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Her head was throbbing, her hands were clammy where they gripped onto Tattletale and her brother, and she was about one fucking revelation from hurling over everyone and everything in the near vicinity.
Naturally, Tattletale was leaning away from her.
“How long does she have?” Brian asked, his voice low and full of fury, and Tattletale grimaced and swallowed.
“I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve ever seen this kind of thing before, and I don’t have anything to work off of, I’d be just guessing here, but -”
“How. Long.” he demanded, cutting off her shitty rationalizations of not being better at her one thing, figuring shit out.
“Not long,” she said, and there was a terrible finality to it all, like she was some fucking cancer patient just given a terminal diagnosis. Honestly, though, that might have been fucking better because they could go and kidnap Panacea or do whatever stupid shenanigans Taylor was so good at.
Her head itched, and she let go of Tattletale to scratch the staples that kept her brain from falling out. Tattletale blinked, her eyes sliding right over her and to Brian, who had folded in on himself the same way he did every time he saw Mom.
She let go of him, too, and didn’t miss the way that Tattletale mouthed “I’m sorry” to empty air as she fled the building.
The sky was blue in that way that looked kinda white, the sun so bright and the clouds so few that it could almost pass as a hot summer day if it wasn’t for how freezing it felt. The sea breeze curled its way through her clothes as she walked along the docks, avoiding people.
It was halfway to July, and a week after her escape, so this was summer, but that wasn’t really important.
People would bump into her anyway, and the slightly more mindful ones would side-step without even noticing how they moved around her.
The stinking sea glittered all the way up to the horizon to match the early midday, but it didn’t feel like a day full of possibilities. There wasn’t that brief serenity of looking at flowers, only a tainted mix of too many things to name.
She found him there, eating an ice cream. It wasn’t exactly him but one of his guards, soldiers, whatever. One of his people that he’d paid to puppet around, and instead of doing random heinous - big word! - shit, he was eating ice cream.
She guessed it could be the guy itself, but the body language felt familiar, felt Alec, so she was pretty sure.
She walked right up to him, where he was leaning on the weather worn wood and looking out, and grabbed his arm. He stiffened briefly, turned, and relaxed.
“Who are you?” he asked, though the tone didn’t even sound like a question.
“Don’t joke with me right now, you dickhead,” Aisha replied. She tried to not show how stung she felt, since Alec never meant anything real beyond their quiet talks when no one else was around, outside of the crazy that was the Undersiders.
“...Sorry,” the guy’s face replied, and she -
She couldn’t take it. She wasn’t even fucking talking to someone real, just a puppet, when who she wanted was wherever the fuck knew else, and it was just so unreal -
She stepped back, interrupting whatever he would have said. She’d find him later, if he even remembered this conversation at all. Maybe.
She swiped his ice cream too, on second thought, before walking off.
It seemed so hard to make time stick to her, to make the minutes pass and to make her heart beat and to let her breathe and to make her skin sweat, and she wondered if even time could forget her.
What that might look like, wandering a world frozen and unchanging. It didn’t really change around her, anymore, but that was kinda on her stupid shitball passenger messing up.
She wanted to have some impact on the world now when it had already slipped so far out of reach, just two weeks later.
Even now, when she walked with all the rest or kept an eye on her territory and stepped in, it felt like she was walking backwards or forwards in time, the sun slipping its spot in the sky and dawn and dusk indistinguishable. The early morning dew was the late night fog, and the moon she gazed at would blind her with sunspots later.
Sometimes, she could swear that the lake that now decorated downtown had moved spots, gone a little left or a little right, because she’d only find it half the time, and in some places she’d see glass windows instead of boarded up plywood and people walking on the street who she started paying as little mind as they did her.
Aisha carefully kept these hallucinations - whatever else they could be - under the file of brain damage, and rubbed her staples. A couple had already fallen out, but that probably just meant she was healing. The blood flaked off in dark near-black crusts, tangled in her hair, so that was in support of the theory, right?
Coil as a guy had been kinda nuts, and it was one of the few times that she’d taken what she’d been turned into and made it useful. It was a shame she wouldn’t be able to do it forever, not with how things were going, but that was for later, and they’d figure something out anyway.
They always did.
Her perspective blurred, and for a moment she’d seen some glimpse, some memory that seemed like it was from later and not earlier. There was probably some fancy french phrase or other for it, day jah voo or whatever but the opposite kind? Or was it actually the right kind?
