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It’s a comfortable couch, objectively, soft, buttery leather in the warm, dark brown of freshly ground coffee beans. He runs his hand over the back, but he finds he can't sit on it. This resistance is one of the small cruelties left to him by Maverick, lost until this moment among all of the larger ones – You don't need help, you're fine just the way you are, aren’t you stronger than that, Barnaby? – and sitting on the couch will somehow make it real. He struggles against the impulse for a moment – it is real, he is here, he does need… something – then surrenders and chooses a chair, perching on its edge like a penitent student in the principal’s office.
Not that he has ever been a penitent student, a rule-breaker. Or maybe he has. Maybe he doesn’t remember. There are so many things he can’t remember, and no way to know what is real.
The chair is comfortable, too, objectively. It doesn’t help.
“I’m sorry,” he says, because he is so far out of his depth that all he has to call on are the good manners and aloof air that have misled the entire city of Sternbild into the belief that he is well-adjusted. “I’m afraid I’m a little...”
“Take your time.” Her voice is like the couch, warm and inviting and terrifying all at once. She sounds like a grandmother, a little like Aunt Samantha. The thought is still raw and painful. This grandmotherly woman with her kind eyes and gentle smile is a stranger.
What is he doing here?
This is a mistake, he wants to say, but doesn’t. Barnaby Brooks Jr. is many things, but he is not a coward. Probably. Yet.
He stays in the chair. Seconds tick by on the clock on the wall. The silence is suffocating. The words burst out of him, tinged with desperation: “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to you.”
“That’s all right,” she says. Fine smile lines fan out from her eyes, and her lips remain turned up at the corners. A genuine smile, he thinks; he is well versed in false smiles and feigned nonchalance, but she is exhibiting none of the signs that would imply she is anything but comfortable in her own skin. “I’m very glad you came.”
***
“I’ve been sleeping. I... dozed,” he says, a little defensive. “Last night.” A restless hour or two a night in his chair would be dangerous, if he had a job that relied upon his reflexes. He doesn't have a job anymore, hasn’t for a month and four days; if he’s dull and listless, no one will die.
“How long since you have slept through the night?” she pushes, giving him an incredulous look. She is the master of such looks – they say, without words, You and I both know very well that you can do better than this.
“I don’t know,” he tells her. “I don’t…” His bed is too big and empty, he thinks, like his life is too big and empty. The chair is better, but even then, not better enough. “I have nightmares,” he admits. “Often.” Waking to the lights of the city helps, as much as anything can. All those lights, all those people, all that life, somewhere down below. Apart, but there. And the stars above, those few not washed out of the sky by light pollution, cold and constant and familiar.
“What do you dream about?” she asks.
“Fire,” he replies, trying to turn the chaotic terror dished out by his subconscious into words. “A face made of flames. Gunshots. My mother’s voice.” He takes a deep, shaky breath, then lets it out slowly, as she’s suggested. The panic recedes. “That man’s face, in the fire.” Be a good boy and don’t scream, Barnaby. Is it real, or a figment of his imagination? He doesn’t know. He can’t even say his name. Maverick, he thinks. Maverick is gone. “It isn’t real,” he adds, forcefully. “Most of it isn’t real.”
“It’s real to you,” she says quietly. “It’s not wrong to be afraid.”
“There is nothing to be afraid of,” he says, shaking his head, disgusted with his own weakness. “I know that, intellectually. Sometimes I remember…” he trails off. “I had nightmares, as a child. Every night, at first. He would…” he closes his eyes, takes another deep breath. He is stronger than the panic. “He would give me warm milk,” he says. “With honey. He took me out on the balcony and we would count the stars in the cold until…” He trails off, shakes his head. “I don’t know, maybe that never happened.”
“It’s real to you,” she repeats.
“I would have liked to ask him,” Barnaby says quietly. “Did he kill them, then wrap me in a blanket and take me to count the stars until I fell asleep in his lap? Was he sure enough of my… my eventual utility to spare me such compassion? Did it happen?”
“What do you think?” she asks.
“I can’t understand what was going through his mind,” Barnaby replies at length. “Why would… he was so kind. If it happened. Did it happen?”
