Hal watched the light from the hallway project on the wall in front of him and then disappear a half a second later with the reclosing of his door. He felt a second body enter the room and expertly maneuver around in the darkness of it. He preferred the room that way. Dark and isolated...to match the atmosphere that had settled inside of himself. He had been fine until several nights ago when the flashbacks and the nightmares started. That was when he felt his hope to move on and forget about the whole ordeal regress greatly. Since then, he could only find enough motivation to switch sides as he lay in bed.
"Today you have to eat more that you did yesterday, Uncle Hal." The smell of fresh flowers accompanied the aroma floating from the tray of chicken noodle soup that landed on the nightstand next to him. A small hand lightly covered his shoulder. "Please look at me. I'm really worried about you."
A small bedside lamp flickered on illuminating the room with the closest thing to light it had seen in days. Hal moaned in slight annoyance but didn't move. Sunny took a seat in the computer chair across the room, accepting the back of his head to talk to instead of his face. She let a short lifetime of silence pass between them before speaking.
"I picked some more flowers for you, Uncle Hal. They're really pretty. They started to bloom on the day you came back. I like the magnolias and azaleas the best. They're so beautiful. Snake helped me pick out the azaleas." She laughed. "You should have seen him in the plant store when we went to go get them. He stuck out like a sore thumb! Everyone was looking at him really weirdly and that made me angry until I realized that he didn't care." She sighed heavily and plucked a flower out of the bouquet she had sat in the vase. "The magnolias remind me of Snake. They're pretty tough and can stand up to a lot. They were the only flowers I wasn't worried about when everything stopped growing...I knew they'd still be alive. I haven't found a flower that reminds me of you yet, Uncle Hal. Maybe when you're better, we can go to the plant store and buy some more...like we used to. Only if you want to, though." She added in the absence of a response from him. She moved to his side of the room once again and pulled down on his shoulder to flip his body on his back. He kept his head facing the wall in the opposite direction.
"I heard you last night. I was in my room but I heard you call for help while you're sleeping again. I came to check on you and talk to you until your nightmare went away. I told you that it was all going to be okay. Then, it got really bad, and you started to cry. I held your hand and promised to make you better, to make the pain go away. I'm going to do that. I'm going to be by your side, Uncle Hal, no matter what. Even if you never talk to me again."
Hal quickly wiped his eyes and looked up at the bowl on the nightstand. Sunny followed his glance.
"It's soup," she said. "You can eat that, right?"
He began to lift himself upright and Sunny slipped an arm around his back to assist him. Once he was sitting up against the headboard of his bed, Sunny presented the tray to him with a small smile that she hoped he'd return. He didn't.
"Uncle Hal, come on," she begged when he turned away his head from her as if he had suddenly changed his mind about eating. "It's not a whole lot. Just eat this and I promise I'll leave you alone." She lifted the tray to his chest so that the steam from the bowl rose directly to his face. "It's really, really good." She sang sweetly, moving the tray back and forth to lightly bump his chest.
He stiffened as if a ghost passed through him. "Please...please don't make me eat it." His voice trembled out every word.
Sunny lowered the tray and tilted her head slightly at Hal. "Are you okay?"
"Do whatever you want to me...but I'm not eating that."
"Hey, what's wrong? I'm not going to hurt you."
He shrinked back into the headboard with his arms covering his face from the impending harm he felt he was in. When she moved closer to him and reached out to touch him, he thrust her back away from him with his hands. She stumbled backwards in the loss of her balance and caught the edge of the nightstand with the side of her head before her little body connected hard with the floor. The blunt thud snapped Hal back immediately and sent his whole body into a new panic when she didn't stir after several seconds.
"Sunny?" The adrenaline in his blood pumped movement into his limbs as he dropped to his knees next to her, shaking her with more strength he thought he had left in him. "Sunny! Sunny wake up!"
Her head bounced around in the movement of his jostling her body but her eyes failed to open. Hal noticed and touched the small trickle of blood rushing from under her hair. "Angel, please get up!" He begged again right before the weight of what he'd done collapsed his body in a pile next to hers. Hal didn't hear the door open over his sobbing and only looked up when he heard Snake's voice summoning him to do so.
"What in the hell happened, Hal?!"
"I...I, I pushed her and she hit her head."
"You did what!"
"I didn't mean to! It just...happened."
Snake took the little girl's upper body into his arms. He knew she wasn't dead and that her eyes would pop open any second but the thought did nothing to control the fire building in him. He brought her body closer into his when saw Hal's hand reaching out to touch her.
