Gray accompanies Zef back to the subway station, hands jammed in the pockets of his jeans. The sun's just a glow caught in blinding slivers between the buildings now, reflecting off the jagged edges of broken windows.

Zef shoots his dad a couple messages to let him know he got the parts. They ping back, though. Reception's still dodgy. This quarter really is cut off.

It strikes Zef that he hasn't been alone with Gray in a place this cut off. A little fear creeps in.

Station's not far, and there should be more people there. Not that crowds could stop Gray. If he wants to take people out, he can. So far, though? He paid for Zef's dinner, saved him from a mugging, and helped fix his dad's broken prosthetics.

Hard to reconcile this man with that photo in Rylan's office.

At the station, they get on the same subway car. No one else on board except a homeless guy sleeping across the seats and a woman with her grocery shopping in a handcart. Zef plonks down on a seat while Gray stands, holding onto one of the loops above his head, shifting from foot to foot.

"You okay?" Zef says.

Gray rolls his shoulders. "Not a fan of the subway. Cramped."

It's pretty uncrowded right now, but Zef doesn't judge. Maybe it's the whole underground part.

The car window behind Gray has a spray painted, hot pink penis ejaculating little hearts on it. There's shit scratched into the plexiglass, too. Chad wuz here, among other sonnets and works of art. Mostly boobs and boners.

Gray looks over his shoulder at it. He gets a look in his eye. One Zef recognizes and doesn't like.

"About that mark you wanted to leave on the world."

"Christ. You know that's not what I me— What the FUCK?"

Gray pulls a switchblade out of his jacket and flicks it open. They won't get to the next stop in time for Zef to escape. Gray twirls the knife and holds it out. Handle first, fingers around the blade.

Zef, still clutching his pearls, says, "You carry a knife?!"

Gray looks...incredulity doesn't cover it. He looks at Zef like he just took a piss in his pansies. "You don't?"

"No!"

"Well, that ain't too city-slick of you. Maybe that guy'd think twice about mugging your ass if you had something sharp to point at him."

"He had a gun. Knife, gunfight, heard the expression?"

"Whatever. I'm not asking you to shank anyone." He gestures with the knife to the plexiglass scarred with carvings and graffiti. "Go on. Leave your mark."

"No way."

Gray sneers. "There's that buttoned-up butthead again. What are you so afraid of?" He thrusts the knife toward Zef. "You think you can leave a mark without breaking a few rules?"

Zef stares at the knife. Two sides of him go to war. The stubborn side that wants to prove Gray wrong, and the dumbass side that wants, on some level, to impress him.

He must be sick. Suffering from dumb bitch-itis. He reaches out and tentatively takes the switchblade. It's beautiful. The copper-plated handle has an inlaid design in the pattern of a dragonfly wing, and the blackened steel blade has a copper edge sharp enough to cleave a Kleenex fluttering on the breeze. Not small, either. Blade's a good five inches long. He taps the tip against the plexiglass.

"This isn't what I meant by leaving a mark," he says.

"Too important for petty vandalism?" Gray extends a hand. "Give it back 'n let me."

Zef jerks the knife back. "What do I write? Put our initials in a 'lil heart?"

It's a joke, but Gray doesn't laugh. "It's your mark."

Zef leans his forehead against the plexiglass. Tap tap tap. It isn't the destruction of public property that bothers him in the moment; with how damaged it already is, what's one more? The thing that bothers him is what to say. All these little notes from strangers like messages in a bottle carried across time to the passengers of the future. What does he have to add to the conversation between Jesse Sucks Cox and Fuk u bitch? Something he has time to carve on their twenty-five minute train ride. Words that are his and...mean something. Matter.

Or doesn't. Does it have to matter? Why's he getting philosophical about some train graffiti?

Maybe it's dumb. But what keeps circling his head is all the anonymous pain of strangers leaving imprints in the cheeks of sleeping commuters. Semi-permanent screams of the voiceless. And his best friend's suicide note, wrinkled and pocked from the last tears he ever shed.

The blade is so sharp it carves through the acrylic easily, shredding a single vertical line.

He can feel Gray's eyes on him. Heavy as a hand clasping the back of his neck. Soft as a lover's caress. Contradictory, like everything else about Gray.

As reconnaissance missions go, this one's been a bust, but there's still time to talk while Zef defaces public property.

"So," he says, deepening the first scratch on the glass. "You got to pick my brain yesterday. Only fair I get to know you too, right?"

Gray's eyes narrow, but he shrugs. "Can't promise I'll answer. Shoot."

Zef has a question burning him up, but better to start small. "What do you do? Like. Job-wise." He knows the answer but wants to hear how Gray describes it. Or if he lies.

"I'm a proudly unemployed drain on society."

"This game doesn't work if you lie. How'd you pay for sushi?"

"You know what my gild can do. I stole that car. Credits are harder, but get a cap drunk enough. I've got ways."

"So, you're a criminal."

"Sure."

"But you used to be a soldier?"

"Sure."

Not a lot to go on. Zef doesn't know how he feels about the mix of lies and truth. It's not the question he most wants answers to, anyway.

Don't touch me. Never touch me.

"You said you don't like being touched."

The easy tone of earlier turns waspish. "We're not talking about that."

"I didn't ask the question. Is that with everyone? Just strangers? Just me?"

"Everyone."

"Is it, like, only skin-to-skin, or—"

A grunt. "Sort of, yeah. It's—" Zef doesn't imagine the slight shudder Gray barely represses. "Situation-dependent. Complicated."

"You..." Zef pauses after finishing a letter. "You touched me when you gave me your number. That's why I'm asking. You're...a contradiction sometimes. Hard to read."

Gray stands stiff and coiled, his expression cold but cracked open in places. The twitch of an eyebrow. "You, too."

