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The first time you bleached your hair, you weren’t trying to get rid of Whit Young. And, maybe it could have been a bonus, but maybe you could have gotten rid of Lin too.
That’s besides the point. All you wanted was to look more like your mother. To keep a piece of her. It wasn’t enough to wear her silver; the miniscule movements of her watch ticking in tune with your pulse kept you sane.
So, maybe you’re good at this. Alright. Fine, you’ll concede. You’ve got the looks down— the bleached hair, the piercings, her wonderful blue eyes— but not what’s inside. It’s true— no one could replace Elizabeth.
Right now you’re wondering if maybe this is all some cosmic joke. Or maybe you just don’t have enough practice in terms of how to deal with the death of yourself.
Funny. You thought you’d have had enough practice by now.
“Xander,” David mutters, lassitude thick in his voice. He crawls up towards your neck, eyes cloudy and unfocused. You wonder if he’ll try to strangle you, even if he knows that it won’t work by now. Like Xander’s gun and Xander’s life, David has always been fond of trying extraordinarily useless endeavors. But his hands go slack instead, and he traces the skin of your collarbone, hands falling down your shirt and towards where your heart should be.
You don’t remember why you chose pink— pink for femininity, pink for flowers, pink for hearts, pink for mom, pink for lips, pink for tender guts, pink for censored blood.
Now you’re wondering if you should’ve chosen red— red for passion, red for fire, red for anger, red for swollen gums, red for blood blood blood.
And Xander. You should’ve gotten him to wear more pink. He’s the kind of guy that looks good in any color, unlike you.
See this difference? You do, but David doesn’t, as you keep exploring the inside of his red hot mouth with your pink and lying tongue.
Maybe you should explain.
There’s rules to this. You aren’t allowed to die until everyone is on the correct timeline— and it’s a crying shame that your intuition is so good, because you know when you aren’t on it. Your body is programmed to feel things like arousal, because your brain survived with your memories. Or, whatever was left of it anyway. It got turned into some weird wetware, but it serves its purpose of keeping your memories and torturing you for eternity, so it works.
You don’t know why your insides have to be pink. Sure, a brain is pink, but if someone manages to destroy your body it will be blatantly obvious to anyone that looks close enough that you aren’t really human. You don’t know why your waste has to be yellow like your hair and your “blood” Mai red.
Maybe there’s some kind of sentiment in trying to make you look human. But again, you’re not very good at being a good son or a human and you are most certainly not sentimental, not when you always know that no matter what, you’ll wake up tomorrow.
You’ve always had bad luck with love, so truth be told, you like David more whenever he’s in love with Xander first and foremost. Sometimes his heart seeks Arei and one time he sought out Teruko, but the one constant in David’s life is Xander.
You can relate. Not perhaps in the sense of constantly keeping someone in mind— that honor goes to mum, but enshrining Xander. He’s like Mai— he’s got that constant pull, like the sun the planets revolve around. You can see why someone would want to rally to his cause— the world has enough Machiavellians running around and certainly more broken-hearted abstract thinkers like David than it needs. Xander doesn’t overthink it— the first step isn’t acknowledging the problem— Whit knows that. It’s actually resolving to fix it.
Love is a wonderful, potent force. You know how to draw people together for life.
Of course, when you build your foundation on something as fragile as human life, it’s easy to pull the rug out from under David and expose his soft and tender insides.
You wear a collar for fashion. David wears a collar because you said so.
Man, that’s not super romantic when you put it that way. You know the killing game isn’t the best place to develop social skills, but like, in most timelines, Charles does well enough with your help. You like the way Charles flushes like a schoolboy when he falls in love, because you are the only person in his life that has ever treated him with respect, however half-hearted.
But then it spoils quickly like milk, especially so when Charles actually lives to the end. It’s like… how to put it… kicking a cute animal that hasn’t done anything to you. Charles says a few nasty words in the beginning, but doesn’t believe it with his whole heart. Or at least, he doesn’t try to convince himself of that reality, anyway. So, cute. And heartbreaking, his final look of betrayal. Bargaining is always the step Charles gets stuck on.
