Chapter Text
Before the slaughterhouse, before the multi-car catastrophe on the Freeway Hate (H-8) out of the Third District into the boonies, before the string of high-profile deaths catalyzed by his old friend(?)’s head threatening to poke out of its shell, the Dragon, or at least the half with golden hair—Gamma Null Fifteen—had been offered a way out.
Same story. Every NULL’s been through it. Have you ever seen two men in masks? All the time, man. They follow me around. They haunt the hem of my duster coat, the frayed ends of my braid. What, you see ‘em too?
This was during the time when they had his—Gamma Null Fifteen’s—mugshot on record, and they played it on every TV screen, an endless collage of him staring down from the window of the electronics store, sallow-eyed, sneers carved into the lines around his mouth. Looking too old and dried up to be a child now, so he’d lost that bit of immunity. He decided that he had a particularly assholish face, and it wouldn’t be too unreasonable to kill him just for that.
Didn’t try to hide his face, even though every bead-eyed camera that scanned its gaze down from above was encoded to recognize his craniofacial geometries and ping the nearest cop hive about it. Didn't care about all that. He was unraveling—the last molecules of Chronos in his blood gleaming like lightningbugs in the dark, crushed to blue carmine by the endless grind and churn of his metabolism. He had no more doses in the tank. He had no secret stores. Socks empty, sharps boxes in faraway truck stop bathrooms full, smaller crates stacked diagonal in hollow disuse all around the big crate he called his home. He was done, and he was to die soon. Better pick somewhere, and fast, like a feral cat. A porch to drag yourself under and waste away. Somewhere that was an analogue of home, that was warm with a low ceiling, secluded, a place to hold you as you made your final memory. I mean, once you’ve decided to die, isn’t that when the real living starts? Everything gets so soft, the world becoming, with rare mercy, gentle as it was when you were a baby.
So it went he was in the mall trying to buy a fucking lollipop from one of the candy dispenser machines, because he couldn’t remember the last time he had a lollipop, or if he ever had one in his life. But they looked dream-sweet. They looked like an artifact from a world that didn’t exist. He couldn’t imagine anyone actually inventing lollipops, except maybe just to sell them and get stupid rich off the profits from little kids’ pockets—not that anything was wrong with that, I mean, the children have free will, right, free will to decide what they want to purchase, where they want to be, who they kill—so was he a monster or not? God. They said they didn’t blame him for what happened at the end of the war, but they left him to the wastes nonetheless. No one tried—well, they tried up until everyone stopped paying attention—to save him because he had nothing. No connections, no family, no spark of humanity in his eyes that could be recognized by other humans. He had an asshole face and a skillset extremely attractive to people who make money by hurting other people. None of that was worth saving.
All of it shoved under. Under what? Just under. Beneath. Something between them and everything else in the world. Them below everything else, hidden beneath the layers of the city, the truth and injustice of it a time capsule only to be unearthed by historians a hundred years from now. But now, New Meccan now, he was no longer a child, and he had hurt a lot of people, so he deserved to die. His mouth was dry, head spinning; the withdrawal made him weak but he liked the feeling of it, liked blinking so slow and feeling photons fall upon his skin, one after the other like kisses. His fingers were slick with sweat and couldn’t muster the rigidity to turn the dial, the one that ate the quarter and spat out a lollipop. He was mouthing curses that flopped about his tongue, loose and granular.
Trying, quickly, to brainstorm somewhere to die. Trying to think if he’d leave anything for anyone. Trying to think what else about this hell of a life he’d miss. Stale aircon nitrogen suffocating his borders, good riddance, not for long. What he should do before he lost the chance to forever. What he liked to do. What he liked. What he hated.
