~~~Where God Went to Die~~~

Sly and the Ayleen had fallen asleep in each other's arms, sharing an oversized recliner - Murray's favorite. The unspoken agreement between the two of them that all the hard talk would be saved for the next morning ran circles around Sly's dreams. He woke once or twice, only to collect his bearings, then smile and fall back under when he saw his daughter. Ayleen had her head right under his chin, matching her breathing with his. Whenever Sly would shift, she would hold him tighter.

Bentley didn't sleep, he just sat, thinking slowly as he watched the two raccoons. Secretly, he wanted to hear Sly's story just as much as his daughter did. When Sly… traveled back for the final time, broken and changed, he just took Ayleen and left. The most Bentley had been able to deduce was that Carmelita… well, was either lost somewhere in time, or dead. The turtle severely doubted the former was even possible, knowing Sly. He had a lot to answer for, and not just to his kid.

"What happened to Penelope?" he had always wanted to ask. Did Sly even remember? He mentioned her when he came back… It was too risky to go check for himself, but that question had stagnated for so long it felt like a tumor, and he had loosely debated repairing the old machine.

The raccoon grunted, hoisting his tail out from under him. It brushed the ground then shot up to hug his daughter with his arms. Bentley smiled, happy to have his friend back… happy to finally have a shot at the questions that had kept him up for seventeen years.

Sometime during the teary-eyed reunion, Murray made mention of the exact count of days they had all been apart. It was nice, to have another couple pairs of ears to soak in all the big guy's affection. He hadn't taken well to Sly's departure, feeling abandoned and a bit uncared for when all the dust settled. It was nice, to see him happy for Sly's return. Bentley felt that even though he was faking most of the excitement, Murray wasn't. it just wasn't in his nature; he was the forgiving type. Was Bentley? That question and a thousand others danced around the tumor, making him want to wake the raccoon up and get the whole ordeal over with. But as a happy groan escaped one of the ring-tails, Bentley rubbed his eye, and convinced himself he was tired. 'In due time,' had become his uncomfortably familiar mantra.

In due time.

Chapter Fourteen

Paris, France - 2035

Ayleen felt her wrist pop when she stretched, pushing her hands blindly through the foggy walls of sleep. Her dad was still under, a snore growling like an earthquake on her back. She smiled, glimpsing an unconscious, but dearly dreaming smile on his lips. She slowly swung her legs off the chair and fixed the blanket they had been sharing after a few more stretches. Sly adjusted for the shift in weight, but didn't stir.

The girl found her way to the kitchen and stopped to admire the breaking dawn behind the Eiffel. Squeaking metal wheels on the hardwood couldn't muddle the songs of birds creeping in under the window, holding her attention so deeply she paid no mind when Bentley spoke. When she pulled her mind back to her, feeling the birds disappear behind her vision, she smiled. "I'm sorry, what was that?" From the few hours she had spent with the old turtle, he had fit her expectations- or at least her optimistic ones -with such accuracy it felt… phony. She blamed her still settling nerves for the pulses of caution she felt when talking to him, but something about the way he looked at her father… didn't feel right. She wouldn't blame him for harboring some bleak-feelings towards Sly, but he acted almost like nothing ever happened between them. It must have been his eyes. His glasses covered them well, but from the right angle, she could see the cogs behind his pupils slow, and start to grind. He mentioned wanting to ask Sly some questions he still hadn't figured out. The stress must have been painful, building for two decades. All she had to endure was a week on her own. She had a feeling that Bentley was an entirely different kind of alone.

On her exodus (that word humored her, but the more it sat the better it fit) she had made a friend in Barry the chameleon, and even found a bit of emotional guidance from her father's old rival. She decided to hold her mother's honor, rejecting the impulse to rob two unsuspecting lemurs just because she knew how. Had Bentley learned anything since Sly's departure? Or were those questions of his stunting his growth. Bentley used to be a thief, just like Sly. He would probably have stolen from that couple. Would he want to, if he couldn't? Would he want her to? Those cogs behind his eyes were beginning to smoke, his emotional state was shaded.

