The ghost of Roy’s earlier smile surfaced and receded on his lips. But he kept staring. His shoulder twitched hard. Involuntary or a shrug, Jonathan couldn’t tell. “No.”

Jonathan shouted into Roy’s face, “Do you want to die?”

And that it was possibly the stupidest thing Jonathan had ever said out loud was more than he could take. He went cold all over.

Roy wheezed out a shallow laugh into Jonathan’s trembling face. His eyes glittered, remote but piercing.

Jonathan slammed the palm of his hand into the wall next to Roy’s head and pushed up from the floor. He stomped through the house to his bedroom. At the back of his drawer full of T-shirts, he pulled out what was, as far as he knew, the only other prescription in the house. Painkillers. Percocet and Vicodin from his own shoulder surgery and dental work, tucked away for safekeeping.

He hadn’t taken them for long when they’d been prescribed. He couldn’t enjoy being woozy and warm, adrift on imaginary goodwill, quick to smile, and maybe a little too prone to honesty in the hazier moments. He didn’t trust the waking dream of nothing to lose. Some of the pills were years old.

He’d only ever taken a dose or two to get him through the worst of whatever pain he had, and the rest went into the drawer for emergencies. That Roy was still breathing right now was an emergency. He didn’t know how much time he had before Donna and Carly found a way home.

Jonathan’s pulse strobed in his eyesight, throbbing in a sharp headache that had sprung up in his temple. What choice did he have? Roy did this. Roy wanted this and was always going to have gotten all the way to doing it at some point.

All the things he’d watched Roy fuck up scrolled fast through his memory, an exercise that seemed in the service of something not quite under Jonathan’s control as he came back through the house with the pills. It teased him with images of the unsanded splinters bristling on the deck railing. The brush marks in the paint on his father’s kitchen wall. The soap dried in streaks on the hood of his car. The bad green haircut of a poorly mowed lawn. The mountains of useless junk Roy burrowed under like a rat, just like Jonathan’s father. Every flinching, whining, mealymouthing, sloppy, inconvenient encounter. Marcelline dying on the ground.

Roy’s usual half-assed results weren’t going to cut it this time. This wasn’t personal. Halfway would be a disaster.

Roy had slid down low on the wall in Jonathan’s absence, chin to rattling chest now, sipping tiny breaths between long pauses.