The Forest

-18-

Brake lights burnt neon everywhere he looked. Ever driven in a big city? For Lucius the answer was no, and after half an hour of sitting in chockablock traffic he swore off ever getting his license. Buses seemed to have no regard for anyone but themselves and roared down red-lined lanes at a million miles an hour. Some of them had two floors and he had to angle his head back to see the faces up top. Cyclists weren't much slower, and most of them seemed to suffer from some delusion that they too were buses, confidently ploughing through the sea of cars as if any one of the moving vehicles wouldn't flatten them upon a collision. And Lucius thought he had nerve. London cyclists were something else.

The dew on the window made the car lights fuzzy. Lucius couldn't remember the last time he had been in a car. Aside from the police car of course, but he was choosing not to count that. Sitting handcuffed in a mesh box wasn't much of a fun ride. Though neither was this considering that they had barely moved for the past half hour. He always knew that London was a busy place full of people, the trains were example enough, but the roads were even worse.

Tap tap tap, like a clock running double time. He could see his brother's hand if he peeked over the front seats, resting on the wheel of the car with one finger tapping impatiently. He wore no rings and his nails couldn't be cleaner if someone polished them with varnish. If he was in a bad mood, which he was, this traffic was doing little to help.

Lucius slumped back into the seat. He could feel Brianna and Viridis in his sleeve, occasionally peeking out when they heard a distant rumbling or the blaring of a horn, but they didn't have much of a view from down in his lap. Wisely they had kept quiet, barely having said a word to each other since he was herded out of the cell. They had only dared start whispering a few minutes ago. Somehow, they had managed to say more to each other in five minutes than Lucius and his brother had in what was nearing an hour.

Lucius shifted in the seat. The car crawled along at an agonising slog. The sky hung dismal and close just over the peak of the tall buildings that lined the street, and there finally came a point when he could withstand the silence no longer. "Darius?"
"What?"
Lucius twisted the jumper's drawstring around his fingers. A bus thundered past on the left side.
"Where're we going?"
His brother kept his eyes on the road, "Home."
That word was a blank for Lucius. Home was his camp in the forest.

He couldn't see much of Darius. A damp coat was laying in the front passenger seat, a bag was in the footwell, but it probably would have made no difference had those things been there or in the boot, Darius had shown no desire to have Lucius sit next to him. Or anywhere near him, for that matter.
He didn't know whether to feel relieved or annoyed that there had been no warmth on their reunion. The handover from the police to him had felt like a stale business deal; paperwork signed, words of thanks exchanged, a bit of banter from the police and polite laughing from Darius, and the small but vastly important clarification that he was in fact Lucius' brother, not his father. The way he said it at the time had made Lucius feel like if this had been an exchange of some sort, Darius was the luckless one in getting saddled with him. The police woman with the stickers smiled more than Darius as they left. The guy with the blonde hair smiled more, even if it was a self-righteous get out of here punk, kind of look. Darius didn't even glance at Lucius. He had said less than five sentences to him, all something along the lines of come on, over here, robotically asking him if he was okay, and get in the back.

So. Lucius sat in the back. Darius drove. And they were silent. He supposed he was in trouble in some way... though it felt weird to be in trouble with a stranger. And he also supposed he was expected to sit quiet and out of sight until they arrived 'home'. Only, Lucius was having a hard time with the sitting quiet part.