It's lonely at night when he's asleep.
Red noticed as much during the years she's been trying to get used to it. She hasn't managed to do so yet which merely reinforces the inevitability of this loneliness.
It's not that she's unreasonable. Humans require rest to function properly in daily life in order to carry out the tasks they've assigned themselves. But given the fact that sleep remains an alien concept to symbiotes one way or another, it proves difficult to find something to do when your primary source of entertainment is drooling on a pillow like an infant.
Some doe-eyed wretch would probably coo over the sight while it still has her flare with tension at times. At the outset of their bond, she was worried about him losing fluid in this state, and then she went nearly mad trying to find a leak that didn't exist. It didn't take Cletus two minutes to become aware of her restlessness buzzing like a hornet's nest down his spine and for him to make a confession towards her in a strangely-pressed voice. Back then, she did not understand why his face had flushed crimson. Attributing it to the stagnant air the cell provided, she broke a second window through the stone to remedy the situation.
The guards weren't exactly thrilled, but they didn't have to bear it for long. Opening the cell, Red threw herself at them and ate their eyes. Slimy, warm, with tough, smooth cores in their center. She burst the pupils between her teeth and all but mourned the insipid taste.
Here, a lifetime later, the air has been unbreathed for years, a fine cloth of dust woven through the apartment like a truce. Quiet as it may be it's no location Red would have favored for upcoming battle. There are too many blind spots to look out for once the cavalry drops in, too many opportunities to have the red light of a sniper mark Cletus' temple. Drawing attention to this, he waved her concern off as usual saying she'd worry too much, they'd be fine here. She believes him. And stays on guard nonetheless.
A colorless trickle of saliva trails off the right corner of her host's mouth. She wipes it off, mindful not to exert too much pressure. These days, she knows it merely reveals how exhausted he is although he'd rather die than admit to it. And god, he's done this part often enough lately.
The bedroom they reside in is barren and bleak. Roughly-hewn furniture covers the walls, the bluish wallpaper stained by dark blots of water damage. The mattress is saggy and thin. She has spread her skin mat-like under Cletus' back so he won't care when he turns around (He often does. Never a calm one, less so in sleep). He paid the rent in advance instead of killing the landlady, meaning they're going to stay a bit longer.
It wouldn't come as a surprise; there are irregular units of time where they have to lie low. The police stuck on their tail proves habit, yet sometimes Cletus claims a holiday's in order. It's been two weeks since their last kill and the town they chose deems quaint and lax like a gutted opossum, so she supposes this to be one of those holidays. She couldn't care less, honestly.
Her chin bedded on his bare chest, she listens to his snoring while his breath swings her up and down like the slow swell of the sea on a windless eve. The opal white shimmer of her sickle-shaped eyes wanders to the open doorway and the corridor crammed behind. She's memorized three junctions sprouting from it; a bathroom, a kitchenette, the parlor. The latter has been built with an arched glass plate replacing the outside wall, soiled by nature's sputum and lack of care. Raindrops drew glistening veins upon the milky surface when they came in packed with junk food. Judging by the pitter-patter from afar, they haven't stopped falling yet.
She remembers to have asked Cletus about it once. The rain. A small glimpse at the elements witnessed during their first days as one.
Where does it come from? Why is it here?
Old as earth is the scene of them watching it fall out of the ashen sky above Ryker's Island, the black ocean beneath a solemn, gaping wound. Something about it irks her, the waves' motion as persistent as they're crashing. She's not fond of the image. It reminds her of – … no. No need to think about them now. Or ever.
Will it hurt our skin once we go outside? she urged softly. Our skin. It had a nice ring to it. The words melted on her tongue.
Cletus stretched, crossed his arms under his head and stared up the cracked ceiling with pursed lips.
"Relax. It's just rain, nothing big," he said when she nudged him, ever impatient and anxious to hear his answer, sound, anything. Turning on his side, he closed his eyes. "You worry too much. Now lemme sleep."
She didn't. As every newborn, extraterrestrial or not, she couldn't help but bombard him with more questions following. Not that she wouldn't have been perfectly able to gain the answers by reading his mind and card through the memory of a past she ardently wished to have been part of, but… there were problems, at first.
The places she found, fickle, edged and dark between the folds of his brain, confused her. Smeared tableaus of a mewling kid in the corner, a belt lashing, entreaties unheard and the whirr of a drill making its way into well-groomed dog fur; stale piss-smell and rotten wood and so much blood dripping down the stairs akin to the shade of her own skin it made her envious and bristle with warmth though clueless why. But she'd always recognize his voice inside the malstrom of images and noise. She held onto it like a lifeline, being guided through the intestines and entrails of his violent history till her mass bound to every squelch, splat and cry it offered. And thus, she was made.
His voice continued to pose her major link to all that was brooding around them, a condition she wouldn't have missed for the planet she had yet to explore. It helped her sculpt her own when she wasn't too busy being in awe, exercising exhilaration about his half-baked stories which deemed horrid to the judges, and jokes that weren't funny to neither the common nor demented. She didn't care much what exactly it was he talked about either; she preferred to pay attention to so much as a timbre's change, how it cracked and rose when he got excited as he brought life to the coarse images he procured and slurred his words in the process. She liked how his eyes bulged and his fists punched the air, when his lips quivered from agitation and the veins on his forehead protruded like torrents. Most of all, she kept a special fondness for the times he talked as if there were only them both in a dimension they had built from the atoms of their soon-to-be(headed) enemies. A world no one else was allowed to enter but them. A refuge of their own. A home. A lovers' nest.
Her questions, his answers, and the rain leaving earth and cement clammy in its wake merged what would be lullaby to them and eulogy to their prey. It did not compare to the hot currents of blood she hid in soon the guards passed them by, but she never stopped to treasure the noise it made when it hit the ground or the diligence with which it crawled beneath the surface.
She's been listening to the drop and splash of today's rain for hours now, a soft echo to mingle with his snores. Anyone else who'd have dared to so much as yawn in her vicinity, she had slaughtered. But there is none; this building is far from the loudmouthed bustle of a prison. It's run-down and depleted of life, and the few residents withering on its floors are either too old, too poor or abandoned enough to see no reason in choosing another dwelling. Those who stay now will be here till they die.
There are many houses like this in this city, one could almost call them epidemic a priori. All of them terribly ordinary, relics of time; truly, simply made to serve as hiding place for those who don't want to be found. And yet, Red's every particle pulls taut with suspicion for their enemies know it too.
She's not fond of remaining stagnant like this, huddled up in borrowed calm. Rather she thrives on the rush of adrenaline plowing through Cletus' veins the minute acrid copper-smell coats their hands and the screams blare through. A music common ears won't decipher, a blood-curdling cacophony that couldn't be played right by anyone but them.
Her father marks her as a shameful exception of their race for relishing in the massacres they love to produce; the black sheep he didn't care to raise right, raise at all, plunging her in the middle of nowhere like a sickened kitten and still blame her for bonding to the first pulse that throbbed in reach, beckoning her with its raging pace and shelter. She knows this is their way to go, no attachment by any means. Every heart stops beating on its own. And symbiotes are heartless by nature.
And yet, it's comical. Her father has been Brock's bitch for years only to be cursed, pushed off and pulled back to rest in his labile grasp. They don't know of true, unyielding loyalty. She does. Their judgement is hardly fair.
