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When he felt her fingers on his skin, his muscles tensed minutely. He wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for the fact that he was currently hyper-aware of everything that had to do with the situation he was in—including the person he was in it with. As it was, he tried to ignore her pressure for a second before he made a sound almost like a resigned sigh and turned his head to look at her after all.

She looked embarrassed now, almost…guilty? He wanted to say something, maybe ask her about it, but he didn’t want to deal with whatever she was thinking right now, in the aftermath of…that. So instead he waited to see what she wanted.

Don’t do that? Don’t do what? Not look at her? Be quiet? Everything he’d been doing practically since the moment he’d met her, which had led them to this ridiculous situation? It would almost be funny if it weren’t so incredibly stressful.

Her next words, being so muffled, might have passed him by if his hearing hadn’t gotten so much better over the last few…god. Days, weeks, he couldn’t remember anymore.

He blinked a few times. So the keys were at her parents’ place. What, exactly, did she expect that he would do about that? “That’s nice,” he replied dryly. “But your parents’ place isn’t here. And I will not go wandering all over town to show up at your parents’ house in order to open a lock.”

For a second, he almost caught himself wondering if this was an attempt to get him to go meet the people she lived with, but then he figured, no. Why would she want to embarrass herself to that extent, to show up with a handcuffed man in tow? Especially considering how she’d described her family life earlier…

He made a deliberate attempt to soften his voice a little. “Look. It’s fine. You’ll go once I break the chain, and then you can go home to get yours off. It’s fine.” The cat, lounging forgotten on her chair, purred loudly when he spoke; he wasn’t sure if she was telling him to shut up or agreeing with him. Didn’t matter, really.

Darren was utterly confused by this sudden about-face. What was she angry about? He was the one who'd been handcuffed by his little stalker and forced to take her to a place he used to hide from everyone. He was the one who could never go home again. He was the one who was dying.

"Oh, of course. I'd forgotten," he said dryly. "Misery, psychosis, waking up with injuries of unknown provenance and an early death, with the police on one's tail all the way, is the very definition of joy and 'just fine' in our current society. Am I right?"

He lifted his hand, causing the chain between them to jangle. "Fawn, you may have forgotten that we're only here for a very specific reason, but believe me, I haven't. People are dead and the cops either think I'm dead, kidnapped, or they think people are dead because of me. The closest thing I'm ever going to have to just fine," he put a world of sarcasm into those two words, "right now is to stay out of jail and avoid killing anyone. Else."

He didn't think he'd killed those people, but he couldn't prove it. He couldn't prove a damn thing, not even to himself. "So don't tell me everything is going to be just fine for me, Fawn. I'm ********, and right now, all I want to do is get you out of here before you end up stuck in the fallout."

Glancing out the window, he frowned. "Does it look...greyer to you, out there?"

Darren stared at her for a moment, and then let out a low, hollow laugh. “It must be nice to have all the answers, librarian-girl.”

That was all he said for a little while, staring blankly out the window as though he’d forgotten she was there. Then, after what felt like forever but couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, he began to speak.

“I have no family, Fawn, and no loved ones. I was disowned years ago, and as far as my parents are concerned, I don’t exist anymore. I’m twenty-four years old and I am entirely alone in the world. All right? If I were to die today, now, the only person who would care is that stupid cat.” He nodded at the ugly creature, still purring away on her seat in the old chair. Leaning back against the foot of the bed, seeming not to care that the motion pulled Fawn forward, he continued, “All I wanted to do with my life was sort things out. Make myself something they could be proud of, someone they wanted back. Maybe finally meet that little sister who I’ll never know now. That was what I wanted. And I don’t have the time to do that.”

It was incredible to hear all this coming out—he’d thought that he would never have anyone to tell it to, and hadn’t been entirely sure he would want to tell them anyway. But now…now he was dying, now he was chasing away the one person who might possibly be more than a stranger, and he’d never see her again anyway, so why not just tell her the truth? She didn’t have to listen or care. He just had to say it, and her scornful opinion that anyone could be happy had stabbed like a knife.

“What I need to ‘do what I want to do’,” he said dryly, “is time, which I don’t have, and the ability to move freely through the streets, which I don’t since the police are looking for me. I’ve done most everything I ever wanted in those years when I was on my own. That’s all that’s left.”

Taking a breath, he tensed at the scent of blood. “Stop that,” he said, almost absently. His free hand reached over and pulled hers back through the handcuff so that it rested safely on her wrist and she was no longer scratching herself. “Don’t hurt yourself, you’ll be free soon enough.”

Keeping his eyes on the window, not daring to look back at her face because he didn’t want to know what was on it, he said, “I think it’s going to storm. I don’t suppose you did anything clever like bring yourself a jacket.” He avoided the question of whether he thought he was a terrible person, because the truth was, he simply didn’t know.

He didn’t think he was terrible. But good people didn’t break other people or precious things. Good people didn’t drag friends into shitty situations, over and over, until they simply gave up on him. Good people didn’t get disowned by their families after years and years of them patiently trying to pull him out of the dark place he’d been falling into.

Good people didn’t wake up and find out that there were corpses in their apartment.

So what did that make him?

Darren, who’d appeared lost in thought while Fawn was talking, blinked and turned to look at her again. His gaze moved over her face little by little, as though he was trying to figure out something that had only just occurred to him. “Research my…symptoms? It’s not a cold, Fawn. And no, I haven’t. I mean, aside from some Google searches before things got strange.” He either ignored or hadn’t heard her stubborn response—that she’d care. He didn’t say anything about it.

