"I'm sure it's her," Vi whispers. Vander can feel the tension in her body, pressed against his on the narrow ledge they found to have a nice view over the meeting point. "It's Powder."

Fifteen or so feet below, there is the gangly figure of a teenager, perched on the central piece of the crossroad, pale calves exposed by ripped stripped pants and an asymmetric vest in a style similar to the one she had, four years ago, except this one fits her frame perfectly. She's bent over one of her shoes, maybe playing with the laces, though it looks like she's holding something. It's hard to say now that the last of the sun rays filtering through the Gray had vanished, only leaving only neons to pierce through the night, cutting away deep shadows and sharp lights, splashing harsh colors over cracked pavement, rusty pipes and leper walls.

The girl's right hand periodically moves away from whatever she's doing, fingers twitching, as if she's swatting an insect away. Except they are too deep into Zaun for that. At some point, she shook her head, cocked it to the side, then without warning looked up, prompting Vander and Vi to back away further into their hiding spot. For a second, it almost looked like she knew where to look.

"Okay," Vi suddenly says, "I'm going down."

He wants to hold her back, but he doesn't find the words for that, and she has already slipped off the ledge, out of reach.

"Be careful."

She gives him a thumbs-up and a wobbly smile and disappears behind a wall. She goes around the crossroad, as planned, so it doesn't look like she was spying on her sister before actually going to meet her upfront.

It's a few minutes that feel like hours until Vander spots her entering the circle of neon light shining over the crossroad. The girl that's probably Powder notices her almost immediately too, straightening her back, though she stays on her perch, looming a good foot over Vi. From his hiding spot, Vander can't hear what they are saying, but it seems polite enough for now, if not the heartfelt reunion he knows Vi secretly hoped for. She does take a step closer at some point, Vi, and Powder leans back, one leg coming up to keep her sister away. She had been doodling on the skin of her own calf, flashy pink contrasting with her paleness, revealed by the fluorescent light that highlights her motion.

Vander can't hear them, alright, but their bodies speak a language of their own. Powder's movements are jerky, sometimes it almost seems like she's cowering away, other times she lunges forward, almost hopping off her perch. She's all long limbs and sharp edges that go with the shards of a high-pitched, raspy voice that travels up to his ears – a ball of nerves, faking confidence, poses that she can't maintain for more than a handful of seconds before she gets carried away with what she's saying, hearing, seeing.

Vi is calmer, standing in front of her sister but a prudent two feet away, arms slightly outstretched in an invitation, or maybe just a reassurance that she is unarmed. Vander can see the tension in the line of her shoulders all the same, in the way she's unconsciously leaning forward while one of her legs is behind the other, hips very slightly turned in what is reminiscent of a boxing stance. She's on her guard, even if all her attention seems to be turned towards Powder.

It's when Vander shifts slightly on the ledge, one of his legs starting to fall asleep, that out of the corner of his eye he spots… something. A motion, maybe, or- His eyes quickly scan the surroundings as his heart rate picks up, rushing of blood in his ears, hands automatically flexing into fists.

He spots it again, a single reddish light on another corner overlooking the crossroad. Revealed by the feeble light of a distant neon, he can see the shape of long fingers holding what he can only guess is a cigarette – or maybe a cigar, given its girth – the line of an arm and shining embellishments on a garment. Going higher- and the figure shifts, just a little- Just enough to reveal another red point.

The realization that it's an eye feels like a cold stone dropping into his stomach. Especially since he feels like it's staring right at him.

One last glance towards the girl down there, and Vander is leaving his hiding spot. His body leads the way of its own accord, and he realizes belatedly he's trying to reach the owner of the eye – Silco, of course, who else? The look of that burning eye is branded onto Vander's retina.

But when he gets to where he last saw the eye and the cigar light… He's sure this is the spot, it's the same cornerstone that's jutting a bit from the building it belongs to – but there is no one there.

"Who's Silco to you?"

He halts his motion with his spoon halfway up to his mouth.

"… What? Where- where is this coming from?"

Vi is conscientiously pushing all the fish bits to the side of her bowl, looking very absorbed by her meal without actually eating any of it.

"Powder told me quite a lot about him", she continues. "Especially since our views… collided so much. Last time I saw him, I thought… I thought he wanted to kill all of us. And especially you." She finally drops her spoon and the pretense of being interested in her food. "Why did he help free us, then?"

Vander pushes back his own bowl, his appetite suddenly gone. He has no answer to that question himself, nor to the first one, really. He knows what Silco was to him, even if that, it comes with its own load of contradictions. Now, though? He has no fucking clue. He only knows he wishes he could see him, talk to him, once again. Just so he knows what the hell is going on, with their sudden freedom, with Powder too, of course. Just for that.

"Vander?"

"We were close, once," he reluctantly answers. "We had a falling out. Years ago."

Vi just keeps staring at him, and suddenly he doesn't find it in himself to lie anymore.

