So with finals next week, clearly I have a lot of time for procrastination so the good that comes out of that is that this is probably the fastest I've put up a chapter yet!
Anyways, thanks for stickin' with me, the next chapter will be the last in the first part of this story and then basically the second delves right into the aftermath so I hope you enjoy it!
Chapter 12
All the Time for Second Tries
(Sue Sylvester)
Sue Sylvester had become aware of the fact that this day had been destined to be a terrible one straight from the very beginning when she'd walked into her office at six o'clock on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010, only to find her favorite supply of apple-tini protein supplements completely diminished, its box lying empty on its shelf.
She had become aware of the fact that this day was bound to only go from bad to worse when she'd returned from her drive, two hours in either direction, to Detroit – the closest store willing to sell her products that weren't exactly legal in the United States yet, per se – only to find a SWAT truck parked in her designated space.
She had become aware of the fact that this day would be absolutely unsalvageable upon her realization that, in fact, it wasn't merely her parking space currently being occupied by an emergency vehicle, but nearly all of them…
"Miss! Miss, you can't drive through here!"
Sue couldn't remember a single other time in the entirety of her life when anybody had ever dared to call her Miss before… Usually, she preferred "Your Majesty", although she would also have accepted "My Lord", and occasionally, even "God Almighty", but nobody, under any circumstances ever called Sue Sylvester "Miss".
Not ever.
And suddenly, she was fuming; this meant war.
A young officer was sprinting upwards towards her general direction, his face flushed and breathing labored in a manner that had Sue under the impression that this man desperately needed to find himself a treadmill and a grocery store who's selection didn't come with the option of the meals being super-sized straight from the get-go.
His arms were flailing frantically, gesturing towards her in an effort to catch her attention as she rolled her car up as close towards the police barricade inhibiting her entrance as she could get, half ready to barrel straight through it in an effort to speed things up a little bit…
After all, Figgins had always been a sucker towards the state's insistency upon conducting frequent and elaborate Emergency Action Plan drills… Of course, had it been up to her, she would have rendered such nonsense illegal years ago; after all, natural selection had gotten them this far thus far, who were they to start challenging it now?
Yet another reason that she should have been declared the principal of William McKinley High School as opposed to Figgins… at least in her professional opinion of the matter anyway.
But the closer she looked, the more she realized that this didn't seem like your average, every day fire drill… Sure, she had seen a similar proportion of ambulances in the William McKinley parking lot before; nobody was soon to forget that instance where she'd had her Cheerio's practicing in the stifling summer sun until each and every one of them had succumbed to heat exhaustion, and yes, they had proved that they could fit at least four fire trucks in the parent drop-off roundabout after an attempted experiment towards mixing all of her vitamin supplements had gone horribly awry, but this…
This was different.
Students were huddled upwards and against each other throughout the length of the quad, embracing and holding onto each other's hands as they submitted to being lead by a clutter of police officers towards a row of school buses that extended the length of the block, one tearing itself away from the rest every couple of minutes, rapidly transporting its students to wherever it was that they were going…
Directly in front of her, she had suddenly realized that even if she had broken through the police barricade with the force of her car, she wouldn't have made it very far…Pressed up against the plethora of Do Not Cross signs lay a sea of frantic parents; a crowd that extended so far down the length of the block that Sue couldn't even make out where it ended from the spot where she stood…
Each and every one of them were flailing wildly, tears streaking down the lengths of their faces as they attempted to push past each other and towards the school, each screaming in their apparent frenzy, each asking the exact same thing –
"Where's my kid?"
Ambulances were squeezing themselves as tightly as they could possibly manage into the already cramped teacher's parking lot, but for every one that actually left the scene, there were at least five more coming in right behind them for replacement…
And all the while, special forces roamed up and down the length of the scene in its entirety; army men clutching onto their M-16's, SWAT members armored head to toe in bullet proof gear, guns drawn and pointed towards the general direction of the high school that Sue Sylvester had left peacefully behind mere hours before…
She should have known that this would have happened; she leaves the school for a few hours and all hell breaks loose… Whatever it was that was currently happening within those familiar walls, Sue was certain that it was the glee club to be blamed for all of this chaos; and hell, even if it wasn't, this seemed like a perfect opportunity to frame them as if was, maybe even get them disbanded…
"Listen, buddy," Sue snapped suddenly towards the officer currently attempting to inhibit her entrance into the high school that really was practically hers anyway. "I'm the one that runs this joint over here, so how about you quit squawking in gibberish that I can't understand and tell me what the hell is going on in here! I have a protein shake that I have to drink, and I can feel my muscles deteriorating as we speak, so you have approximately ten seconds to answer me; go."
Suddenly, this officer had begun looking at her as if she had sprouted three heads…
"You mean, you don't know?" His professionalism faltered momentarily, voice dropping several octaves as his eyes pointed steadily inside of her own… And despite the fact that she would never actually admit to it, Sue's heart gave a sudden, painful lurch, one that she'd attempted to hide with her relentlessly stony glare although had the officer not been so previously distracted, he would have been able to caught it easily…
"Don't know what? Listen buddy, I've been stuck in a Detroit hell-hole since six o'clock this morning trying to restock on my protein shakes, what the hell am I supposed to know?" She spat harshly, masking her fear with a façade of erratic anger.
"Ms. Sylvester…" He swallowed so heavily that Sue was able to follow the movement of the bollus straight down the length of his esophagus…
And in his temporary descent away from a professional maturity, away from the iron grip that he'd previously been placing on his strong front, Sue suddenly recognized him… He was a boy that couldn't have been graduated from William McKinley High School by any more than four or five years now, a feat that had suddenly became obvious given how childish his face had suddenly become…
"This morning at approximately 10:45 at least two individuals, believed to be students here at William McKinley High School opened fire upon the inhabitants of the campus." He spoke robotically, as if to word his statement with anything less than such a superficial tone would have just been too painful an act for him to commit to… But either way, for Sue, that didn't make actually hearing it any easier.
