Chapter Text
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Marc says.
Steven watches as Marc grabs another fistful of sand and lets it sift from his hand, adding to the small mound that runs in the semicircle around the bed. The sand hisses as it lands, a very familiar sound to Steven – and formerly a comforting one, too, a sound of security. Now, it brings to mind images of the Duat, of being frozen, of that strange impossibility of the afterlife.
“It’s not like you’ve never done it before,” Steven reminds him, thinking of the mornings he’d wake up with the sand line unbroken. This must have been what Marc had looked like, rebuilding the line each evening after taking the body for those secret joyrides.
Marc looks at the mirror leaning against their bedroom wall – the mirror that they haven’t yet bothered to hang since moving into the new flat – to shoot Steven a glare. He gets like this every time Steven mentions the period of their lives – decades of their lives, really – when Marc purposely kept Steven in the dark, in a lie. “Actually,” Marc says, tone flat, “I usually just jumped over it.”
“All right,” Steven says, feeling a bit unfairly judged. The sand line had seemed like a good idea at the time, given the circumstances. “Well, no need to look so smug about it. You wouldn’t have had to jump over it at all if you’d just told me you existed.”
It’s not a real barb; he’s finding that he just likes getting reactions out of Marc sometimes, especially when Marc has the habit of retreating further and further into his own thoughts, away from the real world, away from Steven.
It works, as Marc’s hackles go up. “You’re gonna keep reminding me of that forever, huh?” he says. He overturns the bag of sand in his hand, shaking the last grains loose with more violence than necessary.
Steven hums. “Only when it’s convenient for me. Like when I need you to do something nice for me.”
Marc turns away from the mirror. Usually Marc is willing to play with him – they’re getting better at the banter every day – but now Marc’s back is stiff and his brow is furrowed and he’s not in the mood.
He stands over the sand line, the empty bag crumpled in his fist, his head angled down. He says, “It’s not going to work.”
They’ve already had this discussion. It didn’t matter that the sand, that the ankle cuff, hadn’t worked on Marc back when Steven had been trying to keep him in. They’re both kind of feeling desperate, both unbalanced enough that when Steven had suggested the sand, Marc had set his jaw and reluctantly agreed. Action had seemed a better option than inaction, better than sitting by and fretting.
Three periods of lost time in the past two weeks, three blank spaces in their minds. It scares Steven, but somehow it seems to affect Marc worse. They’ve woken in their bed each time, unharmed and seemingly unchanged, but each time has wound Marc tighter and tighter, his anxiety ratcheting higher and higher, a spring coiling toward its breaking point.
Marc’s never been through it before, is the thing. Steven has walked this ground before, as it were. He’s had the gaps of lost time, the loss of control, the fear that he was carrying someone in his head that he didn’t recognize. But it’s new to Marc.
“Yeah,” Steven says, “but it’s worth a try, isn’t it?”
Now, Marc tosses the plastic bag into the bin and moves purposefully to their hall closet. Steven has a view from every room, from the mirrored surfaces they have placed everywhere in the flat, purposeful and deliberate. They don’t need the mirrors to communicate, but it makes it easier sometimes. Less lonely.
Marc pushes a pile of Steven’s books, a precarious stack in front of the closet door, out of the way. The plastic crates, the ones Marc had kept stowed in the storage locker, scape loudly against the wood as he slides them out. Inside the crates, Steven catches glimpses of small electronic parts that he doesn’t really recognize – motherboards or something, strange little gadgets.
“What are you looking for?” Steven asks.
Marc doesn’t answer. Evidently he doesn’t find what he wants, and he slides out a second crate and digs through that one, radiating impatience. When he finally sits back on his heels, he holds up his prize in the dim evening light of the hallway: a plastic box with wires dangling, a small black lens embedded in one of its surfaces.
“A camera?” Steven asks. He follows as Marc returns to the bedroom, watches as he stands on Steven’s desk chair to set the camera on the very top of their dresser. He has to use an extension cord and an outlet adapter to get it to work, but when he’s finished, the red light on the camera shines steadily, and the lens is angled directly at the bed.
“Bit naughty, isn’t it?” Steven mumbles, trying to be cheeky, as Marc hops down from the desk chair.
