So: A couple of days of the age-old game, Christopher Keller-style -- watching, waiting, making himself...available, everpresent, right at the edge of Toby Beecher's so seemingly-distracted awareness. Glances and deliberate AVOIDANCE of eye-contact, plus the occasional murmured aside or "accidental" brush-by, all muted to the point of sublimation by their mutual need to keep Vern Schillinger unaware of what was not *quite* happening, right underneath his pure white nose. Court and spark.
     Of course, using the word "mutual" was a bit of a supposition, on Chris's part. Nevertheless, he *knew* Beecher was picking up on his efforts -- the smaller man was like a human sex-o-meter or something, always coldly tracking potential suitors with a distant, myopic blue eye, while simultaneously throwing out a haze of mockingly artificial pheremones thick enough to choke the proverbial horse. And -- just like with all the rest of the various predators stalking his pretty blond ass -- if he wasn't exactly encouraging Keller to press his suit, he wasn't exactly DIScouraging his interest, either. That film noir gangster's moll vibe at work, yet again.
     (Not gonna make it easy on me, huh, kitty-cat? Well, that's okay too; I kinda like a challenge.)
     Especially here in Oz, where there wasn't a whole hell of a lot ELSE to focus your attention on.
     With just about anybody else, Keller would already be working on his excuse to jump out of bed before being asked to spend the night. But the fact that this was Beecher --Beecher, who was, well...*Beecher* -- had knocked most of Chris's standard operating procedures for a loop.
     "Call me old-fashioned," he'd told Sister Pete during one of his increasingly-frequent personal counselling sessions, patented roguish glint in full effect, when she'd expressed amazement at his *three* failed marriages. "First I marry 'em, THEN I fuck 'em."
     And then, after the sex goes bad...
     (...it all falls to ratshit.)
     And with Beecher?
     Well, he wasn't out to MARRY the guy. Schillinger'd got there first, after all, on *that* one.
     (With us both.)
     Oh yeah, right. *Vern*.
     Caught up in the sheer, strategic thrill of all his seductive planning and plotting, Keller realized, he had actually come *this close* to forgetting the reason he'd started this whole campaign to win Beecher's...heart -- along with the rest of all the GOOD parts -- in the first place: To fuck Vern up, wreck his "happy home", siphon away some of his jizz and maybe pick up a little reparation for poor, Death Row-bound Richie Hanlon, at the same time. A plan, conceived and executed: All very calm, very collected, if not exactly cool.
     Beecher threw off far too much freaky, fever-bright heat for that.
     Which just made it even more vital NOT to let Vern catch any hint of the currents developing between them -- if there WERE any. If it wasn't just Chris fooling himself (instead of somebody else), for a change.
     Hence:  The Brand-New, Reformed Chris Keller -- the Keller who never missed a day at the library, who showed up faithfully for his counselling sessions, the Keller who actually requested *more* time with Sister Pete.
     Curious, it was, how those two places -- the library and Sister Pete's office -- just *happened* to be the only places you could bank on Beecher being minus Vern.
     Unfortunately, after a few days of this it was getting harder and harder to convince the good Sister -- not a woman who let a lot slip past her, even on her slower days -- that these extra sessions were really for his own benefit.

"Okay, so -- I'm back in bed.  My bed.  At home."  Keller brushed Sister Pete's dark, level gaze with his own, then let his eyes wander off to the corner of the room, as if lost in (fake) memory.  "There's somebody next to me.  You can always tell, you know."  A pause; a faint, lopsided smile.  "You *do* know -- right, Sister?"
     Sister Pete smiled in return -- a warm, understanding expression that didn't give a single thing away.  "Yes, Chris.  I know."
     Keller nodded.  He'd heard she was married, once -- from that fuckin' chatterbox Hill, probably.  Before, he assumed, Christ the Saviour had made a better offer.
     "Anyway," he resumed.  "At first, I think it's Bonnie next to me.  I told you about Bonnie.  Number two -- "
     " -- and number four," Sister Pete finished for him at exactly the same time.  "Go on, Chris.  I'm sure there's more.  Why *did* you think it was Bonnie?"
     (Just the perfect psychiatrist, aren't you,ex-Mrs. Reimondo.)
     "Well...."  Keller drawled the word, leaning back.  Just what *would* it take to get through that serene little mask?  "Bonnie was...  She was a whole lot of woman, Sister."  He shook his head and chuckled, a fond, lascivious sound.  "So whenever you were next to her, you just felt this incredible *heat* coming off her.  And that's the heat I'm feeling.  Like I'm lying next to a radiator.
     "So -- I turn over.  And then I think, no.  This can't be her.  I can't see who it is, exactly, 'cause it's dark.  But it's somebody small.  Lying there, on the stomach, face turned away from me -- all I see is this head of short hair.  Looks kinda... curly.
     "I reach over.  And when I touch his shoulder -- "
     "His?"
     "Yeah.  That's the freaky part."
     Beecher, who Keller could glimpse at his station through the partially open door of Sister Pete's inner office, didn't even look up from his keyboard.
     Sister Pete gave him a look: freaky, huh, Chris?  She shook her head, smiling as if against her will.  "Chris, if you really want to tell the rest of this... this *dream* of yours to me, go ahead; otherwise, go outside and tell it to Tobias.  Because nice as it is to look at you every day,  I just don't have the time."
      Keller made a mock-hurt grimace.  "It's a *good* one, Sister."  Wide, loose grin.  "Lots of action."
      "Yes, I've noticed that.  Do you ever have *boring* dreams?"
      For some reason the first answer that came into Keller's head -- a crack he'd meant to whip off in his best smartass voice -- emerged in a harsher tone than he'd expected.  "I'm here.  In Oz.  Who needs 'em?"
     Beecher's typing stopped.
     Sister Pete considered him.  Keller could see a vague hint of his own outline mirrored in her eyes, their liquid heat momentarily locked away from him -- separate and set adrift, like the shifting globules of colour in a lava lamp.  That wall.  That fucking administrative wall, the one that always came down, eventually.  They could play at being friends, even at flirting; firm but fair Whittlesey, or kind, ineffectual Father Ray and his constant agonizing over poor little Alvarez.  But sooner or later you always crossed the line and got kicked out the other side.  And the barrier slammed down inside the other person's eyes again -- that slick black wall painted with cold white letters a mile high:
     INMATE.
     Keller had thought Oz's *visible* walls were almost too tough to handle, but this had just stopped being fun.  Sister Pete saw the sudden anger cloud his face and reached out a concerned hand, but Keller was already on his feet, turning for the door.
     "Chris," she said.  He stopped.  "We still have five minutes."
     "Yeah?" Keller snapped without looking around.  "Well, *I* got eighty-eight years.  So don't pretend another five minutes' worth of bullshit sympathy is really gonna help."
     He heard her sigh, a resigned sound.  It was dismissal enough.  For once, he didn't bother to cast his usual sidelong glance at Beecher as he strode to the outer door.  He was too pissed to play right now.
     "You could have gone a little... easier on her."  The quiet comment didn't sound like either of Beecher's more familiar voices -- not the lunatic, lilting prag's coo he adopted around Vern, or the machinelike professional monotone he normally reserved for the Sister's office.  The change was unexpected enough to halt Keller in the doorway.  "She's doing the best she can."
     Keller's shoulders hunched.  "Looks at me like I'm a fucking lab rat, and I'm supposed to act all happy about that?"
     "But you *are*, Chris."  Strangely, it didn't seem to be as mocking as usual; bitter irony, acid amusement, yes, but not at Keller's expense.  As Keller turned around in surprise, Beecher raised his eyes from the keyboard.  "We're all just rats in Timmy McManus' maze.  Find the path, eat your cheese, jump when they poke you and just say please."
     (Eeaaagh.  Now *that's* weird -- motherfucker thinks he's Rhymin' Simon.)
     But Keller didn't look away from the other man.  The glasses made Beecher's eyes look larger than normal, eerily flat, their blue so pale they looked almost empty.  Yet the unlikely clarity in them -- the complete absence of the usual myopic haze -- seemed to change the shape of his whole face, smooth out the lines of his quasi-madness into something approaching...
     ...normalcy?
     (Naaah.  Not OUR Toby.)
     "So given all that -- " a sudden, charming, unexpectedly SANE smile -- "I'll take Sister Pete's clinical sympathy -- bullshit or not -- over the rest of these uniformed assholes, with their oh-so-important 'rules', and all the shit that they pull while enforcing them, any fucking day of the week."
     Silence.
     Keller drew a deep breath.  "You are some piece of work, Beecher.  You know that?"
     "So they keep telling me."
     "You talk back to Vern like this?"
     "I'm saving that for when I've had enough of this place."  A sly, insinuating beat.  "You?"
     (Now or never -- )
     "I might."  Keller locked eyes with him.  "If I thought I had something worth fighting him over."
     "Well."  Beecher turned back to the computer screen, the line of his shoulders a loose, indifferent dismissal.  "Tell me when you find it."
     And:  Already did, Toby, Keller thought.
     (Already did.)
 

- 2 -

Sinking hooks was the easy part, Beecher thought, trudging back towards "his" pod.  Guessing how many, how deep, and how hard to pull on them after they *were* sunk... that was the tough part.
     Two sets of instincts were at war inside him.  The lawyer he had been -- the cold, professional computer-mind he drew on when evaluating situations, and forging strategies accordingly -- was urging him to move and move now, all too aware that every day increased the risk of Vern, or somebody loyal to Vern, getting tipped off as to what was going on between he and Keller.
     Not that there *was* anything going on, per se.
     (Yet.)
     The newer instincts, meanwhile, the PRAG instincts -- Vern's lovingly cultivated "wedding gift" -- said something else.  They said, simply:
     *Wait.  Wait and see.  Let him come to you.*
     (And make him pay, when he does.)
     Then again, as the taxi drivers who'd ferried him home from various drunken binges used to cheerfully -- though rhetorically -- inquire, weren't all lawyers whores anyway?  So maybe they weren't two different set of instincts after all.  Which would mean that his own subconscious was just as divided and self-loathing as the rest of him.
     And always had been.
     (Hey -- maybe that was why you DRANK!  Huh, Tobe?)
     Naaah, too easy.
     People routinely blamed things on their subconscious nowadays.  He saw it all the time in Sister Pete's files -- murders and rapes and robberies, all blamed on your mother taking the tit away too soon.  On dead pets and lost opportunities, dreams and portents and bullshit childhood mythologies from too many different cultures to shake a stick at, real or imaginary.
     He knew better, of course.  It was simpler than that -- for him, at least.  He *knew* why he was here.  Knew beyond any possibility of self-deception or redemption.  He knew.
     (And guess WHAT, Toby?  It was your... fucking... fault.)
     Ah yes, he thought, almost smiling at the haggard face in the plastic of the approaching pod door.  Because... you just know yourself *so well*.
     Count had already started when he joined the line, sliding deftly into Vern's bulky shadow.  The older man shot a quick glance at him, then faced front again, familiar bored mask in place -- the one that said, *I don't have to do this, I'm just here because I have no immediate business to attend to.  Not to mention how it amuses me to indulge you.*
     (You fuckin' asswipe hacks.)
     "92S110."  The hack ticked his clipboard, moved a step, and glanced at Beecher; his upper lip twitched just slightly, curling away from his lower in what wasn't quite a sneer.  "97B412."
      Beecher met the guard's eyes coldly, manufacturing an icily seductive pout.  He was rewarded with the threadbare satisfaction of watching the hack's gaze *leap* away to the next prisoner, as though scalded by the almost-eyefuck -- along with the heat of his own not-so-secret disgust/fascination, reluctant though it might be.
     No real victory.  Just a moment's bitter amusement.  But you took what you could get, in Oz.
     (And Vern taught you *that*, too.)
     Speaking of whom --
     Vern liked his routines -- at least, he liked the ones *he* established.  So these last five hours of light before ten p.m. had taken on a dreary sameness:  Vern did some exercises, talked about his plans for the A.B. (Beecher nodding along, making interested noises, and dutifully memorizing anything he thought might interest O'Reily), then -- if he was feeling benevolent -- let Beecher study whatever books he'd brought back from the library in relative peace.  If he happened to feel bored but lazy, he'd engage Beecher in some fucked-up parody of Socratic dialogue, leading him through a roster of questions to which no prag would ever voluntarily answer "No", thus forcing him to admit to any humiliating conclusion Schillinger felt like inflicting:  *I am a fag.  I am stupid.  I am less valuable than a good rifle* (a particularly ridiculous argument based on the fact that the metal in your average rifle was worth more, economically, than the chemicals that made up a human body).  All of which boiled down to one unspoken conclusion:
     *You're just BETTER than I am, Vern.  Always were, always will be.*
     Weirdly, these dialogues had gotten easier to endure, not harder, once Beecher had made the connection and figured out that *was* the message.  He wondered if Schillinger realized that.
     (You know he doesn't.  Because if he did, he'd STOP.)
     Yeah. And think of something worse.
     Such as...the exercises.  Once in a while Vern took out his irritation with some extraneous frustration by making Beecher play private to his imaginary drill sergeant:  Drop and give me a hundred, soldier!  Jumping jacks, right now!  Hup two, hup two, are you TIRED yet, soldier?
     No SIR!
     Good.  THEN GIVE ME ANOTHER HUNDRED!
     In terms of behavior, it was about as masculine as Vern ever wanted him to get, these days --Beecher had to give it *that*.  And it made him far too exhausted to even manufacture the laughter he normally had to struggle to repress.
     But one way or another, the hours passed until --
     Lights out.

To the sound of a shrieking bell, darkness came down on Em City in raw, jagged chunks, section by section dropping out of Beecher's weak eyesight until at last there was nothing left but black.  Not total black -- the emergency lights stayed on, enough for the hacks to patrol by, and the CO station in the quad's centre was always spotlighted -- but enough to effectively blind anybody who already happened to be myopic.
     That had been part of the horror at first.  Now, it was actually a balm.
     Beecher sighed.  This, too, was routine.  Along with --
     -- the next step.
     He got up from the small table, crossed to his bunk (the bottom one, natch), and sat down, hands demurely folded in his lap, waiting to be summoned. For...duty.
     No sound but even, steady breathing above.  Vern wasn't asleep -- when he WAS, he snored. Though he would probably never admit to that fact, and Beecher had certainly never attempted to complain about it.
     (Not like there isn't usually anything ELSE keeping me awake.)
     Beecher's brow furrowed. Usually Vern either called him up to the top after a few minutes or informed him, already yawning, he wouldn't be needed tonight.  But ten minutes had already elapsed, at least.
     "Sir?" he dared.
     "Not yet."
     Well, what the fuck *was* he doing?  Meditating?  Taking Viagra?
     (Believe me, you REALLY don't need it.)
     Another five minutes.  Beecher considered twiddling his thumbs -- then thought *Why the hell not?* and actually started to do it, counterclockwise.  But it palled after a moment or two, so just for kicks, he did it the other way.  That got boring pretty quickly, too.
      (For Christ's sweet sake -- )
     "Sir?" he tried again.  "Do you...at least... want a goodnight kiss?"
     A pause.  A *long* pause, longer than Vern took answering *anybody*'s questions.  Beecher had time to half-complete a thought:
     (Oh, shit, he's figur -- )
     Then: "Sure."  Casual, dismissive, as if it had never been in doubt; or as if it was an unimportant whim.  Beecher swallowed, got up and turned to face the top bunk.
     Vern's hands clamped his head like a construction-machine's jaws coming down and Beecher felt the man's balding skull jam tight against his brow.  Dry lips engulfed his mouth, Vern's scalding tongue punching between his teeth, prying them apart.  There was nothing but flesh and mass and moisture and the viselike, crushing grip on his head.  Beecher writhed, unable to breathe.  Hot, wet gasps dragged at the last air in his lungs, as if Vern was feeding off him to keep *himself* from drowning -- like a suffocation in reverse, sucking out breath, consciousness, and life.  A desperation that matched and mimicked Beecher's own.
     On complete autopilot, Beecher's right hand flew up, flailing, heading for the side of Vern's head -- but with a spasm of willpower, at the last possible moment, he managed to turn the gesture from an incipient blow into a defusing, asphyxiation-gentled caress along Vern's furiously working jawline.
     He wasn't able to stop his hand from trembling, though.
     Under his touch, Vern stilled, every muscle freezing.  For half an instant Beecher hung stunned in his grip, Vern's tongue still pinning his own like a dead, skinned snake.
      (Eeuuuuuugghhh....)
     A moment later, again without warning, he was free, straining not to react to what had just happened.  Thanking God the cell was too dark for his face to be visible.  And thinking:
     (Christ Jesus.  Christ Jesus.  Oh... dear Christ in heaven....)
     "There.  You got what you wanted."  Schillinger rolled back to stare up at the ceiling, voice flat, eyes unblinking.  Beecher could see them shine in the gloom: a raptor's gaze, cold and wide, extinction-bound but still -- dangerous.  "Happy?"
     Oh yeah, Beecher thought numbly.  EcSTATic.
     (To still be ALIVE.)
     "Now go to bed."
     Shaking, Beecher dropped down onto the lower bunk -- almost *collapsed* onto it, truth be told -- and let himself keel over, curling fetally.  He thought about pulling the blanket over himself, but couldn't muster the effort.
     He should, he supposed remotely, be grateful.  Once in a while he got tempted to think he actually had Vern under *his* control, instead of the other way around.  This reminded him not to be so arrogant.
     (What the *fuck* was that all about, anyway?)
     No point in wondering.
     (You'll know soon enough.)

