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Omar White once said, I ain’t no drug abuser. Truth is, I treat my drugs better than most. Elliot agrees with that sentiment.
He spent a lot of time watching Oz before he lost his job. In his opinion, Omar was the smartest, yet nobody ever acknowledged him as anything other than a crackhead.
The irony of that aches like an open wound.
Elliot isn’t stupid, no matter the things everyone else tries to imply with all the raised eyebrows and high, faux-concerned tones of voice and the tiptoeing around him like he’s made of fucking porcelain.
He knows they think he’s a liability. It hurts. For some odd reason the looks Darlene shoots him make his whole body sting.
Elliot doesn’t care what fsociety thinks of him. Why should he? He has Shayla and Flipper and Qwerty and a steady supply of morphine and Suboxone. But it does still hurt, the lack of trust. The slippery agency they’ve granted him in order to mainline the secrets of the universe and hijack Evil Corp’s infrastructure.
Trenton is nice enough. So is Mobley. Darlene still makes Elliot’s heart skip in a strange, vaguely familiar way. Romero knows all too well what the sweat pooling in the dip of Elliot’s throat means. He recognizes the tremors in Elliot’s fingers.
Elliot doesn’t like him. But he can tolerate him, just like he tolerates everything else.
Mr. Robot, on the other hand. He’s a tricky situation. An enigma. A statistical outlier to this handful of clumsy hackers. Mr. Robot keeps showing up where he shouldn’t. Mr. Robot is cutthroat where Trenton is kind, analytical where Mobley is disorganized, assertive where Darlene is hesitant, prudent where Romero is aloof. Something about him makes Elliot’s blood run cold, but he doesn’t want to dwell on it. Doesn’t want to leave the car running, not in a blizzard, the gas tank might freeze up. “Elliot.” When water vapor freezes in a gas tank it develops little ice crystals inside that block the fuel line. “Elliot.” Diesel snowflakes. “Oh my god, Elliot, are you listening?” It’s a bitch to melt a frozen gas line. “ELLIOT!”
“What?” Elliot says.
Darlene snaps her fingers in front of his eyes. He thinks he catches a spark, but it might just be his brain making shit up. He’s still high. His vision is pleasantly cloudy—by that he means half blind.
“Are you here with us on earth, Elliot?” It takes a moment for what she’s saying to resemble real words. She sounds annoyed. She sounds angry.
Elliot’s response comes out soupy. “Yeah. Yeah. Where else would I be?”
Darlene frowns at him. (Or, at least, Elliot thinks she does.) The next thing he feels is skin to skin contact, Darlene crushing his fingers in hers. The palm of her hand is covered with a sheen of cold sweat. Her pulse is rabbiting a million miles an hour. Elliot very suddenly has the urge to cry. Really cry. Not a singular tear down the cheek like a hypermasculine action movie hero who is only allotted one glittery eyeball during his entire trilogy. No. Real crying. Like, bawling. Like snot and phlegm and hiccups and all that jazz.
Elliot swallows a sob. He reminds himself where he is, who he is. He feels good for once. Sure, an artificial good but good nonetheless. He’s not gonna ruin it by crying. He can cry all he wants when he crashes, but tonight he wants to savor this.
He allows the pain to fade behind the veil of morphine. It’s surprisingly easy. It buzzes through his veins like electricity; like music.
Elliot cracks a smile that spreads very slowly across his face. “I’m right here,” he tells her softly, rubbing her arm for brownie points. “Okay?”
The silence had dragged on too long. Darlene’s still looking at him weird, but at least the concern in her eyes diminishes a little.
“I really worry about you sometimes, Elliot,” Darlene relents, finally glancing away. “Come on. We have to go inside.”
Elliot allows Darlene to lead him into the arcade, fsociety’s home-base. It’s a stupid, obvious place for a group of hackers to be hiding out, trying to take down the most powerful conglomerate in the world. The shoddy building has a faded placard screaming F SOCIETY out of a megaphone to the entirety of Coney Island. Quite literally. Elliot doesn’t know where the U or N went.
Then again, maybe the stupidity of it all is what’s kept them out of sight for so long.
Inside, Darlene immediately begins whispering with Trenton. Mr. Robot stands with his back to the wall, one foot kicked up, his baseball cap shading his eyes from view. Despite his tiny presence in the room, he seems all encompassing.
Mr. Robot cocks his head when Elliot passes by and shouts at him. “Where have you been?”
Elliot ignores him. “Do you need my help with something?” He asks the group clustered at the end of the table.
Mobley looks up. “Hey, man. Uh, actually, we’re good here. You know, as long as Steel Mountain goes well.”
Trenton gives Elliot a nod of acknowledgment, but doesn’t say a word. She never really does. Elliot likes her.
“We can depend on you, can’t we?” Romero asks, eyes narrowed. His rough voice rips through Elliot’s train of thought.
“Of course you can depend on him,” Darlene mutters. “He’s the best coder I know.”
“Yeah,” Mobley agrees. “She’s right.”
Romero looks uncertain, but he begrudgingly assents. He still looks at Elliot like he might be able to pull him apart with his eyes and peer into the rot hidden at his core. Elliot crosses his arms over his chest for protection, and then realizes how childish that is. Romero doesn’t know shit about him.
Still, he feels this ache trapped between his ribs, itching to get out. It’s corrosive. It will eat him away if he lets it.
Elliot lets out a shaky sigh. I think I need to go home.
“Okay,” Darlene says suddenly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“What?” Elliot croaks.
“You’re going home?”
Shit. I said that out loud?
Romero raises an eyebrow. He opens his mouth to voice another concern, probably, but Elliot beats him to it.
