Ace is having a really bad day. But then, at this point, pretty much every day is a bad day. He drops his bag by the door with a sigh, kicking his shoes off haphazardly before flopping bonelessly onto the bed nearby.

There's no real reason he feels awful after coming back from work; the job itself doesn't take too much out of him, his boss isn't a shit asshole like his old jobs had, and the people are surprisingly kind of nice. Thatch is actually pretty cool, and Marco's never done wrong by him yet. Still, he wouldn't trust them as far as he could throw them, and considering he worked construction between jobs, that was saying a lot. Then again, that's not really their fault.

It isn't their fault Ace can't trust them.

Well, it isn't their fault Ace can't trust anyone.

Haha of course it isn't.

Acey's just broken, right, Acey~?)

Hey he ain't broken!

Heh is that because he's ruined instead?

He sighs and shifts around until he can reach underneath his bed, desperate to shut the voices up. The brief lull of silence between inhales is favorite reprieve. Ace knows he shouldn't, that this isn't gonna be enough for very long and one day he'd get himself into a lot of trouble for this, but it was only when smoking that the voices were ever silent—

Hey check this out! Wheeeeeee!

Okay, so maybe not silent, Ace acknowledges to himself, grinning like a fool in the mirror, his reflection's eyes scratched out in the red lipstick Izo had left the last time he'd come to clean up. But tolerable, at the very least.

His bedroom is a collage of nights like this, pieces ripped apart and put together to make up the image of who Ace is. By the sink, the twisted up cellphone cord from when he'd wondered if it felt the same as when he began choking at the thought of talking to people; behind the door is the plastic bag he'd used to see how long he could hold his breath (in case he ever physically drowned); the door itself is covered in scratches, scissors gone blunt when he'd gotten curious how hard the wood was. There are soot stains in the center of the tiny room's floor, a joint left too long nearly setting his room on fire.

Three blunts in and he decides he wants to take a walk; his head is blissfully silent and there's always something about the night lights of the city that makes him nostalgic for something he's never had.

Ace wanders around outside his apartment for a bit, looking into dark windows and doodling dumb shit on cars parked along the road. His laughter echoes around him as he clicks the button on the pedestrian stoplight again and again. It's past midnight; there aren't a lot of people around anymore, and Ace's high is fading fast.

He leans back against a stoplight (not the one from before, he'd run from that one fast when he'd heard sirens in the distance) and tips his head up to look at the sky, eyes half lidded against the lights from the building across the street. A beat later and he can feel the voices in his head gearing up again, and there're headlights speeding down the road.

Hey. Hey hey hey. You think it'll hurt, if you get hit?

Ha! Not any more than anything else, I'll bet.

Sure. Doesn't it hurt Acey more when people find out who he is—

Ace takes one step forward, right into the path of the incoming car.

There's a beat, and a thump, and Ace listens to tires screeching along the asphalt as he flies into the air. He begins to laugh, the concrete rough beneath him, because the voices were right: his heart hurts more than this ever could. He doesn't think he's gonna stop laughing anytime soon.

He only tries to look up when he hears a car door slamming, but then there's a weight on his stomach and a fist meeting his jaw, over and over. All Ace can make out is a blur of red because his mouth is doing its best to keep laughing even through the pain, barely getting out a hiccup every now and again. Whoever is hitting him gets another few hits in before a yell comes from his right and the punches stop.

There's a brief scuffle over him and he distantly notes a blonde is holding the arm of the kid still on top of him, but can't really make out what he's saying. It sounds urgent though.

But the kid doesn't seem to want to listen because he wrenches away from the other one and goes back to pummeling Ace.

Ace stops counting after the twelfth punch, content to take his punishment, but a low, even voice cuts through even the haze in his head.

"Kid. Enough"

The punches stop a second time, and the kid is breathing harder than Ace himself, hands fisted tight in the collar of Ace's shirt.

"No," the boy growls.

And at first Ace thinks he's talking to the blonde, saying he wants to stop, but the anger in those brown eyes cuts through last of the fuzziness in his brain.

"No," the kid repeats. "You are not allowed to die."

Ace's breath is gone all of a sudden and he shuts his eyes, unable to stand the look in those eyes as he lets his body fall slack against the pavement. There's this pause, a moment where he feels like the ground is falling from under his feet—then the weight pressing him down is gone. He opens his eyes a little to watch the two have a quiet argument by his foot and almost misses the blood staining the rumpled white shirt of the blonde.

He shouldn't care, not really, and definitely not after what he pulled, but he can't help himself and shoots to his feet to stumble towards the duo.

"Are you alright?! Do you need treatment? Ah shit, my place isn't too far from here, do you want to just—" he knows it's just the adrenaline, the sudden change from his high to this high-tension situation, but he's already reaching frantically across the blonde's torso, trying to find a wound to match with the bloodstains.

He barely even notices the amusement in the guy's face, or the widening grin on the kid's, up until the blonde easily snatches his wrists with both hands and pins them together.

"While I'm flattered by your... proposition," the guy starts in a voice that Ace instantly decides he's going to hate for the rest of his life, "I don't think this is the way you should be going about wooing someone, yes?"

"Huh?" Ace has no idea what he's talking about. The boy next to them begins giggling. "What the fuck are you going on abou…"

It suddenly clicks, what the blonde meant, and Ace flushes all the way to the tips of his ears.

"THAT'S NOT WHAT I FUCKING MEANT."

The kid in the awful red hoodie is laughing harder now, doubled over in half and Ace begins hissing denials at him too. He straigthens up all of a sudden and Ace is startled into shutting up. He'd be lying if he said he wasn't a little scared of the gleam in those eyes.

"We're keeping him," the kid declares firmly, and Ace's mouth drops open.

"What? What the fuck?!"

"Are you sure?" The blonde asshole asks, just as seriously.

"Yep. He needs taking care of."

"Won't it be dangerous for him?"

"Not any more than anything else, really. Besides, it'll be fun!"

"OI!" Both of them turn to Ace immediately, eyebrows raised in question like they hadn't been talking about him the whole time like he wasn't there. On that note, the prick is still holding his wrists together, and he's surprisingly strong considering Ace had been trying to get free for the past minute. The blonde looks down like he's surprised at his own actions and suddenly lets Ace go just as he gave a particularly violent tug.

Ace falls over immediately and the blonde laughs instead of apologizing while the kid giggles and crouches down beside him. Ace groans and looks up to find a hand extended in front of him, a tattered red sleeve hiding the strength beneath those scrawny arms.

There's a smile in his voice and hope in his eyes and Ace knows right then that he couldn't possibly say no when the kid asks, "So what do you say? Wanna join us?"