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Adam wakes in the dark, like he always does these days if he sleeps at all, a shot of adrenaline making his heart race. Knows without looking at the clock that it’ll be 3am, 4am. And there’s that split second every time, before he’s fully awake, when everything still feels like it could be okay. Like the moment after an explosion when you’re still stunned by the blast, not understanding why you’re on the ground. Before you try to move and feel the pain. It feels like floating, hanging suspended in the dark. Before you remember and the world caves in with a sickening rush. Before he remembers, every day, that Rao died, that Rao is dead.
But. But. This time, he feels everything start to come crashing down, but there’s warm skin against his shoulder and that makes his heart jolt and kick even harder, do things it isn’t equipped to do. There’s the soft snuffle of someone breathing next to him in the bed. Flickering light and a fuzz of white noise from the front room, the TV left on and turned down low because someone needed it to sleep.
He takes a breath, tries to let it out slowly. But halfway there, it feels like his lungs are collapsing and he needs to suck in air again. Adrenaline’s still fizzing in his veins, making him queasy. Suddenly he needs to get out of the bed. Too many things are colliding inside him, and he needs to move. Needs to go somewhere. Part of him wants to roll into that warmth and bury himself in it forever. But he needs to think, and he can’t think when he’s touching Rao.
He eases away, shifting his weight slowly so the mattress doesn’t bounce, until he can lower his feet onto the floor and stand without a sound. Probably superfluous. For someone who sleeps so poorly, Rao is very hard to wake up. Is. For a month he’s been correcting himself, biting down on the stab of pain each time and learning how to think “Rao was”, and now —
In the dim light, Rao is only an outline, a hummock in the bed. A messy tangle of hair protruding from a cocoon of sheets. But he’s there. Adam knows he’s there. Breathing and warm. Impossibly alive, undeniably himself. It makes Adam’s chest tight to look at him. How is all this supposed to fit inside his ribcage?
He’s too naked. Picks through clothes on the floor, as quietly as he can. There are a lot of clothes on the floor. Most of them have been there for a while, but he picks up Rao’s shirt — has a momentary impulse to press his face into it, even though Rao’s right there, makes himself drop it before he can — before he finds a T-shirt and the sweatpants he’s been sleeping in.
The T-shirt’s been worn for too many days already. Acrid scent of tiredness and fear-sweat as he pulls it over his head. Something else as well. A trace of Rao’s stupid cologne, smelling like bitter oranges and money, expensive paintings in expensive boardrooms. No. Not on the T-shirt. It’s on his arm. He can smell Rao’s cologne on his own skin.
After last night, Rao’s sweat is on his skin.
A flash-flood of heat, his skin tightening and prickling, suddenly alive and sensitized again. His whole body warm and sharp. He remembers wanting to touch Rao in every way he could. Feel him real and solid against his hands, his mouth. Wanting to leave him breathless, wring pleasure out of him. Hold onto him, hold him down, make him feel it, make it good for him, make him stay.
He knows it happened because he’d never let himself imagine this, not even at his most self-torturing. It had seemed like a violation, after Rao’s death, but more than that, something that might kill him outright. Now he knows so many things he shouldn’t know, things that might destroy him completely. The texture of Rao’s throat where he’d shaved below the edge of his beard. The way his chest had hitched under Adam’s palm as he caught his breath. The things that make Rao’s face twist, make him bite his lip and shudder. That sex is one of the things that can make him look briefly at peace, afterwards, all his tension bled out of him.
A rush of memories. Sensations. More than he can handle. His face is hot and he’s half-hard again already. Refeeding syndrome, he thinks wildly. When people have been starved, POWs or anorexics, you can’t just feed them. Their bodies don’t know what to do with food anymore. Give them enough and they’ll drop dead. Their hearts give out. You have to keep starving them at first, increase the nutrients little by little, until their bodies remember how to be fed again.
He’s been starving for so long. He thinks he’s never not been starving.
He needs a smoke, but if he lights up in here, Rao will definitely wake up. He could go out on the balcony, but even with the door open, that still puts the whole front room between him and Rao. He wouldn’t be able to see where Rao is. See that he’s still there, that Adam didn’t make it all up.
He knows he didn’t make it up. But all things considered, he thinks he still wouldn’t handle that very well.
So he sits on the chair in the corner because there’s nowhere else to go. Rests his forearms on his knees and tries to breathe. He needs some distance, to be able to look at Rao naked and asleep in his bed.
There are clothes slung over the back of the chair, just like there are clothes on the floor, because it hadn’t mattered if he wore the same clothes he’d worn the day before. There wasn’t a point to putting clean clothes in a drawer just to take them out again, over and over. There was probably a point, he just couldn’t remember what it was right now. Like the menorah he’d bought and then never managed to light. All the things that didn’t matter any more. All the details of a world where Rao was dead.
But Rao’s not dead any more, so logically Adam should clean up. He knows Rao won’t care, has cheerfully created worse squalor in innumerable hotel rooms. But that’s why someone else has to. Why Adam has to. That’s the next task. He just can’t quite imagine how to do that right now. Do you just pick up the clothes, throw out the trash, run a few loads of laundry, pack everything away and close the cabinet doors like nothing happened? Because he’s not sure he can do that exactly.
He should make a list. Cleaning. Groceries. Milk, he thinks. They can find a Starbucks in the morning but then he’ll need to buy milk and sugar, because Rao won’t drink coffee black without elaborate complaints.
His hands are shaking, that fine vibration in his fingers he sometimes gets when he’s tired. Never when he’s holding a weapon. Distantly, he wonders if he’s having a panic attack. He hasn’t had one for a very long time. They stopped when he went to basic, pretty much. It wasn’t until years later that he learned the name for them. What they’d been. There isn’t anything wrong with his heart, mechanically speaking.
