Chapter 33
Live Action Adaptations Always Suck
The stranger had his finger inside the wound.
Levi could feel the knuckle against the shattered edge of his kneecap as a nail scraped cartilage.
The sky above the tree line was the color it had been in the first loops — purple-black, with bright stars, strangely beautiful for what was happening.
The stranger’s face was above him, close, those mismatched eyes studying the way Levi’s mouth moved when the pain crested.
“You were cutting wood with him,” the stranger said. “Why?”
Levi couldn’t answer because his jaw was locked. The finger rotated again and the stranger’s other hand was on his jaw, turning his face, holding him still. The stranger said something else that Levi couldn’t hear over the roaring in his own head, and then the gun came up.
He woke up in his apartment, in the dark, drenched in sweat, his knee throbbing with a pain that wasn’t there, and he was devastatingly hard.
He lay in the dark, his heart hammering from the dream, his skin damp with sweat, phantom pain in his knee, and underneath all of it, his body was aroused in a way it had no right to be after a dream about being shot, interrogated, and killed.
My mind is broken.
Like every other time this had happened over the last two weeks, he waited for the arousal to fade, and somehow the waiting was worse than the nightmare.
The nightmare was something that happened to him; the arousal was something that was still happening inside him, and he couldn’t blame the game for it, because the game was over and his body was still doing… this…
He isn’t gay. The system made him feel things.
He has months of recovery and a company to run.
It wasn’t real, he told himself. Levi kept Dr. Kane’s words in his head and laid them down whenever his body started reaching, like a weight he could put on top of what his body was doing.
His body would settle eventually under that weight, and then he could get up.
The first morning he said them six times aloud.
By the end of the first week, he stopped counting.
He repeated them in his mind now without thinking.
There are no resets, he added, because that one was harder and needed more force. There are no resets. It is good that Asher isn’t the same out here. He’s going to be a better person now. So am I.
The arousal went away. He turned on his side to stare at the wall and didn’t go back to sleep.
The car smelled like pine air freshener and coffee.
Levi watched the city go past through the window, his reflection thin and translucent over the buildings.
Late afternoon, the light going gold. His face in the glass looked like someone he used to know — thinner, darker under the eyes, the feeding tube taped along his cheek and looped over his ear.
The physical therapist always looked at it first, then at him, every session, a quick flick of the eyes that said you still have that in.
He was supposed to have had it out by now.
The discharge paperwork said soft foods within a few days, and it had been two weeks, but he couldn’t chew.
He tried. He stood at his kitchen counter with a piece of bread or a scrambled egg, put it in his mouth, and his jaw would work for ten seconds before he’d gag.
Every time. His mouth filled with saliva and the food would come back up, or he’d spit it into the sink, standing there with his hands on the counter breathing until it passed.
Sometimes he didn’t make it to the sink.
The counter was clean now in the places he’d cleaned and sticky in the places he hadn’t.
So he had the tube, a case of meal replacements in his cabinet — chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, flavors printed on the boxes in cheerful fonts — and a sixty-milliliter syringe called a bolus that he used to push them through the tube and into his stomach.
He was supposed to do it three times a day.
He didn’t. Some days he didn’t do it at all.
He knew the math. He’d lost twelve pounds in the system; he was losing more now and he could feel it in the way his pants didn’t sit right on his hips.
He was supposed to care, but he kept forgetting to.
His cane was propped against the seat next to him. He only vaguely remembered Paul handing it to him when he got back to his apartment, and at first that bothered him…knowing that at any point someone from Virtual Vice could show up on his doorstep. He didn’t care about that anymore, either.
He’d been home for two weeks, but the shape of those two weeks was a thing he could see from the inside of the car like a building he’d walked around and never gone into.
He still had three nightmares a night, minimum — the stranger in the forest, the stranger in the barbershop, the stranger in the sanitarium.
