Every Breath Is Mine To Take

📅 December 8th, 2011

【ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢ ғᴏʀ ᴅʀᴜɢ ᴜsᴇ/ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, ᴏᴠᴇʀᴅᴏsᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ ɴᴇᴀʀ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ】

The early-setting sun of winter was a disorienting thing, and walking the long way back to the car from the movie theatre kept feeling a little like a wild late-night excursion despite it only being just past 6. The sky had just barely gone orangey-pink when they went in, but now the city was ink-dark between the street-lights and neon. Athena cast Kato a half-accusatory look as he passed her, having hung back briefly to ash his post-movie smoke; it seemed she wasn’t too fond of the particular neighborhood they were being forced to walk through.
“No offense, but why do you have to have taste in movies like that?” she asked.
“It was a documentary. What’s the problem?” he responded, turning around and shoving his hands in his pockets, walking backwards to face her and failing to look sullen due to his smirk. “We’re coming back to-fucking-morrow to see We Need To Talk About Kevin, anyway, so if you didn’t like Into The Abyss—”
“No, you see, that’s what I mean! You like murder stuff that only plays at creepy, niche theatres in East Flatbush—”
Kato laughed and threw an arm out in indication of the shadowy street and the dilapidated, graffiti-laden back-buildings that lined it. “What, you don’t think a gutter full of car window glass adds to the ambiance?” he drawled, starting to turn back around. “At least Seth doesn’t drive a Camero, right?”

Athena apprehensively glanced across the street, following the line of his offhanded gesture—and stopped herself short, her shoulders going rigid.
“Wait,” she said seriously. Kato stumbled to a halt a few steps ahead after nearly walking directly into Sethfire, who’d stopped in his tracks at Athena’s tone.
“What is it?” Sethfire asked, turning questioningly to her at the same time as Kato, who raised one eyebrow, though with less nonchalance than the previous moment. She pointed across the street, where, in a recessed doorway, the watery streetlight seemed to illuminate the pale form of someone lying awkwardly on the ground, half propped against the brick wall and disused backdoor of a building. 
“That doesn’t look right...does it?” she asked, casting a nervous glance at Kato and Seth out of the corner of her eye. 
Kato followed her line of sight and offered an impassive shrug. “What, a homeless guy? Seems normal. Probably sleeping off some booze,” he said, starting to turn away. “It’s fuckin’ cold. Can we get home?” 
As if on cue, the slight breeze picked up.
“No one should be out when it’s this cold.” Athena didn’t wait for a response before stepping out into the street.
“Really?” Kato asked, exasperated. What was she gonna do, give the guy her new jacket? For fucks’ sake. Sethfire stepped off the curb after her without hesitation, though, and forced Kato to heave a sigh and follow suit.

Athena appeared to grow more cautious as she approached the doorway and the person slumped in it. It could be a trap; it was dark, maybe it was dangerous—but Seth was 6’8” and Kato carried a knife and she was stronger than before and maybe all those things rallied her, too, because she broke into a run and covered the last few feet in the span of a heartbeat, before falling to her knees, panicked, next to the stranger. Kato had lunged past Seth when he saw her sprint, just in case, and in doing so he saw what had driven Athena’s urgency: The kid’s hoodie sleeve was rolled up to his shoulder and Athena looked up and met his eyes and in that look, it became clear they both knew something was wrong. Because the stranger was a kid—around Kato and Athena’s age, it looked like, and the orange protective cap off of the needle beside his arm seemed to glow like a neon warning sign in the dim overhead light and shit, he was pale—
“Heroin, I think—God, what do we—?” Athena asked, her voice stressed with panic. She half-lifted the boy towards her, back into a sitting position; his head lolling limply, his long, dark hair fell back to reveal a pink scar that carved up his left cheek and split his eyebrow. Athena drew a sharp breath and Sethfire dropped from standing at Kato’s side to crouch down beside her. The night air somehow seemed colder to Kato, with everyone else on the ground.
“Let me see him,” Seth rumbled, his deep voice resonating with concern. Athena went to move out of the way, but Sethfire caught her by the arm.
“Do you know how to take a pulse?” he asked. “I don’t trust the sensation in my fingers.” 
“I can take one from a neck,” Kato replied in Athena’s stead, stepping over the unconscious boy’s legs and crouching beside him, opposite Seth. He tilted the boy’s head to the side and pressed his fingers up below his jaw. It was something he’d sometimes do with himself—to see if he really was panicking or not when it felt like his heart was pounding, or when he was checking to see if the three Adderall he took at once had any appreciable effect. Sometimes it just felt steadying, to feel his heart working, to know he was here, now, in this moment with a heartbeat he could feel, and not trapped in a dream, or a nightmare, or something. 
This time, with this boy, it wasn’t steadying. It wasn't steady. The thrum of his body was weak; frail, like his form. And if Kato wasn’t mistaken, it was getting weaker. There were scars on the boy’s throat under Kato’s fingertips, which he moved away, disconcerted.
“It’s really fucking weak. God, these marks, I think he’s been shooting into his jugular…” Kato scanned the kid’s face, troubled. “Guys, his lips are blue.” 