He cleared his throat, rolling himself to a dining table with his squeaky wheels. "I asked about how you slept. We have spare beds you know." He was smiling.

Ayleen swallowed a yawn and smiled back. "Actually, pretty comfortable, I might go back." Bentley responded with a humored grunt, hoisting himself higher on his chair. Ayleen almost asked if he wanted help.

"Sly's always been a restless sleeper, I'm surprised-" he stopped himself, and let his voice wander off into inaudible territory with a shake of his head.

"Tell me about it." she never really noticed, back home Sly usually kept to his room if he didn't have a beer or coffee to hold his eyes open. Maybe Bentley cut himself off because he was worried Sly wasn't a restless sleeper anymore, and didn't want to look wrong. Ayleen considered it, and hated the idea of losing someone for so long that when they came back, even the small non-critical quirks had morphed. The finer details make everything, and in a friendship, kept the foundation rooted. She wanted to help him feel like her Sly was the same as his Sly. Maybe the small stupid inches like sleep patterns and whatnot would end up going a mile.

Or at least a few feet. The turtle nodded and sighed in agreement. "Well, you should see Murray." he made an effort to keep the conversation flowing. Honestly, Ayleen would have talked about anything. Despite his cracked voice and hidden demeanor, he made for good chit-chat. "As long as he's fed, you could probably sneak a tattoo on him when he's out." that made her laugh.

"He's asleep still?" she asked, noticing a skinny shadow climb the stairs. Bentley watched that shadow morph into the dingo James, and pointed to him.

James, bright eyed and bushy-tailed in a button up dress shirt and slacks folded his hands behind his back. "Murray likes to rest until eleven." he winked at the turtle. "That's when 'Goodies' opens, if I'm correct." He stuck out his tongue and rolled his eyes a little.

Bentley was looking behind the dingo, waiting for a second shadow. "Is Dorothy back yet?" asked in a way that made Ayleen feel like she was eavesdropping.

James shook his head. "You know her, she likes her walks." he clapped his hands, and looked at Ayleen. "I don't mind taking over, would you like some breakfast, Miss Montoya?" Ayleen beamed, and politely asked for whatever Bentley would like, but when the turtle declined the offer, she felt a sudden craving for eggs. Her dad liked eggs, too. Maybe the smell would wake him up.

"Oh, one more thing," Bentley started, but stopped to breathe for a minute. "some coffee would be great, too." Ayleen doubted that was what he really wanted to ask.

However, she swallowed that hesitation and looked her host in the eye. "Is she your maid?" she didn't want to say 'caretaker.' Something about that word sounded demeaning.

"When she wants to be." Laughed James.

"More of a caretaker," Bentley grabbed a wheel and jerked the chair a couple times. "You probably haven't noticed this, but it makes the chores a tad tricky." They all had a laugh at his joke, Ayleen hopeful for more to come.

As the morning evolved, and the kitchen filled with the ashy smell of eggs, the trio were joined by Murray and eventually, a ragged Sly. His fur was tufted like an oil rag, sticking so far off his neck his head looked small. He wiped sleep off his face and sat next to his daughter. With every new figure to enter the room, Bentley would act more and more energetic. He would laugh where it didn't feel entirely appropriate, and no matter who spoke, wouldn't stop looking at Sly.

"Morning." He said with a yawn, eyeing the coffee pot. A light squeeze on Ayleen's shoulder when he passed. She smiled at him, touching his fingers. "Sleep well?" everybody took their turns answering with various volumes of grunts and nods. When Ayleen caught his eye, she figured her voice was the only one actually cared to hear. She was sure Bentley noticed that, too.

James had made them all a healthy heap of scrambled eggs, the smell actually reaching Murray before her father, but maybe that was supposed to be normal. When she looked at the hippo, she saw heavy bags on his cheeks, weighted by dark stress. She asked if he slept well, but he just expressed some predictable excitement for Sly's return. Bentley absentmindedly bounced his finger on his fork while the big guy spoke. Sly engaged this topic, running over everything in Paris he missed, and what he wanted to show Ayleen. She was kept the subject of his ideas, but he politely tacked on an invitation for the others, catching the turtle's stare.

