[ Behind the mask, the guy smiles. It's noticeable in how the shape of his eyes change in the hole of the mask, crinkling at the corners in a way that, in isolation, looks almost like there's no smile underneath it at all. Just a wince.

He doesn't move a muscle except to smile and keep breathing. He doesn't even raise his hands in surrender, which certainly tells Riz a few things about him. This isn't the first gun someone has pointed at him in a quiet room. This isn't even close to the first. It takes some time to build up this kind of habitual indifference even if you don't give a damn about your personal safety - to break yourself of the instinctual flinch of mortal terror. ]

Correct.

[ So that's some muscles moving, to speak, and then a twitch of the fingers of his dangling right hand, index and middle, where he would be loosely holding a cigarette filter if he had one. Riz might have seen that exact gesture before, or just be able to make the inference. ]

Good trigger discipline, by the way. I'm impressed. You do know your stuff.

[ He observes, idly, because he's just waiting, now. Riz is a smart guy. A smart guy, with enough context clues to put a lot of things together very, very quickly. Krouse doesn't need to start spelling it out.

And why would he deny Riz the big detective's reveal speech? He has to owe him that much. He understands the thrill of pulling a trick together, disparate cards swept up, reshuffled, and flushed out in a perfect hand. ]

And I think you can guess what I did. Why don't you take a shot, and I'll fill in anything you miss?

[ There's a tiny but deliberate emphasis on take a shot that Trickster, for his part, decides he's not going to examine for any meaning. He's set up the stage. Now he'll see how Riz decides to bring it home. ]

[ The tiny, hidden, fixed smile on Trickster's face doesn't so much as twitch at Riz's initial assessment, until Riz gets to the part about himself. It falters, then, and disappears, leaving his eyes nothing but intent and focused. That deep, sharp focus, always a little too much for the story of the kind of guy he was pretending to be, the flicker of his attention from one thing to another too swift and practised for someone who'd done all his conflict resolution at a keyboard.

He holds Riz's luminous, incisive gaze without flinching, sitting up straighter on his prison cot underneath the bright warning painted on the wall above him. ]

You're not like them.

[ It's a quick, almost dismissive assessment, something he says like he's sweeping it out of the way. Like he'd prefer they not linger on that judgment call, with all the things it might imply about Trickster's opinion of Riz.

He's a liar, and a manipulator, and a fraud. And he's not going to try to tug on the strings of a nascent friendship built on him lying to Riz since the moment he typed his first reply to him on the network to try to mitigate this. He's not willing to call it a scruple. It's just not his play. ]

And there are two answers to that. The first one, local? High hero population. Not exactly conducive to promoting teamwork if they found out what my old gig used to be. I prefer to stay under the radar.

[ He flexes his hands, sliding them up to rest on his thighs, the movement slow and telegraphed. Riz might not be pointing a gun at him anymore, but Trickster isn't interested in making him twitchy. Not that Riz seems twitchy. He seems like a compressed spring in a clockwork mechanism, wound tight, poised for motion under a hard metal shell of control. Trickster knows what that's like. ]

Second answer? Money. Resources. Access to things I couldn't get access to without this. And I had this thing about not wanting to be locked up under government quarantine for the rest of my life.

[ He doesn't have to nod at the words behind him. Riz is, again, a smart guy. ]

I wasn't lying about getting my power during a disaster. I just left out what it was. There are these things called Endbringers, back where I came from. City destroyers, superpowered giants that show up to kill everything they can reach before they're pushed back. She's one of them. And her trick is cause and effect. Precognition and setting up...cascades. It's not the initial attack, with her. It's how everyone who spends too long in the area and lives through it could be a bomb. Implanted conditioning, subtle nudges, and then one day some of the survivors start snapping. Assassinate a politician, poison a water supply, walk out into the street and start killing people. Always something with ripple effects.

So. Quarantine. They keep you isolated for a few months, monitoring. Put you on a list, make sure anyone you interact with longer than a bus ride is informed. They used to do tattoos. White birds. That didn't pan out, long term.

[ He delivers all of this almost nonchalantly, ending with a shrug. Purposeful defensive distance. ]

I wasn't interested in that lifestyle. Neither was my team. So we broke out. Took up the masks, made ourselves into a mercenary group. You'd be surprised how much of being an e-sports team transferred, actually. And there's your second answer.