He wraps his fingers round his wrist, squeezes. The old ache in the bone, the place that feels like it never healed right. Psychosomatic. Greenstick fracture.
Rao jerks in his sleep, then grabs at the sheet over his shoulder. Adam doesn’t know if he’s trying to pull it up or down or both at once, but whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to work. He buries his face angrily in his arms, then goes still again.
Rao always sleeps like he’s busy, like he’s doing something that requires all his concentration. He makes faces, sometimes mutters to himself. Now he’s folded up as small as he can go, sheets pulled tight around him. In a while, he’ll thrash and throw them off, starfish his limbs out. Maybe stumble half-asleep to the bathroom to take a piss. If it seems like he’s sleeping peacefully, it means he was exhausted or drunk enough to pass out, or he’s faking. If he’s lying rigidly still on his back, it means he’s wide awake and trying not to be. He only ever seems deeply asleep late in the mornings, when Adam’s trying to wake him up.
Adam learned Rao’s sleep patterns across endless hotel rooms. At first so he could wake up if Rao was trying to sneak out, sleep through anything else. Then it became another piece of data he tracked automatically: especially poor sleep might be a predictor of a particularly volatile mood.
He hadn’t known how deeply it was ingrained in him until after E-MAD. The night after -- he hadn’t slept at all the first night, but the next -- he’d finally started drifting off and then snapping awake, over and over, because Rao wasn’t in the room, he’d gone somewhere and Adam needed to go find him --
He tries not to remember that, mostly.
Achingly familiar patterns. Jarringly strange now they’re not happening on the other side of a hotel room but in Adam’s too-narrow bed. He’s used to life in close quarters, not used to sharing a bed. Has never done it regularly enough to get used to it.
He’s good at getting used to things. But there’s a stab of adrenaline in his stomach at the thought, as if thinking about anything beyond right now is a trap, like it might make Rao vanish somehow.
Rao’s getting more restless now. Surfacing. Adam could get back into bed, so quietly. Rao would never know he'd been gone. But he doesn’t move. Doesn't know how to cross that distance.
He feels like he’s made of broken pieces, too big and too many to fit inside his skin again. A miracle's happened, and he can't handle it. Maybe Rao's right and he's just addicted to misery. Incapable of being happy.
He doesn’t know how long he sits there. Time doesn’t always work the same way, when you wake in the night. Sometimes it stretches out indefinitely, like morning’s an event horizon you might approach forever and never quite reach.
At some point, Rao rolls over, flaps a hand out into the empty space in the bed, says, “Adam” in a blurry voice. Then, more awake and a little alarmed, “Adam?”
Busted, he thinks without surprise.
“Rao,” he answers, will always answer.
Rao lifts his head for a moment, then drops it back to the pillow with a groan. “Adam, watching people sleep is proper serial killer shit.”
Adam feels his mouth twitch.
“Are you alright?” Rao adds, the bastard.
I’m fine. He feels the shape of it in his mouth like a stone. Doesn’t say it.
He should be fine. He should be better than he’s ever been. He feels — he has no idea what he’s feeling.
“Go back to sleep, Rao,” he tries, with no expectation of success.
“Fuck off,” Rao says amicably. He props himself on an elbow and fumbles for the light switch, blinking and screwing his eyes shut when it comes on.
Adam glances away reflexively before he remembers that Rao’s bare chest is something he’s allowed to look at now. It doesn’t matter if his gaze lingers for a fraction of a second too long. Gives away too much.
There aren't many parts of Rao's body he hadn’t seen before last night. Rao's not shy, is prone to wandering around hotel rooms at least half-naked. Has sniped at Adam about American puritanism more than once. But it's different, being allowed to look.
He forces himself to look properly, and his heart hammers in his chest, a drumbeat of alive, alive, alive.
There's Rao. Look at him. The bump on the bridge of his nose, the way the light falls on his cheekbones, that one cowlick he always fusses with. Acrobatic eyebrows, currently drawn together in concern. Is Rao handsome? Is that even the right word, is he beautiful? Adam has no idea. He might have known once, but he’s looked at Rao too much to know any more. Rao is just Rao.
Rao in woodsmoke and lemon-yellow light, buying bread in the marketplace. Rao with his eyes coated in silver, with metal curdling in his mouth. Rao with the streetlights outside the motel painting his face in blue and orange.
Now he’s rubbing his hands over his face, trying to wake up, says, “Right. Right.” Hands through his hair, scratching vigorously at his scalp. “Okay, clearly you're not alright, so what's the matter, love?”
The familiar sting, vinegar on a cut. He can’t tell himself Rao doesn’t know, not any more, but Rao’s still calling him love, and that should mean something, mean things too big to think about. Except he’s pretty sure it's automatic, that Rao hasn’t given it a second thought. It feels like something’s changed but he has no idea when. It's disorienting, exasperating, like a sleight of hand he can’t quite spot.
“I couldn't sleep,” he says. It's not not true. “I needed to think.”
“About what?” Rao asks, then grimaces. “I mean, aside from the bleeding obvious. I realize it's a bit of a shock to the system and all that. You know. Me. Everything.”
Adam makes a noise which approximates a laugh, and says, “You died.” The words fall out of his mouth and it’s not what he means to say at all, not what this is about.
Ever since Rao died, he keeps being surprised by the words that come out of his mouth. Like something’s come loose inside him, some essential safety mechanism’s broken.
Rao starts, “We've been over that, love --” and Adam interrupts him because they’re not having that conversation again, says “No, listen, you were gone,” and hears agony in his own voice. “I was never going to see you again.”
