A/N: Happy Monday, everyone! So we're finally getting close to the end. It's been a wild ride, you know. Thanks so much to everyone who comments: again, I am a terrible human who is terrible at responding, but your thoughts and messages fuel me. Don't underestimate that. :)

O

He was cold. That was the only thing Alex found himself aware of as he fell. Was he falling, though? It felt like it every so often; this disconcerting pull near his navel as though he was base jumping into a secret pharmaceutical facility. That had been scary-fun, he recalled distantly, with Tom and Jerry cheering him on in the background and adrenaline swallowing him whole. Not like this.

This was just falling.

It didn't worry him much. He wasn't necessarily worried about anything. Didn't really feel anything except the cold. He could hear sometimes, snatches of someone talking. Yassen's voice. There was no need to bother trying to make out the words. If he could have mustered the inclination to speak, he would have asked him to bring him a blanket. He couldn't even shiver in this strange everything-place, so he didn't. Instead, he just felt the cold.

He had been here before, or perhaps just on the edge of it. This black-white-all-color vast place, where things weren't just limited to their thinginess but were everything at once-

Alex.

If he could have smiled, he would have. Jack, he wanted to call out.

Some not-speech part of him must have summoned her here, in this strange phase place. Reddish hair swirled around her head like a rusty halo, or perhaps it was just the idea of red hair. Warm eyes met his, but they were distant. Sad. She settled around him somehow, in this place without proper things, a small ocean of the familiar in this sea of strangeness. Like she used to at home. Laying beside him on the couch, eyebrows raised as they contemplated the best way to waste a sunny afternoon that had no expectations of them.

He wished she would hold him, like when he was little. Ordinarily he'd be embarrassed at the thought (he was practically an adult after all), but he didn't have the capacity for that right now. He wasn't quite upset, but he was torn in this strange middle-feeling between missing her intensely and being elated that she was here now. An embrace would cement something. Her hugs had always been warm too.

Sometimes, when he got the dosage just right, he could get close to those hug feelings for a few minutes at a time. The warm-safe-happy bit, that floating essence of Jack from when he'd been seven and the world had been small and his tears important. Not the exact feeling, of course, but-

Alex.

"I missed you so much," he wanted to say. Somehow it still happened. It wasn't quite speech, but Alex didn't mind. They were both understood, resonating off of each other in this strange, inherent way to them, like ripples across a pond's surface.

She knew. She understood. She had missed him too.

He was so glad she was here. Wished he had a body to hug her with. He was so cold still.

More sadness from her. The sense that the coldness would fade. Hopefully. He wasn't certain that was something to be sad over, though.

O

It was like sleepwalking. Yassen was alert and aware, but he wasn't strictly piloting his body in the usual sense. This had never happened to him in his adult life; his relationship with death had always been complicated, but very much concrete. The realization used to distress him until he realized that in some way it had inoculated him against grief. Death followed him; he was beyond questioning it's ever present shadow in his life. He must have lost that instinct to wonder why somewhere. Until now.

Alex couldn't die. The thought didn't work.

Fortunately, it was as though some phantom-Yassen had picked up the slack while his actual self watched from the sidelines. Phantom-Yassen was extremely competent, Regular Yassen was reassured to discover, and never seemed to stop moving. He gathered all the gauze he could find and pressed it firmly against the wound. He moved Alex onto his side and checked his airway and pulse. He covered the windows with thick curtains and turned on some low lights. He draped the boy in an electric blanket from the closet. He even found the time to pick the lock on his cuffs and move the boy's arms into a more comfortable position.

Phantom-Yassen couldn't do everything though. Not forever.

As soon as they both realized that Alex was very nearly dead already, his numb helpful counterpart receded abruptly. Gone. He'd done him one last favor, however: in Yassen's hand, he found a perfectly round, white plastic button.

The panic button.

Yassen's problem, Yassen's choice.

With a short, ragged exhale, he activated it and set it aside. Prison was fine, he decided, readjusting his grip on bloody gauze. A streak of red made its steady trail down the side of Alex's hip so he pressed harder. Smithers could send whoever he liked. MI6. The CIA. The local cops. Didn't matter. So long as they stitched Alex shut and filled his too-skinny body with blood again, Yassen wouldn't complain about what happened next. Separate prisons would be acceptable. Solitary confinement would be fine. A hole in the ground would be better than this feeling right now and he knew it would only get worse if Alex were to stop breathing and go cold, so anything else would be fine.

Why? The question consumed him as he sat staring down at the bloodless lips and stilled eyes. Why was Yassen here? Why had destiny done this to him?

Yassen accepted his fate a long time ago. A one in six odds had decided his role in the universe. The echo of a gun chamber he could hear even now. He'd killed a part of himself that day so that he could operate as a killer, as he was meant to. He'd dutifully played his part for years. Gotten comfortable. Had resigned himself to it. Destiny had abruptly removed him from that path with a gunshot wound to the chest, but hadn't killed him. He was a little bitter about that, actually. Didn't know what was supposed to come next.

