Every pair of eyes in the public train were focused on the collection of advertisements lining the interior of the compartment. Every hand gripped a paper coffee cup or portable music player. Every shoulder donned the strap of a bag containing glossy textbooks and empty notebooks. The first Tuesday of February marked the beginning of Freie's winter semester, and enthusiasm was deficient even among those with timetables starting in the late morning.
Edward sucked his teeth as he exited the train and joined the rest of the students diffusing within the station. His shoes felt like weighted shackles as he began to walk toward Freie's campus. He rolled his shoulders, attempting to relieve the tension being held there. Any time spent away from home was always accompanied with anxiety. He came to Freie loaded with student loans and scholarships, but studying part-time while searching for a job to support himself and Al limited the time he could spend supervising his brother. With his mother's death and his father's absence, a degree wasn't something Ed had previously thought to pursue, but education is an investment, and everybody needs money. Worse still, he abruptly switched majors one month ago, rendering his completed prerequisites useless and further prolonging his expected duration as an undergraduate. That, coupled with the loss of his most recent job, put him under an enormous weight of distress.
His brother's present life was the epitome of the traumatic stories non-profit organizations like to tell teenagers. Previously, Al's logic and sensibility surpassed expectations for a person of his age. Now, he was a slave to substance and the coercion of his own overwhelming id. Whatever hole Al had hoped to fill with heroin was now ripping at the seams with apathy and collapsed veins. He was swept in and out of rehabilitation centres before Ed offered him his only bed, where he spent most of his typical day, shooting up and nodding off. Trying to keep Al indoors for the sake of his own safety was ineffective; Ed couldn't be home constantly and Al would wait until he woke up alone to sneak off. Al refused to disclose the nature of the errands he'd run, and Ed learned to stop asking questions.
He and Al lived in the rented, unfinished basement of a house owned by a family who was never peaceful, overlooking a highway that was never quiet. Ed was thankful for a separate entranceway, but he didn't trust the renters enough to forego changing the locks upon moving in.
Being optimistic made the battle seem less vicious. During the nights, as Ed ignored the familiar sounds of domestic violence and traffic, he tried to be thankful that he could afford a home at all. When Al refused to eat, he tried to be grateful that he only had to pay enough to feed his own mouth. He was careful, though, to not let that optimism blind him; he could never hope to achieve anything unless he kept a realistic perspective of his current situation.
Discord flooded Ed every time he obeyed Al's demands to visit his dealer. Enabling Al's addition might be risky, but Al's withdrawal effects were scarier. It wasn't uncommon for Ed to arrive home after work to find Al unmoving on his bed, blissful in his self-induced coma. It was a normal occurrence to pry a syringe from his clammy grip, and relieve him from the confines of the sheets tangled around his limbs. Holding Al's limp body provided Ed with more despair than comfort, but he preferred finding his brother in a semi-conscious state than seeing him awake. The latter would force Ed to witness the substance eat at him from the inside. His eyes would be open but unseeing; his heart, beating but irregular; his mind, active but incompetent. Al had died long ago. The drug annihilated his mind and soul. All that remained was an empty shell of a human being.
But the disheartening reality of Ed's relationship with his brother was evident. Al could probably live without Ed if he filled himself with enough heroin, but Ed wouldn't be able to function if he lost Al. The proof was in the aftermath of Al's most recent near-death experience. The passing concept of Al's death regularly crossed Ed's mind since his brother began using, but that was the first time he seriously considered how he'd feel if Al were to actually pass away. Ed pushed the memories out of his mind. A stroke of luck had kept Al alive this long, and Ed was eternally indebted to it. It's funny how two wrongs sometimes make a right.
He reached his destination and took a moment to survey the building, shielded by a layer of fog. His gaze glided along the row of windows on the building's third floor before entering. He began to ascend its staircase.
Lonesomeness filled the dimly lit single office, its atmosphere unfamiliar to Roy. Closed blinds covered the room's lone window and blocked the view of Berlin's grey winter sky. Lectures and discussions from nearby classrooms filtered through the ducts, combining to form a clutter of incoherent voices that amplified Roy's migraine. Distraction was unavoidable. If it wasn't from the building's poor sound insulation, it was found in the travel-sized bottles of mouth wash Roy kept in his desk drawer.
