Chapter Text
i
“It starts with bloodshed, always bloodshed, always the same
running from something larger than yourself story
shoving money into the jaws of a suitcase, cutting your hair
with a steak knife at a rest stop,
and you’re off, you’re on the run, a fugitive driving away from
something shameful and half-remembered.”
- Richard Siken, ‘Driving, Not Washing’, Crush
there is a fear instilled in every individual in the world of the unknown, of the thing that lurk beyond human understanding and knowledge. the beings that live in the dark corners, that make their homes in the shadows and take up these shrouded vantage-points to watch over the comings-and-goings of society. these overseers are faceless and monstrous and unknowable until the day they slip themselves into the everyday life of a person without anyone noticing.
this monster is called mr jacobi, or sir, or father. never dad, never by a first name, never anything less formal. he watches his family with a cold and steely gaze and an iron fist, its silvery surface marred with scarlet after one-two too many drinks and one-two-three too many comments from the middle child.
said child shelters in their bedroom, presses their back to the door and the back of their own hand underneath their nose. the bedroom is dark and only dimly lit from outside, a little of the artificial light coming through their still-open window and illuminating their haven in an almost-otherworldly orange glow.
already, the metallic taste has made it to their mouth, the back of their throat, thick and coating it with something they’ve grown all-too used to by now. their hand is red and there are spots on the front of their t-shirt too, which they’ll scrub out in the bathroom sink.
“pull yourself together, daniel,” he whispers into the stillness, because his own self is the one he cannot keep secrets from and this may be the biggest secret of all. his name is daniel and he is a boy, no matter what people say. he's almost a man, come three more years of waiting and an out-of-state college acceptance. he sniffs once, and wipes his nose on the already-stained back of his hand (only really serving to smear blood across more of his face, not that it really matters) and plucks his shirt away from his chest a little as he changes into softer pants than the jeans that are already wearing through. he drops down onto his bed to the cacophony of protesting springs, smooths his hand over the sheets before he lays down and pulls them over himself.
“be strong,” he breathes, curling in on himself beneath the covers, breeze coming in through the window and barely even bothering him, barely even noticed. it brings with it the distant sound of a car, in the street a few blocks away. a siren. the occasional call of a bird he can’t put a name to and a little of the smell of rotting leaves, brought about by the turning of the season. late september, almost october, almost sixteen. almost, almost, almost. he could bet his life on almost.
“almost,” he thinks he tells himself, face mostly pressed against the pillow and carving the lines from it into his cheek as he draws the cover tighter around his curled-up form, cocooning himself in the promises he makes of his future. freedom and honesty and peace, for what any of that’s worth. for all he knows, they're just words, but they're a driving force and they're hope for now, which will have to be good enough.
his father buys him a half-junk old car for his graduation and daniel smiles and accepts it readily, the hollow words of a promise to be good still echoing in his mind three hours in when he pulls into a rest stop with a dirty mirror and hacks at the shoulder-length hair until he looks more like a delinquent than the respectable young woman he’d been cast as for eighteen years. he turns his face to the side, then to the other, and offers himself a grin. the mirror warps and distorts his face. he looks like his father. he looks like his father.
daniel looks away from the mirror.
he ties the jacket ‘round his waist and shakes out his hair into the sink until he’s reasonably sure any loose strands are out (after he kicks most of what landed on the floor behind the sink) and he thinks he feels - different. lighter, somehow, but there’s still a weight of something in his chest that aches a little, weighs on his gut and presses against his ribcage. breathing feels a little harder and daniel thinks that maybe, maybe something about him’s even more wrong now, but there’s no going back. can’t change the past, can only move on and learn, can only fuck up the future in some new and exciting way.
he stops again after another three hours in search of snacks, a bottle of water, and somewhere to piss, although not necessarily in that order. the guy - person? it’s a little hard to tell in the fluorescent lighting when he’s halfway across the store, but daniel’s reasonably sure that it’s a guy with weirdly dark eyelashes - at the register eyes him in a way daniel would probably categorise as wary. which is dumb, objectively, ‘cause he’s not gonna steal anything. half because there’s nothing worth stealing, half because he really doesn’t want to go to jail. or see cops. or get his dad called on him.
