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“So what are we watching?” Steven asks, and Marc groans – inwardly, because Steven has the body right now. Apparently he’s not quite discreet enough, though, because he can feel their brow creasing as Steven frowns in response. “Well, there’s no need to be like that.”
Just choose something, Marc tells him. Otherwise we’ll be sitting here debating it for the next two hours.
Layla, curled up next to Steven on the sofa, cat-like, turns her head. “What’s Marc complaining about?”
“What I call ‘allowing everyone a chance to express their preferences’, he calls ‘taking too long’,” Steven says primly. “Marc, mate, you’re forgetting that you and me are a democracy now.”
That makes Layla laugh. Marc loves her laugh, loves hearing it regularly again after those strained, tense months right before he’d bailed on his marriage and tried to convince himself he’d done it for her sake. What they have now is not what they had before, and they are, all three of them, still working out how to adjust to a life that includes Steven and excludes Khonshu, a life where Layla is the one with superpowers. It’s good, though. Better than Marc ever thought he had any right to deserve.
They shredded the unsigned divorce papers soon after Layla joined them in London, after she’d finished tidying things up in Cairo, so she and Marc are still married, but they haven’t quite figured out what kind of marriage they have now. Currently it’s the kind of marriage where they live apart but spend a lot of time together. It feels a little bit like they’re dating again, learning how to be with each other the way they did at the start of their relationship, except this time Marc isn’t hiding anything from her. Marc knows he kept too much from Layla for too long, and he also understands that he owes her the chance to get to know the person – the people – he really is so that Layla can decide for herself what she wants her future to look like. He hopes very much to be part of it.
And nights like this, to Marc’s surprise, are the parts of his new life which he likes best. Nights when he or Steven or both of them go round to the flat Layla has rented and they cook dinner together and sit on the couch and watch TV or listen to music or read. Marc doesn’t even have to be entirely present at these times to enjoy them. He can hover in the background while Steven and Layla sit side by side reading, and be content. It is not unlike the way he used to observe Steven’s life from its edges, watching while he worked in the gift shop at the museum or went grocery shopping, but this is better, because Marc isn’t hiding anymore. Now he can nudge forward and say, If you’re buying wine, get a six-pack of beer for me, or, Don’t bolt your food, you’ll give us heartburn.
Steven lifts the TV remote and starts scrolling through the options. The problem, of course, is that Marc knows exactly what kinds of movies Steven enjoys, and he finds almost all of them unbearably saccharine.
And here it comes. “Oooh, Notting Hill,” Steven says. “I like that one.”
At least it’s not Love Actually. Marc hates that fucking movie. But he doesn’t like Notting Hill much more. You must’ve seen that twenty times already, he points out. Anyway, Layla doesn’t like romcoms.
(This is true. Layla doesn’t like Hollywood movies at all, and prefers European arthouse cinema. Marc remembers a very early date when she’d taken him to see some French movie which she’d been raving about. He had fallen asleep halfway through - he’d thought he’d gotten away with it, until Layla informed him on the way out that the couple in front of them had turned around to complain about his snoring. You know, she’d said, if we don’t like all the same things, it’s fine. We’ll do what we both enjoy together and do the other stuff by ourselves. That had been the first time Marc had started to believe that his relationship with Layla might actually be something he could make work.)
Layla doesn’t look like she’s about to object – Marc thinks she indulges Steven – but he knows his point has been taken when Steven says, “Maybe not,” and flicks on through the menu.
He works his way through the list, pausing briefly to allow Marc or Layla to voice an opinion before moving on. Fifteen minutes later, between them they have rejected Bridget Jones’s Diary, Amélie, La La Land and You've Got Mail.
“You can’t hate all of these,” Steven says to Marc when they’ve exhausted the entirety of the ‘modern classics’ collection.
Marc pushes forward and takes over enough to speak out loud. “It’s not my fault if your taste in movies is terrible.”
“It kind of is your fault, though,” Steven returns amicably. “You had your chance to give me good taste when you made me up.”
Marc casts a brief sideways glance at Layla, just long enough to see her carefully not react to that. She knows the whole story now, or at least enough of it to be able to understand the shape of who he is – who they are – and why. Of all the revelations he and Steven had to face while they were in the Duat, this is the one which is the greatest remaining discomfort between them: Steven’s newfound knowledge that he is the product of Marc’s trauma, a coping mechanism with a name and a personality. That’s not how Marc feels about him at all, but he doesn’t know what words to use to reassure him, and since their return Steven has taken to making jokes and comments about his status as Marc’s invention which unsettle Marc and make him feel guilty, even though he cannot sense even the tiniest sliver of resentment or anger behind any of Steven’s words.
