Trudging away from the train station, Lysander made a quick internal checklist for what he needed to get done when he got home so he wouldn’t get sidetracked. But as he entered his apartment, the first thing he noticed was that the living room lights were on, which he hadn’t registered on his approach because someone had closed both the blinds and curtains to his living room window. The second thing he noticed was Red sitting on his sofa in her usual spot watching him, her eyes shadowed by the lamplight, the green appearing almost black from the tilt of her chin.

“Holy shit, you scared me!” he shouted, pressing a hand to his rapidly beating heart. She said nothing, just continued to follow him with her eyes. Bingley had been sitting contentedly next to her until Lysander jumped, and now the dog jumped on him excitedly.

Crossing the room, Lysander let Bingley out into the night. He had almost nothing left inside him for this moment. He certainly hadn’t expected to come home to Red lounging in his living room. Indeed, he had no room in his thoughts to even wonder how she had gotten inside without him. But now that his adrenaline was leaving him, another rush of emotions swept over him, anger forefront among them. It was a rage more intense than he had ever experienced in his admittedly short life, and it burned his chest painfully.

“Was it you?” he asked while turning to face her.

To her credit, she didn’t play dumb. There was only one thing he could be talking about at that moment, so she said softly but firmly, “Yes.”

At the admittance, the anger surged up his throat, and he could feel the skin of his neck and cheeks turning red and blotchy. “How dare you,” he growled out, “I trusted you.” As a naturally non-confrontational person, Lysander had never been one to start a fight, either verbal or physical, but he felt like he could do it now, could scream and rage at her until there were no more words in the world and no breath left in his chest.

At last, she stood from her place, her body unfolding to her full height, and it struck him again that she was dangerous, that she had killed people, had killed someone he knew personally, in fact, but the realization was almost like a blip on his radar, like a tiny red flag raising amidst the fog that had descended over him, and he found it easy to push aside.

She said nothing more, just faced him across the room, face the blankest he had ever seen, no teasing grin or plotting smirk tugging her mouth, nothing. A face wiped clean.

“Aren’t you going to tell me why?!” he yelled. “If it was an accident or somethi--”

“It was no accident,” she cut him off, “I killed Joseph Campbell.”

The sentence struck him like a bullet firing through his chest, all the betrayal and grief sucking the life out of him, and it hurt, physical pain thrumming through him and making him nauseous and he grabbed a handful of his shirt over his heart. He knew, logically, that he barely knew the woman in front of him, but he had believed in her, had felt a kinship with her, had defended her to his friend, and this, this was the result of that? “Why?”

She didn’t look like she was going to respond, her eyes roving over his face like they had done so many times now, and now he could see it for what it was, an attempt to catalogue his emotive feelings like she had never seen anyone so expressive and needed to take note, a specimen to be studied.

“Please tell me why,” he begged. If this was the last time he ever saw her, then she owed him at least this much.

Finally her face moved, a small twist of her lips as though she was biting the inside. And then, “He was trying to kill you, Lysander.”

Honestly, he spent the first few moments after the pronouncement shell shocked, convinced she had misspoke because that couldn’t be right. Certainly not. That made no sense.

And he remembered:

Joseph’s hand in his hair. The image forever implanted in his brain, even as the exact size of his palm and length of his fingers already began to slip from memory.

And he remembered:

Too many things at once, thousands of tiny moments spent in the company of Joseph Campbell, growing up in his home with his family and too many times accidentally calling both Campbell’s ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ and being corrected, gently by Avianna and with a sorrow he could scarcely comprehend as a child by Joseph.

And he remembered:

Walking up to Joseph’s office and overhearing something that changed his life and ended Joseph’s, and Joseph desperately trying to speak with him and explain, and meeting Red just two weeks later, and planning their fake (real) assassination that she insisted would take two weeks, and Red killing a man not even four blocks away from his apartment, a man sent to kill him, and Red always being there, catching her skulking in alleys and springing up when he least expected to see her.

And, two weeks, two weeks, he thought.

“He hired you,” he whispered. And if he was right, god, if he was right--

“Yes,” she said with the same softly firm tone as earlier.

But this admittance shattered him rather than enraged him. He wouldn’t have, couldn’t have, believed it if he hadn’t just realized the truth for himself. “It was never Anthony who had it out for me. It was always Joseph.” He was still whispering, but to say it any louder, he felt, would summon forth a cataclysm in the very floor of his apartment. A black hole, maybe, to suck out the rest of his soul.

“Yes,” she admitted again.

“But, then, why? Why did you work with me? Shouldn’t I be dead?” The questions came faster now.

“I couldn’t do it,” she said, and he could tell that this admission cost her.