The kissing had seemed like a good idea at the time.
     They'd been back "together" maybe a week.  O'Reily had dropped little encouraging hints to him in the dining hall:  Not bad, but keep your eyes down more -- and keep on eyefucking everyone *else*.  Or:  Learn how he wants things done and do 'em without him asking. Or:  Be more, you know, affectionate.  But not faggy.
     (Prag Etiquette 101.)
     So how do *you* know so much about it anyway, Ryan? he still found himself wondering occasionally.  Personal... experience?
     Ah, the mysteries of Oz.
     In terms of how best to demonstrate said affection, however, Ryan had been quite annoyingly unhelpful -- small wonder, coming from the self-professed straightest man in Em City.  In exasperation, Beecher had thought, finally:
     (What do you want me to do, asshole, French kiss him?)
     At which point his traitor memory -- the part of his mind that diligently stored up *everything*, even the stuff he wanted to erase forever -- had replied:
     (Well, he did used to say he *liked* that....)
     Liked how Beecher had *hated* it, at any rate, back then.  But still.
     He'd taken a couple of nights to work up his courage -- then jumped in at last, with both feet.  Vern had ordered his usual blowjob -- like at a restaurant:  "Yeah, I'll have my usual; you know how I like it" -- and waved Beecher back down to his own bunk afterwards.  Beecher had gone to brush his teeth, saying nothing.  Then, turning:
     "May I kiss you goodnight, sir?"
     Vern put on the look of mild bemusement he used to cover his few moments of genuine surprise.  Beecher read the expression clearly:  *What am I supposed to do with this?*
      And projected back:  *Whatever you want.*
     (I mean... you're the one in charge here.  Right?)
     A few moments of consideration; a shrug.  "Fine."  Vern sat up in his bunk, leaning down to bring his face close to the smaller man's.  The satisfaction in his hooded gaze was tangible, though not quite free of any long-timer's chronic suspicion.  So the prag was showing some initiative, was he?  Presenting the submissive gestures himself, instead of waiting to be instructed to.  Maybe, just maybe, he was learning some goddam discipline at last.
     Some respect.
     And:  Mm-hm -- that's right, Beecher thought, coldly; though there was a part of him that wanted to do nothing but howl with laughter.  Because I've finally come to see... what a MAN you really are, Vernon.
     (What a man, what a man, what a man, what a *mighty fine* man.)
      Not wanting to give himself time to think better of it, he leaned up, pressing his mouth against Vern's.  No more, that first second, than a perfunctory peck -- the pressure maybe a *little* firmer than had once been the "norm".  Then:
      Curling the lips.  *Undulating* them against Vern's, muscles contracting and pressing onto stubbly skin, softer inner tissue.  He could sense the other man's paralyzing shock in the immobility of his body.  Taking advantage, he opened wide, didn't quite *bite* through.  Added some tongue:  Plunging between Vern's teeth, swishing around, 'til Vern's own tongue couldn't help but respond -- an involuntary salivation, hungry, like a guard dog shown raw meat; half automatic defense, half genuine NEED.
     The kiss was clumsy at first; Vern obviously more than a bit uneasy about the implications of his own reaction.  Teeth scraped teeth awkwardly.  Beecher felt Vern's hands sink into his shoulders, pulling him closer.
     And then the grip tightened that extra notch, changing what had been almost tender into something MUCH more familiar.
     Pain.  And the delighted awareness of pain.
     Eyes closed, his own mouth working vigorously, Beecher nonetheless recognized Vern's forming expression by sheer *feel*, not just touch but the *vibe* coming off the older man.  That unpleasant, benign little smile Vern got whenever he was sure his target was absolutely *loathing* what he was being "forced" to do, yet afraid enough to adopt the semblance of complicity.  Hurt, terror, "freely granted" submission.  Tits to Vern's addiction.  Beecher could almost hear him thinking:
      (You think you're trying to distract me, right, bitch?  As IF.)
      Trouble with that self-justification, though, was that Beecher's oh-so-transparent "plan" was obviously *working*.
      Because -- he was kissing Vern as though he was Vern's *wife* or something.  Which, in here, he was.
      And a MAN... needs a wife.
      Vern broke away, rearing back, staring down at him hotly, those empty eyes dazed and slitted with unexpected greed.  Then:  The big hands on his shoulders half-lifting him, dragging him onto the upper bunk.
      "Get the fuck back *up* here."
      And thus a pattern was born.
      Afterward, lying with his head on Vern's chest, right above the eagle's wing; Vern raking his hands through Beecher's hair, his "affection" just this side of an outright tug, and rumbling on about everything "they" were gonna do: Gonna grow your hair, get you another tattoo, something...significant. No more of that drag shit, but I think gettin' your ears pierced might do, little studs with something pretty on them -- how you like *them* apples, sweetpea?
     And replying, into the sweaty flesh of Vern's pec: "I'd like that...very much. Sir."
     A snort. "Fuckin' lying slut."

The words rang hollowly in Beecher's mind.  Above him, Vern's snores rattled like faraway machinery.  Memory tumbled randomly inside his skull, images and sensations surfacing from the boil with unexpected force and clarity:  The sting of that initial needle-push through his lobes.  The bright, hot, pus-ridden song of the infection that'd followed.  That shift in Vern's perception of him, clear as the sound of a turned key, but still impossible to fully grasp.  He had *hit* something with that first kiss; struck just the right pose for Vern to respond to -- and everything had fallen into place.
     Like love.
     God only knew how Vern had treated his *real* wife, before she died.  But Beecher thought he'd probably have had a lot to talk over with her, if the opportunity were ever likely to arise.
     (Which it might.)
     He still *could* end up dead, after his plans for Keller reached their final -- consummation...
     ...if he was lucky.

END PART FIVE
 
 

UNBOUND
PART 6/1
 
 

- 1 -

Deep night in Oz, a time for silence, for a man to be alone with his thoughts.
     Uncomfortable as those thoughts might be.
     The darkness cloaked the ceiling.  Looking at it in the gloom, you could fool yourself into thinking you were staring at an overcast night sky... if you blurred your eyes and had a *very* good imagination, that was.  Imagination, however, had never been Vern Schillinger's strong suit.  Not that he'd ever *wanted* it to be, of course.  As far as he could tell, it was more weakness than strength; it was the "imaginative" people who always cracked fastest.  Imagination didn't seem to be good for anything beyond daydreaming and anticipating pain in ways that made it almost impossible to endure, the way you had to.
     Toby Beecher, with his screaming, sweating nightmares and his little--LAPSES, the ones he thought Vern didn't notice...that little fucker was "imaginativeness" personified.
     But Vern didn't think that he'd "imagined" the endless, circular stream of memory leading to questions leading to potential problems reeling through his mind right now:  Traitor thoughts, unbidden and unwanted. Impossible to trace, let alone stop.
     And the *primary* question, the one at the root of it all:  Just *when*, exactly, had he lost control of this...situation with Beecher?
     Technically, he supposed, he still had *some* influence over what was going on.  But influence wasn't enough, never had been.  Did he own Beecher or did Beecher own him?  He had always believed the former.  He KNEW Beecher, after all, inside and out--knew the varying shapes of his madness the same way his hands knew the line of the other man's limbs, even in the dark.  From the minute he'd taken him back, repossessing the thing he'd once thrown so blithely away, Vern had enjoyed riding the currents of Beecher's lunacy the way some athletes enjoyed shooting rapids with nothing but a flimsy one-man kayak and a paddle.  It was an instinctual thing, figuring out which way Beecher was going to jump.
     An art.
     Except... artists (Schillinger grimaced at the word) always fell victim to the addiction of their art, in the end.  Got caught up with words or pictures or music and forgot what they were trying to *do* in the first place, turning endlessly inwards on their own navels like some slant-eyed Jap monk spouting Zen bullshit.
     There was, he supposed, more than a little irony in that idea.  The addict becoming, himself, an addiction.
     And addiction, Vern saw now, coldly and clearly, was definitely the right word.  Tonight, for example:  He had deliberately had to make sure *not* to have sex with Beecher to keep himself from "forgetting" to punish him in the morning for that open show of defiance two days ago.  Shaming Vern in front of his boys by ignoring his repeated orders to return to place, "tragic" news from Mc-fuckin'-Manus or not, as if Beecher actually got a *say* in his own actions.
     Vern had always understood there would be an implication of weakness read into his decision to take Beecher back after Scott Ross' death; which was, in fact, exactly why he'd done it.  Sworn loyalty or not, stated ideals or not, Vern knew a growing core of the A.B. had fallen into the tactical error of putting their *own* interests first.  Ambition was fine, as long as it was used on the Brotherhood's behalf.  Vern could respect ambition.  He was ambitious himself.  But *greed*... well, that was a whole 'nother story.
     So, a gambit not without risk, but not without reward either:  A mask of growing senility.  Deliberately draw challengers into the open with tempting hints of inability.  Feign flaws in your armour, so that when your betrayers finally got confident enough to strike, you were ready and waiting to defuse -- and punish -- them.
     Beecher had once been nothing more than that.  A means to an end, like always.  A tool Vern used however necessary or desired; valued while intact, protected from theft, but never *consulted* on its use.  And, ultimately, disposable.
     Not like there was ever any shortage of prag material to be found, if you only looked hard enough.  And one was as good as another.
     Or so he'd thought.
     So what was this crap, this feeling that if he allowed himself to indulge in his usual nightly go-round with Beecher, he somehow wouldn't be *able* to pass sentence on him for his disrespectful disobedience, let alone carry it out?  That some twisted kind of... *affection* for the little prick would keep Vern from doing what had to be done?  He'd never before let the simple fact of a good fuck screw with his brain to the point where he couldn't dole out proper penance.  Not even with Chris Keller -- and Chris'd *really* known how to make sure Vern got the most out of any given interaction.
     Come to think of it, that was one of the reasons Vern had eventually cut Keller loose.  It had stopped being a challenge.  There was no sweet jolt of power involved any more once Vern realized that if Keller wasn't sucking *his* dick he'd be sucking someone else's with just as much enthusiasm and expertise.  Beecher, on the other hand -- there'd always been that little thrill of conquest.  The idea that he'd NEVER do any of these things if he wasn't MADE to.
     (Yeah, you remember, right, Vern?  Back when fucking Beecher *was* the punishment?)
     Force versus want, Vern thought bleakly.  At some point... at some point, fucking Beecher had become something he actually *wanted* to do, not just something he WOULD do, if Beecher didn't toe the line.  It had become a desire, a necessity--a weakness. A sweet indulgence Vern couldn't stomach ahving to live without.
     And Beecher knew it, too. How could he not?  Probably part of his plan all along; get Vern hooked, then steer him around by his balls.
     (Devious little law-boy *slut*.)
     Well, that was fine.  That was just... peachy.  Let Beecher make his little plans, concocted from the depths of his "normal" mix of half-crazed cunning and fully-crazed hatred.  Vern could deal with that.  The day came he couldn't outplay a nutcase lawyer from uptown at the game of power and control, he'd walk alone into a gathering of Said's Muslims wearing the same Confederate-flag T-shirt he'd sent old ToBIas off to die in, that first time.  Before Vern had figured out how much more he liked Beecher left *alive* -- and back in his rightful place:  Under Vern's thumb, to be cherished or commanded at will.
     Thinking:  You're mine, 'cause I took you. But no--MINE, 'cause you *gave* yourself to me. And you do NOT get to take yourself back.
     (Ever.)
     Thinking, before he could stop himself--knowing how screwed he had to be just to form the thought, but forming it anyway. VOICING it, all the same.
     Thinking: Beecher, you bitch, you whore, you--lawfully wedded *wife* of mine, before I live to see you really turn on me, instead of just striking that pose to keep me...*interested*, and all...
     (...I'll fuckin' kill you first.)
 

- 2 -

Beecher was washing his face when the lipstick was slapped down on the sink beside him  -- so close to his cheek, in fact, that even his pathetic eyesight was enough to recognize it instantly.  The harsh crack of cosmetic tube against metal basin wasn't loud, but it was so sharp, unexpected and penetrating that it jolted him upright anyway, spinning to face --
     -- Vern, looming over him, brow thunderously knotted.
     (Oh, shit.)
     "Sir?"  Letting just a hint of quaver into his voice.  Hating that not all of it was faked.
     "You must just be so pleased with yourself, Beecher.  Considering how you put one over on me."
      (Oh, SHIT.)
      But... he hadn't actually even *done* anything, yet.
      (Um, HELL-o?  Like Vern's gonna think about rules of procedure and EVIDENCE, you moron?!)
     Beecher moistened his lips, letting his gaze drop.  "Sir, I'm not -- "
     "Don't talk."  Not a shout.  Almost a pleasant remark.  But an order, all the same.  Beecher's jaw clenched as he swallowed.  "You know, I can accept you're not exactly firing on all cylinders.  I cut you a lot of slack for that.  But don't you *ever* think you can just ignore me -- in public.  Or anywhere else, for that matter.  Never think that you're the king of *me*."
     Beecher nodded, fighting to keep the sullen anger he felt from seeping onto his face.
     (No, I'm just the queen.  Your queen.)
     "I killed somebody for you.  Don't you ever forget that."
     (Well, whadaya know; so did *I*!  'Course, that WAS just by accident.)
     He realized Vern had stopped.  The older man folded his arms, fingers of the right hand drumming on his left bicep.  "Well?"
      Frantically Beecher rummaged about in his mind.  A coffee, he thought inanely.  Just one.  I can't think in the morning, don't expect me to deal with THIS....
      What had he *done*?
      For once his memory failed him utterly.  When he tried to search the fugue-haze which had descended over him after McManus' little bombshell in the quad, nothing solid coalesced.  He could have done *anything* in that gap of time, he supposed.  Something as reflexively, acutely skilful as research the law on child custody... or something as insanely stupid as defying Vern to his face.  There was no sure way to know, short of asking someone -- and he wasn't about to admit to that kind of amnesia.  Not in Oz.  At best it would mean extended work with Sister Pete and possible transfer, losing all the reputation and protection he'd built up here; at worst... at worst it was an invitation to a shank in the back -- like any other open display of weakness.
     Not that it mattered.  Vern would do what he wanted, regardless.
     Beecher had to clear his throat before his voice would work, and it still came out in a rasp.  "I'm sorry I didn't listen to you, sir.  Is there any way I can make it up to you?"  He dragged in a breath, making his next word sound forced -- which wasn't hard.  "Please."
     Schillinger donned his mock-thoughtful, mildly disappointed teacher's look, the one that always made Beecher want to spit in his face.  He *hated* that expression: it was a lie that cloaked Vern's already-made decision in a thin veneer of consideration, like he was actually *thinking* about the person before him, rather than just drawing out the tension in order to heighten Beecher's discomfort.  Like a cat, playing with a mouse, and pretending to "mercifully" let it go -- a second before it pounced for good.
     "The apology's a start."  Vern nodded as if deciding something.  "But I think we're gonna need something a little more... public."
     He leaned past Beecher, pressing his heavy chest into the younger man's.  For a moment Beecher was engulfed in Schillinger's smell:  pungent bedsweat guy-reek, mixed with a weird, yeasty, fresh-bread undertone.  He repressed the urge to gag as Vern found what he was groping for on the sink and tilted back, holding it up before Beecher's eyes.
     The lipstick.
     Once more, the familiar thought twisted through Beecher's brain -- not the bright flare of terror or incomprehension it had previously been; now, just a weary, resigned, bitter acknowledgement:
     (Oh... shit.)
 
