sunnydalealum | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Columbia University
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
4:02am

It's about four in the morning, that dead time even in college dorms, when the door to Mark's room softly creaks open.

Leland's moving carefully in the near-darkness, stepping lightly across the somewhat cluttered floor; it's almost soundless when he pulls the chair away from the computer desk, settles slowly into it. His hand is steady as he reaches to turn off the speakers before waking up the computer.

The screen, once it powers up, is the strongest light source in the room.

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"The cops would never believe us anyway, not once we got to the Sulcaric part. We're just here to make it stop."

Incredibly, Leland starts to smile. Scornful, and bitter, but a smile nonetheless.

"Make it stop how? Do you have the slightest fucking idea how this even works?"

"Little bit."

Andrew's not smiling. Not at all.

"Somewhere in this town there's a Sulcar demon with an oversupply of hysk. Maybe he hasn't got any young of his own to feed it to, maybe he's producing more than they need, I don't know. But either through a middleman or directly, he gets it to you, and you sell it to college kids as a brain-booster. And they get smarter, and if they try to quit they get a whole lot deader."

His lip curls.

"And you get richer."

"We know what's going to happen if we stop you dealing", Jonathan says quietly. "But we can't let you carry on bringing more people into it."

The smile splinters and falls to pieces, but what comes out of it is a choked, bitter laugh.

"I get richer. Oh yeah. That's why I'm still living in campus housing. This, this is the fucking lap of luxury here."

He's shaking his head, still laughing. "You've got no clue at all."

"Maybe not."

He takes a step back, hands loose and empty at his sides.

"Did Mark have a clue? Is that what went wrong?"

"You wanna know what went wrong?" Leland's shoulders rise and fall with a heavy breath. "You really wanna know? Fine."

He turns the chair more directly toward them, his hands flattening on the armrests again.

"Mark came to blackmail me. He put it all together, about the breakdowns and how they were all customers of mine who quit buying. He said he'd expose me. Stop me taking any new customers, just like you said. Except he had an 'unless.'"

His mouth twists again. "Unless I supplied him free of charge for as long as he wanted, and started splitting the take with him. His words."

"So you decided to get him out of the way, didn't you?" Jonathan says grimly. "You gave him an overdose."

"Well, I guess you weren't about to pay him."

Toneless, and utterly noncommittal.

"I couldn't afford to pay him! I couldn't even afford to cut the price for him, and I would've done that if I could, I didn't want to cut him off." He gestures jerkily at his own chest. "But there was just no way. I tried to tell him that."

Brief silence.

"What'd he say?"

Leland looks away, and his voice drops low in something that might be anger, or might be shame.

"He laughed. Said I'd better figure out a way. And if I couldn't figure out a way, maybe I just needed to boost my brain a little more. Or boost his, and he'd figure it out for me." His mouth twists. "Mark was always making cracks like that....

"You didn't know Mark. He's just a job to you guys. I knew him. He was ... he was driven, you know? Nothing ever came fast enough for him. Some guys, some of the guys I sell to, they only take the bare minimum to give themselves the edge. Take some right before the test and then don't come back until the first warning signs show up. But Mark always took the max dose I'd sell him, at the shortest intervals. He probably wouldn't've run out of money this soon if he'd been taking it easy, pacing himself, but ... that was Mark. He was always like that. Always had to have more."

Leland's eyes have gone distant. "So I guess I gave him what he really wanted, you know?"

The room is dark, silent. Jeff's room, abandoned for the night. Claire sits on his bed, huddled and shivering and pressing her hands to her mouth to keep from making the slightest sound.

She tries to breathe as tremors go through her, tries not to breathe too fast, too shallow. Her worst fears are coming true.

It's all Leland's fault. She can't blame Mark, Mark's dead, Mark loved her, and Leland killed him.

Leland killed him. Leland killed him, and it's all her fault. It's all her fault...

"No, you didn't." That's almost sympathetic. "Mark never wanted to die, Leland."

"He did it to himself."

Harsh and bitter, and desperately defensive.

"He didn't leave me any choice."

Andrew's lips go white.

"You had a choice," he says, low and deadly. "You chose to do this. You chose."

"There's always a choice." Jonathan's voice is low, almost to a whisper. "I learned that one a long time ago."

"Is that it?" His face is drawn now, and wearing that bitter smile again. "Are we done here? 'Cause right now I don't see how you figure to 'make it stop'."

(He doesn't actually mime airquotes around Jonathan's words, but they're audible anyway.)

"However we have to."

"You shut me down and that leaves all my customers without a supplier."

That bravado is back, making the words something close to a taunt.

"And every one of them goes Flowers for Algernon and dies when their current dose wears off. That's gonna be on your hands."

He did it to himself.

He didn't leave me any choice.

Everyone will die.

Inside Claire's chest, her heart speeds, set on anarchy, and she can't stifle the sob wrenching its way up her throat. Her stomach turns, and pure instinct sends her bolting from the bed and into Jeff's bathroom.

His head jerks up at the noise.

"There's someone else here."

"There's nobody here but us, Leland --"

Except he's got a sinking suspicion that isn't true, because Claire knew where they were going to be tonight.

Jonathan moves between Leland and the connecting door, because whoever's in there, there's as much chance they're innocent as not.

Except Leland sees the movement and shifts suddenly in the chair, bringing up a hand from behind his back. The light from the computer screen reflects sharply off dark metal, outlining the shape of the pistol and its silencer as he levels it at Jonathan.

"You're gonna want to stop moving right about now." His level tone is belied by the flick of his eyes from Andrew to Jonathan to the door and back, and by the sheen of sweat on his temple reflecting the light of the screen.