Chapter Text
The painting in Carlyle’s office was new. Where a simple Jackson Pollock facsimile once stood, now a framed etching of a shipwreck in black waters decorated the wall. It looked authentic, not just a copy. Numbers wondered how much Carlyle had paid for it. Nevermind, the guy never paid for anything himself if he could avoid it. He had probably stolen it.
“I need you two to take care of Frank Marsh.”
Numbers mulled that name in his head. Frank Marsh. Didn’t ring any bells. Was he supposed to recognize it? He scanned Carlyle’s face, who was looking at him impassively behind his square glasses. His bald head had a slight gleam under the light that came in through the window, like his skin was made of wax. Sitting there in his huge office chair, with his hands clasped on top of his desk and his poker face looking at Numbers like he was auditing him, the guy really did look like a robot.
“And who is that?” Numbers replied candidly. If he was going to look like an idiot for not even knowing the names of the people he worked with, so be it. They’d made him get up at six for this meeting and he was slightly hangover, he was not in a state to give a rat’s ass about it.
Carlyle held his gaze for a moment before answering. “I mean Mr. Viper” he clarified. Apparently Numbers’ reaction had been the correct one, because he didn’t comment any further. Of course. Numbers was not supposed to know his colleagues’ real names, save a few exceptions. Oh. So that was a test. That was something that Carlyle liked to do from time to time, creep in trick questions in random conversations to keep his employees in check. Sneaky bastard.
“Didn’t he kill himself?” Numbers asked.
“That’s what we thought. But apparently Mr. Viper has been living the good life in Manassas right under our nose all this time. I want you and Wrench to go there and take him out, quickly and discreetly. You know what to do.”
Numbers sagged on the chair, his shoulder hunched. “Fine, then.” He groaned. “Any information in particular that we need to shake out of him? Bank accounts, names?”
Carlyle shook his head slowly. “No, that part won’t be necessary.”
That statement threw Numbers off. In his experience, almost every job that contained the phrase ‘take him out’ also included a parameter where they were required to extract some information from their target before finishing them. Usually, it was something relating to a large sum of money. He knew that he was toeing a dangerous line for questioning his superior’s orders, but curiosity got the better of him.
“What do you mean?” He asked with incredulity. “There’s nothing you want us to ask him before we cap him for good? Surely you want to know where your money went?”
“There is nothing to ask because there is no money” Carlyle explained very slowly, like Numbers wasn’t very bright and needed to have it spelled out for him. “Right now, Mr. Viper is… how should I put this? He’s a wildcard. A loose end. An itch that needs to be scratched. We don’t like things that we cannot predict in this business. They have a pesky tendency to turn on you sooner or later. And what else can you expect from a snake, anyway?” Carlyle accompanied that sentence with what Numbers assumed was an attempt at a smile. He felt tempted to tell his boss that he shouldn’t bother, emulating human emotions was clearly beyond his range of capabilities. “We want you and Mr. Wrench to nip this in the bud, no fuss made, no questions asked. That’s all.” He pulled a thin folder from a drawer and left it on the desk for Numbers to take. “Here’s all you need to know. Now grab your partner and get going.”
Numbers knew that Carlyle was itching to get him out of his office to clean up the mud that his shoes had left in the carpet. It had been raining the whole morning. Not even a few seconds after closing the door behind him, Numbers heard the buzzing of the handheld vacuum that he knew Carlyle kept under his desk and rolled his eyes. He’d always suspected that his bald boss was a bit of a germaphobe.
He opened the folder and read some of the information on it with a mixture of curiosity and dread. He quickly learned several things previously unknown to him about the other hitman from the scarce information in the pages. A few things made more sense now, but reading it also gave him a sense of unease that he wasn’t used to. This felt personal.
Wrench was waiting for him in an empty conference room with glass walls, leafing through a hunting magazine. The chair was too small for his long legs and he didn’t look very comfortable. To catch his attention, Numbers waved the folder and left it on the glass table in front of him. ‘They want us to take care of Viper’ he signed.
Wrench frowned and took the folder. His eyes scanned the contents of the first document before looking up at his partner again. ‘Didn’t he kill himself?’
