Reagan breathes in, out. Inhale, exhale.

Inhale.

Exhale.

“Calm,” her brain whispers to her. “Steady.”

Even so, her nails still bite into her palms. Even so, her knuckles are bone-white, her heart beats in anticipation.

A simple door lies ahead, close enough for Reagan to make out a silver doorknob, wood made of the darkest ebony. It rests in the middle of the street, as if a child had thrown it down, not caring where it landed — but Reagan knows that this door has been placed here with anything but carelessness.

The quiet of the air is tangible — it rests heavy and humid on Reagan’s shoulders, brushes whisper-light fingers over her cheeks and tells her to fear what’s coming next.

“What is coming next?” she wonders, the thought breaking through the fragile bubble of pretense calm she’s built up around herself in the past few minutes. “What could possibly be next?”

Another game? Another deadly decision? Another sick, twisted price to pay?

The iron tang of blood still fills Reagan’s senses. It still drips down the side of her face from a gash above her right eyebrow, still fills her mouth with a bitter bite from a busted lip.

It still stains her fingers.

The memory of it gushing hot and slick over her hands, up and over her wrists, as she had tried to stop the bleeding, as she had cried and screamed for help, comes rushing back.

The cracked concrete sidewalk is darkening with rain, with blood. Reagan kneels as the rain pours down all around her, her palms pressed to Night’s chest, to his skin and bones, trying to hold him together.

“Stop,” her mind tells her. “Not now.”

Slowly, one by one, Reagan uncurls her fingers. The bite of her nails disappears and blood trickles warm and sticky down her palms from the crescent moon cuts.

She keeps her eyes on the door. The buildings of this ruined city rise up around her like a forest of concrete and glass, faded copper and ragged metal.

A raven lands on a lamppost a few feet away. Its guttural caw cracks through the air like a gunshot. Broken glass glitters from the ground beneath it, reflects a dark sky and heavy clouds and for a moment Reagan imagines falling through the shattered reflection, being spat out into an upside-down world where everything wrong has been turned right.

But the reality is here. Reality is now. The raven screeches once more — a signal, an announcement.

The GameMakers are watching.

The door opens.

Reagan tightens her grip on the bat in her right hand, feels the familiar weight of the wood and the smoothness of the handle under her fingers. She ignores how it’s stained crimson — brown in places but bright in others. She ignores the bruises painted up her arms, along her neck. She forgets about Jasper. She forgets about Cora and Nia and Kingston.

Most of all she forgets about Night.

“Breathe. Inhale. Exhale.”

Above Reagan’s head, the clouds begin to swirl, thicken. The street she’s on is thrown into shadow. A sharp, cold wind bites at her skin, raises the hairs on the back of her neck.

A figure emerges through the doorframe.

Reagan stands still — her pulse thrums with a frightening ferocity at her wrists.

“Inhale. Exhale.”

The door closes. The person is too far away for Reagan to see their face and for a moment neither of them moves.

The wind picks up, howls down the streets of the ruined city like the cries of the dead.

“Inhale. Exhale.”

A drop of rain hits the ground at Reagan’s feet — a brief distraction, a tiny sliver of memory.

“No,” Reagan thinks but her mind is already working, conjuring up a ghost.

Night’s golden eyes meet hers as she kneels on a cracked sidewalk. He smiles. He begins to speak.

Reagan shoves the memory out of her mind with brutal force, gritting her teeth. “No,” she thinks again.

The figure at the other end of the street begins to move, walking careful step by careful step forward.

“Steady,” Reagan’s mind tells her. “Wait.”

But her memories flash by like a train hurtling down the tracks. Cora and her innocent eyes. Nia and the way her fingers had danced over piano keys like water. Kingston and his unmistakeable smile.

Night and his eyes that had burned like shined copper.

Jasper and the tightness of his fingers around her throat.

The person draws closer, closer, closer.

Reagan buries it all. She shuts it away somewhere dark and cold, swallows down the pain and the grief — but the fury is harder to quell. It burns her skin, makes it hard to breathe. Reagan’s fingers tighten around the bat until her knuckles turn white.

“Inhale. Exhale. Control it.”

Somewhere, underneath the rage, something else shifts and turns. Something Reagan has been denying, has been holding onto with a desperate grip ever since she had been thrown into this nightmare. No - something that’s been growing even before then, something that had grown up from between the bloody cracks in the concrete that night. From up between the cracks drenched in Night’s blood.

Something dark and electric and powerful.

Whatever happens, she can’t let it go. No matter what game she has to play next.

“Anger,” a voice from a distant past laughs, as if reading her thoughts. “Anger will get you nowhere.”

Reagan’s breath catches in her throat at the voice, something hot and heavy wells up behind her eyes — but like all of the others, she lets the memory flutter past, lets it fade away with the scream of the wind.

And the person finally emerges from the shadows.

Reagan’s heart stops. Her brain goes blank. Everything, everywhere, turns upside down.

