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He should know better – just as he should have known better than to think that the Doctor really care, or to think that screaming her name in the rainy streets would really bring her back to life, or to think that society would ever change at the whim of a misguided man and the gun in his hand – but his mind is warped, twisted, the way it's only but, just a little more, and he's waiting for the moment she leaves. Gone again, only with her life in her hands but a hatred for him in her heart. It's not Mary, not how he knews her, but it is what that self deprecating voice that's plagued the back of his mind for years and years likes to tell him. He's yelled at her, snapped at her like any of this mess could have conceivably been her fault. What kind of monster would do such a thing? The kind not worthy of the woman he holds so faintly. The kind that deserves every bit of isolation that's been handed to him. The life she deserves is one devoid of churches, of sleazy men. No more playing the doormat, no more playing servant to the revolution. No more playing servant to its hitman. If she goes, he won't blame her. (He'd do the same in her shoes.)[break][break]

But that's the difference between them, isn't it? Nikki's the sort who would abandon someone to a cruel fate without any shred of regret. Mary, though – Mary is different. She is kindness; she is forgiveness. He holds her hand limply in her's, and she grabs his back like a child clings to its favorite toy. (Stupid, stupid. How could he ever think she might break? She's been the stronger of the two from the day she was born. He's the one who's going to shatter. He's the one who's been shattered before, over and over and over -) “Nikki,” she says. “Look at me. Please look at me.” She holds his chin in his hand, guides his eyes to stare at her helplessly, but it's all formality. All she has to do is ask, and he's certain to obey. Malleable, obedient. Maybe that's what made him a target all those years ago.[break][break]

“You and I need a break, okay? I love you. But we're both exhausted. This conversation – It's not going to go anywhere if we're both so tired.” I love you the blonde says, still, despite it all, and despite the comfort that's supposed to come with those words, it feels like another knife through his stomach. How many will he take before his organs come tumbling out once and for all? “We're going to go back to my place, okay? And then – and then we can talk about this.” About what? he asks her silently, desperately. What is there left to say? He's not her's, she's not his. She was kidnapped, only to spare her from her murder at his hands. She takes so much grief, balls it up in her hands where it can't get the best of her, but sometimes, he can't help but think that she can be so stupid. (Leave him, leave him to die. No one's safe, not when he's around. He's doomed to kill everything and everyone he loves.) And yet, for all his raving - “Let's go home, okay?” - he can't help but relent: “... O-okay. Yeah, okay. Let's... Let's go to your place.”

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He's made a horrible mistake.[break][break]

He sees it immediately in the way she seems to freeze at the sound of his accusation, struck by an anger he's never spoken to her with before. Even in those early days, full of needles breaking through veins and irritation at her filthy church, he'd never spoken to her with anything aside from classic, bitter rudeness. She had not been welcome, and he had been certain to make her sure of that, but even he understood on some level that she had little choice in the matter, herself. Slay not the messenger, so they said. Was it fair, though, to compare those days to this very moment? Back then, she had meant nothing to him. Nothing at all. If she keeled over dead, it would have only mattered to him because he would have been begging and sweating and bleeding for the heroin she had failed to deliver. Now, though, she is his everything. The memory of her in his mind, the reminder that somewhere out there, across time and space, someone had cared that he has lived at all, was more, often than not, the only thing that had enabled him to keep going on his holy quest of “saving the world” from itself. To hear that she is not the same woman who had kept his very soul alive would have broken him (is breaking him now, a chisel to breaks in his mind, in his heart that had been hastily, poorly mended out of nothing but necessity). It's better to call her a liar than to accept the sad, sad truth. He wants Mary, his Mary, the one that had stroked his hair and held his hand and told him that she loved him just as much as he loved her, oh, how he loves her, how he would gladly set his world ablaze if only it would call her soul back to him -[break][break]

But he can never have “his Mary”. “His Mary” is buried six feet under the dirt, and no replica, no matter how close, could ever be her.[break][break]

