Chapter Text
“Thank you again,” Jessie told the man.
“It’s not a problem,” he said. “You’re paying.”
I caught her nod out of the corner of my eye before his hand, and the tool he was holding, got in the way again. It had cooled down some with the evening’s arrival, and I was quite acutely aware of the breeze on the currently-open wound on my face. Predictably, the local anesthetics had done absolutely fuck-all.
I absentmindedly drummed my fingers on the bench I was sat on. I had been banned from talking, because it would move my face, so I didn’t have much to do but listen and think. Pain aside, it was sort of serene. There weren’t too many people waiting for the late train, but there was background chatter. The train would get here when it got here. The sky was darkened, there were crickets chirping in the bushes. Jessie was standing next to me.
“This should be the last bit,” the man said. I felt him stop poking around and pull out another bit of bone, or cartilage, or whatever it was, with the tweezers. His tweezing hand withdrew, while his other hand daubed some blood with gauze. I watched as he set the bloody chip down in his little rectangular steel basin. Then he set the tweezers back in his briefcase and fetched something else.
The briefcase lay open on the bench next to me, full of shiny tools and reagents. Traveling doctor. I’d spotted him on the platform for the transfer to the sleeper train, we’d propositioned.
There were a few chnk-chnk-chnks from the tool he was now holding, and I felt little needle impacts around one side of the flesh. ‘Flesh’ was really all I could identify it as, although I assumed it was coming together into something decent.
Then he set that aside so he could open up a jar of red powder. I took the opportunity to speak. “Make sure it doesn’t come out crooked,” I said.
“Of course,” he said.
“Of course,” Jessie said. “We don’t need you getting any more crooked than you already are.”
The doctor gave her a bit of an odd look, but, having mixed the powder with a bit of liquid, began to apply it by means of swab.
It maybe wasn’t the best joke to make, given that we’d come to him with an injury you could really only get through giving someone a reason to punch you in the face. And that people generally didn’t trust my face, even when it was in good condition.
Judging by the awkward, almost silent throat-clear she made, she knew that, and really hadn’t been able to help herself. I couldn’t help but smile to myself.
It didn’t take too much longer after that for my nose to be fixed up. There was a period where it felt a way I could only think to describe as goopy, like I didn’t even have a nose, just goop. There was some new bone he stuck into the goop. There was a little bit of sculpting, and some new skin that Jessie promised matched my tone enough sewn on with tiny thread. There was cream put on top of that. And eventually, he packed his briefcase away, Jessie handed over a few Crown dollars, and the train pulled in. A boxy, wooden-and-metal thing, with Leyden tanks as whole cars in the back.
I poked Jessie in the side as we queued up in the short line, behind a woman with children and ahead of an older gent. “Do I look right?”
“It looks fine,” she said, without looking down. We shuffled forward, bags in hand.
“Is that all? It looks fine?”
“Over your nerves and back to being a pest, Sy?”
“I am not,” I said. “You would not believe how sweaty I am right now.”
The crickets filled in the silence really perfectly. Another shuffle forward.
“Ha,” I said. “Ha ha. Kidding.”
“Uh huh,” Jessie said.
“Unless,” I ventured. “You like when boys are sweaty? Then I’m not kidding.”
Jessie glanced down. I regretted it the moment I said it, shrinking down a little and flashing a nervous grin. She didn’t particularly look like she liked it.
She exhaled in amusement, not quite a snort. “I think I owe you an apology,” she said.
We stepped up onto the train. It had a decent interior, with a nice rug covering the wooden floor and patterned brown-and-gold fabric on the seats. The rest was typical–wooden paneling in general, steel reinforcements, and voltaic wiring throughout to power the interior and augment the steam propulsion. Jessie presented our tickets to the stitched at the check.
“An apology?” I whispered, once we were past. We were headed farther back, where the sleeper cars were.
“I knew you were nervous,” she said. “I thought it was fun to watch you squirm a little, honestly. Felt like what goes around coming around. But I didn’t know you were that nervous. I should have spoken up. Sorry. I feel like a heel that I didn’t.”
I’d meant to say “It’s okay,” but instead I sighed, “It’s no fair.”
“No fair?”
“You always see past almost all my fibs–”
“Fibs. What a quaint way to put it.”
“But you’re all mysterious. You’re always one of the hardest people for me to read. It’s not fair that I’m sweating and you’re all casually put-together.”
And she was put-together. Every time I’d glanced over, I’d been treated to a look at a girl who I would’ve never thought could have existed.
