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In Val's experience civilians and 'siders both fell into a certain handful of sub-categories (that they all vehemently denied, of course, bitching about labels and federally sponsored oppression); there were the 'siders that hated or were indifferent to humans, the 'siders that only wanted to blend in and resented any reminder of their fringe status, the humans that hated or were indifferent to 'siders, the humans that felt that 'siders were this generation's civil rights cause, and the luckless demis born Earthside that didn't fall neatly into any camp. The only thing any of them had in common was their universal dislike of freelancers, the lowest common denominator beyond even Department personnel. Half of them hated that freelancers were licensed to kill dangerous Outsiders; the other half hated that freelancers weren't licensed to kill all Outsiders. The Liaison Office had been named deliberately to imply that they were simply bureaucratic extensions of existing law enforcement organizations and not their own army, which was kind of a lie, but the freelancers made up the big numbers and apparently no one liked the idea of dubiously legal irregulars running around with badges and guns playing sheriff. Val got it, of course he did, everybody worried about who exactly was in charge of the 'sider situation so they knew who to blame when shit inevitably went pear-shaped, but it didn't mean he had to like being the guy that everyone looked sideways at or down on when he just was trying to do his goddamn job and save some ungrateful human lives.
*****
Valentine was twenty-two now and he'd been running solo jobs off and on for five years, in between all the times he was backing up his dad on the cases that needed two people or maliciously scheming against the partners the Liaison Office occasionally assigned him or the other freelancers Harper tried to coax him into working with, forever bitching that Val had to learn to get along with people that weren't relatives someday and he'd never goddamn learn if he didn't try. Val didn't like partners, didn't like amateurs, didn't want to babysit people that weren't familiar to him as his own skin and didn't know how to act around him on a job, how to use him or be used like a natural extension, a perfect synchronized entity. They always zigged when they should have zagged, always second-guessed his instincts because they thought he was too young, too reckless, or just too much a Browning, if they knew anything at all about his daddy, which was stupid as hell. You had to be a little crazy to get into this life, in Val's extremely experienced opinion, and Jon Browning, ex-Navy Seal and the definition of hard ass, wasn't any further off the reservation than half the other guys out there, drinking and bleeding inside and hunting 'siders like that was going to make up for all the unfair shit that had happened in their lives. He'd lost a wife and Val had lost a mother in The Accident, and Harper had lost his son and the use of his legs, and Caleb and Sheridan and Kim and Wright and Tanya and everyone else Val knew in the Liaison Office and outside of it had all lost people. It was practically a prerequisite for the job.
So maybe they were all of them a little bit crazy, with the wrong set of priorities and the wrong kinds of coping mechanisms. But Val had earned this, fought for the right to his license tooth and nail even when his dad told him it was too dangerous. He wanted to be here, saving lives and killing the things that needed killing, even if he had to do it all by himself with his dad disappearing for months at a time and his baby brother Danny four years gone, lost somewhere in the fucking 'sider foster care system and Valentine slapped with a permanent restraining order because of his criminal record and his hunter's badge and the fact that Danny was his step brother and also a budding psychic, a rare and valuable commodity even among 'siders. For years Val and his father had managed to fake or delay or cheat the results of Danny's annual battery of 'sider ability tests, but once he hit level three on the CE scale used to measure 'sider powers the mandatory restrictions about underage psychics went into effect, aka no living with bad influence relatives that had criminal records and no intentions of subjecting Danny to addictive suppressant drugs or enrolling him in the various government programs that so desperately wanted a new baby psychic to train and use. Val's little brother was a diamond and everyone wanted him, wanted a piece of what he could do, and he'd been scared and sixteen and screaming when they'd taken him away, hand-me-down sneakers skidding on polished hospital tile.
