Parasite

The sound of loud footsteps, practically stomping, alerts the red one to his companion’s arrival. The front door is broken; it lies crooked on its hinges, and as such, the blue one can no longer use the slamming of the door to make his presence known. However, he’s always been adaptable, and the sound of his thick boots edging closer to the kitchen is as much as a warning as any.

“Hey,” the red one greets, forcing a welcoming smile onto his face that dims slightly when the blue one simply gives him a side-eyed glance. Yet, as much as the blue one is adaptable, the red one is stubborn. “I made dinner. Are you eating tonight?”

He was named once for the deep, scarlet color of his hair. But like most things in this house, that has faded away too, more of a strawberry blonde now than a cherry red.

“That depends,” the blue one replies, and then just to be difficult, he adds, “What are you trying to pass off as ‘dinner’ this time?”

The red one frowns, but he doesn’t take the bait. Instead, he lifts the lid off of a casserole dish, and the blue one curses internally when he smells it. Bastard, he thinks, bitterly. That’s cheating. He doesn’t want to give the red one the satisfaction though, so instead he shrugs and replies with a half-hearted, “I’ll eat, I guess.”

They sit down at the kitchen table. The red one fixing them each a plate as a silent peace offering. The blue one allows himself to whisper, “it’s good,” through a mouthful of food. Hoping his words are muffled enough that the red one might not hear. The genuine smile that breaks across the red one’s face is enough to tell him his hopes were futile. A part of him misses when things were simple like this. A part of him misses his friend, misses the days that the two of them were more than two strangers living in one small house. It’s that nostalgia that drives him to open his mouth – a punishment – disrupting the peace not even five minutes into their meal.

“I want to leave.”

The red one’s casual slouch drops away like a heavy overcoat, practically audible in the way it hits the floor. He shifts out of the amiable coworker role he’s been donning these days and back into the soldier they both know he is.

They’ve had this conversation many times. They’ve seen about all the ways it can go by now. That’s why when the red one narrows his eyes and bites out, “then leave,” the blue one is caught off guard. He’s stunned into silence for a moment. The red one hasn’t been this angry in a while. It makes him feel sort of bad. Some days he argues just for the sake of conversation, but there is something rawer about the red one’s words today.

“I can’t. It would be pointless if I were the only one to go. Nothing will change if you stay.”

“Why does anything need to change? We were fine just a couple of weeks ago.” The accusation in his words makes the blue one defensive, and when he gets defensive, he gets angry.

The blue one sneers. “I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to be a parasite-”

“We’re not parasites,” the red one corrects, savagely. He takes a moment to calm himself after noticing his companion’s flinch. “We’re passengers. We’re not hurting anyone.”

“That’s what they tell us. That’s what they say, but have you taken a good look at the host recently? She’s wasting away.”

And she is, though the blue one takes no pleasure in being right. He takes no pleasure in the greyish tone to the host’s skin, too far past jaundiced to be yellow anymore. Nor does he find the brittle, twine-like string on the host’s head amusing any longer. He used to make fun of her straw-colored hair, back when it was healthy, musing that it made her look more like a scarecrow playing pretend as a teenage girl. Now his words feel prophetic, and the memory of them on his tongue makes his throat coil and constrict, coveting the days he could joke around like that. Without consequence.

“We’re killing her,” the blue one adds, suddenly sad and exhausted.

“We’re not doing this for fun. It’s for survival,” the red one mutters. “We give her nice dreams to ease the pain.”

It’s the blue one’s turn to correct. “We give her nice dreams to repay the fact that we’re slowly killing her, and they don’t come free of charge. They’re addictive. She already spends most of her day sleeping. Pretty soon she won’t wake up at all.”

The red one frowns. Despite his training, his self-denial, he’s always been more sympathetic than any of his peers. He considers it a weakness, but the blue one thinks it’s a blessing.

“I don’t enjoy this,” the red one admits, and the blue one’s eyebrows raise. They stare each other down, the fight slowly seeping out of their bodies. Then, with a glance to the floor, the red one says, “Where would we even go?” It’s a whisper, but it is also a victory. He’s never bothered to ask something like that before, and the blue one is surprised by how proud the defeated look on the red one’s face makes him. He fights back a smile because he knows that he’s won, and bragging about it would just be rude at this point.