Chapter I: Cover
2013, North Bay ON
Eight Minutes Before Arrest.
Calvin prays the door won't be locked.
The late hour has turned him away from every other storefront. The chill breathing at the back of his neck prods him to keep trying. It won't be long before they find him. It's not like Calvin did a very good job of hiding the scene from passersby.
Someone should find him. Even Calvin doesn't really want him to suffer for too long.
He simply knows he can't be there when it happens. There will be too many questions that he doesn't yet have the answers to. The anger and regret are still mixing in his mind like the blood and dirt on his shoes. It's like both have decided to take on the same hue, preventing Calvin from even beginning to tell the difference. Trying to tear apart the emotions right now might just rip apart his insides as well.
I did what I had to do, Calvin tells himself for what feels like the hundredth time. Nothing more.
Does he really believe that?
"Can I help you?"
The sleepy voice of the convenience store clerk travels through the aisles, stopping Calvin clean in his tracks. He can hear footsteps as they trek towards him, but no part of him wants to turn to greet the man.
"Just water," Calvin mumbles.
"Hey, you're Eva's kid right?"
The sudden warmth in his voice tells Calvin there's no use in denying it. He shouldn't be surprised the man knows his mother. She was born and raised in Hamilton, about as ingrained into this side of town as people come.
"Yeah," he answers simply. "Do you mind if I stick around a while?"
"At this time of night?" The clerk asks. "Isn't she expecting you home?"
"I already texted her." Not a lie.
"Come on, I can give you a ride home."
Calvin shakes his head. "I'll get there."
"No, I insist," he smiles. "You're my first customer in the last hour. Are you still up on Franklin?"
Calvin considers denying the offer a second time, but truthfully home is about the only place he wants to be right now. His mom's not going to be up waiting, but it shouldn't be long before she wakes up. He doesn't know what she'll be able to do, or even if he should be telling her about the night. He just wants her to be there even if that's never been something to count on.
If he can just make it home.
2014, Undisclosed Location
Two Minutes After Victory.
Calvin's chin lifts to the sky, blood dripping steadily onto the pavement beneath him.
He takes in a shaking breath, doing everything to ignore the stinging pain that swirls around his nostrils. A deep breath feels impossible, in fact it only stirs up more panic when his swollen nose refuses to take in more air. His lungs burn though they have no reason to. Calvin commands himself to calm, but only his clenched fingers listen and unravel.
Calvin reaches up to touch the side of his neck, grimacing immediately with the pressure. Another centimeter might have killed him if she'd gotten just that little bit closer. His blood might drip rhythmically beside his feet, but it's hers that coats the cement. Calvin stands trembling above the girl, but at least he stands. There's no other person in this prison that can still claim that victory.
His eyes return to the clouds, to the overhead birds that move far too slowly to be natural. He knows they're watching, he knows they're judging, and he knows they chose him. From the beginning the screens have shouted their support. They chose him.
Not her.
It could have so easily been her staring down at his bloodied stomach, entrails tangled with slit fabric until no one could reliably tell the difference. It could have been her listening to the building silence as it crests over the prison, waiting for his chest to finally stop rising. It could have been her, but that's not who they wanted.
"They're going to riot when I slit your throat."
He will never forget the sound of the boy's words, the venom in his tone as he found Calvin staring up at the screens. It became an obsession, watching the words slide down the dark background. It was there when no one else was, because both of his allies were already dead. The words said he could keep going, and he had to believe them.
He had to do this alone; there was no other way out.
It had only been hours since their elimination; hours since he'd truly been alone. Their memories confused him- Calvin dumped curses across their names then sobbed with the same breath. He went from anger to desperation then back again without either taking root. He missed them with every thought yet hated them for leaving him here.
It wasn't their fault, every rational part of Calvin's brain understood that yet the angry tears still burned his eyes.
Alone again.
Nothing's changed.
