"Eric - you're awake. Temp, go get Vondra." Mort laid one thin hand on his brother-in-law's shoulder, trying to stop him sitting up. "Take it easy. You've been shot."

"Amazingly enough," Glottus groaned, "I'd noticed."

He shrugged Mort's hand away. The action must have hurt, because his face contorted and he took a breath so sharp the air whistled through his teeth.

Then he doubled over, coughing spasmodically.

When the fit subsided he looked over at Fry, and hacked up a laugh.

"I'll say this," he managed. "You're a better shot than I gave you credit for, kid. I feel like I got hit by the damn hovertruck."

"I crashed it," Fry admitted.

"Right."

"In water."

"Jesus."

"They got a vet to fix you."

"Yeah, this feels like the expert ministrations of a vet." Glottus cast an evaluating eye over Fry. "You've looked better."

Fry shrugged. He'd felt better, though it was becoming hard to remember when.

"They keep tying me up," he explained, tugging frustratedly at his restraints. "They won't listen to me. They won't let me go."

"Would you?" a voice interrupted.

Vondra was standing at the top of the steps. She swept down them standing regally straight. Only a very close eye would have noticed how deliberate her movements were, or how tired she looked.

She drew closer to her brother.

"Eric."

"Von."

There was a loaded silence. Vondra broke it.

"So," she said. "I hear you're a murderer now."

"That's the story," Glottus said warily.

They stared at each other for a beat – and then Vondra smiled, and Glottus wheezed out a laugh, and they cracked up together. Glottus laughed until he was spitting blood, and Vondra doubled over, clutching the rack of whips for support. When she straightened up again, tears were streaming down her face.

She wiped them away, gasping for breath.

"Jesus," she managed.

"Christ," Glottus agreed.

"What the fuck, Eric?"

Glottus sighed.

"It's a long story." He nodded at Fry. "And it starts and ends with him."

"He shot you."

Glottus grimaced.

"It's incredible how people keep pointing that out. Like I'm not bleeding into my own lungs over here." He spat bloody saliva onto the floor, to illustrate his point. "Look, take it from me – the kid did me a favor. If he hadn't shot me, he'd be dead by now. And believe it or not, that's a worst-case scenario for the whole damn universe."

Vondra frowned. Her gaze shifted from Glottus to Mort, as if seeking confirmation.

Mort nodded.

"It's true," he said slowly. "I've read his cards. They're . . . confusing. But they're consistent about this. He's important."

He drummed his fingers on the table, a thoughtful click-click-click.

"Something's coming, Von," he said at last. "And whatever it is, I don't think we can fight it."

"He's right," Glottus said darkly. "I've seen what wants him dead. It wanted me dead too."

He snapped the clasp on the gold nugget around his neck – the flash drive with all the people the Brains had killed on it. All the deaths the DOOP had covered up, because they didn't know what was causing them.

The deaths they'd pinned on Glottus, when he wouldn't collude in the lie.

"I couldn't fight it," he admitted. "This, Von . . . it's not a normal enemy. It got inside my head," he said, and there was real horror in his voice. He stared at the flash drive, watched it swing hypnotically on the end of the gold chain. "You can't fight it," he explained. "You can't even think about fighting it, if it won't let you. The only thing in your head is what it put there. You lose your mind, lose your wits, become their . . . thing. Their puppet," he spat.

"Mind control," Mort murmured.

"Mind control – body control. You'd put a bullet in Von's head, if they wanted you to. I'm telling you, you can't fight it."

"But he can."

Vondra brushed aside the hypothetical of her death and narrowed her eyes at Fry. Calculating how much trouble he was likely to be, and how much he was worth.

Glottus nodded in confirmation.

"He's done it before. Don't ask me how."

"I don't know how," Fry insisted. This seemed as good a time as any to speak up. "But it's not important! What's important is you should let me go, before everybody dies." He gestured at Vondra. "She gets it. You should listen to her. You should listen to me. No-one ever listens to me!"

