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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes

Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.

Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html

That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html

And sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html

Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.

Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.

As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.

Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:

https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826

A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.

This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @[email protected] explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I

Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.

What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”

https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/

Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.

Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”

That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”

Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make

Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.

In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”

Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.

In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.

Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.

Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”

Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”

That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.

As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.

This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.

The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.

But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.

The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”

Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.

These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:

https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california

But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.

Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.

Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”

Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”

In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing

Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.

In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.

Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.

Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.

Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/

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hellotherekenobi · 2 years

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WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN. [v]

CHAPTER FIVE: MEET IN THE MIDDLE

Summary: living in the ghetto meant living on borrowed time. After a desperate attempt to add more to your clock, you find yourself in the middle of an ongoing arrangement with one of the head Timekeepers.

Word Count: 7,134

Warning(s): direct theft (written lowkey suggestively, might be sensitive to some); guns; blood & injury.

Index: Previous Chapter. | Masterlist.

There is no one you would ever admit to that you’re working for a Timekeeper. Or, rather, that you’ve helped a Timekeeper. But Charlotte seems to gain that information from you since you’re currently not thinking straight.

He knows your name.

Since the beginning, you’ve never shared it. He didn’t need to know and you didn’t need his name either, yet somehow, he’s found out.

Though there are many logical answers to how he got it, you can’t help but focus on all the irrational options; he asked around or he’s always known.

What is most likely the case is that he’s either looked you up in the registry or found your name scribbled somewhere in your apartment.

Speaking of, it’s too dangerous to go back there now. He knows where you live and if he’s stupid, he’ll check to see if you’re there, but he’s not stupid at all, so he’ll be out looking for you.

Hopefully, your cat will be okay. If he does go to your apartment, you know she’ll be happy at least. She’s always been good at looking after herself, as opposed to you who sometimes enters things head first without warning.

There are plenty of routes from behind the factory that you can take past the roller door. Unless he can track your directions, he will have to check each one. So, at least with that surety, you have some time on your plate before he catches up with you.

Maybe it’s a risky hideout, but you’re currently tucked away in one of the platforms of the train station, right beside the pipelines that travel toward the sewers. No one comes here and if they do, no one comes back.

The reason why you say that is because this is Minute Men territory. They scope around many places but after this platform was cleared out for stock dispatches only, they put their name on it.

It’s not the most clever of places to go, but it’s the only place near enough and also the only place he might not follow you into. So, for now, it’s your best bet, seeing as you and Charlotte can’t run forever.

She’s sitting beside the tracks, arms wrapped around herself as if she’s shivering, though you can tell that she’s not cold. After the sprint you both made, you’re sure she’s as exhausted as you.

“There’ll be a train soon,” you say, stepping beside her. “This is a pull-through station, so we just have to wait, but we should be safe for now.”

She nods, not looking you in the eye, and you sit down beside her with a sigh, wondering how this is possibly going to work.

You don’t know her. You don’t know what she’s done. What if she’s a murderer? It’s possible that helping her out is going to screw you over. After all, in this world, everyone looks out for themselves. You just happen to be the idiot who helped the wrong person and now you’re here.

Where after this, your only hope is upward.

“Why are you helping me?” She asks and her voice sounds so small you almost feel bad for all of this.

“Honestly?” You ask, shrugging your shoulders. “I have no idea.”

“But that guy at the factory,” she says, looking down at the tracks, “you gave him Time. Is he not a friend?”

She means Jayden. You gave him ten hours and then ran. Since you managed to get the roller door shut before he could catch you, you just hope he didn’t turn back around and confiscate the Time from Jayden. He saw you do it, so you can only imagine.

Since the moment you met Jayden, you’ve not called him your friend. Having friends in this life, especially in the ghetto, is tricky. They can be here one day and then gone the next, or they can leech off of you and get you killed. It’s not worth the stress.

But he’s never once asked you for a second and has been the longest-lasting person in your life since your family, so maybe you can stop worrying about titles and just call him what he is.

“Yeah,” you say, “he is my friend.”

Charlotte furrows her eyebrows. “So, why didn’t you help him?”