[ It's a neat, plausible explanation. It's true, in the details. And it's leaving something out. There's a hole in it, an absence of an explanation for how deeply personal Krouse's antipathy for heroes seems to be. ]

It's Trickster in the mask, by the way. Not that I particularly care -

[ A low battery alarm beeps, somewhere not in the cell. Trickster tenses, his eyes strained at the corners in the holes of his mask.

And somewhere behind the walls, buried in concrete, something massive and organic thuds against solid, unyielding metal. Krouse flinches as tiny particles of grey dust shake off the wall at the back of the cell. ]

Don't worry about that. [ He says, quickly, his voice tight. ] It's - ambient.

[ Krouse's eyes go wide behind the mask. It'd be melodramatic to say it looks like Riz shot him instead of reholstering the gun. It's more accurate to say it looks like Krouse wishes Riz had shot him.

It has a similar effect as a bullet to the torso would have, in this costume. Krouse knows what that feels like, so the radiant shock that punches his chest is almost familiar. He digs his hands into the thin mattress of the cot, clenching his gloved hands, as he struggles to keep his shit together.

There's one hideous, excruciating second where he thinks: don't open your mouth. Don't you dare open your stupid fucking mouth.

He doesn't let himself get as far as why he has to tell himself not to do that, blinking his eyes sharply, smothering the possibility hard and fast and fucking dead. Not here, not now, not in front of anyone.

It's not that Riz's tone is cold, or that the words are harsh. That's the surface level. That's Riz's mask. It's not how he says it, but what he says, and what he did before he said it. Taking the gun off the table, even if he thinks Krouse is a lying piece of shit who used him as - some kind of outlet to vent to, a head to mess with because Krouse couldn't keep his mouth shut before. Saying that Krouse is his friend, present tense, as rightfully pissed as Riz is. Even thinking it's not reciprocated.

Krouse swallows something hot and choking. He gets it together, one slivered fragment at a time. ]

Yeah. Thing is. [ He says, his voice rough, with a barely there vibration, and he doesn't sound like he's about to fucking- he doesn't sound like that. ] Last guy I was friends with, I broke his fucking legs.

[ Dropped him twice. Once to try to get him to stay down, and twice to make him stay down, and sometimes when he thinks about Luke that's the only sound he hears. He's hearing it now, those wet cracks, the scream. ]

I'm a shitty fucking friend. And that's the fucking truth.

[ Fabian would be ashamed of both of them, handling it like this. If Krouse starts letting himself go anywhere else with that, he's going to have to get it together all over again. So he sits there, not saying this right, I'm sorry and I didn't want to hurt you and fuck, fuck, fuck stuck under his tongue with the taste of salt. He swallows again. Focuses up. ]

Mass. It's mass.

[ A low battery alarm beeps. ]

[ Krouse catches the screwdriver reflexively, his hand flying up to snatch it from the air deftly. He closes his gloved fingers around it as he watches Riz rummage in his briefcase, dragging out items that shouldn't physically fit inside of it, and whatever excitement he might feel about seeing that is flatlined by grasping the implications of what Riz wants to try.

He gets off the bed. He doesn't start disassembling it. He reaches for the catch of his mask behind his head instead as Riz gets to work levering apart the chair with his sword. Probably not great for the sword.

Krouse tosses the mask on the cot and runs his hand through his hair, the screwdriver jutting out of his clenched fist. It's not an aggressive hold. He just needs to be doing something with his hands so they don't start shaking. He watches Riz toss the chair leg into the bag tiredly, so goddamn fucking tiredly, his bare face showing deep, purpled hollows under his eyes. ]

I remember.

[ They'd talked about a lot of things. But in the context of Riz assuring Krouse he'd shoot him if he tried anything, the possibilities narrow sharply. He thinks he can grasp the intentions there, too, if less clearly. I'm not a good person either, maybe. Or, I fucking mean it about shooting you. The point is, there's a point, and Krouse should let him get to it.

A low battery alarm beeps. ]

It was kind of funny. [ He says, not sounding like it's funny at all. ] I don't think I really put it together at the time. But in retrospect. Parallels, you know? Coincidence.

The guy who used to own this place - half of this place - [ he could explain it, but getting into theories of congruence and the amalgam of one prison with another feels unnecessarily esoteric ] - he -

[ He doesn't even know why he's trying to tell Riz this. To get him to stop, maybe. To just stop. To understand how much he's wasting his time. To get the gun back out. To make anything else be happening but this.

He gets his wish. Not the way he wanted, but he never does.

The massive sound of something wet striking hard metal comes again, the back wall shaking, and Krouse pivots towards it as reflexively as he caught the screwdriver. There's a pause, a silence, and it seems like it might pass the same way it did the first time, until the screaming starts.

