Archive of Our Own

"Go kill yourself."

It had become a mantra in his daily life, muttered at every inconvenience, every frustration, every tiny thing that went wrong.

It used to belong to someone else.

It used to make him furious whenever Jimmy said it carelessly between laughs or arguments, like it was the answer to every problem.

Now he'd give anything to hear it again.

Breakfast had gone badly before it had even really started. The mug slipped from his prosthetic grip, struck the tile, and cracked in half. Orange juice spread across the floor in a sticky river while shards skittered beneath his legs.

Curly stared down at the mess.

"Fucking go kill yourself," he muttered at the ruined mug.

A nurse nearby snorted softly as he stepped forward, already reaching to steady Curly's arm.

Curly flushed beneath the layers of scar tissue that covered what remained of his face. Embarrassment settled heavy in his chest as the nurse guided him toward a table.

"Sorry," Curly mumbled.

"It's just a cup," the nurse replied kindly. "You're allowed to be annoyed."

Curly wasn't sure he believed that. He slumped into his usual spot, shoulders tense, a headache already building behind his eyes.

Sometimes an old voice creeps in. That maybe things would have been easier if he'd never woken up.

That Jimmy should have finished what he had started.

Sometimes he thinks he should have just killed himself. But he's too much of a coward to even commit.

Instead, here he was. Burned over nearly every inch of his body. A quadruple amputee.

Afraid of the dark. Afraid of cramped spaces. Afraid of the cold, yet too terrified to sit near a fireplace or strike a match.

He hated depending on people. Hated the way nurses lifted him into bed. Hated being wheeled from room to room. Hated watching everyone pretend they weren't exhausted by him.

Even now, with prosthetics custom-made for him, expensive and painstakingly fitted, he barely touched them.

Most days he retreated to the library and sat alone among shelves of books to brood.

A wheelchair rolled alongside him.

"Curly," a familiar voice rasped. "You look miserable. Tough morning?"

Curly lifted his head.

His friend was grinning. Or at least trying to. Severe burns had altered both their expressions, reducing smiles to subtle shifts around scar tissue and grafts.

He'd been at the rehabilitation center about a month longer than Curly.

Somehow they'd become inseparable. Maybe because they understood each other without explanation. Maybe because misery loved company.

"I dropped my cup," Curly said.

His friend raised an eyebrow.

"Told it to die."

That earned a laugh. It was rough and uneven, damaged throat still relearning how to make sounds years after smoke and heat had torn through them.

They'd relearned a lot together. How to speak. How to eat. How to tolerate mirrors.

His friend had adapted to prosthetics far quicker than Curly ever had. Though even he still preferred his wheelchair some days, especially when his new legs rubbed painfully against sensitive skin.

"Do you want to watch the new movie with me?"

Curly turned his head toward his friend. His face was just as ruined as Curly's own. Burned skin stretched across old grafts, scar tissue twisting familiar features into something unfamiliar. His lips had never fully recovered, leaving his words slightly slurred and rough around the edges. They had both endured countless surgeries, and doctors still offered more procedures meant to soften scars, restore movement, and make them more palatable for strangers to look at.

His friend had declined every single one.

Curly wasn't sure what he wanted anymore. Part of him thought he should say yes. Another part of him felt exhausted by the idea of trying to look like the person he'd been before.

"What movie?" Curly asked.

His friend looked away, thinking. "The new war one. Uh..." His scarred brow furrowed. "Something with cows in the title? I don't know. Doesn't matter."

Curly snorted.

"Listen, I asked permission to go to the theater and they actually said yes. Supervised outing and everything." He glanced back at Curly. "Want to come?"

Curly blinked.

"Wait. They actually approved that? Sure. I'll go." Curly hesitated, his expression shifted. "But... Why me?"

His friend shrugged. "I thought we could test out our legs."

Curly grimaced.

"And..." His friend smiled, or did his best approximation of one. "I want to spend time with you before they drag me off to jail."

Right.

Curly forgot sometimes that his friend wasn't here forever. He was only staying until doctors decided he was stable enough to continue serving his sentence.

Maybe that was another reason Curly gravitated toward him. Sometimes, when his friend laughed too loudly or rolled his eyes just right—

All Curly could see was Jimmy.

Fucking Jimmy.

Fuck Jimmy.

He wishes he had.

Maybe he would have sought him out on board instead.

Curly readjust himself in his seat. Those thoughts started pouring out of him lately more than he'd like to admit.

He hated how Jimmy had a hold on him. Even now, when he's dead six feet under.

"Sounds like a date," Curly finally said.

His friend barked out a laugh. Curly smiled faintly.

It was easy to joke with him. His friend never never got defensive when Curly playfully flirted. It was refreshing. Jimmy would always snap back and curse Curly out for any display of affection if it seemed gay. 

Jimmy would cross his boundaries so many times but if Curly even once tested a line with him, Jimmy would burst into a rage. And it took so much effort to get him to calm down.

But strangely, Curly found it worth it.

Because Jimmy hadn't always been cruel.

He'd been broken. Neglected. Hurting. Life had failed him in ways Curly couldn't even begin to understand.

But understanding someone didn't erase what they'd done.

It was his fault everyone died. It was his fault Curly now spent his days in a rehabilitation ward while nurses adjusted his prosthetics and doctors discussed future surgeries like he had a life to live.

He shivers at the thought.

He hated hospital beds. All that time in space, unable to move, stuck to the bed being force fed pills because Jimmy was losing his sanity and didn't know how to be gentle.

It scarred Curly. Hospital rooms, pills, the cold, knives, meat, horses. 

The one horse actually.

Even hearing a familiar jingle was enough to make his body tense up in full shock.

Trauma was cruel like that.

He keeps repeating Jimmy's joke in his head over and over no matter how hard Curly tries to push it away.

Polle says go kill yourself.

Jimmy used to say it with a grin, with that strange blend of self-deprecation and humor that always seemed to leave Curly feeling more uneasy than amused. He had never liked the joke, never laughed when Jimmy repeated it, never allowed it to pass without correction because hearing those words tossed around so casually made something tighten in his chest, made him feel responsible for pulling Jimmy back toward safer ground, toward healthier ways of speaking.

Back then Curly had believed he was helping.

Now he wondered if he had only succeeded in teaching Jimmy that certain thoughts were unwelcome, that certain feelings had to remain hidden, folded inward, buried beneath sarcasm and poorly timed jokes until they solidified into something heavier and more dangerous.

Jimmy hadn't said those things because he enjoyed upsetting people.

At least Curly didn't think so.

Jimmy never seemed to possess the vocabulary necessary to describe what was happening inside himself. Everything became irritation, anger, mockery, bitterness, or humor because those were the only languages he knew how to speak fluently. Vulnerability was foreign to him. Admitting pain seemed almost humiliating in his eyes, as though acknowledging weakness would somehow prove everyone else's worst assumptions about him correct.

And perhaps, as the walls had begun closing in around him, as Pony Express prepared to discard him, as the future he had imagined for himself narrowed into nothing, Jimmy had simply run out of energy to continue pretending he was functional.

Curly understood that feeling. He understood what it meant to sit inside your own mind and discover corners so dark and suffocating that even acknowledging their existence felt dangerous.

The difference was that Curly rarely spoke those thoughts aloud. He drifted away from them instead.

He dissociated instead, allowing himself to drift somewhere distant and indistinct, spending hours staring at ceilings, tracing cracks in paint, counting tiles, rereading the same paragraph in their work manual repeatedly to seem busy.

He disappeared into himself because disappearing felt easier than asking for help.

And if he was being honest, he never trusted Jimmy enough to tell him those things.

He never trusted Anya enough either. Not because they were cruel or wouldn't have cared.

But because Curly had spent his entire life convincing himself that being needed was more important than needing other people.

Captains were supposed to be stable. They were supposed to carry burdens, not distribute them. They were supposed to reassure people, not confess that they woke up some mornings wondering if they had enough strength to continue performing normalcy for another twenty-four hours.

Sometimes Curly wondered what would have happened if he had been honest. If he had sat beside Jimmy one night and admitted that he understood.

That he knew what it felt like to dread existing. That he knew what it was like to feel trapped inside expectations you never asked for but couldn't escape.