She caresses the stubbly cheek of the man they call devil, the flesh in between soft and amicable to her touch. He stirs in his sleep, caught up in whatever vortex of dream he's barging through. She smiles, bitter at the edges. Can't follow him there; just watch and wait with a patience she'd surely have strangled if given physical form. Without his voice conquering hers, the muteness rests deafening as a grave on both sides.
She's already experienced what it's like to be buried alive. The ramified mesh of scars that splits his lips into segments reminds her of past agony and a void that would not end. They glow like ghost flesh in the dark, and like sun-bleached malachite in her unblinking eyes. She is about to trace their shape when a knocking rips a cleft into the silence.
She freezes. Lifting her head, her body loses some of its suppleness and hardens over the lungs of her host in the faint replica of a shield.
The noise is steady, does not diminish nor swell. It reaches from afar, yet its echo reverberates close enough to their position that Red bares her teeth. The knock gains tremor in reply, festering. Mocking.
She'd have growled out loud if it hadn't likely woken Cletus, and that's a completely different matter to occupy her; he rarely sleeps this deep. She doesn't want to spend the night alone, but even less so she wants someone to disturb his repose.
Her hostile gaze wanders in the direction of the knock. She'll kill anyone who tries.
Checking his breathing one last time, she carefully detaches from his body and spirals to the ground. A single scarlet strand preserves their connection as she meanders out of the room and into the hallway, weighing the possibilities about to greet her.
If they're soldiers, it's a mystery how they found them – this time they did try their best to remain inconspicuous, meaning they'd have had tailed them for a while at least (a poor attempt she'd have caught on the second someone's step aligned with theirs). If it's a burglar, however, chancing their luck at a lonesome place as this, they'll be turned into a midnight snack; she hasn't had a squirming meal for days.
She licks over the honed edges of her canine teeth and hopes for a gang.
The knock resounds from the parlor. She heads for it, halts swiftly as Cletus rolls on his side in the background and murmurs scraps of words into the crook of his arm. She ponders, torn for the moment. Since the Silver Surfer incident, he can't stand it when she leaves without his knowledge. The accusation that goes with it he might never live down in truth. – he's good at bearing a grudge if he wants to. She's good at sitting them out.
In conclusion: Better get a move on. She's just as sick of drama as he is.
The colors of smoke and cold ceramic bathe the room when she gets in. The rain has gained strength, directing its rumbling cargo and the pale glow of the night towards carpet fringes crowned with fuzz and sofa cushions bursting at the seams. The smell of abandonment and mothballs lines the air. With one elegant leap, she clings on the back of an old-fashioned wing chair that leans crookedly against the coffee table, and searches for the source of the noise.
Raising her head, she catches a shadow at the upper right corner of the window wall. She looks more closely and relaxes though gravely disappointed. The anticipated terror turns out to be a bird that strikes the glass with his beak. His dark plumage is soaked to the bone, reminiscent of a bulging sponge dripping from each pore. The burden of the world weighs on him, and it does no more than bring him back to the ground that spat out his ancestors eons ago as they toiled up a pool of mud, their wingspans still leathery and without a single down to be envious of.
There is something funny about evolution. Red knows the joke by heart.
Birds are not alien to her. When Carnage swung beneath the skyscrapers of New York, rows of doves would sit on the roof edges like jurors in a court trial, following their jagged path with their senseless cooing. They fluttered up cooing soon as he got too close, and sat down cooing soon as he was gone. Cooing this, cooing that. It's stupid. Red can't stand the sound.
There were times they would get in position and throw tiny spears hardened by blood and symbiote flesh from the shadows just to watch them scatter with glee. A game, Cletus explained, one of many. This one like darts, but with a target that panics and the points being made due the puncture of organs, limbs and heads rather than a colored field. The wing counts 20 points, the head 40, the lungs 60. He preferred the eye (80) and got it most times; the times he didn't weren't worth mentioning.
She doesn't care about the easy-to-spot targets herself. Personally, she is set on their hearts; these small, dainty jackhammers housing each ribcage. Their erratic pace alarms her, derides her, that's what makes their halt so attractive. She has never missed her aim.
Her tendrils stretch over the couch cover and reach into the loosened seam, enriching each hole she finds with a larger crater. The musty filling scratches her lissom mass while the water forces the bird down heavy as a centner; still, it struggles to keep position. Cletus would have laughed about it, and she too feels a shrapnel of amusement scraping inside her, flashing like a pearl. They'd have bet the exact minute of the fall and whether it would be CRACK or SPLASH when the body hit the ground. She'd have guessed wrong just to see the glitter in his eyes yelling triumph as the winged rat lay flat.
He loves to win. She loves to watch him when he does.
The shrapnel continues to creep, taking snippets and shreds along the way. Bowing forward to watch the little creature's exertion more comfortably, her thoughts reach farther down a root system that spreads for impressions in the dried ground of dead end feelings, absorbing the life-giving wet that still burbles in the stomach of its own darkness.
Cletus laughs less than before, rarely smiles, lips raised just to show teeth. It may be the time of year, the stale odor of this city or the fact there's hardly a month left in which they're not wounded, banished, locked away or visited by strangers and confronted with battles that are not theirs, but end up to be a personal agenda soon as they refuse. They've had to fight so often lately, even if they didn't feel like it – a contradiction in itself because Carnage is always ready to slash throats and hang disembowled toddlers on a granny's clothesline. If he isn't, he could as well be dead because Carnage lives for the kill. He knows no limit, no patience, no reason for mercy, conscience and horror. No rest for the wicked as they say, and no goal for a demon.
And yet, here they are. In a run-down apartment complex, tired and watered down to the bone. Dungeoned like rats squeezing their way through disused sewers as they gnaw up the walls. The blue-belted shriek of police sirens passes them daily, as unaware of the monster-made man who roams the bowels of the building as they are of bodies wrapped and rotting under the floorboard. Safety is a bad joke built on a human's capability. The long arm of the law is a cripple and can be ripped off with a jerk if you simply take courage to open your mouth wide enough.
The knock mixed with the rain reigns the background of her mind, a dull thump in the ether. Thorns outgrow the shrapnel. Beautiful and sharp, they hack underneath her larynx, drilling deeper while she watches the bird as a cougar would a sheep. No dove, and she doesn't think it belongs to one of the species that coos, but its knock turns out to be just as annoying. Just as stupid.
It's been ages since Cletus and she played darts, eons since the days of Maximum Carnage. And though it's only been four months since they've wreaked havoc in New York, she misses roaming the dirt-caked streets of the town he was born in. Often enough, she catches herself glancing at the tacky postcards they find in souvenir shops, shopping malls or gas stations, potraying locations like Carnegie Hall or the Brooklyn Bridge. However, sight-seeing is soon replaced by the cashier's sullen voice asking for cash. They kill him, the customers howl symphonies to fit the theme. It's not even their fault, really, some people pretty much beg to be quartered. And who are they to deny such favor if it has them shut up at last?
She's not a child anymore. She understands that times have changed and these games once carrying their peak understanding of fun have resigned to aims and threats of far greater importance. This doesn't mean it stops her from following the simplistics of a more lenient past, of course.
They have surrendered to a routine that seeks chaos, demands blood, but ultimately strives towards greater ruin and the burden of their own survival. They flee or are trapped, they kill or are killed. One does not exclude the other, that's become clear in the meantime.
