A/N:

Putting the author's note up ahead of time just to give everybody a brief warning. Obviously Madness Combat has a violent canon plot, but since this here story deals with something a tiny bit different, I figured I should give a warning now. So yeah, if the topic of suicide triggers you or bothers you in any way shape or form, then please read a different story! I don't want to bother any nice pals out there, okay? Good.

But yeah, if you're feeling like reading another story in which Maddy basically rambles on and on about Madness Combat mental toll and the effects on these poor little guys who can't seem to catch a break, then here ya go. (This story takes place post MC 10, by the way, for reference.)

I'll stop rambling now. Enjoy and have a Happy Halloween! (If I don't post any other stories before then, that is!)

Sanford was in the prime of his life and he was haunting himself.

He was hunched over on the bathroom floor, the cold tiles pressing into his cheek. His hands were trembling, far worse than any of those damn earthquakes in that damn hellhole and way worse than the final boom that took everything.

The first night he got home he had scrubbed his hands for precisely three hours. Deimos' cigarette ashes, and maybe his actual ashes, were still under his fingernails and he had to get them out. Hank's blood was still caked into the lines of his palms and he had to get it out. His old life was still in his hands, but that was in his blood and no matter how hard he scrubbed or how scalding the water was, he couldn't get it out.

It had been about a month. Maybe longer, or maybe it had only been about two or three weeks but Sanford had stopped caring about time long ago. There had been no different between night and day in Nevada anyway. No matter what hour it was, it was still hell.

The agency medics and doctors—the ones who were still living at that—said that he wasn't too bad off. Physically, he wasn't in too bad of shape at all. The cane was a bother, just a pain in the ass, but at least he could still walk.

Sanford threw away the cane the night he got it. He could still walk by himself. He could still do this on his own.

He hadn't cried, either, which the doctors never mentioned. Sanford knew that it perturbed them. But he was permanently stuck as an uneasy person to be around anyway, so it didn't matter. He didn't need to shed tears.

His best friend was dead and Sanford knew that he hadn't personally killed him but it sure as hell felt that way. It was tearing him up from the inside out and it felt like there were knives permanently embedded in his gut, but he still didn't need to cry.

He had been living with Hank, but even that wasn't true. He had been away so much for physical therapy and just plain therapy in general that Sanford wasn't sure if he really was living with someone, or if it was another ghost from inside his mind.

Hank hadn't wanted to go to therapy at first. He still didn't, but he had accepted it. Or at least had stopped trying to snap the necks of his doctors.

The doctors were scared of them both. Sanford knew it, Hank knew it, and the doctors themselves knew it too. Everybody was scared of those two lone survivors from Nevada.

It wasn't as if Sanford hadn't heard the whispers, the hushed voices; it wasn't as if he hadn't felt the sidelong glances and the darting eyes.

"Oh my god, look at their eyes."

"What happened there?"

"Look at the scars, Jebus Christ, what was happening out there?"

"They look like they've died a thousand times over."

The words stuck with him, like some sort of disgusting putty in his mind, a child's glue stick plastering the disturbed tones and quiet words into his memory.

Dot, dot, not a lot.

Hands still trembling, Sanford pulled himself up, grimacing as his bad leg protested against the movement. He scrambled to grab a hold of the bathroom counter with his free hand, looking up into the bathroom mirror.

The mirror was cracked, probably from another of Hank's incidents, where he would just lose it. Suddenly Hank was thrust back into Nevada, somewhere in that hellhole, and he would fight and strangle his ghosts for hours at a time. The screams were hard to ignore sometimes.

It was smudged, too, from apparent lack of care. Everything was worn down in the house, that was no surprise.

But Christ, what was that thing in the mirror staring back at him?

It took a minute or two to even register in his mind that it was his own reflection.

His hair was in disarray, longer than he had ever remembered it being, a sick, twisted sort of halo about his head. The hair at his temples had gone grey. The scars he could ignore, even if the pale tissue stood out like a sore thumb against his skin. His face seemed hollow, bonier than before, all sharp edges and vaguely skeletal features.

All of that he could live with.

But holy shit, his eyes.

They were dead. That was the only way he could think to describe it. His eyes were dead and sunken in and just about glazed over and pitch dark and every last bit of life had drained away.

He was no more than a dead man. A walking dead man.

Sanford took a step back and started to laugh.

