Summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiBaBca7-rY

Naser performed CPR on Fang from the brightly-lit backseat of his sedan, cruising along endless nocturnal streets. Anon was there too, bare-chested and eating a chicken drumstick. Fang hummed a tune to the rhythm of a heart monitor, one eye half-open and a purple tongue hanging from her mouth.

They were in his living room with Naomi and the kids. The television glowed and Fang bled out on the sofa. Anon ate cereal from a large tupperware bowl.

His back and neck ached. Why is it so bright in here?

Naser opened his eyes.

***

With eyes scrunched, his pupils adjusted to the blinding light.

Anon and Mom watched television together from a queen-sized bed, surrounded by pillows. They shared a duvet on crumpled bed sheets, a bowl of popcorn between them. A Phil Collins song played from the AV system.

Not Mom, Fang. God, she looked diminished and frail. They were inside his guest bedroom, sunlight piercing through the thin curtains of the window opposite.

“I love this movie.” She murmured, taking a sip from a can of lemon soda. 

Naser leaned forward, groaning at the pain in his spine. It dawned on him that he had fallen asleep in Naomi's office chair. Anon and Fang turned their heads in unison to gaze at him.

“Afternoon, Naser.” Fang rasped, a faint smile on her beak.

“Popcorn?” Asked Anon. He held the bowl out to Naser.

“What?” Naser mumbled, his mouth was dry as hell. “No.”

He scowled around the room. It was a mess, remnants of last night's surgical procedure littered the place. The unloaded gun still lay on the nightstand, next to an open bottle of aspirin. Here and there, flecks of dried blood stained the carpet and bed sheets. The odour of burned rubber and gas lingered at the back of his sinuses. 

A cartoon played on the television screen, it depicted a neanderthal swinging through a jungle, his arm around the narrow waist of a pterodactyl girl. 

“What… time is it?” He looked at his watch. It was early afternoon.

He felt through trouser pockets for his phone. He found it. Over twenty missed calls from his neurotic receptionist at the clinic.

“Yeeeah.” Said Anon. “Your phone was going off, we didn’t want to wake you.”

Naser dialled his receptionist and rushed out of the bedroom, into the hallway.

“...Hi, Natasha? This is Doctor Aran… Yes… Yes… I know… I’m sorry, tell them I’m sorry…” 

He pinched the bridge of his snout between thumb and forefinger.

“Yes. Okay. Did you call around?… Good. I won’t be in for the rest of the week. Can you reschedule?… I’m sure he will fill in. Good… Great… Thanks Natasha… I’m fine, I had a rough night… Thanks… You too, Natasha. Bye.”

He stormed back into the bedroom. Anon and Fang stared at the cartoon on TV, munching out of the popcorn bowl, bits of popcorn getting everywhere.

“Why are you two acting so fucking relaxed?”

“Wow, Naser, what crawled up your ass?” Snarled Fang, chewing on popcorn and washing it down with a soda. 

“Yeah, rude.” Said Anon, throwing his word in there.

Unbelievable, it’s like being back in high school. “Where do I even start? Me, Mom and Dad thought you were dead but it turns out you’ve been alive this entire time-”

“Why did you think I was dead?” Fang interrupted.

“The meteor, what else? You get your ex-boyfriend from high school to call me in the middle of night and it turns out you’d been shot. The first thing you do when we meet is point a loaded gun at my face.” Naser made a finger gun out of one hand and pressed it into his brow. His voice grew louder.

“Then what do I find out? You’d murdered two cops. We almost get arrested at a police stop on the way out of town and then when we get you home you almost die on me. I was having thoughts about burying you behind my house! My car interior is covered in blood and I’m going to have to burn those bed sheets. That’s what’s crawled up my ass!”

Fang clenched her teeth. She opened her mouth to speak, and paused. “Fuuuck…” Her face softened as she let her back sink into a mountain of pillows. “You’re right. Naser, I’m sorry.”

