Crossposted; this is the less explicit version

[Soft Spot; Lightning Rod]

Edgar hears the crash even over the clamor of the crowd talking and scraping their spoons on ceramic. He winces, shoulders climbing towards his ears, and he holds up a finger. "Excuse me," he says, to the man in the wool beanie. "One moment."

The kitchen part of the soup kitchen is an absolute wreck. Edgar picks his way through the fallen stacks of pots to where his one and only employee is swearing and clutching his arm, hunched over, red faced. The grease-soaked dish towel on the floor lies there like a limp accuser. The oven door is wide open.

"You didn't use the mitts," Edgar says, drawing his own conclusions.

"No I didn't use the fucking mitts," Jimmy says, through his clenched teeth. "The towel's faster."

"Let me see that," Edgar says, peeling Jimmy's hand away from his forearm. It takes some effort. The skin is already red and puffing up into what is going to be a really horrible blister. Edgar lets him go and finishes pulling the pan of pork out of the oven, careful not to spill the grease that has already caused so much trouble. Once it's taken care of, he turns back to Jimmy, who is panting and staring up at the ceiling.

Outside the kitchen, there's a telltale rise in volume from the cafeteria that means a lot of people are waiting at the counter, milling around and grating on each other's nerves. Edgar knows from unrelenting experience that gathering a bunch of desperate men and women in a small space can be as dangerous as shoving a bunch of strange cats into a room together, and he's not eager to see what happens when it's left unattended for too long. It just seems heartless to leave Jimmy here like this, is all.

"Do you want to take a breather?" Edgar asks him. "The soup will wait."

"I got it," Jimmy manages.

"Are you sure?" Edgar says, "There's really no reason to push-"

And then he hears one particular voice high pitched and hysterical plowing right through all the others, growing in volume with each syllable. Edgar goes into panic mode.

In the time it takes him to get out of the back room, the man who insists on being called Nny has already climbed up on the counter and started pacing, laces swinging from his untied boots, his long black coat whipping out behind him as he rants. His fingers, hacked off at the second knuckle, gesticulate at everything and nothing. The crowd is hooting and hollering, egging him on. Edgar catches something about milk fat in the rant there somewhere.

Despairing for the cleanliness of his counters, Edgar sighs and calls up, "Nny, please come down from there!"

The man whips around. He cuts a pathetic if not uncanny figure, all bare angles and bulging insomniac eye, just the one, and the first time Edgar saw him it was actually quite a shock. In this line of work you see some hard up people, but there is a truly haunted quality to Nny's madness that struck Edgar to his core. No one else seems to know what he means, of course. Jimmy just calls him Nubby , except that Edgar has threatened to dock his already meager pay if he pulls that shit again.

"Please," Edgar says.

Nny tilts his head, birdlike and uncomprehending, and then he hops right down, like nothing happened. He straightens his ragtag assortment of clothes, flicking wrinkles out of his coat. Unfortunately, they're both on the same side of the counter now.

"Why did you put all those pans on the floor?" Nny asks him, staring right past him and at the floor of the kitchen. Without waiting for an answer, he starts walking.

Nny started showing up at the soup kitchen about four months ago, looking like an absolute fright. Truly like something that had crawled starving out of a dumpster with half a mind to give up and die. He mumbled a lot back then, talking into his food and looking through people, going in circles and circles about a woman - the Artist, he said, although Edgar wasn't sure that such a person existed at all. Sometimes it sounded more like a recurring nightmare.

Maybe it's just Edgar's predilection for collecting strays, but he finds himself unfairly fond of Nny. He certainly wouldn't let any of the other patrons climb up on the counter like that.

He's right on Nny's heels, trying to reel him back out without actually touching him, which never ends well, as Nny goes into the kitchen. Jimmy looks up from his swelling injury. The two of them blink owlishly at each other.

"Nubs," Jimmy says, "what's the deal?"

"Jimmy!" Edgar snaps.