It used to be different. That's what she can't forget, much as she tries. They used to be the dominant link in the food chain, feared nothing for there was nothing to fear. And they clung to this fact like a dying fire to its ashes.
Cletus still fears nothing. But he says it so often lately, and sometimes it seems to her he might not believe himself as matter-of-factly as he once has. She has a clue why. He spent most of their time in space in comatose, but forbad her to get rid of the rest she couldn't erase before they took her away. The rest worries her. She locked it inside his subconscious and keeps ardent guard so it won't dare reaching towards the surface. As long as they're one, it won't have the chance to — she'll bite it back down the Lethe where it belongs.
The routine doesn't bother her as much. It's a manageable evil at best, and doesn't have to be condemned to eternity. The food chain it drags behind causes her greater concern, because one day – and this day comes, the thorns know – it will lead them to someone so powerful, so relentless that their defeat could be a lasting one. Irreversible enough that not even she might be able to bring him back from the dead.
And then what?
Then, his hours of sleep don't imply the only time she's alone with the rain.
Then, she'll be damned to exist in a devoted corpse. Forever.
With the bird still hovering, the impertinent knock grinds down her temples. His calls overlap with the wind yet she hears them regardless, every retch of life and death and confusion to come. He disgusts her. He's weak. The old itch settles beneath her mass; she wants to play.
This creature deserves to suffer. And the storm deems far too tender for the definition she's grown to perform.
Sending a final look into Cletus' direction, she reaches for the door. It's an old thing, with an oblong inset of patterned glass mottled grey by the dirt. The impermeable void of the unlit hallway yawns towards her. She closes it with care, accompanied by the hinges' dreadful sigh. It won't be long, she tells herself. He'll be fine.
Settled, she turns back to her prey. Her tendrils stretch, climb up the wall. They find a hatch in the glass, a crooked, rust-covered lever seemingly stuck next to it. Pulling it down with little effort, the hatch opens with raindrops spraying onto the carpet. The bird takes the chance, squeezes through the gap. Curious, Red watches as he falters to the ground and shakes off the ballast of excess water. Roughly the size of Cletus' hand, his belly feathers and the inside of his wings are peppered with bedlam streaks of white, now dyed ashen by the rain. His ochre beak contradicts the gloom stitched in his pupilless eyes while his gaze wanders attentively. A single, vermeil spot sits upon his quickly-heaving breast like he was born to be wounded. She can't match him with any species she has knowledge of, but this is of no matter. Like any specimen of this type, he sports a filigree framework of feathers, claws and meager flesh. What was his creator thinking as he moulded him so miserably? Surely not much. Not that she should say anything better about her own race and origin.
Taking a few plodding steps, the roundish, agile beast makes himself a home in his soon-to-be grave. This place is by no means ideal, but it's dry and sheltered from the cold and that's all he hoped for. Fluttering his wings, which comes closest to a shrug, he lowers his head and preens the lumps of dirt from his soaked plumage.
He's visibly trembling. Red knows how it feels. Usually, she keeps the reminder at a safe distance, yet every so often it sloshes back to her like the tiresome certainty of ebb following the tide.
The first impression the world gave her, was cold.
She can't remember to have trembled back then. Whether it had even been clear to her that symbiotes could tremble – but she was cooled and longing the very minute Venom delivered her and had her stripped off their flesh with neither warning nor guidance.
Tough as resin, she ran down the hole that gaped like a broken set of teeth in the masonry, her spinning senses palpating the crumbling stone till she climbed down and jumped off the fragment of an iron bar left from the grid. She smelled the wound before she saw it – a small cut, sweet and metallic, more of a crack on the surface barely penetrating the epidermis. She slipped in with a sigh, and the second impression given was the lulling warmth of blood.
The third one was Cletus screaming like a little bitch at her intrusion. It makes her grin at times. They've come a long way since.
Dark button-eyes set on her as she glides off the sofa and comes closer. For the first time, the bird perceives her as vivid being rather than part of the furniture and has no sound to describe her. A slimy seeming something, dazzling too, but neither sticky nor oily. He tilts his head, posture neutral, abeyant whether he should flee or not. He has never seen an animal like her before. He is wary of humans, even if they scatter food and wait for him to pick up the grains. Sometimes, they have cages with them, or the grains stink of poison.
She doesn't carry a cage and the scent of old blood is quite gentle on her. She has no scent of her own, not one he could detect. She stares back, unblinking, silent and big-eyed.
She could stir the bird away with a hiss, chase him through the apartment like a mangy cat, shatter the glass and throw the leftovers back into the rain. The urge is there, always is.
The bird chirps at her, a questioning pitch added – or perhaps it's just her imagination.
"Hello. Hello."
Red memorizes the tune. She halts. Then, her mouth opens with her head facing forward, and a chirrup of her own sounds through it.
"Hello. Hello," she echoes back in the same key.
The bird recoils as if he'd been stung, trilling his indignation at being played. A chuckle splits her features, hastily intent on embroidering her coal-black teeth with skin. It's been a long time since she's imitated other voices. Rather than luring prey in by deception, Cletus prefers to jump at them from ambush. He cherishes the unpredictability of a stab in the back, the short-lived shock in the victim's chalk-white face when they turn to him. Like in the movies. The scene blackens out, screams fade into oblivion. Cut.
Red's expression mellows. They might never shoot a film true to their life; x-rated, gore, trauma and all. But he will always be her star.
Seemingly swallowing his shock at the sight, the bird tilts his head and cheeps anew. She follows suit and deepens the melody by a half tone. He repeats her, adding another chord. It's a conversation. They could talk all night without understanding each other, enthusiasm replacing sense.
(Cletus and she don't need neither words nor sense to understand what tickles their fancy. They just do.)
Her chin droops, and the bird comes closer. Two of her tendrils, fine as nylon, pierce through the sofa leather and move behind him. As she tweets, a man-made sequence finds way, carrying a longing only those understand who got their first taste at freedom by watching its caricature on TV.
This song is always with her, bedded like a coffin. Verses that she knows like the rain, the blood and Cletus' smell when he pulls her closer at night only to deny it later. No metal, no rock, that's why it seemed so peculiar at first, in such need to be savored and kept before it would come apart at the seams of memory. She found the verses deliberately hidden in his subconscious, back when he wasn't a man yet, maybe not even a murderer. Stuck near the cerebral cortex, she asked him to sing them because music as such proved odd to her, and she was curious to know what it looked like when his own vocal chords generated such noise. He laughed at her and she didn't understand what urged him to. He didn't amplify on it, she thought to have made a mistake and remained silent in turn, counting his bones third time in a row.
When the guard began his last tour earlier than usual as not to be late for the shift change and the birthday party of his daughter, he lay on his hard bed with his cheap headphones plugged in, humming the melody. For her. In the darkness.
And there, dipped in his crimson vision and terrorized psyche and sad, cruel crux of a soul, she knew. She loved him.
She'd love him dead.
If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
The bird stills. Her tendrils crawl into his shadow, avoiding the small puddles his unsteady walk has left behind. Sliding back, she is pleased soon he takes up on it, hypnotically pulled wherever she treads. She's got him hooked; all left to do is pull him in and hang him by his ankles out to dry. He trusts her. Someone capable of such heart-wrenching chant can't possibly be evil. Right?
The tendrils rise, melt, and forge to an arrowhead that targets his cranium. If she cuts his spine rendering him immobile, she can play with him for a while. She's bored anyway and there's plenty of time till dawn.
