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“Your eyes are doing that thing again,” Milagro says when they are laying on the roof of their home one night.
Freshly rebuilt, the roof now lacks the patchwork of metal sheeting that Jaime had grown accustomed to digging into his back when he spread across it – with his hands on his stomach and his eyes on the stars. Instead, he and Milagro are laying on a blanket stolen from Uncle Rudy’s pile in the living room, spread out on the brand new shingles. It is the first time they have been up here since the house was finished, and it is familiar in that Milagro is lying beside him, but different because Jaime can feel the sandpaper texture of the shingles even through the blanket. It feels wrong.
He blinks, keeps his eyes closed for longer than needed, and when he opens them again he turns to Milagro to ask if the dull glow in his eyes has faded. It is one of the many new modifications Khaji Da has made to his body, against his command, and without his knowledge – until it is pointed out to him. His eyes glow golden in the dark now.
“Still doing it,” Milagro says.
Jaime groans, “Khaji, come on.”
Inside him, the bug wakes from whatever sleep state it’s entered and answers, “Yes, Jaime?”
“Eyes Khaj, we talked about this.”
Khaji is not a physical thing inside his brain, but he somehow still feels as if it’s cocking its head in confusion.
“No glowing,” he expands, talking to the open sky above him as his sister stares. When he talks to Khaji Da now, he has the habit of moving his hands for emphasis. This too earns him strange looks, especially when he is communing with the scarab in public, which is something he’s taken to actively avoiding unless necessary.
“Sorry Jaime,” Khaji concedes. He cannot see when the glowing stops, but he can tell when his vision dims slightly, the stars going fuzzier than they were before.
Milagro tells him it’s gone, and then they go back to sitting in silence. Normally, she’d be asking if she could bring a drink up here – if Jaime could buy her that beer she likes from the gas station down the street before they climb their way up. Normally Jaime would act reluctant, and Milagro would pester him, until he caved. But tonight she has only asked for his presence. Neither one of them was in much of a drinking mood.
Jaime is still steadily healing from a broken rib – a parting gift from his latest battle, because he is apparently Palmera’s protector now. It’s a dull pain, but it aches enough that the thought of drinking makes him sick. Milagro has been quiet since they moved back into the house, bristling at all the ways it was now different. It was never going to be an exact replica, there is no replacing everything they lost, but the uncanniness of being in a home that is just off wrong has set Milli on edge. She’s wearing their dad’s jacket again, like a protective shield.
Jaime keeps his eyes on the stars when he asks, “You okay?”
Milagro stiffens beside him, “I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
“Says the idiot with a broken rib."
She’s all sharp-tipped words and venomous bites tonight. Jaime has spent eighteen years with her, knows her moods almost as intimately as he does his own. She is hurting, with the same raw wound they both share, and she does not know how to heal it. Jaime doesn’t either. The roof was meant to be their safe place, and now even that had changed.
He shifts closer to her until their shoulders are pressed together. When she does not pull away, he counts that as a win.
They lay in companionable silence, Jaime picking at his skin, his clothes, breathing in the familiar scent of the Edge Keys and trying to find home again. For Jaime, who has Khaji Da enhancing every one of his senses as a protective measure, the comfort is easier to pinpoint. He hears the gentle ringing of the wind chimes that have acted as a soundtrack for countless late nights, smells the distant sea breeze drifting in, tastes the salty tang of it on his tongue and feels the humidity settling on his skin like a sticky second layer. All of it is elevated to a point that borders on overwhelming, like someone has taken the background noise and amped it up until he cannot hear his own thoughts. It is another thing he is trying to grow used to, another way in which his body sometimes does not feel like his own.
The heat, which used to bother Jaime, doesn’t nearly seem as bad. He has learned that this is because Khaji prefers the warm, wet humidity of Palmera. When he takes showers now he sets the temperature to scalding, lets the bathroom fill up with a thick haze of steam, and sits there until the water runs cold and his fingers have pruned. His mom has gotten onto him for it, for how it’s going to spike their water bill. Jaime used to take two second showers for that very reason, but now it’s like Khaji Da keeps him rooted to the spot.
“You aren’t worried about getting wet?” He had asked them one night, laying on his bed with damp hair soaking into the pillow beneath him.
“Is there a reason I should ‘get worried’?” Khaji had asked, like they weren’t sure what the emotion meant.
Jaime shrugged, “I don’t know, because you’re a piece of alien tech? iPhones say they’re waterproof, but you get like one drop on them and it’s over.”
