A/N: YAY! Another update! I know I've been slacking a lot with the wonderful art of fanfiction lately, so I figured I wouldn't be a complete snail with this one, for what it's worth…
8: The Ghost Of Naomi Watts
Now, Adam is silent again.
The tears are pouring. Pouring even more violently.
He'd forgotten about his mother.
He'd forgotten that Lawrence wasn't the first one he ever loved.
In some way, his mom and his dad had floated together in his mind, his mom's grey eyes that smiled even though they were encircled with bruises had floated together with the monster that his dad sometimes turned into, that the beer turned him into.
The most amazing woman he'd ever met had floated together with the one who ruined him. Made him this way.
Because Adam really is broken.
It's barely even a figure of speech. It's like a chair or a TV. It's broken. He's broken.
"So your father was an alcoholic?" Jigsaw asks plainly.
Adam's first instinct still is to tell him to shut up. But the open, gaping wounds on his arms are grinding, throbbing, burning, reminding.
"Yeah."
"Did you meet your mother after that?"
Adam shakes his head.
"Did he kill her?"
He's asked another one of The Questions. And this time, it's not a question that scares the hell out of him, but a question that's no one dared to ask Adam in fourteen years, not the cop that questioned him a week later, not his older brother that Adam met years later on a bar, not even Lawrence when they got into the subject of Adam's family.
But Jigsaw can do it.
God, Adam hates him so much.
"Mm."
"Did you meet him after that?"
Adam shivers.
He's so cold.
But in reality, that shivering is more than anything an attempt to shrug off Jigsaw's question, shrug off those damn memories it brings, why the hell does he have to stir up everything that has only been a squishy, disgusting bottom in the lake that is his soul, why would he bring everything up when Adam has tried so hard to forget it?
Because now, he remembers again.
The last time he saw his father.
They needed someone to identify the perpetrator.
So they, not his mom, had called Adam, when he was Fred's, who's mom had found him sleeping in a ditch the morning after That Night. They'd called him and asked him to come down to the police station.
They had a suspect for the murder of Samantha Faulkner. Her husband. That was Adam's father, right? So all he had to do was to come down to the station, look at the man they'd caught and say if it was his dad. He could do that, couldn't he?
No one had told Adam that his mom was dead.
The way he found out about it was that a cop asked him to tell them if the man that killed her was his father.
So Adam had gone down to the station, more out of shock than anything else, and they'd sat him down on a chair. He'd had a label on his chest. He'd sat on the uncomfortable plastic chair with a phone next to him and a glass board in front of him, and he'd waited.
And on the other side of the glass, they'd brought in his dad.
He'd worn an orange overall. He'd been in handcuffs. A cop had had a firm grip on his shoulder, he'd kept his head down but not at all in a shameful way. More like he didn't think that the little punk on the other side of the glass was worth his attention.
The cop that held his shoulder had put him down on a chair in front of Adam.
Only a board of glass had separated Adam from the man that had killed his mother.
Adam remembers how his dad had looked up when the cop had let go of his shoulder.
Adam had stared into those eyes.
The cop that had brought his dad in hadn't even asked if it was the right guy. That one moment of eye contact was proof enough.
That one moment when Adam looked into his father's eyes, and didn't see a smidge of compassion, not a smidge of love, not even the tiniest wish to reach through the glass that separated them and touch him.
Only hatred.
Only pure distain.
Only a few words. Only a few words for a goodbye.
I refuse to let you make me guilty, you little piece of shit. You're just the product of a condom that I'd had in my wallet for too long, and that fucking little whore that you keep bitching about sucked at fucking, hell, it's a miracle that she managed to squeeze enough com out to conceive you. And if you give me some beer I'd do it again, any fucking day of the week, you hear me?
And the cop had taken him out again.
Adam could say that. If it had been Lawrence who asked. If it had been his warm, blue satin eyes that had looked at him instead of those cold, cold ice eyes that he now avoids with all the little energy he has.
"Once," he says, instead. "They wanted me to identify him."
