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When she first wakes up, blurry and bloodied with some kind of body-horror surgical drain hanging out of her chest, she’s terrified that Van won’t be there. Every fried nerve ending in Wade’s body had been screaming at her since the day she first noticed the weird, pitted mark on her chest - guys don’t stick around when their girlfriends get cancer.
But there he is.
Recovery is slow and gross and largely undignified - nothing to make you feel like a woman quite like needing your boyfriend to help you wipe your ass, huh Shania? But it passes. The new state of Wade’s body is adapted into his normal quicker than she can wrap her head around it herself. Van touches her like he did before, fucks her senseless as soon as she can handle it, dosn’t let her question for so much as a second whether or not he’s still into her. Before she knows it, they’re screwing around in the grocery store, arguing like maniacs over what fruit would work best to fill her newly-empty bra cup. Van is team cantaloupe, Wade is pretty sure a decent-sized grapefruit would do it.
It’s reassuring, the way that nothing changes. It’s a non-sequitur, a little blip in their lives that they’re already well on their way to forgetting.
And then Wade hits the deck out of nowhere on her way to the bathroom.
Turns out that it’s possible for thirty-nine years of human life to entirely shit the bed in the span of one doctor’s appointment. That’s all the time it takes for ‘yeah, you have cancer and that sucks a cock but you’ll be a-okay, if missing a tit, within the year’ to become ‘you have cancer and if you’re not dead within the year then you’ll fucking wish you were’.
Wade is numb in the doctor’s office and numb on the ride home, and she’s numb when she collapses into a despondent puddle and stays that way for, god, who the fuck knows how long? Prone on the couch, in the bed, on the bathroom floor. She and Van wander around the apartment in a daze, on two completely different planes of existence, and then cling to each other at night when neither of them can sleep.
Wade thought she wasn’t scared of dying. The impulse to fear the abyss as she stares into it and waits for it to blink was stripped out of her years ago. But the death she’d been taught not to shrink from was sudden and merciful - gunpowder and lead, over in an instant. It was not waiting for her rotting bones to crumble, becoming less and less of a person until she flickers to nothing in a haze of opiates and her own bodily fluids. That fucking scares her.
She wants to scream until her larynx gives out, cry until her eyes desiccate. Instead, she starts gutting out her possessions, and reading every scrap of drain-circling shit she can find on the internet about how irreversibly fucked her body is becoming. How long dying is going to take, how it’s going to feel, how much she’s going to lose on the road between there and here. She holds her hand to an open flame and tries to make peace with it as her flesh blisters and chars.
Van talks endlessly about treatment options and new research and his uncle’s thyroid. He makes her weird bile-green super-smoothies that taste like shit and watches her drink them. He asks her over and over again if she’s okay, if she’s in pain - fusses over her if she so much as sneezes around him. He’s scraping desperately to find a way to make her live, while she tries to teach herself how to die without hurting him, and in the meantime she memorises his face, his smell, every little quirk and atom of him.
There’s a living will of post-it notes scattered all over the apartment, labelling everything with the slim handful of names she’s managed to keep in her personal circle. Van, garbage, Weasel, Van, garbage, Van, Van again. Wade tells herself that the neon paper makes it feel a little less fucking morbid. Keep a brave face, prepare herself for every dehumanising in and out to come so that she doesn’t struggle as she goes and drag him down with her. Spring-clean her possessions to take the weight of it off of him - that way he won’t have to sift through her crap and clear away what’s left of her, or fight it out with Weasel over her action figures. He can move on from her faster.
“So, this is it?” He asks, while she’s sitting on the bedroom floor and sifting through her clothes like she’s headed on vacation. One pile for the thrift store, one that she thinks Van might be sentimental about, one of contenders for what she’s gonna wear in her casket. “I’m just supposed to smile and wave you out the door?”
Wade tries to contort her response into a joke, and then she can’t stand up without steadying herself on the edge of the bed. God, is that something she’d have had to do a month ago? A week ago? Yesterday?
Van plays along with her ass-covering snark and forces a laugh when she says her liver, lungs, ovaries, and brain are all things she can live without. He pulls her into an embrace, and she grips into his slim shoulders like a vice, and all she can think about is how she needs him like she needs air to breathe.
