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Jake is all sharp corners and contradictions, a puzzle that Marc can’t figure it.
It’s disturbing, having a person in his head that he doesn’t quite know, doesn’t quite understand. Two months after Jake joins them in a shared consciousness, Marc can count on one hand the things he’s learned about Jake.
One. For Jake, driving is not a chore, not a method to get from one place to another; it’s something more. Marc can feel it in Jake’s chest when he takes them for drives along the curving rural roads outside of London, taking turns on two wheels and swerving to avoid the small animals that dash across the road - joy, exhilaration. Equal parts control and freedom.
Two. Jake seeks out death like it’s an old friend. He takes Khonshu’s missions with a sort of glee that makes Marc uncomfortable; he revels in a victory against any opponent, laughs when he feels a bone breaking beneath his hands. For Jake, this, too, is freedom. There is safety in power. There is freedom in power, too - freedom from potential victimhood.
He knows that Jake prefers speaking Spanish over English, that Jake chews gum with the compulsion of an ex-smoker, that Jake is messy – even messier, somehow, than Steven. Three, four, five.
He could leave it at that, the five facts of the man who lives in his head. The sixth is one he wishes he did not know, one he wishes he didn’t notice so clearly: over the months Jake has grown more comfortable conversing with Steven. Together, they confer like college roommates, like brothers, lobbing insults back and forth like terms of affection, their conversations easy and fraternal and casual.
To Marc, Jake does not talk much at all.
You’re not going into my shift as me, Steven says.
Jake adjusts the sleeves of his sweater – Steven’s sweater, technically - looking himself over in their mirror. “Sure I am, cariño. I used to do it all the time.”
Yes, and I really wish you hadn’t, Steven says.
While Marc and Steven can slip easily in and out of control with each other, Jake cannot. He gains control of the body randomly, loses it unpredictably. When he wakes up, all Steven and Marc can do is watch.
“You work at a bookshop,” Jake says. “How hard can it be? Pick up a book, put it on the shelf. Pick up another book – guess what? It’s going on the shelf.”
That’s… extremely dismissive. Actually sort of hurtful to hear, thanks.
Jake begins slipping Steven’s sneakers onto his feet.
You’ll have to, to talk to customers! About books! Do you even know how to read? What’s the last book you’ve read, mate?
Jake grins. “I’m a big fan of Green Eggs and Ham.”
There’s an edge of desperation in Steven’s voice that suggests that he’s not joking around, an edge that sounds something like genuine worry. Marc can feel Steven’s anxiety tittering over into his own mind.
Jake, Marc says. Jake stops with his hand on the doorknob of their apartment and cocks his head. He’s listening, even as he says nothing. If Steven doesn’t want you to go in, don’t go in.
“Not your conversation, jefe,” Jake tells him, flat. “Steven, relax. I know you hate missing shifts.” He waits for Steven’s response, his hand still gripping the doorknob.
It’s not that I don’t think you can do it, Steven says, it’s that you’d be there, pretending to be me. To my coworkers, to other people. I don’t want- I don’t… Steven takes a moment to gather his thoughts. I want to be the only Steven Grant.
Jake remains frozen for another extended beat. His thoughts are quiet; Marc never can quite get a sense of his emotions, even when he’s technically inside of Jake’s head.
Jake releases the doorknob and backs away, back into their apartment. He pulls Steven’s sweater off over his head and tosses it onto the floor.
There, Steven says, much more relaxed, that wasn’t so hard, was it?
“Cállate,” Jake says. “I’m still calling in as you. Don’t piss me off or I’ll come up with a really embarrassing excuse.”
Got my hand stuck in a pickle jar?
Jake slides their phone from his pocket and collapses onto the sofa. “You know those people who come into the emergency room with weird objects stuck up their asses?”
Wanker, Steven says, without malice.
It’s always strange, unsettling, to hear Jake modify his voice to imitate them. Jake adopts Steven’s accent to tell his boss that he’s “really just under the weather, blimey, Rachel, I’m so bloody sorry.” Steven’s boss – an older woman who has a soft spot for Steven that Marc thinks is lunacy until he looks in a mirror and has Steven’s big, pleading eyes turned on him once again – offers condolences and tells him to rest up.
