A/N: First off-thank you, thank you, one and all, for your fantastic reviews. Mwah! *does happy dance with her annoying yet semi-cute preppie* Dalton, for one, was absolutely floored by the response-he annoys me to finish these things but somehow doesn't think they're very praiseworthy. Hopefully you guys have showed him what's what...and I didn't even give you Race! (Just for your loyalty you each get a jar of peanut butter-and if you don't like it, well, tough; Dalton's eaten everything else in the house. Bad muse.) But fret not...more drama awaits. Starting at--*gasp!*- -this very chapter. So read on, and enjoy your snack. Extra crunchy, anyone?

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Home

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I left the hospital a little over an hour later, after Spot had at last gone back to sleep I could perhaps believe that I had gained a little safety in that morning's long-overdue meeting. It was almost eleven a.m. when I stepped out onto the street, the sun high in the sky, its unabashed wintry brightness only serving to make me feel more cold. But what a strange thing, to know that the sun was still there, even-that it still rose in the morning, and set at night, rescued us from darkness without fail. I felt then as I had felt six years ago, when I had fallen for Jack and the sky had come down on both of us. For the days that I was walking wounded and even, for a while, after I had been safely delivered out west, I felt the strangest sense of wonder at every piece of evidence that the world did go on. The rain that followed me out to California turned to snow on the jagged mountains, melting-sweet, and I was astonished that such a thing could happen, time passing by without me going along with it. Later that winter, while I was Canada, near Yellowknife, I went to one of those mountains with a photographer friend of mine, and those pricks of icy heat melting on my face were like Rapunzel's tears lifting the veil of blindness from her long-lost sweetheart. That day on the mountain I learned to see again, and what I saw was that all ties to my past were gone and I was now in a whole new world, free to live my life.

In truth, that feeling never really left me. Even now, back in New York City, I knew that I would never go back to being the same person as I had been before. I had seen the world that lay beyond Brooklyn's daily fight for survival, and this knowledge alone had given me a strange kind of liberty. Still, though, I knew that it would be nothing short of hubris to not believe that I was now at the mercy of the city.

I had forgotten just what it was like to be living here. Everything was fast, fast, faster, nothing constant, nothing that stayed, the atmosphere itself seeming to heat up charged with tension and strain until I feared the very air around me would ignite. I looked around me, felt this living current pass through me, felt the weight of a thousand lives around me. No more Alaska silence, no more snow, no more howling midnight wind, no more darkness. This was life as it was meant to be lived, a dusty allegory to the hungry pursuits of man. Money. Sex. Religion. Everything that mattered was contained on a single Brooklyn street corner. I opened my eyes wide, looked out at the new world that surrounded me, the world that I had known forever, the world that accepted me now as I accepted it, my homecoming. And I knew, then, this more than anything else: a tide running the length and breadth of the city reached out, took hold of me and would not let go until one thing had been accomplished, one thing that had to be done. Yes. I had to go back to Manhattan. If only to prove once and for all that I had survived.

I had scrupulously planned it out on the train ride over, and this feeling went against everything that I had figured. There were two paths set out for me, and I was old enough to know now that they very rarely converged. Manhattan was the battleground, where every street was charged with painful memory. Manhattan was where all of us had risen above the hand fate dealt us, and it was where I had fallen. It had been my goal to avoid it for as long as I could, to go about the quiet business of making a life for myself here where I belonged, looking after Spot and staying where I was safe. Going to Manhattan now would ruin everything, destroy my plans and bring me back to the place I had been six years back, when the dress rehearsal that my life had been finally seemed to make sense. There were two paths laid out for me: ration and instinct. I took the latter. What else could I do?

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Past

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"So what are we gonna call you now?"

Samuel looked over at his little sister, and saw the expression of insatiable curiosity on her face that never really seemed to go away. "I dunno," he admitted. "I haven't thought of anythin' yet."

Sammy considered this. She wasn't entirely sure if she liked the idea of her brother going by a different name. She had seen enough change in the past week to last her a lifetime. Samuel changing his name would only add to that. And change, she had decided, was never a good thing.

Samuel went back to sifting through the gutters, poking through the accumulated debris with the worn-down sides of his boots, looking for something good to take to the junkie on Sunday. It was how a lot of the kids on Water Street made a little extra money-collecting string, paper, washers and cardboard and balls of tinfoil. What bought peppermint wafers and purey marbles for the other children helped put food on the table in the Conlon house. And that did for Samuel what no baseball mitt or bag of gemlike boiled sweets could-he was providing family, and it gave him a sense of pride that he had never known the likes of before. It was a feeling that he needed a name to go with. Something strong. Something grown-up. Most of all, something new.

"I was thinkin' maybe, y'know, somethin' tough-soundin'," Samuel said shamelessly, kicking at the curb with the toe of his show. "Like, I dunno...Fang, or Dragon...."

"Fang?" Sammy said incredulously, already beginning to giggle.

"Aw, shut yer pie-hole," Samuel muttered, his cheeks beginning to color. As if to add insult to injury, a man hurrying along the sidewalk, clearly not looking where he was going, bumped into the equally unseeing Samuel, taken by surprise so that he was unable even to break his fall.

"Sorry about dat," the man chuckled, helping Samuel up. "Didn't even see ya, boy. Why, you're no bigger 'n a spot of ink."

