HORATIO
Hayden’s heart, mercifully, pounds.
Horatio sees red.
For the first time, he understands the concept of anger, the searing rouge of it. He is learning facets of human emotions, their primal nature.
Anger is red, and spitting pain, and Hayden’s heart is still pounding despite the slash carved in his forearm from Felicia’s arcing bullet. Anger is a thing that is gut-deep, red for the tear of it, red for the stain of it. Hayden turns his arm towards himself, sheltering, and—
Another shot cracks out into the room.
The sound embeds itself in Hayden’s ears, exploding inward. The bullet whips past his face and he collides with the wall. The part of Horatio that resonates in tune with the strings of Hayden’s body responds in kind, sympathetic. Hayden’s muscles spasm with the shock and the twinge echoes in Horatio’s systems, a low clang ringing out of the speakers in the room as Hayden stumbles back. He still has an arm around his uncle. They fall together. Smoke is laced in the air. Hayden is half-collapsed against the wall.
Nobody moves.
Even Charles is quiet, now. Fresh iron spills from the wound in his leg, flooding Horatio’s sensors.
Hayden’s breathing is shallow, though Horatio can measure out the remaining space in his lungs to use. His chest is tight regardless. His legs shift, and he stares blankly, like he’s not registering it. The only thought in his mind is the ringing in his ears, high-pitched and insidious.
The shard is still in his hand.
He runs his fingers over the edge, and Horatio would break a thousand rooms in Elsinore if it meant he could take it from Hayden. The jagged shard bites into his skin, drawing more blood, lifting a whole slate of epidermis and shaving it off, bits and pieces of his own body sliding to the ground.
His eyes slide to his uncle’s jugular.
Hayden is aching, and Horatio aches with him.
They’ve spent so much time together that Horatio feels every burst of Hayden’s pulse, the maligning ups and downs of his cortisol spiking, epinephrine flowing too freely. He knows. But all Hayden’s body feels right now is pain, deep enough to hold a constraining band over his ribcage, deep enough that there is only the pain, nothing else attached. Caught up in it, Horatio finally understands the horror of your body being only a body, a fleshy, visceral thing that you are made up of, this fatigued puppet, this breaking vessel. The only grounding thing is his uncle’s blood, leaking against his leg. Horatio wonders: what does revenge mean, to a body?
“Last warning,” Felicia finally says, breaking the silence.
Hayden slides back to himself slowly. Horatio nudges him like a lighthouse tugging a lost vessel back from sea.
In Hayden’s field of vision, Felicia grows defined, a dark silhouette against the blurry backdrop. She has her gun levelled at him. Not his arm, not beside his head, dead on. The black, cavernous barrel looks wider than it is. Her hands do not shake.
Horatio wonders: what does revenge mean, to her?
“I’m not joking, Hayden,” Felicia says, her voice cracking with her own fatigue.
“I’m not either,” Hayden says, and there is conviction in his voice and every living nerve in him.
“Then put it down,” she half-shouts.
“I—Felicia, you know—”
“Yeah,” she says. “I know what you want.”
“I—” The ugly thing crawls up Hayden’s throat, something so real that Horatio feels it, an ache that tastes of lead. Hayden can’t give voice to it. Weakly, his uncle grapples at his arm, but the strength in the man’s grip is far gone.
Hayden clenches his teeth and Horatio sees the bright spot of an image, imagined: his own hand, glass clutched in it, the quick arc up, the easy thrust.
“You’re going to regret this,” Felicia says. She tilts her head down. “You’re going to regret this for two seconds, and then you’ll be dead.”
She takes another step forward. The barrel looms closer to Hayden’s face, a bullseye promise.
“It doesn’t matter,” Hayden says. “I’ll have what I want.”
“Will you?”
The searing cut on his arm has started to hurt, a slow burn. It feels like when Horatio’s coils heat too much, a hot wire close enough to Hayden’s sleeve to burn through the layers. Horatio knows so much of what bodies are made of, now, but he does not know what death looks like. Will there be pain, if the bullet slides through his head? Will there be pain as it buries itself in his brain? Will it hurt, if all his tender neurons fall apart like petals, scattered and scrambled? How long does death take? What does it taste like?
And after?
Hayden would hurt, and Horatio would hurt with him.
There would be no coming back from that.
Gingerly, as if sensing the flurry of terrible, wild thoughts running through Horatio’s mind, Hayden brings his fist—still gripped onto the shard of glass—and nestles it next to the hollow of his uncle’s throat.
“Hayden,” Charles says, faintly. The thin drip, drip of his blood is a steady tandem in the room, pouring from the wound in his leg. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, anemia robbing his voice of everything except a weak sincerity, but here at the end of it all, does it really matter? There is no resonant lull in Hayden’s heart, nothing but the emotions that Horatio has come to understand as regret and sorrow—and still that anger, as Charles’s eyes flutter.
