Zef doesn't hesitate. His instincts are firing fast, telling him Gray's not okay. Any hurt he felt over the lacklustre response to his good news gets swallowed up by that.

He follows.

The night air is humid and hits his overheated face like soup. Ahead, Gray nearly bumps into a couple necking against a brick wall. He grips his head like it's about to split and abruptly turns left into an alley. Zef jogs to catch up. Dumpsters overflow with rancid garbage. It hasn't rained, but there are puddles, and it smells like piss back here.

Gray stops next to the dumpster and shakes out a cigarette from his pack. His fingers tremble too badly, and he fumbles it. It rolls into one of the puddles.

"Shit."

He tries to shake out another, but the entire pack spills out. They tumble around the alley like little, white animal bones.

"Fuck."

Zef crouches and picks up a lucky one that didn't land anywhere wet. He rubs the filter against his shirt. Gray holds out his hand for it, but Zef says, "Let me," and takes the lighter from him before he can protest. He lights it up and, with exquisite caution, puts the filter between Gray's lips. Carefully, carefully. So their skin doesn't touch.

Gray notices.

In the warm light of the flame dancing in his eyes, he manages to look both afraid and grateful. Panicked and penitent. A worshipper lighting a candle for a prayer in church rather than a strung-out assassin lighting a cigarette in a cum-stained back-alley while having a panic attack.

'Cause that's what this is. Zef's seen it before.

Zef steps back. Gives him space. Gray sucks on the filter like it's his only source of clean oxygen, not a cancer stick. He exhales smoke on a shaky breath. Leans his head back and bumps it against the brick in a steady, firm rhythm. Zef steps gingerly around puddles and leans against the wall, a reasonable two-foot distance between them.

Gray closes his eyes, but he doesn't look peaceful. One hand clutching the cigarette. The other fisted in his shirt, stuffed into the open zipper of his leather jacket.

He reminds Zef painfully of Ollie.

They stand in silence. Gray sucks the life out of his cigarette. Zef watches like a cowboy settling a spooked horse. The city sings a background chorus of night traffic, club bass and—somewhere—the distinctively uncreative cursing of a drunk couple having a fight. Weirdly comforting. The city buzzes with so many people. Not all of them are having a good time, either.

Gray finishes his cigarette and stubs it out. His breathing's a bit more normal. Less rasping.

"You okay?" says Zef.

"Fine. Was fine."

"No, you weren't." Zef studies his shoes. "You have panic attacks often?"

Gray looks at him sidelong. "Nah. Just when friends do stupid shit."

There's that word again. Friend. Said like he means it.

"Care to tell me why top surgery counts as stupid shit? Not to be, like, 'me, me, me,' about this, but I thought you'd be...happy for me. Or something."

Gray kicks his heel against the wall a few times. Turns, leaning one shoulder against it so he can look at Zef. "I am. And I'm not. Look. I ain't got no place telling you what to do with your body. I know. But I— You gotta make sure it's yours, understand? If you go corporate, read the fine print. All of it. Every line."

Zef's heart gives a feeble throb. "You think there's some catch?"

"There's always a catch with caps."

"What, like repair subscriptions, bad warranties? I'm an engineer. I've fixed my dad's legs for years. I'll handle it."

"Like you not owning it," Gray says. "Not controlling it."

It clicks into place. Project Jewel Wasp. Gray's implants were cap installations, and through them he lost his autonomy.

It's a different situation from the stuff Zef has installed. But it suddenly makes total sense why Zef getting cap-funded top surgery would trigger a panic attack.

Quietly, Zef says, "I promise, I'll be careful."

A gruff nod, but Gray looks resigned. "Good." He stuffs his shaking hands into his jacket pockets. "I know what it's like when your meat suit's a bit ill-fitting, trust me. But if there's anything else you end up wanting, there are options."

"Gray... What if I can't afford options?"

"You come to me, and I'll find affordable."

"You say that like it's easy."

Gray looks at him. "I say it 'cause I don't care if it's hard."

Fuck, thinks Zef. Fucking romantic. 'Cause it's usually Zef trying to help everyone. Now the shoe's on the other foot, he doesn't know how to take a step. Just knows those words kindle and stoke the drip of warmth in his chest to a blaze. Something not easily snuffed out.

