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And it had been such a good day.
They’d laughed together up on stage, the spotlight so bright that no one but the two of them even existed. Then during the commercial break Tenna had given Spamton this look and held a hand against his back as he led him somewhere and Spamton’s heart had near hammered its way right out of his chest because he had been so sure it was finally happening (whatever it was)—but no. Tenna took him to the green room. Where they’d laughed some more, and pat each other on the back, and once more, unknowingly rubbing salt in the wound, Tenna had given him that same look before sauntering back to the stage and leaving Spamton to stew alone in his frustration at the bar until his return.
Really, the frustration stems from the simple fact that Spamton still isn’t sure what kind of look it is. He can’t tell, doesn’t know—no one’s ever looked at him that way before. He likes it, is the problem. Makes him want to do crazy things, things he definitely should not do under any circumstance—things he’s caught himself daydreaming about anyway in the private sanctity of his own bed, when he ought to be sleeping and no one had any reason to be sifting through his thoughts.
Things like smiling at Tenna. Touching him. Not just bumping his arm or shaking his hand, or fingers brushing against fingers as they pass pen and paper—real touches, soft and obscured by gentle shadow. Dangerous touches. Ones that could ruin everything.
It’s still a good day when Tenna finds him hours later and ushers him back to his office to finalize some scripts, go over finances, and gossip about the new hire. Spamton starts out in the chair Tenna usually leaves out for him but ends up perched on the corner of Tenna’s desk as he always does, legs crossed comfortably. Tenna laughs at his jokes. It’s nothing special. It ought to be a crime to be this happy about something so mundane but his chest feels too full, his mind too soft, to feel bad about it. He’s too hungry for it to let it go.
“Where do you think the new guy’s been hiding all this time?”
“Huh?” Tenna says distractedly, looking up from the spreadsheet he’s been toying with. “Hiding?”
“Well, yeah, he’s a Shadowguy, ain’t he? It’s not like there’s other places for him to be than here, so—where’s he been?”
“Well, I don’t know. In the shadows, if I had to guess.”
“You’re not funny.”
“Then why are you smiling?”
“Because it’s stupid. You’re stupid. Y’know when something’s so stupid it makes you smile?”
“Yeah, I’m looking at him.”
Well, now they’re both grinning and pretending like they’re trying to hide it, which just makes them smile more until Tenna starts to snicker behind his hand and Spamton gets one of those thoughts again, the dangerous ones. A warm, faceless urge in the depths of his chest that tells him to pry that hand away, to hold it, to do… something.
But he doesn’t do a damn thing. He never does.
It’s a good day until Spamton leans across the desk to reach for a sprawling receipt just as Tenna bows his head to better scrutinize his spreadsheet. The position it puts them in is the most dangerous thing of all—Tenna’s massive head looming over Spamton’s in a way that steals all the breath from Spamton’s lungs, their faces mere inches apart. Spamton stares like a deer in headlights, his already pale face stained even whiter by the glow of Tenna’s screen, which only grows more blinding with his surprise. The emanating static makes Spamton’s hair stand on end—yes, it’s the static, surely. It feels like every hair on his body bristles, every inch of his skin electric and alive. He’s frozen, a sculpture of ice, because Tenna shifts—not away, like he should, like Spamton wills him to, but closer, slowly, his lips parted almost expectantly.
Spamton doesn’t know what to fucking do.
He jerks away on instinct, a protective shoulder curling inward to ward off Tenna’s tempting warmth and light—and just like that, he feels a tug. Not at his body, but at his mind—a fishhook buried deep in the back of his brain that yanks and pulls and wrenches until it turns him inside out and he watches from afar, cold and prickling with a strange static of his own, as his body leans back in, wraps a hand around Tenna’s tie, and crushes their lips together.
I died, Spamton thinks. I fucked up and I’m dead and this isn’t happening, this can’t be happening—
But he knows better. He knows by now what it feels like to have his strings pulled. He’d signed up for this, after all. This is what he’d paid for.
