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He climbed.
Hand over hand, knees gripping the weave of the curtain, heels tangled in the fabric as the sequins of his corset caught and tore free with soft, expensive little sounds as they fell down to the stage below. Each sequin flashed once in the lights before vanishing into the dark, like tiny pieces of him being shed, discarded, already forgotten. The fabric burned against his bare thighs as his manicured nails dug into the heavy velvet.
The stage lights were still hot. Still white. Still holding to the fiction that this was only a number, that in a moment the lights would come up full and there would be applause and someone would hand him a robe and he would take his bow. Past them there was only the dark of the flies, and the small, humiliating fact that the roof of this place was not high enough to take him anywhere at all.
He was not ready.
The thought arrived without elegance, without the usual flourish he gave even his most private agonies. He had rehearsed better lines than that for smaller occasions, but the thought was blunt and childish and just plain true. He was not ready. The night had been perfect - his night, his design, his little puppets moving exactly as he had wanted them to move - and now the machinery of the universe was trying to close the curtain early. It wasn't his time, this wasn't what he had planned.
He could still taste champagne on his tongue, still feel the residual heat of bodies against his own, still hear the exact pitch of the applause that had almost, almost sounded like the adoration he'd always craved. Almost. Always almost. The almost was the part that hurt worst. The almost was the space where hope lived and died in the same breath.
Why couldn't he stay?
He liked it here on Earth.
Here on Earth the air was thick with oxygen and cheap perfume and the specific electricity of an audience that had come wanting to be shocked and had gotten, instead, exactly what they didn't know they wanted. Appalled and enthralled in the same breath.
Here on Earth he had built a man out of spare parts and a tank full of amniotic fluid and watched those borrowed eyes open for the first time - bright eyes that asked nothing of him yet, that hadn't learned yet to want anything but what he offered. He had liked that best of all, if he was being honest with himself. Not the desire. The innocence of it.
Here on Earth the nights were long enough to contain every performance he had ever rehearsed in the cold reaches between stars.
Here on Earth he had perfected the art of the entrance, the art of the reveal, the art of making an entire room hold its breath while he decided what to do with their attention.
He had found himself here, on Earth, and here he did not want to leave.
The curtain swayed. Far below, the floor of the stage looked soft and very far away. His ears had filled with a low electric static. Frank’s arms shook. Sweat ran through the powder on his face in thin bright tracks and pooled at the corners of his painted mouth, and he could smell himself now under the greasepaint - the metallic tang of the lab that never quite washed out, the animal, unglamorous smell of a body drowning in fear, and under that, fainter, something like ozone.
He climbed higher. Higher, higher, and higher, until there was nowhere to go.
The castle was a stage and the stage was a trap and the trap had always been waiting, waiting out the whole performance, letting him take his bows, only closing once the house had emptied. Even knowing that, his hands kept climbing. Still his hands kept moving. Still his body, this ridiculous, beautiful, temporary body he had perfected through sheer unwillingness to be ordinary and then offered it to the world, it refused the ending written for it. He had spent so long making this body into a statement. Every curve, every sequin, every carefully chosen shade of lipstick had been a declaration: Look at me. See what I have made of myself. See the art. And the world had looked. The world had gasped and laughed and wanted. But it had never quite seen, not yet.
He was not ready to die.
The fear coursing through his veins was not elegant either. It was hot and immediate and firmly lodged itself somewhere behind his sternum, a second heart beating out of time. Running out of time. He could feel it in the tips of his fingers, in the soles of his feet, in the soft vulnerable place at the base of his throat.
He thought of the inventions left unfinished in his lab. The dreams yet to be brought into reality. He thought of the songs that had never quite found the right key. He thought of Rocky’s face in the final moments of the floor show - open, uncomprehending, still somehow his.
Frank thought of the way the Earth had smelled the first time he stepped onto it: wet soil and gasoline and the promise that somewhere, someone might look at him and see the artist he was. The soil had been dark and rich and full of living things that did not care what planet he came from. The gasoline had been sharp and chemical and human - the smell of engines and movement and the particular restlessness of a species that had not yet learned how to leave its own gravity well. And underneath both, there had been that promise. That quiet, stubborn hope that this place might be different. That here, among the cigarettes and the cheap champagne and the audiences that wanted to be shocked, he might finally be allowed to stay. That he might finally be allowed to find himself.
Please.
The word arrived without sound and without an audience for once, which was its own small tragedy. Please, one more curtain call. Please, let the house lights stay down a little longer. Please let this not yet be the part where they turn the lights up and make everyone go home.
Below him, behind him, something sang.
It was a sound that belonged to the cold places between stars, the places he had left behind, the places that had never understood the point of sequins or champagne or the particular joy of making something beautiful simply because it could be made.
The laser's charge was a high, thin note, felt more than heard, threading through his teeth and the soft places behind his eyes, and for one absurd half-second some reflexive, incorrigible part of him reached for the correct response to any note that pitched - hit your mark, hold for it, let it land clean.
His hands tightened on the curtain until there was nothing left to tighten. A single drop of sweat left his brow and fell the whole long distance to the boards, and he watched it go, and it occurred to him, distantly, that it was the last thing on that stage that still belonged only to him.
He had never once been happy anywhere but inside these walls.
Outside these walls the universe was vast and cold and full of rules that had no room for creatures who wanted to be looked at, who wanted to be loved for the things they made, who wanted the simple, devastating mercy of being allowed to stay. Outside these walls he was only an exile, a freak, a temporary visitor who had overstayed his welcome. Inside these walls he had been an artist. A creator. A man who built life from nothing.
He did not want to go.
The sound of the laser firing was clean, and short, and entirely without the mercy of a longer note - a single bright syllable in a language that did not require translation, that every living thing on every world understood the first time it was spoken to them.
The language of violence.
Pain bloomed between his shoulder blades, precise as a lover's last touch, a kiss goodbye delivered red-hot and without warning. It was hotter than the lights. Hotter than the champagne in his blood. Hotter than the first moment Rocky’s heart had started under his hands. The heat spread outward in a widening circle, claiming more of him with every fraction of a second.
His hands loosened on the curtain.
The velvet slid through his fingers like water. The sequins that remained caught the light one last time. The stage floor rose to meet him, soft and very far away and entirely inevitable.
He fell.