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"You go to hell for the company, and to heaven for the peace and quiet."

"Sometimes it's more gradual than people talk about," Fran's roommate had tried to explain. "Like, on TV you'll see oh, this person's reacting to this specific crisis, she's up on a ledge, they talk her down, it's over, she made it." It was the sort of thing that had a way of gripping her mind.

"It's not always like that," the jackal had acknowledged.

"Sometimes it's more like, every little bad thing that happens to you throughout the day adds up to bring you just a few steps closer to it, inch by inch, each time." Ultimately it'd amounted to the same.

"And every little good thing that happens to you also adds up to pull you a few steps away from it, doesn't it?" It'd seemed to beg the question.

"It'd have to, wouldn't it," Fran's roommate had grinned. "I have a system for it." Because of course she would've. "They're called Will-To-Lives." Or WTLs for short. "You start at 100%." She'd had a system for everything. "Every time something good or bad happens to you, you win some or lose some."

"What happens to you when you get to 0%?" the jackal had asked.

"You die."

***

"Rise and shine, sleepyhead!" The first thing Fran saw when she came to was a cuckoo bird's face looking down at her, its cheery expression much at odds with her own.

"BLEEAARRRGH!" The first thing the jackal did when she came to was to throw up.

"You're up, you're up!" Cuckoon barely had time to scramble out of Fran's way as the jackal stumbled out of the Revival chamber to vomit on the floor next to it.

"BLEEAARRRGH!" The cuckoo didn't seem to have expected Fran to react the way she did, but still didn't seem too fazed by it in spite of this, all in all.

"Welcome back, friend!" The jackal had just been through death - the worst thing in the world.

"BLEEAARRRGH!" Regardless of how many people back on Earth shared Fran's death phobia, not many of them would ever fully experience their worst fear as directly as she just had, and be able to look back on it the way she was then. She was in shock.

"You'll be okay!" Cuckoon put her arm around the jackal's shoulder as she finished throwing up on the floor from stress.

"Does this...?" Fran had thought she'd be fine to talk but apparently had to vomit again instead. "BLEEAARRRGH!" The cuckoo patted her on the back a couple of times as the jackal finally finished throwing up for real this time. "Does this usually happen?" Would it happen to her every time she'd be brought back, she asked herself? She sure hoped not.

"Sometimes," Cuckoon shrugged.

"Be more careful." Fran looked up. There was a camel sitting at a control panel nearby.

"Sorry about the mess," the jackal apologized.

"I don't mean that," Cactus dismissed. The same pleco fish that Fran had worked with back on the rock planet showed up with a mop and bucket to clean up, she noticed. "I mean about being killed." The jackal still couldn't fully process what a weird thing to be chided for that was. "We're not made of Revivals, you know." The camel's icy tone contrasted as sharply with the cuckoo's warmth as it was possible for it to. "How many times did you even die this century?"

"I, uh..." Cactus sighed and rolled her eyes, not really giving Fran a chance to answer.

"Just try," the camel pleaded, "try to do better next time." Maybe the jackal should've been looking at the situation differently after all. "That's all I ask." Maybe she was just the first Earthling with her phobia who'd get the chance to get over a fear that no one usually survived experiencing through exposure therapy.

***

"No, I could never do something like that," Corsair told her.

"You couldn't?" Orchid had just caught the puffin in a puffy shirt on her way out of her Revival chamber. "Or wouldn't?" She hadn't even been assigned a proper Enforcer quite yet.

"Neither," the space pirate simply answered.

"Your frost breath sure did a number on Glew and Solder, though," the mantis went on.

"They're not about to let me live that down either," Corsair said bitterly. "Thanks for reminding me." Since the Tracker had to stop by the Revival chambers anyway, she may as well have gotten this part of her investigation done while she'd be there, it'd seemed like.

"Surely you can see how it seemed relevant to ask you, based on that." The glowworm and toucan would've probably agreed with her, she figured.

"My frost breath doesn't work that way, though," the puffin shook her head. "I mean, I can use it as a weapon," she added. "It can kill or paralyze someone, but I could never use it to put someone in suspended animation that could fool sensors for a long time like that," she explained. "You can ask the person who put it in about that too, have it examined if you want." Corsair seemed determined to have the time she'd have to spend with an Enforcer on her hands to be kept as short as possible, whatever that would entail.

