Watch Me Move

Another shitty hotel room in another shitty city. Nick lay on the bed, staring up at the water-stained ceiling, eyes tracing the shape, irritably.

Kira had come back, grim-faced, and handed him Carver's watch.

Then she'd doubled over, and started throwing up blood. She was lying in a different room right now, with a Stitcher, one who was doing what they could to keep her in one piece, and alive, though they kept having to repair, sometimes once every five minutes, sometimes once every three hours.

Either way, it wasn't good.

"It's the drugs," Cassie had informed him, as her silver pen scritched – scratch scratch scratch – across black paper, spinning it so he could see the syringe, black and infuriating. "She still needs them, Nick."

Maybe, but where was he to get them? He'd just arranged for the death of his only source.

He'd gotten better at Moving. He wasn't sure if it actually was the practice, or if his acceptance of his own gifts that were allowing him to actually do this. He could even do it in his sleep, now – he'd woken up, one morning, with his cheek pressing against the cool ceiling, instead of his pillow.

It had taken him ten minutes to get down.

Cassie had no idea what to do, now. She Watched, as hard as she could, longer and harder than ever, smuggling mickeys when she thought he wasn't looking, trying to figure out if she had a way to save Kira, to get her mother back, to destroy the Division. She'd filled four of her notebooks in the last week, but she seemed to have a blank spot.

"Shadow?" he'd ask.

"Maybe," she'd shrug.

He'd been lying on this bed too long. The pictures on the ceiling were failing to be water stains, and starting to become answers.

Kira, in one of her rare lucid moments, had wanted to know why Carver's Push hadn't worked on him.

"Dunno."

"That's not an answer."

Black pupils, black iris, black sclera, one bleeding into the other as he reminded into his cerebral cortex, whispered of how much life had kicked him in the teeth, how frustrated he was with it. Murmuring of blood in the sink and stained razor blades, buzzing of bottles and pills and shaking in fury and bitterness when he woke again the next morning, muttering of guns to foreheads and no money in the bank to get bullets.

He'd stood at the edge of the glass, and the wind blasted up the wall at him, and he'd almost been about to step off into the waiting sweet oblivion.

And then... he hadn't.

"Guess I'm just too stubborn to be Pushed on."

The water-stains-turned-answers were demanding he get over himself, and write them down, already.

"Bullshit. That's not how Pushing works."

Finally, he rolled over and grabbed a pen and the phone book, the closest things, both sitting on the bedside table, some numbers underlines, and began to copy the pictures on the ceiling onto a mostly blank yellow page.

"Done," he murmured, considering the drawings.

They weren't bad, actually, though the proportions weren't perfect. A small girl with wavy hair, drawing frantically. A man, scruffy, frowning at a painting on the wall, the painting one of a sleeping pair of women, one in a hotel room, one in a hospital bed. An Asian woman stood between them, with a lollipop.

"Holy shit," he gasped, staring at his little drawing.

"I know what the future is."