 
 
 

- 3 -

It was Ryan who noticed him first, of course; chemo hangover-fuddled or not, the Irishman's eyes missed *nothing*.  He elbowed Keller just as Keller was considering how many cards to draw for his current hand and pointed.  "Ho-lee SHIT, will you look at that."  His manic grin distorted his face into something cartoonish and demented, like a Disney character on crack.  Irritated, Keller glanced up -- and felt his face slacken with a combination of surprise, disgust, and reluctant but uncontrollable amusement.
     Slinking along behind Vern, invisibly leashed by a cord of fear and loathing, and looking like a kicked dog--
     (don't you mean kicked BITCH?)
Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2000 23:43:42 -0500
From: Gemma Files <gfiles@interlog.com>
To: Te <thete1@earthlink.net>
Subject: Last of the Oz Files Files

     --came Beecher, his features obscured by what had to be the ugliest set of cosmetic amendments Keller had ever seen.  Garish green eyeshadow clashed with screaming scarlet lipstick.  Heavy pink rouge burned over cheeks gone pale with fury and humiliation.  And the blond hair was slicked back and frosted with streaks that bleached it almost white -- not natural, silvery, old-guy type of white, but a pallid glowing tone like some kind of luminescent fungus.  Laughter, whoops and cheers followed him like a spindrift of mockery.
     Keller winced, his own humour dying at those sounds.  His tablemates didn't seem too truly amused, either; Ryan's grin had the hysterical overtones of nerves tuned too tight by drugs and instinctive dissembling, and Hill's snort of mirth was as much disdain as amusement.  Hill and Ryan had their annoying points, God knew, but both carried as much dislike for Vern Schillinger as Keller himself did.
     Not that that meant a whole lot with Ryan O'Reily, granted.  Keller had noticed that Ryan had an amazing habit of taking on the likes and dislikes of whoever he happened to be talking to at the moment.  But if Keller had to bet on any of Ryan's assumed disaffections being genuine, Schillinger was a safe gamble.  The A.B. leader's ironclad tits-free policy had cut solidly into Ryan's business, and nothing pissed off the skinny Mick quite so much as losing a profit.  Hill -- safely in Ryan's absence, of course -- had brought Keller up to speed on the rise and ground-glass fall of Nino Schibetta; it was enough to assure him that *he* never wanted to be on O'Reily's bad side.
     "Keller."  Keller blinked, realizing that Hill was tapping the table impatiently.  "You in, or what?"
     Keller tore his eyes from Beecher's caked-on glamour with an effort.  "Yeah, sure.  Give me three."  He tossed in his discards, looked at the new ones and swore inwardly.  He'd thrown away shit and just got dealt worse shit.
     Well, nothing for it.  Time to bluff.
     They were halfway through the last round of betting when Hill's eyes flickered over Keller's shoulder and narrowed.  "Well, check *this* out."
     Keller twisted in his chair.
     Beecher was striding in and around the tables in a stiff-backed gait, not making eye contact with anyone, but deliberately passing close to each and every table or gathering of men.  It had to be deliberate, Keller saw; the looping route was carefully chosen to cover as much ground as possible.  Beecher wasn't saying anything, but he didn't have to:  That makeup, that walk, that glaze of sickened rage and self-loathing drew everyone's attention the same way a model's preening display on a catwalk drew paparazzi.
     Display.  Of course.  That was the point, Keller abruptly understood.  This was payback for that little freakout a few days ago.  For not snapping to Vern's call the way a good little prag should.  So:  Let the punishment fit the crime -- public demonstration for public demonstration, an eye for an eye... exactly Schillinger's Old Testament totalitarian style.
     As Beecher swung by their table, Hill and Ryan watching with the covert, revolted fascination of people unable to look away from a car wreck but not wanting to be seen gawking, Keller put down his cards.  "Hey -- Beecher."
     Beecher slowed, ice-blue eyes snapping to him; Keller fought the urge to recoil from their cold regard.  He injected just the slightest touch of sympathy into his voice.  Any more would just sound sardonic.  "Man... you look like shit."
     For a moment Beecher's face twisted, as if on the verge of exploding.  Keller held his gaze, not looking away.  Something must have penetrated; the trembling grimace of angry compliance suddenly slid sideways, the anger not disappearing but morphing into something leavened with bitter, ironic amusement.  "I hope you're not expecting a 'thank-you' for THAT comment."
     "Well, what do you expect?  I guess skanky hooker-red really isn't *anybody*'s colour."  Keller smiled slightly.  Thinking, deep inside where the cold didn't show on his face:
     (Yeah, Vern never kissed me... but he never made me wear *that* shit, either.)
     Thankfully.
     Keller indicated the table with a nod.  "Sit down.  Play a hand."  He ignored the not-especially-quiet groans that greeted the suggestion.
     Beecher shook his head.  "Can't.  Not now."
     "'Cause you haven't shown yourself to *everyone* in Em City yet?"
     Simply:  "That's right."  A brief twitch, more rictus than smile.  "Marching orders.  Literally."
     "Yo -- "  Hill slid his wheelchair over to Keller and leaned in, dropping his voice.  "Man, you do *not* want to get involved in this little domestic disturbance, you hear what I'm sayin'?"
     Keller's urge to scoff faded as he snuck a glance across the room at Vern, who had paused, turning to watch Beecher's progress.  From the darkening in Vern's eyes, he wasn't pleased with the delay.  Keller waved one hand at Hill impatiently, not sure himself if he was dismissing him or agreeing with him.
     Beecher saved him from having to figure it out.  "Keller, it's okay.  I've done this before, I'll do it again.  It's no big deal."
      Keller:  "Really?"
      Beecher's eyelid flickered, so quick, almost tic-like, that it took Keller a moment to realize it had actually been a wink.  "Really.  But don't tell Vern that."
      And he moved on.  As Keller followed him with his eyes, thinking:
      (Yeah -- and you know, I think you even believe most of that, Toby.  Just not... quite... enough to make a difference.)
 

- 4 -

Later that day, in a group addiction-counselling session that had been called unexpectedly early:  Keller sitting a strategically-selected three seats away from Beecher, not directly across but not right next to him, either.  Beecher, still practicing his involuntary Tammy Faye impression.  Everyone else pretending not to notice, though only Sister Pete doing a remotely convincing job.  For his own part, Beecher ignored the sidelong looks and hand-hidden whispers with surprising dignity.  Keller knew he'd never have been able to pull that off himself -- he might have been able to survive by striking a campy pose, playing up to the situation, but he could never have simply sat there and endured.
     Strength and guts he had.  Patience, save in certain very specific matters, had never been one of his virtues.
      (Yeah -- like you were *ever* famous for your VIRTUE.)
      "What we're going to do today is share a story," said Sister Pete, laying her clasped hands on her lap as she looked around at everyone.  "Something personal, something that points out an unpleasant incident resulting from an addictive habit.  It doesn't have to be drug-related, and it doesn't have to be incriminating or humiliating... but it would be nice if it were *true*."  She smiled directly at Keller, who widened his eyes and put his hand on his chest:  Who, you mean ME?  "So -- any volunteers?"
     Keller glanced around, but nobody seemed particularly willing to break the ice.  Which was fine with Keller.  If there was one thing he liked to do, it was tell a story.
     (Well -- ANOTHER thing, anyway.)
     He leant forward, elbows on knees, chin on his fisted hands.  "I got one."
     Sister Pete shrugged.  "Go ahead."
     Keller blew out a breath, finding the memory in the last moment.  "When I was sixteen," he said without preamble, "there was this chick in school I wanted to fuck.  Victoria.  She was this tiny thing, white-blonde hair, kinda pouty little mouth, what'd they use to call that? -- cupid's bow, I think.  She was the only reason I stayed for my junior year.  And I could tell she was thinkin' about it.  But, you know, parents.  So I was playin' it cool.
     "Anyway -- one night, there's this big party at one of the jocks' houses.  They invited *everybody*.  Which was probably the only reason I got in."  He grinned, letting the others in on the gag, and was rewarded with a string of answering grins -- though *not*, he noted, from Beecher.  "I knew she'd be there, and I figured, here's my chance.  So, I grab a bottle of rum from my old man's stash -- I'm thinking even if he sees it's gone, he'll just think he drank it himself and forgot -- and I'm on my bike and over there."
     (Yeah, good old alcohol.  YOUR drug of choice, huh, Tobe?  Aside from the occasional hit of PCP so you can kill someone, that is.)
      "Well, it's goin' okay, and I keep the rum n' cokes coming, and Victoria's really getting loosened up, and I'm thinking:  This is it, this has *gotta* be it.  But I guess... maybe she mixed too much, or *I* got a little heavy on the rum part, or something.  We end up in the washroom with Vicki puking her guts out for a solid half-an-hour, and then she gets all white and trembling and shit and passes right the fuck out.  So I check her forehead and she's sweating, she's like ice.  I had to get somebody else to *tie* her to me on the back of my fucking bike so I could get her to hospital, 'cause there's no *way* we're calling an ambulance -- and then her parents practically got me kicked out of school anyway, for making their little baby girl go into toxic shock from alcohol poisoning."  Keller shrugged.  "Didn't make much difference to me, I dropped out the year after that.  But I never saw poor Vicki again."
     (And I'll bet SHE was just as glad.)
     Hill gestured as if trying to pull an answer off an invisible loom before him.  "Not to sound like an asshole, but I'm a little fuzzy on where the addiction comes in.  If this Vicki chick is the one who got drunk -- "
     Keller snorted.  "Don't you get it, Hill?  My a-*dick*-tion?"  He smiled without humour at his own hideous pun.  "I was thinking with my balls, man.  Every bad decision I've ever made came from letting my dick lead me around by the nose."
     From Beecher, a dry aside:  "*There's* an image."
     The group broke up.  Sister Pete obliged with a few chuckles of her own, but never swerved from her purpose, waiting patiently until the storm of laughter had blown itself out.  As the last sniggers and gasps were subsiding she turned to Beecher -- who had also, Keller observed, limited himself to a smile.  "Well, Tobias, would *you* like to share a story with us?"
     The undertones were easy to read: much as the affection between them was obvious, there wasn't going to be any extra slack cut -- by, or to, either of them.  Keller instinctively sensed that this was an old running conflict between them.  Sister Pete, the crusader and confrontationalist, seeking to drag things out and face them openly; and Beecher, the elusive, the evader, the compromiser -- procrastinating and avoiding until problems either disappeared or became so entrenched they were simply the normal state of affairs.  Keller settled back, waiting to enjoy the incipient battle of wills.
     He was oddly disappointed when, after only a second's pause, Beecher shrugged and said, "Sure."
     Unlike Keller, Beecher didn't change posture or seem to gather himself visibly in any way.  He just launched into it, speaking in almost a monotone, staring distractedly ahead -- as if by showing as little animation as possible, he could minimize the effect of his horrid makeup, or lull the observers into forgetting it.
     "In my first year at Harvard I was at a frat party.  Harvard law school has a big celebration for every year.  First year, you celebrate getting in.  Second year, you celebrate still being there.  And so on.  By the end of the program, you have to celebrate fifty times as hard, because you're finally going to take your bar exam and get the fuck out.  And I had a little extra to celebrate because I was not only away from my family, but I was a legal *adult* -- and therefore entitled to get myself just as plastered as I wanted to."
     Ghost of a smile:  "Granted, I was nineteen, and granted the drinking age in Massachusetts is twenty-one, but it was the principle of the thing."
     He paused, as if waiting for his own share of sympathetic laughter.  None came.  Beecher didn't shrug or show disappointment; he only went on.
     "I started on draft beer -- this truly pissy stuff that came in a keg.  About a step away from being coloured water, but if you drank enough of it, it started to work.  Then I moved up to the punch.  Which someone had spiked with about three bottles of Everclear."  *That* got a response: a long, low whistle from someone, Keller didn't see who.  Beecher nodded.  "I had next to no tolerance and was about forty pounds lighter than I am now.  And the last thing I remember is somebody putting something down my throat with a funnel."
     (Thus starting a *long* history of unhealthy things going down your throat?)
     "Next thing after that I wake up in the ICU of St. Martin and Mary's Hospital, about three blocks down.  This intern who looks about two years older than me, but ACTS like he's Jesus Christ with a stethoscope, lectures me about how close I came to giving myself brain damage.  And I lie there, too weak to move, my head feeling like a squashed watermelon and my throat too fucked up to say anything -- not that I *could*, because a second later I realize there's a fucking TUBE stuck in it -- and I can't make up my mind whether I want to kill this little prick for being so self-righteous, or kill myself for being so fucking stupid."
     The delivery was so deadpan that it seemed to take everyone a moment to realize Beecher had actually finished, not just paused.  Sister Pete cleared her throat.  "These sessions are not about judgement, Tobias," she murmured.  "Either ours or your own."
     "You asked, Sister."
     "Yes I did.  Because in order to learn from these things we have to understand them."  She pointed at Keller.  "You, Chris: did it ever occur to you that a lot of guys your age wouldn't even have stayed with Vicki once it became obvious she wasn't gonna put out?  Let alone drive her to a hospital."
     Keller shifted uncomfortably.  He supposed that was true, but he knew himself well enough to realize those choices hadn't been "moral" or considered; he'd just reacted.  For all he knew he might easily *have* decided to dump Vicki right there, just for inconveniencing his insatiable teenage libido.  The fact that he hadn't seemed like nothing more than sheer chance.  And he couldn't for the life of him remember why he *had* reacted as he had.
     "And Tobias -- "  Sister Pete turned to Beecher.  "The way you tell it, you sound like you think it would have been better if you *had* died in ICU that night.  For some people, maybe it might have been."  The words came out firm but nonjudgemental, though the name *Kathy Rockwell* remained carefully unsaid.  "But your children would never have been born, and the people you've helped in your life would never have received that help.  Part of this program is accepting that there are reasons for everything... even your own survival."
     Beecher raised his eyebrows.  "Are these real reasons or just phantom examples of some inexplicable 'divine plan'?"
     "Well, you'll never know if you don't stick around to find out, will you?" Sister Pete shot back.
     Beecher flipped a vague hand at her, looking away:  *WHAT-ever.*  Sister Pete sighed.  "Would anyone else like to speak?"
     Hill suddenly gave a wide, loose grin that would have ended up in the dictionary next to "shit-eating", if the word had been listed.  Before he could say anything, however, Sister Pete just closed her eyes and said, "Not you, Augustus."
     "Oh, so Beecher and Keller get to mo-NOP-ol-ize this situation and I don't get to say *shit*?"  Hill's voice wavered between genuine outrage and unwilling laughter.
     "Saying shit has never been your problem, Augustus.  Your problem is that you don't seem to have any conception of the word 'ending'."
     Hill looked stricken.  "Yo, man, that's cold."
     "'Strue though, ain't it?" said Keller innocently.
     "Fuck you, Keller."
     "You get it up, I'll take it on."
     "*What,*" murmured Beecher, "a surprising offer."
     "Yeah, fuck you too, Bitcher."
     "You get it up...."  Beecher mimicked Keller's drawl.
     "...and you'll bite it off," Hill snapped.  "No fuckin' *thanks*, you crazy hooker."
     Beecher held up his hands, palm out.  "Your loss."
     "Gentlemen?" Sister Pete prodded.
     Keller looked around, mock puzzled.  "Where?"
     And Beecher --
     -- actually laughed.
 

- 5 -

It was always the first day or two that was the hardest to get through.  The deadly boredom of Oz meant that almost any change at all was worthy of being greeted with delight, especially if it was not only new, but amusing.  And most people found the sight of Beecher "pretending" to be some fucked-up facsimile of a woman pretty God-damn funny.
     Beecher supposed he would have laughed himself, if it had been someone else.  Hell, once in a while he'd caught a glimpse of himself reflected in a pod wall -- a garish, translucent, pale-eyed ghost -- and been tempted to at least giggle.  As long as Vern wasn't around to hear.  If the Master realized that this drag-show pantomime wasn't *nearly* the punishment he thought it was, he'd try to think of something else.  Maybe fuck Beecher again in the interim, just to keep in practice... then come up with some insane variation on his Confederate flag T-shirt execution manoeuvre:  Make Beecher put it on again, to "test his obedience", then send him to ask Adebisi for a cup of tits and order the A.B. to back him up at the last minute -- or hint to McManus or Whittlesey that they might want to be in the same area.  Like God, testing Abraham with the last-second rescinsion of Isaac's ordained death.
     (What a  very... BIBLICAL metaphor, Tobias.  For a spectacularly lapsed Episcopalian like yourself.)
     Of course, Vern wasn't the type to clue in to the fact something like that might not WORK -- that that kind of timing had so little margin of error that the slightest miscalculation or interference would turn it into a catastrophic fuck-up.  Which wouldn't make much direct difference to Vern or anyone else.  But alluring as death sometimes was, getting vivisected by a Nigerian maniac was NOT how Beecher had envisioned going out.
     Then again, maybe Vern *did* realize what a tightrope-walk that kind of scheme would be.  Which would be one very good reason for him to *do* it.
     If he ever thought of it.
     (Christ, Toby, now you're thinking up new punishments before HE even has a chance to.  Get a fucking *grip!*)
     But Beecher was an expert at self-torture.  He'd been punishing himself for a long, long time, long before the law had taken over for him.
     Compared to all that -- to the hells he imagined for himself, to the revolting routine of feigning desire for the monster he slept with, to the tiny fragment of self-esteem that still remained disgusted by the plan he'd concocted for Chris Keller -- wearing a bit of makeup, and putting up with a little laughter, was nothing.
     Abso-fucking-lutely NOTHING.
     Right?
     (Riiiiiight.)
     It did get better.  Beecher took comfort in that.  By now, the fourth day of his current predicament, his freak-show face had become just another fixture:  Still worth the occasional jibe from bored passers-by, but for the most part ignored.  The novelty had worn off.  In the mess hall, Beecher made sure to sit all alone and mope, looking depressed, forlorn, and furious, whenever Vern was in the vicinity -- which was another unexpected fringe benefit; as part of his public display of disgrace, Vern spent much less time with him now, and hadn't bothered him at night since this had begun.
     Not since that last bruising kiss.  Or kiss-*off*.
     In mid-forkful Beecher's stomach turned to vise-crushed ice.  He had to put his fork down and breathe deeply and slowly before the panic began to let up.
     Was Vern actually planning to... let him go?
     (Again?)
     And not in the good sense, either.
     No.  No, that couldn't be.  Momentary flares of defiance aside, Beecher knew in that twisted thing he'd once called a heart that Vern now *wanted* him far too much to ever dispose of him permanently.
     Just like Beecher had always intended, almost from the moment Ryan had first shown him the way back into Schillinger's "good graces".

The inmates were filing their way out of the mess hall, most of them -- sub-army standard of food aside -- wearing as contented a look as could be found in someone who hadn't yet made parole, when Whittlesey swung her nightstick lightly across Beecher's midsection, stopping him.  "Beecher.  You got a visitor."
     Beecher blinked.  "'Scuse me?"
     "Visitor," Whittlesey repeated patiently.  "You know, person comes here, wants to talk to you?"
     "Nobody told me."
     "They don't *have* to, now come on, you're holding the line up."  She gestured with her nightstick into the corridor outside.  "Let's go, she's waiting."
     That viselike, freezing grip seized his stomach again.  "'She'?" Beecher asked tonelessly.
     (Anyone, please, God, anyone, ANYONE but my MOTHER --)
     "Your grandmother."
     (Okay, God, you fucking tumor, I didn't think there was any way this could be worse and YOU just made it WORSE!  How do you DO that?!)
     Helpless rage and deep, sickening humiliation:  Business as usual.  No point in even asking if he could go wash his face first.  He wouldn't have been able to get away with it, anyway; even if Whittlesey let him use a water fountain on the way, he didn't have his makeup with him, and couldn't put it back on before returning to the Em City quad and Vern's wrathful eye.  Better to just push on, get it over with.
     (Better.)
     Nothing about this was *better*.  Nothing could be.

