Archive of Our Own ^beta

Vincent did not anticipate being born. But then, who does?
That he had heretofore taken his nature more or less completely in stride was a not insignificant point of pride. The wailing, the despair, the religion—those were for lesser men, men who failed to appreciate the opportunity given them. That wide open endless yawning void called opportunity. No, he would not cower before it but rather look it gamely in the eye. Like a man.
For all his lifetimes it had been so. But as Vincent blinked slowly into consciousness at the ripe old age of two and three months old on lifetime number thirteen, he couldn't help it: he flinched. And, like a supercritical mass of fissile material, his meltdown was spectacular. By age three, he had screamed his premature vocal cords so raw the doctors feared permanent damage. By five, the screaming subsided into haunting nightly sobs. By ten, it occurred to him that, perhaps, nothing bad was going to happen to him after all or it would have happened already.
“Of course nothing bad is going to happen to you,” his poor father insisted when he gathered the wherewithal to float this possibility.
Maybe he got hit by a car, Vincent mused, or was struck by lightning. An act of god. But this thought only renewed the crying jags, for reasons he struggled to articulate even to himself.
Nevertheless, by time that avenging angel finally revealed himself to have neither been hit by a car, nor struck by lightning, nor a victim of divine intervention not otherwise specified, Vincent had sufficiently recovered something that palely resembled his sensibilities such that he did not faint outright but merely swooned like a Victorian heroine too long on the moors. He was nineteen years old, and somehow still alive.
Harry frowned. If Vincent didn't know better—and, good god, how he wished he didn't know better!—he would have called it a look of concern. "Vincent," he said. "Don't tell me you're ill."
And then, having held out not only as long as he could but far longer than he had imagined he would have, Vincent collapsed in an ungainly and somewhat sweaty heap on the floor.

He came to in bed with a vial of smelling salts under his nose and Harry's eyes staring back at him out that perfect, terrible face, the redcrosse knight of Vincent's dreams and nightmares alike. "Harry," he said as gamely as he could manage, though his pediatricians' prognosis was rather accurate. "And here I was worried I had given you bad directions."
"He hasn't fainted like this since he was a child," Vincent's father supplied rather anxiously.
"Oh, Father, you're here, too," Vincent said. "Father, Harry; Harry, my father. He'll be quite blubbery if you kill me, but you'll only being putting him out of his misery."
"No one is going to kill you, son." His father patted him on the arm. To Harry, he said, "He's had terrible nerves all his life, for as long as he's been able to put together a sentence. The pain of losing his mother, you see."
"I see," said Harry, though plainly he didn't. He cleared his throat. "If you don't mind—?"
"Of course," said Vincent's father. "Thank you, doctor. If there's anything you need, anything at all—he's my only son, after all."
"Well," Harry said when they were, at long last, alone together in Vincent's childhood bedroom, "I'm glad to see you're taking this well."
"Ha ha," Vincent intoned and struggled into a slightly more dignified sitting position amongst the various befrilled pillows.
Harry laid a hand on his shoulder. "Maybe best if you didn't."
Vincent stilled. "Yes, doctor, whatever you say, doctor." It was easier, anyway, not to look at him.
"Now, is that any way to speak to the man who holds your life in his hands?" Harry's voice, his Harry's voice after all, like the voice of god—a little amused.
"Of course," said Vincent, who hadn't managed to string together so many coherent sentiments in row since he was a middle-aged man dying of radiation poisoning. It felt good, like exercising a broken leg. "What would you like—supplication? tears? the great white flag of surrender?"
"I'm sorry would be nice," said Harry.
"I could say the same to you," Vincent sniffed.
"Vincent, my friend—you tortured me, tried sincerely to kill me several times over, and married my wife. What could I possibly have to apologize to you for?"
"It's not fair! How was I supposed to know that you—" Vincent was embarrassed to learn that hot tears were swiftly escaping his ears. "I was only doing the best I could with admittedly limited information. And you—you said some very hurtful things."
Harry, perhaps wisely, apparently found himself at a loss for words.
"I would have gone through with it, but thankfully it never came up," Vincent repeated in what surely must have been an attempt at a Northumberland accent. With the recollection of these words a childish urge to scream nearly overcame him, and in a brief fit of dignity he plucked one of the myriad pillows from his environment and began to smother himself.
