Hi everyone, I am so, so, SO sorry you've had to wait so long for this…especially since I did promise someone it would be finished about two weeks ago. I just had some personal stuff I needed to deal with and I kind of decided that to do that I should take a break from fanfiction, as much as I love it, and just concentrate on my original stuff for a while. But I'm back now, I'm not going anywhere (especially since I'm currently planning an epic new fic) and I'm actually quite pleased with this chapter, I hope you all enjoy it and that you're all well : )

Disclaimer: I know I've been gone a long time but I STILL don't own this book series (sad face)… however Thirteen is mine, steal her and I will personally throw you to the sharks (or SunWillRise2340, whichever's quicker, she's a lot more violent than you people know!)

This chapter is for a few people: TheStolenPhoenix who stayed up all night and whose reviews make me smile, aniram1122 who is so good to me when it comes to reviewing , Elizabeth-Jasper, who just understood everything I was trying to get out there and Mrs Becky Salvatore, who I failed so entirely when it comes to deadlines….

But seriously, all you reviewers, everyone who reads this…you have no idea how special to me you are 3

Chapter Fourteen

Bleeding Out

Vick

(I'm bleeding out, so if the last thing that I do is bring you down, I'll bleed out for you)

Gone. It's four letters, one syllable. It's pain, and anguish and regret. It's Thirteen having left and the huge gaping hole remaining in the spaces she once filled. But it's more than that.

It's anger, and bitterness. It's the sudden need to swear, to punch something, to hurt someone because only by destroying someone else will I feel any less destroyed, any less broken.

"There was nothing else you could have done," my mother soothes. The circle of brothers on the front porch behind me nods in agreement, eyes blank, faces wiped clean of any emotion, any clue to what's going on inside. They don't want me to see the tiny bubbles of satisfaction bursting inside their brains, the waves of euphoria sweeping through them at the knowledge that they were right about Thirteen, and that even if they weren't, she's gone now so what does it matter?

They're not bad people. They're great people, wonderful people. That's what pisses me off. That people so generous, so giving in so many ways could refuse to give something as simple as trust to someone I care about, someone I trust.

It's because they don't trust me; don't trust my judgement.

The thought comes to life unbidden, unwanted, but once it's been thought I can't just push it to the back of my mind, can't force it away. I can feel the fallacy pouring off it, even in the spiralling, twisting, raging corners of my grief-wrecked mind, and for a fleeting, feeble moment I don't give a damn.

All this time spent struggling over right and wrong, yes and no, to act or play safe – it's all been time wasted. It's all trickling away now, all useless, irrelevant.

There's nothing left but anger.

"She put us all in danger," Zed growls in the background – my careless brother, my thoughtless brother. My brave, strong, completely unbroken brother whose Bambi-eyed soulfinder is tucked in the hollow between his back and the front door; safe, happy, here.

I punch him. Even as I do it I can feel the wrongness, the evil, the foulness of it all. I can feel a lifetime of painstakingly taught lessons and hard-learnt morals shattering like glass. It's sickening and heart-wrenching and disturbingly, disgustingly exhilarating. The knowledge that even as I tackle him to the ground even as I feel the quavering of his heart and the clenching and unclenching of his muscles as he tries desperately to fight back, that it doesn't matter if he does stand up for himself, if he does hit me back.

The power at my fingertips – a power I promised myself I wouldn't use, not after Thirteen, not after that night we first met and her screams in the hospital room, never again after that – has never felt so close. If I wanted to, I could order Zed to punch himself, to knock himself out – to snap his own neck if I wanted to.

If I wanted to.

Do I want to?

Anger fizzes and burns inside my stomach, grief howls inside my head, anguish digging razor-sharp fingernails into my heart. I want to hurt, to destroy. I want pain, I want someone else to feel like this so I don't have to be alone.

He's my brother. My youngest brother. I'd rather be alone than lose that, lose him.

I don't want this.

I scramble up, hands trembling, vision blurring and unblurring – the tears I'm not going to let myself cry gathering in front of my eyes.

I can't stand their faces, can't stand that they're not angry, not scared. Can't stand that they want to help me, want to save me. They can't, no-one can.

I turn on my heel and almost run to the car, whipping my phone from my jeans as I go. I won't destroy my family. I won't let them watch me falling apart, won't let my pain tear them in two.

But I'll still have blood, I'll still have revenge.

"Garcia," I say as the call connects and the sound of my own voice startles me. It sounds calm, clear, strong. It sounds like it knows what it wants, knows what it's doing. Clearly nobody's told it that not even I have the faintest clue.

