Work Text:
“You’re what?” Alex nearly shrieked.
He had spent nights nauseated with worry after he had shot – killed – murdered – Nigel’s father, a witness and unwilling participant to the parricide of Nigel’s caretakers (if they could even be called as such). Alex had found himself numb and for the first time found himself praying to God, any God, to ask whether he was finally too far gone to be healed from whatever parasite had infected him and propelled him to remain by Nigel’s side. The gun in his hands felt as though it slotted perfectly within his palms and Alex had never felt quite as empty, as though there was truly nothing left of whatever he was, taken apart at an atomic level and left as a pile of dust that was mistaken for cat dandruff and swept away and put in a bin to be discarded, forever.
Yet Nigel continued, unfazed, unfaltering, marching onwards as though he was an infantryman from a military that was composed of schizophrenics and dead animals. Nigel cleaned – and it was sickeningly domestic, if not for the organs and the blood and the smell of bleach and the corpses. It made Alex want to throw up (but he never did, for the only thing to ever come out of his stomach for Nigel would be love). And once he was done, they disposed of the evidence – they being Nigel, mostly, for Alex had no experience, and did not want any, thank you – and they returned to a home that couldn’t quite be called home, but was a shelter nonetheless. It was tender as a bruise was tender.
Nigel’s parents had died in that house that night. Alex wondered if parts of Nigel had died there, too.
Nigel smiled at Alex, one of the rare smiles that seemed genuine and whole and it unnerved Alex to an extent words could not hope to convey. It was the way people smiled at you when you were about to hear the best news of their lives, and the worst news of yours.
“I’ve been granted the position of the acting headmaster of the Order.”
The first thing detailed on Alex’s about me section on a metaphorical page that maybe, had it been multiple years into the future, would have been detailed on a carrd (because he was a mentally ill seventeen-year-old, also referred to as the target audience for that kind of thing), was that he favoured cognitive empathy, and by favoured he meant that he was completely and utterly dogshit at the other two types.
As much as he tried to appear rational – which he wasn’t – at all – he ultimately ended up squashing whatever feelings tried to make their way into his prefrontal cortex and opted for a mental lobotomization of his amygdala. He knew, at the very minimum, that he appreciated praise, and despite the amount effort as it took (which was to say, monumental), he tried to praise others. Not to the extent of his greatness, of course, but he could understand the concept of transactional relationships or whatever it was with Jesus and his teachings that Catholics always droned on about.
But the thing with cognitive empathy was that people always seemed too fixed on the fact that it was also the style of empathy employed by the undesirables, and in the end, Alex figured that the only difference between kindness and a disorder was whether or not some old man with a book hated your guts. This was, of course, an ultimately comforting revelation, assuming comforting was an emotion that made one want to kill themselves. Congratulations, you've convinced yourself you're a horrible person with absolutely zero redeeming qualities, here's a whoopee cushion as a reward.
The second thing detailed on Alex’s about me section was that he really, honestly, fucking hated churches. Which, unfourtunately for him, was where he was currently located.
It wasn’t the school church, which Alex had dutifully enacted multiple missions such as deploying a pipe bomb within the middle of the night, but instead one belonging to the Order, an order of which had lost it’s previous grandmaster in an event that Alex had zero involvement in, and had opted to give the position to the son of the aforementioned grandmaster – at least temporarily – an event which Alex figured Nigel may have been involved.
Alex stared at the centre of the room where Nigel stood, his usual uniform discarded for robes, robes that cascaded down his body and pooled at his joints and swayed behind him and with him and around him and Alex contemplated whether he would rather take a bullet for Nigel or put one through his head.
Nigel looked like a God, and it was mortifying. Alex was transfixed on the horrible. He wanted to haunt the robes like a ghost and be driven mad. Heaven was not a place that held some primordial deity but instead here, on Earth, with Nigel at its center standing in a manner of holiness. Alex understood, he understood what it felt like, in this moment, to have a muse, to be compelled to scribe every word spoken from Nigel’s mouth within the pillars supporting the church so that it would remain, to draw and to paint and to create an image that he could never even hope of fully creating in Nigel’s likeness, and above else, Alex felt like grieving.
(Grieving what? Nigel? A childhood you never had? Yourself?)
