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The Nightmare Dimension proves to be even less pleasant than he's imagined, and the Manager's imagination is not a thing to be underestimated.
It's worse than unpleasant, actually; it's actively distasteful, so much so that as soon as he feels the presence of that roiling, festering mass of calleidoscopic chaos all around, closing about him like water over a diver that's just broken its surface, he spares no time to put it right. It's practically an afterthought, a reflexive twitch of will inside of him that reaches out and quickly, efficiently, prudently rearranges the Nightmare Dimension around himself. It takes him less than wink to determine up from down and enforce it, to conjure a facsimile of Earth's laws, just for systematization's sake, to tell right apart from left, front from back, to take the shapeless void and firmly place it within a structure, stretching it like canvas over a frame. He instantly feels much better, as if he's chased away an upcoming migraine with a well-timed painkiller, although in that brief in-between moment of creation he can't but glimpse a strained figure, suspended listlessly in the yet-unmade expanse, stranded in a point where timespace is an idea that simply doesn't exist with no one to uphold it.
The Manager almost pities the figure in that one moment. Almost.
Readied appropriately, the Nightmare Dimension now stretches out around him, obedient and much easier on the eyes. He goes for simplicity: an endlessly dark stretch of space, illuminated softly and evenly by light sources that are nowhere to be seen, an inconspicuous black tiled floor, two chairs separated by twenty feet or so. Between them, an inch-wide white line runs across the ground, disappearing out of view and into the darkness on both sides. It's rudimentary, of course, and not very elegant, but at least now they've got a bearable setting for conversation.
The figure is there. Naturally, it must be. The Manager takes the seat on his side of the line, crosses his legs at the ankles, and waits.
The figure right in front of him, now mere paces away, is stretched out on the chair like a scarecrow, limp limbs dangling idly on both sides of the seat. Its head has dropped past the backrest, its unseeing eyes staring vacantly into nothingness. The Manager sits there, watching it, torn between satisfaction and a peculiar sense of loss when he knows he should feel neither.
He doesn't keep track of time, but the figure takes surprisingly little of it to pull itself together. If the Manager had blinked, he would've missed the first independent twitch of its muscles, the first shadow of a cough that indicates it is still animate, if not exactly alive.
He squares his shoulders and watches and waits as the figure which was once him, which he once was, raises itself up to a sitting position and looks his way. It slowly rolls its shoulders, accustoming itself again to motion, to gravity, to a shred of control, and assumes a languid pose on the chair. It, he, Nyarlathotep, all the personalities and faces the entity in front of the Manager has worn, are now crammed into one frame and labeled with one name: Kayne. For all the distaste it sparks, the Manager must admit the ontological shortcut is rather handy.
Expectedly, Kayne skips any greetings. The words come out slurred on his unwieldy tongue. "Have you come to gloat?"
Apparently, it's rather hard to speak without a jaw. Acting on a magnanimous thought, the Manager rights that too before replying. He's no cheap parlor magician to snap his fingers or proclaim anything, but reality bends to his will like grass blades under touch: he doesn't give Kayne the jaw back, naturally, as that wouldn't be proper, but he simply makes reality ignore the fact of Kayne's jawlessness.
It's only then that he answers. "Why? Is that what you would do?"
Being able to use a jaw he doesn't have is remarkably low on the list of oddities Kayne has encountered and seems to hardly have caused him a moment of confusion. "No," he says conversationally, "I'd have torn you to so many pieces that the atoms of your being would each separately scream in silent agony until the end of time. And if I had to keep you alive, as you no doubt have to do with me, I'd drop by to flay you alive inch by inch every spare moment I got." He stretches again, moves a hand through his black hair, which flows around his shoulders like a lustrous waterfall. "I'd say gloating is rather boring, to be honest, so I do hope you've prepared something better for me. You're keeping me away from, oh, an eternity of languid and unending torment. I've got places to be."
