Verdy was having a feeling.

Not a particularly bad feeling, just a strange one, like she was slightly out of sync with the world. She tried to shake it for a while, had a shower, flicked through a book, even unpacked and folded all the clothes in her drawer. The feeling lingered. Glancing at the clock she decided it wasn’t too late for a stroll and slipped into something a little warmer, shoes instead of bare toes, and her hand-along jacket over her long black pyjama shirt.

Perhaps she was hungry. With that possibility as an objective she left the room with nothing more than the key in her hand. She didn’t need anything else. She would just duck on down to the kitchen and have a glass of milk, perhaps a cookie, then go back to bed, to see if that shook the niggling feeling.

As the door shut her eyes rested for a moment on the picture of Andrew, Jack and herself, on their first day together, the marker for the door for Andrew to come pounding on should anything happen to their pirate pup. With a gentle smile at the true happiness in the glossy print she turned and headed towards the kitchen, tracksuit pants scuffing along the way only tracksuit pants do. It wasn’t so cold in the hall as she expected, so she wandered a little slower. There was no rush, and perhaps in the time it took her to arrive she could place the odd feeling or figure out what it meant.

After her two glasses of milk (one chocolate, one ordinary calcium-flavoured) and a choc-chip cookie she dawdled back up the hall, still trying to figure out what was off. She was certain she hadn’t left the hair straightener on (that was a fact, especially since they didn’t have a hair straightener) and all her online-class work was up to date, so no looming incomplete assessment was draining her. Furrowing her forehead she tried to put a finger on what it was that was distracting her so badly.

Pausing in front of her door for a moment she frowned at the picture, perhaps there was something wrong with Jack. Maybe he was sick and Andrew had thought it was too late to call her and was trying to get him through it by himself. Perhaps even now he was wishing she was there to help him.

Her feet carried her onwards down the hall to the door with a different picture of the same people and pooch on it. Andrew’s room. There was no real reason for her coming here, just a feeling. She paused outside the door, was it too late to knock? Her ears strained for any whining or other sounds of doggy-distress. Rude as it might be to wake Andrew, the feeling was stronger here, and now mingled with a tinge of dread. What was behind the door that made her feel so strange? As she was no form of empath (at least as far as she was aware, that seemed to have no link to her mutation) she simply had to put it down to intuition.

That or she had finally cracked and gone bonkers.

It was quiet tonight. Jack was asleep on the blanket that Andrew had consigned to the floor for the dog just at the end of his bed. Though his eyes were heavy with drowsiness Andrew did not sleep. He could not sleep. If he slept he'd see the bloody head again. Or he'd see Jorge, dead. There were any number of variations on the visions that plagued his sleeping hours. They wouldn't cease and they made him shy away from sleeping. It was better to avoid sleep and thereby avoid the dreams than to struggle through them every night.

And if it wasn't the dreams it was the feeling of the gun in his hands again. It was as though his hands had memorized the texture of the grip and the recoil as the weapon discharged its rounds. The sensations would ghost over his hands and dissipate quickly, staying around only long enough to disquiet him. It, like the dreams, only bothered him at night. During the day he had other things to focus on. His work for Sam and other aspects of day to day life filled the sunlit hours. When the sun went down and Andrew was alone he dealt with what he'd done.

Others would tell him that it wasn't so bad. That he'd done it to save someone else. Or perhaps they would say that one person's life wasn't much compared to how many more people had died at the hands of others. They were wrong. A life was a life and no amount of rationalization would diminish that. Andrew stood up from his bed to pace the room and it creaked as he did so. He had to wake himself up, otherwise he'd fall asleep. Despite his wardrobe saying otherwise, dressed only in a pair of pajama pants that were a dark green color, Andrew did not want to sleep. His eyes started to drift shut and he jerked upright as he awoke. The pacing began.

The feeling wasn’t resolved by standing at the door, but it had settled into a dull nagging. Whatever unknown force that had brought her here, had brought her here. She frowned and considered knocking, would she disrupt any potentially delicate task? Distract someone from a lifesaving moment? Fear held her back, in silence at the door, until the bed creaked, and there was the unmistakeable sound of someone shuffle-pacing around the room.

Whatever was happening to Jack, her knocking now wouldn’t disrupt it. She was certain, now, that it was Jack who needed her, and that the feeling was what was known as a ‘mother’s instinct’. Her baby needed her, and so she had come. Sure, it had taken her a while to figure out what the instinctual feeling was, but she got there eventually. Now all she could do was hope she wasn’t too late.

