by Tam MacNeil
Now Sean seems to get it, at least a little. Now he frowns and his eyebrows scrunch down toward his nose. “Wait. You mean you can talk to-”
“Are you two assholes coming or what?” Mad hollers from the cab of the SUV. She points. “Because that’s a press helicopter and I’m not waiting till it gets here.”
“We’re coming,” Sean shouts back.
The shinigami are gone and the world is quiet and empty again, and he misses them, misses them already. Alex can’t shake the feeling that he’s being escorted back to his cell. Sean stands on one side of him and Mad on the other, like guards. A couple people in the lobby raise their eyebrows at his dirty, bare feet, but nobody says anything about how weird it all is, not even while they wait at the elevators. But nobody gets into the elevator with them.
They ride up, all three of them, and Mad gives Sean a significant look when they reach the seventh floor.
“It’s ok,” Sean says. He jerks his head and Alex follows him out of the elevator and back to the apartment. He gets a glimpse of a communal kitchen that he hadn’t seen before, and about a dozen apartment doors standing open, all the suites look identical to the one they live in. The place is weird.
Sean opens the door and steps aside and Alex goes in. “We gotta get you some shoes,” Sean says, toeing off his runners.
Alex shrugs. “No point, is there?” he asks. He looks at Sean and he doesn’t mean to be cruel but Sean killed the shinigami before he could help them and he’s a little angry about it. It might be weeks before he sees them again.
“No… point?” Sean echoes.
“I’m not really allowed to leave, am I?”
Sean shrugs. “Nobody stopped you just now.”
“But Mad was going to give you help if you needed it to get me back in here, wasn’t she?”
Sean breathes out through his nose. “You really wanna go out there?” he asks, almost like he’s daring Alex. “You want to take your chances with Cameron?”
“You stayed away from him for a year.”
“I had Annex,” he answers. “You think you can do it alone, you go can ahead and try.”
“So that’s how it is?” he asks. “Same as before, just a different boss?” There’s something so unfair about it. When he was little he wanted to be a firefighter or a scientist or something. He didn’t want to be a wreck of a human, the weapon of choice for more powerful people. “Great. Yeah, I’m good at this. This is going to work out great.”
“Hey,” Sean says, his voice rising, “nobody’s keeping me here. They’re sure as shit not going to stop you from walking out either.”
“Great,” Alex matches his volume and his tone, “Just like home, isn’t it?”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I’m getting real tired of people telling me I’m free to do whatever I want when that’s bullshit.”
“What the hell, Alex?” Sean shouts. “That door isn’t locked. You can fuck off any time.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Sean points at the door. “It’s not. Fucking. Locked.”
“It doesn’t have to be locked and you know it,” Alex practically screams it. “Cameron never put us in chains, but look at what he did to us.” His voice rings in the tiny apartment and it must shock Sean because Sean stares at him and says nothing. Alex’s chest is heaving. He tries to control the volume of his voice but he’s tired and he’s angry and he can’t. “Look what he fucking did to us.”
“To you,” Sean says at last. He says it quietly. It takes the air out of Alex’s mouth and lungs steals the words he was going to say next. “I know you caught most of it. I know he liked you best.”
It’s like Sean’s pulled open a door that was supposed to stay closed and now Alex is angry, so angry. “No, you don’t get to…” he can’t talk he’s so angry, and it came up so fast and all he wants to do is hurt Sean and make him close the door he opened. “You don’t know, you have no idea.”
“Alex-”
“No, you have no fucking idea.” He’s getting cold, the way he used to get when he had a target in the crosshairs and it was only the two of them, and one of them had to die. “He fucked me afterward, you know. He knew what you said, about never again, and he fucked me after and asked me how it was all going for me.” He’s shaking. His stomach is knotted like someone’s been punching it. “He used to choke me till I blacked out. He used to stick his dick down my throat till I puked. The door was never locked then.” He can feel the way he’s smiling, snarling, he must look like a monster with his carved up face. “He told me I liked it. He called me good boy because I did what I was told and you never would. He didn’t just like me best, Sean. I was his goddamned motherfucking favourite.”
