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The night after they killed Ivan, once Till was finally forgotten in celebration, he was allowed to slink away and nurse his wounds while his captors made their drunken merchandising deals and press statements. Under a table, he found a discarded jacket and tried to sleep.
There were still flecks of blood soaked into the fabric of his shirt and crusted between the rhinestones, but in the dream, the blood was his. In the dream, Ivan held his face—more gently, this time, petting his cheek with his thumb—and ate it. He was firm, and methodical, and he kept coming back for more. The human mind is remarkable, really, how it can conjure the feeling of flesh cleaving from your bones in mouthfuls, even though it knows nothing about the subject. The feeling of teeth in your lips, not on them.
When Ivan was finished, Till had managed, muddlily, to ask him why, through broken sound and gesture.
“I was hungry,” Ivan had replied, with those nearly-closed eyes and his apologetic smile. Blood made the parting of his lips all slow and sticky.
Till hasn’t slept much since. After all, he watched his best friend bleed out on the floor.
— - —
Hyuna leads Till to a door by the hand.
“Here,” she says, “He’s in here,” and she points at it with her thumb.
It’s all over. The impossible has happened. Till stumbled out of an arena service entrance propped in Mizi’s arms and into a van and the world fell to pieces. He got out. Yet, still, there comes a second, more impossible thing.
Ivan is behind the door. Injured, but breathing. Dead, but alive.
Till’s mind spins like the back tire of a wrecked bike while Hyuna rattles off the details of that previous daring escape. Posing as a clean-up crew, bloody body in a utility cart, high-speed car chase, the works. Action movie stuff. He tries not to vomit what little he ate on the hours-long ride to the base, when Mizi broke off pieces of a nutrition bar and handed them to him, one by one, because Mizi knew he would eat them if they came from her hands.
And then Hyuna had kissed her.
“Sure, it’s been a couple weeks, but we don’t have the best medical care out here—don’t tell anyone I said that, feelings will get hurt—so don’t let him move too much. He’s still healing, and he will be for a long while yet,” Hyuna tells him, with an odd amount of flourish.
He manages to get out: “Are you sure it’s okay for me to visit him?” by which he meant: Do I have to do this now? Is this happening now? Is this real?
“Are you kidding? He made it very clear that he wanted to see you the moment you got here, even if the building was on fire and the planet was getting liquidated. Like,” she goes flat in the face and then takes on a terrible look, grabbing his forearm, speaking lowly, “If you get him out, and I don’t see him immediately, I will make things very difficult for you.”
It doesn’t really seem like Ivan at all.
She looks somewhere above them both, somewhere between sheepish and uncaring. “I don’t want him to chew me out. He’s a bit of a prick. And we need him cooperative for messaging—God, it’s gonna be great when we televise we’ve broken you three out. Well, I’ll leave you to it.”
Then she swaggers away.
Till keeps his hand on the door handle so long it’s warm to the touch before he turns it.
The room is dark, like most of the rooms in the rebel base are. Windows boarded over, leaking light and dust. In disrepair. A bedside table speaks to the existence of a scattered nurse—the packaging of formerly sterile gauze and instruments is strewn about in a way that makes one worry about quality of care. A hanging bottle drips something steadily into a tube hooked into–
Ivan.
Ivan is lying on a cot, facing the far wall, a clean but bloodstained sheet draped over his form. In repose he echoes the last time Till saw him; but now, visible in the slice of light let in by the door, there is a definite rise and fall to the chest.
He’s wearing some makeshift version of a hospital gown. His ankle peeking out from the sheet reveals—thank god—pants.
“Ivan,” Till says, softly, but loud enough to know he’d be heard.
Nothing happens.
When Mizi had disappeared, a hole had been punched through the core of him. He wallpapered over it with memories of the garden and visions of gentle smiles and outstretched hands. He let himself become fully lost to daydreams. It hadn’t really worked.
When Ivan had died, the lens through which Till saw the world had fractured, rearranged, and stuck that way, like a broken bone that wasn’t set. A bleeding kaleidoscope of the past. A dozen years of memories clamored for fresh attention, to be reexamined, to be cut open so they could show off all the terrible wriggling things that had wormed around inside them and eaten them hollow. He couldn’t think of the garden, anymore; only of how stupid he had been.
The curve of Ivan’s body rises and falls.
The steps to the bed are an eternity, inconceivable, already over. Till is ghosting his hand over the sleeve of Ivan’s hospital gown, barely considering touching his shoulder (why—maybe to rouse him? Maybe to feel the texture of the fabric?) when Ivan’s hand closes around his like a trap.
Till goes as still as a rabbit under eyes.
