Chapter TW: Dysphoria, mentions of self-harm and attempted suicide

Adrian bled through his pants during the night.

It wasn't the first thing that he noticed; that was the dull, nauseous roil that the hunger pangs had taken on deep in his abdomen, which roused him from what restless scraps of sleep he'd managed. For a while he resisted waking, struggling to keep his eyes shut and nose his way further into the soft things nearest him, but the discomfort wasn't going to let him escape back into sleep easily, not that sleep had been peaceful, either.

When his need to do something to relieve it outweighed his need to do nothing, he gave in with a resigned sigh. He was sat up before his eyes were open, then blinked slowly. Still dark. Occasionally their shelter creaked or clicked trying to shrink in on itself away from the frigid wind outside.

Stumbling. Searching. Past pale rays of light trickling in through the clear barriers; if he stopped to watch long enough, he could observe them shifting from thin and fleeting to composed of intricate webs to the murky blue-green of underwater and back when he blinked.

He found what he'd been looking for, the holding thing Sister-Not-Sister carried on her back, slumped listlessly by one of the walls. Was there food in there? Part of him still held anxiety about her suddenly charging in ready to defend whatever she had, but he felt too blank and disconnected to worry much about prodding and nosing through.

A belated few moments into this, an uncomfortable twinge and tacky sensation caught up to him, followed by a whiff of copper too fresh and too himself to belong to any of his kills. Had his stomach wound opened back up? His hands absently pawed around the edges of his coverings until recollection arose.

Oh. That.

Search for food abandoned, his hands rested cupping his lower belly, and an expanse of time stretched out while he felt the pulse of his insides accompanied by a hypnotic steady thrumming of the wall and hum vibrating the air. Finally, in the absence of much else guiding him, he allowed a compulsion to wander stir him and shuffled back to his feet.

Each step he took seemed sluggish; thick, fluid, and mired in the enormity of residual weight still pressing in since the world had collapsed. It dulled his senses, narrowed his perception to only a narrow corridor outside of the broken pieces that his labored brain was sifting and spinning through over and over and over. The throb between his temples pleaded to be released.

More soft, glowing tendrils of nighttime light before him materialized the passage to what looked like one of those water rooms. Adrian crossed the boundary.

"So you know?" his Sister-Not-Sister asked behind him as soon as his eyes caught the surface the other him resided within, "That you were... like me?"

He exhaled his held breath, and bobbed his chin slightly; he didn't think he'd ever not known. Hadn't wanted to, had fought with all he had not to, but even in times when he hardly knew that he existed as anything more than ravening, agonizing rage exploding from the confines of his body, he wasn't sure it had ever really gone away. None of that could be expressed in the way that he wanted, and by the time he realized as much he also realized that the exchange had actually taken place far earlier and she'd long since gone to sleep back where they'd been resting.

Staring back in that direction eventually turned into sitting on the cold, smooth floor, gazing numbly at his double. It was so like him. Identical, even, in bursts where his grip on realness felt more firm. It moved in all the same ways he did, down to the twitches of his face, and looked just the same. Didn't it?

Would he know? Stretching back into recesses of his memory faded enough it was only impression, studying his own body had been avoided whenever possible. Making himself do so now spiked the twisting in his stomach and the squeezing in his chest. The same features he half-recognized. The same crescent of scar on his belly where Sister-Not-Sister's stabbing thing had dragged downward. The same dark patch where his legs met from his blood saturating through the layers-...

He felt like he was going to vomit.

Whatever impulse had told him that he was supposed to be digging for something in there faded under his morbid fixation. Time ceased to have what little meaning it had, and the image continued to warp before his eyes.

Him. Not him.

Sick. Not sick.

What was not sick? he asked. The other him's answer came only in throbbing on the inside of his skull that made him groan and go to the floor with his head on his knees. Was it hurting him because it resented being held captive?

... Oh. No?

That was it, wasn't it? Yes. He was starting to understand. That made so much sense. Maybe more sense than anything ever had.

