Nicholas: This chapter was hard to write. I kept thinking "poor Marco" and then showing becki and hearing her whine "poor Marco" so yeah...poor Marco. The only reason besides mental agony that this was hard to write is that I didn't think it was characteristic for someone as cold as Marco to get choked up about his past, but that's the effect I wanted from the chapter...so you read it and see if I succeeded. Oh and for you mental sadists out there, there's more to come, don't worry.

I sat down on the curb, knees up against my chest and my head propped up on my elbows. Things like this didn't happen in real life. I'd already gone through fifteen years of life knowing that. My hand was still bleeding a little bit, under the thin strip of fabric I'd torn off my shirt to bind it up. It stung like heck and as much as I didn't want to cry, my face was wet anyhow. I could hear the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn behind me, but I faced the street—the busy drive—to make sure there wasn't anyone who saw me like that. That was shameful, if anything else, and a cut hand wasn't worth wasting his time sitting on the side of a crowded avenue.

"Yo, you alright?"

I looked up at Leon and he jumped up a bit. "You're crying," he commented, "You don't cry, now what's up? Your dad again?"

"Yep," I lifted my hand and showed it to him. I think that seeing it wrapped in blood soaked cloth like that made him go ape shit because I could tell he wasn't fucking mad at me. "Mom's pregnant…so you get the picture."

"I do not. You give me a chance with that bastard, I'll kick his ass!"

Coughing to hide my laugh, I looked back down at the street. "He said she 'got herself pregnant' like it was some curse or something…" He sat down next to me and I felt a hand on my shoulder. The warmth made me ache so I shook it off. "Doesn't it take two to fuck? I mean, it's not her fault…is it?"

"No, it ain't her fault," Leon snapped viciously, "Hell, she's having a baby, that's a good thing. We should celebrate." Taking my hand from me, he carefully unwound the bit of shirt I'd used. It looked worse than it had an hour ago and I could feel the rage radiating off of him. I shouldn't have found it funny, but I did. I wasn't crying anymore. "C'mon. Ma'll clean this up for you and then we'll get drinks. My treat."

"You're going to answer me, Marco," Angie insisted. She'd forced Marco down on the couch again and was kneeling in front of him, looking at his bare thigh and how that damn cut had decided to open up a bit and bleed out onto the jeans. "I buy you some new clothes so you don't have to prance around in your britches scaring holy hell out of the old lady that is across the alley..." She pointed out the curtain-less window to an apartment with lace drapes. "…I want to know what the heck was so horrible that you couldn't just calmly leave the cemetery with me. Speak!"

With his half-nakedness not being a problem in the least, Marco sat straight and dignified in front of what he deemed a PMSing psycho. "It ain't any of your fucking business," he said, "drop it!"

"No I won't drop it, not when it has to do with you messing up your leg again." Standing, she picked up his jeans from the couch and folded them to place on the table. "Besides, I never got an answer about that whole Leon thing. What is with you?"

"Get off my nuts, crazy woman!"

"I'm not amused." The unusual malice that graced her face at this moment did nothing but make the man smirk. God, he's infuriating! He's getting a big laugh out of this, isn't he? Why doesn't he get that this is important to me? Why is it important to me? Pressing her palm against her head in frustration, she ignored the doubt in her mind. She wanted to be firm and she couldn't go rethinking herself, especially since that was what Marco wanted her to do.

For a split second, it seemed like he was almost to the point of conceding. She felt like she'd almost, almost, gotten to him. Just the way that shit-eating, manipulative grin sort of faded slightly gave her the fleeting illusion of success. Marco the Illusionist. He should go out on the road, make an honest trade out of it. Then, within the span of two and a half seconds, he glowered so darkly that she actually felt the need to use the restroom. "You may not wake up tomorrow morning," he threatened harshly.

"That's it, I've had it." She took one more step closer to him and lifted one knee. This she placed on his bad thigh and pushed down…hard. "I dare you to threaten my life just one more time."

His throat let out a high-pitched, border-embarrassing screech. Grabbing tight to her arm, he jerked his body in a defensive mechanism to get her off of him. It didn't work. Pain shot up through his limbs, almost completely engulfing him. Bright flares of light shot up over his eyelids that he'd closed in his surprise. There goes the theory that she was a pacifist push-over. "Fuck!" he shouted. "Get off!!!"