The Manager waits patiently for him to finish the tirade, glancing at his wristwatch only once. He's the one who's got places to be, primarily the Waylay he's already left for long enough—even thinking of it, just existing unprotected and unattended, sends another ripple of anxiety through him.
First things first, though. "And if I said I wanted to talk, would you believe me?"
Kayne's manic smile is sweet and sticky like rotten fruit. "Of course. You've got no reason to lie and even if you did, you still wouldn't do it. I know, because I wouldn't either. Spoils the fun. Now, now," he adds hastily, just as the Manager opens his mouth to reply, "please spare me the indignity of your protests, as I think we're both beyond pretending to be anything else than each other. Believe you me, it disgusts me as well. Unconvinced?" He sighs theatrically. "Let me guess. You're here because ever since I got relegated here, you've been feeling torn apart by this strange, strange urge to harm and kill and destroy. No?"
"I've been having," the Manager hesitates briefly and hates himself for it, "intrusive violent thoughts. And," he hesitates again, "and fantasies. Also violent."
He's sitting ruler-straight in his chair but experiences the sudden need to straighten up even further. He fiddles with his gloves, tugs them tight up the edges of his white suit sleeves. His scalp hurts with how his braid, made way too tight, keeps pulling at his skin. He is holding all the cards here, all the power, he's been Nyarlathotep as long as this Kayne has, so why is he fighting a losing battle yet again? As the Manager, he's got rules, protocol, he knows order, restraint, and still there's this thing scrambling and slithering inside him in a frenzy at the mere sound of Kayne's voice that he can barely keep control of.
Violent thoughts and fantasies are rather an understatement. He longs to make Kayne suffer. Revenge. Catharsis. Split his cranium open, scoop out the brain. A frenzy of rage. Laughter, teeth sinking into flesh. It would not be fair, would not be proper, but he simply cannot go on existing like that any longer, an unknown desire filling his mind with images of shredded skin, splintering shards of bone, a wet mist of blood on the air.
"Of course you have," Kayne says soothingly. The change is awfully dissonant. "And you're simply too upstanding to indulge in them, since that would make you," his voice lilts up in delight, "just the same as me. Which would mean your whole existence as my inversion is pointless. Naturally, that is just the case, but after so much time and effort spent on crafting that illusion of purpose, of being oh-so-different from the awful, violent me, I can hardly blame you for clinging tooth and nail to it. What a sorry stalemate. But then, eureka! I suppose you could always just torture me to go on and get all that drive for violence out in a nice and safe environment. It would feel good, you know it would. It would be righteous. I killed your daughter, didn't I? I deserve whatever violence you hold in you. Whatever you'd do here wouldn't count," he cocks his head to the side, "is that what you were thinking? Oh, or did I spoil it just now by saying it all out loud?"
"You have a shockingly low estimation of me," the Manager says flatly, "and I will not sit here and have you insult me to my face. It seems we are at an impasse, so let me break it by saying this much: drop this act or I will throw you right back into the Nightmare Dimension in its original state and never come back again. Eternity is a long time to spend on absolutely nothing, an emptiness of experience that will be far worse for you than any torture, than anything anyone could really do to you. Nothingness is your antithesis." He leans forward. "It will undo everything you've ever been until you're an empty husk of yourself, vacant and confused, unable to die but unable to exist in any meaningful way either. We will both lose on that decision and I don't want to make it, but I will not spare it a second thought if you push me to that. That's the difference between us, Kayne; the capacity for self-control. You claim to know everything about me so tell me, would I do it?"
Kayne scowls, silenced for a moment. There's a sliver of defeat to his voice as he speaks again. "You would."
Much briefer and much, much better. The Manager allows himself a tight smile. "Great. Now that we've established as much, let's move on to what we can do to restore a bit of mental free space for the both of us. Any suggestions?"
"Please stop running this like a corporate meeting," Kayne says, looking actually distressed.