“I gave him Time,” you say confidently.

“But you took me with you.”

Not the best plan, it seems. Understandably, from her point of view, this whole thing is mad. After all, you’re a stranger. The only time before now that you’ve spoken to her is when you had to in order to get her name.

Aside from taking her with you, your intentions have been far from honest. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure that out, though it must be confusing for her.

“You walked into the room like you knew exactly who I am,” she says.

When you turn to face her, she’s looking at you. Her eyebrows are furrowed slightly, more so in an uncertain fashion rather than a sceptical gaze.

“Well,” you breathe out, “I know a little bit.”

“How much?” She asks, bringing her knees up.

With the two of you hiding out after the stunt you pulled back at the factory, you think there’s probably no coming back from this. Might as well let the truth out. There may never be another chance.

“I only know that you did something to upset that Timekeeper and how he’s been looking for you since.”

“You mean Leon?” She says, and you somehow can’t fit the name to his face. “How do you know him?”

“It’s a long story,” you shake your head. “I needed Time and he needed information. It kind of snowballed from there.”

Charlotte nods, taking in the details, though you’ve only given so much away. It almost doesn’t feel like you. When you think back on everything, it seems so impossible.

To think this started out with you pointing a finger down the road and his wrist on yours. Now, you’ve stolen from him, skipped out on your shift, and are hiding with who you can only assume is a fugitive.

All of the simple things seem a little bit bigger now, though.

Letting him into your apartment, talking to him about your cat, standing so close to him and him being so strong with you. That ice-cold stare of his was something you shied away from, then became hard to look anywhere else.

Just remembering those moments sends a tingle up your spine, so focused on how it all felt that it’s like he’s breathing against your neck right now, or that he’s so hot on your tracks that his cologne is greeting you first.

But when you take a look around the platform and see it as empty as when you first came here, you know you’re imagining things.

“He asked me to find you,” you admit aloud. “He didn’t say what for, but he already knew you’d be at the factory.”

She nods. “I thought so. I’ve never been a fast runner.”

“You did pretty well back at the factory. Smart thinking, too, for knocking over those capsules.”

She smiles faintly, locking her fingers in place around her legs. Everything she does—all of her mannerisms—makes her seem so young. Maybe your guess of her just turning twenty-five is not far off. If that’s the case, she’s started off her clock pretty rough.

Imagine only just learning to portion your Time and you’re unlucky enough to get the attention of a Timekeeper of all people. Being in their bad books is not a premium place to be.

“He wants my Time,” she says softly, then shakes her head. “Well, his Time. I stole it from him.”

“Why?” You ask though you’re sure you know the reason.

It’s most likely the same reason as everybody else; desperation. But the fact that she had the guts to take even a second from him seems insane, especially from someone so quiet.

“I had an hour left,” she explains. “It was raining and there was no one around. Then I saw his car driving down the road and I got desperate. I waved him down and told him I saw Minute Men. When his back was turned, I slipped into the driver’s seat and took his per diem. But he saw me before I could disappear, so I ran.”

You’ve been desperate before and, sure, you’ve risked a lot by going behind his back today, but what Charlotte just admitted to is a death wish. No one touches a Timekeeper’s car and no one dares to take their Time, and, if they even try it, no one makes it out alive.

How Charlotte managed to steal the Time right from under him, you’ll never begin to understand. But the details of her story only make the cogs turn faster in your head as you’re pretty sure you know exactly what night she’s referring to.

It was that same night that you saw him again. Like Charlotte said, it was raining and his car was just left in the middle of the street with the door wide open. Sure, you entertained the idea of stealing his per diem yourself, but you never slipped far enough to actually do it.

Then you found him in that empty building. He was drenched from head to toe and looked like he had been running. As it turns out, he had been. He was looking for Charlotte but got you instead and now it makes sense as to why he offered the job to you in the first place.

Most likely he took one look at you and thought ‘this is my chance’ to find Charlotte and get back his Time. You were never a player in all of this, you’ve been a pawn.

“So, that’s why.” You say, connecting all the dots in your head.

