Archive of Our Own

The kid shows up while Marcus is eating two day old pizza for breakfast. He's maybe fifteen, wrapped in a bedsheet and staring up at Marcus with terror that shifts to wild glee as soon as their eyes meet. Marcus is still chewing his pizza and the kid is looking at him like he expects to be invited inside.

"Marcus!" he says, pulling the sheet more tightly around him. "I mean." His face changes, his big, crazy eyes going serious. "You don't know me yet, but, um. Well, I need to talk to you. Okay?"

Marcus sighs under his breath and looks out at the driveway. Ray's truck is gone, and Marcus is getting really tired of his junkie friends showing up at all hours and foisting their strung-out hijinks on him. And it kind of pisses him off that Ray is dealing to kids who are this young.

"Ray's not here," Marcus says.

"What? Who -- oh, your brother." The kid looks very grave for a moment. "That's what I've come to talk to you about, actually."

"Yeah, well, I'm kinda busy," Marcus says, scowling. He takes another bite of pizza, and the kid grins at him stupidly, his eyes getting wet. Ray's junkie friends: they're always bursting into tears.

"I never thought I'd see you again," the kid says, soft and reverent, and he's got this incredibly wide-open face that makes Marcus feel sorry for him, because he might have been, like, a painter or a physics teacher or something, but he's a slave to drugs instead, because of people like Marcus' brother.

"I'm pretty sure we've never met," Marcus says. He would have slammed the door already if he didn't suspect that the kid doesn't have any clothes on under that sheet. He's not the kind of boy who should be turned loose into the world when he's essentially nude.

"Oh, well, I can wait," the kid says. "I actually, um. Fuck, this is going to sound so weird to you, but I actually came from the future, from 2018, to warn you about how you're going to die if you do this particular thing with your brother and get arrested and donate your body to science? So. I can wait."

Marcus takes a deep breath and stares up at the dull stretch of blue afternoon sky, cursing Ray inwardly. He's actually heard stranger things from the people who show up at the door looking for Ray or drugs or both, and this kid might need hospitalization when he comes down from whatever he's on, so Marcus steps back and allows him inside.

"Sit at the table there and don't touch anything," Marcus says, gesturing to what would be the dining room table if this were a normal household. As it is, the table is covered with Ray's get rich quick shit, books about real estate strategies, diet pills and a pile of cheap gold jewelry. The kid sits down obediently, drawing his sheet around him.

"What's your name?" Marcus asks, sitting across from him. He was going to wash his truck, but he feels some grudging responsibility to babysit this punk. Probably because the first time Marcus got truly fucked up off of Ray's product he was left alone to cope with it in the alley behind a bar.

"Kyle Reese," the kid says, sitting up straighter, as if he's proud to tell Marcus so. "We've actually met before. But you. Well, that was in the future."

"Uh-huh. Why're you wearing a sheet?"

"Oh, I guess when you time travel you can't do it with your clothes? I don't know, I'd never tried it before, I mean I was wearing clothes when I went into the transport chamber, but when I got here I was naked. So I kind of stole this from someone's laundry, it was hanging on a line in your neighbor's yard." He's grinning as if everything is not just completely normal, but absolutely ideal. "I'm so glad I found you," he says. "It's been like, two days since I got here, and I -- I --" His eyes well up again, and Marcus goes to the fridge for a beer.

"Where are your parents?" Marcus asks. Kyle's eyes change, going somber again.

"Dead," he says.

"Well, shit." Marcus sits down again and takes a long pull of beer. His mother died when he was two years old, and might as well have taken his old man with her, for all the good he did Ray and Marcus afterward. To orphans, he thinks, raising his beer in Kyle's direction.

"So who takes care of you?" he asks.

"Well, nobody," Kyle says, frowning. "I mean. You did, once."

"I did?" Marcus drinks again. "Who do you think I am exactly?"

"Marcus Wright," Kyle says. "You were, um. You're about to do this thing with your brother, try to rob this drug dealer, and your brother, well. He isn't going to make it, and you're going to freak out and kill two cops, and --"

"Wait," Marcus says, slamming his beer down onto the table. Kyle jumps. "Who the fuck -- who the fuck sent you here? Are you threatening my brother?" Ray might be a magnet for junkie losers, but he's still all that Marcus has, all he's ever had.

"No, no!" Kyle says, and Marcus doesn't trust him, but he wants to, because how could anybody with such big, dumb, watery eyes be any good at lying? "I came here for you. See, you won't believe this, and, oh, shit, I practiced this and it didn't sound so dumb in my head, but I came here to save your life, actually."

"Actually," Marcus repeats, nodding. He drains the beer, and Kyle watches him, sitting forward on his chair, bent toward him. Marcus imagines he can hear the pounding of the kid's wild heart, agitated by whatever Ray sold him, whatever he wants more of.

"Well," Marcus says. "Ray'll be back in a few hours, maybe."

"But, see, you've got to get away from Ray," Kyle says. The sheet has slipped off his left shoulder, and Marcus groans.

"Do you want some clothes?" he asks, narrowing his eyes. Kyle stares at him for a moment, as if he's confused by the question.

"Oh," he says, sitting back. "Yeah, thanks."

Marcus takes him into Ray's room, because the kid is Ray's problem and Marcus isn't loaning out his own clothes to help solve it. Plus, Ray is smaller than Marcus, and even Ray's clothes will hang like tents on Kyle. Kyle walks in cautiously, hanging close to Marcus as if he's afraid some wild animal is going to jump out from behind Ray's ransacked bed to eat him alive. Ray's room reeks of pot and is darkened by the broken shade that always hangs over his window, but Marcus can see well enough by the glow of the sunlight behind it to fish a t-shirt and an old pair of sweats out of Ray's drawer. The elastic waistband is the kid's only hope; he's goddamn willowy, like most of these junkies, as if he forgot what food was as soon as he found drugs.

"You need underwear, too?" Marcus asks, almost enjoying the idea of loaning out Ray's boxers as revenge for his spoiled afternoon. The kid nods shyly, his cheeks going pink. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He's probably some kind of rent boy. Marcus has long been immune to giving a shit about Ray's "people," but this one is just so fucking young.

"How old are you?" he asks as Kyle dresses, Marcus' back turned so that he'll have privacy. It makes him nervous, taking his eyes off of someone who is obviously insanely high, but he's not about to stare.

"Eighteen," Kyle says, and Marcus snorts.

"Yeah, right."

"I am! You met me two years ago – well. Actually, seventeen years from now, but I was sixteen then."

"Right." Marcus turns when Kyle taps his shoulder. "Makes sense to me."

Kyle looks hilarious in Ray's Pink Floyd t-shirt and the sweatpants, which are baggy on him. Marcus gives him a pair of Ray's socks and watches him pull them on, sitting on the floor. It's been a long time since Marcus instantly liked someone. Figures that he'd be a lost cause.

"It feels so weird to have clean clothes," Kyle says, standing. "Thanks so much." He stumbles a little, swaying as if he's going to pass out, and Marcus catches him. Kyle's skin is incredibly hot, his arms and the back of his neck red with sunburn. The tip of his nose, too.

"What are you on?" Marcus asks as Kyle regains his balance, lingering a little too close as he rubs his eyes.

"Huh? Oh, you think I've been taking drugs?" Kyle beams as if this is all a charming misunderstanding. "No, no, I've just been wandering through the desert naked for like two days, so. Um. Can I have some water?"

Marcus takes him back into the kitchen and watches him drink two big glasses full of tap water. Kyle wipes at his eyes when he's finished, and Marcus can see that he's trying not to start crying again. Marcus wonders how Kyle really lost his clothes, and for a minute he just hates Ray so much. Not that it's Ray's fault, really. The kid's parents are dead. This is what happens. Worst case scenario.

"I'm sorry," Kyle says, sniffling. "You must think -- it's just -- it's so clean, you know?"

"Huh?"

"The water."

Marcus nods and checks the clock; there's no telling when Ray will get back. He's starting to think that Kyle shouldn't be turned over to Ray, but maybe he really doesn't have anywhere else to go. He sees Kyle eying a can of Pringles that Ray left open on the counter after eating half of them for breakfast, and he picks it up, offering it to him.

"You're hungry?" he says. Kyle nods, not taking his eyes off the chips. Marcus lets him finish them, and he can see that Kyle is trying very hard not to stuff them all into his mouth as fast as he can. He's not crying anymore, just looking amazed.

"That was so fucking good," he says, boggling at Marcus, sour cream and onion dust stuck to his lips. Kyle looks down at the can, turning it in his hand as if it's a sacred artifact. "I found something like this at this old gas station once, but they weren't as good as these."

"Uh." Marcus doesn't really know how to talk to these people. Ray is good at humoring them until they start to come down, then he loses interest. "I've got some pizza, if you're still hungry," Marcus says. "It's two days old, though."

Kyle grins hugely. "Two days old, yeah," he says. "Um. Perfect."

They eat pizza together on the couch. Marcus turns the TV on for awhile, just to have some background noise, but Kyle jumps at every loud commercial and seems nervous about it in general, so Marcus turns it off, not wanting to agitate him. So far he's pretty easy to deal with, for a junkie. When Marcus comes back from the kitchen with another beer, Kyle is curled up on his side, fast asleep. Marcus figures he's done enough, but he has to wait for Ray to get back before he can go to the hardware store with his list of equipment they need for their next job, so he sits down beside Kyle with a sigh, feeling ridiculous. He's not a very charitable person, and it irks him to be put in this position, but there's just something about the kid's face. Especially when he's sleeping. He looks as if he's afraid of something; his shoulders keep jerking in tiny jumps, and he's making little noises under his breath, as if he's being chased by a dog in his dream.

Despite the annoyance about the kid's fitful sleep, Marcus manages to fall asleep himself, two beers into the afternoon. He wakes up feeling hot and looks down to see Kyle clinging to his side, his head on Marcus' chest.

"Hey, hey," he says, rousing him. He can hear Ray's key in the door. Last time Ray caught Marcus in a compromising position with a guy on a couch, Marcus was fifteen and Ray proceeded to beat the desire to ever try it again right out of him. Kyle sits up quick, as if he'd been waiting to have to wake up and run right out the door. His eyes are bloodshot, and Marcus feels something drop through his chest when Kyle blinks at him wearily, licking his chapped lips. Marcus actually had something, for a minute there, some kind of weird, fleeting peace. He gets up from the couch when Ray walks inside.

"There you fucking are," Marcus says in a growl, remembering who he is in the presence of his brother, as always. "Where the hell have you been?" Marcus doesn't really need to ask; Ray has a spring in his step and a large paper bag full of clinking bottles in his arms. He got laid, fell asleep for awhile and went to the liquor store. It's pretty funny that this scummy house and these worthless afternoons make up Ray's dream world, the one he risks his life and his freedom for every time he and Marcus pull a job.

"I been around," Ray says cheerfully, walking into the kitchen with his booze. "Who's that?"

"Like I fucking know. He's one of your customers, I figured."

"Oh." Ray lights up at the prospect. "Whatcha need?" he shouts to Kyle as he's unpacking his bottles. Kyle is staring at Marcus pleadingly; he can feel it. He doesn't look back.

"I -- I actually just wanted to talk to your brother," Kyle says.

"My brother!" Ray unscrews the top on a bottle of Wild Turkey, and Marcus still hates that crack crack crack sound. He remembers Ray saying, when Marcus was eight and Ray was ten, that he would never in his life take a single drink, leave the boozing to losers like their old man. Two years later, Ray and their father were getting drunk together on a regular basis, and they were both drunk the night Ray maybe killed the old man during a bad fistfight down in Mexico. Marcus and Ray didn't stick around to find out if he ever got up, but Marcus is still afraid, sometimes, that he'll open the door one day and the unflappable son of a bitch will be there on the front stoop, healed up and vengeance-ready.

"Not too many people are interested in talking to Mark, he ain't very entertaining," Ray says, pouring himself a glass. He always fakes a southern accent when he's in a good mood. He and Ray were both born in Kentucky, but after their mother died they never stayed in one place long enough to pick up an inflection.

"I need to talk to you," Marcus says, walking into the kitchen and grabbing Ray's arm.

"Careful, dude!" Ray says when his whiskey sloshes in the glass. Marcus pulls him out onto the rotting back porch, peeking back inside through the window at Kyle, who looks frightened and small inside the mess of their house.

"That kid is high and he's -- he needs help," Marcus says. "He showed up here without any clothes, telling me he's from the future."

Ray snorts and takes a drink. "That's awesome," he says.

"Actually, it's not, Ray. And he -- he said some shit about robbing a drug dealer, like he knows about the whole Firenzo thing, I don't know --"

"Wait, what?" Ray's whole face changes, all of the good humor gone in an instant. Exactly like their father, after everything. Marcus is sorry he told Ray about this; ever since he came up with this stupid fucking plot to rob his dealer, Ray has been more nuts than usual.

"I don't know," Marcus says, throwing up his hands. "Maybe he's just ranting, crazy, but --"

"You think Firenzo knows about the plan?" Ray asks, staring in through the window at Kyle, who looks as if he'd be eaten alive within five seconds of meeting a guy like Firenzo. But maybe that's the idea. Marcus certainly allowed himself to be taken in by the kid. This is why he's always needed Ray, and he knows it. Ray doesn't even trust himself.

"I doubt Firenzo knows anything," Marcus says. "Or we'd both be dead right now."

Ray nods to himself, unable to deny this. "What exactly did the kid say?" he asks.

"Something about how --" How you're not gonna make it, Marcus thinks, but he doesn't say so, because that and a few drinks would be enough to set Ray off on the kid, and they really don't need another probably-dead body on their hands. "How we're gonna rob a drug dealer. He said he knew about it to, like, prove that he knew me."

"Maybe you spilled our shit to him when you were fucked up," Ray says, turning his glower from Kyle to Marcus.

"You know I don't get fucked up in mixed company."

"Yeah, well," Ray mutters. He throws back the rest of his whiskey, wincing as he swallows. "Don't let him leave. I need to learn a few things. And he said he wanted to talk to you. So maybe you two'd better have a little chat."

They go back into the house and find Kyle still standing nervously in the middle of the living room. Marcus takes Kyle's arm and pulls him into his bedroom, shutting the door behind them. Kyle hovers close, like he's afraid of something, and maybe he should be. Marcus doesn't understand why Kyle isn't afraid of him, too, and he feels like a failure for it.

"So what the hell do you need to talk to me about?" Marcus asks, shoving Kyle away a little. "And how do you know about this Firenzo thing?"

"Firenzo? Oh --" Kyle pinches his eyes shut and scratches a hand through his curly hair. Sand falls out onto the shoulders of Ray's shirt. "That dealer you guys -- I know all this because one of our guys hacked into the Skynet database after you -- after you were gone, they wanted to find out more about the project."

"The project?" Marcus says. "What project?"

"Um." Kyle shrugs as if he's embarrassed by this story, suddenly. "You."

"Me?"

"Yeah. Fuck!" Kyle groans, bending over and squeezing his fingers into his hair. "I -- I thought about like a hundred different ways to try to say all of this, but --"

"Okay, okay," Marcus says, holding up his hands. "Explain how you know me. How you knew my name."

"We met in the future," Kyle says, his eyes getting wet with frustration. He seems so tired, and his sunburn has darkened since he came into the shade of the house. "I know it sounds crazy, I know. But we were friends. You helped me."

"Okay." Marcus shakes his head, wondering if this kid is even telling the truth about his parents being dead. Maybe they're driving the streets right now, searching for him. Maybe he's not even high but more like schizophrenic. He seems pretty lucid, despite what he's saying.

"So," Marcus says. "Why are you here now?"

"Because you die," Kyle says, his voice going weak. "In the future. And I. Thought I would stop missing you, but. I didn't. It's been two years and I just, I. I wanted you back."

"So where's your time machine?" Marcus asks, because maybe he should keep the kid talking, maybe there is a tiny hint of useful information buried in all this bullshit. He's beginning to get a headache and really wants another beer.

"The machine is back in the future," Kyle says, gesturing with his thumb as if the future is over his shoulder.

"And in the future you're just allowed to go back in time and tell your friends how they're gonna die?" Marcus wonders if he'd even change anything about his life if he believed this. He's never really expected to live past thirty.

"No, I don't know what's allowed, really," Kyle says. He scratches at his elbow, the skin there going white and then red again. "Connor -- that's, um, kind of our leader? He was always, like, letting me in on all this information about the time travel technology, like he wanted me to know how it worked, and I never really understood why, I mean I was just a stray, the second youngest person in our camp, but he trusted me, and I feel kind of bad about that, since he doesn't know I'm here, since I used the transport without asking, except that I don't really feel that bad, because he's the one who let you die."

Marcus sighs and sits down heavily on his bed. Kyle is quick to sit beside him, too close. He seems like he wants to be held. Like he needs a mother. He's come to the wrong place.

"So I'm dead," Marcus says. "Where you're from."

"Yeah," Kyle says. His shoulders slump, and he looks down at his hands. He's got red dirt under his fingernails. "Most everyone is," he says.

"That so?"

"It's funny." Kyle smiles a little, sadly. "I already explained all this to you once. 'Cause you showed up from the past, sort of, and didn't know anything. And I thought, like. I'd get to do it all over again, only now you won't believe me, because it won't all be there in front of your face."

"What won't be there?" Marcus asks. The last of the sun is disappearing outside, and he's beginning to get a really eerie feeling about this kid.

"The robots," Kyle mutters. He looks up and grins. "You think I'm crazy," he says. "Or on drugs, I guess. Okay. That's fine. Just don't make me leave, alright?" He grabs Marcus' arm, and Marcus shakes him loose. He hears the front door opening, and the whoops of Ray's friends.

"Why would we be friends?" Marcus asks. "In the future? Ever?"

"Because you -- you were just walking down the street one day and I saved your life," Kyle says. "And then you saved mine a bunch of times and then I was in trouble and you came to get me. But I couldn't even hardly thank you, because Connor was dying and you were telling him he could have your heart and I just, wanted to, I don't know, I was so angry but what could I say? I didn't want Connor to die, either, but I didn't want you to die."

Kyle presses his lips together and shuts his eyes. He takes a deep breath before opening them again, and when he does he looks at Marcus, seeming so desperate and lost, and Marcus might actually believe he's telling the truth. Maybe if he'd had like five more beers.

"I know I'm talking a lot and not making any sense," Kyle says. "It's just been a long time since I really talked to anyone. My best friend in the future doesn't talk at all, and Connor hardly says shit to anyone unless he's issuing orders, and I, just. I liked talking to you, and you showed me things, and you fought for me, and no one else ever had. I just liked -- being around you, and ever since Connor told me about the transport I've been planning this. I can't believe I'm actually here. I can't believe the way the world is, the way it was."

