Constant Bearing, Decreasing Range

by Neriad13

You know the end of the story. But *how* it happened is a different matter entirely. Nobody can look away from a good wreck. How Delta came to be Delta.

11. Chapter 9: Solitary

Chapter Summary: Things get worse. But Delgado finds a new reason to keep going.

Notes:

- CW: consent issues, self harm, memory loss, suicide mention and drug addiction.

Delgado opened his eyes.

Through a web of winking, dancing stars, he caught glimpses of darkened lighting rigs and red curtains trailing upward into the gloom. The stench of smoke was thick in the air and far away, through the ringing in his ears, someone was shouting.

"Dev-uh…" he slurred, his voice small and strange to his ears.

He squeezed his eyes shut and put a hand to his neck. With wonderment, he came to the realization that he was still breathing. The stars remained, flickering behind his eyelids, offering nothing in the way of answers. His neck was slick and warm beneath his trembling fingers, but nowhere near as damp as he was sure it should have been.

"Dev-uh!" he repeated, his eyes snapping open as the piece that completed the picture fell into place.

The world spun as he heaved himself upright.

It unfolded like that nightmare he had with some frequency, in which no matter how hard he tried or fast he ran, he could not move any further than the patch of ground beneath his feet.

There was what his gut told him beyond all doubt was Devon, in the impossibly-far distance, silhouetted by a spotlight, his shadow long across the smouldering remains of the stage, his arm shaking as he lifted it towards the shadow cowering before him.

Delgado screamed his name again and again, the syllables blending and crashing into each other until they were unrecognizable, his voice nothing more than a hoarse cry no matter how much he strained, his useless jelly-limbs collapsing beneath him with every frantic, arduous effort he made to crawl toward him.

Doggedly, he dragged himself forward inch by inch, heedless of the obstacles in the way, his vision narrowed only to the slow-moving disaster that he knew he was powerless to stop but dead set on trying anyway.

And then his hand sunk into something soft and warm, a thing that shifted and groaned beneath the weight of his palm. His blood turned to ice. With a cry, he recoiled, his eyes darting downwards before he could think to stop them.

For a moment, he stared, uncomprehending. The beliefs that it can't be alive, that it can't be real, that it can't have been who he thinks it is, stay stuck in his thoughts, even as its breath rasps loudly through melted lips and jagged holes where a nose should have been. Even when it turns to him, a pleading look in eyes that cannot be anything but human.

It made a noise in its blackened throat that sounded like crying and reached out. Delgado jerked away, a hand over his mouth, his body trembling all over.

That's when it happened.

The light of the plasmid that he had only heard about in unconscious midnight ramblings and waking hints he chose not to pry further into scorched his eyes like the sun once did. He cried out mindlessly, wordlessly, a primal wail that rattled the depths of his already rattled skull.

The fire dimmed. The silhouette crumpled to the ground.

His mind set, he crawled on despite it all, clambering around the body tugging weakly at his coattails, slicing his knees and palms on the sharp rubbish of the discarded setpieces, slipping and soaking his clothes in the half-melted ice and loosing a string of slurred obscenities all along the way.

"Dev-on." he said again, forcibly forming his mouth into the right shape and almost collapsing beside him when what little concentration he had left to his name was momentarily shifted away from the maintenance of his balance.

Devon rested on the heat-warped floorboards, curled up like a scared child hiding beneath the blankets. For a moment, it all seemed so familiar. So ordinary. The image of it flashed across his mind' s eye - him still lying in his bunk, come morning, come midday, come lights out, all but dead to the world and frustrating him more by the day. How badly he'd wanted a friend to fill the silence that Harold left behind. Could it be so simple as pulling a mattress out from under him this time?

No.

His chin was still covered in drying blood. His clothes were torn and grey with soot. His eyes were closed and his face was wrinkled with lines of pain. He hugged his blackened, twisted arm to his chest, as though to protect it from the harm that has already befallen it.

Delgado's heart gave a start when his eyelids fluttered. When he opened them, his eyes were distant and unfocused, as though he was peering not quite at the place he was in, but through its smoking walls. A sob of relief built in Delgado's throat as he reached out to touch him - and then he stopped, his fingers inches above his shoulder.

He doesn't like to be touched, was what he told himself. It had been so hard to refrain at first, once he'd made his preferences known. Delgado was the type of person who reserved no affection - who slapped friends on the back without a second thought, who once hugged his protesting sons in public without hesitation. Come to think of it, it never really stopped being hard.

But that ain't all of it, is it? another thought says, sliding into his mind like an earthworm through muck.

The sound of that raspy breathing echoed through his head, even as he told himself that he could not possibly be close enough to hear it. He sees the scorching blast that did that again, seared into his memory like a cattle brand. For a fraction of an instant, he's clawing his way through a rabid crowd once more, his heart pounding with desperation and the hope that he can reach the man who would break his hands on another's face before he can totally beat his target to death - and he feels his gut clench in a terror that makes him feel just as guilty as it does afraid.

He pulls his hand away and rests it on his knee.

"Hey." Delgado said, in a tone suggestive of having run into an acquaintance in line at the bank. He forced a smile, though his bottom lip quivered and his blinking was fast becoming more erratic the longer he held in the tears.

Devon's eyes went wide - wide enough to see the stormy blue rings of his irises, as wide as though he was staring at Santa Muerte herself - and then he smiled the gentlest smile he'd ever seen.

"Ken…" he whispered, his good hand reaching out for him.

Delgado recoiled and the weight of that guilt crashed with brutal force over him all over again. A million and one panicked thoughts whizzed through his aching head in tandem.

Oh God, he's delirious.

He needs me, but…

Ken?

I'm a horrible friend.

And I can't.

They all fell into silence when Devon's blackened arm flopped down to the floor, revealing the fork buried up to its tines in his gut. Blood oozed from the wound, slowly widening the scarlet outline that darkened the dingy white of his shirt. Delgado's breath caught in his throat.

"You're...okay." Devon went on, so softly that he had to strain to hear it, the smile still radiant on his cracked lips. "I didn't…"

He coughed, then groaned, then made a horrible face.

"Shhh." Delgado said, barely able to stop his own voice from trembling. "I-It's okay. You don't have to"-

"...fail." he finished stubbornly.

Delgado hesitated, watching the pale, sooty hand inch toward him. And then he took it, squeezing it tight.

"It's going to be okay, alright?" he answered, with what he hoped was much more conviction than he felt. "It…will be. D...Dammit."

Devon sighed, as though releasing a breath that had been pent up for a long time, touched his forehead to Delgado's knee and closed his eyes.

Delgado trembled. His breathing was almost as ragged as that of the one that would ever haunt his dreams. His blinks were no longer sufficient to stop the tears. They poured down his cheeks and oozed out his nose as he stretched out his other hand to pet Devon's scorched hair.

"The hell did you have to do that for?" he whispered, his voice breaking, his tears vanishing into Devon's hair as he stroked it.

The answer he gets is the same one the stars gave him. He breathed out and realized that his jaw was throbbing and his head was pounding. Spots still flashed and cavorted before his watery eyes. When a wave of faintness washes over him, he squeezes them shut, in the slim hope that darkness would swallow up the sickness he felt, if only for a moment.

