I'm not sure if this one took a while because I had to finish the semester or because I couldn't bear to kill Dallas, but... it's finally done, and I'm hoping to complete this fic before the two-year mark :)

Dally's dead.

Angela was still crying, clutching my neck in a stranglehold; I laughed like a maniac, in short, gasping bursts, because none of this was real. I'd wake up soon. I was used to her appearing and vanishing like a shade, like a vision, I'd wake up and she'd be gone and her words would just be a figment of my fevered imagination. "He can't be dead," I tried to explain to her, her perfume crawling up my nostrils and taking up permanent residence there. I couldn't handle the corporeality of her body up against mine, blood and flesh and sinew hardening the edges of my dream world. "I just saw him. He wasn't dead, was he?"

She gulped and gave up crying as she broke apart from me; when she spoke, she sounded more like a kindergarten teacher attempting to be soothing than a hysterical teenage girl. "Jas, I saw it myself, Christ, they pumped him full of lead. He's dead as a doornail."

I imagined she might've still been half in love with him, the stupid girl, hearing the longing in her throaty voice for a... dead man. The weight of that thought hit me like a cannonball had landed in my lap; I stumbled backwards and sat down on the couch again, my balance badly distorted by all the booze I'd chugged, pinned in place. That stubborn fucking sonuvabitch— of course he would never stoop low enough to actually kill himself, too proud to admit defeat or weakness like that. He'd just keep driving his car without the brakes, mainlining dope, raising an empty heater at the cops, until—

He'd loved Johnny enough to die for him, but he hadn't loved me enough to smile for me, or laugh for me, or cry for me, or live for me. I just wasn't quite enough, in the end.

"Someone needs to tell his daddy." That thought, in the place of any others, entered my mind, and I didn't even know what in the name of God had put it there— maybe I just wanted to get away from Angela's tears, her open, devastated face. Maybe I just wanted to keep moving, like a kid who'd banged their knee against the bedframe, engaging every muscle so as not to feel the pain of slowing down.

"What?"

"His daddy— Norm," I said slowly. I didn't want to use that word, it tasted wrong on my tongue, like taking a bite out of rancid meat— but in some twisted biological sense, it still applied. "That he died. He oughta know, shouldn't he?"

"When my daddy died—" She rubbed the tops of her arms vigorously, but it didn't make the goosebumps in her skin sink back down. "I dunno, I don't remember nothin', just that my mama was cryin'."

I remembered death, the realization that human bodies were only flesh and blood, but I couldn't apply that same memory to Dallas, no matter how hard I tried; I'd never quite seen him as mortal, that was the trouble. I hadn't ever thought he was capable of breaking down and decomposing, my mechanical boy, until he'd finally flown apart.

"You can't go out by your lonesome to that part of town, it's two in the morning," Angela tried to tell me as I grabbed the wrinkled cardigan I'd thrown onto the floor, but her voice was like a swarm of gnats around my head, something to bat away and disregard. Mascara was smeared across her face in ugly dark streaks; when she wiped her nose, she got some of it on the bridge, too. "Jesus, he just got shot, who the fuck cares what his bum-ass daddy thinks about it—"

I laughed again, hard enough to clutch my sides from the force of the rictus, and stumbled over to the door. "He should care, though. He really should."

She didn't offer to come with me. When it was a woman, Angela recognized a fool's errand when she saw one.

I barely remembered the look of the house from the time Dallas had driven me over here; I wandered the streets for what felt like hours, helpless and stumbling and drunk off of both grief and fear. I couldn't go home, though, I didn't have a home to go back to anymore. I didn't have anywhere to put this down.

If you ever loved me, then watch over me, I pleaded with the shade of Dallas that hovered around the edges of my mind, before I could even accept the truth with my consciousness. You lowdown fucking sack of shit. Watch over me, just this once. I clutched the class ring he'd rolled a drunk senior for between my fingers, looked up at the sky for succor.

Sure I will, he said, didn't I promise I'd always look after you? But all I could see was his face crumpled in grief, the tears mingling with sweat and dirt, finally defeated, and then I pictured his bullet-ridden corpse, and I bent over vomiting onto the concrete. I had a powerful headache pounding against the left side of my skull, I wasn't even sure if it was from the booze or the stress of the past few days.

How could I go on, how could I possibly take it, when the strongest person I knew had snapped? Why couldn't I just throw myself in front of a passing car and be done with it? Hadn't he given me tacit permission?

