Chapter 4: The Crying Adonis
The rental car’s air conditioning was a feeble whisper against the LA heat. David drove with a tense, white-knuckled grip, his eyes scanning the sidewalks like a surveillance camera. Marcus sat rigid in the passenger seat, every nerve alive. The cheap denim of the daisy dukes chafed his thighs. The tube top was a straitjacket. He felt every glance from passing cars like a physical touch, a violation he’d courted and now had to endure.
“This is the block,” David muttered, slowing near a sun-bleached Rite Aid. Its neon sign buzzed, one letter dark. The sidewalk glittered with broken glass. The air smelled of exhaust, stale urine, and the cloying sweetness of rotting garbage from an overflowing dumpster. A lone pigeon watched them from atop a chain-link fence, its head cocked.
And then Marcus saw him.
A massive figure was hunched against the grimy wall of the pharmacy, squeezed between a newspaper box and a graffiti-tagged trash can. Even folded in on himself, he was huge—broad shoulders straining a thin, ridiculous tank top, muscular legs bent at painful angles. The pose was one of utter defeat. Then a shudder went through the frame, and a raw, wet sob cut through the traffic noise.
It was his body. His Ares template. The perfect jawline, the defined brow, the dense muscle he’d saved for. It was all there. And it was weeping uncontrollably into its own enormous, beautifully sculpted hands.
A bolt of pure, electric nausea shot through Marcus. His vision tunneled. His own hands, small and slender, flew to his mouth.
“Dude, stop the car!” The words tore out of him, high and strangled. “There! There I am! I mean, she is! You know what I mean!”
David swore and jerked the wheel, bumping the sedan over the curb with a screech of tires. He threw it into park, half on the sidewalk. Marcus was out before the engine died, the car door slamming behind him.
He took three stumbling steps forward. The sensation was surreal—seeing his own dream from the outside, a monument to his ambition now crumbling in public. The man—Lexi—heard the footsteps. He looked up.
Marcus froze.
His own face, the one he’d wanted for a decade, was ravaged. Mascara—waterproof had evidently failed—was smeared in grotesque black streaks down sculpted cheeks. The eyes, red and puffy and full of a bottomless, childlike terror, locked onto him. They widened in dawning, impossible recognition.
For a long second, there was only the distant wail of a siren, the pigeon cooing.
The Adonis’s full lips, which Marcus had imagined issuing confident commands, trembled. A whispered, broken syllable emerged.
“Marcus?”
The voice was all wrong. It was his old voice, the one from the before, but higher now, frayed with panic and tinged with a questioning, lilting cadence that was entirely foreign. Hearing his name in that voice, from that face, was a psychological car crash.
“Yeah,” Marcus croaked. He took a cautious step closer, aware of his own body in the skimpy clothes, feeling like a grotesque parody meeting its counterpart. “And you’re… Lexi.”
A fresh wave of sobs shook the huge frame. Lexi nodded, wiping at his face with the back of a hand, smearing the makeup further. “They said it was a glitch. They said they were sorry. They gave me a bag and your… your old clothes.” He gestured limply to a crumpled Aurora Clinics tote bag beside him. A sleeve of Marcus’s favorite flannel shirt poked out. “I don’t know how to be in this! It’s too heavy. Everything is… loud. And I tried to buy eyeliner and the lady yelled at me because I was crying and I scared her.”
He said it all in a rush, the words tumbling out with a frantic, confessional energy. The disconnect was breathtaking: the physique of a action hero, the emotional breakdown of a lost kid.
David appeared at Marcus’s shoulder, his face pale. “Holy shit,” he breathed, taking in the scene. “It’s really you. I mean… him. Christ.”
Lexi’s terrified eyes flicked to David, then back to Marcus, seeking an anchor. “You look… you look like I was supposed to,” he whimpered. “You look amazing.”
A harsh, mirthless laugh burst from Marcus. “You have got to be kidding me.” He gestured at his own body, the tube top, the shorts. “This is a nightmare. I wanted what you have.”
“Well I don’t want it!” Lexi wailed, drawing a look from a shuffling man across the street. He lowered his voice to a desperate hiss. “I wanted to be, like, a vibe. A hot girl vibe. I wanted to be soft and have cool nails and turn heads. This is… this is a lumberjack! I’m a monster!” He looked down at his own massive pectorals with utter disgust.
The sheer, tragic irony of it hung in the air, thicker than the smog. David pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay. Okay. We can’t do this here. You’re both drawing attention we really, really don’t want.”
He was right. A few people were slowing down, their stares curious and uncomfortable. The pigeon had been joined by two others.
“Get in the car,” Marcus said, the command feeling absurd coming from his new voice.
Lexi looked at the sedan with suspicion. “Where?”
“Somewhere not here. Somewhere we can talk without an audience.” Marcus tried to sound firm, channeling his old self. “Do you have anywhere to go?”
Lexi shook his head, a slow, miserable movement. “I slept in an alley. It was cold. These muscles don’t keep you warm, they’re just… dense.”
