Post by Cass van der Berg on Jun 28, 2009 21:39:58 GMT
ooc: Set post-SSCW, as I couldn't resist powering on ahead =] So I suppose it constitues as a spoiler, but c'mon, guys, you must have figured by now that I'm not going to kill Kenny XD I'm too soft for my own good.
The light was the colour of split limes, and spilt through the window with the same glistening quality.
It had been a beautiful day, the first proper spring day that they’d seen so far. The sun had scattered gently over the scarred landscape, the burnt forest that those Carers who specialised in plant work were straining so hard to rebuild to even a shadow of its former glory and the school which lay suppressed by the weight of the grief and defeat of hundreds of students. Now the sun was sinking below the horizon, sending salmon rays out from behind the clouds. But the window that Cass was nearest to was stained with a predominantly green pattern, and so the pink light became stained with the colour of limes. Limelight.
Cass sat in a worn armchair beside the window, looking out. He sat perched on the armrest, his feet bare and resting on the seat. On his knees lay his guitar, and he played it gently, absent-mindedly. The melody staggered from one motif to another as his thoughts staggered from one topic to the next; and the music was disconnected, unplanned, lacking any structure. Cass played like this a lot. Musical reverie, Kennedy had called it once. It didn’t sound great, but it soothed Cass, and that was all that it was supposed to do.
He was thinking about nothing, really. Nothing that mattered. He was thinking about how it had felt to go back to classes for the first time today and feel almost as if he was new, picking new seats beside new people who he’d barely known even before he’d left. He was thinking about his work in the hospital, and the people they’d lost, and the people that he had helped to save – because that was the only way that you could cope, really: the Carers had to think about both sides of what they did. He was thinking about the beautiful day outside, and how he had just taken five minutes to flit around the fields with his super-speed, and feel the sun on his face.
And he was thinking about Lynnie, even though he shouldn’t have been.
He’d barely spoken to her since he’d got here. Barely spoken to her properly, anyway. They had had conversations in the hospital over Kennedy’s bed, but they had not been proper conversations: they were only small talk, and never had Lynn and Cass been left alone. The thought of being left alone with her almost scared him now, as it had never done before.
And the thought of that thought scaring him made him feel a curious feeling of loss. It was strange that he should feel loss now, when in reality he had lost her months ago. He’d never felt loss when he was in Amsterdam, when the loss was fresh and should have hurt the most.
Out of sight, out of mind, he supposed, and the tune tripping from his fingers grew almost melancholy. A shift into a minor key, and the music became slower. Largo.
She hadn’t been out of mind, though. He’d never forgotten her. He’d never even considered the possibility. But, possibly, he’d allowed himself to forget the loss of her. Possibly it would have been too hard, considering the fact that he had been losing a little bit of his mother with every passing day, losing her by degrees. Possibly it was easier to pretend that Lynn would still be there for him when his mother had faded completely.
He’d never consciously thought that she wouldn’t move on, but the subconscious was a powerful thing.
And now he couldn’t do that anymore. Cass had lost her, although Lynn still undoubtedly had him. She probably didn’t want to have him anymore, but that made no difference. Cass couldn’t not be there for her.
She wouldn’t turn to Cass anymore, though. She would turn to him.
“That’s pretty,” a voice said softly – for her – from behind him, and as soon as the voice reached Cass the music stopped abruptly. He turned to look at her.
Lynnie winced. “Oh, Christ – sorry, did I surprise you?”
There was guilt in her eyes when she looked at him now. If she had startled him before there would have been no need for apologies. She would have laughed, and made a joke. He knew this for certain; it had happened dozens of times.
Now she winced.
Cass didn’t like that.
So he smiled slowly, set his guitar down. “Yeah,” he said gently. “But don’t worry about it; I wasn’t doing anything important.”
Lynn smiled back tentatively. “You sure?”
Cass nodded. “Certain.” And he turned in his seat, angled himself so he would face her more directly. She stood about two metres from him, and the limelight fell softly on her face, so that her usually-strong features seemed soft too, and her freckles didn’t stand out as much as they usually did.
Once Lynnie had fallen asleep on the sofa beside Cass, and Cass had watched her for a while. As he had done so, he had tried to count every freckle on her face, starting below her left eye and progressing across her cheekbone, over her nose and down to her lips. At the lips he had lost count, and, deciding not to start again, he had kissed her so gently on her sleeping mouth that she hadn’t woken up.
That had been two weeks before he had to leave.
He shouldn’t have been thinking about that.
Realising this, Cass shook his head slightly, so that it just looked like he was trying to get his hair out of his eyes. He hadn’t thought about things like that in Amsterdam; he shouldn’t have been thinking about them now. It was just harder, when Lynnie stood there in the flesh.
But he’d get used to it eventually. He had to.
He kept his smile fixed in place, and said, “I haven’t seen you up here since I got here.”
Lynn laughed, but it wasn’t her usual laugh – it was a breathless laugh. An awkward laugh. He hadn’t heard her do that before, and the guilt was still in her eyes. “Yeah, me neither. This is the first time since – since the, uh, battle, and all that. Ken said that I should get out of the hospital for a bit – he sort of forced me to go up here, really. Says that I wasn’t built for hospitals.”
Cass laughed, and his laugh wasn’t awkward – it was the same slow laugh that he had used a thousand times before with her. He wasn’t going to make this awkward. “Who was?”
“I don’t know,” Lynn admitted, and her smile became a little more like the smile that Cass remembered. “You and Cardo seem to be pretty well settled in there.”
“That’s nurture, not nature. You get used to it after a while, and it’s different, working there, anyway. If you work there you can detach yourself. If you’re visiting you don’t know how.”
Lynn shook her head, and walked over to a nearby sofa, the back of which faced the chair that Cass was sitting on. She jumped up to sit on the high back, and, when settled, her legs kicked out and swung back and forth like a seven-year-old’s. “Don’t really want to detach myself, though.”