After he hangs up, Steven says, I don’t prattle on that much.
“Yes, you do,” Jake says, at the same time that Marc says, Yes, you do.
Before Jake can set the phone down, it pings with a notification. It’s a photo of a trio of pigeons on the edge of a building, the sun bright over the skyline of Cairo in the background. Layla’s caption says: Friends of yours?
She’s been back in Cairo for three weeks, back in her new home, and though she texts or calls nearly daily, Steven manages to sigh forlornly each time she does. Marc thinks it’s only a matter of time before Steven suggests that they move to Cairo permanently, following Layla there like lost ducklings.
The thing is, the moment Layla gives the indication that she’d be okay with it, Marc would agree to do it.
Jake’s thumb rubs the edge of the phone, up and down. He lingers over the photo long enough that the silence grows tight and awkward.
Steven says, You can text her back, you know.
Marc tenses. Jake has not yet formally met Layla, has not yet talked to her, and though Marc wouldn’t admit it, he’s glad for it. Jake’s control of the body means that, if he were to say something wrong to her, there would be nothing Marc could do to stop him.
And Marc has no idea if Jake would say something wrong to her. There’s something barbed in the way he interacts with Marc. With Steven, his jokes are soft things, lobbed lightly and meant to be tossed back; with Marc, they tend to have sharp edges, things meant to cut and dig and persist. Marc doesn’t know if Jake hates him, doesn’t know how far he might go if he felt the need to lash out, doesn’t know if that would put Layla in the crossfire.
He doesn’t know Jake at all.
Jake clicks the textbox on the phone to respond, then hesitates again. He types, Hello, luv, but deletes it before Steven can chastise him. He taps his thumbnail against the screen, pensive.
Aren’t you supposed to be the one who’s good with women? Steven asks.
“Pendejo,” Jake says. He tosses the phone onto the coffee table.
You’ll have to talk to her eventually, Steven says.
“No, I don’t.” Jake kicks his feet up onto the coffee table, still wearing Steven’s sneakers. “I’m very busy, you know. Fist of Khonshu. Takes up all my time.” He tucks his hands behind his head, stretching out his chest. His feet waggle back and forth, tapping together at the toe.
Marc, tell him that he should stop avoiding Layla. She’s perfectly lovely.
Steven has the habit lately, Marc has found, of trying to include Marc into his conversations with Jake. He seems completely ignorant of the fact that, whenever Marc speaks, it makes Jake’s hackles go up like a defensive dog.
Marc wants to be left out of this. He can’t tell Jake to stay away from Layla, because it will only serve to make him run directly toward her. He can’t encourage Jake to talk to her, because he actually might.
I don’t care what he does, Marc says.
“Is that so,” Jake says, his voice flat. Jake stands up and slips from the apartment to take a drive. He leaves the cell phone behind.
---
“You don’t need to try and include me when you talk to Jake,” Marc says, later, when Jake has slipped away again, back to the place they all go when they sleep.
“What?” Steven answers. He puts the eggs that Marc had pulled out back into the fridge and instead sets the egg replacer carton on the counter. He snorts in amusement. “That would be awkward, wouldn’t it? Having a conversation with Jake and just pretending you’re not there? Who would do that? Not me.”
“I don’t think he…” Marc trails off. He doesn’t know how to state, I don’t think he likes me, without sounding like a fucking child. “I don’t think he appreciates my input,” he says instead as he begins chopping up a pepper.
“Oh,” Steven says, with dawning realization. “You think he hates you.”
Marc grits his teeth. He’s an adult, and this is a ridiculous conversation, and he has absolutely no excuse for continuing it. “He has a preference for one of us, yeah, just a bit.”
“Well,” Steven equivocates, “he and I have spent more time together.” Marc adds the peppers into the pan to cook down a bit; they steam and hiss satisfyingly, and he watches the oil pop beneath them. “He’s not so bad,” Steven continues, when Marc doesn’t answer him. “I mean he’s a total nutter, but then, aren’t we all.”
