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The thing that scares George Luz the most is the empty pages.
It’s different when he’s choked out a paragraph or two, because there's something to build off of, and he can think ‘Okay, maybe I've got the hang of this’ until it all crumbles down again, and then he’s erasing everything because it doesn’t fit right. Like an artist struggling on drawing an eye, like an architect mapping blueprints, like a detective coming back to something again and again, because it doesn’t make sense, because it’s wedged in all the wrong places, the deadly urge to figure it out. For it to fit.
It’s all the same feeling if you think about it.
So, the page is empty. Basically — he’s had a rough day. Being a journalist isn’t exactly what he thought he was going to be as a kid, but he’s here, stuck on an article he has due by next Monday about this Cat Cafe down the street, even though he’s only mildly allergic to cats and he’s pretty sure it’s owned by Nixon because all the workers won't give him a straight answer and he kept getting cat hair in his coffee, so.
It’s hard enough living in a regular apartment building, but it’s far more different when you live in one like his. There’s probably an official term for it, one that's endearing and lovely sounding. Where every single person in the building knows each other, well enough they all basically have keys to each other's apartment. They use other people’s spare guest rooms for their own family members to stay in or decorate someone else's home on their birthday, or spend one huge Christmas with all their doors flung open, free access to food and gifts floors and floors up all day long. There’s only a few like this in the city or really in any city, and yet none of them are quite like his. Because they’re all one big family, and it sounds good in a positive light.
What isn’t positive about it, though, is being rudely awoken at 4 in the morning because Malarkey desperately needs the cheese in his fridge for whatever Cooking School reason, and then not being able to fall back asleep again because Speirs lives above him and his cat is a nightmare. He seriously isn't sure how it makes half the noises it does, and so far Lipton is the only confirmed person to have seen it other than Speirs, and also the only one who can make it act like a regular totally not a demon from hell cat. ("It's just a rescue cat, guys, it just doesn't like people." Lip explains. "Right," Luz nodded, eyebrows up.)
He got home around 7, with a bag full of Chinese takeout and no plans to sleep that night. Of course, once it's in your own fridge it's free reign to fewer people, but word gets around fast to the smaller group. He hasn't even taken his shoes off before he can hear the rumble down the stairs. God, this is why he has a baseball bat in his kitchen.
It's one big blur of brown, Ginger and blond shoving through the door, and he's pretty sure he sees Babe though he doesn't know if he actually wants any as he practically only eats the shit and is just here to be an asshole or not, but Bill definitely was trying to sidearm him to the fridge and Welsh was a sneaky bitch that didn't leave evidence, so he had more on his plate than a Babe Heffron.
"AhaH!" Babe announces, and George pauses to see Babe behind him, teriyaki chicken in hand. He sighs, and starts pulling out his wallet. “You fall for the same shit every time, Luz,” Babe says.
“Half of the chicken at least,” He says, handing Babe a five.
“Don’t look at me, I’m not eatin’ any of this,” He says, handing the box to Bill. “I gotta date.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” He calls, already making his way out the swung open door. George waves a hand bye, even if he can’t see him anymore.
“A date?” He says, raising an eye at Guarnere, who just shrugs.
“Don’t look at me, I don’t know anythin’ about it,” he says, piling a bunch of teriyaki chicken into one of his bowls before shoving it in his microwave.
“Least save me some you asshole,” he groans, going to close his swung open door.
Except by the time he reaches it, one hand on the door and the other rubbing a hand through his hair tiredly, an unfamiliar stony face has climbed up the steps to the door across from him, the one that’s been vacant for a month because Winters moved up top with Nixon and the sink broke itself in half. It’s that same millisecond where his brain is processing the command to close his door as registering that there’s a person there and to stop, so he sort of awkwardly jerks it and wow that's a very nice face. He’s struggling to hold a box in one arm and shove his key into the apartment door with the other.
“D’you need help with that?” George says, moving around the door. The guy spares him a glance, maybe two.
“No.” And it’s rough, like his vocal cords were made with sandpaper, just rough enough that it took you off guard and could peg you down a few steps, but just right enough that it made you want to dream a little harder. George Luz was a dreamer. He definitely wanted to dream a little harder, oh my god. The guy eventually gets his key into the door, and it glides open loudly, like a door that hasn’t been opened in a month and would’ve gathered dust if it could.