Irritated, Samuel turned his eyes to the ground once more, as Samantha just stood there, grinning at him dumbly. He waited for her to say something else, but she remained silent, irritating him to no end simply by not speaking. "Cat got yer tongue?" he said at last.

"That's what we'll call you," she said.

"Call me what?" he asked, exasperated.

"Spot!" she laughed. "We'll call you Spot."

"What, like a dog?"

She didn't answer, dancing around him in a circle, chanting in her high voice: "Spot, Spot, Spot Conlon, Spot, no bigger 'n a spot of ink," always evading him by a hair's breadth whenever he reached out to grab hold of her. From that day on, she called him nothing else: first because it simply annoyed him, and then because neither she nor anybody else simply could not conceive of him being called by another name.

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In the wild constellation of Manhattan, lit by the violent, celestial lights of a thousand places that I had known and could not remember forgetting, Central Park was my constant, my point of reference, my north star as I navigated this unforgiving world. My father had taken Spot and I there when we were young, and he still the strongest man in the world. Later, while I was in Manhattan visiting with Jack after he had long graduated from the gritty majesty of the Brooklyn docks, we had gone there together to admire one of the few things of beauty that either of us knew. I knew the minute I made it across the bridge that Central Park was where I was headed; right then, it was one of the few places that I could go, a neutral territory in a city overcome by old battlegrounds.

It was cold that day, just a few degrees above freezing. I walked with my head down, bracing myself against the elements. Sitting down in one place, staying still, would only make me colder, even if I could convince myself I was warm. But by principle almost everything I had done in the past few years had been wrong, in some way or another. Doing the sensible thing would somehow have been going against the grain of my nature. I found a familiar place, a bench in an unpeopled pocket of the park that, and gratefully sat down, feeling my cheeks burn with cold.

Trying not to think about Spot was almost as difficult as thinking about him-it required a great amount of skill in the subject of avoidance, something that I had never really possessed. Maybe it was because of how hard I was trying not to think about Spot, and then worry, and then panic, and then lose whatever remaining shred of sanity that I had left, that I didn't notice the little girl until she ran smack into me and fell sprawling on the ground. She jolted me out of an intense reverie--on gingersnaps or matches or baseball or some other topic that was as far removed from Spot as I could possibly get-and I helped her right herself, a girl no older than five who had lost her footing chasing after a ball that got out of control. I'll always remember the first impression I got of her, a girl I immediately saw myself in, a tomboyish disappointment to mothers everywhere with eyes of a warm, chocolate brown that I had only seen once before, long brown braids and an enormous red tam-o'-shanter that slightly resembled a tea-cozy, perched askew on her head.

"Sorry, Miss" she mumbled as I helped her up off the ground ("Miss"? When exactly did this happen?), looking at me sheepishly while she brushed the dirt from her jumper.

"It's all right," I said, reaching down under the bench as I rummaged around for her ball. As I handed it to her, she rewarded me with a stupendous crooked-toothed grin. "What's your name?" I asked her.

She tossed the ball from one palm to the other as she answered, dropping the thing more often than she managed to catch it. "Annie-well, my whole name's Annabelle Samantha. But nobody ever calls me that." She wrinkled her nose.

"It's a fancy name," I supplied.

"I don' like it. Papa says it was Mama's idea t' call me it, but he jist calls me Annie."

"That's a nice name too."

Suddenly she dropped the ball in midair, her jovial manner evaporating. "I ain't allowed t' talk to you. I just remembered-you're a stranger."

"Oh," I said quickly, "I'm not a stranger at all."

She looked at me with newfound interest. "You're not?"

"Nope," I said, picking up the ball and tossing it to her once again, in what was beginning to feel like a familiar ritual. " 'Cause I'm a Samantha too."

"You ARE?"

"Yep." She tossed the ball back to me, without even thinking, and I did the same, the game continuing on like that until we didn't even notice we were doing it. "We've gotta stick together, you 'n me. There aren't many of us left."

She nodded. "That was Papa's idea. The Samantha part. It's kinda a fancy name too, ain't it?"

"Yep. Just like Annabelle. But I usually go by Sam."

Annie started chattering excitedly then, about how I could come live at their house and we could be friends together, an high-pitched narrative that she couldn't seem to get out fast enough, one sentence overtaking another before she was even finished speaking it. While she talked I studied her, her face and the way she tossed an errant lock of hair out of her eyes. There was something so sweetly familiar about her, something that I just couldn't place, and I knew that it was going to trouble me until I figured it out.

And things continued on like that until suddenly a low, blunt shout cut into her words. "Annie! C'mon, it's getting dark," came the call, lost somewhere, just out of sight.

Her ears perked up at the sound of that. "That's Papa. Wanna meet him?" she asked me. It wasn't really a question, of course. She took my hand in her small, mittened one and led me hurriedly towards the source of the noise.

It really was getting dark, the trees casting long shadows that were quickly turning into a harder stuff, the makings of night. I only noticed we had reached her father until she looked up at him proudly, and said to me, as if whispering some fantastic secret: "that's Papa."

But of course, by then I didn't need any sort of an introduction. It was dark, and the face I saw older, a face I hadn't seen for nearly six years. But still it would have been impossible for me not to recognize it. And suddenly it was the only face that I could ever see, the only person that I wanted to see at all. It was the only person that could have been there. It was Jack.

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TBC...