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“You were going to kill me.”
Paul ignores him. It’s not the first time.
As always, he finds himself counting the syllables, every delicate inflection that Julian puts on each of his words. He could listen to him forever, and never get bored.
When he’s particularly upset, there’s the barest hint of an accent. The sort that would be lovely if it were not so reminiscent of his mother.
He’s not upset now.
For his own good, he really should be.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
The first few times, they scarcely remember a thing. That’s what they tell one another later, anyway.
He relives the story as studious as ever. Turns off the radio, goes for his morning run. Lays out his bat and his matches and his knife, just in case.
These are not the weapons for which he is to kill, but the instruments for which he is to create.
Après moi, le déluge.
Secretly leaving a mark on the world isn’t so bad — not when Julian can know about it, too.
It’s a little harder to smile back at Laurie, but there’s no real surprise there. When had it even been easy?
There’s no clear cut deja vu. Only the urge, more hostile than it ever was, to kiss Julian as soon as he sees him. The way he gives in, rather than stomachs the feeling.
“It took me ages to get dressed this morning. I nearly had a nervous breakdown over socks, of all things—“
He kisses him again, just for the hell of it. Again, and again, desperate for it as he had been the very first time (and the very last).
“Endgame. The day of the endgame.”
Paul whispers the words on Julian’s lips, so silent they shouldn’t matter—so silent that he could take them back. That he could take it all back.
Instead, he pulls away.
Julian drives.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
The day of the endgame is followed by every day after it.
It goes quite the same.
Charlie Stepanek dies.
Julian Fromme does not.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
If he doesn’t make a mistake with the dosage, something else goes wrong. Charlie is more resilient than they gave him grace for, it seems — that old fighting spirit, determined to win one last time.
If only he was half as haunted as he should have been and had let those twin angels take him to be where he deserved. If only Paul hadn’t imagined this moment over and over again and known exactly where and how hard to swing to kill a man. If only Julian could dare to see what was in front of him and not just shy away like had had with the fox, or if he had just forgotten the fucking dog entirely—
And then the end of it. That always goes wrong, too.
As always, Julian lets him lie to him.
As always, he sees through the lie.
Come and see.
He never understands.
“We were going to start over, we were going to be alright, I was finally going to make you happy—I love you, I love you so much, I’ll do anything for you, please believe me, please give me a chance—”
Paul could never remember not believing Julian.
It was me, I’m so sorry, this is the only way we can fix it.
Never is there a time where Paul thinks of the two or so minutes that he would have to find the edge of ravine, to live without Julian, and thinks himself capable of it.
“Pablo, please, I don’t want to die.”
Never is there a time where he doesn’t break Julian’s heart.
And, always:
Paul lets him go.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
On what might be the sixth, tenth, or even thirtieth time — neither of them had ever bothered to count — Julian doesn’t push him away.
They stare at one another for a second, wide eyed, before Paul reaches down again.
Three minutes without air is an awfully long time when you can’t bear to count.
Julian’s throat bobs under his hands, and if he could breathe, Paul knows that he would struggle regardless. The cold has never been good on Julian’s lungs.
Before, he would shake and thrash. Now, he just slumps, limp, in his grip - his own hands clutched around his own, not to maintain any illusion that he wants to withdraw, but to make sure that they keep on going. The terror has worn down to something unnameable and terrifying.
To something curious, like his father. Like him.
I don’t want to hurt you, please don’t let me.
No. That’s not right, is it?
It didn’t happen like that.
Paul shakes his head, just once. Loosens his grip but refuses to let go, even when Julian lets out a startled sound and, finally, starts to cry.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
“You were going to kill me.”
His voice is hoarse, even when it really shouldn’t be.
What happened might as well have not happened at all, for they both wake up, silent and hopeless, in their beds. With the first memory come all the rest.
This time, Julian doesn’t wait for him. Instead, he marches straight through the front door - past Ma and her breakfast, past Laurie and her homework that’s been waiting for him for days - and finds Paul, head in his hands, huddled up in the far corner of his room.
