Word Count: 4074

“How old were you when you first started dancing?”

Of all the help he’d been encouraged to seek following his trip to the hospital, this was by far the worst.

Paris didn’t want to see a therapist. If he’d had more of a choice in the matter, he wouldn’t have gone. He’d refused when his mother had suggested it at the beginning of July, and he’d spent much of the last six days continuing down that same path, never once veering off into more accepting territory, ranting against it until he was red in the face, slamming doors and hiding away when his mother attempted to coax him into agreement.

But circumstances changed, often without warning, and so it was that Paris found himself begrudgingly sitting on the clichéd leather couch in a dimly lit office across from a kind, patient woman who kept jotting down notes on a pad of paper.

He wondered what she was writing but didn’t care enough to try asking her.

“I don’t know,” he said with a careless shrug, staring down at the rug beneath his feet instead of looking across at her. “When I was really young. I don’t remember exactly when.”

“How did you start?”

“I liked music. Mom enrolled me in a Kindermusik class. Then dance after that. I liked it. I was good at it.”

“And you do ballet?” she asked.

“Mostly,” he said.

“What is it about ballet that you like so much?” she wondered.

Paris shrugged again and looked over at the door, tempted to get up and leave. He didn’t see what ballet had to do with anything.

“I like the structure,” he said.

He wouldn’t have come here at all if he hadn’t been firmly cowed into submission by the one person in all the world it seemed he could never refuse—not that he’d ever put much of an effort into trying. The fight always seeped out of him before he could.

He had no problem arguing with his mother without feeling too much guilt. He could tell her “no” all he wanted, remind her that he was eighteen-years-old and capable of making his own decisions, point out that he’d been taking care of himself—largely without her help—for the last eight years.

Chris, too, he could argue with when he needed to, or turn a pair of large, sad eyes on him until his boyfriend caved. He could whine to Momma Gallo, look to her for pity and let her coddle him until they both felt better, and convince her that this wasn’t necessary, that all he needed was to sit in her kitchen with her and let her pet him and bake him sweets. Even Peter could be thrown off the trail after a while, distracted from his arguments by kindness and the promise of company, and then coerced—like many lonely, impressionable kids—into Paris’s point of view.

But Paris could never refuse Chris’s father. Beau didn’t even have to say anything, just stand there and look at him with his sharp blue eyes full of expectation, and Paris backed down and murmured in unwilling agreement. All it took was that kind, dignified voice gently reminding him how many people were worried about him, how he wasn’t doing himself any favors by refusing, how simple it would be for them to believe him when he said he was alright if he would just sit through the appointment and try, and Paris backed down with a sullen frown and mumbled a quiet “Yes, Sir.”

Of course, that didn’t mean he had to like it. He didn’t even have to make it easy now that he was there.

“Were you ever bullied in school?” the therapist asked him, jumping from topic to topic in a such a way that made it seem deliberately random, though he was sure there was some sort of a method to it he wasn’t yet aware of.

She wasn’t a very old woman, probably somewhere in her early- to mid-thirties, old enough to give off an appropriate image of competence and maturity but young enough to empathize through the generational gap. Instead of the formal sort of business suits his mother wore to work, this woman was dressed in a simple blouse and a comfortable pair of jeans—perhaps for her comfort, perhaps for his own. Paris thought he could have liked her if he weren’t stuck on the defensive, if it wasn’t her job to dig into his personal business and analyze his behavior.

He thought he did an okay job analyzing himself without her assistance.

“Of course I was bullied in school,” Paris replied, leaning back into the leather couch and crossing his arms over his chest. He kept his gaze removed from her, glancing off to the side again.

“Why ‘of course’?”

“If you look at me I figure it’s fairly obvious why I’d be picked on,” he said, and then finished with, “It doesn’t really matter.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?” she asked.

“Other kids had it worse than me.”

“And you don’t think you have any right to be upset about it?”

“It’s done and over with,” Paris said with another shrug. “Kids picked on me on the playground in elementary school, or shoved me against the lockers and gave me a hard time in high school. It wasn’t a big deal. I could take care of myself. I’m done with high school. I’ve been out of there for a year now.”

“You dropped out,” she clarified.

Paris nodded.

“Why?” she asked.

“Not because I was picked on,” Paris told her before she could make the assumption on her own. “I left because my dad got sick and I wanted to help him out at the shop.”

