WHO: Kaden, Hecate, Cin, Qebhet WHEN: Friday 25th WHERE: The Enodia and the Hole WHAT: Against all advice and reason, Kaden goes home WARNINGS: TBA, bit of domestic violence
According to Hecate the full moon up there was called a Strawberry Moon, and although it was a fraction past full tonight, the strawberries in the pot on the roof were begging to be picked. Kaden had a strained relationship with the strawberries. He liked them so much, he’d never tasted strawberries as sweet and juicy as these ones, never picked them straight off a bush, all sun warmed and perfect. He wanted to eat every one of them as soon as they’d lost their last hint of green, but the thought of stripping the plant bare gave him anxiety. What if someone else wanted one of them. What if someone – Marcie, Hecate, or anyone else – said to him that he’d taken too much.
Said it out loud, he meant. Kaden already knew he was taking too much. This room was too much. Every time he ate from a restaurant he never would have been able to afford in his real life, it was too much. The drain he’d been on Hecate's magic, it was too much.
He couldn’t take the strawberries on top of everything else he’d already taken.
But under the full moon tonight, Hecate sat down on the bench beside him and opened her hand to offer him a taste of the fruit, and he took one, and tried not to feel awful about biting into it. “Marcie told me she’d like you to make her journey home with her,” Hecate said, taking a strawberry for herself as well. “How are you feeling about that?”
Kaden shrugged a shoulder. He should tell Marcie he was okay if they went, but he hadn’t bought it up yet. The words kept strangling him. Most words did. “You could use the room for someone else if I went,” he muttered eventually.
“Yes,” Hecate nodded. “But that doesn’t mean you’ll lose a place to come back to. I promised to keep you safe, that promise doesn’t end just because you leave the city. You and Marcie will always have a safe space here.”
Kaden had asked why before. Why him. Why this promise. Why’d she care. What made him so special. None of the answers she’d given had ever done anything to lift his guilt, and he wasn’t going to ask it again now, because nothing had changed, nothing she said would help.
Hecate watched this inner turmoil, one that she’d watch wax and wane as time went on. Some days the pain sat a little lighter on him, some days it was clear how deeply the pain had carved into him. “I have something to pass on to you,” she said, reaching into the wide pocket of her light linen dress, and pulled out a card. Kaden felt another rush of discomfort as he took it, turning it in the light of the moon and the fairy lights to read it. A New York drivers license, an unfamiliar name printed on it, under a picture of a boy who's face he thought he knew.
Uncomfortable memories threatening to drag him down. That night, terror and excitement and anticipation sitting beside Tragos in the car, looking at the ID he'd got for him, for Lil T, feeling his blood running fast with adrenaline at the thought of what they were about to do.
Now it was a different ID, and he was sitting with Hecate, looking down at the face - the hair was different, and the picture was a few years younger than the face he'd seen in the hall, night after night. "This is Hazel," he said blankly.
"It was," Hecate had spent a lot of time with Hazel, working out her history, seeing if this would work - and making sure she was fully on board with being outed to Kaden. "She doesn't need it any more, and with a little fiddling we can make the photo work.”
Kaden was too stunned to say anything and Hecate let him sit with it till he was ready. She hadn’t wanted to ask Hermes to create a new identity from scratch for a teenage boy, especially after seeing him being friendly with Apollo over drinks at Peitho’s apartment the other night. But creating a brand new ID for a young woman? Hecate asked that kind of thing of Hermes all the time.
"What about her though?” Kaden asked eventually.
"Hazel has been given a new ID, with her chosen name, and no connection to this person at all,” Hecate said. “And listen, you don't need to worry, if you do choose to assume this name for a while, that people from her past will look for you. Her connections with her old life are thin as parchment. No one is looking for her, no one cares.”
“Right,” said Kaden. Well wasn’t that both horrible and lucky for Hazel, then.
“You don’t need to keep it for long,” Hecate continued. “In time, we can gather the documents of the person you’d like to be. But for now, if you choose to go with Marcie, this will be enough to see you onto the plane.”
Kaden’s stomach hurt. This was so much worse than strawberries. This was taking too much. Everything he did was taking too much. “Thanks,” he said, his voice no more than a croak. God, what the hell was he supposed to do? The debt he was in kept growing. To Hecate, to Marcie, now to Hazel. When would it end? His mom had taught him the only person he could really rely on was himself, and these days, all of Kaden’s safety, all of his life, had been handed over to other people.
