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Day 271
Two-hundred and seventy-one days. He’s kept count. Originally it was to stop him losing his mind, but now he thinks it’s just made him go crazy faster. The hallucinations pretty much proved that.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Andrés says from where he’s leaning against the wall.
“Shut up,” Martín says and throws his slipper at him.
It passes harmlessly through Andrés’ chest and falls to the floor. Martín scowls at it. It didn’t even have the decency to fall loudly. Andrés sighs, managing to sound superior despite being a figment of Martín’s twisted imagination.
“I thought we were over throwing objects at me.”
Martín scowls and throws his other shoe. “Maybe if you were less annoying, I wouldn’t feel the urge to throw things at you.”
Andrés smirks. “You know I’m not really me. I’m just you. So if you find me annoying, doesn’t that mean you find yourself annoying?”
Martín flops onto his bed, propping his bare feet up against the concrete wall. “I thought we’d already discussed my self-hatred.”
There’s a sigh from across the room and when Martín next opens his eyes, Andrés is sitting on the bed next to him.
“What do you want?”
“What do you want?” Andrés asks, leaning forward so his face is hovering over Martín’s. “Why me? Why spend all your time talking to a version of me when you could be figuring a way out of here?”
Martín closes his eyes again. “You know why.”
“Of course I do, I’m you,” Andrés says softly. “But I want you to say it out loud.”
“Why?” Martín asks. “You fucking know why it’s you I’m talking to. Don’t make me say it.”
There’s a hand on his face – the memory of one. He remembers how the real things felt, how hard they gripped, how warm they were. He could describe every scar, every callous on Andrés’ hands, when they got there, how they happened.
A tear rolls down his cheek and it feels hot against his skin, burning.
“Hush now, mi amor,” Andrés says, voice soothing, and Martín whimpers.
He doesn’t even know any more if that’s really what Andrés sounds like. He thought he could never forget, but three years in Palermo and 271 days in wherever the fuck he is now, and he’s questioning everything.
“You’d never call me that,” he says bitterly and when he forces his eyes open again, Andrés looks sad.
“I told you I loved you, didn’t I?” he asks softly.
“And then you left,” Martín spits. “Why don’t you go now? Go! Just leave me alone!”
There’s a sigh and then Andrés is gone. Martín screams his frustration until his throat is raw and collapses onto the bed. Above him, the fluorescent light flickers off. He curls in on himself, alone again, and waits for morning.
Day 275
He’s woken by the scraping sound of the grate at the bottom of his door being pulled open and a try of food sliding into his cell. He groans and rolls off his bed, shuffling across the cell to collect his breakfast. It’s the same thing it always is, a bowl of oatmeal, a shrivelled looking apple, and a lukewarm cup of coffee. He picks up the coffee and leaves the rest on the tray, slouching back over to his bed.
“You need to eat,” Andrés says and Martín scowls into his coffee.
“I thought you left.”
Andrés straightens his cufflinks. “I came back, don’t want you to be lonely.”
“Great, my hallucination is worried about me, great,” Martín mutters.
“Maybe if you took better care of yourself, I wouldn’t have to,” Andrés says, pointedly looking over at the tray of food. “You can’t keep your strength up, if you don’t eat.”
Martín takes another gulp of coffee. “What do I need strength for? To sit in a cell in some off-the-books prison for the next fifty years?”
“You’re going to get out of here,” Andrés says. “You broke into one of the most secure banks in Denmark and you’re telling me you can’t get out of a shitty Spanish prison?”
Martín slams his mug onto the desk so hard that half its contents spill over the sides.
“And then what?” he demands. “I get out and what do I have? A shitty apartment and all the whiskey I can drink? You ran off into the sunset with your brother and his gang of miscreants and a billion euros and you left me behind for the police to scoop up!”
As always, when Martín throws these accusations in his face, Andrés doesn’t say anything. The tiny part of his brain that can still think rationally, suspects it’s because even now he can’t imagine how Andrés would react. There’s no way he knows what happened to Martín after the entire world watched the Dalis escape from the mint. He doesn’t know that in their desperation, the police went looking for any leads they could find and what they found were old arrest records that brought them to Martín's door.
“You really want to stay here?” Andrés asks and Martín shakes his head. “Then try and get yourself out. You know no one else will.”
Martín buries his face in his hands. “What’s the point. In here, out there, no matter where I am I won’t have you. Might as well be somewhere I get free food.”
“He wouldn’t want this for you,” Andrés insists.
