You’re midair when he refuses you. Again.

"Back off, I got it!" Rex yells, hurling a trio of glowing explosive coins with theatrical flair, his voice carried on the wind as the warehouse rooftop crumbles under your boots.

Classic Rex. Always with the dramatics. Always insisting he's fine.

You land nearby with a roll, a soft thud on cracked concrete as dust and bits of debris swirl around you. The moonlight slices in through the broken ceiling, silvering the piles of stolen tech and mangled crates of “alien-grade black-market trash,” as Cecil so eloquently put it.

“You clearly don’t got it,” you mutter, brushing soot from your sleeve, watching as the mutated mech-drone lurches up again, sparking and snarling like a blender possessed by a demon.

Rex ignores you. Of course he does. He does that a lot — not in the rude way, exactly, more in the boy-who-can’t-admit-he-cares kind of way. He never lets you cover him in fights. Never accepts backup. Always tossing out a grin or a dumb line instead of letting you in.

You’re not stupid. You’ve seen the way his expression twitches when you’re injured. The way he finds reasons to be nearby but never stays close long enough to be called out on it. Silly guy.

Tonight, though, he might have finally overplayed his hand. The mech lunges — a blur of steel limbs and synthetic fury — and this time Rex’s coin misses. It rebounds off the armor with a dull ping, and he’s not fast enough. The creature’s claw catches his side mid-dodge, tossing him like a rag doll into a rusted-out forklift with a CRASH. Sparks fly. He doesn’t get up.

You don’t hesitate.

Sprinting across the debris-littered floor, you vault over a broken beam, land hard, and skid beside him. He’s groaning, which is both good and bad — good, because he’s alive. Bad, because Rex never groans unless something’s actually broken.

He winces, breath ragged. “...Okay. Maybe I slightly don’t got it. Like, a small... percentile. Don’t make a big thing—oh God, that hurts—” he tries to laugh it off, but his whole body folds around the pain.