How to Save the World

by Tam MacNeil

Mad: Brought doughnuts

  Sean: got 1

  Mad: Ok this morning?

  He smiles.

  Sean: sort of ok

  Sean: thx

  Sean: u?

  Mad: Paperwork on the second floor. Rak’s pissed. Guess I’m late with the monthly stuff.

  Mad: How’d the baby sleep last night?

  Sean: ok

  Mad: Sedatives help I guess. What about daddy?

  Sean: Didnt

  Mad: Better make another pot. The one in the kitchen is decaf. :P

  Sometimes Mad drives him crazy. She gets into his place and puts groceries in his fridge, restocks his first aid kit, even she makes him go for haircuts. She knows everything that’s going on with him and sometimes it drives him crazy, but sometimes, sometimes he’s so glad to have her around. He pockets the phone and then pushes open the door and goes in.

  The soft thump of the door wakes him up again. He didn’t realize he’d been sleeping. He hears the clunk of ceramic on the counter top, an exhalation. A long pause. Then the sighing of fabric and the tup-tup-tup of feet on the floor. Sean stops at the door, his body blocks the sunlight for a moment, then is illuminated by it. He’s got a cup of coffee and a doughnut in his hands. The toasted smell of the coffee and the scent of sugar fill up the little room.

  “Hey,” he whispers. “Can I, uh, can I come in?” Sean doesn’t move, but he chews his bottom lip like he’s nervous, and it’s hard to stay at the door.

  Alex’s head feels heavy with the drugs they gave him. He tries to sit up, but it takes more effort than he expected. The bed is soft and his arms are weak. “Yeah,” he says when he’s more or less sitting.

  “Mad brought doughnuts, and there’s coffee. It’s decaf. Kinda… a joke on… a guy I know.” His voice dies. They look at each other. They’ve done this before. How many times did Sean bring him water or coffee or tea when he was laid up sick after too much booze, or hurt after a job? And how many times did he call Sean an idiot but bring him something to eat and something to drink and make sure the wounds were washed and dressed?

  But this is different, and that difference fills the air up with something heavy and squeezes in the little room. Sean’s chewing his lip, the way he does when he wants to say something, and Alex thinks he knows what it’ll be. He doesn’t want to hear it.

  He takes the coffee and he takes the doughnut, light as air and sticky. He bites into it, because he wants a reason not to be able to speak if Sean asks him if he’s forgiven, if Alex is ok, or any number of other questions that only have unhappy answers. The sugar fills his mouth with an intensity that hurts and something animal in him takes him over and he can’t stop eating, pushes the whole thing into his mouth and swallows, then drains the coffee to unjam the dough sticking in his throat.

  “Hey, uh, Alex?” Sean asks. His voice is almost a whisper. Like he’s afraid of the answer. Like he’s afraid of asking the question. He kneels down by the bed and for a moment Alex doesn’t understand what he’s doing. “I swear to god I didn’t know,” he says. He looks up at him, all sad-eyes, like an old dog begging. “If I knew, I would have found you. I wouldn’t have let this happen. I’m sorry, babe. I thought you were gone.”

  He puts his head down on the bed, and Alex realizes it’s because he’s crying. Sean always hated showing emotion, even to him. Even when they were lying together and Sean was panting under him, even then he would pretend he didn’t care. But the trouble with Sean was that he always cared too much and it always got him into trouble. Now his shoulders are shaking, and he’s hiding his face, and Alex can hear the wretched noises.

  Alex lets his fingers settle on the back of Sean’s neck where the hair’s cut short. Sean stops moving, stops talking, maybe even holds his breath for a moment or two. When he speaks again is voice is muffled. “I don’t know if I can ever fix it,” he whispers. “What happens if I can’t ever fix it?”

  Sean’s hair is soft, buzzed down to nothing near the nape of his neck. Real. Like the light-as-air doughnut that left a crust of sugar on his fingers. He believes in Sean, the way he always has.

  “Sean,” he says quietly. Sean looks up. His eyes are threaded with red from the tears. “You gotta stop being so stupid, ok? I never saw anything so broke you couldn’t fix it.”