The sound started off small, a little hoarse, and then grew in intensity so rapidly and so sharply that quite frankly it frightened him. But he just couldn't stop laughing. His free hand was shaking so badly still, but he didn't know why, because he was laughing.

Deimos would be laughing at him, too. Deimos always laughed, always found a way to make some sort of shitty joke no matter what had gone down. Wow, he missed Deimos.

Sanford glanced down at the loaded revolver in his hand and just laughed harder. Wow, he missed Deimos so much. How was Deimos doing? Where had he gone? Why had Deimos left him all alone? They promised to always have each other's back.

He was holding his gun like a lifeline.

It was so wonderfully, sickly ironic. It made Sanford laugh all the more.

He cocked his gun, shoulders still shaking with silent laughter.

Deimos was so slow in coming back. He said he would try and get out. Must've been a couple of days ago. Damn kid, always screwing around. It was just another failed joke.

Sanford lifted the gun to his temple and smiled at his reflection in the mirror. He was looking a bit more like himself now.

Deimos would be there any minute, anyway, so it was okay. Everything was gonna be just fine.

Sanford started to laugh again. He was laughing so hard that he couldn't even hear somebody pounding on the bathroom door. He was still laughing when that somebody started pounding on the door harder, and he was still laughing when he heard Hank scream his name.

But Deimos was coming, so it was going to be just fine. He could hear Deimos laughing too.

Sanford was still laughing as he moved his finger to the trigger, but his laughter was cut short when the door was knocked off its hinges and the force of it made him drop his gun and he was pretty sure that the gun fired but Sanford missed.

The mirror had shattered.

Hank had been the one to knock the gun out of Sanford's hands.

Nobody was laughing, and Deimos wasn't coming.

Sanford crumpled down, back down onto the bathroom floor, with Hank crouching next to him.

Sanford wasn't laughing, he was still alive and he was sobbing on the cold tile floor.

He hadn't cried in months, not since his first brush with death out somewhere in Nevada. He hadn't cried at all since he had gotten back home; he refused to let himself cry. Crying was stupid. Crying was a waste of time.

And now Sanford had never cried harder in his entire goddamn life.

He was vaguely aware of Hank's presence next to him, and he was also vaguely aware of the jumbled phrases he was somehow managing to blubber out.

Hank sat with him for two hours.

After a few minutes, or maybe a few hours, or maybe even a few years, Sanford lifted his head up slightly.

His eyes felt crusty with dried tears. He wasn't sure when he had stopped crying, but his sobs had been reduced to little breathless hiccups. Hank was still sitting next to him, motionless and silent as ever.

Sanford's throat felt hoarse, and speaking wasn't something he really felt ready to do, but he felt like he owed it to him. Maybe Hank, maybe Deimos, maybe himself.

"Thank you."

He lifted his head up a bit more just in time to see Hank give a half-shrug. "Don't worry about it."

Sanford's hands were shaking again, and the dryness in his throat was even more apparent now. "Can I—water. Water."

It was humiliating to not even be able to form complete sentences, but it was the best he could get for now. Hank nodded, and then sucked in a deep breath.

"Don't even try to move until I get back."

"I'm not going to try and kill myself again." The words felt like barbs, but they had to be said. They made what had happened seem a bit more real and less like another nightmare. He had tried to kill himself. He didn't. He was still alive.

He was still alive.

"You swear?"

"Yeah, I swear." Sanford pulled himself up into a sitting position, being especially careful not to cut his hands on any of the broken glass left on the floor.

I swear.

Hank got up, muttering something under his breath that sounded like a string of curses, but hesitated in the doorway. "Sanford."

"Yeah?"

Hank grimaced down at the broken glass on the floor, then took a deep breath. "Yeah, look. I'm sorry I haven't been around like you need me to be. I'm really fucking sorry that I'm not good enough in the head to help you out any yet. Just don't kill yourself. I need somebody here that saw what I saw out there so I know that I'm not just completely insane."

If Sanford didn't know Hank as well as he did, then he might have thought that Hank actually sounded pretty choked up himself.

But this was Hank J. Wimbleton, after all, and Sanford knew him well enough to know that yeah, maybe Hank was a bit choked up because Hank wasn't any less human than he himself was.

"Not your fault. We're just pretty messed up right now." It was, for lack of a better way to put it, a lame reply. But Hank seemed to get it.

"Yeah. Just don't move until I get back, and try not to touch the goddamn glass that's all over the floor."

This time Hank set off down the hallway for real, leaving Sanford alone again.