Sean nods. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “I know.”
“I would have done anything to keep you safe. Anything.”
“I know.”
“And I did.”
Sean says nothing. He nods. And then all the anger’s gone out of Alex as fast as it came, and there’s nothing left in him, and he’s exhausted and he thinks he should never have said what he said.
He looks at Sean. Sean’s got scars too. Sean screams in the night. They suffered together. And it wasn’t how Alex wanted it to be; the point was that he could take it but Sean was already hurting and broken and never had a real family and never deserved any of what happened to him. The point was that everything Alex did was supposed to keep Sean safe and he’s sorry, so sorry, that it didn’t. Alex spreads his hands.
“I did everything he asked,” he says. “I don’t understand why it didn’t work.”
Sean licks his lips. He raises his head and looks at Alex. “Because it wasn’t up to you, babe.” He says it very softly. “It never was.”
It’s like taking one in the chest. Alex exhales. He sags down onto the back of the sofa and looks at his empty hands. He’s never felt so useless before. Never felt so small.
“What was the fucking point of it all, then?” he asks.
Sean shrugs and shakes his head. “We did what we had to do. To stay alive.”
Maybe. Alex feels like he doesn’t know anything any more.
Sean comes over to him, sitting close but not touching. Alex is starting to get that this is a thing he’s doing. Not touching. Being so careful about it. He wants to ask about it but Sean’s starting to talk now.
“Look, Alex, the people here, they’re not like anybody we used to know.” Sean breathes in a deep breath and lets it out. It shakes a bit. “It’s kinda weird at first. You keep waiting for something to go wrong, for everything to suddenly get crazy, you know, like, expecting people to take off faces and for there to be monsters underneath, but it never happens. It takes a bit to get used to.”
“I don’t…” he sighs and shakes his head.
“If you wanna go, you can go. Nobody from Annex is going to come after you. Nobody’s going to do anything to me. You can just go if you want. But I don’t want you to. It’s not safe, not till we’ve figured out what we’re going to do about Cameron and SysCorp and the shinigami. But if you go, it’s up to you. Nobody will be mad.”
“Sean, come on, don’t lie to me.”
“Well, they’ll be upset, but it’s not the same.” Sean raises his head and smiles with half his mouth, a wry sort of grin at some private a memory. “Ok, so, for example. I crashed a company SUV in winter-” he glances at Alex “-because I was drunk, it was fucking stupid,” he adds. “Anyway, Art got so mad. So mad.”
Alex’s heart twists in his chest. He doesn’t want to know what happened when Sean was on his own. He knows that sort of misery.
“So she went to the gym and lifted weights and chewed me out while she lifted. I swear, that’s it. I told her what happened and she was just lifting these fucking weights till I thought she was going to stroke or something.” He laughs a little at the memory. “I fucking never seen anything like that before, I thought her eyes were going to pop out of her head.” He looks
at Alex. “But that was it. I mean, I had to pay for the repairs and she made me take this course about drunk driving. But that’s it.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah. She just lifted a bunch of fucking weights. Couple weeks later she comes over and tells me she did a personal best that day, and that the damages were more than my whole damn paycheque.” He laughs again.
Alex can’t help himself. He smiles a little, even if he doesn't really believe it.
“She’s the boss and I’ve known her for a year and never seen her go crazy on anybody. It’s good, working for her. Mad and me, we do shinigami stuff, but the Annex does all kinds of security stuff I don’t even know about. And it really is a job. I can quit if I want. I can go do other things. I don’t know, work at a coffee shop or something. I get a paycheque every two weeks. I have a bank account and everything.” He grins at Alex. “It’s so legit, I even pay my fucking taxes.”
Alex laughs.
“No, I’m serious. They take them off the paycheque.”
Alex looks at his hands. He’s still shaking but it’s not like it was. This life Sean’s got, it sounds good. “You’re happy,” he says.
“Yeah.”
