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Trevor is four and his mother is smoking in the bad, bad light. There is smoke curling around him and it dribbles from her mouth, pooling on the carpeted floor. He is transfixed, he never wants to look away. He will not understand until later in his life, but smoke is his constant.
“My beautiful Trevor.” His mother coos, ash falling from her cigarette and floating around Trevor’s head. “Beautiful, beautiful Trevor. Promise me you won’t grow up mean and ugly like your father?” And Trevor, naive in his narrow view of the world, but he is four, and the most important thing in his word is attention from his often absent mother.
“I promise.” He says, voice small as he wriggles under his mother’s arm. With those words, he seals his fate. There is no going back now.
The promise is forgotten, pushed under the carpet corners in the back of his mind. His life is full of green glass bottles and crushed aluminum cans bouncing off the wall near his head and his mother, drifting away into her own world. Trevor grows up quickly, no one else is going to take care of him, so he does it himself.
He is ten and his mother seems surprisingly sober. They are sitting in the kitchen and the cigarette smoke floats out the open window.
“I thought you promised me.” She says, voice quiet because his father is in the next room in a drunken sleep. “That you’d never be like your father.” Trevor is confused, because he isn’t, he isn’t like his father. She narrows his eyes. “I saw you with those bottles!” She hisses and grabs his wrist, too long nails making perfect crescents in his skin. He cries out, bending to his mother’s will.
“I was putting them away! Mama! Mama, you’re hurting me!” She releases him and takes another long drag from her cigarette. Blood wells up in the marks on his arm.
“Good boy.” She says. She looks at Trevor, up and down, before narrowing her eyes and studying him like he’s a science experiment. “You’re getting fat, Trev.” She says and Trevor blinks. He’s not, right? He’s not… Right? She pours him a glass of water and slides it across the table towards him. “Here, kiddo. Drink this, it’ll fill your stomach.” So, he does, he drinks it all and his mother hugs him when he’s finished. “Good boy.” She coos, petting his hair. He melts into her touch and he vows to himself that he’ll do whatever his mother asks, it’ll make her happy.
He’s thirteen and looking in the full length mirror his mother got him for his birthday. He’s surprised that she remembered, she forgot it last year. And the year before.
He spins in the view of his mirror, examining every piece of flesh, pulling it out from his body. He can not see his bones, but they’d be visible to anyone else. He sighs and pulls his shirt back on. He can go without dinner tonight. The smoke from his mother’s burnt casserole drifts from the kitchen and his stomach growls.
He’s fifteen and he has a reputation in high school. He’s smart and somehow everyone knows his grades, straight A’s though, so it doesn’t really matter. He’s mysterious, but that might just be because he doesn’t talk to anyone. He hears rumours about himself, whispered in the hallway when he walks by. His personal favourite is that he’s the child of the devil. Many, many years later, he will look back on this and agree that they were right.
He does make friends eventually, a group of kids in his English class that respect his quietness and ever-changing mood. They hang out a lot, and Trevor finds that it’s so, so good to have friends.
They don’t mind that he smokes, and he does it when they hang out in their backyards, and he lets the smoke tickle his lungs. One of them has blood as a constant, so as a group, they’re so prone to accidents. At one point, Trevor runs into a wall and the blood runs freely from his nose.
He falls out of their company as quickly as he fell into it and he’s back to looking at himself in the mirror and eating way too little.
His teacher stops him one day on his way out of her classroom.
“Trevor, can you stay here for a moment?” Trevor shrugs and makes his way over to her desk. “Trevor, are you okay?” She is looking at the cut in his cheek and he reaches up to touch it. The remnant of his mother’s anger last night and the sharp cut stones adorning her rings.
“I’m fine.” He says and it comes out much harsher than he intended. “Sorry, I just- I’ve got to go. Have a good day.” He runs out of her classroom and sprints home. He feels sick, so sick, so sick. He vomits everything that he’s eaten into the toilet and he dry heaves for solid minutes afterwards.
