It was over. It was over. It was over.

Done. Finished. Dead.

The thoughts spun and twisted themselves into the lingering violent impulses and together they made an ensnaring, suffocating web that filled the cramped space holding his body.

In all of it, the worst part was that he'd tried. Against everything he'd tried, and it hadn't mattered. Didn't matter. For the first time since… since… his sense of time was too blurred to know when, he was sure that she was going to kill him.

He just wanted to fall into the water and dissolve until no part of him was left.

Help. Help. Help.

Time passed, and for a while, occasional sounds could be heard from both out on the shop floor and from upstairs. After the close call, the Witch outside the closet remained settled, and eventually, the shifting sounds coming through the ceiling ceased, although not even Skyler was ready to take a gamble on that one just yet.

Which meant more time camping out in the closet with Adrian.

Following the episode, he looked a mess, which sounded about right for someone who'd had- was having?- she assumed a psychotic break. He hunched with his knees up by his chest, one arm wrapped around them and the other shoved down into his pocket. Every once in a while, she could tell from the faint refraction of his eyes that he was looking over at her and she got the hint that he was waiting for something. Retaliation, maybe.

The thing was, though, it wasn't that she was angry. She was feeling an unfortunate amount of ways, but for once, angry wasn't one of them, even as she fumbled around in the dark while they sat on the floor so she could very roughly wrap the fresh cut on her forearm in silence. Once that was done, there wasn't much else she could do besides sit to the opposite side of the closet and keep her eye on Adrian, though in this lighting she was sure he was doing a better job of watching her.

Just. Things would have been so much simpler if he could be one way or the other. Either a monster stripped of all the things that had made him a person, or that through some dramatic movie misunderstanding he was actually non-aggressive and would never dream of killing another human being. There was a scary area to traverse now that she was starting to view him the way he insisted on being seen. Which was much more akin to an innocent person strapped to a bomb.

Clinking, uneven breaths, and sure not a whole hell of a lot else for her to be forced to focus on.

"I, um," she finally had to say as loudly as she dared, maybe just to hear something else, "I did mean it. You know. When I said I was trying to help." She just sucked at it, was the problem.

The space went quiet, on their side of the closet door, anyways. After they'd stewed in that for some time longer, Adrian shuffled back to his feet, slowly and with an audible catch in his breath. He reached upwards as if to stretch his muscles, his poor fucked-up spine popping, then didn't look back as he nudged the door open and slipped from their questionable four-by-four safe spot.

Ah no. Nope, she wasn't letting this one fly. The "some bad shit happened so I'm gonna wander off to go it on my own"? Fucking save it. With as much caution as she could muster, she squeezed out behind him, intent on putting a stop to this only to come to a dead halt when she realized he was headed directly towards the damn Witch.

"What in the fuck do you think you're doing?!" she mouthed, agape and baffled, but he'd crept too far ahead by the time she went to snag the back of his sweatshirt.

At the very least, seeing him pause when the wraithlike woman cast eyes up at him and bared teeth told her that he probably wasn't interacting with something in a deluded haze. He lowered himself to the floor, gingerly pushing something from himself to within arm's reach of her and it was a blanket. It was a fucking blanket that he was offering to someone sitting in the cold. Skyler knew he hadn't picked that up from her, except she remembered that oh hell maybe he had.

The Witch stilled in her contemplation of whether to get up and tear them a new one to stare blankly down at the knit throw. Considering she was surrounded by coats and was sitting there in her pajamas in spite of her near-skeletal frame, Skyler was skeptical of her caring enough about her own welfare to do anything about it. Sure enough though, once Adrian had backed off to give some room, she extended a couple of the wicked talons her fingers had twisted into to catch in the fabric and draw the blanket over her lap. During this entire process, her expression remained wholly flat and her only acknowledgment was a soft sigh before she resumed her rocking, albeit now maybe a little warmer.

His work apparently done, Adrian stood. One of his worn sneakers scuffed the floor a few times. A low noise had the intonation of a question, as did the brief darting of his gaze from a hole near his toe that he'd pinned his focus on to her and back. She could take a couple of guesses at what he wanted to know, but the answer to most of it could be wrapped up neatly with,

"Yeah. Yes. For real."

