The Confession

The silence that followed the dimensional bleed was deafening.

Toby sat frozen, his mind scrambling to process the impossibility of what they had just witnessed. He had seen his own death. He had seen his own marriage. He slowly turned his head to look at Kael.

Kael was destroyed.

The tough, tattooed exterior had entirely collapsed. Kael was bent forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his face buried in his hands. He was shaking. A harsh, ragged sob tore its way out of his throat, echoing loudly over the sound of the washing machines.

"Kael?" Toby whispered, his voice trembling.

Kael didn't look up. "I'm sorry," he choked out, the words muffled by his bruised hands. "Oh God, Toby, I am so sorry."

Toby swallowed hard, the old defenses rising up. "For what? For shoving me into lockers, or for whatever that... that ghost story was?"

Kael finally dropped his hands. His face was wet with tears, his dark eyes red and wide with raw, unfiltered agony. "For all of it. For high school. For making you feel like you were nothing. You saw that first vision. That was how close I was, Toby. I was so angry, so messed up inside, and I took it out on you because you were quiet. Because you let me."

He swiped a hand across his jaw, a bitter, self-deprecating laugh escaping his lips. "You want to know why I do this?" He gestured vaguely to his tear-away pants and the glitter on his skin. "Why I take my clothes off for drunk strangers at two in the morning?"

Toby remained silent, his heart aching in a way it hadn't in a decade.

"Because after I graduated, I realized what a monster I had been to you," Kael confessed, his voice dropping to a raw whisper. "I realized I didn't deserve to be a person. So I made myself into a body. Just meat. Something people can look at and throw dollar bills at, but nobody actually has to care about. I punished myself."

Toby stared at him. The man he had feared, the man he had secretly yearned for, had been carrying the exact same weight of their traumatic history, just on different shoulders.

Kael looked at the empty space by the folding table where their ghostly, married counterparts had stood just moments before. A look of profound, desperate yearning crossed his face.

"I saw that," Kael whispered, tears spilling over his lashes again. "I saw us folding towels. I saw the ring." He looked back at Toby, his eyes begging for a mercy he didn't feel he deserved. "I want that, Toby. I want the folding. I want the quiet. I don't want to be the monster anymore."