Without looking up, Ivan squeezes Till’s fingertip between his thumb and the crook of his pointer finger. Then he drops it.
“You’re mad at me,” Ivan says, the childishness of the words in contrast with the deep clarity of his voice.
Till—who hadn’t been feeling much of anything, just moving forward, just skidding over his own thoughts like ice—is suddenly furious.
“Of course I’m fucking mad at you. I- that wasn’t your choice to make! How could you? And how could you- how dare you not tell me? How dare you tell me like that? Who said I wanted your fucking tongue in my mouth?” With each question he shoves Ivan’s back, punctuating the words, making the rickety cot creak in protest.
Ivan doesn’t reply. His back is firm under Till’s palm, shoulders broad, the warmth of that little slice of back where the gown slides open burning hot.
Ivan half rolls over to face him, turning his shoulder flat against the bed. His irises are pits someone could fall into. Jet. Oblivion.
“In my defense, I very much wanted to kiss you before I died.”
Oh, he’s so innocent.
“Don’t try to pull that martyr shit with me. I’m mad about that, too.”
“I didn’t think I would have to face you afterwards,” he says, and the corner of his mouth jerks up into an empty, fake-apology smile, like an itch.
Till smacks him.
It’s not very satisfying to hit someone who’s lying down. The angle is bad, they barely move, and you feel horrible afterward, as they slowly blink their way back to you, docile and aching.
Ivan just lies there, still, ready for whatever blows Till desires to deliver, eyes glassy and faraway. He always was good at taking punishment. That was his specialty; waiting for the strike, unflinching, going somewhere in his mind where the present didn’t touch him. It’s why the monitors all loved him so much. Why they took off his collar. Because they knew he would kneel and let them cut his throat, softly, without sound.
Till had always fought back. Their captors liked that for a different reason.
Their captors had trained them both until they were parodies of themselves, their natural actions as well-suited to the needs of the game as if they were acting from a script. Their methods said to Till: Oh, you want to be a pain in the ass? You want to be a fighter? Your brand is “rebel,” and every time you kick and scratch and cry I make another penny.
The fact that he bit someone trying to get out from under them once became the inspiration for a perfume ad.
On the worst days, the way Ivan looks at Till reminds him of them. Is he a bug pinned to styrofoam? Is Ivan going to pull the needle out of him, just to watch him bleed? Is it cute when he writhes?
Still, Ivan is more than some moments of morbid fascination. So many times, his fingers had been on Till’s neck. Once, just tight enough to leave the faintest dusting of a bruise that faded in days; a thousand times, feather-light, relieving him of the burden of captivity for a second when no one was looking.
Either way, Ivan didn’t push the pin in. He just took it out.
“I’m so mad at you,” Till says, and the waver in his voice is verging on dangerous.
With a single, slow blink, Ivan says, “I know.”
He did just say that, after all. Someone wasn’t listening.
Slowly, delicately, with great effort, Ivan hauls himself into a sitting position. He looks at Till so intently, always, in a way that used to make him feel suffocated. Now it reminds him of their childhood.
Ivan pats the bed with the hand he isn’t using to hold himself up.
Till sits down next to him, stiff as a board.
“It’s nice to see you,” Ivan starts. “We never got to say a proper hello at the arena.”
Till grunts in response, because he’s an excellent conversationalist.
“You kept playing guitar,” Ivan says, as if it’s something interesting to note about Till, personally, and not a fucking given in their situation.
“You changed your hair,” Till says, tersely, and Ivan laughs in that fake way he used to use in the mess hall and later perfected for interviews.
It hurts.
“Yeah,” Ivan says, reaching up to rub the end of his bangs between his fingers. “Do you like it?”
“It’s too sophisticated for you. Makes you look like you look like a stuck-up prick.”
He laughs again, lightly. “Well, that is why they picked it.”
Till knocks into Ivan with his shoulder, and stays there. “Stop it.”
Ivan lets it fall away, just like that. Like an exhaled breath.
“I don’t know what else to say.”
At first, it’s a relief to feel Ivan breathing. It’s familiar. Till hasn’t been this close to him for years, spare the kiss, hasn’t been this close to anyone by choice since they left the garden. Back then he didn’t know how to appreciate the weight of someone else’s hand on his back, the chance to wrestle in the grass and end up laughing in a heap. The value of your body being your own, even if only part-time.
It feels like a sick parody of their childhood. Ivan pressed close to his side, safe stupid oddball Ivan with his bottomless eyes and his warm hands–
Till draws himself together, lifting his bare feet from the floor, curling into himself and hugging his knees. The sheets are soft, if worn, and he can feel the seam of the mattress through them with the soles of his feet. The room smells like rubbing alcohol and Ivan, the lingering scent of that fucking cologne he repped mixing with the sweat of a sickbed. He can hear the breath through Ivan’s nose.
