Mercury's Orbit

by Lia Black

  Again, Mercury’s gaze made him uncomfortable when he caught it, and he wondered if Mercury had been staring at him the whole time. He felt as though he’d just blabbered on for hours about nothing; something a three-year-old, or crazy person, could get away with. He looked down, glad for the fading light to hide his embarrassment.

  “I’m very glad you didn’t quit,” Mercury finally said. “There is no one I can think of that I’d rather be stranded with now.”

  Sean laughed, knowing that before too long, it wouldn’t take much to push him into hysterics. “You sure about that?”

  “You’re a good person. The best I’ve ever known.”

  “Thank you. I don’t know if I’m all that, but it’s nice to hear.” A range of compliments stuck in his throat, the sensations dancing across his tongue, but he was unable to speak them. He was getting sucked in. Seduced by a master manipulator. When he examined it later, in hindsight, it probably wouldn’t matter, but it made sense to try to keep his guard up, just in case.

  “In the beginning,” Mercury said, with a heavy sigh, “when I was still too young to know better, I trusted someone, fell in love—or what I thought was love. It was when I first arrived on Earth. I was injured, hungry. A man offered me something to eat and took me home.”

  While so far his story sounded okay, Sean had a feeling it was headed someplace dark. He chose to listen anyway.

  “Doctor Edward was not an innocent man,” Mercury said with a sigh. “He had been a real doctor, released from prison for inappropriate contact with some of his young patients. He was a drug addict. I was fourteen, afraid, broken in so many ways.” Mercury’s eyes wandered along the floor as he spoke. He wore no expression. “He knew I was something different and special. He knew I needed him. Dr. Edward would give me a shot of something. It would make me lazy, so I could watch my cartoons while he touched my body. Sometimes the touch was nice and it helped me relax and quiet the nightmares in my head. Sometimes the touch was strange and painful.” Mercury turned his attention to his hands, pretending to examine his palms. Sean could see the tension, the hurt, causing his brow to furrow and his shoulders to go tense.

  “I’m so sorry…” Sean began to say, but realized it wasn’t enough. Mercury had become something slightly more fragile, more human.

  Mercury raised his face, his eyes locked with Sean’s but glassy and distant. “Dr. Edward said he loved me, and love was a good and special thing—that’s what the Flutterby Fairies said too, and they were wise and right. Sometimes love hurt, they said, although this was a concept I didn’t understand was not supposed to be physical. Dr. Edward must have really loved me.” He offered a crooked quirk of his mouth that was supposed to be a smile, and let out a bitter chuckle. It turned Sean’s blood to ice and started gasoline burning in his lungs. He had all ready guessed where this was going, and it made him angry. Angry at the way life was, angry that Mercury was making him care.

  “Maybe Dr. Edward believed that himself. Maybe he thought love made it all right to give a child drugs and fuck him like an adult. But I wasn’t a human child. Drugs did not keep me complacent for long, and once I began to heal, I began to want to leave the stained, tea-brown walls of the little apartment. Dr. Edward wouldn’t let me go. He’d seen the serial numbers— the Sol Labs logo. He tried to keep me so he could sell me back to them. Sell. Me. He told me he loved me, but I was just a thing. That was the first time I felt my heart break. That was the first time the world went red and I killed a man with my bare hands. It felt…good.” Had Sean not been so aware of him—what he’d learned by being stranded with him for days—he would have believed Mercury was evil. Maybe that was how Mercury wanted people to see him. It kept the smart ones at a distance, but intrigued the curious and the wicked. Sean recognized that this had been a difficult story to tell, and Mercury was waiting on him to react. His pain was masked by calculation; acceptance, rejection, either one would dictate how things went between them from this point forward.

  Sean went with the emotional response. He held open his arms, felt Mercury’s entire body melt as he leaned into him. It was awkward and physically uncomfortable, but it seemed to be the right response. Even if Sean had completely misread him and he was pure evil—his intent malicious: to break his spine, twist his neck until it snapped—Sean didn’t think he could have responded any other way. He hated that Mercury was making him feel for him, making him take the time to look past the surface, past the black-and-white of the law, to see the flesh and blood and history that defied it. His exposure to the prostitution detail had opened his eyes to the darkness that made up other people’s worlds, made them raw, open wounds. His experience and wisdom had helped him realize that all he could do was address the result, and try to stem the bleeding. That’s all he could do now for Mercury. What had made him, shaped him into who he was now, couldn’t be erased. No amount of therapy could wipe the slate clean and start over from clay. Sean couldn’t—and wouldn’t—forget their early days together, when Mercury was in control, but he couldn’t dwell on them. He had to deal with the here and now, and try not to worry about how it affected the future. The future could end in a heartbeat.