“I can’t tell you,” she says, her eyes sad and bright with sympathy.
“I know,” he says. “No one can. They’re all gone.”
“You need to sleep,” she tells him. “I can prescribe a sedative. Something to dull the dreams.”
Pride battles with exhaustion, but his pride is badly bruised. Exhaustion wins. “Yes,” he says. “All right.” He’s tried alcohol – good wine, mediocre vodka, the remnants of the cheap beer Kotetsu left in his refrigerator – but it doesn’t touch the nightmares, and he’s terrified of becoming lost in it. He knows, objectively, that his problems are legion; he doesn’t want to add another to the mix, and drinking alone feels…
He prefers the pills, all in all.
***
“Because you cannot erase twenty years of your life by the force of your will alone,” she replies gently, “formidable though it is.”
“I paid for his burial,” Barnaby tells her. “The cemetery plot, the headstone. It’s a quiet spot. I almost bought flowers. Instinct. I shouldn’t have done any of that. I don’t know what I was thinking; I don’t know if I was thinking.” Kotetsu would have told him not to do it, he knows, but he didn’t tell Kotetsu, or anyone else. He feels tears at the corner of his eyes. “I don’t know how to feel. Everyone else has moved on already – this is last year’s news to them. But for most of my life, he was my father.”
“Yes,” she says.
“And he was a monster.”
“Yes,” she says again.
The sky outside her office is gray with ominous, low-hanging clouds. It mirrors his mood, heavy and sullen and bleak. “It would be easier,” he tells her at length, “if I could speak with him. If I could look into his eyes and tell him I hate him. For destroying my life. But also for leaving me alone. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Not everything must be logical,” she says with a small shake of her head. “It isn’t about whether you should feel happy, or sad, or angry, or vindicated. There are no rules in this. You loved him.”
His chuckle is devoid of humor. “Is that what it was?”
“Isn’t it?” she asks. “You don’t trust easily, but you trusted him, absolutely. For someone you trusted to betray you… it is natural to want closure.”
“I don’t know what I want,” he says, then, “I’m not exactly well-versed in functional relationships of any kind. Maybe I’m not cut out for them.”
“That’s self-defeating,” she tells him. “You had a healthy, functional relationship with your Aunt Samantha.”
“Aunt Samantha is dead,” he says shortly.
“And your colleagues? Your partner?” she asks.
“Former partner,” he says quietly. He has to put that distance between himself and the issue. Like the distance from Sternbild to Oriental Town, it is just far enough for numbness; it is not Kotetsu’s fault, none of it, and Barnaby can’t blame him, but Kotetsu left him, too. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“None of this is your fault, Barnaby,” she says gently.
“I wish I could believe you,” he replies.
***
“What did you say?” the doctor asks, smiling at his almost-joke. It’s probably the first time he has said or done anything remotely approaching levity in her office; she is probably relieved.
“I turned it down,” Barnaby says. “Can you imagine me shouting blow-by-blow commentary at a microphone?” he asks.
Her laugh is pleasant. He is surprised to realize that, four months in, this is the first time he has heard it. “It does not seem the best fit for your skills.”
“I’d be miserable, you mean,” Barnaby says. More miserable. “I won’t deny I was tempted.”
“I’m sure you miss it,” she says with a nod.
“It isn’t as simple as missing it. There were aspects of it I never liked, that irritated or exasperated me. But I do miss… purpose,” he says, settling on the right word at last. “I miss waking up in the morning and knowing what I will be doing and why.” Agnes is wrong about many things, but she is right about one thing – he is bored. “But the only reason I became a hero… that was all a lie. Would I have chosen it for myself? I don’t know.”
“No one can know,” she tells him. She reminds him often, not knowing is not the end of the world. “Let’s assume for the moment that it doesn’t matter. Did it make you happy?”
“It made me… sometimes,” he says. Happy is too simple a word for the complex things he feels when he thinks back to his brief time as a hero. “Sometimes, it made me happy.”
“Are you very certain you don’t want to go back?” she asks.