Weary as he was, something close enough to brush hope blessedly crept in, and a tic brought a smile of sorts to the chapped corners of his mouth. Of course. He was the one that was trapped behind the barrier, and past that was where everything was alright. The, the him that wasn't sick and the Before and the safe and none of the pain or the anger fear wrongness if he could just-

It was so thin. It was right there. Adrian scrambled to his feet.

Skyler was woken by the sound of shattering glass. Groggy and driven by gut reaction, her first instinct was that something was breaking in through a window, which had her feet hitting the ground before she processed getting out of bed. While nothing had rushed her by the time she got to the living room, there were definitely noises, coming from towards the back.

Wait. Adrian. He hadn't been nearby when she'd startled awake. That filled in all of the details that were important at that moment. She now recognized his gasping amidst the scuffle. The toe of her boot hit the bathroom threshold, nearly launching her in headfirst.

Adrian was down hands-and-knees on the floor, frantically sweeping through the scattered glass of what had been a door-length mirror for she could only guess what. In its two-second assessment of "what the hell do I do", the solution her judgement provided was "drag him off before he cut the hell out of himself". He fought her as soon as she caught him by the arm, screaming in alarm. Around then it hit that she might as well have charged in there and grabbed onto a confused cougar, which made it extra fortune that he was shaken from whatever had fallen over him into disoriented panting and swiveling to look over himself, her, and their surroundings.

"Adrian. Adrian," she called.

His unfocused stare snapped back onto her, and she surprised herself by actually recalling her chat with the base psych at an appropriate time. Since he seemed to be turning directly to her and wasn't actively trying to maim her, she looked him back in the eye and with the hand she still had on his arm gave what she hoped was a grounding squeeze. Adrian whimpered.

"Yeah."

The same whimper once more.

"Yeah."

They'd gone from her grip on his arm to him also clenching her other sleeve white-knuckle tight. He was sitting still, though, so she checked him over for any serious injury. It certainly didn't make things easier that he was still in the clothes he'd been in during the fiasco with Cat and the two men, but it was nothing major that she could see.

The wrappings on his hands had shielded him from all but a few shallow cuts. If her non-mutant nose was half-decent, he was bleeding somewhere, though. She found it relatively quickly, a spot right around his crotch. Now how had that happened? There wasn't a tear in his clothes or anything, and she didn't think-

"Ahh, shit."

Yep. Maybe it had been the stress, maybe astonishingly his body still knew how to cycle something between keeping his vital organs chugging, but the red tide had rolled in at about as convenient a time as it ever did. What a night.

Adrian had calmed enough that his vice grip relaxed and he cast a dour look down at the spot. The sigh he let out got across, 'well, doesn't this suck,' so it seemed he wasn't wholly uncomprehending of what was happening to him, for whatever that was worth.

Uhh. Let her think for a minute. She had a few spare tampons in case of her own breakthrough bleeding on the shots they had her on to stop the same damn thing happening to her, but, "I don't figure you would let me...?" Words were unlikely to be of use here, but the ring-and-pinched-fingers gesture she made sent him from dully observing into a face journey through an alarmed grimace, sharply inhaling through his teeth, and intensely shaking his head. Yeah, she'd thought not.

Frankly, she wasn't going to push that one, either. Besides the practicality of trying to shove something into a fucking Hunter who didn't want it there, it did not feel right to use force there however important it may be, and he was clearly still recovering from this latest episode. So it rested, for the minute.

Once she grew awkward enough with the position she'd put herself in kneeled between Adrian's legs while wrestling him off the pile of broken glass, Skyler slid back to lean uncomfortably against the bathtub and spent the next several minutes staring up at a lone tile by the top of the half-window with a folksy painted moon motif. He slumped into a lightly curled shape both protective and ginger of his lower abdomen and looked up towards the same, perhaps wondering what was holding her attention.

"...Are you mad?"

