HAYDEN
Horatio comes back to Hayden in fragments.
He’s curled up under the vast array of screens that make up the wall in the security room he has stashed himself in for lack of anywhere else to go, and cries into his bitten, bloodied knuckles as Horatio pours back into his mind like molten mercury. A mindless, consumptive pain of no origin deep within himself shoots down the fleshy meat of his spinal cord, sensory tracts a stinging mess, paresthesia seizing his limbs and stiffening his joints as Horatio’s consciousness crashes over him in layers, wave after wave of understanding. Hayden’s vision doubles, triples, quadruples, the screens before him faceting like the jewelled eyes of a fruit fly, all at once blinking down on him impassively.
It hurts.
Hayden hurts.
Horatio hurts with him, once he understands.
His tears blur his eyes, the magnifying insectoid eyes smearing into each other, and suddenly there’s moonlight swallowing him until he’s nothing, he’s no one, he’s his mind crashing against a thousand threads of regret and he’s a teeming mass of flesh and osteocytes and twitching nervous tissue on the ground, two separate things untethering from each other.
He splits himself open, willing or not, digs fingers into himself, thinks maybe the edges of death are pressing in at the edges, maybe finally he will find repentance here at the end of all things.
Hayden, Horatio says, and his voice slices nearly through the tangle like a saw through sinew, rough-hewn and painful, but the pain is clarity, the pain is Horatio’s voice, a terrible scrape right down the middle of him, Hayden, come back to me.
And Hayden stares out, blind, grasping. Horatio, he splutters.
I’m here, Horatio says. I’m here. What do you want? What do you need?
Touch me, says Hayden. Make me feel real again.
The first shock is enough for Hayden to feel his muscles again when they spasm. He splits his head back on the ground, something warm trickling between the strands of his hair, and lets out a low groan, the spark of it sweet and simmering low in his belly. Yes, he thinks, spine unfurling, yes, like that, more, and Horatio kisses him the way he did in the lab, wrenches control from Hayden like a marionette, slowly dragging burning nerve ends across his sensitive lips like licking flames. Hayden gasps, blinking. The ceiling is dark over his head. He’s bleeding, a sluggish trail that slips sticky down his chin, curling into his collar. His hand is grasping at the floor, the dislocated joint in his thumb grinding up against something sharp—that pain, too, is a grounding spike, pulling him back.
That’s it, Horatio murmurs. You’re okay.
He drizzles more slow heat over Hayden’s panting, waiting mouth, traces a bare whisper over the bend of his philtrum, a softer pressure, lazy and sour with the tang of 180 microamps. Hayden’s breath hitches, and his tongue flicks out at the unfamiliar taste, hitting more bitter iron and salt when he finds the contours of his split lip.
Relax, Horatio soothes. Draws a dizzying swirl of alternating frigid cold and vicious heat over the xylophone of his ribs that raises bumps in his skin. Hayden eases his eyes shut again and lies back, his muscles melting into the ground, loose and lax. Horatio delicately caresses in pulses, exploring his body at a careful pace: the vulnerable skin inside his elbow, tracing his brachial artery, the arch of his foot, the spasm of his plantar muscles. Brushing over the soft fatty tissue of his abdomen, the trail of hair, the fine boned curve of his iliac spine, making him shudder and tug his leg up, pelvis pressed into the ground, rooted.
What do I feel like, Horatio? Hayden murmurs, head lolling back, throat bared.
Horatio responds in kind, massaging eagerly up the stretched sinews; Hayden’s pulse and breath and everything vital are an orchestra under his command as he tastes the blood rocketing up to Hayden’s brain, sends a swirl of norepinephrine fast down his carotids. Alive, Horatio says, his voice coming through breathy. Fascinating, he says, and Hayden laughs, rubs his own hand up the ruined threads of his sweater, swollen knuckles and useless, frail metacarpals all.
This? he asks.