She tempers the rhythm, bends it to a lament. The bird's movements grow slower in response. It's too easy, but what can you do? He's a plain creature, his eyes like paste, and she's far out of any league he could aspire to be part of.
For I must be traveling on, now
Cause there's too many places I've got to see
He opens his beak in reply. Whatever sound he might have produced stays stuck in his throat as she pierces his neck and the blast throws him to the ground. The upper beak cracks in two, branch-like, the impact leaving an ugly tear in the carpet and a notch in the wood beneath. She hums in mind, neither interrupting the song nor changing its rhythm. Funny sounds they make, especially in tandem. His limbs' crush like cornflakes between teeth straight from the package, the boombox blasting in the background. She demands more, never having learned to be satisfied with anything but destruction.
But, if I stayed here with you, girl
Things just couldn't be the same
His chirp wrenches a new, stuttering pitch while she grabs his head and swings him backwards. Pinned on his back with a thud, the weathered grain of the floorboards presses into his still wet plumage and rattles the skeleton within.
The spot on his breast, quivering now, is a bloodstain in the bluish semi-dark. Her face hovers enthroned above him, black teeth exposed and dripping with drool. The view makes him flutter and twitch in panic, but more tendrils force his wings down to secure his position. Blood from the fracture of his beak dabs rubies dripping down his tongue and neck. Some of them fall into his pinkish throat as he cheeps like a newborn in its stroller being cooked by the sun. Red wonders how it's like to him, tasting his own vulnerability while his blurry sight captures her as many men have known her to be: death incarnate.
A thread of red wipes over the wound, leading the liquid to her open mouth.
Don't get carried away. Break his legs. The baritone of his voice reverberates harshly in her head, contrasted and contained by the rain's gentle tambourine. She pauses. Right. Who knows how long it takes for the feathered rat to die from its own fear. She gets the blood off with a flick and forms a hammer in its place, her tune unabated.
The song's about a bird too, she recalls faintly. Out to leave the life he had built for himself because he was made to fly away.
What's her nature, after all these years? "Deranged," says her father. "Unstable," say the doctors. "Bloodthirsty. Keep under lock and key. A killer machine," says the universe. Corrupted by a rotten mind. Beyond saving.
They never have the guts to tell her side of the story.
Bye, bye, baby, it's been a sweet love
Though this feeling I can't change
But please don't take it so badly
Cause Lord knows I'm to blame
There's nothing more satisfying than the crunch of claws as his right foot breaks under her blow, the left one following shortly. His high-pitched cry of agony follows in thrusts; a deceptively human-like sound, better than any aria he might have sputtered in the early hours of dawn. It has her smile. While they scream, his laughter doesn't ring as far in her mind. It rushes back like a kicked dog, a rerun of good old times. God, she wants more.
"Now, the wings," she whispers rashly, and it feels like a kiss to her neck. Her voice echoes deep and rich, an amalgam unlike her usual resonance, burdened with a soul. Gaze growing heavy, she adds: "No slacking off. They can smell your hesistance." And yes, yes. Indeed they do.
The hammer melts into a scalpel and rips the right wing clean off. The wound offers blood too though not much, underpinned by his clamor. She'd have preferred larger prey to stay in shape, but for today this must suffice.
She peers at the wing as it lies there, shabby as a piece of plastic on the carpet, a moist, foreign body that has split off from the whole and no longer performs function nor use. 20 points in the game, otherwise it's worth nothing. Obviously, she's doing him a favor here.
Its counterpart rests tamely in her grip – whether thanks to the final admission of his fate, or if pain and shock are so exuberant at last he forgets to revolt isn't certain yet. She studies his demolished visage in search of an answer – the round head, the rigid pellets presenting his eyes. No life glints inside; no spark, no sign, no emotion but blank, dull canvas. With a slap of her tendril, she turns them to look at her directly. No reflection, not the meagerest shine meets her. She could as well have tried watching her grin wilt on the cracked bottom of a well.
For reasons unspoken yet not unknown, it has her anger rise like the plague, hot and boiling, unsaturated in essence. She wanted to wait, draw it out, but what good does waiting? Hesistance is for those who can afford to waste time, and though symbiotes regard its measure as nothing but a corset for neurotics, strung tight enough to bruise the already-withering skin, someone is waiting up on her. Someone who counts every second that she's gone amiss like it's a lifetime. She can't have him wait. She'd never forgive herself although he probably would.
The pellets burst like amniotic sacs as her needle-shaped tendrils prick into them, accompanied by a wet,unappetizing plop. The bird, regaining a shred of life, rears up and shakes apathetically. In the dark anthracite of the room all he is recalls a sooty, elongated mask on pale sheets. She stabs into it several times, eleven fine pinpricks that puncture liver, pancreas, lungs. She stops counting then, the need lost to her. The sound of impaled flesh, closely squired by the smells of leaking stomach acid and budding rot fill her every sense to the brim.
Time does not exist till she eventually becomes aware of the room's silence engulfing her boundlessly and thick. Her movements halt, head tilting, ropes of saliva running down her chin. The bird's screams have lifted the burden of inanimate space for a while. All the heavier it weighs on her now that he's lying there, spread and mute. She runs a tendril over his still breast, smears his feathers with small dots of blood oozing from the holes she drilled into him. He's dead. Of course, he's dead. She's pricked too deeply, too often. Just some stupid, ugly poultry to pass the time with after all.
"Good girl?" she asks no one, the words fading into the quiet like a radio frequence with no listeners left. Phantom-like, Cletus' snore brims through their connection, but offers no comfort. Had she been human, she might have held her breath, undecided whether in anticipation or pain.
She waits for it; the feeling. The ecstasy to sneak up on her every time she has another bastard sighing out their soul. The rapture eating her up where her chest might have been.
Sometimes, she imagines to have one; legs, arms, a slender waist completing the picture. Hair too, similiar to Cletus' curls, perhaps not in color, but in touch.
She loves his hair. How it flattens and springs back up when she cards through it, the smell and softness of his scalp to linger on while she loosens knots and combs rebellious strands out of his forehead. Would he like to do the same to her? He hasn't voiced such desire yet. Or did she just not listen intently enough?
She looks down at herself and inspects her formless figure with a distant sense of apathy. A smorgasbord of fury, ever-shifting, never-ending. Not at all human to be exact. Is it enough? Was it ever?
Cletus still eyes her with wonder at times when he thinks she's too occupied with other business to realize it. He's the only one to have ever regarded her with more than shock, resentment and greed for the things she'd enable others to do if they put their hands on her – granted that she wouldn't bite off their fingers first which proved far too likely.
She runs a tendril across her front. Smooth, warm surface. No pulse beneath. The same silence that defines the room rests in her too. The feeling does not come, leaving her in the lurch. She's empty.
She resorts to humming again, strangely misplaced now that the bird's gone quiet. Her rhythm is unsteady, the melody fluctuating. There is nothing for her to set the tone.
She eyes the corpse, reminded that he has something she doesn't have to balance his melodies. An organ her species never owns unless it finds a host willing to hand it over in free will, to be commanded and subdued and outlive their loved ones if given the chance. If he does not, well... there are masters, and there are dogs that submit to them. And if the dogs turn out rabid, they're put down for the greater good.