‘Apparently not. Looks like he just staged a suicide and then bailed. They never found his body, remember? Pretty clever, if you ask me.’
Frank Marsh, AKA Mr. Viper, had gotten his nickname due to his signature weapon of choice: poison. The man was a walking encyclopedia of toxic substances that could kill a human while making it look like the victim had died of natural causes and left no trace in the body. He was known for carrying around small bags of strange powders and vials of suspiciously looking liquids. However, Viper was no stranger to close-range combat and more rudimentary execution methods; he didn’t always poison his targets. But when he did, it always made for a good story to tell. He had become a bit of a legend in the syndicate before his abrupt departure. Like his chemicals, he was a silent killer, always lurking, waiting for the moment to strike before slithering back to the shadows where he belonged. Numbers had heard that he dipped his knives in rattlesnake venom and that he actually had a degree in Pharmacology. How one went from Pharmacy school to becoming a hitman for the organized crime, Numbers had no idea. But life could do funny things like that sometimes.
That being said, Numbers thought that Viper was overall an alright guy, all things considered. He mostly kept to himself and you could say he had some slight deficiencies in terms of social skills. A lot of the mobsters in the syndicate were reluctant to work with him because they said the guy made them nervous. “One of these days that autistic crackpot is going to blow a fuse and lock us all in the building with a nerve gas bomb, I’m telling you!” Numbers had heard one of them say. And okay, hyperbole much? Viper was resourceful, but there was no way he had the knowledge to make chemical weapons of mass destruction. No way.
Nevertheless, the guy had never been anything other than civil and polite to him and Wrench in the few times they had interacted. The same could not be said about most of the other henchmen they were forced to work with. Wrench couldn’t hear the jokes they made behind his back, but Numbers sure could. They had learned the hard way that it was impractical to pick up fights with every single asshole that dared to insult him or his partner if he expected to make a lasting career in the syndicate.
The only time Numbers had seen Viper lose his cool was when the poison expert had caught Wrench messing with his things. Viper had left his messenger bag on a table for a minute, half-open, and Wrench and Numbers had been sitting there, bored out of their minds. Wrench simply couldn’t help it, he was a very tactile person. He wasn’t actually going to steal anything. But when Viper came back and saw him poking around his bag, he was livid. The look on his face was akin to that of a parent when seeing their child playing with a grenade, Numbers had noted with surprise.
“DON’T TOUCH THAT!” Wrench didn’t hear Viper screaming at him, but everyone else in the building surely did. Numbers had tugged at his partner’s sleeve insistently to draw his attention, already dreading the scolding they were going to get for that. “Do you know what that is? Those are curare darts! Jesus Christ, do you want to accidentally nick yourself and die a slow agonizing death?”
Viper had snatched the bag out of Wrench’s hands and left the room hurriedly, muttering to himself. Shouldn’t have left it lying around, stupid, stupid.
He was a bit quirky like that. A quirky guy that carried around a case of darts with one of the most dangerous neurotoxins in the world. That kind of guy.
Numbers took one look at his partner’s face and knew that they were both reminiscing. Wrench didn’t look happy about that job. Not happy at all.
They exited the building without another word. They had just enough time to go back to their apartment and pack their things before hitting the road. With two whole days of travelling ahead of them, they tacitly agreed to take turns driving. Like the mature adults they were, they decided whose turn was to drive first via rock-paper-scissors. Wrench lost.
They stopped for lunch at a diner that was only being manned by a tall balding man with kind eyes and a plump woman with cat eyeglasses, probably husband and wife. The woman took their order with so much as a grunt of acknowledgement, and then went back behind the register and proceeded to forget about their existence. Her husband, on the other hand, tried to make friendly conversation when he served them their food, asking them if where they were headed to and such, until he took the hint from Numbers’ one-worded answers and left them alone. Numbers figured that they didn’t see many travelers that time of year. He mostly pushed his food around the plate, trying to avoid his partner’s gaze. It was a difficult task. He swore he could feel Wrench’s eyes piercing through his skin, like an ant under a magnifying glass in the July sun.
