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For the first time in his life, Eli is surrounded by silence; emptiness. 

Four white walls and a ceiling, his every breathing bouncing off the walls and coming back to him in a rumble, remembering him how abnormally alone he was. 

This is not normal– this is new to him, as new as it could be. So eerie he found himself making noise –clicking his tongue; rolling his rs, in the way he couldn’t when he was younger; humming that old, forgotten song his mother used to sing him, right before bed; she’s been dead so long that he doesn’t even remember the words, just the melody, and that also slips from his mind–, trying to fill the gap, that void of perfect, round emptiness that became his cell, so quickly he didn’t even realize it until it happened, and too late to stop it.  

He couldn’t remember a time when everything was so quiet. 

His house wasn’t silent. It was, in those precious moments when his father was away; losing himself in a corner where Eli couldn’t, wouldn’t find him. He didn’t want to, either. His best memories were those when Father Cardale was away, the second ones – those that came and went, so early he’s sure he remembered those before knowing his numbers, were those of his mother, teaching him to shush and quiet down when the sound of his father’s key rasped the door.  

His house wasn’t quiet. He could hear the steps of his father, walking up the stairs, the old, consumed wood cracking under his feet. He could hear his breathing, his musing, his praying; starting every night and every morning before dawn, right before church and right after beating Eli, as if the blood of his son in his hands made him more of a believer –after all, God had hurt his son, hadn’t he? Maybe not with his hands, but he allowed it; maybe his father and God weren’t that different–. He could hear him when he hurt his mother, her begs and her cries; the floor used to crack in a peculiar way when his mother would crawl, trying to slip away from his grasp. She never could. Something that Eli learned very early in his life is that Father was quick in his anger and quicker in his punishments.  

The house was only quiet that day, when Father rolled down the stairs and cracked his neck. Right then, in that moment, raising above Father’s Cardale bloody corpse, everything fell into place inside Eli, like he never was lost to begin with. That was, he learned after, God. 

God had filled out those empty spaces in Eli’s mind; he had filled them with a choir, with a rhythm, with rightness. With purpose. Laying out a path in front of him so clearly, he didn’t quite understand why he never found it before. To him, it felt like a wide hand against his back, pushing him into the right path; and what could he do, except to follow? 

He never felt that way again. Not in the foster houses, not with Charlotte– for a time he felt that way with Patrick and Lisa, too. That was before they died, before Eli had to run again. And then, he felt that way with Angie, just long before the novelty wore off, and he found himself ingraining in her, melting, until he didn’t know where he started and where she ended.  

But the silence never lasted long enough for him to grasp his hands around it and pull.  

Now, Victor was different. Peculiar. New.  

Victor liked silencing his mind, setting his track in a dark and destructive path; enjoyed seeing him struggle, picking up desperately the pieces of his face. He didn’t understand that, until not long ago; the darkness in Victor’s eyes, coming from the sick, deep pleasure of toying with him, was something that it was etched behind his retinas, like a brand of fire that he could not erase with sleep, meditation, or sweet thoughts of erasing that look from his eyes forever. As far as he could tell, forgetting Victor became his new passion; forgetting the way his chest used to rise and fall, and the way he’d laugh at him when he outsmarted him. Not even that was granted, in his cell.  

He couldn’t forget, nor sleep, nor rest. That was his very own purgatory, designed for him. And God must have agreed with it; so awfully quiet since the day Eli got caught, hands bloody and cradling Victor’s essence in the warm of his fingers. 

His cell was quiet, the world was quiet; Stell’s sound was miniscule, pathetic, barely a dot in the sea of divinity intervention God had blessed him with, since that night his best friend died and took his girlfriend with him. God had always guided him, pushed him in the right track, making him follow a lead like a hound does to blood.  

But God was quiet since Haverty– God was quiet since what happened to Serena, since EON caught him, since he found himself in that lab table– no, since before. Since he dragged that dagger between Victor’s ribs and watched the life get sucked out of him.  

His mind was quiet, too. Now that God wasn’t speaking to him, there was nothing else to do, but wait for His arrival, His guidance, once again, to do the right thing.  

He couldn’t help but think that Victor’s death, wherever his spirit was –if he did have one, a soul; that fake Victor, the one that supplanted his best friend and took his body and his memories and the way Eli smiled, reflecting like the edge of a knife, face to face–, poisoned his connection to God; that fragile, eager little thing that guided him so perfectly over a decade and more. Could the other Victor be so strong, to corrupt heaven? Could he kick Eli out forever, so the day should ever come he dies; he has nowhere to go to?  

That was impossible, because God was the highest being, in this world and others; but then again, the Devil once was his, was God’s; heaven, once, was his home. One always comes back to their home. Just like Eli comes back to the top of the stairs, staring down at his father’s corpse, feeling the world falling into place, such clarity forcing in front of his eyes he wondered, twelve and tender and bruised and alone, how could he not see? How could he be so blind?  

There’s a ring in his ears. Once again, Eli is quiet. His mind doesn’t speak. God doesn’t talk to him. Heaven’s doors were closed to him.  

His head falls between his hands and he doesn’t pray. He doesn’t think he knows how, anymore. 

He kept the water running; a fair mistake, from the own noise of his mind. He doesn’t think he could hear anything out of the room, if it ever happened.  

If Angie called, if she wanted to speak, if she texted him… 

If Victor called out for him, stepping out of the shadows of his room to welcome him –in Eli’s mind, it was a lion’s den, protected and dangerous. In his memories, when he’s in the cell and remembering, the apartment is the Garden of Eden, and Victor’s lair is the serpent’s.  

But no one called him. It was just him. And it was late. Eleven o’clock in a Tuesday; Victor had a test for the next morning, he had the decency to retrieving to his room to study a few hours before bed, and Angie was... doing whatever she did, when Eli wasn’t close, when he didn’t need to reflect her light and transform it in something tangible and tender, for her to grasp and delight on it.  

And so, he was alone, and it was quiet, and his mind couldn’t stop calling, but the words were so away he couldn’t catch them.  

Somehow, he’s grateful. If they weren’t so busy, if they hadn’t decided to leave him alone at least for a moment, he wouldn’t have gotten time for his project.  

He pulls and pulls until the wing snaps, carrying a few delicate, almost pristine webs with it. It was on a spider web. Before, before Eli caught it and slid it away from danger, the spider’s jaws already clacking with the prospect of lunch. He wonders if they can think; such small, pitiful things. He wonders if it felt safe, grateful, that Eli saved its life.  

Of course, it didn’t know that Eli was another threat, that he’d indulge in such pitiful activities. But it was all for science; purely science. He was a man of faith, and a man of purpose, of ambition. He used to think that one could have one or another; there were men of faith and men of ambitions, more often than not, with gluttony included, hungry for knowledge. Now that Eli wasn’t young nor naïve, he understood that the both of them weren’t, precisely, mutually exclusive. 

He was hungry, too. He was born hungry. He just didn’t know what to engulf, so he took everything.  

The water keeps running, and he turns it off, when he thinks about the complaints and Victor’s voice, ringing in his ears – “awesome, Cardale. Now who do you think they’ll blame when they see that Lockland has no tap water? Did you think of that?”–. The bathroom is quiet– but not him. Never him. God is speaking to him and he answers, working with steady hands, guiding him to something greater.  

A drop of sweat hangs at the top of his brow, balancing there, just half a second, until it drops and shatters over the sink. A frown appears between his eyebrows, the type that Angie liked to kiss and ease until there was nothing there. She didn’t know that Eli eased that frown all on his own, counting the seconds, watching closely her reaction so her delight would be bigger, and her adoration would grow in her chest. 

People were predictable, and Angie too. Eli liked that. Knowing how to be, before even being.  

He pulls back, scratching over his brow with a nail, the crown of his head peeking through the mirror and staring at him; he doesn’t stare back, he stares down, at his project.  

Where the water ran down, disappearing through the drain, there was the corpse of a butterfly. Whole, but broken; its parts carefully lay down, as if it were on a thin layer of silicone.  

Its wings had a pattern. That’s why Eli chose it from the rest of butterflies, or rather, that’s why he barricaded himself in the bathroom when he found it, laying on their floor, probably had flying inside their place, too early to be noticed by any of them and, by the sights of it, stomped on; either by Victor’s boot or Eli’s shoe.  

And then to be eaten by the apex predator of their small, insignificant realm. A pathetic way to go, just as small as they are. 

Its wings had a pattern, dark like his own hair, with freckles of gold and black. On the front of its wings, it had two even, big rings, as black as ebony and ash, as ingrained with fire there.  

Its wings had a pattern, like eyes. They were watching Eli, and Eli watched them, and they watched Eli back.  

He didn’t feel pleasure out of this, out of taking apart a living being, even if it was dead. No. He didn’t earn the silence that came, when God made him push his father down the stairs and God praised him after. 

He just did it to know that he could, if he truly wanted to.  

He wondered if He was pleased, too. If, in the big scheme of things, the wings and their pattern were as important as his father, or less, or more.  

He gets ahold of the dead butterfly and steps out of the bathroom, throwing it in the trash under the sink in the kitchen. He grabs a bunch of tissues and bags from the last takeout they had, covering the pitiful thing until it’s out of sight. If it were ever to be found, Victor would think it was the spiders, vicious little things, who tore the beautiful creature apart.  

He feels a subtle rush of repulsion going through him. It seemed that they had more in common than he thought.  

He closes the cabinet and walks away.  

The moon is a big, white eye in the sky, cutting through the glass of the window like it’s not even there. It shines upon Eli, but it lacks the divine warmth that God’s light irradiates, like a candle. The moonlight is cold, and detached, and lonely, surrounded by stars but never caressed. It’s dangerously, painfully familiar. Eli frowns at the moon. Then looks away, scorched.  

He tries not to stare at the darkest corners of the room. If he tries, truly tries, maybe they’ll speak to him, tell him all the secrets and half-truths of their owner. He feels a voyeuristic thrill; standing where no one can see him, the shadows engulfing him, making him a part of the room, but watching, watching, oh so clearly, the body that lays on the bed, right across the room, at one side of the window.  

Victor lays still. Eli stands, quiet and mortally static, watching the smooth up and down and up and down of his chest, his heart, his lungs, his veins doing all the work of keeping him alive while he rests, tremendously vulnerable, helpless.  

Once, he thought that Victor never slept. He never heard him doing so, or saw him, for that matter. Eli’s eyes were the first to close every night and the last to open every morning, and Victor, every single time, was untouchable; light and dead, like an old picture stripped of all its color, consumed by time and wear. In his mind, his roommate was a vampire. It seemed to fit him, anyway, and if he ever told Victor what he was thinking of him… Well, he thought that Victor might be pleased about it.  

But no. Victor was not a vampire; he wasn’t a zombie, either. Nor a demon, nor a monster, not something fantastical and impossible; the edges of time and destiny never capable of touching him. What Víctor Vale truly, really was, struck Eli on a simple, quiet afternoon.  

Human.  

Victor Vale was painfully, quietly, shamefully human, and his chest raised and fell with every vulnerable breathing.  

He didn’t know Eli was there. He didn’t know Eli was watching him sleep. He didn’t know that every once in a while, Eli liked to indulge himself; standing in a corner of the dark, cold room, staring at the back of his head, hearing him breathe.  

He had no idea. The thought filled Eli with a sick, sweet pleasure, over the fact that for once he outsmarted Victor.  

Victor’s room was a paradise with no one but him to be able to consume; Eli had pondered over it, when they first met and when they got their separate rooms. One would think that the topic of Victor Vale would become painfully boring, over the course of two years of friendship, but Eli found himself thinking the more of him the more he knew, twisting him like a lab mice in his mind, watching the way the blond stripes of his hair curled over the tips– Victor didn’t like people in his room. Actually, scratch that–  

No one could get inside Victor’s room, except, of course, Victor himself.  

And with a lot of effort and patience and pretended boredom –because, for one, Eli never saw Victor as boring. Selfish, twisted, wrong, but never boring–, Eli. 

And yet after being best friends for two years, his presence in Victor’s room was contained, controlled; once in a while, when he had to get stuff for Victor because he forgot it before leaving the apartment; when Victor got inside, skimming through his belongings under the curious, hot shimmer in Eli’s eyes. And, sometimes, when curiosity was too much, when Victor was not home, but that happened two or three or four times before Eli’s guilt took ahold of his conscience and he decided to respect his best friend’s privacy.  

Even if he died to know, he ached to know; he wanted to know everything about Victor, every ugly thought inside him, every dark corner of his being. Hell, he wanted to know why he was so twisted and crooked. He wanted to know what turned him into that.  

He wanted to know if God ever spoke to him, like He did to him. But Victor, he thinks, frowning in the darkness, has never been a man of faith. He knew that quite early in their friendship.  

There were men of faith and ambitiousness. Eli was both. Victor was the latter; Victor was a black hole, sucking everything in his path, even faith and the notion of believing. With how stubborn Victor was, he didn’t doubt that if the Lord ever tried to talk to him, he wouldn’t listen– he’d make himself not listen.  

Not that he’s complaining. Victor’s stubbornness is, with a lack of a better word for it, endearing. And maybe God belongs to Eli; let Victor with his science and Eli with his choir.  

Eli guarded the very real threads of his faith inside his being, knowing that Victor would never truly, deeply understand them.  

