I Watched Ant-Man And I'm Making It Everyone Else's Problem
2
Sisi rubbed her head while she sat at the kitchen table, and stared at her cell phone. Why did she volunteer to do this? How could she possibly dial someone she hasn't talked to in years? She didn't really know how he would take it. She was afraid to know. She was afraid to find out things she didn't want to know. All she did know is that she hoped he was doing better than she was.
"Hey, what are you doing?" Daniel came up behind Sisi, putting his hand on her shoulder.
Calling an old friend that might threaten your very existence in my life, that's all.
She didn't say that.
"Just thinking. I don't really know what about… How was work?"
She tried to divert the attention away from her years-long battle with her "friend" that really wasn't her friend at all. He was probably her soulmate, to be honest, but she had never sealed the deal on that. And although she loved the family she found, she often thinks about what a family she could have made.
"Work was alright. What did you and Yumi do?"
Sisi froze. She didn't know what to tell him. She knew what not to tell him. And that was about this little project of theirs. She knew that was just as stupid as anything Yumi's capable of doing or has done, but it was best to keep this a secret from him, for now. If Daniel found all of Yumi's research and destroyed it, she'd be dealing with the blows of the century. No amount of apologizing or begging or pleading would ever make Yumi forgive her. Or make Dan forgive her for lying to him. Well, maybe that second part was untrue. Sisi had forgiven Daniel for a lot of lying. He could swing some of the same energy back, couldn't he?
---
Dinner that night was tense.
Yumi and Sisi shared knowing glances through the whole of it. Daniel and Charlie probably noticed. Sisi hoped they didn't notice.
They ordered takeout as was traditional for most Fridays. Charlie sat next to her friend, who was never going to officially be her sister-in-law by any means. That didn't mean they weren't close, still.
"So, how was your day?"
Sisi shrugged. She wanted people to stop asking. She found out her roommate was building some stupid invention that wasn't by any means safe or necessary and now she has to lie to everyone about it. She also has to call a guy she thought she'd never talk to again really. That was a blessing in disguise. This gave her an excuse to call him. She had wanted to call him before. And every time before, she had been too afraid.
Anytime she had undergone a life change, or something exciting had happened to her, she'd wanted to call and tell him. It was about stuff he knew about like her jobs or her certifications, but Sisi found herself wanting to call him for even the smallest of things. Things that were as unimportant as finding the kombucha she liked at the store or getting the Renassaince Fair tickets she had waited far too long to buy because nobody wanted to go with her. Sisi had even gone as far as calling his old cell phone number and leaving a series of long voicemails whenever she wanted to talk to him. It seemed good enough to curb the cravings.
She prayed he'd never hear those messages. She sounded desperate in them.
Maybe she was.
"It was fine. Just cleaned up a bit. The house was a mess. Looked at Yumi's science things in the garage."
Yumi looked at Sisi with a kind of look that made her want to piss herself. She didn't see anything wrong with mentioning his projects. He had definitely told everyone one or two things that he was working on. That wasn't the secret. The Quantum Realm thing wasn't even the real secret. It was the fact that he'd actually (almost) figured it out. That was the secret. Charlie and Daniel were still under the impression that all Yumi was doing down there was making clear ice and sulfuric stink bombs.
"What? I can talk about your science things, right?" Sisi folded her arms and took a drink of her tea. She wasn't enjoying being made out to be the bad guy. She was the guy trying to make sure things didn't go bad.
Charlie wrote it off with a smile, taking a bite of her noodles. "Sisi, he's just shy. It's okay, baby. I support your science things. We don't have to talk about them if you don't want to."
Daniel chimed in after finishing his beer.
"You've been keeping all your junk in the garage for a while, maybe we should?"
Charlie wasn't pleased with that comment. Yumi had been really excited about all his projects, more so at the beginning than now. She knew that over time they had all become less and less impressed with his work and more and more concerned about the inconvenience it was to them. Recently, Charlie and Sisi and even Daniel had been trying to support him more, but he was reluctant to open up. That wasn't his fault, it was theirs. Sisi cleared her throat.
"All I meant was that Yumi showed me some stuff in his lab and I helped clean it. There's no need to tease him, Dan."
Dan claps Yumi on the back.
"I'm just teasing, Yumi. Sorry."
