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BLACK NO. 12 has a hole in his head where the skull is exposed. Rimbaud finds it when he washes him in the inn’s small bath.
The hole is about the size of a euro, and hides just behind No. 12’s ear. The skin around it is pink and rubbery. When Rimbaud soaps it with a towel, curious despite himself, it squeaks.
The first word No. 12 says as a free man is, “STOP.”
“I’m sorry; I had hoped not to wake you,” Rimbaud says. He stops, though Faunus’s weapon is still dirty from the explosion. Pity overwhelms him. He has no idea what will become of him; if he is to die in the morning, then the least Rimbaud can do is listen to him now. Perhaps it will be a comfort to face his execution bearing proof of having struggled.
“Let go,” No. 12 says, rousing. He pushes against the hyperspace cube ensconcing his torso, meant to keep his unconscious body from slumping into the water. Cracks spiderweb the bathroom walls as gravity warps, but there’s none in the cube to manipulate. “Let go, let go, let—”
Rimbaud dismisses the cube with a thought. No. 12’s head falls back against the rim of the tub, narrowly missing the faucet. For a minute, the only sound in the room is his labored breathing and the sloshing of the water. Then he tries to stand. He braces his forearms on the rim of the tub. His thighs shake with the effort of rising.
“Let me carry you.”
“No,” 12 barks. “It can walk.”
For a second, it seems as though he really will, with the help of his ability. Then it cuts as his eyes roll back into his skull, and he drops to the floor in a bundle of wet limbs.
Rimbaud dries him and carries him to the bed. He turns down the thick quilt, and tucks him in with a grunt of effort.
When the covers are at his chin, No. 12 stirs again.
“What’s going to happen to it,” No. 12 says.
“Shh.”
“What’s—”
Rimbaud presses the back of one hand to No. 12’s forehead. “Go to sleep.”
No. 12, who cut off with a ragged gasp when Rimbaud had touched him—gently, gently—crosses his eyes to stare at where Rimbaud’s hand rests just above his browline.
“I’ve secured the room.” I promise, something pathetic about the weapon makes him want to add. But he doesn’t know how reassuring a promise from a stranger would be, even the one who liberated him. “It’s important that you… You can rest now, if you like. We can talk in the morning.”
No. 12’s gaze follows him until he leaves the room, a bewildered and dangerous weight that triggers Rimbaud’s honed spy’s sense for killing intent. Just before he closes the door, Rimbaud spots one of No. 12’s hands struggling out from the blankets, but it’s only to touch the place where Rimbaud’s hand had been.
By the morning, No. 12 is too weak to move. A failsafe, perhaps, locking voluntary muscle in the prolonged absence of Faunus’s dust, or else a debilitating unfamiliarity with self-directed movement. Instead of taking the opportunity to discreetly transport him to a DGSS pickup location without resistance, Rimbaud sits beside him on the bed and spoon-feeds him broth, until, warm and full, he falls back asleep; unwilling to wake him, Rimbaud does the dishes and misses the rendezvous. He’ll be reprimanded for it later, but the sight of No. 12’s chest rising and falling with each unlabored breath feels more like a victory than freeing him had, or delivering him will.
Rimbaud writes, I will conquer any hell we come across. When he says my partner, then, he can’t mean it the way France does when it calls on them.
STRAWBERRY RIVULETS run down Verlaine’s fingers as he grips his cone uncomprehendingly.
“I thought this was something our covers might do,” Rimbaud says, simply, referring to the civilian couple whose identities they’d borrowed earlier that night. He says this instead of I thought this was something you should do.
“The mission is over,” Verlaine mostly says. Asks, a little. His voice is still hoarse.
“Of course,” Rimbaud reassures. He says this instead of I'm sorry. Behind them, the neon sweet storefront buzzes; their reflections hang gauzy as ghosts between vacant high-tops, stools with pink swivel seats. “But it seems wrong for the last thing we do in their names to be impersonal. Let’s stay as them a little longer.”
“They’ll die in our names,” Verlaine says, “so you want us to play house for them?… Do I have that right?”
“We should leave them something.”
“You’re not eating.”
“I’d rather not freeze.”
As far as retreats are concerned, this one’s barely tactical. Verlaine tilts the cone. It splatters against the parking lot pavement, the back tire of their gotten-away getaway car. Helplessly: “Why this?"
It’s clear he knows he’s asking about more than just this.
And Rimbaud could… try.
