Ok, this chapter is going to be where the T rating starts coming into real play. Now, normally, I don't go in for writing language, HOWEVER...when dealing with certain characters, part of keeping them IC sometimes calls for me to step out of the comfort zone in order to truly see from their eyes. The Character is The Character and, as any writer knows, sometimes they jump in and take over in order to get their story heard.
TRIGGER WARNING* There is brief graphic description of torture/rape. We are delving into Lucas' memories and there is some nasty &$#% there, so be warned.
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She had given up nearly on ever seeing him again. After all, it had been nearly 3 weeks.
She was having a rough night. Sleep did not come easily, and when it did, it brought dreams. Broken dreams of fear and anxiety, fear for her Skye, her little Bucket, images of death and pain and her husband.
She awoke, abruptly, out of one such dream. She lay for a moment, trying to calm her heartrate and her breathing when, out of the shadows, a soft whisper of a question floated out into the dark.
"Who is Bucket?"
She jumped, startled again, and saw him move out of the shadows and into her range of sight. It was done so gracefully, thoughtlessly, that she had to wonder how much of his time was spent shifting between the shadows.
"Lucas," she croaked. Grimacing and clearing her throat, she tried again.
"Is that really you?"
He moved closer to her bed, close enough to slip onto the small stool, close enough for her to see the dark shadows that ringed his eyes.
"You know, sometimes I'm not real sure."
He had a strange aura about him. As if her were there but not there at the same time. As if perhaps he had left a part of himself still in the shadows he had just emerged from.
She longed to reach out to him but had learnt well her lesson from the last time.
Gentling her voice as much as she could, she asked him, "Care to talk about it?"
He had his arms wrapped about himself, as if cold, but Deborah would be willing to bet her threadbare and highly cherished blanket that he wasn't. He looked like a man on the edge of falling apart.
Trying to lure him out, she said, "You look as if you were having some trouble sleeping yourself."
He just closed his eyes and sighed, "Always."
"Bad dreams?"
He nodded his head in mute agreement and then they sat, quietly, in the dark, as the sounds of the night pulsed and played around them.
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"So, are you going to answer my question?"
Startled at the sudden break in the quiet they had created, she looked at him questioningly.
"Bucket. Who is it?"
Deborah huffed a small laugh. Curious as a cat, this one.
"Bucket is...my daughter."
His brow furrowed slightly and he cocked his head at her, "And you named her Bucket?"
Deborah resisted the urge to full out laughter. She didn't want to start a coughing spell and she also had the feeling that Lucas, in the strange mood he seemed to be in, wouldn't take laughter at his question well.
So she just shook her head slightly. "No, no, that was just a nickname her father and I gave her when she was little."
She stopped at that and Lucas had to fight the urge to shake her for more information.
"So does she have a real name?" he asked.
She raised an eyebrow at his slightly testy tone and decided to recklessly push her luck.
"Yes."
When, after a few beats, he realized that was all she was going to say, he nearly groaned aloud in frustration.
Although, as far as distractions from his troubling dreams went, this was working well.
It had been awhile since he had last been in the camp. He wasn't too sure, time seemed to slip away from him sometimes, especially when he was working.
After their first meeting, he had decided that he did not need to talk to the woman anymore. She was obviously not going to be a source of information about her daughter, to cautious and closemouthed to tell a stranger much. A fact he could, grudgingly, respect.
But useless for his purposes.
He refused to dwell on the painful, and awkward, manner in which they had parted.
But when he had awoken, as usual, from his godawful dreams, he had somehow, in the midst of his usual pattern of trying to walk it off, found himself walking here. He had stood in the shadows, watching her sleep for a bit, before sinking into his own thoughts once again.
Sometimes, when the dreams (memories?) were particularly disturbing he had trouble shaking them off. He would just about think they were gone and then, before he knew it, they were sinking their claws into him again.
GOD, what he wouldn't give for a good, full nights sleep.