Fuck New Mecca. Maybe it’d be better to eschew what he wants and take someone even more assholish with him, for the good of humanity so to offset all the bad he's done. Fuck. His fingers were useless upon the cool metal of the dispenser dial, that was ridged! and fat! so even the fingers of a six-year-old could turn it. He could not even grant himself a lollipop that cost one coin he found on the pavement outside the mall, so he started chuckling to himself. He was the most hunted fugitive in New Mecca. Look at him. The most dangerous man alive. He had been of legal drinking age for half a year.
It was quiet, wasn’t it? Why was he the only person in the mall? Ten in the morning on a Tuesday—why were all the stores unstaffed? Blank music wafting softly from hidden speakers for no audience but him?
And then federal police with their big black boots swarmed in from both sides of the hall, and the churn left only two more molecules of Chronos in his blood, so the world plunged into twilight and the silhouettes of two lanky entities condensed in his peripheral vision. It was too soon. He wasn’t ready… no, it didn’t matter. His numbing fingers worked unhindered at the dial, which had been rendered violet flat-umbral by the shade of his dying mind.
“Hee hee! Look at this fuckin’ idiot. Oh, how the mighty fall, eh? Needs a silly little shot of a silly little drug to operate a goddamn candy dispenser, am I right or am I right?” the yellow one jeered, pointing. “Behold! A man!”
It was funny. Laughter bubbled up from the rotting depths of his chest and vented through his nose. He covered his mouth with his hands. “Alas, a man,” he whispered into his fingers.
The blue one spoke. “We meet once more, young fellow. I takest thou art familiar with thy imminent choice?”
“Yes, yes,” said Fifteen. “I’m dying from withdrawal; I can die right now, or everyone else in the room can die and I can keep living for about a day longer.”
“Ugh, how reductionist. You’re takin’ the flair out of it, boy.” Comedy shoved his hands into his labcoat pockets. He swayed like a lantern. “Guess our bit’s gettin’ old though, so it’s to be expected. Silver again, then, old buddy?”
Fifteen sighed. He dropped his hand. He was never getting that lollipop anyway, now that time had slowed to a crawl. It would take centuries for the atoms to accelerate enough so that a lollipop would tumble out into the tray beneath the dispenser. He eyed the little wrapped candies in the glass globe longingly before stepping back onto an aching leg.
“This time…” He looked up. No sky to be found. Ceiling piping, ducts and such. Gray architectural gristle.
“For sooth? Hath thy foul beast’s verdure starv’d finally? Hee hee!” Tragedy slinked up to the candy machines and propped an elbow upon one. He peered into Fifteen’s face. “He lies.”
“What? I’m not lying. I’m tired. I’m ready to call it.” Fifteen breathed and tried to memorize the feeling of air filling and leaving his lungs. He couldn’t memorize it—human brains were not built to remember the constant joy of living, or else life would be poisoned with too much joy, as it were. “I just wish… I wished… “ Not to these bozos. They don’t have to know you just wanted a fucking lollipop. What are you, a baby? So, instead of spitting it out, Fifteen’s body decided, for some reason, to cry. He wasn’t used to crying, so he thought he was laughing at first, until he held his hand over his mouth and it came away stringing snot.
Comedy swayed forward. He smelled of ancient blood, like the type stored in the dilapidated tooth roots of the unethically elderly. Grumbling, he turned the dial for Fifteen. A candy fell clattering to the tray. “There,” said Comedy. “And don’t say we never did nothin’ for ya.
Fifteen took it and unwrapped it and stuck it in his mouth. The lollipop tasted like strawberries and cream. He couldn’t stop laughing or crying. He felt as if he were a memory of a kid who had been lost in a mall. It wasn’t his memory because he had never been a kid.
“Alright, you can slurp on it a while,” mumbled Comedy, “but we ain't got all day.”
He didn’t even want to finish the lollipop, really. He took it out of his mouth and turned around with his hands up. Realized the soft pinch of eight red laser-dots on his chest. “This is really the end, then?”
“With every jape cometh a punchline,” shrugged Tragedy. “No special wretchedness to it.”