She refused to speak so much as a single word in response, didn't bother to remove her car from its self-appointed parking space in the middle of the street or even so much as shut it off before she was jumping outwards from the driver's seat, springing upwards and into the air where she pushed past the bewildered officer with ease and entered into a rabid sprint without so much as an idea as to where it was that she was going, but instead, an understanding towards the fact that her legs simply knew where it was that they should be taking her.
"M'ame, you can't go through there – m'ame!" She plowed easily through the tightly sealed line of men whose job it had been assigned to save them all despite the fact that they were currently simply squatting in strategic formation about the entranceways, waiting in game plan as if the shooters would actually consider simply walking out waving little white flags at any moment…
And despite the fact that they yelled for her, that they called her back ferociously, she ignored them alongside her ultimate decision to start taking matters into her own hands…
"M'ame, do not enter that school! Ms. Sylvester, it's not safe!" She could hear the shouts of warning swarming down throughout her general direction, hell, she had even managed to process them while simultaneously evaluating the consequences of her decisions in vivid detail… but she was mere footsteps away, and she wasn't about to stop; not now.
The sound of pounding footsteps ringing out from directly behind her signified the idea that an officer had been sent to chase her down, tackle her to the ground if that was what he had to do to prevent her from committing to single-handedly, the most foolish act that she had ever performed in her entire life…
But she knew that she couldn't bring herself to be too bothered with his presence… After all, she was having a hard enough time as it was keeping her own two feet planted firmly against the ground below her, so much as considering anybody else's without a doubt send her spiraling downwards in a manner that she just couldn't afford right now…
Besides, she wasn't exceptionally concerned; after all, he was impossibly weighted down with his heavy armor and a weapon that looked as if it might have been bigger than he was, and even despite this, she had always been swift – never mind the fact that she was currently running faster than she had ever ran in her entire life…
She'd had the clear advantage straight from the very beginning… that is, up until she had been no more than a mere arm's length from the entrance, up until she had made the foolish mistake of turning her head behind her in order to check the proximity of the officer behind her…
And suddenly, she saw it…
Sue Sylvester had never seen a dead body before.
Sure, she had dished out all of the stories to anybody willing to listen within a thirty mile radius all about how the movie Braveheart had been entirely based off of her life story, and yes, she may have exaggerated the tales of the period in which Lima's hostile resident woodland population attempted to overrun the town to the point that the tale had ended with her viciously slaying them from the back of a noble white steed, but in the end, all those recounts had ever been were stories…
But now… well now that they were here, now that they were real, now that she had actually seen them, she just wished that she could be granted the opportunity to take it all back once more…
There was a stampeding hoard of individuals lined up and down the length of the pathway directly to her right, stamping frantically but at the same time, stepping precariously over the still body in the center of them all, adorned with a sheet that had been thrown half-hazard over his form so that it barely even covered him…
She thought of it as almost a cliché, strikingly offensive, even for her, towards the idea that they would resort to such an obvious, such an over-used manner of masking this mere child who deserved so much more than being made to look exceptionally smaller than he already was in his death.
She couldn't identify him based on her lack of immediate access to his most distinguishable features; in fact, the only thing that had even allowed her to identify him as male at all was a strong, albeit motionless arm protruding from the edge of one of the sheets corners and a brand new pair of Air Jordan's peaking upwards from the end, a direct result of the linen not being nearly large enough to completely mask his still frame.
Directly above him, paramedics clamored strategically, forming an impressively lengthy assembly line in an effort to shuffle the needed equipment to and from the three additional bodies strewn across the lawn whom had been lucky enough not to have been covered with a plain white sheet. Police officers scrambled for evidence, evaluating every square inch of every sidewalk tile as they carefully plucked shotgun shells from the blades of grass. Crime scene investigators were taking pictures of everything, of everyone from every angle…
This was too much… it was all too much.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?"A harsh voice snapped her abruptly back into her world, one which left her strikingly aware of the idea that in her briefest second of hesitation, the police officer that had been chasing her down full tilt had managed to catch up to her, approaching her with an angry tone and a firm hand against her shoulder as he attempted to pull her back, to bring her towards the ever-growing crowds of terrified friends and family waiting anxiously for news on those they loved still trapped inside…
No; she couldn't be like them… Sue Sylvester had never been one to take kindly to merely sitting around and waiting, and today was no exception… in fact, it was the least of them all.
"You're lucky I don't have you arrested!" The officer continued his scolding of her but she was past the point of concern as her mind bubbled with the best possible escape route from within his grasp… There would be no way around a physical altercation, she knew that, and as she quickly evaluated where the best place to strike around his layer of bullet proof armor would be, she figured she'd worry about the inevitable assault on an officer charge later…
This was important; much, much more important.
Flattening her palm expertly, she tensed the muscles in her hand taut, delivering upwards, a swift, harsh chop that landed with a striking accuracy directly underneath his plated helmet and dead center against his throat.
The blow resonated in its success as the officer took a raspy inward gasp that left him inhaling fruitlessly as all the air was temporarily rushed outward from the depth of his windpipe; and just as Sue had anticipated, his natural instinct had his hand quickly reaching upwards to grasp at his aching throat and away from its previously restricting grasp against Sue's shoulder, leaving the woman free to complete what she had started, as she ripped open the heavy double doors and skirted her way inside of William McKinley High School in a manner of mere seconds.
The instant that the door had closed behind her, she couldn't help but feel as if she had entered an entirely different world all together…
The pandemonium, the pure, unadulterated chaos of the world stationed directly outside of these closed walls had disappeared in its entirety, replaced instead by a complete and utter silence that left an uncomfortable chill radiating directly up the length of Sue's spine.