“What do you think? It’s a bit long at the sleeves,” Nigel had asked, which of course he had, looking up at Alex with round eyes that looked an awful lot more like something innocent and not Nigel. Nigel looked at Alex as though he were the Earth and offered Alex a kind of devotion that Alex felt undeserving. Should he kneel at Nigel’s feet and pray? Should he sit on his knees and curve his spine and bow his head and submit? There was a kind of vulnerability that was beginning to ebb from his ribcage and threaten to spill out from his chest that he was pathologically frightened of.
But Nigel would not allow such a thing, and neither could ego. He would lift Alex from the floor should he prostrate himself, however the touch of Nigel’s hands on Alex’s shoulders surely would leave scars. He was sure that when he was tired enough, he would hallucinate halos above Nigel’s head.
“You look weird,” was all Alex responded – and he always responded, for Nigel was the quiet type that quite possibly would refrain from speaking entirely one day should he receive no response. A wolf had fallen for a rabbit, and Alex wasn’t sure who was who.
Time had passed, weeks with long days spent crouched in the pews watching as Nigel, almost something like happy, worked towards some greater scheme that Alex was held by the strings of. They continued studying, Nigel continued to outpace Alex by mere digits all while playing God or whatever, and Alex found himself unable to divert his eyes from a newfound tranquility within his and Nigel’s routine that quite frankly felt like getting hit by an oncoming freight train.
It was 18:00 when Alex found Nigel bundled over his affectionately named (by Alex) Do-It-Yourself Open Heart Surgery Kit. Nigel tapped at a syringe. It was empty – a blessing, as far as Alex was concerned. Nigel had no issue playing God, inflicting disease upon whatever unwilling animal ended up within his arms. It was always loving, of course, a love that propelled one to examine and observe and record. However, it was frightening, to be the subject of some researcher’s desire – although fright and love tended to go hand in hand for Alex.
Alex tried to come off as flippant as possible, “You reintroducing poliovirus into the human population or some shit?” He couldn’t remember whether he learned that from class or from one of Nigel’s endless dialogues about whatever method of killing he had been fascinated with depending on the day.
“Too slow for what I need to do,” Nigel didn’t turn towards Alex, facing away from the boy and remaining focused on the needle. He pulled out a vial.
“What you need to do?” Alex mimicked, tone matching Nigel’s, before pointing at the vial, “what’s in that?”
“The liquid isn’t the important part, but instead –” Nigel withdrew the liquid into the syringe, however rather than filling the needle entirely, Nigel left a small amount of space for an air bubble to form within. “– this,” Nigel finished, holding it out towards Alex.
Alex rolled the needle within his hands (albeit frightfully, naturally), placing his understanding about the needle’s purpose alongside a list that also held concepts such as Nigel’s templar obsession and differential calculus, which was to say, a list of things Alex had absolutely zero comprehension of.
“The pastor seems to be gaining suspicions,” Nigel spoke, drawing Alex’s attention away from the needle.
“Suspicions?”
“About my parents. About us,” Nigel hissed the last word, leaning closer to Alex’s ear so that his breath washed over him.
Weeks had passed since Nigel was granted the position – it was temporary, until they figured something out (which they never did, for the Order was truly nothing important to the members), but Nigel had taken to the position smoothly and without issue, and some of the members looked at him with pity – the son of the headmaster who had lost both of his parents in a freak, unsolved accident. They assumed his fervor for the Order was simply out of devotion and longing for his parents and let him assume the role.
Nigel was only a boy who had lost his parents and found God. Alex’s hands tightened around the needle, suddenly heavy as stone, a cold emanating – from the needle or his hands, Alex couldn’t tell. They could not have been further from the truth.
“So, we’ll deal with him,” Nigel looked upwards at Alex, wide-doe-eyes contrasting the sinister machinations he spoke of, utilizing the word we as though it were another shared activity between the two such as shared religious delusions and watching a singular ant crawl around on the floor.
“We?”
“Of course, we.”
We of course being the word that proceeded to get Alex to somehow continue trailing behind Nigel like a dog and end up laying against a brick wall at God-knows-what-hour under piss-cold conditions just to receive another dosage of very real and material horrors including concepts including but not limited to murder so lovingly prepared for him by Nigel.
Nigel had explained the plan as though he were planning his meals for the day or some other inconsequential task that very much did not have the same weight of planned and attempted murder.
“A venous air embolism – a blockage of blood supply, caused by the presence of bubbles of air within a blood vessel, which travels to the heart and enter into the heart.” Nigel waved the 18 gauge needle around like a wand, “I’ll inject it into the lungs, where it should travel easily into the bloodstream. There will be minimal external evidence, aside from maybe a small puncture wound.”