Would Jimmy have listened? Would Jimmy have laughed? Would Jimmy have gotten angry?

Or would something have shifted between them? Would things have ended differently?

Curly thought about therapy more often these days.

About the pamphlets handed to him after his second year hauling freight through space.

He had refused immediately.

Why?

Because admitting he needed help felt like admitting he had failed.

Jimmy would have said it was because Curly thought he was better than everyone else.

That he thought he was superior.

And Curly would have denied it.

He still denied it.

But somewhere beneath that denial lingered an uncomfortable truth.

Yes.

Maybe there had been a part of him that believed he had to be.

He was their captain. He had responsibilities. He had to be stronger.

More composed. More capable. More resilient.

He had built an identity around being dependable because if people relied on him then he had value beyond existing.

But Jimmy had always been painfully good at seeing through him. Jimmy had always known exactly where to aim his words.

He had spent years convincing himself that he was stronger than the people around him, only to realize far too late that strength had merely become another excuse to avoid difficult conversations, suppress uncomfortable truths, and maintain the illusion that he was capable of carrying burdens no one had ever actually asked him to shoulder alone.

He had only ever felt strong because Jimmy stood beside him.

Jimmy supported him. Believed in him. Looked at him as though Curly was someone worth following. Someone worth admiring.

And Curly had spent years trying desperately to become the version of himself Jimmy seemed convinced already existed.

Perhaps that had saved him. Perhaps it had destroyed him too.

Because in the end Jimmy had still placed him inside the last functioning cryopod.

Jimmy had still chosen him.

Even after the ship became a tomb drifting through endless darkness.

Jimmy had spared Curly from seeing it happen. There was a strange kindness in that.

A final act of consideration from someone who had so often struggled to be gentle.

But distance changed very little.

Nothing could have silenced the sound that echoed through the corridors afterward.

Nothing could erase the sharp crack reverberating through steel walls and empty rooms.

Nothing could stop Curly from carrying that sound with him.

And no matter how much time passed, Curly remained haunted by the possibility that Jimmy had died believing he was alone and unwanted, while Curly continued living burdened by that knowledge

"You seem to be having a bad day. Wanna talk about it?"

His friend's voice pulled him back into the present before his thoughts could descend any deeper into places he wasn't sure he wanted to visit, and as he lifted his gaze he found himself studying the familiar details of his companion's face, delicate patches of hair had finally begun returning after years of surgeries and setbacks, and the faint signs of progress that both encouraged him and exhausted him in equal measure.

He inhaled deeply, held it for a moment, and released it through his nose. "Let's go to the library," he said quietly. "I don't think I want to eat anymore."

His friend nodded without protest, understanding him well enough by now to know that some mornings food became secondary to surviving whatever storm had settled inside Curly's head, and so Curly maneuvered himself behind the wheelchair, adjusting his balance as best he could before wrapping his hands around the handles and allowing the familiar motion to guide him forward through the halls.

This arrangement had become something of a routine between them, half practical necessity and half unspoken comfort, because Curly found stability in having something to lean against and his friend found amusement in acting as an unwilling mobility aid, even if he occasionally complained about being demoted to walker.

The library itself was unimpressive, consisting of little more than a modest room lined with shelves, worn paperbacks, a handful of bean bags, and a pair of armchairs. But to Curly it had gradually transformed into something sacred, becoming less of a room and more of a refuge from the world.

It reminded him of Jimmy.

Not the Jimmy, the man consumed by desperation and unraveled beneath pressures Curly had failed to fully recognize.

But Jimmy before everything had fallen apart.

Jimmy curled awkwardly into an old chair aboard the ship,  in the tiny section near the kitchen, his knees drawn toward his chest, a dog-eared book balanced in his lap while his teeth worried relentlessly at the edges of his fingernails, his eyes darting across pages, the only reliable method he had for escaping.

Curly had often joined him there carrying two cups of coffee so terrible they barely deserved the title, settling into the seat opposite him and listening to the quiet hum of the vessel while they talked about nothing particularly important, discussing movies they would never have time to watch, destinations they would probably never visit, and hypothetical futures.

Sometimes Curly would close his eyes entirely, allowing exhaustion to pull at him while his hands rested across his stomach, and Jimmy would continue reading or rambling about whatever nonsense occupied his thoughts that day until eventually he nudged Curly awake and informed him, usually with theatrical annoyance, that captains were apparently expected to spend at least some portion of their shifts inside the cockpit.

Curly tightened his grip around the wheelchair handles.

His friend had been right.

It was a bad day.

Jimmy had settled into his thoughts again and refused to leave.

Go kill yourself.

Go kill yourself.

Go kill yourself.

The phrase echoed endlessly, worn smooth by repetition, and Curly found himself revisiting it the way one returns to an old injury, pressing against the bruise despite already knowing it will hurt.

Jimmy had said those words so effortlessly.

They had rolled off his tongue with the ease of a reflex, appearing whenever coffee tasted terrible, whenever equipment malfunctioned, whenever dinner disappointed him, whenever paperwork piled up, whenever the weather irritated him, whenever life inconvenienced him in ways both profound and utterly insignificant.

He directed the phrase toward coffee machines.

Toward sinks. Toward broken tools. Toward stars hidden behind clouds. Toward inanimate objects incapable of offense.

Toward himself.

Toward the world.

Toward anything that confused him, frustrated him, frightened him, or reminded him that existing often felt heavier than he knew how to articulate.

Curly understood now, with a clarity that arrived years too late to be useful, that Jimmy had never truly been joking.

Not entirely.

Humor had simply been the only acceptable container he possessed for thoughts he could not bear presenting honestly, because admitting vulnerability required trust, and Jimmy had never seemed convinced that trust was something people could survive intact.

He had spent his entire life hearing that voice inside himself, listening to it whisper day after day until eventually it no longer sounded cruel or alarming but familiar, comforting even, like background noise that had existed for so long it ceased feeling separate from his own identity.

And maybe Curly, despite all his efforts to correct him, had never actually offered an alternative.

He had objected. He had frowned. He had asked Jimmy not to say things like that.

But he had never asked why.

He had never sat beside him and said, What keeps telling you that?

He had never said, I hear things too.

Because Curly heard things too.

He always had.

He had simply become exceptionally talented at burying them beneath responsibility, routine, and the illusion that captains somehow existed outside the normal limitations of human beings.

Jimmy had eventually stopped fighting that voice.

Now Curly found himself confronting his own every single day, discovering with growing discomfort that surviving catastrophe did not silence intrusive thoughts but instead provided them with new material, new fears, new regrets, and new reasons to insist that dying might be easier than enduring another morning.

"Curly."

"Yeah?"

"I want to kill myself.”

Curly's expression softened, their faces had been long robbed of the ability to express themselves through subtle movements. He learned to read the exhaustion in his friend's eyes, in the slight lowering of his gaze, and in the quiet resignation that settled over him whenever those thoughts surfaced.

"I know, buddy."

And he did know.

When they had first been assigned the same room they hadn't spoken very much, not because they disliked one another, but because speaking itself had been a challenge, their throats still healing from burns severe enough to leave every word sounding rough and strained, forcing them to communicate through gestures and scribbled notes.

Curly remembered spending long evenings in that room watching news coverage about the crash, watching reporters speculate about what had happened, watching diagrams of the ship rotate across screens, watching footage of the wreckage alongside photographs of Jimmy that he already possessed in worn copies tucked away in a drawer he visited far more often than he cared to admit.

That bastard had spent years insisting he wasn't attractive, insisting that people barely noticed him, but Curly had always found that difficult to believe because Jimmy had a smirk that seemed to make people forgive his worst qualities before they even had the chance to recognize them. He possessed the sort of smile that could disarm people instantly, a crooked smirk capable of talking its way out of arguments, into parties, and almost certainly into anyone's bed if he truly wanted.

Curly sometimes caught himself wishing Jimmy had tried that charm on him, not because he thought it would have fixed anything or changed where they ultimately ended up, but because some selfish part of him wanted proof that Jimmy had looked at him as more than a captain, more than a responsibility, more than someone he admired from a distance and instead as someone worth wanting.