He didn’t want to talk about any of this. He barely talked about it with his friends and family. Having it brought up by a stranger who he didn’t think could ever understand was way out of his comfort level. He didn’t even know why he was answering except that he didn’t want her thinking things about him or about his life that weren’t true. He didn’t like the wild guesses and the speculation. If he weren’t so intent on correcting that he would have sat there and kept his silence the way he’d intended to when he first walked in.

“Do you think you deserved it?” she prodded him. “Being picked on?”

“No one deserves it,” he said.

“I wasn’t asking about other people,” she gently countered. “I was asking if you think you deserved it.”

Paris paused before he could give an immediate response, thinking her question over and trying to figure out what she was getting at. “Are you asking if I think there’s something wrong with me?” he wondered.

“I’m asking if you think you deserved to be picked on,” she repeated.

“No,” he said simply, “I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand why other people feel the need to do it.”

This was a waste of his time, he thought. He had no idea what the doctors or his mother or anyone else expected this to do for him. It was pointless. How could anyone think going over his life was going to help? He wasn’t here because some a*****e gave him a hard time in school. He’d brushed that sort of behavior off and moved on a long time ago. It didn’t make him feel anxious, or keep him up at night, or give him a poor sense of self-worth. If she wanted to get into that sort of stuff, she’d picked the wrong person. There were plenty of other people out there who could tell her worse stories than the sort of petty bullshit he’d had to deal with.

He knew himself better than anyone else did—better than this woman could ever hope to. He knew what was wrong with his life, the problems he’d caused for himself as well as the problems he had no hope in solving on his own, but he didn’t expect her to be able to do anything about that. Half of it he couldn’t even talk about. Who knew what would happen if he even tried? Maybe she’d think he was lying and making s**t up—or worse, maybe she’d believe him and react that same way half the people in the city seemed to react toward people with his sort of double life, and send the police after him the way they’d stormed into the meeting hall a couple of weeks back.

And then he thought, how was any of this supposed to help when he couldn’t even talk about the things that really bothered him?

“Let’s talk about your father,” she suggested after a brief period of silence.

Paris’s eyes slid over to glare at her. “I don’t want to talk about my father,” he said.

“Did you not have a good relationship with him?”

“It was alright,” he forced out, if only to prevent her line of thought from going in the direction he assumed it would soon follow.

“Was he supportive of your dancing?”

“When it mattered,” Paris grumbled.

“Did he watch you?”

“A few times.”

He remembered last Christmas for many reasons—because Chris had been there to see him, but also because his father had been there, too.

Henri LeFay might not have been the world’s best father, but he’d been there when it counted.

“Did he ever express concern for you when you were picked on in school?” the therapist asked him next.

“Depends,” Paris said. “Mom was the one who always wanted to talk to the teachers and the principal. Dad just told me to kick them if someone bothered me.”

“And did you?”

“Yeah, sometimes.”

“So you listened to him,” she observed. “His opinion was important to you.”

“Maybe it was,” he allowed, glancing to the floor again.

“And you started running when he passed away.”

“It’s not the only time I’ve ever ran,” Paris moodily corrected her.

“When else did you run?”

“When my mom left,” he said.

“How old were you when she left?” she asked.

“Ten,” he replied.

“And when else did you do it?”

“Last year.”

“What happened last year that made you want to run?”

Paris paused before he could say anything. He couldn’t tell the truth, not that he’d become a Senshi or that he’d been dragged into a war that he didn’t understand or that he’d seen more people die in a year and a half than most people his age would ever see in a lifetime. She could dig and dig and dig all she wanted, but that was a secret he would keep with him for the rest of his life, exposing it only to those he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he could trust to keep it.

“Dad was sick,” he said instead. It wasn’t too much of a lie, though both events had happened at different points in the year.

“But it was never like this,” she guessed, and then quickly clarified, “the running.”

“No, not really.”

“Why do you do it?”

He shrugged again. “It makes me feel better for a while.”

“How does it make you feel better?”

Paris raised his eyes up to glare at her before quickly lowering them back down. He really hated how she took his words and repeated them back to him when she asked her questions.

“What about it seems appealing to you?” she amended.

“I can force everything out,” he said.

“And does it ever feel… unsuccessful… when you don’t do it so much that you make yourself sick? Why do you feel like you need to take it to that point?” she asked, lowering her voice just slightly so that she sounded kind and sympathetic and non-judgmental.

Paris clamped his mouth shut before he could say anything thoughtless.