Marcus shakes his head slowly, listening to the sounds of Ray's friends as their night kicks into gear out in the living room. Usually he goes out to avoid this portion of the evening, drives around aimlessly, turns fucked up women down in bars. He hasn't really done anything but what Ray tells him to for the past five years, since the day they left their father's body on the floor of a motel room in Mexico. At one point he had some vague plans to go up to Canada and get a job hauling lumber or something, but Ray has been dragging him around by the collar since he was two years old and Marcus wouldn't even know how to start living without him.

"I know what it's like," Marcus says. "When there's only one person in the world who gives a shit about you."

"Well, I had two," Kyle says. He sighs. "But I guess you were my favorite. Because I didn't want to be there anymore once you were gone. I know it's bad, what I did. Connor will probably have me killed. It's just --" He looks up at Marcus, and Marcus hopes to God this kid, with those eyes, is not a rent boy. He hopes no one has ever laid a hand on him.

"I wanted to save you," Kyle says.

"Hate to break it to you," Marcus says, standing, because he feels kind of dizzy and strange. "But you're probably too late." Glass shatters out in the kitchen; Ray laughs.

"I had a feeling your life might not be that great when I found you," Kyle says, suddenly at Marcus' side again, staring up at him. "But maybe it could be great, if, if we were friends again. We've got three years until -- things change. There's important stuff we could be doing together, me and you. To, you know. Fight the future."

"Fight the future," Marcus says, pointing a finger at Kyle. "I know where you got that from. From that movie, that, uh -- The X-Files. Kid, I don't know what to tell you. Don't you have anywhere else to go?"

"What -- no, I've never seen a movie in my life! I was two years old when the world ended, and no, Marcus please, I don't have anywhere to go."

"Two years old when the world ended." Marcus looks down at his shoes. "Yeah, I -- so why don't you go see your parents, then? They're alive somewhere, aren't they?"

"'Cause I need you to help me bring down Skynet!" Kyle says, his tears welling up again. "Then everyone will live."

"Why me, huh? Why not your father, why not the police?"

"No one will believe me!"

"And I will?"

"Please," Kyle says, blinking his tears down his cheeks. "Even if you don't believe me, don't make me go."

"Fine," Marcus says, the air in the room too thick and the walls seeming so much closer than they usually do. "You can stay here. I'm going out."

"I'll come with you," Kyle says, wiping his face.

"No," Marcus says. "I need to clear my head. You're making me feel like I'm losing my fucking mind."

His face turns red when he says so. It's more than he's said to anyone in a long time, maybe ever. You're making me feel. Well, fuck it, he knows how to solve that problem. He slams out of the room, shutting Kyle in behind him, and heads for the front door.

"The hell you going?" Ray shouts as Marcus stomps through the room.

"Out," Marcus says. He prefers the company at the city's sleaziest dive bars to his brother's friends.

"That kid still here?" Ray asks.

"Yeah," Marcus says, turning from the door. "You'd better just leave him the fuck alone. I'll deal with it when I get back."

"Sure, sure," Ray mumbles, in a good mood again, too drunk now to care much about anything.

Marcus walks down the road to the nearest bar, a place that used to be a strip club before it lost its license for nude dancers. The pole and stage are still there in the middle of the place, dark and abandoned like a haunted amusement park. Marcus can't even get drunk properly, he's so worried about Kyle back at the house, imagining that Ray's friends might be bothering him, getting him fucked up, making him upset. And what the fuck is that? Just 'cause the kid bursts into tears every five minutes, just 'cause he's impressed by tap water and thinks Marcus saved his life once? Marcus laughs into his glass of vodka and thinks of what his father always used to say when he was confronted with an emotion he didn't want to deal with:

"Two tears in a bucket, motherfuck it."

Marcus never really did figure out what the hell that meant.

*

When Marcus stumbles home, so drunk he's forgotten what he was upset about earlier, he finds the driveway empty. Thinking of Kyle, a hard slap of panic cuts through the drunk, and he hurries to the front door, fumbling his keys. Maybe Ray took Kyle somewhere, maybe he's beating the shit out of him in some abandoned parking deck, thinking he can get information from him. Marcus runs through the house and throws the door of his room open. Kyle is there, asleep, curled up in an old papasan chair in the corner. It's Marcus' clean laundry dumping ground, and Kyle has an armful of Marcus' shirts and boxer shorts hugged against him, his face buried in them. Marcus is dumbstruck with relief, and he stands in the doorway for awhile, staring at Kyle and trying to figure out what additional reassurance he's looking for. When he shuts the door behind him, Kyle jerks awake with a gasp.

"You alright?" Marcus asks, and he hates the slur in his voice. Kyle's shoulders relax when he sees that it's only Marcus walking into the room, pulling off his shirt. It's hot in the house, the start of June, and Ray doesn't believe in air conditioning, says it's for pussies.

"Yeah," Kyle says. He looks confused, and Marcus wonders if he's going to start coming down now, remembering reality.

"They didn't bother you?" Marcus asks.

"What? No, they left awhile ago."

Kyle watches Marcus faceplant onto his bed, still wearing his jeans. Marcus sort of knows what's coming, and he pretends not to notice when Kyle climbs into bed with him. He lies on the other side, and Marcus can feel Kyle staring at him, but he's so drunk that it doesn't really bother him much.

"Marcus?" Kyle whispers.

"Mmph?"

"Can I sleep here?"

Marcus shrugs, and Kyle takes it as a yes, settling in. For awhile they just lie there, Marcus starting to slip into sleep, Kyle fidgeting and sighing dramatically, trying to invite a conversation.

"I haven't slept for more than a few hours at a time since before I can remember," Kyle says, still whispering.

"So shut up and do it," Marcus says, his voice muffled in his pillow, and Kyle sighs.

"Okay," he says. "G'night."

"Yep."

Marcus wakes up confused around two in the morning, thinking Ray has passed out on top of him. But it's not Ray lying against him; Ray doesn't smell so clean and unspoiled. He turns to see Kyle asleep with his face pressed against his back, one skinny arm slung around Marcus' side.

"Let go," Marcus says, but Kyle pretends to be asleep, though Marcus can tell by the pace of Kyle's breath against his skin that he's awake. Marcus groans and lets his head fall back onto his pillow. "C'mon," he says, bucking back against Kyle to try and shove him off. Kyle makes a whimpery little noise that kicks Marcus right in the stomach, and he's still clinging, tighter now.

"Kid," Marcus says. He's got a dull headache, and he's never heard the house so quiet.

"Please," Kyle whispers, so soft that Marcus barely hears it. Marcus lies on his side and breathes through his nose, feeling defeated. He's too tired to really fight Kyle away, and it's not the worst thing in the world, and it doesn't mean anything, really. Marcus has never slept with someone curled around him like they'll die if they let him go. A couple of women have tried, maybe, but he's never allowed it. With women, he always wants it to be over as quickly as possible.

Marcus regrets his half-asleep decision to allow Kyle to cling to him when Kyle wakes up in the middle of the night screaming. Marcus shoots up beside him and looks around the room frantically, but there's nothing wrong, it's just some psycho nightmare. He grabs Kyle's shoulders and holds him steady, shakes him twice.

"Hey, hey!" he says, his heart pounding. He prays that Ray isn't home, because he can't deal with him in addition to this. Kyle is panting, staring at Marcus with slow recognition.

"I thought, I thought I heard --" Kyle says, breathing so hard that Marcus is afraid he'll crack himself in half. "Marcus!" he says, as if he's just noticed that Marcus is here. He throws his arms around Marcus' shoulders and hugs him, hiding his face against Marcus' neck.

"Whoa," Marcus says, holding up his hands. "Whoa, whoa. Okay. Let go."

"Please, just --" Kyle says, still holding onto Marcus as tightly as he can. "You don't understand, you don't know what it was like. I had to watch you die, I had to watch them kill you, and then Connor, every time I saw him I thought of your heart in there --"

"Alright," Marcus says, patting Kyle's back stiffly. "It was just a dream."

"No, no, it really happened," Kyle says, and Marcus can feel the wet heat of Kyle's tears against his neck. "I just can't believe you're here," Kyle says, squeezing Marcus with surprising strength, until he can barely breathe. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know I'm freaking you out."

"Yeah, you are," Marcus says, prying Kyle from him. "Just calm the fuck down, okay?"

"I can't," Kyle says, letting Marcus hold him back like a squirming puppy. "I can't let you ruin your life, I can change it all, and me and you can stop Skynet, here and now, and Connor can keep his own damn heart, okay -- okay?"

"Why don't you just go back to sleep?" Marcus says, setting him down on the pillows. "Just sleep, okay?"

"Where are you going?" Kyle asks when Marcus swings his legs over the side of the bed.

"To get some fucking coffee, that okay with you?"

"I'll come with you," Kyle says, shooting up from the mattress. "Please, Marcus, just let me go with you, wherever you go, that's all I want."

"Why?" Marcus roars. Kyle cowers, and Marcus tries not to care. He's close to getting fed up, more with himself than with Kyle, because for some reason he wants to give in to the kid's demands.

"Because," Kyle says, his eyes shining in the first light of dawn through the window. "Because -- we -- before -- we cared about each other."

"How do you know?" Marcus asks, stepping closer to Kyle, trying to make his posture a threat. It's not hard; he could snap Kyle in half if he wanted to. He wants to know how Kyle is so damn sure that Marcus doesn't want to, so sure that he feels confident enough to invade his bed and sleep against his back.

"Because," Kyle says. He's not teary now but steely, ready to win an argument about whether or not Marcus cares about him. "You came for me when I was in trouble. Connor said you were obsessed. We'd only known each other for a few days, but it was like we just--" Kyle shrugs, shaking his head. "We just fit together. All I could think about when we got separated was getting back to you. And vice versa, I guess." He looks down at his feet, and Marcus scowls.

"What, like we were in love or something?" he says, as if he's disgusted by the idea. Which he is, of course, completely.

"No," Kyle says, his eyes still on the floor. "Not like that."

Marcus storms out of the room, really needing to get away from this goddamn kid for five minutes. So it doesn't really make much sense that he's relieved when Kyle follows him silently and climbs into the truck beside him. They drive to a diner, and Marcus drinks coffee while Kyle eats a giant stack of pancakes.

"Don't cry about the pancakes," Marcus says when Kyle seems to be getting emotional about them. Kyle grins.

"You don't know what the world is like, in the future," he says, and he proceeds to tell Marcus all about the evil robot revolution and Judgment Day and John Connor, and Marcus' stint as a half-Terminator in another life. Marcus pays as much attention as he can, ordering more coffee and trying to decide what the fuck to do about this kid. He should be able to just open his hands and let the kid float off like a leaf on the wind, but he can't shake the feeling that the kid will die horribly if Marcus allows him out of his sight. Strangely, the kid seems to feel the same way about him.

"So you see," Kyle says, his mouth full of pancakes. "As long as you don't do this thing with your brother, he doesn't die, you don't kill two cops, and you never have to give up your heart."

Marcus wants to tell the kid to stop talking about his heart. He sits back and stares at Kyle, trying to make sense of him. Where he came from, how he might know Marcus' name. It could all be a con, Kyle could be working for Firenzo, Marcus could be playing right into the trap. But that really isn't Firenzo's style; he's more likely to just fire a bullet point blank into his enemies' heads and move on with his life. Marcus tries to come up with any others who have it out for him and Ray while Kyle continues on about the robot apocalypse, but he can't imagine any of the regular goons getting this creative.

"Does this radio work?" Kyle asks when they're driving back to the house on Elgin Avenue, where Marcus and his brother have been living for the past two years. Longest time they've ever spent in one place, and they're planning to relocate after the Firenzo job. Which, actually, Marcus might be having second thoughts about. Not that he didn't hate the idea from the start.

"Yeah, it works," Marcus says, flicking it on. Kyle beams and begins messing with the dial.

"You're pretty good at fixing radios in the future," Kyle says, "And cars."

"Well, I oughta be," Marcus says. "Working on cars was the only honest job I ever had."

"So what dishonest ones have you had?" Kyle asks, and Marcus laughs, though the question would have annoyed the shit out of him if Kyle hadn't asked it with such oblivious earnestness.

"Are you an undercover cop?" Marcus asks.

"What's that?" Kyle says, and Marcus gives him a look, but he appears to be serious.

"Nothing," Marcus says. "Forget it. You know about me, right, and what I've done? You're from the future."

"You don't really think I am," Kyle says. He doesn't sound disappointed; he actually seems kind of charmed by Marcus' disbelief.

"Yeah, well."

"But you must believe me a little," Kyle says. "Or you wouldn't be driving me around and buying me pancakes." He rolls down the truck's window and puts his hand out, cutting through the wind with his palm. When they pass people who are walking on the sidewalk, Kyle waves at them as if he knows them, as if he's so happy to see them.

"It's not that I believe you," Marcus says. "Not even a little."

"So why then?" Kyle shuts his eyes against the early morning sunlight and leans against the open window, smiling contently. Marcus thinks that for some people it must be a relief to finally just go crazy. It hasn't escaped his attention that Kyle has sharp, white scars all over his arms and a few on his neck. His hands look like those of a farmer who's been working the fields for fifty years. Marcus would steal from his own grandmother if Ray asked him to, but he can't imagine hurting someone with eyes like Kyle's. You'd have to be inhuman.

"It's --" Marcus stammers, trying to explain. It's just that he feels like he knows Kyle, like he's someone Marcus lost once. Which doesn't make any sense, because even if they're living in some science fiction world and Kyle is from the future, Marcus hasn't met him yet.

"It's because you know I'm right about everything," Kyle says, his eyes still closed.

Kyle is right about at least one thing: he and Marcus seem to fit together, and Marcus feels calm in a way that he never has before, as if something at the pit of him that has always been in motion has suddenly gone still. It doesn't make any sense, how this can make him happy, just driving around town while Kyle changes the radio station and pretends not to recognize anything – What's a water park? what does Led Zeppelin mean?, and Who are the Spice Girls?, a bit fearfully, as if he's afraid they're a team of renegade assassins. His most frequent question is What does this song mean?, and he asks Marcus this after listening thoughtfully to any song he hears, his brow slightly furrowed. Marcus hardly ever knows how to answer.

"Love, or something," he mutters in regard to most of them.

"Like, the guy is in love with a girl and he's singing about her?" Kyle says, narrowing his eyes as if he can't quite understand the concept.

"Yeah, sure."

"Hmm." Kyle sits back against his seat as if he's bothered by this. "Have you been in love with a girl yet?" he asks, turning back to Marcus. "I mean, or a woman?"

"I'm not really into that shit."

"What shit?"

"That sentimental crap. I fuck when I feel like it. Most of the time it's not worth the trouble."

"Oh, well." Kyle picks at his fingernails, which are still dirty with sand. "You will be into that shit in the future."

Marcus snorts. "I doubt it." That sounds about as likely as him sacrificing his life to some asshole who thinks he's the next messiah.

"Yeah, you will. Her name is Blair. You kissed her before you died. She's really pretty, but. Like six months after you died she fell in love – or whatever – with someone else."

"Hmm. Sucks for me."

Kyle reaches over to punch Marcus' shoulder, grinning, and Marcus chews his lip. He drives past the street that would take them back to the house, not ready to face the real world yet.

"I can't believe I'm here," Kyle says, shaking his head. "It all feels like a dream, like if I stopped for a minute and thought about what is really happening, where I really am, I would never stop crying."

"Yeah, no kidding," Marcus says with a snort, because he kind of knows the feeling. And though he won't let himself look, he can feel Kyle smiling at him like he thinks Marcus is some kind of heroic figure, somebody who would ever even consider doing the things that Kyle tells him he's done in his crazy ass dream about the future. Just the idea that someone would even want to think that about Marcus is enough to make him dangerously stupid, cruising pointlessly around the neighborhood just because he doesn't want whatever's happening to end. Wasting gas.

When they get back to the house, Ray's truck is in the driveway, and the sight of it makes Marcus cringe. He wants to drive away, but where to? That's always been the problem. He chews the inside of his cheek and pulls his truck up next to Ray's.

"Your brother's here," Kyle says, and he sounds about as happy about it as Marcus is. Marcus shrugs and turns to get out of the truck, but Kyle grabs his wrist before he can open the door.

"Listen," Kyle says. "You can't do this thing with him, this robbery --"

"Hey." Marcus shakes him off, and Kyle's face is like one of those in the commercials for starving children, How dare you look away from me, aggressively helpless.

"Don't tell me what to do," Marcus says before he climbs out of the truck. Kyle stays in the passenger seat until Marcus has made his way around the front of the truck, and then climbs out looking defeated. He follows Marcus into the house, and Marcus has never had someone follow him everywhere before; he's always been the one who did the following. He sort of understands, already, why Ray seems to like it so much.

Ray is inside on the couch, and Marcus can spot his surly hangover from the door. He walks toward his room, Kyle trailing him, and he can feel Ray glaring at him, daring him to look back.

"What the hell's he still doing here?" Ray asks, and Marcus doesn't have anything even close to an answer for that question. He stops at the doorway and turns back, almost crashing into Kyle, who always keeps so close.

"Thought he might help us on the job this afternoon," Marcus says. They're robbing a country-ass pawn shop way out in the desert, wanting guns more than money. "He's skinny. We could do that back-window plan we were thinking about." Ray wants Marcus to slip in through a tiny back window over the store's employee restroom, something about the element of surprise. Marcus could never fit through that window, but maybe Kyle could. He hates to get Kyle mixed up in his shitty life, but Kyle seems pretty determined to stay, and Marcus at least needs time to figure out why the hell he doesn't want him to go.

"Like that junior high motherfucker knows how to use a gun," Ray says, staring at the TV again.

"Well, the plan is kind of not to need to shoot anybody, yeah?" Marcus says.

"I can use a gun," Kyle says, and Marcus wants to tell him to shut up, that Nerf guns and Supersoakers and video games don't count.

"Bullshit," Ray says, scowling at Kyle.

"I can," Kyle says. He looks at Marcus as if he can attest to this. Marcus doesn't want the crazy little fucker anywhere near a firearm, really.

"So you want to come with us, then?" Marcus asks, and Kyle nods.

"Uh," Ray says, sitting up, the remote control rolling from his stomach to the floor. "He ain't getting a cut."

"That's okay," Kyle says. "I only want room and board. I mean. If that's alright." He looks at Marcus, and it feels like being dragged down to the floor, having Kyle's eyes on his, like being swept to the ground.

"Maybe we should keep him around until after the Firenzo job, at least," Ray says. He's mostly talking to himself, rubbing his eyes. He doesn't really look to Marcus for a lot of executive decisions, and refers to him as the brawn behind their operation, which would make Ray the brains, and that's pretty fucking hilarious.

"In case he really does know something," Ray says, leveling a suspicious look at Kyle.

"Fine," Marcus mutters, and he shoves Kyle into his room. "I'll keep an eye on him."

He shuts the door behind them and watches Kyle do a lap around the room. He pauses at the short bookcase by Marcus' bed, which is packed with old CDs and issues of Car and Driver. Kyle picks up one of the magazines and flips through it, smiling.