"Your associates seem in less of a rush to break you out of here than last time," Orchid noted.

"Yeah, well," the puffin replied tongue-in-cheek, "I kinda ticked 'em off." She was being sent to work in the red desert on the desert planet, where her frost breath was sure to be as useful as the heat would be unpleasant.

"Has Speaker been brought back yet?" The parrot had taken the brunt of the damage from their prisoner's escape, after all.

"I haven't heard," Corsair shrugged. "I don't think so, though."

***

"So, what are you working on?" Fran had asked innocently.

"What?" Her best friend had panicked. "Nothing!" She'd tried to hide what she'd been working on but the jackal had already seen it.

"This looks like a suicide note," Fran had noted grimly.

"Well, you weren't supposed to see it until it was finished."

The jackal had picked it up. "This is over three hundred pages long." She'd skimmed through it, as well as she'd been able to.

"Four hundred, actually."

The first page hadn't been in cursive. "You started writing this when you were in grade school."

Fran's best friend's expression had changed, if imperceptibly. "Did I? I forget." The jackal had put it back down.

"It looks like you put a lot of work into this." Somehow that had seemed like the most constructive thing for her to say at the time.

"Well, you don't get a do-over if you mess it up so you have to make it count," her best friend had shrugged.

"Why not make it into a novel?"

Fran's best friend had winced. "Trans people don't want to read stories about trans people killing themselves. I sure don't! We get enough of that on the news." Fair point.

"What do we want to read about, then?" the jackal had asked.

"We want to read stories about going to space and fighting monsters that have nothing to do with us being trans, same as everybody else."

Fran had tried to smile. "Why not write us something like that instead, then?"

Her best friend had brought her hand to her mouth in thought. "What about the note?"

The jackal had waved it off. "Forget the note."

***

"It was weird working without you waiting for you to get brought back," Jackie admitted. "I mean, I know we haven't been partners for a long time or anything, just..." The roach paused and looked at her hands, looking for the right words to say.

"I know," Fran acknowledged. "It's the most time I'd spent with the same other person since..." The jackal's mind seemed to drift off. "... for a while," she finally finished.

Jackie nodded. "Thanks for saving my life."

The jackal nodded back. "Thanks for saving mine."

The roach furrowed her brow. "What, the space pirates, you mean?"

She did not. "Uh, yeah," Fran cleared her throat, "the space pirates." For a moment, the jackal asked herself how weird it would be for her when Jackie would die. Would Fran have to Clean her? Would she be able to get the ship to the Revival chambers alright?

"Hey, we make pretty good partners, don't we?" The roach gave her a 'thumbs up.'

"You know," the jackal smiled back, "I think we do." She gave a thumbs up back.

***

"Well, it's not like I asked to be sent here," Solder chuckled mirthlessly, gesturing at the ice forest on the ice planet around them. "They wanted my flamethrower arm, which Corsair wrecked and owes me for, by the way." Ghost resisted the part of her that wanted her to tell the toucan in camo pants that she should take it up with an Arbitrator.

"No, I get that." The mantis would've meant it in earnest, but in context, she realized it could only come across as sarcastic.

"You can't get yourself anything without everyone wanting a piece of it these days," Solder shook her head.

"I'm sure Jackie would agree," the Tracker thought out loud, thinking back on how the space pirates had hijacked her as a power source.

"You get it, I'm sure," the toucan gestured at Ghost just as her lighter flicked another cig alight. "Sometimes it's just nice to have some fire on you, innit?"

***

"I mean, on paper, it may as well be right out of a self-help book, wouldn't you say?" Fran's roommate had asked her. "I go up to a nice-looking spot, with a great view, and I think about reasons to continue to live."

"It just happens to be the edge of the roof of your office building after work," the jackal had tried to say casually.

"Nothing wrong with that, we've all done that, right?"

Fran had nodded, too wrapped up in the moment to have the presence of mind to lie. "We anywhere in there on that list of reasons of yours, by any chance?" It hadn't been the foremost question on her mind, but it'd seemed the most harmless under the circumstances.

"You're up there," her roommate had nodded without turning her head. "It must feel freeing for a moment, I imagine, sometimes." She'd meant falling, the jackal could tell. "Completely untethered to anything but air for a bit, you know? But then," she'd gone on, closing a fist next to her, "Earth's gravity reasserts its hold on you, always does, doesn't it?" Fran had put a hand on her shoulder.