Vondra folded her arms.

"I've reconsidered. I say we hog-tie the kid and dump him as far away as we can get."

"Von -" Glottus began.

"Don't you 'Von' me." Vondra rounded on her brother, eyes flashing. "You show up at my door half-drowned, with a bullet-hole in you and a bounty on your head. That I can take. That - for you - I will take. But then you tell me there's some kind of mind-controlling monsters on your tail, and Marty McFly here shot you in the stomach for the greater motherfucking good – and you expect me not to throw his ass into the street and run like hell the other way? Have you lost your damn mind, little brother?"

"Vondra."

Mort reached out for his wife, and she turned on him.

"Don't even think about it," she snapped. "You're no better. You find a kid with some grand destiny, and suddenly we're mixed up in all his shit. You can see his future and suddenly that makes his problems our business?"

To Fry's amazement, Mort held his ground.

"He became our business the day he saved Eric's life," he said quietly. "And you're right – I looked into his future. And I swear to you . . . if we don't help him, how we can . . . then Vondra, every one of us dies anyway. Not today, and not tomorrow, but one day soon."

"I won't see that happen."

"You won't be able to stop it." Glottus had found his voice again. He sighed. "Look, Von, all I'm asking for is a ride, and some time. A week at the most. And then I'm out of your hair and the kid is back on Earth, where we can get some answers and put an end to this."

"Nibbler," Fry nodded. "Nibbler knows how I stopped the Brains before. I don't remember it, but I know he knows. He can tell me what to do."

"Nibbler?" Mort raised one hairless brow.

Fry winced. Sometimes he wished Leela had given her pet a less adorable name. "Nibbler" was a humiliating enough name to yell out when your carnivorous gerbil slipped the leash and ran down the street. Using it to describe an ancient creature of incredible wisdom was just . . . awkward.

"Yeah . . . uh, Nibbler."

Glottus waved this aside.

"The name's not important. The point is, the kid's got a plan. All we need is time. Time for the heat to die down, time for me to get back on my feet -"

"Time for the Brains to hunt him down and kill us all?" Vondra didn't miss much, and there was acid in her tone.

"That's why I keep telling you to let me go!" Fry interjected. For a conversation about him, it sure seemed like no-one cared to hear what he had to say. He was starting to feel like a broken record.

Glottus turned to him at last.

"No," he said calmly.

"No?"

"No. They don't know where you are, remember? You blew up the scout. He didn't know who you were, you said it yourself. The rest of them might figure it out when they find the blast site and one dead Brain, but with him dead they won't know what happened. They won't know where you went. It's a big universe. You could have gone anywhere from there."

"On half a tank of gas?" Vondra, again. Fry was starting to see why Mort had called her a ruthless pragmatist, even though at the time, he hadn't understood the meaning of the word. "I saw the heap of junk you rode in on," she elaborated. "The kid was coasting on fumes. You can't have been more than a day's flight from here. They'll figure that out."

Glottus shifted uncomfortably.

"Still a lot of options. It'll take time. To narrow down our trajectory." His breathing had become labored again. "Right now," he said tiredly, "I'm the bigger threat. If the DOOP find me here, it won't be pretty. I don't want you caught in that crossfire, Von." He slumped, and tried to pull himself up again. "You need me off-world at least as much as the kid."

Vondra's glare could have nailed him to the wall.

Then -

"Oh, fuck you, Eric," she declared. She sat down, suddenly, on the edge of his makeshift bed. "You take two steps and you'll hock your insides all over the floor. You know damn well you're not going anywhere."

Glottus shook his head, quietly insistent.

"Say the word and I'm gone."

"Don't fucking push it," Vondra warned.

Mort must have caught the look on Fry's face, because he smiled.

"For them, this is warm and fuzzy," he murmured. "So," he said out loud, "Eric stays."

"And the kid." Glottus coughed.

"And the kid," Vondra conceded. She watched him wipe the blood from the corner of his mouth, and sighed. "I just hope you know what the hell you're doing."