Taking you out of the equation is just a bonus to him. He knew that Charlotte would be at the factory and in setting up a sweep he could catch her and eliminate your involvement with him in the process. Two birds with one stone.

Somehow, hearing the truth doesn’t ease your questions. In fact, you only have more of them because if he really only sees you as a piece he can move around as he pleases, then why did he give so much Time away in the first place?

And why, only a couple of hours before, was he so willing to give them back to you after the sweep?

You swear, the more you learn, the less you understand.

“I know it’s bad but I was going to time out,” Charlotte speaks.

Shaking your head, you give her a reassuring look. “It’s okay, you don’t have to defend yourself with me. I’ve done some risky things too.”

“You mean,” she looks at you, “by helping Leon?”

“Uh, yeah. By helping... him.”

When she cocks a brow, you partly chuckle.

“Sorry, I’m not used to his name.”

“Oh,” she says it like it’s completely surprising to her, but you haven’t a clue why it would be.

After all, there’s no need for you to know his name, especially now. Any association you have with him is cut off now. It’s probably for the best. Yet, you can’t help but feel a little weighted at the thought that if you step carefully from here on out, you may never see him again.

You already know it like you know the numbers tick down on your wrist that you will never meet a Timekeeper like him again. To be fair, there’s no one who’s like him. Still, things have ended quicker than you thought they would.

Is this really how you’re going to say goodbye to your partner in crime? You’ve always shuddered at the description but you know it’s true. Whenever you thought about this ending, you always imagined him running off, not you.

“What did he take you in for?” Charlotte asks.

You furrow your brows. “What?”

“Back at the factory, I saw him take you into another room.”

“Oh, right, that—” swallowing thickly, you wonder how exactly to phrase it. “I guess you can say he fired me.”

“Before or after you stole the capsule from him?”

“That part is a little tricky to explain,”

With her questions, you’re starting to look at this in a different way. Not entirely the rebellious tendency you thought you had, but a lingering intention you don’t even want to fathom.

At the end of the day, he’s a Timekeeper and you’re the person who cheated him. Even though you only did it because you thought he was crossing you first. Sometimes it pays not to jump the gun.

Yet, you don’t have time to focus on it so intently as there’s a rumble coming from behind the archway and you can hear the scraping of the wheels against the track.

“That’s our ride,” you say, standing up and looking at the damaged screen on the wall.

It still functions to read when a train will pass by, surprisingly, and Charlotte is up on her feet and waiting for the train to come into view, though it sounds a fair way off still.

Except, it won’t stop. As you mentioned before, this is only a pull-through station. No one man’s the trains, it’s all run on fuel and Time, just going from one station to the next with cargo loaded in its carts.

Some people have tried to jump the train before and get into the next Zone without having to fork a single second, but with the threat of Minute Men around the corner, no one’s gotten very far.

If you continue standing here, though, you most likely will get the same experience. The train is usually long and travels relatively slowly, so something big will have to happen for you to miss it. Otherwise, you and Charlotte are in the clear.

“One of the carts should be open,” you say, “so when you see it, jump on.”

She whirls around to face you, eyes slightly widened. “Jump?”

“It’s the only way out,” you explain. “If you want to stay here, that’s fine by me, but I’m taking it as far as I can.”

If you can at least get out of the ghetto, you should be all right. It’s a definite that Leon will still be looking for you, but at least you’ll be further ahead than sticking around in the same place.

Something rattles down the other end of the track and for a moment you think you see the black leather of his coat, but out from the shadows steps one person, then two, then three, and you know just by the number who they are.

“Found you,” one of the Minute Men says.

He’s the same blonde one who took four hours from your clock that night in the rain and you wonder how you could have let so much time pass without you noticing.

This stupid train couldn’t have come sooner to save you from this. No, instead, it’s still clattering down the track, still not in sight. There’s nowhere to go.

“We heard about the noise at the factory,” he says, stepping onto the platform and making a tsk sound. “Didn’t your parents ever teach you to share?”

You stand in front of Charlotte as they approach and hope to find an exit that you can both run for before they can turn your clocks to zero. Being in a remote area like this is not good, especially with the new company.

