Breakable by mosylu

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Just before dinner, Uly apologized to her, stiffly and hesitantly, and she accepted it. He paused, shifting from foot to foot, as if he wanted to say something.

"What is it?" she asked, but just then, Yale put his head around the tent door and told them dinner was ready. Uly rushed past her as he hadn’t eaten for a month.

She followed him more slowly, and not just because her legs felt like blocks of wood after the day’s hike. In spite of the apology, their fight still sat like curdled milk in Devon’s stomach. She could count on one hand the number of times her phlegmatic son had been mad enough to lose his temper with her, and it was always over something important.

By the time she took her place in line, Uly already had his food and had plopped himself on a handy crate, shoveling the fruit into his mouth with all the grace and manners of a starving wolf. She watched him covertly, wondering when she'd lost the ability to understand her own son.

"Spirulina," Julia said to her, and Devon looked around, startled.

"Oh, no," she protested, knowing she'd already lost. "Julia--"

"Yes," Julia said firmly, and planted a large chunk of the ghastly foodstuff on her plate. Devon looked at it morosely--she was the only one who had to eat it these days--and left the line, heading for the bank of crates where her son sat, now deep in conversation with True.

"You promised my dad," Devon heard her say.

"I will," Uly said.

True gave him a ferocious frown, undoubtedly copied from her father. "You better."

"I did part of it."

"But not the important part."

Uly's chin jutted. "I said I would."

"Whoa, you two," she said, and they both jumped, True fumbling her cup so badly that half the water inside slopped down her front. "What’s wrong?"

"Nothing," they said together, a united front in a millisecond.

"Okay," she said slowly. "Can I sit down here?"

True gave Uly a look. "Yeah," she said. "I think that would be good. I’m gonna go eat with my dad." She took herself away, leaving the two of them alone. Uly ate silently and studiously, as if the taking of a meal were a complicated test that he wasn't sure he would pass. He didn't look at her.

Devon twisted her fork in her fingers for a few moments, listening to it scrape against the plate. "Honey? Did you and True fight about something?"

"No," he said, so flat and final that it was the end of conversation.

Devon managed some of the meat, and about a quarter of her squishy, cider-tasting fruit. She couldn't make herself touch the chunk of spirulina. She thought she couldn’t stand it before, but now she honestly hated the sight of it. Like her son when he didn't want his vegetables, she broke her food into pieces and shifted it around her plate, hoping to make it look as if she'd eaten more than she had.

Of course, just as when Uly did it, anybody who wasn't actually blind could see right through the ruse. Yale said, "Devon, you aren’t eating."

"I’m not really hungry," she murmured, crumbling a chunk of spirulina between her fingers.

His voice was ladled over with thick, gooey dollops of understanding and patience. "I know, but you need to eat. You're still recovering, and--"

"Stop fussing!" she snarled.

The camp went silent. Uly looked up at her, eyes wide. He'd never heard her yell at Yale before.

Her heart thudded in her chest and her ears. Her mouth felt dry. She hadn't meant to scream, but it felt so good to let it out. She looked around. Nobody met her eyes for more than a second. They looked away from her and at each other, and their looks said, Be patient. She's still recovering.

Which made her want to scream again.

She stared longest at John, waiting for him to say something. Knock it off, Adair, you’re bein’ a bitch. He’d actually said that to her once, and she’d practically had a stroke, but he’d been right. Just like he’d be right if he said it now.

But he didn’t even look at her.

"I’m sorry," she said into the silence. "Yale--I’m sorry. I’ll eat." She suited action to word, lifting the pieces of spirulina to her mouth and forcing herself to chew.

Devon slipped away after dinner, feeling as if she were getting away with something as she ducked around bushes and behind trees. She didn’t go far, her own restrictions echoing loudly in her brain, but she knew she went farther than Yale would have been strictly happy with. Just because of that, she went a little further still.

I’ve regressed, she thought wryly, hoisting herself up on a fallen tree and swinging her legs. Hello, fifteen, it’s been awhile.

Twenty-one years before, she’d been the kind of girl that adults called "precocious," and "spirited," code for "why didn’t you drown her at birth?" Choking on pastel designer dresses and discreet pearls, Devon had fought tooth and nail to break out of the box the world had put her in. Probably the only reason she hadn't destroyed herself--or someone else--in the process was the fear of seeing that expression of disappointment in Yale's dark eyes.

But she was almost sure she'd left that self behind. She'd made her peace with elegant gowns, traded rave parties for cocktail parties, and seen to it that her juvenile record was not only sealed but buried. Almost nobody remembered what a wild little alley cat Devon Adair had been, not even Devon herself.

Yet here was that scowling girl again. Next she’d be dying her hair blue.

