Rin Abbot had lived most of her life with a bone-deep certainty that she would be dead before she would see 16. Looking back it was hard to discern whether the thought had been born out of the way adults had never looked at her with anything but pity all her life, or if she'd just come out of the womb with an expiration date seared into her brain. Regardless, it had rather naturally become a cornerstone of who she understood herself to be. Now she was 17 and a half and feeling like she was living on borrowed time.

She spent her days living a timetable and trying not to think about it - that was her preferred method of dealing with tragic things, to shove them in a tiny closet in the back of her head and pretend they weren't there. The ambient misery she was surrounded by in the home (read: self-important orphanage) was quite enough to drown out the sound of the door handle rattling.

As a full time student, a lot of her was already spoken for, and the rest was given away to a part time job and devoted selflessly to her friends. Whenever they were unfortunate enough to draw enough attention to force the adults in their lives to talk about them, the matrons and wanna-be parents would shake their heads and lament about how much worse it could have been if Rin hadn't been there - such a lovely and kind girl she was.
Rin didn't think she was very kind at all. Caring for someone who wasn't solely her responsibility (like she herself was) was a matter of survival for her.

Privately, Rin had long dreamt of cutting her hair short and dyeing it blue. The allure of a pointless, selfish choice like that was often what kept the smile on her face when she otherwise had to press her nails into her palms to keep from screaming.
The lovely pious older ladies who helped at the home loved her especially, which did not endear her to her fellow prisoners. They liked to pet her head and coo over her conversational skills. She'd had the cruelest, most hurtful thing she could think of for every one of them lined up on her tongue since she was 14 and preparing to die. She didn't say anything, though, for the same reason that she never looked at the hair dye isles of super markets anymore. Rin knew what happened to little girls who disobeyed the unspoken contract of the home and refused to put on a show for the copious sniveling donors and volunteers.

On Sundays after mass, when she hadn't found a good enough excuse to be out, wrinkled hands adorned with stomach-turningly ugly rings would urge her down in a chair in the dining hall to be fussed over like a doll. Afterwards, she would stumble up to her shared bedroom and take the scissors out of her drawer, stare at them wistfully, and lock them away again. Then she'd hurry out the back and bike down to the park where the abandoned brick train shed stood where they met. Cris would be there, and, before her tears could fall, he would sit down on the dusty floor with her and gently comb out the mess that had been made of her hair.
Unlike the harpies at the home, she liked being touched by his hands. It made her feel human again, and ridiculously a bit like he was cleaning and stitching up fresh wounds there, hidden away from the people she belonged to by ivy and a century old brickwork. Cris would collect the clips and pins and bows in a cracked porcelain ashtray they kept there, and together they'd go throw them in the river later.

It was a cold August Sunday when she burst into the train shed to find him not there. It was only Lia, sat in the corner with a book, and Alec, on his back on the ratty couch they'd dragged in off the street with his hands covering his face.
Rin swallowed heavily, and went to sit on the floor alone. She struggled for a while to work her hair out of the ridiculous tight braids, but she didn't make it very long before her hands started shaking and her eyes teared up.
Lia looked at her then, pulled a pained face and softly shut her book, slipping out of the room quiet as a shade. She couldn't fault her - she knew she must have been a horrible sight right then. Alec shifted behind her, and the idea that he would leave too made her finally really begin crying.

She startled at a warm hand on her shoulder - warmer than Cris, whose hands were always a little cooler than expected.

"Sit still, Rin," he said, not unkindly, and caught her wavering hands and put them down in her lap. Then he began to pluck out the pins that kept her from unwinding the braids, and she wiped at her tears and tried to stay still for him.

Alec was careful, but noticeably less experienced with the task. Oddly, she found it sort of comforting when he pulled a bit too hard on a strand and cursed under his breath. She would have gotten it undone herself eventually, but he seemed to understand that her not having to do it herself was more important right now.
When he was done he combed his fingers through her hair loosely, catching on the hood of her top a few times, before he tied it back with a rubber band. It would be a horrible pain to get out in the evening, but she didn't mind very much at all at the moment. She preferred pain to the pointed absence of it, especially if it was inflicted by such a sweet gesture.

