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The desire to be sicker, to prove that you are sick, itself is indicative of sickness. A well person doesn’t desire to be sick.
I. Ace of Spades
Keith isn’t really sure what love is.
He had been six when his father had burned, and though the memories of him were childish and dream-like, slipping through his small, fragile fingers like sand and ash the way the fading memories of a six-year-old tended to be, he remembered this feeling – this unearthly, sweet devotion to him. It was a constant, as impermanent as the stars in the sky that they’d map together, and it had been so, so infinite. He remembered wondering if it could drown him. Not so much as a six-year-old, he’d been innocent and young, condemned the way children were; but later – when he was old enough to understand the concept he couldn’t back then – he realised that his father had loved him.
He remembered it through the whisper of stronger, steadier hands running through his hair, his voice lulling him to sleep during the desert sandstorms, the happy-sad-sad look he’d receive when he’d ask his father why the other children got to have a mother. His dad would take him out to chart the stars to see as if, somewhere far out into the abyss that was the sky, she belonged to them. Maybe she did.
And it had been enough, he’d realised after – after his mouth had tasted like the burned ash condemned within his father’s lungs, and after he’d made a bed for himself on the scorched Earth above the ground where his father’s bones now lay for eternity.
What once had been soft and familiar and kind, had morphed into something unrecognisable, something that he couldn’t piece together like the constellation maps he was used to.
And so –
It had begun like a little game in his head. He didn’t play with love-me-nots, with star charts, or with cloves and diamonds and kings and hearts, anymore; but he picked the days out, however, as if they were. As if this Tuesday in his new group home were the Ace of Spades – a day where all the other children had been screaming their throats bloody, and he had almost suffocated in it. He didn’t though; maybe he should have. Because instead –
– Keith slammed his head against the wall. He lined his skull up with the doorframe, calculating the rivets in the wood, assessing which bone would hurt the most if it were to break, wondering if the force of it all would be enough to make him die.
He hadn’t thought that’s what he had wanted, but he didn't seem to question it either.
So he smashed the side of his head against the doorway as hard as his ten-year-old body could, and suddenly his body was all paper skin and glass doll bones and sticky sweet marrow that leaked out from his organs. He watched it.
They watched him watching it.
The shouting had stopped. He stood there, a mere carcass of a child in the seventeenth home he had ever lived in, blood like poisoned watercolour drowning his lungs alive, tasting distinctively of the morphine they’d blessed into his collapsed veins that time he had appendicitis, and of the constellations he and his father would map out before his father became a star in the night sky himself, along with his mom. Keith still felt the need to say goodbye to them at night. It felt good.
But maybe he didn’t remember those times very well. He guessed he was a little too young for that kind of love he didn’t know he was promised.
Maybe now he could have it again, like a child picking up a house of cards ruined by the wind, balancing the deck together with empty, shaking fingers that don’t quite understand cards weren’t built to be played in such a way.
Whatever. Didn’t matter. What did, however, was that –
The screaming had stopped.
He doesn't remember the Ace of Spades very well, but he remembers the blood. It had wept into his eyes as if they themselves had been gorged out of his head. His delicate, unmarred skin had been painted with tainted scarlet watercolour, a glorious masterpiece that he’d found so much more poetic than the box of vomit-smelling canyons touched by a thousand unloved hands. Everyone had bore witness to his artistic insanity – to his mere attempt to tell them to be quiet – and they had stared with alien eyes and choking, vermilion mouths, as if they had never, ever, ever been told to shut up before.
Maybe they had been condemned that way, he supposed.
A moment later his foster mother had come into the room, and she had sounded like a car crash. She had held a dishcloth to his head, and told him to sit on the floor. She begged Keith to keep his eyes open, and then she held him to her chest as if he were more than just a stranger living in her galaxy of a home.
Before this, he could remember sitting at a thousand dinner tables, one for each day of the week, seconds of an hour, cards of a deck. A new family of strangers always sat beside him, destined to dwell in different cities that seemed like planetary solar systems and far away universes, and he slept in their alien beds, ate their strange foods, and lived their extraterrestrial lives like an imposter desperately trying to belong. And, before, he couldn’t control the otherworldly outer space homes and families and cities he lived in, no more than he could control those night sky constellations, but this time it was different.