She stepped tentatively further into the familiar school, eyes wide and head constantly swiveling as she evaluated her surroundings for any signs of life whatsoever… But she didn't see anybody, she didn't hear anything… and for the life of her, she couldn't decide whether this was a good thing, or a bad one.
For all of the attention that she was pouring into her every step, it was a miracle in itself that she hadn't noticed the body of Michael Rosario laying motionlessly against the floor at the head of the main staircase until she'd stepped directly on top of him…
He recoiled with a violent scream that had shocked Sue back into attention harder than the actual act of stepping on him had done…
Jumping backwards automatically, her eyes scoured immediately over the boy currently laying at her feet, scanning across his form as he automatically began to scramble in his retreat from the unexpected presence of a person that he could no longer be certain hadn't just come here to hurt him… But ultimately, he'd failed to achieve that essential bout of locomotion, settling instead to curl upwards and into a protective fetal position, desperate to prevent any more harm from befalling upon him than what already had…
The first thing that Sue had looked for was the blood; after all, if he was lying here down against the ground, refusing to move, refusing to save his own life, he had to have been impossibly injured… right?
But she grew immediately confused upon her lack of identifying those characteristic, deep red puddles that she'd always seen in the movies but never in real life…
She moved down the length of his body, prowling for injuries that became obvious the further downward her eyes travelled; his right ankle twisted painfully underneath him, leaving the allusion that his foot was literally detached internally from his leg in its entirety…
Sue glanced up and down the surroundings, easily putting two and two together as she evaluated the steep staircase whose base Michael was currently laying at… But of course, she had already been proven wrong today once before when she'd woken up and believed her biggest problem of the day to be the fact that she no longer had any protein shakes… She wasn't willing to take that risk again, so she decided to ask him anyway.
"What happened?" She spoke abruptly, harshly even, begging the boy to answer with a similar sense of urgency in a motion exemplified by her violent shaking of his shoulders.
"I was… I was…" He choked over his own words, pain and fear lacing beneath his stuttering voice. "I was leaving English class… on my way to lunch… This girl, I don't know who she was… I think she might be a senior, she… she had a girl pinned in the corner… You know, that weird girl from the glee club that everybody's always throwing Slushies at… She shot her… she shot her, and I think… I think she might have killed her so I ran… But I tripped. I tripped and my ankle… oh God, my ankle…"
Sue released the white knuckled grip that she had upheld against the boy's shoulders throughout the length of his recollection of events and stood slowly upwards from her previously crouched position.
"Wait…" Michael called back to her, eyes suddenly widened in terror towards the idea that Sue's intentions weren't to stay here and help him. "Wait, you're leaving me here?"
"You'll be fine." Sue stated in a matter-of-fact manner although it were obvious despite the fact that she herself couldn't be certain about it; not for him, not for her, not for anybody. "Get yourself behind this stairwell; stay hidden. The police will be here soon."
She turned away from him, her priorities set upon locating those that had been more mortally wounded than a kid that had been stupid enough to trip over his own two feet in his bid for escape and break his ankle.
She walked briskly away from Michael Rosario's side, stepping on the balls of her feet the entire time that she was moving, her heels never once touching the ground below her as she followed a chronicled trail up the stairwell, the evidence of the direction that the shooters had travelled in obvious in the form of miscellaneous blood splatters and stray penetrating wounds in the shape of bullet holes riddled across the walls, the floors, the ceiling, everywhere…
She'd tried to imagine what this setting must have been like what couldn't have been any more than five or ten minutes ago now, tried to imagine what it might feel like to stand amidst a crowd of your peers, cramped like sardines and all rushing to escape down the same narrow staircase as an explosion of gunfire rained down directly behind you, leaving you able to only pray that you wouldn't become the next to feel that lead punch pierce through your skin and bring you hopelessly down against the ground mere seconds away from freedom…
Sue smelled the blood before she'd actually seen it; a prominent stench that lingered in such copious amounts with that characteristic irony tang that she could literally taste it on the tip of her tongue…
Swallowing hard, she coated the inside of her mouth with a layer of saliva in an effort to wash the taste from her mouth as she came to an abrupt pause at the head of the staircase before transitioning her previously steady pace into a brutal crawl as she extended her ears outward in an attempt to evaluate whether or not she might find herself running into somebody that she did not particularly want to run into right now…
It took her several distinct seconds to actually bring herself to take those additional steps forward, and even then, she'd done so with a tremendous trepidation, her heart pounding so harshly against her chest that she truly feared the idea that her own body might traitorously attract unwanted attention upon herself.
Her feet skidded to an abrupt halt directly around the length of the corner in an automatic response towards the oceans of blood spilled and streaked across the otherwise spotless tile in an absolute portrait of the exact consequences of what happened when some of the world's best creations went horribly, horribly wrong…
The collection was prominent, thick against the stark white tiles so that it was left little sparkling beneath the glow of the overhead lights above.
She could feel herself unintentionally gagging, the site in itself enough to leave her sick to her stomach in its prominence; the infinitely deep puddles, the stray splotches that had managed to travel an impressive distance from its original site down the length of the hallway…
It wasn't until she had noticed the clear-cut trails reminiscent of a heavy object being dragged away from the scene and what appeared to be at least two distinct sets of footprints outlined in the blood splotched sporadically in every which direction that she realized, despite the seemingly large magnitude of blood, there weren't actually any bodies behind to claim it…
She stood confused for a brief moment; after all, there was no way in hell that a single person could have lost that much blood and still managed to get up and walk away… But finally, amidst the chaotic array of footprints mirroring the hallways now destroyed centerpiece, she managed to make out a clear cut pattern; an actual trail of footprints leading from the spot that she currently stood, straight into a closed classroom door directly adjacent to her.