"I told you I was gonna kill you if you called me that again," Nny says, calmly, and thrusts his whole arm into the drying rack full of silverware after the buried butcher knife. Edgar has to wrestle him out of it before he slices himself open, or worse, accidentally cuts off what's left of his phalanges.

Scruffing Nny by his coat collar like a cat-he hisses and wriggles like one too-Edgar points at Jimmy. "I'm going to forget I heard that," he says, "because you're in a lot of pain right now. Seriously, Jimmy, take a break."

"I'm fine," Jimmy says, visibly not fine. "The stew's gonna burn if somebody doesn't stir it."

Nny is seething in his grip. Edgar takes a gamble and lets him go, careful not to accidentally brush skin. "Nny, I don't suppose you could do me a favor, while you're back here?"

Immediately he perks up. "Sure, Edgar, anything for you."

Edgar tries not to look flattered and embarrassed by that, he knows that Nny's moods are as volatile as the weather. "If you can get hold of that spoon," he says, "could you stir for me?"

It isn't easy for him, but Nny wrestles the long spoon into his grip and that's that, once he's got his hands on something you'd be hard pressed to pry them back out. Edgar turns his attention back to Jimmy and drags him over to the well-stocked first aid kit. They have a lot of accidents here. A month ago Jimmy stormed out of the building in a huff and kicked the table on his way, which should have been fine because Edgar had long ago moved all the breakable stuff off that particular table (never doubt his ability to recognize a pattern), except that Jimmy missed the table leg and hit the cement wall. And broke his little toe. And then he'd come limping and shaking into work the next day because for all his many, many faults, he had a die hard work ethic (and no other income.)

While Edgar dabs on ointment and tries not to make things worse - he can feel Jimmy stiffen under his hands, trying not to flinch - Nny hums something that sounds like a sloppy memory of Claire De Lune. Jimmy sucks in a breath, head thumping back into the wall.

"So," the boy says, putting on an attempt at a casual voice, "what's new on the streets, Nny?"

Nny shrugs. "I fought a raccoon for a box," he says, nonchalant. "Scrappy little fucker."

"I thought you were squatting in that abandoned construction project," Jimmy says.

"Was I?" Nny says. The spoon pauses in his hands. "I guess I was."

"I keep telling you to get in with the homeless shelter," Edgar says, frowning. "It's dangerous out on these streets, lately. Do you have any idea how many people go missing in this city? And that's just the ones who get reported."

Nny lets out a laugh that has all the mirth of a hysterical episode, shaking his head. Chunks of unevenly cut hair flop over the bandage that runs around his head like a hemispherical marker. Privately, Edgar thinks an eyepatch would be less unnerving. The permanent white bandages stretched over the concave hollow of his eye give him a perpetually hospitalized look, as if he has just stumbled out of a locked ward.

"I hope she comes for me," Nny mutters, "just let her try."

Edgar and Jimmy share a glance.

For all that Jimmy is a rude bastard about it, anyone with working eyes could tell that he's taken a liking to Nny. Once Nny came at Jimmy with a ladle in the middle of a manic-paranoid episode and Jimmy just let him get his swing in, even though Edgar has seen Jimmy wriggle out of much tighter spots. While a lot of things set Jimmy off, such as certain sounds, weird looks from strangers, and the whole concept of sports, violence never seems to bother him. Sometimes Edgar wonders if it's not because Nny is so unpredictably violent that Jimmy likes him.

"No one is coming for you," Edgar soothes, "I didn't mean to imply that you were in danger. It's just a scary world out there, Nny. That's all."

"Yeah," Jimmy says, "it's full of guys like me! You gotta watch yourself out there."

Edgar shakes his head. Sometimes he thinks that the parole board made Jimmy leave prison just to spite him. Of course Jimmy's parole officer - Mark, nice man, lovely wife - says that it all comes down to overcrowding, but there must have been other convicts they could have released who would have been more grateful for it. Jimmy, it often seems, took it like a personal insult.

The story, as Edgar understands it, is that sometime earlier last year, Jimmy shoplifted a zippo from the corner store and made the mistake of mouthing off to the officer on the scene, and that had been that. The arresting officer tried to pin a nearby manslaughter on him too, but the jury had laughed that one right out of court.