"Then why would you," Calvin asked, wiping the fearful tear that slid down his cheek. His head turned slowly to watch the boy approach. He told himself not to be afraid.
This wasn't who he'd been before, when prison had still been a faraway wondering. That scraggly boy with the crooked septum piercing couldn't hurt anyone; it should have never crossed his dainty little mind. So much had changed that Calvin barely recognized the memories of home. That boy standing alongside his mother, her eyes always looking elsewhere, just wasn't him anymore.
Calvin swallows again, feeling the fresh run of blood as it streams from his throat. His fingers make no move to stop its flow; that feels so pointless right now.
"Camille Rojas has been eliminated. One contestant remains. Congratulations Calvin Delinger, Winner of The Cut Season 1."
The words force themselves down Calvin's throat, his lips parted in a sob that leaves him gasping for breaths that don't come. His eyes fall to the ground, but all he can see is blurry rust that can't possibly still be there. His entire body trembles until his knees collapse underneath him; days of bruises and empty bowels finally catching up to him.
He wipes the moisture from his eyes, painting everything in the red that still bleeds from the concrete.
2014, Toronto General Hospital
Two Weeks After Victory.
Calvin's legs shake beneath the table as many eyes stare across at him. He keeps his chin raised even as his gaze continues to fall to the untouched mug by his hands. It's almost impossible to keep the frustration from his clenched jaw. He can't stand to look at their disappointed expressions again.
"You can control it, Calvin." He can still see the doctor's incessant glare through the isolation box walls; feel his heart beating through his thin hospital clothes.
I'm trying, he wanted to say but the words refused to pass through his bitten lips. Calvin could taste blood through the saliva-soaked gauze stuck in his cheek. His breaths fell in shaking gasps around him because there was nowhere else for them to go.
There's only the box- meant to safely contain the hurricanes of rotten memories that Calvin's shocked haven't yet finished what the set started.
"You're doing well," Dr. Liu smiles, but there's no comfort hiding between his perfect teeth. Calvin knows the words are nothing more than a dressed up lie. Everyone sitting around this table knows. "We're moving onto a new treatment today, we think it'll help."
Calvin searches for the familiar faces, each nodding encouragingly when his eyes finally reach them. It's been just two weeks yesterday since he first arrived at the hospital. He's already spent hours with psychologists, taken dozens of pills and injections, and yet he feels no closer to himself. If anything, the sun takes another piece away each time it sets.
Still, he wants them to be right. He wants them to help because otherwise Calvin wouldn't know where to start. Without Dr. Liu, there's no chance of the storms calming; Calvin can't stop the winds by himself.
Even if it hasn't happened yet, he wants so badly to believe that something will help.
"What is it?" Calvin asks.
Dr. Liu glances back at a shorter woman behind him, one that Calvin doesn't recognize. She nods curtly at him, giving a smile that almost doesn't feel like one. "Close your eyes."
He does as he's told but seconds tick by and nothing happens. "What do I do now?"
It's the same woman's voice that answers. "Keep them closed. Breathe."
Breathe.
In and out, as easy as the day he was born. As simple as blinking or finding the rhythmic beat of his heart. Calvin does as the woman says. He breathes.
A fist knocks the air from his throat, throwing Calvin back against the concrete wall. He tries desperately to replace it, drawing in more breath that refuses to enter through his swollen nose.
He wants to breathe.
He can't breathe.
All that fills his lungs is blood.
Calvin's eyes snap open, an electric buzz still fresh in his ears as the stinging pain begins to disintegrate. Air rushes into his chest and forces away the memories, but it burns. His heart is a slow drum behind his gown but it no longer feels like his own. As he tests out his muscles, they smoulder like kindling still alight from the electricity that stripped the set away.
"What did you do?" He whispers, choking on each word as they come up like smoke.
"Minor electrical impulses triggered by increasing tachycardia," someone explains but suddenly Calvin's head throbs too much to place the voice. "They'll cue your body out of these abnormal responses."
