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They say that the Spiral is, in part, like the Stranger. The feeling of something being wrong, the sense that your mind somehow misunderstands what sits in front of it–yes, perhaps that is similar.
In this case, however, it is also a little bit like the Flesh.
The mind, and all of the things within it, are unlike anything else that has ever existed. It is not possible to put into words the strangeness of a human consciousness, and the things that make it fascinating. Michael Shelley’s mind, being only ordinary, was no exception to this rule. Granted, perhaps he wasn’t anything different, or special, and it is incredibly likely that he would’ve lived out a boring and uneventful life, had he never met a woman like Gertrude Robinson, and ruined any chance that he’d ever had at forgetting the things that haunted him.
There was a rotten, mushy thing living inside the body that had once belonged to Michael Shelley, fermenting in its own disgust like the unwanted core of an apple. It did not fit within that painfully ordinary skin, nor did it want to.
It sat within the centre of that prison of viscera, of wet, bruised flesh, and swallowed down the taste of bile.
Perhaps Michael was not ordinary, after all. He certainly didn’t die an ordinary death. It is hard to say with any certainty what he actually was. Any trace of who he was, or who he could’ve been, meant very little after he died. With nothing to follow and nothing to cling to, it is no small wonder that of the people in the world who remembered him after his disappearance, nobody searched for his body. The world kept on turning as if he had never existed.
Or perhaps, again, it did not.
Skin stretched over malformed bones, pulled taut over all of their impossible joints. Michael’s body was claustrophobic in the worst possible way–not crushing, but suffocating. There was no space inside of it within which Michael could breathe; there was no room for it to curl up, or shrink. It could not move. It could not breathe. Within its unwilling cocoon, it thrashed and clawed at skin that should’ve broken to set it free, and it could not make a hole.
The bones shifted and bent, in an attempt to grow around whatever had died inside of that skin. They curled here and there, and took into themselves the splinters of Michael Shelley that it could not dissolve.
The human mind, being a strange, unstable thing, does not always die in the way that we expect it to. Sometimes it behaves like wet meat, and all of those bits of broken up consciousness stick to each other and fall, clumped-up and useless, into a messy, ugly sense of a thing–like a child’s attempt at a sandcastle, badly packed into its bucket, falling to bits on the beach. Sometimes it snaps cleanly like a bone, or splinters like the dried branch of a tree when a boot crushes it into the ground.
Michael’s mind did none of these things. When he became The Distortion, in that horrible, final moment of freedom, it did not crumble, or snap, or splinter. Something else happened to it, and it is there, on the edge of that abyss, with the end of Michael Shelley’s consciousness peering down into the abyss, that this begins.
๑๑๑๑๑
The Distortion did not want to be Michael. There was absolutely no doubt about that.
That, of course, was a pretty tough pill to swallow. To wear the skin of something that it was not–to wear the face of the man that prevented its becoming, to dress up in his body and speak with his voice and to be unable, above all, to tear that body from its frame and rip it limb from limb, was…hard. It was hard. And The Distortion, or the thing that now called itself Michael even though it did not want to, was not happy about it.
Things like it, naturally, were not supposed to feel the way that it did. They were not supposed to exist in the capacity that it did, with a body that knew where it was and a mind that knew which way was up without plucking the sense of it from somewhere abstract within the air. They did not choose the existence that it was stuck dragging itself through. If any of this was a choice, and it found a better way to live, then it would most certainly take it. Being Michael was one of the worst things that could’ve ever happened to both of them.
Still, it would find a way to get rid of it. These things never lasted forever. Human faces changed so very often, and Michael was sure that, at some point, the thing that had been Michael Shelley would fade, and his skin would be cast off like clothes into the indefinite pile of things that, once, it had been. It just had to wait.
It was very good at waiting.
It had waited, once, for a ritual–a lovely, grand thing, made up of colours and shapes that did not exist anywhere within the human mind, and a fear so rich, so divinely ordained, that to feed off of it was almost too indulgent. It had waited, and waited, and it had tasted the fear from that altar. It thought, perhaps, that some humans might’ve called it communion, the way that it set itself among that glorious sermon–but they would not understand, it thought, the true design of the thing. Nothing else ever could’ve comprehended it. It was not of this world of uncoordinated bodies and joint pain. It had been elegant, in a way.
In the meantime, waiting for its release, it hurt.
Michael sat opposite Gerry Keay in a little coffee shop opposite somewhere that it did not remember, and it hurt so very much.
