A/N: Thank you so much for all the follows, favorites & reviews. Here's a chapter from Dick's POV. It starts a bit before the events at the end of chapter 1 and continues on from that point, for an outsiders view on things. Of course, he's got his stuff going on now, too. A BIG shout-out to my beta-cainc3! Enjoy!

Obligatory disclaimer-I don't own a thing in the whole wide VM 'verse-it's all Rob Thomas' domain. I like to play around in it though...So thanks for indulging me.

Chapter 2—Thinking-Trees

Dick's POV-June 6th, 2009

The summer Dick was twelve and Cassidy was eleven, his younger brother learned yet another way to take revenge on his tormentor. Where Dick was obvious with his torture, Cassidy tended toward the more subtle, more psychological acts to get back at Dick for real, and imagined, slights.

Roughly three, sometimes four times a week, Dick would wake up to a wet bed. The bedwetting episodes, as Big Dick called them, began to get concerning. His dad wanted to get him in front of the Casablancas family shrink, for documentation purposes more than any real parental concern; he wanted to use it as more fodder for his arsenal of complaints against Betina's mothering skills. He and his team of lawyers spun it for his own benefit—it was her indiscretions more than his that were scarring their progeny.

The episodes went on for almost a month, until one night Dick found himself wide awake after an unsettling dream about a little league game and menacing masked umpires. A glance at the clock revealed it was almost 3:30 AM. Suddenly the door to his bedroom creaked open.

He squinted his eyes shut and pretended to be fast asleep. He heard soft shuffles as the interloper tried to be soundless. He listened for the tell-tale creak of the loose floorboard by his bed. That sound never came, telling him whomever had sneaked into his room knew where to tread and where not to.

The intruder lifted his hand, and Dick instinctively let it flop as though he were truly deep in REM sleep. He felt his hand being submerged in a small bucket of warm water. Dick responded by sitting up in one smooth motion, reaching his other hand out and dumping the bucket on his prankster.

"Surprise," he said his voice calm, though he was raging in the inside. He turned on the light to watch the warm water meant for him raining down on Cassidy, instead. "The game is up, Beav." He popped the p in the word up.

Cassidy's eyes narrowed for an instant, his hatred of that nickname broadcast clearly on his face. No sign of remorse, only sizzling, poorly controlled anger at being caught. Then that brief glimpse of his usually tightly controlled outer emotions was over, replaced by his default smirk.

In exchange for not narcing on him to Big Dick, Cassidy agreed to be his Cinderella for the rest of the summer, not that it was any different than things usually were. Dick always seemed to be the puppet master, from the outside looking in, at least. Cassidy's 'shows of dominance' were more behind the scenes, psychological, like the bed wetting "prank."

For some reason, that memory came back to haunt Dick as he drove to Settler's Park, which was located deep in '02 territory—a foreign country almost, which was what he was going for today. He'd always scrutinized his memory bank for little hints, clues to the mindset of his murderous baby brother. The only question was, did he do it to get himself off the hook or put himself on the hook? It seemed to depend on the day…

That was a fitting memory jolt being that it was exactly three years, to the day, since Cassidy jumped off the roof of the Neptune Grand Hotel. This was shaping up to be one of those days he put himself back on the hook for the evil deeds his brother committed. He knew there was something off about Cass—he had always known that, but it was something he could overlook, ignore, and make it go away, until that was no longer an option.

Cassidy was too smart for this world. Most days Dick thought perhaps he was lucky being the dumb brother.

Dick knew Settler's Park was close to Mac's house, but he didn't think he'd see anyone he knew. Or rather, he really hoped he didn't see anyone he knew. He had to admit though, Mac would be more fitting company than anyone else he could think of. However, she had also self-diagnosed herself allergic to nature, so minus a cold snap in Hell, he doubted very much they'd be crossing paths today. It was a day they both usually went underground for, anyway. Dick knew he didn't have to go it alone. Logan would have come along had he asked, but he never did.

He just couldn't.