She crumples, and so does his ego. It's a revelation that shakes him more than the reminder that her blood is on his hands, and he feels as helpless as she looks there, fallen to her knees, a sinner begging to her god. But Nikki is no god, and he knows far too much about worshiping at the shrine of a false deity to let her do it, herself. A moth to flame, an insect caught in a lamp – no concept of glass, no way out. She falls to her knees, and he rushes as if to catch her, to keep her from falling again, again. The floor never meets her face, though, and it leaves him to hover miserably at her side. His hand won't touch her because he fears it will burn; he won't let himself reach out because he's afraid she'll shattered in his grasp if he does. (It's only been minutes since he'd clung to her like his lifeline. What has changed?) “Nikki,” Mary whispers, an afterimage of herself, the tremble of a wall shaken by a cacophony in the room adjacent. “When have I ever lied to you?”[break][break]

“Never,” he chokes. It's immediate, the words of a starved man, he forgiveness the only thing that will quell the ache in his belly. All he's ever wished for was her well being, her happiness, but all he knows how to do with his own hands is break, kill, destroy, destroy, destroy. “You've never lied to me. I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, I swear, you're – you're perfect. Perfect, Mary. Please don't cry.” Not because of me, he wants to say, but the unspoken words hang there all the same. When had she ever been hurt by anything else, after all? Oh, yes, the world was cruel, and she was only one of its many victims – an outcome of the disease, a pawn played in sick men's games of chess, but she knew better than to let that get to her by now. The only times it hurt was when she never expected it to. The only times it hurt were when the injuries were delivered by the one person she never expected them to come from. (This was his warped perception. Guilt unfathomable, self-hatred stacked upon self-hatred. How could she ever love a man like him?) Even now, he had lashed out at her, afraid of the possibility that she was not exactly who he had wished her to be – but she looked like “her”. Sounded like “her”. Spoken, acted, remembered like “her”. The only difference was that the woman before him had never known the cruel fate of death, not firsthand. If he was wishing for “his Mary”, he was wishing upon her her death. How selfish was he to think, even if only for a second, that his self-interested desires were more than the safety of the woman he loved? Was it not enough to get to hold her mirror image in his arms again? To know that, at least in some reality, she had not had to perish in order to set him free from the wicked Doctor?[break][break]

“I love you,” Nikki tells her again. He'll tell her a thousand times if he has to, but he doesn't think the words will ever measure up to the feeling that's tearing his heart in half now. He takes the hand that she rubs so furiously against her crying eyes and holds it as carefully as one would an ancient heirloom, too old to repair, too precious to replace. All he can do is break her down, but he'll change. He has changed. He won't think her death worth it, even in passing, anymore. “I still do, after – after all this time. I never stopped thinking about you. … But –” But. Things aren't the same anymore. No longer is he shackled to his “god”, nor is she shackled to her's; and, of course, the elephant in the room. Has she even realized yet? “– I'm not... I'm not the Nikki you knew. I mean, I don't – I don't think. A-and even if I was, I mean... Mary, you died. They put me in a hospital, Mary, you – you don't just walk away from that. I-I mean, he wouldn't have... wouldn't have snapped at you.” A breath. “... S-sorry. Again.”[break][break]

His eyes are dry, cried of all the tears they can, and all he can feel now is the shuddering exhaustion that follows the misery of an emotional high. Her hand is still in his, but he won't meet her eyes. (Unworthy.) “... Fuck. I used to picture this in my head all the fucking time. It – it was going to be perfect. And I fucked it up, j-just like always.”

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There were an infinite number of realities out there. String theories, parallel universes, anything of the like: He hadn't believed in them for a second before coming to the island, had barely even heard of them before his departure from Seattle, but if Tomodachi had done nothing else, it had taught him wrong. There were things out there that abided by temporal and physical laws that were beyond his comprehensions, and billions more that were functionally identical to the home he had come from save for one insignificant difference. Morgan Freeman ate Lucky Charms one morning instead of a waffle, and the universe as they knew it immediately splintered. For as many as there were that were so close, though, there were infinitely more that were so drastically different. The chances of him running into people he knew were so astronomically low that it shouldn't have happened at all – and yet there was Mary, the woman he had loved until she died because of his impact on her life, and Aggie, who had known him in another life well enough to consider him her closest friend. Worse than those, however, there was Emilio, someone from some disgusting revolution that had somehow persisted even after the him of that universe had succumbed to grief over the loss of Mary and left the Operation in chains. He didn't know Emilio personally, but Emilio knew him well enough to want him dead for his so-called betrayal. How many others like that violent man were there out there? Slaves to the Doctor that had yet to see that they were being played for fools, made into body bags, scapegoats for whatever the man in the chair was finally asked to pay for his crimes? And the wicked Doctor himself – he was out there, billions of versions of him, some kinder, some crueler, but all of them identical to his core. (If only he could find one, just one, squeeze the life out of his throat with his own shaking hands, maybe he wouldn't have to feel the guilt as badly as he did now.) Fate dictated that it was only a matter of time before one of them showed up, another member of the operation or the corrupt man at its head. What he hadn't been prepared for was one of them showing up so soon.[break][break]