He thinks of Kotetsu, his cheerful recklessness, his immeasurably big heart, his unwavering dedication to doing what is right instead of what is easy. He thinks of going back and being alone among people all of whom will know or suspect something in him is broken. Or of being assigned another partner, one who doesn’t know or understand anything. He can’t decide which would be worse. “Very certain,” he tells her firmly. “That part of my life is over.”
“Well then,” she says, “what do you want to do? You don’t need to work.”
“No,” he confirms. His inheritance could keep him in comfort for the rest of his life. He could be – he shudders at the thought – a bored socialite. He could have a foundation. Something suitably removed from reality to show people that he is very rich and very conscious of just how privileged he is. To protect an endangered species, maybe. Tigers in the wild. Hand out stuffed animals to donors. He’d keep one in his bed next to the worn pink rabbit he has washed a dozen times.
It isn’t funny, but he sort of wants to laugh.
He realizes she’s waiting for an answer; as is so often the case, the answer is, “I don’t know.”
“Then perhaps you should think about it,” she tells him. “Many young people your age are only starting out now. Your whole life is ahead of you. You can do anything.”
What a horrifying thought.
“It doesn’t have to be overwhelming,” she says. He starts; it is like she’s reading his mind. “What do you want to do tomorrow?”
The truth is, he will likely sit in his apartment and stare out at the city and listen to the same track of the same album, over and over. It has become a habit that he doesn’t know how to break. He will have a glass of wine and he will sit, and he will wallow. He has been wallowing for four months. “I want to get out of my apartment,” he says. It is a startling epiphany; he has not realized he was feeling caged in until now, but the thought of going back there literally sets his teeth on edge.
“How long has it been since you’ve taken a vacation?” she asks him.
“On my last vacation, my parents took me to Disneyland.” It has been twenty-one years. There were always things to do after that. Research. False leads to follow. Schoolwork. Wallowing.
He knows a series of emotions is playing across his face. She watches him quietly as he thinks all this through, then suggests, “Start with that.”
“I can’t just pack up and…” he trails off, shakes his head. “What am I talking about? Of course I can.” There is nothing holding him here. He feels… hopeful. Ready for a change of scenery. Lighter, somehow.
“It’s a good place to start,” she says.
***
“I didn’t wear enough sunblock,” he tells her with a twitch of his shoulder. “My back looks terrible.”
“You’re better at taking compliments on television,” she says. “I suppose your frankness is a compliment to me.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he agrees.
“How was Cabo?” she wants to know.
“Relaxing,” he replies. “Warm.” He pauses, then adds, “Noisy.”
“Sternbild isn’t quiet, either,” she points out.
“I suppose not.” He shrugs again. “It was… an experience.”
“Why did you choose it?”
He considers telling her the truth – that he bought a ticket to Oriental Town, that he really thought he could do it – show up at Kotetsu’s door like it is no big deal, like he hasn’t been ignoring calls and letters and the standing invitation for months – but the thought of being unwelcome and self-conscious and in the way was only slightly less terrifying than the thought of being welcomed with open arms. He misses Kotetsu so badly that it is an ache in his chest, but he is not ready for either eventuality. The ticket was shredded, unused; he called a travel agency and told them to book him on the next flight somewhere. He wound up in an all-inclusive resort in Cabo. It was not the worst place in the world to wind up. “I let the travel agent choose,” he says. It is true. Her eyes say she is willing to pretend that she believes that is all.
“What did you do there?” she asks.
“I read a great deal,” he replies. Most people, he discovered, read glossy magazines and dog-eared romances at the beach. He had read One Hundred Years of Solitude, equal parts disturbed and drawn in by the bleeding of fantasy into reality and back again. What does it say about him, he wonders, that in some ways, it reminded him of his life? “I ate too much. No one seemed to know who I was.”
“Did you talk to anyone?” she inquires.
“Only one person who you would consider notable,” he says at length; this is not something he truly wants to discuss but it is, he thinks, relevant. Unfortunately.
“Oh?” both her eyebrows rise slightly and she gives him a curious look.
