Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sun visits him.

“Why don't you cry?” Her tone is so flat it doesn’t even sound like a question, but a quirk of a dark eyebrow over questioning eyes prompts Wolfgang to shrug and answer anyway.

“Crying means you’re too weak to do anything else.”

“That's not true. Crying means you’re still capable of feeling, that you’re still human, that you still have a heart.”

“So maybe I don't have a heart.” He tries to keep his tone light-hearted, like he means what he said as a joke, but the words feel heavy in his mouth, tasting like rusted metal, like spent shell, and the tone comes out grave and a little petulant.

Sun gives a short shake of her head, dark tresses falling over one eye. “That's not true, either.”

“Well, then that negates your theory, doesn't it,” he drawls and tilts his head back toward the grey sky, bored at the conversation already.

Sun lights a cigarette and leans back on the palm of her free hand pressed against the concrete edge of a high-rise, bare legs dangling from the side. She takes a long drag on the burning cigarette and steals a furtive glance at Wolfgang who has his eyes closed against the soft glare of the morning sun stubbornly peeking through heavy, pregnant clouds.   

She passes the cigarette to him, and they spend a few seconds in silence, breathing in the smoke and each other’s subtle scents and listening idly to the incessant hum of traffic 100 meters below their feet.  

“You should cry.” Her voice so low it only scratches at the wall of silence between them.

Wolfgang stubs out the cigarette on the parapet, and turns his head toward Sun with a raised brow and the corner of his lips slightly pulled upward in an imitation of a teasing smirk.

“You want to see me cry?”

“Yes.” Blunt and sharp, a hardened look in her dark, admonishing eyes.

Wolfgang scowls. “Why?”

“Because I can't feel your pain.”

“Maybe because there's no pain.” He says dismissively, looking away.

He can almost taste Sun’s persistence in the air, mixed tantalizingly with the lingering smell of the smoke and the early morning mist infused with the promise of rain.

“You’re hiding it from the cluster and it's driving us insane.”

Wolfgang’s frown deepens, the sharp line between his intense eyes cutting into the skin over the bridge of his nose. “I don’t understand. How is me not showing pain driving you insane?”

Sun lights another cigarette and this time doesn’t share. “Ask Kala. She knows this feeling better than any of us.”

Wolfgang lets out a short sigh in mild annoyance. “You know I’m not going to.”

Sun exhales deeply, Wolfgang’s eyes follow the curve of the smoke rising above her upturned face and spreading across the thin air above her head.

Her dark eyes are now back on his face. Wolfgang doesn’t look away.

“Sometimes I reach out to you and you feel so cold under my touch that I think you’re already dead.” The blandness of her tone takes the dramatic effect of those grave words away, leaving Wolfgang with an unwelcome mixture of nausea and dread rocking heavily in the pit of his stomach. He can’t be thinking of his time at the BPO and under Whispers’ torture now. He has suppressed those memories for too long and has no plan of returning to them any time soon. Maybe it’s Sun who’s trying to bring them back to the surface.

She should go.

“Wolfgang. Stop hiding.”

The tone this time is authoritative, like a command, and Wolfgang has always had a strong aversion to following rules and orders.

“What if I don't want you to see me?”

The eyes lose their authority and turn soft, almost fond, in the pastel hue of early morning, and the voice barely rises above a whisper.

“What if we all need to see you?”

Wolfgang doesn’t let Sun stay long to see the rain.

Chapter Text

He visits Will.

“Do you want to see me cry, too?”

Will starts, leaning slightly forward in his chair. “Wolfgang.” Inky brows knitted over concerned blue eyes.

Wolfgang feels restless under that penetrating gaze. “Well, I’ve got a better idea.”

“What is it?” Wolfgang detects slight wariness under Will’s curious tone.

“Fuck me.”

His blunt request throws Will, who gets to his feet and levels him with a chastising look, like a mother disappointed in the man her prodigy child has grown up to be. “Wolfgang.”

“Come on, fuck me. There's no better way to feel me. Really feel me. Isn't that what you want?”

Will shakes his head in mild frustration. “This is not about what we want, Wolfgang. It's about what you need. We’re worried about you.”

“Then don’t be. I’m fine.”

Wolfgang ignores the tingling weight of Will’s exasperated stare and begins pulling his dark grey jumper over his head, throwing it carelessly aside. With his upper body now naked and glistening with a thin sheen of sweats, he takes a few purposeful steps toward Will who’s having a hard time keeping his concerned, sad eyes on Wolfgang’s determined face.

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

Wolfgang clenches his jaw, trapping a few choice words behind his grinding teeth.

