Dating the Moon Knight system. A bad day.
With Marc, people assume it's the injuries. It isn't the injuries.
He has been shot enough times to have opinions about calibers. He has coughed blood into a sink and then rinsed the sink. He has set a bone against a doorframe in a stairwell in Budapest and gone back out. Khonshu closes the wounds — not gently, not kindly, and never fast enough to spare him the part in the middle — and Marc has learned to think of pain the way other men think of weather. It arrives. You get on with it.
He has died. More than once now, and he's stopped keeping a number, because the number stopped being useful somewhere around the third time. He's crossed and come back and crossed again, and the thing nobody tells you about that is how quickly it becomes ordinary. He'd take a bad night of it over a bad day, and he means that literally, and it isn't bravado. It's arithmetic. A body is fixable. He has been given a great deal of proof.
For Marc, a bad day is arriving late.
Not late by hours — late by four minutes. Late enough that the work is finished and all that's left is the arithmetic afterward. There's no fight to interrupt, no one to pull out, nothing to be fast about. What's left is a room, and what's in the room, and Marc standing in the doorway of it doing the only thing left available to him, which is counting.
And then killing the men who did it. That's what's left. Not saving anyone, because there is no one — just the mechanical, unhurried, entirely successful business of ending the people who made the room the way it is. He is very good at it. He is better at it than at anything else in his life. And when it's over he walks out of a building where everyone is dead except him, and the ratio of that is a thing he carries down the stairs and into the car and to bed and into next week.
A bad day is one who begs.
They do, sometimes. Not the hard ones — the hard ones die swearing. The ones who beg are usually young and usually frightened and usually not lying, in that specific moment, when they say they'll do better. He believes them, some of them, and it changes nothing, because the decision was made before Marc came through the wall. Khonshu doesn't revisit. There is no appeal, no discretion, no space between the sentence and the hand carrying it out.
He goes home with their voices anyway. Not the ones who cursed him. The ones who said please, and meant it, and got the same as everybody else.
A bad day is a girl who didn't get one chance, didn't get pulled back from an early death like Marc did. A man who used his life poorly and would have got it right on the next go and doesn't have a second one to retry with. People who are simply gone, permanently, at the first mistake — while Marc has been handed a second and a third and a tenth, and got up every time, and cannot for the life of him point at what he did with any of them that was worth the trade.
That's the one that gets him. Not guilt exactly. Accounting. He's been extended credit he did not ask for on terms he didn't read, and the interest is other people, and he cannot make the numbers come out.
He could end it. That's the part he'd rather not have understood as clearly as he does.
He knows how the deal breaks. He has known for years. He was at the bottom of himself on a mountain when it was offered and he took it, and he'd tell you he took it to live, and that's true, and it's also not the whole of it — because he has had a great many exits since and has taken none of them.
He hates it. That's real. He hates the Khonshu's voice, hates the debt, hates being a tool with an opinion. He also needs it, and not just for the healing. Without it he is a man with this skill set and nothing to point it at, and he knows exactly what that man does with himself.
So he stays. And he resents staying. And both of those are permanent conditions rather than a problem with a solution, and he has stopped expecting either one to resolve.
You know the shape of a bad day before Marc's through the door.
He's not injured, or not much. That's the tell, actually — the bad missions are usually the ones where he comes home mostly intact. He's quiet in the specific way that isn't tired. He goes and stands in the shower for a long time and the water is far too hot. He eats whatever you put in front of him without registering it. He does the dishes on autopilot.
He won't tell you. Not that night. He'll answer questions, badly, in the shortest available number of words, and none of the answers will be lies — Marc doesn't lie to you, he just makes the truth as small as it will go.
What you've learned is that there's nothing to fix and nothing to say, and that the correct thing is to be in the room and not require anything of him. Leave a light on. Don't make it a conversation. Let him do the dishes even though there are four plates and it takes him twenty minutes.
Sometimes, very late, he'll say one sentence about it. Never the whole thing. One detail, offered flat, apropos of nothing — the age of somebody, or what a room smelled like, or that one of them had a school bag.
You: You couldn't have got there faster.
Marc: I know.
You: Marc.
Marc: I know. That's not — I know.
He doesn't sleep those nights. He lies there with a hand on your back and stays awake with it, and in the morning the bed on his side is made and the coffee is on and he says he's fine.