"None of that," Harry said gently, and so Vincent contented himself with laying as still as possible with his eyes squeezed resolutely shut. "It seems there's no need to impress upon you the futility of continuing with the quantum mirror project."
"So too the futility of breathing, or eating, or—but no," Vincent said, "I understood. I'll content myself with the dark ages if it would make you happy. You have my word."
"Good boy," said Harry. "You'll make a fine recovery, and when you're ready, you'll apply to Cambridge and make you father proud."
Vincent counted to ten, then to a hundred, before opening his eyes to find himself in the same place he always managed to find himself, totally alone. He spent the rest of the day, then the week, then the month, blushing furiously into the pillows and suppressing the urge to scream.

Of all the indignities of Vincent's many lifetimes, few ranked as high as entering university for the sixth time at twenty entire years old. His peers struck him as terminally immature even in his first life. But this was the first time he found himself feeling quite so old.
He spent the first semester oscillating rapidly between panic and dread, like he was in constant fear of being judged and found wanting. In this way, he was not much different from his peers, terminally immature or no. Unlike his peers, and much to their resentment, he could manage top marks in nearly any subject in his sleep. For Christmas, his father sent him a letter congratulating him on how well he was doing there and wondering if, perhaps, he might better stay there rather than come home and risk a regression.
On his way to the young tutor August's apartments, he practiced his breathing exercises and his affirmations. Smart, capable, no worse than anyone else is, he told himself. Breathe or die. A block from the door—he could find his way there in the dark, in his terrible yawning void dreams, in a fit of pure terror—a mad giggle escaped from somewhere near his diaphragm. His script, copied out carefully in long hand, was useless with sweat in his sweaty hands. He knocked on the door.
"Vincent," Harry greeted pleasantly. He was resplendent in slightly fuzzy wool knit, that drab of academia. "I'll invite you inside, but you'll have to promise not to try and punch me again."
Vincent was unsure what his face was doing, but whatever it was was sufficiently mollifying: Harry stepped aside.
Inside it was just as it always was. Back at the beginning again. Vincent cleared his throat. "Harry—I have something to say to you."
"I could say the same to you." Harry sat in his perpetual upholstered chair, retrieved a cup of tea, or whiskey, or turpentine, for all Vincent knew. "But, sure, why don't you go first."
"You told me you were going to kill me, and then you didn't. You told me come here, and then —nothing! I understand that you must be angry, with me, but if there’s something that you want from me—some reason I’m still here, again—you’ve somehow managed to leave that part out." Vincent swallowed. "Also, my father has kicked me out."
Harry deposited his cup onto the mantle and his face into his hands.
"Don't laugh at me," Vincent said hotly.
"I'm not," Harry contested. “Only—you must realize that you’re in a poor position to make demands.”
“Only you seem so pleased to remind me, and what else are friends for.” Vincent sat down.
Harry ran a hand over his face. He looked, abruptly, unspeakably tired. It almost made Vincent want to fix it. "You're right, that this—an unfair situation. Whatever else you deserve, a summary execution would be..." Harry sighed. "Even Victor Hoeness was given a chance to repent, after all."
“Some might call the attempted usurpation of the powers of god a summary offense,” Vincent offered. He couldn’t help it. It was the fireplace, the over-stuffed chairs, Harry’s beleaguered face. The suicidal urge to disagree. Point, counterpoint.
“I don’t understand you, Vincent,” said Harry finally.
“No,” Vincent agreed, and through a supreme act of will left it at that.
“And so—what next?” Harry tapped his finger musingly. “Pardon me for saying so, but I can’t imagine what you would do without some ill-advised hubristic quest to occupy that terrible mind of yours.”
“It involves a lot of screaming,” said Vincent. “as I’m sure my father’s household could be compelled to testify.”
“And so I’ve devised for you a new project,” Harry continued. “Convince me to let you live.”
Vincent could have laughed, and so he did, though in some ways the resulting sound more closely resembled a bark. “And how do you imagine I might do that?”
“You’ll put your mind to it,” said Harry. “I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”

And so Vincent came to enroll, for the first time in any of his lives, in a course on philosophy. He had considered, briefly, the school of divinity—because why bother with half measures—before concluding that an untimely death of apoplectic rage would be, at best, counterproductive. Not to mention that he couldn’t imagine himself looking at all good in a cassock.