A copycat image of herself stands bold and strong before her — her dark hair blows in the wind, her eyes flash in the gloom, and slowly, as Reagan watches breathlessly, her lips curve, twist into something cold, predatory.

“Hello, Reagan,” the clone speaks. Her voice is quiet, soft, but Reagan hears it as if it has been whispered into her ear.

Reagan doesn’t respond. She can’t. The air has been sucked from her lungs and it’s horrible because after everything — after everything — the GameMakers have thrown at her, this should be no surprise.

But it is. Seeing herself like this — unblemished, strong, blood-free — is terrifying. Seeing herself like this — dark, confident, dangerous — turns Reagan’s blood to ice.

“Are you enjoying the games?” her clone asks at her silence. She doesn’t move closer, just stands there amongst the wreckage and ruin, under a sky that’s as dark as the feelings that sometimes threaten to overwhelm Reagan — the ones she’s been trying to push down for so long.

The words make Reagan grit her teeth, but still she doesn’t speak. “Calm, steady. Anger will get you nowhere.”

Her clone hums into the electric-filled air, tucks a strand of hair back behind an ear, clasps her hands back behind her back and rocks innocently on her heels.

“I can talk if you won’t,” she says. Reagan grips the bat tighter, keeps her peripheral vision on the darkness between the skyscrapers and demolished streets on either side of her. Every muscle in her body is tensed, ready.

But the clone doesn’t make a move to come any closer. She just stands there — and then she speaks.

“You’re all alone, aren’t you? Somehow you’re the only one still running. The GameMakers are very pleased, I can tell you that.”

Reagan’s mirror image smirks at Reagan’s continued silence, hums a little, her eyes dancing over Reagan’s face.

The bat rests heavy in Reagan’s hand — ready to be used again. But her clone just sways again, smiles as if they’re discussing something pleasant, stays in her place. Her next words hit Reagan all at once.

“Remember Cora?” she continues. “Remember how she fell all that way down? So many stories up… but I guess she just couldn’t hold on any longer.”

The words are a baseball bat to Reagan’s stomach. The memory flashes across her mind’s eye in horrible clarity without her permission.

Reagan holds onto the twisted metal for dear life, dangling, her shoes touching thin air and the muscles in her arms screaming. Her heart is a wild thing in her chest.

“Not here,” she thinks fiercely. “I’m not dying here.”

Above her she can hear Nia shouting, indistinguishable words over the howl of wind up this high. Jasper’s voice is there too, and Kingston. All three of them are still on the roof. They had been lucky — they had avoided the trap.

But Cora… Reagan can just see the other girl, hanging from the edge of a window, her fingertips clutching at brick. Her face is turned away from Reagan — she can’t see anything but the long spill of Cora’s blonde hair.

“Cora!” Reagan tries shouting, finally getting one foot on the thin ledge in front of her and steadying herself, sweat dripping down the back of her neck. She breaks off, focuses on inching her hands one over the other until she’s close enough to get her other foot comfortably on the ledge, pulling her body in until she’s flat against brick. An open window lies inches to her right.

To get there means letting go of the metal beam above her head, letting her fingertips cling to the brick wall and hoping a strong wind doesn’t blow her off balance. Reagan grits her teeth — and lets her fingers slip from the cold metal.

For one, heart-stopping moment, Reagan feels as if she’ll tip backwards, as if she’ll free-fall all of the way down to the hard ground below her. But she presses flat to the wall, holds her breath, and the feeling passes. It takes one small step and then one more to the right until her fingers grip the edge of a window frame, until she can pull herself around and in, until she’s safely inside a bare room and she spins around, leaning out the window to see Cora, to tell her she’s coming to help -

Cora lets go.

Her body hangs suspended, just for a moment, like a piece of art — delicate hands, large eyes, blood trickling down the side of her face from a head wound.

She lets go and she falls. Her long, blonde hair billows up around her face, hides her eyes. Her hands reach up.

And in the breath before Reagan’s scream, Cora’s face comes into view, just for a moment. The faintest hint of a smile curves Cora’s lips, soft and sad.

Cora hits the ground below.

“And Kingston… he couldn’t stand the idea of losing another one of you could he?”

Reagan bites down hard on her tongue, tries to block out the clone’s words — but it’s no use. The bitter bite of blood fills her mouth. And another memory fills her senses.

“Go! Get out of here, all of you!”

Kingston’s eyes are wide, his voice desperate. He’s pushing them, pushing them all through the door, holding it open as Jasper slips out behind Nia and Reagan, all of them cut and scraped and bruised. Hunted.

And Reagan feels the shot more than hears it.

She sees Kingston’s body jerk, watches a bright crimson flower bloom across his chest, soak through his shirt — watches his body crumple to the floor as it spreads out around him.

She’s running before the light fades from his eyes.

“Stop,” Reagan breathes out through trembling lips. Her stomach is twisting, turning. The anger, the fury — it begins to catch fire, as easy as paper held in a flame.

Her clone laughs — a horrible sound. So familiar, and yet cold and strange. It raises the hairs on the back of Reagan’s neck.