That preoccupied me until I reached the right house and banged my fist against the door; after a few moments, Norm stalked over to it and jerked it open, red marks on his cheeks from his pillowcase. He was as repulsive as I'd remembered him, as thoroughly gone to seed; he clutched the doorframe just to keep himself upright long enough to address me. "The fuck are you doin' here? Your kind don't sleep at night like regular folk?"

"It's Dallas." I tried to look anywhere but at his face, avoid noticing the genetic resemblance. "Somethin' happened."

"Oh, he mess around on you, sweetheart?" He gave me a grin full of broken teeth. "Havin' a broad for more than a month, think that's a record for him, so go pat yourself on the back— that's one hell of a pussy you're totin'. But I dunno what kind of lesson you want me to school him 'bout it."

I cursed whatever crazy impulse had brought me here, my forehead slick with sweat, though the wind chilled my arms through my thin cardigan. "He's dead."

"... What?"

"He's dead," I repeated, though I'd told myself so many times the words had lost all meaning to me. "Dally, he's dead, he got shot by the fuzz— you need to go to the morgue. Decide what to do with the body."

He paused only long enough for me to exhale on the last syllable. "I ain't payin' for nothin'."

Though I'd hoped for little, expected even less, I really thought I'd misheard him. "You ain't— you ain't payin'—"

"That's what you want, ain't it, that's what you came here for? To get cash for a headstone, not to make me feel guilty." He spit a wad of chew out onto the rickety boards. "I ain't really his— he never called me Dad, not even when he was a kid. We didn't get on. Shit, with the amount his mama was sleepin' around, I dunno if he's even mine."

Anger crouched down low in me, waited for the right moment to strike. "... You don't even know who I am."

"Yeah, I know you two robbed me stone blind—"

I flew at him and scratched a long line across his forehead, so many cusses leaving my mouth I could barely separate them from each other. "You don't even know who I am!" I clawed at every available inch of skin I could reach— he was too startled by the sudden attack to repel me at first. "He grew up with me, he grew up in my daddy's house, he spent every day with us and you didn't even notice he was missing, you sick fucking sack of shit—"

"Crazy bitch," he snarled, and finally flung me off with a vicious backhand to my left eye; I stumbled, smacking my head against a picture frame on the wall. There was an old, black-and-white photograph of a blonde woman, with a long, thin face and an elfish turn to her nose— Dally's mother, the second family member he'd outlived? "You get outta here. Get the fuck outta here before I give you more where that came from."

"You're right." My breath came like I was being stabbed in the chest with every inhale, my hand came back dark with blood when I touched the side of my head. I felt like a wolf, a feral thing. "You ain't his daddy. You ain't shit."

In a movie, this would've been the part where he collapsed into heaving sobs, overcome with grief at the loss of his son. But instead he just slammed the door in my face, and I was the one who sank to my knees.

"I don't have any goddamn money, okay?"

"What do you mean, you don't— what'd you do with it, get a hooker? Lose it playin' blackjack?" A harsh, alcohol-soaked laugh rent the air. "It's fine for you, you can squat with these people, but where the hell you think I'm gonna sleep if that rent check bounces? The street, that's where."

"You ever considered gettin' a fucking job?" Dallas's voice had lost its hard edge of defiance; despite the flippant words, he sounded like he was trying to appease a rampaging zoo animal. "Sellin' your own product? Don't bullshit me, the only thing you're gonna buy if I give you a Yankee dime is more smack—"

A hard blow, Dallas's dizzy cusses, more indignant than angry, and Dad threw down his suite of cards— I didn't know why he was trying to teach me to play poker, I could always see every emotion on his face. "Stay here," he told me, but when I followed him out the door, he didn't say it twice.

"The fuck are you doin' here." It wasn't a question. The last time I'd heard him sound like vodka out of the fridge, he'd been talking to a junkie trying to grab at Mom, right before he snapped his wrist backwards. "You think I'm just gonna let you beat the hell outta your fifteen-year-old son on my porch?"

It had taken me that long to realize that the man was Dallas's father, not one of his shadier clients, that he hadn't spontaneously generated out of the ground or something— but when I looked closer, they shared the same mulish set to their jaws, the same pronounced brow. "What's it to you?" he asked, slow and condescending. Someone could be the lowest kind of white trash there was, and that type of guy would still think they were better than my daddy, above having to answer to him. "I'm collectin' the cash he owes me, is all. Ain't my fault he has to do it the knuckle-dustin' way."