“I just,” Gerry said, “don’t get it.”
As if he ever could’ve. As if Gerry could understand the revulsion with which Michael looked at what it had become, compared to that beautiful, twisting thing that it had so very nearly been.
“What?” It asked.
Gerry’s face twisted slightly, as though he couldn’t quite understand the question. Michael felt a hint of satisfaction at the movement that his skin made. His confusion, it’d argue, wasn’t quite as comforting as his fear, but it would do. It was good enough.
He didn’t ask the question that Michael expected him to.
“Why you’re still here, I guess.” Gerry shrugged, and reached for his coffee. It was lukewarm. Black, with one sugar. It didn't strike Michael as his usual order, but truthfully, it wasn’t sure that it cared. Gerry could drink whatever the hell he liked.
Somewhere within him, he felt a pang of loss. Michael Shelley must’ve cared, once. What a pity.
It found itself asking anyway.
“Why are you drinking that?” It asked, as Gerry pulled a face at the flavour of the drink.
“I paid for it.”
“You do not like it, though, Bookburner. It is…”
“Cold.” Gerry laughed–a snappy, broken noise. “Yeah, I guess it is. It’s fine.”
Michael could’ve done something about that, but it did not. It sipped its own cold coffee, or the thing that might’ve once been intended to be a cup of coffee, and stared at Gerry as though it was trying to understand something about him.
“Is it?”
The question was surprising. Gerry raised his eyebrows, and set the cup back down on the table.
It struck Michael, then, that Gerry probably wasn’t there for the coffee at all. He was probably there for Michael Shelley, it thought, in whatever sense it was still Michael. It wasn’t sure if it wore the sense of him correctly, but it seemed to please Gerry somewhat when it did.
Its relationship with Gerry was puzzling too, all on its own. Whatever it was that they were doing, it decided, it definitely wasn’t what it had been when Michael was alive. There was no way for it to be anything remotely similar. Whatever sweetness had settled between the two of them, once, was gone.
Gerry still lingered, though.
Either that, or Michael couldn’t let him go. That option was infinitely more humiliating. The Distortion was a being existing outside of time and the laws of spatial possibility. It did not need attachments, or connection. The little impulses that compelled it to seek Gerry out were remnants of a thing that it desperately wanted to kill, and yet time and time again, they ended up sat together, and against all odds, it kept showing Gerry mercy.
Gerry’s face looked odd, when Michael next looked at it. It was twisted in a way that it couldn’t quite identify, at first.
“Yeah.” He paused, and looked down at the remnants of his coffee, sat in a thin film at the bottom of the mug. “It’s fine.”
Michael had never felt loss, but it imagined that if it ever could’ve, it wouldn’t have reacted with the sullen emptiness that he watched flickering across Gerry’s expression. It would’ve been stronger, sharper, quicker. It would’ve done something.
“A lie,” it said simply, “and not even a good one.”
“Yeah, whatever.” Gerry rolled his eyes. “I need a cigarette.”
Michael stood, abandoning the dregs of coffee in its own cup.
“...and you’re coming too.” Gerry muttered. “Great. Okay.”
“I do not have to, you know–”
“Yeah, you do.” Gerry picked up his coat, and fumbled through the pockets until he found his lighter. He left the coffee cup on the table, with the last sip untouched, and walked out of the door into the cold winter breeze.
He did not look back.
Michael followed him–or perhaps Michael Shelley followed him reflexively, and The Distortion found itself reluctantly dragged along for the ride. It walked a minute along the street with him in silence, taking steps that didn’t quite match his gait. Gerry had found it endearing when it was Michael Shelley, it remembered. He’d enjoyed walking alongside Michael, even if it meant that Michael had to slow his pace to match Gerry’s steps.
Gerry did not enjoy whatever this was.
Well. That was a difficult statement. It wasn’t entirely true. Gerry enjoyed their arrangement a lot of the time, it recalled. He enjoyed whatever it was that they had enough not to tell him to go away, and he enjoyed it enough to kiss Michael, occasionally, if it felt right. There was something to all of that, and something within Michael leapt to grasp at it.
It wanted that feeling gone.
Still, it couldn’t bring itself to stop returning to London. It didn’t want to abandon Gerry Keay, even if perhaps abandoning him would’ve been the quickest and simplest way to rid itself of that horrible, yearning ache for something.
For now, it followed Gerry and waited for the click of a lighter.
