#stossi

Sometimes he looked into his own face and saw the handiwork of time and thought, “fuck, I’m getting old!” With a surprise not fit for his age. It was hard to make amends with the fact that they were getting older, time seemed to be slipping through his fingers, but it was somehow worse to see it in Casey.

Still, Valentino wouldn’t lie and say that they were too old for him to have had a brief, vivid moment of delusion where they were again young and their teeth ached to bite down on another win to bring them closer to their name on the metal of the Tower of Champions, but he had looked away before a camera caught him watching.

Now, the paddock was packing up again, the circus getting ready to move onto the next country and Valentino was walking somewhat aimlessly until someone needed him. It was bittersweet for him, coming back to the paddock, old memories coming back to settle heavy in his chest.

He found himself wandering over to Ducati – he had no real intentions to talk to Casey, the air of Misano already coating his mouth with a bad taste, but maybe it was nostalgia and old sentiments and he found himself walking towards Casey. He stood beside him silently for a second and watched on as the Ducati mechanics loaded the bikes into the trucks.

“The bikes are so different,” Casey said after a pause and Valentino turned to look at his face. There was no sense of longing in Casey’s eyes, not like how Valentino couldn’t let go, but there was a distaste to the tension between Casey’s eyebrows.

“You don’t like the bike, no?” Valentino stated more than asked. It was amusing, just slightly.

“No, I don’t,” Casey said stiffly, never turning to face Valentino. Valentino hummed in acknowledgement and again they stood in silence.

“Come to my hotel?” Valentino found himself asking, and again he couldn’t exactly fathom why but it felt right; nostalgia, whim, or whatever else could be blamed.

That seemed to capture Casey’s attention because he finally looked up at Valentino. “What?”

“Eh, I said come to my room.”

“I thought we didn’t do that anymore.”

“Allora, you do not say that at the ranch.”

Valentino meets an angel at a train station in London late at night.

He is waiting for the last train before the tube shuts down for the night, tired and sucked dry by a day of work. The life in London was not as he had imagined it and the disappointment weighed him down. It was a momentary disappointment, he would go back home as soon as he finishes his degree this year and London would be a distant memory, but the homesickness didn’t leave him no matter what he tried to console himself with.

The angel was not there when he first came to the platform, but he is there when Valentino looks around to see who else is waiting along with him. An old lady is knitting in a corner and watching the clock mounted on the wall with contempt, a middle-aged man with his suit jacket in his hands and his tie loosened around his neck is slouched against a pillar, rumpled and drunk, and an angel is sitting on a bench, his head is bent down and his hands are clasped as if in prayer and his large, pure white wings are hung limp, brushing against the dirty station floor.

Valentino spares another glance at his companions before he furtively makes his way to the angel – he is selfish and doesn’t want them to notice. Carefully, he sits next to him, and he looks. If the angel is bothered, he does not show it, and Valentino is thankful because he finds that he doesn’t want to stop watching.

He is pleasing to the eye, this angel. Even though he is far shorter than Valentino, he is broad and masculine in a way that Valentino could never manage to become. His brown hair is spiky and his coloring looks almost sickly under the station lights, not a word Valentino thought he would ever use to describe an angel, but there is a distinct otherworldliness and unbelonging to him even in sickness that marked him as decidedly inhuman.

For a moment, Valentino allows himself to imagine the angel as a normal man, someone that Valentino would find in a bar – the type that the church found distasteful and perverse and God’s omniscient eyes skip blindly over – before he snaps himself out of his own daydream.

The angel does not look at him, but Valentino knows that he is being watched as well. He shivers slightly at the feeling of eyes trailed on him and wonders what the angel sees of him. Does he see a random stranger who sees what they are not supposed to, or does he see a sinner, shameless of his guilt?

“Why are you here?” Asks Valentino, curiosity overwhelming his logic, and the angel finally looks up at him, his hands still clasped together in mock prayer.

“I do not want to tell you,” he replies, earnest, and Valentino nods as if he had already known that it was the answer that he would have gotten even before the angel had said a word.

