chapter 6 - till daylight sends me home

You don't take a lot with you. Clothes, mostly. Toiletries. Hal didn't ever come with, at least not in digital form, even if your notes are extensive enough that you might be able to recreate him if you wanted to.

You're about three hours out from your now former—you're never going back, you refuse, it'll never be anything but former—home—if it ever was a home to begin with—when it happens.

You think about the fucking puppet.

Just a flash, orange running through your mind like the light from a bomb, and you know that when you look in the rear view mirror you'll see orange eyes peering back at you. HIYA, KID, WAS REALLY STARTIN' TO MISS YA. You'd hoped you could manage to avoid it for a bit yet, but at least now you know the strange things happening around the puppet aren't entirely your tenuous grasp on reality slipping even more. Or maybe you're wrong about that, too. Frankly, you have nothing solid left to ground yourself with, so you might as well accept that Cal's just going to keep being... a thing. Something you'll keep having to deal with.

You huff a laugh out at the idea of Dante trying to find the damn thing, the only thing left of his brother. Your mood sours when you realize he probably won't ever have known that you didn't take Cal with you, that the puppet just followed you like a homing missile.

Really, you should have known things would have gone this way. Why didn't you figure it out before? It's not like you were going to be able to keep everything out of your mind forever. It's not like you could avoid all this until you could figure out how to make things right. It's not like you could have changed anything in the first place, since you were always destined to end up as the worst you there was.

Why are you even trying any more? You could have crashed this car miles down the road.

You couldn't have, though. This thing is never going to let you go, now that the first try has come and gone and left you with nothing to show for it but a thin scar circling your neck.

Bleaching your hair in a gas station bathroom, you look at yourself. You never really did look like Dante again, not after his growth spurt. Or, rather, you never really did look like Dante at all, not when you stopped staying in his shadow. Your skin starting to gain color when his stayed sickly-pale, flaking red in the sun. You looked similar because you were children who were treated the same. Or maybe because you stayed like him because you wished you could be him—that you could have stepped into his skin. Misplaced admiration growing into resentment growing into pity growing into—

You breathe in, the sharp burn of the bleach filling your thoughts.

This has to stop. You can't afford to think about that now. You have a plan. Another round of bleach leaves your hair... not quite the platinum blond of your brother, you realize, but it's close enough.

As far as anyone you meet from now on is concerned, your name is Dante Strider.

⁙

Dante Strider is an out-going kid. Obviously a runaway, as obviously as the driver's license has to be fake, because there's no way that's an 18-year-old—or a 21-year-old, depending on who you ask. Still, he manages to find a place to squat for a good few weeks, surrounded by people he barely remembers the names of half the time. He keeps a swiss army knife close at hand, though luckily the bottle opener sees a fair bit more use than the actual knife. At some point, he gets a place for himself—disappears quietly, his backpack there one day and gone the next.

You manage to sell the car for a decent price, and with that, along with your access to Dante's savings account, you manage to put in a deposit for a place. Despite some small problems when trying to get the bank transfers through, a bank teller can't really accuse someone they've never met of identity theft, especially when he's got all of his personal information down pat.

The apartment is decent: small, out of the way, cheap enough that you don't think Dante's going to notice anything soon. Even if he does, he might not do anything about it. You get out whatever savings you have under your legal name, too. It's more than you'd expected, and covers you well into the next month.

You train yourself to respond to Dante's name—it's easy. You've been going by names that aren't yours your whole life.

Dante never takes his shades off, hair so bleached it's the texture of wire. Whatever you say about him, you can't deny he's a character. He once shooed a guy off the DJ rack and whipped up a mix that baffled everyone present so much that they would not be able to tell anyone how he managed a seamless transition from The Hampsterdance Song by the Boomtang Boys to Hustlin All I Can Do by Point Blank in less than two songs. He once started giving an impromptu lecture on the flaws of the floating point standard, leaving many of those present enraptured and still wondering what the hell the developers of Quake III did that was supposedly so damn impressive.

Depending on who you ask, he got a job at Skaianet because he managed to back-end their systems, or some secret government project hired him to keep him quiet—the one common denominator is that no matter where it is he supposedly works, he got there by being really fucking good at computers.

The truth is a lot less glamorous, even if it did involve spending about 10 hours a day hunched over a computer in the library for a week. It gets you a paid internship at a place that's doing work for Skaianet. If you manage to play your cards right, you're pretty sure you can work your way up to a position that pays well—enough that you won't have to worry about covering your bases, at least. Your paychecks go to an account you set up in another bank—might get a bit tricky when tax season comes, but you doubt Dante's going to care if you do his taxes for him. As long as you're still dragging around the body he left you in, you might as well do it in his name.