With one final scan up and down the length of the hallway in an effort to ensure its safety, she tip-toed slowly towards the door, the only sound her body produced being the squeaking of her permanently destroyed white sneakers against the slick floor below her…
Her initial thought in regards to her approaching of the doorway before her was that it was empty; after all, she couldn't make out so much as a single sound being emitted from within, and with all of the overhead lights shut off, the space was dimmed to a darkness only penetrated by the soft glow of the high-noon sunlight…
It was only after she'd peered through the small window embedded inside of the doorframe that she'd realized how truly wrong she had been…
She evaluated the scene quickly in one sweeping, initial glance so that the first person she'd identified became the first person she'd invested the entirety of her attention on; none other than William Schuester himself so that her brain couldn't help but take the automatic instinct to think of a highly inappropriate, offensive remark towards his personal appearance.
I always knew that he was gay.
It was the first thought that her mind had managed to produce; what, with Will shirtless on his knees and Finn Hudson hovering incessantly over his shoulder, she just couldn't help herself…
But slowly, she began to process the extent of the scene, the details surrounding Will's currently questionable positioning coming into light before her very eyes so that she had no choice but to perform a double take…
And when she did, she knew that she couldn't have possibly been to blame for her initial assumption; after all, the object that Will was currently pressing his discarded shirt – balled up inside of his clenched fists – against was so tiny, so impossibly miniscule that nobody could have possibly identified it as a human body upon first glance…
Her eyes had become so accustomed to blood in these past several minutes that she hadn't even processed the liquid surrounding the small group as thus upon first glance… However, as she soaked in its prominence, followed its impossible pattern splotched up and down the lengths of Will's arms and drenching his permanently destroyed shirt, she couldn't help but wonder how she'd missed it at first…
Because no matter what Will did, and no matter how hard he tried to achieve success, the blood didn't seem to want to stop flowing in rivers from the chest of a young girl who's life, Sue had helped to make a living hell throughout the majority of the past year…
No, her first initial suspicion told her that Rachel Berry was long dead; and through closed eyes, a face so pale that she blended to the exact with the sterile white of her surroundings, and blood pouring from a spot-on wound that seemed to have struck her directly in the center of her chest, she could have easily passed as such…
But the harder she searched for any signs of life from the girl, the more she realized that, by some sort of miracle, Rachel Berry had been spared; for now, that was… Of course, that didn't mean that they didn't need to get her out of this school as soon as humanly possible if she wanted so much as a prayer's chance of staying that way…
Sue's hand lingered against the doorknob where she moved as quietly as humanly possible, twisting the handle before giving the wooden plank a sharp thrust inward where it was met with an immediate resistance, striking against an object weighing it down from within the room with a tremendous bang that sent the three conscious occupants of the room scurrying in their fear, muscles tensing and arms automatically flinging over their heads protectively – the only means by which they could think of to cover themselves should the bullets start flying…
But for the first time in her life, Sue hadn't run into William Schuester with the sole intention of belittling him and his glee club emotionally, and occasionally, physically as well… No, today, instead of destroying them, Sue Sylvester was going to save them; and with a sudden burst, she couldn't help but find herself appalled with the idea that it always seemed to be the worst that managed to bring out the very best in her.
Sue searched for Will's eyes, begging him to make direct eye contact with hers so that when they finally did, she couldn't help but notice the prominent flash of recognition followed by an immediate tidal of relief that had washed across them…
She signaled with her hand quickly, beckoning for him to come and let her inside before anybody came barreling around the corner looking to finish them all off for good…
She could tell that his entire body was trembling even as he stood to his feet clear across the room; a trait that she attempted to poke fun at him for, simply for the sake of lightning her mood, but she couldn't… not with the blood prominently visible against the skin of his hands, his arms, splattered like art work clear across his white undershirt…
But despite her commitment towards backing away from a clear opportunity of William Schuester degradation, she couldn't help but notice that his hands had been shaking so hard that he could barely push the offending bookshelf away from its position blocking the doorway…
He struggled briefly, his trembling palms leaving streaky handprints outlined in blood along the wooden panels of the bookshelf as he pushed it just enough to allow Sue to slip quickly inside…
"William." She addressed him sharply, shocked even at herself towards the casualness by which her words slipped from her mouth as she closed the door silently behind her and advanced several paces into the classroom in an effort to evaluate the situation for what it truly was.
"What are you doing here, Sue?" Will asked; his voice stony and cold in the evidence of his highly elevated guard… Sue could only imagine that the experience of watching one of his own students lingering on the border between life and death must have done this to him, must have made him like this; lifeless, emotionless, outwardly resilient to everything that the world had to offer towards him.
And for the first time in her entire life, Sue saw a little piece of herself inside of the uncharacteristically dead eyes of William Schuester… She saw it in every one of them as she scanned the faces of those throughout the room… more so than anyone else the boy stuck at the head of the room, the boy that Sue, upon her first initial sweep of the room, hadn't even noticed…
Everybody knew who Jamie Porter was… that is, everybody knew Jamie Porter as the hopeless loser who was willing to be relentlessly used by his fellow peers strictly for the sake of being able to call them his friends…
But not today; today, Jamie Porter was cold; he was lifeless amidst the literal characterization that had befallen upon him so that she knew he hadn't been blessed with the luck that Rachel Berry had received inside of this hopeless classroom…
He was dead and no matter what any of them so much as attempted to do, he wasn't coming back; not now, not ever.
All around her, she could see flashes of individuals starkly reminiscent of her past self transforming into her future right before her very eyes… You see, like them she used to be so much bigger than this, she used to be so much better than this… It's hard to believe now, but Sue Sylvester used to be alive, she used to be optimistic, she used to hold so much faith between the seemingly bottomless cup of her palms…
Now her biggest concern was the idea that these kids were suddenly destined to become no better than the cynical, broken mess that she herself had grown up into… entire futures, destroyed in an instant.
