all of a sudden you're a hostage to things you thought you wanted

[closely]

( open for messages, action, overflow. )

Comments

[elanprime]

[ A memory:

Metal at his back, cold through a gown. When he's asked to raise his arms, he crosses them over his face -- against a light that's too bright; eyes that are too many. They lie instruments across his skin and take notes directly on his body. It's an exacting science, but they are considerate enough to pursue it for just fifty minute stretches every day -- at least in his case. He has no trouble being still when he's alone, but it's different -- it's all he can do to keep the jitters out of his legs -- when he's under observation, on or at the table (surrounded by researchers, by family friends). Expectation, all the time. The hand touching his knee tells him he's forgotten to follow instructions again. He'd slam his foot into the woman's abdomen if this weren't for his own good. The more he cooperates now, the less he'll have to cooperate in the future: Only this reminder checks his impulse to run.

Should I acquire fresh clothing for you?

A once-familiar question, delivered in a voice just shy of his own. Elan almost believes he's imagined himself speaking. And then he remembers: It's now. He's lying on the floor in Four's room. They've tried to kill him. He can't doze off; he has things to do.

Elan uncovers his face, turns to prop himself up on one arm -- slow, deliberate. Too caught up in his own mind to pay much attention to Four when they were face-to-face, let alone after he'd initially sized Four up and started taunting him, Elan's able to look -- really look -- again, now that he's become too worn out to tear himself away from what he sees: A tension so intolerable to Four he's made himself as small as possible; so overwhelming even then that any attempt to ignore it could only hasten its breaking point. There'd been a shift when the poison had started going through Elan's system. A call to action. One inert solicitation to assist after another. Expectation, all the time. Once fashioned, a tool is a tool until its (over/mis)use renders it otherwise -- and then...

Elan realizes what he's done only after he's moved to kneel in front of his copy -- a mirror image of their positions from before. In contrast to the incident in Four's bedroom at Asticassia, there is no performance. The opportunity for one passed the instant Elan had reached out to touch Four's hand without guile earlier. It's not that he has the grace to admit to himself that he doesn't understand what's happening or what he wants -- what he's trying to get -- out of this moment. He's simply become too tired for any mental contortions to frame the situation just so for his own sake. There's no avoiding the absurdity of it now. Everything -- everyone -- activates Elan's paranoia, except this person.

He gazes at the red-white glow in Four's hands, steadies himself by keeping his palms flat on the floor. He's not sure if he's arrived at an answer to his own question -- what's wrong? -- that makes sense of Four's behavior. There's no hope of explaining, discussing things now. (And why would there have been? Elan's relentless strategizing is superhuman when it works as a coping method and outright deranged when it doesn't.) Still, he feels compelled to say -- ]

You've done enough.

[ -- as if it'll make a difference. One small, well-timed push, delivered when Elan has no idea the other's at his mercy. ]

[closely]

( words that would come as a relief or a kindness to someone else lower around four as some impenetrable dark. he isn't conscious of the things that happen: the jarring silence where his breaths should go, the way the black of his pupils swallow up elan ceres' trademark green, the stock stillness of him otherwise that belies how wrong it all is. you've done enough. or: you are no longer needed.

it isn't fear of death, a thing four will deny upon pain of it. it isn't the desire for death, though four has been playing cat and mouse with it while swapping roles for far too long, all the while having convinced himself it was fine whatever the outcome; because he couldn't remember who he was much less the terms of his role and his presence. except that the existence must have already been a cursed one to volunteer for this real life disassembly. it's worse than both of those things, anyway; far more shameful and idiotic.

what four doesn't remember: sela, age five, planting seeds that wouldn't grow. sela, age six, planting seeds again even when it risked the sin of a waste they could not afford. sela, age seven, planting seeds that, once again, failed to live.

though something grew there anyway.

four looked it up once taken in by peil, given access to their technology and even the scant books.

dandelion.

human beings used to believe they could be wish giving, even after they had all but died. and then, those wishes carried on versions of it somewhere else to be born the same but different.

what four does remember: intermittent messages at all odd hours and some regular ones too, dance lessons that felt uncomfortable with nowhere to hide and comfortable for the same reason, books now on the cart in this room delivered without any fanfare except their very existence,

elan ceres telling him what to do and —

— four not doing it.

the words i don't want to die won't ever come.

a life of economy could not, it turns out, protect much. if he was more lucid right now, four would question himself anyway: what was there to protect in the first place?

instead, a small push is also a small pull: the key place to unravel everything.

a push in the center of a room is safe, mostly. a push before an open window, not so much.

four plummets.

sela, age nine to a woman whose face cannot be recalled: "but i want to help you...can't i help?"

can't i...do anything?

peil never implemented their enhanced humans with a fail-safe; no emergency destruct trigger in their systems. but four makes the spitting image of what it might be like if they had done so. rather than like the time at the school, he stays so completely still one might wonder if he wasn't a disturbingly life-like replica in another way: a model of what not to do, not feeling the blood from his nose or the pounding in his head, not truly registering the black spots in his vision nor the lancing burn of the permet no longer content to cluster in his arms and throat and face, running the whole of him like he's been turned inside-out for better understanding.

not that there is any.

you've done enough.

it hurts. )

[elanprime]

[ ... Is it over? Has Elan said the right thing? The instant Four's breathing quiets and his frame goes still takes whatever tension's left out of Elan's shoulders. He feels it go from his body with a sigh -- of relief, bone-deep exhaustion; from having been -- no: continuing to be -- overwhelmed. Aren't I just a saint, he thinks, leaning back on his arms, for giving somebody else the time of day after my own company's tried to kill me...

... Hang on, is that...?