There’s only one way out, however, and it’s taking its sweet time to come here.

The three of them circle the two of you, looking at you like vultures, and the main of the group holds his hand out.

“Give me the capsule,”

Damn. It’s just your luck that as soon as you get enough hours to keep yourself stable, a bunch of goons come to take it away. Word travels faster than you thought it would. At least that’s the only thing they’re here for.

It would be foolish of you to try and run or to trick them out. You’ve handled enough danger for today and you’d rather get this over with. Besides, you can’t run faster than a train and if you attempt it, you’ll be flattened in a heartbeat.

Reaching a hand into your pocket, you pull out the capsule and slap it against his palm, which he chuckles at. He turns it over to look at the hours on the viewer and seems pleased by the number he reads.

“You know,” he starts, “I think you’re our most reliable supplier. You always seem to have the Time we need.”

“It’ll catch up to you eventually,” you grit. “It always does and people like you always deserve it.”

He laughs, looking at his friends with a smug smile.

“You’re fun, you really are. But biting back costs more—”

He grabs your wrist, pulling you forward. You trip from the sudden force and he tugs your sleeve up, twisting your arm painfully so that he can read your clock.

“Hey!” Charlotte shouts, but as she steps forward one of the Minute Men grabs her and holds her still.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get your turn,” says the sicko holding your wrist. “Good things to those who wait.”

He tilts your arm without another warning and the numbers start to spin, moving from your clock to his. They flicker past one hour, then another, and then another, and you know that he’s not going to stop. You’re at the tracks, you think, so who’s going to know what happens?

When you have an hour left, you feel your heart sink in your chest and you try to yank your arm back, but his grip is clamped like an iron rod. All those stories of people seeing their life flash before their eyes are true since as the numbers keep rolling, you see your life roll by, too.

Then, an explosive sound ricochets across the platform, lighting up the tracks for a split second, and the sound scares him enough to let go of your arm and turn toward the noise.

In the midst of heavy footsteps which echo over to where you all stand, there’s a clicking sound that’s unmistakable and then the nuzzle of the gun comes into view as someone emerges from the darkness.

It welcomes another kind of darkness, except this time when you see his face, your mood lifts.

“Step away from them,” Leon says, gun aimed at the Minute Men.

The blonde one snickers, stepping away from you, and then within another second, he’s pulling out a revolver and firing it in Leon’s direction.

He manages to dodge it and shoots back, hitting one of the pipes that burst and steam spouts out of it. It swipes one of the Minute Men and he tumbles to the side, and as Leon gets closer, dodging another bullet fired at him, he reaches out to grab the guy’s wrist and twists his arm, knocking him down to his knees and throwing the revolver onto the tracks.

The guy behind Charlotte pulls out a gun of his own but Leon shoots at his hand and it drops to the floor, and the guy screams out as he clamps a hand across the fresh wound on his skin.

“Don’t move,” he growls, reaching down to snag the capsule that the blonde guy is still holding.

When he shoves it into his pocket, he nudges the guy’s back with the tip of his gun. He’s all intimidating and authoritative but with a simple glance in your direction, you see the distress in his eyes.

It’s not a look you’re used to seeing, especially directed at you, yet somehow it feels truthful. With him standing there, all of your worries are eased. The transition from cautious to caring isn’t as outlandish as you thought it could be.

Right now, you’re glad you stole that capsule off of him because if you didn’t, he wouldn’t have saved your life. That seems to be a reoccurring theme with you two.

Then he’s shoving at the guy’s shoulder, and that bark in his voice reaches you even from where you stand.

“Get out of here,”

The blonde guy stands, looking between Leon, you, and Charlotte with a clenched jaw, and then gestures for his mob to follow him. They walk down the platform and back from where they came and as soon as they’re gone, Leon turns around to meet you.

Closing the distance, even by a hair’s breadth, is remedying.

“How much did he take?” He asks it hurriedly, slotting the gun back into his holster.

For a moment, you don’t speak. The rush of everything that just happened hasn’t exactly sunk in yet, nor is the fact that he’s not aiming the gun at you instead.

