Chapter Text
Iris would like to file a personal complaint against gravity. He’s currently lying on his back, at the bottom of a steep hill, with Lillium on top of him.
“You’re heavy,” he hisses.
Instead of getting up, Lillium touches a finger to Iris’s lips and shushes him. He still has one arm wrapped around Iris’s head. Even when Iris trips over his own feet and then manages to drag Lillium down when he attempts a save, he still protects Iris from injury like it’s instinct.
He is heavy, broad-shouldered and solid with muscle. Iris is intimately aware of how solid Lillium is like this.
After a short eternity, Lillium sits up to better look around. The air feels cool after having him so close. He turns back to Iris and slowly signs, “Are you hurt? Can you run?”
Iris still hasn’t mastered the amount of sign language people at the camp are expected to know so they can communicate silently in an emergency, but Lillium has been a patient teacher. He signs that he’s fine and lets Lillium pull him to his feet.
They manage to avoid any more complications as they move away from the abandoned town. Iris almost can’t believe how quickly he’s gotten used to running from glitches. He still remembers how terrified he was the first time he stumbled upon one, but out here where it’s easier to avoid being cornered just being alert is usually enough. Iris knows now that living people can be so much more horrible.
It’s also easier when they aren’t people he knew.
“At least we got what we came for, and then some. I’d say a success all around,” Lillium says once they are what should be safely out of range.
Iris can guess the ‘and then some’ is why Lillium was so eager to invite him along on this scouting trip. He hadn’t even known there were whole stores for art supplies until Lillium took him to one. It’d been less ransacked than most of the places he’d been. He’s pretty sure Lillium had as much fun as he did, excitedly trying to pick things out for him and helping pack his bag as efficiently as possible.
“What about your arm?”
“Don’t worry about it. Better my arm than your head.”
Lillium got his arm up and around Iris’s head to keep him from hitting it on the way down the hill, but his bare forearm is scraped raw because of that. The bandages around his wrist are even starting to unravel.
“I can bandage it up for you,” Iris suggests. He wants to do at least that much.
For some reason Lillium’s easy smile gets a little brittle at the offer. “My extra bandages are kind of buried right now.”
Now Iris really wants to do it, stubbornness gearing up for a fight. “If we don’t have enough bandages I can draw some.”
“It can wait, and I’m used to doing stuff like this one-handed.”
“Just let me help!” Before Lillium can argue Iris has swung his pack off his shoulder and is digging through it, essentially forcing the issue.
“Iris...” Lillium starts, then finally relents under his glare. “I have to warn you, I’ve got some scars and they aren’t exactly pretty.”
Iris scoffs as he sets to work because really, why would Lillium have any reason to think he’ll get all judgmental about a few scars? Then he gets the bandage partway unwound and his breath suddenly catches.
He pulls the bandage off, as much as he can in one sharp movement as he yanks his hands away.
Lillium’s palms aren’t scarred. They’re raw. They’re wrong, fizzing at the edges into a static that hurts his eyes.
“Ow! What was that for?”
Iris can’t speak. He’s remembering Lillium promising him demiflora don’t get infected the way normal people do. It’s one of the reasons some people blame them for the outbreak, but in that moment it had also meant Iris was safe. He remembers Lillium’s hands gently chafing his arm to wipe away a clammy touch.
They’ve been living together for weeks now, and Lillium touches him all the time. Everything runs through Iris’s head in a frantic mess. Lillium insisting on leading him out of the lab by the hand the day they met. Lillium laying a finger across his lips less than an hour ago. Lillium changing those bandages in private every morning and evening.
"Iris, breathe." Lillium's voice is low and careful. He has his hands up, and that is the opposite of helpful. "Can you tell me what's wrong? Is it because they're burn scars? You don't have to look. I'll take care of it."
"Burn scars?" Iris repeats weakly. He can't actually tell if the skin is scarred. He forces himself to look at Lillium’s face and not his hands.