“But I'm here now,” Rao says, so earnestly. “I really am.”
Like a child, Adam thinks, believing that if they just say something with enough conviction it'll be true. But it is true. The universe has bent to make it true.
“I know that, Rao.”
And he does know. He just doesn’t know what to do with all this grief. All unnecessary, pointless now, but it’s still there, heavy and unwieldy and sharp-cornered like a piece of furniture he has nowhere to put down. Rao died but Adam’s the one who feels like a ghost, stuck and unable to move on.
“So what's the Twilight shit in aid of, then?” There’s the usual sarcastic bite to Rao's words, but his eyes are still a little wide. Worried.
Adam knows he's being cajoled, charmed. There's a weird comfort to being on the receiving end of Rao's soft interrogation tactics, knowing that Rao will drag his secrets out of him sooner or later. Adam doesn’t have to choose. But he doesn't know how to explain.
“It's just -- delayed reaction, I think,” he manages.
It’s not exactly right, but it's not untrue either. Close enough for government work.
Rao doesn’t look entirely convinced, but he nods slowly. Blows out his breath. “Okay. Well. Fuck knows you're entitled, love, after everything.” He tilts his head to one side, scratches his cheek. “Is there anything I can do to help? Cup of tea, blowjob?”
Adam snorts and sees the corner of Rao's mouth quirk up in satisfaction. Awarding himself points, like he always does when he can get a flicker of amusement or annoyance out of Adam.
But then he adds, in his serious voice, “What do you need?”
It’s not fair. Adam used to know. Used to have the sharp and separate categories of the things he needed and the things he wanted and the things he was allowed to ask for. But they've all broken down now, and ... he has no idea.
He’s taking too long to answer, because Rao taps the fingers of one hand against his thumb, one by one, then starts clicking them, thinking. Like he’s flicking a busted lighter, trying to spark an idea.
“Okay, break it down,” he says. “Are you coming back to bed, or am I getting up?”
“You don't have to do that,” Adam says, and Rao sighs, “Don't be a dick, Adam,” and swings his feet to the floor like it’s been settled. Looks at him expectantly.
It’s the middle of the night and Adam’s keeping Rao awake again. This is becoming a habit.
“Thought I might go outside for a smoke,” Adam offers, because at least it's something.
Rao snorts. “Pretty sure the smoke detectors in here must be dead if you've not set them off by now, love.” A wince. “They are, actually. This place is such a shitheap.”
“I could use some air.”
“Oh! Sure, yeah.” Rao stretches extravagantly. He rubs at his upper arm, then digs his thumb into it with a pleased expression. Adam guesses it's going to bruise.
He should feel guilty about that. He doesn't.
Then Rao folds himself forwards at the waist and stares contemplatively into the mess of clothes on the floor. Adam looks for his running shoes, finds them still in his suitcase.
They navigate around each other in the small room and Adam doesn't know how this part works. Has never known. Whether it's been casual hook-ups or his few cautious attempts at something more. Doesn’t know what’s supposed to happen in the space between sex and shutting the door behind you to go out into the world and pretend you never touched. He’s used to sharing spaces with Rao. Doesn’t know how it’s supposed to change now they’re whatever they are now.
He goes to the nightstand for his sidearm and two of his knives; the boot sheath won’t fit in his sneakers. He’s pulling on a sweatshirt to cover the holster when he looks up to find Rao staring at him.
“Al Qaeda are not in your fucking courtyard,” Rao informs him.
“Thanks for the intel,” Adam says, as deadpan as he possibly can, turning away so Rao’s indignant expression has nowhere to land. Smiles to himself at the audible huff. Familiar rhythms, easy as breathing.
It’s inefficient to do a separate threat assessment every time he leaves the apartment. Better to be prepared and not need to be than the other way around.
They cross past each other on the way to the door, and on impulse Adam catches Rao's wrist, reels him in for a kiss, because he can, now. Because he wants to watch the way expressions flicker across Rao’s face. The flash of surprise, then the smirk he hides it behind, the way it softens in the last millisecond before Adam closes his eyes and their mouths meet. The way Rao melts into it, the way his whole body relaxes and tenses up at once.
Rao tastes like stale breath and cigarettes and the crappy instant ramen they’d eaten late last night standing in the tiny kitchen. It’s perfect.
For all the pieces of information Rao’s dropped about his sexual preferences, trying to provoke or shock, Adam never imagined he would be so absorbed by kissing. As if Adam has every scrap of his attention, as if nothing could be more fascinating to him. As if Rao has been longing for this just as desperately as Adam has, longing for him, for Adam specifically —
He pulls back, because the kiss got dirty fast and he can feel his world narrowing to the inside of Rao’s mouth, Rao’s hand on his jaw, Rao’s chest against his. If he doesn't back off now, they're going to end up back in bed. And he doesn't want that -- no, he does, very badly, wants to pull Rao down onto the bed and learn more about how they fit together. But even more than that, he wants to hold onto that edge of wanting. Hold it where he can look at it for a moment. Feel it, unsatisfied, and know that it could be.
Rao chases the kiss for a moment, then sighs, sounding deeply put-upon. Adam tugs him down again so their foreheads touch, and Rao lets himself be pulled off-balance, leans his weight into him easily. Breathes, “Fuck. Adam,” as if Adam’s name says something he doesn’t have any other words for. His fist is still clutching the front of Adam’s sweatshirt.
This thing between them is shockingly good, new and strange and familiar all at once. Adam's never been to bed with someone he knows as well as he knows Rao, someone who knows him as well, not remotely, and that had made it easy and terrifying at the same time. He’d kept stumbling over it, as if he couldn’t hold onto the thought. Kept discovering amazed that this was Rao, not a stranger or one of the people he hadn’t known how to be with.