It was tough to be around Logan on June 6th, he didn't blame Logan, not really. But, well, shit! How could he face Logan on this day of all days knowing he was one of the last people to see his baby brother—his screwed up baby brother—alive? There was also the Veronica connection; he knew how his own flesh and blood had scarred the Pixie Spy in countless ways. It hurt too bad to be around other people, and be slapped in the face by his own tenuous connection to their pain as well. Everything hurt on this day though. Why not? He deserved it, after all he was a King Midas—he turned everything he touched to fucking stone. He played no small part in turning Cassidy psycho. He wasn't ignoring Woody Goodman's role in casting Cassidy as a murdering teenager, of course, but he was the one who tormented him from babyhood. He seeded the whole damn thing.

It was only 11 AM, and this hot, sticky day was already proving to be long.

He liked to be around normalcy, especially on this day of all days. He parallel parked his truck, squeezing in behind a bright green convertible, the exact shade of his vomit the last time he was in TJ, partying it up, which happened to just be last week.

The puke green car looked a lot like Mac's, but he couldn't imagine she'd willingly spend her time outside in the heat. Again, she had that whole anti-nature thing going on, minus her save the Whales; don't eat anything with a face mentality, of course.

He grabbed his faded blue backpack, and flung it over his shoulder. There was a tall tree, a stately oak tree that had, centuries ago, set up home in the center of the park. He made his way over there, annoyed as he weaved and dodged his way around groups of bored suburban moms trying to herd their rambunctious toddlers towards the playground.

He finally reached his destination—his thinking tree.

Mac, his new pseudo-friend—a label she was fond of—was the only one he'd told about the existence of his thinking tree. Even she did not know its top-secret location though. Nope, he kept that intel classified.

Flopping down at the base of the massive tree, he was shaded by the leafy umbrella from the probing rays of the mid-day sun. Dick dug through his bag and removed a water bottle that was actually filled with vodka.

His Neptune High days had imparted a lot of valuable lessons, like what a good hiding place plastic water bottles made for clear liquors like vodka and gin—though vodka made a better choice because it didn't smell like a pine forest, and cheating off of Mac was always a safe bet, though they'd had exactly five classes together the entire four years and one of them—gym—he didn't need to cheat off of anyone, especially Ghostworld.

His walk down memory lane—sometimes he wished it was amnesia lane—was rudely interrupted by a loud thwack of a ball connecting with an aluminum bat and happy shrieks. How dare anyone be happy today? It was a personal affront. Though he knew it was a risk he was undertaking by going to a park, where gaggles of happy kids liked to congregate during the hell-hot Neptune summers. However, this particular off-the-beaten '09'er path park was also home to his thinking tree, so he risked happy park dwellers to sit under the tree's shade and drink and well, think.

Dick looked off to his left and saw that there was a game going on in the baseball field. It didn't seem to be a professionally organized though, probably just a group of high school kids enjoying their first full week of summer vacation, when it seemed to yawn out towards infinity, before the boredom set in, infecting their lives and those around them.

Like a bruise he couldn't stop pressing, Dick found himself watching the baseball game and inevitably wondering how many things would have been different if Cassidy had never been bat boy for the Sharks. Maybe that was bullshit, it probably was, but the thing was, there wasn't a time machine that could give him a definitive answer on that.

Without prompting, his mind automatically rewound back to the time machine talk he had with Mac a couple of weeks ago as he "let" her kill him during one of their frequent gaming marathons. He'd had a hard time, that night, keeping from kissing her. He was fairly certain she felt something too, mainly because every time he'd been about to lean in and nip those full red lips she would suddenly get up to grab something—a beer or switch out the game they were playing, and she was spanking him at, or to grab a new bag of vegan-friendly munchies he always seemed to keep in the bar area of the suite at the Grand, where he still lived with Logan.

He was getting awfully vegan-friendly these days.

