FOR THE BENEFIT OF ONE SCALY BASTARD

HERE IS THE STORY OF HOW GLOW AND SIL MET.
Or at least the basic outline, since the whole thing would be a story in itself and I don't have time to write it all out now.
(Also I heard that song Candy Shop by Andrew Bird's whateveritis and I really liked it, but can't find it on Youtube to download. So. If you have a torrent would you be willing to share?)
The story of Sil and Glow meeting begins with Sil getting herself into serious trouble. Go figure.
At this point in Sil's life getting herself in trouble and getting outright arrested is a pretty frequent occurrence, generally for minor infractions, and she pretty much always gets bailed out by her dad, who is too valuable to his company to fire for bad publicity, so instead they spring his kid when she does something embarrassing. And take it out of his paycheck. Which he isn't happy about.
He finally gets not overly happy about it to the extent that he and Sil's many fights get physical. He's still in denial about Sil being masc--he's convinced she's just some kind of confused dyke and wishes she'd just admit her sexuality already instead of bringing home similarly confused "gay" boys--so when he starts hitting her he doesn't have the foresight to expect her to hit back. Which she does. Hitting eventually escalates to outright fistfights, which Sil doesn't win because she feels bad about beating up her dad, and he doesn't win either because she puts up enough of a fight that he can't. She's been involved with a gang for some time now already, having gone to Duke and her gals for cheap street steroids that mascs in the lower, poorer levels will resort to, as opposed to the preferable, safer muscle enhancement surgery. She's been on the steroids a little over a year now, and her dad isn't exactly muscular himself, so she's very capable of holding her own against him.
One night after this has been going on for some months, Sil's dad's work buddies convince him to go out drinking with them. He can hold his liquor well enough, but he's a stupid, violent drunk. He owns a gun, because everyone owns a gun on the lower levels unless they're idiots. He takes it out and starts brandishing it at Sil. She tries to knock it away from him without him accidentally setting it off in her face, and is unsuccessful, in the sense it DOES go off accidentally. Sil's dad has his hand over the barrel to get a superior grip while she's trying to get it away from him, and one of his fingers gets shot off.
So Sil moves out. Duke puts her up in one of the buildings they regularly rent, paying the owner by not beating the crap out of them. Sil's not great at stealing cars, which is the gang's secondary source of revenue, but she's a pretty good mechanic, which makes her a valuable asset to their primary source of revenue, which is street racing. They make good money off bets on the races, and even better money off the cars they win when they race for keeps. When Sil shows a love for racing, Duke starts training her up and letting her race for small fry.
Small fry races are risky, almost riskier than big time races. The cars are lower quality, the crowd is less of people who love the game and more people who just want to make some easy money, which makes them less reliable and more likely to name faces if they get caught, and small fry races are held on "raw ground". Raw ground is the term for streets that aren't usually raced on--they're usually any less-traveled street that a couple gangs can grab and barricade in a short amount of time. The people who frequent and live on the street are considerably less likely to be under influence of the gang in that area, which means they're bolder with talking to the cops. Raw ground is also used once or twice for a race and then never again, which means people don't know the area as well, making getaway routes harder to plan. And as the people of the area are less influenced by gangs, they're quicker to call the cops. Raw ground races and their gatherings can only last for minutes at a time. They're planned and marked a week or so in advance, which would ideally give anyone who's showing up time to drive through the area and map things out, but the problem being small fry is that you don't have connections yet and the people who plan the race or know about it are less likely to talk to you. So a small fry racer isn't going to know where things are until a day or so in advance.
Overall, cops show up faster, you can't rely on people to cover you, and you're more likely to get caught. Also, being small fry, you have no friends yet. No one is coming to bail you out. Your car is going to get impounded, and you're probably not going to be able to afford the fee to get it out. Meanwhile, cops are going over it, and (if you're the average small fry lower level racer) they're finding the illegal nitro installments, drug residue, and a dozen other "personal modifications" that don't quite meet dome safety requirements. All of these are additional charges to what you're already facing.
Since Sil is being sponsored by Duke, she gets to bypass some of these risks. She knows what's what as early as anyone and has time to memorize the area, modifying her ride doesn't break her bank, since Duke's investing in it too and gets a cut of the winnings, and since people know who she is, and who she's associated with, they're less likely to turn her in if they're caught lest Duke take a chunk out of their hide when they get out.
However, what Sil doesn't know yet is that if there's too much heat on her Duke isn't going to pull her ass out of the fire. She also has no intention of bailing Sil out. Raw ground races are usually broken up by cops from higher levels, who have the time and resources to go out after individual gangs that happen to piss them off. Duke does not want to be one of those gangs.
After a year or so of bringing in consistently more money with each race, Sil's about to move up to the big games, which she's more than excited about. And cocky about. This is a mistake. During her last small fry race, even after the alarm goes up that cops are breaking into the barricade, Sil punches the nitro, thinking that she can win the race and go back for the money later. She wins the race, but she won't be going back for the money.
