Hey, sorry I haven't updated but I'm so stressed with school, I don't have enough room in my heart to stress about fan fiction, so I'm just taking this at a leisurely pace.

This chapter gets a little bit racial (I didn't make Two-Bit racist, but I just used the language of that time.) Just thought I should warn you.

I don't own

Buck grinned when I entered. Possibly because he liked me, but more likely because I was an alcoholic that could pay for my alcohol. I desperately asked for a beer and felt the familiar numbing sensation as my brain registered it's medicine.

I hustled a few games of pool and won consistently at poker, earning myself a couple hundred dollars. I put about fifty away to give to the Curtis family and used the rest to buy all the alcohol I could afford...which was a lot.

I actually can't remember much about that night, which made it perfect. I hated being able to remember every second of my life in vivid detail, having my brain flash random information at me at the most inconvenient times.

Unfortunately, because I was so drunk I also had no control of my actions and woke up in a jail cell.

"Shit." I said groggily as I recognized the ceiling. "Shit!" I said again, pressing my palms into my eyes. My brain helpfully proved that the triangular shadows on cell floor were congruent and isosceles. "Couldn't have told me to not do whatever the hell I did last night and you think the triangles are important." I yelled at my brain, not realizing I had spoken out loud.

My brain frantically yelled back, giving me images of the other triangles on all of my previous cell floors and noticing that these triangles were different sizes, none of the shadows, no matter what time of day it was, were matching up.

I panicked. I had never been in this cell before. What did that mean?

"Officer?" I called to the guard. "Yeah, hi, what did I do?" I shouted as he came near me.

"Driving under the influence and public indecency, but no one will pay for bail for you, so you'll be here for three weeks." Three weeks. Three weeks! Yes, there was alcohol in prison, but it was nearly impossible to get a hold of a drop, let alone enough to actually get drunk, to stop talking to myself and feel sane.

I had only ever had over night in prison-Darry or someone had always bailed me out, but I had a feeling that after our row, Darry wouldn't be too anxious to pay a shitload of money to get me out. He probably thought that jail would sober me up.

I doubt he'll like me much when I am sober I thought spitefully.

"Hey, officer!" I yelled again just as the guard was turning around. He snapped his head back, scowling.

"What, Matthews?" Not a great sign that the guard knew my name, but I pushed that thought away for now.

"Can I have a phone call? Also, uh...do you know if Dallas Winston is in here" I gestured vaguely around the prison. I knew I looked panicked because the guard actually softened his voice slightly to a gruff grumble rather than a hate filled sneering tone.

"You already used your phone call yesterday when you first got in. You called someone named Darry and had a fighting match over the phone. No, Winston is still loose on the streets. Unfortunately." He added the last word under his breath, and I knew that it had been a mistake to mention that I had ever even heard of Dally.

The guard left me alone with my thoughts.

I don't know how long it was before I was brought back to attention of the world around me. For once, my intelligence wasn't a curse but a way to distract myself. My brain was being useless and boring as usual, what with the way it was calculating the effect of hiroshima on each layer of the atmosphere and the percent of change on the gases that comprise the atmosphere and that affect on the world.

I suppose I should explain something about what I can do. First, I have as much control over it as a normal person has over their thoughts. Second, as far as I can tell, it doesn't make me correct more often than any other person. Well, than any other smart person. Sure, I can calculate things much quicker, but the percent of error is about the same, except they've had training while I just do it naturally. It sort of feels like when you just go off on a train of thought and it gets crazier and crazier...like a dream sequence. And it's truely terrifying to feel like you're dreaming when you're awake and expected to be paying attention.

I don't think I explained it very well, but it's really hard to explain I suppose. That's another thing-I can't ever put my thoughts into words for other people to understand, but it makes perfect sense to me. I think everyone has experienced this type of thing before, but for me it just happens all the time.

So anyway, my thoughts were interrupted by a guard transporting me to my new cell for the next three weeks. I didn't even notice him until he slapped me on the chest to snap me out of my daze. I walked in a dream-like manner behind him for maybe 500 meters.

He brought me to a different section of the jail where there were only negroes. I didn't particularly care, although I was surprised that they broke their rules of segregation for me. The guard even looked a little apologetic, but I didn't see this as a bad thing. Perhaps it was even easier to get alcohol in the colored jail and I wouldn't have to be tortured.

"This is completely against protocol, but you were screaming and talking to yourself. The white prisoners were complaining. We called your mom and agreed to drop a week off your sentence for this deviation of rules."

I felt a lurch in my stomach at the mention of my mom. She had never stopped thinking that I could be more-that I was only showing the tip of the iceberg and that if I just stopped getting arrested, I could be a success. She always cried whenever I went to jail. I really hated my photographic memory as it dished out pictures and snippets of all the times I had disappointed my mother.

I pinched my arm hard, and was surprised when the thoughts halted and I was able to concentrate on the present.

The guard pushed me into a cell with about ten other men. I couldn't help but notice that the cells were in deplorable conditions. separate and not equal I thought. I wasn't much for politics-the solution was always SO simple, always able to be proven correct by equations and graphs, and yet we got nothing done. But this prison system seemed, even to my analytical brain, completely unfair.

The white guard left and the other prisoners looked warily at me, some with distaste, some with hatred, some with wariness. I noticed that all of them had wounds. My brain told me that they were all created at the same time, about three days ago and that they had not been given medical care before coming here. Most of the cuts looked infected.

The wired-wrong part of my brain took complete control and I reached out to the nearest man. I grabbed his arm gently. I think he was too alarmed to wrench it away. I put his arm next to the naked side of another man. The wounds were similar sized. I ran through the weapons I knew of, debating each one and mentally deciding if it made sense.

This is another disadvantage of my...disease. Most people could probably put the pieces together in certain situations faster than I and analyze the situation. I find all situations that could have occurred, even the almost impossible ones, and I use logic to rule them out.

"You were attacked? Police brutality." I hardly even realized that I was speaking out loud. "Batons. Protesting? Civil rights movement. March on the Ribbon!" I can't put situations together as quickly as most people, but I am much better at extrapolating and bringing forth information I didn't even know I had and using it to correctly deduce a situation. The Ribbon (basically the main street of Tulsa) had been partially closed off a couple of days ago, around the same time these peoples' wounds were made

The men looked at me, now with expressions of confusion and terror.

The man whose arm I had grabbed before extended his hand with the bruise on it, this time for me to shake. "Max Lee Dunlap."

"Two-Bit Matthews." I said back, shaking his hand, and making sure that I wore a winning and confident smile.

There was a long moment of silence, then one of the men held up a deck of cards. "You know how to play, white boy?"