Naser deflated. He was working himself up for a fight, not an apology. He stood there feeling awkward.

“C’mon,” Fang patted the bed between herself and Anon, “watch Tarzan with us. Anon brought in some bottles of water and cans of soda from your kitchen. The soda is getting warm but it’s still good.”

He blinked at her. “Ah, let me do a check up on you, first.” He went over to the IV stand and inspected the heart monitor display.

“That thing is annoying.” She asked. “Can you turn it off?”

“I’ll set it to emergency only. Put your arm out for me, please.”

“Did you have to put a needle in my neck?” She rubbed at the catheter sticking out the side of her throat with her free hand. “It itches.”

“Don’t touch it.” He checked her blood pressure. “I wouldn’t have had to stick it in your jugular if I could trust the veins in your arms weren’t collapsed. You got track marks all over.”

“Ah…”

Naser cocked an eyebrow at her. “Are you still shooting up?”

She snorted. “No. Not for a while. That’s all in the past. Are you done?”

He tapped at his phone. “Give me a moment. I’m organising a courier delivery of antibiotics and intravenous penicillin.”

Her eyes went wide. “You can do that? Just order drugs to your house whenever you like?”

“I’m not going to order drugs for your recreational use, Fang.”

“Pft, killjoy.” She rolled her eyes. “Are you going to watch this movie with us or what?”

“I don’t think-”

“Get on the fucking bed, you pompous asshole.”

Anon shuffled over, leaving a gap in the middle of the bed for Naser. They looked at him expectantly.

***

“Lemon soda?” Anon wiggled a can at him.

“Er, no. Thank you.”

“You comfortable, bro?” Fang asked with a mischievous gleam in her eyes.

“No, I don’t feel comfortable at all.” Said Naser. He lay above the duvet between Anon and Fang on the bed, his arms folded across his chest.

“Don’t be a bitch.”

“Water?” Anon offered.

He eyed the water bottle and smacked his parched tongue. “Yeah, I’ll take a water.”

Naser settled into the pillows, sipping away. This is kind of nice, he admitted to himself. It reminded him of the good old days when Fang didn’t hate him and they would watch movies together with friends. He had forgotten how much he missed it; chilling with friends, doing or watching whatever.

"Is there any popcorn left, Anon?"

"Yeah, plenty." He handed the bowl to Naser.

He could leave this movie, though. He didn’t like cartoons, they were for kids. Or in Anon's case, man-children.

Why did we stop doing this? Naser wondered, trying to pinpoint where things fell apart between himself and Fang. We were close once, but then it just… Stopped being that way. He couldn’t remember if it was a gradual erosion in their relationship or one defining event. Maybe a messy combination of both. Fang falling in with Trish and Reed certainly hadn’t helped, and now she’s back in touch with both of them.

"Why did you come back, Fang?" Naser asked.

She shrugged. "I wanted to see you and Mom again."

"Bullshit. You've been in town for at least a week or more, why wait until you had a hole in you?"

"I'm not bullshitting you, Naser. It's not that simple. Life for me, it hasn’t been great. I was hoping to, maybe… I don’t know, turn back time to when things weren't as shit. Anon, can you leave the room for a while? Me and Naser have to talk in private.”

Anon looked hurt by the request, but he dutifully did as she asked.

She grimaced as she tried to reposition herself to face Naser. “I’ve been back in Volcadera for a few months, the plan had always been to find you guys, Mom and you, specifically. Dad can go fuck himself. I got a-, had a job working at a liquor store downtown, near where Skin Row used to be. Have an apartment out that way too, under the name Jennifer Martinez.”

“Why all the different identities? I saw your wallet.”

“It’s… Fun. Remember when I was a kid and would put on different personas? It’s like that. New county, new me. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get some dead persons identification with your picture on it. A lot of people died after the meteor, from starvation or emphysema or whatever. They’d roll the corpses into landfill without updating the public record. Billions of people, dead in real life but still registered in the system. With their paperwork, some cash and a visit to a DMV, you’re soon wearing some dead guy's skin, so to speak. Anyways-”

She drained her soda and dropped the empty can onto the carpet.

