#hellyea.

From the bridge between Condition Attachment and the mainland of Updaam, Charlie manages to stop his hands from shaking long enough to peer down the sights of his gun and put a bullet through one of Aleksis’ several rubber faces as it peeks over the top of the buildings. As it explodes with an awful bang, ribbons of black and red shattering across the night sky, Charlie is firstly surprised his warning shot even hit its target and secondly bitter that he probably wasted his best snipe on the fake wolf. He can hear the thud of bad electronic music and the yowling of karaoke from his office, the occasional scream, loud and raw as someone in the throes of a grisly death, that peters out into drunk laughs. These are unsociable hours. There are laws about this back in the Motherland.

Doesn’t that asshole get it? Of course he doesn’t. He keeps whining about how he’s allegedly just as creative as the rest of them but a real intuition for genius, intelligence, and artistry would have told him to keep his shitty party music down to give Charlie the highly necessary space to finish the quality assurance test on his latest RPG before the programme inevitably crashes on him. Even the computer fails to contain and handle the pure talent Charlie has had to unfortunately cram inside it, that tawdry vessel. Goddamn frozen wasteland of an island slows everything down, though, and 2-BIT can barely run the microwave some days; it’s sapping at his natural instincts, his reaction times are suffering. What use is this art if it has had to be condensed into this half-measure analogue nightmare?

Charlie flaps his trigger hand restlessly. He should save a load of lead for Egor, too, all that crap about this being a place for co-operative creation. Frank, Harriet, Colt, too. At least Fia gets what this place is meant to be, he tells himself, marching up the rest of the bridge and under the brick arch at its end. That’s why she’s back at the bunker, resting up, not sleeping anything off just connecting to her own, higher server. It’s all part of the process and she has to do it alone, obviously. He dislikes working with people, too - diluting the idea, sharing nonsense, complaining about marketability and wages, so insolent and demanding! - so he understands. Lets her drift away. 

The cold suddenly nips at his skin, burrowing through the layers of tan coat and shirt. Charlie shivers, stops in his tracks, realises he’s nearly at the fireworks place. He looks back at the tracks he’s left behind in the snow, the trail of them interrupted by a short gap. That’s what the nausea is, the fast burst of his Slab in his guts, making them cramp, stealing time from him, muddling the clear and linear train of his thoughts. He rubs the butt of the gun against his forehead, roughly massaging out a throb of pain that skitters down the back of his beanie hat. 

He reminds himself that this anger was about Aleksis, not all that other stuff, by firing another shot at a balloon, delighting in the sound of it and the jolt in his shoulder when the bullet leaves the weapon. Some Eternalists scatter and others come out from apartments and lounging areas to hover near the scene of violence, curious. Charlie waves the end of the gun at them, the fucking lemmings, and the majority of the rubberneckers slink back to their Fizz-pop and radios. Their clothes make him squint, too bright and contrasting, but he manages to spot a small scouting group who turn tail back up to the mansion. 

“You’re gonna go tell on me to Daddy?!” he cries after them, unclear why that’s the term that came to mind first. Frank would be disappointed. “Get a life!”

He hurls the gun after them, weaker than he’d wanted, as though it’d really scare them, as though, in that house, with that freak, they don’t do that bird thing Fia tried to show him once but with grenades. Charlie itches his scalp, suddenly feeling too hot, wants a fight, wants to put his hands around something a squeeze until they see the little spots of black around their eyes like he does. 

A physical fight isn’t usually his thing, but he can’t threaten 2-BIT anymore and going after Colt in the sewers will just piss off Frank and he knows he’d crumble into tears if he went to Fia and Aleksis is close. 

And getting closer, as Charlie looks up and sees him saunter down the path, passing the ammunition vendor, passing the fireworks manufacturer, passing Charlie. He smells liqueur sweet, with a tang of sweat, alabaster mask barely swivelling to glance at him.

“Step into my office, Charles,” he sighs, opening the door by the library, back the way Charlie’s glitchy tracks led, and not waiting to see if Charlie follows. “Let’s not keep the delegates waiting.”