A closed office offered enough privacy to relieve Roy of the need to act out the physical movements of a responsible worker. Jean had correctly predicted Roy's lack of preparation for his first seminar and made it his business to organize the syllabus and discussion material. Roy made three attempts of reading the first paragraph before giving up and forgetting about it. Fuck it. There was no point in trying to be productive when he's so irritable from last night's binge. He could swallow his weight in water and never fully rehydrate. The thwarting recollection of his departure from BfV crushed any effort he made to be enthusiastic about his new line of work. He collected the memories of his former career as he stared, unmoving, at the surface of his barren desk.
At the time, he had worked within Berlin's BfV branch for nearly eight years. Mindless, unfulfilling work filled his usual days, at the demand of his superior. Under any other circumstance, he'd be annoyed at the inelegant nature of his labour. Such work was normally reserved for recently employed workers who still had something to prove to their superiors. But he could practically taste his next promotion, and every obeyed command brought Roy closer to it and its subsequent renown. After a particularly fruitless workday, he emerged from train station of his home's locality with a predisposed negativity, and made his way to the back door of his complex.
The flashbulb memory of what he witnessed upon entering the alley behind the complex would withhold peaceful sleep for the next month. The spilled blood added a coat of thick, cooling burgundy over the victim's dead body and the perpetrator's weapon-yielding hand. Previously, Roy had thought that BfV training and six years of studying criminology would have desensitized him. Media depictions of gore and death were too impersonal to prepare him for the trauma of observing an actual murder. Something inside him broke, punctured a hole, and all preservation of his own species oozed out.
Admitting to killing a man to his superior was only embarrassing. It was admitting it to himself that was demoralizing. The victim's own crime provided insufficient justification. There was no rationalization. There was only impulse.
Needless to say, the promotion that Roy had worked for was immediately torn from his grasp. He managed to construct an excuse of self-defense to protect himself from any significant legal trouble, but the publicity wasn't something his employer wanted to deal with. His boss became the target of his resentment, and his colleagues were mere sources of annoyance. But intoxication coated the inside of his veins with a soothing balm and temporarily alleviated his guilty conscience. First he was dragging Jean to the bar with him to supply cash and a sympathetic ear. Then he was smuggling vodka into his office. Deadlines came and passed. His coworkers pressured and his boss criticized, but it went unnoticed. His eventual termination was disheartening, albeit expected.
The financial hindrance didn't bother him. He could rely on Jean to pay his rent and bar tabs. However, Roy couldn't ignore the gaping hole where his pride used to be. Education is about establishing a career, and a career is about status and power. Roy could live off of power, but, by his own actions that stemmed from impetuously stabbing a murderer, Roy had joined the ranks of all the other unemployed failures in their thirties. Jean offered him a job at Freie after persuading the connections he had in administration, but it didn't stifle Roy's drinking. He knew it was only the mouth of the storm. Working among university faculty wouldn't dent his animosity. Soon, it would transform into another bout of hostility. His only option was to gather the remains of his former occupational glory with a single, trembling hand.
"Good morning."
The opened door of Roy's office broke walls of the privacy he had built, and the room's seclusion poured out into the rest of the building. Occupying the doorway was a blond creature threatening to infiltrate Roy's fortress of self-pity. He looked over the intruding figure and absorbed its aura. Its confidence was depicted by its domineering posture and the self-assured movements it made to enter the office, close the door, and inhabit the chair on the other side of Roy's desk. Roy could smell another man's vulnerability from a mile away, but the office was currently void of weakness.
"My name is Ed," it said. "I'm a third-year student. I recently declared a major in psychology."
Roy was never good company in the first place, but weeks of drinking alone in his dark flat had considerably damaged his ability to socialize. Now the challenge embodied the form of a student attempting to engage in conversation. Roy lowered his gaze to the only used drawer of his desk, denied of its original purpose of containing work paraphernalia. The alcohol within called to him. He felt his lips moving. "You're a third-year student who just declared a major?"
"I used to be in the geology program."
"You left geology for the social sciences?"
"Geology just wasn't for me." Ed was neither surprised nor offended by the older man's social ineptitude. He knew Roy was sitting at the bottom of the institution's hierarchy. Surely, that bruises one's pride; he didn't expect warmth. No matter. Ed had no plans to build a casual relationship with him. He knew what he needed to obtain from Roy, specifically targeted because the demands of a new job would make him easy to manipulate. The veteran instructors were like hardened clay unwilling to be moulded any further. Ed wagered that Roy, however, was relatively susceptible. "I wanted to discuss your research lab."
Roy began to tap his foot in aggravation, hidden underneath the desk. He was desperate for a drink. Surviving the cravings was more painful than succumbing to the appeal of the bottom of a liquor bottle, as long as he didn't have to admit it to anybody. "So you're saying you're looking for research experience," he mumbled.
