Chapter Text
i. mutualism.
The man in front of him is not Saps.
He has Saps's white hair, slightly longer than before, tied up loosely. He has Saps's voice, the few times he bothers to open his mouth and speak. But he's not Saparata. Flux knows it. He just can't prove it.
Not-Saps doesn't drum his fingers or hum when he thinks — and ever since he came back, he seems to be always thinking. Eyes unfocused, like he's still far away, on whatever expedition Ish had taken him this time. He doesn't laugh loudly at some Instagram meme or even scroll his phone much at all anymore. He doesn't pitch his voice up and mimic Flux whenever he says something pretentious — and Flux had tried, intentionally being annoying, what would've riled Saps up had this been months earlier — and all Saps did was turn to look at him from the blank spot he'd been staring at on the wall, his face equally blank, save for a small furrow in his brows that seemed to ask, What are you doing?
After half a week of this Flux is frustrated enough to find Ish's contact on his phone; the last time they'd texted was over two years ago, but he doesn't need to scroll far down in his messages to find the name. He sends, Can we talk?
It only takes a few seconds for an automated reply to pop up on his screen: Hello! Thanks for the message. Ish is currently out of town and busy working on his next project, and there is currently no estimate as to when he will return. For emergency inquiries, please contact his office at (xxx)-xxx-xxxx. Otherwise, he very regretfully asks for your patience in awaiting his correspondence.
Fucking bastard, Flux thinks, gripping his phone so hard the buttons dig into his fingers and leave little oval-shaped imprints there. You returned nearly a full week ago. I'm married to your most prized, most skilled technician, and I don't even count as an emergency?
He tries the office number, but the phone rings and rings until it reaches voicemail.
"Just tell me what you did to him," he says into the phone, then decides he sounds absolutely fucking pathetic and deletes the message. Somewhere in another room Saps is shuffling around. Something heavy falls with a loud clattering noise. There is no loud exclamation of shock, no cursing. Flux enters the doorway just in time to see Saps on his knees, methodically putting each book back into its place on the shelf.
"How was the trip?" Flux tries, once again, as he scoops scrambled eggs onto Saps's plate.
Saps stops staring into his coffee to look up at him, a misty look in his eyes. "It was fine."
"Yeah?" Flux dumps the rest of the eggs onto his own plate. "It's nice that it was a city this time, huh? At least you're not as sunburnt as the last time Ish dragged you all to that deserted island. And the weather these days is pretty nice, too."
"Yeah," Saps replies, evidently no longer listening. He's poking at the eggs on his plate like a cat faced with a dead cockroach. "The weather's nice."
"Wanna go for a walk later? We always like to go walking when it cools down like this. It's just about the season when the flowers on that hillside trail start blooming again." Flux bites back the urge to append remember? to the end of his sentence.
Saps just shrugs. "If you want."
"You're always the one dragging me to go hiking with you." Flux swallows. The eggs are going cold on his plate. "If you're tired from the trip, we don't have to—"
Saps pushes his chair back from the table abruptly. It makes a loud, irritating scratching noise as it grates against the floor, and he pays it no mind as he gets up and walks away.
"Why aren't you playing with the other kids?"
His older sister had crossed her arms, having found him behind a large tree, digging a hole in the ground with a brightly colored plastic shovel. "You're getting all dirty back here."
He had shrugged. He must have been eight or nine years old, certainly not double digits yet. "Don't wanna."
"Come on. It's not like you're not friends with them. Stop making me run around looking for you. You're too old to still need babysitting."
He'd just grunted in response, jabbing the shovel into the hole once again, so hard that the plastic nearly bent when it struck stone. "I'm lost."
"What? No, you're not. You're barely five feet away from the playground where everyone else is."
"No, I'm lost," he'd repeated, tilting his head up, past his sister's disapproving gaze, up at the sun. "I don't know where I am."
"Stop— stop staring at the sun! Oh my god. This is why I should get paid for watching you. Are you three years old? Do you want to go blind? And stop saying nonsense. Seriously, you're kinda scaring me." She'd hastily covered his eyes with her palms and looked around hurriedly before muttering, "go wash off your hands and play with the other kids."
