BZRK: Reloaded (BZRK 2)

Too much.

She couldn’t break. Maybe the day would come when she broke, but not yet. So she smiled and so did Keats. It felt like the first genuine smile for either in quite a while.

“Sorry, had to save your life first,” Keats said. “Duty before booty.”

“You shouldn’t always be the good boy, Keats,” she teased. “Don’t you know that messed-up girls like me prefer bad boys?”

“You are toying with me.”

“I used to break my toys,” she said.

“Is that a warning?”

“I wouldn’t break you. I might bruise you a little . . .”

“Okay, that’s quite enough.”

“Might bend you. There could be some chafing . . .”

Keats grinned, unable to manage a stern expression. “Now you’re going past toying to torturing.”

“Yes, I am.”

“It’s cruel.”

“Mmm. I’m trying not to be the goody goody.”

“No one thinks you’re the goody goody,” he said.

“You sure?” she asked, her tone rueful. “Jin needs me, even Lear needs me, if there really is a Lear, but I failed them, didn’t I?”

Keats glanced at the driver. He didn’t seem to be listening, and they were talking in whispers. Keats leaned closer. “Listen to me, Plath—”

“It’s Sadie on this trip,” she interrupted. “The lawyer and the others know me by my real name. So just for this trip, let’s not play crazy little BZRK games. Let’s act like real, normal people.”

“Sadie,” he said, trying it out. Liking it. Feeling flattered by the right to use it. “Do you want to know my real name?”

“Keats will do. I like it, actually. It suits you. You could totally be a poet.”

Veer away from tragedy, back onto safe ground.

We take the names of madmen because madness is our fate. But Keats, the real one, the poet, hadn’t really been mad, just depressed and addicted.

Plath, on the other hand: head in a gas oven while her children played in the next room.

Veer away from that, too.

“I know nothing about poetry,” Keats said.

Plath said nothing for a while, watching the street go by, wondering whether Caligula had them in view. Wondering whether AFGC also had them in view. The reading of a will is not a very private matter, private in terms of the actual reading, perhaps, but not in terms of who knows it’s happening.

“This could be dangerous,” she said.

“Maybe,” he agreed. “Do you know how to do this? I mean, this whole reading of the will. There’s a lot of money involved, right?”

She nodded. “Money. And power.”

“And you’re okay with all that, not nervous?”