Bentley stopped tapping, freezing in place or time when Murray agreed. The turtle watched his two friends play ping pong with suggestions, inquiries, and excitement for various activities. When the conversation was directly extended to Bentley, he forced a smile. "Well, yes. While it might be nice to reintroduce you to the city, I feel we shouldn't distract from…" He looked up at James, standing over the frying eggs. The dingo looked back, nodded, and switched off the stove. He said something about finding Dorothy and left the room to the four. "…From what we should talk about." Bentley finished his thought in the silence. "It won't help anything, to save it all for later."

He was about to continue, but Sly grunted. "Christ man, I just- " He said in a quiet voice, but cut himself off as soon as he felt the room's eyes. Even the small twitching of his lips felt like noise, stopping all other sources in the house as the group waited for him to speak again. Sly wouldn't lift his gaze any higher than the table they all surrounded, studying the rivers in the wood. "Yeah, that's… no you're right. I'm sorry." He pushed his plate away from him, without having taken a single bite, Ayleen noticed. "Okay, well… where do I start?" a nervous chuckle.

Ayleen waited for Bentley to speak, before realizing she was the one being asked. Somehow, this felt like the one scene she hadn't rehearsed in her mind. Her father gave her time to gather herself, then she gulped. "Okay… first question." Sly pursed his lips and held his gaze like he was looking through a scope. He knew what was coming. "What happened to… Carmelita? To my mom?" her voice was quiet and quick, but scratched her throat as it left.

Sly nodded, and sighed without broking eye contact. "She's dead, Ayleen." Slow, confidant, sure.

Murray didn't make any noise, just sat studying his eggs. Ayleen wondered how much of what was to come he knew. Bentley was holding his cards close to his chest, but the big guy looked out of place. Would he interject? Bentley definitely would. How much narrative drive did Sly actually have?

"Okay…" she looked away. She knew that Carmelita had to have been dead. This was just a confirmation, not a revelation. She was ready for it. "Did… w-was it y-you?" she choked out, prepared to say it, but nauseous it was finally happening.

Sly grabbed her wrist. "God, no, no I- No." His voice cracked, but the urgency was still there. Ayleen nodded and felt a tear streak her face. Sly wiped it away with his thumb. "She… was shot." He said when her eyes raised back to him. He eventually forced his eyes away to look at Bentley. "Penelope… Penelope shot her." Bentley was unmoving.

Ayleen jumped from each of their faces. "Who's Penelope?" she remembered when Officer Marsh dragged her drunken father though their front door, he mentioned that name; Penelope. What else? Something about Tahiti.

Sly pushed his har behind his ears. "Maybe I should backtrack." Now it was his turn to anxiously tap his fingers. "My family… my old family, I mean, were a clan of master thieves. The Coopers..."

_I/*\I_

"…That's when these guys came back to rescue me. I was there for… only a few hours, maybe." He was wrapping up. Bentley was nodding. "And Carmelita came with them. I think that surprised me, honestly. After I lied, and ran off… well, it just seemed like a good time to step out, if you ask me. But she didn't, which I guess meant she loved me." Sly felt Bentley's eyes narrow. This was going to hurt him inside and out, having to admit everything he saw, everything he did. Even the good parts, all the love he got from Carmelita, it was the same kind of love Bentley watched walk away from him. In the end Sly got his daughter, Bentley had lost all but one person. "When we got back to 2017, I don't think she let me out of her sight." He tried to smile. "Almost, I mean… there were some errands I still needed to run."

He stopped to watch Ayleen, who through his entire story of thievery had sat silently, immersed in his tales. Now, minutes after learning time travel was not only real, but operated almost exclusively by her father, she played with her fork and bit her lip, struggling to believe what she was being told. She hid it well, but Sly could almost smell the anxiety congealing.

