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When she'd left for Peyton's she'd returned to find that his guilt or his disgust or both had motivated him to shower, at least; to strip the bed and replace the sheets. The only evidence of it was the damp of the pillow where his hair had been and the fact that her room did not instantly smell of stale cigarette smoke when the door was opened. He neither spoke of it nor acknowledged it.

Other than that he'd not left her bed save for brief excursions to smoke or piss or mechanically choke down enough food to stave off the worst of her coaxing, and one instance of being coerced into sitting outside, huddled on the back porch with his eyes closed and a cigarette dangling from his fingers. It was something like wheeling a catatonic invalid out to enjoy the sunshine, save that he murmured a quiet thank you as he delivered himself back to the disheveled nest he'd made of her bed.

When she returned from Peyton's he said the most he'd said since he'd made his final desperate plea to just let him divorce himself of the weight of his self-imposed standards, to let him be as disgusting and useless as he felt. He'd told her that Fiona had stopped screaming, and he had volunteered, tiredly, the information that she was not broken, only damaged in some way that he did not yet understand. With her screaming abated and his own system too overloaded to process further stimulus, he slept heavy as he had on the heels of terror and grief before, motionless and peaceful for hours at a time.

He was by his own admission bad at doing nothing, but it was to this that he devoted his time, fully and completely, and when he woke up and she was there insinuating herself into the curve of his arm or wrapped around his bony back he neither pulled away nor drew her closer. He'd reacted more to the treat than he did to her, tearing up inexplicably at its tiny needy gestures and clinging to it with a greater show of emotion than anything else had procured including soccer balls you a**.

Until tonight, that is, when he woke in the middle of the night and after lying still and silent for a long time woke her up, too, by abruptly nesting in close to her and threading an arm over her waist, pushing his nose against the hair falling across her shoulderblade and pulling her close, ribs pressed into her back.

"How do you feel?" he whispered suddenly, in the low conspiratorial whisper of children staying up late and talking in the dark. A pause. "Not about me. How are you feeling. Generally."

He was quiet, but unlike with her there was no question that he had simply fallen asleep, his fingers lacing and unlacing with hers, feeling along her wrist as though, after a long absence, he needed to re-memorize her geography.

"You're good at making things nice," he said, still without raising his voice despite the empty house. A long pause, heavy with the sense that he was thinking about saying something else, but what he said instead was: "I need to go get another tattoo."

Little, mundane (except that it wasn't). He sounded tired when he said it, like finding the reserves to get the words out had exhausted him.

He almost smiled, very nearly, and it wasn't there but maybe the feeling was, because he ducked his head away from her anyway.

"Not quite," he said, but he didn't volunteer more, just chased her fingertips with his. "I don't know if they'll let me leave alone. I didn't ask because I didn't wanna go anywhere. Don't."

"I love you," he answered, this time immediately, tired. "And I'm sorry that I'm... whatever I am, right now." He hesitated, and he answered her unspoken thought because of course it had been the same as his. "I think you're good at teaching other people how to make things nice; I think I'm just bad at learning."

He was fragile at the best of times but the word didn't even come close to being sufficient for what he was right now, and after a bewildered moment he realized what it was that she referred to and a frisson of grief and gratitude ran through him and between them.

He thought of Harley and Alex and Mal and even Bird, and he said it without hesitation, whispered and tearful: "You're the best friend I've ever had."

Maybe fragile didn't suit because he'd already been broken, and was only loosely holding his own pieces together. His face crumpled around the strain of suppressing his tears at the idea that if not the world at least someone's world was better for his being in it, rather than worse.

"I want," he said, "things to be easy. For everything. For you."

It was, as always, a struggle to explain what he meant, and he was unequal to it even when he wasn't having to fight waves of exhaustion to get a few words through his teeth.

"I want to be able to take care of you," he tried, "even if you don't--think you need taking care of." And here he was in her bed, submitting to the comfort of her hands, and he didn't even need to say what was obvious: that he couldn't even take care of himself. "I just want to take care of something. I want to fix something. Something."

It would have been so satisfying to argue with her again, either in a vain attempt to explain that what she was saying wasn't enough or in an effort to goad the both of them into a real fight and all the ensuing making-up that never failed to soothe. But just a few sentences and a couple of tears and the effort of willfully touching her and he was exhausted again, closing his eyes.

"Do you always know who you are?" he asked, apropos of nothing.