'Lungs need air and life needs light.'


Strangling someone is more intimate than shooting them. A shot right in the head pierces a brain and kills much more imminent. At least with a gun, the chances for that a higher.

Strangling someone needs contact between their bodies now. For a second he thinks how it would go to use one of the tubes behind him. But he is already rushing forward, so close he feels the breath knocking out of Maven's chest when they collide. The physical contact has a pinch of another connotation.

Eye to eye, facing, it is strange that Maven is taller than him, even just by the bit of a flat hand. He is much thinner though without all the wiring running and fighting that Thomas body is designed to do.

Thomas' naked feet slip over the ground, then his whole body makes contact and rips him from his legs.

The sound of a body hitting tiles echoes in smashing sounds through the white room. It breaks on his eardrums too loud to not alarm anyone outside the doors. The tubes and broken straight straps coil over the ground in a mess of bubbling see-through liquid, inconsequential colorless as everything around him.

Maven lies flat, a body in an open casket, only now starting to struggle in a twist of a face that only speaks about fear.

Thomas is fine with that, if only because it is better than soft touches and whispered promises. His feet kick, his arms struggle, but being trapped under the whole pushing weight of legs and knees pressing the arms into the tiles he does so to no avail.

The ghost steadies, fingers slip over the blood trickling over the gap the needle hole has left. The remaining stingers clip through his skin and break in his veins with every move. The blood is everywhere, a tickling sensation that soaks through his grey shirt, rough fabric drenching itself in almost black stains, a maroon-colored mess.

The red blood also drips and smears over Maven in the collision. On his much paler skin, it sinks in crimson.

A pulse rushes like a river under Maven's throat. It circulates in the gushing of a hammering pulse that speaks about surprise. Thomas imagines the way that the adrenaline must shoot through his body just like it does in his, the twin breath of feeling alive and invincible, ready to fight or flee.

He does neither in grey pallid stillness, just for the fraction of a moment, a lung filling with air as the hands push over his windpipe, moving his head back under the weak building pressure. His skin is soft and lost between the collage of dark blood-stained hands.

If he thinks that he won't do it, he is a fool. And despite every bad quality, the world has pointed out to sit under Mavens skin. He has never been a fool, or has he?

The last he'll feel is the charcoal ripped skin of a scarred hand, if that isn't the perfect symbolic ending then the ghost of Thomas doesn't know.

His hands push together harder around the throat, just as Maven's nostrils widen. He only gets to let loose one raspy sound overbearing with the struggle of dying or living.
He squeezes tightly once, twice.

His fingers twitch held beneath legs, his face falls, lips open.

Strangling someone takes a lot longer than Thomas thought it would.

Watching the perish slow and methodical is not joyous. He doesn't feel anything.

He is empty.

Even the anger retreats, whatever bitter lemon that is stuck in his throat, the grief, a line of gun powder leading into the fray of a forest fire.

He is empty and tired, and whatever is still pressing fingers deep into the skin of someone that he used to love a long, long time ago, in another lifeform and before too mnay deaths, he doesn't feel anything for it.

The longer he stares at the face, the more his hands start to shake. Then his grip gets weaker, just as Maven's legs stop moving. He counts his own boiling heartbeats that dimly thump through the skin on his hands, and he can't say if it just overtones Maven's with its loudness or if there is nothing more to hear and feel.

His body is slack now, it feels too soft under the weight of another living being. His eyes are closed shut.

The ghost releases his quivering grip and looks at the thick two thumbprints that line the white skin. Blistering in a darker color, his nails have also left scratchmarks on the exposed bit of a neck beneath a dark hairline.

He should squeeze longer, to make sure this is it. Crush the windpipe so much the damage is irreparable. His fingers push back over the marks fitting.

He takes a long breath and leans forward again before the impact of a too long silence and the echoing fall push into the room.

Hands push him back, a beating and clawing, a fist that flings toward a soft spot in his body.

The impact makes him gasp and breathe in.

On the ground right beside his struggling, fighting body, Maven does the same.


The chain is not very long. It connects over his ankles and his hands this time.

He curls together in a room that is not white now anymore but black, no more neon overlight that illuminates the slightest stain. The room gets only split by one ray in the doorway from time to time.

The silence stays the same. It only gets louder because his ears are bad, his nose doesn't smell anything, his eyes are blind.

It sucks the life out of him in streaks of grey, his body gives in. Every scar on his body tingles, every healed rib feels like it will snap again, every muscle is sore, every nerve is dead and disintegrated.

The sensation is a million times stronger than a girl shocking him in defense.