When he opened them, he sucked in his breath again. There was a ring of black-coated figures surrounding them. He blinked and they remained. His bones thrummed with a fear he couldn't entirely have explained. Without thinking, he pulled Devon closer, as though he could stop them from reaching him by holding him. Devon let out the tiniest whimper of pain.

"I'm sorry." Delgado said, backing off a little but holding fast to his hand. "I didn't mean to hurt you."

Was it his eyes or were they closer now? For a moment, he believed his fevered mind had twisted their faces into those of monsters, but then he recognized them as gas masks. The ones with which his personal guard squad had escorted him into the theater, holding him at arm's length. Their wide, buggish lenses stare coolly at him as they approach, their steps measured and wary. Their fear is something he can feel in the air, brushing his skin like a summer breeze.

He looked down and saw that the ball was already in his hand, glistening and green. He has no memory of summoning it. For a moment, he glared at it thinking, Useless. Useless thing. Useless goddamn hand on a useless goddamn person.

To the right of a gas-masked figure is one who only has a bandana tied around his face. With a wild cry, he chucked it at him. It hit in the most satisfying way, splattering snot down the front of the trenchcoat, the blow sending its owner reeling.

"Stop it!" Delgado screeched, his voice carrying in the silence of the stage, a spray of spit flying from his mouth. "Just leave him alone! Fucking vultures!"

The splattered figure stopped in his tracks.

Delgado blinked. Mind control. It was real.

He chucked another and another and another one out, screaming at the top of his lungs for them to stay where they were. The ones with makeshift masks halted at his command and stood there with dreamy looks in their eyes. He laughed - a weird, gurgling laugh of disbelief that it kept happening despite the recurring evidence that it was clearly designed to happen that way.

But the others kept moving, the noose of their circle drawing ever tighter around him. He tried to force one more ball out of the sickly pores of his hand and found that he could not.

They descended like the carrion birds they were and tackled him to the ground. His face was slammed against the floor and a knee pressed down against the back of his head. Another one tried to wrench his arms behind his back, but he screamed bloody murder and flailed with every limb that was still free. And he held to Devon's hand so tight that he felt the shape of it deform under his grasp. The thought that he was hurting him again flashed through his mind and then -

It was over.

There was a sudden feeling of emptiness - a howling void inside him - when he realized that he was holding nothing but air. For an instant, he saw Devon, his hand outstretched, his dirty face streaked with tears, his mouth open in a scream too quiet to be heard. And then he was gone, behind the wall of black coats and billy clubs. The cuffs clicked around Delgado's wrists. The fight went out of him like water through a sieve.

The last thing he saw before they hauled him offstage was a pair of figures in wrinkly scrubs wheeling a gurney through the maze of hazards the show had left in its wake.

*.*.*

For a moment, Devon was happier than he had any memory of being.

It was over. Nothing had been in vain. He could stop fighting, stop trying so hard. He could lay the burden down. He could rest, in the arms of the person who had never left him after all.

He was holding him. Touching his hair like his aunt had never done when he was scared of the dark as a child. Telling him that it was going to be okay. Devon squeezed his hand back, closed his eyes and felt himself drifting away.

And then they were wrenched apart.

There was shouting and shoving. Rough hands lifting him off the floor, hurting where they touched. His fingers slipping away, though he tried with all his feeble strength to hold on.

"Ken!" he cried out, his voice so small that it was swallowed by the sound of fighting, "Ken!"

And then he was alone.

Bizarre shapes rushed by in a dizzying array when he turned his head. Voices whispered and hissed in a dizzying array around him. A face filled with fear peered down at him and then turned away.

"Be a dear an' hand me that file."

"You knew."

"Boss, I…"

"Pack it up, boys! After today, y'all ain't getting a job in a flophouse without my…"

He squeezed his eyes shut. Tears were pouring out of them. His chest hurt even more when he sobbed.

"Er...ex-boss? You holding up alright?"

After a time, he dared to open his eyes a little. A face he didn't recognize, its eyes swimming behind a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, was studying him intently. When he looked back, it turned away.

"Well, it sure looks like he could use some, don't it? A heap of it."

"It'd be a kindness. Why, it'd be such a kindness that I'd…"

"You want us to kill him?"

His eyes snapped all the way open.

He was locked in a bathysphere depot, a line of gunmen waiting outside.

He was in a closet, pressing a single headphone to his ear as he trembled to hear what was happening on the other end.

He was in a movie theater, the film that was everything he'd worked for dissolving in fire before his eyes.

He was sitting in that chair again, the needle about to pierce his skin and turn his own body against him.

They weren't listening. They were never going to listen no matter how hoarse his voice became with shouting, no matter how many times he broke himself against their assaults.

He was done asking.

And this time, they'd neglected to restrain him.

*.*.*

"Boss!" the medic - who was as interchangeable as anyone else in the company and thus, nameless - said, nearly running headlong into Sinclair when he abruptly turned a corner. He stumbled backward, a look of fear on his face when Sinclair just kept on barreling through.

"123158 is on a transport back to Persephone." he went on, speedwalking to keep up with Sinclair. "T-The other two went into shock when we tried to move them and"-

Sinclair stopped in his tracks and put a hand up for silence. The medic shut his yap faster than a chastised spaniel.

They'd arrived at the dusty backstage corner where whichever medical staff could be spared from Persephone that day parked themselves during shows. Today, there were two of them. The second medic eyed the prone figure on the gurney nervously, hugging a clipboard to his chest. Sinclair purposefully drew his eyes away from the body and fixed them firmly on the medic.

"You." he said, his voice calm in that way that suggests that the speaker is holding back a fair amount of outrage. "Be a dear an' hand me that file."

He held out his hand. The medic eyed it with a look of apprehension, then passed him the clipboard. Sinclair put his glasses on his face and scanned down the list until he found the pair of entries that had been circled. Electro Bolt and…

Ah. There it was. "Incinerate IV - Balance Issues" it said, simply.

"You knew." he said softly, pushing the clipboard into the other medic's hands and taking a step forward. "You had an idea that a fella might blow us all to kingdom come and you didn't reckon you should speak up?"

The medic took a step back. There wasn't much further he could go. He was already backed up against a pile of electrical equipment.

"Boss, I…" he said, his eyes darting this way and that for some kind of escape. "Everyone was in such a"-

Sinclair put his hand up for silence again.

"Mm-mm, nope!" he said, a strained smile on his face. "I ain't sparing an ear for it. You're fired."

He threw his arms up and turned his ire on the one with the clipboard.

"Y'all are both fired. Pack it up, boys! After today, y'all ain't getting a job in a flophouse without my"-

"H-Hinckley and Dervis brought them in!" the medic sputtered out, hiding behind the clipboard like a shield.

Sinclair sucked in a deep breath through his nose. He could feel the cracks running through his composure. Losing it in public was not something he was in the habit of doing but with a miscalculation of this scale...

"Four people?" he said, with a note of rising hysteria. "Y'all are telling me four en-tire highly trained employees of Sinclair Solutions Incorporated saw a...a self-immolatin' plasmid on the docket and thought it'd be all fine an' dandy? Y'all said to yourselves 'Now gentl'men, that's how you build trust in a brand! That'll keep ol' Frankie sweet!' an' went right on ahead w-with...with..."

