Life Is A Performance

Yael stitched up Macbeth’s split skin with stolen medical supplies once they escaped the city.

Unfortunately, he had to keep a gag in Macbeth’s mouth at all times to prevent them from mistakenly biting and infecting Yael, but he switched it out regularly to keep it clean and only tore strips from his softest shirts to use. He clothed Macbeth after Macbeth was so rudely stripped in the incinerator. Because his skin was so cold now and his body showed rot, Yael kept him covered up in warm turtlenecks and loose sweatpants that didn’t chafe at his peeling flesh.

It helped disguise Macbeth from a distance, but anyone could tell in reasonable proximity to him that he was infected. His gait staggered. His skin was gray. Black rot crept up from his throat to his chin and jaw. Macbeth didn’t speak anymore but for groans and grunts, and his eyes had a certain vacancy that was hard to mistake.

They still had to lie low. They still had to run far, far away from that facility where Yael found Macbeth so no one could find them and take Macbeth away from him again.

Obviously, it hadn’t been as simple as Yael taking Macbeth back to his car and driving away. His car was undoubtedly still surrounded by dozens of people parked around him and soldiers patrolling the city limits. Escaping was no easier than getting in—it was harder, even, without the girls who were God knows where if they were still even alive—but Yael found the same gap in security that Naz and her friends had pinpointed to sneak in and used it to slip back out.

If one or two people had to get hurt for it…

It didn’t matter. He and Macbeth would be safe. They would be free.

Yael took them north, because that’s what they were supposed to do—explore the eastern seaboard, then head west. So, he decided, they would. The path was still intact. There were just—just setbacks, but Yael would clear the path for them every time. He would walk ahead of Macbeth whether his darling was blind or deafened or half-dead and move the branches in his path so he didn’t trip and scrape his hands and knees.

It was Yael’s duty, now, and he supposed it had been since he met Macbeth for the very first time. He just didn’t know it. 

Macbeth had been quiet about what kinds of destinations he would like to see, but Yael remembered he let slip once that he would like to see mountains. That was all. Just mountains. 

So he would see mountains, Yael decided. He would show Macbeth beautiful mountains.

Somewhere along the Appalachian Trail, after who knows how many days of hiking along backwoods routes and avoiding roads and towns, they came upon this old, abandoned township. A ghost town or something. Yael guessed it had to have been one of those places that had a population less than a hundred people. It was strange. It gave Yael a bit of a chill.

It was the perfect place to headquarter with Macbeth between their first round of explorations.

There was a spacious church nestled in the hills of the ghost town. The dirt path leading to the heavy wooden front doors was so weather worn that it had practically vanished.

Macbeth seemed to like it well enough, at least. He was calmer in the quiet of the old church with its dusty air and creaking beams, more than he was in the woods surrounded by animals.

The woods had worked well for a while. Macbeth would even eat the squirrel and rabbit meat Yael hunted for him.

For a while.

But Macbeth grew more and more displeased with his meals. He began to resent even the rawest, bloodiest catch, lashing out at Yael with disgruntled groans and snarls. He would do that thing again that he did when Yael first found him again at the incinerator, finding a place on Yael’s bared flesh to mouth at, gnawing frantically at his gag in an attempt to break through and reach the skin beneath it.

Their last night on the trail without shelter was when Yael finally realized it. He tried to feed Macbeth some leftover meat, but Macbeth shrieked and tore the meat violently between his fingers, then shoved Yael to the ground, trying to access the juncture between his neck and shoulder.

All Yael could do was murmur, “I’m sorry, I understand,” and hug Macbeth with a sinking feeling in his stomach that must have mimicked Macbeth’s increasingly insatiable hunger.

Macbeth needed human meat like all other infected humans.

Yael couldn’t keep his hunger at bay forever…

…but he tried what he could until they found a solution.

So a routine began, starting their first night in the church.

“Don’t worry, ‘Beth.” Yael spoke tenderly to Macbeth as he knelt before him where he’d secured Macbeth for the night with restraints so he laid on their pile of blankets and pillows. Macbeth didn’t perk up from where he laid, looking awfully sickly and lethargic, until Yael pricked his own finger with the tip of Macbeth’s pocket knife. Macbeth raised his head at the smell, pupils dilated, and sat up, straining against his restraints. They were there for his safety so he didn’t wander off and get himself lost where Yael couldn’t protect him. The sight still broke Yael a little more every time.

He blocked it out.

It’s just Macbeth.

Macbeth understands.

Macbeth wants to be kept safe.

“Hi,” Yael said with a smile. “Snack time. I don’t have much yet, but I’m going to give you something to hold off the worst of your hunger until I do.” He raised a can of cold tomato soup that he’d found in the town and shook it around playfully. “This is mine. Don’t worry. I won’t force you to drink such paltry offerings,” he teased.

In his head, Macbeth rolled his eyes and shot back, How kind of you.

Yael’s heart fluttered happily.

It was what he always imagined, their little trip together.

Freedom.

Together. Yes.

While a little stream of blood ran down Yael’s pinky finger where he pricked himself, Macbeth watched, tracking the path like a starved animal.

Yael thought he’d better get to work, so he said, “Just a moment. That’s not all you’re getting, I promise.”

He drew a bottle of stolen whiskey from his bag and splashed it over a spot on his arm, then took his lighter from his pocket and heated the blade of the knife with it. 

Then, without a doubt lingering in his mind, he began cutting into the fatty part of his upper arm.

It wasn’t shallow. It took effort to drag the blade through tissue. Yael noted, with clenched teeth and teary eyes, that this was a lot harder than a quick slash across the hand.

But he would do it for Macbeth.

“I w-would have done part of my thigh instead,” he gritted out, beaming at Macbeth as tears streamed down his face and blood gushed from his arm, “but in case this gets infected, it can’t be my leg. I at least need my legs. You get it?”

Macbeth stared at the deep wound. That foam was already beginning to trickle from his lips in a steady drip.

Good. He had an appetite for it. He hadn’t had one for all the rodents and birds as of late.

“There,” Yael choked out when a roughly jagged square-shaped strip of his skin came loose, and he peeled it away. He didn’t look at it. He didn’t look at the wound it left, either. Right now he was running on pure adrenaline, and it kept him from vomiting all over the floor and their makeshift bed from the agony. Instead, he was just happy that he could provide something.

“Say ahh,” Yael said, hooking a thumb under the gag to lift it for just a second—

—enough time to slip the bloody, wet flesh into Macbeth’s mouth and then yank his hand away so he wasn’t bitten.

Macbeth chewed once, then made a weak choking sound as if overcome and devoured Yael’s skin ravenously. Within seconds, he was swallowing, and Yael quickly placed one hand on his jaw to hold his mouth open as he wrangled the gag back into place.

“There.” Yael panted, his heart racing, arm shaking. “There, don’t worry, ‘Beth. I have a first aid kit. This will be fixed like nothing even happened.”

While Macbeth slouched in relief, his hunger sated for now, Yael went about tending to the deep, raw wound where a sizable chunk of his flesh was missing. He poured just a little bit of water from his canteen over the bleeding mess, enough to wash it off a little, and held gauze over the wound to slow the bleeding. After moments of this left in companionable silence, Yael placed fresh gauze over the wound and wrapped it.

“All better,” he chirped. 

Of course, the pain didn’t go away.

He ignored it.

“I almost forgot…” Yael reached excitedly for his bag and pulled his Polaroid camera out. “I got some pictures of the range while we were hiking. There were a few pretty birds, but I couldn’t waste our film on anything minor… but look. Look how beautiful. They came out really well.” He pressed a photo into Macbeth’s limp hand. “Isn’t it beautiful up here? It’s exactly what you wanted, Macbeth.”

He crawled closer to his companion and gently pulled him down to lie next to him in the blankets. Yael held up the photos, watching with a dreamy sigh as they caught the moonlight spilling in through the old, dirty stained glass of Saint Mary in the church wall.

It was beautiful.

It was...

“Maybe it’s not what we expected,” he whispered to Macbeth like they were sharing secrets right in the domain of Christ, like a confessional— “but I think it’s beautiful, regardless. You deserve to see beautiful things.”

He rolled over to stare at Macbeth’s golden eyes, which were hazy and stared right past the photos to the stained glass.

Yael smiled.

He could almost hear Macbeth saying, Yeah. It really is beautiful.

So it ended like this:

There were stories of a boy in the mountains who cut people down with an ax and stripped the supple flesh from their bones.

The first one found was a married couple of ranchers whose animals were left untouched.

The second was a hiker who simply disappeared in the area—not even his bones were ever found.

The third was a single man camping in the wilderness to escape the swaths of infected flooding the cities and towns.

And more missing.

Again and again.

Months went by, and bodies dropped.

For a while, the cases were ignored, because there were just too many people dying across the whole nation, too many people becoming infected, to focus on just a few bodies in the mountains.

And when state troopers finally tracked reports of suspicious individuals spotted in that shady ghost town a few miles off the trail, when they found traces of DNA left in the old church, it was already vacated.

When it ended, the boy was found in an abandoned apartment complex in the Carolinas in a city where the citizens had been evacuated due to infected numbers but for those who refused to give up their homes.

There, the soldiers raided the place.

They found the boy, shockingly young with the ends of his hair purple and his roots growing in brown. His arms were covered in bandages. Later, they found bandages over his stomach, too. There were pieces cut out of him, scarred over with thick, ropy tissue.

And they found the boy at night, startled awake in a pile of blankets with one of the infected hovering over him, arms bracketing his head, and teeth bared when he saw the troopers. 

Immediately, the zombie, grotesque and dangerous as he was, was wrestled to the ground, gagged and chained up. There was an industry for things like him after all these months. There was a way for profit to be gained from wrangling them up. Besides, the job was to find the killer, not a zombie.

As for the boy, it didn’t matter if he was damaged goods.

They beat him unconscious before he was shipped back to his home state where they would sentence him.

Only after he was unconscious did they find the freezer with the body parts.

Food for a zombie.

The world swayed before Inna in a sickening blur of colors and nausea.

Yael didn’t hold back. He stated every detail plainly. He confessed to his crimes, his sins, as if they were nothing.

I just looked at the cattle and the sheep, Yael had told him, his expression blank. And I thought, you know, it wasn’t so different, butchering a human for meat. That’s what they would have done to the animals. Why should they not have had to ever fear the same fate?

Macbeth, infected. Taken away by soldiers.

Macbeth, eating… eating…

“You’re sick,” Inna choked out. Why would Yael tell her this? How could he? That her childhood friend was dead was all she needed to know. She didn’t need to know the rest, didn’t need to know that Yael had fed her friend human flesh and killed people for that flesh. This wasn’t Inna’s place. She never should have agreed to talk to the patient even if Eve wanted her to. Or, the moment she saw it was Yael, she should have left.

“You’re disgusting,” she whispered. Inna turned away from him, shaking her head so harshly that her hair tie began to free itself from its tangles. “That’s—that’s disgusting! You deserve prison, you deserve this. I’m not giving you your checkup. Find someone else for this. Find someone who pities you. You’re sick.”

Yael’s voice was quiet, and it had taken on a strange quality over the course of his story—not quite hoarse, but hollow, his tongue tripping over his syllables. “Don’t be mad, Innamorati, just because I did what you didn’t. I stayed with Macbeth.” A flash of anger and white hot guilt flashed through Inna’s core. “I did what I had to do to save him. And then I did what I could to keep him alive.”

“But he’s not!” Inna snapped. She rounded on Yael, jabbing her finger at him furiously. “If it’s how you say it is, then Macbeth is dead, Yael! The infected aren’t just sick. They’re gone. They’re walking corpses. The media’s labeled them zombies for a reason, Yael, they’re fucking dead!” 

Yael stared at her. He looked so different from high school. His bare arms were scarred to all hell. His pallor was pale and strange like he was coming down with the flu; he probably was, after so long on the run. His neck and face were horribly bruised, and hardly a hint of his trademark purple dye remained in his hair.

When he spoke, he almost sounded sympathetic. “You’re crying.”

“No, I’m—“ She turned away hastily, touching her face to find it soaked.

Macbeth, something weak and miserable in her brain wailed. If I only hadn’t left him. If I’d just dealt with my own shit and focused on him. If I hadn’t been—so scared—of seeing myself in my friend who managed to find himself while I—just…

No.

Now was not the time.

She shut the voice down and glared at Yael, feeling with every cell in her body that she could kill him and not feel an ounce of remorse.

“You did this to him,” she accused, her jaw trembling. “You should have to live with the consequences.”

“I loved him,” Yael shot back. Then, again, his voice slurring, “Love ‘im.”

Inna bristled—

—then went still, something in the back of her mind ringing out like a bell, a warning, a reminder.

Her mother’s words.

The same words that could be found on one of those stupid informational flyers.

ONCE BITTEN TURN YOURSELF IN FOR QUARANTING + EXPERIMENTAL CURING IMMEDIATELY BEFORE SYMPTOMS SET IN!!!

And in smaller print:

Symptoms include lethargy, excessive sweating, lack of control over muscles, numbness at or around infection site, delusions, hallucinations, and excessive saliva. ONCE SYMPTOMS SET IN, IT IS TOO LATE!!! TURN YOURSELF IN IMMEDIATELY!!!

“Sir.”

Inna’s arm dropped where she’d been gesturing frantically. Yael lifted his head a little, swallowing.

Inna stared at the bob of his throat. Excessive saliva. And she had a feeling. She just had this feeling. It was risky, but if she could identify it herself after the special unit missed it, her mother would be impressed. She wouldn’t be able to control Inna so much, knowing how capable she was. “Yael. I need you to open your mouth. I’m going to shine a light in there. I need to see something.”

She quickly grabbed a small flashlight from the table, used for examining the insides of patients’ mouths and ears. When she turned back around, Yael still just stared at her.

Inna clicked the light on and shined it at him, hissing, “Open. Now.”

Yael opened.

And fuck.

Fuck. Fuck. She knew it. She fucking knew it. Of course they didn’t check the inside of his mouth for a bite. Why would they? There had been no recorded patients to have a bite there.

But there it was. 

Teeth marks ringing around Yael’s tongue.

The marks were festering. They were blackening around the edges. Yael must not have noticed because the rot seemed to numb the bite site—a biological imperative for the zombies to spread rapidly.

Either that or Yael was lying to her.

He’d been nothing but painfully and horrifically truthful while telling Inna what happened to Macbeth, but Inna already knew how far Yael was willing to go to keep Macbeth safe. Maybe he was still deluded into believing he could get out of this and find him.

And like nothing crazy was happening, nothing out of the ordinary at all, Yael jerked forward and then almost tiredly sunk his teeth into Inna’s fingers.

Inna shrieked, and Yael unclamped his teeth like even he was surprised.

“What the fuck,” Inna hissed. She looked at her fingers. The bite was almost—almost gentle. She couldn’t see any blood. It wouldn’t take, would it? It couldn’t take. No.

Yael stuck his tongue out and ran his fingertips over it carefully, locating the site of the bite marks and the flesh necrotizing around it. For a moment, shock flashed over his face.

Then he huffed out something like an awed laugh.

“He bit me,” he breathed. “I must have forgotten what happened when they hit my head…”

“You bit me,” Inna shot back, her voice shaking, near hysterics. “Why the fuck—? You bit me. You bit me.”

“I’m sorry.” Yael almost did sound sorry. Almost. “I wasn’t thinking. But… Macbeth could still be alive, and this—this is the only way I can have any chance of getting out of here. I’m sorry.”

