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He practices smiling in the reflective surface of the water, as instructed. It’s more endearing, apparently, if he can emote satisfactorily. So he dedicates time every day to cultivating muscle memory in his face. It starts to feel like he is someone else watching himself from the outside, and that makes it easier. As someone else, he can evaluate himself more objectively.
Does that boy’s smile look sincere? Would I believe this smile on anyone else’s face?
The point of his tooth still catches on his lip regularly, skewing the symmetry. He is working hard to train himself out of that, even though it’s what seems to come naturally. It’s okay that it peeks out, he just can’t let it get caught.
Ivan continues to smile, hold his expression for several seconds, and then drop it entirely over and over again feeling more and more separate from his reflection in a way that is just as much a part of this ritual as the physical work. Soon it feels like he is not a part of his body whatsoever.
Once the muscles in his face begin to ache and his mind feels pleasantly detached, he concludes his practice and drifts over to join the rest of the children who are engaged in a serious competition to see who can jump the furthest. They even got one of the older boys to keep score as an impartial judge.
He watches them shouting and laughing for as long as he can before it’s his turn, surreptitiously massaging his cheeks when it looks like no one is watching.
Till catches him. He always seems to catch Ivan in the moments before he does the right things with his eyebrows and his mouth. It makes him tense up, and Ivan imagines that Till is running his own calculations; trying to predict how Ivan is feeling and whether that puts him in any danger.
There were other children like that around before Ivan got caught and sold. Twitchy and sensitive and alert. They made good lookouts, until they didn’t.
It makes Ivan want to hold back more and see what the excess of Till’s well of emotions will do when met with his deficit. Maybe Till, who is always turning his head to every new noise in the classroom, can tell that Ivan is somewhere outside of himself when he smiles.
But no one else seems to notice. They treat him no differently, and they smile back when he smiles at them, and they can’t tell that he isn’t really there. His other classmates no longer seem to notice any delay in his expression while he remembers how he’s supposed to react. Eventually, like reading sheet music, making the right face won’t take any extra thought at all.
There is something inside of Till that overflows so forcefully that they have to stopper his mouth with a muzzle and stay the swinging of his arms with restraints and collar his throat to shock and sedate and control him.
Ivan hasn’t had to wear a collar in weeks. Maybe months! And those rare occasions when they do make him wear one, he knows to smile sympathetically at them and say, it’s okay, I know it’s the rules. And they praise his maturity and detach it for him before the day is even half over.
You’re so well-trained, they praise him.
What Till has in excess Ivan lacks entirely, and thus covets with single-minded determination.
Ivan is reading with his back resting against the school building in companionable silence with Mizi sat beside him doing the same when a commotion breaks out. Till had been playing a rhythmic clapping game with several of the other children, and although Ivan had not watching he was subconsciously aware that one of the other boys kept shouting numbers during Till’s turn get him to mess up.
Apparently it worked, because there is a sudden flurry of children yelling and when Ivan looks up, Till is on top of the other boy shouting and grabbing and hitting. The rest of the children crowd around them so quickly that Ivan has to stand up and rush over to see, squeezing himself in between the older children. The other boy is trying to get away, wriggling and shoving and holding his arms defensively over his face as Till rages, scratching and screaming and—and crying in his rage.
And all Ivan can think about is the sudden deep and fathomless want that appears like a vacuum in the core of his body. His face grows hot with it, watching Till land a punch squarely on the other child’s jaw, and he brings a hand to his cheek to see if he can feel it that way too. This yearning is the antithesis of everything he has ever read or heard about humans being filled with an emotion; this was a deep and profound absence, an innate longing for.
And what is he lacking? What is it that he wants? He cannot tell, cannot even begin to puzzle through the enormity of his wanting enough to interpret it in words. It’s like an object that is so big, he cannot back away from it enough to see the whole of what it is.