Grandmother tried, she really did.  Hell, her performance was note-perfect -- especially compared to Gen's during their one conjugal, when she'd seen his ass and blanched.  Not that he planned to show his... *tag* to Grandmother any time soon.  As it was, though her face slackened a moment in shock at his appearance, it was only a flicker; by the time he'd sat down across from her and picked up the receiver, there was nothing in Grandmother's expression but compassion and an almost unbearably familiar warmth.
     "Hello, Tobias," she murmured.  Voice just like he remembered it:  Smooth, with just a hint of old-age waver under the cultured enunciation so much like his own had been... before words like 'asswipe' and 'cocksucker' had entered his habitual speech.
     "Hello, Grandmother."
     "Your parents say hello."  An affectionate smile, tinged with hope.  As Beecher thought, coldly:
     (My mother, maybe.  Father?  Not fucking LIKELY.)
     "Tell them I appreciate the gesture," was all he said.
     Her face wavered, hope fading into sadness, though the affection never faltered.  "I'll do that."  She took a deep breath, banishing the smile.  "Tobias -- "
     (That's my name; don't wear it out.)
     Nice change not to hear a mocking emphasis on the second syllable, however.
     " -- I was wondering if I could do something for you."
     Beecher shrugged.  "I'm fine for money, thanks.  Not much to spend it on, in here."
     (Aside from condoms and cigarettes, or the occasional bottle of homebrewed hooch.)
     Grandmother was too schooled in upper-class emotional control to visibly cringe, but Beecher -- who had learned to read the subtleties of face, eyes and body with an acuity he hadn't even believed possible two years ago -- saw the pain well up.  He bit the inside of his cheek with sudden savagery, tasting blood.  Christ, this was no way to treat the only member of his family who was still willing to talk to him.
     But... it was so *easy*.
     So satisfying.  To hurt someone aside from himself.  To *give* pain instead of simply sucking it up -- along with so many other things.
     He clamped down on his treacherous tongue, making it do what he wanted.  "Grandmother -- I'm sorry.  I really am.  But unless you can talk the Governor himself into jumping my parole hearing about thirteen years forward -- "
     Grandmother shook her head.  "No.  No, I wanted to tell  you -- your parents are in Washington, your father had a business trip.  Gary and Holly are staying with me for a few days.  And... I know Genevieve and your father were against the idea, but...."
     (...I guess HER opinion doesn't count for much any more.)
     Oh, God.  *To*by....
     Suddenly, distracted by his own nastiness, he understood exactly what Grandmother was getting at.  Too fast even for emotion, his hand slapped the glass with a *crack*:  Whip-shot, lightning reflex, like a raw electric shock.  Grandmother jerked back as he leaned in, unused to the kind of tactics that worked so well when warning off potential prag competitors.  But Beecher had no room to consider her feelings.  Not now.
     "You bring my kids here," Beecher said, very carefully -- voice kept soft, for all that his lips were drawing back in that oh-so-accustomed feral pre-snarl -- "and I will kill myself, Grandmother. Do you understand?"
     (And not just *me*, either. I'll kill myself--by killing someone ELSE.)
     Take the easy way out, like I always do. And let the State foot the fucking bill.
     "Tobias -- "  Whatever else you could say, Grandmother was persistent.  "They NEED to see you."
     "Here? Like this?" Beecher felt his face twist, felt a stab of sadness at the way his expression obviously made his Grandmother edge back, her veneer finally beginning to give way. "No."
     Such a lovely woman. So polite. So...SOFT.  Again, like he'd been.
     Once.
     Grandmother gathered herself.  Still, there was no anger in her voice -- only a faint hint of reproach, along with a palpable sadness.  Guilt:  Her last and most powerful weapon.  "Then what am I supposed to tell them?"
     Beecher coughed.  Swallowed what blocked his throat, blood and all.  And answered, voice dry and almost inaudible:
     "Tell them...I'm dead too."
     (Because -- )
     -- I might as well be.

END PART SIX

UNBOUND
PART SEVEN
 
 

- 1 -

Day in, day out.  Count, eat, work, eat, work, sit around, watch TV, count, lockup, lights out.  That pretty much covered everything Oz had to offer.
     Except for the one thing no hack, however zealous, could really keep a lid on:  Gossip.  Listening in on the Em City chorus like some perpetual small-town anti-party-line, all threat and chatter, macho posturing and bitchy innuendo.  Awash in this sea of misinformation, you had to develop an ability to sift fact from rumour.  You watched and learned for yourself, whenever you could.  And if you were smart, you never *stopped* watching.
     Even during something as "harmless" as a card game with the two most unthreatening individuals in Oz, fellow Others Augustus Hill and crazy old I-Talk-To-God --
     (Oh, excuse me -- "God talks to *me*.")
     -- Bob Rebadow.  You took a card, then scanned the area; you considered your hand, evaluated the odds, scanned the area, and asked for your next cards.  You placed your bet and scanned the area.
     And you noticed anything strange.
     Like, say, Ryan O'Reily, the Lord of the fuckin' Dance himself, sitting alone at a table across the quad and... brooding.  Unprofitably.
     Keller frowned.  This wasn't the skinny Mick's usual afternoon chemo hangover -- though the drug-hazed pain was there, like always.  No, this was something different.  O'Reily's lanky body was hunched in on itself like an owl's, narrow green eyes deep-set in bruisy shadows, face so tight the scar on his chin looked fresh-cut.  And no hint of his usual smile.  He rested his chin on one fist, bald head bowed; the other hand lay splayed on the table before him, fingers tautly kneading an invisible lump of clay.
     "He's in love," said Rebadow.
     Hill blinked.  "Say what?"
     Keller, who had gotten used to Rebadow's cryptic pronouncements, just cut to the chase.  "With who?"
     "Dr. Nathan."
     Keller grinned.  "Well, sure -- I'd wanna jump her bones, she was workin' *me* over every day."
     Rebadow shook his head.  "No, no.  I don't mean lust.  It's the real thing."  He glanced across the quad at O'Reily, sharp old eyes -- peering, as usual, from his deceptively mild mask of a face -- momentarily soft with regret.  "As real as it gets for someone like that."
     "Man, that ain't the point."  Hill threw down his cards, looking disgusted -- as honest an expression as Keller had ever seen on the crippled man's mobile features.  "God puttin' one over on YOU, old man--O'Reily ain't equipped to LOVE *no*body. May look like the Scarecrow, yo -- but he the Tinman, you get me?  You hear what I'm saying?"  He held up a hand just in front of his own chest and made a white-knuckled, quivering fist, as if crushing something out of existence.
     Keller tossed him a lazy grin.  "Why, Augustus--you're just a big ol' romantic, ain'tcha?"  He reached over and ruffled the other man's dreads.
     Hill ducked away from Keller's hand with a scowl.  Snapping:  "Fuck YOU, you snake-hipped motherfucker.  You *barely* equipped yourself."
     Keller's grin faltered, just a fraction.
     (You don't *have* a heart, do you, Chris?  Just learned how to fake having one -- fake it so well you even fool YOURSELF, sometimes.)
     For one terrifying instant, he couldn't even remember *which* of his wives had actually said that to him.  Or when.  But the reaction, unexpectedly, was almost exactly the same:   A moment of shocked hurt, the surprise almost more intense than the pain -- then a white-hot flare of anger, equally intense, equally startling.
     What do you think you know about how *I* feel, bitch?  I can love anybody I set my mind to, thank you very much.  I loved *you*.  Even after you say shit like that.  I can love any... one... I choose to.
     (Fuck them, sure.  But love them?)
     Which came first -- the choice or the feeling?  Keller could barely recall a time when they hadn't been synonymous.  Hell, he could still remember feeling... *something*... for VERN, come to that.  The big Aryan being such a *formative* influence on Keller's early years, after all.
     (A Dad *and* a Daddy.  How fuckin' convenient can you get.)
     But fuck it.  Did it even matter?  Was what he did any worse than the excuses everybody else made, the rationalizations for "giving in" to what they wanted to do anyway?  Was it any less real for being something he went into with his eyes open and his mind working, instead of letting shit happen at random because you believed in fate?
     Especially when the alternative -- he looked over again at the sunken, sickly brooding shape of O'Reily -- was *that*.
     (Call me heartless 'cause I know how to *deal* with it, fuckin' jealousy.  That's all it is.  Gotta be.)
     The faltering smile tightened, became cold, the memories, thoughts and emotions flickering and gone in a moment.  "Flatterer," he told Hill silkily.
      "Sometimes not being able to feel is better," Rebadow murmured, rearranging the cards in his hand.  "For example...."  He nodded slightly towards the quad's main entrance.  Keller twisted to look.
      Beecher, scurrying back from the library, yet another weighty tome tucked under one arm.  After nearly six days in the clownishly heavy makeup, nobody bothered to fling even a single absent insult after him.  And Beecher himself barely seemed to notice, as preoccupied in his own way as O'Reily was in his.  Without a moment's slack in his pace, he crossed the quad, climbed the stairs to the second tier and vanished into his and Vern's pod.
      (Jesus.  You really *can* get used to anything, can't you.)
     Keller wasn't sure if he was speaking to Beecher or himself.  And he wasn't sure which possibility depressed him more, either.
 

- 2 -

"Don't you *ever* get tired of -- you know -- *reading* all the time?"  Vern folded his arms, scowling down at the younger man.
     Beecher carefully removed his glasses.  Thinking:
     (Yeah, I guess it must rankle.  Considering it's not a skill YOU ever really mastered -- aside from whatever it takes to copy out addresses and zip codes.)
     And:  Oooh.  THAT'S *nasty*.
     He shut the book, making sure not to slam it -- it wouldn't do to show *anger*, heaven help him.  "Do you need me for anything, sir?  I'd be happy to help."  Raising his brows in that classic mildly interested, eager-to-please prag's look he'd perfected, long months earlier.
     Vern's eyes flicked skyward, half in disgust, half amusement.  "Riiiiight."
     "But, sir... I love you."
     And oh, CHRIST, was it difficult to keep a straight face while saying it -- especially since he didn't know what would come through the mask, if it broke:  Hysterical laughter, or screaming red-hot rage.
     A snort.  "Yeah, you 'love' me--like you love me keeping everyone else off your ass."
     "Yes." A chilly smile.  "Exactly like that."
     Vern paused, blinking a little at the abrupt disappearance of the prag veneer.  Then -- smiled.  Sat down across from him.  And reached over to Beecher, pinching his cheek as if he was a toddler who'd just said something precociously precious.
     "You're so *cute* when you sulk," he purred.
     (Well, that answers that.  Definitely... rage.)
     Vern's smile vanished.  "Now go take that shit off," he growled, swiping his hand roughly through Beecher's hair, ruffling frosted white strands back to show the dull gold beneath.  "We're square."
      (For now.)
      Until the NEXT time Beecher did something Vern decided he didn't like.  Which could be... anytime, really.  Because that was the point, wasn't it?  That was part of his duty too.
      No rulership without something to rule over.  And never, EVER, let your vassals think you *owe* them something.
     Punishment must be regular.  Rewards must never be.  So codified, it was almost Napoleonic... or Machiavellian.
     A thought came to Beecher as he made his way to the shower room, black with the kind of humour that wasn't at all funny: it was a good thing Machiavelli *had* been Italian, as it pretty much guaranteed Vern would never actually READ the fucker.  Give him a chance to make a science, a conscious skill, of his instinct for brutality and domination....  It was tough enough to play Vern as it was.
      He checked as he walked, automatic as always, watching for signals and reaction.  Most of it was only reflex, the habits of the well-trained cellblock 'ho.  But --
     -- there he was.
     Keller, leaning back, arms behind his head, the crucified Christ on his shoulder flexing just faintly with the skin flowing over muscular biceps.  Lazy, sybaritic grin firmly in place, as his dark blue eyes flashed sidelong to light on Beecher's towel-clad butt:  That flare, recognizeable, familiar, chartable as the seismic activity on a continental faultline -- simmering, fiery, the pressure ever mounting.
     (Get back, folks, she gonna BLOW!)
     Soon.
     *Very* soon, now.
     He had Keller... if he wanted him.
     (So -- *do* you?  Punk?)
     Hmm.  A little close to home for comfort, with that last line.
     He considered Keller, dispassionately, part by part.  The tall, lean body; that ASS -- what was it the morons back at the office used to say?
     (You could eat DINNER off of that!)
     Those dark, deceptively soulful blue eyes, set deep under brows that always seemed quirked, as much at his own expense as at everybody else's.  The mobile mouth, the lopsided smile... the *nose*, nostrils flaring just slightly, as if to suck you in, scent-first.
There was a tactile lure about Keller which made you just naturally want to luxuriate, physically, in the spring and coil of him; like sprawling headlong on one of those multiple-support mattresses, borne up completely in a grip shaped to you alone.  The smooth, controlled strength, like -- and yet completely unlike -- Vern's overpowering bulk.
      Just a mere year ago, Beecher would never have been able to make this kind of assessment, effortlessly compartmentalizing another guy according to some hard-learned relative standard of desireability.  A mere year ago, he never would have *had* to.
     And: Did I always like men? Beecher wondered. Was that always *in* me?
     Not that he *liked* Vern, exactly. Not... per se.
     (Per fuckin' SE.)
     But the fact remained:  Oz was ground zero for horny, stupid men who spent every waking hour trying to fuck each other over -- literally *or* figuratively.  Testosterone in the air like some toxic cloud; the "power" inherent in being suddenly able to start fights, just by walking through the mess hall and swinging your ass a certain way.  Seeing other guys not as potential competitors, workmates, buddies, but as *prospects*:  Knots of muscle and hunger, upright bundles of instinct tied together by latent aggression and sexual tension.  Forget the brain, the dick's the thing you have to make your closing argument to.
     (And I was always good at THAT.)
    Judge, jury... executioner.
    He shed his towel and stepped under the nearest nozzle, smiling a kitten-sharp smile as the hot water sluiced away layers of unflattering makeup like so many mud flats melting in a flash flood.  Revealing the temporarily hidden charms beneath, his own arsenal of attractions -- the sleek blond hair, water-darkened now; the orthodontically-straightened teeth, white and uncapped, a vision of TV-anchorman-like perfection; the pale skin over sturdy limbs, still so smooth and "untouched" next to everyone else's street-toughened hides and malnourished frames, their bad skin and worse tattoos --
     (Only ONE brand on THIS model.  And it's in such an... *interesting* place.)
     An eruption just waiting to happen.
     Looked at himself in the mirror, afterwards, narrowing pale blue eyes between newly-clean gilt lashes.  Face naked, freshly scrubbed and glowing, just waiting to be... dirtied.  Everything back in place, mask included.  Armor on, shields intact.
     (Lookin' *good*, ToBIas.)
     One more smile, for himself alone:  Quick and thin, like the flicker of a lizard's tongue.
     Keller didn't stand a chance.
 
 

- 3 -

For all Vern liked to complain about his "days at the office", the man lived for mail call.  Precious little else in Oz could provide the accomplishment to match his sense of self-importance -- though God knew he worked at maintaining it ceaselessly anyway.  Still enjoying the feel of the air on his unmade-up face, Beecher smiled, carefully concealing it from his owner as Vern moved about the quad, tossing already-opened letters and packages to the inmates at each table.
     (Don't get too carried away, Toby.  Long as he's feeling good about himself he won't make *you* try to make him feel good.  Be grateful.)
     Yes, yes.  Gratitude.  He'd heard that line before.
     He sighed and bent his head to the book on the table.  This was the downside of being able to look like himself again -- Vern's old restrictions on wearing the glasses in public had come back in full force, and the legal volume's text was so small he had to jam his nose almost right to the paper to make it out.  *Carson v. Rheinhart, 1989; precedent on custodial arrangements for incarcerated spouses, relative to death of existing guardian...*
     The text vanished, a blank white wall slicing down over it, the edge flicking the tip of Beecher's nose.  He jerked back, a tiny noise like "hunh" escaping him, blinking.  Tried to focus on the whiteness -- a *letter*, of course.  The address unreadable at this distance.
     "'Syours," said Vern dismissively.  The cart already rolling on to the next table, Vern not even looking back.
     Through the fog of myopia and gathering dread, Beecher stared down at the innocuous white envelope.  He could already feel it happening:  Time slowly congealing around him, getting ready to disappear under its own gravitational collapse.  His very own personal black hole.
     (I SO do not want to read this.)
     Which, of course, was *exactly* why he knew he couldn't avoid it.  He picked the letter up, flipped it open, and...

