Chapter 44 - Alexei
One was compatible.
Marco would get a heart.
I stood in the hallway when the doctor said it, watching Marco’s parents break open in front of everyone.
His mother pressed both hands over her mouth.
His father turned away so no one would see his face.
I watched them and for one single moment I could breathe.
Just one. The air went all the way down into my lungs without catching on the barbed wire that had lived there for months.
Then the moment ended.
They went into Marco’s room to see him, to sign the papers. I walked out and gave them a few moments with him alone.
The hospital stairs were cold under my hands.
I sat on the third step down from the landing, elbows on my knees, staring at the scuffed floor.
The transplant had a list of risks longer than the list of people I had killed.
Rejection. Infection. Bleeding. The heart could refuse him.
His body could refuse the heart. He could open his eyes tomorrow or he could never open them again. I couldn’t let myself breathe properly.
I needed the surgery to go well.
I needed him to wake up.
Only then would I be able to breathe.
Footsteps stopped beside me.
Rei sat down on the step to my left. He didn’t look at me at first. He just sat there, hands loosely clasped between his knees, the same way I was sitting.
“I know what you did,” he said.
My throat tightened. I swallowed once. “Dimitri has a big mouth?”
He shook his head. “No. I just… like to eavesdrop sometimes.”
I nodded slowly. Somewhere down the corridor a cart rattled past. “Ah. You must be happy.”
He turned his head. “About?”
“You don’t like me. Which is mutual, by the way. But you get what you want.” My voice stayed flat. “Marco will hate me when he finds out.”
Rei’s mouth pressed into a thin line. He looked away for a second, then back. When he spoke again the sharpness was gone.
“It’s true I don’t like you,” he admitted. “But I’m not blind. I know you love him. You’ve been there for him throughout all these months. When he was feeling bad I know you were the one holding him through the pain. I’m grateful for that. I don’t wish you bad.”
I stared at him. I didn’t expect this so I didn’t know what to say.
Rei kept looking at me. “Were the people you killed bad?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
And it didn’t matter. I’d do it again.
Rei swallowed.
I watched the movement of his throat and knew exactly what was happening behind those eyes.
He hated violence. Right now he was tearing himself in half: on one side his best friend would wake up with a beating heart; on the other, one hundred and forty-seven people were dead so that heart could exist. The arithmetic didn’t sit cleanly in a mind like his.
He looked down at his hands. “I don’t think he will hate you…”
I turned my head slightly, giving him my full attention. Rei sighed, the sound tired. “I don’t think Marco is capable of hatred in general. But even if he is, I don’t think it can ever be towards you. He talks about you like you are an angel, you know?”
A sound almost left my throat. Almost a laugh. It died before it reached the air.
Angel.
There was nothing holy left in me.
“He never had one bad thing to say about you. It was always about how you made him feel loved and safe… and how much he loves your smile.”
Something inside my chest folded in on itself.
I needed Marco to open his eyes. I needed to see the colour of them again.
I needed to know whether that love would still be there once he found out the truth, even though…
I didn’t want to tell him. The thought of watching his face change when he understood what I had done made my hands go cold.
I wondered if Rei would be the one to put the knife in.
“I won’t tell him.” His words came as if he had reached into my skull and pulled the fear out by its roots.
He met my eyes without flinching. “The thing is… he won’t hate you. But he will hate himself. He’s so kind. The thought that he took a person’s heart - someone who could have been innocent - will destroy him. He will hate himself.”
A fine tremor started in my fingers and travelled up my arms. Marco already carried too much self-loathing. If he ever learned that one hundred and forty-seven lives had been erased so his could continue, he would look at his own chest and see a graveyard.
A thick lump rose in my throat. I couldn’t swallow it down.
Rei’s voice softened further. He sighed again. “I won’t tell him,” he repeated.
And I wasn’t sure I should either.
***
I leaned over him and pressed my lips to his forehead.
They had already begun preparing him for the surgery. I stayed there longer than I should have, forehead against his, trying to pour every unbroken part of myself into him before they took him away.
I was scared. I was so fucking scared.
I cupped the side of his face with shaking fingers and brought my mouth close to his ear so the words would belong only to him.
“Be strong for me, little star,” I whispered. “I need you to come back to me. I need these beautiful eyes to open again and look at me the way they always have. Please… fight your way back. I don’t know how to exist in a world that doesn’t have you in it.”
My throat closed. I kissed his cheek, then the corner of his mouth. I lowered my face into the curve of his neck and breathed him in one last time. I tried to lock it inside my lungs forever, as if storing it carefully enough might keep him tethered to me.
Hands appeared at the sides of the bed. I stepped back only when I had no choice.
I watched the bed roll down the corridor, watched the doors swing shut.
The hours that followed were the hardest of my life.
I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t speak. I walked the same stretch of hallway until the floor blurred beneath my feet, counting ceiling tiles and scuff marks and the exact number of steps it took to reach the double doors and turn around again. Every time those doors opened my heart stopped cold.