Archive of Our Own

   I always keep my kit close by. I know the next time I shoot up, I’ll die. The Memory told me so. I keep it close because its nice to always have the choice. I can do other things, when it all gets too bad. My death will be because of heroin specifically, so every other drug is on the table.The Everything stops when I’m asleep. The feeling of Everything. I haven’t learned to “breathe into it” yet, so until then, there’s always Klonopin, and NyQuil, and Ambian, and Xanax. It’s supposed to flow through me, but instead it’s like it gets stuck in my head, like a pile up on the freeway. 

   The Everything, its less like knowing everything that’s happening or everything that will happen, and its just the feeling. I feel like something bad happened to an expectant mother in South Africa, something is missing, and something hurts. I feel like the entire city of Mumbai is breathing a sigh of relief. I feel like the earth is sad. I feel like the sky is angry. I don’t really know why. Maybe that’s the job of a doctor, diagnosing the problem. I can’t find it in myself to investigate. I’ll stick with band-aids for now, until I learn how to be one with the universe or whatever. 

   The drowsier I make myself, the more I can zero in on the country I’m in, the city, the room, until finally I fall asleep and its just me in here. No pile up. Just silence. And its amazing. I’m trying not to sleep through the end of the world. God knows I want to. 

But there isn’t a god. 

   And I know that because I know, in reality, that energies only exist through the channeled thoughts of sentient beings, neurons firing off sparks of bio-electricity, all centered on a single idea creates a tangible symbol in the fourth dimension that can effect our plane, that deer have their own god of trees that they worship in their own way, which makes the trees sentient, in a way, and they, themselves worship the soil and the rain, and the highest being in this long chain is the Mother Earth, the highest and most tangible reality that all life can respect, but Mother Earth doesn’t answer prayers and it doesn’t speak, or even know what a mother is, because its so high on that chain of symbols and belief and electricity that it transcends consciousness, simultaneously a thoughtless rock and a living thing, and its not going to help me with any of my problems, even if it means the world ends.

Or, at least, it feels that way. 

   I can feel that chain pulling me, and I’m scared to follow it because I can feel where it leads. Maybe that’s what I should do to stop The Everything. Right now, I’m too scared. Doesn’t feel very “hippy-dippy flow of the universe” to force yourself into some scary situation like that. So Klonopin it is. 

   The team keeps me honest, I suppose. Keeps me from sleeping life away. I can do anything, if I think it. I can’t create real sentience, though, because that requires the transference of souls, but I can get damn close. This all to say, I can sober up at will. I can’t awaken myself though. If I’m hard asleep, disconnected from that chain, from The Everything, I can’t do anything. I feel human again. So, for the fate of the universe or whatever, I have to stay on my toes most of the time. They’ve had to cover my ass more than once. Apparently, space-faring, inter-dimensional eugenicists don’t understand that 2:30 am is an ungodly time to try and blow up the earth. Or maybe they know there is no god, and so they just do it anyway. Who knows. I was asleep for that one.

   I try to stay drowsy and medicated when I can. Sleep only during the night, but never too drugged out. It’s a balancing act, held up only by guilt. Its hard, because as I close myself off, it gets easier and easier to ignore everyone’s problems. Close off one more voice, one more feeling, next thing you know, I’m dead to the universe. Not really dead, though. I’m saving that for heroin. 

   To avoid sleep, I find myself passing my slice eternity by…practicing, I suppose. Reaching my fingers out into the collective unconscious, seeing what I can feel rush by in my drugged haze, like sticking your hand out of a car window. I feel everyone inside the Carrier, I feel the Carrier, herself. Breathing. Thinking. 

   She was a wanderer, an explorer, and everything she did was out of curiosity. She had heartbreak inside her, some sense of mourning, but that’s all I can feel. I dare not dig any deeper, as something tells me that she doesn’t want me to know where she comes from. What I’m endlessly curious about is why she feels feminine, why she sees herself as feminine. It’s the same sense of womanhood I feel in a young girl. Something vapid and half-formed, ill-defined but still tangible, like how you can smell the ocean before you see it. Something that makes Jack call his cities female, a female thing that makes cold metal and concrete come alive. 

   Inside her, near her beating, pulsing engine room, some version of Angie is doing some sort of electrical maintenance on her, a gaping hole in the floor where she performs her mechanical surgery. Another version of Angie was also in Spain, hosting a charity event for research into AIDS, or cancer, or some other baby-killing disease. Another version of her was helping civilians in China clean up after an earthquake. Another version of her was making out with Shen, both of them sitting on top of Jack. That was the real Angie. Half of her mind dedicated to rolling her hips and the other half on saving the world.

   If the Carrier was a woman, Angela Spica was a force of nature. An overwhelming, unavoidable thing, something that could hurt people without noticing, without remorse, and without meaning to. Jenny Sparks had been like that too. Maybe that’s why Shen was so quick to bed The Engineer. 

