Chapter Text
There are worse places to return to than the Southern District. Or that’s what she tells herself. The truth is more complicated than that. True: she’d scaled the LCBI to heights she never dared dream of when she was just another rat scuttling along these bloody alleys. Also true: once she finally wore the badge she coveted, she wanted nothing more than to cast it off.
Sparkling and false, little more than gilded tin. At some point over the past two years, she realized just how insignificant she was to the institution that now lauded her. She shudders to think of how she ran herself ragged to prove she was worthy of their praise. But what truly loves you doesn’t demand proof of your value.
Rafayel taught her that.
She should be ashamed of what it took—a city in flames, and lives lost in the wreckage—to find her way back to him. She isn’t. She only mourns how she trod on his heart in the prelude, until it was bruised beyond recognition. How haunted his eyes looked as they tracked her movements in the basement of EVER’s laboratory, turned rabid with time lost.
“What am I to you?” the caged beast hissed. “A madman? A monster? Or just a pitiful prisoner?”
“You’re Rafayel,” she replied, knowing that in that moment, there was little left of him to hear her. “I’ll help you remember who you are.”
He nearly killed her. She would have forgiven him.
Rafayel was heavy when she eased him onto the gurney. He peered up at her, seeing her with more clarity than anyone in all of Linkon despite his half-conscious daze.
“Where are you taking me?” he slurred softly.
He was glistening with sweat. He looked as pretty as he did pitiful like this, and far more delicate than the LCBI would have you believe. She brushed the hair from his brow, tasting the metallic traces of his blood on her bicuspids. His Adam’s apple swayed like a paper boat on a river, still bearing the marks of her teeth.
“Home,” she said, watching as sleep reared up and dimmed the light in his eyes. “Don’t worry. I’m taking you home.”
DAY ONE – 8:17 p.m.
She abandons the van she used to transport him in the warehouse district before sunset, well before the Praedators emerge from the shadows. It’s a good distance from their safe house, which is to their benefit in the grand scheme of things. For now, though, it means she’ll have to endure a long march back.
The district unfolds for her as if she’d never left it. She recognizes landmarks she used to take note of to help her navigate these seedy neighborhoods. She finds herself walking down old shortcuts to long-forgotten roads. She even passes a cracked window she once crawled through to escape a Praedator who’d stalked her one night, not long after Josephine passed.
Not a year ago, it would have shamed her to admit that this forsaken place was written into her marrow. But her ties to the Southern District was why the LCBI gave her custody of Rafayel to begin with. No matter how she tried to outrun her past, they’d always branded her for it. They’d always known.
A familiar shop emerges from the depths of an alley. Its insides are deserted and silent aside from the whirr of an old rotary fan. She walks to the grizzled woman smoking behind the counter and unceremoniously lays her gun before her, carefully wrapped in a strip of cloth.
“I’m looking to trade for another.”
The shopkeeper studies the weapon, the lines of her face held in careful parity. As she takes it up, handling it through the fabric, a bit of ash falls from the tip of her cigarette.
Intuiting what she’s searching for, the fallen enforcer adds, “No ammo. Serial number’s filed down.”
The woman finds the stripe of metal that’s been worn smooth on the receiver, running a finger across it in search of any lingering marks. “Nothing I’ve got is half this pretty.”
“As long as it shoots, I don’t care.”
The shopkeeper reaches under the counter and the fallen enforcer braces herself. She only relaxes when a small box comes into view. It rattles when placed, metal glinting through its mouth in invitation.
She reaches for a gun that’s a bit older, inconspicuous and sturdy. It’s plain and the metal’s lighter in color. Besides the fact that it’s a semi-automatic pistol, it shares few similarities with the polished firearms issued by the LCBI.
The shopkeeper watches disinterestedly as she picks it up and assesses its weight in her hand. Breathing a plume of smoke from the corner of her mouth, she reaches once more beneath the counter and lays a magazine and a silencer between them. “Go on then. It’s rare for me to feel generous.”
“What’s the occasion?”
The shopkeeper stares at her for one long moment and the fallen enforcer suddenly remembers a woman from ages ago—just as forbidding, but with less grays. The shopkeeper shrugs as she nudges the magazine closer. “You’ve got a nice face.”
