Whistleblower

Miles grimaces at what Waylon tells him, knowing there isn’t nearly as much on the tape as he’d been hoping. He taps his fingers on his own camcorder in thought– it’s funny, he never really shook that habit, even though he’s down two digits. What he’d been hoping for was footage of the guts of the operation, Murkoff in action of the torture and inhumanity, not just the effects. He knows the effects– too well, in fact.

He looks at Waylon, cowering in a corner of the makeshift couch. Was it worth it, then? To make him watch this all over again? 

Miles breathes out his nose, a small cloud of the swarm following. 

Yes.

Just in case.

“Great,” he says, his smile only a touch toned down from before. Carefully, almost as if he’s about to wake a sleeping child, he steps over to pick up the camcorder, placing his hand on it like the precious artifact it is. He glances at Waylon, as if asking permission– a silent “are you sure about this.” He doesn’t, however, give Waylon the chance to change his mind before he’s already hooking up the camera to the TV.

Once the image flashes up on the screen, Miles flings himself down next to Waylon, excited, like they’re about to watch a movie he’s been waiting to see for ages. 

CW / implied cannibalism, canon-typical violence, gore

Waylon tucks himself more securely into the corner, pillows on each side cradling his body- he’d bought more a while ago, and a few are even stacked on the floor at the end of the bed, too many to fit with the way he’s set up. He considers grabbing one to hold to his body, but then Miles is throwing himself down on the bed, and his eyes are gleaming even as fucked up as they are, and Waylon knows he’s only got so much leeway. He hugs his knees tighter to his chest instead, rests his chin on them, until he’s as small as he can make himself.

He turns his eyes to the screen.

The footage is steady to start with, simple- a man in blue scrubs, head to toe, and thick rubber gloves, wiping down a chair in a plastic-encased room. Dragging sounds, and another man in the same uniform, but with a gas mask too, pulls a body into the room. Waylon’s body. There’s blood on his face- he seems to be having trouble keeping his eyes open, even when the maskless man lifts him and dumps him in the chair, entreats him to keep his eyes open, slaps him across the face.

Even when the man leans in and licks the blood off his cheek.

But then his eyes are open, focused on something across the room- the screen, Waylon-in-the-present knows, showing those dancing geometrics, the impossible images that are even now seared into his brain. And that’s all- just Waylon, squirming and crying out, unblinking, until Waylon-in-the-present gets up and moves over to the camera, fast-forwards through the footage.

“Nothing happens here.”

He stops it when the screens go off, when the chair releases him, when the Walrider tears a man to pieces in the next room and Waylon takes the camcorder off the stand. For a second, he just stares at the screen, hollow, before he returns to the bed, to his previous position, holding himself tightly. This is where it begins.

The variants’ threats, all pointedly sexual in nature. Ducking through plastic-draped hallways avoiding the Walrider, avoiding men with knives, avoiding men with nothing more than their hands. Waylon’s silent and still, pale and empty-eyed as he watches these things, remembering. It’s odd, how... pathetic it seems, on screen. Remembering it fills him with horror, but seeing it fills him with ice, leaves him frozen inside and out, a statue of the man he was before these things happened.

Until the Cook.

Body parts strewn on a bloody table. Hands in a bloody stew. Waylon’s breaths fills the recording, ragged panting with an edge of voice that says he’s trying not to scream, or to vomit, or any number of other things that would be detrimental to his ability to escape. The first image of the Cook- of Frank Manera- makes Waylon-in-the-present jolt, then bite his tongue, a faint shivering starting along his arms and shoulders. It doesn’t stop until he lifts the camera one last time, outside the building, after he escapes the oven Frank shoves him into, after fixing leaking gas lines, to zoom in on the man leaning out the window, screaming after him, voice lust and hunger and rage. You were mine!

The trek through the fog is next, and Waylon looks at Miles for a moment, going still again finally, feeling hollowed out and filled with cotton.

It’s kind of cute, the way Waylon is curling in on himself like a wounded animal. He doesn’t want to watch the footage. Miles knows he doesn’t. But Miles also knows this: he’s kept that camcorder on him for a reason, and the only one that makes sense and isn’t some kind of half-baked delusion is to prove to himself what happened was real. It wasn’t a bad acid trip or a night terror. It was as real as the ache Miles feels in his fingers and the static he hears thrumming in his ears. And he needs to square with that.

“I don’t know!” Miles whips around on his heel, facing Waylon with his arms outstretched, a parody of Christ. He thinks, blithely, that Martin should see him now. “Pick your poison.” Bile oozes through his teeth as he speaks, grinning.

