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The blow to the head is an accident.
Whoever imagined that peace would come easily was a dreamer - war latches on with teeth and does not let go until all innocence is drained away. A country as young as Gilboa could not have more than six months of peace in its whole history, six months of peace combined, even with God’s true king at the helm.
Maybe, because of God’s true king.
David’s advisors tell him that he is sour, angry, that his coronation (despite the miracles and butterflies and diamonds from water) was the last time any of them saw him smile, that his affectation worries the kingdom.
Michelle tells him that his sourness is alarming, that she worries for his soul, that she is concerned with how he cannot get over his coup. Did my father’s death wound you so terribly that you will never recover?, she asks, and he does not reply with anything save a softening of his features. It’s not her fault that her eyes remind him of her twin, that the way she sets her jaw, or the shape of her mouth is identical. David does not know how to tell her that it is not her father’s death that has sucked the good humor from his features.
And so like the king’s black moods, elevated in thunderstorms of piano music and refusals to accept any aggressions towards the farm communities that dot the borders, lead him to war again, as if half his soul is on the battlefield there, as if it was dropped there the same day that that Jack’s body fell, and refused to be found again.
The blow to the head, then, is an accident; a grenade falling nearby and in the toppling of men, in the confusion, someone smashes his elbow into David’s temple.
The first thing he’s aware of as he wakes are hands, pressed against his wrists. “No,” he argues, “I’m fine,” he keeps going, “I’ll be fine,” he finishes.
“You’re an idiot,” is what he hears, in a voice he has not heard in a year, in a voice that tangles in his heart like string and knots there. This is a hallucination, he thinks, this is terror and hell and horror all at once. This is God, finally punishing him, this is God’s wrath against David’s sins of negligence, against his sin of foul humor. Every king is punished in their own way, and this is David’s. “Open your eyes,” the voice commands, and David does, because for all that he is king, he thinks he would respond to any command given to him by Jack Benjamin.
“Will you vanish?” David asks, but he opens his eyes regardless, and he sees: mouth and chin and jaw, and his eyes, gray and storming and beautiful, and he wonders how he ever could have thought Michelle looked like her twin, when she is the sun and he is the storm.
Jack’s hands move away, and David sits up, in a bedroom, in a bed, in Jack’s bed. In his room in Altar Mansion, untouched still, a macabre shrine to a dead boy who never lived in that room past the age of 18. In the corner is a bookshelf with a pair of stuffed elephants, one gray and one green, one stolen from Michelle, but living forever now in a dead man’s sanctuary. That’s what David fixates on. Where else could he be? “Am I dead?”
Jack moves away then, too. “I don’t know, David,” he says, the snap in his tone the growl before the bite, “did you do anything stupid enough to merit the loss of your precious life?”
It is an old argument between them, and it’s funny how it used to be maddening, but now it feels like something warm, familiar, and his lips curve upward without him wanting it, he smiles for the joy of a stupid fight. “Am I dreaming?”
“Dreaming, or death? You should think these things through before you ask them,” Jack snaps back, and David thinks to reply, the words are near his own tongue when he opens his eyes
(his eyes were open, he thinks)
and someone mutters a praise to god, and he realizes he is in a hospital bed.
~~~~~~
David knows the difference between dreams and dreams; one is nonsense, like dreams of flying or dreams of endless paperwork or dreams where he is lying on a sunny field and he cannot find Jack no matter where he looks, and he grows more and more agitated as the sun is blocked out by scarlet clouds that billow into the sky like blood from a wound (a wound he saw, a wound he could not fix and God would not fix and no one could stop).
The other are true things; dreams as messages, dreams as prophecy. They were common, once, during the worst of the coup, dreams that would lead him to improbable places to find improbable things, dreams that saved his life and the life of his men hundreds of times over. Nathan calls it God, and David accepts that definition, because Nathan would know.
They feel different, inside of David’s heart. One kind makes him pleased or sullen, by turns, but does nothing more than that. The other is different. The other makes him sit inside the sanctuary until finally Nathan ferrets him out.
But this time, Nathan does not come. It is as if there is no spiritual guidance for seeing your best friend when you’ve taken a blow to the head, it is as if God requires David to find the solution to this by himself.
But there’s no solution. David doesn’t dream of Jack again.
~~~~~
The shot to the stomach is an assassination attempt.
The only reason that it does not hit David in the heart is that during the procession where it happens, a child pushes through the crowd and hits the shooter in the leg on the way; David sees that and moves, just enough, just enough that the bullet misses its terrible mark. He’s aware of the screaming, his hand grip his stomach, and he thinks he has seen this amount of blood before.