David was already moving, grabbing the Aurora tote bag. “Car. Now. Both of you.”
Getting Lexi into the back seat was a logistical challenge. He moved with a clumsy, unconscious strength, bumping his head on the doorframe and folding himself into the space with obvious difficulty. Marcus slid into the passenger seat, the familiar act now feeling like an imitation. David got behind the wheel and pulled back into traffic.
The car was silent, heavy with the weight of two impossible people. The only sound was Lexi’s quiet, hiccupping breaths from the back.
“So,” David said, glancing in the rearview. “Lexi. What’s the plan? The clinic just cut you loose with a bag of clothes and a ‘sorry?’”
“They gave me a phone, like yours,” Lexi said, his voice small. “With money. A lot of money. I don’t care. I want my body back. My real one. The one I paid for.” He leaned forward, his presence immense even in the mirror. “You’re Marcus. You’re in it. Can you… can you give it back? Please?”
The raw, desperate plea was like a shard of glass in Marcus’s chest. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said, staring straight ahead. “They explained it. The neural mapping is fused. They can’t separate us without… without risking wiping both. We’re stuck like this until they find a fix.”
“Then we make them fix it!” Lexi cried, pounding a fist on his knee. The entire car shook.
“Hey, easy, Hercules,” David snapped. “You break the suspension, we’re walking.”
“Don’t call me that!” Lexi shot back, a flash of fiery indignation in the tear-streaked face. “My name is Lexi! I’m not a him! I’m not a… a Hercules!” The defiance crumpled as quickly as it appeared, back into misery. “Or I was. I don’t know what I am now.”
Marcus closed his eyes. The headache brewing behind them was epic. “David’s right. We need a base. Somewhere private. Then we need to think.”
“I have the money,” Lexi offered, sounding like a child offering a toy. “We can get a hotel. A nice one. With soft beds. This body hurts my back.”
The absurdity kept compounding. Marcus exchanged a look with David, who just shrugged, a ‘why-the-hell-not’ gesture. They were two minds in swapped bodies, one a terrified young woman, the other a dysphoric former accountant, plus one overwhelmed best friend, armed with two hundred million dollars and no roadmap.
“Fine,” Marcus said. “A hotel. Somewhere discreet. You book it. Use your phone.” He couldn’t bring himself to say ‘your name.’
Twenty minutes later, they were idling under the sleek, minimalist portico of a boutique hotel in Silver Lake. It was the kind of place that preferred discretion. Lexi, wiping the last of the mascara off with a wet wipe from his bag, lumbered inside to check in under the name “Morgan.” He returned with two keycards, moving with a newfound, fragile determination.
The room was on the top floor, cool and dim, all neutral tones and floor-to-ceiling windows offering a hazy view of the city. The door clicked shut, sealing them in.
The silence was immediate and profound.
Lexi walked to the center of the room and just stood there, a mountain of muscle and confusion in the quiet, tasteful space. He looked at Marcus, really looked, his gaze traveling over the curves, the hair, the face that was supposed to be his.
“This is so weird,” Lexi whispered.
“You’re telling me,” Marcus said, his voice dry.
David cracked open the minibar and pulled out a tiny bottle of whiskey. “I’m not even asking.” He downed it in one gulp.
Lexi took a deep, shuddering breath. “Okay. Okay. So we’re together now. We found each other. What’s step two?”
Marcus sat on the edge of the plush king bed, the softness feeling alien. He looked at his own hands—small, smooth, a woman’s hands—clenched in his lap. He looked at the powerful, lost creature wearing his dream.
Step two was a cliff’s edge, and the fog below was impenetrable. But they were over the edge already. All they could do was fall together.
“Step two,” Marcus said, meeting Lexi’s scared, familiar eyes, “is we call Vasquez. Together. And we tell her the lost property has been found. And then we find out what the hell they’re actually doing to fix this, because the waiting game is over.”
He pulled the burner phone from his pocket. The screen glowed in the dim room. Lexi nodded, a slow, decisive movement in the powerful body, and pulled out an identical phone.
For the first time, they were on the same side of the catastrophe. It was a start. It was all they had.
It was all they had. Marcus placed his phone on the sleek hotel desk, activating the speaker with a tap. Lexi hovered nearby, his large hands twisting the fabric of the ridiculous tank top. David stood by the minibar, silently opening another tiny whiskey.
The line rang twice. Dr. Vasquez answered, her voice tight with professional calm. “Mr. Hale. This is unexpected. You should be resting.”
“Change of plans,” Marcus said. His new voice sounded strangely firm in the quiet room. “I’m not alone. Lexi Morgan is with me. We’re together.”
A profound silence stretched from the speaker, broken only by a faint, staticky breath. “I see.” The calm fractured, just for a syllable. “That is… unforeseen. How did this occur?”
“We found each other,” Lexi blurted, leaning toward the phone. His voice wavered. “You left me in an alley! I was crying by a dumpster!”