  He stares at Alex, and then laughs, a single helpless, wet burst of a laugh. He clambers up onto the bed with him, frames his face with his hands. He pulls Alex into the kind of embrace he pulled him into yesterday, when Alex was screaming because he felt like he was coming apart, and because everything hurt, and because Sean looked so beautiful and the same, and Alex doesn’t even recognize himself. It was awful yesterday, but today it’s easy to sit like this. He leans against Sean. He is warm and strong, and he smells like the bar of soap near the sink, and like coffee, and like sugar.

  And then it hits him. Maybe the sedatives have worn off, maybe the sugar’s kicking in. Whatever it is, he feels present for the first time in a long time. And he’s not in the Tank, and he’s not in the mech. He’s here with Sean, and everything before is done, there’s no more of it. He looks up and Sean is looking down at him. “I never thought…” He pushes himself upright, so he can see Sean’s face, so he can slide his hand up the back of Sean’s neck. “I never thought I’d see you again.” He can hardly say it because his throat is so tight. “I missed you.”

  For a second Sean doesn’t move. Then he twists to hide his face and his arms go tight around Alex. “So much,” he answers, and Alex can hear him choking on the words. “So fucking much.”

  There’s nothing in Sean that is unkind. He would have freed the pilot of that mech no matter who it was. It was just that Alex is the last of them. It was just that the windshield had been smashed out, and they could get inside. A small thing. The final gift of a shinigami.

  It takes him a while to get ahold of himself. First it was understanding, really understanding, that Alex might be gone to a place there’d be no getting him back from, and the sinking horror of it. Then there was the breaking relief that even if the person in what remained of Alex’s body was not the same man he’d known, at least part of him was in there still, accessible, in some way. Not utterly destroyed. Hope like a hot coal in the middle of his chest.

  Now he drags in a breath that steadies him. He realizes he’s kind of crushing Alex he’s hugging him so hard, and starts to let him go. He shouldn’t be touching him. He shouldn’t have touched him at all. Promised Simone he would always ask first. But Alex makes a little noise, burrows in just a little and Sean stops.

  “Babe,” he says softly, almost afraid to speak in case the next words undo everything that’s somehow happened. “Do you know where you are?”

  Alex raises his head. “Vancouver, right?” he asks so softly Sean hardly hears it. “We’re still in Vancouver, right?”

  “Yeah,” he agrees. “We’re in the Annex.”

  “What?” Alex sounds horrified, which makes a kind of sense because the Annex works against Cameron, and it takes some getting used to the idea that the Annex are friends now, Sean should know.

  “Look, the people here…” he’s not sure what to say so he just kind of makes it up. “They’re good people. They’ve been sorta looking after me. Not like Cameron, though. It’s different. It’s better. I’ve got a job and a place and stuff.”

  Alex blinks a couple times. “So, this place is yours?”

  “No, not this place. My place is on Seymour. But I didn’t want you to be here alone, so Art set this up. She’s the director.”

  Alex nods, then he shrugs out of Sean’s embrace and stands up. The jogging pants and t-shirt that Mad commandeered from the gift shop seem to hang from him.

  He follows, and Alex goes over to the windows, and puts both hands against the glass like a little kid. Sean knows he can just see the sparkling waters of English Bay from here. They used to stay close to Davie and Denman, him and Alex. Davie and Denman was the natural place for them. It wasn’t safe, but
it was the safest place for two homeless queer kids who had nothing but each other. Maybe that’s where he’s looking. He looks back at Sean, his face all lines and ridges. He shakes his head.

  “You came into the mech,” he says. “Through the windshield.”

  “Yeah, the shinigami broke it so we figured we’d go have a look.” He shrugs. Alex is looking at him with a weird expression on his face. Like he wants to say something. He waits, but Alex keeps quiet. “You remember?”

  “I remember,” he says. He puts a hand up to his head, like it’s hurting. “I thought it was a dream.” He rubs at his temple, and then he leans forward and grimaces. Sean goes over to him, trying not to worry, trying not to run.

  “It’s ok,” Alex says. His face is screwed up like he drank too much cold water all at once. “It’s fine.”

  He doesn’t want to tell Alex he knows that’s not true, so instead he steers him over to the couch. “Well, maybe just sit for a bit, ok? Maybe that’ll help.”

