Vintage SN fic rec: Love's Fool by Kristophine; Casey/Dan, Casey/OMC, A/U; Rating: 15

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Title: Love's Fool
Author: Kristophine
Author's website: No current information
Pairing: Casey/Dan, Casey/OMC
Rating: 15
Category: Slash, A/U

Note: Sequel to Love's Bitch



Love’s Fool
By Kristophine

"Casey, there’s someone here to see you." Kim’s face was alive with curiosity as she thrust her head into our office. "She’s waiting in the hall."

I glanced up from the files I was going over, raising my eyebrows. Women don’t often visit me, especially here at the offices of Sports Night; I’ve tried to make work a place separate from my personal life. Which worked well enough until Dan. I basked a little in the stray thought, letting the echo of his personality warm me. (It wasn’t only his personality I thought of, but I would never admit to that in polite company.) As Kim failed to understand the question implied by the eyebrows and kept staring at me with the predatory look of a person who smells gossip, I asked her, "Did she give a name?"

"She said to tell you that it was Speed, and you’d know who that was."

Of course. I grinned in recognition, as well as some satisfaction at Kim’s obvious attempt to bite down on her annoyance when it became clear that I had no intention of sharing. After all, this was Kim, not Natalie. I had no compunction about not sharing with the former. The latter had a weird kind of strong-arm charm that kept me in line for the most part.

Speed. We hadn’t used the nicknames in years, but it was always good to see her, this remnant of a past we’d shared and overcome in our separate ways.

She was standing as promised in the hall, chatting amiably with Danny. Flirting? We haven’t told anyone about us yet, that there is an "us", because it seems easier this way. Easier if Dana doesn’t know and start crying in the breakroom, if Jeremy doesn’t look up the statistics for homosexual relationships in sports, if Natalie doesn’t start cooing over us as her protective instincts kick up to full gear. So Dan cracks about cheerleaders and figure skaters, while I remain quietly beyond suspicion. Having an ex-wife can be a handy thing.

The years hadn’t dulled her speed; she flew towards me, and the hug took me by surprise. "Hey, Stevie Galaxy," I said, and was startled by the sudden overflow of tears that poured onto my jumpsuit. Her arms were a vise around me, and the sobs that racked her chest left a feeling of disquiet deep in my own. Stevie had killed men. I’d watched her when she’d slain the first. She hadn’t cried when his blood spurted from the jugular to cover her in a thick, sweet, smothering syrup. She had not cried when her husband left her, or when her two-month-old baby died in her arms. We’d grown up with pain, she and I.

Which was why fear was blooming in my belly and spreading to every limb.

"Casey — " It was half a sob.

Stroking her hair, gently, I murmured, "Come on, babe, I thought men were supposed to be the weaker sex."

That elicited a little laugh from Stevie, still sniffing, but beginning to regain control of herself. Her head burrowed into my shoulder. "Damn it, Casey, he’s back."

If she was trying to scare me — "Stevie, if you’re trying to scare me - "

"Abel."

"Okay." There was nothing else to say to that. Over her head, I met Dan’s eyes. I wondered briefly how mine must look if his could seem that hollow and filled with fear. He didn’t know Abel. He didn’t know, he couldn’t understand. Gamma-5.

When people talk about the shit-hole of the universe, when they talk about living hell, they’re talking about Gamma-5. My home planet. My beautiful, hideous, twisted urban sprawl of a world. I was born there. Joined a street gang at age twelve after living in a series of filthy government-issue apartments for the length of my young life. Moved into the gang headquarters—a mansion left over from the early days, when any planet other than Earth was more like a resort than a colony.

"Abel," I said again, dully. Stevie made a little choked noise into the collar of my jumpsuit. Pulled back, she straightened up, scrubbing at her streaming mascara with the back of one hand. The rhinestones lined along the seams her ‘suit suddenly seemed garishly incongruous. In the light she was a sparkling thing of fire, a flame soaring with her bronze-tinted hair and tawny skin.

Dan stood a few steps back, face turned away from us. I said his name, very softly, and his head snapped around as though he’d been slapped. His eyes met mine. "Can you tell Dana that we’re going to be gone for the day? Both of us. There are some things I should probably tell you about." He nodded, and I felt a new spark of dismay. I’d been dreading this day. He knew I came from G-5, but he didn’t know how I’d gotten off it or what I’d done and been while I was still there.

