"How did you find me?" the man asked. Thanos Castellanos was watching him carefully, and had dismissed the guard who had accompanied Alex to the top deck of this beautiful yacht.
Alex didn't know how to explain how he had got here. There were articles—all that was left from his mom and dad. A few letters, a paper cutting, photos of a wedding, nothing too obvious. And the painting. Maybe he should start by explaining about that.
"My Mom had artwork in the front room, a vista, a harbor. It was beautiful, but she never mentioned the place by name nor indeed anyone in Greece. She never said that I should go to Greece if anything happened to them. I sensed the association with Greece and the beach in the painting and the sea, and every time I looked at the painting I felt I should have memory of such a place."
"How did you know to find me though?" Thanos asked.
"I arrived at the airport and the driver of the taxi asked where to take me. I just knew." Alex stopped and drew in a deep breath. How was any of this going to make sense to Thanos?
"I don't discount anything you say." Thanos seemed to want to reassure Alex, so Alex did what he could to explain more.
"It was only when my lover died…" Alex stopped again, twisting one hand in his long hair, the exhaustion inside leaving him shaky. How could he even begin to explain this? Edward's death, equally as violent as his parents' but much, much nearer in time and in terms of emotional investment, seemed to serve to shake old thoughts and memories loose.
Tracking Thanos Castellanos down had taken three weeks. Alex only had papers from his father's estate, everything left of his dead foster parents, contained in a simple box with little to no explanation. Some of the contents were written in what Alex had been told by the family lawyer was ancient Greek. The writings revealed little more than a few names and some history. However, by the time he arrived at the Eleftherios Venizelos airport in Athens, all his instincts—every single one of them—led to one Thanos Castellanos, the billionaire shipping magnate with his yachts and his wealth and his mansions.
Which led to why he was now sitting on the Castellanos yacht, numb and quiet. The tremendous pain of grief was still raw inside him, surging out at odd intervals whenever his shields flickered and failed to hold. His senses were working overtime trying to deal with the scent of salt and sea in the air, the heat of a new day starting to shimmer on surfaces, the tide encroaching on the harbor walls, and the yacht swaying gently at each surge of the crystal blue water. Sitting silently, he occupied a booth on the outside deck of the yacht, his ever-watchful gaze roaming the dock and categorizing the exits and the people as he sipped on black coffee and regarded Thanos seated opposite him.
"I do have some idea of why your Edward may have sent you here to Greece," Thanos said quietly. "I hoped he would never actually be forced to tell you to come here though."
Alex felt grief slice through him at Edward's name being spoken with such familiarity by a stranger. Half of him was now missing without Edward there for him in a hundred different ways, not just when he had nightmares and there was no one to hold him. Edward's presence had helped him focus, provided a calm balance to Alex's edginess, and allowed thinking space for Alex when the emotions and thoughts of the world around him became too much to deal with. He had been Alex's shield against the world, rooted at the very the soul inside Alex. He just wished he could have loved him as Edward loved Alex. He had let Edward down in so many ways.
Alex was suffering from what conventional medicine would call shock. Doctors, however, had no convenient label for the empathic connection he had with the world around him or for the wash of pain in his body whenever his still-fragile shields slipped. Edward had repeatedly said Alex was strong, said that if he could find some kind of balance inside him, his empathic gift would be easier to control. Alex had always laughed grimly. Being able to see into people's emotions wasn't a gift; some days he was convinced it was little more than a curse. Rebuilding his defenses and attempting to deal with Edward's death at the same time proved to be almost impossible.
He looked at Thanos steadily, his barriers in place, willing the man to stop talking about Edward. He focused instead on the subtle feel of the wind upon his face and the sound of the ocean on the nearby shore. He always felt at peace when he was beside the ocean. He could stand for hours with the water sliding and caressing his feet; the waves crashing onto the fragile shore, the smell of the brine, and the rhythm of sound settled him when he was at his most raw.
"It is good to see you looking so well," Thanos commented, startling Alex with the observation. He certainly didn't feel well. He looked down at himself, at his light-colored chinos and the long-sleeved black cotton shirt buttoned to his neck, knowing his hair lay lank around his face and that he had to look as damn exhausted and on the ragged edge as much as he felt.
Despite the walls he had in place, Alex relied on knowing a person's mood like others would rely on knowing what someone's frown means. He could sense Thanos didn't really know where to start. That didn't strike him as odd; how do you even begin to summarize the story of someone's life over coffee and pastries?