‘What is it?’ He asked when he grew tired of playing that game. Wrench had a trail of sauce on the corner of his mouth. Numbers took a napkin and wiped it for him. Wrench was taken aback for a moment, but he consented to the fastidious gesture.
‘Did Viper steal Fargo’s money?’ Wrench asked after the napkin was removed from his face.
‘No.’
‘Did he join a rival syndicate?’
‘No.’
‘Did he rat us out to the feds?’
‘No.’
‘Did he put rat poison in Carlyle’s coffee or something?’
‘Not as far as I know, sadly.’
‘Then what’s the big the deal? Why the fuck are they bothering us with this bullshit?’
Numbers looked at his partner sadly. He knew what Wrench was trying to hint at. That the whole endeavor seemed pointless. A needless bloodshed, even by their standards.
‘Because he left.’
He admitted what neither of them wanted to say out loud: that there was no way out of that life. Desertion was a crime punished by death. They had known it all along, but they always tried to keep that little fact out of their minds, convincing themselves that this life was all they wanted. But they could only delude themselves for so long. Numbers could feel them, the nagging doubts that plagued him late at night, the unspoken promises and what-ifs. Maybe it was because he was getting older, but he could feel himself longing for other things, things that their lifestyle could not provide. Sometimes this feeling made him angry at himself, so he overcompensated by being more brutal than necessary on their targets. And each time he did, Wrench would give him this look, not of disgust or disappointment, but like he was confused by him. And in the end it would just leave Numbers feeling empty inside.
These days, he just felt so tired. So, so tired.
‘I actually liked the guy.’ Wrench said after a while. ‘I couldn’t believe it when you told me he had offed himself.’ He literally used the sign for ‘turning off’, which Numbers would have found very amusing if he wasn’t in such a somber mood.
‘Don’t’ Numbers stopped him before he could go on in that vein any further. ‘It’s no use. We have to do this. We need to focus.’
And truth be told, Numbers thought when they were back in the car, he couldn’t believe it either when the news of Mr. Viper’s sudden self-ejection from this world had reached his ears. Their colleague had been acting perfectly normal, until one day, he had simply stopped answering Fargo’s calls. The police of St. Paul had found his car (actually Fargo’s car) abandoned on the outskirts of town, close to the High Bridge. The doors were open and the keys were inside. It was hard to imagine the tale of a hardened killer like Frank Marsh ending with him jumping off a bridge, but on the other hand, the man was known for his frequent bouts of melancholy. The car was empty except for a note in the glove compartment with only five words in it.
I CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE.
As far as suicide notes went, it certainly met the standards, although the wording was a bit vague. Numbers had thought at the time that the guy had made it that way on purpose so that Fargo would get the point without tipping the cops in the process. Surely, if he had written ‘I can’t keep assassinating gun dealers and moneylenders for a living, it’s eating me up’ that would have been a bit of a situation, albeit a very comical one in a way. But in retrospect, Numbers thought, maybe there was a double meaning to the note. Perhaps the suicide was fake, but the intent behind those words was not. Vipers had absolutely meant it. It had never been a goodbye letter; it was simply a declaration of intentions.
Fargo had checked Viper’s apartment. It didn’t look like he had packed anything. There was no evidence of clothes or personal items missing, everything looked perfectly in place. His bank account was intact. All of this coupled with the note and the ominous location where the car had been found made it easy to guess what had happened to Viper. The organization had wisely decided to not report him missing to the authorities. Doing so would only result in long wasted hours that the police would spend searching the depths of the river fruitlessly, only to declare the man legally dead after whatever number of years the law required to do so had passed. And more importantly, it would draw unnecessary attention to the syndicate. There was no question, really. Fargo’s enforcers only existed to Fargo. When they were gone, they were gone for good, to be forgotten forever by the rest of the world. Like they had never existed.
But apparently, the high-ups hadn’t been completely convinced by the circumstances surrounding Mr. Viper’s presumed suicide, because they had investigated further until they had found him. Fargo would always find them. That’s what they did. And not many people besides Wrench and Numbers knew this, but it was no surprise, considering that the man at the top of the organization himself was a top old-school tracker. Or at least, he’d once had been.