She couldn't put a word to the vocalization that he made. All at once, it was a sob, a whine, and a strange yell stuffed into the crook of his elbow to muffle the volume. He stopped short of her, arms held slightly to his sides seeming unsure what to do with them, then wrapped them around himself in a short self-comforting gesture because obviously, it wasn't enough for Skyler to be stuck in a room with two crying infected and-

"All right, okay, shit! They're gone? We're going." This girl had very kindly not made ground beef out of the two of them yet, maybe because of the small kindness from Adrian, but it did not strike her as a good idea to overstay her hospitality.

Creeping as though she was getting home at 3 am and she still cared whether her mother was mad, Skyler skirted the perimeter of the room until she got to the stairwell that Pink had come down from. Got to check that they weren't still lurking waiting for her to step out the door. She got her rifle into her hands before the memory of the actual child with that pack reared its head. Fine. At her side, with the strong hope she wasn't going to have to use it and disentangle another mental crisis over it because apparently, she had those now.

Not much upstairs, including any of the four Hunters, so that was a start. Just an empty office and restroom, with an open window that was a likely culprit for how Miss Pink and the kid got in without her notice. Adrian without any prompting already leaned out to check up towards the roof and out at their surroundings; another reminder that they'd developed a lot of the same survival skills since the start of the outbreak, despite their wildly different experience.

Skyler made her way over as well to see if there was any sign of where the bunch had vanished to, but they knew better than to make it that convenient, and traveling on rooftops and otherwise off the ground gave them the benefit of not leaving one set of easily-distinguishable tracks. Did they also have the forethought to not take on a risky fight with a young kid around? Everything about this made her want to scream.

It was the best shot she had, though, that something had otherwise preoccupied the pack. So back downstairs it was, all the while paying close attention to their ex-roommate.

"Byeee, please don't follow us," she whispered with a little wave.

Then, ready as she could possibly be, they were back out the door and into the streets.

She was making a mistake.

A swarm of questions once again surrounded Adrian, buzzing like the tiny flying things that sometimes pestered him. As was frequent, it was like he was trying to think through mud, which was maddening as ever. But he was relatively grounded in where he was and what was happening, which was both far better than not long before and gave him time to turn over the question that's haunted him for the longest, since the first time he remembered her putting hands on him that could have ended his life and had helped instead: Why?

From that now there were others, flitting by too fast for him to focus on for very long. Didn't she realize? Didn't she know? More than ever he wanted to make her know his thoughts somehow, had this strange, frantic urge to make her understand that what had happened hadn't been an accident and that for so long he'd reveled in that drive to kill and kill and kill that he'd never realized that he'd never had a choice. That still, he knew it was going to happen again; got a whiff of the rush that he felt at the climax of evisceration when the only thing there was room for was the want for it to never, ever stop and the beautiful, terrifying certainty that it couldn't be stopped.

Adrian reflexively stuck his hand into his pocket and fumbled for the ridged smoothness of his charm while keeping mindful to leave his profile low and not get far from her as she pressed forward with an intense sense of urgency.

It was his stupid, senseless wish that she would know this and that she wouldn't leave him alone anyways.

Help.

More buildings and wide-open passageways went by. Wreckage that didn't mean anything to him, towards a destination that he didn't know. There was no sign of the pack detecting them yet. With a small, vulnerable packmate like that, they'd likely detoured to get him someplace safer or to provide food. They must be effective, to have kept him alive for this long; it was hard enough to find food even for those who were healthier and stronger than himself, since the faintly remembered time in the past when the world had frozen.

His sister-

No. He couldn't deny that she was different. She wasn't Like Him and she wasn't a monster and he didn't want her to be prey, so what did that make her? If he just had something to know her with...

She paused every so often to stare at some strange, repetitive mark on the walls around them, before continuing on her way each time. After some time, she rounded a bend and followed with her eye from another mark all the way down to one of those heavy, red entrances that her kind had tended to hide behind when there were still more of them. This time something clicked and he wondered whether she was following them the same way he'd use landmarks to find his way through his well-traveled hunting path, which made sense. She must have been seeking more secure shelter, which he couldn't fault her for; maybe there was something in his chest that hurt for the Crying Sister back at the poorly-chosen nook that he'd escaped into, but he had no desire to accidentally draw her anger by staying longer.

