"It was a cold, winter's night-"

"How cold!?" Jack asked with a noticeable voice crack, completely sucked into the story six words in.

Mark gave the other his signature "what the fuck is wrong with you" look. Jack's smile seemed to be permanently fixed onto his face.

"About 70 degrees. I mean it IS California."

Mark definitely preferred the more energized, chipper side of Jack despite his distaste for loud noises in general.

"Okay, okay. Continue on." Jack said with an exaggerated hand motion.

"You know, I'll tell you later."

Jack's genuine excitement that Mark had finally opened up a bit vanished, but he was more optimistic than ever. He had found a home and possibly a friend, two things he had forgotten the power of.

The two men stared off in different directions. Jack took a good look around the kitchen from his chair. It was connected to the living room where he slept. Over the couch was a stairway that lead up to another floor. The whole house was decorated in furniture that seemed to be at least a hundred years old. Shelves of old, well read books covered all the walls. Behind the bookshelves and old lamps, the tan, patterned wallpaper appeared to be peeling a bit. The color of the walls perfectly matched the worn keys on an old piano in the corner. Jack cracked a smile as he realized the television wasn't even plugged in, since there seemed to be no plug outlets in sight. His over-analyzation of the house was interrupted by a sigh from Mark.

"You know I'm not letting you get up from that chair until you learn how to use your knife."

"O-okay" Jack stuttered out, distracted by the bumps on the ceiling.

The lack of eye contact made the room feel extremely empty.

"I didn't come here alone," Mark said to the toaster his head was fixed too. Like the tv, it was not plugged in.

"...no?"

"Before everything went to hell here, I had a girlfriend."

"Oh." Jack didn't really know how to respond to that.

"Her name was...Amy. She was the most beautiful woman in the world."

"She was?" Jack said.

"Yep. She was brave and kind an-"

"Was she blonde?" Jack asked jokingly.

"Very," Mark replied with a chuckle. "We were dating for about a year before everything...erm...happened. We hid out in my neighborhood for a while before we realized we had to get moving. "

"So it was just you and her?"

"No, actually. I was also living with some friends, Ethan and Tyler. They...um...well it was dark one night, we were all running from something, all four of us...and...when I stopped, just Amy was with me. I never knew what happened to them." Mark said, looking down at the floor.

"That sucks." said Jack, feeling guilty for reminding Mark of the memory.

Some silence passed. Mark clutched the coffee much as he searched for the right words.

"So anyways, Amy was the perfect teammate. Yeah, she was deadly, but she did everything with such care and skill and dignity. She saved my ass more times than I could count." Marks sorrowful expression turned into a bittersweet smile as he reminisced back.

"One day, around November...well...you remember when you were bitten by a hellhound."

"Yeah."

"Tore her left arm clean off."

Jack cringed at the thought.

"She kept running, she ran and ran until she collapsed. I carried her around for a bit, but night was approaching quickly. She had gone unconscious from the blood loss. I was running out of time."

Mark looked down at his reflection in the bottom of the mug. It had only been 8 months since things started to go downhill, but he looked like he had aged at least 5 years since then. He had a mostly healed, but very visible scar on the side of face, from the side of his eye all the way down to his chin to serve as a souvenir from that night. He took a deep breath.

"Eventually, I came across a large, mysterious house in the woods. Thinking it was empty, I ran inside, tied up her arm with the sleeve of my shirt, and started to panic."

Mark looked directly into Jack's eyes. "Jack?" he said in a deadly serious tone.

Jack blinked a few times to indicate he was paying attention.

"Never do that, panicking just makes things worse."

Jack nodded. He had a tendency to panic quite a bit under pressure, which is pretty much 24/7 at this point.

"Well anyways, the house wasn't empty, of course. Enis was there. He promised that if I didn't drive a stake through his heart right that second, he would save Amy's life."

Jack perked up, awaiting the (now) happy ending to this story. At least he did until a few tears started streaming down Mark's face.

"He tried everything. Every magical potion, every spell, everything he knew. It was of no use. She was gone."
At this point, Mark was practically sobbing. Jack was unsure of what to do. After waiting for Mark to pull himself together for a minute he chimed in.

"I'm...I'm so sorry. I know how it feels-"

"No, Jack," Mark said quietly. "You don't know how it feels to watch helplessly the last person on the planet who cares about you slowly and painfully dies in your arms."

At this point, the awkwardness of the silence outnumbered the amount of dust that filled the room.

"Um...so that knife. Let me see it."

...

"You know what they say…" Mark said with a smile.

"...what?"

"A sharp knife…" Mark sliced another piece of paper in four pieces with two arm movements. "Is a safe knife" Jack had seen this trick multiple times by now, but it never failed to amaze him. "You try with your own knife."

Jack uncomfortably held up his knife in his left hand and a new sheet of paper from the stack in his right. Mark gave him a funny look.

"What?"

"You're left-handed?"

"...no."

Mark glared at him without blinking until he swapped hands. He, once again, awkwardly tore a jagged line down the paper.

"Well, as you can see the problem is that your blade isn't sharp enough. It probably is sloped over to one side. Take your fingernail and run it along the blade."

"..but..what if?"

"You have ten fingers, you can loose one," Mark said. Jack was not reassured.

"Yeah, it's curved a bit."

"See, all your fingers intact. Now, what I'm going to want you to do is hold the knife at a 45-degree angle to the cup." Jack balanced the knife on top of the coffee mug.

"...No. You have to hold it to the non-polished side. Now swipe it in the same direction AWAY from you a few times on each side of the blade."

Jack quickly slide the knife five times on each of its sides. It made a strange squeaking noise as visible metal shavings flew off of it.

"Now try," Mark said, holding up the paper. Jack took a deep breath. He sliced through the paper in about the same time it would take to blink.

"Excellent. Now you have about a 2 percent chance of surviving another year." Mark said with a cynical smile.

"Lasted longer than you," Jack mumbled with a chuckle.

"Oh shut up!" Mark said, gently punching Jack's arm.