Grocery bags held in clenched fists fell to the ground the moment he saw her across the way, potatoes scattering everywhere, a milk jug tipped on its side. She'd seen him first, he knew; it was made obvious in the way she stared at him across the way with wide, terrified eyes. A deer caught in the headlights of a car? No, that couldn't be. He was the one in danger here. He was the dissenter, and deserter, the traitor. She had to have known it was him, too. If there was a person in the revolution who's name got around, it was the revolution's prime hitman, it's poster child. “Look at him,” Doctor X would say in anything but words, “a boy raised from up from nothing, molded into a perfect killing machine.” Anyone could be anything had been the unspoken motto – hobos turned spies, dropouts turned assassins – and no ones success story was quite as touching and miraculous as his own. Because he was X's favorite. (If he really was X's favorite and still meant so little to him in the end, then what did everyone else from Operation: Mindcrime mean to their silver-tongued savior?) It begged the question of how they all reacted when he, the favorite child, the success story to beat them all left. His towel must have left red marked when he threw it in once and for all. It wasn't something that could have been covered up. With the loss of activity, it could be assumed that the Operation had simply crumpled after he was taken into police custody – but then again, nothing was very clear during his stay at the state psychiatric ward, and his memory of his time there and what came before was... fuzzy, more often than not. This woman, this doer of evil must have hated him for it. If not for betraying their god, then for potentially bringing the whole effort down to its knees when his mind had shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. Surely, she'd want him dead, too, just like Emilio. But this time, he knew the person he was looking at. Libby? Lyra? The name didn't matter. He knew who she was, and he knew what she'd do if he let her – so he didn't.[break][break]

Sorry, Homura, he thought, well aware of the trouble he was causing her with one simple act alone. The peoples' memories could be erased, though, and replaced. His life could not. His Berreta glinted with a familiarity in the sunlight, its barrel aimed straight for a person who would surely want him dead, and the sounds of screaming and pandemonium at the sight of a fire arm in plain sight was quick to follow its reveal. “Move,” he told Lydian from across the way, “and I'll shoot.” He considered making a threat of show and telling her that he'd shoot her if he could hit or any random denizen from the crowd if he couldn't, but this was a member of Mindcrime he was talking to. All she had in mind, he had to bet, was survival and revenge.[break][break]

“Alright, spill it – I wanna know. Why the hell are you and that bowlcut guy after me? Killing me ain't gonna change anything, an' it sure as hell ain't gonna make you feel better about losing the Operation!”

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There are tears in her eyes.[break][break]

The circumstances they had found themselves in had never been what he could have labeled as ideal. His own revolved around the slaughtering of others, lives he thought all corrupt (those he would later learn to be innocent) lost to the gun in his hand and the revolution on his mind. A man who spoke in tongues weaved from lies and a cause that sent him spiraling to his own demise. But for all of this – even the broken family that came before it, comprised of an angry father, an absent mother, and son who found himself a bit too fond of the needle's end – he'd still found himself inclined to believe that Mary had always had it worse. Her story was no mystery to him; it had taken months, yes, to drag it out of her, but there came a point in their lives where the only secrets they'd allow themselves to keep from each other were the ones that they absolutely could not say by word of the master they were forced to serve. From one broken household to the next, only to be spat out onto the unforgiving streets. At least when Nikki had found himself there, it had been of his own accord, caused by his own final act of rebellion. Mary? She'd never even had the choice. And yet through all of the abuse, the violence, the dehumanization, and the blackmail, she still stood taller than all those around her, still radiated a light that could be matched only by the blinding sun in the sky. Kindness never left her mind, even when pitted against those without a drop of it in their black, black hearts. Sister Mary Fairchild was a stronger woman than any he'd ever met and any he would ever come to meet, powerful enough in heart and mind to rival and exceed even those that history showered in praise and heroism. Duties placed on her head were faced head on, regardless of what they entailed (carrying packages of powder forbade by the law, following a man who hadn't wanted her around like a dog, laying herself bare for any and all who saw her only for the flesh that made her human), but never once had he seen her cry over them or the cruel fate that had brought them about. In truth, he'd started to believe that she couldn't. Heroes didn't have tears to drip down their faces miserably – and she was certainly his.[break][break]

