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Simon Blackquill, the Twisted Samurai from death row, a ruthless convict who had been hardened by seven desolate years of cold cell bars, dark corners, and jeered in the face of mortality, did not enter through the wide glass doors of Whole Foods. He did not pass by scattered people—middle-class suburban strangers trying to live on a pretender’s upper-class budget—and withstand the sear of their stares as he passed, boots clicking quickly across the glossy grey floors. He did not count every step, noting how each multiple of twenty was a lap around his prison cell, and one lap more exposed than he should have been. He did not tense with every breath, every rustle of clothes, as he traversed what was not aisles of overpriced produce proclaimed “organic,” but a battlefield.
The Twisted Samurai was used to battlefields.
Posture straight. Shoulders back. Eyes ahead. Countenance creased by scowl. His muscles were pulled taut with vigilance, wrists light from the absence of cold metal shackles that had once restrained the swiftness of his blade, and poised to strike. His eyes were swift, frantic in anticipation.
He could see it now.
The glint of silver where a katana would swipe, leaving crimson in its wake. The hiss of a grappling hook, shooting through the air. A sudden pry of flesh, leaving naught but dark void where a face had once been.
He had not been ready seven years ago. He had barely been ready months ago. He had to be ready now.
Yet the battle never began.
He saw none of the phantoms that haunted him. Only price tags that incited physical anger.
The Twisted Samurai did not scavenge the soup aisle, eyes honed and flitting across cans and cardboard boxes, for a 24-ounce plastic container of Nana’s Chicken Noodle Soup; yet he was bound by duty to emerge triumphant with the aforementioned soup of a nonexistent grandmother. And he would not deign for his honor to be vanquished by overpriced comfort food. Especially, he resolved, by a soup that was nearly indiscernible to his sharp eyes from one proclaimed as Mama’s Chicken Noodle Soup, if not for the clarification of: “Mama is skimpy with her ingredients.”
Simon scoffed. Took a container and glanced at the price. “Bloody ludicrous,” he muttered under his breath. “Soup was fifty cents in the clink.”
The Twisted Samurai took five containers, more eagerly than he’d been to embrace the Reaper’s scythe of execution, and dropped them into the reusable shopping bag he had equipped. Then, with haste, he vacated the soup aisle—only to find himself drawn toward the overpowering allure of the bakery section. Its pull was irresistible.
No being alive, no matter their fortitude, was capable of vanquishing the bakery section.
Tables of brownies and cookies, their containers all clear to boast of the sweetness of rich fudge and soft dough inside. Shelves of fresh bread, stacked to display all their baked goodness. A glass display to tempt the tongue with cakes intricately frosted, pies topped with fresh fruit, cupcakes of luxuriously artisan design and macarons, small and delectable and in precise, perfect lines.
For seven years, he had not fallen victim to temptation. Not the temptation of freedom, the temptation to take back the life that had once been his. He had thought only of his duty—of his master, of her beloved treasure, of what would happen if he did not sacrifice himself—and accepted his desolation behind lines of cold bars, precise as the schedule the prison enforced. He had not thought of himself.
He did not think of himself now.
But when he absconded from the bakery section to the check-out lines and their infernal beeping, the bag at his side was one item heavier.
Softly, the door clicked as Simon eased it open, casting a brief sliver of light into the room before he pushed it shut behind him and entered into the darkness. The living room was still and silent. Tentative as a pond’s glassy surface.
He moved carefully from the doorway, acutely aware how each step he took and each rustle of clothing punctured the quiet. The containers of soup jostled against the inside of the bag, practically scratching like rabid, feral cats to break free and scurry into the refrigerator.
Simon furrowed his brow against the darkness.
His eyes had grown used to the strain, sharpened against the dull concrete of his meager cell. Every thin crack of prison ceiling had been traced in the night, every pattern followed perpetually until he drifted into unconsciousness—always too fleeting before the guards’ routine check-ins rattled against the bars and pried him away from sleep yet again.
Now the couch was nothing more than a dim rectangular mass with the curtains drawn. Gradually, the shapes solidified. The armrest with a pillow against it. The half-empty glass of water left on the coffee table and the bottle of ibuprofen close by.
Simon kneeled down next to the couch. Then, slowly, he lifted a container of soup from the bag and dropped it down atop the unmoving heap that rested on the cushions.
Klavier woke with a start.
“I’ve returned from Whole Foods.”
