Title: The World Outside
Author: Anney
Disclaimer: I do not own. Blah blah blah...
Pairing: hints of Schu/Brad, and something else
A/N: Blah blah blah. Erm. Angst, maybe? But not really. But yea, you could say there's angst. Unhappiness most definitely. If you can catch on you can probably catch the pairing that I hint at. I barely hint at, so much of the barely hint that I could even possibly say that it's not even hinted at.
Summary: He can remember when...
The World Outside
When every thing is over he sits back in a chair, glasses sliding down to the tip of his nose, and wonders just what went wrong. There's still blood on his hands, little nicks and cuts on his wrist where he wasn't so careful, and he looks out the window with the cigarette in his mouth dangling down; and he wonders what it was about tonight that made every thing so blurry.
The smoke in his lungs burns from where he's been holding still so long. When he finally lets go it's a whoosh of exhale, smoke flowing across his vision. If he squints hard enough it makes the world look nicer than it really is. He tries to go though every day with a careful masking of smoke between himself and the world. The scene outside his window is full of late night lights of blinding neon colors that flash and move across in intricate patterns of what is meant to be temptation.
The world outside is full of people that wander around and look for things to make their lives worth living. They stumble around in ignorance; some times he can't help but feel like he's so high above them. Like he knows more than they ever could. Like he's so much better than they could ever hope to be.
Then guilt crashes down around him and he doesn't think he's much of anything. He'll go down to his other job in the morning; a little late, his eyes covered with colored glasses, and smiles. He'll move through the rest of his life with a smirk and teasing flicks of his hand only to one day die alone. This is his reality as he sees it. The world doesn't move around him anymore. He's not really sure if it ever really did. He's getting older; and with age comes wisdom, but the only wisdom he's ever realized is that bullets really hurt when they make their mark in him, and women never really stay as long as you want them too.
He sits in his chair late at night with a pack of cigarettes and his glasses. Random flicks of a lighter that was a gift from himself to himself one paycheck long ago, special ordered from an American magazine. It has a cross on the front and back; a blood red cross and a name engraved across the top that he can barely remember having. A name he finds himself missing the more time passes by. He can remember a time when people would keep him company late into the night. When the neon lights surrounding the night were a comfort to him and he would dance and drink the nights away with someone new every time he opened his eyes.
Life doesn't get harder as you get older, he thinks. It's just that you slow down, your desires change and you just stop living. Or something like that. He was always better at thinking clearly when he had a few drinks in.
He can remember when his only diet was beer, cigarettes, and sometimes a hamburger. The cheapest, biggest one he could find. He can remember when his hair was a flowing halo around his head of a color he loved having. He can remember when he didn't have to work so hard, when he had everything he could want, when he almost owned the world.
Just like he can remember the four bastards that stood in his way, and he can remember the laughter of a teammate when the world fell out from under his feet, and even when he saw it coming he didn't really i see /i it. He didn't realize what it meant. It's like every thing had just stopped after that one moment. Like he shouldn't have made it from the bottom of a cold littered ocean onto a warm sandy beach. Like he shouldn't be the only one to conquer his fight with the ocean. People he had been stuck with for so long that they seemed like the only family he had ever known washing up days later. People he had no more use for.
He stood on the sidelines trying to stay hidden from sight as he watched the only people he can remember flung into the past of lost remembrance, and he sits in his chair in the early morning and smokes away more of the memories he had fought to hold onto after a fight he didn't really want to win. In the morning he'll walk down the stairs of his apartment, and he'll go to work in a place he hates with people he had tried so hard to kill and he'll avoid looking in a mirror so he doesn't see a face that he had never grown up looking at.
People he has to pretend to like will carry him through his life and he'll respond to a name that he doesn't recognize. Growing old and living with the enemy. He had known, he had seen it; in one quick glimpse from some one he might have loved, and he hadn't been able to stop himself. He didn't want to die. He had never wanted to die but he didn't want to be someone else.
No more flowing red hair for him, now it's shoulder length and wavy dark. He keeps it off his neck in a ponytail, he wears sunglasses on the tip of his nose regardless of how much light there is or isn't. He smiles, he flirts, he wears a watch on the wrong wrist and he writes with the wrong hand. He's still alive but the face in the mirror isn't the one he remembers. The people he works with aren't the ones he misses, and the person he loves isn't the one he sleeps with.
Life goes on, and he sits in his chair in front of a window and he can remember golf clubs, and blood. White hair and laughter. Dark eyes behind glasses, a mouth that always smirked at him. He remembers a sullen eyed youth peeking out from behind a computer screen. He can remember quips about his heritage from mouths that never moved. And an Irish accent when songs were sung in the shower. He remembers all this and more, but the thing he can never let go of is that he was left alone. Alone and alive in a desperate attempt at something he had thought would be better than death.
He can also remember dark eyes mocking him, and a smirking mouth turned up in a smile that was later denied. Harsh bloody kisses and laughter when he denied what he was shown as his future. He wakes up every morning wrapped around a body that he can remember hating and missing a body he had never really gotten to know like he wanted.
end