They checked in a motel to stay the night. Numbers lied down on his bed without taking his clothes off, staring at the ceiling. He heard Wrench shuffling around the room, changing into his sleeping clothes, checking the bag where they kept their weapons, keeping himself busy. Eventually, Numbers felt the bed dip when his partner climbed in and wrapped himself around him. Numbers sighed and put his arms around the other man’s back. He knew he eventually would have to get up and go take a shower, but he granted himself those few minutes of just laying there with Wrench.
‘That was a good trick, what Viper pulled’ Wrench propped himself up on his elbows and signed with arms tired from driving for hours. ‘He almost had Tripoli fooled.’
‘Yeah’ Numbers admitted. ‘He really took care of all the details. He was very thorough.’
‘He had to leave everything behind. He couldn’t take anything with him, or they would suspect. Can you imagine that? To walk away with just the clothes on your back, so you can start over somewhere else?’
Numbers scoffed. ‘He probably had a secret stash of money hidden somewhere. I bet he planned it all with months in advance.’
‘I still don’t understand what we’re doing here’ Wrench signed with jerky movements. ‘We could all just pretend he’s already dead. I mean, what difference does it make? So he doesn’t want anything to do with Fargo anymore. I say as long as he doesn’t fuck with us, cool. We could be home right now.’
‘Don’t be stupid. That’s not how this works.’ Numbers massaged the bridge of his nose. He shimmied out from under his partner’s body and leaned over to take off his shoes. He felt Wrench shuffle backwards to rest against the headboard. Sighing, he turned around to look at him. ‘You know Viper has always been unpredictable. And a guilty conscience makes you do stupid things. Like turning yourself in to the cops. And then you start talking and talking.’
‘That’s bullshit and you know it’ the look on Wrench’s eyes was intense. ‘He wouldn’t have gone through all that trouble just to rat us out now. The guy was a weirdo, but he wasn’t stupid.’
‘You don’t even know him that well. And neither do I.’
‘I know he saved our asses once.’
‘I don’t make the rules, okay?’ Numbers hoped that his face could express the frustration that his hands couldn’t. ‘Carlyle was very clear. Viper is a potential timebomb. Better safe than sorry.’ He got up from the bed and made his way to the bathroom without looking back at Wrench’s reply.
He took longer than necessary in the shower. When he back into the room with his hair still damp, Wrench was engrossed in a book and pointedly not looking at him. Numbers glanced back at the other, empty bed in the room, unsure. They tended to give each other some space after a fight, a sort of unspoken agreement that they’d developed over the years. Did they just have a fight? He didn’t even know. But clearly standing there like an idiot was not the answer. He went over to Wrench and loomed over him blocking the light of the lamp until his partner was forced to meet his eyes.
‘Look, I-’ His hands fidgeted in the air as Numbers struggled to find the words. He stilled them for a moment and then signed with an earnest look in his eyes. ‘I don’t want us to be angry at each other over something we can’t control.’
Wrench nodded. He looked resigned. ‘If that’s what you think.’
Numbers wanted to say more. A blood debt was still a blood debt. He wanted to say that if he ever had to choose between his partner’s life and anyone else’s, he would always choose Wrench. Even of the other person didn’t really deserve it. But he was tired and he didn’t want to end an already long day with a heavy conversation, so he didn’t say anything.
Numbers clambered over to get in the bed with him, but his partner stopped him with a hand on his chest.
‘You’re not going to bed with your hair wet, you’ll catch a cold’ he said.
‘Okay, mom’ Numbers replied sarcastically, but still went back to the bathroom to towel it off properly.
That night, Numbers dreamed that he was floating above a wide river. He was flying, higher and higher, over grey-blue waters, and he could see dark shapes swimming in the deep, waiting for him to fall and devour him.
The second day of driving was as uneventful as the first one. They bought packaged food in a gas station and ate it at a rest area overlooking a small park. It was a sunny Sunday and there were kids playing on the swings. Numbers sat on a bench and tried not to look like a creep while Wrench picked the red peppers off his sandwich and fed them to the pigeons. Numbers’ lack of appetite continued, but he forced himself to eat. It seemed like the knot of apprehension in his stomach didn’t leave much room for anything else.