"Where I'm from, whenever I'd find something like this intact, it was such a big deal," he says. "And then I never had time to really look at it. I feel like I've been running nonstop since before I knew how to talk. And now, now --" He looks up at Marcus, chewing his bottom lip. Marcus keeps catching himself thinking that all this delusional nonsense actually means something.

Kyle puts the magazine down and walks to the window, pulls Marcus' mini-blinds apart to look out at the bright afternoon. His face is so sincere, his expression always so curious and open, and Marcus has never met a teenager who looked out at the pointless scum of the world as if it were a wonderland, especially while sober, which Kyle must be by now.

"Do we have to stay in your room?" Kyle asks. "Can't we do something?"

"Like what?" Marcus sits down on the bed and kicks his feet up onto it, crossing his ankles. "We've got a job in about two hours. You'd better get your head in the game if you don't want Ray to kill you."

Kyle lets the blinds go, a puff of sunlit dust floating up around his face. He drums his hands on his stomach, making an uncertain face and staring at Marcus, who wants to tell him to cut it out, but there isn't really anything to look at except each other.

"So do you like him?" Kyle says, sitting on the bed beside Marcus.

"Who? Ray?"

"Yeah."

"What the hell kind of question is that? He's my brother."

Kyle shrugs. "I never had a brother," he says. "Or any siblings. And I never knew anybody who did, either. I mean, anybody who had siblings who were, like. Alive."

"Well, there you have it."

"I guess. But. Okay, here's another question. You like cars, right?"

"They're alright." He used to like working on them. It was the only thing that ever came easily to him. Then Ray cracked their boss in the jaw one night when they all went out after work, and that was that.

"So if you like cars, and you and your brother are professional thieves, then how come you don't drive really nice cars?"

"That would be a little conspicuous, don't you think?" Marcus says, narrowing his eyes. He has never in his life talked as much as he has in the past twenty-four hours. Mostly it's just a nuisance. He could always tell Kyle to go sit quietly in the corner until they leave for the job, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of having him here.

"Like, what is your goal, ultimately?" Kyle asks. "Why do you want to rob this dealer, what do you want the money for?"

"If you're right about the world ending in three years, my goal is to fucking smoke 'em while I got 'em," Marcus says, still looking at Kyle like he thinks he's an idiot for questioning the way he's living his life, though Marcus questions it every day, all the time.

"What does that mean?" Kyle asks, frowning, and Marcus hates that it's such a good defense, pretending wholesale not to know anything about the real world. If the kid is even pretending. He seems to at least believe what he's saying.

"Nothing," Marcus says, holding up a hand. "Forget it."

"Yeah, but what do you want out of life?" Kyle asks. Marcus shuts his eyes and groans.

"You sound like one of those fucking Jesus salesmen," Marcus says, and by now he can anticipate the response he'll get.

"What is that?"

"These guys on the boardwalk who smile and try to get you to stop and listen about how they can save your life."

"Yeah." Kyle grins. "That's exactly what I am."

"I believe it," Marcus says, slumping down onto his pillows. Kyle does, too, turned toward him. "If you don't stop staring at me, I swear to God," Marcus says, fed up.

"I'm sorry," Kyle says. He's still staring. "But it's like I forgot what you looked like." He says so as if Marcus' looks are capable of instilling disbelief. Ray has called him pretty boy all his life, and once, when Marcus was fifteen, there was that other boy who thought he was worth looking at.

"Where did all this come from?" Marcus asks, lifting his hands up and dropping them back to the mattress. He can hear Ray's too-loud TV shows, and the light is deepening the way it always does around noon, the house stagnant and stale with the dread of the next job, same as any other afternoon, but yesterday he didn't have a kid glued to his hip and today he does, and it should feel a lot more fucked up than this.

"Where did what come from?" Kyle asks.

"You. It's like you're from Mars."

"I might as well be. I didn't really expect you to believe me. I had this whole plan worked up where I was gonna join your gang." He grins when Marcus turns to give him a look. "But then I thought, okay, well, I won't pull that off, either, and after I'd been wandering through the desert for two days I was so disoriented that I just started telling the truth as soon as you opened the door. Oh, man. See, it proves something that you haven't just told me to go to hell."

"Yeah." Marcus folds his hands behind his head and shuts his eyes. "That I'm a fucking moron."

"No, no. It's like you recognize me somehow. Though that doesn't make sense. I mean, of course you don't--"

"Do you ever stop talking?" Marcus opens one eye to look at him. Kyle is still in Ray's Pink Floyd shirt, still has dust in his hair. When they get back from the job Marcus will offer him a shower. And then, what the fuck? Will they just go on like this forever, until robots rule the world, until Ray gets them both killed, until the kid's parents show up to reclaim him, until what?

"I don't usually talk this much," Kyle says, pulling his knees to his chest. "It's just, I don't know. I've got a lot to tell you. And I don't really know what to do with myself when I'm not, like, running for my life or looking for food or trying to take a piss without letting my guard down."

"Who did this to you?" Marcus asks, reaching over to touch a particularly big scar above Kyle's right elbow. His skin is still hot with sunburn.

"Oh, I don't know," Kyle says, looking down at it almost wistfully. "A T-800? One of the robots, or maybe I just fell, trying to get away."

Marcus almost believes that he doesn't remember who really hurt him, but Kyle's eyes aren't clear of pain, not even close. He looks like he's Marcus' age when Marcus is staring straight into his eyes, or older, like he's been through worse. Well, of course he has. Marcus might be a little fucked up, but he never broke down and decided he was a time traveler.

"So why doesn't everyone just come here?" Marcus asks. "If they've got a time machine? Why don't they all just travel back to the fifties and live and die before the robots take over?" He laughs at himself, saying this.

"Because," Kyle says. "It's not like they could enjoy themselves, knowing what's gonna happen."

"You're not enjoying yourself?" Marcus asks, which is a dumb question, because how could he be, sitting around this scummy house, getting ready to be shoved through a pawn shop window. But maybe it's better than wherever he escaped from with that sheet wrapped around him.

"Well, I kind of am," Kyle says, and he blushes, which just brings the whole world to a screeching halt around Marcus' ears. For some reason.

"Why, 'cause you're with me?" Marcus asks, mocking him. Kyle stares down at his hands, and Marcus aches for miles at the sight of him, because it's been so long, twenty years, since anybody got to him like this. Marcus reaches over to press his fist into Kyle's shoulder, and Kyle looks up, all bashful, still blushing.

"I just," Kyle says, his voice tight. "I just never wanted anything but food and water and shelter and then there you were, and then you were gone so fast, and as soon as I got you back they just took you away again."

Marcus presses his lips together, afraid to say anything, because he kind of knows how that feels, though he shouldn't, because he's never had anything worthwhile to lose, unless he counts his mother, who has always only been a ghost.

Suddenly Ray is pounding on the door. Marcus jumps out of the bed, and so does Kyle. They stand there looking at each other, on opposite sides of the bed, battle ready, and Marcus tries to imagine himself in some apocalyptic world, running from robots, coming across Kyle and thinking he'd finally found something worth protecting.

"What the fuck, let's go!" Ray shouts, and they do.

*

Marcus drives. He always drives, and Ray always chews his thumbnail in the passenger seat, glaring out at the world while he thinks about the job, a gun in his lap. Kyle sits between them, holding the gun Marcus gave him over his knee like maybe he does know what to do with one, or at least knows how somebody should look while they're holding one.

"Here's how this is gonna go," Ray says when they're almost there, after a silent, hour-long drive through the desert. They've got the windows down, but the hot air that blows past the car isn't helping much, and they're all breathing hard through the heat, drops of sweat dripping from the ends of Kyle's curls.

"We'll get the kid through the window first," Ray says. "And he'll open that back door so you can get through, Mark. I'll go in front and give them the first shock, then when that one-armed old man goes for his piece ya'll come in from the back and scream at him not to move and such."

"All this trouble to rob a one-armed old man?" Kyle says, quirking a look at Ray, and Marcus wishes he wouldn't do that.

"He's a retired sniper, dumb shit," Ray says, shoving Kyle, who bounces against Marcus and then stays there, not touching him but close, scooted away from Ray. Kyle smells like clean teenage sweat and cheap maple syrup, which he drowned his pancakes in back at the diner. Marcus wishes Kyle weren't here, that he were safe on a high school basketball court or something, but at the same time, he's glad to have him around, selfishly. He makes Marcus feel important, even though Kyle clearly doesn't know who Marcus really is. At this point in his life Marcus is glad to even be mistaken for a great man. Closest he's gonna get.

Ray drops Marcus and Kyle off about half a mile from the pawn shop so they can sneak around back while he parks up front, pretending to be a customer. The walk feels endless in the heat, but Kyle seems unfazed, even as the sun burns the back of his neck a darker shade of red.

"You sure you want to do this?" Marcus asks. Kyle shrugs.

"I don't want to," he says. "But I can't leave you alone."

"Oh, yeah, you're gonna save my life, right?" He shoves Kyle's shoulder, grinning, but Kyle doesn't seem to think it's funny. "But then we'll never meet in the future, right, so where's the fun in that?"

"I'm not going back there," Kyle says. He's staring at the ground. "I'm kind of a traitor there, now."

"So, what, you're going to stay here with me?" Marcus scoffs at the idea. Ray will never allow it. He'll get sick of the kid, or suspicious about why Marcus might want him around.

"Me and you are gonna take down Skynet," Kyle says with a nod. "Or anyway, we're gonna try. If we can't do it, well, we'll just have to try and survive Judgment Day and then rejoin the resistance --"

"Wait, but won't there be some other version of you running around in the future?" Marcus asks.

"Uh." Kyle makes a face. "I hadn't really thought about that. I guess it doesn't really matter. I mean there are already two versions of me in the present. There's a baby version somewhere."

"Yeah, but in the future, there'll be some version of you waiting for me to show up, and I never will, because this you stole me away."

"Alright, well." Kyle holds his hands up and shuts his eyes in frustration, making Marcus laugh under his breath. "I haven't worked out all the kinks."

They reach the pawn shop and duck around back. Ray's truck is parked out front, and Marcus imagines him inside, doing a bad job of browsing inconspicuously. It's amazing that neither of them has ever served hard time; Ray got picked up for assault when they were kids but the guy ended up dropping the charges, and Marcus has always been a fast runner. They've both had cops fire shots at them, and Ray is missing a chunk of his shoulder from a shot that connected, but that was a homeowner, not a cop. It's a miracle they're both still alive. Marcus looks down at Kyle and knows that he's lived the same way, whatever fantasies he has about robots and time machines. He has always been running from something; Marcus can see that clearly enough. Takes one to know one.

"Ready?" he asks Kyle when they're crouched under the back window. Kyle nods. He doesn't look scared, which is pretty amazing, but maybe it's only because he's out of his mind.

"Are you sure you can use that thing if you have to?" Marcus asks, nodding at the gun.

"Yeah, I'm sure," Kyle says. He drops the clip out and shoves it back in, the only demonstration available that won't make too much noise. "I had one like this, once."

"In the future?" Marcus glances at his watch. It's almost time. He's having second thoughts, like always, but it's especially bad now, with Kyle involved.

"Yep," Kyle says. He looks like he's tired of being reminded that Marcus doesn't believe anything he says. When they get back to the house, Marcus will let him clean up, give him some more clothes. Maybe he'll take him out to the mall, buy him a hamburger and a three-pack of boxer shorts.

"What the fuck is going on?" Marcus says, talking to himself, because he is actually having these thoughts, this is actually happening to him.

"You'd better hoist me up," Kyle says, standing. "And I've told you what's going on," he adds snottily. Marcus grunts in annoyance and cups his hands so that Kyle can step into them.

"That's not going to be enough," Kyle says as he scrabbles at the high window, the gun tucked into his pants. "I'm going to have to get on your shoulders."

Marcus nods and squats down so that Kyle can climb onto his back, and when Kyle's arms are around his neck, and Marcus feels, for a few seconds, like he did in the truck on the way home from the diner, reluctant to move forward. Kyle scrambles up Marcus' body without a hint of shyness, hooking his legs around Marcus shoulders while he braces himself against the back wall of the shop. He grabs the window and hoists himself up through it with surprising ease, his feet, in a pair of Ray's dirty old shoes, pushing off of Marcus' shoulders. Everything goes smoothly until he slips a little on the way in, and suddenly he's not crawling but falling through the window. Marcus hears him crash to the ground way too loudly inside, and his heart jerks at the sound.

"Kyle!" he whispers sharply, standing up as tall as he can, the window still a good two and a half feet above him. There's no sound from inside, and Marcus is frantic for a moment, wondering if he should run around front and get Ray, call the whole thing off, find out where the nearest hospital is, and what will he even tell the admitting nurses when he arrives? "Kyle!" he says again, jumping now, feeling helpless.

"M'okay," Kyle calls out with a groan, and Marcus hears the scrape of his shoes against the floor inside as he struggles to get up.

"Are you sure? Are you hurt?" Marcus is making way too much noise, but he doesn't really care. Ray wants the guns they're trying to steal for the Firenzo job anyway, and Marcus isn't sure he's on board with that anymore. If he tried to explain why, Ray would just cold clock him. The time traveler talked me out of it. Well, it was a dumb idea, anyway.

The back door of the shop opens and Marcus pushes his back against the wall, startled, but it's just Kyle, gesturing for him to get inside. He's got a big red spot on his left cheek that is already darkening to a bruise. Marcus hurries inside and Kyle shuts the door so quietly; he's good at this, at sneaking around.

"Okay, the masks," Kyle whispers, and Marcus doesn't know what he's talking about for a second.

"Your face," Marcus says, handing him a ski mask. "Did you -- are you alright?"

"I might've twisted my wrist a little," Kyle says dismissively, pulling on his mask. "No big deal, it's not my shooting hand. What time is it?"

"Uh." Marcus looks down at his watch. "We've got about two minutes." Ray's shout will be their signal to come pouring out of the back room. At the moment, they're in a narrow hallway that reeks of garbage and stale bathroom disinfectant. Down the hallway, they can see the doorway that leads to the back room, and it seems to be empty. Ray has cased the joint and he claims that the old man usually works alone, which is pretty ballsy, considering how far from civilization the Last Chance Pawn is.

"Just stay behind me," Marcus whispers when he's pulled his own ski mask on. He hates the feeling of the thick cotton on his face, way too fucking hot in this weather and inside this stifling, stinking little shop. Kyle's eyes are so obvious and bright through his own mask that anyone who got a good look at them could pick him out of a lineup, no problem. This is the first time Marcus and Ray have ever worked with another person, and Marcus feels his stomach pitch when he realizes why Ray has allowed it: he's probably been looking for a fall guy, somebody to leave behind and take the blame while Ray makes for Mexico with Firenzo's stash. Maybe, before Kyle, that was going to be Marcus. But no, no. Ray has never left him behind before, and he took that bullet to his shoulder when he was pushing Marcus out of the way.

"Maybe you should just --" Marcus starts to say, hearing every tick of his watch like it's slamming against the side of his head: they're down to thirty seconds now. Kyle grabs his shoulder and grins through his mask, looking obscenely innocent despite the disguise.

"Relax," he says. "They're just people."

"What, as opposed to robots?" Fifteen seconds.

"Exactly," Kyle says. He flicks his head toward the back room and starts to walk toward it. Marcus grabs Kyle's shirt and drags him backward, then heads for the room with Kyle following. It's like being pulled at a little all the time, knowing Kyle is back there, so perfectly silent that Marcus can't hear his breath or a single footfall. He keeps glancing back to make sure Kyle is still there, and then suddenly Ray is screaming from the front of the shop.

"Get down!" Ray shouts again, and Marcus runs out from the back room, slamming the door hard against the wall. The old man was reaching for something, but he freezes when he sees Marcus. Kyle is quickly beside him, and they've both got their guns trained on the old man.

"Is there anybody else in here?" Ray asks, walking forward, his gun pointed at the old man's face. The man's single arm is raised in the air, the other one lost to some rival sniper, his left sleeve pinned to his shirt neatly, in a way that makes Marcus think he must have a wife.

"Nobody," the man says, and Marcus can hear his hatred for Ray in the answer, his desire to blow him away, this common criminal, somebody who's never been presented with a medal in lieu of a lost limb, who's never sacrificed anything.

"You better not be fucking lying to me," Ray says, stepping closer, his stomach against the counter that the man is standing behind.

"Have yourself a look around," the old man says, glowering. "I ain't lying."

"Mark, check the back again," Ray says, flicking his chin toward the back room.

"There's nobody back there," Marcus says, not wanting to leave Kyle alone with Ray. "Just start loading up the shit and let's get the fuck out of here, okay?"

"There are two cars parked out front," Ray says, pressing the barrel of his gun to the old man's chin. "Where's the other driver?"

"That Buick hadn't run in five years," the old man says. "It's my son's car, so I let him keep it in the lot. What the hell do you want, money? Take it and get out."

"Don't tell me what to do, motherfucker!" Ray says, pushing the gun in closer. The old man's eyes narrow, and Marcus feels nervous, like something's not right. He would check the back again, he should, but Kyle, Kyle can't be left alone.

They take all the guns in the place, ammunition, some diamonds, a guitar Ray is interested in for some reason, and cash. Nobody drives by on the dusty highway road, and the job is remarkably easy, too easy, until they're loading up the truck and preparing to drive away, the old man tied up behind the counter. As they're stowing the last of the goods, the door of the pawn shop slams open and a man in a flannel shirt and jeans hoists a giant shotgun, aiming for the truck.

"I fucking knew it, I knew it!" Ray shouts, still in the truck bed, tying down the guitar. The man fires at the truck and Marcus yanks Kyle around the bed to take cover while Ray ducks down. Marcus pulls open the driver's side door and shoves Kyle inside; he doesn't need to tell Kyle to get down, he's already on the floorboards. Marcus catapults into the driver's seat and starts the truck, keeping his head as low as he can.

"Ray!" he shouts as he pulls out of the lot, the back window shattering against another shot from the man, who is working his way over toward the Buick that supposedly doesn't run. Marcus is starting to get the feeling that it probably does.

"I'm here, go!" Ray screams, and he takes a shot at the man, but it bounces off of the Buick. "He's coming after us!" Ray shouts as Marcus peels out of the lot. "We're gonna have to stop down the road and take him out!"

"No, I can stop him," Kyle says, climbing up to the passenger seat. Marcus reaches over to shove him down again.

"Stay down!" Marcus says. Another shot from the Buick, which is following close, stabs through the roof of the truck and out the front window, splintering but not shattering the glass.

"Fuck, Ray, shoot at him!" Marcus screams, not sure if Ray can hear him over the wind as they speed down the empty highway. Kyle gets up again and leans out the window, just out of Marcus' reach as he grunts with the effort of trying to yank him back into the truck.

"Turn left!" Kyle shouts. "I don't have a shot!"

