Day 25:

You wake to a Christmas surrounded by white, your finished Paris painting finally dry on the easel. You skip out of bed and hurry over to it, grabbing the edges of the canvas and holding it back at arm's length as you scurry out into the main room.

The Eiffel tower is gorgeous, all shining steel with gold accents from the setting sun above it. The grass below it- you couldn't remember if it was grass or a garden or just a mall- is twined into delicate flowers, each with more detail than the next, in sunset reds and pinks and burning oranges that complement the energy of the piece. And there, in front of the dazzling scene, you painted yourself, poised with an easel.

The TV clicks on behind you, and you freeze, the painting in your hands.

"What's that?" your mother asks, turning back to the kitchen behind her. "Charles, I said fifteen minutes on the ham. No, fifteen-"

You swivel around, trying to find something to stash the painting behind, but your mother turns back to you.

"It's a painting," you say, trying to casually tuck it behind your back. "You know. I paint. Who's Charles?"

Your mother nods approvingly, and points the phone camera over at a middle-aged man with a scar across his eye. He looks like he spends too much time frowning.

"We were on assignment together in Minnesota, and, Y/N..." she leans in, as if sharing the kind of mother-daughter secret that makes a Christmas morning. "I think I'm falling in love again."

You pull back as if you've been burned. "What? What about Dad?"

She huffs. "Y/N!" she scolds. "It's been years. You can't seriously expect me to be your mother forever. Besides, Charles, he gets it. He's realistic, Y/N. He does what has to be done."

Your heart twists painfully, and you swallow hard, staring down at the corner of your painting poking up from behind your back.

"He's climbing the ranks at USOAT," your mother continues proudly, leaning over her shoulder to sniff the sample of the ham he offers her. "No," she says to him, shoving it back in his hand. "Fifteen more minutes, Charles."

He moves out of the frame, and you can't help but feel an aching sense of hollowness flooding through you.

"Anyway, I called to say I have a Christmas gift for you," she says, clasping her hands in her lap. She pauses, and your hollowed-out chest begins to burn. "I've lined up your next assignment!"

The world freezes around you, your chest on fire. She's talking about it, talking about a nice little assignment on a city's action team, spending your days tracking-

"No!" you say, hand jerking forward before you can think. The painting thuds the ground behind you. "No, Mom, you can't. You can't do this to me. Please."

She pauses, a frown wrinkling her brow. "Y/N, please. It's an action team, and you'll be on it. A real agent, in a year, once you've-"

"No," you say, clapping your hands over your ears and shaking your head as if to make her words fall out of your memory. "No, I'm not going- I'm going to Paris. I'm taking off. I'm going to learn how to-"

"Are you crazy?" she snaps, scowling at the camera. "I came here to give you a present, Y/N, something I've scraped for months-"

"I don't want-"

"You're lucky they'll take you at all!" Your mother shouts, starting to get up from the couch. "Y/N, you are not in high demand right now. You proved yourself stupid, gullible, and weak. Show me your scars."

"No," you say, brushing your hair over your shoulder, wrapping your arms around yourself. Your whole body shakes, trembling like your skin is covered in aloe. "No, I won't."

"You know they're there," your mother hisses. "You can't go bouncing off to Paris to follow a useless hobby, Y/N. We both know what you're good for. We know what you're going to do, but first you have to prove it. This is your step up, and you're going to take it."

"I'm not, I-" you start, but your lips are trembling and the words are dying in your throat, and you know it won't make a difference, your eyes filming over and starting to fill with tears. You squeeze them shut and look away from your mother so she can't see you, then run over and hit END CALL.

"I can't," you whisper into the black, sitting on the ground, squeezing your legs to your chest. The tears streak down your face in little wet tracks. Your expression stares back at you in the dark TV screen: huddled up in a corner, hair hanging long to cover the scars you've covered for years.

You close your eyes and scream, a sound that echoes through the empty Bubble, up the stairs, out the raft, lost to the wide Atlantic. It scatters lonely seabirds and sprays the wash of salt in the ocean. It burns in your chest, but it takes the pain with it, launching it away in the explosion of sound.

You scrabble at the coffee table for your Dad's book.

"You're not gone," you mumble, sniffing back and swiping at your face. "Dad, I never forgot about you. You're not gone to me, you're not."

You flip past the cover page, pressing the pages to your nose to see if you can smell him, but all you smell is the smell of the warehouse. But all across the pages are his drawings, his handwriting, a piece of him that your mother can't replace.

You don't move for a while, until your phone rings with your reminder to feed the monster.

You numbly turn, getting up from the ground.

Your painting lies against the ground, facedown, forgotten. You prop it up, fingers shaking so hard you have to try three times. Then you pull the food you made yesterday out of the fridge and into the microwave, and stumble downstairs.

"Merry Christmas," you say, swiping at your nose with a sleeve as you lower his plate down onto the tray. It's danish, arranged in pieces on a plate.

"I found some in a box in the storage room," you say, trying to ignore how pathetic- how raw- your voice sounds. "I, um. I know you... used to..."

The lump presses up in your throat again, but you swallow them, turning away. "You know."

He leans over to look at the conveyor belt, and his whole face lights up when he sees what it is. "Smooch," he says, pulling the plate of the belt and holding it to the light. "Y/N, thank you."

His voice is sincere, and you sigh, thumping down next to him.

"I know you heard all of that."

