They cornered Tick four blocks and an alleyway away from Mulberry Street.

All four men were taller than Tick by a good several inches. All four wore brass knuckles on their left hands, and identical hate in their expressions.

Tick pressed himself against the back wall, and bowed his head.

"See those scissors?" breathed the blond man on the far right. "He's the one, Clay. Gotta be."

The leader, Clay, stepped forward and scrutinized Tick's face with dark, hungry eyes. "What a freak," he muttered. "Hey, freak, you know why we're here?"

"Ummm." Tick considered the four men's rough appearances, their plainwear, the mud upon their boots. The brass knuckles. "Is it…something I did?"

The brunet on the far left jerked forward in anger, but Clay stuck out his hand to stop him. "Easy, Marv," he said, his dark gaze fixated on Tick all the while. "You're goddamn right it's something you did. You sliced up cousin Paulie last week with those scissors of yours, and all 'cause he was running a few craps games on Gandor turf. Ring any bells?"

Tick furrowed his brow, concentrating hard. He recalled Paul after a moment or two, a twenty something brunet into whose palms Tick had cut thin whorls for three minutes straight. "Oh…" he said, bowing his head even further. "You're…here for revenge? I'm sorrrrry."

"You fucking bet we're here for revenge!" shouted the man between Marv and Clay. "And who the fuck do you think you are, saying 'sorry'?"

Tick nodded in agreement. "I understand," he replied, his voice full of childish sorrow. "I hurt him. So you're here to hurt me. That's okay. I guess I deserve it."

Something ugly flashed across Marv's face, and he charged at Tick with an animalistic howl. Clay did not try to hold him back this time, and instead looked to the man on his left and the man on his right. "Barry, Duncan, go." To Tick, he said. "Revenge, yeah. That, and you're gonna tell me which Gandor ordered him tortured."

Tick offered no resistance when Marv plowed his right fist into his cheek, and remained pliant when Barry's and Duncan's fists followed at his chest. His breath was stolen from him in an instant, and he hovered his hands at his sides, near his scissors – but he made no move to grab them and defend himself.

Another few punches to Tick's ribs and sides sent him to his knees, and Marv drove the hard tip of his boot into Tick's shins, over and over. Tick's whole body juddered involuntarily, but he never once acted to defend himself. He did not act at all.

Tick retreated into himself, and felt relief.

"I…re-really respect you," he coughed, in between Barry's kicks to his side. "Y-you sought me ouuut because you…love your cousin, right? That your bond is so strong…I really aaaadmire—"

Duncan pressed the sole of his shoe down on the soft exposed flesh of Tick's right forearm, silencing him. Tick squinted past him at Clay, who had approached to stand just inches away from the mayhem. "Thank you," Tick wheezed, "For this."

Clay recoiled, his face contorted with disgust. "And why's that?"

"Be-because." Tick's cheek scraped against rough rock as he spat out blood from his split bottom lip. "Becauuuse. I want to know. If my – if my bonds to the Gandors are strong enough. I waaant to…" his cough this time was worryingly harsh "…believe they won't break, even if I break."

For a moment, there was nothing but silence. Barry and Duncan shared mutually nonplussed glances at one another, while Marv vibrated in a palpable effort to keep himself from letting loose another kick.

"Huh," said Clay, flatly. "Then you won't mind if we break you, right?"

He brought his boot down on Tick's right hand. Tick's phalanges cracked under the pressure, and his world went white.

Beneath the thick haze of agony lay a thin, detached sense of dismay, and Tick found himself taking refuge there. Ah… Tick may not have been all that smart, but he knew, at least, that his hands were his greatest assets. They were what made him valuable to the Gandor Family. The only thing that gave him value.

Clay stared down at him, humorless, and ground the heel of his boot down onto Tick's other hand.

Tick's ring finger snapped against his chest and he bit down on his ravaged bottom lip, splitting it further. He did not recognize the noise keening between his teeth. He did not recognize that Clay was speaking until a hand pulled at his hair and forced his head upward.

"Much as you're the star here… I'm still waiting on that name," said Clay, into Tick's ear. "Who handed Paul over to you? Who had him brought in?"

The names sprang to the tip of Tick's tongue – names, plural. It had been Luck who'd brought the multiple craps games to the Gandors' attention and who'd ordered Paul tortured, but it had been Berga and Nicola who'd broken up the largest craps game last Friday.

"Well?" Clay's whisky breath washed hot over his skin. "You know, if you don't talk we just may have to go after all the Gandor capos. Sure, it would be difficult, but…" He trailed off meaningfully, keeping his fingers woven into Tick's hair.