"I looked you up on the internet and found out you're some big, successful trauma surgeon with a 24-hour clinic in the city. I tried to think of the best way to approach you, what to wear, all that." She brushed her ruined black and white barcode wings.

"I played it out in my head how it would go down; your drug-fucked bitch of a loser sibling, out of nowhere. Look at me, why would you want any of this near someone like you? So I kept putting it off. Every day I'd go to my shitty job and daydream about meeting up with you and Mom."

"Jesus… Fang, I'm sorry."

“Don’t be. You’re not responsible for my feelings. It was stupid, looking back now, but it’s how I lived my life. That changed a week ago. I was walking home from work when I saw the National Guard beating the shit out of a human on the sidewalk." She closed her eyes, reliving the experience.

“It was Anon. I didn't recognise him at first, it wasn’t until he called out to me that I realised who it was. I watched as they dragged him into a black van and drove away, out of sight. I thought ‘you deserve it, you bastard’.” She opened her eyes and looked at Naser.

“That night, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop crying, I couldn’t get the look of despair on Anon’s face out of my head, the moment before the van doors closed him in. That’s when I decided I was going to take it all back.” Her amber eyes blazed.

She grabbed Naser’s arm and squeezed. “I asked myself, why I should give a fuck about what Anon had said on prom night? The last time I felt remotely happy in my life was when we were together. So what if he really meant the things he’d said, it doesn’t matter anymore. I had to find a way to free Anon before he was lost forever. I couldn’t do it on my own, I had no idea what to do. I contacted Reed.”

Naser didn't know the particulars of what happened between Fang and Anon the night they broke-up, but he got the idea. “Have you told Anon about any of this? It’s been a long time since you two dated, let alone had anything to do with each other.”

She let go of Naser and crossed her arms. “Not yet, I’m waiting for the right time. Do you want to hear the rest or not?”

“Okay, go on.”

“With Reed’s help I discovered that Anon had been taken to the Volcadera police headquarters, pending transfer to a forced labour camp. We managed to steal logistics information out of the police database, including prisoner transfer timetables and routes. From what we had gathered, I was able to pick a place to ambush the cops. After that…” 

She waved a hand around. "You pretty much know the basics of what happened next. It worked out well, I think.” She scooped out a fistful of popcorn from the bowl.

Naser stared at Fang in disbelief. He leaned towards her. “You think it worked out well ?”

She chewed on a mouthful of popcorn. “Uh, yeah. I rescued Anon and I get to hang out with my little bro.” She patted him on the shoulder.

“Your heart stopped for fuck sake. You were clinically dead for almost eight minutes.”

“Wow, really?” She looked thoughtful. “That’s kind of badass.”

“It didn’t feel very badass to me, Fang. Not one bit.”

“I already said I was sorry, what more do you want?” She wiped her salt encrusted fingers on the duvet.

“What about those two police officers you murdered. You’ll have their deaths on your conscience for the rest of your life.”

“If I had my way I’d murder each and every one of those genocidal cock-tuggers. It’s not the first time I’ve had to kill someone. It’s not a big deal.”

“You’ve… Killed people before?”

Fang scowled. “Don’t look at me like that, I did what I had to do to survive the meteor.”

“The police-”

Fang gritted her teeth, the down feathers on her shoulders bristling. "Screw the police. Do you know what they and all the other government institutions did when folks were eating each other in the dark? They deemed themselves ‘necessary’ to the survival of civilization. They hoarded food stockpiles, decades more food than they ever would have needed while regular people stabbed each other to death over mouldy dog biscuits!”

The heart monitor beeped a piercing tachycardia alert.

“Shh, it’s okay Fang. I believe you. Calm now, it’s alright. That was then, things are different now.”