“Getting sentimental?” she asks. Her eyes grow darker, as if someone is dimming whatever light may have once flickered within her. Reagan feels something chip away inside her own chest, feels something cold and sticky spread through her lungs.

“And poor Nia. She was weak — but you all knew that from the beginning.”

Shoes dangling inches above a floor, the horrible creak and groan of a rope looped around a bare beam in the ceiling — looped around a fragile neck.

“Shut up,” Reagan growls through gritted teeth, breaking her silence once more. ”Shut up.”

“Why?” the other her asks, suddenly taking a few steps forward, her eyes flashing, the smile dropping from her lips. “Why should I stop when I’ve just gotten to the best part? You may have somehow failed all of the others, again and again, one after the other… but Jasper was no mistake.”

Reagan’s nails bite once more into her palm, blood trickling freely down her hand. She tastes dirt on her tongue, feels fingers press bruises into her throat.

“He was trying to -,” she chokes out, choking on the accusations.

“Trying to what?” her clone interrupts, drawling the words. “Kill you?”

Reagan squeezes her eyes shut, tries not to remember how it had felt being suffocated, of having Jasper’s fingers wrapped so tightly around her windpipe and squeezing.

“But you knew he wasn’t doing it on his own,” the doppelgänger continues, something like glee oozing through her voice. “You knew he wasn’t himself. And yet you still stuck that knife in his chest. You murdered him. Easy-peasy.”

Sticky, warm. Blood on her hands again, welling up around her wrists — but different eyes this time. Ones that had cleared like the sky after a storm as soon as sharp metal had sliced through skin and muscle, had carved deep into bone.

Dark eyes instead of gold. Night and day.

Reagan’s eyes flash open. She’s teetering, she can feel it — balancing on the edge of something dark and dangerous, a fall that has no bottom.

The rage fills her lungs — it wells in her stomach, presses behind her eyes, turns everything else to ash and cinder. It hurts, burns at her bones and skin as if she is a girl made of paper. Paper held much too close to a flame.

Reagan bares her teeth, grips the bat in her hand as tight as she can.

The clone’s eyes flicker down at the movement. A slow smile spreads over her lips like honey.

“Reagan,” she says, the name like a shard of glass hitting the ground. “The others may have failed the games, but you — you were born to be here. Night was your ticket in, you know. The GameMakers needed something to pull you in and he was the perfect target… but you didn’t need it. You were born this way — cold, powerful, willing to do whatever it takes to win. Ruthless.”

Reagan tastes blood in her mouth. She can’t see past the haze filling her vision. Her heart beats with a tempo that matches the rage and fury of the storm whipping all around them, growing stronger, stronger, stronger until she’s consumed by it.

Her other self clicks her tongue, a gunshot in the quiet eye of the storm — and then she speaks the words that have been tearing at Reagan’s heart ever since that night spent kneeling on the concrete.

She speaks and the whole world holds its breath.

“And yet you were still weak enough to let Night die. The one person you ever actually cared about.”

The storm explodes.

Reagan screams, the sound ripping up her throat, clawing its way up from somewhere deep down inside her. The darkness slams down over her vision — it fills every pore, wraps around every bone.

The screech of the wind is her voice and the flashes of lightning feel as if they’re coming from the fire burning over her skin and this — this is the monster inside her.

Reagan watches as the vision of herself glitches and wavers before disappearing, sucked back into the storm — the imprint of a pleased, wicked smile is all that’s left behind before it too fades away like smoke.

But Reagan has lost all control. Her pain and her fury pull and tug at her, stretch her apart.

Wrath makes up her entire being.

“Don’t let go.” The voice is small, tiny, insignificant in the power that’s coursing through Reagan’s body as the bat drops from her fingers, hits the ground with an unheard clatter — as the wind and the sky and the storm all converge above Reagan, the crackle of electricity humming over her skin, the power of the gales rushing through her lungs.

And yet she still hears it.

“Don’t let it consume you. Anger will get you nowhere.”

Reagan drops to her knees, hugs her arms around her body as the fury eats her alive. She wants to take it out on someone. She wants to see someone feel the same pain, wants them to bleed for what she’s been through. She wants to inflict pain, wants to wreak chaos, wants to let this anger bleed out and take over someone else.

She wants someone else to feel this.

The cold concrete below her bites through her clothes, stings at her palms when she braces them against the ground. The rain begins to fall, lashing down on her shoulders.

“Anger,” the voice comes again, stronger. “Anger will get you nowhere.”

The wind howls. The sky grows darker.

The ground is wet with rain.

Reagan is the storm — she has the power. She could take down the world, could use this energy to demolish everything left on this twisted, half-dead planet. She could destroy the people who had come to her after Night’s death — the people who had promised her revenge but who had been the ones with their finger on the trigger the entire time.

She could take everything away from them — could take away the people they hold most dear, watch them suffer for their sins, watch them crawl and grovel in the same pain they had given her.

She could -

“Anger will get you nowhere.”

