He was surprised to find there wasn’t a whisper of jealousy inside of him—he was actually fucking happy about it. For so long, Miki was his and his alone. Sure, he’d shared the lithe street rat with Johnny and Dave, but when push came to shove, it had always been the two of them. Knowing someone else could make Miki smile made him feel pretty good inside.
“’Course, we’ll see how I feel when I finally find you, yeah?” Damien snorted. “For all I know, I’m going to get mad pissed and try to punch him out.” He studied the slightly out of focus photo. “He looks damned huge. Hope he’s taking care of you. Shit, maybe even get you to talk….”
He’d wasted so many hours trying to convince Miki to talk to someone about the horrors he’d lived through, but the man he called brother wasn’t having any of it. He wasn’t ready… didn’t want to… couldn’t look at it… all excuses to fend off Damien’s attempts to heal over Miki’s cracked psyche. For everything he couldn’t remember about himself, he knew twice as much shit in his waterlogged brain about Miki’s life before he became Damien’s brother.
“You ever think that maybe having all this crap in my head makes me who I am?” Miki shot back once when Damien pushed a little too hard. “Leave me the fuck alone. We can deal with this shit when we’re old and bloated.”
“Dude, you’re too skinny to ever be bloated.” Damien smirked at his friend’s photo, then sobered. “I just want you to be happy, Sinjun. You fucking deserve it.”
He was too tired to go out warehouse hunting. The days were packed with roaming through the tourists’ spots, setting up his case, playing for half an hour, then moving along before one of the boys in blue pushed him out, and getting around San Francisco at night was a pain in the ass.
“It would help if I remembered where the fucking place was,” Damien grumbled as he dug out a roll of masking tape. He tore a strip off and plastered the article up next to the others he’d found during his time at the public library.
Mostly, everything he found was related to the accident, but a rare few articles talked about Miki’s life following the tragedy, concentrating mostly on the deaths of Miki’s former tormentors. He’d winced at the thought of the GTO’s interior after a dead body had been dumped into it, but there was nothing he could do about that either.
“Tell me you at least learned how to fucking drive, you piece of shit.” He stripped off his street clothes, needing to leave the day behind him. A pair of thin cotton pants was all he could stand to have on his skin, especially since it felt too tight and stretched across his bones. Sighing, he padded over to the window and leaned against its frame, looking out at the piers down the hill.
He was no closer to finding Sinjun than he’d been when he’d finally rolled into San Francisco a month earlier. It had taken him more than three months to get to California, hitchhiking and working his way west from Montana. A few days on the street told Damien he wasn’t cut out for dumpster diving anymore, and the flophouse’s vacancy seemed like a godsend.
Even if he had ID, he knew he couldn’t use it. Whoever had been shooting at him back at the nuthouse probably would also be able to hunt him down. Damien debated going to the cops or the paper nearly every day when he woke up, but he stalled. He had nothing to put in front of anyone to say he was Damien Mitchell, and the truth was, he no longer trusted anyone to help him out. Walking into a cop house could mean either his freedom or a one-way ticket to the man who wanted to put a bullet into his already fucked-up head.
“Fucking ties me to working the sidewalk.” He ground his teeth. “Worse than when we were touring.”
His stomach mumbled a bit in discomfort, and Damien reached for the package of Nutter Butters he’d spent a buck on at the Quiki-Mart. He unhooked the window screen and slipped out onto the narrow fire escape, then reached behind him to grab a sheet to protect his bare back from the building’s brick exterior. The building’s jutting overhang kept most of the rain from pouring down the fire escape, but a few thick drops hit his toes when he tried to stretch out. Tucking his legs up, Damien stared out at the city beyond.
Somewhere out in the lights lay Miki, unaware that his best friend was still alive and kicking.
“Kicking,” Damien snorted to himself. “Guess you can say I’m kicking.”
He’d remembered nothing when he’d woken up, groggy and restrained to a metal bed. The story he’d been spun about a life lived as Stephen Thompson echoed as a lie in some recess in his head, and even now, he had doubts about his sanity, especially on those days when he could recall nothing of his previous life other than the sound of his best friend’s laugh and the music they’d made together.