Victor let Eli walk inside his room; his lair, his own, small Haven. In his mind, Eli compared it to the border of Eden. He gave Eli access to his place and his ruined books, a little corner of his mind. Eli nabbed into it like a dog does with a bone.  

He steps past the threshold, bathing in moonlight; but his light didn’t shine as bright as it did on Victor; light attracts light, he supposed. White, quiet and still, Victor was as bright as the moon.  

Its light cast a halo of his hair, reflecting it, mercury curling around the edges of Victor’s pillow. His nose reflected a curved shadow over the wall, and Eli had the bursting ache of brushing over the delicate bone with the tip of his fingers.  

Eli stood there, staring down at Victor until his eyes dried up over the corners, the chilling cold of the room prickling at him. He didn’t stop staring. He wanted to know if Victor would know it, would feel it, deep in his bones and the blood in his veins; that Eli was there and Eli was watching him, up in the sky. Would he feel it? Would he know, as sure as Eli felt like he would, if they ever were in different positions? 

But Victor didn’t move. Apart from the breathing, the low cadence of it and the movement of his chest, he might well have been dead.  

Eli didn’t touch him, thinking that he might startle him. It’d be a shame, anyway, to wake him up, when Victor seemed so peaceful and calm, stripped down of the cold walls he built himself in.  

Eli frowned, staring down at him, seeing the elegant, long lines of his body and the nest of his bones under the pristine skin; so white it was almost translucent, and the blue veins painted it in watercolors, and he saw it clearly.  

It'd be way easier to ruin him in comparison to a butterfly, too.  

Human bodies were universally big, in comparison to a bug. To strip down a butterfly’s skeleton you needed steady hands, stable ones. You needed a critical eye to see the delicate planes of its wings separating from their thorax. Eli always had good eyes. Eli didn’t care about small things, not because he felt apathy towards them, but because they lacked the complexity that bigger things possessed. That Victor Vale, upon him, possessed.  

If Eli ever were to pull Victor apart, he could see with such clearness, even if the darkness, where he’d fall apart by the edges, like a crystalized butterfly.  

He thought of that. He’d start right by the deltoid. The muscle would pull apart cleanly, evenly, hanging off in skin strips; but he’d like to preserve the teres minus, the infraspinatus, and the teres major. How could he achieve it? Maybe he could expand Victor’s arms, up, like stretching, resting under the sun– or side to side, like wings.  

Or like Christ, maybe.  

He’d have to be careful with his thighs. He could strip him away, by the pectineus and the adductor brevis, open his legs wide. Eli frowns when he thinks about the neck. The neck– 

He didn't want to damage the trapezius– that was his biggest concern. Pulling apart the sternohyoid and the scalene wouldn’t be hard, when he thinks about it; give him a good knife and time and he could pull it off, but the trapezius–  

The human body was so complicated that sometimes he wished –ached, longed– for Victor’s natural understanding of it, his pragmatic view of how it worked. Eli wished to grab Victor’s boots and insert himself into his mind with the familiarity of someone walking home; without anyone to ever doubt he belonged there. 

But truly, he didn’t care about the state of his body– not in the way anyone would think he does, anyway. All he cares about is Victor’s chest; or rather, what lies under it. He wonders if it’s rotten, too, like his; if his ribs gave away over the pressure of containing such a putrid, cursed, machiavellian thing; if every time Victor breathes he feels it, the unstoppable and undeniable notion that his body would give up before his heart could ever purify it.  

Now, he imagines himself discovering it; cutting through layers of skin and muscle until the black goo gives away, and he finds, unmistakable, Victor’s heart lair.  

Dark and rotten and crooked, wrong. Expanding over the extension of his veins and cartilage until it spells Eli’s Victor’s name.  

A man can dream.  

He leans down, eyes fixed on one single, perfectly still strand of blond, and pinches Victor’s nose closed.  

Victor’s breathing stops, and the room falls silent. The only thing Eli can hear is his own thoughts, and God’s guidance, so brightly he could close his eyes and feel it.  

He counts to twelve and a half seconds before Victor’s eyes snap open –icy blue in the darkness, like the edge of a frozen river about to crack under his feet– and he chokes on Eli’s hand.  

Eli steps back, staring quietly at him, Victor’s body curling on himself while he spits and curses and coughs. And, in the darkness –though Victor wouldn’t be able to see it–, his pupils engulf the golden in his eyes, making a ring out of it.  

“What the fuck–” Victor curses, his mouth full of spit.  

“You asked me to wake you up,” Eli mutters, his eyes singularly staring at one spot on Victor’s nape, where a small, almost unseen dot lays, like a pool of darkness in the marble statue that Victor Vale is; uncracked, unfaced, immortal.  

A pair of white gold eyebrows frown, and the memory washes over Victor like a summer rain. So easy that his breathing eases and calms down, and his back hits the mattress once again; because he doesn’t know, of course, that Eli was watching him sleep, counting his breathes and every blond eyelash resting on pale cheeks.  

If he knew, would he trust Eli? He thinks, watching him blink in the darkness, drinking the dark line of Eli’s body like one would do with a divine sighting, would he trust that Eli wouldn’t hurt him? 

“Yeah,” Victor breathes, rubbing a hand over his eyes, “yeah, I did.” Eli raises one eyebrow, silently.  

Because he did, of course. Right after coming back from one of his exams, Victor threw his bag on the floor, groaned and, with a rather colorful language, told Eli to wake him up before midnight to keep working on one of his assignments. Eli was sitting on the couch and hanging on every word. Eli was watching Victor go and then counted the hours to step into his room, pouring every unholy, dark thought into his own assignment; midterm season, anyway. He hadn't done anything except work and study. He hadn't been able to see Angie, either.  

He had barely been able to see Victor, too. Even if they lived together, even if Victor fetched two cups of coffee before setting on his own assignments or walking to class, even if Eli woke him up every time he overslept –because Victor, Eli realized with an unsettling amount of delight, was easing, relaxing, letting him get ahold of the reins–, the times Victor and him actually spoke like two people –friends– were limited, and he could count them with one hand.  

For some reason the thought bothered him more than it should have. 

“It is eleven twenty-four, right now,” Eli says, not to think about pale skin and the way marble looks against tan skin, “you should start with your assignment.” Then, softer, with a nonexistent edge that he tried to sharp and failed miserably, “I can make us drinks, maybe.” 

Victor snorts. He frowns. He feels pathetic for doing so.  

“Oh, yeah, of course. Getting drunk during midterm season, Cardale?” a bite, soft, but nonetheless: a bite.  

Eli growls, “Don’t call me that.” 

“Yeah,” Victor stands up, scratching a point on the back of his nape that Eli thinks is where that dot lays. Then, with the casual cruelty that Victor uses with him, “yeah, right.” 

Ever so cold, so detached, easy. Eli wonders if Victor likes it; tormenting him, teasing him, making him mad and hot and move like an engine. 

By the way his eyes shine in the darkness, blue and feline and bright, he thinks that it's so. 

He has the very first words of an argument on the tip of his tongue; they die the moment Victor’s arms raise over his light head, stretching –just the way he thought he would, if he’d ever dismember Victor Vale–. His old t-shirt raises with the movement, and Eli catches, just for half a second, the silver lining of a stomach; pale and perfect and flat, its planes perfectly even, lacking the hardness and curves that Eli has.  

He turns around, staring blankly at the hole in the wall that they never quite fixed and never told anyone it was there. There is one in Eli’s wall, too; of one stupid, young night where they were drunk right after finals week and decided to throw shit at their wall and dance at the sound of Vampire Weekend and they never talked about it again, except to grin at that hole when Victor stepped into his room, and to think, absentmindedly, we should fix that.  

Eli thinks that again. We should fix that. 

His tongue is dry, and he doesn’t know why. He’s not quite fond of the feeling, as it remembers him of those nights his father sent him to bed without water, telling him that he’d drink something in the morning if he ever were to deserve it; the morning after Father Cardale would beat him up, and Eli would be too busy drinking his own tears –because his mother was crying, too, and he decided that if he could spare her of any pain, he would– to drink a single glass of water. That way would follow his days until Father Cardale remembered the limit of what a human body could endure. Then he’d give up and sit on his heels until Eli would drink an entire bottle of water.  

Eli learned –after a long time of thanking Father Cardale and promising, once again, to never make him mad, and to know later that that didn’t matter to him at all– that his father didn’t budge because he loved him; because in some dark corner of his mind the slightest love towards his son conquered the hate he emanated: having a dead child was just a hassle; a nuisance.  

Thinking of the logical way to justify why it happened and what happened and how he let it happen was too big of a waste of effort and time for Father Cardale, for him to ever conceive a world where his offspring was dead.   

His mother didn’t think the same, though. Maybe explaining why Mrs. Cardale cut her veins in their bathtub was way easier. It was, but because Eli was the one who found her, not him.  

“Let’s drink,” Victor says, and he’s no longer staring at his mother’s body in their bathtub. Water pink and gushing around the elbow-wrist cuts on her skin. Eli blinks, trying to erase the memory from the back of his eyes. The gesture is natural and controlled; anyone stupider and slower would believe that he was just tired or distracted or anything that seemed normal enough to belong to Eliot Cardale. “Why not? It’d be fun.” 

Victor isn’t tricked. Ei sees it over the corner of his eyes: Victor can’t ever be fooled.  

Eli scoffs, “Since when you do anything out of fun?”  

“Well, am I not a college student like anyone here? I’m not made of stone.” 

“Could have fooled me,” Eli murmurs, with the same amount of bitterness that he seems to have bubbled under his skin every time he speaks to Victor, talks with Victor, feels Victor around him like a vice.  

Victor smirks, and it parts his lips like an open wound, just enough for Eli to sense the mocking under it. 

“Don’t be pissy, Cardale. It doesn’t suit you.”  

“I am not pissy,” he says, way too quick for it to not be true. “And don’t–” don’t call me Cardale. 

It's enough already as it is; waking up every morning and glancing at the mirror and watching the face of Father Cardale staring back; eyes cold and dark, and curly hair over a crown of thorns. He just needs a few decades, a few years and a miserable, slow, haunting life, and he’d look exactly like him.  

The thought never slows down and never quite goes away, and it makes him want to vomit his guts all over the tile floors.  

It’s enough as it is, having his name, and having his face. And now, Victor wants to call him that, too.  

He doesn’t even know his father; never could, since he’s dead and rotting under the same ground he walks on, but he wonders, rather bitterly, if Victor knows what he’s doing. If he sees his father’s face in his and torments him on purpose, just for fun, just to pry a reaction out of him. 

Not surprisingly enough, it works. And it’s not even out of the blatant disrespect Victor throws at him every time he can–  

The thought of Victor watching anyone else in Eli’s face and not him makes him want to twist his neck. 

“Don’t call you that. Got it. Want a drink or not?” Victor says, before he can even think of something to say. And he’s smiling, again. 

He’s smiling and he’s taunting, white and silver against crimson and blood, and Eli hates him with all his being. 

His blood boils under the skin in a perfect mix of frustration, ire, and shame. Eli opens his mouth to answer with a quip, but Victor is already circling him, like a lioness does to a prey, walking away from him– 

No, not prey. A lioness would devour its prey; a lioness wouldn’t delve into unsignificant, small, foolish games. A lioness only cares about eating, but even that carries intend and care and attention– 

Victor wasn’t circling him as if to eat him. Victor was circling him, evading him, avoiding him.  

Ignoring him. Like he was just another idiotic student at Lockland, a bug squeezed under his pristine, expensive boots, staring down at him over the edge of his blond eyelashes. 

Eli’s blood tastes like bile on his tongue. Who the fuck does he think he is– 

His hand wraps around his shoulder, slender bones and pale skin –he thinks, once again, of the bones and the muscles under it, of how he’d pull them apart and make them right again–, fingers digging into the fabric of that wear, old t-shirt that Victor likes so much, because it’s comfortable and easy, and Eli thinks about the way it hangs over his clavicles before he thinks about the way he’ll punch him. The momentum goes away because Victor turns in his heels, and Victor is smiling; wide and closed and dark, just a shimmer of white, perfect teeth with a single dent –childhood accident, Victor had said. Eli wondered how it was to have a childhood fulfilling enough that he had memories of it that weren’t scars– on his fang. 

And Eli lost before it even started. 

“C’mon, Eli. Just a few drinks, it’d be okay, right?” then, with an edge of boyish amusement, so young it cuts to gaze at it, “We can get some snacks, too. Watch a movie. Didn’t you say we hadn’t done anything fun lately? You’re right, we didn’t. We’ll drink just a little, so as not to get wasted. What do you say?” It’s almost hopeful, Eli almost believes it. Almost, “Yeah?” 

By the time Eli’s hand slips from his shoulder, he realizes he’s not mad anymore; though the anger buzzes under his skin in a low, hot cadent. There’s no difference from the way anger and rage flushes over his skin all the time, though; an old anger, from before Lockland and Angie and Victor’s ice eyes, from before his mother; from Father Cardale. Maybe an anger as old as time and his blood. It just buzzed there, waiting for the time Eli would just let it be. He had got so used to it that he didn’t even feel it, most of the time; just a part of his skeleton that he could endure and hide between smiles and laughter, and no one would ever conceive the idea that Eliot Cardale was anything but a fucking idiot that laughed too much, smiled too much and did too much. 

