The voice inside of his head was not Jinhai's, nor was it his own.
"My father gave it to me, I figured you're finally old enough to accept this responsibility."
A familiar voice, and yet distant; background noise in a room full of people, someone off camera mumbling, a conversation caught accidentally in passing by someone just walking by. He reached for it, tried to grasp it, arm outstretched, but he could feel it slipping through his fingers like sand, drifting away into an endless -
He was awake.
He was awake, and the clock on his bedside table read in thin block letters, 12:01 AM. Just beneath it, in smaller figures, January 1st, 2014 blended into his line of vision, a smear of neon red that was blatant in the otherwise darkened room.
His head felt thick with thoughts, clogged and confused with the sheer weight of them, and for several moments he just lay there in his little white bed, not knowing who he was or where he was
Facts, look at the facts.
New Year's Day.
One down.
Deus Ex Machina.
Obvious.
Death Hunter Division.
Another blatant statement, but necessary.
Full hunter for approximately eight months now.
His biggest accomplishment and the one he was most proud of to date.
My name is Gale Arthur Summers and I am eighteen years old.
No.
No.
My name is Gale Arthur Gentry.
A barrage of thoughts, too many for his organized brain to handle, cascading over one another until everything was tangled together in an absolute chaotic mess. he was sitting up now, the note in his pocket already having been read and processed, clutched between pale fingers that wrapped unconsciously around it and then loosened again every few seconds.
Benjamin Summers.
Clarice Sinclaire.
"Thanks, Dad."
No, Gale thought, and panic began to well in his throat, thick and cloying. No, no, no,no, no -
"Oh sweetie, I thought you were going to wear your newer suit?"
"He's still in work mode. I'm gonna spike his drink and hide his phone later, after he's grown complacent."
"Gale doesn't deserve you, but you treat him well okay?"
He didn't want to remember, he didn't want these memories, he didn't want them, take them away and make him forget again, make it so that he wouldn't ever have to think of them again, make his memories like they had been before.
The sun had not even risen yet, but it was on the horizon when Gale became aware of his surroundings again.
He was sitting on the front porch of his little house, his new coat from Stormy donned, his arms wrapped around his midsection. All around him papers were littered, some crumpled, some still tucked into their file folders where they had been originally; all printed in neat, tidy lettering because Gale had always been meticulous when making records of all his prior missions.
One particular file - this one labeled Benjamin Summers near the top - lay in his lap. It wasn't a very thick file, not as big as some of the others, but there was still a fair amount of detail tucked within the manila colored ends, all of which Gale had spent collecting over his time at Deus. He wasn't sure why he had looked in the first place, or really what he had been looking for at all, but whatever it was, he hadn't found it.
Nowhere in any of his notes or any of the notes that he'd been able to borrow from the Deus Libraries said anything about Benjamin Summers having a child.
In his head he knew that it had been a dream, an illusion, that it wasn't real; but in his head he also knew that it was.
Gale stood almost mechanically, gathering up the papers with stiff, automatic movements. When he was finished, he let himself back into his house and moved the files back to his desk. He got dressed in silence, this time pulling his coat on over a sweater instead of a pajama shirt, and then he left his house without a word.
It was relatively obvious where he was going. He'd visited Ben's grave many times over the past few years, and his feet knew where to carry him even if Gale was not paying attention, even if he was trying desperately to cling to some semblance of reality. His boots crunched on the cold ground and when he reached the cemetery with its plain markers and cold, unfeeling look, Gale stood there for a long moment, wondering.
Wondering, wondering, wondering.
He found Ben's grave easily, a little off to the left; and a short distance away, less visited by Gale only because she had not been gone as long, was Clarice's.
He stood in front of the graves, of these particular graves, and felt as though the world had been snatched out from beneath him.
"It's not fair," he said aloud, and his voice cracked, thin in the early morning. "It's not fair. You can't do this to me, you can't give me something like...like that and then take it all away from me, you can't do that to me."
Here on the island, he had friends. He had Stormy, who he loved, and he had Bix, and Candace, and Marcus, who he held near and dear to his heart. But in that place, in that one place, he had had something else, something that didn't quite fit within the definition of a family, and yet wasn't enough to be considered anything less.
He'd had something.
"You can't do this to me," Gale whispered, and he wasn't sure if he was talking to Ben or Clarice or even Clerise, or all three of them, or himself. Perhaps it was a mixture of all four, but either way, he couldn't seem to stop the ache in his heart from spreading. He sank to his knees in front of Ben's grave and tried to ignore the way his vision blurred, the way his eyes stung.
"I already lost all of you once," he said softly, hoarsely. "Once was enough."
And now all two - all three of you are gone.
There's no one left that I can talk to.
He was not alone, he knew this, but he had never felt more lonely than in this moment, right here and now. The pain of losing Ben, of losing Clarice, of Clerise, had already been seared deeply into his heart; and now it felt as though it had been pulled apart again, ripped at the seams to let everything spill out once more. A fresh wound, not an old one, and it almost hurt more this time because he had seen what it would have been like, what it could have been like.
Gale pushed himself up and, in a terrible mimicry of what he'd done in the memories he didn't want to remember, wrapped his arms around Ben's headstone, his forehead pressed against the cold stone. It wasn't comfortable, and his stone was scraping against his skin, but he didn't move away, his arms shifting so that his hands could grip the top of the headstone so tightly that his knuckles were white.
His face was wet.
There was no telling just how long Gale stayed in the cemetery, but the next day he was gone. In his place were three plain white cards with just a short line written on each one.
One card read, I'm glad you found your happiness, and was propped quietly against the headstone that bore the name of Clerise Wilson, a red flower tucked against it.
The second card read, I wish you were still here, and was laid at the headstone of Clarice Sinclaire, this time with a pink flower.
The last card, which was set gently and carefully in front of Benjamin Summers' grave, simply read,
Thanks, Dad.
- G
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