An approximation of a laugh escapes Martín’s lips. “He doesn’t care. If he did, he’d have taken me with him.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes I do. Now why don’t you do what you do best and fuck off.”
Day 309
“Did you hear that?”
Martín doesn’t look up from his game of solitaire. “Oh good, you’re back. It’s been a while.”
There’s a noise of impatience from Andrés. “Martín, I’m serious.”
“So am I,” Martín says, finally looking at him. “You were gone for thirty-four days.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that I am part of you? If I wasn’t here, that was because of you!” Andrés says angrily.
Martín smirks. “What can I say, I’m crazy, you can’t expect me to make sense. But for what it’s worth, I missed you.”
Andrés’ face softens just a fragment. “I missed you too, but right now, I need you to pay attention. Something’s happening.”
“Like what? Prison riot?” He laughs at his own joke, but Andrés remains impassive.
“Listen,” he tells Martín.
Martín puts down his cards and moves towards the door. He gets down on his knees and presses his ear to the grate near the floor.
“I don’t hear anything,” he says, but Andrés shushes him.
“Wait.”
He sighs, but does as he’s told, which might be a new low for him – taking orders from a hallucination. He waits and after a moment he hears gunshots. There’s shouting too and something that sounds suspiciously like an explosion. The noises get closer and he scrambles away from the door.
“What the fuck?” he asks and Andrés shrugs.
“They’re either coming to rescue you or to kill you – let’s just hope it’s the former.”
“I hate you,” Martín scowls, just as an explosion – much closer than the last one – rocks his surroundings.
He moves to the far end of the cell, pressing himself against the wall, wishing at least one piece of furniture weren’t bolted down so he’d have something to defend himself with.
There’s scuffling outside his door and he bites back the urge to tell whoever it is to just hurry the fuck up. There’s another explosion and his door collapses inwards, slamming onto the ground and he takes a moment to be grateful that he moved as far away from there as he could.
Three people step into the room, walking right over the flattened door. They’re dressed in the same uniforms as the guards Martín saw when he first arrived and the rare occasions he’s allowed out into the rec yard, but they don’t look like any of the guards he’s seen before. Two of them are female, one with long, shiny black hair and the other with a mass of blonde curls. They’re on either side of a huge bald man with a long, wild beard.
“Who the fuck are they?” he asks Andrés, who shakes his head in reply.
The woman with the curly hair narrows her eyes. “Who are you talking to?”
Martín blinks, unused to being addressed directly. “No one, who are you and what do you want?”
“We’re friends of the Professor,” the dark-haired one says. “We’re here to get you out.”
Martín frowns. “I don’t know who that is.”
“Look, we don’t have time for this. All I know is, Berlin insisted we come and get you, so here we are. We’re running out of time, let’s go.” She reaches forward and grabs Martín’s arm.
Embarrassingly, even though he tries, he can’t wrench his arm free – maybe Andrés was right about keeping his strength up. He struggles and the big guy takes his other arm.
“Come on,” he says in accented Spanish. “We’re taking you to Berlin and the Professor.”
“I told you, I don’t know who those people are,” Martín spits as he’s dragged out of his cell and down the rubble-strewn hallway. “Tell me what you want!”
“We don’t have time for this,” the dark-haired woman sighs. “Stockholm, stick him and then Helsinki can carry him out.”
The blonde produces a syringe from nowhere and pushes his head to one side.
“What? No!” he screams, but the needle is in his neck before he can try biting at her hand.
The hallway starts to swim in front of his eyes and he feels his whole body relax. Darkness starts to cloud his vision and the last thing he sees is Andrés, a worried look on his face, moving towards him.
When he wakes up, he decides he must finally have finally gone properly crazy, because he can hear the ocean. He slowly opens his eyes and finds himself in a room that is neither his cell, nor his flat in Sicily.
The bed and the sheets he’s lying on are softer than anything he’s been around in years and he almost can’t bring himself to leave it, but he needs to figure out where he is. The wooden floor isn’t cold when he stands on it with his bare feet and he crosses to the drawn floor-length curtains. He tugs them open just a few inches and blinks at the bright sunlight that floods in.
“You’re awake.” He turns and sees Andrés standing by the door.
He’s not in his usual suit and Martín almost laughs that his brain has seen fit to dress the other man in linen slacks and shirt so thin it’s almost translucent.
“Of course, you leave me alone for a month in that cell, but the minute we’re out, you pop right back up,” he scoffs. “Where do you think we are?”
