Quality Control
Warnings: None
Word Count: 2,300~
Trent knows he is a self-made martyr, but just because his fate is already spelled out for him doesn't mean he can't always be in control.
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When the safe house was empty and lonesome like this, he and Erika would sit and drink tall glasses of chilled water — a delicacy in this part of town, especially when the alternative was spooning crushed hydration tabs in their mouths. He’d sling his arm lazily across the sofa’s head, muddy eyes lingering on the glass she held in her spider-like fingers, watching her lipstick audaciously stain the glass. The mark stamped her presence on the edge, as if to say, “I’m here, look at me, don’t just pass me by.” But such an insidious imprint could be easily erased, unlike Erika’s physical presence.

“There are some things that cannot be fixed,” she had once told him, as she let her paintbrush waltz across her canvas. The art of her painting was almost an intimate affair; greens and yellows held each other, their passion forming each individual blade of grass, while reds and yellows melted together like forbidden lovers, their burning embrace illuminating what had once been a blank, unassuming piece of  paper.

As he stared at the work of art, she told him it was called a sunset. He did not know what a sunset was.

But he wasn’t a critic, nor was he a conversationalist by any means. Talking just for talking’s sake was a waste of oxygen, and you never knew when the day would come when the government would make you pay for breathing air by the gallons. “You’re right,” he had agreed, crossing his arms, his heart suddenly feeling like a stone in his chest. “But I won’t be able to sleep at night if I don’t at least try.”

Back then, it hadn’t been a good enough argument. Now she sat, draining the glass, perhaps not even thinking of that past conversation at all. She let the tip of her long fingernails tap the side of the glass, tilting her head slightly towards him, studying his puzzled face. Those nails tapped thrice more, until her face was full of seriousness.

“You’ve got that look again.”

“I think you should leave,” he began abruptly, standing up. Suddenly, she was just another stranger as he reached his hand out toward her, as if to conclude a business meeting. With precise skill, he removed all emotion from his eyes. “I’ll call you if we need you.”

We, as in everyone who this base belonged to. We, because he did not exist as an individual, but as a puppet of Truth, someone who lived and worked for one cause and one cause only: the purification of their world. He was a self-made martyr, a suicidal maniac, who could live, eat, sleep, and breathe, but only while accepting the fact that one day, any day, he would have to throw his life away for the good of this planet. It was something Trent signed up for, something no one told him to do, and a fate he welcomed with open arms.

He had shown this face to Erika all too many times, and perhaps it was the only thing on this earth that caused her physical pain. Every time he pulled this look over his eyes, he would watch her cringe slightly, as if to look at her with such indifference was to shoot a bullet through her shoulder: painful, to the point where it felt almost unbearable, but she would live to see another day.

She pursed her lips, ignoring his hand, as she always did. Slinging her purse over her shoulder, Erika made her way to the exit. Perhaps she knew her way out better than any member of this base did. No words left her lips, no sign of anger or hatred met her eyes. As best as she could, Erika tried to meet his aloof dose of apathy with her own.

Was it to hurt him, he wondered? He held his own empty glass between two fingers, hands lazily swinging from his sides as she slipped out of the building, locking the door behind her. Without looking outside, she knew she was hanging her head down, to avoid looking back at the base, just as he stood as far away from the windows as he could, not daring to look at her once more.

When she left, all traces of her presence were promptly erased. Her inky lipstick stain was carefully washed from the glass, tossed back amongst the clean dishes, right where it had been before. Her lingering scent was sprayed with disinfectant, as if she were a germ to be eliminated.

Suddenly, as if he had just struck a brilliant idea, Trent rummaged around in the files near their living area’s couch, pulling forth the unfinished painting that Erika had left here, so many visits ago. She had come here to pick it up, of course, but he had shooed her away so early this time, his blood anxious and nervous, unknowing of when the others would come back. Without a moment’s hesitation or a minute’s worth of doubt, he took the painting in his hands and crumbled it in a bunch, tossing it in the nearest trash can, pushing it down to the bottom of the heap, turning his back on something that he once called beautiful.

As he felt the others approach, Trent would crawl into the deep darkness that was their basement, surrounding himself in his element. In the basement sat the base’s one and only computer, and by pulling the keyboard close to him and letting his fingers fly across the keys, Trent knew that he was safe and secure. He pulled the security cameras tight around him, watching Selena and Mikki chat casually to themselves, their conversation of little to no importance. Should he have wished it, he could’ve switched on the audio feature on the cams and let all the little details of their talk fall on his ears — but that was unnecessary, for he had learned to read Selena’s lips.

She spoke of the earlier mission, collapsing on the couch — in the very spot that Erika had sat in — and spoke a word, a name, that he had not heard in quite some time: Jayke.

Ah, he knew she went to see Jayke today, had seen them in his brothel room right before Erika had let herself in, as she always did. He was Talented, of course, but that did not stop Jayke from crawling around this world like the gutter scum of this earth, unfit for the blue eyes he wore. The gutter rat sold body to the highest bidder daily, used his hands to pleasure flesh embedded with red hot lust for a few crowns, and then dared to touch Selena with those hands, those filthy hands. Such filth could not be washed away with soap and water. Such filth crawled underneath his skin and there it would stay until his dying day, never forgotten.

