Lonely Souls
-Sfortuna
-Gamer-
Simon didn't know what to do anymore. It all just sort of fell apart after Slayers.
Well, it wasn't quite that dramatic even though Simon did help Kable kill Ken Castle. Murder. More like self-defense to put it in legalese. Castle's death wasn't like the deaths of hundreds that Simon had technically masterminded if not actually committed. It was like he and Kable were really working together, were one, like the Nanex intended. It was the complete melding of their minds and bodies as they worked in tandem to bring the knife around and shove it into Castle.
That moment. That very moment when it was Simon's hand wrapped around the hilt and Kable's hand around his, both of their muscles straining against Castle's control, the sweat trailing out of their hair and down their temples to drip to their shirts and grimaces of strain on their faces. It was pure synthesis. And even though Simon was a teenager, overly cocky and full of shit, he knew that when he lost that connection to Kable as the Nanex was officially turned off for everyone everywhere he lost something great.
"Hey Simon! Heads up!"
Simon looked up just in time to catch an action figure. He turned it over in his hands and examined the plastic replica of Kable.
"Pretty cool huh?"
"What the hell is it?"
One of Simon's very few non-interweb friends, Mason Heiser, sauntered through the thin crowd with a smile on his tanned face and a sparkle in his dark eyes. His limp book bag hung off of one shoulder and gently bumped against his side as he came even with Simon.
"It's an action figure, duh! Jesus, just because you got to stay home all the damn time doesn't mean you can forget about us mortals in the real world." Mason laughed as he poked Simon in the shoulder. Mason was a little shorter and stockier than Simon's slim 5'8 frame.
Simon stared at the face that had become as familiar as his own in the time period that he had played in Slayers. The eyes, the jawline, the hair... he snorted and tossed the figure sideways for Mason to catch.
"So? Slayers is dead, and Kable might as well be. No one's seen or heard of him since Castle's death." he said and started to walk in the direction that Mason had come from.
"There've been all sorts of rumors so technically he isn't quite gone and forgotten. But I know what ya mean." Mason easily kept up with Simon's strides as they navigated the high school hallways. "Anywho, Kable is still a hit. After that expose from Gina Parker Smith he's like a frickin' hero."
No one bothered them as they made their way down the corridors to the exit. Before Simon had left high school (with the understanding that he would do his work electronically) to focus more fully on Slayers he had been incredibly popular. Everyone saw his stats and how they soared with each match. And even after he stayed in his private wing of the house kids from school still bothered him, though they were of much lower priority than the girls that would show him their tits and/or pussy and try to bribe him. But now things were different. Simon Silverton was still an incredibly popular dude, but no one really talked to him anymore. What was there to say? The media had tried to find out where Kable had gone through him, so had the girls that showed him their bodies and everyone in between the two groups.
Mason knew that something was up; something had been up ever since about the 14th or so win via Kable in Slayers. Simon still played great, still let the fame go to his head, still ate his crazy sandwiches, but something was up with him. And with the loss of Slayers and his return back to the real world it became even more obvious.
"So what's up man?" Mason asked as they stepped out into the late afternoon smog and traffic.
"Nothing." Simon replied, head tilted down.
"C'mon bro, don't sandbag me. You haven't been the same. Not for a while."
The hustle and bustle of the city swirled around them as Simon grabbed Mason's jacket and pulled him to one side of the sidewalk. It wasn't near private but no one ever paid attention to two boys, especially not around the time that schools let out.
"No one understands, not even those punks that couldn't come anywhere close to my record." Simon started, his blue eyes blazing with excitement. "Slayers was more than just blowing shit up and killing the other guys. Course that's all I thought it was for a long time, but even I make mistakes."
"Dude, the hell are you saying? You had an existential experience or what?" Mason exclaimed.
Simon shook his head, "No, no, something even better. It was like me and Kable were one person, Mace, one person! I became Kable, Kable was me, we were the same person, physically and mentally."
