The clock counts the seconds at an uneven beat, the screws behind its arms ill-placed and out of synch. It's two seconds past five in the morning. Three. On the fourth, the screen of June's phone lights up silently, May's photo winking up to a pale ceiling.
June lets the call go unanswered.
His flight is in a few hours.
-
Home is— supposed to be the Dome, with its cold walls and thick windows and never-ending hallways that lead around the compound at impossible angles. June gets lost every time he's been here. He takes himself one way and ends up right back where he started, and some part of him acknowledges that it's by design, that the Sommer twins - unsmiling, sterile, inseparable - make sure no one goes where they're not supposed to. June understands this, but the stubborn part of him refuses it, takes it personal.
Home is supposed to be welcoming. Warm.
What June comes home to instead is the blank stare of a stranger who leads him up to Gloriana's front steps. A memorial to Karla Anderstrom looms over him, her likeness perfectly carved into the marble, with the words betrayed in death written right below her name.
June refuses to look at her.
-
"You look soft," Gloriana comments by way of greeting. She's dressed in white silk and sheer lace, with tight sleeves and a flowing skirt that does nothing to hide the shapeliness of her legs. June stands at attention and stares at a distant point behind her; it's a token gesture of disobedience, when she's always insisted he look at her directly.
"Softer that the last time you were here, in fact," she tuts, her heels clicking on the marble tile as she walks over to him. Lacquered nails pinch his cheeks until the color rises, leaving behind sharp little half-moons on his skin. "Something's changed about you."
Gloriana's fingers slip between the buttons of his shirt, and June bites his tongue. Bites down until he feels the soft flesh give way to copper, the wet salt of it seeping between his teeth. She plucks at the buttons, one at a time until they've given way. Her skin is a brand against his own, as she presses her fingertips over where his heart would be. June wants to set himself on fire.
He figures out the question tucked away between the lines before she asks it.
"Did you fall in love over the summer, little Junebug?"
-
May calls him twice on his first day at Prague; he picks up on the second call, on the fifth ring. She wants to go shopping; she's local, being debriefed for a job well-done, and he's her reward for doing as she's told.
June near-begs her to let him sleep first.
(He doesn't sleep. He spends the day jetlagged and heartsick, and he catches himself thumbing the same phone number more times than he cares to admit.)
-
Work, at least, is a distraction. Christine has grown cruel in the time they've spent apart, and June knows he's to blame for it. She beats him at the training mats with vicious intent; she puts him through his paces until his hands and knees are bleeding, and then makes him run through it again, from the beginning, until he can't feel the bruises and cuts and blisters that litter his body. The softest cloth hurts his skin; the heavy water pressure of the communal showers is torture.
People know him by name here, if not by face. He hears his name mentioned in the halls when he joins the other legacies, and the ones that recognize his father's features in his own whisper loudly about him over their shared meals. June's ears burn, but he bears it.
He earned this. That he only has to live through this for a year is more than gracious as it is, considering his debt.
It doesn't stop him from yearning for the places he's left behind.
-
"Again. Like you mean it."
Like how you killed him, Christine doesn't say, but everyone in the training room can hear it all the same. June falls to the mat and it aches, it aches like a motherfucker, but he gets back onto his feet because he has to. He barely gets his arms up to defend against her when she swings the pole at him; the edge hits him squarely on the head and it splits the skin on his brow. He sees red; it's dripping off him in a steady stream.
Christine jabs him at the solar plexus, and June's finally had enough.
It's been six weeks of self-flagellation. It's about enough.
-
I miss you. Every night I think of you, and I miss you.
June has it saved in his message drafts. He always almost sends it every night he's spent in Prague. May calls it his prayer.
-
They send him to Germany. Somewhere in Berlin, with a name June can't hope to pronounce.
June takes pictures of the prettiest bottles of alcohol and pretends to be interested in drinking when he asks for the best drinks available. He doesn't drink. He refuses every single drink he's offered; he sticks to his pictures and his questions.
A very unpopular politician is dead the following morning. Heart attack, the news says. The man had too much of a good time.
It's not a bad way to go, but June begs to differ.
-
"Tell me his name," Gloriana asks him over dinner. Her cheek is rested on her hand, her eyes bright and sharp as she looks at him. "Tell me about him."
June always loses his appetite every time she asks.
-
May visits him at his assigned room three months into his stay. You've gotten thinner, she tells him first thing. You've gotten heavier, he says back to her.
They spend the night talking about nothing, and by the end of it June is a wreck against her knees.
I miss him, he mouths against her knuckles, while her other hand cards through his hair. I miss him, I miss him, I wish I never left.
-
After Berlin is Macau. A pretty-faced actress waits for him there. After that — an obscure town in Northern Ireland, and a retired journalist. He gets to spend two days in Akihabara before he's recalled; he's been given the wrong information, the wrong target.
They send him to Waverly, Virginia. Anchorage, Alaska. Cecil, Maryland. It's a whole goddamned US tour as he's sent flying from coast to coast without explanation, and June lives out of a suitcase for the better part of two months that he almost forgets.
Almost.
Las Vegas is the hardest. Las Vegas almost gets him to drink.
-
He gets stabbed in Singapore. The knife runs through him and June doesn't register the blade until he starts choking, blood bubbling up and out of his mouth. Christine finds him minutes later, and it's almost minutes too late if Ripley hadn't been around to fix the damage.
-
Here's the thing, though: Ripley never helps without a price.
-
He notices it first when he goes through his phone by habit and finds himself at a loss. His thumb hovers the keypad, +82 already dialled out, but the rest of the string isn't coming to him. He chalks it up to tiredness at first, but it happens again the following night, and then the next, and the next — until he tears off a sheet from a hotel notepad and tries to write it down.
June can't remember.
-
He starts noticing other things, the way a person starts noticing patterns after it's been pointed out to them. There are pictures saved on his phone that he doesn't remember taking, faceless though they may be - they're pictures of the same building, and of shot glasses, and of the same warmly lit bar.
There's a jacket in his closet that has tears in it he doesn't remember getting.
There's a lighter that doesn't belong to him, clearly long empty but also clearly well-worn from constant handling.
-
It's when May asks him if he still misses Seoul that the cold dread winding up from inside him finally breaks through the still surface of his fears.
He hasn't missed Seoul in months.
-
"What did you take from me?"
Gloriana only shrugs at him. "Nothing I wasn't owed."
June breaks the trinkets strewn across her desk, breaks the glass plate that serves as her table. "What did you take from me?"
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relationships
canon.
mixtapes.
a crown of thorns around your heart. ( for saiph )
debts & mortality. ( june )
flash.
you don't want my heart.
icons.