It’s Layla who punctures the moment of awkwardness, probably deliberately. “Let’s hear your suggestions,” she says to Marc, and he gratefully takes over control of the remote and starts navigating the menus.
His criteria are straightforward: Marc likes his entertainment to be mindless and escapist. Violence is fine, but not realistic violence - he’s seen, dealt out and been on the receiving end of too much of the genuine variety to enjoy anything other than the kind of gymnastics-cum-dance that passes for fighting in most of Hollywood’s output. Nothing about superheroes: there was a brief surge in those in the years immediately after the Battle of New York brought the Avengers to the world’s attention, but thankfully the trend seems to have run its course now, and Marc has no interest in watching anything which depicts having superhuman powers as fun and heroic when he has lived out the sordid reality. He likes a good car chase and prefers older movies with practical special effects over more recent CGI-heavy ones.
He will not watch anything where kids get threatened or hurt. Which is fine, because Steven can’t bear to watch that, either.
But Steven’s clearly still slightly stung by Marc turning down all his suggestions, because he gleefully rejects all of Marc’s. They won’t be watching The Rock (a classic action movie, Nicolas Cage was never better) or Training Day or Speed or any of the Die Hard movies, not even Die Hard With a Vengeance (“What does that even mean, Marc?”).
“Right,” Layla says eventually, in her taking-no-nonsense voice. “If you two can’t agree on something, I’ll choose,” and now both of them groan inwardly, because that probably means a three-hour drama set in a fish-processing plant. In Norwegian.
Sure enough, Layla makes straight for the most obscure section of Netflix’s catalog, the place where they bury the movies that no one wants to watch. She scrolls her way through menu after submenu, charting a course in the opposite direction to whatever the algorithm is determined to show her.
Suddenly, a familiar image flicks onto the screen. Then it’s away again as Layla moves on. Marc hopes it wasn’t what he thought it was, or – if it was – that Steven didn’t notice it.
Too late. It was and he did.
“Wait,” Steven says urgently. “Go back, go back.”
Layla stops and hits the back button on the remote. “What are you looking for?”
“That,” Steven says. “Stop! Stop there!”
The screen freezes, and Marc is looking at a picture he knows intimately well. It’s the same image which was displayed on the poster which he had tacked on to his bedroom wall when he was eleven years old and which had still been there the day he’d turned eighteen and had escaped his parents’ home to join the army. It’s possible the poster is still on the wall of his old bedroom; his abortive attempt to go to his mother’s shiva aside, he’s never returned to that house.
It’s a promotional image for the movie Tomb Buster. Which is somehow, through some bizarre quirk of content streaming deals, available to watch on Netflix.
“Oh God, that’s it, isn’t it?” Steven says. “Marc, I’m right, aren’t I? That’s it.”
Marc doesn’t answer. He can’t bring himself to say anything, either out loud or in their head.
Layla looks puzzled and more than a little intrigued. “What am I looking at, here?” Before Marc can say anything to stop her, she selects the title and navigates to the More Information section, where she starts to read the plot summary: “All the family will love this classic adventure story. Join brave archaeologist Dr. Steven Grant as he –” She breaks off. Marc can see her taking in the movie’s original release date in the 1990s. Doing the mental math. “Oh,” she says. “Is this —?”
“Yeah,” Steven says. “That’s me. Brave archaeologist, adventurer and all-round hero Dr. Steven Grant. Except I never managed to get a doctorate. Still time, I suppose.”
The only reflective surface close at hand is the television screen, and it’s too bright and busy with the image it’s displaying to show Marc more than a faint, fuzzy outline of Steven’s face, so he has no way to read his facial expression. Steven doesn’t sound upset, though - his voice is upbeat, his tone almost chipper. But there’s a rapidly growing tension in their body – the heart beating more rapidly by the second, the stomach roiling unpleasantly. Surely Steven’s feeling distress if he’s having that strong a physical reaction to being confronted with this out of the blue.
“Um,” Steven says. “I don’t think Marc’s very happy right now.”
