Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When his head hits the stage floor, Ivan thinks his turn has finally come to meet the great Anakt.

It’s what all children of the Garden were once promised — that in their final moments on earth, when the mind begins to blacken with sweet death, a divine presence would come collect their souls from their withered bodies. And if that story is true, then the hands that would wrap around his heart will be stained with the blood of hundreds that came and went before him.

His teachers promised that death would be gentle. Much gentler than life, anyway. But as he lies there bleeding, dark red pouring from the bullet holes, nothing feels gentle about the whole ordeal. His mouth tastes like hell and his ears are buzzing with the sound of old radio static, an unfortunate companion into the afterlife.

In spite of any empty promises, death feels like a violent unchaining from the earth, a spectacle where his body takes center stage and his mind gets front row seats. It’s almost surprising how intensely he feels everything, even as he can no longer will his limbs into obedience. He can’t do anything to stop his own dissolution, and at this point, he isn’t sure he even wants to.

Just as expected, the segyein tire of him before he can even take his final breath. He can tell from the urgency with which they kill the stage lights, shielding the audience from the sight of his mangled body. Which is a shame, really, as this moment was supposed to be the fruit of his life’s labor: his heart on a platter, served cold. His future exchanged for Till’s, at the cost of a rather ill-timed confession. 

No, he wants everyone to see what a mess love makes of human hearts. What a mess it made of him. They could’ve given his corpse a little more time in the limelight, just a minor show of courtesy to his final riposte. They could’ve, if they troubled themselves to care. But he knows better than to misjudge his own importance, now that the only thing he can offer the world is the imprint of a life measured in applause and submission.

He used to be the segyein’s favorite, the industry’s darling child. Best in show, paraded around as one of the finest spoils of their conquest. And this is all that he amounts to now: a comatose body awaiting collection, present and not, at the same time. Rain keeps seeping through the polish of his facade, slowly dissolving him into the lustrous surface of the stage. Bit by bit, his senses start to fade; first his sight, then his taste and hearing, then whatever else it is that makes humans human. And throughout it all, almost cruelly, the ache of the gunshot wounds still persists. 

Death, he finds, likes to take its sweet time.

But it’s alright. Everything is alright. He learned to walk the world without fear, so all that remains now is the question of what exactly lies beyond, and if it’s going to be good enough to make up for all of this.

What would he even say when the great Anakt comes for him? He’ll have to choose his words wisely, to make up for the sorry state of his remains. First, he thinks, he’ll curse his maker for the carnival of artifice that was his short, short life — one that didn’t allow for much selfishness, save for the very end. And then, for good measure, he’d show appreciation for the brief moments of happiness, and he’d thank any god that could hear him for bringing Till into his life. At last, he’d take his final bows and go on cruising the valleys of the afterlife by his lonesome. No more pain, no more misery wrapped in shiny veneers. Doesn’t sound so bad after all.

But to his surprise, the next time he opens his eyes to what he expects to be the face of the divine, he finds that its shape is strangely human and its breath reeks of nicotine.

“There you are, lover boy,” he hears a female voice say, as its nameless owner creeps into his field of vision.

There’s shades of blue and brown in her blurry figure, but the soreness of his eyes keeps her features a vexing little secret. Surely, the great Anakt would never bother speaking to him in a human language, much less with such informality. Who is this?

He blinks once, twice, trying to jumpstart his brain from the cushioned cradle of sleep. The shift from blissful inertia isn’t pretty. Reality comes to him in waves and he realises, in no particular order, that he’s naked, he’s alive and he’s in a lot of fucking pain.

Someone must’ve taken pity and draped a blanket around his body, which he now finds is not a fly-infested carcass, but the same expensive figure he worked a lifetime to maintain. Somehow his skin doesn’t feel like his own, just slightly oilier, as if coated in a thin, foreign substance. The next thing he notices is the jungle of medical tubes pumping life into his veins, and the oxygen mask doing the heavy lifting of his revival. The only indication of why all this is necessary is the triad of bullet wounds still etched into his side, their sting so irritating that it almost keeps him from slipping back into the void.

As he slowly wakes to a place that lacks the light of heaven, he doesn’t have the strength to argue with whoever it is that brought him back to life. Nor to rip off those strange instruments feeding him chemicals he could never even name. All his strength has run ashore, and his mind still lingers somewhere in the netherworld.

And to think that for a moment, he truly believed he had the chance to leave this life on his own terms. Right, cue the canned laughter. Life gives, and life takes back tenfold. There he lies obediently, half dead and half blind, forever at the whim of a greater force. Forever evading freedom.

Ah, he thinks, this feels like childhood.

“Floor it, Isaac,” the voice says again, calling on some hidden figure. “His vitals look like shit.”

There’s a sudden shift in inertia and it becomes clear that he is, in fact, trapped in some sort of moving vehicle. For the few seconds that he thought he might’ve been in heaven, it did seem strange that its ceiling would be made of steel.

“Ivan? Ivan.”

Now that’s a voice he knows all too well, bringing back memories of yore. A voice that melts the heart and humbles the angels. It comes to him with the gentle touch of hands cradling his face, dewy eyes boring into him.

Mizi.

“Hang on just a little more, okay? You’ll be alright,” she says, and then she lies some more. “We’ll be safe soon and then all of us— Ivan, please—”

Literature demands a great deal of sentimentality in moments like these. Ivan knows it well, as he’d spent countless hours asking fiction to teach him the empathy he couldn’t force out of himself. But the sight of her evokes nothing and resolves nothing but a fleeting curiosity. The night that news broke about her supposed passing, he had a hunch that things were not as they seemed. Granted, he had much more important matters to handle at the time.

Maybe he would’ve felt more seeing her alive and well, if the segyein had found a way to make normality injectable. But for now, he stays trapped in her gentleness, idly watching, holding on to air. If anything, he’d say that after all these years of knowing Mizi, she finally looks closer to her age. No longer sheltered by the love of others, the skin beneath her eyes seems to have taken on a darker shade of exhaustion, and her hair forms an unruly crown atop her pretty little head. She must’ve been kicked out of heaven, too. Though honestly, he doubts the place was ever that crowded.

“Medic,” comes the voice of the unknown woman, a tinge of worry slithering in its tone.

No good thing ever succeeded that word. Whatever it is that she plans to do to his body is most likely nothing that hasn’t been done before. His mind makes no space for dread or worry, only a hollow, endlessly resounding ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────.

He feels so, so tired of thinking, drained by the effort of simply being at all, machine-aided or not. But in the depths of his apathy still lurks a question, the only one that really needs answering. The one string clinging to the quiet pulse of hope.

Despite his best efforts, words curdle in his throat when he tries to say them, so all that is left is an unspoken appeal to familiarity. He raises one hand, a little cautious of Mizi's reaction, and rests his fingers on the left of her neck, where name engravings are the most expensive. Curiously, there’s no blood on his hands, little to no tactile memory of how it felt for them to grasp the pulse of another. She takes a moment to catch his intentions, face slowly lighting up with recognition.

Attagirl.

“Till is here, too,” she says, attempting a reassuring smile. “ We managed to save him, just barely.”

Ivan looks for truth in the bright green of her eyes and feels, with some kind of juvenile certainty, that she’s the only one who would — or could — never lie to him. Her words open up a whole new world of variables, but they’re more than enough to rouse him from his lethargy. This is all that he asked for: a name and a promise. In the confines of his own personal ride into the unknown, his veins burn with a newborn hunger, and he finds himself longing for an improbable tomorrow. 

Alright, he thinks, awaiting sedation.

Death hasn’t robbed him of everything just yet.

Chapter Text

The next time he wakes, life tastes like iron and smells of antiseptic.

It could be days or years after he bled out on national television, but his internal clock must’ve tangled in his entrails when they tried to sew him back up. Once again, he finds himself bound to the great indoors, in a sterile, shadowless place with little to no signs of wear. Most likely an operating room, if his memories of the Garden's similar interiors are anything to go by. A place for discipline, and strangely, for reminiscence.

This time, waking up to the world carries less immediacy. Everything feels slower now, warmer, like bathing in the dark and nurturing depths of the universe itself. Yes, he is still very much incapacitated, but there’s no more blinding pain tearing through his viscera, none that his brain could register, anyway. His mind works in slow motion, and he doesn’t mind who’s holding the remote anymore.

He figures he should be thankful for whatever painkillers his saviors decided to feed him through the IV lines. Dulling the senses is a much kinder way of living, after all. The segyein used to do the same every now and again — small mercies after their vicious testing, new ways of taming the body from within. The thought strikes too close for comfort, so he lets the drugs dissolve it instead. There, there. All better.

He makes a great effort to turn his head slightly to the right, drawn to the steady rhythm of his vital signs flickering on some ancient monitor. If he needed any more proof that he is indeed alive, this should be more than enough. How lovely it would be, he thinks, if all this technology could forever shut off that part of the brain that governs unsavory things like pain and desire. If he were allowed this one request, he would become the kind of person who could meet Till again and not make a mess this time. What he would do or say when they finally reconnect is of no concern now; all that matters is the certainty that it will happen, sooner or later.

Much to his dismay, he doesn’t get to revel in that anticipation for too long, because his attention is drawn elsewhere, back in the here and now. To a person moving by his left side, polluting his peace with their presence.

“Morning, sunshine.”

Ivan turns to look and, for the first time in a while, sees something he’s never seen before. A man clearly touched by time waves a polite greeting, his hair so white, impossibly white, and his face almost nondescript, like an amateur’s first go at sculpting something beautiful. Thin lines cut across the skin around his eyes and mouth, signs of aging that Ivan’s makeup team used to warn him about for years and years. He can’t recall meeting older humans in the flesh before, only seeing them crudely drawn in picture books. In all truth, he always doubted that his kind was even allowed to age at all, but reality proved to be more elastic than he might’ve thought. Much more complicated, too.

Words escape him before he can tailor them to his new companion, so very unlike him. Mumbled, innocent.

“Hello, God.” 

The man laughs at that, low and humorless, then turns to address someone else lurking in the room.

“No one told him flattery gets you nowhere around here?”

Ivan can’t pinpoint the location of the other person, but he recognises her voice from before, as it was her who dragged him out of his sleep and into this new life.

“Go easy on him, doc. Flattery is laced with our DNA.”

Oh, Ivan knows about doctors. Each a copy of the last, feeding on how unfixable you are. Creatures of fragile empathy and morbid curiosity. If that’s who the white-haired man is, he probably doesn’t mind the flattery all that much. And he’ll most likely be here again tomorrow and the day after, watching, monitoring, making sure the body behaves. It’s not beyond belief that the powers that be would send over a sentinel wearing a deceiving face. In his mind, Ivan calls him Camera One.

“Hey there, heartbreaker,” the voice says, just as its source finally emerges from behind a curtain. Ivan turns to face her, expecting nothing, yet finding quite the interesting character. A woman with long, flowing hair, whose eyes hold the color of the Garden’s artificial sky. Rough-dry clothing, a stack of paper files in hand. She must be Camera Two.

“You probably feel pretty disoriented. Let me run you through the details, alright? My name is Hyuna, I’m the boss around here.”

She doesn’t look the part and he doesn’t care for minutiae.

“A pleasure,” is all he can manage for an answer.

Flash a smile at Camera Two, keep eye contact. She smiles back right away, baring her sharp canines.

Well done, Ivan.

“You might think that once you lose your round in the Stage, you’re all done for. But it turns out we pet humans are too big of an expense to just chuck in the bin once we’re worn out, so our lives don’t always end in the spotlight.”

As she speaks she lights up what looks like a cigarette, breaking all safety rules one usually learns about medical spaces. Seems like being a little rebellious doesn’t put you at risk of getting chastised around here. Ivan likes that.

“In an effort to be more sustainable — a word so drenched in venom she almost spits it out — the segyein recently started harvesting the best of us for future use. Cloning, research, you name it. They collect you while you’re still breathing and they keep you in a lab until your handler decides what they want to do next. Not that the public would ever know. You’re lucky this Unsha guy decided to pickle you in the most expensive stuff around, otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten to you in time. And by we, I mean the handful of crazy bastards who still believe in this godforsaken planet. They’ll be happy to meet you a second time.”

She drivels on about the purpose of the human rebellion, how they swore to fight and claw for any chance they could get to take their lives back from those ‘slimy cabbageheads’. How they infiltrated the Stage just in time to rescue Till and gather intel about the inner workings of it all. Ivan tries to follow but his mind trails behind, lingering only on what truly mattered: the fact that Till was the definite winner of the Stage, just like Ivan always knew he could be. Everything else fails to catch his attention, tangling in that chemical calm like a flame in molten wax.

His delight is transparent, front and center for anyone to see.

Push in, hold for a second. Get a good close-up of that feeling. Alright, closer.

Now dissolve.

The doctor kindly lets him know that they had to search him for implanted trackers and the like when they got him out of the lab. Says that he hopes Ivan doesn’t mind, and he doesn’t. He’d learned not to mind many things throughout the years. They go through a couple more trivialities like recovery time and community rules until the room falls silent, heavy with the unspoken expectation for some kind of input from its third occupant. Alright, then.

“Why the cameras?” Ivan says.

He’d noticed them resting on a table not too far away, a bouquet of about a dozen little gadgets disguised as flowers. Blood red, oddly eyeless. Hyuna follows his line of sight, looking almost amused by the question.

“Oh, right. Believe it or not, these are real flowers. Homegrown, not lab-made. A small gift from your lovely fans.”

That’s some food for thought. Ivan watches the flowers, still partly unconvinced that they’re not watching him back. It seems that many things are allowed to grow here — nature, as well as people. His reputation might leech onto him to the grave and beyond, but he might just get a chance to grow into something different, too. Trouble is, many things that seek to grow need to take root first, and he’s not exactly thrilled about that part.

“It just so happens that I’m also a fan,” Hyuna continues, derailing his thoughts. “So I'll keep an eye on you, if you don’t mind.”

This, too, he doesn’t mind. Her smile spells sincerity, but Ivan isn’t drugged enough to fall for appearances. She sees right through him just as he sees right through her, so he lets her know as much.

“You must think I’m volatile.”

He can’t blame anyone for thinking that, not after the way he acted in Round Six. But Hyuna’s smile doesn’t leave her as she bites back, heavy smoke trailing her words.

“I knew someone like you, once. And trust me, I know all about volatile. You’re quite alright.”

There’s a beat of silence after that, an empty space not asking to be filled. Ivan doesn’t feel like probing any further, so he sits with the nicotine tang of her poison of choice, a scent that used to belong in much more expensive places. If he ever cares enough to revisit this hint she left him, he’ll most likely manage to dig deeper one way or another. For now, he watches the doctor light up as well, collecting a cigarette from his breast pocket. What an odd pair the two of them made. Camera One and Camera Two, joined in dirty communion. Ivan spent so long pleasing the predictable, he almost came to miss the charming oddities of humans.

“Hey, look on the bright side, kid,” the man says, exhaling smoke with a mature kind of grace. “Today can be your new birthday. It’s a rainy one, but still. At least it’s summer rain.”

What a thoughtful thing to consider. Not many are partial to the presence of rain, but any soul that wasted their childhood in the gutter knows that it’s more of a blessing than a curse. Before he died, Ivan made sure the rain would become his, perhaps the most beautiful accessory one could ask for at a funeral, or a birthday. That it followed him through limbo and into this new life nurtures something in him that offers some relief from all the tension that came before. Could be contentment, or a close relative. But who is he to know.

Hold on that feeling for a second, hold for two.

It’s one he rarely felt, and will rarely feel again. Taste it, take it in.

Alright.

Now dissolve.

-

One thing that recovery teaches him is that idle time is poison.

Sometime around the second night of being glued to the hospital bed, Ivan realises that a lifetime of experiments made his system a little too good at handling foreign substances. So when the painkillers wear off, he’s not too fond of being left alone with the chaos in his body, and even worse still, in his mind.

He can’t find it in himself to read the books left on his bedside cabinet, nor to distract himself with any kind of significant movement. And before he knows it, he’s back in places he really shouldn’t be — in the filth and grime of the streets, in the auction cage, in Unsha’s deathly grasp, the first time he tried to run away.

“There’s nowhere else for you to go,” his guardian said back then, a horrid mountain of meat and odor. “You end with me, pet.”

He said it again, for emphasis. It was clear enough the first time.

“You end with me.”

Do humans ever feel safe enough unleashed, he wonders in a brief moment of clarity, and when he doesn’t find the answer he asks the doctor to kindly up his dosage, just a little bit.

“You’re a special one, kid.”

“So I’ve been told.”

In the few hours that the chemicals dull the pain, he feels his fingerprints uncoil and his insides splinter all across the room, floating above all that is cold and medical. He breathes in that stale air like the world’s most treasured delicacy and falls asleep feeling less human, so naturally, much happier.

When the pain wakes him up he doesn’t cry and he doesn’t scream, instead gripping the bed rails so tight they could borrow the shape of his palm lines. Nausea comes and goes like a visitor, somehow never violent enough to make him throw up all the badness inside. Such is life when you’re too expensive to die. Endurance is a high art, said his old manuals, and in his lowest moments he very much agrees. So he accepts and overcomes them like he always has, ever since the tender age of six. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

Things get a little more interesting when he manages to walk again, aided by a crutch, little by little. It’s a slow and punishing endeavor, but it’s what finally keeps his mind tethered to the present. His main point of interest, after the restroom, becomes the table where the red flowers sit nice and pretty. The left side of his body is still fairly useless, skin itching and nerves burning like hellfire, but he eventually manages to walk himself closer so that he can take a better look at those tiny anomalies. The monitor lies silent, at long last disconnected. It’s his third or fourth try, or something in between.

Even this close to dying for the sake of his fans’ generosity, the flowers look somewhat regal, painted in the only color that breaks the monotony of the hospital room. They remind Ivan of the flower-cameras that Till used to wear in his hair on the rare occasion that he overcame his awkwardness and accepted them as gifts from the kids in the Garden. Without much thought, he takes one from the shelter of its sisters and stares into its dark, blind eye, something that his old books used to call the ‘pistil.’ He then rips a petal with his teeth, ready to taste metal, but finds a smooth, soft texture instead. A real child of mother Earth, with no mouth to cry. Good to know he’s not the only thing getting eaten alive in this room.