“Nothing. Don't you want to fuck me?” He points at the bulge visible under his black jeans and Will follows the movement of his hand in spite of himself, breathing already labored. He is hard. He wants this. Or maybe it’s Will who does, projecting his desire on him. It doesn’t matter whichever the case is. Being part of a cluster has nullified all of Wolfgang’s perceptions about individuality.

“I can go to someone else,” he continues as Will’s silence drags on. “Then you can be a fucking voyeur or whatever gets you off.”

He isn't used to rejection, and he feels some kind of childish impulse to chide Will for his unattractive cowardice and hesitance. His earlier arousal seems to have dissipated in the stagnant air pressing against his semi-nakedness like a hostile force. 

Will grips Wolfgang’s bare arms in a firm grasp, the pads of his fingers leaving dents in his warm skin. “If there's no pain, then why is this conversation so painful?”

“You’re projecting.”

Wolfgang leaves before Will could change his mind.

Chapter Text

Nomi visits him.

“Come on, Wolfgang. Give me something.”

Wolfgang gulps his beer and looks across the club to make sure Felix is doing alright. He is dancing erratically with a tall blonde, spindly arms flailing in the air, a wide grin splitting his face in unadulterated delight. He’s having a good time, in spite of it all, the constant danger looming over their heads, being on the run, fighting a fight that he would’ve never gotten himself into if not for Wolfgang (he does that a lot), being always on alert, barely getting a few hours of shut-eye every night. He looks like there’s nothing wrong in their world, like he is at the top of his game and he’s not hiding the dark circles under his eyes with concealer, and Wolfgang would have hugged him, maybe even kissed him, if he was right there with him; if Felix was part of his cluster and Wolfgang could appear right next to him in the blink of an eye.

“There’s nothing to give.” He says after a long pause, picking up his beer mug and bringing it close to his mouth, only to have Nomi snatching it away and sniffing at the remaining liquid in distaste.

She thinks, ‘how can anyone drink this shit?’ but she says, “You haven’t slept in three days. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

She is only aware of three days, because by the seventh day Wolfgang had slipped and couldn’t keep his cluster out of his head anymore.

“You can’t hack your way into my mind.” He takes back the mug and chugs the rest of the beer. He likes the taste. Beer is the most, perhaps the only, uncomplicated thing in Wolfgang’s life, and he’s grateful for it.

Nomi sighs in frustration. “Well, that’s exactly the problem here. Why don't you help me with it?”

Wolfgang lights a cigarette, eyes searching for Felix in the crowd and finding him now dancing with a brunette. It’s his birthday and Wolfgang, instead of being there with him on the dance floor, is playing his bodyguard. “Is it you who wants help, or is it me you want to help?”

“Why are you being so difficult?” Nomi asks with fond exasperation.

After his mother's death, somehow Wolfgang knew nothing would ever be alright. He thought killing his father would make the pain stop, but by then his wounds had stopped being a living thing. They were corpses, they had scabbed over. Yet infected under the dead skin. They festered and reeked and decomposed his flesh. But never got any better. Never healed.

Over years, he learned he could never get rid of them, so he might as well learn how to live with them.

“I don’t know how to be anything else.”

Across the club, a man approaches Felix and grabs his arm to roughly turn him around. Wolfgang clenches his jaw and stubs out his cigarette on the counter. Nomi extends a hand in comfort but Wolfgang shuts her out before her fingers could make contact with his sweat-soaked skin.

Wolfgang gets to his feet and makes his way quickly to Felix and the bulky man who is by now writhing in pain on the floor. Great. He wished this night would be different, for Felix’s sake. But every night outside their safe house ends in bloody brawls, none of which initiated by them.

At least they always win, it’s the only comforting thought he has before joining in the fight.

Chapter Text

Lito visits him.

“You’re making everyone in the cluster very uneasy, my friend.”

Wolfgang cracks open an eye. “What do you want?”

His wristwatch reads 1:15 pm. It is too early to have this conversation with his cluster. Wolfgang throws the black covers aside and sits up heavily in bed. His head pounds, courtesy of a hangover from hell and the crazy disco music from last night’s clubbing, still ringing jarringly in his ears. He doesn’t bother covering up.

“What I want is for you to tell me what it is that you want.”

Lito places his hand on his bare shoulder, but the supportive touch burns through his skin, like some stifled desire that he thinks Wolfgang is not in the right state of mind to reciprocate, or perhaps Lito himself is not in the mood to act upon.

Wolfgang still thinks in possibilities and probabilities in regard to his cluster, like he isn’t really sharing a headspace with them, knowing everything about what they think and how they feel with 100% certainty.

He keeps the habit of guessing and being uncertain about these things out of a silly need for normalcy.