"Are you really okay with watching this movie with me?" his friend asked, pulling Curly back into the present. "There's gonna be gore, violence, explosions, fire, loud noises, and incredibly attractive actors."

That last part earned a tired laugh.

Curly lowered himself carefully into one of the cushioned chairs scattered around the library, grateful for anything soft enough to ease the constant ache lingering beneath grafted skin and damaged nerves.

"Yeah, I think I'll be fine," Curly said. "Besides, it's not like we'll be alone. Did they actually approve that movie?"

His friend snorted softly. "I told them exactly what it was and they weren't thrilled at first."

Curly could already imagine the expressions their nurses must have made when hearing that request, because a war film full of violence, fire, screaming, and chaos probably seemed like an objectively terrible idea for two burn survivors still navigating trauma, but then again the staff had also learned that protecting people from every possible trigger wasn't the same thing as helping them live.

And if he was being honest, Jimmy would have loved the entire ordeal.

After they landed, Jimmy had wanted to see movies again more than almost anything else, not because he particularly cared what was playing, but because he loved the experience itself, loved the sticky floors, the overpriced snacks, the terrible previews, the crowds of strangers, and even the inevitable disappointments that came with discovering a film was awful after spending money to see it.

Curly had always suspected that Jimmy wasn't actually inviting him to movies because he cared about the films, but because it was the closest thing Jimmy had to asking someone out, disguising affection behind sarcasm and casual suggestions so he never had to admit that he simply wanted company.

Jimmy had seemed genuinely excited about it too.

Curly remembered agreeing immediately, offering to buy every snack Jimmy wanted, already anticipating the inevitable complaints about the seats, the line, the ticket clerk, the popcorn being stale, or the movie itself, all of which would undoubtedly be met with Jimmy muttering his go to phrase.

It would have been perfect.

"Curly."

"Hm?"

"What are you gonna do when you leave?"

Go kill myself. It was a reflexive thought, something that had remained unchanged since waking up in this place and realizing Jimmy was gone.

"I think I'd like to visit a friend's apartment," Curly said after a moment.

His companion looked at him carefully. "The one who died?"

Curly nodded and exhaled quietly.

He doesn't even know if anything is still there, but he'd like to find photographs, clothes, books, old receipts, jackets, IDs, coffee mugs, or anything. He wanted proof that Jimmy had existed beyond headlines and investigations and photographs shown on television screens. He wanted tangible evidence that the man he remembered reading books in dimly lit corners had once occupied physical space in the world. He felt like the world moved on too quickly, like everyone decided Jimmy was a tragedy before they ever acknowledged he was a person.

His friend leaned back in his wheelchair.

"I want to kill myself."

Curly let out a weary laugh.

They had this conversation often enough that it had become almost ritualistic.

His friend no longer hid his exhaustion from life.

He had explained before that he kept attending therapy sessions, participating in rehabilitation, and smiling politely at nurses because he didn't want them to feel like they had failed, because they had worked too hard helping him relearn basic tasks for him to simply reject their efforts outright.

But he was tired. Profoundly tired.

And Curly understood that too.

"Before you do," Curly said softly, offering the closest thing to a smile his damaged face could still manage, "let's spend whatever time we've got left together."

"You've gotten better with your new arms," Curly said, watching his friend absentmindedly adjust the grip of one prosthetic against the other with confidence now.

"Yeah," his friend replied with the faintest hint of pride creeping into his damaged voice. "I can write my name again. You got better at walking too, even if you still look like you hate every second of it."

Curly smiled faintly before lowering his eyes toward his own prosthetic legs, flexing them just enough to feel the familiar resistance where scar tissue met the sockets.

"You were right about giving them a chance," he sighed quietly. "Sleeping has gotten easier now that I can walk around after a night terror."

His friend nodded without asking what the nightmares were about.

Nearly every nightmare led Curly back to the ship.

Sometimes Jimmy was laughing in the lounge while everyone else talked over one another as though nothing terrible would ever happen to them, and sometimes Curly found himself frozen in memories he'd rather never revisit, memories forcing him awake with nausea twisting his stomach so violently that he often had to sit perfectly still just to keep from getting sick.

He sees Jimmy talking to everyone's corpse at the table with a tear streaked face, he feels Jimmy feeding him his own le—

He swallowed hard.

No.

He refused to follow that memory any farther today.

His stomach was already empty, and throwing up nothing but bitter acid would only leave his throat burning for hours afterward.

His friend shifted slightly in his wheelchair before asking, almost casually, "You want to make a suicide pact with me?"

Curly's entire body stiffened.

The words struck him with such force that for a heartbeat he couldn't separate his friend from Jimmy, couldn't distinguish the present from the countless echoes still rattling around inside his own head, and instinctively every part of him wanted to reject the idea before it had even fully settled between them.

No.

Absolutely not.

And yet another thought followed immediately behind it, quieter and infinitely more dangerous.

If Jimmy had been the one asking...

Curly wasn't sure what his answer would have been.

"No," he said gently, forcing himself back into the room. "But... thanks for thinking of me."

His friend laughed softly. "I wondered what you'd say."

Curly let the silence linger for a while before speaking again. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"Does anybody know about your plans?"

His friend shrugged and Curly couldn't help noticing how much younger he had begun to seem over the past few weeks, retreating into small habits and emotional outbursts that reminded him less of the man he'd first met and more of a frightened child.

Curly didn't mind.

If anything, the familiarity hurts.

It reminded him of Jimmy.

Not because Jimmy had been childish in the way people often used the word, but because his emotions had always arrived without moderation, pouring out of him faster than he could contain them until joy became infectious, anger became explosive, grief became suffocating, and affection hid itself beneath teasing because vulnerability frightened him more than almost anything else.

Jimmy had been a spectacular display of humanity.

Everything he felt seemed to exist at maximum intensity, as though someone had removed whatever filter most people possessed and left him exposed to the world without protection, leaving every emotion to spill outward in brilliant, overwhelming color.

Curly had always thought there was something beautiful about that.

He only wished Jimmy could have believed it too.

He wished more than anything now, that Jimmy had known someone looked at him and saw beauty instead of inconvenience, because Jimmy had spent so much of his life assuming he needed nothing from anyone that he never seemed to realize how desperately he wanted to belong somewhere.

He had always reminded Curly of a stray cat that wandered through his childhood neighborhood, a scruffy little creature that refused to trust anyone completely and insisted on climbing people using claws sharp enough to leave scratches all over their arms, while Curly and his brothers laughed through the sting because even being scratched felt like proof that the animal had chosen them.

Then one morning the cat never came back.

His brothers found it first.

A car had hit it sometime during the night.

Curly cried for months afterward, haunted by the simple conviction that if he'd only carried it inside the house, if he'd only ignored every protest and every scratch, it might have survived.

Jimmy felt painfully similar.

He played.

He purred in his own strange way whenever he felt safe enough to relax.

He hissed whenever the world frightened him.

He climbed all over Curly's life with emotional claws that sometimes left wounds neither of them understood until much later.

And Curly had loved him anyway.

Around Jimmy he felt embarrassingly young again, like a schoolboy who had somehow escaped adulthood for a few stolen hours, spending evenings playing cards in the captain's quarters, shoving one another as they crossed paths in narrow hallways, twisting towels into makeshift whips just to snap them against each other's legs before dissolving into laughter that echoed through corridors otherwise occupied by humming engines and endless stars.

They had been unbelievably stupid together, and perhaps that was precisely why those memories hurt so much now, because somewhere out there, suspended forever in Curly's mind, existed a version of their lives untouched by tragedy, where two idiots floated through space convinced they had all the time in the universe.

Jimmy had burned brightly.

Maybe too brightly.

Maybe he'd been exhausting himself for years while everyone around him admired the light without noticing how quickly the fuel was disappearing.

Curly's prosthetic hand drifted unconsciously toward his leg, where phantom pain still bloomed whenever certain memories surfaced, and he found himself thinking about the kitchen back on Earth, the one place Jimmy had always seemed genuinely alive because cooking wasn't simply a chore to him but an act of care, of creation, of insisting that ordinary evenings deserved homemade meals instead of convenience.