No. No. Why did I fucking risk that, what was I thinking, why, why— 

“I’ll report you,” Inna stammered. “They’ll kill you.”

“And you,” Yael shot back. “You know what they do to the infected. I told you the truth. They burn them. That’s what they’ll do to me, to Macbeth, and to you. Your mother being a nurse won’t save you. The only way out is to free us both and run for it or I’ll tell them you’re bitten too. Put fresh gloves on to hide the bite. Undo my cuffs. Let me go.”

Inna stared, horrified.

They were naked and had clearly been opened up. Their insides were red and glistening even in the dim light. Chunks of them were missing. Yael could see the rot forming in Macbeth’s body.

She shuddered and steadied herself against the counter.

She hated him.

She hated him.

She wanted to fucking kill him. It would be easy. She could just kill him and tell them it was self defense because he was infected, and they would probably believe her.

That was the horrible thing. Inna could probably do it if she was brave enough. She could get away with it.

But she didn’t.

She gripped her hair by the roots, her vision blurring. And she had only just been bitten. No one would show symptoms this early. No, it was all panic and horror at her own fuckup, not just this one but fuckup after fuckup after fuckup leading her to this moment.

Inna drew in a shaky breath. She grabbed a pair of scissors from the desk.

For a moment, Yael’s increasingly hazy eyes focused on Inna’s hand, going still.

He knows I could.

He knows I could.

He knows I could.

She approached him and stared him down, a part of Inna wishing for him to feel the fear that she could murder him in the middle of the exam room if she wanted to.

Instead, Yael relaxed.

He stared back with an unyielding yet softened look.

He knows I won’t.

She gritted her teeth, released a shaky breath, and sliced through the thick cuffs keeping Yael tethered to the table.

Nobody would ever know it, not Yael, not Innamorati, but that day when Macbeth left for the city, he was desperately seeking his way out.

It wasn’t because he didn’t want to be with Yael. It wasn’t because he didn’t want that future together that Yael spoke of so fondly.

It was, in fact, that he wanted it very badly.

Macbeth wanted Yael, wanted them to be together forever, wanted Yael to never leave him or sideline him for another. Yael’s love was his to hold onto, and the fact that he couldn’t control Yael’s wanderlust terrified him. Macbeth always wondered how a person like Yael, full of passion and curiosity, could have fallen for someone like them. Someone who pushed people away. Someone who couldn’t ever express their feelings like they wanted to. Someone who had no remaining ambition for life, who was already exhausted of the whole affair by age sixteen, who would just suck the life out of someone like Yael.

But Yael did.

That terrified Macbeth more than if he hadn’t, because when he finally had someone like Yael, he found it harder with each passing day to stomach the idea of letting go.

The idea hurt so much, in fact, that Macbeth would rather die than have to experience such a thing, to watch Yael fall for humanity at large during their travels and realize he was made for more than Macbeth.

He would rather Yael died too than to go on to love another.

So Macbeth roamed the city and contemplated how he could take himself and Yael before their road trip was to begin.

How he could convince Yael to go with him willingly. He didn’t want to take Yael by force. Not at all. He didn’t know if he could even do it.

But… if it was just… a pact, like the one Yael made for him all those months ago…

Macbeth contemplated, and considered, and anguished, and thought he must be the worst person in the world. 

He was going to give up. To just buy a stupid new suitcase and some groceries to have something to show for his hours-long excursion when he returned home. Macbeth wasn’t lying when he said he truly and genuinely was going to leave it, to let it lie, because in his heart, he couldn’t do it.

But that was when the sirens started.

When his phone blared an alert.

And he didn’t have to do this either when he realized what was happening. There wasn’t a single one of these infected persons in sight who were apparently spreading in great swarms. He could go inside. Seek shelter as recommended. He could text Yael and say he was being held up in the city, but that he was safe, and he would return as soon as possible.

Macbeth didn’t do any of those things.

Macbeth had spent his whole life wishing for the kind of love and companionship that he found with Yael.

He finally had it.

And he wouldn’t lose it.

If this was the way that presented itself… if he could just become someone, something that Yael couldn’t abandon, couldn’t dream of leaving for so much as a second out of the guilt in his heart…

Macbeth didn’t shelter. 

He read the report of the blocks of the city that were under attack by this surge of horrifically sick, decayed humans who had become something else entirely.

And Macbeth just started walking towards them.

ZOMBIE STAGE

Round 1 - Yael vs. Macbeth

Round 2 - Innamorati vs. Toki

Round 3 - Winners Compete!

Where the Show Never Ends!

~

Yael did as he said he would that morning and called the police.

As the news report and emergency alerts told him, the operator explained that there was a sudden and extreme public health emergency breaking out largely in metropolitan areas throughout the country. They explained that due to affected areas being locked down to prevent a rapid spread of the unidentified virus, Macbeth could be quarantined inside the city and out of power on his cell phone, without a charger and unable to use pay phones since the lines were being kept open for emergency calls only. They said they would keep authorities on the lookout for a man of Macbeth’s description.

It didn’t comfort Yael.

He didn’t care about traveling anymore. He didn’t care that they wouldn’t be able to do so now with a potentially international emergency like this going on. All he cared about–all he would ever, ever care about when he got Macbeth back (if he got Macbeth back)–was them. Nobody else mattered. Nobody else mattered compared to Macbeth at all. 

As Yael sat in his house, his quiet house with his parents gone and Macbeth missing, the world seemed so ugly all on his own.

He’d always hated being alone.

He hated it so much.

All he did was watch the news and keep his phone charged and in his hand with the volume cranked to the maximum in case he got a call. Yael watched on his screen as chaos unfolded behind a camera and all he could do was watch. 

Korea had become almost completely overrun within a matter of hours.

Infections spread over borders and overseas. 

The reporters called it a real life zombie outbreak.

There were already people speculating if it was the end of the world.

Yael just felt numb, watching it all play out. While the authorities were filmed scrambling to neutralize the infected and take them in to study the source of infection, currently speculated to be the result of some strange mineral believed to be spotted in freshly rotted bodies, Yael just stared at his TV, stared at his phone, and waited for his life to go back to normal, because This Wasn’t How It Was Supposed To Go.

This wasn’t the path.

Because he knew the path he was meant for. He’d known it ever since he became healthy enough to put together cohesive thoughts. Yael was meant for something bigger than this, he and Macbeth together. They were meant for something better than–than–

–living in a broken world where there was no future. A world where Macbeth’s future could already be–

Yael hit himself so hard in the forehead that he saw stars, thinking nononononononono we’re not thinking about that. Shut up. Shut up.

Night came. It passed at the speed of molasses. The news rattled on. This is the apocalypse. Yael’s phone gave him all the wrong notifications. I don’t care about the alerts. I don’t want them. I don’t care about my parents texting me to see if I’m alive. I’m not right now. If he doesn’t come back to me, I won’t be. He hit himself over and over and over to stop the bad thoughts, he wasn’t supposed to have bad thoughts anymore, stop it. Stop. His whole forehead was bruised by early morning light. His ribs were, too.

No news on Macbeth.

No calls. 

No texts.

He couldn’t take it.

Yael wouldn’t just sit there any longer. He would find Macbeth himself. If Macbeth was stuck in the city, if he was in danger, Yael would find him and get him out of there. 

Yes. This made sense. This was why he’d already packed his bags in preparation for his road trip with Macbeth. It readied him for this. This was his new path. He just grabbed the bag with his necessities–clothes, toiletries, his meds, extra shoes–and he added ziplock bags of cereal, crackers, granola bars, and any other nonperishables he could find that would fit in his bag. Just in case. He would bring Macbeth home soon, but in case–in case it just took a while–

Yael filled a few bottles of water and stuffed them inside too. His parents didn’t believe in gun ownership, which was… unfortunate, at this particular moment where Yael could use something to arm himself with in case things got bad, but that was fine.

He grabbed the ax out behind the house that they used to chop the wood for their fireplace.

He packed up his car and drove north to the city with the ax under a blanket on the floor, the one he and Macbeth always cuddled under when they watched TV together. Yael had his bag in the passenger seat.

He drove until the sun was at its zenith in the sky, until he reached the jam of cars trying to get into the city. Because—of course. There were people just like Yael trying to rescue their loved ones from the battleground beyond the checkpoints erected outside of the city, swarming with soldiers. People just like him were afraid that their loved ones were already lost. They begged the soldiers to let them in. They flashed any IDs they had to steal their way inside; ministry cards, police badges, anything, anything, please, I don’t care what happens to me, let me in there or let my mother, father, brother, sister, child, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, let them leave.

No one let them leave.

Yael watched car after car in the line be forced to turn around. He watched countless screaming people be handcuffed and thrown into vans full of other protestors for trying to make it past the checkpoint.

Yael didn’t bother with the line. He watched these proceedings and then left his car in a field of other parked vehicles. He lit up a cigarette and closed his eyes.

An overwhelming admittance of defeat threatened to break over his mind like a tidal wave.

Yael was drowning again, his lungs constricting without any help from the smoke at all, his mouth gasping as tears sprang forth and he began to flail, he hit the steering wheel, hit the window so hard his knuckles split open, he tore strands of hair from his head and clawed marks into his face, screaming into his fist jammed into his mouth so he bit it bloody—

There was a knock on his window that wasn’t his own.

Yael gasped for air and looked, hand jumping back to the covered ax—

—and the person by his window pulled her mask down and removed her shades, and—

“Naz?” he croaked.

His stepsister. The girl who graduated years ago and returned home so rarely. Who didn’t know much about Yael and yet knew too much. Did she… look for him?

She motioned for him to roll down the window. Yael did.

“Yael?” she asked when he complied, “is that you? Are you okay? I’m—“

Normally Yael wouldn’t have done this—but he was raw, like an exposed nerve, like he’d been flayed open, exposing all his organs, all his weaknesses that said HimHimHimHim—

And he gripped her shoulders and dragged her down into a crushing hug, sobbing into the older girl’s shoulder.

They planned it that night.

The next night, one of the girls with Naz, the one with white hair, incited the riot near the main blockade off the interstate. Yael, Naz with her rainbow braces and pink converse, Naz with her quick remedies for teary, swollen faces, Naz who wrinkled her nose at the smell of smoke and weed on Yael’s clothes and taught him how to get rid of the smell before school—and for her benefit, she joked—and the dark-haired girl who Yael occasionally saw with Inna and her friend Monica in school, both this girl and Monica whom Yael mostly only knew because Macbeth disliked them for taking up his first friend’s time and stealing her away…

…snuck through the barrier in the chaos before separating.

Maybe they would have allowed Yael to stick with them and help them seek out their friend in the city. That was why they were there, after all. It wasn’t for Yael. It was for a girl.

He knew Naz would let him.

But Yael wouldn’t have asked.

He couldn’t waste time.

Yael’s sole mission was to find Macbeth, and Naz’s was elsewhere.

They wished each other good luck when they parted ways, and Yael didn’t see her again.

Soldiers on foot and in humvees and helicopters with spotlights patrolled the streets for infected citizens and those attempting to break curfew. The penalty was clear by the hastily constructed signs for breaking said curfew: Yael would immediately be arrested, and if he resisted, he would be shot. By daylight, Yael laid low and sifted through the rotting bodies in abandoned buildings and tunnels, hoping Macbeth’s broken body wouldn’t be there.

By night, he crept around the streets and alleys, trying to feel confident as his arms shook with the effort of carrying his weapon.

The time blurred. The days and nights blended together. He started to forget to eat. To swallow a little pill that kept his sanity stitched together.

Yael’s first encounter with someone who got in the way of his path wasn’t even one of the infected humans with those strange, hard, glittering growths bulging from their bodies. Instead, it was a lone soldier on patrol.

Yael didn’t see him until it was too late. Suddenly the trooper just rounded a corner, flashlight pointed straight ahead, and Yael had no time to react until the beam landed on him.

He froze.

The soldier froze.

Yael couldn’t see the soldier’s face, blinded as he was by the light. But he did see his movements. He heard the man’s gasp and watched him raise a gun. Lethargy made Yael’s body want to stay still, to submit, to give up. Macbeth was probably dead. He was probably dead.

But probably wasn’t good enough confirmation. If it was over, it was over.

Until then…

Macbeth wasn’t dead.

And Yael had a chance.

So he didn’t think when he clumsily swung the ax out wide for the weapon in the soldier’s hands.

He didn’t comprehend when the blade lodged itself in the man’s chest with a strange squelch.

He just… didn’t think.

All he cared about–all he would ever, ever care about when he got Macbeth back was them. 

Nobody else mattered. Nobody else mattered compared to Macbeth at all. 

The man staggered forward, and Yael, startled, let go of the handle. 

The soldier fell forward into the ax, and he croaked wetly, blood spurting from his mouth, when it lodged the ax deeper into his body. Yael stared, motionless, as the man twitched and gagged and bled a puddle on the cement of the alleyway until he ceased his movements.

Yael… still… needed the ax. That’s what he focused on. He… would need it. Still. He had to get it out.

His shoe was already soaked with the life he just took, so—he figured, he might as well. He rolled the man over with his foot, his body quivering with adrenaline. The flashlight had fallen from the man’s loose grasp, and that had to be helpful too, a flashlight with working batteries, so Yael grabbed it from the sticky puddle of blood. Something… curious gripped him, and he shone the flashlight on the soldier’s pale, lifeless face.

He looked young. Maybe younger than Yael, like a teenager recruited straight out of high school. At the very least, he wasn’t older than Yael. No. He couldn’t have been.

Yael almost dropped the flashlight from his hands, which trembled violently. Nausea swept over him, and he didn’t really puke—there wasn’t enough food in his stomach—but bile surged up in his throat and dribbled from his lips.

Yael coughed, spitting the discolored spit to the side. He stuffed the handle of the flashlight between the waistband of his pants and his boxers, then, taking a deep breath, he gripped the handle of the ax.

Nobody else mattered. Nobody else mattered compared to Macbeth at all. 

Determined, he ripped his weapon out from the young man’s chest cavity, eyes squeezed shut to block out the sight of the gore and pretend he didn’t notice the new but unmistakable feeling of the blade scraping against bone.

Yael almost left. He stumbled away from the cooling body, wobbling from the weight of hefting the ax. Then something occurred to him—and he hesitated.

He knelt by the soldier’s corpse and drew the government ID, radio and walkie talkie from his vest and the gun from his rigid hand. Might as well have a ranged weapon. He found spare bullets in the man’s pockets too and stuffed them in his own pants pocket.

And he steeled himself.

And he reached into the man's splattered torso and scooped up enough gore to smear over his own face and body.

Yael listened to the radio and walkie talkie every break he had, forcing himself to stay awake for what he could only assume was over twenty-four hours straight.

When he finally absorbed something, something he knew had to mean something, he didn’t wait. If his suspicions were true, he couldn’t afford to wait.

He could already have waited too long.

Yael tracked down one of the trucks shipping the captured infected off. For Macbeth. This was for Macbeth.

He mimicked the staggering gait of the zombies he’d spotted in his careful observations, walking into the path of the officers.

They fell for it, as messy as he was with bits of viscera and clumps of thick blood covering his face and neck.

They tranquilized him with a dart. It was exactly as he’d seen them do with the others.

When he woke up, his mind was still fuzzy from the agent, but he was aware. He wasn’t dead, and he hadn’t been bitten. That was enough. 

As he suspected, they removed Yael’s backpack, probably storing it up front with them in the truck. Yael was hogtied in the back, his wrists and ankles already horribly itchy and raw. There was some kind of gag strapped in his mouth, secured by thick layers of duct tape over his mouth. 