Most of all, he didn’t know about Abel.

I took Stevie’s arm. "It’s going to be all right," I said, though whether to reassure her or myself wasn’t entirely clear.

"He’s going to have you killed."

No, nothing was all right at all.

We took a taxi to a seedy cafe I’d seen once or twice, riding in a thick silence punctuated by an occasional sniff from Stevie. Once we’d stepped through the door, she seemed to find a little courage. She ordered a doughnut, which she devoured in a few starving bites as we sat down. Dan slid into the booth next to me and watched her with some concern (which would, of course, be mistaken by bystanders for thorough detachment) as she pulled herself together across from us. His right hand found my left under the table, wrapping tightly around it. I reached out and took Stevie’s hand with my free one. "Why don’t you start at the beginning?"

Through the smudges from her makeup and the lips that still trembled a little, she smiled. "You know the beginning, darling. Gamma five. Welcome to hell and all that. Short story, Abel’s back and he is very, very pissed off."

"Why?"

"You know that, too. Want me to spell it out for you?" Her eyes had gone dark and were glittering with irony. Maybe she saw what I was trying to do, what I wanted to get out of doing. She’s always been exceptionally perceptive that way.

I shrugged, leaning back a little. "Might as well." Undoubtedly it would be better for Danny to hear it from me, but I’m a coward. Always have been.

She disentangled her hand from mine and ticked off each item on her fingers. "First: you leave him. Second: you try to kill him. Third: you put him in jail. Fourth: you marry his sister after convincing her to jump planet with you. Fifth: you leave his sister. Any questions?"

I risked a glance at Danny and saw him staring at her, face and eyes so blank I would have thought he hadn’t heard if I didn’t know him better. That’s a look for hiding things. His grip on my hand had gone loose, fingers barely twined with mine. "Yeah. What’s his plan?"

A twisted grin—she looked like a maniac. "You think he has a plan?"

She crumpled again, sobbing. "Oh, shit. Come on, Stevie, is it that bad?" Understanding came in a painful flash. "Oh, shit. Tell me he didn’t get to you?" Silence, an answer. "What did he do? What did that piece of trash do to you?"

Shakily, she raised her head. "Look, there’s nothing you can do about it now, okay? I just had to warn you. Aren’t you even listening to me? He wants you dead." Her voice made a sudden, shaking jump, lifting a full octave. Dan’s hand tightened around mine. "I figured I should probably tell you that. He knows where you are, he knows where you live, and he’s got your apartment building’s security staff so bought you can’t ever go back there again."

"Bought?" I asked, feeling a chill climb up my spine. "How did he get the money for that?"

"Do you really have to ask?" Another thing I already knew, but wanted confirmed from her lips. "Same way you used to operate. Fucked a couple of good marks and then ripped them off."

There, Dan’s hold had loosened again. "Shit." I slumped back and sighed. "Thanks, Stevie."

"Yeah, don’t mention it. I gotta get out of here, Cain. See you in Hell." And then she was gone. I made the mistake of glancing at Danny then.

Damn. He was looking at me again, in that way that wasn’t pleading. Jesus, I was going to tell him whatever he asked. "Would you mind explaining precisely why this Abel character is out for your blood?"

"I thought Stevie did an admirable job."

"That couldn’t have been the whole story."

"It wasn’t," I agreed, "but that doesn’t matter at this point."

"Then what matters?"

"The fact that Abel is out of prison. Presumably the authorities know he’s come here, but they’re — " I shrugged. "Not really reliable."

"And what about me?" He was upset. The thing his mouth does whenever he gets upset, and it’s so damned sexy, but I couldn’t let him get involved in this. This was between me and Abel. I might have allies, if I could only find them, but I never count my backup before it’s arrived and started shooting at the other guy.

"What about you?"

"You’re being chased by some psycho who’s out to kill you. I assume it’s Lisa’s brother, unless there’s some other wife you’ve never told me about."

"I never make the same mistake twice."

"You — " and his voice slowed, faltered. "Left him?"

Hating myself, I nodded.

"Then you were with him."