He sets about scanning the rest of his enclosure for cameras, chewing on that petal in the hopes that its earthy taste would distract him from everything else going on inside him. The rebels must be monitoring him one way or another, if his instincts still serve him well. He searches every nook and cranny, every apparatus and piece of furniture, the floor, the ceiling, the flowers, and by the time he’s done with everything, sweat clings to his forehead like it used to after a two-hour workout. That’s no good, not at all. The lack of proof and his lack of stamina.

His knees almost give out when he hears a knock on the door, followed by someone who looks like a nurse gingerly popping her head inside.

“Hello. I’m here to change your bandage.”

Ivan recalls meeting her once before in the haze of the chemicals, though her exact designation slips his mind. What’s a name, anyway, if not a collar? As things stand, he’s not exactly fit for public consumption, but any company is good company at this point. The more humans come to visit, the more chances he gets to investigate the common thread in their behaviour. So he offers her a smile, to show he doesn’t bite.

“I’m all yours.”

Her hands are gentle when she cleans his stitches, gloved in pure white, like he imagined the great Anakt’s would be. They don’t wander, and they don’t ask for anything in return. Ivan sits with that thought, holding back any involuntary sounds that might offend her proficiency.

“You’re healing pretty well,” she says in a small voice, like someone whose life never depended on it. “From the outside, anyway. We should start working on mobility exercises soon enough.”

“Sounds fun.”

And strangely, it does, if only to keep his poisoned thoughts from returning.

“Anything else I can help you with?” 

The first glove comes off, while the other follows suit. She must have other damaged goods to tend to, so Ivan doesn’t waste her time.

“Have you seen Till by any chance?”

He measures her silence by the peaks his vital signs would have reached on the monitor, their pattern now etched deep into his brain. He counts one, two, three, and concludes that it takes her a little too long to react, for some unknown reason.

“Till?”

“Yes. From the Stage.”

It’s almost laughable to reduce all that Till is to something so superficial, but Ivan can tell that his new caregiver is not the chatty type.

“I’m so sorry, I don’t really watch that,” comes the long-awaited answer. “We’ve been having more and more people come in lately, so I couldn’t tell you. But I can ask around if you’d like.”

Ivan is staggered by it, without a trace of doubt. His tongue presses hard into the roof of his mouth, jaw clenched discreetly, the remnants of the petal coating his palate like a tapestry. He can’t afford to let his thoughts darken his features so easily — it would be too risky, and worse yet, most inelegant. What common ground could he possibly find with someone who remains indifferent to the one thing that shaped the course of his entire life? His interest in the conversation plummets instantly, with the force of something that could rouse the dead. It doesn’t have a name, but it calls itself his oldest friend. He can’t help it, it’s the way he’s wired. Best to keep a safe distance, for the sake of courtesy.

“Would you be so kind?” he says, honey-sweet.

Two decades in this world, and he still doesn’t know how to converse without forcing performance. The nurse returns his plastic smile, uttering an affirmation in that small voice of hers, then moves to gather her things and make for the door.

“Rest well now, alright? We’ve built a more welcoming world outside, you’ll see.”

Ivan watches her petite frame disappear behind the door, pleading with his muscles to stop their clenching. What a cruel send-off, to promise someone better things in exchange for their patience. In his experience, patience rarely leads anywhere. He’ll rest when he’s dead, should this ambitionist world ever let him die again. So when the sound of the woman’s footsteps fades into the depths of the hallway, he gets up again to resume his search, forcing his body into movement. Complacency kills slower than a bullet, but it tricks the mind into liking it.

He’ll rest when he’s dead.

He’ll rest when he’s dead.

-

The flowers wither for good shortly after he disrupts their bundle.

Before anyone comes to take away their vase, Ivan decides to keep the memory of their little lives pressed between the pages of his bedside books, which he quickly devours in the midst of insomnia. They punctuate the passages he finds most interesting not just for their ideas, but for their charming use of human language, which he rarely had the pleasure of exploring in Unsha’s library. While certainly not his favorite flavor of prose, with their childish optimism and whatnot, they somehow manage to clear a path through the fog that made a home in his brain.

But as beautiful as books are, they are nothing more than silent companions. There’s noise inside his head, unending, uncontainable, sprung from the very first bullet that pierced his skin. It echoes his every waking thought and tails him well into the night, almost like a shadow of the mind. It’s frankly, terribly fucking annoying. At the very least, physical therapy gives him something else to center on.

The person that guides him through the exercises is different from the first nurse, much younger in appearance but less so in mannerisms. Ivan attributes the change in personnel to the hospital growing busier, with more and more injured arriving from off-planet missions. He doesn’t probe for a more plausible answer, so he sticks with this one for now. The two of them exchange pleasantries in between the motions and he finds her tone is gentle with just a touch of artifice, her sincerity a little hard to place. A well-trained way of presenting acts of service. It feels good to find one of his kind this far from home.

“Have you been sleeping well?”

“Yes.”

“Any new or unusual pains?”

“No.” 

“Would you like more water?”

“Yes, please.”

“More books?”

“No, thank you.”

In all truth, Ivan is still surprised by how attentive the rebels are to him, just as he’s still unsure why they saved him in the first place. He figured he must be more than a trinket for someone’s collection, maybe an informant on the segyein business or likely preserved as future cannon fodder. Either way, he’s not one to complain about attention, but when he feels his control of the pain start to falter, he doesn’t mind directing that attention somewhere else.

“Is Mizi doing alright?”

“Oh, I don’t know about alright,” the nurse says. “Poor thing volunteered to do so many tasks around the base she barely gets any time to sleep lately. She’s so sweet, really, textbook hyperactive newbie. But she always asks about you when she gets the chance. Anything I should pass on to her?”

The nerves in his arm ignite when he moves it, and she’s watching, watching, waiting for him to slip. He knows that pain heals — so said the manuals and so said the prayers. The great Anakt must be looking down on him with laughter tugging at Its lips, fingers tapping in anticipation. Ivan doesn’t look back.

“Tell her I miss her hugs,” he says, half present. He means it, truly, just not as much as he’d like to.

“I bet you do. You two were probably very close.”

Watching, watching, waiting.

“What about Till?” he deflects, only an exhale away from wailing to high heaven.

He must sound like a broken record by now, but in many ways, that’s exactly what he is. The nurse takes a moment to study the question, her expression never losing its neutrality.

“You know what, I never got the chance to meet him ever since you guys came here. He’s probably taking his time resting up after everything. Should I also tell him something if I see him around?”

Ivan studies her young face, how well she hides her intentions despite what he assumes is little to no media training. There’s hidden depth there, beyond the charity and suntan and eyebags. Everyone he speaks with seems to skate over the issue of Till’s whereabouts, and the reason why evades him. Come to think of it, the exact details of Till’s rescue sank in the mire of his drug-induced euphoria, and the shape of truth has become more and more intricate since then. Still, he regards the nurse with the same display of good breeding she’s shown him so far. 

“No, that’s alright. But thank you for offering.”

See, God, he thinks, this is me making an effort. 

His smile is pearly white, hers its mirrored image. There’s not much left to be said, and they both agree to it in silence. After all, small talk serves nothing but the gathering of dust. When she finally bids goodbye, he decides that he’ll check himself out the very next day instead of waiting around for answers. If he can walk, he can make it work. Caution be damned.

It’s hard to tell when night is supposed to come with the ceiling lamp burning like a midnight sun and the faint sounds of commotion ever present outside. So he takes it upon himself to make night fall on his little room, killing the light with the flip of a switch, leaving only himself and the noise in his head for company. As he rests his head in the softness of the pillow everything feels out of kilter, everything hurts, everywhere. There’s no novelty to it, this tiring feeling, just as there’s no comfort in pretending that its brief stay in his body won’t stretch on forever, the way things are going. 

Two hundred heartbeats later, it’s still there, in his veins, in between his eyes, making him come apart at the seams. There’s no use in counting for distraction, no use in passing the time enduring like a martyr to nothing at all. He’s tried many things to soothe himself, but he hasn’t tried everything just yet. There’s one other way to drown out reason without injectables, and he usually saves it as a last resort just because it feels like teetering a little too close to the edge of vanity. For all the mess he went through, though, he feels like he finally earned his vanity.

In the infinite dark of the room he wets the palm of his good hand with a long swipe of the tongue, a tad theatrically, and slowly works it into his underwear, sheets long kicked aside. There are no cameras around that he can attest to, and even if there were, he’s never met a doctor who wasn’t also a part-time pervert. So as he takes himself in hand, he doesn’t bother with even a shred of decency and gets lost in memories of Till, as he can’t seem to slow the pace of his thoughts in any other direction. 

He thinks of thin lines under milk white skin, green and blue in the sunlight, of long eyelashes, long fingers, making music, picking flowers. Of the bruises and scratches the two of them exchanged in childish altercation, the only times when Ivan’s touch was reciprocated. Of many, many things, lapsing deeper into self-indulgence with every brush of fingers over the most tender part of him, pressing harder right where he knows his body likes it best. Snippets of time come to him in tidal waves, some more clear than others, some he craves closer, some not.

Towards the end of their stay in the Garden, Till did something that remained nestled deep in Ivan’s mind, a keepsake from a time when forced proximity kept them closer than ever. While they brawled for what could’ve been the hundredth time, for a reason so trivial it’s not even worth remembering, he bit hard into Ivan’s hand, almost hard enough to draw blood. Right into the thin valley of muscle that connects the thumb to the forefinger, in a frantic attempt to break the other’s grip on him. And it worked. As they parted with heavy breath, Ivan watched him in momentary silence, a little startled by the escalation.

“If I show this to the teachers, they’ll put you in solitary confinement again,” he needled, flaunting the bright red of his skin. Pain radiated from the bite mark, icy cold in the heat of summer.

Till’s alway been a fighter, always wore his bruises well. He was afraid of nothing at all, except the closeness of other people.

“Go ahead,” he spat back, pulling his shirt back in place. “Like I give a shit.”

“But you do give a shit about Mizi’s solo performance tonight, don’t you? Do you really want to miss it?”

Till’s expression grew more concerned then, his attention thoroughly captivated. He was so easy to read it was almost ridiculous. Stupid, stupid boy.

“What do you want to keep quiet?”

“Let me do it too.”

“What?”

“Bite back. I’m usually more civil than this, as you know, but it’s only fair. What do you say?”

His eyes fixated on Till, the sweat on his neckline, the clothes he’d long outgrown. Ember in his lungs, love of his life. Never in a million years would Ivan have expected that Till would take the deal, stubborn as he was.

“Fine,” came the answer, delivered with an outstretched hand, palm open like an offering. “Bite, asshole.”

Ivan took a moment to register the reality of it all; he'd almost fallen out of the habit of being taken seriously. He then moved to take Till’s hand into his own, holding it gently, as if the gesture preceded a bow or an oath of servitude. Even this close, it still didn’t feel real — not until he made it so. And he did, slowly, almost gingerly. His one crooked tooth sank deep into that soft tissue before the others followed, then his tongue traced the salty taste of skin and nothing else in the world mattered for a blissful five seconds. He returned the bite with as much pressure as he'd received, his body flooding with an eerie sensation that spread far lower than what felt appropriate in public.

Really, he should count himself lucky. What a pleasant turn for a day that was going nowhere.

Till stood still throughout the whole thing, not pulling away but not complaining either. Ivan expected some kind of revulsion that never came, not even when he drew back, leaving the skin damp with his breath, tinted in the loveliest red. For once he couldn’t put a name on Till’s expression, suspended somewhere between fluster and intrigue. He must’ve been dead set on his goal to put up with something so decadent. Funny thing, love. Cruel, too.

“Happy?” Till said lightly, looking anywhere but at him.

“Happy.”

“Weirdo.”

They never talked about it again, just like they never talked about many other things. That same night after the lights went out in the Garden, Ivan walked the hallways in a trance and locked himself in the bathroom, wasting half an hour touching himself everywhere marked as ‘unsafe’ in the pet human handbook, teeth sinking into Till’s bite marks before they got a chance to disappear. He chased that release for longer than he should have, stopping and starting his frantic motions one too many times; much like he is doing now, so many years later. Little has changed since then, save for the frequency of the act. Oh well. It would take more than three bullets to fix his compulsion.

This thing he’s doing, however messy or reckless, feels like a brief reminder that bodies are made for more than pain and service. His muscles are still pulsing from the strain of exercise, but as skin tends to skin and his legs part wider, he feels warmth pool in the pit of his stomach, pressure building, brain slowly melting. He searches through the cobwebs of his past for more images to cling to as he pumps his hand faster, until he inevitably drifts a little too close to the present, back on the Stage, back in that pouring rain.

He’d avoided facing that night with an undiluted mind ever since the rebels granted him a new birthday. It was the night he sang his heart out to a world that killed the light in the only person he ever cared for, and it all felt far less intimate than a duet should feel. Till didn’t look at him once, not until Ivan forced him to, taking from him one last time with newfangled selfishness. When he opened Till’s mouth with his own, he didn’t taste the naive emotion of the hand bite, but something deeper and more urgent, impossible to untangle, even now. 

He hated how pliant Till felt in his hands, how quickly he gave up when he used to fight through thick and thin for his right to life. In truth, Ivan's one wish was for Till to resent the intrusion so much that he'd never make time to grieve, so he doesn’t know exactly how to deal with its aftermath now. But if there's one thing Ivan knows for certain, it's that he makes it hard to be a friend. That he was made to burden, made to break into a million beautiful and useless collectables before he could reach the ripe age of thirty. As he feels warm liquid begin to coat his desperate fingers, he knows that he is and will forever be dysfunctional and depraved and only half-human — and that despite it all, he got to make a difference anyway.

Yeah, he thinks, I know you’re angry. 

It’s no wonder he could bond so easily with the Garden’s watch dogs. He and they are cut from the same cloth, rabid things chained by loyalty. Till was the only person who seemed to understand how rotten he was on the inside, and for whatever reason, tolerated him anyway. 

I hope you are. So angry you'll come for me first.

He’s too far gone to mind logic or reason as he milks the pleasure from the wet heat in his palm, wanting and wanting and wanting more and everything and nothing at the same time, arching his back in a lewd display for no one but his four walls. Just as his control starts to slip, he throws his other arm over his mouth without thinking, pain flooding his insides before he can truly register what he’s doing. And as a wave of all-consuming sensation spills out of him, he buries a low, strangled sound into the meat of his forearm, biting down until he rides out the feeling, pulse after ruinous pulse.

For this private and divine indulgence, he deserves whatever is coming his way. Soon the pain will double and white noise will erupt in his head, to keep him company as he cleans up the mess he made. Soon, but not right now. Right now, there’s only feeling.

Taste it, take it in.

And, dissolve.

Chapter Text

They call it discharge against medical advice. He calls it longing for the outside, but the receptionist couldn’t care less for lyricism.

“I’ll send for someone to get you. Sign this, please.”

There, easy as can be. Yes, I confirm that I have taken this decision of my own free will. Yes, I voluntarily assume the risks and accept the consequences of this decision. No, this isn’t the worst I’ve had to deal with. Ever had electroshocks for dinner?

He slides the form back with quite possibly the most wavery signature ever put to paper, then settles quietly by the window, waiting for his nameless escort. However great his ambitions are, he still needs some domestic insight into how things work around here. From the cold interior of the hospital, he takes his first real look at the world outside, illuminated by a sun so white and perfect, like a bullet hole ripped through the fabric of the sky, the edges still burning. Whatever rain might’ve graced the cityscape is now long gone, its concrete skeleton shimmering lightly through the summer heat. Like a lovely postcard from the sunny side of hell.

In his sleepless haze he finds himself craving the feeling of the sun on his neck, on his arms and legs and cheekbones, now that he is no longer obliged to bleach his skin every damned month. Despite his former instruction, he almost craves a sunburn. Oh, to stagger so far into degradation that even if the segyein found him again, he’d be so thoroughly changed that they wouldn’t want him back. It’s a nice, momentary thought. It’s delusion muddling his senses, making him forget that without his looks, he would’ve been landfilled long ago, before anyone even bothered fitting a collar around his neck. So he settles on waiting inside like a good boy, scanning the horizon for the shadow of his new guide. From the looks of it, the sun’s not going away anytime soon.

Freedom, true freedom, has always been a hinterland to the well-engineered mind. Ivan had it, briefly, on the night of the meteor shower, and now he has it once more, in bitter solitude. He knows he’d slice it to ribbons to assure Till’s own, however irrational that might be. Of course he would, again and again, beyond question — this conviction lived for so long in his heart that it became the only thing he could call the greedy, infantile ‘mine’. A miniature rebellion, if you will. Nobody teaches that in school.

He slouches in the waiting room chair, mindlessly tracing the edges of his name branding with a short fingernail. Almost like a label he could tear away, skin and flesh, bones and all. He breathes in, breathes out, watching red-white trails spring under his touch.

Yeah, he’s never getting clean. And that’s alright. 

“Well, my day just got better.”

An outstretched hand, traces of scar tissue proudly on display. 

“‘sup. I’m Dewey.”

He looks up to meet the beaming face of a man around his age, his bleach-blond hair, his dimpled smile. Good, they sent him an interesting one. Something about the way he holds himself, the skin of his arms a patchwork of deep marks and near misses, makes it clear that no one alive could make a pet out of him, first impressions aside. And with the way he reeks of sweat this early in the day, he most likely wouldn’t fit the role anyway.

Ivan reaches out a hand in return, as humans do, catching the other’s in a polite greeting. He says his own name too, even if it tastes like mold in his mouth. It echoed far more naturally in the vastness of concert halls than it ever did strained from his own throat, but a custom is a custom nonetheless.

“Oh, I know who you are. I carried your ass from the lab to the car myself.”

“They must feed you well here, then.”

It was meant to be funny. Dewey doesn’t find it funny.

“Who’s ‘they’, dude?” he says, eyebrows raised in wonder. “You pet humans always talk like that. There’s no man behind the curtain here.”

The thought doesn’t seem to hold space in his mind for too long though, as he turns on his heel, head motioning toward the hospital door. The tag on his shirt sticks out like a hangnail, and the skin on the nape of his neck looks two shades darker than the rest of his body. Ivan feels something crawling in his guts, a warm and familiar feeling, and promptly crushes it before it grows more legs.

“Come on, I’ll show you around.”