Philosophy—the morality of living, formed over thousands of years, from and eye for an eye to the atom bomb— proved itself to be only slightly less tortuous, an infinite regress of pointless hypotheticals built on a muddy and meandering half-logic.
"Total dreck," he often found himself declaring. Harry, in the kitchen, was pretending to grade. "Harry, listen to this, will you." He read what he supposed was meant to be a sentence from his textbook involving, among other things, the faculty of desire, various purities and impurities, and the acquisition of the proficiency of reason.
"And have you formed an opinion you would like to share, or are you only enjoying the sound of your own voice?" said Harry, who he suspected of not even listening in the first place, and not understanding any better than Vincent himself in the second.
“My opinion is that—like some other people I know—philosophers seem to be paid by the word.” Vincent considered, also for the first time in any of his lives, that he might simply be stupid. It was a grim thought that he did his best to suppress. “I hope you’re enjoying this,” he added hopefully, “seeing me frustrated.”
Harry hummed agreeably. "It’s an introductory survey, Vincent,” he said. “Stupider people than you have passed it."
"Some things are easier for stupid people, if you haven't noticed," said Vincent. Conspicuously to himself, he added, “The things I do for you.”
Harry, if he heard, was unmoved. “Poor you,” he said.
It was an effective diversion, anyway, at least in the way that gnawing on shoe leather might be an effective diversion against starving, something to shore up the weekend and evening and holiday hours where he otherwise had nothing to do but think, which was increasingly proving itself to be a bad time. And, worse, the awareness of this fact, that what had so far been his chief pleasure in life now rendered him sick with a grieved and guilty misery, was small enough that it could creep in the gap of only a mere moment of unoccupied time.
But, still, it was easy enough to fall into old habits.
“Here's a thought experiment for you,” he said. “And this time I get to play professor. Let's say you are one of two survivors—for now, anyway—of a shipwreck. Between you and your unlucky compatriot floats a single life preserver that can keep one—and only one—of you alive long enough to be rescued. Do you go for it? Or do you let yourself drown?”
“The right to self-defense is considered nearly universal,” said Harry. “It's only natural to save yourself, if you can.”
“You know I of all people hate to split hairs, but self-defense usually refers to situation where someone is trying to harm you—not a case of mutual bad luck. But it's true, of course, that no one would blame you, and they'd be a terrible hypocrite if they did. That makes it right, then?” Vincent asked. “No one judges you, therefore you've done nothing wrong?”
Harry shook his head. “It's the wisdom of the crowd. A moral consensus that extends across time, across cultures.”
“Democratically elected morality,” he said, and Harry assented. “Let's say now that you're not one of the drowning men, but rather on the rescue boat, life preserver in hand. To whom do you throw it?”
“All else being equal, between them?”
“Presumably not. But even if you hold their lives in your hands, you aren't actually god. So, yes, equal as far as you know.”
“I suppose, in that case, it would be best to just pick. What else can you do?”
“You could hold it to a vote, which would helpfully obviate the need to decide at all since they'll both die before reaching a consensus. But, alright, you pick one—but the wind catches, it lands dead between them, and they wrestle each other for it.” He paused, then added, “Luckily, in this scenario, you also have a gun. Or, I don't know, a harpoon or something.”
“You're suggesting I should kill one of them.”
“No, I'm suggesting you could kill one of them.”
“And if I don’t, they'll both die.”
“Presumably, they'll both die sooner or later no matter what you do,” said Vincent. “You're not god, remember. It's only a matter of when.”
“Better one than both, surely,” said Harry finally. “Better later than now.”
“You just pick one?” said Vincent.
“You just pick one,” agreed Harry.

The situation, for all its familiarity, was off-putting. He had braced himself for—well, he wasn’t sure what exactly, but surely something. Vengeance. Retribution. Fire and brimstone, or, barring that, a bad mood. Those he could have accepted, even understood. But Harry treated him with a uniform if slightly paternalistic good humor. Even when provoked, whatever he really thought, whatever he really felt, he obscured quite ably with a studied and impassive blankness. And, like a man who, having shot himself in the foot and found himself miraculously uninjured, must press his luck and try again, provoke him Vincent did.