“Although…,” he edges closer, no less giddy, “I’m sure you’re dying to know what happened here.” Miles holds his hands up, palm outward, and wiggles his eight fingers. “But I’m dying to know what happened…,” Miles flicks his wrists so now his palms are upward, gesturing to all of Waylon. “Here.”

It’s not... an insult. Or at least, it wasn’t intended to be. Waylon knows that. Miles gets a look when he’s trying to rile someone up, when he’s trying to hurt them or piss them off. A narrowing of the eyes, a sly quirk of the lips- his shoulders come up, like he’s daring the recipient of his barbed quips to meet words with fists. He’s doing none of that now- his eyes are wide, shoulders loose, grin manic and maniacal. 

Still, Waylon flinches, and his gaze slides away, then drops down to his fingers, tapping his shins nervously. He knows he’s a mess- he knows, god, better than anyone else ever could. Being in his own head is misery, is a nightmare that he won’t be able to escape until the day he dies.

(He doesn’t imagine that will take a terribly long time, at the rate he’s going. He tries not to think about that too hard. Or at all.)

“Y-you... won’t see a lot of it,” he says- “They ‘admitted’ me right after... right after I tried to send the email out. That-” he nods at the camcorder, then- “only has the last day. Whatever other records there are burnt down with Mount Massive.”

Miles can do math. He can extrapolate how long Murkoff’s ‘Doctors’ had Waylon in their hands, in their machines. Waylon’s not stupid enough to expect sympathy out of the revelation- he doesn’t deliver it with self-pity, just the mild disinterest of someone revealing a fact. He swallows, then closes his eyes.

“Mine.”

Maybe if he just... gets it out of the way, it will be better. Easier to handle, at least. Or maybe he’ll fling himself into such a bad panic attack he’ll pass out and won’t have to find out what did happen to Miles.

Oh, Waylon’s in the same building as him! How lucky! Miles grins, positively giddy at the time he and Waylon are about to have. He grabs his camcorder, stuffs an HDMI cable under his arm, and heads to the elevator.

To be honest, Miles hasn’t given the kiss much thought. He hadn’t given it much thought when he’d done it, either– just that of all the things to freak Waylon out, sudden affection was the only route he hadn’t yet taken. Was it just to upset him? Surely, kissing a man who he’d done nothing but terrify so far would do exactly that. But there was a little something more underneath the desire to devastate, Miles knows– a little something he won’t admit unless the Walrider itself spits it out of him.

Miles grimaces. This elevator can’t move fast enough.

When he finally reaches Waylon’s floor, he sprints to his room and bangs on the door. When Waylon finally answers– it hadn’t actually taken too long, but Miles is so excited the seconds drag on like hours– he grins slick black ear to ear, and pushes past Waylon roughly at the shoulder.

“I’ve got a cable here,” Miles wiggles it between two fingers, “so we can hook them up to the TV. I went and bought it right after our talk the other day– I knew this was coming.” All the while, Miles is busy darting around properly setting up the TV and camcorder, paying Waylon no mind. “I wanna see this shit on the big screen.”

He’ll have time, he thinks, before Miles gets there- he doesn’t own much, so it’s not really a difficulty to straighten up the room, make it look presentable. He lights the candle he bought to drown the smell of “I’m a middle-aged shut-in” in the room about a week ago, shoves his clothes into the laundry receptacle and straightens the small framed picture of Lisa and the boys on their last vacation.

He pauses and touches his lips, then sweeps the picture into the drawer of the bedside table and shuts it, guilt churning in his gut. He just, he tells himself, doesn’t want to give Miles any more ammunition against him.

That’s all.

He manages to get his hair washed and put deodorant on before the pounding on the door scares him half out of his skin, and it takes him a bit to come to the door- having to towel off his hair and struggle into his shirt again, quickly. Hopefully he won’t look too much like he’s been hiding away for these past weeks-

Not that Miles seems like he’ll care. He’s a whirlwind of activity as he shoves past Waylon the moment Waylon opens the door, and he thinks he could probably have just left the room exactly as it was and he wouldn’t have noticed a damn thing.

Ah, well. 

He retreats to the bed, which he’s shoved up against the solid wall, pillows lining the back to simulate a couch, and he curls up in the corner and watches Miles hooking everything up. His own camcorder sits on the bedside table, waiting, and he only now really processes what’s about to happen. Miles is going to project the footage of the worst experiences either of them have ever had onto the television, and he’s going to watch them, and he’s going to expect Waylon to watch too.

Waylon shivers and curls his legs up, wraps his arms around them, and holds himself close, watching Miles steadily instead of the screen.

He doesn’t want to.

“Good,” says Miles with a small nod, then, again, quieter, a murmur: “good.”