“I don’t know,” you say honestly, only knowing it was enough to leave you running on empty.

After you saw an hour, you were too scared to watch the rest of the numbers fall. They would have gone straight to zero if he hadn’t shown up. Just a second later and you’d be on the ground.

He nods his head and touches your sleeve with careful fingers, looking up at you for a moment, waiting for your approval—something especially considerate after what you’ve done, and it makes your heart flutter—before rolling the sleeve up.

He sucks in a breath when he sees the thirty minutes ticking away.

“Here,” he holds out the capsule. “Take it.”

Absurdly, you shake your head at that, leaning away from the Time that can save your life.

“No,”

“What?” He asks, clearly stunned by your response.

“I can’t take that.”

He groans, pressing two fingers into the bridge of his nose.

“Why are you so stubborn?”

“Why aren’t you mad?”

When he looks at you silently, you can feel your own anger bubbling. He’s doing it again—he’s helping you when all you’ve done is betray him. Though you ask him heatedly, you feel a swirl in your stomach that’s too frightening to name and the thought of how pleased you were to see him.

In a ridiculous way, him coming back for you—instead of hunting you down like you thought he had done, using the years of experience on his belt to apprehend you—erases all those tally marks you drew against him. Now, they’re all ticks.

Though you’re grateful, you can’t wrap your head around why he isn’t shouting at you. It’s not exactly the welcome you were expecting.

In a way, having him be mad at you would stop the racing of your heart. Surely, you’re feeling this way because of how close you were to timing out, but even still, you always expect worse than what you get with him.

His eyes flicker behind you and you realize that for a moment, you’ve completely forgotten about Charlotte.

“Are you going to arrest us?” She asks.

He looks at you both for a moment, stretching out the uncertain silence, before shaking his head.

“No. I’ve chased you both long enough. There are better ways to spend my Time.”

It’s not said as pointedly as you would have assumed. There’s no malice or agitation. Instead, his voice is coated in sympathy. He looks nothing like a Timekeeper now and it complicates all the feelings you have for him, even though the term feelings is something you wanted to never associate with him.

After everything, it seems they’ve creeped up on you.

“Here’s your exit,” he nods his head over at the train that finally comes into the station, teetering past.

It’ll go far away from here, the tracks that stretch on for miles, all pointing away from the ghetto, and he’s nudging you right toward the escape.

“But,” you start, taking one step in his direction and then hesitating. “Everyone at the factory saw what I did.”

If you leave now, go as far as you can, your name is going to plastered to every Timeshare, every bank, every workplace, and every headquarters for the Timekeepers. It doesn’t matter at all if you can run fast. All that matters is disappearing.

Knowing that now, you wish you had done things differently. But you were tipsy on the hope that you could escape with Charlotte.

Leon takes the step you didn’t, moving in closer. “You mean skipping out of work?”

When you look at him confusedly, he smiles. It’s the first time you see him look like that. Strangely, you hope it’s not the last but you know you’ll likely never see him again.

He knows it better than anyone that you didn’t simply skip out of work. Everyone saw you run from him and they most likely all saw the capsule in your hand. There’s no way even he can convince them all to keep quiet about what happened, especially your boss. That man is the real scum of the earth.

“That’s the only report I’ll send back and—” he looks past you. “The case of my thief will be closed. I just happened to lose you at the train station.”

It takes you by surprise as much as it does for Charlotte who looks at Leon like he’s spouted out an equation she can’t solve. But that’s what he is at the end of the day; a riddle with no answer.

He won’t report back to headquarters, that’s what he’s just said. He won’t tell them about you or the stolen Time or even Charlotte who he’s been on the prowl for. All of it will only be kept between you three and the people who saw.

You know it better than anyone that the word of a Timekeeper is more valued than of the people, so no one will question it even if they have evidence. This, much like most things in the ghetto, will be swept under the rug.

Does he have to do it so fast? Even though that’s how life has to be lived with a clock constantly ticking away, you want to slow everything down with him. Everything can stop, just let him stay.

