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Sir inhales deeply before blowing it out nice and slow. It’s a calming technique. Carter hates that he made sir need one of those. He doesn’t like upsetting sir. Mostly because upsetting sir makes his life harder and more miserable, but also because… well… it’s nice, in a way, to be sir’s good boy. Topleasehim.
"Shouldn't I be the one asking you about your brother?" sir finally asks in dry amusement.
"I know stupid stuff. You know the big stuff."
"Like?"
Carter shrugs.
"Like, I know he puts ketchup on his scrambled eggs and he's never been able to stand the color orange for some reason. You know what he does. Who he really is." Carter stares down at the bubbles that are slowly dissolving before him. "You know why I'm here."
"I suppose you have a point there. Is that what your question is? Who he really is? What he does? Why you're here?"
"They're all my question, yeah."
"I'll answer one."
Carter supposes that's fair.But what one?
"Who is he really, sir?" Carter decides to ask. "Because he's clearly not some cookie cutter soldier, right? I mean, those guys, they don't get caught up in things like…"
"Like…?"
"This," Carter whispers, his voice carrying a slight tremble. "Things likethis."
Sir gathers some bubbles in his hands and begins to drag his fingers along Carter's chest and shoulders, covering him with suds. "Your brother works for an elite unit that your government will never even admit exists. To us, until recently, he was Mathew Davis from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Grew up in the foster system. No family. No collateral. No attachments. A ghost."
"But you found out the truth…?" Carter is fishing, pushing his boundaries on the question, but he can't help it.
Sir indulges him. "He made a mistake. He visited baby brother, not covering his tracks like he must have whenever he came to see you before. It didn't take long at all after that. We traced you and found some pictures of your brother Maison who looked slightly younger than our own Mathew Davis. When we called him and told him we knew, he tried to deny it. The moment your name was mentioned, he flew off the rails. That's how we knew for sure."
Carter closes his eyes. "I was hurt."
"What?"
"The reason he came to see me. The reason he blew his cover. They found his emergency number on a slip of paper in my wallet."
"How did you get hurt?"
Carter shrugs. "It doesn't matter."
“It does to me,” sir says in a slightly terrifying voice. “This never showed in your report.”
Trying hard not to think about how sir has a ‘report’ on him, Carter says, “Some guy tried to – well, he-” Carter closes his eyes, suddenly able to feel the gritty cement of the alleyway beneath his cheek and taste vodka and blood on his tongue and hear the grunted insults from the man wrestling with him in a demand to submit.How is it possible that it’s so hard to think about when it was nothing compared to his life now? Is it harder because that happened to the Carter frombefore, instead of this version of Carter?
“He…?” sir prompts.
“I was outside of a club – a gay club – and he – this guy – he… grabbed me. Tried to… ya know.” Carter stares down at the bubbles, his eyes burning. He won’t cry. He’s tired of fucking crying. “He tried to rape me, or whatever. In an alley near the club.”
Sir’s voice is startlingly dark and calm as he asks, “Did he succeed?”
“In raping me?”
“Yes,” sir growls, his grip suddenly bruise-worthy where he holds Carter.
“No. He didn’t.” Carter runs a fingertip along the surface of the water. “I fought him. He beat the shit out of me, but he must have realized too much time had passed by the time he had me under control, or maybe he just didn’t want to risk it, or he sobered up, or I don’t know. Whatever. It doesn’t really matter. There were no signs of sexual assault at the hospital.”
“You don’t remember all of it?”