Suddenly Reagan is back on a different street. The ground is wet with blood. The rain is quiet here, hushed — it falls down on her shoulders like the tears of the grief-stricken.

Night lies in her arms, a gunshot wound ripped through his chest. He looks the same — still has eyes the color of honey, still has hair the color of ink and collarbones like bird wings.

He looks up at her, smiles. He speaks.

“Anger,” he laughs, choking on the blood in his mouth and breathing wetly before he regains his speech. “Anger will get you nowhere.”

Reagan sobs, the breath hitching in her throat, hands shaking. “They took you away from me,” she cries, caught somewhere between the past and the present. “They took you away and they turned me into this.”

Night lifts a hand, his golden eyes steady. He touches two fingers to her cheek.

The storm stops and Night’s voice is all Reagan hears.

“Then don’t give them what they want. Don’t turn into one of them.”

Reagan’s heart stutters at the words. She stares, tears pouring down her face, suspended in a moment of time that is torn between calm and fury.

Night smiles — and then he disappears.

Reagan is left kneeling on cold concrete, the rain pouring down onto her shoulders in a city wrecked by anger — in a world torn apart by war and violence and above all, revenge.

But something warm touches her cheek. It pushes away the darkness, if only a little.

And as Reagan stares down at her empty hands, all she can do is close her eyes and let all of it bleed away — back down into the cracks of the concrete.

The bus had never supposed to have been there in the first place.

That’s the one stark, black-and-white fact that has refused to leave Gabriel’s mind.

“The driver was supposed to be off this week,” the policewoman had said.

The brim of her stiff, navy hat had shadowed her eyes, words that Gabriel could only catch fragments of leaving her lips as they continued to move.

Asleep at the wheel… contacting the company… ongoing investigation.

Unfortunate accident.

Unfortunate accident.

Unfortunate accident.

Gabriel stares at the wall after she’s left, disappearing out the door and leaving the shadowed imprints of her words resting in the air, hovering around Gabriel like apparitions, reaching for him with dark, sharp-clawed fingers.

The bus had never supposed to have been there in the first place.

What an unfortunate accident.

Gabriel doesn’t cry.

“Ah, excuse me.”

Gabriel stumbles in his steps, pausing inches from bumping into the person standing just outside the door to the library, the words of apology leaving his mouth easily.

The stranger doesn’t answer.

Instead, there’s a click and then the tiny, unmistakeable rasp of a lighter, followed by a bright, flickering burst of flame, and Gabriel watches the boy in front of him light the long, white stick tucked between his lips with practiced ease, his eyes thrown into shadow.

Gabriel clutches the books in his arms closer to his chest, caught in some kind of limbo suddenly, unable to move even though he knows it’s rude to just stand here and stare.

The boy seems to think so too, lifts his head and peers at Gabriel in the gloom of the quickly dawning afternoon, the sun disappearing in a spark of gold like the glowing cigarette between his long, pale fingers.

His copper eyes are sharp, the smile that slowly seeps over his face is mocking.

A small breeze flutters over the back of Gabriel’s neck, ruffles the other boy’s bangs and reveals a delicate, silver piercing in his right eyebrow that catches the fire from the cigarette and burns.

“Unless you’re going to apologize for staring, I suggest you move,” the stranger finally says, his eyes studying Gabriel’s face, cool and calculating. “You’re blocking the door.”

He takes a long pull from the cigarette and exhales.

White, curling smoke fills the air between them, stings Gabriel’s eyes, fills his senses with the heavy, warm scent of tobacco and something sweeter, like strawberries.

A shoulder bumps his, nearly sends his books tumbling from his grip, and when Gabriel finally manages to blink the smoke from his eyes, the space of sidewalk in front of him is empty.

The boy is gone.

The library door swings shut behind him.

Wake up, eat, sleep, get shaken awake to take his medicine and eat again, back to sleep, up again for more painkillers because his fractured ribs are screaming, the blow to his head is sending whatever he ate for lunch back up, everything fucking hurts and the pain is almost welcome, a distraction from the absolute agony that rips at his stomach and crushes his heart into something unrecognizable the rest of the time, that leaves him screaming in the middle of the night when he wakes up and remembers.

It’s a routine.

Three days and Gabriel knows when to open his eyes, when to shut them, how to answer the nurses and the doctor when they ask him how he’s feeling and he just wants to be left alone, how to trick them into giving him more morphine because it numbs everything, leaves his thoughts hazy and sluggish, and wipes everything out of perspective.

The police come back on the fourth day.

It’s a different group this time. All men, three of them, although two stand outside while the first one ventures into Gabriel’s room.

He’s tall, has shrewd, hawk-like eyes and the shadow of stubble along his jaw, but his voice is gentle when he introduces himself, quiet and reserved like everyone else’s has been ever since Gabriel opened his eyes four days ago to blue sky and no clouds and hard concrete under his back.

Gabriel loathes it. The softness makes everything else that much sharper, that much more painful and vivid and horrible.

