A/N: Ho shyit. Even I feel bad doing this.

Unghhh.

(On the bright side, FFAK will be updated shortly as well. Cheerio!)

THIRTEEN

Another night.

Just another night found me trying to do my job: buffing rag in hand, hand frozen on the bar. Super-slow weekdays helped my little introspective issue, 'cos I didn't have much to do… but that wasn't much of a relief, with the crap I was turning over in my thick head.

I mean… I hate to jump into the dirty details so quick, but I could take abuse. Honestly, I've proven that ten times over. I could take being smacked around, especially when there's something stringless in it for me, so long as the memories stay longer than the bruises. And 'cos of that, maybe I don't pick up the most virtuous of rampaging sugar-daddies, and don't exactly know what its like to get a valentine, but…

What happened last time at Dead Town: the whole reboot of Mar, with the picking up and the looking and the smiling and the… that was normal, wasn't it? Sure, he was fucked up, but wasn't that how normal people act in sitcoms? Below that, even! He hadn't even done anything nice for me! He hadn't said a single nice thing to me! He'd just talked to me. Told me what was going on in his sad excuse for a life. How he was killing himself, y'know? I just… He wasn't my boyfriend; he wasn't anything but a good and troublesome fuck that I visited every so often to get a taste of the other side: to get an ego-boost of just how good my life is!

I dug into a dimple on the bar with my rag, not liking how my thoughts were spiraling. Tightening.

It was… just my name. Anybody could say my name. Could look at me, say "Dax", and smile like that. Anybody, say, wanting to get into my pants. It'd be a hell of a bad pickup line, but anybody could do it.

But he was… I don't know. Maybe it was the fact that I didn't even see him smile when he said it, but knew he did, but I couldn't take this. I just… couldn't. A week after I left him at the tipsy house, I was only sure of one blessed thing: no.

So I avoided him. Again. He… called me a few times after that. Left just two messages full of that rattling breathing, maybe a (small, unsure) 'um' or three. It… got into my dreams, sometimes. I'd already sworn off of watching the races because of those dreams: Mar'd been sucking ass on the track, and I added those visuals to the ever-growing list of things I just could not swallow anymore. He wasn't his normal confident self, that was for sure, but I knew how things were stacked against him. I tuned in every so often… but hell like he knew.

He was probably already off his abstinence program. Back on his fix. Living, rasping, hurting people, and getting a lot of ass. Typical Mar. Just… having a little trouble on the track. He'd be back soon. The man was like a bad rash that way.

So there I was, settled behind the bar in our yellow-lit one-room saloon, trying to get on with my life… but feeling kinda hollow. Exhausted. I mean, livin' where I do… you see a lot of things. See them, but don't touch them or push them away or have sex with 'em. I'd been marked, kinda. I'd seen too much, and I'd felt twice that much. But I still… gods, there was something about it that I just couldn't drop. I thought I was the only one in the world crazy enough to keep… liking someone like that, even after everything: but then the concrete jungle spit out a reminder that I wasn't alone. Alone… and maybe the worst off I could be.

I'd heard the door squeak, but didn't pay attention. She stood in front of me for maybe two minutes, face blacked out by the cataract of the bar light, before piping up, sudden and husky.

"Hi."

I looked up, and immediately twisted my rag over itself, eyes nearly popping out. It was… aw hell, it was Mar's sister. If I'd just seen her feet from under the bar, maybe I would've caught on faster, but the voice did it for me. The sweet girl was hidden in a leather jacket and coarse clothes, definitely not her usual fare, but street-smart for my area. I swallowed and tried to cover whatever I'd given away, wondering stupidly if it was even important anymore. The kid who'd been stuffed under Mar's bed was a different animal than the one across the bar from his sister.

"Uh. Hey," I started, then looked around into the silence. What was there to say? I'd never technically been introduced to her: most I'd got was a secondhand bitch-fest and some bunny slippers. So I played it safe, hanging a near-sunny grin on my handsome mug and ushering the apparently anonymous gal into my booze lair.

"Welcome to the Shrapnel Shack. What can I getcha?"

