“I’m fine!” Adon’s ears flushed, his cheeks burning in embarrassment, flinching at the flecks of blood dripping around him and staining his only nice shirt. He kept his hand pressed tight over the wound, taking the strips of shirt Y was tearing away from another of their victims, “it’s not even that bad. Like, an inch,” he held up an estimation of how much of the knife had been stained red that was more than an inch. “Still have my pinky,” he held up his left pinky with a delirious giggle, his brain working out how many of the alarm bells to silence and how many to let scream at the end of his sliced nerves.

Y rounded on him, but Adon smiled, pulling out of her grip and straightening, wiping away all his dramatics and meeting her gaze with clear eyes, “it’s not that bad, really. Bodies just bleed a lot. I swear,” he turned in a small dance to prove it, creaking and twitching to hide his wincing while his brain eased up on the drugs and decided that screaming pain was the proper response. “Hurts like Oedipus,” Adon kicked a shelf. 

Startled, dislodged, or otherwise disturbed, several small pieces of debris fell from above them, one of them landing on Adon’s shoulder and skittering down his arm as he realized they were cockroaches. 

Adon squealed and shook his arm violently while Y smacked at it, leaving a new line of bruises down Adon’s side until she finally smacked it off his opposite shoulder and sent it flying toward the flickering clamp lights, the generator hum easing in the absence of D’Arjon and his remaining crew to refuel it. 

Adon gulped down his nausea and held his arms out again, more hesitantly, “see, I’m fine.”

Y huffed, rolling her eyes but hiding a laugh, looking around at the bursts of neon lights returning to the Chroma Plaza, D’Arjon’s borrowed darkness must be up. She moved Adon out to a balcony to get a better look at him, inhaling the fresh air and blinking away the flashing billboard signs, “fine.” She huffed, turning his face by the chin and watching his eyes strain against the light. “But they’ll be coming back, so let me just—”

“I’m fine,” Adon chuckled, holding up his phone to show her he’d already requested a med kit at Nyx’s and Mess and Euri’s barrage of responses and demanding questions as they ran around to find one. 

Y relaxed, ruffling his hair proudly, “I’m glad you met your bro—oh, see!” She twisted his shoulders, pointing across the sliver of plaza at three silhouettes seated in the fancy bird-cage restaurant now across from them, “isn’t that your little mafia bird?” 

Adon followed her finger to a man haloed in roving neon lights, other windows revealing customers dancing and toasting in the common dance area below them. The shadow that was unmistakable Lu shifted uncomfortably and followed the gestures of the others to sit like uncomfortable prey between them, though whether he was being intentionally bullied or flirted with was anyone’s guess. Y watched Adon’s insistence that he was fine-but-wanted- to-whine-about-it stiffen into a focused goal, his bleary eyes narrowing with a warning sneer as his head cocked curiously. “See, it is him,” Y confirmed, “you doubted me for what?” She said a quiet prayer for the other two guests harassing Lu-Bird, then draped her dark suit jacket over Adon’s shoulders, hiding the dark stain of blood on his silk shirt, waving as Adon stomped down the stairs to the closest skywalk bridge into the cagey establishment. 

She couldn’t tell if he was jealous or protective and stood watching until his shadow appeared beside them at the table, a vicious princeling come to save his big dumb prince. She laughed at what she could make out of their clashing wardrobes: Adon dressed to meet the King of Diamonds in a printed silk shirt he’d probably wagered off an Arcade kid, and Lu dressed in the same old formal elegance X preferred, but somehow made Lu-Lu look like an escort. What was it about Wells boys born to be kings that made them simultaneously reject their heritage but want to look like the royal Uppers at the same time? She laughed to herself, finally understanding why Adon and X would never get along, then frowned, squinting at Adon, surprised to see that her coat no longer seemed to fit the scrawny kid she’d met in the Pits. She flexed her biceps, measuring with her grip and falling into a set of push-ups because the day Adon could whoop her ass was the day X would probably get what he deserved. 

“Y?” Ash snuck up beside her with their team of eight.

They were lucky for Tasha’s heavy-footed scuff or Y might have sprung up and fought them just to remind herself she was capable of doing so. Instead, she gestured to the warehouse, leading them to the ring of unconscious bodies and rewinding the generator as they gathered the crates D’Arjon had left in his eager escape. 

☆

Adon appeared at Lu’s table as if he belonged there, sauntering over and leaning on the back of Lu’s chair with a bored sigh. He glistened with sweat and his slicked hair was mussed, but it only looked like he’d been dancing downstairs with the other customers. He looked nice, black shirt and jacket covering his scars, and when he smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkled, and Lu couldn’t believe how much of the beautiful Adon he’d once known shone through the decade they’d been apart. 

Adon lolled his head to stare at Mr. Aedipo’s hand creeping up Lu’s thigh with a breathless “mother-fucker.” He moved one hand from the back of Lu’s seat to his shoulder, squeezing twice to let him know he was there, then reached over Lu to throw the investor’s hand away from his leg. One hand still tucked casually in his jacket pocket, he took Lu’s hand and pulled him up, tugging him gently sideways. 

Mr. Aedipo stood angrily, slamming down his glass and gripping Lu’s wrist, glaring at Adon.