Truthfully, though my complaints were real feelings, I was playing it up a tinge out of melodrama. I couldn't say I was really unhappy, when that girl was next to me.
“Sy,” Jessie said. She stopped with her hand on the sliding door to our compartment to say it. “I’ve spent the past six months thinking I had a five-percent chance with you, at most, and it’s not fair that you have to feel a little flustered?”
“Well, maybe–wait, why would it be five-percent, and not zero?”
“That’s besides the point, Sy.”
“Fine. It is fair. But I don’t like it.”
She slid the door open, and we stepped into the little double roomette. “You’re such a rotten little prick, Sy.”
At that, I shamelessly grinned.
Seeing it, Jessie raised a hand to jab or shove at me, but I raised my own and caught it, pushing it back. When she raised her other, I caught that one, too.
Fingers intertwined, we pushed at each other for a few moments, neither making real headway. Only then did Jessie smile back.
I grinned wider, laughing a little. “Ahaha.”
She shoved me, and I fell back against the wall, laughing harder.
“Pest,” she said. I could hear her smiling, too, even as she turned to put her bag up.
“Hey,” I realized. I threw my hands up in the air. “Air-con!” I cheered.
“Shh,” Jessie said. “It's late. Manners.”
I put my hands up again, slowly, as if I were moving underwater. “Air conditioning,” I cheered quietly.
“Air conditioning,” Jessie agreed genially. “And your bag, please.”
She was still smiling, and I thought that was so lovely. “Bag, ma’am,” I agreed.
I handed it over so she could stow it up on the shelf hanging over the beds. But for one low-humming voltaic light on the ceiling, it was dim.
It was quiet, too, I now noticed. The most prominent noises were only the train beginning to move along the tracks, and Jessie and I’s low voices. If I listened, I could hear low chatter from people settling into other parts of the train. The distance of it made it suddenly very strikingly obvious that I was alone with Jessie, the two of us cordoned off by the thin sliding door.
Jessie was lifting the mattresses to check for bugs. I moved to help. After we confirmed both were clean, we set them back down.
On the way here, we’d gone easy on my heart, mainly talking about the relevant minutia of the trip. If not for what the trip was for, it could have passed as being like any conversation we’d had before–a smooth flow of teases, albeit one where we both seemed brighter than usual. We’d held hands on the first train, a quiet, private little thing that I’d smiled over as we stared out opposite windows. There had been something humming between us.
Somehow, I thought it was the sort of memory that might stick with me for a long, long time.
“So,” I said, raising the subject remarkably belatedly. I nudged my shoes off using the toes of my other foot. The air in the room felt quietly charged. “We're sharing a room.”
A bed, really. Although there were two mattresses, they were laid side-by-side, no real space between them. They each had their own set of burgundy bedding, but it wasn't tucked in, so you could lay in either direction you chose–head near the other's feet, or head near the other's head. I could mentally place our heads side-by-side there.
“Is the bed too much?” Jessie asked. She was eyeing it with a hesitancy that reminded me of what I'd seen from her earlier in the day. Something in her eyes distrusting the thing she wanted being in reach.
“No,” I said.
I'd told Lillian it, earlier, if I remembered correctly. That for the past year, I had been waking up reaching for her, reaching for a Lamb that wasn't there.
When Jessie and I had first moved into our separate rooms at our orphanage, I had missed our one-room. I thought how much I missed it might have been part of why that apartment was what my mind kept going back to when I tried to imagine our most golden days. I hadn't slept as well when I couldn't hear Jessie snore at night, when I couldn't look across the room and find myself consoled by her silent form under the covers. In the orphanage, on the nights I couldn't sleep, I couldn't find my reassurance just in knowing she was there while I maintained my tools or practiced my lockpicking.
“No,” I said. “I'd like to be under those covers with you right now more than anything.”
She smiled in a soft, earnest way that made me want it ten times more.
It was odd how natural it felt to strip down to my undershorts. I didn't feel like it might be the end of the world, anymore. I just wanted to be in bed, finding out how Jessie liked to cuddle. My hands were steady as I unbuttoned, shucked my shirt aside, unbuckled. “Remember when you used to throw slippers at me for being underdressed?” I asked. The train was rattling along the tracks.
“I do,” Jessie said. She was watching, her new nightgown waiting in her crossed arms.
I dropped my pants to kick them aside on the floor. “Why did you do that, anyway?”
“Boundaries,” she said, very simply. I was keenly aware of her eyes locked on me.