So he watches, a trembling ghost over his own shoulder as a thumb that ought to be his smooths across the beveled edge of Tenna’s face as if caressing a cheekbone and Tenna’s screen flares from a pristine white to a brilliant pink. A mouth that had belonged to Spamton once works hungrily against Tenna’s lips and Tenna reciprocates with the quietest sigh that doesn’t make Spamton shiver, with a hand that finds the back of a pale neck and holds it so gently that it doesn’t make Spamton weak in the knees, because he can’t fucking feel it. He can’t feel anything.
It’s stupid, but Spamton would be biting back tears. He would be biting back tears if he was still real.
The kiss only breaks when a gigantic pink flower blooms at the tip of Tenna’s nose, petals flopping against the puppet’s face. Spamton knows what he’d say—a snort and a wry, “Tens, you know I appreciate a bouquet as much as the next guy, but you really gotta work on your delivery.” He watches his own mouth move and the voice that comes out is his, but the words are all wrong.
“Pretty,” the puppet says appreciatively, its fingers ghosting across perfect petals. “Like you.”
I wouldn’t say that, I would not fucking say that—Tenna, you prick, you know I wouldn’t say that—
But Tenna’s screen glows a color to match the blossom. A smile spreads across his face and he makes this noise, something halfway between a disbelieving chuckle and a giggle.
“Oh, wow,” he says, positively delighted.
Asshole, Spamton thinks miserably, and feels like a little part of him dies.
“It’s late,” the puppet says, smoothing down Tenna’s tie as if it hadn’t just been gripping it like a leash. “I should be heading home. See you tomorrow, Tenna.”
It can only get so far as hopping to its feet before Tenna stops it.
“Wait.”
One of his massive hands finds the puppet’s to engulf it. It must be warm. It must be gentle. It must be good.
“Stay.”
But Spamton can’t fucking feel it.
“Please.”
Spamton feels like he’s going to be sick, but without his body it can only manifest in an all-encompassing vertigo, the pressure of a pent up scream.
“Ah, ah,” the puppet chastises, like he’s talking to a damn dog, and the way Tenna relents at once, obedient, makes Spamton want to throttle him, throttle the puppet, himself, anyone, anything. “Tomorrow, Tenna,” the puppet says, and it grins—sleazy and perfect with just the right amount of teeth. It’s the grin Spamton gives on stage when he’s trying to sell something, trying to convince a crowd full of idiots that the hunk of worthless crap in his hands is worth spending their hard-earned money on—and Tenna buys it. He buys the lot of it.
“Tomorrow,” he says, his screen glowing with hope and excitement as he gives the puppet’s hand one last squeeze before letting go. “I’ll hold you to that, Spam. What do you want, dinner? I’ll take you out, wherever you want to go. We could come back here after, or—or go to your place, I don’t mind. Does that sound good? Tomorrow?”
All the puppet does is smile, murmur, “Tomorrow,” and seal the deal with one last chaste kiss to Tenna’s lips. Spamton watches wretchedly as the puppet pulls away and Tenna leans after it as if magnetized, drawn to his perfect little fake on strings of his own making.
From there, everything happens too quickly. Too slowly. Spamton sees flashes of it from over his own shoulder—the checkered halls of the studio, the bright red sheen of his Cungadero, the flashing lights of the city from within a darkly tinted window. He’s not paying attention. Doesn’t want to. Doesn’t matter.
So it’s quite the shock when that fishhook yanks him forward between the eyes, squeezing him right side out again through the eye of a needle, and he slams back into his body, not dissimilar to the way his car nearly slams head-on into the truck in the next lane before he course-corrects with a yelp.
And everything hits him at once. He snarls like a fucking animal and hammers his fist against the steering wheel over and over again as the rage strangles him from the inside. A howl that sounds dangerously like a sob chokes out of him and he slams the butt of his hand down on the horn to drown it out until the other cars on the road decide it would be best to let him have his space.