When the subject of time machines first came up, he made a joke about wanting to go back in time and battle tigers with a team of gladiators. The pensive expression on Mac's face had slipped, replaced by a frown. He got the distinct impression he'd disappointed her somehow, like maybe he wasn't paying attention to the script she'd created in that too big brain of hers. Maybe she was trying to broach a serious conversation with him. Dick admittedly had suspected what she'd been trying to say, and it wasn't an area he wanted to tread in yet. Honestly, it wasn't an area he ever truly wanted to explore. Out loud, at least, and definitely not without the aid of his thinking tree and a vodka-ized water bottle.

He couldn't read Mac as clearly as he could the other vapid chicks he used to bed on a weekly basis. The realization struck him again that somewhere during the past year or so he'd found he preferred the element of surprise that came with the whole Mac package. She was a challenge in the best kind of way and though he'd been born to expect silver plated service, it was really not what it seemed to be on the surface. The best reward was when it was earned through hard work rather than just given via nothing more than an accident of birth.

Dick took a big pull from his incognito bottle of vodka, sighed, and leaned his head back against the giant oak. It had weathered so many storms, and yet was still anchored firmly to the Earth, not ready to give up living. Shutting down that thought train before it lead inevitably to Cassidy and the brutally self-inflicted way he died, Dick took yet another drink from his bottle. It wasn't doing its duty. That was an impossible feat, at least on today of all days.

Tired of being in his own head, he decided to take a walk around the vast park instead. Dick picked up the bottle cap he'd placed beside him on the ground, and tightly closed it. He then threw the bottle into his backpack, zipping it up and carelessly throwing it over one shoulder. The thinking-tree was doing its job quite well; he couldn't stop brooding about Cassidy—poor, messed up kid unable to face down the horrors that happened to him, because he was too vulnerable to protect himself. It was his own damn fault his baby brother was too scarred internally to confide in him. He'd done fuck –all to sabotage any hopes of a close brotherly relationship. It would have been easy of course to cast more than a little blame (there was plenty of that to go around) on Big Dick, but then this was an "on the hook" kind of day.

He wished for something, anything really, to take his mind off the calendar, to take his mind off his brother's death, his culpability in the whole tragedy.

Almost as though he were on auto-pilot, Dick found himself wandering closer to the baseball game. He thought he heard a voice shouting the name Mackenzie, but he was too far away to be certain. Then, after another 50 feet of progress, he noticed a dark haired girl sitting on the fifth row of bleachers.

Mac.

Just then, as though she felt his eyes on her, she took her nose out of her eReader and set it down. She had streaks of Mahogany artfully applied to her chin length hair, a departure from the fire engine shade she was partial to in high school. She just kept getting hotter and hotter.

She looked up just then and turned her head in his direction as if she'd tuned into his thought frequencies or some sci-fi crap like that. She seemed to notice him, based on the expression that stole over her face. The tell-tale smirk was just for him, it was an expression she wore well.

He matched her smirk and took it up a notch. Game, set, match!

His own smirk was short lived though when he noticed a flash of white out of the corner of his eye. It was the baseball heading straight towards Mac. The kid up at bat had misjudged the pitch, and ended up hitting it into the stands.

Dick screamed out her name, the terror rising up and wrapping itself around the word, so much meaning packed in her too short nickname.

He held his hands up in the air, a referee motion; as though he thought he might actually be able to stop the ball mid-trajectory. He had a lot of thoughts flashing through his mind all in the span of the mere seconds it took for the ball to collide with the side of Mac's head with violent force. He wished he could stop time just long enough to alter the course of the ball. He wished he had been sitting there with her, and could have caught the ball with his bare hand. Even if it had broken his hand in the process, it would be a price he'd have paid without hesitation. He would have paid any price to have a do-over at that moment, anything at all to have prevented it from happening in the first place. He didn't take the time to evaluate where these thoughts were stemming from, it didn't matter.

In horror, Dick watched Mac fall backward, colliding with the bench behind her from the violent force of the impact. Then she hunched into herself, limp, unconscious.