“Well, it’s not complete detaching,” Cass said, after hesitating a minute. “I mean, it hit me pretty hard to see – well, you know.”
“You can say it,” Lynn said. “It doesn’t bother me now that I know it’s going to be OK.”
“All right – it hit me pretty hard to see Kennedy. But when I say detaching – well, you can detach yourself from the atmosphere in there when something like a battle happens, but not from people you know, but then, no one expects you to do that.”
Lynn nodded. “That would be useful, I guess. I mean, it’s the atmosphere… That’s the bit that bothers me. But I thought that was just me.”
Cass laughed. “Nope, it’s pretty much everyone.”
“Well, I don’t know. I mean, you and Cardo are fine, and Arihant… Well, Arihant’s oblivious to everything but Kira right now. Jamie seems OK with it; Kenny’s dealing better than I thought I would; Carmen seems all right. And … well, all right, I don’t think Russ likes the atmosphere, but he’s the only one I’ve noticed it with.”
Unintentionally, Cass’s smile faltered a little. He tried to disguise it by leaning down to pick his guitar up again.
He wasn’t as smooth as he thought he was, though, because Lynn did notice. Her face crumpled into a mask of consternation, and she looked as if she wanted to slap herself. Her words tripped out at a hundred miles an hour.
“Oh – oh, shít, right. Oh… dàmnit – Dàmnit, Cass, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to – I wasn’t going to mention him…”
Cass looked at her, raised an eyebrow. “You can mention him if you want to.”
“No, I can’t!” she said. “I wasn’t going to say anyth – Oh, Jesus Christ, I’m an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot,” Cass asserted. “You can mention your boyfriend if you want to. Why shouldn’t you?”
He felt immensely proud of himself for not tripping up over the word boyfriend.
Lynn looked at Cass with a scrutinising expression. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not really,” Cass said, even though it was. It shouldn’t have been obvious, though. Cass didn’t want the fact that it was weird for Lynn to talk to him about this to be obvious; if it was obvious, then that was awkwardness already. That was a wedge in their friendship already, and that was what Cass didn’t want. He wanted their friendship back, if he couldn’t have anything else.
Lynn snorted. “You’re lying,” she said. It wasn’t an accusation; just a statement.
Cass hesitated. “…Maybe. But I don’t want it to be… I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk to me about anything.”
“I don’t want to feel like that either,” Lynn admitted. “But I do.”
A silence followed; a heavy silence. Lynnie looked down at her feet, and Cass held his guitar, but he did not play. Playing would have felt wrong, now. Or – it wouldn’t have felt wrong, because it never felt wrong, but it would have given away too much. Cass played his thoughts – and it wasn’t usually noticeable, but if he started playing now, the music would be far too accurate a reflection of the cocktail of nostalgia and fear and loss and love that he felt right now for him to be comfortable with it being let out into the room. Even if Lynnie didn’t know the meaning behind the music, it would still be too intimate. It would still be far too personal.
But a couple of seconds later, Cass felt like he needed to break the silence somehow. So he looked directly at her, and he said bluntly, “I never expected you to wait for me.”
Lynn looked up at that, met his gaze with her own cinnamon eyes, and said, after a brief hesitation, “You can say that, Cass, but it was never going to –”
“I mean it,” he interrupted. “I do mean it. I know that it was…”
“It wasn’t wanting to be apart that broke us up,” Lynn said. “It wasn’t. I know it wasn’t, you know it wasn’t. That’s why it sort of… Cass, I feel like I’ve betrayed you.”
“Why on earth should you feel like that?” Cass asked, and he genuinely wanted to know.
“Because… I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I… I don’t want to say it.”
“I want you to say it. Please, Lynni – Lynn,” he said, stopping himself from saying the old name. He shouldn’t say that anymore, should he? It wasn’t appropriate, not anymore.
“…Because I moved on first,” she said, and the guilt was pulsing through her eyes again.
And even though Cass was trying to be the good guy here, and he was trying not to be possessive or regretful or jealous, he still felt a stab of pain at those words. I’ve moved on. Those words were bare, no cushioning the blow and no sugar-coating. It made Cass very painfully aware of his own situation – Lynn had moved on, and Cass hadn’t, so Cass had been left behind.
And being left behind always hurt.
But he wouldn’t let her see that. “Like I said you should,” he said.
“You said that we should move on, you never said that –”
“What, so we should have synced our moving on? Timed it down to the second? Lynni – Lynn, someone had to be first. I honestly prefer that it’s you.”
Lynn looked confused. “Why?”
Because I want you to be happy.
Cass shrugged. “I’unno, just do.”
Lynn didn’t look like she really fully believed that excuse, and the frustration that she seemed to feel at the words both grew and burst in a moment. “Could you maybe stop being such a bloody saint about this?”
Cass blinked. “What?”
“Why are you doing this, Cass? I mean, I know you do this thing where you try to make everyone feel better, but Jesus Christ, aren’t you even slightly angry at me?
“I’m only trying to make this easier for you.”
“I don’t deserve to have it made bloody easier for me!”
“Of course you do.”
“No, I don’t, Cass. Not if you cared about… about what we had. You should be angry with me. You should feel betrayed, you should be –”
Cass looked at Lynn. “Please don’t say that.”
“Say what?”
“Don’t tell me how I’m supposed to be feeling,” Cass said, keeping his voice soft and steady. “I don’t want to be angry with you.”
“I want you to be angry with me,” Lynn countered.
“Well. Tough.”
Lynn looked at Cass, irritation still festering in her eyes with the guilt that hadn’t stopped even through her angry outburst. “How the hell aren’t you angry? If I was in your position –”
“We’re different people.”
“Oh, no shít,” Lynn said sarcastically.
“Why do you want me to be angry?” Cass asked. “I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. Do you think you’ve done something wrong?”
“Please, Cass, not the shrink routine –”
“I’m curious,” he said. “What is this? Do you think you’ve done something wrong? Do you think you shouldn’t have moved on?”
