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At the end of time, Greg thinks Lukas Matsson will still be around as the Earth’s solitary survivor, and the thought of this makes him want to vomit up the rest of his dinner that was far too expensive and didn’t taste that good to begin with anyway.
Between the start of the end of humanity, and the end itself, Lukas will probably emerge victorious over the rest of them because he’s an asshole, and Greg has since come to terms with the fact that assholes really do get everything in the end. Not all of them, but a large portion do. Lukas is probably already in kahoots with like, the Illuminati or aliens or whatever other bullshit organisation is going to lead to the Earth’s downfall, and as he grins his shit-eating grin and squeezes Tom’s arm following another meeting, Greg settles on maybe I’ll end up killing him first.
It is not a notion born out of jealousy, not in the orthodox way at least. It’s just, well, Tom hasn’t smiled at him in three days, and he’s not sure how much longer he can take it.
*
Tom usually hands out smiles like party favours; now more than ever, since he’s the Big Man in Charge butnotreally. It seems as though Greg must have been excluded from the guest list, because it’s going on six days without so much as a passing glance, an indication that he still fucking exists to him. He eats his lunch in his office alone, arbitrarily counting numbers in his head. They hold no meaning, but Greg has always had a thing for lists; Jedi, birds of Canada, and now, apparently, numbers. He makes it to two hundred and forty one when Tom knocks on the open door and walks in without Greg giving him a response.
“FYI—” he draws out each syllable with precision, all sing-song, eff-why-eye “—the Colbert decision’s been called off.”
“What? Why?”
“The cost of the acquisition greatly outweighs any future return. Like, we’d make money from it for sure, but not enough to justify the hassle.”
“Oh.” He’s not really looking Tom in the eye. He feels like a plant in need of light from a sun that keeps burning its leaves, yet can’t help but continue to face it anyway. “I guess that’s not so bad. It’s sort of a shitty little network anyway.”
Tom lowers his head, and he cocks it, all dog-like. Sometimes Greg feels like Tom stopped bringing him dead birds long ago; sometimes he feels like the bird itself, all limp and bloodstained in the dog’s mouth. “I thought you’d be happier.”
“Whatever benefits the company best is fine by me, dude—”
But Tom is fast, so much so that it is almost unsettling, and he makes these smooth and deliberate strides across the too small room and hauls Greg out of his seat, plants his mouth flush against his skin, kisses all dirty and aggressive and harbouring no affection in them at all. Greg wriggles against him — his belt is being unfastened by Tom and his hand that’s big and deft, the other one against the wall as Greg finds himself backed into the corner, pressed against his body. He writhes and he whimpers, counts his breaths, starts to list the First Generation Pokémon in his head. The hand makes its way into Greg’s pants, then his underwear, around his—
“Come on, come on, fucking stop it”, he protests.
“Do you know— just how long I’ve waited for this? Been a week, hasn’t it?”
More. He doesn’t know how long exactly, but it’s more. Everything always turns out to be more.
“Fucking Colbert”, Tom grits between his teeth. “Woulda had to go to Seattle for that. Woulda had to wait even longer.”
“At least close the door— the door Tom, please—”
Greg comes and cries out harshly when Tom goes for his neck and plants his mouth firmly on where the skin is its most pale; he feels himself deflate and stumble back into his chair, disgusted, disgusting. Tom wipes the flat line of his lips and doesn’t shut the door on the way out.
*
It’s not all bad.
Sure, Greg hasn’t left his apartment in weeks barring work, and he hasn’t spoken to his mom for a while either, but he’s never had much of a life with other people anyway. He’s an adult, been one for a while, and adulthood for him has been defined by the same loneliness he held throughout his youth. People don’t get too close, and he’s fine with that, thanks.
His apartment is empty, in more ways than one. Devoid of bodies, devoid of life. Empty pantry. The last time he ate with another human being was in January when Tom took him to some fancy French place that made him sick.