But I killed the guy, Jimmy always says at this point in the story, with his face screwed up in helpless bewilderment. I killed a guy, I swear to god I did, the body was right there.

And at this point in the conversation, Edgar usually reaches out and pats him on the hand and says, I know it seems like it was your fault, but everyone agrees it was just a slip. He shouldn't have been up on that ladder in the rain like that.

But I did it, Jimmy always says.

Nny is back to stirring, his rhythm only a little jerky. It's amazing how difficult normal things are for him, things Edgar never would have thought twice about. Nobody knows exactly what happened to him, but it sounds like the woman - if there is a woman at all - took his fingers off just to see what would happen. It's frankly amazing they didn't collapse with gangrene a long time ago. And then, of course, sometime while he was in the middle of all that, they evicted him from his apartment. It's all been a wreck from there.

Turns out there's really not much you can do in this world without fingers.

Edgar tapes down the bandage pad over Jimmy's wrist, ignoring the way he flinches. Edgar comes from the school of tough love, just like his haphazardly catholic parents before him.

He's already been back here too long. There's still a crowd out front, still a pot of soup to be dispensed before six. The work waits for no man. Edgar stands up and brushes gauze wrappers off his apron, and he makes a decision.

"Nny," he says, "would you be willing to help Jimmy out for a minute here? Just while he catches his breath."

Nny looks over his shoulder-or he would do, if he had an eye left on that side. As it stands, he is staring Edgar with the mummy swath of empty eye socket, still stirring.

"Sure, Edgar," he says, "anything for you."

[x]

Edgar's story, if you could say he has one, isn't complicated. He's lived in the city for the better part of ten years, making as few waves as he can manage. His parents died before he turned twenty-one, not at the same time of course, and they left him enough for a couple of respectable if sparsely attended funerals, and then it was back to the grindstone.

Edgar Vargas is not stupid. Lots of people are stupid, and lots of people are ignorant and self absorbed which is not quite the same thing, but Edgar is not any of those things. For a few years Edgar worked a steady respectable job and went out for drinks with his coworkers on Friday nights, and was very careful never to say what he was thinking because he had seen how that worked out for other people over the years. People like Jimmy, who said what they thought whenever they thought it, people who picked up misery like a black jacket picks up cat hair, they started spinning their wheels and never stopped.

Now he works here. There's not a lot of time to do anything else, after all the hours it takes to just keep it afloat, but he likes to be busy anyway. He owns the kitchen, although it's a non-profit. Plus, what else is he going to do with his time? People are exhausting. He gets all he can handle of that from the patrons. It's fine. He's fine.

When Edgar closes up the serving counter for the night, crockpot balanced on his hip, he comes around the corner to find Nny still working at the station. Actually he almost has a heart attack when he sees the knife jutting out of Nny's hand like a horror movie monster, flashing in the light of the open refrigerator. Jimmy pops up from behind the fridge door and grins at him.

"Check it out," he says. "Multitool."

Edgar makes his way carefully over to Nny, who doesn't look up until Edgar clears his throat, and then he freezes. The knife is ductaped into his hand like a bad DIY project, undoubtedly Jimmy's doing. Did Nny actually let the boy touch him?

"Did you agree to this?" Edgar asks.

Nny looks down at his hand, following Edgar's gaze. He seems nonplussed as he lifts the blade away from the pink strips of chicken on the table and turns it over, inspecting it.

"This is how I killed her," he says. "The snake slain with its own fang."

Edgar nods slowly. "Okay," he says. "Can I take that off you now?"

Nny makes a disinterested noise of agreement. Edgar very carefully cuts off the tape, after spending a futile moment trying to unwrap it without hurting either of them. He doesn't really know whether Nny killed anyone. He's volatile, sure, but right now he's just scared and alone. After what he went through, whatever it was, anyone would be. Anyway, if a guy like Jimmy could get picked up for pocketing a zippo at the corner store, it's hard to imagine how a - dare he say - wacky looking guy like Nny could get away with cold blooded murder. It just doesn't add up.

