What
to Believe
(Notes: Written for the first Secret Identities
challenge ["someone tells the truth and someone tells a lie"].)
Reasonable Doubt
Toby has known
for a long time how
brilliant a liar Chris can be. He has, after all, painfully intimate
knowledge of his skill in that area. In fact, it took months before he
was convinced that Chris was capable of telling anything but a
lie.
Even now, his
certainty of Chris’s honesty usually falls somewhere
short of 100%. Maybe the lies are
smaller, a
voice in the back
of his mind tells him. Maybe they aren’t
meant to
hurt you.
But... chances are,
they haven’t gone anywhere.
There
are things he wants to ask him and probably never will, because, no
matter how Chris might answer, it would probably sound like a lie to
him. “How many men have you done this to,” he almost asks
one
night. Chris has been fucking him with his fingers for so long that
Toby can’t even guess how many he’s using anymore. He feels
stretched and raw, like Chris has reached inside him and exposed nerve
endings Toby never even knew he had. His pelvis spasms gorgeously
whenever Chris twists his fingers a certain way, and he seems to know
exactly how often he should take advantage of that—when to back down,
to make him wait, when to balance the pleasure with a sharp bite to his
hip or a rough twist to his nipple. Toby doubts anyone would get this
good at something without a lot of practice—or maybe, in Chris’s case,
without a purpose.
He can’t believe
how much the idea
bothers him, the thought of Chris doing this with other men. And
yet...no, no, it’s not even a matter of the act itself. That isn’t the
thing that turns his stomach inside out when he thinks about it. It’s
the thought of Chris being like this with other men.
“God,
Toby...” Chris runs his lips along the underside of Toby’s cock,
licking, sucking, like he could do this all night and never get enough.
“So fucking hot...”
No, Toby thinks, as he
reaches down to touch Chris’s hair. I
wouldn’t live through finding out this is just another sort of con.
But the more time he spends locked away with him, the more he suspects
that what he doesn’t know about Chris will always vastly outweigh what
little he does.
The question
then becomes “How much does he really want to
know?”
Exhibit A
Toby throws his
cards down after losing for the sixth time. “Okay, how
are you doing this?”
“Doing
what? Beating your ass?” Chris looks up briefly as he gathers the cards
to shuffle and flashes a radiant smile. “Just lucky, I guess.”
“Bullshit. How
dumb do you think I am?”
“You calling me
a liar, there, Beecher?”
“Fuck yes.”
Chris
stops shuffling and looks up at him again with a tiny, indecipherable
smile. Toby watches his eyes and recognizes something, something he
can’t quite put a finger on. The silence stretches between them for a
long time, too long.
“You really want
the truth, Toby?” Chris finally murmurs.
“Yeah, actually,
I do.”
Chris
leans far forward and his eyes drop, looking somewhere over his left
shoulder. “You and me ain’t never played an honest game of cards. Not
once.”
“What?” Toby
snorts. “What the fuck do you mean?”
“Just
what I said. It’s true.” Chris shrugs and leans back in his bunk.
“You’ve been haaaad.” He drags out the word in a lazy, self-satisfied
drawl.
“Yeah?” Toby’s
jaw tightens. “Well. I guess it wouldn’t
be the first time, right?” Standing abruptly, nearly overturning his
chair, he snatches the cards away and stalks across the room, then back
again. How could he be so goddamn blind? After everything that’s
happened? His cheeks burn as he looks back at Chris, who’s scratching
the back of his head and still won’t quite meet his eyes.
“Just relax,
Toby. You want me to teach you how?”
“How to cheat at
cards? Thanks, I think I’ll pass.”
“It’s the best
way to protect yourself. Take it from me: a mark who
knows what to look for ain’t no good at all.”
“A
mark.” Toby wants to put a fist through something—maybe Chris’s mild,
too-earnest face, offering to help him be less of a pathetic mark.
“Take a look at
the cards.”
Toby
stares poisonously at Chris for a few more beats before glancing at the
top card in the deck. “What. I don’t see anything.”
“Look closer.
Move it around in the light.”
Toby
squints closely, changing the card’s angle this way and that. He can
just barely make out a tiny scratch, about halfway down its length. The
next card has a scratch as well—this one vertical rather than
horizontal, and in a different place. He snorts and shakes his head.
Once he knows what he’s looking for, they seem so obvious. “Marked
cards. Very original.”
Chris shrugs and
breaks into a low chuckle. “Why mess with what works?”
“But... Chris,
we never even play for money. I mean, why bother?”