Alex’s throat was dry. “And internal evidence?”
“It will be visible upon scans. However, it can mimic other ailments, which may throw the authorities off-track. If we’re lucky, they’re incompetent and assume it was an unfortunate stroke.”
Incompetent was not a strong enough word to describe the authorities. Nigel’s parents were buried not far underground beneath his house. They hadn’t been found. At this point, Alex started to assume that maybe Nigel was a God and had just performed a miracle or something.
[ I didn’t get around to finishing this section. In short, they kill the guy. ]
The sequence of events that followed was ultimately unclear to Alex, overtaken by some primal desire or influence rather than acting out of a sound mind. The shotgun that fit so neatly into his hands clattered to the ground, discarded and unneeded, a child’s toy no longer cared for; Nigel, robes coated with dirt and gore laying sprawled across the ground, his own robes tied around his head, obscuring his vision; and a scalpel kissing Nigel’s neck.
The white of the scalpel nearly matched that of Nigel’s skin, a translucent and ugly thing, the scalpel itself, still and lifeless, an inanimate object, threatening to instill the same affliction on the boy that laid opposite the blade. Alex held it perfectly still, his arm failing to shake with the adrenaline that spilled forth from his neurotransmitters, mind and vessel in concord as he assaulted the holy figure beneath him.
There was no movement from Nigel as Alex applied pressure to the blade, breaking the skin barrier and causing small beads of blood to form at the breach, staining the scalpel in a shade Alex didn’t know Nigel could bleed. Alex kept Nigel pinned to the floor beneath him, Alex applying the force of his own body to keep Nigel down (a sinner above a God – he rationalized this as equality).
Alex dragged the scalpel further along Nigel’s neck, deciding himself to have been infected with some parasite that compelled him towards Nigel, blood following the cutting of the blade and falling down Nigel’s skin, pooling at his collarbone and sinking indelibly into the cloth that designated his holy status. Nigel’s eyes remained closed – Alex felt a force crawling upwards from his spine into his head to force them open.
“Look at me,” Alex spoke, a command – what right did he have to command, to ask something of Nigel, who the sun bathed so frequently, favoured by the Gods and beings of old? Who wore the robes of the Templars that seemed to fit perfectly to his figure, an image illustrating something more than just a seventeen-year-old boy.
Yet Nigel complied, he complied with Alex’s order – for despite everything, he was truly nothing greater than a dog to follow the whims of its owner, something that would always return to Alex for he, like a dog, could not live without his owner – and met Alex’s stare.
Nigel’s gaze was hot on Alex’s body. “What do you wish for?” he enquired, as though he were some Christened saint that had been bestowed the ability to grant desires from a higher deity, unfazed by the spilling of blood that tainted his skin.
“I don’t know,” Alex pressed the scalpel further, beads forming into a singular line of gore. “I want to go home,” his voice came out brittle, “I want you dead. I want to take this scalpel and plunge it into your throat and watch you drown in your own blood, I want to carve your eyes out, so you’d stop staring through me all the fucking time, seeing things I can’t, I –”
The blood that reverberated through Alex’s head was earsplitting. “I want to kiss you. I want to stare at you in your stupid fucking robes and just touch you because I keep getting these awful nightmares that we were on a set of tracks and you were there, dying, in my arms, and sometimes I’m not sure who I am anymore. I want to be what you want me to be, to be your Jack, but I don’t know if I can.”
They were sitting a cathedral of their own design and the floorboards were forged from want and the foundations filled with a shame only felt by those who believed themselves to be fundamentally unlovable. The cathedral ceiling would tower far above their heads, the desire to be loved far out of reach that it disappeared into shadow, and the pews would be scalding for the love that filled their composition was only ever intense and scalding, for anything less would be unacceptable and unwanted. Love was dangled on a leash and Alex would die for it.
Alex’s rage had teeth, a kind of genetic rage that he learned from his father, who learned it from his father, and hence forth, and Alex wondered that maybe if he killed himself, he would not die but instead wake up in bed, held in the arms of a mother he never met. The extent his father remained in his blood, and the extent of how much Alex would become akin to him, both frightened him. He couldn’t forgive his father, for if he did, what would he have left? What would become of the intensity that burned within him? Alex wondered if Nigel ever laid awake at night in the same way, only to reassemble himself once the morning arrived.