"I want so much to be able to tell you it all." Thanos sighed, the story he was telling clearly a hard one.
Alex opened his mouth to say something, to demand the whole truth.
Thanos cut off whatever Alex was going to say, holding up a hand to stop him. "I will tell you all I am aware of, but I am sorry to say that even I don't really know the entire story."
Irritation rose in Alex; he had no patience for incomplete stories, partial truths, and he thought he could see where this was going. He relaxed his guard slightly, reaching out to see what he could read from Thanos, but there was nothing but honesty and a strange kind of wariness in the older man's thoughts.
Alex reined in his impatience.
"Everything started a long time ago when you were nothing more than a small boy. To this day I cannot tell you what made me go to our private beach. I had been in meetings the whole of the day before and maybe I craved the outside. Whatever. It wasn't usual, it wasn't expected, but I walked to the beach to breathe in the salt air. I was only thirty-two when I found you as a child, as near dead as you could be, on the shoreline where the high tide had left you. It was as if Poseidon himself had dredged the sea and thrown you up on a wave. You were covered in blood, sores, cuts…" his voice faded and Alex could read the clear memory in the pause. "I immediately thought you had been thrown from a boat, in an accident maybe. I pulled you into my arms and I ran back to the house. The nanny for our children was a trained nurse and she cleaned you and helped you." He sat back in his chair, his eyes staring at something in the distance and Alex could sense as well as see the older man carefully prioritizing elements of his story.
"Not to a hospital?" Alex observed and Thanos grimaced.
"No, no hospital. I don't know why. It just didn't seem right," Thanos said. Alex suddenly needed to understand, to play devil's advocate over that particular statement.
"You find a dying child and no family nearby, possibly from a boat accident and you don't think to get a hospital, a doctor, or even the authorities involved?"
Thanos continued. "It was the gods who placed you at my feet, and it was they who had decided I was your destiny that day."
Alex nodded, but he refused to believe any nonsense about gods despite the energy that collected in his spine and skittered into every cell of his body at the thought of any higher power interceding in his arrival on the beach.
"Then there were the scars on your body. They weren't random marks but patterns that we discovered as we washed the mud and dirt and blood away. You healed so quickly," Thanos continued. "Apollo himself was looking in on you. It seemed in days, a week at most, you were with us again in body and spirit, although terribly scarred. Patterns that had been deliberately cut into your flesh, lines burnt across them, terrible, such terrible, painful marks." He stopped, Alex could see that the memory was too much for him, watched him twisting his hands in front of him. "You never cried. Not once. You just smiled, all the time you smiled, and it was when you were able to walk that we were garnering attention from others."
"Others?" Alex asked curiously. He leaned forward in his chair, sensing anger inside Thanos now, anger and grief.
"The authorities' gaze. That which my father's money could only keep from the door for so long, and then the others, also. Others who were interested in the marks on you, in your story, on how you were found. Then there was Xanos—they wanted you, they claimed you, and I felt it was wrong."
"Xanos?"
Thanos nodded, a frown darkening his face, and Alex waited, wondering at the direction this story was taking.
"You have to know that we have a lot of myths on these islands, none as strong as the tales surrounding the temple at Delphi. Legends of Apollo, the sun god, the healer, and his followers." He paused again.
Alex could sense him searching for the right words, could feel the reverence in the older man for the myths that shaped the land of Greece. "There are some groups who still practice the old ways but they have twisted the written word, the spoken word, and made it to suit their purpose. One such group, Xanos, found a woman who claimed you as her own. Two men brought her to the house. She stood there, weeping and wailing and wanting her son back. Only it was all wrong, so very, very, wrong."
"She wasn't my mother?"
"She held you, was grabbing at you while completely oblivious to the scarring on your body, as she continued with the weeping and the wailing. It was too much, too rehearsed, and then you did something that I will remember until the day I die." He paused and closed his eyes briefly. "You cried. You looked at me, with your eyes swimming with tears and you, who always smiled and never wept, cried. I knew then this wasn't your mother and I had them removed. They threatened to find a way to return you to 'your mother' and that was when I fully understood that you had to go, to be safe somewhere." Thanos stopped again, taking a deep breath, and Alex didn't even want to feel the anguish inside the man, seeing the grief on his face was enough. "I secreted you away that same night, and finally you were placed with old family friends, Andrew Sheridan and his wife in San Diego, and they named you Alex. They educated you and they kept you safe. I warned them of the people that wanted you, told them to be careful, to keep you hidden. They did what they promised to do and I stayed away. I haven't seen you until now."