I take a deep breath, and even as her voice starts to fill up my ear, I block it out, filter it away. I'm done listening, and in truth I'm done talking to. Words failed, words shrivelled life up and cackled as it died. Action's the only option left.

"We've got a serial killer to catch."

Beneath my shirt, I feel my bullet-wounds burn.

Thirteen

(Traded my vision, for heartache and sorrow)

After one drink, the world started looking a whole load brighter. After four it fades away again, to shadows and ashes and cigarette smoke.

My whole life has been bleached and disinfected and wiped away. Colour doesn't belong here, happiness doesn't belong here – love doesn't belong anywhere. Only confusion and hate and loneliness.

I need another drink.

"What've you lost then honey?"

She's pretty, in that obnoxiously blonde and skinny way that those of us with shit complexions and insufficient statures have been hating since the dawn of time. I think she's the bartender that served me the last four beers but I really can't tell anymore. It's all blurring into one now – thoughts and feelings and memories – all mashing into one huge lump of pity, of self-loathing, of despair.

And the thing is I don't know if I can't see straight because of the drink or the fact that every time I hear the bar door bang shut I find myself sitting up and looking for Vick, even though I know he won't follow me, even though I begged him not to, even though in some far-flung part of my heart I still think it's better if he doesn't.

"I haven't lost anything," I sigh. "Except my drink, I've definitely lost that." I gesture towards the bottle – I have always been, and will always be the worlds most obnoxious drunk.

Blonde bar-girl shakes her head at me. "Uh-uh sweetheart, I'm cuttin' you off."

I raise my eyebrows. God bless my North Carolina drawl because heaven knows I don't have it in me to sound deliberately contemptuous anymore.

"I'm not sure you can do that you know." I just want a drink. I just want to drown this all out, to smother the pain. To make it fade away into nothingness.

She smirks. "Course I can, I'm the bartender here meaning if I don't want to give you another drink until you talk to me, I don't have to."

"I. Haven't. Lost. Anything." I grind the words out through gritted teeth. "Though I'm still kind of missing how it's any of your business in the first place."

She lowers her head so our eyes are on the same level. "Because if you work in a dump like this long enough you start to recognize what the big drinkers look like. You ain't one of them. So I'm standing here watching you get trashed, all by yourself and it's obvious you don't go in for that kind of crap normally so clearly shit's gone down. And -,"

She spreads her hands, shrugs her shoulders. "What can I say, I like to help people."

Something's wrong with this picture. I feel the tingle of unease slip through my murky mind, wincing as it tries desperately to find some part of my brain still awake enough to work out what it is.

I know her, I recognize her. The name tickles on the tip of my tongue, but my brain can't grasp it, can't make out the shape of it.

"I know who you are." I hate how the alcohol's made my mind go runny, how just thinking feels like an effort. On the other hand I love it, embrace it, need it. A little oblivion is exactly what I want.

Blonde-bartender widens her eyes just a fraction. "What? A really good guesser?"

I catch the hint in her eyes, catch the meaning lurking behind them. She's trying to help me, trying not to make me feel stupid, drunk, pathetic.

"Yeah," I nod. "Of course. That's totally what I meant."

Why am I still talking? Why haven't I turned tail and run yet? In any other circumstances I would be out the door in a flash, gone the minute I thought I'd recognized someone I knew, someone who might remember me, someone who might hurt me. Why not now?

Cos you want someone to talk to. Someone you can spill your guts to.

"If you're such a good guesser why don't you tell me what I've lost?"

Her smirk has returned. "Father." She holds up one finger. "Sister." She holds up another. "Boyfriend." Finger number three.

Despite myself, despite every better instinct in my body, I shake my head. "Mother. Brother…" boyfriend? But that's not what Vick is…what he was anyway. He was more than that, he wasn't just some guy he was…everything; the sensible to my insane, the rational to my reckless, the dutiful to my disrespectful. My other half, my –

"Soulfinder." The word is out of my mouth before I can stop it and just saying it – just trying to wrap my tongue around the word that's not mine anymore, the word for everything I lost, everything that's missing – sends little needles of lip-biting, sob-choking agony shooting through my heart.

The look on her face says it all. It's almost gratifying really, almost pleasing to see my pain reflected on her features. She doesn't recognise the word but maybe she gets it, maybe she understands, maybe there's a reason this girl is working in some backwards bar in downtown Denver.