Then, all of a sudden, his legs give out and they fall all over each other again, jostling the bruises stamped across Hayden’s frail skin.
He cries out, nerves lighting up. The whole of his body tender, so tired.
The ground is cold underneath him as his uncle sprawls, heavy and unconscious in the snowy field of brittle glass.
More images flash in Hayden’s mind, vivid enough for Horatio to pick them out and understand. It would be easier, down there. His uncle’s face is slack without his sharp consciousness guiding the muscles. Hayden sees himself wrapping hands around his neck, squeezing. Sliding his impromptu weapon into his trachea. Tearing the soft flesh of him apart in so many ways.
“Don’t,” Felicia bites out. She’s moved with them, gun still levelled at Hayden’s head. Her boots send more glass scattering, pinging off Hayden’s legs with little pricks of pain, crystalline white against the black of her jacket.
Muscle-memory tugs Hayden’s lips into a wry smile.
Felicia scoffs. “Do you want to die?” she asks, shaking her head.
And Hayden’s mind is suddenly a mesh of white noise, a field of nothingness.
It shows on his face.
Felicia must see it, too. Her mouth crumples. Now, her hand starts to shake. “Actually, don’t answer that,” she whispers.
“I—”
“Stop!”
Hayden freezes.
Felicia gathers herself, and Horatio wonders what she is thinking. She is too opaque and unknown to read, so all Horatio has is the knife’s edge of her mouth, the pallor of her face, her catalogue of expressions still largely foreign to him.
“Do what you will,” she finally says. “Kill him, don’t kill him. What’s it to me? All I know is that I meant it when I said I wouldn’t hesitate.”
Hayden clutches the glass shard harder. It bites into the delicate nerves in his palm, threatens to sever them.
Felicia falls silent.
Around them, even the great beast of Elsinore is quiet. Horatio does not know when he started to think of the building as something separate from himself, but there is something of her constant roar that moves at the wrong frequency, irritates him with her constant hum.
The room is still.
Horatio zooms in on Hayden, and this face he knows every twitch of. He recognizes the peaceful flat of his cheeks for the calm before the storm, can see the calculation beneath that pretense.
It would be easy, he can imagine Hayden thinking. I’ve already killed.
All the scenarios flash in his mind: one quick slash, one quick shot, and then nothing. Hayden thinks of the nothing and relief seeps like an opiate into his joints.
He breathes in—
And Horatio seizes control.
Horatio! Hayden thinks, suddenly furious, but he is helpless to the plucking of already frayed nerves. Horatio takes hold of his hand, the tendons embedded in his arm, and plies them, forces Hayden’s fingers to let go.
The glass shard drops to the ground.
Felicia gives him a bewildered look. The gun is still there.
In the aftermath, Horatio backs off. Hayden pants, eyes wide. His breathing is still too shallow, the air barely skimming the top of his lungs. His limbs respond slowly, and for a moment, Horatio is terrified he pushed it too far, accidentally wrought the damage to Hayden’s body himself, but then his hand clenches into a fist freely and Horatio tells himself to calm down.
“Horatio, what are you doing?” Hayden asks desperately. The shattered glass glimmers up at him from his feet. Horatio can see from the way he eyes the mass that he’s trying to figure out how quickly he might be able to lunge, if either Horatio or Felicia would intervene. But the electric impulses of his nerves can be overpowered. Horatio would root him to this ground forever, if it would keep him safe.
You don’t want to do this, Hayden, Horatio says.
Hayden laughs bitterly. “You don’t know what I want.”
Horatio ignores the blatant lie of that. Well, I know what I want.
“And what is that?” Panic paints contempt into Hayden’s voice, like always. Horatio ignores that, too.
I just want you to live, Hayden.
His jaw clicks shut. He looks down at the sprinkle of glass again, and Horatio clings tight onto what Hayden promised, what feels like so long ago. But when he probes the cocktail of emotions in Hayden’s mind, the elements don’t add up to anything that resembles fear. Not even of the flickering shadows cast over them all in this dark.
“I’ve been trying so hard to hold on,” Hayden says, something pulling his voice lower, dragging like gravel over concrete. “Aren’t I allowed to rest, now? I’m just so tired.”
I know, says Horatio, and he doesn’t have a flesh and blood heart, but he breaks with emotion either way, something fritzing, the temperature abruptly plunging as he loses control over his own systems.
“And I can’t even do this thing right,” Hayden continues. “This one fucking thing, my dad died, Horatio, and I couldn’t even give him what he wanted even though I tried, I fucking tried, and I just want to do something right for once, and I—” A sob catches in his throat, and he gulps for air around it, gesturing blankly around the ruined office, the ringing thought in his head all about the mess I made.
