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You are Doctor Lawrence Gordon.
You’re a respected oncologist, loving father, husband. You are self-sufficient, intelligent, resourceful.
You are a good man, or you were at some point, and you give a shit about saving your patients, even if your bedside manner may not reflect that.
The mirror in front of you tells a different story.
The man in front of you is a murderer. The man in front of you left an innocent man behind to bleed out in an abandoned bathroom. The man in front of you is assisting, willfully, the architect of his own worst nightmare.
Brushing a rough hand through your hair, you scoff to nobody and leave. Your cane clicks against the ground, and you swear that every step sounds like his screams.
Amanda is waiting for you, as she always is, where you least expect to see her.
She’s a tiny woman, hair cut short like his . Honestly- you’re the one down a foot and she‘s the one who could be knocked over by a stiff breeze. The shabby coat that she’s wearing like a suit of armor is several sizes too big for her.
“Hey,” she greets.
“Hello, Amanda,” you respond politely. You’re always polite with her.
“John wants to see you.”
“Now?”
“Yeah. Now.”
You go to respond, but she beats you to the punch.
“I dunno what about. He won’t tell me.”
Hm. Suspicious, but you suppose that’s what one gets when cavorting with serial killers and psychopaths.
“Mhm.”
You walk with her in silence.
She has that same tension in her jaw and her shoulders that he had. The eyes of someone young and angry who’s seen and heard and been through too much.
He’d been angry, he’d said so himself. John had said so too, and John… well, John knows these things.
“Thank you, Amanda,” the devil speaks from in front of you.
He’s lurking in front of a table of monitors, each one showing a different one of his twisted machinations. He doesn’t turn around.
“Now- Lawrence… I believe we need to have a chat… in private.”
Amanda senses her dismissal, leaving with a nod. You think you can hear the click of a lighter, and the smell of cigarettes confirms it.
“What do you need, John?” you ask, irritated.
“Do you remember Adam?” John asks. The bastard.
He knows you remember him. He knows all too well.
“Yes.” You always try not to give him too much, to win his games- but it’s a fool’s errand. You’ll never win.
“I’m sorry to tell you, but his untimely demise… Don’t worry. I’ve rescinded a good amount of my trust in Amanda. In fact… I have a test prepared for her soon.”
“Amanda?”
“Yes… yes, her mistakes directly led to his fate,” he says, face dark. “I thought you would want to know.”
“What did she…?”
He tells you, and all you can hear is Adam was alive he was alive and Amanda killed him while he was still alive and she’s the reason that his trap was rigged in the first place.
And maybe you’re just as angry as the two of them.
John tries to stop you from storming off, you think. Not hard. He knew you’d do this, and you can’t find it in yourself to care. Amanda sure didn’t.
When you find her, you yell at her. You’re cruel about it. She doesn’t cry, just stares at you with her jaw all set.
He looked like that, in the beginning. When you saw him for the first time.
Before you know it, you’re sobbing like a baby, and Mandy’s the one comforting you.
-
You’re Amanda Young.
You’re a fuck-up and a disappointment, you’re a waste of space tweaker. All you’ve got is John’s cause, and the legacy you’ll inheret when he leaves you too.
Lawrence doesn’t like you, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Neither does Mark, another unsurprising truth. You’re not likable. You’re just Amanda.
Lawrence is also, by all accounts, a straight-edge prick, which is why it’s such a surprise when he leans against the wall next to you on your smoke break. He pats down his coat before his face scrunches up in the most British looking frown you’ve ever seen in your life.
“Do you have a lighter?”
“You smoke?!”
“Not…” his frown deepens. “I don’t make a habit out of it.”
You shrug, tossing him your lighter. He fumbles it spectacularly, and you have to retrieve it from the ground for him. He lights his cigarette.
He’s clearly an inexperienced smoker, if the coughing fit is any indication. You can’t help but laugh.
“First time?”
He huffs, taking another drag.
“Obviously not.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“Oh, shut up.”