"He got himself beat up again," he said when he was done, like he felt the need to explain himself.

"Is he okay?", Rin asked, a little ashamed of how wet her throat still sounded.

"Nothing's broken. But his hip is bruised too hard to make the trek here at the moment."

She didn't ask if she would be able to visit him, because the answer would be a grimace and a yes. Cris and Alec had recently reached what seemed at the moment to be the end to their multi-year journey of being handed from caretaker to caretaker, and they'd gotten themselves written over to a rich family from the nicer part of the city. 'Looking for pets,' Cris had said, and Alec had stepped on his foot. It was easy for him to like them, she'd privately thought but never dared to say, because they liked him. A little too much, maybe.
Alec's new father (just Alec's, because Cris called him exclusively 'Mr. Fletcher') had seen in him what his own watery-eyed disappointment of a son had not been able to give him: enough of an intellect to follow in his professional footsteps. If he thought that taking in a poor orphan boy and his unfortunately unavoidable half-brother would buy him the grateful obedient little scion of his dreams, he'd quite miscalculated, of course. But among them all Alec's acting prowess was possibly only rivaled by Lia, who was still walking around with her head held high like the rest of them didn't know how deeply her parents resented her.

All this to say, Cris getting into fights he couldn't win was old news. He'd confided in her once that all of it made him feel like a caged animal, and she'd never forgotten it, because she felt much the same way.
Getting to her feet she gave Alec the half empty packet of gum still in her jeans pocket to smuggle to Cris. It was her favourite flavour, and Cris sort of hated it. When they were stood together on summer evenings on the crumbling terraced hill overlooking the train tracks he still took it from her happily enough, like partners in crime offered each other a cigarette in the films they'd sometimes sneak out to see together before him and Alec had gotten parents who cared about where they went.

It was an accusatory offer of forgiveness. Alec took it with a nod.

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The next time she saw Cris, he was wearing his oversized black hoodie with the hole in the right elbow. He was sitting on the old couch like it hurt to have his legs bent at the hip. Rin joined him on the couch, and he grinned at her. As the expression stretched his lips, she could see a fresh pink scar where his bottom lip had been recently split.

"Are you doing better?", she asked softly, eyes wandering to the healing scabs on his knuckles. No one else was there yet, all of them either at school or loitering elsewhere. They were all chronic loiterers, the lot of them.

Cris shrugged.

Undeniably, not she, not anyone, could stop him from picking fights every chance he got. She wasn't really sure what he got out of it, but from the few times she'd witnessed it, she suspected it had something to do with the moment that first fist came sailing for his face, when in the fraction of a second before he recoiled from the hit, Cris' face would light up with a grin that was downright scary.
She knew that Alec thought it was about adrenaline, about forgetting everything while for a brief period of time your priority became survival. She disagreed. He was projecting.

"'m able to walk now," he said, his head tipping towards her like he was considering resting it on her shoulder.
"You know how it goes."

She did know how it went, had been absorbed in memorizing the way his bruised flesh shifted through the many colours of decaying blood for almost the entire time they'd known each other. It fascinated her, how his body fixed itself, despite the best efforts of the person who inhabited it.
Sometimes she caught him flexing his knuckles or knees, painted in a rainbow of blue and green and yellow, like he found it very fascinating as well. Through the flinch of pain, she spied a reverence in his eyes then - and maybe that was why he did it.

Cris rarely won the fights he got into, although he'd likely be able to overpower the rest of them easily. A month or so ago, she and Alec had been dragging him bleeding and panting into the back seat of Lia's parents' car, and while the girls had spread towels on the seats to keep his blood off the leather, Alec had flicked his brother in the forehead and said "Maybe you should learn to pick on someone below your size."
Cris had laughed at him and shook his head. Winning, if it did happen, was incidental.

"Oh!", he said suddenly, "Do you wanna see? It's a wicked one this time."