He glanced down at the soup on top of his unkempt frame. “Ja, I… can see that,” he said, voice groggy. He brushed his bangs back from his face, his sunkissed features still sharp and refined even in the darkness of the living room. Still stunning.
Crumpled on the couch and cradling the soup container in his hands, he did not look the part of the glimmerous nepotism nuisance Simon had deemed him months ago in shared complaints with Detective Skye. Now, all he looked was exhausted and disheveled. His blond hair had been tied back, errant strands falling loose in abject haste; and he wore some well-worn band shirt atop sweatpants, rather than the gaudy blazer, obnoxiously popped collar, and silver jewelry that so-often glittered from his skin.
Neither did he play the part he had been initially assigned. He did not treat law with the same frivolity as a too-loud, too-flashy stage performance to be swooned over; the passion he held for law illuminated the courthouse and his pursuit for the truth had been the only song upon his lips.
And the only swooning had been—to a morbid amount of lobotomy-considering-dismay—on Simon’s part.
“How are you faring?”
Mindful of the dull throb returning to his skull, Klavier inclined his head, almost imperceptibly, to the coffee table. The water and ibuprofen atop it. “For the past few hours, I’ve grappled with the fear that my head may split open. Perhaps this is fate’s payback for all the speakers I blew rocking out… but, I suppose I’m faring…” He plastered a grin across his face. Pain slammed his skull in return. “I feel far better now that you’re back.”
“Hmph.” Simon turned his head. Then remembered that the darkness masked the heat rising to his face. “To see a day where I would alleviate pain, rather than provide it…”
Klavier chuckled lightly. “Oh, how unthinkable… and on the very same day you honored Whole Foods with your presence!” His fingers danced a light rhythm across the soup container. “How was your trip? Did you enjoy what Whole Foods had to offer? Have you finally decided to abandon Wally World?”
“Good Lord,” he scoffed. “Your migraine must’ve inflicted neurological damage if you think I’d squander my money on your overpriced organics when Walmart will suffice, Gavin-dono.”
“Ach,” he sighed, “I’ve been reduced back to the honorifics.”
“Even Athena, scatterbrained as she is, recognizes the value within Walmart’s hallowed halls. Though she is foolishly wary when I determine Walmart as the location for our grocery expeditions, she ultimately appreciates its worth upon my presenting her with the receipt. Even if she squanders her finances, none of the rubbish she insists on consuming damages my own.”
Klavier smirked. “...You buy Fräulein Cykes her groceries?”
“I did not endure seven years of purgatory for her sake only for her to starve to death due to financial incompetence. She whines, as she often does, of the lacking funds in her bank account, and I take pity upon her. It is my duty, and it is an act of benevolence… and it is an act far more tolerable than descending into the wretched pits of Whole Foods. You’d scarcely believe the horrors I endured to bring you that expergefactor.” He gestured to the soup.
Klavier’s smile faltered. He had felt the tension in his hands when they went out; but Simon never said anything, and he never asked. Just as Simon never asked when he saw him linger a moment too long at the mirror, scrutinizing his features, his hair. Gaping at ghosts in the glass.
“I swear by the Devil, the blasted wench in front of me was ailing from early-onset caducity. I never thought I’d find myself in the presence of a bigger buffoon than you. Yet, without an ounce of effort, she managed to vastly triumph over you without any semblance of your daft theatrics…”
“Oh, come now, Herr Samurai, I have a migraine. You can’t expect my typical levels of theatrics, ja?”
Simon merely smirked in response. “I suppose I shall be merciful and give you a pass, just this once… but this woman! Klavier, the absurdity of this woman! She ought to have been an ambassador of Lilith herself, sent with the sole intent of stoking misery like hellfire! She couldn’t remember her rewards number, she couldn’t find the coupons she swore she had—my hand yearned to draw my blade upon her with each breath she wasted,” he lied.
He had become an expert of lies; his life had been one for seven years.
So, too, had Klavier. He was a performer; and, gracefully, he put on the performance of one whose head had not pounded at the sudden raise in his voice, and he smiled at the melodrama. The standard brand of Simon Blackquill theatrics were, after all, a spectacle to behold.
“Yet, I would have needed naught but my hands in that moment to send her head rolling across the accursed Whole Foods tiles, for her wretched offspring—how they shrieked…” Simon seethed. “Bloody banshee spawn crawled straight from the most fiery depths of Hell, they were! The horrendous scamps practically reeked of sulfur!”