The question, spoken while staring up toward the ceiling in the bathroom, fucking humiliated her. She felt like a stupid middle schooler, except even by then she'd have felt like it was stupid. She was compelled to ask it anyways.

Adrian shuffled to lay on his other side, facing her. His expression and murmured, "Hrmm?" held question but not understanding.

"Mad? You know..." She acted out a scowl, clenching her fists and giving her own, less Hunter-y wordless growl.

After a second or two of pulling a responding snarl, Adrian's gaze flickered away and downward as he hummed in what she guessed was as deep of thought as he could manage at the moment. He'd only just started dipping his chin into a nod when the antsiness grating at her pushed her to blurt out,

"At me? You're mad at me?"

His brows scrunched together and his nose wrinkled as he followed her gesturing from him and then towards herself. He repeated the motion at her, this time accompanied by, "Mmh?"

"For telling you you're sick? Or that you were like me, or..."

However much of her rambling he understood, it only perplexed him more. By the time she trailed off, he was shaking his head, making her want to simultaneously choke and self-immolate.

"Fucking, I don't know, I don't know."

She slumped back down to put her head on her knees and grumble at herself. But, like. Was he really better off knowing what was wrong with him? The only reference she could have was imagining if she would want someone to tell her, and she wasn't even going to pretend she knew the answer to that.

No taking it back now, though. Only figuring out what to do with it, which left her wracking her brain for a place to even start.

At least one thing came to mind while drumming her fingers on the tub behind her. Skyler stood, taking a minute to survey the thoroughly bloodied state of her companion.

"You could really use some new clothes."

The pieces of the world felt a little more held together with someone else there; the space around him still somewhat dreamlike and his motions weighted like sleepwalking, but the information he was taking in made more sense. Muffled sounds from the rooms nearby, shuffling and sliding as She continued to rummage through their contents. The various textures of an assortment of soft things piled into a loose nest in the water room where he'd remained. The coolness and repetitive shapes of the floor beneath him, so long as he looked away before he started seeing things crawling in the patterns.

Adrian had shrouded himself in one of the longer drapings, wrapped tight in the folds like an extra skin over his coverings, when she returned. This armful, she dropped separate from the rest of the heap with a sigh and brushing off of her arms that suggested being done with her search. More coverings. To replace the bloody ones plastered against his skin? That would make sense.

Even so, he was sluggish to grasp that her crouching by him and lifting her arms over her head was an ask for him to do the same, or that her sounds ("This? You can do this?") matched. Once he did, he still couldn't bring himself to react immediately.

He wanted them off, wanted to shred the tacky feeling off of his skin so viciously that it would rip away the memory of the sensation with it. And he wanted to envelop himself in it until his diseased body failed, kept going only by the maddening compulsion to relive the killing. And he wanted to believe that somehow, it really was okay to be bare, vulnerable, exposed in what he was before another person. And he wanted to not just hide, but destroy every eye that had ever seen him, including his own. He could never want things that didn't clash with each other.

She was waiting and he still hadn't moved, not even to shrink away. He could tell she didn't know what to do with that. But he didn't stop her when she cautiously tugged at the edge of his top covering, either, and responded to her, "Can I?" with a weak chuff and dip of his chin.

Unless he was misremembering, the first time she had done this, she'd been thoughtful enough of the process of stripping him down, for whatever he'd envisioned of an Other. Even so, he could tell that this was different; it was already different, because he knew she was asking. Her hands were still tentative and a little rough, but as they worked, it felt like she was still asking. That made it... more okay. Not all okay, but better.

Every piece pulled away from him felt like it unveiled something secret and burning. His unsheltered face that both was and wasn't his, his skin littered with scars carved out by his own doing and otherwise, the twisted shape of his body, everything that had always seemed warped and wrong now screaming in his head. This... had been like hers once, right? Was that why he hated having a body? What would happen if he kept going? Tore away layers until he reached something that wasn't revolting to him?