A million reasons, diagnoses, fears, tumbled through her as she raised her hand and knocked on the door. What if she had missed something vital in the myriad of pamphlets the shelter woman had given them. What if some well-meaning mansionite had given him cheese, or some other milk product, and even now he was in the midst of a terrible allergic reaction. What if, what if, what if. She couldn’t know anything for sure until she saw her little furry captain, and she knocked again on the door.

“Hello, Andy? Its Verdy, can I come in?”

No matter how bad it was, Dad wouldn’t hide it from Mum, right?

After some time of pacing Andrew came out of his haze to a knock at the door. What? It took him a minute to realize that that meant someone wanted in. The question was whether or not he wanted to let them in. He couldn't let any see him like this. Then Verdy's voice made itself known from beyond the wooden barrier. Verdy was...well he still wasn't sure exactly what she was but she was close enough that he actually had to consider letting her in. Andrew continued to pace. It wasn't possible to think quickly while he was this drowsy. He needed sleep but the very thought was appalling at the moment.

Verdy was nice and she might have a legitimate reason for coming. Who knew, maybe she needed someone to listen? What sort of person would he be to deny her that. He was already awake. Yet Andrew was also selfish. He didn't want her to see the results of his struggles against sleep and have her ask. Andrew didn't want to have to lie to Verdy about why he looked so tired. Because if she asked he would lie. Blatantly if needed. His friends wouldn't know if he could help it and that was that. Was there something he was supposed to be doing? Oh right, the door! Verdy with the waiting outside for him to say something about whether or not she could come in. He trudged to the door and unlocked it while barely avoiding falling over.

"Sure. Door is unlocked."

He went back to his pacing. The upside of Verdy's surprise visit was that he was no longer focusing solely on the shooting. But what could someone like her want with him in the middle of the night? It wasn't like they were that close.

In the pause between her knock and any answer fears of a different kind began to plague her. What if Andrew was entertaining and she had disrupted them with her arrival? The thought was quickly dismissed, surely he wouldn’t do… well do that, with Jack there. Her fears returned to ones for Jack’s wellbeing and she frowned at the door. Why was it taking him so long to answer her, what was so wrong that she needed to be shielded from it?

As the lock clicked back and permission for her entry was given, her hand was already on the handle, her heart fluttering a little from the nerves she had worked herself up into. The movement between hallway and room was seamless, and the door slid shut behind her. The pacing friend gained merely a glance before her eyes rested on her baby.

Who was sleeping peacefully, with an occasional twitch as he chased a rabbit in his dreams.

Her eyes turned back to Andrew, who’s pacing seemed to be occupying most of his attention, they flicked over his attire (or lack thereof) and noted the sleeping arrangement. Well, she was in her Pj’s too. Perhaps the feeling had woken him/kept him from sleep, and encouraged him to pace, where she had showered and ate. Truthfully pacing seemed a little healthier, and yet he didn’t look at peace with his decision to pace.

His bare chest almost distracted her, but she resolutely reminded herself about his orientation, and their status as ‘just friends’. That chest was reserved for people of a decidedly more male nature to drool over and the such like-

He turned in his pace and walked away from her, and her eyes rested on the scar on his back. A broken promise’s heavy toll. She breathed in sharply, it looked like it had hurt, a lot, and frowned at it. Scars didn’t particularly bother her, nor blood nor other things which usually had girls squealing and scrambling atop chairs, but this one distracted her in that it was a symbol, a price.

The continued pacing made her a little concerned. If nothing was wrong with Jack, could it have been that the feeling had brought her here to look out for her friend? How to broach a subject that one knew nothing about…

“I thought Jack might have been sick, I couldn’t sleep… Are you alright?”

Andrew didn’t seem like an insomniac, nor did she recall anything about his mutation affecting his sleep patterns. Perhaps it was something else on his mind. Plopping onto the edge of the bed unceremoniously she drew her feet up under her and watched as he moved, back and forth, back and forth. He was her friend, and now she was a little worried about him. Perhaps he was suffering from the dreaded ‘dreaming’. She had booted her dreams after her visit to Hunter, and she tried to recall where she had left his pamphlet. Perhaps Andrew could benefit from a little balance in his life too.

“Bad dreams?”

It was quiet for several moments as Andrew paced and Verdy stood looking about the room. In the quiet his mind threatened to return to his previous thoughts. Therefore he was glad when Verdy spoke. That didn't last. She asked if he was alright. Andrew hated the idea of lying to her. Yet if he admitted that he wasn't alright then she might ask what they were and he'd feel even worse when he told her point blank that he wouldn't say. He opened his mouth to speak and hesitated a moment.

"No, I'm not alright."