He huffed loudly, squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. It didn't help much with the headache. The headache had been there almost since Persephone had first opened its doors. Sure, he was making a mint and a half off the place but he had to admit, the inmates who found ways to flood blocks with - of all things - bees, the sheer percentage of employees who ended up electrocuted or frozen, or worse, the absolute impossibility of assurance that anybody who came back from a stint up the stairs was entirely drained of EVE, the fact that when something went wrong down there, it could go no other way but seriously, deeply, expensively wrong - it wore on him, more than he'd ever, in his lifetime, be willing to admit.

More than a few times, he'd considered selling it and focusing on the ventures that didn't require a cold compress at the end of the day. But, as he told himself month after month, he'd be a fool to walk away from a partnership this reliably lucrative. Until this moment, he'd half-expected to be sitting on a mound of riches big enough to build a solid gold skyscraper on the ocean floor by next year.

So he just kept sitting in his high class office, as far as it was possible to be from the trench that housed the source of both his fortune and his anxiety, smoking his smuggled cigarettes, drinking his real topside liquor that'd make Ryan cry if he knew about it and soaking in the profits that poured in like water from an unpatched crack in Rapture's infrastructure.

He opened his eyes. The medics were frozen in their spots, eying him warily. He supposed he should figure out an answer to the more pressing question before telling his secretary to serve up however many pink slips it took to restore his sense of financial security.

He pushed glasses up his nose and peered down at the gurney.

A pair of watery blue eyes in a soot and blood streaked face stared back. He took in the burns, the bruises and the scrapes, all with an admirable amount of dispassion, but once he got to the fork, well, it was all he could do not to retch behind his silk handkerchief. These things just didn't happen in the scrap metal business. Granted, it was possible, in the event of bizarre, unforseen processing accidents, but probable? No.

"Stick a fork in him, he's done, eh?" said the medic with the clipboard, chuckling with a smile that was just a little too wide. "Eh-heh. Hm."

The other medic gaped at him, open-mouthed. Sinclair coughed into his handkerchief and stepped away before the caviar he'd had for lunch could make a second appearance.

"C'mon." the jokester whispered - very audibly - once Sinclair had turned his back. "You were thinking it too."

"Nobody was thinking that! You lose your job and the second thing out of your mouth is - er...ex-boss? You holding up alright?"

Sinclair waved him away and hurried over to where it was quiet. This happened to be between a stack of precariously balanced christmas wreaths and some dusty cardboard cutouts of naked babies with trumpets. His legs felt weak. He wanted to sit on the floor and put his head between his knees until he felt better, but this was a thousand dollar suit. So instead, he stood there awkwardly, unable to bring himself to lean against the none too clean wall either.

He'd never considered himself a weak stomached man. His entire career was built on backroom dealings, shady plans, careful calculations of how to screw over the most people for the biggest return. The last time he hadn't been elbow deep in dirt was probably at some point before his twelfth birthday.

But buying stock under a competitor's nose, signing the papers that would send an entire factory's workforce out into the streets, hashing out plans to suck every nickel and dime from people with no other options - none of those were anything alike to seeing the effects of his own machinations in person. Why the hell, after everything he'd spent his life doing, should one dying piece of his own legal property be the thing to send his rotting shreds of a conscience into overdrive?

These things didn't happen in the liquor business either. Or in toys or housing or production or every other sane, logical business model that wasn't a part of a market that was ruled by the whims of glowy, double-dog-damned, may-as-well-be-hoodoo worms by now.

He took a deep breath - and coughed for real. The air still tasted of smoke and not the pleasant kind. With his luck, Frankie was probably going to send him a bill for the cleaning.

He strained to retrieve his wits from the well into which they'd fallen and think through this logically. In truth, it was nothing more than another financial decision. In theory, no different from the ones he rubber stamped and sent on their way from his wingback chair every day. And that meant...that there was only one logically sound conclusion he could reach.

If that convict had blown up himself and whomever else was in his proximity once, he was fully capable of doing it again. What was to stop him from lighting up the Persephone lunch line? The infirmary? The body of the next lab tech who was unfortunate enough to give him his next dose of EVE?

Visions of lawsuits and collateral damage worse than that which Frankie was likely about to inflict on him danced through his head. That thing was a breathing, crying liability that put all of the investments he'd worked so hard to secure at risk.

The thought that he should lock him up in solitary, away from any and all assets, employees and opportunities that he could possibly cause damage to drifted feebly through his head. But what, pray tell, would be the point of that? said the facts and figures feverishly running through his head in parallel. It would be a cell - occupied and unusable - for years, a mouth to feed that could contribute nothing in return, a sink for medical costs that would inevitably pop up, a possibly-expensive hole into which the nickels and dimes of profit would fall.

After he'd made up his mind, he mopped his forehead with his handkerchief, stuffed it in his front pocket and headed back to the two medics, both of whom were watching him with concern as he approached.

"Alright, boys." he said in a low voice, sparing only the briefest of glances at the gurney between them. "You...uh...y'all have any…"

He pointed at the case of emergency medical supplies sitting on top of an old speaker.

"Y'all have any morphine in that suitcase?"

One of them stiffened. The dunderhead who'd made the awful joke looked confused.

"Of...course?" he answered, glancing back at it.

"Well, it sure looks like he", Sinclair said, jabbing a thumb towards the gurney without looking at it. "could use some, don't it?"

The quicker-on-the-uptake one glared at him.

"A heap of it." he added, flashing a smile that didn't reach his eyes.

He was sweating again. He could feel it soaking through the collar of his custom tailored shirt, making that same fabric cling wetly to his armpits beneath the facade of his jacket. Before going on, he stopped to mop his forehead once more. But when he tried to stuff the handkerchief back in his pocket, his fingers were clumsy and unsteady, a collection of entities beyond his control. The slippery fabric fell through their grasp and he let it drop to the floor without looking down.

"It'd be a kindness." he said quickly, before his nerves got the better of him. "Why, it'd be such a kindness that I'd...uh...simply have to rehire two such kind, upstanding gentlemen. W-With bonuses, of course. For their...invaluable service. To the company."

The medics were silent for a moment. The sensible one was making a hard face at the feet of the body in front of him and gripping the railing at the foot of the gurney as though it were the only thing holding him up. The other one scratched the back of his head. It must've helped in some way, because the instant after he did it, his jaw dropped to the floor.

"You want us to kill him?" he blurted out.

Everyone except the one who'd spoken winced.

"Now see here", he went on, taking a step towards Sinclair. "I may not look it, but I've got standards and...I'm going to need to know exactly how big a bonus we're"-

He was not the one who got kicked in the face.

It happened so suddenly, with a force that didn't seem possible from the dying body in front of them.

And then the body was more alive than it had any sense being - thrashing, kicking, making inhuman sounds. Sinclair watched, dumbly, when its dirty nails scratched open the other medic's face as he tried to subdue it.

Despite himself, Sinclair backed up a step. And then another. And another. Every carefully cultivated survival instinct he had was telling him to flee, to get away from here while he still had the chance, but at the same time, he couldn't tear his eyes away.

"You and your GODDAMN MOUF." the one who'd been kicked shrieked, trying futilely to staunch the flow of blood from his nose.

"Just get - aaaaaaa!" the other one screamed, narrowly dodging another swipe to his face. "Just fucking help!"