“hey,” daniel says when he sets his haul down for the guy to tally up the prices (this close he can see broad shoulders and the barest hint of facial hair on the guy’s chin, which solidifies his theory, because he’s still silent). “you know if there’s any really cheap motels near here where i can crash for the night?”
the guy pauses with daniel’s bag of cheetos in his hand and furrows his brow for a second, thinking. daniel takes the moment to study his face a little more. it’s not bad. the guy looks like he’s wearing makeup or something, but he manages to make the blacks work, makes them bring out features instead of making him look like a nightmarish version of a halloween clown.
“yeah,” he says. “about… a half hour away, i think. up the interstate.”
he has a nice voice. not quite the accent daniel had been expecting - a college student, he assumes, albeit a little older, and he's not quite sure why he cares so much about a stranger's life until he realises that this is his first chance to be seen as himself, and that it matters to him what the strangers see.
“thanks, man,” daniel says, grinning. “don’t wanna pass out at the wheel before i ever even make it to college, y’know?”
stranger nods. daniel can’t see a nametag, and doesn’t ask for a name. better to remain the strange guy with one earring who gave him directions to a likely-infested motel for a night rather than strange-guy-with-a-name-who-told-him-where-to-go-to-get-eaten-by-bed-bugs. daniel offers him a wave on his way out of the store anyway, which the guy looks hilariously confused by, before he gets back into his piece-of-shit car and keeps driving as the sun sets. the sky is painted in all the colours of a fire, sinking into a deeper spectrum as time goes on. it’s beautiful, and the first time daniel really feels like he can appreciate it.
the motel sucks. the rest of the drive is fine. it’s entirely unremarkable. daniel sings along to the radio at the top of his lungs and can't stop smiling the whole way.
registration at mit ask his name and he slips into the lie he’s constructed to explain away the discrepancy on his application - empty words, he tells them with a plastered-on smile about how his brother had found it really funny to change certain details on his form, like his name and sex, and the girl with the clipboard just… shrugs.
“sure, dude,” she said. “i’m sure we can fix the room thing, but you might be in a co-ed dorm already, which is like…”
“no big deal,” daniel assures her, his smile suddenly real. “thanks. seriously, thank you.”
the girl looks at him a little warily. wasn’t he thanking her too much for some stunt a punk younger brother had pulled? but daniel just smiles and rocks back on his heels, duffel bag bumping his hip. he feels good.
daniel sings for his supper, sings a song of sixpence and spins a story worthy of scheherazade as he works, but everyone knows that a liar gets his comeuppance eventually. every liar is met with the kiss of hellfire, is tormented with brimstone and sulfuric fumes, and he’s no different.
the noise of it is enough to set his ears ringing, the flames leaving him flushed and sweating and all he can think is no no no no no, because his partners are gone and he did it, he made a mistake, the fuse was wrong and ignited wrong and it’s all wrong, wrong wrong wrong. daniel spirals and sobs, something sharp and biting in his throat as he chokes his way through a fire escape and heaves in the late-april sun. he spits black onto the concrete and watches his hopes burn inside it.
“jacobi,” magellan says, six steps away from him with his eyes wide, “jacobi, what did you do?”
“i don’t know,” daniel lies, and doesn’t look up from the ground again. he curls his hands into fists and lets the pain from the bite of his nails leave him weightless and floating.
because he gets fired. obviously. fired in so many ways, cut off and left to burn up the meagre savings he’s scrounged up over the years. severance pay is fine, is whatever, the board probably expect him to go crawling back up to wisconsin and beg to stay back in his parent’s basement, but daniel hasn’t spoken to his father since his twentieth birthday and his mother since he was seven-and-a-half, his siblings probably think he’s a fucking soviet spy or something, and he’s completely alone. he cries into his pillow and the ghosts of his partners are in the room with him telling him how its all his fault, how he’ll burn with them for this, how they’re there to drag him down and down and down with them.
he almost wishes they would.
he flees on a night that he remembers with a more familiar burn - his throat rubbed raw by the cheapest and strongest vodka he can find, probably only half-legal, choked down as he drives the fuck out of ohio and south, to the sun, to somewhere else he can burn.
two years into self-flagellation a man gifts him with a square of cardboard with a number and a company name and it almost hurts to look at him - two pm on a thursday, daniel drunk and miserable and halfway to hell in a cradle made of booze-infused ice when the man offers him a hand, a way out of the hole that’s far more radiant than any way daniel’s ever looked for salvation before.
man is a selfish creature, above all.
daniel shakes his hand and signs a contract three weeks later.