Keith had a woman – warm like the sun – cradling his broken bleeding brain in her hands like he were sacred glass fragments of something she was piecing back together. He had her bloodied brain matter artwork against her wall as if it was always somehow meant to be there. He had everyone’s eyes on him, and for the first time in his lonely ten-year-old existence since The Before, they looked at him as if he mattered. Before, no one had cared if his skull had shattered into a hundred pieces, or if he was read his bedtime story, or if he possessed the ability to move his fragile doll bones in every way he was meant to – but they did now. It wasn’t brain damage that made Keith think this. It was love.
Tonight, he will not have to wish the stars goodnight.
The next night, he will be chosen to explore amongst them, anyway.
II. Jack of Cloves
Sometimes it wasn’t always a game. Things just happened. It just happened, even after the homes and the screaming and that all-consuming infinite loneliness that engulfs him like the starry night’s black holes next to the constellation embers where his father lay. It had been something of instinct, of unthinking desperation, synonymous with that of breathing at first, but now Keith knows to dig a little deeper, bury his bones in ash until he suffocates.
Everything is planned. He lies and he’s good at it. Medical classes are his favourite, he knows how to stitch flesh back together and he knows how to fray it apart. He knows the stages of hypovolemic shock and how much blood one has to lose before it’s too permanent. He knows about every type of seizure, and how high a fever has to be to cause one. Like star fragments or ash embers, smithereens of condemning knowledge have laid upon the ruins within his head, making their earthy graveyards right beside the scar of broken bone that had bled glass paper marrow over his house of cards from when he was ten.
No one seems to notice – a fall down the stairs that wasn’t quite an accident, a fistfight on the concrete that he should have wanted to defend himself in, and today, a fever that he’d prayed for with doll ash upturned palms condemned together laced within a plastic rosary, all the while charting finite star maps in astronomy. Some of the children he had lived with used to pray to God for a family; Keith had too, until he learns to pray for salmonella, instead.
The gallows of gospels tastes the way his childish scarlet artistry had as it wept into his mouth that day in the home, and then it tastes like the rotting carcass of ungodly meat left to decay in the Arizona desert heat for three days. It hadn’t looked infected as Keith took the plate from the windowsill, but it is. It smells of gangrene bone, of the mildewed carpet in the seventeen homes he’s existed within, and then of the putrid way his father’s flesh burns within Keith’s dreams.
He eats the meat anyway. It is his new card from the eternal deck. Today is a day where meat, rotten like infected corpses amongst the decaying gallows within the shattered pieces of his brain and its matter, condemns its existence inside the dying organ that is his stomach. The septic meat unmakes him within the constellations of his seventh-grade star maps, and he thinks he sees his father a few hours later as he writhes on the bathroom floor; in Shiro’s arms once his friend picks him up from the ruins of vomit-strained tiles that leave behind the remains of rotted lunch meat and cloves.
Jack of Cloves.
“Keith, hey, buddy. Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t feeling well?” Shiro says, and it’s familiar. This. Keith and Shiro. The achingly ephemeral moments where Keith’s body refuses to move, as if knowing that somehow, this finite moment of childlike tranquillity will wilt away along with the meat in his stomach, and he will be fixed once again when Shiro lets go. He is lingering like a benevolent shadow careful to cross over the threshold into the space of his apartment’s bathroom where Keith lays empty. Keith chokes again – thick, dreaded panic burns through his veins at the thought of this person leaving him all alone and alone and alone.
But he doesn’t. The soft murmurs of Shiro’s voice is that of music against the pitiful chorus of stay moans that leave Keith’s gangrene bloodless lips, and he curls around the warmth of Shiro’s lap like the child he shouldn’t be – isn’t. But Shiro is picking his glass doll corpse of rotting embered organs, and carrying Keith back with him as if he is made for this unearthly type of comfort. He has the remnants of Keith’s vomit bleeding down his lap, the evidence of this twelve-year-old orphan’s decomposing stomach coming undone against Shiro’s own flesh, and somehow it doesn’t matter.
“You can rest in my bed, okay? Let’s see if we can get this fever down. I think you might have the flu, bud.” Shiro lays him down upon his own mattress, right where he now somehow belongs, and Keith weeps. He’s figured it out.