Maybe there was hope for them – it was Nigel who had explained, one night while laying with his head close enough to Alex’s arm that he could feel the warmth of his breath envelope his skin like a wave, that he believed that he had been reincarnated and had died once before. Nigel seemed at ease as he elaborated as to how God had granted him a second chance at life where he would lay in a tattered blanket in a worn-out bed in a bleary dormitory room for over a thousand more nights so that he could find Alex, Jack, him. There was a light at the end of the tunnel releasing them from their parents, their home, their genotype and their phenotype and their atoms and proteins and amino acids. All that was left was for them to only walk to it. They were vessels and there was love contained within.
When they would kiss, it felt less like something romantic and something more along the lines of cannibalism, an act that would inevitably devolve into biting, for neither know how to love without consuming or swallowing the other. A wound that always answered the blade – their love was not beautiful, it was a terrible and fervid thing, but it could have been.
And it was loving that led Alex to press the blade too tightly to Nigel’s throat, for Nigel was a treasured thing to Alex, and he feared that if he were not to hold Nigel down, Nigel would fall from his grasp and shatter as though he were a delicate toy. The tightening of his own throat, the closing of his own windpipe and the buildup of acid just above his collar confused Alex as to which person was truly holding the scalpel, as the bile that threatened to spill certainly wasn’t Nigel’s.
“Look at you,” Nigel spoke, voice strained under the pressure, “I only need you.”
The blood that threatened to spill from Nigel’s throat was one of the most beautiful sights Alex had ever seen – and he had seen what felt like a thousand ways to bleed, from Nigel’s parents with shotgun wounds that expelled blood with force to the death of the pastor that left no trace of ever occurring save for the smallest dot of blood where the needle broke skin – Nigel’s blood, the way looked on him as he bled and gasped for air under the threat of the blade, was by far his favourite.
“I’m not Jack,” A retort Alex had spoke thousands and thousands and thousands of times – something of a dance, at this point, where Alex would bite at the leash Nigel pulled him by, a mantra of restraint and refusal for the calling, yet never able to yield, relenting against the force of the collar that dragged him.
“But you are,” Nigel, who had been rather unfaced by the whole assault, abruptly shifted in tone at Alex’s persistence, a change that really, Alex should have seen coming. It was always like this, with Nigel – an unflappable demeanor regarding his belief, so sure in his ways that any other possibility had never been considered – they were the rogue and the pike, they always were destined to be, and they always had been. The wounded look Nigel gave Alex was haunting – Nigel was like a hunting dog, except if it was a hunting dog that had been raised with a litter of kittens and was socialized as something cute but in the end could not even escape the villainy his genes foretold him to be. “The card – you remember?”
“How the fuck could I not?”
“Describe it,” Nigel, despite having a blade to his throat and pinned to the dirt, managed to somehow switch from his submissive act effortlessly to regaining dominance over the conversation (and Alex’s head, a tantalizing parasite) with ease.
Alex focused on the blade to the best of his ability, and not the boy beneath him. “The Jack – a playing card. A knave, rogue – lowest of the court cards, a boy, commoner, compared to someone like you,” Alex couldn’t help the hiss at the end, the vision of Nigel swathed in robes, now dirtied, seared permanently into his eyelids. Could murder be considered a form of worship? The tongue was both the vessel to allow for the union of a kiss but an impossibly sharp dagger at the same time.
“Then there was you – the spade, pike, whatever. You said it was an implement, you said you were the tool for me to use, so then why do I feel like I’m the one being puppeteered?”
“Because it can only be you,” the fervor in Nigel’s tone was sickening, it was like a prayer and he wanted to hear it more. “Tell me, do you remember what the Knave held? It was infinity, eternity.”
“But I don’t know how to give you that.”
“You have hands, don’t you?” Nigel smiled upwards at Alex, still not making a move to escape from the blade, laying almost peacefully beneath it.
He would decay so gracefully, his condemnation for loving a sinner such as Alex leaving him a corpse; Alex’s retribution for loving a God would leave him purposeless and wandering without Nigel aside him. Nigel would haunt him like a ghost for all of the eternity Alex granted, each step in the dirt filled. It was a promise.
Nige’s gaze was unfaltering upon Alex. “That’s all you need. That’s all we need.”
Maybe he was dead from the beginning. Someone had to leave first, of course, and Nigel’s body sprawled in the dirt with his arms splayed out as though they were wings would make for a pretty corpse.
Maybe they both were. Alex pressed the scalpel down harder.
It felt an awful lot like suicide.