A guard. They needed a guard. Yes, it stood to reason that there had to be a few around here. There'd been a dozen out on the stage not ten minutes ago. It wouldn't be fleeing, per se, if he ran in the opposite direction to find them.

"Augustus!" an overly friendly voice trilled from behind, the second he'd made his decision. "There you are!"

He spun around to see Dr. Alexander - that soft spoken bore who bent over backwards to get on everybody's good side, but could never quite disguise his disdain for Sinclair when they spoke - red faced and panting, speeding down the hall towards him.

"Gil!" Sinclair said cheerily, flashing a forced smile as he came to a screeching halt. "What a...pleasant surprise. Now, to what exactly does little 'ole me owe the honor of"-

From somewhere behind him, there was a crunch that set his teeth on edge and which was quickly followed by the most agonized screaming he'd heard in his life.

A bead of sweat dripped into his eye. When he reached for his handkerchief, it wasn't there. So, grimacing as he made the decision, he wiped it off with the sleeve of his five hundred dollar jacket and casually stepped between the scene behind him and Alexander's line of sight. Alexander craned his neck around curiously.

"Sooo...uh…" Sinclair said, sticking his head in front of Alexander's and straightening a tie that didn't need straightening. "What...uh...brings you to my neck of the woods on this...fine day, hm?"

"Oh, just that one." Alexander said, gesturing behind him. "Five hundred dollars, cash, for him to be delivered, in one piece, to my department."

There was a wave of garbled screaming from the direction in which he'd pointed, in which the only words that could clearly be heard were "GET IT OFF" and "OH GOD."

The urge to turn around was strong, but Sinclair's desire not to know was stronger.

"That one?" he enunciated, pointing behind him with his thumb, every muscle in his body struggling to maintain the illusion of having things under control.

Alexander nodded, his head bobbling like the last grape in a bunch, on the end of its stem.

"Oh yes." he said. "If you've no more use for him, that is."

There was a pop from behind and the screaming turned into no less disturbing crying.

Alexander was completely nonplussed. He stared at Sinclair, with that infuriating little half smile of his, politely awaiting an answer.

There were quite a few questions on the tip of Sinclair's that were in that moment, raring to get out. Among them were "Might I offer you a less well-done model?", "The hell is wrong with you?" and "You ain't been, say, experimentin' on yourself lately, have you?"

But then he looked in his eyes. His body language spoke of nonchalance, of not caring what happened one way or the other. But his eyes gleamed feverishly with desire. The sweat he'd worked up from running dripped down his temples.

This was a man who would pay anything for a one-of-a-kind commodity. The why didn't matter. Only the opportunity to exploit it that had fallen so generously in his lap.

What came out of Sinclair's mouth was instead "Eight hundred."

Alexander stiffened. For a fraction of a second, his smile faltered.

"Five-fifty." he replied.

"C'mon Gil, be a pal." Sinclair said, feeling like the cat that had swallowed the canary. "You know I've got costs to cover. This one, here? Hardly got a splice on him at all. Truth be told, I reckon I ain't even turned a profit on him yet."

Alexander's eyes narrowed.

"Oh, come now, Augustus." he said, his tone not changing in its saccharine sweetness, but his eyes going icy. "You know how tight Frank is with the budget."

Sinclair smiled a smile that was more honest than any he'd ever smiled in recent memory. It was such a relief to be his old self again, pulling every trick in the book for the sole purpose of fleecing a fool for all he's worth.

"Ah, but this one's real quality." he went on, laying it on perhaps a little thicker than strictly necessary. "You don't see a lot of his like in this market. We've been getting less dissenters coming in, did you know?"

That was a lie. Was he sharp enough to know the difference? From the look on his face, the answer appeared to be "no."

"Ryan's about finished cleaning house for the time being. Why, it won't be long 'til everyone I've got in there is spliced halfway to Sunday and I'm running low on product. You know how it is. I don't mean nothing by it. I'm always doing the best I can for you folks in the labs, given what I got to work with. Right, Gil?"

"I've got him!" a medic yelled. "Get the - gah! The syringe! I can't"-

Alexander gave him a pained look.

"Six-fifty." he said, with resignation. "That's it. I can't go any higher."

Sinclair sucked in air through his teeth and flashed him an equally pained look.

"Oh, you're making it hard for ol' Sinclair. But…"

He stopped to think for a moment.

"Word I've been hearing 'round the block is that your little department's building some kinda...bodyguarding machine. Well, I want one. When it's done, of course. No need to rush it on my account. Things ain't as safe as they used to be around here and I, for one, will always welcome a smidgen more insurance in these…"

Something made of glass shattered behind him and was quickly followed by a "Shit!"

"...troubled times." he finished.

"Mr. Sinclair" Alexander said wearily, enunciating every syllable of his name. "I fear, at this juncture, that your request is quite impossible. However..."

He looked off into the distance like he was calculating figures in his head.

"Should my project succeed, you, I guarantee, would be first in my thoughts. Would this be an arrangement to your satisfaction?"

"Hmm." Sinclair said, exaggeratedly tapping his toe as he thought about it.

It seemed as though he was butting up to the attempting-to-get-blood-from-a-stone phase of negotiations. It was a much flimsier deal than he was normally comfortable with, but if he didn't make this sale, right here, right now, the truth was that he would salvage nothing at all from this mess. He'd played his cards without showing his hand as long as he could. It was time to fold.

He stuck out his hand and flashed the smile that'd been more expensive than his suit and even more useful in sealing deals. Alexander looked at him with undisguised shock.

"I'll take it." he said. "But I would prefer it be in writin' by this time tomorrow."

"Well!" Alexander said, seizing his hand and giving it a firm shake. "I am certainly able to arrange that. Oh, and…might it be possible for your clinic to send blood samples from the...ahem…subject, by the end of the week as well? Biopsies, possibly, if it isn't too much trouble?"

Sinclair shrugged.

"I don't see why not. I'll have my secretary get you in contact with Dr. Grimes, on the double."

"Fantastic!" Alexander said, with the most genuine smile he'd ever seen out of him. "Now, if you'd excuse me, I have quite a bit of work I've been neglecting to do."

"Oh, of course." Sinclair said, waving goodbye as he practically skipped away. "Nice chattin' with you too."

"Boys! It's time to"- Sinclair squawked, turning to the medics and abruptly stopping in his tracks.

One of them had his cash cow in a headlock. The other had twisted his one remaining good arm behind him and was attempting - while not quite being able to see the underside of the arm - to locate a vein with a needle of what he assumed was the morphine. There was an impressive amount of black eyes and ragged scrapes all around. The one doing the headlock appeared to be missing the tip of a finger.

"Boys!" he said, with more indignity. Both of them jumped, then glanced up. The body growled like an angered predator and wriggled in their grasp, but did not succeed in breaking free.

"Would you pack up the dog and pony show and get a move on?" he said, planting his mostly-dry hands on his hips. "We've got a train to catch."

"Wha...what?" one of them asked, the needle still poised over his cash cow's naked skin.

"You heard me. Up and at 'em. He's got a new lease on life and we're running late. Chop-chop."

"But...you said...the bonus...is it..."

"Ugh."

Sinclair rolled his eyes.

"I don't know what y'all thought I said, but you'll get your bonus if you get him to the train without losin' any more fistfights to a one armed invalid. Come on, now."