He has Shiro’s body against every part of his own and suddenly it occurs to him that he matters. Keith matters to Shiro. He’s picking up this disgusting carcass of an abandoned little boy he barely knows – one that eats rotting meat like some feral animal until he is sick – and then he’s bringing him back to his bed to sleep.
It is as if this all fits, anyway, in every way. It’s perfect.
“It’s okay, you’re okay. I know you’re feeling pretty bad, but let me help, Keith.” Shiro sounds like a lullaby, an old Japanese one that his father would sing just before bedtime, tucking him in and whispering goodnight to the sky. Within the distorted haze of fever and rot plaguing Keith’s broken glass brain, Shiro looks like him, too. And if Keith can fake sick until he is, he can fake his dad. Tonight is the Jack of Cloves, a day where he just simply has the flu and his dad is taking care of him.
It isn’t the fever that makes Keith think this. It’s love.
III. Six of Diamonds
“Fuck!” Keith falters, falls, and looks down to see the bone of his forearm sticking out of the fucking skin. He suddenly regrets everything in that moment, including the methodically planned moment to intercept his sparring partner’s training weapon at exactly the right time. “Ow, fuck, ow, ow!”
“Oh, God – I’m sorry. Keith, fuck, I’m sorry!” The other kid is frantic, shouting through distressed lungs, and maybe Keith even hears him crying. He can’t see his face, Keith’s own body hunching over, eyes hidden behind his astray hair, which refuse to look anywhere else but the bone tearing through his flesh. It hurts more this way, making him feel sick and dizzy as the blood starts weeping down onto the gym floor.
Someone from somewhere else around him, closer than maybe everyone else (who also sounds just about as nauseous as Keith feels) says “that – that looks very broken…” and yeah, he’s not wrong. He places a gentle hand on Keith’s shoulder, and though Keith makes an effort to shrug the stranger away, he aches for their touch after his other classmate drops their hand. “Lance, the bone is –”
All his other classmates are surrounding the chaos in shocked silence. Their teacher is giving out commands, ordering certain students to go and alert the doctors, but he’s kinder with Keith. Gentler, calming. “It’s alright, just breathe. You’re being really brave, son.”
He feels his training partner’s gaze on him with that real panicked look in his eyes as if Keith will bleed out or disintegrate away right in front of him, and he realises he wants it more than anything. It’s the kid who hates him, whose anger and jealousy had seeped underneath his fingernails like rotting earth, making him taste the feeling of ruined paper playing cards and decaying wooden door frames and unlovable hands in his mouth against every one of his teeth.
But he can only taste nausea now, weeping against his mouth from along the veins of his delicate ash bone sticking through his ruptured skin. He hadn’t thought bones were this colour before. It’s satisfying.
“Keith, I… I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean –” Lance reaches out his hand, grazing Keith’s arching back with his gentle palm that Keith would normally turn away from it like it is poison, but now he drinks in Lance’s touch, wanting to drown in it. Maybe it is family that is this one constant thing in his life that he is destined to lose over and over and over again, but he knows how to make them stay, now.
And he isn’t family – not in the way Shiro is – but Lance touches him anyway, and Keith wants more. Lance pulls him in like a red string drifting out into space that’s commanding him back. Their shoulders touch, Keith is leaning against him and he smells like metal. He wants more open fractures, more bleeding wounds, more infections, and then he wants Lance’s hand in his, brushing bruises away like butterflies. Because –
Because Keith isn’t just hurt, but he was hurt by someone else. He was hurt by the kid who hates him, Lance broke his arm and Keith’s arcane secret made it so. He isn’t hated anymore.
“I’m really sorry, are you okay?” When Lance talks, Keith suddenly doesn’t want him to stop and when he breathes together with him, Keith feels like the epitome of all the sleep he’s never slept because he was too busy looking up induced psychosis in the Garrison’s archives, or convincing himself that ‘no, crushing his hand in the industrial door really wouldn’t hurt that much.’
“I feel weird,” Keith says, unsure if he’s deliberately choosing to drift unconscious against Lance or not. “I think I’m gonna –”
So maybe he is insane and damaged and alone, and sometimes loses fights, and breaks bones for the sake of unattainable familiarity; sometimes he maybe sees intangible playing cards – this time the Six of Diamonds – as he does it.
But it doesn’t matter.
He falls anyway.
“Okay, hey – I’ve got you.”
