Anybodys was heading home after a session of spying on the Jets with a triumphant spring in his step rather than the sullen slinking through the shadows he usually did while trying and only mostly succeeding in shoving down the memories and residual sensations that he had started watching them to distract himself from.

Those memories definitely weren't even close to the surface of his mind now that their drawn out war against the Hawks, their rival gang consisting of low lives who wanted to take their hard earned territory from them, seemed to have taken its decisive and inevitable shift to the Jets being on top.

They would have gotten there eventually no matter what, of course, since they were objectively more skilled at fighting and loyal to each other and willing to defend their territory as the only source of security they had in the world besides each other, but Anybodys' actions of using his slipping in and out of the shadows skills to spy on the Hawks, figuring out that they were planning on bringing a gun to the next fight, stealing it from right underneath their noses, and bringing it to the Jets' meeting place outside the shop they called Doc's shop right before they got there had definitely sped things along and saved the Jets a lot of time and effort and harm.

The Hawks had been so freaked out when they'd realized that the Jets had their gun, and the Jets hadn't really known what hit them either but they'd used it to force them to agree to never intrude on their turf again.

It had been awesome even in comparison to the other fights, where the clobbering of the Hawks by the Jets had usually gotten cut short by the coppers shoving their noses where they didn't belong.

Fucking coppers...

Anybodys' longing to be in the gang if he didn't have responsibilities at home that he admittedly had been shirking a little bit to help them out with the Hawks was still there, but it was a little easier to deal with now that they owed a huge victory to him.

He had proved himself more than capable of contributing in the rough and tumble, die hard life that came with being in a gang, of providing support and protection to the guys in it, even if he wasn't able to get some of that for himself or participate in any of the badass fighting himself.

...He should probably pick the slack he'd been dropping to spend more time around them and help them back up, though... money was still tight to the point that the metaphorical rope had snapped and was gonna send the piano it had been holding up down on them if he didn't get them out of the way, and Antonia and Toby still needed money and necessities and stuff no matter how painful and dangerous some of the stuff he had to do to get it was... like those... sessions with clients that had been the reason he had started trying to distract himself with the Jets...

The Jets were lucky that they didn't have to worry about stuff like that or do stuff like that... they all loved to prove themselves so much, understandably so, but he had proven his capabilities more than any of them- wait why was his mom standing outside the apartment with one of her fake plastic wine glasses of vodka looking distressed in more of an active way than the passive resignment and sullenness that always came with one of her all too frequent fights with his dad?

And she usually drank at the kitchen table in the wind down while his dad unfortunately temporarily stormed out of the apartment, so the neighbors wouldn't see, as if they weren't already all way more intimately familiar with their frequent fighting with each other and fucking other people than they would ever want to be because of how goddamn noisy it all was.

They could probably recite them almost as well as he and Antonia and Toby could at this point, the classics like the one about how his dad wouldn't live up to his promises to start his own car repair business and provide for his family and make something of himself, the infidelity one, the everyone in my life warned me to not tie myself down with you one, even the rarer ones that were sometimes more vicious but good for breaking up the banal monotony like did you just call me by my sister's name and I could've made something of myself.

Anybodys approached her cautiously, slipping out of the shadows so she could see him, and immediately felt his blood run cold and his normal defenses to keep emotions that were too negative and tough to deal with and still function mostly crammed behind the long standing wall in his mind go into overdrive before failing as she looked at him, way more actively distressed than usual and a little accusatorily but mostly with an understanding guilt.

"Where've you been running off to- I'm sorry, it doesn't matter, not any more anyway."

He got closer to her, looking into the apartment for Antonia and Toby and wondering why it was even more of a wreck in there than usual once he didn't find them, like a hurricane had gone through just their apartment and left the rest of Manhattan alone for some reason.

"What happened? What's going on?"

She looked at him without her expression changing much for a long moment before taking a large swig of the vodka, as if she was trying to push something back in her mind just like he was, but she had an aid to help her.

"The social workers came by, said that Antonia had been caught stealing food and said that there wasn't any in the apartment. After making a mess of things they decided that a group home for youth would be the best place for them to be. I can't entirely say that I disagree."

As his mom took another large sip, Anybodys expected the years of stuff behind the wall to be let loose by this revelation that he had completely failed his siblings, that they were god knows where being treated god knows how because all the stuff he'd done for them that had necessitated the wall in the first place hadn't been enough after he had started slipping recently with the Jets, with the... sessions with clients that had been a tragic necessity but had just driven him to neglecting his duties, his responsibilities in the end... but, if anything, it seemed to have been solidified and strengthened for some reason.

He felt empty for once, not like he was trying to keep a tempest of emotion behind an ever more strained barrier but like that barrier would be able to hold not just it but everything out forever, like the storm would now be left out in the cold forever and not even be able to slip small and sometimes significant bits of debris through like it usually could.

That was probably the best possible outcome, because he knew even without being able to feel it that the hurricane had been fueled to be so much bigger than its quite significant size before, to be so much larger than him, and it he was exposed to it at all no resistance or inner strength would be enough to prevent him from being subsumed entirely.