  Alex looks up at him. Doesn’t move his head, just his eyes. One corner of his mouth turns up. “You’re so bad at this.”

  He grins back at him. “Well you’re a shitty liar.”

  Alex laughs softly. He’s so glad to hear the sound. “Look, just… Don’t call your doctor friend, ok? I don’t want anything. I just got right again, that’s probably all it is. But I wanna keep it for a bit.”

  He nods. “Ok.” He considers. “Maybe you should eat something.” When Sean reaches for his phone, Alex’s eyes track the motion.

  “Don’t worry. I can’t call Simone. She’ll kill me if she hears what we’ve been eating. And I can’t go out and get something, since the RCMP’s after Art because…” and now he looks at Alex and can’t bring himself to say because Cameron’s saying you’re not human, and we’ve stolen you. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that’s going to help. “Well, Cameron doesn’t like Art very much,” he says at last. Sean’s not sure when he picked up Mad’s compunction about lying, but it seems like he has. “I’m gonna order in. You still like sushi?”

  Alex frowns. “Sean,” he says softly, “except for that doughnut, I don’t remember the last time I ate something solid.”

  It would be an understatement to say that bothers Sean. It would be a mistake to assume that Sean’s nod and his steady hands mean his heart isn’t beating against the cage of his ribs, and he’s not imagining in loving detail, as he orders from the little place on the corner, exactly how he’s going to make Cameron pay for everything he’s done.

  When he’s done ordering, he hangs up and finds a text message waiting.

  Cameron wants a meeting this afternoon at 4. You want in?

  He looks at Alex, who’s still rubbing and his forehead, who can’t remember the last solid food he ate, whose face and body have been cut apart and put back together so many times that SysCorp is actually telling the police he’s a stolen thing. He types out Yes.

  Sixteen

  Sean leaves Alex on the couch with the TV on. He wishes he knew that everything would be ok when he was gone, but they ate, the two of them, and it made him feel better to see Alex start off eating slow and careful, and then finish everything, glad to see him still eating, picking at pieces of rice that spilled in the bag, and dipping the balsa-wood chopsticks into the soy sauce and sucking on them. He’s too thin, and all Sean wants is to see him eat. There won’t be a scrap left when he gets back. He should probably bring more food when he comes.

  Mad meets him in the hall, as he’s going to the elevator to meet Art and Rak.

  “Thought you were on the second floor,” he says. It’s where the communications department is, all cubicles and photocopiers. It’s where Rak has an office, and there’s a desk for operatives like them to do their paperwork.

  “In the sensory deprivation chamber?” she says and gives him a big grin. “Paperwork is for chumps. The second floor can’t hold me.” She grins. “I’ll ride down with you.”

  “You coming?” he asks, surprised. Mad never goes anywhere the press’ll be, and she never goes anywhere near Cameron.

  She shakes her head. “You kidding? No, I’ve got some questions for Simone about those ports and the HCI in that mech.” She pauses. “Look, I know you told Art you’d go, but you don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t. I don’t want to see that fucker.”

  “But?” she asks. He shrugs. She shrugs back at him. “Well I’m not going. You and I can stay home and drink beer.”

  He smiles faintly. “I’ve gotta do it.”

  She frowns at him.

  “I’ll keep one cold for you. You’re gonna need it when you get back.”

  “Yeah, I probably will.”

  He steps out and she punches the button for the third floor.

  “Thought you were going to the lab,” he says.

  She arches an eyebrow at him. “Said I was looking for Simone, not going to the lab. And mind your own business, O’Connell.”

  They take the SUV, the one with the tinted windows, and one of the security agents drives. The press is mostly gone, just a couple long-suffering reporters trying to get a scoop that none of the others have covered yet. He sits back in the leather seat, tugs his ball cap down.

  “The windows are tinted,” Art observes.

  “I know I just…” he shrugs. She smiles at him.

  “Feeling better?”

  “I got some sleep in the afternoon, and got something to eat. And he’s doing better today.”

  “Good.”

  He doesn’t like the scrutiny, and unlike Art he’s not good at the careful talk. He looks over at Rak, who’s sitting with his head tipped back and his mouth slightly slack. “You ok?” he asks.