"Get back!" Marcus says, managing a handful of Kyle's shirt, the truck swerving and Ray cursing in the bed as another shot from the Buick flies past, this one coming so close to Kyle has to duck into the truck for a moment. He fights his way out of Marcus' grip and fires at the Buick like he's done this before.

"Turn left!" Kyle shouts again, and this time Marcus does, his heart so wild that he can't think or breathe or do anything but what he's told. The truck swerves and Kyle fires once, then again. Marcus hears two tires blowing out, and he turns the truck around again as Kyle falls back into the passenger seat, pressing the pedal to the floorboards as they speed away from the disabled Buick.

"How," Marcus pants when he hears Ray whooping victoriously in the backseat. "How did you do that?"

Kyle pulls his mask off and grins; he's soaked with sweat but looks perfectly calm, pleased with himself.

"You kidding?" he says. "Easiest shots I ever took. You should have been there when me and you and Star were running from the Harvester, holy shit. I mean. You were there, but. You know."

Marcus shakes his head. The Harvester, well, okay. He's got to stop letting himself forget that the kid is out of his mind.

"Where'd you learn to shoot like that?" Marcus asks. Ray is pounding on the back windows, asking Marcus to pull over and let him in.

"My dad," Kyle says. "He started teaching me how to shoot when I was six. Good thing, too, 'cause he was dead three years later."

"Fuck," Marcus says, blowing out his breath. "You alright?"

"Yeah, I'm okay," Kyle says. "I'm okay," he says again when Marcus stares at him, Ray pounding harder on the window now. Marcus doesn't want to pull over yet, and he's so ready to hear the whine of police sirens that he thinks he does a few times, but it's just the wind against the truck.

They take a long, circuitous route home to make doubly sure that they're not being followed. They stick to back roads in case there's an APV out on the truck, and the drive is long, the desert scenery dull. Ray falls asleep two hours in, leaning against the passenger side window with his mouth open against the glass, and Kyle starts to nod off twenty minutes later, his head dipping forward and popping up again, until he finally leans drowsily onto Marcus' shoulder.

Marcus should shove him off, at least so that Ray won't wake up and see, but he only lowers his shoulder a little so that Kyle can get more comfortable. Kyle has his arms tucked into his lap and his sore cheek has bloomed into a purple bruise now, his hair still damp though the day has cooled off a bit. Marcus keeps his eyes on the road, tense at the thought of Ray catching him again, if that's what he's doing, that old bad thing, but he doesn't shrug Kyle away, because it feels good, letting Kyle sleep on his shoulder, it feels really, really good. Maybe only because Marcus has never done anything for anyone, except Ray, who has never really needed him. Hell, maybe Kyle doesn't even need him; he certainly seems capable of handling himself, at least when bullets are being exchanged. But Kyle wants Marcus, maybe. His friendship. Or whatever. That's the part that feels good, being wanted, even by somebody who thinks he's from the future. And Kyle's sweaty skin against the sleeve of Marcus' t-shirt, Kyle's sunburned arm pressed along his, Kyle's hot breath on his shoulder, the boneless weight of him slumped against Marcus' side. That doesn't feel too bad, either. Fuck.

"Hey," Marcus whispers, very softly, and Kyle doesn't stir. Marcus glances at Ray, but he's dead asleep, snoring. Doesn't mean they couldn't go over a pothole any minute, Ray waking up to this, and if Marcus lost Ray where the fuck would he be? Living in a dumpster with a crazy kid he barely even knows. He reaches down and squeezes Kyle's leg to wake him up. Kyle makes a noise like a startled puppy and shifts but doesn't sit up.

"Kyle," Marcus whispers, and Kyle shifts again, moving closer, his head still on Marcus' shoulder. He tips his face up to look up at Marcus, swallows and rubs his eyes.

"I'm so thirsty," Kyle says quietly, as if he doesn't want to wake Ray, either.

"Sit up," Marcus says. He glances at his brother, and Kyle gets the idea. He pulls himself from Marcus' side in slow motion, groaning under his breath. The sun is just beginning to sink, and Marcus can see the fog of L.A. in the distance. The traffic will be horrible.

He pulls into a drive thru to get Kyle a soda. Ray wakes up with a grumble and asks for a value meal and a milkshake. Marcus doesn't order anything, too queasy about what's happening to him to have an appetite. Kyle is orgasmic over the soda, as if he's never had one before.

"The fuck's wrong with you?" Ray asks as Kyle hums in delight around his straw.

"This is just really good," Kyle says. He's still sitting too close to Marcus, who's leaning on the driver's side door, his elbow out the window.

"Where'd you find this punk, Mark?" Ray asks. He licks ketchup off his fingers; Kyle is staring longingly at his fries.

"Told you," Marcus says. "He just showed up at the door."

"Sure can fucking shoot," Ray says. He's staring at Kyle like Kyle is a safe and Ray is trying to figure out how to crack him open. He looks at most people that way.

"You're welcome," Kyle says.

"Still not getting a cut," Ray mutters.

They get back to the house exhausted around six thirty and unload the truck. Ray won't let anyone touch the guitar, and he disappears into his room with it as soon as everything else is hidden away. Marcus takes his cut of the cash -- barely a grand, not really worth the trouble -- and tapes it under his dresser while Kyle is having a shower. Or anyway, he's supposed to be having a shower. Marcus keeps hearing the water from the tub faucet turn on and then off again, and that's about it.

"Um, Marcus?" Kyle says, poking his head out from the bathroom. He's pink-cheeked and bare-shouldered, and something about the baked-out glow of the last of the sun through the blinds makes Marcus think he could grab Kyle and kiss him and the world wouldn't immediately end. He feels sinister and sick for wanting to, and not for the usual reason. Kyle is so fragile, never mind how he handles a gun. He's crazy and hungry-thin and his eyes water up so easily. Marcus would just as soon devote the rest of his life to never letting anyone lay a hand on Kyle than do it himself.

"What?" he snaps, as if Kyle has interrupted something important, though Marcus was just sitting on the end of his bed and thinking about Kyle, wondering what he was doing in there.

"How does this thing work?" Kyle asks, his voice low with humiliation.

"What thing?"

"The shower. I can only get it to come out of the bottom one."

"You pull that silver tab up," Marcus says. He's beginning to become uncomfortable with the consistency of Kyle's insanity.

"What silver tab?"

Marcus groans and gets up. He pushes his way into the bathroom, trying not to let his eyes settle anywhere. Kyle has a towel around his waist, and he pulls it more tightly around himself when Marcus stomps past him, feigning exasperation. He turns the faucet on and adjusts the temperature, then flicks on the shower. Kyle is staring at him when he stands up, wide-eyed and clutching his towel. Marcus looks back long enough to see that Kyle's pulse is pumping hard, visible in the hollow of his throat.

"I've never done this," Kyle says. The tone of his voice almost makes Marcus ask Never done what? But he's talking about the shower, of course. They don't have this sort of luxury in the future, and so on, and so forth.

"You'll figure it out," Marcus says, and he makes himself walk out. He sits on the bed, his own heart beating pretty wildly now, and listens as the sound of the shower beating against the tiles changes to the sound of water spraying off of Kyle's skin.

"Oh, God!" Kyle calls, because apparently he can't stop talking to Marcus even when they're in separate rooms. "It's hot."

"You can adjust it," Marcus says, his throat tightening up. Something bad's going to happen, Marcus is going to let it happen, he's going to dive into it face first.

"No, I like it, it feels good," Kyle say, and the boner Marcus has been trying to fight off begins to stiffen between his legs. He imagines Kyle beneath him on the bed, spread out and panting, saying, when Marcus asks if it's too much, too hard, No, I like it, it feels good. Just the words feels good out of the mouth of that kid, goddamn. Marcus shakes his head, stands, and makes himself think of Ray in his room, pathetically plucking at guitar strings. Marcus just really needs to get laid, that's the problem. With a woman. Of course. He's lost interest lately, what little interest he ever had, and he's getting sloppy, and this kid is chewing on his mind, burrowing into it in unsavory ways.

"Hey, Marcus?" Kyle calls from the bathroom, and Marcus grits his teeth, wincing, because he can't hear Kyle say another word while he's naked, everything sounds obscene.

"What?" he shouts.

"Um," Kyle says, timid now. "What does 'lather' mean?"

"You put it in your hair and rub it in and then rinse it out," Marcus says, snarling out every word, so furiously angry, because he was so sure this wasn't going to happen to him again, that he wasn't going to be pulled back down to these feelings, this goddamned struggle.

"Oh, like regular soap?"

"Yes, goddammit, how the fuck else would you wash your hair? Would you hurry up in there? Shit!"

Kyle doesn't ask any more questions, and Marcus' hardon is gone, replaced by his guilt about taking his anger out on the kid. But Kyle is the one who crept into bed with him last night, and Marcus hates him for that, for making him wonder if it'll happen again, though what he really wants isn't cuddling.

Kyle takes a long time to dry off, and walks out of the bathroom with the towel around his waist, half-cowering and half-scowling at Marcus. His hair is a mess of wet curls, and Marcus just wants to -- what? He's filling up with rage, the whole dammed up mass of it breaking free.

"Here," he says, keeping his voice rough, barely looking. He goes to his clean laundry and finds a pair of old boxer shorts that have been shrunk by laundromat dryers, a t-shirt with the same history, and from the bottom drawer of his dresser he digs out a pair of flannel pants that he wears to bed in the winter, because Ray doesn't believe in central heating, either. He shoves the clothes into Kyle's hands and hurries toward the bathroom before he can breathe the skin and soap smell of him in more deeply, or catch his disappointed gaze.

He slams into the bathroom like he can't stand to be in the same room with Kyle for another second, which is almost true. He tears off his clothes, hands shaking so badly that he can barely get his jeans undone. As soon as he's under the water he grabs his cock, which was half-hard when he entered the bathroom and is red and thick with anticipation by the time he actually touches himself. He braces a hand against the cracked tile of the shower and shuts his eyes, stroking himself fast because he wants this over, wants to stop imagining the heat of Kyle's sunburn against his lips, the way his freshly-washed skin would taste, the way he would cling and cry and beg as his legs fell open around Marcus' weight.

He makes more noise than he intended to when he comes, nearly out of his mind with the intensity of his orgasm. He beats off on a regular basis, but his fantasies aren't usually so directed, and when he recovers he feels like a pervert, because Kyle might claim to be eighteen but he sure as hell doesn't look it. He's not exactly Marcus' type, because Marcus has never allowed himself to have a type, but everything about him seems as if it were designed to surrender to Marcus, and he's got to want it, the way he clung to Marcus in bed, he wants it.

Marcus shakes his head clear, or as clear as it will get, and turns off the water after soaping up and rinsing off hastily. When he climbs out of the shower he curses himself for not thinking to bring any clean clothes into the bathroom with him, then realizes that Kyle still has his only towel. Marcus stands on the damp bath mat, dripping, the steam from the shower clouding around him. He listens for sounds from Kyle, but the room outside is silent, and the aching panic that floods through him when Kyle isn't in his line of vision whirls to life.

"Hey," he calls, and he's relieved to hear the creak of the mattress, Kyle sitting up.

"What?" Kyle is trying to make his voice mean, too, and it's not really working.

"I need that towel back," Marcus says, not really relishing the idea of drying off with a towel that is damp with the smell of Kyle's skin, 'cause that's exactly what he doesn't need right now, another fucking boner for the sweet, perfect smell of him.

The cracked door opens just a bit further, Kyle's hand poking inside, the towel hanging from his grip. Marcus yanks it away from him, and Kyle's hand disappears. Marcus tries to breathe through his mouth as he dries with the towel, doesn't let himself bring it to his face and inhale deeply, because he's not some kind of freak, he doesn't have to do freak things, can fight them if he tries hard enough, has done it for the past ten years. And of all the people to break his clean record, it's not going to be some goddamn lunatic kid who showed up naked at his door to tell him that they already care for each other in some burned out future.

He walks out into the room with the towel around his waist. Kyle is lying on his stomach on the bed and pretending to be asleep, his arms folded under his head. Marcus dresses quickly, keeping his eyes on Kyle to make sure he isn't peeking. It's gotten dark outside and the room is lit only by the streetlight's glow through the blinds. Marcus can hear the bugs singing in the yard, making the room seem hotter somehow, the soundtrack of summer.

"You want something to eat?" Marcus asks when he's dressed. Kyle doesn't stir and doesn't answer. Stubborn little shit. He must have figured out the shampoo, because Marcus can smell it all through the room now, cheap stuff Ray got from a gas station, because Ray does all the shopping and he only patronizes gas station convenience stores. They carry milk, condoms, soap, booze. Everything he and Marcus have ever needed.

Marcus sighs and falls to sit on the bed beside Kyle. Even Kyle's shoulder blades through Marcus' thin shirt are tempting in the dark of the room. Marcus just wants to rub a hand all over him, wants to feel every inch, the soft indent of every scar.

"Let me see your face," Marcus says, and Kyle is suddenly awake, rolling over, his eyes half-shut as he gazes up at Marcus with that expression that is more an entreaty than a dare. Still, he looks defiant now, and he can probably smell it in the air, how badly Marcus has come to want him in the past few days, how Kyle's closeness has begun to feel so natural.

The bruise on Kyle's left cheek is almost pretty against the perfection of the rest of his skin; he has only a smallish scar cutting through his right eyebrow, the rest of his face untouched, as if whoever hurt him couldn't bring himself to go that far. Marcus touches Kyle's cheek, pretending to examine his bruise.

"Ow," Kyle says softly.

"You don't know what lathering is but you know to say 'ow' when something hurts?" Marcus is trying to work it all out, still looking for cracks in the story, though the whole story is pretty cracked.

"I learned that one pretty early," Kyle says. His voice is deep with something like pride. Maybe he is kind of a badass, for whatever reason. The way he blew those tires without blinking. It's one thing to know how to shoot, another to know how to stay calm like that, to fire at a moving target that is firing back at you.

"Where did you come from?" Marcus asks, keeping his voice quiet, as if asking carefully enough will cause the real answer to fall out of Kyle while his guard is down. Marcus still has his hand on Kyle's face, and Kyle is just basking in the shadow of Marcus, staring up at him as if, wherever he came from, this is what he came for.

"I've told you," Kyle says. Ray's guitar has gone quiet. Even the bugs have shut off outside, the night thickening over them. The whole house is humming as if it's waiting for something.

"This," Marcus says, sliding his hand down slowly to trace a finger over the worst scar he's seen, a big gash that runs from Kyle's shoulder to the side of his neck. Kyle shudders, his lips parting with a tiny, wet little sound.

"How did you get this?" Marcus asks, rubbing his finger very lightly over the scar, making Kyle shiver, his eyes falling almost shut.

"I don't even remember," Kyle says, his breath is coming harder now. Marcus believes that answer more than any others he's gotten. "Want to see the worst one?" Kyle asks. Marcus nods, his head moving as if through water, his finger still sliding carefully over the cruel texture of Kyle's scar. Kyle lifts up his shirt -- Marcus' shirt -- and shows him a big, ugly scrape along his side, the skin knitted together roughly in spots. Marcus wants to touch, but he doesn't, because the scar is too close to the soft rise and fall of Kyle's stomach, and just above the waistband of his borrowed pants, and Marcus is over the line already.

"I had to stitch that one up myself," Kyle says. "Hardest thing I've ever done. Star -- my friend Star, you met her in the future -- had to keep pinching me to wake me up when I'd pass out. I almost died," he says, easily, like a normal kid might say he almost failed a class.

"Who's Star?" Marcus asks. He takes his hand away, which hurts like a sting, and rubs at his eyes to stop the dark of the room from lulling him into something dangerous. "Your girlfriend in the future?"

"No, no, she's just a little kid. I don't even know her real name. I found her about a year before I met you, scared, hanging out with her dead family. We were kinda like family, me and Star, when we were on our own."

"So what happened to her?"

"She's with the others, with Connor's people, they take good care of her. She sort of looks after Connor's daughter, because he and his wife are always so busy."

"Mmm-hmm." Marcus is both impressed and annoyed by the scope of Kyle's delusion. "So. Do you want to eat?"

"Yeah, but here, feel this," Kyle says, and before Marcus really knows what's happening Kyle has grabbed his hand and brought it down to the long, pink scar on his side, guiding Marcus' fingers across it. Marcus makes a surprised sort of sound that he couldn't catch as it came up his throat, and he leaves his hand there, staring down at Kyle.

"Feels like it must have hurt," Marcus says, moving his thumb across Kyle's skin, just barely, ghosting it over the rough cut of the scar and then back onto the smooth, trembling skin at his side, back and forth, feeling the difference.

"Yeah," Kyle says, his voice pinched. "Marcus."

"What?" Someone is pounding on the front door, and Marcus hears Ray grumbling as he goes to answer it. Maybe he'll go out. And Marcus will stay here with Kyle, order pizza, touch his scars, make him shiver like this until neither of them can take it anymore, and then, God, Marcus has never wanted to be inside someone like this before, so much it burns through his chest like something he can't swallow. He'll regret it, but he's close to not caring.

Kyle sits up, groaning a little with the effort, and it's enough to tip Marcus' scales in the direction of doing anything Kyle wants, so he lets Kyle twist his hands into his shirt, doesn't break eye contract. Out in the living room, Ray is yelling at someone, already brawling. Just another Friday night.

"Every second," Kyle says, so close that Marcus can feel Kyle's breath on his lips. "I'm afraid I'll wake up and be back there, without you."

It doesn't really matter where back there is. The future, some terrifying crack den, the motel room that a john made him leave without his clothes. Marcus doesn't care anymore. His hands are on Kyle's face, Ray is going nuts out in the living room, and the only thing that matters is the way Kyle looks at him, like Marcus is still going to save his life.

"Fuck," Marcus mutters when Ray's screaming continues, some guy shouting back at him and what sounds like a gun being cocked. Kyle goes stiff under Marcus' hands, half-turning.

"Oh," he says, and Marcus can feel the air in the room change, the inevitable catch settling in around them. Kyle looks back to Marcus, his eyes cleared of everything but fear. "It's him."

*

Marcus doesn't pause to ask who Kyle is afraid of, who's come for him, just gets him up from the bed quick, and then into the closet. Kyle's eyes are so wide, and Marcus' heartbeat is already slamming, because he can hear whoever is out in the living room calling Kyle's name.

"Just stay here," Marcus says, and Kyle shakes his head like Marcus has no idea what he's up against. Marcus shuts the closet and takes the gun he used on the job from the dresser; he didn't need to fire a single bullet, thanks to Kyle, so it's still fully loaded. He presses his back to the wall beside his bedroom door and listens as the man who is looking for Kyle makes his way through the house, opening doors. No more noise from Ray, and Marcus pushes his crippling guilt aside for later. Ray was right to beat him up for being a fag, for threatening to kill him if he ever saw any further evidence. Whatever's going on with Kyle might have just gotten Ray killed, might have cost Marcus the only thing he ever had.