It came easily, before, when people asked him what the hell happened to his partner – "he got spooked and fled" – and, later, when the kids bugged him about his previous love life – "no, I never got anything serious; never had the time for that, you know?". One day, they asked who was the man in that one photograph they found, the one from their revolutionary days. "No one important. Just a comrade, some guy we used to work with," he said after he was done admonishing them from going through his stuff. None of them dared to push it further, nor to point out that he had his arm around Silco's waist, looking down at him with a cocky half-smile.

"I betrayed him," he admits in one breath. "Hurt him-" I almost killed him, kept my hands around his neck and his head underwater, but he can't say that to Vi, can he? "-and pushed him away from the Lanes."

Vi nods, seemingly digesting the information. He hopes she will drop the matter.

"Powder said you're the reason his face looks like that. The…" She gestures vaguely towards her own face. "Scars, spooky weird eye. You know."

Vander feels his chest constrict in a weird way. He remembers Silco squatting in front of him, fiery eye feeling like it was searing a hole through his very core, and the way he touched his scars when he talked about the river toxins, the way his voice almost cracked. It all sounded so much like an accusation.

"We fought in the Pilt," Vander cautiously says, still not quite looking Vi in the eyes. "It was even more polluted then than it is now, it caused infection if it got into an open wound. This might be what happened."

(He tries to not think about how painful that must have been, too.)

"How close?" Vi asks then, and it takes him a few seconds to figure out what exactly she's referring to.

"We worked together," he admits – not a lie, not the truth either. What they had, in his eyes at least, wasn't about work, or even about a dream. In hindsight, that might have been part of the problem. "The way the Lanes are now… this is partly his doing."

Partly, eh? This was Silco's dream, that and so much more, from the very beginning. For him, at first, it was only a means through which to imagine a better life. Then, when life bled all over dreams and hope, it became a way to channel his anger. A reason to fight and hurt and kill, and still be able to look at himself in the mirror afterward. And be admired for it.

"Were you… friends?" Vi asks cautiously, before sighing and rubbing at her face. "Ah, shit, that sounds childish."

"Ah, it's a little childish, maybe," he lies, and tries to smile, and he has to bite his tongue so as not to say "Friends, no. But so much more". He truly misses those days, he realizes. He misses Silco.

When, two days later, Vi comes back from visiting her sister with an invitation for him, this time… he can't find a sufficient reason not to go.

He has trouble believing this is real.

That he's standing at the back of the Last Drop again, on one of the small balconies looking over the street there. Precisely, it's the one where he used to smoke his pipe, when the kids had settled down for the night and he was taking his break before going down to man the bar again. And if the rest of the bar had changed – the music too loud and the inside lights harsh – this little corner hasn't.

Above all, he has trouble believing that it's Silco standing on the next balcony, forearms resting on the railing as his eyes scan the city below. A thin trail of smoke rises from his cigar. There is the glint of a knife at his belt.

The meeting point, this time, was the Last Drop itself.

The back of it, precisely, that back street crowded with pipes and emergency ladders – however, Vander couldn't help but look at the front of his old home first. In the shadows, half-blinded by the neons forming that high-strung eye, sharp lines stabbing into the pupil of the old sign, he felt awfully out of place, and he wondered how much of what he knew had changed beyond recognition. He wondered, too, if that was how Silco had felt, during all these years of exile.

He thought he would meet with Powder in turn, that after her sister, his girl had asked to see him again. He dreads that conversation. Powder has always been so… alien, to him. He doesn't understand her sensibility, and much less the way she sometimes flinches and turns to look at nothing at all. Vi knew how to take care of her, though. He fears how things turned out in her absence, and what Silco would have told her about him. He fears she won't even want him to try and connect with her again.

Maybe he should have felt relieved to realize it wasn't Powder waiting for him. He would have, probably, if he hadn't come face to face with a ghost, a familiar face he doesn't quite recognize only because he hurt him, years ago.

There is barely a four foot between them, five tops, and sure, there are the two railings, on his left and on Silco's right, but he could easily jump over those. He guesses that, then, Silco would as easily stab him, maybe in the neck, or maybe in the stomach or the leg, somewhere non-lethal, but that would make him lose his balance all the same and topple to the ground, twenty feet below.

"How was prison?" Silco begins, startling him out of his thoughts.

"Uh… Small. Boring. Cold. And…" He hesitates, then figures out he might as well continue: "Eye-opening, in a way. It made me angry again."

Silco glances at him, but Vander would be damned to guess what he's thinking right now. He would have every right to be frightened by that statement, or at the very least wary, Vander thinks. Silco took the brunt of his anger before, and more than once, though nothing worse than that day by the river. But he never showed any trace of fear, and he isn't now. (The railings and the twenty-foot drop between them don't count. That's just common sense, given their history.) No, instead, that glint in his sea-green eye, looks almost like… satisfaction.

I'll show you who you really are.

"Good."

"Good?" Vander repeats, raising a brow.

"Yes. Less likely to cut another deal with fucking Pilties now, are you?"