"Why? It's efficient. Would you prefer for us to waste time insulting each other with jabs and insinuations? For how long, before we'd actually get to the point?" The Manager takes another look at his wristwatch, this time for show. "With that level of organization, I'm surprised you got as far in any plans you ever made. Less surprised that they all ultimately failed."
Kayne chuckles; in all probability, it's the first laugh the Nightmare Dimension around them has ever heard. "Ah, that's much more like it. You know, it is a pleasure to meet you, after all. I'm not the one for formalities but, hey, I'm almost glad I didn't get to just kill you instantly before getting to talk to you."
"Likewise," the Manager says. Upon reflection, it is their first actual meeting and anything less would've been rude.
"So, are we back to idea of torturing me to relieve your violent thoughts and fantasies?" Kayne repeats the phrase with evident relish, making it sound far more transgressive than necessary. "Should we call a vote, Manager?"
"I have no wish to torture you," the Manager lies easily. "You seem to think the root of the problem lies elsewhere."
"Why would I?"
"Because I know I do."
"Point taken." Kayne says. "It's hard to say whether we loathe being similar or different more, isn't it? I am a danger to your reality, your sense of self, an abomination reminding you what you were and could still be. The feeling is mutual. But the difference between us, which you so aptly diagnosed, is a double edged sword. You've cut off the parts of yourself you didn't want and now you're surprised that you aren't whole. How could you be alright when you've repressed so much of what you are?"
"What I am," the Manager hisses, suddenly seeing red, "is not what you are."
There is no provocation to the reply, only pity, and that makes it all the worse. "Isn't it?"
This the Manager cannot, in good faith, answer the way he knows he should.
"So," Kayne goes on, "it appears we really are at an impasse. Let me tell you something now, Manager: you cannot go on existing in this way. You will bend or you will break, I don't much care which one, but there is no way in which you can go on as you are now. Denial. Restraint. Repression. That's simply not all there is to being; you cannot be the negative, be only what I am not. You have to meet me halfway." There is no malice in his words but certainly no kindness either. "You are the superego to my id, but even the lengths you've gone to be so are extreme. Don't you see the irony? I'm the only one who can show you how to let go, who can save you from unbeing. Not away from your violent thoughts and fantasies, but into them: that's the only way there is. So ask yourself, dear Manager, what is it that you desire?"
There is silence between them for a long moment: two figures and two chairs divided only by a line on the floor and an infinity of space around them. The Manager feels cold. What does he desire? Nothing, it's always been nothing. He is not of desire: he is of law and order and the neat feeling of a folded page whose edges align to the millimeter. His eyes dart across the floor but find nothing to focus on.
Kayne leaves his chair, pushing it backwards with a scrape. The sound of his steps across the tiles rings out like the gunshots of an execution squad. He crouches down right before the line on the floor and stretches out his hand, as if he were approaching a wild animal.
"Come on," he says softly and now his voice is truly mellow, like crushed velvet and molasses. "Let me show you. You will feel better, I promise."
It would be so easy to yield, to let it all go away, and he suddenly realizes he wants it so badly his whole body literally aches for that one, little instance of bending his own rules. The Manager pictures himself crossing that line, falling onto Kayne with nails and teeth ready to rip and tear and ravish. He can almost feel the flesh yield under his touch, parting skin, naked muscles quivering with tendons primed like violin strings. It would've been easy to justify, as all crimes seem when they are committed.
You have to meet me halfway, Kayne said, but the half-point between them didn't lie on Kayne's side of the dividing line. It was at the line itself. The Manager looks up and, for the first time since they started speaking, forces himself to actually meet Kayne's eyes; two identical gazes lock together.
"I will," the Manager says, "in time. There's still the matter of your penance to settle."
"That works too," Kayne says. His elasticity is almost admirable. "Well? Go ahead."
"Me? No." Now it is the Manager's turn to smile, actually smile, lips stretching to reveal pointed teeth. "I know you'd enjoy anything I could come up with because, well, I know I would. And neither of us is here now to enjoy ourselves, I'm afraid." He searches his pockets. Not much in there: a pen. It takes next to no effort to make it into a knife. "A pound of flesh," he says, "for my Lilith, and for everything else. I reckon you know what to do."