“Why not?” As strange as it was to argue for his own demise, he needed to understand. Red wasn’t the sentimental type. As far as either of them were concerned, Lysander should be turning to dust as they spoke.

With another twist of her lips, she continued, “The whole job felt wrong to me from the get go, which wouldn’t normally bother me. I’m paid to kill, not to think about the moral implications of my job, but, I don’t know, the wrongness stuck with me while I was watching you and getting ready to do the job and I just couldn’t do it, especially not after you hired me to fake kill a guy so he would have a change of heart like out of some kid’s book.” This last bit came with a chuckle and a shake of her head, and this, more than anything anyone had said about it previously, threw into sharp relief how very naive and childish he had been when coming up with that plan, how very little he had listened to the advice of people he claimed to trust in regards to it.

“So, what? You couldn’t kill me because I’m too dumb?”

“No, you’re twisting my words. It’s less stupidity and more...purity? Like, the sun might shine out of your asshole or something.”

Narrowing his eyes incredulously, he said, “That’s absurd. I’m just a normal guy, Red.”

“I know that. But you’re also just an objectively good guy, y’know?”

“Were you raised in a den of wolves or something?” he asked.

Glaring, she answered, “No, but it is rare to have one of my marks be just some average dude, so I got curious, fucking sue me.” Sighing, she spread her hands, relaxing the combative posture she had taken on as their argument progressed. “The first night we met, I was all set to go through with it, but I wanted to talk to you first. I don’t know why, but it felt necessary to me at the time to give me some peace of mind. And then you took me here and you had a zoo full of pets in your home and you wanted to hire me to take on the same person who had just hired me to get rid of you, but instead of wanting him dead, you just wanted him to change his mind, and then I was curious. What happened between these two guys? I wondered, so I had to let it play out and get some answers.”

“Then what? You just hedged your bets to see which one of us deserved you or something?” Even to his own ears, the proposition sounded crazy, but his thoughts swirled too chaotically to put all the pieces together on his own.

“Well, no,” she started, and now she looked embarrassed for the first time since he had known her, “You were more interesting, so I had to get rid of him to protect you.”

“You--You killed Joseph Campbell, the most powerful man in the city and my foster father, to protect me?” The logic made sense in a twisted way, but his own sensibilities prevented him from seeing what she had done for him as anything but horrible. Two men were now dead because of him, and the weight of it crashed unpleasantly into him, especially as the picture of Miria still sitting alone in their childhood home returned to him. Alone because of him, an orphan because of him.

“Well, yes, of course,” she said matter-of-factly. To her, this must be just any other normal Sunday.

“Did--did he hire you directly?” he asked. He was having trouble focusing now, his hands shaking and lungs constricting, so he asked the first thing that popped into his head.

“No, he had his secretary set up the meeting,” she responded. She seemed eager to tell him all this, like she had been holding it all back and now that it was out in the open, she was only too happy to share all the sordid details with him.

At the mention of the secretary, he thought back to Anthony in his office and the passing comment about Joseph’s secretary disappearing. By the way, I heard your secretary stopped showing up to work last week. Shame. She was a nice girl.

“Oh my god, did you kill her too?” He wanted very badly to believe she hadn’t, that it was just some wild coincidence that Jude had disappeared.

Seeing his distress, she cocked her head to the side curiously, “I had to. Otherwise, BP would have asked her too many questions and tracked it all back to me and you, by extension.”

That was three now. Three people gone from the world because he still lived and breathed.

He ran unceremoniously from the room and proceeded to dry heave in the bathroom for the next ten minutes. Bingley had returned from the outside and now sat next to him on the cold linoleum, pressing his warm furry body into his side. Red hovered awkwardly in the doorway, and the cats had fled to some hiding place during the commotion of him running.

“This is awful,” he whispered, his eyes burning from the pressure in his head. “What have I done?”

“To be fair, I did all the heavy lifting,” Red chimed in. Her tone suggested she wanted to cheer him up, but she failed spectacularly.

“You wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me,” he groaned, pressing his eyes into his palms. “God, how am I supposed to tell Miria?”

“Well, I guess you’re just gonna have to make it worth it,” she stated firmly.

“What does that even mean?” he asked weakly.

Shrugging, she explained, “Now that he’s out of the way, you can do your thing, right? Save the city and all, I mean.”

“This is barely helping, Red.”

Silence.

And then, “My name is Lexi. Lexi Wells.”

Shock reverberated through him, and he dropped his hands away from his eyes to stare dumbstruck at her.

“Lexi Wells? As in, Alexandria Wells? The poster child for what not to do at the grocery store?”