“I want you all to leave me the fuck alone.” He says that with no actual rancor in his voice sounding deeper and huskier from lack of use, almost groggily, as if the reason for his request is merely so that he could go back to sleep.

Lito knows that’s not the case. “Sorry, that can’t be done. Tell me the next best thing you want.”

Wolfgang turns his head to look at the Mexican sitting next to him on the bed. He likes those eyes of his, dark yet bright, surrounded by thick, curved lashes, a piece of art. Lito is good at lying, but somehow his eyes have always remained the most sincere thing Wolfgang has ever seen in his life. With all his honesty, Wolfgang knows his own eyes lie and conceal and manipulate all the time.

“I want you to fuck me.”

His request doesn’t startle Lito. He knows what happened between him and Will a few days ago. All of them do. Wolfgang fights the urge to grimace at the thought.

“Is it so I can feel you?”

“No. It’s because I want to feel me.”

Lito nods slowly, in understanding and acquiescence, and leans forward to claim Wolfgang's lips in a way he knows will leave Wolfgang disoriented and needy, like it is his first time, or perhaps his last. Lito’s clothes come off in a blur. Wolfgang lets him take charge, lets his body be pushed back until he’s lying on the satin sheet again with Lito hovering above him, leaving open-mouthed kisses along his collarbone and all the way down his chest.

He feels safe enough to close his eyes and let Lito do to him as his pleases. This is a feeling he barely allows himself to relish outside his cluster, perhaps only with Felix, but things with Felix have never been sexual no matter how close they both got to cross that line.

This is different, though. Nothing like masturbation where he has to be conscious about where his hand is going, how much pressure he needs to apply, how faster or slower he needs to go, to reach climax at the exact moment he wants. Here, he doesn’t need to think at all. And even if it is his hand and not Lito’s actually touching his own erection right now, he doesn’t feel it, he doesn’t register it at all. All he feels is a throbbing sense of pleasure, like a pulse under his touch, the ticking sound of a pendulum clock in an otherwise quiet room, an evading scent that he chases down through the dark. This kind of pleasure is grounding at the same time as it is liberating, an exercise in love, lust and trust.

He can’t remember why he had deprived himself of this pleasure for so long.

Lito doesn’t take long to prepare him and push into him with a grunt. He knows how much lube to use to keep him on edge, when Wolfgang is ready for another finger, when he is starting to feel a little uncomfortable and how to make him comfortable again. Lito is the perfect lover, attentive to the smallest sound Wolfgang makes, and Wolfgang makes very little sound during sex. For a brief, absurd moment, Wolfgang feels an ember of jealousy beneath the pile of ash collected in the pit of his heart, at Hernando for having someone like Lito as lover, at Lito for being physically there with him. Lito laughs as he keeps thrusting into him and hitting the right spot and missing on purpose every other time, and leans down to whisper into his ear, “you have me, mi corazón.”

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

There is a third presence in the room. Wolfgang opens his eyes.

“Here to play the voyeur, cop?”

Lito doesn’t stop. He pinches a nipple, licks into his belly button and tightens his hold around his cock. Then his next thrust brushes against his prostate and Wolfgang swallows a moan.

“You wanted me here.”

Wolfgang gives him a pointed look over Lito’s tilted head. “You could’ve not come.” He pants.

Will shakes his head with a half-sad, half-resigned smile on his face. “You know I come every single time you call me.”

Which doesn’t happen as often as his cluster likes. He isn’t just bad at asking for help. He hates doing it. He hates reliance. He hates dragging others into his own shit and being let down when the help he needs doesn’t come in time. Why ask for help and invite so much trouble when he could just do it on his own? The worst that could happen was if he’d die. Wolfgang has nothing against his own death. But his cluster apparently does.

Lito turns his head to look at Will, who is still standing at the foot of Wolfgang’s bed, eyes unabashedly resting on the Mexican’s ass, although his thoughts are tangled with those of the blond.

He wants to chide Wolfgang for his strict, and in his opinion, ridiculous, adherence to the principle of self-reliance, but Lito cuts through his thoughts, “Don't you want to join us?”

The playfulness in his tone clashes horribly with Wolfgang’s heavy breathing and Will’s gloomy expression, but none of them really cares.

Will takes off his clothes without any ceremony or being asked twice, and joins the two in bed. Lito moves aside to give Will more access to Wolfgang’s prone body wet with sweats and flushed in arousal. He starts kissing Wolfgang’s bruised mouth with so much fervor it leaves both of them breathless for a while.

“I’ve missed this.” He kisses along Wolfgang’s defined jawline as he tangles his hand into his short dirty blond hair, tilting his head back to better reach the underside of his jaw, lips trailing across the long column of his throat, then going all the way back up to take his mouth. “I’ve missed you.”

