--XVI--

I looked from the sky above me, down to Malcolm's face. It was difficult to tell my tears from the rain, or his tears from the rain, or the tears from his eyes and the ones from mine.

The dead bodies of both Skittles and Crayon were just yards away. White fur. White fur that protected hearts that were no longer beating. I refused to look. Too much.

"Chris." Malcolm's voice was almost as ragged as mine. Almost. He wasn't poisoned- at least not that I could tell. I wondered what else happened; at times Malcolm couldn't use his abilities. Maybe that was the case or Joe incapacitated him early. I didn't want to know. "It's too much," he said, in the same voice that he used to tell me I wasn't being kidnapped or harmed, the day I woke up in his house for the first time, after I jumped off Century Spire. "Chris, please." Somewhere between our heavy breaths mixing and the thousands of raindrops hitting concrete, I heard him sniff. "I don't want you to hurt."

My lips moved instantly. "When did anybody care if I was hurting?" I whispered, without any thought or tact.

"When Kaylee got you the drive. When Caleb manipulated computers for you." He was begging me to stop, yet I felt nothing, apart from the completely shattered bone in the wrong place and the warmth that I somehow always felt with him. "When James saved you." He paused. "When I saved you."

It was on his face, the pleading. His hair was some color between russet and chestnut brown, with just a few strands of silver every here and there. Like coffee. It was the color of his mustache and beard, too. His eyes were blue, but not like Scott's or Caleb's- it was deep blue. Ultramarine.

I said nothing.

"I can't see you like this!" he said.

"Then don't-" I inhaled a sharp breath, held it, and breathed out as slowly as I could. The pain was more than blinding, more than an open drain underneath your bathtub of sanity, and yet more than the pain was the memories. I felt my eyes go from grey to something else, something maybe close to white, close to transparent, close to invisible, close to nonexistent. "Then don't look."