Devon sighed and worked her nail under a loose piece of dead bark on her log bench, prising it up and regarding the scuttling insects underneath with detached interest. She felt as if she were in a box again. Hard-won maturity allowed her to see that the advance crew, like her parents and Yale, weren't doing it out of repressiveness, but a genuine desire for her well-being. But the fifteen-year-old brat inside said, So what? I never asked for it!

All she wanted was to go back to a world that she knew. She wanted to be in control of her own body. She wanted to understand her child again. She wanted . . . she wanted . . .

"Hey."

She looked up to see Danziger trekking toward her. Her mind went temporarily blank, but her mouth said, "Do you know anything about the Danziger/Adair Fight Scale?"

"Is that still going on?" he asked, stopping in front of her.

"So you have heard of it." Keep going, she thought. Keep going.

"Hard not to. Sometimes it was the only good conversation going."

"Out of curiosity, what's our highest score?" She moved over slightly, a tacit invitation to sit.

He stayed on his feet. "Think we might've gotten a fifteen once."

She tried not to look disappointed. "Fifteen? Really?"

"Oh, yeah." He rocked back on his heels, a grin flickering. "That one had it all. Volume, ferocity, publicity, length . . . and bonus points like you wouldn't believe."

"Let me guess. Was it the one during the winter camp? When you wanted to go out in a blizzard--"

"Hey, I was goin' a little stir-crazy. And they were flurries. At the most."

"--and then called me Captain Bligh for three days afterward?" This conversation was very nearly flirtatious, she realized. Had they always been?

"That's the one," he affirmed. "Classic."

She laughed. "We're not always that bad, though, are we?" she appealed. "We mostly get along."

"Sure, mostly we do. Just that when we didn't, it was like Hiroshima, meet bomb."

She noticed his use of the past tense with a mental frown. Did that mean he didn't forsee any good fights in their future?

"Speaking of that," he said, drawing her attention back to him, "about this afternoon. I shouldn't've--"

"Oh, no," she said, pushing even though she knew she'd lost ground. "No, no, no. I have it on highest authority that we scored at least an 8.5 this afternoon, when all the bonus points are added in. God only knows how many we’ll lose for an apology!"

Momentarily distracted, he said, "8.5? Are you kidding? Damn."

"It's no fifteen, but that’s got to be up there--" She caught herself, crossing her arms. "We’re wandering. I don’t accept your apology, Danziger. What do you have to say to that?"

He stared at her, narrow-eyed, for several seconds. "I don’t know what’s going on in your head, Adair," he said finally. "I don’t even know if I want to know. But I promised Uly I’d talk to you about something, and that’s what I’m going to do."

"Uly?" His behavior at dinner came back to her, and she forgot everything else. "Is something wrong? What’s wrong with him?"

"Calm down," he ordered sharply. "The kid's perfectly healthy. Quit hyperventilating."

She pressed her lips together, forcing herself to be still. "Healthy," she said, knowing instinctively that there was a reason John had said that and not fine. "All right. Is there something on his mind that he couldn't tell me?" What could her son not tell her?

He did sit then, but far down the log, bracing his palms against his knees. To Devon, it looked as if he were searching for very difficult words. Her fingers dug into the bark, a rock settling in the pit of her stomach. She didn't think she wasn't going to like this.

"You ever realize that Uly knew he was going to die when he was five years old?"

Cold washed over her. "No. No, he knew he was going to live. He always knew that. I always told him--"

"Lady," he said wearily, "I'm no expert on the Syndrome, but even I know the statistics. What is it--thirty or so little kids get diagnosed every year? And only three of that thirty will even make it to Uly's age. He's smart. He saw it happening to them, he knew it'd happen to him." John’s fingers tapped restlessly on his knees. "He told me about some of his little buddies. Paolo, Jennie, Matt, Layla--" He looked at her. "Sound familiar?"

They had been Uly's friends. They hadn't made it to the launch. Paolo hadn't even made it to his fifth birthday. Devon put her hands to her trembling mouth.

"He thought you were dead for the first two weeks, because we put you in that sleep chamber and left you behind."

Her voice wobbled and cracked. "Didn't you tell him I--"

"He said adults lie about this kind of thing all the time." He looked at her. "Your boy loves you, Adair, and he knows he almost lost you for good. He also knows you're not running at full strength, no matter how much you pretend you are. And he's sick and tired of being lied to. So quit it."

"I'm not lying," she said steadily. "I'm trying to protect him. He doesn’t need that kind of stress--"

"What he doesn’t need is your protection. Did you hear me? He gets it. He looked death in the face for three years, and just because he got to walk away doesn’t mean he’s forgotten what it looks like. Let him take care of you for a change. He needs to do something instead of just watching you kill yourself all over again. Let him love you. Think you can handle that?"

Words wouldn’t come. She struggled for them, but they dammed up her throat, and she could only stare at her own knees as if the patches on her pants held the key to the universe.