IV. Ten of Spades
The cards don’t stop when he goes to space.
He feels metallic shrapnel cutting into his insides, the tainted bone marrow leaking all out over his paper-child skin, down upon the training room floor. He wonders if the chaos from the rot eating away at his organs will ever seize. He knows he didn't hit anything terribly vital, but this really hurts, this time around.
He hides it for a day, in lousy dressings and deficient first aid, and waits until it becomes something that the others cannot unsee.
“When did this happen?” Shiro asks, wrapping bloodied, irredeemable flesh in condemning bandages underneath the abdominal stitches that Keith will tear apart as soon as Shiro is gone. He wants to infect them, his smithereen ash brain already planning out when he will steal the medbay’s needles and fill them with enough saliva to inject within himself.
And it's okay. The others will rebuild him once again, after he falls apart. The pain love is, is infinite, and he knows this is love because this is agony. He’s got teammates and a brother and maybe even best friends, and they all love him so much it hurts. So yeah, that makes sense to seventeen-year-old Keith.
“Just before,” he replies, the words spilling out of him methodically, practiced a thousand times over again and again and again. “I was training with the Gladiator – set the level too high. Relax, it’s just a scrape. I tried to clean it up already,” He sounds like someone who will eat Hunk’s dinner after this, who will go play Pidge’s video game with her, and fake an argument with Lance.
“God, Mullet, you’re hopeless. You must’ve failed first aid, because that is a mess,” Lance tells him from the doorway, and Keith scoffs at him because it’s familiar. The injury isn’t bad enough for Lance’s teasing to completely dissipate – not like it had been before – but it will be.
Shiro traces his hands over the wound in Keith’s paper skin, then against his hands, and then he counts all the indentations that shouldn’t belong within his flesh but do. Keith’s upturned hands are raw, the knuckles inside fragmented in so many insignificant little pieces of cartilage that Keith wouldn’t know how to pray with them anymore, even if he could remember whatever it is that normal people were supposed to ask God for, instead of sepsis.
V. King of Hearts
One day he does almost die, and it’s just all there again. Every lie of every symptom of every sickness of every love.
Today’s card is the King of Hearts, because of course it is. It is a day where all the medication, pills of ash and chalk like that of children’s rainbows on the tarmac in a thousand different colours, has come to claim him. He’s moved on from rotten meat, and now it’s the medical bay’s locked alien pharmaceuticals in too-high dosages in too-many capsules in medicines he doesn’t need.
He doesn’t even try to understand what it is that he ends up eventually ingesting. It’s colourful and marred with outerworldly warning labels, and that's enough. It will do.
As soon as he steps into the common room, he drops. He is on the floor, with the King of Hearts lying next to him in glorious, beautiful damnation, and suddenly his stomach is hurting the way it had on the Jack of Cloves, the way his brain had collapsed itself into a million unfixable shards of insanity on the Ace of Spades.
And suddenly everything is wrong. He’s ten-years-old, standing upon a moudling carpet with mildew wall, a mere corpse of a child in this desolate fucking home he is condemned to exist within. He’s breathing in the stench of vomit-coloured crayons and neglected uncharged diapers, building a house of cards with fifty-two fragments of paper that are also his bones, the marrow that weeps from inside them, and the flesh that consumes it all. The paper house of cards he is building with bloodless birdbone hands is fraying undone into fifty-two embered smithereens, falling apart, collapsing at the seams.
“Keith?!”
“What just happened?!”
“He’s seizing, get Coran and Shiro!”
“Oh God, I know what he did –”
He closes his eyes and sees stars. He thinks someone has shoved their fingers down his throat to make him throw up, because when he opens his eyes again, he is lying on his side. The castleship’s flooring lays with him as it's done a thousand times before, and this time, he is staining it white with the colour of his condemned hands and festering organs and the King of Hearts that now live within the cold space underneath his tongue along with all the words he cannot say.
“I think it’s an overdose.”
“What did he take?”
“I don’t know, he didn’t say anything! He just collapsed!”
“Keep him on his side.”
“Is – is Keith dying? Oh God, he’s dying…”
Keith doesn’t really notice how fucked up all this truly is until now, he thinks the crying voice might be right. He really is going to die. It’s not a game anymore, it's a habit, an addiction.
His stomach hurts, and maybe it’s real this time.