‘You’re too old to be a picky eater’ Numbers said. One of the perks of sign language was that talking with his mouth full wasn’t nearly as rude.
‘And you’re too cheap to buy something actually edible instead of these pieces of plaster.’
‘Half of the expenses of this trip are for gas money. I’ll take you somewhere nicer when they don’t send us on a fucking pilgrimage across states for a job.’
A bird with an underdeveloped wing approached them cautiously, hopping on its tiny scaly legs. It picked one of the red peppers that Wrench had discarded in its beak and scurried away before another bird could take it. It was kind of pathetic. That bird clearly couldn’t fly, and Numbers wondered how the hell it had survived that long, having to compete for food and avoiding opportunistic and much quicker predators.
‘You just dragged out that poor little thing’s miserable existence by feeding it for another day. How cruel of you.’
Wrench gave him the side-eye. ‘And you’re a real expert on misery, aren’t you?’
‘Absolutely. I’m a world E-M-I-N-E-N-C-E on all things relating to death and misery. In fact, I’m going to charge you for that piece of wisdom. You’ll receive my bill in the mail.’ His partner grinned a little, and that feeble tug of a smile loosened the knot in his stomach a tiny bit. ‘Finish your sandwich already, we’re running late.’
Wrench had never been one to question orders. He did his job, didn’t make dumb mistakes, didn’t step out of line, never caused any drama, and never complained. He got paid after each job and then he went home with his partner and tried to relish every minute to the maximum until their next assignment came in. It was simple, and it worked for him. Back when he was much younger and Tripoli had started tasking them with more demanding duties than running errands or being lookouts, Wrench had decided that nobody in that syndicate apart from Numbers meant anything to him. It was the only way to cope.
At that point, it was already clear that their lives were irreversibly interwoven with Fargo. It hadn’t happened overnight, of course. But their ‘mentor’ (if he could even be called that, but there was no accurate word to represent the force of nature that had dragged them out of the orphanage and put pocket knives in their then-small hands) had a way to worm himself into people’s heads. Fear was a very compelling force to keep people in line. And everyone feared Moses Tripoli, the mysterious man that had come out of nowhere one cloudy morning and had almost single-handedly taken over the Kansas City and Fargo crime syndicates. Wrench was too young back then, but he remembered the grisly stories. Fear, however, tended to lose its effectiveness as a persuading force over time if you didn’t feed it regularly. It simply wasn’t the best way to keep the reins of a cohesive organization long-term. So either Tripoli kept committing horrific atrocities to those who crossed him from time to time, or he changed his leadership methods drastically. Tripoli was a man that didn’t feel like he needed to choose. He thought he could have it all. So he took both options. He was generous enough with his enforcers that they were usually very loyal to him, but so ruthless with his enemies that most people thought twice before messing with him.
Sort of like a god, someone in the syndicate had said one day. Or maybe a demon you make a deal with. But definitively something not from this world. It didn’t matter anyway. All that Wrench knew is that he had no family, no future prospects, and one day he’d woken up to the news that apparently he was indebted to life to this guy, he just hadn’t gotten the memo yet. Everything Wrench had in the whole world were his childhood friend and his own willingness to live. So Wrench had distanced himself mentally from Fargo, even if he worked for them. The drugs, the black market guns, the petty infights to ascend. He had distanced himself from it all. It was all just a job to him, and the other guys could all rot for what he cared. As long as he had Numbers with him, that was all he needed. He thought that his partner felt more or less the same way, although Numbers preferred his deep cynicism and booze as coping mechanisms.
Neither of them was super crazy about their jobs, if they were to be honest with themselves. But that was all they’d ever known, and it turned out over the years that they were also pretty good at it, so what else were they supposed to do, really?