Whenever hot oil splashed onto his hand or he caught himself on the edge of a pan, Jimmy would inevitably curse at the stove, tell it to go kill itself, shake his burned fingers dramatically, and then return to cooking as though nothing had happened, leaving Curly laughing so hard he could barely breathe.

Those evenings had felt ordinary.

At the time, Curly hadn't realized it would become something worth mourning.

They could have had that life.

If Jimmy hadn't crashed the ship.

If he hadn't hurt Anya.

If he hadn't spent so many years convincing himself he had to survive alone.

If he had ever believed, even for a single moment, that Curly's arms were a place where he could safely lay all the weight he insisted on carrying by himself.

Curly closed his eyes.

The question settled over him with all the unbearable gentleness of grief.

Why hadn't Jimmy ever felt safe enough to do that?

He should kill himself.

The thought arrived with such practiced familiarity that Curly scarcely noticed it anymore, settling quietly into the back of his mind alongside every other unwelcome certainty he had accumulated since surviving the crash, because as far as he could tell there was very little waiting for him beyond the rehabilitation center except unanswered questions.

There wasn't really anything to return to.

His job no longer existed.

The Pony Express had become synonymous with disaster, lawsuits, investigations, and grieving families, all of whom deserved someone to blame even if the truth was far too complicated to fit inside a courtroom, and Curly understood why some of them had tried to place that blame on him despite knowing, deep down, that no verdict would ever resurrect the people they had lost.

Going home hardly felt like an option either, not looking the way he did, not when his siblings had children of their own to raise and lives that had continued moving forward while his own had become trapped inside a single terrible day, because he couldn't bear the thought of watching nieces or nephews stare at him with frightened curiosity while adults awkwardly insisted that everything was fine.

Jimmy's family almost certainly hated him.

Hatred wasn't even the right word anymore.

Maybe they simply looked at him and saw the captain who survived while their son did not, the man whose name appeared beside Jimmy's in every article discussing the crash, every documentary speculating about the investigation, every interview dissecting the final days of the crew as though their suffering had become entertainment for strangers.

Jimmy's face had been everywhere.

So had everyone else's.

It felt as though the entire world had memorized the worst moments of their lives while remaining blissfully ignorant of everything that had existed before them.

"Want to play a game, Curly?"

The question gently interrupted his thoughts, and Curly looked across the table at his friend before forcing himself back into the present with a quiet nod. "Sure. What were you thinking?"

"Joshie brought me a deck of cards yesterday, but he put them on the top shelf where I can't reach them. They're next to those old star maps."

Curly smiled to himself as he pushed himself upright and crossed the room, discovering exactly what his friend had described, a small unopened box decorated with constellations and phases of the moon sitting neatly beside a stack of oversized celestial charts that only saw use by them.

He retrieved the box and turned it over in his hands before returning to his chair, taking a moment to admire the artwork printed across the lid, where tiny silver stars drifted across a deep blue sky.

"These are nice," Curly said, passing the unopened deck to his friend. "I almost don't want to open them."

"You can keep them if you want."

Curly tilted his head. "You don't have a need for them?"

His friend shrugged as he carefully peeled away the plastic wrapping with fingers that had only recently begun obeying him again. "No."

Curly watched him shuffle the deck, the cards slipping between prosthetic fingers in an awkward rhythm that carried the unmistakable satisfaction of someone rediscovering an old skill.

The cards fluttered softly against one another before his friend glanced up. "You know how to play Liar's Game?"

Curly shook his head.

"I don't think so. It's been a long time since I played much of anything."

His friend began dealing seven cards to each of them before asking, almost absentmindedly, "Not since losing Jimmy? Was he a cheater?"

The question caught Curly off guard, though not in a painful way, and to his own surprise he laughed, the sound fuller and lighter than anything that had escaped him in days. "No," he replied, smiling as another memory surfaced. "He wasn't a cheater, but he was the sorest loser I've ever met and somehow an even worse winner, which was honestly impressive because I still can't decide which version of him complained more."

"If he finally beat me after losing all evening he'd stand up, get right in my face with that smug grin of his, and start doing this ridiculous little victory dance."

His friend laughed loudly enough to draw a disapproving glance from someone farther down the library.

"That's adorable. You ever teased him about it?"

"I teased him constantly," Curly admitted, his smile widening despite himself. "One time he got so worked up he nearly punched me in the nose. He was just so easy to rile up, I couldn't help it."

His friend watched Curly's expression soften into something almost peaceful, noticing the way his blue eyes brightened beneath the scar tissue as though, for the briefest moment, they belonged to the man who had known Jimmy before the crash instead of the survivor sitting across from him now.

"You really loved him."

Curly's smile lingered for another second before grief quietly reclaimed its place. "Yeah," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "I really did."

His friend lowered the cards into his lap. "I'm sorry he died."

Curly nodded slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on the celestial pattern decorating the backs of his cards because looking anywhere else felt strangely impossible. "Yeah," he murmured. "I am too."

"I'm sorry he didn't take you with him."

Curly squeezed the cards tightly enough that they bent beneath his prosthetic fingers, closing his eyes as tears threatened to spill despite every effort to contain them. "Yeah," he answered after a long, trembling breath. "I am too."

"My offer still stands."

Curly lowered his gaze to the handful of celestial cards resting awkwardly between his prosthetic fingers, tracing the painted constellations.

"Don't worry about me," he said after a long moment, his voice carrying more exhaustion than conviction. "But... if that's really what you decide, then I could keep you company until it's over. Nobody should have to be alone."

His friend regarded him quietly, the corners of his damaged mouth lifting into something that wasn't quite a smile.

"If it wouldn't bother you... do you think it'd make you feel better?" he asked, his tone remaining remarkably gentle despite the heaviness of the question. "Pretending I was him for a little while, just so you could finally hold him?"

Curly's chest tightened.

He wished he'd held Jimmy during those final moments instead of leaving him alone with everything that had been crushing him for years, wished he'd wrapped his arms around him despite the anger, despite the betrayal, despite everything that had happened aboard the ship, because somewhere beneath all the horror remained the simple truth that Jimmy had been frightened, and Curly hated knowing that fear had been the last companion he ever had.

"I think..." Curly began quietly, swallowing around the ache gathering in his throat, "I think part of me would like that."

He closed his eyes briefly before continuing. "But I also know I'm supposed to tell you not to ask me something like that."

The words tasted strangely hollow.

He had spent years correcting Jimmy whenever those thoughts escaped his mouth, interrupting every dark joke, every careless remark, every attempt to disguise despair as humor because he genuinely believed that if he pushed back often enough Jimmy might eventually stop believing them himself.

Now he wasn't so sure.

Maybe Jimmy had needed someone to listen more than someone to correct him.

Maybe neither would have changed anything.

Maybe Curly would spend the rest of his life wondering.

"So..." his friend said as he placed another card onto the growing pile between them. "You still need me around?"

Curly studied his own hand for much longer than the game required before finally choosing a card and laying it beside the others. "I suppose..." he admitted with a tired smile, "I wouldn't mind if you stayed."

His friend nodded thoughtfully. "Want to sleep in my bed tonight?"

Curly looked up.

The invitation wasn't strange between them anymore.

Nightmares had a way of making grown adults ask for things they would have considered embarrassing before the crash, and neither of them had enough pride left to pretend.

"I think I'd like that."

Another card slid onto the table.

His friend glanced at Curly almost mischievously. "Wanna see how good I've gotten with my new hands?"

A laugh escaped him before he could stop it, warm enough that he had to wipe at the corner of one eye while pretending the moisture gathering there had nothing to do with emotion.

"Hell," he chuckled, clearing his throat, "you really don't hold back."

"I stopped seeing the point," his friend replied with an easy shrug. "Besides, I'm not in love with you if that's what you're worried about. I just don't trust many people anymore, and you're one of the few who doesn't make my skin crawl."

Curly understood that feeling all too well.

For months he had dreaded every dressing change, every examination, every pair of careful hands lifting burned limbs that no longer belonged to him, and although the nurses had never once given him reason to doubt them, allowing another person that close to his body still felt like surrendering a piece of himself he wasn't always prepared to relinquish.

He found himself smiling despite the embarrassment creeping into his voice.

"Fine," he said. "But you're going to get those joints messy."