And with that he follows Dewey outside, his first proper excursion into this new reality. Right away, he notes the air is thick with unforgiving heat, and his new companion seems to favor a pace that poses quite the challenge to his weakened body. But that’s alright. It’s a worthy discomfort, all things considered. It’s his grand prize for insubordination: a constant pain in the side and a weeklong oxycodone prescription. He has about five hours until the effects wear off and his insides turn on him again. 

“That’s Block A,” Dewey says, stretching his arms as they keep walking. He points toward a cluster of run-down buildings huddled together like a pack of strays. “That’s Blocks B, C and D. Best part of town. Only two types of cockroaches!” 

How uncanny it feels to walk among buildings that may well be older than the Stage itself — structures once crafted by humans for humans, now reclaimed by the survivors who insist on enduring like the dirt lodged underneath God’s nails. A few of them linger in the concrete alleys, young and old alike, stealing glances but never engaging beyond private whispers. For all he knows, he might as well still be dead in the eyes of the public, if the rebels’ mission was classified. Funny thing, if true. A relic of the Industry walking their streets, limping.

“That’s the canteen. That’s the shooting range. And that's the bar. The only bar. If it were up to me we'd have ten of those, you know what I mean?”

Ivan draws a map in his mind to revisit later, leaving out boring details like ad hoc gardens and defunct crosswalks. His attention shifts to his chattering companion, who, much to his annoyance, towers over him by a good ten centimeters. A lifetime of looking up at your handlers strains more than the spine. Why do it again?

“Who gave you your name, Dewey?”

“Funny you ask. I did.”

“How come?”

“Well, until I was four or five I was a street rat with no name, so everybody called me ‘kid’ wherever I went. Stuck to me like gum, even after I was brought here. I hated that. So one night, when one of the adults was reading the kids a bedtime story, I started really paying attention to it, maybe for the first time ever.

"It was a story about this dog who ran in circles trying to catch his own tail so fast and for so long that he created a tornado that swept up aaaall the houses in the neighbourhood. And he ran and ran until he caught a whiff of his favorite food cooking in one of the houses, at which point he got so distracted he stopped running, and all the houses dropped down in some beautiful mountain region far away from their shitty home. And to thank him for bringing them to this beautiful, beautiful place, the townspeople fed the dog his favorite food for the rest of his life.

"At the time I thought that was the funniest shit ever, just how far being stubborn could get you. But to get to the point, the dog’s name was Dewey. I liked it, so I borrowed it. And the rest is history.”

In all that gratuitous avalanche of details, Ivan finds one thing that might serve him later, a hint of shared roots with this curious stranger. Street rat, he’d said. There are many questions Ivan wants to ask about that, ones that his own cranium could only echo back at him.

Does your bed ever feel like concrete, still? Do you ever taste that piss-soaked rainwater when you don’t wash your teeth for too long? Do you feel like you never left that place, after all? Like it bound itself to your spinal cord? Like it gave birth to you? Do you?

Out of better judgement, he doesn’t say that. He takes the more civil route, that of the invisible prompter.

“That’s cute,” he says, the way he imagines a mother animal would humor its offspring’s first catch.

“Yeah, I know. Should I ask about your name?”

“Better not.”

“Thought so. You can get it removed, you know? The name branding. We’ve got good doctors here, although they’re a little busy reattaching body parts right now.”

Ah, there it is. The point where they might diverge. For someone who was picked off the streets by the right people, it’s only natural that having a tangible reminder of your lack of freedom would kindle infinite shades of disgust. But for someone like Ivan, forever deficient despite all the resources in the world, those four expensive letters meant that throughout his ash gray, filthy little life, he somehow managed to endure, and somehow managed to matter.

For all the times he hovered sharp edges over that name, he knows that without it, he might never have truly tasted life, and never have met someone worth renouncing it for. The ones that didn’t deserve a name were all fleshed and turned into leatherbags — or worse, to give credit where credit is due.

He feels sweat begin to collect on his forehead, a quiet luxury in the absence of cold. And he isn’t lying when he says:

“I’ll think about it, thank you.”

Sounds sincere enough. Ivan wonders if his companion noticed that their movements complement each other now, right legs descending together, left legs following suit. He’s not bad-looking, all things considered. If Ivan cracked open his skull right now, would it flood the streets with pornography or alcohol?

“Your five-star tenement, right this way,” Dewey says, smiling brightly for no reason at all.

They enter what looks like a modest three-storey building overlooking an empty playground, a strange parasite plant clinging to the vast majority of its walls. Ivan follows quietly, taking in the tableau of his new home, one peeling layer of limewash at a time. Dewey climbs the stairs ahead of him, getting taller and taller.

“There are communal bathrooms on each floor,” he says. “Breakfast at nine. Curfew at ten. Just to keep everybody safe during the night, you know?”

“Is Till staying here, too?” Ivan asks, feeling like the prelude has already run its course.

“Nah, don’t think so. We barely found a space for you. Some people decided to have kids around the same time this year and that only made the space problem even worse.”

“Why would they do that?”

They pass through a hallway made of tile cracks and sepia walls, and Ivan has to let pure spite shape his path forward, as his muscles are only minutes away from failing him.

“Beats me, dude. Go ask them, make some friends.”

Same old song and dance: go on, little one, make some friends, pay no mind when they eventually get shot in the head. Ivan can’t even begin to articulate how exceptionally shitty he’s feeling — because the pain returned way ahead of its due time, because humans insist on bringing other humans into this world, because he once again couldn’t get any information on Till — when Dewey finally stops in front of the last door.

“This is it, I think.”

He opens it without a key, and they find themselves stepping into a place half the size of Ivan’s old walk-in closet, consisting of little more than a bed, a nightstand, a window and a bunch of boxes housing what could only be classified as ‘stuff’. So far, no other notables.

“I mean, I know it’s perfect and all, but do let me know if you need anything else,” Dewey says, somehow prolonging that last word into a long, unapologetic yawn. Ivan stands there watching, so drained and empty that he feels himself turning into ‘stuff’ by the minute, and in the privacy of his mind wishes for a sainted club to the head. He could use something else, though. His lifeblood, one might say.

“Do you have any music?”

“Like, CDs and stuff?”

“Anything.”

“Coming up, princess.”

He keeps watching as Dewey disappears back into the hallway, the rhythmic squeak of his shoes following him right outside. And with that, Ivan is once again left alone, a body between four naked walls. Discomfort burns through him, from his scalp all the way down to the soles of his feet, and for the first time in forever, he doesn’t mind dropping into bed wearing unwashed clothes. Once again, he is greeted by an unfamiliar ceiling — an infinite stretch of flatness, painfully silent. He pleads with himself, says to himself, Come on, relax. Be nothing. Be ‘stuff.’  

And it seems to work, funnily enough. In a record time of about seven minutes, he makes a home among the clutter, closes his eyes and thankfully, blissfully, dreams of nothing.

-

One of those dark and dirty winter Mondays, Till looked through Ivan’s rough drafts scattered all around the studio. He shouldn’t have.

“Who’s the ‘you’ in all your songs?” he asked, battered sneakers on the leather sofa.

Ivan couldn't say that he anticipated the question, not really. The simple fact that Till was curious about his music was enough to keep his ego well nourished, but he still had to tread softly around the subject. One had to choose their battles like they chose their silences.

“Don’t you know? It’s the universal ‘you’.”

“The what?”

“Looks like you really weren’t paying attention in class, huh? ‘You’ isn’t always intended to be a real person, but a vague address that makes any listener feel a little more special, like the song was meant to be a personal dialogue with them. Cheat code to airtime.”

Look at him, sprawling bullshit like the world’s most decorated ventriloquist act.

“There’s no sincerity in this industry, Till. And, honestly, if we were allowed any more sincerity, your PR team would have an existential crisis.”

That much was true. For all the success that Till’s debut album had, Ivan was well aware that Urak considered his latest, more experimental endeavours to be nothing more than musical roadkill. There was so much potential lying dormant in that pretty head of his — of course any venture too far outside the norms of the Industry would cost him harsh reprimands, and even harsher punishment. Ivan knew this because he could always tell when Till wore foundation, and that day was one of the rare occasions when Till allowed his bruises to be covered, just to keep up appearances in the studio. Theirs was a life of infinite compromise. You had to put up with many things in order to keep making your music.

“Okay, let’s take this one then,” Till said, shifting his attention from one sheet of paper to another. ‘I want you more, to dig into your wounds / Even if you curse me with addled eyes’. Why would anyone want that directed at them?”

Ivan had to fight the urge to wet a finger in his mouth and smear the makeup on Till’s face, as he found it so much easier to be distractive than to be sincere. He succeeded in that, just barely.

“Well, some people really are gluttons for punishment. When you scream and spit at your fans, don’t they open their mouths wider?”

“Fuck’s sake, I don’t get you sometimes.”

Case in point: Till’s features twisted in the most adorable grimace, like a child who stepped in an ugly puddle of someone else’s feelings.

“So you're saying there’s no sincerity in this? In your music?” he continued, ever talented at twisting the knife.

Ivan had to gather himself, lest he’d end up shining light on all that he’d meant to pen in invisible ink: Please don’t do that. You’ll break me.

“Not exactly,” he said, a pathetic insect of a man.

“Right.”

It was then that Till eased away from the sofa, shoulders sagging with disappointment. His shoes stained the leather; his words left their mark too.

“That’s too bad.”

-

Three knocks on the door. Mizi’s voice on the other side.

“Hey, Ivan. Do you want to have breakfast together?”

No.

“Yeah. One second.”

He doesn’t remember sleeping for more than two hours at a time the day prior, and he can’t even recall having lunch or dinner either. He had no expectations beyond a soft bed and a roof over his head, but he could’ve done without being able to hear most of what was going on outside. Strangely, though, it doesn’t bother him all that much, not like it would have in the past, when he used to cherish the ritual of the Beauty Sleep. In fact, all he has lately are watercolor feelings, diluted by the constant preoccupation with and anticipation of pain. He takes his pills with a glass of water, and he opens the door.

Standing in its wooden frame is Mizi, looking a little bit livelier than when they’d last met. Standing next to her, Sua, the mirrored image of his own hypocrisy, with her inkblack hair and hollow eyes. The dark circles adorning her white, doll-like face betray the fact that she, too, visited the great beyond not so long ago, but the way she glued herself to her dearest one says that in the end, it was all worth it.

“Welcome back, crazy,” she says, doing him the kindness of offering an almost-smile.

“Why, thank you. Likewise.”

“Don’t even start.”

“I won’t. It’s all in the past, isn’t it?”

There’s a long, deep scar embracing the right side of her neck, cutting her name in two unaesthetic chunks of skin. She regards him the way one would regard a gum on the sole of their shoe, and in that condemning look he finds a home away from home.

“You don’t mean that,” she bites, lowering the temperature around her to sub-zero.

“Come on, you two,” Mizi interrupts, taking both of them by the hand. “Let’s meet the others outside.”

And so they all make their way through the hall together, hand in hand, in a hasty revival of their childhood group. It’s a nice thing, Ivan thinks, yet it feels painfully incomplete. Because the fourth piece is missing. And Ivan hopes the fourth piece knows that it would never fit in anywhere else in the world, and that the other three were purposely designed around a space it alone was meant to fill.

It’s unfair, isn’t it? For whatever reason, life designed humans to need each other.

“Everyone, say hi to Ivan.”

Downstairs, everyone says hi to Ivan, and he shakes more hands than he expected that day. It’s quite impressive just how many souls are crammed in what would initially appear to be a desolate landscape, but he finds himself surrounded by a large number of both adults and children — joyous, uncollared and uncomplicated, running around with smiles on their faces. He walks among them with the feeling of the sun on his neck and a shimmer of hope just beyond his reach.

The mind is a fertile ground. Perhaps, with enough time, he will manage to live among the warm blooded creatures without too much strain on his part, only after he adapts to their conventions. It shouldn’t be too hard. First you earn their trust, and then you earn a gun, presumably. It’s the hierarchy of privilege. And, to be frank, Ivan misses feeling safe, and he misses feeling fine without the aid of chemicals. At least he infers a path to securing one of the two.

When they all sit down to eat in the canteen, he knows exactly why Mizi decided to surround herself with people before meeting him again. Still, he decides to pop the question anyway, as he can’t tell just how much more dancing around the subject he’s willing to tolerate.

“Is Till joining us, too?”

One beat of silence, a few prying glances directed his way. Sua remains silent, minding her own slimy breakfast, while Mizi fiddles with some kind of hybrid between meat and pastry. She seems uncomfortable with the question, for reasons thoroughly unknown.

“I don’t think he’ll be joining us for a while, actually,” she says. “When he found out that he could have his name engraving removed, he wanted to get the surgery right away. And since our doctors are a little busy right now, he was transferred to the sister city to get it over with a few days ago. I’m sure he’ll be back in no time.”

Ivan knows that he shouldn’t speak with food in his mouth, but he does it nonetheless.

“Really? I’d like to go there.”

“I know, but I think you should focus on your own recovery right now. If you wait just a little longer for him to come back, I—”

“How far away is it?”

“About fifty kilometers from here. But we're in a bit of a tough spot right now with so many injured returning from missions, so I don’t think there are any more outside trips planned for the week.”

“I could walk.”

“Ivan—”

“I like walking.”

“IVAN.”

He can tell that she spoke his name with far more venom than she intended, for once dropping that artificially sweetened tone that was so integral to her character. In this momentary hiccup in her demeanor, Ivan catches a glimpse of the real her, the one who delayed both Round Six and Round Seven by turning Luka’s face into raw meat. It’s the version of her that he wanted to meet all along. She looks at him like an insect strangled in its own netting, her eyes a sickly green, the color of dis-ease.

“Sorry, um, I’m just a little tired, you know? I want this to work. I need this to work. We’re supposed to be happy here. And we could be, if— if only—”

“Why don’t we get some fresh air, Mizi?”

Sua places a gentle hand on her shoulder, the touch of a snowflake that wouldn’t melt away. She, too, seems less pristine after her visit to the cloning tank. Wearier than before, slightly older.

“Alright. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

As they excuse themselves to head for the door, Ivan follows Mizi’s gaze with what he hopes is perceived as a tender expression, as if to say, Nice to meet you. What took you so long?  She’s trying way too hard to play up her grip on the situation, the poor thing. All that she was before the rescue is likely jamming its grimy fingers through the cracks of her composure, ready to carve a way out if none is given. He wouldn’t say that the feeling is entirely unfamiliar.

Thankfully, the brief awkwardness that follows their exit is drowned out by the day’s gossip, and Ivan is able to turn his full attention toward his meal. The food tastes decent, as if someone, somewhere, poured their love and accidental sweat into it. Before leaving the canteen himself, he pockets a knife from the dishwasher just because he can, with no one to breathe down his neck anymore. And as he makes his way back to his little room, he tests its sharpness with a cautious finger, still pondering Mizi’s words.

He’s not entirely sure whether that story is plausible or not, but he supposes he could give it a few days to prove itself. It makes sense, of course, that Till would choose not to have that name etched into his skin forever — even if, deep down, the thought stings a little, as though the weight of their shared burden might somehow shift unfairly onto just one of them. Ivan knows that it’s a petty thing to dwell on. The truth is, Till deserves to be free, no matter the cost. That Ivan will keep chasing him to the edge of forever is a whole different story.

He decides that it wouldn’t hurt to take a look through the CDs that Dewey left him yesterday, most likely when he was passed out from exhaustion. Somehow, today feels kinder to him than all the previous ones, so he might as well make the most out of it. The sun shines brightly outside his window. The knife sits pretty in the nightstand drawer, waiting patiently.

-

Life is strange in the human world.

Turns out people don't need all that much to keep themselves happy; no lavish gifts and no daily injections, like the segyein thought. They’re content with breaking bread and sharing body heat in the colder evenings, with bonfires and card games, with the occasional messy joining of bodies in the dead of night, when all is supposed to be quiet. Ivan knows this, because his walls aren’t thick enough to conceal the wet, obscene, unmistakable sounds of fucking — that curious thing that humans do when they want to multiply, here, where they owe their bodies to no one. Ivan knows this, because ever since he died, he can’t seem to get any proper sleep.

From the floor above his own, he can make out a female voice and a male voice, or two, although he couldn't tell for certain. From the muffled sounds that travel through the ceiling and fire up the tension between his legs, he can picture the drag of a body against another, can almost piece together the kind of act that might draw such reactions from those faceless strangers. Curious thing, to know that others are willing to open themselves up and empty themselves out in front of each other when seemingly no one asked them to.

In fact, and to borrow from the vernacular of the rebels, Ivan did entertain the idea of fucking all decency out of of a certain someone too, of reducing him to nothing but whines and syllables, until only Ivan could nurse him back to coherence. Of crawling out of his own skin and making a home in that certain someone’s ribcage, where the music of his heartbeat would forever loll him to sleep. He wanted it not out of some irrational desire to reproduce, as he’s well aware that their anatomy wouldn’t allow it, but out of just that — desire, the primordial leech.

Despite what all his senses are screaming at him, he doesn’t touch himself anymore, just to see what that might feel like. He sits still as a corpse, slowly sweating the shape of himself into the narrow mattress, and he keeps listening in with quiet interest. He tries to wait out that growing, quiet interest, counting heartbeats, counting bedbugs. It’s quite miserable, but at least it’s interesting.

Every night, there’s always some type of discomfort that keeps him from sleeping like he used to do. Every night, the knife sits patiently in the drawer, his one trusted companion. When dawn breaks, he forces out five or six mediocre push-ups and then he gets on with his day, patrolling the surroundings before anyone else wakes up. As always, one has to observe life in order to replicate it.

Not long ago, he stepped into the abattoir of showbusiness ready to forsake his human nature, only to now live surrounded by real, unfiltered humans, who all value their freedom as a birthright. He only got to live past the average lifespan of pet humans because he was a willing victim of circumstance, a model plaything for the segyein. And he swears that he's not actively trying to defy the herd, but he can't help feeling like a stray wherever he goes. Maybe, just maybe, he is starting to realise that at his age, it might be too late to be rewired.

Despite his suspicions, though, the other humans seem to like him well enough so far, because his voice is pretty and his face is even prettier. They invite themselves into his personal space like he used to do to the kids in the Garden. They ask for his attention, but never for his autograph. And he succeeds in feigning chemistry with all of them, because he didn’t graduate with an A+ in Persuasion without merit. He teaches the children how to start a fire without matches, and Till isn’t there to witness it. He sings a ballad on the backdrop of Mizi’s rusty piano playing, and Till isn’t there either. Days keep passing, and Till isn’t there. Till isn't anywhere, and the knife sits in the drawer.

