These things I have seen (Cai, Zoe, Zoe-family)

[itsajesusthing.insanejournal.com]

Cai hadn’t been able to imagine Zoe’s bedroom; anything would have surprised him but he was ready to be surprised. She had a lot of books, and a messy desk, but the thing that struck him the most was the heart made from torn up pink paper, pasted to Zoe’s wall. It didn’t seem like a Zoe thing to have.

“A friend made it for me,” Zoe said, when she caught him looking at it. Juliet had pieced it together one night and left it on her floor, and Zoe had taken the paper and stuck every bit of it to her wall. It had faded quite a bit over the years, as the sun poured in through her windows, and some of the scraps of paper were a darker pink where they were covered by others.

“It’s really cool,” Cai said, though he didn’t really think cool was the right word. It looked meaningful, is what he meant. It looked meaningful and he found he was interested in anything that this girl found meaningful. “Which friend?”

Zoe hesitated for a moment. “Juliet Horne.” She looked up at the heart, at the corners of some of the torn paper curling with time. “She died,” she said.

“At school?” Cai wondered.

“After. But… yes.”

“You lost a lot of people that day, didn’t you?”

Zoe pulled her eyes away from the heart and looked at him. Yes. She wanted to say it, to admit out loud that yes, she lost so many people on the day of the shooting. But it wasn’t supposed to be about her; her, the surviving member of the Sisterhood. Admitting that would mean coming to terms with the shooting in a whole new way and Zoe wasn’t ready for that. “You got hurt really bad too, didn’t you?” she asked, though she knew.

“Yeah,” Cai said, raising his hand to his chest, over the bullet he carried inside him. He thought; might as well admit all of it, since this is what we’re here to talk about. “After I was shot, that’s when the visions started.”

“Really?” Zoe asked, still watching him.

“Yeah, I had my first one the day I got out of hospital.”

Strange, thought Zoe. She didn’t know if Peter’s visions had been triggered by anything of if he’d always had them, like she did. She thought he’d always had them, but maybe she was just putting her own experiences onto him? And did Bently get them from somewhere? “How old were you?” she wondered.

“Twelve,” he said. “Almost thirteen.”

That made more sense, and Zoe nodded. She’d been twelve, too, though her visions had preceded her trauma, not been triggered by them. Her first visions had been a comfort, rescue is coming for you. She couldn’t say that about the rest of them.

“So,” Zoe said, folding her legs and sitting down on the floor. She had a big circular rug in the middle of her room, which she used to use for calling the quarters, back when she believed in that sort of thing. Back when circles could be protective, not just the shape of a rug.

It seemed like the right place to sit, though. Better than her bed. Her bed implied too much.

“So,” Cai said, sitting down on the rug with her, facing her. He crossed his legs the same as her, burying his fingers in the rug at his sides. “Are we going to try and have a vision again?”

“Yes,” said Zoe. “We need to figure out more about that funeral, whose it was and if we can stop it, and what Rachel started running from.”

“Can you do that?” he asked. “Choose what to see?”

“Well,” said Zoe. “No. Can you?”

“I just see something about the person I’m touching, I can’t choose what secrets to see, or anything. Or if I might see their past of their future. It’s just… whatever God chooses to show me.”

Zoe raised a slow eyebrow. “God, hey?” she asked, and Cai shrugged.

“My point is I can’t choose what I see,” Cai said. He wasn’t going to start talking about religion with Zoe, she didn’t seem like the type to have much patience for it. “I was pulled into your vision, that day in the pool, I think.”

“Hm,” said Zoe. If that was true, did that mean it was up to her to see the funeral again, and try to pull him into the vision with her? She wasn’t sure she could do that; she hadn’t had any luck seeing what she wanted to see, in the past. But she had to try. “So,” she said again. “How does it work, you getting pulled into other people’s heads?”

“Well, with Alex the visions would happen when we were kissing,” Cai said.