Miles reaches out to Waylon with inky hands, dripping in black, and cups both sides of his face like he’d done on the beach. Like everything Miles does these days, it’s threatening, but it’s calm like the sea before it storms. With his left index finger and right ring finger, he taps the sides of Waylon’s face.

“Because I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. And I’d hope…,” Miles exhales, a piece of the swarm clouding out of his mouth. “That you wouldn’t, either.”

Miles’ sclera are slick-black with bile, his irises a shocking white. Instead of the rhythm of breath and heartbeat, there is the constant thrum of the swarm, echoing inside of his chest cavity. Waylon should be able to hear it, distantly, this close.

Miles considers twisting his hands abruptly and snapping Waylon’s neck. Or drifting his hands down to his to break his fingers. Or pushing his fingers inside of his mouth to pluck his tongue out, leaving it dangling between his ring finger and thumb.

He kisses him instead, hard yet brief, leaving a smudge of bile on Waylon’s lips. The intensity of his gaze betrays nothing.

“Take care of yourself, Waylon,” says Miles, standing up to leave. “Keep that holophone on you. I’ll be in touch.”

Waylon exists in the space between one breath and the next. He exists in the sound of blood rushing in his ears, the way Miles’  fingers press against his cheeks, the way he stares through Waylon’s eyes like he can see inside his head, like he’ll rip out every cord tethering Waylon’s mind to his body and set him free of all of this, whether he wants that freedom or not.

This close, he can see the semi-familiar sweep of Miles’ dark eyelashes, the way the outer corners of his eyes turn down just the slightest bit, the long smooth sweep of his nose, the way his lips press together and twist slightly when he’s thinking hard about saying something that Waylon will regret. It’s off-kilter, perhaps, to think in this moment-that-is-not-a-moment that he missed seeing this face, but that’s the thought that slides into his head, takes up residence behind his eyes.

That’s the thought ringing in his ears when Miles presses their mouths together and steals Waylon’s breath, leeches all the heat from his body and sends it directly into his face, presses his lips so hard against his teeth that he tastes blood and whimpers, breathless, in the half second before Miles is pulling away again.

“Wh-”

The protest (Question? Exclamation? Useless sound?) cuts itself off, fades, and Waylon stares at Miles as he stands, wide-eyed and pale but for the blotches of red creeping over his cheeks. He can’t breathe, and there’s something on his mouth, and when he raises his hand to touch it, his fingers come away black.

Oh.

Oh god.

“I- Miles-”

But he’s staring at him with that predatory look, and Waylon swallows, reflexively licking his lips, a nervous twitch that clears the bile away, drags it into his mouth where the taste of it blossoms on his tongue.

“O-okay.”

It’s only after Miles leaves that Waylon sinks down, presses his face to his hands and starts to shudder, small sounds of grief and fear forcing themselves out of his throat.

He doesn’t drink any more of the beer, in the hour he sits there, frozen.

He watches Waylon fiddle with his camcorder and God, Jesus, what he wouldn’t do to see what’s on that thing, the damning evidence that put Murkoff six feet under, but– not now. It’s not the right time, yet. He’s got a panic-riddled computer scientist to deal with.

Waylon doesn’t believe him. Miles knew he wouldn’t. But it’s important to him that Waylon knows his angle, so he emphasizes. 

“Look– Waylon. I’m a journalist. I’ve been writing since…,” Miles screws his face. “Middle school? Before then? And the most important thing I’ve learned in those years…,” he leans forward, head tilted down, trying to get Waylon to look him in the eye. “–is that different words have different meanings.”

He’s speaking softly, as if Waylon were a frightened child. “Even if two words technically have the same definition, the context and usage means that the words will have slight– but important!– differences in meaning.”

Miles reaches over and takes Waylon’s beer now that it’s unoccupied. He’s been dying for a swig. 

“I am deeply envious of you, Waylon.” He speaks with unsettling sincerity. “And I deeply resent you for escaping where I couldn’t. But–,” he holds up both index fingers– well, his left index finger, and his right stump– to make a point. “I don’t hate you.”

Miles is looking at him, intent, and Waylon can feel that unholy gaze burrowing through his skull. It’s the only reason he looks up, meets his eyes- one eye, the other blocked out by a finger. His eyes glance off the stump of the other finger, the empty space there, and his gaze skitters away again, off to the side, jaw tensing.

(He always had nice hands, Miles did. Long fingers, shapely- an artist’s hands. Pianist fingers, Waylon’s aunt would have said. And now- now. Waylon’s fault.)

He swallows self-deprecation, jokes to ease the situation and put everyone back on even ground and deflect from the anxiety choking him, and the effort tenses his shoulders, leaves him shaky. He doesn’t know how to process that. He can’t, while Miles is staring at him, waiting patiently, speaking gently.