"I'm saying I'm looking for a bit more than experience."
Roy groaned inwardly. "The demand for the position isn't nearly low enough to make me want to offer a salary to an undergraduate." He was already nursing a hangover, now he had to deal with job applications from a persistent student nearly half his age. It gnawed at his what was left of his patience. He had looked forward to a day of procrastination, sipping mouth wash and watching students talk during his seminar before retreating to the comfort of the vodka stashed in his freezer. The kid must overestimate his value of this job. Working was merely the result of the unbearable embarrassment of being unemployed at his age.
"You say that like you've an unending supply of volunteer assistants." Ed smiled at him knowingly.
The tapping ceased and Roy averted his gaze. Prior to the beginning of the semester, a handful of hopeful, enthusiastic psychology students approached him, wanting research experience to flesh out their graduate applications. The sweetness of undergraduates made his teeth hurt. Nevertheless, he had expected to rely on unpaid students to do the lab's monotonous work, and didn't bother requesting funding to employ assistants in his grant proposal. Apparently, though, the professionalism of other faculty members was more alluring than Roy's impersonality and hand tremors. He was alone in his quest to get published in an academic journal. He directed his eyes back to the blond sitting in front of him, ridding his mind of the thoughts. His ego was in no shape to endure memories of rejection, even from students. "If you expect money to work in my lab, I'd have to pay you out of my pocket. I'm sure I don't need to explain why that won't happen." He shot the younger man a condescending look. "Try looking for a lab outside of the institution."
"Unfortunately, the options for deviant psychology labs in Berlin are limited," Ed responded immediately, unfazed by the contempt Roy directed toward him. "I know you're a new addition to the faculty. Unless you weren't an instructor until now, I mean." An intentional jab to the insecurity Ed knew the man had about his recent change of occupation. "I've seen the course descriptions from the previous semesters," he explained. He leaned back, settling into the indented cushion on the back of his chair, displaying his vanity. "You could squeeze a lot of job security out of a dedicated student assistant in your lab. The probability of an institution terminating research being conducted on its own campus is low, but it exists. That probability decreases with every person involved in the research."
Roy chose to refrain from making a snide remark about an undergraduate trying to explain the politics of a post-secondary institution to him. He knew the value of assistants, he just didn't possess any incentive to keep his research afloat. After his termination, his life plan fell apart and he was living day by miserable day. He had no aspirations for tomorrow. He would take it in stride. "I got this job as a favour in the first place."
Ed could take a hint, but it would take more than topic avoidance to deter him. He stood. "You think it over," he suggested. "When are you available to discuss this further?"
Roy studied the features of the student's face, silent and unmoving in the office's settling dust. He examined the atmosphere of the other, rife with determination and arrogance. The prospect of working with such an overconfident personality was unappealing, but he couldn't bear the thought of letting the student depart with anything less than complete acceptance of Roy's superiority. "I leave campus at 5:00."
Al felt the interior wall of the train compartment against every node of his spine. The thin fabric of his sweater protected his diminishing, scabbed arms from the sights of the other public transit passengers. The energy he put into suppressing his shakes was exhausting. Rebound effects gave him chills and he felt his ankles quiver inside his oversized denim trousers. His unsatisfied appetite ate away at his remaining body fat, but his dependence consumed his survival intuition.
Turning to drugs was a mistake. Every addict knows that. But it seemed so harmless at the time, and it only took one mistake to ruin Al's life. Once the initial damage was done, it was almost impossible to cease the eradication. It's almost humourous, the way humans tend to believe they're immune to the consequences of risky behaviour. And, like a sick joke, those consequences were often irreversible. He'd try to take responsibility, say that he only had himself to blame, but he didn't feel like his body and mind still belonged to him. He had turned into a flesh casing, filled with destruction from the substance's sadistic entertainment, a slave to its allure.
In an effort to rehabilitate Al, Ed limited the amount of heroin he supplied his brother each day. The intention was good, but it didn't suppress Al's elevating tolerance, and he began doing his only available work to load his private stash. Thus, he obediently answered the calls of a man willing to pay for Al's business. Satisfying the man's yearning and lust turned into an affection so genuine it chilled Al to his bone marrow. He wasn't the type of person Al would either befriend or avoid under normal circumstances. Their exchange relationship transformed into attraction. They needed each other to support their respective needs. For Al, it came in the form of a drug fund. For the john, it came in the form of the touch of another warm body. Co-dependence blossomed into mutual devotion.