Always the stranger, never Asher. His mind wouldn’t call him Asher in the dreams. It kept going back to before the name, before the alliance, before any of the complicated architecture that grew between them, and in the dreams there was only the stranger.
Only the pain and the arousal that came after as his body woke up, reaching for the man who had been hurting him.
The flashbacks came while he was awake — a hand on the back of his neck, the smell of skin that wasn’t there, the taste of blood in his mouth…
. He’d be standing in his kitchen or sitting on his couch or leaning against the shower wall and the apartment would go thin around him.
He’d be back in the game, or he’d think he was back in the game, or he wouldn’t know whether he was back in the game, and there was no way to test it.
He tried. He pinched himself. He bit the inside of his cheek until it bled. Pain was real in the game, too.
There were things in the apartment that weren’t there.
The sound of wood blocks clacking like a metronome sometimes became deafeningly loud.
The scrape of metal fingertips. Shadows moved across his floor when the wind shifted outside, so he covered the windows until everything was shadow.
He knew he was unwell. He knew. He stood very still when it happened and waited for the apartment to settle around him again, and the apartment did, eventually.
He’d lie down and not move for a long time.
He thought, at first, that he might be still inside.
That this was a new game where the AI reproduced a faithful rendering of his apartment, dropped him in it, and was waiting to see what he did.
He held that idea for an entire afternoon, then let it go, because it didn’t help.
If he was still inside, there was nothing to do — no Asher to find, no scenario to escape, no axe to pick up.
If he was outside, there was also nothing to do, because the love hadn’t been real.
Either way, the move was the same: wait.
So he waited.
He hadn’t turned on his computer. He hadn’t turned on his TV. The Switch was on the coffee table where it had been the day he put the headset on, and every time he looked at it he thought about Ethan teasing him over a “fruit stacking game”. He couldn’t touch it.
His phone was somewhere on the kitchen counter.
He hadn’t picked it up. He didn’t know if it had a charge.
Peter would have messaged…maybe. He couldn’t remember Peter’s face and he didn’t have the energy to try.
What would he even say? Hey, sorry I disappeared, I was trapped in a VR simulation where a psychopath fell in love with me and now the VR company is paying my rent and I can’t chew food.
He’d composed the text in his head a hundred times.
He couldn’t send it. The papers he’d signed said he couldn’t send it.
He couldn’t have sent it anyway. He didn’t have the words for what would come after the joke.
He pressed his fingertips against the side of his neck, stroking the place where Asher’s teeth lived over so many lives.
It was gone. As soon as he felt steady enough his first day home, he hobbled to his bathroom to look in the mirror and, instead of noticing all the changes in his face or his hollow eyes, he noticed his neck and how empty it was.
He pressed his thumbnail into the place where the mark should have been and watched the skin go pink.
He still did that every morning. He’d done it this morning.
He pressed his nails into his neck, watching the skin redden, and he stayed there until it faded pink and vanished.
The mark was gone and it was not coming back, because the mouth that made it was attached to a man who didn’t exist. Levi tried so hard to remind himself it wasn’t a good mark.
Asher did that in the sanitarium after holding his head still and making him swallow.
Asher was deliberately cruel then, and deliberately cruel when biting into him.
It wasn’t love, Levi tried to tell himself, he wanted Elliot to back off.
He owned you in there because he didn’t know how to be a person.
That’s not love.
But he would let Asher do it again. He’d let him do all of it.
He’d let Asher hold his head still, call him names, delight in his suffering, and bite him at the end.
He would do it tonight, in his own apartment, on the couch near the Switch on the coffee table, if Asher came through the door.
He wanted the cruelty. He wanted the attention.
He wanted to be marked again. He wanted to be someone’s.
But he was no one’s, and he had been no one’s for two weeks.
Maybe that didn’t count either, he thought, maybe none of it counted. If the love hadn’t been real, the sex wasn’t real, the cruelty wasn’t real either. If the cruelty hadn’t been real, the marking hadn’t been real. Nothing was missing because nothing had ever been there.