With David, it’s easier to not feel bad about it. He’s like you— he sees the problem and looks away. Object permanence? What’s that? Certainly not real to the two of you, but in reverse— if you don’t accept death as a reality, even when someone dies, they are alive, so long as the corpse is not in front of you.
You nip the bottom of his lip— so chapped. You should give him more water, but you don’t always feel benevolent, like you said. If you can’t feel pain anymore, it’s easiest to take your sorrows out on the next best thing.
It’s not your name that he chants at night, and so that vindictiveness fuels itself throughout time.
There are moments when he seems aware of the difference between you and Xander, but you can’t say for sure. See, the thing about liars is that they know white lies don’t work. You’re not sure if it’s just a bad coping mechanism because he’d rather talk to Xander than his captor or if he’s truly on his way to the loony, but it really doesn’t make a difference. It’s like Rose’s fake paintings— if they look identical, will it make you appreciate them less when you know they’re fake?
“Say, Davey… want to play a game?”
You like the flash of irritation that mars his pretty, fucked out face. Sometimes you play along and sing in your sweet little voice, Mr. David! Oh Mr. David, it’s so good! Most of the time David is into it. Other times he yelps and howls like you physically struck him, and he tries to claw out your eyeballs. Unfortunately for him, unlike Xander, that doesn’t really work.
But dumb nicknames are a good way to piss him off. He takes himself too seriously because he hates himself, which sounds like an oxymoron even to you, but hey. Different strokes of the penis for different folks, or… something like that. Now you sound like Ace.
“Not particularly.”
“That’s too bad! Do you see anything else to do around here?” You pat his soft hair and give him a tip: “Trust me: losing your pride is easier than losing your mind.”
“Was there much for you to lose to begin with?”
You laugh and lift your hands away from him in defeat. “Okay, that was a good one, I admit. In fact, you’d probably prefer to lose your mind all the way and go be with Xander for real. Martyr yourself for the good cause and all.” You scratch his scalp like he’s a particularly scruffy dog. He’s more like a cat in terms of personality, so standoffish and prideful, but you know you’re the one that declawed him. You prefer sweet dogs like Laila and Charles, but you have to take what pleasures you can get, so you’ve recalibrated your expectations. “So what I was going to ask was ‘what do you think is the correct way to escape the killing game?”
David swats you. “Come off it. Does it matter?”
You hum. “I’ve been unfair to you, and yeah, it sucks. I can’t see this time being the timeline in which Teruko realizes what she needs to— right now she’s probably trying to decide whether or not escaping is even worth it at this point, which is already probably wandering in the wrong direction of the woods.” You sigh, hoping to keep the disappointment out of your voice, but that rarely ever works. You’re not a good actor, and you never claimed to be. Just good at seeing through the act. “Which means you’ll probably die soon, and the answer to this question probably doesn’t matter to you, but like—” You tug on the chain of his collar, making him cough and sputter. “I just want to hear your thoughts.”
“My thoughts or my dying words, you psychotic creature?”
“It could be both, I can’t deny it. If it helps, after a couple more games, I probably won’t remember your words if you’re wrong.”
“I think I’m more concerned with being dead than being wrong.”
Your brows raise on their own. “Are you?”
It slips out too naturally on its own, and you know this is the thread that connects him and Teruko— the fear of being hurt because you were wrong. Perhaps you were like that too once, shutting yourself away from others, forcing others to see you through the lens of your choosing. But you are better now. You know the best path is the one that lets you laugh at both outcomes. You kiss the side of his mouth in his silence. “So, what sort of advice would you have wanted to give yourself, in the beginning?”
“I should have shoved your head down the toilet earlier.”
You laugh even harder than the last time. “God, I love you.”
“I hate you.”