Coil had done some weird shenanigans with Skitter, teleported her into a house and then blew it the fuck up, or something like that. Skitter lived anyway.
Aisha was the only one who noticed-remembered that the weird girl who’d somehow copped Skitter’s powers wasn’t actually Skitter, and had followed her and jammed a knife into the machine, which ended up making things way easier when Coil did whatever he usually did and then it failed hilariously. Controlling destiny, her ass.
Something about being so gone now messed up whenever people tried to track her. Regent couldn’t even blink without losing her, just over a week later, and something about that wormed its way in her, but it was still a problem for later anyway, once they’d figured this out.
It turned out not much time was definitely not much time at all, but given that this week hadn’t even finished with the Nine and now it was even more shit, it was fine that stuff went to the wayside. Like her.
Skitter pulled the trigger on the kneeling man, the gunshot loud in the expecting silence, and Coil fell over, and if none of the other Undersiders made space for her… it’s only ‘cause reassuring Skitter was more important than her.
She’d crafted herself, her look deliberately, to be so distinct that it was unmistakable, because it always happened to girls like her that they were either overlooked or underlooked. Be meek, be mindful, behave appropriately, and she might be allowed to exist in the world with everyone else.
Be loud and brash and ask for what everyone else got, and her squeaky wheel was seen as aggression, as dominance, as something that made her not a woman but a man, a threat, something to put down and put back in her place.
She thought she threaded that look well enough in defiance, but also in a layer of comfort - she was beautiful and she knew it, given how those junkies had looked at her in ways that made her feel like she was nothing more than food, a pig stuck on a table with an apple in its mouth or whatever rich people ate, and it made her feel good to be so demanding of attention and to also reduce her threat, to be edgy and obscene and bright in all the harmless ways. The greatest prank she ever pulled, even though she did like the look really.
Nobody looked for the blade they never saw coming, to paraphrase whatever random fantasy novels she’d read.
Now, though? Her appearance and her craftiness and her… style, her sense of self, it was all washing away in the threat of her newest countdown, one that people didn’t even have the grace to fucking remember unless she shoved her resentment in their faces, and suddenly it was no different than dying like any other black girl, forgotten.
The Undersiders really tried is the thing that was so bittersweet.
Just days after her diagnosis, the Undersiders all adjusted as best as they could.
True to form, Skitter was being kind of scary. She was thinking of thousands of plans, organizing and killing her insects over and over, and Aisha would be more touched by it if she didn’t recognise that it wasn’t even about her, but more about a problem that Taylor couldn’t solve, another person she’d fail.
She set up tripwires that Aisha deliberately walked through and Taylor never even noticed. She crushed what bugs she could see, and in one fit of insanity, even gathered as many as she could and let them crawl all over her, like she was already in the grave, and Taylor still didn’t notice.
Brian walked around listlessly but still full of confidence, and that’s the one upside to all of it, Aisha supposed. Instead of anyone else having gotten hurt, it was her when she’d be so fucking stupid to step in that bear trap, and -
Asking wolves… no, hyenas, asking hyenas for help while being one herself was a recipe for disaster, but she’d had no choice otherwise with Alec’s sister somehow sussing her out.
It was strange, to witness that Brian would be less for her absence, that Brian had centered so much around her, and to see that she might be forgotten but her loss felt.
It really hurt, too, so she spent as little time as she could watching him, even though she was aware of the ticking of the clock.
Bitch didn’t act any differently, but that was fine, she supposed, since she and Bitch hadn’t developed much of anything beyond being teammates, fighting for roughly the same things. If she was being honest, it was refreshing but in an uncomfortable way, pressure on a wound, that Bitch was the same without her.
Tattletale - Lisa - was the one who was having the most trouble, because her power that had once let her Sherlock Aisha was getting all confused, wound up. Lisa would write down stuff on sticky squares and put them up, and the ink would literally fade out right before her eyes if it was too close to revealing Aisha’s truth. Several computers had already degraded beyond repair, somehow, which was something Aisha didn’t even know her power could do, and cameras started to really go on the fritz, looping or skipping or even just getting stuck before she entered their view.