You get in contact with someone who gets you hooked up with someone who—and so on, until you finally get your hands on enough testosterone to last you—a while. At least two years, by their estimates. Long enough that you can start looking for other ways to acquire it that require less talking to people.

Throughout this, you start to notice a steady beat running through every new person you have to deal with. In crowds, it's manageable, melding into a constant hum, but when you're in smaller groups the discordance is too much. It's overwhelming on every level; sounds, colors, feelings and sensations clash and weave in and out of each other in ways that never add up. One-on-one, you find yourself trying to mold yourself into whatever's radiating off the person in front of you. Though the whole thing is more of a blend of the senses, it ends up as music whenever you try to make sense of it. Like a heartbeat you can control, a steady rhythm running through you that you slow down or speed up to fit in with the rest. Maybe it's your brain having to deal with the overwhelming amount of people you're faced with after years of barely interacting with anyone.

Whatever the case is, you welcome any respite from the way your heart jackrabbits through any conversation.

Aligning the metronome in your mind to the tempo of the people around you, cloaking yourself in what people expect, you quickly find that you pass through most situations unnoticed. The internship becomes an actual job, helped along with some slight corporate blackmail. Your coworkers have nothing to say about Cal, don't talk about it even if the thing shows up in the middle of the day hunched over on your desk.

It slowly dawns on you that whatever's bound Cal to you seems imperceptible to other people—the strange passings of the puppet don't register to anyone unless you directly mention it, and even so their awareness seem to roll around and past it without ever touching it. You wonder if that's why it's so easy to align your own—soul, you find yourself calling it for lack of a better term—to those around you. No friction builds up that sparks dislike or interest, just passing glances and surface-level back and forths about work. You can pull at people, sure; when you're out drinking, you manage to swallow people up in the momentum you build, but it's the gravity of a planet that slingshots moons out as soon as they've made an orbit. Sometimes there's collisions, but then you pass by them again and they barely recognize you if prompted.

This is just as well. You don't need to be caught up in anything too complicated. As long as you don't have to think about them as people, just as patterns to be woven into and back out again, you can handle things in the office and play gigs just fine. You're doing fine.

You try to burn the puppet out in some alleyway on a lukewarm day. The thing laughs at you through the flames, and you feel smoke in your lungs, heat consuming you from the inside out as you watch orange eyes through orange flames. As you panic, trying to smother the fire with your own body, you end up curled up on the ground and clutching onto the felt with a desperation you didn't know you had in you. The burn hurts for the next good while, but you manage to bandage it up fine. You spend a good two months trying not to itch at the healing skin on your stomach.

After that, you start taking smoke breaks at work. You put out the stubs on Cal.

Most of your disposable income goes into your computer, though you do allow yourself a shitty console and a handful of games scrounged from the bargain bin in the bright fluorescent lights of just before closing time. You steal a fair bit of stuff, too. You don't pay for most of your clothes, and you end up with a good collection of t-shirts that are so god damn terrible on every level you can't not wear them on a daily basis. It gets you in with the rest of the office, too—they're all nerds, for lack of a more derogatory term, which endears them to things like graphic tees that have a penguin pointing at the viewer with the caption I WANT YOU TO... sudo pacman -Syu!. You have no idea where you got that one. It just appeared on your fold-out sofa one day. You personally prefer the one that says Don't talk to me until I've had my sudo rm -rf.

You lose your virginity in the bathroom of some bar. The stench of it gets ingrained in your nostrils, stays with you through the smoke you have outside afterwards and the shit you throw up on the way back to your place. You don't remember to whom, nor which bar, which is probably just as well. You're not really fit for relationships. Rotten meat falls off the fingers of your bones as you sit at the desk and type, bone blending into hard white plastic, but you blink and it's fine.

It isn't fine. You know it isn't, because most mornings you look halfway into the grave when you stare into the mirror. After a while, you stop looking. Still, you can't keep it from writhing up your spine and seeping into your brain—the knowledge that something, something is wrong. Scratching at your neck, the scab barely healed from the last time you tried to stop. You find yourself pressing deeper and deeper each time, trying to find some vein you can grab onto and make sure that your heart's still beating.

One day, you wake up to find your heart still.

Blinking at the ceiling, you wonder why it isn't racing away like it's trying to burst out of your chest, the last-minute panic of pre-death that's been constant for months. As you sit up, you realize that what's missing isn't the panic, it's the physical response itself. You don't have a pulse. Pressing your finger against the hollow between your jaw and your neck, fingers brushing against the scar wrapped around your throat like a collar, you feel nothing. How the hell are you still upright? As the day passes, you try again and again. The result's the same every time.

Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, glaring at your own face that's gone hollow, you wonder how you've kept going for the past months. A consciousness haunting a body that should have long gone cold. You felt the strike against your spine, nerves overloading as steel sawed through them.

You didn't expect to hang on.

You decide then and there that you're not going to, either.

