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Chapter 32

It was late by the time Luke got back. The streetlamps didn't provide much light anymore since they hadn't been adjusted in nearly a month.

On a practical level, it was good that it was so dark, because he was less likely to be spotted, but he'd never particularly liked dark, open spaces. He always felt as if something was watching him. But he hadn't particularly liked the idea of Adam going back alone. If it had been anyone else, he probably wouldn't have taken the risk.

His footsteps seemed just a little too loud in comparison to the silent street. The silence made his ears ring, and his head whirled with it, but wasn't entirely unfamiliar to him.

Too much or too little of anything had a tendency to make him nauseous - particularly sound and light - but he'd had a lot of practice in mimimalising the visible signs of discomfort. He'd learnt to keep a reasonable distance, a neutral, professional facial expression, regardless of how much he internally wanted to scream. It had transpired that the general consensus from his peers was that this was robotic and disconcerting, but it wasn't as if he'd been particularly popular before it.

It had been worse when he was younger. Back then he hadn't known how to cope, so he'd screamed and cried and gone to great lengths to avoid situations where he'd be bombarded with those bad sensations. At the age of eight he'd been quietly taken out of classes and told in several more eloquent words that if he didn't learn to blend in with the others quickly then he'd be quietly relocated into a younger class and given a record of disruptive behavior. Blending with the others had never really taken, so eventually he'd stopped trying. It had been easier to just fall silent and channel his frustration into things he'd thought unequivocally deserved to be met with irritation.

Well, maybe not easier. Safer.

Until fairly recently, he hadn't wanted to be around anybody long enough for them to see beyond it, but Adam made it harder to maintain. Any time he thought about him, it seemed to leave him with a tight throat and a feeling in his chest that he couldn't shake. In some ways it was good. In many other ways it was absolutely terrifying. He could now definitively say that whatever he was feeling definitely wasn't fear. But things were already complicated, and he didn't want to make things worse by acting like a clingy teenager.

He thought he'd managed to skip that stage entirely, but it just felt like he'd delayed the inevitable.

Emotions usually ran high under high-stakes situations, and he couldn't imagine anyone feeling the same way, so it was safer to just drop it. He also thought back to what Quinn had said early on - the things she'd accused him of thinking. It had become increasingly obvious that she wasn't entirely herself back then, but still. The last thing he wanted was to prove her right, especially now that the four of them were starting to find a balance that worked. Not when even he wasn't sure what he was feeling.

He'd never had a friend before. Maybe that was all it was. It wasn't like he'd be able to tell the difference either way. And neither would ever amount to anything useful, so he was wasting his energy on it. He wasn’t the sort of person who anybody cared about. He was the sort of person people respected. He'd figured out how to be that kind of person after years of trial and error.

Shaking his head at nothing in particular, he resolved to wait until things calmed down before acting upon anything. Things like that were better left to other people. People who could distinguish love from a persistent stomach ache.

Head pounding, he had to stop and lean back against a wall for a few seconds. Then, remembering the danger, he took a sharp breath and held it for five paces, then exhaled for another five. Things had been comparatively better recently, since his mind had been on other things. It had been a while since anything got on top of him like this. The lack of sound only made it worse. And it was cold. Icy, making him shakier and less co-ordinated than he'd have liked. He could feel a headache settling into his temples already. Nobody was left to make any noise. It was past curfew and this time it was a given that nobody would break it.