Zoe sat bolt upright. “I am not kissing you,” she said firmly.

“You asked!” he held up his hands to placate her. “It doesn’t have to be kissing, it’s some kind of connection I have to have.”

“We don’t have a connection.”

“We saw the same vision. I think we count as connected,” Cai pointed out.

“Alright,” said Zoe. She reminded herself that she wanted this; that she’d invited him to her house because there was something important they had to do. He’s not just trying to stick his tongue down your mouth, Zoe told herself. “Point. So,” she looked down at her hands, palms up, fingers outstretched.

She held her hands out towards him, feeling suddenly like her hands were the most delicate part of her. They were vulnerable little things, hands, and a voice in her head was insisting that she pull hers back toward her to protect them.

Cai reached his own hands out and took hers. His fingers were surprisingly warm, and they engulfed hers with their size. A small part of her was panicking, and all of her had tensed up.

“Tell me about your visions,” Cai said, his thumb brushing over the back of her hand. It felt terrifyingly intimate, but Zoe found that once she’d started to speak, she distracted herself.

“The worst ones come as fits,” she said. “They suck, but they’re generally clearer. More urgent, I guess? They knock me out the worst. And I get them the most often.

“Then there are the dreams. They’re less clear, but sometimes they’re longer. I don’t get a lot of those, but afterwards it can be almost as bad as the fits. Headaches and stuff.

“And sometimes all I’ll get is a flash, like being struck by lightning. They’ll hit while I’m awake, but nowhere near as bad as a fit. Just a flash of this thing is going to happen or, is happening now. Some visions… I never find out what I was seeing. Sometimes I can help, but other times I can’t find the connection, I can’t find who it’s happening to or where it’s happening. It’s…” she struggled to think of the word that would describe her frustrated feeling of helplessness, when she could see something but not enough to stop it. She decided on “hellish,” though she wasn’t happy with her choice.

“Wow,” Cai said, in genuine awe. “Wow, yours sound so much… bigger.”

“Bigger?”

“Because I only ever see the person I’m touching,” he said. “Something they’ve done, or something they’re going to do. You see… heaps more. You see things you don’t even know your connection to. That’s… you’re plugged into something really special, Zoe.”

“Special isn’t exactly a word I’d pick,” Zoe said.

“Important,” Cai revised.

Zoe nodded; she could agree with important.

“And have you ever been able to control it?” Cai asked. “To pick what you see?”

“Hah,” exclaimed Zoe. She'd tried before, and while she'd sometimes been able to induce a vision by concentrating hard enough, it had never been a vision of exactly what she'd wanted to see.

“Neither,” he said. “Ever tried with someone else?” he asked, looking down at their hands.

“Not really,” Zoe looked down too. She’d sat like this with Silva, once upon a time. They’d lit so many candles that the smell of candles still reminded Zoe of Silva and Belle’s bedroom. They’d done Tarot readings and had tried hard to get signals from beyond about which card to pick, but if the signals were coming she didn’t know how to receive them.

And she’d talked to Bentley, in the hospital, but talking to Bentley was very difficult. And she hadn’t tried to see anything with him. “I’ve never shared a vision before you,” she said. “Do you think it means that someone we both know is going to die?”

Rachel had been in the vision, but she hadn’t seen Danny. Danny her friend and Danny Cai’s brother. Zoe didn’t want to say his name out loud because she felt like she’d be cursing him.

“I don’t know,” said Cai, who was thinking the same thing.

“Nargh,” Zoe exclaimed in frustration. “Okay!” she said firmly, grabbing his hands tighter and leaning closer to him. “We’re both going to picture the funeral, alright? Picture everything you remember from the vision, every little detail.”

“Okay,” Cai agreed, bowing his head over their hands and closing his eyes to picture the church. He knew it so well, he was there almost every week. It wasn’t difficult to picture the setting around him, the polished wood panelling, the flowers on the stands as you came in through the entranceway, a lovely arch of stone.

