Chapter 14
Overburdened
Levi heard himself gasp and his hands flew to his temples, making sure there was nothing pushing inside his skull. He felt down his face and neck, wincing as his fingers brushed the bite mark.
Why…? We’re not on the ship? Why did the game change before the end?
What about the white room?
What did I do wrong?
Asher sat beside him in a dark blue dress shirt that looked surprisingly good on a man who was usually covered in someone else’s blood, his sleeves pushed up to reveal his muscular forearms. His hand rested on Levi’s thigh beneath the table, tracing absent circles that meant Asher had been here for a while.
“Hey,” Asher rumbled with a gentle smile. “There you are.”
Ethan on the floor. The creature…
His chest stopped working right. The air went in too fast and didn’t reach anywhere it was supposed to.
His heart was loud in his throat and his wrists and behind his eyes.
The room was warm and full of people as his ribs were trying to fold inward around the place his lungs used to be.
He couldn’t breathe. He needed to breathe.
“Levi?”
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
“Baby, look at me.” Asher grabbed his face, his hands surprisingly gentle as he turned Levi’s head. It didn’t matter. Levi couldn’t breathe.
He was going to suffocate at the table. He tried to tell Asher, but he opened his mouth and nothing came out between his useless, ragged breaths. He grabbed the front of Asher’s shirt, trying over and over to make a sound come out of himself.
Nothing.
Ethan on the floor.
Asher’s arm was around his waist, lifting him from the chair, and Levi’s legs shook with the effort of standing.
“Is he okay?” Zoe called. “He looks—”
“He’s fine,” Asher snapped, steering him toward the banquet room doors. “He just needs air.”
The hallway was carpeted. Levi’s feet registered the softness of it after hours of metal deck plating, the muted green walls were adorned with framed photographs of mountains, and none of it was real.
Everything around him was fake but Ethan was real.
He had been real. He wasn’t anything anymore because Levi killed him.
Levi’s legs simply stopped working, the connection between his brain and his body severing at the point where the grief met hyperventilation, and he went down to the carpet with Asher’s arm still around him.
“Levi, baby, look at me,” Asher whispered.
Levi couldn’t respond because his lungs had forgotten how to expand.
“The room is twenty feet away, can you give me twenty feet?” Asher murmured as he pulled Levi back to his feet.
He walked. He didn’t know how. Everything was a blur as the images cycled through his mind, over and over.
He had kept them neat and separate, bits to mourn instead of the whole shape of it, because the shape of it was too much.
That creature broke the containers that helped him keep them sorted… why did it do that?
Why did it pick me?
Why did they pick me?
Why do I have to be the one?
The key card worked on the second try. Asher’s hand guided him through the door and beside the bed, but Levi just sat on the ground, his back to the mattress, and wrapped his arms around his own ribs as his ribcage collapsed inward and squeezed his heart.
His whole body felt too hot and too cold and all he wanted to do was to make it stop hurting, or maybe make it hurt more. He still couldn’t breathe.
“I’m here. I’m right here. One second, baby, one second—” Asher was at the door, the lock clicking, the chain sliding into its track, and then he was back on the floor beside Levi, dropping to his knees and folding down lower, his arms coming around Levi and pulling him sideways into his chest. “I’ve got you. ”
The sound that tore out of Levi didn’t sound like him. It didn’t sound like a person at all; it was low and airless, coming from somewhere deeper than his lungs.
“I’ve got you, baby. Breathe. Just try to breathe for me.” Asher’s hand cupped the back of his head, his other arm wrapping all the way around Levi to pull him in tight enough that Levi could feel Asher’s heartbeat against his cheek.
He tried to inhale and the air went somewhere that wasn’t his lungs , coming back out as another broken sound, worse than the first, and his fists went into the fabric at Asher’s chest, because if he didn’t hold on now, he would fall somewhere. He didn’t know where, but he knew it in his bones.
“My—” The word barely made it out. “My brother—”
“I know. I know, I know, I know.”
“He was — I found him on the — I had to—” Levi sobbed into Asher’s chest.
“I’ve got you. You don’t have to say it,” Asher whispered, beginning to rock Levi gently.
Levi’s mouth wouldn’t stop. “The machines were breathing for him and he wasn’t — and they gave me the clipboard, Asher, they gave me…” Levi grit his teeth, shaking as he tried to force himself to stop sobbing. He couldn’t. “I signed it….I signed it—”
“Shh. Shh, baby,” Asher whispered into his hair, kissing the top of his head.
“I killed him!” Levi wailed , slamming his fist into Asher’s chest. “I killed him. I killed my fucking brother!”
Asher’s hand tightened at the back of his skull, and when he spoke into Levi’s hair his voice was softer than anything Levi had ever heard. “No, you didn’t, baby. You didn’t.”
Levi’s sob cracked in half around the words.
“You stayed with him and you made the hard choice, right? because it was the right thing to do. Do you hear me? You did the right thing,” Asher whispered fiercely, squeezing Levi tighter to his chest. Levi nodded, barely, into the wet patch spreading across Asher’s chest. “Good boy. Don’t forget it, Levi. You did the right thing.”
Levi’s mouth stopped trying to make words and he let the sobs come in waves that had him curling inward, his stomach aching as he stayed pressed against Asher.
The sound of his grief filled the hotel room, everywhere at once, and underneath all of it, Asher’s heartbeat remained against Levi’s cheek.
He stayed in the arms that held him while they had been crushed and suffocated, the same arms that had held him under water while humming to him, aching for the gentle touch of hands that had killed him.
The embrace was tender and reassuring and everything Asher wasn’t, and Levi pressed closer into it anyway because it was the only thing in the room that felt like air.
Levi sobbed until the sobs lost their force and became shaking, and the shaking became trembling, and the trembling became just his body pressed against Asher’s, emptied out, his hands still in fists.
“Tell me what to do.” Asher’s voice was quieter now, smaller, like something in him hadn’t come back from the airlock yet. “Just tell me what you need. I’ll do it. Anything.”
“Just—” Levi’s voice was destroyed, “hold me.”
“Okay. Okay, I’ve got you,” Asher said. “I’ll always have you. I love you, Levi. I love you.”