Page 49 of Repossess My Heart

“My baby, please! You can have it! You can have it all! There’s a bot it knows-“ Mom’s sentence is cut off by another scream.

“Hush now silly, things were just getting interesting. Can’t have you spilling all the secrets.” The small childlike voice chimes in.

“Nathan, don’t forget the promise you made to us that night. You said you were my big brother forever, no matter what. You said you’d make this right.”

“I will.” I breathe out, “This changes nothing.”

“It changes everything.” He counters, “It did for her.”

My eyes find my mom’s mutilated body through the closet slats. “The lies and half-truths are still what they are. Only thing that’s different is who holds them. A nonissue when you kill them all indiscriminately”

“Then why are you here?”

My head snaps towards him, a frown pulling my brows together as a soft panicked voice urges me from somewhere else. I ignore it the best I can. “You brought me here.”

Michael laughs for a moment his eyes… his eyes…

It’s Michael, his wavy hair isn’t streaked with blood, his eyes are there as hollow as they were before. More rounded like mom’s than mine, and such a cold deep brown I can almost feel the chills they used to give me. He looks so much like her, minus the warmth. I used to be jealous that he’d look so much like mom and yet lack all the warmth she held. That apart from her blue eyes, I was always the spitting image of the man that killed-

Of my father.

“I don’t bring you here dude, you’re going crazy. None of this is real.”

“I know that.” I snap, glaring down at the weight pressing on my chest. The phantom hands pulling and jerking… urging me.

For what? Nobody has ever bothered me here before.

“Reverie?” I whisper, mostly to myself.

“Don’t go Nate please. Stay.”

“I think something is wrong.”

“Yeah, what’s not? None of it matters. Just stay here with us.”

“Something's coming! Nin- Nathan, get up you asshole!”

Michael’s fist bumps my shoulder the way mine used to do to his when he got too moody, “Come on, big brother, everything sucks out there.”

“Everything sucks everywhere, Michael.” How can my head feel so fuzzy and throb at the same time? “She needs me.”

I jolt as his face reverts to the painful one, the one that makes bile rise in my gut and tugs at my chest, “Like we needed you.”

“I need to go.”

“I turned her in to Anton, told him when I saw her sneaking around, always fucking with that stupid bot but at least I did something!” His scream might as well be a knife. My hands slap over my ears as I watch him. Sweat already slicking my brow as my pulse jumps erratically, “But you…” he laughs again. A shudder wrecks me as I hear so much of myself in it. He’s a child- he’s just a fucking kid…

Maybe I don’t hear myself in him… but him in me. Was my laugh ever mine?

“You did nothing Nate, doesn’t that make you just as bad as me?”

“No!” The sound of my own voice is loud enough I’m sure it burst my own eardrums. When I force my eyes open from where they’d shut, the air flees from my lungs. My hand is banded around Michael’s throat, his face turning an ugly shade of reddish purple before my mind again goes dark.

Reverie

My nails score the metal flooring as I struggle to keep still. It’s strange, wanting so badly to die and yet your body still tries to force you to act. To save yourself despite not at all wanting to be saved. Sure, I hadn’t wanted it to happen quite like this. The eerie robotic barking echoing through the pod complex. The screams of other tenants as they run from whatever horrifying thing is rocketing through the tight passages. The complex has no halls, only maintenance tunnels.

Out of everything that’s happened since Nine waltzed into the club, there’s few things left that I feel any degree of certainty about…

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