And–

And he was surrounded by gagged and tied up corpses that groaned and gnashed at their gags, thrashed against their restraints, and smelled as awful as Yael himself with dried gore all over his body, but–but worse. Worse. Like raw meat left outside of the freezer for too long. 

Yael spent his whole life being treated with all sorts of medicines and types of therapies by doctors. Cognitive behavioral. EMDR. Electroconvulsive. All of them were an effort to make him realize that he was alive, not dead. He was alive. Eventually, he began to believe it. Yael’s brain chemistry shifted into the right place. It finally agreed with his body that he breathed and thought and felt. Meeting Macbeth opened his world so that he was living too, actively doing the thing rather than just experiencing it. 

Now he laid among dead bodies, posed and disposed of like a dead body, smelling like a dead body, feeling like he was no different than a dead body.

All he could do for the ride was to close his eyes and dry heave into his gag until he couldn’t breathe and try to stay conscious.

When the movement of the truck stopped, when it was finally over, he forced himself to relax his muscles and go limp and jagged once more when the soldiers began to drag the rotting bodies around him down the ramp.

Yael smelled smoke.

He was dragged out just like the others and strapped to some strange, cold surface, and they wheeled him into a building. The smell of smoke got stronger the further they pushed him in. Yael forced himself to stay calm. He was calm.

They pushed him into a musty room crowded with bodies on tables. Yael strained his eyes to survey the room. 

There were surgical tools.

They were going to cut them open.

Then…

Smoke.

They burned them in the incinerator. That was what Yael heard on the radio. Incinerator.

Hours passed like seconds before someone in a hazmat suit entered the room, and Yael’s heart rate spiked.

They didn’t even say anything. Corpses didn’t get explanations on what would be done to their flesh. They just had to lie there and take it.

Yael watched, eyes wide, as she approached a young boy with choppy brown hair–it’s not Macbeth, it’s not Macbeth–and she just–cut his clothes off and cut into him from his soft belly into guts. 

Yael had to show her that he was alive.

The agony of listening to the others thrash and moan had sweat running down Yael’s face and neck in rivulets. The suited figure dug into their bodies, lifting their organs out, pieces of rot, cutting to those glimmering masses within and scooping them out with blackened flesh still clinging to them. 

When the figure reached him, tools uncleaned–because corpses didn’t get clean tools for their flesh–Yael tried to shout out.

They didn’t seem to register this as any different from the others.

The fabric shavers sliced through his bloodied shirt. Hands felt over his flesh, seeking a point of rot. When it skimmed over his chest, Yael pushed desperately into the point of contact.

The hand paused over his heartbeat.

The dead didn’t have heartbeats.

I’m alive.

For the first time, instead of trying to convince the people around him that he truly knew, deep down, that he was dead, he was trying to show them his proof of life, if only so he could have Macbeth’s.

The hand jerked away like Yael’s flesh was on fire. It may as well be based on the difference in warmth from that of a corpse.

A feminine voice pierced through the muffled sound the mask over their face produced and gasped, “Are you alive?”

So Yael nodded like his life–

–well, depended on it.

Immediately, in a panic, they shoved the cart of tools aside and worked at the straps holding his wrists, ankles, and torso down. They reached to undo his gag, but hesitated.

The panic had subsided, Yael supposed. And they realized he could still be dangerous even though he was alive.

He wished that wasn’t true… but right now, he had no time to waste.

So it had to be true.

He didn’t want to kill them, so he tried not to. Yael alone wasn’t strong enough to knock someone out, but hefting the medical cart with all his might and hitting the suited person over the head with it did it. The tools clattered to the ground noisily. He could only hope the sounds of more screaming throughout the facility masked it. 

Yael undid the suit and mask from the unconscious body and wrestled it onto himself. This wouldn’t work forever, but maybe it would buy him enough time to check the other rooms. If Macbeth was somewhere here in this place where the infected of the city were disposed of, if he was… one of them… Yael had to find him soon.

So Yael checked through every window. Room to room. He peered through the windows on the metal doors where the infected wailed. He looked for Macbeth’s hair. His body. His eyes. He listened for his voice.

Yael’s mask began to fog up as he hyperventilated and lost all pretense of disguising himself. He began to run.

Where are you? Are you already gone? Did I fail you? How could I have failed you? How can you be gone?

Through the window at the very end of it all, he couldn’t see a thing. It was smoke. Smoke that blocked his view.

Is your body already ash?

Yael rattled the door. Nothing. His breath hitched into a hiccup of panic, and he dug around for the keys or a card that the person in the suit before him must have had. He found a card. He jammed it into an electric lock, first the wrong way in his haste, then flipped, and the lock clicked.

Please be alive. If you’re in here, please be alive.

There was the machine.

There was the pile of dismembered bodies thrown haphazardly over the others on a conveyor belt, gagged and tied up.

And Yael’s eyes found them through the smoke of burning bodies.

They were naked and had clearly been opened up. Their insides were red and glistening even in the dim light. Chunks of them were missing. Yael could see the rot forming in Macbeth’s body.

But that was Yael’s Macbeth.

He climbed over the barrier and pulled Macbeth off the belt with all the tenderness of a parent holding their newborn. It disrupted the bodies with limbs strewn over and under Macbeth. One body rolled right off the belt and landed on their side, their intestines spilling out with the motion.

But those were just corpses. 

And this was Macbeth.

Yael clambered back over the wall, lowering himself to his knees with Macbeth’s limp form tucked against his chest lovingly. He didn’t care that the room was smoky, or that it smelled like cooked meat. 

Yael ripped the mask off of his face, lowered his hood, and sobbed.

Not out of grief.

It was relief.

Love.

If this wasn’t love, what was?

“You’re okay,” he choked out. Macbeth’s eyes were hazy, his pupils blown wide, a film over the glaze in his eyes like he wasn’t quite aware what was happening. That was okay. Yael would make him okay.

Macbeth’s eyes focused on him, and his pupils swallowed his irises, foamy spit dripping from his mouth.

Tears ran down Yael’s face, sweat and snot and salt and dried blood making him into an utter mess. He didn’t care. He wiped the spit from Macbeth’s chin tenderly and pulled his head to rest in the crook of his neck.

“You’re okay,” he whispered, and this time, it was to comfort Macbeth with the knowledge rather than himself. “Shhh. I’ve got you now. I’ll never let you go again.” Tilting his head, Yael nudged their foreheads and noses together. “Never.”

A tremor ran through the body in Yael’s arms, warm enough from the heat of the room to be alive.

In a sudden, jerky movement, Macbeth thrashed forward, knocking his jaw against Yael’s so hard that Yael bit his own tongue bloody, and Macbeth’s gagged mouth landed on the corner of Yael’s, more foam spilling out as his lips moved frantically around the gag.

His upper lip brushed against Yael’s bottom lip, and Yael jolted, shuddered, and stayed as still as he could.

Macbeth—knew enough of him to try to kiss him. He had to.

“Do you really like me?” Macbeth glanced away, scowling. “Then try again.” He cleared his throat and looked back at Yael through his lashes. “That one was awful.”

Yael brought his hands to Macbeth’s jaw and tilted his head, then kissed the cloth knotted over his teeth and tongue.

~

Yaelbeth is Mizisuaing it OUT

Once again tagging @lulling-riot @awaggaa @nottoonedin @fl0wers4herfriends @ivanttakethis @4listr

By spring of Yael’s final year of high school, he’d had a growth spurt that put him only a few centimeters below Macbeth in height, his hair was curling from the humidity of the approaching summer, and his eyes were brighter when he looked in the mirror.

He was almost free.

Free to leave this town and do whatever he wanted. To go anywhere he and Macbeth could dream of. He’d always been an isolated kid, his childhood spent surrounded by prescription pill bottles and boundaries of where he could not go because of who he was, imaginary friends acting as his only company outside of his own parents. Maybe you’re not real, he’d whisper to them at night when he was a kid: Maybe you’re not alive, but as long as you’re real to me, you’re kind of alive, in a way.

            Now, he would be free to explore the world as he saw fit. No more confinement to sitting between those four walls of a school classroom with the ten commandments on the wall where he knew, in his heart, that he could be learning theology on his own, in his own way. None of the close-minded lessons he learned there—instead, he and Macbeth could have been spending that time staying up late into the night passing a smoke back and forth in an indirect kiss while Yael articulated his thoughts, his beliefs on what should be taught about this world and its God and how, and Macbeth would watch him with bloodshot eyes until Yael talked himself right to sleep.

            When Yael was younger, doctors told his parents that he suffered from a kind of religious psychosis as a symptom of his illness. 

Yael’s belief that he and his parents were all dead, that he needed to save them, was the effect of this. His parents cared about him—loved him, worked since the day he was born to help him—but they weren’t always the best at solutions. Sending him to a religious school to help him “understand” and “correct” his misconceptions was probably the worst solution in theory. But, well. It was a religious state in a religious country. He would encounter this anywhere, he supposed.

Still… he knew he could be more than that. He could be more than the students surrounding him who blindly believed in what they were told and lacked the intuition to question their reality. Yael couldn’t cut his curiosity out to save his life.

But it gave him that edge he needed in this world to find the meaning that so many lacked. It was the sense of meaning that he watched Macbeth lose from afar before he stepped in, took his hand, and told him they would find it—whatever it was—together. Over time, they were both surprised, maybe, to find it so plainly in each other.

Now they can find other places to be together. To find what their reality was, and what the world meant to them. 

If Macbeth would go with him…

Yael inhaled in anticipation when Macbeth’s car rolled up to the parking lot of the high school. He hustled to get in the passenger’s seat. His lavender turtleneck was still crumpled into the console with a single sleeve hanging out from when he and Macbeth went to a drive-in movie theater that last weekend to give Yael a break from studying for his AP Psych final and Yael got too hot cuddling up to Macbeth in his seat. Macbeth told him he could just move back to his own seat. Yael didn’t. He just reduced his layers.

There was the faded stain on the seat where Yael spilled his drink years ago.

There was the chapstick Yael kept in the passenger side cupholder and always forgot to take with him when he left, the one Macbeth never reminded him to grab.

They didn’t really talk on the drive to Macbeth’s house where his foster family lived, nor the walk to the wooded area behind the row of houses there. 

It hadn’t been until after their first kiss that day that Macbeth took Yael to his spot back here only a few weeks after, his expression oddly sullen.

“I just sit back here sometimes to get away from the noise of all the other kids,” he’d mumbled, sitting beneath a tall, sturdy tree that he peeled bark off of with his fingers. It became evident to Yael in the coming weeks that this was Macbeth’s favorite tree to sit by. He wanted to mention that Macbeth was probably hurting it by stripping the bark off when he was idle and his hands restless. He didn’t. Macbeth loved the tree. What good would it do to tell him it was hurting? It would only make him feel bad, and Yael didn’t want to make him feel bad.

This was where they sat now, Macbeth with his back to the center of the base of the trunk and Yael resolutely claiming his pillow, which just so happened to be (in his mind, anyway) Macbeth’s lap.

It was usual for Yael to nap like this while Macbeth stayed awake, unable to let go of his state of alertness. That day, however, while Yael was wide awake with his guts twisted up in a painful knot, his heart thrumming anxiously, Macbeth had dark circles under his eyes–darker than usual–and Yael watched his eyelids begin to drift shut a few times.

Normally he would let Macbeth sleep, but this couldn’t be the day. Not after he spent all this time today working up the courage.

“Macbeth.” He sat up and shifted to rest his legs over Macbeth’s lap instead. “Don’t go to sleep yet.”

Macbeth opened his eyes wide and closed his mouth, which had begun to open in tired breaths, and set his lips in a straight, serious line. “I wasn’t going to.”

Yael couldn’t help but smile. Typical Macbeth. How could he not want to travel the world with this boy? This boy, who acted so closed off, so serious and untouchable, who hid deep, mercurial feelings and tender spots that required the gentle touch of reassurance that only Yael ever got enough of a glimpse of to apply?

His heart fluttered, lifting the sickening feeling a little. This was what he was supposed to be doing. If there was one thing he believed in, it was that there was a plan set out for him by some higher being, and that he was meant to come upon Macbeth on that path.

So of course he was meant to do this.

“Sure, sleepyhead.” Yael poked Macbeth’s cheek, then reached for his face with an open hand to rest it on the side of his face and worry his thumb over the soft, vulnerable flesh of his undereye. “You look like you’ve been through the wringer lately. You won’t have to be accused of dozing off if you actually sleep at normal hours, y’know.”

Something in Macbeth’s expression seemed to freeze, but it was so fast, Yael was sure he imagined it. “I’m fine. Just been kept up by the heat. You’re not exactly the poster child of normal bedtime schedules, by the way.”

Yael’s grin only widened.

“Just stay awake for a few more minutes. I gotta tell you something.”

The corners of Macbeth’s mouth twitched unsteadily. “You–what? What is it?”

Yael took one final deep breath. Go time. Go time. It couldn’t fail. He was meant to do this. They were meant to do this.

“It’s about you too. I have to ask you something about it.”

Macbeth stared at him.

He shrugged Yael off of him, scooting back in the dirt and leaving Yael motionless where Macbeth left him.

What?

What was that reaction?

Does he know what I’m going to ask?

Is he already turning me down? 

“Why do you sound so serious?” Macbeth’s voice was thin. 

Yael’s whole face flushed up to his hairline. This was not how this was supposed to start.

“Because it’s about my future. After graduation. And your future; where we go next on our path,” Yael explained, holding his hand out, palm up, like he was soothing a spooked animal. “And… I need to know what you think.”

Macbeth didn’t take his hand. He looked down at it, quiet, pale.

Yael swallowed hard. He began to lower his hand. “If… you don’t want a future like that together, you can say it. I’ll stop.”

And like a light switch that Yael didn’t know how to control, Macbeth was back on, taking Yael’s fingers in a crushing grip. “What? What future?”

Yael aimed for a careful smile, using his other hand to hold Macbeth’s wrist in return. “‘Beth, I’m trying to ask you… I don’t want to go to college or jump into the job field after college. I want to travel. Anywhere. However I can get there. Everywhere I can. To see the world outside of here and see people from other worlds, with other perspectives. You know?” He fiddled with Macbeth’s fingers. “I’ve always wanted to do that. Even before I met you. But now that I have… I feel braver, maybe. I feel like I know now that there really are people in this world who make it worth it to exist in it. You made me realize that, so…”

He licked his lips, trying to gauge Macbeth’s reaction: “It would feel strange, to do it without you. I want you to be there. I want to see what the world has to offer after going so many years of my life without knowing there was anything out there for me, and I want to learn what my purpose can be beyond this. But… I want that for you too. I want to show you all the beauty that you couldn’t see, too. I want you to find yourself, too. We can do it together.”

Finally, he released his grip on Macbeth’s wrist, letting him still cling to his own hand.

“If,” he added, his voice a little shaky for his liking, “you’d want to. I know this will be the end of your gap year. Maybe you have other plans.”

If Macbeth did, he would tell him now. Macbeth would let him down as gently as he was capable of. He would go to college, to trade school, apply for a job, or travel all on his own. They would go their separate ways.

Maybe someday Yael would be okay, in that case.

Maybe you won’t.

Macbeth opened his mouth, and Yael braced for impact.

“You want to… do that… with me?” he asked, hesitant.

Yael nodded so emphatically he felt a crick form in his neck. “Yes. I’m certain. I want to find freedom from this life with you.”

Macbeth’s eyebrows were furrowed. Of all the things Yael prepared himself to hear, he wasn’t at all ready to hear Macbeth ask, his voice genuine as can be—

“Why?”