That’s not who Miles has ever been.

What has Mount Massive done to them?

“Okay,” he says, quiet and reluctant and without a great deal of sincerity behind the word. He can’t force himself to believe that, but he can stop arguing, and so he does, biting down on his tongue briefly, flinching when he tastes blood.

“Okay,” he says again, and then, low, “I can’t argue with you on how you feel, I guess.” He forces himself to look back at Miles, or at least in his direction, letting go of the camcorder to cross his arms on the table.

Jesus Christ, here he was trying to help and they just circled back into being predator and prey. Waylon looks exhausted from all the sobbing he’s been doing. Miles doesn’t get exhausted anymore, not really, but God, he’s fucking sick of it too. Not of Waylon; of himself. Of being so righteously angry he can’t think straight. Of the buzzing and the static when he closes his eyes and the bile and the bullet holes that will never heal. Of being dead. 

But what do you do when you’re angry that you’re dead? Who gets the blame? The one who baited him into coming in the first place? No, it’s not Waylon’s fault, as easy as it is to pin the blame on him. He had no idea this would happen to him. It’s Murkoff, but if Waylon did what he said he did– and Miles knows he did, the man can’t bluff to save his life– they’re going to get what’s coming to them anyway. 

Anger with no direction. That’s what Miles is. Just a swarm of buzzing nanomachines held together by seething anger and wearing a dead man’s face.

What’s done is done. You can only move forward. But it is so, so hard when everything you did was worthless, in the end. That your only destiny was to become a vessel.

“Good,” says Miles, and he means it.  “Let the bastards fucking burn.” 

It’s not enough. The silence tapers off into something half-finished, something waiting. The initial shock and sadistic joy that swelled in Miles upon first seeing Waylon has long since dissipated, and even though he is so deeply envious, even though he resents the man sitting across from him, even though things can never be the same, he can at least let him know that– 

“I don’t hate you, Waylon,” says Miles, as gentle as he can with the Walrider tainting his voice. “I want you to know that.”

After the lengthy silence, after Miles’ hand in his chest and his grip on his wrist and Look at me Waylon I want to see what you’ve done, those words ring so spectacularly hollow and false that Waylon feels... sick. Horrific. God, is he so pathetic that a man who has every right to hate him feels the need to reassure him that he doesn’t? Is that who Waylon’s become, or is it just who he’s always been?

He lets go of the beer entirely, both hands coming to rest on the camcorder, and he can’t stand to look at Miles, at this man-who-was-almost-his-friend oozing bile and pretending at some sort of, what, some sort of sainthood?

His laugh is short and choked, and he fidgets with the screen of the camcorder, flips it out and spins it, tucks it back in, pulls it out again. “Oh? That’s, uh. That’s impressive. Not sure how. I hate me, and I have way less reason to th-than you do.”

It’s the closest he’s come to talking back yet, and it makes his entire body as taut as a wire waiting to be plucked, tense and nervous. He’s not allowed to talk back- he remembers the guards’ hands on him as they drag him into the machine, tighter and tighter the more he struggled- Jeremy Blaire’s mocking voice as he proved that the more Waylon fought and protested, the worse it was going to be.

He’d been trying to strike something normal, grasping at all the torn-up paper-thin shreds of his humanity that had been lost in the asylum, trying to remember what it felt like to be alive, to be curious, to be able to look at Waylon and see something other than a head of Ceberus with Brutus between its teeth.

It doesn’t work. The moment he hears I went to a hospital he is nearly thrown into a rage so blind he forgets for a moment that it’s Waylon Park he’s talking to. Miles considers, briefly, extending his arm across the table, seizing Waylon by the throat, and squeezing until his face goes blue and he stops squirming.

It was for nothing. It was all for fucking nothing. Miles feels as if he’s falling endlessly.

“Just curious,” he says, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed. Maybe Waylon won’t be able to see the rage in his eyes at this distance. His fingers twitch. “Since you look like you got out in one piece– physically.”

The loathing and sheer rage filling Miles is nearly palpable, almost something that Waylon could cut with a knife, could reach out and stroke in the air between them, and he flinches back even despite the deliberate calm of Miles’ voice, the false ease with which he speaks. His dead eyes are on fire, or something like it. It’s almost worse than if he had just snapped, or lashed out.

Tension presses in his chest and upper stomach like he swallowed a ball of rubber bands, and his shoulders start to shake.

“Sorry,” he says, whispers, low and hoarse. “I. I did,” and if the apology is for the words he said or the getting out in one piece, it’s impossible to tell. “Um. I mean.” He looks away again, jaw tight.

God, he’s so tired of being afraid, but he can’t turn it off.