I want—I want—
Even when the segyein teachers hurry over and separate the two boys, Till tries to break free from their hold to continue his onslaught. He’s small enough that they simply suspend him off the ground, one segyein holding each arm so that he cannot kick either of them, and a third injects something through Till’s collar that causes him to fall limp moments later.
I want—
The inability to articulate and understand the want keeps Ivan awake at night, overstimulated, staring straight up at the bunk above him. He feels even more separate from the rest of the human boys lying in his bed that night as they slumber peacefully around him ignorant to the enormity of this thing that is missing from Ivan.
If only Till’s bed was in the same room, then Ivan could get up and watch him sleep instead of settling for his own imperfect memories of the day’s tussle.
Before falling asleep that night, and so many of the nights that follow, Ivan tries to conjure up some scenario that would drive himself to such a passionate outburst. He imagines himself in Till’s place, shouting the same words—he mouths them silently in bed and they feel foreign in his mouth—and vibrating with the intensity of his emotions.
He thinks that maybe he should have felt that way when he got caught. Near-death seems like an appropriate time to act out. If Till had been the one dangled over the edge of the building as a younger child the way Ivan was, he would have kicked and bit and shouted and likely wriggled himself loose and fallen spectacularly to his death, indiscernible from the shooting stars above.
The thought sends a thrill through Ivan’s young body, though the only external indication of such a thing is the particularly deep inhale on his next breath and the press of a tooth into his lip.
He imagines the delirious relief that must come from wanting to do something and then doing it without considering whether or not it is what is supposed to look natural, or weighing the repercussions of disobedience. What must it be like, to struggle and shout and fight even when you are certain to lose?
Till is so focused on drawing in his sketchbook today that he hardly reacts at all when Ivan settles down on the grass beside him and lays his head on Till’s lap—he just moves his sketchbook more onto his other leg and murmurs a quiet greeting.
“What are you drawing today?” Ivan asks, looking up at the green light on Till’s collar.
“A guitar,” Till says, focus on his sketchbook unbroken. “Trying to figure out what I want mine to look like someday.”
“Why would your owner ever get you a guitar?” Ivan asks, allowing Till to hear the incredulity in his voice. It’s completely unrealistic; Urak hates Till.
It gets Till to look at him. Just for a second. Just long enough to look uncomfortable.
“If I’m gonna be in Alien Stage,” he mutters, then trails off without finishing that thought.
The light on his collar is still green. Ivan can do better than that.
He reaches up and pokes at Till’s face, pressing into his cheek so he can feel the bumps of his teeth beneath it. Till remains unperturbed, long-since capable of focusing on his own work while Ivan prods at him. Even when Ivan pulls his lower lip down and pokes his fingernail against the pink of Till’s gums he fails to draw the attention he seeks.
“Isn’t drawing so much useless if you’re gonna be in Alien Stage?”
Till smiles, not taking the bait. “You’re jealous I’m a better drawer than you and a better singer.”
That’s how he’s going to do it.
“You got the best score on our last sight-singing test, huh?’ Ivan asks innocently.
“Yeah, I did,” Till says, a shy smile on his face. He usually gets first or second, and has done so in all the time Ivan’s shared music classes with him. It’s one of the few things he seems to take pride in.
“So if we did Alien Stage now,” Ivan says, “I guess we’d all be dead cause of you.”
Till startles, bringing his shoulders in tight and glancing around with worried confusion. “What?”
“Well, if we did a singing contest like Alien Stage and you sang against me and you got a better score like on the last test then they’d shoot me and I’d be dead.”
“That’s, well—“
“And then,” Ivan’s voice takes on a teasing lilt, “you could sing against Mizi—“
“Shut up!” Till shouted at him.
The light on his collar blinks red.
“You’d have to do your best,” Ivan says breezily, “‘cuz that’s how it works, but then they’d shoot her too—“
“Shut the fuck up!” Till growls, his face reddening, and he pushes Ivan off of his lap and stands up, poised to flee.