"That's the Nanex bro-"
"No it's not! It wasn't like that at first! It was just like any other FPS, only more real. This was... this was perfect." Simon sighed out the last three words and slumped as they left him to hang between him and Mason.
For a minute they stood there with the words hanging around and city folk passing them by. Mason eyed Simon like he thought Simon might have finally lost it; Simon eyed Mason like a man desperate for someone to finally understand and accept. Mason crossed his arms and leaned his back against the dirty brick wall, breaking eye contact, and spat onto the concrete earning an obligatory curse from some delivery boy on a bike.
"Shit man. Shit."
"I know, Mace, I know."
"I don't know what you need anymore man and whatever it is I know it's something I can't give ya. But I do know that Slayers and Kable have royally fucked with ya."
Simon shrugged, getting ready for the brush off. He may have gotten popular and famous, but he was still a teenager and he still had some sense of how stupid and nuts he sounded. And no matter how many times he rolled the words around in his head and the tactician side of him said to shut that shit up, he couldn't let it go.
"Listen bro, I think there's only two people who could set this right in your head, and one of them is dead. If I were you, I'd put those crazy mad skills to work in finding Kable. Cause according to you, the other Slayer-players don't know jack."
Looking at Mason, Simon knew that his friend really had no idea, no clue, as to what was going on. They were only seventeen, two seventeen year olds just playing video games and looking at porn on the interwebs. They could talk all day about software, ammunition, guns, the pros and cons of a game, even the social structure of high school. They knew next to nothing about emotions and how to navigate them; usually they either ignored or just pushed on as best they could. But Mason did what Simon was too afraid to do: acknowledge that what Simon felt was just too heavy for them and he needed real help.
Mason pushed off the brick and turned to face Simon, holding his hand out.
"I'll see ya Monday man." He opened his fingers, the Kable action figure lying prone on his palm. Simon reached out and took the mini copy. Mason slapped him on the shoulder and disappeared into the crowd while Simon turned the figurine over and over in his hands. The clothes were the usual cargos, boots, t-shirt, and tactical vest with belt. There was no weapon in his hands, but his fingers were curled like there should be one. The forearms had carefully defined ridges of muscle and the biceps bulged, Kable's face held that stony glare of concentration and four day old stubble.
It was a figure that Simon knew as well as his own.
-Gamer-
Simon spent most of the evening and almost all night sending out search bots and scanning the news for any and all rumors. Everything that he found was full of crap. He dug and dug, searching through every clip or blurb that had "Kable" in it. Dead ends, all of them. He used every program he could think of, hacked a little, and scoured the interwebs.
Nothing. It was all useless.
He lay in his room, surrounded by screens flipping through hundreds of sites a minute, and fell asleep in the wee hours of the morning. The room automatically dimmed when it sensed the lowered respiration and heart rate of its occupant but continued with the protocol that Simon started earlier.
Simon dreamed; his head full of Kable and blood and running. Dressed in sweats and a plain white tee he ran through endless Slayer maps, all ones he had taken Kable through alive and never unscathed. He didn't know why he ran, no one chased him. As a matter of fact, the only other people he saw were the Kibbs. The moment he thought of them as 'Kibbs' someone would start yelling, and then they would all yell at him, screaming, "We're people! We're people Simon! HUMANS! HUMANS! HUMANZ!" And then he would think of them as regular people and the yelling would stop, until he slipped up again and think of them as Kibbs and it started all over again.
On the orange floor, Simon twitched a little as the screens kept scrolling through and occasional matches would be pulled off to the side for him to look at later.
But in his head Simon ran and ran and ran and sweat ran down his face and into his eyes and stung and he went slower and slower and he looked down to see why his feet wouldn't move so quickly. He wasn't barefoot anymore; he wore heavy combat boots with green cargos tucked into the tops and a heavy black tac vest with ammo and a sidearm. The vest and the shirt under it swallowed him, obviously made for someone bigger and bulkier and if his belt wasn't attached to his vest his pants would have fallen clean off. The weapon he cradled had to be close to twenty pounds.