The cops get on her tail and Sil can't shake them. If she'd saved her nitro and broken off and scattered like everyone else, she would have been able to punch it when she needed to and lose them in the alleys. She still makes for the alleys anyway, leading the cops on a merry chase, but ultimately hits a dead end when the tube she's riding is blocked off for maintenance. Sil pulls a suicidal move and punches the gas, ramming her car straight through the tube wall out into free air. Her car can't support itself without the magnelectric wiring the tubes supply, and falls. Sil doesn't manage to hit the escape latch before it slams into a building and crushes the mechanism, so she's stuck for a long fall down. She loses consciousness about halfway.

Glow and Fuschia find her amongst her battered wreck of what was once a very fast, very shiny car. Nowadays the insides of cars are pretty hardcore, and luckily she's not dead or even dying from any immediate organ damage. She's got several broken bones and some pretty bad gashes, not to mention she's unconscious and probably has a severe concussion, but she'll live.
If they decide to take her with them.
Glow gets very upset at Fuschia insisting they just leave her to die and salvage what they can of the car--which is what they do regularly to make money--to the point he starts doing what is a cyborg version of crying. Cyborgs can't actually cry, since they have no bodily fluids other than nitroglycerin, which only has router veins leading to the cooling mechanisms around their miniature cold-fusion energy generator that serves as a heart and provides their energy. They still have lungs to breathe with, but they aren't actually breathing--their lungs provide a sort of...massaging movement? that keeps the nitro moving and constantly circulating their "heart" to keep it from overheating and exploding. They draw air in and out, but it doesn't actually do anything and it's oxygen coming out as well as going in.
Anyway. Crying. Instead of tears, Glow just makes whimpering unhappy noises, sort of strangled noises that are his throat constricting in a human reaction to human emotions that can't actually produce tears. It's very sad, in the sense it's downright pathetic and a little disturbing. Fuschia hates it. (To be fair, Glow's had a rough month. His stutter's been acting up terribly, he has once again tried to get in touch with his family and been shut out, and, well...Glow's really just a tender soul. The idea of anyone dying in general upsets him, a trait that is further nourished by living in a community of cyborgs where people CAN'T die and don't even age unless they want to. The harsh cruelty of letting someone real and bloody and broken into bits dying right there in front of him is just too much for him to handle.)
So Fuschia caves, and they end up hauling Sil back to the Bowels under the Burnouts, as gently as Glow can manage. There are a couple doctors among the large cyborg community, and one of them helps patch Sil up pretty well with the help of some medical nanos. Sil finally wakes up a couple days later, badly weakened by hunger and thirst--IV drips are not really available to cyborgs, along with most human hospital supplies. They manage to get her some water by taking ice down from the Burnouts and melting it by exposing it to a cyborg's cold fusion core. Food is a bit harder, and Sil passes out briefly during the few hours it takes them to buy some food from human areas. Glow hovers over her and does his best to take care of her.
Fuschia wants nothing to do with the human, and most borgs share her side on the matter, so Sil's left alone except for Glow and the doctor. Glow feels bad that she's all by herself when the doctor isn't there, so he has her moved into his little workshop area to keep an eye on her for the doctor. For the first few days, Sil can't do much of anything other than eat and drink(and piss, Glow manages to rig up a makeshift toilet for her), which means she can't talk much, other than to ask for food or water or help getting up and taking a piss(something truly humiliating for her, which gets her Glow's sympathies). Glow gets to feeling kind of safe around her, so it's easier for him to talk to her when she starts being able to talk again.
Sil asks about what happened and how she got there and why, and Glow explains as best he can. Sil's allowed to stay until she's pretty much fully recovered, but then the cyborgs pretty much run her out of town.
Sil gets back in touch with Duke. She's demoted back to mechanic duty for totally destroying the car she had, though Duke is willing to give her a second chance if she shows she's worth one. In the meantime, Sil has to put up with being mechanic for another small fry racer Duke's sponsoring, who's basically her replacement.
A few weeks pass, and Sil ends up running into Glow at one of the small fry races--Fuschia's hiring him out as a mechanic for people who need repairs or quick tune-ups before they get going. Glow doesn't have to do much talking, he just listens to people telling him what needs what and he gets it done. Sil manages to chat with him a little before the race starts.
It's one of the few that the cops don't find to break up, so people hang around a little while afterward. The car Glow worked on ended up being one of the losers, and the racer blames him for screwing up his ride. He gets in Glow's face, pushing him around, and Fuschia's nowhere to be seen. Sil sees what's going on and steps in, earning herself a few bruises and dealing out a few fractures in return. The hothead goes to cool off and Sil ushers Glow away from the street. He's obviously very badly shaken up. Having deeply rooted social insecurities is bad enough when he has to work among hundreds of people on a race ground, someone he doesn't even know yelling at him and physically roughing him up is pretty shattering to his daily quota of tolerance. Sil does her best to make him feel safe, not even trying to talk to him other than to ascertain he's alright and not hurt. She just walks around with him until he calms down, then guides him back to Fuschia, who as it turns out had been on the other end of the street collecting on a bet. Fuschia warms up a bit to Sil after hearing how she stepped in to defend Glow.
