Work Text:
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday, dear Otto!
Happy birthday to you!
The entire dining hall was staring at Otto’s table and, in unison, thirteen watching students lifted their hands to their mouths to cover their whispers.
“Hey, isn’t that the kid who disappeared?”
“He was in a coma for a bit. You should probably keep your distance. I heard he’s crazy.”
“He got his veins tattooed on his arm. It’s super dope.”
“No, man, I heard he killed somebody.”
Otto couldn’t hear these specific whispers, but he’d heard people’s comments in the hallways enough to guess. Everyone wanted to know what had happened to him. Everyone wanted to know if there was something wrong with him. Otto forced a smile onto his face and carefully made eye contact with each of his friends. “Thanks, guys. You shouldn’t have.”
“As always, the credit goes to Shelby,” Laura said. “The birthday cake, the decorations, all of it.”
Wing worried at an interesting combination of Mardi Gras beads and a plastic lei that hung around his neck. “If you can call them decorations.”
“Okay, well, we weren’t even sure that Otto was going to be out of his coma in time for his birthday!” Shelby affectionately prodded Otto with a knuckle. “Attention-whore that he is, he caught me off guard. I’ll do better next year.”
Nigel rolled his eyes. “Anyways, congrats on being alive, man. We’re all glad you’re back.”
Otto did his best to keep his breathing even as he lied, “Me too.”
It was Otto’s birthday and he remembered having Nero’s elbow curled around his neck. It wasn’t that long ago, really. Maybe a little over a year. Number One—Overlord—had drawn them into his suborbital lair and threatened to occupy Otto’s mind and erase his being forever.
Otto asked Nero to kill him. Nero had drawn back, had stared in horror.
“Make my death mean something,” he pleaded.
It was a desperate plea for a desperate moment, and Nero relinquished. There was no choice. Otto was scared, of course. Who wouldn’t be? But he trusted Nero to be swift and to make it as painless as possible. When it came down to brass tacks, Otto thought Nero might be the only man in the world he trusted to kill him as kindly as possible.
But Overlord saw. Zapped Nero. Foiled the plot.
At the time, Otto couldn’t help but feel a momentary burst of relief, though he still believed that his death was imminent. His mind tried to ignore the way that his body wanted to live. And in the end, his death wasn’t necessary. They saved the world, they went home happy.
Otto didn’t know that he would never go home happy again.
If he’d been thinking ahead, maybe he would have asked Nero to finish the job then. He would have spared himself an incredible amount of pain—everything with Jason Drake, his capture by H.O.P.E., the animus, the training, the animus, the day he almost killed Wing, the way his friends almost killed him. And then there was the coma. They still weren’t sure if he had brain damage.
He missed his chance to die happy, but he supposed, in the end, it didn’t really matter how you died, as long as it didn’t hurt anyone else.
“Otto?”
He pulled his focus from his pool of dark thoughts and found Raven.
She studied him clinically. “A little bird told me that there was a student in a restricted area.”
“Damn,” Otto sighed. “I thought I fooled the sensors.”
“Maybe next time,” she said. “H.I.V.E.mind asked me to check on you. He was worried about you.”
“What do I have to worry about?” Otto laughed mirthlessly. “You all saved the day. I’m home again. Everything is back to normal.”
Raven shifted her weight from one leg to the other, and for a few seconds he thought she would chide him about being in a restricted area and walk away, expecting him to follow. Instead, with a wearier sigh than he expected, she stretched one leg out in front of her and used the other knee to bend down, ultimately catching herself on her hands and lowering herself gently the rest of the way to the floor. It was an unexpected moment of vulnerability from her—a physical admission that she was not at her strongest.
“Your knee okay?” he asked.
She shrugged. “It needs some physical therapy. It might not be the same again, but I’ll figure it out.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I know everything about this job—including the risks. I’ll live. That’s all that matters.”
This touched on Otto’s previous ruminations, and he shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah.”
When Raven spoke next, her voice had a higher pitch than he ever remembered hearing from her before, as if she was anxious. “I also know,” she said carefully, “that pretending to be happy on your birthday is exhausting.”
“It’s not really my birthday,” Otto said. “I don’t know when it actually is.”
“Well, that makes two of us.”
“Really?”
“You think you’re the only orphan haunting these halls? Plenty of people in this business don’t know where they came from.”
Otto smiled sadly. “That’s the trouble—I do.”
“I suppose that’s true. You are unique. That’s your curse.”
Otto’s first instinct was to raise his voice, although the urge passed almost as quickly as it came. Trying to sound as emotionally uninvested as possible, he probed, “A curse? I thought everyone wanted to be unique.”
“No, most people just want to know that they’re significant, even if they aren’t. They want to be distinguished, not different.”
“They want a comforting lie instead of a realistic truth?”
“Honestly, Otto, I think they just want to know that someone cares enough to love them. I can’t really hold that against them.”
“Does anyone love you?” Otto tensed as soon as the last word left his mouth—that was exactly the kind of question one mused on privately and never posed to a teacher.
To his surprise, Raven laughed. “Yes. Someone loves me. Does anyone love you?”
“Maybe too much.”
“Do tell.”
“I mean… I don’t know.”
“Really? That doesn’t sound like you at all.”
Raven nudged Otto’s shoulder with her own, which eked a grudging smile from the latter. He thought about it for a few moments, and said, “All of my friends have hugged me today. They’ve all, each in their own way, told me that they’re glad I’m back. I think they really missed me.”
“They did.”