The words had barely left his mouth when Seth lifted the boy up and got to his feet; how little of a struggle it was for Sethfire to throw the kid over his shoulders into a fireman’s carry gave away the severity of the boy’s frailty. 
“The hospital is a block and a half north; turn right at the closest intersection. Go ahead and tell them they have an opioid overdose on the way,” Sethfire said, his serious tone driven harder by urgency. 
Athena nodded and spun on her heel in an instant.
“What, both of us?” Kato asked, torn between the instruction and his instinct to stay with Seth—with his bad back and occasionally painful hips—in case he needed help.
“Or you can jog along beside me, Kato, it doesn’t matter!” Seth responded shortly, his footsteps picking up into a faster pace; “We need to move!”

With Sethfire’s long strides, Athena only beat him and Kato to the ER entrance by forty-five seconds or so, incredibly. She was able to cough out enough information despite the stitch in her side that the staff was ready as soon as they came through the doors, the unconscious boy over Seth’s shoulders and Kato trailing in his wake. The words “Heroin overdose—” were still only halfway out of Sethfire’s mouth before the kid was off his back and in nurses’ arms, being carried over to a bed with urgency that, however professional, couldn’t temper the alarm in the air.
“Naloxone!” One nurse yelled, while another pressed a pair of fingers to the boy’s wrist. 

The chaos was almost palpable in its overwhelm and Athena reached for Seth’s hand; feeling the echo, Kato could only assume, of her brother’s own brush with death in the ER four years ago, triggered by the cacophony of urgent voices:
“I’m losing his pulse!” 
“Naloxone, here—”
“Chest compressions, now—”
“We need oxygen—”
“Jacket off, shirt off, how am I supposed to feel my landmarks—”
A nurse yanked the curtain in front of the boy’s bed closed. Kato looped an arm across Athena’s shoulders, which had developed a slight tremor, and she half-startled at his touch at first, then blinked gratefully at him and leaned into his silent comfort. 
“All we can do at this point in time is wait,” Seth said quietly, her hand still in his. “He has a fighting chance now, though, because of you.”