“Old habits die
hard, I guess. I ain’t used to leaving cards up to
chance.”
“Well, you ought
to try it sometime. It’s actually kind of fun
that way.”
“Hey,
it’s fun my way, too.” Chris’s smile is so bright it almost hurts to
look at it. Toby turns away, wishing he could resurrect the full force
of his anger.
“All this time,”
he mutters. “I can’t believe I never knew anything
about it, all this time.”
“You just saw
what you wanted to see, Toby. People always do. Guys like
me count on it.”
Exhibit B
He
tells Chris a dumb, self-deprecating story about some guy trying to
pick him up at a bar in college. He asks him how he got that tiny scar
just beneath his right ear. He kneels on the floor in front of him,
takes his cock in his mouth for the first time. He watches him sit with
a newspaper in the corner of the room, panicked eyes scanning the same
story over and over again, hour after hour. And after each of these
things, without warning, it happens—a change comes over the room, a
fundamental shift in energy, and every move Toby makes, anything he
says, somehow becomes something Chris retaliates against. Toby
never finds a pattern in what causes it—but he learns quickly that all
he can do when these moods strike, if he doesn’t want a fight, is climb
into his bunk and wait for the storm to pass.
That newspaper.
Whatever’s
in it, Chris is willing to risk a trip to the Hole before he’ll let
Toby get anywhere near the thing. Toby asks (politely) what could
possibly so goddamn fascinating about it, and Chris clenches the pages
in newsprint-blackened hands and spits venom back at him. He has a true
gift for the devastatingly incisive insult at times like this; it hits
like a blow to the solar plexus, and Toby knows they’ve reached that
tipping point once again. So now he can lose it, give in, attack, end
up hurt or in the Hole...or he can be the better man, turn around and
walk away, wait for the inevitable apology.
Of course, part
of
him wants to get that newspaper away from Chris at all costs. There it
is, right there in black and white: something he could learn about him,
concrete knowledge in the form of words on paper, something he could understand.
He hovers just out of arm’s reach, fists clenched, trying to decide.
Chris rises to his feet, shifting his weight like he’s gathering the
strength to bolt, or maybe to throw a punch. It only makes Toby feel
more defiant.
Then the buzzer
sounds for evening count, and Toby is suddenly
distracted by the realization of how much time must have passed. Jesus,
how long has
he been
reading that thing?
His frustration leaches away as he stares back at Chris and sees that
his face has gone ashen, almost ghostly. Toby’s left with nothing but
soul-deep fatigue and resignation. “Fine, Keller. Fuck you.”
When Mineo
reaches their pod during count, Chris bitches at him until
he unlocks the door and takes the newspaper away.
Verdict
During
the night is when Chris always makes his amends, when he’s able to
explain himself most eloquently. He pulls Toby into his arms and
touches him everywhere he can reach, kisses him in all the places he’s
fragile—the soft, paper-thin skin at his temples, his wrists, his
ankles, the wound in his side, his once-shattered arms and legs. Toby’s
helpless against him when he’s like this.
By the time
Chris
starts whispering against his skin, “I’ll never hurt you, never again,
never,” Toby’s too far out of his mind to take it as anything other
than the God’s honest truth.
The things Chris
has done to piss
him off that day don’t so much fade from memory as take on a different
shade of meaning. They’re no longer the weird, semipsychotic actions of
a sadistic criminal he’ll never be able to fully trust; instead, they
seem like those of someone desperate, someone who needs his
unconditional love and understanding, results of a life ruined by
violence and abuse.
What difference
does it make,
that voice tells him, when he’s
just about to fall asleep. A card game? A stupid
newspaper, for
Christ’s sake?
He would do anything for you.
By
morning, Toby has killed Cathy Rockwell all over again, listened to his
wife’s sobs in the last few moments of her life, and kissed each of his
children, explaining again that he won’t be coming home for a long,
long time—but what he clings to is Chris’s whispered words and the way
his hands feel when they touch him. There are things he’s better off
not examining too closely or questioning with his lawyer’s mind. It’s
like exercising a muscle he’s never used before, looking at the world
this way—absorbing only certain, necessary facts and filtering out the
rest, whatever doesn’t seem relevant to his current situation. He’s
getting better and better at it.
Chris stirs in
his bed, and
Toby feels his approach, his warmth as he presses up behind him, kisses
his neck and makes him go boneless in his arms. The reflection in the
pod wall is all Toby needs to see, and he takes it in for a few seconds
before turning around and showing Chris, again, where he’s decided to
place his trust.