Why?

How could he be serious?

“When are you going to believe me?” Yael whispered, his voice cracking despite himself. “What will it take to show you that I like you? That I love you? Do you seriously not believe that I want to take you with me, Macbeth?”

Macbeth’s grip on Yael’s hand slackened until those clinging hands fell away.

His expression was hollow, his eyes so bright by the nature of light but so empty by the default of a heart that couldn’t be filled enough within a lifetime’s worth of love.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled, the words running into one another, “if I do.”

“Then—“ Yael cut himself off when he realized his voice pitched up too much. He didn’t like raising his voice. He rarely felt it happen at all, and when it did, he quieted himself when he caught it. So, he tried to moderate himself. It didn’t work so well. His voice still wobbled. “How can I convince you?” Yael swallowed down the salty lump growing in his throat and smiled at Macbeth, trying to lighten the mood, because as much as it pained him he knew this wasn’t Macbeth’s fault. It wasn’t Macbeth’s fault that he was afraid of being left when no one in his life had proven to him that he wouldn’t be. “I’ll do whatever it takes, Macbeth. You want… a ritual circle? Want me to sacrifice a burnt offering like Job for each of his children?” He nudged Macbeth’s leg with his foot, gently teasing. “Want me to offer my blood for a blood pact?”

Macbeth, for his part, did not look particularly impressed by Yael’s attempt to cheer him up.

He leveled Yael with a flat look, his eyes lidded. Then he reached into his pocket.

Yael blinked when Macbeth flicked open his pocket knife, the blade catching the sunlight and glaring at Yael, and held it out in his open hand to him.

“Then do it,” he snarked, “if you’re serious.”

Yael looked between the knife and Macbeth’s face, the challenging look in his sneer. You won’t do it, it said. I don’t expect you to do it, because who would do something like that, just to prove something to me?

Okay.

Challenge accepted.

Yael didn’t let his smile slip. If anything, it widened. He snatched the handle from Macbeth’s hand and gripped it in his left hand, setting the edge of the blade to the palm of his right.

“I hope you clean this frequently enough,” he said cheerfully. Macbeth gawked at him, his mouth hanging open in unspoken protests.

Yael pressed the blade into the thin skin until it broke with an upwelling of dark blood and dragged it in a long, straight line—straight because his blade hand didn’t even tremble once—diagonal over his hand from the point just beneath his pointer finger to the area above the inside of his wrist.

He flicked the still bloody blade closed and deposited the knife into Macbeth’s front pants pocket where Macbeth drew it from, speckles of Yael’s blood dripping and staining the fabric of his slacks.

Then he took Macbeth’s unmoving hand in his right hand, gushing blood from the open wound that slid in long, curving lines down Yael’s wrist and forearm.

When he squeezed Macbeth’s hand, it only urged more blood to burble out, squelching wetly between their palms and dripping into the dirt below.

It stung. It radiated a bone deep ache all the way down to Yael’s elbow.

It wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle.

Yael leaned forward to touch his forehead to Macbeth’s and whispered, “Believe me now?”

Then he released Macbeth’s hand and scooted back to gauge his expression.

Macbeth looked vaguely like he could pass out. His eyes slowly tracked downward, stunned, to examine his own hand, now soaked in Yael’s blood.

Faintly, Macbeth complained, “You got my hand all messy.”

It was probably supposed to sound more irritated than it did, knowing him. Instead, it just sounded… awed. It was a tone Yael hadn’t really heard from Macbeth before.

The adrenaline rush it gave Yael couldn’t be compared to anything.

Not even to drowning.

Not to dying.

His heart pounding in his chest, cheeks flushed, he smiled and held his own bloodied hand against his chest protectively so he didn’t further injure it. He didn’t want to mess up the scar he might get.

“Lick it off, if you’re so worried about getting your clothes dirty,” Yael joked in a soft voice, drawing a handkerchief from the pocket of his school uniform jacket to wrap around the gash in his palm. If Macbeth was still in school too, he’d still have his handkerchief from his uniform, but of course, he’d turned his uniform in a year ago.

While Yael tied a careful knot, his focus almost caused him to miss Macbeth—almost shamefully, like he couldn’t believe he was doing it but had to, to prove something to himself—licking the blood on his hand.

When it happened, it was only about a week before they were supposed to hit the road and start their journey around the country before tackling new frontiers overseas.

Macbeth had gotten better over the months following Yael’s graduation, actually. He didn’t look so tired all the time. His complexion was healthier. He smiled more, those tiny ones he was prone to, and was more receptive to conversation and attention again.

Yael figured his little pact had sealed the deal in Macbeth’s head. That maybe, just maybe, he was finally convinced.

So in the late summer months, Yael pitched that they should make their remaining travel preparations.

They’d already both worked summer jobs for gas money. Maybe they’d find odd jobs while traveling from town to town. Flying wasn’t a good option lately anyway with warnings on the news of strange diseases popping up in Korea and spreading through Asia—not that the country really cared enough to shut down airports. But Yael and Macbeth were smart. They knew when to stay grounded.

They were working on packing, Macbeth having been living with Yael in Yael’s house over the summer. His parents were accommodating. They liked Macbeth. He was the only person who’d ever stuck with Yael for more than a few brief months, so of course they liked Macbeth. They’d left for a cruise a few weeks prior, so Yael and Macbeth had the small house to themselves until they left.

“I’m going to head into the city to grab a few things for the road,” Macbeth told Yael one afternoon–just a late Saturday afternoon that felt the same as any other Saturday afternoon. He was unusually cheerful, even, his eyes bright and a small smile gracing his lips as he leaned in to kiss Yael on the cheek. It was less often that Macbeth was the one to initiate affection, not from a lack of love, Yael knew, but simply because he was less tactile and more self-conscious. It made it all the more special. “I’ll be back late. You might be asleep by then. Don’t wait up for me, alright?”

“I don’t know,” Yael said, smiling and tugging Macbeth back to him before he could step away, nudging their noses together and rubbing his arms. “How am I supposed to sleep without a teddy bear?”

“Hah-hah.” Golden eyes rolled drily, and Yael laughed, breathless with adoration. “You’ll be fine. Hug a pillow.”

“Pillows don’t have your charm.”

Macbeth flicked his ear and shoved his chest lightly, which only increased the volume of Yael’s laughter, and just as quickly his face fell into something more serious–more typical for him, really–as he grabbed Yael by the collar of his shirt to reel him in close.

“Hey.” Haltingly, he said, “you know that I… do love you. And nothing could, y’know, change that… for me… no matter what we do.”

Yael was… surprised, but not upset. Macbeth rarely said things like this out of the blue. Maybe it should have been concerning, but Yael…

…was just… happy.

“Well,” Yael stammered, “yes, I think I do know.” He pecked Macbeth on the lips and tugged gently on one of the pieces of hair framing Macbeth’s face. “And nothing would change that for me either.”

Macbeth looked at Yael with his head tilted down through his lashes, his eyes flickering strangely. “Nothing at all?”

And, like Yael always did these days when Macbeth showed his insecurities, he raised his hand to show the palm to Macbeth and display the thin white scar that ran across it.

“Nothing,” he repeated. 

Macbeth smiled back at him, and if Yael knew then what would happen, maybe he would have drunk it in more. 

(Maybe he would have noticed the sadness, the solemn attitude behind it of a boy whose life was going in the wrong direction and was taking Yael with him, hand in unlovable hand.)

Because Yael did stay up waiting for Macbeth to come home. Because he couldn’t sleep without knowing he was home safe in bed next to him.

He dozed off sometime before midnight on the couch waiting for Macbeth to text him back. He didn’t mean to fall asleep, but eventually he became so tired from his long day of preparations that he zoned out.

He dozed through the sound of breaking news reports cutting into some silly game show. He’d had the volume too low for the change to startle him into awareness.

And when Yael woke up early that morning at 5:46, he rubbed his eyes and instinctively reached for someone who wasn’t there.

He sat up.

He didn’t even glance at the news as he padded to his bedroom through the living room and kitchen, bleary-eyed and not really fully awake. Yael was just going to join Macbeth in their bed anyway to get a few more hours of sleep in.

But he pushed the door open and Macbeth wasn’t there, a familiar lump I under the blankets.

He stared. He even patted the bed down to confirm that Macbeth wasn’t buried in the blankets somewhere.

Immediately, he hurried back to the living room to grab his phone off of the end table and check his messages, and when he did, a thread pulled loose in his chest and began to unravel.

M: got to town safe. be back in a few hours (7:27 PM)

Y: Great! Text me when you are about to head back. Love you :) <3 (7:29 PM)

M: love you too

Y: I hope everything is going well and you are finding everything you need! ^. .^ (8:51 

PM)

Y: Are you coming back soon? Let me know if you are getting a hotel. Don’t drive in the dark if you are tired. (10:42 PM)

Y: Macbeth where are you (5:49 AM)

Y: I’m serious I’m scared are you okay (5:49 AM)

Y: macbeth please answer me (5:55 AM)

Y: macbeth (6:02 AM)

Y: I’m calling the police (6:19 AM)

That was after the sirens wailing on the special news report finally caught his attention.

~

The scent of the strong medical grade antibacterial soaps on the counter stung Inna’s nose as she scrubbed her hands so thoroughly that little white flakes of skin washed away with the warm spray of water.

It smelled like alcohol. Sterile.

Inna could always still smell it after she finished washing.

With her hands cleaned, she leaned her weight against the industrial sink, turned the tap to cold, and leaned over to splash water over her face. Exhaustion had long since taken hold this particular shift. It felt never ending. An endless number of patients to attend to, patients paranoid they were experiencing symptoms of turning. Somehow they hadn’t gotten the memo how, exactly, infection works. Inna and her coworkers had to risk their damn lives to go out and put informational flyers up around the contained districts, the flyers clearly stating in large red font with a skull beneath it:

DANGER: ONE BITE = INFECTION!!! ONCE BITTEN TURN YOURSELF IN FOR QUARANTING + EXPERIMENTAL CURING IMMEDIATELY BEFORE SYMPTOMS SET IN!!!

And yet they still received patients with nary a bite in sight moaning about how they felt feverish or frantic or that their skin looked like it was in the beginning stages of crystallization.

Usually all this so-called “crystallization” required was a prescription for a rash cream. As if the bite didn’t numb the site. The way Inna’s mother explained it, it was beneficial to the evolution of this species of zombie to unleash that numbing agent to make it more likely that the infected individual wouldn’t notice they were bitten until it was too late.

It’s not that Inna would prefer real zombies in the clinic. There were a few times, three to be exact, when she heard the commotion of more qualified personnel than she discovering a bite on a patient. 

Patients were always inspected for bites in the isolation unit where they stripped naked and rinsed themselves (or, for those less willing to be inspected for bites, forcibly stripped and rinsed) in an industrial shower. The only personnel allowed in the inspection room with patients were approved specialists in hazmat suits and thick padding underneath to reduce the risk of a bite. They looked the patient up and down, from head to toe, and if they identified a bite, the hospital was immediately locked down and the patient was removed from the room in a back door that led to a locked room. Inna didn’t have high enough clearance to know what was behind that heavy, guarded door, let alone approach the hallway leading to it.

All she knew was that no bitten patient ever came out of it.

She was just a nurse. She didn’t go through a nursing program with the idea in mind that she’d be dealing with actual zombies. Inna just needed a job, and, well, this was the job that would make her mom proud. For once.

It was just her fucking luck, though. To be a nurse during a zombie outbreak.

Just my fucking luck.

With a deep breath, Inna yanked a few paper towels from the dispenser next to the sink that scratched her skin uncomfortably when she wiped her face off with it. She redid her ponytail and pulled on a fresh set of disposable gloves, bracing herself.

She opened the door back into the chaos.

Inna couldn’t even make it back to the front entrance before one of her coworkers flagged her down. Somehow, she already knew it was about Eve. It always was. It was never just about Inna.

“What does she want?” The words are out of her mouth before the young woman stopping before her could even say a single thing. So maybe it came out a little snappish. It had been a long night.

The nurse smiled apologetically, the muscles of her mouth twitching nervously. “There’s a… problem. We’ve been looking for you everywhere. A man was brought in for a health inspection–he was found protecting an infected individual. We’ll have to ship him off to the county jail soon. He’s been thoroughly examined and there are, strangely, no reported bites.”

Whatever anxiety or interest Inna had immediately dropped off. She shrugged one shoulder and brushed imaginary dirt off of the front of her scrubs. “Well… good. What’s the problem if he’s not bitten?”

“Miss Del’Arte was preparing to check his vitals once he was cleared of bites, but he seemed to recognize her. Or–well–he recognized her as being your mother. He’s asking for you. He’s not cooperating with Miss Del’Arte until he’s allowed to see you. His name is Yael Iscariot.”

Yael? Inna didn’t know a–

“Oh,” she said aloud as the realization hit. “I think we–maybe shared some classes back in high school?” Inna frowned. “Not sure why he’d be asking for me. We weren’t friends.”

Truth be told, Inna had never really liked that kid. He was weird. Unsettling.

He gave Inna the creeps.

The nurse just shook her head. “Apparently he said you should know about… I think the name he said was Macbeth?”

There was–

…some kind of whooshing sound in Inna’s ears as her blood rushed.

“Macbeth?” she echoed, her voice empty. Flat. “Roulette? What happened to Macbeth? Is he okay?”

She only got another helpless shake of the head in response.

Fuck it.

“Take me there,” she blurted, her chest constricting with a strange kind of preemptive grief. You don’t know. You don’t know yet. Maybe he’s fine. Maybe Yael is fucking with you. He’s going to jail, for God’s sake, he’s probably fucking with you for some reason. Maybe to stall for time before he’s shipped off. Macbeth is probably fine.

It’s fine.

When Yael saw Inna, he sat up straighter where he was hunched over on the examination table. The paper sheet beneath him crinkled as he shifted—he looked like he was trying to stand up to come to Inna, but he was cuffed to the table; probably on account of him being a criminal. Inna hovered in the doorway, tense.

This is your chance to be of use around here, Eve had told her in the hallway in a hushed, stern tone. The patient wants you. Take his vitals and keep him docile before the transport arrives for him. We don’t need any disruptions today.

“Innamorati,” Yael said, his eyes wide, his face gaunt and paler than its natural warm brown shade. “It’s you.”

Inna hesitated. She glanced over her shoulder.

She stepped inside and closed the door behind her, clipboard in gloved hand, and frowned down at her former classmate. “Inna,” she corrected stiffly. She glanced down at the clipboard. “Yael Iscariot?”

Yael’s bloodshot eyes followed Inna as she grabbed a rolling chair and scooted over to the exam table. “We knew each other in school,” he said quietly. “I’m Macbeth’s—“

“You were Macbeth’s friend, I know,” Inna snapped. That’s—not professional. She inhaled sharply and clicked the pen in her hand, composing herself rapidly as she’d been taught to do. “I vaguely remember you through him. You said something about Macbeth. So? What was it?”

Yael’s tongue flitted out to lick his lips, a sort of crazed light in his eyes flickering that made Inna instinctively want to inch back. She forced herself not to. “Ah… I don’t know how to—it’s, so many things have happened since graduation, and he…”

There was an audible click as Yael swallowed. His throat sounded dry. Inna didn’t feel incredibly inclined to get him a cup of water.

“Don’t waste my time,” she said flatly. “If something bad happened to Macbeth, say it.”

Yael looked at him with glazed over eyes and a hollow smile.

“Macbeth,” he began, his voice hoarse, “turned months ago, and they’ve separated us, and I don’t know where he is.”