Ivan sits up on his knees and smiles placidly back as he concludes, “and Mizi would be dead and it’d be because of you.”
He feels a swell of pride and thrilled anticipation as Till launches himseld at him.
Till’s fighting is exhilarating. He flails and scratches and bites and he’s hardly any better at it than he had been when he first arrived at Anakt Garden. And when Ivan is lucky, he gets to be on the receiving end.
Typically when he needles at Till too much—stealing his pencil, poking the tender flesh of his waist, sneaking up behind him and shouting beside his ear—all he does is yell at Ivan. Maybe shove him, if he’s feeling particularly feisty. It’s harder and harder for Ivan to provoke him as time goes on, but he’s always studying Till so that he can improve his efforts.
Because on those occasions when he can get Till to throw the first punch, his heartbeat races and he feels suddenly like he is a part of his own body. Punching Till back is the most honest thing he has ever done in the garden. In the midst of their grappling one another, Till’s hand fisted in his shirt collar and his own fingers clutching at the hair against Till’s scalp, Ivan lets out a joyful peal of laughter.
The rest of the young children are shouting, some of them running over and crowding around to watch while others flee to grab a segyein to break up the fight, but Ivan can hardly hear them over the sound of his own blood singing in his ears.
Till is scrawny but he’s wilier. He manages to bend one of his legs up high enough to kick at Ivan’s knee and try to roll him to the ground, but Ivan just repositions himself to sit atop Till’s stomach, pinning him down by his hair with one and punching his shoulder with the other. The blow stings his own knuckles and his thumb feels awkward wrapped up in his fingers but the results are exquisite because Till thrashes against him and manages to wrench his head to the side enough to bite down into the soft flesh on the underside of Ivan’s arm.
Two segyein break them up immediately after, roughly hauling a still-flailing Till backward toward confinement and jamming a muzzle over him, abruptly cutting off his litany of swears. Some of the youngest children are crying in distress. Ivan is ushered toward the nursing wing, but he keeps his head turned to watch Till until he is completely out of sight.
He has superficial scrapes on his face and may wind up with an errant bruise or two, but nothing requires any additional care. They’ll let Unsha know, but the story they tell him will paint Ivan as wholly innocent. And Ivan will thank them polite as ever for their care whenever he passes by the nurse for the next few days.
He feigns exhaustion to secure some recovery time with the curtains drawn around one of the uncomfortable nursing station beds and breathes still and slow until he hears the alien on duty step outside the room.
Quickly, Ivan unwraps the bandage wound around his wrist to reveal the imprints Till’s teeth had left in his arm. He heaves a longing sigh and smiles deeply at them, the expression having begun to feel more natural—though still imperfect at times like this when his tooth catches his lip.
The marks will fade before long. The redness may linger for a day or two, but the indentations are ephemeral. He runs his fingertips over them with a gentle awe, marveling at how Till had reacted to him so passionately. He wriggles back and forth, unable to contain the energy he feels just thinking about it.
He’ll get up in another minute or two and see about setting Till free. If they drugged him he might not be able to get him out of confinement for the night, but he’ll at least be able to remove his muzzle and collar. And if Till is still coherent enough he will make that inscrutable face and ask Ivan why he’s helping him. Maybe he’ll even spit and swear if they didn’t sedate him at all.
Ivan twists his arm around awkwardly a few times, trying to approximate the correct angle before setting his own teeth gently over the marks on his arm. His bite his different, and the angle is wrong, but he feels a pleasant warmth when he closes his eyes and focuses on the set of his teeth falling into the shallow grooves left by Till’s.
There’s a flickering on the horizon.
No one else seems to notice it, so Ivan isn’t certain of what he sees at first on the way to the classroom building in the morning, but… it’s definitely there. A glitch in the wall. Damage. And it’s still there when they break mid-day to run around the field. And, miraculously, it is still there when their lessons have concluded for the day.