“Well, you got any more boxes?” He says, following loosely behind as the guy flicks on the light and almost dropping the box in the process.
“What’s it to you?” He says defensively and throws him a glare once he sets down the box, in the small corner pile of other boxes he’s apparently made.
“Not illegal to wanna help,” he says and lightly throws up his hands, a sort of ‘what, it’s illegal now? ’ gesture. “Besides if it’s just you, you’re going to get asked the same question multiple times, so why not just take me and I’ll cover?”
While it probably wasn’t very much time at all, it feels like a long time before the man responds. If there’s one thing George Luz is good at doing (in the very, very small list of things he can do at all) it’s read physical traits and movements. His eyes keep flicking around him, his face and shoulders and constant fidgeting he seems to find because goddammit yes George has ADHD, it happens to the best of us. And his eyes are the hard brown of a bull’s but also the sweet chocolate of a Hershey's factory, something akin to doubt and reluctance.
“Rest is furniture,” He says. “You get me a third guy and I don’t sock you in the face, how about that?”
“Deal. Hey, Bill-” he calls, turning around to go to his own apartment. Except Bill is already coming down the hallway to his door, a bowl of teriyaki in his hand and pointing a fork at him accusingly.
“First of all, Luz, you bought goddamn Leeno’s instead of Dragon Treasure,” he says, still eating a piece anyway. “Second, I know Joe, he knows I’m busy, I ain’t helpin’.”
“Busy with what?” he questions as Guarnere makes his way back upstairs, living just two flights up.
“I got the night shift asshole, go bother someone else,” He calls down. George huffs, but he can still feel the joy flowing through his veins, the kind you get when you never had a family as a kid but do now. Different, and jaded, with no baseline dynamic, but one all the same. When he turns back to steel eyes and kickass face, he feels no qualms at all.
“Joe?” he says questioningly.
“Toye,” he confirms.
“George Luz,” he says with an easy smile, sticking out his hand to shake.
“Shoulda just started with that,” Toye says, and shakes his hand.
It’s the beginning of the end.
As it turns out, nobody in the building has the evening to help Joe Toye in.
Skip, Muck, and Malarkey have all miraculously disappeared to head out to The WallStreet Bar, which is owned and ironically named by Lipton actually, leaving evidence that they were heading out and others were welcome to join by a crude sticky note on the door. He wouldn’t dare ask Speirs, he doesn’t really know Blithe well enough to ask if he can help with Toye moving in, and Web and Liebgott are purposefully having loud sex because they know it pisses everyone else off, and they’re nerds for eachother anyway. Babe’s out on his date, and it isn’t something to ask Winters or Nixon, no matter how nice a guy Winters is. The guy needs a break, really — He’s been doing all the paperwork for Nixon’s business for almost a year straight, now.
So, it’s just Luz.
“I swear to god, the second we set this down in my apartment, I’m going to knock your teeth in,” Toye heaves, pulling one end of the couch up the flight of stairs.
“You said that last time we stopped for a break,” George all but breathes. He’s straining to push the couch up the same time Toye is pulling it, the terrible one step at a time pace they’re keeping. “Why’d you decide to move in so late anyway?”
“I got kicked out,” Toye hisses through his teeth. Thump, and they’re up another step.
“How’d you manage that?” He says. Last step, and he’s helping him slide it around to the next steps. They’re on the second floor, almost to the third. Thank god, only a flight away.
He doesn’t respond, choosing to slide it up a step quickly, and despite the surprise to help suddenly push it up onto the step last second George doesn’t pester him. They work surprisingly well together, despite Toye’s occasional threats and his occasional comebacks. He is absolutely procrastinating on even theorizing on how he’s going to begin that cat cafe article by doing this, without a doubt. If he’s going to go for a cheesy lead-in, if he’s going to start with his best cat photo which he didn’t even really have one, really. He’d have to keep going back for more photos and information So much work behind a tiny little advert in the newspaper.
Thump. A third step, and then, “What’s got you so quiet?”
“What?” he says, looking up at Joe, away from his feet and the careful steps he’s taking to get the couch up the steps.
