Aliens on Aventine Hill

A Good Kid [Part 8]

CW: suicidal thoughts

"One of them?" his father laughed uncomfortably. "Remy, what're you talking about? It's your brother who's—"

"No," Gray cut him off, shoving his father away from him and rubbing his temples, "No, not... One of them. You're working with the Men in Black. First the police officer, and now you..."

"Police officer...?" the father held his son's gaze with an expression of dawning horror. Again, he extended his arms towards his son, "Now, Remy, I don't know what..."

Gray stumbled away, catching himself on the edge of the counter, "You do know they tried to kill us, don't you? These people you're working for..."

"I do know that, Remy."

He bristled, teeth bared, and then his father said:

"And I know you killed them."

Gray froze.

"It's OK," his father reassured him, seizing on his son's paralysis to loop an arm around his shoulders. "Nothing bad's going to come of it. After all, there's not really anything they can say, now is there? It was self-defense, and they were on your property, and you had no way of knowing that it was only Roman they were after..."

Gray stared at his father, speechless.

"...and well, it was their intent to kill you that night."

His ears were ringing, but his father continued on, "Oh, Remy, it was just a horrible misunderstanding."

"Misunderstanding?"

"They knew the only way they would be able to get to your... 'brother,'" he flashed his teeth with disdain, "would be to get rid of you, through whatever means necessary. And in their observations, it seemed there was only one of doing things."

"Observations?"

"But they were wrong, Remy, weren't they?" his father insisted, squeezing his shoulder. "I told them they were wrong. There's no need for violence, I said: You're a smart kid, a reasonable kid. You want this suffering to stop just as much as I—just as much as we—do."

"Suffering."

His father frowned at him, "Suffering, Remy, and it can stop, if you only..."

"No," Gray extricated himself from his father's embrace, bracing himself against the wall, "Why... why would you...? They tried to..."

"Is it any different from what they've done?" his father gestured vaguely upwards. "How many times have you nearly died on their operating table?! How many times have they come into your home and cut you up into little pieces, haphazardly pieced back together, not quite the same?! God, Remy, if you let them take much more of you, you'll be one of them too!"

Gray scrunched his eyes shut, fury bursting through the ice in his chest, "What about Arnold?!"

"Who?"

"Arnold Shephard?!" the perplexed expression on his father's face persisted, and Gray shook his head at him, nose wrinkled with disgust, "So they didn't tell you that part of it, then? How they poisoned him for months, how I had to sit there and watch the man who by all rights should've been my father sicken and weaken day by day, how I... how I had to...?!"

His father approached him again, "Easy. Easy there."

"Don't you get it?!" Gray recoiled. "They killed him so that I would need you!"

His father stood silently for a moment, pale as bone.

"But I don't."

He gathered his hands into fists, even as felt the water rising in his lungs, "I don't need you. I don't need Officer White. I don't need your help or your money or... or...or your vague promises of some sunny future where I sit around waiting for the day I'm off the payroll and the gun's at the back of my head!"