One of his hands has slid up under Rao’s shirt, fingers digging into the softness of his side. Rao’s already regained most of the weight he’d lost, now Prophet’s not consuming him, melting through his flesh like paraffin wax. He feels solid and present, not terrifyingly fragile like he’d been at the end. Breath rising and falling unevenly under Adam’s hand. Adam drags his thumb up and down just to feel Rao’s skin jump, muscles tensing and fluttering.
This close, he can watch Rao pulling himself together, re-assembling his facade. It looks like it takes an effort. Adam’s not immune to the ego-boost of knowing that he’s the one who made Rao’s expression so soft and stunned.
Rao draws in a deep breath like he’s fortifying himself, pats Adam’s chest twice with an open palm, then says, “Right. Okay. Smoke.”
Smirk firmly back in place, he adds, “Glad to see you're not having second thoughts about the sex, at least.”
Adam snorts and says, “Come on,” and they head down the narrow stairs of the apartment complex and out into the night.
It never gets that cold in Vegas, relative to plenty of places Adam's been, but it's still cold enough to clear his head, make him feel more awake. People forget Vegas is in a desert, or they forget deserts get cold at night. It’s always surprised him, the things people don’t think about.
Outside, the noise of traffic is suddenly louder. It’s a relief to get out of the closed, dark, private world of the bedroom, where everything could be a dream.
He closes his eyes. Opens them again. Rao's still there, still real. Looking incongruous in this place, next to the half-dead palms, the pink-washed concrete walls, the glow in the sky from the Strip. Which makes him seem even more real somehow.
When Adam pulls out his cigarettes, he waggles his fingers and says “Give us one” before Adam can offer. Parks the cigarette between his lips and digs in his jacket pockets for his lighter.
Adam knows he'll have his own cigarettes in there too. But Rao's always liked asking for little things, small favors. Cigarettes, coffee, candy bars. Does it easily, shamelessly. “Cadging,” he always calls it: “Can I cadge a fag?”
Adam's worked through several theories on the subject since they first met. It isn't stinginess; Rao's more than generous with his own things. At first he thought it might be a manipulation tactic. There’s a theory that asking people for favors makes them more inclined to help you again in the future, though Adam has his doubts. Then he wondered if it was about getting away with something. Getting one up on people. But Rao doesn’t do it to most people. Doesn’t even do it to all the people he likes, at least for Rao values of liking.
Mostly Adam thinks it's about attention, little concrete assurances. Little tests of how much people like him, how much they’ll put up with. Whether he can rely on them.
Such little things mean a lot to Rao, whether it's the ones he asks for or the ones he doesn't, like a bottle of water or Tylenol when he's got a hangover, the ones that always seem to startle him no matter how much he's been complaining. Adam got used to doling them out like bribes, back in those first weeks when he was trying to build a working relationship somehow. Then somewhere along the line it stopped being about keeping Rao on track, and just became part of looking after Rao.
That part’s not hard. It’s never been hard.
When he sighs out smoke into the air, the band around his chest doesn't feel as tight. But it still feels like he’s forgotten how to breathe right. Like he has to remember to breathe in and breathe out each time. He’s lost the knack of it.
Rao slouches against the wall next to him, bumps his shoulder against Adam’s companionably. Shifts away before Adam’s figured out how to react.
Another thing Adam doesn’t know the rules for. Touching that's not sex. Doesn’t know what Rao wants, what his preferences are. If he’s just trying to be kind. Adam’s seen Rao drape himself over people he’s trying to pick up, casually slide a hand up a thigh in a bar. But in other contexts he’ll bristle at anyone he considers too “touchy-feely”, eviscerate anyone who puts their hands on him when he doesn’t feel like it.
But he’d held Adam, that night in the motel, after his nightmare. After the clock. Pulled him into his arms like it was nothing. And Adam had gone out like a light, all his exhaustion rushing in on him. Like going under general anesthetic, the way the world tips up on one end and slides away. He’d felt so safe. Cradled and cherished. As if his body was stupidly certain that Rao was safe, was safety, even if the rest of him knew better. Beyond illicit. But he hadn’t asked for it, hadn’t even dreamed of it, so it wasn’t his fault. He could get away with it. Just for a moment, in the dark. He just had to let it happen.
Last night, he’d been trembling on the edge of coming and Rao had tightened his arms round his shoulders, murmuring raw and breathless in his ear come on, love, I’ve got you, I’ve got you --
It’s hard to think about, in a way the sex isn’t. Feels dangerous to think about.
“Better?” Rao enquires hopefully, and he blinks away memories.
“Yeah. A little. Thanks.”
“Yeah, no problem,” Rao says automatically, then, “What for? I’ve not bloody done anything.”
“Staying up with me.”
“Fuck’s sake. You don’t have to say it like I’m doing you some great favor.” Rao leans his head back against the wall, taps ash off his cigarette. “Besides, it’s not escaped my attention that you’ve not even tried telling me you’re fine, and frankly that’s scaring the shit out of me.”
“You wouldn’t believe me anyway,” Adam points out.
“Yeah, well. This has never stopped you before.”
“This isn’t before, Rao.”
It’s been spilling out of him for weeks, and too many people have had the eyes to see it. Hunter. Rao’s mom. Miller. Caldwell. Rao’s the only one who hasn’t seen it, because he was dead.
“Can’t argue with that,” Rao sighs. “Are you dabbling in honesty, love?”
Adam hums for a moment. “It’s an experiment.”
Rao laughs, but he thinks it might be true.
Above them, the sky is sodium orange, a haze of light over the darkness. He can only see a few stars, pinpricks near the horizon. But he knows they’re there. Can imagine the space between them, endless distances extending up and out.