Days passed.

They untied Fry, sometimes. It was too hard for him to eat while tied up, and if he stayed in the chair too long his muscles started to seize up, so even Vondra agreed he should be allowed to take a walk every so often. But the rest of the time, she kept him restrained. It wasn't that she didn't trust him, Mort had explained. She no longer thought Fry had shot her brother on purpose and might finish the job if she set him free.

"She just thinks you'll blunder into trouble," he'd said, and even Fry had to admit she had a point. The last time he'd been free, he'd crashed a hovertruck on her doorstep, gotten into a fight with Tempest, and almost aroused the suspicions of the DOOP. He hadn't meant to, but . . . as Leela would have said, "You never do".

So he didn't fight it. He wasn't sure he wanted to leave anyway. The vet had seemed certain Glottus would live, but – as Glottus had pointed out – he was a vet. And Fry really didn't like the way the captain kept coughing up gobs of blood. Or the way he slept all the time. Or that wheezing, bubbling sound that underlaid his breathing. Fry was no doctor, but he knew instinctively it would be a bad idea to move him.

Vondra seemed to feel the same. She made sure there was someone watching over her brother at all times, even when all he did was sleep. It was normally Von or Mort, but sometimes Tempest showed up, or Candy. Candy wasn't her real name, Fry learned. She was a runaway from the Amish homeworld, and "Candy" was something forgettable to call herself, while she worked for Vondra and tried to forget . . . herself, as far as Fry could tell.

She'd done something unforgivable, she'd said once, and she'd looked at her hands the way Fry himself did, sometimes. As if she could still feel the blood on them.

She wouldn't change Glottus's bandages, and no-one asked her to, so Fry knew he wasn't the only one who'd noticed that. But Vondra and Mort seemed to like her, so Fry thought whatever she'd done, maybe it wasn't as unforgivable as she thought. And she brought flowers to the dungeon – or, the nearest thing Erosh had to flowers: fronds of colored seaweed that glowed soft pink in the dark. As far as Fry was concerned, no-one who brought seaweed flowers to a sex dungeon could possibly be a bad person.

Tempest wasn't a bad person either, even though she sometimes rolled her eyes so hard Fry thought they were in danger of falling out of her head. She had a heart, buried deep under all the skepticism and snark. Fry got glimpses of it sometimes, when she thought no-one was watching. She never hesitated to checked Glottus's bandages, for one thing – never seemed afraid to get her hands bloody – and even though she hated Mort's premonitions, she let him play poker with her and look ahead at every hand, whenever she could see him becoming antsy and unmoored from the present. And she sang country songs to pass the time, plucking out the tunes on an old guitar when she thought Fry and Glottus were both asleep. It was hard to hate anyone who could sing "Jolene, Jolene" with that much sad longing in their voice.

Fry liked Mort best. He was almost preternaturally calm, all the time, and even when he wasn't – when his psychic energies needed burning off somehow – he only became jittery in his movements and distracted, like he was on a caffeine high and watching some internal TV show play off in the distance. Sometimes he knew what you were going to say or do before you did it, and that was always creepy, but, well, it wasn't his fault and people couldn't help how they were made. Not even robots, not really. So who was Fry to judge? Mort hadn't judged him, after all, and he knew the worst things Fry had ever done.

And Mort talked to him. He could be vague and infuriating - especially if he thought Fry was asking about something that wasn't his business – but he opened up more than anyone else did. A lot more than Vondra.

She hardly talked at all. Mostly she just watched her brother sleep. Sometimes she looked as if she wanted to wake him up and yell at him some more, but she never actually did. There was never a question of him leaving the basement before he recovered, and as long as he spoke up for Fry, there was no question of her kicking Fry out either.

Even if she wanted to.

Fry was half asleep one night when he heard her voice and realized this must be one of the rare occasions when Glottus was awake to talk to her.

". . . smells funny," she was saying.

