Chapter Three
It was odd, sitting on his mattress and actually getting to listen to Hilker work. No writhing in pain, no extended misery as his body fought to recover from the damage of the holy silver. Not even Landon’s voice, telling him to hang in there. “You can’t die on me now, you hear?”
Like this, it seemed easy to last one more day.
“You alive?” came Landon’s hesitant question, about five minutes after Isaiah sat down.
“Hm? Yeah. Just thinking.”
“About?”
“You, mostly,” Isaiah admitted. He wrapped his arms around himself, wishing for the thousandth time that he had a blanket so he could at least pretend at a hug. “I miss you, princess.”
A rapping came from the other side of the wall.
“I’m right here, whipping boy,” they said.
“I’m happy to shout at Hilker next time if you want.
I still think he’s a fucking bastard with a stone heart whose eyes should be pecked out by crows.
” They lifted their voice for the last bit, and Isaiah swore he heard a snort from across the lab.
“Probably,” Isaiah admitted. “But the unholy gold is nice.”
“I’m… glad.” Landon didn’t sound glad.
For a moment, that left a spark of panic deep in Isaiah’s chest. There was something wrong, something he was missing, the way he’d missed the fact that Justin was never, ever going to love him back for all those fucking years—except Landon wasn’t Justin.
Despite their shared bitterness and ferocity, their anger came from two very different places, Justin’s the jaded, weathered violence of a man who cared deeply in the only way he knew how, and Landon’s...
At heart, Landon was still just a kid locked in a cage.
“Are you okay, princess?” Isaiah asked.
“Of course,” Landon said, far too quickly.
Isaiah let the statement hang, tugging at his cuticles. “You know you can tell me. It won’t hurt.” He added, more quietly, “You could never hurt me the way they do,” even though he knew it wasn’t true. Not in the same way, maybe. But in worse ways. More devastating ones.
“I know.” Landon rapped on the wall, a soft tap, tap, tap, that made them feel intimately close and a thousand miles away all at once. “It’s just, nothing I could do has ever stopped them. And now that fucking scientist brings in some shit that makes your life better, and it works.”
“And it reminds you just how useless you are,” Isaiah concluded.
When Justin had needed saving, whose hand had he grabbed?
Not the vampire who’d been there for him all his life, who’d offered him everything and more for every moment of every day of every year, but the one who’d stumbled into the spotlight and almost gotten them all killed for it.
Landon didn’t respond.
Isaiah heard them shifting, the vibration echoing through the wall. He settled his forehead against it. “You know what I was thinking about you?”
“That I’m hot as fuck.”
“Not hot enough to bully me, bitch.”
Landon laughed, short and soft, like Isaiah knew they would.
“I was thinking that you’re the only reason I’m still alive. You have given me the motivation to keep surviving, regardless of how much it hurts or how hard my body tries to fail on me.”
From the lab beyond, it had gotten strangely quiet, but Isaiah didn’t let that stop him.
“You’re not useless. You give me strength and courage.
You make me smile—you make me feel like a person again.
” He didn’t want to keep speaking, didn’t want to watch even this little love be crushed again, whether by Landon or, more likely, the reality of their situation.
But he couldn’t not say it either, the words barreling out of him: “It hurts to be here. But before this, it hurt just to be, and the way it feels to laugh with you gives me hope that it won’t always hurt. ”
Landon didn’t respond immediately, and when they did, it was not what Isaiah expected: not a joke or a kind sentiment, but something raw.
“I know you know about the knife… incident.” They paused, and Isaiah was sure, without even seeing them, that the fact their interactions with Varsity had let that slip still haunted them. “But I…”
As the silence lingered, Isaiah’s chest began to ache, each breath a little more painful than the last. He knew where this was going.
The weight of it was enough to predict its barreling shape, ruthless and unrelenting.
Just its presence hurt. Softly, he said, “If you aren’t ready to talk about it, that’s okay. ”
“I know,” Landon responded, a tiny sniffle at the end. “You never push me to. But I want to tell you this, because we’re friends, right?”
“The very best friends,” Isaiah reassured them, and maybe that was because neither of them had anyone else, but it felt no different in that moment, all their emotions heightened for it.
Landon sniffled again. Their voice came out low and taut.
