Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The Underground had a way of teaching people what mattered. Reminding where they stood in the universe.

Light mattered. Air mattered. A good weapon mattered. The strength in your knees mattered. The steadiness in your hands mattered. And blood—blood mattered most of all, because down there it never truly disappeared. It dried in seams of old concrete. It sank into rust. It sweetened the damp air until the whole place seemed to breathe it you.

Jabber liked that about it.

Loved it even.

The Ground above could still pretend at order in its safe zones with their walls and clinics and headquarters and tidy little routes where Cleaners strutted around like the world could still be kept in lines. But under that, deeper where the tunnels sweated poison and old trash fused into the architecture, things returned to their true shapes. The world became simple. Hunger. Pressure. Survival. Instinct..

And lately, whenever Jabber thought of survival, he thought of Zanka Nijiku.

He moved overhead through the ruined underworks as lightly as something born in the rafters, one hand grazing corroded beams, the gold rings in his long dark wicks clicking softly whenever he shifted. Far below him, between banks of ruined pipes and dead processing machinery, Zanka walked with his supporter through the tunnel mouth into an old maintenance artery that had long ago stopped serving anything but beasts, scavengers, and the occasional fool.

Jabber’s grin flashed white, then disappeared.

There he was.

Even from a distance, Zanka looked infuriatingly neat for somebody trudging through the filth of the underground. His uniform still held that high-cut, almost ceremonial elegance to it even after dust and damp had gotten into the folds and soaked the edges. Loose pale sleeves. Dark underlayer. The long blue sash falling clean from the waist. Tassel earrings brushing his neck when he turned his head. His bag at his hip, and Lovely Assistaff rested against his shoulder with all the casual familiarity of a second spine. His hair, slicked back into that severe shape that made Jabber want to muse it with a fight and blood, while it's lighter streaks caught what little light there was, made him look too composed for this place.

Too refined.

Too controlled.

Jabber had spent enough time trying to crack that control to know how deceptive it was.

That was the delicious part.

To everyone else, Zanka was all edged restraint: the Cleaners’ polished prodigy, the one with the sharp eyes and sharper temper hidden under manners, the one who looked at the world as if measuring whether it deserved the effort of his patience.

But Jabber knew what lived underneath.

Not fully.

Not yet.

That was the whole problem. But he had seen enough through the fractures to become obsessed.

He had seen the moment Zanka’s calm snapped into fury.

Seen the way his navy eyes darkened when he was truly provoked.

Seen the way those deep blue pools burned with ecstatic thrill at it.

Seen him take humiliation personally, as though every bruise was an insult engraved on bone.

Seen him fight harder when cornered, not because he panicked, but because something in him refused to be less than what he demanded of himself.

Jabber had wanted him from that first battle in the ugly, feral way he wanted all rare things: by breaking them open and seeing what they were made of.

But somewhere over the course of repeated collisions, that wanting had changed shape.

That was irritating.

At first it had been simple.

Zanka was strong.

Zanka was proud.

Zanka hit back beautifully.

Zanka.

Zanka.

Zanka.

That… should have been enough. Jabber knew how this worked. He found somebody promising, tore into them, laughed in their face, got cut, got thrilled, got bored, moved on.

Except he had never moved on.

He couldn't move on.

Something held him in place every time he saw him.

Thought of him.

Tracked him.

He had found Zanka again in broken stations, collapsed corridors, drowned service channels, abandoned sorting yards. Sometimes by scent. Sometimes by rumor. Sometimes because he would wake with a restless itch under his skin and know, with the certainty of an animal catching storm in the air, that somewhere nearby Zanka Nijiku was still breathing.

Each fight should have settled something.

But it didn't.

Each fight only made it worse.

There had been one in a shattered loading vault where Zanka drove Assistaff into the floor hard enough to read the vibrations through concrete and found Jabber in the blind dark by feel alone.

Found him by feel.

Jabber still remembered the thrill that went through him then, bright and sick and immediate. Not because he had been found. Because of the way Zanka had looked at him afterward—breathing hard, lip split, expression full of furious focus and something far more dangerous than hatred.

Recognition.

As if by then Zanka’s body had learned him too.

Another time they had come together in waist-deep runoff under a ceiling of old grates, all iron stink and black water. Jabber had slashed. Zanka had caught his wrist. For one brief, impossible second they had been chest to chest, breath mingling, the fight paused not from mercy but from surprise. Jabber remembered thinking—absurdly, vividly—that Zanka felt warmer than he should in a place like that. Zanka had shoved him away so hard it cracked tile.

Jabber had laughed.

Zanka had not.

But the flush high on his cheeks had not been entirely from exertion.

That, too, had become part of the problem.

Something had begun to shift between them in those moments between blows.

Tiny things.

The beat too long of eye contact after a hit landed. The way Zanka sometimes seemed to know exactly where Jabber would come from before sound or shadow should have warned him. The way Jabber could always smell when Zanka was angry versus when he was merely annoyed. The way neither of them ever said the other’s name carelessly anymore.

It was not softness. It was not anything so kind.

It was something rawer than that. More humiliating.

A private current under the violence.

Both of them knew it was there.

Neither of them would touch it directly.

Jabber crouched on a support arch and watched Zanka below pause at an intersection. The supporter with him—young, tense, carrying field gear and trying not to show nerves—lifted a hand to check his communication collar, and frowned at the weak signal, then glanced around the tunnel mouth with the skittish alertness of somebody who knew he was entering the part of the world where help arrived late or not at all.

Jabber did not care about him. He existed only as an inconvenience wrapped in a Cleaner uniform.

Zanka, however, cared enough for both of them.

That was always another infuriating thing about him.

The supporters’ voice carried faintly upward. “Collar signal’s dropping.”

Zanka’s answer came level and clipped. “Expected.”

“It’s worse than expected.”

“Stay within range until we locate the beast.”

Jabber tipped his head.

His golden rings clicking quietly as he did so.

Same voice. Same poise. Same dry command that sounded calm even when the temper underneath it was breathing through its teeth.

Then Zanka went still.

It happened so subtly most people would have missed it. A fraction of tension in the shoulders. A shift of weight. Assistaff’s angle changing against his palm. His head turning—not fully toward Jabber’s perch, but enough.

He knew.

Jabber smiled at the dark.

The supporter noticed the change at once. “What is it?”

Zanka’s gaze stayed lifted another second, slicing through shadow with that unnerving precision of his. “We’re being watched.”

The supporter’s hand went to his gear. “Trash beast?”

“No.”

Just that.

No.

And somehow that single word held far too much history.

Jabber dropped from the arch onto a lower pipe, then onto a jut of old machinery, patchwork shoes landing soundlessly. This time he did not hide the movement. He let metal groan under his weight just enough to announce himself, just enough to draw that line taut.

The supporter startled and swore.

Zanka did not move. But one of his earrings swung with the tiny motion of his breath.

“Stay behind me,” Zanka said.

The supporter did, though uneasily. “You know who it is?”

Zanka’s mouth hardened. “Yes.”

Jabber’s grin widened manicly.

That one syllable did more to him than it should have.

Yes.

Not someone. Not an enemy. Not confusion. Not guesswork.

He knew who it was.

Jabber descended the rest of the way, leisurely, until he stepped out into the jaundiced tunnel light. The old lamps above them flickered over patched fabric, over cream sleeves split wide at the arm, over the stitched indigo panels of his clothes, over the silver rings on every finger that looked harmless right up until they didn’t. His pink eyes caught the light and gave it back wrong.

The supporter took one involuntary step backward.

Zanka’s expression flattened into that particular look Jabber liked best: outwardly composed, inwardly furious.

“Jabber.”

There it was again.

Jabber manic smile pulled wider as his eyes narrowed in ecstasy.

His name in Zanka’s mouth always sounded less like a word and more like a diagnosis.

Jabber tucked his hands loosely into his pockets. “Ya noticed me earlier.”

“Ya weren’t exactly trying to be subtle.”

“I was… a little.”

“Y’re bad at it.”

The supporter’s gaze flicked between them, clearly trying to decide whether to run or stay useful. Jabber ignored him and kept his eyes on Zanka. On the sharp line of his jaw. On the pale, expensive cut of the uniform dirtied by tunnel dust. On the way his fingers flexed once around Assistaff and then stilled.

No immediate attack.

Interesting.

No, not interesting. Annoying.

Jabber rolled one shoulder. “I followed you all the way down here and that’s all I get?”

“What were ya expecting?”

“A welcome.”

Zanka’s eyes narrowed. “Ya should be dead before ya ever hear one from me.”

That should have been enough to make Jabber want a fight.

Instead, he found himself stepping closer simply to watch what happened to Zanka’s face when the distance shrank.

The supporter bristled. “Back off.”

Zanka's eyes shifted towards the supporter without turning his head faster than they should have before they landed back on Jabber's face, as he lifted one hand without looking at him. A silent order. Stay out of it.

There. That was more like him. Proud thing. Possessive of his own battles.

Jabber stopped only when he stood just outside the reach of Assistaff’s haft. Near enough now to see the darker blue in Zanka’s eyes and the faint crease between his brows that appeared only when he was irritated enough to stop hiding it. Near enough to smell the clean iron scent of wood oil beneath dust and concrete. Near enough to feel that hot, ugly awareness uncoil low in his stomach when Zanka didn’t retreat.

“Mission first?” Jabber asked softly.

Zanka’s stare did not waver. “I’m not in the mood for indulging ya.”

That was a lie.

Not the whole sentence.

Only the last part.

Jabber knew the difference now.

Zanka was in no mood to be delayed, yes.

Annoyed, yes.

Focused, absolutely.

But the charge in the air between them was too familiar to deny. It had been building for too long over too many fights, collecting in all the places they never looked directly. Jabber could feel it now in the silence between each word. In the way Zanka’s breathing stayed measured by force rather than nature. In the way he looked at Jabber not like an incidental threat but like something that had become woven into his own internal weather.

Like something he wanted.

They both knew.

Neither of them would let the other say it first.

Jabber leaned in half an inch, grin gone thinner now, stranger. “That’s not what your face says.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“You sent your supporter back with your eyes before you even spoke.”

At that, the supporter frowned. “Back?”