"In what way?"

"I don't know. But it doesn't add up, Eric. You, coming here."

"I must've put in the co-ordinates before I passed out," Glottus shrugged. "There's no other explanation. The kid wouldn't have known where to go."

"I know. I know." Vondra made a sound of frustration. "But I don't buy it. I don't buy that you'd head here, even for me. That's flying into a wasp's nest of DOOP activity, on a prayer they won't intercept you. And they didn't! That's some more bullshit. The planet is fucking tiny, Eric, and we're bristling with DOOP. But their radar didn't pick you up on entry? You're a wanted felon in a stolen vehicle. You crashed in the middle of the street!" Fry heard her bracelets clink as she threw her hands up in the air. "You're lucky I have some pull around here. People will keep their mouths shut about the crash, for a price. But I don't know how you made it past the DOOP scanners, and that? That makes me nervous. You don't have friends in high places, little brother. Take it from me. They've been breathing down my neck for two years, waiting for any sniff of contact. And you know that. But you land in my lap anyway."

Glottus was silent.

"What else?" he asked at last.

Vondra sighed.

"I don't know. Something. Nothing. I'm on edge, Eric. There's a robot shows up here sometimes. I don't what the hell that means."

"A robot? You think the DOOP sent him?"

"How should I know? Maybe it's something, maybe it's nothing. But it's not normal. I've been here fifteen years and I've never seen a robot. Til now."

"What does he do?"

"Nothing," Vondra admitted. "He boozes. Ogles the girls. Tells Temp she should sing more folk songs. If he's a DOOP spy, I don't see the point. He just shows up, asks me the date, and drinks us dry, and then he disappears again."

"Maybe he's malfunctioning," Glottus suggested. "He keeps asking you the date? Sounds like his processor's faulty."

"Maybe," Vondra said darkly. "Or maybe he's waiting for something."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. If I knew, I'd know what to do about it."

Glottus coughed.

"It's probably nothing," he assured his sister. "Robots aren't the DOOP's style. And for interrogation, you can forget it. They can't read human expressions. You've seen that soap opera, right? All My Circuits, with the acting cranked up to eleven the whole time? That's robots for you. They don't do subtle. Not programed for it."

There was another silence. It sounded like Glottus was trying to get comfortable. He coughed some more and then -

"All My Circuits?" Vondra asked slyly. There was a trace of amusement in her voice.

Glottus went quiet again, but this time Fry got the impression he was avoiding saying something, rather than waiting to catch his breath.

"Carlos used to watch it," he said at last.

The silence ballooned out again.

Vondra sighed.

"He calls," she said. "Sometimes. We talk about the kids and the weather, and pretend we can't hear the DOOP agent mouth-breathing on the other line. They're very fulfilling conversations."

Another silence.

"I didn't ask."

"No," Vondra agreed. "You very deliberately did not ask."

Glottus said nothing. But he didn't change the subject, Fry noticed. Nor did Vondra. She just waited.

"How much does he hate me?"

Vondra laughed.

"He doesn't," she said.

"Von -"

"I've never sugarcoated anything a day in my life, Eric, and I'm not starting now. Take my word for it, you married a saint." There was another clink of jewelry, as Vondra shrugged. "I'm not saying he's never angry. You left him with three kids and the official line is that he's married to a mass-murdering psychopath. It's sure as hell not fun. The DOOP are still camped on his doorstep. But he doesn't blame you for that."

"They're still watching him?" For the first time, Glottus sounded enraged. "It's been two years!" he exploded.

Vondra got up and forced him back down.

"Yes," she said wryly. "They're probably thinking most people would've cracked by now." She moved around and there was a glug glug glug sound – water, being poured into a glass. "Carlos says he's not surprised they haven't caught up to you yet. Clearly they have no idea how your mind works."

Glottus sputtered out a laugh.

"No," he wheezed. "They don't. But I should have known he would."