Silence. All the anger that was in him is gone. He feels used up, emptied out. Maybe Sean doesn’t need him. Maybe he never did. Seems like he’s been doing just fine for the last year on his own. “So, uh, you and Mad? Are you like, a thing?”
“We work together, that’s it.”
That takes some of the tension out of his chest and makes it easier to breathe. He looks back at Sean, sitting exactly one inch away from him, so carefully not touching him. “Ok, so, uh, what’s up with this?” he asks, gesturing to the strip of couch between them. Sean shrugs. He looks a little embarrassed. Alex sighs. “I know my face is a fucking mess, and I know my head’s screwed up, but I… I mean, are we done?”
Sean shakes his head. “It’s not like that. Simone said I shouldn’t touch you, unless you said it was ok. Because of everything Cameron did, before. I’m…” he smiles, sheepish and sweet and it makes Alex’s chest ache a little. “I’m kinda the shits at asking.”
“Yeah but are we done?” he asks again. Because that’s what matters. It’s all that matters.
Sean’s chewing his bottom lip, and if he doesn’t stop he’s going to make it bleed. “You wanna be done?” he asks quietly.
“No.”
Sean nods. “Me neither.”
That helps too. He smiles a little. He shrugs at Sean. “You can touch me whenever you want, it’s fine.”
Sean scratches at his jaw. “Yeah, sorry. I promised Simone I’d ask every time.”
“Every time?”
“Yeah.”
Alex laughs. “Are you kidding? Sex is going to take a million years.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Sean laughs too. “Just… I wanna kiss you, ok?”
“Yeah, ok,” Alex answers. Sean’s mouth on his is soft and warm. One hand slips up to cradle Alex’s jaw and the other slides around his hips.
“Like that,” Sean whispers when they break apart, his forehead resting against Alex’s. “It’ll be like that.”
“Ok,” Alex answers. “I like that.”
He’d keep going too, because it’s so nice to be close to Sean, and it’s been so long, but Sean’s phone is buzzing. He sits back and pulls it out and even at this angle Alex can see there’s a text message. Art: Come talk to me about what happened.
He grins at the screen. “Oh yeah,” he says. He looks at Alex, his grin fades. “It’s ok, she’s not angry. But I’m sure Mad told her you were there.”
But there’s something cold gripping his stomach anyway. “You sure it’s ok?”
“Yeah. When she’s angry her texts are all auto-corrects. They’re hilarious. “Come taco my office” and stuff.” He puts the phone back in his pocket. “She’s gonna want to know why you were there. I won’t tell her if you don’t want her to know. I’ll just tell her you heard the shinigami. That’s true, right?”
“Yeah, I heard them,” he says. Sean gets to his feet.
“I won’t say anything, but… We’ll talk when I get back, ok?”
Alex nods. He watches Sean go. He can’t shake the worry, not even when Sean comes back complaining that he’s hungry and needed a shower an hour ago. Not even when Sean comes over to him and says, ok? like a shy lover and Alex nods and he kisses Alex on the mouth before vanishing into the bathroom, and leaves the door open just a crack. Not until Alex slips into the bathroom as if he forgot something in there, not like he owns anything, not like there’s much in there, so he grabs Sean’s comb, as if combing his hair is going to help the way he looks.
He looks at Sean in the reflection of the mirror and there’s no red marks, no hand prints, no bruises rising on the skin. He’s washing his hair, not scrubbing at the memory of unwelcome hands, or soothing aching limbs. Alex takes the comb, might as well, even though he knows that Sean won’t be fooled.
He combs his hair anyway.
Nineteen
They get pizza. There was a time that Alex could eat a whole pizza to himself, so Sean orders two, but it’s too greasy and too rich and he ends up holding Alex’s hair back while he pukes into the toilet after his fourth slice.
"Real bored of this," Alex says between spasms.
Sean has to agree.
After, he settles Alex on the couch and makes him toast instead, and Alex eats it, but his eyes keep going to the unopened box of pizza that’s on the coffee table. Sean thinks he should probably put it in the fridge or Alex is going to try again, and there’ll just be more barfing.