"Sometimes we think we want to escape from life," she'd started, "but what we really want to escape from is our life."

This time the jackal's roommate had turned her head around. " I have to work this job, though," she'd shaken her head. "We can afford the place with two of us working, but not one." The images had eaten away at her sanity more and more, day after day.

"What if I got a job so you wouldn't have to?" Fran had offered.

"What would you do?" her roommate had asked her.

"I dunno, I could be a cashier or something," the jackal had shrugged. "Why not?" Her roommate had turned around and stepped away from the edge of the roof.

***

"The thing is," Jackie started, "she didn't start out like that," she explained, "not originally."

Fran tilted her head. "She didn't?"

"No," the roach shook her head, "she used to be partners with someone I've been partners with since then," she went on, "longer than she'd been partners with anybody else at that."

"Huh!" the jackal took in. "How about that?"

"There was a time when, if you'd called out to her the way you did, she'd have actually responded. Of course," Jackie shrugged, "you wouldn't have had to, because she wouldn't have been doing that in the first place, but still." Fran got the gist of it.

"So what happened?"

"There was an anomaly," the roach answered, "out there in space somewhere." Jackie gestured in space's general direction.

"Does that happen a lot?" How much of a piloting hazard was this going to be?

"Anomalies? Define 'a lot'." An anomaly should've been fairly anomalous by definition, she supposed. "This particular one, though?" The jackal nodded. "Not before or since, far as I know," the roach shrugged.

"It made her into this?" What a thing to have happen to you...

"Well, she always looked like this," Jackie clarified, "she used to be a smart giant centipede, you know?" Fran followed. "Now, she's like..." A thought seemed to pass through the roach's mind as she spoke. "My ex-partner actually tried to rescue her a whole bunch of times, have I ever mentioned that?"

"You did not," the jackal shook her head.

"Didn't go so well."

Fran winced. "I figured not." If the way they'd seen her was any indication, in any case.

"She ended up getting killed over and over trying, hoping each time would be the time she'd be able to figure out how to bring her back." However their partnership had ended, Jackie still cared about this ex-partner of hers, the jackal could tell.

"That must've been awful." Fran couldn't help feeling some measure of empathy for the creature herself hearing this, even though it had killed her quite dead.

"I wish you hadn't died saving me..." The jackal hoped she hadn't done something wrong after all. "... but I'm glad you cared enough to do it," the roach smiled.

"It sounds like I'm lucky I only died once doing it." That story had sure put things in perspective. "Who was she?" Fran asked.

"Bertha." Macha's story still felt as fresh in Jackie's mind as when the pterodactyl had first told her about it so many years ago. "Her name was Bertha."

***

"So you had some history with Jackie, didn't you?" The light Glew's body emitted reflected all over the multicolored crystals in one of the rock planet's crystal mines around them.

"That's right," the glowworm answered between pickax swings. "I used to run food with her back in the day." Glew had been assigned Searchlight as an Enforcer. "Until she betrayed us." The Commission wanted to make sure that the glowworm couldn't take advantage of her light to escape in the tunnels.

"That would've been a while before Ghost was assigned to her, wouldn't it?" Orchid seemed to remember that Jackie was supposed to have had one more Enforcer and one partner before her, if memory served.

"Oh yeah," Glew recalled, "you two weren't partners back when that happened, were you?" The glowworm squinted in the light that the flashlight fish who was ignoring their conversation aimed at her.

"Not at the time, no." Glew was trying to put her on the defensive by poking at their time apart, the mantis could tell. "How's the feet?" The Tracker was starting to squint as much from Searchlight's light as from the glowworm's herself, both reflecting on the crystals around them.

"Tell Corsair she owes me," Glew rubbed her new feet bitterly.

***

"What were you gonna do, exactly?" Fran's best friend had asked incredulously.

"I don't know," the jackal had shaken her head. "I didn't really have a plan or anything." Her best friend had been driving her back after having criss-crossed the city with her car looking for her in the middle of the night. "I just kind of ran out and figured I'd come up with something." Fran had felt driven to suicide and run out into the city at top speed late at night, eventually getting lost and calling home for help in shame after she'd changed her mind. "Maybe I'd just keep walking in a straight line without stopping until I'd starve to death, you know?" she'd shrugged. "I didn't really think this through."

