NO MORE SHAME / NO MORE FEAR / NO MORE DREAD

Sometimes he wonders what it is that Daniel sees when he looks at him with those dark, adamantine eyes. However, Marcus knows more than enough about him to know he wouldn’t like the answer, whatever it is nor how nuanced it may or may not be. The man claims to love Spirit–saying the words with almost disarming frequency around Marcus–but he treats her horribly, save for a few tender moments here and there. All the little lovebombs that keep her nervous system on the backfoot, forever imbalanced, forever second-guessing. That says everything Marcus needs to know about how he views her.

But Daniel has never claimed such a thing about Marcus, their little unicorn; their third and unequal partner. (Though, in reality, none of them are equal. Not when Daniel skews the balance so much.) There is no love between the two men in this odd triangle. And that’s fine. 

It’s… fine.

Or, at least it would be fine, in some other circumstance. Because he’s not here for Daniel, and he never has been. Even if, in the heat of the trio’s intimate moments, he plays his role as the plus one flawlessly; even if he can and does play Daniel’s body like he plays the piano, masterfully, to keep him placated when he’d rather focus his attention on Spirit; even if he proffers himself to be used so that Spirit can retreat when things get a little out of control, so she can take a breather when she needs to under the guise of observation; even if a baser part of him does find watching–when he’s not allowed to actively participate–to be a thrilling endeavor in and of itself.

But this isn’t some other circumstance. This isn’t some milquetoast, experimental dalliance undertaken by some bored suburban couple and a random pansexual guy they’d found at a bar. It’s dangerous. Daniel Romano is dangerous.

And thus, Marcus’ feelings for Spirit are dangerous.

Marcus loves her. Marcus loves her in the way that Daniel says he does, and the way he so freely gets to tell her he does. Ever the outsider in their little escapades, Marcus knows that he shouldn’t love her, in some logical, disused corner of his consciousness. And he knows that even if she loves him–which she has refused to admit to–she doesn’t love him enough for them to have any sort of a meaningful future together. It’s not that he expects her to love him more than anyone else, even; he’d be perfectly content to be part of a poly thing for the rest of his life should the right dynamic arise. But he does not know how to walk the tight rope tethering his heart to hers any longer. Not when Daniel stands so near, ready to cut the wire to send him falling.

With Daniel, there are moments he feels as though he is being scrutinized for deference toward him. The man’s lips will move from Spirit’s neck or breast or inner thigh, and he will lock eyes with Marcus before reaching for him; before snaking a hand around the back of his neck and guiding him toward saliva-slicked skin; before playing what seems to be an unwinnable game with him over what one of them considers property and the other considers a whole person.

Sometimes, he’s rewarded. Sometimes, he’s allowed to paint sweet little blooming bruises of violet and pink and blue across the canvas of Spirit’s pale skin while Daniel sits back with a drink or puts his cold lips to the constellations of freckles mapped out over Marcus’ back and shoulders, fingers searching for the heat between his thighs. Sometimes, he’s struck with bright bursts of phantom pain for daring to do as he’d been asked; for daring to touch her at all, or letting his eyes linger too hungrily for too long, despite what had seemed like an open invitation.

Sometimes Spirit pays for it too. At least, that’s what he tells himself, because sometimes it’s easier to blame himself than it is to handle the fact that the man she won’t leave–the man she’d tied him to as well–just likes to hurt her. A lot.

Marcus could end this. All of this.

At night, nursing headaches he can never be sure are the natural result of stress or not, he often lies awake and thinks about autonomy, morality, and control. He thinks about the principles he’s held himself to for years; the principles that eventually grew to clash too profoundly with his old friends. With Tao Song, in particular.

Daniel is not like Tao though.

Tao, deep down, was afraid of Marcus. Afraid of what someone like him could do–or be forced to do–to mutantkind as a whole, or more selfishly, what he could do to him personally. Afraid that he could be manipulated into aiding in their extermination, or in the rendering of the vigilante impotent. This line of thinking, unfortunately, did not prove to be altogether unfounded; Marcus had been coerced into using his powers this way not long after parting ways with Tao. And he’s never forgiven himself for it.