And Calvin still desperately wants them to be right.
2014, Toronto General Hospital
Five Months After Victory.
Nothing's calmed the storms, but Calvin's built a hundred dams to keep the floods contained.
He reads by the office's windowsill as the nurses move quickly around him. While weeks ago all eyes would have fallen on him as they passed, now they largely ignore him. There haven't been any serious incidents in any of their recent memory and, rumour has it, Calvin's due for release in the coming weeks. He's not sure what that means for him yet, in fact no one seems to.
If it means away from the hospital, that's all that Calvin really cares about.
He flinches behind the paperback, pressing its edge stiffly into his upper chest. It's not hard to feel the racing pulses in his wrists. It's even easier to imagine the electricity that no longer travels from palm to torso. Dr. Liu says that Calvin will grow out of the leftover habit.
Dr. Liu says a lot of things.
Calvin will probably never tell him what he really thinks of these empty declarations.
It's best to keep that inside, like the memories he's choked inside a concrete fence. The doctors don't want to help. They want to pretend that none of it is even there and Calvin finds it hard to disagree with the sentiment. If he slathers his nightmares in thick oils like the scar on his neck, maybe they too will fade with time.
People say time can heal anything. Calvin hopes they're right.
"Do you have any other family we can contact?"
Another evening in the crisis office with the same blonde social worker, her eyes impassive as she waited for his reply.
"My mother," Calvin began, unsure why she keeps asking. All he has is her; he doesn't remember any others by more than a flash of a long ago face.
They've had their differences, but they still only had each other.
"We've been having trouble contacting her," she said again. "Can you think of anyone else, Calvin?"
He shook his head. He didn't want anyone else.
If they just keep trying, she'll have to answer.
The last time he'd sat in that office, Calvin had been asked to record a message for her. It's been eight days now and Calvin's unable to stop hoping for notice of a reply. He flinches again, swallowing down the phantom taste of iron that he knows isn't really there.
When a nurse's eyes fall on Calvin, he pretends to be still caught up in the novel and doesn't acknowledge the glance. The brief smile that crosses her cheeks tells him that was the correct answer.
If she can't see the flood waters, she won't see that he's still drowning.
No one will.
2014, Toronto ON
Six Months After Victory.
Calvin's duffle bag lands on the laminate with a thud that echoes through the empty air. He searches the walls, finding all the familiar features that he chose days ago from a catalogue. Everything looks somehow colder than the two dimensional pictures.
The winter winds had barely receded when he'd first been escorted through the hospital doors. Now, summer's ended and the leaves are due for change again. It doesn't feel real when Calvin remembers that he won't watch the trees shed from behind barbed wire this year.
He pulls open the hall closet, finding jackets far too new to be his. He runs his fingers down the fabric but leaves everything where he sees it. It feels wrong to disturb them. No matter the keys in his left hand, Calvin is unable to convince himself that he's anything more than a guest in this untouched apartment.
He wants to be angry but anything even resembling that emotion fizzled out on his tongue weeks ago. Calvin spent hours in the hidden dome of his mind, thinking of the many things he'd say to his mother if given the chance to see her again. He tucked the thoughts away as soon as he heard footsteps outside his hospital room, but of course the doctors still knew.
His medications were adjusted the very next day, leaving behind more bits of cloud to fog his fractured mind. The new pills made his eyelids droop until Calvin couldn't remember the reason behind his freshly bruised knuckles.
He wants to be angry but, as he spots the blinking camera posed in the center of the ceiling, he knows that's not allowed. Not even here, in the apartment provided and dressed by the network that has somehow become both giver and taker. Not even when he can seldom pick out the sounds of the other tenets. Not even when he's supposed to be alone.
Maybe because the network realized the same thing that Calvin did months ago. That if he allows himself to see, to hear, or to feel any of it that he'll never escape. That one instant of relief isn't worth entering a spiral meant to trap him inside.