“You were going to kill me.”
It doesn’t matter that he wouldn’t have done it. Julian might even have been tempted to congratulate him for his bravery, if he had been but a bystander.
The crime was the thought ever crossing his mind in the first place. That he would have given up on what they had: what Julian had deigned to give him.
Love was such an inadequate term for what they shared. If his mother had ever dared ask why he loved Julian - or, more likely, why Julian loved him – he would have no answer, or at least not one that she could understand.
You didn’t kill the people you loved, after all. You didn’t dare try.
They don’t speak at all, after that. The day passes with Julian smoking cigarettes in his bed, lazy and half asleep from the smog of it all. He looks straight ahead and doesn’t acknowledge Paul whatsoever - doesn’t dare try.
Neither of them are sure what he would see if he did.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
The obvious solution is to carry on with their lives as if they were never intertwined, but the idea is so near impossible that they don’t even dare to attempt it.
Countless loops go by just like that — silent in one another’s company, angry and not yet forgiven.
Rarely, they fight.
It always ends with Paul pinned under Julian, an intentional acquiesce that tries and fails to erase the original. Neither of them can stand to look at one another for long enough to remember before in detail, so, instead, they close their eyes and let their mouths revisit fonder memories.
After, when they’re so close they can hardly stand it, he whispers into Julian’s skin, Julian’s mouth, everywhere he can reach. Tells him that he hates him; that he wishes he had never met him; that he knows he’d be better off if he had just finished the job and rid them both of the shame of loving one another and failing to do a good enough job at it.
Like every time before, Julian tells the truth.
“No, you don’t.”
⪻────𖤓────⪼
There’s another half dozen loops before they dare to even leave the room once they’ve holed themselves up inside it. Thanksgiving is forgotten entirely, even when Ma entirely refuses to let them forget and drags the both of them out, so devoid of shame that he scarcely believes she must still feel it.
Charlie is long forgotten, entirely oblivious to the night he was supposed to have. Now that he really thinks about it, perhaps the dinner alone really was punishment enough.
When they do nothing, the night resets.
So they try again. He takes his time stealing an excess reserve of the sedative and tries upping the dosage, so much so that it’s not entirely without surprise when their friend keels over, clutches his heart, and falls to the ground before either of them can do the first bit of damage.
Julian suggests cutting up the body, to which Paul directs a look so incredulous that they both fall into a fit of giggles.
Murder without purpose is as disgusting as it sounds, and gets them caught every time. If it’s not the way they do it, it’s the way they hide their tracks. If it’s not the way they hide their tracks, it’s —
“Lucy.”
Forgiving Julian’s kindness is as easy as breathing.
To walk to Polish Hill arm in arm would be as futile as every attempt before it, so they take a drive down to the outskirts of Cleveland and use the first pay phone they find to inform the PBP of one missing Charlie Stepanek and his poor, poor dog.
It ends just the same.
When the police tell him that Sullivan had seen him steal the drugs, clear as day, he shrugs. That she got fired for misconduct is secondary: irrelevant, to men like these, if it gets him sent down.
Every act of violence is worth it to stop another, after all. Every mistake, owed to another.
Perhaps he should take it as a compliment that she assumed him harmless enough to let him get away with it.
What was it that Julian had said? That they “didn’t have anything they could put in an acetate envelope and show to the jury as exhibit A, and that they never would?”
It doesn’t matter, anyway. They don’t make it to court — they don’t even make it to a holding cell. The first night of the rest of their lives, just like the others, doesn’t stick.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
One time, they go with Brady, just for the hell of it. Stalk him all the way to a downtown bar, wait till he’s six Pabst Blue Ribbons deep, and club him over the head with a bat as green as the day he thrifted it.
It’s not their finest work, nor was it ever intended to be. The cops are there within a minute.
One whispers that it’s Jake Fleischer’s son they’ve just shoved into the back of their car.
Didn’t know he was a fag, another says, and they all grimace.
The second time, they actually try and make it work. Follow him to his condo, instead, and watch him shower under the flickering porch light. It’s the easiest break in by a mile, which is to say that it isn’t - the door is wide open.