Nod.

"How long?"

I looked away. "Four years."

"Four — " He sounded strangled. "Four years?"

I was starting to get a headache. Probably from all this nodding, slamming my brain around. "Yes, four years. I was fourteen and for Christ’s sake can we not talk about this?"

"Fourteen?"

Fourteen.

Two years after I joined the gang, we’d gone through three or four leaders and it was looking likely for Abel to take over. My nickname was something along the lines of "Shorty" or "Squirt", but when he became the head honcho, he took a shine to me. Really took a shine to me. My name became "Cain" and I moved up through the years to the position of second-in-command by the time I was sixteen. Abel was good, there’s no mistaking that. Only the very good stay in charge for four years. Only the very good stay alive for four years.

The inevitable victory of atrophy: on the day I turned eighteen, he was challenged. If the challenger had been a little less merciful, he would have died; as it was, we were ordered to drag him to the hospital downtown. I argued for killing him, and almost had the new guy convinced, but he backed off at the last minute. I knew my— services—would no longer be in demand, and that I would find scant welcome once word got out that I’d tried to have my master killed, so I fucked a spacer and got myself and his sister Lisa off that planet before Abel woke up.

When the cops came to me about him two years later, I gave them his last known address and a reasonable hypothesis as to where he was. My hypothesis led to his arrest for enough murders to give him an automatic life sentence. They offered me a reward. I took it. Abel went to prison, and I went to college, moving on to a better and brighter life with Lisa and our son Charlie.

Jailbreak, he’s out, and this whole house of cards comes crashing down.

"Fourteen through eighteen. A gang leader needs a bitch, you know." I hadn’t realized how bitter my voice would sound when I finally spoke of it.

His eyes went a little wider, and he blinked, this one slow blink. Then his fingers were practically breaking mine. Grip crushingly tight, unshakably strong. He opened his mouth to say something.

I turned away before he could speak, staring out the window, and was about to make some off-hand comment to lighten the tension when my lips froze in mid-word. "Oh, shit," I whispered. As the adrenaline rush hit, I turned to Danny. He was frowning with apprehension. "He’s out there," I said, voice low.

"Now?"

"Yes. Standing just across the street from us. He knows I know he’s there."

"How can you be sure about that?"

The idea had already begun to form like a crystallizing haze, delicate and cautious, diaphanous yet wickedly sharp in my mind. I felt a dull weight in my heart and thought about the police, and getting in their way, and dying young with a bullet in my chest or my head. I thought about Danny. I thought about death, mine and Abel’s, and answered Dan’s question with a painful awareness of his mingled fear and fury.

"This is Abel. He knows."

"What are you going to do?"

I shook my head. "There’s no time. Come on." I nudged him, and he got to his feet, waiting as I moved to stand beside him. "Stay here."

"What — "

"I’ll be back," I said, cutting him off with a brutal lie. It left an ugly taste in the back of my mouth. "As soon as I’m out that door, get out of here. Take the back way. Wait for me at your place. When it’s safe, I’ll be there." As he opened his mouth, I added, "Trust me."

He closed his mouth and nodded. I tried to hold this image in my mind, of Danny standing beside that booth, the impersonal light spilling over him. "Got it."

Then I was gone.

I stepped out the front door and, very deliberately, met Abel’s eyes. He was still handsome; these years of prison hadn’t blunted the sharp lines of his face, outlined in harsh shadows over the collar of his black raincoat. Still fond of image, I see. I raised my eyebrows before turning.

I made it halfway down the block.

The hand on my shoulder was swift. Although I had been expecting it, it still caught me off-guard.

"It’s been a long time, Cain," said Abel. Gently. In the steam rising from the pavement around us, he looked almost benevolent, face shadowed by the brim of his hat. A fedora? His taste for the dramatic hadn’t faded, at any rate.

I answered his question with a little smile I meant to be mocking, and I think I succeeded. Until his hand slipped down my arm to catch at my wrist, the fingers preternaturally thin and strong.

He caught my slight twitch and smiled. "Reconstructive surgery. I lost that hand in a brawl, and had a prosthetic grafted on, instead of getting it cloned. Mostly metal. It can support three times my body weight."

"They gave you that? The system is even less intelligent than I gave it credit for."