"Thanks for all your help," Edgar says, wadding up the old tape. "If you want to take some of the old bread with you for your hard work, you can do that."

Nny flexes his hand. The twisted ends of his fingers have a brutal warped texture to them, like mottled wax. "Alright," he says. "But it's not because I'm hungry."

After he's gone, with the lights almost all off, Jimmy and Edgar work to wipe down the kitchen in the half light of the back window. The sounds of tin pans ring off the chipped porcelain sink. Jimmy drops his pan in a huff. "What," he says.

"Nothing," Edgar says.

"Bullshit." Jimmy leans his hip against the counter and crosses his arms, illegibly worn old tshirt wrinkling over his chest. "That's the Tense Silence of Disapproval, I can smell it a mile away. Get it over with."

Edgar sighs. "I just don't think you should have taped that thing to him is all. He's not a dog, you can't just dress him up in people clothes and laugh about it."

"Okay, fuck you if you think that's what I was doing."

"And furthermore," Edgar says, "you know as well as I do that Nny isn't… always as stable as some other people. He could have hurt you."

Jimmy gives a one armed shrug, flipping his wrist like he literally could not care less if he tried to. Edgar doesn't know how to respond to that lack of emotion. He frowns.

"Look," Jimmy says, pushing his flat mohawk out of his face with one sudsy hand. "Nny can't do anything. He can barely open a doorknob by himself. If he wants to hold a knife for a minute, I'm not gonna stand in his way."

"Taping it to his skin isn't exactly not standing in his way. "

"Details." Jimmy goes back to scrubbing, but there's something in the set of his shoulders that hasn't come untensed. "Just don't see what's so wrong with wanting to give a guy some autonomy."

Edgar's heart twists a little. He's not blind, he's seen the fits of rage that come over Nny when he struggles with something that should be simple-the howling furious misery, hard to witness, hard to look away from. He hadn't realized Jimmy was keeping track too.

"Is autonomy what you're giving him?"

Jimmy's pan rattles against the inside of the sink. "What do you care?" he says.

Edgar chews his lip. "I don't want to see either of you get hurt. I don't want you to put yourself in a position where you could get hurt."

"It's just some dicing!" Jimmy says. His shoulders work under his t-shirt as he bears down on cutlery. "It was just a one time thing, you're acting like I drew a big X on my stomach and told him to take out my appendix."

Edgar sets down what he was working on. "It's almost curfew," he says. "We should get you back to the halfway house."

"I'm not done ," Jimmy says.

Edgar steps closer to him and puts a hand on his wrist, over the tape that holds his gauze in place. "It's okay," he says. "I'll clean up the rest in the morning."

Water drips from the tap. Jimmy lets the sponge drop with a wet thwop. "Do what you want," he says, and goes to dig his jacket out of the little office where they keep their paperwork and all the rest. Edgar slumps against the counter, wishing there was a conclusion to this conversation that didn't make him feel so uneasy.

What is he afraid of? He isn't convinced that Nny has killed anyone before, but he's also not at all convinced that it couldn't happen under the right circumstances. Nny lashes out, that's what he does, and if you happen to be standing too close you're liable to get splashed. There's nothing noble and quiet about his suffering. And Jimmy, well, who knows what Jimmy is thinking at the best of times.

The truth is, maybe Edgar is uneasy with the whole concept of these two men spending time together unsupervised. Maybe this whole thing with the knife is only the tip of the iceberg.

They load up in the car. It's silent. Jimmy complains like a child when Edgar tries to play his easy listening stuff, and Jimmy's music literally gives Edgar headaches, so now they just have to be content with keeping each other company. Most days, he actually enjoys it. Today it feels like chewing plaster. Edgar swings an arm over the back of the seat and pulls out, almost but not quite catching Jimmy's eye each time he turns to look out the back window.

"You know the guy I killed," Jimmy starts, chin in his hand as he stares out the window. His reflection mirrors back all his grey and black lines.