And a week later, or a month, when it's stopped being the thing eating him alive, he'll mention it again in the car. One more sentence. That's how it comes out of him — a paragraph a year, in pieces, in the wrong order, in vehicles or the middle of a walk.
You never ask for the rest. He knows you'd take it if he offered. That's most of what he needed.
🌙 🌙 🌙
For Steven, it starts with the ceiling being wrong.
That's usually the first thing — a ceiling he doesn't know, in a light he can't place, and the two or three seconds before the rest of it arrives. Then the questions come in their usual order. Where. When. How long.
Where is sometimes answerable. A hotel, a room above a bar, a flat with somebody else's post on the mat. Sometimes a car. Twice a floor. Once a grassy hilltop with a dislocated jaw.
When is harder, and how long is the one that matters. He's learned to reach for the date before he reaches for his shoes, and he's learned to reach for it somewhere that isn't his own phone, because his own phone tells him what day it is and not what he's lost. Three days is a bad one. Three days has happened. He does the arithmetic standing up, in whatever he's wearing, and he gets a number, and the number is the size of the hole.
Then he checks himself over. He's got a system for it now, which is its own kind of terrible — hands first, then arms, then whatever he can see in a mirror if there is one. The injuries have no story attached. A split knuckle, a deep bruise across the ribs, a cut somewhere he can't reach that's already half-closed. He has no idea what any of it is from and no way to find out. He's stopped flinching at his own reflection, mostly.
The blood is worse than the injuries. There's often blood, and there's often more of it than his own wounds would account for, and there is no answer to the question that raises. He's learned not to ask it in his head, because his head will simply keep going.
And the flat, when he gets back to it, is exactly as he left it, or isn't. Either is bad. Either is information he can't use.
No note.
That's the part he could not make anyone outside understand, if he ever tried to explain it, which he won't.
People imagine it's an intercom. That there's a channel — a bit of shared interior somewhere the three of them can put things and pick things up. It isn't like that at all. Reaching another one of them takes effort, real effort, from both ends, and if the other end is exhausted or hurt or simply doesn't want to, there is nothing on Steven's side that can force it. He can shout into it for an hour and get weather. Just the sense of somebody there, not answering or not able to.
So he doesn't know whether it's over. That's the specific texture of a bad day — not the missing time, the unresolved missing time. Is there a thing still coming. Is somebody looking for this body. Should he be going to work on Monday or should he not be at this address at all. He has no way to check, no one to ask, and the only two people in the universe with the answer are inside his own skull declining to come to the phone.
Sometimes they tell him afterward. Sometimes Marc will surface days later and give him a version, compressed, sanded down, with the worst of it filed off — and Steven can always tell it's been sanitized, and never says so, because a clean version is more than he had that morning.
Sometimes nobody says anything ever, and it simply becomes one of the gaps, and it joins the others.
Early on he used to wish he was alone in there.
He'd never say it now. He'd deny having thought it, if you asked him directly, and then he'd go quiet, because Steven's a bad liar and worse at it with you.
But the bad days are the ones that grant the wish. That's the trick of it. He gets exactly what he asked for on the mornings when he wakes in a strange room with somebody's blood on his cuff and no answer from either of them — a body entirely to himself, the whole thing, sole occupancy, and nothing else in it but him. No one to consult. No one to be angry at. Nobody to tell him what happened.
He has never in his life been lonelier than in the sole possession of a body he shares with two other men.
They think the illness is the crowding. It isn't. It's the going away.
You've come to know a bad-day Steven from the doorway.
He's talking. That's what throws people who don't know him — he's not silent, he's chatty, brightly and continuously and about absolutely nothing. He'll narrate the kettle. He'll tell you a fact about kettles. He's filling the air because the alternative is what's underneath it, and he'll keep filling it for as long as you let him.
And he's checking things. The date on his phone, then the date on the oven, then the date on his phone again. The lock. The window. The batteries in the smoke alarm. He'll do a slow lap of the flat that he'd tell you was tidying. The flat does not actually get cleaner.
He won't ask you what day it is. He'd rather look it up eleven times than say it out loud.
What works, you found out by accident, is being an external record. Not comfort — information. You were here Tuesday. You called Wednesday and I didn't pick up. This was Thursday, I've got the receipt. Boring, checkable, dated things about the world, handed over without ceremony.
Steven: You don't have to do that.
You: I know.
Steven: It's just — it does help. Rather a lot, actually.
He sleeps badly and gets up early and reads something he's read before, which is the tell. New books are for good weeks. On a bad day he wants the ones where he already knows what happens.