Quizzically, Keller eyed the postcard Vern had just tossed him.  A brown-skinned, bikini-clad chick lolled on a white beach, a green wall of tropical foliage in the background under the bright yellow message GREETINGS FROM ARUBA!
     (Aruba.  Ariba!)
     He turned it over, read the message, and laughed.  Hill looked over.  "What's so funny?"
     Keller gave him the card, and Hill read out loud.  "'The weather is fine -- glad you're not here.'"  He chuckled.  "Who the fuck's Angelique?"
     "One of my exes."
     "Yo, that's *cold.*"
     "Yeah, well."
     "Bad settlement?" said Rebadow sympathetically.
     "I was never really good with alimony.  Didn't matter, though; she got what she really wanted."
     "Which was?" said Hill.
     "Me out of her life."
     "Oh, dear," Rebadow murmured.
     Keller shrugged.  "Ain't like it bothers me *now*, man -- "
     "No, not that.  Look over there."  He twitched his head almost imperceptibly in the direction of --
     -- Beecher, a couple of tables over, staring fixedly at the single open sheet in his hand.  Something had changed in his face, so subtle and so comprehensive it took Keller a moment to isolate and define the transformation.  Then he saw it:  In a face normally so controlled it seemed like a porcelain mask -- or so wildly animated it was half-cartoon -- every muscle, every tendon, had gone completely slack.  That sudden dissipation of tension, that vacancy, had left his predatorially cunning features looking almost moronic.
     Shock, Keller diagnosed.  Fresh.   Fresh enough to...
     (...bleed.)
     "Uh-oh," Hill said, mostly in amusement but with a thread of something else -- was that *concern?* -- hovering beneath the surface.  "Things lookin' *bad* for the home team, yo."  He slid a sidelong glance to Rebadow.  "Hey:  The Big Guy got any comments?"
     The older man shook his grey head sadly.  "Poor Tobias."
     "Yeah, yeah.  Poor *everybody*."
     And Keller, thinking:
     (Yeah.  Second *that* emotion.)
     He found himself actually starting to rise before he caught himself, checking for Vern -- over on the other side of the quad now, still absorbed in the fascinating mechanics of his daily mail run.  He hadn't been watching (stupid, *stupid* mistake, that):  Had Vern noticed the letter's effect on his prag, or was he actually unaware of Beecher's incipient freak-out?
     (Your kitty just got its tail caught in the door, Big Daddy.  You gonna kiss it all better, or what?)
     *What*, apparently.  As Keller watched, Schillinger finished his last delivery and pushed the cart on through the gates, mailroom-bound.  Keller glanced back to Beecher just as the younger man rose -- timing a bit too good to be coincidental; Beecher had been paying at least *some* attention to his surroundings, then -- and began trudging, pace dull but curiously intent, in the direction of the nearest staircase.
      Apprehension gave way to an inexplicable worry in Keller's gut as he watched Beecher pause momentarily... right behind O'Reily's bald, gleaming head.  A brief touch of square-fingered, gold-furred hand to pale, skinny shoulder, a listless movement.  O'Reily freezing as if goosed, just for an instant; then swivelled his nude skull to watch Beecher's progress, intent as a vulture spotting carrion on the hoof.  A minute or two after Beecher had vanished under the stairwell, O'Reily heaved himself up, tossing his cards negligently onto the table and strolling towards the same shadowed corner.
     Waaaait a minute--O'Reily, Em City's sole self-professed straight man, trading close-quarters favours with the "wife" of its resident Aryan godfather?
     Oh, but right.  Riiight.  That OTHER thing that Beecher does.
     (Crap.)
     Mild disappointment, cut with a surprising undertaste of angry annoyance.  Surprising because... well, fuck, why should *Keller* give a shit what Beecher did to deal with whatever brand-spanking-new avalanche of grief had just buried him up to his pretty blond eyebrows?  Why should it piss *him* off that O'Reily obviously didn't see Beecher's hurt as anything other than a simple business opportunity?
     Yeah.  Why should it?
     Except that... it *did*.
     And:  "'Scuse me," he found himself telling the other two, pushing his own chair back, sauntering towards the well of shadows that had swallowed O'Reily and Beecher.  No sense of reaction from Hill or Rebadow; he could pray Hill had missed it, but Rebadow was too sharp.  Twice was coincidence, three times was a conspiracy.
     Keller only prayed -- and checked, as he walked -- that Vern was still nowhere within sight or earshot.  Going through the "to be examined later" packages that the mailroom sorters generally put aside for digging into, after the mail run was done and they could probe them at leisure, tended to take at least  half an hour and often longer -- but it was far from a guarantee.  If it had been a light load and Vern finished early....
     Well, then Beecher was screwed.  Again.
     (Yeah, like YOU'LL be, if he finds you...)
     Doing what, exactly?
     (Just have to wait and see, on that one.)
 
 

- 4 -

"Thought you said you weren't suckin' any tits these days," O'Reily commented, dryly.
     (Aside from Vern's, that is.)
     "Just give me the fucking junk."
     A shrug:  "Your call, man."
     And:  "Man", Beecher thought, his own mental voice sounding even more vicious inside his head than usual.  Uh-HUH.
     (*That's* a good one.)
     A chickpea-sized knot of heroin, wrapped in the tail-end of what had once been some kind of condom; probably came out of somebody's ass not all that *very* long ago, but Beecher wasn't in any mood right now to quibble over petty little issues like sanitation -- or smell.  He snatched it from O'Reily's carefully angled palm, his own hand bent to conceal its contents from any uniformed passersby.  The latex, warmed by the heat of O'Reily's pocket, felt sickeningly alive against his cold, moist fingers.  He swallowed, forcing down revulsion and a host of other emotions:  Fear, self-loathing, a general creeping suspicion that there was no way he could really count on being sober enough to pass muster by the time Vern finally returned.
     Well, so what.
     (So... fucking... what.)
     A punch in the gut, an Indian burn, more force than usual behind this evening's round of sodomy a la mode -- Beecher had taken it before, and would probably take it again, gladly.  Because nothing, *nothing*, could hurt as much as having to go without *some* kind of mental anaesthesia for another *fucking* MICRO-moment right now.
     "Enjoy," O'Reily told him, as he sidled away.  Beecher didn't even look up.  His fingers trembled around the junk bag, grip sweat-slick and unsteady, as he hung between alternatives:  Spend a hideous number of seconds trying to unknot the thing, or risk spilling -- and *wasting* -- it by tearing it open?
     Ah, the inherent problems of self-medication.
     He leaned back against the concrete wall, letting its chill seep into him, calming him briefly.  Okay.  Okay, he could do this.  Just breathe deep and relax the hands.  Use the thumbnail to rip a *small* hole in the rubber.  Tip it out in tiny scatterings into the pit between the tendons of the thumb.  Snort.  Dissolve.
     Discorporate.
     Disappear.
     Like... Gen.
     (You will NOT think about that now, you will NOT think about that now, you will NOT -- )
     He positioned the edge of his thumbnail against the latex.
     "You sure you wanna do that, Tobe?"
     So quiet and gently amused, the query; so casually warm -- so fake-*affectionate* --
     (Because it would *have* to be fake.  Wouldn't it?)
     Like Vern.  Like... everybody else.
     Like Gen.
     (SHUT UP!)
     Beecher somehow wasn't startled at all to realize he was being observed -- by Chris Keller, no less:  His predator-turned-prey, stalking up from behind like some serpentine shadow in chinos and a wifebeater.  Beecher closed his eyes and slumped, the tension dropping away from him like a thin glass shell, leaving him simultaneously disappointed, defeated, and weirdly...
      ...relieved.
      (Of course you're relieved, TOE-bee.  Had the choice in your hands and couldn't make it, so you waited 'til something -- someONE -- arrived to take it away from you.)
     Like always.
     But, to return to Keller's original question:
     "Yes," Beecher shot back.  "Very."  Then, mock-cheerful, riding the words for all the subtext they could possibly produce:  "You *want* some?"
     (Some of... what?)
     "Pass."  Keller folded his arms, a little too tightly: not a casual gesture as such, more a haphazardly raised shield -- or a conciliating mechanism:  Pulling his shoulders in, making himself look smaller.
     And:  Shit, Beecher realized.  He's trying not to *scare* me.
     (What a fucking joke.)
     Don't frighten the horses, or the women. Or the prags.  'Cause you never know where they'll run -- or what they'll try to bite off, when they get there.
     "Saw you back there," Keller offered.  "You seemed pretty... upset.  Bad news from home?"
     "Home?"  Beecher feigned actually considering the question.  Then, in a Bela Lugosi rasp:  "I *have* no home."
     The word in question coming out more like *kkhhoame*, emphasis on the *kkhhh*.
     "Your wife -- " Keller prompted.
      "Killed herself.  Sucked carbon monoxide.  Didn't leave a note, which I thought was kinda weird at the time... but it turns out, it was in the mail all along."  A new noise escaping his throat, entirely unwilled: a coughed expulsion of air that might have been either laugh or sob.  "That was Gen, though.  Very... *efficient*, when she wanted to be."
     "Her name was Gen?"
     "Genevieve."  Observing the other man's expression, wary concern shifting in and out of other, unreadable currents:  "Surprised?  Prag Toby has a wife."  He closed his eyes, shuddered.  "*Had,*" he corrected himself bitterly.
     Keller, after a pause:  "I was married."
     "I'm happy for you."
     "Four times."
     (Four -- ?)
     Beecher frowned up at Keller.  "Don't tell me.  You just really like Niagara Falls."
     Keller's mouth twitched.  "Sure.  Got more Arby's per city block than anywhere else in North America, man."
     Beecher made a cat-sneeze noise: laughter? contemptuous snort?  Even he couldn't tell.  "Four times," he said.  "Four women."
     "Three.  I married Bonnie twice."
     "She came *back*?"
     Keller let the twitch twist further, becoming a half-leering smile, eyebrows just slightly lifted above hooded dark eyes.  "I'm a *reeeeally* good date," he drawled.
     This time, Beecher really had to laugh; it was that or scream, and his throat already hurt.  Keller joined him, chuckling with a self-deprecating charm so polished it *had* to be as much an act as Beecher's own happy-prag routine.  But just for this one moment, Beecher didn't care.  It was so unspeakably *good* to be able to laugh with *anyone*, however that laughter was summoned.
     Finally, it trailed off.  Somewhere in the interval Keller had managed to slip closer, leaning against the wall beside him, bare shoulder almost touching his.  As Beecher raised his head, Keller gave him a wider grin, eyes sultry under lowering brows.  "Feeling better?"
     "Uh-huh."  Then:  "You want to fuck me, don't you."
     Beecher didn't look away, throwing the blunt, unvarnished words straight into Keller's too-smug face.  He was rewarded with a flash of surprise --
     (Didn't see *that* one coming, did you, you charming motherfucker?)
     -- but the other man was quick, recovering his smile with only a second's break.  "Nope."
     (Bullshit.)
     Classic strategy:  Get in with a shared confidence, a mirrored secret pain.  I see your vulnerability, now you see mine.
     (So let's strip down and bonk.)
    "Then what?  Want me to--suck you off?"
    "I just..."  Looking away, Keller put his hands in his pockets:  See, no harm here; just a good ol' under-the-staircase--*fuck*--buddy.  "...wanna do whatever it takes for *you* to feel good." A deliberate pause. And then, the capper:  "Toby."
     (Just wanna *do* for you.)
     With a direct lock, dark blue eyes gazing straight down into paler blue, wide open and unrestrained.
     (Unbound.)
     Beecher found his voice suddenly failing.  Repeating, weakly:  "...what?"
     "Anything.  Anything you want."  Keller turned, moving his body into Beecher's, chest touching chest.  His fingers spidered up Beecher's arm, ruffling hair, raising hackles.  Beecher took a dizzy breath, feeling a shiver grow and spread along the skin, up into the nape of his neck.
     "...stop," he managed.
     "You don't want that."
     A flare of rage:  Beecher summoned the strength to push free, gripping the other man's elbows, freezing the movement of Keller's arms.  "Don't," he gritted, "*tell* me... what I want.  VERN tells me what I want."
     "Yeah, but -- I'm not Vern.  And -- I'm right."
     (Oh, you fucking... FUCK.)
     Beecher held Keller's stare, level but trembling, slightly. Nose to nose, now--hook to snub, so close Chris could almost *taste* Beecher's coffee-flavored breath. Those pale eyes, narrowing. That pink velvet tongue, half-curled behind kitten-teeth.
     (Oh yeah: SNAP at me, baby. *Please*. Bite down, now.)
     Bite down--
     (--HARD.)
     Lowering gilt lashes. And murmuring, demurely--
     "If Vern catches you...
     Keller dimmed his voice to match, equally intent. "How much of a shit you think I give, Toby--long's you let me so something WORTH him catchin' me for?"
     And Beecher, exhaling once more. Long and shallow, with just a hint of liquid edge.
     "It's...been a long time," he said, finally. "Since anybody. Since anybody's asked me to--*let*--them..."
     (Those blue, blue eyes.)
     Keller leaned in further, before either of them could think better of it. Slid his mouth across Beecher's, flint-click-quick, stubble scraping together like duelling matchbook cover-strips: Warming, sparking, igniting.
     (Uhhhhh,) Keller thought, brain coming apart in a hot wash of sparks. Then:
     (Quick, gotta be quick, gotta be)
     Back against the wall and even deeper into shadow, where the hacks hardly ever bothered to check--connecting here, *here* and HERE, hitting all those essential pressure points at once, groin locking to groin, palm to palm and mouth to mouth. Like they were saving each other's lives by sharing air underwater, or something; huffing the same gust of sweet, moist oxegyn back and forth, forth and back, 'till it got so thin it made them both GASP at once and clutch each other even tighter--
     Groin to groin, hard to--even harder. And Keller genuinely couldn't tell which of them was *more* aroused: Couldn't--
     (--give all that much of a big, fat fuck, actually. Right NOW.)
     The heroin pellet fell unnoticed, lost, from Beecher's nerveless fingers; nice surprise for *somebody*, later on. While Beecher and Keller lost themselves in big, biting kisses, open-mouthed, tongue on tongue--Chris's wicked snake-flicker, Beecher's rough velvet cat-scratch. And Beecher, not making any of those purring, mewling sounds he makes with Vern--almost entirely silent except for a few ragged, trailing groans, humming throatily against the skin of Chris's neck as he sleeked his smooth lips across the Adam's apple...muttering and grappling and scrabbling at Chris's hard, semi-tattooed biceps with sharp-nailed fingers, raising gooseflesh, drawing blood...
     But: "No fucking," Beecher warned, suddenly--pulling back, comically serious. And Chris laughed.
     "Baby. You think he'd be able to tell?"
     "I don't want to have to THINK."
     Chris lifted those small, square hands, kissing their palms. Bit down on a thumb and heard Beecher hiss, then laughed again. Slipping his knee between Beecher's and nudging them open, hands on Beecher's inner surprisingly sturdy thighs--those long, flat muscles, tense now with anticipation: Pain remembered, pleasure...hoped for?
     And: Oh, if *I* have anything to do with it--
     (which I WILL)
     --you gonna *get* it, Toby.
     (BABY.)
     "I like that noise you make, kitty," Keller whispered, licking Beecher's pierced earlobe and letting his hands roam at will, while Beecher strained to keep his answer low enough to not carry farther than the stairwell above them--
     "What nuh--huh, huh, huh*OHHH*, shit--"
     (Yeah. That's the one.)
     ...and oh, Chris, God DAMN, man. Must'a won some fuckin' lottery somewhere, for sure, when you drew *this* gorgeously screwed-up little number here: Teacher and pupil, enemy-lover, shy virgin and feral little tiger all rolled into one--
     Gasping now, so hoarse it was all vowels: "--eller, *iss*. Oh AWD, oh, OHHH--"
     "Toby," Keller whispered back, words muffled by flesh--and heard that whine deform, soar higher, become almost a subsinic *squeal* as Beecher registered the thrum of Chris's words, the moist heat of his breath.
     Spreading. Hiking. As Beecher threw his sturdy legs up over Chris's oh-so-flexible hips, knit his ankles in the small of Chris's back and pulled him in, FIERCE. Desperate for as much consummation as the space, the time, the *place* could stand for.
     Chris lined their still-clothed cocks together and thrust hard, one two three whatever--heard Beecher yowl, through bitten lips; felt him shuder and spasm in his arms, wetness spreading. And thought:
     (MAN. *Somebody* ain't been gettin' any...)
     ...'cept for when they've been GETTIN' it.
     He folded Beecher close, stroking, soothing. Stared down into those glazed-over eyes: Sweet, sweet Beech. Sweet...Toby.
     (ToBIas.)
     Film peeling away, now, as post-climax consciousness returned. Beecher gave him another narrow stare, hot enough to sear, prag game-face back in place like a trap tightening on all of Keller's tenderest places at once: Oooh, shit, that *stings*. SMILED at him, deliberately--and pulled back, twisting, reversing their positions. One hand grazed Keller's fly, making him flinch; the reaction drove Beecher's smile all the way into spit-wet grin territory, eyebrows twitching upward, infinitely promising. Infinitely...carnal.
     In Keller's ear, a mere breath:
     "So. Want me to--return the favor?"
     (Not with my *dick*, though.)
     Keller's mouth went dry, the way he knew Beecher's wouldn't be. Like he was fifteen fuckin' years old, or something. Like: You, uh, wanna put my--? In YOUR--?
     Oh. Ohhhh.
     (Oh *my*.)
     Stumbling over his own numb tongue, as Beecher slid steadily downward, face slipping straight into Keller's crotch as if by some perverse homing instinct, sniffing deep. Easing the fly down tooth by tooth and freeing the sticky shaft in a hop, skip, JERK: Hmmm. Gone commando today, I see...
     Chris felt his hands take root in--*Toby*'s dull gold mop of hair, and gulped, hard. Cleared his throat. Offered, politely--though not exactly EASILY--
     "Look, shit. You, um--don't *have* to -- "
     A dry giggle, right into the tight, slick skin of his balls, cat-lips quirking nastily. That snub nose in his pubic hair, snorting. That hot, wet, perfect hug. Those...TEETH.
     Keller groaned: Christ, fuck, *shit*. Repeating, uselessly, now pretty damn desperate himself--
     "--to have, hah, ahhh--"
     But: "Ssssh," Beecher told him, simply. And...
     ...opened.
     *Wide*.
     (AHHH)
 

- 5 -

Dinner, in Oz.  Not ever, by any stretch of the imagination, a family affair: the closest thing to "family" was the rowdy gathering of Mob goombahs over near the stage.  And Keller, staring down at his meatloaf, still cushioned in a ridiculously persistent afterglow, kept having to remind himself not to grin like a loon.
     He'd long since given up telling himself not to keep looking Beecher's way, though he did retain enough good sense to make the looks both quick and surreptitious.  Because Beecher was right back in character:  Playing devoted wifey to Vern's Daddy-Knows-Best, reinforcing the Brotherhood's father figure's alpha-male status from the literal bottom up, while all of Schillinger's surrogate sons looked on admiringly...
     Shit, maybe it *was* family hour, after all.
     Still, patience--being a virtue--was eventually rewarded.  As Vern gestured, deep into what was evidently a particularly enthusiastic rant, Beecher flicked his eyes away from the rest of the Aryan bunch and let them settle--just for a split instant--straight on Keller.  Their gazes locked, a mutual gas-fire blue flare;  Keller saw the former lawyer touch that *tongue* to his bottom lip, teasingly, and had to squeeze his thighs together under the table, body instantaneously flushed and rigid with remembered heat.
     Not so unexpected, as a response: Good sex had always left that kind of aftertaste in Chris's mental mouth, something to savor long past the act itself. The unexpected part came when Beecher's eyes flicked away again, melding back to Schillinger's bulky form with an--affection--that seemed, for all intents and purposes,  JUST as passionate...
     A spurt of something utterly unfamiliar, squeezing at Chris's pulse like heartworm. The bitter tang of--
     (jealousy?)
     Oh, what the *hell*.
     Staring openly now, and left helplessly hoping that nobody else noticed--not the victory crow he'd worked so hard for, all these past weeks, but a surge of outsize, inappropriate, potentially fatal anger: HEY, buddy. Not *I'm fuckin' your boyfriend, Vern-o*, but...
     (*YOU're fuckin' MY*)
     Ugggh.
     Because: Keller couldn't just take it or leave it, like he'd planned--retreat back into self-sufficiency, leaving Beecher to pine and Vern to fume, cuckolded. It'd been like scratching an itch, getting momentary relief only to find the itch starting to spread; hotter, fiercer, more and more painful. Like: *That was great, Toby. So...when can we do it again?*
     (Right NOW, maybe?)
     Got what *I* wanted, all right.
     (And more.)
     Yeah.
     (More than I ever--)
     --bargained for.
 