It was only a couple minutes later that a medic briefly leaned out from behind the curtain to give the trio a tired thumbs up: “You three are life savers. His heart’s pumping again. Don’t even know if that qualified as coding.” 
Athena sagged with relief against Kato, then rocked the other way and leaned against her brother, still gripping his hand like a lifeline. She heaved a shaky breath but finally managed to smile.
“We did it. Or he did it. They did it, whatever. Thank Christ.”
“Thank us and the hospital staff, more like,” Kato said, though his sardonic tone gave way and wound up lost in one of relief. “...But, so...What do we do now? Just...go home?” Something about the idea of just walking away didn’t sit quite right.
“We can’t just leave him,” Athena said. “No way. We need to stick around. Make sure he’s alright. He might need somewhere to stay; why was he just—”
“Wait,” Kato cut her off; sure, just dipping out like nothing happened would’ve felt wrong, but Athena was on an entirely different wavelength. “You wanna just adopt a heroin addict? Like a stray puppy?” he asked.
“We can’t just dump him back out on the street!”
“There is no reason to think it will come to that,” Sethfire said, his voice soft as ever, but his calm diplomacy easily handing him charge of the conversation: “He may well have somewhere to go and this was an anomaly. I’d be loath to leave someone out in the cold, but if he has a home, we’ve no need to worry ourselves over it. If he does not…” Sethfire trailed off, his expression turning more troubled.
“C’mon Seth, he can’t be worse to have around than Kato,” Athena offered, overdramatically draping herself against her brother and gesturing toward Kato.
“Hey—”
“Hm, that may be true,” Sethfire replied, playing along and tapping his chin. “He did not smell like a smoker, I’ll give him that.” The corners of his mouth twitched upwards; his eyes glittered with gentle good-humor.
“You’re both assholes,” Kato said, though he did too poor a job of suppressing his smile for them to take him seriously; “But really? We’re gonna, what? Stand around until he wakes up and then be like ‘Hey man, you don’t know us. Wanna sleep on our couch?’ Assuming he accepts—we expect him to not use? We don’t know this kid; he could be dangerous or a dickhead or a thief. Seth, you’re the fuckin’ genius, you know this is a stupid idea.”
The humor left Sethfire’s eyes again and they grew darker, more thoughtful. The lines in his brow deepened. His lips drawn, he looked like a scholar doing exceptionally difficult mental math.

“...I am going to hold out hope that he has a place to go. If he does not, we can talk,” Seth eventually said, slowly and carefully. “Assuming that no red flags go up, I can’t deny that I’m disinclined to leave someone out on the street. Especially in mid-winter.” 
“No red flags bigger than overdosing in a back-alley doorway in East Flatbush, you mean?” Kato asked pointedly. Sethfire answered with only a patient blink and a dip of his head, and Kato, left empty-handed in terms of having a debate, just stared. Sethfire couldn’t be serious—but it seemed like he was. 
Okay, fine, yeah, maybe it would’ve felt a bit shitty to save the kid and then leave him there and never know anything else about it—about him, or how okay he was, or whatever—but that was sort of the point of the hospital, right? So that people who could take care of him would take care of him, and have it not be their problem to solve? What the hell were Seth and Athena even expecting? It seemed kind of fucked up, too, to hang around, wait for the dude to open his eyes, then spring a life debt on him and start treating him like a stray pet or a charity case. Seth had been unmoved by his argument, though. Kato finally cinched his brow and gave a slow, disbelieving half-shake of his head.
“We’re adopting...a junkie,” he said, his tone dripping with incredulous judgement. 
“Don’t be an asshole, K-O,” Athena replied, flashing him a look. “You out of anyone should know there’s more to people than just their vices.”
“It’s not about him being an addict! Or, I mean, there is that, but it’s not about the heroin as much as it is that we don’t know the guy!” Kato replied. “Like, fuck, he could wake up and start spouting racial epithets or something. It’s braindead to be planning on ‘taking him in’ this early…And nearly shooting up a school isn’t a vice,” he muttered.
“No, no, you’re right.” Athena rolled her eyes. “It’s not. Being friends with you is, though.”
Kato huffed at her sarcasm, a half-smile of surrender on his lips: “Fine, but when we all wake up with our throats slit—”

Kato didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence; the curtain around the boy’s bed had opened up again. The same nurse who’d flashed them the thumbs-up earlier walked over and smiled at the three of them. 
“As before; life savers,” he said. “Your friend’s stable; we’ll move him to one or of the rooms down the hall here, then you can go in and wait. It might be a while before he comes ‘round, though—flag a doctor when he does if one hasn’t gotten to you all by then. Dying takes a toll on the body, ya know? We’ll need to make sure he’s really okay.”
Seth nodded in response. “Thank you. Do you have any idea how long—?”
“Could be ten minutes. Could be a couple hours. Like I said, though, he barely coded. If I’m allowed to be cautiously hopeful, I’d lean towards under an hour,” the nurse said, then clapped Sethfire on the upper arm. “I really need to run. Should be a car accident coming through those doors any second now.”