Cause I'm as free as a bird now
And this bird you'll never change
Her gaze falls on his unmoved chest painted by blood and wetness. His feathers, proudly cared for, stick to it like cheap frippery. He is not worth the effort to be held together any longer. So she does the only thing remaining of action.
Forming one tendril into a knife's edge, she cuts his chest open lengthwise, sinking in like water. The ribs fold apart like parts of a game set, as if they themselves were tired of staying in place. Her tendrils reach further into lukewarm depths merely to rummage and pause in confusion. No resistance is met. Everything laid before her proves as darkness clad in a fleshen void.
A roll of thunder has her attention switch to the wall immediately, teeth bared. The rain stopped. Instead, washed-out silhouettes rise up behind the glass covered with streaks of dirt like the outlines of uninvited guests. Her eyes narrow to slits. Are they? ...No. Nothing of the sort. She's wrong. It must be. She'd feel it if he lurked nearby. All is well. Well as can be.
Both hate and relief share the moment before her gaze returns and Cletus' face, poured to wax by rigor mortis, stares back at her from underneath. In the hollowed pits that once possessed his eyes an abyss yawns, not unlike Ryker Island's waves she once surveyed in horror. Fine circles of blood line the rims, their tiny breakages followed by trails of carmine running down his temples and sucking into his hair. His lips are torn to shreds, offering a clear view on splintered rows of teeth and a tongue soaked in a black puddle of blood. The sweet smell of decay, ardent companion since childhood, strikes her tender as a fist. The lithic cold of his skin presses against her like a lover would, their entanglement frantic and chafed under drenched sheets. She reacts numbly to it. Never has she been this repulsed by the reminders of death.
With a clipped scream, she starts back and with her the mass that covered what's left of the upper body. The chest is broken up and the breastplates opened to both sides like the pages of a tattered book. The right arm offers no more than a hole of which a broken part of the humerus protrudes. His prostheses are absent; he is only half a man.
"Cletus?" Her voice is a shrill whisper, some subconscious part still urging her to be quiet. How did this happen? Where's the bird? Shaking, she touches his face, aghast by the familiar stiffness greeting her. He's cold as the grave. „Baby…!?"
No answer. She moves to mend him from the inside as she has for so many years, breathing life back into his veins and pain in his eyes, but this time she can't get through his mutilated flesh – no matter how much she pushes and tears, it won't give way. His skin bears no difference to titanium and the hole ripped doesn't let her enter as if protected by a barrier unknown to her kind. A panic-stricken howl accompanies her inability, her mass taking form of the various weapons she memorized. Violence has always been the answer to end mishaps on their way. If they can't be solved by force, what can? The scythe misses his ear by half an inch, but the axe cuts through and gets stuck in his shoulder, having her cry out louder. Blood spreads and bathes the carpet, but it's a viscous broth barely gaining radius. What bad joke is this, to be able to hurt the one you value so severely yet have him stay out of reach to heal the wounds you caused? It's a pain she cannot comprehend, an injustice she's unable to wrap her mind around. Sickened by her act, the blade melts and draws back to hang off her like an unknotted noose. Cletus' blind gaze is glued on her still, unwavering. Pathetic. Alone.
Alone.
The room's shaking – whether it's her imagination or a sudden earthquake come to pass, it's all the same to her. She closes her eyes to be free of a dead man's judgement, accepting the motion, curling into herself. Her. Dead man.
Time passes. Minutes, hours, eternity. Ephemerality is a human concept. She could stay this way until this flat crumbles to nothing while remaining in perfect condition herself, ready to be pulled from piles of debris. But what for? Without Cletus, there is no reason left to live.
When she opens her eyes again, the hollowed-out bird lies in front of her as if nothing out of the ordinary had occured. She blinks lazily, unsure if she's to believe the view now or if her mind's playing tricks on her to cope with the loss. Only when Cletus' snore brims back through their connection, she exhales a breath she didn't have to take in the first place, and breaks her stupor to raise her head and look at the bird properly. It's cold and stale, blood dried, colors drained. The spot on his breast though shines as brightly as it has before. The same color as Cletus' hair. She'd recognize his shade everywhere.
Anguish falls over her like a disease. Shrinking in disgust, the cold of night catches her as much as it had when she was but one minute old. Maybe that's why... He'll start to rot soon enough, inviting maggots in to eat away what he can't offer. There's nothing he has to give but nightmares.
The mood for games abandoned her. She wants back to bed to curl around him, welcomed by his familiar, broken body, and forget that she ever let go. That she was once eaten by her own father. That Cletus had to die and she wasn't able to prevent it. That they were separated and could be separated again if they're not careful enough. Worries as these she's never felt before, barely considered even. These weeks, however, no day goes by without her thoughts wandering into this bottomless pit. It makes her more aggressive, impulsive, easier to irritate and tantalize. Cletus hasn't really noticed it yet, and if he did, he's still dismissing it as the aftermath of Michael Hall keeping them apart. Six months of agony she's spent inside an orb of fluid, fed on the regular yet never sated – ever longing for his need.
But he will. When he looks at her, when he hears her ear-piercing snarl she can't pretend to him any more than he can to her. They are the sides of the same mirror, a coin dipped in blood.
And they're no longer the alpha in the hierarchy they used to rule and wipe out as they went by.
With disdain, she turns away from the puffish, beaten token she has made. They're like this bird now. About to be crushed by a creature superior to them, with no one to see and no one to care if they turn to mud. Not that they'd need someone else. They have each other. Forever.
…But how long is forever going to be?
Worn and sour, she holds out for the door. About to turn the knob, something long and cold wraps around her throat and pulls. A gargling sound escapes her before the unknown force drags her mass up and throws her against the glass wall. Tough as resin she slips down and hits the floor with a dull thump. It takes seconds for her to get up bristling with freshly won bloodlust. Where is it? The target? Her gaze wanders, snarling. So she was right after all, there is an enemy in need to be taken care of. But it isn't one of devouring kind.
The bird's corpse has risen and hovers in the air like a puppet whose invisible strings have been strung tight. As she watches, the broken beak's serrated fragments evert and bear teeth in their gloom, edged, long and rich in number. The tendril that grabbed her, black as tar, crawls to its pulsating source, slithers back in and breaks the body up all the more. Further tendrils emerge from the opening made, tumbling blindly over the ground like weed in search for nurture. She growls. No wonder she didn't find any organs to reap. The body is nothing but a shell to mask the real thing. It's not her style to be tricked that easily.
What do you want? she asks. The corpse stays eerily quiet. Pupilless, red-glowing eyes ogle her like some particularly distasteful breed. Both melodies and words have become fruitless now that the bitch is outta the bag as Cletus would say. It's yet difficult to pinpoint the exact level of danger this creature poses. Well. She's going to find out one way or another, won't she? Better to get it over with now rather than later. Two of her thickest tendrils curl and twist, equivalent to cracking the knuckles she doesn't have.
If you think you've sniffed out easy prey here, you'd better have your ass prepared for a tearing because I'm neither.
The corpse is either immune to her threat or dumbfounded by the implication. All he does is hover and stare ahead, thick, greenish saliva running down the corners of his mouth. She huffs in annoyment. Liked him better when he was that fat, little thing.
It is then that Cletus turns in his bed and the obsolete excuse of a mattress retches a creak absolute as lightning cleaving through a tree. The creature's head snaps to it almost thankfully, whole composure frizzling with new-found energy, and Red's confidence falls to a shrivel. Too late, she launches her body forward.