"That was your plan?" Her best friend had almost chuckled, as grim as the situation had been.

"Well, I'm not like my roommate," the jackal had rolled her eyes. "She'd have probably had a plan that looked like a game of Mouse Trap." There would've been no unraveling that.

"Oh, Fran," her best friend had shaken her head. "Never change."

***

"It's great, isn't it?" Cuckoon chirped.

"Huh?" Fran blinked.

"Every time one of us is taken from us, every time they're brought back, I'm here to greet them," the cuckoo went on, "to welcome them back among us." There seemed to be some sort of clock embedded in the bird's torso, the jackal noticed. "I used to make silk, you know?" She also seemed to be part silkworm.

"Really?"

Cuckoon nodded. "I wouldn't trade this for anything though," she shook her head, "not anymore." It sounded like she'd put a lot of thought into this, if anything. "You probably think I'm being foolish." Fran had learned that, when people said that, they were usually sharing something deceptively important to them that they were sensitive about.

"No, I sort of get it, on some level." She imagined the roach might have found the cuckoo a bit abrasive by now - but then Jackie had died a lot of times in a row at times, which could make it get to be a lot.

"I know it's silly, but for some reason, every time one of us dies," Cuckoon continued, "it's like there's a part of me that thinks oh no! What if we can't get her back?" She chuckled at her own reaction. "What if she's gone for good?" The cuckoo knew it made no sense for her to think that, on an intellectual level. "So every time someone comes back, I'm like, hooray, she's back!" Cuckoon smiled, gesturing for emphasis. "Everything's okay again."

***

"When did you leave the Revival chambers?" Ghost had finally left the ice planet for the water planet herself.

"I'm not sure, Officer." Robber had been sent to work on it as part of her retribution for her space piracy. "Don't they have that on record?" As a yellow rubber duck, her ability to float could be useful to have on the water planet - especially working around electrical charges.

"As a matter of fact, they don't."

Robber looked disappointed. "That's too bad." They usually did.

"What were you doing on the rock planet?" The kidnapping had happened such a short time after the murder. "Right after that breakout?" What if that hadn't been a coincidence, either?

"I'm not sure either." An exceptionally careless, destructive breakout, at that.

"What do you mean?" The Tracker wasn't sure what to make of the duck's evasiveness. "You're not sure?" She was used to Renegades lying to her. "How can you not be sure?" This wasn't a convincing lie if it was a lie, though.

"Can't you just ask the people I was with?" Robber seemed increasingly annoyed by Ghost's questions, pelting her as the rain pelted the docks around them.

"We are asking them." The more the duck resisted, the more the mantis suspected she might be onto something - but what? "Sometimes different people remember different details about events than other people do, that's all." It'd been meant to be taken as an innocuous statement.

"Well, I don't!" Robber quacked back.

"What do you mean?" The Renegade's answers were as opaque as the fog around them. "What don't you remember, Robber?" By then the duck's frustration had grown to panic.

"Anything!" Lightning struck. "I don't remember anything, Officer!" Robber shook her head in dismay. "Not from before I was revived..." It looked like the Tracker was going to need another cigarette.

***

People would always say 'get help.' So Fran had actually tried to do it. One night, when she'd felt overcome with self-destructive urges she'd stopped trusting herself to be able to manage, she'd check herself into a hospital or a help center or whatever they had. People kept talking about it, that should help, she'd figured, shouldn't it? So the jackal's roommate had driven her to a place where people had been supposed to be able to help her. They'd waited and waited, only to be told that there was nothing this place could do for them. So Fran's roommate had looked up somewhere else they could go on her phone then and there, driving the jackal all the way to it to wait there with her as the night had marched on.

After another extensive waiting period around other patients whose behavior had triggered their anxiety, they'd finally been told that the jackal didn't have the right paperwork to get help from them after all. So her roommate had looked up a third place on her phone that she'd also driven Fran to and where, as night had turned to dawn around them, they'd been told that the jackal's insurance wouldn't cover the treatment she'd need there. There had usually been someone around who could've given them the address of a fourth place they could've gone to, but that person had been home sick with the flu, and they hadn't known when she'd been going to be in at all. 'Get help' was scrawled in crayon on a 'door' that was painted on.

"Fuck it," Fran had finally said.

"Let's just go home and get some pancakes."