"—Red!" You call out over the familiar flash-bang of your secretary's biannual memory wipe. In the back of your mind, you wonder how many more she can take before she's reduced to playing in puddles of her own drool, but HR can deal with that later.
Right now he's shoving your secretary out the door and slamming it shut. You're climbing out of your wheelchair and into the cola rocket car you've installed along the handrails while he crosses the threshold. Silently Red Leader steps over Matt's sleeping form amongst the carnage of empty cans and storyboards and half-finished props and tipped over cork-boards covered in doodles/pictures/script pages, his heavy boots further scuffing the spilled paint and cigarette burns that make Pollock paintings of once chessboard-patterned tile.
Three creative minds exploded upon a ballroom canvas.
(And there's always room for one more.)
The rocket careens down with a series of harsh, grating clunks, almost throwing you out as it races to the bottom of the staircase, like it always does. Red stands at the first step, fixes you with a bored eye as you grind to a halt beside him, steering wheel digging into your stomach like a twisting punch.
The only bit of Red Army regalia he's kept tonight is the fur-lined coat hanging open atop his shoulders as his gloved hand sits in his pocket. Plain red shirt, one sleeve tied at his stump with a rubber band. Worn, mud-stained jeans. Gun belt, of course, but you're none too worried.
If he planned to kill you, he'd have done so when you blacklisted him, or when you knocked him unconscious and made the doctors pop his useless eye out on live TV.
You blow up his robot, he cracks your spine. You take his eye, he takes your leg.
No, you aren't go out by bullet; he's told you as much before. Years and years ago, said with the same humor and certainty as when you two promised to run off to NYC and live together as Sesame Street queens should you both outlive your wives.
No, you're going out on the courts of murderball. C'est la vie.
At least he's never lost his eye for aesthetics.
He doesn't ask why you're smothering your laughter.
"You're rather early," you say, cranking the shift until your car is rolling backwards, lifting up the stairs to follow him. You have to almost yell over the machine's crunching protests; you don't know how much worse his hearing's gotten since he rejected your offer of cochlear implants the last time he visited. "Did you miss me that much?"
"Not particularly." A shrug. "But you know how tedious army life can be."
You crank the shift again, stopping with a gesture towards the seat beside you. "Now come on, hop in."
He pauses on the step above you, scanning you up and down before raising a brow. "Looks like it's time for another resizing."
You roll your eyes. "Hardy har har, Red." You wait for him to quip back, but instead he starts climbing again, ignoring your calls until you start the car again, crawling along at his pace. "You're really walking?"
"I have two legs, don't I?"
"A ha ha ha ha." You make a grab for his jacket, but he steps out of your reach. "Red you are simply too funny."
He doesn't even smile.
"Come here," you wave him after you, scooping up Xingo before she can get caught under your wheels. "I had Bing whip up something new in the lab!"
Wheels and footsteps crunch the canvas and tarps beneath you like autumn leaves as you roll towards your desk – and the new machine behind it.
"Let me guess?" He asks, "Arsenic baby formula?"
Oh, he's gonna love this. You lead him past the tree trunk columns of fountain soda, underneath the click-click-click of Coca Cola bottles crawling high above you towards the gift shop now used as your and Matt's and Tom's (but mostly Matt's) walk-in closet.
You press a button on your wheelchair's armrest remote, flipping green lights onto a row of 50s-style vending machines – and behind that, your new clothing line, and the rack of paintball guns that made it possible. His rictus only harshens as he scans the new prints of Matt modeling said clothes, hanging askew over the old Evangelion posters he'd requested when you first moved everyone into the World of Coke, when you paid the best engineers to repair the alien ship and drag it across the ocean from Atlanta right to old Durdum Lane.
When his eyes finally land on the new machine – on the words "POISON SODA GOODIES" emblazoned within a frame of blinking lights, the word "soda" hastily scrawled over where "apples" used to be – he plants his face in his hand.
"I was watching some Rocky and Bullwinkle the other day, and I decided to make a little tribute." You fish around in your pocket and flash him a shiny coin before dropping it in and yanking out the pinball shooter beneath "cyanide." The pad of his thumb is digging into his eyelid as the machine clanks and spits a nice, cold can of Beverley into your hand.
You yoink out your quarter by the string.
Tossing his jacket onto your desk in a gust of paper, Red Leader plops down on the mahogany edge as you toss the can in his direction. Without meeting your eyes, he cracks it open, foam cresting over his hands. He knocks back a few quick gulps.
