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“So,” Arabella huffs, her chin tucked in her hand as she watches the blur of trees on the side of the highway pass by, “what now?”
Driving up I-91 is about as dull and uninteresting as Miles remembers it. Which is to say: very. Not even the apocalypse has managed to change that. Arabella is also about as much of a bitch as she was yesterday, too. Which is to say: very.
Honestly, Miles thinks he prefers she be one right now. He works best when there’s something or someone in his way, some obstacle for him to focus on and subvert, and Arabella right now is that obstacle. Besides the obvious, but there’s nothing Miles can really do about Z.
“Hartford,” Miles says slowly, “and then, Chicago.”
“Well, clearly. We’re going north. I’m not fucking stupid, Miles, much as you might like to believe otherwise.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid, but you can believe otherwise.”
“Hmm.” Arabella frowns and does that thing where she pretends she isn’t paying attention to Miles, where her head is set forward but she watches him out of the corners of her eyes. “I doubt there’s anything left in Hartford. Roman Pendragon went to New York.”
“I know.”
“So let’s go to Chicago.”
“And pass over Pendragon’s unprotected estate while he’s busy explaining the Camarilla to the world?” Miles scoffs. He might be lying implicitly about what they’re going to Pendragon’s manor for, but it is true that it’s unprotected, and probably full of powerful and valuable things for the both of them.
(The both of them not meaning he and Arabella.)
Arabella makes a noise, like she agrees it’s a good idea but doesn’t want to give Miles the satisfaction of admitting as much. It’s something he hears pretty often.
Miles refocuses on the road. Not that there’s much to focus on—you’d think the end of the world as it was would have a little more fanfare. There’s the occasional panicked speeding car gunning down the opposite side of the highway, away from Hartford. He thinks that’s a good sign, maybe. If Hartford has been decimated, getting in will be easy.
He isn’t actually sure what in Pendragon’s mansion Zofiel wants. Miles isn’t actually sure if it’s a thing to begin with. It hadn’t even told him to go, just… made him start driving, and when Arabella asked why, Miles’ answer poured out of him automatically without any thought.
It should probably scare him more, the fact that Zofiel is no longer speaking to him but through him, that he’s not really sure where the line between him and it lies anymore. Arabella certainly can’t tell, and Miles is beginning to feel a little blurry on the issue himself.
Miles adjusts his grip on the steering wheel. He feels remarkably calm, all things considered. He’s not sure if that’s on his part or Zofiel’s either.
Arabella huffs a sigh. It’s purely for attention, because she definitely doesn’t need to breathe.
“Yes?” Miles asks, deadpan.
Arabella drums her fingers on the dashboard. She has one broken nail—the rhythm goes don-don-thud-don, skipping a beat. “Are you going to explain what exactly happened?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I want to know, and you’re…” Arabella waves a hand, as if that says anything at all. “We are something.”
They are something, but Miles doesn’t know what the hell to call it. Rivals. Colleagues in both diablerie and infernalism. Partners, in many senses of the word. Maybe a wave of the hand is actually the best way to put it.
“I don’t think there’s much to explain,” Miles says eventually.
Arabella drums her fingers again. There’s something there, with the one broken nail—a bizarre time signature, maybe, something he could work into a melody. “Not even your missing Malkavian?”
Miles’ grip tightens on the wheel and his eyes narrow. It’s not beyond Arabella’s notice.
“Neil isn’t missing,” he answers, a bit too carefully.
Out of the corner of his eye, Arabella shrugs. The facade of nonchalance is betrayed by the fact that she has stopped drumming her fingers. “Well. It is Gehenna.”
“It is.”
“Your other friend came back, though.”
“I only got to choose one.”
“Hm. Difficult choice. This is why I don’t care about people,” Arabella dismisses, leaning her head against the passenger seat window.
Doesn’t care about people. Yeah, he can tell.
It wasn’t really a difficult choice at all, though. Miles isn’t very good at math, at least when there’s no money involved, but one clearly outweighed the other. Johnny has people to protect, a daughter, a family, something human to cling to. And Neil?
Neil was a weak link, a traitor to the domain and to the Camarilla (on paper), a blood sorcerer, and he was the one who killed…
Miles slumps a little in his seat. Awful posture, he thinks distantly, but Miles’ iron grip on his image has loosened somewhat in the past few weeks. The encroaching apocalypse and your own near-certain damnation will do that.
Obvious as the choice was, it seems to hang the heaviest of all the ones Miles has had to make. All the difficult fucking decisions, where the right choice was always the ugly one, and Miles was always the only one willing to bear the full brunt of that ugliness for the sake of something greater. Granted, there was often something else—he won’t lie and say he didn’t enjoy taking arms from the Black Hand—but the end goal was always something close to noble.
He’s not sure why it keeps on poking at him, until Miles’ wounds open back up and he’s bleeding regret all over himself. Johnny was the right choice, Neil was the unfortunate cost of doing business. Even if he’d brought Neil back instead, what would have happened? There’s no telling what Miles would have done, once he had the opportunity to confront him in full. Killing him in a rage wasn’t entirely out of the question. And wouldn’t that just make the whole thing pointless?
He side-eyes Arabella, who on her surface looks as bored as ever. Arabella would never have to make a decision like that, he thinks. He’s fairly sure that if he weren’t her closest relationship before that he probably is now, and even then he still gets the sense that she’d let him die with no hesitation for just a fraction more power. That might be why she’s so pathologically fixated on him, actually: Miles isn’t nearly as heartless as she is, and yet he’s surpassed her in almost every way he can think of.