Yumi just nods and shrugs it all off. That was the thing. The teasing. He didn't like being discredited. He had gone to school with his due diligence, got a degree, made a ton of money working IT, and worked on his science in his free time. It didn't bother anyone, not so much anyways. Dan told him he didn't mind that he used the garage. Yumi was courteous and, for the most part, contained. There was even still space for a car! Still, sometimes the teasing got to him. It was fun and all, and he knew they were joking but Yumi couldn't help but link all those comments back to the skepticism and the doubt. After all that, he still decided to live with his family because they loved each other and it was easier than wounding them and explaining why he needed some space. He didn't have to be here. He could go right now and get a place somewhere far, get a self-storage unit for his lab, and call it a day. Sometimes, when people treated him like this, he wondered why he didn't do that in the first place.
Yumi smiled. It was a hollow one.
"No, it's all good man. Don't worry about it."
---
Sisi was walking back to the building after lunch. She'd decided to spice up her mundane Tuesday at the office and go grab a burger at an artisan joint down the street. She really liked it. It reminded her of the hamburger place Cole and Matthew and Thomas used to drag her to in college. They'd drag both her and Isabella and all 5 of them would sit there and talk about god knows what. She missed that.
She missed Thomas.
She looked at her dainty watch. She still had about ten minutes before she had to be back at her desk. She decided it was now or never. She'd use those ten minutes to do what she'd been agonizing for the past week. She'd call him.
The lights in the parking garage flickered and cast shadows on the crumbling concrete pillars. Sisi kicked some dirt off her heel against the side of one and hovered her thumb over the keypad.
She had to remember Thomas' new number, since she used the old one so much, it would've been easy to get them confused.
Here goes nothing.
She delicately typed it out. The call will probably cost something, she thought. He was still overseas after all. He went to a university in a Scandinavian country. Sweden or Finland, she couldn't remember. She might not remember everything about where he went but she remembered vividly that last goodbye at the airport.
--
"Hey, is this it?" She asked, bundled up against the nip in the air. The branches of the trees danced wildly around the terminal, and they scraped against the structures outside. It created a noise so whimsical it seemed like it really was a scene out of one of Isabella's dramatic romantic movies.
"Yeah... I do believe this is it." Thomas stood there in his peacoat. Sisi always liked that coat. It was brown and thick and just scratchy enough that when he put it around her it would make the skin of her cheeks just a little redder than the cold had. She would nuzzle against it anyway. It smelled just like him.
His luggage was by his side. It was a leather set, with a messenger bag and a rolling suitcase. How Thomas, and men in general, could fit all his stuff in here was a mystery to Sisi. She'd need ten suitcases to move anywhere for a weekend, let alone eight years. Thomas had always been a simple guy. He was complex in other ways like his emotions and his mannerisms but his tastes were simple. He had a few shirts, a few good pairs of pants, a couple of pairs of shoes, and various accessories, like a scarf and a hat or two, all in neutral colors. He was wearing them now. Sisi giggled at the thought.
He was definitely ready for the aesthetic graduate life at his new university. Drinking coffee in the mornings at the various shops around in beautiful stonework buildings that had been there since the 1800s. That life would look beautiful on Thomas Zieragh.
"Salice? You okay?" Thomas had looked down at his friend of a couple of years now and seen something beautiful in her eyes. He'd seen her concern, her worry, her pride, her admiration, and something that looked a little like love. Thomas had seen all of these reflected in that green gaze before, but now he was seeing it all at once. It was enough for him to regret every time something could have happened between them and didn't. It was enough for him to make something happen between them now.
"Huh? Yeah... Yeah, I'm okay. I'm just really proud of you, that's all. And I'm really gonna miss you."
Thomas melted like ice cream on a hot summer day. He pinched her cheek, summoning her kiddish smile. How he wanted to make her smile for different reasons, every reason under the sun. Maybe it was too late for that... The way she was looking at him told him that maybe it wasn't.
"I-"
It was now or never. Something pulled his attention away. The only thing in the world that could possibly be more important than what he was about to say.
"Oh... I guess that's your flight then..."
Thomas cursed the gods and everything they made.
"It is... You know Salice, you can visit any time okay?"
She tried to hold her tears back. It would be nearly impossible to visit, but he didn't know that. She would have to leap and bound through every hoop imaginable to get her passport since she was something of a quasi-legal immigrant in the country. It was expensive and it would take years, but maybe something would bring them together again soon.
"I know, Thomas. Have a safe trip and good luck with everything okay?"
He nodded and smiled politely, taking a few steps away from her toward his gate.
