HAYDEN36
His uncle sends Rasmussen to escort him to the exit point. Hayden hadn’t thought he was well enough to walk; he thought he’d seen the last of Rasmussen after he stumbled out of that room, half broken. Clever of dear Uncle Charles. Makes it harder to escape when he’s forced to stare down the proof of his own folly, should that be the goal. The sclera of Rasmussen’s left eye is painted a brilliant scarlet. The scowling pallor of his face only makes this clearer, emphasizes the deep, darker crimson veins that run down blanched conjunctiva. He walks with a limp.
Rasmussen looks at him, dead on. Naked resentment he doesn’t even try to hide.
There’s a space in Hayden’s chest where his guilt should be curdling, but—
It doesn’t matter.
Nothing matters anymore.
Can’t escape if there’s nowhere to escape to.
Everything he loves, he left back here. Even Horatio, nestled close as always. Horatio can’t know the flurry of his mind, the crawling neurosis. Horatio can’t know the plan, if Charles is to be kept in the dark, so Horatio can’t be with him, now that Hayden needs him most. All he has is the data. But what could he do with data, without a lab? Without a safe place? Nowhere to go?
The letters sit in his pocket, red hot.
He wants to rip them to pieces, but that doesn’t render what’s written on them moot. It doesn’t erase the truth.
He wanted to know—what had made Charles like this? What had made this so? What knife had twisted so deep in his uncle’s gut to betray them all like this?
Now he knows. The betrayal had never been with him.
But instead of relief at finding the answer, all Hayden can see is the tightening grip of the future, black and unknowable.
“Come on, Lichfield,” Rasmussen snaps, dragging Hayden’s arm hard as he pulls him across the hall.
He nearly stumbles on his feet.
“Is this petty revenge?” he can’t help but mutter vindictively. “You don’t seem to have any signs of nerve damage. Far as I can see, you’ll make a full recovery.”
Rasmussen doesn’t turn to glare.
“Come on,” Hayden parrots, slowing his steps down a little deliberately. “Let’s get this over with. I’m tired of this.”
Rasmussen scoffs. “You’re tired?”
“Of course I am. A lot has transpired tonight, Rasmussen. Don’t you know?”
He stops dead in the centre of the hall.
Some hazy, grim satisfaction hangs over Hayden’s head. Good. He doesn’t want to continue to the exit. Not yet. He wants this kind of anger, easier to swallow. This kind of fight, petty words and taunting barbs he doesn’t really mean.
“Are you fucking hearing yourself right now?”
Hayden raises an eyebrow.
“I’m escorting you to a cushy exit, where you can slip away into the night unscathed after you killed a man tonight—let alone what you did to me.” Rasmussen’s whole body trembles.
“I didn’t do anything to you,” Hayden says, flicking his fingers in dismissal. “Collateral damage.”
“Fucking balls to stand there and pretend you weren’t responsible for all of it.”
Of course not. There are a million things he would do over. He could stay in this moment now, forever, if that was remotely possible. But regretting means never having to think about the nonexistent, nebulous future. Regret means living in the past, even if only in your mind.
And admitting that—his guilt, his regret—would mean admitting he doesn’t want the trade to go through. Would mean discarding everything he’s planned for tonight.
It’s funny, and the humour of it closes on him like a trap, like the exquisite shock of an aneurysm twisting open; they’d all been sitting on this tragedy, building underneath them, the truth of it lodged up in the walls of Elsinore for years.
This is just the counterpoint. The fallout. The catharsis.
He smooths out the edges of his trembling mouth into a smirk. “I wasn’t, though.”
Rasmussen reels back. “Holy fuck, man. I thought your uncle was crazy.”
Hayden snorts. “He is.”
“You’re all fucking crazy.” And there it is, the shaking fear. Once, Hayden had thought he and Rasmussen were peers, but Rasmussen doesn’t belong here, not really. He’s scared. He’s a goddamn coward, lured into the fray by people who had seen more of what was happening than he ever did.
“What did my uncle promise you?” Hayden sneers. “To help him out?”
Rasmussen gives Hayden’s arm—still firmly in his grip—a hard shake. “None of your goddamn business.”
“Did he offer to pay off your student debt? Bump your salary? A fancy publication, for your budding career? What did Paul Xia say to get you to let him into the basement? You blame yourself?”
With a rough snarl, Rasmussen backhands Hayden across the face.