He fusses at the sheet where it’s fraying, pulling the weakest links away from the flock, runs a thread under his fingernail until the tip of Ivan’s finger stops him, and he realizes he’s bleeding.
“I kept all of your magazine features,” Till blurts out.
Ivan’s gaze snaps to him, startled.
If Till had been expecting a reciprocal declaration, he’s disappointed.
“And Mizi’s…?” Ivan supplies, bafflingly.
Till twists his face up and spits out a mocking, “Yes, and Mizi’s.” Then the irritation slips from his grasp. “And Sua’s. It felt like… a way to hold onto a part of you all, still.”
“I can imagine.” He doesn’t continue. There must be a question in Till’s eyes, so Ivan says, “He didn’t like me to read.”
Till is sure the face he’s making is offensive.
“It’s fine,” Ivan presses. “I didn’t like the pictures they took of you, anyway.”
For some reason, this is what breaks Till, and he smacks Ivan’s hand away.
“You fucking asshole.”
The laws of physics may attempt to keep Till from shrinking any further, but he’s willing to test them, to try and fail to keep the words inside him as they spill, unbidden, into the skin of his knees.
“You were there for such a short time, and then you were gone again. I thought I had learned not to miss you, but. I hadn’t. And I couldn’t even think of you- I mean, I used to imagine… When it was too much, I would imagine us all in the garden. Before it was over. But with us, you ended it so horribly I couldn’t even picture it anymore. With Mizi, she was just gone. But with you—the image of you lying there in your blood, the feeling of you gripping my face and pulling me back in—it was ruined.”
Ivan is silent. Then, uncharacteristically unsteady: “I didn’t think you’d care.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
“I didn’t! I didn’t think you’d care, not like that!”
Till leans away from him, incredulous.
“Are you joking?”
Ivan is speaking brightly to the empty room, manic. “Sure, you’d be mad. I didn’t give you a fair fight. But– the whole point was that I didn’t matter! That’s why it wouldn’t hurt you. I-“ he utters a wordless sound of disbelief, almost looks at Till, ends up looking somewhere over Till’s shoulder for a split second and then giving up.
“What the fuck are you talking about? Wouldn’t hurt me? Do you have any idea what the last few weeks have been like?”
“Hopefully better than mine-”
“Oh BOO HOO! You got to make a big, dramatic stand” Till unfurls and shoves Ivan, “without even thinking,” he shoves Ivan again, and Ivan grabs at his hair, but can’t seem to find purchase, “of what that would do to me-”
“I was thi-”
“Yeah, you were thinking? Thinking about what it would be like to watch you die? No,” Ivan gets hold of the hair now, and pulls. Till is shouting at this point. “Thinking about what you wanted from me before you went, doesn’t matter how I felt about it.”
Till lunges, and Ivan ends up lying belly-up on the bed, Till on top of him. He makes an odd noise as it happens. Till doesn’t care.
“And you know what? I remember that night in the club. I was too drugged to move, but I remember you touching me. I wanted to write it off as a bad dream. You like that, huh? You into that kind of thing? I thought you were my friend, but you’re just like all of them.”
Till’s face is on fire, and he’s waiting to die, he’s waiting for god to kill him, because this day can’t get any more strange and awful.
Ivan has gone completely still, his face blank, unreadable.
Then he reaches up and pushes Till on the shoulder.
“Maybe I’m mad at you,” he says, flatly.
“WHAT?” Till shouts, voice cracking, too loud in the little room.
“Maybe I’m mad at you, too,” he says, and he shoves Till again, harder this time, both hands up and on the offense.
Till just looks at him.
“You started it!” Ivan says— Ivan shouts, almost, voice rising, and Till realizes he’s witnessing something the rarely occurs in nature, like the birth of a star. “I was really going to fight you, for everything. And you stopped singing!”
Oh. Had he? He had, hadn’t he. Frankly, he’d forgotten.
He’d just wanted so badly to die.
With one last heave, Ivan shoves Till to the side and groans.
Till just looks at the ceiling. Tiles are missing. Someone could lay up there and watch them have their stupid fight. Maybe the whole building can hear it.
“‘Why didn’t I tell you?’ I did tell you. That’s how I told you. Now you know. And I know it was selfish,” He clutches his side, breaths coming fast, “but you know we’ve never asked.”
Till turns to look at him. Ivan. Pained. Panting. His face contorted in a way Till has never seen before.
“You never asked what you could do to my face. You just hit me. You did it just now, when you came in. And now we’re even.”