The fallen enforcer accepts the offering without argument. As she attaches the silencer and loads the gun, the shopkeeper fiddles with something in her ear. Probably a hearing aid. After a moment, she moves aside and gestures to the wall behind her, decorated with an array of taxidermied animal heads. Upon closer inspection, they’re riddled with the bullet holes of past transactions. Or worse.
The shopkeeper nods, prompting her, Go on.
She flicks at the safety and takes sure aim at the boar.
The crack of the shot is deafening in the cluttered room. The shopkeeper draws in another lazy inhale from her cigarette as she considers the new wound in the animal’s skull—a perfect circle between the eyes. The barrel’s still smoking. Just a pivot of the enforcer’s heel and it would be her head in front of the muzzle. But survivors of the Southern District don’t live on luck alone. The shopkeeper hasn’t even blinked.
As the woman fiddles once more with her aid, instinct circles at the back of her skull like a warning.
“I’ll take it,” she says loudly, barely hearing herself over the ring in her ears. She tries not to look so hurried as she draws out a few bills from her back pocket, intending to buy the shopkeeper’s discretion. “For your trouble,” she says.
“Keep it,” the shopkeeper replies, stopping her with a curt wave of the hand. “But leave the keys.”
She freezes. Like an amateur. The Northern District’s made her complacent. Locking her jaw, she slips her hand into her pocket and draws out the keys to the van, destined to be lost in the currents of Linkon’s dirty river—or so she’d thought.
The shopkeeper catches it in her palm and gives her a faintly disdainful look, like she’s a lost, snotty child crying for its mother. “Lots of eyes peeking around corners nowadays. I wouldn’t stick around long if I were you.” As she examines the keyring, she adds, “No more than two weeks, I think.”
Soft as she’s become, the fallen enforcer still knows a deal when she hears one. “Two weeks,” she agrees, slipping her gun into her holster. “Thanks for the tip.”
The shopkeeper nods and returns the crate to its place beneath the counter. There are no words of goodbye between them when she leaves, just a chill at the back of her skull and the acrid bite of smoke.
DAY ONE – 9:42 p.m.
She takes three steps through the door before she’s thrown against it. The bags she’s carrying drop and land near her feet. Rafayel moves in with the intent to kill, tucking his blade beneath her jaw and planting an arm against the door to cage her.
She sees the moment that he recognizes her—shock and anguish flickering through his eyes in quick succession. Metal warms against her neck as he hisses, “Where have you taken me?”
It’s in her best interest to speak. She doesn’t. She’s too busy studying the width of his pupils. He’s right to be angry, yes, but frenzied is another matter. She relaxes when she notes the shape of his scowl: more gnarled than usual, but not terribly concerning. He isn’t baring teeth.
“Answer me.”
The heat of Rafayel’s body presses in on her. The edge of his dagger’s poised like a wire across her throat. It isn’t exactly how she’d choose to start her first real conversation with her former subordinate-cum-roommate-cum-lover-cum-sexually-charged-nemesis-cum-hostage, but she’s left with no other choice but to make do.
She pushes the muzzle of her gun into his side, just to alert him that it’s there. His eyes go wide, darting down and back again at the pressure. Raising her hand and smiling in cheeky surrender, she says, “I can explain?”
His glare returns with a force. Not for the first time, she’s made aware of the threat of him. The lines of his silhouette are charged with the promise of motion. He still reeks of sweat and the laboratory’s untold grime. His body utterly dwarfs hers like this.
“I won’t ask again,” Rafayel growls. “Where are we?”
“Bloomshore,” she replies obediently, “on the east end of the Southern District.”
“I know where Bloomshore is,” he snaps. There’s a fleeting pause as his eyes ripple with the revelation. His grip on the hilt shifts as he bites out, “Why?”
“Because it’s safe here.”
It’s an honest answer. The truth leaves him dumbfounded. She hikes up her chin and Rafayel’s hand twitches. He draws his blade back ever so slightly as she dares to lean forward. “It’d be easier to talk if I didn’t have your knife at my throat. Slit it later if you don’t like what I have to say.”
His lips part over a half-formed retort before he silences himself. She suspects it was something kind, out of reflex or old habit. Don’t talk like that, probably. Or maybe, Don’t say such things. After taking a moment to reconsider, he has action speak for him and lets his hand fall instead.
