"I tear my heart open, I sew myself shut, my weakness is that I care too much. And our scars remind us that the past is real...
I tear my heart open just to feel".
-Scars by Papa Roach
The sound of breaking bottles was nothing new to Lamont Toucey.
The Franco-Italian was in his mid thirties and scarcely even blinked at it anymore, at a sound people were kind of meant to be stunned at like, as a natural reaction or something. Numbness wasn't a bad thing though, it even made it easier, the same way callouses made it easier to pick strings.
This one time at a bar he'd been so hammered that he'd walked straight into a sheer glass panel, knocked his beer into it, smashed, it, accidentally grasped it in his already bloodied hand, and then for good measure, dropped it on his foot.
Luce had laughed for hours. What a fucking douche bag. Had spent the rest of the night alternating between making jokes about inbred Italians and making sure he kept his cuts clean.
There was no jump-scare this time, and it wasn't he who had done it. Those spade-like angular shoulders were always so tense, like flimsy tents being slowly broken from the inside by the wind. When they finally collapsed, letting the bottle loose from bony fingers it was inevitable. Lamont had known it would happen seconds before he had seen it shatter into a million shards on the floor, heard the gun-like report of the glass. Some of the pieces embedding visibly in the slender man's skin, others scattering into the gritty interior of the room, ending up in all sorts of cracks and homes for roaches, no doubt.
He crunched some small bits under the hard rubber on the bottom of his scuffed black shoes and swept a little more to the side in a small pile where they could glitter malevolently and wait for someone to step on them. Someone else. Someone who had less shit they had to get done. The bigger pieces he managed to avoid on his way to the slumped form of his friend and business associate.
The first thing he did was check his pulse, he hated the way his hands felt against that dry, yellowed skin, and once again he felt the urge to slap the stubble off the Australian's chops and yell at him to "eat a fucking sandwich already, jesus christ" like he did not often enough, but only occasionally. Anyway, it didn't matter right now. Luce was on another planet, and couldn't so much clean what little he'd managed to put in his body off his shirt, let alone put more in it.
He pressed harder with his fingers and shuddered at the way it felt. Too little skin tightened over too much bone, but at least there was a pulse there, he could feel the small vibrations against the pads of his fingers and see the unsteady rise and fall of Luce's chest. It was slower and fainter than usual, but it was there, almost as an after thought. That was unsurprising, if someone was under the impression they could live without food, sunlight and human companionship, then why should a lack of a pulse be a problem? Luce Worth didn't need anything or any one, not even God, hell, not even the Devil. When he sinned it was his own problem, it didn't really hurt anyone else as far as Lamont could tell.
Well, not much of anyone else. Not anyone important.
"You fucking asshole" he muttered, feeling around in his mouth over unhealed cuts for a cig that wasn't there, so instead biting into his lip, feeling the brief tang of breaking skin as a precursor to the taste of blood. He got his arms around the other man's waist, wincing at the smell of radioactive vomit-breathe before hauling him over his shoulders. It was way too easy to do it, and that just made him feel worse.
"Up and 'at em" he said, once again speaking just to hear the sound of his voice. This fucking place was like a cave, or the chest cavity of a gigantic grumpy animal. He didn't like the way it kept bouncing every word and breathe back at him, dirtier than when it had left his body, but even worse he hated the silence, which made the far away scream of traffic almost deafening to him.
Lamont had been better places than this...granted, lots of places that were worse too, but many that had been better.
He had been places with sunshine, and air, water and winding highways, places where it was worth it to actually go out during the day, and he could still do his fucking business, managing affairs for people who couldn't make it away from the cover of darkness, riding around in a Cadilla c he didn't own with his shirt collar open, happily breathing in salt air and motor exhaust like it was going out of style because if you had to die of lung cancer, it'd be better to do it this way.
Maybe sipping at something he wasn't supposed to be sipping, maybe clutching a greasy Big Mac in the kind of weather where even if you had a tan you still had to rub sunscreen on your face periodically just to get through the day (but most people didn't and ended up with red cheeks).