She looked over her shoulder, like she felt the ugly bears in the corner eyeing her—gods, if they were eyeing her any harder they'd X-ray her—but instead spoke into her high collar, keeping her voice soft and safe.

"A moment, if you… have the time."

Unexpected, to put it mildly.

And I was about to make a joke, like I usually do. A Moment? Sorry, toots, we don't have that drink anymore. How about Three Minutes in Heaven? It'll last you longer. Instead, I looked down, following the glossy wiggles of neon light up the lacquered bar to my right. I actually thought about what I was gonna say.

"S'hard to get in a place like this," I muttered after a minute or two, still not looking. "Y'sure you don't just want a drink?"

"We can go somewhere."

I couldn't even ask her where she got off asking a random barkeep to step outside with her in the back-alley of the worst side of town, just cos've the way she sounded and looked. She had a mission. Technically, we didn't even know each other, but… the way Mar ran, he left his mark wherever he landed. Scars. We could see each others, I think.

I glanced up and worked the rag a little, keeping my protective silence. Man, her eyes were pretty. Hurt, but pretty.

"Please," she said.

Bit my lip. Ran my tongue over it, searching for a scar—wound, now, freshly reopened and obvious—to lick. Hers was bleeding into her voice. She could want me for so many reasons, all of 'em to do with Mar: and I couldn't think of a one that'd be worth my time and job and life and… I could get in so much trouble for this.

So much trouble.

"You know out back?" I said under my hand, thumbing at my nose for good measure.

"Think I can find it." She hid her hands in her pocket and disappeared out the door.

Then again, I was already in trouble.

True to her word, the gal possessed a basic definition of 'out' and 'back', and met me there with her jacket buttoned up to her white neck, arms clenched around her little middle. She smiled at me, quick and strange, then looked around the fenced-in cement yard like it was going to bite her. I suggested we move someplace else—or maybe just started walking toward the street, nervously, until I heard her behind me.

We were halfway to the street when I came up with a stupid, stupid idea. It wasn't even that she didn't seem comfortable with talking about anything in the street, or the fact that the streets weren't a great place to do anything other than mug and be mugged—it was just an idea, and it came out before I could stop it.

"We can go… to my place, if that's cool."

And I was about to say, not like that. Definitely not like that, honey, if you hadn't guessed already. But she just nodded and walked ahead of me, right next to… the alley. The alley. She almost turned like she was gonna go in: it was a shortcut to the main street, but maybe I imagined it, because the orderly trash-can rimmed darkness looked so eager to suck another person in and break their mind. I broke all barely-acquaintance rules and lunged forward to grab her arm--

"Gods—not that. Not there. C'mon, just—go around--"

--and pulled her past it. Sick.

Once we were on her Zoomer—parked right under a streetlamp that actually still had a light in it, smart chick—she handed me a helmet and gunned it. The thing was flashy and beautiful and obviously a custom job, but I hardly had time to notice what I was sitting on top of before my arm was out to the side of her head, pointing down black streets and leading her to my pad. Hot-rodding skills must've been genetic too, 'cos… damn, she could've cleared the Port in an ice-storm.

I don't even know why I had to take it that far. I could've just heard her out behind the bar and nodded at all the right times and said something about her crazy big brother—whatever she wanted to hear—and gone back inside. Started polishing glasses again. I figured Orla had probably noticed I was gone by the time me and… Keira were on my broken down couch and I'd plugged in the one light cell I currently had to my name. Man, did I mention how awesome life is?

At first we just… looked at each other, lame housekeeping efforts on my part lighting us both like empty jack-o-lanterns. Then, out of the blue (or black), she apologized.

"I'm sorry."

I raised an eyebrow, trying to settle into my doughy excuse for a couch.

"For what?" I asked. She looked up at me, pretty face sad but dry.

"For him," she whispered.

I winced deeply, caught off guard. Like I'd expected that? I screwed with the buttons clinging to the arm of the couch and thought about it. The fact that she needed to come here and apologize for him… was pretty ridiculous.

I wasn't above pretty ridiculous. I'd been eating and breathing it for months. I shrugged stiffly.

"Sorry don't fix as much as mommy and daddy want us to think," I muttered.

