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There’s a sickness in Alejandro’s veins. It’s not a physical one, but it pulses and writhes all the same. It bleeds agonisingly under his skin, slowly making its treacherous way towards his heart.
What a pitiful sickness it is. One that Alejandro always thought he would have control over. One that he thought would only belong to other people. A silly, nauseating weakness that he could use to his own benefit, pulling it from its pedestal and twisting it into just another tool. A weapon to sharpen and wield in his never-ending war against his own brother. Never once had he considered the possibility of the blade one day being turned against him - and yet it has.
What kicks it off is Alejandro turning on his TV. After the recording for All-Stars was wrapped up, Chris had made him stay in his ‘cottage’, since he technically has custody over Alejandro now. He doesn’t have much else to do, since there aren’t that many games or books or other forms of entertainment around. He’s basically on house arrest, forbidden from leaving without Chris’ permission. Even if he put all of that aside, though, Alejandro simply feels… a way he can’t quite describe. All the things he enjoyed prior to being stuffed in a robot for a year no longer seem to excite him. Dinosaurs, self care, making fun of children’s fairy tales - none of it. So, he just turns on the TV.
He hasn’t watched television shows since he was very little; there were much more productive things to do than sit on the Burromuerto household’s couch staring at a screen, after all. He doesn’t quite know what he was expecting when he flicked through the different channels. Yet he presses away at the remote, network after network, almost obsessively. There’s something calling to him. He finds his answer in a channel airing a show called ‘The Ridonculous Race’.
The name had sounded intriguing enough on its own, but pausing to watch the show even for a brief few seconds turns out to be a mistake. Just as he clicks on the button for the next channel, two ridiculously familiar faces appear on the screen. It takes Alejandro’s mind a few seconds to realise why the participants were familiar before he scrambles back to the show.
That’s Owen and Noah, he thinks distantly. The duo were hard to forget. After all, Alejandro had suffered an incredibly large amount of headaches in the presence of the former. And Noah… Alejandro hadn’t really thought about the boy, after his elimination in London. Sure, Alejandro had seen him on the way up to the mouth of the volcano; they had even locked gazes for a brief moment. But there was a competition to win, and the other teen was soon thrown to the back of his mind amidst the chaos following the finale of World Tour.
Admittedly, Noah’s appearance on this show is stirring up many conflicted feelings, far more than the person he was partnered with. For all that Alejandro had lied to others during that season, he had thought Noah’s companionship was rather… special. At least, it was better than the presence of the other contestants. He had quite enjoyed talking with the snarkish cynic, who made biting, sarcastic comments about even his closest friends.
(Perhaps that is where the problems stem from, because Alejandro can still hear Noah’s voice ringing in the back of his head, calling him an eel.)
Now that Alejandro’s here, sitting in a dark room, alone with nothing but a television to keep him company, he’s left to ponder. If Duncan never returned, or if Chris had followed the rules of the challenge and the Amazons had to face an elimination instead of Team Chris, how much longer would Noah have lasted? What would have changed?
It’s useless to think about, but Alejandro watches Ridonculous Race anyway. It’s just for the cheap thrill of watching Noah struggle through sadistic challenges, he reasons with himself. So he stops watching the minutes tick by in red, blocky letters on the tacky digital clock Chris got for him. So he forgets to eat, forgets to drink water, so he forgets to sleep. Chris never comes knocking. Alejandro stares at the screen and soaks up the reality show until Noah is eliminated.
Getting eliminated for a crush, Noah? Alejandro wants to mock, but there’s no one to say it to. There’s no one around to ask why he felt so strangely about Noah waltzing around on the screen and falling in love with a girl called Emma. He can only watch dumbly at the starstruck expression Noah gives her, watch as something coils tightly around his lungs and squeezes when Noah saves her life and makes a stupidly suave remark, watch with acid boiling up his throat as she places a kiss on Noah’s lips, who practically bursts with dizzy glee.
If Noah had stayed around long enough to be a threat to Alejandro’s victory, would Alejandro have charmed him like he did Bridgette and Leshawna? (He tries not to think about Heather.) Would Noah have looked at him with those same starstruck eyes, would Noah have reached a hand out for Alejandro at the top of that volcano, would Noah have kissed him after?
It’s useless to think about. Because Noah is somewhere out there running around doing who knows what, spending the remainder of his teenage years fooling around with his annoyingly idiotic friends, and Alejandro is trapped in yet another prison-like house, just with less things to do this time.
And it’s not fair.
For the first few days after he watches Noah’s RR elimination, Alejandro is so angry . The jealousy crashes into him in waves, again and again, trying to capsize the already-rickety boat he’s marooned on. He is drowning in it. He can’t bring himself to finish the show, so he punches at the walls and the door and everything that he can see, knuckles bruising and bloody, only stopping when his body decides to collapse. He dreams of Noah, who stares at him passively, that look of judgement that had, up until Germany, up until London, never been directed at Alejandro. Alejandro always grabs Noah’s shirt, shakes him harshly. He’ll yell and scream and shout at the other. Noah just keeps staring. The dream cuts off when Alejandro raises his fist a bit too high.