“Right, uh, can you cook at all?” Dewey asks him one day, scratching at his stubble. “Hyuna wants me to assign you some tasks around the base.”

“No.”

“Can you drive a car, shoot a gun?”

“No.”

“Can you do anything at all besides walking around and turning heads?”

“Not for free.”

“Watch your ego, princess.”

Ivan isn’t stupid. He can tell when others are attracted to him, as he was lab-trained to prompt that exact reaction. It’s clear that Dewey has taken a special interest in him, from the way their paths keep crossing at odd moments throughout the day, to the way the other leans down slightly when they're talking, nodding his head just a little more than necessary. He decides to keep entertaining that interest because, honestly, who knows what might happen next? Every day in the rebel camp brings something new, whether he likes it or not. He knows this game much better than he’d care to admit.

Another day, Mizi hugs him out of the blue, saying that she's tired and that she really missed him after Round Five. Ivan tells her that he’s tired too, and he promises to give her piggyback rides when his body finally gets better. Saying it out loud might just make it come true, somehow, so he does.

“Aw, where’s my piggyback?” Dewey says, popping his blond head from behind the canteen’s door.

“In your dreams,” says Sua, always lurking behind her object of interest. 

Page 150 of the Revised Human Dictionary begins with the word ‘camaraderie’ — a feeling of trust and friendship. But how could he ever trust these people when he feels that each one of them is hiding something in their own special way? Surely, they don’t think of him as so delicate minded that he couldn’t stomach the truth, whatever that might be. This is, at the end of it all, a life without Till, the very thing that Ivan tried his best to avoid. He could rebuild it from twigs and sewerage if he had to, but he has no idea how to shape it around the absent center of it all.

Even this far away from their old lives, sincerity remains the world’s most scarce currency. And Ivan knows, oh, he knows that the shortest path to the truth is through Sua, jagged as it may be.

He catches her alone one fateful Sunday evening, watching the outdoor shooting range like a child who's waiting for the commercial break to end before the real fun begins. Her bench holds space for two, and he occupies it with joyful cruelty.

“Would you kindly carve out five minutes of your day for an old friend?”

“I don’t know where Till is.”

Straight to the point, as expected from an Outstanding Student. He’s always known her to be the direct type, a glacier so enthralling one would risk crashing into it just to look closer. 

“I think you don’t want to tell me. In fact, I think nobody does, and I can’t tell why.”

When he’s met with nothing but silence he takes it as an opportunity to insist, as he’s well overdue a gold star in Insisting.

“What if I were to hide Mizi from you, hm? Wouldn’t feel very nice, would it?”

He doesn’t mean for it to sound like a threat, but he’s not too concerned if it’s interpreted as such either. He knows there are limits to her patience, and that whatever lies beyond that patience is hazardous. The look she gives him holds the rigor of someone who isn’t willing to entertain, as if to say, Caution. Leaning Further Might Cause Injury.

“It’s not like that, Ivan.”

Because you were forgiven, right? You were, and I wasn’t.

Here comes the truth. Open wide.

“He doesn’t want me to tell you where he is. Me or anyone else. That’s why this stupid charade is taking so long. Mizi tried talking to him ever since we came here and he still won’t budge, not even for her. He doesn’t want to see you, point blank.”

Alright, that one feels like a hit to the spinal column, and her tone does nothing but dress the wound in rubbing alcohol. A wound that, from the looks of it, may never get to cicatrize. A nameless feeling begins to ripen in Ivan’s chest, and he tries to make sure that it springs from reality, not from his worst nightmares.

“Till said that?”

“I get nothing by lying to you. You know that.”

That makes sense. It breaks him right in two, but it makes so much sense. He much preferred her ire to her silence, or anyone else’s, for that matter.

“I do feel sorry for you,” Sua continues, and when she feels him slouching in the seat next to her, she promptly adds, “I guess.”

Look at them, two peas in a pond, both rotten to the core.

“You’re so cold, noona,” Ivan says, and it’s only when he hears his own voice that he realises his words are marred by a slight tremor. Far away in the distance, someone takes a shot through the center of a target, and it echoes straight into his core. She doesn’t look at him anymore, speaking her words to no one.

“My coffee’s wearing off.”

-

When he shuts the door to his room, he is once again confronted with the feeling of something ready to spill out of him, something that sat on the edge of combustion for a little too long before being offered the blank canvas of privacy. He feels it bone deep, that sadness, that thing that draped his heart in tar and then cast its shape in amber. Only it feels far worse than sadness; more like its mother, or its primitive in-law.

What the fuck is this, he asks of himself, sweaty hands finding his pulse, his forehead, his temples. Unlike all the things that anchored him to the person that could bear the name that he was given, it is far from logical and too fast-evolving for him to keep up with. Could be growing pains, the thing that his education never allowed him to subdue. Or it could be planned obsolescence in humans who live without their poison of choice for too long, and then crumble with withdrawal once it declares itself out of commission. 

All of this, because of what? Because Till is running away from him, like he already did once before? Is it the years of blunder, the kiss or the strangulation? If so, then fuck it all to hell — he already knew that wasn’t the kindest path to take, deep down in the crater of his heart. But he couldn’t find any other way of making things work. He should’ve known better, if he had half a brain. How was he supposed to know better?

He tries his hardest not to cry because his voice sounds disgusting when he does that, but to no one’s surprise, it doesn’t work out that way. Everything he made work a lifetime ago doesn’t seem to work anymore. He hurries past bargain and disorder and plummets straight into the depths of sorrow, drinking it in until the last drop.

Push in, get a good close-up of that feeling. Here, all curled up in fetal position, is Ivan reprising his role as himself, as the gaping hole in his empathy and as his monumental fucking failure to simply live without instruction. After the credits, of course, comes the title sequence:

You are not a person. 

You have no fucking teeth. 

Now that you know that, everything gets easier.

The audience goes wild. The show has only just begun. He cries and he cries, and he laughs and he cries, and the knife sits in the drawer, the knife sits in the drawer.

Chapter Text

“I’m giving this five days to heal.”

‘This’, he was soon to find out, meant a sudden, blinding slap across the face, the shock of it shooting like an arrow through his eardrum. One hand on his collar, a million stars behind his eyelids. Since nothing in this world is best left alone, he just as soon received another.

“Six.”

And another.

“Seven. We could do this all day.”

How strange, he remembers thinking back then, a segyein who bothered learning a human language, even though that giant, bristly creature could’ve made its intentions clear enough without wasting any words. How very generous, really, to go through the trouble of attempting communication.

In spite of his young age, Ivan was no stranger to affliction, but even he could tell that ‘this’ was a little excessive, all things considered. All of ‘this’, because he was caught trying to stab himself in the face so that no one would want to buy him at the auction. What was the big deal? Just what resources could they hope to extract from a body poisoned by the streets? At the time, he didn’t understand.

“No one’s coming, kid,” the creature said, shaking Ivan like one would shake a gutted vermin to free it from its entrails. “You sit pretty and I’ll take care of everything, alright? No one’s coming for you.”

He wakes up in a cold sweat just as the sky begins to change colors, trying to blink away the shapeless face that clung to his retina. Everything around and inside him is drenched in darkness, and his breathing echoes against those empty walls like the sound of a creature dying in a canyon.

There’s something truly cursed about this place, that’s for sure. In this room, time runs backwards, and he finds himself revisiting endless dormant memories, each one building, tangling, and accumulating into the sum of his faults — a gigantic and untouchable thing, almost alien-like. Nothing neuters it and everything nurtures it. 

He tries to locate the source of the discomfort in his body, from the neck to the ribs to the tenderloin, before he realises that yes, it is indeed everywhere and no, it won’t go away so easily. His feet are already firmly planted on the wooden floor, and it takes everything in his power not to reach for the contents of the nightstand drawer. His body guides him through the hallway and into the bathroom, where he locks the door and turns on the faucet, to wash away any bruising that foul memory might’ve left on his skin.

The mirror welcomes his figure into its well-aged surface, and his face looks like a commercial for bleach ingestion. How To Jumpstart the Engine of Your Ruin in Three Easy Steps. No shades of violet on his skin save for the dark circles that are starting to form under his eyes, for which he needs some makeup very, very soon. This nameless, uncomfortable feeling seems to have taken root deep inside himself, and it wrapped its nest in a thousand layers of his own past and present failings, to make it inviolable, and to make it permanent.

Everything spirals from there, as it always does. Ivan feels Till’s pulse stenciled into the palms of his hands, that scared, naive little thing. Till’s taste in his mouth, Till’s eyes on him, asking for the truth inside the pain. But how does one even begin to justify pain, anyway? For all he knows, it comes as a package deal with the thorn-wrapped gift of life.

Ivan never received any more beatings since the pre-auction incident, as his face became his saving grace, so he couldn’t ever truly understand what Till went through behind closed doors, when Ivan wasn’t there to watch over him. He couldn’t do anything to stop the pain, could only hope to soothe the aftermath with cold comfort and improper humor. Because they were made of different things, the two of them: one of fire, and one of artifice. It’s no wonder Till doesn’t want to see him ever again. 

But in his utmost selfishness, he couldn’t possibly accept that. No, he wants to jam his fingers in his ears and fish that horrid thought out of his brain before it cascades into something even more injurious. Slouching over that old, frigid sink, he wants and wants and wants — always, always wanting.

Don’t you think about me? Don’t you want to kick my teeth in?

It’s ridiculous, really. They’ll have to share this space one way or another. They could pretend that Ivan is dead, as he never had any particular appetite for life anyway. Till doesn’t have to see him ever again, but Ivan does, just to make sure that Till is safe and sound, because he’s always been stupid enough to wear his heart on his sleeve. Ivan will try not to intrude on his happiness, and will gladly settle for a life lived vicariously, forever in the shadow of the fire. It’s what he should want, isn’t it? The right thing to do, however agonizing.

Maybe that segyein was right after all. No one’s coming, no one at all. That’s exactly why you have to go to them. No one in the world could hang him out to dry because nothing in the world could purge him of adamance. The water feels cold on his skin, and the faucet handle screeches as it turns. When he finally leaves the bathroom, he has combustible for blood and a head full of spiders.

-

Turns out the best anesthesia for private collapse is walking, and then walking some more. He takes his pills and he walks to what he’d figured is the highest uninhabited building around, which also means that it is blissfully unguarded. There, he climbs up the fire escape staircase all the way to the rooftop, which offers him a nice panoramic view of the entire base, slowly cooking in its own fluids under the summer heat. He stops to catch his breath at the very edge of the rooftop, and he lets himself take in the sunbaked view below.

There are dozens of buildings that would warrant further inspection, but repeatedly asking people the same question would only risk damaging their trust in him. Then he has to take into account the possibility of some hidden underground settlements that no one will ever tell him about, at which point so many variables swarm his skull that he begins to feel a severe case of the doldrums. Crying his eyes out for the first time in sixteen years should’ve been enough to leave him more emotionally regulated, but it feels like he’s not quite there yet.

Up here the air is thinner, and he finds himself much closer to the skies where the Great Anakt resides than he’d like to be. He has nothing to say to that thing anymore, not when It decided to toy with his life so viciously. He watches the city’s wires curl like fallen hair strands around poles and pillars, and he feels his balance start to falter from the effort of the climb. This search might lead him into every nook and cranny of the world, but it’s not guaranteed to lead him to Till. There must be another way to get around this. And if there isn’t, then he’ll wear the soles off his shoes searching anyway. They’re just playing hide and seek, is all.

Somewhere around lunchtime, when people tend to huddle together to enjoy life, he walks to what he’s come to know as the makeshift office of the rebel leadership, where he assumes they must be keeping some sort of evidence of the remaining human population. They were precious little lives after all — in value and in manpower. If he doesn’t find Dewey there, he can’t count on anyone else letting him in willingly. Not enough time had passed for him to impose himself on their lives in any meaningful way.

Maybe if he goes there with some frivolous issue like the toilet flooding or his bed breaking, they could build some banter on the bones of that. But he doesn’t have to fabricate one for too long, when he catches the faint sounds of an argument just beyond the window.

“Get off my dick, Isaac.”

There she is, his precious saviour, sounding like she’d just woken up from hibernation. 

Hyuna.

“So get off the booze, boss,” says another voice, one that Ivan can’t exactly match to a particular face. “You’ve been back on the shit ever since the mission ended, haven’t you?”

“It’ll pass. It always does. Give me a break, will you?”

“I know it’s because of him. We all do. He chose them, you know that, right? He chose to stay.”

There’s movement in the room, angry footsteps punctuating each sentence.

“He never had a choice.”

“Everybody has a choice. Maybe he chose to stay for your sake, maybe he finally woke the fuck up, I don’t know. What, did you want him chasing after you forever?”

Cue more word vomit, building in volume and overlapping with the sounds of heels pressing hard into wooden floors — helpless bystanders to the power of the human temper. Ivan can’t seem to catch up with the context of the argument anymore, so he slowly peels himself off the wall and steps back into the sun. For all his hunger for truth, he figures that making his presence known right now would not benefit him in the long run.

The cogs turn in his head as he walks without direction, trying to figure out who it is they were talking about. A friend? A deserter? Just who exactly is their leader, anyway?

He walks through the heat radiating off the pavement and the sounds pouring from the open windows, and he no longer knows who’s chasing whom, or where to focus his attention next, or whether it’s even worth dissecting this particular episode. Something doesn’t add up. In fact, nothing seems to add up anymore. Everything he doesn’t know is slowly eating away at him. This whole place reeks of scantily clad hypocrisy, and navigating it is so wearing, so damn wearing. Things were almost easier in the Garden — smaller, more predictable.

…

Easier in the Garden. Are you fucking serious, Ivan?

For a moment there, he was wound so tight that he hadn’t even noticed the air carrying the timid notes of some distant melody, a slightly wobbly composition serving as a backdrop to his crisis. The sound of a piano, young and inexperienced. He walks and he walks, drawn to it as if by the smell of a warm meal, growing ever more weary at just how familiar it sounds.

It's a simple, uncomplicated melody, one’s ego stripped to the bone. Even with the tension he senses in the player's notes, he finds himself matching its rhythm with a quiet hum, and his throat tightens at the mere prospect it holds in its presence. Because it shouldn’t be here. It can’t be here. Not in this place, not in this life.

The source finally reveals itself a few blocks away, on the second floor of a building where a girl of about eleven seems to be practicing piano by the window. Ivan stops his stride to watch this child of anomaly carry her song until the end, only because real artists should never interrupt one another. And there’s real talent in there, seemingly cultivated by and for no one, so he waits until the last note fizzles out in the air around her before questioning its inspiration.

“Hello, there. What’s that song you’re playing?”

“Ivan!”

She seems enthusiastic, if a little flustered by his arrival, teeth bared in a sweet, light yellow smile. Ivan notices one canine missing from the upper arch, and is once again reminded that childhood leaves its marks on every body, no matter their place in the world. He can only hope that the experience was kinder to her than it was to him.

“It sounds familiar,” he continues, adopting the tone and posture one would use when approaching a guard dog on the loose.

“I mean, it could use a little more work, but I think it’s getting closer to your version.”

Your version. Two words like a rush of air to a collapsed lung, making that dormant feeling that lay in his gut flare up with renewed vigor. It had never left, the crooked thing — it was only sleeping.

“Is it Nowhere?” he probes further, just to call a spade a spade.

“Mhm. They played it as a special feature right after Round Six and it reeeally stuck in my head, you know? The melody, I mean, from the very first time I heard it. Oh, but I guess you wouldn’t know that, would you? ‘cause you were dead!”

Ivan remains silent, praying for the stagehands to pull the curtain on this half-baked joke of a life, as if any minute now he would wake up back in the cloning tank and would finally be granted the easy way out of cognition. That song was nothing but an impulsive experiment that should’ve never left the confines of his apartment, and it somehow managed to broadcast his transparency to the entire world. If the rebels heard it, then Till must’ve heard it too, this testimony to his deepest ailments.

How fitting, he thinks. One more thorn in the side.

At the very least, he should take this opportunity to ask about the rebels gaining access to the international network, but he suddenly finds himself overcome with the need to be alone and as far away from the truth as possible. Cowards die many times before their death, and sometimes, that teaches them nothing.

“It’s a good song, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty good,” the young girl says, and it looks like she’d be wagging her tail if she had one. “Can you sign my arm?”

Why, of course. Yes, he can accommodate that request, just as he can easily overcome his privacy being violated for TV ratings. He can be flexible, he can be compassionate. Sure, yeah. Glory to the Creator, always ready to feed his Fans.

He’s operating on autopilot when he waits for her to come downstairs and when he signs his name on her fair skin, deep blue on the pallor of a homebody. He tells her she has great talent and urges her to use that talent wisely, careful to skip the warning that becoming too good at something means that everyone will eventually set out to drain you. Well, almost everyone. Not the ones that matter.

He then walks his empty husk back into his little room, pondering how he’s yet again expected to live in a world where everyone seems to know more about him than he knows about them. However high the podium his career had built for him, the balance always seems to tilt in his disfavor. The door shuts like a full stop to that line of thinking, and he finds himself now facing the decision of what he should do next.

Maybe he should do his physical therapy exercises, to make sure he stays on the right track to recovery. Maybe he should settle on fucking himself for hours on end like he used to do in his old apartment, on the rare occasion when he could find no other mood switcher on hand. Sleeping is out of the question, obviously. He could reach for the drawer, to feed the steel some fresh meat, or he could offer to help out in the kitchen, where he could gain access to even sharper things.

None of these seem like the right option. That’s just too bad.

He recalls sorting through the pile of boxes that cluttered his room a while back, where he found what could only be described as the corpse of a guitar that had long served its purpose. Naturally, his first instinct was to chuck the poor thing straight into the communal garbage incinerator. Yet somehow, he ended up tending to it as best as he could, tightening the strings and cleaning its insides of dead bugs, just because he felt like showing kindness to something with no mouth to bite.