*
That creepy fuck recruiter’s card has barely left her hand in a month. If she’s not bending the corners and running the pads of her fingers over the edges, she’s thumbing at it in her pocket, out of sight but never out of mind. It’s gripped in her palm now, the smooth plastic finish peeling off of the cardstock. After four complete weeks of imminent-death fidgeting, she’s surprised it’s still in one piece.
She said no. But she still took his number. It wasn’t entirely that she couldn’t buy what he was trying to sell. She said no because he was trying to schmooze her - eyeing her up like she was a meal, unapologetically licking shit out of her crack. He talked about her green beret days, the forty-one bodies she put in the ground, as if they’re anything to be proud of, while she sat there with a throatful of shame and battery acid, chased with someone else’s liquor.
She was an experiment. A walking example, never meant to survive, hand-picked to prove that women cannot. But she white-knuckled through the dregs of her twenties while the machine of militia ground her to a paste in its gears, and she exceeded expectations. She killed and brutalised and didn’t question it, took the jobs that nobody else wanted because it made her look tougher. She let her psyche be dismantled piece by piece and reassembled into an automaton wearing her skin. Six years on the other side of it - dishonourable discharge, working for the knife, telling herself that it’s better that way and pretending like all she’s good for isn’t killing - it feels anything but impressive.
So yeah, he was hardly nudging her sweet-spot there. There aren’t enough weasel-words in the English language to drown out the shame. Wade isn’t a hero, she never was; too stripped to her base parts to ever be, super or otherwise.
But the woman who walked into Sister Margaret’s that night was dying in verbiage alone. Thirty-six days of unfettered metastasis later, Wade looks and feels undeniably sick, and Van knows it. She would give anything - her blood-money, her right arm, another pound of tumorous flesh - to make it stop, because her sickness is making him suffer and it’s tearing her to shreds.
She has hit fuck it.
Van is asleep, and she’s packing up some scant collection of things, and then she’s going to leave. Dial the number, hope. She checks over her bag - Hello Kitty and bloodstains, the weight of familiarity. Phone. Keys. Handgun. Wallet. Phone - where the fuck is her phone?
It’s on the floor, right in fucking front of her. She’s looking at it. Wade flinches, head full of useless sludge. She used to be sharper than this.
What happens when she starts forgetting shit that isn’t quite this mundane? She’s had that nightmare too many times now - a stranger with Van’s face, a stranger in the mirror - and she’s not gambling on it becoming reality. She has to go. She has to.
Fuck it could have been when she hacked up her first wad of bloody phlegm, but it wasn’t. It almost struck again when she had to call Van in a blind panic because her brain hazed out on the walk between the apartment and the 7-11 on the corner, and she couldn’t find her way home. The first times - the abyss blinking back, shit happening to her.
But fuck it is not a singular event. It’s the final destination of vomit and indignity, misery piled on top of misery without a break, waking up every morning with some fresh new something wrong - her legs a little weaker, her nausea a little worse, her chest a little tighter - and knowing that that’s the best she’s ever going to feel again. Watching a little light drain from Van’s eyes with each passing day, losing hope and watching her fade in real time.
Fuck it is another night of scraping herself out of bed to stare at nothingness other than her ceiling - pushing Van away, lying about bad dreams and slapping on a humorous veneer that neither of them believe any more. It’s knowing what she’s doing to him, and realising that she’s shit out of better options.
This is nothing more and nothing less than packing up for a job, she tells herself, and she’s coming home. A day or a week or a month or whatever from now, she’s going to walk back through the front door into Van’s arms and a normal fucking life, and they can forget all of this.
The handgun is an insurance policy. Break glass in case of false promises.
She zips her bag, and stands up to shrug herself into her sweatshirt - Van’s sweatshirt, one he doesn’t wear all that often and hopefully won’t miss. He’s still sleeping; his brows knitted, an armful of the sheets where she should be. In the blue-black night, she can’t quite see his overgrown hair and chewed-up nails - the mess she’s made of him already. Wade lingers in the doorway; one weak, selfish moment away from dropping it all to crawl back into bed and stay wrapped up in him forever.
She tries to hold this image of him, burn it into her retinas. And then she steps out into the dark and closes the door behind her.
*
The woman shackled to the gurney closest to Wade is named Corrine, and she looks like unholy hell. Older than Wade by a scattering of years, and probably softer, before. Once-full cheeks gaunt and sagging, her eyes jaundice-yellow. She’s got kids; three of them. Their names won’t stick in the malignant mush of Wade’s brain, but she sure seems to love them a lot.