A hand on his wrist guided him away from reopening a healed gouge in his breast. She paused, which made him twitch with the awareness that she was staring with an unreadable expression, but released him before it got too uncomfortable and instead went to the white basin and made it start raining down again. Soon she motioned him in. Adrian soundlessly slipped under the stream.

His eyes closed. Water surrounding. Warm. Not drowning. Breath in... out. Eyes open again.

A sensory twinge echoed in old injuries, in particular some of the ones over his chest that he'd been pulled away from as well as around his arms. The impulse that bristled at displaying any weakness swelled despite the wounds being closed even longer than the ones in his gut, urging him to either swat or shrink. Struggling against it made him fidget and sway, compulsively coming very close to gnawing at a wrist, but eventually it ebbed enough to let him chew on a couple of claws and focus on Sister-Not-Sister, who was observing him in turn.

He caught the second that she froze up, her face morphing from puzzlement gradually into stricken with a kind of alarm he only faintly remembered having seen back while he was bleeding to death. That was what involuntarily roused the growl from his throat and pushed him up against the cold wall. DON'T look at him like-!

But just as soon as she stepped back and away, the aggression melted off of him, leaving him staggered, shaking his head. Wait. He hadn't meant- At the first sign of her getting closer again, reflex sparked like grabbing for a handhold after stumbling on a precarious ledge. His fingers caught her upper coverings and his claws snagged to drag her inwards and over the edge of the thing keeping in the water.

"Hey wait don't you'regonnagetmewet AH-"

"I used to wish I had star powers when I was a kid."

The air out on the roof was brisk and clear. Out a bedroom window, onto the top of the garage just below, the wind had blown most of the snow off, and a few blankets cut the sting from more spirited gusts. Down in the house, an egregiously floral pink and purple pad wrapper was stuffed into the bathroom garbage near Adrian's discarded clothes and the swept-up shards of glass. Shit still wasn't great, but they were clean, dry, and had some canned approximation of spaghetti and meatballs in their bellies.

"Not in, like. The cartoon magical girl way. More like when I first found out what stars actually were. These balls of light out in space that have been exploding since before anyone was ever born and are so dense and hot no one could even think about fucking around too close without getting fried." Skyler smirked and briefly chuckled, "Mostly so I could incinerate my mom."

In the inky, cloudless expanse overhead unpierced by manmade lights as far as the eye could see, she sought out the bright point of Sirius and traced Canis Major from there. Adrian stared upward in the same direction, fixated for a considerable time, until he gathered up his pile of blankets to migrate. There was hardly any pause before he settled within arm's reach of her.

She didn't know why she was talking like this. It felt weirdly personal, however much of it she was fairly sure still went over Adrian's head. She was also pretty sure that she was going to feel dumb for this later, but damn if she wasn't out here sitting on the roof airing it like the quiet aftermath of some party anyways, dead sober. Maybe it was only fair; Adrian had shown a remarkable amount of trust on what she had absolutely no doubt was a particularly shitty day for him. From the way he'd recoiled, she got the feeling she'd hit on something sensitive focusing on the spots where it now seemed stupidly obvious that he'd mangled himself, too.

Again, she just felt... so wholly out of her depth with any of this that it was almost kind of funny. Ha. Instead of any laugh coming out, she spread her own share of the blankets partially out behind her and laid back, face upwards towards the cold sky.

He wished that knowing he'd once used words the way she did meant that he suddenly could now. Or at least that his understanding of them wasn't so dismally fragmented. What he did have though was a sense of this being something vulnerable and potentially fragile buzzing between them, and a quiet but gripping urge to keep that there, protected and nursed.

Adrian thought he understood her fascination with the immense stretch above them. He'd spent plenty of time staring into the studded depths of that darkness, often perched much like this, watching the slow swirl of those points of distant light. Drifting in and out of surety of the transformation of the curved sliver of yellow up there, and feeling someplace core that this void and the void that lay beneath the big water weren't far removed. Sometimes when his hold on rationality was especially tenuous, he thought that object in the sky and the water below spoke to each other.