By the time Victor turns around and walks into the living room, Eli realizes he’s been toyed with. 

And by the time he sits over him, staring far too much at a bright, blond side profile, he realizes he’s not angry at all. All his plans of retribution, pain and revenge –of hurting Victor, of stripping out the tender layers of the skin he stole from other people and watching him bleed, trying to pull himself together. No. He wouldn’t watch him. He would let him know that he didn’t care about him at all. Who’s ignoring who, now? – settle like driven snow, and he doesn’t gaze at them more than once. They feel silly now. Unimportant.  

Far too little for someone like Victor. He doesn’t deserve it. He deserves more.   

And he, Eli thinks, has a lot of time for it. To think. To plan. To create a new purgatory deserving of Victor Vale.  

He’s nothing but patient. After all, who would be able to endure two years of imprisonment, but him? 

Who would be able to give Victor’s all his attention, but him? 

“Wake up.” Stell’s voice isn’t drowned by the glass between them. A shame. Eli would like a sound proofed room. It would be wonders for his mood. “I said wake up.” 

If he had been paying any attention to him, Stell would have known that Eli wasn’t asleep. That Eli didn’t need any sleep at all. Nor food, or water, or anything that could be needed if he were human normal. His body replaced on its own every single process, without a thought or his say in it. He hadn’t felt thirsty for a long time. He hadn’t needed sleep since he was twenty-one.  

But it was useful, to close his eyes and slow his breathing and pretend he didn’t hear the words uttered from the other side of the glass, the frustration and powerlessness carried with it. Sometimes it was pain, fear. One time he heard regret. It was fun at that moment. What do you regret? 

What do you regret? That you let Victor go? That you let me go?  

That you were so foolish, so blind, so old and incompetent that two students outsmarted you? 

Then, bitter and unwelcome, so quick that he tried to repress it, but it was too late to: What can you possibly regret that I do not?  

He opened his eyes and gazed at the ceiling. White and perfect and regular, without a single bump or shadow. Then, at the corner, a blinking, crimson light, like blood. Like Father Cardale’s red crown around his busted head.  

He wanted to feel disappointed, but he couldn’t find it within himself. All matters aside –that he was helping them, even though one of his men tortured him since Victor played Stell caught him. That without him they wouldn’t be able to catch half of the EOs they did, all those months ago; they wouldn’t be able to catch a quarter. They wouldn’t be able to catch one, at all– Eli admitted it was the smart, logical thing to do. He killed things– people, in their eyes, but they were things. People were emotional, by definition, and so they saw the enemy in Eli, and lambs in the enemy. He didn’t take it personally. Blindness wasn’t chosen, nor it was to be held by God’s grace, but one was purer than the other, they just didn’t know it, yet. 

He didn’t mind. If they felt safer by watching him every night and every day by that small, pitiful thing, so be it. It would make them pliable, meek.  

Not like Eli could do anything in that white cage. He wasn’t Victor; he couldn’t hurt people with his mind and his will.  

Though he wondered if Victor would ever be able of slipping away, sneaking like a bad thought outside of that cell; the limits of his curse were unknown to Eli, as obvious it could be, especially after ten years of distance between the two of them, but if it weren’t through his powers, Victor would find another way to escape. He was that slippery, and in his college years, he leaned into puzzles and mysteries as he did with people. Victor was a lover of challenges before ever being a lover of women. 

But he wasn’t Victor, and Victor wasn’t him, which explained why he was so impatient, so unwise, unruly.  

If Victor could find a way outside it, he could, too. He just needed time, and of that he had plenty.  

And, he thinks this as an afterthought; raising from his cot and staring at Stell’s graying hair and crow’s feet over the corner of his dark, weary eyes; Victor and he were never able to survive separation. That was something he knew, even with Angie’s death and Victor’s imprisonment.  

But Victor didn’t survive, anyway; he thinks, and then directs that silver thread of thinking right. He didn’t survive, but not the separation, the distance between us.  

He didn’t survive me. And that was better. It fitted him better, as a glove.  

And it fit Victor better; the concept of him never surviving Eli.  

He knows why Stell is there, as there isn’t any topic of conversation nourishing for him between them, and because Stell would rather die before going all buddy with him. Or so, he thinks. The thought entertains Eli to no end, and he has to suppress a smile that would do nothing but irritate Stell and deepen those wrinkles between his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. How would it feel, to go silver? He thinks before realizing how useless the thought is and then stops.  

“Good morning to you, too,” he answers, because a few months in his new home (the term is disturbing and bitter on his tongue, like ash or vomit) he just realized that the most entertaining thing to do there was piss Stell off, and he decided to take advantage of it the most. After all, they needed Eli, but Eli didn’t need them, as much as he didn’t need air or water or sleep.  

He welcomed some vague, old memories of Victor –of his snapping tongue when someone was especially irritating or unbelievably stupid, and Eli answered with fake kindness, but Victor wasn’t afraid of telling them how naive and sheltered they were. Of his mean words, drilled in honey and bees so deeply, no one knew how to separate one from the other, and so no one called Victor’s bullshit out. Of his blue eyes, becoming ice when he was irritated and then white-hot fire when he was furious–, twisted them in his mind and twirled them until they fitted him, and so his meanness became Eli’s. Victor’s skin fitted him good, surprisingly, even when it was not. After all, they were so alike to the other they could be the same, mirrors facing one another, but the thought displeased Eli enormously, so he didn’t delve into it as much as he did in his youth; tender, soft, naive, and painfully enchanted by Victor Vale and his reflection. 

He wondered if Stell saw it and in the reflection of Eli’s eyes, the lights turned them from mahogany to arctic, and he found himself facing Victor’s sharp angles instead of Eli’s. But that was foolish thinking, since Stell never knew anything about Victor apart from the boy he found that cold night. More than a decade ago, skinny and slender and blood stained. He didn’t know Victor’s wit; he didn’t know the twinkle of his eyes when he aced a test or the curve of his upper lip when he, once again, fooled someone. Those things were only known to Eli, and belonged to them. 

No; Stell wasn’t facing Victor’s shadow, white and bright over Eli’s corners and sharp ends. In his eyes, old and futile, he must see something else, something that was entirely Eli’s. 

A wolf, perhaps. He always liked canines; he found them rather captivating. But Eli liked to think of himself as the hunter. Did that mean that Victor was the wolf? 

What a charming job I did, disposing of the threat. And no one even thanked him. Too busy being afraid of him for all the wrong reasons.  

It doesn’t matter; I’ll get out of here someday. Someway. Somehow.  

“Do not start with the fake pleasantries, I’m in no mood.” 

When is he, truly? He was just like Victor in his golden years, “I was raised well. I know how to be respectful, even if you don’t appreciate it.” 

“You’re right: I don’t appreciate it.” Stell frowns, knuckles tightening over the file in his hands. They’re hairy, he realizes. Does he not shave? “And you? Well raised?”  

Unspoken between them, lays: when you killed people?  

Eli doesn’t grant him an answer, staring straight at him, no emotion in his eyes apart from the raised eyebrow that brushed close to the line of his hair.  

Stell budges after a few seconds in a way that Father Cardale never did. 

“I have a job for you.” 

“That’s all I do, isn’t it? Work.” 

“Do you want to stop? You can. I can tell the board. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled, but you know what you were getting into when I got you out of Dr. Haverty’s little project and took you here. Do you want to go back?” 

Eli doesn’t answer that, either, but Stell doesn’t mind. He expected that, anyway; that at the sight of a real threat –or rather, the memories of all they did to him, those years with Haverty– all that charming, cunning layer of a fake human being would crumble.  

Eli, however, with all his icy control, wasn’t able to hide his real reaction to Stell; the way his eyebrows dropped, casting a shadow over the fine, hard edges of his face. Such a fine face like that had its own advantages; Stell didn’t doubt it for a second, when he thought of how Eli managed to allure so many EOs to his reach. It was the logical thing to think.  

The funny thing about masks –and especially Eli’s– is that they crumbled under the pressure of strong emotions. No one was dead enough to pretend to not feel, not even EOs. Especially Eli Cardale. Stell was growing more and more familiar with the edges of Eli’s masks, and in so, he could tilt it just enough, more every day, and peek at Eli Cardale’s real face under it.  

The danger was thrilling. Like crouching over and gazing directly into the wolf’s eyes. 

“No.” he said, and nothing more. He eased the wrinkle between his eyebrows and made a hand gesture at him.  

That would be all emotion he could bribe out of Eli, he guessed. At least for today. Next time, he’ll try again. Just to see what he’d do.  

He settled the file on one side of the glass and with a quick snap of his wrist, it slid to the other side, Eli’s fingers catching it with ease. He didn’t spare a look at Stell; long, thick fingers opening the file wide, studying it with the eyes of a doctor. The doctor he could’ve been, he guesses. 

Hercule King, it read in black, thick letters. 

Eli read in silence. 

The sound of the hands of a clock ticked in the background, even if Eli’s aisle lacked one. One white wall in front of him, one behind him, and one on every side; that’s all he had. Stell had decided that Cardale wouldn’t have anything as simple as a clock, since it would tell him the time, how much was passing between visits, and he’d rather keep Cardale in the dark.  

Stell, then, realized it was his own watch, coordinated with the beat of his heart. He covered it with his hand, then realized he was sweating, and then settled on staring at the ceiling until Eli saw it fit to speak to him, even if it was as small as telling him what the fuck he was thinking about those thin papers, containing every single piece of the life of the person they would capture in, God willing, less than a month from now.  

No matter how many times he thought of it, he never stopped feeling sick after handing Cardale those files. Just a few pages, and they had everything. Names, ages, first school, first girlfriend or boyfriend; their first job, where were they a month ago? Did they have diabetes? How many times did they walk across that empty street two corners from their place, where Stell and his men would apprehend them on a starless night? 

Those things were important to Stell, as much as those lives. Cardale didn’t think the same, Cardale saw them as monsters; and yet, Stell walked in every other month, asked him to locate those people and profile them and ignored when Eli told him, once again, how easy things would be if he just fitted the barrel of his gun against their neck –like a lover’s kiss– and just pulled the trigger.  

But we’re not the same, Stell thought again, eyes draping over the edge of messy, dark hair that caressed Eli Cardale’s eyes like a crown of thorns. We’re not the same, lighting a small cig while he waited for a piece of Cardale’s mind. 

And that’s why he’s there, and I’m here.  

And that’s why Victor Vale is dead. 

He closes his eyes and allows three or four afterthoughts about Victor Vale.  

Hercule King. Thirty-four years old, his birthday was about two weeks from now –what a bitch, to not know if he’d be alive by then–. Built like a bull, construction worker; two sisters, five or six nephews and nieces and all that, if he counted the one who disappeared three years ago.  

Dead by asphyxiation. An old building, too many people and a lack of security gear for it.  

A sad way to leave, and Eli died inside a bathtub full of ice. He considered himself to know enough about that stuff. 

If he had just stayed dead; because Hercule King, after a few minutes of being trapped under rumble and then treated by the inexperienced workers of the company, opened his eyes and breathed again.  

A frown settled between Eli’s eyebrows; how it used to be, back at Lockland. The difference was that Victor’s eyes were no longer on him, mouth curling in a smirk. He could still hear the sound of his voice, the slightest tilt of an accent he never could place –and he met a lot of people, since Victor left. No one sounded like him, but it could because of that accent or the way he could say the cruelest things without mattering at all–, mouth edging over the words. The memories had no noise, but they were as fresh as ever. 

Victor always liked to see Eli struggle. No doubt he’d do the same, now. If he could.  

And Eli liked to beat him. That’s just how it worked between them.  

He beat him one last time and now Victor would never have the chance to smirk at him ever again, which was a blessing.  

He glanced at Hercule’s file one last time before laying it down, his back facing the ceiling. Stell’s back straightened immediately, the smoke of his cigarette curling to the ceiling, pooling like mist. Eli wondered if he was watching him over the edge of his eyes, waiting for him to move. The thought was strangely curious and entertaining. 

“Any idea where he is?” 

“No,” Stell said, right away, “the company is not lying. A few weeks after the accident (and a very colorful discussion between King’s mother and his former supervisor, or so I’ve been told) he left. Dropped the project. No reasons why, just did it.” he shrugs, “I asked the people there; King was practically a dog in a suit, walking in two paws; totally dedicated to his work, even if it seemed unimportant to others. Before the accident, he’d rather die before leaving the project. He’d say he was giving housing to the people. After having a few pounds of rubble on top of him, I think he changed his mind.” 

“Or something changed in him, don’t you think?” he frowns, “Do you have his sisters’ addresses?” 

“Yes. Why?” 

“He doesn’t have any friends. Acquittances, yes. Buddies, pals, whatever you want to call it. But he’s close to his sisters: the oldest of three, a few years in school when his mother got pregnant, and then in middle school, again. He’s the protector and main source of income for his family, especially since his father left.” He thinks of that section in Hercule’s file and then he thinks of his own father. The thought is not pleasant, “If he’s not at his house or at his mother’s, he could be at one of his sisters’, or, at least, one of them gave him somewhere to go to; maybe an apartment, a friend’s place, a rented floor. He doesn’t have the resources to leave on his own, but he has a family. Did you go see any of them?” 

“After already asking them about what happened to their brother, who, I have to recall, a whole building fell on top of?” 

