A/N-This is where the story takes a definitely darker turn. Much darker. So if you like that sort of thing keep on reading...just don't say I didn't warn you. It just goes downhill from here... And I'm being nice and giving you this before I go and do 21 hours straight of marching band. Red Scare is awesome, but this is well, more than I'm used to...
I open my eyes
I try to see but I'm blinded by the white light
I can't remember how
I can't remember why
I'm lying here tonight
And I can't stand the pain
And I can't make it go away
No I can't stand the pain
How could this happen to me
I've made my mistakes
Got nowhere to run
The night goes on
As I'm fading away
I'm sick of this life
I just want to scream
How could this happen to me
Simple Plan-Untitled
He stared at the bottom his glass, into the amber liquid. If he ever needed a drink it was now. And boy did he need it. He downed it easily with a gulp and refilled it. He had just almost been shot. He rubbed the top of his ear. Not almost. Technically the bullet had connected, so what if the only thing it took with it was maybe a centimeter of his ear? If it had been just a fraction to the side it would have been straight through his skull.
He would have been dead. Gone. Finished. He downed the glass again with practiced ease, it didn't hurt so much going down anymore, when he first tried to down a glass at once it had stung like hell, but now it was the same long slow burn that he had with just a sip. But he had almost never felt that again. Almost never felt anything again.
Almost died. Almost found himself not feeling. Would that be a bad thing though, to die like that? It was instantaneous, the bullet would have gone straight through, he wouldn't have the chance to process it before his body just shut down around him. And it wouldn't be a bad thing. At least his death would be quick and painless.
And it would get rid of all the pain around him, the pain inside of him. He downed another glass of scotch, pouring his fourth. He wanted to get rid of the pain, get rid of the hurt, get rid of everything around him, the nightmares, the way that she haunted him, the looks that the rest of the staff, his friends gave him every day, every day when he went in looking worse and worse.
Lily had acted concerned. He said he just wasn't sleeping well. That was the truth. She had tried to get him to talk to her, to Stiles, but there wasn't anything either of them could do to help. The only thing he could do was do something to numb the pain. There was no way to fix it. The symptoms could be treated but never cured.
And he wanted them to be cured, he wanted to be free from all of this. He wanted to get rid of it all. He could do it, he had seen more clever ways to die in his tenure at the morgue than any other person on the planet, probably. Many of them looked like they wouldn't hurt a bit.
But he would never do it himself. He couldn't. As much as he wanted to go find a nice little empty corner of the world pull out a gun and pull the trigger, he couldn't. He had one too, he could go into the closet right now and pull it off the top shelf. Two minutes to load it and one quick pull of the trigger and he'd be gone. Free from the pain.
Would anyone even notice him if he did it? How quickly would they forget him? He had no family left, Maggie was out of the picture, and well, Abby had been what started this off. The thought had crossed his mind before in other moments of wallowing in self pity, but he had always kept on going for Abby. But now he didn't even have that.
The only people that would even notice would be his friends. They would be the only ones at the funeral. And even they would forget about him soon enough. Give them a month or two and they would have moved on with their lives, he would just be a picture on a wall, someone to go "Oh, he was the boss. We thought he was a good guy, but he just snapped, went off and killed himself." He'd make the papers, but only inasmuch as he was a higher up, an appointed official, somewhere near the top of the bureaucratic foodchain.
That was something that he didn't want though. He didn't want to have to make the papers, he didn't even want an obituary printed. He just wanted to be done with life, and let everyone else move on. He didn't want to drag anyone else down with him, he didn't want to be a news figure, this wasn't about the attention. He wasn't some angsty teenager who wanted to kill themselves to gain recognition. No, he just wanted to be free.
He didn't want the recognition. He wanted to do it with no one noticing. He could go run off and do it in a foreign country. He'd just be the random tourist that died. Go someplace like Mexico where they wouldn't know and wouldn't care that he was gone. They'd stick him in the earth somewhere and leave him, the unlucky tourist.
And Jordan and Bug and Nigel and Lilly would all forget about him, move on with their lives, thinking he just ran off. But he couldn't do that to them, as much as he wanted to, they meant too much to him. They would be hurt. And he didn't want to hurt them, just be free of his own pain. He couldn't let his own weakness hurt them. He downed another glass, numbing the pain all the more.
It didn't hurt that badly now, not since he had been drinking. The alcohol numbed the pain. It was something to relieve the symptoms. He could never cure it, the only cure would to be to leave all this behind him. Do something quick and painless and be gone from it forever.
He didn't even know what he would do. He had a gun, he could just shoot himself. Rope wasn't that hard to come by, he could hang himself, but there was always the risk that that would fail and he would be left there hanging for minutes, unable to breathe, it wouldn't be painless or quick. Poison was an option, he had access to plenty of things that would kill him quick with no feeling. He could just park his car in a nice little enclosed room and leave it running, kick back with some jazz and just drift off, it wouldn't be quick, but it would be painless. He'd be unconscious before he noticed anything was wrong.
He could always just tamper with his heater if that's what he wanted. By the time anyone else in the building noticed, he'd be dead and they could fix it. And it would be less painful to the rest of his friends, they could write it off as an accident. A bullet in his head and the gun in his hands was just a little to obvious.
But that's what he wanted, he wanted out from all of this. He could go crash his car over the guardrail. But would he wait til he was sober? Crash it into the river, drown, be done with it all. It'd look like an accident. It was a dark and stormy night, he was tipsy, it would be an entirely believable story.
He had just started to walk to the door when he turned and sat back down. But it would still hurt his friends. That was the worst part of it all. He cared too much, that was his fault. No matter how hard he tried to be the cynical, cold, bastard he failed, he could appear to be it, but he never was it, he had too much of a heart.
And that was what was driving him to this point. He had loved Abby too much, he couldn't let her go. He downed another drink, he was starting to feel lightheaded but he didn't care. He was drinking to get drunk tonight, damn the repercussions. He didn't care. He had an excuse, his life had nearly ended.
And he was thinking about how good it would have been if it had. It would have been good. It would hurt the staff the least, they could glorify him, turn him into a martyr, respect him rather than grieve him. And that was what he wanted. He didn't want to be mourned, he didn't even want to be remembered, but he'd rather be remembered for being one of the ones that died on the job than be remembered for the one that had hurt them all when he took the cowards way out.
He downed another glass of scotch, surprised that he wasn't feeling it that much. Usually he was good and drunk at this point, but he'd had six and he was barely feeling them. And he wanted to go all the way to oblivion, pass out, not have to even think about the possibility of nightmares. A nightmare, seeing her in his dreams would be what it took to send him off the edge, no matter what the rest of the world would think of him for doing it.