Work Text:
The first time it happens, he tells himself it’s nothing serious.
A pinprick of blood, a bead of bright crimson, the smooth shimmer of a silver knife: all the tiny details that culminate in his recentering. It’s like fabric; like sewing his soul back into his skin. It’s like it’s been jarred inside of him, shifted uncomfortably out of place and left to rot in the open air. It sits heavy atop his diaphragm.
When Sylvia helps him, it feels like he can breathe again. The first time she does it, he can’t so much as take a breath.
It’s his fault. She corners him for his obviousness, curious and skeptical and sharp, and he answers honestly. There’s a knife in her pocket. Everyone knows there is. His eyes keep drifting, and Sylvia catches on. She’s observant; he’ll give her that. He’ll give her a whole lot, really.
He doesn’t mean to, at first. The first time it happens is something of a blur.
His face is wet with tears and taut with the inevitable indignity of having fallen apart in front of a witness. That day was supposed to be different. For once, he’s away from the clone. (Tamesis, he reminds himself. The clone is a human being. It’s hard to see him as a separate person when he’s stolen Hugo’s face.) Hugo is alone. He took the time to compose himself, and then the sonata hit another wrong note.
It’s experimental, the first time. He wants to– needs to– know what it’s like. He’s tried piano, and talking, and thinking, and family. Nothing seems to reawaken the corpse inside of his body, and Hugo desperately, desperately misses feeling as though he is alive.
(It was not permanent. There has been no change, not really, not beyond the physical inconveniences. He was gone and now he’s back– as though it was just a business trip. He’s still himself. That’s what he tells himself. It sticks like water to glass.)
When he sees his blood, he feels like throwing up. All of a sudden, the nothingness nestled between his ribs is replaced by a panicked revulsion so potent it makes his head spin. His vision erupts in tiny bright speckles, his heart trembles as it climbs the summit of his throat, and his breaths don’t seem to bring any oxygen. He’s bleeding. He’s panicking.
It’s better than the apathy. He hates it.
Sylvia isn’t kind, not in any way. She does not ask for specifics, not at first, nor does she want his input. She cuts where and as deeply as she pleases, clinically surveys the blood upon her knife, smiles with a sort of satisfied sadism when it’s carelessly swiped over with a tissue and pocketed once more. She tells him he must be broken if he’s resorting to this. She says so casually. He thinks she might be right. She likes him better this way. He has no idea how to start fixing himself. It’s terrifying.
This, he tells himself later, arm bandaged halfheartedly under his sleeve, will never happen again. His chest still flutters anxiously with the aftermath, a sick sort of regret trickling into him. He doesn’t need Sylvia. And he manages.
But he thinks about it. And once a seed is planted, it only continues to grow.
On the worse days, when he’s enveloped by the void and blinks quietly into darkness, he thinks about it a lot. The things she said to him (stop fidgeting how did you come back do you see the green you look like a ghost William would be shocked you are fascinating you know), the things she did (cold stare cold knife cold cold skin blood wells like the bloom of a lily of the valley and he silently swallows the poison it brings). And it wasn’t– pleasant. Not in any way.
He remembers being panicked. Feeling horrified and guilt-ridden and disgusted with himself. Feeling noticed. Feeling like he’d managed to sort something, to shift what’s gone wrong inside of him, just a little. Feeling listened to and endangered and in some obscure nonsense way, powerful. Just a bit. Feeling like maybe his skin can belong to him again.
He imagines it pinned open, baring open muscle, slick with scarlet. He wonders what they did to his body in the lab. He wonders what they might have done had he stayed dead. He doesn’t like to think of the time he was without it. He wonders if they would’ve had a burial.
He remembers it covered from the autumn air, eternal goosebumps chafing against his scratchy-soft jacket, hidden to the world. Seeing long nails close around his wrist, not harsh not soft but firm, always firm, seeing the green veins and the glittering blade. Seeing his own blood pour out of him, feeling it go, slide hot down his freezing forearm, experiencing the spike of adrenaline and the lingering sting. He remembers feeling.
He remembers listening. And he remembers thinking that finally– finally– here is someone who won’t alter the facts.