Zanka exhaled once through his nose, slow and sharp. “Take the west passage. Check for drag marks or fresh trails. Fifty count out. Fifty back. If you find anything, signal if the collar allows it.”

The supporter hesitated. “You’re staying here alone?”

“Yes.”

“With him?”

Zanka’s gaze remained on Jabber. “Go.”

Reluctance warred visibly with discipline. But discipline won. The supporter shot Jabber one last distrustful look, then hurried down the side passage, boots splashing through shallow water until the tunnel bent and swallowed him.

Silence thickened after that.

The kind of silence that was not empty at all.

Jabber watched the moment it changed Zanka too. The faint release in his shoulders once there was no witness left to perform calm for. The sharper line of his mouth. The way Assistaff lowered—not relaxed, never relaxed, but no longer posed for somebody else’s reassurance.

“So,” Jabber murmured. “You wanted him gone.”

Zanka’s answer came after a beat. “I wanted him out of your range.”

“Liar.”

“Idiot.”

Jabber laughed under his breath. “Maybe both.”

He should have attacked then. He knew that. Any sensible version of him would have. This was what he came for, wasn’t it?

Zanka alone.

In the dark.

All that cultivated control standing between Jabber and whatever lived beneath it.

Instead he only circled once, slow, studying him.

Zanka turned with him, patient and tense.

“Why do you keep doing this?” Zanka asked at last.

Not ‘why are you here’.

Not ‘what do you want’.

Those questions were too old between them to waste time on.

‘Why do you keep doing this’

Jabber could have answered honestly.

‘Because you are the only fight that doesn’t end when the blood does.’

‘Because every time you look at me like that, something in me refuses to leave you alone.’

‘Because I think if I push hard enough, one day you’ll stop pretending whatever this is can still be called hatred.’

Instead he tilted his head and said, “Because you haven’t shown me everything yet.”

Zanka looked away first.

It was tiny. Barely a flick. But Jabber saw it, and because he saw it, he understood too much.

That answer had landed.

“Jabber,” Zanka said, and for the first time his voice dipped lower, rougher, “not everything in a person is yours to drag into the light.”

The words should have been cold.

They were not.

That was the worst part.

For one strange, suspended moment, the tunnel seemed to contract around them. Dripping pipes. Flickering lamps. Black water between cracked concrete plates. The whole poisoned underworld held its breath with them.

Jabber saw it then with a clarity so sudden it almost angered him: Zanka knew. Maybe not in words he would ever allow himself to think. Maybe not in any shape he would admit under daylight. But he knew there was something festering alive between them, something sharpened by battle and fed by repetition and denied at every turn because naming it would make it real.

Jabber knew too.

Which was precisely why neither of them moved.

Then something far off in the east tunnels let out a scraping shriek.

A Trash Beast.

The sound broke the moment like a snapped thread.

Zanka’s head turned immediately toward it, all business again, and Jabber felt annoyance flood back in.

Of course.

Mission.

Duty.

Trash beast.

Cleaners and their endless sense of obligation.

“You’re boring tonight,” Jabber said.

Zanka’s eyes flashed back to him. “Then leave.”

“Thought you wanted me dead.”

“I do. Just not before I finish my work.”

That almost made Jabber stay.

Almost.

But the fight had gone out of the moment, or rather, had been deferred into one of those unbearable later times both of them seemed doomed to keep creating. No blood. No break. No glorious collapse of restraint. Just that same maddening almost.

Jabber clicked his tongue and stepped backward into shadow. A ringed hand rubbing at the back of his neck as he tsked and rolled his eyes.

Zanka did not call him back.

That irritated him more than it should have.

“Fine,” Jabber said, smiling again with all teeth and no warmth. “Go kill your little beast, Mr. Bad Attitude.”

Zanka’s grip tightened on Assistaff. “Don’t follow.”

Jabber’s laugh echoed low through the tunnel. “You say that every time.”

Then he turned, bored for the moment and restless in a way that felt too much like disappointment, and wandered off into one of the side arteries where the dark was thicker and the air smelled of wet metal and old poison. Behind him, after only the briefest pause, he heard Zanka move in the opposite direction toward duty, toward danger, toward whatever thing down here had been stupid enough to call a Cleaner into its resting place.

For a while, Jabber let him go.

That was the last easy choice either of them would make.

When Jabber’s footsteps finally disappeared into some side artery of the Underground, the silence he left behind did not feel like relief.

It felt like the moment after a blade leaves skin—when the body has not yet decided whether it has been spared or merely marked.

Zanka stood very still in the tunnel mouth, one hand tight on Lovely Assistaff, listening to the dying echo of him. The old pipes overhead sighed with condensation. Somewhere far off, metal scraped stone in a slow, grating rhythm that might have been the beast shifting or the tunnels settling or something older than both. The weak lamp above him flickered twice and went steady again.

He became aware, with immediate irritation, of how sharply his pulse was beating.

Annoying.

He exhaled once through his nose and turned his focus back where it belonged.

Mission first.

Always mission first.

The phrase came automatically now, worn smooth through habit and repetition. It was one of the first things Enjin had ever managed to beat into him without laying a hand on him: do the work in front of you, not the work inside your own head. Zanka had taken that lesson and made something stricter from it. Cleaner work did not permit hesitation. The Underground rewarded distraction by eating people alive.

And Jabber—insufferable, mocking, impossible Jabber—had become the single most persistent distraction of his life.

Zanka hated that.

He moved deeper into the eastern tunnel, steps soundless over wet concrete, collar brushing once against his wrist as he checked the dead signal line on habit. Nothing but static. The supporter had gone west exactly as ordered, hopefully sensible enough not to circle back too soon. Good. Better. That was one less variable to account for.

Ahead, the tunnel narrowed and then broadened abruptly into a cavernous maintenance basin half reclaimed by refuse and mineral growth. It had once been some kind of filtration chamber; Zanka could still see the broken ribs of industrial grates curving up into the dark and the old drainage channels webbing the floor like scars. Trash had collected here for years, compacted in layers and then disturbed again by movement. Trash beast liked places like this. Warm. Covered. Full of edible remnants and blind corners.

He crouched at the lip of the chamber and touched two fingers to the ground.

Tracks.

Not human. Not Raider. Too many points of contact, too irregular in weight distribution. One heavy center-mass, several smaller bodies, recent movement through the outer sludge.

A nest, then, not a lone straggler.

The briefing had been wrong or incomplete.

His mouth thinned.

Fine.

He had handled worse.

Still crouched, he let his gaze move in careful passes over the basin. Torn metal. Split concrete. A mound of shredded plastic and old cable sheath near the south wall. Something glistening beneath it. Egg sacs? Molted casing? No—partially dissolved packaging, slick with rot. The air was thicker here, hot in a way the Underground usually wasn’t, humid and close. The beast-sign was everywhere once he settled himself enough to read it.

A nest meant layers. Scouts. Smaller bodies. Then the thing anchoring them all.

He rose without sound and slid down the broken incline into the basin floor.

The first one came at him from the left.

Zanka did not need to see more than the blur to move. Lovely Assistaff snapped out with a crack, anima filling and changing her, and met the creature mid-lunge. Bone—or something close enough—gave way under the strike. The Trash Beast spun sideways and hit a pillar in a spray of blackened fluid. Small. Fast. Hide plated in shards of compressed junk, jaw too wide, forelimbs made ugly by fused cutlery and wire. It twitched on the floor, tried to rise, and Zanka crushed its skull cleanly before it could scream.

The chamber answered him.

Movement rippled through the piles.

There.

Every heap of refuse that looked inert a second ago seemed now to breathe. Small shapes peeled themselves from shadow, crawling over one another, their bodies clicking softly as bits of trapped metal knocked together. A dozen. Two dozen. More.

Zanka’s grip adjusted.

His expression did not.

This, at least, was simple.

They came at him all at once.

He moved through them in practiced precision, each motion economical enough to look effortless until one understood what effort lived underneath it.

Assistaff cracked sideways into a thorax-like center and caved it in. He pivoted, drove the butt of the weapon under another creature’s jaw, stepped over a snapping maw, and brought the length of the staff down hard enough to split a spinal ridge made of bottle glass and rusted hinges. Something leapt for his throat. He ducked, felt a fetid breath scrape the air over his cheek, and stabbed backward without looking.

The creature shrieked.

Zanka kept going.

He had always fought like this when he was most serious: not flashy, not wild, but ruthlessly exact.

The basin turned into rhythm around him. Strike. Shift. Read. Adjust. Trash Beasts were not intelligent, but nests had a kind of brute pattern to them, and Zanka was excellent at patterns. He began to see where they would spring from before they moved, where the next weight would hit the floor, how the weaker bodies tried to herd him toward the darker center of the chamber.

He refused the funnel.

Instead he advanced.

That was where the pride in him showed, though almost no one but his enemies ever recognized it for what it was. Zanka did not merely survive pressure.

He resented it.

He despised being maneuvered, cornered, belittled by the shape of a fight. So when the nest tried to drive him backward, he answered with a burst of force that tore straight through its front line.

Assistaff hummed in his hands. Her soul echoing his as if it was him.

One beast lunged low. He vaulted over it, landed on a bent grate, and used the height to bring the staff down like judgment through the center of two more. A fourth caught his sleeve with hooked scrap-teeth and he twisted, letting fabric tear rather than flesh. He drove his elbow into its head and sent it skidding. Another broke from the pack and climbed the pillar behind him, trying to drop onto his shoulders from above. Zanka caught the reflected movement in a slick of old oil on the floor and turned in time to spear it through the ribs before it landed.

Black fluid sprayed his cheek.

His breathing deepened, but never lost its measure.

The nest was thinning.

Good.

He should have felt only satisfaction at that.
Irritation, perhaps, that the mission brief had underestimated the count. Nothing else.

Instead, in the small gaps between impacts, his mind kept circling back to the wrong thing.

To the tunnel before this one. To pink eyes catching jaundiced light. To Jabber’s voice lowering on his nickname like it meant something more than provocation.

‘You wanted him gone.’

Zanka struck a beast hard enough to shatter its plated forelimb.