For a moment, the world rings. Iron, bright on his tongue. Hayden’s shoulder crashes against the wall. The already fragile infrastructure of his lip tears. An exploring tongue in the crevice feels out the vitreous tissue inside the epithelium, gelatinous and squirming. His incisors ache. His hands grope out along the walls as he spits out a glob of stringy spit laced with blood. When his vision clears, he realizes his glasses have been knocked to the ground, and he bends to pick them up.
“Satisfied?” he asks, not bothering to straighten.
Rasmussen stands, trembling. His hair has fallen out of the tie, spilled out over his shoulders. He looks like a fucking kid, spindly and in over his head, and Hayden laughs.
“You don’t want to be here,” Hayden says.
“Of course not,” Rasmussen returns, voice raspy. There is still the flicker of—something, flashing across his face. Pity, perhaps. Or maybe regret of his own.
“But you’re still doing it,” Hayden says. “Letting him use you like a glorified manservant. Just because he’s giving you empty promises.”
Instead of an answer, Rasmussen reaches across the hall and wrenches Hayden back upright.
Hayden laughs again, dribbling more bloody spittle over his chin. “Is that it, then?” he asks, going pliant and letting Rasmussen drag him along.
They move faster down the hall, shuttling towards an inevitability.
“You’re too ashamed now? You accuse me of everything, but you listen to him?” The anger mounts inside of him, like a tsunami, low and rolling at first, but suddenly fierce. “Is that all you have to say to me?”
Rasmussen is stubbornly silent.
“Is that what you think of me, now? Is that what you mean? Or have you always thought this way?” At some point, the questions have stopped being about Rasmussen. Hayden breathes in, sharp and stinging. “Say something,” he snaps.
Rasmussen doesn’t even turn his head.
Fuck, he thinks, then repeats it out loud for good measure.
He’s still angry.
He’s still so angry it hurts just to walk. It hurts when his teeth clatter together. It hurts when he closes his eyes. It hurts when he tries to think about what happens now. It hurts when he wonders if anyone here ever loved him, like a keening wail stuck in his chest, trying to escape. Is there anyone left anymore? Is everyone going to betray him, or else leave him alone to blindly stumble through, inevitably fucking everything up? There’s no refuge to retreat to. Nothing to show for tonight but spilled blood and ruined plans.
Unbidden, words from the letter float to his mind. Words his mother wrote, her hands steady and sure.
I would split myself open for this.
Hayden glances at Rasmussen’s hardened face, turned away from him.
No, no, no, he thinks, a cacophony of thoughts spilling out, too fast and fierce, delirious with everything but the need to stop, to get out of this stupid plan, to escape somewhere dark and quiet so he can piece his mind back together. Panic clogs his throat, and he can’t get at his own damn wrists to make sure his heart is steady and—I need out of these fucking cuffs, I need everything to stop. I need to stop.
He can’t step out of this lab.
He can’t let this spill out into the real world.
He can’t—
Can’t—
He shakes his head, a twitching reflex, a red cloud descending over his eyes. Breathing comes easier, now, though it feels like someone else’s chest is rising and falling, somewhere far away from him. The only intelligible thing rattling through his overloading synapses is that he needs to leave, and that tonight, there will be blood to spill.
Perhaps, bloody thoughts are all he has left.
They stop before a smooth white wall that once held an exit.
He finds the outline of it, fine and dark, like a ghost of a door. An imprint.
There’s a speaker somewhere embedded in the ceiling. He pushes away the urge to look up for it and the cameras, stops his mouth from forming the shape of Horatio’s name, doesn’t want Horatio to know the truth of the writhing, madman’s brain left over in his useless body.
“Hayden?” a voice crackles. Felicia’s, not Charles37.
His shoulders drop a fraction. “Yeah,” he calls into the empty hall.
“Are you ready?”
“Is Charles there?”
A pause.
Then, “I’m here. Did you want to tell me something?” His uncle’s voice is as cold as ever, but he can hear the strain like a violin string wound taut. Tight enough to cut. He’s stressed. He’s upset. And he doesn’t want Hayden to know. He wonders if his mother told Charles not to tell.
He shifts his lab coat, slides his hands underneath.
“No,” he says. “I want you to tell me something.”
Charles sighs. “What is it now, Hayden?”
He wraps a hand around his left thumb, brushing up against the fluttering pulse just under the surface of his skin. “I want you to admit it to me,” he says. Carefully, he presses down on the first joint. Carpometacarpal, he thinks, clinical clarity coming to him like a balm, crucial to connect the thumb to the rest of the hand.
“Haven’t we said enough by now?” Charles asks.
He pushes down on his thumb experimentally, enough for it to ache.
“I just want to know one thing, then.”
“What is it?”