⁙

Your brother was not kind. You don't want to call him a boy, because he's past that point. He knew what he was doing.

You don't want to call him a man, because he wasn't. He didn't know what it would mean.

You're not kind, either. Neither of you are. But at least you can do him a kindness, one that he couldn't find it in himself to grant you. You don't leave him anything, because you know he would cry over what he thinks you are. You don't want anything left of you to grieve. He doesn't deserve that.

The rush of the cars under you manages, somehow, to quiet out the thoughts. You wonder, for a moment, what it would feel like. Will feel like. Body crushed under steel, tires crushing you into the highway. Blunt force, first—muscle and fat won't manage to shield your bones from cracking under the impact, and the splinters will work their way into flesh, then past the dermal layer, breaking skin and leaving your insides exposed to the grimy air of the city. Some bone will work itself into your internal organs, as well—it's likely that your ribs will fold in on themselves, puncturing your lungs, leaving your last breaths more painful than the burn running through them right now.

It's a burn you can barely feel.

You doubt you would die from the fall. Then again, you doubt the impact from any crash would kill you, either—the rope tethering your consciousness to the thing you still call your body is beyond your ability to sever.

Even so, it wouldn't hurt to try.

Well.

It would, which is the point. There is no reason you shouldn't climb over, let yourself drop, feel the rush going through your stomach before the crack that resounds through your whole body—

Concrete under your hands, rocks digging into your skin and pinching your nerves against bone. Your legs are numb. The sky above you is red.

You need to go home. There's a deadline due next week.

Your legs are numb. Hand against concrete.

Your legs are numb. Foot against pavement.

Your legs are numb. Wound against denim.

Your legs are numb. Head against static.

Your legs are numb. Hand against head.

Your legs are numb. Wound against skin.

Your legs are numb.

The keys are in your hand. When did they get there?

When did you get here?

The door to your apartment is open—did someone break in? Did you forget to lock it? No, you think, it must be open because you opened it; keys in your hand, shoes still on your feet. They're scuffed to hell and back. So are your pants, for that matter. Something happened, and you wince as you register the pain in your knee, skin scraped back around your legs. Fuck.

There's a first aid kit in the bathroom. Disinfect it.

It's less of a singular wound than a lot of small ones, which means every inch of skin you run the alcohol across stings like a bitch. Still, better to feel it. Rather that than seeing your legs move, never knowing how you managed to walk your way home. Somehow, you don't have a single broken bone. And most of all, you aren't dead.

You should be, probably. You don't know what happened. There was the rush of air—you definitely fell. You came to on the ground. There was blood.

All you can conclude, then, is that something doesn't want you dead.

Fuck you, you think hysterically, this should be my fucking choice.

Too bad.

⁙

You keep up your collection of various knives, trying to find something that keeps your mind off everything. Running through sword-fighting drills becomes your habit of choice, keeping some kind of exercise up even as the idea of just letting your body rot away gets more inviting than ever. Hell, even if you tried to, it might not comply.

Sword-fighting seems one of the least useful skills to train, in a country where most if not all ideas of a duel are marked by the ever-looming shadow of gunfire, the business of death left to machines rather than the human mastery of a blade. You're talking out of your ass, sure, because you're not sure that more people haven't been murdered through methods of, say, poisoning, or just plain old blunt force trauma rather than swords, but they uphold an idea of a past where killing was somehow honest. Like it's more honorable to be stabbed and die of an infection than to be shot in the head.

This also means it's funny, in some kind of weird detached way, to see a guy genuinely devoted to training a skill that is never going to be practical in any situation. You're nothing if not devoted to making your whole life a fucking joke. If the world doesn't want you dead, you might as well make yourself too ridiculous to be allowed to live.

Plus, it gives you opportunities to monologue in your head about how hearkening back to the ancient ways of the blade is the only true way to understand the collapse of modern society or whatever. Using money that you were never going to have any use for—other than to feed the engine of the machine of your body—on something that stands in such fundamental opposition to how one understands life and death in a world that has made it trivial to kill others, while still being a tool with no use outside of enacting violence. This is the ironic balance that you build your life upon: the continued existence of that which should already be dead and buried.

And, in your heart of hearts, you still think swords are cool.

⁙

Some piece of shit has broken into your place and put bugs in it. You know it. The door was unlocked when you came back, and there's a steady low whine right under the hum of the computer. The image of someone putting actual bugs in the walls flits through your mind for a second, millions of little multi-faceted eyes reflecting your image back into the mirrors of satellites high in orbit. You shake the image out of your mind—you can't afford to be distracted. You need to figure out why. How, maybe.

As you start your computer, sifting through whatever notes you made for yourself today, you think of the options. You rarely piss anyone off who didn't just come right up to your face and beat the shit out of you for it. Whatever petty crime you've been involved in has hardly involved a lot of organization, so you figure that's low on the list of possibilities.