Comedy plucked the lollipop from his fingers and jabbed it into the smiling cut in his mask. He shambled back, out of the range of the firestorm that would inevitably make rags of Fifteen’s body. “You know, we kinda thought you might actually stick around forever. You and that gun girl… you two were the little psychopaths who’d do straight up anything to live. Lie, steal, betray, kill… you lasted longer than the others for a reason. But it looks like even your heartlessness has a limit. What a bummer, huh, brother?”
“Fie, ‘tis a shame—ah, for blood-sport spectators such as we. ‘Tis a small blessing for the apes meandering ‘round the arena.”
“True, true. Alright, golden boy, ready for the epilogue?”
Fifteen hesitated, for a single second. Not to doubt, but to try to live more lives than he had been allotted by remembering everything he loved of this world. There was not much. He loved sunlight, so he conjured the warmth of it on his arms, the sight of the little hairs on his arms turned to fiber-optic floss by it. He loved the texture of dry wool socks and he loved the taste of sweet milk in his coffee. He loved… what else did he love?
Despite all other parts of him, he loved the act of killing. Did that count? No—because he feared killing and hated killing too, just not as much. He could say that about just about anything.
What did he love and love purely without some parts fearing it or hating it? He loved cats, so he remembered the face and fur of every feral cat he met on the peninsula whose secret names he whispered only in his head. All this time, his sinuses were full and dribbling. He couldn’t stop crying, so he had to have cared about something— or else what was he mourning? He loved… when bad things happened to bad people, but he couldn’t remember a single instance of this occurring. He loved…. the fantasy. The life he dreamed for himself to have, one where all of the soldiering and killing could be molted away, where the lies about Chronos rehabilitation had turned out to be truths, where he could be part of the massive, squirming whole that made New Mecca, or, hell, the world.
A life where maybe, he could have had a friend. Or had a normal job. A home. A history. A life where he could have been free, or as free as everyone else was, at least. Studio apartment filled with light and linen. Prescription eyeglasses. French press coffee. Family to make proud, a girl at work to woo. But this simply did not exist, so it was not anything to miss.
And now. Back to the warm dark he had been plucked from, screaming. The vast dissolution. He was afraid of losing, his personhood being corroded, irreversibly, wholly, by the slow violence of his body breaking, but he was more tired of fighting the loss. So he accepted his life was like that of small prey: a stillness long as time itself interrupted by a flash of hot-blooded snaggle-toothed jungle struggle. Then silence again, forever.
He sighed and looked up through prismatic wet lashes, airways stretching open. Took a breath more euphoric and satiating than any drug that had ever bled into his body. Smiled wanly. God, no one could say he didn't give it all a chance.
“Yes. I’m r—”
Hot red blitz splashed onto his teeth. Grenade smoke, ruptured arteries, the pistols’ aiming optics sliding off his chest like water. Shockwave after shockwave, tinny bruised eardrums, flashbang, fluorescent crackle, blood mist, sick thunder-throbbing vision, Damascus-rippled singing steel. Weightless fragments of glass, candy tumbling chittering onto the floor, bodies made of dry rubble, his hand in the chaos anchoring on a rubbed-smooth hilt, by his feet: a slat of molten bubblegum? no—brain matter.
“Whoa-hoh-hoh!” Comedy exclaimed, rolling the lollipop between his fingers.
“Good now!” Tragedy flicked blood from his sleeve.
A woman in olive-drab uniform plummeted from a puff of ash before him. A fine spray of blood showered down after her. He knew of her. Never met her prior, only ever tasted the jets of dust she left behind: the only other NULL soldier in New Mecca. The two of them had always spiraled around each other, repulsed like like-poled magnets so that they would never have to fight over the same batch of Chronos. “Huntress,” he said. It was the secret name he had given her in his head.
She nodded, face unknowable. “Dragon.” Fat handsome guns gripped in both hands, their snouts edging towards the masked men on either side of them. “Choose the silver mask.” Her visor lights pulsed with the ebbs of her voice. A subsonic metallic whine underscored her words. “There's no one left to be hurt by that decision now… if that still matters to you.”