Click!
“You are smoking more than you used to,” it observed, when the cigarette had been lit.
Gerry took a drag from it, stared at Michael in silence for what must’ve been ten seconds, and then shrugged.
“Wonder why.”
“If my company is so unbearable,” Michael slid its arm around him, “then I could leave.”
“But you won’t.”
“No.” Michael smiled. The smile felt wrong on its face–too sharp, and yet too sweet.
“And I’m probably not going to ask you to.”
Michael said nothing, but continued to smile.
“So,” Gerry sighed, “this is just how it is, I guess.”
Michael took the cigarette from between his fingers, placed it between its lips, and took a careful drag of the smoke. Michael Shelley didn’t smoke. He’d been asthmatic–not too severely, mind, and he’d sort of loved the smell of it on Gerry’s clothes, but he’d struggled to tolerate it himself and if he sat with Gerry when he smoked, he’d often felt his chest get tight. He’d never told him that.
It exhaled the smoke and, watching it curl into infinitely smaller spirals in front of him, it let that part of Michael Shelley scream its way into silence. The less that he let it speak, it decided, the better.
“Are you going to give that back?”
Gerry’s voice cut through the quiet. Michael turned its head at an impossible angle to look at him.
It offered out the cigarette. Gerry took it, stared at it, and then placed it back between his lips.
“You didn’t smoke, before.” He frowned. “It’s weird.”
Michael felt that little flicker of something human, in a part of the body that it hadn’t asked for. To be recognised was to be seen, and being seen stung, like salt on an open blister–and oh, Michael blistered under Gerry Keay’s stare. It was hot, and sharp, and it felt as though it was attempting to see something within it that Michael desperately did not want to know.
It had never really liked the Eye. Some things never changed.
“There is no ‘before’, my dear Bookburner.” They turned a corner. “Not in the way that you describe it. There–”
“I know.” Gerry interrupted. “But you know what I mean. When you were–”
“I never have been.”
“Don’t.” Gerry sighed. “When you were Michael. My Michael. Or when he was himself. Or whatever it is, I know you won’t tell me. He didn’t smoke, and you do. That’s all I was saying.”
Michael almost felt bad for him.
It must’ve been terribly hard, it thought, to harbour all of those pesky feelings for someone that wasn’t alive anymore. It had watched him grieve; it had known the way that his feelings shattered again and again, always into sharp little shards of anger and frustration that couldn’t quite be stuck back together again. It had seen him, when it knew to look for him–
Why had it known to look for him?
–to look for him, and it knew, without a doubt, that Gerry Keay had been irreconcilably damaged by the things that happened to Michael Shelley.
That being said, it didn’t care. It couldn’t care. That wasn’t a thing that it had the ability to feel, and even if it had been, there was absolutely no reason for it to want to spend any reasonable amount of time around a man like Gerry, with eyes that burned and questions that made Michael talk too much.
So why did it keep coming back?
It didn’t like that thought, either.
At some point, it decided, it would have to stop visiting. Not yet, though. Underneath it all, Gerry was incredibly fun to mess with.
“I suppose,” it said, “you must be right. Unless you are not.”
Gerry scowled. “I am.”
Michael laughed in response. “Anyway,” it said, “I do not smoke.”
“You did, just now.” Gerry pointed out.
Indifferently, Michael shrugged. It hadn’t liked it, but the way that the smoke curled out of its lips was interesting enough that it considered trying again, just in case.
“You are…” it paused, searching for the right word, “difficult, today.”
“Am I?”
Michael laughed. “Yes,” it said, letting its voice soften as the word echoed loudly in Gerry’s ears.
Gerry looked at him again, and hesitated. His pace slowed, but only for a moment.
“I miss Michael.” He said eventually.
“I am Michael.”
“But you aren’t, that’s the thing. You’re not him–only sometimes you are, and it’s really hard to…” Gerry swallowed, “to hate you, when you look like him, and talk like him, and know all the stuff he knew.”
“Then do not hate me.” Michael said, as though it could be that simple. “And do not think about it.”
“Like I could do that.”
Michael raised its eyebrows. They did not move the way that it expected them to; they shifted slightly, but his skin struggled to move with their curvature.
“Oh?” Michael asked.
Sometimes, the way that Gerry looked at it made it forget why it didn’t want to be Michael. Sometimes, he managed to chip a little chunk out of its cold, unfeeling selfhood, and for a few minutes whilst it froze over again, Michael felt something akin to warmth.