END PART SEVEN

UNBOUND
PART EIGHT
 
 

- 1 -

Isolated in the crowd of the mess hall, alone in his fog of nausea, listlessness, fever and pain, Ryan stared at the plate of food in front of him -- starchy smell of instant mashed potato drifting up into his face, thick and repulsive.  While he thought to himself, morosely:
     (Those poetry-spoutin' asswipes who claim they write the Hallmark cards, they got it all wrong.  You don't "fall" in love.  Love falls on YOU...)
     ...like a ten-ton fuckin' weight.
     Pins you so you can't move, then squishes you flat.
     (Whhhrrr-THUD.)
     And then...
     (Well, then -- you're *really* fucked.)
     The one pleasure and the worst pain of this entire ordeal:  Dr. Gloria Nathan, his saviour, his angel, his tormentor.  Dark eyes, huge and liquid and endless; lush body never quite masked completely by surgical scrubs; a mouth like a cinnamon rose, ripe and sweet.  He'd only tasted it once, and that stolen kiss would last him -- mark him -- the rest of his life.
     Yeah, like he hadn't said it himself a thousand times, to a thousand different marks:  First hit's free, bro.  After that...
     (...you gotta pay.  And keep on paying.)
     It was a clamp on his agile brain, like she'd reached *inside* his head and put her hand right on the greyish-rosy folds, feeling for the motor control centres:  Everpresent and everywhere, weighing him down, warm and heavy and terrifyingly seductive.  This thing, this *love*.  Not like anything he'd ever had with Shannon, that was for damn sure.  Even during the all-day fuck-session portion of their relationship, Shannon had never paralyzed his mind like this, never left him struggling to remember just what the fuck he'd been *thinking* about two scant minutes earlier.  On top of the haze of chemo drugs, the faint aura of ridicule that still clung to him and his shaven cancerboy head, and his growing worry over Cyril, love was more than a monkey on your back.  It was King Kong, swatting you out of the sky like one of those little double-winged planes, leaving you in a burning, helpless, immobile heap of wreckage.
     And it was kind of hard to conduct daily business from the inside of a wreckage heap.
     Maybe he shouldn't have told Shannon he was planning to divorce her.  Yeah; maybe that *hadn't* been the world's best idea.  Or even *Em City's* best idea.
      But with the blurry weight of somebody else's drugs slowing his thoughts, it simply hadn't occurred to Ryan to even try to lie.
      And that, in itself, was pretty fuckin' scary.
      Shannon had always been able to see through him better than most.  She wasn't a perfect target -- it took more work to fool her than it was sometimes worth -- but it was doable.  Kathleen and Angela could testify to that, among others.  But not then, not at that moment with her staring right through the back of his shaven skull, listening to him blurt out that he'd met someone else -- quick and fast, like he knew what he was doing.  Only after she'd fled, visibly choking back angry tears, had it come to him that she'd just lost any real reason to keep on taking care of Cyril -- had just gained, in fact, a *real* good reason to throw his slow ass out on the street.
     (Gloria wouldn't do that.  Never.)
     She had far too much compassion.  Even for a devious Mick fuckup like him.
     'Cause that's what he was -- he was *in* Oz 'cause he'd fucked up.  First with Cyril, then *because* of Cyril.  That last joyride, whooping and hollering behind the wheel of a (typically) stolen car, until somehow he'd lost control and sent them skidding into the middle of a construction project, knocking that one guy up over the grille and off the windshield like a bowling pin that bent, broke, bled....
     (Jesus, O'Reily, get a fuckin' grip.  On *something*.)
     He pushed the tray of food away, unable to look at it any longer; his appetite was nonexistent.  Feverishly he cast around the room, only his eyes moving, looking for something, anything to fasten his fractured attention on.  The Sicilians, near the front, rowdy and noisy: nothing new, no interest.  The gangstas, slapping each other's backs and squabbling over differences of musical opinion, exchanging sets like hyperactive kids who'd just learned the rock-paper-scissors game; Wangler simmering in the middle over some perceived slight, Adebisi ignoring him with what looked like regal disdain but was probably just another tits-sucking hangover.  Schillinger and his Aryans, glowering impartially at anyone who dared to toss a glance their way, shoveling down their food with the phlegmatic determination of soldiers preparing for their long-prophesied (and annoyingly overdue) final RaHoWa --
     (Hey, wait a minute.  Something's missing from THIS picture.)
     Beecher.
     Normally Schillinger barely seemed to go to the john without his favourite accessory trailing along beside him.  What the Well-Dressed Aryan will sport this year:  A pretty blond prag, the universal finishing touch.
     (Wears so well... and it goes with EVERYTHING.)
     A sudden spark of alertness kindled in Ryan's mind, kicking his dormant Spider-Senses welcomely awake.  Something was seriously fucked here --
     (-- something or someONE?)
     And no sooner had the thought materialized than he saw Beecher trudging in, head carefully downcast, hands behind his back, making his way directly to Schillinger's table without bothering to collect a dinner-tray of his own.  Schillinger shot him a narrow glance, then reached over to tousle his hair roughly; Beecher leaned into it, a quick submissive rub of cheekbone across palm, acknowledging his own possession.
     It didn't fool Ryan for a second.  He'd *told* Beecher how to go about playing the Nazi fuck -- practically drawn him a goddamn map.  He could also tell shit from good chocolate when he saw it, and *this* was not chocolate.  Not even close.
     Whatever had delayed Beecher, though, the former lawyer was pulling out all the stops to keep Vern from wondering about it.
     Ryan had a horrible sick feeling in his stomach -- even sicker than usual, and *not* because of the chemo.  He let himself sink back into his brooding pose, but his eyes flicked steadily to the mess hall entrance every few seconds.  If he was right, he was probably going to be seeing, very soon now, something that could upset the balance of power in Em City catastrophically.  Maybe even permanently.
     For a moment he felt like he'd just been slipped a second dose of chemo drugs.  Keller's steps into the mess hall seemed impossibly slow, almost langorous.  Ryan could chart every pound of weight shifting inside the tall man's body, map how each flowing line and curve of muscle moved as Keller headed for the lineup to grab his own meal.  Ryan brought his gaze up to Keller's face, watching almost desperately.  He was certain already, as certain as he could be... but he had to *see* it.  Had to *know*.
    Several timeless seconds passed.  Ryan felt like a string on a guitar, tuned too tight and singing with a note too high to hear.  Then, in mid-banter with Rebadow, Keller glanced -- with a perfect simulation of random casualness -- in the direction of the Aryans.
     Ryan twisted fast, just in time to catch Beecher's sly, hot blue flick of a return glance, darted sidelong from beneath lowered eyelids.
     No more than that.  But it was all Ryan needed.  The string of tension snapped in a single discordant blare of dismay:
     (Oh, what the FUCK...?!)
     *Exactly.*
     Ryan turned back, resting his chin on his intertwined, tightly knotted hands.  Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK.
     He hadn't meant things to actually go this far, back when he'd first set this play in motion.  Sensing tension between Schillinger and the new man, finding the source of that tension and playing on it by telling Beecher about Keller's ex-prag status, subtly encouraging Beecher to play the two off against one another -- none of that had been meant as anything more than a distraction, to give Schillinger something else to think about besides interfering in Ryan's tits trade (and, not coincidentally, to keep Beecher in such a state that he'd remain one of Ryan's most faithful repeat customers).
      Except -- he hadn't *really* set anything in motion himself, had he?  It had already *been* in motion, even when Beecher first came to him.  All he'd done was read the situation --
     (badly)
     -- and nudge things into place --
     (ineptly)
     Ryan felt his face spasm from the inside out, a contained shiver like a full-body tic, so hard it actually wrenched his head to one side:  Man, shut the fuck UP, already!
     (Keep it together, Ryan, just keep it together....)
     Public place, people watching.  He was *not* alone.
     Alone.  Yeah.  Some fuckin' joke.  He wouldn't BE alone -- ever -- for the next twelve to fifty, parole hearings notwithstanding.  From now to then and every stop in between, "game face" was the only face he had.  Could *afford* to have.
     But *Jesus*, how else were you supposed to react to seeing a shitstorm like this on the horizon?
     He'd just never thought Keller would be so phe-fuckin'-nomenally *stupid* as to follow THROUGH on the pull of ol' crazy Beecher's ex-shyster nutbag slut-bucket allure.  Lifer or not -- screw-anything, semi-professional 'ho or not -- the guy hadn't read as *suicidal*.
     At least, not five weeks ago--which was around the time Ryan had pretty much stopped paying attention to anything except that cancerous hole under his nipple and...
     (Gloria.)
     There was more at stake here than the loss of an irregular customer, however.  Beecher wasn't just a mark -- he was the only chink Ryan had ever been able to pry open in the Aryans' armour, the only source of inside information to be found within Vern Schillinger's tightly regulated command.  Keeping one step ahead of Schillinger's anti-drug policy -- and finding a way to secure a foothold in the mailroom, with all the channels it offered for his business -- required that he maintain that in, cultivate that breach in security.  For all that it -- and Beecher -- was worth.
     And now, by screwing around with Keller, Beecher was taking everything Ryan had worked so hard for and dangling it off the edge of a cliff.  Poised to tip over and fall at the slightest change in the wind.  Because all it would take would be for Vern to suspect, just once, that something was going on.  Then, eventually, he'd find out, and when he did...
     (He kills them.  Both.)
     Well, fuck *that* action.  Little lawboy-dickhead Beecher was *not* going to fuck up Ryan O'Reily's plans -- not if Ryan had anything to say about it.
     This shit was gonna stop.
     As of right... now.
 
 

- 2 -

"Hey, man.  You up for a smoke break?"
     Beecher looked up, blinking, eyes momentarily hidden behind his lenses' reflective screen-glare.  "O'Reily," he said tonelessly.
     "Well?  C'mon."  From where his hand hung on the low-slung waist of his jeans, Ryan lifted two fingers to flash Beecher a glimpse of two tightly-rolled joints.  "Kick back and relax.  Not like the boss is gonna dock your pay."
     Beecher's head tilted slightly as he considered.  The reflection of the room's light danced and flickered across his glasses, flaring in brief stabs into Ryan's eyes and making him squint.  "Mmm.  And I don't suppose you'd *want* anything for this sudden burst of generosity, would you?"
     Ryan bristled, reflexively. Thinking:
     (Well, my shit was good enough for you *before*, Toby.  What's the matter?  Getting your highs somewhere else these days?)
     But:  Calm down, he told himself; you're not dealing with Adebisi or Nino Schibetta here.  Sure, Beecher might like to play crazy, but he had all the backbone of a wet slug when it came to real pressure -- aside from killing Scott Ross, and that was practically an accident.  That was what made him the perfect prag for Vern, after all:  Ryan couldn't think of anyone else who'd raised acting up and then knuckling under to the art that Beecher had.  All Ryan would need was to do a little leaning, factor in a touch of unstated threat, and they'd be back to business as usual.
     "We got to talk, Beecher."
     Beecher's lips twisted in one of his pissy, prissy little lawyer's smirks:  Aha, the ugly truth comes out.  Changing your testimony at the last moment, eh, Mr. O'Reily?
     But all he said was, "Sure.  Why not?"
     (Why not, indeed.)
     With a click of the mouse he minimized the program he'd been working on and followed Ryan outside to the corridor.  Ryan waited until they were out of earshot of the office, then rounded on him.  "What the fuck are you doing?"
     For once, Beecher didn't even pretend not to understand.
     Cold: "You said you'd help; you didn't.  Well, God helps those who help themselves, right?"
     (I swear to Christ, I didn't think somebody could BE this wilfully ignorant.)
     "Yeah, sure," Ryan agreed through gritted teeth.  "Help themselves get *killed*."
     Beecher's smirk stretched into a wide, almost dazed-looking smile.  "And I can't even *begin* to tell you how little I care about that these days."
     "You care more for Keller?"  Ryan leant down to stare into Beecher's eyes, almost nose to nose.  "You wanna die over him?  S'he that good?"
     Beecher chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip.  Then:
     "Actually," he replied, "yes."
     (I'll bet.  Then again, after Vern, who wouldn't be?)
     The thought was more reflexive than mocking, cloaking the whirring of his mind as Ryan leaned back, never taking his eyes off the other man.  Something was wrong here.  This wasn't a mere show of defiance and bluff; there was something hard behind Beecher's eyes, intransigent and stony.
     "What about our arrangement?"
     Another, wider grin.  "Jealous?"
     "Fuck you, you -- "
     "Whore?" Beecher suggested, pleasantly.  "That was *your* idea, as I recall."
     Ryan flushed.  "Don't recall *you* looking too hard for *another* way to stay out of Vern-baby's sights.  Spend half a year whining and complaining, then all's I have to do is point you back towards his pants; some big sacrifice."
     "Oh, you have *no* idea."  Beecher's voice dropped to a soft, dangerous murmur.  "And that's... kind of the point."
     (Because -- Keller DOES.  After all.)
     The Schillinger Ex-Wives' Club.  Membership:  2.  Agenda:  To fuck Vern over by fucking each other, and getting away with it right under his haughty Aryan nose... until the moment they get too into it to cover up after themselves any more, and bring the hammer of Thor down on both their sorry heads.  Along with anyone else Vern thought might have been helping them.
     (Like... me, for instance.  Your best -- and only -- FRIEND.)
     Here in the Merry Old Land of Oz, at least.
     (Well, fuck *that* noise.  Bitcher.)
     With a concentrated effort, Ryan wrenched his mind into another gear.  Okay: so there was a little more to this than suicidal whimsy or lust.   Forget shouting, then.  He knew instinctively it wasn't going to shift the mulish stubbornness that had taken root in Beecher's brain -- it would be like trying to out-tantrum the sulky fucking infant Beecher still pretended to think he was, half the time.
     Ryan had to be subtle, soft. *Gentle.*  He'd been able to do that, once.
     (Five fucking weeks ago.)
     "Well..."  He allowed himself to slump, switching his facial mask from anger to concern.  "Try to be discreet about it at least, okay?  Way you been flashin' it around, I'm surprised Vern hasn't already stomped you both."
     "Don't waste your worry, Ryan."
     Ryan folded his arms.  "Oh, right, you just turn invisible?"
     "Keller has a place.  Look, O'Reily, this is none of your fucking business.  I..."  Beecher closed his eyes.  "I appreciate your... help.  But this is my lookout now."  He opened his eyes again and met Ryan glare for glare.  "You don't want to be at risk?  Stay away.  *Far* away."
     "Geez, I'm just trying to watch out for you.  Be friendly, you know?"
     "Oh, I'm sorry.  Were we *friends*?"  Eyebrows up, mock-curious.
     And Ryan, thinking, stunned:
     (Weren't we?)
     Because *Ryan* had known they weren't right from the start, of course.  He'd just...
     (...never thought *Beecher* knew.)
     Jaw clenched:  "We had an understanding, you'n me."
     "I have an *understanding* with VERN.  Doesn't mean I *like* the motherfucker."  A sardonic beat.  "Not that I'd call YOU a motherfucker, of course."
     (Not to your *face*.)
     As Ryan blinked, already grasping for a reply, Beecher simply turned and strode back into Sister Pete's office, his shoulders tight. Dismissive. Ryan stared after him, face relaxing to a deadpan blank.  Inwardly amazed:
     (Whoo.  You little shit.)
     He stood there for a long moment, stillness and silence closing fast around him, shocked to immobility by what had to be the first complete failure of the skills that'd gotten him where he was--
     (--one way. Or another.)
     Jesus. Simple fuckin' play, and he'd fumbled the ball like a butter-fingered five-year-old. Nothing, *nothing* had gone according to plan or expectation; wasn't even walkin' away with any useful *information* under his belt, for Christ's sake --
     No.  Wait.
     His face slowly tightened into a smile.
     *Keller has a place*--and in Em City, let's face it, there couldn't be THAT many places to choose from.
     (So, if and when I choose to let Vern drop the bomb on this little party, all *I* have to do... is find it.)
 