“The discretionary funds were to secure lodging, Miss Morgan,” Vasquez replied, a defensive edge slicing through. “Protocol was provided.”
“Your protocol sucks!” Lexi’s shout was deafening in the confined space. David flinched. Marcus watched his own face contort with a hurt he’d never allowed himself to show.
“The point is,” Marcus interjected, reclaiming control, “the waiting period is over. You have both of your… patients. In one place. So we want a real-time update. What is being done right now to uncorrupt the files?”
Another pause. They could almost hear her thinking, recalculating. “The situation remains complex. The neural weave is interdependently anchored. It’s like trying to unbraid two strands of hair that have been fused into a single filament. We are modeling solutions.”
“Modeling,” Marcus repeated flatly. “That’s not a solution. That’s a fancy word for guessing.”
“It’s science, Mr. Hale. Not magic. Rushing could cause permanent synaptic cascade. You could both be left in vegetative states.” Her tone hardened. “Your current… collaboration complicates matters. You must remain separate. The emotional cross-contamination could muddy the data streams we’re monitoring.”
Lexi made a small, wounded sound. “You want to put us back in boxes. Alone.”
“For your own stability,” Vasquez insisted.
Marcus looked at Lexi—at the raw fear in those eyes, in his eyes—and felt a surge of protective anger that was entirely new. “No. That’s not happening. We’re staying together. You want to run your scans or tests or whatever, you do it with both of us in the same room. You get one chance to see the whole problem.”
The defiance hung in the air. David gave a slight, approving nod.
Vasquez was silent for a long time. “That is… highly irregular.”
“So is this,” Marcus shot back.
A weary sigh traveled through the speaker. “Very well. I will convene the technical team. We will schedule a dual-subject assessment. But it will take forty-eight hours to prepare the lab. You must stay out of sight, and you must stay calm. Do not draw attention. Do not engage with anyone from your past lives. Is that understood?”
“We have the money to disappear,” Marcus said.
“See that you do.” The call disconnected with a final, hollow click.
The artificial quiet of the hotel room rushed back in. Lexi sank onto the corner of the bed, the frame groaning under his weight. He stared at his own huge feet. “She’s scared of us,” he whispered.
“She’s scared of the lawsuit we represent,” David corrected, tossing the mini bottle into the trash. “Two messed-up people are a tragedy. Two messed-up people who compare notes are a conspiracy.”
Marcus felt the adrenaline bleed away, leaving a cold, hollow exhaustion. The call had changed nothing. They were just in a nicer waiting room. He watched Lexi tremble, a full-body shiver that made his muscles quiver. The sight of his own dream body, so vulnerable and lost, was a special kind of torture.
Lexi looked up, his gaze sweeping from David to Marcus. The childish panic in his eyes softened into a plea for something simpler. “OK you can stay with me David dude can you drive us home.”
David blinked. “Home? You got a home?”
Lexi shook his head, a messy gesture. “No. Your home. The one with the loud couch. It smelled like your popcorn and your laundry.” He looked at Marcus, tears welling up again. “I don’t want a hotel. I want a place that doesn’t smell like perfume and bleach. I want to not be alone.”
The request was so simple, so devastatingly human, it cut through everything. David’s tough-guy facade melted. He looked at Marcus, a question in his eyes.
Marcus understood. The sterile apartment, the hotel, they were waystations for ghosts. David’s cluttered, messy, lived-in apartment was a place for people. For friends. It was a tangible piece of the world that hadn’t shattered yet.
Marcus felt a lump form in his throat. He walked over and sat on the bed, not close, but near. He looked at the shattered person wearing his ambition.
“Lexi,” he said, the name feeling less strange now. “I’m so sorry this can’t be easy.”
It wasn’t enough. It was nothing. But it was the first true thing he’d said to her.
Lexi’s face crumpled. A single, clean tear tracked through the remaining smudge of mascara. She didn’t reply, just hugged her own massive arms as if trying to hold herself together.
David jingled his car keys. The sound was decisively normal. “Alright. Enough of this depressing neutral-toned prison. My couch is a piece of shit and there’s probably moldy Thai food in my fridge. Welcome to it.” He managed a grin. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”
They gathered the few things they had. Lexi carefully folded Marcus’s old flannel from the clinic tote, handling the fabric with a strange reverence. The descent in the elevator was silent, but the tension had shifted. It was no longer about staring into the abyss. It was about turning their backs on it for a few hours, about seeking shelter from a storm that had no end in sight.
They emerged into the garage, the cold concrete air a shock. David clicked the car unlocked.
“Shotgun,” Lexi said quietly, and moved toward the front passenger door.
David and Marcus stopped. Lexi looked back, confused. “What? I called it. That’s the rule.”
A slow, genuine smile spread across David’s face. “Yeah. Yeah, it is the rule.” He tossed the keys in his hand. “Shotgun it is, Hercules.”
Lexi didn’t correct him this time. She just nodded, a small victory, and got into the car.