Page 146 of Violent Possession

“Myrddin…” he begins, his voice low.

There’s a pause, a fraction of a second in which everything could dissolve, and maybe it would be better if it did.

“No,” I cut in. “You… you thought you had to do that, and I… I’m not even angry. I’m just so fucking sad that you thought you had to do it alone.” The scene of him underwater repeats like a fucking movie. “I would have helped you. I would have stolen. I would have killed for you—Ididkill for you. And I would have done anything so you wouldn’t have to…” My voice fails. I can’t finish the sentence.

In Seraphim, the shame quickly gives way to a deeper abyss—a pain he never managed to hide well, only camouflage behind pretty words. “You were the only good thing I had,” he whispers. “And that wasmyburden. Not yours.”

He touches my back. His hand slides slowly, and I feel him get closer. The gesture is strange, hesitant, and maybe that’s why it has such an effect.

He rests his forehead on my shoulder, and the smell of his hair—tobacco, floral perfume, shampoo—transports me straight back to my teens, to nights of running away and coming back, to the taste of blood and cheap booze in my mouth and the absolute silence after the crime.

It calms something inside me. I don’t dare look at him anymore.

“I thought,” I whisper, “for a long time… that you hated me.”

He says nothing for a while.

“I never could,” he whispers.

I feel a lump in my throat, a tightness that goes down to my stomach. “Even… even after everything, Sera… even without a fucking arm, if you had stayed…” I close my eyes. I try to purge all the fantasies I spent a decade weaving: what would have happened if things weren’t as they are. “…fuck. I would have… I would have kept going,” I whisper. My voice breaks on its own. “I still… I still would have followed youanywhere.”

The weight of Seraphim’s hand on my back is strange, unnatural—because the last time he touched me like this, I was half my age and twice as arrogant, and neither of us knew what to do with our own anger. Now, he holds me as if I’m about to fall apart. Maybe I am.

And yet, he doesn’t tremble. The difference between us was always this: even when he’s fucked up, Seraphim never loses his composure. Not when he speaks, not when he lies, not when he kills, not now.

“You turned me in. To the police.”

And the worst part—the cruelest—is that he doesn’t pull away when he says it. He doesn’t let me go, nor does he push me away.

With every reunion, Seraphim tears away a layer of flesh I thought I had already lost. I stay silent, because there’s no right answer to that.

But he waits.

“I…” I whisper. “You weren’t listening to me,” I try. The beginning of the justification is pathetic, yet I don’t know any other way. “It was the only way to…”

He interrupts me with a subtle gesture, his hand tightening on my back. “I know,” he says, and that fucks with my head. Because the old Seraphim would have thrown this in my face until I bled. He would have staged a play, plotted revenge, made every word a rope around my neck.

ThisSeraphim just looks at me with a silent compassion so absurd that I start to hate him even more for it.

“You told me that, that night,” he says. “I’ve had… a lot of time to think since then.”

I remember his face, stripped of all elegance, just raw anger and pure sadness, and how I tried to explain what I didn’t understand myself.

He offers me the cigarette again. I take it. I need to occupy my mouth with something other than an apology.

“I didn’t want to take the plea deal. It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” I continue, hoping some of these words make sense. “But…”

“It’s okay, Myr,” he whispers. “I know.”

There is silence.

“The rest of the boys wanted you dead,” he continues. “They thought you had sold me out to get rid of your sentence. I did too, for a while. And yet… I couldn’t stand the thought of burying you.”

I let out a short, humorless laugh. It’s the only possible reaction to the absurdity. It’s so fucked up. It’s so absurdly, poetically fucked up.

“Then we’re both idiots,” I say.

I turn my face, finally. Seraphim does too. He gives me a genuine, sad, but true smile, made of nostalgia and defeat, and of everything we could never have. “We always were.”