His friend laughed. "I got gloves, and you got lotion, I've thought this through."

Silence settled over them again as another card changed hands, the only sounds in the room being the soft scrape of cardstock against wood and the distant turning of pages somewhere among the library shelves.

After a while his friend spoke again, this time with considerably less humor than before. "You know... if it makes things easier, you can call me Jimmy again. I wouldn't mind."

Curly's hand froze.

His friend continued before Curly could answer.

"You seemed to really like the idea of him touching you."

Curly looked down, grateful that years of burn scars hid the warmth that would once have flooded his cheeks.

"He was..." Curly paused, searching for his words. "He was honestly the only person I ever let get that close, whether I wanted it or not."

Jimmy had always been like that.

Whenever Curly retreated into one of those strange dissociative moods where being touched felt unbearable and every hand reaching toward him made his skin crawl despite craving comfort somewhere deep beneath the panic, Jimmy ignored every half-hearted protest with the sort of stubborn certainty that only seemed to belong to him, draping himself across Curly's shoulders, wrapping him in loose hugs, ruffling his hair until Curly complained, patting him on the back with infuriating affection, or simply collapsing beside him with enough weight that eventually Curly stopped fighting and accepted that personal space had ceased to exist.

Curly used to think it was inconsiderate.

Now he wondered whether Jimmy had simply recognized something Curly himself couldn't admit, because no matter how often Curly insisted he wanted to be left alone, he never actually pushed Jimmy away once he was there, and more often than not he found himself relaxing against him before either of them realized it had happened.

Jimmy, strangely enough, operated by much the same rules.

When he was in one of his rare good moods, when the world hadn't managed to convince him he was unwanted or inadequate, he became startlingly pliant beneath Curly's attention, allowing himself to be pulled through crowded hallways by the sleeve, tolerating Curly slipping cold hands into the pockets of his suit simply because they were freezing, pretending to complain whenever Curly rested his chin across his shoulder, and even allowing himself to be dragged backward into Curly's lap where he would grumble theatrically for several minutes before inevitably settling against him with all the reluctant contentment of an oversized cat pretending it hadn't wanted affection all along.

Jimmy was confusing.

He was impossibly complicated and, somehow, heartbreakingly simple at exactly the same time, because beneath all the contradictions lived someone whose wants had never really been difficult to understand, even if he lacked the language to explain them himself.

He was frightened.

He was feral.

He approached kindness like a starving animal approaching an outstretched hand, desperate for it and deeply suspicious of it in equal measure, forever expecting warmth to disappear the moment he leaned into it too heavily.

He deserved patience.

He deserved consistency.

He deserved someone willing to tell him when he was wrong without making him feel disposable for having been wrong in the first place, because Jimmy responded to structure far better than punishment, and beneath every argument, every growled complaint, every sarcastic remark, existed a loyalty so fierce it bordered on self-destruction once he'd finally decided someone belonged to him.

That was Jimmy.

He bit when he was cornered.

He growled when he was frightened.

He defended the people he loved with astonishing conviction despite believing, somewhere inside himself, that he probably wasn't worth defending in return, and whenever he sensed rejection, however small or imagined, he seemed to splinter almost instantly, disguising hurt beneath anger because anger had always been easier for him to survive.

Curly sometimes wondered whether Jimmy had spent his entire life searching for a place where he could finally unclench, where surviving wasn't the only thing expected of him, where he wasn't constantly bracing for the next disappointment before the previous one had even finished hurting.

He hadn't wanted much.

Just a reason to keep waking up.

Just somewhere that felt like home.

Just one place where belonging didn't have to be earned over and over again.

Curly understood that now because, despite every difference between them, he had been searching for something remarkably similar.

People saw him as dependable.

Reliable.

Patient.

Strong enough to absorb everyone else's fears without ever revealing his own.

Nobody ever seemed to notice how exhausting that became.

Nobody asked whether he wanted someone else to make the decisions for a while, whether he wanted permission to be frightened instead of endlessly reassuring other people that everything would somehow be all right.

Jimmy never asked.

Jimmy simply did it.

Whenever Curly hesitated, Jimmy answered for him.

Whenever Curly found himself unable to refuse another responsibility, Jimmy refused it on his behalf with a confidence Curly envied.

Whenever Curly became trapped inside his own indecision, Jimmy reached forward and moved the world anyway, whether anyone approved of his methods or not.

Sometimes that infuriated Curly.

Sometimes it saved him.

And in the end, when Curly had been too broken, too exhausted, too defeated to choose anything at all, Jimmy had made one final decision for both of them by placing him inside the last functioning cryopod, sealing the hatch before Curly could protest, and forcing him to continue living despite the fact that Curly himself could no longer imagine a future worth surviving for.

Curly had spent months wondering whether he resented Jimmy for that.

He had finally reached an answer.

He didn't.

He only hated that Jimmy had believed Curly deserved another chance while never extending that same mercy to himself.

"Curly… You're crying, and I don't think it's because you lost."

Curly looked down at the cards scattered across the table as though he had never seen them before, only then realizing that sometime during his wandering thoughts the game had quietly slipped away from him, his attention dissolving so completely into memories that he hadn't noticed his friend laying the final card.

He blinked hard, hoping the tears gathering in his eyes would retreat if he simply refused to acknowledge them.

"They won't stop today," he admitted with a tired laugh that carried no amusement. "I keep thinking maybe... maybe I should kill myself."

His friend didn't recoil. He didn't interrupt. He didn't rush to reassure him with rehearsed optimism.

Instead, he rested both prosthetic hands atop the table and watched Curly with an expression that somehow managed to hold both compassion and exhaustion.

"I know I'm supposed to tell you not to say that," he replied quietly, "but pretending I don't understand would just make you feel alone, and I don't want to do that. The truth is, I keep wondering what exactly I'm walking toward. I don't have anyone waiting for me outside these walls, I don't recognize the person staring back from the mirror anymore, my body feels borrowed, most of my memories hurt to revisit, and after all of this I'll still have to serve my sentence."

Curly couldn't help laughing softly despite the ache in his chest.

"I guess you're right, though," Curly murmured, rubbing at his eyes with the back of a prosthetic hand. "It is my life, and it's not getting better. I'm tired."

His friend quietly gathered the scattered cards into a neat pile before shuffling them together pausing every so often to correct the grip of his new hands before sliding the deck back into its celestial box.

"What always gets me," he said after a while, "is when people tell me that somebody out there must care about me. I always want to ask where they are? Because you're not saying you're one of them."

Curly looked at him for a long moment. "You've spent a lot of time thinking about that."

His friend smiled without humor and glanced toward the library window, absentmindedly exposing the thick scars running where his ear had once been. "I burned my whole life down," he said quietly. "Whether I meant to or not doesn't really change what's left afterward, and once you've watched everything familiar disappear it's hard not to wonder what you're supposed to build from the ashes. I'm tired too."

Curly rose carefully from his chair before moving behind the wheelchair, wrapping both hands around the familiar handles as they made their slow journey back through the rehabilitation wing, their pace unhurried because neither of them had anywhere else they needed to be.

By now the afternoon tea cart would probably have arrived, and with it the dented Christmas tin that one of the volunteers insisted on refilling with buttery cookies every week.

Neither of them ever turned those cookies down.

"So," his friend asked after a comfortable stretch of silence, "what do you think Jimmy would've said if he'd been here?"

Curly smiled despite himself.

"He probably would've looked at both of us, called us dramatic, complained that the tea was cold before he'd even tasted it, and then told the cookies to go kill themselves because they were stale."

His friend laughed. "Think he'd actually drink tea?"

"Not if there was coffee," Curly replied, the smile lingering a little longer now. "But when we were on Earth he used to make me tea all the time whenever I wasn't sleeping well. He'd buy these herbal blends that promised they'd calm your nerves, and he even smuggled a few onto the ship for me."

His friend listened quietly. "He sounds... thoughtful."

"He was," Curly answered, his voice softening. "He cared in strange ways that didn't always look like caring until you stopped to notice how often he was paying attention."

His friend looked ahead as Curly continued pushing the wheelchair toward the smell of fresh tea drifting down the hallway.