 

- 3 -

Alone in the dark, cold metal on his breast, the sound of a single, steady thump in his ears, Ryan stared at the underside of the top bunk.   The flat steel of the bedframe, shrouded in shadow, seemed to shift and ripple like the surface of a black lake.  Ryan could almost imagine flickers of colour in that blackness, wavering ghosts of remembered outlines.  Could almost see, if he let his eyes blur --
     (not with TEARS though, no way)
     -- a pair of dark, infinitely compassionate, infinitely sorrowful eyes looking down on him... and then closing, and turning away.
     Ryan's eyes squeezed shut, his hand going white-knuckled on the stethoscope he held pressed to his chest.  He'd paid Alvarez to steal it from the infirmary a week ago, to make up for not ever getting more of an answer to his daily phone calls than  a sigh, and a click.  He still sent letters, but that was more to remind himself just why it had been worth getting kicked out in the first place -- for that one kiss, that one breath-to-breath, face-to-face, body-to-body clinch, that one second of sweet yielding bliss.
     'Cause... she *had* been yielding.  There hadn't been anybody else there, he'd have had her down on the bed right next to him.  Pulling away the clothes, tearing them if he had to; cancer or not, he was still strong enough for that.  Strong enough to bear down, holding her down with mouth and hands and body, until he could find that hidden passageway and slide, shove, *bludgeon* his way inside.  Feeling her clench around him, on him, legs and arms and lips and sex, scalded inside and out by their sweat, juices and racing pulses, hearing her breathing shudder and rasp and break apart in the fractured cry of his name as he turned inside out through his groin --
     He stopped his own breathing with a massive effort of will, shame and pride and fury mingling to catch his hand before it could leap to the agonizing hardness between his legs.  Christ, it had only been a year and it already felt like forever.  Forever in Oz, with nothing but his own right hand to turn to in terms of relief, of simple human *comfort*....
     But: He was *not* going to let Gloria Nathan reduce him to that again.  Not when she'd already come SO damn close to giving him what he--they--*both* wanted.
     From the back of his brain, meanwhile, a betraying ghost-voice: One all too eager to remind him, slyly, how SOME people--
     (too fuckin' many, matter of fact)
     --*do* somehow manage to do--without. Without relief, or comfort--
     (or women)
     Eeuch.
     Which brought him straight back to the same old dilemma like some kinda crazy-ass boomerang: Exhibit A, currently visible (though, thank God, not especially clearly) just across the quad--the squat form of Vern Schillinger bearing down on Tobias Beecher's hunched-up, more compact body beneath; Prag Mastery 101 in action. Versus Exhibit B, still fresh from earlier this afternoon--Keller and Beecher, *not* caught in the middle of screwing each other's brains out, but entangled up against the wall in the corner of (surprise, surprise) the library's darkened copy room, like a pair of casually discarded mops. Except sweatier.
     (And... naked-er.)
     Ryan had only meant to stay just long enough to verify that this was, indeed, the famous "place"; had, for once, made a concentrated effort *not* to strain for the exact verbal content of the slow, murmured exchange going on in front of him. But holding back hadn't HELPED, exactly--'cause all *that* left him with was--
     (noises)
     One lazy, sated whisper, passes endlessly back and forth. Beecher's distinctive snort-giggle; Keller's husky murmur. The wet sound of lips on skin.
     A warm overspill of afterglow like a musky scent, flowing out to engulf Ryan before he even knew what was happening--making him sway, almost COLLAPSE, in a sudden rush of delirium. Imagining Gloria in HIS arms, whispering to *him*, her hot, moist mouth both soothing and exciting against his flushed cheek, sweat-slick body entwined with his the way Beecher and Keller twined tight around each other....
     He'd fled.  Not retreated, not left.  Fled, as if the two men, oblivious in their semen-rank retreat, were chasing him all the way down the hall and back to Em City--back to his own clean, empty--
     (lonely)
     --pod.
     He'd spent almost every minute since fighting to push the image from his mind, and failing.  Which was not like him.  Shit, if he'd ever been interested, there were plenty of guys around -- but the truth of *that* matter was something people like Beecher and Keller only half-knew, and people like Schillinger and Adebisi never even guessed: *any* step down that road was too far.  You could talk all you wanted about staying on top, about getting off in any handy hole, but it was all just bullshit in the end.  It wasn't even about fucking another guy, though that was gross enough.
     It was about trust.  And how you couldn't afford to have it.  In anyone... but yourself.
     An involuntary smile, more spasm than mirth, crossed Ryan's face.  Take a poll, and nobody in Oz would believe he'd ever known *how* to trust in the first place.  Fact was, though, if you got that close to somebody, the most permanent thing you opened yourself up to was hurt and nothin' but -- and Ryan couldn't *not* open himself. He wasn't about to fuck anybody he wouldn't trust with his life and his soul... and none of the guys around him qualified -- would *ever* qualify.  Easier to go without than to try.
     (Ryan O'Reily, Lord of the Dance, screwed because he can't fuck without trust.)
     Yeah.  That was a laugh.  That was a friggin' *scream*.
     And so it only made sense that the only person he *could* trust in this entire shithole was the one person sworn to save lives, the one person who'd dedicated herself to *helping* assholes like him, along with everyone else.  For all his high-and-mighty ideas McManus was no better than Glynn, just another hack-made-good who saw everybody he looked after as problems, not human beings.  But Gloria saw past all that.  To her, he wasn't Prisoner 97P904, O'Reily, Ryan; he wasn't even "Chest" Cancer Case Number Whatever-The-Fuck.  He was just... him.
     A guy.  Who loved her.
     Who... she didn't love.  Never *could* love.
     (She SAYS.)

Two days ago, frustrated by the so-far-fruitless search for Beecher's and Keller's trysting place, he'd found himself ducking impulsively into the infirmary.  He'd been trying to catch Gloria alone here for weeks, but had never succeeded.  Forearmed with knowledge of his work schedule and her own, she'd always managed to have at least one hack here whenever he had to get his chemo, and to be elsewhere herself on those occasions he had enough free time and opportunity to...
     ...not *stalk* her, exactly.  'Cause it wasn't *like* that.
     (Really.  Officer.)
     He was just looking for a way to... be around her.  At the same time.  With -- nobody else around *them*.
     (Likely as THAT was.)
     But:  Miracle of miracles -- what all his careful planning and forethought kept failing to do, sheer, unpredictable whim had pulled off on its own.  There she was, bent over a microscope, checking some sample or other... and not a single other person, hack or con, to be seen.
     (Thank you, Christ Almighty.)
     "Gloria."
     She jerked upright, head coming around to lock eyes with him in a single moment of electrical surge, the movement halfway between a spooked rabbit and a cat sensing prey.  Her mouth dropped open.  "Rr... O'Reily."
      And *that* hurt, the same way the automatic hack-hunting flick of her eyes hurt:  Don't *trust* me to be alone with you, huh, Gloria?
     (Or is it *you* you don't trust?)
     Mixed anger and need harshened his voice.  "You only call someone by his name when he's sick, Gloria?  I have to be dying for you to wanna come near me?"
     A pause.  Gloria looked at him deliberately.  "You were never going to die, Ryan."  Even the sound of his name came out like a reproof:  *You see how childish you're being*?
     "I'll die without you.  Angel."
     "Don't call me that."
     "Why not?  That's what you were to me.  Still are."
     She twisted away and thrust herself off the stool, hurrying to the exit on the far side which led to the wards.  "Guard!"
     "Gloria, c'mon -- *c'mon*.  Gloria.  Please."  In three swift strides he was across the room, grabbing her by her arms, whirling her about.  Wide brown eyes stared up into his own, frightened, angry, and...
     ...longing?
     (And you know, if she'd *really* wanted help, she could have yelled a LOT louder...)
     "I can't not see you.  I can't not try."  He felt like everything in him was focused on the twin grip of his hands: the dizzying feel of her arms beneath his fingers, warm even through the white lab coat, and the almost manic care he was taking to make sure his grip was too firm to escape but not hard enough to bruise...
     "Let GO of me, Ryan."
     (Yeah, RIGHT.)
     "You can't tell me I don't mean *something* to you.  That's all I want to hear."
     "You want to know what you *mean* to me? Fine. I work here; making sure you got the proper treatment was just one more part of my job. And now--it's DONE."
     "I love you."
     "I'm..."
     (Uh huh?)
     "...married, Ryan. So're you."
     "Not anymore."
     (And I did that for YOU.)
     "Yeah, well. Your choice."
     He could have dealt with the flatness, the rejection, in her voice.  He could have dealt with the pain twisting in her eyes like oil spilled into black water, clinging and poisonous.  What he couldn't deal with -- what was beyond him -- was the combination of the two, the contradiction:  The living, paralyzing paradox of denial and desire.  How could she feel this without breaking apart?  How could she want him and hate him at once?
     "So... what?"  God fucking *damn* it, he hated it when his voice got shaky like this.  "You love *him* now?"
     She dropped her gaze for a moment, then looked back up.  Quietly:  "I'm trying to."
     And trying NOT to love...
     (...me.)
     Baffled hurt and fury weakened his fingers.  Feeling his grip slacken, she brought her arms up sharply, breaking his grip and stepping back.  He followed her with his eyes only, not moving.  In the door to the wards, the hack appeared, hand resting threateningly on his stick, but it was an anticlimax.  Gloria knew, as did Ryan, he couldn't close the distance between them now.  The hack might as well not have been there.
     But Ryan threw him a desultory sneer anyway as he turned and headed for the door.  Pure reflex:  Instinct, deeper than pain or confusion.  Mask on.  Game face, the only face he had.
     (You know things *really* have to suck when your own thoughts start repeating themselves.)
     Chased by the insight, he threw himself from the infirmary -- thinking, if he only walked fast enough, he might be able to beat it back to Em City.
     In the end, though, he had to run.
 
 

- 4 -

The only escape from pain was in the dance; it was one of the reasons he played the prison the way he did:  How else to keep that wired, hyperactive, endlessly working mind of his from devouring itself in frustrated rage?  And for the last two days he'd buried the hurt of Gloria's rejection in the frenzied search for Beecher and Keller, convinced that once he found them -- once he had that information in his hand -- he'd get back the old feeling, the sure and certain knowledge of his own power.  He could deal with anything when he felt like that:  Invisible, and omnipotent.  Like... God.
     (Only having more fun.)
     And he'd felt that same exhilarating triumph for half a second this afternoon, finding the hidden lovers, before that... whatever it was... they were throwing off like poison gas had hit him.  Infected him, bringing back Gloria and all her tenderness in a hallucinatory rush like some tits-trip gone disastrously wrong.  No comfort, no anaesthesia... no power.
     Tenderness.
     Yeah.  That was it.  Tenderness, trust -- trust, *fuck*!  You couldn't trust a guy who was out-and-out trying to screw you.  Had.  And would again.
     (The very next chance he -- YOU -- got.)
     The same tenderness he'd wanted so desperately to reach with Gloria, that trust, that overwhelming need for the person who held your life in her (HIS?) hands -- how had *they*, Beecher and Keller, somehow managed to stumble over it?  Here in Oz, trapped in the middle of constant danger, perversion and double-, triple-, quadruple-cross -- how was that even *possible*?
     It has to be a play, he thought coldly.  One of them's playing the other.  Maybe both.
     If anything could fuck up Beecher's alien computer-mind too badly to scheme, it'd be Keller's grab-you-by-the-balls-and-twist sexiness.  But Ryan had watched the way Beecher's own skills at manipulation had grown --
     (or *re*grown)
     -- since he'd turned the former lawyer onto how to deal with Vern-baby.  No matter what Keller might be mainlining into him (so to speak), Beecher was far too good now to lose it completely.
     (So... if this is a play....)
     ...then what the fuck were they playing FOR?
     Ryan knew what they had to lose, all too well.  Fucking Donald *Groves* could have seen what *they* had to lose, he'd still been alive to gawk at it with those scary piranha eyes of his -- and Groves had never had more than one oar in the water to begin with.  So with that kind of a risk, whatever they were playing for had to be some fuck of a phenomenal prize.
     Which was where his mind did something it almost never did:  Went blank.
     (What the FUCK are they PLAYING for?!)
     Maybe they weren't.  Maybe... they didn't *have* any plan.  At all.
     And how fuckin' scary was that?
     They were dancing on that minefield, Ryan thought -- working his way through the unfamiliar concepts as if they were their own minefield -- for nothing except the pleasure of the dance.  Like he danced.  It was its own justification.  Its own reason.  It wasn't about simple bodily survival, the way that everything he'd done so far had been.
     (Until Gloria.)
     Sometimes, survival wasn't enough.  Life without love....
     (LOVE?)
     Love.
     Yeah.  Fuck it.  If his love was love, maybe theirs was too.  And if they could take that kind of blind, crazy leap -- that leap of faith, in *something* -- then Ryan O'Reily was *fucked* if he'd admit they could do something he couldn't.
     (Life without love -- in Oz or out -- is no love at all.)
     He wasn't gonna live like that.
     And he sure wasn't gonna let Gloria -- *his* love, the love of his *life* -- live like that either.
 

END PART EIGHT
 
 
 

UNBOUND, Part Nine
 

- 1 -

Words.
     Vern had never trusted them, not when it came down to it.  Words were twisted too easily, made to serve whatever end you wanted.  People treated them like money, as if having a lot of them made you special, somehow... *better*.  The language of lawyers and teachers and doctors was all about lies and corruption.  Their *actions* proved that.  There was value in knowing what to name something, sure -- but since when did you need some fancy-ass ten-syllable word for that?
     People who wallowed in words liked to make out that life was a lot more complicated than it was, so that they could justify talking so much about it.
     Truth was, life was simple.  Find your cause, stand by it.  Do what you have to -- and *do* it, don't just fucking *talk* about it.  Talk was a nigger Baptist preacher singing songs from his pulpit while Vern had to beat the drug dealers off his boys.  Talk was his loathsome excuse for a lawyer, fumbling the ball in court and dropping Vern in Oz for twelve-up-for-parole-in-seven.  Talk was O'Reily, lying his Irish ass through shitstorm after shitstorm and still pulling out of his nosedives like some kamikaze-wannabe stunt pilot.  Everything Vern despised as sheer bullshit... was all talk.
     But there were times -- not many, but some -- when he found himself abruptly spread-eagled against the wall of his vocabulary's self-imposed limits:  Aware that there was something, some concept, idea or sensation, he needed to examine, that his instincts told him was *important*... but that he simply didn't have a word or definition for, and thus no way to get a mental grip on it.  Like trying to wrestle something made of smoke.
     He showed none of this on his face, of course.  Your mask was your armour, in Oz, and he'd mastered his mask long ago.  One part of his mind, and all of his body, remained intent on the daily tasks of the post office: scan, examine, sort, toss or put aside, scan, examine, sort, toss or put aside, et cetera et cetera.  But another part, safely hidden behind the facade of bland, blank professionalism, worked furiously at the problem.
     If it *was* a problem.
     (Beecher.)
     Maybe that was all the name he needed.
     He couldn't quite call it suspicion.  If he'd had a genuine suspicion, he'd have had possibilities to check out, watches to post, retributions to take.  But there was nothing that concrete.  Just this faint, uneasy uncertainty that there was something wrong.  He was no stranger to acting on his hunches... but dammit, they were usually *stronger* than this.  This was no hunch, this was sheer insecurity.  His own paranoia, tickling him in a sensitive spot for lack of anything else to do; autonomic reflexes, a sixth-sense hiccup, the phantom singing of his ears in a silent room.
     If Vern trusted nothing else, he trusted his own ability to teach fear, and to read it.  And Beecher's whole life was founded on fear.  Beneath all his nutbag whore's poses, beneath the icy calculation that never really stopped running, the lawyer-turned-prag exuded fear constantly -- like a subtle scent you only noticed when it was gone.  Vern hadn't implanted that fear; it had been there since Beecher's first day in Oz.  He'd only given it a shape, used it and tailored it to his purposes.  But the fear had *always* been there.
     That kind of fear crippled a man.  Bent him.
     Broke him.
     Beecher wasn't physically *capable* of betraying Vern now and getting away with it. Not without giving off telltale signs Vern could read from a mile away.   Of that, he was absolutely confident.
     But it would still be nice to have a word for this... this whatever-it-was, this not-quite-suspicion, this almost-doubt.
     Just so he could lay it to rest.
     ("Lay it to --"  Christ, like you're fucking *haunted* by the guy?)
     Abruptly irritated, Vern banished the problem and bent to his work.  Like he hadn't got anything *better* to think about than fucking Tobias Beecher --
     ( -- or, indeed, than fucking Tobias Beecher.)
     And:  Jesus, STOP it.  There had to be more worthwhile things to occupy his attention than the state of Beecher's so-called mind.
     (Not that I can *think* of one, right now....)
     Which -- would be the trouble.
     (Wouldn't it.)
 