"Mmhmm." Fry couldn't see her, but he could almost hear Vondra's raised eyebrow. "Nothing says I love you like a two-year embargo on communications," she said archly.

Glottus laughed again. Then he sobered.

"I do," he said quietly. "For what that's ever been worth."

There was a silence. Vondra had squeezed his hand, maybe.

"He's good," she said. "He's tougher than he looks. He'll make it through."

"I hope you're right."

"I'm always right." There was a smile in Vondra's voice. "Get some rest."

Fry lay awake for an hour, staring at the wall.

There was a crack in the cement three inches from his face, and cold oozed out of it. His nose was turning numb.

It wasn't like he hadn't known Glottus had a family. Okay, so he hadn't known that family was with a dude, but there was no point making a big deal out of that. No-one would understand why he was even surprised. (It would just be one of those weird, thousand-year-old attitudes he had that made people look at him like he was some kind of relic. And it wasn't like he actually cared, so . . . what would be the point?)

And it wasn't like he hadn't known Glottus was tetchy on the subject. There was that time Fry had asked about his daughter, and Glottus had practically bitten his head off.

And it wasn't like the captain had been in support of Fry's plan to call home.

But . . . what kind of person could go two years without speaking to the person they loved, just to keep them safe?

And what kind of person couldn't hate them for it, if they didn't know the truth?

Better people than him, Fry decided. The kind of people who probably should be saving the world.

That was the thing about spending 24 hours a day locked in a windowless room, he'd come to realize. It gave you too much time to think, and nowhere to hide. He couldn't get drunk, or turn on the TV, or go to a party. He couldn't repaint the hovertruck or plan where to go next. He couldn't talk too much either, because Glottus spent all his time unconscious, and everyone else . . . even if they trusted him, Fry didn't trust himself. He'd already said too much about the Brainspawn, and the only other avenues of conversation around here were ones he didn't want to go down. Like "why did you run away?" and "so who did you kill?".

For the first time in months, Fry had no escape from his thoughts. No escape from his past, no escape from himself. He couldn't keep pushing away the memory of what he'd done, or make excuses for it.

You wrecked Leela's marriage, he thought. And then you ran away.

It had been so much easier when he didn't have to look at it like that. So much easier when he could pretend he didn't deserve any of the blame.

But he did.

The way Leela talked about it, it was like she thought what they'd done was all her fault. Because she'd started it. Because it had been her idea. Because she'd told him it was okay. And it had been easier, for a long time, to believe her. Easier to be angry at her, easier to blame Lars, easier to just run away and blame love for making him crazy.

But that wasn't true. "Love made me do it" was only a good excuse in hokey old movies. It wasn't romantic in real life. It was just a lie to hide behind when you couldn't face yourself. And Fry had run out of ways to hide.

He couldn't pretend he hadn't known Leela was married. He had. And he'd known, from the moment he kissed her back, that her marriage would never be the same again. But he'd done it anyway.

He couldn't pretend he'd been drunk, or that he hadn't stopped to think about how wrong it was - because that only worked for the first time and Fry had kept on doing it, long after he sobered up. Because it felt good, even when it felt bad. Because he'd wanted to.

Leela was right all along, he thought, when she said love wasn't enough. Love was just a feeling, and it didn't stop you hurting each other. It didn't make you happy, not forever.

You needed more than that, to be with someone.

You had to work at it. Even when it was boring, even when it was hard. Even when you hurt each other, and you didn't know what to say anymore, and it would be easier if you just gave up. That was when you couldn't give up, and had to fight even harder and come back and say "I'm not going anywhere" - even if the person you loved probably hated you and wouldn't forgive you, ever.

Maybe if you wanted to love someone – really love them, do it right – you had to work hardest on yourself. Maybe you had to admit your own mistakes and stop thinking the world was made up of losers like you and "better" people - or that better people were just magic or born that way or something, and never had to actually try. Because they weren't. They were just people, like you, who made different choices. And if you knew that, you could be a better person too.

Or at least, you could try.