"Jimmy please," Edgar says, "that was an accident."

"I pushed him because he reminded me of my old man," Jimmy says. "I was passing by. I couldn't get my old man, so I settled for a guy who was nearby and convenient."

Edgar frowns. Jimmy's parole officer says that Mr. Euridge flew the coop before the parole board even set up their meeting. Apparently he was nothing to write home about, even when he was reachable.

"You ever get so mad," Jimmy says, "just, like, so goddamn mad- you don't care who you blow up on, you just gotta do something?"

Edgar shakes his head.

"I think Nny's a lot like me," Jimmy says, opening and closing his fingers absently, flashing black, chipped nails.

"Could be," Edgar says.

"Big world," Jimmy says. "Big ugly world. Little ugly people. Nothing worse than being powerless in a place like this."

The light changes. They roll forward into the cloudy evening, down the slumping side streets that lead to the halfway house, and a block down the other way, the crack house. Out of the frying pan, he supposes.

"Okay," Edgar says. "If you mean it, then - maybe you should work on a better solution than ductape."

Jimmy taps the doorframe. He must go through a gallon of nail polish trying to keep up with the wear and tear of scrubbing like that. Sometimes he wears eye makeup too, which Edgar finds charming if not incongruous with a kitchen setting.

"You still have those leathers?"

Edgar has to fight to keep his eyes on the road. "Do I still have what?"

"That time I was over at your house," Jimmy says. "You had this big box of fabric scraps. You still got 'em?"

Edgar knows his ears are going hot, and he also knows his hair isn't quite long enough to hide it. Jimmy has been inside his house exactly once, showed up out of the blue way past curfew actually, and while that certainly was an experience he has been very firm about maintaining boundaries since then. Like he said that night, Jimmy needed to focus on himself right now. There just wasn't any room for something like that with all the probation and the curfew and the hearings going on. Not that he wasn't flattered.

(Jimmy had looked awfully confused through the whole conversation, which was quite endearing, actually. No idea why he'd had that knife on him though. Edgar's neighborhood isn't that bad.)

Edgar remembers shuffling him off with a poptart for the road and a promise not to tell Mark about this incident so long as it wasn't repeated, and he wonders when Jimmy had the time to look around his apartment in the middle of all that.

"I think so," Edgar says. "Why, do you want them?"

Jimmy nods. He is still looking at his hand, opening and closing it finger by finger.

[x]

Sometimes people (Mark the parole officer, for example) ask Edgar what it is that he sees in Jimmy Euridge. Certainly he could hire somebody less troublesome, even for the extremely low wage of a non-profit soup kitchen. It's true that Edgar has had to rearrange the kitchen so when Jimmy kicks the tables all the pots and pans won't tumble to the floor, and sometimes Jimmy tries to pick fights with the homeless, once getting as far as pulling his whole shirt off before Edgar could drag him away, but.

Okay, here's an example.

Jimmy subsists entirely off the mcdonalds dollar menu and the soup that he sneaks out of the soupturine at work. But instead of just being satisfied with his endless supply of free mediocre soup that Edgar never comments on, he seems to think he owes something for it. Edgar keeps finding suspiciously rumpled random ingredients lying around the kitchen and he knows he didn't purchase them, which means Jimmy must have gotten his sticky fingers on them somehow.

And it keeps happening?

("Well… you didn't get caught again, I see."

"What do you take me for, an amatuer? Fuck off."

"You did already go to-"

"Shut up! I've got shit to make, get off my dick dude, damn.")

At the end of the day, Edgar figures you've just got to hate the sin and love the sinner.

[x]

Nobody bothers to ask Edgar what he sees in Nny. This is because Nny exists in an odd little snowglobe of his own madcap perception, far beyond the reach of sensible people like Jimmy's parole officer. There are very few sensible people in the world. Edgar probably knows most of them.

Nny isn't sensible, not even slightly, but there's something buried in the muddled mess that shines. Something sharp, or something rare. Whatever it is, it catches the light. The way he looks at the world, the things he sees, he must have been a real talent before his misfortune.

