Hidden and Silent (SpyxFamily)

Chapter Ten

 Damian hardly realized his pencil had stopped when a flicker of movement caught his attention and Forger looked up to the right like she'd seen something that wasn't really there. She held it for a moment, eyeing something he couldn't see.

She was doing it again. Damian still wondered at it, but he'd left it alone since the lab seeing as Forger was so off lately. He was more concentrated on her well-being. There would be plenty of time to figure it out later.

So he told himself, but he itched to go looking into it.

Forger returned slowly to her books, not really looking at them. She'd been in a kind of daze all day and it was different than usual. Before, she was at least more aware of her surroundings and today she might as well have been blind and deaf to everyone around her. Blackbell had to nudge her in the ribs a few times in class to get her attention.

School was almost over and the teacher erased the lesson on the board, replacing it with homework assignments for the children to copy in their notebooks. Damian jot it all down and the class was dismissed. Everyone packed up and as Damian and his friends met the girls at the bottom, they headed out.

As they went through the halls, Damian absent-mindedly inserted a word or opinion on whatever they were talking about, though his mind wandered. It often did as of recently. About his father, about the lab, the nightmares, about Forger and his brother. Sometimes it felt like too much had happened to think about it properly, like his brain wasn't big enough to contain it all.

He suddenly wanted to see Demetrius.

As the kids walked out of the school, Damian, Ewen, and Emile spilt away from the girls as they headed in different directions. Forger went to her mother who appeared on the grounds, and Blackbell stopped to say hello.

It wasn't the first time that it made Damian wish, despite his father, that he lived at home with his mother. That maybe she might've come to pick him up at school sometimes too. It flit intrusively across his other thoughts and he shook his head. There was no point dwelling on it. He was too scared to go home again anyway, not while his father was there.

Damian glanced back at the girls once more before turning away. Since the lab, Damian couldn't see Mrs. Forger without remembering the blood-soaked clothes and the knife she'd pulled out of a dead body. She was a doting mother and Forger seemed to adore her, but whenever he saw her, it was like looking at a body with two people shoved into it. And one scared the crap out of him.

Forger's father wasn't much different. Damian might not have seen Forger's parents kill all those people, though he had definitely heard it. Their screams and guns occasionally played in his nightmares.

Damian sometimes had trouble believing that all that happened just because they'd had some training from a veteran.

He readjusted his school bag slung over his bag, wanting for the day that all this wouldn't bother him so much, leaving him free of bad memories and dreams that still shook him up and sent sweat down his neck.

It felt a long way off.

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It was later than Demetrius would have liked when he escaped the gaggle of teenagers. They tended to stay a bit later after school to hang out and chat, sometimes study together. They often invited him to join, sometimes he accepted, and today he regretted it. Demetrius did enjoy playing with them. He had fun getting them hooked on his words and it was doubly satisfying when he had them going back on their own beliefs and ideals without them even realizing. A few words so twisted up that they didn't notice they had changed their views. It could be something stupid like what they thought of another person, their favourite player on their school's sports teams, or he could dig deep and make them question everything they thought they knew about themselves, their identity and personality, the way they saw themselves. The way they saw the world.