Chapter Six: Luke
My brother is dead.
Luke sat in the hospital hallway, knees pulled up to his chest in a lime green plastic chair. He didn't need to be in the hospital room. He saw enough of his brother in his mind, imprinted there like the phrase that accompanied it. The nurses had closed his brother's eyes and wiped the blood from the back of his neck, but no matter how presentable he looked, he was indubitably dead, ever since the bullet went through his head. His face was pale and set like a stone, and he wasn't anyone anymore. Luke remembered the word to be 'corpse.'
My brother is dead.
He stared at the wall, in front of him, and repeated the phrase in his head. He repeated it over, and over, staring at the wall. He did it so that he would believe it, but it didn't work at all. He repeated it, though, trying until it just became words. After that, it became sounds, then noise. My brother is dead. My brother is dead.
"Let me through! Please, my son!"
Luke turned his head slightly toward one end of the hall. His mother had appeared, and she was running down the hall to the hospital room. His eyes followed as she rushed past him, into his brother's room.
His father had appeared there with her, and followed her into the room. He was the one that stood over her with a hand on her back as she bawled, taking the body into her arms. Luke looked over his shoulder into the window, seeing her yell and scream and squeeze the body tight. He couldn't see his father's expression, but he was in contrast, quite still, with a expression that he didn't know what to think.
My brother is dead. My brother is dead.
He set his head between his knees and held it. How could this happen? Why? Just so random and completely out of the blue? My brother is dead. My brother has been killed. He imagined his mother asking the very same questions in the hospital room, but the doors had some good use of a sound barrier. He also imagined his sister with her head in her hands, trying to explain, but finding herself unable to.
Luke felt... Well, it was a weird thing. He didn't feel sadness, or anger for the people who had killed them. He didn't feel grief or surprise that just ten minutes ago, his brother had been alive. He didn't even feel nothing. He felt void. He stared, and repeated the phrase while his mouth seemed to twitch with the words.
His Aunt Elizabeth appeared on her own in the next moment, staring into the window of the hospital room. She was quite still, and her face was sympathetic and grim. After that moment, however, she wiped her eyes and looked toward the teenager rocking himself in the hallway.
"Hey, Luke. Alright?" she asked of him.
He didn't respond, but slowly turned his head to stare at the wall again.
The door opened briefly, letting a moment of his mother's cries to be heard until it closed again.
"I'm sorry. Truly and deeply sorry." It was Elizabeth speaking this.
His father spoke, "How did you know? We've only found out a few minutes ago and even Clarisse can't say anything..." His voice was softer and softer until it finally dropped.
There was silence. It seemed to be the theme of the day.
"I should have seen it coming. My mum's been acting funny all week."
Silence.
Luke jumped. The chair next to him was picked up and slammed into the wall in a loud bang while some obscene words were yelled. When he looked up, his father had his head leaned in against the wall with his arms wrapped around it. Luke listened in closely, but his father was silent and still, except for his fingers, which periodically squeezed tufts of his hair.
"They didn't mean to kill Jeremy," Elizabeth continued. "They didn't know you had a son."
Adam was still holding his head, leaning against the wall. "Yeah, a shot to the head'll do it. Right at the nape of the neck, straight through to the mesothalamus. That's the way to kill a man who can't die."
"I'm s-sorry," Elizabeth offered again. "If I had known--"
"Don't be sorry," said Adam. "I've been foolish, far too careless. What do you have to be sorry about? This isn't your fault."
He sighed, taking in a deep breath while Luke turned his attention away from him.
My brother is dead.
Another curse was thrown out as his father pounded the wall with his fist, making another loud bang. Both Luke and Elizabeth jumped.
An awkward silence spread through the hall once again.
The door opened, as inferred by the sudden cries of his mother, but were stopped, signalling the close of the door.
"I can't stand it. I can't stand hearing her." That was Clarisse. Her voice was unstable too, and she wept and gasped, greeting her Aunt Elizabeth. Soon after, her cries were muffled and Luke suspected they must be hugging.
This time, the silence was replaced by Clarisse's cries.
Elizabeth spoke, "You should be tending to your wife. She's devastated."
Luke took a chance to look up to his father, who leaned at the window and stared into the room. His expression was grim, sorrowful and he didn't move to follow Elizabeth's advice. Instead, he stared, quite still with just his chest moving up and down.
Then, he picked himself up, and treaded tentatively to the room. Luke looked over his shoulder, into the window, seeing his father put a hand lightly on his mother's head, who immediately threw herself into his arms and wept into his chest. Luke had never seen such a reaction from his father, such a uncertain look upon his face. Luke couldn't imagine what his father was thinking at this very moment.