(And, the funny thing about it is how Tom can’t speak French. He tries, but he can never get the accent right. Greg had the idea to playfully correct him — years of French classes are probably the most he’s ever gotten out of the Canadian education system — but ceased when Tom got that look on his face, the type that says stop without being kind about it.)
He goes to sleep with thoughts of escargot and canard aux montmorency and stay for the night, she’s at her mother’s anyway still lingering in his mind.
*
It does get worse when Shiv turns four months pregnant, though.
She’s at the beginning of her second trimester, so sick with literal baby fever that she is rendered basically incapacitated and bed-bound. At some point Tom asks Greg to go to the apartment.
“Don’t you have, like, another secretary for that? One that’s lower than I. One that’s more dirt than person.”
“Tsk. Greg, where’s the love? She’s your cousin, after all.”
“Once removed”, Greg mumbles.
“All I’m asking is for you to do me a favour.”
“She’s not going to like them anyway. You know that sort of shit doesn’t do anything to her.”
“But if I don’t send anything, then I’m the big asshole husband who cares more about his job than his wife. It’s all a fucking spectacle.”
So this is how Greg finds himself standing at the Wambsgans-Roys’ doorstep, bouquet of ostentatious flowers in hand, sweating his ass off under the fluorescent lighting in the corridor. Their housekeeper, Eileen, answers the door, and she smiles warmly. She hasn’t seen him in a few months.
The place is so clean it’s strangely dystopian. Even Greg’s apartment, for how sleek it is, has some clutter, some character. He knocks and opens the bedroom door, and there is Shiv on the bed, sitting up with a book open in her lap, although she’s looking at her phone. The light illuminates her face, drawing out the lines in her skin and the dark circles and imperfections. In the least weird way possible, Greg thinks she’s beautiful, and he kind of hates her for it. She looks up, expression flirting the line between surprised and irritated.
“Hey.” Surprised.
“Hey.” He wants to kill himself. Shiv’s eyes dart across to the flowers. Irritated.
“Doing his dirty work, I see.”
“He said he’s sorry he’s been so busy.”
“I’m sure he is.” She pinches her brow, sighing. “Just leave them on the bedside. The one that doesn’t have the magazines on it, preferably.”
He does just that. His legs then redirect toward the door, desperate to escape, when she shifts in the bed and calls out, “He’s going to Albuquerque next week. You know that, I assume.”
Greg says nothing. His head feels like it’s filling up with water.
“Listen, Greg”, Shiv says all low while leaning forward, and Greg isn’t a baby expert but he’s all of a sudden terrified that the baby is being crushed in this sort of ironing-board position. “Tom and I have a complex relationship, and I can’t change that. But you know this kind of thing never works out well.”
“That’s not really fair, is it?”
“It’s not. I’m just saying. I don’t think I was ever expecting to be Hillary’d like this. Especially not by a seven foot tall Monica Lewinsky who I also happen to be related to. And you know what happened to Monica, right?”
And god, he could just choke. Shiv proceeds, “She got fucked. No one gives a shit about the other woman after it’s all done. Remember that.”
He nods, rasps a half-hearted Ok. Shiv looks to the ceiling like she’s hoping for something to drop down and give her all the answers she desires.
*
“You’re my boy. My number one boy.”
So Tom says between pants, so deep in him that Greg is seeing stars. This is not a bed he recognises, nor the room. They are somewhere in Virginia, outside D.C., and this room, with its oppressive brown walls and yellow lowlight emanating from the lamp, is making him feel just as dizzy as Tom is.
“God”, Tom says while fucking him into the bed, with Greg on his back because it’s better this way, you know how much I love to see your face. “You’re all leg. It’s like trying to fuck a baby giraffe.”
Greg lets out this sound which he thinks is supposed to be a laugh, but it is less of a laugh and more of this shaky rush of air that gets pushed out of his nose. He takes a deep breath — this is merely the plunge, like going under water, except the consequences of this feel more painful than drowning — and lets himself take it all in.