Valentine stood in his cheap motel room and counted shallow breaths like he'd been taught, in and out, fists clenched helplessly and trying to think of anything besides his family, his responsibility, the way he'd screwed everything up and how that had brought him here to this job and this extra special shitshow he was about to start, and eventually the feeling of something stuck between his lungs eased up and let him breathe normally. He could do this. He could do this if he just got through one more hour, one more routine, one simple step at a time, and didn't let himself think about anything past that. His fingers groped blindly for the buckle on his belt holster and he was fine, he was perfectly fine.
The ritual of decompression was as easy and familiar to him as breathing, even when he was falling down tired or drunk or bleeding. Guns went on the table with their holsters, knives unstrapped and arranged in precise military order just like his daddy taught him, charms and wards laid out from defensive to offensive and the entire thing covered in a minor cloaking spell to keep anyone from accidentally getting an eyeful. Val fished the sawed off out of his duffel without looking and leaned it within easy reach against the mattress on the side he'd be sleeping on, always nearest the door. A silver knife went under his pillow, another handgun in the top drawer of the bedside table. Three kinds of protection wards in each corner, north west south east, and he murmured the prayers his mother had taught him as a boy to the old guardian gods of each direction. Life had shaken his belief in everything except his own two hands, the uncompromising awfulness of hospital coffee, and Murphy's Law, but mouthing the words made him feel better, like she was there with him whispering just behind his shoulder.
One prayer for her, wherever she was. One for his father, wherever he was, and one for Lady. Two for Danny, for the boy he remembered and for the man he didn't know, one for safe passage in the journey he was starting (he did this for every case), and one for the lives he'd taken, a hunter ritual that Harper had taught him after his first kill, reciting the names he'd committed to memory. Then it was salt lines poured along the window sill and the bottom of the door, and he traced a binding glyph around the handle, willing it to lock against malicious intent. The low level charms he was capable of wouldn't do much against something really determined to get in, but it might buy him a few seconds while that something had to undo the spell or break the door down entirely. Val was more concerned, if concerned was the right word for 'apathetically aware of the possibility,' about some random human junkie trying to raid his ground floor room for cash. He never took anything except ground floor anymore, after one too many instances of needing to escape out a third story window or getting cornered in an elevator or stairwell. Fleeing vengeful spirits or goblins or whatever on a twisted ankle sucked out loud.
Gear situated, he dredged up another minor burst of energy and picked up the phone to make insincere apologies to the local Department guys (the DOA guys, his brain always remarked, which had been funny before he realized it was kind of accurate) about how he couldn't be fucked to present his credentials until the next morning, but could they start running down some leads for him, person of interest in an ongoing investigation, quasi-white, probably male, somewhere in L.A.
He hung up while they were still sputtering, grinning nastily. They'd make him pay for it in the morning when he actually had to go see them in person, no doubt, Harper's name wasn't going to hold much weight out here and probably nobody outside of the Midwest gave a damn about the Browning family, but morning was at least six hours off and he was steadily losing the ability to care about anything as the toll of the drive caught up with him. There was a bottle of Johnny in the bottom of his duffel with his name on it, his usual medicine when he didn't have company over to wear him out, but California had somehow snuck in and ruined even that, because it would be piss warm after sitting in the car all day and he couldn't even contemplate the walk to the ice machine right now. Instead he threw himself down the bed with a groan, still in jeans and tank top and not bothering to get under the covers, left hand hanging down off the bed and fingers brushing the shotgun, right arm curled around the pillow. In the morning he'd have to come up with a plausible story for the Department mooks he was about to screw over and an excuse to avoid L.A.'s resident warlord, decide which fake IDs to use when he started chasing leads and stealing sealed files and lying to everyone about why he was really here
********
For some unfathomable reason ordinary people weren't all that keen on adopting 'sider children, especially those with powers or other hints of non-human blood, so it was a given that only a fraction of Val and Danny's Class would go to good homes or whatever while the rest stayed in the program and became progressively more institutionalized and unfit for civilian society. Statistically, half would hit sixteen and go to gangs, and the other half would end up working for the Department in some fashion. Val had considered himself personally responsible for his siblings and for making sure that none of them fell into the life of crime that they'd all been assured was horrible and full of teenage pregnancies and drug abuse and wearing bandannas. But he'd never worried back then that Danny would leave, or be taken. Danny had just always been stitched into his life, like Jon Browning and Samantha Caulfield, partners pretending not to be a couple, always hanging around the Class they'd personally liberated from whatever shithole Val and his siblings had been found in Over There even though they were Liaison agents, not Department social workers, and therefore not obligated to care past their initial involvement. Danny had been with him every time they'd watched one of their siblings get adopted out, Danny refused to sleep in his own bed and threw tantrums when he couldn't take over half of Val's, Danny learned to read with Val's fingers tapping out each word and only learned to sign when Val and Samantha insisted. Danny wasn't a mute because he could grunt and cry and giggle, but he never spoke, only shaped the words without air when Valentine made him try. Danny was with him at Jericho and after Jericho, both of them crammed into a hospital bed and refusing to be separated, panicking unless they were pressed together like one person.