He would be as truthful as he could without telling her what had happened. His pacing continued and when she asked if the problem was bad dreams he stopped long enough to answer.

"You could say that."

Dreaming of the bleeding corpse of a man he'd killed wasn't exactly something that Andrew would call a good dream. If that weren't enough his mind did not appear to be satisfied with mere repetition. No, it gave him a thousand variations. It showed him scenes in which he'd accidentally killed Jorge instead, images of his own death at the hands of the man he'd shot, and many other things. He was tired but could not sleep. He feared it as he feared having his mutation used against him or those he cared about. Eventually he would pass out. The human body needed rest. Until then he would deny it.

He wasn’t alright, and it was possible to say that it was bad dreams which were disrupting his sleep. Everything from his body language to the long pauses in between her questions and his answers suggested that he didn’t want to talk about it. Still, it felt right to ask.

“You wanna talk about it?”

Who knew, maybe he would unleash a vent of epic proportions simply because of the offer of someone to listen. Guessing from his distracted body language, probably not. She tried to remember what Hunter had said that had made her feel better about her own dreams. Calmer, more in control. Less likely to wake in the middle of the night gasping, cursing the power of the subconscious mind.

She longed for the strange salty sweetness of the monk butter-tea to offer Andrew. In absence of the tea (and all other beverages, hot or cold) she searched for his words in her mind. While overriding a mind reader was one thing, overriding the mind itself might be a totally different thing altogether. She almost envied Hunter and his four hundred or so years of experience, he would know what words to offer to the young man. Of course the road he had travelled to get there was one she didn’t envy at all, so perhaps it was better this way.

“There’s a way this mutant once taught me, to clear out your mind, would you like to try?”

She patted the bed beside her, totally oblivious to all the possible ulterior motives behind the gesture, Andrew was gay, he wouldn’t take it that way. It might take a lot, to work through whatever it was that made Andrew pace to achieve that moment of blissful nothingness, but judging from the look in his eyes, he mightn’t need much more than that to get himself to sleep. She pursed her lips and tried to think of what it was that did it for her.

Socks.

If she recalled correctly.

Andrew glanced at Verdy. For one thing, and something he should have noticed ages ago, she was sitting on his bed. Not something worth note normally but to a sleep deprived mind it seemed important somehow. Once he shook that off, not easily mind you, Andrew was stuck with debating with himself over whether or not he should tell Verdy. He could just not say anything. A good portion of him liked that idea. Why risk his friendship, and possibility of more, by telling her that he'd killed someone? It wasn't something that could just be dismissed.

Yet they were closer than you'd expect for a pair that had only known each other a handful of days. They owned a dog together. He wanted to trust her. Andrew wanted to tell her. People weren't trustworthy. That was what Andrew had always told himself. However more and more he'd been meeting people that he trusted. It was strange but true. That didn't solve his dilemma though. Andrew fixed his gaze that had strayed around the room back on Verdy.

"Would you ever talk to a killer?"

Maybe he'd ask her to teach him whatever it was she'd mentioned later. Right now, her answer to that question was far more important to him. If he'd been more awake he wouldn't have said anything. If he'd been more awake he would have realized the kind of questions that a question like that brought up. Instead he was simply focused on the answer, not the sheer bluntness of the question.

The tiredness in his eyes made her heart experience something she was sure was referred to in common terms as ‘melting’. Then again, it may have just been that feeling again, wriggling its way into everything. His question surprised her, but she kept her face emotionless while she pondered all the depth behind it.

He hadn’t suddenly decided to become vegan and was regretting every steak he’d ever eaten was he?

She dismissed the idea as silly and laced her fingers together, rested her chin on the flatness they made and observed Andrew. His sincerity startled her, and she thought on her answer carefully. To say the wrong thing now could lead to drastic consequences, and although she wasn’t afraid of the young man, something like a chill touched her spine as she considered it.

“A killer from the past, yes, someone who has done the deed and so be it. Hunter, the mutant I spoke of, killed hundreds, lived off them, but he changed, and no longer takes lives for his own sustenance. A killer from the future, perhaps not, someone planning the murder of another, or others, in cold blood, its different.”

She pondered all the different kinds of killers: the accidental, car crashes and mutational out bursts; the defensive, a frightened punch to an all-too-soft temple; and the repeated, premeditated blood lust. She frowned. He seemed like he was hanging, poised, waiting for her answer. He cared, what she thought.

“It would depend on the type, but probably, yes. Sometimes things happen, for a reason maybe, maybe not. My brother’s friend was killed, by a mutant, and the hate which came from that, it was just too much. I think that the whole ‘hate the act, not the person’ thing is right. Not that mass murderers and serial killers shouldn’t be arrested, but that sometimes, things just happen.”