"I followed the scent of the obscene amount of product that you seem to have placed in your hair today, William." She shook her head from her deepest of thoughts, using her temporary memory lapse into weakness to build up her strongest defense mechanism yet, emitting it in the form of an arrogant teasing she just couldn't bring herself to avoid. "It lead me right to you, you should consider yourself lucky that it was me who showed up and not anybody actually dangerous, especially considering the fact that you were stupid enough to lock yourself and your students inside of a classroom with no way out and a clear-cut trail leading right to you."
Will's mouth dropped downward in the sheer shock of what Sue was currently dishing out to him, so stunned towards the idea that she would be railing into him at a moment like this that he couldn't even bring himself to come up with anything to say in response, leaving him speechless, and Sue free to continue her self-therapeutic degradation of her fellow teacher despite everything that her mind was yelling at her to stop.
"You are aware of the idea that the WMHS teacher's handbook that we receive at the beginning of every new school year states that by protocol, in cases of emergency, which William, this easily classifies as, you're actually supposed to help the student that needs it…" Her eyes subconsciously drifted past Will's shoulders, glancing quickly across Jamie's body at one end of the room and onto Rachel's, fading steadily towards the same direction at the other.
She kept her peripherals firmly upon Will the entire time, watching as the muscles surrounded his eyes quickly began twitching with rage so that she could tell that he understood exactly what it was that she was trying to get at…
"Don't go there, Sue." He muttered, his voice lowering into a whisper as to attempt to get her to follow his dynamic lead and prevent those surrounding them from hearing a conversation that they couldn't bring themselves to confront at the moment. "I swear to God, the last thing that I need, the last thing that any of us need right here is for you to come strolling in here and make everything even worse than what it already is… So if you're not going to help us get Rachel out of this school, then maybe you should just leave."
"Oh William," She skirted past the idea that Will had just made it clear that he was perfectly willing to leave her stranded like a sitting duck all by herself in the center of this hall, silently praising the idea that he truly had possessed the capacity to stand up for his students all along… "Are you finished ranting in garble that I just can't understand right now, because I'm not sure if you've noticed, but one of your students is dying right in front of you… So listen, if you want her to have a prayer's chance of surviving, if any of you want to have a prayer's chance of surviving, you'll follow me, and you'll do it now."
She turned herself onto the idea of possessing an attitude that was actually productive but continued to clutch desperately onto her dark humor, her desire to hold onto anything close to a sense of normalcy obvious in her bid to keep herself from falling into the pitfalls of absolute insanity .
And if her tactics of preventing current self-destruction came at the expense of all of the other people surrounding her, well so be it.
She watched as Will swiveled his head backwards and over his own shoulder, turning towards the cluster of people lingering behind them; Shelby Corcoran replacing him in the job that he had previously enacted upon himself as she clutched Will's button down firmly against her daughter's chest in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding while all the while, Finn stood idly by, clutching onto the girl's hand in a strict act of moral support, supporting the girl through her ever moment, just in case this one would be her last.
Turning back towards Sue, the only thing he could offer her was a curt nod of the head; the briefest of indications that he had actually heard her, and understood what she was trying to say before he stepped away, drifting between Shelby and Finn where he laid a gentle hand against Shelby's shuddering shoulders, shaking due to the sheer force of the pressure that she was currently placing against Rachel's wounds…
"Come on," Will spoke gently, whispering so that Sue could barely hear him from her position across the room. "We're getting out of here."
"Will…" Shelby spoke hesitantly, her motherly instinct screaming against the idea of bringing her daughter back out and into the open hallways swarming with blood-thirsty gunmen… Of course, staying put clearly hadn't gotten them very far either, so here she had entered; a vicious catch 22 of sorts…
But they had waited long enough to try and rectify this; it was time to act…
"It'll be okay, Shelby." Will was speaking to the woman before him, but at the same time, had turned in the midst of his words to lock eyes for Sue – a silent confirmation towards the idea that despite everything, he trusted her. "We'll be safe… she'll be safe, don't worry."
He waited only briefly for a response from Sue, watching her nod quickly in the recognition that she had picked up on his actions before he'd turned back towards the second woman before him, watching as she paused only momentarily in consideration of Will's seemingly flawless confidence…
Her arms relaxed by a miniscule, yet noticeable amount as she strategically rearranged her stance; her body language indicative of the fact that she trusted Will, and she trusted his decisions as she slid her hands beneath Rachel's prone body in an attempt to lift the girl into her arms…
But Shelby Corcoran couldn't have been much larger than her petite daughter lying before her… she struggled with the additional weight, and while she may have found it if not easy, at the very least doable to bring her the ten feet from the hallway into this classroom, her struggle with the additional weight was obvious; carrying her to safety seemed impossible – a failure that became evident by the tears of defeat burning against her eyes.
"Here, Ms. Corcoran…"Finn stepped forwards nobly, arms stretched outwards in his indication to allow Shelby to pass her child into them. "I'll keep her safe."
She evaluated the boy for the briefest of seconds, quickly assessing whether or not she actually trusted somebody other than herself with a cargo so precious, but in the end, Finn must have passed her rigorous standards, because ultimately, Shelby released the girl from her firm grip, allowing him to collect her comfortably into his chest where she shifted only slightly and automatically curled her body upwards and closer into him…
"Finn…" Sue had been so shocked to have actually heard Rachel speak that she allowed herself to jump in shock in response to even her softest voice as it arose from depths of Finn Hudson's arms so that it blew like a mere wind across Sue's ears, so quiet that she'd found herself forced to listen to the echo just to truly distinguish between the words…
"Shh, Rachel don't talk…" The boy shushed her quickly as he repositioned his arms more firmly beneath her, paying extra attention to detail, ensuring that she was nestled both safely and comfortably between them.
"But I need to tell you something…" She muttered feebly, her words barely grazing off of her lips, impossibly chapped and rapidly fading into a deep shade of blue as her life was sucked more vigorously from her body with each drop of blood that spilled from within it…
In fact, from where Finn had positioned her, raised prominently upwards against his unusually tall frame, to Sue, it almost appeared as if a steady rain had fallen from directly beneath her; clear droplets of red forming puddles, rivers, oceans against the world below.
