When her hands fall away, he doesn't move from where she left him, still watchful, still braced for something he can't even name but that he expects will happen anyway.

Los Angeles was terrible, it was dying, but it was home; the rules he was subject to there were exacting, were harsh, but there were rules. He thinks he could like the comparative freedom, perhaps, if it didn't feel like trying to balance on a high wire without a net - and isn't that a traitorous thought, too?

"Not no one," he adds after a moment, gesturing at the black mark down his throat, at the mess that is his head. "I'm trying," he promises, a faint note of something like desperation woven through.