Tick hands burned with needling fire, and he noted distantly that he had begun shivering uncontrollably. He went limp, and focused on breathing one shuddery breath after another.

His hair was released. "Fine," grunted Clay. "You asked for it."

Something tugged at Tick's belt – no, the scissors on his belt. That caught his fading attention. "Not – my scissors," he pleaded. "They shouldn't be uuused…for hatred or revenge."

"Is that right." A faint note of amusement crept into Clay's voice. It morphed into hard loathing. "Sorry to disappoint."

Another sharp tug at Tick's belt resulted in the leather ripping. Tick reached out automatically to try and take his scissors back, but his arm dropped instantly at the lancing pain in his fingers. He curled in on himself, squeezed his eyes shut, and waited.

There was an art to using scissors, and Clay did not know it. He wielded them without respect, crudely and brutally driving the scissors like a stake into Tick's upper arm and right thigh. Crude, but nonetheless effective. And when he slid the tip of one blade into the cuticles of Tick's already maimed right hand, Tick found himself on the verge of crumbling.

It would only be too easy to give the man what he wanted; the syllables simmered on his lips, one mere breath away from betrayal. As temptation clawed at him, he could feel those intangible bonds that connected him and the Gandors, could envision them coiling around his limbs and his heart. The strain upon them was enormous.

He wondered, with a far-off spasm of alarm, if they were reaching a breaking point.

"What about now?" asked Clay, tracing Tick's jawline with the tips of the scissors. "You feeling like talking now?"

Tick's entire soul urged him to talk, but he shook his head with all the strength he had. Pressed his lips together, tight, and as his blood dribbled down his chin in warm rivulets thought only of the Family. Of Keith, austere and protective and so powerful in his silence, the very man who'd allowed him into the Family back in 1925; of Berga, big and bombastic and conservatively appreciative of Tick's work – even if it remained so very different from Berga's preferred methods of inflicting pain; of Nicola, unflinching and sturdy and always willing to lend a willing ear and warm laugh Tick's way.

And of Edith, strong and kind and one of the few people to call him friend, just like Claire – no, not Claire; Felix, who never failed to claim any empty seat next to Tick and greet him with a sun-bright smile and ask about his scissors with unflagging interest, month after month—

And of Maria – if Felix was the dawn then Maria was the eventide, dusky and intense and so, so warmly confident and confidently warm and – what was that Luck had called her? a confidant, and then there was—

—Luck, the youngest Gandor, the one who had looked at young, willowy Tick and given him a chance. Luck, impossibly sharp where Tick was dumb, eloquent and witty where Tick was dull. Luck, whom Tick had already disappointed once with the whole Mist Wall fiasco. Luck, and the rest. They who had given Tick a place to stay.

Clay sighed, and brought the scissors down onto Tick's exposed collarbone in a long, sluicing gash of a cut. From then on, Tick did not speak. Tick did not move. He lay there, limp as a rag doll, and felt the stress against his bonds to the Gandors increase, and increase, and increase—

"Hey!" A man's voice boomed in the distance. "What do you think you're – oh, hell."

Tick dimly recognized the voice as belonging to Nicola, and a warped amalgamation of relief and upset churned in his stomach. No…wait… Footsteps pounded in his direction, and he dimly recognized Nicola's strong, sturdy frame slamming into Clay with a brawler's tackle. The two men tumbled out of his sight in a tornado of limbs and adrenaline.

"Luck!" Nicola roared. "Luck!"

A muffled gunshot went off moments later somewhere on Tick's right, and he impotently twitched away from it. Something sharp dug at the skin of his uninjured thigh, and he realized it was one of his own pairs of scissors, still attached to his belt. The pressure vanished when a pair of hands grabbed Tick by his shirt and hauled him upward. His head lolled, but he managed to peer upward at his kneeling handler through blood-encrusted eyelashes.

"God damn you," moaned Marv, his eyes wet and accusing. "You evil son of a bitch, cutting up people for a living – cutting up Paulie, God damn you!"

His eyes grew impossibly round, and he choked soundlessly before slumping forward. Tick had little choice but to slump with him, and as he fell back against the wall he saw a knife protruding from Marv's back – not his spine, but somewhere around his scapula – and Luck looming over them both with molten fury oozing off him in waves. Luck drove a vicious kick into Marv's side, sending the man rolling off Tick's body and onto the floor, and immediately rammed his elbow into the abdomen of the man who'd been creeping up behind him – Barry. Without pausing for breath, he drew his revolver and shot Duncan's thigh before Duncan could so much as shout and shot a third bullet into Barry's ankle before hurrying forward to crouch by Tick's side.

