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i.
You’re a part of this, either way. He will say it to Kieren Walker, that day at the GP’s. It is an expression of petulant failure. Not a technique of coercion, just involuntary pricking of rage at his own crumbling confidence. He won’t realize until later -- when the bone knife slips from his palm, knees pushed into the dirt, fingers grasping greedily at Kieren’s pale and blackblood-smeared face, when he is numbly feeling the cold itch of a bullet lodged under the bones of his shoulder, when he sees Kieren’s enormous grief bound-up with a sense of surefooted lightness -- it will be later that he realizes he was delivering a blind and impotent prophecy to himself; that he was predicting his own helpless tumble into Kieren Walker.
The Prophet gave him meaning. But also: a heaping, writhing pile of words and faiths that he could pad his empty bones with. A use for his talents, he had use in the world. He had been meant to arrive, meant to be reborn anew, cleansed with the cold water of death and madness and all of sudden all the reasons for wasted raw useless energy expended into what being alive had been were made so, so clear. He could spread the word, he could share experience. The redeemed enjoyed his quiet sincerity. He enjoyed believing in things.
And then Kieren does not need him. Kieren will have no use for any of the things he has decided to define himself by. Kieren will instead sometimes look at Simon like he is ridiculous. He is ridiculous. He is a travesty. He is a mess of ravaged, gasping, gummed-up nerve endings. He is someone’s failed experiment. They gave him too much feeling and then no feeling at all. They gave him an empty gaping hole under his ribs, excavated through his exposed spine, and let him loose on the world to pile it full of something, like throwing him over the expanse of the ocean with no raft: good luck mate, have at it. And now he has a heart and belly full to suffocation of adoration and reverence and no push of pulse to cleanse himself of it, no relief, no deep, exorcising exhalation of breath. He will look at Kieren Walker and he will feel like he might cry, because words can’t -- they won’t -- he can’t ever explain to anyone what this is like.
ii.
“What,” says Kieren, flatly, when he tells him. They are in the graveyard, perched on the crumbling stone wall, because Simon remembers somewhere the story of monks stripping naked in cold stone halls and whipping themselves until blood ran in service and penance to God, and he doesn’t have a whip, but the scene of guilt is good enough, he thinks, maybe, for the kind of pain he is actually able to pay currency with.
But he can’t bring himself to say it again, so he doesn’t say anything at all.
“You were going to -- ” says Kieren. “Kill me. Really.”
“I didn’t,” says Simon, weakly, squinting into the gray sky. “Though.”
“I’m sorry - because, what? Some delusional psycho in a cheap halloween mask told you it was a good idea?”
Without looking at him, Simon can feel the exasperated anger rising up and pushing outwards beside him, the way that Kieren’s body becomes unbunched and wider, the angrier he gets. The way his strides get longer, more fluid. The way he spreads his fingers open onto his thighs or into the air instead of clenching them inside the pockets of his coat. When he lowers his eyes, Simon can see Kieren’s hands flex open onto the stone between them, shaking; it’s like he can see the nerves lighting up one by one -- blistering outward along half-repaired pathways.
“Yeah,” says Simon, uselessly, watching the tremble skitter along Kieren’s ring finger and thumb.
“Christ,” says Kieren, finally, shaking out his hand, tucking it in a fist back into his coat pocket, pushing off from the wall. “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”
For a blinding, hot second, Simon is terrified that Kieren will just keep walking - that the replay in Simon’s memory will forever be that Kieren pushes off from the ruined wall of the cemetery and just keeps staggering on alone through the graves and out the other side, and then he’ll just fade out into the mist and down the road and Simon won’t have any way of following, because confession doesn’t mean you’ve ensured a throne in heaven.
Hail Mary, thinks Simon, watching Kieren kick at a wet pile of dead leaves, his head bent, frown tugging on the corners of his eyes and mouth. Hail Mary, hail Mary, hail Mary, hail Mary, please, please, please, fucking please.
“You do know,” Kieren says, sharply. “Hurting other people to get what you want, that’s definitely the definition of bad, right?”
“I’m sorry,” says Simon. He means to say more. About why, and why now, and why Kieren, and about how he thinks if Kieren does decide to go on without him he might just spend his whole blessed cursed eternity waiting for him here on this shelf of rock in the middle of bleak, rain-sodden Lancastershire, until his bones just give out and melt into the earth, one last time.
“Yeah, no fucking kidding,” mutters Kieren.
“I’m sorry,” he says, again.
Kieren makes a frustrated noise and kicks at the leaves again, digging the toe of his boot into a clod of mud.
“I’m sorry.” He can’t seem to turn it off, this rising, twisting, vice-like inability to do anything but beg.
“Stop -- stop apologizing!” Kieren snaps, turning on him.
“Kieren,” he says, feeling an icy panic gather somewhere in his gut. “I didn’t know what to -- “
“Stop. Just,” Kieren turns his head away, one shoulder raised protectively, like shrugging off an ill-advised hand to his neck. “Stop, for a second, all right?”