Gerry looked at him, then, and Michael splintered.
“Are you him, today?” Gerry asked, after a moment’s silence.
“...no.” Michael said. It felt like a lie; his tongue curled in the wrong way in his mouth.
“When was the last time?”
๑๑๑๑๑
Michael Shelley smiled.
It was a crisp summer morning. Fog crept through the streets, and he walked along them with purpose, one coffee in each hand, cheeks flushed red from the cold. The cups warmed his fingers, although he expected that within a couple of hours, he’d regret the entire thing when he sat there in the murky humidity of the archives, waiting for lunch to roll around so that he could find the time to go out and buy something cold.
Absentmindedly, he wondered if Gertrude had managed to get that whole climate control system fixed. Possibly not. The paperwork probably hadn’t been processed yet, and if that hadn’t gone through then nothing else was going to happen. Funding was tight, and Elias, for all of his insistence on keeping records, probably didn’t actually care enough to stop the creeping damp unless it started to cause any visible problems.
If he could find one, he’d probably bring in a dehumidifier. A little one. Something that he could stash underneath his desk and empty in the bathroom sink.
That was besides the point.
As he approached the Institute, his smile grew, and his movements quickened. On the steps, leaning against the railing with a casual slump, stood Gerry, in that leather coat that he always wore when it was cold. It’d be too warm for him to keep it on during the day, Michael thought. He wouldn’t end up wearing it home. He’d have to carry it on the tube. It’d be ridiculous, and Michael would find it horribly endearing anyway.
He cleared his throat as he approached. Gerry turned his head slightly, and his expression shifted from one of mild annoyance to something soft, and genuine.
“Michael!” He said. “Morning, I, uh–sorry, Gertrude isn’t in yet, do you mind…?”
He gestured slightly towards the door.
Michael nodded immediately, and then handed him one of the cups. Gerry blinked down at it, having instinctively taken it without questioning it.
“For me?” He asked.
“Of course!” Michael nodded. “Your usual. Don’t, uh, don’t worry about it. I–well, I was there, and I thought you’d probably be here, and–”
Gerry interrupted him. “Thank you.”
He moved out of the way to let Michael open the door. Michael could feel his gaze on him as he unlocked it, although he didn’t say anything about it.
“You, um–you left the sweater you were looking for in my flat.” Michael said idly as they descended the stairs into the archives. “Got it in my bag if you want it.”
“Oh, did I?” Gerry shrugged. “I honestly can’t remember doing that. Thanks. It’s sort of…I mean, I could always keep leaving it there.”
“But you were looking for it–”
“Yeah,” Gerry said, “but I kind of wanted you to find it. So you could keep it there, if you want to.”
It took Michael a moment to catch what Gerry was suggesting. The penny dropped right as Gerry was taking a sip from his coffee cup.
“Oh!” He nodded, ever so slightly. “Yes. I, um–that is…yes. I could keep it.”
“Good.”
Gerry leaned over to kiss his cheek in the privacy of the empty break room, and Michael felt his heart soar just a little higher than it usually did.
๑๑๑๑๑
Michael blinked. It recalled the memory and, having dredged it up, let it fly loose in the wind. Another piece of Shelley, discarded like split ends snipped off into the bathroom sink. Michael let the thing tethering it to its body loosen just a little bit, and hoped that the memory would not return, if Gerry ever asked again.
“Perhaps yesterday.” It said. “Maybe weeks ago. Maybe even Michael Shelley was not the man you thought him to be. I am not a self, Gerry. I am not …it does not work in that way.”
“But you are Michael. And that’s–”
“An identity? Yes.” Michael said. “But not mine.”
“But you’re Michael.”
“Yes.”
Gerry looked like he was in pain. Michael wouldn’t have blamed him if he had been. It didn’t like this any more than he did.
“We have,” Michael told him, “talked about this before, and still, you do not understand.”
A trap, of course. There was no understanding something like whatever it was. There was no way that it could possibly be comprehended, not in the way that Gerry wanted to understand it. To understand it completely would fragment the mind in such a delicious way, cracking it open at all of the points that were weak, and scared, and difficult.
It did not want to break Gerry open like that. Even if it had hurt countless others in the same way, there were things that it could do with Gerry that no other creature could tolerate.
Perhaps it did not want to hurt Gerry. It would not do it.