Till is writing lyrics today during their free time, laying on his stomach and kicking his feet. His owner had taken him out for a few days last week and since he had returned the swelling in his cheek had gone down and his limp had healed. He’s been in an almost unflappably good mood and doesn’t even flinched when Ivan lays down to read so close beside him that they’re pressed against each other.
An artificial breeze sweeps over them and Ivan stares up at the programmed clouds overhead. If the glitch were in the sky, someone would have noticed right away. But the one on the southeast wall…
He’s too busy with his thoughts to bother Till right away. And there is something nice about these quiet moments together, too. It can be nice to let the wanting build up into something all-consuming like how it used to be when he first noticed it last year.
An older girl screams from somewhere on the other side of the garden, somewhere past the class building where they can’t see. Ivan bolts upright before he registers that he hasn’t heard a scream like that—an unbidden wail of shock and grief—since before he was adopted. He’s frozen in place as the screaming continues, some formative part of him retaining the instinct to do everything in his power to get away from its source.
Till pushes himself up too, crouched down and unsure whether to join the handful of their classmates running toward the terrible sounds or make himself scarce, lest their catalyst make its way toward him next.
“Don’t,” Ivan says, holding his arm out in front of Till. “Stay here.”
It looks as if every segyein on staff has been mobilized, several of them hurrying toward the commotion—which now includes several other children crying, though none with the same fervor—and more still beginning to round up the stray children who had not yet made their way over to gawk at the scene.
“They’re taking everyone to the dormitories,” Ivan thinks aloud.
“But what happened?” Till asks, growing agitated with fear.
And before Ivan can reply, Till takes off in a sprint across the garden with his notebook laying forgotten in the grass.
Ivan watches impassively as Till’s retreating figure grows smaller with distance, and then collides directly into a segyein more than four times his size who then hoists him up effortlessly with one of its four arms wrapped around Till’s waist.
Normally Till would have to at least intentionally injure someone in order to be hauled off toward the confinement cells like this. Running into someone and then shouting questions at them would never have met the threshold for anything other than a muzzle at worst if the segyein in charge was in a particularly impatient mood. So whatever happened, they must have decided they would rather preemptively eliminate any additional issues brought on by the most troublesome human currently enrolled.
Rather than waiting to be collected, Ivan marches himself toward the dormitory building and lingers in its halls as segyein bring children back in twos and threes. Two of the older boys had blood on their clothes, but they had aged out of the bunk rooms so Ivan had no chance to glean any information off of them. At the other end of the hallway leading to the girl’s wing he could see the sober and haunted faces of the taller girls passing by the door’s window.
There was too much distress, too much murmuring and commotion, to tease out any objective facts at the moment. He’d find out the truth eventually. The segyein here would tell him, or he’d ask Unsha, or he’d read about it in one of his newspapers during a home visit.
One thing seemed more and more certain—someone had died violently.
And if they decided to lock the rest of the humans down for the foreseeable future, then Till would be stuck alone and confused and all of the best parts of him would be stoppered and subdued. And Ivan does not want that.
So he slips out through the chaos. He has no collar on to ping any alarms that they might have set, and in the comings and goings of so many segyein and humans alike his purposeful movements and history of obedience must make anyone segyein who sees him assume he is carrying out a request from one of their colleagues.
Anakt Garden eerily quiet outside now, and Ivan is glad that the dash between the dormitory and the building with the confinement cells is brief.
It is a testament to Till’s unruly nature that Ivan, who has never needed confinement, has memorized the way through this building so entirely that it no longer feels risky.
Security is uncannily lax at the moment; even the usual guard monitoring the floor is nowhere to be seen, likely dealing with the situation outside with the rest of the segyein. Still, Ivan works with his usual urgent efficiency once he unlocks Till’s cell.
They’d jacketed him this time in addition to the muzzle and the tubes hooked into the ports of his collar. Ivan likely got here quickly enough that whatever they had been injecting into him wouldn’t get in the way of…
Of what, exactly?