  21

  He wished he could be like Evan—the man Sean loved. He wished he could get angry without the world going red. He wished he understood why every man he brought to his bed ultimately lied to and betrayed him. But wishing wouldn’t make it so—not those impossible things—so he wished instead that he could stay here, in Sean’s arms, feeling like nothing else mattered. He felt naked, stripped of even his skin, laying exposed and raw before him. Sean could cover him, make him whole, or pour salt. He didn’t care which. He hadn’t told anyone that story—not even Princess—because he understood what a profound effect it could have by telling the wrong person, and he’d been terrified of meeting the right one. He hoped Sean was that right one. He hoped that Sean wasn’t a better liar than he’d ever encountered and would slap him back into cuffs the moment the storms settled down. And they were settling down. Mercury could taste the flavor of the air, changing from the weighty metallic burn to something light and dry. By tonight the rain would cease, and when the sun rose, the mild radiation would kill the electricity dancing across the sand. He would not tell this to Sean, however, though it made him selfish. Rainbow Blue Flutterby said secrets could be good or bad, and knowing the difference was important, but what the fuck did a fairy know about being held, kept safe in a good man’s arms?

  They were lying down, Sean on his back, one arm holding Mercury as he half-covered his chest.

  Mercury raised his head slowly, careful not to make a sudden move that would scare Sean away. He leaned subtly closer, his gaze flashing between those pretty green eyes and those lips that had been eluding him for too long. The bottom one had a cut—a little tear from where he’d bitten him. It would leave a scar that Sean would see every time he looked in the mirror, and he knew Sean wouldn’t get it fixed. If he grew out his hair, the marks on his ear could be hidden, but Sean could never again kiss anyone without Mercury being involved, even as a memory. He could feel his own breath, mixing with Sean’s as he stopped, only inches from their lips touching.

  “Merc…no.” The words were said quietly, almost kindly, softening the blow, but not avoiding it altogether. Sean spoke before Mercury could ask the question. “Comfort doesn’t have to be sexual, and in this case, it really shouldn’t be.”

  Mercury sighed, his own exhale colliding with Sean’s. “You’re going to deny me?” He was unsettled when Sean released him and leaned forward, so he huffed to make his annoyance clear.

  “Boundaries, Mercury. It seems that you really don’t have any, and you don’t respect those of us who do.”

  Well of course he didn’t. Walls were troubling things, meant to keep people out. Blackheart had walls made of thorns that surrounded her castle and made that part of Flutterby Forest always dark and stormy. Walls never applied to Mercury; he’d always found a way around, and ba
rring that, by crashing right through. He opened his mouth, ready with a threat but stopped before he could deliver it. It didn’t taste right on his tongue, and made his stomach burn.

  “What you did back at the outpost; I understand why you did it, but that doesn’t make it okay.”

  Mercury had done a lot of things—some of them when he was hovering on the edge of the red. Those were probably the things Sean was talking about. “But you climaxed,” he answered, watching Sean stand up.

  “I had no control over my body’s reactions. You’d nearly killed me, and then you did…that.”

  It was funny that Sean didn’t want to say the word. “Sex?” Mercury offered.

  “Yes,” Sean said, a tendon flexed at his temple from the tightening of his jaw. “Sex.”

  “I needed it.” Mercury wasn’t feeling quite so sure about where this was going anymore. “You could have attacked me, beat me up and fucked me, any time after what happened in the woods.”

  “But I didn’t, did I? And I wouldn’t.”

  “Are you looking for me to thank you for that?” Mercury asked.

  Sean rolled his eyes, his face pointing towards the ceiling. “I’m looking for an apology, a sense of remorse; for some indication that you understand what you did to me was wrong.”

  He was making Pretty’s face go sour again, and didn’t like it. But it seemed, too often, Mercury said or did the wrong thing and Sean gave him this kind of reaction. He wasn’t necessarily trying to upset Sean, it just turned out that they weren’t seeing things the same way, though Mercury rarely understood why.

  “What happened to you, as a child when you came to Earth. What that man did to you was horrible and wrong. Even if there were times when things he did felt good to you, it wasn’t right, and none of it was your fault.” Sean sighed and was looking at him again. His expression was no longer annoyance, but something he’d never seen before. “I am so sorry that it happened to you.”

  Mercury felt his mouth fill with bitter saliva, like sharp lemons along the inside of his jaw. It was the sensation he often got before he cried, or threw up, or both. Tears burned his eyes and he blinked them away, fighting through the tarry muck of memories never dealt with. It wasn’t the time for that now. “Would you have said yes if I’d asked?”

  The muscle along Sean’s jaw bowed slightly as he put extra pressure on his back teeth. “No. But if I’d understood the reason, I might have been a little more accommodating…” he shook his head. “Although, honestly, hearing you say something like ‘get me off or I’ll kill you’ wouldn’t have been much better.”

  “You’re always honest with me, Pretty; even when it’s dangerous.”

  “With you, Merc, when is it not?” Sean offered him a smile, and for once, Mercury felt it meant that everything was still all right between them, or getting closer to being that way.

  “Will you—”

  “No,” Sean shook his head, though didn’t look angry. “But I’ll hold you for a while if that makes you feel better.”