For a second, she looked offended that that had been his first reaction, but then she crossed her arms over her chest and glared. “Yup, that old chestnut. Don’t see the resemblance?” At this, she exaggeratedly posed for him, contorting her face into an approximation of the scared little girl from all the PSA signs in every Campbell’s. As soon as she did it, he did actually finally see the resemblance--the way a young girl’s cheeks might slim and features sharpen with age to produce the woman in front of him.

Exhaling heavily, he bonelessly slumped against the side of the bathtub, the chill of the fiberglass permeating through his raincoat. He realized he hadn’t even taken off his jacket or shoes upon arriving, had just blazed into this situation after leaving an already fraught emotional one back with Miria, and he felt exhausted, bone deep tired all the way down to his toes like just standing would be a herculean effort.

“I need to get back to Miria. I promised,” he said without making any moves to actually get up from the floor.

Red--Lexi (did he call her that now? that seemed weird, weirder than Skittles becoming Ramon)--raised an eyebrow at him. “Maybe you should just take a nap instead.”

As lovely as that sounded, he knew that if he fell asleep now he wouldn’t wake up for hours, and Miria was still waiting up for him to return, probably getting increasingly confused about what was taking him so long. There was still so much to do and think about, and he couldn’t succumb to unconsciousness quite yet.

“Well, come on then,” she said before gripping his upper arms and heaving him to his feet. As reluctant as he was to be so close to her, he needed the help, his whole body protesting the movement.

Once he was upright again, he stepped as far as he could get away from her, which wasn’t especially far given the confines of his bathroom, but she got the message and dropped her hands. “We’ll talk more about this later, like way later, like so far later that maybe I can just forget about it.”

“I’ll give you a day to figure your shit out, then I’ll be back, okay?” she stated, categorically ignoring his idea.

“Fine, sure,” he said, waving his hand in her direction dismissively.

He was so, so tired. His eyes felt dry and weighted and his head filled with cotton and his limbs like stubby clubs hanging off him.

And so it was that on the 1st of April, Joseph Campbell was assassinated. A life ended so another could continue.

And Lysander Badeaux wished he could take it all back.

Earlier that day, Blair sat outside of Sam’s small house in the backyard. Sam had dug out a pair of old plastic lawn chairs from their garage and placed them on the tiny cement outcropping that served as their back patio. The air still had a bit of winter chill nipping at the exposed skin on her nose and the chair stuck unpleasantly to the bit of her lower back that had come uncovered as her jacket and shirt rode up. Yet, she felt comfortable here with Sam next to her nursing a cup of water in her hands and watching Charlie play on the swing set. The wooden frame was starting to rot in places and the swings creaked ominously with Charlie’s weight, but he still looked thrilled to be rocketing through the air, the weather finally warm enough to justify playing outside.

Blair had spent many a weekend here since they had become friends, and the chaos of Sam’s family was far preferable to the suffocating silence of her apartment. Her parents had invited her to their place for dinner later, and as much as she wanted to decline, she knew that that wasn’t really an option. Her parents fretted too much over her and kept their own apartment clean to the point of sterility, making even lounging on the sofa feel like sacrilege. Plus, they would probably try to get her to quit her job and apprentice under one of them again, and then they would argue passive aggressively about which of them had the more prestigious job while Blair picked at her food with her chopsticks, and the evening would turn into a mess.

So, this was her happy place, even when Sam would awkwardly apologize for the fact that her mother never came out of her room to greet her or when Charlie would somehow get mud all over her clothes after hugging her as his means of saying hello.

“Has Zane found somewhere to work yet?” Blair asked.

Sam tucked her hands deeper into the sleeves of her oversized hoodie and shook her head. “Sometimes I’m still surprised by how blunt you are,” she began. Blair hadn’t thought her question too indelicate--had even spent some time thinking about how to phrase it appropriately--but alas. “But yeah, actually. He found some work doing garbage disposal. Apparently, he sorts through people’s trash for anything that can be recycled for reuse and processes the rest to be taken outside the Barrier. He doesn’t really talk to me about it, mostly because he’s dead asleep as soon as he comes home and shovels in some food.”

“I’m glad he found a job,” Blair said simply.

Sam grimaced, and Blair wondered again whether she had missed something. “Yeah, I’m just a little worried about him being so close to the Barrier. It is nice to have the extra income though.” Thankfully, Sam was practiced in filling the silences that Blair left behind and answering the questions Blair didn’t know to ask.

“I’m sure he’s perfectly safe. I’m sorry that it causes you concern though,” she said sympathetically. As an only child, Blair didn’t have the correct frame of reference for what it might be like to have siblings as well as parents to worry about, but it sounded stressful. She had her hands full just trying to care for Sam and Lysander on a daily basis.