He looks at Rao again to check he's still there, finds Rao watching him, and has no idea what to make of the expression on Rao's face. The tenderness in it, but also something like amusement or surprise. The expression Rao wears when he's been tickled by some private joke he's refusing to share. Half furtive and half gleeful, hugging a secret to his ribs.
It’s too much and he has to look away.
“I like the pool,” Rao says into the silence, throwing him a lifeline.
“It's empty.”
“I can see that, Adam. Very atmospheric. Bit of a J. G. Ballard vibe. Or one of those ‘70s noirs, maybe. The Long Goodbye.”
Adam thinks about the story he read in an anthology from the high school library. “The Voices of Time.” He’s pretty sure that was Ballard. It had been weird and he hadn’t understood it at the time, but he remembers fragments. Images. The scientist carving mysterious symbols into the bottom of the empty swimming pool. The mutating lab animals, dormant genes activating to prepare them for nightmarish possible futures. The broadcast of numbers from across the galaxy, counting down to the end.
It had felt thrilling and calming all at once, like the Salton Sea was calming. The promise that everything was going to stop, that something vast and terrible and impersonal was coming to end it all.
But apocalypses had lost their appeal for him long before he met a real one. There were things he had to lose, people who didn't deserve to be hurt.
“Swimming pools take a lot of maintenance,” he says instead. “A lot of places don't bother, especially in the winter. Sometimes they never get refilled.”
Rao pushes off from the wall, grinds his cigarette butt underfoot, and goes wandering over toward the pool, loose-limbed. Even sober, Rao walks with an uneven, tipsy sway. A security light flicks on as he passes it, sub-aquatic green.
Adam stubs out his own cigarette unfinished and trails him, thinking about sightlines and the corners of buildings. He hangs back out of habit, the way he would to check for a tail or a threat, where he can see what attention Rao draws and then deal with it.
Rationally, the chances of any immediate danger are low. But he still can’t shake the prickle of dread. Hard to tell if it’s spidey sense or just hypervigilance. Rao’s alive, and that means he can be hurt.
Adam’s barely looked at the courtyard since he got here. Now he watches Rao appraising it like it’s the scenery for a play. Concrete paving slabs, beds of gravel with lumps of rock and a few stunted agave plants. A sun-rotted pool chair. One of the palm trees has a half-broken frond, hanging down like a dislocated arm.
The background noise of the city washes over everything, a distant roar, rising and falling when individual cars pass by. Like a white noise generator, like the rushing in your ears underwater. Noise that’s a kind of silence. Adam suddenly, vividly imagines screaming.
Rao glances back at him, asks, “Did you live somewhere like this, when you were a kid?”
“We never had a pool,” Adam deflects. Then, because there was something a little shifty in how Rao’s gaze had flicked to him and then away, “Is that something you saw, when you were a -- a vahana?”
Rao doesn’t seem bothered by the question. “Nah, not really. That was mostly a guess. You did tell me you grew up in Vegas.”
“Mostly?”
Rao drops down to sit on the edge of the pool, dangling his legs in it. Adam follows him.
Most of the windows around the courtyard are dark. In a handful, light seeps out round the edges of the drapes. Some of those are blinking or cycling endlessly through colors. Christmas decorations. He can’t see anyone looking out, but that doesn’t mean anything.
Rao grips the edge of the pool, leans on his hands and gazes down into it. He sighs. “I don't remember most of the stuff I knew when I was … with Prophet. I just remember knowing it. Which is fucking weird, let me tell you. Not being able to remember something. Is that what it’s like for everyone else, all the time? I mean, I knew that, but I didn’t know, you know? Fucking terrifying. I feel like I’ve got Alzheimer’s.”
There’s a drift of dead leaves and crushed beer cans around the drain at the bottom of the pool. Rust stains on the concrete.
“The thing about Prophet, it’s not … linear. It doesn’t just exist across different times and dimensions, it’s acting in all directions, forwards and backwards — I don’t have the vocabulary for this.”
He flops onto his back, exasperated. Pulls his knees up to plant his feet on the faded turquoise tiles round the edge of the pool. Gazes up at the sky. It’s easier for Adam to look at him like that, when he’s not looking back.
“The problem is, we can’t even think about causation without temporal order, you know? This happens and then it makes that happen. We even imagine time travel like that, like you go back and change the past, you kill Hitler or whatever —”
“Step on a butterfly,” Adam offers, and Rao frowns briefly, puzzled.
“— yeah, whatever, and then it’s different.” He shakes his head.
Adam watches Rao’s feet move as he talks, pointing and flexing, yellow Converse tapping against each other. Watches Rao’s impossible mind trying to work out impossible concepts. He’s not wearing socks.
Adam’s excruciatingly conscious of Rao’s body under his clothes, of everything he knows now. The arch of each foot, the bare vulnerable knobs of his shoulders, the sharp smell of sweat in his armpits. The hot hard eager curve of Rao’s dick and how Rao had jerked like he’d been electrocuted when Adam got his hand around it. He’d bitten the inside of Rao’s thigh, hard, and Rao had yelped and nearly kicked him and arched up off the bed, clenching round his fingers, swearing at him and laughing and asking for more, brimming over with delight.
In the same breath, he remembers space caving in on itself, the things that weren’t lights and weren’t kites tessellating across his visual field like a migraine. How they’d hung suspended and at the same time he’d understood that they were moving unspeakably fast, somewhere else. Wind from nowhere blowing ash against his face. The absolute unreality of it all, and Rao at the center of everything.
He doesn’t know how to reconcile the two. Rao looks so ordinary, lying on his back on the dirty concrete, and nothing about him is ordinary. It never has been.