Reading through your notes, a thought drifts through your mind. You grab at it lazily, consider it from a few angles.

It's probably someone from work—Skaianet isn't exactly hiding its ties to the government, and you're sure that whatever black box system the company you work for is designing for them has been deemed sensitive enough to warrant it, so it makes sense to put someone who's working on any component of it under surveillance. Probably not as intensive as the more involved teams, though. The stuff you're dealing with doesn't exactly scream high priority. You probably only got added to the list once they saw the intersection of the people you're working with and the people more directly in contact with the Skaianet team.

You need to take it slow. They can't know that you know. You scan for anything else that might be out of place, but it seems they left the place entirely clean otherwise. You go through your routine, make food from what little you have left in the cabinets—you need to go out for groceries soon, this is only going to last you until Friday—and sit down by the computer. Again, you doubt they'd have done much in terms of this, but you still go through anything that might have been added or changed. You aren't going for a deep-clean, at least not yet. As long as they haven't messed with what you're working on right now, you could frankly care less about what they're tracking. Besides, wouldn't it be more suspicious if they stopped getting signals from an intern that's barely even supposed to know anything about the Skaianet connection?

As is, you're fine with it. You're not doing anything that would get them any dirt on you—

Fuck. You are, kind of—it's not like you're completely in the clear, even if what little dealings you've had with drugs and the gray market in general are probably of little to no interest to whatever letter agency goons they've put on your case. It'd still be enough to either get you in deep trouble—and if they start looking into that, if they start picking at the loose thread of who the hell you even are deeper than the surface level facade, it's all going to unravel. You're going to end up in a lot more trouble than you can afford if that happens. Just off the top of your head, the system you've built up for managing Dante's bank transactions and making sure the ones connected to his actual account end up at his place rather than your apartment—which is listed under his name—is already grounds for several charges. The leverage they'd have on you...

Taking a breath, you think.

Even if you leave whatever listening devices they've set up, you need to know whether they decide you're worth keeping an eye on. You need to know whether anyone else breaks into your place—whether they're putting anything else up. They managed to get into the apartment without breaking the lock—they're not some violent goons out to make it obvious you're being tracked. On the other hand, leaving the door unlocked—maybe in the hopes that you'd have dismissed it—means that they're careless enough about their work to not do a proper job of it.

If you set up your own systems to keep an eye on what happens here while you're outside of the apartment, you can find out whether and where they'd put up anything else, and how you can remove it as inconspicuously as possible.

You wonder who the hell they could have gotten as an informant, if anyone—no one has been particularly prying, letting you do most of the grunt work without bothering with the tedious formalities of asking about your home life. Of course, there was some curiosity regarding your skills—thankfully, you didn't need to spin up anything too complicated for them, just that you took an interest in systems at an early age. That seemed to be enough for them to accept your skills and punt you up into a position where you're actually coding instead of the wasting time with tedious intern tasks. It also helps that you've minimized your presence in their minds as much as possible. Maybe that doesn't work for larger systems that you can't interface with as a person—if someone sees you as a variable to be controlled rather than a someone, you might not have the same level of influence on them.

Thankfully, if you're low enough under the radar that they don't have anyone actively tailing you, you still have some range of movement. You can get some things to set up your own surveillance systems.

You space out your orders with long enough gaps that they won't seem too conspicuous, but you'd be lying if they weren't already suspicious in and of themselves. It's a fair deal, you think.

By the end of the month, you've got a decent system set up in the apartment to record anyone that might break in. It's not the best, and you're pretty sure you've tripped a few wires by even trying to set this up, but anyone breaking in will have a fair deal of trouble trying to avoid any of the cameras, as hidden as they are. You've got a good amount of space allocated for the feed—you'll need it, if you want to go back through it. It's worth it. You're not sure how long you should keep each file, but something like a week at a time should work out fine. You need to be able to check back over whatever footage has been captured during the day and wipe it if there isn't anything important, but if anything happens that keeps you from accessing it, you don't want it getting into the wrong hands, either.

So there you have it. Anything older than a week gets wiped unless accessed again after the initial scrub, which should keep you from having too much space eaten up by however many gigs of video you'll be recording. Obviously it's not a perfect system, but you'd have to get into the Skaianet inner circle to get the kind of funding for what you'd describe as perfect.

You lean back in your chair, cracking your neck. You should go get something to eat.

⁙

Looking on the bright side, now you can at least go back and check if you've gone off the rails in the past week.

⁙

It happens again, this time with your neighbor.

It's a lucky thing you hadn't set up a bunker before this happened. You're sure you'd still be hiding out in it if you had.

