Page 68 of Gunpowder

Blair relaxed his grip and felt Wren’s arms fall limply to the bed. He ran his fingers through Wren’s hair, pulling loose the damp strands that clung to his nape. “It’s okay, it was just a dream.”

“He was here.”

Blair had heard that tone of voice before, one that seemed to be reserved for a single subject. “Your dad?”

“I’m sorry I woke you,” Wren said. He didn’t acknowledge the question. He didn’t have to for Blair to know.

“It’s okay,” Blair said, rubbing Wren’s shoulder until the tension there started to loosen.

Wren sighed. “Now you know why I don’t bother trying to sleep.”

“This happens a lot?”

“The night the bar reopened was the first time I’ve been that drunk. And that was the first time in… years, probably, that I don’t remember the dreams waking me up.” He turned onto his back and Blair could feel his eyes on him. “So, yeah. A lot.”

Blair reached for the shadowed contours of Wren’s face, found his cheek cold and tacky with cooling sweat. He could feel the faceless image of Wren’s father warping in his mind, from the normal shitty dad he had pictured from the way Wren talked about him, to something worse. Blair held his tongue for a few minutes until he finally had to ask.

“Wren, what did he do to you?”

Wren’s jaw tightened under his hand.

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Blair added. Maybe it was selfish to let his curiosity get the best of him while Wren was still shaken from a nightmare, but dammit he couldn’t help if he didn’t know.

The silence extended until he was sure that Wren wasn’t going to answer him, but then Wren’s voice split the empty darkness. “He’s always been paranoid. Enough that he moved us across the country. All he’d ever say was that they were coming. Crazy fucker wouldn’t even tell me who they were.”

“Did anyone ever… well, come?” Blair asked.

Wren snorted. “Of course not. But that didn’t stop him from drilling it into my head every day that they would, and I needed to be ready. No distractions. No attachments.”

“No emotions,” Blair finished, nausea turning the words acrid in his mouth.

“God no, anything but those,” Wren said with a joyless laugh.

“What was he so obsessed with teaching you how to do, anyway?”

The silence returned and it was even louder than before. If Blair’s arm wasn’t around him, he wouldn’t have felt the tiny increment by which Wren stiffened. Pieces were falling together in Blair’s mind. There were still some missing, and some pretty fucking big ones at that, but Wren’s belief that he didn’t have emotions was starting to make sense. He really seemed to believe that his father had trained them out of him. Blair’s nausea churned into a simmering anger.

Then Wren whispered his answer to Blair’s question. “Survive.”

Until that moment, Wren had recounted his upbringing in little more than a monotone, but there was a different kind of emptiness in that single word. It sounded as though it had been wrenched from the pit of desolation his father had opened inside him and then choked out with his last breath. It raised more questions than it answered, but Blair didn’t ask any of them.

He kept his arms around Wren and his fingers moving through Wren’s hair until the breaths against Blair’s neck evened with sleep, and only then did he let his attention shift to the new confusion pressing at the front of his mind.

Who was Wren’s father, and what must his teachings have consisted of for Wren to still have nightmares about him?

Another question nagged at the edge of Blair’s consciousness, no matter how many times he tried to ignore it with the insistence that it didn’t matter, but the closer he came to falling asleep the louder it resonated.

Who was Wren?

Wren slept soundly the rest of the night, or seemed to. He was laying in the same place when Blair woke up. Blair sighed, disturbing a few long, black hairs just under his nose. It would have felt like the beginning of a good day. Wren had opened up to him and he counted that as a good sign for them. I wonder if it’s because he wanted to or because he feels the same way about today that I do, and thought it might be his last chance to share his burdens with someone. He wanted Wren to trust in the promise he made to keep him safe, but Blair could hardly blame him for being nervous when he himself couldn’t stop imagining countless ways their mission could go wrong. He traced his fingers down the ridges of Wren’s spine. Tiny bumps rose in their wake, but Wren didn’t stir.

He carefully unwrapped Wren from himself and went to the bathroom. Once his bladder was relieved, he went into the kitchen. There was as little food in the fridge as last time, and opening the freezer didn’t reassure him since he didn’t consider a couple of microwavable dinners to be food. He let the double doors fall shut with a grunt. It was a goddamn miracle Wren hadn’t shriveled up and been blown away by the wind. Honestly, what did his body function on, if not nutrients? Spite?

The cafe he brought Wren coffee from would probably have breakfast. Plus, he felt like waking Wren up with food and coffee was a safer option than waking him up with just food.

Blair grabbed enough of his clothes from where they lay scattered around the couch that he wouldn’t be arrested for going out in public, and left the apartment. Manhattan loomed high on either side as he jogged across to the cafe.

No one paid him any mind as he stood in line, which was weird and nice all at the same time. People tended to give him a wide berth when his insignia was visible, or a fist bump as they passed by. He was a whole bridge and a river away from Flushing. Here, he was just a guy with a tattoo. No one knew his shirt fit loose to conceal the pistol at the small of his back, or that he leaned his weight on one leg because he’d been shot in the other one. He was nobody and he kind of liked it.

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