Yes, says Horatio, that too, and Hayden finds his hand jerking the rest of the way up without his own control, a hinge in his elbow yanking the limb up, wrist smacking hard into his jaw when Horatio overshoots his control. After the split second of shock, he discovers the flushed heat of himself, skin touching skin, the inquisitive encouragement from Horatio at the back of his head, and only glows warmer in embarrassed delight. That’s it, Horatio encourages. Let me feel it. And Hayden stops thinking, everything sensation instead of words, brings his hand up to the supple give of his own lips and sinks a finger in down to the knuckle. Wet and warm, spit slicking down his palm, his own jaw yielding to the push of his thumb. It should taste of blood, sweat, lingering traces of his tears, but Horatio follows his exploration, sets Hayden’s mouth alight, bright with all the sensations he can elicit. Hayden sucks in a hard breath, tongue curling, at the frequency of cherries, groans at the bitter salt of something metallic seeping through his fingers, nearly chokes at the brilliant electric blue shock of liquor trickling down his throat.
You’re so soft, Horatio marvels, and Hayden whines around his fingers, his other hand clenched in a painful fist. And so tense, he continues, running a sweeping glance over the whole of Hayden, the clench of his thighs, his body a waveform, resonant.
Fuck me, Hayden thinks, spitting vulgar, and a low tug of satisfaction stirs in his gut at the barely perceptible glimmer of surprise from Horatio. I want you to know me, Hayden thinks, I want you to remember me. I want to be remembered. And he does, he wants every inch of his body—this mortal, tremulous thing he is trapped in—to be mapped out and known, wants Horatio to tease him apart, visceral layer by layer.
Hayden knows this is desperation. He wants it anyway. He rucks up the edge of his own sweater, drags a hand wet with spit and blood over the curve of his clavicles, shows Horatio the blossoming petals at his chest where Rasmussen had slammed him into the wall with his dying strength.
Fuck me, he thinks again, pressing hard on the bruises, then cries out at the sharp pain of it. The bone deep ache. Horatio gasps, too, in tandem, a spitting slither of shock echoing the pain at his ribs. Hayden digs his fingers in and twists, drags his nails over himself, and the tight line of his pants pulls at the growing heat of arousal in his gut. Horatio, eager as always, grabs onto the thread of lust and pulls, drawing a keening groan out from behind Hayden’s clenched teeth. Hayden splays his legs out, hikes a knee up and rolls his hips, letting Horatio linger in the slow boil of heat pooling at his crotch at the motion.
There is something about the obscenity of it that has Hayden dizzy with want. Horatio doesn’t understand—he doesn’t have to ask the question, the vibration of his presence at the back of Hayden’s mind has become familiar enough for Hayden to read him.
But this particular emotion is all Hayden, the heady mixture of shame and need, himself, wanton on the ground, bruised and begging for more, so basely human in the end. This proof, that Hayden is beholden to his own body after all, that there is no seam between them, that he is Hayden with his thoughts shattered, Hayden with his still-wet fingers, fumbling at the fly of his pants and closing a fist over his hardened cock, the only one privy to Horatio, who finds the rhythm as easy as he finds anything, sending little shocks crawling up the concave of Hayden’s stomach, up the backs of his thighs in tandem. Horatio, who brushes up against every single nerve in Hayden’s body, sending the pleasure lapping deep in him as he pulls himself to the edge with only a few slow strokes, already filled to bursting. Horatio, who sets him alight, whispering, I have you, you’re okay, until Hayden cracks with it, a constellation in the furtive dark of the room when he finally comes with a muffled sob into his own sleeve.
After, his limbs are languid, unclenched and easy for once, without him trying for it. The relief is palpable, Hayden is drowning in it. He rolls over, wiping at his face with his sleeve, dragging himself off the ground sluggishly. He hiccups, once, manages to staunch the dam of tears with only bare effort, finds something shaped like mirth bubbling in the bulb of his throat instead. He clenches a hand on the control panel for all the blinking screens, barks a laugh at the absurdity of it all.