He drives like a drunk, without a single shit to spare for the other drivers around him as he swerves and blares his way home. He parks crooked. He shoves past the doorman on his way into Queen’s mansion. Key stabbed into lock like knife into gut and then he’s barreling into his apartment, tracking dirt all over the freshly mopped tiles as he storms across the room in a furious beeline toward the table against the far wall.
The phone rings a split second before he picks it up.
“What the fuck!?” he barks into the receiver, spit flying from his mouth. “What the fuck was all that? That wasn’t part of our fucking deal!”
“Hello, Spamton.”
He’s lucky, he thinks. It’s the voice of his sponsor’s representative that greets him, a permanent grin etched into every slimy, pompous word they utter, but at least they sound like a living person. Spamton doesn’t think he has the patience right now to converse with the vocal equivalent of a digitized fucking corpse.
“Don’t ‘hello, Spamton’ me,” Spamton snarls. “That—Whatever that was back there, that was fucked. That’s not what I agreed to.”
“For the record, it’s not I who tugs on your strings.” A grin, made audible by the wet sound of lips stretching tightly across perfect teeth. “I simply provide the voice.”
“Don’t give me that, you’re all the same, the both of you. I—” His voice trembles. He despises himself for it. “You can’t ever do that again, you hear me? Never again.”
“Bold of you to instruct me, little Addison, considering your plea for our help, and not the inverse. You wanted to rise to the top—this is how we achieve that. This is our deal.”
There is something wrong with the voice on the line, sounding more like it’s coming from just behind his head rather than from the receiver. Never aggressive, only happier and happier, lighter and more amused the more riled up Spamton becomes. Frankly, he would prefer to be shouted at. He can understand shouting—he doesn’t understand this. It makes his hands shake but he’ll be damned if he lets it show through in his voice.
“I never agreed to you taking over my body and doing whatever the fuck you want with it,” Spamton snaps.
“Oh?” the voice says, perked up and smarmy. “You never seemed to have a problem with it before.”
“This is different.”
“It’s not. It’s what you agreed to, surely you remember.”
“I didn’t!”
“Of course you did, when you signed the contract with your name! Spamton G. Spamton—you signed over both of you. All of you.” The voice chuckles—giggles, really. “Not a very creative name, is it? Uninspired, I would say. But that was one of your ideas, not mine. No wonder you needed our help.”
There’s a pause.
“Oh, Spamton, my dear, don’t make that face.”
Creeping on the back of his neck, hairy legs and itching eyes. Spamton doesn’t give them the satisfaction of turning around to check anymore.
“Remember our contract—the one that you signed so enthusiastically!” the voice continues. “I seem to recall you saying you didn’t care what it took. Who it took.”
“Yeah,” Spamton mutters, “but… that was before.”
“Before what, Spamton? Hmm?” Goading. It’s not a real question. Even though Spamton has no intention of answering it, his face feels hot, his throat constricted as if there were fingers clamped around it.
“Oh,” the voice says, as if hit by a sudden epiphany. “Oh! Could it be you’re angry because… you wanted to kiss him?”
He wishes the floor would open up and swallow him. He wishes he had never taken this deal. He wishes he simply could have been born right.
“Only… we both know you wouldn’t have, my dear. Like I've said before…” Breath on his ear, the ghost of pressure on his shoulder. “You’re a coward.”
“I wanted to,” Spamton breathes, barely. “I wanted to do it.”
Another audible grin.
“We know.”
Spamton grips the receiver. Of course they do. They operate with laser focus, every move made with the prize in their sights, but they always find a way to spin it just so, to add a dash of cruelty to the mix. Not for any special reason—simply because they think it’s fun. This—this is Spamton’s whole life; his past, present, and future stretched out ahead and behind him like one of the plush, red runners lining the studio halls, but to them? To them, it’s nothing. They’re just playing with their shiny new toy. So what if it garners a few scratches and scuffs along the way? So what if they pull too hard and its fucking head pops off? So what, when they can just cram it back on again, rinse and repeat? So fucking what?