"I don't remember anything of being here," Alex said. He wasn't lying. He couldn't recall the scents of the islands, or the taste of the sea or the touch of this man.
"You told us you wouldn't. You said to me, the day you left, that you would forget. I told you to forget nothing but you just looked at me, wise beyond your years and said that you knew, and that it would be dangerous to remember."
The last he said in a rush and Alex could see anguish in the older man, the pain caused when he had been forced by fate to send the child away. A child who bore terrible scars all over him and who, nonetheless, smiled. Alex's heart twisted; he could sense for himself that Thanos labored under no illusion. Even without proof, the older man was scared. Without Alex knowing, it appeared Thanos had been a fixture in Alex's life ever since his childhood.
"I found a child. That child was you. You had no memories of why you were there, or how you had gotten there."
"I still remember nothing of that time," Alex replied, tilting his head to one side and listening carefully to everything Thanos said.
"You called me papa for the two months you were here. I admit I probably encouraged it; you were such an unusual child, and I had only been blessed with daughters."
"But it all changed and you sent me away."
"We decided a new life was needed for you. We moved you out of the country, and placed with the Sheridan family in America. Alexander, you are still at incredible risk," Thanos said.
"From what?" Alex leaned forward.
"You're not safe. You never were and then they found you and you know what happened to your parents."
Thanos looked ill. Alex didn't like this one little bit. Something about his parents? Alex wasn't ready to deal with memories of his parents; they had been dead since he was sixteen, and he still missed them. Every hour he missed them.
He had always known he had been adopted; from the first day, it had never been a secret. Still, hearing the story of how and why they took him in and cared for him, despite being told danger might follow the young child, made a singular grief flood into him. He coughed to clear his throat; the new heartache twisted around his memories and feelings for Edward. He recalled nothing of living in Greece. His first memory was of Christmas and a tree and presents and his adoring parents who loved him to distraction. He had been eight.
"Mom and Dad." Alex's voice was low and thoughtful as he remembered his parents and the tragedy of losing them so young.
"Like Edward, I think they were killed, Alex," Thanos added softly.
Alex shook his head in horrified, mute denial. Was Thanos even aware of how dramatic his words sounded? That he had just made the deepest knife wound possible in Alex's heart?
"I have no proof of it, nothing tangible, but I know it." Thanos curled a fist and placed it hard against his chest. "I feel it in my heart. The day they died in a house fire, you were not there."
Alex remembered it all, the jolt of terror that blindsided him as he sat with friends at Pauline's diner after the end-of-season basketball game. His legs had pounded as he ran home, the sirens and the horrendous, staggering sight and smell and sound of his family home burning to the ground, of not being able to sense his parents had overwhelmed him. His parents… Alex heard their screams and felt their agony in his head as they died. He could still hear everything now even after more than a decade. And he could hear the silence that met his frantic search for their presence. The only difference was that memories of that night had become mixed in with the horrific nightmares that chased his sleep now.
"I don't understand, who would kill them? Why?" His voice trembled as he wavered between grief and fury and utter disbelief.
"I have no proof. As much as I have searched, I can find nothing except rumors and supposition, but I know in my heart Xanos was involved. They were searching for you, just as they had been when your supposed 'mother' was sent to claim you."
"Me? I was standing there at the house. I watched it burn." Alex fell back into his seat, shutting everything down in order to shield himself and deal with the rivers of grief and guilt washing through him. He didn't have enough protection to deal with both the world and what he had just learned. Not all of this was new; he had suspected there had been foul play as far as the fire was concerned, had even subconsciously thought that his parents' deaths were because of him, because he had come to them.
"You were standing there watching but were you in this world? You hid yourself well, I think."
Alex didn't answer, couldn't assimilate everything Thanos had told him, nor begin to comprehend the implications of Thanos's words; he recoiled when Thanos reached out to comfort him. The older man withdrew his hand. Alex wasn't sure Thanos knew of the powers Alex had within him. Still, to mention the hiding, Thanos must know something.
Yes, Alex had hidden from everyone that day and the days after, used his abilities to step half a dimension away, where no one could see him, closed down, unable to feel or to think. What had Thanos meant? You hid yourself well? Could he know of the strange power that nestled inside Alex, the abilities he had? Could he know him for the empath that he was?