Our Father, thinks Simon, automatically, desperately, struggling. Our Father who art in Heaven.
“I need to think,” he hears Kieren say, and when he raises his eyes, Kieren is regarding him, head tilted, a little frown still pulling at the edge of his mouth. “Just -- okay?”
I have sinned, thinks Simon, in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. He has to look away, and so he looks at his hands where they are gripped in fists at his thighs. His threadbare trousers, dark earth still staining the knees, his black blood still staining his nails and his fingertips. He grits his teeth, and feels dull sparks beneath his palms, dead nerves muffling the sharpness of guilt. He raises his eyes. And they said, what is that to us?
“I didn’t -- “ he says, into the long silence, and now he doesn’t even know how to finish, because Kieren Walker has him pinned back with a look.
“You didn’t do it,” Kieren finishes for him, voice lower now, and very slow and even. There is a halo of weak winter sun behind him, crowning his head.
“I couldn’t,” he manages, so hoarse he feels like the words get devoured into nothing, swallowed up by the cold air.
He sees Kieren exhale, slowly, rocking back on his heels. The furrow between his brows holds, and holds, and holds, and then -- dissolves. He shakes his head once, and there is that quirk of his mouth: the incredulous look he gets when Simon tells him that he is miraculous, beautiful, incredible, impossible.
“I - “
“Oh, shut up,” says Kieren, and takes a step, and kisses him.
Simon, eyes stinging, cups his face with both hands, and drinks him like communion.
iii.
You’re bleeding, Simon will say, one day, in the hallway of the bungalow, as they are putting on their coats.
Kieren’s fingers will come up, smearing the sludgy black line across the tip of his nose and his upper lip. Huh --
Simon will step in and wipe at Kieren’s face with his hands, the sleeves of his jumper pulled down over his knuckles, keeping his touch gentle to tamp down on the rising urge to panic.
Simon -- Kieren will grab at his wrists, tugging. Oi, come on, that’s gross.
No it’s not. Simon will kiss him.
Kieren will laugh, huffing into his mouth. Yer disgusting.
Are you okay? He will whisper, swiping a thumb across Kieren’s cheek. He doesn’t want to let go.
So serious, Kieren will sigh, pushing back, slightly, and he will be smiling. Not like I’m dying, Monroe.
iv.
The sun is setting somewhere beyond the edges of the hills. Pushing through the heavy clouds, it exhales a sickly pale brick-red light over everything, broken by the shadows of the fencing of the trees, bare branches and spindly twigs and heavy lunking chimneys beyond. There will be frost on the ground tonight, and Kieren keeps looking at him.
He can feel it, every four or five steps they take down the hill, Kieren is sneaking glances.
“What,” he says, still expecting the anger to boil up again, or worse -- settle into cold refusal.
“Aren’t you -- “ starts Kieren. He can hear the frown in his voice. “I mean. Isn’t it a problem?”
“A problem?”
“Those people,” says Kieren, and his long shadow hunches. “They aren’t going to be fucked off about it? That you didn’t.”
Simon saw Zoe once last week across the street and she leveled a look at him that had sucking, heated hatred of a jilted lover or a denied addict. She’d spat on the ground, and he’d moved on. It is a low-grade ticking, bound to explode, but he can’t bring himself to care. Maybe they’ll turn over a few chairs, scrawl a few bible quotes on the walls, maybe they’ll hiss from the corners, maybe they’ll hand him the noose, even. He won’t run, not unless it’s to go where Kieren wants.
“Maybe,” he says.
“Maybe?” Kieren snorts. “Simon, they’re fanatics.”
“They don’t know -- “ starts Simon, not sure how to express the way he felt that night, being bared clean by the hands of the First Risen in the dark light of a hermetic bedroom, and searching for the words in the snow in the phonebooth and settling on something that seemed at the time so pale, inadequate, in comparison to what he knew. “I didn’t tell them it was you.”
Kieren’s body gives a little lurch, beside him, and he pulls up short. When Simon stops and turns to look at him, he’s frowning, skeptical, and Simon know he was right, however starved for expression. Kieren is -- with the cold, pink light in his hair and the clearness of his eyes -- so beautiful.
“I wasn’t worried about me,” Kieren says, as if Simon is as thick as anything.
He feels uncomfortable, giddy, panic-stricken, heated, desperate -- all at once, when it sets in. That Kieren Walker might be worried about him, instead. It’s too blinding, so he squints at his shoes and tries not to think about how hard he wants to shove Kieren up against the nearest tree and kiss him until he’s breathless and staggering.
“I can take care of meself,” he says.
“Yeah, right,” Kieren rolls his eyes, hunching his shoulders. “You’ve got loads of self-preservation.”
It’s true. He doesn’t. It still hurts, somewhere, low in his belly. He shrugs.