The nurse walked away and Sethfire gestured towards the curtain, turning his gentle gaze and reassuring tone back to Athena and Kato. “Once again. All we can do is wait.”

They accompanied another nurse to a second, curtained “room,” where she clipped something to the boy’s finger and then left without another word. The doctors had cut his shirt away and left him looking cold and feeble on the cot, a thin blanket thrown carelessly over his knees and accomplishing nothing. He was very thin—pronounced ribs, visible chest bones; with a crooked, clearly hand-poked bloody dagger tattooed on his bony sternum next to a gravestone of similar prison-tattoo quality. Athena silently fixed the blanket and neatly folded up the kid’s discarded grey hoodie. It was dirty and worn, like his other clothes: Both his belt and shoes were held together with duct tape. Despite his obvious poverty, he had a roll of bills in his hoodie pocket that seemed suspicious and finally forced the three of them to break the quiet and discuss it. Maybe the kid dealt; maybe he stole. Nobody knew. They needed to ask him about that when he came around, Kato insisted. They stiltedly wondered aloud about his scar—or scars: His wrists looked a little fucked up, like they might have been cut by handcuffs or something.
  “It's not looking great, guys, let's be real: Heroin, wad of cash, gravestone and bloody dagger tats, wrists looking like a rap sheet?” Kato posed, apprehensive.
“He looks like he’s our age,” Athena said, as though it was a counterpoint.
“He is young,” Seth agreed.
“Okay? So were all the fuckers beating my ass at school.” 
“He has flowers, too,” Athena argued. 
Yeah, the kid had flower tattoos as well. And a stylized sun framed by the words “the sun will come up” on the back of his arm. Sure, it sounded positive, but what it really meant to the guy was anyone’s guess. Kato frowned and looked over at Seth.
“So we’re adding him to the lease because he likes daffodils?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
Seth slowly shook his head. “We’re waiting for him to wake up so that we can…see where we stand,” he replied carefully. “I’ve committed to nothing, yet, Julian. I do understand your concern.”

They lapsed back into silence; intermittently broken by stilted, distracted talk of other things which failed to feel important. They waited for the guy to open his eyes. 
Eventually, he did.

┉✚┉

The first thing Anarchy noticed when he woke up was pain: Radiating out from his chest, through every rib, his entire torso apparently one massive bruise. Sore and sick and disoriented as hell, he just barely opened his eyes into a squint and was met with unbearable brightness that forced him to screw them shut again. 
“What the fuck, my ribs…” he groaned to himself, straining to sit up.
“Hey! You’re awake!” 

The sound of an immediate and unfamiliar voice snapped Anarchy to full awareness: His eyes shot open and he struggled against the pain to lift himself into a sitting position. The situation he found himself in felt immediately like too much to take in: He was in a hospital bed, he was shirtless, there were three strangers in his room, and he hurt. His hand jumped to his chest, dislodging some plastic thing clipped to his finger, and he panicked for the briefest of moments when he didn’t find Hunter’s dog-tags until he realized the chain had simply fallen over his shoulder at some point and was now backward. He tugged it back to being front-facing, pulling his brother’s tags free from his hair and clutching them like a security blanket. 
“Who the fuck are you?—Shit, where’s my hoodie?” The venomous quality of his voice slipped as he twisted to look around, tossing off the hospital sheet.
“We’re the fucks who carried your ass to the hospital. Here,” one of the strangers—a long haired boy with a septum ring—responded, and tossed Anarchy the gray jacket. “Athena folded it for you. Docs totally cut your shirt off, though, huh.”

