A/N: This chapter contains talk of suicide. If this is a trigger for you please take appropriate measures and/or don't read.

She wasn't entirely sure what had happened. Samantha had left him, somewhat reluctantly given his unsteady condition, and gone to the kitchen to pull the scones from the oven. "Thank god," she told Spartacus who was sitting in front of the fridge and staring at it intently. "Got them before they burned. I was worried there for a moment." She turned enough to see where the cat's attention was focused. "No," she told him sternly. "I know you know that there is leftover chicken in there. I'm going to use it to make dinner. Not for kitty." Spartacus blinked, long and slow, and flicked his tail expectantly. Samantha sighed. "Why do I even bother?" she muttered as she opened the fridge and dug out a piece of the cold rotisserie chicken. "This is it," she told the cat as she broke it into smaller chunks and set it on the floor. "No more." The contented rumble that vibrated out of his chest was response enough. If he decided that he wanted more, she would give it. End of story. True, too.

It was less than a minute later, as she was washing out the man's mug that the screams began.

"What the hell?" she whispered, unable to quite catch the words that he was yelling but all too aware of the unmistakable crash of flesh against something hard. She pounded on the door. "Are you okay?" she called urgently.

"No, no, no, no," he cried behind the door, and though it was answer enough she didn't think that his words were meant for her. Going by the unending repetition of his words and the rhythmic slap of flesh against something – Counter top? Floor? – that he hadn't even heard her.

"I'm coming in!" she warned, twisting the door handle and pushing inward. The door moved about three inches and then stopped. She sighed. He was on the floor then. Gently, if persistently, she continued to press the door open. She didn't want to hurt him but she needed it open enough for her to actually slip inside and, despite continual New Year's Resolutions to lose that last ten or fifteen pounds, she wasn't that skinny. She sucked in her stomach, vowed to go to the gym more, thought "THIN", and wormed her way into the bathroom.

He was in a heap on the floor behind the door in a position that managed to be both sitting and lying as he smashed his open palms over and over against the tile floor. "No, no, no, no!" His voice was both a sob and a howl, something torn between absolute rage and complete and utter despair. It made every hair on her body stand on end. All she noticed though was the unmistakable smear of blood across the tile.

"Stop, stop! You're hurting yourself!" she dropped to the floor beside him, forcing herself into the narrow space between his torso and vanity. "It's alright, it's alright," she soothed, snatching at his hands and trapping them in her own. "What happened?" she whispered under her breath as she tried to get a good look at his hands. Last night she had bandaged the deeper, larger cuts and left the numerous small scratches free, and now they were the ones that were bleeding the most. The force of his blows had not only split them but made many of them deeper. She wasn't sure she had enough bandages left for what he had done to himself. "What would make you do this?" she breathed, unconsciously stroking her thumbs along the backs of his hands.

"One. Two. Three. Four," he murmured, his voice finally falling into a quiet desperation. He looked at her over their clasped hands. His eyes, so deep a blue they were almost black, looked at her unseeing and yet… They were clear, she realized. For the first time since he had woken up this morning and despite his current situation his eyes showed a level of cognizance that had not been there before. "It's still there," his voice broke on the last word, a look of such wretched despair written on his face that Samantha felt her heart stop inside of her chest. So much sadness, so much anger… the level of self-loathing written on his face stole the breath from her lungs. His hands moved within her grasp, and after realizing that he clearly wasn't going to start hurting himself again, she reluctantly let them go. He immediately covered his face and broke, sobbing into them. "Dead. I was supposed to be dead. I wanted to die," he keened. He curled his fingers downward, folding them over his mouth and looking up into her face. Even half-lying as he was he was barely shorter than she was kneeling. "He wouldn't shoot me," he told her, a bitter laugh bubbling out of his throat. "Of course he wouldn't. Not even to save the world." He gave his head a little shake, as if he was trying to dislodge water from inside his ears. "So I…" He shook his head again and shut his eyes.

The sound that came out of his throat made every square inch of her flesh ripple, pebbling it with goose bumps. It was terrible: high and keening. It was the sound of a man so utterly alone, so utterly broken that there were no words under heaven to encompass the tumult of emotions that consumed him. Even muffled by the hands fisted over his lips it was just loud enough and long enough that it reverberated against the tile and echoed, seemingly endlessly, around the small enclosed room.

If Samantha had thought herself sympathetic before, it was nothing compared to now. That cry, this scene playing out before her of a broken man – alien or no – sobbing into his hands was enough to make even the hardest, most wary of hearts soften. More than that, though, it was his words. They reached right down inside of her and stopped her heart. No, not just stopped it - tore it from her chest and ground it against the cold, hard floor.

