Mirah disliked that she had begun to feel compelled towards emotion. She hated the uncomfortable nature of her existence now, removed from her trash pile in the side streets of the city. She had opened herself up to Tracker and even been unable to restrain herself from mouthing off at Ajax.

And even now she felt compelled to confront Ajax, as she sat on the couch in his room. Something that she couldn’t even have dreamt of doing the day before. She felt any of ten different emotions, and it was hurting her beyond belief. Like waking up from years of being asleep, only to find yourself in a world you don’t recognise one.

“Are you okay, Mirah?” Ajax’s gentle voice said, though even in his gentlest voice you could hear the depth and power that his voice could assume, if he wanted it to. Mirah tried to snap her mind from its emotional fugue, but she couldn’t. There was just so much to feel and process, and Mirah didn’t understand any of it.

“No. I am not.” She replied tersely. “Of course I am not okay.” The large man recoiled a little in surprise at the force in Mirah’s words.

“Okay,” he said placatingly, “how can I help?” Mirah paused, her frustration abated with momentary uncertainty.

“I don’t know.” She replied, making man’s powerful brow scrunch in consternation.

“But you wanted to talk?” He asked, thoughtfully. It would have sounded condescending, if he weren’t so completely honest. Mirah realised that she wouldn’t have been able to handle anything less than complete honesty right now.

“Yes. I want to ask why.” Ajax waited for her to complete the sentence, in case there was anything else, but he already knew what the strangely distraught girl in front of him wanted to know.

“Why am I finding that I want to be a ‘Hero’?” Mirah nodded succinctly. He had never seen so much confusion and anxiety expressed through an almost entirely stoic face before. But now that he had, Ajax came to the realisation that this had been coming for a while. He had thought Mirah to be in a similar state of cluelessness about the world as he was, but she was in a totally different world than the rest of the team. As his mind reframed the girl’s existence within the team, he felt his heart break slightly, and then a little more when he realised that he knew basically nothing of her past at all.

There was a fundamental breakdown of trust between the team, if it had ever existed. No-one knew anyone else’s past or who they really were, the only person even making the effort had been Walt—when he had talked about his parents—and Ajax had even given him a hard time for it. Ajax had thought himself to be the person putting his best foot forward, but he was kidding himself this whole time. He looked up to see that Mirah was waiting patiently for him to speak, even as the emotions roiled inside her eyes.

“Because I failed in the past.” He said, feeling the old wound split wide open even as he said it—the sorrow, fear, anger, and grief flooding back into his mind, the same forceful emotions that had led him towards his solitary life in the woods. The sudden rush of emotion in Ajax’s voice startled Mirah, but she stayed quiet, her hands deadly still at her sides as she tried to relax her tense body on Ajax’s couch.

“My mother and father weren’t good people, and I was the product of a drug fuelled accident. I lived with them for a few years as a young child, but when my dad did something stupid to make the police raid the house, they found me locked in a room in a days old diaper, barely alive while my parents were getting themselves high.” Ajax’s voice had regained much of its composure, but a low, sorrowful note permeated his speech in a way Mirah had never heard in a voice before.

“They moved you?” She said, faint memories of children being brought to the orphanage she had lived in for much of her early life. Memories of having to help young children so weak they couldn’t walk, helping them eat their food at the long tables of the dining room. Ajax nodded.

“To my grandparents, in the country. They owned a small farm by themselves, raising livestock on a small scale—enough to sustain their existence. I spent much of my childhood out there, amongst the animals—watching them be born, live, and then eventually die. I went to school like normal, did what I had to do to get through the year. But when I was around ten, my mother and father managed to get shared custody back between them and my grandparents. They had cleaned up, apparently.” Mirah could tell from the man’s bitter tone that they hadn’t. Ajax took a deep breath, sinking further back into his own seat for comfort.

“I don’t know how they did it, but they managed to convince someone that I would be better off living with them during the weeks. So that became life for a few more years, spending every moment of those weekdays wishing I was anywhere else but here,” he gestured widely—to Melbourne in general, Mirah supposed. “One day, when I came home from school to hear them having drug fuelled sex in their bedroom, with no food in the fridge, and all the money gone—I wondered if they’d even realise I was missing, if I left right then and there.” Ajax grinned widely, his coal black eyes glittering with a mischievousness, before dulling a little with his next sentence.

“Three months later, my father died from OD’ing on whatever he’d taken that day, and my mother got herself put in a mental ward. It was a whole lot easier to convince people that I was better off living with the grandparents that had been taking care of me through all of that.” Ajax deflated a little, but chuckled wryly before saying, “The only thing my mum did was give me a cool first name, and my dad only gave me his last name. Ajax Nephus.” He said, arcing his hands over his head sarcastically. Mirah’s only response was to scrunch her brow questioningly.

“How did you fail?” She asked, but even though the words themselves were blunt, her voice was almost soft—even if her expression remained at its stony resting place. Ajax rubbed at his forehead before he lurched out of his chair and silently dawdled around his kitchen—opening the large fridge that was flush with the rest of the cabinets surrounding it. Mirah had never used her own fridge, but she had looked inside it, finding it empty. Ajax’s was pretty sparse as well, though there were a few bottles of alcohol—something Mirah was used to the sight of, though usually empty.