“Shut up, Steven,” Marc says, distractedly. He points to the camera and looks back at Steven. “Even if he knows about it, he’ll have to walk over to turn it off. He won’t be able to disable it without us getting a shot of him.”
Steven hums, eyeing the camera skeptically. “Won’t stop him though, will it?” He’s not really sure what information Marc is hoping to obtain. Their third passenger will have an awfully familiar face and body. Shocker.
“You got any better ideas?” Marc asks, brusque. “At least we’ll know when he’s taken over.”
Steven goes quiet as he watches Marc pack up the hallway closet again, shoving the cases back into the closet with quick, harsh movements. Marc hasn’t been sleeping well; the fatigue shows on his face, in the circles under his eyes, in the tension in his shoulders. His mood has been getting worse and worse - more likely to be snippy, less likely to let Steven take the body.
Steven doesn’t know what to do.
“You don’t need to be a prick about it,” Steven reminds him, trying to tamp down his own temper. “I am on your side, remember. Kind of have to be, don’t I?”
Marc runs a hand through his hair, then presses his thumb and forefinger hard into his eyes. He keeps his fingers there long enough that he must be seeing stars behind his eyelids. “Yeah, I know, buddy,” he finally says. Steven feels him nudging in that place in their mind that they share; he wants Steven to take over. So Steven does -- without saying anything more.
They’ve got nothing in their cabinets, so Steven pulls on his coat and walks to the nearest shop in the cool evening air. Even though the sun hasn’t fully set, the moon is visible in the blue sky.
Marc is uncharacteristically quiet for the entire walk to the shop. It’s not like he and Marc have always been the best communicators. Really, technically, Steven has probably spent more time in his life in conflict with Marc than he has in accord with him. But after the Duat, after the deaths and the asylum and the memories, it had seemed easy, natural, to fall into step with him. It had seemed, at the time, as if their bond had been there all along, just waiting to be snapped into place.
It had seemed easy – it had been easy.
And then they started losing time.
Fucking hell, Steven, Marc snaps, breaking his silence, impatient and gruff. How long does it take you to pick a cereal?
“Do sunflower seeds have gluten?” Steven murmurs. He squints at the ingredients list under the fluorescents of the shop; he forgot his reading glasses at the flat, too preoccupied by watching Marc with the sand and the camera.
Why are you- Since when are you gluten free?
“Can’t hurt to try, can it?” Steven’s stomach has been touchy lately. He doesn’t know if it’s the stress, or Marc, or their third passenger, or what.
We have more important things to worry about right now, Marc says.
“Right,” Steven says, taking a moment to look deliberately around at their surroundings, the shop’s colorful shelves, the pop music on the radio. “God forbid we leave the flat to get some food, yeah? Much better if we’re sat at home watching the new bedroom livestream you set up for us.”
A woman at the end of the aisle is staring at him. Steven gives her a bit of a wave. “Hello,” he says. He points to his ears, to the earbuds tucked into them. “On the phone. Very important call.” She turns away.
He sets the cereal box back onto the shelf and picks up a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch for Marc. Maybe it’ll stop his bad mood for a moment. It had been hard enough to live with Marc in his head when he had first found out about him, when they were still getting to know each other, when Marc was still hurting people, when everything was a fight for control. That had been hard – technically harder, probably – but now Marc is coiled and angry and striking and uncertain, and a constant presence. Steven can’t leave him, wouldn’t leave him even if he could, but he doesn’t know how to fix it. He doesn’t know.
The worst of it – the worst of all of it – is that he gets the desire to call his mum. It’s what he had always done before, when he’d been feeling lonely and out of his depth. It had always been nice to feel her presence, even if just through a voicemail, steady and solid and uncomplicated.
He ignores the pang in his chest. It’s not an option anymore.
On the walk home, his hands weighed down with his full reusable bags, he says, quietly, “I think I need to quit the bookshop job.”
Marc says, quickly, No.
The fierceness of Marc’s reply surprises him. He thought Marc would like the idea. “Why not?” he asks. “It’s not fair to them, you know. If I keep missing my shifts. Being unreliable and all. And it would give us one less thing to worry about.”
You worked hard to get that job, Marc says, angry.
“Yeah, well,” Steven says. He shrugs, adjusts the weight of the bags in his hands. “I can get another one. Later. After we’ve figured this all out.”