*.*.*

Delgado trudged into his cell, not bothering to spare another look for the guard who'd escorted him back. The lock CLANGED shut behind him, echoing horrendously down the block in the stillness of the night. It was a sound he'd heard so often that it barely registered as a sound at all anymore, but for a moment, he was thrust back into the body of the person he'd been when he'd first arrived, who'd jumped every time a cell clanged shut down the row and who had lain awake for hours every time it had wrenched him from his already disturbed slumber. There was nothing he could have done about the noise of his door, but he hoped his return to what passed for society down here hadn't disturbed too many sleepers who hadn't yet become inured to it.

Another patient had been rushed with dire speed into the infirmary in the small hours of the night. He'd stumbled in, half supported by the guard who was escorting him, vomited blood on the floor and immediately started screaming thereafter. Delgado had conceded that he probably needed the bed more than him. And so, here he was, back within the grey walls of the small world he spent his days in, as though nothing at all had changed since he'd left.

He felt unwell. The room still spun if he stood up too quickly. He was constantly seeing spots in front of his eyes and the trek back to D Block had taken more out of him than he'd expected. If it was going to be like this for a while, he had no idea how he was going to manage in the laundry room.

But that was a worry he'd decided to put on hold for the time being. He settled down on his old, reliably hard bunk, being careful of his still-healing injuries and closed his eyes. He touched the bandage on his neck as he drifted off, still, days later, not quite believing that he'd been a literal inch from death and lived to tell the tale. They hadn't even needed to bother with stitches.

An hour or so later, he woke up with a numb leg. With a disaffected grunt, he shifted over to the other side. Feeling came back in pins and needles. He wiggled his toes, waiting for the pain to lessen so he could drift off again. And then he'd repeat the process, as needed, all through the night. It was about as normal a sleep cycle as a person could get around here.

Unless, of course, there were options.

He opened his eyes and peered over at the other side of the cell. The faint red light of the exit sign illuminated the empty bunk, the blanket still wrinkled as though its occupant had slid out for a toilet break only a moment ago.

He hadn't made his bed that morning, an eternity ago. That was how Delgado had guessed something was wrong. Well, among other tells. But the bed was the most obvious one. He'd had a celly who had been practically religious about making his bed - on the good days that is. Delgado could understand that. It was the one little corner of any of their lives that they had any kind of control over. Neglecting that control tended to bode ill.

For a few minutes, Delgado lay there, half expecting him to come back any minute and chastise him for even thinking about snatching his mattress pad. But of course the bunk remained empty and of course he was still gone - he'd been in much worse shape, after all. No surprises there.

What was strange was that he hadn't seen him in the infirmary. And when he'd asked the nurses questions, all they'd given him were vague, cagey answers. What he'd stubbornly decided to believe was that he'd been shipped to a facility in the Penthouse for special treatment.

But even as he thought it, he knew the idea sounded ridiculous. Thinking on it even a little was like pulling a thread from an unraveling sweater. He'd seen people in much worse shape hauled back from the brink of death by the medical staff in the Basement's own chop shop, whether they wanted to be or not. They'd patched up burns aplenty. They had definitely taken care of stabbings (too many of them, really). His case should not have been something new.

Forcibly, he pushed the discomfort that had been building in his head, like pressure in a balloon, to the side. It was too late to bear thinking about. Right now, what he needed to focus on were a few hours of quality sleep. He was bound to feel better about it in the morning

Surely he wouldn't mind if he borrowed his mattress pad for just one night. Just until he got back. He wouldn't even protest if a guard had to jab him in the back with a billy club to get it back.

With a groan, he rolled out of bed. His leg didn't quite have full feeling yet, but doggedly, he limped to the other side of the room, fighting both dizziness and the whims of his own, disobedient leg. At the last second, the leg protested its treatment by crumpling beneath him. He fell to his knees, catching himself on the edge of the bunk.

As he knelt there, catching his breath, one hand full of blanket and the other resting on the cool expanse of the mattress pad itself, the feeling of loss hit him all at once.

The cell was so empty - emptier than he'd thought it was possible to be, quieter than should be possible, darker than any light could reach.

And he was alone.

The thoughts that he'd tried so hard to suppress - the dark ones, the ones that rang alarm bells in his head, the ones that knew that he wasn't going to be coming back - came bubbling with vengeance to the surface of his mind.

As did the ones that chanted, over and over in his head, that it was all his fault.

When he could stand again, he got up, went back to his own bunk and laid down on his sack-of-rocks mattress without disturbing the spare.

*.*.*

Samuel slammed the three-inch thick steel door of the cell he'd scrambled out of and hurriedly drew the lock, his heart racing, the vial of blood he swore he almost died to get every other night clenched in his white-knuckled grip. A surge of anger flared up in him when he saw that the guard he supposed he considered a friend had his back to the cell and was heavily engrossed in the contents of a magazine which seemed to have an awful lot of women in swimsuits but very little in the way of swimming.

"The hell is this!" Samuel yelled, jerking it out of his hands.

"Hey…" Jamie said, pouting. "Sammy, c'mon."

"Don't you dare 'Sammy' me. I tell ya to keep an eye peeled in case Mr. Piranha-jaws in there gets it in his head to take another chomp out of me and what do you do? Huh?"

He waved the magazine in his face and then thrust it angrily into the middle shelf of his cart. As he did so, he noticed that one of the bandages on his fingers had been torn. At least there was no blood this time. He made a mental note to fix it once he had everything stowed away.

"We-ell, it was so boring out here." Jamie said indignantly, looking as petulant as a prison guard with a .38 on his hip could be. He reached for the magazine. "You know how it is! And I didn't hear too much screaming, so…"

Samuel made a sound of disgust in his throat as he slapped his hand away.

"Sam"-

"Fuck off. You know what I have to deal with to get this?"

He held up the vial of blood and swirled it threateningly before situating it in its cooler and snapping it shut.

"Or-or getting all those inside a body that wants less than nothing to do with 'em?"

He gestured to the tray of crumpled paper pill cups and empty syringes. The medical tape was just beneath the mess. He reached for it carefully, doing his best not to prick himself, despite how badly his hands were still shaking.

Jamie scoffed.

"With the mugs I've seen you give lumps to? It can't possibly be that big of a…"

He trailed off when Samuel glared at him, held up his bandaged hand and with unflinching eye contact, used his other, equally bandaged hand to wrap the tip of his finger in a fresh strip of medical tape.

"Jamie." Samuel said softly. "D'you wanna know how many makeshift weapons we keep digging up in the mattress in there? Hmm? D'you wanna hear about the time he just about took Grimes' finger clean off? Or how about the fact that he pulls his stitches out on the daily, with nary a flinch to be seen? Or...oh, I know! You'll like this one. The second he starts growing new skin on the arm that's got none, he scrapes it off, with whatever goddamn tool he's made from plastic tubes and a screw he jimmied out of his own bedframe. Nice, huh?"

Jamie made a face. He didn't comment as Samuel dug out the medical chart and penciled in the small victories he'd managed to accomplish without dying tonight. Cryptically, under "Patient", there was only a drawing of a triangle.

Was Jamie really a friend? He wasn't sure sometimes. The man outright refused to get his name right no matter how many times he corrected him, seemed to know exactly when he had a mound of patient files to go through and repeatedly chose that specific time to bother him, was usually the one behind ideas as bad as stowing a body in a mop closet until morning (that'd been a fun one to explain to the cleaning detail) and…

On pain of possibly losing his job, had saved his life without hesitation. Asshole.