“You couldn’t wait to talk earlier,” he says. And it doesn’t sting, more like an easy slide of water off his shoulders, a small ping in his veins of emotion. Not quite anything, because Luz has certainly gotten that comment a billion times before.
“Ooh, Toye, pay for my drink first,” he jokes. “I’ll talk all you want.”
He earns a snort from him, and of course, Luz laughs a little at his own joke and nearly drops the couch on his feet. “Shit,” he says, legs already buckling.
“You good?” Joe says questioningly.
“Yeah my legs just buckle when I laugh,” he explains, waving a hand. “Happens sometimes.”
It does happen more than sometimes, really. George Luz is a prankster and a class clown at heart, laughing is in his genes, it was what he was born to do. So when he randomly started falling over when laughing, or walking and totally eating it when cracking a joke on a phone call, he can’t remember. It’s been a while since he hasn’t done it. He hasn’t bruised his knees in a while, now that he thinks about it. He’s probably going to at some point soon.
Joe just hums a low note, and then they pick up the couch again to move the last three steps. It’s a lot less hard once you’ve reached the middle, so the pull it up to the little hallway with fairly ease. After that, they manage to push it on the ground through his door, and into the living room. Luz plops face first into his couch and sighs.
“Don’t get too comfy,” Toye says, thumping him lightly on the spine. It sends a race up his spine that is just plain bad. He turns to glare at the already-leaving figure, before: “We got the TV stand next.”
George slumps over and groans. It’s going to be a long night of empty pages.
________________________________________________________
It hits him two days later at a train station that 1. He knows nothing about Toye and 2. He has yet to prank him.
He isn’t much a prank kind of guy, really. He’ll absolutely steal your food and prank you after first meeting you, but he doesn’t do it much after. It's good every now and then, for the people who can take a prank and send one right back, but it isn’t if you’re the only one doing it. So George pranks in the beginning and leaves it be until something happens, or nothing happens at all. He’s debating what kind of prank he should do on Joe while leaning on one of the poles on the train, because if he sits he falls asleep and it’s always nicer to save it for the inevitable old lady.
He wouldn’t say he likes riding the train every day to work, as it’s always packed to hell, but he also wouldn’t say he didn’t miss it at times. Something about reading people’s body language is just entertaining.
Work is both slow, and quick at the same time. He’s got a sweet half cubicle full of knick-knacks and papers, all unique in markings of highlighters and colored tabs, edits, and revising suggested by both him and his higher-ups. Slow because he’s still figuring out how to start the article, quick because it was one task after the other, the bustle that is office work. And then it’s just a train ride and a walk home, and he’s already planned how he’s going to pull off his prank.
He doesn’t have keys to Joe’s apartment, of course, but his window faces the building alley which makes it much easier to climb his fire escape without random goodie-two-shoe city goers yelling at him he can’t be up there when yes, he actually can it is legal to sit stand and climb them shut up please. So on his way home, he stops by a thrift shop for raggy old feather pillows and a toy store for a button-press jack in the box toy. He already has some string in his apartment, thank god.
He makes a sharp turn on the first floor to Blithe’s door and knocks. The guy is weird and quiet, but he’s the known window-access to this side’s fire escape as he’s the only one home and willing to open his goddamn window for you most the time, so George deals. And the door creaks open, revealing Blithe with his blue eyes and blond hair which sticks up on some ends.
“Oh, hey Luz,” he yawns, opening his door wider so he could come in. “You pranking someone?”
“Yeah, I wake you up?” he asks blandly, pushing past in a direct line to Blithe’s window.
“Not really,” he says, quietly. “Who’s it this time?”
“New guy moved in,” he begins fiddling with the locks on the window before forcing it upwards, and it creaks sharply at the action. Not the best window, but it’s available.
“What’s his name?”
And, there it is. If there’s one thing they all know Blithe for, if there really is anything else to know amongst them all, it’s that he’s good with names. He knows all of theirs and nicknames, and he knows a lot of actors names, so the guess has always been he’s memorized every name of every person he’s ever met, but nobody really knows. Nobody visits or sticks around other than Shifty, and even he’s sort of a quiet guy. He puts himself out there more.