You want to say You don’t mean that, but you don’t, and you let him have his moment. He’ll come crawling into your arms soon enough, wanting the comfort of the only good person he has ever known for less than seventy-two hours, but you don’t feel the need to delineate the finer differences, because it never matters to you. And that’s perhaps the negative of outliving everyone you love, the reason you can neither love nor hate Teruko: your perspective becomes the only one that matters.
Xander’s corpse is still in relatively good condition for being the first one to die. The miracle of modern science, or something like that. He looks better than your mom did before she even... That’s David’s savior for ya.
You think about giving David a gift, like a tuft of hair. A constant reminder that Xander existed. You consider giving David back Xander’s jacket but— wait, does it even count as “giving back” if the blazer never belonged to David to begin with?
Even David’s love belongs to Xander. Teruko’s too. There are a lot of things worth being jealous of Xander for, but a part of you just feels sad for him, because unlike David, you’re pretty sure you remember that he couldn’t be tamed into acceptance. Easily misdirected with a well placed joke or a sob story sure— but you could never kill his humanity. His sanity would slip before his empathy, and you know things have truly hit the fan if he starts considering murder without the guiding influence of your pen.
He directed all of his strength into being a good person, and it’s such a shame that David will never, ever learn what it means to emulate by example. You know because you are just like him— if you don’t believe it for a fact, there’s no way you can lie about it with any sincerity.
There are two kinds of lies. First is the lie in which you could be telling the truth, but because you don’t know the truth, it is a lie— this is the kind Xander told everyone who ever met him. Believe in your own inner goodness. You are just as human as the rest of us. This is the lie that Whit struggles with, because unlike Xander, he can sense what the truth is. Incidentally, this leads into the second kind of lie— intentional misdirection. The meat of the lie. I have an older sister. You’ll be happy someday, trust in my intuition.
This is what hurts David the most— you can never pretend to be that earnest liar with a shine in your eyes towards greater things. The Xander that David loves is the one that would leave David behind.
You never leave anyone in the past; you can’t pretend you would ever let David go either. You cradle Xander’s rigid face, place a hand on his cold, pale leg, and you mutter a half-hearted apology.
You don’t know who it is for.
There’s a moment of triumph when he fucks you of his own accord and he mutters your name for once and not Xander’s. Hate blazes in his eyes as he bites at your neck like he wants to kill you. He would never be so violent, so hateful towards his beloved Xander.
“Fuck you,” David spits very eloquently. He moans like he’s being killed. “Fuck you and your self-pitying, self-serving jokes. You’re disgusting.”
You try to kiss him and he takes a chunk of your lip off. Mmm. Not very sexy to an outsider, but absolutely to you.
This is probably the first and last time anyone will ever really understand you. This is why you love David: he is a generous soul when it comes to feeling. He can try to act all flippant and cold all he wants, but everything is revealed in the final act— this is the fate of every liar that never learns to swallow down their true feelings.
Let yourself believe in the lie. It’s the only way to be happy.
“I hate you,” David hisses.
“I love you,” you counter back. You try to reach for his hip, but he grabs your wrist in a tight hold and he smirks.
“Don’t be so self-satisfied.” His voice sounds so sure of itself, like he’s managed to find some truth about their world in his final days. “I hate you, but not more than I hate someone else.”
“Oh?”
“You know who I’m talking about.” David puts a hand on your throat, but doesn’t squeeze. Like a symbolic gesture for the one that haunts you both. “I hate him more than I will ever hate you— because he made me feel something. He still does. You’re nothing.” David laughs, wiping away a free tear with his hand like he told the funniest joke of all. “I hate you the way I hate redundant obstacles— and you’re just like her— you just don’t die. But even though you’re going to kill me— that’s all you’ll ever be. Someone that inspires mild irritation and frustration, but you could never make me despair. You’re too weak for it yourself.”
Ah.
So in the end, you lost to Xander after all. The irritation bubbles up, but then—
—relief.
“Aw,” you reply. “I’m hurt.”
But you’re also happy. He’ll never win against you. You both never have to change.
David smirks, like he’s the one that won the battle. Well, like you said before— your perspective is the only one that matters. “I know you are. I know.”