It wasn’t like they were gunning people down every other week. Most of their tasks were things like safeguarding packages, ensuring that a transaction went through smoothly, or getting information. There were many long boring hours of surveillance involved, too. Every now and then they got the occasional jerk who thought he was smarter than the accountants at Fargo who worked sixteen hours a day and proofread everything three times. And hence these morons would fall under the delusion that they could get away with stealing a few thousand like nobody was going to notice. But those guys were always sleazeballs to begin with, so Wrench didn’t feel much remorse when he had to dispatch one of them. He had read once that according to statistics, the majority of crime victims were also involved in criminal activities themselves. It made sense. If you spent a lot of time mingling with thugs and crooks, you were much more likely to have something nasty happen to you. Play with fire, get burnt. It was only a matter of circumstance that made guy A the evildoer and guy B the victim instead of the other way around. Scumbag criminals killing other scumbag criminals. Who cares, right?
But, still. It was just that sometimes, Wrench couldn’t help wondering how his life would be like if things had been different.
The second night of travelling there was less tension in the air, but they were feeling even more exhausted at the end of the day. The second motel was much cleaner than the first one, and the room smelled fresher too, like it actually had decent ventilation. If they left early in the morning, they expected to reach their destination around noon. That would leave them enough time to devise a plan. Wrench changed into his sleeping clothes while Numbers was in the shower. That was just one of the many things where they contrasted, Wrench liked to shower in the morning, while Numbers was a night shower person. Wrench lied down on the bed that was the closest to the window and thought about the job. He knew that he’d been acting too contrarian and bellicose to Numbers about the whole thing, and his partner didn’t need to deal with that on top of everything else. Maybe Wrench was just trying to force a reaction out of Numbers to force a reaction in himself in return. In the end, Wrench knew that he was going to do this job without much of a hassle. He’d known Viper, and he truly felt some sort of fondness for the guy, the kind one feels towards a familiar and non-hostile face in a world populated by strange and hostile faces, like a small spot of respite. But now Wrench had to do this, for his own survival as much as his partner’s. And he found that the thought of wiping Viper off the face of Earth didn’t upset as much as he thought it would. Maybe that was what was making him protest so much. Maybe the fact that it didn’t affect him as much as he thought it should was what truly made him upset. When had he become so numb to everything? Maybe he was just repressing his emotions.
Or maybe he was just overthinking it.
Numbers came back from the bathroom, a puff of steam dispersing behind him like he was making a grand entrance. He sat down on the other bed, his knees perfectly aligned with the vertical brown and blue stripes of the duvet. Wrench wondered why they even bothered to book rooms with separate beds anymore. Some habits were hard to break, he guessed. He looked at Numbers, and his partner held his gaze, clutching the towel around his waist tightly.
‘What?’ Wrench asked.
Numbers’ eyes had faded completely to black. He leaned forward just a tiny bit, enough for a drop of water to trail down from his clavicle to his belly button. Wrench followed it with his eyes.
‘I can’t sleep right now.’ Numbers said.
‘Me neither.’
The space between the two beds might as well not have existed at all. Wrench left his arms fall down to his sides, palms up in invitation. Numbers arose from his seat and closed the distance in one fluid move, but it didn’t register to Wrench because he was looking at his eyes the whole time. His partner straddled his lap, and Wrench also wondered why they kept these formalities as well. I was a sort of dance they had where one of them would ask for permission indirectly, gauging the waters before initiating things, and the other would respond in kind. Every bit of communication between them was like a secret language. Not just the signing that kept them apart from everyone else, but also the nicknames, the inside jokes, the nonverbal cues they had picked up from each other after spending their whole lives joined at the hip. Codes within codes within codes.
Numbers kissed him like he wanted to fuse with him, like two pieces of molten glass. Wrench shivered at the thought of even trying to build a bond like this from scratch with anyone else.
‘Have you heard about the theory of parallel universes?’ Wrench asked later, when they were sprawled in a tangle of sheets, dazed and content.
Numbers gave him a puzzled look, like he could understand the words individually but the whole sentence in which they had been arranged made no sense to him. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’ve been reading about it. You know about that famous experiment, the one with the cat inside a box that was dead and alive at the same time?’
‘Yes, you mean-’ Numbers started fingerspelling what Wrench assumed was ‘Schrödinger’, but it was too long and he was too lazy so he gave up halfway and shrugged. ‘Yes, I know about it.’