Later on Sil convinces Fuschia that Glow signing on to be Duke's mechanic is the best way to protect him on the track and get them to bigger tracks and bigger money. Glow's not too happy about getting involved with a gang, but he's starting to really like Sil at this point and Fuschia manages to push him into it.
Over the next few years, Glow and Sil get closer, then get together, and after that until Dollface their relationship is on and off. Their main recurring argument is Sil's involvement in the gang. After a nighttime shootout at a race, Glow got scared out of it completely and was scared for Sil too, who was far more perishable than he. He tried to convince her to leave Duke's gang, but Sil was too close to having another shot at real racing and told him she was going to race until they had enough money to get out of the lower levels. But when she had that money, Duke came to her with an offer to open a mechanic's shop and run some of the gang's operations through it. Duke could tell Sil was thinking of leaving and, knowing Sil was a smart woman who could get out if she tried, pitched the offer at her to convince her to stay. It worked. Sil ended up staying in the gang, if in a less active capacity, and lied to Glow about it, saying she'd left and she needed some time to get more funds together to open her own business. It wouldn't be in higher levels, which he wasn't happy about, but he agreed to it and they got back together.
Sil did her best to keep the gang's activity in her mechanic's hidden from Glow, but a year later he found out about it when he found her other set of books(this is why Sil now keeps books in paper instead of electronically, which Glow was able to easily hack). He broke up with her again and moved out back to the Burnouts. After a few months there Fuschia tried to convince him to get back into hiring himself at the races. Pissed off at her for it, since he considers it dangerous and also full of painful memories thanks to Sil, he drops off the grid for a while.
This freaks Sil out beyond measure. When he hears about her frantic search for him, he comes back out of solitude to assure her he's fine. She tries to talk him into getting back together, and he refuses. So instead she begs him not to disappear again, and he consents to that at least. He rents out an apartment near the mechanic's and Sil hires him on. It's very hard and painful for both of them for the first several months to be near each other and not be together, but Glow refuses to get back together until Sil leaves the gang. Things get easier when they settle into being friends-yet-also-boyfriend-and-girlfriend-on-break, and their manner relaxes and they can be at ease around each other.
This is roughly the situation when Julian enters their lives, though by that time Sil has managed to distance herself a bit more from the gang. Sil and Glow are just entering a bit of an off-period in their relationship, though it's not really like they were back on, it was more Sil managed to convince Glow to have sex with her again for a while before he got frustrated with her stance on the gang issue again. Sil finally tells Glow she's leaving the gang for real during Dollface after Sonny, the kid, gets caught in some crossfire and almost killed. By then, Duke has invested too much in Sil and isn't willing to let her get away alive, so Sil ends up having to outright kill Duke.
However, Sil has enough security and respect in the gang that she realizes she's in a position to actually take over.
So she does that instead of leaving the gang. She does this because she believes that having enough power will keep her and Glow safe, so they won't have to move up to the lower levels and she won't have to leave everyone and everything behind.
Glow absolutely loses it. He packs his stuff and walks out the same day, dropping off the grid completely.
Sil actually killing Duke and Glow leaving happens between books. I'm not sure how it leaves off with Sil in Dollface, either just saying she's going to do whatever it takes to leave or actually loading a gun and walking out the door, but that's about where it'll end. Sometime in the next book Glow is still vanished when Sonny manages to track him down through Lyre, who's still in contact with Glow for her job's sake. He's modified some of his appearance, going from permanently sixteen to more in his early twenties, changing his freckles to something more extreme, like leopard spots or something, and changing his skin colour to outright black(or white, I haven't decided.) Though he has kept his glowdreads, and neon green is still his favourite colour. Sonny talks to him about a job offer for Sil.
By the end of the second book, Sil has grown good and tired of being gang boss(this is about five years later)now that Glow, her reason for taking the position in the first place, is no longer around. Sonny, who's moved up the levels quite a bit and has a secure job in a video game firm, has a good friend she met in college who's dropped out of the fashion scene to open a club. This friend needs a couple good, scary-looking bouncers who have the experience in being tough to back up the appearance.
It pays good by law-abiding citizen standards, but it's honest money and it isn't half of what Sil's gang makes. It's humble work. But Glow has promised to come out of shadows and give her another chance if she leaves the gang behind, once and for all, moves up the levels, and takes the job.
She takes the job, and Glow stops by to see her after work after a couple weeks. He's older, and more mature, and he's better at taking care of himself. He doesn't stutter as much anymore, and he can talk to strangers without freezing up or shutting down. None of which Sil cares about. She's just incredibly happy to be near him again.
I'm not sure how big a part Glow plays in the second book. I'd like he and Sil to have equal importance, and actually interact with each other a couple times, but Glow still needs to maintain his cold shoulder and his distance.
I'll work it out.
I think I broke auto-save with the size of this post.