Archive of Our Own

By the time the cracked glass of the watch on his wrist flickered over to midnight, two pairs of neon green zeros blinking at him, Thomas had been in Paradise City for three whole days.

Seventy-two hours. This time, he had thought yesterday, ordinarily would’ve been spent hunched over assignments. Fluorescent light highlighting the ink he would have blotted with the heel of his palm, staining his rumpled shirt. Papers scattered everywhere and notebooks splayed open as exhaustion dragged his thoughts into the mud. Forgot to eat, or sleep. The purple crescents beneath his eyes would have darkened into bruises. The list of people Thomas couldn’t disappoint was short, but it pressed on him all the same with the density of stone and his own name sitting, bolded, right at the very top—meaning his room rotted messy and his hair greased over. The blinds drawn for days on end, dust particles dancing in the stagnant air until his tan skin turned. He’d be excavated. A bog body of a man, propped upright at a desk.

What was happening wasn’t anything usual, however, because Thomas wasn’t in his dorm at all. Thomas was not even in his city, the safe haven. And to be completely honest, Thomas had never felt more alive than he did now: standing on the roof of a cadaveric building in a decaying, deserted city with three other people, two friends and one… not-friend (though he really did think of Mr Flux like a friend), laying out sleeping bags beneath the night sky. Guarding a campfire spitting out orange sparks into the dark.

Beside them, the staircase groaned with the wind. They’d barricaded it with scavenged stone and some iron, leaving only a narrow slit beneath the ground and the walls on the side in order to trap Decayed—real life zombies.

Somewhere far below, there was a shuffle.

It would keep them out while they rested.

“Everything good on your side?” Mr Flux’s monotonous voice asked on the other side of the trap. The click of a lever followed, the scrape of stone shifting into place behind the door.

“Yep! Working like a charm,” Thomas chirped back. He crouched down to peer through the thin opening. Torchlight flickered across Mr Flux’s face, briefly catching the purple of his irises and the long scar coursing beneath one of his eyes. Thomas offered him a grin. Mr Flux gave a single nod in return.

Well, at least he acknowledged it!

Thomas had noticed Mr Flux—Fluixon—wasn’t the type of guy to give away smiles. Or any type of facial expression, for that matter, that could show anything other than indifference or mild annoyance. He didn’t mind much. There was Magic, whose grin split her face so, so wide that the corner of her eyes crinkled every time. And Stella, with her loud laughter and her head thrown back. They teamed up, quite often, teasing him about his perpetually unbrushed hair (“So you packed a first aid kit and no hairbrush? Dude, I expected better.”) and the fraying hem of his shirt and bandana (“Once we get out, we’ll give you some fashion advice,”) no matter how many times he tried to get them to stop (“You guys are so annoying, you know that, right?” “Are we, Stella?” “Us? We could never.”)

Thomas never had any siblings, but according to what Stella had told him when she’d confessed why she’d come to Paradise City in the first place, he assumed it would feel a lot like this. 

Stella and Magic were easy to be around. Mr Flux, not so much, but Thomas liked him anyway. He genuinely enjoyed him for what he was, he didn’t need him, or his company, to be anything else to recognize just how goddamn awesome he was, steady, and competent, too! He knew what he was doing, moving through the ruins. Contrary to Thomas.

Again, he didn’t mind. Honest to God. He had long learned to be at ease with callousness. Distance meant safety, and only there could security prosper.

“Okay,” Mr Flux straightened with a huff and stepped closer. His boots scuffed against the cracked tar. “We should be set for the night. See that gap?” It took Thomas a few seconds to realize the question was meant for him. He followed the line of Mr Flux’s finger. “Just… stick your katana through there and you’ll be able to hit them without getting grabbed. I’ll get the other side, and then we can—Yeah, I think we’ll swap with Magic and Stella later on.”

“Oh, like a shift thing! That’s smart.”

“Yeah, sure. That.”

Thomas reached for the Japanese sword strapped to his hips. The handle was cold as ice, freezing the lines of his palm. It sent an electric shiver racing down his spine. A grin split his lips, cracked by dehydration and labor, and every finger of his bandaged hand thrummed and buzzed like a live wire with want. The need to act. Thomas was thrilled.

“Shouldn’t we, uh, blow out some of these?” he suggested, fingertips worrying at the ray skin of the hilt as his gaze drifted toward the glow of the torches. “We already have a big setup here going, and maybe the light could attract the Decayed. Like at the church, you know.”

Mr Flux hummed. “That’s… not a bad idea, actually. We don’t need this much light.”

Thomas felt a flush of pride spread through his chest, warming the back of his neck. Hell yeah, he was useful. But before either of them could move, a voice rang out from behind them.

“Nope! We can’t do that!”

A second later, Stella appeared between them, her thick braids of tightly woven peach hair swinging over her shoulders as she moved. She skidded to a stop, throwing her hands up. Dirt streaked her fingers, Thomas noticed, packed into the lines of her palms which was evidence of the small patches of soil she insisted on tilling beside their sleeping bags, or maybe from climbing up the building. He couldn’t remember precisely. As aforementioned, many things had happened.

Thank God he had his journal to keep track of things. Its weight was comforting in the pocket of his jacket.

“We can’t do that,” Stella repeated. “Because what if other people come in for shelter or something? Or for us? Like—the weird white scientist guy you were searching for.” She waved to Mr Flux. It got his attention. “You know, the other people from the bus. Spidey, for example! They won’t know we’re here if we put the lights out.”

“It’s a matter of two torches only,” Mr Flux replied evenly, although he seemed to consider her for a second. He clicked his tongue. Thomas noticed it was something he did when he was thinking, not when he was irritated. “The campfire will still be visible from any decent vantage point, if there’s any. We have to factor in the Decayed.”

Stella’s shoulders fell with a frustrated breath. A crease between the brows, her mouth pressed into a stubborn line. Thomas guessed it had something to do with her sister, what she’d told him yesterday night. Thomas was fairly good at that—watching, he meant. The perks of being a student, and spending hours nitpicking.

He quickly jumped in. “If you want, you can relight when you take the second… uh… ‘trap shift’, I guess, with Magic.”

“Hey, who said you and Flux get the first shift?”

“I did,” Mr Flux answered at the same time Thomas said, “Mr Flux did,” jerking a thumb at him.

He threw him a look and Thomas smiled bashfully.

“Well! I can do the first shift too.” Stella planted her hands on her hips. A proud grin tugged at her lips, her chin tilting upward.

“I… don’t doubt you can,” Mr Flux started slowly. He already looked tired. He often looked very tired. Thomas suspected they (Magic, Stella, and him) had something to do with it.

“It kinda sounds like you do.”

“I really don’t.”

“You absolutely do.”

“No.”

“Yuh-uh.”

“Listen, why don’t you ask Magic what she thinks?”

Mr Flux tipped his chin toward the sleeping bags, and Thomas and Stella leaned in unison. Magic’s spill of blue and black split dyed hair fanned across the fabric, her face almost disappearing in the mess of it. Her eyes were firmly shut and the nylon rustled with the steady rise and fall of her breathing. Gone to the world.