“I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Gabriel doesn’t answer, just sits propped up by the multiple pillows behind his back and stares out the window at the green grass sprawled out below him, the sidewalks that criss-cross through the hospital gardens where the other patients take walks and the nurses take their smoke breaks.

“We finally got more information from the company that owns the truck, but I’m going to need to ask you a few more questions about that day, Mr. Moreau,” the cop continues, holding his hat in his hands and standing firm when Gabriel turns to look at him.

Everything is so sterile in the hospital.

Everything is so white and washed-out and smells like chemicals and sometimes the faint, bitter, coppery undertone of blood, and the police officer only adds to the stiffness of the sheets Gabriel’s been trapped under, his face blank and impassive.

Gabriel feels like being sick, but the latest injection of morphine had been enough to blur everything just enough and he holds it in check, isn’t as reluctant to speak as he would be without the crystal-clear drip that is connected to his arm.

But still, he remains silent, lets his eyes drift from the shiny, gold buttons on the cop’s uniform down to his own hands where they’re clasped in his lap, fingers laced together.

He’s gripping so hard that his knuckles are white.

Maybe the morphine isn’t working as much as it should.

“Mr. Moreau,” the cop says again, his voice breaking the quiet stillness in the room, breaking the muffled noises of the birds chirping outside and the distant murmur of the rest of the hospital bustling around in the hall outside the door. “I’m going to need your full cooperation. This case may not be as simple as we first believed.”

Simple.

All of this is anything but simple.

Julian dying in the middle of the road in a pool of his own blood is everything but simple.

Gabriel’s fingers tighten around themselves. The haze of the drugs coursing through his veins dims a little.

Outside, the first screech of the summer cicadas echoes through the muggy air.

“I need you to tell me-“

“We were headed back to my place,” Gabriel spits out, cuts the police officer mid-sentence. His words sound sluggish to his own ears, slow and drawn through honey, but the acrid tone of anger is very much there.

Gabriel keeps going, breathing the same words he had choked out to the first police officer on that first night, when nothing had seemed real, smoke and mirrors and one ugly, horrifying, gut-wrenching truth.

“He had lost this ring he always wore, and we both thought maybe he had left it in my apartment, so we decided to go back even though we were going to be late to the movie, and-“

Gabriel stops in the same spot he had the first time, blinks hard and clears the images from his eyes, of Julian’s face before-

“A ring?” the police officer asks, even though they must have this written down somewhere, in some file on someone’s desk at the police station, the first report from the only survivor.

“It was lucky, according to Jules,” Gabriel murmurs, more to himself. “It was very important to him.”

Luck.

Gabriel would never believe in luck again.

“You always wear that one.”

Gabriel’s voice is louder than he intends, echoes through the dusty shelves of the library, and he flushes, feels the blush in the tips of his ears, when Julian fixes him with that sharp-eyed stare, a small smile quirking the other’s mouth up briefly.

When Gabriel’s eyes drop to the hand Julian has resting on the table they’re at, Julian follows his gaze to the simple gold circle that rests against the knuckle of his pointer finger of his right hand, separate from the other rings that decorate his elegant, pianist fingers.

It’s so simple, but just as bright as Julian’s eyes whenever he talks about his photography, about the pictures he’s taken and the ones he hasn’t yet, when he goes on and on and Gabriel listens to him without interrupting because even if he doesn’t understand half of the terminology, he has realized somewhere along the way that he never gets tired of watching that light in Julian’s eyes.

“Hmm,” Julian answers, turning back to the book he’s been peering at for a good half-hour now, his bangs falling in his eyes. The lip ring he has in today glints when he chews at his bottom lip in concentration, pearlescent teeth digging in and then releasing so he can talk again. “It’s my lucky ring.”

Gabriel blinks and then wrinkles his nose.

Julian catches the facial expression before Gabriel can school it into something neutral.

“What, you don’t believe in luck, Mr. I’m-going-to-be-the-best-spiker-in-volleyball-history?” Julian asks, his tone only somewhat mocking, a page turned half-way and paused while he waits for Gabriel’s answer.

“I believe in hard work and strategy,” Gabriel responds cooly, hopes the faint irritation he feels at Julian’s words isn’t visible on his face.

To be completely honest it’s an improvement from the weeks of bickering and snapping they had gone through a few months ago, when Gabriel had run into Julian a second time, this time inside the library, and had offered to buy him a coffee for the one he had knocked all over the floor and Julian’s inked-up converse.

That time he hadn’t been lost in a cloud of white cigarette smoke.

And now there’s this to show for it, this tentative, awkward balance of meeting up on Friday’s at the local library, an hour or so of Gabriel reading all he can about court plays and new moves and past matches, what worked and what didn’t, and Julian flipping through books and portfolios on photography, on exposure and aperture and ISO and a million other things Gabriel can’t make head or tail of.

They don’t ever say, “See you next time,” or “Same place?” when they leave in the afternoon, when the clouds are painted in blushes of rose and cerulean and violet, the spark of the last light of the day flashing over everything and painting Julian’s eyelashes in gold.