"Ooh!" Samuel went on after he'd finished up with the chart. "Y'know what else? I almost forgot the best part."

"And...what's that?" Jamie asked, with some trepidation.

Samuel picked up one of the empty syringes and held it up. The paper label read LETHEVEC in plain, blocky lettering.

"This - they send it special from upstairs, after Grimes gave 'em an earful about missing fingers and plastic tube shanks. They said it's 'sposed to calm him down, but, uh…"

He let out a hysterical laugh and dropped on the tray with a clatter.

"It doesn't work! In statement of fact, I'd say it pisses him off even more. I gotta save it for last or I'm not getting a damn thing else in him. I ask Grimes what the hell the point is but he tells me to 'keep on until it takes effect.' Well, I've been 'keeping on' and...oh, I'm sorry, am I boring you?"

Jamie finished his yawn.

"Whuh?" he asked sleepily. "Uh. Possibly. You know I don't get into the...medical-like stuff. In one ear and out the other. Heh."

"The hell d'you stick around for, then?"

"Iunno. Nothin' better to do this hour of the night. Not like there's a whole lot of riots to break up when everyone's locked up. With you I get sleepwalkers at least."

He winked. Samuel groaned. He was never going to let him live that down. He could see it now - years later, there'd they still be, stuck in each other's company, Jamie still dangling his goddamn life debt over his head.

Samuel tucked the chart back into the cart, did a quick once-over to make sure everything else was secure and set off in the direction of the infirmary. Jamie strolled along, trying to whistle but doing a terrible job of it.

"The point I was trying to make…" Samuel said, interrupting him, in a more serious tone.

"Hold the fuckin' phone, there's a point?" Jamie said, with what might be construed as an evil grin.

"Shut up."

"You miss out on your coffee or"-

"The fuckin' point is that I think he knows."

Jamie gave him the side eye.

"Who knows the what now?"

"Mr. No-Name!" he said just a little too loudly in the quiet corridors, jabbing a finger at the chart. "I think he knows where he's headed."

"Oo-kay. And that means fuck-all becau"-

"He's going upstairs. Permanently. After he's healthy enough to move."

"Oh."

They walked in silence for a beat.

"So, you...uh, ask him?" Jamie asked, raising an eyebrow.

"What the - hell no! You ask a shark if he's about to turn you into chum? But...the reason I'm thinkin' he knows...is that if he knows, then he knows that there's nothing we can possibly do to him that compares to what they're going to do up there. And if he knows that…"

"This rabbit hole goin' anywhere?"

"...then what are we to him but dead meat? Don't turn your back on that hole...is the point. Not that I give a damn or anything, but, the way things are headed...someone's getting hurt. Worse than Grimes did, that is. I'd rather it wasn't your goddamn mug."

They'd arrived at the infirmary door. Jamie, for once, was quiet. For a moment he stood there, looking as though his brain were genuinely trying to process something that required previously untapped brainpower.

Then he made a daring dive, snatched his magazine off the cart and tore off down the hall giggling madly. When he'd gotten far enough away that he wasn't in danger of losing the magazine again, he spun on his heel, yelled "Smell ya later, Sammy!" and promptly vanished around a corner.

"Yeah, you fuck off too." Samuel muttered under his breath.

He turned backwards, nudged the door open with his heel and pulled the cart through. It only got a little stuck on the divider this time. The contents of the cart rattled, but nothing fell.

But goddamn Wilson was already awake anyway. Samuel caight the glint of his too-wide glasses as he turned his head to look at him, from his bed near the window he so loved to stare out. He couldn't remember having ever seen the man ever sleep since he'd been admitted. He was always sitting there. Goggling. Observing. Calculating.

For a brief moment Samuel was tempted to yell "LIGHTS OUT" and clock him good, but decided that it wasn't worth waking the rest of the ward, as funny and satisfying as it would have been.

He pulled up a stool, sat down at the surgery table that served as his makeshift desk and settled in to get through his paperwork.

*.*.*

He remembered, out of everything he'd forgotten, his own name included, that he'd been upset about something. Mortally upset. Upset enough to kill, to burn, to drag whoever got in the way down to the grave with him.

But what exactly that something was - whenever he tried to think on it, it was like touching a piece of machinery in the darkness. He could feel the curves of the pipes, the smooth, hard teeth of what might have been a gear, the sharpness of a seam that hadn't quite been filed down. He could touch and conjecture and get a vague general feeling of what its purpose might have been, but the meat of it and the light switch that would have revealed everything - gone, as though it had never existed.

It had been important. He still knew that much. He couldn't have been that upset if he hadn't cared. He couldn't have felt this much despair, this anger, this wrath, if he hadn't first loved.

So he clung to the feeling of it, to the pain the empty space had left in its wake, like a scab ripped out of a wound, as though it was the only thing in the world that mattered. When he felt himself starting to forget, he would hurt himself to remember. To put the pain on the outside, to make it visible - real. A thing that couldn't be taken away, like everything else.

When they tried to take it (and they always did), he would hurt them instead. He could dislocate his one working wrist to get out of restraints. He saved every last piece of garbage they neglected to take back with them when they fled his cell and turned it into shivs and shanks. He sank his teeth into every person who dared to shove a pill down his throat. He hit and kicked and punched and slashed and stabbed until there were too many people holding him down to move.

He had the vague notion that he'd killed someone that way. The details were murky - like looking down into a pool of muddy water, trying to discern the shapes on the bottom. He couldn't remember what the night nurse had said, that evening when he'd stomped in alone, a pair of pliers in hand. Only the hurt in his voice and the anger in his eyes. And the taste of blood in his mouth after. And the inescapable feeling of having lost something. He was almost certain that he hadn't seen the nurse since then.

Still, other ones came, with more needles, more pills, more of those syringes that burned holes in his mind every time they pumped another dose into his veins. He fought and kicked and screamed and cried whenever they brought that one out. Its pale yellow liquid was something he could not forget, no matter how much of it was inside him.

But they always succeeded in the end. And he would lay there in the dark, sobbing as it took effect, as it made the shadows deeper, as he felt himself drifting farther and farther away from the shapes in the dark that had once been so important.

And then, one day, he woke up and realized that he felt nothing at all.

He had the vaguest of recollections that he'd been angry at something. That he'd been in pain for a long time. That the pain was a thing he'd clung to, that he'd fed on. But that all sounded so ridiculous now. Why hold on to something so awful, when he could be nothing and no one and be at peace? Why had he fought so hard and so long for a prize of such negative worth?

He relaxed in the darkness of his cell and breathed, the weight on his chest that had been there for an eternity, gone. No ghosts stirred in the darkness. No more monsters haunted his dreams.

*.*.*

Delgado kicked his heels against the couch in the newly installed art room impatiently. He felt twitchy today. Restless. That was probably to be expected. He'd always been nervous at doctor's appointments. There was something about near-strangers poking and prodding at him and telling him that there was something wrong with him that would never be anything but inherently uncomfortable. But the crude painting of a person screaming on the wall opposite him wasn't helping much.