“It wasn’t… it was a mistake,” he says, feeling flustered despite himself. She will not judge him, he knows, but he is judging himself, that his first attempt in months at connecting with another human being had gone so poorly. “We were both a little drunk, and, I suppose, a little lonely. It was… awkward.” Unsatisfying. The temporary relief of tension hadn’t been worth the incredible discomfort he had experienced after, lying in bed next to the drunk stranger with the beautiful and unfamiliar dark eyes. “That sort of thing has always been… a little awkward for me.”
A little awkward, the way Lunatic’s flames are a little hot; it is the understatement of the year.
“What happened?” she asks.
“I had a nightmare,” he says. “I woke screaming. He left.” He shrugs again, annoyed at himself. “I don’t blame him in the least. It was a stupid thing to do.”
“You can’t control your nightmares,” she says.
“I can’t expect a perfect stranger to be graciously accepting of them, either,” he parries. “That’s why I don’t usually fall asleep with anyone. But I felt almost like myself and it had been months since the last time I wanted anyone to touch me.” He tries not to think of all of the conflicting emotions tied up in that thought; wanting and receiving are not the same. “Longer since I’ve acted on it. It was a relief to know I still could, even if it was stupid, in the end.”
She shakes her head. “It doesn’t sound stupid.”
“It feels stupid,” he mutters, and he knows that she can sense this topic is closed for the moment.
“How did you sleep, otherwise?” she asks instead.
“Well,” he replies. He’s up to six hours a night, sometimes – occasionally without chemical aid. The sound of the surf outside his window in Cabo had been relaxing; he hadn’t touched the sedatives for most of the trip. “I only had the one nightmare.” It hadn’t been about the fire.
“Hmm,” she says, but he doesn’t offer any further detail, and she doesn’t push.
***
“I went to the opera.” Alone, but he had gone. “I went running in the park.” It had felt good to move, though he has discovered, to his chagrin, that he is terribly out of shape. “I made shrimp fried rice.” He had put in too much mayonnaise; the flavor had been so nostalgic he had very nearly cried into his plate. “I bought a basil plant.” Now he is no longer the only thing alive in his apartment; his only companion may be an herb, but he can’t imagine taking care of something more demanding, not when he is barely taking care of himself. Baby steps.
“You’ve been busy,” she says approvingly.
“I’m still taking it one day at a time,” he tells her. “I have to do something.”
“There isn’t anything wrong with that,” she reassures him. “Sometimes, one day at a time is work enough.”
***
“And this year?”
“Here I am,” he says, spreading his arms as if to say, this is all I have now.
It has been ten months, and he is holding his head in his hands, feeling the tears meander down his cheeks, and he cannot tell her what is wrong, aside from everything. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but he has gone sideways somewhere; it is doubly infuriating because he can recall feeling if not good then at least better not so long ago. The days have grown shorter and with them his temper; he feels anxious and alone and dissatisfied, and the nightmares are back, not just the fire and the gunshots, but the other ones too, the ones he still doesn’t talk about.
“Some days are harder than others.” Her voice is almost crooning, as though he is a small child or a wounded animal. She comes around her desk and puts her hand on his shoulder and he allows himself to be comforted, a little.
He thinks of the box he found sitting on his doorstep this morning, with a bottle of some vile-smelling alcohol labeled in incomprehensible Japanese characters and a box of crumbled cookies burnt around the edges. The cookies come with a note – signed Kaede Kaburagi in surprisingly neat script – and the bottle doesn’t need explanation. It is the first contact they have had since Kotetsu boarded the train that took him away, and Barnaby still doesn’t blame him, but he hasn’t entirely forgiven him, either.
“It isn’t fair,” he chokes out through the lump in his throat. “Not any of it.” She strokes his hair and doesn’t say anything for a few moments.
“You’re lonely,” she finally utters. “You can’t hide inside yourself with all of this forever, Barnaby.”
“I can if I want,” he says, knowing he sounds like a petulant child, not caring.
“Possibly true, but you don’t want that.” Her tone is firm, and when he looks up at her, her lips are pressed together, just a bit, just enough for him to realize she is exasperated.
“I thought you weren’t going to tell me what to want, or what to do, or how to…” He shakes his head. “I’m not lonely,” he says stubbornly. “Or if I am, it’s because I want to be alone.”
“You’re lying to me,” she tells him, “or perhaps you are lying to yourself.”
