Work Text:
To believe in heaven. To believe the humans
when they say they love her. To not want sometimes
to watch them cry. To not want so badly
to be touched, badly enough to slice herself open,
to trap a man in a corner,
to peel the skin from her face
and not let him go until he looks.
F. Choi, “What a Cyborg Wants”, (2019).
***
“What do you even mean, Kendall?”
Stewy’s gold earring glints in the light, he’s letting his beard gray. Kendall wants him more than he wants to continue breathing. Kendall, in fact, wants to discontinue breathing. Kendall wants nothing and everything.
Kendall thinks Stewy looks bored.
He takes the cigarette out of his mouth, watches himself carry out the action. He’s in a pressed suit, and briefly wonders why he bothers with even this anymore. There is nobody to impress, no castle to climb and make himself the king of. What remains of us, he thinks. What remains of anything.
He holds up his cigarette to his face, holds up his hand to his face, his sleeve to his face. He sees, vaguely, Stewy watching him watch himself do it. “What is there for me?” He asks. “There’s nothing left.” He glances leftwards towards his hand. “I look at this and I don’t even know if that’s me, anymore.”
“This isn’t fun,” Stewy says, baldly. “It used to be that you’d get depressed and start getting really into watching roller coaster videos or something. Now you want me to tell you if you’re real or a simulation.”
Kendall unfurls his palm and looks at it, considering. He repeats the motion, once, twice. Measures the sensation. “Do you think I could be a simulation?”
“No,” Stewy says. “Simulations would be more Blade Runner. Huge holograms. Y’know. You’re too Do Androids Dream.”
“There’s something in that,” Kendall says. “In you saying that.”
“I’m sure there is.” Stewy sounds less than interested. “Don’t tell me you’ve been reading forums,” he says. “I hate it when you start reading forums. You’re real, you’re real. God fucking help us all, Ken, you’re real. Stop reading forums.”
“Do you think there’s something symbolic about us being in a club bathroom right now?”
Stewy inhales with fervor like he’s gathering strength. “No,” he says.
“Full circle,” Kendall says, looking around. “Was the first time we…” He still, somehow, can’t make himself say it out loud. He catches a guy’s eye in the mirror, and resists a shudder at the real human sensation of being looked up and down.
“No,” Stewy says, an echo. “That was in my childhood bedroom.”
“That was just experimental,” Kendall says. “That doesn’t count. I mean, y’know. The full shebang.”
Stewy is visibly repulsed by shebang. “Now that was experimental,” he says. “That I can’t remember.” He sucks his teeth and shrugs at Kendall, unconcernedly pantomiming sheepish. “I was on molly.”
“Whatever,” Kendall says. This, for some reason, flattens him and makes everything feel sort of mind-warpingly real. “You were always on molly.”
Stewy doesn’t reply. When Kendall blinks twice in the mirror, noticing more about himself -- a freckle on his neck, the white crescent on his chin where he caught himself shaving at seventeen, his one gray eyebrow hair -- he sees Stewy pull out his phone, scroll, scroll, and type something out one handed, one thumbed. He stares at Stewy, willing him to look up. He imagines watching himself in the mirror reaching out and shaking Stewy, making him look at him. Some version of himself that managed to respect himself enough to ask for it.
Instead he watches as his own hand reaches for his own tie and feels the knot steady against his neck.
“Stew,” he says, and watches how this doesn’t make him look up either. “Everything okay?”
“One sec,” Stewy says, and then Kendall watches how long it takes him to look up from his phone and counts the beats. Twelve seconds. “Yeah, fresh as a fucking daisy. Just closing something up.” He nods at Kendall. “Are we done here?”
Kendall gets shoved bodily by someone wanting to get to the mirror and do a line. He pulls himself from the sight like a dog from its own sick. “Uh.” The sound breaks and cracks into incredulous laughter. “Yeah, we’re fucking done here. Thanks for coming,” he says, trying to make it funny. He fails, feels his conductor’s baton snap.
“Yeah, no problem,” Stewy says, voice tight and bitchy. “Of course I fucking came,” he mutters, as he reaches out to settle a hand on Kendall’s shoulder and then guide him meandering out of the club. The bass of the music pulses and leaps at them, the lights flash in simmering waves of color. “Fucking made me your emergency contact, stupid fuck, of course I fucking came.”
“Not my fault someone called you,” Kendall says, because it’s not. “I didn’t call you, not my fault the guy who found me was a pussy.”
“Twenty-five year olds take panic attacks seriously now, Ken. You should know that, from how many you fuck.” Stewy says, still acting the shepherd. “Of course they called me. You can’t just have them and act like it’s still about you getting to the center of you or whatever. Now you’re just forty five and sitting down in puddles of Jäger and unable to breathe.”
“He was still a pussy.”
“Okay,” Stewy says. They emerge on the street, the shock of headlights appearing, receding, appearing again. He waves a hand over Kendall’s eyes like he’s checking his vision. “Do you still need me to do suicide watch?”
“I’m not going to kill myself.”
“Uh-huh,” Stewy says. He holds both Kendall’s shoulders and tilts him back so he can consider him. “I can tell when you’re lying, you know.” There’s a pulse at his jaw where he grinds his teeth. It settles Kendall, to know that he’s put him on edge.
“Shows how much you know,” Kendall says. “Since I’m not even lying.”
“Yeah,” Stewy says, “whatever.”
He puts his hand on Kendall’s shoulder again, like he’s a child he needs to stop from running off. “I’ll call a car.”
“Where are we going?”
“Where do you think,” Stewy says, tapping away again. Kendall watches him funneling attention into something other than him. It eats at him. “Mine.”
Guilt rises, heavy and acrid. “Stew,” he says.
“Don’t worry,” Stewy says. “I can make you suck me off if that will make it better for you.”
Kendall sets his jaw, because that does make it infinitely better for him.
“Fuck you,” he says.
“Yeah, okay,” Stewy says, glancing up and tugging Kendall towards the road. “Car’s here.”