A fun fact about superpowers: you don't get to blackout for long after getting hit a few times.  Your body will go limp, leaving your muscles weak and liquid, like you're less a person and more a splat of sentient gook on pavement. But after a few seconds of darkness, your brain is back online, even if your body isn't. You can tell me if this is a good or bad side effect of the whole superpower shtick, but to me, becoming a mass of helpless limbs is a recipe for panic. Hysteria. That type thing.

Gideon scoops me off the sidewalk and slings my arm over his shoulder. When my eyes first open, all I'm aware is the grayness of the city. The gray sky and the gray clouds rolling across it, the gray, twisting skeletons of decayed buildings and the sidewalks gray with dirt. Those first few seconds fill me with the suffocating sensation that I'm standing inside someone else's nightmare where the colors drip shades of gray and I'm all darkness, too. Like I'm some evil thing in someone else's story. Like what I am is wrong, but I can't help it, can't help it.

My mouth opens to scream, but I cool the impulse by reminding myself that I don't need to draw any more eyes, being a, you know, teen fugitive and all.  Also, I'm probably having an existential crisis. And you know who else has existential crises? Everyone. 

"So, I'm fine. I'm fine," I say, stumbling. One foot, then the other, until I'm stable enough to snatch my arm off his shoulder and rest it I smile, digging my fingertips into the book's cover, pages still damp with my blood. Gideon grips my elbow and pulls me off the grating, his hands gentle. There's a strength to him, a strength I've only gotten the faintest impressions of behind his gentle mannerisms and friendly voice. He frowns, his eyes trailing the curve of my blood-smeared cheek. "Who got to you?"

"Everyman Cult."

His face drains of color, his eyes widening and his mouth cracking open with a gasp. His hand tightens on my arm, and I can't tell if it's involuntary or if he wants to behind me, or if he wants to protect me, even. I  let my eyes fall to his fingernails, chewed to ragged squares, and push him off me. He stumbles. I feel nothing.

"We'll be fine," I say, less a thought and more an offering of words to fill the silence. I'm thinking of the address whispered against my earlobe, the secrets I'm keeping from the person who offered me his home. I'll have to sacrifice the stranger, and the thought makes my chest tighten. I glance up and down over his body, the black, wrinkled clothes. The square jaw and the dark eyes under a head of black curls. The white flames winking off his forearm. "Fine."

His strides quicken. His chest heaves, his hand groping for my shoulder as if to lean on. I don't let him touch me, matching his galloping pace with my own clumsy strides, enough space left between us that we're taking up the sidewalk. His shoulders have begun to shudder.

"I'm sorry you got involved with this, Max." His head is lowered, and he's murmuring behind a face full of hair. "Thank you for saving me, man, but I'm sorry."

"S'alright," I say, wincing at the pain rippling from the backs of my knees. Turns out knife-slashes ache when no one with magical healing powers fixes them for you. "Glad to have met you. Trust me on this one, I'll make sure they don't get you," I say, lying through my smiling teeth.

His breathing sharpens, spiraling out of him in quick, gasping gulps. His fingers snag the sleeve of my hoodie and he unfurls himself into a run. We're shoving through people, Gideon's speed picking up and up until my new wounds are searing, and I'm the one struggling to follow him.

"I'm gonna protect you, right? Remember? It's gonna be okay." Lying through smiling teeth again. "And even if you do lose your powers, that's all. They're not gonna kill you or anything."

The apartment building sways into view, and by now, I'm already shaking and gasping with the sort of pain that's more internal than external. Like there's glass in my lungs. He runs all the way home, dragging me while I choke on blood and bite back yelps. My feet thump against the stairs on the inside, and I don't even have time to admire the rats in the daylight, though I can hear their scrabbling on the torn carpet. Lights flicker, hissing, and then Gideon's shoving the key into the door lock, both hands still shaking, and the city melts behind my eyelids.

"Dude, I think you're having a panic attack." Chip used to have a lot of those. Probably still does. He remembers how his parents died. Saw them seeping, he later told me. It sometimes gets better, he added, but sometimes he still remembers it so vividly. "Let me run down to the store," I say as the door shuts and encloses us in his clean apartment. Sunlight glows through the open window, casting a milky glow over the ancient computer, the desk, the made bed. I draw in a long breath of vanilla and the smokey residue of a hundred extinguished flames. He draws the blind and pulls the curtain across the windows, pressing his back to the glass. Feet away from him, I can hear every gasping breath. His pupils are dilated to points, and I notice for the first time that his eyes are a shade lighter than black.

"Let me get you some water? Aspirin?"

Gideon claws his fingers in the black drapes, sliding to a sitting position with the cloth wound up in his fists. His shaking has become violent, and I fall to my knees beside him. When Chip got like this, all I could do was sit beside him, clawing my fingers into the floor. I didn't know what to do or say. And eventually, Chip would open himself. Only clips of information, occasionally an explanation. And I would just sit and nod because I didn't know what else to do. But Gideon isn't Chip, someone who hates the sound of his own voice, and the silence is heavy between us and a cruel for him to suffer through.