Anarchy eyed the other boy with well-learned distrust, but upon checking his hoodie’s pockets, he found his cash undisturbed; with his hands hidden behind his sheet, he thumbed through the bills and counted them. None were missing. He looked back up at the strangers in his room and furrowed his brow.
“...Yeah, totally,” he finally replied to the pierced, pony-tailed boy, still trying to make sense of his present company. The first voice he’d heard had been female—presumably the short-haired, smiling girl at the foot of his bed. ‘Athena’. Aside from Septum Ring Boy, there was the third stranger, a tall man with Athena’s same dark complexion, who leaned out from the curtained room and beckoned to someone Anarchy couldn’t see.
“So,” Presumably-Athena said, leaning forward, already smiling, “What’s your name?”
“What’s his?” Anarchy responded immediately, aggressively jerking his head toward Septum Ring Boy. “You’re Athena?”
Athena’s smile didn’t falter at his distrustful tone and refusal to answer; if anything, her eyes brightened. “Sure am! And he’s Kato. This—” she gestured to the tall stranger just as he turned back towards Anarchy, “—is my brother, Sethfire. Seth.” 
Sethfire inclined his head in greeting, his eyes glittering with obvious concern. “How are you feeling? I just waved the doctor over; she should be here to check up on you—” Sethfire said just enough for Anarchy to notice the trace of an accent before Kato cut him off.
“We gonna get a name or not, dude?” Kato asked, crossing his arms and lifting his chin; “You died. And you’d have stayed that way if we didn’t haul your ass in here. I think we earned it.”
Athena shot her friend a glare and a hissed ‘Don’t be like that!’, while Anarchy turned to face him fast enough for his ribs to sear in protest.
“I died?” he asked, wincing, that feeling far more pressing than the rudeness.
“Sure did: Heart stopped. CPR, oxygen, all the dramatics,” Kato drawled. “Name?”

Anarchy didn’t respond immediately, too taken aback, and rolled what Kato said over in his mind. I died, Anarchy thought to himself, testing the words out only to immediately be overwhelmed by them. I overdosed. I overdosed and I died and my heart stopped and I was dead. 
...Was dead.
Was dead and didn’t stay dead, was dead and now was sitting, upright, able to be asked a question. He hesitated, running one thumb over the edge of one of the dog-tags around his neck while the other flicked across the untouched roll of bills in his pocket. Yeah, he supposed this lot of strangers had earned at least his name, then.
“...Anarchy,” he finally answered, his voice coming out so quiet he could have passed as shy.
Kato rolled his eyes irritably and scoffed, “C’mon man, we’re not stupid.”
“‘Anthony Arland Keystone’!” Anarchy snapped in return, “‘An-Ar-Key.’ It’s what I go by, okay? Don’t call me by my birth name.” He lifted his chin defiantly but Kato didn’t challenge him a second time, just tilted his head slightly to the side and gave Anarchy a nod, his slow blink almost knowing. “Hm. Alright,” was all he offered.

“I think it’s a cool name,” Athena said brightly, tossing Kato a look that Anarchy couldn’t help but be impressed by; her warm smile stayed in place but her eyes blazed with behave-before-I-kick-you-in-the-shins energy, and if Anarchy wasn’t mistaken, Kato shrunk back slightly, though the corners of his mouth twitched upwards.
“...Thanks,” Anarchy said. He felt a sudden compulsion to say more; ask more, maybe. He couldn’t bring himself to. But something about the pair and their obvious bond had tripped him up, and paradoxically, in their company, he felt more alone than ever. He glanced away and accidentally made eye contact with his third rescuer—the tall one, Athena’s brother, Sethfire—the worry in whose thoughtful expression was betrayed by the concerned crease of his brow.
“...Anarchy, when this is all over with, here,” Sethfire said slowly, almost carefully, “Do you have somewhere to go home to? Somewhere warm?” 
Anarchy’s face fell and he glanced away, letting his hair fall into his eyes, unsure how to answer—if to answer; what to answer. Lying felt unpalatable and then impossible: He saw Athena straighten up out of the corner of his eye and the concern he glimpsed on Sethfire’s face in his periphery told him that his hesitation had likely been all they needed. 