His brow furrows at the image plastered directly over your desk, framed by bike chains and bottles. Matt had insisted the presses' first photographs of your new body should be more than simple candid shots, so he'd driven you from physical therapy to your private beach and covered your lower body in fake prop limbs and blue cloth tentacles and oversized novelty car keys, stuck your head in a fishbowl, and photographed you as you played on your phone. A beached merman with a junkyard for a tail.
After a pause, Red asks, "That didn't really have cyanide in it, right?" as he crushes the half-full can and tosses it over his shoulder, the spray coating your desk and –
"Hey hey hey!" Xingo is nearly thrown from your lap as you race forward, hastily wiping your laptop's keyboard off with your sweatshirt's sleeve. "You're lucky it didn't, asshole." That was supposed to be the joke: it tastes so bad you wished it really had been poisoned. But apparently he's in an extra pissy mood tonight – "Look, Xingo ripped my pants because of you."
You run a soothing hand down her old back, dabbing your sleeve at the blood beginning to bead up from the new cuts in your thigh. Thankfully they're none too painful – your leg may have been lopped off at the knee, but the nerve damage runs all the way up to the broken discs in your lumbar spine, making even your good leg a trial by fire whenever the universe decides to fuck with you.
That's one of the worst parts – how you'll have to lie in bed and get your assistant to plug in a morphine drip simply to make the carbonation beneath your skin go flat. And that's when you're lucky.
That's also one of the things you've never told him. You've talked about the phantom pain, sure – you both still have it, even after all these years and kidnapped doctors and expensive treatments – but you don't let him know how many times you've hobbled from your bed into your renovated shower, clawing at your skin for invisible bugs, a metaphor until you haven't slept more than two hours in twice as many days and you're scratching raw a leg that's no longer there, the water leaving your skin sunburn pink.
"Then clone her without claws next time," Red says with a little shrug.
If you have to re-explain to one more person how that defeats the purpose you're going to scream.
Stay calm, Edd. You need to rein the conversation back in, so before he can say anything else: "I'm even thinking of installing a few of these babies in the mines. Matt suggested it was high time to shake things up a little, so we're gonna stop livestreaming the executions and try something a little more subtle."
That magical mix of amusement and disgust blooms across his face, recalling both of your days as children gleefully dissecting frogs and daring each to touch roadkill with your bare hands. "You, subtle?"
"I know, right? And from Matt, of all people." You double-check that your art file saved without incident before wheeling back to the machine, slip in two more slugs and yank the stopper for a pair of regular, un-poisoned colas.
This can he catches and sets atop his jacket, reminding you of his first middle school dance since moving from the continent, where you convinced him to turn his trench coat into a sack and helped him smuggle out a 12-packs' worth from the public coolers.
Reminding you of how you slept with that coat as your only blanket the night he left, how your first date as Red and Green Leader began with him noticing you wearing it and telling you to take that goofy shit off.
Now he stretches his shoulders back with a soft groan, reclining until he's lying atop all the very important blueprints and memos and treaties you'd been doodling mech designs on. "You're such a shit liar."
"I'm not lying!"
"Matthew Graves, subtle? That's some flat-earth tier bullshit." A heavy sigh, then a hiss of air. "But then again—"
"Oh yeah," you interrupt with a laugh, for you know he must be referring to the disc-shaped "alternative globes" one of your daughter companies unveiled recently. Wasn't even noon that day before your private cell chimed with a I hate you.
"Every time I think I finally have nothing inside me left to die," he continues, "You push out Cola brand nipple clamps, or – don't write that down!"
You push away from the desk before he can grab you, your cat ripping open new lines your skin, but you laugh and he furrows his brow.
"Why not?" You ask him. "The irony dollar's growing. Now c'mon, the paintball guns're already—"
"Why don't we just watch a movie?"
Xingo growls lowly, and as you smooth your hand down her back you feel familiar bumps; tumors, aka the clone common cold, you'll need to send in your second order in as many months.
But you can do that tomorrow. Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight.
"Alright," you say, drawing out the word as you avert his steely gaze, pretending for a moment that you don't know where on your remote the right button is. " Insane Zombie Pirates from Hell 2019?"
That finally makes him crack a lopsided smile. "How fucking dare you remind me."
The button reveals the twisty cartoon tunnels that take you from the old taste testing room to the old theater, where every guest had to sit through some crywank ad film before they could explore the rest of the facility.
You take your favorite prosthesis with you but leave Xingo; clones lose their tolerance for loud noises almost immediately out of the tube.