Sly continued, forgetting he was still holding his daughter's wrist. She must have forgotten too, when he let go her eyes twitched in surprise. "So, Bentley made another one. One that we didn't find out until much later; worked differently. The first machine… ran like a train, on tracks, you know? And as long as you stay on that train, whatever you changed in the past would carry on into the future. The second machine…" Bentley leaned forward, onto his elbows. Murray was twirling his thumbs around each other like a child. "Well, if you change something using the second machine, the go back… back home, I mean, it just… doesn't count."

Ayleen stammered. "W-what does that mean, doesn't count?"

"I went back to Egypt, not long after I was rescued, I went to see if Clockwerk was going to come after us. He and I… talked. We talked about all the things he was going to do… or, all the things he already did." He forced a chuckle. "I actually pacified him, I- " Sly stopped himself, and shook his head. He could feel his blood march along their cables, drop by drop. "It didn't matter, like that whole reality stopped being real the second I came back, everything was the same. Nothing I could have said or done to the bird would have changed anything." Everyone was staring at him. "Even if I killed him, nothing would have changed." Everyone but his daughter.

She looks like Carmelita when she's pissed.

Stop it.

Finally, Bentley's sigh broke the silence. Until then, his only movement was the occasional rubbing of his neck. "Tell her how you found out, Sly." He said, somehow both feebly and aggressively, in the way only condescension could convey.

Sly looked from him to his daughter, hating that he agreed it was the best example. Ayleen's eyes were clouded, and small. Until she had a better explanation, she wouldn't be able to wrap her mind around everything. With a sigh, the raccoon forced his mind back to that… decision. "Yeah…"

The clouds covering her eyes were dark, and dense. "What happened?"

Sly refused to look away, the image of her face distorting behind his building tears. "Penelope had this philosophy… that the past was so unimportant, I could have… killed her, and nothing would change. So, to test that…" Murray was now very visibly uncomfortable, scratching his arms and slouching. His gigantic frame only made the scratching louder, and the slouching more intrusive. When he would tap his heavy foot, it shook the whole table.

Ayleen scanned over the thieves. "You… did you try to kill her?" She asked weakly. Sly shook his head, unblinking. "Did…" her pupils shrank. "Did you… try to kill somebody else?" Sly pictured the bleeding face of Mugshot, another dark obstacle, growing too close to ignore. He nodded. "…Who?"

Before Sly could answer, Murray purposefully spilled his coffee. Everybody immediately knew it was intentional, a huge pink blur that was his arm jerking way too violently, way too quickly to have accidentally thrown his mug across the room. He made a loud grunt, and pretended to be too committed to cleaning that he excused himself from the table. Bentley hadn't taken his eyes off the raccoons, still as stone when the hippo made his escape. "Sly…" he said slowly, as to not sound like he was answering.

Sly nodded. "Right." His hand returned to Ayleen's wrist, and she almost pulled back. "I didn't believe her, the way she said time worked. I had to test it, something sure, something more than just talking the bloodlust out of a murderer two thousand years before he actually kills anyone." Sly wanted to smile at his last line, but couldn't find the humor in all the irony. Not anymore. He squeezed her wrist. "I went back to my first heist, I watched myself in the past, a young me, I mean." he slowed down when his daughter's mouth fell open, her breathing as loud as the weight of Murray's shuffling. She didn't speak, but Sly knew she figured it out.

"That young me, I killed him. I killed me, Ayleen."

And you still wished it worked, huh?

Paris, France – 2018

"Is she doing okay?" Sly asked, too busy watching his pacing to look his friend in the eye. Bentley clicked his tongue, combing over some clipboard he brought out of the garage with him.

"How the hell am I supposed to know? You're the only one who didn't just get here…" the turtle grumbled, unconvinced which page he should rest his eyes on. Ever since Sly came back, the bridges of their friendship had grown rickety, even if Sly hadn't changed his surface presence since his breakdown. When engaged, he would put on a face, rarely making eye contact. Perhaps it was shame, or maybe he felt only Carmelita could handle his boiling emotions. Bentley almost felt the same way, the last nine months spent alone in his garage, pouring over now-defunct theories and calculations, breaking and repairing the time machines, over and over and over again. Something about Penelope's theory made him feel… uneducated. There was much more to discover in the realms of time, but thanks to Sly's dissociative breakdown, the entire house was oozing with paranoia.