Stella whipped back to them with a sigh and narrowed her eyes at Mr Flux. If looks could kill, he would have made a very impassive corpse.

“... I don’t think she’s going to be helping much,” he offered after a few beats of silence, awkwardly patting the woman’s shoulder.

Stella flung her arms in the air. “You think!”

Their eyes met. It only took this one glance for them to dissolve into laughter. It came out a bit weak, clearly worn down by the late hour and the new scrape of Thomas’ throat after running around and shouting all day but there nonetheless as he bent forward, clutching Stella’s shoulder for balance when she doubled over too. Mr Flux turned his back on them with a lift and fall of the shoulders Thomas interpreted as a sigh, along with a small mutter about noise and being tired, people and some other unintelligible thing. It kind of tugged at Thomas’ sore heartstrings, this indifference, but it was better that way. At least that’s what he told himself. 

If Thomas was ever to be infected, and a fever or something of the sorts hollowed him out, Mr Flux had agreed he wouldn’t think twice about doing what needed to be done. Not like Thomas, who would hesitate with Magic and Stella, even 4C and Spidey, the guy at the church he met for barely a few seconds. He’d search their face to see one last flicker of themselves, because he obviously couldn’t do anything right enough, or be good enough for anything worthy of note. He had to care.

And when Thomas cared, he had a tendency to care a whole fucking lot, too. Both hands and heart and all that stuff.

He thinks he wouldn’t hesitate to kill Mr Flux either, because Mr Flux didn't seem to care as much as him or Magic or Stella, so why would he? He clearly expected Thomas to think that, but there obviously was a hesitancy to the thought itself. An uncomfortable tremor. Because again, he cared so much, and Mr Flux had stuck with him since the beginning, or Thomas had stuck to him, more like, and Mr Flux had begrudgingly accepted it  (“Be careful when you go down the—Thomas.” “You already know how to use—an assault rifle, am I hearing that correctly? Ha. Smart cookie.) He couldn’t quite make the difference between practicality and friendship.

Thomas just had… to get rid of that hesitation, he guessed. File it down. If he could.

It left a metallic aftertaste at the back of his tongue he wished—and really hard did he wish—he could swallow down.

(He couldn’t, but living in open acknowledgment of one’s own incapacity is a self-tied noose, so Thomas will do the second thing he’s good at aside from watching, which is pretending.)

Stella trailed after Mr Flux with another indignant protest, and within moments the two of them were bickering again, the latter toying with the final stones of the trap. Their silhouettes crossed and recrossed in the firelight. Thomas drifted away from them toward the sleeping bags and the passed out shape of Magic, laying between two young oak trees that had forced themselves up through cracks in the rooftop asphalt. 

Beyond them, the skyline stretched so, so very wide. A jagged mouth of broken concrete and skeletal steel. Destroyed buildings rising in uneven spires until they vanished into the sullen clouds that smothered the moon. Vines swallowed their facades with ivy threading through the shattered windows, wrapping balconies and panes of broken glass in leaden green. Maybe it was one of the people on the bus who did so. Or maybe even people before them. There probably were a lot of people before them.

In the dead of night, under the spill of stars like pinpricks through a vast tapestry, the buildings looked like sleeping giants, and the city didn’t feel dead at all, Thomas thought, with the heavy-footed lumber of Decayed through the streets, the flickering of lamplights shining on abandoned cars. 

Everything was kept in amber at the exact moment of collapse. No matter how terrifying it was and the horror of it all, there was some kind of beauty to it. Actually, scratch that, it was starkly beautiful.

Cloistered in his room, Thomas had never seen much of the world beyond his city walls. Not even beyond his textbooks, to be fully honest. He hadn’t known it looked like this, or smelled like this, smoke and ivy. The landscape was something, yes, a ramshackle sprawl of ruins, and yet Thomas was standing there. He couldn’t help but feel like he had made the right choice.

If the world was made of nights like these, on this rooftop with a ragtag group of people, or survivors, with half-alive things at every corner—adventures like these—then he wanted to see more of it. Putting aside the assignments and the money that would crumple and the everything else.

One critique Thomas had about ‘The World’, however, was the cold wind. February dragged its fingers beneath his collar and slipped through his hair, lifting brown strands off his forehead. The altitude didn’t help. He shivered, drawing his jacket tighter around himself. Gripping the lapels, tugging it closer. They could’ve added more wood to the fire. It didn’t linger long, though.

The blood warmed him up quick.

(Thomas didn’t see it coming. None of them did. It broke the stone, and of course it did, splitting right in the middle like a ribcage, because it was a crude barricade, built hastily, and it wasn’t going to last very long anyway. They hadn’t heard the groans. Stella and Mr Flux were bickering and Thomas was looking at the city. Why had he been looking at the city? What was so important about it, again?)

Murky. The color was murky. A swampy shade of red, muddied almost to grey, and it was everywhere. Soaked into the lines of his hands and splattered across his chest. Felt it through the fabric of all, all, all his jacket. It didn’t look like blood, but it had to be because it sprayed in violent arcs the moment his blade connected. It came out so fast, and so much. Its body struck the rooftop with a meaty hiss and a shriek tore from the Decayed's throat, like a rat caught beneath a heel. The sound it made was smaller than what Thomas expected.

(It, it, it. It didn’t look like a it. For the first time since they had stepped into Paradise City, Thomas saw a live Infected from up close. Close enough, at least, to see the ruptured capillaries webbing the veiled white of its eyes, and the sickly pallor of its skin stretched too tight over its cheekbones, and the blackened veins throbbing obnoxiously beneath the surface.

Despite all that, it looked human. A jaw hung wrong and tendons straining to hold it up, but they had once laughed with that mouth, the way Thomas had laughed with Stella mere minutes ago, and held something with those hands. Maybe they had stood on a rooftop somewhere arguing about torches. Maybe they had loved the way Thomas was beginning to love the fragile little shape he, Magic, Stella, and Mr Flux made. They were someone. Thomas had killed—someone.)

He barely registered the metallic clang of the katana as it struck the ground. It sounded dull, as if underwater. Yet, he could still feel it: the phantom weight of the hilt in his hand, and the rasp of the ray skin against his palm as he swung, swung, again, swung again and again.

He remembered the resistance most of all. The way the blade had caught against swollen flesh and he hacked through sinew and cartilage, each strike sending a shudder up his arm. He hadn’t stopped when they fell or when they tried to crawl. He kept swinging until the final stubborn stretch of distended skin tethering head to neck snapped with a wet schlack. The head rolled.

Thick rivulets of blood streamed down the length of his blade and when Thomas looked at it, his reflection stared back. A touch on his shoulder. He didn’t react to it. Hesitant, and light. Too gentle to be Mr Flux. Probably Stella. Maybe the ruckus had woken up Magic. There had been shouting, hadn’t there? There must have been.

(They had gotten so close to Stella. Seconds away from Mr Flux. Its hands—oh my God, its hands—had been outstretched with their fingers splayed, the nails cracked and rimmed in black. If he had hesitated a second more, Stella wouldn’t be there. Or Stella would be there, but she wouldn’t be Stella anymore. Or would she? How long did it take to turn? Weeks? Days, minutes, seconds? Did it hurt? Did you feel yourself slipping away, did you know? There was so much blood.

