Word Count: 2012

By mid-November, there was only one person in all the world who’d heard every thought that ever crossed Paris’s mind—although, he’d admit, claiming that they truly “knew” and “acknowledged” or even “processed” what he said was perhaps giving them significantly more credit than they could feasibly earn this early on.

Anyone who knew him even moderately well would assume this person was Chris, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong in thinking so, as Paris shared more of himself—body, mind, heart, and soul—with Chris than he did with anyone else in his life before or since their first encounter a year and a half ago.

There was, however, a catch: Paris endeavored—typically—to keep both sides of his life, Paris and Ganymede, as separate as it was possible for him to do when they were more or less one and the same. Thus, as Paris he generally refused to openly discuss anything pertaining to Ganymede. Those conversations he saved for the evenings and shared them with Valhalla alone—who was and was not Chris depending on Paris’s mood and how he chose to think of the complicated lives they both led. Sometimes he could admit to himself that there was no other life, no other side to them both, that Ganymede and Paris were one person as much as Chris and Valhalla were. The rest of the time he preferred to think of things another way, when that life got too hard and he needed some way to break free.

So, to that sort of logic, his boyfriend didn’t really know everything. Chris knew half of it and Valhalla knew the rest.

If not Chris, Paris supposed people would assume the person in question to be his best friend, as that seemed the logical choice when ones best friend was, by virtue of the title bestowed upon them, supposed to know one best. But as he kept his powered life a secret from Ladon for the sake of protecting him and retaining some normalcy in his life, that assumption would be very much incorrect.

Particularly religious and/or sentimental people may even think it was his father, who might not be alive but who may or may not be listening from heaven, the afterlife, the great beyond, or whatever else people liked to call it—Paris had yet to decide whether or not he believed in such things given what he knew about his soul and reincarnation. Unfortunately, even with his father dead Paris often found it difficult to figure out what to say to him, and most of the time he spent at his father’s grave was spent in miserable silence, trying and failing to come up with the appropriate words to say to a man he’d never had enough words for.

This left him with very few people—namely his mother Marissa, Momma Gallo, and Chris’s kid brother Peter, each of whom he spoke to with varying degrees of honesty and secrecy.

Peter he could at least speak about senshidom with, and since Peter was a kid and didn’t have many boundaries when it came between his life as a normal kid and his life as a senshi, Paris would even speak about senshi things with him as Paris instead of Ganymede. More normal things, on the other hand, he tended to keep to himself, as it wasn’t exactly appropriate to discuss adult things with a boy who was not yet twelve, no matter how precocious or worldly that boy might think he was. Peter tended to pull out the “ewwww grooooss” when the mushy stuff came up anyway, and so Paris was content to leave their interactions at simple things.

His mother and Momma were the exact opposite. He could talk about adult things or mushy things with them if he needed to—though he would admit he saved the latter stuff for Momma Gallo more often than not. He considered her more of an authority on the matter than Marissa, who had experienced much less romance in comparison and who Paris suspected had reverted back to uncomplicated one-night stands rather than bothering with the mess of another relationship, but he had no proof and he couldn’t say he blamed her either way. Regardless, neither Marissa nor Momma Gallo knew that he was a senshi. Therefore, it would be wrong to assume it was either of them as well.

The last guess the average person might make, Paris figured, was his therapist.

It was her job to know things, particularly things about him, and to drag the answers out of him when she didn’t, and Paris had been more open with her recently than he’d been during his initial visits, but she—like Ladon, Marissa, and Momma Gallo before her—was, as far as Paris could tell, a normal civilian. He talked about his father with her, he talked about his mother and his childhood, he talked about Chris and school and dance and his plans and desires for the future, but he took great pains never to even hint at his double life for fear that she would a) be inadvertently drawn into it, b) reveal herself to be an agent of chaos and proceed to torture and kill him, or c) react as he suspected a normal civilian to react when confronted with a “terrorist” and detain him before reporting him to the authorities and leaving him to his fate, perhaps with the intention of studying him and the mind of a senshi along the way.

Since Paris had no intention of letting any of those possibilities come to pass, he wisely kept the second half of his life to himself when he was in her presence.