At least he had snapped out of that disgusting hallucinatory state from earlier. All that laughing, all those voices in his head, the gun…at least his senses were starting to come back to him. He did feel a bit more like himself, or at least a little more levelheaded.

Sanford let his head loll back a bit to rest against the sink cupboard. Even if he wanted to try and move, he wouldn't be able to. He was just so damn exhausted. Who knew trying to shoot yourself would take so much effort? Damn.

But he knew he wasn't going to go down that route again. No, he had promised Deimos he wouldn't hurt himself a long time ago and he had just promised Hank. That was a double damn promise and that wasn't something you just went and broke.

Silently, Sanford made a third promise, this one to himself.

He couldn't go around in this daze any longer. Yeah, life sucked and he was insane and he could hardly rely on his own two feet anymore, but it was what he had and he was going to stick with it. Deimos had died for a reason. It wasn't Sanford's fault any more than it was that kid down the street's and he had to stop blaming himself for it.

He was a killer, and he was going to have to live with that. Sanford knew that it was going to haunt him, but he had known what he was going into it when he first got into this all so many years ago. Yeah, he had killed people, but he might have saved people too, so he was going to try and focus on that for now.

Sanford was a survivor, and he was going to remember that from now on.

That night, he helped Hank clean up the broken glass in the bathroom.

They had shitty fast-food burgers for dinner and they just talked, still talking long after they had finished eating and longer than any fidgety little kid would ever want to be kept at a table. Sanford couldn't remember the last time that he had had a relatively normal conversation with Hank, one that didn't relate to death or carnage or that hellhole they used to be stuck in.

It was a nice change.

That night Sanford went out in the backyard and dug through the trashcans until he found his cane. He had to clean it off—thorough, scalding scrubbing, at that. But it was still fine.

It made walking easier and that was good enough for now.

That night he and Hank talked even more, focusing back on the more serious things. Sanford made Hank promise to not hurt himself either, and to keep trying the whole counseling thing.

He did.

Hank promised not to bring up the incident with the doctors if Sanford would agree to start going to therapy.

He did.

That night going to bed was a bit difficult, because it meant being on his own again. It was a bit unnerving, and after spending so many nights cramped into that old car with Deimos snoring away next to him, it was a little lonely.

Shadows were dancing on his walls, taking on familiar shapes and features. Some were welcome, some weren't. The shadow of the tree branch outside the window, taking on a shape that looked like it was made up of little flames, was enough to make Sanford go and turn on the hall light.

It was late, past the time of rational thinking and the perfect time for wistful thoughts and nightmares and gut-wrenching regret. Hank had gone to bed a while back, but Sanford figured that he was still wide-awake himself. The old adrenaline rushes were hard to kill.

And he couldn't sleep, but he needed some sort of closure to the whole situation. Some sort of end to the day.

For the first time since he had gotten home, Sanford pulled out the plastic trash bag crammed under his bed.

It was nothing more than an ordinary black garbage bag. Nothing special, nothing organized, nothing nice. It fulfilled its purpose, however.

It didn't have much in it. The old bandanna he had worn out in Nevada. Those circular shades of his that Deimos had incessantly teased him about keeping. His hook, the one weapon Sanford had refused to let the doctors confiscate.

Finally, Sanford pulled out the visor from the bottom of the bag.

It was a little bent, a little worse for the wear, maybe a bit bloodstained.

Sanford knew that he would have traded anything just to get the wearer of the visor back, but he also knew that was impossible. Even if he wanted to go through one of those denial stages like some people seemed to do, he knew that Deimos was dead and even if he missed the little shit, nothing was going to change the fact that he was dead. The Higher Powers had finished playing their game of chess, and they felt no need to bring back any pawns.

So Sanford would take what he could get.

Deimos would have laughed his ass off at the whole thing, but Deimos was dead and that meant that he couldn't really laugh at Sanford for keeping it.

But if there was an afterlife somewhere, then Sanford was completely certain that the little fucker was laughing at him.

And that was it. Deimos was dead and Hank was insane and Sanford himself was still pretty worse for the wear, but that was what the reality of the situation was.

Hank had raised an eyebrow when Sanford came out into the cramped living room the next morning wearing a grey visor. And maybe it was because his visor was a little bit bloodstained, a little bit bent, but that was alright.

They were both alright. They were broken and messed up in the head, but they had survived this long, after all, so they could survive a bit longer. They were gonna be alright.