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When it's over, Marc takes a flight home.
He's got contacts, and enough fake money in enough fake bank accounts to get a private jet sent his way within the hour and be landing at Heathrow before the day is out. (He'd have gone for London City - it's closer to their apartment - but there's not as much traffic; he'd have been easier to spot.) From there it's a muted pair of tube rides across the city to Tottenham Court Road, and an equally quiet bus ride in a night so dead that the bus number actually has an N on the front, and then five flights in an empty elevator before he's finally home free.
Man. Austria. Lovely place - but what a disaster it had been, huh?
I don't understand what the foolish one was doing there.
"Your guess is as good as mine," he tells Khonshu, although he can't actually see them. Maybe that's because he's as of yet neglected to turn the lights on, or maybe they're just choosing to be nothing more than a disembodied voice right now. Or maybe they're on the roof.
You promised me he would not interfere!
"Look - I don't know what Steven was doing there. He's never fronted in the middle of the action before. I don't know if there's - if something broke in the normal brain method of keeping him out of it, or if he's…" and perish the thought "... getting stronger… but it doesn't matter, because it's not gonna happen again."
Can you guarantee it, Marc?
"I can try. And in the meantime we're gonna set his little traps up for him, and then we're gonna take a nice nap, and hopefully he's gonna wake up none the wiser."
Hmph.
"It was aaall a dreaaam," he quips, waving his hands about in the air.
Very well. Harrow and his machinations, me and my avatar - nothing but a dream, as far as that idiotic little tick knows.
"Sure."
Then comes the task of pretending that Steven went to bed exactly the same as normal - he places the blue tape and bolts the locks, smoothes the floor-sand, wraps the restraint around his ankle, just in case he doesn't get to wake up on his own terms tomorrow. He pulls up the Staying Awake files, the ones that don't do anything to help, because Steven's not sleeping when he slips away; he skips it to thirty seconds before the end of the audio and lets that play out, because fuck if he's gonna sit around listening to this lady talk about investing yourself in a story for ninety minutes of his own free will. He rolls over and hopes desperately that when Steven wakes up it will be with no understanding of the world he's accidentally stumbled into by fronting at exactly the wrong moment.
(So maybe it was his fault for getting knocked out - but who can blame him? He literally fell out of a top-floor window in the middle of being punched in the face. That's a hard one to just stand up and shake off.)
Except Steven doesn't wake up, and when Marc stretches into consciousness he realises with growing excitement that he might have the whole Saturday to himself. He can take some time to just chill - no missions, no stress. He brought the scarab home and there's nothing to look for any more, which just leaves Marc, independent.
You know what you could spend that time doing?
"Delivering v-"
Delivering vengeance to those who have made others suffer!
"- yeah, that." He's not particularly interested in any side missions anyway. He's supposed to be getting this scarab to Egypt (oh, shit, he should book the flight) and be done with the deal after that. Vengeance-kills are not very high on his to-do list - at least, they don't outrank convincing Steven nothing is amiss. He's a protector, after all, of sorts - a gatekeeper for sure but a protector at heart - and protectors need to keep things Business As Usual on their downtime. He removes the ankle restraint, hops across the floor-sand, takes off the blue tape and balls it up in that weirdly meticulous way that Steven likes to do it and tosses it in the trash (chucks it in the bin, the memory of Steven’s half-baked East London accent echoes in his head); he closes Staying Awake and pulls up the latest news, which tells him nothing interesting. That’s good, he thinks - hopefully the deaths in Austria have stayed very local and evidence-free, because he was not wearing gloves when he stole that van.
Then there’s breakfast to make (read: One Banana to peel and get down him as fast as possible, slightly brown because Steven’s not actually a huge fan of bananas and has no idea why he buys them or when he eats them), a shower to take, teeth to brush, and all the while he’s keeping himself uncomfortably aware of the silence in his head just in case Steven decides to show back up and assume it’s his breakfast, his shower, his toothbrush. Well. It is his toothbrush, but that’s not the point. Hopefully he’s thoroughly stuck in the front, leaving Steven stuck behind metaphorical bars until Marc gives this control up and leaves the brain-jail door ajar for him to wiggle through later.
Is this really all you’re going to do today?
“Morning’s still young,” he shrugs and spits. Maybe he’ll clean the bathroom - it’s kinda shitty in here, he notices, and he’s not sure whether that stain on the wall is mold or not. The apartment is not, contrary to Steven’s belief, on loan from their mother, and as such there is no landlord to tell them when to maintain it. He really oughta clear those voicemails some time soon, as well. Wouldn’t want Steven to get one of those this inbox is full robot-lady voice clips; it’d totally break the illusion he’s going for.
Speaking of his fake mother - the postcard, he realises, sauntering back into the middle of the apartment, is a little off-kilter. Maybe Steven’s doing that as an artistic choice, but it looks like it’s gonna fall any minute now, and Marc can only be doing him a favour if he…
The fish catches his eye.
The dead fish.
“Shit,” escapes him in a sharp breath of shame and frustration all at once. He pulls away from the postcard, leaving it on its tilt for the time being, and circles the tank - yep. That fish is totally dead, huh? Upside down, a little too heavy to breach the surface of the water, not even flapping its fins a little, or however you’re supposed to refer to fish moving, it’s not his fish. It’s -
It’s Steven’s, and he’s gonna wonder what happened to it, and he’s gonna ask questions, “Shiiit,” he repeats, the height of eloquence. How did it even die?
Probably because you’ve been in Austria since early Friday morning, and nobody’s been here to feed it.
“Ah. Yep. That’ll be it.” How the fuck can a fish not manage two days with no food? More likely it died of heartbreak yesterday evening when it realised Steven wasn’t there to keep it company, Marc theorises with some pursed-lipped irritation. Which - sorry, Steven, but he had a job to do, and a stupid thing like a fish was not going to get in the way of that.