No. Her shriek chinks against the window. Not there! Focus on me, bastard!
The bird that is no bird cares little about her protest. He dodges each barb thrown and aims at the closed door that leads to the corridor. His chirps have given way to a guttural roar, so piercing in pitch that Red wonders if he's trying to break the house into the bricks it was built from. She cannot attribute the noise to any animal that ever lived on earth and no longer believes this being to have originated on earth anyway. She has a far different place in mind. It merely quickens her pace.
He races towards the glass and rushes through in one swift motion, splinters peppering the air yet none seeming acute enough to cut him. She curses, storming after him. Her fault. It was a stupid idea to open the hatch and even more stupid to drop her cover. But there is time for self-mortification later.
She jumps through the jagged hole not giving a damn about the scarlet shreds that get stuck to it. Pain is secondary. Claw-formed tendrils drill into the corridor wall's concrete and shove ahead, eyes unyieldingly kept on the beast which lost all sense of physicality by now, making its way as a toothed, oily lump of mass heading for the soft snores freely falling through the ajar door. She forgot to close it. Damn it all.
You won't get him.
It's the only thought allowed to occupy her mind beyond the bloodlust that overtakes her remaining senses. Bloodlust is good. Absolute massacre is better.
She sees one of his tendrils pass the threshold and jumps. With a dive, she falls on him and bites her way into his neck, dragging him back in the process. They both hit the ground. The rubbery, dull taste of alien mass fills her throat.
You won't get him. You won't get him. YOU WON'T GET HIM.
The beast snarls and squirms under her weight. She pins him down, tears a chunk of greasy flesh out of its spine, spits out just to open her mouth further and bite anew. Like its former shell, it seems to feel pain for it screams when her teeth hit the fermenting wound of what his shoulder would have been. She enjoys his agony, because he who succumbs to pain can be tormented to death. And she is far from being finished with him.
I'm gonna kill you. We'll kill all of you, we'll kill the world and then we'll laugh and look for a new world and kill that one too. Because we can. Because we are FREE. You don't even know what that is!
She laughs quietly to herself, blissfully ignoring how it sounds like a whimper to outsiders. In her back, Cletus' murmur continues to rule, stressed and full of hatred for something he has to fight alone. He's not alone for long though. She'll come right back, always does. Black blood runs down her cheeks, trickles down her chin and colors the ground. It could have been tears, but symbiots don't cry. Still laughing, she heads down for another bite.
And when we die, we'll take each vulture with us. All of you! Everyone who ever hurt us. Everyone who wants to try.
She loves him.
And this bird you can not change
And this bird you can not change
Lord knows, I can't change.
"Holy shit."
The first thing she registers is that each fiber of her body vibrates like a powerhouse despite being filled with a calm so final it mocks every cemetery in reach. The second is that she is no longer in the hallway and the ground beneath her, rough and bent, smells not of blood, but of mothballs. The smell's familiar, a fragment of childhood, – the prison provided no better conditions by far.
The third is that Cletus looks grotesquely funny with feathers in his hair. Of course, she doesn't say that out loud. And, of course, he still hears it tremble in the reverberation of her thoughts which weighs his forehead with an additional crease.
The bedroom proves a hopeless mess. The cushion is burst open and markings induce the clear imprint of canines drilled into its case over and over. The mattress, too, is covered in bite marks. Her tongue runs over the grooves of her teeth and yes; now she tastes the dust. She understands nothing anymore.
The doors of the wardrobe are torn down and the clothes of the person who's breathed out his life years ago, eaten by time and oblivion, are scattered on the floor as perforated rags, torn into even smaller rags than before.
Instinctively, her gaze wanders and searches for the carcass of the enemy. Cletus' eyes are fixed on her like glowing coals.
"Red." His voice rasps harsh, distrustful and still drunk with sleep. Its vibration, however, rings soft as a caress through all she is. "What the fuck happened?"
There is no body. No enemy. No bird turned monster. She blinks. Realization kicks in like a mule.
"I dreamed," she says, the words like marbles in her mouth. It sounds true; a fitting, logical explanation for such horror to happen. The mental image of the abandoned living room stands before her eyes. "I'll be right back."
"Wait –" Cletus reaches out and grabs her, but she glides from his touch like the scales of a freshly skinned snake.
She's searching, and she doesn't really know for what. A proof, perhaps. One half of a wing, a single, blood-soaked claw telling her that she didn't imagine everything, that the threat still lurks in the shadows to try kill her a second time.
She finds nothing of the sort. The room remains grey and desolate and the rain has never stopped falling. With her eyes widening in disbelief, she watches as its drops mist up the glass, building a net of crystalline veins in the aftermath. No bird in sight, no thunder to alarm her. All of a sudden, she feels terribly hollow.
A twitch flickers through their connection and sets her every particle back on fire. Familiar fingers close around her strand and feel the temperature. She expects the jerk before it happens, and allows herself to be pulled back. When she turns around, Cletus leans in the door frame, one hand wrapped around her strand while rubbing the sleep out of his eyes with the other.
"T'hell did you dream!?" he asks with a half-formed scowl. He's naked except for a pair of boxer shorts he pulled over the prostheses just for the heck of it. His hair stands off his head like wires while his gaze reflects sinister and cruel as he finds her rushing towards him. And he's all hers to deal with. Well then.
"Don't be a baby," she scolds without real fire. Crawling back onto metal and skin, she pushes his hands out of the way to replace them with her touch framing his face. Gathering the last dried crumbs of tear fluid from his eyelids, she picks the feathers from his hair in unspoken apology. There is habit woven within her actions, too. That he allows her any of it says everything they will never speak loud enough for others to hear.
When she's about to melt back into his chest uttering obedience, the hand that still holds her strand reaches into her mass and grabs what it can get, forcing her back in place. Surprised, she stops and looks up to find his eyes trained on her. "I asked you a question," he says, more awake this time. He nods to the battered bedroom, frowning. "What the hell caused this?"
He's angry, or at least she thinks so. It would be natural. She gulps.
"Nothing special. I heard a noise, so I went after it."
The anger does not wear off yet adds a layer of suspicion with his expression changing from frown to a twirl of interest that brightens his eyes.
„U-hu. And what did you find?"
Lying would be pointless or, at least, not recommended. Tendrils shimmering like velvet of lush, red shade, run down his chest, shoulder, forearm. When they expose his skin anew, one of the cushion's feathers, white and small as a thumbnail, sits on his palm. He knits his brow.
"...A bird?" he asks disparagingly. "That's what you're making such a big fuss about?"
"He made noise outside, so I let him in. I wanted to play darts." She presses her head into the crook of his neck, eyes big with nervous expectation. Her voice, in contrast, is a small reverberation of the usual timbre. "Like in the good old days. Remember?"
She nearly fears he won't. That her diamond of memory doesn't mean a single scrap to his fast-lived brain. For him, most memories of the past are only worth one act – a flush down the toilet. When he hums in acknowledgement eventually, warmth catches her by surprise like a splash of boiling water on her face.
"Yeah. But without me? That's cold, Red."
"You needed the rest," she informs eagerly, rubbing her mellowed cheek along the harsh outline of his collarbone. He closes his fist in response and sets himself in motion, walking into the kitchen, her constant weight leisurely cradled against him, happy with just being pressed against the cavern of his skin. The metal work of his prosthesis gives a slight ting as it taps from lint-sown carpet to the sickly shade of ocher-white tiles.