"Kyle!" the man shouts again, coming close to Marcus' bedroom door. "I know you're here!" He arrives at Marcus' door and throws it open, entering fast, but not fast enough, and Marcus has the barrel of his gun against the man's head as soon as he's through the door.

"Drop it," Marcus says in a growl, wanting to look back at the living room to find out if Ray is okay, but unwilling to take his eyes off the intruder as he slowly lowers his weapon to the ground. He's a big guy, but not as horrifying as Marcus imagined, though he does look capable of evil, his eyes sharp and mean.

"Marcus," the man says, gruff, and more annoyed than angry, as if he's issuing an order. "Goddammit. Kyle Reese, where is he?"

"Don't know who the fuck you're talking about, and you need to get the hell out of here before I call the cops," Marcus says, pushing the gun more firmly against the man's head. "And how the fuck do you know my name?"

"You're not calling the cops, moron," the man says, glaring at Marcus from the corner of his eye. "I know who you are, and your brother told me Kyle is here, so just turn him over and we'll all get back to minding our own fucking business."

"You've got five seconds to start backing out this door before I blow your head off," Marcus says.

"Like you really need a dead body to lead the cops to your inventory?"

"Who the fuck are you?" Marcus shouts, cocking the gun. The man doesn't even wince, and Marcus wants to kill him just because he seems so sure that Marcus won't actually do it, but he's right about the cache of shit in this house that the cops can't get anywhere near, and Marcus is getting really tired of people he's never seen before showing up at his door and knowing things about him.

"I'm John Connor," the man says, as if he's speaking to someone else, done with Marcus already, and his eyes are on the closet. Marcus will kill him and leave the house and never look back before he lets him get anywhere near Kyle, and he steps between Connor and the door. Connor. That's the name of one of the stars of Marcus' time travel story. Connor was the one who killed Marcus, or took his heart, or something.

"You need to leave now," Marcus says, staring Connor directly in the eyes. He doesn't look as determined to kill Marcus, or even get him out of the way, as he should.

"I know he's here," Connor says.

"You don't know shit," Marcus says, and then the closet door opens, making his blood go cold.

"John," Kyle says, meek and apologetic, and Marcus can barely breathe, because what the fuck, what the fuck is happening? He hears Ray groaning out in the living room and thanks God that his brother is alive, though it only means Ray will want to kill him for this, for bringing whatever this is upon them.

"Kyle," Connor says, his face going hard. Marcus still has a gun on him, but Connor doesn't seem too worried about it. "You're coming back with me. Right now."

"Like hell he is," Marcus says. "Kyle, get back, don't come any closer."

"John, I'm sorry, I had to --" Kyle stammers.

"The only thing that matters is that you're coming back with me," John says. "I need you."

"Hey, fuck you, asshole, have you got ears?" Marcus asks, giving John's head a push with the gun. "I just said he's not going anywhere."

"Kyle!" John shouts, not even glancing at Marcus. "You don't understand how important you are."

"You don't know everything," Kyle says. "You don't know how it's all going to turn out."

"Well, I think I know a little bit more about it than you," John says, narrowing his eyes and speaking condescendingly now.

"This is about to go real bad," Marcus says. "If you don't shut the hell up and get out of my house."

"Fuck, get out of the way!" Connor barks, reaching up to grab Marcus' gun, but Marcus is quick to react, jerking around to elbow Connor hard in the chest. Connor barely flinches, and grabs Marcus around the waist, throwing him into the wall. Marcus has been thrown into plenty of walls and is basically unfazed, coming at Connor with the butt of the gun, but Connor is quick to duck out of the way, and he throws a punch that Marcus catches before tripping him, sending Marcus hurtling to the ground.

"Stop!" Kyle is shouting. Suddenly Connor has the gun, and he's pointing it at Marcus' head. "Stop!" Kyle says, appearing at Connor's side, grabbing his shoulder as if they're old friends. "John, please. Don't hurt him!"

"This is what you came back for?" John says in a growl, still aiming for Marcus, who is trying to figure out how he's going to get up, wondering why Kyle isn't pummeling this asshole instead of begging, trying to reason with him.

"Do you know how long and hard we searched before we realized that you'd used the transport?" Connor asks Kyle, who wilts. "That was the last thing I would have expected, Kyle, goddammit. What did you think you would do? Save him? Talk him out of fucking up his life?"

"If he never comes to the future then you'll never infiltrate Skynet, and you'll never need his heart," Kyle says. Marcus shuts his eyes and sucks in a deep breath, unable to believe that this is happening, this his life has really and finally gone this far off the rails.

"But I need you," Connor says. He lowers the gun and Marcus scrambles up, ready to resume their fight, but Connor only tosses the gun onto the bed and gives Marcus a dark look, daring him to try anything.

"You don't need me," Kyle says, shaking his head. "You won't even let me do anything but train, won't use me on any real missions –"

"It's because you're too important," Connor says, speaking slowly, as if he's close to losing his patience. Marcus eyes the gun on the bed. If Connor tries anything, if Connor lays a finger on the kid –

"Why?" Kyle asks. "Why am I important? You have so many soldiers who are –"

"I can't explain it – oh – fuck." Connor moans and falls to the floor, barely catching himself. Kyle leans at his side as if he's gravely concerned, and Connor's eyes roll back, but he shakes himself out of it, moaning as he regains his balance.

"What's wrong?" Kyle asks. "You're hurt?"

"I'm – disappearing," Connor mutters. Marcus grabs the gun, just to hold it, just in case. Connor's is still on the floor by the door.

"Disappearing?" Kyle says, holding Connor's arm to help him up.

"You've changed the future," Connor says. He glares at Marcus. "For him, for that, you could erase everything."

"Good!" Kyle says, stepping away from Connor, backing up until he's nearly pressed against Marcus' chest. "I want to erase everything, I want to defeat Skynet here, before Judgment Day, before any of that can exist. And you should be glad I have a chance to save Marcus, after what he did for you!"

"You don't understand," Connor says, going weak again, stumbling against the wall.

"Why can't you just help us, John?" Kyle asks. "Stay here and help us, we can tell people –"

"No!" Connor says, his breath labored. "It doesn't work that way."

"How do you know? How can you not want to try it, now that we have the technology? Your thinking is so linear, you're so sure that your mother was right about you –"

"Fuck!" Connor screams, punching the wall in frustration. He looks at Marcus, still glowering. "They don't even know what they really did, creating you," he says through gritted teeth. "They might have beaten me with you, they might have, and not the way they thought they would. It's poetic," he says, scoffing.

"Just get out of my house," Marcus says, tapping the gun against his thigh. "He's not going anywhere with you."

Connor stares at Kyle, who is gaping at Connor, his mouth open slightly. Connor shakes his head and begins to stumble toward the bedroom doorway.

"I could make you come back," Connor says. "But I can't make you do what I need you to do once you get there. I can't make you – not if you're still thinking of him. God, it's perfect. They'll defeat us with our biggest weakness, with what we thought was our greatest strength."

"What are you talking about?" Kyle asks. "You'll be fine without me. You don't need me. I'm nothing, I'm –"

"As long as I'm alive, there's still a chance that things could go the way they're supposed to," Connor says, and he stands up straighter, as if Kyle's fretting has given him new strength. "I'll be back," he says before disappearing through the doorway.

As soon as Connor is gone Marcus hurries out in the living room to find out if Ray is alright. Kyle trails him, not as closely as usual, looking dazed. Ray is on the floor behind the couch, moaning and holding his head in his hands.

"That fucking shit," he says when Marcus kneels down beside him. "I'm gonna fucking kill that guy."

"What happened?" Marcus asks. Ray has a red spot on his head that is already beginning to swell.

"Fucker hit me with the butt of his gun. He was some kind of ninja motherfucker, shit, or a military prick, I've never seen nobody fight like that." Ray looks up at Kyle and gives him a hateful glare. "Friend of yours, huh?"

Kyle says nothing. He's staring at Marcus, who doesn't even know how to begin to think about any of this. Ten minutes ago the most confusing thing in his world was his hands on Kyle's skin. Now, this. He gets up and goes to the kitchen to get some ice for Ray's head.

"I want him out of here," Ray shouts, meaning Kyle. "I don't care what he did on the job today. I don't need this shit. Especially not before --" Ray stops there, and Marcus knows he was about to mention something about the Firenzo job, his big score. Ray wants to move to Hawaii. That's the whole plan. Rob Firenzo, move to Hawaii. Learn to surf. Marcus shuts his eyes and rubs his hands over his face. He's going to throw up, maybe. It's been awhile since he ate anything. He pours himself a short glass of whiskey and brings it back to the living room with Ray's ice. Kyle is still staring and Marcus is still afraid to meet his eyes.

"Gimme that," Ray says when Marcus drinks from the glass. He grabs it and takes a sip, holding the dish towel full of ice that Marcus brought him against his forehead. "I mean it," Ray says, pointing at Kyle. "This is fucked up anyway. We don't even know him."

"Please, I don't have anywhere else to go," Kyle says, his hands fisted at his sides. Marcus glares at him.

"Just be quiet for a minute," he snaps. Kyle slinks away, back to Marcus' room. Watching him go, Marcus feels like he's just ripped his own guts out, but whatever. Ray is hurt. Things are unraveling.

"Hey," Ray hisses, and Marcus looks back to him. Ray has that look on his face, that look like maybe he's not sure if Marcus is really on his side.

"What the fuck's going on?" Ray asks. "Who was that son of a bitch? Who is this kid? Why'd the guy leave without him?"

"'Cause I threatened to kill him," Marcus says without thinking. That obviously wasn't the real reason Connor left. He'd seemed to be internally injured or something, staggering in his steps. Maybe his fight with Ray wasn't as one-sided as it seemed.

"Kill him?" Ray scowls. "Yeah, for busting in here like he had the right -- but I told him, look, you want the kid? Take the kid. If he comes around again you'd better just -- well, fuck that, I want the kid out of here anyway. He gives me the creeps. And you." Ray's lip curls, just a little, then sinks back down. "You're being weird, Mark."

"That guy hurt him," Marcus says, though he's not sure about this. Kyle had seemed afraid of Connor, but not as terrified as he would be if Connor had been the one who gave him those scars. Of course, Kyle is crazy.

"And he's probably some kind of pervert," Marcus says. "I told you, when that kid showed up here, he didn't have any clothes. You want that on your hands, you want to turn the kid over to a pervert who's going to kill him?"

"You don't know what you're talking about," Ray says, wincing as he stands. "And it's none of our fucking business, anyway."

"He's like us, Ray, like we were, he hasn't got anyone or anything. Not even a brother."

"Well, we're not fucking adopting him, Mark, so just find an orphanage or something and leave him on the doorstep." Ray heads for the front door, tossing the dish rag with the ice on the floor. "I gotta go see a guy about a thing," he says, which means he's got to go sell his shitty meth to some loser in Capital Park. "Take care of it," Ray says sharply before slamming out the door.

Marcus sighs and nets his fingers together behind his head, standing in the center of the room and trying to remember the last time his life didn't feel like a ship with a hole in its hull, always sinking a little deeper, a million miles from the coast. He can feel Kyle back there, in his room, waiting, and he doesn't know what's going to happen next, but it's not going to involve separating himself from Kyle. He can't even work up any anxiety about it, because it's not a decision that needs to be made. He has found something to do with his life that has nothing to do with Ray or making money or getting stoned or trying to pass for straight. He's going to keep that kid safe. That's all that he knows, and all he needs to know, and he gets calm again when he realizes this.

He walks into his bedroom and shuts the door behind him, doesn't put on a light. It's dark, and quiet, and Kyle is sitting on the end of the bed with his hands between his knees. He doesn't look up at Marcus until Marcus is standing right in front of him, and Kyle's eyes are so big. He looks like he wants to get angry but doesn't have the energy.

"It's not true what he said," Kyle says. "I'm not important back there. He's -- I can't believe he came. I'm nothing."

"I can believe it," Marcus says. "That he came. That he wants you back."

"What?"

"You said. Whatever. That I lost you, we got separated, and I found you again. That I was obsessed."

Kyle says nothing, just stares, and Marcus can't stand not touching him, so he holds Kyle's face with one hand, his palm against Kyle's cheek. Kyle shuts his eyes and lets out his breath, and just the sound of his breath nearly buckles Marcus' knees, as if no one else has ever breathed like that. Marcus believes what Kyle told him now, that Marcus would go anywhere, do anything, tear through time and space and past a hundred men like Connor if Kyle needed him.

"It's not like that with John," Kyle says. "He doesn't -- we're not even friends."

"Well, fuck him, anyway," Marcus says. He reaches down to hook his hands under Kyle's shoulders and yanks him up from the bed. He's maybe five inches shorter than Marcus, and Marcus loves him for that, too, or no, he doesn't love him, what the fuck, but, well. He can't stop touching him, will never not want to, and both of them are breathing hard as Marcus rakes his hands through Kyle's curls, which are still damp from the shower.

"No one's taking you away from me," Marcus says, and his throat is so tight around the words that they come out sounding angry, like Marcus is pissed off at Kyle for this, and maybe he is, a little. He kisses him too hard, and Kyle makes strangled noises against his lips, but he tastes so good and Marcus doesn't stop, licking into him and keeping his eyes shut tightly, because this was the one thing he was never gonna do again, but he made that promise before this kid came along and now he doesn't know anything, isn't even sure that Kyle isn't from the goddamn future after all.

They pull back and just huff against each other's faces, eyes locked, the room and the house and the city evaporating around them. It's going to rain; Marcus can smell the change in the air before he hears the thunder. He expects to feel the first drops on his head, as if the roof was blown off by what just happened, by what he's done. He's so fucking hard for this kid, just from his breath, and that one taste of his mouth, it's insane.

"I don't really know how to do this," Kyle says, his eyes watery but not quite wet. Marcus kisses his face everywhere, lingering over every inch of his sweet skin, his lips wet for the taste of it, and Kyle whines happily, winding his skinny arms around Marcus' waist.

"You don't have to do anything," Marcus says, his face pressed against Kyle's, eyes closed. "You don't have to. I just. I just want to – I don't know, just –" Marcus doesn't really know how to do this, either, only knows that the heat of Kyle's smaller body against his is like the wicked paradise he's always been looking for, something he never thought he'd actually find, but it's pure, too, it's like being pressed back into the mold that made him.

"I lied before," Kyle says, his voice so small, and Marcus wants to swallow it up along with the rest of Kyle, to hold it inside him and be nothing but a barricade around it. "When I said it wasn't like we were in love. I did love you. I do."

"Why?" Marcus asks, his eyes still closed. Because no one has ever said that. He doesn't know what to do with it, isn't sure he likes it.

"Because," Kyle says. He puts his hands on Marcus' face and waits until Marcus has opened his eyes. "Because you are the one good thing." And it sounds like there's gonna be more, but then it's just that, and Kyle's eyes are quivering with his half-formed tears, and Marcus would believe anything he said right now, he'd believe that they're both from Mars, that they knew each other there before they teleported to Earth, undercover.

"You're hungry," Marcus says, because he can hear Kyle's stomach growling.

"Yeah," Kyle says, his voice a raw moan, and he leans up to kiss Marcus, hard and sloppy before he slows into a sigh, pushing it into Marcus' mouth. Marcus could kiss him forever, he's so fucking soft, and when they fall back onto the bed he's really not thinking of anything much, but his hand finds the warm place between Kyle's legs anyway, and Kyle gasps, spreading them wider.

"This what you want?" Marcus asks, husky and harsh, because Kyle is just so goddamn easy, not only to pry apart but to want and to forgive himself for, and Marcus is not without resentment for this. He squeezes Kyle's cock through the flannel pants he's lent him, and Kyle goes wild with it, his breath all crazy and sharp and his hips flexing up, pushing harder against Marcus' hand.

"Is this what you came for?" Marcus says, keeping his face close to Kyle's, their noses bumping. Kyle gurgles some nonsense response and before Marcus can even get a handle on what he's doing he feels the wet heat of Kyle's come under the fabric of the pants, and Kyle squeezes Marcus' biceps so tightly, pinching his eyes shut and crying through his orgasm. Then he goes limp, the hard push of his breath more astonished than needy. Marcus kisses him, apologizing, and Kyle kisses him back in lazy presses of his shaking lips, licking Marcus at the corner of his left eye, then against his nose.

"You –" Kyle breathes out, "I wanted –" He opens his eyes and stares up at Marcus as if Marcus is going to save him, right now, and Marcus doesn't know how he could, how he ever will. He feels guilty for what he's already done, guilty when Kyle reaches down to palm Marcus' hardon through his jeans.

"Don't," Marcus says, but he doesn't mean it, and Kyle isn't listening anyway. His hand is so eager and random on Marcus' dick that Marcus would laugh if he wasn't half out of his mind with something much sharper than arousal, though that's there, too, because every clumsy pinch of Kyle's fingers across his cock makes the air in the room stab in through him until he feels like he can't breathe. He undoes his pants, gets his cock out and starts to jerk himself off just to relieve the pressure that by now has built to a whine between his ears, but then Kyle's hand is there, greedy, and Marcus puts his hand over Kyle's, squeezes his fingers in closer and guides him, groaning, his whole body arched toward the orgasm that is pulling his ass up from the mattress in anticipation.

"Wanted this," Kyle whispers, hot and close to Marcus' ear. "Everything, you, I just wanted, God, to see you without your clothes."

Marcus comes into Kyle's hand, his own hand still closed around Kyle's fingers, and it rips out of him like nothing ever has, something he didn't want to let go of but couldn't keep, the relief washing over him so completely that he can't do anything but collapse onto Kyle, who cradles him as if he had been waiting for this. And he had been, apparently, somewhere, he wanted this, he said so.

"I knew this would happen," Kyle says when Marcus is leaning up onto his elbows, touching Kyle's face, his hair, still not sure where to start, because every inch of him is so perfect. "I wouldn't have come if I didn't know."

"How did you know?" Marcus asks, hardly caring now how crazy Kyle is. He's sane enough to melt into Marcus' arms, and to huddle beneath him, so calm and still, and it's more than Marcus needs.

"Because of how you looked at me before you died," Kyle says, his eyes filling up. Marcus wipes Kyle's tears away when they leak down the sides of his face. Maybe he should be concerned that Kyle thinks he died once, but he just can't force himself to care as much as he should, not when they're pressed together like this and it feels like some big, aching destiny has been fulfilled.

"Like you were sorry you offered your heart," Kyle says, sniffling. "Like you remembered that you – wanted to be with me. God, Marcus, don't leave me again," he cries, reaching up to pull Marcus back down to him. Marcus lets himself be pulled, and he sighs against Kyle's shoulder.

"I'm not going anywhere," he says. Kyle sighs, deep and wet, humming his relief against Marcus' neck. His stomach growls again, and Marcus laughs.

"You'd better eat something," Marcus says, sitting back. "C'mon, I'll take you out."

Kyle beams up at him, and Marcus knows what happens after moments like this, that the world comes crashing back down like hellfire, but he still can't fight away his contentment.