He doesn't remember if he ever ended up listening to her. He wouldn't even have remembered the conversation having taken place if it weren't for the fact that sometimes it feels like his eyes still sting from the brightness of the sun, the brilliance that sent little worms wiggling across his vision, that burned spots into the blacks of his eyelids. He turns away from the sun, now, as it rises.
He wakes up to the sound of running water.
Saps is in the bathroom, the door half ajar. He's standing in front of the shower. Water rushes out from the shower head, hitting the bathtub and flowing down the drain. Saps is fully dressed. He doesn't even step into the shower, only stares at the water like he's never seen it before.
"You're wasting water," Flux says, because of course it's the first thing he thinks to say.
Saps ignores him. Flux reaches out and turns off the water. The sudden silence seems to surprise Saps, because he shakes his head a little, as if dazed. His shirt is a little wet from the spray. There's a steady drip drip drip as the water slows and stops.
For a moment both of them stand there in silence, and all Flux can think is this is wrong. This isn't how it's meant to be, between them both. He wants to take Saps's shoulders and shake him. He wants to find the power button and switch it off and on again so he can see clarity and light in those warm eyes again, because maybe this was all some sort of weird glitch or dream or he's been transported into some alternate universe where this Saps isn't his Saps and he just needs to find the right door to walk through or button to press or side of the bed to wake up on and he'll be back to his world again, the right one, where he isn't stuck in this terrible stagnant purgatory and he can feel all right again.
He doesn't go to work that day. He sits with Saps on the couch and talks. He talks about their friends, about college, about first dates, about the six months of waiting alone at home. He isn't sure if Saps hears any of it. He turns on the TV and they watch some unfunny reality show, then the weather forecast, then a nature documentary about fungi that reminds him too sharply of everything so he immediately turns the TV off and goes to make dinner. Saps is still sitting on the couch when he returns. His eyes stare, intently, at the darkened television screen. Flux feels himself going a little insane when he lifts the spoonful of soup to Saps's mouth. But Saps drinks and swallows and it seems like it'll be alright again when he takes the spoon from Flux's hand but then it clatters onto the floor and leaves an orange soup-colored stain on the carpet and just keeps staring like he hasn't heard anything at all. The world is buzzing all around Flux, too loud and too quiet all at once, the awfulness of the noise, or the lack of noise, finally catching up to him, and he opens his mouth to say something or scream or yell or anything but nothing comes out.
He doesn't go to work the next day either. He hasn't charged his phone in two days and it's passively losing battery and he can't find it in him to care when Saps is staring at a framed picture of the two of them, at some dinner party some years past, both a little tipsy and grinning at the camera. Saps looks at it with an unreadable expression on his face.
"You," he says, when Flux approaches him. He's pointing. "That's you."
It's maybe the most words he's spoken at once in the last few days, and Flux feels like passing out.
Then Saps moves his finger to himself in the photo. His face is blank again.
Flux waits.
The photo falls out of Saps's hand. The frame splinters on the ground.
He doesn't laugh anymore.
It feels like something so inconceivable. Like the sun not rising or the ocean drying up or the moon disappearing. Like something that shouldn't be possible. Like Flux has somehow lived through the apocalypse and is still alive even as everything that should be essential for life is gone.
It doesn't come all at once. It comes like sleep, creeping up on him. Then it slams into him like waves, crashing down on him over and over. He misses Saps. He misses him even as he sees him in the house, even as he spends every waking moment next to him, guiding — or following — him through the motions of living. Saps hasn't laughed ever since he came back. He's barely even smiled. He's physically there, but it's like he no longer occupies the spaces he used to. Flux crams himself into corners so Saps can fit, but all that leads to is a house that feels too hollow, too empty. Like both of them are treading on negative space to make room for the other.
There is no laughter. There is no music. They fall asleep on the couch listening to the fungus documentary, about spores that take over a host until it's a moving corpse.
"I'm worried about you."
Thomas is so direct it almost makes Flux wince. He'd charged his phone for the first time in four days and found several missed calls and messages. He only opened one, because looking at everything else would have given him a worse headache than he already had. They're sitting outside a cafe, neither one touching his drink.