Empathy — it was a feeling that burst forth from Selena’s being and radiated around her with an ethereal glow. Could others feel the way she cried for the broken and damned of Pridea’s streets? Trent could. It was so easy — all one had to do was look in her eyes. Those eyes were what enslaved him, made him throw away any life he might’ve led before meeting her and replace it with a life of working in her servitude. It was rare, when a slave could choose their own fate, and while Selena would never refer to him as such or never even think of him as such, all that mattered was the work he did with his own hands for her. All because of the empathy that shone from her eyes.

It was this empathy that caused her to visit him every once in a while — at the brothel, where he could not leave unless on business. He remembered zooming the nano cams that he’d implanted on her body on Jayke’s face, catching an unmistakable hint of lust in his wolfish features, wishing fiercely that he could be by Selena’s side right then and there, to protect her from his deflowering gaze.

He knew what Jayke dearly desired — for Selena to one day visit him not for friendly purposes, but for the reason everyone else in his side of the slums visited him. It would never happen, Trent knew, and if it did happen, he’d know. He would catch every single dirty detail and think of the ways he’d discreetly ride Jayke of this world, and where to dump the body afterwards.

He had met Jayke once, and once was just enough for him. At the time, Jayke had been so close to death by his hand, as Trent had both of his pistols drawn, a rush of adrenaline shooting down his veins. He even remembered the crooked little smile he gave the gutter rat as his fingers rested on that sweet trigger. Back then, he had imagined what it would be like to end someone’s life so directly like this, to see blood explode from an enemy’s head and think: This is for the good of Pridea. This bloodshed is for the good of my world.

But then Selena had jumped in from of them, eyes glaring with an unidentifiable emotion, telling him to cease and desist without words. “Stand down,” she might’ve told him, barking an order at him like a collared dog. And wasn’t that such a fitting description? He had been the one to kneel on bending knees before Selena and pledge his life to her, and he had even made his own collar and placed it around his neck. If she said stand down, he’d do it without delay.
If he told her to press the gun to his head and then pull the trigger, he’d do it without delay.

As he monitored their conversation today, checking Selena’s mood for any signs of potential distress, he wondered what would have happened if he were to allow his fingers to press that holy trigger. It wouldn’t have made any difference, he mused to himself, amplifying the audio captors on the canon cams. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would have changed. Yes, even if the gutter rat had been obliterated from the slums, their world would still keep turning, and he would never be as important to Selena as he wished to be.

It didn’t matter that she was the physical manifestation of truth in this world, for that did not mean she would tell him all her secrets. She would tell them to Jayke though, and they’d talk of a childhood that he did not share with them. There was an ease in their conversation that was lost whenever he spoke to her — for Jayke, primitive as he was, had a colloquial way of speaking that Trent could not capture.

They laughed of times when they road hover-boards in the skies together as little children, swapping stories of current events as Selena lay down on his bed, not knowing nor even thinking about the sort of people who had been there before her. He listened in as Jayke spoke of unreasonable customers and shoddy dinners at the brothel, while Selena jokingly complained of having the whole country after her, and recent reports by the Council labeling her as an “anarchist with no morals or values.” They laughed about that, but Trent could not find the humor in such a dire situation. He switched off the feed, angry and confused.

As the video stream whirred away, Trent could feel Selena’s presence creeping down into his basement, coming to see him for her daily tech check up. As usual, she’d smile and wave, and perhaps ask how his day had been, while plopping down in the rolly-chair opposite from him, offering her foot towards him. Trent would unlace her shoes and pry open the sole, glad that she was unaware of Erika’s prior visit. He was already the underdog in this situation, and he didn’t need something like a misunderstanding getting in the way of anything between them — even though they were already so many leagues apart.

Gently, he’d take his smallest screwdriver in hand and poke at all the bolts in the center of her hover-blades, screwing in any bolts or screws that had been shaken up during today’s flight. His hands peacefully rested on her legs as she sat perfectly still in her rolly-chair, staring fixatedly at the rhythmic motions of his hands.  What she didn’t know was, as she sat there, in the chair made especially for her, the nano cams he had discreetly planted in her skin were refueling their energy sources, silently repairing themselves, getting ready for another day’s work.

“You’ve got to teach me how to do this myself one day.” She redid her laces and planted the finished foot on the floor as he took her other foot in his hands. Again, he undid her laces, his hands a little more shaky than before.

“I won’t,” he grunted, twisting the tiny wrench around the sole of her hover-blade. “Then you wouldn’t need me anymore.”

Yesterday, he’d had a dream that he was visited by an demon, while he was floating in a never-ending abyss. As much as he tried to grasp onto something, anything, to pull himself up from his eternal fall, nothing could propel him upwards. His stomach churned as he fell into nothingness, until finally, the demon took his hand. As he loomed closer to the beast, he found that it held Selena in its grasp, her body unmoving, like a lifeless puppet. She had a basilisk stare — one that read into his deepest desires, seeing every despicable sin he‘d ever committed.

“If you come to me,” the demon said with a suspiciously sinister smile, “I can give you her love.”

He reached out towards Selena, but then faltered, a pensive smile looming on his lips.

“Who needs love,” he muttered, watching the demon disappear into darkness, “when you can have control?”