Ivan knows instantly in that moment.
He knows how to remove all of Till’s bindings even if he isn’t yet practiced enough to do so with flawless efficiency, and he knows how to sneak them both out of the building even when Till is a little wobbly from the sedative that already made its way into his system, and he knows exactly where the distortion in the wall that he saw this morning is waiting.
Till stumbles in the grass a few times along the way, but there are no segyein around to see them run or to see them groping along the wall panels surrounding the visible glitch until, at last, Ivan’s deft little fingers find purchase against an edge.
He peels the screen back, careful not to cause a second more conspicuous graphical anomaly, and crouches down to slip into the de facto tunnel behind it, tugging Till along by his wrist. They have to sidle a bit awkwardly through the support beams and pipes and wires, especially since Ivan doesn’t dare to let Till go, but the walls of Anakt Garden aren’t so thick that they need to maintain that posture for long.
Ivan and Till step out and stand side by side beneath an unfathomably vast open sky.
Till stares upward with open-mouthed incredulity, still a little drug-hazed and apprehensive, until his gaze settles on Ivan’s face.
Ivan grins at him, paying no mind to how his tooth catches his lip, and he lets go of Till’s wrist and grabs his hand instead and tilts his head toward the open land in front of them.
They run.
The freedom is intoxicating and, running hand in hand with Till beneath the natural red sky streaked with stars, with no other living being in sight, Ivan begins to feel something he hadn’t known was inside his chest unknot itself ever so slightly in a way too fragile to examine closely. He wouldn’t know the words for it; like the want, it is just too big to articulate.
He hollers into the night, a howl of freedom, and relishes the feeling of dirt between his toes and rocks biting into the soles of his feet. He could run forever like this with Till’s hand in his. He’s older now than he had been in the slums, and together he’s sure they can get by. He remembers how to start a fire, he can keep them both warm. Till won’t have to go back to an owner who beats him and Ivan won’t have to go back to an owner who is shaping him to be the breed standard for humans and they’ll be able to leave all of those obligations so far behind that no one will ever find them. They’ll be wild and feral beasts unfit to be anyone’s pet ever again.
Looking up at the endless expanse of sky—the real sky—Ivan feel like if he tripped he would fall endlessly just like the shooting stars above. And that feels like a type of freedom, his body finally untethered from this world, from everything, except for his hand in—
“Ivan!” Till calls in a breathless gasp behind him, and Ivan can hear the grin in his voice, “where are we going?”
“Wherever we want to,” Ivan calls back to him, still gazing up at the sky and still trusting his feet to bear him onward.
“Ivan,” Till says again, and he’s out of breath and he’s slowing down a little and his hand slips suddenly out of Ivan’s because he stops short. “Where… what happened back there? Before?”
Ivan turns back to him and explains matter of factly, “A human was killed. One of the older boys.”
Till shifts nervously, fear coming over him like a cloud as his whole body compacts itself, looking back over his shoulder at the Anakt Garden building.
“What about everyone else?”
Ivan stares back dumbly. What about them, indeed?
“They’re still back there,” Till elaborates, looking more and more uncomfortable by the second. He’s fidgety, glancing around in every direction. They’re so exposed out here.
Ivan stands still, arm outstretched to Till, the vestiges of a smile still on his face. If he stays exactly as he was moments ago before Till became so unsure of himself, if he smiles in the right way to look confident and reassuring, maybe they can go back to running forward hand in hand.
“We… I gotta go back,” Till says, discomfort turning fully into fear. “We have class in the morning. And a singing test. I have to check on—I gotta go back.”
He turns heel and runs, leaving Ivan standing still and watching him slip away. There are so many arguments he could have made, but he knows none of them would have made a difference. That’s what he loves about Till; the way he can’t help but feel regardless of whether it will just cause him pain in the end.
