Severance

📅 Spring 2007

【ᴍᴀssɪᴠᴇ ᴛʀɪɢɢᴇʀ ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢ ғᴏʀ ɢʀᴀᴘʜɪᴄ ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛᴇᴅ sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ】

It was a scholarship offer. That was the final straw for Seth. His mother had a connection (didn’t she always?) and had put a word in (even though he never asked her to) and now there was a letter from Cambridge laying on his bed, stating that they’d be thrilled to have him attend their oh-so-prestigious university. And sure, in all honesty, Sethfire knew that the University of Cambridge putting in the effort to score his attendance shouldn’t be what broke the camel’s back...But it was. 
He was seventeen and his parents were pushing on him hard; why hadn’t he chosen a university yet? Where did he want to go? He needed to make a decision, didn’t he know? Time is finite and the clock is ticking. They’d dumped the nearly comical number of letters on his bed that morning and told him to make up his mind. And that’s exactly what he did. 

Cambridge’s offer lay next to acceptance letter after acceptance letter to schools his parents had approved of, had told him to apply to. Yale would be honored to have him. Columbia and Princeton both had given him their stamp of approval. And oh, his father would just glow if he decided on Harvard. Sethfire felt the impulse to tear the letters all to pieces. Bitterly he turned away from the pile of envelopes and caught sight of himself in the mirror hung on his closet door—and maybe it was there, in that reflection, that it all really broke down. Letters from Ivy League colleges strewn across a perfectly made bed. An Oxbridge monthly calendar the sole decoration hung on the wall of a room devoid of posters and personality alike. And then Sethfire himself: Hair cropped short and ‘neat,’ dressed in chinos and a crisp white dress shirt that he never rolled the sleeves up on. A perfect, clockwork-motor toy soldier in his parents’ hands; wound and ready to march unquestioningly down the path they selected for him. Ever-obedient, ever-conforming, ever-bowing to the whims of the authoritative. As it had always been…
He forced himself from lingering on the depth of that ‘always,’ but shutting down his train of thought and memory failed to keep at bay the sensation of hands on his body and the bile which rose in his throat at their ghostly touch.

Sethfire hadn’t been aware at first of the way his hands had started to shake, but then the tremor crept into his shoulders and his clenched jaw began to ache and that was all he had that felt like his; the revulsion at the fiction, the sham of it all. Staring at himself in the mirror, he rolled his shirt sleeves up to his elbows, revealing the only part of himself that was his and his alone; his secret shame and secret defiance. The scars on his forearms clashed with the backdrop of his life; the letters, the ironed pants, the characterless room and the pressure to get into fucking Mensa. His self-destruction was the only aspect of his reflection that felt like truth to him and as he rolled his shirt sleeves back down and faced the lie again, the dam burst. 
That tailored reflection was all he could ever be in this life, Sethfire realized. His successes could never truly be his own; they would always be another trophy on his parents’ mantel or a weapon for them to use against his sister. The letters on his bed were just paving stones along a path to a future where he stayed in that constant forced competition that he detested above all else. A future where he was not himself, but his parents’ son. A future where his life was not his own—where he was not his own. A future just like his past; owned and obedient and polished and perfect. A future just like his reflection: Fake.

It was the façade Sethfire wanted his fist to meet, but the mirror took the blow. Standing in shattered glass, his hand cut up and bleeding, Seth knew he should have felt horrified at his outburst. But his only control was in being out of control and the aluminium powder mixing with the blood beading up from his knuckles felt like insurrection, like insurgency, like a desperate, doomed attempt at a coup d'état. Because he was done being a game-piece, a pawn, a puppet on a string. He was done being weaponized against his sister, especially, and if his parents wouldn’t stop forcing her to feel as though she was living in his shadow…? He’d stop blocking the light. 
And maybe losing their son would finally force his parents into loving their daughter.
Their daughter. His sister.
Athena.

She was the hesitation that made him pause with the drawer of his desk already open, his hand already reaching for his blades. Athena would be home in an hour or so; unless she’d gotten a detention or decided to go over to a friend’s house, she would be the one to find his body. And he couldn’t allow that, couldn’t force his little sister to see the aftermath of what he had to do. And he knew that she deserved better than a page torn from his planner that said nothing more than ‘ATHENA: DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR. CALL THE POLICE,’ but he felt he had neither the time nor the words to write in order to communicate that he had to do this, that he was saving her from the way their parents always held him like a gun to her head. So he didn’t try: Just scribbled his warning sign and taped it to his door before sinking to the floor in front of his closet, clutching his pack of razor blades, not caring that he was sitting on shards of glass, in the remains of his shattered mirror. 