“What do you want to do, then? Expect him to walk back on his own, waving his arms in the air and yelling that he sets people on fire, or sees the future, or flies, or is very good with computers? That’s not how it works,” he says, “he’s an EO now. He doesn’t understand what he does or why he does it or how he does it; he just knows he does it, and there’s no one to guide him, or at least tell him what to do. Do you want to wait until he gutters a family of three? Until another building falls on top of him, because we don’t know what his abilities are? Some deaths here and there?” 

Stell frowns. 

“We’re going slowly, carefully, to not spook the women–” 

“How is that working for you so far?” 

“–and do not forget who you are working for, Cardale.” Stell says, through a tightly clenched jaw. 

“Stell,” he says between gritted teeth, so hard he thinks he might lose one, turning it into white dust, “you can’t wait. We can’t wait–” 

“We can’t wait? Who’s we?” Stell asks, with one raised eyebrow. 

He steps one, two times closer to the glass. Dramatic effect, clearly, like that’s going to intimidate Eli. He finds it rather idiotic. 

He got his chest opened by a crazy fucker. His best friend killed his girlfriend and then tried to kill him, just to come back ten years later and try again.  

Stell is impossibly, microscopely, immensely small in the big scheme of things.  

So much he doesn’t even realize it.  

“Having some dreams about going out, Cardale? Seeing the sun? Caressing the trees? Won’t happen.” 

He tightens his jaw, wanting, not for the first time, that there wasn’t a glass between him and Stell, “I didn’t say anything about that–” 

“But you’re thinking of it. Here’s the thing, Eliot: you’re not half as smart and cunning as you think you are. I can see right through you, and I promise you– I promise you, you won’t see outside this cell until the last cell of my body gives up. And even after that, when I’ll be six feet under, putrid and gone, you’ll still be here. Don’t ever doubt that. I made sure of it.” 

Eli doesn’t speak. 

He doesn’t breathe, either.  

And he looks at Stell in a way that makes him think that, maybe, Eli doesn’t feel half as caged as he should feel.  

“We won’t work the way you want us to.” He says, after ten long seconds slide by and the feeling of uneasiness settles down, “We won’t play the game like you want us to– your game. Those days, those old days, where you fled around flashing your teeth, being all charming and crap, are gone. Now you’re here, now you work for me, and there’s no way in hell I'm letting you out again. Do you understand?” 

“You’re so charming.” 

“Do you understand?” 

“What will you do when that EO kills everyone that goes on his path and the dead of innocent, human beings are on your shoulders–” 

“Do you understand?” 

“Yes,” he says, at last. Gritted through teeth, as if that sole effort kills Eli’s soul. Not that he has any.  

“Good,” Stell says. The cigarette dies and all that’s left of it is the column of smoke, twirling over his head. He’s decent enough, so he’ll get rid of it outside, where there is no fire hazard.  

He doesn’t do this for Eli. Firstly, because the smoke can’t reach him, and secondly because he doesn’t give a damn. 

“I’ll come back here when you have any, logical lead–” 

“Pay a visit to his sisters.” 

Stell sighs, “Cardale–” 

“Just do it.” Eli grunts, barely containing the urge to slam through the glass wall and twirl Stell’s neck with his bare hands, “Do it. You’ll find him, I swear. And if you don’t want to kill him, if you just want to recruit him or spare him or–” he takes a deep breath, “whatever, you can.” 

“You won’t force me to kill an innocent human being? That’s new.” 

“Can I force you to do anything at all, inside here?” Eli says. For once, he sounds tired. 

He turns away, taking the file with him. Instead of sitting on the computer in his corner, he just slumps to his bed, strangely, curiously exhausted. If he were half the doctor he was meant to be, maybe he’d look into it, but he doesn’t actually care. 

And he never got to be a doctor, funny enough.  

Hercule King’s eyes follow him through the file, like mocking him. 

He doesn’t need to investigate any further. He’s sure of it– no, he knows Hercule will be with his sisters, one of them, anyway. And if he’s not, he’ll be at a place they sent him to. And if he’s not, they know where he is. 

And if they do not... 

Civilians are way more sensitive than the common EO; that lacks every single human aspect that defines them. Victor was like that, the moment he died and come back, and all Eli had of him was a phone call in the middle of the night, when he told him that Angie was dead. Then he went into their home and stabbed Eli, so that’s proof enough for him. 

Eli is like that, too. He’s way past denial and indulgence, and coddling.  

And Hercule King must be like that, too, if he left the job he loved so much and disappeared like smoke the moment he died. But his sisters are normal; his sisters are not ExtraOrdinary, as humans so usually are. So, if Stell’s men press further, the way they must, until they crack– 

“Whatever you’re thinking, don’t.” Stell says. It’s barely a whisper, and it’s contained and pushed by the glass wall that keeps Eli in and Stell safe of Eli. But Eli hears him. He hears him like he’s at his side, shoulder to shoulder, sharing a cot, “I can see it in your eyes.” 

Eli smiles, and that must disturb Stell tremendously, because he murmurs and turns around, leaving the aisle. The lights go off and Eli swims in the darkness. 

He can’t move his head –won’t–, but he figures that it’s nicer that way. He vomited. Just bile. But it is still stuck to the steel cot, and the smell is rotten and sickening. It stuck to his face, too. The corner of his lip, the line of his jaw, when it dripped and dripped down. His hair is stuck, too, to the corners of his face, the line of his hair, out of sweat and dried, old blood that’s entirely his. Fucking disgusting. And the lights are too fucking white, too fucking– 

Eli sees his mother’s face, and for a moment he thinks he’s in heaven. 

It’s a foolish thought, clearly; not only because he’s not allowed in heaven anymore –no matter how much devotion, how much of an obedient servant he is to Him, his very existence goes against heaven’s divine lining, and so heaven’s door won’t ever open to him–, but because his mother isn’t, either. People that took their own lives don’t go to heaven, something about not having patience in God, faith in God’s ways. Being fit for the test. Eli can’t fail it, because he can’t die. His mother tried and tried but it wasn’t enough, and so she cut her own wrists open and waited for Eli to find her. 

Funnily enough, Eli died a similar way, like hers; not quite the same. He didn’t cut his veins; that’d be messy, and dangerous, and who knows if they’d be able to fix the blood loss, when it’d be Victor’s turn to take him back? It seemed rather silly, too. Uncontrollable. Painful. The way mama left. 

But they both died in a bathtub; he just came back. He just didn’t think of it until later; that he’d never see her again.  

But it’s nice to pretend that he’s seeing her. It is way nicer than what he’s doing now, feeling now.  

Are You protecting me, he asks, staring at the ceiling, the white lights hurting his retinas, are You protecting me now, or did You forsake me?  

Haverty hadn’t cleaned the steel table. He figured that day that it didn’t matter. Even if Eli’s wounds got infected, even if he got sick, he’d be fine a few hours later– a few minutes, even. Seconds. And it was good, to test how long did it took to Eli’s body to torn away the sickness. It was like his own very rat lab. 

He was lying in a layer of his own blood, meat and vomit, not because of the incisions Haverty did to his torso –who healed itself a few seconds later, to Haverty’s absolute delight, rat eye’s shining under the lights–; he had seen corpses, all his life. Mama, Father Cardale, Professor Lyne, Dale Sykes, the janitor.  

Victor, when he drove the knife down. 

No, he wasn’t disturbed at the sight of his own guts, staring down to peek at the white bones that covered his organs– that were supposed to protect them, but could only lay in the puddle of his own blood. He wasn’t disgusted. 

But the smell was–  

The smell of rotten, of blood, of his body desperately trying to pull himself together. He could see his own heart beating down there, and the sighting didn’t upset him, but feeling it, smelling it so closely...  

So, he threw up, swallowing some of it when it came back to his mouth, and he wasn’t quick enough to spit it out. Haverty saw, absolutely thrilled, the way his organs worked inside his body; trembling and shutting out and collapsing in his own bile.  

“Do not move. This hurts me more than it hurts you.” Haverty muses, but he says it in a way that tells Eli that it does not hurt him at all.  

Haverty is standing at his side, eyes fixed on a syringe full of something Eli can’t quite place. It’s been a lot of time since he went to college, anyway, and they never taught him all the ways a human body could hurt, only how to fix it. He learned on his own.  

And yet Haverty excels in this field, because in just a few months he’s been able to show a dozen more ways of hurt to a guy that can’t die. 

He doesn’t stare at him as he does it, because, he thinks, Haverty might find it endearing if Eli ever gave him a drop of attention, if he would ever demonstrate that he was minding him. And he doesn’t want to please Haverty, at all. 

So, he stares up, at the ceiling, at heaven’s lining, and he stares at Victor, too.  

And Victor stares back.  

Its hair is a crown of glass over his head, so clear and bright that it fuses against the white ceiling. Eli can’t separate one from another; Victor is part of this room as much as Eli is part of that steel cot, intrinsically connected. When he parts his eyes from its –impossibly blue under the white lights, like the sheer layer of ice before it crumbles under his feet– he sees it everywhere. Over the dark space in a corner, around the table where Haverty keeps his tools clean and sterile. Not a single shadow of crimson in there, that could show that they went in Eli’s body a hundred and one times.  

With its fingers curling around the door’s knob, dancing over the tools, as if contemplating which one to use on Eli.  

Parting the white–blond strands of its hair, twirling behind Haverty’s back, a ghost to the rest of the world, unseen, but to him.   

Everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere. 

Victor. 

All at once, he twists his neck when Haverty turns around, and sets his gaze on Victor. 

Victor is a point of light; shadowing every corner of the lab. Eli’s eyes hurt, after a bit of just staring at him, watching, glaring. If he wasn’t tied to that table, he’d be way more intimidating. If he wasn’t so bloody, if Haverty wasn’t leaning over his body, injecting the contents of the syringe directly into his veins. If only, if only, if only– 

Victor stares down at him, parts its lips and smiles.  

What unsettles him is not the cruelty of his grin; something he had reserved entirely for anyone that wasn’t Angie. Eli knew the extension of Victor’s anger, how it burns, and it burns and takes everything with it, until he’s satisfied. The sole occasions where Victor apologized could be counted with his fingers –if Haverty ever left him some to spare–, and every time those were silent, twisted apologies where he said anything but “I’m sorry”. He said only one time, and it was for him, only for him, and no one else. 

No, he knows about Victor Vale’s cruelty, his twisted being. He thought of it, dissected it, twirled it around in his mind– 

He’s not surprised by the silent glint in its eyes, of enjoyment and fun. He’s surprised that it’s directed at him, not for him, with him.  

But it makes sense, he thinks, as his body shuts down, and he feels as if he’s bathing in a pool of syrup, heart too quiet and slow. The only thing sharp in him is his own mind, with a low cadence of Victor, Victor, Victor.  

It makes sense, that Victor came back to haunt him. The murdered came back to haunt their murderers, that’s true. But he believes he’s not been haunted by anyone else in his life. There’s a pile of corpses under him, and yet Victor’s the one who clawed his way out of his enclosure and came to see him. Why is that?  

You are here, then, he thinks, gazing at Victor’s white tiara, not in heaven’s holy lining, not in purgatory, not in hell. Haverty pulls back, stares down at his body, and smirks, satisfied. You’re here. 

With me. 

“Do you feel anything, Mr. Cardale?” Victor’s lips curl and part, like the petals of a flower, opening for the first time in a new spring, “Does it hurt? Does it prickle? Does it sting?” 

“What?” He wants his words to be sharp and angry, yet they’re slurred and weak, edged by the blood that’s overflowing his mouth. He spits, tastes copper and saliva, and frowns.  

Victor tilts its head, blue eyes peeking through the curtain of silver bangs and the spotless white of Haverty’s coat, “What was that, Mr. Cardale? Something to share for the class? Louder, please, pray tell. I’m so very interested in what you can bring to the table”, and then he laughs. 

It’s only after he’s being open and gutted and dissected, sitting on his own blood and gore, that he realizes that Victor is not speaking; that Haverty’s voice, booming inside the lab, makes his way up through his throat, taking the place where his vocal cords used to be or were meant to be, if the Victor in front of him were any more of a human that Haverty or Eli aren’t. Haverty’s voice makes Victor’s skeleton shake, like the hollow bones of a butterfly. It makes it crumble.  

He’s way past his fourth prayer. He doesn’t know where he started, maybe when Haverty pulled away his left lung, holding it up for him to see. He stops himself and stares at Victor, and stares and stares. I’m not afraid of You. 

Haverty pulls away, cradling something in his arms with the loving embrace only a mother can muster. Side by side, like photographs with different exposures, Victor and Haverty are paintings of half-lights and shadows. The dark spots in Eli’s eyes go away, and he sees that Haverty is cradling his stomach, pulled out of his open body; blood streams like rust flowing down his arms, through the fabric of his coat, and to the floor. Haverty is smiling. 

“Are you looking at this, Mr. Ever? Isn’t this a miracle?” He says, the smile lines cracking at his face and tearing it away at the edges, like old paint. “And your body is holding up so well.” 

Eli wouldn’t agree; before he can muster the strength to feel horrified, he’s already slipping away. He’s never been this sleepy. Not since– 

“You know, if your body were any different, I could– we could test reproduction; fertilization is the word. We could do very real wonders in the science field, you and me. But oh, well, we can’t have anything, do we? But the least we can do (for science, for knowledge) is try.” Haverty raises his stomach, sending more rivers of blood down to his elbows, “Are you ready for the joy of creation, Mr. Ever?” 