The guitar has always been Till’s instrument — the second love of his life, one might say. Ivan was never particularly drawn to it, nor was he ever interested in getting any better at playing it, but he felt like he knew it well enough from all the mandatory lessons in the Garden. He finds the old thing propped in the corner of his bedframe and slowly reaches out to it, just to give his hands something — anything — to do.

He knows the correct playing position: long, lengthy spine, empty head, empty heart. Still, the instrument feels unnatural in his grasp, almost like an infant in the arms of a stranger. His fingers give life to nothing, anchored to the strings in frozen wait, unwilling to translate those rotten feelings of his into something more beautiful. Because he’s not quite sure if he wants those feelings to be heard anymore, only for them to be used against him.

There is a way around it, though. A code that all the children of Anakt studied as an extracurricular, but very few found a real use for. The human language abstracted, hidden in plain sight. All it takes is turning the dots into eighth notes and the dashes into quarter notes, giving the composition a little time to breathe in between the words. It’s much better than a clumsy imitation of Till’s movements, and most certainly easier than forcing out the music. Ivan plays it to his heart’s content, alone and untraceable.

.-.. --- ...- . / -.-- --- ..-

L-o-v-e-y-o-u.

-.- .. .-.. .-.. / -- .

K-i-l-l-m-e.

-

The night that June becomes July, Hyuna invites everyone to an impromptu concert at the only bar in town. Of course, she doesn’t have to do it in person, as word of any pretext for distraction spreads like wildfire around here.

Ivan toys with the idea of joining in for all of two seconds before deciding to stay inside and fiddle with the guitar some more — not to play it, but to take it apart with a screwdriver he managed to borrow from the mechanics. He finds that this one doesn’t bleed like Freddie did when Till smashed its neon brains out in Round Two. How interesting. It sounded like it would bleed.

After all, things are much easier to understand when you have the luxury to take them apart and put them back together. It gets trickier, though, when you can’t do the same with people.

As hours go by, he tries not to think about the concert, and he definitely tries not to think about the possibility of Till coming out of his hiding spot for this one special night when Ivan wouldn’t be out there to find him. If not even Mizi could pull him out of hiding, then a concert that promises an infinite sweat exchange with a hundred strangers won’t cut it either.

If he hurt himself, he wonders, would Till even care at all? If they found his ice-cold body carpeting the stairs of his new home, would Till give enough of a shit to come immortalise that pretty picture? Probably not, as he’d already lain bleeding at his feet, forever denied a reaction to his life’s opus. He’s not owed anything, obviously — he just can’t help but feel unfinished, dragging loose threads through the mud.

God, has he always been this desperate? So willing to drag his impulsion from the realm of the oblique and into the form of such acidic thoughts? There must be something wrong with his adrenal glands, or his factory settings. This time he’d spent without Till should’ve been a golden opportunity to weed out all that poisoned their previous time together, but he finds himself getting worse and worse by the day.

Nothing heals. Nothing satiates. In this world of freedom and camaraderie, he is useful and he is wanted, just not by the one he wants the most. Therefore, everything else equals zero.

For all the things he did in its name, he still can’t decide on what exactly love is supposed to mean anymore, as it always seems to change its coat from season to season. Love is your guardian making you do things when you’re far too young to learn the taste of skin. Love is your fans selling your stolen underwear on the black market. A slap in the face, an undergrowth that ripens and expands until it blinds you.

Love doesn’t mean anything. Its only value lies in how many CDs it manages to sell. Whatever it is and however many faces it wears, it’s not worth how bad its absence feels. There might be no other way to manage it but chemically, after all.

About two hours before curfew, the door slams shut behind him, leaving a litter of guitar parts scattered all around the room as he makes his way to the bar. There’s a dull pain traversing the entirety of his left arm and he wraps it in the same gauze he’d wrapped around his sleepless brain — that is apathy, cold, cold apathy. 

From the outside, the bar already looks like it’s pulsing with life, and stepping past its threshold becomes a shortcut to a whole new world of blaring music, flux and flow and total sensory overload. All of that, engulfing a mass of bodies liquified into one, waving their arms to a rhythm dictated by their handler for the night: Hyuna, their precious leader, singing her heart out from the smallest stage in the world. Commanding the crowd like someone whose life depended on it, once upon a time. Name branding on display, empty bottle in hand.

On the edges of that crowd, Ivan can see even more people in various states of drunken stupor, some paired up, some not, spread out on the dancefloor like a bunch of worker ants. He tries to worm his way through that sea of bodies until he finally reaches the bar, where he has to shout his order at the man behind the counter, consisting of: one, “The hardest thing you have, please," and two, "The sweetest, too.” When he’s given a glass, he asks for the bottle.

“Take it easy, friend”, the man laughs, “you gotta help out in the field to get the bottle.” Whatever else comes out of his mouth isn’t loud enough to wrestle with the decibels of the crowd, at which point Ivan settles on chugging both drinks like water, even if one burns like hellfire and the other coats his palate in a sugar that might never wash away. He slides the glasses back with utmost grace, flashing the barman his sweetest smile. It takes an A+ in Acting to keep his throat from protesting the abuse, but luckily, he’s the proud owner of an S.

“Two more of the same. If you please.”

And he does get two more of the same, along with some teasing laughter and a subtle gesture to kindly fuck off and enjoy the night by himself. Somewhere in the back of the venue, he finds an upturned barrel to rest his drinks on, and he lets that foreign taste sit on his tongue a little longer as he watches the crowd dance their troubles away.

Did you know, God says from the glass, that you’re worth less now? And Ivan thinks it’s fine, really, it’s quite alright. In fact, he hopes that his value plummets into the negatives the worse he becomes. The segyein can keep his residuals for all he cares.

Song after song, he keeps drinking and keeps watching as the humans’ dedication to their small rebellion is being repaid with a momentary escape from all that lies outside this one bar in the middle of nowhere. With their sweat and their sunburns, their too-long limbs and too-eager hearts, their immaturity, hedonism and humanity — they all look beautiful, much more beautiful than anything television tries to sell to the masses. Ivan wants to feel like them, to live like them, too. He wants, he wants, he wants—

“Ivan!”

A body bumping into him from that maze of strobe lights, broader, taller than any human has any right to be.

A body. He wants a body.

“Dewey,” he says back, a half-mouthed thing that stumbles off his lips and into what the other might’ve intended as a hug, but turns into more of a mutual effort to keep each other upright.

“You look good, man. Better, I mean. Less dead.”

For once, Ivan is too caught up trying to find himself in his own head to bother with any caustic remarks. Like, thank you for the left handed compliment. Like, are you, perhaps, fucking stupid?

“Seen Isaac around? I’m a little— ah, little fucked up,” Dewey shouts in his ear, and the reason why is easy to decipher without even taking into account the half-empty beer bottle in his hand. It’s in his voice, in his weight, the way he melts into the dark of the bar like a speck of dust that’s perfectly content with being whirled around by the sound waves.

Ivan tries to focus on him, but he feels so hungry, so, so lonely walking the tightrope of dizziness all by himself, slowly inching closer like a street rat reaching for another. His hand finds the bottle before his manners catch up, and it feels cold to the skin, like the kiss of concrete in the winter.

“I can take care of you.”

He manages only one sip of the malt before setting the bottle on the barrel, making a little family with the other empty glasses. He has Dewey’s eyes all to himself now, easy attention.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Do you mind?”

“What’s that?”

“I said, do you mind?”

“Ha ha, do I mind—”

He’s given no time to feign naivety before Ivan’s mouth is on him, hands locking him in place, tongue pressing in without a fight. There’s no tension or recoil at the contact, and Dewey’s mouth opens for him so easily, as if he doesn’t even mind his voice being taken away. Ivan can almost feel the other’s lips curve into a smile against his teeth as he shifts the angle of their faces, fitting them together more comfortably. Scarred hands find their balance in a tight grip on his hair, and before Ivan even knows it, they’re kissing long and deep and dripping, slowly falling into a rhythm of their own, breathing in each other’s air.

He doesn’t want to think about what any of this means, only wants to feel his heart beating in his throat, wants to wheel his thoughts anywhere else but deathward. Right here and now, without warning and without complaint, this warm and fractured stranger gives Ivan everything he’d asked for, and he has the audacity to be gentle about it, on top of everything else.

His mouth tastes like seven types of poison and his body smells like it, too, but Ivan finds himself dragging that body closer and closer, welcoming the hands that are slowly starting to drape themselves around his waist. A life ring for drowning lessons. Wires crossing, bodies in dovetail.

So this is how it feels when someone wants you back. 

Fucking hell, it feels disgusting.

It feels dirty, and he wants to feel dirty, too.

They go at it a little while longer, open-mouthed and thoroughly wasted, with Hyuna’s music still blasting in their eardrums. And surprisingly enough, it’s Dewey that pulls away first, seemingly to pause for air before leaning in again, skin flushed against Ivan’s cheek as he says the magic words.

“Fuck, man, I think I’m gonna puke.”

Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise, Ivan thinks. Maybe the world itself conspired to make it so he’d get the hint and put the muzzle back on. There’s spit all over his chin and mouth, and he has to take a moment to let his blurry eyes refocus — not on doubles, but on the one tall figure still caught in his arms, giving him a look that spells a thousand apologies. He then takes a step back in what feels like slow motion, watching his unfortunate companion open his mouth to lie.

“Wait, wait, it’s not you, it’s this fucking, ah, fucking, cheap-ass—”

Alright, that’s enough of that. Chalk it up to the exhaustion of sporadic sleep or the cocktail of liquids fermenting in his guts, but he finds himself drained of all feeling as he gradually comes back to himself, and in that self he still, somehow, feels like a foreign visitor. What comes next is the body chasing its needs, now that the mind has exhausted its wants. And what he does need is more space, less sweat and definitely more air.

He takes a fistful of Dewey’s shirt and drags him from their cozy little corner, pushing through the sea of bodies until they make it outside the bar, away from all that noise pollution.

“Go on,” Ivan says, leaving the other to stabilize himself against a wall. His eyes track Dewey’s movements as he crouches beside him, engulfed in the warm light of a nearby streetlamp. Nothing’s coming out yet, even though he made it seem so urgent. Curious thing, that — he just keeps making some sort of heaving sound in the back of his throat, like a newborn teaching itself how to breathe. Huh.

Do free humans not know how to empty themselves on command? Don’t they learn that in school?

When it does happen, Ivan doesn’t look away. One can't control what's unscripted, but they can at least train their reaction to it. Here, in this dirty corner of the world, is one vital piece of the human rebellion willingly eroding itself before its time, all for the sake of escapism, and even worse still, of company. Here he is, too, doing the exact same. But whatever momentary connection there might’ve been between the two of them is lost now that their eyes are open and their tongues are back inside their own mouths — or just barely, in Dewey’s case.

Maybe, he can’t help thinking, humans do need to be taught their limits, and they do need those limits reinforced, when not even their adult brains can keep up with them. Maybe, just maybe— ah, damn it.

You don’t mean that.

You don’t mean that.

Dewey’s looking at him now, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Sorry, dude,” he mumbles. Some people manage to make it look like they mean it when they say that.

Right now, in his own run-of-the-mill spotlight, he looks so small, so unfitting of his stature. A child of the streets, who doesn’t like being left behind. Ivan feels the sigh that escapes him stir up a surge of acid reflux, a tidal wave that can’t quite tell up from down anymore. This little incident, by whatever name he’d call it, was supposed to take the edge off, not to sharpen it. But being human doesn’t seem to get any easier, after all. Nor does bluffing it with spikes in your stomach.

“I’ll take you home,” he says, reaching out a robotic hand.

There’s that gleamy smile again. Sincerity stuck in his teeth like food scraps.

“Well, aren’t you a sweetheart? My place is right over—”

“I know where your place is.”

It takes great effort to stabilize that sturdy body against his own inebriated one, but Ivan somehow manages, by the grace of all that is fueled by failure. So they head off into the cool night air, making their way toward Block G, letting the sounds of the concert gradually fade in the background. Every miserable step of the way, Dewey keeps slouching, and he. just. keeps. fucking. talking.

“You won’t tell on me, will you? Isaac hates it when I get this drunk.”

“Don’t tell on me either,” is what Ivan asks in return, offering no real promise of cooperation. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

Just like Unsha said. Like mama said.

“Aw, man, how am I a stranger?”

Ivan lets the rocky metronome of their shared footsteps be the one to answer that question. One-two-three, there, one-two-three. After years and years together, people can still remain total strangers, when proximity fails to deepen any real longing for each other. He knows that all too well. He’d lived an entire life in the shadow of possibility, sick and hard-bitten, and then he died at its feet, bleeding out under its shiny white shoes.

What he doesn’t know, and seems to be facing for the very first time, is whether this is how the burden of someone else's attachment feels when it isn’t fully reciprocated. This body clinging to him, willing to give and take, willing to share, looking to stain.

Is this how Till felt all along? Is it anything like the rude awakening he had after listening to Nowhere? Like a rash you didn’t ask for. Like a pair of fingers shoved down your throat.

Come on, that’s enough now. Make it stop. Make it go away.

“Second floor?” he asks as they reach the bottom of the stairs. His feet are almost giving out. As you sow, so you reap.

“Ugh, yeah.”

“Room?”

“Last one on the right.”

“Key?”

“Key, yeah. Mhm.”

By some kind of miracle, they make it past the doorstep and into the refuge of Dewey’s studio, where dust reigns as king over the ancient furniture. Ivan drops him into the unmade bed before stopping to catch his breath against a wall, heart thumping like a stranger banging on its door, saying, Why’d you keep it, man? You don’t even use it. The warranty expired.

He scans the surroundings with bleary eyes, looking for anything to make the strain on his body worth coming all the way here. Beer cans forming a pyramid on the windowsill. Maps and posters plastered on the walls. A trash can. Two cockroaches. A laptop. A collection of old books and magazines.

Oh. A laptop.

A sign from God.

He checks on Dewey’s sizable figure, curled into itself and facing the wall, moaning about the pain in his temples and the nausea in his throat. Slowly, as if tiptoeing through the realm of some sleeping beast, Ivan moves to cradle the laptop in his arms like a child of wires and metals, building his lie in haste.

“I’m going to use the bathroom, if you don’t mind,” he says, and he doesn’t care to wait for an answer.

It’s as if the rush of adrenaline sparked by finding this one object flipped a switch in him — from his default of quiet combustion to an almost mechanical efficiency. Or so he feels as he locks himself in the bathroom, pausing only to gulp down some sink water before opening the laptop. The situation is this: battery at twelve percent. A desktop cluttered with icons. No password. No time to lose.

Humans in the Industry were never allowed technology of their own, but they were familiar enough with it from monitored screentime and discreet shadowing of the segyein. There are too many folders on screen for Ivan to have any hope of finding the one about the rebel camp’s population, so he does the next best thing, which is to access the most popular platform related to the Stage.

He searches for [Round Seven], mutes the sound of the laptop and opens the first video that pops up. His heart is screaming in his chest, and it echoes as a shrill ringing in his ears. Right away, Till’s presence lights up the stage, singing what appears to be an upbeat melody that Ivan can only try to fill in with his imagination. Good, alright. Fast forward.

Luka is touching Till’s neck. Not so much touching, but more like attacking with venom on his fingertips, ghosting over the hands that allowed Till to be there in the first place. Ivan knows exactly what he’s doing, the blond piece of shit. He tried to do the same with Mizi. Thing is, that could never work with Till, because there is no reason for Till to associate Ivan’s touch with anything but the kind of anger that fuels survival, and Till is the strongest person Ivan has ever met, without a doubt. He knows it, feels it in his blood as his throat starts to burn again. Fast forward.

Things seem different now, somehow. Ivan watches as Till struggles to regain his composure, hands clumsy on the guitar strings, nose bleeding on the flashy clothes he’d been forced into. His body language mirrors that of a low-grade segyein gasping for air when you try to kill it for dinner.

What. No, no, no. Fast forward again.

If only he could catch a glimpse of Till winning before the battery died, he could rest easy knowing that whatever happened in those few seconds was merely a hiccup in his path to escape that blazing neon hell. Stop. There, look at him returning to form, giving the audience his most sincere smile in years. It must’ve taken an ungodly amount of injections to prompt that reaction from him. Look at the score. The red loading bar has almost swallowed up the grey one.

Oh.

No, he didn’t win at all. He got shot. In the fucking neck.

Ivan has the privilege to witness it all in lurid detail, from the prestigious official 4K footage of 'Round Seven - The Most Viewed Finale in the History of Alien Stage !! ( •͈૦•͈ ) ⊹ ࣪ ˖  (˶°ㅁ°) !!.' The video lingers on screen for a few more seconds to reveal the stage flooding with the hooded figures of rebels, but Ivan’s attention remains anchored to the image of Till falling from his righteous place, wearing a smile so bright it could even transcend the rigor of death. 

So he rewinds the video and sure enough, it happens again. And again. From three different angles. The sickness reawakens in his body, and he can tell that it’s famished after the short break he took from it.

What happens next is what Ivan had always assumed happens to a body that is struck by lightning: a white heat enters violently and ruptures under the skin, then spreads throughout the entire nervous system, rendering its target inoperable. Then, a total numbing of the senses. Then, most likely, quiet death, first of the heart and then of whatever else is holding his sack of meat together. He feels his guts twist tighter, his vision blur. Out of nowhere, there’s a knock on the door. Could be the faceless stranger asking about the warranty on his heart, or it could be this:

“Dude, I’m sorry, I have to puke again. Like, right now. Are you taking a shit?”

The thing inside Ivan feels like it’s trying to claw its way out through his nose and ears and mouth now. He unlocks the door, takes a step back to let Dewey sprint to the toilet, then walks outside, returning the laptop to its desk. He finds himself in the hallway. Then he finds himself on the stairs, then back on the street, and then, finally, crawling toward his own modest enclosure in total silence. 

Those five minutes spent in front of the screen felt like putting his heart through a meat grinder, yet he soldiers on, because walking seems to be the only thing he’s capable of doing anymore. That moment keeps looping in his head, without any real input from his conscious mind. Pause. Rewind. Replay. Pause. Rewind. Replay. Splash. Thump. Rewind. Replay.

He could try blaming Luka, or Mizi, or Hyuna, or hell, the Great Anakt itself, but if he’d stop to peel back all the layers of nuance to this whole thing, the truth is rather simple.

You did this. You know you did.