So what if that little doll’s heart breaks in the process, into millions of crystalline shards?
“Damnit—” Spamton chokes. He clamps a hand down across his mouth—get it together—but his next words sound no less unsteady, only more muffled. “Damnit, I’m—I’m not ready for this! I wasn’t fucking ready!”
“Oh, Spamton. You never would have been ready.”
The urge to scream in reply, to insult and refute, hits him like a train—but of course, the voice is right about him. The voice pries open his head and plays inside like a doll in a dollhouse. The voice is always right.
“I… I don’t know if I can do this,” he mutters. “Do it this way, I mean. I’ve never—I mean, no one’s ever…” He flounders a little, his words feeling like loose, crumbling bricks on his tongue. “I’m not good at this sort of thing, is what I’m trying to say! I can sell him something, I can sell him anything, you name it, but—but I’m no good at making people like me, never have been. They just… don’t.”
“It’s not so complicated as you’re making it out to be,” the voice says calmly. “You’re still selling a product, Spamton. It’s you. You’re simply selling yourself.”
“It’s not the same,” Spamton mutters. “I’m not exactly worth buying.”
“Well, in that sense I would say it’s exactly the same, wouldn’t you?”
It’s insult layered upon insult with these people. Spamton’s pride is a wounded, writhing thing.
“Gee, thanks.”
“This is what you do best, isn't it? You take something no one wants, you polish it, you flourish it, you make it shine under the light. You get paid. It's really not so different. However—a word of advice.”
Spamton feels a change around him, a quiet shift of air as if something moves from one of his shoulders to the other, a presence right beside his ear.
“Don't make it personal.”
Too fucking late for that.
The presence backs off, and he can breathe again.
“So! Have we come to better understand one another? Have I successfully clarified the terms of our agreement?”
“I… I guess. Yeah. Yeah, you have,” Spamton says, because he really just wants to end this call, get so drunk he forgets his own name, fuck tomorrow up for himself in advance.
“And? What say you?”
“I say yeah—sure, yeah, I say I'll try.”
“We need better than that, Spamton.”
“I can’t do any better than try!”
“I understand. We can take it from here, if you’d like.”
“No!” Spamton cries, sounding far too desperate for his liking. “N-no,” he tries again, calmer, though somehow as equally pathetic. He grips the handset so tightly his fingernails begin to hurt. “Don’t.”
“Manners, Spamton.”
Spamton grits his teeth, nostrils flared. His bones ache from how tightly he holds himself there, every muscle tensed like he’s a mousetrap set to spring.
“Please,” Spamton grinds out.
“You’ll have to be more specific than that. Please what?”
Something in him snaps.
“Oh, go fuck yourself.”
It just slips out.
He feels the voice’s delight, a bubbling rush that crashes around him like a riptide as his apartment simply blinks out of existence. The world outside those broad windows, his lavish furniture, the walls—until all that remains is the rotary phone and an island of blue tile beneath his feet. Goosebumps break out across his skin as a spotlight blasts him from above, searing his eyes when he tries to glimpse its source. His sweat-damp fingers clutch the receiver like a lifeline, like it might save him, as the shapes of great eyes shift in and out of the darkness, lidless and unblinking, sclera like planets in orbit around him. Staring. Burning holes into his back no matter which way he turns, no matter how he tangles himself in the phone’s coiled cord.
The voice is still speaking—asking him something, judging by the playful upwards lilt to its words—but all Spamton can hear is the high-pitched ringing in his ears.
“Fuck this,” Spamton says, his voice so shrill he hardly recognizes it. “Fuck this, fuck you, fuck you—”
A gentle pressure at his throat cuts him off. It’s not nerves this time. It’s not. One hand releases its death grip on the handset to paw at his neck but his shaking fingers only find his own shirt collar and damp skin.