The severed head laid submerged in it, its jaw twitching. In the dim light, its dead eyes caught the fire’s glow as if it were still alive.)

“Thomas?” called someone. He couldn’t pinpoint the voice. “Thomas, can you hear me?”

He wasn’t sure. A droplet slid down his cheek, warm. For a desperate moment, Thomas wanted to believe it was a tear, but the consistency betrayed it. It clung as it traveled, so viscous and so, so, so slow, dragging the stench of iron and rot beneath his nose. The stench, Lord. Copper. Bile. Infection. Open flesh. It coated the back of his throat, crawled into his sinuses. He thought he might retch. Empty himself out next to the corpse.

Thomas was covered in blood.

“Hey. Thomas. Look at me. Can you do that?” Two heavy hands closed around his shoulders.

He recognized the feel of the pressure and the rough drag of calluses catching against the fabric of his jacket. The voice following it grainy, stripped of the usual distance. Mr Flux lurched him back to reality. Thomas’ gaze peeled itself away from the lone head lying in the wreckage of the trap, glassy eyes still open, and when he blinked, he was staring into searching purple irises. 

“Is he reacting?” Stella’s voice came from behind him. She had been the one calling his name before, he realized.

“Oh my God, he’s covered—”

That was Magic. She was awake, and alive. He heard a muffled thump and a startled squeak, and Thomas assumed someone, probably Stella, had nudged her to cut her off. She hadn’t needed to.

Thomas knew what she had been about to say. It was all he could feel right now.

“Yeah, he is,” Mr Flux answered, still looking at him. “Thomas, are you alright?”

(“Do you care about my safety?” “No.” “Oh. That’s fine, I guess.”)

“I don’t—I’m—” he stumbled.

Was he alright? As far as he knew, he was. He catalogued himself automatically. Fingers were attached and he assumed his arms could move, he didn’t feel any pain anywhere or the ache that could, eventually, accompany a bite. Physically, he was intact. Did he feel intact?

Did it matter?

“Is everyone else alright? Did anyone get hurt?”

He looked around. Stella stood, indeed, a few feet behind him, one hand with pale knuckles clamped tight around Magic’s elbow, heaving shallowly. Magic had drawn her jacket up to her chin against the wind, blue-and-black hair mussed by sleep. Not a scratch on them.

Mr Flux didn’t look injured either, bearing only a dark smear of blood on his cheek that had already begun to crust. He was frowning, though, at Thomas. Thomas couldn’t understand why. Thomas couldn’t understand much of anything right now. 

“Not my question,” Mr Flux’s mouth tightened. “I asked if you were—”

“We’re fine, Thomas,” Stella cut in. It sounded a little stern, and Mr Flux’s frown flicked toward her briefly. “You killed it before it could touch any of us. You did a good job.”

Thomas did good. He saved everyone. He did that. The same swell of pride, a mellow little thing, swallowed his entire chest, the same one as before when he’d suggested extinguishing the torches and Mr Flux had agreed. He was useful to them and this entire operation, and he had done something right. It was an accomplishment.

So why were his hands still shaking?

“Thomas?” Magic called.

He snapped his head toward her, or at least as much as Mr Flux’s grip would allow him anyway.

(It felt like mooring ropes, anchoring him there. Thomas had a hard time grasping where he was, right now.)

He forced his mouth into a grin at first, and then into a wide, bright smile. It wobbled at the edges. “I can’t believe I killed my first zombie,” he laughed. “That’s so cool, what the hell?!”

Magic and Stella stared at him, bewildered, until Stella broke the moment and snorted. It was so incredulous, and so ugly, that Thomas let another laughter of his own tumble out again, and that until Magic joined in too. There was a tremor that bordered on hysteria, yes, and definitely sounded manic, but Thomas filed that under exhaustion and the relief of being alive. They laughed there, on the rooftop, the same way Stella and him had laughed minutes before.

Between them lay a headless body still twitching and its blood spread in a dark halo around it. And they laughed. 

The sound echoed strangely in the open air, and the wind cut cold across Thomas’ soaked clothes, but the blood on his skin still radiated heat. The contrast split him in two. Frozen outside and feverish within. The before and the after. And they laughed, harder, around a dead body.

Everyone was alright and everything was fine. They were alive. Thomas was fine. Nothing had happened.

“Alright, alright, that’s enough,” Mr Flux’s voice cut through the laughter. He exhaled slow and released one of Thomas’ shoulders though the other remained firm. His brows were still furrowed as he searched his face. “We need to get you cleaned up. You’re—” Took in his jacket, his shirt, the sprays he could feel drying all over his face, his hands. “We don’t know what infected blood does with skin contact or—or if any got in your mouth, and… I’m not risking anything.”

(“I mean, if you don’t care, that means that if I’m infected you wouldn’t hesitate to kill me. Which is good, I guess!” “It is. It’s the whole reason I’m letting you tag along.”)

“I’ll go get the rags. You have them in your bags, right?” Magic asked Thomas, already moving toward the cluster of sleeping bags.

“Uh—Yeah, yeah they’re—they’re in the front pocket but—Mr Flux?”

“Yeah?”

“You have blood on your face too, you should get cleaned up. At least let me get you—”

“Jesus. Worry about yourself, Thomas. For once,” Mr Flux exhaled. He didn’t look at him when he said it. Thomas thought it stung harder than the recoil of the blades in his palms, the ringing tremor as he swung harder, and harder, and— “Stella, help me get rid of the corpse.”

“On it,” she sing-songed, brushing past Thomas. 

Her usual brightness felt very inappropriate in this situation. Thomas’s gaze followed her despite himself. It trailed down her shoulder and the line of her wrist until it snagged on the slack feet of—

“Hey,” Mr Flux called. Thomas’ eyes snapped up. “Don’t look. Just go to Magic. Me and Stella will carry this shit downstairs.”

Stella chuckled.  “‘Cause I’m so strong and all.”

“... Alright, sure,” he said hesitantly. “Just—be careful, ‘kay? There’s—maybe there’s more downstairs, and I wouldn’t… if something happens, you know.”

Mr Flux’s stare was fixed on the corpse. “Like I said, worry about yourself.”

Just like that, they were gone, and disappeared through the ruins of the trap. Their footsteps faded into the dark belly of the high-perched hostel.

“You have disinfectant, too?” Magic called from the far side of the rooftop, still rummaging through the pockets of his bag. “Dude, just how prepared were you for this trip?”

With nowhere else to put himself, Thomas sat on his sleeping bag. Magic worked quickly once she found what she needed. Soon she was kneeling in front of him, dabbing carefully at his cheek. The rag dragged cool against his overheated skin and left clean streaks in its wake. He couldn’t make himself look at what it wiped away, but it’s not like he needed to: he could feel the tack of it drying along his jaw and the steadily growing pile of gauzes next to him. Magic didn’t complain nor did she comment. Sometimes, she muttered, “Tilt your head—yeah, that way,” as she wiped along his temple, down the line of his throat. Water first, then disinfectant.

The chemical scent stung his nose but still couldn’t overpower the putrid smell of the infected blood.