The irritation in Lynn’s eyes seemed to grow helpless. “I don’t think like I’ve done something wrong. And I don’t feel like… Like Russ was a mistake. I don’t feel like that at all. But I don’t… I don’t want to have hurt you. And I feel like I have.”
Cass shook his head, looked away. “It does hurt,” he murmured.
A sudden silence from Lynn – a silence that felt stunned even to Cass.
“Oh, Jesus,” she muttered after a moment. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Cass, I’m –”
“But it doesn’t hurt in a way that makes me feel like you’ve done something wrong,” Cass finished, interrupting her.
Lynn looked at him sceptically and worriedly. “How is that possible?”
Cass shrugged. “Just is. Lynnie, Christ, we’d broken up. We’d been broken up for months. I didn’t really move on, but it wasn’t top of my to-do list, with… with everything else that was going on. I don’t blame you for the fact that we ended. I can’t blame anyone. It just… happened.”
Lynn bit her lip, looked away again. “But if it happened in a way that left you hurt and me happy…”
Cass smiled at her; a small smile. “Are you happy?” he asked. “With him?”
And God help him, half of him didn’t want the answer to be yes, but he knew that, as she blushed her hair awkwardly off her face and an awkward expression graced the face itself, it would be.
“Uh – Well, um, yeah,” she said quietly.
“How long have you been dating for?” Cass asked, ignoring the pain that her answer had caused him.
“Not… Not long,” she answered, seeming uncomfortable with giving Cass specifics. “Only since Christmas. But I’ve known him since – since last summer.”
“Right,” said Cass, and he thumbed a quick arpeggio on his guitar. That arpeggio was agitation, but she wouldn’t know it. “What’s he like?” he asked.
“Um… I don’t know,” Lynn mumbled vaguely.
“Of course you do,” Cass said.
Lynn’s eyes met his again. “Are you sure you want to know?”
“I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t.”
Lynn hesitated, seeming to weigh her words carefully. Cass wasn’t used to seeing Lynn think about what she said – usually, she just blurted out whatever came into her head. It probably wouldn’t have taken him half as much prompting to get a description out of her if it hadn’t been for their history.
“Well… he’s, um, he’s a Warrior, like me. He’s… tall, I guess, though not as tall as you, and he’s got dark hair – He’s very funny, and… oh, I don’t know. Cass, I’m sorry, this feels weird, describing him to you –”
Cass took pity on her, shook his head. “It’s all right. We don’t have to talk about it. I’ll probably see him sooner or later, anyway.”
“Well… yeah, I guess. You probably have already, actually,” Lynn said.
Cass’s eyebrows furrowed at that. “But I thought that he came to Orchid after I left…?”
“What? No – no, he was here for about two months before you left. He came in March – don’t you remember? He’s Madeleine’s cousin, and everything –”
Cass’s blood ran cold with recognition. “You mean… You mean Russ Ford?”
“Um, Cass, there’s not that many Russes here,” she said, seeming slightly put off by Cass’s shock.
“I know, but I didn’t think –”
“Why not? Do you think it’s weird, someone like him being with someone like me?” she asked defensively. If Cass answered this question wrongly, then that defensiveness would swell into full-blown anger. He wasn’t sure why, but he was certain that it would happen.
“No, it’s not weird, I’m just… I’m surprised. I didn’t… That didn’t add up for me.”
Because Cass hadn’t thought that Russ Ford was Lynn’s type. When Cass was in Orchid before Russ Ford had just been rising to the fame which he appeared to have achieved by now. And Cass hadn’t thought that Lynn would go for someone with a record like that, with a history like that. After all, Lynn was best friends with Jamie, who was particularly vocal about how she felt about Don Juan behaviour, and Lynn herself hadn’t been known to ignore behaviour like that in the past. It didn’t seem to really fit.
And on another level Cass had difficulty with the fact that Russ Ford must have been Lynn’s type. Because that made what Lynn and Cass had fit the rumours that there had been about them, about the male Carer and the female Warrior. People were going to see this as Lynn going back to what was right after having tried the unconventional relationship, realising that the male Carer wasn’t good enough for her and going to one of the most macho of all male Warriors instead. And that made Cass look pathetic – and Cass didn’t usually care what other people thought of him, but he did care that this fact made he himself feel pathetic.
“Christ, Lynnie,” Cass said quietly, shaking his head and laughing slightly to try and clear those thoughts. “Always said that you could do better than me.”
And the defensiveness left Lynn’s face abruptly at that sentence, and left the guilt behind again. “He’s not better, not necessarily. Just… different.”
Well, that would have been reassuring if Cass had believed that she meant it.
“Sure, sure,” Cass said, not really acknowledging her words, but keeping the smile in place. “He does make you happy, though?”
Lynn nodded.
“Well, then. That’s fine. I’m happy for you both, then,” Cass stated with a tone of finality. “End of.”
And there was a pause. Then, Lynn finally laughed, and laughed properly. The sound hit Cass with the force of a tidal wave. He hadn’t heard that laugh in so long. And the laugh shattered the tension that had been building for the past few minutes into a million pieces, and, at that, Cass breathed an inward sigh of relief.
“That sounded very final,” she said, slightly teasingly.
“That’s because it is,” Cass said, making his voice overly stern. Comically stern. “You’re now dating Russ Ford. I am now your friend. That’s the new situation. That’s how we’re keeping things, you hear?”
“You don’t do a great bad cop, Cass,” Lynn pointed out, a smile in her voice.
“Silence,” Cass said, his voice still stern, and he furrowed his eyebrows. The effect was slightly ruined by the fact that he, too, was smiling widely. “Of course I do a great bad cop. Now we’re not having this conversation again, understand? We can talk about your boyfriend as much as you want to, but you’re not worrying about hurting me anymore. You didn’t. Circumstances did; you didn’t. So stop blaming yourself or… I’ll, uh, send the boys round. Yeah. And they don’t play nice.”