You do, and the two of you sit in silence for a bit.
“He probably smelled like cigarettes. He was a smoker, you know.”
“He?”
“Adam. You killed him.”
“From your trap?”
“Yes.”
“Do you like men?”
“What?”
“Like… in that way.”
“What? No. I’m married.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive, you know.”
“Or… I was married. I’m not…” his voice gets quiet, as if someone hearing the word itself might send him to hell. “I’m not gay.”
“Oh,” you say. There’s an awkward silence. “Me neither,” you lie.
More awkward silence.
“I have to head to the hospital. Some of us have actual work, you know,” he says finally.
“Huh,” you say, flicking the butt of your cigarette to the floor. “Me too.”
“You… do…?”
“Yeah. Daniel said he wanted to see me. His mom called.”
“Ah. I can drive you.”
“Really? I was just gonna take the bus.”
“You really shouldn’t. Not with… all the press,” he nods, decisively. “I’ll drive you.”
You eye him warily. “Do you want gas money? ‘Cause that would be a dick move. You’re an oncologist.”
“No need. Here- I’m parked a few blocks away.”
The car ride is uneventful, and silent. Lawrence doesn’t believe in listening to the radio while driving, apparently. You don’t really have anything to say to each other.
You make your separate ways, and a nurse directs you to Daniel’s room.
He’s ambulatory, and has an air about him that you don’t think any kid should have. There’s a permanent crease between his eyebrows, and he holds his shoulders like he’s trying to be a grown-up.
“Hey,” you greet him.
“Amanda. Hi,” he replies. “So you really did make it out! I was worried.”
“Yeah. I managed to crawl back up and get an antidote, and waited out the door to open,” you pause, and recite the rest of the lie John came up with. “I thought you were dead until the news started talking about it.”
“Oh. Shit,” he says. “Did I… Is… Did Xavier die?”
You pause. Then you nod.
“I can only remember bits and pieces of the end,” he frowns. “There was a bathroom… right? And somebody had died in it already. There was… there was a rotting foot in a chain.”
“Yeah. I don’t remember the foot, though-” you’re cut off by Daniel’s coughing fit. “Shit- are you okay?”
“Yeah I’m-” he coughs some more. “Yeah. The doctors say it’ll be fine, though. They say it’s from the safe.”
You’re overwhelmed by a feeling of intense guilt. He’s only seventeen.
Before you can dwell too deeply on that, though, there’s a banging on the door.
“Hey! Daniel! Open up!” comes from outside. “It’s your cousin! Scott! Scott Tibbs!”
There’s a scuffle, Scott Tibbs keeps yelling, and you cover your ears and sink to the floor. It’s too much, and you’re scared. You’re scared.
“Hey… Amanda. Amanda, are you okay?”
You nod, wiping away tears you hadn’t noticed spring up on you.
-
You keep taking smoke breaks with Amanda. She’s funny, in an off-beat way.
The same way he was, if his old blog posts were any indication.
The two of you establish some kind of camaraderie. It’s nice, in a way. A spec of normalcy, despite the fact you are haunted by the ghost of a man you barely knew.
You’re attempting to rectify that. You have all of John’s resources at your disposal.
Adam Faulkner-Stanheight was a child of divorce. He was twenty-four. His twenty-fifth birthday was coming up. He liked sharing videos of farm animals. He wanted to be a vet.
You don’t know his favorite food. He never posted about it.
His parents held a funeral for him, even though his body was never recovered. They didn’t even wait.
-
“You’re in love with a dead man, you know,” you say one day. You’re sitting on the roof of John’s warehouse with Lawrence, both of you smoking hash.
He’s chill like that, somehow.
“He could’ve done so much…”
“He could’ve, yeah. I’m sorry for killing him.”
“I should’ve shot the chain. My fault.”
Somewhere in the back of your clouded mind, you let yourself blame John. Just for this one thing.
-
You knew Lynn Denlon.
Not well, obviously. You barely knew your own wife before she divorced you.
But you knew her.