A wild, shrieking chorus of mouths, dozens of them, each different, almost entirely inhuman, barely muffled by the concrete. It would take a keen ear, or a familiar one, to hear the singular wail of a human girl in agonized misery in the midst of it.

Krouse's eyes go so round and wide in his face he looks so much younger than he is, or how he feels. ]

No'!

[ The syllable bursts out of his mouth as he darts to the wall, slamming his empty palm against it. It could sound like a denial, if not for how he says it, desperate and panicked on the shape of a name. ]

No', No', stop, hey - [ The screaming continues, ricocheting through the cell, through his chest ] - stop it, fucking - stop, stop, fucking leave her out of this you motherfuckers I'll fucking kill you!

[ His voice rips up from panicked to enraged, a snarl teetering on the edge of snapping completely, and he doesn't realize he's punched the wall with his fist wrapped around the screwdriver until the pain is jolting up his knuckles - and the screams stop, cut off, as abruptly as if they never started.

A low battery alarm beeps. ]

Fuck!

[ Krouse pushes his face against the wall, grinding his nose against the concrete, his face contorted in a shuddering convulsion of rage and panic and grief. ]

Fuck. [ He exhales, hopelessly. ] Fuck.

[ Krouse believes Riz. In the long cascade of things Krouse would rather not be figuring out right now, or at all, that's just another one to really kick him in the teeth. Krouse believes, even after all of this - partially because of all of this - that Riz would drop everything sight unseen to go try to rescue a girl from a monster.

It was one of the first real things he ever told Krouse about himself, past mutual exchanges of speculation. The invocation is still fresh in the air, barely older than the screams. It's in Riz's frantic voice, his coldness splintered over that instinct to do something, and Krouse isn't going to look at his face. He's going to keep his eyes good and goddamn closed as he forces his face into some approximation of stillness, winding it down into a hard, shuttered hurt. He swallows, his mouth stretching and thinning, and exhales raggedly. He doesn't lift his head off the wall. ]

Noelle.

[ He can say her name. He's figured out how to get there without losing it, every time, and it should feel like coping. All it ever feels like is betrayal. ]

That's Noelle. [ Krouse pushes his flat palm against the wall like he might push away; he still doesn't. ] And she's not here. Because she's dead. And I wouldn't let you go looking for her anyway. She doesn't - [ hah, under his breath, desiccated and hollow ] - she didn't want people seeing her like that.

[ Krouse pushes himself an inch, two inches, three inches off the wall. His shoulders are hunched, one hand flat, the other curled around the screwdriver. He takes a deep breath, a ragged sniffle at the trailing end, and lets his head hang as his mouth works itself into a crooked, off-kilter echo of a smile. ]

Sorry. [ He lifts the hand holding the screwdriver off the wall and wipes his nose on his sleeve, a jerky, furtive motion that practically begs not to be noticed. ] I don't think I've slept in -

[ A low battery alarm sounds. Krouse flinches, another hah stuttering out of his mouth. ]

God, you know, it's funny? She fucking told me about that. The alarm, I mean. That it kept going off in her room. And I didn't get it. I really didn't fucking get it. It's annoying, but how bad can it be? [ Quieter, with a rasp: ] How bad can it fucking be?

[ Krouse pushes off the wall completely, tilting his head back. He breathes out, wanting a cigarette more than he wants oxygen, and finally opens his eyes to look down at Riz, his face bare of his mask, his eyes glinting with the way it really is kind of funny. ]

I put her in there. In the cell. And I promised I'd make it all right, when she was better, and that was the whole fucking point of any of this. But she asked me about the alarm, and I didn't make them fix it. I asked, yeah, but I didn't - I didn't make them, you know? I could have tried. Could have gone in there with a new battery, or just ripped it out of the wall. I could have listened. I could have made the fucking time. What did the rest of it even fucking matter?

[ The low battery alarm sounds. It sounds for days, and days, and days, never turning off, never missing a tone. Always just piercing enough, just spaced out enough, a person can never get used to it. ]

She was so sick. She was so sick, and I didn't know what I was supposed to fucking do, but I could've done better. I could have been better, Riz. [ Krouse rubs the heel of his empty hand under his eye and looks up at the ceiling, still not-smiling, mouth ugly and wounded with it. ] Case 53s. I mentioned them, right? Mutations with the power.

I got to teleport. She got sick. And it was my fault. So, you know. That's what's going on here, Riz.