Marc pushes the peppers around the pan with a spatula, keeping his hand busy. He feels as if Jake is constantly angry with him, as if Jake is carrying some grudge from a past slight. But Marc has no memory of doing anything to him, has no memories of Jake at all, really. When he thinks back, he only knows Jake as the blank spaces in his mind, as the moments that he denied to himself existed - his going AWOL from the military, the intermittent fugue states that he can’t recall.
Marc knows that his memory isn’t what most people would call normal. He supposes it’s possible, somewhere in those blank spaces, that he did something to Jake to warrant his distaste. But there is another option. Jake has seen everything of Marc’s life – nearly everything. Every conversation, every choice, every action.
It’s possible, Marc knows, that Jake simply does not like Marc because he knows Marc better than anyone.
“He’ll come around,” Steven says. “I wouldn’t worry about it. After all, I wasn’t such a big fan of yours at first either, was I? And look at us now, a regular duo, we are.”
Steven says it lightly, as if his hatred of Marc at first was trivial, was expected, but the mention of it digs deep into Marc, pulls at his innards like a hook. He had spent years, in his weaker moments, imagining talking to Steven, meeting him properly, being more than just a silent observer in his life. And when it had finally happened, Steven had rejected him, had been disgusted by him. Marc remembers blood on a mirror to match the blood on his fist, a wrecked hotel room in Cairo. He hadn’t handled it very well.
Marc pours the egg replacer into the pan. “So,” he says slowly, “We just need to get shot again, die, fight our way out of the afterlife, and then Jake and I will be best buds?”
“Well, no, I’d rather not get shot again if you can help it. Would really interfere with my work schedule,” Steven says. He snorts a bit at his own joke.
The annoying part – the really annoying part – is that Marc can’t really blame Jake for preferring Steven.
Marc finishes cooking the eggs – the fake eggs – and plates them. Much later, after he’s done eating and the plates have been scrubbed and set to dry, Steven says, “I can talk to him if you like.”
“Drop it, Steven,” Marc tells him, weary. “Restrain yourself from sending him a note in Bio that says do you like Marc, check yes or no.”
Steven does drop it, or at least he goes quiet for a time, and he doesn’t mention it again.
---
Layla comes to London again and brings a coating of snow behind her. She curls her legs under herself on their couch and, between mouthfuls of takeout, tells them about Taweret and Cairo and the satisfaction that comes with protecting people.
Each time Marc sees her he thinks she’s become more luminous. Her excitement, and her power, make her bigger than life. She fills the apartment with it, with her confidence.
“The Avengers contacted me,” she says casually, digging deep into her takeout box of fried rice.
“What?” Steven gasps, eyes going wide. “The Avengers? Like, like, the Avengers?”
Layla smiles, soaking in his excitement, but she rolls her eyes. “It’s not like they want me to join up or anything. They want to know who I am, what I’m about.” With rice shoved into her cheek, she says, “I think they really just want to know if I’ll be trouble for them.”
“Don’t tell them anything,” Marc says.
“Bossy,” Steven says quickly, a gentle reminder that it’s not Marc’s right to tell her what to do. To Layla, he asks, “What did you say to them?”
She shrugs. “They already knew my name. I haven’t really been hiding it. It was War Machine, Colonel Rhodes.” She looks down at her food, poking at it with her chopsticks. “He was nice. Said he hasn’t been to Egypt much before. Wasn’t too happy about my record, you know. All the fake passports and black market business.”
Marc tenses.
Layla gives him a knowing look. “Relax. He said that the Avengers have bigger things to worry about than me, unless I go causing trouble.” She bites down on the ends of her chopsticks and raises her eyebrows. “What do you think? Think I’d make a pretty good supervillain?”
“The best-“ Steven starts, and Marc quickly nudges him away before he can embarrass himself further, but Layla only laughs.
She falls asleep later, when the sun goes down, slumping over into a loose curl on their couch. Steven dithers over her for a while, mumbling in argument with himself about whether or not he should wake her so that she can sleep in her own hotel room. In the end, he drapes a blanket over her and stares at her from across the room with his hands clasped.
“Oh, Marc, look at her,” he says, letting out a breath on a deep sigh. “She’s so amazing.”
