It was surprising. Shocking. Illogical, almost unacceptable. Though irate and infuriated by their latest disagreement, the kid had come back to him. For him?

A bleary mind dredges up even hazier memories, worried words being stumbled over in a voice too loud yet weak and wavering, like a worn speaker. Small but capable hands digging into emaciated arms to drag the thin, drugged body off the floor and into the next room, into the tub; cold skin accosted by colder water with never a shiver, scarcely a sign of life.

For him.

He recalls these images as if having watched them from above his own body, through a fogged window. Then a still bleary blue gaze searches the sleeping form next to its own, finding no answers in the falsely content visage. Everyone looks naive and harmless when asleep. But the younger boy would perhaps be naive and harmless, if not for his influence. This stray who is attached, maybe unwillingly, to the patron saint of passive aggression, searching him for a light long since extinguished. One would think the hunt would've been called off by now.

The hunt should have been called off by now. Jimmy wants to shake him awake, gripping his arms just as tightly as those tiny hands gripped his own and demand him off this matress, out of this delapidated dwelling. Send the boy to her. She deserves him. Her light still shines brightly. But no, the jaded junkie is not so nihilistic as to send away the only person he perhaps truly has, anymore. He could wake the slumbering kid to express his relief, his gratitude for the sudden and unexplained reappearance, but that wouldn't do either. It would go against everything this partnership was built on, compromise the entire arrangement.

Through the halogen orange glow that simpers its way into the dusty, desolate room, while watching thick eyelashes flutter as bright green eyes twitch beneath in sleep movement, he recalls how it all started. The same phrase the conversation with, the then more innocent and hopeful Jesus, had ended with the first night pulling itself to the forefront of his exhausted mind.

"You just, accept this. Accept this and question everything else. But you gotta have something static out here, or you'll go crazy...so you accept this."