“Anything could have happened. Sorry. I don’t know. I wasn’t. I couldn’t look at the news. I couldn’t.” The beer isn’t helping, and he’s stammering now, fighting to keep his teeth from chattering. He thinks about telling Miles that he has a piece of his intestine missing, now, the piece that bulged out of his stomach after Jeremy Blaire stabbed him- that his leg hurts all the time now, like the bone is splintering every time he takes a step, that he was told that would be normal for a while.

It doesn’t matter. It’s nothing. It’s nothing compared to bullet holes and leaking bile and the fucking Walrider filling your body like it’s a glove. Waylon has no excuse to throw a pity party when Miles is dead.

The last time Miles had seen Waylon– well, no. not the last time. The second to last time, when his heart still beat, and his lungs still drew breath. The second to last time he saw Waylon was much like this, at a bar much like this, trading life plans and work plans and other things that are so fucking meaningless now. Seeing anyone? Waylon had asked casually, that wedding band of his shining off his finger. Miles had shrugged, shook his head, joked that it’s a little hard to keep someone when you’re willing to risk everything you’ve got to publish the truth. Waylon had looked at him like he was a movie star. 

That shit doesn’t matter now, does it. The bird working the bar shoots Miles a dirty look for dripping bile all over her countertop. Miles just lifts his hand and wiggles his three fingers in a mocking sort of wave.

“No,” says Miles. “Just boring shit to pay the bills.” God, he wishes he could drink, still. Well, maybe he can. But certainly he can’t get drunk. “Mount Massive was going to be the break of the decade. Jesus Christ–,” Miles groans, head in his hands, fingers digging through his hair in frustration. 

“Was it?” he asks abruptly. “What happened? Who’d you go to first? What did the government have to say about it?” He pauses, black sclera glistening in the light. “What kind of footage did you get?”

So there’s something else to feel guilty about, Waylon thinks, and shame and self-loathing in equal parts rush up into his throat, leave acid burning on the back of his tongue, stinging his sinuses. His eyes sting, and he’s glad his gaze has been mostly lowered this whole time- it means it’s not as suspicious when he blinks hard for a second and then looks away, taking a deep drink to wash down the taste of his own complicity in the stealing of his almost-friend’s life.

And then he chokes a little, and he spends a minute or two coughing, giving himself an incredibly valid reason for the watering eyes. He looks up again, lifting a free hand and wiping his eyes, and then trying to swallow the heartbeat ratcheting up in speed in his throat.

“It... uh.” He shivers, averts his gaze. “I went to a hospital. They... found me there. They didn’t say who they were, but they. They helped me... get treatment. Get Lisa and the boys. They... they found us a place to hide, after I released the footage.” He pauses, fingers curling around the handle of his mug. “Murkoff hacked my accounts- backdated a bunch of nonsense, conspiracy theories. Tried to make it look like I was really insane. I don’t... know what will happen. It’s only been two weeks. There was no mobilization of forces, at least.”

His leg shakes under the table, fingers tapping the sides of the glass in tandem. “Footage... I. You know.” He bites his lip, looks away. Prevaricates. It’s the only way he can get out of answering honestly, probably. It’s not usually his style, but neither is talking about... all of that.

“The typical Mount Massive stuff, I think. Murder. Body parts. Getting stabbed by my ex boss. I caught most of it.”

“Oh, you’re not getting hammered,” says Miles, utterly decisive. “Just buzzed enough so you’re not a fucking walking anxiety attack.”

It’s not hard to find a bar; there are plenty of them dotting the beaches all over Nectar, and Miles happily drags Waylon into the first one he finds. They sit, they order– well, Waylon orders, Miles waits for him to stop looking like he’s going to vibrate out of his skin.

Miles props his head in his palm and watches Waylon nurse his beer. Wrinkles his nose. Wishes he could get smashed or even drunk a little at all, but he figures if he doesn’t need to eat or drink, that’s probably null. Instead he just sits there, drums his fingers, and drips bile all over the countertop.

“So.” Miles clicks his tongue. “Been a while.”

It’s like a sick parody of the times they’ve met in person before, how Miles drags him into the bar, pushes him into a seat, stares at him intently until he places his order for... for something that sounds like it’s probably a beer, though it’s none he’s ever heard of. It’s on tap, rich and heavy and sweet like molasses has been poured into it, and for a few minutes he just cradles the glass close and sips carefully, avoiding getting the foam on his nose and upper lip until it fades- slower than any other beer he’s ever had, but eventually the surface lays flat, bubbling only slowly.