So all that Tattletale had, really, were sticky squares that said “Order food for six, don’t extrapolate” and “Downtown occupied” and “They’re friendly, don’t think about it”, and all variations of such things to force an inclusion of Aisha and to work around the way she was being - eclipsed.
But unlike an eclipse, her sun wouldn’t shine again.
It was a couple days to July - three weeks since her diagnosis, if she was counting, which she wasn’t - and those she held onto could forget her if they lost focus for even a second. It made conversations so frustrating and hysterical all at the same time.
She’d have to repeat herself, and she’d walk through entire conversations and find out stuff, and then as soon as she’d let go, she was gone again, and it was like she’d never said anything at all, or they’d remember her asking before but she wouldn’t, or she’d remember before she asked and neglected it.
She couldn’t even write real notes anymore, since the papers just looked blank to anyone but her, and they’d write over whatever she wrote and not recognise that the resulting scribbles made no sense at all. Only stuff that wasn’t about her, pictures, like arrows or exes and ohs, stayed.
She was with Alec, sitting on the couch, and she was thinking that it was so unfair, that she wasn’t even fourteen and she wouldn’t even get to live the rest of the year out, maybe not even the month or the week, and it was just pressing down on her the same way all those eyes had felt back then, pinning her in place like the grotesque butterfly that that bitch had been about to turn her into.
It was a miserable night anyway which worked out, there was a rain that wasn’t too heavy but it was still just cold and wet outside, and the sun had been long gone leaving the flicker of a shitty streetlight outside to illuminate Alec’s pad. Alec himself was just sitting on his massive couch and staring into space, which he was doing more frequently, she noticed.
So she grabbed his arm and ignored his reflexive jerk as she came into his world, and tied a ribbon around their arms so that she could have a little range of movement.
“Hey,” Alec said, and his voice was - soft, and it was so uncharacteristic of him that she knew she wasn’t gonna like this talk at all.
“Yo,” she replied, and let it hang in the air while she just looked him over.
Nobody gave her credit for taking care of herself or figuring her own shit out, but she was pretty in tune with what she was going through and what she needed. Yeah, maybe some things were just too much to handle alone and got put aside for when the fan wasn’t spraying shit everywhere but on the whole, she did it herself. Some things were harder to be normal about, and she was definitely messed up from whatever Mom had done, but in comparison to some of these other people she was as sane as a boring old man.
So she knew that looking at him like this, the stuff they did, it wasn’t love in the books or anything, but in a way that almost could be and a way that she wouldn’t get for sure now. Just a little too young to really feel the edge of that shape inside, which was a chewing feeling in her, but it felt so big. And it made all the rest of her feelings so big around all this, too, big in a happy way when it was and big in a sad way when it wasn’t good and big in every way that made it harder to regulate.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Alec said, and Aisha looked away.
“... I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she said, scratching at the scar that ran along the side of her head. Her hair was still stuck in its fuzzy state and the blood kept leaking out, and the line of congealed skin went from the forehead all the way to her neck.
Alec flicked his eyes to it, and kept quiet. He shifted closer and opened up his arm, and she leaned into it.
“For someone who’s so shit at the mushy stuff, you’re not bad at it,” she said, after a minute.
“Thanks,” he replied drily, and then sighed. “You already know that I’m messed up, but something about this doesn’t feel good at all.” He used his other hand to rub at his chest and when she glanced at his face, he was frowning briefly.
“Are we gonna have the talk or something?” she tried for a little humor, but it just sank like a lead balloon.
He shook his head. “It just feels worse when I can’t remember you, and it,” he stumbled over the words. “It feels worse when I do, too. But I’d rather…”
“Rather what?”
“I’d rather be here with you. Do you remember when we were fucking around with my power?” and Aisha twitched.
“Don’t, not right now,” she warned.
“No, I know. But that was pretty cool, I didn’t realize that it could be cool like that with someone who didn’t mind so much. There was that time I took you to that french restaurant and made you eat the snails and you were this close to throwing me out, and then it turned out you actually like the gross wriggly snot.”
She laughed in a hiccuping way. “Yeah dude, they were so gross but it tasted just like butter.”
“And then you said “I can’t believe it’s not butter,” and I laughed so hard because I thought the snails were so gross. And then after I took you to go get that super fancy italian ice cream, gelato or whatever.”
She froze. The memory was there in her head, but something about it had gone off, dark and tattered in parts. She did remember the slugs and their gross slimy texture and she did remember the ice cream but she couldn’t remember what flavor or where it was.