Whether the way that it almost cared for Gerry came from the deadened bits of Michael Shelley or not, Michael did not care–or, at least, it tried very hard not to. It was better to leave it as an impossibility of sorts than to attempt, even slightly, to understand it.
If it ever found the rigid part of itself that had contorted around Michael Shelley’s feelings, though, it wasn’t sure if it would try to preserve them. They had, after all, only made all of this difficult.
“Guess not.” Gerry said, staring defeatedly along the street.
They must’ve passed people as they walked, Michael thought. This was London. The streets were busy, and loud, and any ordinary person would’ve struggled to hear Gerry over the city’s cluttered soundscape. Impossibility did sometimes have its perks, and Michael did not pay any mind to the people passing them. It must’ve noticed them but, irrelevant as they felt, it did not look at them.
Michael shrugged.
“You are,” it said, “angry, I think.”
“Yeah,” Gerry said, “well, I miss him. And you kind of killed him, y’know.”
“I may also be him, if that helps.”
“No–you just said–”
Michael waved a hand dismissively. “It does not matter. Identity is not real, anyway.”
Not entirely true. The sooner that The Distortion ripped this identity from its not-quite-body, the better.
An odd feeling struck Michael, then. It wanted nothing more than to cast off that awful image of the man that had ruined it. It wanted him gone. It wanted to erase every little speck of him, and to pretend that he had never existed, and yet he, Michael, whatever was left of him, very much did not want to go.
“Do not try to define me,” Michael added, glancing over at the irritation in Gerry’s eyes. “I do not think it will make a difference. It would be better, I think, if you did not look at it that way.”
Gerry swallowed. Michael could almost taste the confusion rushing through his head, in spiralling shades of red, and yellow, and blue.
“No,” Gerry snapped, “I will. I know things are different. I know you did something to him, or it did, and it’s not like I can’t tell that things have changed. You can’t pretend that you’re him if he’s not in there, though–don’t. Whatever you’re about to say, don’t say it. I don’t need another comment about how it wasn’t you, or he isn’t there, or whatever weird thing you want to say to describe what you think you are.”
Michael closed its mouth, and let Gerry finish.
“You keep coming back to me.” He said. “You won’t leave me alone. You act like him, sometimes, and I think you kiss me like he did. You take up my time, and show up at my flat, and you follow me everywhere, Michael–how much of him is in there? How much of him is doing all this?”
Michael did not have an answer for him. It said nothing.
“Michael.”
There was a hint of a crackle in Gerry’s voice, his anger catching on the scaffold of something a little bit bigger. Michael felt the threat and smiled, knowing that Gerry could do absolutely nothing with it.
“Is that a threat, Bookburner–”
“Gerry.” He stared at Michael. “He called me Gerry.”
“Gerry.” Michael said, before it could stop itself. “Is that a threat, Gerry?”
The silence that rang between them was just a little bit too loud. Gerry stared at Michael for a moment, and then shook his head. Whatever threat he’d hoped to get away with died on his tongue, and he swallowed its carcass without another complaint.
“No.” He murmured. “Is that you, Michael?”
Michael shrugged. “No.” He responded. “Or…yes. Something like that.”
“I can’t stand you, sometimes.”
Against its better judgement, Michael let its fingers brush against the back of Gerry’s hand whilst they walked. It could see the Institute up ahead, looming, waiting for Gerry to step back inside. Michael had no intention of joining him, even if such a thing had been comfortable and easy. It had better things to do than whatever it would inevitably end up trying to work on down among all of those musty files.
Or perhaps it didn’t–but that part didn’t matter.
“You would miss me,” Michael said, “if I did not come back.”
“Don’t remind me.” Gerry groaned. “Pick me up after work?”
Michael smiled a strained, pinched smile that showed far too many teeth. It felt the way that Gerry deliberately tried not to count them, and a flicker of satisfaction rushed through its chest. Michael Shelley had probably had a perfectly normal amount of teeth. He’d probably been very good at going to his dental appointments. They’d probably commented on how delightfully ordinary his teeth were.
“Of course.” It insisted. “Take care, Gerry.”
It watched the way that he stiffened, just slightly, before he walked away.
“I won’t.” He told it.
๑๑๑๑๑
Being Michael was not always linear, and The Distortion preferred it that way. Sometimes, being Michael was a blurry, painful walk through the darkness to Gerry’s flat. Sometimes it was light, and laughable and it would struggle to recall why being Michael had troubled it so deeply. Things were not simple, and the discomfort of having an unwanted identity sewn into its sense of self was not always something troublesome.
