Chapter Six
"How many meds does he have in here?"
Squalo is peering at the cabinet, the shelves overflowing with plastic waves of pill capsules. Fran's and Levi's and his too-big feet mix awkwardly on the floor. In the sink, Lussuria mixes a disinfecting solution.
Fucking Hell, this kid is messed up. Prozac, Vicodin, Ritalin, Zoloft, Xanax, Valium. And it's all hidden behind a clean white cabinet door in a tiled bathroom, in a pastel-colored house on fucking Ordinary Lane, Smallville. For God's sake, on the perfectly manicured lawn of Bel's neighbors, there was a statue of their dog. A golden retriever. Squalo's heard the things are loving, obedient, and brainless. They'd last about this long without the master. That sounds like about what people around here enjoy. He glances at the group of people standing with him in this room. They are not, he thinks, exactly the golden retrievers of this town. The thought quirks a smile to his mouth.
Lussuria looks up, wiping his forehead with his rubber-gloved wrist. "They're not even stolen. These are prescribed."
"The prescription ran out like three months ago," points out Levi.
Squalo peers at them again. "Fuck."
"I know. He should have taken these already."
Squalo holds a half-full bottle up to the fluorescent light and shakes it. Backlit, the pills look like mixed candy.
Back in the living room, Bel is quiet and pale. The yawning black arch is still hovering close, so he stays still. The overpowering, metallic stench punching his nose is making him sick. The room spins wildly, dim lights blurring into long shining streaks that slice his eyes. He hunches back, letting the fringe of his bangs cut jagged chunks of comforting dark into the air, and hugs his own arms because it's cold.
Xanxus is sitting on the coffee table, staring around the room. It's so normal, so Ikea. Nice furniture, matching rugs, good glassware, a now-bloodstained but otherwise quite respectable couch. But why? He can't help feeling something is wrong here.
Where's this kid's parents?
His musings are interrupted by the entrance of Fran. "Idiot prince," he says, squatting to eye-level with Bel. "You had to go rub yourself in the dirt like that. It makes everything so much harder, you know?" When Bel doesn't say anything, Lussuria sighs and rips the bandages open. Bel makes a slight noise, fingers turning white as they clench the couch.
"Uuuuugh," whines Fran. "Smelly."
"He's infected," offers Levi, remembering something similar he saw on some medical drama forever ago.
"Might want to clean your blades next time," murmurs Fran.
Lussuria ignores the comments with all the calm of a doctor—albeit one in a rather impromptu operating theatre. "Squalo dear, hold him, please?"
(-)
"If you're going to do these kinds of things, at least learn to clean up after yourself," complains Lussuria, slapping down Bel's hand for the twentieth time as it reaches up to poke the bandages. The room is filled with an exhausted, sweaty weirdness after the charge of the insane afternoon. Now that the whole thing's over, Bel seems more child than potential serial killer. They can't see the hole in his memory, the newly ripped out page, and the abrupt change of mindset that always comes with it. Fran sees as it as he sees most things, and doesn't say anything. It's good to know, he thinks, that there's always a reset button to be used if it all gets too chaotic, and tosses this piece of knowledge far into the spiraling dungeons of his mind.
"He's such a kid," complains Levi. Bel ignores him, scratching with curled wrist all cat-like and elegant at the bandages on his stomach. Lussuria swats at his hand again, and Bel makes a little noise of protest, but he puts his arm down.
"That's like the tenth time you've said that," says Fran. "What are you, some kind of pervert or something?"
Squalo almost laughs at the way Levi bristles. It's like seeing a Chihuahua attack a Saint Bernard.
"Fine. Fine. I'm not saying anything back because you're just another fucking kid, too."
"I'm actually thirteen."
"You don't look like you're thirteen."
"Ew. The pervert's making pervy comments again."
"Fucking Hell! You fucking brat, I'm gonna"—
"Oh, I'm sure you have better things to do. Go lick your boss' ass or something. I'm sure you'd enjoy it."
"What?" squawks Levi, but he's blushing. Squalo does laugh, this time. "You know him, right?"
"Gross. I don't hang out with perverts."
"No. The kid?"
"Bel."
"Yeah, crazy boy."
Fran's mouth ghosts a smile. "For a while now."
"So how old is he, for real?" Squalo braces himself to be called a pervert, but it doesn't come.
"He's eleven. Skipped three grades."