“Even after my mother took away everything sharp, I still tried to kill myself, almost once a year. It was less successful every time, until I’d lie in bed and dream of it instead, a hundred different ways that could never actually work, but that felt better than not thinking about it—and better than actually doing it had, to be honest.”
The worst of the pain loosened from Landon’s voice and that lifted the weight on Isaiah’s chest. They had both been clutched by the darkness, but they were still here.
He didn’t know if that was strength, or resilience, or just luck—and maybe it didn’t matter.
What mattered was the two of them, sitting back to back against the same wall, despite everything.
“So, I know what it’s like not to want to be,” Landon concluded.
“And maybe that’s just because I’m locked in here, but I’ve been in this cell for so long, everything before this seems imaginary.
Like maybe I made up my home, and my brother, and the dreams I had for myself—for both of us, really.
” They laughed, a sharp but hollow sound.
“We thought we’d go to Europe for university, and change the world after—do all the good, decent things with our money that my mother would never dare. That all feels fake now.”
“It’s still real, I promise.” Isaiah said it to himself as much as to Landon.
The good times—amazing times—he’d had with Justin had been real too, even if the man he’d wanted to spend the rest of his life with had redirected his love toward someone else.
That hadn’t made it all a lie. The only falsehoods were the ones Isaiah had told himself: that Justin would want him, if he held on tight enough, for long enough.
A part of him still thought, maybe, if he hadn’t let go…
Isaiah shivered the sickly torment away. “Tell me about your brother?” Landon had mentioned him a few times, but they’d never expanded on things, and Isaiah had always guessed it was because their relationship had been either very bad or else too good to bring into a place like this.
“Fucking Quentin,” Landon grumbled, but it was the happiest they’d sounded so far.
“He was—is, I guess, technically—my fraternal twin. But also my best friend, and my whole life then. Twins aren’t always like that, they’re just siblings like other siblings, but we…
We were the kind of opposites that fit. I’d drag Quinn into adventures and he’d stop me from being stupid.
I was confident and angry, and he was smart and kind, and I thought we could do anything together.
” They sniffled again, despite the smile in their voice, and Isaiah could feel little pieces of himself breaking and knitting back together at the sound.
“Didn’t expect to die without him, though. ”
“You’re not dead yet, princess.”
“No fucking way?” Landon faked a gasp, before snorting. “Figured this was definitely purgatory.”
Despite their attempt to skate back into humor, Isaiah held tight to his sincerity. “There’s nothing you need to purify. I’m not a real whipping boy and you have never deserved any of this.”
The cell beside him went quiet for a moment, before Landon responded, weaker, “I know. Still feels like I’m doing something wrong, every time they pull you out instead of me.”
Despite the pain, and the terror, and the scars, that had always been the worst part about it—that even if Isaiah took every bad thing for them, Landon couldn’t be happy over it. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore. With the unholy gold, the lab tests barely hurt at all.”
A rogue sniffle crossed the barrier between them, and Isaiah could almost picture Landon: still just a child in a cage. “You sure?”
“Yeah. Let me take this, princess. I’ve got you.” Even if he had no one who could offer him the same in return, at least he could do this. For one more day, every day until the end. “I can slay the dragons.”
“Set me free?” Landon whispered, so low that Isaiah could barely hear it.
But he felt it still, deep between his ribs. “Someday, it won’t hurt just to be.”
And for a moment, as Landon sighed, Isaiah imagined that could be true for them both.
“So, you won’t free us,” Isaiah said, leaning against the frame of his cell doorway while Hilker prepped the lab for the day.
It had been nearly a week since Hilker had first brought the unholy gold into the lab—a period which Isaiah could only track by the fact that Landon’s daily meals changed in a regular pattern, and that Hilker didn’t work during what Isaiah assumed were weekend nights.
Varsity had grown so accustomed to the new system that she hadn’t even shown up the last two days, leaving Hilker to casually escort Isaiah around the lab on his own time.
He’d even taken to opening Isaiah’s door on his way in, letting Isaiah come to the table when he felt like it, wander through the lab if he wished.
Yesterday Hilker had offered him half of a sandwich he’d bought on the way there.
It was the most delicious thing Isaiah had ever tasted.