It was stupid to think they could have survived out here anyway. He’d been caught before as a child. He was lucky to have been bought by Unsha. He could do much worse for an owner. At least with Unsha he was fed and housed and he didnt have to worry about some other segyein capturing him.
The tightness returns to his chest as Ivan walks back the garden, trusting that Till will have seen himself to bed long before he reaches to the boundary of the wall.
By morning the glitch has been repaired.
Sometimes, Ivan feels like he wants to consume Till. If he could hold Till inside of himself, then he could absorb all of the thrashing blows and venom of Till’s outbursts while acting as a barrier and protecting him from punishment.
It’s illogical, of course, but it gets on his nerves lately watching Till lash out and wind up muzzled again. Not that it’s ever been much trouble for Ivan to sneak out and deactivate it later at night, but he’d have thought that by now Till would have grasped the cause and effect of his actions. They aren’t small children anymore—some of their cohort are as tall as fully grown humans already.
But if Till stopped fighting, he wouldn’t be Till.
And if he stopped, then Ivan would have no reason to walk quietly and confidently down the familiar halls and set him free, piece by piece.
Till had thrown his utensils at someone else—Ivan had not heard who—during dinner this evening and had been hauled off as a matter of course.
“What was it this time,” he asks with minimal interest once the muzzle unclasps and Till takes a few deep and heaving breaths.
“Fucker was trying to steal my music,” Till rasps.
Ivan hums in response. Their tests have become increasingly dependent upon their own original compositions or lyrics, and Till is as strong of a competitor as ever.
“Will you show me what you’re working on?” Ivan asks as he loops his arm beneath Till’s to hoist him up around the shoulders and help him to his feet.
“No,” Till says, glaring at him with suspicion.
Ivan moves his face into a pout but doesn’t push the matter. He’s learned to be patient.
“You can sit with me while I work on it,” he concedes, “if you want.”
Till is still nervous enough around Ivan after all of these years that he tends to give in to whatever it is that will make Ivan put on a smile so long as it does not inconvenience him too terribly, and Ivan is happy to exploit this knowledge.
The segyein let Till room alone now because he is too much of a liability for anyone else to share the room with him. Not that it makes much of a difference; they’ll all be moving from double to single occupancy soon as the oldest students graduate and their rooms open up. Nevertheless, he has only allowed Ivan into his room a precious handful of times—significantly fewer times than Ivan has invited himself in.
Tonight, Till hunches over his sheet music seated on the floor beside his bed. Ivan tries to sit behind him, craning a neck over his shoulder, but it would seem that Till was serious about not sharing his work in progress. At least, that is the meaning that Ivan gleans behind
go fuck yourself.
So he lays his head in Till’s lap and stares up at him while he works like usual, watching his eyes scanning lines back and forth and his mouth moving ever so slightly as he puzzles out lyrics.
He doesn’t even flinch when Ivan reaches up and pushes his upper lip back with a pointed finger. Till keeps mouthing around the words undeterred as Ivan traces the grooves of his teeth and gums until finally he reaches the threshold of his tolerance and focus.
“You taste like shit,” he barks out, Ivan’s finger still in his mouth.
“How do you know what shit tastes like?” Ivan replies innocently, nudging Till’s mouth open further so that he can feel the flat planes of the teeth in the back of his mouth.
The chomp on his fingers is entirely expected. He hardly even winces.
They’ll all be out of Anakt Garden soon. Ivan has already been around less and less, Unsha having decided that his time is better spent with a greater focus on building brand recognition. He’s already been accepted to Alien Stage, so continuing to attend class is more or less just a formality and way to fill time. They get the prestige of having Ivan as a student, and Ivan gets to be among his own kind.
He is used to making a good impression among parties of segyein, but it is nice to return to the vivid blues and greens of Anakt Garden after his most recent photo shoot. With the rest of the humans here, he doesn’t need to perform the same way. Their impressions of him don’t particularly matter.