“That’s wrong,” Rao goes on. “That’s not how Prophet is. Then and now, they’re not functionally distinct to it. So I was there in the hot bay and — I’d always been there. I was always going to have been there.”
He has to ask. “Are you still there?”
“No.” A hesitation. “Not this me.” Rao rests his arm over his eyes, like he’s shielding them from non-existent sun. “But yes. Sort of. I think so.”
“Don’t look at me like that,” he adds, not moving his arm. “This is much weirder for me than it is for you. Had the whole metaphysical identity crisis already, thanks.”
The sleeve of Rao’s jacket is too short. Some thrift shop find. Where it’s pulled back, Adam can see the fine scar on the back of his wrist, where he used to wear a silver bracelet. But this Rao was built out of nothing. This Rao didn't exist until a month ago. This Rao never had a dying bird sink its talons into him. He remembers it just the same, Adam knows. Identical down to the atom. It’s in the mind, not the gun.
It should disturb him and it doesn’t. Rao says he’s Rao, and he’s the only one who could tell the difference anyway. No. That’s an evasion. Rao is Rao, and something in Adam knows that — knows him — on a level deeper than rational thought. Deeper than he can argue with.
He remembers Rao telling him about his fondness for knives, soft-voiced in the dark. How they make people “very much themselves.” But Rao’s always been very much himself. Is more himself than anyone else Adam’s ever met. As complicated as that often seems to be for him. He’s never imagined that being Rao is particularly easy.
And there’s another Rao too, now. Gone utterly beyond anywhere Adam can reach. Somehow that doesn’t feel like a surprise.
“The causality’s a conceptual nightmare,” Rao goes on. “Does my head in. I don’t think human brains can handle it. It’s part of why I wasn’t going to last very long, like that. How did I get onto that?”
It’s not a real question, Adam knows. He can just replay the last few minutes in his mind if he wants.
Rao sits back up again, crosses his legs underneath himself. "Anyway, I think that’s why I can’t remember most of it. Just glimpses. Some of the things I saw about you. Not you-you, but all the different yous in the universes nearest to ours. I just don’t know which of them were about you. I mean, I can eliminate some of them, obviously, like the ones where you didn’t join up or you didn’t live this long or --” He glances away. “Just possibilities.”
Not a black hole but a smear of possible lives, an uncollapsed waveform. Adam doesn’t know if that feels better or worse. It’s probably one or the other.
“So I still can’t tell with you,” Rao adds, defensively. “If that’s what’s bothering you.”
“You looked happy,” Adam says without meaning to, and it's not true, it's completely the wrong word, because he remembers how much Rao'd been struggling to breathe at the end, the pain that had made Adam's own chest hurt to watch. The punch-drunk hysteria in Rao's laughter. The death Adam had seen in his eyes. Something terrible and glittering.
But there'd been wonder in it too, like his laughter over the lizards. He’d been so proud of himself, so certain. And Adam had hated everything about that. Hated that Rao had still been smiling, even at the end.
Rao looks stricken, says, “I stayed as long as I could. I'm really sorry.”
Then, slowly, telegraphing his movements as if Adam still had a pistol trained on him, he reaches out and takes his hand.
Rao’s skin is dry, a little chilled from the night air, but Adam can feel the warmth underneath. There are no droplets of silver wicking into it. There isn’t any conceivable universe Adam would choose over this one, and he doesn’t know how to be here, how to hold all this.
Rao holds Adam’s hand like he’s not sure what to do with it. He fidgets with it, folds his fingers round Adam’s, then unfolds them again. Takes Adam’s hand between both of his, turns it over, traces fingertips over Adam’s calluses. Adam lets him do it, lets his hand lie open and passive, turns it obediently. There are little scars on Rao’s knuckles.
“Just wanted to see you alright, at least,” Rao says wistfully. “You deserve that, you know. Deserve to be happy.”
“I shoot people for the United States government,” Adam says dryly.
He isn’t prepared for the way Rao explodes. “Absolutely fuck off, Adam, if we’re playing that game you know where I’ve been and what I’ve done. Though we did save the entire world, if you recall --”
“You saved the world,” Adam interjects. But Rao’s on a roll, isn’t pausing for breath. Has dropped Adam’s hand because he needs both of his to gesture with.
“— which I can’t help feeling should count for something. And yes I know it doesn’t cancel out, this isn’t a bloody moral philosophy seminar —” He breaks off, glares at Adam defiantly. It’s almost funny.
“Fine, I'll rephrase, then, if you're going to be difficult. You're allowed to be happy.” A pause, an in-breath, then, like he’s throwing down a gauntlet or tossing a grenade: “I want you to be happy.”
It’s the sincerity that guts him. The kind of sincerity he knows Rao is allergic to. Like a solar plexus punch, how it paralyzes your diaphragm so you can’t breathe in, desperately trying to suck in air that won’t come. Rao’s always had a knack for body blows.
“Don’t,” he says helplessly. A small tight sound.
“Adam?” He can’t look up. Rao’s voice is very soft and uncertain.
He wants to say but I am happy. He wants to say I don’t think I know how to be happy. He wants to say the world doesn’t work like this.
But Rao’s there, impossibly. Adam feels like his ribs are breaking, like his chest might cave in. There’s something wrong with him, some deep subterranean faultline, and Rao’s always known how to drive a wedge right into it.
Mercy has never been Rao’s strongest trait, but Adam throws himself on it anyway. “I don't know how to do this.”
“Do what?”
“This. Us. Any of it. I don’t know how to -- how to have this.”
“Ohh-kay,” Rao says slowly, cautiously, in the tones of someone opening a hostage negotiation. “But you -- you do want this, right?”
