...I can see through you, see your true colors, and inside you're ugly, you're ugly like me...

In perfect stillness, perfectly hidden by a three-foot tall bush, Barkley spies on his Fetch from its back yard, bitter lyrics rising unbidden to nibble and bite at Barkley's brain. He watches the construct kiss the woman he was going to marry on the cheek with both hate and disgust. He regards the stump of his left pinky toe, taken by the Tiger with Emerald Eyes to create this...this...well, Barkley's isn't good with words, and in the absence of a better description, he thinks of his Fetch as simply:

that motherfucker...

...he forces himself to breathe. He doesn't want to do something he'll regret. He watches Christina's face, and sees that she is, in fact, happy. My toe treats her well. Her...and the boy. Barkley moves to a different window, so that he can once again observe their five year old son, Wyatt, as he sleeps. The boy looks so much like him...how he used to look, how his Fetch looks now, and he stares at the child, as if his somewhere in the lad's face was the answer to the question burning in Sam since his return from Arcadia-

Are you my boy, or are you his?

Wyatt was born almost nine months to the day Sam was stolen by the Tiger while on assignment for Wildlife Magazine, what was to be his big break into professional nature photography. Instead, he spent the next two years running and hiding from all manner of unnatural, nightmarish predators in a Jungle where the trees were as likely to kill you as the beasts. Meanwhile, that motherfucker (thanks, Barkley, I've got it from here), Sam's Fetch went on, and got the photos, which won an award, and has been living Sam's life ever since. And, to add insult to injury, the Fetch's photos were good, dammit, at least as good as Sam's were.

...Barkley strode off into the night, determined to get good and stinkin' drunk before he returned to the Hollow. He was always in a bad mood after checking in on Mr. and Mrs. Sam Wesley, and the whiskey made it worse and better at the same time...