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It was a Tuesday, in late fall, three months after Dan had reappeared in Brooklyn, New York with an open wound in his chest and wires poking out from under a t-shirt he didn’t remember owning, that he completed the ritual to summon Mark.
Dromen?
Whatever he was - whatever they were - was finally there.
It should have struck Dan to write out what he wanted to say beforehand.
-
Dromen sat in a circle of salt. Sat wasn’t exactly accurate - he - it - they? - were sort of free-floating. Dan remembered how Christine and Nicholas had described them before all of this, on those tapes. All Dan saw was a faded, ghostly image of his friend.
“Dan,” Dromen said.
Did their voice break? Did they somehow look at Dan with clearer eyes, with pain, with the look of someone who could experience an existential crisis.
Dan swallowed.
“This was dangerous enough,” he said. He was on the floor of his living room, in a new apartment. It was shittier than the one he’d had with his girlfriend. It was even shittier than the one he’d had with Mark. Would Dromen even know what that meant? “You kind of fucked it up.”
“I see,” Dromen said. “I - we tried to do anything to save you, Daniel Powell.” A fuzzy, static-radio fuckery started again. Dan was a bit sick of that sound, so he cringed; immediately it withdrew. “We do not wish to make you uncomfortable.”
Dan swallowed again. There was a dry knot forming in his throat, and no matter how he looked at Dromen, he couldn’t unsee that it was Mark’s form in front of him.
He wondered if Dromen, too, saw him that way; no matter what, he couldn’t look at Dan and not see Dan.
“I had a goddamn hole in my chest,” Dan said.
Melody had tried to help him, from the City; but he’d eventually gone back to Nicholas, knowing it was a far-cry from a good idea, and Nicholas had begrudgingly helped him procure ingredients for a ritual that would stitch him back together. But Dan knew he’d never be whole again.
“We are sorry,” Dromen said.
“Why did you - why did Mark do all of this?” Dan said, after a moment of unbroken silence, Dromen buzzing now, more like the hum of a gas fireplace than the static of radio frequency.
Dromen did not answer.
“Why did you do this?” Dan said. He was beginning to shake, but he wanted to know. “Everything - the podcast, the rituals, the fucking time travel.” Dromen flinched. It was strange, to see that familiar expression on Mark’s face - that look of alarm, embarrassment - when it wasn’t Mark. But it was Mark. But it wasn’t Mark. “I would have - I was going to find - a way to come back, I never…”
“Mark was involved from the very moment it began,” Dromen said, in a voice that now sounded distant and unfamiliar. “We were never going to be disconnected. It was always going to be this way.”
Dan clenched his fist in his lap. He still had a tape deck low on his body. He couldn’t leave the house without long sleeves. No one really looked at him, no, but he was starting to believe that was related too.
“If we were never going to be disconnected,” Dan said slowly, “then where have you been?”
It was a relief at least that Dromen did not seem to have an easy answer to that question. They were quiet for a long moment, buzzing along while Dan stared at him. “It became impossible,” they said eventually, into the silence of the room. “As Mark became Dromen and we became one and many and none, there was very little that could be done.” Dromen made a sound that sounded like a sigh. “What do we look like, to you?”
Dan felt his jaw click. “You look like Mark,” he said, because there really was no point in pretending otherwise. “You look like Mark, but if he was still here, I think my life would be a lot different.”
Dromen made a strange sound, and took a shaky breath. When they did it, they almost sounded human. Dan could hear Mark’s voice, when they spoke.
“We carry him with us, and he carries us. We are neither one nor all, neither his successes or his memories. But he…we…live within it, live within our memories.”
Dan sniffed. “I underestimated him. I wish I could tell him that.”
“Then tell us,” Dromen said, and the air in the room seemed to sizzle with the tension.
Dan looked at Dromen again. They were intense, all encompassing, and made him feel sort of sick to his stomach. But he wanted to answer the question that had been posed.
“I don’t think there’s anyone else in the world who knows me. Knew me. I think that’s still true, now, even after all of this time, and I wish that it wasn’t. I mean, he was - he was the person I told everything. I rented my first goddamn apartment with him.” Dan ran his hand through his hair several times, not sure what the point was but needing to do something with his hand. “When you cut out the tape deck, did you really think it would be enough?”
That was the question he had been holding back. He’d wanted to know, from the moment he opened his eyes and realized he was not, in fact, in New York - that whatever had happened, whatever he had done for Rat and for Lou and for Jennifer - had not been good enough to save him. What had the purpose been? He’d mulled it over a lot. He’d listened to radio waves and signals he never should have been able to tune into, and he’d tried to understand Mark or Dromen or both. If there was one, there was probably the other, and he wasn’t sure he could separate them anymore. When he looked up again, Dromen had shifted. They were now, instead, a fuzzy replica of a statue, something faintly resembling the statue of liberty with Mark’s features. Thick beard, full cheeks, the rest of it impossible for Dan to really make out.