Despite the fact that just about every reasonable part of her brain was screaming at her to shut the door and go call the cops - particularly the mace-toting, 'let's go to Krav Maga tonight' part – she eased into a sitting position beside him. For a moment she considered pulling his hands, still bleeding all over the place, away from his face but in the end left him that small shred of privacy. Naked, alone, and in a stranger's house? The man probably needed all the privacy she could give him. With that in mind she leaned over tugged the fleece blanket out from where it was tangled underneath his legs and pulled it up over his lap.

"It's alright," she repeated, keeping her voice soft and low. "It's alright. You're safe here. It's alright." Hesitantly she reached out and ran her fingers through his hair, down the side of his head, and across the cool skin of his shoulder. "It's alright." She lifted her fingers and ran them through again. "It's alright." And again. A great shuddering breath hitched through him and he leaned into her touch. Bereft of his hands to support him the slight tip in body mass made him collapse against her.

She half caught him with her other hand and eased him down until his head rested in her lap. "Shhhh," she soothed, reaching down to pull the blanket up higher. "It's alright. Get it out. Get it out." Samantha leaned back against the wall and stared up at the mirror. In it she could just barely see the beginning of a reflection. A sad looking woman holding a sadder looking man. "It's alright," she whispered again, giving her reflection a broken little smile.

On the other side of the door Spartacus meowed, demanding more chicken.

"I had a sister once," she said. Samantha didn't know why she had told him that. She certainly hadn't meant or intended to; it had just slipped out. Maybe she was simply tired of mouthing the same empty platitudes over and over – because she certainly didn't know if it was going to be alright or if he was safe here. She certainly hoped so – in both scenarios – but she couldn't be sure. Maybe she felt… not cruel, but something. Here he was so exposed and vulnerable - open for anyone to see. It felt wrong, in a way, to remain closed. Privacy, she mused. Perhaps by exposing herself she was offering him a touch of privacy back. Perhaps that was just silly sentiment, a delusion within her mind. Whatever it was though, it kept her talking. "Older. Just by two years. She was gorgeous and smart and funny. God, I always wanted to be just like her. I wanted her thick dark curls and bright blue eyes. I wanted her brains. She was always getting good grades and winning awards in math and science related things. She was, I suppose, the stereotypical perfect big sister. Except she wasn't. She was herself. Unique. And absolutely wonderful."

She curled her fingers through his hair. It was so soft; like silk and feathers woven together. "She didn't think so though," Samantha added softly, smoothing the spiky tufts of his hair back against his head. "She didn't see, didn't know, how much she had. How many people she had. Came home from school when I was thirteen and found her in the bathtub. She'd slit her wrists with her razor."

Samantha forced herself to swallow past the sudden knot in her throat, forced herself to keep her fingers from clenching in his hair. Instead, she wiped the scattering of tears from her eyes with her free hand, mindful of not smearing her mascara. God knows she didn't need to scare him by turning into a red-eyed raccoon. She inhaled deeply and then exhaled to the count of ten, feeling it shudder through her.

"I don't have that option," his voice was hoarse and bitter, muffled against her leg. At some point he had removed his hands from over his mouth and let them fall. One lay limply on the floor but the other was on her knee, the fingers curled around the curve of her kneecap with a tension that made her think he was fighting the urge to grip her leg with a potentially painful amount of force. She was going to have to change her pants though, there were spots of blood all over them. Probably her shirt too, now that she thought about it. Internally she shrugged. There were plenty of clothes in her closet.

"Slitting your wrists?" she asked, startled into an alarmed and frank response.

"Yes," he replied dully. "Don't stop," he added as her fingers stilled against his skull. His voice was barely a whisper against her thigh and something she doubted he had meant to speak out loud let alone for her to hear. For a moment she almost left her fingers lying motionless, almost let him have the illusion that she had not heard his accidental request but a tension was returning to his body, the muscles between his shoulder blades beginning to shake. Samantha began to move her fingers again, stroking up and down and in senseless patterns as the tension began to vanish as quickly as it had arrived.

"Why not?"

Stupid, she berated herself silently. Just be thankful he's not planning to off himself in the bathtub.

"It's not for lack of desire, believe you me," he told her in an empty tone. "My species… we cheat death."

"Cheat death?" God damn it, she needed to have a long talk with her mouth about consulting with her brain before opening and letting stupid things march out.

"Makes it incredibly hard to kill yourself," he continued, sidestepping the obviousness of the question she had asked him. "I don't think it has ever been successfully done. Suicide by proxy, yes. But simply killing yourself?" He laughed bitterly against her leg, beneath her touch. "Bloody out of luck on that."

Her hand paused at the base of his neck, lingering there as her thumb pressed down and traced circles upon a stubborn knot of tension. "You say that like it's a bad thing."

"It is," he growled.