She’s laying with her mouth open, her hair unwashed and messy from her flight, and Marc, embarrassingly, can’t help but agree.
“We really need to have a talk about this, buddy,” Marc says. He was kind of hoping – a fool’s hope – that Steven’s crush on Layla would fade with exposure. Instead, it seems to have only stoked itself into something stronger, something that Layla doesn’t seem to be discouraging.
Steven and his damn likeability.
It’s then that Jake shakes into consciousness. He takes in his surroundings quickly, eyes falling immediately on Layla’s sleeping form, and his body goes stiff and still.
Great timing, Marc tells him, flat. He doesn’t quite manage to hide his frustration; he doesn’t get much time with Layla as it is, and practically none with Layla alone.
But Jake doesn’t respond with the quick fuck off that Marc expected. Instead, he immediately turns for the door of their apartment, slipping into a pair of Marc’s shoes and grabbing his hat and keys from their spots on the side table before slipping out and down, down into the street.
You all right, mate? Steven asks.
Jake doesn’t respond. He shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans. Outside, the flurries continue to fall, only visible in the light of the streetlamps and headlights. The dirty snow crunches under his shoes as he heads for the parking garage where they keep his car. He keeps his shoulders hunched against the cold; he forgot a jacket.
Is it Khonshu? Marc tries. Jake seems to be moving with purpose, his steps hurried in a way that Marc has never witnessed in him before.
“Huh?” Jake says. “No, no.”
By the time he reaches their floor of the parking garage, he’s shivering. He pulls the dustcover off his white muscle car and immediately cranks the heat as the engine rumbles to life.
“Mierda,” he says, blowing on his hands to warm them. “It’s worse than Chicago.”
No it’s not, Marc says.
We left Layla, Steven says. We really should – we should go back and leave her a note or something, shouldn’t we? Won’t she be worried?
Jake sits still, the car idling in the dark garage. His breath coalesces before him in the cold interior of the car. “She’ll be fine,” he says, a bit distantly.
He takes them out again, aiming for his usual roads outside of London, but his driving is different, lacking his usual erratic desperation for speed. He keeps the music low, his thumbs tapping on the steering wheel, rhythmless, his eyes looking far off, far down the road, barely seeing it.
Marc keeps expecting Steven to pipe up with his usual words of soft encouragement, or to nag, or to insult Jake out of his mood. But Steven says nothing. He spends the entire hour of the drive silent. It’s not unusual for him to sleep during Jake’s drives – it’s practically a defense mechanism for his own sanity, given how much he hates and fears them – but this isn’t one of Jake’s usual drives.
It’s abnormally quiet in a way that, Marc realizes, has become alien to him. He’s gotten accustomed to always hearing someone chattering, whether it’s him or Steven or even Jake, and now the silence is strange and thick and tangible, draping around the car in a way that makes it feel like they’re cut off from the rest of the world, like nothing’s quite real.
Outside of the lights of London, the sky opens up wide and the stars brighten, visible between the wisps of clouds. It’s still strange to Marc, who grew up in the light pollution of the city, to see the stars; their existence still manages to surprise him.
He has no idea how Jake knows the areas around London so well, but he seems to drive with a destination in mind, and after an hour, he finds it. Not a racetrack like Marc might have expected, and not even an empty strip of street for Jake to test. It’s a quiet road on a hill amongst a set of hills, empty of people, dark but for a few old-fashioned streetlamps. At the apex of the hill, Jake parks by the side of the road and turns the key. The radio goes off; the only sound is the engine as it clicks, cooling rapidly.
Jake puts his arms over the steering wheel and rests his chin on them. He looks out at the hills, pristine and white and reflecting the starlight.
Marc really wishes that Steven would say something.
He didn’t know that Jake was capable of silent introspection, but he doesn’t know what else this could be, what other name he could give it.
Did something happen? Marc asks, breaking the silence. Did Khonshu do something?
These days, Marc is generally conscious when Jake controls the body, has been doing a pretty good job of keeping track of what’s happening, but he doesn’t know what could be making Jake act like this.
“Madre,” Jake mumbles, leaning back in his seat. “Not everything is about Khonshu, you know?”
Most things are, Marc reminds him.