“Joe Toye,” he says and climbs through the window. “Leave it open for me will ya?”
“I got it,” Blithe murmurs, handing him his pile of pillows and the jack in the box wrapped in a bit of string.
Luz takes it and begins his climb up two windows, glad to find Toye hasn’t gotten locks on his window yet. Though it does strike a worried tone because he should probably get that soon. It slides up, he rips up all the pillows and shoves the feathers into just one pillow, bloating it. After that, he sticks the jack in the box in, unfurls the string and wraps one end around the doorknob and the other to shoe, and gently pushes it to press the button so when the door opened, it would be yanked away and the jack in the box would pop through. Feathers everywhere, easy.
He climbs back down, closes Blithe’s window for him, and takes the elevator up like nothing was wrong.
He gets the knock on his door about four hours later.
He opens to a disgruntled Toye, who has a feather sticking to his jacket. He looks tired, his shoulders are less stiff and his face is more blank, less of something expressionless and more of something neutral.
“You’re an asshole,” he nods at him.
“Why neighbor, whatever could you mean?” George smiles, leaning against his doorway.
“I had to run around the building to figure out who bombed my room, and before that, I was actually going to get you a coffee,” Joe says, raising his eyebrows at him before turning and grabbing his apartment keys from his pocket.
“The offer still open?” Luz asks, and no, he does not sound a little desperate as Joe opens his door.
“No,” he says plainly and closes the door behind him.
Damn.
________________________________________________________
A few weeks pass, and George’s Cat Cafe article comes and goes. It’s been a pretty hot summer, the city sidewalk covered in garbage and remnants of people who used to live there because everybody is fleeing to the closest sign of cover from the sun at this point. They all got to squeeze the name of Babe’s date out of him, A Gene Roe who is supposedly the Hottest person in the world, according to Babe. (“Swear on my mother,” he says. “Guy could kill you just with his eyes.”)
He and Toye don’t go very far, other than avoiding each other and making snide comments and jokes when they do see each other. He’s been thinking about that coffee offer for a while and trying to think of what coffee someone like Joe Toye would have. His best guess is black, but he never took Bull as a Chai guy either.
“Stop moping about it, Jesus I already told you it was black,” Guarnere groans, half slumped on the couch as he joins in watching Babe suck ass at Monopoly.
“I am not moping,” He says, even turning to look him in the eyes before quickly turning back to the TV to watch and see where his piece landed. The videogame version of this was much easier to keep up with.
“You only kick my ass when you got somethin’ on your mind,” Babe huffs. “Now I swear to god, if you do not land on my hotel I am going to seriously burn you.”
“No can do Mr. 52$,” George teases, “I’m too busy upgrading literally all of my properties to hotels, thanks to you.”
While Babe curses him out, Bill takes the time to flick him on the head from behind. “Seriously though, Joe’s a cool guy. You just got on the wrong foot.”
He never gets the time to respond, because Babe is lightly kicking his shin after he finally landed on one of Luz’s hotels. They stop talking about it, and for the last bit of it all, he makes sure to keep up his front that he is not moping. Because he’s not, he doesn’t know Toye. He’d like to, but he doesn’t.
He goes to get the coffee immediately after.
It dawns on him on his way back that next week will be the middle of the month, which is when they do the monthly Nerf Gun battles. There are no real sides to it all, or a planned day, just everyone versus everyone until people pair up and there’s only really one person or group left. And after that, they all head out to the bar and whoever won doesn’t have to pay for shit. It’s honestly the highlight of his month, and he isn’t sure Toye knows about any of it. He tracks down some paper and decides to write that the coffee was from him and all about the Nerf battle thing next week, just so he was ready to get blasted by a nerf gun when Luz kicked in his door.
He slips out of his apartment and leaves the coffee at his door. He gets a weird throb of anxiety, so he bolts back and closes his door after loudly knocking on Toye’s. It’s good. It’s okay. He’s absolutely not moping.
He’s not.
________________________________________________________
George Luz carries a water gun in his pocket the entire week, and nothing happens.