“We believed that what we were doing would return you to the plane you had once lived. That you could be free of LMG’s hold.”
Dan snorted. “So much for that, I guess,” he said, and it sounded sad even from his own voice.
“We are not incapable of error, Daniel Powell.”
“Mark never called me Daniel,” Dan said, and hated the bitterness in his own voice. Dromen seemed to pulse across from him.
“You were also the only friend he cared about. The only person we cared about,” Dromen said. In Mark’s voice, clearer, crisper this time. It was almost cruel, and Dan opened his mouth to say as much, but couldn’t get the words out. “We became this to save you, and now you are saved. We exist for little else.”
Dan’s throat had been so parched, and he’d noticed it throughout the length of the conversation because he couldn’t stop swallowing, but this time he noticed how clammy his palms felt, the weight of his new flesh and the old, the emptiness of the hollow on his chest. He thought of the way Nicholas Waters had looked at him with disdain, how Clara-slash-Jennifer would have been horrified to see him the way that he still was, somehow more monstrous before, and he thought about what Rat had said, about being more human.
“Are you saying you don’t know what to do with your existence anymore?” Dan finally said, as Dromen pulsed eerily in the circle in front of him.
“That is accurate,” they said. Dan wondered if the cult had always been a front, something that would just lead Dromen back to him.
He smiled. “That shouldn’t be…it’s not - it’s not good, but, doesn’t that mean you’re a free agent?” He held out his hand, gesturing at Dromen’s form.
Dromen tilted their form curiously. Dan had never seen them do such a thing. He thought of Mark’s voice on the phone.
“A free agent,” Dromen repeated. “But you have locked me in this cage.”
Dan rolled his eyes. “It isn’t a cage,” he said, “it’s a salt circle. If I break it, you can do whatever you want. You don’t have to be bound by me or my ritual, or the cult, or any other entity that might come knocking at your door.”
“That is…a curious prospect,” Dromen said. “And then what?”
Dan shrugged. “Stay,” he said. “It gets lonely around here.”
Dromen fuzzed again, nearly out of existence.
Dan was willing to take that as a maybe.
-
He had moved into the studio suite in the outskirts of a shitty neighborhood that bordered a shittier neighborhood exactly twenty-nine-days after he had gotten back. Being homeless had been strange for Dan, during that time, but it was less difficult than he’d imagined. Now that he was back on his own plane, he was more like Rat than he had ever been in the City - he did not need to sleep, nor did he eat. The eating thing was a disappointment, but not a surprise, and as for sleep - well, it meant he could wander from 24/7 McDonalds over the course of the evenings and buy small coffees that he tentatively sipped while he used the WiFi to apply for remote jobs on a laptop he’d bought secondhand.
For all of LMG’s many failures, Dan had money in his bank account. His identity was a mess, sure, but he’d found his wallet at the hotel he’d been in when he’d been kidnapped at the front desk; apologized profusely to the receptionist who looked him up and down suspiciously and said, finally, “Just glad you’re alright.” He didn’t recognize her, and wondered if he should have. He wasn’t used to people caring.
He’d learned a lot from the radio waves. Constructing a false identity, false credit history, convincing anyone he could that he’d been at his job for longer than two weeks - it was easy to do when he had the full hours of the day on his hands. So it wasn’t as difficult to return to the life he had thought he might never be able to live again as he’d expected. It just sort of happened. Things were different now - he could hole away in his apartment and no one thought anything of it.
Dan had always been prone to loneliness. He neglected his friendships, his relationships; he was lazy about caring for other people, and lazier even then about caring for himself.
But, Dromen was there now.
That was strange - and comforting - and it hurt, too. It was like an open wound that just wouldn’t heal, something that seemed to mark Dan no matter what he had gone through. He barely considered the scars that marked where his new flesh began to even be scars; they were just part of his genetic makeup at this point. But Dromen’s presence was an endless reminder, even if it was one that he welcomed.
If Dan was going to get better, he would have to start somewhere.
“Mark,” he said, sitting at his kitchen table and looking out the tiny window above the sink that looked out onto an alley and the brick building across the way. He didn’t get much light in his apartment, but that was okay; he didn’t really notice a difference in his mood if he went outside, not anymore.
Dromen looked at him. It was always a bit interesting, figuring out what was happening when Dromen looked because they didn’t always have eyes and when they did they did not always look into Dan’s with them. Dan could still feel it though, like Dromen’s gaze just landed on him and lingered.
“Thank you,” he finally said, as Dromen sat silently. He said that instead of all of the other things he wanted to say. The useless I’m sorry, the Is this enough? What would it do, anyway, to ask or to apologize? Dromen would just keep looking at him, and they would be back at the start.
“You are welcome,” Dromen said, and Dan could hear Mark, and he wondered if Mark could hear him too.