Marcus takes Kyle to Target first, buys him clothes, feels like a creep. Kyle is still impressed by everything, but he's afraid of the blenders and won't go anywhere near the electronics department. The lady at the register stares at them like they're crazy when Marcus pays in cash, rolling hundred dollar bills between his fingers while Kyle examines a pack of Tic Tacs like he can't fathom what the fuck it could possibly be used for. Marcus buys him a giant pretzel at the concession counter and Kyle still finishes a bacon cheeseburger and three cherry cokes at T.G.I. Friday's afterward, then throws up in the bushes on the way to the truck. He's still in good spirits on the way home, pale with excitement, his head lolling back onto the passenger seat as he stares at Marcus, laughing at commercials on the radio.

"Are you drunk?" Marcus asks, poking him in the side. Kyle only laughs harder, and Marcus wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't even know what that means.

Marcus drives him up to the place where guys used to take girls when Marcus was in high school. Nobody uses it anymore, and even the cops have forgotten about it. He turns the truck around so that the bed is facing the view of the city, and climbs into the bed, pulling Kyle between his legs. The lights of L.A. only fascinate Kyle for half a minute before he tips his mouth up to lick at Marcus' neck.

"I don't care what happens anymore," Marcus says, thinking out loud. He had a few beers at the restaurant and they were just enough to make him hopeful. He'll figure things out. Someplace to live. A way to make Ray not hate him for this. A way to make enough money to keep taking Kyle out and buying him things, because nothing has ever come close to making Marcus this happy, though maybe he'd be happy living in a cardboard box with Kyle, as long as Kyle squirms back against him like this and can't stop kissing Marcus for more than five seconds at a time.

"I care," Kyle says. "And you do, too. Me and you, we're gonna change everything. The whole world."

Marcus is hard in his pants and close to believing everything Kyle says. He drives him back to the house on Elgin Avenue, his hands shaking on the wheel, Kyle's head on his shoulder. He's so afraid about how this is going to end, 'cause the sunset's long gone and they're not riding into it, but he can't stop the momentum of what's been happening to him since he laid eyes on Kyle. Marcus threw himself into this head-first and he's fully committed to falling, streaking toward the earth at a thousand miles an hour. Ray's truck is still gone when they get to the house, and it's enough, for now, to make Marcus glad to be alive.

He manages a shot of whiskey in the kitchen before he follows Kyle into the bedroom. Kyle gives him a fucking unbelievable look when Marcus shuts the door behind him, like he's daring Marcus to do what they both know he wants to. Or maybe Kyle doesn't know, but somehow this seems like something that won't take him by surprise. Marcus takes his shirt off; it's so fucking hot in the house. In the three seconds it takes him to cross the room to the bed – longer than usual because he can barely walk for his hardon – Kyle has stripped off all of his clothes and whipped them onto the bedroom floor. He's kneeling uncertainly in the middle of Marcus' bed, his skin glowing, drawing Marcus' hands like a beacon. Marcus stumbles out of his pants and crawls onto the bed in his underwear, kneels before Kyle and takes his shoulders in his hands. Kyle stares up at him, looking like he's waiting to say again, I knew it would be like this, I knew it would be this good.

"Hey, listen," Marcus says, his fingers closing in tighter around Kyle's shoulders. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to."

"Don't worry," Kyle says. He leans forward to press one sweet kiss to Marcus' lips. "I want you in me more than anything." His voice shakes with embarrassment, his cheeks going pink in the moonlight.

So he does know what's going on here. Marcus crushes his mouth over Kyle's, and they fall back onto the pillows, Kyle laughing into Marcus' mouth, Marcus trying not to do something disturbing like growl. He's so out of control that he isn't sure what sort of noises he'd make if he let himself. Kyle's noises are all stunned and giddy, and he's wrapped around Marcus so completely, his long limbs surprisingly strong, holding Marcus down onto him. Marcus shrugs himself out of his underwear with some difficulty, Kyle clinging and slobbering on his ear. At some point they both start laughing, because of the nervous energy, because of how ridiculous they are together, and because they just met, only it doesn't feel that way at all.

"Be still for a minute," Marcus whispers, fumbling on his bedside table for a bottle of cheap lotion that he uses for jerking off while he tries not to think about guys. Kyle's legs are spread, his knees bent, and he's huffing his breaths so hard that Marcus flattens a hand across his trembling chest to calm him down.

"You sure you want this?" Marcus asks, slicking his fingers. He's kind of afraid to touch Kyle, to really pull him open, like Kyle is some seventh seal whose deflowering will blow the world apart. He has that kind of face.

"I want you so much, I –" and then Kyle starts sobbing wordlessly up at the ceiling, not crying exactly but just broken up by frustration, a fat drop of precome dribbling down the length of his cock. Marcus licks his lips and pushes Kyle's legs apart. He could make Kyle come ten times tonight, twenty. But he knows it'll only happen once or twice – three times, tops – before they both pass out, and Marcus will curl his body around Kyle's smaller frame and hold him while he drops off to sleep. Marcus has to remind himself about this, that he'll pet him and protect him when this is through, because what he's doing feels so filthy, even as Kyle goes wild for the first press of Marcus' cautious finger. Marcus has never actually done this, but he used to read about it on the internet, back before Ray started making fun of him for going to the library all the time.

"God, that's good, that's good, so good," Kyle moans, arching up off the mattress as Marcus slides a finger inside him, cursing under his breath because the kid is fucking tight and Marcus feels like he can't breathe, like he's going to choke on the spine-shaking throbs of his cock. Kyle is squeezing his finger, or pulsing, really, pulling him in as if he wants him deeper. Marcus leans over him, his arm shaking badly, and kisses him, Kyle's moans pushing into him like air, like he never even knew how to breathe before now.

"Please," Kyle says, his eyes fluttering, and he bites Marcus' lip when Marcus hesitates, his finger pushed into Kyle and curling, making him twitch and groan. Marcus has never been afraid of anything like this, afraid of what will happen to him if he lets himself have what he wants.

"Just be still," Marcus says, though Kyle has gone limp, whimpering. Marcus isn't sure what he needs before he actually does this, but it's some kind of reassurance, some kind of promise, maybe not even from Kyle but from the universe or God or something bigger. When he settles himself between Kyle's legs and stares down at the trembling mess of him, his eyes wet and his hair wrecked on the pillow, he knows what he wants and what he's not going to get. He wants a guarantee that this will never be taken away from him.

"Tell me if it's too much," Marcus says, and those are the last words he'll be able to form for awhile, because sliding into Kyle blanks his mind clear of everything but the sound of Kyle's reedy whine and the encouraging shimmy of his hips. Marcus takes a fucking eternity to fully sheath himself in Kyle's body, because he doesn't want to come too soon, doesn't want to hurt Kyle, and has to focus entirely on what he doesn't want because he feels like he'll explode into dust if he thinks about what he wants to do, which is somewhere between pushing himself harder and harder into the hot welcome of Kyle's body and lying still inside him forever.

"Marcus." His name is broken in half on Kyle's lips, and Marcus kisses him for a long time, his whole body throbbing to the tune of Kyle's heartbeat. Kyle stares up at Marcus like he's the sun, his eyes half-shut and a dopey smile on his face.

"Why?" Marcus breathes out, still afraid he's going to come like a teenager, because Kyle is squeezing around his cock in experimental little pulses, settling into the feeling of being filled. "Why me?"

"Because," Kyle says, his short laugh shaking through both of them. "I just. Saw you, and the world was different."

Marcus knows exactly what he means, and he's pretty sure they are the only two people in the world who have ever felt this insanely certain about each other. He's still afraid he's going to wake from this any second now, even when he starts pushing into Kyle with shallow thrusts that make Kyle's eyes fall completely shut. He gasps under Marcus' mouth, and Marcus can't stop staring at him long enough to kiss him, but Kyle doesn't seem to notice, he's lost to this. Kyle feels like the only thing in the world that has ever been real, but it doesn't stop Marcus from wondering how long he's going to be able to live inside the delusion that he can keep him.

Kyle comes as soon as Marcus reaches between them to touch his dick, and he cries against Marcus' cheek, clinging so hard. Marcus has to pull himself back, because he feels like he's going to melt into Kyle and stop existing, and when he kneels up with Kyle's legs spread out around him he still feels that way, staring down at Kyle in his bed, wet with come and shuddering happily, trying to keep his eyes open.

"Do it," Kyle begs brokenly, and Marcus does, he fucks him like he's never going to get to do it again, lifting Kyle's ass off the bed and driving into him while he screams Marcus' name. Marcus collapses into his orgasm, spiraling down into the dark heat of it and letting Kyle's arms wind around his back as he recovers, slumped onto Kyle, who feels so much stronger than he looks, so sturdy between Marcus and the bed. Marcus rolls onto his side with a groan, pulling out of Kyle as he does, and Kyle rolls with him, pinned against his chest, not letting go.

"So they have gay sex in the future," Marcus mutters when they've lain together in silence for a long time, Marcus' hand on the side of Kyle's face, the heat of his cheek the best reassurance available. Kyle grins.

"Um, yeah," he says. "There were only like, four women in our camp and about fifty men. So you do the math."

"They didn't -- bother you, did they?" Marcus asks, and he's not sure if this means he believes what Kyle is telling him. Probably not. Maybe it's all a metaphor for something true that Kyle wants to tell him but can't.

"No," Kyle says, laughing at the idea. "Connor would have killed them. I just, you know. There were communal showers. I may have done some spying."

Marcus snorts and pulls him closer, squeezing Kyle against his chest. He can feel Kyle's smile against his skin, and he's still waiting for his guilt about what he's done to come crashing onto his shoulders, but Kyle seems so fucking happy, and Marcus feels like a good person for the first time in his life, like he finally understands what it means to want to do the right thing, to live honest and stay safe, why it matters. He pulls a sheet up over them, tucking it around Kyle's back.

"Tomorrow we'll have to do some research on Skynet," Kyle says, his voice quieting and his eyes shut. "We've still got about three years to figure out what to do about what will happen."

"Three years, okay." Marcus strokes his fingers through Kyle's hair, wishing he could believe they'll have that much time together. "Get some sleep."

Kyle is quickly asleep, and Marcus lies still with Kyle in his arms, his lips on Kyle's forehead as he watches the window, the sticky orange glow of a streetlamp bleeding in through the blinds. The street outside is quiet, and the whole city feels as if it's waiting for something. Marcus' heart is still pumping too hard, on edge. Kyle whimpers in his sleep and Marcus wraps him up tighter, shutting his eyes.

It's all the peace they're allowed. Marcus wakes up when Kyle does, and Kyle sits up a little, blinking down at Marcus blearily. It's still dark outside. Kyle smiles at Marcus and touches his lips. They both hear Ray's footsteps too late, and then Ray is pounding on the door, and then he's opening it without waiting for an answer.

"You'd better have --" Ray says, and then he sees Marcus, sitting up in bed while Kyle cowers behind him, the blankets over their laps but both of them obviously naked. Ray's eyes go so huge that Marcus almost laughs, even though his stomach feels like it's very rapidly filling with gravel.

"What the -- what the fuck --" Ray sputters, the shock on his face shifting easily to anger, then fury.

"Get out," Marcus says. Ray has told him to enough times, when he's with a girl. Marcus will leave the house without looking back when Ray asks. Ray just stands there shaking his head hard, like it's the only thing that's keeping him from pulling that gun out of the back of his jeans and emptying it into Marcus' chest.

"So this is what this is all fucking about!" Ray shouts. He's drunk, of course, dangerous. Marcus eyes the gun that is lying on top of his dresser, but it's not like he'd be able to shoot his brother, anyway.

"Ray --"

"This is why you want this little shit around, so you can fuck him? God, Mark, what the fuck?" Ray sounds like he's going to cry for a minute, so deep is his disappointment. Marcus can feel Kyle's heartbeat slamming against his back and it's the only thing keeping him from cracking into pieces.

"Or is he fucking you?" Ray continues, spitting with anger now, pacing. "What is he, thirteen years old? Fuck, you sick -- fuck, Mark, I tried to help you, I tried to keep you --"

"Just get out and let us get dressed, goddammit!" Marcus shouts, his heart pounding just as hard as Kyle's. He's afraid, but not for himself, and he doesn't feel as embarrassed as he maybe should. He thinks of the last time this happened, how Ray punched that boy and he went running, but there was nowhere for Marcus to run to. Ray had cried the whole time he was kicking Marcus' ass, calling him a faggot like he knew Marcus would never be anything else.

"Yeah, get dressed, you fucking son of a bitch," Ray says, picking up Marcus' jeans from the floor and slinging them at him. "And then get the fuck out of here, and take your goddamn rent boy with you." Ray is sobbing out his words now, and Marcus remembers their father getting like this, unable to decide if he wanted to weep or rail.

"You sick shit, I tried to raise you to be a fucking man, I did everything I could --"

"Yeah, you did everything you could!" Marcus screams back. "To make me your fucking servant boy, you --"

"Fuck you, you fucking faggot! I did everything for you, I could have --"

"You could have, Ray, you could have done what? What the fuck were you ever going to do?" Marcus is squirming into his jeans, ready for a fight. "You relied on me just as much as I --"

"Bullshit, motherfucker!" Ray screams, and Marcus is standing now, taller and bigger than Ray, which was not the case last time. Ray shakes his head again, and grabs Marcus' arm, not hard enough to get Marcus throwing punches but close.

"You were everything I had," Ray says, shaking Marcus, his eyes wet and his teeth gritted. "Now I don't know who the fuck you even are, and for what?" Ray looks at Kyle hatefully. Kyle is struggling to get dressed while most of him is still beneath the blanket, and Marcus shoves Ray without even thinking about it, because he doesn't want him looking at Kyle. Ray punches Marcus in the stomach, doubling him over.

"Stop!" Kyle shouts.

"You better not fucking talk to me," Ray hisses. Marcus straightens, groaning, and nails his brother in the jaw with his fist. Ray curses and falls over, against the wall.

"We'll go," Marcus says in a growl, hurrying over to the dresser to rip his take from the last job from its hiding place. "Just back the fuck off."

"We?" Ray says, spitting blood. "Fuck you. Fuck you, Mark! I never turned my back on you for a woman, and this is how you repay me, turning your fag ass on me as soon as something young enough to get your dick hard comes along?"

"Shut the fuck up," Marcus says, trying to fight the urge to kill Ray. He grabs his gun and the bag full of cheap clothes that he bought for Kyle earlier. Kyle is already at his side, hovering, nervous. Marcus turns to look Ray in the eye for the first time since he hit him. Ray is glaring at him, his lip quivering.

"You're not my brother," Ray says. "I don't know who the fuck you are."

"Yeah," Marcus says, grabbing Kyle's shoulder and pulling him from the room. He can't argue with that. Ray never really knew him. Still, when they're out of the house and in the hot night air, headed for the truck, Marcus' eyes are stinging, and part of him wants to run back and make Ray understand, though he never will. He shoves Kyle into the passenger seat like a duffel bag and Kyle just stares at him, watching him walk around to the driver's side, his eyes wide.

"Are you okay?" Kyle asks when they're driving away toward nothing. The sky is glowing with light pollution; everything feels ominous and Marcus' breath is still coming hard.

"Just don't talk for awhile," Marcus snaps. He needs to think. Needs to find a place to stay. He's got some money. He'd feel a lot better about the evening ahead, a motel room and Kyle sleeping his arms again, if someone who is definitely not Ray weren't following them in a black Taurus. Kyle is hugging the bag of clothes in his lap and Marcus is pretty sure that he's the least qualified person in the world to take care of this kid. Kyle should be entrusted to nuns or something, locked up in a tower. Marcus will never shake the feeling that if something happens to Kyle the world will end.

"Looks like your friend Connor is back," Marcus says, nodding at the rearview. Kyle whirls around to look out the back window, apparently unfamiliar with the concept of being inconspicuous.

"Fuck," Kyle mutters. He shrugs. "It doesn't matter," he says. "He won't hurt me."

"Yeah, right."

"He won't. Marcus. You've got to start believing what I tell you."

"Oh, I've got to, have I? Well, how about you start telling me the truth, since I just threw my fucking life away for you?"

Kyle stares at him with those big eyes clear of guilt, as if he couldn't even imagine how to tell a lie. Marcus curses and punches the wheel.

"Your brother," Kyle says softly.

"Don't," Marcus barks. "It doesn't matter. What the fuck does this asshole want?" he asks, watching the black Taurus pull up behind them at a red light, keeping back enough so that Marcus can't be sure that it's Connor behind the wheel.

"He wants me to go back there," Kyle says. "I didn't even know it was possible. But it doesn't matter. I'm not going anywhere." He puts his hand on Marcus' leg and stares at him with sympathy that burns through Marcus' bones.

"Fucking right you're not," Marcus says, and he swings the car into an alleyway he and Ray once used to escape some asshole Ray stiffed who was trying to kill them. Kyle's shoulder smashes up against the passenger side door, and Marcus speeds down the alleyway, then takes a sharp left.

"Put your seat belt on," Marcus says to Kyle, who just looks confused. Marcus checks the rearview, and they seem to have lost the Taurus for now. He pulls over and shows Kyle how seat belts work, then fastens his own, not wanting to look like a hypocrite. Kyle keeps staring at him like he's waiting to hear what Marcus' plans are. Marcus doesn't look at Kyle, because he doesn't have any plans, all he has is Kyle's name ringing between his ears and all he wants to do is close his hands around it, or something better than his hands, something that would really keep Kyle safe. He's never had plans and isn't sure where they even come from, how people seem to know what theirs are. It's terrifying, being out in the world without Ray's plans to at least give him something to do with his hands. He drives to a motel, checking the rearview every ten seconds, but no one seems to be following.

They check in and go to their room, which faces the highway. The place is a dump, but Kyle seems pleased with it, especially when Marcus buys him Doritos and a Coke from the vending machine outside. Marcus sits by the window and watches Kyle eat, thinking that he should probably get Kyle some vegetables or milk or something more traditionally food-like.

"We're both going to have to get jobs," Marcus says, and Kyle grins.

"What do you mean?" he asks. Marcus wants to tell him to stop being like this, but he loves Kyle because he's like this, he can live with that now. He loves him.

"I mean something you don't want to do but have to because you need money, you know, a fucking job."

"Money," Kyle says, and he laughs. "Okay." He has Dorito dust on his lips, and Marcus crosses the room with a groan, sits down on the bed next to Kyle and licks it off. Kyle hums against Marcus' lips, throws the chips aside and climbs into his lap, straddling him.

"Are you sore?" Marcus asks, muttering. He puts his hand on the small of Kyle's back so he'll know what he means. Marcus is already hard just from the press of Kyle's thighs around his, and he knows that they don't have a lot of time to waste, because Kyle thinks money is hilarious and he's going to evaporate into nothing when enough of the real world bleeds into him. He's too good to last. Marcus' chest aches with the weight of knowing this, but he tells himself that he should be glad, because it would be worse if it were a surprise, if he just looked up one day, unknowing, and saw that Kyle was gone.