She allows her gun to fall with it. Then, after a bit of thought, she offers it to him. “Here.”
Rafayel glares at it and her before snatching it up. As he steps away, she reaches for the bags sitting at her feet.
She peeks up and finds him staring at her apprehensively, like he’s the one who’s been cornered. (Though, considering the circumstances, she supposes he isn’t entirely wrong.) He doesn’t go so far as to take aim at her, but it’s obvious that’s conditional. One small misstep and he’ll bring the gun swinging from its place at his hip.
A better enforcer would be on her guard in this situation, but she’s disgraced for a reason.
She rises and says, “Let’s talk in the kitchen. I brought food.”
DAY ONE – 9:54 p.m.
In the same way that the streets outside unfurled for her, the old house welcomes her just as readily. Rafayel stares as she rummages through the cabinets with disturbing ease. The dishes are dusty, stacked exactly where she left them. But a few squatters must have traveled through at some point—they’re missing a few pots. The blinking clock on the stove seems to indicate that paying her power bills has actually been worth something, but it’s ancient. Luckily, they could probably use Rafayel’s evol to cook simple dishes in a pinch.
If he doesn’t kill her first.
“You said you’d talk.”
She glances at him over her shoulder and hums in affirmation, drawing a loaf of bread from a bag on the counter. “What do you want to know?”
The floor creaks as Rafayel walks closer. He hesitates as she reaches into the bag and reveals a six-pack of yogurt drinks. It feels manipulative now, in the context of things. He scowls at them for a long moment before turning his sullen glare on her.
“What did you do to me? The last thing I remember, we were in the lab. And that… spray.”
“The Praedator Snare.”
“What?”
“It’s called a Praedator Snare.” She sets a block of cheese on the counter, then a carton of eggs. “Based on the notes I found, anyway.”
There’s a prolonged silence between them. When she turns around, she finds Rafayel staring at her in disbelief. “I don’t care what it’s called.”
In hindsight, it was a stupid thing to say.
She sighs and puts her hands on her hips, tapping her toes as she considers where to begin. Finally, with a curt nod, she orders, “Sit down.”
He’s the one wielding the weapons but he listens. His gaze is wary as she sits across from him, though not nearly as venomous as before.
“Here,” she says, tossing him a snack to tide him over. “You must be starving.”
Rafayel catches the apple and stares at it like she’s handed him a hunk of spoiled meat. His eyes narrow as she places a honeydew yogurt drink in front of him for good measure.
He looks to the meager offerings on the counter, then back at her. “Is that all?”
This time it’s her features that twist. Apparently they’ve been separated for so long that she forgot about his audacity. When she doesn’t answer him, Rafayel rolls his eyes and bites into the fruit with a scoff.
She doesn’t mean to laugh. It’s a faint sound. Rafayel still pauses, his jaw frozen mid-chew. Their eyes meet and he feels it—she knows he feels it: the comfort of this moment even in the thick of their hostility. Even after so long, they can sit across from one another and bicker like no time’s passed.
He averts his gaze and swallows. They move on.
“When you were captured by the LCBI,” she explains, “they installed an activator I could use to subdue you in the event of a frenzy.”
Rafayel’s stare turns hard and flinted. “Installed?”
“Surgically.” God, she wished he looked more surprised. “It was a safety measure, for the study. It only responds to me. You needed to snap out of it, so I figured out where it was.”
His eyes narrow over an icy smile that has her stomach flipping, both for the danger of it and its sheer appeal. “You have my thanks.” He picks up the gun and leans forward in one slow, fluid motion. By the time he's stopped, he's transformed: no longer Rafayel, but the Tamino who purred threats at her at Flowin’ Fire’s base. He loosely points it at her and demands, “Where?”
“Your neck.”
“Still?”
Rafayel leans back and sets the gun down at her nod. His hand disappears under the table and reemerges with a flash of metal. She jolts upright and gasps.
With a sharp kick to his shin, she hisses, “Don’t you dare.”
He yells as his dagger falls to the floor with a clatter, along with the apple. 'Rafayel' returns instantly, looking at her with wide eyes as the fruit rolls to her feet. “Are you crazy? I could have hurt myself!”
