His teeth chattered with emotion.

“We’re not going to help you,” Cradle said.

“If you do,” Rain said. “I’ll do what you want. Tie me to a chair, torture me for days. Kill me. But save them.”

Love Lost shook her head, looking away.

“We’re going to come after you,” Cradle said. “Could be tomorrow, could be a week, could be a year. Then we’ll do that anyway. If you’ll lose people and things you care about in the meantime? Good. And you can know we let it happen because of your fucked up attitude infecting us.”

“Fuck you,” Rain said. “Whoever or whatever you were before, it wasn’t normal or good. People staring at you with disappointed looks from across a desk, looking at reports? What was it? Because you weren’t living up to potential? You’re proving them right.”

Cradle didn’t flinch. “You don’t know anything.”

Rain clenched his fist. He looked at Love Lost. “Your daughter would be disappointed in you.”

She raised her other fist, ready to punch the barrier again.

“Don’t take the bait,” Snag said. “Don’t give him that satisfaction.”

“If you got anything from me, it wasn’t evil,” Rain said. “It was willful blindness, being fucking sheep with no self-esteem or self-respect. What happened to that Snag that helped that girl?”

It was Cradle who answered, “You guarded the door while he was trampled on the other side, and you laughed. You see what we went through in our dreams, but you were the one getting a drunken handjob and laughing while we faced the worst days of our lives.”

“It was panic,” Rain said.

“Fuck that.”

“It was panic. It was a nervous reaction!”

“Fuck that,” Cradle said, dismissive. “We’ve heard it before, but—”

“Why do you think my share of the powers breaks things apart? They’re thematically tied into who we are! And my share is to shatter things because I was fucking shattered, right then!”

“It’s a power to destroy because you destroy things. Do you know how I know?” Cradle asked. “Because you fucking told us. Day one. You, me, him, her, in this room. You laughed. You told us we deserved it. You threatened us.”

“Kill me, then. Stop the Fallen, kill the monsters at the top, like Seir, and then kill me.”

“We’ll do all that without your help,” Snag said. “Give us time. Wait for it, dread it.”

Rain was shaking. He approached the dais. He found the his shards of metal.

He snatched them up and gripped them as a stack in his hand.

He turned his back to the dais, the three others, and the mangled body.

⊙

Fingers ran through Rain’s hair.

“Shhh. Easy.”