He stares at Victor, and Victor is smiling.  

Haverty is no longer talking through him.  

“Wake up.” 

“I’m awake.” 

Stell frowns at Eli; sitting on his small, harsh bed, staring at one point on the wall, like he could bring it down with just his willpower.  

“You’re ready early today.” Stell says, doing as if he doesn’t mean anything by it. 

“Rise up early.”  

Eli stands up, rubbing a hand over his eyes, trying to forget the vision of Haverty holding his guts and Victor, white and flawless and unmarked, hanging over the edges of Haverty’s body; as closely as he used to do with Eli’s. 

Dreams. Who would have thought he still could dream? 

“What is it, today?” Stell doesn’t have time for him, and Eli isn’t in the mood to humor him, so he just slides him a file and curls against the wall, staring as Eli reads, still in one spot.  

Eleven people. 

Eleven people. Women and men, and even a little kid. Eleven people. 

The beginnings of a headache are starting to swell over his temples. He rubs one finger over them. How could they not catch a little child?  

“What do you think?” Stell says. He lacks any of the nonchalance he thinks he’s painting his words with. The hand he’s holding his cigarette is trembling, and he’s sending rivulets of smoke, shivering, to the ceiling. His knuckles are covered in ashes. Eli doesn’t know– 

“Do you have any idea of how she got away?” 

“My team is working on it–” 

“Working on it? How did she get away in the first place?”  

“It doesn’t matter how; it matters that you find her.” 

“I don’t know. Maybe she’s at a playground, under a bridge, running around some tree. How could I know? How did you let her go–” 

“Your job is to find the EOs, not question me. I did not get you out of Haverty’s dirty hands for this, Cardale–” 

“What the fuck were you doing, Stell?” 

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” 

Eli turns the file around and presses it against the glass, facing Stell. He pales and he knows that he’s seeing exactly what Eli saw, first time he opened it; the pictures of the corpses left behind, too broken and bloody for a relative to recognize them. They had to bring the dental records, and even some of them were useless. Whatever was that little girl’s powers, she had torn away the corpses to no return, leaving a pile of bloody guts behind. Eli, with all of his knowledge and years of hunting EOs, had never seen anything like it before.  

And too imperfect for Eli, who, in his mind, thinks that he would have been able to stop the carnage to ever happen. 

“How did this happen? Did you get distracted? Did you forget what you were facing? Eleven people are dead.” 

“Don’t you think I know that? I know.” Stell tears his gaze away from the file, right into Eli’s eyes. The color hasn’t come back to his face. “There’s nothing I can do now, except finding her.” 

“What’s the use of it, now? You can’t bring those people back. That kid certainly won’t.” 

“If you can find her–” 

“What can I find, Stell? An eight-year-old child that was run over by a car last year and miraculously survived the crash and now killed eleven people, crushing them like bugs?” He throws the file. He can’t bear to stare at the eyes of that thing. That’s not a child; that’s a thing. “I don’t know a thing about her, except how many bones she broke when that car went on top of her, how many months she was in the hospital, all the money she got from the internet and people of good faith. And even if I could find her, what would you do? Another failed operation that you can brood over, counting them on your head before falling asleep to beat yourself over, when we all know what you had to do since the very beginning?” 

“What do I had to do, then?” Stell tries to sound taunting, and in control. All Eli thinks is that he’s old, way older than him and useless, too. He’d never allow himself to turn into something like that. “What would you do in my place?” 

The thought fills Eli with a hunger that almost makes his knees weak. I’d grab my car and drive the farthest I could from here. No one would ever see me again. I’d be free from you, and them, and the thing that has Victor’s face. What would he do in his place? 

“I told you. Since the beginning. What to do with those things–” 

“Those are not things, Eliot. Those are people. Human beings. Fucking sisters and brothers–” 

“Would you call the thing that killed those eleven humans a human, too? Who are you trying to fool? Yourself?” 

“That was an accident. A mistake.” 

“That thing killed them–” 

“It’s a little girl, Eliot! A fucking little girl!” Stell screams. The veins in his neck are bulging, almost at the point of exploding. He sends little drops of saliva to the glass wall. Eli doesn’t care about any of that. 

“You’re fucking delusional. You’re the only man who could call a murderer a little girl. You don’t see it, but I thought that, someday, you would; but you’re stubborn, aren’t you? What does it have to happen for you to see? For you to stop being so blind?”  

In any other day, Eli would calm down. Taunt Stell, curl on his cot, promise him hollowly that he’d find a lead, and wait for him to leave the hallway before doing so. Mocking Stell was fun, making him hate him more was the most fun he’s had since– 

But there’s a reason he has been killing EOs since what happened with Victor, with him. There’s a reason he never became a doctor, and he spend his years rotting away, in old cars and clothes too juvenile for a man in his late twenties, then his thirties; because they’re twisted, wrong, empty. EOs don’t have souls; EOs destroy everything in their paths, not out of cruelty or wickedness, but because that’s what they do.  

He wouldn’t blame a hurricane for destroying his house, but a hurricane has a reason for being. What’s an EO but a mistake, a crooked approach to nature, goodness, rightness and all it entails? EOs are empty carcasses of the old outline where a human used to be, and for that and more, they’re born to die. They’re not meant to last. 

And EOs and people aren’t the same. Eli doesn’t see the need for people dying, humans dying. If he’s been doing all of this for the good of the people, the good of the whole world, why wouldn’t he, in the grand scheme of things, put EOs lives and human lives on a scale, and prefer the purer over the cursed?  

But Stell doesn’t see it. Stell is old, and sensitive and emotional. He doesn’t see the fact that an eight-year-old never had to come back. An eight-year-old isn’t meant to be crushed by a car, lose her heartbeat and come back later. That’s just not how it works.  

“Stell, listen to me.” If the glass wasn’t there, he could touch him. Grab him. Make him see like Eli does, with his own very eyes. If he could, he’s sure Stell would understand, would get why Eli took the hard, painful work no one was brave enough to do, for the good of the whole world, not only his. He would make him understand. He’s sure of it, “Listen, I know you’re a sensible man; you just want the best for your team and everyone, yes? I do, too. Don’t you get it? What good could you get from that thing? Do you think you can trap it, is that it? Make it part of your team, too? Groom it nicely? There’s no need. Be smart, as I know you are. I’m certain you are.” 

Stell, for some reason, looks at him with disgust. 

Why? What did I do? What did I say wrong, when I did it all right?  

“You do think you’re in the right.” 

He almost frowns. Is he not? He is. Why would he not, if God has been guiding him?  

“Do you have a child, is that it? Your child and that thing aren’t the same, you know–” 

“Sally Brown is not a thing.” 

Eli frowns. 

“What?” 

“Sally Brown. The name of that little girl.” Stell says, unmoving. “What? Didn’t you read her file?” 

“I couldn’t remember her name, alright?” 

“And yet, you think you have the jurisdiction, the right to send her to her death, because God told you so.” Stell says, and it’s mocking.  

If it was any other day, Eli would let the mockery slid away, like slipping on a slippery water screen. There wasn’t any use of it. 

Today, though.  

“You’re a small, pathetic, old man. What do you know Him? What do you know about his divine intervention? You don’t know a thing. You have a small mind, with small ideas. You don’t even have the balls to kill a stupid child. Fucking pussy.”  

The glass doesn’t move an inch when Eli punches it, and his knuckles crackle and bleed to the floor, but he doesn’t feel the pain. One knuckle gives away and bleeds freely, crunches under the pain. Stell seems paralyzed, entranced by the crimson’s blooming, cracking Eli’s skin and staining the glass that’s protecting him, keeping it away from him.  

After a second, he blinks, blinking himself away from his fear and back to his hatred. Rage is way more controllable than fear; it makes you move, makes you endure. But Stell doesn’t know a thing about enduring; what the fuck could he know? What the fuck does he know about your father beating you up and your mother leaving you to your own devices? What the fuck does he know about delivering yourself to the lord’s embrace and hoping and praying that he catches you? 

What the fuck does he know about shooting your best friend three times and caging him up like a beast? What the fuck does he know about sliding a knife between his ribs, ten years later? He doesn’t know a fucking thing.  

“A serial murderer is telling me I don’t have any balls. That’s rich.” 

“Oh, spare me that shit.” Eli scoffs, pressing his bloody hands against the glass.  

“Spare you? Your god may spare you all he pleases. I don’t do that, Eliot. But you know that, already, because you’re not fucking stupid, and all you’ve done in years is circle around like a rabid dog, waiting for a way out–” 

“Do you really think this can keep me here, forever? Do you really think, with no shadow of doubt, that I won’t find a way to get out of here?” Eli says, throat raw of pure emotion, adrenaline. This is the best he’s felt in months. The most alive he’s been, since he killed Victor. This is him, in his pure habitat.  

They stare at each other in silence. Eli has this weird urge; he wants to cackle. 

He settles with: “Don’t be a fool.”  

They fall in silence again, and for a moment, neither of them breathes. 

A shadow goes through Stell’s face and leaves as fast as it comes. He looks peaceful, straight, calm as ever. Eli’s skin feels like it’s boiling; confusion going past delight going past hatred and aversion. 

“You’re a mass murderer, Cardale.” Stell voice comes, quiet and measured; nothing could disturb it, perhaps not even him, “You’re not godsend, you’re not divine, you’re demented, and insane. Your parents failed you; your family failed you– hell, even your friends failed you, if your only one killed your girl and slipped out of your reach for ten years. Did that frustrate you? That Victor Vale was more of a ball ache than you’ll ever be? You’re a guard dog, Eliot. And I have your leash.” Stell’s smile comes and goes as quick as lightning, and all its left is a shell; a shell full of satisfaction, nonetheless. 

Eli feels the world moving, buzzing around him. After a moment, he realizes he’s trembling, his nails digging in the tender skin of his palms. He’s never seen it so clearly before: slicing Stell’s throat open, twisting his neck until it gives up, gutting his insides, while he’s still alive and ungagged to hear him –feel him– cry, whimper, beg, scream, die.  

He should have killed him when he had the chance. He should have; he could have, he’s sure of it, when the man came to take Victor away and Eli realized he was just a threat as much as the rest of the police. And now it’s too late. Now there’s a glass wall between them, protecting Stell’s throat from Eli’s grasp. 

But he’s patient. What is he, but patient? He can take his time. He has nothing but time.  

“We won’t kill Sally Brown,” Stell says, slowly, like talking to a child, “we’ll find her, and we’ll take her to safety where she can get a professional who can take care of her and rehabilitate her, get her back on her feet, and then–”  

“I’m going to kill you. Isn’t what you say I do? Big bad Eliot Ever, killing innocent kids, innocent little people. Fuck that. What have I done except helping this city, except enslaving myself for all of you? And none of you thank me. Well, I don’t need your thanks. I don’t need your goddamned gratitude. I was perfectly fine, all by myself. Things got to hell when you got me, because you don’t have a fucking clue of how to deal with EOs. You made everything worse. I hope you know that. I hope you know, when you lie on your bed, that you’re a fucking excuse of a man, and that everything you’ve ever done in years, I did it better.” 

The venom spills from between his lips like lead; he can’t stop it. He doesn’t want to, either. It feels nice to let go, to take the mask away and ramble away. He doesn’t even know what he’s saying, the buzzing in his ears going louder, louder, louder. 

“Does the fact that I kill people hurt your honorable feelings? Well, I did, and I liked it. I liked killing those things. I loved it. If I had the chance, I’d do it again, and again, and again.” He punches the wall with every word, his throat raw with rage, the corner of his eyes blurring further and further. He doesn’t know where the rage ends and he begins. The cameras in the corner are furiously beeping; when will they punish him for this? He doesn’t know, so he will get the most out of this. “You think I can’t kill you? You think I can’t? I shot my best friend three times. You’re nothing. I could gut you alive and not break a sweat.” And now he’s angry again; furious.  

At Stell for taking him away, for not listening to him. At Victor, for what it did to him, for leaving and changing and coming back to hurt him instead of staying by his side. 

How life would be if Victor stayed? Stell wouldn’t be alive and fucking up everything, that’s for sure. 

He punches the glass so hard that he thinks he broke a bone.  

“Eleven people died, damn imbecile, because you couldn’t shoot her. Why didn’t you shoot her, Stell? –” 

“Security–” 

“Give me the gun if it’s so damn hard. None of this would have happened. None of this would happen again, fucking coward–” 

His body spasms like hit by lightning; the pain is quick, white and sets his nerves on fire, so strong he loses balance and sees black for a second, falling to his knees. He’s still pressing against the glass, so they charge him two more times, until his hands lose strength and he falls on his back, staring at the ceiling. 

With all those nerves burned, charred and restoring in so quick instances, Eli loses the rest of the events, trying to regain control of himself over the pain. Stell’s face pales, darkens and flushes in quick succession, and he can’t hear nor read what he’s saying. It must be an insult, though. He really played with the man’s patience today, and he won’t forget nor forgive. What was I thinking. Now that the pain is an old buzzing in his bones, he thinks clearly and logically, and the anger goes away to give past a sense of urgent so strong he can almost sit up. Almost. 