******
Everything in his life was divided into Before The Fire and After The Fire (and also, in his moments of weakness, into Before Danny Left and After Danny Left) and cheap motel rooms fit firmly into the years after the Jericho fire, when Valentine's daddy had gone temporarily insane from grief and loaded up his guns and his two boys and his black rage into Lady and set out on the open highways of the world, hoping to kill his feelings by killing all the evil things he could find.
For eight years everyone had been assuring Valentine that the fire that took his mother had been an accident, as if there was any kind of accidental fire that could level a three hundred person town made up almost entirely of freelancers, former or current Department employees, and pro-integration 'siders. A lot of lives had been destroyed and afterwards a lot of people tried to tell Val how he ought to feel about it, that it was only natural to react to it like a declaration of war, that his upbringing had trained him to look for culprits and motive but that he had to understand, the way his father was refusing to, that it was no one's fault and that there was nothing out to get him and what was left of his family.
Valentine called bullshit. He'd been a 'sider refugee himself once upon a time, one more orphan infant from one more forgotten massacre Over There, and any blood relatives he might've had were dead and gone or at least indifferent to his continued existence. His family, his real family, was the ex-Navy Seal turned Liaison agent that had stuck with him over the years and let Valentine abuse his last name and his goodwill, and his freelancer partner Samantha Wesson, who always smiled sadly and wouldn't talk about how she used to live Over There but loved Valentine and all twenty-nine brats in Class 5494 like they were her own, and baby Daniel from the same Class, mute and shy and without any hope of adoption, doomed to the continued half-assed care of the Department's refugee program along with Valentine himself, except that didn't seem so bad when it was Jonathan and Samantha stepping past their carefully defined duties to look after Val and Danny personally and pretending that the four of them were a real family and not an assortment of strangers thrown together by circumstance. The rest of Class 5494 made up Valentine and Danny's sort-of-siblings, names and faces disappearing one by one over the years to adoptions or accidents or to Jericho, which took six of them and Samantha and Jon's sanity and Danny's innocence by the end.
So yeah, Valentine had plenty of reason to buy into the idea that shit was out to get him and the people he loved.
*********
L.A. was used to weird. Someone should've been asking for his papers with the way he tripped the wards on the threshold, lighting up symbols for 'armed and dangerous' and also 'criminal record,' but he figured that was probably par for the course for everyone in this section of town when the clerk slid the key across the desk without ever losing his bored expression. Val wavered between chewing the guy out and taking advantage of the ten minutes he didn't have to spend explaining who he was and what he did, lips actually parting on the opening lines of the lecture, before letting his jaw snap shut and re-shouldering his faded dark green duffel. He palmed the key without a word and stomped off to find his room, tired and pissed and tired.