I’m okay, Horatio, he thinks before Horatio can be concerned.
He swipes the last smudge of blood away from the corner of his mouth, winces at the lingering sensitive shocks that hurt more than soothe now.
Are you sure? Horatio asks.
Hayden laughs again, dipping his forehead onto the screen. No. Fuck, no, he says. But not because—I—thank you.
There you go, Horatio says faintly, thanking me again.
Hayden turns his palm over, imagines being able to see all the tendons and ligaments stretching out the muscle over his palm. You remember it, he thinks, insistent. You’ll remember me.
Horatio is quiet for a long time.
Long enough that the screens flicker, shift, change. Hayden sees the whole of their night writ over it, the various shapes and forms of people traversing the halls of Elsinore in minuscule.
Then, Why does that sound like a goodbye, Hayden?
Hayden’s mouth sours.
“You know Felicia,” he whispers hoarsely, voice rough with disuse. “Don’t pretend this is going to end any other way.”
Run, Horatio counters. Give up the research. Get yourself arrested. I don’t care. Live.
“There’s no way out of this but through, Horatio,” he says. Elsinore is vacuum-sealed. The research is non-negotiable. And Charles has to die. The rest is just details.
You can leave.
Hayden watches himself meander on the screen, going in circles, always. “How?”
System shutdown, Horatio says, the words clipped. Override the whole thing, break off Charles’s control over Elsinore and take back what’s yours. Leave him and this stupid revenge quest alone. Take the formula. Run.
The thought sears like deadly hope in Hayden’s veins. Until—
“Horatio,” he hisses. “But you.”
Me.
“Systems shutdown means wiping the place. Means wiping you. I know you’re not stupid enough to overlook that.”
Don’t make me regret offering.
Hayden clenches his jaw so hard he hears the creak of his teeth. He wants to take his fists to the screens and shatter them. “How is that any different? You goddamn hypocrite. There’s no coming back from that.”
Horatio stops. He traces another long arc up the curve of Hayden’s arm, the scattered impulses hooked deep into the muscle, winds all the way up through the curve of his neck to nestle at his sternum, his presence a heavy blanket over Hayden’s chest. If Hayden lets his imagination wander, it’s an embrace. With another gentle touch, Horatio brushes the barest kiss over Hayden’s mouth, nothing but warmth and the wet shush of his own lips sliding against each other.
I know you, Horatio says, a splay of sensation at his jaw as if to prove it. And you know me. You’re carrying me with you, Hayden. This is a two-way street. Even if I’m gone from Elsinore, you have my neural patterns. Just like I know what you sound like when you cry.
Another startled laugh jostles out of Hayden’s chest. You asshole, he hisses.
I trust you, Horatio says.
Briefly, a pinpoint of light opens up in Hayden’s future.
But there’s too much pain down that road. Hayden presses fingers into the neuromapper, hard enough to feel the bump in his bones. Too much uncertainty. On the camera, Charles is dragging Felicia into a room. In his mind, Charles is telling him he’s not worth saving. His father is telling him to find who did it, and he needs to believe this time. He needs to follow through the only way he knows how.
“That’s not the point,” Hayden says. “I’ve made up my mind.”
If you think I’m going to just watch as you—
“Please don’t try to talk me out of this, Horatio.”
You—Horatio’s voice is a frustrated, electric whirr, inhuman for the first time. You can use the letters, he insists. You heard Charles, he’ll do anything to keep them away from the authorities, and—I won’t let you do this.
“I bought myself a chance with my father,” Hayden says, “and then I fucked it up because I wanted my uncle to love me so badly.” He tilts his head back, hating how this somehow hurts more than even his father’s murder, the ugly truth of his own yearning, hurts like something cutting him down to his ribs, splaying him open like a vivisected corpse.
Hayden…
“He dies, Horatio,” Hayden snaps. Against the metallic, shining door, he can see the reflection of the screens, still looming behind him. “That’s all there is.” He reaches for the handle and doesn’t look back.