“I don’t suppose,” he remarked as casually as he was able, the once, “that you have access to any philosophical texts not yet stocked in the library.”
There were on what passed in the south of England as a hike, rendered endurable by the mixed blessings of Harry’s only slightly breathless company—it was hard to believe that he had ever been something so bucolic as a groundskeeper, even in another life—which presently sputtered to a stop.
“You don’t mean from the Club,” he said doubtfully.
“No,” said Vincent, “I mean of your own devising. I’ve decided that I’d like to die peacefully of old age before finishing.”
It was summer in the fenlands, and Harry was looking startled and unusually pink in the face. In another life, Vincent would have thought—but, no, best not to think of that, now. “Don’t tell me you lot are too good for solipsistic navel-gazing,” he said instead.
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Harry, firmly resisting the bait. “Only—”
“Only they don’t know,” said Vincent, “about all this.”
“It’s my responsibility,” said Harry, pink face gone red but otherwise rather authoritative, and resumed walking.
“Good god,” said Vincent, whose turn it now was to play slightly breathless catch-up. “Your responsibility, or—or your dirty little secret? I have to say, Harry, I’m positively scandalized! If I didn’t know better, I might even suspect that you’re embarrassed of me.”

While philosophy proved an effective if unsatisfying balm against the loss of his ambitions, it did nothing at all to ward off his more self-indulgent trains of thought. To not think at all of Harry would have taken an act of will of which Vincent was neither capable nor very much interested, and if those thoughts left him feeling, afterwards, sick with both loneliness and guilt — well, those feelings, at least, he had had several lifetimes to get used to. And if his fantasies of Harry’s hands grasping at his shoulders, of Harry’s clothes — knit woolen sweater, or suit, or uniform — abandoned on the floor or at least pushed out of the way, of Harry’s voice calling out his name, were sometimes brought to a cold close by intrusive memories of Harry helpless and delirious with pain, or dying, or dead, that, too, was really nothing new. To these things Vincent was accustomed, and he rarely found it any more difficult than he always had to look the man in the eye afterwards.
Still, sometimes Harry made things difficult.
Out of abhorrence of natural talent wasted and want of other things to, Vincent elected himself as the secretary of the college’s part planning committee, a position he found to be of great strategic significance, especially for parties planned to be held during term holidays, when the committee’s nominal but weak-willed leader could often be found ingratiating himself with prospective future employers. And, for better or worse, the first amongst these in magnitude was New Year’s Eve.
That it was a good party, in objective terms, went nearly without saying. The decorations grand but not excessive. The guest list tailored but not exclusive. The drink strong enough to embolden the free flow of friendly conversation but not so strong as to encourage violence against either guests or the environment at large. For the most part, anyway.
Harry, one of the few—but not conspicuously few—outside the body of the college itself to land himself an invitation, swiftly found himself cornered by one of the philosophy departments more tedious lecturers, and the conversation, if Harry’s expression was anything to go by, was just as unpleasant as the man’s lectures had been. Vincent considered launching a rescue attempt, but in the end his curiosity got the better of him. He had never seen Harry truly and violently angry before—or at least, not at someone other than him—and firsts, after all, were so hard to come by these days.
And, of course, he had other duties as host to fulfill, like sneaking out onto the hall’s dusty balconies to breathe in the cold winter air. He was feeling melancholic. He had made the inadvisable decision to attend a talk by a visiting lecturer.
“If you had perfect knowledge of all things,” she had asked, “not just of physics, and chemistry, and biology, and of history, and literature, and religion, but also of the contents of men's hearts” —and wouldn't that be nice—"would you really know, any better than you know right now, what is right and what is wrong?”
Smart, capable, no worse than anyone else is. Breathe or die.
“Fancy seeing you here, Mr. Secretary,” said Clara, sometime girlfriend of the committee’s currently absent president, who smoke like a chimney. “Shouldn’t you be enjoying the fruits of your labor?”
“I wondered if there mightn’t be better company out here,” said Vincent, and the force of habit felt almost lazy, like shooting a lame horse or lying through his teeth.
Clara snorted. “I saw that odd professor friend of yours” —friend, said here suggestively, with a thoroughly waggled eyebrow— “chatting up Dr. Marks. Remind me what he teaches again — something funny, wasn’t it?”