Angie let her eyes narrow venomously. "I didn't hear a please there, did I?"

He felt her kneecap grind down harder on his thigh. With an unforgiving groan, he threw his head back against the back of the couch and shoved her violently. Once again, she kept good balance and much to his dismay gained the leverage to make it hurt even worse. "Fuck you!" As much as it killed his pride, he squirmed indignantly against her to try to gain some sort of advantage without doing the worst. He really didn't want to hit her. That would be a waste of that pretty face. "You're an insufferable bitch, you know that?"

"I don't want to hear your filthy language. I want just one, lousy answer!" Her eyes met his for the first time without that lingering uncertainty or fear. Strangely, he didn't have a murderous leer on his face either. This was the only thing that could possibly have made her step down. Genuine pain. So the statue feels. Easing off of the couch, she backed up a few steps. "Please."

"Please? Now you say please?" Fingers digging into his palms, he tried to control himself. If he tried what he wanted to try his leg would no doubt disagree and he'd be on the floor again. That wasn't really a place that he was comfortable being. "Well fuck you!!! You don't even know a goddamned thing about me, what makes you think you have a right to talk to me like that?"

"Why don't you enlighten me, then?"

With an accusatory scoff he crossed his arms in front of his chest and huffed childishly. He was deciding his words. What could he say that was anything important to her? "Fine," he said, "You wanna hear my whole life story, I'll humor you that."

"I just want my questions answered. It's ridiculous I have to almost break your leg to get two words out of you." She went back to tending his leg, but from all that pressure, it had pretty much stopped bleeding.

"I already told you that the grave is my mom and sister. I think that is enough of an answer to your question." He ran a hand through his hair, trying to calm his anger just a little bit to keep his voice from being so growly. "You wanna know why the names are scratched off? Or do you wanna know about Leon and me?"

"Both," Angie replied simply, "why don't you just start from the beginning?"

She says that as though I should tell her my whole family history starting from Ancient Rome, he thought. The beginning, huh? Easier said than done. "They're the same story, I guess," he muttered. Now that it came down to telling, he didn't like it; he wasn't comfortable. "My dad was poor, drunk off his ass half the time and shouldn't have been allowed to have a family. I have absolutely no idea why that woman stayed with him. He did nothing but beat on her, and when I came along, he substituted her with me. Then again, I guess the only reason for that was me attracting his hand from her."

"That's horrible." Angie sat back, cross-legged, in front of him.

"And your family life was posy-perfect, is that what you're saying?"

Blinking a few times, she cocked her head to the side in confusion. "Uh…no. I just—"

"I don't want fucking pity, all right? You want me to talk, don't fucking interrupt me." He paused long enough to get the point across that he wanted an answer. The silence sounded like "do you understand me?" in the most demeaning tone. Almost obediently, she nodded, but he knew better. She just wanted him to keep talking. "Okay. I worked at John's pizzeria, I bet you know where that is, since I was old enough to. Someone had to earn money so we could eat.

"That's where I met Leon. He was kind of in the same boat as me, working to support his mother because of a father that was dead for all intents and purposes. The only difference was that he was also taking care of two little brothers and his father really was dead. He started taking care of me too. I'd show up at the shop with a cut lip or a bruised eye, he'd rant and rave about not looking after myself, but he'd always help me in the end. He became the only friend I ever really had." The responding silence pleasantly surprised him. "What? No gasp, no amazed shout? Try not to be alarmed."

"Well…sure, that's surprising. I thought you hated him, but this is the past we're talking about. Things change."

"You're so understanding of that…"

"Yep, now…"

"Right…" With a sigh, he continued. "Well…Like I said, he looked after my ass like an older brother, even though he was younger than me. When I showed up with my hand sliced open because that fat bastard found out Ma had 'gotten herself pregnant again,' he took me home with him and had his Ma bind it. She never really approved of me, but I guess she thought that she shouldn't discriminate when I needed help. Call it her intuition, but she really should have shunned me.

"Bobby and Ally-boy knew me pretty well too. Bobby is a wannabe mama's boy--kind of sucks when she liked Ally-boy more. Thing was, Alphonse clung to Leon and then to me as well. Everywhere we went, there was a tag-along and I never minded. He was a bright kid for the most part. Always trying to help or learn something. Leon kept telling him to go and make other friends, but the kid didn't listen. It was a nice adoptive family.