He tosses the knife forward, watches it skitter over the tiles, turning and turning, its sharp tip drawing an arc of steel as it does so, stopping at a sliding halt right in front of Kayne. A pound of flesh; no cartilage, no bone. A viciously twisted self-flagellation that is still too little, perhaps, but enough for the debt to be settled, at least symbolically.
Kayne picks up the knife, toys with it for a moment. "Careful," the Manager adds, "Whatever you cut will be a permanent loss, so do try to choose things you have no immediate use for."
The Nightmare Dimension is not a place for linearity, for lasting changes, but now the Manager senses he can enforce his own rules on it if he pleases, and this he does. Kayne's injuries would not keep forever, but with how weak he really is, underneath all that bravado, they would still keep long enough to truly hurt. Not for pain; but for the notion of consequences, of having to mind one's actions rather than just act. All in all, a simple task, no grand or dramatic thing, really, just the base necessity to appraise oneself like a piece of meat at a butchering counter, to pick out the unnecessary and cut and pick and pick and cut, knowing the weight of every single one of these decisions. It is, in one word, the penance of restraint.
And, of course, it will probably also hurt like nothing Kayne has ever experienced.
"That much," Kayne says pointedly and the mask of his face is no longer that placid, pleasant expression but a frozen snapshot of hate and fury that is so much closer to the truth. "That much and we're square. Then we can start really negotiating."
"Sure," the Manager says sweetly. He leans back in his chair and prepares to watch.
He forgets to blink, to breathe, practically even before Kayne makes the first cut. The Manager gazes intently as Kayne shrugs off his black suit, glances over his limbs with a hard-won expression of assumed inertness and trails the tip of the knife over the underside of his arm, where the flesh is supple and soft, but no major blood vessels run. The blood still flows though; the Manager was graceful enough to give Kayne a knife, but not enough so to make it a sharp one. As such, the dull edge sinks into the skin well enough, but it takes some effort to get it to cut anything. With the knife handle already wet with blood, Kayne spits and curses in all the world's languages but knows better than to make any rash movements. The tissue tears reluctantly, wetly, and yields but a small strap of flesh. The Manager licks his lips, imagines burrowing his mouth, his face, into that oozing cut. And there is so, so much more to come.
Around halfway through to the proverbial pound, Kayne is much more docile than before. The pile of discarded flesh next to of him has grown to a small, anthill-shaped gruesome heap; blood pools around it, traveling across the grooves in the tiled floor. At first, Kayne seemed surprised that the wounds he was making didn't heal instantly but truly kept on hurting, kept on bleeding. He knew it was going to be so, of course, but how could mere knowing measure up against innumerable years of immortality, invulnerability? So, surprise gradually became wariness and that eventually coalesced into bone-deep fear. Now he's realized cursing takes up far too much energy, as does everything else other than yet again sizing his as-if chewed up body with hate-filled eyes. There are no easy cuts to be made now and he's given up long ago on any promise not to show distress. His breath comes shallow, every new cut accompanied by a low hissing in which fear and shame override pain. The knife keeps slipping in his fingers, blood-slick and treacherous, stabbing where it is not wanted.
"A little help, perhaps?" Kayne whines, torn between annoyance and resignation. "We technically didn't say I'd need to do all this, you know, by myself?" He stops for a breath but seems beyond most considerations anyhow. "Please?"
It takes the Manager a long second to find his voice and a longer one still to form an answer. "Why should I? You seem to be doing fine."
Kayne sets the knife down with a clutter. "And I know you fucking want it! I can feel it and it's as bad as this goddamned thing! I've had a lot of time to think that much through recently. Finish the job if you need to or don't, but come over here and get your hands dirty before it drives us both mad. I mean, madder than I already am and possibly madder than you are, if that much is even fucking possible."
