Home, 2025
Roman learned quickly that a basement could hold more than bodies.
It could hold meanings—misunderstandings, refusals, prayers disguised as sarcasm. It could hold the kind of silence that wasn’t empty, only occupied. And in the weeks since Anthony’s arrival, Roman had started to hear the smallest things as if they were verdicts: the way footsteps hesitated before the glass, the way a breath caught before speech, the way a hand dragged against concrete like it was trying to sand itself down to bone.
Tonight, it was the hands. Roman brought the tin anyway.
He had prepared it with the same care he gave varnish mixtures—measured, tested, altered, tested again. Beeswax softened with oil, a trace of resin for barrier, an herbaceous bite meant to cut through raw dryness without stinging. He had even warmed it slightly so it wouldn’t feel like winter against skin. Comfort, presented as restraint. A gift that didn’t demand gratitude.
He stopped outside Anthony’s door long enough to listen, not because he enjoyed listening, but because he had learned—through Vincent, through years of trying and failing and trying again—that arriving too soon could feel like intrusion. The room beyond was quiet, but not peaceful. Quiet like a clenched jaw.
Roman knocked once. Not loud. Not tentative. A single sound, an announcement without apology.
When he opened the hatch, he did so as he always did: measured, deliberate, with his hands visible and empty except for what he’d brought. He didn’t look at the whole of Anthony at once. He looked the way a restorer looks—small sections first, edges and fractures, what had changed since yesterday.
Anthony sat where he’d been sitting more often lately, not by the bed, not near the vent, but in that stubborn middle distance that made a room feel like a battleground. His posture had the defiant stillness of someone refusing to be read. His face was turned partly away, as though even the act of being perceived was a tax he didn’t intend to pay.
And his hands—Roman’s attention went there immediately, like a tongue seeking a chipped tooth.
Cracked knuckles. Split cuticles. The kind of rawness that came from scrubbing too hard, working too long, from making the skin prove something the mind couldn’t articulate. The fingers were strong, yes—sculptor’s hands always were—but strength didn’t prevent damage; it only hid it longer. The pads of the fingers looked abraded, the fine lines deepened, and in the joints there was a tightness Roman recognized as overuse, tension, and the beginning of a pain that could become permanent if it was fed.
Roman placed the tin in the enclosure—not close enough to force it into Anthony’s space, just offered at the distance where choice could still exist.
“I made you something,” he said, voice low, careful. “For your hands.”
He waited. He didn’t add a lecture. He didn’t attach a condition. He let the offer sit between them like a cup set down on a table: simple, present, unclaimed.
Anthony’s gaze dropped—briefly, reluctantly—to the tin, then lifted past it as if looking through Roman instead of at him. “Why?” he asked. Not confused. Accusatory in its simplicity.
Roman didn’t flinch. He had learned not to answer tone—only words. “Because they’re injured,” Roman said. “And because you use them to survive.”
The smallest twitch in Anthony’s mouth suggested a laugh that never fully formed. “To survive,” Anthony echoed, like the concept was sentimental. Like survival was a slogan people put on mugs.
Roman’s chest tightened, and with it came the old, familiar misalignment: the urge to fix, to mend, to preserve—caught against the reality that some fractures were kept on purpose. He tried anyway, because Roman always tried.
“You’ll lose range,” Roman said quietly. “Not tonight. Not tomorrow. But pain teaches the body to move differently. It makes your hands—” he searched for a phrase that wouldn’t sound like ownership, “—it makes them change shape.”
Anthony’s eyes flicked at that, sharp and resentful, as if the word shape had touched something sacred. “Good,” Anthony said.
Roman paused. “Good?” he repeated, not as a challenge—an honest attempt to understand.
Anthony finally looked at him properly then, and it wasn’t pleading or gratitude or fury in the simple sense. It was something more exhausting: a kind of determined sorrow, weaponized into principle.
“If my hands stop hurting,” Anthony said, each word clipped like he was carving them out of stone, “I stop remembering why I make things.”
The sentence hit with a quiet violence. Roman stood still, tin still offered, suddenly too heavy for how small it was.
He had heard pain framed as identity before. He had listened to people cling to their wounds like proof they’d lived through something real. But it still unsettled him every time—because Roman’s instinct was always to separate injury from essence. To save the work without keeping the fire.
“You don’t need pain to remember,” Roman said, and even as he said it he knew it was a plea disguised as a statement. “You need truth.”
Anthony’s mouth pulled into something bitter. “You don’t get to tell me what I need,” he said.
Roman inhaled slowly through his nose. Not to calm himself. To keep himself from replying with the wrong kind of honesty. Because he could have said: I’m trying to keep you capable. I’m trying to keep you alive in the only language I know—preservation.
He could have said: I watched someone fade no matter what I did, and I won’t watch that happen again. He could have said Vincent’s name and let it sit there like a ghost at the edge of the room. But Vincent had taught him something else too: that grief, spoken too early, becomes a kind of demand. That a confession can be another form of taking.
