Disclaimer – None of the characters are mine; I'm not making any money by writing this.
Schuldich pulled himself out of Brad faster than he had ever done before, the memory hanging in the air, threatening to descend upon the telepath with greater force, and drag him deeper and deeper into the next set of memories. The same half-dark swirled around him, and he was sitting on the bed again, staring at the face of the child he'd been in the memories.
The crying grew quieter as Schuldich leaned forward, trying to find some shard of recognition, that the boy in the corridor had been Crawford – but no hint of affirmation came. He shifted further onto the bed, and propped himself up on one arm, now lying parallel to Brad.
"You shot your father?" He was careful not to add any emotion to his voice – anger, disbelief, or sorrow would merely isolate Brad from him, disallowing him to connect in any way. He watched the face and thoughts of the man in front of him intently, scanning frantically for any indication that his comment had been taken as a reproach.
Brad nodded a second before he spoke, taking deep breaths, trying to clear his voice, bring it back to something resembling normality.
"Yes. I won't regret or forget it. Ever." Schuldich could feel the pent up rage contained in these words, and blessed with telepathy could pick his way round the invisible traps the words contained.
"I'm not saying you should – Can you tell me why…" He cut off suddenly as Crawford raised his face slightly, for the first time making eye contact. The usually mellow or sincere hazel they usually were was darkened by the semi-light, but the tears and the raw emotion pouring through them wove round him, transfixing him in mid-sentence, startling him into silence. He kept staring into those twin dark pools of pure amber, trying desperately hard not to be dragged back by curiosity into the recesses of Brad's memories. A hard decisive voice shattered any desire to ever to go there again.
"He hurt me."
Realisation struck through the core of Schuldich's soul, spearing him again from those burning eyes… He hadn't just been hurt…
"Oh – Oh Brad!" He could hear the pity in his voice, but couldn't take it back. He'd survived memories of a madman in the asylum who'd abused children…He could feel both sides of the equation now, known a perpetrator and a victim. Leaving the glass bottle by his side, he wrapped both arms around his friend and pulled him close, as though he was trying to protect him from his own past and memories.
Brad started crying again at the contact and the inevitable reliving of the experience that came with the retelling. Schuldich now felt the ghost emotions he'd felt in the memory come pouring back through him and as he struggled against the current, he inadvertently fell back in.
Again, he shook himself free of the clutches of the memory, and was back in reality again, his arms tightly locked around Brad, the sobbing American's face buried in his shoulder. How in the name of anything was he supposed to react? Comforting words? A 'he-deserved-it-you-didn't' speech? For once, the telepath had no idea. Technically, he'd been abused through other's memories, but never in person, how could he even compare his personal hells with Brad's? Raped by his father –
"Have you ever seen anyone's memories like mine?" He was too deep in his thoughts to have noticed the change in tone in the crying, now more controlled, and a clearer voice. Schuldich thought over for a second. Yes, he had…
"Once, while I was in an asylum. I shared a cell with a man who'd done many bad things, murder, arson, rape. I practised mind reading on him for two years. I still have nightmares of what I saw in his head. He wasn't a victim, but the one who did it." Here he felt Brad's thoughts swing widely, and continued fast, somehow wanting to tell his side before Crawford shut him out.
"I hated him more than anything. More than the people who kept me in there, more than myself. Some days when he used to talk to himself, going on about what he'd done to children, I found myself so close to pulverising his brain, making him turn in on himself, but I stopped, scared by the threat of a longer time incarcerated. He was boasting about some poor child, Joseph, or Jacob…"
The sobbing stopped suddenly. Brad pushed himself back from Schuldich, and stared straight into his viridian eyes.
"What was his name?" It was a cold hard tone, but it threatened tears.
" I don't know. I don't think I was ever told."
"You must know. You saw his memories. Someone would have known it. Screamed it." Schuldich heard the desperate urgency in his voice, and scoured his memory for any remnant of a name. He found shards of sanity in that particular collection of memories, and ran backwards and forwards through them, leaping over pools of black that hid the more disturbing recollections of a paedophile. He came out of his search.
"I can't find anything…" He felt Brad take in a shaking breath.
"Show me what he looked like."
"Why? He's dead now…"
"That's what I thought."
"What? Brad, I don't under - " Schuldich was as loathe to show himself that face, as to show the American.
"My middle name is Jacob." Brad had regained his amazing control over his emotions, continually suppressing them, and was continuing to do so now, his face devoid of any expression, except for determination. "Show me his face. I want to know." Schuldich, silently raised his hand to Crawford's forehead, and let the string of images flow through him. Flashes of a dark-haired man, brown eyes, stubble, and a scar running from the corner of his right eye to the back of his ear. Snatches of sound came through, but disjointed with the memories, subtle manic laughter with tears, calm voice with laughing mouth.
