The headstone is simple. Black granite, polished enough to catch the gray Seattle light even through the rain.
Nashville Steele.
Beloved brother.
The music lives on.
I'd hated that last line when the funeral director suggested it, but I couldn't think of anything better. Couldn't think of anything at all, really, standing in that sterile office with Phoenix's hand on my shoulder and the weight of the sight of my twin zipped up in a fucking body bag imprinted on my memory.
Now I'm sitting in the mud with my back against the stone, guitar across my lap like a shield I can't lift. My fingers haven't touched the strings in over an hour. Maybe longer.
Time gets slippery when you're watching rain carve rivers through cemetery grass.
My phone is face-down somewhere to my left. Dead. I turned it off after the message came through.
STEPHEN
First photo's live. The rest follow in 24 hours unless you send Bells back to me.
I didn't respond.
What's the fucking point?
I'd seen the photo before I killed the power. Every disgusting part of my face captured in merciless clinical detail, tagged and shared and screenshotted by thousands of people who finally know exactly what I've spent half my life hiding.
I haven't seen myself that clearly in years.
I avoid mirrors. Avoid reflective surfaces. Avoid puddles and windows and the black screens of phones. Avoid anything that might catch me off guard with the truth of what I am.
But there it was. My face—what's left of it—staring back at me from my phone screen like something that crawled out of a morgue. The right side completely destroyed, melted and reformed into something that doesn't look human anymore. Exposed teeth where my cheek should be. That dead eye that won't close, black pupil swallowing everything, staring and staring and staring even in unconsciousness.
I'd thrown up in the studio bathroom. Barely made it to the toilet before everything came up. Bile and coffee and the protein bar Phoenix had forced on me that morning. Heaved until there was nothing left, then kept heaving anyway, my body trying to expel something that can't be expelled because it's part of me.
Itisme.
My hands hadn't stopped shaking for an hour afterward. Still tremble now, even numb with cold.
The comments were worse than the photo.
No. That's a lie. Nothing could be worse than the photo. But the comments were confirmation of everything I already knew, everything I've always known, written in the casual cruelty of strangers who will never have to look me in the eye.
Monster.
And they're right. Not cruel, not unfair, not exaggerating. Iama monster. I've known it since I was sixteen years old, watching Nash's face try and fail to hide the horror every time he looked at me.
At least now the whole world can see what he saw.
At least now there's no more fucking pretending.
The rain has soaked through everything. Even the canvas jacket I grabbed on autopilot before walking out of the studio. Water drips from my hair, runs down the leather of my mask, pools in the hollows of my collarbones.
I should be freezing.
Probably am and can't feel it.
Can't feel much of anything right now.
I close my eye. The damaged one stays mostly open behind the mask, of course. It always does. No eyelid left to close it, just that constant horrifying, unblinking stare at a world I can't escape no matter how badly I want to.