He’d known this would come up at some point. This was the entire reason he was here, after all—because he’d pushed himself so hard that it had placed him in the hospital, because the excess of activity and the lack of appetite in the wake of his father’s death had shown up in his blood-work as startlingly low nutrition levels the doctors associated with certain illnesses someone of his build and career path were frequently susceptible to or associated with.

Even now he denied it. He didn’t believe it was true—couldn’t believe it, because that wasn’t the point of the running at all. Yet it was what people always assumed. Ross had. Some of the other dancers had, too, though they’d never said it to his face. His mother had been watching out for it since he’d been young, always keeping a careful eye on what he ate, how much he ate, monitoring his behavior during meals, encouraging him to seek help when she thought he needed it. To her and to many of the others, his recent hospitalization had simply served as proof for what they’d all expressed concerns about all along.

“I’m not trying to lose weight,” he insisted, not bothering to conceal the bitterness he felt at the thought, and the stigma that came with it. “No one’s giving me a hard time about it and I don’t think I need to. I look fine the way I am.”

“It’s not always about perception, Paris,” she cautiously replied. “Sometimes it’s about control.”

Paris was two seconds away from denying that too when he realized he’d already practically admitted to it.

He ran to force his emotions out.

Wasn’t that a way to gain some sort of control? Hadn’t he done it because he wanted to have some sort of an impact on his own grief rather than letting it play out naturally?

He’d thought it would be better this way, that in time he could learn to cope and living in the aftermath wouldn’t be quite so hard. He ran because he thought forcing it and facing it and getting it all out at once would be better than stewing in it for months and going through the seven stages of grief everyone always talked about. He didn’t want it to come in stages. He wanted to get it over with, wanted to accept that it had happened and move on, because there wasn’t anything he could do to change it and wasting month after month in grief wasn’t going to make things any better.

In the end, the time it took or which process he went through wasn’t going to have any effect on what’d happened. Everything would still be the same when it was over. He would still be here and his father would still be dead. Why not deal with it on his terms?

“You saw a nutritionist when?” the woman across from his asked.

“Tuesday,” he said, his voice suddenly low and quiet.

“And what did they say about it?”

“She said what you said,” Paris admitted. He shifted on the couch, trying to make himself comfortable when he was anything but. “I have to go back in two weeks.”

The therapist—what was her name again?—watched him with her keen, perceptive eyes and said, “You don’t like talking about this.”

Paris shook his head. “No,” he said, frowning at himself when his voice sounded strained.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because everyone assumes it’s for all the wrong reasons,” he replied, letting the bitterness take over for a moment.

Bitterness had always been easier. It was a safe emotion to him, because it meant no one could ever get his hopes up and he would never have to be disappointed. He clung to all the disappointments of the past and fortified himself with it, let the cynicism burn into him and become a part of him. He’d used it against his father, he used it against his mother to this day, and all the other people in his life who gave him a reason to question their motives—and there were a lot of them, on both sides of the divide.

“They think it’s because I’m a dancer,” he continued, “or because I think poorly about myself or some other bullshit that isn’t true. I’m not doing it on purpose.”

“Aren’t you?” the therapist gently opposed him.

Paris could feel the emotions building up. It immediately put him on the defensive.

“Look,” he said, “if you’re just going to sit here accusing me of s**t then I’m going to get up and leave.”

She was doing this on purpose. She had to be. She was trying to make him talk, to admit to everything, and he didn’t want to. He’d done enough. He’d been through enough. He didn’t want to do it anymore.

“I’m not trying to accuse you of anything, Paris,” she reassured him. Deftly she uncrossed her legs and leaned forward slightly in her chair, as if to offer him comfort with her proximity alone. “I’m trying to help you make sense of everything.”

“Nothing ever makes sense,” Paris argued.

She allowed this, but continued soon after. “You can pinpoint all these instances of running to specific times in your life,” she pointed out. “You know what you’re doing, you know why you’re doing it, but you shy away from the consequences of it… why?”

“Because it’s not about that.”

“What is it about?”

“My dad’s dead!” Paris exclaimed, louder than he’d intended, and he hurled it at her like an accusation.

It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t even Paris’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault when it came down to it—not his or his mother’s or the doctors who hadn’t been able to save him—but sometimes it felt better to have something or someone to blame.

Maybe, in these last few months, he’d spent too much time placing all of the blame on himself.

“Have you ever known anyone to die before?” she asked as if his tone of voice had no effect on her. It probably didn’t. He expected she was used to the outbursts. “A pet? Another family member?”