Lynn was laughing. And it felt nice, that he’d been able to make her smile again. If he could still make her smile then he hadn’t lost everything.
“OK. OK, fair enough. Can I ask a question, though?” she said, still laughing.
“You may ask one,” he said authoritatively.
“Who are the ‘boys’?”
Cass kept playing along. “Their identities are remaining secret.”
“Oh,” said Lynn, and her face became an exaggeration of disappointment – she was practically pouting. “Right. I see. Henchman confidentiality, and all that.”
“It’s one of the first lessons in Carer training.”
“Oh, of course, of course. I only asked, you see, because I thought that – considering our friends – that it seemed pretty likely that the ‘boys’ would be Kenny and Cardo, in which case… Well, you’re right, they don’t play nice, but I’m thinking I’d be better at, uh, ‘not playing nice’ than they are.”
“Hey, Cardo packs one hell of a punch,” said Cass defensively.
“And how do you know that?” Lynn asked, raising an eyebrow.
“We saw a yellow car in Cardsdale and he got in there first.”
“You what?”
“A yellow car in the street. You know. You see a yellow car, you punch the person beside – What? Stop looking at me like I’m mad, lots of people do it.”
Lynn’s eyebrow looked as if it was attempting to go into orbit. “I… see. Interesting games you play. So Cardo could give me a good thump if he wanted to, then? That’s what the long and short of the yellow car game is?”
“It’s not a game, it’s a tradition. It’s a way of life,” asserted Cass. “And yes. That’s basically what I’m telling you here.”
Lynn leant forward on her perch so that her elbows rested on her knees. “Could he drop me?”
“Well, that depends. What is ‘dropping’ you?”
Lynn laughed. “Oh, the Carer innocence – could he get me down on the ground?”
“I’m guessing you mean in a combat way and not in a dirty way,” Cass said, raising an eyebrow.
“He would have no desire to get me down on the ground in a dirty way – combat, of course. Whatcha think?”
“Well… no, probably not,” he admitted.
“Aha, then I would win!” Lynn said triumphantly. “And so the Warriors come out on top again.”
“Hey, you haven’t even thought about Kennedy here. Spies have combat training.”
“Pfft, Kennedy wouldn’t hurt me,” Lynn said dismissively.
“Uh, I’ve seen you two fighting.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s not real fighting. Just a couple of kicks and stuff. That’s just brothers and sisters. That’s what we do.”
“Is it, now? Haven’t seen Cardo and Trissy at each others’ throats lately.”
“Well, there’s too much of an age difference, there. Wouldn’t be fair on Triss.”
“Ageist!” accused Cass.
“I’m not being an ageist! I am simply stating that your threat to set the boys after me isn’t a very effective one. Hence, you are a bad bad cop.”
“Well, you’re a bad bad bad cop,” Cass said childishly.
Lynn laughed. “Oh, mature, Caspar.”
“Very, Lyndsey,” he agreed, and he grinned lopsidedly.
At that moment, a bell sounded, its shrill ringing poking a hole in their conversation as they both flinched and lost track of their thoughts. Cass turned around and looked at the clock.
“Oh. Dinnertime,” he said, surprised. “I’ve completely lost track of the Orchid timetable, then. I had no idea it was so close.”
Lynn shrugged. “Well, so has everyone, though. I don’t think dinnertime means a lot right now; there probably won’t be that many people down there. There’s still… still quite a few who aren’t leaving the hospital, y’know?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Cass said, and turned to face Lynn again. “You want to go to the canteen, then, or are you headed back to the hospital?”
“I think I should go back to the hospital, actually,” Lynn decided after a moment’s deliberation. “I know Kennedy wants me out of there, but… It came too close. I don’t want to leave him for too long; it doesn’t feel… right yet.”
Cass nodded. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Well. Here, I’ll come down with you, then. I have another shift starting in twenty minutes; might as well get a head start.”
“You sure? Aren’t you hungry?”
“Well, yeah, but there’s food in the hospital. Cardo and Anna have a huge stash of chocolate digestives in the staff room.”
Lynn raised an eyebrow. “Really? I’ve never heard about this stash.”
Cass paused a minute, then his eyes grew wide. “Oh, right, yeah, crap. Secret stash of digestives.”
Lynn laughed. “Well, don’t worry,” she said, jumping up and walking over to where Cass was. “The secret of the stash of digestives is safe with me. Anyways, you coming?”
“Yup,” said Cass, grabbing his guitar and shoving it into his case before standing up and swinging the case onto his back. The entire process took about a second. He then turned to Lynn, and said, “Well, after you, Lynnie.”
Lynn stared at him, blinked, then laughed. “Sorry, forgot how annoying that speedy thing is,” she said, grinning wickedly.
“Wha – Annoying? It’s not annoying! It’s fantastic, that’s what it is. You’re just jealous. I bet you secretly missed it.”
Lynn laughed. “Yeah, of course, that’s what it is.”
And Cass’s mock-outrage morphed into mock-hurt. “You didn’t miss me, then, Lynnie?”
And Lynn’s laughter grew awkward for a moment before dying away, and she looked at him appraisingly, as if she were trying to figure out what exactly Cass had meant by that. He hoped that the smile on his face would convince her that that wasn’t meant as flirting, or anything, and was suddenly terrified that she would take it that way. That would completely screw up all the progress they’d made in the last few minutes.
But Lynn seemed to figure out what he meant, and her limelight-softened face grew even softer as she smiled at him, and said, “Don’t be stupid, Cass, ‘course I missed you.”
And Cass’s grin returned as he realised that she had taken it the right way: as friends, and he replied, “Ditto.”
Lynnie grinned back at him, and then they started to walk down to the hospital.
As friends.
That was clearly how Lynnie was seeing him, now. He hadn’t thought that it would happen so fast, so easily. He’d wanted it to happen that way, of course, but he’d always assumed that it would be more difficult than that. But then, Lynnie wasn’t usually difficult, or, at least, not in that way. He shouldn’t have been expecting it to be hard.