He had wanted the supporter gone because support personnel complicated fights with Raiders. Because Jabber’s toxins made close-quarters chaos worse. Because collateral was unacceptable. Because Zanka was responsible for the people under his command in the field.

All true.

All in-suf-fici-ent.

He killed another beast and felt, with disgust, his own mind produce the real answer beneath the clean, professional ones.

He had wanted the supporter gone because there were things in that silence with Jabber that did not belong in front of witnesses.

Zanka slammed Assistaff through the throat of a creature half-buried in trash and wrenched it free too violently.

The thought sat there, unbearable.

He had known, for a while now, that something had gone wrong between them.

Not wrong in the sense of surprise. Jabber was always wrong. That was the nature of him. He entered a space and spoiled its shape just by standing in it. He laughed at things decent people flinched from. He touched battle the way other people touched prayer, touched a lover. He stared at Zanka as if every wound he carried was an invitation.

Zanka should have found him easy to hate.

Often, he did.

That was the problem.

Hatred ought to have been clean. Useful. It ought to have remained one thing.

But over the course of too many encounters—too many repeated collisions in darkness, too many moments where a fight had carried them absurdly close and then left them breathing each other’s air—something else had begun staining the edges. Something humiliatingly aware. Something that made Zanka able to identify Jabber’s presence before he appeared, able to distinguish the cadence of his footsteps from any other, able to feel his attention like heat across the back of his neck.

It was monstrous, really, the way familiarity formed.

More than once, after a fight, Zanka had caught himself replaying the wrong details.

Not the openings Jabber left. Not the poison angles. Not even the tactical mistakes he could exploit next time.

But, the sound of his laugh.

The fever-bright delight in his face when Zanka managed to land a real hit.

The strange, unbearable sharpness of being looked at by somebody who seemed to see not just strength in him, but hunger.

That last thought alone was enough to make him furious.

He broke the spine of the next beast with both hands and did not stop moving.

The chamber had gone quieter. Bodies twitched across the floor in broken heaps. The smell had thickened: hot refuse, old acid, opened innards, the metallic tang of his own sweat under the filth.

Too quiet.

Zanka stilled.

His gaze lifted slowly toward the far side of the basin, where the drainage channels converged beneath a collapsed loading platform. The smaller bodies had come from there, yes, but the pattern had always suggested something heavier anchoring them deeper in. He could feel that absence now the way one feels a missing stair in the dark. Everything he had killed had been orbiting something.

He stepped forward once, carefully.

The refuse mound beneath the platform shifted.

Not skittering this time.

Rising.

The sound it made was not a shriek but a wet, dragging inhale, as if some enormous set of lungs had just remembered air. The whole platform bowed upward. Junk sloughed away in clattering sheets. Beneath it, a body unfolded piece by piece from camouflage and filth: too many limbs, two main forearms heavy with fused blades of broken steel, a torso armored in overlapping plates of compacted trash, and a head shaped wrong around a jaw split into layered mandibles slick with old gore. One eye—if it was an eye—opened like a lens clogged with sludge.

Zanka’s spine went cold.

Dread seeped in at the corners.

Nest mother. Or close enough.

It was far larger than the tracks had suggested.

The first strike came fast.

One bladed forelimb scythed through the air with enough force to split the pillar where Zanka had stood a heartbeat earlier. Concrete exploded. Zanka rolled, came up on one knee, and drove Assistaff into the creature’s joint. The hit landed solidly enough to crack plating, but not enough to drop it.

It screamed.

The sound battered the chamber walls.

Then it was on him.

The next few seconds dissolved into impact and pressure. Zanka dodged the second forelimb by inches, felt the wind of it graze his throat, drove the staff upward into the softer underside, and was forced back when the beast slammed its own weight down to pin the weapon and lunged with its mandibles. He jerked sideways and one serrated edge ripped through the shoulder of his outer sleeve instead of flesh. He twisted free, planted a foot against a drainage ridge, and used the leverage to wrench Assistaff loose hard enough to tear black fluid from the wound.

Not enough.

The beast adapted instantly, circling to herd him into the narrowed section between two collapsed grates. Smart, then. Or nest-instinct smart, which was often worse.

Zanka’s jaw tightened.

Fine.

He let it think he was yielding ground.

One step back. Another. The creature surged, overcommitting with its heavier arm. Zanka pivoted and brought Assistaff down in a brutal diagonal strike that shattered one of the blade-limbs halfway through. The beast convulsed, bellowing, and reared.

Victory opened for exactly one breath.

Then that breath slipped from his lungs.

The floor beneath Zanka gave way.

Not fully. Only a rotten section of grate hidden under sludge, collapsing under the shift of his weight. One leg dropped to the knee. His balance broke.

That was all the opening the beast needed.

It hit him with the intact forelimb like a battering ram.

For an instant Zanka felt nothing but force.

Then everything arrived at once.

The impact drove him backward into the jagged remains of a broken pipe jutting from the wall. Rusted metal punched deep into his side, just under the ribs, with a sick, dense resistance before giving way. His breath vanished. Not left him—vanished, as if his body had forgotten what air was. White burst across his vision. He heard, very far away, a sound he did not at first recognize as his own.

Pain followed half a heartbeat later.

Not sharp. Sharp would have been merciful. This was bigger than sharp. It was pressure and heat and tearing, a horrifying awareness of intrusion, of something inside him being made violently wrong. He felt the pipe grind as the force of the blow pinned him there.

The beast lunged again.

Training moved him where thought could not. Zanka ripped himself sideways off the pipe with a wet, blinding agony that nearly blacked him out and swung Assistaff one-handed. The strike connected with the creature’s damaged forelimb and shattered the rest of it. He stumbled, nearly fell, planted the staff to stay upright, and tasted blood flood hot into his mouth.

The chamber tilted.

No.

No, not yet.

The nest mother lunged with its mandibles.

Zanka drew every remaining ounce of steadiness into one line and drove Lovely Assistaff straight up through the thing’s open jaw and into the softer cavity behind it with all the force his body still possessed.

The creature convulsed.

Its weight hit him once, twice, then slumped aside in a collapse of black fluid and broken scrap.

Silence swallowed the basin.

Zanka remained standing only because he had not yet informed his body that it was allowed to fall.

His hand was shaking.

He looked down.

Blood was already pouring dark and heavy through his fingers where they clamped over his side. Too much. The broken pipe had gone in deep, through and through. The angle was bad. Worse than bad. He could feel warmth spreading under his uniform in thick pulses, could feel something slipping with each beat of his heart that he could not afford to lose.

His communication bracelet spat static when he tried it.

Nothing.

The basin around him seemed suddenly enormous. The air too thin. The shadows farther away than before.

He took one step and almost dropped.

No supporter. No signal. No immediate route to the surface he could trust while half-blind with pain.

He swallowed hard enough to hurt.

“Move,” he told himself aloud, voice wrecked.

One step.

Then another.

The dread did not come all at once. It seeped.

It came in the way the tunnel entrance looked farther now than when he had entered it. In the way his fingers were becoming slick enough on Assistaff to worry him. In the way the dead beasts on the floor no longer felt like victory, only delay. In the way every breath seemed to scrape around something wrong inside him.

It came in the horrible, private recognition that if he died here, it would not be noble at all.

No last stand.

No glorious battle.

No meaningful sacrifice.

No Jabber.

Just a Cleaner in the dark, bleeding out under a city that would keep breathing without him.

And, monstrously, through the haze of pain and discipline and the ruthless math of survival, one thought kept returning with humiliating insistence.

Jabber would be furious.

Zanka almost laughed at himself then, except laughing would have split him open.

He made it as far as the tunnel bend before his knees buckled hard enough to drive him against the wall. He caught himself with Assistaff, forehead touching cold concrete for one brief, ugly second. His vision spotted. He could hear his heartbeat in the wound. Could smell the iron flood of his own blood so strongly it seemed to fill the entire world.

And somewhere farther away he could feel Jabber waiting for him to return. Somewhere out there in the tunnels that now seem endless.

Somewhere, not far enough away, Jabber Wonger wandered without direction and pretended he had chosen to.

He kicked through shallow black water in a side tunnel lined with old cable husks and mineral bloom, scowling at nothing anyone sane would have noticed. The boredom he had claimed earlier had curdled into something uglier. Restlessness, perhaps. Or frustration stripped of its usual laughter.

He kept replaying the conversation anyway.

Not the sharp parts. Not the easy insults. Those meant nothing.

The pause after ‘not everything in a person is yours to drag into the light.’

That was the problem.

Zanka had said it like a warning, but underneath it there had been something else. Something raw and low and unwillingly honest. Jabber had spent years sharpening himself against battle, against impact, against pain that made other people sob or beg or break. He knew the sound of strain. He knew the sound of restraint. What Zanka had given him back there was both.

It had lodged under his skin.

Disgustingly.

Jabber dragged a hand through his ring-weighted wicks and laughed once, short and mean. At himself, mostly. At this whole stupid, escalating situation he kept refusing to name.

He wanted Zanka to fight him properly. That was all.

Wanted to drag the hidden cruelty out of him, wanted to see him stop hesitating, wanted to be met at full force by the one person who never quite gave him all of it.

That was all.

That should have been all.

So why had the sight of Zanka sending the supporter away felt less like strategy and more like being chosen?

Why had Jabber nearly stayed when there was no fight to be had?

Why did the thought of Zanka turning his back and vanishing deeper into danger leave something hot and unpleasant curling low in his chest?

He stopped walking.

The tunnel had changed.

At first he thought it was only the air pressure—some minute shift in damp and heat, the way old underground spaces sometimes warned of collapse before stone moved. Then he realized what was actually wrong.

The scent.

He smelled oil.

Rot.

Blood.

Fresh.

His grin vanished.

He lifted his head, nostrils flaring once, twice.

Not Trash Beast blood. Too dirty. Too sour.

Human.

And under the iron, beneath the wet mineral stink of the tunnel, there it was: the clean, unmistakable note he had learned too well over too many encounters.

Zanka.

For one suspended heartbeat Jabber stood perfectly still.

Then something inside him tore.

Not cleanly. Not beautifully. It ripped open in jagged strips—denial, irritation, possessiveness, hunger, panic—so fast he could not sort one from the next. He did not call it love. He did not call it anything at all. But whatever lived under all his delighted cruelty reared up then with teeth bared and bloodshot eyes and a single hideous certainty:

No.