   I could feel them all, the three of them, grabbing, stroking, gripping too hard, and I could feel it from every angle. Jack was struggling to breathe properly between Shen’s thighs, gripping her hips as she grinded down onto his mouth. Shen, atop him trying to breathe properly herself, with Angie groping her breasts through the shirt she wore, still unsure about full nudity after what happened with the G-7. And Angie, riding Jack, and kissing Shen, her hands all over the two of them, saying whatever filthy thing came to mind, since she was running the whole show. That sense of control, that was more gratifying for Angie than anything an orgasm could give her. I could feel it. It was overwhelming, what Angie felt. This heady thing, hovering over the waves of sexual pleasure she was feeling, a high like something I’d never really felt in my own body. 

   “Shen,” Angie panted, gripping Jack’s kneecap behind her. “Pull his hair, he likes it.” She did as Angie said, thoughts a tangled mess, emotions and sensations boiling over in her gut, surrendering all of herself to a voice. And the king of cities, now a throne made for two, did, in fact, like it. 

   Jeroen, the Jeroen before me, never used to understand kinky sex, but the reasons for my confusion have been completely forgotten. Close-mindedness had left my body like a soul soaring high, and now I have compete hyper-empathy. Its comes with the territory. Now, I get why people like being hit. There are as many reasons for it as there are people on earth. 

   In fact, I remembered, in some other life that I never lived, being a man with HIV, and finding sexual satisfaction without touch, since my touch could now kill. The pain that I once gave to myself, the humiliating words others would scream at me in public, like everyone knew I was wrong, for my skin color, for who I chose to love. Those things that were once weapons were now sex toys. I would bust in my pants and someone would be there to tell me how embarrassing that was. How gross it was, and how stupid I looked kneeling at his feet. The playfulness in his voice told me he didn’t mean it, and this was all a fun game. I remember it being so much fun. 

   I remember being a woman, raised catholic, a mother of three children, and owner to a fat, flabby body that they gave me, feeling grotesque, and unwomanly. But I felt so beautiful when my loyal husband called me a slut, told me I was a bad girl, a temptress. I remember one night, he took me from behind over the kitchen table, impatient, pulling my panties to one side, the two of us fully clothed. “The kids,” I moaned, adrenaline zipping through my veins. My husband slapped me on the ass, “They’re asleep, don’t worry about it.” he whispered in my ear, and I let him shove me down onto the polished wood. 

   I remember being a different kind of woman, I remember the smell of a leather club, how it was a relief to taste sweat in the air, rather than Febreeze and printer ink from the office. I remember being disgusted with the leering men at work, how their eyes always fell to my chest as I walked by, and I could feel that same gaze fall to my backside when I passed them. I remember depositing my paycheck and crying because I didn’t get paid enough to put up with them. But I remember stripping naked in those dark musty rooms, putting on a cheap plastic mask, having anonymous men all but attack me, my knees scraping the concrete floor as they bound and gagged me, whipped me till I bruised, and it felt like heaven on earth. Because in any second I could say “butterfingers” and they would all stop, unlike my boss, or the perverts in accounts payable, or the sleezeballs in sales. All of them animals, behind silk ties and expensive cologne, at least here, underground, men were honest. At least here, ironically, I felt safe. 

   All of those people were dead now. That’s how I could remember them. Memories, for the most part, belong to a person until they die. Then, their soul belongs to the collective unconscious—The Everything

   Since Jack was alive and well, I couldn’t tell what made Jack enjoy being thrown around like a sex doll and all but ignored like a piece of furniture. He was something different than I remember being. He liked all this for reasons I couldn’t quite place, but again, I could feel that he liked it just the same. A sense of peace and tranquility that settled deep into his metal guts. Something similar to what Angie was riding out. Something more than sex, but something that came packaged with it. It was like his head was empty. 

   Shen felt like a woman going mad. This wasn’t a sado-masochistic-power-dynamic thing for her like it was for the other two, no. It was like she had just been caught in the middle of it. Losing her mind, for all she was worth. The satisfaction, for her, came after. After she was wrung out and exhausted, and her two partners threw a soft blanket over her sensitive flesh, passed her a glass of water, and wiped sweat from her brow with a wet washcloth, telling her she was amazing. It was almost as if she were challenging herself, seeing how much she could take before she broke in half. Pleasure so good it literally hurt, an ache deep in her gut, skin chaffing, and muscles fatigued. A feeling that almost possessed her body, something she couldn’t ignore, or push away, something she had to surrender to. The ultimate foe to shame and insecurity, I suppose. 