"So?"

"So nothing. Drop it."

Zef doesn't imagine it. There's a threat in his tone. A flash of teeth, and not a smile. Zef raises his hands in surrender. Tries to play it smooth, but inside his heart's an unhealthy clip away from arrested locomotion.

"Sorry. Consider it dropped."

Gray shrugs his jacket up on his shoulders. Unravels a little. As he does, a necklace caught up in the folds of his jacket twists and the charms at the end dangle free, catching the light.

Not charms. Dog tags. And a bullet.

The bullet's got something etched on the side. Before Zef can see, Gray catches it and stuffs it into his turtleneck. Movements too smooth and buttery to bely nervousness. Not a concerted effort to hide it so much as a sign not to ask about it.

"You must have been young." Zef comes at the question from another angle. He adds an 'a' to his graffiti. "When they recruited you."

"Mhm. Fifteen."

Zef jolts, nearly fucks up the 't' he's carving. That's younger than he thought. Gray looked young in those photos Rylan showed him, but with trans guys pre-T it could be hard to figure age.

Harder still when the subject's covered in gore.

"Didn't know they recruited that young," Zef says.

"Not usually. I was a special case." The word 'special' drips like it's oiled in kerosene and ready for a spark.

"Special?"

"Didn't matter. They used me up and spat me out. You know the drill. Didn't serve long enough to see all those shiny benefits they promised."

Zef can't help it. Sympathy curls like a stray cat in his lap, ready to be fussed over. Maybe Gray did do horrible things...But maybe he did it under orders from people more powerful than he was. Did that excuse it? Make it less evil? He'd taken lives.

But, presumably, so had Zef's dad. Softest man Zef knew. But when you're desperate just to feed yourself, your family, well—

"My dad, too," Zef says over the screeching of the train coming into another platform.

"Mm." Gray looks to the door, where a smattering of people file in from the stop.

"That why you helped me today?" Zef asks.

Gray's face scrunches like he's thinking hard. "Does it gotta be deep? You needed a thing. I knew someone who could get you the thing."

"So you're just a nice guy."

All the cracks in Gray's expression shutter closed. "No. I'm not that, darling."

Zef doesn't know what to make of that bit of honesty. Doesn't know whether to be scared for Gray or scared of him. The train takes off again, and Zef returns to his graffiti. The new passengers glance warily at the knife and sit on the far side of the carriage from them. Easy to keep talking without being overheard.

"Okay, since I'm really coming up bust on the question front, have you got any hobbies? Passion projects?" Zef asks. Gray opens his mouth— "Other than hijacking pretty cars and questionable cuisine," Zef adds.

"You ask hard questions, Zef."

"Is that a hard question?"

"What if I told you I don't have many answers 'cause I really don't know no more? I liked stealing that car, yeah. Gets the blood pumping. But beyond that... Don't know."

"When you were a kid, didn't you have dreams?"

He squints into the middle-distance. "Probably. Who knows? My memory's got a few too many holes."

"What, like, amnesia?"

"No, nothing like that. I remember plenty, just—" He pauses. His tongue traces the hairline scar on his lip instead of his teeth. Is it a nervous gesture? He does it a lot when he's not smoking or chewing on a toothpick. "Stuff I remember's the stuff I wish I could forget."

He looks away after he says it.

Before Zef can rein in his loose tongue, he says, "You want in on my dreams? We can share."

He says it lightly. Like a joke. Change the subject and give Gray an out. For once, the look Gray gives him is soft and uncomplicated. Gratitude.

"You sure I won't turn your dreams into nightmares?" Teasing. He jerks his chin towards the plexiglass. "You done there?"

"Think so." Zef leans back to admire his handiwork, but the moment he takes a look, a spike of anxiety goes through his heart.

You matter. Written in chicken scratch with the point of a borrowed knife. In the moment, he'd wanted to put something that could brighten a stranger's day rather than darken it. But in the harsh fluorescents of the subway car, it feels trite. Drop in the bucket hopeless.

Gray doesn't tease him for it. "You're a soft touch, ain't ya, darling?"

"Maybe it's dumb."

"Naw." Gray nudges Zef's foot with his own. A touch. Not skin to skin, but still. A hint of what closeness is welcome or not. "My turn." He takes Zef's seat and holds his hand palm up for the blade. Zef gives it back and watches Gray stab it into the glass a ways up from Zef's message.

"What are you going to put?"

"My initials. Going for the classic."

He starts with the 'G,' almost diamond shaped, too tricky to make it round with the point of the blade. The gloves hinder his dexterity so he takes one off, flexing his fingers. Zef gets his first good look at those hands. Prominent knuckles, veins snaking up from delicate, bony wrists. The gilded tattoo depicts a blossoming peony in back and gray, surrounded by curling leaves. That bone notched at the wrist has a leaf curved around it. Zef feels an inexplicable need to press his lips over that bony prominence, that bare skin. A kiss gentle as a snowflake melting there.

Can't. Gray hates touch, and crucially, it's nuts. A bonkers impulse. Like eating laundry pods just because they smell tasty. Gray is poisonous as that drink they imbibed their first night together.

But he's also...brittle, damaged, a walking cry for help.

And Zef. He's a helper.

Not meant to be helping him, though. Meant to be catching him.

Gray finishes carving an 'A' when the train pulls into the station. He turns to Zef, mouth open to speak. He gets as far as, "You should sign y—" Then his expression changes. Deadens. Steely and hard and hateful. Pupils so blown his eyes look black. The peony on his hand, fisted around the knife, lights up red. But erratically. Like fluorescents first coming on after a blackout.

Smooth as a predator, Gray rises from his seat into the stream of passengers milling onto the train and stabs a man in the stomach.