Listen To The Rain On The Roof

[The Delaney Twins]

Lynn grabbed her knees closer to her chest, shivering harder as the next roar of thunder rolled over her, almost tangible. The sound was hideously loud, ripping at her ears and reducing her to a whimpering wreck.
It was getting closer, wasn’t it? There were only a few seconds between the lightning and the thunder that time. It was getting closer. Soon it would be right above her, she knew it.
The thought reduced her into an even further mess, and she couldn’t help herself from laying her head on her knees and moaning, “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”
She hated this. She was being weak; she was being childish; she was being stupid. People weren’t supposed to be scared of thunderstorms, not when they were inside. She was fine in here, she was safe.
She didn’t feel safe.
Needless to say, this was not how she’d imagined spending her Christmas holiday.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so scared.
The man shook his head sadly. “This was not what we expected from you, Number Eight,” he said, genuine reproach painfully evident in his voice. He sounded so disappointed with her. “We had thought that you were happy here. That you were beginning to accept your new life.”
Lynn didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. It felt like a lump had risen up in her throat, completely blocking off all speech. Even the idea of talking hurt. She was too terrified.
The man tapped his fingers on his imposing desk, probably wider than the nine-year-old Lynn was tall. “You must understand the magnitude of what you have done. You have cost the compound hundreds of pounds in the damages you have caused. You have irradiated a good portion of the camp that will now be entirely unusable until we find some way to make it safe again. You could have killed not only the staff, but also your fellow comrades in your foolhardy behaviour. And most importantly, you have completely disregarded all the trust we have placed in you over the last four years. Have we not looked after you? Have we not kept you safe?”
A little of the aborted rebellious spirit that Lynn had been feeling until they had caught her stirred up again. No, she wanted to say. You haven’t kept me safe. You stole me from my mummy and daddy, you locked me up in here, you won’t let me see Kenny. You haven’t looked after me. If you had looked after me, I wouldn’t hate you.
But she couldn’t say anything. She was just a child, a child who had been caught red-handed in the biggest act of disobedience that she’d ever committed in her short life. Children in that situation couldn’t fight back. They wouldn’t dare.
The man’s eyes narrowed.
“I expect an answer, Number Eight.”
She did consider answering for a moment. The part of her that was completely terrified wanted to, wanted to tremble and cry and beg for forgiveness. But the same part of her that had wanted to say the words above wouldn’t let her. That part was what had her sitting there completely silent, just staring at the man who said those horrible things to her – she didn’t even know his name – while her fingers gripped, knuckles white, on the stool she was perched on. She wouldn’t say anything. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
“Number Eight, what do you have to say for yourself?” the man asked, growing irritated now.
Nothing from Lynn.
“You must realise, if you show no hint of repentance, we will have to punish you,” he said, sadism glinting in his eye, now. “We cannot risk another outbreak of this behaviour, Number Eight. We will not.”
Nothing. She hoped he couldn’t tell that her heart had started to beat at twice its speed, that her head was swimming with fear.
The man stared at her. “Fine. So be it, then. Mr Simmons?”
A man stepped out of the shadows. “Sir?”
“Take her to the roof.”
The thunder bothered her more than the lightning did, which was stupid, considering what had happened. Lightning was horrible, but it was short. Thunder felt like it lasted forever, the sound waves tumbling through the room and making the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She hated it. It was a complete assault on her senses, and the sound of it terrified her, made her think of the walls crashing in and the floor falling and the awful awful awful pain…
There were things that could make it better. It was worst, like now, when she felt alone, when she felt helpless. Usually she got Kennedy to sit with her, and he held her and sang to her, and it made her feel better, but she couldn’t do that now. It was nighttime, he was undoubtedly fast asleep, and he had looked so exhausted when she’d seen him earlier. He’d been working, for once in his life, because his English teacher had decided to resort to downright threat in order to get him to do his coursework, and when he’d finished, a few hours ago, the rings under his eyes were the same colour as his pupils. She wasn’t going to drag him down here to get him to sit with her. That would just be selfish.
And she really shouldn’t be so scared. It was just a thunderstorm, a perfectly natural phenomenon. Granted, she had had bad experiences with them in the past, but what were the chances that that was going to happen again? About a billion to one, surely.
She needed to figure out some way of getting over this by herself. She couldn’t just rely on her brother for the rest of her life. It wasn’t Kennedy’s problem.
Another crash of thunder, and she gripped her knees tightly. The beginnings of a whimper passed her lips and her left leg phased metallic, but she stifled it, but she phased it back. No. She was going to be stronger than this.
She had come down to the common room about five minutes after the storm had started. Her dorm had suddenly felt oppressive, claustrophobic, and she didn’t feel safe, not at all. And even if she had, she wouldn’t have wanted to wake the rest of the girls up with her moans. No one else needed to know about this.
So she had walked here, nearly falling over every time she heard the thunder crashing. And when she had arrived, she had sat down in the middle of the room, on the floor, hugged her knees to her chest and prayed for it to be over.
It didn’t seem like it would end anytime soon. She needed to distract herself. Or at least, she needed to make it so she couldn’t hear the sounds, the horrible rain and hail and thunder that grated on her nerves. If she hadn’t been such a goddàmn eejit and left her iPod upstairs…
Kennedy sang to her at times like this. Maybe she could do that too, maybe she could sing to herself. Something happy. Something Christmassy. There was that song Cass had sent her the other day, the Christmas one that he had sworn was “perfect” for her. Well, it wasn’t an exaggeration.
“Christmas in California,” she started, her voice shaky, breathy. “And it’s h-hard to ignore that it feels like summer all the time.”
Thundercrash. This wasn’t helping; she could still hear it over her own voice. Maybe if she manipulated the waves so that the sound waves from the thunderstorm wouldn’t reach her, so she could only hear her voice in her ears. She tried that, shifting into her other vision.
“But I’ll take a West Coast winter to remove my splinters.” That was better, yes, that was good. She could barely hear it at all. “It’s good to be alive.”
The man’s hands gripping her were rough as they thrust her into the cage on the roof, and she grazed her elbow as she fell on the hard concrete ground. She still didn’t say anything.
It was a different man, now, not the same one who had peered coldly at her over the desk. This one was big, burly, and he had a voice like a dog’s, but with the roughness multiplied by a thousand. He turned to the woman next to him and asked her, “How far away is the storm?”
The woman’s eyes glazed over, and glowed green, before she turned to the man and replied. “It will be here in seventy-three seconds. You don’t have much time.”
“Right,” he said, and turned back to Lynn. “Number Eight!” he barked at her. “I want you to phase into your metallic form, now.”
Lynn wasn’t stupid. She didn’t know what they had planned, but she knew that she wasn’t going to help them do it. So she said the first thing that she had since they had foiled her escape – “No.”
“Number Eight, that was not a request, that was an order!” he barked, his voice rising into a shout on the last word.
“No,” Lynn said again, too afraid to be able to say anything else. As the word left her mouth, it started raining, the little droplets lighting up yellow from the electric floodlights above the cage she was in and pelting against her skin, almost painfully in their intensity. “No, I’m not going to. You can’t make me!”
“Oh, we can,” the woman said, her eyes no longer green, but just as malevolent as they had been. “Rest assured, we can. It will be a lot more pleasant for all involved if you obey us.” And she turned to the man, “Forty-eight seconds.”
The man’s face twisted into a snarl. “Number Eight, I will give you one last chance – phase!”
“No!” Lynn said, her terror changing her voice, making it louder and higher than it usually was.
He looked at her for a moment with a strange expression on his face, as if he couldn’t believe her audacity. Then he turned to a woman who Lynn hadn’t noticed before, who had been standing in the shadows. “Clarke, do it.”
A brief silence. “Sir, I’m not sure if that’s wise. She’s – she’s only nine years old, she’s just a child. She’s learnt her lesson –”
“No, she hasn’t,” the woman said. “If she had, she wouldn’t be up here. Don’t you have faith in your own father’s judgment?”
“Of course I do,” replied Clarke. “But I don’t have faith in his patience.”
She came forward out of the shadows, and the light lit up her face, her brown eyes, her curls. And Lynn recognised her. It was May, not a woman, the girl in her dorm. It was May, her friend. It was May…
May, who was the daughter of the man who had sent her up here.
“Lynn, apologise to them,” May said, pleading in her voice. “Please. You need to apologise to them, you don’t know what this will be like –”
“I’m not saying sorry,” Lynn said, looking down at the ground. She didn’t want to look her in the eye. “I don’t care. I don’t care what you do. I’m not saying sorry.”
“Lynn, please…”
“Eighteen seconds.”
“Clarke, stop fùcking around. Do this now, or your father will be hearing about this.”
“But you can’t, she’s only little. Look at her! This isn’t humane!”
“Eleven seconds.”
“Clarke, phase her!”
May looked at her helplessly, looked at her own hands, and said, “I’m so sorry, Lynn.”
And then Lynn was metallic, and she couldn’t see anything. She couldn’t move. She was trapped.
She saw the woman speak through the waves.
“Five… Four… Three… Two… One…”
And then in the moment before whatever was coming hit, Lynn regretted everything. She regretted trying to escape, she regretted not saying anything, she regretted not taking her chance. She tried to speak, No, please, no, I’m sorry, please, I promise, I’ll never do it again, please, just let me go!
But it was too late.
A peal of thunder, and pain. Something hit her head – lightning, it must have been lightning – and it felt like a blowtorch had been put to her head, burning, searing pain ripping at the side of her temple. She wanted to scream, she was screaming through the waves, a high-pitched buzzing sound that she was sure everyone else could hear. And then the pain spread down through her body, flooding down her torso and pooling through every limb, pain like no one was ever supposed to experience. If she was a human she’d have passed out by now, she’d be dead by now, but no, she was a hunk of metal, and so she had to stay here and she wanted to die, she wanted to die. The feeling was indescribable, the little jolts of current running up her arms and through her body like swarms of ants, the electricity searing through her with pain she didn’t believe possible; oh God, oh God!
And the pain didn’t leave when the electricity did, it stayed, it kept resonating through the metal, and then the lightning hit her again and it started again with twice the intensity, she tried to change back, she couldn’t, she was trapped, she wanted to cry out to run away to scream to sleep to die but she couldn’t, she couldn’t, she had to stay and the lightning hit her again, oh God, and she couldn’t do anything, she had to stay.
She didn’t know how much time passed, minutes or hours or years or eternities. She didn’t know how many times she had been hit after the first three. She didn’t know anything. She was nameless, faceless, she had no history no life no family, all she had was pain and all she was was pain and all there ever could be was pain.
But eventually it stopped.
One second there was the pain, the next she was back, she was alive, she was Lynn, she was lying on the ground in her human form and pale and shaking and it was over, it was over, but that didn’t stop her from screaming.
And screaming. The noise pierced through the night sky, ringing against the sides of the cage, catching on May’s pained face and on the sneers of the other two people. And screaming. The screams pressed against their hands when they picked her up, the screams were dripping off her, the screams crawled over her body. And screaming. The effort tore at her throat before long, hurt her own ears, pressed against her mind, but she didn’t stop.
She didn’t stop until the long thin needle that contained her sedative broke her skin.
It didn’t take long for her to realise that she wasn’t going to be able to get any sort of respite by singing to herself. When she didn’t use the waves, it was too quiet, but when she did, she could see the thunderstorm, even if she couldn’t hear it.
She didn’t know what to do, then. The memories were starting to push against her, fighting for her attention, tugging at the corners of her consciousness, and she didn’t want to let them in. She didn’t want to think about it again, the pain, the fear, the prison. It was more important to focus on nice things. On good things.
Her first port of call was Kennedy, naturally. She was laughing with him, she was teasing Ari with him, she was walking through the grounds with him, she was sending him joking messages as they teased their parents. It worked, for a few seconds. But Kennedy was too close to what had happened. She remembered seeing him after they escaped and not recognising him, she remembered the last time she saw him and they were pulled apart from each other, they pulled them apart, and she remembered trying to escape so she could find him and being caught and then they…
OK. So she couldn’t think about Kennedy. That wasn’t smart.
Cass, then. Cass. She had no shortage of good memories with Cass. She tried to focus on them all, but they weren’t specific enough. She couldn’t remember anything specific, right now, she realised. None of the memories were strong enough, they merged in together, they all became one haze of half-smiles and strumming guitars and slow laughs. Good memories, great memories, but they weren’t enough to distract her. They were half-remembered for the most part, blurring in together.
When did that happen?
The wind blew against the building, whistling through every crack in the windows and the walls, and she couldn’t think about that anymore. She needed to think about someone. Anything. Any happy memory. She could feel the cage looming around her, she could feel May’s grip on her mind…
The names flowed through her mind quickly, Jamie, Emily, Ari, mum, Lily, ‘Cardo, Carmen, Toby, dad, Scotty, grandma Hannah, Irene, Meredith, Russ –
Russ.
A moment passed, and then she was dancing under the bright lights, warm despite her scant Hallowe’en costume, comfortable despite Carmen’s insane heels, happy, so very happy, and God, she was safe, wasn’t she? She couldn’t not be safe, with those arms wrapped around her. Nothing was going to hurt her, nothing was going to –
And the distant boom of a thundercrash, and the consequent sharp gasp from her own mouth, the consequent grasping of her knees and seismic shuddering quaking down her back.
Dàmn it, she’d been sure that that was working.
Was nothing going to work, then?
Apparently not. She was just going to have to wait it out.
She laid her head against her knees, tightening her arms around them and letting a sob escape – just one sob, one dry sob, she wasn’t about to start crying on her own in the middle of the common room in the middle of the night. That would just bring her to new heights of sadness.
Just wait it out. Just wait. It can’t last forever.
Oh, please, God, let it be over soon…

