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1. You’re fifteen when God offers you a choice. He offers you, orphan, bastard child, the choice to become something more than just a boy with his mother’s name and a hunger hollow in his chest. You clutch the God’s offer close to you and let it suffuse your soul with a power you didn’t know you were capable of, choosing a new life for yourself with the promise of violence tucked behind your teeth. You smile at the man who killed your mother, offer yourself to him, and wait to dig your hands into his skull. You spend your time picking apart the heads of others first—there are choices to make, and this is yours.
You’re seventeen when a bullet slices through your back, and you realize that oh, this was never really your choice at all. Because deep down, within the hollowness that never really left your chest, you know that only boys with bright, honest eyes are allowed those kinds of things. Boys with eyes that have never seen how a person looks when ripped from the inside-out, boys with eyes that stared you down unflinchingly across a pool table, across a dusty coffee booth, across the barrel of your gun. Boys with eyes that’ll be the very last things your bleeding, aching self imprints into memory, until—
2. God—another one—decides to fuck with you again. This time, for better or worse, there isn’t even the pretense of choice.
3. Whatever. You were done pretending anyways.
4. The new reality you are thrust into, however, is all about facades. It sickens you, and makes you hate the soft-spoken, artificial, and blissfully dead version of yourself even more. You throw yourself into battle with a renewed viciousness, sinking your claws into every last asshole tentacle monster you find and letting your voice go hoarse with rage. The other one cowers away from the grin sharpening your features and the blood you carelessly flick away from your sword, but he doesn’t even act surprised, like he already knew that this ruthless monster is the kind of person you were all along. Or more likely, some weak part of you hopes, like he has the same kind of teeth hiding in his boyish, unsuspecting smile. All the more ready to eat you with.
5. His friends come back, because of course they do. You make an alliance with them, or they make an alliance with you—it doesn’t seem to matter as much to you, knowing that you now have a deadline for your real, not-real life. You accompany the group when needed, you bite back when some of the members choose to remind you about some of the careless fuck-ups you’ve committed in the past, you bite your tongue when talking to the people who you’ve traumatized with your more severe fuck-ups. You don’t ask for forgiveness because you’re not fucking stupid and that would never be your call to make, anyways (you know you would’ve murdered your father if he ever attempted the same). Instead, when you’re with them and you remember, again, the phantom bite of a bullet in your back and the raw desperation that arrived with it, you find it in yourself to offer a Thank you—even if those assholes never get around to accepting it.
6. Back in the real world, or whatever constitutes that, you don’t talk to him about what happened. You speak in a deliberate tone about deals made, promises kept. You catch his gaze in passing under flickering city streetlights and let your own eyes trail away. It’s enough, for now.
7. Yes, you know you said you would stop pretending. Shut up.
8. Realize that this love has never been your saving grace, your second chance, your redemption. Realize that you can’t distinguish love from the heady pressure of competition and rivalry, the caress of a dagger in the back, a bullet in the brain. Or, even worse—from secrets said in steam and smoke, from gloves kept in the bottom of school bags, from a boy’s dying wishes to his only friend. Realize that you’re absolutely fucked, you’ve been fucked since the minute the only person who ever loved you killed herself because she couldn’t stand an empty life with just you and her regrets, you’re fucked because the hollowness she carried in her bones until the day she died still haunts your body, too. Realize that maybe you don’t even deserve love or redemption or some cliché bullshit like that, because you’re the kind of person who tells the boy he loves that he hates him, and kills him for good measure, too.
9. As a reminder: the boy doesn’t stay dead. Neither do you, but you don’t think you really count.
10. In your old life, you used to practice everything—smiles in your smudged bathroom mirror, speeches and interviews during inevitable all-nighters, laughter and shock and confusion and every other human emotion that never seemed to slot itself cleanly onto your face. In the Metaverse, though, you never felt the need to rehearse anything. There was never a second thought about what tearing into the soft belly of a shadow could feel like, where to point your pistol, or how you could make another decrepit billionaire or pedophile weep for mercy on death row. You would call up your other self like a second skin and simply move like you knew how to, like this is the only thing you were made to do. Dying is no different, especially the second time around.
11. Don’t kiss boys in laundromats. Don’t kiss boys in the back alley behind jazz clubs. Don’t kiss boys who let you pin them against their shitty futon, who let you unravel the scarf around their neck just so you can see the pale crest of skin beneath, who let you press your hands gently against their throat as if they weren’t the same hands that killed them. Don’t kiss boys, and then definitely don’t come within seconds of your dick being touched for the first time in what feels like ages. Don’t think about the fact that a megalomaniac God has taken it upon himself to manifest your adolescent sex dreams into living, writhing color, because if you think about it for any longer than a moment, you’ll break your admittedly half-hearted vow to not commit homicide while you’re on a mission to take back reality. Don’t think about anything except how badly you want to make the boy smirking beneath you feel as wrecked and wanting as you’ve been ever since meeting him.
12. Don’t kiss boys who kiss you back with the same yearning and reverence that you have been waiting for your whole goddamn miserable life, and don’t you dare act like this feels like absolution, salvation, deliverance.
13. You do not beg. You do not ask. Your voice does not waver. You say, That’s the path I chose. You say, You’re fucking spineless, folding over some bullshit trivial threat on my life and I don’t want to be pitied and I’m not debating with you. You don’t say, Stop looking at me like I’m the deciding factor between this reality and the next. Stop looking at me like I’m already dying. I’ve been dying, I was supposed to be dead, and you wished me back to life like the sentimental, unrelenting fucker you are, and you made me want to stay again, stop looking at me like you think you can make me stay, because you can, you can, you—
He says,
Okay.
We’ll stop him.
14. You watch the boy you love punch God in the face, and you think that maybe, this isn’t such a shitty way to go out after all.
15. Until—
fin.