You two order overpriced rum and coke and bicker briefly over the movie – anything but the remake, please god – what do you mean you don't want to experience the death of art right before your eyes? – so eventually you settle on Rocky Horror Picture Show, a celebration of its fifth year since becoming mandatory watching for every citizen above the age of fourteen. He sits abreast to you, feet up on the seat in front of him. You swallow down the disappointment that you can't take his hand.
Before you even have a chance to get into the film, however, the screen pulses green. You groan and press a button on your remote, turning the projector onto the security cameras that dot the outside. Four dark figures are taking spray paint and hammers to the E of the large EW sign before the front gates, and with another groan and button-press you and Red watch as limbs suddenly start flying. Lasers cut off heads, cleave bodies in two, the blood filling in the sidewalk cracks with black.
"I should start charging you for that," Red notes.
"Can't, I still own the rights to all your inventions." At the time it had felt like a dick move, but you weren't yet in a position to argue with the board of investors. Now the irony of your loyalists using security systems designed by the Red Leader himself is too delicious to resign.
"Christmas present?" he asks sweetly.
"You don't celebrate Christmas."
"Hanukkah?"
You roll your eyes. "Tell Tom to come back from vacation, first."
Tom has always been the emissary betwixt you two during the holidays, bringing back and forth donuts and leftovers and candy canes when you all were children, old comics and poisoned food and quirky little gifts now that you're all grown up.
Like Red's last gift to you: a noose. Pre-tied and everything, fairly thick and sturdy, because he's just so thoughtful.
On the screen, the bodies are already being raided and the raiders are already turning on each other, bludgeoning whoever's closest with blood-soaked bats and spraying paint into each other's eyes. In the bottom of the screen, plump mutant rats are tearing out ligaments from one of the corpses' hands and are using it to play jump-rope.
You turn the screen back to Rocky Horror. "Interested in another weapons contract?" You loll back, hands a pillow.
"I'll consider," he says simply with a sip on his drink.
You wait for him to say more, to sing along with you as the first number starts, but he doesn't, so the words die on your tongue, too.
Not too long later, you dare a glance over. He's on his phone. "How are your bread lines looking?" you ask, perhaps a bit too loudly.
"Splendidly short," he quips back. "My man's" (means nothing, just one of his show's inside jokes, it means nothing) "latest invention has doubled our production recently, so –"
"You mean theft."
"You mean innovation." Another sip, eye still trained on his screen, and you're tempted to grab your leg out of the next seat and bash it over his head. "All this money and yet your factories haven't been renovated since my parents stopped having sex."
The corner of his eye crinkles with a small smile as you laugh, quip back, "But then I'd have less money." He shakes his head, takes another sip. Before, he would have launched into a tirade, quoting extensively from theManifesto and probably Engels and Marx' private love letters, willfully ignorant of how quickly the words jumbled in your mind.
You were never the one for complex ideas; you wonder if he ever resented you for that. Because as much as he loved taking the helm of each project, storyboarding OVA trilogies with you and fighting tooth and nail with Tom over every story beat and character name, sometimes…
What's accelerationism, again?
How sweetly and patronizingly he'd patted your head. Capitalism but every time you feel oppressed it gets faster.
"Which reminds me," his voice breaks you out of your reminiscing. "How are sales? My sources say half the city'll be eating their shoes by the end of the third fiscal quarter."
"I should expand into cookbooks, then! Shoe leather should have some cross-market appeal; it's gluten-free, right?"
He presses one of the buttons on the inside of his chair, reclining it until he's lying flat, avoiding your gaze for the ceiling. You chuckle. "What? You were always the better cook than me."
"Because you thought cola syrup counted as a sauce," he says.
"I still don't see how it isn't."
His fingers drag down his unscarred cheek, a heavy sigh, so you ask him if he's going to see the new comedy Matt's starring in. He says no, you say he better, because it cost a lot to convince them to take Matt on. Something about a "Neo-Aristotelian comedy" – how that's any different, you don't know and don't really care.
"It means mean-spirited. Because Aristotle thought humor came from realizing we're better than other people."
Your immediate thought is well that's fucking stupid , but instead you say: "He must have been fun at parties."
You can see a million different thoughts flash across his face, but he merely puffs out his cheeks and presses another button on the inside of the seat – large Mickey-gloved hands pop out of the back, and he slams the button in until they recede.
"Don't want a massage?" You ask, planting your cheek in your palm. "You should; your knots probably have knots."
