My time with Gav ended at the same hospital that I had picked him up at. He was transported there, along with pretty much everyone else at the gym that had slipped into unconsciousness after being set free from the mind control system. Just like Gav, the former horde of gym bros couldn’t remember a thing. It was a strange case of mass amnesia, the kind that, if it hadn’t been the result of a case ending, would definitely have been the beginning of one.

  I entered Gav’s hospital room. Lexa was there, keeping him company. She was still in a tracksuit, although notably one that didn’t have the Mars Gym logo or colors.

  “You’re Mr. Alvarez,” said Gavrillo.

  “Yessir,” I said, pulling a seat next to Lexa. “How you doing Gavrillo, feeling better?”

  He smiled. It was the kind of smile that hid a lot of pain. “I can’t walk anymore, but apparently I never could. Not without that green stuff Lexa told me about. She said I would’ve died if you hadn’t come around to help me, so uhm… thanks.” He had the same embarrassed look that he had on when we first met. As if almost to say .

  “I should be thanking you. Without you I wouldn't've been able to survive this either. I wish you could remember. Gavrillo, you were literally bulletproof.”

  “Bro, no way!” said Gavrillo. His smile could speak for itself. “Yo, Lexa, I was a superhero.”

  “I know, and I saw. I watched you kick meat head ass! Gav, you took out a whole horde of lunks all by yourself!”

  “Ha,” he let out, blushing, then suddenly sullen, looked at his left hand, and flexed it. “Hard to believe I would even try that now.”

  Gavrillo had withered since I’d last seen him. He was practically a different person. He was thinner for one, and shoerter for another. His massive biceps were gone, along with bulky shoulders. Beneath the covers of the hospital bed, it could be seen that his legs had seemingly atrophied to nothing. And yet. He was no less handsome for his deterioration. His eyes were still kind. The creases around his eyes said that if he could do more, he would do more. If only all it took was will.

  “You would,” I said. “Even if it was a snowball’s chance, you’d do it.”

  He smiled faintly. He liked what I had said, but didn’t really believe it.

  “I’m guessing you’re leaving soon, right?” he asked.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “As it happens I’m not,” I said, leaning back into my chair. “I suspect there are a couple more martians out there, and it’s my job to wrangle them up before they can restart their operation. While I do that, some of my people will be busy dismantling and studying the gym itself. The little green bastard let slip that it was a ship of some kind.”

  “Bro, no way!”

  “Way.”

  “Uhm…” let out Lexa. “Mr. Alvarez, who your people exactly? Or can you not say? Is it like a thing where if we found out you’d have to kill us?”

  “Christ!” I said. “No, no, nothing like that. We don’t go out of our way to advertise ourselves, but we aren’t monsters.” I pulled out a green business cart. It was a bright neon green. The color of a quetzal bird’s feathers. Written on the card was my name and number, with the title Written at the top, was the name of the company I worked for. It was Their face company anyhow. .

  “Whoa,” said Gavrillo, taking the card from Lexa after she was done looking at it. He examined the shining green of the card, and the gold lettering. “Hold on, Lexa told me you were a rep from a charity. Was that not true?”

  “Technically it was. The charity is real. If the source of your out of this world strength turned out to be benign, then we would have honestly tried to rehabilitate you. There’d be a file of you made, and we’d try to get you back to your normal life if it turned out you weren’t a danger to yourself and others. It just happened that we stumbled on an illegal martian pharmaceutical ring.”

  “I still cannot believe any of that happened,” said Lexa. “This whole time, my weirdo manager was an alien.”

  “There’s weird in every nook and cranny,” I said, getting up. Gavrillo tried handing me back my business card. “Keep it. Contact me if you ever run into anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Sure thing Nando,” he said, suddenly realizing he dropped a couple levels of formality with me. “It’s cool if I call you Nando right?”

  “Only if it's cool for me to call you Gav,” I said, returning the smile he was giving me.

  “Yeah, it is,” said Gav.

  I left the hospital, fully expecting to never see Gav or Lexa again. Though I had known Gav for only a few hours, and Lexa for even less than that, we had survived a deadly encounter of the third kind together, and survival builds quick attachments. They waited exactly a week to contact me. I thought they’d encountered another Martian, but they just wanted to hang out if I was still in the area, and I was.

  So in my time between tracking down the remaining Martians, and checking in with the dismantling of Mars Gym, I hung out with Gav and Lexa. It was a strangely normal period of my life. I wasn’t used to sleeping in the same bed every night, or having people I knew to talk to regularly. It was nice. I was privy to the tender beginnings of Gav and Lexa’s relationship. Their budding relationship inspired envy. They were cute together.

  After about a month of relative normalcy in my life, it was time to go. Mars Gym was dismantled and studied, and the runaway Martians were caught, totalling three in all. And again I thought I was saying goodbye to Gav and Lexa for good, but this time with a heavier heart. Before, we had been acquaintances. People who had bonded in a dire situation because it was demanded of us to trust each other for our survival. Now we were friends. Real friends.

  I never thought I’d see them again, but I did. However, that's a story for a different day.