If there were a medal for narrowly dodging death's touch, he'd wear it with pride. Nobody knows how good the high is until they crash, and nobody recovers from the first crash. You either suffered or you tried to nurse yourself back to a functional state with more heroin. If you chose the latter, you crashed harder, and you kept shooting up and crashing down until your skeleton was shattered into a fine powder and your mouth was full of loose teeth. Before inhabiting Ed's rented room, when Al was prematurely ejected from a rehabilitation centre, he would move in with the two people who provided him with his first hit. There was no way out of the addiction, but misery loves company.
One starts to lose track of time when he spends extended periods on the floor of a cold house, paid for and maintained by Giselle's boyfriend. Giselle herself was usually found between Al and Driscoll, a trio of friends brought together by their shared habit. Most conscious moments were spent recklessly breaking each other's skin with the end of a filled syringe.
They say overdosing on heroin is one of the most pleasant ways to die. Al chose to believe that, convincing himself that Giselle's death was as euphoric as the high that caused it. Waking up to find yourself next to your dead drug buddy was an experience Al couldn't describe. His continued substance abuse after witnessing Giselle's overdose was even further from comprehension.
Driscoll's death was undoubtedly less enjoyed. He and Al fled after finding Giselle's lifeless body. It was a cruelty toward her boyfriend, who was left to discover his partner dead in his own home, but panic takes a toll on one's compassion. They took refuge east of the Spree river, in the house of some guy Driscoll knew. That arrangement lasted one week filled of mourning and chemically induced highs, until Driscoll and Giselle's heartbroken lover were both dead. Al knew it was an act of vengeance for introducing Giselle to heroin and abandoning her dead body. Immediately after hearing the news, Ed drew Al into his home, like a theft victim salvaging his remaining belongings.
Emptied of his former dignity, Al bridged the gap between the train and the station's floor, the number of a motel room scrawled on the back of his hand.
A depressive episode is difficult to explain to someone who's never experienced one. Even then, individual differences impact one's perception of the emotional turmoil. Vato was unfortunate enough to have a personal experience with the disorder, but even at his age, his vocabulary was too limited to accurately describe the incident. It began devouring him in June of last year, and he was officially impaired by the next month. He felt an ominous, suffocating body of darkness encompass his being and his life. It soaked through his skin and pooled in the hollows of his collarbones. He watched his former hobbies and pleasures melt into it like sugar in boiling water. He stopped eating and he stopped sleeping, but his former sleep cycle wasn't replaced with any other activity. If Marlowe was correct when he said Hell is a state of mind, Vato was convinced that he had died and gone there.
The most unforgiving aspect of a depressive episode is that it can strike anyone. There's no predisposition, which is a shame, because the sheer contrast of the depression and his former lifestyle made Vato's episode that much more obvious. His previous persona was tender, caring and wise; his current persona was none of the above. He felt lost, wandering the world, trying to find his misplaced happiness but not knowing where to look.
Initially, he could fake his way through public interaction without arousing much suspicion, but it soon gave way to the overwhelming urge to spend his entire life indoors, alone. He ceased contact with his friends and they stopped calling. He avoided work until he ran out of sick days. His long-term girlfriend reached the limit of her patience and left him. He didn't blame her; he would leave himself, too, if only he knew how to.
There were plenty of institutions offering a helping hand, but social implications made reaching out difficult. Elderly people are more vulnerable than others to depression's most devastating symptom, but the public tends to cluster clinical depression with female, angst-ridden teens, not established and educated middle-aged men like Vato. Seeking relief, he was guided to a self-administered treatment; one he could keep confined in his home, away from the public's judgmental observation. He dabbled in a few forms of destructive behaviour, but self-injury provided the most immediate gratification.
In the beginning, he would drag the point of a thumbtack across his skin. It would appear as a reddened scratch the next day, but all evidence would be gone afterward. That transformed into stubbing lit matches onto his skin and beating blunt objects into his joints. There was a need to punish himself, and this was the most effective punishment he could muster.
It was so fucking shameful. He knew a grown man shouldn't spend his afternoons trying to shatter his kneecap with a hammer. Surely, there were better and more rational means of dealing with the pain. But the edge of a razor gave relief that Vato couldn't deny, and he opted to wearing long-sleeved shirts throughout the summer months.
It all contributed to a feeling of hopelessness. Hopelessness is a demoralizing sentiment. It's an invincible weed that sprouts deep in your core and snakes through your body, constricting your organs, binding your limbs. It's no wonder he spent so many hours in his dim bedroom. Responsibility and recreation were easy to forget when he didn't feel in control of his own muscles.