Could teach, could say any number of things about sentiment and insist, after, that Verlaine’s disbelief wasn’t any proof of inhumanity.
But how to be honest? How to say he’d noticed the expression Verlaine had worn when they’d succeeded in destroying the processing plant? The metal debris threw up dust so hot and acrid Rimbaud could taste it even now, hours later. Soot-stained, burning, Verlaine’s face splintered under the weight of his memories. Too late, Rimbaud pulled hyperspace around them, filtering the air.
I thought to get the taste of metal out of your mouth? I thought the cold would be enough to empty your lungs? When you shook in my arms, I thought, I want to feed him?
We don't have to be playing?
He settles on, “It’s sweet.”
“Oh.” Distress dulls to resignation. “If that’s all.”
“Sometimes it’s enough,” Rimbaud says. “To be sweet.”
The door chimes. The last employee out locks up for the night, casting them furtive glances between fumbles at her keyring.
“Is that what you want from me?” Verlaine says. It's a strange lesson.
“I want you to eat your ice cream,” Rimbaud says.
Verlaine hops up onto the hood of the car. He rights the cone—now mostly empty—and considers it for a moment, expression unreadable. Then he bites down. He eats.
Rimbaud pretends to watch moths circle the shut-off sign lights, seemingly bereft. Verlaine watches Rimbaud.
After, Rimbaud will offer to drive. Verlaine will decline, as he always does, not liking to be taken anywhere by anyone.
You weren’t a mistake. Paul, I will definitely take you back with me. Even if I have to tear you to pieces.
It’s too hard to be kind to someone wearing your name. “Try to understand,” Verlaine will say, and then, realizing this, he will not ask again.
“I did this to save you,” Verlaine will say, and he will mean I did this to save myself, to name himself, meaning to give Chuuya a name or else take one from him, make them brothers, and so Verlaine can save him but he cannot, cannot ever be kind to him.
To pieces. He will pull the stakes from Chuuya’s wracked body. Which pieces? Whose pieces? Who could say?
Would Rimbaud have put him back together again? Or someone else, given Rimbaud’s failure? In whose image would he have been made that time, had he stuck around long enough to see?
A DAY after the last birthday, Verlaine tells him, “You should have killed me.”
He doesn’t move from where he’s perched on Rimbaud’s windowsill; he isn’t wearing the hat he’d been given. Moonlight limps across his face, paints him light and dark and light again. Every time he goes slack he comes closer and closer to falling off.
“I heard you the first time,” Rimbaud says, evenly. “Stop it, Paul.”
Verlaine ignores him. His body glows as he dislocates the majority of his joints all again, all at once, in a series of disgusting pops. He goes nauseatingly limp, neck pressed flush against one jutting shoulder, hips canted at an angle that should be impossible with his back straight. Then he cracks himself back into place. He’s like a child shoving apart a doll over and over, only while he’s still inside of it. Rimbaud can’t imagine what point he thinks he’s making.
“You called the day I came into control of myself my birthday. In that case, I’d rather have been stillborn.”
“I would’ve missed you,” Rimbaud says.
“You wouldn’t have known me,” Verlaine rejoins.
“I knew you the moment I saw you.”
All of you.
The curtain whips between them.
Was that cruel? Rimbaud supposes it might be. But it was also true: there had been so little of Verlaine, then.
Dangerously, delicately: “And what did you know about me, Arthur?”
He’d fit so easily in the ridiculous grave he’d made of his birthplace. In Rimbaud’s arms, too, when he’d carried him from it. The size and shape of a defensive wound. Verlaine had been frightened even then.
“How long have you been sitting here?”
Verlaine doesn’t answer him either.
“I knew that you were human,” Rimbaud says. “That you deserved—”
“If I were human—”
“Paul—”
“If I were human it would take more than seeing me to know me,” Verlaine spits, “I would have privacy—something to cover myself—my shame would mean something.”
Verlaine pitches backwards dangerously. Rimbaud has no idea if he’s willing to save himself from the fall in this state, or if he’ll fight if Rimbaud tries.
“Innocence, that as a veil had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone. ...But look at me. Born without innocence and yet knowing nothing, I am exactly as I was made to be!”
Worry makes Rimbaud take that first step towards his partner. Something less kind makes him speak.
“Should God create another Eve,” he starts.
Verlaine jolts. “What are you—”
“Another Eve,” Rimbaud repeats, louder, pushing on, “and I another rib afford, yet loss of thee would never from my heart.”
“Don’t come any closer.”
“Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone—”
“Arthur!”
“And from thy state mine never shall be parted… Let me see.” He brushes back the hair from Verlaine’s temples, cups his cheek to check what’s red and aching there. Thumbs at the swollen line of his jaw. The mess he’s made of his shoulders. “Where does it hurt?”
“I don’t know,” Verlaine whispers.
“Oh, Paul.”
Verlaine despairs. His face crumples; he drags a hand over his lips to hide their trembling. “Don’t call me that. It’s your name.”
“And Adam’s rib.”
When Rimbaud takes Verlaine’s hands in his own, they are so cold that even Rimbaud runs hotter. With some alarm, he realizes he cannot find a pulse. He tries to massage blood and warmth back into his fingers and Verlaine tries to pull away or look like he is pulling away or look like he wants to pull away.
“I can’t escape,” he says, and whether he is talking about what he was made to be! or Rimbaud it is impossible to tell.
“No,” Rimbaud agrees, just in case.
“Was I to have never parted from your side? As good have grown there still a lifeless rib. Being as I am, why did… why… why didn’t you…”
“But I did,” Rimbaud says, when Verlaine can no longer recite this poem they are breaking between them, “I do, I do command you: do not go, you may not go,” and again, “I command you,” and again, “I command you, Paul Verlaine,” until the tears are spilling down Verlaine’s cheeks for Rimbaud to wick away with his thumbs.
“I’d like to watch over you,” Rimbaud says, eventually, when the tears have slowed a little, and Verlaine is only sniffling. “Come to bed with me.”
Verlaine goes, though he won’t consent to be carried. But he lets Rimbaud put an arm around his shoulder, and when he wakes screaming from nothing at all, he lets Rimbaud hold a glass of water to his lips without complaint.
Can you shoot, Paul? Me, who saved you and gave you life as a human being?
Verlaine is ungrateful. Ungrateful for having been born and ungrateful for having been born again. Oh, but he’s sorry, that’s all. He’s sorry he was so difficult to instruct, easy to want but hard to love. A vile temptation. A wicked thing, made for control and always somehow so wretchedly out of it.
Can you? Of course he can pull a trigger; he was made to do nothing but pull them, all sorts of triggers of different shapes and import; he himself is a trigger, built beneath the slide of a gun. Rimbaud never asks him the right questions. Here it should have been: Is there any world in which you don't?
All the great human questions can be condensed to free will. A joke.
“I don’t have the capability to decide if the human beings I protect deserve it,” Adam will say, and Verlaine will very nearly laugh.
VERLAINE DOES NOT say, I’m tired, as tired is an exclusively human state of being, and lately he doesn’t like to pretend.
He does, however, allow their car, so far sliding frictionlessly against the blank desert road, to abruptly jerk and rumble to a stop amidst the rocks. He cannot be tired, but many things can be exhausted.
Rimbaud blinks himself awake from his half-doze in the passenger seat.
“Drive,” Verlaine says. The word tears from his mouth like a man from an airlock.
In the rearview, he’s sprawled out across the entire backseat still; too tall for it, so he’s slung one sneakered foot over the shoulder of the empty driver’s seat, with the other pressed against the window. He’s shirtless from the wavy heat that’s left sweat to suction his back to the faux leather, and the tight jeans from his mission disguise press angrily into his hips and the lower band of his stomach. His unbraided hair hangs limply around his face. On one side it unspools off the seat to brush the floor and collect dust.
It’s strange to see him so casually undone. Verlaine’s everyday melancholy, such that it is, is loud and pointed; clear, unmistakable. Camouflaged now amidst the loneliness of the desert at scalding noon. If they were strangers, if Rimbaud had driven past him, he would have thought Verlaine a mirage, an avatar of the burning land itself.
Rimbaud doesn’t say any of this. Verlaine would not appreciate it.
Instead, he asks, “you’re certain?”
“I’m certain. At least until I wake.”
Despite the fact that Verlaine insisted on scrubbing off the remains of their last fight before he and Rimbaud made their escape—washing his hands in a cheap office sink while Rimbaud kept watch over the bodies crumpled over desks and desktops, distant sirens growing less distant—dirt smudges one of his cheekbones. Now, under Rimbaud’s gaze, a bead of sweat slopes down, cutting it in two.
If Verlaine minds being watched like this, he doesn’t say. He closes his eyes. Rimbaud climbs into the driver’s seat. Verlaine’s sneaker buttresses his shoulder, and Rimbaud likes the weight.