[Madeleine Baudelaire&Russ Ford]

And another clap of thunder sounded.
Russ leaned back casually against the side door of the kitchens, lowering the cigarette from his mouth and exhaling a stream of blue smoke into the rain; the harsh light from the porch illuminating the sheets of the grey, clinging rain.
Aside from the rain, it was dead outside. Not an animal stirred in that storm, all the birds had flown elsewhere. And of course, all the students and staff were locked safely and smugly inside their school, sleeping on the pissy Christmas holiday that it was – probably not even noticing the storm inside the fortress.
‘T’was the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…’
Allowing himself a grin, Russ took another puff of his cigarette.
Christ, the Christmas season. This time last year, he’d been… where had he been? Imogen had gone to Longbourn, before travelling to Lylis, but he’d been in his own trailer, somewhere. Somewhere up north – near Graymoor, that was it. He’d been near Danny O’Connell, O’Connor, O’Connelly – well, whatever the hell it was – and there had been a fight early on that day, but it had been sorted with a few drinks – as things usually were with Danny. He was a brilliantly good-humoured drunk, provided he wasn’t anywhere near bourbon. And it had been sunny up there, which was just friggin’ mental. It had been sunny – with no thunderstorms.
And this was a bítch of a storm. The sky was completely covered with charcoal, marred only by the odd flash of white lightning, like the one just illuminating the forest now. There was a weird kind of beauty in it, the way a fork of lightning rent the sky like that. It’d be the kind of thing that Shaun would have liked to have photographed. And no one saw it, because they were all fast asleep. It was pretty late, but Russ hadn’t been able to sleep, so he’d come down for a cigarette… an hour ago. It was freezing, but there was something smug about being under a lit porch in a storm with a cigarette. Or four. It was probably time he went inside, anyway. The cigarette was nearly burnt out, in any case, and he was nearly out.
He sighed, throwing the cigarette stub to the ground and stamping out the glowing orange ember, leaving a patch of ash to be washed away by the downpour, before opening the door and letting it close behind him on another peal of thunder.
The kitchens where the magical food-preparers worked was deserted, though it probably wouldn’t be for much longer. They knew him here, though. It was a safer way for him to come outside to get his nicotine cravings than trying to go through the Hospital Wing, anyway – which, at night, was the only other route to go down.
If Olivia was on duty, he’d bet she’d let him get away with it, though. She was soft like that.
Quietly, he exited the kitchen, before entering one of the many mostly-unknown corridors of the school. Exploration had been one of the ways in which he’d originally tried to kill of the stir-craziness, but it had never worked prop-
Christ, was the thunder really that loud?!
Russ made his way down the hall (that vaguely resembled a sleigh explosion – the only thing missing was the big man in red himself), before going through the side door that opened onto the common room, hearing another thunderclap echo off the walls. Jesus, how did anyone sleep in this?
… actually, no, not everyone was sleeping in this. In the middle of the common room, someone was curled up, with deep shuddering breaths punctuated by the noise outside.
Someone who looked very familiar.
Sally.
Shít, what was wrong with her?
Russ paused at the door, so as not to scare her. “Sally?” he said, quietly. “You okay?”