Thomas wished he could help her. He wasn’t a kid and he’d said so earlier to the scientist in white, Saps. He was in college, he was twenty-two, and he could take care of himself. The problem was that his eyes just wouldn’t focus. There was him, in the physicality of it, with his body and fingers, his legs and his hair and his jacket, and there was his mind somewhere five feet behind him watching everything happen to him, pliant, as Magic helped him get cleaned up. 

“I’m going to do your hair, now. I don’t want the blood to knot them,” Magic announced softly. He didn’t miss the lack of light-hearted bullying this time around.

She moved behind him, tipping one of her flasks over the back of his head. Water ran down through his hair and over his scalp, along his spine. He sighed pleasantly at the feeling. Thomas doesn’t really remember when he stopped being cold.

He reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out his journal and pen. He tilted his head without resistance as Magic’s fingers combed through his hair, patiently separating each strand. Siblings would probably feel like this too, he imagined, when they weren't fighting.

Thomas pressed his pen to the paper. I killed my first zombie today, with a KATANA!

Magic leaned forward, peering over his shoulder. She laughed. But the exclamation point wobbled at the end because Thomas’ hand was shaking, so much that the pen tip snagged through the page with a tear. Ink bloomed all over the sentence. Thomas stared at the blot.

There was blood seeping up from beneath the page, the same sickly-colored one that wasn’t his but still coated his hands. It stained the bottom margin in a spreading crescent.

Thomas dragged a finger through it and the nausea returned instantly, his stomach turning on itself, choking him, fever licking up his back and climbing behind his eyes until something burned there. 

But when Mr Flux and Stella returned, Thomas was smiling again. Magic nudged his shoulder, poking fun at what he wrote in his journal and Stella hopped over to help with his hair. Mr Flux’s eyes lingered on Thomas for a second too long, even as he begrudgingly complimented him on his “well-done job”, but he held on to that smile anyway. And when 4C, Spidey, and Jonathan—or whatever his name was—showed up to their rooftop after spotting the camp light, Thomas told them the story so proudly. Pointing to the dark stain where the Decayed had fallen as Spidey laughed and Stella chimed in with more details, as Mr Flux warmed his hand over the campfire and Magic chatted with 4C.

His hands were still shaking with the impact of the sword, though.

Thomas woke up the next morning as a ghost which felt very ironic, considering he was the one still technically alive. He didn't remember lying down or closing his eyes. To be fair, he couldn't remember much of last night either: 4C, Spidey, and Jonathan came and left, then there was the shuffle of organizing the watch, and—Had he fallen asleep during his turn or had he skipped it entirely? If he had, why hadn't Mr Flux woken him? Had they rebuilt the trap?

He was cold. The morning was blue and steeped in mist, clinging to the rooftop in a damp veil, silvering the edges of the broken hostel walls. He'd discarded his jacket almost immediately after Magic and Stella were done with him. Meanwhile, Mr Flux had managed to scrub the blood from the fabric until it was only… well, cloth. But Thomas didn't want it. The mere thought of sliding his arms back into it made his throat constrict.

(The disgusting warmth of it at the collar. The way it had soaked into the lapels. The sticky drag of it against his shirt.)

Even after washing his face last night, splashing himself again that morning and his skin stinging a darker shade, he couldn't reach the crescents of dried something beneath his fingernails. They crusted there. He still felt humid, soiled, grimy, stained. Filthy.

He scrubbed and scrubbed at his hands until the skin around his nails reddened and split. It still wasn't enough. He just couldn't be clean enough.

(His fingers trembled, but he wouldn't stop until it stopped moving. Again. And again, and—)

"You're going to rip your fingernails off if you keep doing that," Stella observed, fastening a third knife to her waist.

Thomas blinked and the redhead was beside him, eyebrows raised as she looked down at his hands. He followed her gaze. His fingertips were an angry red, nearly bleeding, and still, somehow, not clean. Thomas had the hollow certainty that they never would be again.

A murderer stayed a murderer, regardless of motives. Many such cases in his textbooks where it detailed intent versus action.

"Oops, sorry." He beamed at her and scratched at the back of his neck to get rid of the prickling under his fingers.

"Why are you apologizing?"

For many things, he thought. Making her carry the corpse downstairs, and the mess the blood had made on the ground. For being weak and not feeling like the Thomas he was a day ago, or acting like the Thomas he actually was. For maybe skipping his shift. Thomas felt so guilty about so many things he hadn't expected to ever feel guilty about.

Emptying the gas tank of the bus. Pretending, all the time.

"Uh. Dunno," Thomas shrugged instead. He rose to his feet and tucked his flask into his backpack. "Was thinking about what we need from the beach. Obviously sand, for the glass thingy I wanted to make, but it might be useful if we can get some, like, iron along the way."

"Sure! I'll keep an eye out. I mean, it's probably not what's lacking around here."

"Touché," he chuckled.

"Maybe we could look for a hairbrush, too."

"Oh my—"

"Are you guys ready?" Magic called from near the staircase door.

She already had her backpack secured tight against her shoulders with enough inside of it to sustain the four of them through a day of scavenging. The crude weapons resting against all of them, knives and swords and daggers, would assure their safety. Thomas blamed the flimsy air in his lungs on the altitude.

"All set and raring to go," Stella chirped. Thomas assumed he was, too. His bag wasn't missing anything.

Except…

Magic stepped down the first stair and all of them noticed at once.

"Mr Flux…?" Thomas called, turning.

He was adjusting the sword strapped across his back, methodically tightening the worn leather harness. He looked up, not quite at him, with one eyebrow arched in a silent question. In the dim light, with the sun swallowed behind low clouds and the rooftop drenched in blue shadows, he looked very important, Thomas thought.

"… Aren't you coming with us?" Thomas ventured.

"'Afraid not," he answered with a shrug. "I have some things I need to do in the industrial district. We'll meet back here."

Thomas heart's took a sickening seat beneath his tongue. "What? But—alone? Are you sure?"

"That might be dangerous… I mean, there's so many zombies back there," Magic added from behind.

"Yeah! Especially after—" He swallowed. "I can go with you. We can find sand in the industrial district, too, and there's probably more iron in this part of the city, and—and so many things could go wrong, especially there, and what if you—?"

What if you didn't come back?

Thomas didn't doubt Mr Flux's capability. In his eyes, Mr Flux was the most capable of all of them. He had let them here, and he knew which weapons to favor and how to navigate the streets without drawing notice. He'd stepped in, over and over and he'd helped Thomas more times than he could count. Mr Flux was the best of them, in their little group and out of everyone on that bus, no exceptions. But there was the case of what happened yesterday.

It never occurred to Thomas just how human Mr Flux was. At least, not fully and certainty not until now. Not until he saw him with blood streaked across his face, carrying that corpse.

It hadn't truly settled into Thomas' understanding until now how human he was himself, and how human they all were. They could all end up hollow-eyed, jaw-slacked, wedged into stairwells for the next batch of wanderers to step around. Starting to decay, just like the one Thomas had— that he—

God.

"I'm sure Mr Flux will be fineeee," Stella cut in the silence. "The industrial district isn't that far compared to the beach. He won't be any longer than us, and if he is, we'll go search for him!"