“You’re going to fire the head of your security,” Jack commands, and David blinks and there he is, barely lit against the window, all of Shiloh below him. It’s smoky and dark, where it’s normally brilliantly and wildly technicolor, the city refusing to sleep. There are candles in the windows, David thinks, because he sees tiny lights, just barely, but the rest of the city is dark, just shapes of buildings.
David doesn’t move at first. “Am I dead?” he asks again, but he’s crossing the space between them, gripping Jack’s wrists. Later, there are things he won’t wonder, and one of them is why it’s Jack, and not Eli or his father who is greeting him here.
“I don’t know, David,” Jack says, raising his arms as though they will keep David at a distance. “Does your heart still beat?”
David doesn’t focus on that. “I was shot,” he says, “in the stomach,” he adds, perplexed. Jack’s eyes narrow, the storm in them howls, David can almost hear the winds screaming. “It wasn’t my fault,” he explains, because he can’t look at Jack when he looks that way, he feels as though his heart is giving way when Jack looks so angry that he could destroy the world with the way he simply holds his chin, arrogant and ugly.
Ugly is still beautiful, here, in the dark. Oh.
Oh, David realizes; he does not miss his beating heart, he does not miss the pulse of life, insistent and quick at his wrists and neck, he does not miss the fill of oxygen in his lungs, because it’s Jack, grey and angry and full of fear, and David missed that more than anything, enough that now he smiles as if he’s been given a gift better than any other in his entire life. Better than the day that Michelle put his son in his arms and whispered, “he has your smile,” and they were, for that brief moment, a family.
“Does your heart still beat?” Jack asks, and David doesn’t want to answer. Jack pushes David’s hands away, pushes him back against the glass, uses his bare inch or so of height to try and intimidate him, but David can’t stop himself from watching Jack’s mouth, like he used to, back before, right before-
(you didn’t tell him, this is your fault, this is your shame, this is your sin to bear)
-before Silas died, David’s brain supplies, censoring itself from the blood and the anguish.
But there, pressed against the glass overlooking the shadow city, hemmed in by the force of Jack’s brutal displeasure, David nods, finally. “Are we so locked together that you’ll chase me down in death?” Jack asks, disgusted.
Once, that disgust would have made David upset, would have made him anxious in how he had displeased his prince. Then he recognized it for what it was, and now that disgust only leaves him cold inside, because yes. It’s the truth; they’re locked together for eternity, souls entwined. “I miss you,” David admits, and Jack looks away, his bottom lip pressing out a little from the pressure of Jack’s own tongue, from Jack resisting words. “I look to be happy-”
“You have Michelle-”
“-but there is no joy left inside of me,” David whispers, and he thinks, this could be that moment, that moment that they never had, that moment that was stolen from them, but Jack moves away. “Jack-” he tries, but Jack holds up his hand, and David cannot disobey him.
There is silence between them, and finally Jack says, in the softest tone David has ever heard from him, with no armor barbing his words, “I miss you.”
David opens his eyes, and the beeping of machinery wakes him fully. Later, the nurse will find him, face up, gripping his sheets in an iron clutch, trying desperately to rail against God, but being unwilling to deny a deity who gave him even those brief moments, the honor of hearing those three words out of the mouth of the person he loves most.
~~~~
He heals and he fires his head of security, and he tries to track Nathan down, but the prophet seems to be actively avoiding him; it must be easy when you have a direct line connection to the entire universe, David thinks.
The weeks pass, quietly, and one day during a quiet evening, while David plays and Michelle sits nearby and listens, the music that comes out of the piano as sad as anything else, she moves close to him, presses her mouth against his hair, smooths it back as though he were a child. “I’ve missed you,” she says, and it makes David’s spine straighten, the notion that she would miss him, when she can see him whenever she wants.
He doesn’t stop playing. His fingers know the make of this song. It pulls him, but he does look up at her, and she’s smiling at him like he’s breaking her heart, over and over. He doesn’t care for that smile, but not because it hurts him, but because he worries he’s done something to her he cannot fix. He’s the knife that sliced open the Benjamin family, wounded it beyond repair, destroyed the good in it. “I’m sorry,” he finally manages, and she takes his hands from the piano, sits next to him.
“You can talk to me,” she tells him, and there’s kindness in her eyes where David seeks a storm that will howl so loudly as to drown out the sorrow that wails in his own heart.