"It's a shame," he said. "It sounds like people didn't always meet him with the same kindness he tried to give them."

Curly felt his throat tighten so suddenly that speaking became impossible, and he found himself clenching his jaw until it ached, fighting against the sob threatening to escape because the unfairness of it all still lived inside him as sharply as it had the day he woke up alone.

Jimmy had tried.

Not perfectly.

Not gracefully.

Sometimes not even wisely.

But he had tried, over and over again, to become someone worthy of being kept, and somehow Curly couldn't shake the feeling that the world had noticed every one of his failures while almost completely overlooking the countless quiet ways he had loved the people around him.

Jimmy had been an asshole.

Curly had never denied that, not even now, because Jimmy could be abrasive, selfish, infuriatingly stubborn, and so convinced that the world expected the worst from him that he often fulfilled those expectations before anyone else had the chance, yet beneath all of that lived someone Curly could never reduce to a single ugly word, because every sharp edge Jimmy possessed seemed to grow from fear rather than cruelty.

Everyone else saw a bastard.

Curly saw a frightened little boy who had somehow grown into a man without ever learning what it felt like to believe he deserved kindness.

Jimmy could be impossibly stubborn, but he listened whenever someone approached him with genuine patience instead of ridicule, and although he rarely admitted he was wrong with any amount of grace, he almost always tried to repair the damage afterward in whatever awkward, imperfect language of affection he understood.

Curly remembered too many nights of hearing Jimmy cry when he believed everyone else aboard the ship had already fallen asleep, muffling the sounds beneath blankets or burying his face into a pillow as though it was less embarrassing if nobody witnessed it, and every morning Jimmy would emerge wearing that same crooked smirk, making coffee, complaining about work, and pretending the previous night had never happened because pretending had become easier than hoping things might actually improve.

Curly had watched Jimmy try.

He had watched him cautiously open himself to people outside of their friendship, forcing himself to believe that maybe this time things would be different, only to return quieter each time another relationship unraveled beneath misunderstandings, impatience, or the simple exhaustion people seemed to feel when confronted with someone carrying as much pain as Jimmy carried.

Each rejection left another bruise.

Each disappointment seemed to confirm something Jimmy had already suspected about himself.

Eventually Jimmy started rejecting people before they could reject him.

Curly wasn't spared from that.

Jimmy convinced himself he wasn't allowed to have a best friend.

Wasn't allowed to let somebody love him wholeheartedly.

Wasn't allowed to become that important to another person because important things were eventually taken away.

Curly understood that now with an unbearable clarity.

He remembered asking Jimmy out.

He remembered Jimmy turning him down.

He remembered the guilt that settled over Jimmy afterward, lingering for weeks despite Curly insisting everything was fine, and now Curly wished he had found better words, wished he had sat Jimmy down and told him that friendship had never been a consolation prize, that losing the possibility of romance hadn't meant losing Jimmy, and that he hadn't been angry when Jimmy snapped at him or hid behind familiar dark jokes because, if anything, Curly had been quietly relieved that Jimmy still felt safe enough to be entirely himself around him.

Sometimes Curly imagined finding every person who had ever convinced Jimmy he was disposable, every voice that had reinforced the belief that he was too difficult, too damaged, too much work, and punched them bloody in the face. Fuck it. If he can't live. Then why should they?

His friend interrupted those thoughts by frowning at a stubborn tin of cookies that refused to cooperate.

"Do you happen to know where to get a gun?"

"I was just going to take pills."

Curly let out a breath that felt as though it had been trapped inside his chest all afternoon.

It had been a long day.

Lately every day seemed long.

There were still mornings when he woke expecting to see Jimmy leaning against the counter with a mug in his hand, and the brief moment before reality returned remained one of the cruelest parts of surviving.

He wishes he died next to Jimmy. His blood soaking into his bandages.

He does want to kill himself. But he needs to live a little longer to make a point.

The world could kill itself.

He missed him with an intensity that still surprised him.

After a long silence his friend spoke again, setting the tin down between them.

"I'm sorry I've been so dark lately," he admitted, rubbing at the edge of the table. "I don't think my medication's working the same."

Curly looked at him for a moment before reaching over and opening the cookie tin.

"You don't have to apologize ," he said quietly. "Do you want to change them?"

"Maybe, do you think this movie's going to be terrible?" he asked while taking the first cookie.

Curly laughed, the sound still scratchy but undeniably genuine.

"Don't know," Curly replied, taking a careful sip of his tea. "Think it'll make you want to die any faster?"

His friend laughed, it sounded noticeably lighter than it had been that morning. "Who knows. Sorry you're stuck with me."

Curly looked over at him, shaking his head almost immediately. "Mate, I'm the one who's sorry you're stuck with, but... I'm really glad you ended up here." He smiled softly. "It's nice not having to be alone all the time."

His friend was quiet for a moment before speaking. "I think you're a great guy, Curly."

Curly visibly winced.

His friend noticed. His friend reached over and tapped one prosthetic finger against the table. "You don't have to be perfect around me. I like you, faults and all.”

Curly felt an unexpected warmth settle somewhere beneath all the grief. "I like you too," he admitted quietly. "Faults and all."

He reached across the table and rested his hand on the back of his friend's prosthetic, giving it a gentle pat that felt clumsy and strangely natural all at once.

"So," Curly asked, "is anybody else coming to the movies?"

"Yeah. A few other patients, a couple nurses, probably one of the therapists too. I think they're splitting us into groups because some people wanted something less violent." His friend grinned. "I still want to see the horror movie."

Curly laughed. "Come find me afterward."

His friend tilted his head mischievously. "Really? You want me to hand you in the theater?"

Curly nearly snorted into his tea. "Why not?" Curly shrugged with exaggerated indifference while reaching for another cookie. "It's not like we're going to live longer."

His friend raised an eyebrow. "Would Jimmy do it?"

Curly inhaled a mouthful of cookie at exactly the wrong moment before breaking into a coughing fit, memories surfacing so suddenly they almost made him laugh.

"Oh..." he managed between coughs, reaching for his tea. "He absolutely would've." He remembered Jimmy telling him about a girl he dated and the time he took her to a theater and sat in the dark corner to fuck around.

"We're pretty messed up, aren't we?" his friend asked.

Curly smiled into his tea. "I think that's why we get along."

His friend looked down at the half-empty cookie tin. "I'll miss you."

Curly's expression softened. "I'll miss you too."

Another quiet moment passed before his friend cleared his throat.

"I guess... I could talk to the doctor about changing my medication."

Curly looked up.

"If you're planning on sticking around a little longer..." His friend smiled awkwardly. "...I suppose it's worth a try."

Curly smiled back.

They weren't in love. Not romantically.

Whatever existed between them had settled into something quieter and, in many ways, rarer than that, built from long nights neither of them wanted to survive alone, from shared rehabilitation sessions, painful honesty, dark humor that somehow made room for tenderness, and the quiet understanding that neither of them had to pretend to be stronger than they really were.

It was comforting to have someone who didn't laugh at his scars. It was comforting to have someone who didn't treat him like a burden. It was comforting to have someone who didn't expect him to perform optimism simply to make everyone else feel better.

Most of all, it was comforting to sit across from another person who understood what those dark thoughts felt like without either of them having to hide behind embarrassed smiles or polite lies.

Curly had spent years believing that speaking those thoughts aloud would somehow give them more power.

Instead, he had discovered something unexpected.

Whenever either of them admitted how badly they were hurting, the conversation almost never ended where it began.

Somehow, by the end of it, neither of them felt quite as eager to disappear as they had an hour earlier.

Curly wished, with every part of himself that still ached for Jimmy, that the two of them had found a way to have conversations like this before everything fell apart.

Maybe it wouldn't have changed anything. Maybe it would have changed everything.

He would never know.

What he did know was that the voice in his own head had finally grown quieter.

For months it had repeated the same cruel refrain until it became almost impossible to remember any other way of thinking.

Now, sitting beside someone who understood him without demanding he hide the ugliest parts of himself, Curly realized he wasn't hearing that voice to kill himself nearly as loudly anymore.

Instead, he heard someone asking whether he'd still be around afterward.

His friend finally died.

On his own accord like he said.