When you see her again, she’s got her head blown up. John is dead and Amanda close to it when you find her. You rescue her, though you probably shouldn’t. She’s a murderer, doing this out of love for the game.
A bullet through the side is tricky business, but it’s managed to avoid anything completely fatal. You save her life.
-
When you wake up, you’re in Lawrence’s apartment.
“Oh. Good. You’re awake,” he says.
“Mmm?” you groan.
“You’re welcome, by the way.”
“J’hn?”
“John… didn’t make it. Jeff Denlon slashed his throat.”
“D’d ‘e…”
“He left tapes, yes. There are still orders.”
He pauses, and you see that he’s holding a framed photograph. He places it down before he turns to look at you.
“You’ve been incriminated in the murders. Is there a plan in place?”
“Yeah,” you sit up, wincing at the pain.
“Alright. You can… hide out here. I have an alibi, after all, and Mark has said that he’ll handle any interviews needed.”
-
Amanda stays with you.
She’s still injured, of course, and Mark is doing his part to keep the police off your backs, so you both decide that it’s fine. When Diana comes over, Amanda locks herself in the office of your apartment that you’ve converted into her bedroom.
She gives a mostly fake name to Diana as well. To your daughter, she’s just your roommate Mandy.
It’s… not that bad of an arrangement. She cleans up after herself. She makes dinner, and you make breakfast.
She’s scared of the dark.
You realize, somewhere in there, that you and Amanda Young have become genuine friends.
-
Lawrence holds himself like she had.
He has the same pride in his face- he’s better educated than you, and he knows it. He’s tall, and walks with his chin up, his chest out. He doesn’t let you see him cry, tries not to let you know he’s ever emotionally effected. She put on that same mask.
You knew Lynn for a very short amount of time. Mark was in charge of trailing her, all you had to do was steal her away.
It’s by the third week of consecutive nightmares that you realize that you’ve fallen in love with a dead woman.
One of those nights, though, you wake up and it’s too dark, and you’re scared, and your bullet wound hurts, and it’s storming outside, and you’re in your cell/at the warehouse/in the pit of needles/bleeding out/watching her die.
You stumble out of your room, and you’re sobbing, and Lawrence finds you.
He hugs you close, and Adam sounds close enough to Amanda that you’re okay again. You wake up tangled together in his bed. It’s bigger.
Neither of you talk about it come morning.
-
You and Amanda begin to sleep in the same bed regularly.
Neither of you talk about it.
You don’t talk about it when you buy a nightlight for her, and you don’t talk about it when most of her clothes move into your closet. You don’t talk about it when she wakes up screaming for Lynn, for John. You don’t talk about it when you wake up and your foot feels like it’s being sawed off and all you can feel is guilt.
You don’t talk about it when she creeps in after Diana has gone to bed and out before she wakes.
You don’t talk about the way you grow used to warmth on the other side of the bed again.
-
You’re pretty sure he’s gay.
You have been for a while.
You’re pretty sure that you’re gay too.
-
You are Doctor Lawrence Gordon.
You’re visiting Adam’s grave for the first time today. Amanda’s with you. She’s dyed her hair. She looks less like him now.
There isn’t a body buried.
Amanda had disposed of his body herself.
-
You are Amanda Young.
Everywhere you look, you are stalked by ghosts.
Lawrence doesn’t look as much like Lynn these days, but that doesn’t stop the pain in your side like a bullet ripping through you.
You’re still in contact with Daniel. He doesn’t snitch, though- he’s said as much. You know that you shouldn’t talk to him, but…
Fuck. He’s a good kid. In the past couple years, he’s gotten into a good school. He changed his last name, just to get away from his shitty fucking dad and the legacy you left him with.
There’s hope for him yet.
-
They don’t find Amanda. They don’t find you.
Diana grows up more.
She and Amanda get closer.
Mandy’s always been good with kids.
-
You come out to each other on one of the bad nights.
It’s cathartic.
-
You are Lawrence Gordon, you are Amanda Young, and you live.