Victor steps into his sight, long legs going for miles and obscuring everything he sees. He almost expects it to talk with Haverty’s voice, wherever he is; but no, Haverty is away, too away, and he can’t get Eli, now. No one can get Eli anymore. Not even Victor. 

Especially Victor. 

“The golden Icarus finds himself on his back, at last.” He’s surprised to hear Victor’s voice, forever young, coming from the core of his lips. He leans in, and Eli catches the sight of a cross under the shirts he used to wear at Lockland– downsides, though. That’s so Victor.  

It blinks. It looks almost endearing; in a way Victor could never be from his own devices. 

“Did the wings not work?” 

Eli groans between his teeth as he sits up, the sweat and the near-death experience clinging his hair to his forehead. Victor smiles, he can see it from the reflection on the glass– and on the other side, Stell, frowning, startled, because Eli’s nerves are still fried, and he should be on his back a few more seconds before even being able to move. 

But what is Eli able to do but miracles?  

He slumps into the glass, pressing his forehead to it. Shock him, if they must. Not like his heart is going to stop. And he’s endured worse. 

“You must kill it, Stell. Do it.” His voice sounds ragged, not from himself. Lacking all the charm and boredom he has ingrained into it over the years, “Do it. Do it.” 

“Oh, for fucks’ sake–” 

“Do it, Stell.” He lets out a painful bark, biting so hard into his own tongue that he tastes copper. He thinks he chopped a part out of it, too, just the tip. When they shock him again, he thinks that he swallowed it in an accident. 

“Do it, Stell. Stell–” 

At some point, Stell turns away from Eli, his face full of aversion. Eli keeps murmuring over his own voice, the reflection of his own eyes returning his gaze. Another pair of eyes join his, on the reflection. Those are blue, cold and shiny. Eli doesn’t stare at them, praying that, in doing so, they’ll go away. 

They don’t, and after a few minutes of it, they turn off the lights, drowning Eli in darkness, with Victor’s breathing on his temple. 

Haverty ties Eli down to the table. When he asks him about it –as in, stares at him directly for five seconds, because the feeling of Haverty’s freezing hands on his skin is disgusting, and it feels like maggots are crawling under his skin– he says is to keep Eli from trashing around, from messing all up. Truly, he doesn’t see a point in it. Eli won’t fight, because there’s no fight left in him, and no reason to make it all difficult if he’s going to come back the next day, and the day after, and so on. He’s not eager to piss off the man with a scalpel and his body tied to a table. 

Also, when his hands and feet are nailed too, what’s the point of resisting?  

It’s all about theatrics, you see. Haverty doesn’t have a reason to tie Eli down, not only because Eli won’t fight, but because his body can’t stand up for itself when he’s all open and bleeding his guts down to the floor. There’s not a reason to, but it makes Haverty feel powerful. It makes him feel in control, the motion and the sensuality of pushing Eli’s hair away from his eyes, so he’s sure they’re staring right into his, and then hammering down the point of pulse in the palm of his hands until he can’t feel them anymore. It’s a ritual, at this point. A private, emotional ritual between the two of them. To Haverty, it’s just a part of their relationship. 

The irony doesn’t escape Eli. What was his last relationship? The one where he used Angie for his own convenience, or the one where he couldn’t refuse her? His luck isn’t getting any better, if his current state means anything.  

“Do you know what vein stripping is, Mr. Cardale? Have you ever practiced it? That’s so silly of me, of course you haven’t,” he taps his temple with his scalpel, scoffing, “you graduated from med school, didn’t you? But you have been so busy lately, so where’s the time for silly practices like that? First time, then? I’ll be nice, just for you. Keep your eyes very open for me, then.” 

When does this motherfucker shut up?  

“You’ll see, Mr. Cardale. Usually when we pull a vein out, those are damaged veins. You must know why, you’re a med student, too. It depends on the severity of the state of the veins, you know? As in, sometimes we do small cuts on the skin to remove it, but sometimes we tie them off, too. Can you guess what we’ll do today?” Haverty clicks his tongue, frowning down at Eli’s slow body, from whatever was that thing that he injected him and his own sick, rotten stubbornness, his refusal to cooperate. Father Cardale used to say it was the devil in him, us Cardale boys have the devil inside, Eliot, but you just outdone Satan yourself. Eli would like to tell him it was just a little boy being stubborn as a mule and not the devil, but for that he must die first, and he doesn’t think that will ever happen. Dying, and going to the same place as his father. “I guess we’re not talkative today, aren’t we.” 

I’m talking a whole damn lot under here; your guts disgust me. 

“You know what, Eliot? It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to speak; you have given me so much, did you know that? You’ve been so useful to me, my research, the whole world, even. I’m so thankful for that. So, so thankful, you have no idea.” He sniffs, cleaning his nose with a clean tissue that came magically out of his pocket. Eli wonders if Haverty ever did theater. He always found it rather stupid, “So, I’ll let you rest today. You just lay down, my boy, and I’ll take care of you. I’ll take care of anything.” 

No one ever told him that taking care of someone was pulling his veins out of his body, but his father used to beat him up for breathing too hard and crying too loud and wanting to get a kitchen toy for Christmas. So truly, what does he know about care?  

Maybe that is care, but he wouldn’t call Haverty caring, or kind, because your veins and ligaments being pulled off from under your skin doesn’t feel nice. If he knows something, anything, about Haverty, he’d say that he’s not an idiot, that he knows how to do vein stripping, that he knows about the procedures, but he doesn’t give a damn. Why would he?  

At this point he’s tasted his own blood more than anything in his life.  

What a fucking depressing thought.  

Haverty is singing; he realizes it after a while, because the blood loss is making his head dizzy and quiet, and he doesn’t know what he’s thinking now. He doesn’t know what he’s singing. Maybe a Christmas tune. Is it Christmas? Is it winter, already? How could he know? If he were to strip Haverty’s skin off, wear it as a suit and step outside of the facility, what would he find? The world in flames because of the EOs, or covered in white, pure snow, waiting for the new year? 

Victor used to despise snow. It would stick in his shoes, inside his socks, over his head. It would stick to his eyelashes and make them shine like stars under the sickening white lights of the labs. Sometimes they’d melt before they stepped foot inside their class of that day; since the Lockland buildings, lacking any logic and design, would still be warm and ready for them, and Victor would look like he was crying, God knows why. Victor didn’t cry; he just didn’t. Angie would cry over dogs and movies and dogs in movies, but Victor couldn’t care less than he already did, and would care just enough to comfort Angie, and nothing more. Sometimes Eli would wonder if he was broken, defective, or flawed. Maybe in the same way as him, or different. He wanted to strip Victor off and peek into his brain, he wanted to chew on his gums, or meet his parents, to ask them where they fucked up so bad their son was–  

“And they crucified him, and parted his garments, casting lots: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots.” 

His father used to make him kneel to read the bible, and he’d make him kneel to get a beating. Somedays both, somedays neither, but Eli’s hands were always bleeding, nonetheless. It’d seep into the pages, oozing like honey, and his father would beat him again for holding it while bleeding and for forcing him to make him bleed. 

“And sitting down they watched him there; And set up over his head his accusation written, This Is Jesus The King Of The Jews.” 

He blinks one, two, three times, staring up at his father’s old, bashed and washed in blood’s face, until it turns into Victor. Something settles in his chest, fitting like a puzzle piece.  

Victor stares down at him, eyelashes covered in little, shiny snowflakes, the high bone of his cheek bruised and violet like ice, and yet he’s impossibly warm; his breath and his touch, when he leans closer, covering Haverty’s silhouette like dark clouds due to the sun. Eli jumps and twists in his hold, because bodies shouldn’t be this warm, and if Victor Vale is as dead as he should be, rotting under six feet of cold dirt, then why is he warmer than Eli?  

He stares down at the holes in his hands, those in his feet. He stares at the hole in his chest, at Haverty’s hands, as they pull from the end of a vein, pull and pull, until it twists outside Eli’s meat. Victor doesn’t do anything but stare, that phantom of his. When he does, he speaks with his father’s voice. 

“Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying...” 

Funnily enough, he’s been counting the years his father has been dead. He doesn’t have a calendar; if you asked him, out of the blue, when his father died, when did he push him down those stairs, he wouldn’t remember. But his body does. His body knows all about the two decades since his father died. And yet, Father Cardale has been dead twenty years. And yet, his son is still terrified of him, of his voice in his counterpart’s face.  

Victor opens his mouth and lets a drop of blood drip down to Eli’s skin, pooling on his upper lip. It feels like a bite, like surrendering, but when he speaks, he’s no longer Father Cardale, but Victor Vale covered in snowflakes; Victor Vale in a white halo, answering every question right and smirking smugly at Eli with an air of sufficiency and pride.  

Victor Vale, with his mouth open, mouthing Eli’s name from the other side of the classroom and when Eli’s knife dived between his ribs, way gentler than any kiss Eli gave Angie when she was alive.  

“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” Victor says, the tip of his blond hair tickling Eli’s nose, “That is to say...” 

My God, why have you forsaken me?  

He only realizes he whispered it against Victor’s dead cold lips when he sees him smile. 

“What was that, Mr. Cardale?” Haverty raises from the cavity in his body, frowning under layers of dried blood –his–, darkness and medical equipment. Haverty looks like a big, bloody mouse. Eli’s laugh out of him doesn’t stop him from leaning against his lips, as closely as Victor and more, and feeling his breathing, rhythmic and slow, and connect the points from one another. “Are you praying, Mr. Cardale? Are you religious? Are you a man of faith?” the thought seems to fill him with surprise, the rodent eyes shining under the lights, “Well, I’m not religious. You may forgive me, but I’ve never felt as connected as God as I to science. What I can touch, what I can see.” 

I can see God, I can touch God, God brings himself to those who believe and deserve it, but how could you know? God would never touch you; God would never speak to you, Eli thinks, just barely surprised of all the anger he can muster against that rat of a man, how clear he sees behind his own retinas how he kills him; God would always forsake you.  

“Speak, Mr. Cardale. Speak. Talk to God, then. I can hold you while you do.”  

Victor watches him as Haverty pulls away, holding one ligament between his fingers as one would do with a fine cup of glass; blood stained fingers touching it like a violin string. Eli watches him back, afraid to blink not to lose him. Pain is an afterthought now; slow and sweet like honey, and he can’t reach it, just like he can’t reach his mother’s memory on a bright, sunny day. Victor is brilliant and luminescent; Victor hurts against the back of the lab, glistering as a blistering wound. Present and eternal.  

He’d like to touch him, just to see what would happen, what would be of his own phantom.  

“You’re bleeding, Eli. I can see your guts from here. I can see life slipping from your hold, just like Angie did. How does it feel? Does it hurt?” He doesn’t answer that, the movement of Victor’s white eyelashes sending him reeling, like more than ten years ago. 

He tries to look down, and Victor’s fingers catch his jaw, cradling it back to its place. The touch burns like the back of a freezing cross, like mamas's hands, that were always cold and unliving, even in summer.  

“I thought of you a lot. I thought of all the things I’d say to you, of the things you said to me, too. The things we never talked about–” I thought of you, too.  

He pushes Victor by staring at him far too much, brushing and caressing the line of the allowed. If he knew him well, catching the dazzling light of the movement his eyelashes did when they brushed against the highest point in his cheek would mean something to him, everything. But, truth be told, he doesn’t know if Victor is moved, if he’s disgusted by the sight of his own blood –old and new, dark and bright–pooling around his ankles, or if it’s all in his mind, like so often it did when it came to him.  

But Victor cradles his face like one would do with an infant, and Eli has to suck the air in his lungs to not make a sound at it. Something like begging.  

“Do I look demonic to you, Eli? Do I look sinful? Does your god forsake me?” 

“No, no. No, He doesn’t–” but He does, so he doesn’t say that. He doesn’t lie. Victor’s eyes are bright and open over him, and Eli can’t do that to him. “I–” 

“Don’t speak, you’ll drown in your own blood, and what use you’re to me if you’re dead? I need you alive, I want you alive.” 

Anger could fuel him; anger could make him stand; make him walk, make him endure.  

“You told me, once, that God chooses the courses of our lives. He chooses what happens, what will happen, what not. We all follow his divine intervention and divine intention, want it or not. We are all puppets in his divine plan, isn’t that true? Nod if you agree. I know you would. I need some holy advice from Father Cardale,” the name contorts something inside of him. Something ugly, and aching, and black. Victor’s pupils go big and wide and engulf the blue in his eyes, “I need your guidance. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, and I will again.” 

“Vic–”  

“EOs are unholy, are we not? We’re made of flesh and blood and sin, and so we’re made to die. We’re not meant to exist, because death is the end of it all, and coming back from it it’s sinful and only god can choose to do so, am I right?” 

“What we did was wrong,” he murmurs, dancing on the line over delirium, eyes half closed and half open not to lose Victor from his sight, “what we did was unnatural. Don’t ever punish me for that. Don’t ever–” 

“You were back, and you were whole. You were okay.” Victor is frowning, like a little kid watching someone else get the gift he wanted for Christmas, or the Victor he used to know and want so much, out of himself after being unable to solve a puzzle. He loved his puzzles. Sometimes he used to think he loved them more than he ever wanted him, “What’s so different between you and me? The nature of our gifts–” 

“Not gifts, curses. Punishments.” 

