Author's Note: Hello, Shallow Grave fans! So...I'm back, with another story, which is also gifted to my dear friend Cobainlover4ever, as she provided the prompt: 'This has always made me ponder, the process that David goes through from the time he decides to be in on 'the plan,' and then when he's sitting at that fund raising dinner all alone at the table. He's watching Juliet dance with Alex, they are getting along very well...what would David be thinking, realizing? Would that be solidified when he finds them together after their spending spree?' I took the liberty of expanding the story idea from three chapters to five as I felt that there were a couple of other key 'moments' that contributed to our Mr. Stevens's 'journey' from tenuous sanity to abject madness and unwilling moral depravity, but...Bree, this is for you!
Disclaimer: I don't own Shallow Grave, though it'd be fun if I did. I also don't own Gone in 60 Seconds, but if anyone can find the line that I shamelessly stole from it, I'll give you the number to the flat, tell Alex that he should expect a call from his favorite sex line, and let you two get it going. ;)
"Good morning, Lumsden and Sons Accounting. How may I help you?"
Leigh Oliver's soft, mewling voice, just barely audible beyond the span of his neat desk, was little more than a feather-brush of sound that carefully stroked the gaping wound that the ringing of his telephone had torn in the library's oppressive silence- a silence so heavy as to be nearly tangible. A funereal thing, it was: lifeless, listless, dully torpid, yet living and breathing still, adamant in its desire to let no noise louder than a whisper permeate the fragile glass of its tender flesh.
Normally David didn't mind the silence- really, its ghostly presence was actually quite soothing when compared to the exuberantly obnoxious inanity of Alex's morning prattle- but today, something about it seemed to set every nerve in his body on edge. There was a strange tension in the air, a sort of charged prickling not unlike the fretful dance of electrified atmospheric particles that preceded a storm, that pervaded the stale air of the library so strongly that he could practically smell it. Certainly he could see it: a swarm of tiny, shivering snake-squiggles of an icy grey-blue darting about his field of vision, hissing and crackling in a language known only to the visions conjured up by his subconscious. A warning, he couldn't help but think, or perhaps a reminder...but of what? From those warped syllables he could derive no meaning, and wasn't that just bloody typical. Too dense to ever understand what even his own mind was telling him half the time, wasn't that what Dad had always said?
X X X
Frustrated, he heaved out a noiseless breath that sank through his body as though it bore the weight of all his irritation and disgusted bemusement, and lifted his eyes to the curly-headed figure of Leigh, still mumbling away into the phone. Even the numbers in his file had ceased to make sense to him by then, swimming and blurring dizzyingly before eyes that burned with strain and boredom...and for the numbers, with their typically ubiquitous power to reassure and restore, to fail him so completely, so unprecedentedly...that terrified him, more than anything he'd ever known before ever had. The numbers were (had always been) the one thing upon which he could depend for security, because in this mad world in which nothing lived longer than a second past its moment of usefulness, they were always there- never changing, always creating the same patterns and outputs. Cold. Logical. Sensible. Why, then, did that same comfortable constancy now abhor him so much that he could barely bear to even look upon its figures?
...Because it's so bleeding BORING, innit? The thought came to him suddenly, Alex's smooth voice ringing out clear as day against the muffled-cotton disjunction of his own befuddled musings. It wasn't a conclusion he would ever have reached on his own, but...the more he pondered it, the more he began to see a kernel of truth within it. The numbers and ledgers and calculations might've been calm and safe, but there was no pleasure to be taken from something that remained, day in, day out, precisely the same. Even Lumsden himself had pointed that out, hadn't he? Yes, maybe sometimes we're a wee bit boring...what had he meant? Had he meant him, David? Or had he meant the lot of them- the merry band of chartered drudgery, naught but shuffling moles locked forever into tunnels of wearying banality?
X X X
Neither idea was particularly appealing. As he cast his gaze about the room once more, taking in the seated rows of the suited, the vested, and the bespectacled, the endless shelves of musty old books and the endless bent heads of musty old men, and the deafening silence in the library, he felt the familiar claustrophobia rise up within him, a fear that he hadn't felt since he and the others had first burst in on Hugo's naked corpse- an overwhelming, choking feeling of walls closing in, of breath stilling and heart racing and Christ-please-I'm-trapped-let-me-out-let-me-the-fuck-out….
No more! he wanted to scream, and squeezed his faltering eyes shut, and when he opened them again Juliet was there, sitting calmly in front of his desk like she'd been there for hours, oblivious to his private struggle. He hadn't heard her come in, hadn't even been alerted of her approach, but she was there, her blue eyes shining cat-like in a sedate pale face adorned with the subtle little smirk he knew all too well. Come with me, it seemed to whisper, and suddenly those eyes were mirrors, reflecting back to him all of the thoughts, all of the desires, that he'd travailed to keep hidden from even himself for fear of confronting the shame of them.
Take the money. Hugo's dead; he can't care about it anymore, and no one even knows where it's got to! Go along; the others want it, right, and you're the only thing standing in their way. Don't they already hate you enough? Boring old David? Stick-in-the-mud David? Poker-up-the-arse David? Isn't that what they think? Is that what you want?
David blinked, twitched. Juliet just stared, silently, invitingly, the mirrors of her eyes a beckoning Lorelei to his uneasy conscience. Maybe she wasn't really there. Maybe his fevered mind, in abject desperation for some sort of justification, or approval, had put her there. Maybe she wasn't there...but she was enough.
"Let's do it."
Well, I'm not particularly satisfied with this latest set of ramblings (then again, when am I ever satisfied?), but...here it is.
I didn't create the character of 'Leigh Oliver;' he's that curly-headed fellow whose phone was ringing in this scene in the accounting library. He wasn't given a name in the script (or in the film credits), so I took the liberty of inventing one. That being said, I actually have no idea what he said when answering the phone. No matter how high I turned the volume, I could only ever make out 'good morning,' 'Lumsden,' and 'how can I help you,' so...I may have misquoted him. Sue me.
I'd love to know your thoughts, be they good or bad! Stay tuned for Chapter 2!