Luke turned back to his knees.
My brother is dead, he thought. He's not coming back.
Athanatos Johnson sat in his living/bedroom, upon his cubic sofabed and groaned at the stacks of empty boxes that filled the room. He figured he would pack up his stuff tonight since he owned so little. The landlord owned his furniture, his appliances, and even his lampshades. All he owned was his measly collection of clothes and his absurdly large collection of books, half of which were stuffed into his closet.
Life, in general, was shit. It had been since he took a chance and paid some guy on the black market a few thousand euros to see that Greek play. The only problem was that the play was in Ancient Greece. After a few seconds of being in 420 BCE, they were busted by the World Temporal Corps.
Because Athan (as he was usually called) continuously begged the Corps to believe that he was merely a civilian taken hostage by a bum terrorist, they felt sorry for such a pathetic man and decided to not execute him after all. They only kept him in debt for letting him live, and that debt was paid off after he told the colonel that the Ferguson girl had been following Peter Petrelli.
A few months after Ancient Greece, Athan was laid off by the newspaper that he had devotedly worked for twenty-some years. In short, they said his book reviews sucked and that they had always sucked, but such few people actually read the book reviews section that it hardly mattered until the layout was changed to put that section ten pages closer to the front. And so, they sacked him.
With no job, Athan had no money. With no money, he couldn't afford the rent, and was therefore being evicted from his flat. He was being thrown out on the street. Thirty years ago, he was in Cambridge University, a promising scholar in the subject of Historical Literature. Now, he was jobless and homeless.
Athan pushed himself up with great willpower and dragged himself to his closet. Upon opening it, three books felt out from a tall stack in the front. He sat down on the floor with a great sigh, and glanced over the titles: Lost in Self-Confidence, The Hand-Carry, and Madame Schulde.
"Oh, Madame Schulde," he almost laughed in this grim time, flipping through it. Oh, what a terrible book you are, how certifiably insane your publisher must have been. What an painfully horrendous book you were to read, back in those good old University days. Would I have read you at all if my girlfriend's... well, ex-girlfriends mother hadn't offered you to me? Of course not. Would I have kept you if I didn't think I could use you for firewood? No, don't be so silly. But, what curious questions you opened to my naive mind. Back then, I thought it was possible that our future was part of our past.
He frowned.
He remembered the Corps agent's very interesting past, of her as a teenager going into a 18th century house with. She was being guided by a 'Miss Bailey,' who seemed awfully familiar to Athan, although the Joseph Allen there seemed infinitely more familiar. So Joseph Allen hadn't died, but became lost in time instead, he was now sure of that. So, the people of the future (or rather, now the present) had existed in the past, and the story of Madame Schulde was completely plausible.
In fact...
Athan flipped through the book, jogging his memory about the story. It was about some poor lady from the 21st century stuck in an Revolutionary French bakery. Didn't that Ferguson go into an 18th century bakery, too? And wasn't there a woman and an unenthusiastic man, which she teleported back to the present?
This was strange. Was it even possible that Madame Schulde was a true story about this Miss Bailey?
While he packed his books into his boxes, he thought upon this. Yes, completely plausible. Actually, it seemed to fit. Perfectly. Well, a little too perfectly. God, why do I have so many books. This is too much. Why do I have to have a historical epiphany the day before I have to move out? I need... I need a break.
Athan sipped his Earl Grey and flipped open the newspaper, a reputable one instead of the one that laid him off. Individualists in Parliament raising taxes for the upper class? Again? Typical bastards. Old news. He flipped past to the local news, which were usually filled with happy stories about little children having bake sales for charity.
"Academy Student Dies in Car Accident," Athan read with a scowl. "Jeremy Watson, a sixth year student from Gerard Clifford Academy, was killed last evening in a car accident while driving to the party of a friend."
Well, that sucked. Even more so than being evicted. He read on, about the poor kid and how smart he was and how beloved he was by his classmates. The article was accompanied by a picture of the car, which was destroyed to the point that Athan had to look closely to even recognize that it really was a car.
He read on, about the mother, who had a few words to say, and was according to the article, a professor of Classical French at the Academy. Her name was Katherine Watson.
Kate. He knew a Kate once upon a time, in the good old days of the Academy. She was two years his senior, and they knew nothing of each other outside of Debate Club. But, she took German and her name was Kate Bailey.
He could've sworn that his head had just exploded.
A/N: I enjoyed this chapter. And since some people *coughschnubbi* were freaking out, I decided to be nice and post it early.
And as a totally random special feature, Athanatos is greek for "immortal." Coincidence? No, something else...