"I deserve to live. I deserve to live. I deserve to live…" Jay muttered the words, barely aloud, all the way home. He didn't feel better. He didn't believe them. Saying them only made him angry. He stopped, then started again when Mouse and Erin's faces flashed into his head, when Dr. Garner's logic bit at his mind. If he stopped saying it, was he agreeing Mouse and Erin's lives were worth less? Somehow he felt like he was.

So with hands growing tighter, knuckles whiter, around the steering wheel, he kept repeating the mantra until he pulled into the parking lot of his apartment building. It played on a loop, bitter-tasting, in his mind as he walked through the building, as the elevator rose, as he slid his key into the lock, registering a moment too late the spicy smell and the sound of laughter slipping around the door's edges.

"Jay! Come taste this!" Erin's voice bounced out of the kitchen the moment he stepped inside.

I deserve to live, I deserve to live, I deserve to live…

He slipped off his shoes, dropped his keys into their bowl, and stepped resignedly toward the kitchen. He was dreading the looks on their faces, their questions. He wanted to go to bed and lay in the dark and turn off his brain. But there was golden light beckoning him to their warmth.

He stepped through the doorway. Erin, her hair pulled back in a chaotic knot, with pieces falling out, looked up and smiled, soft and easy and like there was nothing unusual at all, and Jay's heart clenched and released. Mouse glanced up and waved a kitchen knife in a lazy hello then turned back to the chicken he was carefully dicing.

"Here." Erin dipped a spoon into a skillet with a simmering orange-y sauce—sienna, a distant memory of his mother's voice said, edged with smugness from behind the dictionary, well-worn from Boggle nights—and carefully lifted it to his lips. Automatically, he dipped his head, and the rich taste of cream and spices coated his tongue. It almost burned away the bitter taste of the mantra in his mouth. He offered her a smile, hoping it was enough. He felt as though the only words he had left were the ones Dr. Garner foisted upon him. Erin grinned. "Good?"

He nodded and her grin grew wider.

Behind her, Mouse put down the knife and picked up the cutting board, carefully sliding the chicken pieces into the skillet. He glanced over, letting only a flicker of worry show in his eyes before he smiled.

"There's a recipe for pakoras over there," he said, nodding at the table where a cauliflower, a few potatoes, an onion, and some other scattered ingredients rested beside a piece of paper. "You can get started on that if you want."

Jay nodded again, smiling back, and turned to the table, focussing all his attention on the unfamiliar instructions of the recipe.

If Mouse and Erin traded worried glances, or resigned grimaces, Jay didn't see them. He narrowed his world to slicing the cauliflower into perfectly sized florets, and making even little cubes of potato, to mixing perfectly measured flour and spices. He was nothing but careful hands and the smell of the batter.

I deserve to live, I deserve to live… The words were still bitter.

The food was not. After the careful cooking was done, it was warm and thick and rich on his heavy tongue. Fresh baked naan was sweet and soft, and the pakoras born of his hands were steaming and crisp, and the chicken was moist and permeated with perfect spice. It was the kind of meal that… well, the kind of meal that makes him feel alive.

And still, Mouse and Erin didn't ask. They made quiet easy conversation and Jay's silence didn't seem like a void. He was not excluded, but nor did they let empty spaces yawn open in the shape of his voice. His tongue was still heavy, but couldn't find the taste of bitter words beyond the spices.

"I deserve to live," he whispered to his reflection that night before bed. Erin was waiting for him under the covers. Mouse was reading in the next room by the soft lamplight, which just barely spilled into the bedroom. He whispered the words, and they were the closest they had been to true all day.

He went back to Dr. Garner. And again, and again. It never got easier. But against all odds, he's… grateful? He never realized how many poisonous words were tangled up and oozing inside of himself until Dr. Garner started pulling them from his mouth. They don't come easy. But they do come, and she picks them apart with ruthless logic, with the kind of kindness that is sharp. And he breathes just a little bit easier.

He saw it in Mouse too, and in Erin, and he regretted that he still couldn't pour the words out to them that spilled from his lips in Dr. Garner's office. They're working on that. Someday, he'll be able to give Mouse what he needs, be the other half of impossible conversations in more than moonlit fragments. Someday they will let Erin see the scars and tell her the nightmares that aren't just nightmares.

And there was something else that floated just out of reach. Something in the way that Dr. Garner studied him sometimes when he talks about Erin and Mouse. Something about watching the two most important people in his life laughing together. Something about the way Erin stared at Mouse sometimes when Mouse wasn't looking. Something… And then it was gone.

But Erin had been on edge the past few days, since her last appointment with Dr. Charles, and Jay worried. It was subtle, but there. The way she bit her lip as though to stop herself from speaking. The way her eyes flicked so quickly between him and Mouse. Sometimes he thought she was holding him more tightly, as through afraid he would disappear.

Mouse wasn't there that night, and Erin had been biting her lip more, and fidgeting with the coin Mouse gave her, tapping her fingers, and Jay knew something was coming. He just didn't know what, and he was afraid.

He picked up the remote, and Erin's hand, soft but calloused, slipped it from his grasp and his heart skipped a beat. He forced himself to smile.

"Erin?"

She bit her lip, then spoke.

The cold air was a relief, brushing across his cheeks and into his lungs when he stepped outside, Erin's words ringing in his ears. What if you didn't have to choose? The thought swirled around and around, a hurricane, rearranging everything into chaos. An option he could never have considered. There was a part of him, the part that sounded like his father, like the church he didn't go to anymore, that recoiled. That had always recoiled, full of fear and confusion, when he let himself consider what he felt for Mouse. There was a much larger part of him that could already see it. It was the thing that had been teasing him, floating just out of reach. Erin had plucked it out of the ether and handed it to him.

What if you didn't have to choose?

Was that what he wanted? He thought of all those times, watching Erin with Mouse, sitting with their warmth on either side, their laughter filling up his apartment. He thought of the morning after that terrible day and how he'd tried to forget how perfect it was to wake to them both there. He thought of what it might be like, to press a kiss to Mouse's lips, to see Erin do the same. And it was everything he didn't know he'd wanted, everything he thought he couldn't have.

What if you didn't have to choose?

So he doesn't.