"The person formerly known as my father was after my mom almost every day since she conceived. He hardly ever got to her because I got in the way half the time or put myself in the way. It was better that way, no pregnant woman deserves to get hit because some bastard can't keep his dick in his pants. My sister was born on Friday the 13th a perfectly healthy child except that she cried every second of the next three days. They actually had to give her some meds to get to sleep before she suffocated on her own saliva. They say that an unborn child experiences everything that the mother does, so I think that's what happened. There was a big problem with the noise when she finally came home because that thing formerly known as dad couldn't yell over it. It became just another thing that I had to protect. Mom couldn't do it. The crying lessened, I guess, to the point where she only cried at night and early in the morning, but little slip ups from my mom could set of the siren.

"I was still working, harder than ever to try and get money for Mariangela's fat belly. She really was a big kid, but I loved her. In fact, I loved her more than I loved my mom. I held her at night and perfected a skill at keeping her quiet. Even when things got loud and violent, I could distract her and play with her. I was the only one who could do it. Just before my seventeenth birthday, I was at work for about ten hours that day to take the day off the next. It was probably the biggest mistake in my life.

"I got home late and heard the crying from the kitchen. Ma was probably comforting her and failing, but Angie was screaming. That thing called a father was shouting for the kid to shut up. I knew something was wrong. I ran into the kitchen and I remember that feeling of my heart beating so fast it felt like it wasn't working. I entered behind that fucker and stared in horror at the first gun I ever saw in my life. A shiny, nickel-plated pistol pointed into the corner of the room at my mommy…" His voice cracked slightly and he cut himself off, wide eyed as if he didn't expect that.

Angie felt her lungs let out the breath she hadn't meant to hold in. The last thing she'd expected when she asked him was something this scary. It was like telling ghost stories around the campfire, except for the underlying, terrifying fact that this was real. Books and motion pictures never made her feel much past excitement for the simple fact that they were all fiction. With it in her mind that he'd been through all this and that he wasn't lying—just by the look in his eyes—she reached up and put a hand on his knee.

"I said I don't want your fucking pity." He grabbed at her hand, but she moved it quick enough.

"This isn't pity, it's for comfort, dummy."

"Who says I need comfort?" For some reason, he tried to ignore the fact that he'd said something so childish. "The next thing I knew was a .45 caliber bullet went straight through Angie's head and into Ma's heart. She died with her dead child held in her arms while I sat in a corner of the living room, half-hoping he'd find me and shoot me too. Obviously, he didn't. He sent me to my room and locked me in for the next four days." Looking off to the side, staring at some distant object in the room, he scratched the back of his neck. "I didn't go back to work after that. I avoided Leon and his family at all costs, and most of all I found excuses to stay away from home sweet home…I don't want to talk any more."

With a few blinks of her eyes, Angela leaned back, away from him and considered what he just said. "But you said you'd answer my questions," she reminded calmly. "I still want to know what happened between you and Leon."

"Story time's over, kid. My head hurts."

"No it ain't," Angie snapped. Standing, she put a hand on his shoulder and shoved him back. Once again, she showed more strength than she probably should have and he glared uncertainly at her. "You have one more little bit to tell me."

"You like hearing my tortured, fucking, past don't you? Fucken sadist."

"Am I causing pain, then?" As she spoke, she kept her voice low, trying to match that threatening tone she'd heard him use. It had occurred to her that trying to cause him any sort of physical pain would either not work or just make him want to spite her. Maybe if she pressed in a different spot, she'd get a better reaction.

"Th'fuck is wrong with you? Why in God's name would it hurt?"

"If it doesn't then it shouldn't be so difficult, or head ache inducing to tell me about Leon." She reached up and poked him on the cheek, not even bothered by the fact that it looked like he was trying to keep from clawing her eyes out with blunt nails. "You owe me for the crap you pulled earlier. That dish was my grandmother's."

"You shouldn't have left it on the fucking counter, dipshit." A long, sharp finger jabbed into his jaw and he grabbed her wrist to pull her away. "Fine! I want dinner first, then I'll fucken talk…Jesus, it's like being a prisoner of war."