When I turned to face her, wearing only my undershorts, she met my eyes. The voltaic light shining through its grate left panels of yellow across her face, like a windowpane. There was something unspoken between us, something saying that there wasn't any pressure, but she was appraising, and her appraisal was the most natural thing in the world. I didn't mind the vulnerability of what outlines she might be able to see, of the cool air on my skin.
A part of me briefly debated asking what she thought, but I didn't want to break that natural silence. I slipped into the bed instead, and flicked the lightswitch off, dampening the room in night-blue. I patted the sheets next to me, smiling.
“Okay,” she said.
But she hesitated, not moving.
I realized that she really wasn't smiling, anymore, and peace had suddenly left her face. She looked small, uncertain, askew in the blue darkness.
“I can turn around,” I offered. “I know how it is.”
“It's not that,” she said. “It's just…”
Uncharacteristically, she cut the sentence early. She was silent for a long moment, trying to put her words together.
“Earlier,” she said at last, voice quieter without the humming of the light. “When you said you were thinking things you could never tell me about. You were thinking of doing…?”
Her halting inflection on doing made it an action in itself, not something to fill in a blank after. Really only asking that I had been thinking of doing things, taking actions, not yet asking what those actions might have been.
“Yes,” I answered truthfully.
She swallowed visibly. I could see her Adam's apple bob. “Doing what?”
I paused for a moment while I thought. “All sorts of things,” I confessed. “Until I found what worked.”
It was strange to see her with this posture, with how she held the gown protectively to herself. “It's not what you're thinking,” she said. “It's just.”
Tentatively, she set the gown aside on the window sill.
Then she pulled the sweater off, letting it gather at her wrists. Her shoulders hunched, hiding her torso. She gathered it awkwardly, folding it and setting it on the window sill.
Chest rising with an inhale, she stiffly brought her arms back to her sides, showing herself, all of the scars. Then, as if in an afterthought, she shucked down her skirt, leaving herself bare to the world but for a pair of plain navy-blue knickers. Her face was steely, but something in her eyes was sad.
“It’s just something that I've known,” she said. “Doctors and other experiments don't flinch. But people don't find this attractive. It's not…me being hard on myself, or some kind of self-hatred or insecurity, it's just a fact I've known. It's a fact I've known for a long time."
“Jessie,” I said.
“I could tell you what works. But Sy,” she said, and then she didn't know what else to say.
“Jessie,” I repeated. I held out my arms. “Shush. Come here.”
She did, after a moment. She crawled onto the bed, arms and legs moving carefully, the metal frame creaking. Her gaze didn't break from my eyes, but she now looked unsteady.
Smoothly, carefully so as not to startle her, I set my hands on the cool skin of her shoulders. Knowing that she was searching for my reaction made that sense of odd calm wash over me once more. I looked her over.
It was a body I'd seen time and time again over my years. I could remember Jamie in the chair, young and afraid, folded over himself, those metal snakes spiraling from his back and dwarfing his presence. Again and again, as he grew used to his throne, but never quite grew into himself.
Jessie on the day she entered the world, blank and staring, unable to comprehend her own nakedness. Jessie when I had cut the ravage out. Jessie with her pale torso convulsing on the stretcher, chest heaving as voltaic currents burned new scars into her. That was when her heart had stopped, and I'd said to Marv in a low voice, Fix it or I'll kill you.
I ran my thumb across that voltaic scar’s starting point, the glossy, smooth surface from which the rest branched like lightning. Jessie was breathing so quietly it was like she was holding it.
I started there, leaning down and pressing a kiss to it. I held my lips there for a moment. Simply breathing. Simply feeling the press of her skin against my lips, and letting her feel my lips against her.
I moved onto the others next, the knife scars. Some were only a few inches long, some spanned nearly the length of her shoulder. Some were more faded than others. Some were messier, raised. All spots where the ravage had been taken out. I pressed a kiss to each, my hands clasped gently around her upper arms.
A kiss for the tiny, pale one you could barely see.
A kiss for the worst one along her collarbone, my lips dragging softly across the length of it.
A long kiss for the circular scar at her bad shoulder, the area where Marv had punched out a whole chunk of flesh the ravage had taken deep root in.
Kisses at all the dozens-odd scars that marked her shoulders alone. I counted them in my head: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Twenty-two, twenty-three. The train rolled on, and I kissed.
She was breathing deeper by the time I reached the last one, unsteady, her shoulders taut with something like disbelief. I raised my head up, catching beneath her chin with a finger.
Ever so slowly, so slightly, I raised it. Tilting her head up so I could see the vertical scar that started at her neck.
She let me. Our eyes met.
“Sy,” she said.