At one point, Bentley and Carmelita pushed themselves into a pointless argument, debating the ethicality of "dissecting time" with his second machine. If Sly was to be believed- and the blood-stained mask was still in the house somewhere, lost like an excess sock -then there would be no consequence to exploring that kind of past. Carmelita must have found the idea personally insulting, believing that power could "give someone a god complex." Bentley agreed, but internalized that if something is sought by some it must be studied for all, or else risk never learning why people do the things they do. Bentley loved learning about why people worked the way they did, and this machine could be the ultimate answer for that. Besides. even if the freedom to kill your past self without losing your life made you feel indestructible, feeling and reality are two very different things. Sly should know; for what relatively little research was put into that second machine, 'feeling' was absolutely the right word. Sly didn't kill himself, but he feels the result of it. He saw it. It wasn't reality, it was all just a feeling, a feeling that for a small modicum of time whisked his body to a featureless void, the past and all its horrors existing only behind his eyes, and in his memory, like a vile dream.

It made Bentley's head spin, and with this flatfoot Sly had to go and knock up blocking every chance he had to steady it, the pressure was collapsing into pain. But how can you tell that to your best friend? A friend who found a way to traumatize himself, and who loved the only person trying to forget about it all. How would that conversation even start? How would it end?

There was something else, Bentley was sure of that. Something both he and Penelope overlooked. He just needed the space to find it.

"Oh, I'm here too, Bentley!" Murray's voice danced parallel to the pictures racing through Bentley's mind. He hadn't noticed the big guy occupying the entire couch, cluelessly spinning a Rubik's Cube.

Sly ruffled his hair and tried to look through the crack in the door again. "Yeah, but you've only been here."

Bentley, with a groan, rested the clipboard on his lap. "I haven't been inside, Sly. I don't know." He hated saying that string of words, the few times he actually had to.

The raccoon nodded, and eventually sat in the armchair opposite the hippo. "I know, I know, I'm just…" the other two noticed he was shaking. "Just… of all the places to go into labor, huh?"

"Would you have preferred the hospital?" Bentley asked Sly, who clicked his tongue and looked at his lap in response. Carmelita knew staying with the Coopers was like career cyanide, but chose her lover and her daughter, over everything else. The four weren't technically in hiding, but the ten or so months she had been AWOL garnered enough search interest, that the best option for everyone was to stay indoors. Suddenly showing up in the ER, giving birth to the baby of "Incarceration Priority: One" …well, it was an entirely different sparkling bottle of stress Bentley didn't want to deal with.

Sly shook his head, shooting a quick glance behind Bentley, towards the garage. "No." Bentley heard a beep from the small computer he built into his wheelchair's arm rest. "I guess not." Bentley had to look twice, the first time, his eyes refusing to perceive the message. He was about to comment on it, unsure of what words to use, even as they ossified in his throat, when the door opened.

One of the few doctors Sly had trusted through the arduous screening process Carmelita insisted on, lowered his facial mask. "Mr. Cooper?" he asked, sheepishly. Bentley had tried to learn more about this troupe of twenty-something-year old medical students, only four in number, before letting them into his home. Carmelita didn't want a hospital, but she didn't want her baby to be delivered by the gang either. He didn't even know if she knew these 'doctors' well before summoning them. Sly grew to be somewhat okay with it, and evidently, that was all that mattered.

Sly stood up and wiped his clean hands on his legs. "H-how is-"

"She's ready to push." Sly was quick to follow the man back into the room, like he was stapled to his shadow. The door shut behind them, closing off all the room's sound with a heavy click.

Murray leaned onto his thighs, and grinned, audibly. "Can you believe it's finally happening?" his voice was tame, and quiet, probably for the first time in years.

Bentley looked back at the tiny glowing screen under his wrist. Penelope's icon alongside her username, in bold pink font, stared back up at him. "Yeah," he sighed, tapping on the message.

Bentley. We should talk, before this gets out of hand.

"It's been a ride, all right."