He jumped in his seat when the door swung open and an inmate he'd never met before trotted out. It was getting so hard to keep up with all the new ones. They were like a shifting, amorphous kaleidoscope of faces that never stayed the same for more than a moment. And what did Delgado do? He remained. He stayed the same, though everything was crumbling, morphing and shifting beneath his feet. Or, he had, until recently. That was the entire reason he was here, after all.

The man was carrying what appeared to be a likeness of a butterfly crafted out of papier mache. When he saw Delgado eying it, he smiled at him and nodded as though they had shared a private thought. Delgado gave him a blank stare in return.

The door he'd come out of was open a crack. For a moment, Delgado regarded it as though it were a yawning chasm or an alleyway you didn't go down after dark. Then he gathered up his courage, heaved himself off the couch and made his way towards whatever it was that was going to happen next. Knocking on the door took a smidgen more of scrounged bravery before he could manage it.

"Come in." a voice answered from behind it.

The strangeness of hearing a woman's voice after all this time temporarily stopped him in his tracks. He'd almost forgotten what they sounded like.

When he stepped inside, it was dim. But not the lonely dimness of his cell or the loud, sweaty dimness of the laundry room. It was more comforting, more...

Like stepping into a cocoon, came the thought, unbidden. Butterflies on the brain. That was what he had now. Great.

He closed the door behind him and the world outside went away.

"Mr. Delgado-Álvarez, is it?" the woman at the desk asked, offering him a thin-lipped smile. The light of the lone lamp glinted off her horn rimmed glasses.

She looked immaculate. Not a hair out of place. Not a wrinkle to be seen in her uniform. That couldn't possibly be lipstick, could it?

"Er...just Delgado's...fine." he said, trying his best not to stare. "Should I…?"

He gestured vaguely at the empty chair in front of the desk.

"Please do." she answered, returning his gesture. "That is what we're here for, after all. Do make yourself comfortable."

"Thanks."

He dropped into the chair like a bag of rocks. Every thought that had been in his head prior to that moment exited at top speed. Why had he come here? What was he doing? How could he possibly tell this woman half of what he wanted to say? Part of him wanted to spill everything - every last gory detail. But the other part made his tongue heavy, advised him to keep his silence. Silence was safe. Silence was static. If he said nothing, nothing would have to change. If he didn't speak it into being, nothing was wrong.

Mindlessly, he scratched the inside of his arm. The pinpricks left behind by his recent trips upstairs bothered him more when he was nervous.

"So…" she said, breaking the less than comfortable silence. "You may call me Dr. Lamb. Welcome to my office, such as it is. While I can't promise you that doctor-patient confidentiality will be respected by our superiors in this environment, I would like you to rest assured that I make every effort to exclude the more...salacious details from my reports. Now, why don't you start by telling me about yourself?"

It was too broad a question. His brain froze like he'd eaten ice cream too fast as he scrambled for an answer. There was an answer in there, he felt it - but connecting it to his mouth was another matter.

Lamb waited, watching the struggle on his face without interfering. He felt as though he were stuck under a spotlight again, all eyes on him, waiting for him to fail.

"I'm sorry." he blurted out, scratching his arm a little harder. "I'm not much for talking about…feelings and all that. I just...I-I don't know where to start."

She nodded knowingly, the wispy smile never leaving her face.

"Not an uncommon conundrum. Especially in...this population. The Tyrant reveres silence. How difficult it must be, to speak after being told for so long that it is against the rules."

Delgado gave her a stare as blank as the one he'd given the guy outside.

Lamb let loose a barely perceptible sigh in return.

"Perhaps this is my fault." she said, crossing her legs behind her desk. "Why don't I start with something...simpler? What do you do? Did you have a job, past or present?"

"O-oh!" Delgado said, jumping a little in his seat about how easy it was to get an answer out of his head for that one. "I'm a barber. Was. Kind of. Still am? But...not so much...these days."

He held up his hands. They were trembling - not terribly, but just enough to be a bother - as per usual.

"I'm...not as steady as I used to be."

He dropped his hands back in his lap.

Lamb nodded sadly and wrote something down in the file in front of her.

"And this...bothers you?" she asked.

"Well of course it does!" he blurted out, with sudden anger. "You think I wanted to get hit in the head?"

"I did not say that, Mr. Delgado. I merely"-

"You think I wanted to leave my boys behind and-and just give up on running a barbershop together, just like that?"

He looked down at his hands. They were shaking even worse now. And these temper tantrums he'd been inadvertently visiting on every person, total stranger or not, who came into contact with him...

"I'm...sorry." he said, in a gentler voice. "I don't know what came over me."

"Oh, there's no need to apologize." Lamb said, her eyes glittering behind her glasses. "Do continue."

He gaped at her in shock for a moment. The words were coming so easy now. They were almost pouring out of his brain, filling his mouth like water.

"It...it was stupid of me, really." he said. "Ever since I got locked up, I never really thought I'd get out. Not once. But...whenever I was squaring some guy's neckline, I could pretend, see? I could imagine we were all together. Renato Jr. going through the account book in back, Enrique sweeping up...I-I...it's so silly, but…"

"It helped you feel close to your sons." Lamb finished. "No, that isn't silly at all. We all have our little rituals. We are still, after all these millennia of evolution, social animals. This, for instance..."

She reached up her sleeve and after a small struggle, pulled out a locket attached to a silver chain. When she popped it open and held it under the lamp, he could see a faded picture of a smiling girl with pigtails.

"It's strange." she said. "My daughter's every feature is engraved into the grooves of my grey matter. I could not forget her face, even if I tried. I need not have anything physical at all to remember her by and I know I am past such things. It would have been easier, had I accepted that. And yet...before I knew I was due to be arrested, I took...great pains...to ensure that her picture would not be taken from my person. It was not my proudest decision, but…"

She looped the chain around her wrist and pushed it back up her arm.

Delgado smiled at her.

"Here it is, the only thing I own that has any value to me. Now, then, it's out of my area of expertise, but, seeing as Dr. Grimes seems to have proven unhelpful in these matters, I do know of some exercises that might help with that..."

*.*.*

"So Harold skipped out again today, the fucking - oh, pardon my language."

"I hear worse every day, Mr. Delgado." Lamb answered, peering up at him over the tops of her glasses. "Do go on."

"Right...so I'm stuck in there with Thomas and - uh, no offense to Thomas! He's great. One of the best friends I ever had! Kept all of us sane when"-

"So you've said."

"Y-yeah…ahem. Anyway...he was drunk again. Big surprise, right? But not...in the fun kinda way. He gets too soused and he just...well he just turns mean. If Harold's around, he can kinda redirect him. Trick him into not being so much of a sour pickle. But...he wasn't there today and...y'know how when Thomas gets rollin', you can't just stick out your foot and stop him?"

"I do."

"Well...he starts ragging on about how I'm so high and mighty on the other side of the partition w-with a...a face that don't make babies cry and he's going on about 'why don't I just go over there,' to...his and Harold's side - y'know, the...the splicies - like a real man and...get it over with."

Delgado paused for breath. With frustration, he noticed that his fingers had been scratching away of their own accord at the inside of his arm again. He jerked them away and sat on his hand.

"He hit a nerve, didn't he?" Lamb asked, steepling her fingers on the desk. "What happened next?"