A few more hesitant, indistinct mumbles called his attention back toward the side she lay on, and when he rolled over to face her, she was already turned toward him as well. Being so close, an agitated shiver ran its way down his spine, through his muscles into his claws and back up again, carrying urgency along its way. But... she'd said that was okay. That it was there. Somehow that made it some fraction easier to sit with.

Regardless of there being little he knew the meaning behind, he listened intensely. And then when she was finished, he hummed, paused, hummed again, then ventured into a few murmurs of his own, intuiting that was the correct thing to do.

He'd, um. He'd tried to disappear into it before, did she know that? The big water. He remembered that much. Had always been entranced by it, as much as it frightened him. He thought sometimes that it'd be a nicer way to not be there anymore than some of the others. At the time he'd been convinced that if he opened his veins to it that it would gently ebb his blood away into itself and dissolve him into painless, unthinking nothingness.

That had been... wrong. It had been bad.

With the recollections, Adrian's breath skipped and he drew the drapings tighter around himself. He'd spent so long locked into that fight to stay alive, maybe forever, and yes, the exhaustion that questioned how long he could possibly keep going crept in often. But past that came wondering if it was even a fight that was better to keep winning, which inevitably gave way to holding death close as an option, however much primal instinct railed against not doing everything possible to desperately claw out his survival. And from that emerged, would this be the day that he made himself be dead?

Despite the physical ache and having been pushed to his absolute emotional limit, though, he didn't feel that way now. Even without being lost to the anger or bloodlust or the euphoria that followed satisfying them. If anything, their itchy nag was distracting. What he wanted right now was... mostly just more of this.

His occasional vocalizations drew to a close and he rested, watching her as he'd watched the night sky.

"...She was my sister. You know what that is? She was someone... close..." Skyler crossed her arms and drew them in over her chest, in a sort of mime of physical proximity, "To me," and was met with a slow repetition of the motion before a muted hum and affirmative nod.

"You would have liked her. It was hard not to. Had her shit together, knew how to deal with people. She was an asshole sometimes, but in the right ways. Would get you going right up until you wouldn't be sure whether she was fucking with you or not and then make you laugh. Not sure how she turned out right in that house, but Lauren was my shooter. And I didn't even know it until mom finally told me, 'Get out and don't come back,' and Lauren was like, 'Nah actually, she's coming with me, and you can forget about hearing from either of us.' I was, uh."

Skyler's words stopped working for a bit, which was embarrassing, considering the only ones she was speaking to were herself, the air, and a guy who comprehended a fraction of them anyway. Which, shit, even with that, he'd either figured out already that she was a godawful mess, or he wasn't going to. She shrugged into the blankets,

"Mostly too busy being stupid or thinking she was too up herself being better to realize she cared before then. It's like. We could have been friends so much sooner if I got it, y'know?"

Adrian didn't. That was a near-guarantee. But he was listening with the gravity of being let in on something secret and direly important, which in itself made her fidget. Some part of her, defiant, wished that bunch of other Hunters would show up and eat her guts while she was apparently spilling them anyways, but nope, it was just the two of them.

"It was Laur and me when shit went down. Before, when Cat asked if I-" Tripped again. Starting over. "We were doing good. Keeping each other alive. Made it all the way to where we were supposed to be rescued. This was back when those CEDA fucks still had their operation running. By the time we got there it was... bad.

"Turned out we weren't the only ones evac-ing who made it there, but we were the only ones left, and not for the good reason. Was just five of their guys, pulled back as far as they could go, waiting on the convoy to come dig them out. Doctor or scientist they had out there calling shots, guy who was probably his assistant, medic, and a couple of those glorified mall cops they had on crowd control. All of them freaked like they were about to die.

"Of course they were like, 'Were you bitten? Have you been close to the infected?' Which, fucking yeah, what did they expect? We were as beat up and gnawed on as anyone else who fought their way there. Eventually they said, 'Alright, we're letting you in, but you're not getting anywhere near our evac until we've got you tested for this thing.'

