This Trophy Isn't Real Love

Chapter 6

Sleep comes in fits and bursts, restless and interrupted.

When he finally wakes all the way up in the morning, ten seconds pass where he doesn't remember. Ten seconds of calm quiet stretch out through the still air of Mac's room, disturbed only by the vague sense there's something he's forgetting. It's a common enough feeling that it doesn't ruin the feeling, though, of stillness. Peace. Ten seconds of peace.

Ten seconds is all he gets, though, and the memory crashes abruptly into his awareness, the violent moment from the night before replaying itself inescapably. It's such a clear recollection it may as well actually be happening again. The crack of James' palm connecting with the side of his face rings in his ears, and Mac flinches sideways into his pillow, breathing hard and scrunching his eyes shut.

Several minutes of battling with himself, and Mac drags his exhausted body out of bed. He walks to the bathroom and stands at the sink, hands braced on white ceramic, trying to talk himself into looking up. There's no way around it. He has to see how bad it looks, what the damage is. Before he can figure out what to do next, what the hell he's going to say to Bozer, to Riley, to Jack about what's wrong with his face, he has to know what's actually wrong with his face.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, reminding himself that he's stared down things a hell of a lot scarier than this, Mac looks up into the mirror and sees-

Nothing. There's nothing. Where James had struck him there's no bruising, no purpling marks of broken capillaries starbursting up his cheek. When he leans closer, looks intently at the left side of his face, there's some swelling, barely noticeable, and a bit of redness, tucked into the corner of his mouth, but that's it. The cut from his teeth isn't visible. It would be impossible to tell if you didn't already know, just by looking at him, that someone had very recently hit him.

Now that he's looked, Mac can't look away. He stares at his own face, a slightly delirious thought crossing his mind that maybe it hadn't happened at all. Maybe he'd dreamed the whole thing. His hand shakes a little when he raises it, pressing his fingers into his cheek and feeling his heart skip a beat when a pulsing pain erupts under the pressure. So no, then. It wasn't some kind of terrible dream. It had happened.

It's a thought that shadows him all morning, following behind him as he leaves his room, walks around the empty house. Bozer is already gone to work, and Mac himself isn't needed at the Foundation that day, left to bounce around the house left to his own devices. It happened. It was real. It happened.

Mac exists in a sort of haze, walking aimlessly around the house, starting tasks and leaving them half finished. He can't seem to concentrate on anything. Following rote steps he's walked a hundred times, Mac makes and eats a breakfast he can barely taste, spends maybe thirty minutes working on his bike, loads a handful of dishes into the dishwasher. All the while, in the background, the knowledge that he's running from something he doesn't want to acknowledge, hiding from the fact that it happened, it was real, it happened.

In the middle of rewiring a video-game console whose power port had been intermittently not working, the thought dawns on him. He should tell Jack. He should call Jack right now and tell him what happened, about the argument, all the arguments that had led up to it, the way this one had ended. Mac had agreed to tell him, if he gets to be in danger. But…

But Jack had been talking about the mission, not about the increasingly volatile relationship between Mac and James. Besides, what danger? Yes, there had been violence, his father had gotten tired of being ignored and hit him pretty hard, and it had hurt damn bad at the time, but there isn't even a bruise left behind. There is no evidence one could find without close inspection, knowing what they were looking for. Just a little cut on the inside of his lip that bled for fifteen minutes and only hurts when he disturbs it. That's not danger.