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“Oh, Tristan,” Mort murmured. “What have you done?”
“I don’t want to be chosen,” Tristan said. “Did I get it?”
It was impossible to tell because the area was a bloody mess. Sanguine essence soaked his hair, too, not to mention half of the bathroom.
“Yes,” Mort said, telling him what he wanted to hear, lest he continue to try to chip at his head. “You got it.”
“Good. I was just trying to clean up, but that stuff hurts like a bitch.” Tristan gestured to an open bottle of mouthwash, used as an impromptu sterilization medium. At least he was trying.
“You couldn’t have…” Mort dithered for a moment. He had to put more effort into learning how to care for Tristan’s physical body. He could not keep stumbling into these situations where Tristan decided that the hammer of self destruction was the appropriate tool for any given problem. “Just, why…”
“I didn’t want it,” Tristan said. “And you didn’t like it on me either. I’ve never seen you look as angry as you did when you saw that mark. It was like it turned me into a piece of trash. So I decided to dig it out.”
Mort looked at the blood smeared over the bathroom counter and Tristan’s hands. The room looked like a crime scene. It was a crime scene. A crime against self-preservation.
“You did this for me?”
“Yeah,” Tristan said, his lips twisting in a wry smile that telegraphed he knew very well how much he’d fucked up, but hoped he wouldn’t get in too much trouble. “Do you like it? Maybe now I can touch you without the fiery electric shocks.”
Mort took Tristan’s bloodied face in his hands and looked deep into Tristan’s eyes. He could feel the slight sanguine stickiness beneath his fingertips.
“I want you to understand this,” he said. “I want you to write the words I am about to say on your soul. I love you how you are. I do not need you to change anything. Not a single thing. You will never need to carve yourself up for me. Not in any way.”
“You didn’t like the mark.”
“No. I didn’t. But I did not want you to butcher yourself. I was unhappy someone had seen fit to lay claim to you while leaving you to suffer to such an extent you considered ending yourself. A mark claims a mortal, but it also implies some responsibilities on the part of the claimer.”
“Why didn’t you say that?”
“I was trying to recognize the mark, work out where to place blame, and who I needed to go to in order to reclaim you. I am sorry I did not explain myself. I am not used to explaining myself.”
“Yeah. I’m not used to… any of this shit. I just want to be normal.”
“You’re still bleeding,” Mort said. “We should bandage you before we speak further.”
The bandaging was not good. The place was awkward to get anything to stay on, and Mort was not an experienced caretaker. He tried his best to fasten bandaids and clean cloth over the wound, having cleaned it with soap and water.
“We may need some help here,” he said when the blood-wet bandage had fallen off for a third time.
“I don’t want to go back to the hospital. I’ll just stick a rag on it and hold it there.”
“That does not sound like a good idea.” Mort prodded Tristan up from the side of the old avocado-toned bath where he had been sitting. “Come on. We need help.”
“The wait in the emergency room for something like this is going to be hours, Mort. I’m not going to wait that long. Just leave me be. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. I have seen smaller cuts than that become infected and end lives millions of times.”
“Oh well,” Tristan shrugged.
Mort snarled.
Tristan’s eyes flew open in fear as Mort’s true, dark, dominant nature came roaring forward in a sudden surge that overpowered even this special, stubborn mortal. Mort loomed over Tris, barely containing his anger, and as he spoke it was in the voice of the wind running through the trees beside the river Lethe.
“When this is cleaned and bandaged, you and I will have a very long, very painful conversation about your ongoing inability to value your own life.”
Tristan had frozen before him, a little rabbit before a predator larger than it could comprehend. This wasn’t the same kind of natural respect other mortals showed Mort. It was a pure fear response.
“Breathe,” Mort reminded him.
Tristan let out the breath he had been holding but failed to inhale again.
“Keep breathing,” Mort prompted, his voice softening. This boy was so maddening, so perfect, so fragile, and so very his.
“Stay there. Do not move. I am going to get…”
“Don’t say Tom.”
“I am going to get Tom.”
“It’s two in the morning. And we just woke him up practically yesterday.”