Alex would never find out by hiding behind his walls, he needed to reach out to Thanos again. Carefully, very carefully, he tried to sense what was in the older man's thoughts. It was one word, Edward, a barrier there. Clearly Thanos didn't want to touch the subject of Alex's lover, and that reluctance was enough to make Alex want to know why. Why was Thanos blocking these memories? Anger started to build inside Alex, he hated that there were secrets about the man who had been the other half of him for so long. Secrets weren't acceptable, and he stood, his hands flat on the table between them.
"Edward?" he prompted grimly, watching as Thanos half closed his eyes, his face drawn tight in great pain.
"I knew Edward," Thanos said and Alex paced, as much as he could in the small space on the top deck. "He was the friend of my daughter at Oxford, a good man, one whom I could trust." He paused, and Alex sensed he was holding back a truth that once spoken would make Alex look at him—and worse, perhaps see Edward—differently. He sensed fear in Thanos, fear and resignation. "I engineered your first meeting; I wanted someone I knew, who I could trust, to be able to watch you. Firstly from a distance, and then to befriend you, get closer to you," he admitted.
With those words, Alex 'heard' every word Edward had said, every moment between them, the laughter and the gentleness and the 'I love yous', hearing all of that while he was questioning the very basics of his life over the preceding two years. The effect was catastrophic. Doubt knifed through him. Who was the real Edward, the man behind Edward's gentle hands on his scars, his calm that provided refuge and solace to Alex? Alex flinched as he felt Thanos project "this is the truth, don't doubt his love" as he continued to speak. "The attraction thereafter was real, I promise you."
"How much did he know about me before he met me? About the freak inside?" Alex snapped, stopping his pacing and clenching his fists at his sides. Thanos just shook his head.
"I told him some of your background, the mystery of your arrival on the beach, about the energies you seem to have inside you."
Alex narrowed his eyes as Thanos shook his head sadly, obviously grieving over Edward's death himself.
When he looked into Alex's eyes, however, his voice rang strong and true. "He knew, Alex. Edward knew. He knew you were special, and he loved you. Have no doubt of that, ever. He loved you."
Thanos clearly needed a moment to compose himself and he closed his eyes, bowing his head in what looked like deep thought. Alex stood as still as stone, waiting for Thanos's next words, with images of his Edward spinning in his head layered with new grief and more pain. The harbor remained so very quiet and the wind was still blowing the smells of the sea around him, the sun high in the sky.
Thanos raised his gaze. "I told him that if ever he felt you were in danger, if ever things happened he couldn't explain, then he should bring you to Greece. I told him that if he thought there was danger for you then he should consider himself in equal danger. If Edward was unable to come, then he knew to send you home to me."
Alex sat back down into his chair, exhaustion at the effort of keeping his barriers solid leaving him wiped out and close to collapse. His next words came out forced and thick with sadness.
"He didn't have time to give me your name, only that I should go home to Greece. He died quickly." Alex stopped, twisting the gold ring on his right hand, a gift from Edward for Alex's last birthday. "He left me violently and very suddenly."
"I know. Despite that, somehow you still found me." "
Alex shrugged. "I did."
Alex reached for more coffee from the carafe between them, needing something warm to melt the sudden ice in his spine, to slow the shaking in his hands. As he reached forward, his shirtsleeves rode up. To his amazement, Thanos, mimicking what that language guy, MacKinnon, had done at the museum, grabbed at Alex's wrist, although with a great deal less dexterity, and twisted it to look at the tattoos.
"What did you do, Alex?" There was horror in Thanos's eyes as he slipped the cuff button and pushed back the sleeve.
Alex allowed the older man to touch his skin, barriers to these raw emotions back in place. Thanos gasped seeing the black curling and twisting up Alex's arm, and he looked directly into Alex's eyes, obviously wanting to know more.
"I was eighteen…" Alex pulled his arm away from Thanos's grip. "The scars were there, faint but there." He stopped, fiddled with his sleeve, and pulled the material back down. "I had the patterns tattooed in black."
"All of them? The bird, the sun, the letters?"
"All of them." Alex lifted his shaggy, damp hair from his neck and twisted his head so Thanos could see the tattoos extending up past his hairline, and then dropped the hair back in place as Thanos drew in a startled breath.
"Alexander. Why?"
"It felt right to do it, like sitting here with you feels right. Black and white, like Edward's death feels so very wrong, like my parents dying because of me feels wrong."