Title: Indecision
Author: Maranwe
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own them or make money off them, but I figure it can't hurt to play with them while we wait for Duffy to do his thing.
Summary: Post-All Saints Day. Now that the boys are in prison the guards have to figure out what they should do.
A/N: Sorry to all my LOTR peeps. I saw All Saints Day March 20th and it ate my brain. So now I'm trying to cut my teeth, find my groove. If anyone has anything they'd like to see, I'm open to suggestions (would welcome them, really, because my thoughts keep spinning through the same stuff without catching on anything and it's driving me nuts), just not slash or twincest. I like the well written stuff as much as the next person - most of the time - but I can't write it. Enjoy.
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The Hoag prison guards didn't know what to do with the Saints of South Boston.
Oh, the regs were clear: take them in, process them, stick them into the population and treat them like any other lowlife murder that came through. But they weren't just any other prisoners, and that fact had the guards split straight down the middle.
Half thought they didn't deserve to be in prison. The other half thought they deserved to never see the light of day again.
They gathered in the locker room on their breaks or made excuses to be nearby, and bandied about ideas.
Some wondered what it said about them that the first and most appealing idea was to set them loose in the courtyard during exercises with a couple of AKs, let them go to town with it and hope they wiped out every last motherfucker doing time.
Nothing that every guard there hadn't at one point wished to do himself, had he but the freedom.
But they didn't. Even living it vicariously, second-hand, they didn't have the freedom to act on that idea, not and keep their place in the world. And they knew it, proclaimed it with their silence, with awkward coughs and skittish eyes.
Someone wanted to let them loose in the courtyard with the inmates, sans guns, and see what happened. They were pretty sure that whatever else, the boys would manage to take a few of the freaks with them.
Except they all knew that would be a death sentence. Here, it didn't matter which side of the debate they fell on, they knew they didn't want the boys dead. Only a few admitted, silently and within the safety of their minds, that it was because they felt safer with the MacManus brothers around, but it was true of all of them.
They wanted the boys around in case the world went to hell in a hand-basket.
None of them knew how to make that happen, though. They couldn't figure out how to balance the regs with their desire to keep the boys alive when every last prisoner here had good reason to want the MacManus brothers dead, didn't know how much special treatment they could get away with.
So they met in the locker room, and they talked and argued and heckled and walked circles around the issue, and were glad, very glad, that for the moment it all was moot. For the moment, the boys had to stay in the infirmary and no one could touch them there.
Maybe, if they gave Him enough time, God could tell them what to do with the Saints of South Boston.