His surrender must come as a relief to Charlotte after having run for so long and when you stare at him, it seems he reads your mind with that and he holds the capsule out for her.

“Take it,” he says. “This never happened.”

She reluctantly takes the capsule, tilting it in her hand like she’s distributing the weight as if the Time inside is actually heavy. There are a lot of hours in there and it’ll be enough to get her as far away from the ghetto as possible.

With the capsule, she can start a new life. The crazy thing about it is how a Timekeeper is the one to give her that chance.

“You’re different,” Charlotte says, looking right at him.

For a moment, they just stare at each other. His gaze, which once was so frigid and harsh, is more human now. Then she smiles, very faintly but it’s there.

“Thank you.”

He nods. “You take the train and you run.”

She’s quicker now, knowing that this is her one and only opportunity to get the freedom she’s been hoping for and makes her way across the space to take it before it’s too late.

Charlotte waits for an opening on one of the carts, watching intently as the train keeps moving forward. With all the cargo that it’s carrying, the last few carts will most likely be the only ones to hitch a ride on.

Out of everyone, you should be the one moving quick, but knowing now that this really is the end is keeping you frozen in place.

When you turn to him, his eyes say that you can’t stay here and you know that. You’re sure there are less than twenty-five minutes on your clock and you’ll have to take some Time from Charlotte before you both separate since there’s no way you can get to a Timeshare soon enough.

But if this is the end, you can’t leave without a few answers.

“You know my name,” you say, watching him closely.

His cold eyes soften and the whole of him looks so human. The leather on his back is no longer frightening. Now, it’s just a coat. The man beneath the exterior, though, is someone you’ve grown to know better than you think anyone has before you.

When you leave, you won’t just be walking out of here with a target off of your back but you’ll be walking out of his life, too, and with an intimacy you couldn’t have ever imagined.

“I got curious,” he tells you. “I wanted to know who you are.”

“And did you find out?”

He huffs, shaking his head, and his jaw clenches.

“Yeah,” he breathes, catching your gaze. “You’ve left a severe mark on me.”

You smile, somehow feeling proud at that but happy about it, too. When you both part ways, you’ll still be on each other’s minds. It’s happened against your will, shoving itself to slot between your heart and your ribcage, but you think you wear it well.

“That makes two of us,”

With a skip of your pulse, you want to rectify all the bad things you’ve done. Not in life or against the system, but toward him. He might have started out cold but he soon warmed up and you were too stubborn to let yourself thaw out.

“I’ve been nothing but terrible to you,”

“Let’s not,” he says like he’s exhausted.

“But after everything—”

He reaches out to hold your wrist, his fingers wrapped around you urgently. With only his touch, it speaks volumes.

It’s absurd but you get lost in his eyes, waiting for him to say more or anything else. There aren’t any reasonable things he could say. At least, you know that all the things you want to hear aren’t possible.

But even after you leave, you want to have this. You want to know that you could feel a certain way to someone and that after all the years you’ve spent alone, you could call someone, not just a friend but more than that.

Leon isn’t your friend. He never will be. But you want more.

“Go,” he whispers.

When he lets go of your arm, his hand instead pushing lightly at your back to encourage you toward the train, you hate to think that this is it. He’s saved you again and you’ll never have enough to repay it.

If Time was not an issue, you would have stayed there with him for hours. You feel as if you’ve taken all the moments in your apartment for granted and that you’ve wasted so much on all the silence, too.

Peering down the tracks, you can make out the last few carts. Within a few more seconds, you’ll be gone quicker than the first deal you made with him.

“I didn’t thank you,” Charlotte says. “If you didn’t help out at the factory, I might not be here.”

“Yeah, catch me doing that again,” you chuckle. “Just don’t steal from any more Timekeepers, okay?”

She nods, smiling briefly.

There’s more you want to say but you know that your Time has to come first, so you start to ask Charlotte if she can give up at least an hour when suddenly gunfire comes crashing through the other end of the tracks and you duck, scampering to the side.