I set my other hand on the scar’s starting point, tracing it down to where it stopped at her sternum. Neat, thick, raised. A rope of things she needed for the Caterpillar project, corded neural tissue or bits of specialized nerves. At roughly equidistant points along it, horizontal scars branched off, each one carefully placed along contours.
“Do you think this counts as only one? Or does it need a kiss at each section,” I murmured.
A moment passed, and I heard Jessie's breaths.
“Each section,” came her quiet reply.
“That's what I thought, too,” I said. “Would you lay down a little?”
And she did, slowly, as if not to break a spell. She settled against the pillow, legs stretched tentatively out on the covers, propped up by her elbows where she could watch. The faintest lighting from the moon caught in her glasses lens. I thought she looked like something out of a painting.
And so, I did as she said. A kiss at each branch, the central stem, and the branch on the other side. The scars that traced along the undersides of her collarbones. The scars that crawled across her chest, close to her soft, pink nipples. The scars that curled forth from the bottom of her sternum. I kept my hands wrapped around her, sliding down inch by careful inch as I went. I kissed like the world was timeless. I kissed like the world was the skin of this girl against my lips.
Then, just as carefully designed, empty space from the bottom of her sternum to just below her belly button. Where a doctor might one day want to slice into, get at her organs, left free and clear. Where the doctors had, when Jamie was hurt.
My hands slid down. From chest to waist. I let my faint breath land on the naked flesh of her stomach. I saw it respond, tensing, bare and bated. Beneath her belly button, the vertical scar picked back up. It had one more pair of those branches, and then it disappeared beneath her panties.
When I reached it, I pressed a slow kiss. One after another, on the branch, the central node, the other branch. Those timeless kisses. My hands slid down, from waist to hips.
As my fingertips touched the waistline of her knickers, I looked up for permission. I was on my stomach, by then, resting against her legs, my own dangling off the bed. I found that permission in the look on her face, in her fractional nod.
I hooked my thumbs between the soft fabric and the muscle of her thighs. Smoothly, gently, I pulled them down. The scar terminated there, trailing to a point at the lower end of where her genitals would have been.
I opened her thighs, so gently the movement was of her own accord, only guided, until I could see the slight curves of her ass pressed against the covers. Something in me stirred, but only so softly, saying Later, later, but isn't she beautiful. I moved my head down, and I kissed the scar. I kissed it twice, letting my lips linger and drag. I heard her breath hitch. And then, as smoothly as I had taken them down, I guided her panties back up.
I didn't look up again before I slid back, reaching her calves and her feet. The last places I knew to have scars, ones I had spent an agonizing hour giving her. The ravage had been surface-level, there. Each scar was small, faded into tiny white lines. I took her leg up in my hands, bowing down as I lifted, meeting her leg halfway for the careful search.
There were dozens, small as they were. I started at the top of her left calf, making my way down with a kiss on each. The act felt hypnotic, kneeling there. There was nothing in my mind but the one task, remembering each and every scar, kissing each one through the thin hair on her legs. I turned her legs enough to catch the ones on the sides, on her ankles. When that would have been uncomfortable for her, I turned and bent my own torso instead, tipping my head. I kissed the three scars on the sole of her left foot, the five on her right. I kissed them like I was kissing her lips. This was the body that held the people I loved most.
It felt like snapping out of a trance, when I finally pulled back. A haze. No, the haze still held. I still held her foot in my hands when I met her eyes across the bed. The clouds had moved, or the train had moved past the clouds, and the full moonlight draped and settled in all the bumps and crevices of her body.
“Sy,” she whispered, quieter than anything.
“Will you turn over?” I whispered back.
And she did, slowly flipping onto her front, as if she felt the trance, too, and didn't want to break it.
On the back of her calves, more of those same little scars. I slipped silently off the bed, lowering myself down, and kissed each of those. Left, then right, top, then bottom. Each scar covered.
I moved out of order, then, starting back at the top. I got back onto the bed. I crawled carefully up to her shoulders, straddling her back without placing weight on it. There were ravage scars there, too, the same as her front. Burns and massive cuts I traced my fingers along.
Most prominently, there was the most important Caterpillar scar of all, the ridge of tissue down her spine. It was raised, starting at her nape, ending at the small of her back, with five metal outlets three-quarters of an inch in diameter buried along it. Insertion points. The scar looked as if it had grown around them. The top two had drifted out of place slightly, with the scar there being cut through and re-scarred, turning into a jumble of gnarled tissue in every spot the ravage had grown, every spot a knife or a current had been taken to her. Two more insertion points, curved slots, were nestled beneath her hair, tracing the hairline.