"But everyone has something to offer," she protested, a familiar breathless sensation pooling in her chest. "Everyone is unique. There is no one else like you in existence. Why would you choose to snuff out that potential? Why would you choose to leave those that care for you?" Her voice broke and she shook her head, struggling to take a deep breath, to breathe past the feeling in her chest.

Breathe, Sam. You have to breathe. You're twenty-six. You're in your apartment in Salt Lake City, Utah. You're sitting in your bathroom with a strange man, an alien man at that, lying in your lap. You're just about as far away from Sarah as you can get. Breathe. Just concentrate on the breathing.

"Whatever I might have once had, whatever I could have been – that's all gone now. Gone and I can never get it back."

Samantha shut her eyes and silently inhaled and exhaled to the count of four. "Do you want to talk about it?" she asked hesitantly. All the help websites, all the hotlines, they all said to ask – to get the person to talk, to communicate. She had never been sure that would work though. After all, she had talked to her sister every single day she could remember. Talked and communicated, laughed and cried. They'd done it all and it hadn't stopped her.

"No," he snapped, fingers tightening around her knee.

"Alright, it's alright," she backtracked, returning her fingers to his hair. "It's alright," she repeated, more for herself than for him. Breathe, she reminded herself once more as she stroked those impossibly strands of hair. If it was this soft when it was dirty… well, either way it was wickedly unfair. Her hair was… not coarse but not soft either. Its wavy strands were too thick to be silky. Sarah's hair had been fine and soft and curly – thick ringlets that coiled like springs around her face.

"I don't have anyone." Samantha started out of her train of thought, fingers growing still as they rested on his skull. She stared down at the head resting in her lap. Battered and blood smeared he was studying the tired door of her vanity like it was the most fascinating thing in the universe.

"No one?" she asked, disbelieving. He shook his head against her leg as she began to move her fingers again, not wanting to make him ask a second time. "Mother, father, siblings, friends, distant relatives?"

"No one," he affirmed. "I'm the only one of my species left. Well, there is one other but he and I are… not exactly on good terms." He shut his eyes. He wouldn't shoot me, his earlier words echoed around her head. Of course he wouldn't. Not even to save the world.

"Oh," she said softly, completely unsure of what to say.

"I'm nothing and I am all alone. No loss to the universe there, just no way to take myself out of it."

It was there again. Absent for most of the conversation that had taken place on her bathroom floor the heart wrenching desperation, the absolute despair was back in his voice. The self loathing that had colored his face now filled his voice and it made something inside of her break.

Her fingers tightened in his hair before she could stop them. "What is your name?" she asked softly.

He was silent for a long moment. So long that she began to think that he wasn't going to answer her. "The Ma…," he paused and inhaled sharply. "Matt. Matt Yana," he finally told her.

"Well, Matt Yana my name is Sam – Samantha Tate," she told him levelly, returning her gaze to the partial reflection of the pair of them in the mirror. "No one is ever nothing," she continued softly. "Besides, now you have me."

The scones were cold.

Of course they were cold given that they had sat on the floor of her bathroom for the better part of two hours. To say that she had been surprised when she had entered the kitchen and glanced casually at the clock would be an extreme understatement. It hadn't felt like that long, not at all. But the clock didn't lie and both the scones and bacon were cold. Good thing she hadn't made the eggs already. Reheated eggs were nasty, absolutely nasty, and she hated throwing out foot.

Her stomach didn't lie either and right now it was informing her in no uncertain terms that it had been nearly fifteen hours since she had last fed it. After pausing to listen for a minute - yes, the shower was still running – she filled a mug with milk and stuck it in the microwave. She needed food and she needed something hot. It wasn't until she lifted the mug from the microwave and set it on the counter that she noticed her hands were shaking. "Low blood sugar," she told herself firmly and while that was certainly true she also knew it wasn't the real reason, or at least all of it. Emotional distress. Borderline anxiety attack. Just breathe, Sam and drink your damn hot chocolate.

She sighed and turned the oven back on so that she could reheat the scones and bacon. The way things were going she would wait until Matt was safely out of the shower before did anything about the eggs.

Still covered in most of the dirt and grime he had collected before falling on her doorstep along with the painful, more recent addition of a rather macabre mask of his own blood he had roused from the almost catatonic stupor in her lap when she had suggested that he might like a shower. She had fetched him a towel and a washcloth and he had watched, but said nothing, as she had removed her razor from the shower. After the Bathroom Floor Incident she didn't think that he was lying about his inability to kill himself but she wasn't taking any chances.

She had also managed to dig through her closet and find some clothes that just might fit him. Operative word there: might.

