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Get out of my head, he pleads, every time the boy lays his eyes on him.
Every time Alex remembers Nigel, or glimpses him over the congregation of Christian boys, Nigel sifts through his head, picking things up and putting them back where they don’t belong, the same way Alex regularly takes apart Nigel’s collection of preserved body parts and rifles through his vile notebooks, leaving them strewn about where Nigel can see that someone has gone through them. It’s violating, and it leaves Alex with the feeling of dirty fingerprints on the inside of his brain.
Nigel hates him, in the beginning, oh, how he hates him. The headmaster’s son, a pompous, sadistic brat who gains only boredom from rules and consequences, and to whom they do not apply. He hates him and the two pubescent boys of the same breed that follow him around, as he separates skin from tissue from bone on his makeshift workbench. He awakes one night to the sound of a screaming train and a face that’s almost angelic in that it’s beautiful and fills the pit of his stomach with hate, and oh, how he wishes to rend that face to shreds beneath his fingernails.
After the accident on the train, Nigel doesn’t sleep for a while. The night he does, he falls asleep imagining the touch of Alex’s fingers over his face; drawing his eyelids shut, stifling his breath, silencing the noise from his lips, as his insensate body is secreted away, to be roused where Alex needs him to be whenever he so requires, to the sound of a hello that’s as sweet as it is mocking.
Nigel writes about the man God made for him, his dearest Jack, and himself, whom God will make into a weapon to put in Jack's hands, and the eternity that they will share, scratched into his notebooks and inked as testaments into the pages of his bible, in the beautiful cursive that his father taught him. He thumbs over the knave of spades every night before he falls asleep, more so than he's done with the cross in recent days, giving in to thoughts of chestnut hair, splashes of freckles and coral lips, and he tells himself that he will adore them.
It’s not until Nigel is dead that Alex finds himself missing him. No, he’s not gone – he can feel him curled up at the back of his brain, sewn into the warm underbelly of his cerebrum, right where he said he’d leave a piece of himself; always listening, always the gentle nudge at the back of his mind.
Fate is cruel, then, Alex admits, for their fathers to have brought them together, to have provided the means for his and Nigel’s minds to interlock in an inseparable chain-link so briefly only for Nigel, his other half, to saw himself off and unmake himself into what he was meant to be – a mere tool for Alex to use and use alone. At least now, tucked away in his mind, the treasured heir of their holy bloodline who brought death with him everywhere he touched, he can keep Nigel safe.
When Alex sees the boy on the train, not one he’s ever had the familiarity of knowing – unremarkable, seemingly of a studious affect judging by the book on the history of the Church in his hands, Alex feels it – the resonance of an alike mind, like a tolling bell reverberating in great, silencing waves in the presence of its ringing twin.
Nigel traces a slow sideways eight into the soft flesh of Alex’s brain, and Alex goes to sit beside the boy on the train, finding for the first time in a long time a strange comfort in being unalone.