Private Finished Your secrets keep you safe, your lies keep you alive

Lochlann was late for class.

He thought about not even going but he needed to show up for the bare minimum if he wanted to pass this semester, which he did, so he made himself stumble out of bed to brush his teeth, grab his bag, and walk through the halls relatively undisturbed.

He looked like he always did, which was to say the words beautiful and disaster might both be used to describe him. His hair was mussed and curled around his neck and face; it was getting long and he should have it cut again. Though there were deep bags beneath them, his green eyes were only slightly glazed from the whiskey he drank on the way to school. The faint aroma of whisky, cigarettes, and sandalwood clung to him like incense in a church. The effect of being near him might be like seeing a thunderstorm from the distance: you'd like to watch it but you wouldn't want to be caught in the rain.

Lochlann just rounded the corner when his eyes locked sight with the person standing across from him.

The words it's you didn't tumble from his lips. Those words were reserved for the woman who had carved her name into his body.

It was him.

Lochlann hadn't really seen him since that time in the darkroom. Goosebumps danced up his arms. He thought the other boy might have dropped, but then again, Lochlann hadn't really been arriving or paying attention in class even when he was there.

Instead, he said, "You're late."





@birdie

Lochlann was never good with the concept of time. Late was a concept he could get.

Sabriel was late. So was he.

Loosely related to the concept of time was the concept of numbers. Recently, Lochlann had been horrified to discover that he didn't know what his own bodycount was up to. He didn't understand why 106 was not a good number on a thermometer.

He didn't know why four things came though his mind:


The first was his accidental confession to the other boy.

The second was the feeling of his own lungs feeling with water.

The third was a casual remark, overheard in the library, just two unrelated words: Sabriel and Nightmare. Something easy to dismiss. Lochlann wouldn't have even connected Sabe and Sabriel under normal circumstances, but it had been one of the girls from their photography class, the one with the long legs who wore the jeans that clung just a little bit too tightly when she bent over. (Lochlann spent a little bit too long on that memory.)

The fourth thing that came to mind spurred Lochlann to move forward, closing the distance between them until he had pressed the boy against the corner next to the art room. Faintly, he could hear their professor talking about apertures.

Lochlann's fingers curled in Sabe's shirt and lifted him up towards his face.

His eyes were wide and dark.

His heart was pounding. If he got any closer, the other boy probably would be able to feel it.

"We need to talk," Lochlann's voice was low, his breath tinted with whiskey. His voice nearly dropped into a growl when he said, "Something interesting happened to me very recently. Can you guess what that might be, Sabe?"

Sabe couldn't look him in the face.

Lochlann could not tell if this was working in Sabe's favor or against it. On one hand, eye contact was something humans valued, and Lochlann was pretty good at pretending to be human. It might have irked him that Sabe wasn't willing to look him in the eye, to meet him man to man, as his father would have deemed it.

On the other hand, it wasn't always wise to look a predator in the eye.

"I was in the infirmary," Lochlann said. He didn't feel the need to even gloss over the reason why. His episodic passing out was distant to this situation, part of his treatment towards a cure, not a symptom of anything else.

"While I was there, one of the residents made a remark that was a little bit too casual for me. She said, 'Lochlann, has someone been in your dreams lately?'"

It wasn't Emily.

Lochlann knew it wasn't Emily because he'd been avoiding her. Just the thought of it put a sharp pang in his gut. He pushed passed it.

"She asked me, 'Lochlann, have you had any nightmares that you can't explain lately?' and I thought, 'huh, that is very interesting, because I have had some nightmares I can't explain.' "

Lochlann pushed even further forward, his fingers tightening their grip on Sabe's shirt. He could smell the other boy's shampoo this close. Lochlann licked his lips. He narrowed his eyes.

He asked, "But I think you can, Sabe. Care to explain what that might mean?"

Lochlann's entire body was still.

It was like watching a wave reach a peak right before it crashed down. Whatever was in Lochlann's chest had been rising and rising and rising and now was just the split second before the crescendo.

Everyone did have nightmares they couldn't explain, but that wasn't the problem. Lochlann could explain all of his but he couldn't control them.

Lochlann's words came out of Sabe's mouth.

Sabe spoke in English but Lochlann's words had been in Welsh.

I was hungry, he said. I was so hungry.

It had been so easy to lure the boy onto the ice, further out and out until it became thin and he slipped under. The water was too cold for a proper search, but Lochlann's family was furious, because the town would search the lake in the spring. They had to leave again, and it was Lochlann's fault, just like it was always his fault, because that gnawing, desperate hunger that clawed at him was something that he couldn't ignore.

Lochlann's fingers tightened around Sabe's shirt and he lifted him higher, his other hand swinging down fast as though he was going to place a well-aimed shot right to the kidneys.

Instead, Lochlann's hand came up around the boy's side and he hoisted Sabe over his shoulder, his hands clamping tight on the back of his knees. Lochlann moved fast past their classroom, praying they had not been spotted. He brought his knee up to the door handle, pressed, and slipped into the class room.

He practically tossed Sabe into a desk chair. Lochlann stood, his arms crossed, in front of the door. There would be no escape (beyond the windows, which was something that Lochlann should have considered given his own penchant for diving out of them).

He said, "So you can control it?"

Lochlann's voice was near breathless.

He asked, "You could....do it again?"

Sabe looked like a fish that had been tossed onto the side of the pier and was flopping back and forth in a desperate attempt to find water.

Lochlann took another step closer with his arms still crossed. Sabe's eyes were wide, his breath was fast, and Lochlann advanced on him like a coyote on a fawn. Lochlann put his arms on either end of the chair, caging Sabe in, and lowered his face so there was no escaping his questioning.

"But could you?" Lochlann asked. "Could you do it again?"

His fingers gripped the edge of the chair until his knuckles were white. It helped stop them from shaking.

"is it just something that happens? Or if I asked you, right now, to do it....could you?"