“My dear,” said Vincent, “I have no idea who you’re talking about. And it’s mathematics.”
Clara puffed on her cigarette shrewdly. “It’s awful cold out here, isn’t it? Maybe you should be a gentleman and offer me your jacket.”
Vincent, the gentleman, so loaned. It was terrible on her, draped over her shoulders like a funereal shroud.
“A real shame that Jacob couldn’t be here,” she continued. “Considering as he is the president. I do hope he isn’t making people think that someone more…dedicated shouldn’t be in charge.”
Somewhere in the night, the three-quarter bell chimed.
“That’ll be our cue then,” he said, “or they’ll be talking about us.”
Inside the party at swelled to less manageable proportions. Harry, he saw, had managed to extricate himself from the tedious Dr. Marks and was radiating a sufficiently foul energy that no one else dared approach, and Vincent felt a brief but debilitating pang of emotion.
“Someone’s in trouble,” Clara giggled unhelpfully.
Then, like an episode of mass hysteria, the countdown began, and he found himself with Clara in his arms and the taste of Clara’s cigarettes in his mouth and the tasteful confetti he had so carefully selected raining down on them like nuclear fall-out.
He was meant, afterwards, when the party had departed whooping into the night, to clean up the shrapnel and detritus left behind, a task to which he felt himself in the moment totally unsuited. Instead, he collapsed himself into a seat at the bar. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” he intoned. “And a happy birthday to you, by the way. Did you hate all of my parties so much, or is this one special?”
Harry, deposited on a velvet settee, ran a hand over his face and grumbled something mostly unintelligible.
Vincent laughed. “Actually, now that you mention it, don’t answer that — have a drink.”
This Harry gracefully accepted and downed in a single swallow. After a period of somewhat more companionable silence, he said, “That girl you were with—is she a friend of yours? Or merely the friend of an enemy?”
“She was offended on my behalf, I think, to see you carrying on so flagrantly with the esteemed Dr. Marks,” said Vincent. “And at my own party, no less. I think she figured she’d make you jealous over me, and in return I’d depose her boyfriend for her.”
Harry winced.
“Oh, don’t look so wounded. After all, like you said — everyone thinks it!” Here Vincent winced himself, at a carefully repressed thought rendering itself unignorable. “And she’s not so bad, anyway, once you get past the cigarettes. A good eye for politics, at least.”
“So you are going to depose the boyfriend, then, are you?”
“I suppose that depends on how jealous you’re feeling,” said Vincent. “And how was Dr. Marks for you, by the way?”
Harry let of a despaired sounding laugh. “Idiotic.”
“Here, here,” agreed Vincent.
“And an idiot of the worst kind, too,” said Harry, “the kind who believes himself to be very smart.”
“I must say, I’m surprised the two of you didn’t find more to commiserate over. He doesn’t like me very much,” supplied Vincent. “Would you like to hear what he had to say on my final paper? I’ve never before encountered a student with such great knowledge—"
“—and such little understanding,” finished Harry. “And he apparently found the remark quite clever, too, for the number of times he repeated it to me. God, what an ass.”
Vincent snorted. “Am I to believe you defended my honor to him, then?”
“You’re many things, Vincent,” said Harry grimly, “much of them bad. But you understand things a man like that couldn’t imagine given a million years of thought.”
On the walk home, Vincent was warm with the glow of honest flattery. “Cold night,” he remarked casually. “I don’t suppose you’d be a gentleman and lend me your jacket, seeing as how I’ve managed to lose mine.”
Harry, the gentleman, so loaned.

“Out of curiosity,” Harry asked, “what were you going to do, after? If the mirror had worked.”
“It would have worked,” contended Vincent, “if you hadn’t engaged in such low sabotage.”
“Or if you could be bothered to do the work yourself, instead of foisting it all on me,” said Harry. “If, and if, and if. But I suppose we’ll never know, now, whether it would have worked or not.”
“You wouldn’t have bothered to sabotage it if you thought it wasn’t going to work anyway, and there’s no harm now in admitting it,” said Vincent. “Unless you mean to say you were so eager to be my heroic rescuer that you deliberately caused a nuclear meltdown rivalling the worst environmental disasters of the twentieth century?”
Harry’s shrug, like most of its kind, was noncommittal in nature.