"It's not your fault." Her answer's quick, thoughtless, one of those textbook phrases people pull out when they don't have the words or the time or the empathy to think of something better.

Of course it's my fault. My thoughts throw themselves at the edges of my skull. I screwed up, I ruined it, if I'd only –

What? If I'd only what?

What could I have done, to save my Mom, to save Charlie. Could I have dragged them tooth and nail, blood and cursing, to get help, to fix themselves? Would anyone have been able to pluck the pain out of their skulls, the words they didn't know how to say, the anguish they had no way of expressing?

No.

I could have saved those girls though, could have stopped once I'd known what was happening, could've dredged up some bravery, some integrity. That way I wouldn't be running, wouldn't be drinking, wouldn't be missing my soulfinder with every fragment of my being. I wouldn't be feeling lost, broken, torn in two – a puzzle with half the pieces missing, a novel with every other page ripped out.

You would have died. I know instantly that the voice isn't mine – it's too calm, too rational, too sober, too right. If I'd tried to run, tried to escape the job, he'd have come after me. And he would've done the job properly, I wouldn't have lived to meet Vick, to be with him, to be loved by him.

If I had to lose him a thousand times just to meet him once, I would do it. It's as obvious as thinking, as breathing. We don't question why the trees change colour or the sun sets and rises or the seconds tick past. We just take it for granted. That's what love is, real love anyway. It's not to be questioned, it's not to be picked apart. It's just something to be done.

Love and life have an awful lot in common anyway.

"It wasn't my fault," I whisper to myself. "It wasn't my fault."

God reaches down and lifts the weights off of my shoulders. It all seems lighter now, easier. I realize with a start that the sky outside the bar is a crisp, bright, flawless blue – not the vacant expressionless grey I remembered from before. And slowly, cautiously, I let emotions flood back into my head – lost emotions, forgotten emotions, emotions I blocked out years ago.

Perspective, forgiveness, faithfulness – hope; it's all coming back to me now.

Because for years now I've been barely living with myself, my head and my heart two separate entities, uneasy within my skin. Broken, damaged, shattered, useless – that's all I've ever been as far as I'm concerned.

But it wasn't my fault.

And with time, and superglue and enough effort, what's shattered can be fixed, broken wings can fly again and uneasy hearts can love. I'm proof of the last one if nothing else.

It wasn't my fault.

In my excitement I stand up – I'm getting the hell out of this place, running as fast as I can, as far as I can – I'm going to fix myself, I'm going to forgive myself, I'm going to live. But it's all too much, too fast, my thoughts may have sped up but the alcohol's still seeping through my veins like poison and I feel my knees buckle underneath me, my back spasms and I'm slipping away, falling down, down, down.

"Do you want me to call someone?" the bartender asks from a long, long way away.

With one shaking hand, I scrabble in my pocket and slap a calling card down on the counter.

Then swirling blackness and nothing but peace and oblivion. Finally, thankfully.

Vick

(X & Y)

A map. Red dots where victims were found, girls ripped apart and lives torn to tatters. Reclining in my old desk-chair, with my back to Cass's desk and my eyes on my work I can feel the old me flooding back in. Calm, authoritative, responsible, efficient.

Thirteen had a way of erasing the parts of myself that I've never liked, the parts I've lost all hope of fixing. Something about her, her recklessness, her tenacity – her Thirteen-ness – smothered them all, suffocated them. Now I feel them knocking on my mind again, begging to come back in.

I let them.

Maybe I can pretend that I'm the old Vick, that none of this ever happened, that this is just another case, another killer. That he hasn't taken half of my life with him.

"I don't get it," my eyes have burnt holes in the paper, I've pored over it and scrutinised it and stared at it from every angle. Still nothing. "What links this guy with these places– Colorado, Arkansas, Maine, Florida, Illinois, Arizona – why did he go there, they're nowhere near each other, they've got nothing in common…just what was he thinking?"

Callum shrugs. "They're just the places he was in at the time I guess."

"No way," I like the certainty in my voice, the sincerity. I like that I sound like I know what I'm talking about, what I want, what I mean.

"No he planned those killings, he targeted those girls," I tilt my eyes towards the ceiling hoping for inspiration, a revelation. "I just wish I knew why."

"You can't." His voice is cold, brisk, calculated. Indifferent.

The anger's not gone. I may have hidden it under the coldness, the briskness, the impassive façade of Old Vick, but it's still there, burning, seething.

"Callum," for a moment I don't care that he's my superior, that he outranks me, that I owe him everything. "I will find this guy if it kills me."