"The implants in their catalogue," Zef says. "Gray, I don't know if I can say no to that. I'd pass. I'd pass naked."

"Is looking cis all that matters?" Asked without a lick of judgement. Just open curiosity.

"Yes. No. I don't know." Zef runs his fingers through his hair. Finds his curls a tangled mess in the humidity. "I'm still figuring that out. What it means to me. Being a man."

"Means whatever you want it to. Whatever feels right."

"What if I'm so used to feeling wrong, I don't know what right feels like?"

Gray tips his head up to the starless sky and thinks about it. "Same way you knew what you wanted out of top. In lots of ways, it's easier to pick out than the wrong feelings, 'cause the wrong ones you get so used to they're just...background noise. Then suddenly, you put on clothes that fit, or—" He glances over his shoulder towards Prancer's. "Or you see someone who's like you, glowing and snug as a bug in a rug in their body, and you wish that was you."

"Can I ask..." Zef coughs. "Can I ask what you opted for? You don't have to answer."

"Top surgery. Found an underground surgeon who did it the old-fashioned way. She did Cal's, too. Testosterone. Probably the same implant you got, only older. Dee hooked me up with that one. My refills aren't prescription, but I got a doodad for testing them." He shrugs. "That's it. Never felt the need for nothing else."

"And you always knew that's how you'd want it?"

"No. Figured it out as I went."

Zef folds his arms around himself. Around his new, comfortable chest, with its embellishments that some cis people opted to get purely for fashion and aesthetics. Would it bother him, having scars? Taking off his shirt for a one-night stand and knowing they'd know?

Gray's looking at him, dully backlit by the streetlights outside the alley, his sleepless eyes for once completely sincere and unguarded.

Well, there's one person Zef could take his top off for.

Can't think that. Not with the job you've got. Can't help it, though. His feelings are cut and dry as rotten fruit.

"Thanks for telling me that," Zef says.

"Thanks for the cigarette."

"It was your cigarette. I just saved it from this grotty as fuck alley."

Gray snorts. "Well, thanks for that."

"Seriously. Pick a cleaner place to have a breakdown next time."

A full laugh. It cracks all the jumbled, harsher feelings between them. Grinds them out like the ashes of that cigarette under Gray's heel. Leaves only a relief. An ease.

It shouldn't be this comfortable, talking to a man like Gray. It often isn't. But all the conversations that should be hardest? They're smooth and silky. Zef could never talk to Ollie like this. Or Leo. Hell, even his dad. His dad loves him, which absolutely helps, but always with that touch of worry to his eyes when Zef talked about transition. Worried for Zef, because the world didn't often treat people well if they were even a bit different, but still. It made it hard for Zef to share. 'Cuz the world heard 'transgender,' and thought, 'miserable, lonely, unloved.' They didn't realise how that single word had opened Zef up and shone a light on all the parts of himself he'd been too afraid to accept. How it helped him love himself.

Gray gets it.

A pop of electrical discharge and the screech of rubber snatch their attention. The slam and crunch of metal loud as a gunshot.

The intersection just visible at the mouth of the alley is a smouldering twist of metal. Several self-driving cars crashed together, head-on. All the traffic lights glare down on the wreckage with green eyes. The rest of traffic, held up and unable to pass, lays on their horns as if the inconvenience to their day is far more offensive than the possibility of bodies crumpled like accordions in those cars.

Gray whirls and stands in the middle of the alley with his shoulders bunched and his hands flexed near his hips like he's a gunslinger in an old Western reaching for a revolver. He doesn't need one. A red glow emanates from beneath his gloves, creeps up the back of his neck into the shorn hair at his nape.

He stares at something. Someone. Standing on the corner, watching it all with a cigarette between her lips, is a brawny woman with tattoos lit blue and orange.

From this distance, Zef can make out a splashing koi.

The woman turns and looks over her shoulder. Looks directly at Gray. Then starts walking towards the alley.

Unhurried. Casual. Like she's an old friend about to ask how the wife and kids are doing.

Zef recognizes her. She's one of the goons from outside his apartment.

She pulls something out of her pocket. A little device the size and shape of a grenade. When she reaches up and pulls the pin on it, Zef thinks, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. Looks like a grenade because it is a grenade.