He honestly couldn't remember the last one he'd had...but he had a feeling it was probably before Somalia.
He brought himself back to where he was at with a jerk to see her, Deborah, looking at him with equal parts concern and amusement.
He tried to pick up the thread of their conversation.
"Is that it? Just yes? Or do I have to jump thru some kind of motherly hoop to earn the knowledge of her name?"
He tried to make it seem teasing but could tell by the expression on her face that it must have fell quite short.
She frowned at him and them motioned him forward.
"Come here, Lucas, sit down."
Normally he would rebel at such a parental-like order but just then, with the ghosts of his past and his dreams still in his mind, he simply did as he was told.
She fixed him with a Look, which he could not meet. Instead, he dropped his eyes to her hands, which were twitching at her blanket.
"You know, it may be one of the oldest damn cliches around, but it really does help to talk about it."
He looked up, to see her regarding him frankly.
She smiled, that sweet smile that seemed to transmute her face into its former prettiness...
a smile that made him think so much and so hard and so painfully of the one his mother used to give him when she was particularly proud of him that he damn near choked on the sob that rose in his chest.
He managed to turn it into a strangled cough at the last minute but he was sure that he probably was fooling no one, least of all her.
Her eyes clouded with compassion and she whispered softly, "Oh, honey, I'm so sorry."
WHY was this bothering him so? Why now?
He squeezed his eyes shut, gasping for air, gasping to stay quiet, to not let loose the monster that raged inside his chest, threatening to tear him in two.
He didn't realize he'd slid off the stool to his knees, didn't realize he was rocking back and forth as he tried to contain the clawed creature made up of grief and anger and love and heartbreak and God alone knew what else that was trying to rip its way out.
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Deborah gazed in horrified fascination at the man in front of her as he seemed to completely collapse in upon himself.
What in God's name had happened to cause this?
She knew next to nothing about him, however she got the feeling this was something he would kill to keep others from knowing about. Why he was having this reaction here, now, with her, she could not even fathom, but he was dangerously on edge. She could feel the aura of instability rolling off of him.
What should she do? What could she do?
She bit her lip in indecision and then, her mind was made up for her.
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The moments never came often, but when they did, they damn near crippled him. Moments when he became lost in his mind, in his memories, in flashbacks so real he felt as if he were being ripped apart. He had developed some few coping mechanisms for dealing with it.
Sometimes, they worked.
More often than not, he just suffered through it. There was no one to see, no one to care that Lucas Taylor, the psycho genius son of the Great Commander Taylor, was losing his fucking mind. He was usually quite successful at staving off such moments until he was alone, away from anything and anyone that might see. It was the only way to survive.
Here, the strong survived.
The weak got eaten.
His mind dragged him further in, down to the deep wells of memory and pain that he tried never to go near. His fingers tunneled unknowingly through his hair. Grasping and pulling as if to try and manually move his mind out of the danger zones.
He didn't want to, didn't want to, oh GOD, he didn't want to see it again!
But he couldn't stop.
He was watching, screaming, unable to look away from the bloody horror that was once his mother. Ears, hands, nose, breasts, hacked away like so much meat. Down on the ground as soldiers raped her brutally with their gunstocks. He had screamed til he was hoarse, no voice left, begging, pleading, sobbing til he threw up, dry heaving on the ground because he'd not eaten anything TO throw up since he and his mother had been kidnapped however long ago it had been it seemed like forever and still, still, they made him watch, yanked his hair til he thought he would have none left, didn't in some spots he had pulled and fought so vigorously not even feeling the pain of his own injuries anymore unable to hear his father's desperate screams for death and mercy oh godohgodohgodpleasepleasePLEASEmake it stopstopSTOPdearFUCKINGANYBODYkillherkillherpleasegod
He could hear her saying his name over and over and over again. He could hear himself keening in grief and agony. Even after the axe came down for the final time and he collapsed in a puddle sweat and blood and bile he could still hear her voice calling to him, soft and gentle.