She nodded, of course, and he scooted away just far enough that he could pull the right side of his pants down without kicking her in the shin.
The bruise bloomed over his hip bone and ran down his thigh where blood had been carried along underneath his skin by gravity, and Rin took a sharp inhale.
Filled with quiet awe, she reached out a hand to lightly brush over the tender skin, and then it was Cris who was inhaling sharply. It looked horrible, really, grotesquely sprawling across pale flesh, and she couldn't tear her eyes away.

"Must hurt," she mumbled, and Cris seemed to barely hear her, eyes fixed on her fingers. Experimentally, she pressed down lightly, and he didn't cringe away, so she dragged her fingers up to where the tensed muscles of his stomach were painted sickly green.
Then she snapped out of it, and realized with horror the kind of moment this was. It was a very, very bad idea on her part to be interested in him.

Rin straightened, and when Cris had righted himself, she managed to say something inane about healing balms. The conversation quickly became ordinary, which was often how these things went with them.

Not long after, the door swung open with a creak to admit Tump.

They mumbled a greeting. The way Tump's eyes lit up when they fell on Cris made her shift uncomfortably in her seat - she knew what had to happen now, and she knew that Cris would not enjoy it. She thought uncharitably that Tump had come today only because he'd heard Cris was up and walking again.

"Cris!", he said, rushing over to drop onto the couch on his other side. Rin took the opportunity to subtly scoot away. Tump was someone who thought that being right was necessarily the same thing as being helpful.

"Tump."

"I heard about your injuries-" what an over-dramatic word choice, Rin thought- "are you feeling better?"

"Much," Cris returned in a clipped tone and when Tump pursed his lips she could practically hear his admonishing thoughts.

"You should take your health more seriously - one of these days you're going to break or tear something that doesn't go away with a few weeks of bedrest."

"And isn't it the stakes that make life so exciting," Cris drawled.

"It's not," Tump asserted, sounding piqued.

This was a dance that had been going on between the two for years now, and it was sometimes hard to tell if that made them more or less irritable. Ironically, they'd come to blows over it before, and despite the fact that Tump had been forced to retreat with his tail between his legs, he'd never budged on the issue. Lia always said that the only real way to deal with foolish idealists was to make concessions, or otherwise to lie to them. Rin wondered sometimes if that was how Lia got along with Tump the best out of all of them.

Tump had been taken in by a family when he was 15, but still regularly came to their hideaway. It had done odd things to him, being under the care of authority figures who gave a shit. Recently, they'd even gotten him a councilor, and now the rest of them had to suffer through his well intentioned explanations about coping mechanisms and emotional awareness.
Despite how annoying he got sometimes, Tump was one of them and they stuck together, because they needed each other. Undeniably, he was correct about a lot of things, and sometimes even truths you didn't want to hear were important. At least, that was her opinion on the matter. It seemed often like Cris disagreed that anyone ever ought to talk about anything.

"Maybe it is for me, you don't know that," Cris said crossly, and both she and Tump rolled their eyes.

"You know damn well how unhealthy this is as a coping mechanism - I know things suck, but," he started, and it was clearly going to be a longer monologue before Cris interrupted him.

"And you know damn well it's none of your business."

"I'm your friend, of course it's my business," Tump protested, and since he couldn't very well argue with that, Cris just looked at him angrily, his eyebrows drawn and lips pressed together in a frown. She thought she saw Tump's eyes flick to the scar on his lip, but he didn't comment.
He said something much worse.

"You're not hoping to die, are you?"

Cris stared at him, the irritation dropping from his face as shock replaced it, and Rin cringed. He was really looking to get hit today.
To her surprise, Cris remained calm.

"I'm not," he said, and stood abruptly, flinching as he put weight on his leg.

"You're in pain!", Tump exclaimed in a mixture of triumph and anger.

"Shut up," Cris replied through gritted teeth and stomped over to the door. It shut with a final loud crack, which made some of the old crumbling plaster around the doorframe drift to the floor like dust.

Tump sighed deeply, a wide gap between them on the sofa now. Rin leaned over it to put a hand on his shoulder. She didn't blame him for being principled, or righteous, or anything else among the big words Lia often used. It would have just been nice if he'd learn when to give up.

