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I shivered. I remembered the void I was in. “Can you see your own body, but nothing else? Like you’re swimming in the blackness?”
He nodded, somewhat surprised. “It happened to you too?”
“Adrik’s voice pulled me there, out of the loop from the ball. Or that night…with my uncle. I could hear my uncle’s voice there for a while, until I finally let myself remember everything from that night.” I looked at him apprehensively.
“He told me what you did that night, Sephie.” He smiled. “I told him that I had thought your beast mode was activated when you shot that guy in the face, but it turns out your beast mode has always been activated.” He winked at me.
I gave him a small smile. “I still don’t feel any remorse over it. I think I might be a monster for it, but I feel nothing when I think about what I did.”
“You’re not a monster, princess. You saved yourself. You proved to yourself that you can get yourself out of any situation you find yourself in. Not everyone would’ve made it out of that house alive that night.” He sat up and moved closer to me. “That’s the only good thing to come out of me breaking out of the facility I was in. I proved to myself I can get out of any situation. That’s valuable information, especially for people like us who tend to get a little too close to death a little too often.”
I looked at him, laughing. “Seriously. Death is obsessed with us. Like, give it a rest, bro. I’m embarrassed for you.”
He laughed. He pulled me toward him and hugged me. “You have no idea what your laugh does for me, princess.”
I raised my eyebrow. “Please tell me it’s not like fingernails on a chalk board for you.”
He laughed again. “No, the opposite, really. I think part of the reason that it takes me days to get over a trip to the doctor is that I inevitably end up in the darkness. I like it there, Sephie. It’s quiet. It’s calm. I find myself wanting to stay there.” He paused, inhaling deeply. “I’m tired of fighting sometimes. I know if I decide to stay, there’s no coming back. Your laugh gives me a reason to come back. You radiate joy when you laugh and smile. It’s a reminder that I can keep going.”
I didn’t even try to hold back the tears that were streaming down my face at his words. I curled up next to him, pulling his good arm around my shoulders, my head on his shoulder. “Ivan, I understand. I understand the tired. I understand not wanting to come back. But I need you. If you ever can’t find a reason to come back for yourself, then know that I need you here. I will always need you here.”
He didn’t say anything, but I felt him lean down and kiss the top of my head as he held me a little tighter. We sat in silence for a few minutes. I remembered Misha’s plan to help him get some sleep without needing me to babysit him. “What about last night when you were listening to me playing at the gallery? What happened then?”
“It was basically the same as hearing your voice. As long as I could hear you playing, I stayed in the darkness. It was nice actually. But when the music stopped, the doctor came back, same as when I lose your voice.”
“So, you think if we made a longer recording or like a playlist of me playing, you could sleep for longer?”
“I don’t see why not. It worked last night until the phone died.”
“Yeah, that was my bad. I don’t know why I didn’t think about plugging the stupid phone in,” I said.
He chuckled. “You’re sleep-deprived because you’ve been trying to take care of me, princess. It was still a good idea.”
“I will happily take care of you if it means you heal faster. Your one-armed hugs suck,” I said, poking him in the ribs. “Do you know what happened to the facility? Like, is it still there?”
“I don’t know. I tried to investigate it a few years ago, but I kept running into dead ends. I think it was a top-secret level operation, so there’s not much information on it available. There were a lot of boys there still when I broke out. I sometimes wonder what happened to them. There was one nurse that I would talk to. I sometimes wonder what happened to her too.”
“Can you remember her name?”
“I don’t need to. I stole her key card to get out. I still have it,” he said.
“Have you tried looking her up?”
He shook his head no. “I thought about it, but I was too scared. She was the only one that was ever nice to me. I don’t know if I could handle knowing that something happened to her because I took advantage of her niceness and stole her card to get out.”
“That’s fair. But don’t forget that she was choosing to work there. Day after day, knowing what was happening there. She’s your Max. You’re ignoring her red flags because she was all you had at the time.”
He was quiet for a moment, then pulled me closer to him. He kissed the top of my head again. “Sometimes I hate it when you use my advice on me. I hate it even more that you’re right.”
I laughed. “It’s good advice. I can’t keep it all to myself.”
Once Misha and Andrei came back, I spent a little time playing the piano, so Misha could add to the recordings he already had. I had a new melody in my head for a new song that I thought of while staying awake for Ivan. I started to play with it and a new song started to form. I wasn’t sure if I got it from my dad, since he was the one that planted the melody of my song into my head and then let me finish it. That was how I usually wrote songs. I would just think of the melody and the more I played with it, the more the song would form around it. My dad has probably been planting melodies in my head my whole life without me knowing.
Once I was done, Misha said, “That’s not one you’ve played before, is it?”
I shook my head no. “I just thought of that one the other night. It’ll change a few more times before I figure it out.”
“You just made all of that up? Right now?” I nodded, laughing at his expression. “That’s amazing. It sounds like a finished song.”