A while. The words make his shoulders hunch, startles his heart into beating faster, and his fingers curl tighter around the glass before he forces them to loosen, remembering. Time before Mount Massive seems to stretch in his mind, elongate- it seems an impossibly long time ago he sat at a bar next to Miles Upshur, the man still living, all sharp grins and bright zest for knowledge and discovery and life. It’s a struggle, to remember.

“Yeah,” he says, voice thick, and it’s a struggle, but he pushes the words out anyways. “Um... Two months? Uh. Almost.” He remembers through the mental distance- the last conversation they had. Miles mocking him for picking up and moving his entire family for a single stupid job, no matter how well it paid. Waylon hadn’t gotten heated, had just smiled awkwardly and said he would miss Miles too- and he’d been able to see Miles thinking about dumping his beer on his lap.

It’s a bittersweet memory. He wishes he’d stayed.

“Did, uh.” He takes a slow breath, exhales. “Anything... exciting happen? Before... before Mount Massive, I mean-” And he rushes the clarification, words tripping off his tongue, trying to head off the mad shrieking cackle that he’s already wary of.

It’s been only a couple days and Royce Bracket decides that he has just about had it with the Sea of Tranquility – if that’s what people around here call it, anyway. He was never cut out for the Country, fought vehemently to avoid his own Processing because only he could save Cloudbank, order the city back into submission, utilize the Transistor the way it was intended to be utilized – 

He realizes he’s pacing and stops suddenly, causing the Process cell to skid clumsily to a stop, knocking into the back of his head. The inside of his mouth tastes of iron; he’s been chewing the inside of his cheek bloody since he came here.

Royce lets out a soft, annoyed tsk and considers the loamy earth at his feet. A vine crawls lazily past the toe of his dress shoes, continuing up the bark of a nearby tree, and for a strange moment he feels offended at the plant’s lack of regard. No one at home cared who he was and certainly no one here cares either.

Not even the plants. Focus, Bracket.

The crunch of a stick underfoot halts his train of thought; someone, or something. Ideally, he would have his cameras, his floating LEDs with his face displayed so he could address his intruder head-on  without the pain of eye contact or injury like he did as always at home. Unfortunately, this was not home, and all he had was a cell practically hell-bent on ignoring his orders.

“Investigate,” Royce attempts, anyway.

The cell stares back at him with its huge, unblinking red eye.

“It was worth a try,” he replies, defeated. Royce turns his head in the direction of the disturbance, and calls out: “Hello?”

No response – instead a sudden movement that snaps Royce’s body rigid, as if preparing for a fight he isn’t sure is going to come yet. Without thinking, it’s as if his feet move his body all on their own, and he’s being carried forward swiftly – too swiftly, if you were to ask him – toward its source. The cell whirrs softly as it struggles to keep his pace, and Royce hangs a hard right around a tree –

Right into someone else. Ow.

Whoever it is, he’s apologizing profusely. It doesn’t take a medical professional to tell Royce has likely hit his head, not with the pounding migraine that has decided to take up residence in his skull. His visitor is holding – some kind of device?

Royce’s eyes light up.

He wants to see the device.

“It’s no trouble, really–” Royce begins, distracted and trying to keep his wild-eyed visitor at bay. He’s not interested in apologies – neither giving nor receiving them. “I mean it. Can I see that?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer, instead snatching the thing wholesale out of the man’s hand and beginning to turn it over. It has a screen that can collapse outward and inward. The lens reminds him of a SnapShot, but he’s never seen anything quite like it before.

“This is…incredible.” He turns his owlish eyes back to the device’s owner, unaware of how strange he looks. “Where did you get it? What’s it called?”

The thing about the camcorder... the important thing about the camcorder, at least... is that it was the only thing, other than blue thin-point marker and a crumpled sheaf of papers, that made it with him through the halls of Mount Massive. It was the only thing that he had that could tell Lisa what had happened to him, that could show the world that it wasn’t simply some natural disaster hitting an asylum, or however else Murkoff would have tried to spin it. 

It was his link to the truth. To sanity. To life. The only times it left his hand...

Grip on his chin, tongue sliding slick and rough up his cheek. Hands on his calf, scarred face leaning over him, gesturing. Here, and here- remove everything... vulgar- 

Waylon reaches out and snatches it back, cradles it to his chest like one might a child, or something equally precious. His shoulders curl forward as he remembers to breathe.

“It,” he says, a little hollow, “It’s a camcorder- it. It records, uh.” What is he doing? Why is he stuttering? This is his life’s work. He knows everything there is to know about electronics.

Deeper breath. Try again.

“It was designed to combine a video camera and a device that records sound in one. Audio and video get compressed into data which is stored on memory card, which can then be put into any number of other devices which can pull the data out and reformat it into the original audio and video format again.”

There. Properly technical.