He is seventeen and he finds his mother, dead on the living room floor. Everything is a blur as he calls the police, but that might just be his dangerously low blood sugar.
“I’m sorry, kid.” One of the police officers puts their hand on his shoulder and he is too tired to shake it off. “I’m sorry.”
Trevor doesn’t eat for three days while his father binge drinks and smacks him around. He wants nothing more than the rough touch of his mother.
He grows skinnier and skinnier, but he can not see it. He goes to his mother’s grave, picking his steps carefully because if he falls, he knows that he will not be able to get up. He stands next to it, run of the mill stone block with her name carved in it. He balls his fists.
“Hi, Mama. I hope you’re doing okay. I’ve been using all your tricks, I think I’ve been losing weight.” Bonfire smoke curls over the distant treetops and it tugs at his heart.
He is still seventeen, just barely, and his father is dead drunk. He shoves Trevor into the car, locking the doors. He drives and Trevor worries, knuckles turning white from gripping his seat belt. His father drives for so long and when he finally stops, he lets Trevor out of the car. They’re in the middle of a field, golden grass stretching to the horizon each way.
“You killed your mother.” His father says and Trevor wants to protest, say no, no no, but he is frozen to the spot he is standing. “You killed her! You took her light when you were born and you took her life!” And he lunges at Trevor, brandishing a knife that Trevor didn’t know he had. “I’ll kill you!” Spit flecks Trevor’s face and he is fighting for his life. His father is drunk, but he is strong, and Trevor struggles to get the knife from his grip. He growl and lunges and Trevor doesn’t mean to, he swears, but his father impales himself on the knife in Trevor’s grip.
Trevor screams as his father’s body topples to the ground and he runs, jumping back in the car and turning the keys in the ignition. He drives until dawn and even then he doesn’t stop, just lights up a cigarette and lets the familiar smoke lull him into a false calm.
He finds a city far, far away. It is not the city of his dreams, not even a pale imitation, but it is a city of crime and he decides that he belongs.
And he leaves Trevor behind, that poor little boy, the shell of a person, and he becomes something much simpler. Zed, a killer for hire. It’s not hard, he’s good at it.
Zed is a new person, a completely blank slate. He doesn’t have problems with food, not at all, he just forgets to eat sometimes because he’s so busy. That’s it. He doesn’t have body image problems, he needs to be slim and agile to kill people. It’s simple logic, that’s all it is.
He’s there for a long time in solitude, and he plans to be like that forever. He doesn’t need anyone else. His heart throbs when he sees the smoke from factory furnaces float upward because maybe he does need someone, but what are the chances that they’ll be interested in him? They’re probably a civilian anyway.
He never even thinks about joining a crew until it’s offered. He’s running through the city, dressed in heavy clothing and over exercising. He’s breathing heavily and his mind is swimming and he runs straight into someone when he turns the corner.
He sees a glimpse of red hair before he falls over backwards and he can hear the noise of his skull on pavement before everything fades to a blissful black.
He jolts awake on a stranger’s bed and his head throbs, a fierce pain in the very center of his skull. The girl with red hair is there and there’s a girl with purple hair sitting next to her on a chair.
“We want you to join our crew.” The purple haired girl says. Trevor doesn’t even think about it.
“Yeah. Yeah, sure. I’ll do it.” She grins and throws herself around the red haired one.
“I’m Meg. This is Lindsay.” She says and Lindsay waves.
“Yo. It’s good to have you, man.” She sticks out her hand, which Trevor shakes slowly.
“Trevor.” He says and Meg smiles.
“So, you can shoot, right?”
Trevor honestly didn’t expect being in a crew of three people to be this difficult. Meg insists on making meal for all of them and sitting down in the kitchen. Trevor understands where she’s coming from, it promotes a sense of family that he never had as a kid, but he wants nothing more than not to eat. So, he doesn’t. He pretends, yeah, and Meg is so happy when they all hang out together in comfortable silence.