"If it kills you?" Callum jerks to his feet, and the world slows down. It's like someone's taken his face, taken his voice, and transplanted them onto a different person, a different Callum. At the flick of a switch he's transformed, morphed, mutated. His lips draw back in a sickening, stomach-churning, sadistic twist of a smile – those are stones in those sockets, not eyes.

I'm looking up at my boss, at a man I've trusted, respected, relied on. A monster's looking back.

"Even if it kills you Victor?" he repeats. "If it breaks you and crushes you and rips you in two, like all those little girls you're so worried about?"

All I can think – all that registers, all that computes – is that he's between me and the door, blocking any exit, any escape. His words come from a thousand miles away, I don't hear them, don't recognise them, they just wash over me.

It's not fear I'm feeling, just acceptance. Like I've been expecting this, like I'd seen it coming even though I didn't, even though never in a thousand years would my thoughts have strayed this way.

"Because that's what love will do to you Victor," Callum rasps. "It'll mangle you and butcher you then stand over your cold, dead body while you bleed out, drop by drop by drop. Trust me, I know."

I don't know that. I would've sworn that I knew what love is long before Thirteen, would've sworn that I'd felt it, mastered it, acclimatised to it. I was wrong.

Real love doesn't hurt – it doesn't keep you up at night, doesn't play with you or belittle you or pretend it knows everything that you are. It's just…there, all the time, with every breath, every thought, every moment.

Loving Thirteen didn't feel like an effort, I didn't feel like I was having to fight for it or struggle with it. I just knew, with every inch of my body, every aspect of myself, that I loved her. And that was enough.

"You're wrong." I look straight at Callum, daring myself not to look away, to meet that stare, to glare through the madness, through the malice. There must be something underneath all that, some hint of Callum, some trace.

There isn't.

He shrugs.

"Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm not. I suppose we'll just have to see."

And once again I find myself staring down a bullet.

Thirteen

(Stop every clock, the stars are in shock)

My head spins, my heart hammers in my chest. Black dots like butterflies chase themselves across my vision. But I'm alive, so very, very alive. The euphoria's not gone, the happiness still fizzes away inside of my stomach.

It's not my fault, it's not my fault.

"Are you ok?" he's some friend of the bartenders I guess. Sweet, skinny, attractive I suppose except he's not tall or tanned or possessing a ludicrous looking pony-tail so I could never find it in myself to love him. He leans against one wall of the bar's kitchen, glancing down at where I lie on a moth-eaten couch and there's real sympathy in his eyes, real kindness.

I don't think I'd have noticed that before, or trusted it if I had.

From behind him, the blonde bartender clears her throat. She doesn't look at the guy, doesn't even catch his eyes, just stares straight past him at me, inquisitive, enquiring.

"Someone's here to pick you up," she barks across at me.

Despite my head, despite the hangover, despite everything I sit bolt upright, heart summersaulting in my chest. "My boyfriend?" I gasp.

I didn't expect him to come, didn't expect him to want to see me. Just the thought of his voice, his eyes, his arms around me is enough to wipe the pain from my body, to ease it out of my muscles, my bones, like it never existed.

But she shakes her head. "Nope. Apparently he was busy, his boss is here instead."

His boss?

The guy raises his eyebrows. "You sure that's a good idea?"

"It's fine."

Shit.

All of a sudden, through my disappointment, through the sinking of my heart and the despondency flooding through my veins, I join the dots, I finish the puzzle, I realize why I know the girls face.

Garcia.

Which means –

"You ready to get going Thirteen?" Callum sticks his head down the door and smiles down at me.

That smile could stop hurricanes in their tracks, kill giants stone-dead, make a shark weep and cry for his mama.

And it tells me everything I have to know, everything I didn't want to know.

I will go with Callum. I will pretend that there's nothing wrong and do whatever he tells me to do.

I don't have a choice.

Well…was it ok? What did you guys think? How about letting me know in a review!

Right…so this chapters song lyrics go as follows

Both the chapter title and the first subheading are from Bleeding out by Imagine Dragons whose album I am DYING to buy : )

Next up is Sky's still blue by Andrew Belle, an absolutely amazing song and a new favourite of mine (Traded my vision for heartache and sorrow), after that is actually the title of the Coldplay song X & Y which makes a lot more sense in context if you know the song and last up is Tears of an Angel by RyanDan which is a song I tend not to listen to not because it's bad (it's stunning) but because it's flawlessly perfect and makes me cry every time : )