Zoe was doing the same, but she was remembering how she was running after Rachel, someone, some person chasing them. She kept trying to picture who it was, but she hadn’t been able to see.

What if it was Cai? He’d been there, after all. What if it was Cai following them and not something sinister?

What if it was Cai following them and he was the something sinister?

Zoe felt a cold rush of fear. Oh shit, what if he was?

Then she thought firmly to herself. Then you keep hold of his hands and you figure out a way into his head and you bloody well find out.

She gasped down a deep breath, and with that, Cai leaned forward a little more, intending to whisper something to her to urge her to relax. He could feel the tension coming off her.

Zoe opened her eyes at his movement, and for a brief moment Cai was seeing through her eyes, looking at himself – and then he was Zoe, climbing over a wood and wire fence to join a group of people who were smoking in a field.

Zoe yelped in surprise and pulled back, yanking her hands out of his. She didn’t know where to put them, so they hung in the air near her shoulders.

Cai opened his own eyes, back in himself once again. “Smoking is bad for you,” he said, his voice attempting to be funny but coming off rather thin.

“Yes,” said Zoe, staring at him, hand still in the air. She felt disorientated, like she’d misjudged the number of stairs and had stepped out onto nothing when she’d expected a floor. A sickening lurch before she’d come right again. A jolt of adrenaline through her body.

“Where was that? Did you see it too? The field, and the big blond guy and the girls?”

“I saw it,” said Zoe. “That was when I went on Christian camp.” She’d felt so out of place there, with Aggie being nicer than she deserved, so she’d sought out the people who took the piss out of everything, Rueban and Arwen and them. “Why did we see that? That’s nothing to do with it!”

“But we did it, Zoe,” Cai reminded her. “We saw the same thing. That’s pretty huge.”

It wasn’t huge enough, Zoe thought, a sudden bloody-mindedness coming over her as she reached out and took his hands once more. “Try again,” she said.

For more than an hour, they tried again, and again and again. Each time getting flashes of Zoe, snippets of Zoe’s past.

Zoe and the puppy Ghost and how upset she’d been when Ghost had to go back to her home.

Zoe and her desperate attempts to have visions about a missing girl named Tasha.

Zoe and Silva talking about werewolves and Zoe trying to have a vision about the animal that was terrorising London.

Some men breaking into Zoe’s house, this house. Cai felt Zoe’s rush of hyperactive fear, but Zoe yanked her hands away from his before he could see much more. Before either of them saw the Templar die in front of her. Zoe could almost forget she’d seen that, sometimes. She didn’t want a refresher.

She reached for his hands again, but he put his hands up in a T for time out. “I have to take a break,” he said, using Zoe’s chair to pull himself to his feet. His legs had gone to sleep, and the blood fizzed painfully back into his feet.

“What’s wrong?” Zoe asked, as Cai sat down in her chair.

“Don’t feel good. Don’t you feel not-good?” Cai held a hand out flat in front of him; it was shaking visibly.

Zoe opened her mouth to profess she was fine, but did decide to assess herself before she spoke. Cai was right, she didn’t feel good. Not the normal post-vision feelings, either. Her muscles shook like she’d sprinted for too long without any warm up, like they’d been swamped with acid. She felt ever-so-slightly like throwing up, or possibly passing out.

She took a few deep breaths and then slowly turned to fish her drink bottle from her bag. Drinking seemed to help, and without thinking much about it she offered the bottle to Cai, who took it and drank deep without a second thought about sharing bottles and the weird closeness that implied.

Leaning against her windowsill, Zoe flicked the latch and pushed the window open. The cool air was a relief, and she breathed in deep, exhaled and –

Was watching Rachel’s father with some dark haired woman in a small and cluttered kitchen. He pushed her hair behind her shoulders and leaned in to kiss her.