"What are you seeing?" Lillium asks in the careful tone he’s started to use when Iris says something he doesn't understand. Lillium won't call him crazy, but it usually means what they are experiencing isn't aligned.
"What happened to your hands? Was it a glitch?"
The color drains from Lillium's face. Iris would almost rather be crazy than have this confirmation.
"You can see the damage?"
"You’re infected."
"I’m not. I told you, being attacked by one of them doesn't work the same way for us. The wounds won't heal, but it doesn't spread. It just damages us.”
What was it Lillium told him the night they met? Regular people can’t spread the infection. But they aren't regular people, are they? "Did you bring the infection to Washington lab?" Even as he says it, Iris wants to recoil from the accusation. Lillium wouldn't do something like that. He wouldn't. There are humans at the camp. Lillium would never knowingly endanger them.
“No! Do you really think I would risk other people’s lives like that? That I would risk your life?”
Iris knows Lillium wouldn't risk hurting him. Lillium would put his own life on the line first. Iris trusts him.
He trusts Lillium with his whole heart, and that's why he can’t let it go.
“Then why did you hide this?!”
"I won’t touch you if it bothers you."
“That’s not the problem!” He doesn’t want Lillium to stay away. He wants Lillium to push back, to demand his trust. He wants Lillium to reassure him so he can say, ‘I believe you.’
“Iris, I will never touch you again. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Now, let me wrap these back up so we can go.” Lillium’s voice is hard in a way he hasn’t heard before. He’s used to Lillium being firm, steady, someone he can push against or lean on. Now his voice has a harshness that makes Iris afraid it’ll shred his heart if he gets too close.
Iris turns and strides silently away. He doesn’t go so far that Lillium won’t be able to keep track of him, just enough so he won’t be able to tell he’s fighting not to cry.
For the next few hours, it’s painfully obvious Lillium is constantly having to remind himself not to walk too close. He’ll half-turn to Iris and have to stop himself, measuring the distance between them. Iris hadn’t realized he’d gotten used to having Lillium no farther than arm’s length.
That night Lillium goes to change his bandages in private, as he always does. Iris settles himself directly in the middle of the crumbling shed they’re using for the night (not the most stunning accommodations, but well-situated for a quick escape) like a challenge. He can’t help being irritated when Lillium doesn’t say a thing when he comes back and has to figure out where to bed down out of range.
Iris’s short life doesn’t so much flash before his eyes as drag by them as he struggles to sleep. Fourteen, with no one willing to tell him what trauma caused his memory loss while his therapist urged him less and less patiently to stop fixating on the fragments he invented to fill the gaps. Fifteen, when the one friend he’d managed to make at the lab realized he was always going to be awkward and annoying and stopped talking to him. Sixteen, so obviously unstable Dr. Li had to confiscate his art supplies until he promised not to use his powers unsupervised. Seventeen, when his first boyfriend called him out for being needy and manipulative, saying he was too much for any sane person to handle.
Eighteen, sitting beside Lillium after what had been objectively the worst day of his life, experiencing the unfamiliar sway of the truck and the rush of wind and the brand-new sensation that he was being swept far, far, far away and he never had to go back. Lillium had been trying to reach out to him then, saying they would need to be honest with each other.
He should have known he wouldn’t get to keep whatever-it-was that had been growing between him and Lillium. He’s a master of self-sabotage. He should be amazed they lasted this long.
Listening to Iris shifting restlessly on the other side of the shed, Lillium can’t let go of the cold weight of guilt. He never wanted to frighten Iris. Even when he’s the one who has to explain horrible things to him, he has always selfishly wanted Iris to see him as dependable and safe.
He’d been braced for disgust. He’s seen what similar damage looks like on other demiflora from the outside, and Iris isn’t good at controlling his expressions. Lillium fully expected shock at the extent of the ‘scarring.’ He was even ready for Iris to pull away from him.