“Did you know that it was mine more than it was his? The Sisyphus Formula,” he says, his voice falling to a bare whisper.
“…No. I didn’t.”
“Would you have tried to take it anyway, if you did?” Would Mom still have wanted it that badly?
His uncle’s mouth must be close to the microphone, which transmits the halting, shaking breath. “I would’ve, yes.”
Hayden nods, slowly, realising Charles most likely hasn’t even bothered to watch him.
That’s enough, for some sort of confession. Which means it’s time for the trade.
He pushes his thumb down harder, right into the divot between the bones.
“Thank you for being honest,” he says.
“Are you ready, then?”
“Sure,” he says. “Let’s do it.”
Then he sucks in a sharp breath and forces the joint all the way down. Crack. Biting down on his lip, he forces the cuff off over his hand as fast as he can. It doesn’t feel broken. Dislocated, maybe. But he keeps the hand stiff and still anyway as he carefully holds the cuff—still magnetic, still drawn to the other—in his right hand.
Rasmussen gives him a suspicious look. “What was that?”
Hayden grits his teeth. “Nothing,” he says, hoping he doesn’t sound faint.
On the other end of the line, Felicia’s voice comes back. “Hayden, you have the data card, right?”
Swiftly, he crouches. “I’m sorry, Felicia,” he says.
Then he lunges, uses the cuff to whip hard metal across Rasmussen’s face hard enough to stun him.
“What the hell—?”
Rasmussen wheels back with a cry. Before he can bring his hands up to guard himself, Hayden gathers his strength and uses the cuff to bludgeon him again. He cannot be certain, but he hits hard enough that he thinks bone cracks. Rasmussen staggers. He’s bigger and stronger, but Hayden has surprise.
And he has a weapon.
“Wait—” Rasmussen chokes out, and Hayden slams into his face yet again, catching cheekbone and sending a light spray of blood spitting out of Rasmussen’s mouth. He uses his momentum to twine his fingers into Rasmussen’s hair and bashes his face into the white, sterile wall, grinding down.
A weak breath wheezes out of Rasmussen’s lungs. Hayden gulps down the bile trying to crawl up his throat and reaches into his pocket. He hooks an arm around Rasmussen’s neck, and he pulls out the heavy red fountain pen that is still engraved with his traitorous mother’s name.
It’s quick. Stab, drag. The wet slick of blood and tissue separating. Rasmussen’s wheeze. Hayden breaks cartilage, trachea. Pulls his arm back. Stabs again, finds the carotid.
Rasmussen himself only has enough time to choke, for his eyes to bulge. A flailing elbow catches Hayden in the ribs, strikes hard enough for pain to skitter over the whole of his left as Rasmussen crashes them both hard to the ground. Hayden grunts, tightening his grip. Rasmussen is weakening, one hand pressed tight to the wound. Slowly, the pressure against Hayden’s chest eases as the whole of Rasmussen’s body goes limp. Hayden braces again him, rolls them both over. Rasmussen is facing the ceiling, mouth open and gaping, still gasping. Hayden lowers him carefully to the ground.
Fucking cliché, he thinks, hysterical. Rasmussen’s blood paints the whole wall in striations of red, Pollock-sprays, haphazard and wild.38
Rasmussen’s mouth opens and closes as if he cannot fathom what has happened. Blood spurts between his fingers. Hayden’s own hand is throbbing. There’s a wet squeal under his heel when he turns.
And then: “Goddammit, Hayden,” Felicia says.
“Sorry,” he says again. His hands aren’t shaking. Why aren’t they shaking? He tries to push his hair back with the heel of his palm, but it jostles his injured thumb and he has to stifle a pathetic cry.
“We had a plan,” she says.
“I wasn’t satisfied by it.” Hayden chokes on the words.
“Is this what you meant by ‘messy’?” she asks. “Is this what you were planning?”
All he can do is repeat the same words, “I’m sorry,” over and over, as if that means anything. He knows it doesn’t. But Felicia can take care of herself. There’s only one thing he has left to do now, and when Charles is dead, she can walk away anyway.
“Don’t follow me,” he says, and then he retreats down the hall without looking back, every ragged breath hurting as he desperately pulls for air, burying himself deeper and deeper into the bowels of Elsinore.
36 Once again, the proceeding chapter is my own fictionalized account.
37 The following intercom conversation is as per the original transcript, altered only to eliminate repetition.
38 Autopsy report recorded Gabriel Rasmussen’s official cause of death as massive hemorrhage, although blunt force trauma wounds consistent with bludgeoning force were documented, causing multiple skull and orbital bone fractures.