It wouldn’t take nearly so many mental gymnastics to do it again though. Not to Daniel. Daniel who would deserve it far more than any other mutant Marcus has ever had the displeasure of knowing. Marcus knows he could steal power from him so thoroughly and so permanently that the man would forever have to lower himself to lift his own hand to inflict pain. Every single time the man uses his powers in Marcus’ presence, Marcus can feel it acutely; he’s memorized the sensation of it and mapped the channels it follows; he knows exactly how to shut it down at this point, because Daniel uses it–primarily on Spirit–all the damn time.

That would make everything so much easier, wouldn’t it? To curse him with human level normality? 

Daniel is a hard man, but he lives an exceedingly soft life. Any exercise he performs is for vanity’s sake, while Marcus’ is focused on practical application; on hefting kegs around the bar like they’re empty boxes, subduing threats against his patrons and staff, and roughhousing with friends who don’t always know their own strength. Daniel’s hands are manicured, nails buffed to a subtle sheen, while Marcus sports hard earned callouses and fraying cuticles. The very nature of Daniel’s powers means that he’s likely never had to physically fight an opponent, let alone one so driven as Marcus would be if he ever reached that point.

Daniel doesn’t seem to take him seriously as a threat. But Daniel has also never felt the weight of powerlessness that Marcus can lay over him. Nor has he seen the satisfaction that would spread wide and wicked over Marcus’ features as he came to terms with the horror of that loss.

The thought makes him shiver, and that shiver is not wholly unpleasant. He does not want to think about what that means when it happens.

Marcus could also do more than just depower him. He’s killed before. But that’s not something Marcus has ever been comfortable enough to bring up at dinner with Spirit sitting across from him and Daniel fucking Romano sitting at the head of an obnoxiously long glass table like he’s the king of the universe. 

Spirit–due to the nature of her own abilities if nothing else–probably knows. She can probably sense it on him; she can probably see the blood on his hands that he’d agonized over for weeks, months. There’s probably still a ghost tethered to him after all these years, angry and seething and perhaps cursing him to the trouble he’s facing now. Marcus would have made sure to haunt the fuck out of the guy he’d killed if their scuffle had gone the other way, after all. They don’t have to talk about it for her to know, or for him to know that Spirit knows.

He does wonder if she’s talked about it with Daniel. It seems doubtful: Marcus’ one desperate self-defense kill compared to the gallons of blood that are on Daniel’s hands isn’t anything remotely notable.

All of this weighs on him, and eventually, Spirit notices something is up with him. Or at least he thinks that’s what’s happening when she begins looking at him differently, little by little, like she’s trying to read deeper meaning from his expressions and movements. She’s smart enough not to say anything though, not even in the rare moments they share while out from under Daniel’s panopticon eye; while he attends to the troupe at the circus, or any of his other… dealings, and they hang back in the sterile, brutal penthouse. 

More and more, when she lies between the two of them in the giant plush bed, her back pulled territorially into the curve of Daniel’s slumbering embrace, she stares at Marcus in the low light, squeezing his hand beneath the covers.

Wouldn’t it be great, he thinks, if the radio in her head could tune into his living thoughts? If he didn’t have to die to communicate privately with her?

The straw that breaks his back is no different than all the ones that had come before.

It had all just been a thought experiment, more or less, up until this point. He really, really never thought he'd go through with any of his musing about depowering the monstrous man Daniel Romano had become. But then he is standing above him, his feet on either side of Daniel’s thighs with his hand knotted in the front of a needlessly expensive shirt, knuckles and aforementioned shirt bloodied by Daniel’s freshly broken nose.

It happened so fast. Marcus doesn’t even remember doing anything, but he can put the pieces together well enough: Daniel had hurt Spirit; Spirit had reacted, crying out or wincing in a way Marcus always dreaded; Marcus had lashed out with his nullification power; Marcus seized on Daniel’s shock to drop on him, throwing a few hard punches, going by the dull ache in his hand.