“Curses, then. You were cursed with immortality; I was cursed with pain. Do you think that’s fair? Do you think that answers the great question of if we deserve to live or to die, being EOs?” 

“I asked God to make me whole, and He did, and then He pushed me to pursue His divine mission.”  

“Yes, of course. That you did. You never prayed for me–” 

“I prayed for you.” Eli mutters, grinding his teeth, gagging in his own blood. Suddenly he’s twenty-one and scared, sitting at the side of his best friend’s hospital bed, watching his chest move under the sheets, and so terribly sure that if he blinked Victor would slip from his hold, “I prayed for you. I said– I said, ’Lord, if You bring him back to me, I’ll never play with his life again. I’ll never be so foolish. I’ll be wiser than I am now, wiser than yesterday. I asked him to keep you safe.” 

“And what did that do for you? You turned around and played with yours, instead.” Victor is smirking now. But he doesn’t look any happier. “I didn’t pray for you, Eli. I never knew how.” 

“I prayed for myself, that was enough.” 

“Did you pray for me when I left? When you realized I was gone, and I wasn’t answering the phone, and I didn’t come back? Or did you leave me to my own devices?” Victor says, “You ran out of faith, then. Or you chose not to.”  

“You hated Him, you hated when I prayed, you’d have hated if I did for you.” 

“That’s right, I did.”  

“So?” A drop of blood dances over the corner of Eli’s mouth. Victor stares at it and leans in to clean it, just to pull away. “What is it for you? What do you want to achieve with this?” 

Victor stares at him, a marble statue, untouched by time and Eli’s hands. He wishes to taunt him, to tarnish him in his perfection. What would he give to do it.  

“If god is perfect and knows it all, then EOs were meant to exist, did they not? If god didn’t want them to exist and they did, then he’s not that powerful–” 

“Don’t start.” Because he doesn’t have the time to fight over this again, to pull and push around faith until one of them breaks –usually him– and they just let it lie there, the very center of the differences between them. What was the point of being mirrors, equals, if Victor despised the apex of his being? If he gave his back to God every time, he was given the chose not to?  

But Victor didn’t stop. Staring down at Eli, sliding like water through his wounds and the gap between his ribs, straddling his hips like poison. He’s light and airy, and weightless. Eli wonders if he was this light back then, or if he just lost all meat when he died and came back. He could pick him apart like a butterfly and not sweat a drop. He could bite his neck off and do it tenderly.  

“If god didn’t want me to die and come back, if it was sinful, why did he give me the tools to do so? The ways? You say that god light up your path, your divine mission.” that is mockery, Eli frowns, “well, have you ever thought that he enlightened mine, too?”  

“You do not know one thing about God, Victor.” He says.  

“I know you. You were always more god’s than mine.” 

He scoffs at that, and Victor bounces on his hipbones, “Jealous of God, now?” 

“Always.” Victor leans in; chest to chest, nose to nose. He smells like the shampoo he used to use at Lockland; he smells like Eli’s bed and his cigarettes, “Did you think of me when I was gone, Eli? What did you think of me?”  

“Yes.” And nothing else. 

Victor seems pleased with the answer, but Eli pushes. Eli pushes.  

“You are my sin, my biggest mistake, my biggest regret–” he mutters, counting Victor’s eyelashes like counting his knifes and the bodies he’s left behind, with no one to blame and no one to lock up for. “You are–”  

“You are a fool.” Victor says, but it’s tender, in the only way Victor would be. “You’re stupid, and a fool, and your god plays you like a kid’s toy, but it would kill you to realize it, so you don’t. Does denial taste good, Eliot?” 

“It tastes like Angie’s cleavage.”  

Victor’s eyes open, then narrow, then shine like a shark’s. 

“Were you in denial when you fucked her?” 

Eli doesn’t answer. 

“Were you praying to god when you did, or sin only applies to–” 

“Shut your mouth.”  

Victor smirks, flushes, bites down his low lip until it bleeds. Eli wants to munch on it.  

“Open your mouth,” he says, leaning in until he feels the light bones of his hips against his, the dip of his crotch. Eli does; his tongue slipping past his lips in its own mind. Victor opens his mouth wider and bleeds into Eli’s, closing his jaw with slender, pale fingers, making him gag and swallow around it.  

Eli moans.  

Victor doesn’t let go of his face, but rather presses further into his bare body, until Eli doesn’t know where he begins, and Victor ends. A phantom feeling, if he could ever compare it to something that did happen. Victor never touched him like this; Victor never stared at him more than two times in a row. So, his mind supplies Angie. The thought doesn’t help, being rather inconsequential and baseless. Angie was softer, sweeter, all curves and eager touches, and the tip of her tongue was warm and wet, pushing against Eli, searching to please. Eli controlled what Angie could take and could not; Victor would bite his hand off if he ever tried. Victor fed him his blood and made him moan and hard around it.  

Victor is hard and lean and cruel, and Eli wants to eat him whole, make him whimper in joy and cry in pain.  

“Your god has no dominion here.” Victor whispers, almost lovingly. Eli’s eyes open in the brightness, and it hurts, but not in the sweet way that Victor makes him hurt, giving just enough to make him weep and then taking it all away, “When you lay down for the last time; I don’t know when this will be, Eliot; as you may know, you’re nothing but eternal, but when it happens, because it will happen, I want you to close your eyes and think one last time that I outsmarted your god. That he guided you your whole life, and he couldn’t predict me. I outsmarted him. I’m better than him. And, in consequence, I’m better than you.” He smirks, watching Eli’s blown pupils, the weeping hardness against the open cavity of his stomach, wet from blood and wet from desire, “But you like that, don’t you? You sick boy. I could smack you and you’d beg me for a taste of your blood under my nails.”   

Eli thinks of it and moans around the idea, eyes wide and fixed on Victor’s throat, wanting to bite.  

“If god were all powerful, if he were your lord, if he were your master...” Victor murmurs, the bottom plushness of his lip brushing against Eli’s in a lover’s kiss, “A lot of ifs. There are no ifs here, Eli. But you probably know that already, don’t you?” He pulls away, looking down at him. Eli blinks and he’s suddenly in Lockland, in their place, with Victor’s bare body straddling his.  

Victor smiles like he knows what he’s daydreaming of, digs his fingers lovingly inside the gore in his torso and clips a vein away, making it hurt.  

“I am your only master, Eliot. Never forget that.” 

He leans in and breathes against Eli’s mouth, and Eli drinks of it like a parched man.   

Eli stares at his own reflection until the bags under his eyes turn violet, then gray, then black, and then they bleed down his face like tears made of blood. He hasn’t cried in a while, he hasn’t cried since that night; when he knelt and wept and asked God if He wanted to give back His blessing, cutting his own flesh and drowning in his own blood until God embraced him, turned him around, made him stand and gave him a purpose; made him talk, made him walk.  

But now, he was crying. His reflection on the mirror was crying; dark, crimson tears that went away when he blinked, replaced by dark dots in his vision, and then went back. Blink and gone. Blink and back.  

Eli wants to dig his nails on his skin and follow the course of those tears, made them real, tangible enough for him to grasp and hold and taint, but, he thinks, Stell would find it rather disgusting, if he came back and found him digging at his own face. So, he doesn’t. Apart from that, he finds self-flagellation rather pathetic. 

Like he didn’t bleed at God’s mighty feet and cried until He answered. 

The thought makes him tremble and twitch, his body with a mind on its own, and he wipes at the mirror until it’s no longer fogged and he sees, unmistakable, his own face on the reflection; tan skin and harsh edges, no blood and no tears for him to turn to God.  

The moisture clings to the skin of his fingers, and he pinches them between his nails, clean and short, his eyes carefully avoiding the screen; the only connection to the real world he has, carefully emptied of any connection or train of thought that might lead Stell to the realization that Eli had come to, alone in the dark, his eyes sore and dry from staring at the screen for too long. He’s buying time– buying time, something he used to have in enormous amounts, and now he lacks.  

Buying time.  

For whom?  

“For you.” He whispers to the mirror, looking up and gazing right into blue, dead eyes.  

Victor gazes back at him; blue skin, blue eyes, like a piece of the sky. A smirk tugs at the end of his low lip, full and cracked by the edges, blood painting it like a blush.  

Eli can’t look away. Victor used to look alive when he thought he was dead. Now that he knows he’s alive, he looks like he clawed his way out of the dirt upon his grave and crawled back to Eli.  

He doesn’t know if it’s his mind playing games with him, making fun of him, for how naive and foolish he turned out to be. He made fun of Stell for years, played with him, taunted him, and yet– 

The only body that Stell had to burn, and he didn’t. 

He didn’t.  

“Are you jealous that I’m giving all of my attention to other people, aren't you?” Victor asks, mockingly. His breath hits Eli’s cheek and he doesn’t startle because he knows he’s not there. He’s not dead, he’s alive and worlds away, and all Eli has of him is a pale, cheap imitation of what Victor Vale used to be for him, to him, “How petty can you be?” 

“You’re not real.” Eli looks down at the sink, blood turning the water pink. He’s picking at his nails, and they heal too quickly for the pain to register inside of his mind, but he has a sudden flash of a dead weight body inside a bathtub painting the water crimson like water tints, and he has the urge to scream.  

He turns off the tap, drying his hands with slow, medical movements, like a doctor. The doctor he’d have been, if he hadn’t been so foolish to follow Victor’s crazy, jealous ideas of greatness, his pursue of action. If he hadn’t followed his own desires, defied God, rejected his mother’s ghost, turned away from His path– 

If he hadn’t met Victor Vale. If he had never met him at all, he would have been a doctor.  

“You’re not real.” He says again, his hands are fully healed and dried. He doesn’t meet Victor’s eyes in the mirror, even if he feels them like hands on his skin, burning and touching. “You’re a figment of my mind, a trick to keep myself entertained, busy, while I rot inside here. You’re not Victor. You’re not even his phantom.” 

He looks up and finds icy blue eyes, void and empty of any light that was there before; greed, ambition, envy. Victor is empty as a shell, as the way he looked the day Eli killed him. 

“You’re not real.” 

“Couldn’t I be a fragment of my own soul? Don’t you believe in souls, Eliot–” 

“You don’t have a soul.” And he laughs at the sole thought. Even when he wasn’t an EO, Victor was carefully, clinically empty, lacking warmth and life, “You have a hole where your soul is meant to be. You’re broken, and evil, and wretched–” 

“Ouch.” Victor grins. 

“–and you’re alive because Stell failed.” He finishes, “Not because of me. If it were for me, you wouldn’t be around. You would be just bone and ash, rotting away six feet under, where you deserve to be.” 

“I’m alive because you want me to be.”  

“Bullshit–” 

He whips around and stops his tongue, just a second before cursing Victor out. He seems pleased, charmed by the sudden outburst he plied out of Eli. He closes his jaw so quicky that his teeth clatter inside, and he shuts his damn mouth.  

“I don’t mean your pathetic endeavor at killing me, though it’s not, precisely, your fault.” Victor muses, eyes fixed on Eli’s neck as he turns around and walks to his cot. There’s a spot there, something dark and small that Angie couldn’t spot when she was alive (and so she couldn’t shape and trace with her mouth or the warmth of her tongue), but that Victor used to look at so much that he feared he’d burn a hole in Eli’s skin, and then he wouldn’t be able to hide that he looked at him when Eli wasn’t looking at Victor, “Stell fucked up. He didn’t listen to you. That’s his own fault.” 

Eli scoffs as he lies down. The thought of Victor’s phantom– of the fake Victor that his mind conjured as his own small hell, agreeing with him and insulting Stell, was funny as fuck. And then it wasn’t, and he started to think that he was going unmistakable crazy.  

Victor stands above him, eyes glistening like a cat’s, his pupils choking the color out of them.  

“I mean,” he says, then, so low that’s almost a purr, and it travels through Eli’s spine like lightning, making him shiver, “that I’m here because you want me to. I’m alive inside of you, because you want to, Eliot.” He smiles, “You miss me.” 

“Yes, I miss the crazy motherfucker that killed my girl and stabbed me. You got me, Vic. I really can’t live without you.” 

“Then, why am I here?” 

“Because I’m going insane here,” he hisses, catching the crimson light of the camera in one corner. He wonders what they think of him; Eliot Ever, going batshit crazy after five years, succumbed to Stell’s fucked up haircut and not Haverty’s torture methods. “Because I’m worried, annoyed, and I can’t die, so my mind decides to fuck with my sanity and cast you of all people that I could spend eternity with–”  

“Come on, Eliot,” Victor hums, painfully pleased, enchanting as the silver glint of a knife, “you’re shit at lying, do you know, now?”  

Eli’s throat bobs when he swallows, and all fight goes away with Victor, where his corpse was supposed to be when all of it ended. He supposes the grave is empty and all there is his own defiance against him. Here lies Eli, alone, making space for the body of the man that was supposed to lie with him for the rest of non-existence.  

“Yeah,” and then, ragged, “I know.” 

Victor grins like he won the battle– no, the war. Eli isn’t strong enough to tell him otherwise.  