Jake drums his thumbs on the wheel again. Already the air in the car is beginning to cool again, seeping through the window; Marc can feel it on the side of Jake’s face.
Jake’s mood seems to shift, suddenly. His shoulders go back; he plasters on a grin, baring his teeth. “So,” he says, “jefe. What do you suggest I say to your wife when we get back? Which embarrassing internal thought should I expose first?”
Speaking to Jake can be like walking a minefield. Marc has no map for how to traverse it safely.
What, about yourself? Marc asks. Go for it.
“No, no, about you.”
Marc tenses despite himself. You can’t read my thoughts, he says.
Jake looks at his own eyes in the rearview. Marc hasn’t quite figured out how to manifest in reflections when Jake is fronting yet, but the look is meant for him regardless. Jake lifts his eyebrows and grins. “You sure about that?”
No, Marc is not. But he decides to call his bluff. Yes, he says.
“Eh, you’re right, I can’t. But I’ve seen so much of your life that I feel like I can.” His mirthless grin widens. “I can guess what you’re thinking right now.”
Marc doubts it, but Jake looks into the rearview again and says, “You’re wishing Steven was awake right now so that he could talk to me instead of you.”
Marc isn’t used to feeling shame; he’s usually quick to defend against it, to morph it into anger before it can do any harm. But now, it spreads hot through his chest.
His thoughts stutter over excuses, over lies, but they dissolve as quickly as they form, fruitless. It wouldn’t do any good to lie.
Marc says, I’m not the only one who plays favorites. His desperate bid to deflect.
“Oh, everyone’s favorite is Steven,” Jake agrees, looking up at the ceiling of the car. “Es verdad.” After a moment, he adds, “I’m going to put his garden plants in the garbage disposal.”
It shocks Marc enough that he has to suppress a laugh. They don’t really have garbage disposals in England, he tells Jake.
Jake rolls his head against the headrest. “Ay, really? The toilet, then. I’ll flush them down the toilet.”
Marc, comfortable in the knowledge that Jake would never do it, says, I’ll give you an alibi.
Jake grins slowly. He takes on Marc’s accent to say, “No, buddy, we were at the movie theater all afternoon, buddy.”
Must’ve been the fish that did it.
“Oh, lookin’ fishy, were they?”
Shut the fuck up, Marc says.
In the distance, a few cars move across the hills, their headlights little cones of illumination against the road.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Jake says. At Marc’s confused silence, he elaborates, “About what I should say to your wife.”
Marc hadn’t known that it was a genuine question. Since when do you ask me what I think? he asks.
Jake shakes his head and says nothing.
Marc doesn’t know why Jake would need advice in the first place. He’s seen Jake speak to women before; Jake approaches women with the same lack of fear that he approaches everything else. He’s incapable of being embarrassed, and it reads, apparently, as a captivating level of confidence. When he wants to charm, he seems to do a good job of it.
It’s not like you’re intimidated by women, Marc reminds him.
“Most women, sure,” Jake says. He waves a hand, dismissive. “The ones that don’t matter.”
Marc hears the implication between the words, even as Jake doesn’t voice it: but Layla does matter.
Fuck, Marc says. If you also have a crush on my wife I’m going to chew off my own hand.
Jake laughs, a hoarse, almost soundless thing. “No,” he says. He runs his hands over the steering wheel, a meaningless gesture. Then, apropos of nothing, he says, “If I mess it up, what will you think of me then, huh?”
It seems to come from nowhere, a thought plucked from the ether. Huh? Marc asks, lacking anything else. He can’t follow Jake’s thought process, can’t untangle whatever he’s getting at.
Jake tips his head back against the headrest again, jostling his hat. “You don’t need more reasons to keep me away,” he says.
It feels significant, even as Marc tries to make sense of it, tries to rationalize it. Marc hasn’t been keeping Jake away; he’s made an effort to never fight Jake for control. It had been Steven’s insistence, back in the early days after Jake’s arrival.
He was alone for so long, Steven had said. I don’t understand it either, but I understand that. He deserves time in control. So if he takes it, let’s let him have it for a bit, yeah? He’ll figure it out.