Dismissing that with a wave of his hand, he kept his grip firm. "You can get anything in prison if you know the right people."

"Including out?"

His smile, thin-lipped, a beast in a man’s clothing. "Yeah, including out. How’s life treating you, Cain?"

I shrugged. "Life’s going fairly well, aside from Lisa."

"Yeah, Lisa. What happened there?"

"What do you mean?"

Abel sighed in exaggerated patience. "Why did you two split? I mean, you and I got along fine. You and Lisa should have done great."

"We just didn’t work out."

He nodded, thoughtfully. "Well, of course, she’s safe, and so’s the kid. Even I wouldn’t be that low." Turning to me, giving me that smile like molten lightning that I had seen so many times in the years I’d known him, he added, "I’m afraid that bitch of yours isn’t going to be quite that lucky, though."

"What do you mean?" I asked, feeling the hair on the nape of my neck rise, wondering for one panicking moment if he’d found out about Danny and was—damn it.

"Stevie Galaxy," he said, and for a moment I could almost see a snake’s tongue flickering between those lips, "as she’s calling herself these days. I spent some time with her."

"So I gathered." I managed a level voice, though I was aching to beat the crap out of him. I knew, intellectually, that this was better than hearing that Danny was being killed. Still, Stevie —

Fuck.

"She’s a talker, did you know that?" He leaned over to him, whispering in my ear, his voice smelling of meat and blood, a carrion stink. "I figured her for a screamer, but it turns out she’s a talker. Kept jabbering the whole time I was fucking her. She tell you how many times she said ‘please’?"

I wanted to hit him, punch that leer right off his face, ram his teeth back down his throat. I wanted it so badly.

Buy time, Casey. Time is the important thing here. Time to think. Time to plan. Time to figure out how you destroy the one man who saved you from death and hell on Gamma-5, who lifted you out of the dirt and the mud to become someone temporarily glorified.

Who raped, murdered, tortured. Whose actions you never thought much of because they involved strangers or enemies. Who has raped your oldest friend. Who hates you, who loves you, who needs you to see and to know your failure before you die.

Yeah, fuck summed up the situation pretty aptly.

"Really."

"Mm-hmm." Grinning. Waiting for me to crack.

"See, that’s funny," I said, slipping back into the way I’d talked when I was one of them. Part of the gang. "’Cause your sister? She’s a talker, too."

That did it. His fingers clamped down into my wrist like a set of knives. I kept my mouth shut, though, didn’t whimper once. He liked it when I whimpered. Abel was a low-class grade of sadist.

Buy time for Dan to get the fuck away. If Abel didn’t realize who he is, hasn’t got backup.

Abel never did anything without backup.

"So," I said, conversationally. For all the pressure that felt like it was going to rip my hand off my arm. "Where are your friends?"

"Friends?" He seemed momentarily puzzled. *Please, tell me you made a mistake this once, Abel.*

"You know. Your posse. Somebody to clean up your mistakes. I assume one of them is going to jump out and hit me over the head in a minute?"

That was his cue to tell me that no, his minions were finishing Danny off in a secluded alleyway. Yet all he said was, "It’s a lot harder to spring two guys than one."

Thank you, God. My faith may yet be restored.

"Hmm. And your plans for me?"

"Didn’t Stevie tell ya?" His grin would have told me, if nothing else.

Glancing down the street, judging how much space I had before we came to the first convenient alley, I replied, "She said you were going to kill me. Left out the details, though."

"Details?"

"Details."

"You know," and now he was speaking slowly again, thoughtfully, deliberately. I hated it when he was like this. It meant he felt more himself than ever. And Abel feeling like himself was a bad thing. "You’re talking big now. You’re all big-city sophistication. You think I didn’t change? Think I didn’t grow? Think I made it through prison without learning anything?"

With anyone else, it would have been a rhetorical question. Abe, though—he had a way of making questions that you had to answer, whether it was a good idea to or not. The words were pulled out of me like taffy. Agonizingly slow, stringing the fragile space between us. "To be honest, yes, I think you didn’t learn a damn thing, or else you wouldn’t have come after me like this. Revenge is a bad idea. You told me that."