“You are supposed to help me, not push me!” He has never raised his voice at her, but it feels good, the yelling, the misplacing of blame.
“Those two are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes,” she says, her voice as gentle as her touch was moments ago, “healing hurts.”
He doesn’t say anything for a time. It doesn’t feel good to cry; the lump in his throat only seems to be getting bigger. “I’m sorry,” he says, feeling miserable and guilty and terribly pathetic.
“You don’t have to apologize,” she tells him. “That’s why I’m here.”
“For me to yell at you?” he asks.
She strokes her hand down his hair, the way Aunt Samantha did. “You needed to yell at someone.”
***
“Let’s talk about your partner,” she says.
“Former partner,” he replies. “Let’s not.”
She gives him a look that says quite clearly that she is not impressed. “I think we’ve put it off long enough, don’t you?”
“I don’t think any span of time is long enough,” he says. This… thing with Kotetsu is too complicated; if he approaches it from the wrong direction, he thinks it will implode, and every direction is the wrong direction. Every single person he has ever loved has wound up dead; every person but one. Maybe his fear is irrational, but he remembers the feel of Kotetsu’s body in his arms, his chest a mass of burns, his face creased with pain. He still feels that in his dreams, those not awash with flames – Kotetsu’s heavy, labored breathing, the knowledge that he, Barnaby, has killed the last person in the world who really thought he was worth something.
And then, too, there is the fact that Kotetsu left. After all of that banter about his eyelashes, his partner left him alone with his fuzzy memories and his nightmares, and maybe he acted cool, like nothing was going on at all, but Kotetsu, the only person left in the world who was supposed to know him, should have known better. But he is gone, and even if Barnaby had found the emotional fortitude to go and see him all those months ago, face to face and heart to heart, he already knows how this would have ended. He is doomed to awkwardness and unrequited affection, or worse, to a brief and uncomfortable liaison that will end with the deterioration of whatever comfort remains between them; there is no happy ending here, and he did this to himself.
“I haven’t answered his calls or his letters,” he says at length. “I never went to see him. Maybe he was waiting at first, but he’s impatient and foolish and… he’s done waiting around for me. And he’s better off that way.”
“You don’t think you’re selling yourself short?” she asks him.
He turns away from her piercing, perceptive eyes. “I said I don’t want to talk about this.”
“What happens when you see him again?” she persists.
He lets out an annoyed huff of breath. “If I ever see him again – ”
“When,” she interrupts.
“You seem sure of yourself,” he grouses.
She smiles an enigmatic little smile and tells him, “I watch the news.”
***
“What do you want to do?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he tells her; his best practiced response to this question.
This time, she doesn’t take it at face value. “Don’t you?” He is silent. “The first step is the hardest,” she adds. “It never becomes truly easy, only easier.”
He stands up. “I have to go,” he tells her.
“Yes,” she agrees, “you do.”
***
“Am I?” He is not – perhaps will never be – entirely okay, but today, he thinks he remembers the layered complexity of the idea of happiness.
I thought you were mad at me. Hey Bunny, Bunny, are you sure you’re not mad? I missed you, you know.
“How was your Christmas?” She is smiling, too, as she looks at him.
“…Unexpected,” he tells her.
Listen, I thought about this while I was retired. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’m kind of old and not very cool. But you don’t care, do you, Bunny? You don’t mind.
No, he doesn’t mind.
“It’s frightening,” he says, “how easy it all seems, suddenly.” His life, it turns out, is right where he left it. Pieces of it might be missing, but with all of its flaws, it’s his. He has picked it up again, and it is heavy but not unmanageable. He can do this.
“It will not always be so easy,” she cautions.
He laughs. It feels amazing to laugh, to mean it. It doesn’t even seem to matter that he is the butt of this joke. “I know,” he tells her, “believe me.” He has only started the process of picking up the pieces, but he’s at a point now where a second pair of helping hands is welcome. “Still,” he tells her, thinking of a warm, solid arm flung around his waist, of Kotetsu’s noisy breathing against the back of his neck, of a warmth derived not from his down comforter but from actual comfort, “I think that I will be sleeping better from now on.”