[The Delaney Twins]

Maybe just not thinking at all would be the best way to deal with this. After all, if she were sleeping through it, she'd be fine. Oblivion was really a pretty good way of dealing with things, she didn't know why so many people knocked it.
Of course, the only problem with it was that there was absolutely no way that she was capable of it. Her thoughts were too noisy; they just wouldn't stop rattling around her head. And they wouldn't stop rattling back to the thunderstorm every time she heard the sounds from outside.
Oh, for God's sake, this was ridiculous! She was seventeen years old, she was a fùcking Warrior, for crying out loud, and yet a couple of bolts of lightning outside, and she was reduced to -
Thunder.
And her anger dissipated, and she just got back to whimpering quietly and gripping her knees. She was probably going to have bruises on her legs tomorrow.
This peal of thunder was longer than the other ones. By the time it was over, she was gasping for air, thirsting for it, breathing in deeply and steadily and shakily and wanting to cry or something, she didn't know. This was horrible. This was hell.
She couldn't go through hell alone. This was it. She knew she shouldn't, but she was going to have to go and get Kennedy up and bring him down here, because she couldn't do it on her own, she just couldn't. She needed someone here with her.
And suddenly as if her prayers had been answered - and she had a few ungracious feelings about God there; if He was going to answer one of her prayers, He could stop the goddàmn storm, that would be entirely more useful - someone was in the room with her.
"Sally? You okay?"
For a moment she did actually think that it was Kennedy, thrown off by the "Sally" and by the noise that came from outside, blurring the voice, but when she raised her head from where it had lain on her knees, wide-eyed and shakily, she saw that it wasn't. It was Russ.
She wasn't any less relieved.
It took her a couple of moments before she recovered enough to speak, the words feeling thick and ungainly in her throat. She tried to smile, but she had a fairly realistic idea of how her attempt must have looked. "I-I'm fine," she said, then took a deep, shaky breath. "I'm just being silly, I gue- "
Crash. Oh God, closer, it was getting so close, every second that passed brought it...
She couldn't help it, she gripped on her knees again, and her head jerked forward again as if she had been hit. Oh, right, this was so fine, so normal. She was just spasming to the fùcking beat, that was all.
When the thunder stopped rolling, she couldn't look up at him. She wasn't going to try to appear happy, that would be stupid, but she couldn't look at him. She looked insane.
Well, so much for that friendship, then. Not most people wanted to remain friends with the sort of certified mentalist that Lynn must have appeared to be right now.
"I just," she swallowed, and her words came out blockily, broken up by her shaky breaths. "Don't deal. Very well. With storms."

[Madeleine Baudelaire&Russ Ford]

Lynn’s head snapped forward onto her knees again as the next peal of thunder resonated across the room – oh, fúck -, and Russ moved towards her, concerned to see her like that.
“I just,” she started, before pausing for a shuddering breath. “Don’t deal – very well – with storms.”
You don’t say.
She looked so small, sitting there trembling on the floor of the common room – all alone in the huge space. She was shaking like a leaf, and white as… white as the dead, really, and every so often a limb would spasm slightly. And she was going to cry. God, she didn’t usually look like this – Lynn loved to laugh. She laughed, and grinned… she didn’t fall to pieces like this. He’d never have imagined her breaking down, or crying, or getting scared – anything that didn’t involve laughter. Nothing should make her fall to pieces like this.
Especially not something like a godddámn storm
Russ sighed and went over to kneel beside her. “Bullshít, you are not fine,” he stated, placing a hand on her trembling shoulder to try to stop her from shaking. There was no way that her reaction to this was just because of a storm. She was inside. People didn't react like that storms, unless there was a big reason for it.
“Did you ever get caught in a storm, or something?"
Tactful, Russ.

[The Delaney Twins]

How had he known?
That was exactly what she needed at times like this. She knew that, obviously, because she knew herself, and she knew that before, when this happened, the only thing that made her feel better was someone holding her. It just helped to remind her that she was still human. That she wasn’t trapped in that stupid metal form. While she was in her own skin she could never be in that much pain, she could never survive it, she would never have to live through it. She was safe.
And it took the warmth of another person’s skin against her own to have her realise that. The warmth of his hand on her shoulder. How had he known?
Her shaking relaxed a little, and she swallowed. Loosed her grip on her legs. A gust of wind blew against the windows, and the rain hammered against it. “Y-Yeah,” she said. “Something like that.”
And another clap of thunder before she could say anything more. She didn’t jerk forward this time, but a violent tremor quaked down her spine, her right hand phased half-metallic.
And for the first time in years, Lynn felt ashamed of herself.
“I-I’m sorry,” she stammered. Her voice felt foreign to her own ears, it was so frustrated, so small. “I… K-Kennedy’s the only person who’s sup- supposed to see me like this.”

[Madeleine Baudelaire&Russ Ford]

"Y-yeah," she stammered. "Something like that." It was great to see that even in this state, her evasion tactics were still perfectly intact. Russ opened his mouth to ask exactly what had happened, but a peal of thunder sounded before he could speak, and Sally jerked violently beside her… and her hand suddenly transformed into smooth, silver metal.
Shít…
"I-I’m sorry," Lynn said, in a tiny, scared voice. "I… Kennedy’s the only person who’s sup-supposed to see me like this."
Bloody hell. Something had to have gone really, really wrong for Lynn to react like this to a storm. She… she was a Warrior, and she was pretty fearless. Lynn didn’t get scared like this. Something had to have gone wrong. Badly wrong, and the thought of it made Russ’s teeth grit and his hand tighten on her shoulder.
And what the hell was she apologising for?!
"Don’t apologise," he said gruffly, lifting his hand from her shoulder and stroking back a strand of her coppery hair from her cold, clammy face. "Jesus, you've nothing to apologise for, Sally," he added, with a slight sigh.
Something like that? Something like what?
"Something like what? D'you want to tell me about it?" he asked, gently, remembering the well-used tactic that girls tended to use to each other in situations like these.

[The Delaney Twins]

His hand left her shoulder.
Not good. Oh, that wasn't good, wasn't good at all. That was like someone throwing a drowning person a life preserver that would dissolve in their hands. She could feel the shivering start to build up to critical again as soon as his skin left hers -
- and then it abruptly fell away as Russ's hand gently pushed her hair out of her face. Her breath caught in her throat.
"Jesus, you've nothing to apologise for, Sally."
...oh, she loved the way he said that. The way he said that with his black eyes looking straight into hers, the way that his face was perfectly serious, the way his low voice roughened the words, the way every word throbbed with proper sincerity, like he really meant it.
And something about the way he said that brought all the doubts and questions of the last month rushing back into her head, but differently, this time. This time, she wasn't thinking about it seriously, properly, she wasn't thinking about it rationally...
Her thoughts were more along the lines of, Screw Jamie and Kennedy, that is not a face that would hurt me.
"Something like what?" he asked. "D'you want to tell me about it?"
Oh. And he'd been distracting her so well...
But she didn't care that he'd brought her thoughts back to what had happened. Something about the way he'd said it...
She didn't know. Maybe... she could tell him. Maybe.
And if he couldn't take her past, then that didn't have to be all bad, she reasoned, ignoring the pain that she felt at that thought. Then at least she wouldn't have to think about these questions any longer.
"All right." She swallowed. "I t- I told you about the place before, I think... When I met you, I said that I had spent some time in another place with my powers. Y'know, where they'd taught me how to use my radiation power..."
She had to take a deep breath before she could continue.
"S-Something bad happened there with storms. I... Well, I did something bad, and they- "
Swallow again. Her voice was barely a whisper when she continued. She couldn't look at him anymore, focusing intently instead on her knees.
"They punished me for it. There was a storm that night, and they put me in my metal form, and..."
One more swallow. She had to be able to do this. The words didn't want to leave her mouth, but she was going to force them.
"Well, I got h-hit by lightning. A few times. I wasn't hurt - well, injured, but I haven't... Haven't exactly done well with thunderstorms since then."
She shrugged and looked back up at him, trying to bring a smile onto her face. "It's not a big deal. I don't think about it most of the time. I just - it's just when it's like this that I have problems. That's all."