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Lia met her outside her school's doors, a brutalism-inspired monstrosity. The solid blocks of concrete were lined with dirt carried down like tear tracks over the building's facade.
Rin took her backpack so her friend could slip out of her cardigan - it was usually colder inside the building than outside - and then they walked off into the spring afternoon.

The route to Lia's parents' home was familiar and ordinary as her friend recounted her day at school.

"You know, I think Mr. Cooper is considering his options."

"Like to get away? Flee the country?"

"Well, maybe," Lia said with a mock serious expression and they both giggled.
But actually what I meant is he's trying to figure out how to get to me. We've got a whole thing going on where he gives me detention and I laugh in his face."

"He's got his work cut out for him then," Rin said, and found it sounded shamefully admiring.

Lia was one year older than her and at times Rin thought she understood something the rest of them didn't. It was something in the way she carried herself, that made adults respect her - or in the case of Mr. Cooper, feel threatened by her.

Somehow, she always seemed in control - Rin could count the times she'd felt that way on one hand. There had been 5 years ago, when she'd punched an annoying boy at school right in the face and seen the realisation on his face that anyone he told would just call him a liar, and then last year, when she'd been old enough to sign her very first form all on her own.
Unlike Rin, who was generally calm but prone to emotional outbursts, Lia very rarely tipped her hand like that. In the past Rin had thought her melting point was so high it didn't even exist, before she witnessed her friend suddenly start hitting someone and storm out the first time.

They reached Lia's home, a tall block of desperately middle class apartments that no one had told the middle class was dying yet. There were hedges and a gravel path outfront that always appeared well looked after, and a great wooden door with an ugly pattern of carved foliage.
The cold entrance hall and tall stone stairs never failed to make her feel out of place. Realistically, maybe it was less about the impersonal decor and more about her: Rin never really felt like she belonged in any place, except maybe their abandoned train shack. She was always passing through, or just leaving, or an unpleasant intruder. Such was the life of a teenager, Alec had said when she'd tried to talk about it with him once.
Lia, in contrast, fit right into this proper neutrally decorated house, looking composed in her white turtleneck and grey slacks. It was a cruel thought, and she lowered her gaze to the carpet that was secured to the polished stairs under her feet by bronze capped nails.

As Lia pushed the door open, the noise of someone bustling around at the other end of the flat suddenly stopped.

"I've brought a friend, mom," Lia called, and the noise resumed without verbal acknowledgement, so she led Rin on into her room.

The two of them settled down and chatted for a while longer about the increasingly outlandish ways Mr. Cooper might come up with to make Lia regret skipping his class. Then, after the topic had run its course and they'd lapsed briefly into silence, Lia cleared her throat nervously.

"I think Tump is thinking of doing something very idiotic."

"Moreso than usual?", Rin inquired, trying and failing to not sound on edge in turn. She pulled her knees up onto the desk chair, which pressed her shins into the table's edge.

"He's been talking a lot about how Cris doesn't understand that his actions have consequences - I think that councilor of his has been putting ideas in his head."

"You don't think-"

Lia cringed.

"Do you think his new parents would talk to the police?", Rin asked tentatively.

"I think maybe their wealthy outrage would protect him. But you know they wouldn't protect the rest of us."

Nodding, Rin resolved to slap some sense into Tump.

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Erik reached over their stacked cereal bowls and poured the rest of the luke warm cocoa into his coffee cup.

Easily one of the best things about the home was that they weren't chased out of communal spaces the second they had completed the associated activity. That being said, few people wanted to be in them longer than necessary. The dining hall was just small enough to feel cramped, and to be very cold on winter mornings and very hot on summer evenings.

Naturally, there was no chance of privacy while people were eating, but usually the table cleared quickly enough, leaving only Rin and Erik. On weekends they sometimes sat until lunch.

"So," he said, setting the cup down. Rin blinked at him. There was a drop of cocoa drying on the collar of his cardigan.

"What, 'so'?"

"You've been thinking about something all week."

She sat up straighter, a bit embarrassed at being read like it was nothing. He'd been one of her closest friends for years, and yet - she'd thought she was hiding it better than this.