"Okay…" He nodded, pausing in his motions in order to lean his head closer downwards and towards Rachel; and Sue knew that she should have rushed him; she should have told him that they needed to move quickly, but she couldn't… not when this was quite possibly the last chance that they had.
And in a rush of jealousy towards the idea that had it been her bleeding to death in the middle of a classroom floor there would be nobody to love her enough to stay behind amidst the danger, she lingered, she listened, and she allowed them to have if but a single moment for each other.
"Can you tell them that I was brave?" She murmured against Finn's chest as the boy turned his head inwards, pointing his eyes down and towards her so that Sue could only just make out the flash of a single tear lingering in the corners of her eyes.
"Tell who?"
"Tell… everybody…" She breathed her words slowly in terms of single syllables, speaking through a shudder of pain that forced her to recoil naturally, falling further inside of Finn's arms in a matter that Sue was sure, neither of them really minded.
"You are brave, Rachel." He assured the girl quickly, and for once in her life, Sue had to agree with him; despite the fact that her first impressions of Rachel Berry hadn't been nearly so high before today, she now had no doubt in her mind that the girl was anything less than a trite and true example of bravery. "You're so brave, Rach… we all know it, we all think it…"
"Don't leave me okay?" Her off-topic plea came out high-pitched, almost squeaky, and in his response, Sue couldn't help but notice Finn's hands clench subconsciously tighter around Rachel's tiny frame.
"I'm not going to leave you." He promised, and for the life of her, Sue couldn't remember ever hearing such a remarkable tone of confidence, of honesty behind anybody's voice ever before.
"I don't wanna be alone." She choked, the sob that she had involuntarily allowed to escape her lips forcing her to cringe and recoil in her pain so that her muscles grew so tense that she nearly slipped straight out of Finn's grasp.
"You're not alone." He assured her quickly. "I promise Rachel, you're not alone… You have me, and you have Mr. Schue, and Shelby… we're all here for you, okay?" Sue couldn't help but notice the fact that Finn had conveniently left her name out of his recount of the verbal attendance record, but she couldn't bring herself to be too offended by her absence. "Don't worry Rachel, you don't have to be afraid, okay… I'm here, and I'm not gonna leave you. You'll never be alone, I promise."
"Finn," Sue watched as, to her utmost surprise, it became Will who ultimately approached Finn, cautiously placing a firm hand against his shoulder in an effort to guide him away from the plights of his dying girlfriend. "We have to go now, son."
He nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving Rachel's frame once as he slowly turned, moving with carefully truncated steps as if he were carrying a porcelain doll …
Sue lead the chorale, stepping carefully outwards and into the hallway, head barely peeking out from beyond the door frame as she searched up and down the length of the corridor for any signs of life, waiting several moments in the silence before ultimately deeming it clear, signaling for the rest to follow her suite.
She held the door carefully for the remainder of the group, eyes continuously scanning back and forth across the hall as Finn shuffled carefully past her, followed immediately by Shelby… It was only after several seconds had passed with still no sign from Will that she turned back into the room.
He was at the head of the classroom, struggling visibly with the body of the boy that must have been at least five inches taller than him while outweighing him by a solid thirty pounds… He tried to lift the dead Jamie Porter upwards and into his arms, tried to bring the boy out like he deserved rather than leaving him alone, trapped in the depths of an abandoned classroom, left to rot…
But his attempts were futile, Sue knew that, she could see it, and truthfully, she believed that Will did too… They couldn't linger on the dead right now; they just couldn't; not when they had to invest so much time into the living.
"Will," She called back to him, addressing him for the first time in her life that she could possibly remember with a tone of understanding rather than one of glistening malice. "Leave him… We can't have the extra weight."
Her words perhaps, would have sounded harsh to an outsider, but truthfully, that wasn't how she had intended them to; and she could tell by the way in which Will slowly nodded as he hesitantly abandoned his effort that he understood that.
They walked in a tight circle about each other, heads continuously turning in every which direction as they expected to meet their deaths with every corner that they turned, with every ringing gunshot that they heard… But judging by the relative distance of the bangs, Jacob and Suzy were currently confined to the opposite end of the school; as long as they moved swiftly, they expected to be met with little to no resistance…
They attempted to ignore their surroundings, attempted to enforce a tunnel vision strictly in terms of their own escape, but for every single body that they'd passed lying dead on the floor, for every speck of blood, for every bullet shell rolling across the ground, they couldn't help but to allow a split second's hesitation, their eyes dancing across the latest additions to their school as they stepped carefully over them…
By the time they had reached the door, it might as well have been framed with gold it looked so inviting.
With a collective breath of relief audible between the small group, they stood before their safe haven, tears of pure joy stinging at their eyes towards the idea that this nightmare was now over in its immediate, that now that they had successfully escaped with their lives, they could now focus on the aftermath…
"We're safe, Rachel…" Sue could hear Finn speaking animatedly downward towards his girlfriend, but the girl never responded; she had been long past the point of conscious speech, Sue knew that, but judging by Finn's refusal to cease talking to her, he had yet to do so. "You're going to be okay now, Rachel. Just hold on. Just be strong for a few more minutes… we're saved now."
Finn Hudson quickly became the first to exemplify his mad dash towards the double doors, taking his final steps in steep strides so that he was practically leaping, leaving him arriving at the door in a matter of four or five swift steps.
Shelby skirted quickly at his feet, her refusal to allow her daughter to so much as leave her sight prominent as she pushed the door open and into the sunlight, guiding Finn quickly through as she shuffled him outside where they both disappeared in a rush of light that Sue's eyes could barely even process, let alone adjust to anymore.
Beyond their backs, another series of gunshots echoed; distant, yet closer than where they had been before so that Will and Sue knew that it wouldn't be wise for them to linger for too much longer.