Wrench rolled his eyes. ‘There’s a theory that expands on it that says that there is an infinite number of alternate universes that exist at the same time. Every time someone makes a decision, at every single second, the universe splits. So in one universe you’ve made one choice, but in another there’s another version of you that’s made the opposite choice.’
‘Every single choice? Like when I decide in the morning which cologne to wear or whether to floss or not? Sounds incredibly R-E-D-U-N-D-A-N-T.’
‘But it’s interesting to think about it, don’t you think? If there are other worlds where we made different choices. Maybe there’s a universe where we have completely different lives.’
Numbers smirked at the idea. He stretched on the pillows like a satiated cat, reaching out a pale arm to rub Wrench’s belly seductively. ‘Do you think there’s a universe where I’m a rockstar? Like there’s another version of me that’s rolling in groupies and cocaine?’
Wrench snorted. ‘Sure. And maybe there’s another universe where you’re a writer. Or a teacher. Or a cop.’
‘A cop? As if that would ever happen.’ He waved his hand at the ridiculousness of the idea. ‘No, I think that some things are set in stone. They’re bound to happen one way no matter what you do.’
‘Like what?’
Numbers shrugged, scratching his ear. ‘You know, things.’
‘Come on, what kind of things?’ Wrench prodded.
Numbers shrugged again, refusing to meet his eye. But Wrench was stubborn, so he trailed his fingers down his partner’s chest until he saw the dark hairs on his forearms begin to rise with goosebumps. Numbers’ head jerked to him, his brow furrowed.
‘You just don’t know how to give up, do you?’
‘Come on, rockstar. Things like what?’
Numbers said something, probably some curse word, but Wrench was feeling too sluggish to translate the gesticulation of his partner’s lips into words. Oh, those lips.
‘Like… us.’ Numbers finally answered.
Wrench perked up at those words. ‘Us?’
‘Yes. I think even if we lived an infinite number of lives and made different choices each time, we would always end up together. It has to be that way.’
Wrench shook his head, but the grin on his face persisted. ‘No, I don’t think that’s how it works. Maybe there’s a million worlds where we never even met.’
Numbers pulled him down by the scruff of his neck to kiss him fiercely, and Wrench knew that he was trying to make a point. They broke apart for breath, and his partner looked him in the eye before signing: ‘I don’t think I’d want to live in a world like that.’
Wrench decided that they could have pointless philosophical exchanges like that every night if they always gave Numbers that intense look in his eyes. And if they made him use his tongue like that.
‘But in that life you wouldn’t miss me in the first place, see?’ Wrench pointed out. ‘You can’t miss what you’ve never known.’
Numbers shook his head again and looked down at his hands. ‘I’m not sure about that. I think the feeling would always be there.’
‘What feeling?’
This time, Numbers didn’t make Wrench press him for an answer. He could be charitable when he wanted to. ‘Like something was missing. It would never go away.’
Wrench didn’t think it was possible for the pool of affection in his chest to grow even more. But when they were alone, sometimes Numbers would share with him a glimpse of himself that he never showed to anyone else, and Wrench would feel everything inside him expand, like his thoughts and emotions were spreading to accommodate this everlasting flame in his heart. Like the simple act of loving this man was making his own soul grow larger each day. Even if a good number of days, Wrench felt like he didn’t have a soul at all.
He wrapped his arms around his lover and pinned him down on the bed for an ardent, breathtaking kiss.
‘Look at you getting all sentimental, you master of words.’
And with that, the magic of the moment burst. Numbers glared at him and shook him off with a shove.
‘Suck my dick, idiot.’
Wrench smirked, feeling smug. ‘Already did.’
Numbers rolled his eyes, letting his head fall back on the pillow. He stared at the ceiling for a moment, and his features transitioned from an annoyed frown to a neutral expression and finally to sadness.
‘We’re all just pawns to them.’ Wrench said, reading his partner’s thoughts.
Numbers shrugged, looking defeated. ‘We already knew that.’
‘We’re still doing this, aren’t we?’
‘If it means living another day.’
Wrench turned off the light, but they couldn’t fall asleep for a long while after that.