Khaji Da had responded completely deadpan, “I am not an iPhone.”
Jaime had thought about the raised edges of his skin where Khaji was embedded, the exposed expanse of his back, “What about me? The water won’t like…get inside me or anything, right?”
“Your skin is fused to my shell. We are one, Jaime.”
And that image had grossed him out so much that he didn’t speak to Khaji Da for the rest of the night. They were fully a part of him now. If he focused hard enough he thought he could feel them entwined around his brain stem, wound around his muscles, embedded into his veins – like his body was hosting not just his own blood and bones, but a second skeleton as well. Jaime thought there shouldn’t have been enough room in his scrawny frame, but Khaji had found their way in anyway. He wonders how much of the heat against his skin, feeling like a warm blanket, was Khaji’s manipulation. Them twisting his perception just enough that he didn’t mind the layer of sweat that was building on him in the humid night.
Milagro shifts beside him until her head is resting on his shoulder, she’s careful to avoid jostling his ribs when she curls up against him the way she used to when they were small. As a kid, she used to cling to him constantly. Until she was seven, she had begged their parents to sleep in his bed most nights, bringing her blanket and stuffed llama with her. Milagro claimed it was only because she missed him, Jaime knew it was because she was scared of the tree outside her window – the shadows the branches cast on her wall. He used to get annoyed by it, until the day she stopped asking and Jaime found himself missing the comforting familiarity of her presence.
Beside him now, she smells like paint, and the oil that is embedded in their dad’s jacket. He never thought he’d miss the scent of the auto shop, but now it fills his head and makes him yearn for simpler times.
“I’m sorry everything’s different, Milli,” he mumbles, quiet enough that he hopes it won’t upset her.
“It’s just wrong,” Milagro replies, equally as still. Jaime knows what she means. There is an empty space in the new house that cannot be filled. Their furniture is a matching set taken from a magazine and missing all the idiosyncrasies that made it theirs. They have six dining chairs in the kitchen, and one remains perpetually empty.
Jaime tries not to feel guilty, but the taste of it sours at the back of his mouth anyway. There are so many what if’s in his head. What if he hadn’t accepted Milagro’s offer for a job at Victoria Kord’s mansion, what if he put in more job applications, what if he didn’t accept a burger box that held a secret bad enough to set off actual alarms. What if he had listened when Khaji told him to back down, that Victoria had a weapon stronger than him. Jaime knows there is no point entertaining the past, and yet he cannot stop doing it.
“I can erase the bad memories for you if you’d like, Jaime,” Khaji Da offers. It is the same one they have extended to him before, and each time they say it like it’s a comfort.
Jaime is secretly afraid that Khaji Da will start taking things from him without his permission, that they have begun to do so already, and since Khaji is inside his head, he knows they know this as well.
“No Khaji,” he states, with enough emphasis that it comes out angry.
“What did it say?” Milagro asks, perking her head up just enough to look down at him. Her hair is coming out of the loose braid she’d put it in, fly aways frizzing in the humidity.
“Nothing.”
“Didn’t sound like nothing.”
Jaime has not told his family all the ways Khaji Da has invaded his body. How they have built new muscles just to further anchor themselves into him. How they’ve wound around him with metal legs that he can feel beside his ribs, acting as a permanent armor. How he can forget to eat now, as he often has before when he got too busy or too stressed, and Khaji will supply him with nutrients recycled from his own body so that he does not feel the hunger. He is scared to tell them. Scared that they will find him a stranger in the way that they now do the house.
He is afraid one day they will look at him and no longer see Jaime Reyes.
Already he can see the difference in Milagro’s eyes. She stares at him with concern and a hint of fear, the way she used to stare at the shadows filling her room. Once, Jaime had been the big brother who could tuck her into bed, kiss her forehead and promise that the monsters weren’t going to get her. Now he had become the monster.
Not for the first time, Jaime thinks that if his dad were here that he’d know how to fix this. But he’s not here, and that is the crux of the problem.
“Just forget it, Milagro,” he tells her, tone tinged with the plea. His hand raises up to where his Saint Michael medallion rests in the hollow of his neck, cool against his skin, fingers playing with the chain. It has become a comforting motion to him since his dad first gifted him the medallion at sixteen – after his confirmation.
Milagro huffs, sits up, and he watches as her hand reaches for her own necklace. She pulls at it blindly, rubbing her thumb on the back of the pendant.
“You know, you’re really annoying sometimes.”
Jaime loops the chain around his finger, unloops it, loops it back until the golden ridges are digging into his skin. He doesn’t know what to tell her.