Not to a Trash Beast.

Not in some hole in the dark.

Not without him there.

Jabber was already moving before the thought finished, sprinting back the way he had come, rings flashing at his fingers, pulse detonating under his skin.

And for the first time since he had met Zanka Nijiku, Jabber was….

Afraid.

Jabber ran toward the smell of blood like a man racing a sentence.

The tunnels narrowed and widened around him in jerking pieces of dark. His boots hit rusted grates, then old concrete, then black water shallow enough to splash but not slow him.

Every corner he took wrong felt like theft.

Every second that passed without seeing Zanka made something in him snarl harder. The Underground seemed determined to mock him with its familiar miseries—its wet heat, its breathing walls, its dead lamps coughing weak light into poisoned air—as though this was still just another night, another chase, another one of their endless almosts.

It wasn’t.

Not this time.

He knew that before he reached the basin.

The smell alone told him.

Not a cut. Not a graze. Not the bright, excited scent of battle spilled in manageable amounts. This was heavier than that. Thick. Ongoing. The kind of blood loss that turned the air metallic enough to taste. The kind that made the old animal part of the brain go cold before the mind caught up.

Jabber hit the chamber entrance at full speed and stopped so hard the soles of his shoes screamed against stone.

For one beat the whole world narrowed to a single frame.

Dead nest-beasts lay in pieces across the basin floor, broken under impacts only one person he knew could have delivered in quite that ruthless, precise rhythm. Black fluid spread in wide slicks among twisted heaps of scrap and shattered plating. The nest mother—huge, grotesque, split open through the jaw—had collapsed half over a drainage channel, its corpse still twitching in little aftershocks.

And beyond it, against the far wall near the tunnel bend, Zanka was still on his feet.

Barely.

Assistaff was planted like a crutch beside him, one hand locked white-knuckled around it, the other clamped hard over his side. Blood had soaked through his uniform in a ruinous dark sheet from ribs to hip. It ran down his fingers. Down his wrist. Down the line of his leg. His pale sleeve had gone red to the elbow. His face had lost all its color except for the bright, wrong stain at the corner of his mouth.

Jabber had imagined Zanka broken before.

That was the ugly truth of him.

He had imagined Zanka bleeding, furious, brought to the edge of himself so that all the hidden violence inside him finally came roaring free. He had wanted to be there for that.

Wanted to drag it out and bask in it and maybe die in it if luck was feeling kind.

But this—

This was not what he had ever meant.

Zanka lifted his head at the sound of him, and even now—even like this—his expression tried for irritation first.

“...You,” he managed, voice torn rough.

Jabber couldn’t answer.

For the first time in years, maybe ever, something in him failed so completely he could only stare.

Zanka, who never let himself look weak if he could help it, was shaking hard enough to make Assistaff tremble against the floor. His breathing had turned shallow and vicious, each inhale carefully measured around pain too large to hide. And his eyes—those sharp, proud eyes that always met the world as if daring it to be worthy of his effort—were glazed around the edges with the beginning of shock.

No.

The word did not leave Jabber’s mouth. It slammed through his chest instead.

He crossed the chamber in a handful of rushed frantic strides, dropping to Zanka’s side so fast his knees cracked against concrete, not caring that blood was seeping into his pants, Zanka’s blood.

Up close the damage looked worse. Much worse. There was a tear in the fabric at Zanka’s side where the pipe or blade or whatever had gone in, and every heartbeat welled more blood through it even beneath the pressure of his hand.

Jabber caught Zanka’s wrist instinctively. “Move your hand.”

Zanka tried to wrench free on reflex. “Don’t—”

“Move it.”

It came out not as a taunt, not as a laugh, but as something nearly feral.

For one second they stared at each other.

Then Zanka’s fingers loosened.

Jabber shifted his hand over the wound and felt the hot, slick horror of it immediately.

Deep.

Ragged.

Still bleeding hard. His own stomach twisted so violently he almost mistook it for rage.

Zanka sucked in a breath through his teeth. “That’s not helping.”

“Y’re talking. Good.” Jabber pressed harder.

A sound escaped Zanka then—small, involuntary, more felt than heard—and Jabber wished, with sudden murderous sincerity, that the beast had somehow survived just so he could kill it again with his own hands.

“We need to move,” Zanka said after a beat, forcing each word into shape. “Too deep. No signal.”

His bracelet glinted weakly at his wrist when he shifted. Jabber followed the motion and understood at once: dead line. Of course. The tunnels at this depth swallowed sound, signal, sense, and whatever else they pleased. The Cleaners’ neat little systems meant nothing down here.

Jabber looked toward the tunnel mouth, then back at him.

“How far can ya walk?”

Zanka gave him a look so offended it would have been funny under any other circumstances. “I am walking.”

“Y’re leaking.”

“I noticed.”

Another pulse of blood slid warm over Jabber’s hand.

The panic in him sharpened.

“Zanka.”

Something in his voice must have landed, because Zanka’s expression flickered. For one exposed, unbearable second, the discipline slipped and what showed beneath it was not pain alone, but fear—cold, precise, hated fear, the kind proud people only felt when they had already done the math and understood exactly how bad the numbers were.

Then it was gone again.

“Help me up properly,” Zanka said.

Jabber almost barked back that Zanka was already standing, that this was the stupidest possible time to be difficult. Instead he slid one arm around his back and another under his good side, careful and clumsy all at once, trying not to jostle the wound and jostling it anyway.

Zanka’s hand shot to his shoulder hard enough to bruise. His breath broke.

Jabber froze. “Sorry.”

The word came out wrecked.

Zanka blinked at him as if the apology itself had hurt more than the movement.

Then, very faintly, with blood drying at the corner of his mouth, he said, “That’s new.”

Something jagged and helpless tore through Jabber’s chest.

“Shut up.”

A ghost of Zanka’s old scorn touched his face. “There ya are.”

Then his knees tried to fold.

Jabber caught him properly this time, hauling him against his side before he could hit the floor. The contact knocked the air from both of them. Zanka made a low sound into Jabber’s shoulder, furious and human and wounded enough to break something open. Jabber did not understand why holding him like this felt so different from every other time they had collided. They had slammed into each other in battle before. Grappled. Torn at one another at breathless range. But this—this was not violence choosing proximity. This was need.

It made everything worse.

“Can ya keep pressure if I move yer hand?” Jabber asked.

Zanka gave a tiny nod.

Jabber shifted their grip, guiding Zanka’s blood-slick fingers back over the wound while taking more of his weight. “Good. We go up.”

“Brilliant plan.”

“I will bite you.”

“Ya’d probably enjoy that.”

Jabber looked at him, startled enough by the weak scrap of dry humor that he almost smiled.

Almost.

Another fucking almost.

Instead he dragged Zanka’s arm more securely across his shoulders and started them toward the tunnel.

The first few steps were ugly.

Zanka was trying—Jabber would give him that much—but the right side of his body kept betraying him in tiny failures. His boot skidded once in black fluid. His grip on Assistaff slipped and recovered. Every breath sounded stolen. Jabber adjusted constantly, half-carrying him, half-manhandling him in a rhythm that would have ended in a fight any other night.

Now it ended only in suffering.

The basin seemed bigger on the way out. The tunnel steeper. Every rise in elevation an insult. Jabber had always moved through the Underground like he belonged to its worst parts, quick and amused and impossible to pin. Going slowly through it now felt obscene. Like asking a fire to count grains of sand.

But there was no choice.

Too fast, and Zanka would tear himself open further.

Too slow, and—

Jabber refused to finish that thought.

They made the first incline. Then the second. The air changed by degrees as they climbed, thinning less, moving more. Water dripped somewhere overhead in steady taps that became, by sheer repetition, maddening. Zanka stumbled on a broken seam in the floor and nearly pulled them both down. Jabber braced, cursing, and shoved him upright again.

“Stay with me.”

Zanka’s head tipped slightly toward him. “That order would sound better from Enjin.”

The name hit between them like a thrown blade.

Because of course that was who lived in Zanka’s emergency instinct.

Of course the person he meant to call, if they got high enough for signal, if they got lucky, if he stayed conscious that long, would be Enjin.

Team.

Structure.

The clean lines of the life Jabber had no place in.

Jabber hated the stab of jealousy so much he nearly laughed.

“Fine,” he said, harsher than he meant to. “Pretend I’m him.”

Zanka made a weak, almost offended noise. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Would ruin y’er face for me.”

The words were slurred at the edges, but the meaning landed clean.

Jabber went still for half a second in the middle of the tunnel.

Zanka seemed to realize, too late, what he had actually said. His mouth tightened. He looked away into the dark ahead of them.

Neither spoke for several steps.

The silence changed shape.

Not empty.

Never empty.

Crowded with everything they had never said. With all the fights where one of them had almost reached for something that wasn’t a weapon. With every too-long look after blood had been spilled. With every time Jabber had stalked him and every time Zanka had noticed and never truly sounded surprised.

Jabber’s throat felt wrong.

“Ya say things like that,” he said at last, voice low and unsteady in a way he hated, “then ya act like I’m insane.”

Zanka’s laugh was almost soundless and went crooked with pain. “Ya are insane.”

“Not the point.”

“I know.”

The admission was quiet enough to nearly disappear under the sound of their steps.

Jabber tightened his hold on him. “Then what is the point?”

For a while Zanka did not answer. His breathing had worsened. Jabber could feel the tremor going through him now in waves, the body’s desperate response to blood loss and stubbornness and movement no injured person should have been managing. The heat of him soaked through their clothes where they touched. Too hot. Too little. Human in the most dangerous way.

“The point,” Zanka said finally, “is that y always want what hurts.”

Jabber almost snapped back some easy answer.

‘And you don’t?’

Something mocking.

Something safe.

Instead the truth came up first.

“Yes.”

Zanka’s grip tightened faintly on his shoulder.

“And what,” Jabber asked, the question dragging raw through him, “do ya think that says about you?”

This time when Zanka fell silent, it did not feel like evasion.

It felt like defeat.

They climbed.