Then, lower down her spine, in the areas untouched by the ravage, there were the same horizontal branches as on her front. I knew there were lobes of brain tissue in or beneath some of the scars, although I didn't know where, beyond those she had mentioned in her shoulders. I knew there was metal embedded deep in her spine, current conductors, fine-tuners, things that made her stiff in the cold and sometimes slower than she'd like to be.
I kissed all of it. I swept her hair up and kissed the highest slots, my hands cradling her head. I kissed the spots on her neck and back where the scars were thickest. I kissed the two ruined insertion points, where the machine could never go again. I kissed the ones that still worked. I kissed each Caterpillar branch. I kissed the thinnest points. I kissed the knife marks. I kissed every offshoot on the voltaic lightning marks. I kissed, and I kissed, and I kissed, until every stroke on that canvas of scars had been kissed. My arms were around her, pulling her into me. My forehead was pressed against the highest insertion point, my lips against the scar, my nose tucked where scar met skin. I held her like that. Her hair draped down in front of her, tickling and brushing against my forearms.
We sat like that for a moment, silent but for the sound of the train on the tracks, but for her breathing. Hitching, not quite right.
“Did I miss any?” I asked gently.
It took another moment for her to reply. In the silence of the room, I heard a quiet, quiet sniffle, barely audible over the train.
“No,” she said.
It was then that I turned her face to me. “Are you crying?” I asked, still gentle.
Her lip quivered. I caught a tear running slowly down her cheek. She was flushed. “No,” she said.
I stroked her back, hand rubbing gently across her shoulderblades.
She hid her face in a pillow, after that. I laid down next to her and held her. A part of me expected her to break into tears, but she didn't. Her back didn't heave. I didn't hear any sobs, no muffled cries or sniffles. She only laid very still, with her face buried in the pillow, and I held her.
It was maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, when suddenly, she turned and kissed me. The force of it pushed me back against my pillow and the bedding, passionate, waking me right back up in one bewildered instant, her arms thrown around me even before I processed what was happening. And then, feeling the weight of her body on mine, our lips interlocking, I did understand, like a burning strike of lightning to my brain and my body. And I grabbed her and I kissed her back, every ounce of feeling that had been building over the day suddenly bursting out of me.
And then, as suddenly as she had come onto me, she rolled away. I was propping myself up when she snatched her nightgown off the sill, and, fixing her glasses back on her face, swiftly tugged it on.
There was a resolute look on her face as she turned back around, determinedly fixing the nightgown’s lay. It was a sleek, breezy, blue thing, minimalist for summer’s heat, blending her in with the darkness like a slinky shadow.
“Wow,” I said, like an idiot.
And then the bed squeaked, and she crashed back into me. Her glasses smashed against my face, going askew, and my heart pounded and pounded, and we kissed and we kissed, legs intertwined like we were the same creature, my fingers tracing over her scars, and I realized I was on my back, and her knee was jammed between my legs, and she was an inch from my face looking at me with want, and I had the sudden fuzzy thought, This is definitely not decent, my brain sparing a glance at the thinness of the door, but I knew exactly where this was going, we both did, and there was nothing I wanted more than to take her gown right back off–or, no, I realized only a half second later, my hands sliding up beneath it, we would only hike it up instead, and it would be the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
☙
“I feel like–”
I stopped for no particular reason, looking up at her from where I lay sprawled half at her side, halfway on top of her. We were on a blanket on the floor. Her hair was stuck to her shoulders with sweat, and she was still red-faced, breathing heavily.
“I feel like I've had a hole in me,” I explained in a low whisper. “Ever since I left the Lambs. A hole in my heart. And you've been doing your best to fill it with just you, but even still, it was only…twenty-five percent or so, maybe. We were holding each other at a distance. I could only have part of you. But now…having all of you, if we can be like this, I feel like it's sixty, seventy percent filled in. I feel better.”
“What?” she said. “No. You filled my hole, Sy.”
I propped myself up. “I'm being serious!”
She laughed silently.
“I'm telling you about my heart!”
She grinned. “I love you, Sylvester.”
“You're my biggest piece, Jessie,” I said simply.
But she was so integral, so critical to me that I felt not even those words could explain the truth of it.
I handled this by abruptly jabbing and tickling her in the stomach.
This led to a tumultuous wrestling session that ended in me bonking my head against the wall as Jessie pinned me down, and then we shared a moment of concern at the noise through eye contact before we both began to crack up as quietly as we could. The two of us heaped in a pile of nakedness and sweat and freedom. It felt so good to be touching and playing and wrestling with this body again. It felt so good.