"Kable! Kable! Please, Kable!" Simon yelled and tripped around in the thick sand. He fell and ate the very stuff that hindered his feet with unfamiliar shoes.
"That's not my name."
Simon looked up at a serious Kable, in plain clothes.
"What?" Simon asked, not bothering to wipe at the grit in his face.
"That's," Kable put one knee close to where Simon's outstretched arm clung to his weapons handgrip, "Not," and then he leaned down with one arm stabilizing his body on the upright knee and rested his free hand in the dirt by Simon's opposite shoulder. "My," and Kable's face was so close to Simon's that the teen could pick out individual whiskers and the swirls of green and grey in the eyes.
"Name."
Simon jerked upright and wiped at the drool on his chin as the ambient light slowly rose and the screens undimmed. He stared at them all, at the miniaturized results, at the continued search, and smacked himself on the forehead.
"Dammit!"
He swung his left arm around and all the action halted.
"Delete! New screen!"
Everything blanked to a calm sea blue except for one square with a black line and a question mark.
In fifteen minutes Simon found the criminal record of one John Tillman. All the pages had a large red "PARDONED" crossing them diagonally, but the information under could still be read.
"It's not your name." Simon muttered to himself as he spread the pages out to cover his walls so he wouldn't have to flip through them, just turn around. And then he smiled, the first true smile since Kable and he had rid the world of Castle and his egomaniacal machinations. "I'll find you now. John."
He got up and left to make a pistachio and jelly sandwich and let the search programs do their thing.
-Gamer-
John 'Kable' Tillman sat in a bar. It wasn't a city bar with thumping bass and grinding bodies but a rural home town kind of bar. A clean place with aged regulars that were related to the younger generation of regulars. Most were laborers of all sorts. Some were guards, or ex-military, or any-other-sort-of-odd-job kind of guys. John was just a stranger, a polite one, that didn't get into trouble and stayed out of everyone's way. The waitresses at the diner that he went to eat at thought he was sexy and an utter gentleman. They lamented the fact that he never smiled.
He drank his scotch and stared at the lone television in the whole bar. This place wasn't exactly information central but it wasn't cut-off from the rest of the world either. He got along just fine with the one news channel that stayed on all the time. Or at least he thought it did; he wasn't there every minute of the day and night.
He caught the bartender frowning over his shoulder and wondered what would elicit such a reaction. The guy seemed nice enough, he certainly had more smiles than John did.
"Kid, you and I both know you shouldn't be here. This ain't the city where your money does all the talking." the bartender said. He sat down the shot glasses that he had been in the middle of putting away behind the counter and stepped up to the bar proper, meaty hands with a lone wedding band grasping the edge for no other reason than to intimidate.
"Hey, it's cool, I just came to talk to someone."
John's eyes closed and he let out a near silent sigh. He may have only heard the same voice on a few occasions, but he knew it. He knew it like his own.
"Simon. What are you doing here." Kable quietly demanded.
He looked over as the tall and slim teen sat on the barstool next to him.
"Listen, mister-" John raised a hand and grinned in a self-deprecating sort of manner.
"I know, I know, no kids. But this one's a stubborn smart ass and I promise he won't have anything to drink. He'll only be here for a few minutes."
The bartender squinted at Simon suspiciously but did nothing. "He does anything, it's your problem."
John nodded in agreement and the bartender went back to arranging his shot glasses. Though instead of turning to see what Simon wanted he returned his eyes to the television.
"Hey, listen Kable. Oh, uh, sorry, John." Simon scratched at his head, unsure exactly of what to say even though he needed to say what he came to say.
John snorted into his scotch and glanced at Simon, this time grinning with real humor.
"What?" Simon asked self-consciously, patting down his hair thinking he had done something funny to it while scratching.