The tunnel narrowed into an old service throat lined with dead conduit. Twice Jabber had to angle them sideways through collapsed supports. Once he nearly lost footing where water had eaten a channel into the floor. Every jolt tore another breath out of Zanka. Once, when the path rose too sharply, Zanka’s knees simply buckled and they both went down hard against the wall.

Assistaff clattered from his hand.

The sound echoed horribly.

Jabber dropped with him at once, one arm hooked around his chest to keep him from sliding flat to the floor. “No, no, no—”

Zanka was still conscious, but only just. His lashes fluttered against skin gone too pale. His head had fallen against Jabber’s throat, his breath hot and ragged there.

For one awful second he did not seem to know where he was.

Jabber cupped the back of his neck with toxin-ringed fingers and then, with a flare of panic, snatched them away before metal could touch skin. His own hands had never felt more treacherous.

“Zanka.” He shook him lightly with his forearm instead. “Look at me.”

It took a moment.

Then Zanka dragged his eyes open.

The sight of that effort nearly undid him.

“Don’t,” Jabber heard himself say. “Don’t you dare.”

Something in Zanka’s face softened—only slightly, only for him, only because he was too exhausted to hold every line of himself together. “Ya sound afraid.”

Jabber wanted to lie. Instead he said, with ruinous honesty, “I am.”

Zanka stared at him.

The tunnel around them narrowed to breath and heat and the wet gleam of blood on both their hands. Jabber could hear nothing now but the ugly broken rhythm of Zanka’s breathing and his own pulse beating against his teeth.

He had never meant to end up here.

Not like this.

He had imagined all kinds of endings for them—violent, brilliant, stupid, catastrophic. Zanka driving Assistaff through him with his eyes blazing. Jabber laughing blood into Zanka’s face and thanking him for it. Some final fight so intimate and merciless that neither of them would survive being known by the other afterward.

Not this.

Not holding him together in the dark with shaking hands.

Not begging without yet using the word.

Zanka’s gaze dropped to Jabber’s mouth and then away so fast it would have meant nothing from anyone else.

From him, it meant too much.

“Get me up,” he whispered.

Jabber swallowed whatever was trying to claw up his throat and obeyed, grasping Assistaff in the process. He swore he'd give her back soon when Zanka could hold her himself.

The rest of the climb blurred into pain and fragments.

At some point Zanka stopped pretending the walk was mostly his own effort. He leaned fully now, all his hard-won pride forced into practical surrender. Jabber took the weight gladly and hated what that gratitude revealed.

Twice he muttered sharp, directionless threats at the tunnels themselves. Once at Enjin, for not being there. Once at Zanka, for bleeding. Once at the whole idiotic Cleaner organization for having routes this deep and not enough signal to save one of their own.

Zanka, astonishingly, still found enough spite to answer.

“Try insulting the architecture less,” he murmured at one point, barely audible. “It isn’t responsible.”

Jabber laughed then—a cracked, miserable sound—and felt tears sting his eyes so suddenly it enraged him.

“Are you joking right now?”

“Trying.”

“Terrible timing.”

“Ya noticed.”

By the time the air truly changed—by the time the damp pressure lessened and the tunnels began to remember the existence of wind—Jabber already knew the truth he had been refusing since the basin.

Zanka was fading.

Not fast enough to be merciful. Not slow enough to be fixable.

Just steadily, horribly, like a lantern running out of oil while someone kept insisting light was still possible if they climbed a little farther.

They reached an upper breach where broken concrete gave way to a sloping spill of rubble and, beyond that, a ragged mouth open to the lower outskirts near the surface. Night air slid in through it, cold and thin and almost clean. Jabber had never thought air could hurt, but the first breath of it felt like being cut open.

Zanka sagged hard against him.

His bracelet sparked once.

Signal.

“Zanka,” Jabber said, too sharp, too loud, almost shaking him again. “Now. Call.”

Zanka’s hand missed the first time. Jabber grabbed his wrist, guided it, tried not to feel the terrifying looseness in him. Static cracked. Then, at last, a channel opened with a burst of interference.

Zanka drew one shredded breath and forced the words out.

“This is... Zanka Nijiku.” Another breath, shallower. “Upper breach—east district underworks. Nest eliminated. Severe injury. Immediate extraction needed.” He swallowed. Blood touched his lower lip again. “Notify... Enjin.”

Static answered.

Then a voice, distant and broken by the line. Confirmation. Location repeat. Hold position.

Hold position.

As if they had anywhere else to go.

The bracelet slipped from Zanka’s fingers. Jabber caught his hand before it fell and felt, in that contact, the extent of the trembling he had been fighting to hide.

“Good,” Jabber said, because he could think of nothing else. “Good. They heard you. They’re coming.”

Zanka nodded once, but the motion looked more like his body yielding than agreeing.

Jabber lowered him carefully onto a rise of broken concrete just outside the tunnel mouth, half under the open air, half still in shadow. He tried to keep pressure on the wound. Tried to situate Assistaff within reach. Tried to arrange this like anything about it could still be controlled.

The night above them was huge.

That felt obscene too.

After all that suffocating dark, the sky seemed far too wide, scattered with hard indifferent stars above the jagged skeleton of the ruined district. Wind moved over them in cold threads, lifting the edges of Zanka’s torn sleeve, stirring Jabber’s wicks and the rings threaded through them. Somewhere very far away, the city still existed. Somewhere farther still, the Cleaners were on their way.

Too far.

Jabber knew it now with the certainty of a wound.

He pressed harder over Zanka’s side and felt blood still seeping between his fingers.

Too far.

Zanka turned his head slightly and looked at him.

In the open night, without a tunnel dark to soften anything, he looked heartbreakingly young.

Proud mouth bloodied.

Skin white with pain.

Eyes still sharp somehow, still trying to hold the world at proper distance even while his body betrayed him breath by breath.

Jabber could not bear it.

“Stay awake,” he said.

Zanka’s lashes lowered, then lifted again. “Y’er becomen’ demandin’.”

“I’ve always been demandin’.”

“Yes.” The faintest ghost of a smile touched him. “But now it’s desperate.”

The word cut clean.

Jabber’s hand shook.

He should have denied it. Should have laughed in Zanka’s face, made some ugly joke, dragged this back into the familiar language of mockery and teeth and battle where neither of them had to stand naked inside a feeling they still refused to name.

Instead he bowed his head over their blood-slick hands and said, in a voice he no longer recognized as his own, “I don’t know what to do.”

Zanka went very still.

Then, slowly, with enormous effort, he shifted his free hand toward Jabber’s wrist. His fingers brushed the rings there, careful even now, and settled against the underside of Jabber’s arm as if feeling the frantic pulse there proved something.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

Then Zanka whispered, “I know.”

And that was worse.

Because there was no accusation in it.

No disgust.

Only understanding.

Only that terrible intimacy born from too many collisions, too many almost-confessions, too many times they had circled the truth until it became another battlefield they were both afraid to enter.

Jabber looked up at him, eyes burning.

The rescue had been called.

The sky had opened.

And still, holding him there in the thin cold wind, Jabber knew with hideous certainty that help was coming too slowly, and that whatever lived between them was finally cornered into speech.

Neither of them knew yet how to survive that. And the waiting was worse than the climb.

Jabber had not known anything could be worse than dragging Zanka’s failing body through those poisoned tunnels with his own heart trying to rip through his ribs, but the waiting proved him wrong. The climb had given him motion. Pressure. A task. The climb had lied to him with action, had let him pretend that effort and terror together could still bargain with fate.

Waiting stripped all that away.

It left him kneeling in the broken mouth of the tunnel with one hand pressed over Zanka’s side and the other braced against the rubble, staring out at a night that went on existing with obscene indifference while Zanka bled against him in slowing waves.

The wind had teeth up here.

It slid over the shattered outskirts in thin, cold currents, carrying the smell of dust, rust, distant smoke, and the stubborn green bite of weeds that had somehow forced their way up through broken concrete. Half-collapsed buildings hunched under the stars like the corpses of giants. Far below them the Underground breathed through the tunnel throat in long damp exhales, as if it were reluctant to surrender what it had already started to claim.

Jabber hated the sky for being so clear.

He hated the stars for looking like pinpricks in a black curtain someone had hung over the world to keep it from seeing this.

Most of all, he hated the length of every second.

Zanka lay half in his arms, half propped against a slant of broken stone. His breathing had gone quieter.

That was the first truly terrible thing.

Loud pain was still a fight.

Quiet pain meant the body was running out of strength to protest. His head rested near Jabber’s shoulder now, dark lashes throwing shadows on skin that looked almost translucent in the starlight. Blood had dried black in some places and stayed wet in others. It clung to the torn edge of his sleeve. It slicked his wrist, his fingers, his bracelet at his wrist. It soaked the sash at his waist and spread under him into the cracks in the concrete, as if the ground itself were trying to drink him. To swallow what was left of him because it believed Jabber didn't deserve him.

Assistaff lay near his right side where Jabber had placed it within reach.

Zanka had not touched it again.

Jabber kept waiting for that to feel wrong in a temporary way, as if any second now Zanka would recover enough spite to make some comment about being handled like luggage, would reach for his precious Vital Instrument with that offended pride of his, would tell Jabber to stop looking at him like that.

He didn’t.

Instead he shifted once, very slightly, and his mouth pulled tight around a pain he could no longer hide.

Jabber’s panic sharpened into something bright and useless.

“Too much?” he asked, voice breaking around the question.

Zanka opened his eyes after a moment. It seemed to take effort now, as if his lashes had grown heavy. “Y’re crushing me.”

The lie was weak. Tender, almost. Too obviously meant to spare him.

Jabber made a sound that wanted to be a laugh and failed halfway into a sob.

“Don’t do that.”

Zanka’s gaze wandered over his face in that strange, lingering way people only looked when they were already starting to say goodbye and hated themselves for it. “Do what?”

“Act like this is manageable.”

“It is,” Zanka murmured. “Y’re being dramatic.”

“Y’re dying.”

The words came out before he could stop them. They weren't loud or demanding. They were quiet and broken.

Silence followed.

Not empty silence. A struck silence. One that trembled around the edges because both of them had heard the truth in it and neither could force it back into softer shape.

Zanka closed his eyes for one beat. Two.