He couldn’t sleep after Hecate left. He stepped out into the halls later, but couldn’t face heading to the common room because he didn’t know what to say to Hazel. Thanks for your dead name? What the shit?
Kaden took the emergency stairwell down. And down. And down. And then pulled his hood up over his head and walked out of the Enodia entirely.
Fuck fuck fuck. Every footstep down the street pounded the word into his head. Fuck fuck fuck what the fuck was he doing? The night air was hot and close, muggy, smelly. The sound from the traffic going past was louder than he’d heard in weeks. A car blasted music that shook his bones. An alarm was going off around the corner. The beep beep beep of a traffic crossing hurried him across the road and when he got to the other side Kaden started running.
It’d serve him right if a War Dog shot him in the back right now. Serve him right if Apollo stepped out from round the next corner, all smooth and smug and smiling. Serve him right if he started hearing dogs, chasing him down. This was so so stupid and he deserved to die for it, Kaden knew this. Kaden half wanted it. He wanted something he deserved, not more and more and more things he didn’t.
Each running footstep cracked him a bit more and he dragged his sleeve across his face, smearing away tears, snot. He outran his breath, and stopped outside a Denny’s, bent double and panting hard. He used to be able to run longer than this. Turned out sporadic runs up and down hotel stairs weren’t really enough to keep up his fitness.
Kaden looked around when he straightened up, finding a dry bit of his sleeve to dig into his eyes, dry them out properly. Atlantic Avenue, the street sign said.
Alright, Kaden thought. Alright, he knew where he was going. He rummaged a few coins out of his pocket as he kept walking. The coins were like charms, he’d picked them up one at a time from around the hotel. Little bits of money people had lost, down the backs of chairs and that. He couldn’t help himself.
It was enough to get a metro card from the vending machine, and disappear down into the subway. Enough to get him onto the train going east. Get off at Grant Ave and start treading south over familiar territory.
It was enough to get him home.
God, this was so stupid. He deserved to die for this. It was so stupid. But he couldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop crying either, the first couple of blocks, but as the neighbourhood turned into the Hole proper, the tears stopped. They had to. Old survival instinct. Kaden scrubbed his face again till it was sore and dry and kept walking.
He missed this place. The cars on the side of the road, the fences twisted with weeds, the tangle of powerlines humming overhead, the trees, the smell. The relative quiet of the street directly around him, though he could hear music in the distance, and shouting, and car engines roaring in a drag race a way off. That would’ve been his brothers, once. Sometimes just him and Tragos, driving as fast as Tragos could.
As he walked closer and closer to home, the endless chant of this is so stupid, you’re gonna die and deserve it, this is so stupid, you’re so stupid didn’t let up, but the beating of it started to numb him out. Yeah okay, he was stupid and deserved to die.
He didn't even freak when the boy he'd seen up on the roof of the Enodia caught his eye, walking the same direction as he was, on the other side of the road. Kaden stared at him for a long blank moment, knowing he was a ghost, that a ghost was following him, wondering if this was some extra sign he was going to die and not finding one single fuck to give about it.
He flipped the ghost off, and turned away, yanking the cords of his hoodie tighter to cut out his peripheral vision. He didn't care. He didn't care about anything.
His old house was dark and empty. No cars sat in front of it, and a lot of the windows had been broken. A ragged bit of police tape was still knotted tight to the fence, about a foot of it handing limp in the hot, humid air. Kaden poked it, then tugged at it, stretching it further out of shape. The knot had gone grimy, bits of black in the folds.
What if he just lay down on the pavement here and waited for the daylight to find him. Maybe Apollo, god of the sun, would see everything the light touched. Hecate wasn’t as powerful in the day, there might not be anything she could do to stop it. What would Apollo say, about ripping his throat open? Kaden reached for his throat, running his fingers over the scars of the prophecy come true. Maybe Apollo would try ripping it open again and maybe Kaden would deserve that by being so dumb.
Kaden didn’t lie down, but he didn’t move away either. He made the fence creak as he leaned his weight on it, made it creak again as he leaned backward.
Backward and forward, over and over, creak creak creak, as he stared with empty eyes at his empty old house.