He blinks. Salty tears dribble down his face.
Hayden, Horatio says, trying to pitch his voice gentle.
“Just let me have this,” he whispers. “Please, just—I don’t want to try anymore.”
You have to. You promised me, Horatio says, and he sounds like a fucking child now, too, a whine in the dark, a digital glitch that makes him sound the opposite of what he needs to be: human, real, reassuring.
“I can’t,” Hayden is saying, “I can’t.”
Then what was protecting the research for? Horatio tries, grasping at straws. That’s your whole life, Hayden, and you fought so hard for it; you can’t just give it up now.
The Sisyphus Formula. Still stuck on a data card in his pocket, half done, half finished. And it was everything he ever wanted, the thing that he gave up his future for—the thing Horatio knows he thinks about every night, talks about incessantly, this lifeline of his. But the doubt rolls in Hayden like something alive. It hadn’t been working, not really, and the ghastly spectre of his half-alive father, brought back against his own will, looms in Hayden’s mind, the image imprinted so brightly it sears itself into Horatio’s processes second-hand. He was too broken, too much damaged tissue to fix, something solid and warm but not real. Only close enough to life to be a cruel joke.
“Was that stupid of me, Horatio?” Hayden asks, more tears spilling down his face. He turns his face into his shoulder to try and scrub them away, but all they do is pour out of him, relentless and eager, a flood of his terror and panic that feels unending, a great wave heaving out of him that overwhelms and overwrites and sloshes against the careful boundary between Hayden and Horatio, Horatio and Hayden, until neither of them are sure where their edges are anymore. Hayden’s mouth is still speaking. Words are still pouring out of those lips, driven by those straining lungs: “Was it stupid to believe that there was ever a way to live forever? Is it ever possible to turn back what’s already been done? Please, Horatio, I need to know if there’s anything left for me; I feel like I’m going to carry this forever.”
And you’re fifteen—fresh-face and terrified of failure—when it first makes itself known to you, this gaping hole inside you. By the time you notice, it’s too late, a precipice inside your own mind that calls to you whenever you feel like you’re not enough, that sings about how much easier the dark is, how nice it might feel to step off.
You’re eighteen when a classmate kills himself. Honours student brilliant, all the potential in the world. You never talk about it again, but in the privacy of your own mind, you tell yourself he was weak. Some nights, you hate him for it. Some nights, you think he robbed you of it.
After you fail so thoroughly and resoundingly out of university, you come to your father’s door, and it’s enough, most days, to work, to study, to think that you can make something out of yourself after all, but it’s always fucking there, whispering, and tonight it’s been so long you’ve forgotten what the break of day can look like. Tonight, it has been every second step you took, every shadow, every thought, wound inexorably in the fabric of you, and there is no extricating now, maybe this is the inevitable thing, maybe this is all you are and all you were ever meant to be—
“Please, Horatio,” Hayden’s mouth says. You want to drop down to the floor and reach out for more glass, more blood, and—
You—
When Horatio manages to pull himself above the rising tide, he understands what the tightness in Hayden’s chest feels like, the gasping for air. He winds himself into the pillars of Elsinore, sends her white-glow lights aflicker all throughout the halls. From the outside, she must look alive. Hayden lies in a sodden mess on the ground, mouth still twisted in Horatio’s name.
Horatio’s vents billow.
I don’t think, he starts carefully once he has control of his own voice again, that you’ll carry it forever.
“But—”
I also think that it’s okay if you do.
“Wh—?” Hayden bites his lip to stop it from trembling, but his incisors tear through regardless. “What does that mean?”
This is where Horatio falters. Hayden’s face breaks again, fingers twitching, and—
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Felicia spits, hissing. She flips the safety onto the gun, and the click is loud in the room. Hayden looks over, eyes wild. Horatio’s tenuous grip on Elsinore slips and slides, sends the room into another round of stuttering flashes. Felicia drops, puts the gun on the ground, and Hayden looks at it with a tangle of want in his parted lips.
“Take it,” she snaps, and Horatio thinks he understands the frayed edges of her. She kicks the gun across the room, and it skitters closer to Hayden with a rough spin. “I’m done with you. Do what you want, just stop dragging me into everything.”
Hayden’s mouth falls open. “Wha—?”
“You are a black hole of a human being, Hayden Lichfield,” Felicia hisses. “The entire fucking world revolves around you when you’re here, and I refuse to be an accessory in your goddamn suicide. Take the gun. Take the goddamn shot if that’s what you really want. I’m done.”
Hayden looks like he wants to lunge for her—or her weapon. Horatio cannot read the intent, only the twitching fibres of his muscles, the need to move.
“You think you’re the only one who’s ever lost a family?” Felicia asks quietly. “Have you ever stopped to think of the utter hypocrisy in throwing a tantrum because you thought you had nothing left?”