Klavier’s smile broadened into a grin, face bright and brilliant and beautiful even disheveled in the darkness.
He did not need to know how Simon had sped to the self-checkout to escape the long lines packed tight with people, the prying eyes, the utters too quiet to hear. His only having six items had been a pathetic afterthought.
“I would’ve rejoiced to reunite with my cell if only to silence the death knell wails from their forked tongues. I would’ve dove into the River Styx myself instead of waiting for Charon and his bloody ferry! Yet,” Simon keened, “the effort would have been futile.”
Klavier’s voice was soft yet teasing when he spoke again. “I would have sent you off with fare for the Styx if you’d only asked… but I’m certainly glad you had the strength to restrain yourself.”
“Barely.”
“It would break my heart, having to prosecute you,” he said. This went unsaid: after my bandmate, after my brother. Both of whom Simon had heard whispers of from between the bars.
Daryan Crescend, the Gavinners’ second guitarist. The man he’d played alongside, he’d trusted for all those years.
Kristoph Gavin, the coolest defense in the West. The brother whose attention he’d fought for, whose approval had been just out of reach—a note above the range of his voice.
Both of whom Klavier never spoke of. Instead, he continued his performance just as he had for seven long years, now turned eight: the easygoing rockstar who was not maimed by how his brother had betrayed him and his band had shattered, charismatic and cool with smiling deflections. It was his nature.
There was already enough to worry about with migraines and ghosts in the grocery store.
“Hmph. Rest assured, if you are ever summoned to the courthouse to prosecute me with your air guitars and glimmerous smugness, it will be for something far more important than Whole Foods. Besides,” Simon muttered, gently sweeping back his fringe and pressing his lips to his forehead, “I hardly trust your teenyboppers to acquire your soup.”
Klavier chuckled, leaning into the motion. Then he reached up to cup Simon’s cheek, his touch warm as he tilted his head down to kiss him, lips lingering on his for a moment: soft and sweet with the faintest aroma of his residual cologne.
A moment too brief.
Gradually, he drifted away, an easy smile playing upon his lips. Still soft, still ready to be kissed. “I’d assume the teenyboppers would be eager to track down my soup, considering they’ve had nothing for a whole year… and will continue to get nothing. Ah, though I suppose… they could receive a concert in exchange for my soup, ja?”
Simon was relieved to be in the dark, if only to conceal the flush rising in his face. “I’m sure they would be delighted to see you in your migraine-laden state, Goldie Locks.” Then, taking the soup from his hands, “May I open the curtains? Or will the invalid shrivel as the sunlight graces his skin?”
“Ja, that’s fine. But have you looked in the mirror recently, mein Liebe?”
Simon knew not an ounce of German, but he’d heard Klavier babble enough to understand the endearment: my love.
“You look in the mirror enough to compensate for my lacking,” he stated, rising from beside the couch with the bag and lone soup container to make for the curtains, and finding relief in the action. With his back to him on the couch, Klavier couldn’t see how the corners of his mouth twitched up, unbidden. Not in a smirk. Not the deranged grin of a madman eager to take more down with him when he was banished to the house of Hades.
The Twisted Samurai did not smile.
He had not smiled, not genuinely, for years. Neither had he been loved; not in any way he’d felt, any way that could warm him within the frigidity of his cell when all he had to give had died away and awaited reunion at his execution, leaving him a cold husk.
Aura’s love had coalesced into hatred so raw and visceral, it had taken the very Space Center she’d once cherished hostage. Yet he’d disregarded it, abandoning it behind the bulletproof glass he stood behind, yelling at her, pushing her further and further away.
Athena’s love had blazed into a passion, a resolve spurring her all the way in Europe to take the blade of law he’d once paraded for her—regaling her with tales of courthouse battles—and use it to slice the noose he had accepted for her. Yet he’d known none of this, not until it was time to prosecute from the grave and haunt the courtrooms as a lure for the phantom; a sacrificial lamb offered twice to a cause bigger than himself.
It was rather selfish, he knew. He acknowledged both affections duly with the numbness of hindsight and time passed when he’d desperately needed them; and he felt them now, in Aura’s tight, tearful embrace in the visitation room, and when Athena ran up to him, beaming like she had never been able to in her youth.
But knowing didn’t change the years spent alone. It didn’t change the isolation that returned in the night. The ceiling was the same as his cell’s. Same plaster, different cracks running through it.