Taking a quick step forwards, Will shortened the distance between himself and the front door, allowing himself to take several paces forward before he paused, finally realizing that Sue wasn't following him…
"Are you coming?" He asked, and she swallowed in her answer as she considered the depth of his question momentarily, trying to decide exactly what her answer was going to be… She should have gone, she knew that she should have gone, but at the same time, she knew that if she had indeed followed Will through those doors right now, she would never truly be able to survive this ordeal in its entirety… not when she would be spending the rest of her life bogged down by the cowardice that her retreat would cause.
"No," She answered after a few short moments, "No Will, I think that I'm going to stay behind… see if anybody else needs somebody to lead them out."
"Okay…" Will accepted her answer for what it was but at the same time, he couldn't help but to be a little bit hesitant about leaving her behind; and as surprised as Sue was by this fact, she could have sworn that she saw something resembling a hint of concern glimmer behind his eyes in response.
"What you did today was good, Sue." He finally nodded, delivering to her the praise that he knew he would need to get off of his chest just in case this was his last opportunity to do so. "You might have saved Rachel's life today… You sure as hell saved the rest of ours… Just be careful, okay."
"I can look after myself, William." She responded with a lack of emotional attachment but still, delivered to him a nod of mutual understanding as Will turned his back and followed everybody else out of the front door and back into the open air.
For a brief moment, Sue was overwhelmed by the sense of absolute silence that had suddenly come across her.
There was not a single individual around her, not a single noise surrounding her… The gunshots had since disappeared into silence, the screams dwindled into obsoleteness in the representation of the fact that all of the people that were now left inside of the school with her were either dead, or else so mortally wounded that they couldn't bring it inside of themselves to achieve escape.
Her vision tunneled in around her in a sharp breath of air that registered to her brain as being so cold that it physically stung at her lungs as she tried desperately to assess her next move, tried desperately to map out her most appropriate course of action…
A trail of scattered debris lead her carefully from the main entrance; backpacks, papers, notebooks… the ground was littered with the scattered reminder that this school had once been a mere inhabitant of students learning, rather than students fleeing for their lives…
At the end of the hall, a single pair of sneakers told Sue that at least one student had been so desperate for freedom that he had run clear out of his shoes without so much as looking back to retrieve them.
It would have been so easy for her to turn around, to follow Will out and relish on the idea that she had potentially saved four lives today… But at the same time, she knew that she could never be satisfied with merely settling. There were still so many people left inside, still so many lives hanging in the balance…
A piercing scream that originated from the very end of the adjacent hallway told Sue Sylvester exactly what her next destination was going to be; and despite the fact that any normal reaction would be to run away, to flee from an expression of such terror, Sue swallowed her fear, and instead, she followed it.
She moved slowly, scissor-stepping on her tip toes as she pressed her back firmly up against the tile walls in an effort to make herself as small as humanly possible…
She took every step at a mere crawl, turned every corner slower than a sleeping snail; but as she moved, she ran into nothing, she saw nobody… She took such tentative steps across her recluse of abandon that for a solid five minutes, she'd actually believed herself to have been trapped inside of some crazy science fiction movie…
But then, she finally heard it.
"Did you see her fall?"
Sue stopped walking so abruptly that her previously pristinely kept sneakers, now caked with blood, squeaked harshly against the ground in a manner that she cursed immediately despite the fact that whoever it was that was around the corner, didn't seem to have actually noticed.
"Oh help me," She identified the voice as male in his swooning as he mocked whoever it was that he had just shot to the ground. "Help me, I've fallen, oh no!"
"Do you think that they're dead?" There was a second voice, a female this time, as she inquired towards the boy not out of concern, but instead out of a genuine interest towards whether or not her intentions were successful.
"It doesn't really matter now, they're gonna die."
Holding her hand up and against her mouth in an effort to inhibit so much as the tone of her breathing from escaping into the shooters' ears, she edged carefully as close to the corner as she possibly could without being seen.
She chanced a fleeting glimpse around the corner; her heart pounding with the fear of not what it was that she would see, but who would see her in return; and with an audible sigh of relief that pressed a stream of hot air into the palm that she held still firmly clamped against her mouth, she saw the two brooding forms, hunched shoulders, guns in hand, and thankfully, backs turned towards her.
Sue lingered for a moment, the idea in mind being that if she couldn't be seen, she could risk extending her glance an additional fraction of a second in an effort to evaluate the statuses of the two victims that had been lying on the floor at their tormentors feet.
Sue had never truly had any kind of physical interaction with Judith Klamm before despite the fact that the woman had been a teacher at William McKinley High School longer than herself…
She had been the head of the special needs program at the school, and given how near and dear to Sue's heart the special needs program had always been, Sue had allowed Judith to slip from the burden of her constant insults in a silent tone of the respect that she held for the woman.
Directly besides her, curled up in a knot of tangled limbs lay her single most well-known student… Greta Cohen was known throughout the entirety of the town of Lima, Ohio simply as the girl who had crawled out of her crib in the middle of the night when she was two years old and had somehow managed to sneak outside into her backyard where she fell into the family pool.
She had been clinically dead for thirty six minutes before her parents had actually found her, but, by some sort of miracle, she'd survived despite the fact that she had been left severely, and permanently brain damaged…
Sue's eyes glanced timidly upwards in her attempts to identify the two animals who would ever so much as possibly consider placing harm upon such a defenseless target, eyes straining in an attempt to identify them despite the fact that their backs were still turned towards her.
The first child had been an easy one to identify; after all, there was no mistaking that plethora of red curls as anybody else other than Jacob Ben-Israel.
She'd known the boy for years, particularly due to his relentless gossip-mongering of her Cheerios as well as one particularly awkward confrontation on the day that she had caught him with a pair of Rachel Berry's underwear in his locker.