Adon scoffed and did not let go, glancing at Lu once for permission or a reason to leave him there, but Lu only stared wide-eyed from Adon to his client. Adon followed Lu’s fear to the client, who was glaring like one of the dogs when a new-comer tried to steal a toy or a bed. Adon was tired of people treating Lu-Lu like a toy. He removed the hand tucked in his jacket with a brazen smile, gripping the client’s wrist and throwing his hand away from Lu a second time with a low hiss, “don’t fucking touch him.”

Mr. Aedipo let go of Lu with a disgusted frown at the bloody handprint now staining his white cuffs. 

Adon yanked Lu once so that he stumbled upright and backwards, then stepped in front of him, glaring at the table and nodding at Apolla, “who's she?”

“Bo—” Lu cleared his throat, his voice shaking with embarrassment and fear and rage, “boss.” He looked down at Adon’s pale hand, cold, as shaky as Lu’s voice. He looked smaller without the orange coat.

Adon moved toward Apolla but Lu remained where he was, hunched shoulders hiding his fear, biting his lip hard as he surveyed Adon for the source of the blood, but all Lu saw was all Adon could have been, suddenly terrified that he could never love him enough to make up for all he’d taken. 

Adon did not strain his hand away from Lu, leaning forward to bend over the table so that his eyes were level with the whimpering Apolla instead. 

Lu squeezed his hand, afraid for his job, the only thing he had to keep Adon warm. 

Adon sighed and straightened, cocking his head at the investor client who’d begun shouting about expensive shirts, shaking his arm at passing servers who could not hear over the private booth requests in their ear-comms. He shook his fist in front of Adon, face purpling. 

Adon gripped his warbly chin and forced their eyes to meet with a petty smile that promised to enjoy a challenge, “touch him again and I kill you, Mr. Aedipo.” 

With a nod to Apolla, Adon removed his hand, tossing the shocked man a napkin for the bloody handprint now staining his face, then pulled Lu beside him until they emerged to the safe, breathable bubble of the Chrome Plaza air. He smiled at Lu, hovering and tipping forward with a giggle, then Adon collapsed. 

After the Pits, Adon and Y had scammed a series of Med-Pods for an entire year before their menagerie of physical wounds had healed enough that their print-os read gray and green. There was still that lingering numbness in their minds, a passive acceptance of pain that never went away; while Midder kids bragged about pain tolerances in the safety of Arez’ gym, Grounders died because they just didn’t know they were that hurt. Y had warned him back then, she’d worried at the glaze over his eyes, but then he’d smiled at her and frowned at Lu and wandered the ground and endured the cold, and so she’d believed him when he said he was fine. He was not fine. 

Adon didn’t have anyone in the outgoing emergency contacts of his jail-broke district ID alert, so the only person who knew he was dying was Lu, and that was only because he was the one carrying Adon on his back as he sprinted to the nearest available Med-Pod, ignoring the pattern that was already emerging between them: Adon gets hurt by Lu, Adon gets hurt around Lu, Adon gets hurt regardless of Lu’s presence, Adon gets hurt. It was becoming inevitable, expected, as if he were waiting to be hurt enough that it would excuse his life. Lu found a strength in that fear, enough to carry Adon all the way to something close to safety, watching the Med-Pod stitch him up under Lu’s ID. It would come up as fraud later, when the blood didn’t match, or maybe they had the same type and the Asylum would never know it wasn’t Lu with the scar to match his records. 

He sat restlessly in the fold-out guest chair, watching the gash that could have killed Adon in a dozen ways shrink into a small line, bandaged and taped for good measure, hardly more than an accidental brush with an overzealous counter or a drunken fistfight. It seemed wrong that something so scary could be eliminated so quickly while Lu was still holding a bloody jacket to his gut and wondering what happened, the progress bar promising Adon would be ready to go in fifteen more minutes. Exhausted, or maybe drugged (he wouldn’t put it past Mr. Aedipo), Lu ruminated in circles. No matter how he laid out the cards in his hand, the same helpless pattern seemed to emerge: Adon gets hurt, and Lu didn’t know whether to hate Adon’s mom, or Gideon, or Adon’s friends who called it to be normal, or himself who’d hurt him first. There was no beginning to the hurting, it seemed, and as Lu listened to Adon’s breath catch, he compressed all his grief into the single fear that Adon’s hurt would have an end. That he was broken beyond repair, no matter how high Lu turned up the heat, no matter how desperately he wanted to keep him warm, he couldn’t shake the clamminess of Adon’s cold hand, already haunted.

The Med-Pod beeped a million sounds of warning, the screen prompting Lu to approve immediate evacuation to hospital, followed by flashing diagrams while the doctor frantically typed walls of text explaining that his mic connection was broken but that the patient should be taken to a hospital. Lu confirmed, signing himself as a guardian in a moment of panic, reading the doctor’s worries about deeper wounds that needed monitoring as the Med-Pod rolled onto the red-track emergency line like a marble, dropping down the slope toward the Charity House, the gyroscope the only thing keeping them comfortably upright as Adon groaned and an EMS team jogged out to meet them at the arrivals bay. 

Later, when she counted the new tallies on his arm and learned that he didn’t have her as an Emergency-ID contact, Y tackled Adon and it took Xeri, Euri, Mess, and Nyx to pull her off him. Then all five of them stood around him until Adon had added each of their names beneath Lu’s (who’d done it himself), still insisting he was fine.

☆☆☆