Realising she was rambling, confusing the matter and the tired young man even further with her muddled explanations, she took a deep breath, and a leap of faith.

“Yes. I would.”

She was taking a risk, and yet the meaning behind his question, the details unknown, suggested at one thing. This killer, was him.

“Whatever happened. It doesn’t change you being my friend, and I’m here for you.”

Confused, that's what he was. So many words from Verdy. Not all of them made sense. Those that did sparked questions in his mind. If he admitted it, what sort of killer would she see him as? He'd known what could happen when he'd pulled the trigger. Did that make it premeditated? It shouldn't but maybe it did. Andrew didn't know. He stood there, blinking owlishly at her while she spoke. He was nervous for what all these words meant. Right now, much of it had little meaning and he might not remember some of it after he did finally sleep.

Eventually she must have realized that all the extra words were little more than wasted breath at the moment. Verdy told him point blank that she would, in fact, talk to a killer. He tried not to let it show overtly but he was extraordinarily relieved. Then, scarcely a breath later Verdy said something that made his blood run cold again. She knew. She'd guessed at it. How? He hadn't said anything! For several moments all he could think was that she was a telepath or something in addition to those really cool shotgun hand things.

Oh wait...

Yeah...

Andrew felt somewhat stupid and he knew that it was due to the late of sleep. Verdy wasn't a telepath. She'd simply inferred something from the question he'd asked. He felt foolish and defeated. Not mention he made a note to never let himself get interrogated when he was this tired. It made him really dumb. Andrew walked with dragging steps to the bed where he turned around and collapsed onto the bed, facing the ceiling.

"I shot a man. I shot him and now his family is pressing charges. That's what Jorge wanted to talk to me about at the park."

He saw no point in hiding it if she'd guessed. Andrew was a horrible liar once someone caught on to his game.

Relief and fear mixed on his face and her suspicions were confirmed. First by his body language, then by his admission. So Jorge and he were involved in a police-criminal kind of way. Who would’ve thought. The bed wasn’t really the right length for the tall man’s stretched out legs, as well as her perched self, so she wriggled around until she was laying next to him, not quite touching, but facing him so they both fit without fear of slipping off.

Which was ok, because it couldn’t be taken the wrong way.

She had said it didn’t really matter, so she wouldn't ask why, but at the same time it did matter, the confusion she was feeling must have been nothing next to that of Andrew's. Her opinion of her friend wasn’t changed by the knowledge of what he had done, true she was surprised, but still, the man was dead (she figured, since he called himself a ‘killer’, not a ‘maimer’) so the reason he died wasn’t really important. It seemed to be plaguing Andrew though, as of course it would, and that seemed to place him in a better light than if he had simply shrugged it off. She put her top arm around his chest and squeezed gently, hugs couldn’t make everything better, but they helped.

“Jorge is a good man, and good at his job. I’m sure he’ll help to get you through it without too much drama.”

As she had said to him, things happen. Sometimes by accident, sometimes not. That the family wanted to press charges was difficult for Andrew, and would obviously prolong his guilt at what had happened, and surely the family couldn’t feel any better about dragging him into court. Not only would it not bring back their son, it would put the man who removed the son from the mortal earth in front of them, possibly for days, while the whole thing got sorted out.

How anyone could believe that Andrew would maliciously harm someone escaped her, yet loss made people do strange things all the time, and perhaps it had happened in a moment of rage which she had glimpsed before. When you bottle all the feelings up inside, sometimes they just spill over. She squeezed him in an awkward half-armed hug again. There was not really anything she could do, other than support him, her knowledge of the legal system was limited, to say the least, and she knew nothing about courtrooms or much about what happened in them. All she could do was listen, and hope.

The subject at hand had completely distracted him. Andrew was occupied with his own thoughts and what he would say next. Even as tired as he was he knew he needed to explain. He was quite prepared to do so until Verdy laid down beside him. They weren't touching but she was close enough that he wouldn't have to move far to do so. Her arm slid across his chest in what was unmistakably a hug and yet it only served to make him all the more uncomfortable.

If he turned he could easily kiss her. While he contemplated that and whether or not he wanted to do so an odd thought struck him. Uncomfortable or no, this had definitely taken his mind away from his problems. Andrew enjoyed a nice chuckle at himself within the confines of his mind. It helped settle his mind so that he was not quite so uncomfortable. The forwardness of it had shocked him. Of course nearly everything since they'd met had been forward.