“Go to the library about it,” he muttered, shaking his head in what might have been either amusement or sorrow at her naïveté. “Wouldn’t that be something. To find the book All About Your Strange Psychopathic Behaviour on a shelf somewhere. Somehow I don’t think the library stocks that.” Ruffling his hair with his free hand, he gazed at the doorway for a second, a frown flashing across his features—there and gone.

At her question, his lips parted slightly and for a moment it looked as though he were about to say something sarcastic, but then at the last moment he bit it back. Instead, he said, “I’d offer mine, but it’s kind of stuck on me at the moment. I might have a spare in the closet here—I’ll check in a minute.” He would have done it right then, but of course he’d just drag her with him while doing so. At the very least, he could warn her so that she knew he was about to get up.

When she mentioned his sister, he winced a little. “I don’t want to hurt her,” he admitted, and his voice was so, so quiet. So sad. “I don’t think I would hurt her…not physically, anyway. But she might not know about me. I don’t want to hurt her, or make her upset, or…” he paused for a moment, searching for the right word, and then gave up. “…or anything.” Cracking a dry, sarcastic smile as though to cover for his moment of vulnerability, he added, “Besides, my parents would probably call the cops on me if they saw me now, after all these years. They’d have heard the police report.”

He paused for a second when she asked if he’d ever apologized. “Oh, plenty of times when I was younger. I never meant a word of it. When I left home at last and they said they never wanted to see me again, I didn’t bother.” He shrugged. “I sent them a letter, a year or so back, but I wouldn’t blame them if they chucked the thing in the fire. Even if they read it, they wouldn’t believe it now. They’ve heard it all before. I have to prove it.”

Looking back into space, not even blinking when the cat leaped from the chair to the floor and then jumped into his lap and curled up, he murmured, “So it all comes down to time again.”

((OOC: I am the laziest ********. I am so sorry. It’s my thesis semester, so I’m going kind of insane.))

Darren hesitated at the suggestion, and then he turned his head away, idly scratching at his wrist with his free hand as the cat purred under Fawn’s touch. “What’s wrong with me?” he repeated. He doubted she could help, but ranting about it would at least pass the time until he could break the chain and she could go. Besides, maybe that would be the final push she needed to stay away from him, where she would be safe. “Ah…well…are you sure that you’re comfortable with knowing that while you’re literally attached to me?” In her place, after all, he certainly wouldn’t want to know exactly what the thing attached to him could do.

He didn’t even have to look back at her to feel her rolling her eyes. She hadn’t been making great decisions before he met her—what made him think she’d have changed now?

“…I can tell you what I remember,” he said at last. There was a hesitant note in his voice that had never been there before when he’d brought up his sickness. Damn it, why did he feel so uncomfortable about telling her? He wanted her to be scared, wanted her to be scared enough to be safe.

(Even if that meant he was alone again.)

“It’s probably not enough to be useful. Like I said, I’ve done a little bit of looking into the symptoms myself, and I never pinned anything down. But…” he trailed off, looking thoughtful.

“It started with the dreams,” he said at last. “Darkness, and death, and the scent of blood. There’s nothing—no one, I mean—just dirt. Something kind of hazy off in the distance, but mostly there’s just dirt and the smell of blood and death. After a while there were names. Faces. Strangers, mostly. I found them in the obituaries a few days afterwards, every time.” He took a slow breath. “Sometimes there’s blood on my hands. But they’re not mine. I mean, they don’t look like mine. Oh hell, I’m bad at this.”

Pushing his hair back with his free hand as the cat shifted her position to make herself more comfortable, he continued, “And then there was pain. In the sunlight, especially, but by now it’s…really any kind of bright light. I don’t go into big stores anymore—the fluorescents hurt too much. And at night, it…changes. I change.

“Everything is pain and hate, Fawn, you have to get that. If you don’t believe anything else I tell you, you have got to believe this. I hate everything and it hurts so much it feels like dying, and it all makes me so angry—I destroy things to get it out, but it doesn’t really help when all that I want is to hurt someone, break someone. It’s like I’m not myself anymore. I can see myself doing things, breaking things, and there’s just enough of me left to keep from going out of my apartment…for a while. Lately I black out. I’ve been waking up in places I don’t remember going to. And I know I’m causing damage along the way, Fawn, but I don’t know to what. I don’t know if…if I ever ran across a cat—” and there he paused to stroke the ugly tabby on his lap with a trembling hand, “or a person, one day, what I might do to them when I’m not me.”

He fixed her with clear dark eyes that seemed to be a mix of ashamed and defiant. “Do you get it yet, Fawn? When I’m telling you that you need to go, to stay away, it’s not because I hate you, or that there’s anything wrong with you—and don’t you dare tell me you didn’t think that was it because I know you did, I could see it in your damn face. I’m telling you you need to stay away because I could hurt you. You. This stupid cat. A stranger.”

Taking a sharp breath, he looked away again. “There were bodies in my apartment. I don’t understand why that doesn’t even make you nervous, knowing what you know, seeing what you saw that night when…when you went to pick up the cat. And then again the other day, with the car accident. I—something happened there, I can't explain it either, but...” Frustrated, he trailed off. "I just don't know what the hell to make of you sticking around," he confessed at last.