Paris didn’t want to answer, but he found himself speaking despite that. “I had a fish once,” he told her, trying to ignore the other images that threatened to rise—these ones more bloody and bleak.

After more than a year it was easy to forget his poor Beta fish, whose death and burial down the toilet bowl at his father’s house had heralded a string of bad luck that had culminated in the youma encounter that had seen him acquire his pen. His life had changed so much since them, it was often difficult to look back and remember the time before, and the boy he used to be.

Was death always like that? Did it always bring so much change and warp one’s life in such a way that it was nearly impossible to remember what it had been like before it?

The therapist looked at him with her sympathetic face again, and she said, “But this is different.”

“Of course this is different,” he tried to sneer, but he was surprised by the sound of his voice.

He sounded close to weeping.

“He’s my dad,” Paris said, like Henri was still there to glower at him and mutter insults beneath his breath, stare at him in frustrated disgust beneath the cloud of disappointment he’d carried around with him since Paris’s mother left—or longer, Paris thought, before she’d gone, when nothing ever went the way he expected it to.

But he wasn’t there anymore, not to do any of that, not to do anything different—to correct the misunderstandings and try for something better. For eighteen years they’d lived together and never really known one another. For eight they’d fought against one another, battling for acceptance and never quite achieving it. For the ten before they’d mostly kept their distance from one another, leaving the other to their own devices until they could no longer ignore one another. Once there’d been a time when they’d been happy, when he’d known something of his father’s love, but Paris had been too young then to remember.

And now Henri wasn’t there at all, and it was one of the most painful experiences Paris had ever been through.

How could this feeling ever go away? What was he supposed to do to fix it? Why did it have to happen in the first place, right when they were beginning to make the effort to change?

Or had his father made the effort because he’d known this was how it was going to end?

Now that he was gone, Paris would never know.

“He’s my dad,” he said, still in that weak, trembling voice that spoke of emotions too thick to wade through. “He’s my dad and I couldn’t do anything…”

He remembered that day much more clearly than he would have liked—how lost he felt, how alone and helpless. He still felt that way now. Even after three months, it hadn’t gone away. Paris wondered if it ever would.

“And I tried so hard to help but nothing ever worked,” he rambled. “All I could do was stand there and watch him get worse and worse, and then he went in for surgery and it was supposed to make things better but instead he just… he just died, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.”

Never in his life had he felt anything more awful than that, not even when his mother had left, which, before now, had been the instance with which he measured all emotional pain, because watching his mother leave him and thinking that, after everything, she didn’t love him after all had been one of the most traumatic things he ever could have imagined until the moment the doctor found him pacing in the waiting room and told him something so much worse.

There weren’t many other things that could ever hope to compare. The only instances that had any chance… he wouldn’t speak of them, couldn’t speak of them—not to her.

For all he knew she could be an ally—or worse, an enemy. Most likely she was little more than a normal human being, going about her normal life in an abnormal city and paying only as much attention to the war going on around her as she needed to in order to avoid trouble. She didn’t have to see what he saw. She didn’t feel the things he felt or know the things he knew, but she thought she could help him, maybe even heal him, though Paris knew that could never be the case, that her good intentions were just as insignificant as all of his had been.

“There’s never anything… no matter what I do… no matter how hard I try… everything just… it never matters… He’s just… he’s just gone.”

He hated it—how quickly it had happened, how powerless he’d been to stop it. Logically he knew there wasn’t much more he could have done, that he was only capable of so much and that he’d done the best he could with what he had, that care and determination weren’t enough to heal a damaged heart, but it still made him feel so weak and incapable to realize that none of his efforts had made a single difference. He had done everything he knew how to in an attempt to prevent the inevitable, to give his father more time—to give them both more time—and still it hadn’t worked.

Now all he had left was the regret and the pain and the emptiness, the bitter memories that should have been replaced by better ones if only he’d had the time to make them.

And the helplessness grew with each fight, with each new death, because it all seemed so futile, so meaningless, and there was nothing he could do—nothing any of them could do—to end it.

If he couldn’t even save his father, how was he ever supposed to save anyone else?

“Do you want control, Paris?” the woman’s soft voice asked him.

Paris could feel her eyes on him, warm and kind but expectant, too, and he didn’t know how to fight it anymore, how to keep denying.

He closed his eyes and hunched in on himself, and he whispered, “Yes…”