Adam stares at him. “Of course I do.”
Rao raises his hands. “Just checking! I don’t know what goes on in your fucking head, do I?”
“That’s not true.”
“I mostly don’t. Okay. Well. Look.” Rao falls silent, gazes down. Scratches at his cheek, his beard. Finally throws his hands up and gestures in a way that’s probably supposed to illustrate something and doesn’t. “If it’s just feeling wildly out of your depth, then join the fucking club, yeah?”
Adam must still be staring at him, because he goes on, with feeling, “You are sorely mistaken if you think I’ve got a clue what I'm doing here, love.”
“Can I get another fag?” he adds after another long moment.
Adam gives him one, watches him fiddle with it. He takes his lighter out of his pocket, then changes his mind, puts it back. Unfolds himself and turns to dangle his legs in the pool, then takes out the lighter again. Adam recognizes the signs of Rao winding himself up to tell something.
For a second, his face is uplit by the lighter flame. Dark eyes, dark brows, the quizzical twist of his mouth as he thinks. The complicated curves and angles of his face. The scattering of gray hairs at his temples catching the light. He’s going to get more as he gets older. The thought makes Adam dizzy.
It’s far too dark to check Rao’s pupils, but Adam knows they’d be normal. He doesn’t have the ashen pallor he’d had when Adam first saw him at Pollheath, or the pinched expression that means he’s getting a headache. And there are no bruises on him except the ones he’d begged Adam to leave.
Rao takes a couple of drags on the cigarette before he speaks. “It's not really been something I've gone in for before,” he says, intently examining the cigarette in his hand, turning it to look at it from different angles. “You know. Romance.” He says the word as if he's handling it with tongs. Adam can almost hear the words he isn’t saying. “Never been my thing, really.”
He looks up then, meets Adam’s eyes. “Wasn't expecting you.”
There’s the mixture of amusement and surprise in his face that Adam had seen before and not known how to interpret. Rueful and gleeful at once. Rao’s jokes are rarely self-mocking, not without a barb of some kind, but Adam thinks this one might be. A joke Adam’s meant to be in on.
Rao’s face is as open and honest as it had been in the hot bay, at the end. His eyes are taking in every detail of Adam’s face like he’s never seen him before. Like he hasn’t seen him for a very long time. Like he’s really seeing him. But with a sort of wonder. As if Adam’s something amazing. A revelation.
He feels very exposed. Like being in a room that’s too warm. Like he’s too present in his own skin. There’s a shape to it that’s something like terror, but he doesn’t think it’s bad.
“So excuse me for being late to the party, but I didn’t bloody know, okay?”
Adam’s throat is very tight. He says, as lightly as he can, “You're saying that neither of us is operationally qualified for this.”
Rao’s shoulders relax a notch and he snickers. “Wouldn't put it quite like that, but yeah.” He swings his legs, heels bouncing off the pool wall.
“Rao, that isn’t as reassuring as you want it to be.”
“We're a highly effective team,” Rao says primly, then exhales. “I’m saying you're not on your own in this, you twat.”
He keeps thinking about that stupid glass of water, the one Rao’d brought him after his nightmare. It’s funny in hindsight, though Adam hadn’t been in any state to appreciate it at the time. How out of his depth Rao’d been, how much he’d been panicking, clutching at anything that might help. How hard he’d been trying. How hard he’s trying now. His careful, awkward kindness, odd and unpracticed because he keeps it hidden behind armor plates most of the time.
He reaches out and steals the cigarette from Rao’s hand, takes a drag. Rao arches his eyebrows in mock outrage, beaming.
“You’re not scared.” It’s a question.
A one-shouldered shrug. “It’s just us,” Rao says, like it’s self-evident. “We’ve done weirder shit. We’ll figure it out, yeah? Together.”
A wave of exhaustion hits him then. Adrenaline drop. He’s familiar with the way it can hit after combat, all the energy you had a minute ago vanished, until you go to lean against a wall and find yourself staggering.
He holds the cigarette out, lets Rao reclaim it.
Rao gestures with the cigarette, his voice turning arch, acid-bright. “See, the thing about relationships, Adam, and I don’t know if you’re aware of this, is that there’s customarily two people in them.” He makes a moue. “At least.”
“Is that so.”
“I read a book about it once. Now, can we go in yet, or do you need more time to be a drama queen?”
It startles a laugh out of him. Rao grins at him, unrepentant, but Adam can see the flicker of uncertainty under the bravado. He’s always an asshole when he’s nervous.
“I really hate you, Rao,” he says, and prays that what Rao said is true, that he can taste the lie in it. Taste the magnitude of the lie. That it can stand in for some of the things Adam can’t yet say.
Adam will never know what truth and falsehood feel like to Rao, but he sees the answer instantly in Rao’s face, a micro-second of dismay and then the bloom of realization, delight, his whole face lighting up with it. Rao’s always been a connoisseur of lies. He screws his eyes shut for a second, like he sometimes does when he’s taking the first bite of something delicious, savoring it. Then he throws his head back and laughs, voice pitching up into the high cackle that means he’s truly amused.
“You’re a dirty liar, Adam,” Rao says when he’s done laughing, and his voice is so full of fondness it’s almost too much to bear.
“Let’s go in.”
Rao immediately shivers, as if he’s been trying hard not to. “Yeah, can we, it’s fucking Baltic out here. Do you think you’ll be able to sleep?”
“I should try.”
The noise of the TV startles him when he opens the door to the apartment, makes him think for a moment that someone else is there.
Rao’s stripping off his jacket before the door’s even shut, sheds clothes in a trail all the way to the bed, slides naked between the sheets. It’s casual, utterly un-seductive.