Andrés frowns. “We’re in the Philippines.”
Martín looks back out the window, at the white sand beach he can see stretching out towards the ocean. “As good a guess as any, I suppose. It makes sense that you don’t know, if I don’t.”
“Martín what are you talking about?” Andrés asks.
“You know, you’re a part of my brain so you don’t know things that I don’t and vice versa. Nice outfit, by the way, I really outdid myself on that one.”
Andrés scowls, moving towards him. “Martín, you’re not making sense – are you still woozy from the drugs?”
“Ugh, stop acting so concerned,” Martín says, opening the curtains fully. “You know the real Andrés wouldn’t act like that.”
“The real Andrés?”
Martín nods. “Yes. Now, we need to figure out where we are, who the Professor is and why he wanted those people to get us out.”
A hand touches his shoulder and Martín flinches away violently. Andrés stares at him, his hand still outstretched.
“That’s new,” Martín says breathlessly. “Didn’t think I could imagine such real touches.”
Andrés’ eyes are wide as he steps towards Martín again and puts a hand on his shoulder and another on his cheek. “Martín, I’m real.”
“It’s been a while since you’ve tried that trick,” Martín tells him, even as he leans into the imaginary touch.
“Martín, por favor, stop whatever this is,” Andrés says angrily.
“Yes, that’s more like him – I think nostalgia softened my memories, but Andrés always was a bit of an asshole,” Martín says conversationally. He laughs when Andrés looks insulted. “You’re not actually him, don’t be offended.”
“Right, come with me!” Andrés says and suddenly his grip tightens on Martín’s shoulder and he’s dragging him from the room.
“This is weird,” Martín says. “Am I moving myself or am I just imagining being moved?”
“You’re not imagining anything!” Andrés says and Martín sniggers.
“Going crazy is fun, you should try it sometime. Or since you’re me, do you already know what it’s like?”
Andrés sighs, but doesn’t say anything, just keeps dragging Martín through the house. They enter a huge, state of the art kitchen and Andrés lets go of him long enough to stalk over to the adjoining living room. He reappears with his brother, who looks exactly like Martín remembers.
“Oh good, now there’s two of you,” Martín sighs. “Sergio, no offence, but get out of my head.”
“See,” Andrés says, gesturing at Martín.
Sergio sighs. “Martín, you aren’t hallucinating. You’re at my house in the Philippines. My gang rescued you from the prison near Seville where you had been held for ten months.”
“Well that makes no sense, why would either of you send people to come and get me?” Martín asks his hallucinations.
Sergio looks mildly guilty and Andrés looks surprised and angry at the same time.
“Martín, you don’t really believe that?”
“You’re me, you know I do,” Martín says, rolling his eyes.
Sergio looks between the two of them and then steps forward. “Right, come with me. Your brain can’t conjure hallucinations of people you haven’t met, so I’m going to introduce you to the gang and they can confirm to you that we’re real.”
Martín releases a heavy, disbelieving sigh, but gestures for Sergio to lead the way. Andrés stays close, so close that Martín can almost feel the heat of his body – almost as if it were real. He follows Sergio through the living room and out onto a sun-drenched terrace, where a group of people are seated at a table, clearly in the middle of lunch.
“Everyone, this is Martín, can you please confirm to him that you can see me and Berlin and that we’re the ones who had him rescued,” Sergio orders.
Martín squints at the group of people, recognising the three who came to his cell. Everyone is staring at him with varying degrees of confusion on their faces.
“Uh, what’s going on?” a man with a square jaw and short curly hair asks.
He has his arm around the blonde woman who sedated Martín, who is frowning too. Martín turns to Sergio and raises his eyebrows.
“See, you’re in my head,” he says pointedly.
“You think you’re hallucinating the Professor?” a woman with a short bob asks.
Martín turns to look at her. “I don’t know who that is, I’m hallucinating Sergio.”
“That’s me,” Sergio says and the woman’s eyes narrow.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but you’re standing between Berlin and the Professor,” the woman with the dark hair tells him. “They found out the police had taken you and figured out a plan to save you. Then they sent us to get you, since they couldn’t risk returning to Spain.”
Martín pokes Sergio hard in the side making him yelp. “You all saw and heard that?”
“You assaulting the Professor? Yeah, we saw that,” the man with the square jaw says.
“Oh,” Martín says faintly. “And… Andrés?”
“Berlin? Yeah, that fucker is there too,” the woman with the bob say, smiling unkindly at Andrés.