She looked down at her lap, like she knew it was true. Then her clean mechanic hands slid inside her dull brown jacket and came out with something wrapped in blue cloth, which she set between us like a peace offering.

"I want to show you some things, if… that's alright."

It wasn't alright, but I needed to see it. If it was… what I thought it was, I needed proof. And I got it. I didn't know what to take away from it, but I got my proof. Mar was… human once. More than human. Loved, and whole, and… good.

He was beautiful as a little kid. Wiry and top-heavy just like now, but with this manic little grin that made my lips twitch. There were only about seven pictures, but they said so much: the browned one of tiny sunhat-dwarfed Keira and little Mar crouched in the ocean someplace, Mar's blue eyes sparking eagerly toward the camera like there was someone important behind it; the one of Mar pulling a face as his dad—gods, was the man built like a barbarian, all brown with white hair knotted behind his head—crammed him against his sweating side. They were out in the sunlight of… what I guessed was Spargus, out on those trips Mar told me he loved. It was real.

Keira told me how he couldn't talk for the longest time. How his dad never pushed him to talk, said that it was his boy's own way of living: listening. I think he… always could talk, he just didn't want to. I don't know how I knew it, but I did. I mean, I couldn't live without talking, it'd be the seventh circle of hell for me, but… for him, it fit.

She didn't say when the switch happened, but obviously he was talking by the time he came out of prison. Can't help but think that it… would've hurt, to see that change. The fact she didn't really tell me what happened to his dad made me think she was well-aware that I'd gotten my hands on the information myself, so we didn't say anything about it.

I took the pictures from her, not pinching or touching them too much, and just carded through them, one after another after another then did it again. Surreal magazine images, all of them, except for the one with Mar standing in front of a broken down old shop window. Maybe Keira had taken it herself, not really realizing there was nothing left to see. Maybe she was trying to believe otherwise. Mar was… he had to have been fifteen, and already he was too far gone.

His smile was a flat show of teeth, and the circles under his eyes were like bruised flower petals. His dad must've been dead by that point. It showed.

I thought about them for a long time, turning each one over in my head and my fingers. My dingy apartment almost disappeared around me. When I looked up, it took me a few seconds to wake up and realize Keira was staring at me, sad as can be.

"He must have hurt you," she said softly.

I shrugged. Funny, how I never really remembered the actual sting and pain of different things. I'd been tossed around a lot, scraped and punched: anything worthy of a bandage didn't matter. That shit was just a Slummer Badge of Merit. It was… what came before he'd hurt me. Fear and an armful of humiliation. That was what mattered.

I guess it was the way I was looking at the pictures that tipped her off. The fact I was finally seeing the human in the messed-up monster I'd gone toe-to-toe with for so long… well, the surprise—and anguish--wasn't something I could hide.

"Hurt me," I repeated blankly, half-smiling and bringing that one picture of him and his dad back to the top. I tipped it so the yellow glare wouldn't bleach Mar's sun-bright face to nothing. "S'that what they're calling it these days."

Her feathery eyebrows drew together, hands clasping.

"Your heart."

I laughed. Snorted, really. Sorry. Couldn't help it.

"Don't think I have that anymore, sweets. Sold it for basic cable."

"I'm so sorry," she murmured, stricken, and she wasn't apologizing for my bad choice in swaps. I peered at her sideways. The dull confusion at the sudden color rising in her cheeks just made my face twist grumpily. Gods, I was tired.

"Quit that."

Keira just shook her head viciously, silky hair whipping around. She brushed it back behind her ears and stared hard at the floor, throat jumping as she tried not to cry.

"I'm sorry I came here--that I bothered you with this. I'm sorry. I…have to do this," she explained brokenly, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth for a second, steadying herself. She hiccupped. "I have to justify the things he does, even when I don't know what they are half the time. Because he… oh gods, it just isn't his fault."

It wasn't his fault. I knew what she meant.

I tried to imagine living with him from the preteen years. Surviving through the years after his dad left him and… her dad got him addicted to dark eco, and… now, watching him kill himself. I felt something black open inside me.

"Yeah," I whispered, and I knew it was the truth. Dead Town showed me that. "I know."