Well, shit. Apparently that’s all him.
I’m fine, he tells Steven internally. I’m fine, it’s fine.
“You clearly aren’t, since I feel like I’m about to throw up.”
I’m fine, Marc repeats, and pulls back as far as he can without actually going to sleep. It’s a trick he mastered during the years he was keeping tabs on Steven without Steven knowing about him. From here, it feels as if he’s looking out at the world through the wrong end of a telescope, so that the living room of Layla's small, neat flat feels as if it’s at the far end of a long corridor. He retreats, pulling the stress and anxiety he’s projecting into the body back with him.
He can hear Layla speaking, but it’s as if she’s a very long way away and not leaning up against Steven on the couch. Her voice fades in and out of his awareness. “…Marc okay…?”
Then Steven’s reply, equally faint: “…gone away, I think…”
Marc hovers somewhere in the liminal zone between consciousness and unconsciousness. He’s not completely numb to the world, maintaining just enough of a connection to the body to be vaguely aware that Steven and Layla are still talking. He can stay like this indefinitely, as long as nothing happens to pull him back –
The opening theme music of Tomb Buster blasts from the TV speakers.
Yeah, that’ll do it.
Marc slams back into the body, grabs the remote and jabs the off button furiously until the screen is mercifully dark and silent. “No. We are not watching that.”
Layla sits up and draws back from him, switching from wholly relaxed to alert and on guard in the space of a heartbeat. Marc’s seen her do this many times before, but it’s not usually as a reaction to him.
Steven, meanwhile, is angry.
That, he says coldly, was uncalled for.
“Marc?” Layla asks cautiously.
He takes a breath, gets himself under control. “Steven, you don’t want to watch this.”
Steven pushes forward and Marc guiltily lets him back into the driving seat. “Actually, I do want to watch it. And I just asked Layla if she wanted to watch it with me and she said yes.”
Laya has been watching their exchange closely, her expression serious. Not for the first time, Marc wonders why the hell she decided to stick around. A few minutes ago, she was relaxing with her husband and her – well, whatever Steven is to her, they haven’t settled on a word for that yet that everyone is comfortable with. Now she has to navigate the complexities of whatever Marc-and-Steven-together are (and they haven’t really got a word for that, either, although Steven’s started doing some reading and has recently informed Marc that they’re a system, apparently).
“Okay,” she says after a few seconds. “Clearly you guys need to talk this out, and you know what, we’re out of wine, so I’m going to take a walk and go buy some more. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
She puts on her jacket and lifts her purse and heads out before either of them can object.
When they’re alone, Marc gets up and goes into the bedroom, where he can sit on the edge of Layla’s bed and look straight into the mirrored wardrobe door.
Steven’s opening gambit is, “It’s just a movie.”
“You know damn well it’s not just a movie,” Marc replies.
“I’ve never actually seen it.”
“You have,” Marc tells him. “You just don’t remember. And you don’t remember because it might be too… difficult for you. To watch something… made up… and know that’s where you…” He trails off, unwilling to finish the sentence.
“Well, maybe it would have been, before — everything,” Steven says. “But things are different now, aren’t they? I’m different.”
That much is inarguable. And it’s also true that ever since their lives started overlapping, Steven has consistently surprised Marc with just how much inner toughness he actually possesses.
“You know what I think?” Steven says. “I think you don’t want to watch it and you’re using me as an excuse.”
“That’s not it,” Marc says, much too quickly. Then, realizing that he’s going to have to give some ground, he says, “All right. Look, if you want to see it, I’m not stopping you. But don’t make Layla watch it, too.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a terrible movie, Steven,” Marc says. “Seriously. When was the last time Layla enjoyed something that didn’t win the Oscar for Best Examination of the Futility of Human Existence In a Foreign Language?”
Steven laughs at that, which lets Marc know that they’re mostly-okay again.
“Yes, it’s not her kind of thing, I know,” he concedes. “But, Marc —” He stops, apparently trying to gather his thoughts. Then he lifts his head a little and meets Marc’s gaze. “This is mine. I want to show it to her because it’s the only thing I have that’s just mine.”
Marc gives him a skeptical look. “The only thing —? You own about a thousand books and twice as many random bits of junk.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Steven says. “The things I remember about growing up — well, they all came from your life, didn’t they? The house I remember was your house. Only one of us has a real birth certificate, and it’s not me. My name is about the only thing I’ve got that’s properly me, and that movie is where it came from. And I want — I want to show Layla that. It’s the only thing I’ve got that’s just mine that I can show her.”