"You stay away from her. I think you've done enough." He hissed at the engineer and watched him draw his hand back as if he had bitten it.
"It was an accident, Snake. I love her! I would never hurt her!"
"Then why'd you push her? She's a child!"
"I don't know what happened. She was trying to get me to eat something and I just...I just lost myself for a moment. I swear I didn't mean to hurt her. God, I swear I didn't mean it. I'm so sorry."
Snake watched him sob into his hands but stayed a complete void of empathy for the man. His only feelings was for the small body that was still motionless in his grip.
"What in the hell is wrong with you, Hal? You could have killed her. What would you have done then?"
"I don't know..."
"That's not good enough. All she's been doing in the past few weeks is try to save your ungrateful, worthless--"
They both looked down when they heard an awakening moan escape Sunny.
"Sunny?" Snake called to her. Her eyes met the mercenary's, bringing a warm smile to her face until the muffled sobbing of Hal entered her ears. She could feel the words that had been exchanged between them to make the air the way it was: thick with anger and regret. She attempted to sit up but grabbed her head in pain.
"Oww. My head..."
"You bumped it pretty hard. Just relax, okay?." Snake lightly pressed around the side of her head near her temple where a bruise were clearly beginning to form. She made a face as he pressed the area closer to her left eye but gave no hints to it hurting more than it was supposed to at the moment. "I don't think anything's too seriously injured but you're going to have a bruise there for a minute. Do you remember what happened?"
Sunny looked over at Hal, still spilling his sorrow into his hands. She wanted to tell him that it was okay, that she forgave him but the look in Snake's eyes told her she needed to answer to him first.
"I fell."
"You fell?" Snake repeated, inflecting every bit of his disbelief of her statement. "Is that all?"
She hesitated slightly and nodded. "Yeah. I lost my balance and I fell."
"It's okay, Sunny." Hal said, "Tell Snake the truth. Tell him that I'm the reason you fell."
Sunny's eyes pleaded with Snake before her words could. "It was an accident. It really was. Please don't be mad at him."
"Are you sure you're okay?"
"I'm okay, Snake. Uncle Hal," she called and looked over to him, "Please...don't cry. It's okay. I know you didn't mean it."
The words did little to bring comfort to him and his lungs exploded with more sobbing as Snake carried her out of the room and out of his sight. A few minutes passed before he could lift himself back up onto his bed. He regained a little control of the storm raging inside of him and tried to not think about Sunny and the way her body flung to the floor with the push from his own hands. He looked up and watched Snake reenter the room moments later alone, taking special care to close the door behind him.
"How...how is she?" Hal asked.
"She's going to be fine. She's resting in her room. Even now, she's more concerned about you than she is about her own self." Hal relaxed when he noticed the storm winds in Snake's own body and voice had calmed as well.
"I didn't mean--"
"I know. I know that you didn't mean to hurt her. Look, I'm really sorry about what happened to you those two months with the Resistance members...and I've been really patient with you when you tell me you don't want to talk about it but you need to start talking now, Hal."
"What do you mean?"
"You need to tell me what they did to you. Something Sunny did triggered you to react and push her in self defense."
"I...I can't."
"That's not an option. She is what matters right now."
Hal almost smiled despite the situation.
"You really care about her, don't you?"
"I don't like to see any child get hurt."
"No, it's more than that. I saw the way you looked at her when you were holding her. You were scared to death. I've seen you face unnatural, unholy things in this world and I've never seen you scared."
"She...she saved my life. There aren't a whole lot of people who would have cared enough to do that."
"I know she was only trying to help me," Hal started, "the only thing she ever wants is for me to be okay. She was urging the food at me, trying to make me eat it and then, I just got this vision of being back there again, having those guys shove plates into my chest telling me to eat whatever was on it. At first, I refused because I thought they had done something to it. I pushed them away from me but they'd beat me until I couldn't move and just shove it down my throat anyway. After a few weeks, I became too weak to do anything about it and I learned to eat whatever they gave me and do whatever it took so that they wouldn't kill me." He dropped his head to look at the floor. "I let them do horrible things to me, Snake...just so they'd spare my life."
Snake had heard the preview of what he was building up to in his tone. Hal began to tear up again but he feverishly wiped them away before they could fall out of disgust at himself for crying so much already.
"Like...what?" Snake asked cautiously. He felt terrible for asking but he needed the verbal confirmation for his own mind.