It isn’t weird to the people who work around him at work, because he makes sure to slide it in a drawer way before it gets to even be seen. The water gun is more a precaution that he can get to his apartment before getting actually shot because there have been plenty of times guys have gotten knocked out of the game before even having a weapon, but it sucks to suck. Hell, George’s even been one of the guy’s shooting at them, doesn’t mean he’d like to be them. But the days keep rolling by, and it rolls to Thursday but nothing happens. He’s on more edge than ever.
So when he walks into the apartment building, he’s already gotten his water gun out by the time he here’s the sound of yelling. He slowly goes up the stairs, finding the second floor under fire, so he sprints up the steps as fast as he can. When he turns the corner of the stairway where the yelling is happening, there is Joe Toye himself. He has pillows taped together to create a barrier that he hides behind, the side of the pillows pressed up against the stairway leading up. There are some occasional nerf bullets hailing down, some thumping down with more aim than others, ones that are just being flicked. He’s a little shocked, to say the least, that the amount of childish antic there seems to be on this floor is created just by Toye existing.
Toye shoots back, gun pointed upwards to the higher levels where he can hear a screech and a laugh that sounds painfully like Speirs before the gunfire sounds a little bit heavier. He notices him standing there and staring, and slowly a sly smile spreads over his face, ever so slightly turning the Nerf gun onto George.
"You wouldn't," he says, arms a little raised, ready to bolt.
Oh, but Joe would, and he can hear the plastic of the bullet thump against the wall behind him as he books it back down the stairs. He can hear Joe thunder down behind him, and uses all of his energy to run a little faster down the steps. Except, well —
He trips.
The tumble is a little violent and he can hear himself already cursing as he goes down, hitting his elbow and forearm against a step and banging his knee into his ribs before he finally collapses on his back in the apartment lobby. It takes a few seconds for his sight to catch back up with him as the flood of I just fell down the stairs and ow ow shit clogged his head, but by the time they did Toye was already on him, standing above and pressing his boot into Luz's ribs while he pointed the gun at his forehead. (Though he eased up on the ribs, a little, when he hissed in pain and instinctively pushed himself into the ground in an attempt to remove the pressure.)
"Any last words?" Toye says, and his poker face is impeccable. Not even a trace of a smile, like he was taking this seriously when he absolutely was not because he was holding a Nerf gun to his head while asking his last words and George was maybe a little bit turned on and his poker face was always a smile anyway, so —
"I took all the eggs out of your fridge and hid them around the house, then replaced the eggs in your fridge," he blurts. He didn't actually do anything near that, but real pranks were good.
And he's already breaking the moment and laughing at the expression on Joe's face, least until he calls him a fucker and shoots Luz right in the face, but it's all too quick until he's bubbling in laughter again. It’s only a tiny bit of plastic, something fake, that couldn’t hurt. “Buck wants to know if you’re joining,” Toye calls down the stairs, heavy footsteps climbing up them. And he props himself up on his arms with the same, lazy smile, staring at the first stairway steps as if Toye was there.
“Nah, I’m gonna -”
Now, this is where it splinters.
You could imagine George didn’t move at all, that he was still talking. About not going to join the nerf battle, about how he had to cook an actual dinner tonight, about a job application, about a simple denial lead with an immediate pull in, a not quite yet on Toye’s behalf. You could imagine Toye was there, back down the stairs to convince him. You could imagine there was another person there. You could imagine they were both talking. Yelling, or whispering, or speaking evenly paced, both at different levels of tone. Or you could imagine they were different tones. You could imagine there was a woman crying. Sad, happy, angry tears, every emotion all at once streaking down her face like broken stars, an apology nobody would know had to be given. You could imagine she’d leave evidence. You could imagine she had done it. You could imagine the other person had, and she was just the one trapped in the car. Or, you could imagine it was just George after all. Just George, who was just talking, sitting on the ground with a nerf bullet next to his fingertips. Just George, who had to cook dinner for real and wanted to be simply convinced into a Nerf battle because he was in love, just a little. It all ends the same.
There’s a bullet that goes through his head, and this one is real.
________________________________________________________
It’s —
________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________
— Dark. It’s is Dark.
That’s what he was going to say.
Luz?
________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________
— gun. Where’s —
It’s okay. It’s okay.
________________________________________________________
The first thing George Luz does when he wakes up is breathe.