"Okay... thank you Salice. For everything, really."
She waved at him through teary eyes. Watching him go. She should've realized then that would be the last time she was gonna see him. Maybe she did. Maybe that's why she knitted him that pair of mittens that were still on her hands.
"Oh! Thomas wait!"
She had run up to him and caught him right before he was to check-in. She had taken the mittens off and shoved them into his already gloved hands. She thought now that it might have been silly, but she didn't care. It was cold where he was going and she wanted him to have something that reminded him of her.
"Oh? Are these for me?"
Sisi nods, wiping the stray tear from her cheek. She chalked it up to the cold but she was really devastated that Thomas was going. She had loved him far more than he knew. And these mittens were the last physical proof of that. Or maybe every tear she cried when she got back to her dorm would be. In any case, these mittens were something Thomas could perhaps cry over. And that's why he needed to have them.
"Yeah... wear them when it gets cold? I don't want you getting sick up there."
Thomas' heart skipped a beat as he held the gift to his heart.
"I'll wear them... thank you so much, Salice."
He didn't hesitate to embrace her this time.
The way he wrapped her in his arms would be engrained in Salice's brain for the rest of her life. The way that hug made her feel... it was the closest she had ever come to the kind of love that made everything inside her still. She was overcome with the peace of the ocean at sunset, where not a single wave disturbed the beautiful quiet that the gods had provided. Even 10 years later, Sisi had never felt a love like that.
"Of course... go learn about Rocket Science or whatever it is you do," she teased.
Thomas' cheeks were hot with a flush. Hot with the love he had for her. Hot with the shame he had that he couldn't tell Salice his feelings before he got on that plane. Hot because suddenly he was thinking about staying here and all the possibilities that could've come with that.
He was thinking of Salice in a beautiful white dress. He was thinking of her with a round belly. He was thinking of her handing him the child he'd always wanted and he was thinking of how it would look exactly like her, maybe with his unfortunate nose. He was thinking of her with wrinkles and scars that she hated but he loved and that he worshipped every day. He was thinking of rocking chairs and peach pies and crochet and bingo and all the things people do when they're too old to care about material things and just young enough to enjoy the last bit of life they have left with the person they love. He was thinking of all that when he said-
"It's quantum physics..."
Sisi laughed. That laugh threatened to throw Thomas back into the flash of the life he'd never live if he didn't do something.
"You're such smarty pants. Sure, yeah. Quantum physics. Talk to you later, Thomas."
Sisi thought about all that. She thought about how now... now was that later she'd been talking about. She slowly smiled at the memory as she called.
---
Waiting for him to answer felt like the hardest thing she'd ever had to do. Part of her wished he didn't, to save her the embarrassment.
One ring, two rings, three...
"Hello? Dr. Zieragh speaking."
Sisi couldn't help but smile as she lit a cigarette. The concrete post she rested against was scratchy against her back. She was probably getting debris on her overcoat. Her arms were around her because it was winter once again.
"Hi, Dr. Zieragh. Do you have a minute?"
There was silence on the phone for a heartbeat, but then he must have recognized her voice. It had gotten more sultry, more melodic, but it was still just as sweet. Maybe even sweeter.
"Salice?"
Thomas couldn't believe his ears. He couldn't believe he was talking to that girl he'd said goodbye to at the airport all those years ago. He figured she was a woman now. He couldn't believe that he hadn't seen her since then. It was really a shock. Had it really been so long?
"Yeah... How are you, Thomas?"
"I..."
He didn't know how to answer that. He was doing well, sure, all things considered. He had graduated and gotten his Ph.D., as was made clear by the whole Dr. thing. He was working at a university, teaching classes, and doing research that seemed so mundane compared to everything he had done in his life to get to that point. He had done Ted Talks and traveled the world giving speeches and demonstrations of the wonderful and dangerous work that he eventually had to leave behind. Because of that work, he suffered a catastrophic accident causing his research to be confiscated by the government, resulting in Thomas becoming something of a recluse. But before he could vanish from the public eye and rightfully steep in his depression, he was required to lie to the media about the reason he had concluded his studies. Once the powers at be had their bases covered, they let Thomas go. He disappeared into his private life and decided to never talk about it with anyone. Not even a therapist. All the stress he'd been under for more than a few years was weighing on his conscience insurmountably. Thomas was hiding a plentitude of information from a great many people. And on top of all that, he was living with a woman he didn't love with no children to call his own.