Several things clicked together like puzzle pieces in Inna’s head all at once.

A man was brought in for a health inspection–he was found protecting an infected individual.

Apparently he said you should know about… I think the name he said was Macbeth?

They’ve separated us, and I don’t know where he is.

The pen slipped from Inna’s fingers and hit the hard floor with a sound that was too small to express the weight of her sudden grief.

She remembered when she and Macbeth were friends.

How Macbeth scowled to hide when he wanted to smile.

How he was the best student in algebra and life science in middle school.

How he worked so hard during the summers to be able to buy his first car, but by the time he finally got it, Inna was too busy to take his first ride with him. Macbeth said he didn’t care. Said it’s fine.

How he always tucked in his school shirt and ironed the collar so it wouldn’t stick up.

How he hated the soggy cafeteria pizza.

“How?” she asked, her voice foreign to her own ears—too high, too scratchy. She set the clipboard down on her lap, not trusting herself not to drop that too. “How?”

So it started like this:

Yael was in the car.

“Shoot,” Yael sighed loudly, looking at the blue tint seeping into the cloth, only seeming to sink deeper the harder he and Macbeth scrubbed with dollar store wet wipes. The whole car smelled like blue raspberry and cheap brand cigarette smoke. Maybe it was a shitty idea to get slushies on their first ride in Macbeth’s Honda. It was definitely a shitty idea. “I’m sorry. I think it’s staining.”

Macbeth glared at him. “Jesus. I didn’t even take that turn that sharply.”

“Sorry,” Yael repeated, smiling at him sheepishly. “You probably wish you took Inna.”

There was a beat of silence.

“No. I mean, she was busy anyway, again,” Macbeth said gruffly, scrubbing at the blue spot on the passenger seat again. Yael’s striped shorts had blue all over them, too, from the top of his left thigh to unfortunate placement over his crotch. “So it’s whatever. We don’t really hang out. Here, put the wipes in the cup holder or something.”

Yael blinked at Macbeth, curious. Hopeful. Yael was a year below Macbeth in school. Macbeth was a junior, an upper classman now—Inna was closer to Yael’s age, but just beat the cutoff that put her in Macbeth’s year. Yael was still just a sophomore. He hadn’t been friends with Macbeth for nearly as long as Inna, having only met Macbeth as a freshman when he started going to Anakt. They weren’t really friends that year, either. Their friendship only bloomed in the summer between years when Macbeth was bored and alone with Inna spending more and more time with her other more popular friends.

And Yael, well—was fresh off of an attempt that summer. He waded into the deep part of the town lake. He couldn’t swim. He knew he couldn’t swim. Put him together with Macbeth who was contemplating an attempt and…

Well. They just bonded.

This school year, Macbeth was seeing less and less of Inna. Yael told Macbeth that he was cool with spending time together as a group, but Inna never had the time. That’s what Macbeth said for a while anyway. 

Yael could tell he was getting frustrated.

He stuffed the used wipes in the cup holder next to his now half-empty slushie and climbed back into the passenger’s side while Macbeth rounded the front of the car to slide into the driver’s seat.

Already, he loved the feeling of riding along with Macbeth. It felt freeing. He told Macbeth as much, smiling out the window. Then, figuring maybe he could slip it in…

“So are you two not hanging out anymore? You and Inna?” Yael asked innocently.

They didn’t really consider themselves a jealous or possessive person over their friends.

But he was nosy.

Macbeth turned the ignition, looking at Yael out of the corner of his eye.

“No,” he said decisively. “I don’t even want to hang out with her. I mean, who cares? If she wants to hang out with other people, fine.”

Macbeth and Inna had been friends since Yael knew them. He heard they were even friends in elementary school. That was a lot longer than any of Yael’s friendships had ever lasted.

Not that he really had a lot of friends in his lifetime.

…he wasn’t sure he really knew what a friend should look like. Or feel like.

But he definitely felt something for Macbeth.

Was he so selfish for wanting to be, well…

“Does that mean I’m your best friend now?” Yael asked as Macbeth pulled out of the parking lot and back onto the street. He smiled, somewhat teasingly to try and inject a little humor into it–something that would make it hurt a little less, maybe, to be rejected.

His heart was in his throat and beating right up to his ears when Macbeth rolled his eyes, pure gold in the evening sun that his visor couldn’t quite block out. Macbeth’s leg shifted, maybe an instinct–when they sat at their desks together and Yael said something dumb, Macbeth kicked him, not hard but not exactly soft either–right in the shin. Sometimes it bruised a little. The console between them prevented him from doing that, but Yael tracked the movement and felt some kind of relief that he could inspire those kinds of instinctive reactions.

Macbeth just huffed and gave him a strange look, and maybe it was Yael’s imagination, but his cheeks looked a little pink.

“In your dreams.”

When Macbeth graduated, Yael was the person who cheered for him in the crowd.

Maybe Inna got more cheers. Maybe she was applauded by more people, rows of friends and a present mother. Maybe the cheers for Macbeth were more isolated, more quiet. 

But Yael was as loud as he could be, because that was, after all, his best friend and the person he loved most in this world.

Macbeth took a gap year afterwards, telling Yael that he needed time to consider what he was going to do. 

“Gotta figure out, you know, colleges and stuff,” he told Yael when he informed him of his decision. “I mean, which one to do, you know… or… I don’t know. Some people get jobs right away. All the websites these days say getting a degree doesn’t help anymore anyway, so it doesn’t matter, I guess.”

Yael chewed on his thumbnail, watching Macbeth eat his burger across the table from him at their favorite mediocre diner that always overcooked their meat. “This year you’re staying in town for sure though?”

Macbeth’s chewing slowed, and his eyes narrowed over the glass rim of his Dr. Pepper bottle as he raised it to his face, eyeing the carbonation bubbles through the glass like he was deeply interested in them. “Why?” he started, his voice dry and bitter, “Are you disappointed?” 

Yael blinked. Tilted his head.

It took him a moment to process Macbeth’s words, and when he did, he frowned so deeply his face hurt.

“Why would I be disappointed?” he asked pointedly, setting his own orange soda down with a loud and, as he liked to think, assertive clink.

Macbeth shrugged, swallowing a mouthful of his drink. “I was just thinking. Aren’t you sick of me yet? Because this means you’re stuck with me for another year until you take off.”

That was enough. The only thing Yael was sick of was hearing that.

Macbeth flinched back when Yael reached and grabbed the neck of the bottle the other boy held so tightly and tensely in his hand that his knuckles were white as bone, wrenched it from his grip so dark soda sloshed on the table’s surface with a bubbling pool of fizz, grabbed the back of Macbeth’s neck with both hands and pulled him forward into the most uncoordinated kiss Macbeth had probably ever had.

And Yael, well.

Hadn’t ever had one.

It tasted like carbonation and burger meat. Yael didn’t even eat burgers. He thought they tasted too much like, well, flesh.

But he realized as he put a concerted effort into worrying Macbeth’s lower lip between his teeth to urge his frozen mouth to do something–that nothing could taste too shitty if it was coming from a kiss with him.

When Macbeth didn’t really… move… Yael became worried and pulled back, and he’s pretty sure he might have gone more heavy on the teeth than he needed to and not heavy enough on the actual lips or tongue, because he can see indents in the shape of his front and bottom teeth imprinted in Macbeth’s lower lip.

And Macbeth’s eyes were stuck wide open like someone just shot him in a vital organ.

All of Yael’s certainty and bravery evaporated, and he let go of Macbeth and sat back in his seat, picking anxiously at the peeling leather of the booth.

“Sorry,” he choked out, feeling scared enough he thought he might vomit up his soda and mozzarella sticks. He just ruined everything. He just grossed Macbeth out so badly that Macbeth was never going to want to hang out with him ever again. What a stupid thought, that such a thing would reassure him how much Yael likes him. How he wants him around. All he did was blow up their friendship. He was going to go back to being friendless and would remember his first kiss as a devastating–

“Sorry?” Macbeth blinked rapidly. “You’re–sorry?”

“You’re probably not into me like that,” Yael rambled, “and I shouldn’t have caught you off guard like that, I mean, it was a dumb idea. I don’t know what I was thinking. I just really–like you and… wanted to show you that I–care, you know, and that I–”

Macbeth cut in, his voice oddly strained, “Then–do it again.”

“What?”

“Do you really like me?” Macbeth glanced away, scowling. “Then try again.” He cleared his throat and looked back at Yael through his lashes. “That one was awful.”

Yael coughed in surprise. “Awful?”

“Well, yeah.” Macbeth rested his chin on the heel of his hand, staring at him. “You kind of bit me.”

Heat flooded to Yael’s cheeks. “I don’t think it was that hard. Besides, that was the first time I’ve ever done that.”

Again, Macbeth froze, and Yael worried he said the wrong thing. “...What, the first time initiating a kiss?”

Yael licked his lips. He still tasted Dr. Pepper. “First time kissing anyone at all.”

Seconds ticked by without Macbeth saying a word, that weird, closed-off look on his face that he got sometimes when Yael said or did something particular, but Yael could never find the formula for what triggered it or if it was a good thing or a bad thing.

“You know I haven’t really had anyone I was close enough to try that with,” Yael tried to explain quietly. He smiled, trying to be reassuring about it. Calm.

Finally, Macbeth mumbled, “Oh. Well, that explains why you suck at it. Are you gonna do it again or wait until you embarrass yourself with someone else?”

Yael’s mouth hung open for long enough for a fat, sluggish fly to buzz close enough for concern before deciding Yael’s crumbs from greasy, fried food were more interesting. The diner was mostly quiet, only one other person there aside from the waitress, and they were sitting at the bar facing away from Yael and Macbeth.

So Yael quietly scooted out of his booth and slid into Macbeth’s to sit next to him, accidentally crowding Macbeth a little close to the wall.

He looked over Macbeth’s face, trying to figure out how best to go about kissing him again with less teeth involved, and he must have looked for a beat too long, because Macbeth sighed in exasperation.

“You’re so weird,” were the words that Yael felt against his chin when he leaned in to try it again and reassure Macbeth how glad he was to have him around town for his senior year all over again.

Yael didn’t actually learn until three months later that this had been Macbeth’s first time kissing anyone, too.

~

Enjoy this because it's ALL downhill from here

Okay.

So sue Macbeth.

Confessions were bullshit.

The first time he contemplated this horrific problem in life was—maybe later than most. Maybe earlier. What was the normal time to fall in love for the first time, anyway? Fuck if he knew. He didn’t… like, watch romcoms. Or read those “young adult” novels. That’s how people learned that shit, right?

“There’s good stuff to learn from these,” Toki once sniffed when Macbeth, at summer camp, gave a somewhat horrified look to Toki’s novel of choice for free reading hour that day. Well, at least he had no shame about whipping out a book with a cover displaying an 8-foot tall werewolf chomping into some twinky guy’s neck (…was that meant to be hot? He didn’t want to know. Was Toki unironically taking pointers for his love life from a gay werewolf erotica? He didn’t want to know that either, though he was pretty sure he knew the answer). 

He didn’t really… “date” either. Girls weren’t really into him, and he wasn’t really into them. By the time he learned there were other options, it just wasn’t that big of a deal. As it happens, there were plenty of queer kids at summer mental health programs. It was never something he’d thought about before, just like romance, dating, kissing, sex.

One of the loudest and proudest kids at camp was the purple-haired boy, someone he’d never paid attention to until he was suddenly just—there, and vibrant. More so than I’ve ever been. Than I could ever dream to be. Macbeth hadn’t recognized him then. Why would he?

By the time he realized they went to the same boarding school, it was weeks into their tentative friendship, and Yael was—definitely different. When he transferred to their school, he had longer hair, messy, the shade of browning leaves in the fall. Something about summer made him bloom. He had dyed hair that curled neatly in its shorter cut. His skin bronzed deeper than its usual warm shade. He was pretty. 

And he was recontextualized, in this setting. It was different, knowing someone so bright could possibly struggle the same way Macbeth did. For a while, it felt impossible. Fake, somehow. Yael smiled at him like he meant something and laughed with him, looked at him like he mattered, gravitated towards him like he was special.

Sometimes it was easy to forget he was at that program for a reason until he asked Macbeth with distant eyes if he was real.

But it was… better that way, maybe. Macbeth didn’t make many friends as a kid. It was hard enough, moving around all the time to different foster homes. How are you supposed to make friends when you’re always leaving? Always arriving? 

(And no, Macbeth didn’t think that particular tidbit of information was in Toki’s book recommendations.) 

And it was harder, being like him. Having that pervasive dark fog over his brain that convinced him someone like Yael couldn’t possibly want to be his friend. Before that, it drove him away from Inna, the only person who put up with him enough to call him a friend. And Macbeth was too scared. Scared of being left.

So he left first.

And then there was camp. Yael. The end of the weird, incredible summer they spent getting to know one another. The summer Macbeth spent feeling special for the first time since Inna.

But then there was—

—that feeling.

It started out simply enough. It felt like a stomach ache when Yael gave him that smile, or sought him out among a group. Every day it just got worse. Macbeth briefly catastrophized and researched symptoms of ulcers.

Luckily, he determined he did not suffer ulcers.

After he checked off inflammatory bowel disease and inflammatory bowel syndrome since he didn’t suffer constant and urgent diarrhea or fever when Yael looked at him, Macbeth came to a sinking realization.

He felt… something.

It was similar to how he felt with Inna at first, but worse. Literally so much worse. It actually hurt. He didn’t let it get to the point where it hurt with Inna. Macbeth protected himself. Shielded himself from it. He was so confident that would be his only brush with the emotion.

So confident, he didn’t realize when it hit him. By the time he realized it, it was too late.

Macbeth thought that maybe they would naturally grow apart after that summer together. They’d never interacted at school before: Why start now? On his first day back to boarding school with his suitcase, he felt relief. You can’t judge him for it—being alone can be relaxing, actually. Having no one to rely on him but himself lacked obligations. Relying on no one but himself was happiness. There wasn’t that fear floating nearby. No fear of someone pulling the rug from underneath his feet right when he came around to trusting them. It was delightful. 

Well. It was what he was used to, anyway. It was comfortable. Safe.

And then Yael sprinted up to him at the steps of student housing and threw himself at Macbeth so violently that Macbeth dropped his suitcase (his nice fucking suitcase that he saved money for) to catch him so they didn’t both eat shit.

“Macbeth!” Yael cried out joyfully, crumpling Macbeth’s white shirt in his hands. “I missed you! I went to your assigned room but you weren’t there yet. I did meet your roommate, though! Remember Toki?”

At the time, this was the worst sequence of words Macbeth had ever heard.

There was no escaping that feeling. There was no dodging it. Avoiding Yael was useless. How could he? Yael acted like they were lifelong friends. Like he’d never known life without Macbeth. He sat next to him in every class they shared. He hunted him down like a hound at lunch to eat together. Even when Macbeth tried his damndest to dodge him, it was virtually impossible. Yael was always. There. 

Even when Macbeth snarked at him.

Even when he didn’t feel like talking. 

Yael was just… there. Constantly. Whenever he could be.

It was weird. It was obsessive. Stalkerish, really. Totally freakish.

But maybe…

…nice?

It was nice to have a place to stay outside of his room with Toki. Nice to escape his asshole roommate who snuck booze in and watched loud movies on the TV, and didn’t take his shoes off before coming inside, and smelled way too strongly of cologne. It got even nicer to have an escape when Toki started bringing around his brand new boyfriend who just so happened to be Inna from middle school. 