"A little sore, yeah," Kyle says, his cheeks going pink. Marcus nods and pulls Kyle down onto his chest, wrapping his arms around Kyle's back. Kyle sighs and sinks against him, shutting his eyes, every inch of his body completely surrendered. Marcus wishes he could have lived like this, even for a little while, that he could have shown up naked at some guy's house and trusted the world to take care of him. The best he can do is let Kyle feel this way for as long as he can.

"Tell me where you really came from," Marcus says, rubbing his fingers across the back of Kyle's neck.

"Los Angeles," Kyle says, mumbling and close to sleep; Marcus can feel it in the weight of Kyle's body.

"Right. And where are your parents?"

"They're dead. I told you." He stiffens a little.

"How'd they die?" Marcus asks, and then, because that seems like a rude question, "My mother got stabbed by a guy who stole her purse. Me and Ray were there, but we were so little, we couldn't do anything. I don't even remember it. Ray does, I guess. And then my dad, Ray maybe killed him. They got into a fight, and we left him. I guess I was about fourteen."

Kyle doesn't sit up and stare at Marcus with stunned sadness the way every woman Marcus has told this story to has. He doesn't say he's sorry, doesn't even flinch.

"Mom died on Judgment Day," Kyle says. "I don't remember her. Dad had a picture, and he talked about her a lot. Dad. Terminators got him. It was my fault. I wasn't being quiet enough. He was always having to remind me about that, but then I would start laughing or talking like I wasn't afraid, and I think he liked it a little, so he would let me do it, and. Well."

Marcus sighs and tangles his fingers through Kyle's hair. He likes the idea that in the apocalyptic future there will still be people like Kyle, curly hair and freckles. It doesn't mean he believes what Kyle is saying, even though it sounds true somehow. He just likes the idea, willing to entertain it: Kyle in the future, alone, curled up and hiding and waiting for some version of Marcus who will know how to save him to come along.

"You can wash dishes or something," Marcus says, because he doesn't want to fall asleep without a plan, it feels dangerous. "And I'll work on cars. We'll get an apartment."

"And we'll take down Skynet," Kyle says, yawning against Marcus' neck.

"Yeah. Sure. Okay."

Kyle falls asleep in Marcus' arms, spilled onto him in his reckless way, and Marcus settles back against the headboard, watching the corners of the room. He's not sure what he's waiting for, but something is coming. His gun is on the bedside table beside the one that Kyle cleverly stole on the way out of the house. Marcus thinks about Ray while Kyle sleeps, his shoulders twitching and his grip on Marcus tightening. Ray is probably getting historically fucked up, maybe sobbing. He was always a big crier when he was high. Once, when Marcus was around ten and Ray twelve, Marcus announced that it was his birthday. Ray knew it probably wasn't, because neither of them had ever been informed about the exact dates of their birth, or maybe Ray had once but he'd forgotten by then. Ray bought Marcus a Frosty at Wendy's and a plastic watch from a vending machine. The watch never worked, but Marcus kept it until he was about fifteen. He didn't wear it, just kept it, just for the hell of it.

The pounding on the door starts just a few minutes after Marcus has managed to drift to sleep. Kyle wakes up with him, startled, and they look at each other for maybe half a minute, taking their time, because it's always going to be like this, isn't it, they're always going to be interrupted, they'll always be running. It's something they've both known all their lives, and there's no denying it now.

"This is the motel manager," a man shouts through the door. "Open the door."

"What do you want?" Marcus shouts back. What if Kyle isn't as legal as he claims to be? What if, what if. Marcus doesn't even know where the sky ends and the earth begins anymore. Kyle is frowning at the door.

"There has been a problem with your credit card," the man says.

"I didn't pay with a credit card," Marcus says, quietly, to Kyle. Kyle stares at him for maybe two seconds, then his eyes shoot open so wide.

"Oh, God," Kyle says, grabbing for his gun. "We've got to get out of here."

"What? Why?"

"Because, I don't know why they would send one, but that might be, it might be looking for Connor, it might be --"

And then the door is smashed to splinters. Marcus is up with his gun in his hands in half a second, but Kyle is pulling him toward the bathroom. A big guy comes through the door with a gun in his hands, and Marcus fires at him twice, hitting him once in the chest and once in the neck, but the guy keeps coming, doesn't even bleed, and now he's firing back. Kyle is screaming to come on and Marcus doesn't know where he thinks they're going to go, they're trapped, and then Marcus takes a bullet to the shoulder and falls into the bathroom, Kyle slamming the door shut behind them as if that's going to stop this guy.

"Fuck!" Kyle shouts when Marcus sinks to the floor by the toilet. He crouches beside Marcus, panting and looking around frantically for some means of escape that he's not going to find. The big guy kicks the door in, and Marcus can barely get his thoughts organized enough to figure out that his shirt is wet and warm because he's bleeding all over it. He shoots the big guy again in the chest, and the big guy just stares at him, stoic, then shifts his eyes to Kyle.

"Kyle Reese," he says. Kyle is holding his gun with a shaking hand, as if he's forgotten how to use it. Or maybe he just knows that, as Marcus is slowly beginning to accept, bullets aren't stopping this motherfucker, not even slowing him down. The guy walks forward and picks Kyle up by the front of his shirt, shoving Marcus away easily when he tries to stop him, skidding him all the way across the floor. He lifts Kyle up off the floor, and Kyle struggles, but not very hard, as if he knows he hasn't got a chance.

"Where is John Connor?" the man asks, his voice completely flat. Kyle shakes his head.

"I don't know!" he says. The man lifts his other arm and takes Kyle by the neck, holding him up by it, choking him.

"Where is --" the man starts to ask again, but he stops talking when Marcus shoots him in the head. There's metal in his skull, and when he turns to look at Marcus in annoyance there is something robotic about the motion. Marcus breathes hard, staring at Kyle and waiting to get blown away, because all he's got is two more bullets and he's fresh out of ideas about how to stop this guy if shooting him won't work. The guy does nothing, just turns back to Kyle, who is sputtering, his face beginning to turn blue.

"Where is John Connor?" the man asks again, and Marcus wrenches himself up from the floor with a groan, the first searing pain shooting down his arm as he continues to bleed out. He knocks into the guy, who feels like he weighs about eight tons, and though he can't topple him he does succeed in getting him to drop Kyle, who lands on the toilet seat, gasping for air.

"The back of his, the back of his," Kyle says, panting between the words. Marcus stares the big guy right in the eye, and he can feel it, how much he -- it -- wants to kill him, but for some reason it doesn't, as if it runs up against a wall every time it tries. Then Kyle is moving like a cat, practically bouncing off the wall, and scampering behind the big guy to plug him once in the back of the neck. The big guy flinches, looking stunned, and Marcus jumps out of the way when he falls over.

"C'mon, we don't have much time!" Kyle screams when Marcus only stands there staring at the wires that are sparking at the back of the big guy's busted-open neck. Kyle grabs his arm and Marcus lets him pull him from the bathroom. They run to the truck, past a couple of shrieking onlookers who came to see what the commotion was; they jump away when they spot Marcus' and Kyle's guns. Marcus gets behind the wheel and doesn't know what to do next. He feels like he can't see straight, like he can't make his eyes focus on anything, and then he remembers why. His shoulder is still pumping out blood like it can't get rid of it fast enough.

"Move over, I'll drive!" Kyle says, which is a good idea, because Marcus is swaying in his seat and about to pass out. "C'mon, hurry, it's only disabled!"

Marcus crawls into the passenger seat and Kyle bounds over him, turns the key, backs out sloppily and crashes into two other cars on the way out of the parking lot. When he's finally on the road he drives wildly, panting over the steering wheel, bent over it, his knuckles white. He glances at Marcus, and Marcus can see two big, red hand prints rising on Kyle's neck. But they got away. No thanks to Marcus.

"You'll be okay," Kyle says, nodding frantically. "It must have had orders not to kill you, because they still want to use you for -- you'll be okay, he couldn't have given you more than a flesh wound, you'll be okay."

"I'll be okay," Marcus repeats, though he can't keep his eyes open. It would feel so good, he's surprised to realize, to just let everything go, but the opportunity to guiltlessly do so is gone, because now, when everything goes black, he knows that means that Kyle is on his own.

*

When Marcus comes to, it's dawn. He's somewhere outside of the city; it smells like the desert. He can hear Kyle talking, agitated, and someone is answering. He pulls his eyes open wider and looks around, sees that he's in some kind of desert junkyard, lying on a filthy mattress, one of the t-shirts he bought for Kyle the night before wrapped around his arm like a bandage. Kyle is not far away, arguing with someone. John Connor. The black Taurus is parked fifty feet away, near Marcus' truck, which is badly dented.

"It doesn't make any sense!" Kyle says to Connor. Marcus wonders if he's traveled in time, if this is the post-apocalyptic world. But no, they probably wouldn't have retained their cars.

Kyle sees Marcus struggling to sit up out of the corner of his eye and hurries over to him. Marcus groans at the pain in his arm and thinks of that day when Ray got shot, how they got home and couldn't stop laughing because they were still alive and it was hilarious.

"Are you okay?" Kyle asks, seated beside Marcus on the mattress, touching his forehead. Marcus nods and glares at Connor.

"What the fuck is this?" he asks.

"This is the end of the world," Connor says. He turns his head to spit. "You and him."

"It is not!" Kyle says to Connor. "If what you're saying is true, then how are you still here?"

"The only reason I'm still here is that you haven't made up your mind yet," Connor says.

"Yes, I have," Kyle says. "I can stop Skynet myself, here, with Marcus' help."

"You're just a kid!" Connor shouts. "This is not how it's supposed to happen, and if you were really so sure I would have disappeared already."

Marcus groans and Kyle turns from Connor, holds onto Marcus' arms, stares at him like he's the one who's sorry that he couldn't protect Marcus.

"What the hell is going on?" Marcus asks again, not really expecting a useful answer from either of them.

"He says I'm his father," Kyle says, scoffing. "But I can't be."

"What?" Marcus would laugh if he didn't feel like he's going to pass out again. He's coated with sweat, and his wound is throbbing.

"He says I went back to the past and got his mother pregnant, but --"

"Oh, fuck." Marcus lies back down and covers his face with his hands. "Never mind."

"Kyle, please believe me," Connor says, walking closer to the mattress. "The machines only sent him to screw things up, to defeat us, and that's exactly what he's doing right now, still, he's making sure I'll never exist."

"So what!" Kyle shouts. "Why should he have to die for you?"

"I'm sorry that you don't believe I can lead the resistance," Connor says tightly. "But --"

"Maybe you can lead it, what do I care? You've got your mission and I've got mine, mine is here, with him --"

"You could destroy everything --"

"Wait," Marcus says sharply. "Wait." He looks at Kyle, then at John. He doesn't really see the resemblance. "You're supposed to be this guy's father?" he says to Kyle, who nods.

"He fell in love with my mother when I sent him to the past to protect her," Connor says. "And now they've sabotaged everything, everyone who's looking to me, counting on me --"

"Well, he still falls in love with her, right?" Marcus says, laughing now, because he fired four shots into a robot man and now anything is possible.

"What?" Connor barks.

"There are two Kyles now," Marcus says. "One of them is here, still a baby. If -- if everything goes the way you think it will, and if I don't show up and screw things up, he can still do anything you want."

"That's not possible," Connor says, shaking his head.

"Why not?" Marcus asks.

"Because you can't change the past! You'll always get co-opted by Skynet, you'll always meet Kyle in the future --"

"But you always tell us there's no fate," Kyle says, narrowing his eyes at Connor. "That you can change things. That you have."

"That's not the way it works!" Connor says.

"Then why are you still alive?" Kyle shouts back. "And why don't I -- feel anything for you? I'm not your father, that baby who's living in the suburbs with his mom and dad, he's going to grow up to be your Kyle."

Connor shakes his head and sits down on an overturned trashcan near the mattress. He looks like he's deep in thought, occasionally opening his mouth and then shutting it.

"But what was happening to me before, those pains," he says. "I was fading."

"That was all in your head, man!" Kyle says, his voice getting ridiculously high-pitched. Marcus laughs, feeling delirious, wondering if he's dreaming this.

"Why was the T-800 looking for me?" Connor asks. "None of this makes any fucking sense! Fuck, Kyle --"

"Yes, it does!" Kyle says. "Maybe you are still important in the future, I mean you must be. I sure as shit haven't figured out how to stop Skynet yet, and maybe as soon as I do a T-800 will show up and want to kill me. But it didn't care about killing me now, because I'm not your father, John."

"But it still wants him to show up in the future and meet you," Connor says, gesturing to Marcus.

"Yeah, because it thinks -- well, I don't know what it thinks. Maybe it thinks Marcus will still show up and make the other Kyle – want to time travel, too. All I know is it's here now and it wants to kill you. You just have to go back, John, and everything will be okay."

Connor scoffs as if he thinks it's hilarious, Kyle giving him orders. He looks at Marcus.

"I still haven't worked all this out," he says.

"Me either," Marcus says. Kyle sighs and lies down beside Marcus with his hands folded on his stomach, staring up at the sky.

"I'm not here just for myself, John," Kyle says. "I'm going to try, I really am. I'm still part of the resistance."

"There's just too many possibilities," Connor says. "Too many ways it could go wrong."

"It's always been that way," Marcus says. "Before your robots. Everything can always go wrong and it usually does."

Connor scoffs. "Thanks for that brilliant fucking piece of philosophy." He stands, shakes his head, and stares down at Kyle.

"There are two John Connors in the world right now, too," Kyle says. "In this time, I mean. It's 2001 -- had you met Kate yet?"

"I --" Connor seems taken off guard by the question, and he frowns. "I'd met her, yeah. But we sort of -- drifted apart. I guess in a couple of years I'll see her again. The teenage version of me will, anyway."

"She changed the world for you when they killed you in the future," Kyle says, sitting up. "She sent a Terminator back to save you in 2003. I've heard the story. That was when you -- fell in love, I guess?"

Connor shakes his head, not in answer to the question, just in exasperation.

"I've got a small window for getting back," he says.

"You're good to," Kyle says. He sits up and looks down at Marcus, who is feeling light-headed, feeling light, like he might blow away. "I don't know if I could."

"Yeah, well," Connor mutters, turning to go. "Kate is there."

He drives away in the Taurus without saying goodbye, and Kyle watches him go. Marcus fades in and out of consciousness, wondering if Kyle was right about him being okay, because he feels like he might die, like he might just slip off the earth, loose and airy even as his whole body throbs.

"We should get you to a hospital," Kyle says softly, leaning over him.

"Nah," Marcus says. Because what the hell is he thinking. Kyle is right about everything, turns out.

"Nah?"

"C'mere."

Kyle lets out his breath and lies down against Marcus' side, putting his head on Marcus' uninjured shoulder. Marcus closes his eyes and then drags them open again. Kyle's side rises and falls under Marcus' hand with his breath, and somewhere a vulture shrieks.

"Everything you said was true," Marcus says.

"Told you," Kyle says. He leans up to kiss Marcus' jaw. "So you see. We have a lot of work to do."

"Uh-huh."

"But maybe you should heal up first. Hey, maybe we could go on a trip! While you recover? My dad told me about all the different countries. I heard someone speaking Spanish once. It's crazy."

Marcus groans and pats Kyle's back, the reality of what he's being forced to accept still hovering on the periphery of his mind, not sinking in.

"That costs too much money," Marcus says. "We're poor and unemployed. Welcome to paradise."

Kyle laughs and slings a leg across Marcus' middle, still happy as a fucking clam, his grin pressed up under Marcus' chin. Marcus hears a familiar noise then, one that he can't quite put his finger on for a moment, and then he realizes that it's his cell phone ringing in the pocket of his jeans. Only one person in the world has his cell number. Ray.

"What's that?" Kyle asks, shooting up from the mattress as if an alarm has gone off.

"My phone." Marcus sits up beside him and scrambles to get the phone from his pocket. He uses it so rarely that he forgot that he had it. Ray only ever calls him if something gets screwed up with a job, and it's usually a last resort, because Ray tends toward paranoia and always thinks the cops are recording his telephone conversations.

"Are you going to answer it?" Kyle asks, and Marcus can't decide. Then he does, because it's not like Ray is going to call him up just to yell at him some more. And even if he did, Marcus would take that as a good sign, somehow. Progress or something.

"What?" Marcus says, and he can hear Ray's harsh breathing before he speaks. It's enough to make some kind of anchor in Marcus' chest free fall into his stomach.

"Mark," Ray says, crying. "Please, you gotta help me."

"Ray -- what --"

"There's this guy here, this big guy, he says he's going to kill me if you don't come, if you don't bring that kid --"

"Fuck, Ray --"

"Please, Mark, please, I'm your brother, you gotta help me man -- I didn't --" Ray screams as if someone has struck him and then the phone goes dead. Marcus is already up from the mattress, jogging toward the truck, and Kyle is following him, shouting questions.

"What the hell?" Kyle says, grabbing at Marcus' arm. "What did he say? Where are you going?"

"That guy -- thing -- that tried to kill us, it's at the house," Marcus says, trying to climb into the passenger seat. Kyle pulls him back out, shaking his head.

"No, no, you can't go there, it's a trap!"

"No shit, but what am I going to do? You stay here --"

"No! Marcus, you don't -- listen, that probably wasn't even Ray on the phone."

"What?" Marcus gets into the truck and slams the door. He's not really thinking, set into automatic mode by the sound of Ray's voice. Marcus hasn't heard Ray like that since he was maybe eight or nine years old, getting his ass kicked by the old man.

"It wasn't even him!" Kyle says, climbing into the passenger side.

"I told you to stay here."

"Stay here! No, Marcus, you can't go, and I won't -- listen, the T-800, it can imitate voices."

"Yeah, great, whatever, it's still at the house, Ray is still there --"

"He's dead!" Kyle shrieks, grabbing Marcus' shoulder. Marcus turns to him, frozen with his hand on the truck's key, half-turned.

"No." Marcus starts the car, shaking his head. "You don't know that."

"Yes, I do! The T-800 kills humans before it imitates them --"

"He was calling me Mark! That fucking machine couldn't know -- "

"Okay, fine, let's say your brother is alive. He'll be dead by the time we get there, and --"

"We aren't going fucking anywhere, I'm dropping you off --"

"Marcus, it only wants Connor, and it doesn't care who it kills on the way to getting him, it would have killed me before it --"

"It doesn't matter!" Marcus shouts, because he can't make sense of any of this. "You didn't hear him -- you don't know what it's like --"

"Yes, I do!" Kyle screams, his voice so shrill that Marcus stops the car as they're pulling out of the junk yard -- he doesn't really know where he's going, anyway. Kyle stares at Marcus as if he's startled himself with the volume of his own voice, his lips trembling with the weight of what he's about to say.