   Here, in my own body, I felt myself trying to get hard. A twinge of recognition in my dick that didn’t amount to anything else, because barbs can give you whiskey-dick as good as liquor can. But the explosion of wants, needs, desires, sensations, feeling in that room was giving me a headache. Something more wholesome was happening elsewhere in The Carrier. 

   Jenny was having Jacket chase a laser pointer around the sitting area. The full, wide, and alien range of emotions that other animals felt, that was something I wasn’t expecting when I became the shamen. They have new, strange feelings that human beings had no use for, ones that humans had no frame of reference for. Ones that words failed to fully describe. Canines, for example, felt this negative emotion that could only be illustrated by their body language—a feeling that makes them curl their body into a crescent, lean their head low to their feet, pull their ears back and raise their hackles. It wasn’t sadness, or fear, or anger, or even defensiveness, it was something utterly unique. 

   Jacket had a lot of those “big emotions” when he first entered The Carrier. It was grating, having him so close. He was so confused. In so much pain. Yet, he was so trusting. He felt this immediate dog-affection (another nameless feeling dogs experienced) for The Midnighter. I could sort of remember being Jacket, stuck in a wire kennel and seeing this large dark figure walk up to the door, unlock it, and unhook me from biting wires and needles. I know how he smelled in that moment. Like B.O., spice, and motor oil. And I remember liking that smell. Don’t remember much else, and I won’t remember many details until Jacket dies. 

   He’s very close to death. Even Jacket knows that. The enhancements weren’t the cause, no. In fact, many of them elongated his life significantly. But he was already a very old dog. A mastiff mutt that typically wouldn’t break past the age of 10. He’s about 12 years old now, according to his previous family. I couldn’t get much of a feel for his memories before he became a lab-rat, but Midnighter had told us all that the owner didn’t want to take him back. She had already convinced her son that he had died, she had already taken him through a grieving process, had a little funeral for him and everything. Bringing the dog back, half-metal, and half-dead, she said, that would fuck him up for life. Who knows if Jacket even remembered his old family, his old life. Maybe that’s why he and Midnighter clicked so well. 

   Jenny, now aged 5, loved Jacket very much. Sometime soon, she would see him die, and her fathers would explain death to her, and show her how to grieve. Maybe they would also have a little funeral for the mutt, for real this time. 

   Something that does still confuse me, with all this Everything, is how parents seem to find it in themselves to not fucking snap. I don’t remember my own parents that much, actually. I remember their names, I remember their hair colors, our home address, our home phone number. I struggle to remember much else about my own experience with them. It should be sad, that I dont remember my childhood, but it isn’t. I remember enough. Even moreso, I remember my mother’s emotions. I remember she had so much love for me. I remember that I made her angry, that I left her lonely. I remember my father being very proud of me, but not knowing how to show it, and I remember him being extremely disappointed in me, and not daring to show that. They were hanging on by a thread their whole lives. From cradle to grave. Hanging on to me by a thread. From cradle to penthouse office to smack-house to the astral plane. 

   There are plenty of parents who snap, the vast majority of parents either implode or explode, and fuck their children up forever, but the ones that hold it together surprise me. If anything, those people give me hope that people are inherently good, and society is what taints the soul. 

   Right now, Apollo is close to imploding. I watch Apollo, in front of the mirror, flossing his perfect teeth and grimacing. Not in pain, not from the discomfort of jamming his hands into the back of his mouth, but from looking at his own reflection in the bathroom mirror. 

   Something really bad happened to him in ‘00. It’s been festering inside him, eating him like a rot. I know what happened, because The Carrier told me. Torture of all kinds. I doesn’t feel right that I know, but she had to get it off her chest, everything those bastards did inside her, everything they made her do, the things they made her see, and she couldn’t do anything about it. She had a low-level telekinesis, as all 4th-dimensional beings do, and she told me she remembers how Apollo felt, down there in the dark. She knew how his powers worked, she wanted to tear her walls open to let him feel the light of the sun, but she couldn’t. She was caged, held captive, paralyzed, and conscious to Apollo’s torment. 

   I feel a zip of shame and disgust fly down my throat and I realize it was Apollo’s. He’s sitting on the bathroom counter now, his back to the mirror, floss in the trash, head in his hands. All his hair products lay next to him, expiring, his blow dryer hidden away in a drawer somewhere. There was a reason Jack was our spokesperson these days. Apollo wasn’t as camera-ready as he used to be. Most of the team pinned it on new-parent stress, because that’s what he told them it was. I feel so gross knowing the real reason. Knowing he wouldn’t want me to know, he doesn’t want anyone to know, in fact, he wants to forget it all himself. 