Wolfgang sighs into the kiss. “I’m here now.”

Chapter Text

Riley visits him.

“You’re bleeding.”

He times the grimace he couldn’t hold in upon seeing her with pulling out a broken shard of glass from his palm.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to see her. It’s just that his mental blocks have fallen down without him noticing. And he can’t even blame pain and blood loss for that slip-up. One would think he has gotten used to those little nuisances a long time ago.  

“It’s nothing.”

The glass had been aimed at his throat while his hands had been held tightly behind his back, and he barely managed to wrench one of his arms free to block the deadly swing with his open palm. Back in Berlin for less than two months and he’s already been in more fights than he had been in a whole year. Maybe it was a mistake coming back here, but he still has unfinished business amidst these ongoing gang wars and the ever looming threat of the BPO.

This time, there were five of them - all hired by Sebastian Fuchs, who is now hellbent on having Wolfgang's head served on a silver platter as revenge - and Felix was back at the safe house, sleeping off a hangover. Three of them were armed with assault rifles and all he had was a single Glock. By all means, he could have gotten royally fucked up, but somehow he made it out with only a shard of glass stuck in his hand and a few bruises here and there, while Fuchs' hired guns had bullet holes all over their bodies thanks to the rifle Wolfgang had managed to grab from the guy who was still holding to his arm like it was going to stop Wolfgang from fighting back.

His injury is really nothing compared to what it could have been.

You could have been dead, a voice, which sounds like Kala’s, but Wolfgang knows for a fact that is not hers, whispers almost patronizingly inside his head. She wouldn’t patronize him. She would just give him a look, a knowing one, admonishing perhaps, almost resigned, immensely sad, and that would be it. Somehow that look would have made him feel worse than if she had just said those words.

“Why didn’t you ask for help?”

Wolfgang gives her a look, and makes a sharp hiss as he pours saline on the gash. “I could handle it.”

Riley shakes her head in mild exasperation and grabs his bleeding, now stinging like hell, hand into her soft, clean ones. “Here, let me help.”

Wolfgang wants to say no. He knows how to disinfect a wound and wrap a gauze around it. But there is something fierce in Riley’s eyes that kills the protest in his throat.

She wipes the blood away more gently than Wolfgang remembers anyone has ever done for him, and begins bandaging his hand with so much care as if she is trying to create a work of art.

“You’re lucky it doesn’t need stitches.”

“I don't mind stitches.”

“No, you don’t, do you,” she says with a sad smile, as if Wolfgang's words mean something beyond their literal sense. She has kind eyes. The kind that are ready to unsee all the ugliness in you if you just show her your heart. Wolfgang remembers what Sun had said almost a month ago on the rooftop of that high-rise. Maybe he does have a heart; he just doesn’t know how to deal with it.

But that’s alright, it’s Sun. She shows up out of nowhere and is gone before Wolfgang could do anything about it, like the voice of reason, intruding on his plans uninvited but not all that unwelcome.

“Why are you here?”

“Do I need a reason?” She gives his now carefully bandaged hand one last look and nods in approval at her neat handiwork.

Wolfgang clenches and unclenches his fingers experimentally, rotating his wrist. It’s a good wrap. But he doesn’t say it out loud. He doesn’t even thank her, but that’s only because he knows she doesn’t want one.

“You could be somewhere better, with someone better.”

“Will?” She gives him one of those mysterious smiles; the one that seems to say, I can see something about you that you think you’ve hidden so well; probably the cracks, the debris behind his facade, the falling bricks in his walls; an unsightly scar. “He thinks about you all the time. I think, excluding me, you’re the one he’s most obsessed with.”

Wolfgang clenches his jaw. “He’s just a paranoid, overprotective mother hen.”

“Who thinks about how huge and wonderful your cock feels in his hand?”

It is not so much the words, but the almost teasing expression on her face, that throws him. He soon takes back control over his own startled expression and schools it into a flirtatious one, but the victorious smile still lingers on her red lips for having caught him off-guard.

“If you want to fuck me, all you need is ask.” He quirks a brow, tilts his head to one side, and allows the golden sunbeams coming through the window to bathe his face in its warm glow. He knows his eyes look like some dazzling gem, like sapphire, in the sunlight.   

“Wolfgang,” she takes his face into her hands and leans in close. Her long, cool fingers caress his face in a way that reminds him of something he hasn’t thought about for years, loving but without any trace of lust, unconditional and safe, giving and wanting nothing back, like a mother’s touch. “Let us in.”

Wolfgang sucks in a breath.

“You already are.”

Chapter Text

The problem is, sometimes he wishes that they weren’t. Sometimes he really wants to be left alone.

