Few things are as mystifying as a member of the opposite sex's bathroom. Despite all the beard oils and creams that Faust had shoved into his cupboard, one bottle of 'XX-strength' shower gel stood alone in the bath. Mould, having long won the battle for the shower curtain, crept up the tiles and was now caking over an extractor fan, which smelled chokingly damp.

It was an appropriate room to cry in, sure, but Connie quickly grew tired of crying. The strap on the communication tile had been digging into her, so she pulled it free of the raw skin as she spoke.

She said, "Is anyone else still alive?"

The extractor fan hummed. The shower spat out a few droplets of water. The word count ticked up ever higher.

"Hello?" she said. "Are we seriously the only ones left?"

The people in the flat above began hammering the wall, which was tolerable up until the point they started drilling, which wasn't tolerable in the slightest and echoed through the bathroom like it was an opera house. If someone from Barden was covering their ears, she knew it had to be bad.

The communication tile crackled.

"I'm busy, sister," said a man, and the sheer violence in his voice made her shudder, bringing her back to her childhood in Slumsfield, when she ran away from a pack of hoodies that streamed after her from boarded up windows, jeering that they'd kill her if they caught her.

She said, "Who were you again, man?"

Connie sat there for a few minutes waiting for a reply that never came, calling out the names she could remember, but she got no answer from Haralda, Eirlys or the kid.

Only three of them left? Shit.

She strode back into the bedroom, finding Faust back in bed, staring at the ceiling through blurry eyes, his mouth all twisted up in a look of hatred. Every so often he would cringe, wince, screw up his face, and mutter some form of insult under his breath. He slapped his hand against the wall, crying out with every blow, though for what reason she had no idea.

Legs on the street walked past the windows.

"Faust," she said.

"My mind's made up on this. The only use I can be is as a sacrifice."

Connie was paralysed. Of course people talked about men needing to show more weakness, and she'd coaxed plenty of lonely taxi-goers out of their shells just by being a stranger who was willing to listen. Every time she'd be shocked at the depth of feelings they revealed to her, violent or self-hating, or despondent, or inadequate, of their resolutions to divorce or suicide. Having seen it before didn't make it easier to watch.

"I'm not afraid of death," said Faust. "I'm afraid of having died without making an impact. You're worth saving, Connie. At least grant me that."

She said, "You're worth saving, Faust. At least grant me that."

He shook his head and retreated under the duvet.

"Just fuck off, then," she said, taking a deep breath, and with no idea what else to do, threw the Net of Truth at him. "Look, man, I was a person who wasn't worth anything, and you ain't nothing like me. You know what I was that you weren't? I was 'happy'. I was content to do the same thing every week and work the same shit job and fuck the same carousel of people who leeched off me because I didn't care to do better.

"I'm the kind of person who ends up single in their fifties and never ever learns. I never thought shit to myself like, 'you fuckup', because I just shrugged and got on with it in my entry level job! I was like that, man. I fucking loved myself, and I loved my flat, and I loved that I was such a player, and I never once thought I could do better than taking on more hours and more credit cards.

"If you hate yourself, then you're saying you know you could do better, that you have the potential to do better -- in other words, that you're worth saving. Maybe you think it's easier to keep on hating yourself than changing your life, for the same reason that I found it easier to lie to everyone than admit I was in debt, but you know that it's at least a possibility. Am I right or am I fucking right, man?"

He lay still under the duvet, making it rise and fall with his steady breaths, constrained as it was under the net, and Connie found it the most shameful thing she'd ever seen. She felt like she was facing down the ostrich again, even if what she was really facing down was herself. Her anger sprung up a furious energy in her arm that wanted her to slap the wall, just as Faust did, to cry out to herself and ask herself why she'd been such a fuck-up, but she held it still and instead clutched the old gentleman's business card.

She'd ace that fucking chauffeur course.

"I want to save myself," said Faust. "But it's easier to die. If not a decisive death on a hot night of impulse, then a slow, languid death of inaction, a rotting away of the spirit, a death of the self before the body."

"Do you want to die, or do you want to save yourself?"

He cleared his throat; rubbed his eyes, and said, "I want to save myself."

"So what are you going to do about it?"

He sat up, somehow phasing through the Net of Truth, and he reached around the lamp on his bedside table for the remote control. The tissue in his hand was crumpled and besotted, but he used it to wipe away the last of his tears and looked in the mirror at himself, face full of resolve.

"One day," he said. "I'll live one day out the best as I can. I'll ignore every thought that tells me to do otherwise. I'll live the day not of *the* Faust, but of *a* Faust. But after that, I'm going to the flesh mound."

"If you're going to the flesh mound," said Connie, "Then I'm going with you."

He looked at her and sighed, but she held his gaze as a walker grips an electric fence.

"I'm serious," she said. "I'm not letting you go out as a martyr. At the very least, we'll die together as Team Shameless."

The remote tried to point Faust back to bed, but he pinched the arrow between two fingers and snapped it off, grinding it to dust. Suddenly inspired, he gripped the Double-Edged Sword and tried to snap it in half, but the only thing he managed to do was cut his bed to shreds behind him.

"You said you can't force these things," said Connie, ducking out of the way. "But actually, sometimes, I think that's what you gotta do."

"Right," said Faust. "Team Shameless. I like that."

--

So it was that on one morning when one Faust lay in bed until twelve, another leapt out as soon as he awoke, grabbing a shirt and jogging shorts before changing in the bathroom. Connie kicked away the loose clothes in her way to pass the time, on account of having better things to do than listen to someone brush their teeth. She found herself excavating a pile of notebooks in what appeared to be his music corner, propped up by guitars, and she came upon the lyrics to a song he'd written called Wiggle Worm in G# Major:

"All the worms come out to wiggle

Eat their way through your middle

Happy little wiggle worms dancing

Your body is food for them."

A chill ran up her spine -- what kind of weirdo would put a song like that in a major key? She tried to strum a few of the notes, but the guitars were way too out of tune, and besides, she only knew how to play Wonderwall.

"Oh," said Faust, coming out the doorway in an outfit of dubious athletic merit. He tucked his beard into the baggy running shirt. "As if I hadn't bared my soul enough, you rife through my verses?"

"Help or hurt, win or lose," read Connie, "Wormies don't give a damn about what you choose. Man, after all we've been through I still feel I need to ask -- are you *okay*?"

"That one was pretty fucked up," he admitted from the kitchen, and she heard the clanging of drawers and crashing about of cupboards.

She followed him in, expecting the worst, but it was suspiciously clean, and the pile of pizza boxes in the recycling bin confirmed it. The only thing in his fridge was an open plate of some kind of macaroni cheese that smelled ancient.

"I guess I could eat that for breakfast," said Faust.

"Dude," said Connie. "You'll fucking die."

"Then I require ingredients," he announced.

Pinching her nose, she scraped the pasta into the empty food waste bucket, where it would later be deposited onto a landfill and eaten by a starving fox that would pay the price for its bravery by vomiting out its guts to the bitter end.