The Edifice

49. Take a Breath

"...Otis?" Lee repeats in concern, a growing uncertainty in his expression. "Do you... remember me?"

I've gained enough control over this oppressive meat-blanket of a body to move my neck in what should be a nod. This useless neck won't even move without spikes of pain, worse than anything else I've felt.

"Can you speak?" Lee asks, features relaxing in relief. His hands are firm and strong against my back, tilting me upright so I can rest against the headboard of the bed. He kneels on the covers beside me as though a palliative nurse at the side of a particularly helpless patient. I guess the image isn't that far from the truth.

I shake my head, wincing at the crick in my neck. I try speaking again, manage a series of warbled moans that at the very least exceed my earlier attempt.

"Fuck," Lee mutters. His fingertips dig into the side of my waist. "They said you might struggle a little but the doctors didn't say anything like this. Are you in pain? Is this helping?"

Doctors. I'd been thinking about doctors recently, I'm sure of it. It wasn't for me though, I swear, it was for... It was for...

Fuck.

I take control of my own torso again, almost buckling under the weight of this foreign flesh. With a heave of effort even my arms and finally legs respond, jerking under me as I try to propel myself forward. I pitch over Lee's lap, almost landing flat on the floor as once more gravity fights me and wins. Lee grunts with strain as he catches me, hauling me back upright.

I slap at his chest, frenzied as I try to form sounds to form words to form the only question that matters. The 'zuh' sound evades me but clumsily as a baby I take control of others, memorising the positions I need to move my mouth in. Come on, I can say 'brother'. Or not. Maybe Olivia. "Buh- buh. O-luh. Ol-ee-ah."

Comprehension dawns on Lee and he relaxes, one hand still stroking my hair like he's soothing the damn-baby I've regressed to. "Olivia? Olivia is OK. Zagan is too, as far as I know. He's alive at least. Your parents have paid Katy off a fortune not to leak anything else about him, so there's still something left for them to protect. He's in private care somewhere. Olivia is here- down the hall actually."

Lee explains it all- I glare at him every time he trails off without answering a question that I don't have the words to ask.

We're at Katy's home, now reduced to pawns in the ongoing media feud she's started with my parents. Impossibly, I've somehow been asleep for three days while lawyers drew up the contracts for the rest of my life in a three-sided battle between Katy Perry, Creed Estates and a coalition of a dozen different government bodies. Against the odds, Katy has been winning.

"You've been summoned for a couple of hearings in the next couple of weeks, in court, not with your parents. The Potentate wants to see you for themself to make sure you are who we say you are and to... decide what to do with you next," Lee trails off, looking down at his lap and twisting a ring nervously around one finger. "Otis, you didn't have any actual physical injuries but we had doctors over to check on you and scientists- not your parents' don't worry- and they found... Well, they did blood tests. Blood tests."

I stare in confusion at his second emphasis before it hits me. Listening this whole time has felt as though he was describing the lives of someone else, so distant has everything felt from the realm of possibility. Suddenly, I understand however. They ran blood tests on me. 

This body isn't just a temporary vessel- it's not even an instance of possession.

"There was a jumble of different DNA. You're still a freak, Otis. But you're a human freak," Lee explains. "Whatever insanity happened when your soul left you, you had a body while it happened and have a body now it's finished. Some Olivia got jumbled into you though and most of you came back positive as the original Otysses Creed, but yeah. You're a real boy."

"I..." I stare down at my hands, the minuscule nexus of veins and creases of the skin. They're not the hands I've built before. I'm human. I'm human.

The comfort of those words I've yearned so long to hear is lukewarm. A desperate dread settles in the pit of my stomach as the permanence of this settles in, the weight of it all, the pain. How blind and slow and confined I feel.

"Here," Lee says quickly as the reception to his words turns awkward. He gets up and retrieves his phone from the floor where he flung it in his haste to reach me. While he opens up the camera app, I return to working on control of my speech, moaning like a banshee to stretch the foreign trappings of my throat. When Lee offers to show me my reflection I twist my head away nervously.

"No. Just..."

Hugging Lee is so instinctual that I barely feel the weight of my arms as I wrap them around him and bury my face in his chest and breathe in the smell of him. Even this is different now my senses have been dulled this much. All I can feel, see and smell is Levi Noble and the ache in my chest begins to lessen as I let him consume me.

Lee doesn't return the embrace. His hand rests awkwardly atop my head, twirling a single finger through a strand of hair. The size difference between us was negligible when I could shift to any size and shape I wanted and his aura was a speck beside mine, but now he towers over me. Cupping his jaw with my clumsy hands, my fingertips barely brush his cheekbones.

I have to pull his head down towards me. Even then his eyes glance past my shoulder, staring into the distance rather than meet my gaze.

"Lee?"

"I- I'm sorry Otis," he murmurs slowly. His head tilts gently until our foreheads press together. His skin is soft and warm against mine. "I was so worried about you. I'm not going to ask for your forgiveness because I made the choices I had to but I-"

I cut him off with a kiss. Our lips move gracelessly, tender and uncertain at first. As always, he's a devilishly good kisser. I can feel the twist of his smile against the my lips as we tumble back and I close as much distance between us as possible. It's nice to know some things feel better as a human.

"I'm not having sex with a coma patient," Lee huffs into my ear, voice slightly pained with the effort of pulling away. "And I don't think it's consent if you can't say no."

"Asshole,"I respond, some familiarity working its way back into my voice.

"There I was enjoying the silence-" I shut him up with another kiss, christening my new body with the experience of human touch. Lee laughs, accepting the kisses with good grace and returning a few of his own. 

A part of me still worries for Zagan, locked away in a hospital if not a cell, prisoner to my parent's wrath. Especially is half the stories Lee's told me about Katy's blackmail is true. It's the fate I always tried to spare him from but there's the single, inescapable fact I've finally learned to face. Zagan life is the way it is because of his attitude, his actions.

I finally have a family and I'm not tearing it apart for him.

Glancing up again, content with my fragility so long as I have someone by my side, I nudge Lee with my elbow and gesture to the closed doorway. "Olivia?"