Good Enough (Scomiche)

Ch 12. Darkness

"Tell me about yourself" I asked, my voice still not strong enough to be more than a quiet whisper. 

He looked mildly surprised as I made my request. I don't know why I asked, but I did. I was curious. 

He chuckled a bit. "I take that as a sign that you're feeling better. What do you want to know?" He looked at me with a hint of amusement as he wrote something onto a notepad I couldn't see.

"Everything. Your name? Where you're from? Why you're here?" 

He hesitated for a moment, but eventually he started talking… not instructing me or questioning me, but just talking as he began to check my vitals and unhook me from some of the various machines, tubes and lines. 

Avriel, he told me, was his name, but everyone called him Avi. It actually made me smile, as much as I could anyway. Avi. Such a strange name. I liked it.

He told me that he was from California, that he’d wanted to grow up to be a musician, but his parents and everyone else said he was gifted. They told him that his intellect shouldn’t be used for something as trivial as music. So they had naturally enrolled him in the best schools, pushed him into the field of science and he’d hated every second of it. 

He was only 24 years old and had 3 different Master’s Degrees. 

Gifted. 

Well, I guess so. Reminded me of someone else I knew. 

But no, I couldn't think about him. 

“If you hate it, why are you still here doing this?” I managed to croak out awkwardly. My throat was still raw. 

He looked at me and I swear I saw nothing but pure sadness, a darkness behind his eyes that I'd never seen in anyone else before. 

“My sister. When I found out she was sick I swore I’d find a cure. No child should have to live their life like she did, always sick and in pain, in and out of hospitals, undergoing treatment after treatment.” 

He looked away from me, remembering. I couldn’t take my eyes away from him. I felt closer to him in his sorrow. At least it was something we shared. I didn’t want to think about the irony, of what Mitch had gone through before he’d met me. 

“I dedicated every spare second to research, to experimenting. That’s how they found me. AdAstra. They told my parents they could help Esther. They said they had a cure for her cancer. We, of course, didn’t believe them, but Esther didn’t have more than a couple of months left in her. We had nothing to lose.”

He busied himself with drawing more of my blood, avoiding my gaze. He seemed to have trouble looking at my face, but my eyes were all over his. I remembered the girl in the photo he’d shown me on the day he’d began my torture. She had the same eyes.

“Your friend has something inside of him that makes him incredible."

My friend. 

I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of those words. Mitch was so much more than that.

My friend. My lover. He was all I'd ever known and all I ever wanted to. My love, my heart, my entirety. 

"He saved a life. I just need to know how. I want to know how to help people, children like Esther. I want to save people’s mother’s and fathers... grandparents, sisters & brothers … sons and daughters. I’ve lived this life, lived in my own cage and I want it to mean something. X23-“

I flinched, grunting my hatred at the label. 

He stopped and chewed on his lip. “Mitch” It was forced, almost as if he was choking on the simple word.