It hadn’t been. It had been fast, like ripping off a plaster. And it had left Lynn seeing him as a friend, thank God.
All Cass had to do now was make himself see her in that way.
The light was the colour of split limes, and spilt through the window with the same glistening quality.
It had been a beautiful day, the first proper spring day that they’d seen so far. The sun had scattered gently over the scarred landscape, the burnt forest that those Carers who specialised in plant work were straining so hard to rebuild to even a shadow of its former glory and the school which lay suppressed by the weight of the grief and defeat of hundreds of students. Now the sun was sinking below the horizon, sending salmon rays out from behind the clouds. But the window that Cass was nearest to was stained with a predominantly green pattern, and so the pink light became stained with the colour of limes. Limelight.
Cass sat in a worn armchair beside the window, looking out. He sat perched on the armrest, his feet bare and resting on the seat. On his knees lay his guitar, and he played it gently, absent-mindedly. The melody staggered from one motif to another as his thoughts staggered from one topic to the next; and the music was disconnected, unplanned, lacking any structure. Cass played like this a lot. Musical reverie, Kennedy had called it once. It didn’t sound great, but it soothed Cass, and that was all that it was supposed to do.
He was thinking about nothing, really. Nothing that mattered. He was thinking about how it had felt to go back to classes for the first time today and feel almost as if he was new, picking new seats beside new people who he’d barely known even before he’d left. He was thinking about his work in the hospital, and the people they’d lost, and the people that he had helped to save – because that was the only way that you could cope, really: the Carers had to think about both sides of what they did. He was thinking about the beautiful day outside, and how he had just taken five minutes to flit around the fields with his super-speed, and feel the sun on his face.
And he was thinking about Lynnie, even though he shouldn’t have been.
He’d barely spoken to her since he’d got here. Barely spoken to her properly, anyway. They had had conversations in the hospital over Kennedy’s bed, but they had not been proper conversations: they were only small talk, and never had Lynn and Cass been left alone. The thought of being left alone with her almost scared him now, as it had never done before.
And the thought of that thought scaring him made him feel a curious feeling of loss. It was strange that he should feel loss now, when in reality he had lost her months ago. He’d never felt loss when he was in Amsterdam, when the loss was fresh and should have hurt the most.
Out of sight, out of mind, he supposed, and the tune tripping from his fingers grew almost melancholy. A shift into a minor key, and the music became slower. Largo.
She hadn’t been out of mind, though. He’d never forgotten her. He’d never even considered the possibility. But, possibly, he’d allowed himself to forget the loss of her. Possibly it would have been too hard, considering the fact that he had been losing a little bit of his mother with every passing day, losing her by degrees. Possibly it was easier to pretend that Lynn would still be there for him when his mother had faded completely.
He’d never consciously thought that she wouldn’t move on, but the subconscious was a powerful thing.
And now he couldn’t do that anymore. Cass had lost her, although Lynn still undoubtedly had him. She probably didn’t want to have him anymore, but that made no difference. Cass couldn’t not be there for her.
She wouldn’t turn to Cass anymore, though. She would turn to him.
“That’s pretty,” a voice said softly – for her – from behind him, and as soon as the voice reached Cass the music stopped abruptly. He turned to look at her.
Lynnie winced. “Oh, Christ – sorry, did I surprise you?”
There was guilt in her eyes when she looked at him now. If she had startled him before there would have been no need for apologies. She would have laughed, and made a joke. He knew this for certain; it had happened dozens of times.
Now she winced.
Cass didn’t like that.
So he smiled slowly, set his guitar down. “Yeah,” he said gently. “But don’t worry about it; I wasn’t doing anything important.”
Lynn smiled back tentatively. “You sure?”
Cass nodded. “Certain.” And he turned in his seat, angled himself so he would face her more directly. She stood about two metres from him, and the limelight fell softly on her face, so that her usually-strong features seemed soft too, and her freckles didn’t stand out as much as they usually did.
Once Lynnie had fallen asleep on the sofa beside Cass, and Cass had watched her for a while. As he had done so, he had tried to count every freckle on her face, starting below her left eye and progressing across her cheekbone, over her nose and down to her lips. At the lips he had lost count, and, deciding not to start again, he had kissed her so gently on her sleeping mouth that she hadn’t woken up.
That had been two weeks before he had to leave.
He shouldn’t have been thinking about that.
Realising this, Cass shook his head slightly, so that it just looked like he was trying to get his hair out of his eyes. He hadn’t thought about things like that in Amsterdam; he shouldn’t have been thinking about them now. It was just harder, when Lynnie stood there in the flesh.
But he’d get used to it eventually. He had to.
He kept his smile fixed in place, and said, “I haven’t seen you up here since I got here.”
Lynn laughed, but it wasn’t her usual laugh – it was a breathless laugh. An awkward laugh. He hadn’t heard her do that before, and the guilt was still in her eyes. “Yeah, me neither. This is the first time since – since the, uh, battle, and all that. Ken said that I should get out of the hospital for a bit – he sort of forced me to go up here, really. Says that I wasn’t built for hospitals.”
Cass laughed, and his laugh wasn’t awkward – it was the same slow laugh that he had used a thousand times before with her. He wasn’t going to make this awkward. “Who was?”
“I don’t know,” Lynn admitted, and her smile became a little more like the smile that Cass remembered. “You and Cardo seem to be pretty well settled in there.”
“That’s nurture, not nature. You get used to it after a while, and it’s different, working there, anyway. If you work there you can detach yourself. If you’re visiting you don’t know how.”
Lynn shook her head, and walked over to a nearby sofa, the back of which faced the chair that Cass was sitting on. She jumped up to sit on the high back, and, when settled, her legs kicked out and swung back and forth like a seven-year-old’s. “Don’t really want to detach myself, though.”
“Well, it’s not complete detaching,” Cass said, after hesitating a minute. “I mean, it hit me pretty hard to see – well, you know.”
“You can say it,” Lynn said. “It doesn’t bother me now that I know it’s going to be OK.”