They do their first job together, a simple, semi-grand robbery. Trevor provides cover from across the street, picking off their threats. His vision blurs over at points, but he doesn’t miss a shot. He even keeps it together until they’re in the apartment, but even then he picks the most inopportune moment to collapse, sprawling across the carpet in a tangle of limbs. He picks himself too quickly and he’s swaying.
“Are you okay?” Lindsay asks, hovering behind him, hands outstretched like she’s ready to catch him if he falls again.
“What’s wrong, Trev?” Meg asks, voice quiet and eyes wide.
“Nothing. I just… Low blood sugar, yeah? I haven’t eaten today.” Lindsay narrows her eyes and he looks anywhere but at her.
“Trevor, when was the last time you ate?” Trevor looks down, focusing on the floor.
“Few days.” He mumbles and he can hear Meg’s sharp intake of breath.
“Trevor… Are you okay?” Trevor shrugs.
“It’s nothing. Just something I’ve never been able to shake. It’s stupid.” Lindsay and Meg reassure him that it’s not stupid, it’s not good, but it’s not his fault. They usher him into the kitchen and give him a glass of juice.
“Drink.” Lindsay commands and Lindsay scares him, so he does.
So, Trevor tries because he has a family now and he doesn’t want to disappoint them. It’s hard, so hard to break a decade and a half of conditioning, and he feels so sick, but he loves them both, so he tries, tries, tries.
He’s smoking on the roof, trying to calm himself down and Meg finds him.
“Is your constant smoke?” She asks from behind him and he can feel it wind around his head.
“Yeah.” He answers, taking another drag. The ember glows red in the setting sun.
“Have you found your soulmate?” He shakes his head, he hasn’t, not yet. “I used to know him.”
“Really?” Trevor asks, surprised and confused at the same time.
“We were at the same orphanage.” She sits down next to him. “His name was Jeremy and he was my best friend. He was amazing, so sweet, so kind. Just this little kid, I felt like I had to protect him, you know? So I did. He used to think that when he found you, you wouldn’t love him.” She chuckles. “That’s hard to do, everyone loved Jeremy.” She tells him every little thing she knows and he is close to tears when she finally finishes.
“Thank you.” Trevor says and his voice cracks.
He’s preparing for a heist and then he decides that he’s going to throw all of his childhood values out the window, they were stupid anyway, so stupid. He does his makeup, smokey eyeshadow fading upwards and he’s surprisingly good at it. He blinks and looks at himself in the mirror and something that he had tried to forget springs to his mind.
“Mama?” He’s young, six or seven, and his mother is glaring at papers on the table, a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other.
“What?” She snaps, clearly not wanting be disturbed, but Trevor isn’t put off.
“I don’t think I’m a boy. Not all the way.” She grabs his arm and he whimpers as she draws blood and then pain, pain, pain.
He snaps back to reality and Meg is standing in front of him, looking scared.
“I’m not a guy.” He blurts out and he really doesn’t mean to, but some pressure that he didn’t realize was there disappears. “Not completely.”
“Do you want us to change your pronouns?” Meg asks and Trevor thinks that she’s taking this very well.
“No, no, I don’t care. I think I’m good with anything but she. Yeah, yeah, that sounds good.” Lindsay pulls him and Meg into a hug.
“Let’s go steal some motherfucking diamonds.”
They do, and the explosion rocks Trevor’s mind and there is a ringing in his ears, but he can make out Lindsay and Meg laughing.
And then Trevor looks across the street and he is there. Their eyes meet and he instantly knows that it’s Jeremy and his breath catches in his throat. He taps Meg on the shoulder and whispers.
“Jeremy.”
Meg brings him home and it is such a surreal experience, talking to him on the roof that first time, but he loves it and he loves Jeremy.
He could get used to this, this jumbled family. It is perfect to him and that is all he needs.