Spoony lay splayed out across the bed, all long limbs folded at uncomfortable angles. Linkara straightened him out and bent to press a kiss to lips that tasted of bile.
In the shadows behind them Tom shifted, but Linkara refused to look round. Waited in silence for the man to leave them, to follow his orders and shut fast the door.
He kissed Spoony again when the lock slid home, a distraction to keep himself from flinching at the finality of it. But Spoony stirred when he pulled back, eyes screwed shut against the light, groping for Linkara with clumsy hands in a mute but eloquent plea.
"Easy," Linkara told him, "I'm not going anywhere."
And laughed, because that had been a promise once, not this simple statement of fact. Now that he was in, he couldn't get out until Critic decided to allow it.
If he ever did. If he didn't leave them there to starve, and what comfort would being together bring them then?
Linkara knew the thought for a paranoid fantasy. If Critic meant to kill them, he would do it face to face. He would give his apologies, his justifications, but he would look them in the eye, and Linkara supposed there was something to admire in that.
Just a paranoid fantasy, so why didn't it feel like one?
"Les?"
Lewis.
"Right here, Noah," Linkara whispered in answer to the slurred mumble. He propped Spoony up long enough to fed him some pain pills, then shifted them both so the heavy head rested in his lap. Rubbed the other man's back, smiling when he hummed his appreciation.
"Not going anywhere," he said again, and this time the words brought no fear.
For the moment, there was nowhere else he wanted to be.
But that paranoid fantasy haunted Linkara over the days and weeks ahead.
He dreamed of it. The slow death. The room like a coffin, already buried deep beneath the earth.
Critic was no monster. He was flesh and blood, a man, and that meant he was vulnerable.
In this world without doctors and hospitals, there were many ways a man might die. What would happen to Linkara and Spoony if Critic succumbed to appendicitis? If he fell in the next invasion, for surely there would be a next, surely it was only a matter of time.
He asked the question of Snob, when he could bring himself to speak to the man again.
"I have access, if it comes to that," Snob told him, "Don't worry about it."
Linkara didn't remember throwing the punch. But he must have done it, because Snob was on the floor, and Linkara's knuckles were aching in the most satisfying way.
"I worry," he said.
He didn't offer Snob a hand up, just stood back and watched while the man wiped at his nose with his sleeve.
"I'm an ass," Snob said when the bleeding had slowed, and it was easier between them after that.
Easier, but not the same. Linkara no longer knew where he stood with Snob, with any of the others. He ate with them, at Spoony's insistence, but he could not claim them as friends, could not forget the way they had stepped aside or forgive them for the pity in their eyes.
But what anger he felt toward them was low banked and smoldering. The heat of his rage was all for Critic, and it was just as well that he rarely saw the man.
No one offered now to relieve the man during meals. There was a brittle edge to Critic, a white rim to his eyes that kept the rest of them at bay. Even Chick was careful with him, soothing him with little pats and whispered words.
As bad as things had become, for Linkara there was a reminder that others had suffered far worse. Tom had never been one for loud, flashy displays, and his grief too was understated, confined to the lines of his face and the grim set of his mouth. To go from Handsome Tom and 8 Bit Mickey to just Tom...
Linkara had tried hugging him, desperate to offer even that small comfort, to absorb some tiny measure of pain. But Tom had only stood waiting, and released had simply walked away.
It was Linkara who wept. Bitter tears that stung, and he could not had said just what he was mourning.
Mickey, of course, but the loss went deeper. Some part of them all was mourning Molossia, not its tiles or its turrets but the home she had become.
There was no safe haven in the world. It was something they knew well, for hadn't they killed a man and claimed what had been his for their own? And perhaps they'd even felt it, in those early days when Molossia still smelled of Baugh and his family.
But for each of them had come the day they woke and thought 'mine', and in doing so had forgotten Molossia could again become 'theirs'.
Facing their own mortality did not stop them from taking each other for granted. They did not look for beauty in the simple things, or strive to live in the moment.
It only chilled them, left them cold and weak and numb. They yawned over their plates, went to bed early and woke grudgingly.
And why not? This was not their story.
It was the story of a place, the story of Molossia. If they died tomorrow, she would stand, and she would not remember their names.
There was a limit.
Had to be a limit, and so Spoony was careful with Linkara's time. He greeted him with a kiss and sent him off with a smile, listened to his troubles and made little of his own.
Because he could see the little cringes, the tensing of Linkara's shoulders when the door clicked shut. And he knew what panic did to a man, how it fed upon itself.
How quickly it grew teeth.
And all because of a lock for which Spoony held the key, if only he could trust himself to use it. But Spoony had his limits too, and to open the door would be to open himself to the one alter he had never been able to control.
It was a truth that went unspoken between them, and so Spoony knew he was forgiven for his weakness, for the selfishness that kept him from making the offer. Instead Linkara paced, a blur of motion that made the room seem that much smaller.
Outside the bedroom door waited Critic and his hard, measuring eyes. There was Tom and his grief, Snob and his desperation to support everyone and commit to nothing.
But outside the bedroom door was also freedom, and Spoony knew this too. The fear unique to being dependent on others, the terrifying realization that everyone, everyone, had a fucking limit. The realization that you could be loved, and still a burden.
So he did his best, to make the room and his bed an oasis for Linkara. A place to rest, to forget, if only for a few hours, just how royally screwed they were.
Spoony could not make Linkara stay, but he could give him a reason to return.
But it was hard, and getting harder, because Critic had done more than just rattle his cage. There had been times in the recent past when the alters had been distant, their whispering faint and easy to ignore.
Now they were standing at his shoulder, breathing down his fucking neck. There was a pressure behind his eyes that no pills could touch, a terrible sense of fullness, of pregnancy.
Wresting back control only meant more seizures, and more worries for Linkara. Instead Spoony was learning to pick his battles, to let the alters out to have their fun during the long, lonely days so the nights could belong to Linkara.
And if that meant Spoony had no time of his own, he'd just have to deal.
Because there was a limit, and he could see just how close Linkara was to hitting his.
"Kiss me," Chick ordered, and Critic obeyed.
But if felt like obedience, not worship. Even in their bed he thought only of turrets and camera, and he hated his own creeping impatience. Hated that even this had been taken from him.
"Hurt me," he ordered, and Chick obeyed.
It wasn't enough.