As a journalist, it was only natural to check out the story that was to be covered before actually covering it. And because of this, Antonio Fernández Carriedo was out and about in the streets of Hull. His shoes clicked down the streets and alleyways, writing notes here and there when a willing soul told him a few things. But for the most part, all he did was saunter down the streets and take in the atmosphere. Describing settings in his works was as vital as blood to his style, which was more like story-telling than anything else. But with that small quirk he gained many vivid readers, so the newspaper he worked for only kept raising his salary until he could afford four houses that spread over England, Wales and Spain. Not to say that he was the type to keep all his money to himself though. Antonio was the kind of man that held a blind faith to those who needed help, even though said people would normally be irreversible in society's eyes. So you could only imagine what the Spaniard thought when he cut a corner into a dirtied young man hunched against the shadow-painted brick walls.
The first thing that Antonio noticed was the Briton's hands. They looked terrible, knuckles scabbed over and black from bruises. The Spaniard slowly pulled the other's chin up to take a long look at the blonde's face, which contained a pair of smoky, shut eyes, a busted lip and a pair of prominent eyebrows ("orugas" was the Spanish word that came to mind). The bruises and cuts looked too old to have been made that exact day, or even the day before, but when he looked back at the man's hands he saw that there was still some new blisters and such. Though a normal person would have never considered doing such a thing, Antonio gave up to his swell of sympathy and gathered the man into his arms. With that, they were off to the car and the journalist's home. He didn't necessarily expect a dozen thank-yous from the young man, but he would have never guessed that the stranger would leave without a word, only with a scrap of paper that contained his good friend's address that happened to be the head cameraman for a well-acclaimed local news station based in York, Francis Bonnefoy.
Above him was a sky of blue and grey, below him a waterwash of black. His eyes groggily opened, stinging and fogged with a blur that inflicted them, and he thought, am I in heaven? It took him a moment to figure this thought out before he slowly concluded that he was indeed not in heaven. It was much too cold for it to be heaven, and he was so tired. It took him a few more moments before he finally realized that he wasn't breathing. This confused him, and it also took even longer for him to figure out.
But he did. And with that, as if jolted awake by a golden lion's roar in the early-birthed hours of the morning, his muscles tensed and his oxygen-deprived lungs instantly heaved for air. Instead of getting air, they got water. Bubbles raced each other to the surface, escaping a display of thrashing limbs. The man was suddenly blind of direction in his inner chaos, first swimming down and burying himself underneath more waterly pressure before he finally realized the additional weight and flailed his way upward. The soft crepuscular rays of artificial light broke through the surface of the water just slightly, the reflection of ripples distorting his face and flawless skin just before the surface broke and Francis breathed.
At that moment he felt something that he immediately dismissed. Was going to the surface any better than staying down below? It was so gentle, so calm in the river. He could feel his sleepy body get gently nuzzled by a barely-moving current, and his eyes begged to be shut to hide themselves from a quilt of heavy blue that somehow reminded him of ripe blueberries and their undertoned taste in the late French countryside mornings. But no, the Parisian knew that if he decided to rest in such a beautiful place that there were consequences: Suffocation, death. Humans did not belong in such conditions, sleeping underneath the stars and riverbeds to rest their beaten bones. They were made imperfect, and in that respect were not able to come in contact with the perfect, because once the perfect comes the imperfect must leave.
However, there are already perfects out there, and perhaps he could have even achieved said perfect in the onyx skirts of Lady Death's embraces. But ignorance is bliss, so they say. Man continues to make decisions, to face things that have incomprehendable outcomes, just as Francis did as he coughed out water on the river's shore and crawled to the streetside before flipping over onto his back to try to regain breath. In all his panic to stay alive, he'd sadly forgotten that life may have been easier to bear if he had drowned. But being oblivious to what sort of situation he had gotten himself into as of that very night he only managed to noticed a faintly familiar landmark that splayed itself over and across the river, the Scarborough Railway Bridge, before heaving himself up and trudging towards his car. The vehicle welcomed him in it's metallic embraces, for the door was already open, gaping and bringing in the fog of the night - a mouth inhaling smoke. Dangerous. Francis didn't think of why the door was open, or why he had just nearly been drowned from a swim he didn't remember taking. He didn't even remember driving there to the river.
The door hung outward yet still as he stood in front of it in confusion, the car before him open to the biting, moth freckled cool and perplexing lights from street lamps, the aggressive, tall-standing iron poles curving like a hook and spilling yellow-golden blood to the streets below. And how they buzzed and hissed, the glass-sheathed lights causing unsuspecting flies to drop down like fishing bait into the asphalt sea below. Francis snaked up to the high-leveled driver's seat of his black chariot, a fairly new SUV, and after resting a few moments more and rubbing the remaining water that blurred his eyes, to home he drove in ghastly white, shivering skin, grey and bright blue from the lights of the dashboard before him.
Something was wrong. Of course there was, as the man had woken up in a place he didn't remember getting to, a mile from home, but as he pulled his car into his house's driveway his blurred sky-wash eyes couldn't help but notice the already opened garage door and striking cast of shining lights within the house's walls. This was not normal. The lights were always off by eleven at night, so why were they on now? Why was the garage door open? He didn't bother to park all the way in the garage as he'd intended before - instead, feeling his pulse hammer the back of his head, his feet carried him hastily through the front yard and to the front door. The grass sunk down in his feet and the bushes seemed to glow from how their leaves wore moon liquid dew, the parlour light snapping through the window above and shedding them in faint god rays through fog.