“But they don’t know what it was like, being under the influence of the animus. I told them all that I don’t remember what happened, but the truth is—”
Otto found his throat was closed and his eyes were suddenly wet, and he self-consciously swiped at the tears with the back of his hand. She offered him a handkerchief, which was so unexpected that he laughed.
“Wow, this is like the movies,” he said, accepting it and pressing it to his damp cheeks.
“The truth is, you want to protect them from how bad it really is,” she encouraged. “Go on.”
“The truth is, when I was infected with the animus, I spent every day hoping that I would die and that nightmare would be over. I wasn’t strong enough to overcome it. I could only hope for a future where no one else died because of me. And now that I’m back, I haven’t stopped wishing for it. Not at all. I’ll leave, and they’ll grieve for me, but the world will move on. There will be one less dangerous thing in the world, and I think it will be better. I hope it will be better. I wish I could see it—but that would defeat the purpose, really. I just keep thinking… it would be enough.”
“It wouldn’t.”
Otto was surprised by the cold certainty in Raven’s voice. Even the tears on his face felt frozen as he watched her in stillness. She noticed this, and sighed, spooling her words together slowly and carefully. Her accent got stronger.
“I never meant to be this old, Otto. I spent a long, long time thinking the world would be better off without me, and that my death could justify my life somehow. It might make things better, like you said. Or, at least, without me, there would be one less thorn in the world. I hoped my death would make the world hurt less, somehow.
“I don’t know what an animus infection is like, and it’s likely that I never will. But I know the kind of pain you’re talking about. It’s your birthday, and it is not. You are unique—and you are not. You’re hardly the first person to imagine that their death might solve something.”
“What changed your mind?”
Raven shrugged. “Someone loved me.”
“And that was enough?”
“God, no. It took years of work to see the world as something other than a living hell. I’m not a dreamer, Otto. I still know a lot about pain. But it gave me a different way to experience the world. I saw myself as something other than a weight. If you try to think of life as something that can be measured, or balanced, or satisfied, or designed, or fixed, then you’ll go mad, because it can’t be any of those things. It’s life. It can only be lived.”
“Well, living kind of sucks,” Otto grumbled.
“I know. But life is not a problem with an easy solution, either.” Raven nudged him with her shoulder again, and it occurred to Otto that this small act might be her loving him, in her own strange way. She let him sit in the quiet for as long as he wanted.
“Is it always going to feel this way?” he asked.
“Probably not.” Raven shifted slightly, moving her injured leg as a singular unit. “Here’s a different question: what would it help you to hear right now?”
“Probably that it’s okay if I still want to die.”
“It is. Like I said, it took me a long time to feel another way. Just because you want it, doesn’t mean you have to live your life around it.”
“And maybe also that I’m right, and that the world would be better without me.”
Raven tilted her head thoughtfully. “We can certainly consider that possibility. Is it important to you, that you make the world better? Or is it just important that you’re right?”
Otto thought about many things, all at once. St. Sebastian’s Orphanage. Violet. Shelby, refusing to lose an argument with him. Cypher. President Obama. The thing he whispered to Laura, when he was first coming back. Ghost. Dr. Nero. Wing, and the way he hugged him. “I’m not sure.”
“Well, then you have something to think about when you leave.”
Otto sighed. “I feel like this is leading up to me admitting that I should go spend some time with my friends and let them celebrate my birthday.”
Otto hoisted himself up, and extended a hand to Raven. To his surprise, she accepted. She steadied herself and then looked at him.
“You said it, not me. If you want to spend your birthday hiding in a different, non-restricted spot, pretending you don’t exist, then I won’t get in your way.”
“No, you’re right. Or, at least, I want you to be right. Maybe I should focus on not being unique for a little bit and see where that gets me.”
Raven followed him back out into the bright hallway, where they both squinted. “Well, when it gets tricky again, you know where to find me.”
“Where ya been, birthday boy?” Shelby looked up from the gang’s study cubby. “We were looking for you.”
Otto could tell Wing knew that he’d been crying, and was trying not to expose him to the group. “Are you… feeling all right?”
“I thought I’d just take a break for a bit,” Otto said. “But I thought we could get back to the birthday-ing, if there were more plans.”
“Well, excitingly, we have options,” Shelby said. “You get a choice of a spa night, a movie night, or, if we want to get really crazy, we could go hot tubbing.”
“Hot-tubbing doesn’t sound that crazy,” Lucy commented.
Nigel explained, “It’s crazy because it’s a staff-only hot tub and we’d be breaking about a hundred rules to get in there, and that’s even with our swimsuits on.”
“A movie night sounds just fine with me,” Otto clarified.
“I’ll make the popcorn,” Laura said.
“I will get the sleeping bags and the pillows!” Franz added.
Lucy stood, too. “I’ll see if I can rustle up some crisps or candy or something.”
“Way ahead of you, sister,” Shelby said.
In the quiet after everyone began rushing to assemble their movie theater experience, Wing slid next to Otto. Silently, Otto rested his head on Wing’s shoulder.
“How are you holding up?” Wing asked. Otto made a noncommittal grunt. They waited out the quiet.
“Hey, you love me, right?” Otto asked.
Wing threw his arm around Otto and squeezed. “You are my brother. I feel like I belong here because of you. No one makes me feel known like you. If that is what you call love, then yes. Undoubtedly.”
“Dude, don’t make me cry before the girls come back,” Otto hissed.
“You’re allowed to cry,” Wing said.
Otto pulled the unreturned handkerchief from his pocket and wiped at his eyes again. “Then maybe we could do some of that after the movie. If you have time to talk, that is.”
“Always, my friend. Always.”