So Roman did the harder thing. He let Anthony be wrong on purpose.
He closed the hatch— not withdrawing it in defeat, not pushing it forward in insistence—just leaving it down where Anthony could reach it if he chose, and where Roman didn’t have to keep holding it like an offering that might be refused.
“I’m not telling you what to need,” Roman said quietly. “I’m telling you what I can give.”
Anthony’s eyes flicked to the tin again. Then away. “And if I don’t want it?” Anthony asked.
Roman’s throat tightened around the answer that mattered. “Then you don’t take it,” he said.
The words should have felt clean. They should have felt like proof—evidence that Roman understood boundaries, that he could practice restraint. But they didn’t.
Because even here, even now, Roman knew the uglier truth: that choice inside a cage was a complicated kind of mercy. That “you don’t take it” didn’t erase the fact that Roman had built the room where refusal had to echo.
Anthony leaned forward, not reaching for the tin, only letting his forearms rest on his thighs, hands hanging loose. The cracks in his skin looked like small maps of stubbornness. He stared at them as if they were scripture.
“My hands hurting is the only part of this that’s mine,” he said, voice quieter now. Not softer. Just tired. “It’s the only thing you didn’t choose.”
Roman felt that land somewhere deep, the way a truth lands when it doesn’t have a defense. “I didn’t choose to hurt you,” Roman said, and it sounded pathetic in its accuracy—like saying the sky didn’t choose to rain.
Anthony lifted his gaze again. “You chose everything else,” he replied.
Silence gathered, not hostile, but heavy with the kind of honesty that made the air feel thin. Roman found himself thinking—without wanting to—of Vincent’s hands.
Those calloused fingers that had once moved like certainty, like prayer. The way illness had crept in, not with drama but with small failures: a tremor, a missed note, a stiffness that wouldn’t loosen. Roman had tried to treat it like any restoration problem—identify the damage, isolate the cause, reverse the effect. He had brought in specialists. He had begged for answers in polite language and in dangerous language. He had watched Vincent’s body reject every solution like the world itself was refusing to cooperate.
And Vincent—Vincent had wanted relief. Had wanted comfort, even if he resented the cage, even if he hated Roman for building it. Anthony was the inversion.
Anthony wanted the pain because the pain was proof. Proof he hadn’t been turned into an object. Proof he still remembered the shape of his anger.
Roman stared at the tin. Then at Anthony’s hands. Then—carefully—at Anthony’s face. “Would you let me at least stop it from getting infected?” Roman asked.
The question was simple. Practical. It was the closest Roman could come to compromise without calling it that. Not “let me fix you.” Not “let me care for you.” Just: let me prevent a preventable thing from becoming ruin.
Anthony’s jaw tightened. “I’ll wash them,” he said.
Roman nodded once, slow. “Good,” Roman replied, because he meant it, because some autonomy was better than none, because he had to accept victories that weren’t his.
Anthony’s gaze flicked toward Roman again, almost curious now, like he was trying to decide whether Roman understood what had just happened.
“And the salve?” Anthony asked, voice flat.
Roman hesitated—not because he didn’t know what to say, but because the answer contained the entire moral problem in miniature. “It will be there,” Roman said. “If you decide you want it.”
Anthony looked at the tin again. This time, his eyes didn’t harden. They simply rested there, thoughtful in a way that was almost cruel. “I don’t want to forget,” Anthony said, quieter. “If it stops hurting, it gets easier to pretend this is… livable.”
Roman’s chest tightened so sharply he almost resented his own body for having that reflex. He kept his voice steady. “I’m not asking you to pretend,” he said. “And I’m not asking you to forgive anything.”
Anthony’s mouth quirked, faint and humorless. “Good,” he said. “Because I won’t.”
Roman nodded again. He accepted it the way he accepted cracked paint: not as insult, but as condition.
He turned away from the room, then stopped—just briefly—without looking back.
“For what it’s worth,” Roman said, voice low, controlled, “I don’t want your hands to be another thing the world ruins.”
Anthony didn’t answer right away. When he did, it was barely above a breath. “The world didn’t do this,” Anthony said. “You did.”
Roman swallowed. He didn’t deny it. Denial would have been another theft. “I know,” he said.
And because there was nothing else he could offer that wasn’t intrusive, because staying longer would start to feel like pressure, because Anthony’s refusal had drawn a boundary Roman hadn’t designed—and Roman, unsettled, respected it. He extended the space between himself and the glass wall with the same care he used on museum frames, as if gentleness could keep the moment from splintering further. The hatch latch clicked. The sound was final without being cruel.
In the hallway, Roman stood still for a beat too long, staring at nothing. Care, he thought, was supposed to be clean. Supposed to be obviously good.
But in captivity, even kindness had a shadow. And tonight, Anthony had made Roman see it.