The closer that she drew to the entrance, though, the more she slowed her footsteps until she stopped a short distance outside. Adrian caught up, rumbling quietly in question. Why was she just standing here? Out of sight was the best place to be, even if they weren't being pursued by anything in particular. It'd be far less dangerous-

Oh.

Yes, he thought he understood.

His gaze flitted to the sides like he was trying not to look at something that was too bright and he compulsively picked at a sore on his hand, but he didn't protest this. That's okay. She's right. He could find someplace nearby to nest in for a while. That's still okay, right? Just close enough that he could know that she was still there?

She called his attention back directly onto her with a sound and a serious expression and held it there until he was just starting to become uncomfortable. Abruptly she then threw him entirely off guard by breaking out into the ugliest, most ridiculous face he'd seen her pull. The shock of it actually staggered him for a second, long enough for her to stifle a short bout of snickering laughter under her hands.

Part of him wanted to start crying harder than he had sitting on the floor thinking he was about to die, but instead, automatically and almost against his will, he was laughing back. At least for that single moment of surprise.

Maybe he was going to cry a little. Once she'd gotten the room opened, she stood expectantly just inside, tilting her head and then crossing her arms when he didn't immediately budge. One more time he wavered, scouring her face for what the truth actually was. Did she mean it?

"Yes," she groaned, rolling her eye and waving inward with one hand.

He hurried behind her before she could change her mind.

Out of all of Skyler's many and abundant talents, keeping a poker face wasn't typically one of them. That had gotten her into trouble on more than one occasion, but unless she was entirely mistaken, she was doing an unusually good job of it as she settled in to check the safe room for any lurkers. She was glad that she'd broken some of the tension with Adrian, but, uh. It was working out to be a pretty rough night, truth be told!

Four months. It'd been four months since shit had started going down, and about that long since the date on the evac info that had been hiding in Adrian's pocket this whole time that hadn't gotten him out of the city. There were some situations where four months weren't that long; four months ago, she'd been applying for overnight security gigs, and it often felt like a couple of weeks ago that she'd turned up to an interview realizing she'd forgotten to look up anything about what the place actually did. But it was a pit of the stomach nausea-inducingly long fucking time to survive in the post-apocalyptic abandoned hellscape of the city, bunkering down under some bed, beat-up and skinny and alone and very, very sick.

The tiny bed-and-breakfast that had been co-opted into a safe house was tolerable. Not plastered with granny decor or tacky beach theme or anything. Comfortable, even. A poster board above the deserted front desk proclaimed the optimistic message of, "Stay Strong, All! We've Got This!"

Once a combined inspection of the two bedrooms upstairs turned up nothing of concern, Skyler once more shrugged her rucksack carelessly to the floor off the side of the closest bed and then slung herself to rest on her belly propped up on her elbows. Adrian came to a rest on a rug near the foot of the bed, laying himself down as well and watching her the same way she was him.

After four months, the thing to break him down in the middle of a violent freakout had been "help".

There were so many layers of awfulness in everything that implied. In the questions, questions, always more goddamn questions that it raised. What had been going through his head when he'd realized that he was going to turn? That because of that shitty roll of luck and genetics, there would be no help coming for him? Was that what he'd been thinking about while he lost his ability to reason or understand what was happening? What would that even do to a person, carrying that with you while your brain failed you? Oh shit. Oh fuck. She didn't feel so hot.

The mattress dipped under Adrian's weight as he leaned up and set his chin down on top of his hands at the end of the bed, which wasn't the distraction that she needed but did stop her from laying there spiraling. Her poker face hadn't held up.

"I don't-," she started, then scooted herself to sit closer to that end. "I don't know what help is for you. I thought the best thing anyone could do was put you out of your misery." It was an admittance that she had no clue what came next here. At that moment, though, it felt like the worst thing she could possibly do was nothing.

She flicked on her radio, and for a while let it play at a low volume, and sat in the dark with the quiet sound of that song from Scrubs wafting through the bedroom. Gradually Adrian seemed to ease from his usual irritability towards the sound, maybe adjusting to the sound of music or maybe just not so set-off without it being too loud. He climbed up opposite her. She made the call in.