Till’s owner has attempted to acquire sponsorships as well, but given the temperament of his pet, he’s been rather less successful. At least, that is what Ivan gathers from eavesdropping on the segyein during networking dinners and from seeing the cuts and bruises Till returns with after time away.
Once, while Till was standing to practice guitar, Ivan snuck up behind him and lifted the hem of his shirt and caught a glimpse of some of the bruises and welts at his waist before Till spun around and allowed the neck of the guitar to smack into Ivan’s head. That guitar was the only reason he hesitated to retaliate further—but once Ivan jabbed his fingers into Till’s waist he lifted the guitar up over his head, set it aside safely, and stepped up aggressively.
“What the fuck is your problem?” Till asks, standing up tall to try to meet Ivan’s height. He’s got a cut on his face today that’s so fresh it hasn’t finished scabbing over, the seam of it still glistening.
“Are you failing to attract sponsors on purpose?” Ivan asks curiously.
Till growls and surges forward the slightest bit, his chest pressing into Ivan’s and the light on his collar blinking a threatening red, but he balls his shaking fists at his sides and manages to avoid turning this into a physical altercation when he is already injured.
“Why the fuck would I want to?” He responds venomously.
“Nicer clothes?” Ivan suggests, glancing down conspicuously at Till’s threadbare shirt. “They usually let you keep them after they photograph you in them.”
There’s a puzzled scrutiny in Till’s expression, like something about what Ivan said didn’t make sense. He stares hard, waiting for something more—taunts or physical blows, most likely.
He is close enough that Ivan can smell his breath, and with those furious eyes fixed directly on him, he can only smile fondly.
Unnerved by the lack of response and satisfied that no further attacks are incoming, Till mutters, “Whatever,” and retreats back to his room with the guitar in tow.
Everyone in their class will graduate soon. Then they will only see each other in passing at events. And the ones who did not pass their Alien Stage audition will return to their owners with a greater pedigree, perhaps to be trotted out as an amusement now and then. And the ones who did pass will meet again on stage. And then, one by one, they will die. All of this will be over.
Ivan doesn’t feel nostalgia, or fear, or anything really. This is the path they have always been on drawing to its inevitable conclusion. But it’s a shame that he won’t be around Till for much longer.
At dinner that night he gazes at Till, admiring him openly as he eats. If he asked, Till would never let Ivan keep some part of him. He has a small collection of stolen trinkets in a drawer in his owner’s house—torn corners of drawings and slide whistles and a broken blue crayon and a small used bandage—but those are things.
So Ivan steps over to him just long enough to press into his cheek, breaking the seal on the tender wound so that blood wells up and over onto his finger, and he’s already back at his seat before Till can retaliate.
But he doesn’t retaliate tonight. He recoils, sees that it’s Ivan, and simply continues his dinner.
Ivan licks Till’s blood from his fingertip, surprised to find that it tastes the same as his own, and feels like the infinite amount of what is missing inside of him is one drop less empty..
Ivan is good at polite conversation. He is charming and pleasant and, as he has been told repeatedly for most of his life, a model specimen. Of course he is; he had to be. Unsha has paraded Ivan around since the time he bought him, and his success in advertising as well as on stage has only increased the demand for his presence at events like this one where he can tell everyone what it’s like behind the scenes and on the stage at their favorite event.
As a child he had not been very involved in these dinners, but he has played an active role in pitching himself as a promising competitor in this season of Alien Stage since Unsha had first laid out his plan to turn Ivan into a brand several years ago.
The modeling is easy. The interviews are too, now. He’s spent years honing his ability to conjure up a charming smile on command and he knows all the right answers.
He’s used to observing, tucking away information to use to his advantage during the competition. It did not escape his notice when earlier this evening one of Unsha’s associates had made a passing comment about the presence of Urak down the hall of this venue.
They don’t censor themselves around pets like him. He refills their drink glasses and listens to their chatter with the perfect pleasant smile unmoving on his face.