There are many things that happen that are overlooked when waking up, and the first one is breathing. So the first thing Luz does is breathe, and choke and moan in pain as he struggled to pull the tubes going into his nose out, his arms sluggish and slow. It's dark in the room. He's confused. He can't breathe. His head hurts.
"Woah, woah - hey - Nurse!" Someone is yelling, tugging his arms away from the tubes. It sounds familiar. It's so dark?
And, then there are different hands. Small in size but calloused, and there’s muttering before a voice. “George,” a woman says, gripping his hands like steel. “It’s okay, you can still breathe, just easy breaths, okay? Follow my lead,” she says, before slowly breathing in exaggeratedly, and back out again.
And-- and he does breathe with her, or at least tries to after his brain actually processes what she said, mingling the words into something he can understand and turn into action, the slow connect of Oh, I can breathe. He coughs and sputters a little bit at the itchy feeling of the tube in his throat. She lets his hands go, and he lets them fall into his lap.
“We can take that tube out now that you’re up, okay?” She says, almost gently. He frowns, in the direction of where he thinks she is, once the words hit him. She’d already moved on to talking to the other person in the room, advising they could leave for this part as it was uncomfortable, and the steady, strong voice of “No.”
He remembers that voice. Somewhere.
Where is anything?
He slowly begins freaking out again, his hands coming to his eyes. There's — There are bandages covering them, had he not noticed that? But he can feel his eyelashes fluttering against it, and it's not entirely dark because he can still see the room’s light and really he’s just terrified.
There’s a hand reaching over to one of George’s hands away from his head, slow and familiar. It’s calloused, the same calloused hands that were there before the nurse. They just hold his hand, so gentle and light like they were afraid he was going to shatter, that they couldn’t believe he existed at all.
“It’s okay,” A voice says, and it's rough, like his vocal cords were made with sandpaper, just rough enough that it sounds destroyed and makes George want to take a few steps back, but just so unfamiliarly right that it made him want to remember.
The nurse pulls the tube out of his nose, stops, and then continues and it is the weirdest feeling he’s felt in a long, long time. The guy’s squeezing his hand a little tighter, and then finally the tube is out. He coughs again, at the feeling of breathing fully on his own accord.
“Alright, sir, I am going to actually have to ask you to step out of the room for this, we need to do a little bit of testing to just see what he remembers.” The nurse says, and she sounds gentle. “He’ll be alright. It’s nothing big,” she says.
“Sounds big,” the voice grumbles, but the hand is still pulling away. He jerks a little at the loss, and blinks, still trying to look around. He wants to talk. He knows how, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know how to say anything. He just sort of hums and hopes that conveys anything at all.
The man’s voice is long gone by then.
“Alright George, I’ve put a piece of paper on your tray,” the nurse says. He can feel its there, suddenly, when he bumps his elbow into it. She gently grabs his hand and sets it on the paper. “Tap if you can hear me.”
He taps. He feels very, very small.
“Can you make a sound?” She asks.
He wants to say yeah, but instead what comes out is a weird version of an “Um.” He frowns, horribly.
“No no no, that's good,” She says, and he hears scribbling. “Can you say the word ‘Hi’?”
“Hi,” he says, and all the tension leaves his shoulders. More scribbling.
“That was perfect,” she says. “Can you wiggle your toes?”
He can. Is this? Okay?
“Good. Alright, I’m going to real gently take off your bandage, alright?” she says. “Tell me if you see anything.”
It’s slow. But.
He sees nothing.
________________________________________________________
If there’s one thing that scares Joe Toye, it’s the empty expressions.
It was different when he barely knew Luz. It was just the guy across the hall that blasted his room full of feathers. Who also had really nice hair and a thousand-bolt smile but, he would never voice his opinion about that to anyone. And, when he’d got that coffee he could start to think ‘okay, I can do this’ and when Luz was there for the nerf battle he thought it was good, he could be close to this guy, but then —
Everything came crumbling down.
When you hear a gunshot, no matter how far away you are or how much experience you have, you know it’s a gunshot. His first instinct was to run into his apartment and call the police but if it wasn’t, if it wasn’t. Maybe he could’ve socked whoever shot Luz straight in the mouth. And he would’ve kept going, and going if he could. If it wasn’t, if he decided to run down the staircase beforehand and gotten to Luz would.