[Madeleine Baudelaire&Russ Ford]

It was good to see her evasion tactics were still perfectly intact, wasn’t it?
But that wasn’t really what was going through his mind as his teeth gritted and eyes closed over his coal black irises momentarily, to try and slow his temper breaking.
Russ had been right. He knew he’d been right, the story behind Lynn’s learning to use her radiation was more than she’d ever given away, despite his attempts to get the story out of her. But… Jesus Christ.
That wasn’t what he’d thought it would be. At all.
Wherever this place was, had been… Lynn had done something. It couldn’t have been something that bad – for God’s sake, this was Lynn. He’d been with this girl every morning in the past few months; and while he – clearly – did not know everything about her, he knew who she was. Lynn didn’t have a bad bone in her body, he was sure.
Just look at her now. She was a mess, sitting there and shaking on the cold floor of the common room. White as paper, and shaking like a… no, not a leaf. Leaves didn't shake like that. She was trembling, and she looked… broken. How could anyone who looked like that do something that could be punished for in a way like that?
And anyway, was there any crime anyone could have admitted to deserve that? That wasn’t punishment. That was torture. And especially to –
No, hold on. That couldn’t be right. She’d told him that she’d been at Orchid for a few years, so that would have meant she was little more than a kid when this happened. They wouldn’t do that to a kid… would they? What sort of sick, twisted animals would do that to a child? Who would do that to Lynn?
Behind this, as he thought about exactly what they had done, the pain they’d put her through and the wreck they’d left in her, Russ was dimly aware of a searing spark of his anger flicking the electric current in his blood into life. It wasn’t blue, like it usually was. This time, it was a white hot current – and that meant he needed to calm down, before metal objects in the room started to slam into him. Or, God forbid, hit her in their path.
And if he found out that they done anything else to her… well, he hoped to God that what ever metal that was in that chandelier wasn’t attracted to magnets. It looked like the real thing and not a crappy imitiation, so it should be safe – but testing that theory wasn’t the best idea.
Russ tried to calm down a little as he looked into Lynn’s pretty, but now pained and scared brown eyes, he really tried. But the look on her face because of what someone, some…
Lynn forced an attempt at a smile on his face – and it just about broke his heart. "It's not a big deal. I don't think about it most of the time. I just - it's just when it's like this that I have problems. That's all."
Okay, screw calm.
"Not a big…" He bit it off and ducked his head, gritting his teeth. Not a big deal? For…
"They put you in your metal form," Russ started through his teeth, raising his head so that he could meet her eyes. "Left you outside. In a fúcking storm. So you could get hit by lightning. And it's not a big deal? What the hell kind of place was this?!"

[The Delaney Twins]

As Russ spoke, Lynn began to feel a firm force pulling insistently at her hand. Confused, she looked down to see that it was still metallic. Obviously she hadn’t been thinking straight when phasing her hand spontaneously earlier – she’d managed to keep alert enough to avoid lead (which was, unfortunately, a little bit too poisonous to phase into regularly when radiation didn’t call for it), but she hadn’t remembered to phase the hand back from iron into flesh.
And now it was rising, being drawn gently but surely towards Russ. It didn’t take her long to figure out what was going on. He was angry.
Give the girl a prize, as if anyone wouldn’t have been able to figure that out from his voice, from what he’d said. But she hadn’t realised… If it was so bad that he was magnetising things, then that meant two things.
One, he was far more affected by what she had just said than she could even begin to comprehend right now. And two, she had to calm him down. She didn’t know what would happen if the magnetism got stronger, but nothing good ever happened when people’s powers started going haywire.
So she phased out of the metal, took the tense hand that had stroked her hair a moment ago and held it tightly between both of hers.
“Don’t get angry,” she said quietly, trying to stop her voice from shaking. She had a feeling that that wasn’t helping the situation. “There’s no point. It’s over now. It was just… something that happened. Everyone has bad memories. Bad things happen to everyone.”
She hesitated for a moment, the weight of her childhood seeming to hang in front of her, hang between them. Like a veil that was separating her from Russ.
She’d never felt like this before. She’d never felt like she had to tell someone, like anyone actually needed to know. She’d told Cass, and Jamie knew some of it, but it hadn’t made any difference. It wouldn’t have made any difference if she hadn’t said anything.
But now, for some reason, she felt like she had to tell Russ, like he deserved to be told. Even the small part of her that was terrified of telling anyone and terrified of what they would think of her still wanted to tell him.
“But I’ll…” She swallowed, and didn’t let go of his hand. “I’ll tell you about it. That place. You should probably know, anyway. But you can’t get angry. You shouldn’t. It’s… It’s horrible, I’m not denying that, but it’s over.”
She didn’t give him an opportunity to answer her before she started into the story. She felt like if she stopped, she wouldn’t be able to go on. “It happened when we were five. Kennedy and me, I mean. There were these two people who came to our parents’ flat. A man and a woman. Social services, they said. They said that… Um, well, they said that my parents weren’t fit to look after us. And my parents aren’t exactly responsible people, so it made sense; or at least it did to most people. People who didn’t know my family, you know. But it wasn’t really my parents who raised us, it was more my Grandma Hannah, and she did a dàmn good job. There wasn’t any real reason for social services to come. Which is why it makes sense that they weren’t actually from the social service – Oh!”
Thunder peal. Her hands tightened on Russ’s, and her teeth bit onto her lip. There was a brief spasm of shaking.
But really, she was just waiting for it to be over, so she could go on. It ended soon enough.
“Sorry,” she said. She didn’t dwell on it. She didn’t want to. “Right. Well, they weren’t from the social service, anyway. They were from this other place – they called themselves the C&C Association. They… They took children, magical children, from their parents and took them to…”
She swallowed. “Well, I’ve never been completely clear on whether there was only one thing they wanted to do with us or not. I don’t know what happened to other people. But they took me and Kennedy, and I know what happened to us, at least. For the first two years, we were kept in the same room, and the people ran tests on us. They wanted to find out what our powers were, and we wouldn’t tell them, because when other people told them what their powers were, they were taken away. And we…” She shrugged, trying to make herself seem even slightly OK with what had happened, but the strangled tone of her voice completely betrayed her. “We didn’t want to be separated. Because we were only five – well, seven by the time it finished – and we were kind of terrified, you know? Because we didn’t know where we were and we didn’t know why it had happened or what was happening, and we didn’t have our parents or anything anymore. I mean, Kennedy was all I had.”
And really still is, she finished silently.
“They wouldn’t let us talk, or anything, but they didn’t know that we had the waves, so that was when we made our… the code thing that we use to talk to each other without speaking. Or whatever it is. You know what I mean. And thank God we did, because they did find out what our powers were eventually, and th- they did – they se- s-”
To her horror, Lynn’s words suddenly started to trip over one another like she had something in her mouth. And her mouth started to twist, and her breathing came ragged. Her eyes started to sting and she looked away from Russ’s eyes and focused instead on their clasped hands. The picture was blurred through the tears that were now tumbling down her cheeks against her will.
She was crying.
“T-They didn’t understand,” she forced herself to go on, her voice shaking. “I would have – I would have done anything they’d told me to. I would have done anything if they told me they wouldn’t take him from me. I would have – but the- they didn’t, they took him away while I was asleep and I d-didn’t –”
The tears were coming fast and thick now, but she tried to ignore them. There was no point in pretending they weren’t there, she knew that, but she needed to focus. “I’m – I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not used to t- telling people about this. I’m not very good at it.”
She still didn’t let go of his hand.
“So I was put in a different place,” she said, trying to calm herself and trying not to think about the separation any longer. “With all the other girls. And I was there until I was fourteen, without Ke – Yeah. Anyway, me and him could talk for the next couple of years, because we had the waves. And it didn’t – it didn’t really make it easier, but at least I knew he was all right, and he told me what they were doing to him. It was different than what they did to me.
“Me and the rest of the girls stayed in a bunkhouse, and they divided the day into halves,” she said, the tears still tumbling silently down, but more slowly. “We got up at six, and they made us run around the yard for a few hours until about ten-ish, and then we did endurance stuff, like assault courses and all. And after lunch they either made us train their powers or they made us do experiments so they could find out more about them. I got more of the second thing, because they don’t know much about the wave powers. And it was an injection they gave me that gave me my metallic power thing. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know.
“But Kennedy said that he was kept inside somewhere all day, like a hospital room, and they… well, they did tests for him too, but they were different. I don’t know, he was pretty vague about it.”
But she didn’t really want to know more about it. If there was more… It was hard enough thinking about what she did know. She didn’t want to know what else happened to him.
“So it went on like that for a couple of years. But then one day when we were nine he stopped replying to my messages to him. He never did tell me why, but I know it was – it wasn’t his fault. He wouldn’t have done that to me. They did something. So I… I got angry, and I tried to escape. I tried to burn through the walls but they caught me before I got out, and that was why they did the… lightning thing. And after that, they told me that if I tried to escape again, they’d ki- kill him.
“So I didn’t try again. I stayed and I didn’t say anything to anyone, I didn’t… Well, except May. May was the only person there who was nice to me. Everyone else got the same way, all closed off and stoney. And I was kind of like that too. That’s why… That’s sort of why I am the way I am now, you know. I mean, I smile a lot, because it kind of… makes up for it, if you know what I mean. I do it on purpose – or I did to begin with, anyway. ‘Cause every smile I have now is… it sort of makes up for one I missed out on back then.”
She could feel her cheeks warming up, so she changed the subject. “Or something like that. Anyway, I stayed there for a few years, and they kept training me. They trained me more than most of the other girls, because – well. I’ll get to that part in a minute. Then one day…”
She couldn’t stop it. Despite the fact that her face was still wet with tears, she let a proud smile play around her lips, and she was able to look back up at Russ. “I don’t know how he did it, but Kennedy… he escaped. He saved me. He got into our building and he saved me. And May, too. This was when I was fourteen. I think he wiped some people’s memories, or something. It took me a minute to recognise him, because… Well, Kennedy, the way he looks now, that’s not actually… him. When we were little we looked just like each other, but since we escaped… I don’t know. He never changed back to the way he used to look. I didn’t believe it was him to begin with until he told me with the waves and mimicked our dad’s appearance. But it was, and we got out. We slept rough for a few nights, and we eventually managed to get home. Hitchhiking and stuff.
“And then a few months later we came here, because we found out that – well, May told us who C&C really were.” No need to tell Russ why May had so much insider information. “They were these two guys – they’d been dishonourably discharged from Marius’s army, and they had been… They were making the girls like me train to be soldiers so that he would let them back in. I mean, they had some sort of weird idea that if they gave him trained soldiers like us, that would make up for whatever happened to get them kicked out. And I… Well, both of us, me and Kennedy, we were furious. So that’s why we came here. It’s sort of selfish, really. I mean, I know we’re supposed to be fighting for the gnomes and all, but... I’m really only doing it for me. For revenge. It’s not good motivation, but there’s no way in hell that that’s going to stop me.
“But that’s not really everything,” she continued after a brief hesitation. “That’s not the most important thing. It was Professor Hoodham who told me… what they had wanted to do with me. I wasn’t going to be a soldier, I was going to be a…”
She swallowed, and her words came out in a whisper. “A bomb. They had plans for me. On my seventeenth birthday they were going to make me… They were going to make me blow up Orchid. With the radiation, you know. They were training me so that I could kill-”
And God, the tears were starting again. She stopped them this time, blinked them away furiously. “I would have killed everyone,” she said in a hushed voice. “I would have killed them all; Ari and Cass and Kira and Carmen and Madeleine and Cardo and Jamie…”
And a horrible fact hit her, and her face was replaced with a mask of horror. She stared at her hands, still clenched around his so tightly that her knuckles were white. “And you. You were here on my birthday. I would have – oh, Jesus fùcking Christ, Russ, I would have killed you!”
She pressed her eyes shut, not wanting to let that thought in her head. She couldn’t even think of the idea of Russ being dead, of Russ just not existing anymore, let alone think of it being her fault. She closed her eyes to clear her mind.
“This is why I don’t tell anyone,” she said, eyelids still fused, teeth gritted. “You must understand now. I don’t want everyone to know about this. No one wants to know someone who would have killed them if it weren’t for luck. They’d never… They wouldn’t want to be anywhere near me. And I can understand that. It makes perfect sense. But I still don’t want it to happen. That’s why I don’t tell anyone. Why I didn’t tell you.”
She took a deep shuddering breath, her hands clamping more tightly on his, her eyes still tightly shut. She knew she wouldn’t be able to hide the fear in her voice. The uncertainty. The plea, because in a way, it would be a plea – a prayer for him to say something, anything, that would let Lynn know if he was all right with this. If he would accept her past.
The thing was, her past didn’t matter anymore. It was over. It made her into a wreck talking about it, sure, but that didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. But if people had a problem with her past – if Russ had a problem with her past…
She wasn’t used to opening up like this. She really had no idea what to expect.
But just to be on the safe side, she admitted softly, “I don’t want you to not want to be anywhere near me, Russ.”

