Nine's POV. This chapter happens between the episodes.

Enjoy~

Days grew longer between the explosions. Nine woke up at night, the fire of the bomb burning in his back. He felt as if he had been branded by her, the mark still fresh on his sweaty skin. Sometimes he heard voices calling out for him, or for mercy, or for anything he couldn't give them to silence them. When he finally awoke the only thing left was the taste of ashes in his mouth that made breathing not only harder but disgusting. It was as if there wasn't enough oxygen in the air left for him.

He didn't get up out of bed anymore. He just lied there, entrancing himself by counting the seconds until they became hours and he calculated how long he had been awake as soon as the sun rose. Sometimes the ticks of the clock were smothered by Twelve's breathing, and sometimes the latter gave away that he was awake. Together they ignored each other and watched the distance between their beds grow beneath closed eyelids. It grew like hunger did, worse and worse until it reached a certain point where it wasn't felt anymore. It stopped demanding their attention and evolved into a mere presence in the background.

He wanted to blame Lisa. Because he could almost feel her presence lingering between them. It was strange and it didn't belong. She could not help them and she could not be with them. And every morning he told himself he would make sure she would leave. Because they didn't need that. They didn't need another obstacle on their way, another burden to carry with them.

Yet when she sat there in the couch with her slumped shoulders and powerless arms as her only shield, she hurt him the most. Because they had all been like that. They had all been faceless puppets with stones on their tongues, unable to speak. Just waiting for a sign or word to wake them up; someone that would tell them to live and breathe and laugh. Something Twelve and he had learned themselves to do, but he had found himself not quite capable of it still. Yes, he had sat there too. He had asked and pleaded without his voice, too.

And if he would tell her to leave, she would. He had run through all the possible phrasings and again and again came to the conclusion that it didn't matter. She would leave without much resistance, if any at all. She would not make a fight or beg them to stay. Easy to remove. But when her starry eyes found him, that old stone sunk back onto his tongue.

He remembered when Twelve had given him the chance to save Lisa. And he had given Lisa the chance to save herself. Yet he knew that the strength so save someone was not so much about bombs and blood as it was about words. But what were words to someone who never said I love you? Who never said I need you or Please don't leave me alone, or I'm scared?

Lisa pleaded for reconsideration without making a single noise. They acted blind to her questioning stare and deaf to her wavering voice. This was something that had to be done, Nine believed. They were not going to get distracted.

Except, Twelve slipped. Nine felt mouth run dry as he heard those words.

"You're pale."

It was 6:58am and the curtains were closed. Artificial light whitened everything. Even her messy hair lost its vibrant dark tone and her blue sweatshirt, which she had borrowed from Twelve, seemed misty. How could one distinguish whether something was whiter than usual? Nine turned his head to stare at the curtains. In his head he had the exact image of the view he would be having if they weren't drawn.

Lisa had not responded with words. There was merely a soft, somewhat blank look on her face. Perhaps she did look a little pale. But now she knew that Twelve was watching her. Now it was clear that the silence that brooded between them, which had never been merely a foggy thing but had been present like a brick wall, was not impenetrable. Their ignorance in favour of their goal was not unwavering anymore. She was seen. And they could not step back from acknowledging her feelings and thoughts anymore, much like one couldn't just glue a brick wall back together.

Nine pressed the back of his hand to his forehead. He was starting to run hot. Why had Twelve made that mistake? What had he miscalculated so that he thought those words would inflict any change?

He could see the gradation in the curtains growing stronger as the sun started climbing over the horizon. For a moment everything became blurry. He closed his eyes. Twelve wasn't paying attention to him at the moment. His voice still rolled through the room but Nine only half caught what he was talking about. It was hesitantly answered by Lisa, who had been described as pale yellow not one but twice.

His eyelids fluttered and everything returned to its usual sharpness. A headache began to press on his temples. He caught Lisa's stare on him and returned it. She quickly averted her eyes as if to apologise for noticing his existence. He ran his hand through his hair. She eyed him again. He almost found himself waiting to say the only reasonable words that had been lingering on his lips for the past few minutes. She's ill. Put her to bed. But they remained on his tongue. They did not feel like that stone he felt in his mouth when he couldn't speak. Keeping them to himself felt much like restraining himself from desperately trying to tape stones to a hole in a wall.

