The German returned fire. Tommy made a bet, and hoped that he was right, and that Tessa wouldn't be shot because of it. Hoped, because that was all he could do, because whatever he felt for her, he did what he had to do. He always did what he had to do, and this was it. The last man was distracted, trying to get a better view of Tessa's copper colored head, allowing Tommy to move out from behind the door, cover the few strides across the room, and raise his gun. He leveled it, shot, got so close he could see the German's black hair move over his forehead as the man flinched out of the bullet's way. The man raised, fired, and it tore through Tommy's arm, but he kept moving forward, closing the space between them before the other man could fit in another squeeze of the trigger, but the German kicked out, his foot colliding with Tommy's knee, making it buckle. Tommy went halfway down, to his knees, caught himself with the hand of the arm he had just been shot in, the hand that was holding his gun, which skittered across the floor, and the unexpected jolts of pain doubled as the man's fist collided with his jaw. The German was wearing a heavy, gilded ring on his right hand, and Tommy's vision blurred and swam with popping lights and pain from the blow. The other man raised his fist again for an uppercut, but Tommy raised his forearm to block it, then angled his elbow upward, catching his opponent in the temple, and struggled back to his feet. He aimed a kick at the other man's torso, knocking his wind out, then another, to the face. There could be no mercy. Mercy didn't exist. Mercy was just weakness with a placating smile, and it was Tommy or it was him, the nameless other, the man at his feet. That was the only choice. Him or me. Not mercy or no mercy. That is the only question. The answer is the same. Him or me. The man swiped at Tommy's feet with his legs, trying to knock him off balance, shuffling out from behind the overturned table like a backwards crab, his hand groping blindly behind him for a gun, for a weapon, but Tommy sidestepped his attempts to trip him, which gave the other man time to scramble to his knees, lunge at Tommy again. He dug his fingers into Tommy's bleeding arm, and Tommy thought he might have screamed, but everything was nothing, just a struggle, just limbs and pain and weaknesses and bullet holes and blood. The other man seized the upper hand somehow, and then Tommy did, somehow, got his hands around the man's neck and started to squeeze. He turned blue, then purple, then an ugly, mottled red, his legs twitching desperately, hands flailing at his sides. Tommy kept squeezing, closed his eyes, but the nightmare was in his hands, not his head, and when he opened them again the man was lying still. He took a second, just one, to breathe because he still could, let his head hang, felt the burning fucking pain in his arm and appriciated it, somehow, for proving that he could still be hurt, that he too had suffered in exchange for all the suffering he caused. He stood, and walked to where Tessa was still behind the counter, peeking out past it, wobbling slightly on his feet, not even able to isolate the specific reason why. He didn't look down at the body, at any of the bodies. Her eyes followed him, watched him grow nearer. There was something in them, but he didn't want to know what it was, because it looked like it might have been fear. She looked younger to him in that moment than she ever had before, despite the blood on her face and gun in her white-knuckled hands. There were bruises circling her pale neck, like an upside down crown of thorns, across the smooth line of her jaw, dark against the ivory of her skin, blood splattered across it like bright red freckles against the bright red of her hair. He lowered himself to her level, and wished he hadn't, because he wasn't sure he would be able to convince himself to rise again.
"You alright?" He asked, and she nodded, but she wasn't. He offered her his hand, and she still took it, but she let go once she had stood to her full, sleight height. She wasn't looking at him anymore, her eyes roaming the room with a kind of expression like she was forcing herself to do it against her own desires.
Beck's body was crumpled against the wall, still bleeding profusely from several holes in his abdomen, holding the gun Tommy gave him. Tessa wondered if he had even gotten one good shot off on it, or if they shouldn't have even wasted it on him, and the cruelty of the thought surprised her. The lack of sympathy she felt looking down at him surprised her as well, his wide eyes closed, bulbous nose leaking a small stream of red. She thought of how he followed orders and left the house when Arnholt had taken Ada, and then she no longer felt remorse for her lack of remorse. She moved past him, commanding her joints to work, her muscles to contract, to propel her body forward when it felt like there were invisible hands of trepidation holding her back.
"Papa?" She called, her voice cracking a little with fear. There was no response. "Dad?" She called to him again, and from down the narrow hallway, Tommy said,
"Tessa. He's here," and his tone gave away nothing, but his words did, and she stumbled desperately to him, her mind blank but her knees trembling so badly she could hardly walk.
"He's breathing," Tommy said, evenly, calmly, while checking his pulse, and Tessa fell to the ground next to her father, who was lying on his stomach, bleeding from his lower back like he had been shot trying to get to safety. She felt horribly, horribly sick, she felt like she should have done more to prevent this, even if there was no possible way for her to have, and she was disgusted with herself for not trying harder, for not doing better. There were salty tears streaming down her cheeks, and she took her father's hand, which felt cold. Her throat was tight and burning and constricted and sore, but her voice was flat when she asked,
"Will he be alright?"