She nodded, green eyes wet with tears, and stayed upright as long as she could. But too soon the tremors worked her down to a wounded curl, her hands sealed over her eyes. She sobbed out:

"I love him. I love him so much, you wouldn't even—"

Finding it hard to breathe, I grabbed her arm and she grabbed me back, sudden and tight, and when we were half-tangled together in the middle of my broken couch, I realized we were complete strangers. I realized I hadn't even told her my name.

Didn't want to, now.

I held her. Dumbly, though, because I'd never held anyone before in my life. But I guess you can't really hold someone wrong, unless you drop them. It didn't feel good, having her wet face crammed against my neck: every time she sobbed, the sound and the spasm ricocheted in my empty chest. It scraped and hurt, and I couldn't stop thinking about him. I couldn't feel any warmth for her, she was still too new to me, but we had a place to put our mutual dread for one man, and that was enough. After a few minutes of it, struck dumb by the strange pain, I got the remote and thumbed on the TV. Just… anything to make noise.

But I'd left it on the racing station, and it was the right time for the right channel. The weekly run was well begun: second lap. I flinched and tried to change it, but the remote tipped out of my fingers, and the tinny roar of the crowd roused her anyways. Keira froze and peered, eyes swollen, past my arm at the static-torn screen, then gently fell away from me. The places where she'd touched were clammy. She rubbed at her face, which gave me permission to rub at my neck. Already things weren't livable: she was too close to me.

"Have you seen him?" She asked me after a second or two, voice raw from crying. "He's been missing, only… showing up at the races and they—they won't even let me in to see him—"

"He hasn't been home?" I rasped. She shook her head. "Does he have any other places he sleeps?"

That hurt her. She had to swallow a few times before finding her voice again.

"He—he has to come home, h-he doesn't trust anywhere else…"

To keep him safe during the day.

The fact that Mar hadn't floated back into his club-filled self-destruct cycle was more shocking to me than I thought it'd be. I couldn't find anything to say to her. I didn't know what it meant, for precursors' sake. He could be anywhere, and anywhere wasn't safe for him.

Anywhere, like on screen.

I'd turned from her, only to find Mar briefly pictured on the tube, screen-scrollers detailing his recent string of losses and expectations for the future. His face was a bony mess, hair and eyes leeched of color. The camera, disinterested and unaware of two tense messes nearly doubled over a sector away, took it back to an aerial view and that was that. He was racing. Still racing, now. I barely had time to think about it before… gods, before hell broke loose.

It was so eerie, seeing that little dot I knew was Mar go careening into the side of the track.

It must have been a basic glitch in the zoomer, or an impossibly bad call: he was rocketing along as smooth as anything, gaining on a sporty red zoomer, then he just banked left and exploded into a vomit of smoke and sound. The scrollers went blank, and the idiot tech shouted over the link, shrieking at the camera to jerk up from its steady slide around the track and lock on that smoke. Smoke, pouring, filling. My heart had stopped.

He didn't get out of it. I waited with my hands crammed under my arms and Keira dug her fingernails into her lips, but the seconds of the race ticked on and he didn't limp out with a brave, cocky grin twisting his too-thin mouth. Too slowly, a team of mechanics scurried in their little white suits over to the crash, fanning their hands in a panic to clear out the smoke belching from the twisted metal. Then they dragged Mar out by the scruff of his neck like a too-heavy doll; he was covered in blood, each jerk twitching his jaw up, throat blanched fish-belly white.

Keira screamed, loud and real.

"No. Oh gods."

I was out the door before I could ask myself what the hell I hoped to do, or what was left to save.

We caught them at the hospital. Both of us crashed off her zoomer and shoved ourselves into the intricate mob at the fringes of the parking lot, lorded over by the big medical tram with the flashing red lights and the limp body being loaded out of it—

"Mar! M-mar, gods, are you—"

I was nearly swimming in the people, Keira floundering close behind me, until a thick white arm cut across my front and shoved, and I nearly lost my footing. I glared up, so close to the stretcher, and shoved back at the arm, which belonged to some kind of medical assistant with a mask. He was shining with sweat, shouting over the noise:

"Excuse me, I'll have to ask you to stay back, sir—"

I tossed his arm off and grabbed Keira at the wrist, getting in his face.