"I'm fine," he lies, knowing it's unconvincing.
Thomas waits for him to elaborate, and when he doesn't, sighs. "You look tired as hell."
"I'm managing."
"Are you?"
"Will you stop psychoanalyzing me?"
"God forbid I worry that you're not taking care of yourself." Thomas begins to speak, then hesitates. "How is—"
Flux cuts him off. "I don't want to talk about Saps."
"But is he—"
"He's fine." The he in question has not left the house in nearly two weeks.
Thomas looks like he wants to speak again, but thinks better of it. "Has Ish reached out to you at all?"
Flux scowls. "No. I don't have a goddamn clue where the guy is. I've tried texting, calling, emailing, showing up at his office — the guy's dropped off the face of the earth." It's a little vindicating, at least, to be able to complain to someone who listens and nods sympathetically. "It's like he doesn't even care that Saps is— that he's—"
He cuts himself off. Saps is what, exactly? Not himself. Different. An alien. But it's like no one else even knows or sees or cares.
Thomas reaches out and covers one of his hands with his own and it's only then that Flux realizes he's been shaking. Thomas doesn't understand. But his palm is warm and they stay like that for a while, neither one speaking, until Flux's pulse stops racing and his breathing evens out again.
Flux swears that Saps is getting paler by the day.
He was already pale, from his skin to his hair, but whether it's from not being under sunlight or barely eating or staying still for so long, it's like he's gotten paler, like the blush has left his cheeks and the color from his lips and even his eyes seem to have dulled. Flux is almost afraid to touch him, in case he bruises from the contact.
"Eat," he urges. But Saps just sits there. Sometimes he speaks. Most of the time he doesn't. He just sits, still as a statue, and like a weeping angel Flux will turn around and he'll have gone, back to the living room to stare at the dark TV screen or into the bedroom to lie stiffly on the bed or in front of the bathroom mirror making empty eye contact with his reflection or by a window to gaze solemnly outside.
He drifts, from place to place, like a ghost, like a shadow. He's noiseless as he moves, and sometimes Flux feels like if he's not careful he'll pass right through him.
"I hate that they won't even tell you how long you'll be gone."
Saps had given an apologetic smile. "Well, that's work in this field. It's always unpredictable. Sometimes a story wraps up in just a month. Sometimes it takes two years. Well—" He winces. "Hopefully it doesn't take two years. I'll really miss you, you know. I'll start whispering it to the cameras after I go crazy from you withdrawal. Then they'll broadcast the doc all over the world and everyone will know how absolutely insane I was just waiting to go home. And then it would really be bad for the brand, and Ish would probably fire me, and then I'd be out of a job and we'd be homeless but at least I wouldn't have to be gone for years at a time."
Flux had rolled his eyes. "You ramble whenever you have something you want to say. Spit it out."
"Fine— fine! But it's not, like, some huge secret or anything. I'm just— stalling saying goodbye. I guess. I don't know. I took so much time off for the wedding, and the honeymoon, and everything, and it was all just such a mess, and now they're having me go super far out of country again and it just feels weird this time now that, I don't know, now that I know for sure you're here waiting for me. Like I'm going to war or something. But that's stupid. 'Cus I've left you behind so many times and you're always here waiting for me when I come back, and it's not like I haven't gone to farther places, or for definitively longer periods of time, but it feels more… serious now." He was rambling again. It was so endearing.
"Then we don't have to say goodbye," Flux said. He didn't know why he'd indulged Saps. But his heart was aching, much in the same way, though he would have never admitted it. "Just— see you soon. I'll be waiting here, don't you worry."
Saps had grinned. His smile always felt like it was splitting open the whole sky. "See you soon."
Flux rolls over in bed. It's late at night, the sort of dead hours where it almost doesn't even feel like time is moving.
Saps's eyes are open. They're glassy, like an animal's.
"I hate you," Flux whispers.
"No, you don't," Saps replies. His voice is flat. His gaze is vacant.
"No, I don't," Flux says. Then he turns around and closes his eyes before they can begin to moisten.