It was strange receiving a letter from a dead man but Curly knew this was where he was heading.

It was sweet of him to mail the deck of cards.

Curly placed the letters down on his coffee table and stared at them for a long moment.

His burn friend had written them, intending to hand the cards over when Curly was finally discharged and allowed to go home. It was supposed to be his way of seeing him off, one last parting gift before they found themselves separated. Curly drew in a slow, measured breath until his lungs ached, then released it just as carefully, hoping the familiar exercise would settle the storm gathering in his chest.

Reaching for his walking cane, he pushed himself upright before hobbling toward the bathroom, every uneven step accompanied by the dull ache that had long since become another part of his body.

The mirror greeted him with a stranger's reflection.

He looked better these days, at least according to everyone else. His grafts had healed as well as anyone could have hoped, although his skin still stretched in unnatural ways across muscle and bone. The tall, blond, handsome captain who had smiled so effortlessly before the fire was gone.

Oddly enough, he found that freeing.

People had stopped expecting him to be the same man, and somewhere along the way he had stopped expecting it too.

Slowly, he turned his face from one side to the other until his gaze settled on his own eyes.

Blue as the ocean, Jimmy used to say.

As distant as the sea.

A faint, tired smile tugged at the corner of Curly's scarred mouth.

"You were right."

His eyes had always looked far away, as though some part of him was forever standing on a shoreline no one else could reach.

The world never seemed to like that.

Curly lifted his prosthetic hand toward the medicine cabinet, stiff fingers wrapped around the handle and pulled the door open.

Rows of creams, ointments, and moisturizers lined the shelves in careful order, each one prescribed to soothe skin that would never truly stop hurting. They occupied nearly every inch of space, little reminders that healing had become a full-time routine.

Hidden among them sat an old, familiar bottle.

Bright orange.

The color reminded him of a sunset, warm and beautiful enough to fool anyone into forgetting that sunsets always ended in darkness.

Jimmy's name was still printed across the faded label.

Years ago, those pills had been prescribed to help Jimmy keep moving forward, to steady the violent swings in his moods and quiet the relentless voice that insisted the world would be better without him.

For a while they had helped.

Then they stopped.

They weren't doing anything anymore, but asking for different medication meant admitting they had failed, and admitting they had failed meant admitting he wasn't getting better.

He had been terrified of telling anyone.

Terrified of telling Curly most of all.

So he stopped taking them.

His eyes drifted toward the bottle resting in his hand.

Half full.

Jimmy had taken them.

He really had tried.

They just hadn't been enough.

Curly remembered the first time he found the bottle tucked inside Jimmy's smuggled stash aboard the Tulpar. Jimmy had shrugged it off with that familiar crooked grin and insisted they weren't important anymore, and Curly, believing it wasn't worth arguing over, had simply checked the expiration date before handing the bottle back without another word.

He should have pressed harder.

He should have asked why.

He should have ignored every excuse Jimmy offered and forced the conversation neither of them wanted to have.

Instead...

He let it go.

"Stupid," Curly muttered, the word catching in his throat.

His prosthetic fingers tightened around the orange bottle until it rattled softly in his grip.

They had never been what Jimmy truly wanted.

Medication could quiet the noise. It could dull the edges. It could make surviving another day feel possible. But it could never give Jimmy the one thing he had spent his entire life searching for.

He wanted to belong.

He wanted someone to choose him and mean it.

Curly closed his eyes.

The thought had crossed his mind more than once since the funeral.

He could swallow them.

Every last one.

The idea no longer frightened him as much as it should have.

A bitter laugh escaped him before fading almost immediately.

So this was what Jimmy had lived with.

No wonder Jimmy had been so rough when he forced painkillers down Curly's throat after the crash. Curly had thought he was being impatient, maybe even angry, but now he understood.

To Jimmy, swallowing pills had never been a small thing.

It had been a battle.

Every.

Single.

Day.

Curly slowly raised the bottle toward his face until the cool plastic rested against his scarred lips.

Instead of opening it, he simply pressed a lingering kiss against the cap.

"I'm going to see you one day," he whispered, his voice barely louder than a breath.

His hand trembled as he squeezed the bottle tighter, and he shut his eyes, swallowing back the sob threatening to escape.

"When I get there..." His voice faltered before he found enough air to continue. "When I get there, I'll introduce you to my friend. You'd love him, and he'd love you too."

Curly drew another slow breath, forcing it all the way into his aching lungs before letting it leave just as carefully.

He set the orange temptation back onto the sink. Shuffling across the small bathroom, he lowered the toilet lid and eased himself down onto it with a tired groan, resting his elbow on his knee while his cheek leaned heavily into his palm.

His eyes remained fixed on the bottle.

"I talked about you a lot," he admitted quietly. "He always seemed to understand what I saw in you, even when I couldn't find the right words myself. I swear..." A faint smile tugged at his lips before disappearing again. "I swear you'd finally feel accepted by him."

Curly sighed and let his hand slip from his face, lowering it into his lap as he stared at his palms.

They didn't resemble human hands anymore.

Smooth plastic and molded joints had replaced flesh, while scar tissue disappeared beneath the sleeves of his shirt before reaching what little remained of his wrists.

Oddly enough...

He thought Jimmy would have loved him even more like this.

The thought was ridiculous.

Maybe even a little twisted.

But Jimmy had always looked for excuses to stay close to him, excuses so transparent that Curly could laugh at them now.

He would have insisted Curly needed help opening jars, reaching shelves, cooking dinner, cleaning the house, or adjusting some piece of medical equipment that absolutely did not need adjusting. He would have invaded the apartment under the flimsiest pretenses imaginable, pretending every visit was purely practical while lingering hours longer than necessary.

Curly would have let him.

He would have welcomed every pathetic excuse with a straight face, pretending he believed them just so Jimmy never had to admit the real reason he kept coming back.

Curly leaned back until the back of his head bumped softly against the wall.

"We took good care of each other," he murmured, smiling at nothing as he closed his eyes. "Besides..." A quiet chuckle escaped him. "You couldn't keep denying you were the handsome one now with me looking like this."

"I wish your family had let me into your apartment," he said after a long pause. "They packed everything up before I even had the chance to ask. They took every piece of you they could carry, then told me to fuck off."

His eyes drifted back toward the orange bottle waiting patiently on the sink.

"I would've let you poke and prod at me all you wanted," he continued, another tired smile breaking through his grief. "I already know the first crude thing out of your mouth would've been asking if my dick still worked."

He laughed to himself, the sound painfully small inside the empty room.

"It does, by the way."

The smile lingered only for a moment before quietly slipping away.

"It does."

His shoulders sagged beneath a weight that never seemed to grow lighter.

"I wish I'd taken better care of you." The confession escaped almost as a whisper. "I should've clipped your claws and taken you in."

Curly rubbed at one eye with the back of his prosthetic hand before continuing.

"I never cared when you bit me. I never flinched when you growled, and I never minded cleaning up the messes you left behind because I knew none of that was really you."

His voice cracked.

"We could've had something."

Another breath.

"If I wasn't stupid.”

The orange bottle offered no reply.

It never had.

Still, Curly kept talking to it as though the cheap plastic somehow bridged the impossible distance between life and death, faithfully carrying every confession to wherever Jimmy had gone.

"I love you."

"And I know you loved me too."

His eyes remained fixed on the faded label.

"And I know you couldn't express it without nearly killing yourself every time.”

A tear slipped free, tracing the uneven lines of scar tissue down his cheek.

"But I'm glad you kept lying."

He smiled through the tears.

"I'm glad my bed was always softer than yours."

"I'm glad my kitchen somehow made better coffee."

"I'm glad my apartment was always closer, even when it wasn't."

His smile grew just enough to hurt.

"Thank you for every ridiculous excuse you made just so you could stay in my life a little longer."

His heart fluttered as one memory after another surfaced.

Jimmy was always stealing his sweaters because he had "forgotten" his own, swearing he was only borrowing them for the evening before quietly claiming them. Curly never once asked for them back. Seeing Jimmy wrapped in clothes that smelled faintly of him always felt strangely right, and he suspected Jimmy knew that.