An eerie calm settled over him, then. A feeling of inevitability replaced the sense of out-of-control impulsivity that had accompanied smashing his mirror, and somehow Seth felt like this all was where his life had been leading up to for some time; like he’d reached a play’s final act; a logical conclusion to a mess of a story. He’d always been good at muting his emotions and this time they seemed to flee of their own accord: He was left with nothing but an objective, a sense of purpose, and the knowledge of how to execute it. It was familiar, an echo of academia, and as he peeled the paper off the blade in his hand, internally he wryly gave himself a perfect score on the Anatomy final that he would never take. 

——

School was hard. It was always hard. Had always been hard. Sixth grade math was in no way easier than fifth grade math, and getting yet another test back with an abysmal score and ‘See me after class’ scribbled at the top in authoritative red pen wasn’t anything new to Athena—but that didn’t make it easy. She was meant to be looking over the answers now, she knew, as the teacher went over each problem—but half the time even with guidance Athena couldn’t piece together where she’d gone wrong. Numbers just didn’t make sense to her, and all the rules and formulas and tables just seemed to fall out of her head. Trying to understand her mistakes—even as the teacher explained how to correct them—just felt like attempting to hold a wet bar of soap. The problems didn’t make sense, the solutions didn’t make sense, and she was going to get yelled at by her parents no matter what that evening—so it was easy to tune out: To get lost in a daydream about an after-school game of basketball, or just in the view out of the classroom window. 

The rap of knuckles on her desk startled Athena out of her reverie, and she looked up to see her math teacher standing over her, looking deeply unimpressed.
“Athena, have you really not corrected any of your work?” her teacher asked in a tone thick with exasperation, “Honestly, when you’re barely scraping D’s, I’d expect you to care more!”
As the muffled snickering around the classroom started, Athena wanted to laugh it off too—and maybe if her teacher had been right about her, she would have been able to. But she couldn’t, because her teacher was wrong: She did care. She was trying but no one could seem to tell and it was never enough anyway. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment and frustration both, and she slammed her palms on the desk as she stood up.
“Yeah, well, I’d expect you to care more about your obviously failing marriage but I guess no one has their priorities straight!” Athena snapped—then turned on her heel, snatched her backpack off the back of her chair, and stormed out of the classroom. Blood was still pounding in her ears as she strode furiously across the school lobby and flung open its double doors to start her arduous, still-fuming march towards home.

After her school had fallen a few blocks behind her, however, that distance ate away some anger...and regret welled up to replace it. It wasn’t just that she would, for certain, get a detention and a thorough chewing-out from her parents: What really bothered her was that her response had been patently unkind. Even if her teacher had been rather harsh, surely she didn’t deserve to have it thrown back in her face that her students had noticed that framed picture of her husband getting pushed farther to the back of her desktop clutter. Athena guiltily chewed on her lower lip and decided to ask Seth what to do. She knew his school let out an hour earlier than hers; he’d be home when she got there: Would be willing to sit and listen and hear her out, would be the one person who wouldn’t launch right into scolding her for ditching. Her older brother was always composed, attuned, and well-spoken: Surely he’d have advice on making an apology and keeping a cool head. Already feeling reassured, safe in the knowledge that Sethfire would have some kind of answers for her, Athena hitched her backpack higher and picked up her pace towards home.

When she walked in the front door, though, her reassurance faded. She couldn’t place it at first, but something felt off-balance. Seth’s bedroom window faced the front walk; so typically when she got home, her brother was already at the top of the stairs, a hello halfway off his lips before she could even shut the door behind her. Today the house was quiet, the landing empty.
“Seth?” Athena called up to the silent second floor, but she received no reply—so she climbed up the stairs in the wake of her unreturned greeting, confused and uneasy. At first, seeing a note taped to the bedroom door was comforting; of course, Sethfire must have gone out, left her a note to say when he’d be back. That brief sense of comfort was shattered, though, by what was written on the paper in front of her:

ATHENA: 
DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR. 
   CALL THE POLICE. 
-Seth

The words she read transformed into fear as soon as she read them; they held no meaning nor instruction: She didn’t think about whether she should or should not do as she’d been directed; terror prevented all comprehension. All she knew was that she was scared, that something was wrong, that Seth knew what it was and that she desperately wanted her older brother. 
So she pushed open his bedroom door.
The sight was traumatic beyond words and it was all Athena could do to avoid passing out or throwing up. Sethfire was propped up, but slumping, against his closet door; at first Athena couldn’t make sense of his armfuls of rose petals until she realized they were non-existent: The red hues painting his arms were gaping wounds, not blooming flowers. Horror already had a stranglehold on her by the time she realized that his strange maroon pants were actually his normal khaki chinos—just saturated with blood. 

