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Once, Cutter called you into his office, stood from his chair, and asked you to shoot him.
He had made the request as casually as if he were asking you to grab him a coffee – latte, no sugar, exactly two pumps of vanilla syrup, you know the drill – instead of asking for his own quick death. He had supplied you with the gun. A pistol, sleek and silver and small; the harsh light of the room gave it a glint to match the shine in Cutter’s eyes. It was daring – menacing? Mischievous? You still couldn’t read your superior as well as you thought you could. It was only light, to you, dancing off of the metal of the gun and the metal of his irises as they bore into you, the metal of a dagger that pierced your skull even as you avoided his gaze.
“Sir?” It’s all you could think of in reply, too bewildered to offer anything more than a word, and Cutter smiled.
“Pick up that gun, and shoot me. It’s fairly simple.”
Except it wasn’t – why would it ever be that simple? This was a trick, another lie slipping off his tongue, and if you touched that pistol, let alone aimed it between his eyes, he would snap – grab the gun, and turn it right back on you.
You picked up the gun.
The weight, usually so comforting, felt like a dead thing in your hand, and you held it limply at your side. You finally lifted your eyes from that glint, that light on its silver flank, to stare boldly – you like to think – into Cutter’s expression. You couldn’t understand it. You never could.
“I can’t,” you said, after a long stretch of silence, and he sighed. He was disappointed. You were disappointing him.
“Why not?”
“Because –” You paused, because that question was surprisingly difficult to answer. It was the pang of loyalty, you’d supposed, something close to an emotional connection, though not quite. That was something neither of you would ever achieve. The kind of thread that wraps too delicately about you both, sweeter than fate, but far more fragile, far easily broken by your heavy hands – the hands made heavier, in this moment, by the gun. Cutter raised his eyebrows. Funny, how you remember such minute details.
“Why would I kill you? There’s no point.”
“The point, Warren, is that I asked you to. So you will take that point and you’ll keep it in your little brain and you’ll use it to point that gun and –”
He stopped short – and you were so proud, then, to be the one to stop him in his tracks, it felt like a bizarre achievement to cut the words from his mouth – as you lifted the pistol. No longer limp, weak; the shine along its side no longer reminded you of the glaze in a dead man’s eye, but of the glimmer of a surgical instrument, the precision of a scalpel. It was deadly, and you were pointing it at the only man you dared to place a semblance of trust in.
“Yes, sir,” you murmured, but you hesitated. Your hands were trembling, you wouldn’t admit it, you couldn’t aim straight. He smiled again. He waited. He looked ever so patient, willing to guide you, to coax you into it, but you still couldn’t push the thought away that this was a trick.
But, you thought, you understood. His every order, his every word, was one for you to hang upon – whether like a drowning man from a lifeline, or like a criminal from a noose – and it was not yours to question why. That was probably the definition of loyalty, when you got down to it.
You levelled, stilled your hands. You pointed the gun between his eyes. You heard the clock tick over on the hour. You pulled the trigger.
There was a dissatisfying click, and you suppose you should’ve anticipated that, but Cutter laughed.
“Well done,” he said, and you felt your pride surge to greet the words.
Once, you gave Jacobi your gun, and told him to shoot you.
As soon as you said it, you turned your mind back to Cutter’s office. His perspective. Staring down the barrel of a gun, even unloaded, and grinning, like it was a game. You put yourself in his position.
But it was not Warren Kepler holding the gun, now, of course; not a freshly promoted recruit, eager to please in the way men of your profession always were, but a cynical henchman, having hastily swept what remains of his life into this violent new job of his. This was Daniel Jacobi, standing in front of you, clutching your gun.
The way he held it did not remind you of how you held it. You held it like a lump of lead – that is all there is to a gun, when you strip the function away, you supposed – like dead weight. He held it like it was very much alive, alive in the way a rattlesnake is alive. Jacobi acted as if it were writhing, raring to jump at him and tear at his throat – worse, tear at your throat. He was afraid of it.
That had intrigued you.
He looked at you, back at the gun, back at you. His mouth was making its way, laboriously, towards words that had to be schooled into a casual concern as they were tossed into the air–
“Uh, what? You want me to what?”
The smile you gave did not remind you of Cutter’s. His was tainted with distrust, the shooting game a gimmick to measure something he did not fully know, yet. Yours had no such sentiment. You knew Jacobi already, and this was confirmation.
“Shoot me, Mr Jacobi. In the head, would be preferable.”
