WHO: Kaden and Aphrodite, maybe Marcie and Tragos later WHEN: Thursday WHERE: Aphrodite's place WHAT: A little glimmer of love in a PSTD sandwich WARNINGS: Likely not much. Some sad Kaden times.
The bang out in the school hallway was a baseball bat against a locker, but Kaden wasn’t the only student who instantly hit the deck. For a long moment all he could look at were his hands spread out on the ground in front of him, and the leg of his desk, that’s all he could do. Survival instincts said freeze and he’d for sure frozen.
The bang out in the school hallway was a baseball bat against a locker and one by one, and then in groups, everyone figured that out. One by one, and then in groups, kids peeled themselves off the floor. Kaden wasn’t the first, but he wasn’t the last either. He sat back down in his seat feeling like he’d been transplanted into a whole nother body. One with heavy limbs that could barely move, one with tunnel vision, one that couldn’t breathe properly, one that remembered.
Every muscle in his body held the memory of the gun going off in Tragos’ hand. Every muscle in his body heard that sound and every muscle saw Hecate fall. The worst bit was his own right hand, the one that curled around the gun Barak had passed him. Kaden could still feel it. He was afraid to close his eyes in case a gun materialised there, summoned by his own power of will.
He wanted to ask someone how can my actual muscles remember a sound?
It had been weeks. Why did his body feel exactly the same as it did in that car?
Nothing sunk in for the rest of class.
But nothing snuck out of him either. No gun appeared in his hand, no tears in his eyes, no ripping shout of fear when someone’s chair scraped the floor behind him.
At lunchtime, a bunch of his classmates found out who was wielding the bat and made plans to rip him a new one after school. “Y’coming?” Kami asked, all full of righteous fury, and Kaden seriously had to consider it.
On the one hand, he didn’t want to miss the rant she was planning about someone playing on the fears drilled into them since elementary school, since kindergarten. It wasn’t funny, and the thing was, Kami was so well spoken and respected enough that the dickhead might even listen to her. Especially backed up by a dozen of her friends. Kaden knew her should go; with his presence he’d be bringing the weight of the reputation of his brothers, and bat-man would be more likely to back down and mutter an apology if Kaden lent that weight to Kami’s cause.
Or maybe there’d be a fight. Kami wasn’t above launching herself on her victims. It was one of the things people respected about her.
But when the school day ended, he didn’t make excuses and he didn’t explain a thing. Kaden just slipped out of class as soon as they were dismissed and didn’t go down the corridors he knew his friends would be taking. He didn’t message Kami and apologise or wish her luck. He just left school and pretended he’d never been there in the first place.
All he wanted was to see Marcie again.
He had not told anyone that he knew someone who was dying, and the longer he left it the more the silence hardened up, like a big old cancerous lump. He pushed his earphones into both ears, though one of them had been broken for weeks, and pulled up his hood, hurrying out of school before anyone could stop him and ask.
Marcie had told him where she was staying, and as he trekked his way across the city he tried to think of something to bring her. He wanted to make some sort of little offering to her, like she was a goddess, even though she said she wasn't, even though the cancer proved she wasn't. He wanted something elegant and classy, because that's what she was, and he'd googled the place she was staying and one of the other apartments lower down the building was for rent and there were photos that proved this place was even more elegant and classy than she was (after all, she was dating his brother, which was, in Kaden's opinion, not an elegant or classy thing to do.)
She hadn't messaged him back for a couple of hours and it stressed him out. He hoped she was just sleeping, but the hope was a bucket of water against a bushfire.
What would he do if he walked into her room and she was dead?
Kaden had no answers, but he wasn't going to turn tail and run, he was no coward. Kaden tried his best to neaten up his hair, and pulled his hood down because fancy places like this didn't like it, and pressed the little buzzer out on the street to announce his arrival.