"I shouldn't be surprised that you know my name. But somehow I am."
Shrugging it off, Simon replied, "Yeah well, I needed to find you and 'Kable' wasn't really working all that well."
John continued to stare at the TV, so Simon went on.
"Y'know, I was wondering, seeing you sitting here alone, at 5 o'clock in evening, makes me wonder why you're not with your wife. And your kid, don't you have a little girl too?"
Simon regretted his words almost instantly; John stiffened and finished off his scotch in one swift gulp.
"Hey, uhh, sorry man. I didn't mean to stick my foot in it or anything..."
"Why did you come here?" John asked, moving the empty glass away with his fingers and reaching for his wallet with his other hand.
"Well..." Simon muttered indiscriminately into his hoodie and twisted the hood tassels with his left hand. John put some money on the counter and turned his body and full attention onto Simon. "You remember that night, when we killed Castle?"
John nodded, not giving anything away.
"Ever since then well, hrm, it's been, mmmm, different. Y'know?" Simon watched John eagerly, hoping the older man wouldn't leave him hanging. "That night was fucking crazy, you were fighting Castle, and I had set it up so everyone would see, and then it was not just you but me fighting the crazy dude and then we killed him. It was different."
John knew what Simon was talking about. It was one of the many things that he'd been thinking about as he lounged around and did pretty much nothing with his life.
"And well, I was hoping we could, well, ahhh... fuck it." Simon growled in frustration and stood up. If John was going to humiliate him over what he was going to say then he wanted to take it standing. "I don't feel the same anymore. Everything's changed and I know that it wasn't just the damn Nanex messing with both of us."
"I agree."
Stunned, Simon fumbled around a bit, expecting a fight or laughter or something other than this easy acceptance. "Really?"
"Yes. Really. Now what do you want me to do about it?"
"I... I don't know." Some of Simon's courage leaked out of him and his shoulders visibly slumped even further.
"You don't know. Neither do I. I'm just a guy that got out of prison and found out that his life will never be the same. I'm in the same boat as you kid."
John stood, and while Simon intellectually knew that John 'Kable' Tillman was a big guy it was a whole different thing standing not a foot away from him and experiencing the man for himself. For one thing, John was much broader in the shoulder and chest, with muscles that stood out under his clothes. Easily 6'2, if not taller, with a face that stared right at him unflinchingly. And the tattoo. Simon had never really paid it all that much attention until now. It had faded a little with time yet it still stood out in contrast to the warm skin tone.
Simon didn't have a chance to stare for long. John stepped around Simon and headed for the door.
"Hey, wait up!"
Simon crashed out the door right behind John, following him into the cooling evening. While it was no big city the place did have a healthy population that decided to go outside and enjoy the summer evening and sunset after the hot day. People recognized John and Simon as not being from there, but didn't judge and left the strangers in peace.
"It'd be better if you just went home and got on with your life." John said as he headed down the street towards his hotel. He had no where else to stay while he floated in limbo, at a crossroads and unsure where exactly to go.
"I can't!" Simon flung his arms out in a large shrugging motion. "That's just it, I don't know what's going on but I just can't let the past year go like it never happened! And I seriously doubt that you can either."
John stopped at the street corner. Simon stood next to him, a city kid with sneakers and jeans and a plain hooded jacket (in summer of all times) and slightly messy chocolate colored hair. His skin was pale from staying indoors most of his life but his eyes were a sunny blue. Maybe it was the fact that for all his crass words and family money Simon was just a confused teenager that somehow connected with him on a gut emotional level. Or maybe it was the fact that John liked Simon's sheer nerve and stubbornness.
Traffic stopped and they crossed the street.
"So where does that leave us then? I don't have anything to offer you since you can't play me anymore and win games." John stopped off to one side and faced his follower. "What do you want from me Simon?"