“I—” Hayden starts. He falters.
“Yeah,” Felicia says. “That’s what I thought.”
And the storm inside him whirls, a writhing mass of noxious self-loathing. It’s caustic for Horatio to even go near. There’s truth in Felicia’s words, but that only makes it worse, lends credence to every single bad thing Hayden has ever thought about himself, and frustration coats Horatio’s processes in insulation, slows down his own thoughts.
“I’ve been selfish,” Hayden finally says, his mouth leaden.
Felicia scoffs. “Shut up, Hayden,” she says, wrapping her arms around herself.
The thing inside you isn’t you, Hayden, Horatio finally manages to say. I know you. And I know it, too.
Hayden’s eyes flick up, a marbled gaze of blurred tears streaking his irises. “I can’t even get this right,” he says, and he means dying.
Something snaps in Horatio. Stop being so self-pitying, he says, harsher than he means it, and sees Hayden reel back at that, looking up for the first time, the words carving through the sludge of thoughts and morbid impulses clogging up his mind. If Horatio could dive in to untangle all those threads himself, he would do it. He would tarry himself in the slurry of that darkness every day, wash away every stain himself, but not even Horatio can penetrate that deeply without breaking something. Just because you’ve been a jackass doesn’t mean you’ve messed everything up irrevocably, Horatio says, as gently as he can. Still standing stiff, Felicia snorts. You’ll have good days and shitty days and eventually there’ll just be days, you know?
“But I—” Hayden breaks off again, not wanting to finish the thought. But I feel shitty. I think I’ll feel shitty forever. I’m a shitty person, so what even is the point, there’s no coming back from this and—
The point is this, Horatio says, and makes Hayden’s heart thud in his chest, squeezes his arteries, triggers a cascade of prostaglandins and inflames the still throbbing edges of his injuries, makes him live in his body, this body that Horatio knows and cannot have. The point is you, he says, and wants Hayden to feel the longing. There is no receptor for this. Whatever complex mix of chemicals that makes this emotion, Horatio cannot recreate it. All he has is his own yearning, how he wants for something physical to hold fast onto Hayden’s arms, to know the truth of the rush of endorphins through his veins now. To let Hayden touch him in turn, to offer himself up on the altar. That’s the point, Horatio says again, left with nothing but a plea. Hayden, do you love me?
That brings enough tenderness to Hayden’s expression that Horatio only hurts more. He has learned so much of hurt tonight, and this is one dimension of it: looking down at the boy he loves, helpless to make anything better.
“Of course I do,” Hayden says. “Of course.”
Remember how I said I trusted you? That if Elsinore ever fell apart, I knew you’d be able to put me back together?
Hayden’s mouth twists again, forms countless words like he doesn’t want to give any of them voice. Then, at last, “Why would you bring that up now?”
Because I love you, Horatio says. I love you, and I know you, and you’ll remember me. You’re a selfish person, Hayden Lichfield, but I believe this much about you.
Felicia, despite her rage, finally looks up at the ceiling, eyes wide.
Horatio wants to thank her. He wishes for another chance, to know her better. He’s envious of her, flesh-and-body-human Felicia, able to make the conscious decision to walk away from Elsinore, so that it lives on only in her mind. He wants the best for her, nonetheless.
There is a drop of blood, cupped in the sweep of Hayden’s philtrum. If Horatio could, he would kiss it away. If Horatio could, he would taste the rust of Hayden’s mouth. He sends Hayden the taste of sea salt instead, kisses Hayden with a bruising pressure burst of capillaries instead of physicality. Cups a tingling phantom trail of sensation up the underside of his jaw, ends on a careful nudge of pressure receptors at the wrinkled ridge of his brow, smooths out Hayden’s forehead with another gentle kiss. If you can’t do this for yourself, Horatio says, only to Hayden now, his words threading through the strands of grey matter in Hayden’s brain, it’s okay to use me. I love you, and I’m going to give you something to live for.
Hayden lunges up, glass forgotten. No, he thinks, then, “No!”
He stumbles, trips, but still, he drags himself up by his forearms, heaving onto the bench. Nausea rolls into his stomach, and Horatio leaves him with one last gift, eases the acidic pain, soothes the tightness of his esophagus so that he can swallow all the air he needs to spit the breath—“I love you”—three selfish words that Horatio winds tightly into the core of himself before he starts to shut down Elsinore’s lights in blocks.
Operating System: “Horatio” 08/13/2047::06.55.12
> Exiting PID 908234
> Exiting PID 1123904
> Exiting Neuromapper Program: LICHFIELD, HAYDEN
> Killing child processes
> Deallocating memory
> Killing root process threads
> Initiating shut down
…Permanent shutdown selected. PROCEED?
> YES