"Uh—"

Mr Flux dragged a hand through his hair with a sigh. "She's right. You go. Like I said, we'll meet up here later."

"Mr Flux—"

"Thomas. How many times to I have to tell you? Worry about yourself."

Thomas was getting a bit sick of hearing those words. Actually, he was starting to resent them completely, but he swallowed them down for the sake of character and many other things, like picking his battles and all that. He gave Mr Flux one last look, who had turned into a shadowy silhouette, and then he turned, following Magic and Stella down the stairwell.

What nobody tells you about killing, whether it be in fantasy books or in historical epics, is that it doesn't end when the body hits the ground. Once the adrenaline drains away, you're only left with the memory of what you've done. It's nothing like the one and done the many adventures that were advertised to him had promised, and he didn't feel glorious at all, no matter how Stella or Magic had tried to shape the situation.

And the memory followed Thomas throughout the day.

In all honesty, he felt more like the feeling of himself than himself entirely. It was as if his body moved through the streets of Paradise City, sidestepping the collapsed traffic lights and passing the gutted storefront. It spoke when spoken to. It nodded at Agustus and responded when Saparata and Snow crossed their path. It agreed, distantly, to let Agustus stick with him and Magic while Stella wandered off with the scientist. Meanwhile, Thomas—the actual Thomas, Thomas the mind and soul and everything nonphysical that made Thomas—waited just beside it.

There was no describing it, this feeling of waiting and waiting that didn't seem to come. For what he was waiting, he didn't even know. A snap back into place, maybe, although he couldn't tell what was supposed to snap back where and how it would feel.

He wondered if the Decayed had anticipated, in the same way, the swing of the katana. Then he thought about the fact he'd left the katana, still stained with blood, behind, propped far away from his sleeping bag at the hostel because he couldn't hold without his stomach turning inside out. Then he thought about Mr Flux taking it for his own excursion.

Thomas wondered what it meant. Thomas wondered a lot, especially when they reached the shoreline. Thomas' body crouched in the sand beside Augustus and gathered, digged steadily. His filled his bag with coarse grains and scavenged metal scraps. He dug too deep and his fingers struck something smooth beneath the sand.

He realized it was the empty eye socket of a skeleton, and Thomas stopped allowing himself to think.

Of course, he had tried to write about it instead of thinking about it. Multiple times, actually, when he brought Agustus and Snow, who had eventually decided to tag along, back to the hostel and nobody—not Magic, who wandered off by herself, not Mr Flux, not Stella—had come home yet. He tried, between two tasks, to get the tip of the pen to stick to the paper.

It spread in dark lines that bled into the intricate fibers of the page.

(He'd stepped in it. The blood, and how it had seeped into the fine cracks in the rooftop where the Decayed had trashed against the ruins of the trap. It had crusted beneath the soles of his Converses. He'd spent the rest of the evening crouching with a twig scraping it loose. Even now, when he walked, he felt the ground tug at his shoes. Or at least like it did.)

And whenever Thomas tried not to look at the writing, or the semblance of writing, there was the matter of the stain at the bottom of the page of a strange, diluted red. Which was the same eerie shade as the ink.

(When Thomas used to write at his desk in his dorm, he often smeared ink across his fingers without noticing. He'd get way too absorbed in essays, bent over his notebook for hours, and only later realized his hands were streaked with pen. Yesterday, he had been bent over his own blood-slick hands. The memories overlapped until they blurred together. Ink, blood, paper, stone. He could no longer separate what had happened months ago from what had happened yesterday from what was happening right now.)

One moment he was staring at the page, the next he was throwing up over the edge of the building.

The world swayed and Magic was holding up his hair from his forehead. He hadn't ever heard her return. That's when Thomas decided he'd stop trying to write, too. He'd push everything away all together.

Of course, that was without accounting for Agustus.

Agustus was nice, in his own distant way. A little aloof, yes, but at less he seemed less reluctant about the whole friendship thing than Mr Flux. He was good company. Well. Good, until he got bored.

It happened when Thomas showed him the rooftop corner where he killed the Decayed. He had shown everyone. He clung stubbornly to the public version of the story where he was brave and so very glorious and everything had been cinematic. It was another adventure he survived.

Agustus listened with a mild expression, then said, nothing if observational, "You know it was human, before that, right? Maybe it had a child. Even a family, who knows."

His eyes were steady on Thomas.

Thomas knew. He knew that. He couldn't not know that, and he imagined that everyone else was very well aware of that too.

However, no one had said it aloud before.

"If you think about it, it could be any of us," Agustus continued.

Thomas thought about Magic, about Stella. About—

"It could even be Mr Flux," Agustus added.

Thomas didn't want to picture that. Lifting the katana again and Mr Flux's body all slack and wrong.

Thomas didn't want to picture anything. What he wanted was to stop thinking. He wanted to stop listening. He wanted to bury the urge to write about it very deep. He crouched beside the makeshift garden Stella had started and dug his fingers into the soil silently, pressing seedlings into places she had missed yesterday. Magic was on the other side of the rooftop and couldn't hear them. Thomas focused on the feel of earth against his skin and could only imagine the dirt gathering under his nails.

"Would you be able to kill Mr Flux if it came to that?" Agustus asked.

Yes, Thomas wanted to answer.

Instead, he said, the smallest drop of bitterness in his tone, "I don't want to think about that."

The conversation ended there.

By nightfall, the sky had darkened to a bruised violet and when the shadow of Mr Flux vaulted over the ledge and landed cleanly on the rooftop, with Saparata, Stella, and Chuck in tow, Thomas lunged at him with an excited shout of his name.

Thomas didn't think about the narrowing purple of his eyes, or that the katana strapped across the back was coated in a fresh, murky sheen along its edge. He didn't think about the blood staining Stella's sleeve, or the way Magic's mouth tightened as she took them in. He didn't think about the way his own hands were still shaking when he took the book Mr Flux pulled out of his bag, salvaged from the old laboratory.

He didn't dwell on why Mr Flux had chose him specifically to read it to him as he couldn't do it himself, and trusted Thomas with the content all while telling him not to trust anyone.

Thomas smiled and launched into a quick explanation about turrets, somewhere under the church, and ignored the filth packed beneath his nails and the phantom tackiness clinging to his palms, along with the overwhelming weight of his notebook tucked into the pocket of his unwashed jacket.

He didn't want to think, so he didn't think about anything at all.

The hostel had become very crowded.

Saparata had decided to stay for the night, and apparently Saps came with the erratic orbit of Chuck, who was in the middle of an animated explanation that involved far too many hand gestures in front of Stella's skeptical expression. Snow sat with his back against the trunk of one of the trees, watching. Agustus perched higher up on a thick branch, feigning disinterest, though the curve of his cracked lips betrayed amusement. Magic tended to the fire at the center of them all, coaxing it into crackling harder, for a while longer.

Sleeping bags had been arranged in a loose circle around the flames so they could eat and talk, exist in the fragile illusion of normalcy. It was, in retrospect, what a hostel was meant for: a place to rest.