Jacobi pretended his eyes didn’t widen a fraction, but you noticed – and, again, thinking about it now, the strangest details stick with you – and you waited. The silence hung between you, thick in the air, and still Jacobi looked dumbstruck, and still you waited.
An eon passed, punctuated only with the sound of his breathing, your breathing, ragged versus gentle, a storm meeting a calm sea, but Jacobi acted calm. He lifted the gun. You prepared to stare down the barrel, just as your superior did, except this gun was–
The barrel was not facing you. Towards you was the handle, and Jacobi was grasping the pistol by its other end, pointing it towards himself. Offering it to you. He gave you a level stare, and he shook his head, and you should’ve been angry but you were only more interested. This man had lived according to you, ever since he joined the company; you were his gospel, his holy text – the book of Kepler, full of scriptures that Jacobi had read religiously, memorised to the letter. He had never disobeyed an order. He’d questioned, at times, and sometimes you’d answered, sometimes went only with a “because I said so,” and either was enough for Jacobi. Always trusting your theories, leaping on your faith alone. You locked the two of you in a room with a ticking bomb, and he defused it.
“Why the hell would I do that?” He asked, and the words held a bite that took you back. Jacobi was a man of extremes: followed you with every fibre of his being, defied you with every fibre of his being. You appreciated that.
“Because I told you to,” you replied, treading with caution. His eyes narrowed. He pushed the pistol towards you more insistently.
“Then I’m not going to.”
He didn’t have to tell you that he would never kill you, that he would walk above the flames of Hell on a tightrope before he would point a gun at you. That he would miss you too much. He wouldn’t know what to do without you. He said it all without saying it, expressed in the forceful push of the handle towards you; you hesitated.
Then you took the gun back, and you laughed.
Now, Jacobi tells Minkowski to lift her gun, and shoot you.
Dead where you float. You’d laugh at the absurd twist on the expression, if it were coming from anyone but him, directed at anyone but you. Right now, you feel the urge to laugh, because this isn’t the plan – this isn’t your plan. It’s a prank. You’ll put your hand on Jacobi’s arm, later, lean in, tell him that it was horrendously tasteless, but your smile will give you away. He’ll grin in response.
Your mind snaps back from a wishful future, and Jacobi looks expectant as he watches Minkowski, and she looks dumbstruck, and your laughter twists down deep into your gut before it can come out of your mouth. This is no joke, and something more than rage bubbles within you, something so much more rare. You watch Minkowski, because the only other option is to watch Jacobi.
You don’t think she’d do it – but then again, Maxwell didn’t think she’d do it. And now, Maxwell is gone, and she’s torn a rift so wide between you and Jacobi that he feels he can only cross it with a bullet.
Minkowski grips the handle of the gun tight, far too tight, and you focus on the whitening of her knuckles. This will be what you remember, when you think back on it, if you live long enough to think back on it. You stare death in the face. Death, in this moment, happens to look like a dark hand paling as it holds a still darker gun. It is not silver – no light gleams along its side. It reflects a dull blue from the star, but mostly, it is just black. A tiny void in the Lieutenant’s hand. She holds it like the only thing she wants to do is to throw it far away from her.
You want her to do that, too. Or do you want her to point it at Jacobi? You consider it. As you consider it, your brain fires in out of nowhere to inform you that what you are feeling is betrayal.
Yes, that's it. You loved him. No, you trusted him. Same difference. He doesn’t trust Minkowski, but he does trust the bomb he’s tucked away in engineering; as he says, it’s the end of the line. You can go down, or you can take them all with you – and either way, you go down by Jacobi’s hand. Daniel’s orders versus Daniel’s bomb. Out of all the deaths you’d envisioned, experienced over and over in dreams you would never dare tell a soul about (because death is such a silly thing to be afraid of, and they shouldn’t see that), this had never made the list.
It’s a sickening surprise. It’s like stepping on a slug with bare feet, though the mundanity of the comparison is hilarious to your mind. It’s the price you pay for giving him the only trust you had left, and expecting him to love that trust more than he’d love his own best friend. It’s terrifying.
You tear your eyes away from Minkowski’s hand, and you register, vaguely, that the two of them are speaking. Their words are muffled in your ears, and you can't will yourself to concentrate on them. Instead, you finally look at Jacobi.
His hands, you notice, are trembling – ever so slightly. He’s pretending that they’re not. That’s a familiar sight.
It’s a small blessing, you think, eyes fixated on Jacobi’s hands, that he still can’t point the gun at you himself.