Sethfire looked like he might speak and Anarchy wanted to say something before he did, but they were saved by the room’s curtain doorway suddenly being pulled aside by a hurried-looking doctor, who bustled in, generic clipboard almost comically in hand.
“Okay, okay—” she mumbled under her breath, reading to herself off of her clipboard; “Room 3, no ID. Opioid overdose. Given Naloxone, briefly coded…” She shook her head and looked up at the room, smiling despite obvious overwork. 
“Sorry—I’m Dr. Cammell! You’d think by my third year of residency I’d get used to the pace, wouldn’t you? But no, still adjusting! You’ve had an even harder night than me, though, haven’t you?” she said, turning to Anarchy. “You had no identification when you came in. Can I get your name?”
“Hugh Jass,” Anarchy deadpanned. He crossed his arms and hunched his posture further. Doctors were just police in white coats as far as he was concerned, and he didn’t talk to fuckin’ cops.
“Hugh Ja—” Dr. Cammell started to repeat, then her pen paused mid-scratch and she gave Anarchy a calculating look. “...When is your birth date?”
“April 20, 1969,” Anarchy drawled. He heard Kato snicker.
“...You’re claiming to be forty-two years of age, young man?” Dr. Cammell was sounding tireder by the minute.
“Sure.”
“I’m here to help you,” Dr. Cammell said, tucking her clipboard under one arm and snapping the pen into it as though sheathing a weapon. “That’s all. It’s easier to do if you cooperate, ‘Mr. Jass’. How are you feeling, physically?” 
Anarchy gave her an obstinate shrug. “My ribs hurt like fuck.”
“That would be the aftermath of the chest compressions to get your heart pumping again. You’re very lucky. May I check your heartbeat?”
Anarchy shrugged again, but more in surrender this time. “Yeah, I guess.” 

They went through the ‘breathe in’ ‘take a deep breath for me’ routine and Dr. Cammell came away looking satisfied—maybe even impressed:
“Perfect. Incredible. What a miracle...You must have a guardian angel looking out for you.” She tried smiling at him again. He re-crossed his arms and she returned to a more business-like air, albeit seeming rather disappointed behind her glasses. 
“Okay, well, just because I need to check on your brain function, I need you to answer a couple questions to the best of your ability. No personal information this time; it’s just to ascertain that you haven’t experienced any loss of function. Do you know what year it is?”
“2011. It’s December.”
“Excellent. Do you know who the president is?”
“Obama.”
“Great. What’s two plus two?”
“Fuckin’ four. Here’s a question for you, doc, when can I leave?” Anarchy snapped. Antsy and exposed, he impatiently zipped on his hoodie while Dr. Cammell made a quick note on her clipboard.
“Mister—” Dr. Cammell paused, then sighed. “Mr. Jass, you need to understand; you had a very, very close brush with death. You’re only alive right now because of how incredibly quickly you got care. I can’t discharge you—” she checked the papers on her clipboard, “—less than half an hour after you experienced cardiac arrest.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not the fuckin’ cops so you can’t hold me either,” Anarchy retorted, tilting his chin up in defiance. Dr. Cammell sighed, but her pager went off before she could reply. She frowned as she checked it.
“...No, we can’t,” she said, straightening up. “I’ll be back with you as soon as I can; I can refer you to some treatment centers and discuss your options. You three—” She turned her head and looked at Anarchy’s rescuers, “—Make sure Mr. Jass doesn’t do anything irrational, won’t you?”

As soon as the curtain swished shut behind her, Athena and Kato burst into laughter.
“Hugh Jass!” Athena wheezed, “God, you couldn’t possibly have seen when you said it, but her butt was pretty incredible—”
“Fuckin’ 4/20/69,” Kato muttered, his eyes glinting with humor. “So quick on the draw too. Godlike. Alright, fine, let’s expedite this. You got a rap sheet, man?”
Anarchy recoiled, curling his lip. “Expe—what? No, I don’t, not that it’s any of your business!” he snapped. He pushed away from the hospital bed and got to his feet. “I don’t want the cops here, anyway, though.”
“Cool, me neither,” Kato said, also standing. “What’s the cash from?”
“My job,” Anarchy responded, glaring. 
“What's your job?”
“Also none of your business,” Anarchy said, narrowing his eyes and turning to fully face Kato. “What’s it to you?”
“What's a roof to you?” Kato challenged, crossing his arms.
“What?”
“You steal shit? Rob people, pawn stuff?” 
“No!” Anarchy stepped sharply backwards, rankled.
“Well, alright then. I think that’s all we cared about, right guys?” Kato asked, abruptly abandoning the interrogation and turning easily towards the other two. “We breaking him out, now, or what?”
Anarchy stared. “What?”