“You don’t have to be - you know – you all the time.”
His fingers pause the repetitive movement, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Milagro scoffs, “You know! You! Jaime. All-“ she waves nonsensically at his body and then throws her hands in the air like she’s annoyed he doesn’t speak whatever language it is she’s communicating in.
“It’s annoying, honestly. You can tell us what’s going on.”
“Nothing’s going on,” he insists.
She glares at him through the tops of her glasses. Jaime feels like a bug pinned to a board, so he sits up too and then they’re both staring at one another, waiting for the other to break.
Jaime cracks first, “Nothing’s going on. It’s just- it’s just. It’s just Khaji, and the whole alien in my back thing, and it’s nothing Milli. Honestly.”
“You’re such a bad liar.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Seriously dude, It’s not working.”
“Seriously, Milagro. I’m not lying.”
She squints. He can see her jaw twitching from where she’s chewing on the inside of her cheek. A nervous habit she and their dad shared.
“Fine. So what about the bug then?”
Jaime weighs what he wants to tell her. He tries to find the balance between giving her enough to satisfy her and holding back the stuff that would truly freak her out. Should he tell her he’s woken up in the corner of his bedroom some nights, cocooned against the ceiling because Khaji had deemed him too exposed on his bed? Or that he can tell when someone is pregnant, or sick, or dying because Khaji will scan them as he passes and share the information like he’s meant to do something with it? Or maybe she wants to know that Khaji has mentioned many times that they can grow Jaime extra limbs, fingers, body parts just so he can more easily accomplish tasks. All of it is equally fucked up, and horrifying, and wrong. All of it makes him feel like a stranger in his own skin.
“I- I don’t have to eat now,” he says instead, because his family already knows he’s prone to skipping meals in lieu of focusing on work, so this doesn’t seem that strange. His nana has had to pull him away from a school project many times just to sit a plate of food in front of him and tempt his stomach with the scent of it.
Milagro’s eyes narrow even further, “Okay…”
“Khaji calls it ‘recycling nutrients’. They can circulate things back through my body. So I don’t get hungry, or thirsty. Not for a while at least.”
“Okay.”
“That’s all you’re gonna say?” His hands have already sought out the comfort of the blanket beneath him and he’s picking at the spots where the fabric is pilling anxiously. He would like to think this nervous tick is Khaji’s doing, but in truth Jaime had just been born anxious.
His sister shrugs, “Well what do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. Something.” He throws his hands in the air for emphasis.
When Milagro asks, “So does that mean you’re eating your own shit?” Jaime can’t help the baffled sound that escapes him.
“What!?”
“Well you said it was recycled!”
“Not like that!” although…maybe it is? Jaime doesn’t actually know how it all works. He went to school for law, not science. Khaji Da, unhelpfully, remains silent inside him. He makes a mental note to eat more.
Milagro stares at him with a disgusted expression and then she’s bursting out into laughter and Jaime can’t help but to follow.
He feels ten years old, all scrapped knees and gap teeth. Like he and Milagro have climbed onto the roof for the very first time, noticing that the metal grating on the windows acts as a perfect ladder. She’s six and clutching his hand with a death grip as he pulls her up. Both of them are trying to keep dead quiet, because their parents are inside and all it would take is one glance out the window to see light-up sketchers kicking against the glass.
It feels, for just a moment, like home.
When their mom comes out at the sound of them laughing, she pretends to be upset. She says it’s late and they’ll wake up the neighborhood; or they’ll put a hole in the brand new roof, and Jaime has already hit his limit in that regard. But Jaime can see her smiling. It reminds him of all the times they’ve done this dance before. And always he and Milagro return to the roof.
After they’re back on the ground, Milagro pats him on the shoulder.
“Don’t worry. Shit eating bug or not, you’re still Jaime.”
It is a disgusting thing to say. He twists his face up in revulsion.
“Gee. Thanks.”
“No problem bug boy.” He can already tell, from the way her eyes immediately light up, that the nickname is going to stick.
When Milagro stands in his doorway later and asks if she can sleep in his room for the night, Jaime lets her in without question. She tells him it’s because her room still smells like wet paint. He knows it’s because the house feels like a stranger to her – the tree that used to cast shadows on her wall burned down in the fire.
She is seven again, and he is the eleven year old boy holding his sisters hand, so she won’t be scared of the dark. Even after everything, she has come to him to find familiarity. Because, despite it all, Jaime is still Jaime. And the house isn’t quite their home, but it’s starting to feel like one day it maybe could be again.