There was a fleeting, wonderful moment when I woke up, where I honestly believed the whole world was as it should be. I was just at home with a head cold, and I could have some noodle soup and Nyquil and go back to sleep. But my dry, tired eyes discovered the figure beside me and I realised with pain it wasn't who I thought it was; Johnny was dozing with his glasses off, revealing his eyes as they snapped open when I stirred. His expression was grave when he looked to me.

"How you feeling?"

I swallowed carefully, burying my body back under the quilt. "M'throat hurts." I murmured, voice warped by a blocked nose. I felt the back of Johnny's hand against my forehead for a brief moment.

"That'll happen when you pull stupid shit like that," he said quietly with affectionate sadness. I squeezed my eyes shut and rolled onto my back. There was a weight on my chest, something that was twisting painfully in a place where my heart should have been. Johnny released a small breath beside me.

"… Can you tell me what happened?" I heard him continue quietly. My throat spasmed and my mind slipped back, the awful reality closing in on me…

I hugged my bandaged arms around me, the bitter snap announcing an early winter as an icy breeze blew dead leaves and rubbish down the street, the cold seeming to be retaliation for the heat wave of the summer. I rocked back on my heels and began pacing impatiently, rubbing my arms – it had been sunny that morning, I hadn't been expecting this. Though I had a long sleeve shirt on I hadn't bothered with a jacket, and the wind was starting to blow right through me.

I blew a warm breath into my hands and rubbed them together, narrowing my eyes down the street, looking for any sign of Carlos. The last I'd remembered of his being there was him pressing a kiss to my temple, a perfect bloody gentleman; he hadn't been there when I woke up though in his defence I'd slept off the come down till two in the afternoon. It was now five and I was on my way back from picking up 'breakfast' when I'd gotten his call. He'd said he'd come to pick me up and wait where I was; apparently he'd found a contact who could tell us about the Brotherhood's shipment and wanted to take me to see him; he'd sounded excited, and I was anxious to meet this guy.

A wizened old man was shuffling by me, hands wrapping his long trench coat tightly around him. He paused when he saw me looking at him, then suddenly whipped his jacket open and I got an eye full of his emaciated, liver-spotted, naked old body. I flinched away and shut my eyes, but unfortunately I knew I could never un-see that. As I turned I heard a giggle and looked a little way down the alley, seeing a hooker getting to her knees in front of a client. The 'blessed' downsides of living in this neighbourhood – though you could do pretty much whatever you wanted, it meant everyone else could too.

Finally my phone chimed loudly and I yanked it swiftly from my pocket, mashing the call button without even looking.

"Carlos, where the fuck are you?" I snapped impatiently down the line.

"I think your people skills need some work sweetie."

I blinked as I tired to place the vaguely familiar voice. "Jessica… how'd you like Maero's new tattoo?" I said with a dark smile.

"Actually, I think it's pretty sexy. Tough, rugged…"

"Radioactive?" I interrupted.

"That's cute." She said snidely.

"I try. Now what the fuck do you want?" I growled, my banter threshold already reached.

"Well, I just wanted to let you know since you were nice enough to give my man a makeover, I figured I should do the same." She cooed. The hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up as she continued, "Don't worry. By the time we're through with him, Carlos will look just as handsome as Maero-"

"-Listen you little bitch-" I snapped quickly but she cut me off,

"-Course we don't have the same materials you did, but you know, I figure we can make do."

Black, tar-like fury was consuming me as I pictured her face, and my heart hammered when I thought of Carlos, and the words ground out of my mouth "When I find you-"

"I'm sure you'll do something scary." She said dismissively – somewhere behind her, I could hear voices, someone shouting something angrily, swapping between English and Spanish – my breath caught in my throat, Carlos; he was still alive, I still had time… I snarled when I realised Jessica was still speaking to me, "Do me a favour. When you're scraping up your boy's face just remember, Maero gave you an opportunity to be his partner."

The line went dead and I was frozen for a moment, mind forcibly pragmatic as I deciphered her words and felt sick when I worked out what she'd meant. They had Carlos somewhere, and his time was running out.

I ran to the road, spying the first car I saw and whipping out my gun, standing in front of it, firing and screaming furiously at it to stop.

The driver didn't even wait for me to pull him out – he just leapt from the car and ran. I clambered in and barely slammed the door shut as I tore through the streets, hunting down the one person I could think of who'd know where Carlos was.

"WHERE IS HE?" I roared, picking up a tyre iron and smashing it down onto Donnie's back as he curled up in the corner of the garage. He kicked out at me, trying to scramble away as I stumbled back.