An example:

Last week Edgar came out of the kitchen just after dark to find Nny sitting on one of the dumpsters out back, watching the slow rotation of the night sky.

"The church killed men for suggesting that the sphere of heaven wasn't absolutely perfect," Nny said, as if they had already been conversing for a long time. "Then, of course, they invented telescopes. Now you can see every crack and crowsfoot on the moon if you like, with the simple application of glass!"

Edgar paused in the door, precarious stacks of boxes in his arms, and was struck by the shape of Nny against the sky, his rare wistful lucidity, his angles and edges for once rendered elegant.

"But from down here," Nny said, "it still looks perfect. At least there's one thing these flimsy rotting human bodies are good for, you know?"

[x]

What Edgar doesn't know is how Jimmy and Nny met.

Nny, for his part, barely remembers it. Jimmy just doesn't like to talk about those kinds of things. Out of all things in the world, what Jimmy despises most is softness - anything malleable, giving, weak. Now he works at a soup kitchen providing sustenance for the poor and grits his teeth every time Mark the Parole Officer points this out to him. All the softness of the world is a pebble stuck perpetually in his boot. It drives him absolutely crazy when people insist that his manslaughter charge must have been a very sad and traumatic event for him, and would he like to speak to someone about it? Sometimes he feels like he's really losing his mind. Once he tried to kill Edgar, actually, just to prove that he could. But that didn't turn out right either.

He saw Nny for the first time when he was taking in a delivery at the front of the kitchen, months ago. Edgar was back at the counter, swamped with hungry people, so it was up to Jimmy to get these damn potatoes off the stoop before some street kid dragged them away. Last year he would have been that street kid.

He was hoisting one of the heavier boxes up when he stumbled back into something with all the weight resistance of an old scarecrow. If scarecrows were made with bones and rags, that's what it would have been - he stumbled and swore and turned around to find himself facing a vision out of an acid trip nightmare. Nny scuttled back from the blow, dazed and curling into himself, face gaping wide open like a screaming mouth had opened where his eye should be. He'd been wrapped in rags that day, the ghost of what had probably once been a good outfit. He was dark from his wrists to his bandaged hands with something that looked like blood, so old it was mostly dust.

"Jesus fuck dude," Jimmy said, adjusting the delivery against his hip. "What happened to you?"

Nny cocked his head. Slowly, he started to uncurl, and despite the rags and the blood and the gaping eye, the look he gave Jimmy was the disinterested regal consideration of a prince. He lifted his stained mummy-wrapped hand, and in the hacked off violence of his fingers, Jimmy saw the flash of an equally crusty knife.

"Are you real?" Nny said.

"Man I wish I fuckin knew," Jimmy said, without thinking. Lately he wasn't sure of anything. He'd barely kept himself straight through the months of sympathetic gaslighting. He definitely killed that guy, right? Right?

The next thing he knew, the box of potatoes was upended on the concrete, and Nny had smashed him against the building with that gruesome crusty thing pressed against his windpipe, and the back of his head was screaming pain.

"Are you real?" Nny asked again, this time with his eyes wild, his teeth clicking as he spoke. "If you die, I can kill you. If I can kill you, you're real. She didn't die, I killed her and she didn't die, but I won't be fooled again!"

Jimmy couldn't look away from his hollow eye, perfectly empty like the concave doomed port of the death star. It looked like it had healed over from the inside, bloodless and waxy, and he didn't know fuck all about medical shit but something told him it wasn't supposed to go like that. He understood, instinctively, that something horrible and deliberate had happened here.

"Who did that to you?" he said.