"I'm great! How are you? What are you doing?"
Salice relaxed at the chipperness in his voice. It was deeper for sure, but that same good-natured stammer was still hidden underneath all that masculinity.
"I'm okay... I'm working at a sports reporting agency... blogs for race cars... cool stuff. I take it you're still in Sweden?"
"Yes! Yes actually... Still here. I took a job at the university I graduated from. Still doing research and learning as well as teaching, so I can't complain too terribly much."
Sisi's heart swelled with pride. She listened to him speak. The air of intellect in his voice. She was so impressed with all that he had accomplished. She remembered seeing him on television. Seeing him on the news and on Ted Talks. She watched all she could, knowing that she believed in him. That made her the happiest. Believing in someone who showed her that there are still some people out there worth believing in.
"Well, I'm so happy to hear it."
Now was to get to the point of why she called in the first place.
"I'm sorry to ask this... but I have to ask a favor. Maybe even a proposition for you, hm?"
Thomas raised his brow in curiosity.
"Out with it then. Go on."
He was aching to know what she could possibly be proposing. So sad to assume it wasn't marriage. Sisi was a sweet type, but there was a kind of mischief woven into that velvety young woman and Thomas had always dreamed of it taking him away.
"I think a friend of mine has gotten himself into a bit of Quantum trouble... and I was wondering if you could fly down and take a look. I wouldn't ask you to come if it wasn't serious."
Quantum trouble? What could she possibly mean? Thomas knew what that meant. Unfortunately, he was the man for the job because he did know what it means. If this had been anyone else, he would probably turn this down. But Salice had called.
Salice brought a vibrancy to his greyscale life. Even after 10 years of not seeing her, Thomas still knew this was true. He wanted to seize that vibrancy, perhaps selfishly, for himself. He wasn't going to make the same mistake twice. He was ready for an adventure.
I Just Watched Ant-Man So I'm Making It Everyone Else's Problem
1
-----
"You said you wanted to go the quantum realm?"
Sisi was puzzled. She hadn't heard of this before, only in movies. The Ant-Man movie to be exact. Her least favorite marvel movie.
"Yeah, it's totally possible!" Yumi was walking around erratically in his garage laboratory, one that Sisi knew she shouldn't be standing in.
"No... I don't think that's a good idea, Yumi. That's... actually insane."
"Sisi... you shouldn't doubt me like that."
Yumi was leaning over a table, one of the ones that's set up at a barbecue. The white vinyl ones. It had some sort of contraption that likened to a gumball machine. Sisi didn't want to look at it anymore. It could only mean trouble.
"Does Daniel know you're using the garage for this?" She asked.
Yumi rubbed his chin. He'd be lying if he said Daniel was okay with all this. Actually, he'd be lying if he said Daniel knew about this at all. Yumi knew that this was all guaranteed to go to disaster if he knew. There was only a slighter smaller chance of all this going wrong if he didn't. He'd go with that.
"Here... Sisi. Let's just keep this between us, okay. It would be better if this was our little secret, hm?"
Sisi crossed her arms. This already sounded like a terrible idea. And it just kept getting worse.
"That's what shady people say about things that are gonna turn out badly."
Yumi bit his lip and nodded. Sisi could count on her ten fingers the good ideas he's had. She'd have to use all the stars in the sky to count the bad ones. She just knew this was one of them
"Okay, whatever. Show me how this thing works then."
Some part of her was skeptical that it actually worked at all. That brought her some comfort.
Yumi walked over to the counter by the window, getting some dust particles off the machine cog he picked up. It was something so futuristic, Sisi could have sworn she'd seen it in Tron or Blade Runner or literally any movie. Sisi thought she should stop thinking about this whole thing like it was a movie. Then something tragic would happen to her, like in the movies. Except it wouldn't be romantic, fun, cute, or anything like that. It would be scary as hell and she would probably die.
"Okay, you take this. This is the switch. The switch connects to this lever. Well it's not really a lever; it's more like a dial. And you turn it like a radio. The thing about the quantum realm is that, it's not just one place like they make it seem in the movie. It's a spectrum of places, of universes smaller... and bigger... than this one."
Sisi nodded her head in understanding. She knew the whole thing about light being a spectrum, and gender being a spectrum, and sexuality being a spectrum... and this kind of sounded like that. She understood that. Except none of those other things were dangerous. All she could think about was how fucking dangerous this shit was.
"Keep going."