"I don't know-" he squealed, but I just reached down and grabbed him by the back of his jumpsuit, dragging him kicking and flailing to the work bench.

"BULLSHIT!" I shouted, dragging him up and slamming his head down onto the workbench, pinning him there.

"I'm not telling you shit Saint!" he spat, cheeks crushed against the wood, trying for once in his pathetic life to show he had some balls. I didn't have the time for this right now. I reached out, my fingers wrapping around a welding gun and instantly clicking the roaring blue flame into existence, bringing it in my burning fury to his face. Donnie froze, and then suddenly started screaming and begging me as I brought the flame closer and closer – the hairs on his eyebrows began to smoke and shrivel with the heat and the skin around it was going red.

"Where?" I snarled into his ear, "Or you loose your fucking eyes you little bitch."

"The truck yard docks!" he cried, breaking in an instant as his skin began to warp, "They said they were taking him to the docks, please, please just let me go!"

I obliged, smacking his head hard into the bench, hearing a crack and a spatter of blood over the wood. He slumped to the ground, either dead or unconscious, I didn't care which. I snagged the keys from his pocket and made a beeline for his car – I needed something faster than the Aqua I'd boosted. As I leapt into the car – another souped-up Voxel – rain started splattering down from the heavens, making the roads slick. I tore away through the streets, swerving through the cars when I could, and if I couldn't, I was up on the sidewalk, stupid fucking sheep called people leaping out of my way.

"Hold on Carlos," I chanted softly through gritted teeth, eyes peeled as the industrial area began sprouting around me, people and cars thinning to nearly nothing. I raced down the road, my breathing hard and fast and heard from my left a loud rumbling, and as I approached an intersection, a huge Brotherhood truck screamed across my vision, followed by a small flash of purple being dragged along behind it. I nearly screamed when the realisation hit me –

I yanked hard on the handbrake to swerve the car around – it lurched on the slick wet road and threatened to roll – I released the brake and slammed my foot on the gas, chasing down the truck, hands shaking violently.

It was a horrible, foreign feeling that was ripping icily through my body, and I realised that for the first time in years, I was truly afraid. No, I was terrified; I was out of my wits with sheer dread. Ahead I saw the truck follow the road around a corner, Carlos' helpless form being torn along behind it – I had to stop it, and as I saw a side street I irrationally figured out how. I yanked the handbrake, whipped the car around again, slamming the gears and charging through the alley, fingers on my seatbelt and yanking it off my hips. The car scraped along the buildings as I rocketed out onto the street, slamming the break and sliding the car around again, seeing the truck swerve around the corner and come charging towards me.

My foot hit the gas and I drew my gun.

I started shooting blindly through the windshield, eyes narrowed through the rain and broken glasses, spying the face of the Brotherhood asshole driving the truck and fired several shots once he was close enough. The truck was barley meters from my car when I finally shot him, blood flying out the back of his head and his body slumping forward onto the steering wheel, swerving it. I twisted the steering wheel sharply and kicked the door open, throwing myself from the Voxel and feeling my stitches sharply ripping on my shoulder as I hit the road rolling. The Voxel jerked itself into the path of the truck becoming a 1.5 tonne roadblock.

I rolled down the rain-soaked road, eventually coming to a stop and ripping my eyes up to the truck as it pushed the Voxel along, crushing it into a brick wall far down the road and crashing to a stop, the small figure that was dragged behind it rolling for a beat before falling still.

The rain ran down my face and I breathed hard, I pushed myself up – if I was hurt, I didn't know it.

My feet flew me towards the truck, shoes slipping over the slick asphalt as the icy rain began to pour harder. I blinked through the dim storm light, Carlos' body becoming clearer – for a moment I thought he was already dead and my feet came to a sudden stop along with my heart. I heard a soft groan and his body twitched and I ran to him again, skidding down to my knees by his side. The sight of him began burning into my mind – he was face down, the clothes half torn from his body, his cocoa skin shredded. I bit my lip and carefully put my hands on him.

He trembled, a small whimper echoing from somewhere in his chest. One of his arms hung limply from the socket. My breathing was shallow – I gritted my teeth, lifting his body as gently as I could and turned him over – an agonised cry choked from his lips and for a moment he was almost unconscious as I rolled him onto his back.

I had to look away.

It was his soft, shuddering breaths and pained noises that made me look back at him, refusing to forsake him. I couldn't breathe; one half of his face was grated away, the bone on his chin, jaw, cheeks, brow, all exposed. One of his beautiful brown eyes was gone, a bloodied mess where it used to be. There was a crack in his head, a flap of skin and hair folded back exposing the broken skull beneath, blood pouring from it, skin and muscle down his torso shredded away. There were chunks of flesh missing; I could only imagine what he'd hit that had hacked him to pieces like that. He shifted his arms, but not his legs. I couldn't breathe, looking at him. He was utterly broken. Carlos…

My mind swam and I thought I was going to faint, my mind flailing foolishly as I tried to think.