- 2 -

In the midst of the maze of politics, bluff and betrayal that was survival in Oz, Vern had always found a certain satisfaction in the simple fulfillment of duty -- leading his people, delivering his mail.  *His* mail.
     (Well, close as made no nevermind.)
     But tossing O'Reily's letters onto the table before him was always just that little bit sweeter.  Knowing that the Mick could never quite be sure Schillinger hadn't already steamed open his letters, and read the only part of his slippery mind accessible to anyone.  Being sure that for that very reason, O'Reily trusted little to the mail.  Knowing that O'Reily had been working for a year and a half to get a foothold in the mailroom -- the mailroom that Vern guarded as zealously as he guarded his own back, or Beecher's ass -- and that all the Mick's efforts had come to nothing.
     (Try to ship your fucking tits through MY mailroom, O'Reily.  Come on.  Try.)
     It had been particularly enjoyable these last few weeks.  Crumpled under the twin lead weights of obsession over his medical paramour and chemo-drug sickness, O'Reily's senses had dropped to a fraction of their normal wire-trigger alertness, and Vern had started taking care to make his approach especially quiet.  It didn't always work, granted -- not to mention it was pretty petty, as even Vern could admit -- but he always relished the moments when the mail hit the table in front of O'Reily's face and made him jerk upright, caught for maybe half a second without any hint of game face or Irish Spring-Lucky Charms bullshit....
     (Like now, for example.)
     Ryan lay sprawled back in his chair, feet up on the table, immobile as a scarecrow discarded after harvest.  Vern shifted the mail cart to exactly the angle where the screwed front wheel wouldn't squeak a warning, and wheeled it neatly into place behind the Mick.  He'd already picked up O'Reily's single packaged magazine, preventing any betraying whisper of shuffled paper, and drew back his arm to toss it gently onto the table, where it would land flat on with a satisfying, startling smack --
     Ryan's bleeding-shamrock hand flashed up and out behind him, palm flat and extended.  Waiting and ready.  "Thanks, Vern," he said cheerfully, without even looking around.
     (Aw, fuck *you*, you little pissant.)
     Vern slapped the magazine into O'Reily's hand with a grunt of annoyance.  Half the time he couldn't believe he'd ever even *attempted* to be O'Reily's sponsor.  He'd watched the Mick's progress with a combination of cool amusement and -- not *annoyance*, exactly; it wasn't as if the Mick could ever do anything to annoy, let alone threaten, him -- but a growing awareness that the fifty different types of underhanded shit O'Reily got up to almost daily were beginning, slowly but surely, to intersect with Vern's domain -- his *property*.  And had been for some time.
     Starting with slipping Beecher tits under the table.
     In the normal course of events that kind of shit would have earned both Beecher *and* O'Reily a beating at the very least.  But blond, pallid, cat-wiry physique (after Vern had bullied the office-worker gut off of him) and swastika-branded ass notwithstanding, Beecher *wasn't* actually a member of the A.B. -- thus, the hardline anti-drug policy of the Brotherhood wasn't really a factor, and none of the Brotherhood themselves much cared.  Now, if Toby-baby had been blowing O'Reily in return for those tits, then that would have let them both in for *way* more than just some roughing up....
     (Not *killing*, though.  Not Beecher, anyway.)
     Even in his pre-Nathan days, though, O'Reily'd been so stuck on his self-proclaimed status as straightest man in Oz he'd've probably decked Beecher himself, if the little lawboy slut had suggested that kind of deal.  And now?  Whatever twisted scraps of sex drive the Mick had left after his chemotherapy were probably so gnarled and knotted over that miscegenated mongrel Nathan, he wouldn't be able to get it up even if he wanted to.
     Although --
     Taking the magazine, O'Reily jackknifed upright and twisted himself off the chair with entirely too much energy for someone who was supposed to be either dying or lovesick -- or both.
     (Dying of lovesickness?)
     He still hadn't regained the lanky, jaunty strut he'd possessed when he'd first come into Em City; the herky-jerky movements were a little too wired to be graceful, every shift and motion a touch too quick and sharp, overcontrolled and overcompensated.  But he leant against the chair and folded his arms, grinning with something approaching his old I-*run*-this-place cockiness.  "So how ya doin', Vern?  You and the missus figured out names for the kids yet?"
     Vern sighed.  "You been suckin' on your own tits again, O'Reily?"
     (Jesus, THERE's an image.)
     Then again, the little fuck had always seemed... bendy.
      Ryan just kept grinning.  "I'm in love, Vern.  You should try it sometime."
      (Love.  Yeah.)
      Vern huffed.  "Just don't start pickin' out names for *your* kids."  Unbidden, his mind lit on a series of images:  Toddler kids with a weird mix of Irish and Hispanic features -- little Nathans, or little O'Reilys, or little Nathan-O'Reilys....
     (Eeesh.)
     He pushed the cart around O'Reily, resorting to what was, after all, the first and best way of dealing with the Mick:  Ignore him completely, your shoulders stolid but relaxed, as if he and his infuriating chimpanzee grin weren't even there.  Maybe it was the chemo, Vern thought.  Some new treatment, or drug mix.  Maybe Nathan was treating him like a guinea pig -- trying out some new *techniques* on him....
     (Christ, Vernon, get your mind *off* this sick race-mixing shit!)
     Maybe it had been the family visit.  Vern remembered passing by the visitors' room earlier today, his attraction caught first (and briefly) by the handsome black-haired woman smoking angrily against one wall, before flicking her ashes onto the back of O'Reily's moon-bald head.  The Mick, deep in intent conversation with that moron brother of his, hadn't even noticed.  But if talking to your brain-damaged kin could act like a shot in the arm, Vern suddenly wished he had some of his own siblings around to vent some stress on.  The ones that had inherited his Old Man's brains.
     "Don't take it for granted, Schillinger," Ryan called after him, as Vern pushed the cart on its way.  "'Slike that bitch from Woodstock said, don't know whatcha got 'til it's gone, you know?"  He laughed with *way* too much enjoyment.  Vern's knuckles whitened on the handle of the cart.
     (What I *got*?  What the fuck are you talking about?)
     The only thing he *had* was Beecher, and that had shit to do with love.  Ownership, power, loyalty for protection:  *That* was what Beecher was about.  And the day O'Reily knew enough about loyalty to talk sense about it, treacherous double-dealing bastard that he was, that'd be the day Vern listened to anything he said about --
     Vern slowed, then stopped.
     *Did* O'Reily know something... about Beecher?  Because that was the *implication*, wasn't it?
     And come to think of it, wasn't that how O'Reily delivered all his really serious messages?  Ryan knew nobody in Em City -- or their right friggin' mind -- trusted him far enough to believe a straight statement, so whenever he had something important to say he never said it right out.  He hinted around the edges, let you pick it up and waited until you were ready to listen.  Until *you* came to *him.*
     Had he seen something that Vern, unbelieveable as this was, hadn't?
     (Oh, this is BULLshit.)
     Angrily Vern dismissed the thoughts and shoved the mail cart forward, gritting his teeth as the canted front wheel made a squealing sound.  O'Reily was a walking sack of crap with pretensions to True White humanity.  Believing *anything* he said was like dropping your pants and bending over in front of Adebisi.
     (Voluntarily.)
     Stupid wasn't even the word.
     He told himself that, over and over, as he continued on his rounds.
 

- 3 -

With blood thundering in his ears and his eyes slowly refocusing from the black blur of a skull-tightening orgasm, waht was left of Christopher Keller's mind produced a sudden, twisted thought:  How beyond fuckin' strange it was that the room where he'd known the most -- well -- *joy* in Oz was a small, dark, shelf-filled, glorified closet that smelt of sweaty steel and dusty paper.
     He lolled back against the table, the sweat of the past few minutes cooling to an unpleasant tackiness beneath vest and opened, but unremoved, trousers.  From where he knelt between Chris's splayed legs, Beecher grinned up at him, pausing for a moment to wipe the last traces of moisture from his lips with a cat-quick scrub against Keller's inner thigh.
     (Aren't I a *good* kitty?)
     Keller laughed.  Kitty.  More like getting sucked off by a fuckin' leopard, what with the rasp of that stubble Beech had slowly allowed to grow back.  He reached down to stroke Beecher's jaw with one palm.  "Surprised Vern hasn't called you on that yet."
     "He's been...distracted."
     Keller wondered, briefly:  By what?
     (Do I care?)
     You *should*, he reminded himself.  Vern.  Equals imminent danger, remember?  To you.  To...
     (Toby.)
     Little as the ex-lawyer seemed to care about it, one way or another.  Which was not exactly new--but still kind of scary in and of itself.
     Carefully:  "Yeah, well, if the whiskerburn shows, we're both fucked.  You know that, right?"
     That *snort*, plus a sideways slash of a smile. "Well, we're both pretty *fucked* anyway."
     (Aren't we?)
     Adding, drily, after a moment: "But don't you fret your pretty little high-domed head about it...baby."
     ('Cause keeping Vern off our backs--by keeping him ON mine? That's *my* business.)
     Irritation flared momentarily through the afterglow -- it was Keller's ass on the line too, something Beecher never seemed to remember -- but he was too lethargic with post-coital haze to sustain the anger. Instead, he ran a hand over his scalp, snorted--then smiled, langorously. And offered, in return--
     "Whatever. You want yours, now?"
     Beecher shook his head.  "No time.  I gotta get back to the pod.  Vern'll be done his rounds pretty soon, he'll want some... help.  Unwinding."  He tried for the smile again and produced an expression Keller couldn't put a name to; it was too restrined for "snarl" and too unbalanced for "leer".  "See you tomorrow."
     He rose, moved off, paused on the threshold of the copy room.  And threw back:
     "Oh yeah -- you might wanna zip up."
     A last quick smile, this one truly amused and far more human.  Then, gone.  Keller stared after him in bemusement.
     (You just love pulling those little disappearing acts, don'tcha, Tobe?)
     He sighed, tucked himself in, and zipped up.  Well, Beech had been playing prag for over half a year just to survive, and he'd probably perfected that mask to the point where nobody could tell it from his own face -- even him.  Habits of survival, polished and sharpened like knives; Keller knew it wasn't fair to expect, or even ask, Beech to throw them all away just 'cause he was fucking someone he didn't actually *have* to.
     (Not *all* of them.  Just the ones he shouldn't need with *me*.)
     Like that weirdly infuriating way he always made sure Keller was the last one to come.  As if he was proving the pleasure Chris *knew* he gave him was just a fluke, a brief, passing thing; accepting Chris's actions almost like taking a payment, then doling out services in return.  A fucking *transaction*, for Chrissake.
     (And it *is* a "fucking transaction", too, isn't it.)
     And he'd started coming up with reasons not to linger afterwards.  They were all good ones, of course.  Sensible.  Which didn't make Chris any less pissed off about it.  Half the time there was barely even any conversation involved any more -- they'd surreptitiously arrange their next rendezvous, meet, fuck, lather, rinse, repeat....
     Jesus, he was sounding like one of his own exes.  *He never talks to me anymore!  It's just SEX!  I feel so...*
      (I think the word you're lookin' for is "used".)
      Christ, Keller realized, he's playin' prag to *both* of us.  Me and Vern.  He's just using different moves on me, but it's the same fucking thing.  Strip it all down to the basic fuck and run.  So *he's* got the power.  Even that oh-so-pleasant tryst they'd just finished -- it had been all under Beech's direction, giving control to get control.  Like Chris didn't know *that* game, from the inside-out; like he'd never played it himself, with EXACTLY the same dance partner.
     (Yeah.  *That* game.  From the INside-out.)
     But how much could he really blame the guy?
     Nobody'd ever been around to treat *him* the way he was treating Beech now, way back when -- with care, with car*ing*, with basic human kindness.  Everything he knew about manipulation -- and the little he knew about those few and far between relationships that *didn't* involve it -- he'd learned by watching *other* relationships, and infrequent trial and error.  Usually error.
     And where'd all that started?
     Lardner.  With Vern.
     (Vern, the One-Man School of Hard Cocks himself.)
     So how did it go, to cover the distance from there to this?  From the "real world", where mommies and daddies stayed together and people worked hard at their jobs -- and people *had* jobs to work hard at, not just assigned time-filling tasks -- to Oz, where every skill you'd spent the rest of your life acquiring and perfecting counted for exactly fuck-all?
     (Aside from the Lotus and typing ability needed to get and keep that cushy secretarial job in Pete's office.)
     Oz, perfect mirror to Outside, the land behind the looking glass:  Lying, cheating and treachery were the virtues here, and everything you learned back home in Kansas -- politeness, friendliness, smiles and civilization -- became capital crimes, the kind that got you nowhere but dead.  Fast.
     (Lying and cheating and fucking around.  *Prime* lawyer territory.)
     And Beecher, who'd probably had a foot in both worlds even before he'd slipped down that rabbit hole and straight through the gates of Em City, what with the drinking and all -- the guy with an itch, the guy for who having it all was never enough, always looking for that next bottle marked DRINK ME.  And always ready to follow the label's orders... eagerly.
     (Good little prag.)
     Christ, no wonder he was reverting to his old rules.   As Chris well knew, the weird thing was that with Vern, the rules were actually *simpler* than the tangle of crossed wires, missed signals, and failed expectations that made up most marriages on the Outside  -- wedding ring or not.  Do what Vern wanted, the way Vern wanted it, you got your reward.  Do anything else, regardless of what, you got your punishment.  And Vern's unfair but utterly consistent version of "fairness" made those results predictable enough to play, to use, to anticipate -- to cover just about anything and everything that fell in between.
     Which made it a fucking miracle, Keller supposed, that he'd seen as far inside Beech as he had:  This feral, fragile little... *thing*... that had to be teased and tempted out of its hole, its habitual survivor's pose.  Soothed and gentled, until you finally got a glimpse of what lay under the game face -- those thrilling, murky, shark-infested depths nobody ever saw... except YOU.
     (Me.  "That piece of shit.")
     Seeing that, being able to do that, was the kind of thing could make even someone like Chris Keller special.  Unique.  *Good.*
     (For once.)
     He just wished it didn't have to take so much fucking *work* each and every time.
     And, oh yeah:  Why *was* he doing this, anyway?
     (The PLAN.  Remember?)
     Right.  *That* plan.  The one he'd... pretty much forgotten all about, at this point.
     It had been about Vern, once upon a time.  Vern fucking over Chris by fucking over Richie Hanlon--fuckbuddy-doppelganger Richie, still wasting away on Death Row, who Chris hadn't thought about for *weeks*, and hadn't seen since they first took him to Ad Seg.  So Keller had decided to fuck *Vern* over by taking away *his* toy.  And once he'd done that....
     ...he'd gotten so caught up in playing with it himself, that he'd forgotten how eventually, its original owner was gonna come looking for it. Not to mention how the OTHER problem with taking Beecher away was...now *Chris* had him.
     Except he didn't, really.  All he had was what Beech let him see -- more than anybody else got to, maybe, but it still wasn't fucking enough.  Not any more.
     Vern's too-familiar dream-voice, rumbling back: *'Cause, fact is, Beech don't *give* himself to anybody, Chrissie.  With him, all you get--*
     (--is what you take.)
     Chris knit his hands together, pressing them out until he felt his lats pop with an audible crack.  Thinking:  *Shit.  How'd this all get so fucking complicated, anyway?*
     ('Cause basically, that Beech is just one complicated motherfucker?)
     Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Thanks for nothin'.
     (Cupcake.)
     Fuck complicated, then.  He'd been playing that game for weeks -- and though he'd enjoyed the hell out of the ride thus far, it was going exactly nowhere.  Beech didn't trust him?  He'd *make* him trust him, the only way life in Oz allowed for:  Goods for trade, tit for tat.  Secret for secret.
     (Give it to him *straight*, so to speak.)
     Pull up a chair, next go-'round, before Beech had a chance to haul Chris' fly down, and say:  *Hey, listen, here's the way it is:  I ain't been exactly... *forthcoming* with you, ToBIas.*
     Time peeling back, replaying, widescreen detail-bright--that first real conversation of theirs, in *this* same Goddamn supply-room, after "rescuing" Toby from Robeson's less-than-tender mercies:
     *No one can know how it *is* for me. Not unless -- *
     (-- they've BEEN there.)
     Which...I *have*. So I don't HAVE to "imagine" how it is for you.
     (Never did.)
     The enormity of admitting what he'd once been determined to bury forever made Keller's jaw drop; his face went slack, eyes bugging. He took an uneasy breath, already rehearsing it--
     *Look, baby, see what I'm willing to do for you?  I'm handing you something you can use against me -- give you something *real*, not just a dose of angel dust and a goodbye hug: Have a good trip, see ya next fall, write if you get work.  I'm handing you my rep, my jizz, everything I racked up so far in this place where nobody knows me but Vern...*
     (and you)
     Handing you my life. My balls on a plate. Handing you--*
     (--my *heart*.)
     Okay, so it wasn't *complicated*, exactly. Just, kinda, sorta, fuckin' --
     (NUTS)
     Thinking: *Aw, fuuuuck *me*.*
     And knowing, even so...KNOWING, right that very minute, that heartbeat, that space between one drawn breath and the next...
     ...that he was gonna go ahead and do it, all the same.

End Part Nine