David remains silent, and presses a hand to her cheek, and his forehead to hers, and thinks that she really is good, she really is the best he could hope for. She is not his best friend, she is not the other half of his soul, but she is better than he deserves for loving her twin more than he could fathom loving any other human who has ever lived. He stole her from God only to find comfort elsewhere.
Why couldn’t he admit it to Jack?
“Please,” she says, and takes his hands, “you’ve been so pensive, and you’ve been so melancholy, I almost thought-”
“Michelle-”
“-that you were coming back.”
She presses her mouth to his, and he doesn’t return the kiss at once, he takes his time, but finally he gets with the program, tries to remember what it was, those feelings of when the lights were out, that feeling of kissing her when she was girl and he was just a naive farmboy, before politics and war and patricide tangled with love and came out the victor.
“Michelle,” he says, but it’s too late. She gets up, and looks down, and David thinks he will be what breaks her, what breaks her heart into a shattered ruin that not even God will be able to repair. She makes no noise when she leaves the room.
“I thought that she would be the downfall of more than one king,” someone says, in the darkness, and David looks up, sharply. There are always people in Altar Mansion; servants and security and secretaries, all bustling around their jobs, but David knows them all, he makes it a point to, and he does not know this voice. “But it seems that I was wrong. It is not the first time, but it is close.”
“Who are you?” he asks, looking into the blackness that seemed brighter a moment ago, into the shadows he did not think were there.
She is a tall woman, pale like the underside of a cloud, with eyes like pits. She is beautiful and terrible and David finds his hands have curled up. “We are old friends, you and I,” she says, and she sits down next to him. There’s a glass in her hand and she puts it atop the piano. “I have come because you cannot help but call me.”
David’s hands curl into fists; God isn’t in this room anymore. “I don’t mean to.”
“You cannot help it. I cannot rip your soul apart,” she clarifies. “Play for me, King David.”
His hands uncurl; he did not realize how tightly they were closed up until this moment, and he can feel the pinpricks of pain dotting the meat of his palms from where his nails dug into skin. He plays the song, the grieving chorus of a bitter and broken Hallelujah, praise for two minutes with Jack, and the woman closes her eyes. She does not breathe. She makes no motion. She is for all purposes a statue; cold and unfeeling and smelling of overripe fruit and decaying flowers.
And he stops.
She opens her eyes, and there is fury in the blackness. “Play for me,” she commands, her mouth opening as if she can suck his soul from him, but he does not. “Play for me,” she howls, and it is the same noise of a night with no stars, a night where the only redeeming quality is the blackness that disguises the blood. “Play for me,” she screams, but David does not play. “Play for me,” she finally whispers, the cold promise of a grave.
“Give him back,” David retorts. “Give him back, and I will give you this song.”
There is silence between them; the sound of David’s heartbeat is offensively hale in his own ears. “I do this as a courtesy, for those close to God,” is what she says.
“Bargain with us for those who we love? Is that what Silas did for Michelle?” he asks, like slotting a peg into a hole, perfectly formed for one another. Of course it is, he thinks.
She looks at him, sharply. “He bargained his kingship and refused to give it up. You bargain only a song.”
David feels the cold in his hands. God is not listening in on this conversation. This is a corner of the universe that God has turned his face from. Bargains with the Sabbath Queen never go well, he thinks. But still. “Give him back, and I’ll play you the song, I’ll write it into every mourner’s prayer, I’ll announce it in Lamentations, and everyone will know it is for you, and not for God.”
She raises her chin, and her mouth opens again, like a door. “Done,” she announces, and vanishes. David reaches for the glass, and drinks, as though this was perfectly planned, as if she knew.
She is not often wrong.
This time, it is a bower; it’s David’s own garden, in the countryside, at his mother’s farm. Jack is already sitting at the table; he has an apple there, he’s cored it and he’s carefully eating at the fruit. The juice runs down his chin, and that’s impossible, David thinks, it cannot be real. Apples are not that juicy, but there it is, milky and ripe and trickling.
David sits down next to him, and Jack methodically ignores him. This is an old game; who will break first. At the front, they used to do this, and David always did; he didn’t have the patience that Jack did, he never had that cold, undeniable arrogance that powered all of Jack’s best (and worst) decisions. "Am I dead?" he asks.
"I don't know," Jack replies. "Don't eat any of the apple," he commands, although David knows full well what happens to those who eat the food of the dead. He read Harlowe and the Sabbath Queen, too.
David finds himself smiling, pressing his face into his hand, shy. It's a smile he had forgotten, one that takes his entire face to do. “I forgot how much it hurt to look at you.”