"Then I'll have to say no, asshole. I know this guy, I gotta to talk to him—"

"Please—"

"No—"

Mar, slow and pained, opened his eyes and mumbled something as he came to, more ruckus exploding around him because of it. His hazy blue eyes flickered around, touching on the throbbing human chaos and the countless unfamiliar faces and the fogged tubes stuck in him—then, finally, through the gap underneath somebody's arm, me. His bloody chest heaved, and, like he was lifting the world, he sat up and knocked the O2 mask off of his red mouth, only to cover it a second later when he coughed, corrosive and wracking. He reached for me with the same hand, now dripping with hot crimson splatter.

"St-stop, let me talk to him--"

The stretcher was still moving, pushed by a dozen hands, and I couldn't ask them to stop or slow down. Mar was a mess of split flesh down his right side, gleaming with shrapnel and sticky red asphalt abrasions on top of the huge gash stretching from underneath his arm to his hip. His left eye was cut to his temple, all of it mixing into a matted red patty of skin. My breath caught in my chest looking at him, but I ran alongside him anyways, feet pounding against the concrete.

The nurses heads' snapped back and forth from the injured racing hero to the scruffy slum kid, one shouting past her mask:

"Who is he?"

"Family?"

"He's m—" Mar coughed again, thrashing against all attempts to make him lay down and take the mask again. He shook his head as hard as he could. Dogged. Certain. "He's my best friend."

They let me close, and he fell back on the stretcher when my hand found his.

He looked up at me, the sudden burst of sanitary hospital lights as we crashed across the foyer lighting up a waxy film over his one whole blue iris that made my heart catch in my throat all over again. His other hand fell atop my wrist, not pulling. Just holding.

"Daxter… Dax. Let me drive you home. After this?" He whispered imploringly, suddenly, looking up at me like he'd never seen me this way.

In that instant, I realized he was blind. Mostly blind. He couldn't see.

He'd stayed till morning.

I couldn't hear for my tears. The words made no sense and I smiled just because I didn't understand and there wasn't anything else to do because the stretcher was going so fast.

"What?"

"Can I drive you home?" He asked again, hand tightening around mine, clumsy and slippery and warm.

I couldn't be scared of his hands anymore. Couldn't.

"…Yeah," I choked after we crashed through another set of doors and I could talk again. I looked at him, then smeared the blood off his forehead with a trembling hand, nearly gasping with the effort of keeping pace. "Yeah, you can drive me home. Only if you promise to stay put."

Something happened—something announced by a sudden deluge of beeps and shrill noises and Mar jerking violently on the reddening cot--and the nurses forced me away long enough to wrestle the mask back on him. His chest pumped up and down. I fought my way back to him, this time with Keira.

Gas already dampening his mind, his chin jerked up when she came close enough, and his ruined eyes flickered in recognition.

"Keira," he said softly, bloodstained teeth multiplying in a hazy, plastic-capped smile.

She couldn't say anything. She held her mouth with one hand and ran alongside the stretcher as best she could, just watching him. His big fingers spread, reaching toward her a little.

"I'm sorry I didn't call."

In that second, we both knew where he'd been all this time. Dead Town. Keira nodded and sobbed once and reached for his wrist, white fingers coming away wet with dark blood when a jolt of the cart tore him away from her, and the rush made it impossible to catch him. As they wheeled him away at a run, he looked back at me, lips hung high on one side, useless left eye swollen shut.

"Don't split before I get out," he rasped, and the white doors flew open and shut behind him, sealing in all the noise and the life and all the screaming momentum. I staggered toward them anyways, hands curled into fists and tears hot on my face. I couldn't feel my body, couldn't feel my heartbeat. I couldn't feel anything but silence, and the dwindling chaos I could see through the small door windows, but I raised my hand anyways, jabbing it after him.

"Like hell I'll split! If you bite it in there, I'll kick your ass to next week, Mar!" I screamed at the closed doors. Keira collapsed into a chair behind me, sobbing, because she knew. "I mean it! Don't you dare die!"

When they announced him dead two hours later, I didn't have a straw left to pull.

Life with him was a party, but now the party's over.

I got nobody to drive me home.