“I got it from-”

Flashing lights, twisting patterns, twisting mind-

Waylon’s never been known for his backbone, but Jesus Christ. Massive did a number on him the in the complete opposite direction than it did Upshur. Could either of them have possibly predicted something like this happening, it would have been expected. 

Miles obliges, plucking Waylon’s fingers from his wounds and gingerly guiding his hand back into his lap. For minutes on end he just watches Waylon’s breakdown, the heaves and the sobs and the struggling the suppress the bile rising in his throat.

Eventually, he does do Waylon the decency of buttoning his shirt back up.

If he wanted, he could do more. He could force the nanomachines in his throat to growl like It, to affect his vocal chords in ways that are inhuman and despairing to hear. He could violently injure himself and watch Waylon scream as he keeps walking. He could make the swarm raise him up and pull his limbs so taut he’d think they were going to be torn off.

Miles doesn’t do anything of these things. 

What he does do is stand and hoist Waylon up by his collar.

“Come on,” he says. “I’m going to get you a fucking beer.”

With his hands free and his own, Waylon curls around himself and tries to breathe through the swelling panic attack. Having Miles in front of him still isn’t helping- he can feel him there, not a line of heat like Lisa standing behind him at the computer but like a wound in the world, full and absent at the same time. Wrong. So wrong.

It could be seconds or hours before there’s a hand on his collar, and if he had the breath for it he’d scream again- but then he’s dragged to his feet, turned around and pushed, and he takes a stumbling step, inhales sharply, pauses-

He shudders and turns back around, dropping back to the sand to grab his camcorder, sliding his hand under the strap of it and clutching it close. This time, he stands on his own, swiping at his face with his sleeve and drawing in deep, ragged breaths as he turns to walk in the direction Miles pushed him in to start with.

He’s still shaky, but moving helps. Moving always helps. Not being trapped against the sand helps even more. He’s numbing, a little, retreating inside himself- the shock is overwhelming him, forcing him to calm. It’s helping, at least, to keep him from breaking into a sprint away from the only person-

no matter how fucking terrifying-

That knows Mount Massive. That might possibly even begin to comprehend why Waylon is the way he is, now.

“I don’t think,” he says, voice hoarse from his shrieking and crying, “that I’m. Uh. Going to be much... much better inebriated. But it’s worth a shot.” And he shoots a sidelong look at Miles, the bile dripping down his face, soaking through his shirt-

“... Thanks.”

It’s funny how something as simple as an email can end up driving such a deep, incurable wound between two friends. If this were a month ago, and Miles had been anyone else, he would be telling Waylon to tell the guy that he’s gonna stick his foot up his ass so far he’d be tasting dirt for weeks. 

But it’s not a month ago. And Miles is the one with a grip on Waylon’s wrist.

He lets go to unbutton his shirt; unbloodied, but still dirty, because the holes don’t– won’t– heal, and they leak, just like every other part of him. Beneath the fabric his chest is riddled with machine gun wounds, at least fifty holes, each just as pitch black inside as the next. The bile that plagues him oozes out of every one. 

Again, Miles takes Waylon’s hand; but this time, he guides his fingers into various holes, letting him feel the abyssal space inside, the way the nanomachines pour into his body. 

“I hope you know how fucking lucky you are, buddy.” He jams Waylon’s fingers deeper. It hurts, but like everything else, he thinks it’s funny. “This could have been you.”

Waylon shudders, and he’s shaking like he’s pre-hypothermic, like his body is trying to shut down everything unnecessary to keep only the important things alive. Shoving his fingers into the rush of nanomachines feels like holding his hand out a car window in an area thick with mayflies, each impact stinging and making him flinch.

Oh god. Oh, god.

He can’t not look- he can’t just not know what it is his hands are feeling. His eyes open slowly, drop to Miles’ chest, and his throat feels tight, lungs struggling to inhale.

He thinks he’s going to be sick.

Another sound, this one of horror, dragging itself out of his throat despite clenched teeth, and he breaks- he jerks at his hand, tries to pull out of Miles’ grip on his wrist. Again he fails- Miles is strong, and it makes sense, since he’s... not just Miles anymore.

He’s the Walrider, too.

“Oh god,” he whimpers, and he bites his lip hard enough to taste blood before he gasps out, “Let go- please, Miles, let go-” and his chest is starting to heave with his breaths, with swallowed sobs, and he thinks he’s definitely going to be sick, or pass out, or-

Or-

What is the difference between Waylon Park and Miles Upshur?