"Well, how many points did you score?" he asks, prodding at the kitchen shelves with a thumb. They swing open with a pitiful squeak, barely holding themselves up on rusted hinges. A wide smile spreads on her ever-shifting features. She's always liked to tell him of her achievements.
"280! First, I cut the wings off so he couldn't evade me anymore. Then I pricked out both his eyes so that he could no longer see what was happening. Lung and head I kept for last –"
"What about the heart?" He brings the feather before her eyes, as if she couldn't see it better than him, before he puts it on the splotch-faded counter and reaches for the coffeepot kneeling in the back. One corner of his mouth hangs lopsided while its twin stays in a hamstrung line. "Isn't that your specialty? Brings a straight 100."
She hesitates before shaking her head, admitting to this small… hindrance.
"There was none," she says, and mentally pictures the depth of void found under the fabricated breast, sending it to him. He stills at first, then creases his brow, trying to make sense of the empty cave.
"None what?" he asks, irritated. „It's all black."
„It had no heart." Her trendrils weave across his chest, keeping her sight fixed on the patterns made, following the crook of his arm and the hand choosing the mug least chipped. He doesn't bother to wash it out, puts it aside and holds the pot under the tap. The gargle of conductions unused for years coughs up a torrent of frigid sludge. Whatever calcareous bacteria might gather inside, they'll have no effect on his body. For the taste, however, she might need to putter around his gustatory nerves a bit in order to not have him throw up right away. His body is better behaved when hydrated. Furthermore, she belatedly notes to find them a place with a steam shower, for various reasons. „It wanted to devour mine, I felt it."
„Symbiotes have no heart either," Cletus muses and rummages through the drawers till he finds an half-empty package of ground coffee, crumpled in a corner. „That's what you told me, and I never felt a second pulse."
„I need no pulse to have one regardless."
He laughs, fills the machine, turns it on.
„Babe, since when?"
Tender goosebumps have begun to spread over his forearms like spider silk without him noticing, and it's fine that way. The rubbery texture of her flesh expands from Cletus' waist down to the iron balls of his feet, wrapping him up like a tourniquet: tight, warm and unwavering. If it hurts him, he doesn't complain, but this doesn't mean anything. She could have strangled him till his arteries popped open like a piñata and he wouldn't have cared either way, given her this secret signal of a shrug and a grin that leaves his eyeballs blank with out-of-place euphoria that distorts his mouth into a crooked avalanche.
Because he trusts her. He always does. His brows raise with the realization. It isn't new.
"Oh. That one." Eyes waver, focusing on the pot where the water slowly starts to heat up bubbling. She watches his hand itch towards his chest, but never reaching the location for his fingers halt and ball to another fist. His knuckles sink to balance on the counter. „Care to explain what the fuss was about in the first place then? You just played." It isn't a question, really. She twitches, then forces herself to regain composure. There's this ounce of spite that never seems to vanish in him, incised in his bones, tattoo of doubt. She, likewise attached, doesn't remove herself from his chest one bit.
„It was no bird. It looked like one at the start, but… it was different. It had teeth." She pauses, contemplating further words and truths necessary to spill or not. Then, more quietly. „It looked like a warning."
The knuckles protrude empty of blood. He hates the mere implication that anything could be powerful enough to make a leap at their throat. „Warning for what?"
She doesn't answer. He looks at her, burning, waiting. When she makes no effort to continue, he shrugs. "If you don't wanna tell me, that's fine." He turns back to opening the kitchen cupboards, or attempting to since they seem stuck and refuse to show their unused insides. His impending slur turns into a yawn, then neatlessly finishes the expression with an added exclamation mark in mind. He knocks the wood as he would a neighbour's door. Knock Knock.
"Now where's the damn sugar, Ashley?"
"One day, we will die," she says flatly, the broken body of the bird – the creature – a clear vision in front of her inner eye.
Cletus's knock hardly stops yet changes in rhythm. "Not the answer I asked for, Red."
"It's not a question of when or if. Someday, we'll meet someone I can't handle. They will slaughter you like this beast wanted to slaughter you and forge a weapon out of me. And that will be that."
This makes him halt at last, palm flat against the cupboard. He tilts his head, the words working their dwindling path along his cerebrum. Lips press to a firm line without looking at her, meaning unkown and plentiful.
"So that's what's gotten into ya? I thought it was serious." There is no joke in his voice, though.
"It is serious," Red stresses. He pausest at that.
"Well, it would be. If it could happen, which it won't,' he says then, far too lightly to be true; terribly relaxed, like nothing could hit him. But she remembers the unforgiveness of death's grip, and him writhing in it blindly like a larva. Humans are granted the mercy of suppression. Symbiotes, however, are not. She shakes her head.
"It has already happened."
"Then it won't happen a second time."
"How can you know that?"
"Because I fucking say so. Also I didn't have my morning eggs yet and this shit-arsed cupboard just won't – "
An axe blade formed of alien flesh lodges into the shelf's body before commands fall off his tongue, the sharp edge passing mere inches by his left ear. He goes silent to admire his favorite color and the black veins pulsing beneath as it rips the wood off and leaves a whole big enough to stick his head in if so desired. He's never stopped to admire her as anything else than she is. He'll never know how thankful she is for that.
„There we go," he grunts, running a finger pad over the blade's sharp edge without cutting himself (she would never) in acknowledgment.
„Y'know, I knew something was wrong." He takes out the sugar, inspecting a milk carton far past its expiration date with too much hesitance before he throws it aside. „You've been distant since they experimented with you. Think I wouldn't notice you keeping secrets from me? Nuthin' I hate more than a little liar livin' in my body."
"No secrets, Cletus. No lies. Concerns."
„Fuck your concerns. There's no reason for that."
"This nightmare was –"
„– A nightmare, not reality."
"I killed you." She is surprised herself at how quickly these words tumble from her mouth and how dull their aftertaste is, but once they're out the weight crashes on her tenfold. "First, it was the bird, then it was you. And then it was this beast, and it looked like my father, and then –" Quiet. Her voice fails its task.
He looks at her, carrying an indefinable expression that aligns well with the wavering shadows crossing the freckled skin on his shoulders.
"I keep telling you; you worry too much."
The bubbling coffee is a bland background noise merely enhancing the tension between them. He takes the pot and pours himself a cup, stirs the contents added by a hill of sugar thrown into black. The spoon's ting gainst the inside of the cup forms a lonely echo between them. Eventually, she reaches for his hand and brings it to a halt, the noise dying within her action. He glances at her, unrelated, as she wrings the spoon out of his fingers and puts it in the sink. (This is all the warning he gets.)
"Listen,' he says, „when I die – should I die – you go and look for a new host to continue doing more massacres with. Since I'd be, well, very stiff at that point, I wouldn't care much."
Red snorts in disgust.
"Do you really think it's that simple? After everything?" The possibility of choice insults her, ruptures the very fabric of what she's made of. Blood, abandonment, rage, psychosis and fucked-up loyalty.
"Simpler than walking in an empty flesh suit? Absolutely. The silence will annoy you, then it will fuck with your brain. And then, it will eat you whole and shit you out at the side of the road." He pauses. „I've known you for a while, darling."
