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“It hasn’t. Let me-come a little closer. Your pant leg is soaked with blood. God… we gotta stop this. Pad the wound with something… just a minute.”

As Zevon gripped a standing slab and winced, Stiles ripped apart the edge of the mattress near him and pulled out a wad of stuffing. He folded the stuffing into a crude pad, then worked it between the blanket strip and the wound on Zevon’s leg, unfortunately causing considerable pain, until Zevon could barely stand when it was over.

“That’ll help,” Stiles hoped. “Come here. Take the weight off it. Sit here next to me.”

He smoothed a place on his slab and pulled Zevon to his side. They sat leg to leg, facing each other, as Stiles adjusted the knot on Zevon’s bandage. “It didn’t pierce through your leg, did it? You could be bleeding in two places. I can’t tell-“

“No,” Zevon told him, his voice weak now. “No… a simple puncture ..”

Stiles looked at him and paused. “You dragged yourself all the way from your cell to mine, through that wreckage, with your leg impaled like this?”

“I thought you would die if I didn’t come” As pebbles continued to trickle around them, Zevon dug through the rubble to the blanket that had fallen off Stiles. Without meeting Stiles’s eyes, he pressed the blanket back around the ensign’s chest and hips and tucked it as well as possible. “We must keep you warm. You could still go into shock.”

Surveying his companion, Stiles allowed himself to be cared for by these unlikely hands. “Don’t take this wrong,” he began a moment later, “but why would you care? We don’t know each other. I could’ve been just a garden-variety criminal. Why would it matter so much to you if I died?”

For many moments Zevon was silent, though obviously troubled. He tucked and retucked the blanket two or three times before the ringing question demanded attention. “Because the count is crushing me,” he said. Stiles frowned. “What count?”

Settling his hands in his lap, Zevon sat suddenly still. He sighed roughly, and his expression took on a shield of burden. His eyes crimped. He couldn’t look at Stiles. Again he sighed.

“Tyrants have made names for themselves by murdering a thousand people,” he slowly said. ”Ten thousand, a hundred thousand… a million. I have surpassed them all. There are no Hitlers, no Yum Nects, no Stalins or Li Quans who can compete with me. Among all the men and women of the galaxy, you have the privilege of sitting with someone who is utterly unique. You see, I’m the only person, anywhere, on any world, living or dead… who has killed a billion people.”

As he sat on his rock, gazing at Zevon and hearing the echo of true burden, feeling as if he had known this man all his life, Eric Stiles grew up ten years in ten seconds. The urge to say something, to trowel away the grief with mere words, failed him entirely. There were no words for this. Not this.

Rather than flapping his gums as usual, he was completely disinclined to speak at all. Instead he shifted his good hand a few inches and gripped Zevon’s forearm in a sustaining way, and did not shrink from the contact. Empathy flowed through the simple touch. The concept of billions of people dead at a single sweep overcame them both and seemed oddly tangible. For an instant or two, critical instants, Stiles totally comprehended the number.

Then, as all huge things do, the grasp of such volume fled and he was left only with the tremendous drumming regret that Zevon must have borne all these years. It wasn’t the kind of thing that got better with time. Some things didn’t.

There had to be another effort, a different one. One that looked forward for a change.

And that view was tricky for Eric Stiles, but for the first time in his life he didn’t care what had happened in the past. For the first time, the future was everything.

With his hand still pressed to Zevon’s arm, Stiles spoke quietly, firmly.

“I’m here now. This is where I am. Things are going to be different for both of us. We’re getting out of here