“I’ll never forgive them.” She whispered. “Fuck I’m tired.”

Her body relaxed and she closed her eyes.

***

Naser found Anon sitting on a barstool at the kitchen counter, eating out of a cereal box.

“Is Fang alright?” Asked Anon, looking over his shoulder at Naser. “I heard her shouting.”

“Yeah… ” Naser pulled up a stool beside him. “She, ah, she got worked up about how the government handled the crisis and knocked herself out.”

“Understandable. They did a lot of messed up things back then. Still do.”

Oh no, Naser thought, not this again.

“She’s been through a lot.” He said, steering conversation away from the subject of government conspiracy. “She came loaded with heavy baggage.”

“That’s the Fang I remember.” Said Anon. Plastic crinkled as he rummaged inside the cereal box. Feeling around for a toy at the bottom, Naser guessed.

“Some of the things she said, I don’t know if I want to believe. She mentioned the night she broke-up with you, too. About what you had said to her.”

The sound of crinkling plastic abruptly ceased. Anon lowered the box to the counter. “You're married to Naomi, right? I’ve seen your family photos around the house.”

“Yeah, we’re still married.”

“Have you ever- how do I put it… You think you loved someone, but you didn’t actually love the person for who they are, you were just in love with the feeling of being with them. Know what I mean?”

Naser crossed his arms and rested his elbows on the counter. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, they’re the same thing.”

Anon shook his head. “Forget about it.”

“You know she’s going to want to get back together with you, right?” Naser said, studying Anon.

“I figured as much, the way she was acting with me when she woke up this morning.”

“You don’t seem very enthusiastic about it.”

Anon sighed. “I don’t know, Naser. I’m not good at relationships, what if-”

Naser’s arms shot out, his claws latching onto Anon’s bare shoulders. “If she asks you to be her boyfriend, you are going to say ‘yes’, you ungrateful piece of shit.” Naser hissed into Anon’s ear. “You're going to say ‘yes’ and you’re going to mean it, or I will lock you in the crawl space beneath my house until you wither to dust." 

He released Anon’s shoulders. “If having your limp monkey dick slapping her thighs brings her a single iota of happiness, then that’s how it’s going to be.”

Anon rubbed the indentations Naser’s talons had left behind. “I'm afraid I'll fuck it up again, even worse than last time."

"I don't want to hear it. Your rejection would be the most damaging thing you could do to her after what she's been through."

"What if I already have a girlfriend?"

"Tch, get real."

Anon grinned. "You know, I've never been threatened into dating some dude's sister before."

"Sibling, Anon. It's not a joke. She risked her life to be with you, killed for you. Get that into your head."

"Why do you insist on calling her a sibling, are they still non-binary?"

“When I last saw her she was bigender, she-”

A smooth chime rang from hidden speakers in the ceiling.

Naser looked at his watch. “That must be the courier with Fang’s antibiotics.” He slid off the bar stool and began making his way out of the kitchen.

“Naser, wait.” 

He stopped and glanced at Anon. “What?”

“Check yourself.”

Naser looked down. Patches of dried blood stained his long-sleeved shirt and slacks.

“You’ll probably want to change your clothes before answering the door.”

***

Naser hurried down the stairs, buttoning a fresh shirt. Whoever was at the entrance had given up on ringing the bell, they had escalated to knuckle tapping and then full-fisted thumping.

“I’m coming!” Naser shouted. “Holy shit, stop banging down my goddamn house!”

He twisted a brass knob and pulled open the heavy alder wood door.

Ripley in Volcadera police chief uniform filled the doorframe, black police vehicles parked in the porte-cochere behind him. 

“Afternoon, son.” He growled. “Me and the boys had a lot of drama this morning. Held a press conference about it, in fact. I decided to swing by for a little chat, to tie up loose ends.”

He smiled a broad nicotine stained snarl.

“What were you doing last night?”