You call in, say you had to take a few days off sick. Excuse yourself by saying you could barely even see anything right in front of your eyes, let alone call in. You're all better now, though, so you'll be coming in on Monday. Yeah, it turned out alright in the end. Yeah, you need to keep an eye on yourself. No, it isn't natural for a young man to get as sick as you were, you agree. You'll be sure to go to the doctor and see if it's anything serious, of course.

Your next-door neighbor, whoever he is, never crosses your path again. This is the only reason you don't move immediately.

⁙

“My parents wanted me to be sick,” you say, beer heavy in your gut and none of it coming up yet, “bleached my hair from the start. Kept me inside. Something about Munchausen, you know the thing, where you keep someone sick to get people t'feel bad? Keep 'em dependent on ya?”

Whoever you're talking to, some guy whose name you barely remember—Brad?—Brad nods, leaning over the table. There's two girls, too, hanging onto each other by the crooks of their elbows, like two little dancers in a ballet, eyes wide as you go on. The thump-thump-thump coming from Brad's direction is drowning out most of the others, but you think you can hear some hi-hats in the mix—just a bit off-tempo from the music droning in the background. You keep yourself in-between, trying to pass for what they're expecting from you. High and discordant, a bit out of tune.

“Kept me,” you say, thinking about your brother poked and prodded at, thinking about yourself kept well out of reach and out of sight, “kept taking me t'doctors, tried t'make em say I was sicker'n the fuckin' plague, that I wa'n't gonna b'able ta drive, wasn't gonna stay alive past twenty—”

“Bet that did a fuckin' number on ya,” Brad says, vaguely gesturing with his glass. He's a solidly-built man, somewhere on the north side of 26, T-shirt fitting nicely over muscles padded a bit with fat. You've been looking at his jawline a lot more than his face.

“Shit, you tell me,” you snort, “still got the docs sayin' I'm legally blind—”

You aim for only just sloshing the beer up to the edge of the glass, but you end up spilling a lot more than planned. One of the girls jumps back shrieking in surprise, and you swear as the other one—blond, purple top covered in glitter that sparkles in the low light—tries to reach over the table to the napkins in the—the thingy, the one that has napkins in it—you pat at the small puddle on the table, resigning yourself to smelling a lot more of beer the rest of the evening that you'd planned to.

“—doesn't seem like they're too wrong,” Brad finishes for you, cackling, and you laugh along with him. The girl who jumped back laughs along, too, brought back in to where you're sitting by the hook of a joke.

“Naw,” you say, taking a sip, “I can drive fine. Managed to make my way here without crashin', at least.”

“What, where'd'ya come from?” Brad asks, raising an eyebrow at you.

“Don't matter none now,” you laugh, waving him off. Another swig.

He laughs.

“Guess not,” he agrees, raising his own glass. He looks around at your small group, and there’s another breath before he talks again.

“A toast to—” he pauses for a moment, “—to gettin' away.”

You laugh a little at that, but raise your glass. Clinks over the table, and everything's easy again.

A bit later, Brad says he's going out for a light. You pause for a bit, but you figure fresh air would do you some good, and you can probably mooch a cig off him, so you leave the girls at the table as you follow a little behind Brad. You almost bump into him when he's going out the door, but you laugh it off.

It's a nice night out. It's certainly a lot cooler out here than in the bar, and at the first breath you wonder how the hell you could even stand being in there. Brad leans up against the wall, and you elect to roll your shoulders a bit, moving away from the entrance and trying to see if there's any other stiff muscles you can loosen up. As Brad smokes, the two of you end up standing across from each other in silence.

In the suffused light of the bulbs above the door, Brad looks at you as if trying to figure something out, eyes running over you as he sticks his face right up in your business.

“Hey, the fuck are you—” you say, almost losing your balance as you lean back and away. At least you're not up against the wall.

“Shit, what are you? 14?” Brad says slowly as he puts his back against the wall, hissing through his teeth and letting the cigarette drop, “knew you types started young and all, but Christ."

“Fuck you mean by that,” you say, after a moment of trying to piece what the hell he's talking about with your mind still slow like treacle.

“Y'know,” he says, shrugging, “queers.”

You snort out a laugh, halfway between nervous and covering for it. It fizzles out when you realize he isn't laughing along.

“Y'ain't looked at them girls in there all night,” he says, nodding at the door back in, “and it's not that hard to figure out when someone's feelin' ya up with their eyes, even if they're wearin' shades. You better keep yourself in check, kid, or you're gonna end up with a lot more problems than it's worth.”

You breathe in quick, try to review how the hell you've been acting the past hours. You don't think you've been doing anything weird, but the haze of alcohol makes it hard to figure out what you've been doing at all.

“Woah, hey, easy,” he says, holding his hands up, “I ain't gonna get you kicked out or anythin'. God knows I was gettin' wasted when I was a kid, too. Just tryin' ta make sure y'ain't gettin' anyone else in trouble. Don't want any guys endin' up in jail for doin' something stupid when they're wasted. You know the kinda problems a man gets in for fuckin' a teen?”