Somehow, it’s even worse than his sacrifice meaning nothing at the end of it all. Because it did mean something, and that something is this: blood splashing from the feeble neck he’d tried to shield from a fate so dirty. Adoring someone, quite literally, to death. Because he finally managed to carve out a space in Till’s mind that was never his to fill. His nuts and bolts are screeching to high heaven as he moves through the dead of night, and he knows the Great Anakt is watching him through its own personal television set.

You threw the game. You made him worse.

He thinks of the knife in the drawer. Of the things it could fix, and the things it could amplify. At one point, he doesn’t even think anymore. No matter how you slice it, there’s no hope of deliverance from this. Not now, not ever. The knife sits in the drawer, and the night is still young.

As he opens the door to his little room, he can’t quite discern just what is real and what isn’t anymore. Nothing makes sense, if it ever did at all.

Because in there, despite everything, he finds Till.

Chapter Text

They used to have creative writing classes back in the Garden.

The intention was to sharpen their storytelling and lyric-writing skills, and to help them understand, from the outset, what truly tugs at the heartstrings of an audience. You didn’t have to feel or understand emotion, but you were required to be good enough at describing it in a flowery language that would satisfy the teachers.

The themes were quite diverse, some of them downright ridiculous, and they went something like this: describe love. Now describe heartache. Your favorite meal, your favorite person. Describe ambition. Light deprivation. Death. Your relationship with death. They were only thirteen, for fuck’s sake.

When it came to describing heaven, Ivan went on and on about how it is the place where all music springs from. That all children of Anakt had to train themselves to capture that music, tailor it and gift it to the masses that couldn’t hear it from the void. Heaven was supposed to be a stage of light, outside of time, where you could write the story of the world on thin, long clouds stretched across the sky like a musical staff. A place where you could be remade and redemodeled and perfect, finally perfect.

He got an A+ on that assignment, obviously. Their school system was set up to breed sweet talkers, after all. That they all eventually grew to be so defective in actual communication wasn’t its problem anymore, now that it had a fresh batch to tend to.

His first draft, the one he set on fire, described heaven as more of a feeling than a place, a light blooming not from above, but from within. Ideally, you should be able to carry heaven in your heart, or in your pocket, long before your body is set to expire. It should feel like something that makes you complete, that washes away all malicious thoughts intrinsic to the human mind. It should feel warm, warmer than the sun itself, the real one. So transcendent that it ruptures your synapses with how good and right it feels to touch, and to let it envelop you.

It was at that stupid line that he lit the match for the fire.

Now, all these years later, fragments of that feeling are starting to creep into the last of his working parts, slowly, but surely. Right here, in this moment, as he watches Till sleep soundly in his bed, he feels heaven take shape inside him, even if his guts burn like hell. His entire world narrows down to this one room and this one silent presence — a truth that feels implausible, not only because of the haze of alcohol, but because, deep down, Ivan feels that he doesn’t deserve it just yet.

Still, he eases the door shut, careful not to make a sound despite his faulty stability. He then checks Till’s body for a reaction or a sign of life, but there’s nothing to betray him as being awake, only the gentle rise and fall of his chest as he breathes in the stench of the room. In all truth, Ivan doesn’t care to decode how or why Till even got here, and is, for the moment, perfectly content just watching — or rather, indulging in the image of him, as lovely as it is breakable.

He takes one step closer, two steps closer, tiptoeing over the boneyard of guitar parts that is his dirty floor. Still, no reaction. Having reached the edge of the bed now, he can see that Till’s face wears a subtle sickly pallor, as if he hasn’t seen the sun in ages, and couldn't be bothered to seek any other source of nourishment either.

His neck is covered in layers upon layers of bandages, seemingly new and reasonably clean. Under there hides the sum and substance of a life, scraped, inked and carved deep into skin that never learned how to heal. Ivan would give anything to take a look at the bullet wound, to align this peaceful image of Till with the truth he’d learned just moments ago, and to make sure that someone, somewhere, took good enough care of it. Strangely, he finds himself wondering if the pain of the shot matched his own or far exceeded it; it being so precise and categorical, unlike the horrid foreplay his own triad of bullet wounds put him through.

He wouldn’t dream of disrupting this moment, though, not when it’s so fragile it could fracture in the blink of an eye. Instead, he settles on doing something just about as reckless, despite the shred of common sense that still lingers in his mind. Moving with all the caution he can muster, he slowly slips onto the empty side of the bed, resting his weight on his good arm, allowing himself a closer, horizontal view of Till’s sleeping figure. Again, no reaction.

If he didn't know any better, he’d mistake the ringing in his ears for the sound of his heart flatlining, and this very moment for an actual, physical heaven. Too good to be true. Too easy on him. It would be a nice way to spend forever, he thinks. Two idle bodies weighing down the mattress, neither of them speaking, neither of them hurting the other. Just like this, watching over Till as he lies on his side like a stray without a nest, trying to preserve as much of his own body heat as possible. If not heat, then at least a sense of safety.

Being this close, Ivan can tell he’s been crying by the collection of tiny red dots that cover the skin around his eyelids. It’s a curious thing he’d come to learn about Till ever since they were children: that, when Till cried hard enough, he’d burst the tiny blood vessels beneath the skin and would have to spend days evading the other children’s teasing until they faded away. It didn’t happen every time, but it did happen on the worst of days.

This is the first sign to warn Ivan that his rose-colored delusion was always meant to be short-lived. The second sign is the faint movement of Till’s pupils behind his eyelids, which gives away the fact that he, too, would rather evade confrontation, in spite of all the effort it must’ve taken to come here. A superficial little thing that could never escape Ivan’s knack for memorising the tiniest details of people’s faces. Almost had him fooled for a second there.

Oh, well. This is it, then. Out of the two of them, someone has to take it upon themselves to break the ice and thaw the moment. So here goes nothing.

“You’re not sleeping,” Ivan says, barely above a whisper. Just like raindrops, those words grew too heavy to keep looming over them until the storm erupted.

God, he hopes he’s wrong. He wants to be wrong, even as his body is idling high with the tension of waiting for an answer, a kick in the mouth, anything. What he does get is a few more seconds of silence, followed by a soft rush of air against his face and the image of Till slowly opening his eyes, finally looking back, inviting the shape of him into a dark cyan no elegy could ever truly capture. His mouth opens to speak, and the whole world stops to listen.

“What took you so long?”

There, cold open.

No appetiser to ease Ivan into the weight of the question. As if he hasn’t spent every waking moment out of the cloning tank thinking of and searching for Till, even as he made it clear enough that he didn’t want to be found.

More than the absurdity of those words, Ivan is struck by the sound of the voice that delivers them, which barely even resembles Till’s at all. It’s as if he’s trying to force air through an open wound, raw and uneven, like he's had a cold ever since the day he was born — or reborn, from the look of things. It’s quiet, so very unlike him, something borrowed from the great beyond just for this special occasion.

Ivan is torn between questioning or honoring that effort with some half-hearted remark, and the decision is still unresolved when he finally tries to speak.

“I—”

“Are you drunk?”

Ah, right. One could probably smell his gut rot from the other side of the world. Although, to be fair, he’s not the best person to ask about the state of him on any given day, and especially not now.

“I don’t know,” he says, truthfully. “Are you here?”

Without much thought to it, Ivan reaches out a hand fully expecting it to pass through Till’s head, as if he were nothing more than a fragment of the imagination. But to his surprise, Till catches it mid-motion, nails digging hard into his skin. There’s a tightness in his features, anxious with a slight edge of anger, when usually it would be the other way around.

Alright, Ivan thinks, no touching. If the half-moon indents pressed deep into his forearm are anything to go by, any kind of touch will be off the table for all intents and purposes. Now, this is the part where the shot widens and weaves more than just the two of them into the fabric of the scene. Enter their majesties, Cause and Effect. Hold for two, let it sink in.

“Why’d you do it, Ivan?” Till says as he lets go, and he has to swallow once or twice to ease the roughness in his throat. “Why’d you cheat yourself like that?”

And really, Ivan should’ve expected this, with the consequence of his fuck-ups circling him for so long without ever landing a bite. He doesn’t get to chew on an answer for too long before Till speaks again, and it sounds like pure, undiluted torture.

“Be honest, for once in your fucking life. Spell it out for me, ‘cause I just don’t know what to make of you anymore.”

A pause, a dry cough.

“You owe that much, you know? I’m so, so close to leaving.”

If silence had a texture, it would feel like hard gravel scraping your skin as it breaks your fall. Now that his turn has come to speak, Ivan feels himself fade into a silence he can’t possibly hope to fill, lingering on the edge of what feels like a thousand possible answers. The quiet moments of his childhood always felt like precious interludes, rare opportunities to take in the world without it reacting to him in any way. This silence does nothing but injure, and it doesn't even know how to apologise. This one is saying, You’re worse than a child. You’re a fucking termite.

Push in, tight medium shot. Here is Till, looking right through him, killing him softly. Here is Ivan, blanking out as if decoupled from a socket, with all his motor functions deciding to fall into a synchronized delay just for the fun of it. Quite embarrassing, really. Till seems to tire of it, too, as he tries to move things along with yet another stab in the gut.

“I can’t sleep, Ivan,” he says, and it almost mirrors someone talking through an unsedated biopsy. 

He doesn't have to tie the reason why to the dreaded 'it' he mentioned earlier, because Ivan can at least assume that 'it' is likely the root of all this complication. ‘It’ is the one that kept him from sleeping, too, with its rain-worn hands blurring and smudging all his days and nights together.

Why’d you let it get to you?, is what he wants to say. Why’d you let it kill you?  

It doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense and all but shakes the foundation of everything that guided him into the line of fire. It would be easy to deflect the conversation to that, but maybe it would be wiser to try doing as he’s told before the light of day comes and he winds up talking to his empty walls again.

So he tries to make an effort, because God knows all he ever wanted to do, for Till’s sake, is try.

“I think,” he mumbles, “I—”

And already, he’s off to a rough start, to put it mildly. Like he’s trying to talk underwater, pressure building in his chest, forcing his mouth open so he would drown faster. He wants to be empty, and he wants to be done for. Because the truth’s no life raft, and it's not fair to make more casualties than there need be. Even if the damage is already done, despite his best intentions.

So really, honestly, fuck it. Let the currents take the reins.

“I hoped that if you won the Stage,” he says, “life would order itself around you and no one would get to hurt you again. I wanted to have a hand in that.”

Sweet, sweet nothings, the tooth-rotting kind. He needs a palate cleanser lest he starts to hurl.

“But in all honesty, I thought life would be so dull without you that I’d rather just pass the burden.”

He can’t seem to measure just how badly he misfired from Till’s expression, who remains firmly glued to his side of the bed, watching, measuring Ivan in return. It was so much easier to read people’s emotions when they had a collar on hand to flash them right in Ivan’s face. It was a tad reductive, but at least it was binary: green means You’re safe, I don't mind you, and red means You creep me out, go away. Somehow, Till manages to mix all of that and more into the silence he offers back, letting it chip away at Ivan’s words like they’re slowly dissolving in acid.

“That’s what life is to you?” he says after thinking them through, digging where he’s not supposed to. Ivan takes his turn swallowing down spit and bile and things he doesn’t want to feel, and definitely doesn’t want to talk about.

“Some days.”

Most nights.

After that comes even more dreadful silence, and Ivan feels a sudden need to defend himself from something that hasn’t even happened yet, fight and flight merging into a third, more distorted hybrid option. Firewater speaks through his tongue, and just like it, he feels volatile, flammable and rancid.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that. You wanted to get yourself killed, too, the way you stopped singing halfway through the song. What was I supposed to do?”

This, right here, is the perfect recipe for implosion. Introspection doing fuck-all to ease thought delivery. Tone and intention, happily divorced from each other. No take two and no outside direction. And to top it all off, Till’s features start to crease with growing frustration as he rushes to meet Ivan’s keyed-up drivel with his own special brand of nonsense.

“Hell, I don’t know, win? Live?”

Nails on a chalkboard, drills on teeth.

“Yeah, and let you go to waste? I don’t give a shit about winning. I already said all I wanted to say.”

That much is true, if you choose to look at it from its most flattering angle: everything he wanted to say is already in the music, out there in the open, on paper and on television and pulsing through the radio. Finely veiled, but still, more or less genuine. If he put it any more literally, he might just have an allergic reaction to his own audacity.

So why is it, then, that after everything he did to try and find closure, there’s still so much residue left on the inside? Hell, it’s like a fucking landfill. He can’t drag Till in there, not when he finally has a chance to start over.

Right now, Ivan can sense that Till is trying his best to keep from raising his voice, which only serves to drive home how proximity alone is enough to set them both on a hair trigger. It hurts him just to speak, yet he seems dead set on holding Ivan’s feet to the fire, digging for his heart through piles and piles of litter. His hair falls in his eyes as he tries to clear his throat, and he looks like death warmed over. He looks beautiful, razor-edged and all.

“Let me get this wrong,” he says. “Would you do it again?”

And this time, there’s no delay in Ivan’s answer, assuming they’re still talking about the dying part.

“I would. But I’d try to spare you the cheap spectacle, this time.”

“That’s unfair, Ivan.”

“That’s subjective.”

“You’re truly fucked in the head. Don’t make this—”, Tills says, and gestures vaguely towards Ivan’s, well, everything, “—my fault.”

“See, you asked for my honesty, so here it is. ‘This’ is all I have to give to keep you safe. I just happen to think that you fit more into this world than I possibly could. Nothing was ever your fault.”

There, if you doctor half-truths for long enough, they might just start to resemble the real thing. At least that’s what he’s come to believe — that he is just a mannequin with a pulse and not much else going for it. Dozens of manuals on music theory shoved in a pricy skin suit. If there ever came a time to trade one life for another again, he’s learned the sting of bullets well enough not to flinch. 

How is he even supposed to explain the kind of attachment that feeds on your bone and marrow? It has nothing to do with nurture, and is more likely the result of some kind of inborn dysfunction. He can’t undo it, and he won’t excuse it, either. Those tedious writing classes did nothing to prepare him for this, and he’s not sure he even knows what he’s saying anymore. The two of them aren’t hearing each other, anyway, and Till keeps insisting and pushing and digging, when his hands are already dirtied up.

“But why did you— why would you do that? You’re not making any sense.” 

And in the face of that, Ivan can barely bite back a laugh.

“Are you stupid?” he blurts out. “How could you not know?”

He can’t seem to make sense of why Till is doing this to him, when Nowhere already uncovered all the answers, playing over his dead body like a final act of degradation. Why is he insisting on spelling things out? He never cared to question anything before; not the escape from the Garden, not even the shameful return. He almost always took everything at face value like he was supposed to, and things were just fine, sizzling right beneath the boiling point. What they once had was all waxed skin and spoiled filling, and now, they can finally have a look inside through all the bullet holes.

Ivan isn’t doing himself any favors letting liquor mince his words like that, but really, what is he supposed to say? I love you, whatever that means. There, am I forgiven now? There’s aeons of silence between them once again, raining down, solving nothing. Maybe he’s the stupid one, after all. Straight A featherbrain. In the heavy stillness of the room, he watches Till search for the right words, too; the strain on his ashen face, the tension in his jaw. If Ivan could, he’d love it all away.

“You said nothing was ever my fault, right?”

As Till speaks, he seems to try and shift from his withdrawn position, and before Ivan can brace himself, he feels Till’s hands close around his throat, cold and tender, as if checking for a pulse.

“What if— what if I made it my fault?” Till says, with no bite at all. “Would you mind?”

If he were functioning at his utmost clarity, Ivan would take it as some sort of challenge or retaliation. But right now, in the midst of the worst skin hunger of his life, he takes it as a gift. His heart hammers in his chest as Till spreads his fingers along the sides of his neck, reaching just behind the ears, reaching somewhere deep inside that burns and aches to shatter.

Hell, if Till wanted to skin his knuckles raw on Ivan’s face, he’d be happy to clean up the blood like a creature of the streets licking spilled wine off the pavement. He’s being asked for something he can’t exactly name, but he figures that giving everything might just cover it. So, in spite of the ‘no touching’ rule he inferred earlier, he slowly moves his hands to cover Till’s own, pressing the heels into the soft muscle of his neck. He traces a gentle thumb over Till’s skin, trying to ease him into the movement, all the while feeling his own nerves tear open like the sky under a meteor shower.

And Till lets it happen. Oh, he lets it happen, kindly offering his undivided attention.

“If you want to go for the blood flow, you press inward on the carotid arteries, right here,” Ivan says, and guides Till’s index and middle fingers where he wants them to be — right where they belong, dictating the rhythm of his heartbeat. Till says nothing, and Ivan swallows hard under his touch.

“If you want to choke the air out,” he continues, “you compress the windpipe, like this.”

He shifts Till’s hands again, heedfully slow, this time over the cartilage that sits at the center of his throat, that holds his voice and breath and whatever little life he has left in him after the past few weeks. It only takes a dozen seconds of carefully placed pressure to collapse the trachea, which Ivan knows from the memory of fellow nobodies getting caught by street patrollers, back in the motherland. He could be reborn a thousand times over, and he’d still carry that image with him.

What he does know, too, is that if Till wanted to escalate this, he’d still love him until he turned red and blue and corpse-white, making things roughly ten percent more even between them, or however else you’re supposed to measure injury. There’s tension in the palm that rests against his throat, and he uses the space he still has to breathe to ask what he should’ve asked long ago.

“What do you want, Till?” 

Push in, hold. The look Till gives him sparks a feeling that rivals the high the hospital meds used to bring, and only by a slight margin. All intrigue, more present than ever, and for once, entirely of his own accord. All for Ivan, total battery of the senses. Contact, attention. Makes him hard. Makes him want to drown in it, and get drunk on the way down.

If he made the most of the borrowed time he’d been given and had Till show him what to do to set things right, he would mold himself into whatever shape it took to keep the spoilage from spilling out again. The rebels said some creatures of old Earth got a chance at nine lives, so maybe he wasn’t given this one for nothing. And at this point, really, he’ll take anything he’s given — whether he’ll be kept or erased, with utmost pleasure. His thoughts are so loud they seem to echo far beyond his own skull, and Till catches them with his teeth, looks him in the eye and says:

“I want you to make it up to me.”

Beat. Wind-blown tree leaves scraping softly at the window. Ivan’s stomach turning on itself. His composure, catatonic.