Inna who looked at Macbeth like he was seeing a ghost when they saw each other again in Macbeth’s dorm for the first time, having forgotten to knock before entering and walking in on the unsightly view of Toki kissing someone against the fridge. Fuck. I have to touch that fridge to get my filtered water.

And it was him.

And he just stared at him.

Macbeth left without saying anything while Toki’s voice crowed behind him with laughter, “Oh, you two know each other? I would’ve never thought you would hang out with him.”

Dickhead.

Macbeth hoped he got hit by the morning shuttle bus.

So he knocked on Yael’s door, and just like any other night, Yael answered with a beaming smile and asked if he wanted to put a movie on. Yael’s favorite was Re-Animator. Macbeth thought it was kind of weird. He watched it for the second time for Yael anyway, dozing off and on in Yael’s lavender sheets to the sound of some weird bullshit happening on the flashing screen. He’s dead? the screen asks. Not anymore, it answers itself.

He didn’t know when he fell asleep for real, but at some point he woke up and the tiny, boxy TV that Yael’s parents sent with him to school was off, but the room was still illuminated by the glow of about eight night lights. They filled every single available outlet.

“I can’t sleep when it’s dark,” Yael once whispered to him at camp with only the glow of firelight outside of their tent and a dim lantern inside of it. It was a hiking day. Yael hated it. “Everything seems so small when it’s dark. Like the world is shrinking and trying to consume you. And it’s so quiet that it’s loud.”

Hence the white noise machine in the corner plugged in beneath his cotton candy cloud night light.

Macbeth never told Macbeth that he preferred it dark, or that he preferred it quiet, either. Part of the reason Yael was given his own room–one of the few in the school who did, in fact–was because he needed those things. He needed the light and the noise and the bottle of pills by his bedside so he would wake up and remember that he was alive.

Because that normally cheerful and bright boy got so terrified when he thought he was dead.

Macbeth had only seen it twice at camp, once during their hiking trip. But he knew it was bad. He knew it more than most people did, aside from Yael’s parents, he supposed. All things considered, Yael came across as weird, but not troubled. That went to show what little Macbeth knew during the time in his life before camp, he guessed.

He didn’t know why, but he felt the urge when he realized Yael was fully asleep to sit up in bed, the blankets bunching around his waist. Yael’s hair was a wreck when he slept. He snored, too, and drooled on the pillow. It was completely inelegant. He couldn’t have looked further from an angel.

Macbeth still stared.

And that was his first confession: He didn’t plan it, didn’t think about it, but it rose up in him and jammed his throat with pressure like a geyser ready to erupt. He thought about nature documentaries. He thought about Toki’s dumb books. Then he didn’t really think at all.

“Love you,” he mouthed at Yael’s sleeping form. But that wasn’t enough. It needed to escape. It needed to be audible, because it never had been before when it should have been, and now it wouldn’t stop or listen to reason. “I think I love you,” he muttered, loud enough to kill the urge and quiet enough not to wake him.

He rolled back over, his stomach tight and sinking at the same time.

He didn’t think anything. Macbeth prided himself on being knowledgeable about lots of things. Love usually wasn’t one of them. He didn’t think about it much. Didn’t want to think about it.

But this time, he knew. He just… wished he didn’t.

Maybe you love me too. He stared at Yael’s back, the printed design on the back of his shirt that he fell asleep in. His eyes focused on a graphic of a cat between his shoulder blades. You might. But not in the way I want you to. You wouldn’t love me at all if you knew how I love you. I don’t love you like people are supposed to. I just want you to stay.

He blinked the blurriness from his eyes as the cat slid out of focus. Macbeth wondered if he could project his thoughts into Yael’s head if he stared for long enough. I don’t want to be scared. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want you to leave. You’ll get bored. Haven’t you realized how boring I am yet? Why not someone like Inna?

…Shit, even Toki is more interesting than me. 

Why me?

Macbeth pulled the blankets back over his body where they slid down, sinking back into the pillow and closing his eyes to block out the image of dyed purple curls.

Half a question and half a lament for his own awful luck, Macbeth mumbled into the pillow, “Why me.”

Neither a TV nor a Yael answered him.

Because of his own bad luck, this became a routine.

Toki and Inna seemed absolutely determined to make out against every surface in Macbeth’s room possible. He started to become afraid of the couch. And if Inna wasn’t going to acknowledge him, he sure as hell wasn’t going to acknowledge Inna. Ghosting people was a talent and a hobby. If it was a sport, Macbeth would be a popular athlete. Not just Yael’s-stepsister-who-played-for-the-school’s-roller-derby-team-popular. That was dorky popular at best. (Her rainbow braces didn’t help.) He would be a god.

But of course, it wasn’t actually a sport.

And he had a weird stain on his bed that he wouldn’t know until months later was just from Toki’s Dippin’ Dots that he just had to eat on Macbeth’s bed.

“What?” Toki would protest when such a time came. “It’s not like you ever use it, and I didn’t want to get Dippin’ Dots on my bed!”

So Macbeth became Yael’s unofficial, unsanctioned roommate who would probably get him suspended if they were discovered.

Whatever. It’s not like they were doing anything bad. They just watched the tiny portable tube TV, ate snacks, listened to music on low volume and sometimes slept so close together that their legs touched. Their whole legs.

…Ugh, yeah, it was pathetic.

That wasn’t even the worst part.

No, the worst part was that he kept waiting for Yael to fall asleep and then, for some godforsaken reason, he felt compelled to whisper “I think I still love you” before rolling over with a self-flagellating huff. 

Yael wouldn’t love him like that.

Even Macbeth was confused by the substance of his own feelings. It’s not that he was really physically attracted to Yael–he was pretty, clearly, but Macbeth enjoyed his beauty in an… aesthetics sort of way. He could appreciate that Yael was good-looking. He could admire it when Yael didn’t know he was watching. 

And that didn’t make sense. Other people talked about love like this raw, carnal thing. Like… well. Making out against the fridge. And the wall. And the couch. And the door. And–he didn’t want to think about that anymore, actually. The thing is, he wanted things with Yael. He was beginning to accept that he did. He wanted to fall asleep with him every night like this, and wake up and see his face first thing in the morning. He wanted to eat with him under their favorite tree, and feel Yael’s smooth, uncallused hand in his, and he wanted him to stay, stay, stay, don’t leave and don’t let me leave. 

That’s what he thought about when he couldn’t sleep at night.

He was Yael’s friend, but he wanted to be his everything. Not in the fast-paced carnal way. Not like the books and movies.

He didn’t want that at all. He just wanted what they had but… more?

And he felt weird for it.

Day after day, Macbeth woke Yael up (because God knows Yael could sleep through a train wreck) so they could ready themselves for classes and watched him carefully to see if he acted any differently. If–just maybe–he heard Macbeth’s whispers at night. If he would acknowledge them.

But fuck. He could sleep through a trainwreck.

And forty-two love confessions.

(Not that Macbeth was counting or anything.)

So Macbeth, after about the seventy-eighth, started to feel like he was pushing his luck.

Shouldn’t he be satisfied with this? With what they had?

He should be happy. Yael was the only friend he’d ever had who actually put up with him. He was the only one who sought him out before anyone else, who chased after him when he tried to run and held onto him tight. He was the only one who genuinely seemed to… well, like him. Not just tolerate him, not just pity him, but really enjoy him and who he was.

So why was Macbeth being selfish?

Because this was selfish, right? Doing this. Trying to somehow turn his confessions into some kind of magical incantation that might seep into Yael’s brain.

Wanting more than what he already had, because what he already had…

…was too much.

Riddled with guilt and a slightly above average amount of self-loathing for his usual dose, Macbeth stopped whispering confessions before he went to sleep.

He even started sleeping in his own bed more often again. …after Toki confirmed the stain was just melted Dippin’ Dots. He still washed the blankets. Just in case. 

Before, when summer camp ended, he avoided Yael for his own selfish reasons. He was afraid of the connection they formed during the summer. He couldn’t begin to decipher what it meant to him. He dreaded the thought of trying to engage Yael at school and watching him pretend Macbeth didn’t exist.

But this time… it was for Yael, really.

It was for Yael, so Macbeth didn’t hold him back. Who was to say Yael hadn’t heard any of his confessions anyway? He had to have caught at least one. He had to. He probably heard it and pretended to be asleep so he wouldn’t have to turn Macbeth down. It was the most logical explanation that Macbeth could come up with; Yael was trying not to hurt him. He already knew how Macbeth felt.

Yeah. Of course. Macbeth would be doing him a favor by stepping back.

On the fifth night in a row that Macbeth slept in his bed again, Toki stopped dead in his tracks in the doorway as he came back from… probably a date with Inna. Macbeth didn’t pay attention.

“You?” he said bluntly. “Again?”

“It’s my bed,” Macbeth protested from underneath the pile of blankets concealing his angst.

Toki flung his boots off so they bounced off of Macbeth’s bedframe, rattling his precious cocoon. Bastard. Dickwipe. Buttface. Elephant cunt. “Riiiight, it’s just that I assumed you moved in full-time with your boyfriend. What was it? Harvard.”

“He’s not my boyfriend. And it’s Yael. And it’s not even spelled like Yale the school. There’s no connection to Harvard whatsoever.”

“Whatever. Did you have a couple’s fight or what?”

“We’re not a couple and we didn’t have a fight.”

Toki collapsed on his own bed with a dramatic sigh. “You’re probably one of those irritating guys who thinks you’re in an eternal torture nexus of unrequited love and oh, no one could possibly want to date me–”

“That’s a terrible fucking impression of me.”

“It’s actually really accurate, you should hear yourself. I mean, actually, do you hear yourself? This is pathetic, Roulette. It’s making me feel seriously homophobic.”

Macbeth yanked the blankets down and raised his head, sputtering, “Aren’t you literally gay?”

“Gay people can be homophobic. Jesus Christ, don’t generalize. Seriously, come on, do you not think Yael wants you?”

“I wish this conversation would not ever happen.”

“Because it’s obvious that he does. It’s awful. Even if you do kind of have the tall dark and handsome thing going for you which I can see the appeal of–”

“What?”

“–your pervasive negativity really sours the package. But he must like it. I always knew he was weirder than me.”

Macbeth scooped up Toki’s boot from the floor and threw it at his head, and that about ended that conversation. It was the longest one Macbeth had ever had with his roommate up to that point. 

He hoped it never happened again.

Besides, how wrong was he? Yael didn’t want Macbeth. Yael was realizing he was in too deep with someone he didn’t really want in his life. He couldn’t even be blamed for that. So be it and so it goes. Macbeth would get over it. He would be fine.

Until Yael banged on Macbeth’s door one evening, thankfully, while Toki’s nosy ass was off on yet another date with Inna.

It was too late to avoid him and pretend he wasn’t there. Macbeth forgot to look through the peephole, and by the time the door was open, it was too late. Yael pushed his way in, his eyes wide and–

–teary?

“Why haven’t you been coming to my room? And why do you keep sitting between two people in class so I can’t sit with you? And why do you eat your lunch off campus? Is it something I did? What did I do? Do you not love me anymore? Tell me what I did!”

Half-assed, guilty explanations began flying without any thoughts from Macbeth’s brain.

“You didn’t–I was just–look, I didn’t mean to… I didn’t think you would care this much, it’s not that you did something, or that I–”

Wait.

“–don’t… love you anymore?”

Macbeth was so out of it that he didn’t even close the door behind Yael. He just blinked at him and his red-rimmed eyes and incredulous expression.

“Yeah,” Yael said like it was just obvious, “every night before you went to sleep, you said ‘I love you’ and then you stopped saying it, and then you stopped coming. So you don’t love me anymore?”

Macbeth blinked.

Yael stared back at him, seeking an answer.

And Macbeth jabbed him right in the chest with his finger, practically spitting, “You heard me say that?”

Yael’s brow crinkled. “I–? Well, yes. Why wouldn’t I? You don’t whisper very quietly. It’s loud, actually. And I can’t always fall asleep until you’re asleep. It’s peaceful that way.”

Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.

“How many times did you hear?”

Yael just kept looking at him like he was the insane one, but he didn’t step back despite Macbeth repeatedly poking him with unnecessary force. “Wasn’t it just something you said every night?”

Macbeth gritted his teeth so as not to scream. He was right. Yael did hear. He heard and he didn’t–he didn’t–

“Why didn’t you–” Despite Macbeth’s best efforts, his voice cracked, betraying his feelings of hurt. Confusion. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Yael hovered there for a moment, silent. Then he shuffled slowly to the door, quietly shutting it, and leaned his back against it, taking a quivering breath. Like he was… nervous. “I thought it would be unfair.”

Unfair. Because he didn’t want to hurt me. He didn’t want to have to turn me down outright. Macbeth’s heart constricted so hard that it felt like he could have thrown up. He swallowed the lump in his throat and thought: I’m not going to cry about something so stupid. 

“Okay.” He kept his tone as flat and even as he could, keeping his gaze fixed resolutely on Yael and not dropping to the ground like his eyes ached to. Even as his throat burned and squeezed painfully, he kept a straight face. “I thought so. That’s fine.”

Yael’s hands fumbled where they fiddled with the hem of his shirt. “You know?”

Macbeth couldn’t help but think that this conversation was steadily becoming more frustrating and confusing than his unpleasant bedtime chat with Toki, and that was an extremely high bar to meet. Yael was climbing over it with speed and ferocity.

Exasperated, Macbeth grunted, rolling his head back to look at the ceiling like God himself was forsaking him. Who knows–maybe he was. If he existed like Yael believed, then he had a sense of humor. “Know what? That you don’t… love me like that? Yeah, I know. It’s fine. I didn’t expect you to. It’s just, you could have said something, or–”

Yael took a step towards him, his hands lifting from his shirt like he was going to grab Macbeth’s shoulders in that way that he did when he felt like he had something important to say to him. “Love you like–? But I do! That’s why I didn’t say it back, because I knew you weren’t saying it like that, and if I said it, we would be on different wavelengths because I would mean that I love you as more than my friend, and you–”

Horrified, Macbeth’s eyes widened, and he stepped back from Yael. “Wait, you’re saying–you love me as more?”

Yael frowned. His hands dropped to his sides. “Macbeth, what are you talking about?”

Now Macbeth was the one reaching for Yael. He gripped his arms so tight his knuckles went bone white, his mouth hanging ajar. “Yael, all those times I said I loved you before I went to sleep–what did you even think I meant by that?”

He watched in what felt like slow motion as Yael tilted his head like a confused bird.

“It’s obvious,” he said. “You were saying you loved me like you would to a friend. I assumed it was platonic.”

Macbeth stared.

Yael stared.

Macbeth stared for so long and with such shock that he was pretty sure a vein in his temple was visibly throbbing.

Yael licked his lips, shifted awkwardly, and had the fucking audacity to ask–

“Was that… not platonic?”

Oh my god.

It’s not that he doesn’t love me like I love him. He wasn’t holding back from saying it because he didn’t love me back. He wasn’t pretending to be asleep because he didn’t want to confront me about my feelings.

He’s just a massive fucking idiot!

For the first time in years, Macbeth laughed so hard he couldn’t breathe while Yael’s face reddened as he watched Macbeth fall to pieces, helpless.

For the first time in his relationship with Yael, Macbeth’s relief left him feeling so unbelievably free that he threw his arms around the other boy so hard they almost fell over into a heaping pile of stupidity.

And, soon, Yael must have caught on, because he hugged Macbeth right back and started giggling, too.

~

Whenever he was left alone with Onyx, he was afraid. Afraid he would hurt this—tiny, fragile thing. Afraid his eyes matched his father’s because really, he was no better than him. Maybe he was worse. 