A cathedral of lions; a gospel of friends; a graveyard of all the things he couldn’t let himself think about since smashing his brain into the hundreds of smithereen mosaics the matter lies in now. Every moment is a card of a deck of days laid out before him – days where he thinks about depriving the oxygen supply in his suit or letting the gladiator give him enough blunt force trauma to break enough of his bones, all for the fucked up purpose of someone else saving him.
It’s pathetic, and yet he can’t stop.
It is this rot of diseased brain matter inside of him that he thinks might be killing him – infinitely, permanently killing him – this time around, and Keith sees that now. He had always been a different kind of broken.
“Hunk, shut the fuck up, he’s not dying!”
The King of Hearts card, mangled in his sins and in his vomit, destined to cease his existence spills out across the floor of the common room, tainting those warm bodies next to him like a curse eating away at them all. They’re pressing Keith to their chest, cradling his head – and he’s pretty sure they’re holding him like this because they think he is dead. They do not know that he is this card, the King of Hearts, and they do not know that he has condemned them all here to watch him dying, nor that he is intoxicated by every single one of his friends thinking that he might be.
He opens his eyes and sees the deck on the ground, on Shiro, and wants to burn each and every single fucking piece of paper cartomancy, eat them again once they are ashes and cannot hurt him. And he loves it here. This is his favourite place. The moment where Keith drifts within the in-between of life and not, hurting just enough that everyone exists amongst him, their bodies against every part of his own, their bloodless faces of pure terror from the moment he closes his eyes, and then their whispers of promised infinite love afterward he awakes again, as if he is a child being read a bedtime story before wishing the constellations outside goodnight.
And he knows this is so fucking wrong, but this is the only way he’s lived this way since he was ten, and he doesn’t know how to ask for love any other way. The cards are all he has, and if they were to come apart in smithereens of embers and cider, he will fall apart along with them.
“Stay awake for me, otouto. I’ve got you, I’ve got you.” He is collapsed in Shiro’s lap, and he is burning – a bright ember of distorted emotion and overwhelming sensation, so much so, that Keith doesn't want to touch him. He is a blur of frantic panic that Keith feels all over in a flurry of heat and colours and organs. Shiro touches his hair, his back, his arms, his face –
All his cards disintegrate like burning embers, laid to waste in the back of his throat, underneath his flesh and within each crevice of his body like embedding pieces of glass. He’d thought this was what he wanted, for the King of Hearts to make all of his friends love him unconditionally if they truly thought he might die, but hadn’t thought that he actually could, and now he has no idea of anything.
The warm thickness of too-human-but-not-quite-enough amethyst vermilion paints his chin, the white undigested capsules lie on the floor, the hands that were inside his throat are against his cheek – he thinks they might’ve been Lance’s. Maybe he still feels bad about breaking Keith’s arm, all that time ago.
“Let’s get you to the medbay. Come on, you’re gonna be alright. We’ve got you,” Shiro murmurs and this time Keith knows he’s thrown up again. The common room is disgusting, the scarlet King of Hearts lies in a thousand mocking paper pieces and it’s smothering everything; ashen chalk tablets, some undigested and dissolving in the bile, lie within the rotting organs that are all over everyone.
Together, with all of their bodies amongst him in this awful still symphony of love that is conditional, he hates himself, and his hate is red – the colour of the cards and his body and everything.
“Keith,” the tangible voice says amongst the fevered haziness of his unmade consciousness bringing him back into the warmth of the universe. The stars reign delicately above, just beyond the landscape of outer space, enough for Keith to reach out and touch them if he were a little less lucid. Maybe, he should try to do so anyway, just in case they want to reach back.
He doesn’t want to think about anything.
Maybe he is not so well-put-together-again as he thought, but that doesn’t seem to matter much to eighteen-year-old Keith in this moment. He’s laying on his side, tucking in with the stiff blankets that exist within the medical bay. There’s a bowl beside him in his bed, and Keith lies with it. There’s a faint steady beep of a heart monitor, the warmth of another hand lacing through the stands of his hair, and the strong smell of nauseating antiseptic. He wants to drown in its insufferable additive toxicity until he is nothing but broken bones and bleeding spinal fluid and the decay gangrene meat that condemns every one of his organs to a corpse, even after everything, still. Every time he feels lonely enough, the ghostly remnant that his body destines to bury itself here: the voidness of an ashen medical room, the vomit-stained bathroom floor of his friend's apartment, the mildewed carpet of an unloved home for all the children condemned to be unlovable.