Then, half joking, Valentino asks, “Won’t you ask me?”

The angel shrugs. “I don’t need to.”

Valentino laughs in delight at the bad manners of this angel and the old lady looks away from the clock to stare at him with narrowed eyes, she thought he was crazy. He smiled genially back, maybe he was.

There is a pause, the angel does not tilt his head back down in prayer but his fingers are still loosely interlaced. He doesn’t look at Valentino; instead, he looks at the wall, his face impassive and blank. The speakers crackle and a woman’s voice – robotic and too chirpy for how late it was – announces that the train will come shortly and an idea flits through Valentino’s head.

“Would you come home with me tonight?” Asks Valentino and the angel turns again to look at him again. His face, so startlingly human for something that is far from one, is scrunched in confusion.

“Why?”

“Whim, boredom, curiosity, or a mixture of all three,” shrugs Valentino, looking at the angel expectantly but the angel looks away, his brows creased.

“It’s not like I have anywhere else to go,” he mutters finally and Valentino takes that as a yes.

Valentino is quiet, he has nothing more to say and the angel doesn’t say anything either. The angel watches the ground as if he would find the word of God in the trash and dirt collected on the tiles and Valentino watches the clock like the old woman. 

“What do you want in return?” The angel asks suddenly. “You must want something in return.”

“I don’t want anything, angel,” Valentino shrugs, watching the clock tick steadily on.

“No, you must, you must want something.” Valentino looks over and the angel is watching him with an unwavering conviction in his eyes. It had to be one of the more absurd things that Valentino had come across: a bad mannered angel who doesn’t believe in altruism.

Valentino pretends to think for a second before snapping his fingers. “Tell me your name.”

“What?”

“Your name, angel, what is it?”

The angel hesitates for a second, eying Valentino warily as if he were a Pagan fae vying to steal his name. “Casey,” says the angel finally when he judges that he has nothing to lose. He returns his focus back to the ground when he deems his debt paid.

“Casey,” repeats Valentino, sounding the angel’s name out carefully in his mouth. “Hello Casey, I’m Valentino.”

The newest mech suit in the bay was mostly a florescent neon and Casey wondered how the kid – because it was always a kid, that was the coal of this war machine, the corpses of children – had convinced them to paint it such a revolting color. It was shaped like a humanoid monster, just like the rest of the mechas, but it was lean and lacked the mechanical bulk that was present in most of the others. It struck Casey as something made for a more graceful battle unlike the lumbering masses like the rest of it’s compatriots.

He found himself in the bay often, but it wasn’t often that he was well and truly alone in it. There was always at least one or two engineers running around, feverishly prodding at the electricals or running data, but this time it was just Casey and his thoughts. Everyone else was celebrating another dead kaiju but Casey had started to find celebrations a little pointless at this point.

Human-made monsters to fight real monsters, was what Cristian had always said about the mechas. It had gotten winces and gentle rewordings from HR every time he had said it, but whenever Casey was surrounded by their giant, ugly mimicry of human figure, he couldn’t help but agree with him.

Unconsciously, his hand went to touch his leg and the metal which covered it before Casey aborted the movement and hung his hand back down by his side. Maybe it was his resentment, but there was something grotesque in the nature of the mechas as much as there was something grotesque in their figure, they gave as much as they took; a life for a life, a kaiju’s death for the pilot’s death.

Steeling his nerves, Casey walked the familiar path down the walkway to his mecha. It was his, revoltingly and disgustingly, it was his. After all, he had bled in it and sealed his soul to hell in it, so it was his. 

The echoey clang of his leg as it made contact with the metal walkway was loud and jarring but the silence when he stopped to look up at the giant, neglected mecha seemed even louder. Just for a moment, he wondered if it was a curse or a blessing that they had found it whole enough for the MG project to drag mecha twenty-seven out of it’s watery grave.

Casey stared at its half-destroyed frame like he had done so many times before, trying to find any humanity in their sharp, gleaming metal carcass. Its dim eyes stared stonily onward, standing larger than life with an air of blood thirst around them, and Casey found that he couldn’t.