Zoe crumbled by the window, and Cai leapt up from his chair but he wasn’t close enough to catch her before she hit the floor. He knelt down next to her, and – not thinking about first aid and not touching people who were having seizures – slid his arm under her back when she arched it and pulled her into his arms.

She stopped seizing immediately, turning into a ragdoll, slumped against his body.

He saw the images of these adults he didn’t know, kissing in a kitchen he didn’t recognise. The disorientation with this vision was so much worse than the ones that involved Zoe – at least he was prepared to see Zoe. He was not prepared for strangers.

He could tell these adults were trying to keep the kissing secret, though. He could feel it, though there was no other clues that the relationship was illicit.

Zoe came out of it with a groan, gagging a bit. “Gross,” she muttered.

“Gross kisses?”

“Gross, Rachel’s dad. And not his wife. Gross.” Zoe became aware that she was lying against Cai’s chest, she could hear his heart beating under her head. She let embarrassment fuel her strength and pulled herself away from him, heaving herself up onto her bed, where she lay on her stomach, arm hanging off the side, breathing heavily.

She felt weak as a wet paper towel, and just as clammy.

Cai stayed where he was, sitting on the floor beside her bed. He looked about as bad as she felt.

They stayed where they were for a few long minutes, till Zoe couldn’t stand it anymore. She sat up slowly, hoping that she wasn’t as close to passing out as she felt.

“Well,” Cai said. “That’s a bit to process.”

Zoe breathed deep, deep down into her stomach. “It usually is,” she said, on her exhale.

“So Rachel’s dad is cheating on his wife with another woman,” Cai said, processing out loud.

“You once tried to have visions to see if a werewolf was the thing behind those animal attacks. Some scary men broke into your house once. And you had a dog called Ghost that got taken away?”

Zoe didn’t quite nod, but she didn’t deny any of it, either. “Hoy,” said Cai quietly. “There was nothing nice there.”

“Ha ha,” Zoe said, amused but too tired to put the energy into laughing. “Welcome to my life.”

“Sorry, Zoe,” Cai said sadly. Zoe shook her head; it was fine.

Slowly, she stood up. She didn’t move for a moment, just to make sure she wasn’t going to fall.

“Going to throw some water on my face,” she said.

Cai nodded, watching her leave. He stayed where he was on the floor for a while longer, listening to taps run through the wall. He knew he should stand up too, but he wasn’t quite ready. The world he’d be standing up into wasn’t the same world he’d sat down in, not really.

He crawled across the floor and checked his phone, putting off standing for a little longer. He didn’t have any messages, and the time on the screen said it was almost six. Shit, but they had been at it a while. Cai dropped the phone back into his bag and sat back against the wall, running his hands through his slightly sweaty hair.

Zoe came back into her bedroom, leaving the door open behind her this time. She looked a little better – definitely better than he felt. He supposed she’d had more practise at this. “So, did it turn out to be a werewolf?” he asked, trying to make a joke, like they’d joked about werewolves and wings in his bedroom a few days ago.

“Yeah,” said Zoe, without any glimpse of humour.

Cai’s stomach turned over. He didn’t reply. Zoe knew she should have said something to cushion that answer, but that would have taken more energy that she had.

“I might throw some water on my face too,” Cai said.

Zoe nodded. “Left the door open,” she said, with a small gesture in the right direction. “S’the one that looks like a bathroom.”

He was still in the bathroom when the call for dinner came. He stared at himself in the mirror for a while longer, just taking in the shape of his face.

Not for the first time, he was wondering just how much he was capable of. What was he.

Why him?

"Cai?" Zoe's voice outside the bathroom door. "They're calling us for dinner."

"Okay," Cai said, pulling himself away from the sink where he'd been leaning. He ruffled his hands through his hair, gave himself an encouraging nod in the mirror and went out to join her. "Do I look normal?" he asked.

"What's normal?" Zoe asked. "No, you're fine. Come on, food will help."

Cai hoped so. He was ravenous. He followed her down the stairs, into the diving room where her mothers were laying out the food.