Over the next half an hour, several years passed in W’s prognosis, until Noah was barely propped up in his chair. Drool was covering his chin, and his eyes were looking all around the set. AJ was striving desperately to understand him.
“You need something,” she tried. “You need water? You need food?”
Noah glanced at her briefly, then wet himself.
The audience murmured. It took everything AJ had not to slap him.
But the horrors weren’t over. Noah had transformed his face to the point where AJ didn’t recognize him. He was making strangled gargling noises with his tongue. He was choking.
And now AJ was crying, struggling to help him get air. He fell on the floor. She tried to raise him up into a seated position, but he was deadweight. She couldn’t lift him. His tongue was wagging, writhing. He was drowning.
“Breathe,” she shouted. “You have to breathe.”
The lights blacked out.
He followed her to the dressing room after and changed out of his soiled garments while AJ threw up in the toilet. She emerged from the bathroom to find him waiting on the couch. He looked at her with a drawn, tired expression. It wasn’t disdain, but it wasn’t remorse either.
“I’m ready to go home now,” said AJ.
Noah nodded, and they brought Bud back to her apartment. AJtook the first turn in the shower and was tucked into bed by the time Noah emerged. She pretended to be asleep, listening to the sounds of his footsteps on her floor, waiting for the relief of the lamp’s off switch.
The darkness brought no rest. Every time AJ shut her eyes, she saw him as he had been onstage that night: mangled, helpless, damned. He was so fucking good at what he did, but AJ had never seen him play like that, like he was hooked up to a video in his own brain.
A video of what was coming for him.
For the first time, AJ’s resolve began to falter. Not about their relationship ending—that, they would both regret until the day they died. Buthowhe died…
AJ so badly wanted for this not to be happening to the person she loved most that she had considered every possibilityexceptthe one staring her in the face, which was that he knew what he was talking about. That suicide actually might be his best option.
I fucking love you more than life.
AJ did not want him to suffer pain or indignity. Certainly not for her.
As she began to cry, she felt his arms engulf her. He was crying too, unapologetically, which made AJ cry harder. His hands closed like shackles, binding her to him, and AJ felt his energy glide against hers, immense, profound, and then they were submerging, two mated creatures flung deep into a fathomless sea. They cried and cried until they passed into nothingness.
Two shows left.
AJ brought no fire to her final initiation.
“I’ve been going through my old papers,” she told him. “Remembering how it all began.”
From there, she took them into an F and W prequel, the story of how the two of them met at a research institution, where it was hate at first sight.
“Stay out of mylab,” he fumed.
“Stay out of mylife!” she rejoined.
Thrown together for the sake of funding, they eventually did get to know each other.
“I have a disability,” she confessed over imaginary beakers. “To me, most people are just flat surfaces. They’re not…real.”
“Am I?” he asked.
She searched him. “I don’t know yet.”
For a time, they collaborated as friends. Then he received an invitation to pursue his research across the country. When she heard he would be leaving, W broke down.
“This work has meaning,” she said with difficulty. “And we are the only two people who can do it. I know things aren’t perfect, but—”