The problem is, he is just tired. But he can’t take a rest with all those voices murmuring inside his head, all those watchful eyes monitoring his every step. Pitying him. Reproaching him. Needing him. Rejecting him. Seeing him and yet, not really seeing him.

Sometimes the only other person he wants to look at is Felix. There is no judgment in those big blue eyes of his. Felix grew up in the same shit that he did. He understands everything about him without needing to be inside Wolfgang’s head. He is no stranger to stinking blood stains that have long ceased to be offending enough to require cleaning up. He understands the inevitable. The necessary evil that sometimes isn’t all that necessary, and the other times, not all that evil. If Felix didn’t love women so much and Wolfgang wasn’t a sensate with his tattered soul already stitched to someone else’s, he would have fallen in love with Felix a long time ago.  

Or maybe he already has. What difference would that make anyway? Love is abstract. Wolfgang has no use or need for the abstract.

But Felix’s touch is concrete. It is real and Felix gives it to him freely, no questions asked, no conditions set, wanting nothing back. And he isn’t in his cluster, an extension of his psyche, so he isn’t this forgiving to Wolfgang by design. Wolfgang could do with that touch right now.

“Hey, Wolfie. You aren’t dying, are you?”

Wolfgang leans back from the sudden hug he initiated and allows his eyes to linger on Felix for a very long time.

“I am. But in a very gradual pace. At least for now.”

“Ahh, you’re in your macabre mood again. What do you say we go out tonight? We could find some gorgeous company.” He wiggles his brows in a way that is both ridiculous and endearing at the same time, something only Felix could pull off.

They both know going out to clubs that are practically swarming by Fuchs’ men is asking for trouble, but they have long lost the ability to give a shit.  

“Are you saying you aren’t in gorgeous company already?” He teases in a parody of a tone that he uses for the people he sleeps with; random people that he meets in clubs or hooks up with on Tinder; he hasn’t done that in a long time, and he wonders when he stopped being bothered by not taking a chance to sleep around.

Felix snorts at his silly, flirtatious tone and grabs Wolfgang’s face in his large hands. “Wolfie, Wolfie, Wolfie. You know you’re the most gorgeous thing in my life, right? But like, a very antique and precious gem. Stolen, too. One that you have to put inside a glass and just appreciate its beauty from a distance. No touching or anything. Just watching and admiring.”

The ‘what the fuck are you talking about?’ dies on his tongue at seeing how serious Felix looks, an unsettling expression on his usually lax and carefree face. “You don’t need to be careful with me. I won't break.”

He isn’t sure what it is he is asking for. Is it more emotional support? Less of it? Some sort of sexual gratification? But he never needed that with Felix, and he doesn’t think he should start now.  

“No. But you could get stolen. If I touched you like the others do, if I became like them, they’d take you from me and then what would I do, Wolfie? How could I take you back?”

Them? The random people at the clubs or on Tinder? No, he doesn’t mean them. He means the cluster. He means Lito’s firm grip around his cock, Will’s soft, persistent lips trailing wet kisses across his jaw; he means the taste of Sun’s mouth on the cigarette they share, Nomi’s hot breaths caressing the back of his neck, Capheus’ strong thighs holding him in place. But more than anything, he means Kala’s soft smiles, her lingering looks of lust and love, the feathery touch of her hands burning through the skin and reaching all the way into his heart.

Felix is saying that he can’t compete with that kind of love. That he can’t compete with Kala if he was to become something more to Wolfgang than he already was.

“You won't have to. I will always come back.”

Felix smiles and ruffles Wolfgang’s hair in affection. Wolfgang still thinks about kissing him, but he doesn’t share the thought. He is grateful that Felix isn’t part of his cluster, listening in on every stray thought and grabbing at every wayward desire. And he loves Felix for that. He loves him in a different way than he loves his cluster, but no less than that.

And he thinks he will tell Felix one of these days that he loves him. And perhaps then they could kiss and it would not feel to either of them that the kiss was stealing the other away.

Perhaps, one of these days, things would finally be okay.

Chapter Text

He visits Capheus.

“Hey,” he greets Wolfgang first, with a wide, joyous smile, as if it is not Wolfgang who has intruded on his privacy and busy schedule with his usual grim expression and grimmer demands. “You don’t come here too often.”

Capheus wants him to visit more often, and it still baffles Wolfgang that he does. Capheus brings hope, love, courage and optimism wherever he goes, and he's so close to becoming a president now. Wolfgang, on the other hand, is a fugitive and a killer, carrying with him an infinite reservoir of feeling unworthy and vengeful.