It never ceased to amaze and irritate him how vulnerable civilians chose to make themselves, like choosing to turn a blind eye on the things they didn't want to think about was going to keep them safe. Still, one less person to roll out the 'protect and serve, really, honestly, government licensed and everything, on the side of the angels, and oh by the way you're welcome for all the supernatural shit I shovel so you and your 2.5 kids and your white picket fence life don't get ripped apart by the things that go bump in the night' spiel for, and any day Val wasn't getting the stink eye from some blissfully ignorant citizen over his pentacle shaped hunter's badge and the rune-covered machete slung across his back and the pair of revolvers strapped to his hips counted as a good goddamn day.
Val didn't actually hate civilians, of course. It was his job as a hunter to protect them, just like a regular cop or a fireman or anyone else that specialized in certain types of trouble. It was just hard to remember that he didn't hate civilians when half the protecting they needed was from their own stupid. Sixty or seventy years ago it might have been okay for Joe Average to live in perfect ignorance about Outsiders, about the mirror world across the Veil that they came from, about magic and spirits and fairy-tale monsters that not only existed but crossed back and forth between the two worlds with regular impunity. Fifty years ago there hadn't been registration laws about 'siders living in the human world, or travel restrictions, or organized and licensed hunters that chased down border jumpers and other bad eggs with more serious crimes to their names. The flesh eaters, the soul stealers, the things that Crossed over with ill will towards all living beings into a world that wasn't prepared to handle them.
Now there were people like Val and his dad to handle that particular brand of disaster. The Department of Outsider Affairs dealt with everything from immigration records to doling out suppressant drugs for 'siders with inconvenient powers, but their peacekeeping branch was the Liaison Office, understaffed and criminally underfunded and stuck with all the messes that cops and feds refused to touch and the local 'sider warlords felt were beneath their notice. A vampire or a were or a witch might get away with murder once or twice, if she/he/it kept moving across state lines or sucked up to whoever was running the underground in a particular city, but sooner or later the case would get back to the Liaison Office, and men like Tiberius 'Don't Fucking Call Me Tiberius, It's Tom' Harper would get on the phone with men like Valentine and Jonathan Browning, licensed 'sider hunters, and soon enough there'd be a dead bloodsucker or werewolf or witch and good fucking riddance. Sometimes the job was just to corral the perp and haul him back across the Veil to face what passed for justice over there, sometimes a city warlord wanted help with a job his or her own men were already heading. A good hunter was a one man army, capable of switching hats from private detective to interrogation specialist to enforcer to social worker to assassin.
Val and his dad were good hunters. They were technically freelancers, paid job by job rather than submitting to the bureaucratic red tape involved in actually being a Liaison agent (which was a thankless soul-sucking occupation ranked just below garbageman on the social scale, according to Harper), and they took almost any case passed their way whether it was an execution, escort mission, or tracking down illegal aliens that had Crossed without authorization and kicking their asses back to the proper immigration authorities. They exorcised spirits that had grown too powerful off of unsealed tears in the Veil where amateurs made their Crossings. They built wards and relocated hippogriff herds and chased harpies off of skyscrapers. They put down feuds between rival vampire clans and pulled 'sider kids just coming into their powers out of public schools, because discussions of 'sider bloodlines and their abilities still weren't allowed until high school level and there was always some poor sucker discovering he was a wizard at age eleven and accidentally setting himself on fire. Few of the jobs were glamorous, in fact 90% of them fell into some variation of dangerous, filthy, tedious, and/or next to impossible, but the important part to remember was that those jobs saved lives and paid the bills, sometimes handsomely. The Liaison Office dealt in 'sider monetary standards, which meant they shelled out gold, silver and gems instead of cash. A man could make a decent living off the misfortunes of others if he so chose, and if he could stay alive long enough to spend the rewards.