   What Jack’s doing, back in Angela’s bed, he’s making himself into an object. He enjoys it. It’s like a game. I guess the root of what happened to Apollo is that he didn’t want to be an object. Now he can’t stop seeing himself as one. Everything reminds him of it, and he just wants to disappear from view. Being seen reminded him that he had a body. Which reminded him that his body was now an object—a punching bag, a trophy of war, a cigarette lighter, a scapegoat, a sex toy, a piece of furniture. 

   Apollo eventually ditches the rest of his little routine, relinquishing himself to being seen in public wearing athleisure again. He puts on a jacket and some glasses before fetching Jenny. 

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come?” Midnighter is stripping himself of his armor, belts and buckles clicking as he looks to his husband, frantic. 

   “You said it yourself, you have work to do.” Apollo doesn’t look at Midnighter. “We’ll be back in an hour. Maybe two.”

“It’s just a checkup, will it take that long?” Midnighter asks him, confused, worried. 

   “She’s getting some shots. I’m taking her for dinner and ice cream after.” Apollo shrugs, tying Jenny’s shoes, fingers fumbling in his rush to leave. 

“And I’m not allowed to come?” Midnighter challenges, slapping his gloves down onto the kitchen table. 

   “You can do whatever you want.” Apollo raises his eyebrows, Jenny on his hip, his other hand on the doorknob. Like a dare. 

Midnighter doesn’t push. He kisses Jenny goodbye. He tries to do the same for his husband but Apollo turns his head. 

   “I love you,” It’s a begging thing, the feeling in Midnighter’s chest. Something small and sad. 

   “I love you too,” Apollo returns, the words, that were a reflex, almost reminding him that he’s married to the man in front of him. As if he forgot, the monster beneath his skin so all-encompassing that he has no room for any other thoughts. 

   “Have you got the NHS card?” Midnighter is stalling, trying to keep them both in his vision for as long as he can. As if this is the last time he’ll ever see the two of them. “The adoption certificate? Your ID?”

“I’ve got everything, M.” Apollo leaves. 

   Then, I feel something really heavy sit down in the Midnighter’s brain. He’s about to do something really fucking stupid. Something he’s ashamed of. He stands there for a moment, staring at the closed door of the flat, hands clenching and unclenching. It takes me a while to figure out what he’s doing, but I realize he was talking to himself. On the inside. It’s gotta be something to do with his neural implant, because I can’t get a read on anything. 

   Touching the Midnighter’s mind is dizzying, like I’ve been held upside down and then put rights again. It’s strange and fascinating how his brain works, how his spirit is split in half by amnesia, then split in half again by hardware.

   The Quarter-Man shucks off the rest of his armor, leaving chunks of his shell on the living room floor. He retrieves a duffel bag from his weapons closet, shoved behind two identical but empty bags. This bag wasn’t empty. It carried something that made M shiver and perspire. 

   He exits the flat in nothing but his pants—a t-shirt and boxers. The thought crosses my mind that he was about to commit suicide. He very rarely came out of their flat without his suit, and never in such a state of undress. He always covered himself with thick denim and sturdy leather when the Kevlar was socially inappropriate. Something is about to happen. Something M didn’t want to do, but he felt he must, caution to the wind. I consider getting out of bed, going to stop him, but I think better of it. He’s not going to kill himself. He’s too scared of death for that. He’s going to do something stupid, but not that stupid. 

   He carries his bag to the sitting room at the center of the team’s shared living quarters, a large circular dent in the floor that houses a television, couches, a fireplace, and soft carpeted floors. The carpet was scattered with wooden food and toy money from Jenny’s latest play-profession as a store clerk. Midnighter kicked a pretend corn cob aside, kneeled in front of the television console, and ejected a tape from the VHS player. He set Jack’s copy of Star Wars: A New Hope on top of the cabinet without rewinding it, and unzipped his duffel bag. 

   He spent far too much time putting all of the VHS tapes in order, sorting them by subject, and placing them in piles. He didn’t have a lot of time to do this, but he also didn’t want to do this. I couldn’t see the labels on the tapes, but I could hear him reading them in his head. 

“Amazing Project: Consent”

“Day Star Project: Consent/Diagnosis”

“Necromancer Project: V2”

“The Night Rider Project: I” 

“The Night Rider Project II”

“Night Rider project: Subject Consent”

“Night Rider: First Cut”

“NR—HANDS”

“Day Star: microwave test”

“NR project: roadblock 1”

“Night: nervous sys”

“Amazing Girl: operation 1”

“Night—circulatory”

“Apollo: gamma pulse”

“Stalker: crown test”

“Stalker: ground floor”

“Stalker: cryostasis”

“Crow Jane: Insentive/Consent”

“Night—musc/skele reinforc”

“Night—brain 2”

“Night: sleep study”

“Night —complications 7/2/92”

“Lamp lighter cross test”

“Lamp lighter cadaver bravo”

“Lamplighter: decomp hault”

“Nighter test 1”

“Nighter armor version 5”

“Nighter leg problem”

“Nighter starvation test”

“Stalker Starvation Test”

“Crow Starvation Test”

“Apollo Starvation Test”

“Amaze Starvation test”

“Impetus Starvation Test”

“Apollo Starvation Test 2”

“Nighter combat test 1”

“Nighter healing test 1”

“Nighter combat test 2”

“Midnighter Test Track”

“Midnighter weapons training”

“Midnighter obedience training”

“Midnighter Test Track 7”

“Midnighter Demo Tape”

   Midnighter picked the first tape from the largest pile and pushed it into the VHS player. As it clicked and aligned the tape, he took a seat on the coffee table, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, one leg bouncing as he bent his neck upwards towards the static screen. 