Eventually, the wave crest breaks. Suicide seemed like the only option. Even some of the most severely depressed people retain their desire to survive and refuse to think seriously about suicide, but Vato lost that desire somewhere along his plummet into the bottomless pit of depression. As he slid the razor through the scar tissue on his forearm, he idly wondered if a deeper cut would further penetrate his self-loathing. That ideation transformed into a new prospect: Why should he rely on self-mutilation to alleviate his mood when he could completely abolish his mind instead?
Vato didn't know regret could be felt so instantaneously. He wasn't an optimist, but he felt the suicide attempt (and the frantic emergency telephone call that followed) allowed him to regain control over his psyche. That control evaporated when he was forcibly institutionalized.
The behavioural therapy didn't accomplish much. The SSRI was worse. It nullified his persistent aching, but it also numbed out every other emotion. The agony was gone, but it wasn't replaced with euthymia, like he had hoped. His sex drive went through the floor. He felt anxious to do nothing in particular. In a way, the artificial state of mind built by the drug was a level of Hell even deeper than depression. Depression, at least, provided emotional predictability.
He managed to go back to his job after the unexpected leave. That stroke of bliss was the least fate could do for him, after what he had put up with. But his post-attempt work was insultingly ironic. He gave university students advice on how to plan their futures when he nearly threw his away. Every meeting, he considered revealing the brutal honesty about life; to tell the students that the world is a dark fissure and their life is going to shit and the future isn't any brighter. He compressed that compulsion underneath the sole of his shoe.
These days, he knows better than to walk along the edge of life's cliff tops. He was saved from impending death, and he was genuinely grateful, but even his suicide attempt wasn't enough to make him appreciate existence. Since he made a promise to himself to not die by his own hand, life had turned into a waiting game. He idly watched the sun rise and set, wondering when death from an outside source will consume him.
Then, a few months before the beginning of Freie's 2008 winter semester, a blond ray of sunshine penetrated the rainclouds that obscured Vato's vision. When Ed entered Vato's office for the first time, he offered more than his identification card and his transcript. He was the foothold Vato needed to climb out of the crater filled with his misery.
That foothold wasn't found immediately, however. Vato had essentially given up on life, and he refused to let the hope of a new romance deceit him. Then, the meetings got more frequent and less formal. Vato realised he would purposely digress to squeeze out extra, precious minutes of Ed's company. One morning, he discovered that there was no battle involved in getting Ed to spend time with him. The mutuality made his declining laugh lines crease.
Ed, never one to be subtle, was first to open up about his affection for the man. Vato, on the other hand, was not as willing to admit infatuation when it involved another man a fraction of his age. But ever since the departure of his former significant other, he hadn't expected to find another person infusing his mind during every waking minute. There was something about the way Ed carried himself - his arrogance was alluring, his confidence was attractive and his immaturity was endearing. It appears that opposites really do attract.
When Ed approached him and asked to meet him off campus, Vato could see a glint of nervousness deep in his pupils, but he hid it well. Vato spent two hours before the scheduled date cleaning his flat and pacing his living area, sweat coating his palms. Ed was fashionably late, as expected, but his punctuality improved as the private meetings got more frequent.
Most of the sex with Ed was an exploration of his body, trying to map each of his sensations; just feeling. Vato rarely removed his clothes in Ed's presence. Clothing felt like a security blanket, and the prospect of revealing his scars hurt him more than the feeling of a candle's flame blistering his skin. Even without the scars, the SSRI made Vato's ability to maintain an erection unreliable. He was content with the satisfaction of bringing Ed to climax.
For the first time in months, Vato used his bed for more than restless sleeping and wallowing in pity. The lovemaking revealed a side of Ed that Vato didn't expect, and it revealed a side of himself that Vato didn't even know existed. Vato would drink in the life radiating from Ed's naked body underneath him, and Ed would gaze into Vato's eyes, silently communicating. Through this, they lavishly revealed the details of their devotion to each other, interrupted only by the friction of Vato's thumb pad against the head of Ed's cock, and the curling of Ed's toes. In a well-choreographed action, he would trail his lips down the groove between Ed's abdomen muscles, and Ed would card his fingers though Vato's brittle hair. Vato would lower himself, enclosing his mouth around Ed's member and gripping his hipbones. Ed would wither underneath him, fisting the bed's fitted cover. His breath would be heavy, sprinkled with the occasional moan, and he would drag his fingernails across Vato's shoulder blades. Vato would slide a firm grip along Ed's shaft, lubricated with his own saliva, and suck on the hardening flesh of one of Ed's nipples. Vato's pace would increase, and Ed's vocal pitch would rise; Vato's muscles would quiver, and Ed's back would arch.