When he opened them again, the composure there was not the old crisp discipline he wore in battle. It was something far more fragile and far more honest: a man holding himself together only because someone was looking at him and he could not bear to fall apart first.

“Probably,” he said.

Jabber stared at him.

The world seemed to tip.

“No.” He shook his head immediately, violently, as if denial could still be muscle-deep enough to matter. “No. Don’t say it like that. Don’t say it at all.”

Zanka’s throat worked. His hand twitched once against the stone and then drifted, slow and uncertain, until his fingers brushed Jabber’s wrist where it pressed over the wound. The touch was so light it should have meant nothing. Instead it nearly stopped Jabber’s heart.

“Jabber.”

No mockery in it. No irritation. No sharpened edge.

Just his name, laid bare.

Jabber bowed over him at once, forehead almost knocking against Zanka’s temple. “No. No, no, don’t—you said they heard you. You called them. Enjin’s comin’. Y’er teams comin’. Ya just have to stay awake long enough to make fun of me for panickin’.”

Zanka’s lips parted around the shadow of a breath. “Ya are panickin’.”

“I’m going to kill ya if ya keep talking like that.”

That finally pulled the tiniest thread of a smile from him. It was gone almost as soon as it appeared, but Jabber saw it. Saw the fondness in it before he could convince himself he had imagined it.

Fondness.

The realization hit so hard it left him dizzy.

He had spent so long circling this thing, biting at it, provoking it, dragging it through blood and violence and obsession because those were the only languages he trusted. He had told himself over and over that what he wanted from Zanka was simple: a better fight, a final blow, one clean absolute truth ripped free under pressure.

But none of those lies fit here.

Not with Zanka looking at him as though he mattered in a way that hurt.

Not with his own hands shaking so badly he could barely keep the pressure steady.

Zanka’s breathing roughened again. Pain rolled through him visibly this time, tightening his jaw, pulling a faint tremor through his fingers.

Jabber looked down at his own hands as if seeing them for the first time. The rings. The transformed edges. Mankira. Right claw for poison. Left for relief. Something in him recoiled at the thought of using his own weapon on Zanka now. It felt wrong. It felt like an act of desecration. It felt like every cruel thing he had ever been condensed into one final touch.

But Zanka was hurting.

Hurting enough that his body was beginning to curl around it despite his pride.

Jabber made his decision in the same breath he hated it.

“I’m going to use the left claw,” he said, voice low and wrecked. “Small dose. Just enough to keep ya lucid...”

Zanka’s gaze flickered to his hand, then back to his face. Even now, even like this, he was reading him more carefully than anyone else ever had.

“Y’re askin’ permission?”

“Shut up.”

The faintest exhale through Zanka’s nose. “Yes.”

Jabber swallowed. Then, with more care than he had ever used in his life, he shifted his left hand and transformed Mankira, willing her to heal him to help him even though he knew all she could do was ease his suffering now. He barely cut him, the wound that should have bleed didn't bleed enough, and that ripped a choked sob from Jabbers lips. Makira delivered only the pain relief, none of the ruin he carried in the other side. The contact was feather-light

Zanka flinched anyway.

Then, little by little, the terrible line of strain in his mouth eased.

Not gone. Never gone. But gentled enough that he could breathe without every inhale sounding like punishment.

Jabber nearly broke right there.

He turned his face away for a second and pressed the heel of his free hand against his eyes, furious at the wetness there, furious at the weakness of it, furious that he had only just learned what tenderness cost and was learning it too late.

When he looked back, Zanka was watching him.

Softly.

Jabber had never once in his life wanted softness. It had always seemed like the sort of thing weak people begged for when they had nothing sharper left. But from Zanka, here, at the very edge of everything, it landed like a blade slipped cleanly between his ribs.

“Don’t,” Jabber said, voice choked and low.

Zanka’s voice was barely above the wind. “Don’t what?”

“Look at me like ya know somethin’.”

A pause.

Then Zanka whispered, “I do.”

Jabber’s chest caved inward.

He laughed once, ragged and unbelieving. “Ya can’t say things like that and then die.”

“I’m trying very hard not to.”

Something inside Jabber tore.

He lowered his head until their brows almost touched. “Then try harder.”

For a moment Zanka only breathed with him. In. Out. In. Out. Their air mingled in the cold. Jabber could smell the iron on him, the dust, the faint clean trace beneath it that had haunted him through tunnels. He could feel the slowing weakness in the hand still resting over his wrist.

Then Zanka spoke.

“Jabber.” His voice shook once and steadied again by force. “I should have been more honest.”

Jabber went motionless.

The night seemed to draw tighter around them.

Zanka’s eyes had gone distant and intensely focused at once, as if he were speaking from a place he had kept locked for too long and now no longer had the strength to guard. “About you. About what this was. About what I let it become.”

Jabber could not breathe.

“Ya were always unbearable,” Zanka whispered, and the corners of his mouth twitched with the memory of it. “You ruined every clean hatred I tried to keep. Every time I thought I understood how much I despised ya, you’d say something, or look at me like that, or laugh while I was trying to break ya, and it would—” He stopped, swallowed with effort. “It would become something else.”

Jabber’s hand slipped from the wound for one awful second before he caught himself.

“Zanka—”

“No. Let me.” His fingers tightened weakly on Jabber’s wrist, asking for the chance to finish, voice already falling apart and low. “I loved our fights.”

The words hit like an impact.

Not because Jabber had never hoped to hear them. Because he had. In secret. In the most humiliating hidden chamber of himself, he had hoped. But hope, when it actually arrives, can be as cruel as despair.

Zanka’s lashes lowered once, lifted again. “I loved what ya pulled out of me. I loved that ya never let me lie to myself for long. I loved that ya saw the worst parts and looked delighted instead of afraid.” A breath. A tremor. “I think... I think I loved ya long before I was willing to understand that was what it was.”

Jabber’s vision blurred.

“Don’t,” he said again, but now it was plea, not refusal.

Zanka kept going, because of course he did. Stubborn to the final breath.

“I wish I’d been more careful,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time trying to turn this into something smaller because naming it frightened me.” His mouth trembled. “I wish I’d told ya. I wish I’d given ya what ya wanted.”

Jabber shook his head so hard it hurt. “Ya already did. Ya did, ya idiot, you impossible—”

Zanka lifted his hand.

It barely reached Jabber’s face, but Jabber caught it and pressed it there anyway, cradling those blood-cold fingers against his cheek like a prayer he did not deserve.

“What I wanted,” Jabber said, words spilling now, wild and broken, “was not this. Not like this. I wanted ya furious. I wanted ya impossible. I wanted ya alive enough to hit me for saying something stupid.”

Zanka’s eyes shone in the starlight. “Ya always did like impossible things.”

“Then be impossible,” Jabber choked out. “Do it again. Fight. Survive. Live for me if ya have to, but do it. Do ya hear me? Live for me, please.”

The silence after that was unbearable.

Then Zanka gave a tiny, shattered smile.

“For ya?”

“Yes.” Jabber was crying now and did not care. The tears fell hot and humiliating and endless down a face that had forgotten how to hide anything. “Yes, for me. Be cruel if ya want, but do this one thing. Stay. Stay and fight and be angry later. I’ll take it. I’ll take anything. Just don’t leave me here with this.”

Zanka’s thumb brushed once, weakly, against the corner of Jabber’s mouth where tears had gathered.

Then, with the last of the steadiness in him, he leaned forward.

The kiss was not dramatic.

That was what made it unbearable.

That's what broke him.

It was soft and trembling and ruinously careful, as if Zanka were trying to memorize him through touch before the world took the chance away. Blood and salt and breath shared in cold night air. Jabber froze in pure devastation for the first half-second, then clutched the back of Zanka’s neck with both hands as if holding him there could arrest time itself.

When Zanka pulled back, only a fraction, their foreheads stayed pressed together.

“I loved ya,” he whispered.

Not love.

Loved.

The shape of a thing already becoming past tense.

Jabber made a sound that did not belong to any language. He kissed him again at once, desperately, sloppily, as though he could push life back into him through sheer need. “No. No, don’t say it like that. Say love. Say love me. Say it like there’s more time.”

Zanka tried to answer.

What came instead was a shuddering breath.

His hand, the one nearest Assistaff, moved weakly across the broken stone until his fingers touched the familiar shaft of his Vital Instrument. The contact seemed to steady him for one final moment. His gaze found it, then found Jabber.

“Take care of Assistaff,” he said.

Jabber stared at him in horror. “No.”

“Jabber—”

“No.” He grabbed Zanka’s hand and forced it tighter around the staff. “It’s y’ers. It answers to ya. Ya have to be the one to use it. Ya have to live so you can use it.”

A terrible gentleness entered Zanka’s face.

“Please.”

The word was barely sound.

Jabber shook all over. “I can’t.”

“Ya can.”

“I don’t want it!”

What he meant was: ‘I don’t want anything from a world that doesn’t have you in it.’

Zanka’s fingers were slipping.

Jabber felt it happen in real time—the loosening grip, the loss of strength, the body withdrawing from its own beloved weapon because it no longer had enough left to claim it. Assistaff rolled half an inch in his hand. Then another.

Jabber caught both the staff and Zanka’s wrist together as if he could force them not to separate.

“Please,” he pleaded, and now he was the one begging. “Please, Zanka. Please, please, just hold it. Just a little longer. Hold anything! Hold me! Hit me! Yell at me! Do something!”

Zanka looked at him with such naked love that Jabber’s heart simply gave way under it.

“I’m sorry,” Zanka whispered.

Then his fingers let go of Lovely Assistaff.

The sound it made, settling against the stone, was small.

It still felt like the end of the world.

Jabber lunged forward and gathered Zanka to him fully, heedless now of blood, wound, pain, anything. Zanka’s head fell against his shoulder with shocking, helpless weight. His next breath was thinner. The one after that thinner still.

“No,” Jabber sobbed into his hair. “No, no, no, no—stay with me. Stay with me. Stay with me…. Please, stay with me…”

He kissed Zanka’s brow, his temple, his eyelids, his mouth, frantic and trembling and undone. “Open y’er eyes. Look at me. Ya said ya loved me, so look at me. Fight! Fight for me! Ya hear me? Don’t do this. Don’t make me live in a world where we said it too late.”