Marc is quiet for a moment. Steven can sense his anger, flaring up into the space that their mind shares. He says, You’re not quitting your job, all right?
“Bossy,” Steven says. He can do what he wants; it’s not Marc’s decision to make. But Steven is tired too, and tired of arguing, and so it lets the topic drop for the moment.
That night, when he’s lying in their bed, restraint secured around his ankle, he watches the red light of the security camera blinking from the corner for long, sleepless minutes.
“Marc,” he says.
“Hm?”
But his mind goes blank. He’s too close to sleep, and whatever he wanted to say is gone. “Never mind,” he says.
---
Steven wakes up with a headache and dry mouth. He pushes himself into a seated position slowly, and something falls from his chest, rolling onto the mattress beside him. He lifts it before his face; it’s their security camera. Its wires have been cut.
Before Steven can react, Marc is taking over, throwing the sheets off of his legs and flying over to the laptop sitting on Steven’s desk, his feet kicking up sand behind him. He boots up the laptop quickly and clicks into the camera’s feed; it’s supposed to transmit and save its contents wirelessly throughout its runtime. When Marc pulls up the saved storage file, it’s empty. The backups have also been wiped clean.
Steven watches as Marc grabs the laptop and throws it across the room with both arms, smashing it into the opposite wall. It cracks horribly, and Steven flinches.
“Marc,” he says.
Marc puts both hands onto the desk and hunches over himself. From his position in the reflection of the fish tank, Steven can only see his back. From his position behind Marc’s eyes, he sees only the wood of the desk before them, Marc’s hands clenched into fists.
The same cursed desire rises, the desire to call his mother. He knows she’s not real, knows that not even the memory of her can offer comfort anymore. But Steven doesn’t know where to turn. How does someone stop their own body from betraying them?
“Marc,” Steven says again. He hesitates, but he knows he needs to say it. “Maybe we need to ask someone for help.”
“That,” Marc says, putting one hand up as if to stop Steven, even though he still doesn’t look at his reflection, “is the opposite of what we need to do.”
Steven frowns. Marc has something that Steven had never had: people in his life willing to help him. “What if we call Layla?” he suggests. It would help, wouldn’t it, to have someone to watch over them, to keep them from leaving the flat when they weren’t themselves? To talk to this new passenger, figure out who he is?
Marc does finally turn to him then, frustration and exasperation rolling off of him in waves. “Buddy,” he says, “no offense, but you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Steven feels his own temper flare then. He hates when Marc gets like this, gets condescending. It’s a reminder that Steven is not as experienced as Marc, is not as old, technically – is not the original. Is a mess of half-formed memories and a half-lived life. “I know you’re out of your league with this one, mate,” Steven snaps. “I know that you have no idea what the hell you’re doing.”
“Shut up, Steven,” Marc says, low.
“Oh, do I not even get an opinion now? When it’s inconvenient for you, then I have to shut up? It’s my life too, you know.”
“I’m aware of that,” Marc says, his tone even in the way it gets when he’s trying desperately to clamp down on his emotions.
“You just got Layla back into your life,” Steven says. “You just got her back, and now you’re going to do the same shit you did before? Shutting her out? Refusing to-“
“Shut up, Steven!” Marc yells. He flings an arm out, gesturing angrily. The violence in Marc is always there, always just beneath the surface, and it overflows now, fills the room. “Layla is a continent away. She has her own shit to deal with. It’s not her job to fix us, all right? So what we’re not going to do,” he says, stalking closer to Steven’s reflection, jabbing a finger at him like a warning, “is burden her with whatever the fuck we’re dealing with right now.”
Steven watches him. Marc doesn’t scare him, can’t scare him. Steven doesn’t know much about relationships, but Layla had made her wishes clear enough. “You know what she’d say to that, don’t you?”
“Yeah, well,” Marc says, rubbing a hand across his mouth, “I’m making an executive decision.”
Steven feels it like a punch to the gut. Days and days of Marc’s snapping, Marc’s condescension, Marc pulling rank. Standing by and watching Marc self-sabotage, dismantling their lives bit by bit by bit. “You’re being a right prick right now, you know that, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Marc says. “What else is new?”