Marc breathes out. “Yeah,” he says at last. “I get it.”
Steven looks up hopefully. “So we’re watching it?”
“You can watch it,” Marc says. “Inflict it on Layla if you have to. But I’m taking a rain check on this one. I’ll go away and come back when you’re done.”
“Yeah, ‘course, that’s fantastic!” Steven gives him a thumbs-up from the mirror and grins broadly. “Thanks, mate.”
Just then Marc hears the front door of the flat open and close. “I’m back,” Layla calls out.
Marc pulls back and lets Steven get up from the bed and join her back in the living area, where she’s uncorking one of the bottles of wine she’s brought back. “Everything okay?” she asks, tone deliberately casual.
“Yeah, Marc and I had a chat, we’re good,” Steven says. “He says go ahead and watch it, but he’s going to disappear for a bit. What’d you get?”
At moments like this, Marc thinks that Steven doesn’t realize just how important he is, how much he helps without even knowing it. Where Marc would be an inarticulate, bad-tempered mess if he tried to explain himself to Layla, Steven just — breezes past it. Marc’s sitting this one out, what kind of wine did you buy? Steven’s superpower is the ability to make things normal.
“Another Malbec,” Layla says, refilling the two glasses.
“Ooooh, nice,” Steven says appreciatively.
They settle themselves back on the couch and Layla fires up Netflix. When the theme music starts up again, Marc withdraws, turning his focus inward and doing the mental equivalent of closing his eyes and pulling the duvet over his head.
It doesn’t work; he can’t get to sleep. Over the years, Marc has learned how to come and go out of awareness with a fair degree of conscious control, but there’s always an element of chance and uncertainty at work, too. Right now, he feels like he’s lying awake at two in the morning, tossing and turning in bed, except he’s shifting restlessly inside his own skull. He tries to be as unobtrusive as possible, but he knows Steven must be aware of his presence, because if it were the other way round, he would absolutely know that Steven was there.
Sure enough, the film’s opening credit sequence – God, it looks cheap – hasn’t even ended before Steven is fidgeting uncomfortably. “I think Marc’s still awake.”
Dammit.
It’s fine, Marc says, breaking his silence. Just can’t sleep right now.
Steven lifts the TV remote and hits pause. “Well, I suppose we’re not doing this tonight after all.”
He sounds disappointed, and there’s a faintly sour note in his voice, like he thinks Marc is doing this deliberately. Which Marc isn’t, but he can see exactly how it might look that way to Steven. And now the night – which had been pleasant and fun – is getting spoiled by increments, and it’s Marc’s fault.
Go ahead and watch it, he says. I’ll stay quiet.
“Yeah, but you don’t want to.”
It’s fine. I don’t mind.
“But—“
Just watch the fucking movie, Marc snaps at him, much more forcefully than he means to. Steven starts and blinks, and the look Layla gives them tells Marc that she’s figured out exactly how his side of the conversation sounds.
“You know, we can do this some other time,” she says diplomatically.
Steven recovers himself and lets out an annoyed breath. “Oh, no, Marc insists.” He presses a button on the TV remote.
Tomb Buster starts to play again, and Marc resigns himself to the worst possible outcome for the evening: Steven (and probably also Layla) is pissed at him and now they’re all going to have to watch the worst movie in the world in awkward silence for ninety minutes.
Because there is no sugarcoating it: Tomb Buster is a truly awful movie.
Marc doesn’t want to watch the film, but it’s hard to avoid seeing something when his consciousness is hooked up to the eyes which are looking at it. In fact, Marc doesn’t need to watch the film, because he remembers it perfectly. At a conservative estimate, he thinks he probably watched Tomb Buster at least five hundred times between the ages of eleven and fifteen. He remembers wearing out and replacing three VCR tapes.
He admits to himself that he owes Steven an apology, because Steven was right: Marc was trying to save himself from seeing this, not Steven. If there is anything that takes Marc straight back to his adolescence – to those crushing, ruinous years which exist in his mind only as a vast black scar of grief and terror and guilt – it is this movie. This stupid, dumb, badly written, badly acted, badly made movie.