Breathing heavy but thinking more clearly than before, he pulls his arm back to strike again, relishing in the way Daniel’s typically disinterested eyes widen–despite the ways the tissue around them is starting to swell–and his breath hitches as he struggles to get free of Marcus’ tight hold on him.

Good, Marcus thinks. He should know this feeling. He deserves to know this feeling.

He hits him again, self-righteousness a driving force behind the strength of it. And again. And again until Daniel finally stops resisting, slumping.

Though he stops immediately at this, Marcus does not let go of the man in his clutches. Shaking with his fury, he stands over him for a while longer, knowing he needs to restrain himself; knowing the threat has been neutralized, at least temporarily; knowing that continuing on and beating an unconscious man crosses… some sort of line that he does not know the definition of. And so he is gentle when he allows gravity to claim the now-unconscious man: he puts his bloodied striking hand behind Daniel’s head as he slowly lays him down, struggling a little from the perceived loss of strength that comes as his adrenaline rush subsides.

And when he stands again, he is face to face with Spirit.

“I did this for us,” he insists, blissfully unaware of how often similar proclamations slipped off Daniel’s tongue.

For all intents and purposes, Spirit has gotten away with murder. She was able to cheat on Daniel Romano with another man and live to tell the tale. Above that—she was able to cheat on Daniel then convince him to include the other man in their committed relationship. She’s still in awe of that—perhaps dreading when the other shoe will drop, when Daniel will realize she’s a worthless whore who doesn’t deserve to be devoted to him. 

In the meantime, things feel good. Or—things feel so overwhelming that they must be good. To allow for any other option would surely drive her to hysterical despair—and that’ll never happen to her. She’s figured out how to dance precariously through her own hectic life with a skilled grace that doesn’t translate to her physical movements—she won’t falter or fumble this far into things. 

What Spirit has done is save her own skin and Marcus’s. Spirit tells herself that Marcus has seduced Daniel—charmed and captivated him in a way that makes Marcus too useful to kill or torture to an unforgivable degree. For accomplishing this, she is brilliant, and Marcus is beautiful. (She has reduced his value and worth to how those things are viewed from Daniel’s eyes, which is how she has been trained to reduce most people she now encounters.) 

Love has become a little irrelevant. Her love for Marcus, at least. Some part of her that is desperate to survive—the part of her that has persisted and prevailed since she was a little girl—knows that something as indulgent and superfluous and love can’t be sustained under these circumstances. Prey isn’t loved. Victims aren’t adored. 

Daniel just likes to hurt her. A lot. 

The way that Spirit’s abilities work allow her to recognize that Daniel and Marcus have something unique in their foundation, their genetic makeup, that creates a distorted signal to be picked up by her radio brain. Over time, she’s learned that this something is the X-gene, and she has learned that any mutant who possesses it emits a signal slightly different from the next mutant. She could recognize Daniel or Marcus with her eyes closed—or with a blindfold wrapped around her skull. Sometimes, it has come to that. 

Spirit can also hear so so so so so many of the people whose deaths Daniel has orchestrated or caused directly. He’s not a man equipped for dirty work. All the same, there are anti-mutant militants or obscure street criminals or even more fundamentally, irrevocably, innocent people who know that they only died because Daniel Romano made it so. He insured it. And those people, some of them are lucid enough to see Spirit flitting about in Daniel’s orbit—so they blame her for their fates, too. And maybe they should. Sometimes, Spirit helps Daniel find people’s weak spots—their homes, their families. She accesses privileged, private information from covert operations. And people suffer. People suffer for it all the time. The bathtub in Daniel’s luxurious apartment often looks, in her eyes, to be stained reddish-pink with other people’s suffering. 

What Spirit cannot hear: when Daniel or Marcus or any mutant, for that matter, utilize the abilities that the X-gene grants them. Of course, she has learned the unique and creative ways that Daniel prefers to hurt her. She’s also learned how he likes to make her feel good—and realized that he knows exactly how to reward her in a way that’ll render her appreciatively complacent long after whatever encounter they just had.