“All right – it hit me pretty hard to see Kennedy. But when I say detaching – well, you can detach yourself from the atmosphere in there when something like a battle happens, but not from people you know, but then, no one expects you to do that.”
Lynn nodded. “That would be useful, I guess. I mean, it’s the atmosphere… That’s the bit that bothers me. But I thought that was just me.”
Cass laughed. “Nope, it’s pretty much everyone.”
“Well, I don’t know. I mean, you and Cardo are fine, and Arihant… Well, Arihant’s oblivious to everything but Kira right now. Jamie seems OK with it; Kenny’s dealing better than I thought I would; Carmen seems all right. And … well, all right, I don’t think Russ likes the atmosphere, but he’s the only one I’ve noticed it with.”
Unintentionally, Cass’s smile faltered a little. He tried to disguise it by leaning down to pick his guitar up again.
He wasn’t as smooth as he thought he was, though, because Lynn did notice. Her face crumpled into a mask of consternation, and she looked as if she wanted to slap herself. Her words tripped out at a hundred miles an hour.
“Oh – oh, shít, right. Oh… dàmnit – Dàmnit, Cass, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to – I wasn’t going to mention him…”
Cass looked at her, raised an eyebrow. “You can mention him if you want to.”
“No, I can’t!” she said. “I wasn’t going to say anyth – Oh, Jesus Christ, I’m an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot,” Cass asserted. “You can mention your boyfriend if you want to. Why shouldn’t you?”
He felt immensely proud of himself for not tripping up over the word boyfriend.
Lynn looked at Cass with a scrutinising expression. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not really,” Cass said, even though it was. It shouldn’t have been obvious, though. Cass didn’t want the fact that it was weird for Lynn to talk to him about this to be obvious; if it was obvious, then that was awkwardness already. That was a wedge in their friendship already, and that was what Cass didn’t want. He wanted their friendship back, if he couldn’t have anything else.
Lynn snorted. “You’re lying,” she said. It wasn’t an accusation; just a statement.
Cass hesitated. “…Maybe. But I don’t want it to be… I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk to me about anything.”
“I don’t want to feel like that either,” Lynn admitted. “But I do.”
A silence followed; a heavy silence. Lynnie looked down at her feet, and Cass held his guitar, but he did not play. Playing would have felt wrong, now. Or – it wouldn’t have felt wrong, because it never felt wrong, but it would have given away too much. Cass played his thoughts – and it wasn’t usually noticeable, but if he started playing now, the music would be far too accurate a reflection of the cocktail of nostalgia and fear and loss and love that he felt right now for him to be comfortable with it being let out into the room. Even if Lynnie didn’t know the meaning behind the music, it would still be too intimate. It would still be far too personal.
But a couple of seconds later, Cass felt like he needed to break the silence somehow. So he looked directly at her, and he said bluntly, “I never expected you to wait for me.”
Lynn looked up at that, met his gaze with her own cinnamon eyes, and said, after a brief hesitation, “You can say that, Cass, but it was never going to –”
“I mean it,” he interrupted. “I do mean it. I know that it was…”
“It wasn’t wanting to be apart that broke us up,” Lynn said. “It wasn’t. I know it wasn’t, you know it wasn’t. That’s why it sort of… Cass, I feel like I’ve betrayed you.”
“Why on earth should you feel like that?” Cass asked, and he genuinely wanted to know.
“Because… I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I… I don’t want to say it.”
“I want you to say it. Please, Lynni – Lynn,” he said, stopping himself from saying the old name. He shouldn’t say that anymore, should he? It wasn’t appropriate, not anymore.
“…Because I moved on first,” she said, and the guilt was pulsing through her eyes again.
And even though Cass was trying to be the good guy here, and he was trying not to be possessive or regretful or jealous, he still felt a stab of pain at those words. I’ve moved on. Those words were bare, no cushioning the blow and no sugar-coating. It made Cass very painfully aware of his own situation – Lynn had moved on, and Cass hadn’t, so Cass had been left behind.
And being left behind always hurt.
But he wouldn’t let her see that. “Like I said you should,” he said.
“You said that we should move on, you never said that –”
“What, so we should have synced our moving on? Timed it down to the second? Lynni – Lynn, someone had to be first. I honestly prefer that it’s you.”
Lynn looked confused. “Why?”
Because I want you to be happy.
Cass shrugged. “I’unno, just do.”
Lynn didn’t look like she really fully believed that excuse, and the frustration that she seemed to feel at the words both grew and burst in a moment. “Could you maybe stop being such a bloody saint about this?”
Cass blinked. “What?”
“Why are you doing this, Cass? I mean, I know you do this thing where you try to make everyone feel better, but Jesus Christ, aren’t you even slightly angry at me?
“I’m only trying to make this easier for you.”
“I don’t deserve to have it made bloody easier for me!”
“Of course you do.”
“No, I don’t, Cass. Not if you cared about… about what we had. You should be angry with me. You should feel betrayed, you should be –”
Cass looked at Lynn. “Please don’t say that.”
“Say what?”
“Don’t tell me how I’m supposed to be feeling,” Cass said, keeping his voice soft and steady. “I don’t want to be angry with you.”
“I want you to be angry with me,” Lynn countered.
“Well. Tough.”
Lynn looked at Cass, irritation still festering in her eyes with the guilt that hadn’t stopped even through her angry outburst. “How the hell aren’t you angry? If I was in your position –”
“We’re different people.”
“Oh, no shít,” Lynn said sarcastically.
“Why do you want me to be angry?” Cass asked. “I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. Do you think you’ve done something wrong?”
“Please, Cass, not the shrink routine –”
“I’m curious,” he said. “What is this? Do you think you’ve done something wrong? Do you think you shouldn’t have moved on?”
The irritation in Lynn’s eyes seemed to grow helpless. “I don’t think like I’ve done something wrong. And I don’t feel like… Like Russ was a mistake. I don’t feel like that at all. But I don’t… I don’t want to have hurt you. And I feel like I have.”