Usually, he would've been right there with them. He would've asked Agustus about his base and helped Magic with the firewood. Instead, Thomas sat alone on the rooftop ledge, his legs dangling over wide open air, staring out at the jagged silhouette of Paradise City.

The ruins were ugly beneath the stars, and he should've been sleeping.

Soon enough, the night shifts would begin. Just like the previous evening, he and Mr Flux were meant to take the first watch, guarding the newly reinforced trap at the rooftop entrance, and Magic and Stella would take the second half of the night. Just like the previous evening, distant gargling and grumbled came from below, carried by the wind threading through the buildings. Everything unfolded just like last night, to the same beats, the city breathing in its sick way. Everything was the same. Apart, of course, for the presence of four new people on the roof. Thomas clung to this with white knuckles.

Every time he closed his eyes, he was back back there. It wasn't the cinematic flashbacks or montage he'd seen in films. It was more of a physical thing. Sensorial. It was the rasp of the katana's hilt against the mound of his palm. The slickness of sweat gathering at his hairline and the relentless thud of his own blood, thump thump thump, in his ears. This constant, suffocating warmth soaking through the memories. It wrapped around him now.

There was a rock, pressing inward against his ribs, making it impossible to sit still for too long under the risk of his chest collapsing around it.

Thomas should've been sleeping but he physically couldn't without feeling his throat tightening. So he remained awake, perched above the drastic drop. He figured exhaustion would take him out at some point. Perhaps it would earn him a few centimeters of purple under the eyes, but that was his only solution. Seemed like a very small price to pay. There were much higher ones.

"You're not with the others."

Thomas startled at the sound of the familiar voice. He didn't know how he hadn't heard him approach. Mr Flux stood beside him, standing on the edge where he was sat and staring at the immensity of the city. To be fair, Thomas hadn't noticed much of anything today.

"Mr Flux!" Thomas blurted. "Where were you?"

Mr Flux shrugged and lowered himself to sit beside him in unhurried movements. "Been trying to figure out a quicker way to the church from here. We need to be quick tomorrow, I don't want anyone trailing us."

"Makes sense," Thomas agreed. "So it's just going to be us? Like—you, me, Stella, Magic?"

"Like it always is."

It warmed something inside Thomas' chest. If he hadn't already felt so feverish beneath his own skin, he might have cherished it. A reminder that, despite everything, the four of them existed as a unit, now.

"Right," Thomas chuckled. "Who else?"

"Well, I'm not taking Chuck," Mr Flux replied, jerking his chin toward the fire. Chuck was mid-gesture again, nearly knocking over Stella's metal flask in the process. She watched him with a dubious gaze.

"C'monnnn, he's not that bad. He's nice enough," Thomas protested.

"You think everyone's nice enough, Thomas. That's doesn't really mean much coming from you."

Thomas frowned. "Hey, I just choose to believe that not everyone is always out to kill me. I don't think everyone's just nice like that."

Mr Flux's lips thinned into a severe line. "That's a naive distinction to make under these circumstances."

"It's not naive," Thomas shot back, slightly offended.

Wasn't it? Thomas wasn't naive. He could look like it, and yes, sometimes he made himself look like it on purpose, but he was much more than he let anyone on. His vision of the world was based off science, research.

He dangled his legs over the abyss and watched the stained laces of his Converses moved with the gesture. "One thing I learned," he began, "is that we choose who we become, and circumstances don't really erase that. I… I refuse to believe everyone on that bus would be faced with killing someone and just—decide to become a monster. I think there's good in people, like, deep down. We were all on the bus, we're all human. That has to mean something to everyone, right?"

Human. What did it mean, to be human? Did it have the same definition as it did before, now that some humans were… lesser than? Were they actually less? They didn't talk about that in his city.

Mr Flux scoffed. "Let me guess. You learn that in school?"

"My ethics class, actually," Thomas nodded, lifting his chin.

Another scoff.

"What?"

"Not everyone always make the right choice, if there even is one." Mr Flux answered plainly. There was never much intonations to his voice, except for the rare times Thomas took him by surprise with a joke or a comment. When those moments happened, he was very proud of himself. "Sometimes, there's not even a choice. It's do or die. The law of survival, or the strongest, whatever you want, especially in our conditions."

"That doesn't mean morality just disappears," Thomas insisted.

"Morality is a very loose term to start with." Mr Flux gestured vaguely. "It bends a lot. Like you said, we're all humans, and the first human instinct is to survive. Every human is capable of very ugly, very selfish things if it means seeing the colors of another sunrise. And if you're alive at the end of it, does it really matter how you got there?"

Thomas stared into the dark below, thoughts muddling and colliding in painful hisses of memory. He thought of the sword and the warmth and the filth, how he hadn't hesitated once but would think about it for a lifetime.

"I don't think the excuse of surviving automatically makes it right," he mumbled. "I don't… if everything is on the table then what's left? Like, what are we even surviving as?"

"You're alive. That's the only thing that matters."

"But—that's not enough," Thomas urged with desperate fervor. Taking into account how ridiculous he must sound, he took a breath before continuing. "I don't want to live to just live. I don't want to wake up one day and realize I've become something that I hate."

A monster.

"Just food for thought," Mr Flux said at last.

Thomas let out a hot, shaky breath. "… I don't think I agree with you."

"Well. I'm not asking you to."

The distant chatter from the campfire filled the space between them, the crackle of wood collapsing into embers hand in hand with the cold stabs of the wind, needling gusts against skin, yet Thomas couldn't seem to find it in him to shiver. He felt strangely insulated from the cold as though a fever had took hold of him. Still, he tucked his chin deeper into the red bandana at him throat for good measure, pressing the fabric against his mouth for comfort.

He needed to think about something else.

"What'd you think there is back there? Under the church, I mean."

He earned another shrug from Mr Flux. "The turrets, obviously. Probably some kind of underground operation or… something, I don't know. A bunker, a lab… everything's possible." He paused. "Definitely a lot of Decayed."

"Probably," Thomas echoed. "I hope we find something interesting. The book was reallyyyy ominous and vague about… practically everything."

"I wouldn't know."

"Oh! Right. Uh—"

Mr Flux snorted. A short, dry sound. "You're fine, don't worry. But yeah, whatever's down there, we're bound to find something at the very least. Meaning to have to be prepared for anything."

Thomas nodded, and that's when Mr Flux turned to look at him.

It struck Thomas with force, the realization that since last night, Mr Flux had not looked at him in the eyes. His gaze was always on the space next to him, a little bit above his head, past him or at the city in front of him, but never irises into irises.

Maybe he didn't want Thomas to see the overwhelming worry, bleeding through that hard-set composure of his, which was a concerning thing to notice into Fluixon as a whole.

"Will you be prepared?" Mr Flux asked.

Thomas bit down on the inside of his cheek, a strained laugh escaping him. "What does that even mean? Of course I'll be ready."

"… Okay."

Mr Flux bobbed his head in thought. Without another word, he reached behind him to where Thomas' katana was strapped across his back. The metallic sound it made as the steel slid free from the sheath was terrifying. Mr Flux held it out to him, blade angled downward. The tip rested against his chest and the handle, extended toward Thomas.

"Take the sword, then."

Thomas looked at the handle. Looked at Mr Flux again.