In these moments, their gender similarity and the age difference was absent from both of their consciousnesses. Social mandate evaporated as soon as they slid between the sheets of Vato's bed. "My life begins when you're here and ends when you leave," Vato would whisper, before capturing Ed's earlobe between his teeth in post-orgasmic bliss, and Ed would respond with, "Every privilege is a blessing."
A blessing, indeed. Vato could pinpoint the exact moment in which Ed unintentionally taught him the meaning of life. Suddenly, everything fell into place. It was all a learning experience. He realised that life wasn't about finding your own happiness through superficial means. It was about the satisfaction of being the source of someone else's happiness. Vato's self-harm quickly ceased after his first night with Ed, but the scars remained.
Unable to spend enough time together outside of Vato's working hours, Ed established a home in his office. His visits were frequent, stopping by either when he could spare the time or when he allocated time for Vato's sake.
Such a time was now. Vato reached forward and took one of Ed's hands in both of his own. He held it, palm downwards, and caressed the tops of his fingers, feeling his obtruding knuckles and the ridges of his cuticles. He turned the hand over and slid the younger man's sleeve up his forearm. He traced a prominent vein down the inside of Ed's wrist, savouring the smoothness of the skin. He could remember when his own skin was that smooth, flawless, and youthful. He released a breath he didn't know he was holding. "You only get one body," he began to reflect, but faltered when he realised he was speaking impulsively. He cleared his throat. "It's not expendable or replaceable," he continued. "People tend to underestimate the value of their bodies. They don't take care of themselves. They damage themselves. Some damage is . . . " he paused, considering his next words. "Beyond repair."
Ed opened his mouth pre-emptively, prepared to facilitate the unfiltered response he normally relied on. When he drew a blank, his lips curled and he laughed gently. "Why am I only ever at a loss of words when I'm with you?"
"Perhaps you have too much practice giving sarcastic and hostile remarks. You're not used to responding kindly to someone who shows you compassion." Vato released Ed's hand from the confides of his own and returned his limbs to his half of the desk.
Ed begrudgingly moved his hand from where Vato left it, missing the feeling of being touched by something other than his brother's cold, desperate grip. He rested his clasped hands on his lap. "Not many people show me compassion, especially recently."
Vato smiled lightly at Ed's bitterness, but disdain was absent in his expression. "Do you know what the self-fulfilling prophecy is?"
Ed pouted slightly. Vato's right. He's always right about this stuff. "It's difficult to be polite to people," he said, "given all the stress I've been dealing with lately."
Elaboration was unnecessary. Vato knew that all of Ed's problems revolved around one person. The air in the office suddenly felt heavier. "How has he been doing?"
"About the same," Ed said, monotone. Regarding his brother's condition, improvement was unexpected and corrosion was unsurprising. The only astonishing thing that could arise out of his situation would be a hair's breadth of progress in sobriety. "Couldn't I force him into a rehab centre or something?"
"Only if he's a threat to himself or others, I'm afraid."
"He's destroying his soul." Ed felt exasperated. "Isn't that a big enough threat?"
"Interestingly enough, to mental health professionals, a destroyed body is more significant than a destroyed soul." Vato chewed the inside of his cheek, uneasy with the conversation's direction. "I'd know," he finished, awkwardly.
Ed frowned, upset with himself and cursing his habit of speaking before thinking. That was a topic he was better off avoiding. He craned to glance at the clock on the wall behind him. Time always seemed to move too quickly in Vato's company. "I don't want to sound like I have a quota to meet," he said, breaking the uncomfortable silence and turning back to face Vato, "but I might have to transfer some of my time with you to another day. I have a job interview tonight."
"What does the job involve?"
"Whatever I'm needed to do, I guess." Ed shrugged, a nonchalant expression forming on his face. "I'm not picky. Sleeping on pavement isn't an attractive notion." He sighed and slouched forward to rest his folded arms against the edge of the desk before him, and cradled his head there. "Sometimes I just get discouraged," he murmured, "when I considered how small this planet is, compared to the universe. Humans concern themselves with making money, but it seems so trivial in the big picture. Capitalism is such an isolated concept."
"I think your unemployment is just making you unhappy." Vato was an expert in unhappiness, after all. "Try selling your old geochemistry textbooks. I could probably make use of some."
Ed scoffed and rolled his eyes. "Did you run out of fire wood?"