"I left! The hell am I supposed to say to that? 'I'm sorry you're so miserable you gotta pickle yourself into the grave and grab hold of whatever nincompoop is dumb enough to stick around?' I ain't takin' that. So. I...I left him. I feel awful about it."

"And why would that be?"

"Because we...we were friends, once. That's important. There ain't a whole lot of us left. I feel like...it's on me to keep us together. Alive. It's not like anybody else's gonna do it, right?"

"Why not?"

"Why what?"

"Why does it have to be you?"

"Oh...well, y'know Thomas is turning into a lost cause faster than I can say 'boo.' That cough of his is getting worse - has been, for months - and he just...he don't care. And Harold...it's funny. He was the only one of us who ever thought we was gonna get out - really believed it. Damned stubborn guy. There he'd be, coming up with scheme after scheme, every single one of 'em less likely than me shitting a solid gold train ticket. I...laughed behind his back. Sometimes. Always made sure I was out of earshot.

"Ahem. But...the thing of it was, it kept me going too. Seein' someone else with...hope, I guess. A person who don't roll over and play dead until they're not acting, like everyone else. Until...he didn't, anymore. He just got quieter and quieter until...he stopped showing up at all. I ain't seen him in...half a month now, I think. Thomas says he's still alive - so there is thatdays...I've seen it before. It...it worries me. I feel like...there'll be a day when he'll really be...gone. And I'm the only one with a snowball's chance in hell of stopping 'im. Though I...I couldn't. Before."

"Hold on." Lamb said, looking up from her notes. "Before? What do you mean by that?"

Delgado pursed his lips. For a moment, he stared off into space, considering. He'd told her a lot, over the past few weeks. He'd grown to trust her. Adore her, even. And she'd helped him more than he had the words to express.

But that piece of information? He'd never shared it with anyone. It had remained, for all these months, lodged inside him like a splinter slowly making for his heart. He was going to have to get it out eventually. But did he feel comfortable enough to do it today?

He thought back to the smiling girl with pigtails and all the conversations they'd had on trusting that their faraway children were in good hands.

Y'know what?, he thought to himself. Fuck it.

"There were four of us", Delgado said, his voice suddenly hoarse and strange. "For a little while."

"In the…"

"In the Pay John Club, yeah. My celly. Moved in after Harold...had to leave. Now he's…gone and...I'm to blame."

"Surely he made his own choices. As have Harold and Thomas. You cannot be held accountable for the actions of those who are unable to see beyond themselves."

"Maybe so, Doc. But...I sure didn't help."

He saw her opening her lipsticked mouth to ask another question, to probe a little deeper, to ease it out of him as she was so good at doing, when he pulled his hand out from under his thigh and lifted it up to desk height. For just a moment, as the green gook oozed out of his pores, he saw a flash of fear flit across her face. He felt a little bad that he'd scared her, but at the same time, there was a gleefulness in him that he'd managed to crack her facade for even a moment.

"If I was to hit you with this, Doc and tell you to dance a jig on top of your desk...you'd hop to it like there was nothin' more important in the world. If I wanted some guard to toss me their keycard? Same deal. If I wanted some asshole to slit his own throat and shut himself up for good? Well…"

"That's...all very impressive, Mr. Delgado, now if you would please"-

"What I'm trying to say is that it could've saved him. My celly. Hell, there'd be two more guys up and about if I hadn't screwed the pooch. Assholes, both of 'em, but...they didn't deserve that. Nobody deserves that."

"Mr. Delgado, this is a clinical environment and I am asking you...to…"

She trailed off when he sucked it back into his hand and crossed his arms.

"Well." she said, relaxing a little and putting her unflappably serene face back on. "Thank you for...that. Now, you were saying that it could have...saved him?"

Delgado looked off into space for a moment.

"Yeah." he said softly. "It was them against us in the Plasmid Theater. Not by choice. I...didn't know what I had. It was such a mess. So...it was more like two against one. He held them off while I...messed up.

"The second we finally figure out what the damn thing is, y'know what happens? I get my block knocked off. Boom. Say bye-bye to barbering. When I come to, he's hanging off the other guy, stopping him from...I don't know. But I've got a clear shot, I'm taking aim and…"

He touched his neck absentmindedly.

"I just wasn't fast enough."

He was silent for a long time. Lamb just sat there staring at him. Sitting with him until he was ready.

"I think...he thought I was dead and...just couldn't take it anymore. Ya gotta understand, he would've done anything for me. He half killed a guy once because he...well, because I got a sprained ankle on account of him. He was so angry, seeing me laid up. Always going off about how it shouldn't have happened, why can't that asshole just mind his business, yada-ya. Y'know. Then the guy himself picks a fight with him and...that's all it took.

"I don't know why he was like that. I told him, right off the bat, 'when they come for me, ya gotta look after yourself.' Of course we're not leaving each other up the creek without a paddle. Comrades stick together! We made our...home, in here, as best we could. But...

"There's got to be a line, right? If he's gonna hurt himself or somebody else on my account, I don't want it. Never wanted it! I wouldn't...god, I wouldn't be so goddamn pissed if he'd just...well, I should finish the story first, shouldn't I?

"I come to again and the whole stage's on fire. The...guy he was holding onto burnt to a crisp and the next about to join the barbeque. I...think a lot about what would've happened if I'd gotten over there in time to stop him. If I'd...slipped him a dose of my little friend here and given 'im strict orders to cool his heels.

"To be honest, I don't like usin' the thing. It makes me kinda sick, knowing it exists out there, in the world. That...I have that kinda power. That anyone does. But, in this case...I could've stopped it. I could've"-

"Renato." Lamb said, stopping him cold. "Take a moment to listen to yourself. You were placed in a situation over which you had no control, whose odds were far from in your favor, alongside a clearly disturbed partner and you were - to put a cherry on top of the sundae - afflicted with a traumatic brain injury. Do you truly think you could have changed the outcome? Or are you so adverse to speaking ill of your so-called 'friends' that you refuse to see the root of your problem for what it is? Tell me, Renato...who is the person to whom your ire rightly belongs?"

Delgado gawped at her for a second, then hung his head.

"I just…" he said. "I just wish he'd trusted me."

His hands were shaking again. Whether it was because of his brain or the withdrawal cravings he'd been dealing with all week, he couldn't be sure. Lamb reached over and took hold of one. Her fingers were long and cool. He could just see the glint of the chain hidden beneath her sleeve.

"How wonderful it would be" she said gently. "Were this world not ruled by egos run amok. But I harbor no belief that it has to be that way."

She flipped his hand over and lifted her palm up to reveal a delicately crafted papier mache butterfly inside. Delgado stared at it, wonderingly. His hand closed around it, as carefully as though he were holding a real one.

"If what I have said interests you, bring this back to me at our next appointment. If not, no harm done and we'll never speak of it again. Now, since we have a few minutes before this session is over, how are you doing with your exercises?"

Notes:

- Fun Fact: I beg you, take a guess as to what I, answering as Devon, got on an MBTI test which I went into having no conscious knowledge of what the end result would be. Surprise! It's…

ISFJ-T or...Protector. Real world personality typing says there's no escape. ;u;

- Delgado earnestly believes that had the telekinetic guy not almost killed him, he would have thrown his ball at Alves and told him to go fuck himself. Aaaaaaaand, that's how you get the theater closed down for an entirely different reason.