[Madeleine Baudelaire&Russ Ford]

Her hands transformed from the cold, shiny steel into her soft warm hands again, and she took Russ’ hand from her silky hair and clutched it in hers.
“Don’t get angry,” she said, voice as soft as butter. “There’s no point – it’s over now. It was just… something that happened. Everyone has bad memories.”
Jesus, Sally. That’s not just some bad childhood memory. That’s torture. That’s something else all together.
And anyway, this was bloody ridiculous. Somehow, Lynn, by taking his hand and saying “it’s over now, it was just something bad that happened”, she’d reversed their positions and she was comforting him. And that, that was just sick. He should be the one comforting her, here.
That, more than anything, was what made him calm down - but he didn’t say any of it. Something told him that this was her time to talk, not his. She looked as though she was about to start talking – and he could guess that it had been a dámn long time since she’d spoken to anyone about this, and she needed to. People needed to talk about things. He’d seen people cave in too often because they’ d avoided discussing what their trauma, and the fúck he’d let Lynn go through that. So he’d listen, and from looks of it he was going to have to try his dámned best to keep his temper, because it didn’t look like this saga was going to get any better.
“But I… I’ll tell you about it. That place. You should probably know, anyway. But you can’t get angry. You shouldn’t. It’s… It’s horrible, I’m not denying that, but it’s over.”
It was over, and she was in a school trapped in the middle of a war, and she shook with fear if she heard a thunder clap, each stroke of lightning sending her into spasms. That sounded pretty far from “over” to Russ, if he was honest with himself. But before he could say anything, Lynn was beginning her tale.
“It happened when we were five – Kennedy and me, I mean. There we these two people who came to our parents’ flat. A man and a woman. Social services, they said.”
Oh, Christ. Russ had never had any experiences with the social services himself, thank God, but he knew enough about it to know that, for the most part, they couldn’t do the job they were supposed to do. The amount of kids in danger that slipped past the net was ridiculous, and the whole system was screwed up in this country, with all the bias and corruption about the place. Though, they didn’t take kids that didn’t need to be taken away, usually. There was something weird about that – if, indeed, the social services they were.
“They said that… um, well, they said that my parents weren’t fit to look after us. And my parents aren’t exactly responsible people, so it made sense; or at least it did to most people. People who didn’t know my family, you know. But it wasn’t really my parents who raised us, it was more my Grandma Hannah, and she did a dàmn good job. There wasn’t any real reason for social services to come. Which is why it makes sense that they weren’t actually from the social service – Oh!”
Lynn’s cry and the crack of thunder that split the sky at that moment made Russ start, having been listening too intently to her story and focusing on her lovely, tear-stained face to notice that the storm was still ongoing. But her hands tightened sharply on his, and her teeth drove into her bottom lip as she started to shake again.
And what Russ really wanted to do was to take hold of her and keep holding her until she stopped shaking, but he was too wary of what might happen in the nanosecond after his hands left hers. So, he kept holding onto them tightly, stroking her fingers gently with his thumb, because, right now, that was all he really could do. But once the roll of thunder stilled, so did she, and she continued with her story.
“Sorry,” she said, and Russ had to fight the automatic roll of his eyes, because, for the love of all that is sacred, the girl should not be apologising for this. “Right. Well, they weren’t from the social service, anyway. They were from this other place – they called themselves the C&C Association. They… They took children, magical children-”
At that, the warning bells began to ring. Magical children. Russ could have groaned, or something else. First, it was teenagers, and that was friggin’ sick enough, but children?! And how old had she been? Five?!. No. No. This was wrong. This was so, so fúcking wrong-
But she kept on going, her soft brown eyes looking intently into his, and it got worse and worse.
“I don’t know what happened to other people. But they took me and Kennedy, and I know what happened to us, at least. For the first two years, we were kept in the same room... we were only five – well, seven by the time it finished – and we were kind of terrified, you know? Because we didn’t know where we were and we didn’t know why it had happened or what was happening, and we didn’t have our parents or anything anymore. I mean, Kennedy was all I had.”
They were kids. They were kids. Kids don't - kids, they don't -
“They wouldn’t let us talk, or anything, but they didn’t know that we had the waves, so that was when we made our… the code thing that we use to talk to each other without speaking. Or whatever it is. You know what I mean. And thank God we did, because they did find out what our powers were eventually, and th- they did – they se- s-”
No, no. Don’t cry, don’t-
But it was too late, she was already shuddering and her eyes were already spilling over with fresh tears, tears that shouldn’t have to be there. But they were there, and Russ hated it. Russ hated it so much, because, the tears were so out of place there. For God’s sake, he’d never seen Lynn without a smile on her face before – she smiled, she laughed. And Russ liked it that way. He liked it when Lynn was happy, so he really dámn well did not like it when she had cause to cry. He wanted to lift his hands from hers and… and hold her, or something, but the muscles of his hands were clenched tight around hers and would not move. He opened his mouth to say “Ssh, it’s okay, you can stop awhile,” but she got there first, talking fast and trying to pretend that the tears weren’t there, that she wasn’t crying. And that wasn’t fair either.
And, worse, he knew he couldn’t say anything, because… well, it was her time to talk. If he interrupted her, the rest of this might not come out, and Russ’s mind had made it pretty clear a long time ago that not talking about stuff like this was a bad idea. So he was going to have to listen until she finished, and say what needed to be said after – and it was a mark of how bad this situation was that he managed to keep his mouth shut, for once.
But, it kept getting worse. Call him naïve, but he hadn’t realised that it all would have been… well, that bad. This was like… some sort of prison labour camp, and the kids’ crimes had been to be gifted, and be born in a time when there was history’s most pointless war going on. That was it. Because of that, because the Hoodhams couldn’t decide whether to teach dwarves in the school or not, there were people out there stealing children from their parents, and taking them straight to a living hell, a hell that, even if they were able to get out of, they’d never get over. Lynn was living proof of that.
And this conversation explained a lot of things that he’d wondered about before – like the time he’d asked her where she had been trained to use her radiation; it was hardly like they’d teach it here. She’d been evasive, but now, he knew. She’d discovered it in that… in that place (he could think of plenty of words, but none of them quite strong enough), or rather , they’d discovered it. The only silver lining of that was that they’ d given her the protection against it – yeah, she hadn’t discovered it, but if something went wrong some day… well… yeah. But other places could have done that without this cruelty. Russ had thought it bad that the teenagers here, in Orchid Hill, were being trained to be soldiers when they were barely out of primary school, but Lynn… well, with Lynn, it was a whole different story. And her brother, Kennedy? Tests? She said he was very vague about them. Deliberately vague, if you asked Russ. He could guess a million and one reasons as to why he was being “vague” – or, in other words, why he was hiding it from Lynn.
And the “bad thing” that she’d done was try to escape?! As soon as she’d explained that that was why they’d attacked her with lightning, Russ felt his as-of-now-carefully-controlled blood being to charge with anger, and revulsion. Not towards Lynn, God no, but towards the sick, sick people that took it into their heads to punish a child like that. That was… no, no, stop thinking about that. Stop it. He could feel the electric buzz start in his veins, running fast and blue, and right now, that wasn’t a good thing. But he couldn’t stop it – anger wasn’t something he found it easy to control. Imogen used to tell him he had anger management problems, or, changing her tune, that he’d inherited that from his father. Typical gypsy man; and Russ hated her for saying that. So, this time, the anger started to build – or, at least, until she said something that just about broke his heart:
