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Chapter 38

Adam was careful to keep his head down for the next few hours. He'd been trying to avoid any outbursts. Getting too abrasive at this point would not be a good thing. It could lead to him getting kicked out, or shot, or worse.

He walked over to the window and opened it a crack. He wasn't sure what time it was. It was dark out, but since it was mid-winter that didn't mean much. It could have been anywhere from six o'clock in the afternoon to past midnight. Not that it mattered much. He wasn't planning on sleeping any time soon.

He turned a little too quickly back to his desk and felt his arm catch on the side. He hadn't been able to bring himself to see what was under the hastily improvised bandages. Obviously this was slightly different to most injuries he'd had in the past, but he'd read enough medical textbooks on infection in the past to know he'd needed to clean the wound thoroughly and wrap it in a clean dressing. Instead he'd torn a scrap from the bottom his blood-stained shirt and tied it around his arm in a few seconds.

His healing spray had initially seemed like a perfect solution. It allowed him to simultaneously feel productive and be distracted, but the reality was that without leaving the house, the amount of materials he could take produced an amount that could barely be relied on to heal small scars fully, let alone the inch-deep gashes across his arm. It'd be like using a pipette to put out a house fire. And that was without considering the infection. He couldn't waste it all on one older injury when it could easily mark the difference between life or death. He wasn't worth that.

It wasn't going to be a clean wound, but he knew that actually seeing the damage would only make him feel a thousand times worse, and he had better things to be afraid of.

When he was younger, he'd tripped up on an uneven paving stone and had fallen awkwardly on his ankle. It had swollen up and turned purple, and he'd had horrible visions of losing the ability to walk altogether. But after a few hours of research he'd realised that it had only been a bad sprain, and he'd been able to bandage it up easily enough. Within a week he could barely feel it. Sometimes the idea was worse than the reality.

He hoped that this was one of those times.

Taking a deep breath, he started to mutter the first equation he could remember. He didn't want to let his mind wander too much. Aside from everything else, he wanted to enjoy what little time he had left to live. Or at least not spend it thinking about infection and gangrene.

Looking down at his jumper, he traced the pattern in the wool with his finger. He had to remember who he was doing this for. He couldn't risk making stupid mistakes that could get the people he cared about hurt. He found himself leaning slightly on his desk and quickly straightened up. He had to be careful.

He thought about Luke. Thinking about him was one of the few things that still reliably steadied his mind. One thing that he'd become very aware of recently was how difficult it was to force thoughts out of your head, and so he'd reluctantly accepted that whatever he felt for him went beyond just wanting to be trusted again. The thought occurred that if it was his last day alive, he'd want to spend at least some of it with him. But by all logic, it could easily be his last day alive right now, and he was stuck in the basement writing out the formula for tourmaline for the seventh time, alone.

To distract himself, he looked around the room for something he hadn't finished completely. As far as he could tell, everything had been done to death. He had to be distracted. Just for a few more hours.

He noticed the old lunchbox that Quinn had left on his desk a few hours ago. Opening it up, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

There was a faint banging sound from within and the whole box exploded in a mass of pink glitter and confetti.