The Manager says nothing, but he finds himself standing up slowly from his chair. He feels it too, of course, a dreadful tug that makes him want to go nearer to Kayne, a desire that has grown stronger and more violent with every moment they've spent in this space together, separated only by a line drawn on the floor. The Manager is good at handling stray urges, placing them in orderly rows like billing folders, so that every one knows its place. He actually pities Kayne, racked by that same drive but unable to control it even in the least, left to reckon with an emptiness that would not be filled.
The Manager walks up to the line and kneels on the floor, a mere arm's length away from Kayne. "The last two of us left," he appraises, surprising even himself, "and you just had to turn out weak and spineless."
"Look at yourself," Kayne stares right back into his face, "you're practically fucking drooling. Whatever I am to you, brother or father or simply you, it's barely degenerate enough for your violent thoughts and fantasies. You've gone against your nature so far, nothing less will satisfy it now." He starts laughing, picks up the knife and hands it to the Manager. "Go on."
"It's just words," the Manager says patronizingly, but he does take up the knife. "Stay still, will you?"
He's thought, unconsciously, that finally touching Kayne would feel, at least in some way, like a breakthrough; perhaps a letdown, repulsive and unwelcome, but a breakthrough nonetheless. To the Manager's surprise, it doesn't feel like anything, apart from the remote sensation of skin and flesh moving below his gloved hands. The impersonal, matter-of-fact hold is disturbed only by the trembling of Kayne body and, to some extent, by a matching tremor that seems to have seized his own fingers. He grips the knife handle tighter.
Kayne doesn't exactly stay still, but the Manager still makes much prompter work of it, pushing the skin up with the knife and cutting out only flesh and fat from underneath so that the injuries might heal faster afterwards. It's mind-numbing, as all manual labor is, not unlike filleting a fish, if the fish was still alive and squirming with every motion. The efficiency of it all is beautiful but so is the barely contained indulgence, the inimitable feeling of knowing that anytime now he will get what he really wants.
A pound of flesh, just lying there, looks far less impressive than he'd have guessed. A small thing compared to so many lives Kayne has taken; the Manager waves it away and into nothingness. His suit is filthy, his gloves soaked through with a cloying redness. He pulls at them with his teeth and tastes blood, Kayne's blood, rich and flavorful, before the ruined leather finally slips off his hands. He lets the gloves fall to the floor with a wet rustling and turns his hands, bare for the first time since—he struggles to recall, probably since before he truly became the Manager.
Kayne sits on the floor, detangling his hair with blood-red fingers. As the Manager's forceful grip on the Nightmare Dimension's rules ebbs and recedes, there is a feeling as if of tension fizzling out in the air and Kayne's wounds begin to heal, skin closing seamlessly over missing chunks of flesh. The cut sacrificial matter does not regrow, leaving hollow divots and ridges covered with skin that look like gauge marks chiseled right into the body, rough edges left by an uncaring sculptor. The Manager images currents of phantom pain flowing through confused muscles, which try and fail to reorient themselves within this suddenly-chipped off shell.
Kayne trails the edge of one of the marks with his finger. "I guess those are staying," he says. For all the nonchalance in his tone, he seems rather confused to find something permanently changed about him. "At least we'll be able to tell each other apart now, no?" The Manager keeps staring down at his hands; Kayne tilts his head and leans in until their faces are barely an arm's length apart. "You're still sulking?" he adds. "I could help with that."
"Shut your fucking mouth," the Manager murmurs. There's blood pooling underneath his fingernails, stains marking his palms.
He stands up. His debt with Kayne is settled, as they've agreed, but he still hates that pair of unblinking owlish eyes before him, that toothy smile, that inky cascade of hair. As Kayne rises up from the floor as well, the Manager finds himself barely able to fight off a wave of single-minded rage, baseless, groundless, but he still wants to hurt Kayne, he still wants Kayne, he wants him more than ever before.