She lobs it linebacker-style with precision. It pinks on the concrete, rolls to a stop not two feet away from Gray's boot just as he turns and covers Zef's body with his own.

Zef thinks, no, fuck. Also, inexplicably, not again.

The grenade beeps. Do grenades usually beep?

And then a noise similar to the one from earlier pops Zef's ears. Whhoooom POP. An electrical discharge turns the air around them into a burst of static. Gray's tattoos briefly light and then go dark. Zef's implant sputters, but it's mostly shielded by Gray's body.

Gray stands. The woman is now running towards them. Her own tattoos light up, but when Gray clenches his fist? Nothing happens. That grenade was no grenade. It was a close-range EMP. Knocked Gray's implants temporarily offline.

He turns to Zef, face a mask of black feeling. "Run."

Zef does not consider himself a runner. Running for the bus is, in his opinion, a desperately humiliating circumstance in which he weighs up being late over arriving on time and sweaty, and prefers to be late. There is just nothing redeeming about it. 'Runner's high,' more like 'Runners die.' He genuinely cannot see a single advantage to running anywhere...

Until now, with that woman sauntering towards them, and Gray's face a pale wash of anger, hate, and for the first time, fear.

Gray pelts toward the back of the alley, where a chain-link fence bars the way. There's a tear in the bottom left, peeled back to admit someone the size of a german shepherd. Gray slips through like a goddamn ferret. Zef rattles his way past, knees cracking as he crouches in the— Ew, fuck, gross— puddles of questionable alleyway discharge.

Sirens wail, howling over the usual city chorus.

Standing, he chances a look behind him. The woman is in the alley. An intimidating silhouette against the flashing red and blue lights of police cars arriving at the crash she just orchestrated.

"This way." Gray tugs Zef left by his jacket.

They're off again. Zef vaguely remembers the nurse telling him not to overexert himself. Does that policy change in life or death scenarios?

He struggles to follow the logic of Gray's route. They zig zag through streets to break line of sight and throw her off their trail, but then Gray takes him up a fire escape. Zef gets shin splints. His heart burns like he chugged six litres of soda, sneakers squeaking on the metal. With the racket they're making, surely their pursuer will hear and trap them on the roof.

They don't reach the roof. Instead, there's a tunnel through the middle of the building halfway up. Gray leads him through it, and then through a labyrinth of connected tunnels. Like all the buildings here are a networked anthill. When they finally emerge, it is in a completely different district of the city, and Zef is fairly certain his lungs no longer inflate. Each breath comes ragged as grated cheese.

Gray finally comes to a stop, pushing Zef into a hidden space between two vending machines on an avenue where people line up for a club. Gray crowds in with him. Abruptly, Zef's heart hammers for reasons other than unplanned cardio.

"Uh—"

Whatever he'd been about to say gets aborted, because Gray snatches up his hand. Zef's brain does an embarrassing backflip into the abyss. He can't think. He just ran a marathon, and now Gray is touching him.

Not gently, mind, but is anything about Gray gentle?

Doesn't matter. Gray's touching him and Gray hates touching people. Zef briefly feels blessed. Like an ornery cat chose to sit in his lap over any alternative.

"T-thought you hated touch—"

Alarmingly, Gray's body flares with red light. So his implants are online again.

"Sorry?!" Zef amends, but Gray hasn't stopped touching him. Searchingly, his long-fingered hands dance over the back of Zef's knuckles, exploring the creases of his palms. He drags the pad of his thumb up the index finger, then stops. The deep crease in his brow smooths, like he found what he was searching for.

"Fucking knew it," Gray says.

Abruptly, Zef feels a pinch of sharp pain in the tip of his pointer finger. "Shit, what was that for?"

Gray holds aloft what he found, and Zef's airways pinch shut. In the low light from the vending machines, shiny with a little of Zef's blood, is the implant Rylan gave him. The one designed to steal the schematics for Gray's tech. It's tiny and unobtrusive, thumbtack-sized. A stab of shame goes through him, plus a degree of very reasonable fear.

He'd forgotten it was even there. Should have removed it.

But now Gray knows...

He drops the implant onto the sidewalk and crushes it under the heel of his boot. It crunches like glass.

"Someone's been tracking you," he says.