Get him to a hospital.

I clumsily moved to my feet and moving to pick him up; he cried out in pain and I carefully lowered him again, looking to the thick chain that linked him to the truck. Stupid girl! I thought angrily at myself. I ran to the bumper of the truck, kicking at it with all my might but the thick, heavy chain was padlocked on there. I dropped to the ground, closing my eyes. A cruel voice whispered in my mind the awful truth that I wouldn't be able to free him in time, and I tried desperately to crush the thought.

…There was no sound but the rain, and Carlos whispering agony. His broken body echoed past the back of my eyes and I slowly opened them, lifting my head to look to him. I pushed myself to my feet and walked back to Carlos, dropping to one knee beside him.

He looked back up to me with his one dark brown eye – his face was contorted with agony, a pain that would haunt me till my dying day. He couldn't speak, he couldn't scream; only tiny, shuddering whimpers of suffering escaped his tortured body. Shakily, his hand raised and I quickly took it, his fingers curling weakly around my palm. He released a quick breath and his lips – the smudges of flesh that were once his lips – moved as if to say something to me – his gaze dropped to the pistol that was tucked away in the holster on my thigh. My blood ran cold as he looked back up to me –

No, the irrational part of my mind started screaming, not now, please, and I felt my eyes widen, I wanted to shake my head, no. I looked to his mutilated body again – he was trembling, bleeding out slowly over the asphalt; it was as if the rain was slowly washing him away. But that other voice whispered through the screaming in my mind… it moved my hand to wrap my icy fingers around the gun, carefully pulling it out of the holster, never once able to break eye contact with Carlos.

He lifted his head, trembling, and nodded.

Mercy…

My hand moved on its own.

It placed the muzzle of the gun to his forehead.

My frozen finger curled around the trigger. Carlos' pleading look searched my eyes and was beginning to grow fearful; I couldn't string this out any longer.

I felt my index finger spasm and the shot rang out through the empty streets of Stilwater, echoing, endlessly through the silent city. I felt his grip flex on my hand, and go limp as the last light of life left his eye, and he was staring into oblivion. The gun clattered from my hand and my body slouched over.

From the second that shot went out, something in my heart was extinguished. I hadn't even known it had been growing there; a warmth, a hope, a glimmer of something pure that was beyond everything I thought I was. It vanished with Carlos, snuffed out in its infancy.

My insides had gone numb. I knelt there, next to his motionless corpse, the empty thing that had once been my friend. The rain continued to thunder down in the now darkness – it burned my skin with its cold and turned my breath to frost before me. It washed the blood away from Carlos, running down the street and cleaning his disfigured body.

I reached my cold fingers out to touch his face. I let my imagination fill him in; rebuild him in my mind as he lay there, and slowly I slumped forward, shifting and resting my torso over him, closing my eyes, feeling his fading warmth and letting my senses fool me, if only for a while. Under the scent of tar and blood and rain, was that hot, spicy, coffee scent that I'd come to recognise as his. My eyes opened slowly, looking down at the gun that lay on the road next to us. I carefully drew my foot up and kicked it away. I didn't want to see it. The weapon I'd used to kill him. I tilted my head up to look at his mutilated face, again trying to piece it back together, but other long buried memories arose from looking at him – the missing eye and the bullet in his brain… the irony wasn't lost on me at all. Second boyfriend in a row I'd killed…

I don't know how long I stayed; it was only the gentle wailing of a police siren that stirred me, my body reacting instinctively to something my mind couldn't wrap around, just as it had reacted all those years ago, when I heard the beeping of the bomb before it blew up Hughes' yacht.

My legs pushed my body up and started carrying me away from him. My frozen fingers shook and reached into my pocket for my phone, the cold crippling them as I tried to dial. I put the phone to my ear, it quietly buzzed till Shaundi picked up.

"Hey Boss, sup?"

"… I need a ride," I went to say. My voice was barely a whisper.

"Wha – Boss, what's wrong? Where are you?" she said quickly. I slowly looked around for a street sign or landmark.

"…Walking." I said, looking over my shoulder to the truck. The sirens were closer now. They would take him, to the hospital maybe. The Brotherhood wouldn't get him now.

"Y- yeah, but walking where? Boss? Hello? Boss!"