Cass shook his head, looked away. “It does hurt,” he murmured.
A sudden silence from Lynn – a silence that felt stunned even to Cass.
“Oh, Jesus,” she muttered after a moment. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Cass, I’m –”
“But it doesn’t hurt in a way that makes me feel like you’ve done something wrong,” Cass finished, interrupting her.
Lynn looked at him sceptically and worriedly. “How is that possible?”
Cass shrugged. “Just is. Lynnie, Christ, we’d broken up. We’d been broken up for months. I didn’t really move on, but it wasn’t top of my to-do list, with… with everything else that was going on. I don’t blame you for the fact that we ended. I can’t blame anyone. It just… happened.”
Lynn bit her lip, looked away again. “But if it happened in a way that left you hurt and me happy…”
Cass smiled at her; a small smile. “Are you happy?” he asked. “With him?”
And God help him, half of him didn’t want the answer to be yes, but he knew that, as she blushed her hair awkwardly off her face and an awkward expression graced the face itself, it would be.
“Uh – Well, um, yeah,” she said quietly.
“How long have you been dating for?” Cass asked, ignoring the pain that her answer had caused him.
“Not… Not long,” she answered, seeming uncomfortable with giving Cass specifics. “Only since Christmas. But I’ve known him since – since last summer.”
“Right,” said Cass, and he thumbed a quick arpeggio on his guitar. That arpeggio was agitation, but she wouldn’t know it. “What’s he like?” he asked.
“Um… I don’t know,” Lynn mumbled vaguely.
“Of course you do,” Cass said.
Lynn’s eyes met his again. “Are you sure you want to know?”
“I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t.”
Lynn hesitated, seeming to weigh her words carefully. Cass wasn’t used to seeing Lynn think about what she said – usually, she just blurted out whatever came into her head. It probably wouldn’t have taken him half as much prompting to get a description out of her if it hadn’t been for their history.
“Well… he’s, um, he’s a Warrior, like me. He’s… tall, I guess, though not as tall as you, and he’s got dark hair – He’s very funny, and… oh, I don’t know. Cass, I’m sorry, this feels weird, describing him to you –”
Cass took pity on her, shook his head. “It’s all right. We don’t have to talk about it. I’ll probably see him sooner or later, anyway.”
“Well… yeah, I guess. You probably have already, actually,” Lynn said.
Cass’s eyebrows furrowed at that. “But I thought that he came to Orchid after I left…?”
“What? No – no, he was here for about two months before you left. He came in March – don’t you remember? He’s Madeleine’s cousin, and everything –”
Cass’s blood ran cold with recognition. “You mean… You mean Russ Ford?”
“Um, Cass, there’s not that many Russes here,” she said, seeming slightly put off by Cass’s shock.
“I know, but I didn’t think –”
“Why not? Do you think it’s weird, someone like him being with someone like me?” she asked defensively. If Cass answered this question wrongly, then that defensiveness would swell into full-blown anger. He wasn’t sure why, but he was certain that it would happen.
“No, it’s not weird, I’m just… I’m surprised. I didn’t… That didn’t add up for me.”
Because Cass hadn’t thought that Russ Ford was Lynn’s type. When Cass was in Orchid before Russ Ford had just been rising to the fame which he appeared to have achieved by now. And Cass hadn’t thought that Lynn would go for someone with a record like that, with a history like that. After all, Lynn was best friends with Jamie, who was particularly vocal about how she felt about Don Juan behaviour, and Lynn herself hadn’t been known to ignore behaviour like that in the past. It didn’t seem to really fit.
And on another level Cass had difficulty with the fact that Russ Ford must have been Lynn’s type. Because that made what Lynn and Cass had fit the rumours that there had been about them, about the male Carer and the female Warrior. People were going to see this as Lynn going back to what was right after having tried the unconventional relationship, realising that the male Carer wasn’t good enough for her and going to one of the most macho of all male Warriors instead. And that made Cass look pathetic – and Cass didn’t usually care what other people thought of him, but he did care that this fact made he himself feel pathetic.
“Christ, Lynnie,” Cass said quietly, shaking his head and laughing slightly to try and clear those thoughts. “Always said that you could do better than me.”
And the defensiveness left Lynn’s face abruptly at that sentence, and left the guilt behind again. “He’s not better, not necessarily. Just… different.”
Well, that would have been reassuring if Cass had believed that she meant it.
“Sure, sure,” Cass said, not really acknowledging her words, but keeping the smile in place. “He does make you happy, though?”
Lynn nodded.
“Well, then. That’s fine. I’m happy for you both, then,” Cass stated with a tone of finality. “End of.”
And there was a pause. Then, Lynn finally laughed, and laughed properly. The sound hit Cass with the force of a tidal wave. He hadn’t heard that laugh in so long. And the laugh shattered the tension that had been building for the past few minutes into a million pieces, and, at that, Cass breathed an inward sigh of relief.
“That sounded very final,” she said, slightly teasingly.
“That’s because it is,” Cass said, making his voice overly stern. Comically stern. “You’re now dating Russ Ford. I am now your friend. That’s the new situation. That’s how we’re keeping things, you hear?”
“You don’t do a great bad cop, Cass,” Lynn pointed out, a smile in her voice.
“Silence,” Cass said, his voice still stern, and he furrowed his eyebrows. The effect was slightly ruined by the fact that he, too, was smiling widely. “Of course I do a great bad cop. Now we’re not having this conversation again, understand? We can talk about your boyfriend as much as you want to, but you’re not worrying about hurting me anymore. You didn’t. Circumstances did; you didn’t. So stop blaming yourself or… I’ll, uh, send the boys round. Yeah. And they don’t play nice.”
Lynn was laughing. And it felt nice, that he’d been able to make her smile again. If he could still make her smile then he hadn’t lost everything.
“OK. OK, fair enough. Can I ask a question, though?” she said, still laughing.