Schuldich stopped the river of memories, and took his hand away, doubts over what he'd just done flooding him. It made sense, the raven black hair and the pale scar from the bullet. He wrapped his arms around the now silent Brad again, and continued speaking.
"It's him, I know. He's dead now, I killed him. After a meal, I followed him to the washroom, and broke his skull against a mirror, over and over again. They had to pull me off his corpse. They couldn't recognise who he was until they checked some file." He finished his narrative quickly, not adding how he'd been kept in for another four years in a straightjacket, or that he'd continually fucked with the 'doctor's' heads after that.
"Thank you."
Schuldich couldn't say anything more in face of those two words. It didn't seem appropriate somehow. Brad curled up tighter against Schuldich, looping his arms around his neck and burying his hands deep in the wild ginger hair. Schuldich untangled an arm, and removed Crawford's glasses, placing them on the table beside the bed. Reaching down past his knees, he tugged the blanket on the bed out from under them and spread it across them both. To do so, he had to take one arm off Crawford, feeling the coldness flood in.
"Schu –"
"Shhhh, sleep. I'm here, no-one can hurt you…" He replaced his arm about the American, emphasising the protective meaning of his words.
"No – it's not that. Please, tell me your name…"
"I…" Schuldich stopped. Would it really matter against all the secrets aired tonight? Could it ever seem that significant? But why not? An unwillingness to dig up the past? To heal, you must feel. That was what all the cheap trashy talk show hosts said; but maybe it was right, maybe somehow, they'd stumbled across an inevitable truth. Could it really hurt so bad as he thought it would? Almost certainly.
But hey, hadn't he carried more than that?
"Saul. But go to sleep now." With his last few words, Schuldich slipped gently into the glowing mass of thoughts in Brad's mind, smoothly, but forcefully cutting the links that touched a festering grey-green sphere that flickered with black streaks of painful memories. And so he effectively removed the recollections from conscious thought, at least while he was still there.
Schuldich felt the mind around him relax, and pass into a quiet sleep, devoid of natural dreams. Gently, ever so gently, he played a continuous loop of what he thought the pair of them looked like from above, as though in Crawford's dream, he was floating above the bed.
Through the night, Schuldich stayed awake. Part of his thoughts were taken up with isolating the memories that threatened to re-awaken in Bradley's dreams, as much as he hated handling them. Contrary to popular belief, he didn't revel in modifying people's minds. He only really did it when it was necessary – when Farfello was beserking and couldn't be stopped, when Taketori was about to kill him in another golf club rage, when his friend and leader was on the edge of reason, and possibly his life.
The rest of his thoughts were taken up with what had passed between his leader and himself. He didn't know how things would turn out. Would Brad admit he was human and talk more often? This was quite a scary prospect in itself. Schuldich was used to Crawford being a solid, icy leader who would tell you what to do, and how. If he started talking, Schuldich wasn't sure he could continue being his usual self; somehow he didn't think he could be so smug and arrogant around a Bradley he knew might get hurt… The conclusion to that thought made him think. He hadn't really worried if Brad had got hurt before. Physically, yes, if Brad died – and reliable oracles are hard to come by – Schuldich was sure to get the blame for not protecting him, and so didn't let violence get that far, but… Emotionally? To tell the truth, he'd never really thought of Brad as the kind of person who got emotions. He'd never registered Crawford feeling anything before. Sure, he had always known that Crawford got real pissed off if someone screwed up, but anger was different – it wasn't really an emotion, more like a primal reaction…
And what if he didn't remember? Supposing the alcohol would wipe his memory? And he never remembered anything that either had said or done… Schuldich felt himself go pale. It would be even harder to live like that than if Crawford remembered. He had no idea what he'd do. For a start, Brad would probably try to knock him out for sleeping in his bed, then Schuldich would be left on edge forever, not knowing if an noise or vision would trigger the alcohol buried memory, and what the hell he would do if it did. And he'd probably try to protect the oracle, then Brad would demand what he was doing and Schuldich couldn't say, or if he did, then Brad would probably shut himself up again once he knew that Schuldich knew he'd been abused.
All in all, Schuldich had no idea what the fuck he could do. Or would do.
The morning came. Slowly, inch-by-inch it rose up through the shut curtains, and Schuldich's fear of the deciding day rose up a million times faster than the sun. As the light intensity increased, Schuldich watched the sleeping Crawford. He hadn't moved the entire night; his hands had remained clenched in his hair, meaning the telepath couldn't have moved, even if he wanted to. At least – not unless he used telepathy, and that he couldn't bring himself to do. His talent had been described as 'mind-fucking' before, and Bradley had more than his fair share of having a fucked up mind. Schuldich settled down and waited.