“Naw,” you say, suddenly hyperaware of how fucking sweaty you are, “I ain't—I'm 19, man. And I ain't—I ain't a fuckin' fag.”

“Sure as hell seem that way to me,” Brad says, words slow but sure in the way they crawl out of his mouth. Your eyes are fixed on it, wondering if you should be seeing bugs.

“Y'really are way fuckin' gone, kid,” he halfway laughs. The action pulls your eyes back up, and you barely manage to react before he closes in on you.

The kiss is—what you'd expect. Wet, teeth against teeth. Muscle against muscle. His tongue tastes of—skin, spit—his breath is the aftermath of shitty beer and smoke. The intrusion has you frozen—you wish you could bite down, throw up right into his mouth—you wish you could do anything at all, but you can't move. His hands are a vice around your shoulders, and you can't tell if he's keeping you from running or steadying you so you don't fall over. Your tongue presses against his, some semblance of a gag reflex kicking into gear. His breath on your skin gets heavier at that, hot and humid air right under your eye making it twitch. Fingers dig into your arms.

Your mouth hurts.

“Anyway, long as you're old enough and all that. My place, I'm assumin'.”

You blink at him. Your stomach is cold. Your voice is shaky when you find it again.

“I don't—it's a bad idea. Can't go.”

“Seriously? After that performance?”

He's grinning.

“Just—” you try to back away—when did you end up against the wall?—and his expression turns sour, “—I gotta go, man—”

A hand finds its place next to your face, and a hysterical part of you thinks of fucking course, it's just a kabedon, your heart should be fucking aflutter right now—your attention gets pulled away from it when he starts speaking again.

“You're fuckin' lucky, kid,” Brad says, eyes glazed over, “you should be countin' your fuckin' blessings I ain't kickin' yer ribs in right now—” his face is right up against yours, and you can't fucking move, “—I know fellas who'd've fuckin' shot you the second they saw you makin' those fuckin' eyes at 'em. I'm a nice guy, I'll fuck a fag if he comes crawlin' up to me askin' for my dick—don't act you weren't, fuck'd you come out here for otherwise? Bet you're hard as all get out, bet you fuckin' like it when some big guy's tellin' ya how much of a dirty fuckin' slut you are—”

He grabs at your crotch, and you barely repress the shudder that runs through you. He looks confused for a moment.

“Fuck,” he says, eyes widening, "y'ain't even a fuckin' guy.”

Shit shit shit shit shit fuck you have to get the fuck out of here but you can't do anything—he's too close, his hand is—

The door to the bar opens, letting the noise from inside blast out into the night air. Brad freezes at that, both of you stock-still—you breathe, heavy gasps synchronizing for just a moment.

“Hey, were you guys just gonna ditch us or—” a voice comes, and it takes you a second to place it—shorter time than it does for Brad, because he looks back.

Bracing yourself against the wall, you shove him as hard as you can. It doesn't do much in terms of physical distance, but it does stun him for long enough for you to stumble forwards, legs still shaky. You can practically hear the girl now standing in the alleyway piece together what's happening as Brad rights himself, and she does not waste time.

“What the hell,” the girl in the purple top says, voice high and peaky in your ears, “get off him, you gross piece of—”

She somehow manages to pry Brad off you, and you manage to get upright, kick him in the shin. Probably not too well, but hard enough that he startles back.

You and the girl walk back in, and when you look back Brad's still sneering at you, halfway leaning against the wall.

A few moments after you're back in the darkness of the bar proper, Brad walks in after you. You tense up, and the girl pulls you away a little. Not enough to avoid him when he comes past you.

“Fuckin' bitch,” he spits out.

Brad doesn't say anything more, just glares at the two of you. He retreats, lurking back into some corner of the bar where you can't see him.

You get another drink with the girl in the purple sparkly top, voice still shaking as you talk about things you think your brother might have said about you—someone made up, a girl who ended up in a horrible accident, someone you left behind to get here. She cries for you, which makes you want to cry, and you have a hand around her shoulder as she talks about how she misses her parents, her mom's cooking, her mom—the way you hear your own heartbeat line up with her soul drops cold ice in your stomach. You get another drink. Say she's beautiful, though you're mostly talking about her purple top, lights playing across your vision like burning points of—something you can't place. They flash in time with the beat running through your entire body now. Say she's got a kind heart, a big heart, that you hope she calls her mom tomorrow.

She asks you where you're headed, if you want to come home with her. You pause. You could, if you wanted to, spill your heart to this girl in exchange for a night she probably won't remember and you hope to God you won't either, let out the poison festering in your veins. She has earned something, hasn't she? The tom goes into overdrive, reaching a crescendo with the ride that you barely pull yourself away from.