For one impossible second, Zanka’s lashes fluttered.

His eyes opened only a sliver.

He looked at Jabber as if he were the last thing in the world worth seeing.

Then the light in them went out so quietly Jabber did not understand at first that it had happened.

He kept talking.

Kept pleading.

Kept kissing the cooling corner of Zanka’s mouth and begging him to answer, to breathe, to move, to be angry, to do anything but this. He pressed his forehead to Zanka’s and cried like something had reached into his chest and torn out the whole living center of him with its bare hands.

By the time Team Akuta arrived, the night had deepened and the stars had shifted overhead.

Enjin reached the rubble first.

Boots heavy and rushed on the debris.

Then he stopped.

Riyo behind him stopped too.

Because there, in the broken mouth of the tunnel, with the wind moving over shattered concrete and dried blood and one fallen Vital Instrument resting beside them, Jabber Wonger was on his knees clutching Zanka’s dead body like the world had ended and only he had been left alive to witness it.

His face was wet with tears. His voice was shredded raw from begging. He was kissing Zanka’s cold mouth over and over, hands shaking so badly they could not smooth the blood-matted hair back from his face for long before returning to hold him tighter.

“Open y’er eyes,” Jabber was whispering, then saying louder, then breaking on it completely. “Open your eyes. Please. Please, Zanka. Please. I’m here. I’m here. Don’t leave me now. Don’t leave me now.”

Assistaff lay within reach.

Unused.

The rescue had come.

And still it was too late.

Jabber did not understand death at first.

He understood the absence of motion. The cooling skin. The way weight changed when a body stopped holding any of itself up. He understood blood. Understood wounds. Understood the exact instant a fight stopped being a fight and became an aftermath.

But this—

This was Zanka.

And Zanka had always seemed made of too much will to simply stop.

So Jabber kept waiting for the correction.

For the inhale that would snag and then come back stronger. For the lashes to shiver. For the mouth he had just kissed to twist in irritation and say something cruelly composed about how loudly Jabber was grieving. For those navy eyes to cut back open and pin him where he knelt with that same old look—half judgment, half exhausted fondness neither of them had named soon enough.

The correction never came.

And still Jabber kept talking as though language alone might force the world to reconsider.

“No,” he whispered against Zanka’s mouth, and then again, louder, because one refusal was not enough to hold back an ending this large. “No. Ya don’t get to do that. Ya do not get to tell me that and then go quiet. Ya don’t.”

His voice broke on the last word.

He pressed another kiss to Zanka’s lips. Then another. Then to the corner of his mouth, where blood had dried dark and salt from Jabber’s tears made it shine again. His hands would not stop shaking. They shook in Zanka’s hair when he smoothed it back. They shook over his jaw. They shook around the hand he kept trying to warm between both of his own as if friction and desperation could restore pulse.

“I love ya, too,” he choked out. “Do ya hear me? I love ya too. I should’ve said it before. I should’ve said it the first time I started looking for ya even when there wasn’t a reason. I should’ve said it the first time ya hit me and all I could think was’there ya are, there you are, there you are’.”

His words spilled faster, unraveling, no longer spoken to be heard but because if he stopped speaking he would have to accept the silence answering him. He didn't care that the Cleaners were there, that they were hearing his confessions meant only for Zanka.

“I loved the way ya glared at me like I was a disease. I loved that stupid offended look when I got blood on y’er sleeve. I loved the way ya acted like ya were above everyone and then turned around and carried everyone’s lives on y’er back like it wasn’t crushing ya.” A wet, broken laugh tore out of him. “I loved how pretty ya were when ya were furious. I loved how mean ya got when ya were embarrassed. I loved every time ya noticed me before anyone else did.”

His forehead pressed against Zanka’s.

The night air had gone colder. Or maybe that was only Zanka.

“I followed ya because I couldn’t stop,” Jabber whispered. “Because every fight after the first made me worse. Because every time I told myself I just wanted to tear ya open and see what was underneath, what I really meant was that I wanted ya to know me. I wanted—” His throat closed. He forced it open with pain. “I wanted to be the one ya never looked away from.”

Still nothing.

No breath.

No correction.

Behind him there were footsteps on broken concrete, voices lowered by instinct or shock, the sound of several people reaching the mouth of the breach all at once and then stopping hard. Jabber heard none of it in any meaningful way. The world had contracted to the dead weight in his arms and the impossible vacancy inside his own chest.

He kissed Zanka’s eyelids one by one.

“I was going to let ya kill me one day,” he admitted, the confession leaving him in shreds. “Did ya know that? I wanted it. I wanted to drag everything out of ya and laugh and bleed and go under y’er hands, and I thought that was the biggest thing I could possibly feel.” He swallowed against the taste of blood and salt. “I was wrong. I was wrong so very wrong. This is bigger. This is worse. This is what was underneath it. It was ya. It was always ya.”

The night did not react.

The stars did not dim.

The ruined outskirts remained ruined, the broken buildings still crouched under the dark, the cold wind still combing through rubble and torn cloth and bloodstiff hair as if this were just another grief in a world already full of them.

Jabber hated that most of all.

He drew Zanka closer, one hand cupped under the back of his neck, the other locked around his shoulders so tightly it bordered on violence. If the world wanted him, it would have to take him by force.

“I should have stayed,” he said into Zanka’s temple. “I should have kept following ya. I should have fought ya there in that tunnel just so you’d be annoyed enough not to go after the trash beasts alone. I should have done anything except leave.” A ragged breath. “I left because I was scared of it. Not the beasts. Not the dark. Of ya.”

At last one of the figures behind him moved.

Boots scraped carefully over concrete.

Jabber barely turned when the shape entered the edge of his vision—broad-shouldered, taller than the rest, familiar in all the worst ways. Enjin.

For one split second relief stabbed through him on pure instinct. Enjin was here. Enjin fixed things. Enjin always came with that infuriating steadiness, that easy confidence, that impossible ability to keep people from completely flying apart.

Then Jabber looked down at Zanka again.

Relief turned inside out.

By the time Enjin reached a hand toward them, Jabber was already backing away on his knees, dragging Zanka with him protectively, something wild and cornered rising up through his grief. His face twisted and contorted in pain and suffering.

“Don’t touch him!”

Enjin stopped.

The others were there too now at the edge of Jabber’s peripheral vision—Riyo pale and stricken in a way that made her seem all sharp edges and no breath, Rudo frozen with horror written nakedly across his face, Eishia with both hands lifted helplessly near her chest, and behind them the supporters: Gris rigid and grim, Follo white-knuckled around himself, Tomme with tears already running silently down her face.

No one came closer.

No one said his name.

They could see it, Jabber realized dimly. They could all see that he had come apart in front of them and no longer had the machinery left to be ashamed of it.

Enjin lowered his hand slowly. His face had changed in the seconds since he arrived. Something open, raw, and stricken had pushed through the usual confidence. It made him look older.

“Jabber,” he said carefully.

That voice—

That maddeningly calm voice—

Something in Jabber snapped so hard it was almost audible.

“Where were ya?!”

The words came out hoarse. Thin at first. Then louder. “Where were ya?!”

Enjin’s mouth tightened. “We came as fast as—”

“As fast as what?” Jabber barked, suddenly on his feet and then almost falling because he refused to release Zanka’s body even for balance. He caught himself badly, clutching Zanka tighter, and all the while his voice climbed into a raw, tearing scream. “As fast as what? As fast as you could? Then ya should have been faster!”

“Jabber—”

“No!” He laughed then, a sound so wrecked it made even him flinch. “No, don’t stand there and say my name like that. Don’t do that calm thing with me. He called ya. He asked for ya! He told y’er little Head Quarters where he was, and ya still got here too late!”

Enjin took the blow without moving. He knew Jabber need somewhere to release his anger and suffering, and as always was willing to take it if it meant the teenager in front of him would feel some kind of peace in the end.

Jabber hated him for that too.

“Ya sent him down there,” Jabber went on, sobbing now between words, fury and grief feeding each other until he could no longer tell which was which. “Ya send him into places like that over and over because he can handle it, because he always handles it, because he was the one who knew what to do, and ya just—what?! Trusted he’d come back again?” His voice cracked apart. “Ya should have been there. Ya should have protected him. Ya should have—!”

He stopped because the next words were impossible.

‘You should have saved him instead of me.’

The truth of that sat hot and poisonous under everything else.

Enjin’s eyes flicked once to Zanka’s face, then back to Jabber. When he spoke again his voice was lower, roughened around the edges now despite himself. “I know.”

That should have defused something.

Instead it only made Jabber more desperate.

“Then fix it.”

The words fell between them with devastating force.

Enjin blinked once.

Jabber staggered forward a step, clutching Zanka to his chest with one arm while the other hand reached uselessly toward Enjin as though asking for an impossible tool.

“Fix it,” he said again, and now all the scream had drained out, leaving only pleading so naked it was almost unbearable to witness. His pink eyes were wide and desperate, they had dulled to a muddy burgundy color.

“Ya fix things! Ya gather people. Ya make them stand up again. That’s what ya do, isn’t it?! So do it. Heal him. Call whoever you have to call. Get that damn amazing healer who saved that extra over there when I ripped through him! Get Arkha, get every Cleaner in this rotten place and tell them to bring him back!”

Behind Enjin, Eishia made a sound like something small being crushed. Even the man he recognized from his very first encounter with Zanka and Rudo, look down.

Jabber did not look at them.

He looked only at Enjin. Eyes begging pleading through tears.

“Please,” he said, and the word nearly undid the whole night by itself. “Please. I know ya can’t, I know, I know, but do something anyway. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me he’s coming back. Tell me I can still fight him again. Tell me I didn’t get him only at the very end just to lose him the moment he finally said it.”

His knees gave.

This time he went down hard, folding over Zanka’s body as if shielding him from the world even now. His face pressed to Zanka’s throat. His tears soaked the fabric there. He kept kissing him between words—his cheek, his brow, the back of his hand, each kiss more desperate than the last, as if love expressed often enough, hard enough could become resuscitation.

Enjin crouched then, but still did not force contact.

“Jabber,” he said, and now there was grief in it plain enough for anyone to hear. “We have to take him home.”