Maybe Miles’ inability to whittle away at his conscience until it disappeared entirely is also why Zofiel wanted to make a deal with him. He’s just the right mix of ambitious and ruthlessly determined, balanced out by the fact that he cares too much about the people around him for that not to be exploited. And too proud not to think he could outwit something like Z. There’s no world in which Miles would have let Britta make that bargain.
Inside him, Zofiel stirs. Not speaking, not even quite making itself known, but just imparting upon Miles the sense that it’s laughing.
He would do it again, Miles knows. He would do it a million times over, every single part: the Setites, the arm, the chantry, Rowlands, Zofiel, choosing Johnny and not Neil even though every time he thinks about that last one something in him aches horribly.
Miles is the one who makes the ugly choices and is able to live with them. Miles is very, very good at making the calls that make other people, other kindred, recoil in disgust, ask how he could sink so low. Someone has to be willing to cross a few lines in pursuit of something grander, and Miles is just far gone enough morally to do it without breaking himself in the process.
“Chicago was fun in the forties,” Arabella mumbles, breaking the silence. She’s still staring out the window, the occasional fire on the highway illuminating her face. Her expression reads as boredom, mostly, but almost contentedly so. Like she’s fine being so close to him, like it’s comfortable.
They’re not going to Chicago. They’re not leaving Connecticut. At least, Arabella probably isn’t. And Miles has the looming sense that if he makes it out, it’s not actually going to be him at all.
He suddenly feels horribly, impossibly sick.
This car is a piece of shit, being the first abandoned one they were able to get into and steal, and handles like it, but Miles manages to pull over gracefully by the side of the highway regardless. He forces the door open and stumbles forward until he walks off the paved road, his polished leather brogues almost certainly now scuffed with dirt.
He doubles over and retches, even though there’s nothing to vomit up, even though Miles hasn’t puked since the eighties because that’s just not how corpses work. Once, twice, three times, before Miles’ body catches up to his mind and realizes this is kind of a silly and pointless endeavor.
Miles straightens, adjusts his tie, and forces in a few lungfuls of air, because it hasn’t been long enough since he’s been alive for him not to do it automatically upon trying to calm down. He blinks, pushing his glasses a little further up on the bridge of his nose after they’d slid down while he was… sick isn’t the right word. Unwell.
“Nobody’s following us, you know,” he hears Arabella yell from the car.
“I know,” Miles replies, still trying to regain his grip.
“So? Let’s go,” Arabella scoffs..
“Just give me a fucking second,” Miles snaps.
He hears the sticky lock of their stolen piece of shit car, then the squeak of the passenger door hinges before being slammed shut. Arabella’s heels click on the asphalt behind him, somehow steady despite the uneven surface. He can feel her just standing there behind him, impatient, annoyed.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” she says, finally stepping to Miles’ side, even though she’s definitely not sorry. The fact that she says it anyway is a little heartening. Means she has enough investment in Miles to act otherwise.
She’s wrong, though. It is only kind of about Neil. It’s also kind of about Arabella, and kind of about Marcos, and kind of about Elsa and kind of about Jan and, really, kind of about everyone. Kind of, but not really. What it really is is about Miles, and the weight that sits on his shoulders and hangs heavy around his neck, about the willingness to watch the way that the people he cares most about look at him like they’re afraid of him becoming a monster, if they don’t think he is already.
A scarred and twisted pride wells up in him. He’d done a lot of things right, no matter how sickening they were. A lot of people would be dead if he hadn’t. Sometimes it was for the wrong reasons, but that’s why Miles is Miles, not purely and subhumanly selfish like Arabella, or selfless to the point of destruction like Neil. He’s on that narrow middle ground between the two, and he’s walked it well.
“I think he might be doing better wherever he is now, actually,” Miles tells her after a moment. “I don’t know. Shadowlands, that kind of thing. I think—Wynn said something about a ferryman.”
“Then there’s nothing to feel bad about, is there?” Arabella pokes him in the shoulder. “C’mon.”
Nothing to feel bad about. That should be the case, yes. Britta had put it best: even in death, he found an identity for himself.
Kind of ironic, given that Miles isn’t sure whether it’s him or Zofiel who replies to Arabella.
“I don’t feel bad about it. That’s why I made the deal,” Miles hears himself say. “Things worked out okay. Relatively.”
“So let’s go.” Arabella’s fingers wrap around his elbow and tug him in the direction of the car.
Her hands are dirtied and bloodied, as with everything else, and in any other instance Miles would recoil at her touching his suit with them. Instead, it’s just nice. Miles feels a little bit more doomed by the realization that even as pathetic as she is right now, he wants to be near her.
“Yeah.” Miles shakes his head, blinking away sentimentality. It’s useless where they’re going, anyway. “Not far now.”
He lets Arabella pull him back to the extremely shitty car, with its sticky locks and cracked pleather seats, and gets in. He pushes his glasses up on his nose again—they’re useless, given that Zofiel had indeed improved everything, including his persistently bad eyesight, but it’s just habit—and starts the engine up again. It takes a few tries to turn over, and only sputters weakly when it does. Miles thinks distantly that he’d probably make another deal just to get his Lamborghini back.
The weight on his neck feels a little heavier. Zofiel is quiet, ominously so. Hartford is less than an hour away and Arabella does not know that that forty or so minutes with Miles in the car is the last she’ll have with him.
Miles takes one last useless breath, just for the hell of it, and starts driving where Zofiel needs to go.