He stares at the fish.
The fish stares at him.
“It’s times like these,” Marc declares, scooping the fish-corpse out of the tank with an empty water glass, “I really wish I had my own body. You know?”
I’m sure.
“Like -” it sticks against the wall of the tank and he tries his best to nudge it over without leaving bits of fin on the edge “- Steven’s great. Totally. I’m glad he has his hobbies and everything - I’m glad he makes money - whatever.”
You frequently refer to him in much less polite terms.
“But I just wish I could live my life, do my job, all that - without having to chase after him all the time, you get me?”
If this body was your own, you would not have your job.
“Details, details.” He walks the glass to the toilet, dumps the body, and hovers over the flush-lever for a moment. “Uh, rest in peace - what’d he call it, Goldie - Gus, that’s the one. May you know no more suffering. I would say you’re going to a better place, but I doubt the sewers are gonna be any better than the place you were before. Uhhhh… please don’t block the drain, I guess.”
That’s it. That’s the eulogy. Marc flushes and watches the little orange lump slide away in the current.
Touching.
“Thanks, I really tried my best,” he deadpans.
Still - now that the old fish is gone, he’s gotta go buy a new one, right? Or Steven’s gonna have even more questions than he already did. Which means Marc tugs on a jacket, pulls on their one definitely-not-bloody pair of sneakers, and heads for the street.
The annoying thing about occasionally living Steven’s life for him is that Marc has had to get very good at pretending to be Steven. (There’s probably a more specific word for it, but it’s not one Marc’s aware of.) Sometimes Marc will stick around in the morning through no intent of his own, and on those days he’ll be forced to turn up for work in Steven’s name, imitate Steven’s voice, keep track of the things that Steven knows and what he’s been told. It’s always been in the back of his head that they should start keeping a diary, or a planner or whatever, but he thinks it would have to be Steven’s organic idea for that to actually work, and so what usually ends up happening - he’s pretty sure; he doesn’t really stick around for the work day - is that Steven has to be told the same thing twice, and his boss hates him even more. And Steven’s boss is a dick already, so it’s not super great. Either way, he’s pretty sure that he’s going back to the pet store where Steven got the fish from in the first place, so today is unfortunately one of those days that Marc has to put the Steven-mask on, just in case the employee recognises them.
(Okay, so he puts the Steven-mask on a lot more often than just when he has to. People wanna know what a guy with a Chicago accent’s doing in the UK, and that’s not a question he’s particularly interested in answering every time he goes outside. It keeps him sharp, alright?)
So when he walks into the store and says “Hello,” in the timid, high cadence of the area that Steven’s affected, although Khonshu snorts an echoey laugh, the lady at the desk doesn’t seem particularly bothered.
“Can I help you?”
“Erm -” Khonshu laughs again, and he tries his best not to look like he feels stupid “- I’m looking to buy a goldfish.”
“Yeah, we’ve got a couple.”
“Great, that’s - that’s ace, yeah -” he presses his lips together “- would you be able to… do any of them have one fin?”
“Sorry?”
“Like, instead of two. Like - you know in Nemo, he’s only got…”
The woman hesitates, eyeing him like he’s mildly insane. (Which he is by some metrics, but she doesn’t know that.) “Doooon’t think so.”
“Oh, c’mon -” fuck “- come on, really? It’s just - it’s really important to - for me that it’s -”
“They’ve all got two. That’s how fish come. Can’t help you, mate.”
“Right.” A targetless anger rises in him like someone’s turned up the thermostat. He thinks about - but there’s probably alarms - and the woman’s just doing her job, unfriendly as she’s being - and that won’t change the fact that the fish are all - and he knows where this feeling is coming from, actually, Khonshu.
Kill her. Kill someone. I don’t know, I just feel like it’s been too long since you enacted vengeance.
There’s no vengeance to enact here - just a shitty situation with a shitty outcome either way. “Fine,” he grits, and then to the woman, “right, thank you, I’ll just take… one of the normal ones, then.”
It occurs to him, as she’s ringing him up, just why Steven might have liked the old fish so much. It’s got a lot in common with the pair of them.
Once he’s brought the new fish home, he releases it from its little plastic bag into the much more spacious tank, and actually gives it a bit of food. “Gus Two, huh,” he muses, having let his normal accent return, “you’ve got a hell of an acting job ahead of you. Good luck, li’l guy.” Maybe he should grab his penknife and - No. The fish’d probably die of shock first, and then he’d have to find a third pet store, and he’s already come up with plans for how he wants to spend his afternoon that don’t involve running around after Steven any more.
So no violence?
“Not today.”
Disappointing. I expect more from you when we get to Egypt.
“Shit, you’re right, I gotta book that flight.”
And I had better not even hear a whisper of consciousness from the worm when we get there, okay?
“I can’t -” promise that for certain “- He’s not gonna get in our way, I swear.” If he knows what’s good for him, at least.
I will hold you to that.
“What’s the plan if I’m wrong?”
I am a god. My powers are beyond your prediction.
“Right - you’re gonna kick the wind up and knock me on my ass a couple times, same old.”
He can’t see Khonshu, and he knows the god doesn’t have a pair of lips to pull taut or a brow to furrow, but he can still feel the done-with-your-shit-puny-human expression in their words. Just don’t let him get in the way of you finding the tomb. Perhaps I might decide that I don’t need your help after all. And then? Well, my next candidate’s not so far away.
Marc can only hope that she’s still free.
One more mission - this one mission - and they’re supposed to let him go, but they’ll need someone else to take his place, and he can’t bear thinking of that future.
He sprinkles a little fish food in the tank and tries to put the whole thing out of his mind. Maybe he’ll clean the bathroom.