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For the survivors
Stain, Noam thought. Lehrer’s persuasion left a stain.
Lehrer, damn him, had his utopia after all. And this time he hadn’t even needed to declare himself king.
The man might’ve had a family. A husband who loved him—a daughter who thought he could do no wrong. Now he was combustion fuel outside a red ward, him and the virus both burned like trash.
Lehrer was the only person who understood that guilt. Lehrer had lost Dara too.
I am going to scream or vomit
They’d been out in public, arguing over something inconsequential, and Lehrer had used his power to make Noam stop talking.
i will kill this man myself (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
For the first time, Noam glimpsed a shadow of what this really was—as if he were watching Lehrer construct this façade in real time, hollowing himself out bit by bit and blotting out the pain until he was all cold logic and utilitarian restraint. Lehrer didn’t become who he was passively. He built this.
horrifying i hate him
And it only occurred to Noam later that Lehrer wasn’t drunk the first time, or the second. And he hadn’t hesitated.
I WILL MURDER THIS MAN MYSELF
The two of them built this hell together, and together they were damned to it.
The last time he’d visited the Keatses’ home, he’d been thirteen. Their daughter, Eleanor, took him up to her bedroom and tried to kiss him against the floral wallpaper. He’d spent the rest of the evening avoiding her and reading trashy novels in the toilet while pretending to have food poisoning.
Noam’s very bones felt sick. The effort of keeping his mouth shut was exhausting. He wanted to lie down on that sofa and press his face into the cushions and suffocate there.
He questioned himself like this, when he was younger. Used to think if he’d been a little less foolish, hadn’t gotten himself involved with Lehrer in games he was too young to understand . . . It took a long time for Dara to trust himself. He wasn’t about to start doubting now.
good! fuck leher!
Right. Noam wasn’t at Lehrer’s anymore—it was Thursday night. He was in the barracks. Lehrer was nowhere near him. He was fine.
“It’s no problem,” Taye said. “You . . . kind of do this a lot, actually. So I figured maybe I should try and help for once.”
PTSD whomst??