Together, they hold his head under the water.
The arrest doesn’t come until mid March.
This time, they ask him what, exactly, made him dislike Brady so much in class. Why something so simple as a disagreement would lead him to murder.
That time, he’s immensely glad for the reset. It gives him the chance to tell Julian, grinning, that he told him so.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
Winter is always unusually warm.
He’d give anything to see the cold again.
Julian? Well, Julian just yearns for the challenge.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
“How old do you think we are now?”
Julian asks between cigarettes, thoughtful.
It’s hard to say.
Paul is perched on his shoulder, caught somewhere between the sound of the engine and the ragged breaths of a half-failed lung. He’s almost tempted to fall asleep, there and then, and let the warmth of the sun through the chevrolet windows drag him into the tomorrow of today. They could doze then, too, and start over whenever they wanted.
Sometimes, they only last a day before it resets. Sometimes, an entire three or even six months.
Time matters so little now.
They try to plan it. To have such a material impact on one another’s future that they could know where they are at every moment, if they were to ever change their mind.
That one of them could call, and the other would come.
It doesn’t matter. The truth that they no longer need to convince each other of is that they would take a million half-lives over even one spent alone.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
Sometimes, they’re sloppy. Sometimes, they spend the entire day touching one another up.
They could kiss in broad daylight, and it wouldn’t mean a thing.
Julian had joked, once, that he might have been an exhibitionist if the worst crime of it all was simply getting caught.
Paul chooses to indulge him. They finally get around to seeing the godfather - the second part, in fact - and frequent a dozen movie theatres by the end of the week. Always, he has one hand on Julian’s thigh and another wrapped around his mouth to swallow down the sounds he’d, otherwise, beg to hear.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
Where had Julian gone, that first time?
The answer: New York. He had confessed this over a game of chess, the moves so exhausted that he often wondered why they still pretended that playing had any merit at all.
He had told Joy the only truth that made any sense at all, which was that Paul had, for once, succeeded at something. That he had left no note, and had died the only way Julian had always known he would. That he had burnt all his paintings before he did it.
You told me that you would, so that I would beg for you not to.
If only they could have started over again from that day in January. If he could have loved Julian the way he had deserved and loved himself even half as much, or had just allowed somebody else to.
If only the first time had been good enough for the both of them.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
It’s not that Julian’s wrong — not entirely. Really, that’s what he’s always loved about him. That he had always told the truth, even when he had refused to believe him. That he’d said as much.
Perhaps it’s curiosity. Perhaps it’s just boredom. Perhaps it’s the conscious desire to be seen and known and loved, so loved, always so intensely.
He’s tired of being proven right. Wonders what it would feel like, just once, to be wrong.
At first, he settles on the shed. The service pistol is still there, he knows: next to the medal of valor; the medals; the power tools. It’s a memorial and a warning, all at once. Pity that he never realised it was all for him until now.
Hanging, too, would be suitable. Almost poetic. Often, he has wondered how Julian must have felt in his arms, Paul the last thing he would ever see.
But no. As flattered that he is that Julian had imagined him as some half-brave thing, reality is much less exciting.
An exacto knife and a closed bathroom door will do the job just fine.
Bleeding out is much less thrilling than the media would have you believe. Much more menial than it had been to watch Charlie do it.
It’s just as black, though. Just as messy.
Once he’s done with the worst of it, he takes to leaning by the toilet bowl. Nausea was a malady he had been unable to shake or stifle again since he had forgotten the first time. It, undoubtedly, looked better on Julian.
Since the day, that first day, when he had found Julian’s message. He had been a fool to think he was ever capable of recovery: of rectifying the grave error of daring to exist in his orbit.
“Paul.”
He hadn’t dared to lock the door. Why would he? If it went wrong, he would just try again. If it went right, at least he wouldn’t have to be alone.
Julian doesn’t need to ask what he’s doing. If he did, he’d shrug his shoulders, and tell him what he already knew.
I’ve always wanted to try.