He had told me that. I had a blinding flash of memory; of being seventeen, lying next to him after he’d fucked me one night. Our mattress, bare in the squalor of the apartment we were crashing in at the time, and the rest of the gang murmuring or snoring in the next room. Abel had been so much younger, handsome and deadly. Hands folded behind his head, he had said to me, "You stop to go back for revenge, you get whacked, Cain. That’s the way it is. Never look back."

I hadn’t looked back. I’d taken every piece of advice he’d ever given me, and I’d made it. Off Gamma-5. Into a real life.

Beside me, I felt him shiver a little. Bad sign. So many things about Abel were bad signs. "Cain." He paused, then spoke again. "Casey, isn’t it? That’s your real name."

I waited, but he seemed to be waiting for me to speak. "Yeah." Keep it short, Cain, he always told me. Keep it sweet. Then blow the motherfucker to Kingdom Come. "Casey McCall."

Still he was just waiting, staring ahead in a listless way that made me feel less comfortable than any amount of blustering he could have done. His lips began to move, but it was a moment before any sound came out. "Casey McCall, anchor for one of the most successful sports shows in existence. Casey McCall—formerly known as Cain, the one man I trusted for four years of my life, until I was scrapped and he tried to get me killed. Until he put me in jail. Until he married my sister, for fuck’s sake, my sister! Why? Why?"

He was nearly shouting. Please, let me out of here.

Alive.

It’s funny, you know. Back when it was just me and Abel and the rest of the gang, I didn’t really give a fuck about staying alive. It was a hobby. As long as I didn’t care about it, I survived just fine. But now that I have something to live for, a son, a job, Danny, I know I’ll be dead within the hour.

I can’t die. Not here, not now, not with Abel. Not before I’ve had time to tell Danny that I don’t care if the whole fucking system knows about us. I love him.

"Abel," I say, and it’s suddenly clear to me what I have to do. Laid out in front of me like a road-map. This is my game now, only he doesn’t know it, and he won’t know it for a while longer if I’m lucky. Everything moves into this moment. Life is abruptly right-here-right-now and I can’t think of the future or the past.

"Hm?"

He’s not really looking at me, but he will in a minute. "How about one more fuck? For old time’s sake."

That gets his attention. Good. I thought it would. Take this, you fucking bastard. And then I’ve got my lips against his, and he’s resisting a little at first, but his mouth is open in no time and I’m kissing him.

"For old time’s sake," he says when he draws back for breath, shaky, all thoughts gone from his head except getting my ass as soon as possible.

I nod and smile and I think my game, Abel, my game now.

***

The hotel was seedy. Disgusting.

I’d stopped living in the right-here-right-now several minutes ago, and the whole idea of going through with this made me feel like a whore. I hadn’t felt that way in years. It was familiar, in a way that made my skin crawl. Abel—yeah, sure, there’d been something between us when he held my life in his hands every morning. Power is an aphrodisiac, isn’t that what they say? It had been arousing to know that he could kill me and chose not to because of some attraction I held for him.

Something of that had come rushing back to me, the eddies of it not unwelcome. If it made this easier, why not? Sexual attraction, I had said often enough, was natural and healthy. Particularly when it’s to someone who has in the past been able to make you go through the roof by touching your hand.

That, there, was an aspect of all this that I really preferred to remember as little as possible. It is one thing to live by the laws of a planet ruled by fear, hate, and sex when you are there. It is quite another to admit to people on the outside (and I had made the leap from inside to outside, knowing full well at the time that as time passed I would begin to forget who and what I had been) that there is a kind of destructive beauty to it. The lure of Gamma-5 is the hypnotic spell of addiction, the sharp glory of needles in veins or fists meeting bone. Lasers carving bright paths through the air. Danger has always been a turn-on for humans.

I’d forgotten, really, how human I was.

Especially where Abel was concerned.

In a way, twisted and vicious and mingled with fury, I had loved him. Part of me loved him still. The truth of which seeped into me as he leaned against the counter, smiling at the clerk, his eyelashes managing to give the impression of fluttering while maintaining a perfectly masculine image. She blushed, stammered something, and his voice glossed over the pointed edges of her words with a smooth flow that I remember all too clearly. It was seductive. Seductive like cigarettes, still not extinct despite the fact that they’re banned from here to Delta, pointless cancer, or the suprastrips of heroin which had become so popular in the last few decades, so potent that they slipped into the bloodstream even through skin.