Why would anyone want that? Wolfgang doesn’t need an answer to that, so he shields the thought behind a fierce, admonishing scowl and grim hostility that at that moment he feels more toward himself than anybody else in the world.

“I want you to tell them I’m alright.”

“Are you?” Capheus tilts his head to the side, giving him a once-over. The dark circles were still there under his haunted eyes when he checked his face in the mirror this morning. He has a week’s worth of stubble covering his pallid skin. His hair is longer now, stuck in every direction. Self-care has not been high on his to-do list for the past couple of months.

Ever since the end of Whispers and Lila. Ever since the coming back to Berlin and the never-ending wars with Fuchs’ men, Lila’s avenging cluster and the secret BPO agents still hellbent on dragging his ass back to the torture and experiment lab.

Ever since he fled his cluster and lost his way back.

“Does it matter?” He deflects with a raised brow and a steady gaze, not able to lie, not really in the mood for the truth, either.

Capheus’ expression darkens and Wolfgang hates himself a little more for that. At this point, he has developed an addiction to self-hate. The pin prick of the injection that pierces smoothly through his tissues, the sharp pain and the droplets of blood collecting on his damaged skin, the telltale signs of feeling and being alive.

Wolfgang devours that feeling like a starved man feasting on a rotten animal corpse.

“We love you, Wolfgang. Of course it does.”

Love. The word tastes like ancient blood on the back of his tongue. A distant memory of a still open wound, something that his mind is making every effort to push out of his skull like it doesn’t belong to him; like he isn’t worthy of it; like it doesn’t make any sense to him, so what does it matter if he loses it?

It doesn't. Does it?

Wolfgang shakes his head to disperse the thought. “If you love me, then stop pestering me.”

The frown deepens on Capheus’ face, a look of hurt that simultaneously cuts through Wolfgang. He wonders if he’s feeling the hurt through Capheus or if he’s just really that disillusioned that he can no longer justify his actions to himself.

“What do you mean? We’re just concerned about you.”

Capheus’ confusion hurts, too. But this kind of hurt is different. It’s completely his own.

“Well, fucking don’t be. I missed you, can’t you see?,” desperation bleeds into his voice and his eyes start to sting. “But I can’t fucking visit any of you without being pestered about my fucking wellbeing every goddamn time. I want you all to stop looking at me like I’m about to fucking break.”

He wants to keep talking until his voice cracks and the tears fall and he can breathe again. But the alarmed look on Capheus’ face stops him. He chokes on the next words, not wishing to turn this into yet another reason for his cluster to be worried about him.

“Wolfgang...I…,” Capheus also seems to be struggling with the words inside his head. He finally gives up. “Alright. I think you know best. If you say everything’s fine, if you’re doing all you can to make everything fine, then I believe you. Come here, brother.”

He opens his arms in an invitation for a hug, and Wolfgang takes some tentative steps forward. Capheus throws his arms around his shoulders, pulls him closer and holds him firmly against his chest, breathing in his presence. Wolfgang slowly lifts his arms and hugs back.

The cluster stops asking him if he is fine. Eventually, Wolfgang thinks, he will be.

Chapter Text

Kala visits him.

He feels her presence like a gust of hot air whipping against his bare back before he sees the wild flow of her lush hair in the fogged up bathroom mirror. His hand moves on its own volition (not his own, hers, but he allows it to happen) to clear the mist away. In the mirror, his haunted blue eyes turn dark and imploring, his bearded, squared jaw becomes smooth and delicate, and when he opens his mouth to speak, the words are not his, and neither is the voice.

“You can’t fool me, Wolfgang.”

He turns his back to Kala’s reflection in the mirror and walks out of the bathroom on laden feet. Water runs down his spine, and the heat clinging to his skin turns cold in the airy bedroom. He thinks about getting dressed, but he is not in the mood to dry himself up first. He sits on the edge of his bed, wet and naked, and Kala sits down next to him in her floral crop top and taupe slim-fit pants.

“I know. Why do you think I’ve been keeping away?”

Lito would believe him. Capheus would give him the benefit of the doubt. Sun wouldn’t care much. Will would bite his tongue. Riley would give a sigh, but otherwise, would not pry. Nomi would shake her head in exasperation, and give up. But Kala...she knows everything and she cares too much and she doesn’t know when to stop.

“I’m not going to ask you what’s wrong. I think I know what.”

Of course she does. Because Wolfgang let her in once, showed her his darkest desires and fears, his most terrible memories, the scars and the nightmares and where the blood was coming from and how he couldn’t stop the bleeding, and he had hoped that she would take one look at the mangled, bloody mess that he was and flee, but she stayed, sinking through the pores of his skin, and he doesn’t know how to make her leave now.  