Already, he feels the blood loss taking the sort of toll he knows is beyond escaping. The sort that will have him stumbling and slipping over himself in a matter of moments.
Even his last moments aren’t without shame, or one last witness to it. It’s nothing, at least, that Julian hasn’t seen before.
He’s too greedy, however, to not drink in the way Julian refuses to look below his waist, or the way he clutches onto the faucet, practically swooning all over him. It’s not intended to be a punishment or a reward, but he can’t help but take what little pleasure he can before it’s impossible. He’s always been a selfish creature.
“Don’t let me convince you that you deserve this.”
What he wants to say is that he doesn’t deserve him, but it comes out as a bewildered sort of humming - animal and afraid, even though he swears he isn’t. That he hasn’t been afraid in a long, long time.
It’s a little like falling asleep, he supposes, but much nicer. Even his touch isn’t half as good, almost annoying in the way it centers him solidly to the ground and tightens every time he sways. The way it guides him down, down, until he’s curling into the bathtub.
He had been foolish to ever think Julian could be dragged away to this far away place. To think that he would ever let him.
It’s alright. You’re alright. I like looking after you.
Simple things are good. Julian is much more simple than he had ever allowed him to be. Warm eyes and heart and hands, the sort that wrap around him and refuse to let go.
Looking after someone must be so easy when they aren’t trying to fight against you every step of the way.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
“How long was I asleep?”
Dying in Julian’s arms is, unsurprisingly, nowhere near as good as waking up.
“Long enough, Pablo.”
They leave it like that — taking turns. Sleeping side by side is unnecessary when neither of them have to sleep alone.
Julian looks so young with his eyes closed. The harshness of his delicate features washes away until they’re just that: delicate, so softened by sleep that it’s almost shameful they won’t stay that away. A crime, really.
Paul imagines his parents checking up on him in the night. How they would have seen Julian curled up on his side, clutching his arms around anything in reach (I always have to, he had said. I always have to hold onto something.) and as restful as he had never been in waking.
Perhaps they would commit it to memory. More likely, they would watch him — only for a moment — before turning away, and walking downstairs. They would never count their blessings to have a son so unlike themselves.
It’s their loss. Was his loss, long ago.
Now, they can hold each other. Adore one another. Can ignore the endless promise of tomorrow and have today, and the next, and every day they can make work until they finally deserve one another.
Night falls.
The sun rises.
And they wake up, wide eyed, to snow.
⪻────𖤓────⪼
New York is nothing like Vermont or Maine, but that’s probably for the best. Neither is Harrisburg, or Staunton. Appalachia is too cold for Julian, but then again, most places are.
In the end, they settle on San Francisco.
Ma visits them from time to time. Audrey and Joy, too, when they aren’t endlessly busy with one another.
Julian smokes habitually. Paul only ever smokes when he wants to make him smile (the answer: more often than he’d like).
I wanted to show you it was real.
It’s no reward. Real life never is. The factory windows let the damp in. The autumn sunlight creeps through the blinds and wakes them up earlier than they’d like. A future of petty frustrations, of collegiate joys. Of inevitable quarrels, never so easy to return as they’re easy to learn from.
They do try and stick to the plan. It’s the plan, however — like the hundred or so before it — that doesn’t seem to want to stick to them.
The weekdays, where they only see one another in the morning and the latest hours of the night. When there’s only time to kiss one another breathless and collapse into bed.
The weekends, where there’s time to do whatever they like to one another.
How it’s okay, even when it isn’t.
How it’s all the time in the world, and it’s still not enough.
It was so easy to love Julian that he couldn’t remember ever doubting it. So easy to be loved that he didn’t have it in him to fight.
And Julian. Still marked for greatness. Still unbearably kind, and crueler than ever when he tried to hide it. He was softer than he had any right to be, and as beautiful as the day he had met him.
Paul, too, would have his legacy. All the things he wanted to kill. All the things he wanted to save. Every bone he might have broken — every bone he did in that sordid dream, so long ago. Every win, and every loss.
And between the both of them, a secret: owed, now, only to one another.