"They made another one that looked like you," Kyle says, his voice soft now, worn thin. "And they tried to get to me with it. Connor had to -- tie me up, I, I would have done anything. I went kinda. Insane, I guess. Because it was you and you were hurt and you needed help and I was going to give it all up just to pretend that I could believe it was really you out there, waiting for me."

Marcus grips the steering wheel and tries to slow his breathing down. The phone starts ringing again, the cup holder where Marcus tossed it when he climbed into the truck, and Kyle grabs it before Marcus can. He pitches it out the window, and it's still ringing as it bounces through the sand.

"Please believe me," Kyle says, reaching for Marcus and then drawing his hand back when he sees how tight Marcus' jaw has become, and how deadly his grip on the wheel is. "Please, Marcus. You're just going to get yourself killed if you go back there."

Marcus sits in the driver's seat, unmoving, his head beginning to throb in time with the wound on his shoulder, which has soaked the t-shirt Kyle tied around it with blood, everything finally beginning to dry up in the heat. The phone is still ringing, maybe twenty feet from the car, the sound muffled by the beat of Marcus' heart, which is deafening between his ears. He realizes now that he thought Ray would never die. That he thought they would always be together, unhappily, barely getting by. Now nothing he believes is true anymore. The world has become some kind of comic book nightmare. Except that Kyle is here, looking at him like he's going to die, too, if Marcus goes back to Elgin Avenue, and he probably would. Marcus lets go of the steering wheel and sits back, pushing his sweat-soaked shirt against the seat's cracked leather.

"So what do we do?" Marcus asks.

"I don't know," Kyle says. He lets out his breath, relieved. "Marcus. I'm sorry about your brother."

"Don't -- I can't think about that, so just -- just tell me what to do about this robot, fuck, how can any of this be real?"

Kyle sighs. "Just drive north," he says, pointing down the long desert road that is shimmering with heat, leading away from the junk yard. "Back toward the city. We've got to destroy the T-800 somehow. It doesn't communicate with a base or anything like that, so it won't know that Connor has gone back to 2018. It'll just keep coming after us, thinking we know where Connor is."

Marcus doesn't say anything for awhile, just drives. He's always been the driver, he knows how to do this, even when he's bleeding and thirsty and so tired he can't remember real sleep. He thinks about everything Kyle has told him, so much of it still too outlandish to seem like anything more than the kid's hysterical delusions. The world will end in three years unless Marcus helps Kyle stop it. He never wanted this kind of responsibility, but he never wanted anything petty, either. He never wanted anything, not really, until Kyle showed up.

"So Skynet," Marcus says. "They're responsible for what happens."

"Yeah. Connor thought he stopped them in the past once, stopped them from developing the technology that causes Judgment Day, but it didn't work. We have to figure out a way not just to destroy the technology, but to make it so people won't let Skynet get away with this, so that they know what will happen if Skynet goes forward with the project. But who will believe us? You didn't even believe me until you saw --"

Marcus slams on the brakes and Kyle sags forward against his seat belt. Dust rises up around the car like a poisonous fog, and they're both coughing as Marcus turns the car around.

"What are you doing?" Kyle asks, flailing a little.

"Going back," Marcus says.

"Back where? To the junkyard? Why?"

"To get my phone."

"What?" Kyle slaps his knees, panting in exasperation. Marcus loves him when he's like this, agitated, trying to make Marcus believe something unbelievable. He thinks of Kyle in the future, running into the arms of some evil robot Marcus clone, something that wanted to kill him. He feels insane and good and terrible, too, because of Ray. He presses the pedal to the floorboard because he's not sure how much time they have.

"Just trust me," Marcus says to Kyle. "You said this thing doesn't want to kill me, right?"

"Well, it didn't before, but this could be a new Terminator, one that knows I don't mean anything now and that it doesn't need to keep you alive so that I'll --"

"Let's just hope it's the same one, then," Marcus says. He squeals to a stop when he sees the gates of the junk yard, and throws his door open to go and look for the cell phone. Kyle grabs his arm as he's climbing out of the truck.

"What are you doing?" Kyle asks.

"Saving the world, I guess," Marcus says with a shrug, and Kyle lets him go.

*

The news vans are already there when Kyle and Marcus arrive at Elgin Avenue, but the cops haven't shown up yet. Marcus parks down the street from the house, his stomach lurching at the thought of his brother inside that house with the bullet-riddled metal man from the motel. Dead. Murdered. But Ray said he could have been something, as if he wasn't as happy with his pissed away life as he pretended to be, and now he will be something, he'll be the biggest thing there is.

Kyle and Marcus hide in the narrow alley between two houses across the street, watching with a number of other onlookers who have come out onto their porches and driveways to see what the news vans are filming. When the cops arrive, they start telling people to get inside, that there is a hostage situation in progress. Most people attempt to stay, and the cops don't work very hard to brush the stragglers back into their houses, but Marcus keeps back in the shadows, Kyle clutching at his back.

"People are going to get killed," Kyle whispers. "Cops."

"I know," Marcus says. "But we might not get this chance again. And even if we didn't do this, the thing would still be loose in the city, killing whoever gets in its way."

It's still hard to stand back and watch what happens. The cops fail to initiate communication with the hostage-taker, and they storm the house. The gun shots seem louder than any Marcus has ever heard. The Terminator comes out the front door shooting and fells everyone in his path, bullets sinking into him like raindrops into a puddle. Most of the reporters bolt, but one of the more ambitious ones dies live on television. Kyle is holding onto Marcus, his arm around Marcus' waist and his breath hot on the back of Marcus' shoulder. Marcus feels like he's already watching the world end as the Terminator helps itself to a cop car and speeds toward the city. Two of the news vans follow. Kyle runs out of the alley and toward one of the cops who was shot, kneels down and puts his fingers against the man's neck, looking for a pulse. When he can't find one, Marcus just stares down at him, feeling as if he's going to have to explain death to Kyle, too. But Kyle must know plenty about that, because when the ambulances scream onto the scene he stands up and walks away without looking back.

"It's because of me," Kyle says as they make for the truck. "Those people died --"

"They were all going to die anyway," Marcus says. He's shaking pretty bad, because one of the cops who fell looked only a few years older than Kyle. "And now people will know," Marcus says, reassuring himself as much as Kyle. "When they stop the Terminator there will be an investigation, and it will lead back to Skynet, and then the whole company will be investigated, blamed."

"Maybe," Kyle mutters, still staring at the dead and wounded on the street, the path of destruction left behind by the Terminator.

"Yeah, well," Marcus says, taking hold of Kyle's shoulder. "It's the only plan we got."

The highway starts to empty out as the news about the incident in Los Angeles spreads throughout the state. Radio DJs speak gravely of a possible alien attack, an indestructible man who killed at least twenty and injured hundreds before he was taken down near the airport by a S.W.A.T. team. Every station has a different theory about where the Terminator came from. Marcus wants to turn it off, but Kyle is on the edge of his seat, chewing his nails, listening.

"What if this works?" Kyle says. "They'll send more Terminators after us."

"I guess," Marcus says. "I don't know if those machines are as smart as they -- think they are. Why don't they just go back to when Connor was a baby and kill him then if they're so worried about him? Why don't they kill his freaking grandparents while they're babies? Jesus."

"I don't think they're that creative," Kyle says, smirking. "It's like, I don't know. I don't really know what it's like."

"Hey, listen. I don't know anything anymore."

Kyle unbuckles his seat belt and scoots over to put his head on Marcus' shoulder, staring up at him with those doe-eyes until Marcus glances down at him. Kyle grins, and Marcus figures he's right, he's got a point. He does know this one thing, the only thing in the world that could make all the murderous robots in the world easy enough to accept, as long as Kyle's head is on his shoulder.

"You ever seen the redwoods?" Marcus asks.

"The what?" Kyle asks, and Marcus will never get tired of this, Kyle blinking at the world as if it's all brand new and better every minute.

Ray is famous by the time Marcus and Kyle reach Crescent City. He was the first person killed by the Metal Man, whose crushed remains are in FBI custody. The theories about why the Metal Man was holding Ray hostage and who made the call to tip off the police are crazier than anything Kyle has ever told Marcus. He smiles when a caller to a radio show suggests that Ray might have been an alien, too, some more advanced, closer-to-human model. Marcus' eyes burn, but only for a few seconds, when he thinks about how Ray's laugh would have shaken the cab of the truck. Hear that, Mark, turns out I'm a fucking Martian. Explains a lot, Marcus would have said, and they would have driven on, to the next town, the next job, the next shithole house with the windows always covered. Maybe they would have gone on that way forever if Marcus hadn't found Kyle. If Kyle hadn't found Marcus.

Marcus buys Kyle a notebook and some pens at a gas station and he starts writing down everything he knows about Skynet, composing letters to newspapers and the L.A.P.D. and the families of the victims, claiming to be a company insider instead of a time traveler. Even if a Terminator comes back for Kyle and Marcus now, it's too late to make people forget. Marcus waits to feel accomplished, as if they really did save the world, but he knows there's no such thing. One robot apocalypse down, so what. Humans will figure out another way to destroy themselves before too long.

It's dark when they get to the Redwood Forest National Park, just like it was the last time Marcus was here. His father brought him and Ray up to the park once when they were kids, raving the whole way about the camping trips he used to take with his dad when he was a boy. They had no tent and nothing to eat except for some powdered donuts that Ray had been resourceful enough to steal from a gas station shop when their father stopped to fill up the truck, but it was a good time, and Marcus has never really stopped thinking about these massive fucking trees. When he's standing beneath them their size makes anything seem possible, and Kyle keeps crashing into him, walking backward with his eyes tipped up to the tree tops.

"Can we stay here?" Kyle asks, as if he wants to build a log cabin on the park grounds.

"For the night," Marcus says. He hasn't had a cigarette since he was seventeen but for some reason he wants one now. It's gonna be hard to sleep. He got a six pack at the gas station and he reaches into the truck to pull a can from the plastic rings.

"Then what?" Kyle asks, hovering. Marcus hands him a beer and Kyle looks down at it as if he doesn't know what it's for, then holds the can against his cheek, because it's still cold from the gas station refrigerator.

"I don't know," Marcus says. "Maybe we'll just keep driving north until we hit penguins. I don't know." He sits down at the base of a tree to drink his beer, the massive confidence of its trunk against his back enough to almost calm him down. Kyle is quickly at his side, cracking open his own beer too hard and pulling the tab clean off.

"Careful," Marcus says while Kyle tucks the tab into his pocket like he might need it later. "You'll cut your lip on that sharp part."

Kyle spits his beer out instantly anyway, and gives the rest to Marcus, who should have gotten him a soda. And hell, something to eat. He kind of forgot about food for awhile there. He inherited the ability to do that from his father, and without Ray around, someone will have to remember to buy chips and cinnamon buns at gas stations.

"I'm not very good with like. Plans," Marcus says. Kyle leans against him and shrugs, curls his knees up to his chest.

"Yes, you are," he says. "Look what you did today."

"Yeah, look what I did," Marcus mutters, thinking of the people who died, of Ray. Kyle picks up Marcus' arm and pulls it around his shoulders, settling in closer, like Marcus is his sleeping bag.

"You did good," Kyle says. "You might have even changed things. This definitely didn't happen in any of the other histories. It will at least complicate things for Skynet. I'll write my letters and --" He breaks off there, yawning. "And maybe, I don't know." He pulls Marcus' arm up across his chest and shuts his eyes against Marcus' shirt, as if he's tucking himself in. "I guess we won't really know what happens until Judgment Day."

Marcus scoffs. "Ain't that the way it goes," he says. He finishes his beer and then Kyle's, and lifts Kyle up off the ground when the darkness starts to hoot too wildly around them. He lays Kyle across the front seat of the truck and lets him sleep with his head on his thigh while he drives them further north. Marcus' shoulder is still sore, but it was a flesh wound, like Kyle said, and it'll heal. Kyle sleeps like dead weight against him, his face turned into Marcus' stomach, fingers twisted in the hem of Marcus' shirt. Marcus drives for as long as he can, then pulls into a motel and pays for a room in cash while Kyle stands outside the front office, yawning, his arms crossed over his chest. They've got eight hundred and thirty eight dollars to go before they have to figure out what they're really going to do now.

Closing the door to the motel room and bolting it shut feels like the most important thing Marcus has ever done. He doesn't put on any lights, and Kyle goes right for the bed, collapsing onto it, looking like a normal teenager after a long night of drinking, still in his clothes. Marcus sits beside him on the bed and rubs his back for awhile, distracted, Kyle's tired little moans making his dick ache. Now, after he almost dies or barely escapes from getting arrested or just has a shitty day at the shitty job that he's headed toward taking, he can come home and fuck someone he loves. He feels like he's unlocked some big secret to life that surprisingly few people in the world actually know.

"I'm gonna take a shower," Marcus says, scratching his hand through Kyle's hair before he stands from the bed.

"Me too," Kyle mumbles into the sheets, but he doesn't move, so Marcus reaches down to lift him into his arms. Kyle groans and slumps against Marcus as he carries him into the bathroom. Marcus wonders how much of a reprieve they've earned this time, how much longer they have until someone comes pounding on the door.

They take a ridiculously long shower, Kyle half asleep under the water, kissing Marcus lazily and stroking his fingers around the edges of his gunshot wound, which is red and angry under the water. Kyle seems mesmerized by it, as if he's afraid the wound itself is a danger to them, some kind of evil talisman.

"When you died you had a metal hand," Kyle says. He reaches down and lifts Marcus' right hand to his lips, kisses his fingers. "This one."

"Now, see," Marcus says. "I can't tell if you're talking nonsense in your sleep or saying something true."

"Both," Kyle says, grinning, and he pushes his half-hard cock against Marcus' thigh. "You gonna carry me back to the bed?"

"You've got a thing for that, huh?" Marcus says, turning off the water.

"No, but you do," Kyle says, laughing. He's probably right, but Marcus calls him a smartass and makes him walk back to the bed himself.

"What are you gonna do with me now that you got me back?" Marcus asks when he's leaning up over Kyle, stroking his cock in lazy pulls, Kyle humming against Marcus' cheek, begging for more in little twitches of his hips, his eyes closed.

"I'm already doing it," Kyle says, laughing again, and something about the way he laughs at Marcus, as if Marcus is kind of clueless and hopeless and small, is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for him. Marcus feels like it's been at least two years since Kyle showed up on his doorstep, that blanket wrapped around him, those eyes so big.

He sucks Kyle's cock, because it's on the list of things he wants to introduce Kyle to, which he composed in his head while Kyle slept in the truck. Kyle curses in some crazy non-language when he comes, and then he gasps up at the ceiling for a long time, Marcus licking his cheek, until he knocks Marcus onto his back and tries to return the favor. He's pretty lousy at sucking cock, but he moans and sighs while he does it, like he's getting off on the taste, and Marcus comes at the first slide of Kyle's tongue across his balls. Kyle crawls up and flops onto Marcus gracelessly, exhaling an eternal sigh against his neck. He's asleep about two seconds later, the last three or four inches of tension sinking out of him.

Marcus lies awake for awhile, sweating under the heat of Kyle's body and listening for approaching enemies, nuclear explosions, the blare of the cell phone. Part of him thinks Ray is going to call him up and tell him what it's like to be dead, that Ray will laugh about it and dismiss it and passive-aggressively apologize for throwing Marcus out of the house. But nobody calls, and nobody comes to the door, and the world doesn't end. Outside, it's morning already, and the comfort of the blurry blue light through the blinds finally puts Marcus to sleep.

He dreams that he's at Ray's grave, alone, trying to read it, but for some reason he can't because the words keep rearranging and don't make sense anyway. When he looks up, he's not alone anymore. Their father is there, frowning down at Ray's headstone and smoking a cigarette.

"I knew you'd outlive him," his father says. He doesn't sound like he's happy about being right.

"Fuck you," Marcus says, because if there's anyone he's going to defend Ray to, it's this bastard. Or maybe he's defending himself, because it's all his fault.

"What the hell are you doing?" his father asks, glaring at him.

"I don't know," Marcus says, but he's not apologizing for it.

"Yeah, well." His father throws the cigarette into the grass and puts his hands in his pockets. "I never did, either."

"I'm not like you," Marcus says.

"No shit," his father says, but suddenly he's Ray, and he's smirking, winking. "Good luck with that," he says, and then Marcus wakes up like someone has pushed on his forehead with two stiff, obnoxious fingers, which is how Ray used to wake him up when he fell asleep in the car, slumped in the backseat while Ray navigated and the old man ranted about whatever was on the radio. He opens his eyes and sits forward, thinking he's going to see the windshield, an empty highway stretching out ahead of them.

Instead, he sees an old TV set, and a shady motel room shut off from a bright afternoon. He looks to his left and sees Kyle, on his back in bed and holding the Holy Bible over his face, squinting at it. He throws it onto the bedside table when he sees that Marcus is awake.

"Can we go to a library?" Kyle asks, as if he's disappointed by the selection of reading material in this motel room.

"Sure," Marcus says, scrubbing his hands over his face. "Sure, yeah. And food, you need to eat."

"So do you," Kyle says, and he beams when Marcus looks at him with irritation, because apparently Kyle wants to look after him, too. Marcus slides back down to his pillow and for awhile they just lie there and kiss each other experimentally, taking the time to really learn it now, touching each other like they're afraid they'll wake from this better dream.

"I feel so bad for that other me," Kyle says, and for a minute Marcus has no idea what he's talking about. "But maybe he'll never know Judgment Day, maybe he'll grow up with his mom and dad and go to school and drink soda all the time."

"Then you should be jealous of him, not sorry for him."

"Jealous! What!" Kyle sits up, grinning. "Are you kidding?"

"What?" Marcus mutters, though he gets it, he does. Kyle shakes his head and lies down again, sighing, as if he has to explain everything.

"I wouldn't want to be him," Kyle says. "Not for the sodas, not for anything."

Marcus wants to scoff and tell him he's ridiculous, because Kyle watched his father die, never knew his mother, lived worn out and rootless for so long, so close to death that it was one of his only friends, but Marcus knows what Kyle means, how he wouldn't give up any of it because it got him where he is now. Every second and every scar and every disappointment, they all lined up to dump him here, and now it all seems like careful artwork, a masterpiece, destiny, whatever.

He keeps meaning to get out of bed, get in the truck and buy Kyle some Mountain Dew and pancakes, but he can't make himself do it, and Kyle doesn't seem to mind, just keeps rolling around and kissing him and wrapping his leg around the small of Marcus' back. Marcus feels now like he knew this was the meaning of life, the point of everything, like he knew it all along, but he's fucking fooling himself, because if he had really known anything he would have built his own time machine and gotten himself there sooner, he would have ripped a hole in the sky to fall through, he would have done everything he could. It's all he plans to do for the rest of his life: everything he can to keep this. It's the first real plan he's ever had, and he knows now why it took him so long to formulate it, because any other plan would amount to nothing but useless bullshit in comparison, and he knew that, maybe, instinctively, before he knew anything else.

**