Vato chuckled. "Listen." He reached forward and traced the hairline on Ed's forehead, running his fingers through his bangs. "If life is meant to be fulfilling, and a career can provide someone with that sense of fulfillment, is it really so trivial, even considering the vastness of the universe?"
"That's assuming a career can fulfill every person. For the rest of us, work is just a necessary hurdle to obtain our own brand of fulfillment." Ed pried one of his hands from underneath this chin and rested it on the desk's surface.
Vato laced his fingers between the digits of Ed's offered hand, and the two men cherished the texture of each other's skin, listening to the sound of the Earth turn.
Income was the only motivation Riza had to get through the workday, but sometimes her exhaustion hindered her ability to accomplish even that. She stared at the words of a document set on the desk in front of her, treading through the thoughts overflowing her mind. Lately, she was a cognitive mess. Walking into rooms and forgetting why she was there. Waking up to the sound of her own screams and being unable to identify the nightmare that roused her. Having to read a single sentence multiple times to absorb the gist of its information. Sometimes, she wondered how she was even able to navigate from Jean's car to her front door at the end of the day.
Her impairment certainly didn't spare her bodily health. Initially, being diagnosed with hypertension was a mild annoyance. Riza shouldn't have to be worrying about that shit until she was elderly, assuming she managed to survive that long. However, once the consistent dose of the diuretic drug inhibited her physical body, she had a whole new list of medical complications to report to her physician. Eventually, she required secondary medication to cope with the side effects of her primary medication until she was downing a prescription cocktail every morning.
The idea to use her prescription collection as an extra source of money sparked when Riza found her savings account empty. Years of studying medicine may not have gotten her a job, but it did give her a talent for faking symptoms. Previously, she would have never thought she'd be selling a handful of Adderall capsules or a bottle of Xanax to tweakers and avid workers. Today, Riza found it challenging distance herself from that clique. A chronic gambler has no right to pass judgment on those who choose somatic maltreatment for comfort. "Could you drive me to the pharmacy tonight?"
Jean raised his head to look at Riza, interrupted from organizing the stack of belated registration forms before him. It took him an abnormally long period to decipher Riza's question. Due to a lack of nicotine intake, agitation and mental disorganization was a common consequence of spending too much time indoors. "Sure thing," he said, forcing a smile. He bowed his head again and continued visually scanning the papers. He was thankful for any excuse to visit Riza's office and occupy the neglected chair across from hers. He just liked to ensure she had someone to talk to. Today's blessing came in the form of delivering a stack of documents. "What'd you sell this time?"
"Epiklor."
"I didn't know there was a recreational demand for potassium supplements."
"I try not to think about it."
Surprisingly, Jean proved to be a good actor. He was already taking medication for hypothyroidism; it wasn't difficult to ask him to play up the side effects. He reluctantly agreed, and after just a few complaints of insomnia, Riza had a steady source of Temazepam to sell. Malingering wasn't something Jean typically condoned, but he was willing to go as far as participating in it to ensure Riza didn't get evicted. He stood and handed the completed forms to Riza.
With a word of thanks, Riza took them between her fingers and returned her hand to the surface of her desk. She began to wade through her thoughts again, and quickly forgot about Jean's presence.
Jean looked down at his colleague, aware of the uncomfortable stillness that filled the room, accompanied only by the ticking sound of a nearby clock. He was familiar with Riza spacing out like this, but witnessing it never got easier. "Are you going to be alright tonight?"
"Yeah," came her predictable response. Vulnerability was not a characteristic Riza showed often.
Fortunately, Roy managed to consume enough alcohol during the afternoon hours to smother his cravings. Unfortunately, he was unable to act sober enough to hide his intoxication from others. He spent the day hoping that nobody would find him drunk and dysfunctional.
So when someone entered his office unexpectedly at exactly 5:00, interrupting him from the warmth of his buzz, he was unable conceal his annoyance. He glared toward the opened doorway. He scanned the figure standing there, trying to match it with one of the individuals in his memory. It didn't look like Jean. He also deduced that it wasn't Jean's frigid bitch of a girlfriend.
"Hi again," the entity said, taking a seat in the vacant chair across from Roy's desk, joining him in his closed office's security.
Oh, the kid. Right. Roy felt the dull pain behind his eyes intensify and he looked away, furrowing his brows. Intoxication and sobriety were two separate worlds. After a few drinks, it was difficult for Roy to recall the events of the few morning hours when he was hungover. Slowly, the memory of his earlier conversation with the student began to trickle into his mind. He didn't have the mental vigour to deal with him at the moment.