He could swear he felt her hand on his head, his head on her shoulder just like when he was smaller and had hugged her.
He was too tall to do that now.
He could still hear her. Still feel her hand, still feel her shoulder. He needed to open his eyes, needed to know it wasn't real, believe it wasn't real.
He cracked his eyes and began to shake with helpless, silent tears as his hopeless belief became reality.
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Deborah gathered what scraps of reserve strength she had left and levered herself to the very edge of her bed onto her side as the man in front of her began to keen in a rictus of grief the likes of which she had never before been privy to. She had seen her fair share of PTSD, she was, after all, a former active military wife, but this, this seemed to be something else. Moving as carefully as if she were trying to steal eggs from a Nikoraptor nest, she put her hand on his head. When he failed to lash out at her, she gently, slowly, pulled his straining, shaking, but unresisting form against her shoulder. She began to softly call his name, trying to help him come out of whatever waking nightmare state he had entered as she gently, and cautiously, began to stroke her hand over his disheveled head.
Slowly, ever so slowly, his keening ceased and he raised his head from her shoulder and opened his eyes. She watched as his face seemed to literally break with pain and he began to shake, weeping silent tears that broke her at last and she began to cry with him. Unable to understand, but incapable of maintaining her stalwartness in the face of his grief and pain.
A slight noise alerted her and she looked up, locking eyes with Mira who stood in the shadows of the doorway to the hut. Her dark eyes glistened in the faint light and she nodded, very slightly, before fading into the darkness of the night.
After a few moments, when it seemed as if he was regaining some slight control of himself, she swallowed back her tears and questions and decided to do her damnedest to offer him the only other thing she had to give.
A distraction.
"Once when Skye, my daughter, was little, oh, only about maybe 4,she had this pet. It was nothing more than a shoestring but she treated it like it was the most important thing in the world. Carried it around in a little plastic box and gave it bits of paper as 'food'," she giggled softly at the memory and gave a silent sigh an prayer of thanks when he lifted his head, eyes still swollen and bleary and seemed to give attention to her story. She continued on, watching discreetly as he rubbed, child-like, at his eyes and swiped his face on the bottom of his shirt and generally tried to restore his dignity.
She continued on, telling stories of her daughter, laughing and sighing by turns at the memories and feeling inordinately happy on the few occasions she managed to elicit a laugh from him as well.
It was late into the night, or early in the day, when she finally trickled off into silence. He had moved, at some point, so that his back was against the post of her bed. They sat silently for a moment, which stretched into two, before he raised his eyes to hers and, so softly she almost didn't hear it, said, "Thank you."
She grinned. "Thank you for taking the time to sit and reminisce with a sick, old woman about things I'm sure you've no interest in."
He gave her a small, lopsided grin, "Sick, yes. Old? Not a bit. And I've enjoyed all of your stories," he got a strange, wistful look on his face, "She sounds like quite a girl."
"That she is. Not so much the girl anymore, unfortunately though. Every time I see her, she seems more and more the woman," she stated fondly.
He murmured, so low she almost didn't catch it, "Yes, yes she most definitely is."
Her eyes sharpened, "Have you met Skye?"
He looked suddenly flustered, turning his eyes down and picking at nonexistent strings on his cargo pants.
"No, no, I've not met her."
Deborah was willing to bet her so-called 'bottom dollar' though that he'd definitely at least, seen her. And, judging from that 'classic' response, she thought not a little sarcastically, he obviously liked what he saw.
Deb wasn't too sure how she felt about the idea of the, clearly, troubled young man before her, casting his eyes at her daughter. He seemed nice enough but she really knew too little about him to be certain of that fact. Her features hardened somewhat as she determined that she would do her damnedest to find out all she could about him before long. As limited as her movement was, there was little she could do to actually prevent them from meeting one another, but she would do her best to make sure that, if he did, she would be aware of just what exactly kind of man he was...
and if she needed to warn her daughter to be on guard.