Time has lost any semblance of meaning. Dark as pitch where it’s not floodlight-bright - a torch in the prised-open eyeball, a kick in the head back to oblivion. Sometimes, they’re both awake at what could be night, and they talk in hushed, chewed-up voices. Corrine tells her to think of puppies.
The abattoir-howl white noise is constant and choking, penned in like battery chickens with nothing but mildewed white paper between them, and the lead-eyed orderlies don’t care who’s looking when they wheel the bodies of failed experiments out. A table will sit empty for a while, once its occupier leaves in a garbage bag, just long enough for blood to dry to a crust on the restraints. Then Ajax sends his creeps out searching, and a new desperate carcass will come to take up the vacant lot.
Blackness. The shrill of ice water. Blackness again.
Ajax tries and tries, straining the big ugly vein in his forehead. Wade spits in his face and talks incessant crap and riles him up on purpose in return. She blurts would-be names like machine gun fire - Dick, Tyler, Lesley, John, Paul, George, Ringo, whatever the fuck - just to get under his skin. He takes the bait like the fucking asshole he is; holds her head under the surface longer, draws it out, snarling venom with frustration caught in his teeth.
She tries to keep his attention on her because she was trained to withstand torture, and the dying ranks around her were not. He’s one shitheel in a pile of several, she doesn’t know how much good it can do - but god, some kind of defiance has to be better than nothing at all.
Light filters in, and she hisses Corrine’s name. She’s got that look of the real long-haul cancer patients that would smile at Wade in the oncology waiting room, six remissions deep but back at square one. Nearing the end of a long road of fighting, keloid and cath-port, options running dry. She can’t remember how long she’s been here.
They joke through swollen throats about dish soap and ugly names. Wade does not tell Corrine that she gets through it by thinking of killing him.
Wade has seen more corpses leave than she has full-fledged superhumans, of which there have been approximately fucking zero. Mutates and mangled flesh, sure. Sometimes, someone will come back as a horror-show puddle of goo, bone protruding from where it shouldn’t or puke melting holes in the floor. Cells multiplying wrong and frantic, humanity guttering - snapped under pressure and exploding in all senseless directions.
It scares the shit out of her, and so she resists. Hones in on that well-used part of her mind that locks down her feelings and keeps her safe. Sinks into the familiarity of bad memories, steps out of her body and waits for something to happen.
He strings her up by the wrists, her shoulders grinding in their sockets. She’s only a year into mercenary work and this job would be biting off more than she could chew by half - she misses her mark badly enough to get caught and regains consciousness in a shipping container, hanging by cable-tie cuffs from a support bar. Then she’s puking up a gutful of blood and gastric acid, orbital bone shattering against a length of pipe.
Ajax’s fists don’t compare. She’s kicked and screamed her way through worse; turned an uzi against its owner, cashed her cheque in Sister Margaret’s with stitches in her eyebrow and a freshly-broken collarbone. He can’t harm her. He can’t even touch her.
That’s the problem with round-the-clock torture: you can’t really step it up.
Corrine, pus crusting at the corners of painfully swollen eyes, asks if she thinks it’s all a lie. Wade doesn’t have an answer. So they talk about anything else. Bucket lists - fuck-it lists - and washing the dishes and what they’re going to do when they get home. Lighting a spliff on the Olympic torch. Standing tits-out on the I-495 at rush hour, flashing commuters.
Corrine misses her kids - she says that Wade reminds her of her daughter.
Van. Wade wants to see Van. Her absent jigsaw piece, the crazy that maps onto her crazy and fits her weird edges.
Ajax purrs and preens as she lies like a naked slab of meat, his hand trailing over the flat side of her chest. She’s in an army base in a shitty part of Texas, the night before shipping out - half-drunk and asleep in someone else’s bunk, and then awake with a zit-faced private on top of her, his hand groping around inside her shirt and his half-hard cock pressing into the meat of her thigh.
Sand-yellow boots stained red, a tooth embedded in her knuckle. Nobody dares to try and touch her again.
She laughs. She’s laughing, that he thinks frat-boy manhandling is such a step up from his usual repertoire of ineffectual shit. Ajax grips her by the jaw and tells her that he’s going to sew that pretty mouth shut. He fucking loves that threat, it must’ve taken him a while to come up with.