“What’s life for you without me, anyway? You’re bored out of your mind; you’re alone. Who’s there to stimulate that deranged brain of yours when I’m not there? You need me.” He presses down on his neck, feeling the bone there, the way his throat works to swallow air around nothing. Victor’s eyes are black, the pupil swallowing the blue until Eli can see himself there, “You miss me. You can’t live without me. You can’t live without Lockland, what we had there, what we were. It’s making you go insane. It’s making you rot, existence without me.” 

“It’s maddeningly boring,” Eli talks under Victor’s hold, his fingers turning around a slender, pale, dead cold hand. Victor’s eyes widen and narrow, pleasingly calm, like a snake, “it’s unbearable. I cannot–” 

“What?” 

“Jesus Christ, Victor. Why do you always torment me? Why do you haunt me? You take any form, or any shape. You’re my own shadow, the darkest corner of my mind; I cannot rest because of you, I dream of you, when I do. When will it be enough for you? When will you tear your hold out of my soul, and let me rest?” 

“Rest? What’s rest for you, anyway? Death? You cannot die, Eli. You’re eternal. There’s not a world where you’ll perish, I won’t allow it.” Victor’s eyes stare right through his skin, his meat, down the valley of his muscles and the beating blood of his heart and to his soul, watching the rot there, the darkness there, and drinking it, “You want death? I won’t hand it to you. You want rest? You won’t get it. And even if you do– you won’t even rest, as long as I'm alive. You’ll hunt me down, you’ll hold me down, and feast on my body until you’re absolutely certain, without shade of doubt, that I'm dead and over. Until then, you won’t rest. You won’t let yourself do it, because god forbid someone else catches me before you do, isn’t it right?”  

The thought comes and goes as quick as lightning, and Eli tenses under Victor’s hold. He sees it, clearly as day, the reason why he covered his tracks, and why he refused to tell Stell that Victor is still alive; Stell would hunt Victor down. Stell wouldn’t allow himself to fail again, just as he did more than ten years ago. He left Eli go, and he let Victor go, once, because he was unwise enough to turn his head away, and where did that get him? He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice; Eli knew that.  

He could see it, then, shining behind his retinas like a wound; Stell’s hands curling around Victor’s bony, long neck, skin pale out of sickness and family heritance, like a swan; blue veins protruding under tan skin, furiously bombing blood to his heart, his head, Stell’s hairy knuckles pressing down, making violet bruises bloom across Victor’s ivory skin, and then twisting and turning until his neck gave up, quick and clean– or worse, he’d relish on the kill. He’d get drunk in it, tearing Victor’s life away breath by breath, watching it slip away from his eyes. 

Victor wouldn’t survive a second encounter with Stell, as sick as he was –because Eli could see it, inside his head. He could taste it, the sick sweetness of his life giving up, the years stretching between them. Eli was preserved in a chrysalis for the rest of his existence; Victor didn’t share his luck, and life was tearing away at his limbs and the paleness of his cheekbones, making him look sick instead of majestic–. And Stell, once he knew that he was still alive, wouldn’t hesitate again.  

Stell would squeeze and squeeze the life out of Victor until it slipped out of his mouth in a whimper, and he’d get drunk in it. 

“I’ll kill him.” He whispers, hot and eager and trembling, and realizes that he means it. “I’ll kill them before they can touch you. And then, when I find you– because I will, don’t ever think otherwise, I’ll kill you. I’ll send you back to the hell you came from. That’s my promise.” 

“I didn’t know I was yours to protect,” Victor murmurs, drunk in ecstasy and victory. 

“You’re mine to dispose of and mine to destroy. You’re my sin, I must repent.”  

Victor stares down at him, the crimson reflection of the cameras dancing like flames in the icy blue of his eyes. In that light, he looks like a predator. The lights turn off inside Eli’s cell –way earlier than they should, which awakes the thought of if they’re watching him there, slowly going crazy and talking with the piece of his mind that looks like the boy that haunted his every waking moment for ten years–, submerging them in darkness; the contour of Victor’s body open and hot like a wound, boiling him under his skin. He leans down and the blond tips of his hair, wet and cold, caress his skin like a kiss. He shivers all over.  

“Open up,” Victor says, and it bolts through his body like lightning.  

Instead of opening his mouth wide to receive him –as one would do with spit, or tears, or regret from a lover–, Eli’s chest cavity crumbles apart, blood and gore pooling around his body like the tears that dried away in his face. Victor crawls inside, curls like a cat, and makes home inside Eli’s body; side by side his beating heart and cradled inside the bloody landscape of his ribs.  

Haverty’s body slumped down, curling on the floor like a puppet without its strings. The blood pumped out of his body in quick, crimson tears, and when he tried to speak, he choked on his own blood.  

It was rather slow, as Eli could still hear Haverty’s shallow, quick breathing as he embraced Victor, as he received him in all his mighty coldness; but if you were to ask him, he wouldn’t be able to tell you that. His memories from that night were divided before and after; before Victor, and after Victor. Victor making his way to him, blond hair shining like quartz under the chandeliers; Victor outpowering Jonathan and sending him to his demise; Victor staring down at him, bare and bloody and impossibly alive. Victor, Victor, Victor. 

Eli straightened up, rolled his shoulders and stared down at Haverty’s body, watching the blood pool around his neck like a hood. He almost felt regretful over the fact that he couldn’t enjoy this, couldn’t sit down and strip the life out of his body with careful tenderness. Killing was an art, and he was forced, pushed to do it quickly. This wasn’t how he wanted it to be, Haverty dying a hundred different ways in his dreams.  

But it would do. 

Haverty's eyes rolled in their sockets, fixing their gaze on Eli's. He knew that look, knew it as well as the back of his hand, and a ripple went through his spine, recognizing it deliciously. Sheer fear.  

How does it feel, to be afraid? To be mortal and ephemeral? 

“He never stopped talking,” said Eli curtly. Dark pleasure curling under the layers of skin like rot. Eli put a shoe on Haverty’s back and pushes the doctor’s body over.  

His mind was deliciously quiet, the ringing in his ear growing quiet, still. It was such a long time, since the last occasion he felt it; God’s hands on his back, embracing him, guiding him. Everything fell right into place.  

Except for one detail; but he didn’t feel the dread that had been following him, back five years ago, when he first learned that Victor was free, when his life seemed so painfully empty and void of any thrill, any chase.  

What was Victor, then? A shadow of his past? The biggest showing of his own weakness, his softness, his viscera? Victor was an opponent, an enemy, a threat. 

That night, Victor was the cold embrace of dead, and he felt sweeter than he ever was, alive or dead, hidden inside the corners of his mind. 

Victor’s breathing was as loud as a bullet in the silence, Eli savored the moment before raising his gaze and fixing his eyes on his face, tying him in place. He almost felt a pang of disappointment; in his memories, his dark dreams, his sweet caresses, Victor was young, unmarked and beautiful, forever preserved in amber. Time couldn’t touch him, neither could Eli. Forever his, forever inside of him, and yet– this Victor, the one that had killed Angie and tried to kill him, too; the one that eluded him, tormented him, taunted him and challenged him, was consumed and tore apart by time. He found himself numbering the dark corners at every side of his eyes, the low downturn of his lips, once full and pink, and he found himself comparing the two of them. 

A Victor that had mocked him in his dreams, and the one that was alive and beating, and terrified of him. And that thought was sweeter than anything else, sweeter than the darkness in his eyes and the warmth of his saliva, and sweeter than the fake fragment of Victor inside of his mind.  

Under the twitching lights, Eli’s eyes were consumed by the dark ring of his pupils. He bore the same look that he used to give Angie, those very first months of their something that turned into nothing. Victor frowned at that; deliciously confused, cruelly consumed.  

Victor, with the tips of his blond hair damp, hair wet by the sprinklers, curling the ends. Victor, with the frown he used to wear when he fought with Eli, defied Eli, toyed with him. Victor, all bones and edges and curves hiding under an armor far too brittle for Eli not to see. 

Victor. Victor. Victor.  

“That man can burn in hell.” And of that he didn’t doubt; that Haverty would be delivered to the coldest, darkest pits of hell. His dark eyes drifted to Victor’s, something close to delight dancing there, “Victor.” A pause, Eli’s lips curled by the ends, full and tender, “You were supposed to be dead.”  

Victor shrugged, a smirk on his mouth mirroring his. Eli’s heart inside his chest twirled and jumped. He saw himself wrapping his hands around Victor’s neck and twisting, wrapping his hands, dipping his head and biting until there was nothing left of him, except inside of him. For Eli to consume and conquer.  

“It didn’t take.”  

A grim smile crossed Eli’s face, stretching it in a mask that he never bored before for Victor’s eyes to see, “I have to say, you don’t look well. But don’t worry, it’s not your fault.” His face darkened and transformed right before Victor’s eyes, something new flourishing there, something like hunger. “You were always divine.”  

Something flashed across Victor’s face; the look he used to wear when a puzzle got too hard, too twisted, when he got outsmarted in his own game. It turned and hardened and disappeared, but his confusion burned into Eli’s retinas, and he opened his mouth loud and wide to swallow it whole inside of him. 

“Are you insane?” Leaves his lips, quick and hard. Eli’s monster curls inside of him, purring with pleasure.  

The irony didn’t leave him; in his twisted dreams, Victor’s ruination came slow and tenderly, always by him, guided by his hand. Perfectly orchestrated, almost erotic, he dreamt of five hundred different ways to make Victor suffer, and whimper, and die. In his darkest days it kept him going, in his best ones he told himself he had an excuse to keep thinking of him.  

In none of those he thought of himself, bloody, open and wet, shoes sliding against the wet concrete, dressed like a guard and facing an old, weary version of his best friend, his sin, and his very own damnation. It seemed like a bad joke; Victor and Eli walked inside a storage facility...  

Who got out first?  

Eli’s hand grabbed the scalpel so hard it left a dent on his skin, straight and deep. It burned, and it scorched, and it mocked him, as Victor’s eyes slid out of him, and to Haverty’s tray, and then rage burned way brighter than the pain.  

Do not ignore me.  

Eli’s fingers wrapped around the scalpel like a lover, and he lunged forward, meeting Victor in the middle. 

Blossoming crimson red, Victor’s throat opened under his blade. Beautifully, prettily, his skin parting ways under his hand, his mouth letting out desperate breathings, with his legs kicking him wherever they could reach; his shin, his thighs, his free hand digging into the open wounds and going back to his wrist, when the blade dig deep and cut him open like a fish.  

That wouldn’t do.  

Sydney couldn’t know it yet, of course; she was still running, still dodging the guards and the cars and the sirens. She was going to be Victor’s hero, in her mind. She was going to save her, just as he did her, so many nights ago. She hadn’t changed a bit, and Victor changed a lot, and yet she was still his little girl, and she was on her way to save him. 

But Eli wouldn’t have that. He couldn’t know that Sydney was in her way, but something, anything, something dark and rotten and possessive inside of him buzzed, calling Victor’s name in a low cadence.  

He wouldn’t give him away; he wouldn’t allow them to take him from him. Victor would be right where he belonged; in his arms, held by him. That was how it was meant to end that night so many years ago, cradling Victor against his chest and hearing the rhythm of his heart, the one that he stole from Angie. Whether he was alive or dead at the end of it was another thing.  

In the two, three seconds that it took to Victor to weaken his hold in Eli’s wrist, he decided for him. 

The blade screeched against the pavement when he threw it away, sending sparks over them. Victor’s eyes were bright, and wide and carefully empty of any emotion, staring up at him. The pale extension of his neck was covered in his own blood, in Eli’s, and in Haverty’s. 

Funnily enough, this was the most beautiful he had ever been, in Eli’s eyes. 

He wraps his hands around his neck, digging deep into his blood, his nails scrapping the cut tenderly and making him groan at the pain. Just like he dreamed Stell would do, and he dreamed that he’d kill him for it. But Eli’s fingers are clean, and young, and strong, and they belong around Victor’s pale, elegant neck. The feeling of rightness washes over him like a summer rain, and his mind is quiet, eerily quiet. 

Victor fights his hold and Eli squeezes, buzzing like an open nerve when he hears him whimper, his legs trembling under his thighs. He likes it. This control. This possession of his, to be his forever, never to part. 

Eli leans in, tongue diving between his lips, the tips of his hair brushing against Victor’s pale face as they used to do more than a decade ago, of dark nights spending watching him sleep and old fights that ended bloody. This was the way his phantom used to taunt him, too. Used to torment him. Just this one time, Eli is the one on top. 

He leans in until his breath caresses Victor’s top lip, making it blush, making it quiver. Victor’s eyes are big and dark around the pupil, all the color drained, black staring into black.  

“May you not rest as long as I’m living,” he mutters, and he says it like a love confession, like condemnation and damnation, “be with me always. Take any form, any life. Do whatever you must, and you want, and what your heart desires, but do it as long as I’m there to haunt you.” Something flickers in his eyes, and Victor tenses and stays still like a prey, “You haunted me, did you know? You haunted me.” 

And you’re mine to take, to condemn. Who are you, if not mine? And what am I, if not yours?   

Eli’s hands wrap around Victor’s throat like a lover’s embrace. He breathes against his mouth, feels his throat bob, his breathing slowing, and he delights in it, pleasure washing over him as if the two of them were bare and intertwined.  

Eli opens his mouth, leans in, and presses it against Victor’s cold, bloody one. He coaxes his tongue inside, savoring his blood and his spit and the darkness inside him, and he draws him out this way; he consumes him, bones and sin and all.