Would anything have changed?
He can’t go back. He’s come to terms with that, at the very most. He still leaves a lot of the guilt on himself, though. No matter how many times the others tell him. And when visiting hours were open, he’d take as much time as he could to visit Luz. He kept having to work around his work hours, nearly asking for time off even though he’d just gotten the job. A lot of the other guys kept visiting too, usually in groups, as they had all already declared themselves family. It was true. He and a few others made it their mission to always be there, though.
In the meantime, he's taken to asking everything he can about what makes George Luz. Stupid things he's done, where he's from, his job, things he kicks ass at and things he is banned from doing. And for the most part, they tell him everything.
But then Luz woke up, and he was right there and breathing, on his own, until he got kicked out. He’s barely seen him since.
And a month and a half later, Luz’s moved back into his apartment. Not a word said to anyone. He hasn’t let anyone visit him in the hospital either, apparently. So yeah, the first thing he’s going to do once he gets back is knock on his door and demand to be let in.
“No!” Luz yells through the door, and then there’s a crash and a “shit.”
“Luz, open the goddamn door or I’m kicking it down,” Toye yells back. “I haven’t seen you in months—” and I’m scared.
“No!” he yelled again, and this time there is no crash.
“I’m serious!” he yells. “On three!”
“One!” Luz yells, and he sounds like he’s almost laughing. This asshole.
“Two!” he yells back, and that's when he hears scrambling.
“I was joking hold on Jesus Joe —”
“Three!” and he slams his leg into the door, and it sends a shock of pain up his knee. And then again, and again, and the door swings free and he’s storming inside.
The place is nearly trashed. The lights aren’t on, there’s a picture frame in the door hallway on the ground, the kitchen has papers scattered everywhere and George himself is sitting in a dining room chair, next to one that’s knocked over. He just sighs through his teeth, walks straight up and hugs him.
“You’re an asshole ,” he hisses. “Don’t ever do that again, Jesus Christ.”
George takes a second before he wraps his arms around him, and he just seems rigid, like he was in shock. Or scared. If Toye leaves a few seconds of the hug for himself before pulling away, nobody has to know. He settles away to pick up the fallen chair and sit across from him, and George only jerks and looks faintly in his direction.
He just stares.
"I'm fine," George says bitterly, wringing his hands in his lap.
"Your house is a mess and you planned on locking everybody away," he says flatly. "That sounds fine to you?"
It really is now that he doesn't have a near direct mission to get to Luz. There's a vase of mini-roses shattered on the ground, and the fridge is still open. Almost looked like it was still in the process of being robbed, really. Scattered in just the right places.
"Luz, look at me," he says, noticing he seemed to intentionally be avoiding his general direction.
That's when he cracks. "I can't! I can't fucking see okay!?"
He just sort of sits, stunned. Luz has his face in his hands, propping his elbows on his knees. The most horrible feeling of guilt drops in his gut like a stone and then jerks so hard to get to his heart he can barely breathe.
"Bullet went in and bounced around. Fucked up my vision and took a bit of my speech, too," Luz sniffs, gesturing vaguely with his hands before going back to wipe his eyes, and that’s when he realizes he's crying. "I didn't even remember you."
"But you do now," he says, and it comes out as more of a statement than a question.
"It came back to me," he nods and wipes at his eyes. "You're a tough fucker to forget."
"Thanks," Toye snorts. Luz just sort of breaks between a laugh and a sob, but at least he's smiling. He rubs his shoulder if to mean a form of comfort.
"That was kind of a lie before, I can still see light." And then he’s sitting up a little bit straighter.
It clicks in his head. Why there are no lights on, the vase that was broken. He nods at the room. That makes sense.
"What, so they just sent you on your way home, congratulations?"
"They gave me a cane at least Joe, god," Luz jokes lightheartedly. It's not really that funny, but he appreciates him trying to lighten the mood.
"Jesus," he breathes, and pulls Luz in for another hug. This beautiful bastard.
"We're gonna figure this out," Joe says.
"'We're'?" George questions. And he has to smile, at that.
Every step of the way.