  It wasn’t what he wanted, but it was something. “Yes,” Mercury bobbed his head. “I would like that very much.”

  22

  In retrospect, it had been foolish to leave Mercury untied all night. Sean figured there were a million things he could have done differently, but last night it hadn’t mattered, and he wasn’t so sure it would matter today.

  Mercury did not wake Sean up in the morning, and Sean quickly realized it was because he was gone. He’d left what remained of their food, water, and clothing behind, but had taken the bag and a few of the guns—Sean’s father’s included. He’d also left behind the bloody bandages from his head.

  Sean rolled over on his back with a groan. It wasn’t a surprise; in fact he’d kind of hoped that Mercury would run away. That way he’d have an excuse for not turning him in. It wasn’t that Sean thought that what Mercury had done was right, but he knew that the kind of punishment he’d receive was completely wrong. Mercury had no idea why others couldn’t see his logic. In some ways, he really was just like a big, messed up kid; raised in an environment that had literally fucked with his mind.

  He knew that Mercury leaving was the right thing, and that Mercury could take care of himself. Still, he’d been such a mess last night, Sean wondered if Mercury might end up fetal somewhere from the pain in his skull, or captured by his father’s militia. It was something he didn’t want to dwell on.

  “Ow...” Sean’s back was killing him from sleeping on the ground. He was getting too old for this shit.

  He stood up, surveying the inside of the hold for something—maybe a goodbye, but Mercury was just gone.

  Sean stretched, letting his vertebrae settle back into alignment, then he shook out the blanket that he and Mercury had shared last night, and began to pack some things up. He decided to forego the armor; it was going to be difficult enough to walk for however many miles before he reached civilization without the extra weight.

  It felt surreal to step out into the sunlight. He hoped he’d find Mercury basking on top of the ship, but no such luck. He scanned the flat horizon as it rose to become sand-covered dunes, but saw nothing. The gnawing sensation of disappointment— worry— was overpowering Sean’s sense of just wanting to be done with it all. Somewhere out there, Mercury might be hurt, and a sitting duck for the Sol Labs militia to scoop up. Or he might have just fled, knowing that they had started down a road where neither one of them could go safely, and certainly not hand-in-hand. It was the most logical outcome.

  Slinging the makeshift sack over his shoulder, Sean picked out the early remains of Mercury’s footprints. They were heading back the way they’d come, into the forest. Sean chose the opposite route across the desert. He knew that’s where he’d find a port, and since he hadn’t flown over any before crashing down, it was likely he’d find at least the remnants of one before he hit another stretch of trees. At least, that’s what he hoped.

  The suns of Terra Huygen were warm, but not sweltering. Part of the reason that Terra Huygen was such a popular place for military maneuvers was its changing landscapes. The temperatures in each zone remained within a few degrees of one another, but a person could pass through forest, plains, and desert in about a day. The planet’s ozone layer was thriving thanks to all of the forests...not to mention the lack of people. Since most of the mines had been stripped, there wasn’t much left here of value. People that chose to live here did so because they’d become sick of life in the overcrowded cities—sick of other people. Maybe it might be the kind of place Sean might like to retire...find a small settlement and disappear from the world.

  Sean had been walking roughly an hour before he stopped to rest and get his bearings. He stood up on the crest if a dune, turning around to look back at the forest that had become little more than a smudge of watery green along the horizon.

  He was starting to turn around again when he thought he saw movement. At first he assumed it was a trick of the light, a mirage playing off the planet’s different climate zones running so close together; but he saw a definite flash, like sunlight reflecting off a smooth surface.

  His heart lurched as he thought it could be Mercury, then reality slammed back at him. That would actually be the worst case scenario for both of them...especially if Sean was starting to have these kinds of reactions. It was probably normal to wonder about someone’s well-being; he’d often wondered what had become of the people he’d had contact with during his career. But Mercury wasn’t just some anonymous young man who’d made a single foolish mistake and gotten arrested. Sean shouldn’t be feeling anything resembling happiness to see him.

  It wasn’t Mercury though, or if it was, he wasn’t alone. It was a vehicle coming towards him—just a lone dune crawler, kicking up a cloud of dust as it drew nearer. They must have spotted him because the vehicle began to pick up speed as it headed his way. His initial thought was that it was Sol Labs, and if that were the case, they’d either ignore him, question him, or sho
ot him, and there wouldn’t be much he could do about any of it, but as it began to take shape, he saw that it was an older-model military transport. Painted flat black, the front cab was open, its fabric top removed, with the domed cargo area just behind. With the kind of budget Sol Labs had, Sean doubted that this was part of their fleet; it could be from a nearby settlement. Maybe they’d seen the footprints outside of the freighter and come to see if anyone needed help. He felt a measure of relief; maybe tonight he’d be on a shuttle back home, or at least be given the opportunity for a solid meal and a soft bed. It made him smile to think about getting back to his apartment, sitting on the balcony with Pearl, a smoke, and a good scotch before falling apart, falling into bed, and sleeping for a week.