“SETH!” His name ripped out of her throat and she stumbled forward, instinct pushing her towards her brother more than logic. Her knees hit the floor beside him and she couldn’t bite back a gasp of pain; something sharp—a shard of mirror—had cut into her skin. Glancing down, though, only choked her with the realization that she was kneeling in a pool of her brother’s blood, warm and slick and nauseating. She desperately looked up only to notice the spray patterned stain across his shirt, the spattering up the closet doors behind him. At that point, hysteria started to overtake her—worsened by the fact that the air was so thick with the scent of blood that hyperventilating made her feel as though she was drowning in it. Her head spun and her vision swam and she scrambled desperately from Seth’s bedroom to her mother’s office, smearing the desk with blood as she reached for the phone. And though numbers had always seemed to fall from her memory, Athena groped her way through her panic to the three digits that endless repetition had managed to drill in: 9-1-1. 

“Nassau County 911, what is your emergency?” asked the voice that crackled from the receiver, her business-like tone feeling absolutely surreal.
“My brother is bleeding to death!” Athena choked back, barely able to form words through the stranglehold of her fear, “You gotta send an ambulance, he’s—”
“I’m gonna do that for you sweetheart, what’s the address?”
“8¼ Chestnut Drive, in Great Neck Estates—please, you have to hurry—” Athena gasped, tears running hot and fast over her cheeks. She clung desperately to the phone and hung off the dispatcher’s words.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’m hurrying. What’s your name?”
“Athena Brookes, my brother is Sethfire Brookes—Seth—you gotta help, he’s dying!”
“Okay Athena, stay on the line with me. Are you with your brother right now?”
“No, he’s back in his room—somebody’s coming, right?! There was blood everywhere—”
“I’ve got you, sweetheart. There’s an ambulance really close by, heading your way, but you’re going to need to go back so you can help Seth until they get there, okay? Can you take this phone with you?”

Athena felt her throat close up at the idea of turning around, facing the sight of that room again—but the words “help Seth” echoed over and over in her head and she forced her shaking legs to move. They nearly gave out in his doorway, where Seth’s slumped figure and the overwhelming smell of blood doubled her over. She couldn’t stifle her horrified, half-retched whimper.
“Athena, honey, are you with him?” the dispatcher asked, her voice pulling Athena incrementally closer to clarity.
“Yeah...” Athena whispered.
“Okay, help is on the way. Where’s he bleeding from?”
“Ev—everywhere on his arms, oh my God, they’re gaping open,” Athena choked out, the words tearing her throat with fear. She was unable to keep herself from dry-heaving at the sight of the still-bleeding wounds, and she heard the dispatcher let out a faint, distraught sound of her own before she pulled herself together.
“I’m so sorry sweetie,” the dispatcher said, truly sounding it, “but I need you to put pressure on his arms, okay? Can you tie something around them?”
Athena wrenched her eyes off of her brother and looked frantically around the room, finding it—as always—meticulously pristine: No laundry on the floor, no forgotten shower towels. There was a handful of envelopes atop his perfectly made bed, though—and Athena sent them scattering to the floor as she dove for the bed and stripped Seth’s pillowcases from his pillows.
“Pillowcases, I have pillowcases,” she gasped tearfully into the receiver as she all but threw herself back into kneeling beside Sethfire. The pool of blood around him seemed to have grown; she failed to bite back the cry that ripped out of her chest: “What do I do?”
“Take a deep breath for me; I’ll walk you through this. The ambulance is coming, sweetheart,” the dispatcher said gently, “Now if he’s not already laying down, get your brother flat on his back, alright? And I’ll go step by step with you through tying a tourniquet. Okay?”
Athena took a broken gulp of air and steeled herself.
“Okay.”

