He is laying on his side on the hard wood, his blood staining the floor and dripping through the cracks to splash into the ocean below. He has been shot in several places, and there are others laying around him who are already dead from similar wounds. He is the last survivor---not that he minds. The others were his enemies, anyway.

He stares out blankly across the docks, his hazel eyes half-open and glassy. By now he is not certain if he is even seeing anything that is actually there. Perhaps it is all in his mind. He sees other things in front of him that he knows are past and gone---his childhood years, life with his aunt and uncle on his mother's side, fleeting friends who abandoned him when things became rough, and any spark of innocence that once existed in his soul. He smirks weakly, several locks of brown hair drifting in front of his right eye. Now, of course, he is the farthest thing from innocent. He has not known such purity since he was about five or six. No, perhaps not even then.

He has never known what it is like to grow up with love. Or at least, he does not remember knowing. Perhaps his mother loved him. He was so very young when she died and he was taken in by Aunt Cleo and Uncle Bradford, and they did not love him. They considered his mother to be a sinful woman, and that he was the result of such wickedness. They had not treated him with kindness, though when he pointed that out to them once he was older, they had told him that it was very kind of them to take him in instead of allowing him to go to a group home. He should be grateful, they said, and not complain. What they had done for him was more than he deserved.

It did not help that his short temper existed even then. Many times he got into schoolyard and street skirmishes that humiliated his guardians, but they never tried to help him overcome his furious outbursts. He was an inherently bad child, they believed, and there was nothing that could be done for him. They would punish him, beating him severely and leaving him locked in a dark room for hours, but this only contributed to the bitterness in his soul. Someday, he vowed many a time as he lay in a corner nursing his injuries, he would be powerful and strong and they would not dare to beat him then.

Well, he thinks to himself, still gazing out at the endlessness of the Pacific Ocean, I got my power---for a price. I got disowned too, but they really never wanted me in the first place. That just made it official. I always had to just live for myself. No one else cared whether I lived or died.

He was taught only cruelty and hatred, and he learned it well. "Train up a child in the way he should (or should not) go, and when he is grown, he will not stray far from it." He was bitter as a child, when he realized that he was not cared about, and that bitterness grew until it erupted into the hatred and selfishness that fueled his life of crime. He chose his own path, but no other kind was ever shown to him. Those who claim to uphold the law and live uprightly are, in his mind, hypocrites---every last one of them. They can say that they are so much better than everyone else, and yet he sees---he experiences---that they can be just as treacherous as outright criminals---and often are. They lie, they steal, they destroy lives---perhaps not in the same way that he has done, but they still do it. They are not guiltless. No one is guiltless, in his mind.

He tries to move, to test if he still has feeling in the rest of his body, and the pain shoots through him like another series of bullets. Wincing, he curses and lays still again. There will not be any relief for him, unless he dies from these wounds. And that is a distinct possibility.

He has injured many through the years, and has killed as well. In his warped mind, he has never believed that he killed someone who did not have to die. Allowing his temper to get the better of him was what caused many of his victims to perish, and at other times, he felt that he had to kill some poor fool to get him out of the way when his own escape was being halted. But he never randomly roamed the streets, looking for people to murder. Even so, he knows that he is not considered justified by most, and that many will feel that he is only getting what he has deserved for years. And perhaps that is true, he decides ruefully.

He hears footsteps running down the dock and then stopping near where he is. A familiar, female voice cries out the only name that he has been known by for years, and he feels the wood vibrating as the woman kneels down beside him. Gentle hands are placed on his body and their owner tries to carefully pull him up. He hisses in pain, struggling to form words.

"Cool it, baby," he manages to say at last, his eyes now refusing to properly focus. "Just let me lay here."

He is slowly released, and he can feel her hands shaking. "You're hurt," she whispers, brushing the hair away from his eyes---not that it does any good. He cannot see her. "I knew this would happen! I knew it would. . . ."

"Well, don't get any ideas about calling for help." His own voice is almost a whisper. "I'm done for. The last thing I want is to croak in some prison hospital." He weakly clenches a fist. He has accepted the certainty of his demise. At least, he thinks, I've got the satisfaction of knowing that I'm taking my enemies down with me. But he knows that it will be much harder for her to accept it.

"You aren't going to die!" she retorts, her voice straining as she tries to control the hysteria that she feels is coming. He is the only one she has ever loved. He cannot leave her now! She has to do something . . . and yet she knows that there is nothing to be done. His blood is everywhere, his eyes are now unseeing, and she can tell that he is already half-gone. This realization causes the tears to break loose and she sobs, gripping at his shoulder as she does so.

"I can't stand it when you cry," he growls weakly. He does not know how to deal with someone crying, and he cannot comprehend someone weeping over him. Certainly no one else he has known ever would, not even those belonging to his family. It makes him feel uncomfortable.

"I . . . I know," she says then, struggling to stop herself. "I'm sorry. . . . I just don't want you to go!"

He wonders about this. He has never known why she stayed with him all through the years. There were others who would have given her the affection that she could not receive from him, and yet she remained. Now, when he is about to die, he wants to know the answer. "Why?" he chokes out.