Val could've afforded a much nicer motel than this but it was habit, now, when he wasn't paying attention, to always go for the inconspicuous little places that wouldn't ask questions and wouldn't look twice at any weirdness. He'd grown up in rooms just like this one, all across America since the age of ten, living out of the car while his dad tried to get his head together after The Accident and crashed into the hunting life like a comet, burning and inexorable. Just opening the door and getting hit in the face with a blast of stale, over-conditioned air was like coming home, a little bit. If Val closed his eyes he could pretend his dad was just outside in the hallway, hauling in the rest of their bags. That his little brother was down at the vending machine trying to decide between grape or orange soda, bottom lip caught between his teeth like this was a life-changing decision when he knew he'd eventually go with orange, because orange was Val's preference and they'd end up splitting the can.
His jaw clenched despite himself, caught off-guard by the memory. He dropped his bag on the bland carpet by the door and shucked his leather jacket and boots on exhausted automatic pilot, scrubbing a hand over his mouth and trying not to feel like there was something horribly important missing. He was twenty-two now and he'd been running solo jobs off and on for four years, in between all the times he was backing up his dad on the cases that needed two people or maliciously scheming against the partners the Liaison Office occasionally assigned him or the other freelancers Harper tried to coax him into working with, forever bitching that Val had to learn to get along with people that weren't relatives someday and he'd never goddamn learn if he didn't try. Val didn't like partners, didn't like amateurs, didn't want to babysit people that weren't familiar to him as his own skin and didn't know how to act around him on a job, how to use him or be used like a natural extension, a perfect synchronized entity. They always zigged when they should have zagged, always second-guessed his instincts because they thought he was too young, too reckless, or just too much a Browning, if they knew anything at all about his daddy, which was stupid as hell. You had to be a little crazy to get into this life, in Val's extremely experienced opinion, and Jon Browning, ex-Navy Seal and the definition of hard ass, wasn't any further off the reservation than half the other guys out there, drinking and bleeding inside and hunting 'siders like that was going to make up for all the unfair shit that had happened in their lives. He'd lost a wife and Val had lost a mother in The Accident, and Harper had lost his son and the use of his legs, and Caleb and Sheridan and Kim and Wright and Tanya and everyone else Val knew in the Liaison Office and outside of it had all lost people. It was practically a prerequisite for the job.
So maybe they were all of them a little bit crazy, with the wrong set of priorities and the wrong kinds of coping mechanisms. But Val had earned this, fought for the right to his license tooth and nail even when his dad told him it was too dangerous. He wanted to be here, saving lives and killing the things that needed killing, even if he had to do it all by himself with his dad disappearing for months at a time and his baby brother Danny four years gone, lost somewhere in the fucking 'sider foster care system and Valentine slapped with a permanent restraining order because of his criminal record and his hunter's badge and the fact that Danny was his step brother and also a budding psychic, a rare and valuable commodity even among 'siders. For years Val and his father had managed to fake or delay or cheat the results of Danny's annual battery of 'sider ability tests, but once he hit level three on the CE scale used to measure 'sider powers the mandatory restrictions about underage psychics went into effect, aka no living with bad influence relatives that had criminal records and no intentions of subjecting Danny to addictive suppressant drugs or enrolling him in the various government programs that so desperately wanted a new baby psychic to train and use. Val's little brother was a diamond and everyone wanted him, wanted a piece of what he could do, and he'd been scared and sixteen and screaming when they'd taken him away, hand-me-down sneakers skidding on polished hospital tile.
Valentine stood in his cheap motel room and counted shallow breaths like he'd been taught, in and out, fists clenched helplessly and trying to think of anything besides his family, his responsibility, the way he'd screwed everything up and how that had brought him here to this job and this extra special shitshow he was about to start, and eventually the feeling of something stuck between his lungs eased up and let him breathe normally. He could do this. He could do this if he just got through one more hour, one more routine, one simple step at a time, and didn't let himself think about anything past that. His fingers groped blindly for the buckle on his belt holster and he was fine, he was perfectly fine.