“That’s why… That’s sort of why I am the way I am now, you know. I mean, I smile a lot, because it kind of… makes up for it, if you know what I mean. I do it on purpose – or I did to begin with, anyway. ‘Cause every smile I have now is… it sort of makes up for one I missed out on back then.” Then, she started to blush, and went swiftly on. It sort of got better from then on, hearing the story – aside from what she said about Kennedy that proved Russ’ suspicions about why he was hiding things from Lynn correct. But, they’d got out – not without their scars, obviously, but they’d got out.
She shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
When she got to the bit about fighting for the gnomes, though, Russ had to hide a smile. Maybe Lynn hadn’t realised this, but, while gnomes were the starting point for this (and where the hell were they now?), no one in this school was fighting for the fúcking gnomes. Not even Madeleine, Head of the Warriors – could Russ ever think she was fighting for the gnomes? She was fighting for Shaun. From what Russ knew about Lee’s life, he could bet Kira, Head of the Spies wasn’t fighting for the goddámn gnomes either. He didn’t know Will, Head of the Carers, personally, but there were rumours about her parents being killed. That wasn’t about gnomes. And that left Macy Deltine… and, well, quite frankly, she was the only girl Russ knew of that scared him. That amount of intelligence isn’t … right. And Russ? Russ wasn’t fighting for the gnomes either. If Russ was honest, he couldn’t give a crap about the frigging gnomes.
She went on, though, and Russ felt a nasty jolt of shock mixed in with every other feeling he had in his blood right about now, which caused a metal lamp on the table nearest him to start to slide across the surface. “It was Professor Hoodham who told me… what they had wanted to do with me. I wasn’t going to be a soldier, I was going to be a… a bomb.”
“That is true,” she’d said, to the noise of the machines in Cardsdale gym running. “I guess I'm the power equivalent of a Swiss army knife. Microwave, amplifier, lightbulb, muffler, A-bomb…” He’d remembered thinking something along the lines of “Christ Almighty”, but he’d also thought… and, God, was he ashamed of it now, but hadn’t he thought that, if there were people who could do things like that, wouldn’t even the threat speed things along a lot? There was a difference in thinking about it in the abstract – he’d thought she’d been talking hypothetically, not seriously. Because, if she was used as a … as a living bomb, she’d have to detonate herself. She’d be forced into being a suicide bomber, and… Jesus. It didn’t even bear thinking about.
And, clearly, Lynn couldn’t bear thinking about it either, when she realised – “I would have killed everyone; I would have killed them all; Ari and Cass and Kira and Carmen and Madeleine and Cardo and Jamie…” Then, her hands tightened sharply on his, surprising him slightly: “And you. You were here on my birthday. I would have – oh, Jesus fùcking Christ, Russ, I would have killed you!”
Oh… right. Jesus. That kind of thing put it even more into perspective. People who Lynn was near and dear to – and he couldn’t help it, but he felt a thrill of pleasant surprise at her vehement reaction there – wouldn’t have been close to her. In fact, she would have ended up killing them… all of them. From half-forgotten physics lessons, Russ knew that it didn’t take a lot of a strongly radioactive bomb to cause one hell of an impact. A bomb the size of a seventeen-year-old girl… well, again, it didn’t bear thinking anything about. And Lynn had to live with the knowledge that she could, that she was going to… but, that wasn’t really the point, was it? The point should be that she’d gotten out – that she hadn’t done it, and they were all still here, still alive. So, his hand gripped just as tightly on hers as they were gripping his.
“This is why I don’t tell anyone, you must understand now. I don’t want everyone to know about this. No one wants to know someone who would have killed them if it weren’t for luck. They’d never… They wouldn’t want to be anywhere near me. And I can understand that. It makes perfect sense. But I still don’t want it to happen. That’s why I don’t tell anyone. Why I didn’t tell you.”
She was probably right, but that kind of reasoning for not being near her was really, really, really stupid. He wished he could convey that without interrupting her speech, but her eyes were closed tight, so she couldn’t see his eyes, his face. And then she said it – something that made Russ’s heart tighten in a way that he’d never even knew could happen:
“I don’t want you to not want to be anywhere near me, Russ.”
Oh. Okay.
In a way, Russ couldn’t believe that she had really just said that. She’d really thought that this would change…? Jesus. Then again, if he put himself into her shoes… Alright, yeah, some people might – and probably would – recoil, but if they knew the story behind it, how could they blame her for it? How could… aw, Christ. It was pretty evident that it wasn’t her fault, how could it be? If anything, this made Russ… well, respect her more, now. It wasn’t quite the right word, but still. Not just for the person she was, and for the way she acted – but the fact that she’d come out of that as this smiling, lovely, strangely un-bitter girl sitting beside him was… well, how could anyone react the way she thought they would, knowing…
Yeah, if she hadn’t escaped, they’d all be dead. But the thing was, she had escaped. Better than that, she’d wanted to escape, she’d managed to hold onto herself, to remember – even though she was so, cruelly, fúcking young at the time – that it was wrong, that the aims of these psychos wasn’t right. She’d even tried to escape, to that cost that left her an absolute wreck here, and did escape.
She was supposed to have killed them all, but she didn’t. Wasn’t that the point? Focusing on what had happened, rather than what would have happened? It was the reason Russ hated hypothetical history. If Karise Hoodham hadn’t done this, this wouldn’t have happened, and this would have … did it really matter? You can’t change the past, so there’s no point thinking about it.
And not only that, but Russ knew a ton of people who would have used this as some form of twisted excuse to be a twát and treat other people like shít – you know the type, you know what they’re like. This would be like the holy grail of excuses for these people, and Christ, were there a lot of them. They would constantly complain about the horrible things that they’d been put through. Lynn didn’t. By her own admission, aside from Kennedy, he was the only person to be told the full story, and while he wasn’t sure if keeping it that secret was an entirely good plan, that showed one hell of strength of character. She had every right to be a mess, but she wasn’t. And Russ couldn’t see that there was any other reaction to that but admiration.
So the fact that she thought…
In the short, quiet silence that followed her words, their hands stayed locked, his never leaving hers because, frankly, he hadn’t a clue what to do next. The horror and anger in his blood hadn’t calmed any, the electric crackle was still going, and everything else he was feeling for her wasn’t quite enough to cancel those two out and make him trust himself to open his mouth.
And he wanted to see if she would look at him.
The seconds passed, tense in the thick atmosphere of the room. She still wasn’t opening her eyes. Russ sighed gently, before starting to talk. “Look, Sally… Lynn… don’t…”
Argh, how the hell was he going to say this?
“You shouldn’t worry about… people … not wanting to be around you.” Christ, getting these words out was awkward. “Especially not… look, there is nothing you can say, not something like this that… that would…” He bit it off, before sighing in resignation, and beginning again in a sort of rush. “Okay, you think that I wouldn’t want to be near you because of what they were planning to do, right? That sort of hits on a number of different levels here, but trust me, that doesn’t change things. That was what they were planning to do, but the thing is, that didn’t happen. You escaped – hell, you wanted to escape from them. That’s the point. It didn’t happen. How could anyone blame you for what those fúcked-up bástards were trying to do? It’s not your fault. None of this is, how the hell could it be? Anyone who says it is a twát and isn’t worth listening to. And you – by all rights you should be a total mess, but you’re not, you’re… you’re still smiling. I don’t really know how you do it, but, you are. You haven’t let this… you haven’t let this make you into the wrong sort of person. “He stopped for a second, before grinning slightly. “And the gnomes? Yeah, you’re not fighting for them, but seriously, who here actually gives a crap about the dámn gnomes, Lynn? I sure as hell don’t. You have a reason, a real reason for this, and that’s better than fighting it for the sodding gnomes, isn’t it?” Finally, his hand moved, and he raised it from hers to stroke her cheek, gently wiping the silver streaks of tears that lay there away with his thumb. “And, Sally? Listen. What you just said... I won’t ever not want to be anywhere near you."/

