“Fuck” Amer slams the mug back down on the coffee table. Hard enough to leave an indent in the wood but not quite enough to shatter it. The table or the mug. Honestly, he’d be fine with either at this point.

He’s been at this for hours. Staring at the infuriating ‘Westland Insurance Expo 1996’ mug. Trying, and spectacularly failing, to change its colour. To convince said mug that it isn’t, in fact, faded sky blue with sickly off-white lettering but is, instead, a rather vibrant shade of fuchsia pink.

As it turns out, that shit’s harder than it looks.

Amer glares at the mug. The mug glares back. And resolutely refuses to be anything but blue. Amer shoves it away and watches as it topples over a little before righting itself. If ceramic could look smug, it’d be doing a bang-up job. Amer wants to kick it off the table.

“Having fun?” Amer feels the cushions sag slightly at his back as Marcus drops down onto the couch. Amer’s sitting on the floor. He’s been sitting on the floor for far too long. Far longer than he’d like to admit. Legs curled up to his chest, elbows digging into the coffee table. At one point, he thought getting closer to the mug would help. It didn’t.

“Oh yeah,” Amer deadpans. “So much fun. I love being outwitted by inanimate objects.” Amer narrows his eyes, giving said inanimate object another quick burst of what little energy he has left. Maybe taking it by surprise will do the trick? It doesn’t.

Amer drops his head back on the couch, giving up for what feels like the fifteenth time in as many hours. He shifts uncomfortably, trying to roll out his shoulders, feeling as much as hearing the knots click and shift under his skin. He aches. All over. And not just from being curled around himself like a pretzel for the better part of the day. The slow headache behind his eyes is starting to morph into a migraine. And the damn mug is still as blue as ever.

Marcus doesn’t even seem surprised. In some way, that makes it worse.

Amer blindly grabs the mug again, on instinct if anything, not sure what he intends to do, but feeling rather strongly about doing it. It looks small in his hands. Small and insignificant. And really fucking blue.

Amer’s knuckles are white before he realises his hand is shaking.

“You can smash it. If you want,” Marcus says from behind him, nonchalant as ever. And yeah, Amer would very much like to do that. Chuck the thing at the wall and watch as it shatters to pieces against the exposed brick. Or better yet, fling it clean off the balcony. Yeah. He’s pretty sure that would make him feel a whole lot better.

But it wouldn’t fix the problem. He’d still be here. Sitting on the floor. And the mug would still be blue.

Amer drops it back on the table so he doesn’t lob it out the window.

Amer opens his mouth. Starts. Stops. Trying to find the words for the slithering thing currently coiling in his chest. “Shouldn’t I… I mean, shouldn’t this…” He sighs, trying to say something that doesn’t feel like failure. “… shouldn’t this be easier?”

“Why?” Marcus. Always straight to the point. Amer kind of loves him for that.

“Because if this is who I am,” Amer flaps his hands in the vague direction of the mug, “If this,” another wild gesture, taking in the room, “is what I’m meant to be… shouldn’t it be… easier?”

The thing in his chest swells, growls, takes up the space where his lungs should be. Giving it words is not helping. Making it more alive. So Amer tries to choke it down. Push it back into a little ball. Turn it outwards at the mug, at Marcus, at anything, instead of inwards, where it’s making him feel sick. “If I’m this all-powerful Fate Spinner like you keep telling me I am… why is this so hard?”

“Because it’s hard,” Marcus. Again. Straight to the point. But he’s not smirking as he says it, or grinning, or doing any of the other things he does when he makes some joke Amer doesn’t get. His eyes are soft, creased a little at the edges, emerald green shining in a way Amer doesn’t quite understand as he looks down at Amer, pretzled in knots on his floor.

“This shit is hard.” Marcus gestures to the mug, to the books, the papers, strewn about the room. “What you’re doing is hard. That doesn’t stop it being a part of you. Struggling doesn’t mean you’re failing. Struggling doesn’t mean this isn’t who you are.”

“You keep saying that,” Amer winces at the crack he can hear in his own voice, “but I can’t even change the fate of a piece of fucking kitchenware. How the hell and I supposed to help you fix the goddamn world if I can’t even do that! How am I supposed to be… this… if all I do is fail?”

The words are making it worse. Making him vibrate with the need to move, to run, to get the fuck away and run into a goddamn wall so he can stop feeling so fucking useless. He’s about a second away from asking Marcus to punch him. About two away from making him.

The thing in Amer’s chest slithers up his neck, a thick, heavy weight wrapping around his throat, pushing the words, the air, the warmth from his chest as he says it.

“I feel like a fraud.”

Amer waits. Resting a moment in the silence between them. Letting the thing coil and throb in his insides, feeling open and raw with it, but just a little better for having given it a name.

“You know, that’s exactly what Rit used to say.”