"They...they assaulted me. Sexually...and I let them. There was two of them and they'd take turns. They made me beg for it like I wanted it. They told me if I didn't do what they said that they'd kill me...and then you and Sunny." Tiny, gasping sobs managed to fight their way past all his attempts to hold it in, "So...I let them do whatever they wanted to me. I said whatever they wanted me to say, acted however they wanted me to act. And then one day...they just stopped. I guess they got bored with me or something. I think I must have taken a thousand showers to try and wash off the filth but...nothing made it go away. I'm sorry I didn't tell you before but..."
"It's okay, Hal." Snake seated himself next to Hal and listened to his desperate attempts to continue to wall back the emotions brewing furiously inside of him. His body trembled with the mounting pressure like a support beam destined to give away any moment. Snake pulled the lever that lowered the wall when as he put his hand on his back. "We'll deal with this," he told him, "somehow."
"So, how goes it, Snake?" Snake couldn't even muster up enough of his sense of humor to step on Mei Ling's over spirited greeted. "How's Hal doing?"
Snake made a groaning noise into the receiver of the phone.
"Hmm...that's not good." she concluded.
"Things were okay but his progress seems to be getting worse instead of better."
"Try and keep in mind that Hal has been through a lot. He's not a super soldier like you, Snake. He needs time to heal all the way around." He remembered himself saying something like that not so long ago and shook his head.
"You don't understand. He's become...a danger."
"Who could Hal possibly be a danger to?"
"Sunny..."
Mei Ling cut short a small chuckle that slipped out. "That's ridiculous, Snake. Hal would hurt himself before he'd even think about hurting Sunny."
"But he's not himself right now. He's different, darker. Something else has taken over him."
"Snake...what are you saying? He didn't actually do anything to hurt Sunny, did he?"
"It was an accident" he began and heard Mei Ling gasp, "but he had some sort of a flashback and pushed her night before last. It wasn't the push that hurt her...but she nearly took her head off on the side of a table."
"Oh my God! It wasn't too serious, was it? Is she okay?"
"Yeah, she's alright. It knocked her out for a moment...and she's got a bruise the size of Texas on the side of her head now but you know Sunny..."
"Yeah...she was probably too worried about Hal to even care."
"That's why now, I have to worry for her. I have to protect her."
"He's not a monster, Snake. He made a mistake and if I know Hal, he's punishing himself for it in ways another person wouldn't dream of."
"But it's too much and I can't babysit him 24/7. The trauma goes too deep. He needs professional help."
"Well, I'm sure Rose could offer him some sort of counseling a few times a week via web cam chats or something. She's trained to deal with the effects of PTSD."
"That's not going to do it. There's nothing that can be done from here to help him."
"You almost sound like you want to send him away, Snake..."
"Just until he can work through things, Mei Ling. It's the safest way to do it."
The line was engulfed by a deafening silence. Snake knew Mei Ling wasn't speechless. She never was.
"That's the most selfish thing I've ever heard you say, Snake." she snapped.
"What?"
"Need I remind you that four months ago when you were on your deathbed, you were not the most pleasant person in the world to deal with. No one else in their right mind would have put up with your fits of verbal abuse...but Hal stuck by you and he did it without mumbling a single complaint. He cared about you...and he certainly didn't think about shipping you off to complete strangers to be taken care of!"
"This is different. Sunny was hurt in a moment of delusion."
"That's a cover up, Snake. Don't pretend that you're only looking after Sunny's best interests here. What happened was an accident. You said that yourself. Has Sunny said anything about being afraid of him now or something?
"No..."
She sighed in grave disappointment. "I can't believe you're giving up on Hal like this, Snake."
"I'm not giving up on him! I'm trying to help him."
"No. You're angry and you're trying to take the easy way out in order to not deal with this." She softened her voice. "Look, I get that you're concerned about Sunny. I really do, but think about Hal as well. If you take Sunny away from him, you won't be helping him at all. You'll be killing him."
Snake felt Sunny's presence behind him as he reached for the doorknob of the front door. They hadn't talked much since he had taken the liberty to ban Sunny from visiting Hal. She hadn't argued with him but the lack of words told him clearer than anything she could have said that she wasn't happy with the decision or with him.
"Are you going to send Uncle Hal away?"
He turned to face her, the blue and purple splotch being the first thing on her face to enter this pupils.
"Where'd you hear that?"
"I heard you talking to Mei Ling on the phone last night. Please don't send him away, Snake. He's not a bad person."
"I know and I'm not. I didn't mean that stuff I said about sending Hal away. I also didn't mean when it I said I didn't want you around him anymore. As a matter of fact," he said and placed his hands on her shoulders, "I need you more than ever to look after him, okay?"
She smiled. "Okay. I can do that."