[The Delaney Twins]

“And Sally? Listen. What you just said… I won’t ever not want to be anywhere near you.”
And he wiped the tears off her cheek.
And at that moment, she felt a very strange feeling overtake her, a feeling that she hadn’t been expecting at all. After all, she’d only told him about this because… because she had to. Because there wasn’t much of a choice, here, what with her being found in such an obviously insane position, quaking and shuddering with fear as if the world were ending at the sound of a mere thunderstorm. That wasn’t the sort of thing that you could get away with not explaining, if one of your friends witnessed it.
But then, when she admitted it to herself, she hadn’t had to tell him at all. She could easily have just said nothing, she could easily have just said, “It’s personal,” and hoped that he would have left it there. She could have made him leave it there, because Lyndsey Delaney was nothing if not stubborn, and no one was going to be able to coerce information out of her if she didn’t want to share it.
No. No, she’d told him because she wanted to, nonsensical though that was. She had never in her entire life wanted to tell anyone about that hell. What could possibly have made her – What was so different about –
She stopped those questions off before she could even begin to think about the answers. She didn’t want to think about that now. She couldn’t. There were too many other emotions rushing through her.
Emotions – no, emotion, singular. But it was a powerful emotion. It was an overpowering emotion.
Although the idea was perplexing her, she couldn’t deny that she’d told him because she wanted to. And that fact somehow had made her more vulnerable than anything else could. If someone had tortured it out of her, or if they had forced her to tell it, there would have been defiance in her telling them, there would have been protection, armour. But telling him willingly had taken away all her defences.
She’d never expected to feel such raw terror in the moment of silence. The moment between her confession and his reply. It had been one of the longest moments she’d ever known.
And then he’d spoken, and he’d said everything right. It didn’t matter that his words had been hesitant, that some of them had tripped over one another, that it sounded like he was struggling to find what to say. The speech had been awkward; it was wonderfully awkward, because it was sincere.
And those words – I won’t ever not want to be anywhere near you.
She didn’t really know what to think of those words, but she knew what she felt at knowing that they were sincere too.
The emotion that overpowered her now was a feeling of relief so strong that she felt almost light-headed. So strong that another tremble ran down her spine as the tension she had been feeling evaporated. So strong that when she opened her eyes again she was smiling.
She was smiling already. That had never happened before. Last time she’d told that story – and that was a long time ago – she hadn’t been able to smile again for hours afterward. Kennedy had been frantic, terrified that there was something horribly wrong with his sister, but it was no such thing – as she’d said to him then, it was just that it was exhausting, telling that story. It didn’t make her physically tired, but it tired the part of her that was responsible for smiling so thoroughly that she hadn’t felt comfortable in her grin for days afterwards.
But something about the words that Russ had just said, something about how his black eyes looked when she opened hers and saw him, something about the way it felt to have his fingers run over her cheekbone and take away the tears… She couldn’t help but smile. She didn’t have much of a choice.
Even though she knew that it did make her seem… slightly lacking in sanity. She was well-aware how she must look now, smiling – not grinning, it wasn’t a grin. It wasn’t a smile for jokes, it wasn’t the wicked smirk that she employed when teasing her brother or engaging in a little spirited innuendo with a certain friend of hers. This smile wasn’t the same as that.
She didn’t know exactly what it was, but it wasn’t a grin.
But while it was true that it wasn’t a grin, it was still a smile – she was still smiling, even though traces of her tears were still on her cheek. That must have looked strange. There was no way of getting around that.
Then again, random smiles, random grins, random laughter – they were all Lynn’s forte. Russ should really have been used to them by now.
“Russ, that really –” she said, and swallowed. Her words had rushed in together; she had spoken too fast. Try again. “That really means a lot to me.”
She looked down briefly, laughed faintly, and colour came to her cheeks. “Or – well, I guess that much is obvious, but still. It’s just that – I mean –” And another embarrassed break.
This was ridiculous. What on earth was she acting like?
“Sod’s law,” she said suddenly, laughing properly, and she looked him in the eye again. “I tell you my whole sorry saga, and it’s now that I start bumbling over my words like I’m George bloody Bush. I guess that should show you pretty well that I’m not exactly used to telling people about it, if you know what I mean. I’m all out of practice.”
And then she realised that from Sod’s Law she’d been doing it again; she’d been grinning. She’d gone and started grinning and laughing like a bloody imbecile. What was she doing? It got serious, and then the laughs came out, the grins came out, like some sort of twisted protective mechanism. Like she needed to make…
Oh, God.
She knew exactly what she was doing. This was getting too serious. And so she felt awkward, and so she started grinning and making light of the whole thing. And that would have been fine otherwise, she supposed, but she didn’t want to do it to this situation. She didn’t want to go screwing up this situation. She needed to be serious too.
The grin fell, and she said, “Seriously, though – I mean, just… Thank you. It means a lot to me that you reacted this way instead of –” She swallowed. “Well. You know. I mean, most people wouldn’t think that I have this deep dark past or that – that – well, that there’s anything much other than…” She smiled brightly for a moment, and pointed at her face, then said, “That thing. And I don’t think that they… maybe really want to know about there being anything else, or something. So – well, thank you. Really, thank you”
And with those words, that same smile from before – that relieved smile, that sincere smile, that unfamiliar smile – cropped right back up on her cheeks.
Maybe there wasn’t so much of a mystery about that unfamiliar smile; about what it was supposed to show, supposed to be.
She guessed that, maybe, it wasn’t supposed to be anything. Maybe it was just… a smile for Russ.
Or something.

[Madeleine Baudelaire&Russ Ford]

“… like I’m George bloody Bush. I guess that should show you pretty well that I’m not exactly used to telling people about it, if you know what I mean. I’m all out of practice.”
No, don’t do that.
There was her bright grin again, and her laugh, but it wasn’t right. Not now: it was just out of place, and Russ knew exactly why she was doing it. Self-protection, avoidance of the situation – and he got it, he did. But he wished that she wasn’t doing that, it wasn’t fair, not on her, not… arghh.
Just, don’t do it, alright?!
But she was a step ahead of him, as per. “Seriously, though – I mean, just… Thank you. It means a lot to me that you reacted this way instead of, well, you know. I mean, most people wouldn’t think that I have this deep dark past or that – that – well, that there’s anything much other than…” Her face lit up again in the same way it normally did, but… there was something about it that made it fecking terrible. It looked false, and just ... under any other circumstance it would be good that it was there, but now… urgh, hell. Then it faded again, and Russ didn’t really know which face was better. “That thing. And I don’t think that they… maybe really want to know about there being anything else, or something. So – well, thank you. Really, thank you”
Then, she smiled again, the way she had just before she put up her guard and … dámn, okay. For… well, the first time, Russ knew that Madeleine was right, and he was suckered. But… well… yeah, screw that worry.
“Don’t thank me, Lynn,” he muttered, averting his eyes from her gaze. “Christ, Lynn, why would you need to thank me?” Christ knew, he done nothing to merit that, he’d only… God, Lynn.
Now he just felt… right. Use your words, man. Most people would have reacted like this. No one would run away from her, like that, no one would blame her for what shít those people had done to her. Chrissake, how could that be something to blame her for?
This was Russ walking round in fúcking circles. Forgive him, but he was having a bit of trouble accepting this... she'd really been expecting him to hate her for that. Expecting everyone, but...
Jesus. Russ knew he shouldn't blaspheme, however... maybe it was needed a bit.
So, she shouldn’t be thanking him, to sum up the circular paths he'd been following for the past while. This was called feeling out of your depth, he guessed, but still, she shouldn't freaking thank him. He wished she wouldn’t, really. But.
Fúck, this was so unfair.
"I know there are people that would freak out at that, Sally, but not me. And, to be fair, probably not most of us." Levi Ryder wasn't here anymore, after all... But that maybe wasn't the best thing to add, he guessed.
But.. he didn't really know what else to add, so he just dropped his hand to touch hers.