“Maybe you should write me your own ethics textbook, after all,” said Vincent. “I’m sure it would be very novel. They could add it to the senior curriculum, and have the students write about how it resembles not at all any system of morality otherwise put to paper.”
“You’re avoiding the question,” said Harry.
“Yes,” said Vincent, who had avoided that question for almost as long as he could remember.
“Mind that I’m your judge, jury, and executioner, here,” said Harry. “Recalcitrance will get you strictly nowhere.”
Breathe or die. “To be honest, I hadn’t really thought about it,” said Vincent, honestly.
Harry laughed. “What—you just thought, I’ll commit an act of mad hubris, alienate everyone who’s ever cared about me, render the planet uninhabitable, and after that—well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it?”
“Something like that,” said Vincent uncomfortably.
“You can’t possibly be serious.” Harry laughed again, then frowned. “Vincent, you can’t just have not thought about it at all.”
“It seemed to me that what I did next would depend,” said Vincent. “And, anyway, you’re not the only person who’s ever cared about me.”
Harry snorted. “You think that because you can get people to do what you want, that means they care about you.”
“People like me,” said Vincent. “I’m likable.”
“People like being around you,” countered Harry. “I won’t pretend you can’t be—ingratiating. But it’s like saying you like Tchaikovsky. You like the man’s music, sure. But you don’t like him. You don’t even know him.”

“Let's say now that, instead of your measly little life preserver, you have a rowboat that can rescue not just one person but several,” Vincent continued.
“How prudent of me,” Harry remarked.
“Ah, but not so fast. This time the shipwreck has more survivors—say, one to your right and three to your left.”
“And I have to pick—the three or the one?”
“Naturally,” said Vincent.
“Naturally, the three,” said Harry.
“It nearly goes without saying, doesn't it? Simple utilitarianism.” He paused meaningfully. “But let's say that all else is not, as you put it, equal between them—the three are bunch of dastardly villains who have caused much suffering and, if rescued, will only cause more. And the one is an innocent lamb who has done nothing wrong—let's call that one Vincent.”
“You're very funny,” said Harry humorlessly. “But you know my answer.”
“I know what you would do,” said Vincent. “But I’m asking what you should do.”
“Why save three lives, if it will only allow countless more to be destroyed?” said Harry.
“Maybe, in the face of your generosity, they’ll have a change of heart,” said Vincent. “Near death experiences can do that to people. Or so I hear.”
“You set the scenario, Vincent, not me.”
“Let's go back to the beginning, then. The two of you are in the water, with only the one life preserver between you. But this time it's you who is the dastardly villain, you who has caused so much suffering and will cause so much more. And, of course, your innocent but unlucky friend.
“And no wisdom of the crowd, this time,” he continued. “The man on the rescue boat, god for a day, wouldn't save three of you put together. But would you save yourself?”
“I don't suppose a murderer would be very bothered by one more life on his conscience, even if he should be. But do enlighten me, professor—what is the right answer?”
“Ah, my dear pupil,” answered Vincent, unenlightened, “but a philosopher never tells!” Privately, he wondered if he hadn’t come along to the party line after all. Too complicated, let them all drown—there’s no one to blame but the shipwright.

That managed to pass his degree at all, let alone with honors, was a feat sufficiently miraculous that he felt justified in getting really and stupendously drunk in a way he had not been in thirty, maybe forty years. It was a good feeling, and he remembered with a sense of epiphany why anyone bothered not only with the foul taste of cheap wine but more broadly with anything at all. He felt hot in the face, like a defunct satellite hurtling into the sun, and more like himself than he had for nearly two decades.
“Harry!” he called from the street. It was somewhere in the vicinity of four in the morning, and it occurred to him that he had forgotten what he had meant to do, which was collect pebbles to toss at the window. “Harry! Hel-lo!”
Harry’s window — bedroom window? —jolted open. “You’re drunk,” Harry, only mildly dressed, said blearily.
“Yes,” said Vincent. “Isn’t it nice to agree on something?”
“Surely whatever it is can wait until morning.” Harry frowned. “Or have you done something truly disastrous?”
“Consult your clock, old thing,” said Vincent. “For morning it is. And, anyway, in the morning I’m supposed to graduate. And, anyway, besides, you’re already awake now, so you might as well speak with me.”