"I'm going into town to get some supplies. I should be back shortly. Keep an eye out on him."
"But, Snake...we already have supplies. You bought them last week."
Snake smirked from the corner of his mouth. "Let me rephrase that: I'm going into town because I need cigarettes. I'll pick up some other items while I'm out to make it look like I didn't waste a trip." He ruffled the hair on top of her head in another silent apology to her before he left.
Sunny immediately redirected herself to Hal. She hadn't seen him in nearly two days since the incident. He had locked himself away in his room much to the convenience of Snake who couldn't have planted a better barrier between the two himself.
She opened his door slightly and peeped in. He appeared to her to be sleeping until he turned to her and weakly offered her a smile that brought her into the room.
"Sunny?"
"Were you sleeping, Uncle Hal? Did I wake you?"
"No. I was just...thinking is all. What are you doing in here, though? Snake will kill me if he sees you in here."
"No he won't. He's not mad at you anymore. Besides, he's not here."
Hal sat up and began running his thumb over the blue and purple bruise on her face. He hadn't seen it get so big and he felt his heart plunge and shatter inside the cavity of his chest when remembered how it had gotten there.
"It's not as bad as it looks." she said sensing the guilt overwhelming him.
"I'm so sorry I did this to you. Maybe he was right, Sunny. Maybe you shouldn't be around me anymore."
"Don't say that. I don't want that."
"You...you don't hate me, angel?"
"No! I could never hate you. I love you. Always and no matter what."
"Thank you, Sunny. I really needed to hear you say that." he caressed her face between his hands, "I promise you, I'm going to make everything right. Everything is going to change. I'm never going to hurt you again."
Sunny studied her Uncle Hal deeply in the dim lights of the room. There was an emptiness in his eyes that didn't match the tone of the words.
"Uncle Hal..."
"Do you know what I need you to do for me right now, though? I need you to go outside to your garden and pick me the biggest bouquet of flowers you can, okay?"
"But...why?"
"Because they're all in bloom now...and you can make me the bouquet that you wanted to."
"I don't want to anymore."
"Sunny...please, just do this for me," he pleaded, "I really need you to do this."
"I'll do it tomorrow. I don't want to leave you right now, Uncle Hal. You're scaring me."
He kissed her gently on her the bridge of her nose and pulled back to look at her once more. "Do it now, Sunny. For me, okay?"
Sunny moved both of her hands closer to Hal's head but he caught them in mid-air and shook his head.
"No, not this time, angel. This one is mine."
Sunny had no control over her body as she found herself leaving the room. Leaving her Uncle Hal. He mouthed "I love you" to her when she took one last look at him and then, he smiled at her. She couldn't return it. She didn't want to. Nothing he had said had given her a reason to smile. Not even the flowers.
Sunny had been hysterical when she had called his cell phone. The ability to make sentences had gotten lost in all the crying and all she could do was give key phrases.
Hal.
Locked door.
Silence.
Please hurry.
She had repeated the "please hurry" one more times than Snake could count, but no matter how much or frantically she said it, it didn't make the hour and a half drive back to the house any shorter. Even pushing ninety-seven on the more densely populated roads, the truck still went too slow for Snake's patience and he found himself being one of those drivers he usually hated that weaved in and out of cars and blindly changed into the lanes that seemed to be moving the fastest.
By the time Snake saw Sunny, she had just pounded her last fist into Hal's door before sliding down into the corner. She looked defeated and her hand throbbed for every second of the fifteen minutes it had stuck the door. Snake took his turn to pound on it, calling desperately for his friend on the other side.
Silence.
"Sunny," he knelt down in front of the little girl and got her attention by lightly jerking her by the shoulders. "Where are all the pills? All the pills I got for Hal from Rose," he repeated when she didn't respond, "Where are they?"
"I...I don't know." She was beat red and could barely catch her breath from all the crying. Snake was sure she didn't even know she was answering a question at the moment.
He stepped back and kicked the door twice and it flew open, loosing a hinge in the process. The room looked empty but it didn't feel that way. It felt potent and thick with loitering despair and chaos. Snake halted Sunny back when she tried to barge in past him.
"Stay out here."
"But--"
Snake shifted his body quicky inside the room and closed the door before she could let another word escape. He applied the lock when she hit the door in frustration. He hated the silence in the room and was thankful when he found the ticking of a clock to concentrate on. He slowly walked through the room until he found a trail of red on the floor that rushed him to the source on the other side of the bed.
It was Hal.