  “My head is killing me. I feel hung over.”

  Sean feels a little sympathy for the guy, but Mad’s his partner, and his first loyalty is always going to be her. Besides, she might prank him next if he spoils it. Art raises an eyebrow as she looks from Rak to Sean.

  “Not enough coffee,” she says.

  “I had like four cups.”

  Art purses her lips. “From the pot in the lunch room?”

  He nods.

  “The one Mad made?”

  He nods again. “Yeah. Like four of them.”

  “And where is Mad anyway?” Art asks, all innocence.

  “Paperwork,” Rak says. “She’s over a month behind. I told her to get her ass up to the…” he trails off. “Decaf,” he says. He opens one eye and looks at Art. “I’m gonna kill her, you know that right?”

  Art smiles quietly to herself, and Sean tries hard not to laugh.

  There’s so much press, and so many protesters and cultists at the SysCorp building that Sean’s not worried about getting shot in the parking lot, even though it would be easy, so easy, to just pick him and Art off. Cameron could even put Chen in the crowd with a pistol, if he was willing to sacrifice her. He’s got no doubt Chen would sacrifice herself to do it.

  But there’s no one. No ringing gunshot, no spray of blood. They walk across the hot pavement and into the cool of the air conditioned lobby, where security guards are waiting for them, and they’re whisked up to the fourth floor offices. It’s the first time in over a year since Sean’s been in the building, and it’s strange how familiar it seems, how familiar it smells, and how different it feels to know that this is not his environment any more.

  They go to the boardroom on the sunny side of the building, where the AC is working double-time and the air is dry like before a summer thunderstorm. Cameron is already there, seated at the conference table, and Sean recognizes a couple other faces. One of them’s Marshall Campbell, the doctor who runs the mech program. He’s seen him before.

  Art goes through the door, long strides in the exo-suit. Voices rise in greeting, all false pleasantries. Suddenly Sean’s veins are full of ice and he knows, quite clearly, that he’s going to kill Cameron today. Nobody’s armed here, Chen’s not around. It’ll be eas
y.

  “Sean,” Rak says softly.

  “Yeah, it’s fine.”

  They’re chattering, offering professional small talk. Hot weather. Air conditioning so pleasant. Vacation plans. Rak grabs his arm.

  “I said it’s fine.”

  “No, it’s not. You look like you’re going to rip somebody’s throat out. Listen to me. You don’t have to go in, but if you do you need to keep your mouth shut and yourself under control. Anything you do now could fuck up what happens in court later. We don't win this with fists. We have to win this with lawyers. Got it?”

  He nods. “Ok,” he says, because he doesn't have an agreement with Rak like he does with Mad. He steadies himself with a breath and Rak lets go of his arm. “Yeah, ok. Let’s go.”

  He follows Rak into the boardroom and when he seems him, Cameron’s eyes widen. “You,” he says. He says it in a strange way, a weirdly delighted sort of way. He looks at Art. “Well done. I had no idea.”

  Rak settles down beside Art but Sean stays standing.

  “Well, I know how you love surprises Cameron.” Art’s tone is light, but her eyes are hard. She sits down in one of the grey, swiveling chairs and folds her hands on the table. “Speaking of surprises I was surprised by your statements in the press. You know Annex respects your property. We have no interest in getting into the mech business. None of my people would have taken anything from the mech.”

  Cameron laughs. It’s not a good sound. Sean tries not to shake. Tries not to show how his heart is pounding, and how awful it is, how small and useless he feels and how afraid he is of the short, aging man sitting in the chair across the boardroom table. He grips the back of Art’s chair and she glances up at him.

  “Why don’t you have a seat?” she asks softly.

  Cameron looks at him too, he gestures to the chair beside him.

  “Come here, Sean.”

  He makes himself stay where he stands. He makes himself speak. “I don’t work for you any more,” he says.

  Cameron’s eyes widen just a fraction. Then he smiles very faintly. “Don’t you?” he asks, and then, while Sean’s wrong-footed, he looks over at Art. “I never had a problem with you taking my garbage, my dear, but I draw the line at stealing the things I’m not ready to throw out.”