There they all are, just as you left them.

There they all are, just as you left them.

Happy birthday, me.

No banner with your name, no funny hats, no cake. A cluster of faces packed into a corner booth of the Fogged Mirror, each familiar to you but not to each other.

Your human situation.

It hurts to look at them all again.

And yet in the photo all are smiling, oblivious.

There's Tempo. Off the drink and vocal about it, he's still the loudest and most aggressive person in the room on just a soda and lime.

Far left. A frame built for violence. Bulbous glistening skull shaved bare every morning.

I don't know if he managed to stay off the drink...

People like Tempo move through life telling themselves the devil is in the sauce, until they get off it -- only then do they realise it's inside them.

What else?

Next to you, Ramses is warm silence, nodding along, it's hard to tell whether to the music or to the conversation. Karolina stirs her drink, a gin drink like she imagined you would be drinking.

They didn't really talk, but she gravitated toward his presence like an animal to an abandoned building.

K...

Black bangs, a scarf her face always seemed about to disappear into. The openness of her smile betraying her youth.

Ramses smokes inside, indifferent to laws and customs. Karolina has actually gone and bought you a gift.

A pair of loafer pins, made to look like eyeballs.

She says they remind her of you.

Now they remind you of her.

You still have them, in fact. On your feet. Right now.

To your other side, Vespar keeps disappearing and reappearing with two small glasses of schnapps at once. The second one he calls his 'insurance policy'.

Against what?

Sobriety.

Leather jacket, moustache and military cut. A face that could fluctuate wildly between innocence and depravity depending on the setting.

Even though she's just arrived, Eszti looks ready to leave. That she's even come at all is a sign of respect.

Older than anyone else there by at least ten years. Small eyes in a smaller frame, looking out from her corner with cold intelligence.

Even now the sight of her brings up difficult feelings in you.

She and I never quite got on.

No one said you needed to 'get on', you just had to work together.

HOLOCENE arrives last, thinking it's only going to be the both of you. He goes pale when he sees your entire network, gathered in one place.

Your double. Together you assembled the crew from the ground up, but he never crossed professional boundaries the way you did.

He's appalled by your 'sentimental fallacy', and threatens to report you to your controller.

But he doesn't.

You know it's an empty threat. Even then his distrust of the Opera was already curdling into something darker.

Then someone offered to take our photo.

The last thing any network should think of.

And yet so many do -- the eternal and the doomed.

It was a lapse of temporary insanity.

A needless gesture, an unforced error, an utterly inexplicable fit of camaraderie.

Put the photo away.

It disappears back in your pocket.

It was a good time.

And somehow, despite everything that comes after, it feels good to let yourself remember.

I just thought it would be nice to have everyone together, just once.

A little memento against eternity.

Melita would've reamed me, but that's okay, I've been reamed before.

Compared to what comes later, this little gathering is almost excusable.

He was always paranoid. Smart, but paranoid.

Perhaps he sensed what was coming, or was already gleaning the patterns from its isolated dots.

She was committed, I give her that.

Let's be honest, I hated her guts.

And yet she performed her role with admirable consistency all the same.

He was an insurance policy. Meant to keep the carabineros off our tail.

Not that it made any difference in the end.

I liked him way too much, considering he was a cop.

He hated cops more than you ever could. Including himself.

But he isn't just a cop. He's a carabinero -- one of the investigative branch's best.

You still have them, in fact.

It was awkward, she didn't need to do that.

Completely unnecessary -- that's what makes the gift sincere.

Ramses...

Massive beard, prematurely greying. Eyes shot bloody if he were ever to take those reflective sunglasses off, even in the dead of night.

Keep looking.

Probably shouldn't have brought him to a bar.

Our enemies could've been moving against us at that very moment.

All those smiles, perched unknowingly at the edge of an abyss.

It's just an operant and her old assets.

That's certainly how you behaved when the chips were down.

Then why does everything hurt?

There was nothing special about that night. Everything looks meaningful when you look at it in retrospect.

At the very least, it was something that never occurred again.

And per the standards of stagecraft, should never have occurred in the first instance.

Put the photo away.

You hold the photograph in your hands. Beneath the smudges and creases, seven figures gather under dim barroom lights.

The Whole Sick Crew, together in person for one night only. In the centre, you, their lead and birthday girl.

It wasn't actually your birthday, you just said it was.

There we are.

There you are, together. Just once.

But for all they knew it might have been.

One more lie for the lie pile.

All I needed was an excuse.

I don't want to think about my birthday right now. (Put the photo away.)