On the screen was a man the Midnighter didn’t recognize, but he knew who the man was. Or, rather, he recognized the man but didn’t know who he used to be. 

   “My full, legal name is Lewis Alexander Russo,” The television said, “I’m 26 years old. I was born October 2nd, 1964 in Camden, New Jersey. I joined the armed forces in 1982, I was discharged due to a medical diagnosis in 1986. From that point on, I was a ward of the state of New Jersey. I have signed up for this program in an effort to serve those less fortunate, and to treat my ailments with the best technology mankind has to offer. I hereby consent to any and all medical procedures suggested by the staff present, and my further recovery will be left to the discretion of the staff present. I hereby forfeit power of attorney to the ruling bodies of this organization, and I am doing so of my own free will.”

   It was a woman’s voice saying this. On the screen, Midnighter could see her pointing to a stack of papers, showing the disoriented man in front of her where he can sign his name. His eyes were unfocused, he moved sluggishly, as if drugged. As soon as he signed the page, he began to seize, falling from his chair and onto the cold tile floor. 

   The Midnighter ejected the tape. Started another. Each tape lasted less than two minutes, a perfect waste of good film, so he sat through the pile of Night Rider Project tapes quickly.

   I rose from my bed to join him. On my wobbly way to the sitting room, I could feel the man in the videos, as if he was dead, but I know he was not. If I concentrated, I could remember the feeling of concrete beneath my hands. I could remember hospitals, the smell of them, the taste in the air. I remembered seeing ghosts, feeling afraid, shooting a gun, and killing people. Flashes of a man’s life. A man, dead. The edges of the memories blurred the farther Midnighter got through the tapes, closer to where Lewis stopped and where The Midnighter began. I could tell the opposite was true for Midnighter. The more he watched the tapes, the more he recognized, but nothing he didn’t already remember came back to him, like he had hoped. He didn’t remember any of it. Midnighter and Lewis Russo, opposite ends of a gradient, blended but separate. 

   Looking at him from the doorway now, it was very hard to tell them apart. Eyes staring off into space, seeing ghosts. The Midnighter breathed unsteadily, the final tape having stopped a few minutes ago. Lewis Russo cut apart, killed, replaced with a machine. Chosen because his wrecked mind and tattered psyche were the perfect blank canvases for a man like Henry Bendix to project his vision upon. 

   I remembered being Henry Bendix too. I remember watching dead man after dead man lie on that operating table, either leaving the world during the procedure, or surviving long enough to pass away from shock days later. Then Lewis came along and he was perfect. I remember feeling the sutures beneath my fingertips, I remember seeing tears in his eyes, his paralyzed body beneath me as he tried to scream but could not. Every waking moment between procedures was spent begging for me to stop it, but I couldn’t because he would thank me some day. I remember loving him like I loved myself, because he was a part of me, like a child, a first born son but deeper. 

   I remember being Midnighter. Scared and alone, in a cold white room, draped in dirty bandages that everyone neglected to change. Average-looking people would lean over my restrained form and smile, talk about me like I couldn’t hear them, like I couldn’t understand them, like an animal in a cage, I couldn’t speak. I had a tube down my throat every other minute of the day, helping me breathe, feeding me against my will, while some wounds healed and others festered. I remember sepsis and seizures and a pain in my skull. My ears rang all the time. The thoughts hurt. They were disgusting. They never stopped. They were driving me insane. I remember the feeling, and I could easily compare it to The Everything. I remember being told my name, and my purpose and I remember not having any choice. I could kill everyone in that room, but I knew I was trapped because they could kill me too. Easily. They made me, after all. 

   I remember being Bendix, spending every waking moment thinking about how I can make my Midnighter better but I couldn’t, because he was perfect and I made him that way. He was beautiful, a work of living art. 

   Me, now, real me, was getting nauseous, all of these memories, these feelings, the dizziness from being in Midnighter’s head. He was still staring ahead, looking at nothing. He swallowed hard, kept swallowing. I couldn’t hear anything in his thoughts. He was somewhere else, perhaps where I just was. Maybe I had left him behind. 