“No.”

The answer was immediate. Animalistic.

“We have to—”

“No!”

Jabber drew back just enough to glare at him through tears and ruin. “He stays with me.”

Riyo turned her face away then and covered her mouth with her hand.

Rudo had not moved at all. He looked like a boy struck silent by the fact that the world had just removed one of its fixed points. Gris bowed his head. Follo’s eyes were red-rimmed and shocked. Tomme wept openly but made no sound, as if even grief itself should step lightly around this.

They all mourned him.

But none of them interrupted.

Some instinct stronger than protocol had settled over the whole group: this belonged to Jabber first.

Not because Jabber deserved it more.

Because Zanka had died in his arms.

Because the shape of the grief on him made it plain there was nothing left hidden to protect. That everything Jabber was had faded away with Zanka.

Enjin’s own composure finally cracked around the eyes. “I’m not trying to take him away from you.”

Jabber laughed weakly and horrifically at that. “Aren’cha!?”

“I’m trying to help carry him.”

That nearly broke him afresh.

For a long time he said nothing. He only bent over Zanka again, stroking the line of his jaw with trembling fingers, pressing one more helpless kiss to his lips as though he could not stop memorizing him now that memory was all he had left.

When he did speak, his voice was ruined down to a whisper.

“I can’t let go.”

No one answered.

Because there was no answer to that.

In the end they did not pry Zanka from him. They did not try. They let Jabber keep him all the way back, let him remain half-curled around the body in the transport like a mourner guarding a relic, let his tears dry and return and dry again, let him murmur broken confessions into stillness the whole ride until language itself began to fail him.

And when they reached Cleaners Headquarters, Jabber followed with Zanka and simply didn’t leave.

Three months later, he still hadn’t.

Zanka’s room at headquarters had not been changed.

That was the first thing everyone noticed and the one thing no one dared challenge anymore.

The bed remained where it had always been, neatly made when Jabber could bear to make it and left in disarray when he could not. The folded spare uniform still hung where it had hung. The utility bag stayed on its hook. Little things that would have meant nothing to anyone else became sacred by repetition: the angle of a book on the desk, the cleaning cloth folded beside the window, the place on the shelf where Zanka had once set down a bracelet and forgotten it for exactly one afternoon before scolding himself for carelessness.

Jabber sat on the edge of that bed now, elbows braced on his knees, Assistaff laid across his palms like an offering.

His own hands had changed around it.

Mankira’s ten silver rings still lived on his fingers, the familiar weight of them as inescapable as his own bones, but they looked different now against the staff’s long, careful form. Too sharp. Too cruel. Hands built for claws and toxins and delighted brutality had learned, somehow, to hold Zanka’s Vital Instrument with reverence. The skin across his knuckles was mapped in old scars. The veins on the backs of his hands stood out more these days, his body leaner than before because appetite had become a distant administrative problem. His grip on Assistaff was meticulous. Not possessive—never that.

Only devotional.

He cared for it the way some people tended graves.

Every scratch cleaned. Every wrap preserved. Every bit of dust wiped away before it had time to settle. He had learned the balance of it, the precise shifts of weight along its length, the natural place for his hands even if the dormant anima inside would never answer him the way it had answered Zanka. He could wield it in the dead, practical sense. Carry it. Maintain it. Move through the forms he had pieced together from memory and observation.

But activate it?

No.

That part had gone with Zanka.

A Vital Instrument was not just a weapon. It was a history. A devotion. A thing awakened by one person’s anima and care until it crossed the line into something more. Jabber could not become that person by wanting. He could only cradle the shell of what remained and pretend, during the daylight hours, that preservation was close enough to resurrection.

He looked down at himself.

The Cleaners had eventually given him a uniform.

Not because procedure demanded it. Because he had refused to leave, refused to surrender Zanka’s body, refused to stop haunting the halls after the funeral rites until the line between tolerated intruder and member blurred into something irreversible.

No one had questioned him for the first few weeks about what had happened. They had simply let him grieve.

But it had to come, he had to tell his side of the story. And he broke all over again as he did so. And blamed himself for not following, for not staying, for not being there with Zanka when it happened, even if he was at the time still the enemy.

Team Akuta, in the end, had opened the door because none of them had known what else to do with a man who had loved one of their own so catastrophically that he seemed to have died in every way except technicality.

The uniform they settled on looked like grief made wearable.

It carried the Cleaners’ colors and emblem, yes, but its shape was neither standard nor truly his old Raider attire. The shoulders and sleeves borrowed from Zanka’s baggier, more ceremonial cut. The long dark sash at the waist echoed Zanka too, though Jabber wore it looser, more crooked, like a memory he could not quite make sit right on his body. Beneath and through that refinement lingered his own roughness: patchwork seams, stitched panels, asymmetry, a silhouette that remembered the Raider’s freedom of movement and menace even while dressed in Cleaner navy and cream instead of Raider purples and harsh contrast.

His dreadlocks were pulled back now into a high ponytail.

The first time he had done it, Riyo had stared for several long seconds and said nothing. Enjin had looked away too quickly. Jabber himself had nearly torn the tie out afterward from sheer humiliation.

Because he remembered exactly where the habit had begun.

One fight. One breathless pause between impacts. Zanka, bloody and furious, snapping that Jabber would look better if he just tied the damned mess back from his face already.

It had sounded like an insult then.

One he had gladly accepted.

Three months later, Jabber wore it that way almost every day.

And from his ears hung Zanka’s long blue tassel earrings.

They brushed his neck whenever he turned his head. Sometimes, in the half-second before he remembered himself, that movement made him feel haunted in the gentlest possible way.

He had moved into Zanka’s room the same night they brought the body home.

No one had asked him to leave after that. Not Enjin. Not Riyo. Not Rudo. Not Eishia. Not Gris, Follo, or Tomme. Not even Arkha had dared to. They had all seen enough by then to understand that changing the room would not help him. It would only remove one more place where Zanka still seemed arranged in the world, and Jabber was already running out of those.

During the day, he worked.

That was the strangest part, perhaps.

He no longer enjoyed fighting. The old bright mania had drained out of him as if grief had poisoned that part of his blood first. He still moved well. Still struck hard. He followed orders and took missions and put himself between danger and weaker people with a kind of dead, efficient competence that unsettled those who remembered what he had once been. But the joy was gone. The hunger. The laugh in the middle of violence.

Now there was only purpose.

A grim, punishing attempt to carry out what he told himself Zanka would have wanted: protect people, finish the work, do not let the world become uglier just because one beautiful furious person is no longer in it to shove back.

At night, however, he unraveled.

He had learned the exact dosages of Mankira’s hallucinogenic poisons that would put Zanka back into the room.

At first it had been accidental. Then deliberate. Then necessary.

He waited until the headquarters had fallen quiet, until footsteps in the halls grew rare and distant, until even the supporters had drifted to sleep. Then he would sit on Zanka’s bed in the dark or on the floor beside it, press a measured trace of poison into his own bloodstream, and wait for memory to bloom into apparition.

Sometimes Zanka appeared by the window, arms folded, expression unimpressed.

Sometimes at the desk, adjusting that nonexistent bracelet with a little huff of annoyance.

Sometimes sitting right beside him on the mattress, so vivid that Jabber could nearly believe the dip in the bed was real.

The hallucinations had once been enough to keep him breathing until dawn.

Lately, they faded faster.

His body was learning them. Accommodating. Growing used to the chemistry. Each night, the edges blurred sooner. The voice thinned sooner. The face—the face terrified him most of all. There were moments now where he could feel the details beginning to slip, not gone yet but threatened. The exact angle of Zanka’s smile when he lost an argument. The sound of his exhale when he was trying not to laugh. The weight of his gaze when it softened.

Jabber responded the only way he knew how: he increased the dose.

Slowly. Secretly. Just enough each time to keep the dead from receding.

He knew what he was doing.

He knew one day the poison would stop giving him what he wanted. Knew one day he would either forget something vital or chase it too hard and not care whether he came back from the dark it opened.

Some nights, sitting in that untouched room with Assistaff across his lap and Mankira shining faintly at his hands, he did not think he minded the possibility very much.

Zanka’s family had only made it worse.

The Nijikus had come with all their old nobility and high blood and fine displeasure wrapped around them like another uniform.

Kyouka and Goka had not wept the way Team Akuta had. They had held themselves with the same rigid polish as always, disappointment and restraint braided too tightly together to separate grief cleanly from offense. Jabber had hated them on sight for it. Hated the coolness in their posture, the dissatisfied shape of their mourning, the sense that even death had become another place where Zanka had failed to fit what they expected of him.

He had almost attacked Goka for one remark.

Enjin had stopped him with a hand on his shoulder and no real force at all, because by then Jabber no longer wanted to hit people so much as tear the world open for being wrong.

Enjin kept trying, anyway.

That was another thing grief had not managed to kill.

Every few days Enjin found some pretense to step into Zanka’s room: food, a mission update, a complaint about Rudo, some memory of Zanka told in that infuriatingly steady voice as if two people speaking his name aloud could keep him from thinning. Sometimes Jabber answered. Sometimes he did not. Sometimes Enjin sat on the floor against the opposite wall and talked until silence softened enough to be shared.

Neither of them ever said the ugliest part out loud.
That Jabber did not know how to go on in a world that had removed the one person who had made all his worst instincts feel like they could become something more than destruction.

He traced the length of Assistaff now with his thumb, careful over every preserved detail, every place Zanka’s hands had worn smooth through use.

The room was quiet.

Too quiet.

Jabber lowered his head and closed his eyes.

“Don’t let me forget you,” he whispered to the weapon, to the room, to the memory that lived in both and neither. “I can do the work. I can keep them safe. I can wear the colors and stand where you used to stand and pretend that means I’m still moving forward.”

His fingers tightened.

“But I don’t know how to want this life without you in it.”

The confession did not echo.

It just settled into the room like another object he would never have the courage to move.

And in the silence that followed, with Zanka’s earrings brushing his neck and Zanka’s staff across his hands and the poison waiting for him again when night deepened enough, Jabber sat very still and looked like a man preserving a shrine while slowly, quietly, deciding how much longer he could survive inside it.