Was this it? Was he meant to end up exactly as he was now? Embroiled in this panic and pain and dread and overwhelming terror that he had failed at the most important thing he had ever tried to do and that there was nothing else he could do to fix it? It made no sense, beyond karmic cruelty. Yassen could end dozens of lives without so much as a gasp of hesitation, yet now he couldn't prevent the life of one stupid fucking teenager from draining out of his body drop by drop-

Grinding his teeth, he forced himself to mentally eject from his existential tailspin. Peeled away the gauze to check the wound. Alex's blood had stopped flowing freely, but he hadn't woken. What did he need? Even with his moderate training, Yassen was no surgeon but he knew better than to try to dig the bullet out himself. Help was at least an hour away though. Blood loss was clearly still the biggest problem next to outright shock. Not that he had many ideas on how to fix that: Yassen couldn't physically scoop Alex's blood from where it had spattered in the car and across the floor and pour it back into his body-

He was being stupid. Again.

Standing, he rifled through the cupboards a second time until he found what he needed: an IV. Ignoring the saline solutions lining the top shelf, he rummaged around until he found another needle. His training was far from that of a doctor, but he could remember getting medical treatment for himself and his subordinates dozens of times. He drew on those memories now. Saline was usually the go-to for mild blood loss, but Yassen suspected Alex was well past 'mild'. Additionally, it had made him cold the last time he'd gotten one, which with Alex's unstable body temperature regulation….

Hesitated.

There was so much to keep track of. He had only vague memories of Alex's Scorpia file now. Something in his brain suggested Alex's blood type was A, but it didn't really matter. Yassen was type O- so theoretically he could donate to anyone.

Alex's vein was almost uncomfortably easy to find and, within seconds of his own sharp pinch as the needle slid in, Yassen's blood was flowing into him.

He sighed and leaned on the bed, staring down at the boy. "There's a lot of people who'd like to pay for this stuff, you know."

There was no snarky answer. The skin around Alex's eyes was dark, yet the rest of him was as pale as the sheets he lay on. He was unnaturally still. More still than Yassen had ever seen him. Probably in some deep stage of shock.

"If only you'd slept like this on the cruise ship," he grumbled to the empty room.

The sound of his own voice was oddly reassuring in the silence; echoing as though it could tether Alex's mind to him as the plastic tubing tethered their bodies. He shifted, dragging a chair towards him with his ankle and trying to find a comfortable way to sit without tugging on the needle. "You really are a lot of work to keep alive. I don't think I've ever met anyone with one foot so firmly in the grave. It's not even your fault. At least, not all of the time..."

Alex barely seemed to breathe. Even the slow, shallow rise and fall might have been his imagination. Yassen decided he didn't want to know if it was.

"I don't want you to worry about that stuff, though. You seem to waste a lot of time feeling bad about it. You shouldn't. It doesn't matter if it's hard." Leaning forward, Yassen rested his chin on his palm and glanced around the room. Everything was so quiet and frozen, despite the vast amounts of tension drifting through him. "I'm not great at it, but to be fair, it does seem unusually difficult. Maybe that's why destiny chose me. My life was nearly used up, yet I lived past my expiration date. I've always wondered why."

Yassen looked back down at Alex, at the blood flowing out of him and into the boy. Swallowed. "I think I've figured it out. Destiny is saying it's your turn, little Alex. Perhaps my life is meant to last only long enough to continue yours."

O

Jack was still sad, though Alex had the vague impression of her hands running through his hair. Of being held. It was nice in a way he hadn't felt in a long time. There wasn't any pain or fear here. He appreciated the change the way drowning men appreciate that first gasp of air.

He wasn't even that cold anymore.

I'm glad, she felt at him. It was a mixed up feeling to him. Warm is good.

You're still sad, though, he pointed out because of course he did. He could never help himself.

That's okay. I'll be fine. Are you feeling warmer?

Yes but why sad?

Warm is better.

O

The slight pinking of Alex's skin was far too subtle in this light to take hope in. Yassen found himself strangely reluctant to touch the boy. If his skin was cold, if his pulse was still, if there was no rise and fall beneath his fingertips- Yassen would know. Know that he had failed. If he were to succeed, Alex would begin to show more obvious signs of life: Yassen wouldn't need to worry about his own sense of denial if Alex were to sit up and start complaining that he wanted a milkshake.

There was nothing to lose but his life if he failed, at any rate. He spared a moment to imagine what the authorities would find when they got here; the picture this presented to an outsider. Two corpses, one slumped over the other. An IV futilely pumping life out of one in a vain, dead hope of resuscitating the smaller. Yassen's worthless, yet highly prized blood spilled all over the floor in a silent message; that whatever his value had been in life was Alex's to have, even in death.

He didn't mind it as much as he thought he would.