A/N: This was inspired by "Why Soldiers Won't Talk," an essay by John Steinbeck on men in combat during World War II. All details of this fateful night are taken from Red's account to Madeline in 1x14 Madeline Pratt.
P.s.-I'm aware that this is mytharc holy ground, and I can only hope I do it justice. Finally, so much appreciation goes to the lovely Selinabln, who generously offered to beta this last-minute and convinced me someone would read it. Someone already has, Sel, and thanks for that.
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters or storylines of The Blacklist, just taking them out to play.
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His feet were numb by the time he reached the hill. He'd walked for hours, the dead weight of his limbs slamming into the frozen ground like a heartbeat, the snow crunching under his feet. The moon was full, casting a pale blue pallor against the downy snow and pushing back the shadows of birch trees and loaded juniper that threatened to swallow him as he walked. Every now and then a dry wind would shake those trees and they would rattle and crack in protest against the bitter cold.
He swayed a little under the burden of exhaustion and winter clothes as he crested the little knoll. He stopped for a moment to catch his breath, taking it in pale and blowing it out white. It had not been a bad walk, not really. No journey is long if the destination is worth it; he just hoped he would make it in time for Santa.
A few minutes more he labored. His face stung, his nose and the apples of his cheeks, but he would be there soon, and he could push his face over a bowl of oyster stew and defrost fairly quickly. The thought warmed him, and he quickened his pace. Secretly he allowed himself a little laugh. To run out of gas, how idiotic. How perfectly basic and dumb. He stopped once more and pressed his hands into his knees, kneading the screaming tendons there. He looked up and in the distance the winking lights in the warm windows of the modest Victorian house shone brightly, cutting through the blue night with the glow of hopefulness.
He smiled. He was home.
The previous fatigue in his limbs leached into the snow, and he was renewed by the immediate promise of his family, of his daughter's warm hands, tiny and perfect, as they clumsily fastened around his neck. She would kiss his cheek; if there was a hint of stubble there (which there would be at this late hour), she would complain that his beard was scratchy. He was always clean-shaven just for her.
He was halfway up the drive when he felt it, the first tinglings of something from another life. Something inexplicable in this moment, ephemeral but unmistakable. A cold fist settled low in his gut, reaching up into his chest, icing his heart and further still where it stopped, cold fingers around his trachea, cutting off his air. It gave him pause, and the realization of what it was threatened to break him. His mouth went dry.
It had been a long time, years since he'd felt the presence of death.
He ran, legs pumping, straining against the cold; he strained against fear, against the distance, his enemy for these long hours. He slowed as he reached the front yard, and his hands began to tremble. There was a stillness, an unnatural quiet that chilled him more than the cold beneath his clothes. It was Christmas. The air should be filled with music, yet he heard not a note of laughter, not a lark in the trees.
As he walked the short path to the porch, he passed his daughter's red wagon. It was covered in snow.
The door was ajar. He remembered that. He remembered the sliver of butter-warm light that rimmed the threshold as he saw his hand go out. As he saw himself standing at the door of his house as his hand went out to grasp the door knob. He saw these things removed from himself, and suddenly it was if there were two of him. The old man and the new.
His feet were caked in snow as they met the polished hardwood of his cozy home. He should take his boots off, he thought hysterically, to avoid a mess. His daughter could slip, after all, and he wouldn't want her injured, least of all on Christmas.
There was blood.
He looked down at the melting snow on his boots, at the standing puddle of cool water he had tracked in at the door. He watched as the polish on the floor quivered like the skin on the back of a restless animal. It crawled along the woodgrain, and his vision blurred. He blinked, clearing the perspiration that stung his eyes, and when he opened them again the polish was red. It was red and had sponged into the snow on his boots, making the snow red, too. For a yawning moment he looked at it, trying to reconcile somewhere along the synaptic pathways of his brain just exactly what his eyes refused to unsee, what he stubbornly refused to believe.
There was blood.
Blood along the walls, dripping like wet paint, already tacky. Blood in the floor of the great room, a crimson Rorschach.
Numbly he staggered through the tragic battlefield of his home, etherized and unfeeling, pushed along by the eddying current of chaos and death and the need to find them.
Them.
He remembered then. His wife and daughter. They were here. This was their house, their home. Together.
He rushed into the corridor and was met by a river of blood. He grimaced, wrinkling his nose against the warm, sticky smell of iron and salt as the meager contents of his stomach swelled. Practiced eyes searched the room, darting to each corner and then settling on the center.
He found her first, spread against the rug in front of the smoldering fireplace just to the left of their Christmas tree.
The long, dark hair of his wife fanned out beside her, the black wings of a flightless bird. She was face down in a puddle of blood, her arms stretched and rigid in front of her as if reaching to another room. One chalk-white leg was bent against an oversized box wrapped in bright metallic paper, half-hidden under an evergreen bough.
His hand went out to her still form, and he watched his fingers as they somehow obeyed the command to open against the hollow of her throat. A small part of him knew this was a futile action, knew it more when the two fingers of that hand slid inside a gash in his wife's neck, colliding with muscle and sinew. He gasped. He drew them out cold and covered with gore.
The hand moved her then, gingerly, and he watched the new man do these things from the safety of the porch. He turned her stiffly as the water ran down his face-perspiration, tears, melted snow, and blood, they were all the same now because he felt none of them, could no longer see past the next half breath, the next cruel moment of life.