"You're doing the whole pining book character thing; staring off into the distance, taking a second to respond because you were miles away..."

"Yeah yeah," she interrupted him with a wince before he could get more specific, and tried for a joke to lift the horrible air of sincere concern.
"I'm just fucked up over a guy, you know how it is."

Erik laughed, but sobered quickly. He'd always been like that, perceptive and serious, a great counterweight to the rest of her friends. Also taxing.

"So," he said again. "Cris?"

Rin hung her head in shame.

"It's terrible, I know. You don't have to tell me, I know."

"Well, it is true that you could have chosen more wisely," he said awkwardly, and Rin slumped down in her chair until she could lay her head on the table top.

"What do I do about this Erik? What if he feels the same?"

"Why do you have to do anything?"

She tilted her head to look up at him and found the confusion on her face mirrored in his.

"What do you mean?"

"What do you mean?", he returned.

"Like, there's no way it would end well. But I think doing nothing will drive me crazy."

Erik nodded like he was considering her point very deeply. Or maybe like he was struggling to come up with a response that wouldn't hurt her, she thought uncharitably.

"I really think it'd be easiest to just wait it out? Just because you like him doesn't mean you have to date him and make things be 'terrible', as you called it."

"I guess," Rin conceded, and shifted to look down at the table again. The wood grain was faintly visible through the thinning eggshell paint.

"Maybe you should talk to the other lot about it before you decide anything, since they should certainly know him better than I do," Erik suggested, and she agreed, effectively closing the topic.

The problem was, she really wanted to be level-headed about these things like Erik was. He had shown barely any interest in matters of the heart in all the time they'd known each other - prime crush years - and often offered advice that made her embarrassed to not have thought of it.
But she was not like Erik, not at all. Though she was often outwardly calm, she was utterly powerless to control herself if an emotion was strong enough to break through her feeble restraint. Likewise, she had practically no way to predict what emotions would be ahead of time.
For months she'd sat next to Cris on the sofa and thought it would resolve itself and all be fine in the end. It was not fine, not at all. She felt like at any moment it might explode out of her and she might kiss him or punch him - possibly both.

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The cool spring rain rolled over the city like a thick grey blanket, drowning out most sounds and smells that weren't its own. Rin took the long way around, walking nearly the perimeter of the abandoned train yard as the water slowly crept up the legs of her jeans in dark stains.
It was washing the thoughts right out of her head, drumming against her umbrella with a calming ever steady rhythm. She wanted to enjoy that feeling for as long as she could.

She'd been on her way out of the home, meaning to go to school, when she'd seen the clouds brewing on the horizon and wandered off instead.
When the first slivers of bright blue sky announced the end, splitting the rain clouds along their seams, Rin relented and made her way to the hideout.

The door was ajar, and the wood looked like it was soaked and softened on the corner that was broken off. She felt a little soaked and softened herself, as she shut her umbrella.
Only Tump was there, and it struck her immediately as odd. None of them could beat his impressive attendance record, except maybe Alec, who'd begun to care in recent years although he still proclaimed not to. Cris always joyfully called him a killjoy for that, which she thought was a bit mean. Rin was sure that if she'd been born with a real shot at something good, she'd put stock in her education too.

He was sitting on the old inbuilt metal bench they used mainly for storage, and by his feet sat the piles of things he'd moved to make space. There was a window right behind the bench that even still had glass in it, and he'd opened it. She could see where stray rain drops had hit the shoulder of his hoodie.

When she entered he looked up to smile at her, and she returned it. He was working on something, whittling away at a piece of wood with a pocket knife.

"What are you making?", she asked, and was already walking over to him before she'd decided what to do when she got there.
In the end, she stopped awkwardly next to him, and sat when he scooted over on the bench, pushing a box of collected magazines away with her foot.

Tump told her he was making a bird, though he didn't sound very convinced of that himself as he held the thing out for her to see. It was uneven; the face, the only thing that had any detail yet, overshadowed by a slightly misshapen chunky beak. It was cute.

"I like it," she told him honestly, and he smiled a brilliant smile and let her watch when he went back to it.