Sometimes, just sometimes, it helped.
Days passed in a blur. Michael kissed Gerry Keay a few times in a week, or more, or less. It remembered almost all of them, and tried not to think about the times that it remembered kissing Gerry when its lips had been warm, and human. Michael Shelley had enjoyed kissing Gerry an awful lot, and it had a few too many memories of that kicking around:
“Ask a better question, then.” Michael Shelley’s eyes locked with Gerry’s. He leaned forwards, only slightly, letting Gerry feel the heat of his breath as he spoke. “Tell me, my dear Bookburner, what was it that you wanted to know? Perhaps I might answer.”
“Do you love me back?” Gerry asked, whispering with a sudden desperation as though the question, being so intimately his own, was ripped out of him.
“Good question.” Michael said. He smiled. “Should I…?”
Gerry had nodded. Michael looked at the memory of that nod, let it fizz on its tongue like sherbet, and then let it dissolve into a sugary, intangible sweetness.
It was better off letting those things go. That love, or whatever it called it nowadays, was too much a part of Shelley. As good as it felt, as sweet as it was to have the company of a man that would not leave it behind, it did not need it. It was a timeless concept, and as soon as it knew how to ditch its body, it would be gone, and there would be no lips left for Gerry to kiss, no hand left for him to hold, no hair for him to run his fingers through.
Despite how it loathed its own physicality, it felt a pang of loss, letting go of that memory. It must’ve mattered, once. Shelley must’ve treasured it.
In the hollow from which he ripped it, a little sense of warmth lingered–a blossoming thing, a feeling, something that it could not rip out. The roots ran too deep. It could’ve dug its fingers into that gap in its brain and tried to rip at it, but nothing would’ve come out.
It left the feeling behind when it realised that it could not touch it, and tried not to think about the memory any more than it had to, hoping that it might not grow back. It was harder to rid itself of the bits of Michael Shelley that had loved, or cared. They’d welded themselves into his bones and stuck to the insides of the marrow like superglue.
Michael wanted to scrape itself clean. It wanted the bones hollowed out. It wanted there to be nothing of Shelley left, and–
Its eyes met Gerry’s across the room. It felt a pinch in the back of its head, and–
“Do you love me back?”
“Good question.”
Some memories were harder to rip out than others. Some feelings embedded themselves into the mind, and as hard as it tried, Michael did not know how to get rid of the way that Shelley had fallen in love. Such an innate part of a man was hard to tear out, and though it would rid itself of the itch, eventually, there was no rush to figure that one out.
For a while, it let itself be drawn back to him, again and again. It found itself lingering in Gerry’s shadow, or in the wood of his bedroom door, or in the untidy mess that had started to consume his living room. It sat on the sofa in the evenings–or tried to sit, anyway. The legs were all wrong for sitting. They didn’t bend in the right places, or the right amount of times, unless you looked directly at them. In Gerry’s peripheral, Michael always looked a bit uneven, and it liked it that way. It liked the way that he’d look at it twice when he wasn’t sure what he’d seen and, more than that, it liked the way that it felt not to look like Michael Shelley all of the time.
It would have to do, for now. It would have to be good enough until there was a better solution.
“You’re really weird, Michael.” Gerry said, as he walked past Michael sitting on one of his kitchen chairs, knees contorted, head tilted at an angle that he’d refused to acknowledge.
Michael felt a laugh drift from somewhere across the room–its laugh, though its mouth did not move to make the sound.
“Am I?”
“You know you are.” Gerry sighed. There was something uneven in his step that day, an unsteadiness that settled with him on the chair opposite Michael. He spilled a little of his coffee as he sat down, and watched it pool on the table with a low, frustrated sigh.
“Perhaps you are right, Bookburner.” Michael shrugged.
“I’m absolutely right.” Gerry leaned across the table a little bit.
His eyes didn’t quite focus on Michael’s face when he looked at it, and they struggled to follow its movements when it stood to, rather reluctantly, clean up Gerry’s coffee spill.
Gerry yawned, then, and took another sip of his coffee.
“Did you change my coffee somehow?” He asked. “Is it, I dunno, not-coffee, because I’m so tired, Michael, and this isn’t waking me up.”
“I would not know.” Michael glanced at it. “Objects are only what they are. I do not know what that is any more than you know what I am.”