"So they funnel us into this locker room, take our blood, and then we're just stuck waiting. But, like. It had been days since the first time either of us got bit, so we figured we had to be fine by then, right?"

He couldn't possibly still be paying attention to any of this. Christ. She'd spent the past however many minutes running her mouth like she was goddamn possessed. But when she stalled, frustrated and unfinished, she was jarred shortly afterward by an expectant, "Hmm?" followed in her surprised silence by a thoughtful grumble, then a shaky gesture outward from his own mouth accompanied by an additional, "Uhm?"

Shit.

"...Um. Finally they came back for us; doc, assistant, and both the guards. Right away they're trying to step between me and Lauren, and obviously I'm going, 'Don't fucking do that,' while we're both asking what's going on. Assistant starts in like, 'Calm down, we're trying to get everything sorted, you have to come back with us to the other room.'

"Didn't take long to realize they were only talking to me there, and I was the one they were boxing in back towards their setup. None of them would even get near Lauren, which is when it hit that something was wrong. And I'm pissed and panicking at the same time, trying to think of what to do, so I'm shoving the guard with her hand on me, yelling like, 'What the hell do you think's going on, look at her, your test's fucking busted, she's not fucking sick.'

"Which, did I know that? Nah. I didn't say it, but I couldn't help thinking too, oh shit, what if she is? Back then, none of us knew much of anything. Maybe a family thing, and I didn't tell them this either, but Laur was my half-sister. Folks were only just starting to find out there were people that caught the virus and don't turn, and those tests, they don't know the difference between someone who's going to change or not. Only way to actually know is to wait it out.

"Lauren because she was smarter was telling me that's what had to be happening, and the doc, he agreed with her. Seemed like she trusted it; said she'd probably do the same thing. I-I shouldn't have just bought that. But I did, at least for a minute, because when mall cop and assistant were leading me out, the other two and Lauren were just... talking.

"Couldn't have been two minutes after the door shut. They were taking me to the medic and hadn't even sat me down when I heard the shot.

"I don't remember everything that happened after that. I know I rushed the door, I know all three of them tried to hold me back, I know there was a lot of screaming, that Lauren wasn't answering me. And, uh."

Skyler sat up and began tracing a fidgety back-and-forth curve into a lingering wisp of snow on the shingles.

"...I killed them. The ones with Lauren, the ones who tried to drag me off the bastards. All of them. I didn't know who did it, or if anyone knew that was going to happen. Didn't matter. All that was really going on in my head was they decided I didn't get to see if my sister would have been okay, so I decided they didn't get to be alive anymore.

"I realized later that what I did was fucked. Christ, you don't even know why that's fucked. For all I know, it was one person that panicked and pulled the trigger, and the rest were just trying to stop me. Talking right now, I know that. If you threw me back in there, the same situation, would I still do it?"

She scoffed into the air.

"Yeah. Probably. I'm an angry, vengeful bastard who doesn't learn from anything.

"It was too late to save her, anyways. As soon as no one was in my way, I was trying to get her up off the floor to see what happened. I remember thinking 'oh my god, they shot Lauren in her head, am I hurting her by moving her, what if she's in a coma or can't walk, or-'... And, I mean, she was- she was obviously already dead; I had a lapful of my sister's brains. But that's not how your head's working when you're in it, you know? I. I. I."

Catching sight of Adrian startled her into wondering what she must look like, because he'd sat up as well and was staring with mouth slightly parted and hand half-reached. She didn't particularly want to know, either, feeling her muscles stiff and trembling, and that hated and much-too-frequent lately welling in her intact eye.

That was it. She was done, just about. "I was the only one to walk out of there when rescue came. No one asked why, so I didn't tell them. Now though I guess, uh. You-"

What happened next was... She had time to stop him, if she wanted. Being drawn in on with the care as if she were some wounded, defensive animal wasn't quite so weird when the one doing it was, well, also a wounded, defensive animal. Her eye clenched shut at about the same time as she felt first one and then another arm wrap around her back, and then the pressure of being pressed up against Adrian's furnace of a body.

