Every nerve of his body screamed it out; that he shouldn't even be out there, that this was playing with something far more dangerous than fire. But something else had told him to come out here all the same, something that fluttered deep in the pits of his stomach and it refused to go unheard. But he had never expected that it would have been so much like home - all the destruction, the pain and the grief that was all around. And he'd never expected to see him, the Commander all of them learned to hate as soon as the children of the Underground learned the truth. And that truth was that there was a whole other world out there, where they didn't live below ground in tunnels nobody wanted anymore, where the sun shone unlike the flickering lights they had lived underneath all their lives, where there was food aplenty. In short, a world they could never have, where they didn't belong.
But some did. Stephen Mahoney was one of them, but that wasn't the name of the man who haunted every single second of his days and nights. Stephen Mahoney was the one who had walked the underground and had embraced it with both arms. In other words, he was okay. And the man tried to juggle both worlds in favor of the one below - which was the only reason Samir hadn't gone out and killed him just yet. But this man ... Samir reached out with both hands and pulled the man up, caring little whether it hurt. "How does it feel, Commander Randall L. Richardson?" Something tightened in his eyes and Samir fought it.
"Samir..." His grasp around the man's wrists tightened as the man moved his head. And Samir dutifully looked. "That's your sister ... Proud ... Alliance runner." Even in his anger, Samir heard it - all the mocking and laughter in every syllable the man uttered, but he smelled something different. And then he remembered. That he wasn't supposed to be here. And yet he looked until he found her. The dark curls he could call his own with his mother's eyes ... and a Runner outfit. But she was still alive. What he did next, was the dream of any Underground Citizen: he snapped his neck, let him fall like the trash he was and walked away.
Walked until he reached the woman, with the word Marcus, J. emblazoned across her shirt and with a gun in her hand. But even then, he saw recognition in her eyes as he knelt down and reached for her hand, to take the gun away from her ever weakening grasp, only to wipe her hair from her eyes. "It's okay. Just go to sleep. It's okay." One, two, three seconds before he had her in his arms. "Sing granddaddy's song." Samir shook his head and closed his eyes, but he began all the same.
"They say there's a place where dreams have all gone..."