All that was left was the waiting. Another gun to appear in Ace’s hand. An explosive he sequestered during the struggle.. Strength rushing into his limbs on what had to be their two hundred and second wind. Curses, objections, absolutions garbled by blood and pain until not even the cameras could keep record of what Ace meant to say.
Marco waited.
There was silence. Stillness.
“That’s what I fucking thought.”
It had a lot less conviction when he echoed it. It could be there was a kind of comfort in that. Impulse on impulse had pushed him to make bad calls for his own good and he’d given in once. Only once. The temptation to do it again never went away, nor did the fear that tried to consume every other possibility, and he had no ground to pretend that was a unique struggle. Everybody in this room said their hands were forced, that everyone uttered some form of the words ‘I don’t want this’ but while Marco couldn’t speak to what compromises they made his version still felt true. He’d stopped pointing guns that weren’t pointed at him first. Offered every out he could beyond suicide. Marco had never hurt another person who hadn’t tried to hurt him since Kayla. He’d let nothing, not fear, not anger, not justice, not even certainty take him to that place again. Marco didn’t pull the trigger first, and that gave him the distance to pull it last.
That didn’t mean that he won.
He lost less than Ace and Diego.
He was still losing.
The kitchen’s doorway did most of the heavy lifting to get him back on his feet. One hand had to, he had nothing else to keep the pressure on with, so his gun had to go. He couldn’t remember where he dropped it. Later. So many guns later. Marco grabbed the first one that caught his blurry eye in the wreckage, the one Diego hadn’t been able to fire before Ace had pinned him. He could only imagine it made the explosions that destroyed the manor, even as Ace unloaded with everything he could find Diego hadn’t brought it to bear against him in such close quarters, but the other was empty. Everything else too far out of the way. The chandelier was dead in his path up the stairs where his bag was waiting and he had to have some protection with him. If he could, it was a lot of blood but they, he, he was alone but there were supplies, he wasn’t walking well, his body slumped lower into the railing every step he had to drag himself over and his hands were trembling but there were supplies in the bedroom and he could try to fix it. He couldn’t win, but he could lose less. Up in the bedroom he could rest, he could wait, he could…
At the top of the stairs he made the mistake of looking back.
The chaos of the lower level couldn’t be put into words. There was no describing it. There was no illustrating something so purposeless.
“I wanna win,
I want to go home,
And I wanna hole up and wait out the rest of this game in this fuckin’ manor.”
So unfair.
"I-
I wanna-
I wanna-
I wanna go home."
So rigged.
"I hid,
I mean,
I've known for,
I've seen what I want to be for so long and none of you ever…
I never...
Never lived.
Not really.
Not there,
Not here.
I want to go home."
“You never gave us a chance.”
Marco did not recognize the voice.
“Show us j-just...what you want us to see. ‘N hear. The worst.”
It sounded far away but in every direction. The words came slurred and were distorted with frequent sharp breaths, interruptions sounding like gasps or the sudden hesitance to hurl.
“Death and, cheating and, an...lying...every day. The worst. We never get...hear...we tried. I have, have to believe you don’t get that des...you have to try and, you lose…”
He was crying. Marco was able to tell himself he was crying through the nonsense speech he could barely recognize as his own when he collapsed in the master bedroom. He couldn’t get the words out clearly when it was hard to know if he was making them in the first place but the idea burned clear through the haze. The feeling swelling in Marco’s chest that didn’t have the fuel to make it all the way to anger couldn’t point itself to Ace or to Diego anymore than it had to Marceline. He couldn’t understand them past speculation, couldn’t forgive them, but he couldn’t hate them. They didn’t want this. They didn’t revel in it. They weren’t proud of what they’d done. They weren’t monsters. They were just people who had lost. He’d never get to know what, or how, or if they thought they could get it back, or...he just knew they lost.
Marco didn’t want to hurt them.
Marco had never
wanted to hurt anyone. Not even the ones who deserved it.
There was only one person in the entire world Marco had ever really, truly wanted to hurt.
Across the room hung the same large cracked mirror Marco had used to do his make-up. Much of it was smudged now. The outfit he’d cut down to a more appropriate size was stained with blood, torn, flecks of wood and dust and who could say all else dotting all over. The person under it all was the same though, there was no avoiding that as he peeled his shirt away to reveal the scatter pattern of bullet wounds. Subtract them and he was not radically different than this morning: The reflection in the mirror hanging across from the bed was imperfect.
Plenty of room for improvement.
A half dozen iterations away from struggling to find flaws.
There was a smile reflecting back at him with kaleidoscope intensity through the cracks.
Lines so faded they could barely be seen began to itch on Marco’s left arm, and his right hand drifted from his bag to rub at them. The smile he saw was not the one he wore this morning, of course it wasn’t, he was delirious, in pain, struggling under the hopelessness that there was anything waiting for him one step further but putting off loss one more day and that, maybe that most of all was why, why the smile looked so familiar.
Why under his reflection no matter what futures he tried to see where it got better, he saw the only person in the world he had ever truly, really...no. Hurt wasn’t enough. He’d hurt her. He could have hurt her at any time. His nails were right there ready to dig into his flesh, he’d had larger, sharper blades to re-open old wounds in ways she never could have imagined being capable of, but Marco didn’t want to hurt her.
He wanted to kill her.
He’d been trying to kill her with every choice since he’d forced himself back on his feet after Kayla, and now he was dying. He was dying and when he was dead he, he thought of Princess. He thought of Marceline. Of Ace. He thought of stillness, and of hours spent under the lens of a camera, and how when everything that he had chosen to make himself Marco left this body with him, it would die with her reflection on his face.
Today, she wouldn’t stop smiling. Tomorrow, she wouldn’t stop smiling. Twenty years from now, she wouldn’t stop smiling. If he killed every person left she would still be alive inside him and she wouldn’t stop smiling. The hope, the progress, surgery, therapy, she wouldn’t stop smiling. When people wouldn’t stop saying her name, when there was no home to go back to because Marco didn’t have a home, or a family, or friends, or a life, Marco was just an imposter haunting them through the body of a dead girl, she wouldn’t stop smiling. As his vision got dark at the edges, as he couldn’t think straight, as his limbs were getting too heavy to hold up he could still see her clearer than anything else in the room and she wouldn’t stop smiling.
If there was no hope for anyone, if everyone here just lost and lost and kept soldiering on to be vilified until they died, if they didn’t have a chance with a goal so concrete and clear as ‘survive,’ why should he have any hope for conquering something so ephemeral?
Why keep fighting at all when he was so, so tired?
When she would never stop fucking smiling?
He screamed and pulled a trigger he was not fully aware was trembling under his finger.
There was a thunk, and for the barest split second the sound of glass shattering on impact.
B066: MARCO HART, DECEASED
And she stopped smiling.