“Urak thinks he’s going to break into the breeding business with that one,” one of the segyein with a sack-like build says scandalously to their neighbor, “but who in their right mind would want to deal with such an aggressive human? He’s out of his mind. They won’t even want to splice him.”
“Especially since our Ivan is going to eliminate him next round,” one of Unsha’s associates says, turning to Ivan and beaming at him proudly. They turn to Unsha then to ask him, “Have you thought about breeding Ivan once he wins?”
“We have had some offers,” Unsha says, pleased to be able to hint at great things to come.
Another segyein chimes in, “I have heard that the money is better in breeding than cloning. I would certainly pay more for a human no one else had. They take so long, the bespoke ones.”
“You can clone any of the ones that don’t win; that’s what makes the living winner so much more valuable if you license them exclusively.”
They are talking about his body, but it doesn’t phase him. Ivan is no longer a part of his body, that implacably smiling shell that they praise so often. He is somewhere else, single-mindedly waiting until an opportunity to exit their private room in this venue presents itself.
Once they are sufficiently jubilantly intoxicated enough not to notice his delayed return, Ivan excuses himself casually and keeps himself smiling until he slides the door shut entirely. The hallway is more quiet than it had been earlier, the various parties in private rooms having wound down into something less raucous or dispersed entirely.
Following the context clues he gleaned from eavesdropping, Ivan makes his way toward where he thinks Till’s room will be, peeking in through the frosted glass windows on the doors and pressing an ear to the seam to hear. The third room he checks is dark and silent; a safe room to check first even if it’s the wrong one.
Ivan wishes it was the wrong room. He sees Till immediately, slouched over on the floor leaning slack beside a chair, dull and limp and muzzled. At first Ivan thinks he’s asleep, because he’s almost never that still and slack even when they sedate him, but Till meets his eyes briefly as he approaches. The light on the muzzle is still red.
He unlocks it effortlessly—how many times has he disabled one of these?—and realizes suddenly that he may never do so again.
And though he would never wish to have left Till restrained in any way, he does wish that removing the muzzle didn’t reveal the acrid alien smell on Till’s breath, shallow as it is through his slack lips.
If he were anyone else, Ivan might know what to do or say. Anyone else would have a better idea. If he were anyone else he would not have to be himself. He would not have to be seeing Till for perhaps the last time off-stage. The ache in his chest, that fathomless want, might not make him feel so debilitatingly hollow.
That was how Till looked, now. Empty in a way Ivan felt. It isn’t supposed to be this way; he couldn’t be Till for Till. He needs Till. What would he do if the world let someone who burned as brightly as Till in spite of everything they endured be extinguished?
With a hand at his cheek, he turns Till’s face gently toward his own so that he can rest his face against it, breathing in the smell of his skin and feeling its warmth. Till is alive in his hands, there is blood coursing through him. Till is alive. There is still so much to want.
Even now, with Till empty like Ivan, there is still something that he yearns for just as badly as when Till is shouting or laughing or crying. He aches with the want for it and nuzzles in closer, like that might somehow satisfy that need he’s carried all his life.
He brings his other hand to Till’s parted lips and slips one finger in past them—and presses his other hand into Till’s cheek just a bit harder to stop him when he tries to close his mouth around Ivan. He could tell himself that it’s a kindness, helping Till remove the lingering segyein taste in his mouth. He could tell himself that it’s a comfort to feel that Till is still warm and alive here in this moment.
But some part of him knows that he would rather Till remember the way that his hands tastes. That maybe some part of himself will be in Till, the way that some part of Till was in him after he swallowed his blood.
“We could run,” Ivan whispers, knowing that they cannot.
Till uses what little he has left to give to press his face back into Ivan’s. An apology, perhaps.
Ivan’s face twists into some sad and ugly smile that no one can see, the point of his tooth pressing hard into his trembling lip.