"Okay, and when you turn the dial to the left, you can access all of the communication waves that we can send down to those smaller universes. There's a spectrum like I said. And you turn it until you can get to the right frequency, and establish a connection to that plain of existence."
"Kinda like a telephone?"
"Yeah, like a telephone."
"You're gonna call the Quantum Realm?"
"Yeah... well no. It's like the Quantum realm is calling me."
Ha ha ha. Very fucking funny.
"Okay so when you get to the right frequency, then what?"
Yumi ran his hands through his long hair. He should have it in a ponytail or a bun or something. What if some fire comes out of the Quantum Realm and roasts his ass like a Thanksgiving turkey? That's how Sisi was thinking. She was like the resident risk assessor of their found family. Dan was the risk prohibitor. Yumi was the walking risk. Charlie was usually what inspired said risk, and there they would be, fighting for their fucking lives.
"When you get to the right frequency, you grab..."
He reached over and turned a few machine parts on the table, shoveling and sifting through them like they were just some dirty laundry on his room floor.
"You grab one of these..."
"What's that?"
I'm about to tell you." Yumi said.
"I'm waiting to know..."
"It's a hydro-paula-icitatortron.... or something."
"Oh, that sounds so official and gives me so much confidence," Sisi told him, rolling her pretty green eyes in exasperation.
"Your sarcasm is enchanting, really."
"Okay seriously, what actually is it."
"It's the locator. So kinda like in Minecraft, you know you have the coordinates?"
Sisi nodded. It insulted her a little bit that Yumi had to resort to Minecraft analogies to get her to understand his science project that could potentially get her killed. But if that's what he had to do, then that's what he had to do. And Sisi would listen, because she's not too proud for that.
"Yeah, it helps me know where I am when I'm mining and when I die, I can go back to that exact spot."
Yumi lights up. His pearly white teeth looked clean. Looking clean and being clean were two different things, but they were probably the cleanest thing on his body. He looked like he had been down here for days, wearing the same clothes he did the last time Sisi saw him. Which was.... a couple of days ago.
"Yes!" He points at her, bright blue eyes wide with excitement. He was excited to teach her something. He was passionate about this type of science. He thought he'd be an IT nerd for the rest of his life but Marvel movies really inspired him. So it was like Marvel Movies and the Dark Web had gotten married and created this Illegal Quantum Realm Catastrophe that Yumi had become obsessed with. Today would mark somewhere around three years.
"Yes! exactly, exactly. So with the locator, we find the exact coordinates that we had come across using the..."
"The switch"
"Yeah... with the switch!"
That's why Yumi gave all his tools and objects simple names. He was a scientist, but a scatterbrained one. He might as well have instruction manuals on everything too. There were multicolored post-it notes on every surface... so it was practically the same thing.
"So when we get the coordinates from the locator..."
Sisi leaned over cautiously to see more closely just was Yumi was going on about. It looked like one of those headers in the Time Square, or like Wall Street, with the pixelized information and text floating across the interface over and over. but those were words. Movie times and stocks and headlines and stuff. Those things Sisi could understand. This looked like something she had seen in her college physics course but hook it up to an IV and put whatever Dolph Lundgren and Arnold Schwarzenegger had taken for all those years directly into it. But multiply it by one hundred thousand infinity. How could Yumi even understand this?"
"We put these coordinates in here."
There was a separate part of the machine. A kind of annex, but it looked even more important than the first part. Yumi used a keyboard that looked like it was from like Star Trek or something to type in the same text from the first machine part.
"Yumi... Are we done with the MasterClass or what?"
"Hold on... I can't get this part wrong. If there's a single mistake, it could be really bad."
"Wait... then how'd you make this thing if you couldn't make any mistakes. Isn't that what science is? A bunch of mistakes until you've found something even semi-concrete."
There was silence for a few more seconds until Yumi was done transcribing the Klingon.
"Well... yeah. That's kinda the thing Sisi. I just built this. And what I'm doing now... I'm gonna test it."
Sisi went cold.
She thought of every possible thing that could go wrong. Every possible outcome that resulted in her getting obliterated, fried, disintegrated, or lost forever in a world she had no idea ever existed. She looked at Yumi with a blank stare. One that she tried to break, but just couldn't.
"You... can't be serious Yumi." A nervous chuckle came from her lips. She quickly realized, when he didn't shift, smile, laugh, or blurt out 'just kidding!', she realized he was dead serious. And the dead part might be the most relevant right now.