Tommy looked up at her. He was crouched by her father as well, his hands covered in blood, maybe her father's, maybe his own, maybe someone else's. Tessa couldn't remember, couldn't keep track. She wondered if he could. His eyes gripped her, opium, and said I will let you go when I want to. She stroked her father's hand and wondered, for a moment, if she had gotten shot, if he wouldn't have. If there was a way for her to make that trade with the universe, she would have done it. Tommy didn't answer her question, just said,
"We need to get him the fuck out of here." And grunted slightly as he slid the larger, older man onto and across his shoulders, standing slowly under his weight. Tessa was so grateful to him, so scared of him in that moment she couldn't form the words "thank you", so nauseatingly concerned about her father she couldn't say "please help him", so terrified and horrified and traumatized all she could do was stand and stare, thinking about Tommy's hands around the twitching German man's throat, Tommy's hands around hers as he kissed her, Arnholt's hands, Tommy's around a gun, hers around a gun, and she stood on her toes to place a small, chaste kiss on Tommy's bloody cheek. The slight scratch of stubble caught her bleeding lip, and it was a twisted kind of juxtaposition, her kiss covered in red. Tommy sighed, quietly, and readjusted her father slightly.
"Come," he said, turning and moving back down the hallway, her father's unconscious form draped over him like a huge overcoat. Tommy was still holding a gun.
"Your medals," Tessa said. He looked over his shoulder at her, turning slightly so that he could see her past her father. "You deserved them," she said, and he looked blank, but she could see that under that he looked angry, and under that he looked sad. He turned back around.
Reilly was fucking heavy. How such a large man had such a small daughter, fuck knew. She must have taken her height, or lack thereof, from her mother. Tommy responded to his own, falsely ambivalent, thoughts, with a detached sort of curiosity. Odd that his mind should try to force him into some semblance of normalcy, as if this wasn't what it begged for, in the small hours of the night, this blood and this pain and this darkness, the only thing it was familiar with, the only thing it remembered how to know. Odd that now it should be deflecting the truth that it always seemed to search for otherwise.
What are you?
He knew, and he wished he didn't.
There was blood on his hands and a man's body on his back. Did that even out? Would he have saved Reilly if it wasn't for his promise to his daughter? Did it matter what he would or wouldn't have done, weighed against the bodies he was leaving in a trail behind him? Why did he bother with these questions of morality, when he knew damn well that he had his own code, and fuck what anyone else said?
They passed back through the kitchen. Tommy saw Beck lying in a pool of his own blood, but it registered like a passing cloud in the sky of his thoughts. Water is wet, Beck is dead. He moved on.
Reilly stirred on his shoulder, and lifted his head slightly.
"Tessa," he said, his first thought, and she was there instantly, gripping his hand. Tommy lowered him gently, more for Tessa's sake and at the risk of her scolding than anything else. His hair was matted with dried blood. She supported her father, holding both of them.
Reilly tried to speak again, but all that came out was a wheeze. For a moment, Tommy pitied him. It would have been better if he had remained unconscious. Less painful. But he was alive, and Tommy supposed that counted for something, made this whole venture not a complete fucking waste of time and simeltaneous threat to the lives of almost everyone Tommy cared about.
"Shh," Tessa said, gently, hooking one of her father's arms over her shoulders. "Don't try to talk, it's alright. I'm alright. We're going to get out of here," and she kept talking in a low, soothing voice as they staggered back to the kitchen, and Tommy knew it was for her father's benefit, but he listened too, so hard it took him several more seconds than it ordinarily would have to notice choked breathing calling out to him through the darkness of the dining room, the sky having darkened beyond the gray of the rain into the deep blackness of a post-downpour night outside the large rear facing windows and open back door, and Tommy cocked the hammer of his pistol, one he had taken from one of the Germans, he could hardly remember which, immediately, goosebumps rising down his neck and arms. Another? His mind asked him, in a tired voice, and Tommy pushed it down, and a different voice, a quieter one, said, another, like it was hungry, and he pushed that one down farther. Tessa hung back and her father hung on her, his face like a skull, gaunt and scared.
"Please," a voice rasped, followed by more unsteady breaths, and Tommy located the source to where the man had apparently drug himself, leaving a streak of red behind to map his progress, a cannibalized Hansel and Gretle. He was halfway upright, on the wall, surrounded by his fallen comrades, bleeding from a shot under his collarbone.
"Please, leave me," he said, and he was right by the door, the back door that was open and unguarded and covered in bullet holes. "For the love of God, please, just go, for the love of-,"
"I have no love," Tommy said, and he raised with no hesitation and shot the man through the eye.