Shit, shit, shit.

He was different than when he had met her.

The thought had come to Adrian before. In various forms, he'd been thinking it since he'd left his old nest to seek her out, lost, afraid and angry that she'd made him feel that way. Like this, though, with the weight of another person who had done so much to help him pressed up against him in shared intensity... It felt important that she know that.

Since being dragged away from the shattered image of himself, all through their time out here in the open air, it had occupied his mind on and off. What he'd thought had been the Before him; how he'd been when he'd first followed her, after so long of not questioning if he had the capability of interacting with another person outside of violence or fearful avoidance; even the him he'd been before the confrontation earlier, and more past hims than he could count. They all felt like they existed in that state of both him and not him, like to survive he'd had to pull their jagged pieces together into something else, and maybe he just did that forever.

One of his hands curled, gripping into her top coverings, making no effort to stop his own sniffling.

It was almost too much to bear to be safe like this. And. And from the way that she'd laid beside him and spoke like that. He... he hoped that he'd done something for her to feel safe that way, too.

She- At that point he did lift one arm to roughly wipe his face, leaning back slightly with a low sound, "asking" her in his own head. Was she, um, she at all? The actual words were confusing to him, but there was a vague, fuzzy way that he'd been categorizing her since seeing her, and he doesn't think he should have done that. Sometimes she seemed so much like himself, after all.

He didn't know how to ask that, but he'd do his best to commit it to his conscious thoughts that he couldn't actually know that by looking. Was there something else that he could call her by? He had a name, so maybe...

Nervously that this wouldn't work, he called for her attention again, then once he had it, gestured a few times inward. Toward himself. It did the job of conveying that he wanted to hear something from her.

"You?" she offered uncertainly, then when he repeated the motion tried again, "Adrian."

Adrian. Yes. His breath caught in his throat as he nodded, then, rocking slightly with anticipation, turned his motioning hand out toward her.

The pause and, "Me?" that she blurted out suggested surprise, but after that, she seemed to think quite hard, leaving Adrian to wonder if she was struggling to remember whatever it had been. But the moment passed, and she drew in a deep breath before returning with, "It's... Theo. My name. Theo."

Theo. Theo Theo Theo Theo-

A name. She had a name, just like he did. He was Adrian and she was Theo, they were both real, alive people and they were here together, and-

It took a while until he could stop looping that little sound around attempting over and over to say it back to her, clenching his gifted charm in the same hand he used to repeatedly motion. Eventually he managed to recall that there had been something else he'd meant, resting his gaze firmly on her. On Theo.

She was different now, too. Not just because his strange, shifting perception of her was less often monstrous or malignant. Did she see it? Sometimes she seemed scared too, by that changing. She'd taken some of the terror out of that for him, and... that's what he wanted to do for her.

That was okay? For him to try what he could to do that?

His question, while it couldn't have words, was answered in at least some small part by her eye trailing downward in a furtive glance toward his arm he'd moved, though she made no move of her own. Adrian returned it to its position wrapped around her middle, slid the two of them together, and believed that maybe, just maybe, there really was a chance that they would both be okay.

A/N: Well gang, it sure has been an... over a year now, hasn't it? For me, maybe for all of us. I said that I was sticking around though, and I meant it. Funny enough, after struggling with this chapter for so long, at least half of both this and the rewrite of Ch2 came to me in a rush over the course of the past month or so, which is wild because it was a hell of a month, too. Got COVID. Was in a car for 16 hours on a week-long trip. Hit my third decade on the rock. Part of the difficulty I think is that this was an emotionally-difficult one for me personally, which I hope comes through in my writing.

Thank you again to those of you who have stuck around all this time, as well. (Also to Kel, for beta reading this for me lol.) Seeing all of the comments and encouragement from those of you who have taken the time to let me know this fic means something to you has kept me going on many occasions, and I can't tell you how much it's appreciated. You keep going, too, wherever you are.

~Lyss