Again and again.

The hilt of the sword was virtually the same as before. Same worn wrapping around the handle and subtle detailing, for the very little there was, near the guard. And yet it didn't feel the same, and never would anymore, just like Thomas wouldn't either and so couldn't take it. He gaped helplessly at the katana, then at Mr Flux. Again and again.

He couldn't. He couldn't reach for it any more than he could force himself to sleep or write or scrub his hands clean or talk or act or anything, truly anything, without the image of skin splitting under the blade rising unbidden. The sound, this awful, torn scream, with the cry and the heat of blood soaking into his jacket, and his hands, onto Mr Flux's face and— There had been so much blood, all over—

He could feel his capillaries redden, his vision blurring as heat surged with the painful burn behind his eyes as the final step of understanding washed away any confusion in Mr Flux's expression. He withdrew the sword brutally, as if it had burnt Thomas despite the fact Thomas hadn't even touched it, and laid it down on the other side of himself.

"Last night—"

"I don't really want to talk about it," Thomas cut in quickly.

"Don't be self-centered. I'm telling you to listen, not to talk."

Thomas shot him a look that Mr Flux held without flinching, answering with an indecipherable one of his own. His own stomach was a mess of nerves and nausea but faced with an accepting silence, Mr Flux continued.

"What happened last night was… unexpected." He was searching for words in a way Thomas had rarely seen him do. "But it's, uh, over, and—"

Thomas groaned. "That's not what this is about."

"Jesus." Mr Flux exhaled and dragged a weary hand down his face. "Then what is it about? I'm not good at this kind of… stuff."

He said it as if the mere prospect of trying to comfort someone was the biggest task he'd ever had to accomplish. Good thing Thomas didn't want comfort. As a whole, he didn't want the whole thing to be acknowledged, but here he was with nowhere else to flee and Mr Flux who, despite the density of his emotional stone walls, was relentless in everything he ever attempted. He didn't abandon halfway through, and though Thomas had always admired this in him, he hadn't realized just how inconvenient it could be for a third party.

Thomas' hands trembled violently in his lap. He gripped the fabric of his pants to make it stop, knuckles pale, and tore the words out of his throat.

"Mr Flux. I killed someone," he hissed.

Hearing the words in his own voice, aloud, made his stomach lurch. Mr Flux looked confused for a second until he realized who, or what, Thomas was talking about.

"It wasn't alive," Mr Flux said calmly.

"It was," Thomas insisted. His voice cracked despite his best attempt to keep it under control. "It—it tried to speak, and it screamed. Do you remember how loud it screamed? It bled when I stabbed it. They were human before that, like all of us. I killed one of us. I killed someone."

By the end of the sentence, his entire body was shaking. His lashes were clumped and humid and yet he didn't cry. He didn't feel entitled to tears, but his vision still wrapped until the city dissolved into indistinct shadows. He waited for Mr Flux to say something. He always had something to say.

"If you think of it like that, this city is going to crush you," Mr Flux started cautiously. Rare were the times he measured his words, or sanded down the brash tone of his voice. It was one of them. "What they had, if you insist on thinking them as living, wasn't a life. They weren't themselves anymore. They had no agency over what they did, they were driven by primal instincts and sickness alone. If anything, you ended its suffering. And maybe now, wherever you think souls go if you believe in… that, maybe it's free of whatever twisted thing is going on in this city. And if you don't believe in souls, then at least the body isn't trapped in that state anymore."

"Yeah, but what if they were still conscious, under all that?" Thomas asked. He dragged a restless hand through his hair. "Maybe… maybe they were still in there and there were still… there was still something to save. And I took that away."

"By something, you mean what you were talking about earlier. The good in people."

"I guess, yeah." He let out a brittle breath. "That. Humanity."

Mr Flux hummed and shifted his posture. Lifting one leg, he rested his heel against the very lip of the rooftop ledge. Thomas barely registered the movement at first until he saw Mr Flux's hands move to the cuff of his jeans. Confused, he watched as he rolled the frayed denim upward. The fabric cleared his calf.

There were bite marks. Five of them, at the very least, grotesque arcs bruised and torn deep into the unnaturally pale skin.

"What the—"

From the looks of them, they didn't look infected. It's not as if Mr Flux showed any signs of being infected either, but it was a relief to see the wounds relatively clean of symptoms: no pulsing veins spidering outward or sickly green or grey discoloration creeping through the flesh. It wasn't inflamed, and no pus oozed out the open flesh. It still looked bad enough, however. The skin was damaged and crusted with dried blood. Some were bandages, but the fabrics of them were stiff and overdue for changing. They all looked a few days old, at most.

All except one that still shone fresh with blood at the edges.

"What—When did you even—"

"It grabbed my ankle after your first swing, when it was on the ground," Mr Flux explained.

As if slapped, Thomas averted his eyes immediately.

"Thomas. I'm going to need you to look at it."

His voice was firmer, now, and closer to what Thomas was used to. With a roll of the eye and visible reluctance, he turned his head back toward the awful exposed wounds.

"If you hadn't done that." Mr Flux put emphasis on every words. "It could've gotten a lot uglier. For Stella and, as much as I actually hate admitting it, for me too. There's a chance Stella would've been the body we dragged off the rooftop and—and the bit, maybe it would've gone way deeper, and I would've been the next one you had to put down."

Would he have done so? Would he be capable of it, knowing it was Mr Flux at the other end of the blade?

Probably not, he thought. As aforementioned, Thomas was the weaker link out of the four of them—it was established. He pressed his lips into an uncertain line, unable to speak. And so, hesitantly, Mr Flux reached out and placed a hand on Thomas' shoulder.

It was so out of character, this gesture, and the strange contact startled Thomas. He flinched at first, muscles tightening instantly. He then registered the rough scrap of calluses through the thin fabric of his shirt and the steady weight of the hand anchoring him in place. The warmth, spreading from that single point of contact, was nothing at all like the feverish heat given by the memories of yesterday night, which had stuck to him like molten plastic on asphalt. It felt strange and unfamiliar, but comforting. It was welcomed.

Thomas never had a brother before.

"What you did," Mr Flux said quietly, "was save us."

Thomas squeezed his eye shut, hard enough that white shapes formed behind his lids and moisture pearled along his lower lashes.

"Does that make me a killer, Mr Flux?" he asked weakly.

His grip tightened on his shoulder. "… Doing something bad once, or occasionally, even if it's not inherently bad in my opinion, is negated by all the good that comes out of it. Whatever is bad in the act is outweighed by what it prevented, or allowed. Sometimes, it's necessary because all the options you're given are ugly. By killing it, you saved Stella and you saved me. You saved Magic by association. We wouldn't have tonight—" Thomas felt him looking back at the campfire. "—if you didn't."

Thomas didn't miss the fact he didn't really answer the question. He didn't answer it at all actually, but reflecting back on it, Thomas had the disturbing feeling he already had his own answer.

However, it wasn't the type of night to say it out loud.

Tearfully, he huffed out, "I really don't know if I agree with you. You have pretty weird morals, Mr Flux."

"I'm not asking you to agree with me," Mr Flux answered, echoing their earlier conversation. "I'm just telling you the facts, and what you have to do is acknowledge them. Nod if you do."