“Fuck,” Martín says.
He suddenly has a headache the size of an elephant rampaging behind his eyes and he feels a little nauseous. A hand grips his elbow and then Andrés is forcing him into a chair.
“Everyone fuck off,” Andrés commands and to Martín’s surprise the gang does as they’re told. “You too, Sergio,” Andrés says when his brother hesitates. “Let me talk to Martín alone.”
When Sergio follows the others into the house, Andrés drags a chair round to sit in front of Martín.
“You’re here?” Martín asks and Andrés nods. “You came for me… why?”
Andrés sets his jaw. “Do you really think so poorly of me, that you believe I’d let you rot in prison?”
He considers lying, but now that he’s got the chance to speak to the real Andrés, maybe he owes him the truth.
“You left me,” he says. “What you did in the monastery… it’s the cruellest thing you could have done. You left me and kicked me out of the plan and then the police dragged me from my home all because I once bailed you out of prison. Why would I ever have expected you to come for me?”
Andrés settles back in his chair and nods stiffly. “I deserve that, I suppose. But you have to know, when I left you, I thought it was the right thing to do.”
Martín scoffs. “You did it for yourself though, not for me. You did it because Sergio asked, because you decided your brother was more important.”
“I was wrong,” Andrés says, setting a hand on Martín’s knee.
“Maybe you were,” Martín says. “But you still did it. And I still spent three-hundred days in prison. And three years before that, trying to drink myself to death to try and forget you.”
“So where does that leave us?”
Martín shakes his head. “I don’t know. The last time I saw a version of you that wasn’t a hallucination, you said you loved me… was that true?”
“Yes,” Andrés says immediately. “It was, it is.” He hesitates. “And you?”
“Well, I wasn’t hallucinating about Sergio,” Martín says, sniffing.
Andrés smiles, crooked and familiar. “I’m glad to hear that,” he says and pulls Martín into a hug that has both of them half off their chairs.
Martín buries his face in Andrés’ neck and lets the other man hold him close. “You certainly smell better than my hallucination.”
Andrés laughs and then pulls them both upright. “I’m going to take that as a compliment and I’m also going to recommend that you get some more rest. Do you want anything to eat?”
“No,” Martín says. “I haven’t really been hungry in a while.”
Andrés frowns, one hand sliding down Martín’s side to grasp his waist. “Is that why you’re so thin? It’s not healthy, querido.”
“Neither is hallucinating your best friend,” Martín says bitterly.
Andrés grasps his jaw tightly and forces Martín to look him in the eye. “You’re not hallucinating anymore and I’m here now. I’ll take care of you.”
He nips at Martín’s bottom lip, just hard enough to make him feel it without drawing blood, and then kisses him. Martín has replayed their last kiss thousands of time alone in his cell, but it doesn’t compare to the feeling of Andrés’ lips on his, his hands on his face, the sound of the ocean beating against the beach indistinguishable from his heartbeat pounding in his ears.
Martín curls his fingers into the short hair on the back of Andrés’ head and tugs roughly. “You can’t leave me alone again,” he says.
Andrés smiles and Martín can feel it against his mouth. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Now, you should rest.”
“Come with me?” Martín asks, disentangling himself from Andrés.
“If you eat,” Andrés argues. Martín scowls and he just shrugs. “You won’t take care of yourself so I’ll have to.”
He takes hold of Martín’s hand and they go through the living room – where the gang is all trying to look like they weren’t eavesdropping – and into the kitchen, where Andrés collects food for them both.
“We’ll eat in my room,” Andrés says, glaring over his shoulder at the gang who all look away immediately.
They return to the room Martín woke up in and he rolls his eyes. “I should have known this was yours, the sheets were too nice for anyone else.”
Andrés smirks and then ushers him onto the bed, where he badgers Martín into eating an apple and a slice of raisin bread, before he refuses anything else.
“We’ll work on that,” Andrés says, vaguely threatening as he clears the food off the bed.
Martín yawns and curls up, patting the space beside him. “Come here.”
Andrés acquiesces to the request, climbing onto the bed beside him and curling himself around Martín’s diminished frame. He rubs a hand across Martín’s chest as he presses even closer.
“Stay?” he asks quietly and Andrés nods.
“I won’t leave until you tell me to.”
“Not likely,” Martín says, clutching at the arm Andrés has around his waist.
“I walked away from you once, it won’t happen again,” Andrés tells him, but Martín’s asleep before he can reply, enveloped in Andrés’ solid warmth.