Venomous: On Ezra Tully

META Offices

London, United Kingdom

January 2011

11:53 AM

Ezra finds himself at his workstation, hands covering his face. The lights are too bright and the room is spinning a little too quickly for his taste.

He tries to calm his breathing, tries to remember what his boyfriend had told him. In through the nose and out through the mouth. Over and over until the world felt stable enough, over and over until things felt some kind of okay. But since returning to London and receiving the news, “okay” became an unfamiliar, foreign term.

The investigation was called off a little over two months back. Investigators from Seattle deemed Iris Hu’s case as unsolvable and hopeless at that point. There was nothing that could lead them to a centimeter or inch closer to her; nothing that could give them some kind of peace of mind. He and Leo simply had to live with the possibilities. Multiple thoughts of how Iris could have met her end left multiple puncture bites all over his conscience and mind, filling them with gruesome images that kept him up for weeks on end.

The possibilities are venomous.

They kept Ezra up at night. Closing his eyes for more than an hour, maybe two if he was lucky, would almost always lead to seeing Iris dead. The previous night, he saw her with bullet wounds in her chest. The night before that, her body appeared mangled and bruised. The previous week had a bloated, greyed out image of her chasing him down, water pouring out of her mouth. Iris’ voice, soft and eager and sweet, had screamed and cursed and accused him of her death. It sounded garbled.

Ezra remembers this well. He remembers the sound of choking and spitting. He remembers turning around and seeing drenched clothes, a waterlogged messenger bag, a notebook in her hands with the ink all over her fingers. He remembers meeting dead eyes. He remembers her pointing a finger at him, remembers her screaming that it had been his fault.

It was. Ezra acknowledges this. It had been him who had insisted on Iris going out and interviewing. It had been him who had insisted on Iris doing some research, doing some snooping around here and there for the sake of their article. He acknowledged all of this and confessed his sins to the investigators over at Seattle.

Ezra had received amnesty. A kind woman had assured him that it wasn’t his fault.

(Leo would disagree. But Leo was another set of puncture marks, another week’s worth of nightmares, another kind of venom.)

He keeps his face covered. Ezra’s head aches, pounds; the nights without sleep were finally catching up to him. He couldn’t sleep, definitely not. The nightmares proved to be too sharp, too much, too horrible. The thought of them makes him a little queasy. His stomach shifts and he manages to get up, manages to escape to the floor’s restroom while shielding his eyes from the fluorescent lights.

A co-worker calls for him, but Ezra pays him little to no notice.

The same co-worker finds him crouched over the toilet a few minutes later, heaving almost nothing into the bowl. Ezra hears him speak quietly for a moment. It takes him around twelve seconds to realize that his co-worker would be telling HR that Ezra needed to go home and rest, that they needed to contact his boyfriend and have him picked up immediately.

He keeps his head on the rim of the bowl, raises a shaky hand to flush away whatever had come out. It would take him minutes to collect himself. Maybe his boyfriend would have to support him on the way to the car. Maybe he’d have to come back and collect his laptop. Maybe the others would whisper again and point in his direction, thinking that Ezra wouldn’t notice or mind.

Another pair of puncture bites. Another rush of venom.

Ezra’s stomach lurches yet again.