   I ejected the tape for him. I put everything back in his bag, zipped it up and tucked it behind a bookshelf. By the powers of the universe, harnessing the manifestation of life and all ancestral knowledge, I conjured up a rolled spliff. Midnighter didn’t smoke, but he needed it. Risking serious injury, I gripped the man by the shoulder, sat down on the floor in front of him. He blinked several times, heat building behind his eyes, his breathing, quickened. I could feel his heartbeats in his nose as his face flushed with shame. He sniffed, blood vessels in his nose constricting. 

   I held the spliff up to his mouth and he took it between his lips, gentle like feeding a baby deer at a petting zoo. I took a lighter from my pocket, flicked it on and told him to breathe in slowly as it lit it. Once it caught, he started to cough immediately. Poison, he screamed in his mind, poison, smoke inhalation, respiratory damage. I had never felt the computer before, never been close enough to to the man to hear it. It was awful. It was like The Everything, but sick. It reminded me of the urges in the mind of a POW, the compulsions in the mind of a traumatized child, the thoughts of a man lost at sea. Survival, tainted. 

   In his mind, he was murdering me. I could see it. He thought of thousands of ways to subdue me, neutralize my powers, ways to trap me in my body so I couldn’t use my powers but I also wouldn’t die, preventing the next shamen from being gifted. He knew every possible way I could stop him. He was narrowing the possibilities down, based on my state of intoxication—he could tell I was high. He could tell I could tell what his head was saying, and he knew I knew it wasn’t really him. We caught each others’ eyes and we both knew exactly what the other person was thinking. 

   It didn’t frighten me like it should have. Because I knew the Midnighter, and I knew he could control the thoughts. I was envious, though. How could he handle all that noise? Why couldn’t I do that? 

   Midnighter panted like a dog and reached for the spliff again, as my invasion unsettled him. His eyes were wide, pupils pointing in different directions, like a goldfish. He took a real puff of his own accord this time, only choking a bit. His eyes began to water. I could feel the heat settle in his lungs, the scratchy satisfaction in his throat. I almost groaned, it felt so good. 

   I took the joint from him, puffing it once before letting it burn on the side of the coffee table for a moment. I switched the television over to cable. Clicked a few channels before I found a mindless canned-laughter sitcom to look at while he rode the high. I put Jack’s tape back into the deck, began to rifle through the City God’s record collection.

   As I set up the turntable, I could sense a bit of familiarity that the Midnighter was feeling. He picked up the joint, held it between his fingertips and looked down at it, just watching the smoke curl into the air. I could see him now, much younger, the same spirit, but different quarter of it. He knew how to roll a joint. Knew what rolling paper tasted like. He remembered using notebook paper when he got desperate, paper from his math homework, looking for shake on the ground to save for later. He remembered swallowing printer paper, thinking it was acid, wasting $20 and a whole afternoon. The Midnighter didn’t remember, but some part of him knew it happened, not the conscious part but something deep and dark beneath the conscious part, a part locked away that could never ever be seen again, synapses long dead, broken and repurposed. 

   I’m not picky about music anymore. I used to be, I think, but when you know the motivations behind every song you hear, when you can feel the person writing it every time you hear it, everything starts to feel the same. Soulful and angry protest songs, bubble-gum flavored pop music, experimental noise-jazz, ska—everything blends together when all you can think about is the artist, their memories, their hardships, their hatred, their anger, their childhoods, their souls and spirits and how they all fit into the cosmic wheel. But I do know that Pink Floyd is good stoner music, especially for a first timer. I set the record the turntable and turn the music up louder than the television. 

   I take my seat back in front of Midnighter, who was now holding a burnt roach in his hands. I stare up at him. I take the spliff from his fingertips, and our skin brushes. He doesn’t like my touch, so I don’t reach any further. His face was bright red, his forehead starting to glisten with sweat. The whiney guitar in the song was making him anxious, the lack of a consistent beat in the song, the lack of spoken lyrics, the way the music clashed with the theme song of the sitcom on TV, how he couldn’t focus on anything, couldn’t concentrate, the floaty feeling from the pot, the itching in his throat, the threat of poisoning, it was causing him to shake with real, genuine fear. I could feel it all. I didn’t change the song, or the TV channel. I didn’t regret making him feel like this. At least his mind was here and not inside itself. I shook through the fear with him as he stared at the floor between us. 

   I could feel him panicking. It was strangely intoxicating. Kinda like what Jack and Angie and Shen were doing in the other room, but more intense somehow. Midnighter made me dizzy. 