Charlie bundles his fingers into fists by his side, teleports in a blink of purple to the space before Aleksis’ next step, cutting him off by the HORIZON door, making him stumble. Charlie grabs the mask’s ears and tugs, imagines its real, imagines the yelp of protest would turn to begging, to a tearing sound and blood. He backs off with Shift, taking the head with him, throws it out towards the square. His chest is pounding with a little thrill; still got the reflexes, still perfectly capable of testing those QTEs later.

“Hey!” Aleksis collides with him in what seems like an attempt at a tackle, hands going for Charlie’s eyes, more wild cat than dog. “Quid pro quo, bitch! You break my face, I break yours! Do you know how personalised that was? The specs?! Do you understand those words? To the millimetre, asshole, the millimetre!”

Pushing out ahead of him, Charlie does his best to keep Aleksis at arm’s length, who is yelling and accusing. Able to see his mask-less anger, Charlie is unexpectedly bodied by the realisation that he looks tired, wired, the unmistakable face of someone running on suspicious coffee fumes, eyes bloodshot and pulse an inconsistent, hurried tattoo under his jacket. Charlie drops his arms, the need for a scuffle hesitating. 

I should call her.

Aleksis aims a swift kick to his crotch and he doubles over, whining.

“Are we done here?” Aleksis straightens his coat with a huff, smooths one hand over his stiff hair. “I’ve got cake to cut.” 

“I literally just want one night without your - your noise,” Charlie seethes. “Just one night when it all shuts up.”

Idly, Aleksis kicks at a stone in the path. “Get the feeling this isn’t about me, actually,  so…that’s my cue to go.”

Charlie stands as upright as his posture will allow, scowls at Aleksis. “That’s what I’m saying! It’s isn’t about you, actually. Other people live here, okay! I just want - I was supposed to have the night to myself and my project and not - ! Agh!”

That swimming sickly feeling again makes him wince, bite down on his lip, thoughts and words scattering, melting away. “You know what I mean!”

Pathetic, he hears. Asking for understanding from this leech, like he’d know anything. Desperate. Pathetic.

A soft laugh brings Charlie back to the reality of the alley, one door shut ahead and the open one behind him, the lights from the stage in the square making the edges of it glow that candy coloured halogen glow. It still feels too bright, oppressive, makes him turn his face away and at the ground, but the inherently submissive and shy look of that action only makes him burn up again. He rubs his face, sets his jaw, makes eye contact with Aleksis in the gloomier side of the tunnel. He’s smiling, a smirk fit for the cover of some glossy magazine, or a fetching courtroom drawing. 

“Oh, I get it. You’re home alone. And chewed through Fia’s leash, huh? I do imagine she ties you up to some pipe in that place, y’know, leaves you with a bowl of water,” Aleksis arcs an eyebrow, shrugs. “Whatever high she’s after isn’t here. And, believe me, I’d totally rub it in your face if it was; I’m just as disappointed as you to find out we’ve been blue-balled.”

Break his face, huh?

Charlie's swipe across his face catches him more in the nose rather than his cheek, but the crack of it breaks through the buzz of music a street away. The lucky bastard even draws blood, a red stream slowly dripping down over Aleksis' mouth and onto his collar, justifying various fantasies in which Charlie is fed to whatever fanged Leviathan lives in these fucking freezing waters. He sticks his tongue out, pokes the tip of it to the injury, tastes iron and grins. 

"Oh, okay!" he shows teeth, the best veneers several tax fraud cases can afford. "That make you feel big and strong? You get something out of your system; want to pretend I'm her now? I can take it, Charlie! I love you, Charlie! That’s, no, ha, I’m losing the scene, that’s not the script is it?" 

Tugging Aleksis closer, Charlie's open palm bunches into a lapel of his jacket, creasing it. It'll have to be thrown away immediately. He smells of cigarette ash and something sour, talcum powder and stale gum, and the little freak is quivering with something like rage, something like desperation. It borders on funny, the way his mouth twitches, how he’s trying to puff himself up, like he can be intimidating. Aleksis would laugh at him more, but the ache in his face distracts him from the hilarity, soured instead into frustration by the dawning realisation that Shit-for-Brains Montague’s made him bruise, with First Day less than a week away. If he has to spend an eternity reaching for a fucking compact every morning to blot concealer on his busted lip, Charlie can spend his eternity scrabbling for purchase on the sides of the mincing tank.

