"Character Study" on the cliche bingo sheet, written in a five times format (though I only got to four, so, four times format). Suicide discussion towards the end.

Four Times Reaper Cursed the C24

1.
He counts time by the emerging grey in his sister's hair. He can trace where the wrinkles will set in on Sam's face, where she's started losing elasticity in her skin and it drives him fucking nuts.

"I don't think your eyesight is that superior," Sam says one night, when the tips of his fingers trail the lines that will bracket her mouth. Careful, careful, careful, he doesn't want to bruise her.

She's so easy to break.

The skin is already starting to sag, droop, and John just drops his hand. "You're probably right," he says.

"I usually am," Sam says. She folds her hand over his and squeezes before going back to her work. "It comes from being the oldest."

"Two minutes, Samantha."

"It's enough, John."

He doesn't mention them again.

2.
"John, it's alright," she says.

John curls his fingers into his palms and tucks them into his armpits. Fuck if it was alright. "I hurt you," he says.

She smiles around her busted lip like that's supposed to make him feel better, like he can't see the bruising around her eye and her throat. "You were having a nightmare," Sam says, "I should have known better than to wake you up like that."

"Don't do it again." He fucking could have snapped her neck if he'd hit her just a little bit harder, and she can't heal from that, she isn't superhuman.

It's dark enough that she's gotta be mostly blind in the room, but she still manages to meet his eyes. "I'm not going to just sit in the other room while you scream, John," she says.

That's his Samantha, so brave and so stupid and she's going to be so fucking dead if she tries this again. He'd woken up in time, stopped himself before he'd done more than brush aside the annoyance, but if he'd been more asleep or more awake, she'd be dead.

"Yeah you are," he tells her, "Or else I'm gonna leave."

"You're threatening me?"

It sounds ludicrous. They'd lived without each other for over ten years, once, but now the thought of being out there, in the world without Sam at his side is enough to make him want to curl up in a ball and die.

Can't do that, of course, because he heals too fast for normal suicides and he's not sure how he feels about letting someone chop his head off.

John digs his fingernails into his skin hard enough to feel his palm slice open and heal up again around the obstructions. "It's not a threat, Samantha. It's a promise."

"Of all the bullheaded stoic Marine shit to--" Sam breathes out harshly. She shoves herself to her feet; John watches to make sure she's steady, resolutely keeping his hands to himself. "Fine," she says, "Fine, John. Next time I hear you screaming for me, I'll just go and eat ice cream, how about that? Ignore you?"

"Fine by me."

3.
"I'd appreciate a new rule," John says as he sits beside Sam at the table. There's a bottle of shitty whiskey in his hand, which he refuses to feel guilty for even if Sam's sending him mildly reproving looks.

"What's the rule?" Sam asks.

"If you don't want me to kill your boytoys, fuck them outside of the house."

Sam looks at him over her glass and raises one eyebrow. Her boyfriend chokes on his eggs. "I don't think that's for you to decide," Sam says. The amusement in her voice is enough to grate on John's ears.

He's tired. "Your boyfriend called out for Shirley last night when he came, though judging from the fact that he still has his balls, I don't think you heard it," John says bluntly. "You told him that you were going to ride him until his dick felt like it was gonna fall off."

He wanted to know if anyone could sleep through their sister having sex what sounded like a foot away from him. John knows what she sounds like when she climaxes now, and he hopes to God he can drink enough booze to make that memory disappear.

"Oh," Sam says, blinking a few times. "I forgot about..." she makes a hand motion that could mean hearing or it could mean that she forgot he couldn't drink coffee in the morning anymore.

The taste was too strong.

"Yeah," John says. He takes a slug off his bottle, winces horrifically at the taste. Goddamn enhanced senses, and sorry, Goat, for taking the Lord's name, but Goddamn, he misses being able to drink without everything tasting like turpentine "Hence, the rule."

He slits a glare at the boyfriend. Fucker. He's lucky John doesn't rip his fucking head off for cheating on his sister.

Sam's mouth quirks like she can hear him. "You can leave, by the way," she tells her boyfriend, "I don't even want to know who Shirley is."

4.
Sometimes he still rolls over in the middle of the night expecting to hear seven people breathing. There's no Goat mumbling about sins in his sleep, or Portman fucking his mattress while dreamily murmuring about tits and he misses it.

Instead he can hear crickets fucking miles away and the sound of the highway even though it's ten minutes by car, and he can hear Samantha making little hurt whimpering noises in her sleep.

"If I can't go into your room," she'd said, arms crossed and chin tilted, "Than you're not coming in here to wake me up either. We can both suffer."

Putting a pillow over his head does nothing to muffle the sound. Nothing does anything to muffle the sound, which is why he lives in the fucking middle of nowhere with nobody but his sister.

"Go to sleep, Samantha," he whispers to the wall.

But she wasn't injected with the C24 and no matter how loud his voice sounded to him, she can't hear him.

And the one time he's grateful for it.

"There's blood in the bathroom," Samantha says.

She's standing over him when he opens his eyes, but that's not really any kind of surprise. He'd heard her car fifteen miles away, heard the way her throat had closed on a gasp in the bathroom for all that she's playing it cool now.

"It's no big deal," he tells her.

Her mouth flattens. "Are you trying to--"

"Kill myself?" John interrupts. He pushes himself into a sitting position and plants his elbows on his thighs. "We both know I can't do that, Sam."

Sam breathes in sharply. "Lucy died, John. The entire civilization died, superhuman or not. You're not invincible."

"No, it just takes more than the average person can dish out." He'd gone toe to toe with a mutated monster and lived.

"If you're going to be melodramatic and suicidal, I'm going to drug you," she warns. "I don't want to scrub your blood out of anything, 'Reaper', and you've always been messy."

Which is funny, because he'd been neat today. "It was in the bathtub," he says, darkly amused, "Clean up doesn't get much easier than that."

She reaches out like she wants to hit him and remembers at the last second that it would hurt her a lot more than it would ever hurt him. Instead, her hands grab his own, her longer nails scraping against his knuckles.

Her eyes are extremely dark when she looks at him. "If you're going to kill yourself, John, I'd appreciate an advance warning."

"It wasn't about that," John says, and it wasn't. It was about limits. He knows how much blood he can lose without passing out, now (enough to fill the bathtub twice, and he doesn't even want to think about the cellular activity that corresponds with), and he knows just how much it takes to keep a wound open.

Granted, it's not all that useful today, but if someone ever fucking comes after Samantha, he knows how far he can push this new body before it buckles. That's going to be worthwhile.

He's going to make it worthwhile.

"I won't do it again," he tells her.

Sam's fingernails dig into his skin and then abruptly she sags against him, her head on his shoulder. John tentatively puts an arm around her waist to keep her from falling.

"You can't leave me alone with this, John," she says. He realizes she's crying. "Stay with me."

"I will," he says, and he fucking means it. There's nothing on this goddamn planet or fucking Mars that's going to make him leave her, and anything that tries is gonna get a pissed off superhuman on their ass. "I'll stay."