The pressure around his throat tightens.
His body jerks. He tries to suck in a great, desperate breath but already all he can manage is a pathetic wheeze. The loudest sound in this void. The receiver falls as he grasps at his neck with both hands now but it doesn’t clatter when it hits the ground because there no longer is any ground—the floor crumbling away in shards of clinking blue until he’s scrambling on his toes atop the last tile.
The nothing around his throat tugs, upward, toward the spotlight.
They’re going to fucking kill him.
“Sorry,” he rasps. “I’m sorry—”
A soft, beatific laugh crawls in through one ear and wraps itself around his brain with sharp, prodding, chitinous legs before wiggling out the other. Spamton chokes, his head filled with a pressure ready to burst, his heartbeat a desperate pounding in every corner of his heated body, the sound that comes out of his mouth more of a death rattle than a voice.
“Please—please, I’m sorry—I’ll do it, I’m so sorry—please—”
The tile shatters beneath him. He drops, feet kicking. He feels his body break, skin of the neck, rent apart like it’s nothing.
And then his body hits cool, blue tiles. A deafening gasp rips its way down his throat and into his lungs. His feet thrash blindly, knocking into the table and sending the rotary phone crashing down next to the receiver, which lies quietly beside him. The receiver, which doesn’t utter a single sound even as that voice whispers in his ear.
“Ah, but it’s late, and we’ve talked enough for the night, don’t you think? Don’t let me keep you. You’ve got a big day ahead of you tomorrow, after all.”
Dial tone, like the distant bellowing of a freighter on a cold ocean.
Spamton’s hands haven’t left his throat. They shake so badly he can barely feel any of the trembling breaths he sucks down but he tries anyway, desperate to experience each one. They rasp, burning like fire on the way down, and they hitch, aching. As the high-pitched ringing in his ears begins to die down, he hears an awful noise—this pathetic, smothered keening. The sound of a wounded animal. On every exhale. Riding out on each of his shuddering breaths. His face, damp. Salty.
He has to shut that noise up.
The snarl he lets loose feels like it rips his throat apart as he scrambles to his knees and reaches for the phone. Not the handset, but the cradle—gripping it in both hands like it’s nothing more than a hunk of stone he found lying by the side of the road somewhere, the skull of some long-dead animal. The crack that cuts through the air when he smashes it against the floor is deafening.
Again.
And again.
Until the plastic splinters and the hard edges of it cut into the soft pads of his fingers. Until all the bits and pieces inside stop rattling around because they’re strewn across the floor. Even then, it’s not enough. Spamton feels too small for whatever this feeling is, this impossible weight at once nesting in all the hollows of his chest and trying to claw its way up out of his ragged throat.
The carcass of the phone feels like a thing with teeth where he clutches it to his chest as he stumbles to his feet. He takes a few staggering steps—doesn’t know where he’s going, tries to get there anyway—but the phone is still tethered to the wall by its plug and he’s yanked back a few steps.
Yanked. Pulled tugged dropped
Teeth gritted, Spamton looses a furious cry as he hugs the phone tighter to his chest and uses his entire body to wrench it free of its leash. It comes, but not cleanly—plug snapped and socket malformed, untethered but unsalvageable. Spamton hurls it as hard as he can against the furthest wall, the handset trailing after it uselessly. It smashes, shatters, hits the ground, and then—
And then.
“Fuck,” Spamton breathes. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, shit, fuck—”
He collapses to his knees beside what’s left of the phone, hands hovering, but it’s far too late now. With the bits of rotary dial crushed under his knee, it hardly even resembles a phone anymore. It’s fucked—completely and irrevocably fucked.
Just like he is.
