Work Text:
Silco stood before the grimy window of The Last Drop, the blazing light of neon outside branding his skin with sickly emerald patterns. The glow illuminated the streets below, casting the scurrying and stagnant figures of Zaunites in shadow, cutting the outlines of arches and rooftops and every jagged crack in the walls, reflecting brightly in the glass of each building within view. Tiny glints of dust floated in the air like firelights, and it was not unpleasant. But Silco could not call it beautiful.
“Surveying the kingdom, my lord?” Silco did not turn at William’s voice, but he could smell the bitter chemical perfume of Shimmer and knew his companion had lit a cigarette. “Feeling proud of what you’ve won?”
A flash of movement through the window, a glimpse of someone who had learned to hide their movements. A flicker, from far down in the Lanes, of twin braids vanishing around the corner. “I haven’t won yet,” Silco muttered.
“You’ve got a business, a following, and few enough good and real enemies that you could count them on one hand,” said William. “Nobody will challenge your authority over Zaun, and the deal with Talis is as good as sealed. And you have me,” he added, with a vague air of snide pleasure. “What else do you want?”
William, Silco knew, would never be the type to understand the concept of family. To William, there was only himself; all others were simply puppets or playthings or whatever else made them entertaining. William did not feel the way anyone else did, and Silco thought that was why they were still locked together in the bizarre dance they had been engaged in for the past few years. Neither of them felt as others did, and understood each other more for it. But that meant that for William, people were nothing. It would be impossible for him to know what Jinx was to Silco.
Silco looked away from the tiny chaos of the streets, back to where William was, in his usual fashion, sprawled across the worn red couch with Shimmer in hand. The light filtering through the window just barely reached William, giving his pale form an unnatural hue and deepening the shadows clutching at his frame. He was thinner of late, the network of Shimmer-shot veins mapping his skin broken by old scars. One scar, oddly, Silco had never seen before— a thick rope of tissue straight down William’s left forearm. William found Silco’s gaze and his sneer twitched almost imperceptibly, and he drew his arm too quickly to his chest.
“Why do you hide your scar?” Silco asked. It was no use being tactful about it; they both knew Silco had seen.
William laughed, a brief and ineffective attempt to ignore, to deflect. “I don’t hide my scars. You of all people should know.”
“The one on your arm,” Silco said. “Not the others. Why hide one and display the rest?”
William watched Silco for a very long moment, searching his face for something Silco did not know. His smile faltered. “It’s quite the thing we’ve got going on, isn’t it?” he said, his voice suddenly devoid of its usual casual flippancy. “You and I.”
“That’s certainly one way to put it,” Silco replied.
“I don’t respect you,” William went on. “I don’t fear you. God knows I don’t love you. I don’t know why we keep playing this game. But whatever it is, whatever… this is…” He gestured loosely to the imaginary thread that bound them. “It’s something that tells me I’m not the only monster. I’m not alone.”
William looked down, taking a thin drag on his cigarette. Finally, he sighed, the sound harsh and bitter. “Look, I… had a rough night,” he said at length. His words were clipped and flat, as if he did not care to modulate anymore. “A while back. Several years. Before we met. I… I was drinking. And the voices, they were bad, and the drink wasn’t making them quiet. I found… I don’t know, maybe it was glass, or metal, or a knife; I was… close to blackout, I think. And I thought to myself, Well, shit. If I can’t shut them up, maybe I can rip them out. So I tried; I really, really tried. Carved myself down to the fucking bone. And surprise, surprise, it did fuck-all but nearly kill me. Babette found me half-bled-out, out back of this place.” William jerked a hand in the vague direction of the lot behind The Last Drop, looking anywhere but at Silco. “I owe her my life for that. That’s why I hide this scar, Silco, and why I put the others on display. My scars are a testament to the times I survived. This one is a reminder of the time I almost didn’t.”
Silco said nothing. There was nothing to say. William was not looking for sympathy, nor was he asking for empathy. Silco had asked, and William had answered. Silco was quite sure he was now the only person other than Babette and William himself who knew that tale.
William’s eyes drifted back to Silco at the window, locking onto him now that his story was done. “I told you mine,” he said, slipping easily back into his old careless, malicious demeanor, “now you tell me yours. Why do you hide your scars?”
Suddenly Silco did not like William’s gaze, the way his dead gray eyes seemed to dissect him where he stood. “I haven’t done that in years,” Silco said, his hand lifting to brush the cracked and discolored flesh around his eye.
“You can’t lie to a liar, and we’ve both seen you shirtless,” William said, his lips pulling back in a crooked grin. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you hold your arms when you're exposed. I know the look of a man who wants to cover something up, whether he knows it or not.”
Silco returned his attention to the windowpane, all too aware of William’s stare raking his back. “One scar came from freedom, the other from betrayal,” he said finally, softly. He folded his arms, the thin fabric of his shirt pressed against his chest, against the marks that had made him who he was, against the scars he thought he would never want to keep secret. “Yet I hide what I wanted and show my pain for all to see.”
“Freedom made you a man,” said William. “Betrayal made you a monster.”
“Is that it?” Silco asked drily, cutting a sharp glance back at his companion. “We hide our humanity and flaunt our monstrosity?”
William was absently running a hand across his scarred forearm, the twisted imperfection passing in and out of Silco’s vision, and he did not look away when Silco’s gaze locked with his. “Why not, eh?” William said with a derisive laugh. “This world doesn’t abide humanity. Kills it the first chance it gets. It’s better to be a monster than dead.”
“Yes,” Silco murmured, his attention still held on William. William, who could kill for fun without a second thought. Who would never comprehend forming an emotional attachment to another. Who was already as dead inside as he would be when someone finally cut him down. William, Silco’s monster. “Better to be a monster.”