"It's fine," Dallas said, but his eyes were strangely wide. The mark where he'd been slapped seemed to glow beneath the lamp, a fire under his pale skin. "Just— I can handle this." He cocked a shaky, unsure fist; Norm tried to get into a boxer's stance and nearly fell off the deck. "If it's a fight he wants, what the hell—"

"You don't have to handle nothin'." His jaw set. "I've been meanin' to talk to him for a while anyway."

"Dad—"

He wasn't looking at the drunk guy on the porch.

"Dally, honey, go back inside, okay?" The tone wasn't one you argued with, but the 'honey' softened his words considerably. "I'll just be a minute, this shouldn't take long."

And for about the first time in his life, with a brief, sidelong glance at the building scene, Dallas turned tail and ran back inside. I did too, but hovered near the frame, didn't want to miss the show.

"You wanna go that bad, I'm a grown man, I can take it." Satisfaction unfurled in the sentence. "But leave the kid the fuck alone. He didn't do nothin' wrong 'cept get squirted out of you."

Norm laughed again, incredulity leaching through. "Only use anyone ever got out of that kid was that guard who—"

He never finished the sentence, because I heard the unmistakable crunch of a nose breaking and turned to run into Darry's room. Dallas was sitting on the floor, his back against the dresser, his knees held to his chest. He didn't look up at me.

"Does it hurt?"

"It's fine," he said sharply, too sharply, his cheeks bright. "I could've taken him, it ain't the first time. I didn't need anyone's help. Ain't my fault your daddy—"

"Does he hit you a lot?" I'd never thought of him as a boy my brothers' age before, with feelings that were capable of being hurt. Maybe that was my biggest mistake, when it came to him.

"Often enough." His jaw hardened, he still wouldn't look at me; he was digging his blunt nails into his upper arms, hard enough to leave marks as he gingerly withdrew them. "I can hit him back, though, you better not think I'm gettin' slapped around like Johnny does— he knows he shouldn't fuck with me."

"Dally, you can't go back there, you can't live with him—"

"We ain't doin' this." His eyes were glossy, I thought, but he blinked again and it was gone; maybe it had only been a trick of the light. "No, we ain't gonna do this. I can handle him, I don't need you feelin' sorry for me, princess."

Somehow, even at that self-absorbed age, I recognized that his lashing out was like a wounded animal biting those who were kind to him. I sat down beside him and brushed my hand against his. He waited a moment before pulling it away.

"Jasmine."

When I saw the headlights of the truck, I thought it was the end, that it'd run me over in my stupefied state, that I was staring at a pedophile like a stunned deer, anything. I wouldn't have protested. Instead, it pulled over sharply at the curb, and Darry jumped out.

"Where you been, Jesus Christ?" He clutched me by the shoulders and gave me a hard shake, but I was too drunk and sedated to gain any sense from it. "Can't you ever stay in one goddamn place long enough for anyone to keep track of you? It's the middle of the night—"

"Dally's dead," I said like that explained everything, and to me, it did. "His daddy don't give a damn."

He sighed and led me into the truck with a hand against the small of my back. "Honey, you really expect him to?" His eyes looked hollow and dark-rimmed, like he'd been crying, but that couldn't be right. "You're dead drunk. Where'd I go so wrong with you, huh?"

"You didn't," I tried to reassure him, in the midst of all this madness, it wasn't him, not my daddy either... maybe it had been lying stagnant inside of me all my life, like Uncle Gene's, just waiting for the right trigger to go off. I didn't want to blame him, I felt too old for that all of a sudden, blaming him would only hurt me worse. If I closed my eyes, I was dizzy enough that none of this was real, anyway. "You didn't."

He scoffed a little in the back of his throat and put his hands on the wheel, ten and two, the way Dad had taught him— but he near slumped over it and I wondered what the fuck what was wrong with me. He'd been my boyfriend. I'd loved him, he'd loved me— Darry had loathed him at times, for dating me, for being more my father's son than any of his biological ones. And all I felt was a fierce, nagging anger, digging at my insides like a shovel. I couldn't cry. The action didn't even occur to me.

We approached home in tense silence, waiting to pounce; he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand before we went in, turned away so I wouldn't see. There were too many thoughts, that was the trouble, too many thoughts at once and all of them very bad. I pressed one side of my head against the window and I thought about my last words to my mama before she died. I pressed the other side to the window and I thought about Dallas's body frozen in the morgue, unremarked and uncollected. I pressed my forehead to the window and thought about his lips against my skin, corroding me down to the bone. I'd never wanted to get off.