“You were about to slice your neck open!”
“Yeah, with control,” he argues, and her jaw drops. “And that’s rich coming from you. Where was all this concern for my safety when you locked me into that cage?”
“I was keeping you safe—”
“You imprisoned me—”
“The LCBI would have tortured you!”
“—for a month. And you think what you did was any better? You lied to me. You forced me into a frenzy.”
“I had to!” she insists. She hears herself and it sounds awful. It sounds like a crock of shit. “They didn’t tell me where the activator was, and it only reveals itself when you’re in the worst of it. I thought it would happen naturally if I kept you there, but you were in a low-grade frenzy for so long that—”
“You abandoned me,” he says.
The words lay between them like cracked shards of clay. Rafayel’s jaw clenches to prevent more from falling from his mouth. His eyes are suddenly glossy, and miserably trained on hers. She tries to speak, but the sound that escapes her is barely discernible and hollow.
“I… I needed to.”
That yanks a mirthless laugh right out of his throat. “Are you really going to try to convince me that it was for my own good?” Rafayel cocks his head, smiling without sincerity. “You left me to die.”
“I knew you’d survive,” she countered, digging in her heels. “I know you. I know what you’re capable of. Obviously you’d survive. But you weren’t in those meetings. You didn’t see what they were designing. You would’ve died if you’d stayed.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You could barely stand after the fourth trial!”
The chair screeches as Rafayel abruptly rises. “It wasn’t your decision to make.”
The room goes silent. Motes of dust lazily drift between them, kicked up by their flurry of motion and wasted words. Rafayel’s glaring down on her, more wounded than wrathful, and she can see every fine crack she’s inflicted upon him under the aged fluorescent lights.
If he’s going to do it anyway, she might as well offer to shoot herself.
“I would have—” Rafayel croaks, only to stop himself. He shuts his eyes with a shake of the head. Silence passes between them as he centers himself, his breathing evening out. When he next casts his gaze about the room, he’s schooled his voice into a tone that sounds vaguely calm. “Next question. What is this place?”
She tries to imagine what he sees. The house is humbler than the one she remembers. The explosion did a number on it. As far as repairs went, she had little interest in renovating the wreckage, and after using most of the funds to pay for her move up north, the insurance only covered so much.
Josephine’s ugly old wallpaper was turned to ashes, and what was once a disparate living room, dining room, and kitchen has been muddled together into one composite space. The whole house has gone from four bedrooms to two. She didn’t bother to reconstruct the second floor. Only a few pieces of furniture survived the blast, and the ones that did still sport scorch marks black as damnation. As far as new furnishings went, she went with the cheapest options possible. Even the beds are more like cots (she never thought she’d have to use them again), the bare-minimum of mattresses set on metal frames.
Altogether, it looks less like a home and more like an abandoned hovel. Which, she supposes, it is.
Even so.
“I grew up here,” she says.
Rafayel twitches in surprise. “You—” He studies her, clearly trying to judge whether she’s serious. “You never told me you lived in the Southern District.”
She could’ve laughed again. She finds some sick pleasure in the idea that he might’ve known her as little as she did him. They really are compatible, for better or worse.
“Yeah, well...” She shrugs. “You never asked.”
Moving slowly, she picks the apple up from the floor. Once upright, she gestures to the sink in request. Rafayel grants her permission to move with a reluctant nod, but she takes her time getting there, not wanting to agitate him any more than she already has. The old faucet sputters and pours a stream of water the color of rust. As she waits for it to purge itself of the murk, she says, “Look. You won’t believe me, but I’ve only lied to you once. Everything else I’ve said about wanting to save you is true. That’s why you’re here.”
“…Once, huh?” Rafayel murmurs, a memory in static (Is it because you hate me…?) whispering between them. Any tenderness that might’ve come with it is promptly batted away. “So what? You think I’m going to fall to my knees with gratitude? Submit to being your little pet again?”
She deserves every blow he’s throwing at her, but that one especially hurts.
“No,” she says, letting her eyes drop to the apple in her hand. “Actually, I just wanted to give you a place to rest.”
Rafayel falls silent. She glances at the faucet and finds that the water’s running clear. As she rinses the apple beneath it, washing it of dirt, she announces, “I’m leaving Linkon.”