“Want one?” Ajax asked, holding the bottle up, making it seem small in his massive hands. Mirah was about to decline, when something inside stopped her. ‘Why not?’ It said quietly, and Mirah decided that maybe she should follow the advice. She nodded, and before long Ajax sat opposite her, both of the teammates holding their own bottle of beer.

It tasted terrible, but Mirah had drunk and ate far worse.

“I had finished high school that year, and I was hoping to work that whole summer with my grandfather. My grandparents were getting really old, and as much as my grandpa would have loved to work until he walked right into his grave, he could barely walk for a few hours a day. We were slowly coming to the realisation that I would be running the farm, sooner rather than later.” Ajax took a long swig of the bottle in his hand, draining the brown bottle by almost a third. Mirah took an accompanying sip, letting the terrible tasting liquid slip down her throat. Ajax winced before the next sentence but managed to find it within himself to start.

“It was a really hot day, and my grandparents were struggling in the heat. The house had terrible air conditioning, so I drove us all into to town. It wasn’t a big town, but it was large enough that it had a shopping centre, even a movie theatre. On a day as hot as that, everyone was in town trying to run away from it.” He took another swig from the bottle, the emotions he’d pushed down earlier resurfacing themselves as he drew closer and closer to the event.

“We were just leaving the theatres when the sirens started going off.” The fear in Ajax’s voice hit Mirah dead in the chest, the harrowing fear so similar to what she experienced when she closed her eyes at night. She struggled to stop her throat from convulsing with the emotion, but Ajax’s eyes were focused on the rim of the bottle.

“We checked the news and the town over had been wiped out. The Wastelanders were going on another spree, and they were headed right for us. Everyone knew that it was a possibility—the Wastelanders had gone on tirade after tirade for years, but this little town had always been safe from them. There was a shelter built back when they started their ritual culling, but it hadn’t been maintained or upgraded in years, decades even.” His hand was shaking, Ajax noticed. He tried to make it stop but, after one last swig of beer, he placed the bottle down on the table—leaving his hand to tremor atop his thigh. Mirah’s eyes watched the man intently, her own hands white-knuckled in their grip on her bottle.

“A few hundred people made it to that shelter, and we waited in the darkness—the electrical system had long since stopped working. In the distance we could hear the horrible sounds as the earth dried and cracked, the air becoming hotter and barren of moisture, and the terrible sound of everything decaying. Then it was silent.” The air in Ajax’s room was suddenly just as tense as it was all those years ago in that bunker. Ajax realised that he was reliving it, the memory in his mind almost tangible, the heavy breathing of those around him, the few moments of quiet spawning a crazed hope within his chest. Just maybe—maybe this one time they would leave.

“Then the stone of the bunker cracked, aging hundreds of years and decaying in seconds. To my left, hanging on the wall was a red fire axe, so I grabbed it in the vain hope that I could defend myself. I don’t know how many died as the bunker fell apart, rock and metal wasting away and eventually turning into piles of dust. Anyone that was still alive could barely see against the sunlight, the dry air pulling the life out of our bodies. And then when we saw them standing atop the rubble, looking down on us like ants.

“Then they burned the anthill.”

Ajax grabbed the sheathed axe that had been sitting on the table, pulling it out of its holster and placing it across his thighs, sadly caressing the chipped red paint on its head. He could barely hold the axe, even as it sat on his legs, the trembling so pervasive that it would rock his whole body if he let it.

“I Awakened as everyone melted around me. The dryness was so intense that their skin instantly cracked and flaked away, the earth below, crumbling and dropping them into the crevices. And then their bodies aged, their flesh rotting and wasting away before their eyes. It was all over before I even called upon my link.” Ajax looked up at Mirah, right into her vivid green eyes—he knew his face was the very same one he had seen every morning in the mirror, the one that held every terrible emotion he had.

“I was left in the dusty remains of everyone I knew and loved, of the people I had Awakened to protect. And all I managed to protect was myself.”

Who had started crying first was irrelevant. The timeline of events didn’t matter anymore. Ajax had believed they would, before this—that he would have to manufacture the closeness between himself and the rest of his teammates. He thought that every exact step would be important, like a computer would log how it played a chess game. But as Ajax’s conscious mind woke for split seconds between his sobbing, every time he would see something and not remember how it happened. He didn’t remember when another beer had made it into both of their hands, or when it was that Mirah had hugged him in her best attempt to console, or why Mirah had begun telling her own story—her words laden with just as much sadness and loss as his own.

He had felt it at the middle of the day, the little spark of closeness that had jumped between the group—chemistry that they were so heavily lacking. He had wondered what he had to do to attain it, to put it in a jar and keep it. How many nights had he worried about it, now? Tossing and turning, running situations through in his head, questioning what he should do to win the team over.

But now, as he and Mirah sat across from each other, emotions emptied from the hours of reliving the worst of both of their lives—of why Mirah ran from her orphanage, when she had seen that poor little girl, and the look on Mirah’s face when she said she’d do anything to go back and kill that man. Ajax could only barely remember himself saying the words, but he knew they would stay in his mind forever.

“Careful, you’re beginning to sound like a hero.”

When even Mirah had laughed, a shockingly beautiful sound, Ajax knew he had truly found it.

His first teammate.