It's less conscious thought than lurch of nausea in Elan's stomach. Seconds pass as he inclines his head slightly forward, stares at Four in disbelief -- watches the permet bloom in places he's never seen it before, glowing faintly through the fabric of the other's clothing; notices how only a sliver of green yet rims Four's pupils. At this point, he's beyond checking his impulses, channeling their expression, repackaging them in more palatable form: Elan Ceres may not touch people for any purpose other than manipulation or out of sheer caprice, but Elan is far too greedy, too clumsy with his emotions for any sense of propriety or disgust to prevent him from cupping Four's face in his hand and running his thumb under the other's nose to confirm -- yes, it's blood. Hot and sticky like Four's skin, searing against his palm like it was in Four's bedroom at Asticassia -- and not.

This time, nothing comes at a remove or through a filter. Elan knows what it means when his chest aches as his heartbeat accelerates; when he breaks out into another cold sweat; when his hands -- the one still on Four's face, the other gripping Four's shoulder -- start to tremble with a strength he wouldn't be able to suppress even if he wanted. ]

Stay with me.

[ Soft, at first, in a tone that would surprise him if he were in any position to evaluate its difference from his usual. ]

Listen to my voice.

[ So easy, now, to say what he couldn't moments earlier, to tell the other what to do. ]

Don't... do this, don't let yourself go, don't leave me alone here, don't...

[ Why? Because -- ]

I need you, alright? I need you.

[ -- there's no strategy to it, no plan; he's too afraid. That nothing that's been gnawing at him -- since Three's execution, since Two ran way, since One was pronounced as good as dead on arrival; since they asked him to give everything, everything, away to the very idea of Elan Ceres: a prettier face, a straighter posture, a smoother speech, a sharper mind, a shrewder character; since those parts of the day he could call his (his?) became ever smaller; since the day he was born -- it hits him, suddenly, with all the force of the poison he'd expelled from his system earlier, raises his voice. ]

I can't have you doing this, I won't have you doing this, you have to last --

[ Distantly: There's no coming back from this. ]

-- at least until I can get out of here, at least until they've fixed you, at least until it's all gone, I don't give a shit about what you want or your stupid death wish, you will do as I say or...

[ There's no saving him from becoming like Four, because their similarities are what drew Elan to him to begin with -- they're in the way his hands burn, his eyes itch, in the bile he tastes in the back of his throat, and if it weren't for his unrestrained desperation, the pressure in Elan's head would give way to vertigo and horror at what he's said, what he's shown. He catches on the "or," because -- there's nothing he can, could, do.

Farther still: Is this what you wanted a break to catalyze?

Whose break -- his, yours?

Does it even matter? ]

[closely]

( on the outskirts of the thing that sufficed as a city because it didn't quite look like a town, all was dusty roads and beaten earth saturated with the runoff of some company's drones. not particularly visible, given the state of things out there, though it always struck sela even as a child to be inherently wrong. rain was rare but came; he would know, laying out jars like they'd regressed centuries, to catch the fresh water. and earth was earth. wasn't it?

the way four is now, he doesn't remember that. but he had these questions: why won't anything grow? what can i do differently? what can i do? even if it isn't the best way.

even without the memory, something of that question idles under the surface in layers: where elan ceres reaches through ice and water and the curious cat's cradle of negative space and connections that would as soon strangle as save. despite the earth still being mostly, even more so, ocean, four of course has never seen it. but after he started his education with peil, he would sometimes find himself drawn in by images and information about it. depth. temperature. pressure. distance that was also right in front of you. lightless unless you knew how to look or would be close enough to the surface.

he doesn't remember this either even though it was never taken from him: when he stopped asking questions, when he stopped trying to know about things he could not reach and replaced them with philosophy that also felt unreachable but less...

...less?

it hurts.

like he's drowning.

elan ceres grips him tightly but four can't feel it. with spotty vision and disorientation, he grapples with awareness: a hand on his face, a hand on his shoulder. doesn't it burn? don't touch me. a voice that is not his voice that is his voice that isn't saying:

alone.

need.

do as i say.

do as i say.

sometimes what a person needs is not what's objectively good or right. in his desperately unmanufactured display of fear and humanity, elan ceres —

— says the right things.

the problem: tenuous supports holding four together in an ill form of control and decorum and the mirage of not-wanting could be likened back to water but instead of an ocean, a river that breaks the dam. he couldn't stop himself even if he wanted to, held at bay by something that was good until it wasn't. walls aren't boxes. cages are not homes. no matter what four told himself. elan ceres says all of these things and these things are breaths and blood and the honesty to bear them safely.

somewhere in peil's most buried and locked archives is four's real name, where he came from, and the procedures to follow if or when he runs up his usefulness.

he doesn't have the wherewithal to think of that or even how it doesn't matter. four can only manage and poorly, what is in front of him.

blood. the taste of it in his mouth. saturating his sense of smell. nonsensically: is he hurt? four thought it was poison but had it caused some external rupture? that it is himself gets lost as he looks at the face he took on and only sees the differences through his blurry haze.

i need you.

the permet does not relent, but the tension that looked like shocked inertness gives way. four collapses and murmurs an apology in his head, not unconscious but not exactly coherent either. his mind feels like the frayed candle wick that won't light. his heart wants to leave him. if elan ceres catches him it is a shame in a way because four cannot feel his own body except the livid heat in his blood and the sense of the permet prying his head apart to better use him than peil or anyone else ever could. despite his temperature, he shivers inconsolably. sweat mats his hair to the back of his neck, the side of his face. he is so tired.

but,

he is alive.

he is,

needed.

elan ceres says do as i say and...four does. he "stays".

the heart on the threshold, looking back. )