Kato continued to look at Sethfire instead of replying, so Anarchy followed suit: Sethfire pursed his lips thoughtfully and glanced apprehensively around the curtain, then turned back around to raise and lower a single shoulder at Anarchy.
“I don’t know if ‘breaking you out’ is necessary. I would not encourage leaving against medical advice...I am assuming you have no insurance and no billing address, however.” He tucked his tongue to his cheek; his glasses reflected the light and made his gaze unreadable. “I could give them my information, I suppose—”
“Oh, fuck that, he used a fake name!” Kato said, rolling his eyes, at the same time Anarchy threw out an instantaneous: “What, no, don’t do that for me!”
Blindsided by the concept, he warily eyed his rescuers and edged sideways. “I'm not waiting around for them to call the cops, anyway.”
“They don’t do that,” Sethfire reassured; “You’ve no need to worry.”
“First time for everything,” Anarchy responded with a shallow head-shake; “Y’all can do what you want, but I’m getting out of here.” 
He turned to leave and nearly missed what Athena cheerfully pitched in next, bouncing on the balls of her feet:
“Yeah, fuck the rules, Seth, c’mon! Let’s spring him outta this place and get him back to the apartment.”
“What apartment?” Anarchy asked, stopping short and looking back over at her. “I don’t—I dunno if I OD’d behind one or something but I don’t live there—”
Athena laughed. “No, no! Our apartment.” 
Anarchy figured he must have looked exactly as lost as he felt, dumbstruck, because Sethfire adjusted the glasses on his crooked nose and offered clarification:
“You need somewhere to recover; I believe I’m correct in saying that your answer to my question earlier if you had someplace warm to go home to would have been ‘no’?” he said in the soft, clear intonation of a compassionate schoolteacher. “We have room in our flat.”
“You’re...offering me a place to stay? Just...Like that?” It left Anarchy reeling; so shocked he almost wanted to argue on the insensibility of it all.
“Should I not, Anarchy?” Sethfire asked in return, his eye contact steady, almost penetrating. Anarchy had a million ways to answer; a million ways to tell this stranger that no, he really shouldn’t be throwing his door open to any random squat kid that keeled over in front of him—but some baffled gratitude overtook them all and left Anarchy stunned to silence. It was a relief to be surfaced from it by his other two rescuers’ readiness for action: Kato vaulted the cot and shoved on Anarchy’s shoulder while Athena excitedly whisper-chanted ‘jail-break, jail-break, jail-break’ and gave her brother’s coat a tug.
“Less talking, more moving!” Kato said, almost into Anarchy’s ear, leaning past him to speak to Athena and sounding as if he was planning a real jailbreak; “Is the coast clear?”
Athena peered around the curtain. 
“No sign of Dr. Cammell. Let’s go!” The excited grin she threw over her shoulder at Anarchy just about stole his breath with how familiar it was. She’s just like Chey.
He was shaken from his thoughts by Kato’s palm against his shoulder again.
“I know she’s gorgeous, Anarchy, but we gotta get going. Stare later,” he said in a snarky undertone, half-pulling, half-shoving Anarchy out of the room. “Or don’t, ‘cause she’ll black your eye and you’ll deserve it.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Save it. Come on!”