[The Delaney Twins]

And the feeling of relief catapulted over into another feeling, a feeling that was equally unexpected, equally overpowering, equally –
God. Did she even know what it was?
He wasn’t even looking at her. Russ bloody Ford; and he wasn’t even looking at her. He wasn’t even looking at her, and she loved it. She loved it.
He was looking away from her, his dark hair partially hiding his darker eyes, his face and voice more hesitant than she had ever seen them before, and something about the expression on his face and the words he said just made her… ache. She didn’t know what the hell she was supposed to do right now. His hand dropped to hers and laid on top of it, and she felt as if electrical currents tingled under the skin, shooting up through her arm and neck and face and adding to the confusion that she felt in her brain.
This beautiful, poignant, mad, lovely confusion.
A billion different thoughts tumbled through her head at once.
So Jamie thought he would hurt her? He’d just had more chance to hurt her than she’d ever given anyone else in her entire life, and he’d made her feel like this. Cardo said it was time to move on. Arihant had told her to go for it, and that was Arihant, for Chrissake. Kennedy thought that it would all end in tears? Well, he could think whatever the fùck he wanted to think, it wasn’t Lynn’s problem. Maybe it would end in tears. Maybe it wouldn’t. What the hell did it even matter? That was always a chance; everyone risked that when they –
When they –
Everyone risked it. They risked it because they thought it was worth it; because they were prepared to risk the heartache and the hurt and the pain for the sake of something like this. For this confusion and this ache and this –
Oh God. Oh God.
She looked down too, away from his averted gaze, and she raised the hand that was not held by his to cover her eyes briefly. She blinked hard behind the cover of her skin. Then her hand slid down from her eyes to cover her mouth, and it dug gently into her cheeks.
Muffled from behind her hand, the culmination of all her confused and conflicting thoughts pushed out of her mouth in an elegant mumble:
“Oh, fùck it.”
She took the hand off her mouth.
In one quick darting motion, she placed the hand on the back of his neck, leant forward, and pressed her lips to his.
She kissed him. Russ bloody Ford; and she kissed him.
And she loved it.
She loved it.

[Madeleine Baudelaire&Russ Ford]

After he’d said that, there was a pause, and a soft silence broken only by the heavy raindrops hitting off the leaded windows in their futile fight to get into the room. The thunder claps were growing further and further apart, but it wasn’t like either he or Lynn had noticed, and in her case, that was probably a good thing.
Even if the only thing that could distract her was the outpouring of her past in the fear that Russ would be revolted, it was still a good thing.
She wasn’t shaking or crying, and Christ knew that Russ was going to try his dámn hardest never to let her get like that again. She shouldn’t ever be like that. He couldn’t stop the storms, but if there was another one, he’d sit with her and talk to her – that seemed to help, right?
Okay, now she was moving her hand about. He glanced up at her, but her gaze was averted from his while her hand started to fidget a bit. The one that was under his stayed still, but the other one was flicking to cover her eyes now.
What is she doing that for?
Russ didn’t like it when he couldn’t see her eyes, because that meant he couldn’t even try to judge what was going on in her head – then again, he guessed this episode had just proved that he’d been crap at that anyway. But she unveiled her eyes, even if she was still looking away from him. Then, her hand slipped down to hide her mouth, her fingers gently pressing in against her cheeks.
And again, why was she doing that? What… Christ. Russ sighed minutely, too minutely for her to notice. Why did he care so much about what she was doing? This, it shouldn’t bother him anywhere near as much as it did now. Problem was, though… he didn’t really care about caring. Not that it was really a problem. It was just… fúck, he didn’t really know. Barely cared... maybe it was just too late, or something.
This silence, though... It was fair to say that he and Sally never had silences. Far from it. In dog-walking or training... yeah, it was never silent. And maybe the silence - in a way - was kind of apt after the flows of speech from the two of them...
It was a nice silence. They weren't used to it, but it was a nice silence. Comfortable, he guessed - despite what they'd just been talking about. It gave them a chance to breathe, to think - or, not think, as the case may be. It gave him the chance to see that Lynn was really okay, that the only beginning-to-fade storm wasn't hurting her anymore. It gave him the chance to see just how important it was, that she had just given him her past, laid out everything that made her vulnerable and shown him; to see how big a deal it was that she trusted him like that. To see the new smile, and to see that... that somehow, it made him see her in a different light. Not in the way that she had foreseen, but in that he took on a new respect for her, a new outlook... and that, in her vulnerability and how she'd just recovered from that, there was a strange beauty, different to the one he knew - one that he hadn't ever noticed before, because he hadn't known to see it.
Russ just wished that she'd look at him.
Look at me, Sally.
It took a second, but she did look at him. For barely a second, because from behind her hand there came a muffled something that sounded suspiciously like "fúck it", before, suddenly, she'd leaned forward and was kissing him.
... well, it was fair to say he hadn't been expecting that - or his response. Her lips shocked him, sending into motion an unusual, fast current of blue static electricity through his veins and moving him to respond to her, his body moving instinctually closer to hers, one hand going to her hair, and the other curving around her waist.
Somewhere, though. the vague whisper came into his head stating that, yeah, he'd been hoping for this for months, but this wasn't the right time, she was upset, she'd been crying. He'd hurt her, and she'd-
... nope, she was right - fúck that. Vague, half-formed doubts didn't matter, they were things they could worry about later. Now, she was kissing him, and the doubts...
Well, Russ didn't really care, and this time, it really didn't bother him.

[The Delaney Twins]

Please kiss back please kiss back please kiss back please kiss back please kiss back plea – Oh, thank God.
Fear had seized her again in the moment that she pressed her lips to his. But that was understandable. You couldn’t be confident about this sort of thing, not without being completely up yourself. And it was nothing, nothing, compared to what she would have felt if she had tried to do this before this evening, before she’d told him.
She trusted him.
And her trust was proven well-placed as he pulled her closer and kissed her back, one hand falling to her waist, the other tangling in her hair. As it did so, Lynn’s hand moved from his neck into his hair, threading it through her fingers, bringing him closer, drinking him in. Her other hand found his shoulder, gripped tight.
Surprise, surprise; Russ was a good kisser. Considering his track record, he didn’t have much of an excuse not to be. But it wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t been. The best thing about this situation wasn’t the kiss, it was the wonderful trust that jumped through her arteries with every heartbeat. I trust you I trust you I trust you.
She wondered if he’d been thinking about this for as long as Lynn had. After all, he’d first asked her on Hallowe’en, and there was something about this kiss… It felt like something they’d both waited for. It felt bloody fantastic.
And yet they’d have to cut it off. It was their first kiss, true, but she was pretty sure it was a… strange one for him. Or, well, hopefully the actual kiss wasn’t strange, but the circumstances were. She’d explain. And she needed to tell him that she’d made a mistake. She should have said Yes when he’d asked her. She should have realised sooner that she could trust him, idiot that she was.
Hopefully she’d get a second chance.
So. Yes. Now. She’d cut the kiss off now and explain now.
Now.
Right now.
(His lips continued to move against hers, and she shivered, her fingers suddenly growing a mind of their own and pulling him even closer.)
…Well, she’d leave it a minute.
After a little while and in an extreme show of self-control, she broke the kiss and moved back, but didn’t move her hands. She didn’t really want to let go.
As she looked into his eyes, without any prompting from her brain at all, a smile rose to her lips. She couldn’t help it. She just felt insanely – ridiculously – happy. Her smile was bright and it was real, not like that one before; and suddenly, very suddenly, she felt a mad urge to laugh. She didn’t think the situation was funny – not at all – but she was just so dàmn happy that it felt like smiling wasn’t enough. Like she didn’t have enough skin to contain the emotion; like the happiness was going to bubble out from within her and scatter from her mouth.
Of course, she knew why she would do that, but she doubted that Russ would understand what the hell was going on if she kissed him then burst out laughing. So instead she tried to say something, anything, that would stop her from giggling like a maniac.
The happiness throbbed strongly through her voice when she spoke. She smiled a wider version of the smile-for-Russ, and said happily, “Russ, you taste like an ashtray.”
…OK. Well. That was appropriate. She’d probably have been better laughing.
She should have got a badge made up. Lyndsey Delaney: Moment Killer.