When she was finally on her back, he could not see her face. The soft features of his loving wife, her full lips and gentle eyes were gone. There was only smooth whiteness, a smudge of color and pale brush stroke on a red canvas-an Impressionists' rendering of the woman he loved.
Shaking, he fell back on his knees. He looked about him. A thundering in his ears presented itself, a resonant hum and a piercing ringing. He shut his ears against it but it persisted. The unnatural quiet of the house roared in his fevered mind, assaulting his senses and threatening to tear him in two.
On the legs of a foal he staggered upward, leaving his wife there sprawled on the floor under their Christmas tree. And then, that icy hand around his throat began to thaw. Warmth returned to his vocal chords and with a broken scream, a deafening sound of pure and blinding pain, he shattered the silence of the house of death.
He called her name. His daughter. He screamed her name.
She was hiding upstairs, he knew. He knew it with everything he had. She had lived...a piece of his wife, a testament to their love. His daughter had lived.
Desperate thoughts erupted, and he pushed them down with comforting reassurances. He had trained her well, his little girl. If there was ever trouble, she was to hide. His work was dangerous. He had planned. She knew what to do.
But the thought gave him no comfort as he bounded up the stairs, heart racing, blood and sweat and tears and melted snow still running down his face. Pain, guilt, and fear running jagged lines through his veins, pulsing little electrical storms in his tormented mind and pushing him through the fog, the cotton-wrapped anesthesia of utter shock.
On toward action, activity. The new man must move.
He looked inside the crawl space, the laundry room, her favorite hiding place. He looked under the beds. Besides the carnage he had tracked upstairs, the second floor of their home appeared as he had left it. Lived-in and comfortable. Welcoming.
From somewhere above him, he saw himself turn. With leaden feet he made his way downstairs, stopping at the landing in a sea of blood.
That's when he saw it. A shock of ringlet, dark blond and glinting in the mellow light of the room off from the kitchen. For one brief, peaceful moment he just looked at the little curl, the lock of spun gold fixed so gently, hanging there in the stillness just a foot from the floor. There was nothing wrong with that image, his daughter's hair. She had the same sandy blonde hair as her father. He could remember that and survive it all.
He thought of leaving, of preserving the last shred of his old self, the vestiges of a life shared with two other people, a life he would never live again. He thought of walking out with the sweet memory of his daughter's golden hair, and her warm hands, and the little fingers on his face.
Instead, he turned his body toward her, felt his feet move across the ruined floor until they reached the edge of the den, until the toes of his shoes perched at the precipice of the cream-colored carpet of the room that held his little girl.
She was hunched under the piano stool, her hands at her sides. She had hidden, after all.
The old man was across the yard now, standing outside the white gate with the weather-stripped paint he'd vowed to touch up last summer. He saw the new man from that great distance, standing before his daughter and looking down at the piano. The sheet music for "Jingle Bells" was still in its place. There was a recital that night and he'd missed it; if he closed his eyes he might hear her tinkling away at the keys.
He did not close his eyes. He looked down to the polished black surface of the piano stool, the same smooth black veneer that shone on the shoes of his dress uniform. His daughter's coffin.
Instead of removing the stool, he crouched beneath it. He could not see her face. The blood from the bullet wounds in her tiny chest had bloomed into the black velvet dress she wore; its crisp collar and green satin bow still stood stiffly as new clothes do. She was still dressed from the recital and would've wanted to show him how pretty she looked. With her head down, she looked almost asleep.
He saw his hand go out and brush the golden lock. She did not stir. His hands on her cool forehead told him she would not, and that the little face would never press against his, warm and loving, and complain about her daddy's beard.
The little curl he disturbed swung in midair from where a flax-colored curtain of the same cascaded over her knees, silken and beautiful. Its momentum was reflected in her crossed feet, the paten leather shoes. The same as his. He pressed the dimpled hand lying lax on the carpet. It was now cool and lifeless, and he sought to warm it with his palm.
He stopped living then.
He stood up slowly in that house of death, threw his head back, and screamed.
When he was finished, when he was rung out and halfway to the knoll and running steadily away from there he stopped; he turned. He saw himself collapse, saw himself drop to his knees beside the little girl and reach for his service revolver.
The cold steel pressed into his temple. He cocked the gun, heard the comforting mechanical click of a bullet settling in the chamber. He exhaled, intent to pull on the breath, but in the seconds before his death life sparked anew. But not life. Some semblance of life. Purpose. It was almost as if the gun had pressed a thought into his head-a single will. That word rooted itself in the core of his being and, feeding on the wellspring of his despair, began to flourish.
Avenge.
The single thought, the only one he could manage, blinked like a neon sign onto the pupil of his waking mind. He would avenge their deaths, inflict a portion of his pain. Yes. The people who did this, the entities, the principalities; he would take them down with the brute force of his pain.
Slowly, he lowered the revolver. It would always be there, he thought. If his quest turned fruitless, it was an option. Tonight, it wasn't. Tonight, there was work to be done.
He stood, feeling strengthened, empowered by his own sense of purpose. He swallowed the blackness and let it soothe the open wounds.
He watched himself stagger away into the cold, empty night, the gun still cocked and swinging from his bloody hand. He was a new man fueled by rage and pain and with a growing maw where his soul should be.
He watched. He waited. And when he saw the new man disappear over the crest of the hill, he slipped back down the road and into that house to dwell among the horrors there. He kept the memories (at least the bad ones) but left the new man with just enough to feed his purpose. The new man's reason for living.
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I appreciate your comments, every one. Since this is not my usual, I would love your thoughts on this, especially. Please take a moment to let me know what you think :).