Abel’s hat was slipping over his eyes and he winked at her, one smoldering wink. She gave us the room. "Only for three hours," she warned him, and he gave her the kind of smile he had used to keep all of us in line.

"I know the limits, babe," he purred.

I felt an irrational urge to slap her and kiss him.

Right here. Right now. I am in the right here, living the right now, and I don’t know if I will ever feel this way again, because this is the way it feels to edge into an abandoned warehouse wondering if there is someone waiting with a gun. This is the way it feels to have a gun pressed to my forehead, and to have Abel shoot its wielder out from under it, kicking their body with a viperine fury and kissing me, hard and hot.

Damn. Damn, damn, damn. My profanity may occasionally get repetitive, but this has more to do with the rest of my mind being occupied than with any verbal lack on my part. If I’m concentrating on something else—say, Abel’s hand on my ass and a rush of blood to my cock—I’m certainly not going to be thinking of how to best express this in words. I will, instead, be considering the fact that Abel still knows how to kiss, particularly when he has me up against the wall of the elevator and his fingers are digging into my sides, one set of real, fleshy fingers, the other hard and cold and oh God that feels good. I always was kind of kinky. Abel really liked that.

There were a lot of things Abel really liked about me. This is probably one of them, the way I’m tilting my pelvis up into his, feeling his cock through his pants, his trenchcoat open at the front so that I can feel how tight and strong the muscles under his shirt still are. I always was a sucker for a pretty chest. His nipples are standing out through the thin black fabric of his shirt, they’re so hard it has to be painful, and when I slide two fingers to catch one he’s jerking me away suddenly, so fast that I almost lose my balance and I tumble through the opening elevator door.

I don’t ask questions. Not then, not when he half-drags me down the hall, an unearthly beauty in his face and body. Abel, Abel, what would you have been if only you’d been born somewhere else? Luck of the draw, I guess. We had to lose a few artists to G-5 as well as the trash and the scum.

He practically kicked the door in, then hauled me in after himself. The bed was too far away for his taste, so he fucked me right there, against the wall. A lubed rubber was enough for both of us. I’m an old pro at this, and he—god, he was always amazing. For a gangster from Gamma-5, he had a talent for fucking like nobody else I’d ever encountered. It was good with Danny, it was a lot more than just sex, and it became meteoric at times, but this was like the first time I’d gotten high. Fast and hard and just sort of catching me and lifting me up, like I was riding a goddamned jetstream.

I came, and then he came, and for that fraction of a second when he’d pulled out of me and was slumping a little and sighing as he caught his breath, his guard went down.

Which was when I pulled the knife he hadn’t thought to search me for and put it through him.


There are muscles connecting ribs, you know, a couple different kinds. There’s this network, a mesh of blood-rich fibers lacing together to form the extraordinarily light and supple supporting framework of the ribcage. At the front of this, joining the ribs together where they end, is the sternum. It doesn’t harden until age twenty-five or so.

"Knife" is, perhaps, a misleading word. The switchblades that I’d grown up with had been replaced by things with metal so hard and sharp that they could go through cartilage and bone as though they were warm butter.

When I put one through the other, Abel lifted his head and stared at me for a moment, shock and pain making him blink once, confused. I’d been certain of my aim. They didn’t keep me in the gang for my pretty face alone—I earned that place. I killed as many men as Stevie did, maybe more. It slid in through the sternum and into his heart, the left ventricle, which was why I found myself almost immediately doused in waves of hot, stinking blood as I drew the blade out. That sickeningly familiar stench, cloyingly sweet, bathing my clothes and my skin.

Wash away the sin, I thought as an eerie calm came over me. Cleanse me. At last, release me.

If this is freedom —

I yanked his trenchcoat free of his body as he fell, knowing that I had a very limited amount of time to get out of there. Fucked a mark, Stevie had said, and ripped them off. That was what the clerk would think I had done, if she thought at all. I stripped off my bloodied shirt and threw it out the window, straight into the dumpster below. I hung out that window for a moment, inhaling the tainted air, letting the chemicals seep into me. The sky above was a straightforward gray. Strong as iron, cold as ice.