"Nine?" His own name pierced through his head and for a moment he couldn't even tell whose voice it was. The sharp noise had felt unpleasantly much like a physical stab.

Twelve smiled towards him. Slowly the sting of his name melted away. Bright as the sun, he thought, but Twelve's eyes stripped him of his emotionless face. He felt bare and exposed, as if his thoughts and feelings were all engraved on his throbbing head. And Twelve smiled softly.

It hit Nine that Twelve had not slipped at all. That the cracks in the silence had been there for a while now, but Nine had chosen to be oblivious to them either way. The fragile strings of words and glances that were tying Twelve and Lisa together before him were now flung to him as well.

She's not one of us, a voice in the back of his head hissed. But it sounded weak. He wondered whether he was trying to deceive himself again, like he now realised he had been doing before, and had been a pointless waste of time. She wasn't like them, but maybe she wasn't far off. There was something, he allowed himself to believe, something that tied them together no matter the differences. Perhaps it was that wish of recognition, to be a flicker of existence in another's mind. The silent craving to be meaningful, to grow bigger than just another shadow in the dark, a faceless figure on the streets. Maybe Lisa wanted to be remembered too.

Nine tapped his fingers over the caps of pots and packages of all sizes and shapes. Pills, pills, what kind of a headache did he really have? One wrong pill and he could be knocked off his feet for the rest of the day. The tip of his finger trailed over a rimmed cap. Two of those and he would be dead. That's how easy it was. His fingertip drew circles over the cap again and again, until the ribbed edge numbed it out and he could barely feel it.

Footsteps were headed towards the bathroom. Their step was light and quick; at first it was hard to tell whether it was Twelve or Lisa. He counted the steps, and he needed but three to tell that the strides were too short.

The door opened soundlessly. Nine didn't look up from the box of medications. "Lisa?"

"Eh," She started, "Twelve asked whether he should turn off the lights."

"No," Nine responded, suddenly caught by the resemblance to Lisa's not unusual "I'm fine".

"Oh, okay." She licked her lips, as if she wanted to say more.

It was fairly dark in the bathroom. A few rays of sunshine slipped through the window and hit the wall to provide him of enough light. He usually didn't need more than daylight, until sunset. But he didn't need them to darken the rooms for him because of another headache. Lisa blended in nicely with these mild tones. Both her naturally whitish complexion and her pitch black hair were soothed into greys and Nine had always preferred the milder contrast. Her arms were wrapped around her stomach. Twelve had said people did that to protect a vulnerable area, as if their hands and arms were a shield. Nine didn't understand the point of such a weak shield, or such a gesture, or what she was protecting herself against. He didn't think he needed to understand such matters, as long as Twelve did. His legs were beginning to hurt from kneeling but he didn't shift. Lisa too didn't make a move. It felt as if he was having a contest with her of which only he was aware; who was better at keeping still? The ridiculousness of this thought was obvious even to him, but he froze as if he had to win either way.

She looked down, losing his imaginary competition, and seemed to search for a solution to her situation on the spotless tiles. "Something wrong?" He asked, formulating his words somewhere between wanting her to leave and allowing her to stay. She parted her lips and he could already hear her negative answer, but she stopped herself and shut her mouth again. Nine waited patiently, ignoring the stiffness in his legs and listened to the clock. Tick, tick, tick, he started counting almost automatically.

She finally caught his eyes again, a hint of feverishness in them. It seemed she had figured out just what she had wanted to tell him all along. As if all her thoughts had melted into a conclusive bundle that she was still carefully weighing word per word, but that met with an abstract line of sufficiency when it came to phrasing her emotions. A sort of determination kindled in her expression. He barely noticed he was holding his breath. "You're pale."

The seconds started following each other irregularly as those two words, thin and meek, were presented to him. He almost cracked a smile.

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