Klavier was something different. My love.
Slowly, Simon slid open the curtains. Light flooded in as he tried to stifle the smile that persisted, warm on his face.
If he could not banish it, he could at least morph it into something more suitable.
“Mein Gott, that’s bright.”
He glanced over his shoulder at Klavier, the window’s soft stream of light illuminating bright locks of gold within his hair as it fell freely into his eyes, errant strands escaping the tie he’d done. Old bleach stains splattered pale across his shirt—unsurprisingly, Simon noted, the crooked Nirvana smiley face he’d allegedly worn since his teenage years—in testament to how many cycles it had run through and to how little he anticipated leaving the couch. Yet, even in such a slovenly state, his eyes were brighter than shimmering sapphires; his features, smooth and refined as if by artisan’s hand, radiated the warmth of adoration.
He did not need his exuberant clothing and cosmetics to be beautiful.
“The sun’s radiance pales in comparison to you,” Simon said.
A grin further illuminated his features. Brilliantly sunkissed to the amber of sweet honey. “Does it, n—”
“I shall prepare the nonexistent grandmother’s soup that my Whole Foods plight was for. And, when your pretty little head has recovered from the headache that plagues you so, a tart patiently awaits you in the refrigerator,” Simon stated. “I believe it would do you well to be in similar company.”
Klavier let out a scoff, lifting a hand to knead his temples. “Ach, liebling, you wound me.”
His smile fell into a smirk: familiar territory. “It’s fortunate you’ve ibuprofen handy, then.”
Then he went to the microwave.
“Thank you,” Klavier uttered, head resting against Simon’s chest, his arms entangled loosely around his waist, “for picking up the soup.”
Chicken’s savory aroma lingered in the air. The soup container sat empty on the coffee table beside the glass of water, thrice refilled, and the ibuprofen bottle, missing one more capsule than it had already. A lone spoon stood propped against the rim.
Spoils of a never-ending battle.
“Say nothing of it.” Simon slid his arm further around his shoulder, easing him closer to him. “I was merely doing my duty to society. Enduring Whole Foods to cease your whining was the honorable thing to do.”
Lightly, he laughed; Simon felt the movement against his chest. “Ja, I’m sure society would grow rather tired of me if I whined rather than sang for them. But, duty or not…” He lifted his head, just barely, to look up at him, a gentle smile creased across his features. “I appreciate it.”
No matter how many times he glimpsed the adoration that shimmered in those eyes, brighter than clear, long-forgotten skies when he gazed upon Simon as a precious treasure, something beloved, rather than the soulless murderer he’d eagerly become, there was still a flutter within his chest. A pitiful giddiness. He had lived so devoid of any affections aside from the scars he bore—for Athena, for Aura, for Dr. Cykes—that the most fleeting of warmth seared deep into his brain, degenerating him into a blundering, uxorious idiot.
“It—”
Klavier continued to regard him with that damned smile of his. He shone so bright, it burned him.
“I-It really is nothing.”
His smile broadened into a grin. Not the glimmerous, perfectly practiced kind that sent shockwaves of swoons through a packed stadium. The kind that parted his soft lips, ever so slightly, and creased his eyes with affection at the corners.
That somehow made it worse.
Simon could not believe he was stuttering like a pathetic, overgrown schoolboy, depraved of the time necessary to become fully-functional in terms of interpersonal relations. “Journeying to a suburban Tartarus of self-proclaimed organic food is nothing in comparison to seven years on death row, Goldie Locks,” he said quickly. Far quicker than he could recompose himself. “If it is for your sake, I would endure far worse than Whole Foods.”
His expression softened. The amusement in his grin waned into a smile, bittersweet and tender. “I would rather you not endure anything… Simon.” He said his name with a gentleness, the sound strangely serene on his lips, like some sacred song, before it faded into the air.
It practically rang in Simon’s ears.
Then he was quiet for a moment: three throbs of his head. “You’ve endured far too much already for me to ask any more of you.”
Simon remained silent. Unsure of what to say; Klavier often left him that way. He tried to shift the subject, to deflect the attention. “Anything I’ve endured is long past. I am no longer in the clink, awaiting the Reaper’s embrace. The only embrace I await now is yours—and are you not the one enduring a migraine at this very moment?”
“Yes, and I’ve been very brave about it—but I…” He sighed, saturnine. “You know what I mean.”