He doesn’t know how to fix this.
He should talk to Shiro. He should stop breaking his bones and bleeding out. He should ask for love and all the other things he doesn’t, without hurting himself first, but the hearts and diamonds and cloves and spades within the scarred fragments of his decaying brain matter don’t want to let him go. This isn’t something either of them can fix. It’s inside him, it’s all him, and he’s so very, very sick in all the ways Keith never intended to be.
“Mmh?” He mumbles instead, having the ability to form words if he truly wanted to, but not quite ready for them just yet. He wants to pretend to fall asleep, and he wants Shiro to watch him as he does. Shiro is inevitable, here forevermore of course, with his scrutinising eyes and suffocating hands and his whispers of otouto that make Keith want to weep.
But he doesn’t say such things this time.
“Keith, I need to talk to you,” Shiro tells him simply, and the words go sour. They sound off within the atmosphere, heavy and broken and cold, and Keith has somehow known their familiarity as if they were his buried gospels within the gallows all the way back from Before.
Somewhere beyond, the constellations loom in scrutinising condemnation, and the heart monitor's soliloquy sings faster.
“Keith,” Shiro presses again, concerned, wild eyes bearing witness into all the decay remnants of Keith’s paper ash existence, and yet for all the wrong reasons. He takes his hand away from Keith’s forehead, and all is cold. “What happened earlier?”
He lies because he’s good at it. He’s been doing it since he was ten. It’s a reflex, an addiction. “I didn’t know I’d taken that much, I swear.” His words are casual, the way they’d been when he’d prayed fifty prayers for a fevered seizure until the Hail Mary had tasted like rotten meat, or when he’d held his own artery together in all its fraying smithereens as it had pulsed against his bloodless fingertips that had held that plastic rosary all the same. “Forgot what I took, Altean measurements and stuff…”
“Keith, the bottle was empty. ”
“I wasn’t trying to do that if that’s what you’re talking about!”
“Then why? ”
Because –
Colliding his head into the flesh of the wall, eating rotten meat, and losing all his blood, had made them love him. It made him feel all the love that children like him were not destined for otherwise, the kind of love he isn't supposed to know he’s promised; and it is everything. He trades injuries for their attention, he swaps the King of Hearts for comfort, he buys his love with his body – he’s known that since he was ten-years-old. It isn’t that hard, really. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not. It’s easier every time, easy like finding the right vein, like knowing how much of any drug would cause an overdose, like memorising the most important areas of the brain, perhaps to not hurt them or perhaps to.
He will not go back to the Before. The Before where no one had cradled him to sleep, or set his bones, or shoved their fingers down his throat to make him throw up, in every way they were meant to. The Before where Keith never had someone to pick up all these broken glass pieces of brain matter and rotted organs and drowned blood and before those someones knew to condemn him back together into whatever it is that he is now.
Keith doesn’t know how to say this. Instead, he forces his mouth to move and with it, the graveyard of gospel inside the gallows within his fragmented bones and brain matter come undone.
“It’s different when I’m hurting. It’s different when you all have to look after me. You have to love me then, and if I’m not hurt, you stop.” Then, almost as an afterthought that just happens to slip past his lips like his most arcane secret along with everything else – like red-stained bile and white undigested pills dripping through his teeth, Keith tells Shiro, “I don’t want you to stop.”
Because, when it all comes down to it, Keith had been a child. A child that had been lonely and desperate and unloved, and made the simple, childish deduction that ‘being hurt gets him love’. It is something he is only deserving of if he is in pain. He hadn’t played with love-me-nots, with skipping stones, or with cloves and diamonds and kings and hearts – but he had learned the concept of love, nonetheless, and he had found that it is conditional. It is something he earns through hurting, something he will receive if he is willing to hurt enough – sacrifice the bits of himself in order to get it; and that trade is irresistible.
“I know that I shouldn’t want to be broken, but I don’t care. I want to be loved more,” he says, looking beyond Shiro’s bloodless face and seeing little pieces himself in every single fucking paper ash card that finds on the floor. He wonders if he’ll bleed bone marrow again, or if maybe, he’ll rebuild the card house, this time.