“Jesus”, Tom murmurs. “Look at you. Look.”
He smiles and nips at Greg’s lower stomach with his fingers. “A few pounds gone, and I’d be able to see myself in you. Wouldn’t you like that, Sporus?”
Greg hesitates, and he nods, and he doesn’t know if it’s involuntary or not.
*
Nero and Sporus were not lovers.
Well, Greg reasons, they were lovers, but they were not in love. There is a distinction, regardless of flair or attitude. Nero, as it turns out, was an all-round cunt — from burning people alive to banging his own mom — and an even shittier husband. His wife died in childbirth, although a lot of people believe he killed her himself, either via kicking or a good old shove down the stairs. Overwhelmed by grief and guilt, Nero got a slave boy he favoured, Sporus, and had him castrated before marrying him. Sporus probably wasn’t even his name; they called him that because it meant ‘seed’, of which he had none, on account of his inability to have kids.
Nero dies, and Sporus ends up with another equally bad guy called Otho who is vying for power in merry old Ancient Rome. Otho dies too. Enter Vitellius, intent on using Sporus in a reenactment of an old story, the one where the Roman equivalent of Hades kidnaps and rapes Persephone. Not wanting to be subjected to the humiliation, Sporus kills himself.
There is no romance to this tale, or anything to parallel it. It’s just two men, one holding the power, the other unable to escape that dynamic. He presses x on the Wikipedia tab and thinks of how Nero and Sporus were not lovers when he goes out onto the balcony, body half-way over the railing just so he can fucking feel something.
*
They’ve never been to this place — lately that feels like the norm for their rendezvous, always somewhere anonymous and untouched by the light of day — but Tom is all for spontaneity tonight (he did assure him though, on the drive here, that it did have an average rating of four stars on Yelp). Greg’s been communicating via hiccups and nods for the past ten minutes because the only thing in his stomach is a few drinks, and while they wait on the vinyl couch by the door, filling out paperwork, Tom places a hand on his thigh and squeezes lightly, saying nothing. It’s enough though, the physical contact and the lingering smell of his cologne that’s probably made from wildflowers and diamonds straight from Australia. Even now, here, Tom radiates with something Greg can’t put his finger on. He’s wearing a fucking cardigan in a tattoo parlour, god.
The artist is called Carly, and she’s this blonde with perky tits and a right arm totally covered in tattoos. She has a septum piercing and when she smiles at him, there is a gap in her teeth. Tom’s fingers press deeper into Greg’s thigh, and that’s when Greg gets the message that he should stop looking so hard.
She has the design that Tom’s handed her: four letters in some showy font. You happy with the placement? flies through one ear and out the other, but again, all he can do is nod when he’s laying back in the chair with his pants half-way down his thighs, and when the gun makes contact with the skin somewhere beneath his slightly concave stomach, he tries his very best not to pass out from the pain of it.
“Do you trust me?” Tom says when Greg’s two letters down. It’s stupid, because he does, and he shouldn’t.
“Yeah”, he nods, breathless. “Yes. Of course.”
And Tom’s eyes soften, like he wants to give him the world, money and all. Not just that; the moon and the stars, the whole fucking solar system and every galaxy to exist. The type of shit you can’t buy in a business deal, or monetise until some richer asshole builds colonies and space hotels on them.
Carly finishes the O. Greg finds that he can’t fucking move, he’s so sore. But Tom, Tom leans over, looks down at the newly marked flesh, and he says with a slight smile, “Would a heart be too tacky? Or a star?”
Greg’s breathing hitches; it’s stars again. The universe. And it would be tacky. He nods anyway. “Go for the heart.”
Go for the heart. Go all the fucking way.
*
The baby’s name is Rose, after the great-aunt Greg never got to know. She is born on the cusp of winter, healthy and cooing and, dare he say it, rosy. She is beautiful like her mother and has her father’s eyes. When Greg meets her, she’s just over a week old and stirring in her bassinet.