The pet name breaks the last barrier. With a hiss, she tears the coffee pot out of its holder, throwing it to the ground with frantic relish.
"I don't want to be free of you!"
The pot shatters into clunky pieces, hot, dark liquid pouring over the marble slabs encrusted with dirt. Unfazed, Cletus watches her small temper tantrum, pointedly leading the steaming cup to his mouth, uncaring whether the liquid burns his tongue or not. She'd like to believe her voice sounds mature and firm and, most of all, fear-inducing, even if truth has contradicted it all already. To make up for it, she turns Cletus' face up to have him look at her properly, not missing the slightest calculation of movement when he already cranes his neck before she makes him. It has her shudder all the more after she's gathered enough courage to speak up again. "Even if you can't walk anymore. Or talk. Or if I can't bring you back to life..." She jolts at the thought. „Even then, I won't go. I don't want another host, so don't fucking tell me to find one!"
"That, my dear, is a fucking stupid decision."
"I never said I was fucking clever to begin with. I chose your dumb ass to be my first. And now, you don't even have that ass, because –" His artificial thighs shimmer cold and sleek in the half-darkness. Even with her own mass covered, the outlandishness of the material marks a personal offense. „What if you'll lose more than your legs next time? What if I'm not strong enough? You could as well choose another, more powerful symbiote and leave me."
„Hey." In an instant, Cletus' tone shifts to something bordering on reluctance. On worry. „I never said that, come on."
„You might as well." She hangs her head in bitterness, recalling past pains and past failure. Past everything. "Since Toxin and Scorn were born… I might be losing my grip. You know this better than me."
He puts the cup down. Next is a broad hand under her trembling chin. She tries to stay mad, maybe even considers to leave for a frantic moment, but sags against his palm in abashed defeat all the same. It's too warm and familiar not to fall for, and the sight of his lifeless residues in her dream still seems too close for comfort. „I'm sorry. You know I talk a lot of shit these days. No one's gonna leave anyone, okay?"
„Don't say these things to me. Not after what happened in space. Not after we almost..." It takes a lot for her to realize that it's not only her chin that has started trembling. All of her has succumbed to a different kind of cold.
"Hey," he says again, his tone blemishedby a pinch of helplessness. He offers his arm in silent apology, either for her curling in or biting it off. That's rare. Her privilege. Hopeful and sad and suddenly exhausted beyond measure, she lets him pull her close again. Always. Again.
„No more nightmares." His voice is low with emotion, like she's not the only one he's talking to. „There's no need. I mean, I don't mind you ripping the bedroom to shreds… but I'd like to be awake and take part next time that happens. In the old-fashioned way. These prosthetics have to come off somewhen after all."
She answers him by lazily tracing the scar tissue that breaks through the thin bridge of his lips as if it was sacred, aware of how she could make it disappear with a flick of her tendril. She's gathered enough medical knowledge of former hosts' brains that mortal wounds quiver before her ability. Being capable to repair most damage others inflict upon them on this planet calms her.
"Without you, it's just half as fun," she says, a deep, wondrous sound in the empty kitchen. The tip of her chin rests onto Cletus' palm as her mass presses firmly against his skin. No more but three layers of muscle, tissue and bone marrow separate her from the constant hammer of his heart. The world thinks he doesn't have one. Therapists say he's puked it out when he was a kid and scattered its shrivelled pieces among the remnants of the orphanage he burned down.
She spits at them all. She bites, and scratches, and tears as much as she has to and more. She rearranges their worst traumata should they even dare contemplate grazing his flesh while he fillets theirs.
His heart sits well under her clawed touch. There it is. This she guards. Mine.
They remain like this for an amount of time no one cares to count. „I know you hate lying low," he says eventually, and it feels like a dream. A good one, this time. She could stay like this forever. But they don't have that much luck.
„I don't mind." He pinches her, not too roughly.
„Like hell you do."
Okay then. She won't argue with that. And hell is the last place she wants to be right now.
„We're not easy to put down. That's why they fear us. But they don't fear us enough yet," she whispers, more of an afterthought than actual conversation. „It's like they never learn. Never want to." Cletus hears her, vibration in body and mind, and lifts her face up.
„Shoulda give 'em a fresh reason to then. Valentine's day's right around the corner. My baby deserves her chocolates." He grins at her, her marveling silhouette reflected in bloodthirsty, larkish green. It's a real grin with real eyes to match; unadultered, none of the slimmed down versions. And just like this, she falls in love anew, though she hasn't found reason to fall out of it yet.
This time, it happens with the knowledge of what is at stake here. What she could lose. He's her host, and their parasite. He is her life, and their decay. He is her order; they are the chaos they can't handle.
And she is ready.
„I want more than chocolates, Cletus," she says, her calm voice betraying her intention. „Or bodies. Or a killing spree. I want much. More."
„Oh?" The corners of his mouth curl upwards, eager to be intrigued. Perhaps desperately so. „Making demands again? Sounds like you're getting back to your old self." He breaks the embrace to cross his arms and lean against the kitchen unit, studying her. "Speak up. You'll get everything you want."
"A town." Her uncharacteristically austere tone marks the sincerity of her request. "I want a town. For now." Cletus' brows perk up.
"Hmm. And what do we want with a town? You don't plan to settle down already, do you? I may look like a veteran from Good Morning Vietnam, but –"
"– It will be the first of many. Our anchor point. A footing to built our kingdom upon."
Cletus hums. „Wanna see me in a crown so badly?"
„Doesn't matter what you wear. You could as well walk around naked for my tasts, I'd just like to see you rule." She brims with excitement. Slowly but surely, the more she thinks about it, her idea gains dimension. Gains gloom. Gains power. „Always thought the White House needs a paintjob anyways. Guess my take on the color." It earns her a chuckle.
„A symbiote state, huh." He gives her a sneaky look. "Is that what your little monster told you to do?" Her eyes narrow. Teeth bared, she stretches her body so that she towers over him.
„I'm the monster here." Her tone leaves no doubt that she means business. „And I'd rather die than take advice from my prey. Not in the mood for smalltalk."
„That's my girl." He carries the coffee (already cold) out the kitchen and flops on the living room couch. Before he even utters the need, the remote is put in his hands and the TV comes to life with a snap and a fizzling grey mesh.
„Got something particular in mind? Yankee or Redneck?" he asks while flipping through the channels. Eventually, he gets stuck on a report "Or are we gonna jump the Queen of England next?"
„Your call." She scans the room by habit, her gaze caught on the window wall. The hatch she found closed in her nightmare aches open an inch as if to mock her for being awake now. She can't help but be bothered by it. „Pick what suits us best. You always do."
The lever lures her at last, even more rusty looking than she recalls. Slithering off Cletus' body without cutting the connection, she heads for the wall. Right when she's about to close the hatch for good, a shadow in the distance tearing itself out the shape of the tower building in front of their hovel, taking flight. It can't be bigger than a bird's supposed to, maybe it even is one of the doves she so despises. Hypnotized, she watches its leave till it melts with the grey of the horizon, and can't help but be relieved to see it vanish into the ether, away. It isn't... no. It can't be. It mustn't. It won't.
„Hey babe," Cletus calls behind her, drowning out the gibberish of some report which topic she wouldn't care about if she was tortured to do so. She peeks up at the laughter in his voice though, like a tiger would on a wounded antelope's cry. Loving. And utterly doomed. „What do you think of ‚Doverton'?"