fade into you

Fox thinks about Sure Thing. It should be someone else that gives him the escape he needs. It's not. He tried the others. None of it helped. Not Pay's sweet softness, the warmth of his body, the smell of freshly turned soil on his fingers when Fox nudges in close and kisses them. It's not Tiger or Stock, or laying under the stars with his side pressed against Scheme while he waxes poetic on God and space and decay.

He tries to bury his racing thoughts into Pay's neck, breathe in the familiar scent of his hair, but it doesn't hold. Slips right through his palms. It turns into Thing. Again and again. Thing smoking, Thing touching him, Thing killing. As Fox's captor fingers an almost-congealed wound his partner jabbed into the meat of Fox's shoulder hours ago— digging around for anything that will make him burst out into a sobbed confession— Fox packs his mind away.

He drifts off to Thing's rumbling, early morning talks. He doesn't think about his body, or what's happening to it.

Thing speaks low naturally, but it's different when the sun is dim and the air is crisp, with no one else around. More self aware. Maybe they aren't used to an audience of one… outside of Ground, who's almost an extension of them. Maybe it's something in the way Fox watches them while they talk, so careful not to look too long at their dark eyes. That part isn't any rule of theirs. Nothing set in stone. He just knows they don't like it, knows them, sees the way they can't hold onto a glance casually without wanting to turn it into something adversarial.

Sometimes he wonders if Thing knows how often he falls asleep worrying about them.

Back in the chair, in the basement, in the flesh-and-duct tape bruised body real world, one of the men is doing something to his arm. He's vaguely aware of it— alarms sound in his bones, regardless of how dull his sense of reality has turned.

Fox flinches from the fingers pressing on his scars. He's probably been twisting away like a trapped cat through the entire out of body ordeal, but it's the arm that does this every time: before he registers it, his mouth is open and all sorts of pleas are spilling out. It's not what they want, and it never will be; he won't speak a single word of value. He can't.

It doesn't matter, because he's miles away, looking through the half caved in corrugated tin roof of a structure Thing has put them both up in for the night. Sleeping bags rolled out. Lantern on a stack of bricks. Chilly.

They're eating warm SpaghettiOs out of cans.

"It tastes like can."

Thing exhales in a way that means they've laughed. Nothing. Then: "I used to kill two of these after school. I like it. It's nostalgic."

"I never really got that word."

"Nostalgic?"

"Yeah," Fox says. "'Nostalgia'. Like, it's a descriptor. Like hot or cold or sweet. But it's an emotion, really, right?"

They pause and scrape the inside of the can, chasing sauce. "I guess."

"It's a good thing?"

"Not necessarily," Thing said. "It's like 'longing'. 'Wanting'. S'not always good."

"Mm." Scrape, scrape.

"You just know it when you feel it."

Abruptly, he's ripped away. It feels like someone's gripping fingers into a head of matted hair buried deep inside his flesh— yanking apart an intricate, tangled nerve-ridden thing he's lived unaware of. Something grown-over. Pulling it out of his pores in clumped together strands.

It's his arm— some old cavity that's been torn open, a blade stuck between tech and skin and then inside and pried apart. He can't look, won't let himself, even out of morbid curiosity to see what's left of himself. He can't move half of his body. The slithery-agony sensation slashes through his pectoral, up and down his spine, creeps inside his ears and through his sinuses and presses behind his eyeballs, all at once, a sensation entirely immeasurable—

It's the pain Thing told him he'd probably forgotten, haunting him. One of the many memories stolen from him, they say. The pain, the recovery. The procedures to turn him into something right and useful, worthy of scientific boasts.

("—and you're saying that's bad, right? I'm supposed to be mad I can't remember that?" Fox had said it to them teasingly, a troubled smile on his face, trying to dodge the subject. It was an almost unbearable thought. Better to make fun of it than to let it take root and turn into sad rage.

Thing didn't call him out on it.)

***

Maybe they'll come for you.

It's a nasty, aching thought. Even worse: it's so desperately plausible.

They could come. They could. And they'd have all the brutality they'd need to save him.

He can't entertain the thought. He does anyway. He goes back to the early mornings, the cans, the hushed conversations, their hands on him. All of it a dozen times over.

If he's there, he's not here.

***

One of them, a squirrelly, thin man who's never touched him before, gives him shoddy first aide. It's nothing special, and it's not meant to be long term. Just long enough that he can survive more struggling.

The rodent-man, averting eye contact, packs something gauzy into the gaping wound that's been cracked into the right side of his torso. Then, a needle. He leaves.

Fox falls asleep— if it can be called sleep— in the cold, glaring, almost surgical light of the basement.

The dream that finds him is good. Thing brushes back his hair with one of their pale hands— their gloves are off, and he's struck by how cool-toned their skin is. Almost ghostly. He's feverish, and when he tilts his head back he feels a sticky tackiness on his neck and arm.

Blood's begun to dry there.

Sure Thing is quiet. They have a soft cloth, suddenly, and it's damp (suddenly), because that's how dreams conjure up what we need to see. Entirely lacking continuity. They run the cloth against his throat, his shoulder, his back, with such an unusual softness that he wakes up.

And he laughs, because they'd simply never.

So that settles it.

I am going to die here.

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