With shaking hands, Athena fixed her grip under Seth’s shoulders and gently lay him down. His head lolled limply and his eyes stayed shut, but as his back hit the floor he gave the weakest of exhales; far too faint to be a sign of consciousness—just air escaping his lungs as his body shifted—but a sound enough to shatter whatever composure Athena had. She broke under her brother’s breath; couldn’t stop the keening wails that tore her throat as she begged him not to die on her. But despite her tear-blurred vision, her painful sobs and fumbling fingers, she followed every instruction crackling through the phone’s speaker. Knotted a pillowcase around each of Seth’s upper arms; 
(“Okay, sweetheart, a couple inches above his elbow then, if all the bleeding is below that”)
Used a ballpoint pen to twist them tightly to his skin;
(“Do you have a pencil or something you can use to wind it tight?”)
Bawled her terror into the copper-heavy air, her brother’s blood drying on her own skin, clinging to the hairs on her arms;
(“You’re doing great, Athena. Hang in there. Put pressure on those cuts if you can, but the tourniquets should do their job.”)

“I’m trying, I’m trying!” Athena sobbed in response; her eyes swollen, her throat sore. There was the faintest sound of sirens in the distance, and she prayed, hiccupping, that it was the ambulance for Seth.
“Shh, it’s alright. You’ve done amazingly, sweetheart, the paramedics are gonna be right there.”

Either time skipped or the ambulance flew but the woman on the phone was abruptly right, and the drive was alight in red and white and wailing noise. Paramedics were suddenly in the bedroom with her so Athena felt she had to have gone to the door and let them in, but couldn’t remember doing it. She was watching an EMT lean over Seth, saying something into his radio; 

“Black male, young adult, massive blood loss—”

And then all of a sudden Athena was outside of the room and a different medic was talking to her, asking questions, and she was answering even though she couldn’t make out what either they or she herself was saying—
And then she was in the ambulance, somehow, and she couldn’t remember having gone down the stairs
or how Seth had gotten onto a stretcher
but there he was, right beside her, 
and she kept asking why the ambulance wasn’t moving yet; they had to GO. 

The answer “We’re flooring it for him, sweetheart” made no sense at all until suddenly they were there, 
they were at the hospital; they must have teleported—
And then the ambulance doors flew open and they were pushing Seth to safety, 
(safety, safety, safety) because that’s how the world worked; 
he was safe now, he had to be—

“HEMORRHAGIC SHOCK; PULSE IS VERY WEAK,” someone pushing the gurney shouted.
“FLUIDS FLUIDS FLUIDS, KEEP HIS HEART PUMPING! CALL FOR A TRANSFUSION—”

The realization that Seth wasn’t yet safe crashed over Athena like a rogue wave and she collapsed under its weight; clinging to the EMT who caught her when her knees buckled and then sobbing into the chest of some nameless, faceless person she was handed off to. Eventually she found herself inside with some official-seeming adult assuring her that her parents had been called and were on their way. She supposed she must have told someone her mother’s phone number, but she couldn’t recall having done so. 

Time and memory kept warping around her emotional overwhelm; a nurse gently handing her a paper cone of water rippled and became the moment her mother came running in, heels clacking on the sterile hospital floor, towards her—then past her; ignoring Athena’s raised arms and beelining to interrogate the nearest doctor. Sethfire was in surgery to attempt to repair some of the damage he’d done to his arms, Namibia was told, and Athena tried to wrap her head around her ever-gentle older brother having hurt himself so badly that maybe even doctors couldn’t fix it.
Her mother, never discomposed, seemed suddenly frantic: Her tone was just as demanding as it had always been, but there was some desperate edge to her voice that only added to Athena’s feeling that the entire world had to be falling apart—or maybe she was the one dying: Had been hit by a car while storming home from school and was now in some medical-coma-nightmare, because her mother was right: This can’t be happening. There’s no way this is happening.

After exhaustively reaming into every staff member she could get near enough to and sending her husband on multiple errands to obtain water, Namibia appeared to have come to the conclusion that she’d done her part and took a dramatic seat beside Athena, who kept staring at her hands in her lap, wishing her mother would hug her and knowing she would not.
“We’ll have to make some calls,” Namibia said with a haughty gesture and the tone one would use in a company meeting; “I’m certain they don’t have any clue what they are talking about here; of course he’ll be able to use his hands again.” She pressed her phone to her ear. 
Athena didn’t respond, but felt her lip trembling. Seth might not be able to use his hands? She looked up, hoping to find any reassurance, even the soft smile of a sympathetic nurse. Instead she saw that her father had taken over the position of arguing with the hospital staff, and the volume with which he announced his own medical accreditations steadily grew with each poor person in scrubs who failed to give him a satisfactory answer on why there was any risk of permanent damage when they were living in an age where you can clone a blasted sheep, for God’s sake.

