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The moment the futility of their condition becomes impossible for B to endure is when he finds A slumped over in the corner of his bedroom, taken down in the act of pacing, possibly regretting the empty amber bottle and the three remaining capsules crushed underneath the soles of his trainers, staining the rug with blue # 3.
It’s easy to say fuck it until it comes upon you in high definition reality. Foam at the edges of a mouth and blue lips and you wonder if you’re imagining the inflation of thoracic cavity and the gentle struggle of a heart underneath. You don’t look at the numbers. They are not a factor. You do what you do, fuck it all.
That’s what B operates under. He will do what he will do and most of the time it’s only the bare minimum when in the service of others though he will move heaven and earth to get what he wants for himself.
Same rules apply here. this slab of meat falls under his jurisdiction. It doesn’t matter what the numbers say because B says that this one is his and no one is taking him, it’s not a thing that is feasible.
“You’re wonderful to have around for the unsavory business,” A said to him once. They were in their Anatomy module and B was elbows deep in a corpse, shredded bits of cirrhotic liver in between his gloved fingers. “If we ever need to resort to selling human organs, I want you on my team.”
It was a joke but it’s true, B never flinches from the sordid human tragedies. Everyone rots, slowly, quickly and everyone dies.
Like objects thrown into trash compactors, crushed up in neat little cubes or more aggressively, burned into dry little remnants and then mostly ignored. Carbon, basic amnesiac elements. He watched this boy in one of his other care homes die and then they all put half-rotten flowers on a sad little frozen grave and they all whispered terrified things to each other when B didn’t cry he just asked if the dead boy was in hell now because he’d never been baptized.
Even before that, his mother. He told Different versions of the story: she jumped in front of a train, he watched her get decapitated, the police having to fish her head out from under the train, stuff the remains in a black bag like discount garbage meat cuts. He found her in the bath, slit wrists, too much of a masochist to run the water at all, just naked but for dried sheets of blood, viscous and fake looking because he’d never seen it before.
She blew her brains out in a car and he never saw it they just told him the story later on and he never could act surprised because he warned her every time he told her that there were too many zeros, mummy. Please be careful. In every version, she looks through him, eyes glitching like she has no battery left and maybe he’s delusional enough to imagine that she smiles sadly at him but no she probably didn’t. Her mouth was slack and paralyzed from the moment he first met her as an infant like he’d induced muscle death from the inside. She was a walking corpse.
He was born of death for the life of an amused spectator. Nobody knows the trouble he’s seen or that he has no sorrow. A life of acute awareness of expiration dates and the demystification of bone marrow and the human heart. No romantic shit; life is one cold algorithm of decay.
B kneels down at his side. His own face feels numb as if from frostbite but the skin his fingers touch beneath him is warm. He leans over, aligns his ear to the slack mouth (desperate he can’t say he didn’t feel this coming the kiss was too desperate, pathetic, no preamble just diversion) and feels the soft sway of air. Not dead yet. Just in time. Let him die, the voice says. Let him die he is not anything you need to concern yourself with. Let him die, assume his place don’t be stupid boy just play the game. It was all part of the trajectory, wasn’t it?
From the moment they’d met, B saw the enlarged heart and spirit at odds with the general moral degeneracy of their fated career. Years of gazing and wading into the abyss have been costly and the boy has withered and now it is his time. He’s ready. He yearns for it like a refuge. Weak. He disgusts B. So Let him die.
But he’s mine, B thinks in a very pragmatic fashion (stubborn, attached, stupid, stupid, stupid). And no one, nothing fucks with what’s his. Not even A. Not even fate. He curls long fingers around the dimpled chin, brings it down to regard fluttering eyelashes, weak gusts of air with his own cold stare (lockdown. Feels nothing, impose his will).
“Who told you you could leave,” he says, thumb tracing a lace of saliva down the side of A’s mouth. “You do not have my permission.” It would be merciful as A faces expulsion, the shame spiral of his decline, loneliness. The ugly face of their future and their myriad failures. The black hole within of no love, no hope, no life. Let him die. You can’t (won’t) give him what he wants. Let him die.
But B is not merciful. He saw this coming. In The anhedonia. Brain fog. No sleep, just endless pacing. Last night, inert, side by side, A ashamed that he couldn’t get it up not even sure that he wanted it. Dead fish kisses. Eyes alternately empty and crystalline with pain. Like his mother. He saw this coming. He’s prepared.
He reaches inside his pocket for the loaded syringe he’s kept on him for days, waiting since he found the bottle of Oxys in the false drawer in the nightstand. Let him die. It’s just borrowed time. He doesn’t look at the numbers because it doesn’t matter he’s a foolish Orpheus in this moment only more pathetic as simple self control will not save them in the end.
The game is rigged in all its possible endings but still, he stabs the needle through his skin. Once, then twice. They’ll have to go to the hospital but B wants to allow the screaming part of himself a moment to make itself known (selfish indulgent stupid fucker).
A opens his eyes, red, dry and he swallows, looks away, breathes consciously like it’s a bitter novelty. His lips move in aborted formations of simple, general questions like why and how.
“I know you,” B whispers, hand tender against the sweat stiff waves of light brown hair while he burns inside, chafes for unspecified violent retribution. Do not attempt to sever a connection without permission. You do not go alone.
A stares at him, eyes in and out of focus as if moving inward to outward and back again.
“That doesn’t mean anything.” Fine tremors seize A’s limbs. A terrible feeling or the injection, it’s unclear initially what the source is. “It won’t matter in the end.” Incomplete, not enough, inadequate.
The acute blunt force of those words confirms their trajectory.
B stands up, walks over to the phone to page the infirmary. Foolish to interfere, he tells himself coldly. The voices that susurrate underneath the protection, the casual detached violence are not to be listened to. You are mine though. You are. Ingrate. Should have let him die, better for us both. He looms, waits for the medics in silence, face carefully shuttered so as not to leave the impression of that there is anything human (vulnerable, fucked, invested, stupid) in the room at all.