“Where was that ice cream place?” she asked, and Alec looked at her.
“... Our regular bougie spot, Aish. The one we go to all the time, since it was one that opened up on the boardwalk and had the plastic so it didn’t get totally destroyed.”
“Oh, haha, yeah,” she said, and then she couldn’t speak around the lump in her throat. She didn’t remember that they had an ice cream place at all, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out the conclusion.
“Aish,” he said, and gripped her tighter.
The thing with power is that once people had it, they forgot what it was like to not have it. She wouldn’t have that problem, exactly, but it was time to put that fear back into people, and she was tired of leaving business unfinished.
The girl in the bed, the one who’d been Rune - she looked so ordinary now, out of costume, and so pale against the red that splattered the rest of everything. Aisha almost felt guilty, in the way that it was a shame things had come this far for someone who wasn’t that far away from how old she’d be. But, she supposed, Rune had given up that right when she’d joined the Empire, and she’d paid for it in turn the same way they all would.
It hadn’t even been troublesome, just a flash of the knife against this teen Nazi bitch and she was already dead in her bed, a cot with a depressed mattress in this random building in Boston. It was a storehouse, probably, and she’d burn it down too - no reason not to.
She wrinkled her nose at the smell of blood. These clothes would have to go, for sure, and an extra extra long shower as well. She’d started reading some books, and Lady Macbeth had the right reaction honestly, cause blood just wouldn’t come out of anything ever.
Down the hall was another couple of them, that Victor bastard who’d sucked that girl dry of her violin talent because he was an insecure little man who’d had to have a child bride so he could get his dick wet.
Even the footprints she left were smudged and shrouded in the light, brighter in a peripheral awareness that suggested that they wouldn’t be found til Aisha was long gone. So on she went, checking for traps this time.
She could be as noisy as she would like and it would go unnoticed til she’d undone the bubbling on her skin that itched fiercely, pins and needles that never stopped.
Victor was still awake and the other girl dozing in the room, slightly more comfortable in contrast to Rune’s, was probably Othala. Aisha decided it didn’t really matter anymore.
Victor stepped around Aisha as she stalked in the room, and paused for a second, before shaking his head and stepping out. He sniffed the air and paced for a second.
“Dear,” he said in a soft hiss, unaware that his said dear was bleeding out too. Aisha might have had fun with the torture, but they just didn’t notice their wounds until she pulled away, and there wasn’t any satisfaction in it beyond the dizzy jerk, gurgle, and choke that Rune had managed before dying.
He wheeled around and Aisha’s knife slid neatly into his upper stomach. She gave a twist and yanked, the serrated edge catching on some flesh, and he stumbled. His eyes widened as he caught sight of Othala, and then the knife was in his throat.
To his credit, he reacted pretty quick, a fumbling slash of his own hidden knife splitting her wrist deeply, and she gasped more in surprise than anything else.
The wound didn’t hurt, even though it gushed blood to match.
He and his knife dropped to the floor, his hands grabbing at his throat, and Aisha watched the puddle pump out little ripples as his rotted heart gave its last frenetic beats.
Her head buzzed in equal measure with her skin, and she barely remembered finding the accelerant, throwing random scraps of whatever would set ablaze, and the lighter she’d stolen from Alec igniting the pile in shaky hands.
She remembered even less getting back to to the bay.
The boardwalk was pretty cool - how come no one had told her that there were such cool shops in her town? Granted, she did live in a pretty shitty area of it so they probably didn’t want whatever scrounged couch cash and stolen bills she could manage, but the few people who scurried around ignored her easily.
There was a cool shop with a little cup logo and some bright pink frosting, advertising some gelato thing that looks a lot like ice cream. The space was nice and there was glass windows and stuff, which for some reason only a lot of newer stuff had. The city was probably replacing all the windows or something according to whatever the stuffy bigwigs said.
Intrigued, she went in, skipped the short line of three or maybe four people - two of them were standing close to each other, so they were probably ordering together, but who knew - and walked right around the counter. Reading the flavours upside-down was tricky and the letters didn’t line up right, so she just stuck her boney pinky in each open tin and scooped up a little bit.
The pink flavor was some terrible creation that tasted way too sour and way too sweet to be any good, but the lime green one was kind of like Halloween. Green apples, maybe?