Right now on the TV screen, a man in a pith helmet and khakis – Dr. Steven Grant, archaeologist and adventurer – is rescuing his best friend and sidekick, Ben Rosser, and oh God Marc wishes he didn’t remember what the sidekick was called. Rosser is trapped underneath a rock fall. The rocks are very obviously painted lumps of polystyrene. The actor playing Grant delivers excruciatingly bad dialogue in a fake English accent as he works to free his companion. “Don’t worry, my friend! As sure as the sun rises and sets, I will not abandon you!”
Marc remembers the next line: For friendship is the true adventure!
“For friendship,” declares Dr. Grant, lifting another pretend rock, “is the true adventure!” He reaches out a hand to his companion and helps him to his feet. Several painted polystyrene rocks fall to the ground and bounce lightly out of shot.
He can’t understand why Steven hasn’t turned it off already. If it’s this bad for Marc, how much worse must it be for Steven? Steven, after all, has to live with the knowledge that he owes his existence and his name to something as inane and trivial as this.
At this exact moment, Steven lifts his hand to his face. Maybe he’s going to break down and start crying. Marc wouldn’t blame him.
Steven puts his hand to mouth and laughs.
“It’s – so bad,” he chuckles through his fingers. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it was this bad.”
Layla looks round at him and smiles apologetically. “I didn’t want to be the first to say it.” She squints at the screen and frowns. “Is that meant to be a crocodile? Crocodiles don’t look like that.”
Thank you, Dr. Grant. You’ve saved my life again.
“Thank you, Dr. Grant!” declares Rosser. “You’ve saved my life again!”
Steven bursts out laughing afresh. “Oh, God, Layla — Marc knows all the dialogue. He’s doing it a beat ahead of the characters. It’s hilarious.”
That brings Marc up short; he hadn’t realized Steven could hear him, for whatever value of ‘hear’ applies inside their head. It should be mortifyingly embarrassing, but… filtered through Steven’s perception, he can almost see the funny side.
Making an effort to project an air of nonchalance, he asks, Are you criticizing my performance?
“No!” Steven says, waving a hand from side to side for emphasis, and almost knocking over Layla’s wine glass. She snatches it out of his way. “I mean, you’re a lot better than anyone who actually got paid to be in this.”
In the movie, Dr. Steven Grant runs past a marble pillar in an ancient temple and it wobbles. He is attacked by bats; they flutter towards him, suspended from visible wires.
Layla is laughing so hard now that she can barely breathe. When she finally manages to catch her breath, she chokes out, “So — tell me— did Tomb Buster win Best Picture — or was it the Palme D’Or?”
Steven‘s cracking up so much that it takes him a minute or more to answer. “Oi, watch it, that’s my antecedent you’re making fun of.” And then, to Marc, he adds breathlessly, “You could have picked anything, you know. I could have been Han Solo or Batman.”
You would’ve been a terrible Batman, Marc tells him. You didn’t even give yourself a cape when you had the chance. Anyway, I didn’t pick Tomb Buster. You did.
“I — what?” Steven asks, but Layla is still laughing and, of course, she can’t hear Marc’s side of the conversation.
The rest of the movie’s running time flies by. Steven and Layla take it in turns to make fun of Tomb Buster’s frankly ludicrous plot and the utterly terrible performances of the leads. Marc stays in the background, only breaking into Steven’s thoughts to give him advance warning of some particularly absurd piece of dialogue. Each time he does it, he can feel Steven tentatively making ready to pull back, allowing Marc to take over control of the body if he wants to, but Marc doesn’t want to. There’s something straightforwardly happy about Steven and Layla killing themselves laughing at Tomb Buster, and he doesn’t trust himself not to ruin it somehow. He doesn’t mind; watching the two of them easy and content together brings him a kind of pleasure he wouldn’t have thought possible just a few months ago.
He doesn’t take over the body again until the end of the night, when it’s time to make the brisk ten-minute walk from Layla’s rented flat to the place where he and Steven are living. On the nights when they don’t stay over at Layla’s, Marc always takes charge for the walk home, mostly because he’s significantly better than Steven at handling the body when they’ve been drinking. Even so, it’s an effort to walk in a straight line. That extra bottle of red wine was probably a mistake.
Also Steven is humming the theme music to Tomb Buster in the back of his mind.
“Cut that out,” he says sternly.
Sorry, Steven says. Catchy, innit. Got it stuck in my head, now.
“You’re drunk.”