"What?" I murmured back into my phone. "Oh, uhm…" I turned a street, looking around, my eyes caught by a neon sign far in the distance. "Apollos… Fox Drive." I said quietly. She was still talking when I hung up on her. The rain saturated me now, washing Carlos' blood from my skin, the ice biting into me which I was glad for – the freezing pain was all I could feel at the moment as I walked towards the neon light, like a moth to the flame.

"You see her anywhere?" Gat said, peering through the rain and darkness. Shaundi frowned, quickly tapping him on the shoulder.

"There,"

He pulled up to the side of the road, squinting through the darkness as Shaundi leapt from the car.

Her canvas shoes squeaked and sloshed over the muddy grass as she ran to the Boss, gasping. She was drenched, her skin deathly white and lips blue as she trembled with the cold, ebony hair glued with wet down onto her face.

"Boss, what are you doing?" Shaundi breathed, grabbing the other woman by the shoulders. There was cover not far up the road but she was standing there on the side of the road in the rain? The Boss didn't respond, just stepped with Shaundi towards the car; Shaundi threw open the back door and followed the Boss inside, quickly clambering in and slamming the door behind them.

"Jesus," she murmured, grabbing the Boss' hair and twisting water out of it, "Johnny, where's your jacket?"

"Here," Gat said, shifting in his seat and yanking it off his shoulders, twisting to look at the two women.

"Boss! Talk to me, what's happened?" he said quickly spying her torn clothes and bruises, "You hurt?"

She rattled her head no as Shaundi wrapped the thick jacket around her shoulders, rubbing her arms to get the blood flowing again.

"What the fuck were you doing?" he yelled cranking up the heater, his worry bursting forth in irrational anger. Shaundi was pushing wet locks of hair from the Boss' face.

"Boss?" she begged. The other woman just shook her head.

"T-Take me b-back to the hhide-o-out," she stuttered as the cold shook her. Gat swore and thumped the steering wheel in frustration, clicking the auto into drive and pulling away, starting down the road again. Shaundi tried to wrap her arms around the other woman but she was pushed away. There was strained silence in the car while Gat tore through the streets to the Red Light District. Shaundi was stressing and texting people, trying to work out what was going on, calling backup to comb the area. She dialled a number, biting her lip with the phone to her ear, frowning impatiently.

"Dammit," she said, hitting redial and waiting it out again. She whipped it away from her ear after a long wait. "I can't get onto Carlos," she said with a sigh to Gat, quickly dialling another number. Gat regularly flicked his eyes to the rear view mirror to check on the Boss – the tiniest hint of healthy colour was coming back to her cheeks and lips as she warmed up, but there was something off. She had a creepy look about her, not sad or defeated but like… an alien had taken her body as a host. Her blue eyes stared through her reflection out of the inky black window and into the night, not secretly sparkling with the emotions she forever tried to hide; they were empty, the soft lights reflecting on her opaque skin as they pulled up outside the hideout.

She stepped out of the car automatically, both Shaundi and Gat quick to follow, sticking to her like glue as they descended the labyrinth into the hideout. The Boss ignored them both, making a beeline for her room – Shaundi put a hand on Gats arm when he tried to follow.

"I'll get her showered," she said with assurance. Johnny only snorted, shifting Shaundi's hand from his arm and followed the Boss into her room along with the other young woman, sitting himself on the end of the bed to wait as the she closed herself away in the ensuite.

My hair was only half dry as I pulled the shirt over my head. I pushed the door open and stepped back into my room. Johnny was still there, his phone in one hand, head in the other, shoulders hunched. He turned to look at me, quickly getting to his feet and taking a hesitant step towards me, his expression telling me that he'd found out what happened.

"Boss…" he said in a quiet, slow, pained tone I'd never heard before, "I'm so sorry,"

I could hear Shaundi in the hallway; her voice was high pitched and panicked, but hushed in the one-sided conversation which told me she was on the phone to someone. I swallowed carefully, only a little aware I should be crying, but there was nothing there. I pulled back the sheets and slipped wordlessly into bed, turning around to face away from Johnny. I buried lower into the warm quilt and closed my eyes, blinking at the scent that echoed on my pillow, shuddering and letting myself breathe in the spicy coffee scent Carlos had left from the night before. For a little while, I allowed myself to think it had never happened.

I fell back into the old pattern of willing my body to sleep. There was a shifting weight next to me as Johnny lay down on top of the quilt wordlessly, carefully away from me. My tired mind waited patiently for sleep to come.

There was a fleeting, wonderful moment when I woke up, where I honestly believed the whole world was as it should be.

No voice divine the storm allayed, no light propitious shone;
When snatched from all effectual aid we perished each alone.
But I, beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

-William Cowper