He did. He had for years.
“I don’t want to ask much of you. Only your time and your company.” Gently, Klavier’s head fell back to Simon’s chest, his arms drawing tighter around his waist. The warmth of him, his embrace, and the slow, steady rise and fall of his breathing, the rhythm of his heart, soothed the pound inside his skull. “And,” he added softly, “that you let me give you all of my affections.”
“I… can do that.”
For all Klavier had given to others—his music, until his throat ached with the words he’d pried from his heart; his faith, unwavering until, like a guitar string, it snapped onto him, sharp as it cut his skin; himself, upon a stage—he had yet more to give. He always did. Even if he was to receive nothing but the frigid chill of scorn in return.
If Simon’s life had been one of sacrifice, of draining himself for years until he had only his life left to lose, surely there was room for what Klavier had to give. And, surely, enough remained after Simon’s sacrifice for him to reciprocate.
He could hear it in the steady beat of his heart.
“Good,” Klavier murmured. Then, with a light chuckle, “Because I intend to spoil you whether you like it or not.”
Simon smirked.
What prison had frozen over in the frigidity of his cell had begun to thaw, melted by the warmth of his affections; for after seven cold years of winter nights, Klavier was the sun, with his gleaming tresses of gold, with the radiant magnetism in the words that fell from his lips, with the smiles bright enough to burn if Simon’s gaze dared linger too long. Which it often did—including now, as he gazed down at him.
In the vastness of the universe that surrounded them, the constellations that time had etched the past into and the planets that followed, always watching, always orbiting, Simon was the moon, with its rubble and scarred pale surface, able only to reflect the light that shone down upon him. Sunlight into moonlight.
Always, he was shining. Always, he was giving.
“As you wish,” he said. “But I intend to do the very same.”
The Twisted Samurai did not trust. He had not trusted the convicts that surrounded him like flies a corpse, nor had he trusted a single suburbanite pursuing organics within the overpriced aisles of Whole Foods with their mob anonymity and prying eyes.
Klavier should not have trusted. Not after two of the people closest to him—his bandmate of seven years, his brother who he’d revered even as he casted never-ending darkness over his life—had betrayed him in the blindness of his smiles.
Yet, in the quiet of their embrace, they did.
Simon had not had restful sleep for years. Nobody had slept in front of him—dared to regard him with enough trust to be in such a vulnerable state—since he was a fledgling prosecutor with bright eyes, polite words, and both time and juice boxes to give; yet there Klavier lay, head resting on his chest and body curled into his, having drifted off. The sound of his breathing, faint and rhythmic, was the only song Simon cared to hear.
And there he sat. On the couch. Klavier sleeping atop him.
He let out a sigh. Then, with a tenderness both foreign and natural, he lifted a hand and ran his fingers through Klavier’s hair, shining gold faded to amber as the sky dimmed into evening outside the window. His locks were soft beneath his touch: the end result of exuberantly priced hair products.
He had grown rather fond of what those hair products could do.
Simon had not thought of himself for years. He had not thought of himself, still, when there was Nana’s Chicken Noodle Soup to extract from Whole Foods and migraines to tend to—which he had deduced from Klavier’s symptoms as not being the actual neurological disorder, but rather extreme headaches. Unsurprising, considering most assumed migraines were simply that, viewed as the same difference as Mama’s Chicken Noodle Soup and Nana’s Chicken Noodle Soup: more ingredients, more symptoms, but vaguely similar.
It did not matter, the difference between what Klavier thought he had and what he had in actuality. It mattered that he was in pain.
Simon let out a slow breath, running his fingers through his hair again.
In the hazy trickle of thought as his eyes fell closed and his breathing eased into slow, steady rhythm, he thought of aisles of overpriced organic produce and the phantoms that haunted them, and would continue to haunt them just as they had the past seven years. He thought of a nonexistent grandmother’s soup, filled with the nonexistent love of a nonexistent heart. He thought of the man who had requested his journey into those overpriced aisles, and who lay sleeping atop him now, warm and having broken—if only for a moment—the persona both so vastly different than his own, yet so similar.
A rockstar, nonchalant; still singing even as the world burned down around him. A convict, nonchalant; still smirking even as death came for him.
Then, briefly, he thought of himself.
How lucky I am to have met not the Reaper, but this fopdoodle.
And for one fleeting moment, he drifted away into repose from the battlefield, embraced in guitar-scarred hands.