"Jesus, shut up!" He screamed violently downwards towards the writhing, sobbing body of Judith Klamm, delivering a firm kick into her midsection that silenced her in her entirety. "Why aren't you dead yet?"
"I think that she might be now…" The girl breathed out as if in amazement towards the fact, turning only slightly so that Sue managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of her profile.
For the life of her, she couldn't remember the name of the girl. Of course she had seen her about the hallways, and yes, she had been known by the teachers of William McKinley High School as that girl that had had such a frenzied crush over Will Schuester that she'd sent herself to the hospital…
Sue had always known that the girl had been a little bit off… she just wished that she'd thought to do something about it before today…
Pushing herself back firmly against the wall, she embedded a complete map of the scene firmly into her mind, breathing heavily and eyes wide in her attentiveness as she attempted to plot what her best next plan of action would be…
She needed to do something; they all needed for her to do something…
Silently, she slipped her sneakers from her feet, the reminder that she didn't need the extra noise standing out strikingly in the back of her head as she made the final, abrupt decision to take matters into her own hands, exact a confrontation that would either leave her a hero, or leave her dead.
She didn't so much as breathe; not once as she instigated her initial approach… Instead, she gathered up all of the expended energy that she would have otherwise used on respiration and placed it upon sizing up her victims, deciding which one would she would be better off going for first, and had to ward off one while dealing with the other.
She had picked Jacob as her go-to guy in the immediate; the idea that he was more of a threat than Suzy, more violent than Suzy, obvious … Yes, she would go straight for Jacob while simultaneously just praying on the fact that she was banking on; that Suzy would remain too stunned by her presence long enough for her to knock Jacob Ben-Israel to the ground, to disarm him…
Of course, her entire plan was hit or miss, but at this point, she had absolutely nothing to lose, so with nothing but the years of martial arts training that she had committed to since birth to defend her against two kids stocked with an armory that rivaled that of the United States Army's strapped to their bodies, Sue made her final run at a swift stride, providing herself with the momentum that she needed as she struck Jacob Ben-Israel hard in the back of the head with her elbow.
The boy was knocked to the ground in a second, his grip loosening against his gun in his shock so that the weapon went skirting across the length of the hallway, just out of arm's reach from the young killer… Of course, Sue hadn't expected anything less; she had a very hard elbow, and a lot of experience delivering swift blows with it.
Her adrenaline pouring through her veins, turning her into a real-life superwoman, Jacob began his instinctual attempts at fighting back, flailing his balled fists up at the woman who was currently attempting to pin him defenselessly to the ground…
But Sue overpowered him easily; after all, hand-to-hand combat had never been Jacob's strong suite, a fact that had become obvious this morning upon his resorting to fire arms in order to exact his revenge…
"Suzy; Suzy, do something!"
Suzy… that was her name… She allowed the thought to briefly enter her mind, but for the most part kept her focus on Jacob as the boy struggled to keep Sue from achieving her efforts to acquire the spare pistol that Jacob held currently holstered in his belt, and when she didn't feel an immediate resistance from Suzy, strike her in the form of a bullet to the back of her head, she knew that her initial assumption that Suzy would be too shell-shocked to do much of anything was correct, she knew that somehow, someway, this crazy idea of hers might actually work.
All she had to do was get her hands on this gun… Then, Jacob would be completely unarmed, no longer a threat, allowing her to easily take Suzy out before the girl had the opportunity to snap back into reality… She had no intentions upon killing her; maybe just a quick shot to an arm or a leg, just to bring her down…
No, Sue figured that she would let the police, the state, the friends and family of all of the people that Jacob and Suzy had killed today deal with them themselves because despite her tough demeanor, and her insistency otherwise, Sue Sylvester was not a killer, never had been… It just wasn't in her blood; a trait that clearly separated her from the two murderous students currently surrounding her.
She had had her hand around the butt of Jacob's gun, had come mere seconds from achieving her goal until in an instant, out of nowhere, a sudden explosion of white hot pain caused a burst of stars and light to dance in front of her very eyes themselves…
Subconsciously, her grip slipped from the gun that she had just managed to remove from Jacob's belt, diminishing any chance of her achieving her goal in a split second.
She had been a fraction of a second too slow, she had overestimated the amount of time that she would have between attacking Jacob and Suzy's bounce back into reality; a reality that Sue became all too aware of as she fell to the ground below her, knocked out cold for a quick millisecond before her eyes finally focused on none other than Suzy Pepper, hovering before her with a stony anger in her eyes as she held her gun outwards in a manner that told Sue that she had just been knocked upside the head by the butt of Suzy's shotgun.
With a pang of defeat, Sue accepted her failure for what it truly was, relishing in its consequence as she allowed her fingers to graze a particularly painful spot against the back of her head and removed them only to see the now all-too-familiar glisten of blood against the pads of her fingertips.
Before her, Jacob had gotten shakily to his feet; clearly stunned, yet slowly regaining his previous threatening demeanor as he wiped the blood from his nose and backed away from Sue in order to collect his dislodged weaponry, leaving space for Suzy to swoop down in front of her, gun drawn so that now, instead of facing its end, Sue had found herself face-to-face with its barrel.
She'd felt as if she had just been doused with a bucket full of freezing cold water, the figurative liquid seeping through her very pores, turning her already cold mind into pure ice so that although she was fully aware of the idea that death was currently knocking at her very doorstep, she couldn't process the idea that it would manage to steal any capacity of innocence that she actually had left inside of her body.
"What happened to you Suzy?" She asked the girl… She hadn't exactly envisioned those to be her potential final words, but they had somehow managed to formulate themselves, slip from her mouth completely devoid of voluntary control. After all, if she was going to die here today, right here, right now, at the very least, she could have been given an explanation. "Who did this to you?"
"Life did this to me." Suzy spoke harshly and without hesitation, her voice cool, inhuman even as she steadied her arm, adjusted her aim carefully, and finally, pulled the trigger.