In the steps he took to get closer to him, the blood around him made a thick, red path that he had no choice but to walk on. This much blood couldn't be from pills alone if at all. He searched his body and quickly landed his eyes on Hal's wrists, both deeply and vertically slashed into identicalness. "Damnit, Hal...Damnit! Sunny!," he yelled to the small soul he knew was standing right outside the door, "Call 911 now!"
The door rattled impatiently against the locked knob. "What's wrong with--"
"Don't come in here! Just call for help now!"
Snake's brain placed the nearest hospital in town at nearly two hours away as soon as he heard Sunny run from the door. He begged something of Hal's body to move in his arms. He envisioned his blue eyes beaming up at him and curiously blinking him into focus just the way they had nearly two weeks earlier, the corners of his mouth pulling into a smile, and the first words out of his mouth whispering and stammering out at him. But the stillness of his body was crippling and his clammy skin sent a chilly message through him that told him everything was too late.
In all his hyper awareness, the chime of Hal's computer nearly made Snake jump out of his skin. Any other time, it would have registered as background noise but he shot a look to the direction of the computer and caught the light from the monitor dancing on the matte surface of the wall. He kept Hal's body in his arms out of a personal refusal to let go. It had been so easy to do it before, to let him go off and fight his own battles with shame and trauma in the care of strangers or 'professionals'. He had failed Hal and he knew it and found the guilt in his heart being the magnet that kept him holding him. Around the time the computer chimed again, he made himself lay his body on the floor, nearly in the same position he had found it in. He knew the second time was a definite demand for his attention.
A few lights on the hard drive blinked rapidly before a video box opened on the screen and Hal's image appeared in it. Snake landed in the chair behind him that would have easily tipped over onto the floor if he would have put any thought into actually sitting in it. He watched the recorded image of Hal's push his glasses up the bridge of his nose and move the web cam to center himself in the view. The recording was only a few hours old as Snake noticed he was wearing the same clothes that were bloodied now and somber appearance he had seen him with just hours before.
"Hi, Dave. I really hope I timed this right. I set this video to play at 7:23 PM and only once. After this play through, this file will be permanently destroyed and deleted from the hard drive." He paused and added, "I don't ever need Sunny to find this." The engineer adjusted himself in his seat for a couple of seconds and took a deep breath before looking back up at the camera. "I guess there's a lot of things I need to apologize for. Like taking the coward's way out and not saying goodbye to my best friend. I never meant to be a burden to you, Dave, and I certainly never meant to be a danger to anyone...especially Sunny. I want you to know that you had every right to want to keep me away from her. I know if Mei Ling would have seen what I did to her, I don't think she would have talked you out of sending me away."
Snake's exhale caught hard in his throat almost threatening another flair of one of his coughing spells. He had talked too loudly and too heedlessly to Mei Ling the night before into the same paper thin walls he had warned Sunny about.
"The truth is, Dave" he continued, "I should have been dead two months ago. Neither one of you should have ever seen me again. I lied and I cheated my way free of death everyday...just so that I could see Sunny again. But when I got back, the damage I thought I had left behind caught up with me. I was unrepairable...but Sunny tried her best to fix me anyway. She never gave up...but I did. I was just waiting on someone--or something--to put me out of my misery. And when I hurt Sunny...that was the blow that finally did it.
"I'm leaving my angel with you. She's been yours for a while now, actually. It's clear that she feels close to you and has grown protective of you. I know she loves me still but, I don't think she'll ever be able to look at me the same way now that she knows I can harm her. Take care of her and let her take care of you. Her saving your life wasn't an accident. There's a huge place for you in her heart and it's growing everyday." He smiled. "I think you finally know that I don't call her an angel for nothing. She's not an ordinary girl. She possesses something unexplainable, something that I think only she understands. The only thing I ask is that you don't mention to her what's in this video or that it even exists. I know it's wrong but I pray to God that her memories of me will fade as she gets older. I only want her to remember the good things about me but since I barely remember them at this point, it may not be worth it for her to even try. But, the day she becomes old enough to find out what happened, tell her..." Hal took a moment to look off camera and close his eyes to the thought lurking behind them. When he looked back up, his gaze pierced the screen with an accepted finality and control of himself even through the tears, "tell her I said this: I know you'll never understand what I've done but I hope that maybe you can learn to forgive me someday. I wanted to be the person you needed me to be—the person I was before—but I just couldn't. Instead, I caused you pain and there was no way I wanted to live knowing I had done that. I let you down and for that, more than anything...I'm so sorry, angel."
As I mentioned above, there's notes for this story but there's a few of them so they are in my profile under "Story Notes". Hope you enjoyed this...and that you'll let me know what you think! -- Andi Mack