He leaves the deflated bag by the door and his shoes on his feet. The outside view is so different here as he looks out the window. Every tree has been replaced with a cloud topped building, every bird by a hanging hydro wire. The window only gives a crack as Calvin presses it open, but it even smells different here. The after-rain musk doesn't feel the same when it drips off concrete. Still, it's better than paint; it's better than bleach.
This new city's never going to be home. Not when there's so much of him still missing and so much has changed.
2015, North Bay ON
One Year After Victory.
Calvin doesn't want to watch. The brand new television flickers to life, a play button ready on his remote, but he can't bring himself to start the tapes. The remains of the last screen still lay by the door, ready for the cleaner to put to the curb tomorrow morning. He had hoped it wouldn't take so little time to deliver the new one. He wanted more than a day to prepare even though he'll never be ready.
He doesn't want to see it. Maybe it's not him that will be moving through the highlights, but it just as easily could be. The arena hasn't changed, neither have the concrete walls that still hold bloodstains from the contestants he can remember so clearly. Even the seconds of commercials that Calvin's mistakenly watched have sat like a vice in his lungs.
His chip pulses in his wrist. It's a warning, one that no one but him can feel as it beats into his skin. Today, it's so much harder to push away the racing heartbeat. It's like his body's getting ready to go back; trying to survive.
They said he wouldn't have to watch. They said he could just work on forgetting. They said there was no need to subject him to another set of memories that aren't even supposed to be his.
Another lie; another change of plans that's torn down the thin curtain of sanity he keeps trying to pull over his head.
"It's only the highlights," Dr. Liu said in their last check-in. "People are going to ask you about how the second season ran and you need to have answers. It's really not that bad, Calvin, I've seen it myself. We can even talk immediately after you watch the reel, if you'd like."
It's become so easy not to believe a word the doctor says. It doesn't matter what's best for him, because Dr. Liu only seems to be treating the TV show and not it's victor. Calvin wonders how he ever could have trusted the man yet can still remember a time that he did.
Calvin doesn't want to watch the world collapse around this year's lucky winner. He doesn't want to experience it all over when he's finally starting to feel some semblance of calm. More than anything, though, he doesn't want to go back to the hospital.
He's already noticed the dark van waiting down the street. They know how he could react and they still insist on him watching.
Isis chirps under his hand and Calvin pulls it back immediately. She stares up at him for a second as he searches her small form for an injury. He hadn't meant to press so hard. He'd completely forgotten she was even here.
He'd forgotten he was here.
Any thought of the set never fails to send him back.
The tiny kitten curls up again in his lap, snuggling her head calmly against his thigh. All he wants is to be here, in the new cottage that's just barely within North Bay's limits. He wants to be away from the set, the hospital, and the spotless apartment they first set him up with. Calvin just wants to be here.
It's not home, but maybe someday it can be.
He shoves his hands behind his back, clasping his fingertips together to keep them tangled after pressing play. Calvin glances again at Isis, her eyes closed to what's already begun on the television screen. The last thing he wants to do is hurt her. She's all that he has right now.
He cannot pry his eyes away.
He can't reach them; barely understands if what he sees is real at all.
All he can do is stare as his world melts to nothing.
A/N: Happy New Year! I hope that you enjoyed the first chapter of my latest project, a companion story to my The Cut Verse trilogy. In these seven chapters, I will be introducing each of the previous winners of The Cut in preparation for my next SYOC story. These characters will make up a large portion of the subplot for 2TC and I felt that they deserved proper fleshing out beforehand.
Calvin is extremely near and dear to my heart, as are all of the characters that I will be sharing with you in this story. I'm extremely excited to continue on with these chapters over the next few weeks and tell their stories.
Speaking of 2TC, I have now opened submissions for the second installment of The Cut Verse - In The Core. Information and the character form can be found on my profile and I will be accepting submissions until February 1st, 2022 12PM EST.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss your character prior to submitting, don't hesitate to PM me.
~ Olive