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Aleksy sighed. It made sense, but at the same time, he thought... he didn't know what he thought. "We don't know that," he said. "There was... a girl. A wraith, really..."

And again, something in his throat seized up at the mention of the wraith-girl, and he sat up suddenly and gagged on nothing. "I can't say," he choked, coughing until he could speak more clearly. "I don't know what I am."

Aleksy almost relaxed into Eve's arms, weird fox-ness notwithstanding. Almost, because he could sense the energy flowing from those points of contact, the places skin touched skin. "Mom!" He shouted it, not for effect, not to grab Eve or Leila's attention: he was panicked, and he wrested himself from Eve's arms and hauled off the couch, hands up in a don't touch me gesture. "Don't," he said, "I don't want to--I can't control me--Are you okay?" He looked at Leila, black eyes wide, hair falling every which-way. "You can't do that. You can't."

"But I don't want to," said Aleksy, sitting down on the floor, his back against the couch. He didn't shrug off Eve's hand; he wanted to list towards it as he always did, hungry for a friendly touch as he ever was. In public, it was one thing. This was private. This was family. "I feel disgusting," he said. "I don't want to be like this."

A response pinged not even a couple minutes later.



There was another text a moment later.

"Yes," said Aleksy, still holding himself tight and rigid in his own arms.

In the end, it was less the eating other people's energy thing than it was the dependence that scared him. He liked to be around Eve and Leila and Mercer and Finn, but if he had to, he could cut and run. It would hurt and he'd hate it but he could do it, he could go live a life in the mountains as a hermit and be happy. That was kind of The Fantasy, the one he retreated to when dealing with a particularly awful person as sometimes happened, things being as they were. Only now he had a choice, and it was, to him, a perfectly awful choice, as if some greater power had cracked open his head and done the most awful thing it could imagine with his fears.

He could agree to be dependent on people, reach out and ask people for help in a way that he couldn't ignore or pretend not to recognize or ever ever repay. Or he could die, and waste all the effort it'd taken to get out of Russia, out of that whole sorry mess that had been the first twenty years of his life. The entire situation : did he want to cut off his left arm or his right? Either way, it was going to suck, but one version of it would suck less. A lot less.

Aleksy picked restlessly at the hem of his shirtsleeve. "May I stay with you. For just a little while." The words crushed out of him like glass in a compactor, but he said them, and they were some of the most painful words he'd ever had to pronounce. Not that he was going to admit it, not even to people he trusted so implicitly.