Chapter Text
I’m twenty years old, on the balcony seats of some huge theater that makes me sick just with its size. Date with Diamond, obviously. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this otherwise. I barely even got here as is. She’d had to beg and plead and basically drag me into the car. What kinda… uh… y’know am I? She takes me somewhere nice and I spend the whole time panicking.
“Excited?” Diamond whispers.
“Uh, yeah,” I reply. God, none of me fits in this place. My whispers are too loud and my nice clothes look like I just rolled in off the street compared to everyone else here. “Remind me again why we’re not allowed popcorn in here?”
She laughs and that’s why I’m here. “It’s not that kind of theater, silly. I can buy you a drink at intermission, though.”
“Uh.” My heart is beating too fast, too loud. Can everyone else hear it too? “I, uh…” And I don’t wanna say no to a free drink, but… goddamn the price tag on those things. “Uh… yeah? Okay.”
Thankfully just when I’m finishing my stupid sentence the lights begin to dim.
About… two hours — time is weird in the theater — later, I’m walking back to our parking space, hanging on Diamond’s arm, a bit more tipsy than I thought I would be, and talking louder than I remember talking since… well, since Benten.
Because look, Benten was the performing arts twin, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t into it, it just meant that the one time I tried to do a musical theater thing with him and his friends, they kicked me out because I got into a fistfight on day two. I hadn’t really thought about it since… you know, but going to the theater with Diamond had woken all that up inside me.
“And you know, it’s not alive! It’s the deadest thing on that stage!”
“The… gargantuan scorpion-spider puppet?”
“Yeah!” I yell. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that exactly! It’s not alive, but it’s more alive than any one of the actors. Like, it’s… deliberate. They make it breathe and move and exist as a real animal, it– it’s just amazing!”
“I know!” Diamond smiles, brighter than the sun. “It reminds me of you, a bit.”
My smile fades a bit, because… I’m not twenty on a date with Diamond. I’m thirty-nine and there’s something in my head that isn’t me.
“What do you mean?” I ask, knowing exactly what she means.
“The Theia, silly. It makes you more alive– it makes you better than anyone really can be.”
She says it with a smile that curdles in my gut. Hell, she’s like Ramses. Sky blue eyes that promise you a brighter future, promise you they’re gonna do Good.
“I don’t… I don’t want it,” I whisper, strangled.
“But…” Her face is the same as it was the last day I saw her. So… disappointed in me. “It makes you better, Juno. You need both eyes to function, and even when you did… who did you manage to save, acting on your own?”
And then in front of us (and now it’s definitely a dream): Ben. Ben, dead on his bed. Ben, blaster hole through his chest. Ben, who I couldn’t save. Ben, who I killed. Annie Wire, who I killed. Sunny, who I—
“Stop it.” I try to yell, but it just comes out weak and pathetic.
“You’re smart,” she says to me. “You know you could do so much Good if you just took a little help.”
“It’s not—”
“If you weren’t so paranoid when people are trying to help you!” Puck says.
My head is spinning. Were they always there?
“If you kept your promises,” he says.
“No.” I can’t handle him right now, not… not now.
“But you’ll never do it, will you, little monster?”
I’m not twenty or thirty-nine anymore. I’ve just turned eight years old, and good old ma has a story she likes to tell at every possible opportunity.
“All your brother cares about is himself. And he can’t even do that right.”
And Benten isn’t looking at me, hunched up like he gets — like he got when she was like this. Sometimes he’d stand up for me. A lot of the time he wouldn’t.
“If you think I’m bad, Benten, look at where your brother’s going.”
And I want to feel angry, just angry, but there’s a sharp pang of shame in my chest. I think they’re all looking at me. Everyone who tried to keep me from drowning in my own goddamn neurochemical mess.
“Juno?” one of them says. I wanna run. I just stand there. “I will allow you to stay on this lighthouse only if you confirm that is what you want.”
I open my eyes in the real world. Then I close my right eye. Well, not really mine.
My name is Juno Steel. I had a chance to get rid of that eye forever. Just one chance.
“Big guy?” I ask.
“Yes, it is me. Do you plan to kill yourself on this lighthouse?”
“What?”
“I said, do you plan to—”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard what you said. Um, I—” I try to reply to the big guy, but… I… can’t. Do I plan to kill myself on this lighthouse? Do I just stay up here and hope the radiation does me in? Do I jump?
The gun Buddy gave me is lying next to me. No stun setting. Put it against my head and pull the—
“GOD!” I can feel it, white hot and burrowing deeper and— “Goddamnit! Fuck! Goddamnit!” I gasp, trying to get my arm to move, hit the Theia a bunch, make it stop—
“Mista Steel,” it says, in it’s stupid fucking robotic voice, overtaken by the beeping and the static and— “Mista Steel, you mean more to me than any old case. You can’t keep doing this to yourself. You can’t keep doing this to me.”
The pain is less. I can move my arm. “Who said you get to do that?” I growl.
“User: Juno Steel enabled emergency life-saving protocols yesterday at—”
“Got it,” I mutter. Then to the big guy, “No, apparently I’m not.”
“Would you like me to kill you?”
I look up at him. I don’t know how to read his expressions but… god, that seems genuine. “I…”
And fuck personal growth. Fuck chairs that take your blood and make you realize you wanna live and that your eye can take over your body whenever. Because I don’t want to die, not fully. If I could walk out into the desert and know that I’d die out there alone, then I would. I’d do it. Maybe I’d even shoot myself, take direct action. But saying yes… I can’t make myself do that.
“I’ll figure it out,” I say.
“Do you require anything from me?” he asks.
“Still sure you can’t take me to Hanataba?” I ask. It’s supposed to be a joke but… it’s not.
The big guy’s quiet for a moment, then puts one of his giant hands on my shoulder. “I am sorry, Juno.”
I don’t really make a decision, more like just wait for whatever happens. I take the gun, not sure what for. The big guy gives me a comms, it feels like a waste. I don’t say goodbye to Buddy or Vespa, tell myself it’s ‘cause they don’t need to be bothered by some lady’s suicide note. I don’t really know what the actual reason is.
I walk out into the desert, again.
Before, there was this… need. For quiet, for sleep, for an escape. I don’t have to kill anyone out in the desert. I don’t have to do Good. I can just… walk. Until my body gives out.
Now all I feel is dread. Waiting for something terrible to happen. Walking until I get back to that world of politicians and promises and Polaris goddamn Park. That world that made me believe in the Free Dome, in Ramses O’Flaherty, in myself.
I hope I die before I get there. I hope my brain is so messed up by the radiation that he gives up on me. I hope the Theia digs into the wrong part of my brain and kills me. I want to die before I get there.
When I was a kid, I used to imagine the hallway leading to the apartment was endless. I’d think about never going home, just walking and walking forever. I’d think about leaving, running away, living with Sasha or Mick or just… on the street somewhere. I’d sleep in the day and stay awake at night. I’d get a job, I’d sell drugs, I’d do whatever to support Ben and I. We could camp out in the sewers and live with the rabbits. We could—
And then I’d reach the end of the hallway.
I see the car in the distance and I stop moving. Tried to run and failed. Tried to die and couldn’t.
I sit down on the sand. My gold watch glints in the little sun I can see through the dust. I don’t have a watch. The ticking is familiar.
Maybe there’s no car, I let myself think for a moment. Maybe it’s just a hallucination. Maybe it’s gonna be okay.
The car stops a few feet from me. No one gets out. Something gets out.
Eight spindly legs. Sleek metal. ‘Theia’ written on its midsection.
It doesn’t approximate breathing, it doesn’t fake life.
But I will.