comparison—he wouldn’t even believe it was the same mutant. Unguarded disgust sparks in his eyes and stays lit for what seems like an eternity.

Empaths are not the ones they should be treating like this, he finds himself thinking, silently screaming. There’s a murky line in his mind, now, somehow; dangerous and non-dangerous mutations, and how they should be handled.

Something resembling determination only comes to him when he remembers that this empathy knows Ruin, that he’s sticking his neck out for her, for Ruin, who has done so much more than broken skin and bone. ]

I see you’ve made a friend in my absence.

[ It's as if there's blood and ash in his mouth, thick on his tongue and hard to ignore, and he isn't sure he can perform to the others' satisfaction. He isn't sure he can do this with this mutant.

Give him someone else, someone dangerous, and he knows he could do it. He knows he might even almost enjoy lashing out, punishing someone dangerous.

(Someone like him.)

And so again, he asks; ]

Where is Ruin?

[ There is a patch below Elliot's eye that is relatively clean, save for some bruising, and the tender skin threatens to yield at Adrian's knife's pressure.