There are the physical differences, of course. Waylon is Korean, Miles is white. Waylon has a few years on Miles, but is also a couple inches shorter. Waylon is leaner, lighter, sharper; Miles is bigger, heavier, blunter. Then there’s the personality divergences; Waylon’s soft-spokenness versus Miles’ brazen fearlessness. Miles recalls that the first time they met, sitting at a bar both sipping beer, that Waylon had once said that he was almost too nervous to meet him there. Miles had laughed out loud. 

Mount Massive changes people. It changed the patients, the staff, the government agents, the police. It changed Waylon and it changed Miles. Miles doesn’t know the intricacies of Waylon’s personal horror, what he experienced deep in the halls of the asylum, but he does know something very, very crucial: he got out alive. 

The difference between Waylon and Miles is that Waylon can heal. 

Miles can’t. 

Miles’ left hand mirrors his right, now holding both sides of Waylon’s face. The pads of his thumbs rub beneath his eyes, wiping his tears, leaving black streaks. 

Does he hate Waylon? Not exactly. But he is deeply, indescribably jealous.

“Did you know,” Miles starts, his voice so soft, but with an underlying harshness. “That I’m dead?”

Miles takes Waylon’s left hand in his right and splays it across his left breast, where his heartbeat used to be. He can see it in Waylon’s face that he can tell; there is no pulse, no warmth. Just flat cold. 

Demonesque eyes glare directly into Waylon’s bitterly human ones. “Want to see the bullet holes?”

The black bile is uncomfortably warm in the wake of Miles’ cool fingers, and Waylon fights not to squirm, to stay still- he fails, but he’s still not pulling away, feeling trapped by his own guilt, perhaps, or maybe he’s waiting for Miles to finish it. To cast him to the sand in disgust and anger, or to decide that he wants a revenge more permanent than just scaring Waylon half to death.

Waylon hasn’t had many friends, in his life. Miles Upshur was, once, almost one of them. It makes everything about what’s happening that much worse.

His fingers tense, try to curl against the firmness of breastbone, fail with Miles’ hand pressing his down. His breath hitches, and another thin, warbling sound of fear drags itself out of his throat. He wishes... he wishes he could stop- in Mount Massive, he couldn’t make a single sound past a frantic wheezing, even when he got caught- couldn’t scream, couldn’t do anything but writhe and breathe and struggle- but now, after, he can’t seem to stay quiet.

The tears still flow, make the streaks drag down his face like a poor parody of wet mascara.

What can he do? What can he do, at all? What can anyone?

“Please,” he whispers, shaking like a leaf, jaw trembling just below the press of MIles’ other hand. “I don’t- I- if-” and he squeezes his eyes shut, then, swallows, and breathes, “If that’s what. What you need me to do-” Because he doesn’t, god, he doesn’t- but he owes Miles, doesn’t he- 

Miles’ hand sits idle in Waylon’s ribcage, between pulsating organs and shuddering bone. Waylon heaves, and Miles moves in rhythm, not letting his grip on Waylon lessen until he knows the weight of what he’d done.

The only hint of emotion in his haunting face is the light of sheer rage in his eyes.

Finally, he relents, but only just; drawing out his arm agonizingly slow, ensuring Waylon feels every prick, every shift, every nerve. Once he’s free, Miles flexes his hand once more, and then cups Waylon’s face with that very same palm with a terrifying gentleness.

“Look at me, Waylon,” says Miles, in a voice low and threatening. His teeth are grit, blackness between them. “I want you to see what you’ve done.”

It’s almost worse coming out than going in, and there’s something about that thought that starts the low gurgle of laughter in his chest, but it comes out as breathless whining. His fingers fist weakly in the fabric of Miles’ shirt over his shoulders, and he’s clinging, the grip the other man has on him and the grip he likewise has back the only things keeping him from collapsing fully onto the sand when his hand finally slips out of Waylon’s chest and he can breathe again.

He chokes on his first deep inhale, wheezes, sobs in relief. The tender way he cups his cheek just makes him sob harder, trying to twist his face away without letting go. He feels the tech’s hand on his chin, tilting his head, wet tongue along his cheek-

The words snap him out of it, and he opens his eyes, vision still swimming with tears and impossible patterns, and he nods frantically, each breath forcing a small sound of pain and panic out of him. “I see,” he chokes out, and his entire body is shaking now, adrenaline making every second seem too slow, making him feel mired in it- “I see- I’m sorry- M-miles, I’m so sorry-”

It doesn’t mean anything. What can his guilt do? What can his grief do for a man that he lured into the depths of hell, who to Waylon’s best knowledge never made it out? But he says it anyways, because words are all he has, it’s all he can offer.

He stops trying to pull his face away, lifts one shaking hand and wipes away a streak of something black and slick from under Miles’ eye. It’s an inane motion- he can’t fix this like he fixes everything else- but he has to do something.

It’s his fault. He never should have sent that damn email.