The ringing in his head stays the same.

The thoughts that pull in are the amalgation of whatever the Pulls conjure up, and they punish him and his memories with whipping lashes of screams, tears and blood.

He only curls together in the chains and stone that is his latest cell. He existes in a vacuum. Time has no meaning. It never did.

So he just lies in the complete annihilated darkness until the ray splits the black room again. Even sedated he was not this weak. Even with broken ribs or filled with poison pills he was not this useless. His head doesn't work.

"No mockery about how I come prepared to chain someone in manacles because I have done it before." Nothing is smooth about the way Maven's voice sounds. Just like the Ghost valued his body as an instrument, his voice and words were a whole machinery of different artillery shots. Now it is a rough, choking sound. Beneath the high dark collar of the shirt, he knows that there will be blooming prints of his fingers and bloody leftover marks.

The realisation is surprising. It means no one knows this has happened. It means that he hasn't talked or done anything the last days.

He sits down in the lit up grey, right beneath the small split of light that drives tears into Thomas' eyes. Just out of reach of his chained up figure.

It could be taunting if it wasn't something else. Something much more vulnerable.

They shake back and forth in their respective places, swaying dried out dead straws of grass in the wind.

"You could have just burned me when I started attacking you."

"I should have done that," Maven agrees in rough rasping strokes of his voice. "I knew you would break out. You are lethal, Tommy, I'm not stupid enough to not know it. As soon as I learned you were alive, I studied everything I could very carefully."

The chains rustle and clutter over the ground in sounds excavating dead memories and shivers on spine for the trapped ones. "Then why didn't you? Because I was an accident?"

"I'm not going to hurt you. I promised," Maven whispers. "I don't want to, I don't know how many times I have to tell you."

This time, I promise, I promise- hand on a scarred brow below hair, throwing a dark space over a white bed and the world spins and looses itself in the void-

"I'm not going to stop." He pushes out an unintelligle sound filled with dread and sorrow and uncried tears. His shoulders shake and he cries, one flood of panic and a pinch of regret.

Maven pulls his legs on his body and folds together, inching slightly closer, still out of reach.

"Maybe I want to convince you to stop."

He thinks about all the faces flooded in cold tunnels, in city streets, faces of people he barely knew, and faces of people he cared for, jsut for a short moment, because they were kind to him.

"No."

"Give me a chance, Tommy. I know-" He doesn't say what he knows or not knows. "I need you, I didn't lie. You are all I have left. Stay with me. I'll show you everything. I have offers to make. It doesn't need to be like this. I know this is not your end. Not this way. For whatever it is worth, change your mind."

With the lack of possibilities to even disagree he just pulls himself together and stops looking at the light or the way it draws over the silhouette in front of him. It takes everything in his mental system not to just lunge forward and die in some malnourished state , dragged in chains. In the light split from the door, he is very sure that someone is watching carefully.

With the care of someone that has been bitten before and returns only slow to approaching any animals with as much as one sharp tooth, Maven drags himself over the floor , and even if he wanted to, Thomas' carcass is too heavy and weak to do more than flinch once, even if his head screams something else.

The collar tickles Thomas' face , and in the cold grey stream, Maven's heated form is warm enough to almost be inviting, even if it is too hot and searing.

"I can make everything better, just be with me, that is enough." The voice is a croaking, heavy sound that breaks now. The hands that touch him are just the same as before.

Something in him melts under the way they move in the darkness, the hands that slip along the chains and touch him, the other part is revolted and disgusted.

Thomas lifts his hand and presses one long kiss right about the line where he presumes the bruises on Maven's neck. Dissonance is vibrating through his bones, the one part of pure anger and the other remembering something entirely else. He repeats the motion next to the shell of an ear, then a cheek, a fluttering eyelid that presses together.

The heat of their bodies is pressing to a melting point now, even if they barely touch.

"Yes?" The voice asks hopeful and picks up the pace of lips pressing together on skin. The long fingers touch his numb dead skin and push gently over the scars.

"No," he explains and turns away before they kiss, just a split second before it happens. "And this is all there is left. You can't- and I can't. Because I am not the same Thomas and you are not the same Maven. But you can stay a while like this. And I promise that I will not hurt you either today. Because I can't."

And that is all there is left in the darkness while they breathe.

And that is all there is with binding fates and falling hearts, sinking stars and rising flags. Darkness and fights and escape and endings, some more bitter than others.

Until another person opens a door and reminds whatever is left of one of them why they chose to say yes or no that last day.

Because as much as he tells himself he is unimportant, people haven't forgotten him. They don't let him rot for too long.