Ed sat in silence, calmly waiting for Roy to organize his thoughts. He was not unfamiliar with the company of someone under the influence, considering he lived in the same room as a heroin addict. He had assumed the predicaments of Roy's life would lead him to some type of coping mechanism. Looks like alcohol was his poison of choice.
"What's your name again?" Roy inquired, slurring slightly.
A small, patronizing smile graced Ed's face. "Ed."
"Ed." Roy hoped he'd remember that long enough to complete this conversation. He hadn't thought about Ed since their previous meeting, and he was still torn about whether he wanted to see him again. Roy had spent his adult life surrounding himself with weak-willed people because they were easy to control. Even so, he wasn't one to deny a challenge. He didn't expect to become a long-term employee at the institution, but if he did, he wouldn't dare have his first workday plagued by some egotistical kid's arrogance. Forcing him into submission would be simple enough. The incentive was well worth the work put into breaking him. He lost his train of thought and looked at the man across from him, curiously. "You remind me of myself," he said quietly, a reflection slipping from his mind and out of his mouth.
"Hopefully you're referring to a time when you were my age. Otherwise, that's just insulting." Ed's smile remained, a belittling gesture framing the malice of his words. "I know about you, you know. Word gets around. It takes a special kind of failure to get fired from BfV."
Roy felt his jaw clench and his glare hardened. His heartbeat hastened and he felt his alcohol-infused blood pump more quickly throughout him. Almost automatically, he stood and approached the seated student.
Ed stood as well in an act of defiance, reducing the distance between him and Roy despite their height difference. Ed congratulated himself. It was too easy. "Did I hit a nerve?"
Roy placed a hand on Ed's shoulder and roughly pushed him back down into the chair. He glared down at him, contempt secreting from every pore. He hated thinking about his old job, and he despised others bringing it up. Using it to insult him was unnecessarily callous, even by Roy's standards. The kid must have known it was a sensitive subject. Roy reached forward and grabbed Ed's jaw, forcing the younger man to look at him, his numb fingers applying more force than intended. "What are you trying to achieve?"
Ed tried to mask his fright. He hadn't been prepared for a physical confrontation, and he was only skilled in dominating others mentally. He sharply turned his head to dislodge it from Roy's grasp, and returned to face him with an insincere and vindictive smirk. "Just making conversation," he shrugged.
Roy shoved his hands into his trouser's pockets to restrain them, knowing better than to allow himself to spontaneously do something he'd regret. The fingernails of his fists left indents on his palms. "I used to work under this misanthrope. Some Austrian fuck." He paused to dredge the name from his memory. "Ketterle," he spit the name out with disdain. The agonizing recollections he tried to drown with alcohol crawled back up his throat. "If it didn't result in bad publicity, nothing would have happened, and I'd still be working there. His reputation was more important than my career. He said it would be easy to replace me, and apparently he was correct." Roy fixated on the Ed's throat. Slowly, he removed a single hand from the confines of his pocket and pressed his fingers against the front of the other's neck. He drug his fingertips down to the base of neck, capturing Ed's collarbone and the curve of his shoulder in his grip. His digits dug into muscle tissue and pressed against bone.
"We don't have to get along to work together." Ed thanked his voice for not breaking, and his stomach twisted in nervousness. The other man's touch felt like hot iron. Out-running a drunk man would be easy, but Ed felt frozen, unable to escape. Submission wasn't a feeling he was used to, but already knew he didn't like it. He straightened his back, every move carefully considered and executed. "But I accept your position's authority."
Satisfied, Roy relaxed his grip. He might have won this power struggle, but he knew maintaining power was more important than achieving it. "You've got a lot to learn about my authority, kid."
Ed felt the sharp sensation of offense prod at his core. "I'm not a fucking kid, douchebag - "
The feeling of Roy lifting his hand from his shoulder interrupted Ed's words, and Roy inserted a thumb into the other man's mouth, holding his tongue against the bottom of his mouth's cavern. His remaining fingers cupped Ed's chin, gripping his tongue and lower jaw with a single hand. Roy smiled slightly, feeling the warmth of the other's mouth, the edges of his teeth, the way the flesh of his lips stretched. It had been too long since he invaded someone else.
When Ed collected himself from the unexpected violation, he pried himself away and instinctively cowered against his chair. Preserving physical confidence was difficult when someone else introduced himself into your body's cavities without permission. "Sadistic asshole." Ed suppressed a shudder, still tasting the other man on his tongue. "I thought sociopaths targeted weak characters."
"Taking advantage of a strong personality like yours is so much more rewarding."