"No. I'm telling Dan."
She turned and marched up the garage steps to the door that led to the house. Yumi had caught her wrist before she could get too far.
"No!"
Yumi Ishizaki was shaking. He hadn't really felt this way about anything else before. He found a passion. He had a boring life before, such a boring life that going to a Marvel Movie would be the highlight of his fucking 3 month quarter. But now, after all this hard work and research and sleepless nights with something like this keeping him going... he felt like he finally found a passion. A purpose. And sure, maybe he thought he felt like that when he got a new job or a relationship or something, but this was the first time he felt like he was doing something that was actually gonna matter. Yumi didn't wanna die without doing anything spectacular. This was fucking spectacular. And he would be damned if Daniel was gonna come in here and smash up 5 long years of hard work because Sisi cried wolf.
"No, Sisi. Wait. Please. Don't tell him. I'll do anything. Just... I need this."
Salice had tears in her eyes. Alarmed tears. Her heart was racing and she was shaking too. Not because this was considered her life's work or anything, but because this type of invention could make short work of her life! And Yumi's and Daniel's and everyone who lived in this house, on this street, in the neighborhood, or even on the fucking planet. This was not meant to be some garage project. This type of information belonged to some powerful, invisible people that Salice would never know and would be okay with not knowing. Because, unlike Yumi, she was okay with the life she'd built here. She was okay with her messy, on-again-off-again relationship with Daniel. Her sisterhood with Charlie. And the best friend she had come to find in Yumi. And she would be damned if something like a stupid, silly garage project ate her family up like a three-week-old genetic material that turned into a monster and ambushed a 2nd grader as he opened his lunchbox.
"Yumi... I can't let you do that. It's dangerous... thank you for telling me... but I can't."
Yumi was practically begging her now. "Please, please. I'll wait, I'll hold off on testing it, just please don't make me quit doing this. This is... something amazing. Something I don't wanna lose.
Sisi was empathetic to him, but only so much that she rubbed his hands a bit before taking a few steps out of his grasp.
"Okay... Fine. But... I have some conditions.
---
"We have to call someone who actually studied this..."
Sisi thought about this logically and rationally. If they were gonna do some stupid shit like this, they needed someone who knew the official ins and outs of everything theoretical and hypothetical that could happen. Someone who could save their asses if things went horribly and terribly and inevitably wrong.
"Where are we gonna find someone like that? I mean, all the guys I was looking at research from are like fifty-year-old men who live in another country."
Sisi smiled bittersweetly. She knew someone like that. She knew someone who would be excellent for this type of thing. But she didn't really wanna call him. Not after everything they'd been through. Not for a favor, anyways. She couldn't call him to ask how he was doing, so it would be ten times harder to ask for a favor.
"I know a guy. He lives in another country, yes, but he's more like thirty-two."
Yumi was hapless. Who could Sisi possibly know that knew anything about Quantum Physics?
"Who? Can you call him now?"
"Just.... hold on. I'll call him this week. We're not doing anything else until he gets here."
Yumi's next question was if he could trust him. A lot of people would be at his throat for this work of his. Especially because he managed, in theory, to figure this all out in a garage with one-sixteenth of the budget of any lab at any worthwhile university or institution. And people would be out to steal all their credit. They'd maybe even go as far as to trap them in the Quantum Realm to keep the public from finding out about all this if they were really so evil.
Bellamy reached for his mother, who knelt down by his bedside at his question. She was just reading him nighttime stories uncle Yumi had written for him and for his cousin Nell. This particular story had been about a magic peacock, and when the peacock touched you with its feathers... you disappear.
"Oh, Bellamy, dear. It's just a story, you won't disappear."
Salice cleared curly mess of hair from her son's face. He look up at her with her very own green eyes... with a gentle and inquisitive gaze, which he had gotten from his father.
Bellamy sighed and looked over the edge of the bed, towards his bin of toys. That gentle look surrendered something likening to grief. An apathetic bastardization of grief. A complex emotion for a six year old to show. His voice was heavy when he spoke, barely above a mutter.
"But momma... sometimes I just want to disappear. Things might be easier?"
Salice's heart and stomach sink into the floor. Bellamy, her little ray of sunshine... had just told her he wanted to disappear? She hadn't anticipated figuring something like this out so soon... she was still figuring out her own bout with wanting to disappear. She and her sister, Charlie. They had both struggled with that.