“You can hold her”, Tom says with a sort of nonchalance that nearly sends him up the fucking wall. “She won’t bite.”
“I don’t know. I’m sort of paranoid around babies. Their fontanelles give me the creeps.”
“Their what?”
“That’s, um. That’s like the thing where the baby has all these soft spots on its head, because its skull isn’t fully formed yet. It doesn’t even come out as a whole person.”
“As long as you don’t dig your thumbs into my daughter’s central sulcus, I’m sure she will be fine.”
So he scoops her up and presents her to Greg like she’s a gift, and in some ways she is. She’s also a weapon. The poor thing just doesn’t know it yet.
He draws her into his chest and rocks back and forth, and he doesn’t let go until the emptiness in his chest closes a little, an open chasm that’s just the slightest bit connected now.
*
Maybe he’s always been this way.
There’s a strange naturality to being like this, the object to be desired, to be lorded over. You’re not supposed to be fine with that; to be human is to have agency. But Greg, he knows there is comfort in possession. It takes away the guesswork of figuring himself out, because someone else is there to fall back on; to make all the important decisions.
And.
And.
He doesn’t know what else he’s meant to do with it. All he knows is this: he is not who he used to be, and he hates himself for it.
Greg knows he must have this far away look in his eyes; he’s got that feeling, when the world is nothing but an afterthought. An aspect of his peripherals.
“Is he okay?” Matsson says after a meeting, although there’s no concern in his voice, only sick curiosity. “He’s just standing there like an invalid.”
Tom replies with, “Greg is always like this. He’s a fawn that doesn’t know how to use its legs because it's four hours old and still slick with embryonic fluid.”
“Aw.” Matsson grins like he isn’t all human, like he’s just burnt down an orphanage for deaf and blind children. “A little Bambi. What does that make you, Tom?”
Tom shrugs and smiles back. The hunter, probably.
*
“You know why it’s there, right?”
Greg reckons he’s got a fucking hunch, but supposes he can do the small mercy of humouring the man with his mouth on his cock. He chokes out uh-huh, all guttural and searching for something more.
“Ownership.” Tom’s teeth graze against his flesh, and it makes him breathe in a fucked-up way. “I always hold on to what is mine.”
*
He drinks, mostly. It’s the sort of coping mechanism he probably inherited from his mom, who in turn resorted to it when his father left, and she’s never really shaken it off. In between binging shitty American reality shows and buying mass amounts of NutriBullets, she drinks, and she forgets.
Greg never forgets a thing. He sometimes thinks he could’ve gone without making copies of those documents, because it’s all up in his head anyway. In some ways, it’s like the best worst superpower.
He drinks on the balcony and leans over the railing more than he should, because it’s just that fucking easy. He could stare in the face of mortality and spit on it, and it wouldn’t do a thing to stop him.
But mortality always wins. It wins, and it rubs its victory in the face of the losers, and Greg realises this when a panic attack starts to brew in his chest, clothes suddenly feeling stuck to his skin, and he’s just so dirty. Unclean in all the ways Tom makes him.
He hunches up his shirt and looks down, and the space between his ribs and his cock taunts him, terrifies him, sickens him. All bloated and warped and marked, and when he gets out of the shower an hour later, the area below his stomach where NERO and an unfilled heart reside is scrubbed red raw with soap, and He is nowhere near gone.
*
The Newsom deal ends with Greg passing out in another soulless boardroom, and when he wakes up he’s in a different room which sort of reminds him of the one he and Tom had hidden out in once upon a time when they thought there was a terrorist in the building, and this is when he discovers that Tom himself is the one crouching down and pressing an ice pack to his forehead.
“Don’t move”, he mumbles. “Or do. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.”
“You’re supposed to put a cloth around this. You don’t just put the ice pack directly on.”