This was not what he meant when he had wished for something, anything, to take his mind off Cassidy. He wouldn't have wished that on anyone, but especially not Mac. She'd endured too much pain in this life, a major chunk of it from the hands' of his own flesh and blood.

Still screaming her name, Dick ran towards the bleachers. A crowd had gathered around her, though no one seemed to know what to do. The game apparently stopped mid-play at the realization that a spectator had been hurt.

His frantic shouts of Mac mixed in with equally terror filled screams of Cindy. He presumed it was her brother. Raphael? Ryan. Yeah, Ryan, he was sure the kid was named Ryan; they'd met briefly when he came to visit his sister at Hearst College the previous semester. Some short, stocky redheaded kid was right on Ryan's heels.

The three of them converged on the scene at the same time, but Dick pushed in ahead, parting the crowd around her. He didn't care at that moment in time whether the now-crying baseball player was her family or not. His entire focus was on Mac.

Some well-meaning bystander—who was obviously short on brains—had laid Mac out on the bench, before he'd been close enough to stop them. Even he knew you shouldn't move an unconscious victim unless they were in imminent danger, like about to get crushed by a train, or some such shit as that. She wasn't moving, and her eyes were shut.

Did she even have a chance to process what was about to happen before the ball struck? He hoped not. One of the most haunting images seared in his brain concerning the brutal, but self-inflicted, way his brother died was the idea of the primal horror he'd had to experience as he'd been about to meet pavement. The idea of Mac—through no fault of her own—feeling even something slightly akin to that terror made him nauseous.

Dick knelt down beside her, sandwiching his tall, lanky frame in the narrow aisle space of the rickety bleachers. He didn't notice the wooden splinters slicing into him as he gently checked the side of her neck for her pulse.

Dick could see that she was breathing, though it seemed shallow to his untrained ears. He watched the rise and fall of her chest. The pulse, though he had no freaking clue what the desired rate of speed was, seemed a bit sluggish. The closest he came to being a doctor was his prized Freelance Gynecologist tee-shirt he often wore, he definitely wasn't versed in the Hippocratic Oath, but he dug down deep and tried to access any medical training he had from a summer course back in high school that 'trophy bimbo stepmom number 3' (the one that preceded Kendall) made him take so that he wouldn't drown during surfing and interrupt one of her personal training-sex-sessions. He wasn't recalling much right now. There was a lot of yelling call 9-1-1's and feeling up a stuffed doll named Annie, none of that seemed like it would be very relevant in this situation.

The bench shifted and bowed under his feet, as Mac's brother knelt down beside him, so he, too, was stationed next to Mac. The kid reached out and gently stroked her forehead before Dick could stop him. He was afraid the gentle, soothing, gesture would cause her more pain, though the kid made a concentrated effort to avoid the point of impact, which was closer to her temple. It was definitely starting to swell, but not nearly as much as he would have expected from the speed the ball was traveling.

Unfortunately, there wasn't any flicker of response from Mac. As much as he hated the idea of her being in any more pain than she already had to be in, he also hoped that maybe the pain would bring her out of this scary, unconscious state.

The red headed kid trailing Mac's brother had located her black messenger bag that had fallen off the bench in the melee, and was rifling through it. Dick glared at him, but before he could say anything, the kid triumphantly held up her phone, most likely as an explanation as to why he had been snooping in her bag to begin with. He dialed 9-1-1.

As he disconnected the call, the kid announced that the ambulance was on its way, then he dropped Mac's phone back into her bag. He distantly heard Mac's brother call the redhead kid Zane, but his focus wasn't really on anything other than Mac. He grabbed one of her hands that had been folded on top of her chest, as though she were posed. It was to keep her arms from dropping through the spaces between the aisle and bench seats of the aging, weather-worn bleachers. He gripped her slack hand and held it gently in one palm while stroking it with the other hand.

After probably a minute, though it could have been a lot less or a lot more than that, he watched her eyes flutter open. She ripped her hand away from his grip. She glanced around, having no clue where she was, disoriented. He could tell she was about to sit up, so he quickly shut that operation down. He laid his right arm across her chest, a blocking move. She was too confused and weak to fight him off.