It's not that it's surprising. It's the unspoken question that comes with it. Her heart sinks as Rafayel skirts around it, quietly asking, “To go where?”
She turns off the water and holds the apple up for examination, admiring how the red skin glistens around the edges of his bite. “Dunno. I don’t think it matters, as long as it’s not here.” She holds it up to him in offering. “Do you still want this?”
Rafayel ignores her. The floor creaks under his weight as he walks closer. “If you expect me to just go along with you like nothing happened—”
“I don’t expect you to do anything. I’ve left the LCBI, and the whole organization thinks you’re gone. Our… relationship,” she waves the apple about, because who knows where they stand now, “isn’t defined by them anymore.”
Rafayel stares, and there she goes again, getting some sick satisfaction out of how disoriented he is. She’s throwing a lot at him all at once, so she really should have more sympathy when he asks, “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying: if you want to remove the activator for good, I can help you. If you want to catch the next train out of Linkon with me, you can. Or.” The words catch in her throat and she hates it. Does her best to muscle through. “If you just want to get as far away from me as possible, as soon as possible, that’s fine, too.”
She takes a bite, and the crunch tears through the air between them. The flesh is crisp to perfection, but the juice is more tart than sweet. She wipes a drop of it from the corner of her lip and catches Rafayel following the path of her finger, if only for a moment.
“I promised you freedom, and now you have it. I’m not here to tell you what happens next. You get to choose.”
He stares at her like she’s speaking in tongues. She takes another bite if only to do something with her mouth, because who knows? Maybe she is. Juice seeps around the edges, trickling over the heel of her palm and then her wrist. As she pokes her tongue out to catch a stray drop, Rafayel sucks at his teeth and steps forward, snatching it out of her hand.
“I did want this, actually,” he mutters at her questioning look. She doesn’t know why he’s embarrassed about it. The tips of his ears are a bit pink when he gives the fruit a hefty chomp.
She sighs in resignation, reaching back into the bag for the rest of the apples and laying them on the counter with their scant collection of ingredients. There’s another bag full of toiletries at her feet.
“Here,” she says, picking it up and handing it to him. “I’ll have clothes laid out for you when you’re out of the shower.”
Rafayel gives her a sharp look. “You really thought of everything, huh?”
“They’re not yours,” she grumbles. For some reason, it’s important to her that he knows that. “I had to get rid of those after you got me suspended.”
Which is just another way of admitting she held onto them until then. If he’s caught that, he doesn’t say a word.
“They should be a good size for you. But they’re… old.”
And no matter how many times she washes them, they still smell of smoke.
Rafayel’s eyes trail after her as she walks to the fridge. He affects a tone of nonchalance, but does a bad job of it. “Another one of your secrets, I presume?”
“I had a brother.” She opens the fridge and, to her relief, it's still functional. “Sort of.”
She neatly lines up Rafayel’s drinks along the side compartment. The apples go into the fruit drawer, the carton of eggs on the top shelf. Caleb always insisted that the cheese goes in the drawer immediately below. He’d gripe about it when she inevitably forgot and left it on the shelf—or worse, the butter compartment. She once got so frustrated with him nagging at her that she threw a block of cheddar across the room.
Somehow, the display looks even more pathetic than when the shelves were empty.
The whole while, Rafayel’s stare is boring into the back of her head. If he still has enough sympathy for condolences, she doesn’t want to hear them. But he sees right through her, even with all the awful distance between them. Her only response is the soft creak of the floor.
DAY TWO – 3:24 a.m.
In sleep, she’s in Linkon again, languishing in the apartment she’s scrabbled together between measly paychecks. A man who looks at her like starlight is searching for her outside. He’s coming down the hallway, in the direction of her bedroom. She was always a coward—she should have welcomed him in sooner. She tells herself she’ll open the door this time.
He trudges past.
Her eyes flutter open as she listens to his footfalls, the last vestiges of her dreams trailing after him. A lock clicks open, and she doesn’t mean to make a sound—doesn’t even realize she has until she hears it. A meek and weepy, “Oh.”
The silence that follows seems longer than it should be. She wishes she were dreaming, but she knows it’s real. How very lonely this old home is, she thinks as Rafayel steps across the threshold. How softly he leaves.