Leon’s come running over to you both, standing in front of you like a human shield while you look at where the attack came from. On the other side, you can see the Minute Men have returned with a newfound determination, it seems, and the blonde one from earlier is firing shot after shot in your direction.

For the most part, Leon manages to cover you and Charlotte well, but then his arm gets nipped by a bullet and he stumbles backwards, right against your outstretched palms.

He doesn’t give you a second to say anything, instead, he shouts out clear enough for you both to hear, “Get on the train!”

Charlotte is moving fast and you push her when she hesitates at the edge of the platform, sending her straight into the open cart that is moving past, rolling until she hits the far side.

You’re about to jump across the gap but a bullet hits the handle that you’re reaching for and you leap backwards, covering your head out of instinctual protection.

By the time you’re stumbling right into Leon’s hold—his arms keeping you from falling over—the train is whirling down the tracks with the last of the carts.

There goes Charlotte and there goes the capsule. If there weren’t Minute Men to worry about, you’d be chasing after the train with all the breath in your lungs, but it’s already past the archway and there’s no luck in trying to catch it.

For now, Leon keeps you covered as he nudges you toward the baggage room, shutting the door behind you both with force. He keeps his back pressed up against it as you look around for a place to go, and only manage to find one way out.

“The ladder,” you point to it.

He nods hurriedly. “Go, I’m behind you.”

If you had more Time than him, you’d be forcing him up at the ladder before you, but as much as you’re worried about the Minute Men knocking down that door, you know that he’s got it covered.

Quickly, you begin to climb the ladder which leads up to a manhole. When you push open the cover, Leon has started climbing up behind you, and you pull yourself out onto the road above the train station.

It’s hot and the sun is beaming down on you with aggression. Turning around, you help Leon out of the hole and hurry to close it shut, even though it won’t do you much good without a lock.

As soon as he’s beside you, he grabs your hand and runs down the road, and in the distance, you can see his car. It’s standing out like the black knight you had first seen on that night in the rain, and you push for it with all you’ve got.

But as you get nearer, another gunshot rings through the air and you hear Leon shout, and then he’s tripping over his boots and lands on the concrete, almost about tugging you down with him before his hand slips out of yours.

Before you can even check to see how severe his injury is, you’re having to dodge the rest of the bullets firing in your direction, and the intensity of it pushes you down the road, back behind his car, shielded from the shooting.

In the distance where the Minute Men still stand by the manhole, you hear them laugh.

“Get up!” They taunt, watching as Leon rolls onto his side with a groan.

You don’t know where exactly he’s been shot but all you know is that it’s hit him somewhere bad, seeing his blood splattered on the concrete.

“I tell you what,” shouts the blonde guy, “I’ll do you a favor and put the gun away.”

As you look around the car, you watch as he tucks his gun into the waistband of his pants, raising two empty hands to show that he’s done just as he said.

“Call it even,” he says, gesturing at one of the members of his mob whose hand was shot earlier by Leon.

It’s uncharacteristic for them to surrender, or even walk away, but they all seem set on their decision to leave.

They still laugh as they turn around, walking over to their car which is parked on the side. They all pile in and as Leon slowly stands, you think that this is finally over, but then the engine kicks to life and they’re on the move.

Everything is so spaced out that even attempting to get to Leon before the Minute Men can isn’t possible. The car is near the manhole, Leon is in the centre of the road, and you’re all the way behind his car.

With the engine howling, you feel completely useless at the thought that there’s nothing you can do to stop it. The Minute Men are eager to take down Leon, not content enough with a bullet hole.

The car speeds down the road, the tires so hot on the cement that smoke is left trailing after it. It pulses forward, screeching closer, and you feel your heart lump in your throat.

He stands there and watches the car race toward him and just before it gets too close, he takes out his gun and aims for the front bumper. The bullet pierces the air and wedges in between the spaces of the radiator grille, sparking a fire and it begins to smoke.

As it bursts, the car swivels from left to right, and the driver inside turns the wheel harshly, sailing off of the road and straight into the cement block on the path. It crashes with fury, blackened clouds growing from the bonnet.