Nny clawed at Jimmy's shirt, trying to get a fist full of it that he couldn't quite grip. "It swallowed up the stars it swallowed up everything and she died, she swallowed up the stars-" he breathed like he was having a panic attack, heaving against Jimmy's chest, and with each breath it was more and more like he was clinging to Jimmy instead of holding him captive. "No more stars," he said, "no more anything-"

Jimmy despises softness. Nothing has ever hurt him more than pity, not the sound of a beer bottle breaking over his head, not the hunger of a house left empty for weeks, not even the laughter of other children (how quickly they forget, how quickly they forget what takes a lifetime to unremember). Maybe it's because no one had ever looked to him for comfort before, maybe it's because even Nny's most pathetic moments are hard-edged, relentless and demanding - even broken and ruined he is dangerous, with his misery like a sword that cuts both ways - Jimmy reached for him. Jimmy pressed his hands to Nny's shoulders, almost an embrace but not quite, and he opened himself up to that knife edge.

"Hey," he said, "deep breath. Can you feel me?"

"Yes," Nny gasped.

"Okay," Jimmy said. "Can you hear me? Good. Here, hand over my heart. Come on."

In the back of his mind, Jimmy knew that he was repeating half remembered lines from the movies that raised him in childhood, but that was all he knew how to do. It took a second of dumb scrambling, but Nny got his hand just about over Jimmy's heart. The polished wood handle of the knife pressed hard against rib, blocking most of Nny's touch. Jimmy made a little huffing impatient noise. No, that wasn't going to work.

"Your other hand," he said. "Put that one over my throat. Okay, perfect. You feel that?"

Nny nodded, absently, with his head tilted like he was listening for the sound of the heartbeat itself in the air. Against Jimmy's neck, Nny's own pulse was faint, his skin ice cold. In the wind that blew autumn through the tight hollow of the street, they stood suspended like that, a closed perfect unit.

There's lots of things Jimmy and Nny actually have in common. They're both still perpetually salty about the shit that happened to them in high school, for one thing. They're petty, broken people, and they're both, incidentally, murderers. They both really hate the word "helpmate" for some reason. But that day, all that Jimmy knew about Nny was that he was fragile. Fragile, and dangerous, and unlike anything else Jimmy had ever seen.

October was coming on. In his rag-bone body in his bone-rag clothes, Nny gave a hard little shiver, biting his teeth down on the chatter his jaw wanted to make. It was such a stubborn pointless thing to do, and Jimmy ached at the memory of doing the same thing too many times.

"Hang on," Jimmy said. "I saw a really cool coat in the lost and found box earlier. It's too small for me, but- you're a little fuckin thing-"

Edgar has this infuriating compulsion to rescue strays. Jimmy knows he is one of Edgar's many many strays, and he resents that, or he did resent that, but. As little as he wants to, after Nny, Jimmy thinks he kind of understands. It's just that Edgar wants to feed his strays, and Jimmy wants to sharpen their broken little claws.

[x]

Jimmy comes to work the next day with a prototype.

It closes around the wrist for security. Buckle and strap. Then there are the closed straps that go in the slight curve between the bottom knuckles and the thumb joint (he stayed up late in the night examining his own hands, imagining them even thinner than they are). He's already thinking of different kinds of loops he can add for specific kinds of tools, special handles he can make that will slot in there just right, but right now those are just pencil marks on a turned-over mcdonald's wrapper.

Sketching was a bitch last night, as a matter of fact. Every time his wrist tapped the table he thought he was going to bust the monster blister from the grease burn yesterday.

Edgar eyes the contraption on the counter, where Jimmy has slapped it down for his approval. That's the thing about Jimmy. No matter what a big game he tries to talk, at the end of the day he always holds his breath waiting for the final stoic nod (not that Edgar ever does the stoic nod, Edgar is warm and effusive with his praise when he has it, giving like it costs him nothing).

Edgar rubs his thumb over the buckle. "Is this going to fit him?"

Jimmy shrugs, playing it cool. "I can always cut it down," he says.

Edgar looks up. There's something in his expression that looks almost like pain, but soft. "This is great," he says. "I don't know what Nny will think, but I can tell you I'm very impressed."

Something inside of Jimmy folds like wet paper, and he sighs with relief. "Yeah well," he says, "I could do a lot better if I had decent tools to work with, the scissors they keep in the house are useless. I just about had to chew my way through the leather."