"You know," he says, slowly relaxing until he's lying down on his side, facing you. "I once heard one of them say that true comedy is just God's lets-play of our lives."
"Tom pissed himself lol can we hit ten likes."
His lips thinned into a harsh line – the telltale sign he's trying hard to suppress a smile. "Again?"
"Yeah, didn't you see the reports?" That had been the reason Tom insisted he needed a two-week vacation in the middle of filming, one which he has only granted after finding you a suitable replacement director. "Also, what twelve-year-old's deviantArt did you get that off of?"
"Look it up yourself," he snaps back in toothless anger. "You still own it, don't you?"
When you'd first told him, he'd been reading to you the inspiration for carving your favorite advert (the first cola ad you'd ever posed for, of course) on the moon. About a fat cat corporate king trying to buy his wife all the flowers and songbirds in Ireland - Red, back when he still let you call him Tord, had rolled his eyes and said that if you were going for something similar, you should have bought hentaihaven.
So you did, and promptly shut it down.
He didn't talk to you for almost a year. You were so concerned with each peaceful day that went by you had to triple and quadruple check with your spies that he was still alive.
You're about to settle back in for the rest of the movie when the screen flashes again, Discord ringtone bouncing off the walls.
Your groan, this time, is more of a yell. You decline, but the front desk only rings again – and again and again, until finally you relent, much to Red Leader's tittering amusement.
"What?"
"Mr. Whiting." Your secretary's nervous voice, the shuffling of papers, whispers too static-choked to comprehend. "One of the sentries found something you really should see."
"How urgent can it possibly fucking be?"
"It's about Mr. Rossaler."
Another drawn-out, heavy sigh. "Another DUI is about as urgent as a day that ends with y—"
"Oh no," Red interrupts, grin full of teeth. "You're gonna wanna hear this."
A quizzical look, a cold feeling in your gut. "Okay," you say slowly. "Fax it over."
"Yes, Mr. Whiting." The call ends, and the seats begin to blink their lights. You aim your remote towards the one in front of you, and out of its back spits a dark sheet of paper. You rip it out the printer's mouth, turn the lights up –
Tom: hair swept back, wearing nothing but Red Leader's jacket and Susan's shoulder strap, the bass all that's covering his crotch.
INTRODUCING 80'S BOY
There's more, butterflies and bodies and red banners, but the details fade away as your eyes drill into Tom's face – a huge, devilish grin, not a single sign of resistance or hesitation.
"I wanted to do a live-action remake of Urotsukidōji," Red Leader's words are far away yet right in your ear, his breath hot against your skin. "But Tom wanted this weird arthouse bullshit where he basically fucked Christmas to death, so we had to compromise."
"What's this?" You ask, far too softly.
"Our new production, A Butterfly to Rest. See?" He points to the title you hadn't even noticed. "Right there. A lot sexier than the play's actual title, believe me."
"Play?"
Your hands are shaking.
"Yeah, Tom and I decided to do something autobiographical the only way we knew how – as either a comic, a porn parody, or as a pro-wrestling storyline. So why not all three? A genre gang-bang, if you will." He chuckles, and you feel his stump knock against your shoulder, as though he's trying to sling his arm around your neck. "It's funny; the other day I was lying the floor and I told him to get out so I could have my little pity party, and he just says, "My food's in the microwave, cunt"— god, I'd forgotten how much I missed him!"
Your eyes focus in on Tom's happy, stupid face, until even that is a bowling ball blob and your palms are sweating so hard they come away ink-stained.
You've seen his shows; you've pulled Matt and Tom into this very theater and pulled up some shitty virus-ridden website on the big screen, watched through drunken, slinky-kneed phone cameras him sing and do voices and tell stories— him wearing an ever-growing tower of paper kids' crowns, him fucking girls with less limbs than you, him making brain slushies of his latest political prisoners to the crashing waves of electro-pop, the whole crowd chanting/singing SHOW ME YOUR BLOOD.
You're the only one who ever paid much attention to it - Tom had said his was better, that the experiments in style were tedious and stupid and lame, while Matt critiqued the costume design and asked why Tord didn't install a vibrator or something into his robotic arm, he's made better porn than this in a Nando's bathroom.
So you smile, and tear the poster in two.
Red raises a brow.
"You're such a shit liar." Your smug, knowing smile only grows as you tear it into fourths, eighths, ball up the pieces and toss them over your shoulder.
"What are you on about?"