Jack stops eating and looks at David as though maybe he’s grown an entirely new head, and that head is shaped like Michelle. “Is this how you wooed my sister? With lines?” Jack scoffs, but there is something that’s pleased. Like they’re finally having this conversation, and Jack has waited forever for it.
“I was much more inept with your sister,” David replies, “as is evidenced by the collapse of our marriage.”
Jack shrugs. “She’s always gotten what she wanted, it’s always been so easy for her,” he says, “so maybe it’s about time something was a bit of a challenge.”
“She almost died,” David argues, but there’s a look from Jack, and David realizes that in comparison, in the family drama that was the clan of Benjamin, it was easy to be the beloved child of Silas. She was so sheltered from the hatefulness of the politics. “Point taken,” he says.
“So what was it this time?” Jack asks, setting the fruit down, pushing the plate away from David’s side of the table, possessively. “Strangling? Choking, maybe? Did you fall down the stairs? They do have stairs in the country, don’t they? You take them one step at a time, farmboy-”
“Poison, I think,” David replies, and Jack’s face darkens. “But it’s not like that,” David amends, quickly, “I did it to find you-”
“Ah, suicide for a man who nearly destroyed the country, the press will love that-”
“-to bring you home,” David finishes, and now Jack stills, completely. There’s a complicated look on his face; he looks like someone who is daring to find hope in a country where there is none, but who understands the absolute pain of it, the cruelty of something that should be sweet.
He looks like he about to cry.
David moves, to kneel in front of him, to take his hands. “Please,” he says, “please come home with me.”
“No,” Jack starts, but David doesn’t hear him.
“I am angry without you. Unrecognizable. I cannot love without you, I cannot find joy without you, I cannot hope without you. I thought it was Michelle, I thought she was going to be the thing that fixed me, after everything, but it was you, you pinned the shadows down against my light-”
“David-”
“-you make everything clear, you’re the only voice that makes sense, you-”
“David, stop talking,” Jack snaps, and David does, but he does not let go of Jack’s hand. “Why can’t you leave me be? I can’t even die without you dragging me back!”
David loses his breath, first. “Please,” he begs. “I’ll make you king. I’ll elevate you above all else. I’ll announce that it was always you, that you were the hero, that I was just there for the glory.”
“Don’t lie on my account,” Jack says bitterly.
“Why are you so stubborn?” David asks, but there is no malice in it, just the wheedling pain of someone whose heart is shredding. He thought this would be easy, and now he doesn’t know why he would ever think that. When has Jack Benjamin been anything but a difficult asshole, when was he ever easy?
Jack looks away, and David knows. The answer is no. There is no arguing. It is the loudest silence David has ever experienced.
And so David reaches for the apple, and Jack looks at him, shocked. “No-” he begins, and David takes a bite, and for a brief, sweet moment, it tastes like victory, it tastes like the latching of his soul into death, and how good that feels.
And then Jack is kissing him, and David replaces that victory with this one, because nothing could feel half as good as Jack’s mouth on his, nothing could feel like this because this is like completion, this is coming home, when David has been moored and untethered for two entire years. Jack’s mouth opens to his, and his hand is in David’s, and the apple, the apple-
Jack moves back, and swallows, and his voice is thick with something like sorrow, but it makes him sound like he’s dying once more. “You love because I’m dead, and in the dark, but if I were in the light with you, you would remember that there is nothing here but rot.”
“Jack-”
“I will not let you die for me. Why can’t you let me do this? Why can’t you let my sacrifice mean something? It was for you!” he says, and he throws the apple, far, where David can’t see it.
David is reeling, and he wants to argue, he wants to kiss Jack again, but Jack is already fading. “No,” David says, “you promised!”
When he wakes, the shape of the keys of the piano pressing an imprint in his skin, a maid screaming in terror, he immediately regrets those words, he regrets speaking to her, as if she cares about promises, and not to him, not to reassure him that there is no part of Jack that is rotten, that the rot within them is within David’s soul, from the absence, from the loss. He regrets not saying that he had loved him, a little, from that first moment they met and through to the last moment they had, when David’s hands were soaked in Jack’s blood and Jack smiled and welcomed death like she was the oldest, only friend he ever had.
The maid stops screaming as he lifts himself up, but God has turned his face back to David, and the storm is brewing outside, the rage and disappointment of it. He stumbles, step by step, and finds his way onto the balcony, and sits in the storm, and does not rail. There are things he knows: he will not find his way into the dark places of death again, until God chooses to release him, and he understands how Jack’s yearning to die consumed him.
He cannot even weep for it.