The movement of his hands was practiced but not easy, like he was constantly thinking about how quickly he might cut himself accidentally.
Rin thought it looked somewhat like a sparrow, in size and shape, and there wasn't even any blood on its round little body.
The longer she sat, the more an uneasy dread about broaching the topic of Cris rose in her throat. What could she even say?

Tump was carving lines into the wing tips and tail by the time she'd worked up the resolve to say anything.

"I know you think Cris needs help or something," she blurted out, and immediately wanted to swallow the words back down. Tump put down his nearly finished wooden bird and took her hand. Her skin was still cold from the rain, and his hand was warm in comparison. At that thought, she suddenly became uncomfortably aware of how her drying clothes stuck to her legs and the back of her neck.

"I don't want him to do permanent damage," he said, his voice a bit rough, and she could taste the 'or worse' at the back of her throat like bile.

"Maybe that's the only way he'll stop," she argued. She didn't like to think about it, but she had.

"I don't think he would stop."

"He's not an idiot," she said irritably, and considered tearing her hand out of his.

"Would be easier," Tump quipped.
"But what I mean is that he needs an outlet, and so desperately he's willing to accept any consequences for it."

"Did your shrink suggest that?"

Tump frowned, and squeezed her hand, and Rin felt bad about it immediately. The upsetting topic made her defensive, and she'd never liked the idea that he was talking about all of them behind their backs.Tump frowned, and squeezed her hand, and Rin felt bad about it immediately. The upsetting topic made her defensive, and she'd never liked the idea that he was talking about all of them behind their backs.

"I'm just trying to help," he said, and Rin softened.

"Please just don't try to help in a way that ends up hurting him."

His lips thinned, but he nodded, and she gently extricated her hand.

She stood to leave when he turned away from her and picked up the pocket knife again.

"Does he have a name, by the way?"

"Who?", Tump asked, but realization dawned on his face before she could elaborate.
He lifted the little carving to his face to look into its slightly crooked eyes.

"I was thinking of calling it Bat," he said, a slow grin forming on his lips.

"That's really stupid," Rin said with a laugh.

Only once she'd stepped outside (and into a puddle) did she realize she didn't actually know where to go. The home was not an option as there would be questions, and there were few places in this city she wanted to go to alone. School was her only option - she'd only missed the first two periods, and next up was history, which she liked sometimes. It was as good a plan as any, she supposed, and started walking.
She was already too far to turn around when she realized she'd never asked why he wasn't at school.

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She'd already settled in with the awful book she still had to finish for english class and the frown that accompanied it on her face, when there was a knock on the door.
Her roommate, already asleep, made an irritated grumbling sound - either at the knock or at Rin loudly shutting the book in annoyance.

It was one of the attendants, who told her in a low voice that someone was here to talk to her. It was odd to be explicitly allowed to wander around outside of her room at such a late hour, but she wouldn't complain.
When she caught her first glimpse of Tump downstairs in the foyer, she understood why they'd fetched her anyway. He looked like a ball of pure anxiety, wild eyed and pacing, his hands digging into his crossed arms so hard his fingers looked to be going white.

He hurried towards her as soon as he spotted her, casting suspicious glances at the babysitter who'd walked her down.

"It's Alec," were his opening words, which did cause sufficient alarm to justify his appearance - Alec never needed them, even when he objectively needed them. He was too proud to ever want to admit to biting off more than he could chew.

In halting half sentences, Tump recounted to her that Alec and Cris had been out late and gotten into a fight - or more accurately, Cris had, and then Alec had gotten him out of it.

"Cris called me and told me to get you - you're going to have to sneak out." The implication being, Alec was not conscious enough to talk his brother out of calling for them.

"Sneak out," she repeated, her gaze sliding to the attendant who'd settled down down the hall with a book, "where?"

"To theirs. We need to fix up Alec before his owners come back from their business trip."

Rin sucked in a sharp breath but nodded. They hugged, she went up to her room and said goodnight to her chaperone, and then she slid open the window.
It was the beginning of summer, so the air outside was cool against her skin but not biting. She watched as Tump turned the corner and began pushing one of the bins in the alley under her window as they'd done many times before.