It was probably a blessing that Nyxie grew up to be so stubborn and independent. He learned to crawl and walk and talk sooner than Castor or any toddler Castor ever knew did. Maybe somewhere deep down, he knew that he had to grow up quick because his parents were always leaving their kids in a too-big house for trips and parties and his only substitute was a little redheaded kid with messy hair that was always a few inches too long who was too nervous to carry him in case he dropped him; a kid who wasn’t even at the starting end of puberty yet.

Nyx had his father’s slate gray eyes. He didn’t look at all like Castor, despite sharing their common mother’s blood. Nah. They didn’t look a thing alike. For that reason, it was easier not to think too hard about those scary implications of family. For a while, he could just think: this is my stepfather’s kid. This is my stepfather’s kid whom I take care of.

But around three years after Nyx came Aurien.

And it wasn’t that simple with Aurien.

It was Greeting Day.

Castor remembered when he first arrived at Anakt Garden with the other members of the 38th class. The 37th class greeted them on the second day, after those of them with belongings had moved their things in and they’d met their bunkmates with awkward waves. Back then, Castor was a wreck. A ruin of a child. He couldn’t speak to anyone; couldn’t look anyone in the eye, let alone an older child. Some of the members of the 37th class laughed at his behavior. Others tried to cheer him up and grimaced when they were met with an unresponsive husk of a human. Ultimately, he was skipped over by as many kids as could feasibly avoid him.

Now he was in the place of those kids up in 37. Because this time, the 38th class, grown taller and less naïve since their arrival years ago, was greeting the newest arrivals to Anakt Garden: the kids of the 39th class.

The night before, Kyo complained to Castor in the safety of their room that he was decidedly not looking forward to a “kiddie meet-and-greet.” 

“Really, what are we even supposed to say?” Kyo had scoffed as he plucked loose threads from his blanket. “Like, ‘Hey, kids! Congratulations on your guardians signing your death warrant!’ Yeah, no thanks.”

“That’s not true,” Castor muttered, growing increasingly upset with Kyo’s pessimism. “One of them is going to win, and then they get to do whatever they want. Same as us. We could win.”

“First off, sorry that I’m not excited about the prospect of one little kid out of tens of them surviving.” Kyo glared at him. “And second, don’t be stupid. Seriously, Castor. Neither of us is going to win out of all these people. Even if one of us did—if—what’s worth living for if all your friends are dead?” He sat up and swung his legs to hang over the side of his bed so he faced Castor. “Would you really want to win if it meant I died? Ollie? Isaiah?”

“Maybe you’re just not cut out to win!” Castor snapped, sitting up in bed to glare right back at him.

Kyo’s face turned stony.

Castor almost took it back, but before he could, Kyo reached for the light between their beds and turned it out.

“Goodnight,” Kyo said coldly.

It was the first big fight they’d ever had.

Even though they hadn’t said a word to each other today, Castor still glanced over to watch Kyo as a line of kids—God, tiny, tiny kids, he swore he wasn’t that small when he was that age—lined up against the wall of the cafeteria where the tables were pushed against one wall to make room for Greeting Day. One by one, the members of the 38th class went silent as the kids of the 39th class drew to a halt and stared back at them.

Kyo was pale. He looked like he might be sick. 

Next to Castor, though, Ollie made a high-pitched cooing noise like this was the cutest thing in the entire world. (As if they weren’t just a few years older.)

Castor zeroed in on the smallest two girls at the back of the line. The shortest of the two had her fingers entangled with the girl in front of her with long black hair and a boisterous laugh. The one behind the shortest girl was alone. Silent.

Immediately, Castor’s heart ached.

Maybe it’s why he chose to introduce himself to this one first.

The first thing Castor noticed about Aurien when she was brought home from the hospital was her eyes. Big, brown eyes, like the eyes on a speckled yearling deer. They took Castor aback, because he expected slate-gray eyes like his stepfather. Like Nyx.

These eyes were his mother’s, though.

The mother they indisputably shared.

That was when he really woke up to the reality of it: that he wasn’t just babysitting these kids, or taking care of his mother’s husband’s kids as a favor. He wasn’t detached from them, safely untethered.

They were his blood.

His half-siblings—the term he finally reckoned with as he stared into Aurien’s doe eyes for the first time, and she seemed to stare back.

Siblings, is what it was when you took one syllable off of the front.

Just siblings.

Despite the name, no half measures.

Only when he realized that did something in his brain click, and when he held Aurien in his arms for the first time, he thought with misty eyes: You’re mine. You’re just as much my kid as you are my mother’s and my stepfather’s.

I would die for you, do you understand? 

In some other life I have died for you.

At the end of the line, Castor stood before the little girl flattening herself against the wall as though to make herself invisible. He towered over her in height. She had to crane her neck to even look at him, and in her wide, dark eyes, darker and deeper than the void of outer space, he saw fear.

He saw a child who looked a lot like him, not in appearance, but in experience. Pain.

To make himself smaller, he knelt before her, hoping his expression conveyed nothing but the earnest desire to help and know.

“Hey,” he said softly—soft as he could. “Sorry for all the commotion. It’s pretty crowded and loud right now. When I had my Greeting Day with the class above me—I hated it. I hated it a lot.”

The girl blinked at him from behind round glasses. Still she said nothing.

“My name is Castor, or just Cas is fine.” He cleared his throat and, making a decision, he shuffled so he sat with his legs criss-crossed, lowering himself even more. “Yeah, when I first got here, I was real bad at talking to people. Everyone just scared me. They all seemed like they knew what they were doing, all the time, and I was just… there. Like I missed some big lesson everyone else got. It sucked.” 

Trying for a reassuring smile, he said, “It’s not that I’m not scared anymore. I’m still scared of… basically everyone, I guess? What they think of me. Or what they could do to hurt me if they wanted to. But now I try to think of it like, maybe everyone else is scared too, you know? Or maybe at least someone is. And if I treat that person how I wish others had treated me sometimes, maybe they’ll feel a little braver and a little less alone here. I had one person do that for me.”

“Do you see the boy with the dark hair over there by that classmate of yours, with the gray and black hair?” The girl followed where Castor pointed his index finger. She pushed her glasses up with her second knuckle and licked her lips like she was in deep thought; then nodded. “Okay, cool. That’s Kyo. He’s the first person who made me feel brave.” For a brief moment, he felt a stinging pang of guilt for their fight. “He’s a really good friend. I try to be a good friend too—sometimes I don’t think I’m too good at it, though.”

He turned his head back to the girl just in time to see her give the slightest shake of her head. He felt his eyebrows shoot up—he hadn’t expected her to respond to him in any way. “What?”

She pressed her lips into a thin line, chewed on her lower lip and fiddled with the hem of her uniform anxiously—then shook her head again. “You,” she said quietly. “Not a bad friend.”

Surprised, Castor laughed. “You don’t know me—if you did, you’d probably think differently.”

Almost imperceptibly, the girl’s face fell, her tentative sort of small smile collapsing into a frown. Realizing his mistake, Castor quickly rambled, “Not that… I mean, you can know me. If you want. I sure would like to get to know you.”

Saved it. Her eyes shone with renewed hope.

Castor grinned. “So, um, since you know my name, can I ask what yours is?” He held a hand out, palm up, in encouragement. To show he had kind intentions.

The girl raised her hand uncertainly. Her fingers twitched, her palm hovered over his for a moment, and then she touched just her fingertips to the pads of his fingers. Good enough. That was already more than Castor had ever been able to get himself to do on his Greeting Day.

“Aurien,” the girl said softly.

Aurien. 

“Fits you,” Castor said, earning a short, nervous laugh. 

Feeling the telltale prickle at the back of his neck of eyes watching him, he turned his head to look back at the line of other kids.

Kyo was staring at him where he was chatting with that same kid with the gray and black hair. He watched Castor with… fondness, maybe, or admiration—Castor hoped that was what it was—when he saw Aurien’s smaller hand in Castor’s.

Castor shifted his gaze to the kid Kyo chose to introduce himself to and smiled when he saw the moon eyes the kid was making at Kyo.

He understood that feeling.

The corner of Kyo’s mouth twitched upwards when Castor looked back at him, and Castor smiled at him.

Right now, Castor didn’t see a group of kids destined to be narrowed down to one lone winner. He could see now that Kyo didn’t see them like that either.

They just saw kids.

And years later, when Castor was sixteen and had the first child of his own, subsequently forced to give her up, he returned to Anakt Garden and sobbed with his head on Kyo’s lap, convulsing with the force of his cries, and wailed, “Auri and Nyx are mine, not that one. They’re mine, not—I love Auri and Nyx, I want Auri and Nyx!”

He helped teach Aurien how to walk and talk.

He taught her the alphabet with her sitting on his legs and Nyx hanging over his shoulder, arms resting on his head. He made her favorite soup and dessert on the nights when his mom and her husband were away and read her fantasy books to lull her to sleep at bedtime. (Nyx preferred sci-fi, but he didn’t complain too much. Not when it made their little sister happy.)

On weekends, Castor and Nyx walked down to the playground with Auri between them, holding both of their hands. Castor pushed them both on the swings. If he occasionally got clobbered by dirty sneakers in the teeth due to an over ambitious jump by Nyx, it was still worth it. If Aurien dripped chocolate chip ice cream in his new car the first time he took them for a ride when he turned sixteen, it was still worth it. …Mostly. Admittedly he did rank the car above his dental health in terms of importance.

But of course Aurien was still ranked above the car.

Sometimes they pitched a tent in the backyard and slept out beneath the stars and moon, and as Castor lay in the middle of a doggy pile of siblings with Auri and Nyx half on top of him (and Kyo, who was sleeping over, on Nyx’s other side), he reflected as he stared up at the shining full moon:

This is the life he never thought he could have when he was still living with his bio father.

It’s the life he stopped thinking he deserved a chance at, after a while.

But what did he have now?

The most amazing boyfriend in the whole universe, a baby brother who poked fun at him at every chance and pretended like he didn’t steal his clothes—

—and a baby sister who changed everything for him.

Whose eyes he looked into and realized that he didn’t even have to deserve this kid.

She deserved to have him in her life.

At her side.

Protecting her, making her laugh, trying to repay every bit of purpose she’s given him simply by existing.

Stretching his legs out tiredly, he smiled sleepily at the moon one final time for the night before closing his eyes and turned his head to rest his forehead against Aurien’s temple.

“Love you, sissy,” Castor murmured. He reached a hand behind him to gently squeeze Nyx’s knee. “Love you, bubba.”

Castor almost dozed off before a dry voice came close to his ear and said, “What about me, bubba?”

At least the effort of hitting Kyo in the throat didn’t wake up the kids.

~

“Yael.”

“Wake up, Yael.”

“Yael.”

“Yael.” 

Macbeth’s voice was vaguely irate as Yael approached his desk and, without further ado, swung a leg up over the side of it like it was a horse and shimmied so he was planted firmly in the middle in a straddle with either leg hanging off the sides. Yael didn’t take offense to it. He’d learned not to, anyway. The perpetual stormcloud hanging over Macbeth’s head made him a bit of a grump–prone to scowls and narrowed eyes, gloomy, half-lidded glances and a wrinkled nose to show his typical state of disapproval. Compared to some of their classmates, Yael got the gentled version of Macbeth’s diagnosable annoyance with humanity. Him and Inna, he supposed. But Inna was too nice for Macbeth to understand at his core.

Yael understood. Not that he wasn’t nice–he liked to think he was pretty nice–but he didn’t really care about others the same way Inna did. When Inna finished his bevvy of extracurriculars, he always had someone he wanted to hang out with. Monica to stay out late in the rock-and-cement playground at their old elementary school before puberty and mental illness kicked in and life got complicated. Inna and Monica liked jumping rope, playing tag and hopscotch, while Yael would just sit and watch. Quiet. Uninterested.

Uninterested was how he felt about most people until he met Macbeth, with the exception of Naz from the experimental treatment clinic, who provided decent entertainment.

Yael plucked an eraser out from where it got wedged under his thigh and held it up like something deeply interesting and worthy of discussion, twisting and turning it in his hand. He smiled at Macbeth, the one with teeth that meant he had some grand plan in mind. “What?”

Macbeth fixed him with a deadpan stare. “How many times do I have to tell you not to sit on my desk? Your butt is crushing my papers.”

“Your papers like my butt,” Yael retorted. He grabbed the pencil in Macbeth’s loose grip and started idly scritching little doodles into the rubbery pink material of the eraser. One of them looked like it might be meant to be a cat’s face. Another vaguely resembled a marijuana leaf. “It’s Friday.”

“I have a calendar and eyes to see.”

“And what very pretty eyes they are, my friend.”

“Shut up. And stop poking holes in my eraser! What, did you forget to medicate today or something?” said Macbeth as he snatched the eraser back, which, in fact, Yael had begun to poke. Cats and weed had gotten old fast.

Yael shook his head, the same toothy smile still plastered to his face. “Wouldn’t you like to know. So as I was saying, it’s Friday. Friiiiday. Which is basically our day.”

Macbeth scrunched up his nose in confusion. “Since when?”

“Well, first off, I’m pretty sure we met on a Friday.”

“We met on a Monday.”

Yael squinted down at him. “Did we?” Then he beamed. “You remembered!”

Waving his hand– “Right, whatever. You were saying?”

“For the last three weeks we’ve smoked on Fridays. So what I’m saying is we should keep doing that. For routine’s sake.”

That earned Yael an amused snort. “Routine’s sake? For weed?” 

…that was probably said a little too loudly in a religious school’s classroom. Macbeth briefly tensed, but no one appeared to be lingering. By the time Yael strutted in and took his place on Macbeth’s desk, everyone else left the study hall, eager to get on with their weekends. Nobody ever waited for Macbeth, and no one ever waited for Yael, except for each other. They were safe. 

Back in fall semester when they tried kissing out, Yael would only try it in empty lecture halls after class, in the courtyard behind the big tree near the perimeter where they napped during breaks, or in the privacy of Yael’s house. His parents were doting but thought of themselves as “progressive” by leaving him alone in his room with a boy and offering him birth control tablets. To be fair, they were hippies. Weed-smoking, libertarian hippies who had a handmade sign in their yard that said, “Leave Clinton and Bush to Rot–We Want Legal Pot!” Yael never noticed that they actually misspelled Clinton with an e instead of an o until Macbeth came over to his house for the first time and pointed it out. I was just so used to seeing it, Yael had said sagely.

Point is, they know where to do and say certain things and where not to.

“Just come over to my house tonight.” Yael twirled the pencil between his fingers, pausing to note the small indents and chips in the yellow paint from absentminded pencil biting. His eyes flicked up to Macbeth’s, searching. “Unless you’re avoiding me.”

“I’m not avoiding you,” Macbeth said, exasperated. With a roll of his eyes, he stood from his chair and grabbed Yael’s tie to yank him forwards and set him off balance, causing him to stumble off the desk. “I’ll go to your house. We need to stop by mine first so I can check in.”

“You can grab a few things for overnight,” Yael added, letting himself be led behind Macbeth by the still-held tie out of the classroom. Seeing Macbeth’s hesitation flickering over his face, Yael quickly added, “If you want. Just to sleep.”

So they ended up at Macbeth’s house so Macbeth could announce himself as alive and throw a few things in his overnight bag–which had also been “embellished” by Yael, who drew on it with a hot pink marker once when they were both high. Macbeth said he’d have to throw it away and get a new one. He never did. 