Sylvia listens to his confessional, and she helps him. He listens to her observations, and accepts the judgements she proposes as reality. It’s– there’s something– comforting, maybe. About it. About her laying it all out. She tells him who he is. She says what he deserves– and he’s not seeking dominion, he’s not a victim here– and it makes sense. She articulates that which he can’t express, and isn’t it awful that even language has been taken from him too?
There is another time, another him, who would have bristled at the idea of there being something wrong with him. Who would’ve insisted this is temporary, or rather remained rightfully independent in the first place. Who would have startled ironically at any accusation of being unfocused and hastened to defend his use. He feels far away now, disconnected. The him who stands there doesn’t really care. Not anymore.
It’s supposed to be one time. His conviction in that blows away with the motion of Sylvia’s opening car door.
Her visits are difficult to predict, but he doesn’t exactly have to do much. Sylvia comes when she pleases, knows where to find him, and they fall into a strange sort of routine. She asks questions, he watches his blood drain. Perhaps it’s silly, subjecting minor exsanguination on a cadaver body, but he can see it and he can feel it and those two things make up him. He’s alive. He moves. She talks.
He feels. And when she’s gone, it’s hardly days later before he twitches with the absence of feeling once again.
Typing words on a computer he does not read, he considers the high of adrenaline and how perfectly he’s becoming fixed on it. The world feels dull in contrast to the sharpness, his heart is too slow and his breathing too heavy and his pupils are like polished pebbles in a giant quarry. He thinks about the novelty of being seen and being critiqued, because Sylvia does not cloak herself in pretty words of sympathy.
His Father may be ignorant, but that does not make him unaware of his displeasure. He wishes, some days, that Father would be outright. He works for him anyway and paces at his heels for a tidbit of recognition like a dog begging for scraps under the table. It’s not legal, his position– not really. But it’s what Father wants, and when those glacier eyes slide deliberately onto nuclear green, it’s as though something awakes inside of him.
Ambrosia is the nectar of the gods. Never meant to be consumed by a mortal. Father has surpassed the boundaries of morality. Does that make him Prometheus? Or does that make him Zeus?
What does that make Sylvia?
(What does that make him?)
He knows he has a penchant for overcomplication. For long, winding, flowery speeches that trawl on a road to nowhere, surrounded by the shrubbery of sophisticated arrogance. The deal, however, is remarkably simple. Refreshingly so. It’s like a business of his own.
His sleeves stay long, then thicken and thicken, shielding the bulge of gauze over his wounds. He cleans them, of course, with all the right antiseptics. They’re left to breathe when he can let them (not often, not really, he never has a second to spare and none of his room is truly his), and he picks at the edges when he can.
Thin skin, tin skin, the boy made out of metal. His heart tumbled, gone, from the ribcage within, his lips stretch into a scowl of a grin, he retreats to his sanctuary to hide from his sins, he bites back his comments on Veronica’s violin. The routine is practiced, he is composed. As one might compose a ballad. Is absence itself a story?
His skin maps out the proof he isn’t hollow. It bears the watercolour artistry of resurrecting a soul, and it would be grotesque on another but it’s perfect on him. It has to be. His body is not his, not after everything. This makes it back into something he can recognise.
So if his arms twinge when he reaches for the keys– if his sister frowns at the length of his sleeves- if he panics when Sylvia sees him– it’s all worth it, in the end. Because this is his. He has control.
(He cries sometimes, in front of her. He hates it. Does she?)
He has control.
(Ivy looks suspicious of him. He resolves to avoid her. Eye for an eye, is it not? She doesn’t care. He doesn’t care.)
He has control.
(He can’t argue back for far too long, can’t rebuild the routine. It used to be habitual, the instinct to bite. It takes a scary amount of effort to relearn.)
He has control.
(Father runs him into the ground and his piano floods him with guilt, but if it was gone, that would kill him– really, this time. Father gives him purpose, Sylvia gives him feeling, his music gives him home. His family… His family are something else.)
He has control.
(He doesn’t deserve them.)
He has control.
(He doesn’t deserve this.)
He has control.
(So why is it, of every choice he could make, that he decided to do this?)