After several moments, he let out his breath. "Look, believe what you want, you always do anyway." He got to his feet. "I kept my promise, so--"

Her hand darted out and caught at his. He jerked away, almost tripping over his own feet. She stared up at him, her arm hanging in mid-air a moment before she let it fall.

"Sorry," he said. "Sorry." But he didn’t offer any explanation for it, and she couldn’t understand his expression.

She said, "Thank you," which was what she’d meant to say when she reached out to him.

He looked skeptical. "For what? Yelling at you? Again?"

"For being there for him. When I--I couldn’t."

He looked away. "Yeah, well." For a little while, there was only the sound of wind, rustling the leaves, and her ragged breathing. Finally, he broke the silence. "Look, I’m gonna go back to camp. It’s getting dark. You should come too."

Her own voice sounded very far away. "No, I--I need to think."

He rubbed the back of his neck, glancing back toward camp, then down at her.

"Alone," she said. "I’ll come back, I really will, but I just need to--" she looked up at him. "Think," she said again, for lack of a better term. "I’ll be back."

"You’d better," he said. "Or--"

"You’ll come back for me, like you did before?" she asked. It was supposed to be a joke, but it came out completely serious.

He looked at her expressionlessly, then turned away and headed back to camp. The squelching of last autumn’s leaves under his feet gradually faded away into the distance.

She sat, feeling strangely weightless. She’d held Uly as he cried after he’d lost his friends, but when had she ever talked to him about it? She hadn’t. Not once. Cowardice? Blindness? She didn’t know.

She wondered who’d held Uly when he cried while she’d been in cryo-sleep.

John. Of course, John.

A choked sob broke the silence, and after a startled moment she realized it had come from her own throat. She clamped her hand over her mouth, trying to hold it back, but tears escaped and flowed scalding hot down her face. Finally, she just let them come.

The arrhythmic sobs rocked her body, hiccuping out one on top of the other. She didn’t even know exactly why, except that Uly had never been as protected as she thought he was, and she hadn’t been there for him, and she had died, she had been dead, and she could never, never again pretend that it couldn’t happen to her.

Before getting into bed, she stood over her sleeping son, looking into his face by the illumination of his night-light. She studied him so long that the soft lines and curves became those of a stranger, the way any face does when you look at it too long.

He'd known he was going to die. Her boy--her beautiful baby boy whom she'd always shielded--

How could she have possibly thought he didn't know?

She'd thought at the time, He's too young, he can't understand, and anyway, a positive attitude is the best medicine, and refused to see. She'd gone to the memorial services for his friends, but she hadn't taken him, and that had been a mistake too. She wished he could have told her. She wished she could have listened, and understood.

She took a shaky breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them, her son's face was once again familiar, but there were shadows in it she'd never seen before. She knelt down and kissed his forehead. He shifted and mumbled, "Mom?"

"I'm here."

"Kay." He relaxed into sleep again, reassured by her presence.

She smoothed his hair one more time before she rose and ducked around the blanket that cut their tent in two. In the dark of her half, she undressed by touch. She could have turned on a light, but she didn't want to wake Uly.

Naked in the dark, she paused. Be truthful with yourself, Devon. It was a night for truth.

She groped in a handy crate until she found a lumalight. Turning it onto the lowest setting and aiming it away from the blanket, she stared down at her body.

She thought, as she’d thought for the past month, I’m ugly. She’d always been slender, but now her hipbones stuck out and her ribs showed under her skin, angular and awkward as she remembered being at twelve. Her breasts lay deflated on her chest, so flat now she hardly needed a bra.

She rested her free hand on her breastbone, feeling her heart thud against her palm. She breathed, in and out.

But at least her body was here, and she was in it.

She dropped her sleeping shirt over her head, switched the lumalight off, and slid into her sleeping bag. It seemed ridiculous to even imagine that she could sleep after what had happened, but her eyelids drooped almost of their own volition. She drifted in the cloudy comfort just before full unconsciousness. At least he hadn’t ignored her today, she thought groggily. He’d yelled and scolded and told her exactly what she needed to hear, even if it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, and wasn’t that just like him? It was . . . nice . . . not that being hollered at was nice, but John being himself again, that was . . . that was . . .

Abruptly, she sat up straight, staring wide-eyed into the darkness.

She’d just remembered his face as he’d twisted away from her hand, that expression she hadn’t been able to read in the midst of her own turmoil. Now, however, it had come clear. She’d been hurt then, thinking he didn’t want to touch her. But the look in his eyes--as if he did want to touch her, very badly, but was forcing himself not to for some reason.

Why?

She lay down again, still frowning into the night. There was an explanation, of course, a very simple one. The thought had never crossed her mind in all this time, but--

Was it possible? Could John Danziger actually have feelings for her?

And if by some miracle, he did . . . what did she feel about it?

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