And then blade meets scar tissue, too blunt to cut through cleanly. Wade can hear her skin tearing, resisting against the serration, and she most definitely is not laughing now. Blood pours out and pools under her, hot and sticky - flayed-open fatty tissue, naked beyond naked. Ajax plays around in the viscera like a fucking toddler, worming his fingers under her skin.
Somewhere else. Anywhere but here. Resist, don’t flinch - think of killing him. Think of grinding his stupid smug fucking face to a pulp; swell him full of lead and finger-fuck the bullet holes, see how much he fucking likes it. Leave him less than human, unidentifiable ooze.
She wakes up with tubes embedded in her skin and staples in her ribs - familiar pain, blurry vision and the smell of blood. Van sits at her side, sweatpants and picked-at cuticles. Sobbing relief throbs in the back of her throat, the dying breaths of a bad dream. She reaches out for him.
Her jerking arm rattles the surface of the table, steel clattering on steel as the weight of her wrong decision sets in anew. He’s gone.
Corrine sounds miserably ill, her sallow skin greying and deathly. She chases out every other word with a thin, rattling cough. No levity, no fuck-it lists. corrine wants to see her kids. Wade wants to see Van.
I’m just supposed to smile and wave you out the door?
Wade’s bitten tongue spurts blood down her struggling throat, choking her. The dull thrumming of an electrical current, booted footsteps and breath and nothing. Then searing, white-hot agony in her back, her midsection, the pulse-point of her neck - seizing every muscle in her body, toes curling and teeth bared. She’s shaking in the breaks between, sitting on wet concrete with her legs clamped tight together.
It’s been too long. Van is going to wonder where she is. He’s going to be pacing the floor and thinking that she’s crawled off with her tail between her legs to die out of sight, like a mangy cat under the hood of a car.
She was trained to withstand torture before she became a walking petri dish of cancer cells. Wade thinks her arm is breaking, somewhere around her shoulder; metastasis invading her bone marrow and splintering it from the inside out. The fresh incision in her surgery site leaks septic blood and lymph fluid through its crude closures; her skin flaming hot, the smell of rotting meat. Her body is breaking down, necrotising around her, and it hurts.
For a split second, it’s too much.
She whimpers through a clamped jaw - a horrible, raw-edged little noise that betrays so much fucking vulnerability that it makes her feel sick. Unnatural brightness - the intrusion of fingers prising her eyes open, prodding around inside her mouth. And then her body thuds against chain-link, spitting out a chunk of broken incisor, wrenched one way and then the other by a fistful of her unwashed ponytail. A boot to the stomach, hard enough to double her over and make her splutter. Ajax walks away with a yank of her hair in his hand.
But not before Wade snags a scrap of paper from the cuff of his lab coat between two fingers.
Francis. His fucking name is Francis.
*
Blood threads with saliva, dripping from swollen lips in tendrils. Wade can feel fluid filling her lungs, drowning dry; each smoke-tainted breath a battle, fighting for space with the rebar lodged in her sternum. Everything around her is burning.
Every molecule in her body feels like it’s splitting in half; her skin a raw lesion, a furious sting under the air alone. The flames lap at her ankles, choking the oxygen out of the air.
Sold to the highest bidder. Never going home again.
She remembers incandescent fury, the will to survive - to see Van again. Desperation to live. To take the pain of her amorphous features and contracted eyelids and exposed scalp and use it; wipe Francis from the earth so he can’t hurt anybody else. It feels a million miles away, now.
Any fight has been choked out of Wade’s awful, deathless body - stripped from her one tiny piece at a time since she shut the door on her apartment and on Van and on everything that matters, leaving only a mutilated shell behind.
“Wade…”
The smallest, most fragile bitten-off breath of her name. Corrine, manacled in place - her sick, splintery frame pinned beneath a fallen roof beam. Terror shines in her liquidy blue eyes as they lock on Wade’s, every inch of her trembling.
She did this.
Wade opens her mouth, and nothing leaves it but blood and spit. Tries to reach for her, and feels skin and abdominal muscles rip pointlessly under the strain, her screeching body barely moving an inch.
Flashing commuters. Smoking one last joint. Banana pancakes. She’s a mother, for fuck’s sake. But Wade can’t move. Can’t help. Can’t breathe.
She lies there, burning, until the other woman’s febrile little whimpers stop.
Lies there as the flames engulf her, skin and bone and humanity blistering.
Lies there until nothing is left but ash.
The sun comes up, and Wade is still breathing.