“You may ask one,” he said authoritatively.
“Who are the ‘boys’?”
Cass kept playing along. “Their identities are remaining secret.”
“Oh,” said Lynn, and her face became an exaggeration of disappointment – she was practically pouting. “Right. I see. Henchman confidentiality, and all that.”
“It’s one of the first lessons in Carer training.”
“Oh, of course, of course. I only asked, you see, because I thought that – considering our friends – that it seemed pretty likely that the ‘boys’ would be Kenny and Cardo, in which case… Well, you’re right, they don’t play nice, but I’m thinking I’d be better at, uh, ‘not playing nice’ than they are.”
“Hey, Cardo packs one hell of a punch,” said Cass defensively.
“And how do you know that?” Lynn asked, raising an eyebrow.
“We saw a yellow car in Cardsdale and he got in there first.”
“You what?”
“A yellow car in the street. You know. You see a yellow car, you punch the person beside – What? Stop looking at me like I’m mad, lots of people do it.”
Lynn’s eyebrow looked as if it was attempting to go into orbit. “I… see. Interesting games you play. So Cardo could give me a good thump if he wanted to, then? That’s what the long and short of the yellow car game is?”
“It’s not a game, it’s a tradition. It’s a way of life,” asserted Cass. “And yes. That’s basically what I’m telling you here.”
Lynn leant forward on her perch so that her elbows rested on her knees. “Could he drop me?”
“Well, that depends. What is ‘dropping’ you?”
Lynn laughed. “Oh, the Carer innocence – could he get me down on the ground?”
“I’m guessing you mean in a combat way and not in a dirty way,” Cass said, raising an eyebrow.
“He would have no desire to get me down on the ground in a dirty way – combat, of course. Whatcha think?”
“Well… no, probably not,” he admitted.
“Aha, then I would win!” Lynn said triumphantly. “And so the Warriors come out on top again.”
“Hey, you haven’t even thought about Kennedy here. Spies have combat training.”
“Pfft, Kennedy wouldn’t hurt me,” Lynn said dismissively.
“Uh, I’ve seen you two fighting.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s not real fighting. Just a couple of kicks and stuff. That’s just brothers and sisters. That’s what we do.”
“Is it, now? Haven’t seen Cardo and Trissy at each others’ throats lately.”
“Well, there’s too much of an age difference, there. Wouldn’t be fair on Triss.”
“Ageist!” accused Cass.
“I’m not being an ageist! I am simply stating that your threat to set the boys after me isn’t a very effective one. Hence, you are a bad bad cop.”
“Well, you’re a bad bad bad cop,” Cass said childishly.
Lynn laughed. “Oh, mature, Caspar.”
“Very, Lyndsey,” he agreed, and he grinned lopsidedly.
At that moment, a bell sounded, its shrill ringing poking a hole in their conversation as they both flinched and lost track of their thoughts. Cass turned around and looked at the clock.
“Oh. Dinnertime,” he said, surprised. “I’ve completely lost track of the Orchid timetable, then. I had no idea it was so close.”
Lynn shrugged. “Well, so has everyone, though. I don’t think dinnertime means a lot right now; there probably won’t be that many people down there. There’s still… still quite a few who aren’t leaving the hospital, y’know?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Cass said, and turned to face Lynn again. “You want to go to the canteen, then, or are you headed back to the hospital?”
“I think I should go back to the hospital, actually,” Lynn decided after a moment’s deliberation. “I know Kennedy wants me out of there, but… It came too close. I don’t want to leave him for too long; it doesn’t feel… right yet.”
Cass nodded. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Well. Here, I’ll come down with you, then. I have another shift starting in twenty minutes; might as well get a head start.”
“You sure? Aren’t you hungry?”
“Well, yeah, but there’s food in the hospital. Cardo and Anna have a huge stash of chocolate digestives in the staff room.”
Lynn raised an eyebrow. “Really? I’ve never heard about this stash.”
Cass paused a minute, then his eyes grew wide. “Oh, right, yeah, crap. Secret stash of digestives.”
Lynn laughed. “Well, don’t worry,” she said, jumping up and walking over to where Cass was. “The secret of the stash of digestives is safe with me. Anyways, you coming?”
“Yup,” said Cass, grabbing his guitar and shoving it into his case before standing up and swinging the case onto his back. The entire process took about a second. He then turned to Lynn, and said, “Well, after you, Lynnie.”
Lynn stared at him, blinked, then laughed. “Sorry, forgot how annoying that speedy thing is,” she said, grinning wickedly.
“Wha – Annoying? It’s not annoying! It’s fantastic, that’s what it is. You’re just jealous. I bet you secretly missed it.”
Lynn laughed. “Yeah, of course, that’s what it is.”
And Cass’s mock-outrage morphed into mock-hurt. “You didn’t miss me, then, Lynnie?”
And Lynn’s laughter grew awkward for a moment before dying away, and she looked at him appraisingly, as if she were trying to figure out what exactly Cass had meant by that. He hoped that the smile on his face would convince her that that wasn’t meant as flirting, or anything, and was suddenly terrified that she would take it that way. That would completely screw up all the progress they’d made in the last few minutes.
But Lynn seemed to figure out what he meant, and her limelight-softened face grew even softer as she smiled at him, and said, “Don’t be stupid, Cass, ‘course I missed you.”
And Cass’s grin returned as he realised that she had taken it the right way: as friends, and he replied, “Ditto.”
Lynnie grinned back at him, and then they started to walk down to the hospital.
As friends.
That was clearly how Lynnie was seeing him, now. He hadn’t thought that it would happen so fast, so easily. He’d wanted it to happen that way, of course, but he’d always assumed that it would be more difficult than that. But then, Lynnie wasn’t usually difficult, or, at least, not in that way. He shouldn’t have been expecting it to be hard.
It hadn’t been. It had been fast, like ripping off a plaster. And it had left Lynn seeing him as a friend, thank God.
All Cass had to do now was make himself see her in that way.
