The Authority
Things My Lover Told Me
This is the thing he always remembers.
“You asked about the speech thing.” It hadn’t bee a question and the tone had made Apollo look up sharply from where he’d been studying the street below. They’d just come from a shoot-out with a group of arms smugglers. The whole thing had been broken up early when someone on the other side had called the cops, and they’d jumped out rather than risk discovery.
So they’d been watching the arrests from a nearby rooftop. Midnighter’s eyes were still on the street, but his mind was elsewhere; about two months ago elsewhere, in fact, when Apollo had first asked him about the Speech Thing. At the time, they’d been together — together together, that was — about five months. Apollo had first noticed Midnighter’s Speech Thing about two months before that, but he’d only just found the… not courage, exactly, but familiarity to ask about it. Mostly because it seemed so un-Midnighter; never a wordy guy at the best of times, Apollo had been baffled when he’d suddenly started making semi-rehearsed speeches during fights. Because as far as Apollo understood what had been done to him, Midnighter could tell just by looking at someone the exact numbers on whether or not he could beat them. Making macho-posturing speeches just seemed a bit, well, overkill. So he’d teased the other man about it but that had resulted in a weird kind of walling off, and when he’d finally actually asked he’d only received an evasive shrug in reply. In the end, he’d figured it was some kind of sore point — though he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why — and had just let the issue drop.
And now Midnighter was talking.
He said, “It’s the implants. When the fighting starts, they run the numbers and send instructions out and my whole body just… does its thing. And I don’t have to think about it.”
“Isn’t that, like, some kind of super-awesome Zen martial arts thing?” He was joking, but he wasn’t sure if he should have been. Midnighter’s voice was oddly dark, his expression terrifyingly intense. He was nervous — afraid almost — and Apollo wanted to reach out and reassure his new-found lover but time, or rather a lack of it, had held him back. He would learn, eventually, that the one thing Midnighter responded to better than anything was physical comfort but right here and right now they were too new, too fragile, so he kept his distance.
A bleak smile had pulled at the scarred corner of Midnighter’s mouth. “It’s like daydreaming. The computer handles taking out hostile targets so I don’t have to really do anything. Then when I next bother to pay attention I’m standing in a pile of dead bodies.”
Apollo had opened his mouth, closed it again, finally said, “Oh.” and hated himself for not being able to do better.
“Yeah.” Midnighter turned away slightly, and Apollo knew he was ashamed. “‘Oh’.” He sighed. “So anyway, that’s the deal with the ‘speech thing’. If I’m talking, I’m paying attention, and if I’m paying attention maybe I don’t realise too late I’m holding the corpse of some unlucky bystander. Or worse.”
Apollo hadn’t known what to say to that. Later he’d tried to make up for his lover’s pain in gentle caresses and fierce kisses, but right then he’d been frozen in uncertainty at such a raw revelation. So they’d gone back to watching the arrests in silence.
But he’d never forgotten.
And this is the other thing.
They’d only been married about three months and he was still in a giddy haze of disbelief over the whole thing. He would catch himself, sometimes, looking at Midnighter and thinking This is my husband and the notion would set him off grinning like a loon for the rest of the day. The others were starting to think he’d gone a bit mad. Everyone except for Midnighter.
Outside the window, flocks of purple and green whimsies flew past, lazily circling on the warm currents of thought under the bright blue sun of whatever dimension they were currently cruising. The alien sun was making him a little bit light-headed, and stretched out on their huge bed between it and his spouse — still fuzzy and a little sore from hours of lovemaking — he was feeling particularly whimsical.
Which is probably why he asked, “What would you do if we won?”
Midnighter turned slightly, one eye blinking open to study him with unfathomable mechanical scrutiny. “Huh?”
Apollo turned too, propping himself up on one elbow, reaching out his other hand to trace the ley-lines of wire that hummed beneath skin and muscle. “Say, like, tomorrow everyone just said, ‘Right, you know what? Those Authority people, they’re right. Let’s all stop being cocks and make a better world.’ And you and me and everyone, there was nothing else for us to fight, and we all got to go home. What would you do?”
The eye closed again in cat-like pleasure and the flesh under his fingers rippled as the tension flowed out. “I think the sun here is making you strange. That’s never going to happen.”
Apollo just grinned at the reflexive — and unconsciously perceptive — pessimism, working his fingers hard enough to elicit a contented moan and a slight shift as Midnighter started to rub himself languidly against the mattress. “Well, pretend it did.”
He didn’t get an answer and for a while he thought he wasn’t going to. He could live with that, though, his attention being distracted instead by the lazy, unselfconscious hedonism of his husband.
When Midnighter finally spoke, his voice muffled by his own arm, Apollo was surprised at the guarded tone that was so completely at odds with the actions of his body. Then again, Midnighter had always been a master of that; disassociating his mind from the physical rest of him. “I think,” he said, “what I’d do… I’d buy a house. A small house with a big yard. Somewhere where the air was clear and the days were long. And I’d take my husband, and I’d take my daughter, and I’d work in the garden. Growing flowers. Lots of bright, colourful fucking flowers. That’s what I’d do.”
And it was then, more than any other time before or since, that Apollo knew he loved Midnighter. Absolutely and completely and without hesitation.
“What would you do?”
Wrapped up in his own giddy joy, he almost missed the question, again asked in that hesitant tone that made him break out into a wide, too-innocent grin. “What would I do? If we won? I think…” He paused, hand on his chin in faux-thought. “What I’d do… I’d buy a house. A small house with a big yard. Somewhere where the air was clear and the days were long. And I’d take my husband, and I’d take my daughter, and I’d spend my time lounging on an ottoman in the garden, reading trashy celebrity magazines and watching my husband tending his flowers.” He paused. “Shirtless.”
“Shirtless, eh?” Apollo could feel Midnighter’s grin from here, hidden though it was behind strong, scarred arms and crisp, slightly-less-than-clean sheets.
“Definitely shitless.” He ran his hands across those impossibly broad shoulders in emphasis. “I hear it makes the flowers grow better. Gardening shirtless.”
“Voyeuristic flowers.”
“The best kind.”
And they were both being silly, of course, but Apollo knew, in that moment, that he’d found it. All these years he’d been fighting for a ‘better world’ but if someone had stopped to actually ask what he’d thought that was, exactly, he would have come up blank. Until now. Because now he knew. A better world was a cane sun-lounge in garden grown lush and verdant by a man who’d been made solely to kill.
And it was stupid, really, and tragic in its simplicity. Something so simple yet so completely and utterly impossible.
But he fought for it anyway.