The ritual of decompression was as easy and familiar to him as breathing, even when he was falling down tired or drunk or bleeding. Guns went on the table with their holsters, knives unstrapped and arranged in precise military order just like his daddy taught him, charms and wards laid out from defensive to offensive and the entire thing covered in a minor cloaking spell to keep anyone from accidentally getting an eyeful. Val fished the sawed off out of his duffel without looking and leaned it within easy reach against the mattress on the side he'd be sleeping on, always nearest the door. A silver knife went under his pillow, another handgun in the top drawer of the bedside table. Three kinds of protection wards in each corner, north west south east, and he murmured the prayers his mother had taught him as a boy to the old guardian gods of each direction. Life had shaken his belief in everything except his own two hands, the uncompromising awfulness of hospital coffee, and Murphy's Law, but mouthing the words made him feel better, like she was there with him whispering just behind his shoulder.
One prayer for her, wherever she was. One for his father, wherever he was, and one for Lady. Two for Danny, for the boy he remembered and for the man he didn't know, one for safe passage in the journey he was starting (he did this for every case), and one for the lives he'd taken, a hunter ritual that Harper had taught him after his first kill, reciting the names he'd committed to memory. Then it was salt lines poured along the window sill and the bottom of the door, and he traced a binding glyph around the handle, willing it to lock against malicious intent. The low level charms he was capable of wouldn't do much against something really determined to get in, but it might buy him a few seconds while that something had to undo the spell or break the door down entirely. Val was more concerned, if concerned was the right word for 'apathetically aware of the possibility,' about some random human junkie trying to raid his ground floor room for cash. He never took anything except ground floor anymore, after one too many instances of needing to escape out a third story window or getting cornered in an elevator or stairwell. Fleeing vengeful spirits or goblins or whatever on a twisted ankle sucked out loud.
Gear situated, he dredged up another minor burst of energy and picked up the phone to make insincere apologies to the local Department guys (the DOA guys, his brain always remarked, which had been funny before he realized it was kind of accurate) about how he couldn't be fucked to present his credentials until the next morning, but could they start running down some leads for him, person of interest in an ongoing investigation, quasi-white, probably male, somewhere in L.A.
He hung up while they were still sputtering, grinning nastily. They'd make him pay for it in the morning when he actually had to go see them in person, no doubt, Harper's name wasn't going to hold much weight out here and probably nobody outside of the Midwest gave a damn about the Browning family, but morning was at least six hours off and he was steadily losing the ability to care about anything as the toll of the drive caught up with him. There was a bottle of Johnny in the bottom of his duffel with his name on it, his usual medicine when he didn't have company over to wear him out, but California had somehow snuck in and ruined even that, because it would be piss warm after sitting in the car all day and he couldn't even contemplate the walk to the ice machine right now. Instead he threw himself down the bed with a groan, still in jeans and tank top and not bothering to get under the covers, left hand hanging down off the bed and fingers brushing the shotgun, right arm curled around the pillow. In the morning he'd have to come up with a plausible story for the Department mooks he was about to screw over and an excuse to avoid L.A.'s resident warlord, decide which fake IDs to use when he started chasing leads and stealing sealed files and lying to everyone about why he was really here
**************
For ten years no one had given a shit about the little boy that Val had practically raised by himself, but the moment one of Danny's annual CE tests showed signs of psychic ability there'd been a constant parade of Department sent social workers and specialists trying to tell Jon what was best for the son that wasn't really his and getting in Valentine's face for being a bad influence. Val's own trickle of 'sider blood didn't mean a goddamn thing in the eyes of the government. His father was registered human for lack of powers and most of Val's blood gifts had dried up along with his ability to speak right after The Accident, blocked off and unwanted by his traumatized ten year old brain. The talking eventually came back. The abilities didn't, which made him the worst of all possible combinations. A 'sider without gifts strong enough to register past .5 on the CE scale wasn't worth spit to the nonhuman communities, which prized power above all else, and was of course still too strange for the tastes of ordinary civilians, and nobody from either side liked itinerant half-legal bounty hunters licensed to skip past the human justice system and murder Outsiders with impunity. Neither Valentine nor his father was fit, they'd been told, to properly care for a teenager that tested to level three by his sixteenth birthday, high enough that mandatory restrictions went into effect and the government could take him away 'for his own safety.'