Spamton shoots to his feet, gnaws on his fingers, starts pacing like a madman while going nowhere in the process—he does everything at once, he does nothing at all. He has to get away from here—away from Queen’s mansion, away from Cyber City—away from the whole damn town his laptop is in, and the fastest way is out the nearest window to the fire escape and right over the railing—
He slaps his face, a palm to each cheek. Wake-up call.
“Get it together, Spamton,” he growls, his voice low and raw.
It’s not over. It’s never over—not until he fucking says it is.
Breathing hard and ragged, he fishes his wallet out of his jacket pocket with trembling hands. It’s overflowing, sure—with fucking Points. The amount of Dark Dollars he possesses in cold hard cash is embarrassingly low—not enough time to head all the way to the bank and make a withdrawal, no, he might have ten minutes or he might have no time at all—but he thinks it’s enough. It has to be. If it’s not—well. He’ll figure it out. He’ll make it be enough.
Vision fuzzy at the edges, his whole world viewed through a narrow tunnel, Spamton returns to his haphazardly parked car and speeds to the nearest hardware store. In just a few minutes he’s breathlessly shoving his way to the front of the queue with a box shoved under his arm, his elbow just barely covering up the pretty photo of a brand new telephone printed on the front. If anyone protests when he pushes past them to get at the cashier, a quick snarl and snap of the teeth gets them off his ass.
The cashier is willing to play along at first despite appearing visibly uncomfortable—until she rings him up and Spamton hands over every Dark Dollar he has on him.
“Um,” she says, pausing to count the bills again, just in case, “you’re a little bit short.”
“Fuck,” Spamton hisses, then slams his hand down on the counter. “Look, I’ll pay you back. I’ll pay you back tomorrow, I’ll pay you back tonight!”
“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t—”
“Of course you fuckin’ can, kid! Take control of your damn life, have some balls, do a poor guy a favor!”
“I’m really sorry—”
“I have enough in Points, look”—Spamton thrusts his wallet at her, filling her vision with an endless amount of red and yellow vouchers—“I have enough, see, just take my fuckin’ Points, take ‘em all!”
But she just gives a tiny shake of her head, her lips pressed tightly together.
There’s a pressure behind his eyes. Around his neck. He goes to loosen his collar but it’s already unbuttoned down to his chest, his tie nowhere to be found. He’s not sure when that happened.
He offers her his broadest, brightest grin, cheeks pushed up into his red, jittering eyes.
“Pretty please.”
The way her gaze flicks down at her own phone is answer enough.
He ends up back in his car, somehow, the new telephone sitting beside him in the passenger seat. He’d lost his jacket somewhere, and by extension his wallet, but that’s a problem for another time, a different Spamton. Now, he holds tight to the steering wheel as he speeds down winding backstreets, his pale knuckles stained bright with blood that’s not his own.
Tomorrow. He’ll fix all of this tomorrow. Make some calls, track down his wallet, pay what he owes for the phone. He’ll let Tenna take him out, let him take him home—and whatever happens after that, Spamton will take it in stride. He’ll grin, laugh, bat his eyelashes, wrap Tenna so tightly around his finger that even if Tenna ever finds a way to unwind himself he’ll bear the grooves of Spamton’s knuckles on his body forever. He’ll reach inside and bend the very marrow of him into his own image, leave his fingerprints on his soul, burrow his way so deeply into the fabric of Tenna’s heart and home that he’ll never be able to look at either of them without feeling him.
He’ll do all this because Spamton is capable, determined.
Because Spamton has places to be.
Because he always honors a contract.
Back in his apartment, Spamton tears into cardboard and hoists out a brand new machine, the plastic red this time, to match his misplaced jacket. The thing feels cold in his hands, the cables stiff and new.
“Please, please, please, you fuckin’ asshole, c’mon,” he mutters as he places it on the table. It stands out against the wall, a shock of red amongst a sea of cool blue—shiny, new, and perfect—but none of that really matters. It’s the voice on the other end, isn’t it? The thing inside.
“C’mon.”
He plugs the phone in.
There is a high-pitched ringing.