The evening passed by in a blur; they ended up at a restaurant for dinner, where Athena couldn’t manage to find an appetite and her parents spent more time taking their emotions out on the staff and making phone calls than they did eating. Namibia fretted over the hardwood flooring in the bedroom and the reluctance the cleaners had voiced when she called; Todd contended that they could do with finding a more assiduous staff anyway and that this bunch were, of course, layabouts for not jumping to task.
At one point the harried waiter poured Athena a glass of wine. She didn’t drink it, but tiredly wondered if the ‘accident’ hadn’t been intended for her benefit. 

Seth was out of surgery when they returned from dinner, and the night was spent in his hospital room. Athena’s parents curled into one another in adjacent, uncomfortable chairs; Athena pushed her own to adjoin her brother’s bed and tucked her feet up, her spine bent so she could rest her head on his blanket and clasp his bandaged hand in hers. The exhaustion of the day crashed over her, and even the odd, uncomfortable position couldn’t keep her from the pull of sleep. It was the wee hours of the morning when she was awoken by the feeling of Seth stir beneath his covers; the sound of a pained grunt. 
“Seth, you’re awake!” Even as a hushed gasp Athena’s voice cracked; tears sprang to her eyes and blurred the dark room into a shapeless wash of blues. She buried her head in her brother’s blanket to try and keep from making too much noise.
“Shh, shh...don’t cry…” Sethfire mumbled weakly. His voice itself seemed tired; sound too exhausted to carry itself through the air. He tried to lift his arm and hissed at the pain of it; Athena swiftly seized his hand to keep him from making the effort a second time. He sank back into the mattress as soon as he felt the pressure of her hand and seemed to relax. Athena tried not to hiccup and watched him blink blearily in the dark, his typically sharp eyes dulled and dazed by pain medication. His fingers twitched in hers.
“Don’t cry…” he repeated, sounding confused but earnest, even through his sedated haze; “You’re alright…” He sighed into a mumble and his eyes closed; his thumb twitched against her palm again though he’d already fallen back asleep.  
“...But are you?” Athena thought at him. Without his glasses, deep in an anaesthetic sleep, his dark skin a sharp contrast to the stark hospital bedding...her older brother looked suddenly young, suddenly alone. She tightened her grip on his fingers and nuzzled her head against his side; listening to the sounds of his breath; to the beeping and backdrop of hospital noise, until it all bled together like rain on a roof and lulled her into sleep again.

It was still early but finally light when she was awoken again, this time by hospital staff coming to check up on Seth. Athena found herself out in the hall with her parents, half-listening to what the doctor was telling them, half-wondering what the ones behind the now-closed-door to Seth’s room were telling him.
“...and he needs to be monitored,” the doctor talking to her parents explained; “We’ll be sending him up to the psychiatric ward as soon as we get the all clear on moving him...He’s done an immense amount of damage to his arms, too: He’ll need extensive physical therapy, and even then he might not get back full function…” His words kept seeming to blend together for Athena; she struggled to hold onto their full weight and mostly just ended up feeling somehow shipwrecked, only really grasping that everything—absolutely everything—had changed.

A nurse leaned out from Sethfire’s room and beckoned her over with a kind, encouraging eyes and a smiled, “Hey, your big brother wants to see you.”
Inside, Seth was sitting up and frowning and visibly exhausted, but as soon as she came through the door he made an immediate effort to smile. He went to lift his arms and winced.
“Athena—” he started, and his voice, though strained, was familiar again; not weak and sedated. He seemed once more his intent, intelligent self, and Athena burst into tears all over again. She couldn’t form words and instead all but threw herself onto his bed to cling to him.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Seth said fervently. He managed to embrace her despite the pain that tightened his voice. “They said you were the one who found me, I never wanted that—”
“I don’t wanna talk about it!” Athena choked into his hospital gown; “I don’t wanna think about it! I just want you to come home…”
Sethfire sighed; his posture seemed to crumple by a degree. His voice grew heavy.
“...It might be a while before that can happen, Athena…”

——

The ward was sterile and humorless; Sethfire found his hospital bedroom just as devoid of personality as his real room back home. Initially he and his mummy-wrapped arms drew stares from his fellow patients, almost all of whom he towered over...and his doctors, too, kept getting left somewhat bug-eyed. Sethfire was well-spoken and he knew it—and he found himself able to calmly articulate and grey-rock his way through every interaction. Seventeen years of being parented by narcissists had been impeccable training on how to present an image, so Seth put that training to use: He reassured all of his doctors that he felt fine, mentally, other than his upset over his arms; that he was just as confused as they were and his behavior had been entirely out of character. Yes, he said, perhaps they were right; maybe it was some kind of stress-induced transient psychosis. He’d of course never try it again, what had he been thinking?