The nights aboard the Tulpar when Jimmy would climb into his bed under the flimsiest excuse imaginable, insisting he only wanted to talk for a few minutes before heading back to his own bunk.

Without fail, Jimmy would end up asleep beside him, curled beneath the blankets with his face buried into Curly's shoulder or chest, depending on how restless the day had been. Every morning he would wake with some new excuse already prepared, pretending it had all been an accident.

Curly had never called him out on it.

He liked waking up beside him too much.

Jimmy had always refused when Curly offered to take him out somewhere nice for dinner, brushing the invitations aside with sarcastic remarks about wasting money.

Then, almost without fail, Jimmy would cook instead.

He couldn't accept Curly's quiet attempts at romance, but he still wanted the evening.

He still wanted the company.

He still wanted Curly.

Looking back, it seemed almost absurd that neither of them had managed to say what was so painfully obvious.

They had shared countless quiet moments together.

Moments built from gentle gestures instead of grand confessions.

Every act whispered the same truth.

Jimmy had craved love more desperately than anyone Curly had ever known.

He had only been too frightened to believe it was real.

"Tulpar was our special place," Curly murmured, smiling faintly through the ache in his chest. "It always will be."

The nightmares would never leave him.

"You'd get a kick out of these prosthetics," he continued, lifting one artificial hand into view before letting it fall again. "Hell, you'd probably bully me over them."

A weak laugh escaped him.

"You'd steal my hands just to watch me complain, then act offended when I asked for them back."

He could picture it perfectly.

Jimmy would keep them hidden until Curly admitted he needed help, wearing that infuriating smug grin the entire time before finally relenting.

He'd feed Curly dinner by hand as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

The thought made Curly flinch. He couldn't help it. The time glued to the medbay wasn't great and sometimes he thinks he's back there. Warm familiar rough fingers pressing his tongue down.

He remembered the week he came down with the flu, burning with fever until he could barely stay awake.

Jimmy had hovered over him almost constantly, complaining under his breath the entire time about how inconvenient sick people were while changing sweat-soaked shirts, wiping him down with cool towels, cooking homemade meals, and spoon-feeding him whenever he was too exhausted to sit upright.

Even then, Jimmy never stopped grumbling.

But he never once left his side.

Thinking back...

Something had changed during that week.

Behind closed doors, when it was only the two of them, Jimmy laughed more.

He teased more.

He smiled when he thought Curly wasn't looking.

There was a softness to him that hadn't existed before, replacing the constant tension that usually sat between his shoulders.

He seemed nervous.

Not the kind of nervous that spiraled into anger or another self-destructive outburst.

This was different.

It was the nervousness of someone carrying a secret too precious to risk sharing.

Curly searched his memory, desperate to hold onto those blurred, feverish days.

Most of it was hazy.

The feeling of cold cloth against burning skin. Jimmy changing another sweat-soaked shirt. The smell of homemade food.

The quiet glow of a laptop balanced on Jimmy's knees while some movie played in the background.

The sound of Jimmy's voice filling the silence even when Curly drifted in and out of sleep.

There had been conversations.

Dozens of them.

Curly couldn't remember the words anymore.

Only the feeling.

Safe. Loved. Wanted.

Those were the days he wished he could return to more than anything.

He had never felt more cared for than he did with his angry, complicated friend.

The friend he loved so deeply it had become another organ inside his chest.

Curly's brow slowly furrowed.

The fever.

Jimmy's nervousness afterward.

The way he smiled more.

The way he suddenly seemed terrified of saying too much whenever they were alone.

Love.

Curly's eyes widened.

"...That's what happened."

The memory struck him with startling clarity.

He told Jimmy he loved him.

Jimmy had always known Curly was attracted to him.

Curly had tried to ask him out once, awkwardly stumbling over his words before Jimmy laughed it off and gently turned him down. Jimmy told himself it was better that way. Better to leave those feelings unanswered than risk ruining the one good thing he had.

He thought that was the end of it.

He wasn't prepared for a feverish Curly to look at him through half-lidded blue eyes so unfocused that Jimmy wasn't even sure he understood where he was anymore.

He wasn't prepared for Curly, burning with exhaustion and barely able to stay awake, to reach for him and quietly confess that he still loved him.

Despite being rejected. Not hoping Jimmy had changed his mind.

He just simply did. With all his heart. Nothing had changed that.

Nothing ever would.

That was it.

That was what had changed.

Jimmy hadn't become gentler for no reason.

He hadn't started lingering longer after work, smiling more when they were alone, or inventing even flimsier excuses to stay close because he was bored.

He had believed Curly.

For the first time in his life...

Jimmy had believed someone could actually love him.

The realization hit Curly with enough force to steal the air from his lungs.

Tears streamed freely down his face, soaking the collar of his shirt until the fabric clung damply against his neck.

Crying wasn't unusual anymore.

It had become as routine as waking up.

Only the loneliness kept growing.

Every morning it settled deeper inside him, hollowing him out until he barely recognized the person carrying it.

His chest tightened painfully.

He needs to kill himself.

He needs to let go.

He can't be here anymore or else he'll set fire to this place, kill himself and whoever gets caught up in the flames.

He didn't know how much longer he could carry this.

He was terrified of what would happen if the grief kept growing.

"I love you, Curly."

He had never truly heard them.

He hadn't needed to.

Jimmy's lips behind the cryopod glass had formed every syllable with heartbreaking clarity, and Curly had watched them through tears and panic, committing the shape of those words to memory before the glass stole him away forever.

He knew exactly what Jimmy had said.

He knew exactly what his voice would have sounded like.

Soft.

Earnest.

Beautiful.

Cruel.

Just like Jimmy.

A divine gift born from a living hell.

The sob that tore from Curly's throat barely sounded human.

Another followed.

Then another.

Until he collapsed from the toilet onto the bathroom floor, folding in on himself as grief shook every muscle he had left. His cries echoed off the tile walls, growing louder until they dissolved into raw, wordless anguish.

When the storm finally weakened, all that remained were ragged breaths and trembling limbs.

Curly lay curled on the cold bathroom carpet, staring upward at the sink.

The orange prescription bottle still rested where he had left it.

Tempting.

Taunting.

Beckoning.

He couldn't stop looking at it.

His eyelids grew heavy with exhaustion.

People care about you. Don't kill yourself. There are people who will miss you.

No there isn't.

Jimmy died a long time ago.

And so did Curly.

Orion Grant Carling died a long time ago when Jimmy pulled that trigger instead of just shoving himself inside the cryopod with him.

So why is he here?

He's so tired.

So fucking tired.

His breathing hitched unevenly as tears continued slipping silently across scarred skin.

He curled tighter against himself, instinctively seeking a comfort that no longer existed, looking less like a grown man than a frightened child who had forgotten what safety felt like.

For a long time, he simply lay there, listening to the uneven rhythm of his own breathing and wishing, more than anything else, that the silence didn't feel so empty.

A quiet giggle escaped him.

It was weak and breathless, almost sounding foreign after so many tears, but it lingered all the same before dissolving into a tired smile.

Curled against the bathroom floor, scarred body trembling less with each passing moment, Curly finally surrendered to sleep.

As consciousness slowly slipped away, another memory floated gently to the surface.

“Polle says this. Polle say that. Polle says fuck you. Polle says go kill yourself.”

“Jimmy, that's not right.”

“Fuck off, it's funny.”

“You really hate that horse, huh?”

“Nightmare fuel, I hear it in my dreams.”

“I jump when I hear that tune play in the office.”

“Maybe I should let Daisuke have my room…”

“Where would you go then?”

“Not going to offer me your bed?”

“Oh but then I wouldn't have a place.”

“Are you stupid on purpose? I meant just let me bunk with you numbnuts.”

“O-oh! Yes-yeah- no- uh, that's cool, I'm fine with that. I'm sure Daisuke would appreciate having a real bed.”

“Curly if you hate the idea just say so.”

“No, it's not that I swear- it's a good idea, Jimmy. Very kind of you.”

“I can be nice. Geez, all of you just expect the worst of me.”

“Jimmy you can be the sweetest lovebug I've ever met, don't cut yourself short.”

“Wh-what!? Don't call me that! What the hell! Kill yourself Curly.”

“Jim! Come on, don't be that way.”