His siblings had been taken by the fucking goddamn waste of air social workers because of him, he had failed them, the worst possible scenario that would have gotten the storm raging even worse than its baseline from just the thought of it before had happened, and he was somehow able to be calm about it.

"I've gotta get outta here."

...Huh, he was still talking like his normal self instead of his new mercifully dead inside self, weird.

Not that he disagreed with what he had just said, he didn't want to test his luck with his apparent new ability to conquer his emotional reactions to things by sticking around the site of most of his memories of Antonia and Toby, and nothing had been keeping him here besides them and maybe a little bit of complicated sympathy towards his mom even though he was angry with her for never leaving his dad.

If he could somehow stop himself from collapsing entirely from learning what he had just learned, he could do anything including figuring out where to go from here.

He almost instinctively spun back around to face his mom as he heard her call him back quietly, like her voice was being suppressed just like his emotions were.

"Wait... I should tell you something. I can tell I might not get another opportunity to."

Anybodys stepped closer to her, waiting for this new revelation that could never be nearly as bad as the one she had just given him.

"Do you remember when you asked me who your real father was, and I said 'I dunno, you could be anybodys'?'"

...Of course he remembered that, he had decided to make Anybodys his new name because he liked the idea of there being someone out there who would care for him in a non transactional, unconditional way and also none of the guy names he could think of sounded as cool as that one?

Antonia and Toby had called him that so many times, had she really been so distracted with her all too frequent fights with his dad and trying to make ends meet that she hadn't noticed, or did she think it was based on something else?

He had known it was bad, but not that bad.

"...That rings a bell, yeah."

She swirled the fake glass in her hands a little, taking another large sip and sighing guiltily and forlornly.

"That wasn't true, I just wanted to alleviate some of the pain he was putting you through by letting you think you're not related to him. He's your father, Antonia and Toby have different fathers. I'm sorry."

...

?

!

"Why are you telling me this just now?!"

The dulled pain in her expression only increased, and Anybodys thought about stopping her as she poured what was clearly not just her second way too full glass of vodka into the plastic cup but ultimately decided not to.

Clearly they both needed some vices right now.

"I don't want you to turn out like him. He's so... stubborn about keeping things the way they are and not doing anything to make them better even when he'll swear until he's blue in the face that he's going to live up to his plans to improve them any day now, and it's the system or something else outside of him that's keeping him down. 'The system's been keeping him down for years now. Sometimes it's the man, sometimes it's his boss, sometimes it's the idiots who wouldn't know what the market needs if it slapped them in the face."

She laughed slightly, grimly, before taking another sip.

"You've never been like that, you've been stubborn in a better way, where you see what needs to be done and do it even when that kind of responsibility should never have been placed on your shoulders. Until recently, when it's like a switch flipped and you've just been running off god knows where doing god knows what. You never should have had a fraction of the responsibilities you've had, I have no right to be angry with you for shirking them, but the sudden change worries me. I don't know if something happened to you, I just... don't be him. Please. Don't point fingers at 'the man' when you get knocked down, just pick yourself up again."

She gave another slight, grim laugh and took a larger sip.

"I haven't been the best about following that advice, don't be me either."

The emotions were starting to come back a little, Anybodys could tell because he could feel a fraction of his fury at her for comparing him to that goddamn deadbeat waste of air and fear that she was right to make the comparison.

Even just the fraction felt strong enough to be threatening to force him to his knees, and he desperately fought to beat it back.

"Oh, don't worry, I won't."

Anybodys spun back around, regretting that he had stopped to hear that additional stuff she had had to say and trying and luckily succeeding a little to reinforce the wall.

He couldn't believe that half the blood rushing through his veins was his dad's.

Part of him wanted to make a cut and get rid of it, and he wasn't feeling particularly kindly towards his mom's right now either.

He stopped in an alley and leaned against a wall, fighting with all his strength that he had clearly been lacking in recently to allow this to happen to his siblings to get everything back behind the wall.

He wanted the emptiness back desperately, more than he wanted to not be related to his dad, more than he wanted to have that comforting lie that anyone out there could be the person who would care about him in a non transactional and unconditional way back, more than he even wanted Antonia and Toby and the chance to prove himself capable of protecting and providing for them back.

More than he wanted to punch those social workers and the man who apparently really was his dad and the Hawks and himself in the face.

The storm had been brewing in him all his life, and shoving it back to deal with his multitude of real life problems, the problems he had now failed to keep a handle on, had always been so exhausting and almost as painful as the emotions he needed to beat back.

Complete emptiness, a complete lack of emotions and ability to just focus on what he needed to focus on with clear logic and a clear head, would be a relief, especially considering that there wouldn't be many positive emotions for him to miss out on with the cards that had been dealt to him.

Eventually, he managed to reconquer that nirvana of emptiness, and he left the alley, not knowing where he would go from here and not particularly caring... hey, was that Tony?

Author's Note: Anybodys' mom is portrayed as being more harsh and cruel in West Side of Horrors than she is here. This is the fanfiction version of a retcon, I've decided to portray her in a more nuanced way since writing that fic. For anyone who reads it after this one just pretend that that part aligns with this fic.