"Four Dog. It's, uh. Skyler again. Hi."

Hardly a beat passed before the now-familiar voice burst through in a staticky sigh.

"Miss Skyler, it is fantastic to hear your voice. Every time you get off the connection I think you got yourself killed. What's happening tonight? How's your, uh... friend?"

Said friend was presently tentatively raising a hand and making an unhappy scowl at the source of the other man's voice. Perhaps owing to everything that had gone down, though, he held off on taking a swat. He hummed nervously and sniffed around the radio before looking up at her and sitting back, rocking himself a couple of times but making the decision not to act out towards the voice. She flashed him a quick nod and thumbs-up.

"Better than before, which is something."

"Oh thank god Josh and me were over here thinking you were going to have to shoot this dude before morning today."

Whew. "Yeah, he... had me thinking that for a minute over here, too."

"So, anything else come up, or you just letting us back home know you're still dishing it out?"

No no no, this was a bad idea. She was such a stupid asshole, where did she even plan on starting with this? That okay, listen, he did just try to rip her throat out, but that wasn't his fault? That he was still capable of goddamn crying in relief or smiling when he was surprised? That he was desperate enough to stick with her in the first place? That she was starting to believe that he had so much of a fucking chance if he just had some kind of help that she didn't have for him?

"Skyler?"

"Give me a minute. I'm trying not to fuck this up."

"Hey, take your time, sister. I'm not going anywhere if you're not."

Four Dog being nice about the matter did not make it any easier. Well, Adrian? Sure would be a help if you could tell her what to say. Restlessly, she bounced her leg and pushed and released the transmit button at least five times.

"What I-" she started and rejected, then tried again, "I mean, if-" Get it together. She must've sounded like a whole mess. "Do we have, like. A psychiatrist or something I can talk to?" Yeah. That worked. The rest was a work in progress.

Her question still provoked silence for a bit, and in those few moments she was sure that she'd done something that was going to blow up the entire situation and was seconds away from hearing a baffled, 'I knew it! What the fuck is wrong with you?!'

Four Dog's actual response was the perhaps more likely outcome, which wasn't quite so dramatic. "We sure do, and your buddy Four Dog just happens to know her pretty personally. Is this a right now sort of thing, or are you good until tomorrow?" If anything, the guy's tone expressed surprise and maybe a little bewilderment at what was going on, but also genuine happiness at the request. Go figure.

Skyler gave Adrian a once-over to check that he wasn't in the middle of any immediate crisis. "It can wait," she mumbled, embarrassed at how much more work she'd thought that was going to be.

Before she could even get any further, he cut in, "Listen, I'll make sure you've got some air time to yourself. No one listening in, not even me. By the way, you happen to know what day it is?"

"Can't say I've been keeping track."

"That's cool, that's cool. Hey, you should try to catch us in a couple of hours, though. It'd be nice to know you're listening in."

She nodded to herself. Had this really been so little of a problem so far?

"Yeah. Definitely. Um. Thanks. Like, really thanks. 'M sorry I don't have more to say," she apologized, honestly feeling crappy for being so vague and dodgy even if her voice was brusque.

"You're doing you, sister. Don't worry about it. See you around tonight."

The voice from the box faded out, replaced once more by the soft, rhythmic sounds that had preceded it. These were nice, really; didn't trigger the impulse that there was a Clean One that he had to attack quite so badly. It was soothing in a way that lulled Adrian into a calm that was elusive to him. There was some danger in it, making noise that could be detected by anything that was on the hunt, but he didn't want it to stop. He was content to remain in the spot where She'd allowed him space.

Something was different between the two of them, since what had happened in the enclosed space. He could see it in the way that she looked at him, especially. When he thought of the way they, the Clean Ones, looked at him, it assaulted him with a flurry of negative emotion; anger, frustration, panic, hate. He couldn't stand it. Had to make it go away.

It hadn't been all at once, but slowly he'd seen something creep in that very much wasn't the fury driving her or the terror he was used to seeing from her kind. After he'd cracked under the weight of that sound, though, help, help, it'd been like a sudden heave in the ice. For both of them, he believed. He was scrambling for ground, trying not to drown, and...