Thanks to her mother's scatter brained, if well meant, method of gift buying she had a deep navy pair of flannel pajama bottoms in a men's size large. Never mind that it was the wrong size and last she checked she was definitely not a man, she knew her mother had probably been strolling through the mall one afternoon and spotted a display proclaiming "Pajama Pants" and noticed that there was a pair in a shade of blue she was pretty sure that Samantha liked. It hadn't been the first time she'd gotten men's or wrong sized clothes from her mother as gift and it probably wasn't the last. These were one of last year's Christmas gifts that she had meant to donate but had never gotten around to actually taking out of her closet. They even still had the tags on them. The shirt was a basic unisex tee that she had snatched up at the company picnic for use as a pajama top. It was suitably big enough to be baggy and comfortable on her but she was more than slightly skeptical that it would prove to be large enough for him.

"Smells good."

Samantha let out a small yelp and narrowly avoided spilling hot chocolate all over her second outfit of the day. "Shit. Sorry. Gah, scones!" She turned opened the open to pull out the baking sheets of both scones and bacon. The scones bordering the exterior of the pan were a little more golden than she would have liked but thankfully, still not burnt. Apparently the universe was smiling at her today. "Clearly I am not used to having people in my apartment," she told him, letting the oven bang shut as she sat the metal sheets on the stove top with a clatter. "Sorry about the noise. Now, you said it smelled good. Does that mean you're hungry? I've got orange vanilla scones – they just need the glaze - and some bacon. Eggs too, but I didn't know if you'd want some or how you'd…" Her voice trailed off as she pulled the oven mitts off her hands and turned around to face him. "… take them," she finished weakly.

There is a man in my house, her brain squeaked.

Of course there is a man in your house, stupid. Let's recap, shall we? Man collapses in front of door. You feel bad. You bring man in like he's a damn stray kitten. You undress man, so yes, you are definitely sure that he is male and he sleeps naked on your couch. You just spent two hours with him in your lap, stroking his hair. He used your shower. He's wearing clothes from your closet and now you're going to feed him. So yes. There is a man in your house. Welcome to your Saturday – have a nice stay.

The clothes fit. That was a good thing. Mostly. The shirt was a bit tight across the shoulders and the chest but it fit well enough. The pants were fine. Fitted across the hips and loose everywhere else. Just fine. More than fine. They also happened to be the same exact shade of blue as his eyes.

Stop it. You're acting like a crazy person. Take a breath and serve the man some breakfast. You're an inferior life form. Just give the man some breakfast because it is almost noon and stop gawking like a teenage girl.

Right. It was easier said than done, though. The casual attire suited him, especially with multiple days of stubble scruffing up his jaw line and the complete disarray of his hair. He had dried it, at least mostly, but had clearly not bothered to brush it even though she'd left a brush on the vanity counter. He was still pale, deathly so with hardly a hint or blush of life in his skin which made the cuts on his face all the more visible. His eyes were still clear, though. Weary, but full of an awareness and an intelligence that had been lacking earlier. And his eyes were really, really blue.

"How are your hands?" she asked, her mind finally latching on to something that wouldn't make her sound like a complete idiot.

"Sore," he replied shortly, head tipped to one side as he regarded her quizzically. There was something in his gaze that she couldn't quite place. It made her feel a bit like a mouse sitting in front of a snake and a rubik's cube all at the same time. She bit back the urge to ask if she had suddenly grown an extra head and turned back to the food. "And yes. I'm hungry." The look he gave the food sitting on the stove though was apprehensive, almost as if he expected it to jump off the pan and bite him.

"Do you have any food allergies?" she asked, following his gaze. That would be just her luck if he happened to be allergic to what she had made. He shook his head slowly. "Oh. Good. Eggs?"

"Uhhh…" he stared at her, a look of panic momentarily crossing his face. "My last…" he paused and licked his lips. "I…" he paused again and stared at the stove, lips pressed in thought. "I… oh, bloody hell," he swore, giving his head that odd little shake again. "Whatever is easiest for you," he sighed and waved his hand in a very slight, dismissive gesture.

She stared at him, head cocked to one side, and raised an eyebrow speculatively. "You sure? Really, it's no problem…" he shook his head again and waved wearily at the stove. "Alright." Overhead the lights flickered: once, twice, and then they went out, plunging the room into faded gray. "Son of a bitch," she muttered viciously.

Of course the power would pick now to go out. Because she had a half-naked man still recovering from hypothermia in her apartment. Because she had a sad, broken, too-handsome-for-his-own-damn-good-even-though-he-still-looks-half-dead man sitting at her kitchen table. Because there was already a foot or more of snow piled up outside with more falling every second. So of course the power would go out now.

Apparently the Universe was going for the whole "kicks and giggles" package today.

A/N Part II: I'll be closing on a house and moving this upcoming week so while I intend to do my best to write normally and have the next chapter up in a week I'm apologizing in advance in case I drown in packing boxes.