Edgar smiles, attentioned turned back onto the straps. "I'll pick you up some things from the Home Depot," he says, absently.

Jimmy's throat kind of goes tight. He'll have to find a way to shoplift something nice for the kitchen, if Edgar goes through with that. Jimmy isn't the kind of person who owes debts. He used to be superstitious about it, but now he's just hellbent on holding his ground.

"Do you think," Edgar starts. He frowns. He looks at Jimmy like he's confessing something treacherous. "Do you think it would be alright if we had Johnny do some work for us under the table? Just so he could have some pocket change. It seems like I never have enough hands, and you're always back here by yourself…"

Stuff like this is the reason Jimmy couldn't go through with it, the time and all the almost-times before that when he thought about killing Edgar. This nerdy little goody goody is always surprising him. Jimmy shows up in his house ready to cut his throat just to make a point, and Edgar very warmly escorts him out the back door without so much as dialing 911. And completely misunderstands what is happening.

In theory Edgar Vargas should be incidental to him, but in practice, it keeps coming back to this.

"No problem," Jimmy says. "I can show him the ropes."

It isn't until someone out front bangs hard on the window that Jimmy realizes they've just been standing here smiling at each other for a hot second. Edgar ducks his head down, fingers closing around the back of his neck nervously, and then he takes a step back.

"I'm sorry if I was hard on you yesterday," Edgar says. "There's always going to be- things- I can't understand. With both of you. But I want you to know that I'm always here, and I'm always ready to listen."

Jimmy's stomach rolls like every emotion he's ever felt is crashing down in him, it's an ugly mess that he can't begin to sort through. He stands perfectly still.

"I am," Edgar says, less certain, "here for you. You know that, right?"

Nny is someone that he instinctively understands, as if they were two monsters shaped from the same resentful clay. Edgar-he doesn't know what Edgar is, and there are times when that really makes him mad. Then there are times when it makes him want to peel open his itchy beetle skin and show the last soft pumping valves where they lie buried.

Before he went to prison he was more like that. Open. Heart on his sleeve. But you can't survive like that, hoping for things that don't ever come, starving for scraps when the table is in your reach.

A moment of confused understanding bubbles up in him, in the middle of all his silent boiling nausea: that they are locked, the three of them, in a kind of strange triangle. Edgar wants to help Jimmy. Jimmy wants to help Nny. And Nny wants to help Edgar, for whatever goddamn reason. They are cycling their gifts around and around, skimming just a little off the top each time the love passes through their fingers, afraid to hold it for too long. Afraid of being burned.

Nny loved someone and for that he lost his fingers and his mind. Edgar never loved anyone, and for that he lived alone with his work in a miserable endless silence. Jimmy tried be loved, over and over, and for his crimes he was pushed off the docks into the water again and again until he finally went under.

Edgar's expression is starting to fall, the stupid hopeful half smile trickling away into embarrassment. He pulls his arms in against himself.

This shouldn't be Jimmy's decision. He doesn't know anything about people or about himself, he's never even paid a bill in his life. He's been good for nothing his whole life. Why should he pretend like he's not now?

"I'm not one of your charities," Jimmy says. "I don't want your fucking pity."

Edgar nods, fast, like he's relieved just to have the silence over. "Okay," he says.

Oh no. No no. What the goddamn fuck is his heart doing. He can't be responsible for these people. You do your own time, only ever do your own time, he knows this. It doesn't matter that he's technically not in prison any more, everywhere's a prison of some kind. Edgar doesn't even know what he's asking.

But no one has ever wanted him before.

"There's some shit you aren't gonna want to hear," Jimmy says. His stomach flips. It isn't a no, now, and he knows it. They both know it.

Someone is banging on the window insistently now, out front. The first aid kit lies on the table where they left it yesterday, some of the wrappers still caught underneath it. Edgar offers him his device, straps hanging looped from his fingers, and he says, "We can start small."

Maybe if they all do a little of each other's time, they'll break even at the end of the sentence.