“It doesn't. Hasn't for a long time. But the exhaustion…”
“...Never abates. This I know well.” She shook a red-soaked strand of hair out of her face and glanced sheepishly at the bodies strewn like popped balloons across the linoleum flooring. “However, now that we've finally met… don't you want to know what happens next?”
She gave him a quarter of a vial of the blue juice. Didn’t even let him mainline it down his favorite forearm vein; shoved the shit into his bicep instead. Said his veins downstream were getting leaky, could tell from the bruises, as if that meant anything to the two of them who would find any way, any technique, to get this goddamned molecule from point A (outside the blood-brain barrier) to point B (inside it).
“I can't draw on this.” He tried and fizzled, feeling blind. He was no longer on the brink of mental and physiological collapse, but time could now pass for him only at the speed at which it passed for everyone else. “I need the full vial, at least.”
She scoffed, visor still on despite being far from combat. “You're not getting it, Gamma. If I give you the full thing, there's nothing stopping you from taking all the rest I have.”
They sat on the bed in her little tenement room two buildings down from the train into the first city. In the aftermath of the Levelling, radioactive ash leaked from the moiling clouds above, months after the detonation. But people still had to go to work. So they made it that you could traverse the blocks, from megabuilding to megabuilding, without having ever to see sunlight. The Huntress’s commute is completely sealed from the coal-stink air out of doors, dipping below the tenement blocks in swift tunnels toward the underground train.
Fifteen leaned his head back, somewhat missing the feeling of dying. The edges of the world rendered crisp and matter-of-fact once more, the colors of things being the flat colors they were supposed to be. No magic in life until you’re about to lose it. “What’re you keeping me alive for, then?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to see what would happen if I did.” She scrubbed a pair of pants into a washtub. Faint red swirled in the water. Smog-faded music swirled in the air, seeping from a radio playing on the sill of a window no bigger than a sheet of printer paper. Must’ve cost her a lot to secure this place. “I’ve done some thinking—I know the consensus is that it’s one NULL per city, no more, and that we’re outliers because this is New Mecca. Arterial source, versus a meager capillary. Can fit two tapeworms instead of one.”
“Yes. Though I wouldn’t have put it like that—these aren’t rules to a game. ”
She beckoned for a small canister lying to Fifteen’s side. He handed it to her wordlessly, his fingertips catching cold water from hers. “Yeah, of course not. But it’s how things play out. I’m not saying I want us to work together, to be clear. I just… those goddamned masks. I’ve tolerated so much bullshit in this life, and I just couldn’t tolerate that.” She poured white powder from the can and kneaded it into a dark stain in her pants.
“So you did it to spite them.” He watched her hands work, finding nowhere else to set his eyes. The harsh, scrubbing motion of her arms was slapdash with familiarity. She’d washed her uniform by hand many times—likely preferred it this way over using the machines.
“Hmm... Spite them... That wouldn’t be too incorrect.”
“That's funny. You always struck me as careful. I didn’t think you’d play around with forces no one knows anything about.”
“Seriously, what’ll they do, kill me? That’s one fewer channel for them to tune in on.” Holding the pants up to appraise the status of the stain. Not good enough: dunking them back into the tub. “They don’t give a shit. They like this development. It entertains them.”
Fifteen was still tired, so he laid down onto the bed and stared at the popcorn ceiling. His spine bled endorphins as it decompressed. “It always seemed they were trying to get me to die for the good of everyone else.”
A sharp chuckle from her, rendered piercing by her mask’s vocoding. “Precisely why I jumped in. I don’t think you deserve to die. I don’t think anyone who believes you do should be allowed to play psychopomp.”