“I don’t—”, he tries to counter, but Till stops the words in his throat.

“You don’t get to thrive on some ego-stroking martyr bullshit without my say in it. And now, of all times, is when you care to ask before you dive in blind?”

The room feels smaller, and God is peeking through the doorknob. The grip on Ivan’s neck eases away from the center, settling firmly on the sides, just shy of doing anything more. Pulse meets skin again, missing each other.

“I haven’t slept in days because of you. You were in my head, all. the. fucking. time. And now you’re here, and you’re even more fucked up than him.”

Till looks more incensed now, closer to his old self. Glass-eyed, like he’s on the verge of crying, barely hanging by a thread.

“So if you want to make amends,” he says, “from now on, you have to tell me everything. Show me everything. Stop being fucking twelve. And stop forcing me to hate you, ‘cause you’re really good at it.”

The pressure doesn’t build any further, but Ivan can’t tell whether it’s an invitation to toe the line or cross it. Nothing Till says adds up to a coherent story; wanting to cut ties for good, only to now reverse course and stir up even more confusion.

Ivan went years without believing the two of them would ever meet halfway, but as it turns out, to have is so much harder than to wish for. To be denied a rulebook that would let him live comfortaby, only to be asked for sincerity instead — for the one he turns into when all the glitter flushes down the drain. It’s no good, no good at all. He’s feeling light-headed again, and the words come rushing out to coat the mouth before nausea breaks.

“It’s easier that way.”

“Is it, really?” comes the dispute, as Till tries to blink away that wet swell of emotion.

It is, and yet, it isn’t. Ivan could try winding his way back through the maze of nonsense he’s built for himself, but the truth is, he’s running on empty, and he’s lost count of how many wrong turns he’s already taken. The hold on his neck feels like a safety net, hot and barbed-wired, asking him to stay. There’s nowhere else he’d rather be.

Curb your ego, says the heart. Spit it out. All the rest of him agrees, at long last in tandem.

“I think I was made wrong, so I don’t really know how these things work,” he says, still holding on to Till’s touch. “How I work, or how you work. I’m sorry it had to be that way. I never knew how to talk about it.”

Literature promised relief though confession, which is why he considers it to be his first encounter with a well-dressed lie. This doesn’t feel easy, and it doesn’t feel good, either. Till takes a moment to breathe, and it stretches on forever before it gives way to anything more.

“Are you sorry for mauling my face?” he says, barely audible. Going right after the most difficult thing to explain. At least he found a more fitting name for it than ‘kissing’.

There was nothing Ivan could’ve done to deter it all from coming down to this, and there’s no crawlspace of the mind left to hide in anymore. Alien though he is, even he knows that late apologies ring hollow when it’s transparency Till asked for. That his answer might make Till leave him once and for all, is not up to him to control. So go on, pick the scab. No use in bending the truth now. He’s no better than his handlers, and never ever was. 

“No,” he says, feather-light.

Beat. Breathe in, then out.

What he did back on stage was not planned, nor entirely understood. Just a moment’s spark with infinite aftershocks — desperate on one side, sickening on the other. He could search every language he’d been taught for a more accurate answer, and none would be more honest than a simple, naked ‘no.’ There’s no dignified reason behind it, only the urge to feel, with no expectation to linger. Yet the trace of him did linger, and in doing so, it began to seethe.

“You wanted me to hate you that much?” Till asks; sharp, almost clinical, as if searching him for any residue of bullshit. And it’s easy for Ivan to say “yes” to that, even if it rings colder without its sugarcoat. “To even things out,” he adds, thinking of the love, merging in the hurt. Till’s eyes look like they’re seconds away from leaking dark cyan on the sheets, and his words cut carefully through his vocal cords.

“Well fucking done, then. Did you enjoy yourself?”

So mean. So thoroughly missed.

“No, not at all.”

When one is honed by little else but apathy, they cling to whatever makes them feel something, good or bad, with white knuckles and gritted teeth. They look for someone they can bite into and let their life bleed sweetly on their tongue; someone better, who can turn them into a car crash with the smallest show of attention. And Ivan knows that it’s unfair to put all that on Till, just as he knows that all he has to show for himself now is the selfishness he once rationed on a barely functional diet.

For all the things they’ll never be able to understand about each other, and all the reasons they might never fit together, Ivan can't help but cherish the time and space they share, whether far or near, just like this. And to show that care, he gathers, is to be unvarnished, and to wait patiently for the other to decide what to do with the raw materials. 

“So what do you want now, Ivan?” Till presses further, spewing words that are long past their due date. And thank the stars above, this one is also easy to answer.

“To make it up to you.”

Beat, silence. Till holds him steady, like a newborn creature on the brink of being thrown into a void that will teach it how to fly. One, two. Roll sound.

“Don’t move,” he says.

Ivan couldn’t move even if he wanted to, breathless in wait, too drunk on the moment to anticipate what comes next. He watches Till fight through a myriad of things that should hold him back as he moves closer and closer, impossibly close, until he leans in to press a light kiss against Ivan’s mouth, at which point his entire fucking system short-circuits.

It’s a timid little thing; dry and tender, born and gone within seconds, leaving behind the soft tickle of a shared breath. It’s inflaming, and it’s exactly what Ivan imagines a rush of nicotine feels like. It should be enough to force his overthinking into stasis, but he can’t help frantically searching for a name to give it. Pity, payback, whatever it might be. Maybe this is Till testing his own revulsion to the act, or him testing Ivan’s obedience instead. As if he’s mutely saying, This is what you get, consume responsibly.

None of this makes any sense, but it sure as hell leaves him feeling feverish, caught somewhere in the countless shades between good and bad. Till keeps his eyes closed throughout the whole thing, and Ivan’s stay wide open — wide open to him, never to miss his presence again. When Till does eventually draw back, there’s a slight tension in his lower lip, unsure whether to bring about a sob or a gag. And as the absolute master of being tone-deaf off the stage, Ivan pops the question:

“Better?”

Whatever it is that Till hoped to get out of this seems to have slipped through his fingers, as he moves his hands from Ivan’s neck to his face, voice breaking as he says:

“No.”

It’s no surprise, really, but it doesn’t end there, either. As deflating as the experience might’ve been, Till seems to have something more to ask for, something that might justify, and even demand, some freedom of reaction. His embarrassment hides in the faint furrow of his eyebrows, but he still asks for it, anyway.

“Now move. Slowly.”

It takes a moment for Ivan to figure out what he’s supposed to do, and even then, he still can’t comprehend why Till would ever want to put himself through that again. But giving him what he wants, at this point, is absolutely non-negotiable. His raging pulse seems to move his skin in ways he’d never felt before as he closes the distance between them, returning Till’s temperate understanding of a kiss.

It should feel revolting, the way it did on stage and at the bar, but the urge to sabotage it recedes into shadow as Till inches forward to kiss him back, wanting him back, even as he tastes like someone else. It’s clear from the way he moves that he has no idea what he’s doing, and Ivan doesn’t either, so they try to guide each other through the motions; slow and lazy, probing for more, wanting more and more and more.

Ivan’s hands find their way in Till’s fine, dead hair, and he runs his fingers through it, nails grazing at his scalp, pulling him closer, if closer was even possible at his point. His insides are made of rain and thunder, and he revels in Till’s touch, his taste, his everything, feeling heaven in his hands and mouth and heart. There’s a new thing tugging at his consciousness, a new kind of emotion; not secondhand, nor an imitation of something else, but entirely his and theirs alone. Warm at first, and gradually coming to a boil.

As time slips by, Till slowly opens his mouth wider, and fuck, — oh, fuck — he lets Ivan go deeper, lets him slide his tongue inside and swallow down every little sound he makes, everything he no longer bothers to hold back. He could bite down if he wanted to, but for now he seems perfectly content with this give-and-take of theirs, trying to work out a balance between the two. They keep doing that for a long, long while, and Till’s hands eventually slide back around Ivan’s throat, to keep a pulse on the rhythm of it all, and to hopefully, blissfully, choke the life out of him if it ever gets too much, too soon.

No, this isn’t happening. Ivan hasn’t done a single thing in this life or the last to have such a good thing unfold, and there’s no rhyme or reason to things moving so easily now, when Till showed no interest in doing them before. It’s disbelief that dares him to press their bodies closer, nudging their hips together, knowing his good fortune could run out any time now. Nobody showed him how to do that but his pillow, and his wildly corrupt imagination. They both pull away to breathe a little, separating with a wet sound, and they take a moment to figure out what to make of this new sensation.

Hold for two. Tonight, Ivan discovers just how sweaty the backs of your knees can get when your nerves start spinning out. He moves to brush his fingers through the strands of hair that are falling over Till’s eyes, and he looks so unfairly, annoyingly beautiful, like he’s not even made from the same bones and meat as everyone else. There’s a candy-apple red to the arch of his cheekbones, as if all the love he’d tasted had finally given him a rash.

“Is this alright?” Ivan asks, catching his breath, and his rationality alongside it.

Till doesn’t offer an answer to that, but what he says instead lights a fire that could erase any and all life around them.

“Keep moving.”

It’s not long before Till takes the thin trail of spit connecting their lips back into his mouth, and heat rolls through Ivan’s core when he feels Till press against him just right, grinding against the straining tightness in his trousers. His blunt nails come to rake fire down the nape of Ivan’s neck, wanting to keep him close — all his, again, forever. And just like that, they settle into a slow, leisurely rhythm of rocking against each other, limbs tangled together, melting and merging into this beautiful, beautiful new thing.

They’re going off the deep end, the both of them. Ivan forces his injured arm to move a little, guiding one of Till’s legs higher over his own hip, chasing even more friction. It hurts, and he doesn’t care to mend it. He just wants to leave himself at the door and be something for someone, his only one. To let Till occupy every space in him, and let his mind be filled with one thing and one thing only.

You. You.

You who left me, I adore.

He’s coming apart as he kisses Till’s burning face, his forehead and his watery eyes, before he finds his mouth again, tongue pressing past his lips once more, making a mess — a perfect, irresponsible mess.

If I can’t make you happy, at least I can make you cum.

It’s quite flattering, this unfiltered need for him. Ivan feels Till demand it back unspokenly, feels it in the fervor of his hands roaming everywhere, up his arms, along his back and into his hair again, pulling on it; so mean, so lovely. If their voices never got a chance to synchronise in song, they finally seem to match now, making sounds that are strained with need, and embarrassing, and sick to the core.

At least Ivan can own up to the sickness that keeps him stitched up, because when he feels the copper flavor of blood running from Till’s nose and over their lips, he doesn’t think twice before licking it away, like a starving lapdog, like it makes all the sense in the world to do that for him. Just because he wants to, he opens his eyes briefly to find the red runnel he now tastes on his tongue, which Till doesn’t want or even care to acknowledge. There’s not much of it yet, just a little something to remind him that it’s not a daydream he’s tearing into this time.

Till’s always been prone to nosebleeds, mostly in winter and sometimes under stress — always a pretty sight to behold, Ivan thought. In spite of the most basic conduits of decency that were drilled into their young heads, he’s always been drawn to it, the way one would be drawn to the chemistry behind the pretty lights of the night sky. Ivan could take care of it. He wants to, and he searches for a better angle to do so, reaching out a hand to cup the back of Till’s head just as he hears him say—

“Don’t touch my neck. Don’t even think about it.”

It was only a momentary brush of his arm against the fresh bandage there, but it was enough to make Till flinch and pull away, teeth catching on Ivan’s lip in the fervor of it all. His breath is sour and heavy in the silence of the room, and for a moment they sit still in a sweaty knot of clothes that aren’t even their own, both equally dumbstruck, and stupidly hard against each other. Then Ivan rushes to save face, even as it feels like his brain is leaking out through the one ear mashed against the mattress.

“I won’t. I didn’t.”

“Yeah? How can I ever trust you again?”

Talk about a clean-cut one-eighty. Till seemed to trust him plenty just moments ago, to now turn so quickly into the stark image of his crudest earlier drawings — a frazzled and erratic, paper-white thing, drained of breath, trying to shrink and hide in the corner of some invisible page. Ivan doesn’t know what to say, so he goes with the very first option.

“There’s a knife in the nightstand drawer, right behind you. Do with that what you will.”

In his mind, it’s a clear green light for Till to do anything he wants, anything at all. It’s him freely offering his safety for the taking. However inoffensive his intent might’ve been, it all but gets mutilated on the way from his brain to his mouth, because Till draws back even more, fixating on Ivan’s bloodied mouth.

“Do what with it, Ivan?”

Shit. Fuck, even.

“Look, it’s not what you—”

“Stop. Stop talking.”

The shift of Till’s weight as he moves upright pulls a pathetic squawk from the ancient bed springs. He seems to have as much idea of what he’s doing as Ivan does, voice splitting into tiny, syncopated breaths, nose dripping fresh blood he wipes away in vain.

“I swear, I don’t get you. Why would I— why would you even— fuck.”

The room feels so empty now, its core having splintered too abruptly, that every word spoken against its walls echoes like the feedback of a mic. Ivan can’t do anything but watch as Till’s surfeit of repulsion spills wet over his cheeks; big, fat tears mixing with the blood, as persistent though his attempts to chase them away as a downpour on a windshield wiper.

All this ruin, quiet and intimate — a present from one friend to another. All of it because of Ivan, once again, just like the day Till lost the final round. Because in his desperate rush to show everything and lay it all on the table, Ivan forgot the one golden rule of all pet humans: I think before I am.

Roll the red carpet for his shining negligence. This, right here, is the flameout.

“You know what really sucks?”

Till barely manages to pepper the words through heaps of sobbing and coughing his lungs out. 

“I missed you so bad, asshole.”

Ivan has to fight a surge of vertigo as he rises from the safety of the matress to a horrid vertical nausea, that’s probably the liquor begging to join in the fun. He’s still hard in his off-sized trousers. He wants to crack his head against the wall.

“I really, really did, and I don’t know how to talk about it either. I wanted to figure you out so bad, but after the rebels found me, I just shut down, I—just, fucking—”

He’s staggering through the words, with not enough air to fuel the next part. Ivan’s taken aback, too, on hearing words he’d never thought could be paired with the word ‘you.’ He so deeply wants to reach out and comfort Till in some genuine, human way, but it’s clear to him now that the turmoil stretches far beyond this moment, reaching deep into both past and future. To speak freely is to risk misreading. And, besides, he very much agrees with Till’s sentiment. Echoing it feels necessary, if only for a little consolation.

“It does suck, yeah.”

Run, rabbit, run.

Till meets his attempt at alleviation with bloodshot eyes, nose and mouth dripping red into his open palms like some fucked-up, last resort kind of prayer. He said the wrong thing, again. He knows he did, because he watches Till break into yet another crying fit, curling into himself to hide his face in his hands, fingers tangling in silver hair with no intention to bring any comfort.

From here on, there are no words anymore. Just the endless sound of crying, punctuated by wet coughs, going on and on with full speed ahead, nowhere in particular. And Ivan’s heart is sinking, seeing Till like that, wailing and dry heaving like he never did before, even when the teachers beat the living shit out of him. He can’t touch him, can’t bargain with any higher being of this world for a hint toward the rescue. He’s the one at fault, forever idle when it matters most.

“I’m sorry,” he says, hollow. “Should I leave?”

“No. No, no, no, no.”

Though breaking down in ten different pieces and in five different ways, Till makes a blind lurch forward and grabs a fistful of Ivan’s shirt with his dirty red hands. And he buries his bent-down head into the shelter of his chest, dragging his nose through the upcycled material, mingling snot, tears, and blood and all.

“No, please.”

His voice is cracking like he’s coming of age again, making himself smaller, body rocked by careless tremors. Ivan’s riding one whiplash after another on a modest shred of sanity, hands hovering clumsily over Till’s back, like two magnets that know better than to come together. The truth lurks somewhere in the murk of their shared dysfunction, and Ivan can’t even tell his good wiring from the bad anymore. But he knows — by God, he knows — that whatever it is Till needs from him, he’ll give. Because without Till, there’s no point in growing old in a world so discolored. He needs Ivan, too, right now, like never before.

“Okay. Alright,” he says, caught offguard by a familiar sting behind the eyes. “I’m with you.”

And then he says it again, with all his heart.

“I’m with you.”

Till’s pulling at his shirt like he wants to rip it clean off his body, still crying, not looking anywhere but at the crimson backs of his eyelids. It’s not working for him, whatever this is. Seconds crawl by as he moves to wrap his arms around Ivan’s neck instead, and he buries his face in the nook of his shoulder, letting the waves rock him right there, where he’s not alone. Ivan has no intention of probing the underbelly of it all; he simply holds Till through it, one gentle hand coming to rest on his back, the other threading through his hair. Like Mizi used to care for Sua, on the worst of nights.

It seems like the right thing to do, and he tries to be more careful with it, feeling every hiccup Till muffles into his skin, staining it with the color of their childhood. One, two. One, two. This one’s a long take, with no cuts allowed.

The wind’s growing stronger outside, whispering of rain. Slowly, in time, Till’s throat stops churning out those strangled noises, the revolt in his body not quite coming to a halt, just softening a little. Ivan keeps rubbing soothing circles up and down his back, trying to live up to its promise of relief, as he shifts to accomodate Till’s weight sagging on him, too worn-out to keep himself to himself anymore. What a complicated thing, to be a body.

With the way their mouths are covered in the precious substance that keeps all humans running, they almost look like they took a bite out of each other — which, in a way, they have. Multiple bites, at that. Sooner than expected, Ivan feels Till lift up his face from the pool of liquids sticking to his collarbone, and he turns to him, almost gingerly, speaking softly in his ear.

“Ivan.”

The grating, dirty sound of his name.

“Lock the door, will you?”

Chapter Text

With one hand on the bathroom wall and the other tending to himself, Till didn’t think of Mizi. Or at the very least, he tried not to.

She was the most beautiful stranger to ever walk into his life, verging on ethereal in the most generous kinds of lighting. There was magic in the rhythm of her step and in the melody of her voice, pulled from somewhere far away in outer space, not from this garbage pile of a world. So her place could never, ever be there — in Till’s mind and in the space between his fingers, as he tried to rid himself of that problem that kept rearing its ugly teenage head at the worst of times. Him and it always seemed to be at odds over the proper ambience to coexist, and more often than not, he would end up on the losing side.

