Archive of Our Own ^beta

She was driving down the highway in the pitch-black dead of the night when her car's speakers suddenly stopped playing music from her phone, soft lofi interrupted by the obnoxious blare of whatever pop song she'd made her ringtone this week.

Nene visibly winced at the noise, cursing loudly as she fumbled for her phone with one hand while keeping her eyes on the road and other hand on the wheel. She swerved a bit at the sudden motion, which could've been her doom going eighty in the middle of nowhere, but corrected it, spared but one glance at her screen, and thumbed the button to answer.

"Whaddya want, carrot top?"

"Nene."

Pico. But that couldn't be. The man on the other end of the line had lost the fire in his voice. Nene had only ever heard him without a cruel bite to his tone once in all the years she'd known him - and the context of it was something she fought to forget every day. As did he. It made her foot peel nervously off the gas and afford more of her attention to him, furrowing her brow in concern and even taking him off of speaker.

"...Something's wrong," she deduced quickly. "Wow, must be real bad if you're actually gonna talk about it. And to me."

Pico rasped back but a single word. "Don't."

"Don't? Don't what?"

"Don't...Don't fuckin'..." She heard the sloshing of a liquid and Pico hacking a harsh cough before he continued. "Call me a pussy or whatever, but don't fuckin' tease me tonight. Or do, I guess, I can't stop you if you're gonna be that goddamn insensitive. Won't matter either way."

"I was serious, man," she said, glancing briefly over her shoulder, flicking on her blinker and moving into the center lane. She didn't really know where she was going, possessed abruptly by the Ghost that Simply Must Waste Gas at 1 AM. Nor did she know where she was. Nor did she really care. "Why me? Why not, I dunno...Darnell, or Otis, or your dads?"

Pico's response came promptly and easily. "Couldn't reach Darnell," he said bluntly. "Out fuckin' shit up again. Otis doesn't know what I do. Dads are in an active warzone and don't have phones. Don't get all high and mighty about this, don't get any ideas..." His voice seemed to waver and break for all but a second before regaining its stone-cold, angry stoicism, with all the ferocity of a wounded animal. "You're not and you never will be my first choice for shit like this."

Now Nene was beginning to grow annoyed, staring dead ahead at the road visible in her brights. "Spit it out already," she sighed in irritation. "If it makes you feel better or whatever I won't tell nobody about what's happening, I guess. Bitching about another school shooting? Bad high? One of your hits fucking you up again?"

"I killed Bee."

The words hung heavy and cemented in Nene's head, and for a second she didn't know how to react. A face came to her mind's eye: a fair-skinned boy with electric blue hair and a frankly terrible fashion sense, not the brightest but carrying a wonderful smile. Nene wasn't super close with him before he moved but knew him because they coexisted in the same circle, orbiting around Pico. Back in school. Before everything went to shit. Before the first time Nene had tried to-

"Bee?" she repeated, incredulous. "The...Your old boyfriend from school?"

"Mhmm." More sloshing noises, and Nene realized Pico was drinking something. "A-and like, I dunno why, but I don't...I can't...I can't not care. I can't stop thinking about it."

Nene's kneejerk reaction was to reject Pico's attempt to open up. Emotions were scary. Emotions made people do crazy things like let people get close to them, hurt and be hurt, end and begin their own lives and other people's lives and shoot up schools and light things on fire and yell and scream and try and end it all. Emotions were why Nene hated hearing Pico's voice soft like this. And emotion had been why Pico had held Bee so closely years ago...was it why he'd ended all that now?

How easy it would be to call Pico a puss, clown on him for letting death affect him like this when he'd been born in a warzone and raised with death surrounding him, and call it a day. 

But...well, Pico always said to call him if she felt like ending it again. It was immediately followed up with something about Pico being unable to afford losing one of his top mooks, but still.

Nene's stomach dropped into her stomach. She had to get back to Philly and she had to get back to Philly right fucking now.

"He had a new girl," Pico continued absently. "This tall demon lady with horns n' teeth n' shit...Her dad was the one who told me to kill him."

So...he hadn't chosen to kill Bee. "What did Bee do to piss him off?"

"I don't know, I don't know, and I don't fucking care." Pico was abruptly sharp and hard and fiery, more in line with what she was used to, or it would be if it weren't for the violent, dangerous tremble to his voice. "I had t' fuckin' take him out from a distance cuz his girl being a demon was probably gonna cause a few problems. I couldn't even say goodbye. I couldn't even see his face has he died. He didn't know I was the one who did it. I did it in front of her."

The idea sadly didn't even faze Nene at first, until she really forced herself to think. Watching people die on the regular wasn't a normal occurrence to some odd 99% of the world, so she thought about the first time she saw someone die, and it made her stomach turn and her face tighten and her hand clamp down harder on her phone. And the first person Nene saw die was a stranger. How much worse would it be if the first death you witnessed was someone you loved so dearly? 

"I miss him, Nene."

Pico was in danger. 

She knew, because that was the same voice he used when he spared her the day when she begged him to kill her.

"I'm on my way," Nene said through her teeth, putting him back on speaker. Her eyes flickered back and forth between the road and her phone's GPS, trying to figure out where the fuck she was and what the fastest route to one of her best friends was. And once she was there she'd hug him tight and never let go, even if he screamed or cried or shot or stabbed her. Whatever he tried, she'd surely done worse to herself. And even if somehow he wasn't in danger - didn't she owe him anything for the times he'd pulled her from the brink?

"Don't bother," Pico rasped after another swig, his voice becoming painfully less steady with every passing word. "I just...Nene, I-I..."

Nene's grip on her wheel weakened and slid further down, eyes wide with worry, surprise, shock.

Pico sniffed, coughed again, and then a muffled sob echoed through the speaker. "Bee, my little bumblebee," he mumbled, Nene getting the sense that he wasn't talking to her anymore. "Why did I...? You didn't deserve to - I didn't want to, I just wanted...t' see you again, a-and look what I did."

If it had been anybody else on the planet Nene might've thought it was pathetic, but the pain in his voice was so clear, so apparent it made her own chest ache, grieve for someone she hadn't even remembered until today. She was thirty minutes out of Philly, she had five or six hours until the sun came up, and she had a single connection to Pico, and for all she knew she was his only connection to this plane right now. 

It was the hardest thing she ever had to do - drive in the dark with one ear listening to someone she'd thought was so strong sob and cry like a lost child, the only light in the whole world from her headlights and from the cruise control light on her dash.