"I shot him to save Jorge. We were mugged after boxing one night. In the end the leader ended up fighting with Jorge. He had a gun. Jorge knocked it away. The guy started strangling Jorge. I didn't think I could get close enough in time to save him and the gun that Jorge had knocked away was only a few steps away."

Andrew's mood had come back down again. Now his voice was cold and his face shadowed as he recounted the tale.

"It only had three bullets left. I could have stopped at one. All I needed to do was startle him to give Jorge an opportunity. I fired all three and one of them went through his head instead of his chest where I thought I was aiming."

It occurred to him that maybe Gemma had been right about talking about it. He did feel a little better. He wasn't going to go looking for his other friends to tell them. They were all busy people. Talking to Verdy was enough for now.

Andrew hadn’t snuggled into the hug as she expected, but he had other things on his mind, and who was to say he was a touchy-feely person anyway. She considered retracting her arm, but experienced a wave of selfishness in that his bare chest was quite warm against her cool fingers. Tough for him if he didn’t like hugs. She did.

He elaborated a little on the subject, and she wriggled closer until her tummy was touching his side (overdue for that boxing-benefits, her subconscious noted) and her shoe-clad feet rested somewhere near his calves. Darned shortness. His voice had changed, and the change in tone could only prompt her to one thing, more hugs! That and reassuring words.

“Adrenaline makes things happen. Maybe you could have stopped, maybe you couldn’t, but you did what you could, to save a friend.”

Slash-potential-love-interest-before-the-whole-‘Gemma’-knowledge-thing.

Yeah…

But he hadn’t meant to kill the man. At least not how it happened. It seemed much more likely that someone could heal from a chest wound than a headshot. If he was as inexperienced as she was with real guns, it was remarkable he had hit the man at all. A life for a life, the muggers for that of Jorge. On the morality scale it seemed a hundred times better for the muggers to be the one lost, and yet…

“And if you hadn’t have done something then Jorge would be dead, and maybe you too. You did what you could, it’s in the past, and there’s nothing you can do to change it now.”

She suspected that somewhere out there was a mutant with the ability to rewind time, but even if it were possible, would it change anything? Or would the rewound Andrew do exactly the same thing over again? She rested her chin against his shoulder, he smelled nice, she noted and tried to think of something to say that could make him feel… if not better, at least not so bad.

“I don’t think that you’re a bad person. I think that some bad things happened to you, but that doesn’t make you the one in the wrong.”

And she snuggled closer. They were actually touching now. He had no idea why Verdy was being so cuddly all of a sudden when up to this point they'd had some form of established lines that they didn't cross. Didn't mean much since he'd kissed her before but this was a lot more personal than a stolen kiss in a store. Meanwhile Verdy was telling him all the things he told himself whenever it started bothering him. That he'd done it to help Jorge. That he hadn't had a choice. That he wasn't a bad person.

Sometimes he believed it. Most of the time he didn't. Whenever he didn't he just did his best to concentrate on other things. Speaking of which, tonight appeared to be one of those nights when words like those did nothing to dissuade him from the notion that he'd done something horrible. Andrew turned his head to look at Verdy. She'd snuggled up to his shoulder while he was thinking. This really felt like a little much for two people who were just friends.

"I guess."

He turned his gaze back to the ceiling. They were just friends. Despite her puzzling actions she was a friend. Maybe this was just something she did? If that was the case then she would have been like this since he'd met her. What had changed since then? Jeez this was confusing. People were just confusing. Why did he bother with them again? Oh yeah, 'cus it got really lonely if he didn't. Andrew almost regretted that he wasn't cut out to be alone for the rest of his days, if only to stop the confusion.

Andrew looked confused, she moved her head from his shoulder and placed it on her hand, her elbow propped up on the bed, so she was looking down on her friend and thought back over what she had said. The last few sentences hadn’t been too wordy, to muddle him with their length. Not like those from before which confused even her, the speaker.

He wouldn’t look at her, he just kept his gaze fixed firmly on the ceiling. Curious, she followed his line of sight and glanced up. There was nothing there, at least not that she could see, and she glanced back at her friend with a frown. What was he thinking about, staring off into the distance? Was he reliving the moment of the shooting, trying to see a way that he could have avoided all the bad things? A different path?

“Do you know what will happen, when the family press charges?”

It seemed sad to bring it up again, but anything to keep him from frowning up at the poor, unoffending light fixture. It had done nothing wrong. Perhaps talking about it, getting it out in the open, would make it seem less daunting, like looking under the bed for monsters in the daytime. She wished there was something she could do to make it better, a way so that her skin could just absorb the sadness right out of him, like paper towel on juice-soaked carpet.