When the smoke fizzles away, a dusty grey lingering in the air, you peer past the damage to see that he’s still standing, still alive. You let out a breath of relief, raising your hands to your head.

But when you do, you see the flashing numbers on your wrist and your heart sinks. On your clock, you have two and a half hours.

For a moment, you’re completely disoriented at how you have that amount on you. The last time you looked, there were thirty minutes and you were too frightened to check up on it after that. You had needed Time from Charlotte but the opportunity didn’t last long.

Then, suddenly, you understand what’s happened. The only other moment you could have gotten Time is when Leon grabbed your arm. You weren’t paying attention to the numbers. Instead, you were fixated on him.

He swapped the Time like you swapped the capsules, instead with his hand on your wrist, distracting you with words so that you couldn’t focus on the pulse.

With every Time transfer, it fluctuates with a throbbing feeling, so you can always feel it. But he managed to divert your attention. From his wrist to yours, he gave you two hours.

Everyone knows that Timekeepers don’t have a lot of Time on them. It’s to discourage thieves, so if he’s given you two hours then he must only have a few minutes left, or not even. He’s exchanged his survival with yours.

Like he’s always done, he’s given you Time. He’s saved your life. And you know now that you need to return the favor. Since the start, he’s looked out for you but you’ve been too blind to realize it. If he’s willing to die so that you can live, there’s no second-guessing it.

Losing him, ridiculously, is the worst thing you can imagine.

So you shout, “Leon!”

Despite the distance, you can see the confusion on his face, wondering how you know his name, and then altogether it shifts into hope and before either of you are thinking it, you’re running toward each other.

You’ve never run so fast in your life, not even when you were escaping the factory, but this time you have a newfound purpose and this time you’re running to him, outstretching your arm and hoping that you’ll reach him before his Time can disappear.

You need him. Not for Time, but for a selfish feeling that you can’t carry on alone. Now that he’s a part of your life, you can’t live without him in it.

The air is hot as you breathe heavily, running down the road. He’s just as burned out, heaving from the excursion and the wound that is most likely draining him.

He must have seconds and when you leap for him as you grow near, you let out a whimper with the dread of not knowing.

Leon gasps as your arm slides up against his, pressing your wrist to his skin and turning over the digits. His other arm wraps around you as you collide with his chest, and he holds you against him as you breathe against his leather coat, eyes screwed shut.

You’re panting with tears forming behind your lids, too scared to open them and see if you were too slow. But when neither of you falls, you know you’ve made it.

Pulling back slightly, enough for the two of you to look down and read the hour pulsing on his wrist, you let out a breath of relief, fingers curling into his leather coat with knuckles turned white.

He’s all right. He’s alive. You made it.

“I get it now,” you say, exhausted with an anxious tear running down your cheek. “I know what this is.”

He looks pleased, his hand reaching up to wipe the tear away with his thumb but leaving it there to gently rub featherlight circles on your skin. His touch is gentle and caring. It’s soothing.

“You took your time,” he says.

You grin, knowing it’s true. It’s taken you until now to realize that there’s more to his reasons for saving you and that he’s not as black and white as you always assumed.

What he said about you having a prejudiced gaze is right because if you had paid attention instead of jumping to conclusions, you would have noticed earlier that his intentions have been fueled by emotion.

It’s ridiculous and you can only think, why him? Out of all people to fall for, you fall for a Timekeeper. But he fell first and that only convinces you further.

Grabbing the flaps of his leather coat, you pull him forward and press your lips to his, kissing him with candor. All the trepidation, vivacity, and doubt combine into an intoxicating drive to damn all the consequences and let your feelings win.

He replicates those feelings by deepening the kiss like your lips are air and pulling you flush to his chest, erupting a low rumble from his throat that vibrates against your lips and sends a tingle up your spine.

From here on, things will never be the same. But you’ve changed a lot from meeting him for the first time until now.

After all, it makes sense that you’d fall for the only person who’s ever given you Time and in return, you give him all of you.

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A/N: thank you all for your support, comments, & reblogs for this series! I appreciate every single one. It was fun writing my first original fanfic series, so thank you all for contributing to the experience.

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