They just come back, a convergence of sorts.

“Hard work and strategy,” Julian repeats, smirking. “Those only take you so far.”

Gabriel doesn’t respond, just bends his head over his book and keeps reading.

His eyes drift back to the infinite loop of gold on Julian’s finger a few minutes later.

When Gabriel opens his eyes he’s sure the pain is what must’ve woken him.

But it fades, the phantom memory of his dream, a sickening replay of screeching tires and the acrid smell of burning rubber and Julian’s hands on his shoulders, pushing, pushing, pain in his side and then in his head and then crimson, everywhere.

Now, lying against sheets soaked through with a cold sweat, the tinny beep of the machines he’s hooked up to slowly breaking through the purple-smoke haze of sleep, Gabriel doesn’t feel anything but a dull throb through his entire body.

The last nurse, a woman with kind eyes and cool hands, had given him enough morphine before bed that Gabriel wouldn’t have to try to wean more off of anybody in the morning.

The moon filters through the gauzy white curtains over his window, turns his skin to alabaster and the dark veins in his forearms to graceful lines of ebony.

Gabriel swallows past the dryness of his throat, blinks a few times at the ceiling and holds off the crushing weight of despair that is always there when he wakes up, holds it away for as long as he can manage.

At the first prickle of heat behind his eyelids, the first warmth of tears that seep from the corners of his eyes and run down his skin to drip onto the pillow beneath him, Gabriel takes a shuddering inhale.

“Simon, he’s crying. I don’t do tears.”

Gabriel’s breath stops in his lungs, his heart freezes over with ice, and every thought in his head disappears, overtaken by the strange voice that just came from one of the shadowed corners of his room.

It’s late, must be way past midnight, and none of the nurses ever come in here after then unless he hits the red call button by the side of his bed.

Gabriel is paralyzed, unable to move, to sit up and look around, to even speak, demand to know who is in here with him because he knows he didn’t imagine that, knows it’s not a hallucination from the drugs or from just waking up.

It had been too real, too there and too close.

The second voice is quieter, more reserved but still just as present, another male.

“You were supposed to wait.”

Gabriel does sit up then, the crippling fear moving aside just a little for the sudden desperate need for action, for Gabriel to see who is talking.

The room is dark, all of the lights off after night hours, but Gabriel’s eyes have adjusted to the gloom now, the moon bright enough outside to help him scan his surroundings.

There’s the bedside table directly to his right, a slender, white vase holding two complimentary daffodils from the hospital gardens set on top, and a glass of water beside it.

Past that are the windows, fairly close to his bed. They’re closed and locked. Gabriel had watched the nurse pull them in and flip the latches before dinner.

The room is small, just big enough for his monitoring machines, which are stationed on the opposite side of the bed, the side closer to the door, which is still shut tight.

Gabriel tries to steady his breathing, his eyes flickering over the room, heart racing dizzyingly through his veins.

There’s no one to be seen, no one-

There.

Gabriel’s heart leaps to his throat, a small, startled noise escaping his lips as one, large shock runs the length of his spine, sends the hair at the back of his neck straight up.

There, in the armchair that’s been shoved into the right-hand corner of the room at the foot of Gabriel’s bed, tucked into the small space as if they’ve always been there, are two figures.

Time stops.

Or it does in Gabriel’s head. He’s back to being shocked still, his heart hammering like a bird in the cage of his ribs, his throat dry as sandpaper, the bitter bloom of absolute terror unfurling in his stomach and spreading black-tipped petals that grow and unfurl until they choke him.

Gabriel’s hand creeps towards the red call button.

“Tsk, tsk, not so fast. Besides, I disconnected it.”

The taller figure is the one who’s speaking again, the first voice Gabriel had heard, louder and more cheerful than the second, his teeth flashing as he grins.

Even in his panic, Gabriel can hear the falseness to the air of carelessness in the other’s words, like a sheen of plastic, a perfect smile hiding broken things.

The smaller one doesn’t move from where he seems to be oddly perched on the taller one’s lap, but Gabriel can just make out the glint of gold eyes in the dark, a shimmer of brightness.

“I’ll scream.”

Gabriel is surprised the words are even able to leave his mouth, hates how his voice shakes like a leaf in the wind, tremors and trembling fingers.

He has no idea who would break into his hospital room, has no idea what they could possibly want, why they’re here, but it can’t be anything good.

“We can fix that easily enough,” the current stranger speaking replies, voice still so bright and bubbly, but laced with something darker underneath, something that threatens he’s being serious.

“Emory.”

The smaller one finally moves, peeling himself up and off of the other, his voice monotone but disapproving, warning.

“What?” the tall one, Emory, asks, petulant.

But the other, Simon or whatever he had been called earlier, doesn’t respond, just moves towards Gabriel, his burning eyes getting closer and closer.

Gabriel jerks, fingers suddenly scrabbling at the plastic, slick call button, jabbing his thumb against it over and over.