“Breakfast,” he says, when he gets up to put the box in the fridge. Alex smiles wryly.
“Maybe.”
He sits back down and Alex leans against him and it’s nice. Alex crunches the last of the toast and picks up all the crumbs on the plate with his finger. Sean cracks open another can of pop and takes a drink. Alex abandoned his after he was sick and hasn’t gone back to it yet, but he might. There’s not much on TV, and neither of them are actually really watching it, but they’re close together, and it’s nice.
“You really talk to the shinigami?” Sean asks.
Alex sucks the last of the crumbs off his finger and then puts the plate down. “I don’t know if it’s really talking, but yeah. They kinda get in my head and they know what I’m thinking, and I hear them when they think.”
It creeps him out a little. “What do they want?” he asks. “Why are they here?”
Alex frowns. “Yeah, I don’t know about that. But they don’t want to be here. They’re stuck.” He’s not looking at the TV any more, now he’s sort of looking at nothing, head tipped to one side just a little as if he’s listening. “The old one said we were alike. I think it meant that were both trapped.” He blinks, slowly, and settles his head on Sean’s shoulder. “Nothing should suffer like that,” he says quietly.
Sean doesn’t say anything, but he’s got his arm over Alex and he pulls him a little closer. “What do you wanna do about it?” he asks.
Alex sighs. “I don’t know. When you killed them today, how did you do it?”
“Sound waves. Art developed this gun that fires pellets that make the same noises the shinigami make. It sorta breaks them apart. But it’s not really killing them, I guess. If they keep coming back, and they keep getting bigger.”
“They’re trapped,” Alex says. His voice is so quiet it makes something ache in Sean’s chest. “They’re scared, and what we do to them, it hurts them.”
“We should talk to Art,” Sean says and he feels Alex shake his head. “If there’s anybody who could figure out what to do, it’d be her.”
“Who’s going to believe me except you?” he looks up at Sean and smiles faintly. “They told you my head would be all messed up, that I might be dangerous too, didn’t they?”
Sean feels his face getting hot. “Yeah, but…”
“Well, they’re probably righ
t. Your doctor friend seems to know what she’s doing. And they put that warfarin stuff in my head, who knows what else is in there?”
“C’mon.”
“Sean, we’ve killed a lot of people. And my head is fucked up. And this thing I can do, it’s weird, isn’t it?”
“Well, magic’s weird.”
“I never heard of anybody else who could talk to the shinigami.”
“No,” Sean has to admit that’s a little extra weird.
“I don’t want anybody else to know about it, not unless they have to. I don’t,” he licks his lips, seems to make a decision. “I don’t want any more doctors touching me. You get that, right?”
He nods. He’s looking at a face that looks like it’s made from spare parts. One green eye, one blue. A scar that splits one eyebrow in two, and another that betrays some kind of terrible injury to Alex’s jaw, the meat just sort of slapped back together with big stitches. He saw the skin that didn’t look right that wrapped a muscle that was twisted all wrong around his thigh.
Somebody did that to him. Somebody gave him bioplastics where bones were too badly damaged, and then put him back into the vehicle that didn’t protect him well enough the first time. Somebody implanted ports in his arms and his back because it mattered more that he could move the mech than that he could sleep without drugs. Somebody put stretchers under his skin because they knew they’d need more skin than he could make without them. It’s not the kind of thing just anybody can do.
“Yeah,” he says. “I get that.” And then, because he knows Alex is still in there, in spite of everything, he adds, “But people are getting hurt and people are dying because of the shinigami. So whatever it is we’re going to do, we have to do it soon.”
Alex dreams, of the tank, and the old one and the young one and the one who never speaks. He dreams of the cage, and the crushing power of the mech and the young one screaming in his mind, and the old one, all pity and sorrow as he tears it apart. He dreams himself from the eyes of the shinigami. He dreams that he knows the one who is kills is a slave, lives in a box made of steel, has known no kindness for so long. He dreams he is the old one, and there is a small thing, a very small thing in a much larger cage, and that it is able to hurt him. He dreams that he is sorry for it anyway.