She shakes her head, leaning over to softly kiss him. "I love you," she tells him then, pulling back to look into the blank eyes. "I've always loved you. I don't know why . . . but it's true." She runs a hand through his dark hair. "I guess . . . I think I always saw something more in you than the criminal who went around stealing and killing. You just . . . never really let that side of you out much." She feels more crystalline drops rising in her eyes, but she forces them back. She knows that she has to be strong now, for him. "I've always wished you would. . . ." Part of her is longing to ask him how he feels about her, but the other part is afraid of the answer. If he does not love her, she would rather not know. But . . . if he does, she wishes that he would tell her. She cannot stand to see him as he is now, his body battered, torn, and bleeding. She hates the life they have been living . . . the life that is now killing him. She has always wished that they could run away together, away from all of the crime.

He smirks self-depreciatingly. "I don't really know what you're talking about," he admits. "There's not anything else to me but that." And he honestly believes it. He was told endlessly for years that he was nothing more than a wicked, treacherous heretic, a cold-hearted criminal, and eventually he became exactly what they said he was. It was one of the reasons why he had long ago told Tony that they were alike. "As for love, that's something else I don't know about. I've never experienced it before, so I can't recognize it from you and I can't give you any in return."

She is not surprised by this answer that he is unknowingly giving to her question, but it hurts her heart. She wonders what he has been through in the past. He has never told her anything about his life before he turned to crime. But she knows that it is not a time to ask. She bends over, embracing him as tenderly and carefully as she can without bumping his injuries. "If you stay," she says softly, her voice trembling, "I could teach you."

"I'm not gonna be staying." He answers matter-of-factly, too weary to push her away from him now. Part of him is relieved that he will not have to die alone. It seems comforting, somehow---to know that she is there. And yet it also frustrates him, to not be able to understand why she wants to be there. He wants to understand, he wants that so very much, and yet he knows that he never will.

He lays in silence for a while, many similar thoughts going through his mind. He tries to fit everything together, but try as he might, he cannot make sense of it. And then he realizes that he has been quiet for much too long, as she urgently calls his name again. He grunts.

"I'm not dead yet," he says flatly. "But hey . . . do me a favor, will you?"

She looks at him, surprised. "What is it?" she asks.

"After I'm gone, you and Tony and the others have to keep it under wraps." He pauses for a moment, coughing and then wincing from the pain it produces. Then he curses in his mind and tries to resume speaking. "I don't want anyone to know that I was finally licked." The smirk slowly comes back as he gazes in her general direction. "Let 'em think that I got away and that I could show up again to raise Cain at any time. Got that?"

She blinks back the tears again and tries to smile weakly, even though she doubts that he can see it. "Yeah," she says shakily, "we can do that. I promise we will."

"Good." He sighs, drawing another ragged breath, and allows his eyes to close. "You're not bound to the gang anymore," he mumbles then. "If you want to get out, you can and no one'll bother you."

She bites her lip. "Okay," she agrees, though she hates to even be speaking of what will happen after he is dead. "I . . . I don't really know that I want to stick around when . . . when you won't be there," she finishes after a hesitation. She lays her head on his shoulder, feeling the life slipping from him. She despises it, and wishes more than anything that she could save him, but she knows she cannot. She is helpless to stop Death from lowering his glaive.

Again he is silent. He knows that he will not have the strength to speak once more. And so he remains there, pondering over his life, and her life, and how their lives have been entwined for the past few years. He thinks again of his childhood, and of how he had first been driven to crime when everyone had hated him so much. He had wanted to show them that he would not sit back and take their abuse---he would make something of himself. He wonders if it was worth it in the end. Now he is known as one of the most vicious killers in America. It was not a title he had set out to gain, though he cannot deny that he has enjoyed getting rid of the people who have plagued him. Perhaps, if he had been raised in a loving environment, he would have turned out much different. It is hard to say. But he does not want to think long about the what-ifs.

It's strange, he thinks to himself as a memory of meeting a student from a private school comes to his mind. He was ten then, the student around sixteen. It would have been just an ordinary encounter, if not for one thing---that person was the first to treat him as a human being and not a monster. In some way, there had been a bond between the two of them. They were both lonely, wanting understanding, and they had received it from each other. But after their meeting on the street, they never saw each other again. He thought about that boy now and then, wondering what had happened to him. What is his name again? He thinks, trying desperately to remember.

Then it comes to him. Antonio---it is Antonio. Coming to think of it, that is Tony's full name. He remembers having heard Tony's friend Marco address him by it once or twice, when Tony was still a police officer. Odd, that he has known two Antonios in his lifetime. Both had Brooklyn accents too. . . . He frowns slightly, wondering if it's at all possible that they are one and the same. But no. That is ridiculous. Why would he have met Tony so long in the past, when they were both little more than youths?

He feels her continuing presence as she kneels by him, holding him close and ignoring the fact that she is situated in the puddle of blood. It dawns on him that she is probably the only one who will sincerely mourn his passing. And even though he cannot comprehend why she loves him, he wonders if he knows what love is, after all. Perhaps, he muses, true love consists of being there for someone at all times, and to never stop caring, even if they seem most unlovable. He sighs softly, the darkness washing over him before he even quite realizes it.

She feels him go stiff. She herself freezes for a moment, pleading over and over for it to not be true. He has to be alright! He cannot be dead! But she knows he is. He is still, no longer breathing. When she checks for a pulse, there is nothing to be found.

And at last she begins to weep again. He is lost to her. If there is not an afterlife, then it is truly the end for him. And if there is an afterlife, then he will surely go to Hell. She holds his body close, longing for him to receive another chance. His blood runs over her hands, but she does not care. "I'm sorry," she chokes out. "I'm sorry, Baby Face, I know you don't want me to cry. . . . But I can't help it!"

Get Back, JoJo!