“Sorry,” says Kieren, quietly. “That was -- bit mean.”
“Nah,” he tries to smile, knowing it comes out tight-lipped. “I’m trying, y’know. Normal. All that.”
“Oh, fuck normal,” says Kieren, mouth quirked like he’s surprised by it. “You’re -- you’re all right.”
The way you are -- it hangs in the air. When Kieren starts walking, again, he nudges his shoulder against Simon’s, just once, adolescent like pigtail pulling or tagging in the schoolyard. And Simon feels thrilled and greedy, like he has just been given a sonnet, a declaration, a bended knee, a gift. He takes it all, letting it piece-by-piece fill the empty jostling voids between his ribs.
v.
What’s wrong with me, Kieren will hiss at him, in the dark, fingers tight, clawing at his shoulders. Simon, what’s happening, I can’t --
Simon won’t know. Simon will be terrified. He will have just seen Kieren have a seizure on the floor of his bedroom. He will have gathered him up and lifted him to the bed and stroked his hair and touched his face until Kieren’s eyes opened again, shining and speckled with the heavy unfocused blur of fear.
Simon will have to say that he doesn’t know. I don’t know, he will say, cupping Kieren’s face, trying not to shake. Whatever it is, it’s going to be fine.
Kieren’s face will twist, visibly, like he is feeling pain, sucking breath heavily between his teeth, and make a noise like a wounded animal.
I’ll be here, Simon will promise. He will promise it like nothing else he has ever sworn in his whole life. ’m here. I’m not going anywhere.
The fact that this will calm Kieren, that this will slow his ragged breathing and make his grip gentler and that it will be this, what Simon will say, that will make his eyes focus, and his knotted muscles unknit, like his body feels the assurance of it, this is the most important thing that will ever happen to Simon Monroe.
vi.
“It doesn’t bother you?” says Simon, that night, fitting the syringe into the hole at the top of Kieren’s spine.
Kieren shoots him a look over his shoulder that says both no, and stop being a stupid cunt.
“Why not?” Simon lets his thumb linger at the place where metal and skin meet, feeling the exact opposite of clinical: a strange, slithering, filthy little thought stirring somewhere in his lower belly.
“What’s the point?” says Kieren, and bows his neck. “You said it yerself - you couldn’t do it.”
Simon runs his fingers up the low ridges of spine at Kieren’s neck - whole and ashy white and bared, vulnerable. He thinks about the teeth of a knife, and he thinks about Kieren’s incandescent surety. He lets his thumb rest just below a vertebrae, his fingers spread into the curving hollow of Kieren’s jaw. He thinks about how Kieren, who became the thing he feared the most, fought it off, and came out the other side -- not a phoenix, not a coming of the lord, not a trumpeting fanfare and a descaling of eyes, but just himself, again. The same awkward bones and stiff walk and anxious sinews and guileless eyes and copper hair and sharp anger and talented, practical, no-nonsense sort of being.
He squeezes his finger, the syringe clicks and hisses, and Kieren’s body gives a little heave - from the base of his feet to the top of his head, and Simon keeps both hands firmly on his shoulders, palms down, thumbs touching at the fine downy hairs at Kieren’s neck.
Outside, the wind shifts, catching the faint memory of bells and the hissing of a bus at rest, and a doorbell, and a dog barking, and a small town growing and grieving, and underneath it all, the groan of the earth.
“Hey,” Kieren’s voice is low.
“Mm,” he manages, something heavy and burning in his stomach.
“All right?”
“Yeah,“ he says, but he feels it catch in his throat. He wants to laugh, hysterically, at the thought of being comforted.
Part of him -- maybe all of him -- wanted the lashing. The screaming and the audible anger and the door slamming and the shock in the middle of the night when the light goes on and you’re told you’re a fucking monster, a failure, an undeserving piece of irregular flesh, and now even unable to do the thing you thought you were made for. Part of him, he thinks, wanted Kieren’s refusal, like that. Part of him wanted to do penance. The expectation of some sort of pain for so fully turning in on himself, for turning on the thing he had spent years filling his body with -- his sluggish veins and eroded bones and burned out nerves -- with faith. The expectation that judgment came in the form of a sacrificial hanging, not in the form of complete, obvious, sarcastic, affectionate forgiveness, from the mouth of Kieren Walker.
So he kneels, there, on the couch. He presses his forehead to Kieren’s hair, presses his lips to the nape of his neck. He lets his fingers twist in the collar of Kieren’s shirt, and lets his eyes fall closed, and lets himself breathe there, slowly, in, and in, and in, and in.
vii.
And one day soon, he will feel the coltish pulse of Kieren’s renewed heart under his hands, two of his fingers pressed hard -- disbelievingly hard -- up into the soft skin of Kieren’s throat while Kieren, eyes wide, makes a noise like the frantic fluttering of a pinned bird’s wing, and Simon will breathe out, for what seems like forever -- exhaling, finally, into the world.