We’re drunk, but in the morning we’ll be ugly… No, wait, that’s not right…
Steven giggles internally, and they’re sufficiently drunk that it overspills a little and Marc ends up chuckling, too. His abdominal muscles ache a little from laughing so hard earlier. It’s an unfamiliar but good feeling. A really good feeling. Standing on the street outside the entrance to their building, Marc gives Steven a firm mental push back and gets out their keys.
Thanks for doing that, Steven says as Marc unlocks the door to their apartment and flicks on the lights. I mean, I know it wasn’t as much fun for you as it was for us.
“It was a lot more fun than I thought it was gonna be,” Marc admits. He goes over to the fish tank and taps a couple of flakes of food into the water. The faint reflection in the glass is Steven.
“Marc…”
“Yeah?”
“What’d you mean when you said I picked Tomb Buster?”
Marc lets out a breath. He doesn’t answer immediately.
“Marc,” Steven says.
Marc puts down the fish food and goes to the small table in the flat’s kitchen area. A large mirror on a stand is now positioned at one end, creating the illusion for whoever is sitting at it that someone else is sitting opposite. It probably looks odd, but the only other person who’s ever here is Layla, and she understands its purpose.
He sits down at the table and faces Steven. “You wanna know?”
“Yes. Please.”
“Two or three times a week,” Marc begins, “Dad used to give me five bucks and tell me to go to the movies. It got me away from Mom for a few hours, I guess. I saw every movie that was out whether I was interested in it or not, and I saw most of ‘em a whole bunch of times. I used to go and sit in the movie theater in the dark and just kinda… zone out.”
“You know there’s a proper word for that, right?” Steven says in gentle reprimand. “It’s called dissociating.”
“Yeah, well, I called it zoning out,” Marc tells him. “Anyway, you were… around… but you weren’t… you yet. I mean, one minute I’d be looking at the title card in the movie theater and the next thing I knew, it’d be four hours later and I’d be riding the L-train somewhere, and I knew I hadn’t bought the ticket but I didn’t know who had.”
Marc watches Steven for any sign that what he just said has distressed him. It can’t be easy for him, hearing Marc describe what he was like when he wasn’t yet a person, just a… thing that happened to Marc sometimes. Steven, though, doesn’t seem disturbed at all. He simply listens, calm and attentive.
Feeling somewhat reassured, Marc goes on. “So I didn’t go see Tomb Buster because I really wanted to see it, it was just the next movie playing when I got to the theater that day. And I sat there and I zoned out, except…” He breaks off, not knowing how to put it into words. He swallows and thinks hard. “Except, I didn’t go away. I was watching someone else watch the movie. I was watching you. And you – you loved it. You fucking adored that movie. And when the lights came up at the end, I knew… that you were English, and that you were into all that archaeology and ancient history shit, and that… your name was Steven.”
He waits.
“Oh,” Steven says, but it’s not a bad ‘oh’. It’s a quiet, surprised, softly pleased ‘oh’.
“I guess, uh… I should’ve told you that before now,” Marc says. He shrugs in apology. “I didn’t know how you’d take it. Didn’t want to upset you.”
“Upset?” Steven repeats. A wide, shadowless smile lights up his face. “No, no, Marc – that’s brilliant. You know what that means? You didn’t make me up. I made myself up.”
He looks so happy that Marc has to smile, too. “I never thought of it like that. Yeah… I guess it does.”
Marc can feel Steven’s continuing delight as he gets ready for bed – it’s like a warm, golden glow at the back of his mind. By the time he’s lying down, it’s started to grow fainter, which almost certainly means Steven is nearly asleep. Marc closes his eyes.
…Marc?
Or not asleep.
Marc grunts into the pillow.
There’s a gap on the wall next to the bathroom door, Steven says.
Marc rolls over onto his back. “Yeah, and?”
Well, there’s enough space to hang something…
“No,” Marc says. “No way.”
I bet you can get original Tomb Buster posters on eBay!
“Fuck off,” Marc says, lifting the pillow and putting it over his head.
Can’t, Steven says smugly. And then, in an altogether softer tone, And you wouldn’t want me to.
“No, buddy,” Marc says, “I wouldn’t.”
Then he rolls over, closes his eyes, and pretends very hard to be asleep, before Steven thinks to ask him about Tomb Buster 2: Nefertiti’s Revenge.