Simon had a lot of words he could have said to that, and one phrase in particular that really jumped out at him. Most of it couldn't be said, not now and probably not ever, but there was one thing that wouldn't be quite so awful. There had been times that he'd wanted to hear this said more than anything else.
"I just want to be your friend. We've been through a lot together. We're definitely not normal and I think that only you and me could help each other. There's no one else like us Kable, no one else in the whole world."
Tilting his head and rubbing at the scruff on his face, John studied Simon. He'd done little thinking in the past God only knows how long, just feeling and coping with those feelings. Most of it was still a mess in his head. And Simon was a big part of it, being the one person he had known through his incarceration.
"People grow apart Simon, especially when one of them is in prison."
Thrown off by this non sequitur Simon blinked rapidly and scrunched his nose.
"Angie went through rough shit while I was away and then Delia got taken... point is we were all played and it left its marks on us. We're all different. Delia had grown so much and Angie had lost so much, we lost that time with our daughter, and I... I was in prison." John shook his head and absently scratched his chin. "Angie isn't the same person I married and had a baby with. Delia isn't the same baby we had. As you said," and here John turned his dark greenish-grey eyes on Simon's bright blues, "everything is different."
They stared into each other; while John may have gleaned a little something Simon got nothing but a dark ache inside.
"I suppose," John sighed as he straightened and let go of Simon, "that this means I should go back to the city. I don't have all of that techno-stuff," he waved his hand as if to brush all the complicated technology in the world aside, "and you can't be coming and going here all the time. Off the top of your head, any place I can stay beside a hotel?"
Blushing, Simon mumbled, "Well, my place would be free."
John chuckled. "You actually own a 'place' do ya?"
"No, it's a wing off of my parents house. But it's private and has plenty of room for another person."
John considered his options; looking for an apartment or living out of a hotel again held little appeal. Both reminded him of where he had just come from and made him miss what he had permanently lost. Why not live with the kid for a while? It would be a new experience, an adventure, if nothing else. Maybe even enlightening.
"You've got yourself a roommate Simon." John said, slinging an arm around the teens slight shoulders and pulling him down the street. "What do you say I move in immediately?"
Surprised that this was actually happening, Simon merely nodded.
"So how did you get here anyway? Or find me for that matter."
-Gamer-
John sat up on the large couch that was to be his bed while he stayed with Simon Silverton. It was comfortable and thankfully big enough to accommodate his large frame. Simon had got two fluffy pillows and a thick blanket to make up his 'bed' with, gave him the tour, and said that he was free to have anything in the kitchen but the nut butters. For a spoiled kid, he wasn't selfish with his space or things. Well, except for the nut butters, but that was kind of understandable.
He'd seen the room where the walls and ceiling were all screens and totally interactive with the orange floor. This was the room where Simon had played Slayers. Had played him. When he'd come to that realization John had felt a swell of emotion but he stuffed it down inside and they had thankfully left before anything else could happen.
He only had one bag. Coming out of prison he only had the clothes he'd been wearing when he was arrested and his wedding ring. And the picture. The governments decision for monetary compensation for his wrongful imprisonment was useful and allowed him to buy some necessities. Still, after all was said and done, he only had a small duffel of things with room to spare.
"Just call me Kable, alright?"
"But, that's not your name." Simon slowly replied as he made his sandwich.
"It's more my name right now than John is. I don't think John Tillman is all that alive anymore."
Simon put the two covered pieces of bread together on his plate and went to the fridge. He got the milk out and unscrewed the cap to take a drink directly from it.
"If that's what you want. I've always been Simon, even on the nets." he shrugged and wiped his mouth with one hand and picked up his sandwich with the other. "A name's a name. You'll always be Kable to me anyways so I s'pose it works out."
-Gamer-
There are very few Gamer fics out there. Makes me very sad :( I wrote this because of gilgameshforeternity's fic "Aftermath." If you've read this then you must go read hers. Now. And review please!
Next chapter on the way out of the factory soon...