“No, we’re not,” Till says.
Something is ripping.
He places his palm against the pulse of Ivan’s throat and he wraps his fingers around his neck, a mirror image, rising on the fulcrum of his elbow.
“I could kill you, for real this time.” It’s not a threat, just an observation. His body hovers above Ivan’s, holding him to the bed.
“You can do whatever you want to me,” Ivan says, plain as day. He means it.
Ivan used to have so much fun when they beat the shit out of each other. Like they didn’t have it done to them enough already. It never occurred to Till before their duet that maybe Ivan had just wanted to touch him.
It’s a terrible excuse.
Ivan swallows, the movement of it making Till’s palms too hot and his cheeks burn and Till bends down and he kisses him like he wants to eat his face. Ivan leans up, starts to return it, his throat moving under Till’s hands, and Till shoves him back to the bed. “No,” Till says, and goes in with his teeth, and Ivan doesn’t try to move again, just lies there, still. It tastes like blood. Ivan is bleeding. As Till kisses him Ivan raises his hand against Till’s forearm and pushes, then moves to pull at Till’s hair until he lets him go, and Ivan coughs, wracking, turning away but still catching Till’s face with half of it.
When he finishes hacking, Ivan’s breath comes raggedly. Tears drip off the end of Till’s nose and spatter on Ivan’s skin, and he flinches, like he’s going to be hit.
Till crawls off him, to the edge of the bed, leans over it, and spits on the floor. A long spiderweb silk strand reaches from his mouth to the concrete, threatening to snap back up and touch him. It’s not good enough. He pats blindly around the bedside table until he finds a half-drunk glass of water, swishes it around his mouth, and spits it back into the cup. He can feel Ivan watching him.
Now they’re even.
Ivan leans over from behind him and spits a ribbon of blood into the glass. It spreads through the liquid like watercolors, red fading to orange.
Voice raspy, he states,“You were trying to hurt my feelings.”
Till focuses on what’s happening in the glass.
“That’s why you said that thing about the club. Right?” he presses.
When Till doesn’t answer, just looks at him, utterly spent, fear blooms somewhere in the pits of Ivan’s eyes.
“What do you think I want from you?” he says.
“I don’t even know anymore.”
“You think I want to hurt you?”
Till puts a hand on Ivan’s sternum and pushes him back, so that Ivan’s not practically breathing into his mouth.
“Ah,” he says, a little rumpled line forming between his eyebrows and a half-smile pulling at one corner of his mouth. “I really hurt you.”
“Yeah.”
Ivan’s face crumples. He takes a quick intake of breath, like he’s going to say something, then stops, holds, it, and finally:
“I’m sorry.”
He kneels, pressing his forehead to the bed. His pale, sweaty forehead; his greasy, unstyled hair. The smell of blood. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Till isn’t sure how to be affected. He just wants to sleep for a hundred years.
Slowly, absently, he reaches out and traces the little scar on Ivan’s temple, where hair doesn’t grow, because Till threw a rock at him when they were eight. Because Ivan said, “Why do you like Mizi so much if she doesn’t like you?”
He had needed stitches. Chidingly, by his bed, Sua said, “the better question is, ‘Why do you hang around Till when he doesn’t like you?’”
Ivan had stared at her, fiddling with the stem of an apple. “Till doesn’t like me?” he had said, and Sua sighed, exasperated. He cracked the skin of it with his teeth, pried off a piece, then spoke, muffled through the flesh. “But we have so much fun together.”
Then he turned to the door. “You don’t like me?” he asked Till, somehow divining that he was hovering outside.
Till had walked in and hopped on the bed, perching clumsily, making Ivan scoot over. He had snatched the apple, taken a bite, and said, “I’dunno,” while chewing open mouthed.
Ivan looked at him too long, like he always did. Then the apple changed hands again, and after a crunch, he said, “Sorry.”
That was the first time Ivan had ever apologized to him.
Till spreads his fingers and parts Ivan’s hair over the scar. “I never apologized for this, did I?”
“What?” Ivan asks, blearily, raising his head. “The rock?”
“I can’t believe you thought I wouldn’t care.”
Ivan puts on that smile again. “Are we still talking about the rock, or-”
“I’m sorry.”
“-or does this mean that you forgive me?”
They stare at each other in silence, Ivan hunched over, still with that beaten-puppy-dog look about him and that lie of a smile. Till resists the urge to flick his temple and make him go “Ow- Jeez!” and laugh and pretend nothing just happened. Instead, he lets his hand fall to Ivan’s shoulder and land there.
Ivan breaks character to look at it, surprised.
“It means you’re not allowed to kill yourself. Again.”
No, not quite forgiveness.