His life is a swamp and she doesn’t belong.

“You feel empty,” her voice brushes across his face, soft and tender. Her hand resting lightly on his thigh. “All these people inside your head, all this unconditional love and pure affection and undivided support, and you still feel empty. You feel...undeserved.”

She’s inside his head, running along the soft tissues of his brain on high-heeled shoes, chasing after every stray thought that tries to outrun her.

But she catches them all, every single time. Wolfgang wonders if his brain is bleeding because of all that running around.

“It didn’t use to be like this.” He curls his fingers into the black satin sheet under him. He should be cold, but Kala is sitting in the sun on the rooftop in Mumbai, and the heat on her skin washes over his in gentle waves. “I always felt justified because everything I did was inevitable.” He looks up, locking eyes with Kala. She must be the bravest of them all, sitting with him through this trauma. “You told me that it’s not, that there’s always another way, and now you’re asking me if I’m alright. What do you think?”

With the next exhale, he is no longer sitting naked on a bed in a run-down apartment in Berlin. He is in a dark basement, standing in front of Whispers and Lila, both chained to the wall in tattered clothes and signs of violence painted in faded green and harsh purple all along their bodies. He’s holding a gun. His cluster are standing behind him, but none of them are physically there. They can’t stop him. He can’t stop it. The itch under the skin, the tremor in his hand, his finger sweating on the trigger. The yearning for blood, the sweetness of revenge. Oh but how much he hungers .

“Wolfgang, don’t do this,” Will grabs the wrist that is holding the gun, but he doesn’t have the power to move it aside.

Kala steps in front of him, blocking his view of his targets. She looks the same she did back in his uncle’s mansion, after Wolfgang destroyed that bastard’s face and told her to marry Rajan because he’s a monster and she deserves better.

“Wolfgang, please.” She is crying, and she is begging, and Wolfgang wishes the disgust he feels at himself would be able to give her what she wants, but he doesn’t know how not killing these two would make anything better.

“You have to protect your heart,” Sun says cooly, as she places a hand on his chest, over the heavy thumping of his blood pumping organ that has never meant anything to him in its inane symbolic sense.

“I don’t have any,” he thinks back at her as he pulls the trigger, over and over and over again.

Kala is trying to pull him out of the memories but Wolfgang wants her to see everything from his perspective. She has come this far, she can’t back out now. There is no way out of this hell but downward.

He takes her to three months ago, inside another dark basement that looks, for all intents and purposes, like a torture chamber. One reason for coming back to Berlin was to make himself an easy target, to draw Lila’s cluster away from his own and toward himself. And now, after weeks of painstaking scheming, he has finally captured one of Lila’s clustermates; the Japanese one. He is the most dangerous of them all, and had been the closest to Lila. He has to go first, but before that, he has to tell Wolfgang everything about his cluster. He has to give up their identities and their locations so Wolfgang could get rid of them, once and for all.

Wolfgang’s methods of torture and information extraction are not as sophisticated and technologically-advanced as Whispers’. But they are more effective, more to the point, more brutal. At this point, he looks like a man that has nothing left to lose. He looks like a complete psychopath. In a sense, he does look like Whispers.

He throws up a little in his mouth at the thought. Or perhaps, it’s the acrid stink of blood and burnt human flesh in the air.

There are worse things than dying. As there are worse things than killing. There is always something worse than what humanity can accomplish. Wolfgang never killed for kicks. It was easier to ignore the horrors he had committed, easier to justify them, if he thought he did them for the ‘right’ reasons, never mind his grasp on right and wrong was slippery at best. But he felt the brutal madness, the gut wrenching joy, of killing Lila and Whispers in that gritty, inhuman surrounding where no one, but Wolfgang, could hear them beg and scream. Killing them was, first and foremost, to ensure the safety of his cluster. But it was also a way to satiate his own hunger for revenge.

Never before had he felt more like a monster, standing before those mangled bodies still hung on the wall, their screams and pleas still ringing in his ears, the stench of blood so strong he could almost taste it in his mouth, his head spinning with a kind of delirious euphoria that he felt like throwing up. And as he turned around and was faced with seven pairs of eyes staring at him in abject horror, Wolfgang couldn’t take it, he shut them all out, shut their concerned voices up, he fled to a dark corner where no one could reach him, where their misplaced concern and harrowing disappointment wouldn’t touch him; he only had enough presence of mind to call Felix and tell him to come and pick him up before he lost himself to utter insanity.