You say no, she's not your type, but she's still very lovely, and doesn't she want to find her friend, you think you saw her on the other side of the bar, and when she leaves you make your way out of this place, making sure you keep an eye on Brad and steering clear of him. You go to another bar, get another beer or three. Spin up some bullshit about being born prematurely, hence your small stature. Make some joke about size not being everything, it's the way you use it.

You get into a fight at some point, though you don't remember why—you're pretty far gone at that point in the night, the heavy music thudding through your brain as you look at the mirror, not recognizing who's looking back at you. Your tongue is heavy in your mouth, and you don't know if it's because you need to throw up or because there's something trying to burrow its way out from under your taste buds—probably the second one, you think, head halfway down the porcelain bowl and still nothing is coming up except spit and snot and tears. The blood from the nosebleed, too, swirls into the water like paint in your art classes at school, when you'd wash off the palette and foam would rise up all colors of the rainbow mixing together until they became that murky grey green brown that covers every wall of the stalls here, other than the mirror, which you're leaned onto again, cool glass against your face and you wish you could fuck the mirror for how good it feels on your skin burning but all you can manage is lick it before someone drags you away and you bite, bite, bite and try to chew but nothing's come off into your mouth except your own tongue and there's the bug trying to get out, calling everyone pieces of shit idiots motherfuckers who couldn't wipe their asses if the media didn't tell them how to, fucking sheep, don't you know they're looking at you all the time why the fuck are you trying to enforce the god damn panopticon when you're not the ones getting punished you empty-brained feckless prisoners of mind and soul they make you do everything their way and you think you're better than every fucker who ends up on the street because they can't keep up, huh, you think you're any better than them, it's all sheep to the slaughter and you're all trying to get to the top of the fucking tower the food chain so you can be the butcher and not the piece of meat that's on the chopping block, words crawling out of your stomach and up, up, up into the air like insects, shiny little bugs off to dig into the brains of everyone around you and live in the shit that leaks from every orifice of their being.

Just leave me the fuck alone, you say, or you think you say, someone's hand on your shoulder in a way too soft to be real, the only thing that's real is the way you want to dig out your eyeballs and wander through the desert and let hunger gnaw at your gut forever, or at least forty years, though they might as well be the same thing. Hands against your face, pressing in on your eyeballs, making you see spots that drift and circle and melt into each other. Ah, you think, that's why everything's so bright, someone broke your glasses. Your nose throbs, the bridge of it spreading a dull pain through the rest of your face that sends spikes with it when you brush your fingers against the cartilage. broke your nose, too. could've tried not to be such an ass.

Fuck off, you think. Why are you even here.

could ask you why you're here.

What, you think, looking around, sitting on the pavement?

no, smartass, in here.

I'm the—the guy, you think, because you don't know how to put it into thoughts, let alone words. There's an overtone of superiority, of tiredness, of everything you hate about this—

what, existing? get a load of this douche. thinks he's so god damn special for having a consciousness.

Give him a break. He's barely even been holding on.

y'know what, maybe he shouldn't, give us all a fuckin' break—shit, why's he just going limp.

Great. You want to handle this one, big guy?

you think i remember where the fuck our apartment is? i barely even remember what the hell we had for breakfast. there's a reason you're here.

Thought so. And it was cup noodles, by the way.

chicken?

Yes.

damn. wish i coulda had some.

We all had it, idiot. Maybe if you spent less time buried back here you'd have more time to experience the joys of life.

what, like trying not to throw up in the middle of the street?

Exactly. Being so shitfaced you can barely stand up has long been recognized as one of the greatest pleasures of mankind. Along with trying to figure out how obvious it is to everyone around you how drunk you are.

so is dropping your keys a million times trying to get into the apartment, i'm guessin'.

See, you're learning. Great stuff, right?

outstanding. right up there with knocking into the desk and just deciding to stay on the ground.

No, we need to crawl up into the sofa. Softer. Better for your bones. Should probably get a bucket first, though. Under the sink.

okay, let's see what we can—jesus fucking christ we are not taking a single god damn step. down, boy. scoot your ass across the floor. no one's watching.

Other than yourself, obviously.

seriously, though, what's the fucking deal with the cameras?

Ask the guy who's running this thing. Something about making sure he can check what's real or not.

sounds about right. we're deleting the footage of tonight as soon as humanly possible.

Not arguing with that. Here, there's the sink. Bucket's right there. As long as you can—fuck, we are not getting on that couch tonight.

and i'm not arguing with that.

⁙

You shouldn't drink that much. It's bad for you.

You decide to call in sick before you remember that it's Sunday, so you're left sitting with the phone ringing in your hands like an idiot. You hang up again before the tone. You ignore the call coming in after that, too, because the thought of sitting up just makes you want to throw up even more.