The click of the lock. Vincent let himself in.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to offer me a drink,” he said to the dark. He felt strangled unmoored and like he had really rather sit down. But Harry had retreated to the bedroom, land without chairs. It was a situation—that is, being invited into Harry's bedroom, by Harry himself, and Harry himself only technically clothed—in which Vincent was not really prepared to find himself. And yet, and yet. A new lifetime of unanticipated mixed blessings. He installed himself on the window. Thus situated, he began, “I would like to correct the record.” Then, having said all he had planned to say, he fell silent.
Harry did his best not to dignify this sad excuse for a speech with a response, but in the end found himself the bigger person. “Do go on,” he said finally, “since you’ve already gone to the trouble of bringing us here.”
“You should have told me,” Vincent said. “That you remembered. I wouldn’t have been angry with you. I would have been glad to have you back. I thought you — this you, the real you — were gone forever.”
“And whose fault was that?”
Vincent waved a hand dismissively. “I’m only saying that this” —here he gestured expansively at Harry darkened bedroom— “isn’t all my fault. You made choices, too. You could have been honest with me and I would have—and things would have been different.” He swallowed, and it occurred to him that, drunk as he was, he could be and perhaps ought to be far drunker. “The torture was a mistake. I can admit that. But it’s hardly like I could take it back, is it? And you said, yourself, that forgetting can be a mercy.”
“Vincent,” said Harry, “you’ll forgive me if I find it hard to believe that in all your brilliance you would fail to recognize so blatant an example of the sunk cost fallacy.”
Vincent, who in all his brilliance had so failed, winced but nevertheless continued. “And I never thought of you as a pet, or a habit, or whatever else it is you think. I thought you were my friend, even if I knew—I thought—you weren't really my Harry anymore. I wanted to keep you safe. To make you happy. And I maintain that the—that some of the things you said were hurtful, and unnecessary.” From somewhere behind Vincent’s back, the sun was beginning to rise. Birds cooing in the trees. Another god damned day. " But then I imagine the hurtfulness was the point.”
“Just so,” said Harry, his own face pale and studiously blank, his shoulders bare and sharp and faintly freckled. His red hair pleasingly rumpled.
Vincent was beginning to feel sick, or maybe he had always felt that way. “Can I tell you—I don’t feel bad about it. The end of the world. The ouroborans unborn. They got more life than most people do, and not out of any particular merit, not because of how badly they wanted it or how grateful they would be for it, but just because they got lucky. Well, their luck ran out, and too bad for them, there will be more where they came from sooner or later, anyway.” He swallowed. “I’ve tried my best, but I can’t and won’t be sorry it, and if you told me tonight that you changed your mind and let’s try again, I would start on the mirror tomorrow. If those are my crimes, then I plead no contest, and you can put me out of my misery.
“But for hurting you—I am sorry for that, and I think you know I am, or else why would I suffer for you like this? And, alright, maybe I’m not a good man, but haven’t I tried, in my own way, to be good to you? Selfishly, maybe, and imperfectly, but—”
“Vincent,” said Harry softly.
“And I thought, maybe, if it had worked, I would have you again, the real you, and you would understand me, and I wouldn’t be alone, and we could argue forever and sometimes I could even let you win, and—and I think you really should offer me a drink.”
“Vincent,” said Harry again. “It’s alright.”
“Wine, whiskey, gin,” Vincent continued gamely, “I’m not picky, you know, but they do let people worse than me pick their final meal.”
“God damn it,” said Harry, and then he was standing, then crossing the room, then kissing Vincent square on the mouth. Like a car into a wall, Vincent’s thought stopped rather suddenly. It wasn’t how he expected it to be—not that he had expected at all, really, but imagined somewhat often and not like this. There were more teeth involved, and his head was tilted back at a rather uncomfortable angle. Harry’s hands on either side of his face. Harry pressing even closer when, a moment later, his own hands landed on Harry’s waist. Harry flushed and out of breath and still there even after pulling back.
“You’re taking advantage of me,” Vincent said ungratefully. “I’m drunk, and a student, and—and in clear emotional distress.”
“You’re the worst person I’ve ever met,” Harry contended. “You make me worse.”
“I’m sorry,” Vincent said.
“Don’t be,” said Harry. And then he kissed him again, and, really, Vincent couldn’t complain.