He rejected his cluster before they could gather their senses and reject him. It made perfect sense to him at the time. Plus, his business was not over yet. He still had seven more people to kill and he didn’t want his cluster to be a witness, let alone an accomplice, to any of that. They didn’t deserve to be a part of the swamp that was Wolfgang’s entire life. They deserved better. They deserved to live free of the looming threat of Lila’s avenging cluster without having to get their own hands dirty. Wolfgang would gift them that. For everything that they had done for him. For every smile that they put on his face. For every comforting touch and loving word that he knew he did not deserve but lusted after like the depraved man he was.

This was his repentance.

Killing is the only thing he is truly good at. They have to understand. He lost his innocence when he was too young to know he had to fight tooth and nail to protect it. And now, he doesn’t really want it back, even if it was offered to him on a silver platter. Innocence would prevent his finger from pulling the trigger at the crucial time. But someone in this cluster needs to be always ready to shoot, torture and fight back. That someone has always been Wolfgang.

“Now you know.” Are you going to turn back? I won’t judge you for that.

There are tear tracks on Kala’s face. Something’s broken in her eyes that will probably never mend whenever she looks at Wolfgang, if she ever will after the things he just showed her. But she grabs his face into her delicate hands instead of slapping him across the face with them, her touch firm but tender, like she wants him to know that he could run away all he wants, but she will not go anywhere. She will stay right where he can find her.

“Wolfgang...I always knew, but I didn’t understand. I’m sorry. We all are. We thought we were the better guys. We tried to change you into something better . We judged you based on our own perceptions and experiences. We’re sorry.”

She doesn’t make any sense but Wolfgang gathers enough from the firm press of her hands to his cheeks and the wetness of her eyes that she is not leaving.

The thought feels like a punch to the gut. The pain is of a welcoming kind; the kind that reminds him he is still alive, that he has to keep fighting back, that the time to give up is not now.  Wolfgang blinks, coming out of several months worth of a stupor.

He had closed his eyes, opting to go blind, afraid of coming face to face with the void, the monster staring back at him from the abyss, but he has dared to open his eyes now, allowed himself the luxury of hoping for a better outcome, and his cluster appears in his line of vision one by one.

Every single one of them. Looking at him with love, understanding and affection. Lighting up the pitch darkness in his heart. Reaching out to him to haul him up and out of the hole into which he has sunk.

Wolfgang stares at their extended hands, anxiety clawing at his skin, tearing at his resolve. What if this is an illusion? What if he reaches out a hand and touches nothing but air? What if this is just the continuation of a nightmare that doesn’t seem to ever let go of his broken mind?

“But what if you reached back and your fingers touched ours and we held onto you tight and never let go?” Nomi says with a wavering voice and quivering eyes. “Wolfgang, we need you back.”

Wolfgang meets every pair of those anxious eyes, looking at him with the kind of gut-wrenching fearfulness that a parent would feel at the bed of their comatose child. “I’m not going to stop killing. I’m not going to start caring. I’m not going to become a better person just so you all feel comfortable about me.”

Riley gives him one of those mysterious smiles that she seems to have only reserved for him. “We know. For us, the way you are, it’s already perfect.”

Wolfgang turns to Will. “And what do you say, cop?”

Will doesn’t quite smile, not with those hard-set eyes and the thinly-pressed lips and imploring gaze, but something about his presence feels comforting in a way that Wolfgang finds himself gravitating toward it, like a man starved.

“I say, your darkness is as much a part of me as Riley’s light is, and I’ve been a fucking idiot for trying to reject it, to reject you , all this time.”

“Where would we all be, without your darkness?” Sun asks in her cool, flat tone, giving him a meaningful lopsided smile.

Suddenly an arm drapes around his neck, pulling his head forward. It’s Lito’s. Always the one changing the momentum, making Wolfgang’s nighttime fears look ridiculous in the light. “Anyway, staying too much in the sun is bad for your skin, right?”

And then he finds himself in the middle of a group hug, arms reaching out toward him, draping around him, heads leaning close to his, warm breaths ghosting over his chilled skin.

At that moment, Wolfgang decides, he doesn't want to feel cold, ever again.

“Welcome home, brother,” Capheus smiles wide and joyous at him and Wolfgang's own lips start to move upward.

“We are in this together, no matter what,” Kala’s voice washes over his frayed senses soothingly, and Wolfgang nods, losing himself into the warmth, and the comfort, and the love.  

Whispers is dead; Lila and her whole cluster, too, and also Fuchs, and most of key operatives inside BPO. But the war inside Wolfgang’s head is far from over.

One day, he will learn how to love himself the way his cluster loves him and then everything will be finally alright.

“Oh but how we learned to keep silent, to keep the screams locked in, to keep going despite the crippling pain, to keep away. 

We used to tell each other everything and die a little bit for each other's suffering. Now we keep the smile on and suffer alone.”

...For better or worse.