The home's facade was a hostile brightly coloured concrete, although it too was grey in the late evening light. Before she climbed down, Rin clamped a flashlight between her teeth for the return trip.
Her usual greying sneakers didn't give her much grip on the windowsill, but she didn't need much to jump. Her window wasn't that high up, so the real challenge was always climbing back up. Depending on how late she got back, she sometimes didn't even bother, since after midnight it was vastly easier to sneak in through the front door. There was no telling how late this emergency would run.

Rin landed in a crouch and they both froze for a second to listen for any reaction to the sound of her landing. All was quiet, so she took Tump's offered hand to hop down from the bin and they went off into the night.

The Fletchers' house was like a large mausoleum of marble and granite, only off one floor from a villa. They had a garden out front and out back, with neatly trimmed hedges and a flawless lawn, although all of this was made less impressive by the fact that every single house down the street looked like that too.
It was the sort of neighbourhood where no one was out after 6, which was usually creepy but today was convenient.
They threw their bikes behind a hedge so they couldn't be seen from the street just to be sure anyway, and hurried to the door.

Lia was the one who let them in, leading them out of the entrance hall and into one of the smaller rooms behind the great staircase.
They'd laid Alec out on a couch which was comically just a bit too short for him when stretched out, and one of his hands dangled off the side, tracks of dried blood going down from the knuckles. It didn't look to be his, at least.

His brother was crouched at his side, bandaging up his shin, where Rin guessed the skin above the bone had split under a hit. That would make walking painful for a few days, but overall it could have been much worse.
Cris was looking pale and shaky, and when he looked up at them thankfully, she saw how his pallor accentuated the last vestiges of the bruise on his jaw and a fresh one on his brow bone.
Lia whispered something to Tump, who hurried off, and Rin knelt down by Alec's head. His eyelids fluttered when she carefully tilted his face to look at the shallow wound on his temple. There was no telling how out of it he was.

"We've only just gotten him in here," Lia told her quietly. "Cris called Tump and I from a payphone all panicked."

She nodded, brushing her hands through Alec's fringe as if to soothe him. She wondered if he was conscious enough to be scared right then. He'd be fine eventually, but the situation was urgent nevertheless if they had to get him recovered enough to pretend he only tripped on the stairs within a few days. Mr. Fletcher couldn't know that his perfect son was capable of such unsavoury things as defending his own brother.
Leaning around the couch, she grabbed the disinfectant bottle and a few cotton pads from the first aid kit Cris had nearly ripped apart in his hurry and set to work.
The moment she touched the wound, he flinched violently. Lia was at his side again in an instant, holding his jaw and mumbling reassurances to him. Rin put a steadying hand on the top of his head and continued.

When Tump returned, it was with a bucket of cold water and a whole stack of wash cloths, bunched up like he'd just torn them straight off the shelf of a linen closet.
Together they cleaned Alec of blood as best they could, and then they just sat there on the carpet around the couch, sleeves rolled up and profoundly tired.
Cris got up with a whispered excuse to gather his bedding so he could sleep in the room to keep watch over his brother, and in the time that took him, all three of them fell asleep against the side of the sofa. Of course she knew it was unwise, but she figured Cris would wake them anyway, and the idea of even a few minutes of sleep was temptingly sweet.

Cris did not in fact wake them, and instead Rin startled awake to find the lights off and the moon already descending again outside the window. She got up, aching from the position she'd been in, and her eyes fell on Tump.
On soft soles she padded over to him and lightly shook him until his eyes opened. She pointed over her shoulder at the window. Tump nodded, and just as they'd come in they snuck out together, trying not to wake the others.
As Tump stretched after sitting up too quickly, she caught Lia's eye. She was awake, but clearly intending to stay. Lia and Alec had a thing between them that Rin had not given much thought. Neither of them were the sort to talk about their feelings, but there was undeniably something going on, an odd closeness that she half thought she'd hallucinated.

Then Tump pulled her out of the room and instead of her friends' emotional states she focussed on not crashing her bike.