He talked openly about his hope-filled future; about having plans; he’d like to attend a local college, and since becoming a surgeon had been struck from the table...perhaps he’d major in psychology. To better understand what happened to him. He knew he already had his graduation credits for high school, and he used the nurse station phone to make the necessary calls to get his diploma early. He asked for reading material on the new major he was considering and spent the vast majority of his free time in the hospital reading. He worked as hard as he could bear at his physical therapy, and asked anyone knowledgeable enough to offer an opinion what they thought about nerve grafts; their feasibility, for one, but also if operations of that nature were something he’d have to make a decision about with immediacy—or if, perhaps, he could wait and see how well physical therapy did for him first.

His functionality and drive confused, then finally convinced, his hospital team. They’d floated a few diagnoses which he failed to fit himself to, and eventually they were forced to conclude he’d truly had some spell of temporary insanity. They released him with a tentative diagnosis of Brief Psychotic Disorder and instructions to seek help if he experienced delusional thinking, but reassurances that most people experience only one episode and suffer no permanent symptoms. Seth thanked them, with full knowledge that he’d never once in his life been psychotic.

...It wasn’t really all a façade, in eventuality. He didn’t want to die anymore; Athena needed him—needed him alive; he’d been a fool for thinking otherwise—and he did want to move on. Heal what he could. He was able to return home after just under a month; to retrieve his high school diploma from the mailbox and enroll at NYU, which baffled his parents because surely, surely, he should just go to Columbia. Why not Columbia? NYU was decent enough, of course, but Columbia was right there and it was an Ivy League, didn’t he know? 
He did know, and told New York University that he was looking forward to attendance, all while rolling his eyes at his parents’ superfluous moping. Privately, he felt like maybe he should have just blown up the bridge and gone to CUNY, but he’d not applied...and even if he had, the painkillers he had for his arms surely weren’t strong enough to deal with the headache he would have gotten from his mother’s shrieking. So he looked ahead to his fall semester despite NYU still feeling uncomfortably prestigious, and let life go on. 
Late spring came and decorated gardens with flowers for the arrival of summer, and offered up warm breezes, open windows, and hope: A black man was running for president, with an optimistic smile and promises of change; July would bring the final Harry Potter book to Sethfire’s waiting hands. He’d managed to convince Athena into the series in the meantime: When number seven came out, they could read it together. 

One afternoon found her cross-legged in his room, working her way through the fourth book, while he struggled with the hand exercises he’d been instructed to do following his most recent physical therapy appointment. They were necessary but painful, and eventually one of his winced gasps drew Athena out of Goblet of Fire. She set it down without speaking and padded over to hop up next to him on his bed, where she gently took his hand and turned it over. Wordlessly, she pushed up his sleeve and traced one finger along the scar that ran up his forearm from wrist to elbow.

“...You almost died,” she said eventually, her expression and tone both listing towards tearful when she looked up to meet his eyes; “You almost died and you won’t say why.”
Her eyes were searching and sad and he felt his throat close; he couldn’t keep the detachment up around her, never could, and he breathed his guilt through his teeth:
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, knowing she wanted an answer, knowing he couldn’t bear to give her one. She silently looked back down at the spiderweb of scarring that littered his arm, and he could barely keep from crying.

His arms weren’t the only things he’d left scarred: In the weeks since coming home, he’d noticed the wide-eyed, hypervigilant way Athena now checked his doorway three times whenever coming up the stairs; the sudden quasi-vegetarianism and her aversion to blood and raw meat; the nightmares that now sometimes brought her, shaking, to his bedside in the dark. He bit his lip, his throat aching.
“You can’t try again,” Athena said, her wavering voice surfacing Sethfire from the deep waters of his guilt; “You won’t say why you did, but you gotta promise me you won’t do it again. Ever.” 
Sethfire jerkily nodded his head, tipping his glasses slightly askew.
“I’m so sorry, I truly never wanted you to—” he started, his throat still tight.
“No!” Athena interrupted, “Stop apologizing about it! Just promise me.” She looped her pinkie finger over his and looked expectantly at him, her amber eyes wide and heart-wrenchingly young. And even though it hurt to do, Sethfire grimaced through the pain—and with some effort, managed to curl his pinkie around hers.
“I promise.”