It doesn’t light up, doesn’t make any noise.

Emory hadn’t been lying.

Simon is there right when Gabriel opens his mouth to yell, and Gabriel can see him clearly now, up close, all dark hair and large, gold cat eyes and lips set in a steady line.

A cool palm covers the lower half of his face, another grabs the hand he’s holding the call button in, and Gabriel’s scream gets caught half-way up his throat, escapes as a whimper, muffled by Simon’s hand.

Gabriel is reaching with his other hand, the free one, to punch, to scratch, to escape but Simon speaks again, and somehow, Gabriel pauses to listen, something powerful and significant in some far-off corner of his mind whispering to him to, “Wait. Wait and see.”

“Don’t scream,” he says.

Gabriel is shaking, his whole body trembling, the pain in his ribs and the side of his head bleeding through the haze of the painkillers.

But still, he waits.

Simon stares at him, eyes catching the moonlight and shining.

What he says next leaves Gabriel shell-shocked and sucker-punched, is the last thing- no, the one thing he never would’ve expected to hear, not now, not ever, not in his next life or the one after that.

It steals the breath from his lungs, steals the heat from his skin and leaves his face draining of all color, leaves him reeling while everything else around him shatters, splinters into a million different fragments.

“If you want to see Julian Lovett again,” Simon says, his voice quiet and hushed and sacred in the small second of time they’re all stuck in, “you’ll listen to us.”

Julian kisses him the same way he seems to do everything else.

Full-force, straightforward, powerful and wild and passionate.

Gabriel shuts his eyes and follows, heartbeat thrumming under his skin like he has more than one, thoughts a blur of color and sound and sensation.

Julian’s fingers card through his hair, his mouth hot and seeking against Gabriel’s lips, the full-length of his body pressed up against him, Gabriel cornered back against the kitchen countertop.

This is surreal, so much better than how Gabriel had imagined it, and Julian tastes sweet, like strawberries, his tongue piercing clacking against Gabriel’s teeth when he pries his mouth open, soft and slow despite the grip of his fingers in Gabriel’s hair.

When they part, Gabriel is breathing harder than he had expected, is almost embarrassed by how flushed he must be, the heat spreading down his cheeks to his neck and collarbones, is almost a little subconscious about how tight his arms are wrapped around Julian’s waist, doesn’t even remember putting them there.

Julian peers at him through feathered eyelashes, copper against ink-black, lips swollen and kiss-pink and curved up into a beautiful smile, and Gabriel doesn’t know if his heart has ever beat this hard before, if he’s ever felt this light before.

Julian’s right hand slides to the junction between Gabriel’s neck and shoulder.

Gabriel can feel the cool press of his ring against his skin.

“Go away.”

Gabriel doesn’t care how flat or harsh his voice sounds.

He’s tired.

“We can’t until you try.”

Emory’s voice is just as sharp, whips and cracks through the room, and when Gabriel looks at him, he sees the same solar flare of anger in the other boy’s brown eyes that he can feel eating him from the inside out, burning through his stomach and leaving nausea in its place.

Simon doesn’t say anything, just stands near the windows and stares out at the clouds that drift by on the summer breeze outside.

Gabriel hates them.

The both of them, ever since they had first appeared by his bedside two weeks ago, bleeding in from the shadows and speaking words of utter bullshit, two strangers from nowhere.

“Time-travel,” Gabriel thinks bitterly. “How absurd.”

He’s tried to get rid of them, has screamed for the nurses and threatened to call the police, but every time they disappear just in time, gone through the window or the door, away and gone as if they had never existed in the first place.

And every day or night they come back, creep back into Gabriel’s life and continue to torture him with ideas that hold no scientific proof, that only make everything that much harder, that only fuck with his mind and leave him seeing neon-blue butterflies fluttering through his dreams.

“The butterfly effect,” Simon had whispered to him that first night, Emory leaning back in the armchair and watching with narrowed eyes. “Countless states, countless universes in a nonlinear system of time, countless opportunities and indescribable responsibility.”

It had been nonsense, still is nonsense, and yet, time after time, they come back, the two of them, always together, claiming that Gabriel has the ability to travel back in time, that he’s one of them, that Julian’s “accident” had been very much intentional, a hidden conspiracy to draw Gabriel out of the dark, to put him on display and show what he could truly do.

And yet they never breathe a word about the “society” they belong to. Never whisper about the organization that hunts them down, one by one, the one who is apparently responsible for Julian’s death. Always refuse to show him.

They never say how they know. They never talk about Julian either, not since that first night.

All they ask him to do is try.

Over and over and over again, an endless gold circle of agonizing torture.

Gabriel clenches his fists at his sides hard enough to feel his nails tear into the soft skin of his palms, to feel the wet, warmth of blood bloom under the pressure.

“Get out,” he hisses through clenched teeth.

He’s had enough.

He’s being discharged in a few days, will slink back home and lick at his wounds alone, will try to piece the shattered pieces of his life back together, but until then he wants to be left alone, wants to sit here and not think about anything.