What he hadn’t been ready for was the way Iris’s eyes had widened in that unguarded expression of fear. Iris had been able to see clearly enough to tell that the damage had been done by a glitch, and had completely misunderstood what that meant.
Lillium never intended to hide his injury from Iris. He’s acutely aware that he already had a chance to explain to Iris what damage from a glitch could look and feel like and he completely failed, but that was an accident. Iris had been so panicked at the time. Lillium had only been focused on calming him.
It had been one of their first scouting trips together. They were simply doing a quick check if an old orchard was safe and worth the trouble of sending more than one or two people foraging.
Of course Lillium wants to think he’s always alert, more focused on the importance of keeping his beloved partner safe than distracted by the other demiflora’s antics. Iris gets sassy when he’s nervous, rolling his eyes and making sarcastically catastrophizing comments. Lillium lets him, even if he has to shush him occasionally to check for danger.
When Iris screams it always seems to come at a bit of a delay. He needs to learn to not do that, needs to understand the danger it can bring down on them, but when Lillium whips around at the sound Iris is always already in danger.
That day, he’d already had a glitch tearing through the sleeve of his jacket with nails and teeth, leaving the fabric rotting and unraveled at the edges. They had missed it in the overgrown bushes with legs too damaged to stand, until Iris passed too close.
The only thought in Lillium’s head had been getting Iris to safety and getting the jacket off him so he could check for damage. He’s seen it before on other demiflora; skin scored red, often with chunks gouged away. He still feels sick at the idea of that happening to Iris. The wounds usually seal well enough to look like scars in a matter of hours, but he knows from experience they remain vulnerable and painful.
He'd been talking too fast, telling Iris it would be okay. He wasn't infected. He wasn't in danger of losing himself or harming anyone else. He shouldn't get close to the glitches because they could kill or permanently damage him, but Lillium could at least put his fear of being infected to rest.
Lillium hadn't been able to stop himself from touching Iris’s bare arm over and over, desperate not just to comfort his friend, but to confirm for himself that the skin was unbroken. He’d wanted to drag Iris into a hug, muffle any further sounds of fear against his shoulder, and hold him until the shaking stopped.
Instead, he’d wrapped his own jacket around Iris and teased him about always borrowing his clothes. He’d distracted Iris with playful little comments about how cute he was in the too-large coat until Iris reacted with more annoyance than fear and batted at his chest.
Should he have told Iris then that he was damaged? It honestly never occurred to him that Iris would feel anything worse than mild disgust at the sight of his scars, and even that would fade once Iris was over the initial surprise. He never expected that expression of horror or the way Iris jolted away from him at the realization of the true nature of his injury.
Lillium isn’t aware of a type of demiflora with powers that make them better at spotting glitch damage in another person. This doesn’t match anything he knows about iris powers, but Iris sometimes knows things Lillium can’t predict. If it’s something they can use to see infection in the early stages...
Even if the infection disappears tomorrow, Lillium is never going to be able to forget the nights he’s spent guarding the quarantine area. He knows he’s traumatized by every morning after someone turned, every time he’s had to help put the prepared area to the torch to put them out of their misery. It’s an almost dispassionate acknowledgment. None of this is okay. It’s never going to be okay. He can only set as much as he can aside and keep going.
(It was Heather in there, once. He had to make sure Sunny didn't maul any of the other guards to get her out before it was officially proved she wasn’t infected.)
He doesn’t want to let Iris be involved with any of that. There are people who will gladly believe anyone or anything that they think will give them advance warning, and will gladly cut down others preemptively. Lillium doesn’t want them anywhere near Iris.
Even after Iris’s breathing finally evens out in sleep, Lillium struggles to close his eyes. He wants to keep Iris safe, and that includes helping him feel safe. Now that Iris is frightened of him, he’ll do whatever it takes to stay within Iris’s comfort zone. Any promise Iris asks for, he’ll follow through.
His promises aren’t enough. They make it back to the settlement with no further danger, but Iris doesn’t come home with him.