Malcolm - Post Chapter Twelve (Patreon)

The dark was a sinister place to be. Rarely did it offer anything friendly. Instead, it hid those who would look into the face of nothing and smile at the opportunity it gave them.  Malcolm knew the dark well. He had traversed it for years. Used it to his advantage. And as the lights around him were snuffed out one by one, he felt it consume him in a way that he hadn’t for so very long.

Hazel greeted him with tears. An explanation of some sort falling between broken sobs.  He knew he should wait with her. Hold her through it all. But he walked out into the night, the chaos swirling across the tearing sky in a miasma of pain and confusion.  He wasn’t going to let him get away. Not this time.

He found Milo in a dilapidated hovel, half in rubble.  Broken spinning wheels lay splintered on their side while jars of buttons and thimbles were cracked across the floor. It used to be where Milo had worked, back when he was a child. Apparently, it was nothing more than a forgotten memory, important only to the two of them.

Milo looked up as Malcolm entered the room, his face pale and his freckles standing out in the small pulsing light that remained in the corner.  His lips were parted, hands clasped desperately before him and he looked at Malcolm like he could make it all just go away.

“Are they alive?” he whispered.

Malcolm stalked halfway across the room, watching as Milo scrambled off the crate he sat on, stumbling over his own feet as he tried to escape. Whatever look he had seen cross Malcolm’s face was not one of compassion and open understanding.

“What did you do?” Malcolm hissed.

Milo put a broken wheel between them, gripping the wood of the spokes and staring at Malcolm pleadingly. “Fuck, Mal, are they fucking alive?” he shouted.

Malcolm knocked the wheel out of the way, shoving at Milo’s chest until the younger man's back hit the wall with a dull thud. Milo grunted in pain, moving to escape, but Malcolm held him there, fingers gripping at the chains around his neck, pulling them tight while his other hand splayed across Milo’s chest, pinning him in place.

“Do you care?”

“I was trying to save them!”

Malcolm slammed him hard against the wall. “Sacrifice is not saving, Milo.”

“The market is dying, Mal. You knew it then and you know it now. But instead of the muffled screams you heard back when you were around, it's a deafening roar. I can barely even hear myself breathe!”

“You think that matters? You think your pain in this situation means anything? You were supposed to protect them!”

At that, Milo shoved back. Both hands planted on Malcolm’s chest, he pushed with everything he had, sending Malcolm careening back and knocking into the broken wheel. “I am protecting them! I have given up everything to protect them.” The last word ended on a crack. When Malcolm looked up, he could see the tears gathering. Milo’s hands trembled as fear and sorrow and emotions he probably couldn’t understand coursed through his body until he was a shell of a man Malcolm knew he could be.

“Every day,” Milo began. “Every day I felt them dying.  It didn’t matter how hard I held them. It didn’t matter how much I tried, what I did, they just kept dying. This was the only way.”

Standing, Malcolm shook his head slowly. “It wasn’t, Button.  Whatever this is, it was not the only answer. Life doesn’t work like that.”

“It does when you’re me.”

Malcolm felt his heart drop.  So many years and yet Milo had never found another. No one to trust. No one to fill the void. Malcolm had hoped that when he died, Milo would find love.  He would feel the market and understand that he was worth so much more. Capable of so much more.  But if anything, the love of the market had crushed him, burying him beneath inadequacies that he had woven within his bones.

“Why didn’t you talk to anyone?” Malcolm asked. “Why didn’t you ask for help?” He could feel his throat thickening. Why hadn’t Milo just asked?

“Who was I going to turn to? You?” he mocked with a shaky laugh.

“Anyone, Milo! Literally anyone!”

“Fuck you! You don’t even believe that shit so go fuck yourself, Mal.  I had no one. No one.”

“You had them,” Malcolm shouted. Milo had had the Night Market. He had the one person that could have understood him. Seen Milo for who he was and not care at the mess that festered beneath every beautiful smile he tossed their way.

Milo shook his head. “They never felt like mine,” he said brokenly. “They always felt like yours. From the second I realized they were real, that it wasn’t a sick joke or a construct wandering around with a lack of sentience, I knew.”

“Knew what?”

Milo smiled then. It was thin and full of so much pain. “That I was a placeholder.”

Malcolm stared at him.  “They loved you. You have to have known that.”

“The thing that wasn’t supposed to be real, loved me.  The thing I brought here, summoned with the book of your dead mothers, the one woman in the market who could have actually brought this all to ruin. I was supposed to believe that? I wanted to. I wanted to so fucking badly because fuck you Malcolm. Fuck you for dying. Fuck you for coming back and…”

Malcolm stepped forward, gathering Milo in his arm. He gripped him tight, pulling his head to his shoulder and feeling the tears wet his shirt.

“Fuck you,” Milo muttered weakly, hands coming up to cling to him. “They were perfect, Mal.  I never had anything like that before. It was so damn easy to be with them.”

Malcolm felt the tear slip free, leaving a salty trail down his cheek. Milo shook in his arms, ugly sobs wracking his frame as he begged Malcolm silently to take tonight away. To make it okay.

“Milo,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “You need to come home. You need to come back and explain what has happened so we can fix this.”

“They’ll kill me.”

“They won’t,” Malcolm insisted. “I’ll protect you. They won’t lay a hand on you.”

Pulling away, he shook his head, wiping at his eyes. “I don’t care what they do. I just– I want them back.”

“And maybe we could get them back.  All is not lost. Not yet.”

Milo laughed. The sound echoed hollowly around the room.  “Why would I do such a thing? I summoned them here once and thy knew only pain. Why would I summon them back? For me? To put them in peril again? To tear apart the market again and again and again….”

Malcolm grabbed him roughly, both hands cupping his cheek. He could feel the stubble beneath his palms. Milo’s eyes were brighter than Malcolm remembered. Two amber pinpoints, glowing in a world without lanterns any longer.

“Button, come home. Please.”

But his gaze was already growing distant. “It’s good that you’re back, Mal. The world wasn’t doing good without you.”

“Milo.” He shook him, trying to push the fight back in his bones. “Don’t do this. Don’t you dare fucking run.”

But it was too late. Malcolm should have seen it coming. Milo always went lax right before he burst into a fight.

Malcolm’s legs were swept out from under him and he hit the ground hard.  By the time he even knew what was happening, Milo was already at the front door, looking back at Mal, as if to drink in the sight of him again.

“I missed you,” he said, fingers curled around the door frame. “If I can make this right, I will.”

“Milo,” Malcolm shouted. But by the time he hopped over the rubble and made it to the door frame, Milo was gone. Disappearing into the dark, slipping away between the screams that erupted across the night.

Malcolm winced, leaning against the door frame. Closing his eyes, hands balled into fists, he hit the wall, feeling it crack beneath his knuckles, the skin splitting apart. As he slid down to the floor, feeling his newly returned body ache with disuse and his heart break for the loss of the two people he loved, his hand slipped.  Wiping the tears from his eyes, Malcolm looked down.

A button sat beside him, a glowing lantern embossed into the metal.

Curling his fingers around it, Malcolm worried that this was what death truly looked like. That this was the end.