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They are starting to say that the First Risen, Kieren Walker, can Warm the Redeemed with a touch.
Despite having been instrumental in ensuring that these are indeed the words on everyone’s lips, Simon is, in and of himself, the greatest and most obvious piece of evidence toward their falsity. Even as, throughout the country, across the world, the risen dead are coming back to full life, Simon has stayed as cold as the day he crawled from his grave.
By day he stands beside Kieren, the cold shadow just outside his ring of light, and by night lies curled against him. Kieren is so warm now—by any and every definition of the word; when they lay together, Simon can hear Kieren’s heart racing beneath the icy plane of his cheek. But Kieren never shies away from him—only once, a sitcommy joke about frigid feet. Kieren must have seen something of Simon’s involuntary reaction on his face, and that well of humor has never been mined again. Kieren still stretches up to kiss Simon’s cold lips, sighing in happiness and breathing hot breaths that dissolve to steam in Simon’s mouth.
Simon isn’t ashamed. Simon is so far past shame: he just finds inconvenient things that interfere with his carefully constructed narrative. He thinks sometimes, perhaps when he’s feeling fanciful, that it would all be all right if only he were the very last: Kieren the first to rise and Simon the last to Warm, alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. But he will not be. It is not just most moments free of delusions of grandeur that tell him this, but pure common sense: there are still so many who stand against them. On one side, those convinced that salvation can come only in carefully sealed and well-marketed vials, dispensed by a corporate team at the plunge of a needle. And on the other, faithful followers of the Undead Prophet who view Simon as a traitor and Kieren as a swindler, the thief of their immortality. They do not want to live again—because to live means dying—and so they will not; it is that desire, Kieren swears (Kieren preaches) that is the first and most crucial step, and nothing which his touch imbues.
Kieren gets a look sometimes, when Simon proselytizes for him, like he is very fond of Simon and also thinks Simon is very, very silly. Color cannot rise to Simon’s cheeks, but sometimes he has to shove his hands deep into the pockets of his coat, chuckle, grin like he’s in on the joke. It doesn’t help; Kieren will continue to stare, smiling, up at Simon’s face, one eye white and the other a deep, endless brown. He is still so, so beautiful.
His is the natural face of their rebirth. Because it is Kieren of course who is so easily, so obviously, made a modern-day Moses: the one to show the way but himself stay just shy of paradise, the last mark of their strange journey back to life never quite lifting from his face. He is not in any way comfortable in or eager for his role as icon, but that only makes it better, his sincerity complete when he dedicates everything they’ve done to Amy’s memory and example, when he strives to share credit and minimize his own importance. Kieren could not be more suited to this if Simon had created him for it—but Simon didn’t have to. He came to blossom in front of Simon’s eyes and Simon has not looked away since.
Simon presses his face into the pillow. Kieren has got up already—to go to the toilet. (“Bet you didn’t miss that,” Simon had said, some time after the shock had worn off, and Kieren’s newly pink lips had quirked: “I dunno, there’s something to be said for a good piss.”) Simon wants to have himself together by the time Kieren comes back, but he can’t concentrate: his mind is racing; his hands clench the sheets. For a long, despairing moment, he feels like a great hole has opened in his chest, like his insides are in freefall. What’s the point, what’s the point—it’s all so petty and meaningless. All of it, everything they’ve done—what’s the point, if things are just going to go back to the way they were, if they’ve suffered for nothing, if they haven’t evolved? What is the point of their Redemption—his—if at the end they return meekly to the fold, rejoin the faceless mob that had scourged and flayed them, capitulate with grateful silence? It will have meant nothing. Simon had for so long convinced himself he had returned with a mission, a purpose, but he can feel the void opening up in front of him again. What if this really is all there is? He feels himself reaching for the tendrils of his faith and coming up with—
“Simon?”
Kieren’s tread is light across the floor. He tries, he really does try, to be all right by the time Kieren reaches him: composed, collected, confident, blank. But then the bed dips and there’s Kieren, voice low and gentle as his lips pause above Simon’s throat. “Oh, Simon,” Kieren says on an intake of breath, “why didn’t you tell me?”
Simon forces his eyes open. His cheeks feel damp. He can feel it, he— He bites his lip, hard, and the pain races through him like a blast of fire. He should feel cleansed but he doesn’t.
Kieren coaxes his hands out from where Simon’s pinned them beneath his body. “You’re not happy,” he says. It’s neither a question nor a judgment. Simon finds himself irrationally annoyed. There are aspects to recommend an angry god.
“You don’t always have to be so fucking understanding.” This flash of heat feels better. He still has his back curled toward Kieran and he’s glad of the barrier; he wants to hunch in on himself, kindle the fire of this incipient rage. At least it would be something.
Kieren laughs—gentle and soft, not mocking. “Most of the time I don’t understand you at all.” Simon feels the mattress shift again: Kieren lying down beside him. Then hands, tugging rudely at the blankets Simon has knotted around his waist. “This morning isn’t going the way I hoped. Let’s start over.”