"I get it's scary, but you're safe here."

Gideon lolls his head against the window, his breathing quick and ragged huffs. He shuts his eyes and nods, a red tint creeping over his face. "Yeah. I just need a second. I'm sorry."

"You're fine." It's funny, how exhaustion and pain only set in minutes after the bruises have been dealt and the body broken. And it's funny how that isn't funny at all. Sweat beads in my lashes and rolls between my shoulder blades. I let my hand linger near his on the floor, fingers itching to uncurl against his skin. "No need to be sorry about anything."

"Yeah." Another gasping breath. "It'll all be okay, right? We'll be fine."

No. "Yeah. But, but seriously, do you need anything? Like, let me grab you some aspirin. Tea. That sort of thing."

He dangles a limp hand over a knee drawn to his chest. I can still smell the coffee lingering on his apron, the faded smell of his cologne on his skin. "You don't have to be a part of this," he says, and his voice is a tender sound I'm not used to hearing from the people who knows me truly, as a criminal. A villain. "Everyone I touch gets hurt. And I don't mean that in, a, you know, romantic sense or whatever. It's just, just they broke my boyfriend's jaw before even Gal could save him. My parents... I don't know if it's my fault. My best friend, she's, I-I dunno. She's just gone." 

I squint at the carpet, making designs out of the few crumbs and occasional stains. Anything to keep my eyes away from his. He doesn't know me truly. Why we're both the same. Why I'm more of a danger to him than he is to me. "You just did a good thing for me, and look what happened to you." A tear splatters the floor, but his voice is still the same, still soft. Smooth.

"This?" I press my thumb to the wound in my face. The man left a groove from the tip of my chin to my hairline, over my temple. It's filled with dried blood that flakes beneath my fingertips, and though my face is turned away from Gideon's, I hide my wince with a nervous smile out of habit. "I like fighting people. Gives me a rush. No offense or anything, but you're just a vehicle for guilt-free carnage.

His thumb brushes the scar Monet left on the underside of my chin in our fight at the school. There's that strength I forgot he had, tilting my head toward him. He presses this other hand to the gash, his heat bleeding into mine. His eyes are still shut, tears caught in his lashes, and so I close mine as well. Trying to see only darkness. Trying not to remind myself  that like him, I break everything around me. He laughs, soft, stuttering, and choking. I'm reminded that I like his gentle voice.

"What happened to you to make you so edgy?"

"Prison."

His eyes fly open, that almost-black. And there's that laugh again, still so quiet, still so warming to  even the chilliest parts of me. Sitting beside him, there are so many things I want to tell this stranger. I can feel the sand sifting from the secrets I've fought to burry. Can feel myself unraveling, every part of me coming loose. Can feel a happy sigh welling up from the back of my throat and my shoulders relax against the window. My fingers bump his.

"That's gonna scar," he says. "Was the knife green?"

"Uh, yeah."

His hand curls over mine, his words slurring. "Not good for the home team. Healing powers on weapons are weird. They mess up your healing factor and my power on their wounds." The contact, warm and soft, makes my heart race in my fingertips. He shakes his head, bleary eyes peering up the ceiling. 

"Sometimes I think about just handing myself over," he continues, "but they'd kill me, and they'd chase some other kid." A muscle feathers beneath his jaw. "I can't just let them do that, right? They're wrong. I have to try to stand up for myself." He stretches his legs, wriggling his toes in his shoes. The white scuffs  on the leather bob in the strips of fleeting light. "Right?"

"Yeah, yeah." What else am I supposed to say? You have it all wrong? The people who beat up your buddies and want to rip away your powers are the good guys? "You're doing the right thing."

 Doesn't everyone want to hear that?

He sighs, his eyelids drooping. And looking at him like that, exhausted and scared and vulnerable, conjures a pain inside me that twists and tears in the place my heart should be. "You should get some sleep.  Does using your powers tire you out?"

He nods.

"Great," I say, though I don't mean to voice the thought aloud. "I'm going to get some stuff. Aspirin. Tea? Anything you think would make you feel better?"

"Got a cell phone?"

"...and a cell phone. Got it. I have a little cash on me." As in, thousands of dollars. "I'll be back in an hour or two."

"Mhmmm..." Gideon pitches himself on his side, back against the glass. Trying to heal a cut that's meant to be impossible to heal must be pretty draining stuff. His eyes become slits, before falling shut.

At first, I sling him over my shoulders to carry into bed, but he's so light, despite the muscle. Something so precious and ultimately so defenseless. Reminds me of Chip, who was all bones. Reminds me of Finn, his tux covered in blood. Reminds me of Monet with my fingertips pressed to her throat, squirming as she pooled blood between our feet. And I don't like thinking about that, and so I leave him on the floor.

I flip up my hood and stuff my hands deep into my pockets, Chipish. Gideon screams in his sleep, and between us, the door slams shut. I walk into the apartment's blackened halls, pretending he doesn't exist. Pretending it's only me and the dark.