   The way his throat was closing up, his breathing strained, growing more rapid, I could feel his face heat up even more, blood rushing, muscles clenching, hormones running wild, everything coming to a fever pitch as he tried to hold it in, I was waiting for him to tip over the edge, like an orgasm, like I was working him over. Then his breathing caught like cloth on a thorn before hot tears dripped from his eyes. His mouth peeled into a pathetic little pout, as he rushed to cover his face. I let out a breath of relief at the feeling. The pricks of his despair infesting me, how everything now felt heavy and warm, how it felt like falling, the full-body shakes and spasms, it was just like an orgasm. I’d never felt anything like that. It felt as good as it did bad. Shameful and sick, a release and a catharsis, exactly like sex. 

   I didn’t cry with him, I didn’t need to. He was doing enough for the both of us. Soon his breathy little whines turned into heaving coughs of sound, and then into near screams of anguish. I was watching a man fall apart in front of me, and all I could think to do was ride it out with him. 

   Eventually, he stopped. The record was still playing, the TV had gone to commercial, I had burned sucked down the second joint and had another at the ready. The Midnighter was curled into himself on the coffee table, his legs hanging off the table at awkward angles as he lay there on his side. His eyes were shut. He was breathing through his mouth, his nose swollen shut. His eyes were red, glassy, the panting groans he let out were hoarse. I sat on the couch and he followed eventually. We both made pretend like we were watching television. 

“Where’s Jacket?” Midnighter wasn’t really asking a question. He was telling me to fetch his dog for him. 

   I wished he hadn’t spoken. It kind of ruined the fantasy. The one where I don’t exist and I’m just an observer. My ambian was wearing off. I didn’t feel like being one body anymore. 

   Jacket crawled into Midnighter’s lap, rested his head onto a pillow that the man had set out for him. Midnighter gripped the dog’s back leg, placing his fingers over a pulse-point. He tried to take in breaths in time with the animal in his lap, but he wasn’t truly coming down. 

   Eventually, Angie stepped into the common area to retrieve a glass of water for Shen, and an ice pack for Jack. As she walked past the two of us, staring with red eyes into the TV, stinking of weed and staring off into space, she assumed exactly what I wanted her to assume. 

   Midnighter isn’t the only one who can think three steps ahead, and I just saved his ass in a way he would have never saved mine.

   Angie would retreat back to her love nest and giggle that Jeroen and M were high as balls and watching Cheers reruns. Shen would already be half asleep by the time Jack suggested they all get a shower before they head to bed. Apollo would return to find M missing from their flat and go looking for him. 

“Let her sleep, Jack.” Angie said. “Christ knows she needs it.”

   “Yeah, that was pretty intense.” Jack agreed.

“Not really what I was talking about but, yes, that too.” Angie threw a blanket over Shen’s dozing body. 

   “What’s all this?” Apollo put on a smile and an easy attitude in front of me, like I couldn’t feel the regret in his bones. 

I didn’t want to reply, but Midnighter wasn’t going to. “Cutting loose,” I tell him. “Guys’ night.”

   Apollo scrunched up his nose at the idea. “So, a guys’ night is where you neglect to shower, spend the day in your underwear, and make the communal couch smell like pot.” He’s mostly joking, but he is confused. He can tell something is wrong. 

“You wouldn’t get it,” I tell him. 

   He perches himself on the arm of the sofa where Midnighter had sunk into the cushions. He puts a hand to his husband’s face. “Are you alright?” He says, softly, like I’m not there. 

“No,” Midnighter tells him. “But, everything’s fine. I just-“

   Apollo shifts, like he’s trying to get closer to the other man but not crowd him. 

“I love you so much,” Midnighter says. He’s close to crying again. “We need to talk later.” 

   Apollo nods. Presses a long, warm kiss to Midnighter’s forehead, right on his hairline, above a gnarly scar, and I reach out so I can feel the touch on my own scalp. Apollo is so warm, his skin so soft, I can feel something delicate unfurling inside of the Midnighter, and an uneasy blanket drapes over Apollo’s shoulders, like something cold and confining. 

“I love you too,” Apollo says, pats Jacket on the head, and leaves us. 

   The Midnighter next to me was a gutted animal. I had my hands in his chest cavity. I could feel all the soft bits of him sloshing around, wet and delicate. His breathing was my breathing, and I could feel both his heartbeats in my chest, and I could feel the hollow part in his skull where machinery made its home, a metal parasite, feeding off his life. 

   We both blinked slowly as the record came to a stop. He brought his knees to his face, and ducked his head between them. He didn’t remember the parts of the videos that I could, as I remembered being the ghost of the man he was made out of, and all Midnighter could remember was being Midnighter. It had never bothered him before, being made out of a person. It bothered him now. Seeing his face without scars, a dead look behind his eyes, seeing himself screaming in pain he could only recall distantly, the video tapes a fogged-over mirror.