A few more days of this and a side of Alejandro’s ship tips too far. Suddenly he finds himself trapped in a whirlpool where the only thing he can seem to do is cry to himself in the wreckage made by his hands. The torn curtains, a hole in the wall at the side of his bed, the now-broken door of the closet, a chair fallen to pieces - they all stare at him, until he passes out. It’s pathetic, he thinks. A Burromuerto should never cry like this. But still, when he passes out and dreams, he sees Noah staring at him again. There’s a look on his face Alejandro can’t quite puzzle out, an expression he’d never seen on Noah before. This Noah watches Alejandro cry and weep. Noah doesn’t do anything until the very end, where he slowly wraps his arms around Alejandro and murmurs something indecipherable.
And then he wakes up.
He doesn’t know how long he cries and dreams and gets hugged by the figment of Noah his brain conjures, doesn’t know how long the cycle repeats, doesn’t count the days spent in a dizzy, nauseous haze of anger and want because he tore his calendar to pieces in the process. But eventually, he gets tired. His body gets dragged to the shore by currents, laid to rest in the sand. No one cares for the nameless, washed-up body. Everyone that Alejandro did know has moved on. Heather had only been contractually obligated to act infatuated with him. His father had disowned him. His mother was thinking of him, surely, but she can’t do much, not anymore. His brothers… he would rather not think about José, and Carlos would be similar to their mother. He wonders if Noah even remembers him. In his next dream, Noah is sitting next to him. They stare into each other’s eyes. The apparition’s words are clearer, now.
“You need to let go,” it says mournfully.
Alejandro doesn’t know what he has to let go of.
And then he wakes up.
For the first time in weeks, he leaves his room. Chris isn’t in the house - or if he is, he’s hidden himself away somewhere. Alejandro stumbles down to the kitchen. He drinks a lot of water. He doesn’t have the energy to cook, so he just grabs a box of hopefully-not-expired crackers from the pantry. He finishes the box at breakneck speed. He’s a mess, obviously, so he goes back up the stairs to clean himself up. He takes a shower, brushes his teeth, combs back his hair, shaves his stubble. He thinks he’ll have to go and get a haircut sometime soon, whenever he sees Chris next.
He goes back to his room, sits in front of the TV again. He finishes the last few episodes of the show. It’s peaceful, not seeing Noah’s face on the screen. He goes to bed soon after.
This time, the dream isn’t in a blank space. Alejandro dreams of his own room. It’s confusing, because for a moment he thinks he just went to sleep and woke up without a dream, but then he sees Noah sitting at the foot of his bed, staring at him quietly.
“Hi,” Alejandro finds himself saying. His voice is scratchy - raw from the screaming and crying and lack of water, despite this being only a dream.
“Hi,” Noah repeats, the same voice Alejandro remembers from their time together on the plane, the same voice Alejandro hears from the TV in his dark room.
They stare at each other. Noah has a knowing look in his eye, not unlike the one he gave Alejandro after the challenge in Germany. It’s nauseating, how each feature is perfectly replicated, how he can remember each line and curve and corner of Noah’s face, how he committed every detail to memory.
Ah.
This disease he denies will tear him open from the inside. It will claw its way out of his corpse, red and bloody and glorious and painful.
“You need to let it go,” Noah repeats his line from yesterday, and Alejandro laughs hysterically. He stops after a while because his lungs hurt.
How can I possibly let this go, now that I know? How can I possibly forget the fact that I’m in love with someone that’s moved on from something that was never there? He wants to ask. But the thing wearing Noah’s face knows exactly what he’s thinking. He’s certain of it. So instead he says, “I’m a coward.”
“It’s not too late,” it says stubbornly. Alejandro laughs again. He’s once again reminded that he’s alone, that he’s in his own head. Noah would never say anything like that. These were just words Alejandro had hoped Noah would say, before the elimination ceremony.
But he hadn’t even bothered to look for Alejandro after the London challenge. Noah had just glared at Chris when it was his turn to jump. That hurt for a reason that Alejandro couldn’t identify, back then. So he shoved it to the back of his mind and shut off the part of him that so desperately wanted to lunge forward and grab hold of Noah’s wrist before he fell from the plane, into freefall, out of reach. Like an untreated wound, it went numb, quietly flew under the radar, forgotten, until it got infected , a raging fire that would flay Alejandro alive.
(‘I’m sorry’, ‘I didn’t mean what I said’, ‘I was frustrated’, a voice in his dreams would say sometimes, back when he slept in the Drama Machine.)
(Even now that he knows the truth, he can’t tell if that voice belonged to Noah or himself.)
“He hadn’t felt the same as me,” Alejandro says resignedly. “And if he did, we’ve already ruined everything.”
“It’s not too late,” Noah says again, more insistent.
How pathetic I must be, to use a fake version of Noah to annoy myself into doing something, he thinks.
The weight on the bed shifts as Noah moves closer. It reaches to fiddle with Alejandro’s hair, arms wrapping protectively around him.
“You won’t know until you try,” it murmurs, closing its eyes and leaning to press its forehead against Alejandro’s.
How pathetic I must be, he thinks again, placing a hand on the back of fake-Noah’s head. He pretends he’s not alone in an awful, large house, he pretends that there’s a chance somewhere out there for him, he pretends, just for the moment, that this was the real deal, and that everything was alright.
When he pulls their lips together, it feels like nothing.
And then he wakes up.