Thomas nodded.

"Good."

And, with far less hesitation, Thomas placed his hand over the one resting on his shoulder.

He felt him physically flinch at the unexpected contact. Thomas had imagined a life lived the way Mr Flux lived it, which had been cold water dropped over him, with never many occasions to experience good-natured human touch. To be fair, Thomas hadn't exactly grown up cradled in warmth either, but he at least knew normalcy—or the closest thing to it. He wasn't as reluctant to it as Mr Flux was. He kept people (Thomas, and Magic and Stella) at arm's length, as far away as he could, and didn't care. He didn't care at all.

As the tension under Thomas' hand gradually softened and, so very slowly, Mr Flux shifted his grip so he could hold his fingers, Thomas wondered that if maybe not caring was simply the only way Mr Flux's knew how to care. As twisted as it maybe be. But then again, everything about this world was twisted anyway

They stayed like that, hand in battered hand, as the oblivious campfire laughter carried on behind them. Thomas didn't try to speak and neither did Mr Flux, they both just… held on. Every now and then, his grip tightened, until Thomas' shoulders stopped shaking in dry sobs. His breathing evened out, hitch by hitch, and still, Mr Flux didn't let go.

It ended much more abruptly than it started, when Mr Flux withdrew his hand. The moment had reached its expiration. The warmth of it, diffusing through Thomas' body, redistributed heat: adding where it was too little and retrieving where it was too much, until his temperature finally felt balanced. His hands still trembled, but he never would have imagined he would be so grateful to finally be cold.

In one fluid motion, Mr Flux slid off the ledge, taking the katana with him, and onto the rooftop before turning toward Thomas as if nothing had ever happened.

"Okay. Get up." To punctuate the order, he tossed his tattered jacket at Thomas' chest. "And put some clothes on. You look like you're about to lose a couple toes with how hard you're shivering."

He started walking toward the others. Thomas didn't linger on the jacket (with Mr Flux, it was better not to linger on anything and just accept it, act like it never happened just like he did.) He shivered his arms through the patched-up sleeve smelling of smoke and metal as he scrambled to his feet, hurrying after him.

"Why am I getting up, exactly?" Thomas questioned, voice still a little hoarse.

"Just because something happened once doesn't mean it won't happen again," Mr Flux replied as they passed the stairwell entrance. Thomas' gaze snagged on the dark stain still marking the rooftop floor. He forced himself not to look too long. "Like I said, we need to be prepared. Your form, last night, was lacking a lot, so… we're practicing."

Thomas nearly froze in his track. The katana in Mr Flux's hand caught the firelight. "I can't—"

"I'm not asking you to train with that one," Mr Flux interrupted, lifting the katana slightly. "I'll be the one to use it. However—"

They'd reached the others now. Most were still in deep conversation, far too engrossed to notice them arriving. Mr Flux raised his voice, "Saps! Hand me the sword. The one next to you."

Everyone suddenly took notice of Thomas and Mr Flux's sudden reappearance, much to Thomas' dismay. He hoped he didn't look too… well, brittle. Saparata's white ponytail swung as he looked up. Leaning across the fire to grab the sword resting beside the sleeping bag, which was Mr Flux's, he passed it over.

"Don't go hurting yourself now," he teased.

"I'll be damned before I take weapon advice from a scientist," Mr Flux shot back, however there was no bite behind it.

"Some vocabulary on you for someone who doesn't know how to read."

They exchanged a look.

"What's happening?" Stella asked, glancing at Mr Flux and at Thomas, a step behind him.

"I decided I'd give Thomas here a little sword training."

Thomas frowned. "Okay, I didn't even agree to that."

Stella flashed him a bright grin, all teeth, with her eyebrows raised to her hairline. "Ooh. Are you scaredddd, Thomas?"

Obviously, Magic spoke up next, leaning forward. "Wait, are you… It can't be. Are you… chicken?"

Chuck, without hesitation, began making enthusiastic clucking noises. Snow, half asleep against his tree trunk, cracked one eye open in visible confusion as Stella and Magic all too happily joined in. It was all very absurd: all of them in their twenties or more, reduced to playground tactics.

Siblings, Thomas thought.

He wasn't above it. Deadpan, he stuck his tongue out at them.

From his perch on a branch, Agustus looked down at him with one raised brow, arms folded across his chest. As always, his face was carefully blank. "Are you really going to let them talk to you like that?"

Thomas made an affronted noise and turned to Mr Flux. He was watching him with a similar expression, both swords gleaming under the flickers of the flames.

"Well, are you?" Mr Flux pressed.

If there was one thing Thomas possessed in abundance, it was the desperate need to prove himself, which trampled all fear. He flexed his hand once, twice, maybe three, before he stepped forward.

"Are you gonna give me the sword?"

Stella and Magic whooped behind him, Stella already claiming next round. Mr Flux allowed himself the faintest hint of a smile before tossing the blade, keeping the katana with him, and Thomas caught it cleanly with one hand.

The weight of it felt strange. He tested it out, turned it over experimentally, his fingers shaking slightly around the handle. It was smoother than the katana, lacking the rough ray skin beneath his palm, which made it gentler on his skin. There was less of a daunting sensation in his guts at the idea of using it, not as many stones resting against his ribcage. It was still there, of course it was still there, but in a tamer way.

He suspected the feeling would never truly leave. He would never feel the same again, and holding a sword would never be as simple as only holding one and fantasizing about using it. He would anticipate something, always, even if nothing was coming. He just had to learn how to work around it.

Like Mr Flux said, he had to be prepared.

Stepping in the middle of the rooftop, he positioned himself a few paces from Mr Flux and lifted the borrowed sword. It split his reflection clean in two. One half of his face reflected back at him in warped silver. On the other half, he could see the silhouette of Mr Flux.

"Watch your footing," Mr Flux called. "It's all wrong."

Thomas glanced down at his feet. He adjusted from his narrow stance. Spread his feet wider, one sliding a fraction forward, and knees bending just enough to feel more stable. He looked back up.

"With all due respect, Mr Flux, worry about yourself."

Mr Flux let out a short laugh, surprised and almost winded by it, and Thomas smiled childishly at the sound.

He doesn't think he'll be able to kill him if it came to it.

Not even after their conversations circling around the topic, and not even imagining it. Thomas gives himself the pretension, allowed himself the careless indulgence, for a split of a second, to imagine the inverse and that Mr Flux wouldn't be able to kill him either. He didn't know if that was true. The glare of the katana in his hand, which had already known blood, his usual detachment, and the fond glint in his irises right now, the awkward gentleness of his hand on his shoulder, told two different stories.

Two truths coexisting in one person. A garden and a grave, which made up a brother.

Thomas never had one, a brother, but he imagined it would feel a lot like this.

Behind him, Stella and Magic were loudly cheering. Saparata watched with entertained curiosity, Chuck leaning in with excitement. Snow observed with sleepy indifference, Agustus' gaze remaining cool but still attentive from his perch above. Thomas tightened the grip on his sword, rooting himself in reality. The purple irises in front of him held one question: Ready?

Thomas lunged.