He sees them on her face now, however, prompted seemingly only by his arrival at the counter that keeps them apart, the one that has his hands gripping the stained tiled with a grip that could crush concrete rather than letting them pull her into him, away from those that would take her away from him again. If the sight of her had been a salve on a cracked heart, the sight of her crying shatters it into pieces uncountable, millions of shards imbedding themselves into his lungs, his stomach, his very soul, painful enough to nearly make him keel over then and there. “Nikki,” she says, and a fear he hadn't even known he'd had is suddenly resolved. She knows him. Must know him as he knows her. He's spent three years of hearing that voice whispered in his ear, only to turn to find their speaker gone in a puff of spoke. How long had it been since he'd given up on hearing it from the lips of its rightful owner? How long ago had he resigned himself to a fate of incurable misery? “Yeah. It's – It's me. I can't, uh – hold on, let me –” she continues, disjointedly, and he nods with a fervor, mind barely even registering the broken phrases she spits out into the air. Distantly, he can hear the agitated voice of the man he'd so rudely shoved aside; the words don't reach him, though. How could they? She's here, before his very eyes, speaking words that can be heard outside of his own warped mind, and nothing short of the untimely apocalypse could tear his attention away from that. They stare at each other, equal parts amazed and dumbstruck, even as she slams her hand down on the counter's bell forcefully enough to awake a green-skinned (odd) man behind her and announce that it's time, despite the crowd amassed behind him, to take her break. And just like that, she's off, twisting herself around the counter and pulling him aside and away from the rest. By no means does she drag him off to anywhere private – in fact, he can still hear the confused chatter of the patrons behind his back, vaguely feel their eyes watching them as she pressed herself flush against his awaiting chest, open arms – but they may as well be a galaxy away for all he cares. Let them see, the hitman thinks. Let them know that, for all his bloodshed and hate, all he has ever really wanted is the woman he loved at his side.[break][break]

“Nikki,” Mary says through the wet mess in his shirt, trembling like a leave shaken by the wind. All of his is sucked out of him with nothing by the three words she says to him next: “I love you.”[break][break]

Three years. Three years. (To him, it's been more than an eternity.) Nikki has heard these words before, spoken from that very same mouth, in that very same tone. He'd held her in a death grip with tears in his eyes on that night, fearful of what it was that was being asked of him by his God. Now, he holds her in a death grip just the same, a sob of his own pulled from unsuspecting lungs, a torrent of his own hot tears clawing their way down the sides of his face. Fear does not find him because of what he's being expected to do now – it finds him because of what he had become. The last time she had spoken those words to him, she'd died before the sun had even risen over the rainy city of Seattle. Died, even, because of them. Whoever pulled that trigger ultimately doesn't matter, really, does it? All that does is that she'd perished because he had held her life above that of the cause. If only he'd kept his distance, he thinks to himself miserably, pushed her away to an arm's length at best until the very end, the only one who would have suffered would have been himself. (How many more innocents, he doesn't think, would have died that way? How many more times would Father William have pushed her down against that alter and given her a reason to wish for the death she ultimately received?) I love you. And he loves her back – oh, God, how he loves her, more than anything in the vast, beautiful world around them – but she doesn't deserve someone like he and the death he heralds. He wants to do nothing more than tell her that he feels the same, would give anything and everything for her, but how can he? Doctor X wasn't here, but death followed him as it always had, and he couldn't bring it to her now. (Not again. He doesn't think he'll survive if he finds her frigid corpse one more time.) Instead, he chokes – he sobs – he whines into the crook of her neck:[break][break]

“Fuck, Mary, I – I'm sorry. I'm sorry! It's - , God it's all my fault, I – I didn't mean for you to –” Die. He can't say it. He sobs even harder at the thought alone, and his mouth can't form the word without tearing him in two. “... I'm so sorry...”

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