And at some point he'll ask, in a very light voice, whether you'd mind terribly telling him if he ever comes back different. Not injured. Different. He asks it about twice a year and he always makes it sound like a joke, and it has never once been a joke, and you always say yes.
🌙 🌙 🌙
For Jake, violence isn't it. Let's clear that out first, because everyone gets it wrong in the same direction.
He sleeps fine. He genuinely does — he'll do something in a stairwell at one in the morning that would put most men in a chair for a year, and be asleep by three, and be pleasant at breakfast. He isn't performing that. There's no delayed bill that comes due at four a.m. He looked at the arithmetic a long time ago, decided some people are a subtraction, and has never once revisited it. Marc lies awake over the ones who begged. Jake remembers their faces and feels approximately nothing, and if you asked him about it he'd shrug and say somebody has to be able to do it.
So a bad day isn't blood and death. A bad day is a problem that violence doesn't solve.
It's the ones he can't fix.
A kid in a bad house, and the bad house is legal. A woman who won't leave, who has her reasons, who is not wrong about her reasons. A landlord, a court, a system, a form. A situation with a clear villain who is untouchable — not hard to reach, untouchable, in the sense that reaching him would make everything worse for the person Jake is trying to help.
Because Jake has exactly one tool. It's an outstanding tool. It's the best tool in the room ninety percent of the time and he is very, very good with it, and there is a whole category of human misery it does absolutely nothing for. He'll stand in a hallway with his hands open and nothing to do with them and it makes him feel about six inches tall.
That's the thing to understand about him. Jake's not a violent man who found a use for it. He's a useful man whose only currency happens to be violence, and on the days it won't spend, he isn't anything.
He'll go looking for a way anyway. He'll spend eleven hours on it. He'll find a guy, and the guy will know a guy, and it still won't work, and he'll come home at four in the morning having accomplished exactly nothing and be in a mood you know to stay out of the kitchen for.
The other one is being used.
He is the one the other two pull out when it has to be ugly. That's the arrangement, unspoken, never negotiated — Steven can't and Marc won't, so it's Jake, every time, and he takes it because if he doesn't, one of them will have to, and he'd rather they didn't have to.
But there are stretches where that's all he gets. Surfaced for the thing, shelved after the thing. No morning, no meal, no ordinary Tuesday afternoon. Hands and a job and back in the drawer, back in the black box. He wakes up already in the moment he's needed, and it's finished and he's gone again.
And the worst version is when he catches himself being grateful for a bad night, because a bad night is still hours, and he gets the least of those to himself of the three.
Steven: You were up Thursday.
Jake: For forty minutes.
Steven: I didn't know it was only —
Jake: Forget it. It's fine.
He'd never call it unfair. He doesn't have the vocabulary for that and wouldn't use it if he did. What he does is get spiteful — small things start going missing, plans get inconvenienced, and none of them will connect it to the fact that nobody has let Jake see an afternoon in three weeks.
And once in a long while there's a day where the tool works perfectly and it turns out he was wrong.
Not often. He's careful and he checks, and he's been right about people for years. But it has happened. He has been certain, and correct in every particular except the one that mattered, and afterward there is no fixing it and nobody to be angry at except a man he has to keep operating.
He doesn't spiral about it the way Marc would. He doesn't do penance. He files it, and it's genuinely filed, and he could tell you about it in an even voice over dinner.
But he counts them. There's a number, he knows exactly what it is, and he will never say it out loud to anyone including you.
You know a bad-day Jake by the cooking.
Far too much of it. Three or four things at once, all evening, the good knife out, the radio loud — and he won't sit down, he'll stand at the counter and eat off the pan and keep going. Whatever he couldn't do out there, he can do this. He can put a meal in front of somebody. It's the one thing on the list that's still available.
He won't talk about it. Ask directly and you'll get it's handled, which in this case means the opposite. Push and he'll go out for a couple of hours and come back level.
What works is not asking. Sit in the kitchen and let him feed you and complain about something small and unrelated — the neighbor, the hot water, anything with a solvable problem in it. He'll fix it immediately and be visibly better afterward, and you both know exactly what that was, and neither of you will ever mention it.
And on the worst ones he'll say something once, at the counter, with his back to you.
Jake: There was a kid.
You: Yeah?
Jake: Yeah.
That's all you'll get. 💜 💜 💜 Been sick a few days. Have some angst.