   It occurred to me, that in this moment, I could speak to him, as his younger self. I could talk to him with the memories and experiences of his past life, tell him things he needed to hear. Who Lewis really was, what had brought him there, his life before. Lewis, or the ghost of him, would have been glad to be alive. He would have loved to be in his right mind again, even with the computer, he would have been happy that Midnighter had taken that pain, the injustice, used it to fight for a better world. He would have been surprised to learn he had a husband, a daughter, a dog, a group of friends that cared about him, despite his antisocial tendencies. He would have enjoyed finding little bits of himself in the Midnighter, little things that lasted through the crucible—his sweet tooth, his music taste, this bad habit he had where he chewed on the inside of his cheek. 

   I could talk to him, like a channeled spirit through a medium. I could tell him Lewis didn’t matter. Lewis, himself, thought he didn’t matter. All he wanted was to be sane again, and if he died in the process, he hoped whatever he was doing could help someone else get better. In a way, he had accomplished that. His death did help people. His death saved the world over and over, and it was still saving the world. 

   Lewis didn’t matter, I want to tell him. You matter. You’re wasting your time on earth thinking about what could have been. You’re tearing yourself apart. You’re hurting people who love you.

   Of course, every person matters to someone, and Lewis mattered to more people than he thought, but that wasn’t the point. Even though he was dead, Midnighter was still here, and he could do things that Lewis wanted to but never could. 

   I felt like a time traveler in the past, like in some terrible movie Jack would enjoy. I felt, somehow, that what was happening was meant to happen, and I couldn’t interfere. Of course, that wasn’t really true, and I knew that. It was my job to heal. To help others, to do no harm through action or inaction. But I also knew Midnighter. I knew that no matter what I say, he wouldn’t be able to let go of the what-ifs. He needed to figure this out for himself. Maybe I was jealous of what he had made, and that’s why I didn’t say anything. Or maybe I knew he wouldn’t trust me if I did tell him all those things. Whatever it was, I didn’t say anything. 

   As his accelerated immune system processed the THC and filtered it out of his blood, he began to come down. When he did, he rose from his seat and went back to his flat. He didn’t thank me, but he didn’t have to. No one ever thanks their doctor. 

After Jenny was put to sleep, and after Midnighter finished washing up, he joined Apollo in their bed. 

   “Did you want to talk now?” Apollo offered. 

“Do you-“ Midnighter began, and then paused. “Do you remember when-“

   “It’s okay.” Apollo waited patiently, taking his husband’s hands.

“Do you remember when I told you we were just a tech demo?” Midnighter finished, finally.

   Apollo’s face hardened. “Bendix is dead, M.“

“I know that.” He said, scoffing.

   “I know you know that but it’s good to hear out loud sometimes.” Apollo smiled a bit, like it was a joke but it clearly wasn’t.

“When we were in his lab a while back,” Midnighter said. “I took something.”

   “What did you take?” Apollo questioned. 

“Demo reels. Product presentations. Video logs.” 

   “What?” Apollo’s grip on his hands loosened. 

“Video tapes. Us from before.” Midnighter explained. 

   “How many?” 

“Thirty-two. Most of them are me.” Midnighter revealed.

   “You watched them?” Apollo gave him a disgusted look, Midnighter scooted closer in the bed.

“Just mine.” He reassured, thought it didn’t do much.

   “M…” 

“It’s me from…” Midnighter blinked, scoffed, huffed at himself. 

   “From before.” Apollo finished for him.

“We were all people before, you were right.” Midnighter said, quickly, like he was being timed. “I was…he was so fucked up…the guy I was…like he wasn’t in his right mind.”

   Apollo gave a steely response. “That’s not you, you said it yourself-“

“Jenny changed that.” Midnighter told him, plainly. 

   “What do you mean?” 

“Seeing a person grow up like this, watching her develop,” He shook his head, held on tight to the other man’s fingers. “I can’t stop thinking about myself…younger. A baby. Where I was. Who I was.”

   “What does that mean?” Apollo asked, lost. 

“I have to know,” Midnighter told him. “I don’t have a plan to find out, not yet. But I needed to tell you. I just…I have to know.” 

   They embraced and they were silent for the rest of the night, until they each fell asleep. I had re-upped my dose by that time of the night, so all I could feel were external things. What they looked like, what they said. I couldn’t tell what they felt. What Midnighter was so torn up about. 

  Even so, I could tell that the world’s finest couple was hanging on by a thread, because I had seen it before with my parents, with my own marriage, with every failed marriage I had ever been in as another person, through The Everything. They held each other like they were being torn apart. I know the man I was before would have felt some sense of schadenfreude, seeing a married couple fight and break up, but me, now, who was everyone who ever lived, I couldn’t feel that now. I couldn’t feel much of anything. 

   But, I could feel that, in a month or so, The Midnighter would leave his husband and his daughter behind to go “find himself.” 

Fucking hippy.