He was too old not to know better.
Still the impossible and yet so damn tempting notion of asking her to come with him kept recurring. He usually suppressed it the moment it glimmered in his mind, but seeing her there before him in all her glory made that difficult. Nor did the scotch he’d consumed help matters. It helped float his imagination easily over the low, leaky levee of his inhibitions.
He had to admit that he was tired of being alone. The close press of people here might be more than he could handle just yet, but the best face he could put on returning to the hermetic solitude of the circuit was a nerveless resignation which already needed help from his old friend alcohol to be maintained. For all that things had changed, his life would be pretty much the same.
Marchey sipped his drink, staring into his glass and feeling his mood curdle.
There was no point in tormenting himself with daydreams. He was going back to shuttling from hospital to hospital and patient to patient, with an emphasis on waiting out the periods of suffocating nothingness in between.
It would be like the glass in his hand. Mostly empty, with just a taste of what he needed to get him through puddled on the bottom. It was bad enough that he had to live like that. But to bring someone else into it?
She had a chance to lead something like a normal life now. Taking it away would be selfish and cruel. Maybe even criminal. She had to stay. He had to leave. End of story.
“Can’t you stay here on Ananke?”
Marchey blinked in confusion. The question had risen up out of his own turgid thoughts, but he didn’t think he’d said it aloud. He looked up from his glass toward Angel. She huddled on the couch, hugging herself as if against a chill, her one green eye squeezed shut.
It wasn’t too hard to guess that it had slipped out of her mind and onto her tongue, greased by whiskey. He could answer, or pretend he hadn’t heard. If he asked her what she said, she might say Nothing, and let the matter slide. But he doubted it. He’d been dreading this moment, fairly certain that the subject was going to come up sooner or later.
He decided to answer, as much to remind himself as to explain it to her.
“I wish I could.” Saying it out loud made him realize just how much it was true. But once again it was a matter of knowing what was possible and what was not. This was not.
She hunched her shoulders as if gathering his answer in to keep. “Why can’t you?” she asked, voice little more than a whisper. “Doctors cannot stay in one place?”
Marchey stared down at his silver hands, the polished metal reflecting his distorted face back at him, reminding him that he had no choice but to be what they made of him.
“My kind can’t. At least not yet. There aren’t very many of us, and we have a duty to go where we’re most needed.”
“It could not be done some other way?”
He shrugged. “Maybe it could. I don’t really know. For now we’re sent from place to place because it’s the best, most efficient way for us to be used.”
“I see.” She sat up, finally looking directly at him. “Brother Fist’s system used everyone very efficiently, too.”
He shook his head. “It’s not the same.”
Her green eye narrowed, fixing on him as unblinkingly as the glass lens that replaced the other. “Isn’t it?”
“No!” He snorted. “Not even close.”
“Then tell me how it is different. You go where you are told to go, and do what you are told to do without question or complaint. You have let yourself be used for so long you have forgotten what it is to have a mind of your own.”
Marchey glared at her. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” He knocked back the rest of his drink.
“Don’t I?” She shot back, her voice rising. “Have you forgotten who you are talking to? I am the one who kidnapped you and brought you here. You were so used to having your life controlled that you did not even put up a fight!”
“You threatened to rip me to frigging shreds if I didn’t come with you!” Marchey snapped, on the verge of shouting. He couldn’t believe that they were arguing about this, but he’d be damned if he’d let her get away with saying that she had just snapped her fingers and he’d followed after like a whipped dog.
“Yes, but you were easily coerced. You did not care where I took you. You did not even care if you lived or died! It has taken me some time to be sure I understood this, but what I have concluded is that you were almost completely dead inside when I found you. You had smothered your sense of self inside a bottle and corked it with apathy. Since you have been here you have been faced with the prospect of coming out and living again, and it so frightens you that you are running away!”
“I’m not running away,” he spat. “I’m just doing my duty. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“You keep saying that. Even I can see what you have been doing.” She put her cup down with exaggerated care. “You have hidden on your ship almost the whole time you have been here. You have hidden from everyone, treating them like devices to be repaired, not like people. You have hidden from me. Every time I have tried to see you, you have always had somewhere to go or something else to do. You have run and hidden from me like you never did from Scylla.”
“I haven’t been hiding, dammit! I just want you to start leading a life of your own.” He said it with all the force he could muster, as if that might help get it through her thick silver-plated skull.
Angel stared at him in disbelief. “That is what I have been trying to do!” She shook her head. “But not you. You want to seal yourself back in that ship like it was your coffin and go back to being dead inside.”
“Me?” Marchey growled, her accusations making fury bubble through him. He levelled an accusing finger at her. “I’m not the one who’s still hiding inside that fucking tin can, afraid to come out and be like the rest of us!”
She flinched as if he had slapped her, shocked hurt flitting across her face. “Afraid to come out?” she cried, lurching to her feet, lips peeling back from her jagged teeth. “This is Scylla’s skin! She is in here with me! As long as I wear this I have to be on my guard against her every moment of every day!”
Hooked silver fingers clawed at her smooth, sexless silver breast. “Don’t you know how much I want to be free of this prison? Of her? To be like everyone else? To have a chance to be a woman? To be a woman for a man! To—”
She couldn’t say it. Not to him, of all people. She had said too much already. Her hand cut the air in a slashing motion, as if severing that line of thought and argument. Her voice dropped to an imploring whisper as she tried to make him understand. It was that or scream.
“I cannot let myself do that—have that—until I have finished paying for at least some of the evil I did. I have a duty to earn my way out. I have to give, to serve, to put what I want last or it will mean nothing.”
Marchey had listened in glowering, tight-lipped silence, dismissing all she said as rationalization. A caustic mixture of frustration and resentment churned in his gut.
“Bullshit. You’re afraid. Call it duty if you want, but you’re just looking for something to replace Fist in your life.” He spoke coldly, his voice sounding like that of a stranger. His face hardened. “Do you really want to know why I’ve been trying to stay away from you? Do you? Well, I’ll tell you, little girl. Because I wasn’t about to let you substitute me for him!”