"Tick." Luck said his name with quiet firmness, but no matter how coolly he spoke he couldn't mask the atavistic rage contorting the lines around his mouth and eyes, the tautness of sinew and muscle underneath his skin. And Tick did not miss the way Luck's gaze immediately fixated upon his maimed hands. "Report."

Tick sucked in a raspy breath and flecks of his own blood as he made to reply, but a long, arching caterwaul from Clay distracted him. He glanced out of the right corners of his eyes to no avail in an attempt to see the goings on.

"No, look at me. At me, Tick. That's an order."

With effort, he complied. "My-my hands," he tried, blood burbling at his bottom lip with every consonant. "Th-they…" It was obvious what had been done to his hands. "Ribs," he tried again, "Sides. Shins." He imagined that the holes in his arm and thigh were obvious too. He did not want to imagine the state of his face.

Nicola sidled into view, dark blood dripping from a gunshot to his upper right arm. What pain he must have been feeling remained hidden behind a mask of stoicism and anger at Tick's plight. "Damn it all," he muttered, sweeping his gaze over Tick's shivering body. "We've got an auto parked one block away. You want me to…?"

Luck did not look at him. "Go."

The capo did not have to be told twice. He vanished around the corner of the alleyway, feet heavy against the ground in thunderous haste. Once Nicola had vanished, Luck focused his attention solely on Tick, his eyes glittering. "You have my apologies," he said, hoarsely, "As a member of my Family, you are under my care. And that care has betrayed you."

"I don't…understaannnd…" And Tick did not understand, not in the slightest. He had been walking alone of his own accord, and was caught alone. He made to tell Luck this, but his bruised ribs protested the motion. All that he produced, in the end, was a single, miserable cough. Luck's drawn expression shuttered even further at the sound. "But – but I'm sorry toooo."

That caused concern to flash across Luck's face, but before he could pursue the matter there was a skid of rubber against road and rubber against stone and Nicola appeared at Luck's side once more, panting as if he had run a marathon. "Here, I'm," he gulped air, and Tick was lucid enough to notice that the dark wet patch of cloth over Nicola's arm had grown considerably in size. "Here, let's get him into the car, hurry—"

"Wait." Luck cast his gaze about the alley in tense thought, and Tick followed suit. He tried to, at least, turning his aching neck to the right to see Clay's crumpled form in the corner, to the left to see Barry clutching his ankle in agony. Luck nodded over to where Marv lay breathing shallow breaths near Duncan. "Take his coat. We can't let anyone see."

See what? Tick wondered, the question flitting hazily in and out of his rapidly fleeting consciousness. The answer, as it turned out, was him, and Nicola and Luck carefully helped Tick to his feet before draping Marv's coat over Tick's head and torso with apologetic care. Each man put a bracing arm on Tick's back, and helped him hobble over to the auto with laboriously slow steps. As soon as they deposited Tick in the passenger seat they were off again to fetch the four men, whom they shoved into the trunk and back seats with far less concern for their wellbeing.

Nicola made for the driver's seat, but stopped in his tracks at a word from Luck. "Not with that arm. Sit in the back." To Tick, Luck added, "We're taking you to Fred's first, and then the men to Coraggioso. Do not fall asleep until we get there. That's an order, understand? Tick?"

But Tick had lost himself in the nettling agony shooting through every nerve and cell in his hands, agony that drowned out the sting of his cheek and lip, the throbbing of his arm and thigh, the ache of his ribs and sides and shins, all of it. He had repaid Father's debt collateral in spades, but if his hands could not heal – if they could not heal – then what then?

What then?

He did not dare open his eyes if it meant finding out the answer.

So in The Slash, Cloudy to Rainy, Tick "can't help but think" that his bonds to the Gandors might break before he does should they ever be tested, and naturally I desperately need Narita to explore such a scenario as soon as possible. My dream would be for his bonds to be tested in 1935-E at Ra's Lance, because Dallas will be there and having the two of them in the same vicinity is an opportunity that Narita cannot waste (PLEASE).

You may ask why I ventured to write something like this when 1935-E isn't even out yet, and my answer to that is "a severe lack of self-control." That being said, I am not wholly confident in my ability to write this. I did not write out my dream of Dallas spotting and going after Tick in Ra's Lance, because I severely doubt that I would be able to do it justice. Writing about four OCs going after Tick is, while still risky, less so. That being said, I cannot guarantee that I won't write something on it once 1935-E is out.

Do I have chapter two planned? Not exactly, truth be told, though I have ideas. I just...wanted to get this out before my brain imploded.