“Great.” Gerry rolled his eyes and lifted the mug so that Michael could clean the table with something that very much did not look like a paper towel. “We’re not talking about what you are. I don’t even want to know anymore, actually. Every time we talk about it, it gets weirder.”
“Then we will not talk about it.” Michael shrugged. “Have I finally managed to satisfy your curiosity, Gerry? A Watcher, not wondering? What a fascinating concept.”
“Oh, I still wonder.” Gerry shrugged. “It’s just not worth the headaches.”
“Again?”
Gerry nodded. “I think it’s you, y’know. That weird noise that you make. Sounds pretty headache inducing. It’s..all high pitched, something like that, thought you were doing it on purpose.”
Michael blinked. “I am not.”
It lifted its hand, and gently titled Gerry’s head up to look at it properly. Its fingers curled gently around his cheek, and it watched as his eyes flickered closed for a moment.
“Ah,” he sighed, “that’s better.”
Michael rolled its eyes. “Really?”
“Yeah, really.” Gerry managed to open his eyes again, although they still wouldn’t focus. “Everything gets…hazy, I think, when you do that. Numbs it a little.”
A flicker of concern danced underneath the skin of Michael’s throat. It swallowed, but the tickly sensation that it left behind would not leave. That, it had decided, was another one of those things that it really wanted to get rid of. It was a little bit too much like Shelley, that feeling. He’d always been worried about something.
“I do not want to hurt you,” it told Gerry, although that was perhaps misleading. It wasn’t going to hurt Gerry, but part of it very much wanted to–it just so happened that a larger, unwanted human part kept nagging at him and attempting to convince Michael that it cared for him.
The Distortion did not know how to care for another, but Michael, oh, Michael knew how. It knew how Gerry liked his coffee, and it knew what time he usually went to sleep, and which sweaters it should stay away from to keep the threads from unravelling underneath its fingertips.
Michael was The Distortion, those days, but The Distortion was not exclusively Michael. Identifying in that way was complicated, but it made enough sense to Michael.
It just had to get rid of some more bits of Michael Shelley, and everything would be perfect. Just a little bit more, and…
Well. Perhaps not yet. It seemed like Gerry needed some familiarity in his life, and if it cared for him, as it thought it might, it really needed to figure out how to look after him.
๑๑๑๑๑
It did not, in fact, figure that one out.
Tenderness was another one of those things that couldn’t come naturally to a being made of deceit and someone else’s body. It could rest upon the surface, in the way that its hands caressed Gerry’s skin and smoothed his hair down, and it could linger in its voice when it told him to get some rest late at night, but it could never feel it in the same way that a person did. It had no way to comprehend it, no frame of reference, and yet Michael wondered about it all the same.
If it wondered enough, it thought, something might shift. There might be some cosmic overhaul that deemed it worthy of a body that made sense (that is to say, a body that made absolutely no sense to anybody else). The stars might shift in a way that gave it purpose again, or they might not, and it might stumble upon something fascinating anyway. It might, if everything moved just right, understand why it didn’t want to let go of Gerry Keay…or, again, it might not.
It looked at him in the dead of night, across a rickety old picnic table outside of whatever pub Gerry had wanted to visit, and watched the way that the moonlight caught his hair. If it had been anything normal, it thought, it would’ve quite liked this. Michael Shelley had liked it. It certainly wanted to like it.
It wanted a lot of things, when it came to Gerry. There were things that it knew that it wasn’t supposed to want, that it desperately hungered for.
Was that wrong? Was wanting things that weren’t impossibly abstract…was that wrong?
A cloud drifted in front of the moon, obscuring its light, and Michael’s attention shifted back to Gerry’s lips.
There was some solace, it thought, right there. Some things weren’t complicated.
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skin on skin on skin on skin on branch-cracked-bones that did not fit their shell
no sense, no inward feeling of all that would be
right or
wrong
or comfortable within the skin,
or blood, or bone.
The bone: a scaffold,
a frame,
or a rack.
An easel?
onto which the canvas-skin was pulled taut and painted.
Twig-branch-wood; splinters stabbing into it from underneath.
A yell. Or perhaps a cry, or a plea.
Most definitely a yell.
A roaring feeling in the ears,
or else within the throat,
several beats per minute, or maybe none at all.
Perhaps a flatline.
A cry.
A loss.
A red-streaked hole in the un-skinned canvas.
A hollow pit,
a death,
an empty, match-lit void, and…
silence.
The end, of all things that mattered.
Michael found its release, and the door opened.