Standing directly amongst the three of them brought Anarchy to the realization of just how tall Sethfire was: He himself was used to looking down slightly when speaking to people and Sethfire stood almost a full head over him. The idea of them sneaking, unnoticed, out of the ER became so comical a concept that Anarchy almost felt giggly, and he had to fight the upward twitch of his lips. Sethfire, too, looked faintly amused and made no effort to conceal his towering frame as their motley crew made their way through the main area of the ER. Sure enough, an exhausted-looking nurse behind the desk gestured irritably at them, scowling from behind red-framed cat-eye glasses.
“If you don’t have discharge papers, you’re leaving against medical advice! Your insurance might not—” she snipped, only to be cut off by Athena’s: 
“Tsk! You doctors just don’t understand, my friend can’t stay! Terrified of hospitals! He has this awful phobia of needles. Debilitating.” Her tone was the same scolding one a mother would use and both Anarchy and Kato cracked up. Athena shot the nurse a goofy, triumphant face as Sethfire pushed open the exit doors for them, and the four walked out into the cold December air.

As he caught his breath in the aftermath of laughter, feeling strangely free, Anarchy turned again to his rescuers and shook his head in disbelief. The air, the ‘escape,’ the entourage—everything was too surreal to comprehend.
“Who are you guys?” he asked. 
“Your friendly neighborhood Spiderman,” Athena beamed at him, and fuck, she really did remind him of Chey. 
“We’re a gang of chaotic-good dumbasses, apparently, which is quite an accomplishment considering I’m neutral evil and Seth’s a legitimate genius,” Kato drawled, though the lingering exhilaration in his voice drowned out his poor attempt at guarded distance.
“All we are is people, Anarchy,” Sethfire said quietly, a gentle smile on his face, the brotherly concern in his eyes adding to the weight of Hunter’s dog tags around Anarchy’s neck; “Just people who happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
Anarchy shook his head again. “...I owe you my life,” he said. He looked at the ground and tucked his hands into his hoodie pockets, overwhelmed and humbled.
“...You owe yourself a life,” Sethfire responded. “I feel that having somewhere warm and safe to sleep could help you recover from this. Can we offer you space back at the flat?”

At first Anarchy hesitated, still hardly able to believe that the offer had been genuine before; that it was real enough to be getting posed to him a second time. It was too generous an invitation, even if it didn’t have strings attached, and he wasn’t sure it didn’t—though he couldn’t fathom what these three might hope to leverage out of him anyway. Judging by Sethfire’s tailored clothing and Athena’s sharp leather jacket, it wasn’t his money. And if they’d wanted that, they could have just taken it. He glanced down the street, prickled by the urge to just decline and disappear into the night. Whatever the doctors did to reverse his overdose had reversed his dose-dose, too, and his fingers twitched in his pockets. Somehow he doubted very much that these people knew where to get a bag on short notice, or would be willing to make the detour to. And yet…
His breath fogged in front of him; his threadbare hoodie failed to repel even the faint breeze. One night out of the cold might be worth it.

He felt a gentle, playful push on his shoulder and looked over to meet Athena’s eyes: In the yellow street-lamps they glinted like firelight and were just as warm and bright.
“Come back with us,” she said with a persuasive grin and another shake of his shoulder; “We’re weird, but not, like, super fucked up.”
“Oh, no, we’re absolutely super fucked up,” Kato contended, scoffing; “I won’t lie about it.” He tilted his head, tucking some loose strands of hair behind his ear as he looked at Anarchy, who noticed for the first time the inverted cross tattooed next to Kato’s left eye. Kato’s gaze traveled along the scar that carved its way across the left side of Anarchy’s own face. “...I think you might fit in with us, though. We’ll see.”

Anarchy looked back at Kato: Took in the smirk, the inverted cross tattoo, the Bad Religion patch on his jeans. Thought about having done Chey’s tongue-in-cheek ‘Holy Bathwater’ tattoo a year and a half ago; about the abuse his missing friend had suffered. Athena’s enthusiastic smile shone in his periphery, and there was something about it—and how much adventure glittered in her eyes, so much so that he could almost turn them from amber to seafoam green in his mind. Then there was Sethfire’s gentle tone, the compassion in his expression, and how familiar both seemed when Anarchy brought Hunter to mind. And hey, they’d gone and saved his life. He returned Kato’s steady eye contact.
“...Okay, yeah. I guess we will.”