“Or your little robot? What else do you make it say, I’ve literally always wondered, because maybe I should get one myself when the sheep get boring. It calls you ‘Master’, right? That’s so fucked! Sorta love it, though.” Charlie gives him a shake and Aleksis holds up his hands against the wall in mock surrender. “Hey, I’m just asking if you programmed it to whine for your d-”

"Obviously not!” Charlie snaps. “It’s a, an extension of life! The next step in human consciousness, you clearly wouldn’t fucking get it.”

“It opens windows, bro.”

“Fuck you!”

“I don’t do charity work.”

Aleksis spits his blood at Charlie, then feels the back of his skull connect sharply with the brick wall behind him, dizziness robbing him of the opportunity to see what a nice gory moneyshot he painted on the guy's face. He yelps at the pain, hands gripping Charlie's arms, the sting of Karnesis under his skin chanting for him to push, shove this gross insect of a man off the side of Updaam, or hold him down and use the slab to pull his liver out of his own mouth. 

Shit. He's going to get hard if he keeps thinking like that, thinking about Charlie with the remnants of his brain in the street, making him lick up grey matter and whatever else - how would that even work? I could make it work - Charlie tied with a cable to his stupid gaming chair, good for nothing more than warming cock. He should call Fia, she'd agree. They could tag team it, fill him together, opened to his limit the Slab, maybe further. Though, Fia would probably rake Aleksis over hot coals if he actually hurt a precious hair on her baby bird's head. It'd be worth it; if Charlie wants to march over to Aleksis' own house and shout the place down, he can give the 'genius' something to really scream about. Wenjie didn't explicitly design it for those purposes, but she's taken Charlie apart too and maybe she'd realise they were finally equals in sexy torture habits and come over, run some tests, soothe the embarassing envy he feels at the fact Charlie got his frontal lobe fingered and Aleksis hasn't. 

He swallows. The dry mouth and light-headedness has nothing to do with Charlie in specific, that cheap and uncivilised dumpster diver, it's just the proximity and the sweat and the poppers he did before turning on the disco balls, before Charlie's shrieking pulled him away from the fun. Charlie can choke, should choke. Aleksis wriggles, pinned between Charlie's grip and the wall, damp and dark, ears slightly ringing, blood thumping. Can’t believe I’m gonna go home later and fuck myself over this asshole and miss the third rush of canapes, the cake, the babes in the cake.

“Turn your shitass music down and stop talking about my girlfriend or I’ll blow up your speakers myself the night before your freak party,” Charlie warns, but there’s no bite to it, his voice pitches too high in the middle. “Push your mask supply into Karl’s Bay, too. See how you like it when your vision is disrupted.”

The little fire in his eyes is almost endearing, the permanent crease of his brow. Maybe, Aleksis thinks, there’s an easier way to prove he’s going to be the winner in these arguments, that these weak threats of property damage are bloated, bounce off. The justification for it is flimsy at best, but fuck it, if he’s going to waste my time, my attention, I can make him pay for it just like any other appointment.

As Charlie punctuates his lousy attempt at intimidation with a similarly childish head bob, glancing his nose off Aleksis’ injured one, Aleksis closes the gap, clamps his hands around the back of Charlie’s neck, fingertips in the grain of his knit hat, and kisses him to twist the knife. Their teeth collide in a clack, confrontational, a dare, the return of the backhand but with bruised lips and a tongue going straight for the back of Charlie’s throat. Charlie half-whimpers at the contact, and there’s enough of a tell-tale flinch up his side that Aleksis is ready when he tries to Shift out of the way, catches him mid-flight with his Slab, muscles tense. 

"Are you getting off on this?" Charlie squeaks, incredulous. “Put me down, asshole!” 

“You are such a hypocrite,” Aleksis exclaims, dropping him. “Acting like you’re not a fan of getting told to heel!”