"Tom leaving. He'd never choose you over me, first of all— second of all, he thinks your "genre gangbangs" are dumb and pretentious, and third of all—"
"He's told you he's gone blind, hasn't he?"
From drinking methanol? "Yeah, and I told I'd pay for rehab, what of it?"
Red runs a hand over his scars, clasps them both in prayer and says slowly, like he's explaining the concept of not chewing paste to a three-year-old, "You wanted him to work through rehab."
"As a supervising director! From outpatient! He doesn't even have to do any real shooting. We can't push this movie back, and no one else has the clout he does— clout I gave him, by the way, by rescuing—"
"Stealing, you mean stealing some young indie directors' work out from under them and slapping Tom's name on it."
"Stealing's a very funny thing to call legally purchasing the rights to —"
"Because you knew they were young and debt-ridden and too immature to know how much you were underselling them."
You slump back in your seat, crossing your arms over your chest. "Well if Tom didn't like it, he could've told me." You catch that silver eye rolling in your periphery, so you turn up the heat: "And I definitely don't need any lectures on integrity from the guy who helped me renovate this place just so he could hide a fucking secret laboratory in it and used the job I gave him to embezzle from me. Wanna talk about stealing? What about that, hmm? What about the cities you've bombed and the news anchors you've kidnapped for your stupid speeches and the fucking leg you stole from me—"
"What about the eye you stole from me?"
"You weren't using it! It was all ugly and scarred over — it didn't even bleed when we removed it."
"That doesn't mean you can take it out on pay-per-view."
"That doesn't mean you can try and take my friends away from me!" You don't know when you two started screaming, but your faces are too close, you can smell the old alcohol on his breath, too much like Tom and his Smirnoff, and words ripping themselves out of your throat with a mind of their own. "You've taken the last thirty years away, isn't that enough?"
And suddenly you're kissi—
He shoves you away. "Don't fucking touch me."
You lunge for him, swinging your fake leg in a wide arc, and you two are on the floor just as suddenly. Punching and kicking and snarling until he manages to toss your leg away and slam his boot into your stomach.
Again.
Again.
Again.
He stops and waits, watching as you rub your abdomen and cough with familiar, burning pain.
He doesn't kick your leg any further away, the way that crazy union leader had with your wheelchair when he tried to force you to slash the labor tax— your first execution, free to stream and open to the public, one of the last times your private cell chimed with a good job, he deserved it and bloody idiot was making me look bad.
Instead Red gently kicks your leg back within your reach, struggling to control his breathing, carding his hand through his hair over and over as you try to swallow the bile that wants to explode out your throat.
"Regardless," he says finally, still breathing heavily, "Tom's defected to the Dark Side, where I've outfitted him the new set of LED eyes you banned because one of the inventors liked Pepsi." He spits the word at you like an arrow, but with a smile. "So I have to thank you for giving me a new sniper through your own infinite stupidity."
You sputter and slip on your tongue, but you can't keep your own bitter, humorless laugh in, either. "I have to thank you, though, Red; every time your Army attacks, sales of all doomsday prep-related items go up!"
"And every time inflation and unemployment go up, our recruitment numbers soar."
"See it's like poetry," You try to sound serious, but you're quoting George Lucus circa prequels production, so how can you? "Every stanza kinda rhy—"
"Are you ever gonna grow up, Edd?"
He's so shocked by the sound of his own name he doesn't dare move.
And he can see the scene outside his own body, like a shot from a reality TV show. Close up on Tord's face, shot reverse shot.
Or maybe a lingering wide, then shot to Tord's fists balling and un-balling, reverse shot to Edd, still barely breathing at all. Edd hardly dares breathe - if anything in this tableau vivant changes, the magic will all be lost.
Ah, the Crippling Fear of Change dollar, that's a big dollar.
"Where's the fun in that?" You ask finally.
He merely shakes his head and turns towards the door.
"Wait, wait! Tord, stay, come back." The words fall off your tongue before you can stop them. You're crawling, hands and knees, groping desperately for his leg. "Stay with me. Just a little longer."
He stops and lets you grab onto him, and in that action alone you find the truth about everything you've ever needed to know.
"What do you want to do?" He asks.
Your tongue goes dry as and your eyes dart wildly around, anything, anything... there's a mug of thick, overpriced pens on your desk. Not markers, not paint, not your best friend, but maybe you can both pretend that doesn't matter and let reality have its say in the morning. Take off your coat for a while and go and play. You lick your lips, staring up at him with wide, desperate eyes, words breathless. "Why don't we –"