"Honey..." Salice caressed Bellamy's bruised cheek. He and Nell liked to wrestle, and even though Bellamy was bigger... Nell was quite the fighter. Just like his parents.
"Sometimes... we all want to disappear. You think it might be easier, but we don't know."
She presses a gentle kiss to his forehead.
"Whenever you feel like disappearing... come tell me. We'll... we'll... we'll both disappear in daddy's big arms, okay?"
That was all she had. She couldn't tell him anything else. There wasn't anything she could make up so soon... that seemed genuine anyway. Disappearing into her husband's arms was probably the best thing that could happen to her right now. She needed help figuring this out. Figuring out how to help someone else when you're barely keeping yourself together as it is.
Bellamy manages to smile. "Daddy does give the best hugs."
Salice nods. "Yes, he does... He will be home soon. Daddy will give you your goodnight hug... even if you are asleep. Just like he always does."
Bellamy grabs his mother's hand before she turns to walk to the door.
"You need a goodnight hug, too, momma."
Salice takes a deep breath, holding back her tears before turning to envelope her son in her arms. His little arms and his little hands squeezed her tighter than she thought he could have.
"Oh, baby... oh I love you."
Salice couldn't quite disguise the crack in her voice as she was both hurt and comforted by her son all in the same minute. She hugged the clingy boy until he wanted to let go, and even that seemed way too short.
"I love you too, momma."
Salice kisses his head and his nose and pulls the covers up tight around his body before lighting a small ball of magic and sticking it above his doorframe. That was his nightlight. She made it for him every night. Salice feared the day he would tell her he didn't need it... even then.. she would probably still make it. She couldn't bear to think of a time where that wouldnt be routine.
She eyed the soft green light before cracking his door and going to get undressed for bed.
***
Daniel came through the door not too long after, maybe an hour. Bellamy was fast asleep, but Salice was wide awake. She lay on the couch, curled up with their old dog Blue, who snored softly on her breasts. Her tired eyes were trained on the heavy oak door that, in fact, Daniel had actually carved himself. She blinked twice when she heard the keys jangle in the lock and the sticky knob finally give. She was up in a second, and before he could step one foot into the house, she was there taking his bag.
"Oh.. hello love. Sorry I'm late co-"
He couldn't get his words out before Salice's arms were around his neck, squeezing him to high heaven. He tensed with the shock, but slowly relaxed as the mother of his child ran her nails along the back of his neck and pressed her body to his. He wrapped his big, strong arms around her waist, smaller now that all her new motherhood weight had almost disappeared. He had never fallen out of love with her shape. He squeezed that shape, feeling the softness of her underneath her nightgown, his hands travelling down her back. He took a deep breath of her sweet, warm scent and held her by the hips to get a good look at her. Her eyes were already droopy with sleep. But there was something else there too. He cupped her face when he noticed.
"Salice... is everything okay?"
She sighed and shook her head, biting on her pretty finger. "Daniel... Bellamy told me he wanted to disappear... That it would be easier to disappear..."
Before her husband returned home, repeatedly in her mind, she asked herself... 'what thing is more scary and fucked up than your young son telling you so nonchalantly that it would be easier to disappear?'
She couldnt name a single thing.
When Salice said her words, Daniel's face fell, and his hold on his wife loosened. He could see the tears in her eyes as she tried to go on, so he shook his head to stop her.
"Sisi... I'm not going to let that happen. We'll... we'll all talk about it together, okay? That's something... we really need to talk to him about. We'll do it soon..."
Salice nods, Daniel's deep voice bringing her comfort. He kisses her forehead soothingly, rubbing the sides of her hips. Ever since she was a teenager, she had been safe in these arms. He turned and walked her gently to their bedroom, stopping in quickly to hugs and kiss Bellamy in his sleep.
This time, Daniel took a little longer pressing his lips to the boy's cheek. He took his time carefully engulfing him into his arms. He held him as tight as he could without waking him. Salice stood in the doorway, her arms folded. It was hard to smile, feeling so distressed. The image of her husband and son was normally enough to make her swell with warmth and joy, but this time it was hard: feeling anything else but fear.
Daniel spoke softly to Bellamy's hear.
"Don't worry, Bell...I'm not going to let you disappear. Not you, not mommy... not aunt Charlie... not anybody."
Bellamy opened his groggy eyes for just a split second before they closed and he was lost into sleep.
That second was enough to understand that he had two people, who would go to the ends of the earth to make sure that he did not disappear.