This, to the casual—or not-so-casual—observer might have left him with absolutely no one, and once upon a time that might have been true. The real answer was, instead, quite small, and perhaps not as conscious of what he was saying as most people would prefer when holding such a serious conversation, but for Paris, who liked talking but didn’t always like the responses he got from people when he did, the arrangement worked out rather well.

“You don’t stink yet, do you?” he asked in comfortable French. “Because I’m not going to change you.”

Blue eyes stared back at him with the barest trace of comprehension—not enough to understand what he was saying, but enough to show he had an audience—and a small, wet, toothless mouth worked its way into a smile over a chin covered with drool.

“Non?” he wondered. “Es-tu sûre? D’accord.”

And he began to ramble.

He never spoke a word of English to her, both because his mother liked the thought of her children being bilingual, and also because it gave him the opportunity to talk to someone without anyone else knowing what he was saying. Not since his father had he been able to speak to someone entirely in French. Momma Gallo spoke it decently enough, and Paris would often consent to help her practice, but he was fluent where she was not, and he spoke so rapidly he doubted she would have been able to keep up and pick up anything important had she been there. Without her it was safe to continue, as his mother had only ever been able to pick up a few words from a husband who didn’t have the patience to teach her, and Cal only knew passable Spanish.

Most of the conversations occurred on the floor, either with Lilah in her baby carrier and Paris on his stomach or with Lilah on her back on a blanket with a few plush toys scattered nearby and Paris on his side beside her. She was nearly two months old, still too young to really know or accomplish anything of great importance, but she was growing increasingly more conscious of her surroundings. When she looked at him now he knew she saw more than a blur of color, because she would focus on him for a time and have small reactions to his presence, and when her mouth would twitch into a smile Paris thought she might even be happy to see him there.

And Paris was enchanted by her.

He would never admit it, because he’d been so against it before and because it seemed like such a scar on his reputation, but he couldn’t help that he enjoyed looking at her. He rarely ever held her, but every once in a while he’d touch her soft cheek or let her tiny fingers wrap around one of his own, or he’d stroke the thin strands of hair on her head. Mostly he just sat and watched and talked, encouraged by her smiles as much as by the fact that she couldn’t contradict him or make fun of him. She seemed to like the sound of his voice, in any case, or at least there was something about him or the attention he gave her that kept her smiling until she was hungry or needed to be changed.

He saw her at least twice a week, on the Tuesday and Thursday evenings he’d agreed to share dinner with his mother and Cal—and Lilah as a result—barring any other commitment or sudden change in plans. While his mother or Cal cooked and the other took the free time to catch up on emails or get a brief period of rest, Paris babbled to his baby sister.

He told her about normal things—school and dance and friends and boyfriends, and how he felt about their mother or a few of his memories of his father, whom Lilah would never know, but then she didn’t need to since she had her own father alive and well. He told her about all the abnormal stuff, too—being a senshi and fighting monsters and going to space and seeing things she would (hopefully) never even be able to imagine. He told her every thought that crossed his mind and every fear he’d ever had, from the troubled belief that he cared more for the people in his life than they could ever care for him, to his failings as a senshi and his worry over a war that seemed so far from a peaceful end.

It had to end, he told himself. It had to end before Lilah was old enough to comprehend everything that he said to her, because if it didn’t he would probably go mad with no one to talk to but a baby.

But she listened. Always she listened, and her arms waved about, and her mouth worked into a variety of expressions, and even though Paris knew she wouldn’t remember anything he said to her now, he still felt better when he was done.

“Baby,” he heard his mother say as she came up behind him.

She never called Lilah anything but “Lilah,” which made his sister’s presence somehow easier to accept, though it was petty of him that he still wanted to be his mother’s one and only “Baby” when he’d learned there wasn’t anything wrong with the second one.

He might not have liked it at first, he might not like parts of it now, but she was here and he was adapting, and he found ways to make it work.

“Dinner’s ready,” his mother announced.

Paris finished his last thought and jumped up to his feet, letting his mother grab Lilah’s carrier. His mother looked at him curiously, clearly at a loss, probably wishing he’d talk to her like that again, the way he used to when he was small, when Mommy had been the center of his world and the one who knew all of his childish secrets.

“What were you talking about?” she asked him as they turned toward the dining room together.

“Nothing,” he said with a shrug.

And it was nothing.

Nothing she could ever understand, and nothing he felt like burdening her with when he had another willing ear that promised nothing in return.