As soon as Francis entered and shut the door he reeled back and slumped his back against the wall, out of breath. His muscles were weary, sight blurred, nose, cheeks, ears and knuckles pink and raw from the icy night breath's needles pinning his clammy, sick-looking skin, but he dared try his voice by calling out a querying "mon chéri?"
Nothing.
"Hello?" A shudder ran through him, more from the cold that his damp clothes brought him than the fear that lured his feet slowly through the licorice-smelling hallway to the master bedroom.
The light was off. In all the other rooms the lights were on, allowing nothing to be hidden, everything to be seen out in the open, but in the master bedroom the light was off. All that was visible in the room was the lamp next to the doorway, and a little further on the foot of the bed. Sheets were gathered in a small mass at the footboard, most of the pushed so far in that they were caught between the wood and the mattress.
Trembling fingers slid against the wall, searching for the light switch. For a sickening moment the flash caused his eyes to squeeze shut, the pulsing in his head drumming harder, until he blinked several times and finally chanced a look at the bed. What came next was a yell, running footsteps, even the milky drops of tears. Arthur.
Oh, his beloved folds of beryl foliage in the mornings, his dry remarks and bland tea in the afternoons, his Arthur, and the way that his jaws unlatched and let out perfectly welled yawns before bed. Francis had been missing his Arthur - he wasn't there most of the time, only a blank canvas in the fog under a buzzing street lamp a mile away, at the bottom of a river. The Briton had turned silent, unresponsive. His pupils ran from their center-placed cave at the sight of bright light, but drew in and dotted in the dark. Francis had thought he was sick, maybe tired from school. But this was the night when he knew that his lover was indeed not sick, ill, exhausted.
Arthur was ripped apart. The blonde tried to clean the man's head with a pillow sheet, to try to find where the cut was, but it was hard. All of the sweet cherry that topped the Briton's faded winter skin had stained. It was left on too long, left pouring from a faucet of fractured skull and heavily matted strands of wheat that was now all but grain sticky and dark erubescent.
Discovering the helplessness of drying off his face, Francis gathered a long, wavering, shaky breath and stepped back. The colour nearly visibly drained from his face when it hit him - he was so tired. He took a few more steps back, eyes widened and focused so desperately at Arthur, trying to keep awake, that his vision blurred in and out of being able to see. And with that, he remembered. The heaviness in his pocket. A phone.
It hadn't taken very long for the police to come. A pair of fine-boned fingers tapped across a glowing cell phone screen messily, at first messing up a simple three digit number, and then again once more, before the call was finally put through. "Help," Francis said, voice panicked. And help came, soon enough to take Arthur away safely and late enough to never see the dampness that the Frenchman's clothes had held that night, already replaced by other clothes, this time very warm. The damp ones were cast in the living room, blindly guided atop the sofa, as he made his way hurriedly into the kitchen and sought around the counters a certain card. Where was the card?
The scrap of paper still was not found when the sound of sirens blared in the front of the house. An Adam's apple rose as he swallowed nothing - his mouth was dry, sticky - and his feet sent him stumbling to the front door. It swung open, and almost instantly a man, no, two, plunged into the light of the house and looked at the mess that Francis was.
"Bedroom," the frog croaked, pointing down the hallway, where now the men were jogging through. It was a nickname that always made Francis smile, chuckle even. Frog. He had no warts, his skin held no tone of green, and though he could leap rather far and high, his toes certainly were not webbed.
All Francis could seem to do was wring the open doorway with his hands, trying to keep himself on his feet despite the sudden rush of people and lights around him, the questions that rang in his ears from men in black - how long ago was it when you found him?
I don't know, he said back, and he could of sworn that he said it out loud, but he must not have. The words only rang in his skull, not through the animated air that bounced about him.
The stretcher was being carried through the parlour room now, and the two men in black casted their eyes to the man that was strapped to it. "Dear Gott."
Francis burst into tears.
Ludwig and Gilbert Beilschmidt were policemen in York. Though Ludwig was never very fond of his older brother's friend, the man that he remembered seeing at home in the kitchen with the albino, laughing and talking about things high-schoolers did, it never quite grew beyond a faint dislike, a bad taste. And after all, the three of them saw a lot of each other. Francis, working for the news, often contacted them on business terms, and through that Ludwig began piecing little personal details about the Frenchman that he hadn't cared to in his grade school years; he wasn't very subtle in his ways, but he made up for it by being a good man at heart.
"Gilbert," Francis pleaded, shaking his head. "Help me find... something."
The self-acclaimed Prussian leaped to his friend's side, pulling the other up with an arm around his chest. "What is it?"
The tallest of the three, blue eyes casted down, couldn't bring himself to look at his other blonde counterpart. "I'm going into the bedroom to fill out the report." His words were discarded, but it wasn't like that mattered. He only shuffled out of his brother's way as Gilbert led Francis into the kitchen in search of the card before making his way down the hall.
"A business card," Francis huffed, all of this visibly taking a tole on him. He was falling to pieces, all of the energy that held him together tumbling down like spiraling towers descending to the ground. "For Alys Loisel."
Translations;
Orugas is Spanish for 'caterpillars'.
The rest you should have an idea of.
Ending comments; This chapter took me ages to write! It's not very long, but as I wrote it I also was trying to set up many things, so hopefully it'll all come together in the end. Updates will probably be slow, but it's helped that I've finally organized how everything is going to go. I should really do that for Something Like Seeing, haha.