The bell rang above the door, and some guy with curly hair and fair skin dressed in a way that would be cute if it wasn’t trying so hard to be magazine modeling walked in, and she stared at him for a second. She was pretty sure he’d like some of the light orange flavor.
She grabbed one of the plastic cups right out of the worker’s hand who was operating next to her and confused about something or other, grabbed one of the white spoons, and scooped up some of the frozen treat.
All the people in line had let proper boy through - he looked a little European, not quite American, and something about that made her not want to give him his ice cream thingie. But the impulse overrode any issues she had with his appearance, and she curved right back around and put the cup right in his hand, manipulating his fingers til she was sure he wouldn’t drop it.
She stepped away.
He looked at his hand, and his expression looked briefly constipated. She wondered what was wrong. Oh, it was missing a spoon. She grabbed one for him and stuck it right in.
He ate a spoonful and walked right back out, and nobody paid him any attention like they did her, but in a different way, like they didn’t want to pay him any attention. She followed, curious. She had to know if he liked the flavor she picked.
He walked right across the street to the rails, to where the sun shone on the cold sea and glittered off the soft waves, and she watched as his eyes leaked. He was crying like a weirdo while eating his treat.
Whatever, that probably meant it was good or too cold.
She walked away, leaving the strange guy there. She was hungry for some real food, and she could smell pizza not too far away.
Just after Coil died, they’d had to fight some big monster,, Echidna or something. Aisha remembered something about that being like a greek myth or something, and shrugged. She’d resolved then to read some more at least, so she would get some of these pop culture references. Brian would be proud and Alec would love the updated sass.
Between spying on some troublesome people and wandering freely through the Protectorate building and conveniently misplacing paperwork, she started reading stuff that she’d put on her bucket list and got to figuring out a new cape name, at least. She warranted one, since she wasn’t Imp anymore, but some other forgotten thing, taken over by the passenger that had infested her brain and her life and her memories and was wiping it all away.
She was literally losing her radiance, all that made her stand out. For worse, she’d been altered, transformed by what happened to her and literally by -
She stopped that thought in its tracks, instead rubbing at her wound. The flap of skin that covered the incision site was kinda like a paper-cut, a little flap of skin that she could run a fingernail under if she wanted to. Instead, she played with it, feeling the tingle in her skin of frayed nerve connections, and absently picked out a staple. It was probably the last one in there, and she flicked it away.
On a whim, she looked up etymology - not the other one, entomology, that one was insects, that was Taylor’s thing - and started googling little words.
It was when she hit eclipse that she found the jackpot. Came from the greek to mean “disappearance, abandonment”, like she would. Like she felt. Digging even earlier revealed it was from ekleipo, ending with that little omega that the Case-53s had. Ekleipo meant a lot of things, but it could mean to be left behind, to remain, to die.
She started leaving a calling card of her Eclipse whenever she’d hit a target. It was abstract enough for her power not to erase it immediately.
It was a ruined city that they were trying to rebuild, and they were lucky that whatever insane asspull that Taylor had done with the mayor was still valid.
Aisha was watching them plan a whole future without her, and even though it wasn’t deliberate, it still fucking hurt, running the same wound that had been cut out of her brain that wasn’t even a month old.
She’d handled the Teeth for the team, taking out the clone guy with a shotgun under his chin and the needle girl, Vixen or something, with the knife she’d used to kill the Nazis in Boston. It got a little ugly after that.
When Aisha’s wrist had been sliced from halfway to the elbow, she didn’t bleed any more. Her heart didn’t beat and her skin was the lightest color it had ever been, and she looked ugly. But she was still moving around. Apparently, even death could forget her.
The Butcher had gone on a rampage while Aisha struggled to match the rest of the goons. The Undersiders had appeared quickly with Protectorate forces following a few minutes later, and the only thing that affected her was Grue’s darkness. Even the scream of changer werewolf that had sent the bugs confusedly scurrying and upset other people’s powers hadn’t done anything to her own.
She’d taken some hits for other people, trusting in her new strange undeath to take fatal shots. Tip for fighting: getting shot through by an arrow really fucking hurts. The new hole went all the way through her stomach and out her back, and though the puncture dripped blood, it was like it wasn’t there at all.