Steven can feel his own muscles shaking with his frustration, with his anger, his helplessness. He wants control of the body. He wants to hit Marc again, like he did when they’d been in separate bodies. He wants to grab Marc by the shoulders and shake him until he listens.
Steven says, “I know you love to compartmentalize, mate, but you’re not going to stop this third bloke by ignoring him.”
Marc fists his hands, his shoulders raise, and he looks at Steven like he wants to kill him. Steven doesn’t let himself be cowed. He says, “The sand doesn’t work, the ankle restraint doesn’t work, the bloody camera does not bloody work. He can see everything we do, apparently. He knows more than us. We’re out of our depth, so why not ask for someone for-“
“Because!” Marc says, his anger breaking free, his voice loud enough to bounce against the walls of their flat. “They’ll lock us up, you idiot! How do you think they treat people like me, like us, people who don’t have control of their own…” He gestures helplessly to his own head, his hand moving in circles at the wrist. “You think we haven’t been to therapists before? Real ones? What do you think someone is going to do – what do you think Layla is going to do if she finds out that we’re walking around in fugue states again?”
Steven remembers the look on the HR man’s face, the man at the museum, as he slid the hospital brochure across the desk toward Steven. The pity.
He doesn’t doubt that Marc is telling the truth. Marc probably has seen therapists, doctors, before. He’d built that hospital in the afterlife, and later in their mindscape. That had come from him. Steven has no memory of being in a psychiatric hospital in real life, but he doesn’t doubt that Marc has been. He has no reference for them. Surely hospitals can’t be as bad as they seem in the books and movies, but the way Marc is reacting now, Steven can’t be sure.
“Layla wouldn’t do that to us,” Steven says, his voice shaky with his lack of conviction.
Marc just angles his head back, looks at Steven from the corner of his eyes. He manages so well to make Steven feel small.
Steven glares. “She wouldn’t. And besides, maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if we did go to hosp-“
“Shut up, Steven,” Marc says, his new favorite mantra. “I’m not going to be lectured by you about our – problems.”
Not long ago, just a few months ago, Marc had been kneeling with Steven in the sands of the afterlife and telling him that he saved him. Steven had known he was needed, and wanted, knew that he and Marc were two sides of a coin, as it were.
But when Marc is like this, it’s like their shared history is erased, like Steven is back to being unwanted. Like Marc would happily – without regret – put Steven back into that windowless box, would take him out only when Marc needed his stress ball.
Suddenly, he can’t stand being passive, can’t stand being on the sidelines. “Give me the body, Marc,” Steven says.
Marc looks at him. He says nothing.
“Give me the body,” Steven says. For the last few months, switching forward and back has been as easy as breathing. All he needs to do is nudge the space in their mind, and Marc steps back and Steven steps forward. Seamless and easy.
Steven nudges at that place now, but there is no easy give. Marc doesn’t move. He’s still looking at Steven in the mirror, his gaze unreadable.
“Give me the body,” Steven repeats for a third time. He slams his hand against the mirror, making the glass shake. He can’t stand the lifeless look in Marc’s eyes. “The body!” He squeezes his eyes shut and presses his own hands to his head, hitting that shared place in his mind as hard as he can, give me the body, give me the body, give me the-
The world stutters; his ears ring. He feels the floor jolt upward, rocking at an impossible angle. Then the world is still again. He can feel the weight of his own body, the heat of his blood in his veins. When he opens his eyes, there is grass under his cheek, unpleasantly wet with dew.
He gets his hands under himself and pushes upward. Songbirds chirp loudly in the trees nearby; the sun is rising behind England’s persistent clouds. He sits in the damp grass and watches a pair of young, fit people jog by on the path in front of him.
He knows this place. He’s in Hyde Park.
“Marc?” he asks aloud.
He takes stock of his body. Nothing broken, no blood on his hands. Small victories. He’s wearing one of Marc’s dark jackets but, more strangely, he’s got a flatcap on his head that he doesn’t recognize from their wardrobe. He takes it off and shoves it into the jacket pocket.
“Marc?” he tries again, pushing himself to his feet. A young man is playing with his dog on the grass nearby.
Steven closes his eyes and nudges the place in his mind that he and Marc share. There’s no pushback in response, no one to step forward and take over. There’s nothing at all.