Tom rolls his eyes. “Now look who’s the fucking doctor. Any other important bits of info I should know?”
“No.” Greg shifts up on his elbows and groans. “Sorry for like, causing any hassle. That’s on me.”
“Damn right it is. Greg, what am I supposed to do with you? Here you are, starving yourself like the teenage daughter in a very special episode of some mediocre nineties sitcom. It’s sad. You’re already willowy enough as it is.”
“This is what you wanted”, he says under his breath, courage gone. Maybe he isn’t a dead bird after all, but a dog, with the way he grovels and circles around Tom’s feet, desperate to be loved unconditionally.
“I want you as you are”, Tom says, slow and sure. “Where’s my killer, huh? I miss him.”
With a tug at his lips, he leans forward and kisses Greg on the neck, face buried in the hair that curls around behind his ears. Normally Greg would be satisfied with the length; he’s always liked his hair longer. But now, all he wants is to cut it or shave it off. He needs it gone; to purge himself of everything that used to be untouched, now marred.
It’s always one or the other, and it’s never enough. He’d read once in a textbook during a social studies class, Who controls the food, controls the people. He who controls the food, has the power.
*
But this isn’t power, and it sure as hell isn’t love.
It isn’t enough in the end either, not in the ways that matter. In Nowhere, Arizona, Greg sits atop Tom’s lap like a prince on a throne, and he makes it nearly all the way down before realising that Tom has stopped breathing the way normal people are meant to.
“What’s up?” he says, blinking back supernova bursts. He follows Tom’s eyes down to his stomach, and though he can’t see it very well from this angle, he does notice the swell in his belly. It freaks him out at first, because it might as well be a fucking Xenomorph, but then he sinks further down, and he melts.
Awed, Tom tentatively places a hand against the bulge, fingers drifting down to the cumslick NERO, still as present as ever. “That’s all me. All me in you, baby.”
The little romance of the situation is lost upon Greg when Tom comes, and it's careless and messy. Afterwards, they lie on the bed, panting, and Greg, god help him, rolls over and sits up.
“Hey”, Tom says gently. “We’ve still got until tomorrow. We can go for dinner if you like.”
“I’m not really hungry.”
“You haven’t eaten since we were on the plane.”
Greg sighs. “If I do, will you fuck off?”
Tom raises an eyebrow. “And here I was thinking I’d had you castrated. Little Greg with a set of balls after all.”
“Fuck off”, Greg snaps, all bite and disturbingly reminiscent of dead Uncle Logan. “Don’t push me, man.”
“You seemed to be a lot more compliant a few minutes ago”, Tom deadpans. “I wonder what changed.”
“Yeah, that’s because I’m just your— your, your bitch, aren’t I? It’s not fair.”
“It’s not meant to be. Since when has anything ever been fair?”
Briefly, Greg considers all of his previous possibilities, the chance that life could have been different, and he would be different with it. He could have been sent to prison, he could be miles ahead in his career right now. Or he could be back at home, real home, across the border and still working shitty menial jobs and going back to his mom’s on the weekend. He could have had any of those things, and still, he feels like none of these alternate realities would have had even an iota of the heaviness — the comfort, the security, the pain — that Tom delivers. Somehow, he can’t settle on that being a good thing or a bad one.
“I think I’m going insane.”
“I think you’re just tired”, Tom sighs. “We don’t have to get food. We can just lay here.”
Greg just deflates, and he lays back down, letting Tom’s hand rest on the dip between his ribs and his hip. “Yeah. Yeah, ok.”
*
When he gets back to his apartment, there’s a package by the door. In it is a paperweight depicting Proserpina and Pluto. Pluto with his hands wrapped around her body, fingers deep in the back of her thighs; Proserpina resisting and trying to push him away, a solitary tear rolling down her cheek.
He sends it back. He smiles.
(It all tastes the same though, the defeat and the victory like blood in his mouth while they work in tandem. The dog always comes crawling back, after all.)