Amer is so shocked at hearing Marcus say that name that for a brief second, the sinking pit in his stomach is replaced with genuine surprise. Marcus has never, not once, voluntarily spoken about Ankerit. Not to Amer, and certainly not without being strong-armed into it. (A few times at literal gunpoint.)

Amer bites his tongue, trying desperately not to break the moment. Marcus continues. It feels fragile as glass and just as likely to cut them to ribbons.

“Back at the Academy. Before all this. When they were training us, pushing us, pushing him. To do better, be better. Be faster. Be stronger. Moulding us into the things they wanted us to become. The weapons they needed us to be.”

Marcus is fidgeting with his fingers, rubbing circles over the place where a ring should be. Amer wants to grab his hands, reach out and still the motions, but he’s afraid of breaking whatever has settled between them. So he just sits and listens, nails digging into his palms, questions locked behind his teeth.

“There’d be a new target each week.” Marcus continues. “New bindings, new spells. New hoops to jump through, new skills to master. Rit would spend days locked in his head. Staring blankly at the walls. Trying over and over. Failing over and over. He’d stop eating. He’d barely sleep. And when I did manage to pull him out of it, force him to put his head down for five minutes and rest, he’d say the same thing. ‘I can’t do this’. ‘They made a mistake’. ‘They think I’m something I’m not’.”

Marcus’ eyes are far away. A little homesick, a little wistful, a little lost.

“But eventually, he’d get it.” Marcus’ smile is a tentative thing that feels far too hopeful for their particular brand of broken. “After days. Weeks sometimes. He’d come crawling into bed at some gods-forsaken hour, eyes bright and buzzing, asking if I wanted to see whatever reality-bending shit he’d just figured out how to do.” Marcus laughs, bright and open. Amer’s not sure if he’s ever heard him laugh like that before. “And for those few hours, he’d believe it. Believe in himself. Until the next assignment. The next failure. The next Company recruiter telling him who and what he should be.”

Marcus leans forward, animated, imploring, devastatingly present all of a sudden. “So yeah. This shit’s hard. You’re playing with time. It’s going to be hard. But that doesn’t mean it’s not who you are.”

Amer stares at Marcus. Really stares. It feels a little like he can breathe again. A little like he’d rather not. Like he’d rather suck the air from Marcus’ lungs and stay in this moment long enough to do so. He’s suddenly acutely aware that he’s on the floor. On his knees. And Marcus is looking at him like he’s the world. Or perhaps like Amer could destroy the world, and Marcus would let him. Amer’s not entirely sure. Marcus is hard to read at the best of times. Even more so when he’s so close Amer can taste him. The static, electric thing that is Marcus, sliced open and handed to him. More vivid and visceral than he’s ever seen him before. And Amer’s seen Marcus cut open and bleeding more times than is healthy at this point.

It’s heavy. It’s electric. It feels like the edge of a very large cliff. And Amer has an aching desire to step the fuck off. To stick his hand in the fire and find out if it burns. Grab the exposed wire and see if it kills him.

“Now come on, I’m starving. And there’s all you can eat tacos down the street that won’t eat themselves.”

And just like that, the moment breaks. Tumbling back to normalcy with Marcus’ personal brand of tactless wit, and Amer feels the laugh pulled loud and deep from his chest. A weight you didn’t know was there until after it’s gone. Diving headfirst into crashing waves and finding out you can breathe.

They go for tacos. They’re good tacos. It feels more refreshing than Amer thought possible. To go outside. To step away. To stop thinking, stop trying, just for a moment, and indulge in something as mundane as dinner without having to think about the world ending, or the backbreaking weight of what they’re trying to do to stop it.

It might be the tacos. It might be Marcus. But either way, it feels normal. Far more normal than it has any right to feel.

They walk back, tacos in hand, bumping shoulders as they saunter down the street, neither of them caring which way they’re going, simply enjoying the tail end of the day, and the warm thing that’s settled between them that neither wants to scare away by putting a name to.

After a few blocks, Marcus nudges Amer’s shoulder. “Hey. Look.” Marcus nods across the street. Amer follows his gaze and sees Marcus’ apartment building, looking pretty much the same as they left it: large glass windows, ostentatious lobby, valet parking if you’re really feeling fancy. Oh, and one more thing. The entire building is bright fucking pink.

Marcus is already laughing. “Fucking told you.” He grins, elbowing Amer in the ribs while he shoves another taco in his mouth, making a mess of eating it with a broad smile plastered across his face, clearly not caring about either. “If my entire apartment’s pink, we’re gunna have a problem.” The goofy smile on his face makes his threat pretty easy to see through.

It is. The apartment. Entirely pink, from top to bottom. But Amer puts it back. It’s pretty easy. Now he knows how.

He leaves the mug, though. Garishly pink, sitting on the coffee table where he left it. A little reminder, if he needs it, that he can do this. That he can become this. That he can be this.

That maybe he already is.

---

A little scene from my draft that felt more personal than it should, and was exceedingly cathartic to write. Part of slowly making progress on the novel, little pieces each day, in whatever way they come.