Still, as you try to collect the little bits and pieces your mind offers up to you in sacrament to the altar of your hangover, you become increasingly aware of a few things.

One, your nose hurts like hell. This isn't a surprise, even if you can't remember how the hell it happened. Two, your shades are nowhere to be found. Again, not particularly surprising, since they probably fell off when some asshole decided to punch you right in the face.

Three.

There's something in the back pocket of your pants that definitely should not be there.

When you move, it crinkles, strange plastic sound muffled by fabric. You hesitate to take it out, but you have to know. Your fingers touch smooth aluminium.

It's a pack of Trazodone.

You do not take any medication.

Fuck.

hey, what the hell is this supposed to be. this isn't the kind of shit you get at a bar.

Did we go into someone's home? Why would we take this?

ask the guy who's running this fucking show.

The pack isn't full. There's 3 pills missing.

Did we take any of those? What are the side effects of Trazodone, shit, we need to check this—

fuck, dude, calm down, if we took this from someone's place they're probably the ones who took those, right. it's not like we'd know if this shit was affecting us.

The fuck are you—okay, fine, hangover. I get it. Still. Can't hurt to check.

yeah it fuckin' can. you'll get into a spiral about it.

Shut the hell up. I just need to know if it's going to fuck us over even more.

no, because it's one fucking packet and we've at most taken one or two. if we don't take them they won't affect us any more.

This has to be someone's, right? Who the hell would invite us in?

hah, where the fuck were you last night. plenty of smokin' babes willing to throw themselves at us—ah, shit, what the hell was that?

You flinch. A short stab of pain runs across your face. You've bitten into the fork you're shovelling noodles into your face with so hard it's aggravated your broken nose.

...

don't ... me, you ass.

It's better to leave that alone.

suit yourself. just saying that it's not that weird if some gal dragged us back home with her.

Yeah, but why would we go along with it?

do we even care? not like we're gonna see any of those people again. shit, remember that guy's tattoo? fucking terrible, those lines were bleeding so badly.

Maybe that was a sore spot.

yeah, but breaking a guy's nose? come on, man.

Insulting his girlfriend might have played a part, too.

so what, are we just not allowed to shoot the shit any more without getting assaulted? come on.

For not having patched up a broken nose before, you've done alright.

Your headache's killing you. You need a break.

You think about smoking.

You throw up. There isn't even anything in your stomach anymore, just bile.

Okay. That's alright. We just need to clean this up. Come on.

Cold running through your hair and onto your scalp. Head under water. You're leaning over the sink.

There isn't anything on the floor anymore. You must have mopped it up.

You lie down onto the sofa again.

You really, really want to hug someone.

Cal wraps around you. You bury your face in his plush body, try not to think. Your head hurts.

I'M TELLIN' YA, KID, SHIT'S A LOT MORE FUN WHEN I'M AROUND, Cal laughs. His tone is weirdly soft.

The orange is nice. It's familiar.

In the end, you throw out the Trazodone. You don't need the reminder that this happened.

⁙

You keep using Dante's name, stepping into his skin and acting his part in this small corner of Houston. If he ever actually comes here, you doubt he'll realize what's going on. Your involvement in the office projects is kept to a minimum, lest you risk a promotion that might make him someone of note.

You keep tabs on him, vaguely, through glances stolen at mail and bank notices sent to your address first and shipped off to the right one after you've done your checks. He must be doing well, you think sourly, frivolous purchases made with little to no concern about the cost. A purchase from a high-end photography store. Online shopping done in bulk, or of very expensive things. Some monthly income, probably from your foster parents.

You keep bleaching your hair. You don't really need to, with the amount of times you've gone over the revised, abridged and heavily edited story of your life, but the times when it's grown out enough for you to notice it send uncomfortable bells ringing in your brain. Something's been put in the wrong place and you need to put it back.

When you meet your own eyes in the bathroom mirror, hair gone bottle-blond down to the roots again, the feeling subsides.

It doesn't really change much about you, but the fact that it bugs you so much is concerning in and of itself.

You keep thinking about blood. Bright red against the floor, even though you know it was dark, almost black. Filling the edges of your vision with static, colors just out of reach.

You think about flesh, muscles spasming as the nerves reconnected, flailing and thudding against hard wood, and there were no bruises when you woke up.

You think about things like these, and of summer bleeding into your bones, running outside with Dante by your side. You fall onto soft grass, and there is laughter as Dante falls on the grass beside you. He's out of breath, but still smiling, and you laugh along as he grabs your hair and tears your head right off, the sound echoing through the hollow of your throat down into the grass.

You keep telling yourself you might just as well try again, that it's all just been flukes so far. You do, a few times. None of them work. You keep waking up in a haze to wounds tended and body sore.

You keep doing things that don't matter.

They end up mattering a lot more than you think.