Vander nervously thinks about the Sheriff, and yet another deal. Does Silco know? No, he wouldn't let him get even close if he did. Right?

"Yes," he pushes through, his throat suddenly dry.

If he tells him the truth there and now, what will happen? Will he get sent back immediately to Stillwater? Or would the Enforcers disregard Silco's demands now that they have a trusty way to get rid of him without dirtying their hands?

Will Silco spare Vi, at least for Powder's sake?

For his girls, and for them only – he tells himself – he can't risk telling him about the deal. That doesn't stop the familiar feel of guilt from swelling beneath his ribs.

The silence stretches out, and Vander is searching for words he doesn't have. He can't tell Silco the truth, this will have to be another lie to add to the wrongs between them… but there is one day he can safely, honestly, say he regrets. It's the next best thing, he figures.

His voice sounds distant to his own ears.

"I mean it, what I said at the cannery. It... wasn't because I thought it was what you wanted to hear-"

"It wasn't," Silco cuts him off.

"Yeah, I... Got that. But really. I'm sorry. What I did... I had never forgiven myself. Thought about it a lot. At night. At times I wished I could go back to before... Before it happened. Before I tried to–" (He has to force the word out, but he owes Silco that much, at the very least.) "–kill you."

"Hmm-mh. And yet you never even came to check if I was, you know. Alive."

"You would have killed me."

Silco turns to him at that, and Vander would swear he saw surprise flickering across his face before he carefully schools his features into neutrality again.

"You really believe that? Hum, yes, I guess it makes sense... That's how you would have reacted if our roles were reversed, is that right?"

Vander frowns, confused.

"You wouldn't have?"

"What?"

"Killed me."

"No. Probably not." Silco slowly exhales the smoke from his cigar toward the sky, watching it dissolve amongst the Gray. "Unless you tried to finish the job, of course."

Vander watches his profile in silence for a while. On this side – Silco's right – he can almost pretend nothing happened. He still looks so much like the man he knew, from all these years ago. He's also still really damn hot, but Vander is not dwelling on that particular line of thought right now. Even if the fitted clothes don't help. He forcefully drags his eyes from Silco's narrow waist and tight little ass back to his face.

There are more lines there, of course, and gray hair at his temples, but Vander can almost imagine he was there to see them appear. Imagine, too, that it was him that shaved the undercut for the first time, just as he used to cut Silco's hair whenever it grew past his shoulders, back then. Right now, he wishes this all was true. He knows painfully well it isn't, and that it's all his fault.

He wonders what would have happened, if he followed what his heart wanted, after that day. If he had set out to search for Silco, to apologize – try to right his wrongs. If he hadn't been a selfish coward. Would it have been possible to have things revert to how they were before, then? Probably not. But then they would be there, on a balcony similar to this one, or a street, or in a room or whatever, having a similar conversation – and it wouldn't have taken them so many fucking years to get to this point. There wouldn't be so much ash smothering the ruins of what they once shared.

(How things were before. His mind flashes back to countless arguments – long after the Last Drop doors had closed, amidst the thick cigarettes smoke, the stench of booze, sweat, and puke, amidst the dark – Silco's voice, spitting venom, his words cutting precisely where it hurt most, and the dull thud of flesh against flesh when Vander hit – and he forcefully pushes the thoughts away once again.)

"Silco?"

"Hmm?"

"Your eye… it's my fault, right? I figured out as such, from what you said- and Powder said that to Vi too, but…"

"It's from that day, yes. And her name is Jinx." He takes a long drag from his cigar before speaking again. "You split the skin under my eye and toxins got in. Never get into the Pilt with an open wound, that's one of the first lessons your elders taught you too, right?"

"Yeah." He then can't help but add: "I never intended that. Just so you know"

"I do know. That's not your style." He turns towards Vander again, leaning against the railing. His bad eye glows red, just like the lit end of his cigar. He takes a step closer and, slowly, extends one hand over the railings until his fingertips brush against Vander's vambrace. "Did yours get infected too?"

"Yes. A bit."

He does his best to resist the urge to pull away as Silco slips one finger under the thick leather. His skin is cold, his touch impossible to ignore.

"Why do you hide it?" There is a beat of silence as Vander searches for an answer, and finds none he can bear to say out loud. Silco continues: "Did you try to forget about me?"

"I could never forget about you, Sil."

"Don't call me that."

"Silco. Sorry. It's the truth, though."

He tries to hold the gaze of those mismatched eyes, feeling his throat go dry.

"So, you did try to forget." It's not a question. Vander stays silent. "How else could you know for sure?"

"I loved you."

Silco barks a laugh, sharp and bitter, and his eyes dart to the side.

"Yeah, sure."

Vander has no fucking clue what to add to that. It is the truth, he remembers acutely what he felt, back then, but he knows just as much it doesn't look like it, not one bit. You don't hit the person you love, and you don't hold them underwater. You don't almost kill them.

For one heartbeat, he considers asking Silco if he did too – if he did love him, then – before realizing he lost that right amongst the river and the blood.