And he never wants to even contemplate the impossible idea of something so far-fetched, something so utterly insane.

Emory opens his mouth to retort, and Gabriel can see how tired he is, how tired all of them are, can see the smudges of plum under his eyes and the messy hair and the thinness to Simon’s wrists and the ache in his own chest.

But Simon steps away from the window, lays a hand on Emory’s arm and looks up at him, shakes his head.

Emory’s mouth closes, his eyes shuttering off, lips pressed into a thin line, but he doesn’t speak.

They leave a few moments later.

Gabriel stares down at his bloody palms and thinks about chance.

“Fuck.”

Gabriel stops walking almost immediately, glances over his shoulder to find Julian standing still in the middle of the sidewalk, staring down at the back of his right hand.

“What?” he asks him, retracing his steps to get back to where Julian has stopped.

“My ring,” Julian says, eyebrows furrowed. “It’s gone.”

Gabriel follows his gaze, his eyes landing on the pale strip of skin on Julian’s pointer finger, empty and bare.

“Did you take it off at my place?” Gabriel asks automatically. They had been cooking there, had made dinner before leaving to catch the midnight showing of this new action film they were both looking forward to seeing.

Julian had had it on then, when he had kissed Gabriel at the front door, when he had been chopping onions and laughing about something Gabriel had told him about the summer training camp he was helping teach, when he had grabbed Gabriel’s hand and laced their fingers together while they watched something on tv to pass the time for the food to finish baking in the oven.

“I must have,” Julian answers, but he looks unsure, his bangs falling into his eyes as he continues to stare at the blank spot on his hand.

“We can look for it after the movie-,” Gabriel starts to suggest, but Julian’s head whips up and his eyes are large.

“No, I need to find it.”

“But-”

“It’ll just take a second, I promise,” Julian says in a rush, and then he’s turning back and walking back the way they had come, leaving Gabriel stumbling after him a few moments later.

“Okay, okay, wait, slow down,” he calls after Julian, rushing to catch up because Julian is moving too fast, more running than walking, and surely the ring doesn’t matter that much.

A crosswalk looms ahead, shadowed on both sides by trees from the park they were taking a shortcut through to get to the theatre, an empty road that never seems to see much traffic.

Gabriel reaches Julian right when the other crosses the white line on the street.

He steps to follow him.

Only then does he see the flash of headlights, only then does he hear the rumble of an engine and the frantic honk of a horn.

Time seems to slow dramatically, stilling until all Gabriel hears is the sharp intake of Julian’s breath, the only thing he sees is the widening of Julian’s copper eyes, lit up and photographed by the glare of the truck’s headlights as it barrels towards them.

The only thing he feels is the twin pressure of Julian’s hands on his shoulders, pushing him back, back, back, until something clips Gabriel in the side and sends him tumbling to the sidewalk behind him, his head cracking sickeningly against the pavement.

Everything goes dark for a second, or maybe for longer, until Gabriel blinks, eyelashes fluttering, head throbbing, his ribs screaming in agony, the world returning in sharp bursts of color and sound, flashing lights and screeching sirens.

Gabriel sits up slowly, nausea and despair swirling in equal tandem in the pit of his stomach.

Crimson and copper.

Blank eyes and still hands.

A neck at the wrong angle, a broken body, lifeless, gone.

Gabriel starts screaming and he doesn’t know when he stops.

The police call at two in the morning.

Officer Roberts is the one on the other end of the line, the man from the second time Gabriel had given his report of that day.

“Mr. Moreau,” he says, voice low and serious.

Gabriel’s stomach is down to his feet as he stands in his kitchen, the painkillers he had been about to take scattered across the countertop, next to the glass of water.

“The woman driving the truck, who perished in the accident when it flipped, she never worked at the company.”

Gabriel’s knees finally give out, and he sinks to the floor, clutching the phone to his ear even though he barely registers the words still coming through the phone.

“Looking into it… stolen truck… possible homicide.”

Gabriel can’t breathe.

Officer Roberts’ voice blends with the things Simon and Emory had told him before, mixing in his head with dizzying clarity and his whole world is flipping upside down.

“… a ring.”

Gabriel goes entirely, utterly still.

“What?” he breathes into the receiver, and Officer Roberts stops talking.

“A ring,” he repeats after a moment. “The only thing the woman had on her was a gold ring, in her pocket.”

Gabriel stares unseeingly at the far wall of his kitchen, listens to the cicadas scream outside.

What happens next should be impossible, should be improbable and non-existent, but Gabriel knows it’s real.

When the neon-blue butterfly flaps its way across his kitchen, throwing sapphire sparks from the fragile tips of its wings, Gabriel is only still for one more breathless second.

And then he’s scrambling to his feet, grabbing his coat from the hook on the wall, and sprinting out the front door, his phone clattering to the kitchen floor.

Maybe luck does exist after all.

#angst #lgbtq #scifi #sciencefiction #shortstory #thebutterflyeffect #timetravel