“Sorry. I just need to… do something. Uh, my girlfriend.” He stumbles over his words. Trenton gives him a sympathetic smile. Romero doesn’t say whatever he was going to say. Elliot pulls his hood up and steps away.
The silence crescendos; a held breath, an intake of sweet oxygen.
“Where the fuck are you going?” Mr. Robot makes him pause. “You can’t leave. There’s stuff to do.”
“It’s handled,” Elliot says quietly. He walks out of the arcade, motions mechanical. Mr. Robot doesn’t try to stop him, which is somehow doubly frustrating than if he’d tried. The morphine is swimming in his brain, making it hard to think. He needs to go home. He needs to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and count sheep while his brain melts into a gooey, fucked-up puddle.
Back at the apartment, he flies up the stairs to his room. Elliot pushes his door open, which is when he sees the gun, a blinding metallic flash that affronts his screwy light sensitivity. He blinks and stumbles backwards, the door almost shutting on his fingers, but he catches it with his foot.
“Hey, man,” says a gravelly, lilting voice. There’s a man standing in the center of his apartment. A man with a gun. Elliot hears the sound of the water running in the bathroom. Someone in the shower. “Your girl let me in, sugar.” When Fernando Vera grins, Elliot feels his whole body start to tremble.
He’s so fucking scared that his muddy thoughts clear and he becomes painfully aware of the situation.
“Sobered up?” Vera asks. It’s not really a question. At least not one Vera really wants an answer to. He reminds Elliot of a cat playing with its food before it lands the killing stroke.
Elliot swallows. “What do you want?”
Vera frowns. “Is that any way to treat a guest?”
Elliot glances down. One hand is clenching the door frame, hard enough to splinter the wood. His blood pounds in his ears.
“You gone dumb?” Vera barks.
“What are you doing here?” Elliot mumbles. The words come out disjointed, more like a strangled breath than a sentence.
“What’s that? Speak up, motherfucker.” Vera sounds angry, but when Elliot looks up he sees Vera’s eyes are shining with glee. His mouth is twisted into a smile, or a facsimile of a smile; Elliot can’t tell. He doesn’t know enough about Vera yet. He will. But for now Vera stands in Elliot’s apartment with his gun hanging loosely at his side, a quiet threat, yes, but still a threat.
“I said, what are you doing here?”
Vera makes a noise like a tiger chuffing. He sits down on Elliot’s couch, stares at Elliot’s hand on the door frame, his bare wrist. “Come over here. I’ll tell you all about it.”
Elliot’s blood runs cold. He tries to swallow again but his mouth is too dry. He forces himself to take the few, meandering steps to the couch. His legs are so weak a gust of wind could knock him over. Fortunately, there’s not a hint of air in the apartment. It’s dead quiet. Elliot almost wishes Vera would just shoot him already, get it the fuck over with.
He sits down in a chair, keeping a respectable distance from Vera, who still has that look like a predator stalking its prey. Elliot feels like a trapped animal; smart enough to know it’s going to die but stupid enough to try and survive.
Vera places the gun on the coffee table. For several minutes the room remains drenched in agonizing silence. Elliot shivers in the resounding cold.
Elliot looks at the gun. Vera looks at Elliot. Vera’s lips peel backwards.
“I’ve been waiting a long time for you, man,” Vera looks like a viper, built of black blood and corded muscle. Intrinsic evil. “It was nice of the bitch to let me in,” he continues. His voice is sandpaper smooth, so quiet that Elliot could maybe convince himself it belonged to someone else.
“Did you want something or were you leaving,” Elliot asks at length. It’s supposed to be a question but it trails off meekly.
Vera’s lips twitch, briefly. It’s so slight it could go unnoticed to the untrained eye. But not to Elliot. Elliot sees. More than he wants to, even. He draws his knees up a little closer to his face, caging himself in. As if that will protect him, that little bit of jagged bone and flesh framing Vera’s muted face in the darkness.
Vera could kill him so easily. He wouldn’t even have to lift a finger if he really wanted to. Elliot swallows, but it goes down thick and painful. The back of his throat is itchy but he doesn’t dare cough.
“I thought I already told you that’s no way to treat a guest,” Vera says, mellow as soft rain or melted butter. “Being rude won’t get you anywhere in life. I would know.”
Elliot nods his assent. He can barely hear Vera’s words, it’s all dull code entering one ear and exiting the other. Beginning and end. Rinse and repeat. Elliot knows somewhere, at the gritty back of his fucked up brain, that he’s selfish. After all, what kind of altruist would ever let Shayla go through something like this just so they could get another banal fix? Just one more, he tells himself, all the time he tells himself. Just one more and I’ll quit and I’ll get Shayla to stop seeing her dealer. Just one more.
Elliot grits his teeth and squares his jaw and stares the viper in its black eyes. Demon eyes. Al-‘ayn. Elliot would say he usually doesn’t believe in that kind of thing but he sees it now and understands. Something hideous peers out of Vera’s eyes, hungry, hissing mean, but stupid also. Malleable. Vera may have the upper hand now, while Elliot’s pumped to the gills with morphine and with Shayla’s life dangling on a thread, but there is information that he knows Vera is not keen on being released. Elliot recognizes this like he recognizes the invisible blade at his throat, the hierarchy of blood born creatures. Animals. That’s all they are, no matter how they like to dress it up. Animals working for other animals, and Vera is simply a cog in the machine.
Elliot can see Vera’s raised hackles. The instinctual primitive anger, but also fear. Fear is a prerequisite to anger, he knows this. He knows a lot. His father taught him a lot. Mostly about coding, but other things too. Secret and slippery things, things that only come out at night.
Vera can be the viper, the devil in the tall grass, fine. Elliot will pull out his fangs if it kills him.