******
The sudden blast of cool, slightly stale air in his face was like a physical blow, knocking him back eight years in an instant, to Jericho and being fourteen when everything remotely good in his tiny, crappy teenage life had decided to spontaneously combust. Literally. Growing up a serial number in the Department's bleak 'sider orphan/refugee program, with twenty-nine other 'siblings' and two probation officers as his most consistent parental figures, hadn't left Val feeling an over-abundance of good fortune in his life, but he'd carved out a comfortable niche, taking it upon himself to look after the rest of the luckless brats in Class 5494 and learning the tricks of the peacekeeping trade from anyone who would teach him. He'd had a mother and a father after a fashion, and some not-aunts and not-uncles like Harper and his lot. He'd had dozens of horrible not-siblings that loved and hated Valentine for being a bossy domineering shit, and also for being a bossy domineering shit that viciously policed and protected his Class like an inner city gang leader (most Classes effectively being gangs of the most insular kind, made up of bitter, judgmental, and traumatized 'sider orphans). More importantly, or maybe most importantly, he'd had a precious, idolizing baby not-brother that toddled everywhere after him and smiled for no one else.
Jericho ripped all that away, and everything that hadn't been taken from him outright had changed, completely and unrecognizably. The steady parade of drab motel rooms started a couple months after, when Jon Browning finally checked himself out of the hospital and resigned over Harper's protests, packed up his guns and the two kids from 5494 he'd accidentally adopted via osmosis and his black, towering rage into Lady and set out on the open highways of the world, hoping to kill his feelings by freelancing and killing all the evil things he could find. After the endless fucking nightmare that was the hospital and the doctors and the therapists and the investigators, Val had just been overwhelmingly grateful for the indifference of motel desk clerks and the bland comfort of generic decorating without any smell of hospital antiseptic. Locks were a goddamn miracle rediscovered, doors and heavy curtains that he could close on the rest of the world so he could take care of his shattered family, bitch at Jon for messing with the bandages and coax Danny into eating something, anything at all, without a thousand people watching their every move.
That had been the worst part of it, the way someone's eyes were always on them, sympathetic or speculating or trying to gently suggest bullshit like Valentine letting go of his brother's hand, or leaving Jon's room in the hospital to stay with some well-meaning stranger who only wanted to 'take care of you two poor boys.' Other people were always the ones making it worse, asking stupid fucking questions like the story might change on the thirteenth repetition. What did they remember, what did they think happened, what had they seen and heard, you kids were right in the middle of it, you have to know something that you aren't telling. Or worst of all, asking Valentine if he was okay with real or false compassion oozing from every word, which was the stupidest question imaginable and the reason that Val still hunched his shoulders instinctively whenever he walked into a Liaison Office building in any state. Even all these years later people still talked about Jericho and the Brownings in hushed tones, like they were some terrible historical tragedy from a hundred years ago, and it made Valentine's skin crawl.
Of course he wasn't okay. No one had come back right from Jericho. But confessing that, wallowing in it or bawling over it wouldn't change a goddamn thing, so what was the point when there was work to be done and people to take care of. Valentine was an expert at taking care of other people after bossing around twenty-nine other kids for most of his conscious life. He was good at knowing what someone else needed, whether that meant barking orders or simply being a silent presence at their side. A touch of empathy, they'd told him when he was first taken in to be tested for his CE rating, the government battery of tests that gauged whether a 'sider had dangerous powers or just the useless ability to know when someone was sad. At least until Jericho burned it right the fuck out of him. These days Val could still go through the motions of knowing how to handle someone, but he couldn't feel what other people felt, anymore. He wasn't sure he missed it.
******