Kayne is saying something more; the Manager isn't listening. He only hesitates for a second more before he gives in to the clamor of riotous thoughts in his brain and backhands Kayne across the face with all the force he can muster, watching his head snap backwards with a most satisfying crunch, like stepping on a hard-shelled bug. Pain spreads across his hand, strangely vulnerable, as his skin that must've split on Kayne's teeth now oozes the Manager's own blood.
The Manager just stands there for the briefest moment, frozen in wonder at his own decision to act out of line, before Kayne grabs him by the lapels of his now-spoiled suit and they struggle against each other, two near-immortal entities thrashing in human bodies for a reason neither of them could put into words. It's difficult to tell which of them slips on the bloodied floor and who gets his legs kicked from underneath him with the motion, but suddenly they're falling down, a tangle of locked limbs; the pain of hitting the floor seems rather like an afterthought as the Manager struggles to reorient himself, elbowing Kayne harshly in the stomach only to feel a hand grab at his messy hair and slam his skull again into the tiles until his brain rings with high-tuned static. He kicks upwards, lashing out blindly at the body above him, and they roll over the floor, blood and all, striking at each other almost faster than their injuries may heal.
It's hard to get any leverage, hard to think of anything but the roaring pulse he can feel throughout his entire body, and before he knows it, the Manager seems to be gaining an upper hand in the scuffle, pining Kayne to the ground, twisting his arms above his head, deflecting a jab of the knee that would've thrown him off and that, had he stopped to think about, would've appeared a little half-hearted. In a much-delayed moment of confusion, he realizes Kayne is practically naked; a fact there was simply no need or reason to take note of before now makes itself known sharply, imposingly, the smooth lines of his bare body outlined harshly against the floor tiles.
Kayne's eyes are unfocused, his mouth still upturned reflexively into a smile. "I can't hear them," he gasps, "the voices—they are silent?" It falls somewhere between a question and a sob; he thrashes in the Manager's grip, but it's hard to say what he hopes to achieve. "It's you, isn't it? It's always been. Please, please, just don't let go of me."
That is one thing the Manager does not plan on doing, regardless of how irrelevant Kayne's own disturbed pleasure feels at the moment. Hardly questioning himself anymore, he closes the distance between them to finally kiss Kayne, deeply and hungrily, reveling in the hot, wet feeling of blood on their tongues, blood so intermixed it might've belonged to both of them from the very beginning. In the end, he does let go, if only to move his hands to Kayne's face, neck, letting them glide over the trembling body below him.
There is no question, at this point, that the Manager himself is feeling significantly overdressed. He pulls away from Kayne with a reluctance he can only hope isn't obvious and sits back to fumble with the buttons of his suit and shirt, which now seem utterly superfluous. He feels Kayne put his arms around him, undoing his braid, fingers combing through the strands of hair. Sharp nails move over his scalp, much too forcefully to be pleasant, and yet the Manager craves their touch with a characteristic lack of misgivings, practically whimpering as Kayne's mouth leaves a trail of slavering kisses down his throat, teeth nipping at the skin carelessly, firm enough to draw blood again.
Even when, finally, nothing is separating them, they simply can't seem to get enough of each other, not after that long, long stretch of time when they kept themselves at a distance that now seems impossible to even conceive of. The Manager slips into a daze the likes of which he has never quite known, has never even considered an option of himself, and resolutely decides to feel no qualms about being stretched out on that floor, clothes lying in a discarded pile somewhere far away, as Kayne kisses his ribs, stomach, holds him down by the hips as he trails his tongue across the inner side of his thighs. Disheveled, bloodied, gasping, they look more identical than ever; somehow, the Manager cannot convince himself to care, his body arching into Kayne's rough touches as if it had a mind of its own.
Perhaps later, at the Waylay, fixing his hair again and making sure his clothing is as crisp and neatly-pressed as ever the Manager will struggle to meet his gaze in the mirror, unsure now where he ended and his counterpart began. But it is a fear he will know rather than feel, as he will, in fact, feel so, so much better, reminiscing of flesh and blood on his hands. What more is there to ask for?