Marcus’s mutation wouldn’t affect her even if he did use it, so it usually doesn’t occur to her to wonder if he’s nullifying mutants in their vicinity. When Daniel’s abilities are not only so formidable but also so much of what makes him appealing (she thinks about seeing him with Kinsey at the circus—the bones inside of her bent to a nauseating angle and her, blissfully unaware, damn near stupified and content), Marcus couldn’t ever want to weaken him. They wouldn’t have as much fun. And neither he nor Spirit could handle the inevitable anger, could they? 

As beautiful as Marcus is, as much as Spirit loves his humor and kindness and how he treats her in bed—she admittedly thinks he would never, under any circumstances, be able to confront Daniel Romano. 

Spirit’s not paying attention when Daniel speaks; her eyes are trained on Marcus. She doesn’t lean into Daniel’s hands in her hair, doesn’t respond the right way to some quasi-clever observation he makes about something that had happened earlier when they were at dinner. She feels a cleaving pain, sharp and sudden, almost like a migraine—but it’s somehow more raw, somehow more dangerous, because she knows she cannot do anything to mitigate the intense pain. She’s gripping her head like she’s trying to hold her skull in one piece. This prevents her from immediately noticing what Marcus does next. 

Because Spirit can’t sense when Marcus effectively neuters Daniel. The pain cuts off suddenly in a tangible sense, but the memory and the implication linger. This is what Daniel is capable of. This is what he wants to do to her—and so he does. This is how she should feel. 

The cartilage in Daniel’s nose makes a wet crunching sound when Marcus’s fist makes contact. It’s the sort of punch that’d render anyone stupified—especially a snooty rich man with no idea what it means to sweat, to struggle. He’s not equipped to put up a fight against Marcus. Spirit can’t believe she didn’t realize this about him sooner. 

She jerks away from the couch—Daniel’s body and Marcus’s body a bloody, unmanageable tangle. She’s spent too many years afraid of Harris’s brute strength to intervene when one man is beating the shit out of another. Daniel’s apartment has enough useless, empty square footage for Spirit to be away from the splattering blood or Daniel’s flailing arms. She can’t look away, though—she watches a man she’d always, to some level, viewed as weak and subordinate and meek turn Daniel Romano into bruised skin, useless meat—nothing worth quivering in the presence of at all. 

“Marcus.”

She isn’t sure she’s actually spoken. She isn’t fully committed to it. She doesn’t know if this is something that should stop.

This might be a night that saves her and saves Marcus in a way beyond what Spirit’s subtle manipulations and encouragements were ever capable of. 

I did this for us. 

Her throat started burning when Daniel compelled her to experience a mind-shattering migraine. Now, tears fall freely. She can’t say why. Relief is one option. How awful is that? Daniel saved her, made her. Now she witnesses his downfall and it’s almost euphoric. 

Why didn’t Marcus do this before? Why didn’t Spirit ever ask him to? 

This is what she wants, is the thing. A violent man to take control and assert his will over others. Last night, in bed, it was Daniel. Today, in the living room, it is Marcus. 

She will have to adjust to the slight changes in their usual roles, but she can be flexible. During her brief period of employment at Blackwell’s, she learned how to contort her body in marvelous ways—and she’s always been able to fit into places, into circumstances, that don’t come to the human mind naturally. 

“You didn’t kill him.” 

He does look dead. So reassuring—or disappointing—Marcus felt necessary. 

“He—”

Fuck, how pathetic would it be to admit that she forgot she could see him bleed? What happened with Harris was a lifetime ago. This is much more severe.

She readjusts so that she’s standing upright. She approaches Marcus, but only by a step or two. She is not unaware that he just revealed his willingness to punch someone in the face again and again and again. 

Spirit smells the bottle of wine they’d opened twenty minutes ago. A candle. Daniel’s rich cologne. Daniel’s blood.

“Now what are we supposed to do? You did what for us?” And, fuck, Marcus: “What is us?”