The reason they could never actually stay over together at the Roulette house if they wanted a moment’s peace was simple: Macbeth’s family was expansive in size and in their will to intrude upon others’ privacy. Even as Yael and Macbeth packed (or, Macbeth packed and Yael sat on the bed and watched) his younger sister Mae barged in, her friend from the next town over, Miriam, on her heels. Miriam went to a Catholic all-girls’ school that operated in horror of “forward-thinking” Catholic mixed gendered schools such as the one in their town, Gardens. But then, Eden was a weird town. Veturia–another lively member of the Roulette family who spent an hour in the bathroom every other early morning, thirty minutes to smoke so it rose with the shower steam and through the vent where no one could smell it, and thirty to actually shower––once compared Eden to Clearwater, Florida. She swore on her Chevrolet that Scientology has spread to the west. At some point, Miriam got tired of arguing with her. 

However, she never got tired of arguing with Yael over theology. She only went to Catholic boarding school because her parents made her–she thought the whole thing was “a giant pile of horse-fucking-shit.” Yael disagreed. This annoyed her. And thus was the greatest feud of the decade, shortly ahead of Yael and Mae’s more playful feud caused largely by Yael going from calling Mae “Margaret” to pester her to taking it a step further when she protested by calling her Margaret Thatcher.

As a journalistic family, running the county paper and fond of closely watching the news, the Roulettes naturally had a burning and intense hatred for Margaret Thatcher.

“Where are you going?” Mae asked, flopping down on Macbeth’s comforter next to Yael, who busied himself with stealing her headband and putting it on his own head. 

While Miriam wrestled it from him, Macbeth zipped up his bag and stood. “Yael’s. I’ll be back sometime tomorrow. Yael, give her the headband or she’ll kill you in your sleep.”

Sighing, Yael relinquished the headband.

Miriam glared down at him, handing the accessory back to Mae. “Good choice.”

Leaving the girls in relative peace, Yael and Macbeth trekked the distance to Yael’s house in a nearby cul-de-sac. Walking in school uniform in the summer was hell, but this early in spring, it was cold enough that they didn’t sweat too badly from the sun. Everything smelled clean and fresh after the long winter. Flowerboxes had been set in windowsills outside of the neighbors’ houses, full of blooming yellow, blue, and purple buds. It looked–felt–hopeful.

Last year at this time, Yael’s only friend was Naz, who was too invested in her other friendships to tag along with him constantly. They stuck together more in junior high when Yael was enrolled in the nearest city’s mental health clinic’s new program for youth with unexplainable and undiagnosed illnesses. That was where he met Naz. Naz threw a lot of fits in the waiting room, which made him dislike her, at first. She didn’t like him either on account of that time he smashed his head against the wall and gave himself a concussion–it scared her.

You can’t be too choosey with companions in a religious town when you’re part of a shrink program, though.

Yael had gone to school with Macbeth for years, but only last summer did they actually really meet through a summertime support group their parents made them attend. They didn’t talk for the rest of the summer, but when the school year started up, they recognized one another and clicked. Yael couldn’t properly explain what drew him to Macbeth. Macbeth couldn’t really explain it either.

Fate, Yael had claimed that first afternoon they tried kissing (it was winter and Yael still had his braces in so it hurt, a little), pulling away with a grin.

Maybe he wasn’t so far off.

This spring, with Macbeth at his side, he was the least and most afraid he’d ever been. Not afraid, because he had his soulmate at his side. And he was sure of it–Macbeth had to be his soulmate. He’d always believed in soulmates, waited for one, and what would a soulmate even be if it wasn’t what he and Macbeth were?

As Miriam would say: horse-fucking-shit.

And he was also afraid.

Because he could always lose Macbeth, too.

It was the kind of thing he usually tried to calm his mind from when he smoked. When they got to Yael’s house, they followed the usual routine–got a bowl of snacks and retreated to Yael’s room to do a few pages of homework together, exchange ideas for the story they were writing (it was supposed to be a more insightful rewrite of the Christian Bible, courtesy of Yael who believed they needed one in the world–or maybe just wanted to read something that affirmed his existence and identity and didn’t find it anywhere else, so he figured he’d have to do it himself)–then light up with the window cracked open to ventilate, lying on the bed with their sides touching. They changed into pajamas beforehand so they wouldn’t stink up the uniforms and fall asleep in their slacks and shoes.

These were the moments Yael enjoyed most, these days. He never cared much for his own bedroom until Macbeth. Now it was where they sequestered from the world together; from their annoyance or disappointment with humanity as a species. However applicable.

It was also when Yael could stare without Macbeth feeling the need to perform irritation or embarrassment as he usually did. With Macbeth’s amber eyes fixed up at the popcorned ceiling, eyelids relaxed, Yael could fixate on the brown speck in Macbeth’s left iris, the tiny twin moles above his left eyebrow, the uneven texture of his lips, chapped as they were because he couldn’t drink enough water to save his life. He could marvel at the curve of his eyelashes, the sharpness of his cheekbones that granted him his intimidating quality that kept most away from him, thinking him unapproachable, though it just looked pretty to Yael. There were a lot of things about Macbeth that others found weird or unpleasant that Yael just thought were pretty, in appearance or personality. He didn’t think it was strange to call someone’s personality pretty. It was the only word he could think of for it.

Caught up in the intimate setting of the moment, Yael rolled onto his side to face his companion and curled his calf over Macbeth’s, laying his hand on the soft inside of his elbow. They’d experimented once before, so he didn’t think much of it. Just wondered if Macbeth was feeling the same as he was.

Macbeth tensed, though, picking up on the signal, and glanced down at their legs, slowly withdrawing his from underneath Yael’s. “Yael–”

“It’s okay.” Only miffed by the withdrawal of contact, Yael pulled away to his side of the bed, rolling back over onto his back and folding his hands over his stomach (which was in complete knots). He picked at the skin around his thumb, chewed on the inside of his cheek, then, realizing the thought wouldn’t go away unless he voiced it, blurted, “Is it because of how I am?”

Macbeth turned his head to frown at him, brows furrowed. “How you are?”

“Well, yeah.”

“What do you mean, how you are?”

Sometimes Yael wondered if Macbeth just forgot his differences. Not that it was a bad thing–maybe it was a good thing. He was one of the only people outside of his parents and Naz who knew about it anyway. “Because, you know, I was a girl.”

Macbeth’s nose did that scrunching thing again like he was offended at the idea. “We weren’t even friends when you looked like a girl.”

“Well you could still tell when you had your hand–”

“That doesn’t matter, Yael, Jesus,” Macbeth interrupted, huffing out an audible scoff. “I didn’t care about that. I don’t care now. We were just trying something.”

Yael flipped over on his side again, staring at Macbeth’s side profile. “You’ve been dodging me when I try to talk to you about it, though.”

Helplessly, Macbeth shrugged, which looked quite awkward from a supine position. “I don’t know what to say. I just don’t see why it matters so much. I don’t see why we have to do it to be close. I like being close to you, but I don’t like that.” He took a drag, then coughed and shrugged again. “I don’t like when people talk about it. I thought I would like actually doing it, but I didn’t. It was just… me. Okay? I don’t care that you have to–sit down to take a leak, or whatever.”

He was tense, his face angled to the window away from Yael like he expected anger or rejection. Instead, Yael just laughed. “I could probably do it standing. If I tried.”

Startled, Macbeth actually giggled for what was probably the first time in his life. “What?”

“Peeing. I could try standing peeing. You could score me on accuracy.”

Macbeth rolled over to face Yael, mouth agape. “I’m not–Jesus, Yael, I’m not going to watch you pee to score you!”

Yael only laughed harder, so Macbeth laughed, too, until their stomachs hurt too badly and they wound up nose-to-nose, Yael nudging their faces together.

“That’s two times you’ve said Jesus out of turn. You’d get hit on the wrist with a ruler at school.” Yael studied his expression in response to the proximity. “Is this fine, though? Do you like this?”

Macbeth rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “Yeah, Yael. This is fine.” I like this went unsaid but hung in the air between them.

“Good. It is for me too.” Yael ducked his head further to rest his forehead against Macbeth’s collarbone, breathing deep and peacefully. “I’m tired.”

“You’re always tired.”

“I’m tired like I’m going to sleep, though.”

“You’re also always sleeping.”

“Shush. Be nice and hold me.”

For all Macbeth’s feigned grumpiness, he did.

He’s in a cafeteria, in white clothes, surrounded by more children in white clothes. Like school uniforms, but worse. Worse. He recognizes it. He knows it. 

He searches for Macbeth amidst a few other brunets, but he already knows: Macbeth isn’t here. If Macbeth was here, he’d be sitting with Yael right now, taking prim bites of his food and dabbing his mouth with a napkin, complaining to Yael about music theory or singing practice but he wasn’t in music theory or singing practice. Eventually a hypothermia victim will do anything and everything on this side of irrational to try and get warm, stripping the only clothing defending them from the cold, trying to burrow in the snow and insulate. Instinct.

Yael knows these words, he knows this day, where Macbeth is absent from him.

The moment he realizes it, he jumps up from his seat, his heart seizing in his chest, breaths coming in gasps. As he darts between the tables for the exit, none of the other students look up; no orderly attempts to stop him. The kids are all frozen, immobile, their chattering mouths motionless, their eyes closed, and their heads down so they can’t see what’s happening. Only Inna, easily recognizable by his baby blue head of hair, has his chin up. Only Inna has his eyes open. And as Yael rushes for the door, those eyes follow him the whole way.

The hallway is so much longer than it’s supposed to be. Yael runs as fast as he can, thinking: he can get there fast enough, he can stop it this time. This time he can save Macbeth. This time he can stop him from doing the very thing the old Yael said would save him but it didn’t, it didn’t, and it didn’t save Nina, it didn’t save him, he’s dead, he’s already dead–

He’s dead because You Already Watched Him Die.

But he’s still running to Macbeth’s room.

And he’s still falling to his knees in the doorway, screaming.

He still finds Macbeth dead,

because You Already Watched Him Die.

And All Stories Come To An End.

He’s been here before, and he still isn’t prepared for how shocked he is when the truth of it is before his eyes.

“Yael, wake up! Hey, wake up!”

For all the time Yael slept, he did wake up, screaming.

“No, wait! Where’d he go, where’d he go, where’s–”

Hands held fast to his wrists to stop his flailing, and the size and feeling of them was recognizable enough that Yael settled, his anxious trembling stuttering in its consistency. Only when he looked up at the face above him did he feel truly calmed.

Macbeth.

Alive.

You are beautiful.

“Oh,” he croaked. “Oh. Thank God.” And he threw his arms and legs around Macbeth’s shoulders and waist, dragging him down against him so their bodies were flush together.

Macbeth didn’t struggle or tense in the embrace. He was awkward as ever with physical affection, but he tried, moving his hands from Yael’s forearms to rest against his sides hesitantly. He asked, quietly, “Was it… the drowning one, again?”

“No.” Yael’s voice was still trembling and hoarse as he spoke. “It’s this different one I’ve started getting more and more since we’ve been friends.”

“...Should I be offended?”

“No!” Yael amended quickly, “no, it’s not bad–I mean, it’s not bad about you. Well, it’s–it’s just that you’re dead.”

“Oh. How do I die?”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s… bad.”

Carefully, Macbeth shifted his weight off of Yael so they were hugging on their sides instead, laying his palm flat against Yael’s upper back. “I’m not a little kid, I can take it. Anyway, it’s not real, Yael.”

For a moment, Yael debated staying silent and pretending he was already going back to sleep. But–no. Macbeth deserved to hear.

His voice a broken whisper, Yael mumbled, “I find you, and you killed yourself, and I’m too late.”

He could hear Macbeth’s surprised inhalation in the quiet of the room. It was cold. They forgot to close the window before sleeping. “Oh.”

Yael exhaled harshly. “Yeah. Oh.”

He whined when Macbeth extricated himself from the tight hug, only reassured when Macbeth propped himself up on an elbow and pulled on Yael’s arm to get him to do the same. “Look, I know you know I have… like… some issues. With… depression, or whatever. But that doesn’t mean I’d actually do that. You know?”

“I know.” Yael mimicked Macbeth’s position, though his limbs still felt weak with fear. “It just feels so real. Like… it really happened a long time ago, or something. And… come on, we met over the summer in a support group for suicidal teenagers. Can you honestly blame me for being worried?”

Macbeth’s eyebrows twitched, upset. “It’s not like–like I don’t worry for you, too.”

Despite how close they were, it… honestly hadn’t occurred to Yael. He must’ve looked surprised for a moment, because Macbeth’s frown deepened into something more distraught. “Do you seriously not know?”

“Despite your name, Macbeth, you haven’t ever seemed quite as fixated on death as me.”

“Not death,” Macbeth protested. “More like… I just worry about your wellbeing. That’s what people are supposed to do for one another when they’re close, right?” He rubbed his head between his eyes like he was contemplating something great. “...I don’t know. I think maybe we’re supposed to worry about each other. Maybe we’re supposed to tell each other that kind of stuff.”

Vaguely less miserable, Yael smiled weakly. “Why? So I can make sure you know I’m haunted by your imaginary death and make you worried too?”

Macbeth shoved his arm. “No, idiot. I just didn’t think about it before. You don’t even know I worry about you. Or that I’d miss you if you died.” He paused. Quietly, he said, “I’d miss you if you died.”

I have missed you.

Yael sniffled so snot from his crying didn’t drip out of his nose and nodded, mouth trembling. “I’d miss you if you died too. So don’t.”

Macbeth smiled, a small, barely there thing. “And you don’t, either.”

“We’ll get really old together. And escape from here, like–go somewhere really great. Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll write our book. And get rich for it.”

“Obviously.”

“And we can… hey, we can get a kid someday!”

“...Do we have to do that part?”

“And run a pot farm. Have a big house from all the book money somewhere in Europe.”

“And we’ll…”

“...and…”

Do we get an “and” this time?

Do we get an “after”?

Before

“Yael!”

“Hey, Yael, wake up!”

“What took you so long? I’ve been waiting for you.”

Like emerging from cold water and drawing your first breath after struggling under the surface for so long, Yael wakes with a start, his eyes flying open to welcome an open blue sky, and—

It’s not.

It’s not.

It’s not him.

It hasn’t been him for a long time, it can’t be—

Macbeth’s golden eyes, not one golden eye but two, stare back at him. Yellow and purple flower petals have blown with the breeze into his dark hair, like a scattered version of the flower halo Yael once made for him. Somewhere within those eyes, Yael can see his own disbelief—elation—reflected, shining like the light of the brightest star in the universe.

“Oh, hey,” Macbeth breathes, tilting his head to the side as if in wonder. “You’re finally here.”

Yael’s mouth is not filled with blood.

He is not blinded by stage lights.

He is not staring into one blue eye and one gold.

He’s just Here.

Finally.

Finally.

With a wail, he launches himself at Macbeth, tackles him to the ground, and buries his face in his neck.

“I’m sorry,” he hiccups, tears streaming down his cheeks in rivers. “I’m sorry, I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry, I’ll never let you go again, never, never, I promise—“

“It’s fine. Hey.” Macbeth clings to him tightly, eyes squeezed shut. “It’s fine. It’s fine.”

How long they lie there relishing their continued existence no longer matters; they have all the time they never had.

No matter how long it takes them to embark down the path again and let go of one another’s hand, step into the great unknown of a new life, it doesn’t matter.

Somewhere, they get an “and.”

They get an “after.”

And in every “and” and “after” and “before”—

They’ll find each other.

And when the boy with the blue eye is ready,

they’ll find him, too.