Abel.

I drew back in, pulling the curtains shut again, and swore as I saw how much blood had ended up on my pants. No help for it. The trench would cover it, chances were most people wouldn’t smell it. Especially not once I got onto the street.

That walk through the lobby was curiously easy. As though, having done what I had needed to do, I was free in some way. Either they catch me or they don’t, I thought, and chances were that the police wouldn’t try too hard to find Abel’s killer. Chances were fucking excellent, to be truthful. They like it when people take care of their business for them. Especially when it involves people like us. G-5ers, the real hardcores, the ones who no longer think or feel horror or grief at the taking of a human life.

The elevator pinged, and I stepped into the lobby. Crossed it. Smiled at the clerk, a nod, a wink. She blinked lazily at me and went back to her book. Plush carpet springing under my feet, giving a bounce to my steps.

I didn’t look like a murderer. Really, I shouldn’t have felt that what I had done made me any more of a monster than the crimes I had committed while on Gamma-5. It was just that this was Abel, Abel who had owned me, Abel who had—after a fashion, his own twisted way— loved me. Abel who I had (after my own twisted fashion) also loved. There’s a deeper bond for those who’ve killed together and killed for each other. Cemented in blood.

We were a matched pair. Dark and light, pale ivory and burnished gold, perfect and perfectly beautiful. The killing machine.

What have I done?

I got to Dan’s apartment in record time. As I stepped in, he crushed me in his arms, pulling me to him.

When I didn’t put my arms around him in turn, he drew back a little, searching my face with worried eyes that strove to be blank. I let the trench fall open.

Blood stains look like nothing else in nature. They are unmistakable, as are the scents of latex and sex, clinging to me in a lingering miasma. I waited for him to be angry. I waited for him to start screaming, maybe hit me, but certainly freak out.

"You killed him," he said, and it wasn’t a question, not with those flat eyes like mirrors and tight lips.

I let out an explosive breath. "Yeah," I said, answering the words despite the tone.

"How?"

Darting a sharp glance at him, I shrugged. "Knifed him."

He nodded once, slowly. "After you fucked him."

"He fucked me, actually." Damn, my voice had cracked. I had known from the moment I’d decided to kill Abel that I was probably going to lose Danny, but I’d hoped to at least appear to maintain my cool for it. I’d hoped—but not with the way he was looking at me. Like some sort of vile species of dead fish. He reserved that expression for special occasions. Hot curry, or sky-diving. "For old times’ sake."

"Fuck you, Case."

I flinched. Couldn’t help it. I could still kill a man, but I’d gone soft in my years away.

"*Fuck* you." His voice broke, and then he was yelling. "What the hell were you thinking? You could have died. You could have fucking died! Why didn’t you call the police, or — something?"

"That wasn’t an option." I shook my head, quiet denial. "They don’t give a fuck about the guy who gets caught in the crossfire. I, being said guy, do."

"Fuck you," he said, and third time must be the charm, because then he reached for me and held on tight. After a few seconds, I leaned into it, held onto him like my life depended on it.

We stood like that for a long time.

I changed out of the pants, burned them, burned the trench, never went near that hotel again. Showed up for work the next day. Heard, through the newstream, that an escaped convict had been found dead in a hotel room. "It was most likely a drug deal gone wrong," said the authorities, nodding solemnly. Not that they knew, or cared; it was a catch-phrase, something to satisfy the public, wrap it up neatly. "I doubt we’ll find the perpetrator. Whoever it is, they’re long gone," added another official.

They were right, oddly enough.

Cain, the man who loved and killed a gangster, criminal, and convict, Cain of Gamma-5, is dead. He died when Abel’s brain waves flickered into nothingness. I left him behind on the floor with a cooling corpse and a bloody shirt.

The only thing left, now, is Casey McCall.

And Dan Rydell.

Casey and Dan. Dan and Casey. We’re good together. We’re a good team, a perfect match.

I’m finally myself.

Comments

[bbmgirlfan.livejournal.com]

There's no warning on this for violence (which I try to avoid).

Great writing and good story, but to tell you the truth, as sensitive as I am, I wouldn't have read it had I known.