So why did he always end up here again? This shitty East Coast city where it was always fucking raining and when it wasn't raining it felt like everything was molding and rotting from being wet and never getting quite enough sun to dry off? His family was here, but he'd been determined not to stay. He always thought he'd be the one to get out, he, his mother and everyone else.
He hated it here. At first it was just a little, like the skim of graying water at the bottom of the tub, then it had sunk, then it had left ugly brown ring stains. But he couldn't leave now- time to stop thinking about it. Time to lift up Luce Worth again and carry him to the back room with the broken bed in it, used on the many occasions when Worth didn't go home, and contained little else except a bucket to piss in if you were lazy and old take-out boxes from God knows when. Through a tiny window no one ever opened, the glare of a passing light ambled by and cut a buzzing white line across the darkness.
He laid the other man out on the tattered mattress, careful to put him on his side, listening to the brief millisecond-long symphony of springs bending out of joint again at the unwelcome intrusion of Worth's sleight weight. Worth was limp and cold, and really such a useless prick. One second he could be so full of energy that it made Lamont tired just looking at him, other times he was like this and he just looked so old.
Like, significantlyold. And they were almost the same age
"Fuck" he muttered again, minutes later, picking a few sh ards of glass out of the other man's hands and wiping it down with a towel that was only sort of clean, but hopefully being soaked in rubbing alchohol made up for the "sort of" part. Then he over-used a cheap box of band aids which looked incredibly silly on Worth's hands next to the carefully wrapped bandages on his arms.
This kind of stuff was "Doc Worth's" thing, not his, and he didn't get better with experience. His fingers were twice as big and too clumsy for the detail work. They fit well in the crook of a trigger or laced around a steering wheel or a bra strap, but something about wrapping bandages and Christmas gifts eluded him. Last year Worth had given him a phone book for Christmas with all the numbers of male escort services circled in red...but ithadbeen perfectly wrapped.
After he peeled Worth's dirtied shirt off him and threw it aside, he got up immediately and closed the door behind him, just as that steady band of light was travelling down the crook of the Australian's had no need to sit there studying the other man's face. He knew what it looked like by now.
He walked faster than he had before, winding around to the main office where the remnants of that bottle were still waiting for him to clean them up. He stared at the pile of glass for a second, felt acidic bile boiling in his stomach and stinging the back of his throat, burning.
He raised his eyes and saw Worth's chair partially rolled out from the desk with his coat hanging off it , he also saw a tin tray with a set of scalpels splayed out in a hand like a deck of cards. Proudly stacked up, wet and glistening. Proud as motherfucking paint brushes.
In the end, the bottle didn't get swept up. He was pretty sure Luce could get his ass up later and do that himself, but that'd probably be the least of his worries.
Instead the chair ended up across the room and the coat ended up thrown over the desk, and the desk and all it's contents ended up tipped over with a huge shoe shaped dent banged into the side.
He kicked the desk like a cruel kid kicked a dog. He didn't stop until he ran out of stuff to kick and punch, break and knock over, and ended up with his fist lodged in the peeling wall, the shock vibrating all the way down to his elbow, through his bones, into his guts, then finally he unclenched his fingers and limped back out to his car, covered in cold sweat.
This one time, when they were ten he'd fallen off his the fence and fucked up his leg. Cried, not because it hurt too much, but because his dad had told him not to the climb the fence and he was gonna beat his ass or get one of his big brothers to do it, which was humiliating. Even worse, he'd probably tell him he couldn't hang out with the Anglo kid anymore because his sisters were already dropping hints that they didn't like it. Even worse, his mom would get worried about him and maybe cry.
Luce had laughed for hours. What a douchebag.
After helping Lamont off the grass, he'd left him licking a blue popsickle in his dad's garage while he went and got a first aid kit that he'd probably stolen from his mom's bathroom.
He sat, kneeling in front of him and carefully wrapped up the huge splitting wound sliced into his right calve, the gaping red cut spitting more blood than he'd ever yet seen and chatting up the other boy like it was the most normal thing in the world.