“You don’t even realize you’re doing it, do you?” Jake asks into the silence. The car has gone cold again, his breath becoming visible again in the dim light.
No conscious memories come to Marc, but some gut feeling, some secret shame, fills in the gaps anyway. He tries to suppress Jake like he tries to suppress everything else, keeping him locked away, keeping him from taking the body, keeping him from Layla and from Steven and from everything else – a subconscious defense. Jake is blood in a desert, the elation in causing pain in an opponent, the joy of stepping to the brink of death again and again and again, of welcoming it.
But Jake is more than that, too. He’s a fast car in the dark, he’s making jokes until Steven is wheezing, he’s the refusal to ever be a victim again.
I didn’t, Marc says, honestly making his words heavy. I didn’t realize.
Jake grins in the dark. “You’re pretty dense sometimes, jefe.”
Marc doesn’t bother to argue. He spends so much time lying to himself, so much time suppressing the parts of himself that he finds inconvenient, breaking his memories into pieces so that they can be tucked away and never exposed.
He can keep doing it forever. And if he does, Jake would be the casualty of it, never quite able to gain full control of the body, never quite able to win his independence, never quite able to step into the light – not if Marc keeps denying him.
Don’t lie to her, Marc says, quiet. She’ll see through it. I’ve lied to her so much, you know, that now it’s the thing she hates the most.
“Good thing I never lie,” Jake says innocently.
Offer to take her for a drive, Marc suggests. She’s become a speed freak since getting her wings. She’d probably love it.
“A woman after my own heart.” Jake takes a breath through his nose and reaches for the keys, starting the ignition. “Fuck it,” he says.
He’s quiet during the drive back to the city. The snow picks up a bit, a white haze in the headlights, moisture speckling against the windshield.
If Marc were a better person, he reflects, he would say something meaningful to Jake, something comforting. Some promise to try to do better by him in the future, some offer to make more of an effort. But Marc isn’t a better person, and he’s not in the habit of making promises that he can’t keep. He’s not the type to change for the better.
But that’s not the truth. In the months since Harrow, since Ammit, since the Duat and Steven and Layla and Jake, since the phone call with his father, since he stood up again in the tomb of an ancient pharaoh, he has changed. Steven and Layla have dragged him there, into a new place, despite how he digs his heels in, despite how hard he might refuse to move. He has moved. The Marc that denied and suppressed Jake’s existence is not the Marc who sits in the car now, quietly listening to Jake’s radio, watching the snow fall. Change is not an impossibility; it’s an inevitability, and for once it doesn’t intimidate Marc much at all. He’s not changing alone, and the only way to go is forward.
Jake parks the car and covers it again, giving it two loving pats before heading back to their apartment. Layla is awake when he opens the door, curled up on the couch and flicking through her phone.
When she looks up and sees him, she says, “You forgot your coat.”
Jake adjusts the cap on his head and brushes the snow from his shoulders. “Coats are overrated,” he says. He waits just inside the door, a low-stakes stalemate. The fish tank filter bubbles noisily, and Jake glances at it. Marc, in the reflection of the tank’s glass, looks back. Marc nods, an encouraging movement: go on.
“I hear you’re pretty good at flying,” Jake says.
Layla grins, slow. “Why? You need some pointers, Jake?”
“Flying is Marc’s thing,” Jake says, moving into the apartment, away from the door. “Now, driving. Driving is the real thrill.”
“I’ve heard that about you,” Layla says. She sets her phone aside and leans forward, all trace of fatigue gone. “Do you want to try something?”
An hour later, Jake presses the pedal of his car down to the floor, eating up the road like it’s nothing, but Layla keeps pace, gliding by the car in her suit. Jake swerves closer to her to shout out the open window at her, something fast and joyous and fake-angry in Spanish, despite Steven’s muted protestations, and Marc can see Layla grinning white even through the snow and the dark. She rolls, wings stretching, showing off, and Marc lets out a jubilant whoop before he can stop himself, and it makes Jake laugh. Jake takes a turn too roughly, and it slams him hard into the car door, a thrill of pain zipping through his shoulder, and he laughs – ugly, imperfect, and unconcerned, and they fly into the dark without anything to fear at all.