“You… you don’t…” Huh? But he… He could catalog every ruin he had brought to anyone, every detraction from the wider sweetness of this world, but it felt a hellish tear in his head to do so. He could do it, though, if he needed to. To prove she had made a mistake.
Her hands paused. “What’s so hard to understand? Sure, life would go a lot more smoothly for me if you were dead, but, from an ideological standpoint, did any of us choose this? How is it our fault that we have to kill to survive? Don’t we have the right to live too?”
Fifteen laughed low, under his breath. “That’s a joke, right?”
“Oh, I’m not joking. Are you?”
“No.”
She set the tub to the side and dragged her wet hands across her lap. Bending down, she tugged a gun case out from beneath the bed. A meaty click; unlocked. Laid upon his chest an icy weight in the unmistakable L-shape of a handgun. “Then you know what you ought to do with this.”
Fifteen sat up. Although the weight of the pistol slid from his sternum to his hand, he was still crushed beneath the Huntress’ unyielding silence. She’d stopped scrubbing and now stared at him over her shoulder, waiting.
“Go on,” she said. “Don’t worry about making a mess, it’s laundry day for me anyway.”
Fifteen’s fingers traced the patient metal upon the pistol’s slide. He imagined holding it beneath his chin, the wet cold kiss of the muzzle against the soft triangle of meat ringed by his jawbones. He couldn’t do it. Not anymore, not here, not like this. To go like this was pathetic—what, dead because he’d been dared to demonstrate his morals ? Was he even tired anymore, now that his body had stabilized? His flesh was in its prime.
He wrenched the muzzle to his chin, just to see if that changed anything. It didn’t. Flicked the safety off and creased his finger around the trigger. Nothing, no drive to pull it. The gun sat dead in his slick hands and began to droop.
There was still so much unfinished business, always, nothing wrapped up, no dearth of want in his dumb young heart. He fought to live as much as he always did—how did he ever get so close to letting himself die? Heat rising to his cheeks, he took the gun away from his head and moved to drop it in her lap.
She made a smug noise and pushed it back towards him. “But won’t innocent people die?” she said.
“Why me and not them?” The force of his outward hand met hers, the gun bobbing in between them.
“You’re hardly innocent. You like killing. I’ve seen your work, Dragon; every corpse you leave behind is carved with the aesthetics of play.”
“I’d never hurt a single person again if I could live without having to,” he muttered.
“Then what do you bring to the world? Do you make anything better at all?”
His grip was momentarily shaken, because he knew he brought nothing, and he just made everything worse—it was his nature as a Chronos addict who had no notable abilities outside making war. The gun shoved toward his chest. Catching it, he sputtered, ”I’ll rid the world of those who make it worse.”
Her retort didn’t come. Gently, she slipped the gun from him, clicked the safety back on, and put it back in its case. Dipped her hands into the tub again. “All answers correct but that one,” with a voice that held a hint of a sigh. “Our only sin was wanting to live,” she said, “and our existence needs no other justification. You don’t condemn the wolves for eating the sheep.”
“That’s what you consider them? Sheep?” He wiped his own hot hands on his thighs.
An offended pause, and she spoke more slowly as if she thought he struggled to understand: “They consider us wolves—and we’re in no position to assert otherwise.” She wrung the water out of her pants and got to her feet, shaking the garment—which was so heavy and dark with fluid it was impossible to tell if its stains had truly been banished. “Listen. I’m in a good spot; I can afford to give you quarter-doses daily while we decide what’s to be done with you. You’ll stay here while my guy gets your data off the surveillance registry. Don’t leave the megabuilding until then.”
He squinted at her. What kind of person was she? Did it matter at all? There was the obvious goodwill, and then there was that coldness to her words. “Whose blood was that on those pants?” he said. “Did you know them? Or were they just livestock to slaughter?”
“My blood, you fuckin’ ingrate. I left a tampon in too long.” She flung the pants at him and jabbed a thumb toward the exit. “Now go hang these up by the vents down the hall. I don’t entertain freeloaders.”