He pulls the blankets up over their heads. Simon doesn’t let himself respond to his first instinct: swatting them away like a temperamental four-year-old. He lies still. Still as a corpse, Simon thinks, and it’s funny until all at once it’s too hot and the blankets too heavy and he can’t breathe—
He jerks the duvet away from his mouth with an indignant sputter, gasping. So pathetic. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Kieren poking his head out like an anxious groundhog; his hair is mussed and his mismatched eyes are wide. Simon hates him a little. He loves him so much.
“Thanks, that helped.” The familiar grind of rough sarcasm is vaguely comforting at least. Why bother being inspirational when he can just revert to dully sardonic? “Should have looked before to the example of ostriches.”
“Starting over’s not the same as burying your head in the sand,” Kieren says lightly.
Simon looks at his hands lying limp on top of the covers. They’ve stopped shaking at least. They look alien to him, pale pink except for where the morning sunlight coming in the window cuts across in a golden strip.
“But we’re not starting over,” he says. “We’re going back. Reverting. Assimilating.” He shoots Kieren his best unnerving stare, which has never done much to unnerve Kieren. How harmless must he look now—how empty now that he is no longer the vessel of the word? He raises one of those pink alien hands to his chest and feels its workings. There is nothing in him now but a spiderweb of veins, a nest of organs and coiled intestine, working endlessly toward—what? “I don’t want this,” he says with conviction.
He expects Kieren to look hurt. He is not looking forward to putting that expression on his face, but he would enjoy lying less. His tongue is still his to use as he’s seen fit.
Kieren’s face, however, doesn’t shutter; he stares at Simon with his too-penetrating gaze. “Maybe not right at this moment,” he says. “But you must have.”
He is unapologetic in his assessment. Simon feels another white-hot burst of anger flare and then pass without catching. Kieren is so fucking guileless sometimes, it shifts on itself and becomes its own kind of guile. He reaches out and takes Simon’s hand and Simon is shocked by the coolness of Kieren’s skin. He experiences a brief moment of foolish terror before he remembers that temperature is a comparative thing. Simon himself feels like he’s burning up. In comparison, Kieren is a balm.
“I’m not ready,” Simon says, and he feels a weight lift as the words leave his tongue: his truest truth. “I can’t do it again, if I’m going to go back to the way I was. I can’t.”
Kieren nods. This he understands. He shifts their hands, turns his own wrist up to the light. The scars from his first life—from his death—healed when he Warmed, when he was reborn, Redeemed-in-full, whatever you want to call it—any or all of the things Simon’s called it. The track marks on Simon’s own arms are already starting to fade; his spine is alight with a healing itch. But Simon’s not sure he’s earned that level of absolution. He doesn’t want to forget.
“We’re not who we were, though,” Kieren says with a confidence Simon doesn’t share. “And we’re not like them”—this uttered without scorn but with a clear sense of distinction. His elbow catches Simon’s side, a light little jab that he can nevertheless feel. “Do I really need to sermonize to you?”
Simon lets his shoulders lift in a small shrug, swallowing around the lump in his throat. “Wouldn’t hurt.”
Kieren shifts his legs so they’re tucked up under him. He tugs at Simon’s hand and Simon lets him rearrange them so that they’re face to face, kneeling on the bed. There’s a quirk to the corner of Kieren’s lips, mischief in his eyes, but kindness too—never not kindness. Simon’s not sure what he’s done to deserve it. Kieren’s hands coming down on his shoulders, his expression making a bid for solemnity, his head bowing slightly forward— Simon realizes he’s holding his breath. He lets it out, a big relieving rush. His chest thrums.
Kieren is speaking. “We are the sum of our experiences. Right? We’ve gone somewhere the living have never traveled, journeyed there and back. And now we’re moving forward—entering the next phase of whatever this is. I don’t know what it means. I don’t think anyone really does.”
He pauses, eyeing Simon like he’s waiting for him to argue, but Simon’s tongue feels paralyzed, mesmerized. He can only flicker his eyes, watch as Kieren raises a hand and brushes the sweaty fringe from Simon’s forehead. “I think change is thrilling, though. Change is possibility. Change is life.” His thumb is lying against Simon’s pulse point, trembling along with the throb. “Never in my life—in my lives—have I been more excited to find out what happens next.”
When Simon finds his voice it’s a rasp. “So you’re saying we should be out there. Frolicking through the fields.”
Kieren’s grin is blinding. “Well, that’s not the first place I’d choose to frolic, but yeah. Or we could just—“
He rises up onto his knees. Simon feels Kieren’s lips as they touch his: their warmth, their taste and their texture. It’s overwhelming how much he feels, the hairs standing up on his arms and his heart jumpkicking in his chest. The shock is electric: everything in him stirring, waking up. He has no memory of it being like this. In no memory from before can he recall ever feeling this full.
“See?” Kieren says, as Simon pants hot breath into the curve of Kieren’s soft throat. “This is different. This is definitely different.” His hand sweeps down the back of Simon’s neck, halting above the collar of his shirt. There’s still a hole there, just below where Kieren’s fingers rest, but Simon thinks he can feel it knitting, filling. “What do you think?”
Simon lifts his head and looks into Kieren’s eyes.
“I suppose I can live with it,” he says.