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The first time Caleb Crane went and saw a shrink he was 14. He had been ordered to by his uncle before he went into cadet school, after saying something about Caleb being weird in the head (which was an abridged and gentle way of putting what his uncle had actually said.)
When he had confessed to Doctor Martin that he felt constantly overwhelmed by different voices in his head, all on the attack and leaving Caleb with no space to defend Dr. Martin had told him that he displayed symptoms of Multiple Personality Disorder. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that that was Caleb’s catalyst that led him to many of his quietly self-destructive actions (cadet training was full of things that Caleb probably should not have done and objects that Caleb shouldn’t have been taught to use, but oh well.)
Now, Caleb was 17 and he could confidently say that Dr. Martin was not wrong. It was just worse because now all of his personalities had tangible bodies. It made them about 8000 times harder to ignore. And infinitely harder to dismiss what they were saying about him.
Caleb sat on the roof of his dorm building, legs hung over the edge, attempting to ignore the duplicate sat beside him, whispering how much easier it would be to just jump. 20 stories, it’d be easy, after all physics says you’d die before you hit the ground.
Days like this were a struggle, when he couldn’t make the duplicates go away, couldn’t fight them. It was, after all, a voice Caleb hadn’t heard in a very long time, not since he got his duplicating legacy. It made the voice harder to fight when it had his face.
But it wasn’t anything he hadn’t thought about before.
It’d been better since he started at the Academy, since what everyone was calling the adventures of the Fugitive Six (a name Nigel and Kopano had been trying to copyright, for some reason).
It had been better since Nigel too. That didn’t mean Caleb could forget the night Nigel had found him crying his eyes out on the bathroom floor, whispering ‘go away’ over and over agin between sobs. It had been a rough night for both of them, which had made Caleb feel a million times worse, made him feel like a burden even when Nigel told him he wasn’t. But Nigel did help, what with his constant promises to punch any unruly duplicates in the face and the fact that when Nigel was kissing him, Caleb’s mind was silent.
20 stories, all over, peace. It’s not like you’re that important to anyone.
“Nigel would miss me and so would the others. And I don’t want to jump,” Caleb whispered to the duplicate.
“You’re damn right about that babe,” Caleb turns and finds Nigel next to the fire exit door, a sad smile on his pale face, a blanket over one shoulder and a baseball bat in his opposite hand. “Do you want to hit the duplicate or should I?” Caleb smiled and twisted so he could stand on the roof, reaching for the bat. It may not work for a while, but Caleb needed to kick the duplicate’s butt before he lost his gall. Nigel hands it over and watches in awe as Caleb (in perfect batter’s form, mind you) attempts to hit his duplicate off the roof. It doesn’t work. The bat goes straight through the duplicates face. Caleb passes the bat back to his boyfriend and sits on the edge again.
Nigel makes quick work of the duplicate and comes to sit next to Caleb, wrapping the blanket around the two of them and tucking Caleb under his arm. Nigel kisses Caleb’s forehead.
“You’ll be okay. Trust me, it gets better,” Caleb looks up at the Brit.
“How do you know?” Caleb’s voice was hoarse from not talking all day, having successfully avoided everyone while they had class.
Nigel grimaces at the question before he takes his arm back from Caleb and pulls his leather wristbands off of both arms. Caleb gasped softly. His boyfriends wrists were a conglomerate mess of scars that were only just visible against his pale skin. Tears formed in Caleb’s eyes just thinking about what could have driven his boyfriend to give himself the scars.
“I know because I’ve been there before,” Nigel slipped the wristbands back on and returned his arm to rest on Caleb’s shoulders, tugging him closer. Caleb waited for Nigel to speak more. Caleb’s boyfriend wasn’t a very talkative person when it came to his life before the war and academy. The most he would say was that his parents were the worst and not much more.
Eventually Nigel opened his mouth and started speaking.
“My parents enrolled me into this shitty, rich all-boys school called Pepperpont back in England. It was another attempt to get me to be more like my dad. It worked about as well as you would think,” Nigel laughed, but with no humour in it. It was a darker sound than Caleb was used to.
“Anyway, I was the token gay guy there. Everyone made fun of me, made my life a living hell, so on and so forth. But the worst thing was that when boys wanted to… experiment, they came to me, even if I was against it. My whole experience there put me in a very… dark place for a very long time,” Caleb is scared at how detached and cold Nigel sounds when he speaks about it.
“When we all got contacted to come fight for the Garde, the first thing I did was set my entire uniform on fire with a lighter I had stolen from the caretaker. The second was throw it all out of the boarding house window,” that made Caleb laugh softly, unsurprised by his boyfriends actions. “And then I put my piercings back in and left, flipping my principle the bird as I went. It got better after that, ignoring the whole incident with that dickhead from the Foundation in Iceland. That was my first… relapse I guess since I’ve gotten better, so-to-speak. I still have bad days but… I’m not locking myself in rooms and listening to my music on full volume all day or hiding in bathroom stalls crying anymore, so trust me when I say it gets better, I promise it does,” Nigel laid another soft kiss in Caleb’s hair and rubbed his arm.
“It’s better when I’m with you and the others. Makes it easier to not focus on what they say but… alone it’s hard. When I was in training to be a cadet, my only visitor was my uncle, who said that I should just compartmentalise, to just deal with my feelings and thoughts later, except there was never a later, just anther assignment or chore that required my full attention and vigilance. When the duplicates started popping up, it was brilliant, because i could talk and rationalise with myself without talking to myself, y’know? And then they got minds of their own and everything fell apart. It’s like I’ve gone back to square one and I don’t know how to move forward,” Caleb curls further into Nigel’s side and the Brit holds him tight, lips resting in Caleb’s hair.
“We get through it together. We all hide a little bit of ourselves but if there’s one thing my ma has taught me, it’s that a problem shared is a problem halved. I’m here for you and so are the other and as much as I dislike hitting something that looks like you, I will do it again and again until they’ve learnt to leave you alone. I am, after all pretty good with a baseball bat don’t ya think, babe?”
“You’re pretty horrible at it actually,” Caleb laughed softly at the mock hurt look on Nigel’s face. Nigel smiles back at him and presses their noses together.
“Well, I can’t say I’d mind watching you use those gorgeous biceps to swing that bat again. Did you play baseball before the Academy?”
“I was a cadet, I couldn’t afford to be scrawny… unlike someone here,” Caleb gives his boyfriend a pointed once-over. While Nigel had certainly gained muscle mass at the Academy, his lankiness meant that he was scrawny, no matter what. Nigel looks insulted and sits back.
“Low blow, babe, low blow,” Caleb stomach flutters at the name.
“We should probably go back downstairs, lest they think we’re being unsavoury,” Caleb goes to shift but easily lets himself be pulled back to Nigel.
“Nah, I’m enjoying the view. Plus, I don’t care if the others think we’re being, in your words, unsavoury. Let ‘em think that if it means we can be here a bit longer.”
Caleb was sure in that moment, that no matter what any therapist said, so long as he had Nigel and his friends, he would be okay.
So Caleb settled back in Nigel’s arms and they watched the San Francisco skyline light up as the sun went down.
They stayed there for hours after, content in the silence.