Right on time, Bel giggles from the couch, having found Lussuria's cell phone amusing. Lussuria absentmindedly hands him it. Ice skims over Squalo's nerves, making him jump. He's really just a kid. This is all so wrong.
"Genius and insanity are just one step apart," says Fran.
Xanxus says coolly, "I'd say in this case they've already crashed."
(-)
The inevitable dinnertime comes on, and the members of the Lemming Rebellion depart reluctantly, pulled back away in to the quiet, bleached streets by the force of routine. And when they step outside, all of them feel the strangeness of normality. As if the world they've been in for the last few hours was—well, the real world, and these acid lawns and watchful shutters fake. Where's the evidence of the fight, the loudness of a crowd? It's as if the blood itself has been drunk down by the pavement, slurped down through its pores until nothing but a wary pretense remains. Squalo smiles to think that sitting in the stomach of the streets must be gallons of blood, hidden teenage-blood like theirs. He hopes the blood fills the lungs of this town, hopes it chokes the place to death until it's left vomiting on its white knees. Let this town weep their pain and cough it up in violent spurts of wet hacking.
Why should their struggles be hidden?
(-)
In the end, Bel and Fran are left alone in Bel's normal house. Crickets chirp, the ubiquitous soundtrack of suburbia. The stars twinkle, like the adults tell you they do when you're little. Bel tests how far and how fast he can sit up and not have that deathly arch swing close across his neck.
"Why is the frog boy still in my house?" Bel talks in a breathless whisper, his voice cracking slightly. "He's stinking up the place."
"How should I know? You weirdo prince." Because we're always the ones left, Bel.
"Hm." Bel curls up underneath Lussuria's forgotten jacket, enjoying the residual heat. "Don't want you here, froggy."
"Fran," says Fran automatically. "I'm Fran."
Bel smiles nastily. Darkness floods his eyes, the chiaroscuro effect spontaneously born of the harsh white of moon and the primal blackness of night, the same darkness that is barely dented by the flickering yellow sodium attempts of humans to destroy it. It reminds Bel of some humans in the Dark Ages, firing their flimsy black-stick arrows at nothing as the flame belched flesh-ash and ate their houses. It reminds him of the humans as they danced around the fire, and in their squealing ecstasy killed something not inhuman, and let the waves wash the evidence away in a guilty silence. It reminds him of people putting sacks on their heads, crying and waiting for the world to end.
Waiting for the world to end.
"You should go home soon."
"What home?" asks Fran vaguely. Perched on the edge of Bel's couch, he stares into the pale moonlight, wide eyes turning into reflecting white disks. Enormous, fuzzy-edged shadows of bruises cling tightly to his skin. Maybe if Bel pushes him Fran will fall forever and ever and never, ever come back.
"How's your dad?"
Fran's smile is dark and glossy like a lollipop, and the old scars beneath his eye aren't white like normal scars, but dark, the skin grown over the dirt like an ancient shield.
"How's your brother?"
Bel curls away, burying his face in his couch. It smells of a furniture store—chemically clean, smelling, if it is possible, of nothing, a sort of non-odor. It's a draw, again. It's so hard to win against Fran, with his hurting memory-weapons and his hidden dungeons of knowledge. One memory flutters against Bel's forehead, like a strip of faded bandage against the gushing of a wound.
"He's still alive," is all Bel manages to say. I think.
"It's the same," says Fran, "for me."
Bel turns quietly over, watching Fran leave. He never fails to leave. Always he goes back, and this is very clear: this is not going away. If one didn't know Fran the way Bel does, one would think Fran's footsteps even. One would think his eyes clear, especially in the deceiving white moon when the light reflects off of them in that peculiar way. But Bel sees him, as he sees many things. He sees the clouds in his pupils when there are no clouds in the night sky. He hears the clinking of the key around Fran's neck, latchkey style. It reminds Bel of the signs around prisoners' necks when they take their mug shots. Isn't sneaking back into your house futile, when the moment you left it was already too late? Yet somehow, Bel never feels sorry for that frog.
If he's going to be that annoying, thinks Bel, he deserves what's coming to him. The thought sends him to sleep with a smile, and the primal darkness bears him away on its battle-scarred arms like a mother.
Author's Note: Whoo. I actually like this chapter! :D Mammon will show up soon. I swear! And cookies for anyone who recognizes a certain… reference… (it was pretty obvious!).