And he hadn't expected anyone to be there to catch him.

Adrian loosely curled up and nested himself in the warm materials where they rested. Soon afterward She too let the visible tension out of her shoulders and sprawled out to relax.

It looked to be their lucky night, as Skyler's little trip out to the dining room had turned up both a couple of plates that were entirely too nice to eat pork and beans off of and a stray packet of powdered grape juice mix. "Oh, we are eating fancy tonight," she remarked as she returned to the bedroom where they'd settled and set her finds down on the bedside table.

Unsurprisingly, regardless of how much corpse-snacking her tendency to leave bodies in her wake had allowed him to do, Adrian was immediately interested in food. She scooped half of the can out onto one of the plates and presented it with a flourish. While he did make a rough questioning noise, it was as he was already messily bringing beans from plate to mouth.

"You sure do have a hard time taking 'yes' for an answer, don't you, kid?" she commented through her own mouthful.

You know, she thought, maybe there was something to what people said about sharing food having this communal aspect to it. There was a tie that she felt. Something that had her reflecting on whatever the hell it was that they'd developed in the time between him trying to kill her and... well, him trying to kill her. Skyler had a high opinion of her ability to get through shit, but it was undeniable that he'd done a lot for her, and that it was unlikely she'd be alive otherwise. It was clear that he'd been in stark need of someone as well, and as ill-fitted as she felt to be that, she was right when she'd said that she was what he had. What a pair.

She tipped her glass of Apocalypse Wine into the air in an invitation that he wouldn't take up but that felt right anyways.

"We'll get it figured out. Somehow."

The offering of food had been finished off for some time, and after drifting aimlessly around their temporary nest, they'd come back to the comfortable den once more. Adrian fidgeted idly with his trinket, shaking it in his hand, and She occasionally broke into low mumbles mimicking the ones coming from the box. Fascinated by this, he gave a couple of attempts as well, but even he was able to recognize that there was no cohesion to them; mushy, senseless half-approximations of something that seemed much more direct and purposeful. He found they still made him strangely happy to make in this way, though, so every once in a while he'd give a couple of his own mumbles interspersed with humming.

There was so much that Adrian wanted to take from his head and have her know, somehow, with a desperation that almost overwhelmed him. About the gripping delusions, the aches that settled all the way into his bones if he wasn't drowning them out with motion, the hunger and bloodthirst that were as raw as burning lungs' need for air, the thick murk that made it impossible to even think at times. The questions. What was the Before that was out of the reach of the scattered recesses of his memory? Why did some of her sounds feel like they'd had meaning, once?

And the one thing he'd kept in the core of him since as early as he could remember and that scared him so, so deeply that he'd hardly ever dared to drag it to the surface.

He... he thought that something was really, really wrong with him.

That awful thing hovered in the air for what felt like forever. It was vulnerable and aching and against everything that the instinct screamed, he wanted her to see it.

Please. Please.

Whether she did or not, he couldn't know. What she did do, though, was bring her eye from him to the spot next to her, then gesture in invitation. And that was something.

Adrian accepted and closed the distance between them.

"Well all, it's just about time, and let me remind you again how glad your buddy Four Dog here in the tower at Midway is to have you with us at least over the air tonight. And you know what you hearing me means? You did it. It's been one holy hell of a past few months, and you probably took a beating on the way, but you made it this far. Even if you lost folks, or didn't come out of it in one piece, or thought you were left for dead. I gotcha.

"And let me tell you, there's something else that means, too. You know what? That means this world's not dead just yet, doesn't it? That's humanity that's still kickin'. And we're the pulse. All of us. Anyone that's out there listening to the last DJ on the east coast. You're survivors, and I'm damn proud of you.

"We got about 10 seconds left. Get your drink if you've got one. Wherever you are, you just keep on keeping on. You ain't alone out there, and the rest of us are looking out for you.

"Happy 2010, all."

A/N: Under a month, and another update! Truthfully I've been waiting to get this one out for a long time and am excited to post it! It's very character development-heavy, so I'd love some feedback on how that worked out and if the pace of action was alright.

I'll try to keep up this writing kick the best I can, and thanks to anyone still along for this ride!