He shakes his head. "Y/N, everyone has those moments," he says. "And if it's private, it's private. I'm not going to pry."

The soggy feeling wells up in you again and you sniff, barely managing a nod. You lean against the glass. "Okay."

He pats the glass where you rest. "Merry Christmas, Y/N. I wish I had something to give you."

You shake your head. "No, that's okay. My Mom already got me... something."

He nods slowly, eyes drifting down to the white book you're gripping to your chest.

"Oh, not this. This is my father's journal from his time on the Bubble," you say, shoulders slumping. "Complete with a description of his monster. I haven't... I haven't read it yet."

You flip through it, to the last few pages. The very last page was ripped out. Probably by Desmond. Your eyes feel dead already and it's barely noon. Maybe you really weren't cut out for this kind of life.

You pull a piece of sausage off the plate you took down for yourself, then let it drop.

"You want to know why I'm not a full USOAT agent?" you say, a jagged laugh peeling out of your throat. "I'll show you why."

You yank down your pajama collar and shove back your hair to reveal the bite mark, two fine punctures near the base of your throat. "You know why my mother is sending me to some city to prove myself after this? This is why. This is all why."

He runs his fingers over the glass closest to me, pads skimming over where my neck is. His mouth opens in a silent O. You shiver, imagining those fingers on your neck, over your scar, the one your mother insisted you hide ever since you got it.

"Vampire," he says, glancing at you with a frown. "How did-"

"I trusted him," you say, closing your dad's book and setting it in your lap. "He was from the Outcast Academy near our school, and we would sneak out. Meet each other."

A look of intense pain washes over your monster's face, and he presses his whole hand against the glass. "Y/N."

"One night I thought he tried to kiss me," you say, lifting shaking fingers to the holes in your neck. "But he latched onto my neck instead. I woke up in an ice bath, sluggish, dizzy, barely enough blood to survive. They had to helicopter me out and shoot me full of blood transfusions."

You remember it. Not all of it, but the dizziness, you remember. The way it felt to collapse to the wet, earthy ground, his teeth still ripping at your neck, the fuzzy red blackness of each time you passed out.

And the worst part was, nobody knew. Nobody at the Academy knew why you'd stopped seeing the monster, or why you'd disappeared for weeks, or even why you suddenly wore your hair down all the time. Your mother forbade you from telling anyone.

"So that's why I'm stupid and gullible and I have too much of a heart for Outcasts," you say, pulling your fingers away from your neck. "That's why I'm here, hours away from any hospital or help, caged in with someone they deemed so manipulative that I'd either learn to toughen up or die for real this time. Because at least then I'd be gone."

You sling your arm over your knee. You've already failed, you realize dimly. You tried so hard to spite your mother, that here you are, under a truce with a monster who would do the exact same thing as the vampire, if he got out.

Your monster is silent for a minute, then takes off his jacket and sets it aside. He pulls off his shirt, the way boys do, grabbing the hem with both hands and pulling it over his head.

"I'm scarred, too," he says quietly, looking into your eyes.

He points to deep clawmarks in his bare chest, still red. They move up and down with his breath, deep into his soft skin. You flinch, leaning closer to the glass.

"She- Laurel- made me claw myself here. Said it had to be deep, and..." his breath shakes in his throat, "and it had to scar. It had to be convincing."

You trace your fingers along the glass, the scarring skin catching in the light. He turns slowly, showing you the deeper, older scars along his back.

"These-" his voice breaks, and his fingers unconsciously come to rest on the largest, a huge gash, now a bone white scar, on the small of his back. "These are from Laurel," he admits eventually. "She'd chain me up in this cave, beat me until I transformed. I couldn't- I couldn't say no, it wouldn't let me, but I was in so much pain, all the time. Y/N,  it was horrible."

"That's awful," you breathe, words choking in your throat. He puts his hand up to meet yours on the glass, still not looking at you, but your heart seems to press against your ribs to move towards his.

"You didn't deserve that, Tyler," you say, using his name, feeling the strange, foreign way it feels on your tongue. A name you haven't used often is like a sacred word. "You didn't deserve to be hurt like that."

"Neither did you," he tells you, and you stare at each other until he bends down to pick up his shirt.

He pauses, fabric in his hands, as if weighing the consequences of what he is about to say next. "Y/N, I wouldn't do that to you. I hope you know that."

The air seems to move slower around you somehow, like you're in a bubble. "What?"

"I wouldn't leave you for dead," he says. "Even if I escaped. I wouldn't hurt you, not like that. Not now. I promise."

He slips his shirt back on.

"I have a balm," you say. "I used to use it for my neck. Does your chest still hurt?"

"Yeah," he says, leaning back against the wall next to you, the two of you separated only by the glass. "But... don't leave just yet. Stay."

The lamplight flickers, casting both rooms in that honey-colored, late night glow, shadows flickering over Tyler's body. You find yourself realizing that you don't want to leave, either. While the Christmas truce lasts, the two of you are friends.

"You know, you're not so bad," you admit, your head rolling over to look at him. "Maybe that's just what you want me to say. But I think it's coming from me, and... I mean it."

A smile crosses his lips, smooth and supple. "You're not so bad either, Y/N."

And that is how you spend your Christmas night: basking in soft silence with someone who's been through what you have. For the first time, you told someone who wasn't your mother or the board. For the first time, someone understood. And, you think, leaning back against the wall, for the first time, you can breathe.