The fight had ended bloody after the heroes escalated when Miss Militia got thrown into a wall hard, and the Teeth fled. Probably to Boston, again, though they’d be a lot less. Everyone had gotten lucky that the Butcher hadn’t been killed, instead driven off by her mangled limbs and the decimation of her forces.
Aisha had gained some notoriety for that, some people having put two and two together that the stranger no one could remember was loosely affiliated with the Undersiders, but even that loose connection was getting sabotaged by her power, especially by people who could do what Tattletale did and fill in the blanks.
It was more powerful the harder they looked, and for powers like that, they looked too hard quite easily.
Of all of them, Brian took it the hardest. Brian just looked adrift, these days, and she wondered maybe if it would be some kind of mercy to just leave some signs around him to show she was still there. But a clean break was probably better.
She’d do what she could before she forgot all of them entirely, even though they acted like she was long dead, just a month afterwards.
One of the last times she’d spared someone’s life in her space was when she was in an unfamiliar apartment that her feet had carried her to while she’d been lost in thought.
There was a built black guy there in some cool leather jacket with designs on the sides, and he was looking over photos that were oddly positioned and frayed at edges. They looked like they’d been in sunlight or water too long, the color literally coming out of them, and it was only some photographs that did that. The others on the wall that were of abstract art that imitated some wealthy guy’s idea of decor didn’t fade, and neither did other photos that showed just some young black guy in them, or that black guy and what was probably his mom.
She walked down the hallway, admiring the photos, and she passed a mirror.
Her suit was filthy and in desperate need of cleaning, but something prevented her from just getting another one. There was some kind of important value to this one. Beyond that, though, it was torn and showing rotted skin and bone below it, a neat hole all the way through her stomach. She could see her own spine, and took a couple moments to admire the way it twisted and tugged at the tendons underneath. When she waved at herself, her hand was missing its pinky and index, both lost about halfway down.
It didn’t really affect her, since she felt like she still had the whole hand. She still felt whole, despite the clear hole otherwise.
She wandered back to the black guy who was shuffling the photos together and putting them in a bag, and she debated whether or not she should kill him.
On one hand, he wasn’t doing anything, but on the other misshapen one, it wasn’t like that really stopped her.
She studied him, and his expression was forlorn as he went through the motions of packing up. She reached out with her more-intact hand, instead, to his cheek to comfort him. Some skin sloughed off, caught on the zipper and peeling off like a wet sticker, then fell to the floor with a wet plop.
It didn’t hurt, despite her finger looking like the skin had been sucked off, so she didn’t mind at all.
This was like when she’d been younger and touched things because she was curious, and now she had that same instinctive curiosity again, even though she remembered odd things here and there.
One memory that made her react as if her still heart was beating like a hammer was a memory of a short blonde girl in a nurse outfit, chatting happily to her about something or other. The room was pretty dark, and there was a squishing sound even though she couldn’t feel anything.
And then there was commotion, and the blonde girl vanished under the press of a spiky monster, and there was a dragging feeling of something coming out through her head, and she remembered jerking on that cold table even though she wasn’t supposed to be able to move.
She probably messed up some important surgery or something, and that’s why she couldn’t remember super good now. That’s why the memory felt like it did. The spiky monster was a mystery, though. Who would want to hurt her?
The guy in front of her out of her memory was already moving away, ignoring her touch like everyone else did, and for a moment she gripped her knife. But he was just touching the walls where the paintings had been, and getting the dust off his hands.
Struck by the need to communicate something, she went to the door and carved a C and an O joined together, the O almost on top of the C. She concentrated as best as she could on making her skin stay still, on letting stuff get to her. It was an important trick she had to practice a lot so that she could ask people for stuff, even though they tended to freak out about the way she looked.
The guy turned around, probably having seen her out of the corner of his eye, and he dropped everything he was holding, and the shattering glass sound was enough to upset her concentration. But her name stayed, and he dashed to the door.
She barely dodged him in time, and watched with confusion as he sank in front of the door, gasping for breath.
What a weird reaction - it was like he was crying, but it was too much breathing and not enough tears for that.
He turned around and held out his hand and wrist, offering it for… something. Aisha knelt to grab it, doubtfully, even though he wouldn’t know she was holding his hand.
Somehow, he grasped her hand, and though he couldn’t speak, he bowed his head.
Aisha put down the knife and stayed there with the strange dude, and felt only confusion.