“Thanks.” With that, Sam gently butted their shoulders together and smiled at Blair. “I know my worries are irrational sometimes, but it’s my job as the big sister,” she said with a laugh. Blair thought privately that that sounded more like the job of a mother than a sister, but she would never point out such a thing to Sam with how delicately her friend skirted anything revolving around her mother.

“And how are Brian and Charlie doing in school?” she asked, changing the subject before she inadvertently did say anything inappropriate.

“My teachers say I talk too much but that I work hard!” Charlie called across the yard. While school was no longer mandatory (largely because it was too difficult to enforce), many parents, especially parents of younger children, still sent their kids to school, if even just to give them something to do during the day. Keeping schools running also accounted for a good portion of employment, so people often continued to push for them to remain open.

Laughing, Sam called back to her brother, “Maybe give poor Mr. Jameson a break, huh?” Then, she turned back to Blair and said quieter, “The poor man once sent home a note asking us to burn more of Charlie’s energy before sending him to school. Kid’s like a puppy.”

With a smile, Blair commented, “Yes, I could see that.” In her mind, she imagined Charlie growing long floppy dog ears and an ecstatically wagging tail, and honestly, it didn’t seem too bizarre.

“As for Brian, I think his teachers are more worried about whether he can talk at all.” Sam chuckled. “But, he always brings home good grades, so I know he’s working hard too. He’ll probably be able to get a pretty good apprenticeship, I think.” Apprenticing was the easiest way to train in any job now that college professors had mostly gone into working directly in their respective fields with the high demand for skilled professionals growing, especially in medicine.

At the mention of apprenticing, Blair again thought of her parents and their incessant needling. “When you were a kid, what did you want to be?” she asked, looking up at the clouds rolling across the sky and squeezing her chilled fingers between her thighs.

“You mean before all this?” Sam asked with a wave to encompass everything. “Hmm, probably something dumb like a dog trainer. I can’t remember too well.”

Blair caught an edge to her tone that hinted at a lie, but didn’t know how to delicately confront her about it. “I wanted to be a doctor like my dad,” she confided. That dream had swiftly been killed by the reality of blood and death that confronted her father everyday, but still some piece of her longed to have that healing touch, to be able to gently soothe wounds, both external and internal. Oftentimes, she was too clumsy socially to really do much, impatience and indelicacy dogging her every move. But still she couldn’t fully quash the desire.

“Really? I thought you would rather gnaw off your own arm than apprentice under your dad,” Sam replied.

“Yes, that is true now, but when college was an option, it sounded lovely,” she said. To get out from under the assessing gazes of her parents had always sounded lovely, and college had been her road out before the world effectively ended.

“Mm, makes sense,” Sam murmured while swirling the water around her glass and watching the ripples lap against the edges. “I, uh, actually wanted to be an artist.”

This was news to Blair. Art was a subject they had never discussed. It drifted too close to the forbidden topic of Sam’s mother and father, both of whom had worked professionally in the art world, her father in graphic design and her mother as an illustrator for graphic novels. “I see,” she said once the initial shock had worn away.

“Yeah, stupid right? I gave it up after dad died,” Sam said in a rush, clearly not wanting to dwell on the topic.

“Sammy painted all the murals in her room!” Charlie piped up once more. “Her birds are amaaaaazing! I wanted her to help me draw the planets for my science homework one time, but Zane told me not to.”

At this, Sam froze in her seat before taking a deep breath and shaking it off. “I’m glad you like the birds, Charlie,” she shouted back. “I thought so many times about painting over those stupid murals.” This, she directed for Blair’s ears only. Naively, Blair had thought she had known all the secrets in her friend’s heart. Still, this knowledge only endeared Sam to her even more. Sam tried so hard everyday, and that was amazing to Blair, as condescending as that seemed. No matter how successful she was, Sam kept trying to contort herself into ever increasing difficult shapes to show that she was more.

“I would love to see the mural sometime,” Blair replied. She realized immediately she had said the wrong thing. Sam tightened her lips and hunched deeper into her hoodie.

“I’m not going to be like her,” she said, almost to herself, her tone critical and sharp.

“You practicing your art wouldn’t suddenly make you like your mother.” And there it was, Blair had stepped over the ‘mom’ line, which she regretted immediately as Sam stood up stiffly and gestured back to the house.

“Don’t you have that dinner to get ready for?” she asked, and Blair didn’t have to be a social genius to understand that her friend wanted her gone.

“Sam, I’m sor-” she began, but Sam cut her off.

“It’s cool. I’ll see you at work tomorrow.” And this dismissal was firmer than the first as Sam turned physically away from her and crossed her arms over her chest.

Sighing, Blair took the message and left, calling a final unanswered goodbye over her shoulder as she went.