Things were supposed to be easy, if the manuals had even a kernel of truth to them: boys liked girls. Boys and girls were meant to mate once they turned old enough by someone else’s standards. Then boys and girls made more boys and girls, who in turn made even more boys and girls, without ever trading intimacies before, or even being emotionally compatible. So it should’ve made sense to think of a girl like her when his nethers called for attention, but, somehow, it didn’t. Try as he might, he couldn’t do that to her. His gray matter rejected her being there just as the body rejects a virus.

He rarely had the guts to test the path to her proximity, let alone initiate any form of meaningful conversation. There was just too much negative space between the two of them. His was a pure kind of admiration — devotion with snapped ankles. She was perfection contained in a cotton white dress; splendid, gentle, impossible to reach. Never could he stain the image of her in the gooey stuff that came out when the deed was done. So then, he wondered, what’s a boy to do?

All the other bathroom stalls were empty for the moment, leaving only him to bask in the awkwardness of it all. Even so, he had too short a window to conjure up any other image that could make his blood pump in the right direction. Every other girl he’d ever known seemed dull in comparison, and he had to think of something to get things going before someone else decided to use the bathroom for its intended purpose. So he settled on the next best thing, which is to say the bottom of the barrel; which is to say, he thought of Ivan.

A familiar face, always creeping in Till’s peripheral vision, following him around with muddy intentions and a sugary smile. It was a good face, objectively speaking. And subjectively, he’d come to notice as of late, despite optimum effort to dissolve the thought. It was a good face framed by stupid bangs and lauded by every teacher that fell for its mock innocence. To not only pay quiet attention to it, but to allow it in his thoughts at a time like this, made Till want to thrash around that tiny cubicle in a fit of shame.

His hand pumped up and down, then moved in circles; slower, faster, up and down again. It felt good and bad in equal measure, favoring the latter if he stopped to consider just how low he’d come to sink on a random Friday morning. It’s a transient thing, right? It’s gonna pass. This was just a pitstop on his way to finally getting his shit together any day now. Aaaaany fucking day now, right?

That guy who never even considered Till a friend always seemed to breeze through life, watching the world from some faraway vantage point of superiority. Perfectly manicured from head to toe, and from the inside out. Always in long sleeves, even in the summer, to keep his skin from getting old — or so he claimed when he was asked about it. Never had a pimple in his life. Got to go home to a mother that adored him. Fucking hell. Up and down and up again.

Somehow, his presence over Till’s shoulder never felt claustrophobic, just plain weird and inexplicable. It was one of the few constants in Till’s life, second only to the pain he’d come to expect from crossing paths with his owner, who devoured apologies like desserts. And for the longest time, so flowed his shoestring, 50% OFF life: through endless trials and tribulations, with only art and reverie as his sutures. With Ivan constantly on his tail, at times twisting his innards into a blend of sensations that had no business existing, let alone persisting. Annoying. Inconvenient.

To that pale and arrogant face, he wanted to say: Why are you doing this to me? I want you out of my life. Out of my guts, I say. If only Till could use Ivan's face to get over that problem of his, then maybe, hypothetically, he could balance out all the mess Ivan had made of his head and hormones and stuff. If shame was a straitjacket, then revenge was a luxury coat.

The bathroom smelled strongly of disinfectant, with undertones of someone having had a violent reaction to the morning testing in there. Till resigned himself to the nausea he knew would follow that reckless act of his, and kept working himself to a mental collage of all the ways in which one should never think about a friend. Shoulder touches, playfights. Up and down and up again. Faster, more desperate.

Page 40 of the Practical Manual of Human Psychology, grossly summarised: boys liked girls. Girls liked boys. Back on old Earth, males used to compete over females. Friends didn’t bite each other. Which was fair, because the two of them weren’t friends at all. 

The year 605, on Till’s birthday: Ivan smiling at him through the pastel cake candles, hugging him, nagging him, touching him, always touching him— ah, fuck. God, it spilled everywhere. On his shoes, on the toilet seat. Pooling in the valleys of his palm, the head line and the heart line.

One generous wash in alcohol later, he went to sleep with the lights on. A few months later, he learned that humans had this one organ with no higher purpose than to be a liability, which caused them a great deal of pain when the time came to exit their bodies. The appendix, or something like that.

It must’ve been a remnant of humans’ attempts at evolving into a much more efficient form, rudely interrupted when the segyein barged into their DNA. A ticking time bomb that promised nothing but trouble in exchange for a cozy little space in their lives. Reading all that, Till couldn’t help but think of the one person in his own life who fit that description just right. Function and intention: unknown. Level of injury once the two of them would eventually part: also unknown.

Some days, it felt like Ivan had made it his life’s mission to get back at Till for being too much of a coward to leave the Garden behind. Other days, he let Till talk his ears off about art and music theory, smiling at him through the bruises, quietly taking on the slightly broken shape of a friend. It was not clear who he really was without the theatrics, only that he’d always be there, lurking somewhere close by, like a shadow that grew teeth and a very, very big ego.

What is it you want, you plastic fucking thing? Till never got to speak those words out loud, so every time they would pester his peace and quiet, it almost felt like they were directed at himself instead. And he didn’t like that, either.

Introspection was for smart people. And smart people made themselves future-proof from an early age, unlike his clueless little self, who would much rather live between brush strokes than vertebrates. Stupid ones like him had no idea how to distinguish between sincerity and caricature. Just like that day in September.

“Here, have a sandwich.”

Ivan had this talent of popping out of nowhere when Till least expected it, and it just so happened that he wouldn’t let Till’s absence from lunchtime go unnoticed.

“I’m not hungry,” Till said then, not quite sure if he really meant it or not. When he immersed himself in his personal projects, he often forgot that he was supposed to want or need anything else to function. Ivan didn’t seem to agree with that, obviously. He kept the sandwich pointed in Till’s direction like it was a birthday gift, or a weapon.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said in return.

“Who are you to decide?”

“Well, for one, I’m smarter than you. Like, I can actually read the clock. It’s been sixteen hours since you’ve eaten something.”

There he was again, doing his strangest best to mock Till’s shortcomings, of which there were plenty to choose from. His brain must’ve had infinite storage space for that kind of stuff. To work out how he managed to track the hours so precisely was not exactly a comfortable trial.

“That’s creepy as hell,” is the shape Till decided to give his thoughts — minimal, but sincere. Not that it was likely to have any impact on the boy who had made himself into his shadow. Ivan said nothing with his eyes, and revealed even less when he spoke.

“You can’t die before me. Eat something.”

So needlessly dramatic, running true to form. As if the staff would let any of them die before draining them of all their Value and Potential. But Till knew that Ivan wouldn’t leave until he had it his way, so he grabbed the fucking sandwich and took a big, greedy bite out of it, with a sixteen-hour-starved appetite. It was one of those meals reserved for highly-ranked students, so not entirely familiar to his taste buds. Cultured meat and pickles, premium shit. Maybe he could use the nutrients, after all.

“There. Happy?” he mumbled through his messy chewing, like he was the one doing Ivan a favor instead. What was a friendship, anyway, but a succession of favors? So said page 109. He tried connecting with fellow classmates in so many other ways before, and none of them came to fruition in the long term. Perhaps humans weren’t made for each other, but merely of each other, and that’s where their connection should’ve ended.

Thankfully, he didn’t have to wait long for an answer, even if he remained skeptical about the truth in it. Ivan gave him a look that almost resembled affection, were it not courting something else that neither of them had the capacity to understand yet.

“Yes. Happy.”

In retrospect, things might’ve been different than what he initially took them for. Maybe that was Ivan trying to show he cared in his own plastic way, and Till was just too far removed from the feeling of being cared for to notice. Maybe it was a warning, or an exercise in empathy. Years later, Till found himself thinking about those things over and over as he knelt by the toilet for the third time in a row, after the rebels told him that Ivan was alive.

Somewhere along the line, his system stopped functioning in his best interest and turned into more of an amusement park for his brain to toy with. All the retching caused his neck muscles to hurt, and he couldn’t even stomach anything that was supposed to make him feel better. Because getting better meant having to face the world outside, which meant that he would eventually run into Ivan’s walking, talking corpse one way or another.

No, he couldn’t handle that. He still clung to the few things he knew for certain to be true, and his last, most vivid memory of Ivan was that of a vacant body crying. To try and rebuild the image of him beyond that very last impression was harder than it should've been, considering they had spent nearly a lifetime together. With his forehead resting on a slowly numbing forearm, Till counted Ivan’s ingredients as followed:

• twenty two years of perfecting a duplicate of what the manuals envisioned a human idol should be like
• about ten centimeters of excess height
• a spine that never seemed to rest beneath the aesthetically pleasing 180° angle
• a charm that should’ve been tailed by a dozen asterisks warning of its side affects
• a generous dash of venom
• far too many people’s hearts
• a good percentage of Till’s own, taken when he wasn’t looking
• something like remorse in his eyes the exact moment before he died. relief, too. maybe? whatever it was, it spoiled the whole damn thing.

He had the Industry in the palm of his hand long before he had eighteen candles on his birthday cake. He could have lived a long, luxurious life if he wanted to. But, clearly, that was not in the works, or even in the plan at all. Which left Till to wonder, Why? Fucking, why? If the rebels hadn’t come, he would’ve wasted Ivan anyway, given the direction Round Seven was headed. In an alternate world, they would’ve ended up playing hide and seek in hell instead of there, among the sane and living. 

Not only was Ivan somehow dead and alive at the same time, but he was occupying a space inside Till, too — in the back of his throat, to be more precise. The microscopic, most insidious part of him slid in there when he pressed their mouths together, and no medicine or half-digested lunch could wash its taste away.

It was confusing at first, then settled into the all-too-familiar feeling of having something taken from him with no time to negotiate. After all, Till’s body had always been at everyone’s disposal but his own — always rolling with the punches, and never achieving much in terms of fighting back. Having Ivan of all people know exactly how to hurt him in a way that would last felt like all their time together had been a rehearsal, or a meticulous gathering of information. In that entire masterplan of his, Till wasn’t given a speaking role, let alone a significant part in its making. He was just expected to take it, and iron it out later. 

Sitting all alone in the bed that was assigned to him, he felt like he had to cleanse himself by any means necessary, fair or foul, and to dig into the thick crust of toxins his previous life had left on him. So day after day, he scratched, scratched, scratched himself away, piece by piece and layer by layer. It was the most degrading, and cheapest form of placebo he could think of. It still left him feeling displaced, but for once, slightly in control.

Given the way human bodies functioned, they were allowed to grow new skin every thirty days or so. In thirty weeks, maybe he could have grown an entirely new self, forgotten the pain and the Stage and Ivan, just as he’d slowly come to forget the face of his Provider.

He didn’t think about it often, but he still had so much leftover love for her and no one else to give it to. Mizi had no use for it, having received it from everyone who ever met her, since she seemed like the easiest person in the world to love. Ivan rejected it from the get-go, crushing the only gift Till ever tried to give someone. Art and music were usually on the receiving end, but they couldn’t hold his hand, and couldn’t pat his head when he found it hard to sleep.

Thinking about that, his days grew darker and darker, and the marks on his neck multiplied like smallpox. His turmoil was so grand in scope that it should’ve been considered state-of-the-art already. No, actually, he was not that good at Adapting. He was very good at writing love songs the way he thought they should be written, and that was about it. For her, who came to see him at his worst.

“We could rebuild our family here,” Mizi said after the obligatory ‘How are you feeling?’ and ‘I’m so glad you made it’ and some other stuff that flew over Till’s head as he looked at her, and couldn’t figure out why he didn’t see what he saw before.

The way she barely kept herself awake in the hospital chair made her seem more human than she’s ever been, infinitely more tired and complicated. And he knew he wasn’t essential to her life the way she had been to his, but a souvenir from a past she seemed to miss so dearly, for whatever reason. He waited for his insides to catch fire in her generous presence, but, somehow, they didn’t. So he found himself wondering if, all along, it had been her helping him survive his life, or just something else that looked like her and only knew how to smile. He wondered if the two versions of her knew one another in ways he himself never could. He wondered lots of things, in his boundless silence.

Being seen by her in such a vulnerable state brought him little else but embarrassment; he felt more like a neurotic fan than a friend, or like a festering zit on her back. Why she came to him was beyond reason when he was such a small part of her life. Why— oh, right. He shouldn’t have kept her waiting for so long. Right, right. He grabbed his notepad and scribbled a sorry excuse for an answer, even if there was no explicit need for one.

I don’t know if I want that.

She seemed to deflate a little as she read those words, tucking a wild strand of hair behind her ear. It was so much shorter now. Made her seem way more mature than him.

“I know it’s tempting to reject the past,” she said, recital-like. “I felt that, too, when I first came here. But we can build on it, and learn from it, together. Baby steps, as the rebels say.”

A pause. A scheduled segue.

“I know that’s what he wants, too.”

There was no need for a spoken name to make Till’s nerves rev up within seconds. Tight throat, sweaty palms — all symptoms of a lack of spine. Mizi must’ve meant for the conversation to flow seamlessly up to this point, looking to mend a mess she was forced to live with. Till knew he was in no state to meet her cues properly, but still, his hand seemed to move on its own, and the graphite pressed deep into the paper.

Is he alright? the notepad said in his place, with big, ugly letters.

Watching the words take shape from the depths of his heart, he realised than he’d probably never thought about that before, much less put it forward. Whether Ivan was alright or not. Hell, was anyone?

“Well, I can’t really tell,” Mizi said to the bandage on his neck. “He seems alright, at least. Ha, ha.”

One thing the segyein never managed to fix was the tendency of certain people to laugh when they were nervous. Till never would have thought that this would be what he and she had in common, besides a lifetime’s worth of ill-treatment. Ivan would’ve mocked him for that, found it ironic.

“Are you alright, Till?”

What a complicated little string of words. He might’ve spent years wishing for his name in her mouth, but right then and there, he wanted nothing more than to pull away from her and Ivan and everybody else until he made himself right, and stopped hurting for just one second, just enough to think clearly. His pencil moved across the paper as if it weighed ten times more than it should, protesting against what he was forcing it to write.

Please don’t tell him where I am.

He never asked for much in his life and, paradoxically, what he was asking of her now was a guarantee for the absence of something, some bare-minimum assurance that no day would come when he’d wake up with Ivan’s hands around his neck again, coming back to finish their duet the right way.

Ah, for pity’s sake. He lost so much blood in Round Seven that he was starting to get cold feet.

“Till.”

Her eyes on his; so-called friend, so-called family.

“You really don’t know, do you?”

She said it with such deep sadness, it could’ve shown up as a tumor on an X-ray. Like she really did know something that Till deflected, willingly or not. Worse still, he had a hunch about what she was going to say next, and he knew that it would kill him for the second and last time. Out of nowhere, he felt the taste of iron latch to the roof of his mouth, warning of impending collapse. He took to the paper again, chest heavy, virus spreading.

No. Sorry. Can you leave?

Then,

Sorry x10

And,

Sorry x100, underlined.

In the back of his mind, he hoped that she'd insist somehow, but to her credit, she knew better than to indulge him. Her patience must’ve been stretched thin, and she looked like she’d rather continue talking some other time.

“Okay. Um, if that’s what you need.”

A few other words followed, but he was already ten steps ahead, planning to forget them.

“Go easy on yourself, Till.”

Scratch, scratch, scratch away.

It was true what they said, that you can't socialize the feral. ‘They’ being the teachers, and probably the rebels, too, for how much trouble he caused them by hogging a bed that should've belonged to someone who was actually capable of sleeping. At night, he often felt the dark of the room reach out to touch him; first on his neck, then more audaciously, going lower. The way it made him feel waxed and waned from one extreme to another, unpredictable even to himself.

Hey, Till, said Ivan from the back of his throat, always picking the least sensible moments to make himself known. Ask me if I'm happy. Try to look like you give a shit, this time.

It was getting harder not to give in to compulsion when it was asking so nicely to be fed. Over the next however many days (weeks?), he spent his time mixing and matching a modest list of activities: drawing, crying, chewing on painkillers and thinking too much for his own good. Sometimes he ate a little, tried being nice to his visitors, then promptly returned to the endless cycle of thinking and crying again.

He knew that Ivan was out there looking for him because everywhere around, people talked, and people gossiped. Eventually, Till worked up the nerve to look for him too, sifting through the hallways of his mind for vignettes that were netted under years’ worth of dust. Words and touches, fights and silences.

Slowly — excruciatingly so — he thought he was beginning to get an embryonic understanding of where Ivan was coming from, and what his final gesture could’ve meant. Why the song that played after Round Six started and ended with the L word. Why Ivan’s body was crying when they took it away, dripping warm, young blood. All this time, Till never considered that Ivan was even capable of crying. That, he thought, must've been resignation passing for composure. A jigsaw, rearranged but still unfinished.

All these things swarmed across Till's mind in the dead of night, compiled and shortlisted for the title of his greatest private failure: to have love in his orbit and drift by without ever picking up a signal. For someone so chronically starved of attention, it should’ve been more obvious, if not for the high-functioning liar on the other side.

Ivan could’ve stayed a cruel stowaway in Till’s mind just like he'd planned, but he wasn’t going to get away with it so easily. So one evening, with the reddening sun shining through the window and his throat still aching from all the reflex crying, Till sat up in his bed and thought:

Fuck it. Let’s talk.

Loneliness, self-inflicted or not, was life-draining. It felt like he was mourning someone who was, in fact, roaming the free world they had always dreamed of, while he remained trapped inside — not by a collar around his neck, but by one of his own making. To find Ivan felt more like a need than a formality at that point. They were both part of the Great Anakt’s favorite dirt playground, and there was simply not enough space to hide from each other anymore.

Even with this newfound perspective, there were many things he still didn’t understand. The love thing, and its tendency to speak in songs and riddles only. Why he was a target for it when all he’s ever been was ‘nothing’ incarnate, with a temper and a guitar. But he was too stupid, and tired, and fragmented to figure it out on his own.

He needed Ivan’s brains to pick through for an answer, on his own terms, or at least on the medications’. He needed Ivan, period, despite everything. Missed him, wanted him, whatever. Longing and loathing were twin evils long estranged. By the time he managed to get his address from one of the more gossipy nurses, the sun was already dead asleep.

Fine, asshole. Walk me through your mind.

Cold wind through his hair, a trail of street lamps far ahead.

Let’s get worse, together.