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Laid back atop the sheets of his thin cot, watching black fog cloud the rafters, Eliot wondered if it was true what they said about smoke killing before fire.
He hoped so. The thought of burning to death didn't appeal to him, and he'd had plenty of time to weigh the options. Burning was what you did to witches and martyrs and the honored dead, and Eliot was none of those things, a body barely worth the effort of dumping in the lake. Asphyxiation wasn't ideal either, of course, but it was closer to what he deserved—euthanization or a merciful drowning, like a pet kept past its expiration date.
The floor was an oven-hot thrum under Eliot’s bare feet when he stumbled up and towards the window, IV pole clattering along behind him. He called it a window; really it was a door, double-sided and built from the most beautiful stained glass, to a tiny fourth-floor balcony he expected would splinter and give under his weight even if he had been allowed onto it. He could’ve broken through the glass, of course—the treatments hadn’t left him that weak—but it seemed a sacrilege, to destroy something so beautiful; colors rippling into amorphous shapes, alien terrors or angels or both. It hid all the ugly things outside, or distorted them, gravestones and rotting hawthorn trees washed into an image of celestial purgatory.
Soft as cats’ paws, there was a knock on the door. It was his house, but he was always so courteous. “Come in,” Eliot said.
Doctor Janus Abraham was a tall man, thin, with the countenance of a crow and a smile like an oil slick. He wasn’t smiling now, as he shut the door behind him, crept close enough to breathe down Eliot’s bare neck. Eliot laughed, a convulsive shudder; his go-to nervous response. “Did you do this?”
“That’s what I came here to ask you.”
"How could I have?" Eliot laughed again. He was brutally aware of the filled space behind him, more threatening than the fire that creeped steadily up from the house’s foundations. He hadn't been touched, but he felt the contact between them anyway, like a persistent nag of feathers tickling his back. "I haven't even left my room."
The night that Eliot had arrived here, blissfully myopic and asking all the wrong questions, Doctor Abraham had smiled his gleaming oil slick smile and asked him, are you familiar with the theory of liminal spaces? Yes, but what did that have to do with anything? Think of this house as your purgatory, Janus had told him, as their ouroboros took the first bite of its tail, a site of metamorphosis.
And so it was that in a chrysalis of stained hospital sheets, the treatments started. Injections and surgeries and bits of him sliced off, like DNA taken from a bloated corpse, skin cells and white fur off a lab rat's quivering back. This is killing me, he’d said, and the Doctor had replied, no, it’s changing you. Into what? Something more than you were. That's not a real answer. Isn't it?
"You say that like it's an alibi." The Doctor's words now were dangerous, but there was no accusation in them. Nothing so trite as that. "Look at me, Eliot."
Something inside Eliot hummed at the blasphemy of his first name in Janus's mouth, defunct engines resetting to self-destruct. He'd never been able to disobey the Doctor, for more than one reason, but when he felt Janus's rare intimacies sliding cold-trickle down his vertebrae, playing him like a cacophony of piano notes, he didn't even want to try. He turned, IV cord twisting around him, the world's most delicate shackle. Janus was smiling now, and the way his lips curled at the corners seemed just a little less sticky than usual.
"You've gone and stuck us both at the top of the house," Eliot pointed out, though there was no purpose in doing so. "Four floors up. We're going to burn."
"So I have." If the thought bothered the Doctor, he didn't deign to show it. "You must know that you've become indelibly dear to me."
And the edge in Janus's voice, it made Eliot feel like a moonlit Icarus. "Yes," he answered, breathless. "Yes."
Eliot couldn't remember just when they had spun off from the treatments and transformations into this endless iridescent void between doctor and lover and torturer and friend, wheeling around each other in circles far too uncontrolled to be called flight. He did remember other things, silhouettes leaning against doorframes and that soft staccato knock, midnight looks and hands in his hair and a syringe injecting something far sweeter than morphine into his veins. Let's keep count of all the bones we break, Janus had said, somewhere before the beginning of the end, because to him all of life was one grand experiment; Eliot, his most beloved test subject.
And what was Eliot to do but follow his lead? Janus had ruined him with more than just surgery, just butchery, though there had been no purpose in doing so. Eliot was certain he had ruined something in the Doctor too, doing nothing, nothing at all, he hadn't even left his room. Even now, at the end of all things, he was exactly where he always had been, caught between God and a doorway, choking on the heat. It begged the question—was a house on fire liminal or merely dying? More relevantly, if the two seemed so similar in practice, had there ever been a meaningful difference?
"The final threshold, then," his Doctor whispered, and how many times had Eliot heard those words before? Janus's dry mouth pressed against his cheek, and that incendiary grin slipped off him like his skin had melted away into a rush of clear water. They didn't mix, the two of them, but did that matter?
"I think," Janus murmured against Eliot's ear, pushing him back into the window with all the tenderness of a new bruise, "it's time to find out if you've grown wings."
It must've cut him, crashing through the door, but Eliot didn't feel the pain or the blood, only the cold shock of pressure giving way. Outside, there was nothing to see but stars and firelight and the glittering spots of razor-sharp color. He stumbled, collapsing, and beneath his feet the rotten balcony shrieked. Four floors up—how many broken bones would that be?
Back to the ground, Eliot flew airborne in a shower of the most beautiful stained glass.