Adam puts his weapons away in the nightstand. Finds himself still dressed, standing by the bed. Last night they’d passed out still tangled up in each other, without having to think about it. Now it’s a choice.
Rao props himself on his elbow and pats the mattress like someone trying to coax an elderly pet to jump up onto it. “Come and have a cuddle, love.”
Adam rolls his eyes at him, but then he can move again, and he pulls his sweatshirt off.
Rao waggles his eyebrows and leers, inevitably. But then he leans back and watches Adam strip with frank appreciation, easy and un-selfconscious. It’s unfamiliar, but it doesn’t feel bad.
Adam switches out the light, lies down on his side. In the faint glow filtering through the crack in the drapes, he can see Rao looking back at him, one hand tucked beneath his cheek.
“Can I,” he says.
He puts his palm on Rao’s breastbone to push him onto his back. Rao goes easily, trusting, eyes on his. Face very grave.
Adam stretches out over him. Lays his head on Rao’s chest, lightly, not quite daring to weight it.
“Can you.” But his throat’s closed tight.
There’s a moment where he thinks of all the too-sharp things Rao could say, where he feels nothing but pathetic and needy, but Rao’s arms are already closing around him, warm and safe. And that means Adam’s allowed to pull himself in closer, throw a leg over Rao’s. That means he’s allowed to have this.
“Can I what?” Rao asks.
Adam can’t answer, just screws his eyes shut, presses his face against Rao’s collarbone and concentrates on breathing.
Suddenly, as if he’s just realized something, Rao squeezes him fiercely, mashes his face into Adam’s hair. He disengages an arm to drag the sheet and blanket up over Adam’s shoulders and tuck it round them both, then wraps his arms around him again.
Adam’s already noticed that Rao likes Adam’s weight on top of him. He shifts to cover him more, and Rao exhales a deep, satisfied sigh and wiggles from side to side a little, as if he’s settling himself deeper into the bed. As if this is where Adam’s meant to be.
There’s so much skin contact it makes him feel drunk. So much it feels like he doesn’t have any skin at all, flayed alive. Every touch burning, like the nauseating ache of returning sensation after you’ve been frozen through. He breathes in the comforting, clean-dirty smell of Rao’s skin, sweat and sex and cologne, and lets Rao hold him through it, lets Rao’s warmth start to soak into his bones.
Rao twists a leg and hooks a foot behind Adam’s ankle, flexes it idly. Against his hip, he can feel that Rao’s dick has hardened a little. But he doesn’t seem to be starting anything. Just wanting more contact, more touch.
Adam knows his own body would be responding if he’d slept properly in the past month. He can feel desire between them like the hum of machinery on stand-by, the charge of potential energy. But for now, it’s something he can rest in.
There’ll be time for that. In the morning. There’s going to be a morning. He’s going to wake up and Rao will still be there. Rao’s going to complain because there isn’t any milk and they’ll go to Starbucks so he can drink some god-awful concoction with pumpkin spice and too much syrup and hold forth about the corporate homogenization of national cultures or whatever else crosses his mind, and the world will be intact again.
Rao brushes his knuckles very lightly against Adam’s cheekbone, then settles his hand on the back of his head. Cradling it like Adam’s skull is something fragile or precious. His thumb ruffles Adam’s hair, back and forth. Adam’s not sure he even knows he’s doing it. Somehow that makes it easier to let it soothe him, let the undertow take him.
He’s halfway to sleep by the time Rao says, sounding uncharacteristically tentative, “Are you ever going to ask about the second thing?”
Adam makes a questioning noise.
“You know,” Rao whispers. He sounds conspiratorial. Or maybe shy. “The second statement I was able to do a run on.”
Why don’t you ever want to hear how I feel about you?
He spreads his fingers against Rao’s ribcage. He’s traced the outline of that thought, walked its perimeter. He’s not an idiot. He can do the math, work out by elimination what it isn’t. What’s left.
Are you going to tell me if I don’t ask?
He’d pushed back, then, feeling like a child and needing to do it anyway. Knowing he was standing on some sort of precipice. Wanting to know if Rao would leave him a scrap of control in the end. If he had any choice. And Rao had gone silent, looked to one side. Stared out at the sun in the parking lot.
Adam hums, considering. He still thinks hearing it aloud might be more than he can handle, right now. He wants to hold onto it for a while first. Like a secret. Something small enough to hold in his hands, folded shut like a book or a pocketknife. Something that belongs to him. Something he can learn how to know.
“Not yet,” he says, eventually.
“Okay, love,” Rao says, with that odd, off-kilter gentleness. He presses a kiss to Adam’s hair, then leans his cheek against the top of Adam’s head again. “Okay. When you’re ready, yeah? I’m not going anywhere.”
Rao’s chest rises and falls, and Adam imagines he can feel the words bubbling up inside him. He’s very familiar with the sensation of Rao trying not to say things, how it can fill up a room, like the pressure front before a thunderstorm. Like he’s trying not to burst with how much he wants to say it. There’s a non-trivial chance he’ll slip and blurt it out before Adam can ask. I can’t believe I -- or you’re lucky I --, probably. He buries a grin against Rao’s chest. That’s okay. That’ll be okay. It’s Rao. Adam appreciates the effort.
Everything’s very quiet inside his head. The weight of Rao’s arms round his shoulders. Under his ear, the stubborn, insistent, miraculous beat of Rao’s heart.
He breathes in, breathes out. Something’s expanding inside him, unfolding, something vast and unimaginable, and he doesn’t have a name for it, “happiness” is too small a word, but it feels like there’s more room for it now. It’s like the first time he’d looked through his telescope and seen the darkness between the stars. How there’d been so much more there than he’d ever imagined there could be.