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Tom thought that he heard breathing, the softest of footsteps on the carpet in his office. His senses sharpened since the start of all this bullshit out of necessity.
His suspicions were confirmed when he heard Adrian’s voice right in his ear: “Boo.”
Tom startled, shut his eyes, clenched his teeth.
“Christ, Adrian.”
It was always like this, even when they were kids. Adrian’s favorite kinds of pranks involved sneaking up on him. And now he could be better at it than ever.
“Get it together,” Adrian said with a too-rough smack on Tom’s shoulder. “I need your help.”
Tom turned out of habit, not truly expecting to see anything. He startled again when he saw Adrian’s head hanging in empty space. Then the air beneath his head rippled and flickered and half of the chittering black cameras were in view for a few seconds.
“What—?”
“It’s malfunctioning,” Adrian said, one flickering hand going to his torso and stroking it as if soothing a wounded animal instead of a suit. “She stabbed me with a pen. Repeatedly.”
A dark, icky ooze of blood clogged up one camera. No question of who “she” was.
“Why don’t you use the spa—” Tom began, but Adrian cut him off.
“You think I didn’t think of that? The spare is fucking gone.”
Adrian lurched forward and displaced everything on Tom’s desk with a presumed sweep of an arm. Tom kept his face schooled into a mask of cool indifference.
“It’s fucking gone,” Adrian repeated, breathing hard. “She took it. I know she did.”
A sort of fiery mania always came into Adrian’s eyes when he talked about Cecelia, even back when they were together. That look turned to an inferno once she left.
Tom cleared his throat. “Can you fix—?”
Adrian silenced him by turning his white-hot gaze on him.
Something hit his desk with a weird clatter-thunk. It took another flicker of the suit for Tom to realize that it was the mask of the suit.
He turned back to Adrian to ask about why it was damaged too—was it because it was in communication with the other cameras?—but again the sight of Adrian’s head just… hanging there unnerved him.
It was like he really was dead after all. Like he’d been born a few hundred years too early and gotten his head chopped off with all of the other rich bastards.
The occasional flickers back into partial-visibility with the dozens of bug-eyed cameras all over his body didn’t help.
“Can you take that thing off when we’re talking?” Tom asked.
He shouldn’t have shown that bit of weakness. Adrian seized upon it at once.
“Why?”
“You know why.”
Adrian lifted his eyebrows and all but pouted. “I really don’t.”
Don’t be such a dick, Tom thought but didn’t dare say. A muscle in Adrian’s jaw spasmed and Tom had to reassure himself the ability to read minds wasn’t a part of the suit. But then again, maybe he’d been born with that ability. He certainly seemed to exercise it wherever Cecelia was concerned. He could even recall times when Adrian turned that on their parents.
Tom lowered his eyes for a moment. “Please take it off.”
“I don’t see why you would want me out of it. If anything this should be better than talking to empty air.” Adrian’s voice rose in sudden faux-understanding. “Are you scared?”
Tom said nothing.
Adrian rolled his head to one side. “It feels good, you know. Powerful. Like you’re omnipotent. Like you could rule the world.”
“So you’ve said.”
“It’s painful for me to part with it,” Adrian said, licking his teeth, “but I need you to wear it. Just for a while.”
Tom didn’t say “no” because it wasn’t truly possible to ever say “no” to Adrian. Not that he wouldn’t try in a more roundabout way. Maybe Cecelia was right about him being spineless.
“Why?” Tom asked.
Adrian always had a reason for everything he did. He micromanaged everything in that walled fortress he called home and would do the same to everything outside of it if he could.
“Maybe I just want to share the fun with my little brother.”
Utter bullshit.
“Tell me the truth.”
“Pen stab wound, remember?” Flicker, flicker went the suit. “I need to go clean this up.”
That still didn’t feel like the real answer.
“It will give me away,” Tom protested weakly, “while it’s like that.”
“Not if you’re quick.”
Tom hesitated another moment and Adrian’s smile dropped. “I’m going to have to insist.”
The more he explained exactly what he wanted him to do while in the suit, the more horrified Tom became.
“I can’t hurt a little girl.” Tom said. “I—”
I’m not like you.
“You don’t have to. You just need to make Cecelia think you will so she’ll finally wake the hell up and come back to me.” He said her name in such a weird way, crunching out each syllable despite the high pitch of the sounds, Ce-ce-li-a.
Tom was fucked from the start, but he knew he was especially fucked once Adrian brought her up. Where she was concerned, he would stop at nothing, absolutely nothing. Even the news about the baby had only caused him to stop torturing Cecelia directly, but her loved ones were fair game.
He didn’t say okay, not once, but he ended up in the suit nonetheless. It was still slick and stinking of Adrian’s sweat and blood. It clung to Tom’s body and the cameras felt heavier than he thought they would. It didn’t feel powerful to look down and see nothing and become overcome with a sense of vertigo. Gross, that was the word, it was all gross.
His disgust magnified when Adrian lifted the mask into place. How could he see, how could he breathe? His first steps as an invisible man were about as confident as a newborn deer’s.
“Have fun,” said Adrian, standing in his office in a tank and a pair of briefs and still managing to have an air of superiority somehow.
He wouldn’t. He didn’t get his rocks off torturing people the way Adrian did. But he would do it anyway because Tom feared his brother far more than the justice system he represented.
It wasn’t until Cecelia started shooting, started actively fucking killing him, that Tom realized why Adrian sent him in his place. By then it was too late.