She groaned in response.

"No you don't, Mac-a-doodle," he leaned over and whispered in her ear. "Stay down."

She licked her lips and tried to say something. He watched what looked like panic—or a close cousin to it—overtake her.

He had to believe it was a good sign that she was conscious at least. Relief broke through him, flooding his synapses. "Your ride to the hospital is on its way. They'll get you all fixed up." He hadn't been able to be there for his brother; now at least he got the chance with Mac. He took her hand back.

A look to replace the panic passed over her face, something he couldn't quite label, it was brief though, and then the blank look of confusion settled over her features once again. It didn't look at home on her face.

The skinny kid smiled real big when he saw that Mac was awake. "Sis! Hang tight. You'll be okay." He wiped a tear quickly from his eye before it fell, as though he didn't want anyone to see him upset, his friends/teammates presumably.

She murmured something but it wasn't really clear. She tried to grab the kid's hand, but couldn't focus well enough to do even that simple gesture. He grabbed at her other hand, the one Dick wasn't holding.

The siren from the ambulance drew closer.

In mere moments the bedlam of everyone loudly gathered around Mac, trying to figure out what to do, had been transformed into a subdued tableau as the paramedics expertly came up on the scene and got to work treating the patient. One uniformed worker kept the rest of the crowd back while the other three focused all resources on the patient.

Ryan fired out answers to the barrage of questions that were shot his way from one of the paramedics. She had long brown hair, big boobs and buck teeth. Dick found himself honing in on her teeth—with maybe a couple small peaks at the boobs, they were in close proximity to his face after all; it was easier than watching strangers poke and prod the too-still girl on the bench. This girl wasn't the one he knew, the oh-so-very alive Mac with her bossy ways, quick wit and seamless way of schooling him so covertly he found that he looked forward to debating things with her.

In matter of minutes they were loading her on the stretcher, and parting the crowd as they transported her to the waiting ambulance, parked on the grass before the steep hill began its descent.

Dick trailed behind, watching Ryan running to keep up. At the bay of the ambulance, he was fighting with big boobs and buck teeth about riding in the back with his sister. There was a dejected expression on the kid's face.

The doors slammed shut, with an echo and the ambulance pulled away with Mac, sirens blaring.

He guided Ryan towards his big yellow quad cab truck—Mac called it his Banana mobile—and they made their way to Neptune Memorial. His worried tangle of thoughts was interrupted by Ryan's phone call to his mom. He heard the kid brokenly explaining "Cindy" was hurt, maybe badly, and he was heading to the hospital with some dude she knew from school. Her worried mom's voice filled up the truck, wrapping itself around him. For once, Dick found himself happy, instead of jealous, that she had a caring mom at least. He figured with all she was going through, she needed someone to take care of her that wasn't a self-involved bitch like Betina. Even to himself, he couldn't call her his mom anymore. She'd divorced that right when she couldn't be bothered to come to Cass's funeral.

The scenery blurred by as Dick sped through the streets of Neptune, now stone sober, the affects of his vodka-ized "water" long having worn off in the adrenaline soaked events of Mac's accident.

He figured he probably broke speed records, less than six minutes later they had parked in the emergency lot.

As Dick and Ryan raced through the automatic double doors leading to the artificially lit up Emergency Room, the thought that perhaps Mac hadn't even made to the hospital in time made him draw to a sudden stop. The desire to remain ignorant ran strong in him. Ryan, on the other hand, hadn't noticed a thing. He was too intent on getting to his sister.

Taking a deep breath, Dick once again made his way towards the admissions desk. He hung back and let Ryan take point on it.

After being given the run around, they were instructed to sit down and wait for a status update on Mac's condition.

The wait seemed interminable, but the idea of being anywhere else didn't even occur to him.

…TBC

*******How did I do? That box down there is pretty lonely. Thanks!******