Disclaimer: Don't own. Sorry, if I did I'd be living in better conditions.
This story will most likely end on a sad note. It's a one shot so I won't be keeping you all in suspense for weeks.
This is an experiment on my part. One of the tasks I enjoyed in my English course work two years ago was descriptive writing. We had to write a short story one using three paragraphs of speech and the rest had to be descriptive of an event. I wrote mine on the bus journey home, but then this idea struck me.
-Four Empty Hearts-
Ethan walked aimlessly most days now. After what happened he found himself going insane behind the walls of his latest home. Walking seemed to be the only thing keeping him sane.
It felt like he had been walking since it had happened. When those emotional eyes closed for the last time he had turned around and walked away with his hands in his hair only stopping when he was far enough away from the team to begin screaming. He screamed until he could scream no more and then he just knelt on the floor breathing hard.
It was the fact that they didn't know which one of them was to blame that kept him awake at night. Which one of them had pulled the trigger and killed another agent.
The mission they were on was simple. An old relic had been stolen from a rich bureaucrat who pulled enough strings to get IMF's involved. Their mission which those to accept was to retrieve said relic from an empty house in the middle of the night.
Thinking back now it was too simple. Too easy of a task that something had to gone wrong.
That day it had been raining. Thunder was looming in the sky above them.
They should have turned back. He should have turned the car around and headed back in the direction they had come in. But he didn't.
Instead he had made one of the worst decisions of his life. He parked the car a few feet away from the building they would be entering and got themselves ready to enter.
He was out of the car first and already heading towards the building, Jane was behind him with Brandt and Benji just behind her.
They had gotten a few feet away from the door when the bullet hit the ground by his feet.
Jane didn't like to show her tears. She had been the same since she was a child. She hadn't cried at her father's funeral or her mother's she had kept her tears for when she was alone. When no one was around to see them descend from her eyes.
But as she looked down at the tear stained page she didn't care who walked through the door and saw her this way.
Over the past two weeks this is all she had been able to bear. All she was able to do was sit in silence waiting for a verdict. She had tried to move on like she had when Hanaway had been killed but she couldn't. Not this time, not after what happened.
She had looked at this page enough times to know by heart the measurements of the corner to the image, the print size, and the difference in height between the capital and lowercase letters.
Scrapbooking may be considered a wasted past time but as a child it calmed her. The images in this book where the only ones she had left.
Images of her as a child with her family, images of her and the few teams she had worked with, images of her and Hanaway, images of her and her boys.
She very nearly lost them all in a fire that consumed her home a year ago. But he had rescued the tattered book from the wreckage and created this new book for her from the remains.
The cover was whiter than snow, her name was printed on in rose red lettering, and below that was a hand written cartoon of herself. What touched her most was the message on the inside page.
'Here's to the good memories, B.'
She had thought the memories lost in the hungry flames of the fire but she hadn't counted on her friends warming heart.
The photo that was captivating her at this moment was one of her and the boys before what happened had happened.
They were all running for shelter, guns drawn and firing at the shooters in the distance.
She thought he was right behind her but he wasn't. She looked back quickly to see him stumbling back to his feet after a fall, something she would have done herself if she hadn't turned back around.
She was hiding behind the object that she almost fell over shooting at the figures in the dark as Ethan nearby did the same.
Three of them fired their guns at the same time and one of them fell. That was the last bullet to be fired.
Brandt swallowed the intoxicating liquor and slammed the empty glass on the table. Grabbing the bottle in front of him he poured more of the burning Scotch into the glass. He repeated this action over and over each night until he found he was able to sleep without the nightmares.
Normally he would be doing something to occupy his mind, to get him to think about something other than what haunted his slumber, but recently he found nothing would work to take the images away.
This repeated notion of drinking a quarter of a bottle of Scotch had become a habit of late. A habit he wished he could break before it broke him.
The nightmares themselves were only ghosts haunting him with 'what ifs?'
What if he had been the one to fall, would he have died instead? What if he had never become part of the team? What if he had done his job and protected people?
What if he hadn't of taken that stupid shot, would Benji still be alive?
He was the one to reach the prone body first. At that point he was still alive. He lifted him into his arms, looking over the body for the wound responsible for the blood pooling on the ground beneath them.
A large hold was in the centre of his chest sucking in the air around it with each ragged breath Benji drew.
The blood had already seeped into his clothing. There was so much of this life giving source surrounding him. His hands left like they were gliding though water as they slipped on his friend's skin in his attempts to stop the bleeding wound.
Blood began to spill from the corners of Benji's lips as he tried to speak, but no words passed his lips.
Benji's eyes glazed over as they looked desperately into his. Then they slowly closed, slower than time itself seemed to move the once bright and cheerful eyes closed to the world for the last time.
He hadn't noticed Jane and Ethan walk up behind him. He didn't notice when Ethan dropped his gun and walked away. He didn't notice Jane fall to her knees beside him and hold on to Benji's hand.
All he noticed was his friend. How the blood had formed at the corner of his lips and slipped down his cheek,
The blood on his lips and cheek, his eyes closed and his head turned to the side.
He didn't know how an ambulance got there, he suspected Ethan called it, or how they managed to take Benji away from Jane's tight grip on his hand.
He just knew that no matter how hard they tried none of them would be the same again.
"Is there no other way of finding out which one of them it was?"
"There's no doubt that one them was the shooter. The angle of the bullet proves that. But the bullet was too mangled to be identified. I'm sorry to say that there is no positive way for us to match the bullet to any of their weapons. We may never know which one of them killed Agent Dunn."
"Hunt, Carter, and Brandt. Three of the best now have to live not knowing which one of them killed Dunn."
-The End-
So there you have it, I hoped you liked it and that I didn't make too many of you cry.