"Was he dead, too?"
"No. Just charged."
Jigsaw nods.
"Tell me how you remember your mother, Adam."
And now, Adam could tell him about the picture of his mom that pops up in his head, the picture of her, newly awakened, ruffled and unmade in the pale morning light, her weary smile above the coffee cup when she sat with Adam out on the porch, the sun was coming up, turned her dark hair into black gold.
That memory is one of the happiest ones from his childhood. Just the memory of having breakfast with his mom, with no suppressed sorrow, no made up bruises. That's his happiest childhood memory.
Not afterwards. But that moment was the happiest one in his current ten year-old life, and he knew it was the same for his mom.
His dad hadn't come home that morning. He'd gone out drinking the night before, and Adam hadn't woken up in the middle of the night from a door that was slammed open, glass that was broken, a beautiful woman that was knocked to the ground.
His dad hadn't come home. And right then, Adam, even as a child, had been filled with the sadistic hope that he wouldn't come home at all anymore, that he'd found a new wife to beat up, that the police had caught him, that the goddamned son of a bitch that always made mom look so sad had died, but of course, life wasn't that easy.
They'd found him that same day.
Because he'd just passed out on the street. Of course.
And Adam remembers, no matter how much he's tried to block this out, too, that when the phone rang and the police asked his mom to come down to the station and pay two hundred bucks to release a man that claimed to be her husband, that glitter he'd seen in her eyes that morning disappeared, never to return again.
He remembers that. And he could say that, but instead, he clears his throat and mutters:
"Depressed. Sad. She was sad all the time, but she never allowed me to see it. She put makeup over her bruises and cried in the bathroom."
Sobs from the closed bathroom door. The crack in it from his fists.
Another memory.
"Was she beautiful?"
Adam doesn't have the energy to question him.
"Yeah. She was. When I was alone with her."
"And you said you loved her once."
"Yeah."
"The last time you saw her."
"Yeah."
"Even though you loved her all along."
"You got a fucking problem with that?"
He wants to shout it. But the stinging in his arms is like a weight on his vocal cords, a subconscious force, a suppressed, childish please-don't-cut-me-again that quiets him down, and Jigsaw doesn't even pretend to hear him.
"If you could turn back time," he continues indifferently, "and been able to tell doctor Gordon how much you love him before he went to work this morning, would you do it?"
"Yes."
There's no energy to deny, either.
"How come you only dare to tell people that when you think you'll never see them again?" Jigsaw asks. "If doctor Gordon was hit by a truck on his way to work, wouldn't you want him to die with the knowledge that he was more than a fling to you?"
"He knows I…"
His voice is so weak.
The words love him can't even fucking get past his lips.
"Does he?"
"Yes."
"How do you know that?"
Adam sighs faintly.
Everything he wants to do loudly and theatrically just come out in little bursts.
Maybe because his powers are fading away. He feels them throbbing out of his body along with the blood.
"You know it," he says, almost pitifully. "And no matter how much you've been whacking it while you watch us making out, he still should know it better, since he's kind of there when it happens, you know?"
Jigsaw doesn't even stand up this time, he just throws his arm out with a surprising amount of force for someone who can't even walk without bitching and moaning, and the cut gets as deep as the other two, and Adam bleeds, he doesn't look but he feels, feels the warmth that pours and burns and pounds and sticks his t-shirt to his body when it runs down his side, it hurts, god, it hurts, he hears how much it hurts, it roars and beeps in his ears, and in his head, a scream, his own voice that screams Lawrence's name, screams LawrenceLawrenceLawrenceLawrenceLAWRENCE
And so, this gets up his throat. Not as a scream, but in little whispers, like helpless pleas.
"Lawrence Lawrence Lawrence…"
Lawrence is on the screen in front of him, he's been there for almost an hour now, but he's too far away, too far away to fix Adam with his doctor hands, too far away to kiss away the pain, too far away to hear Adam telling him with he's never said, what rings in his head every time he sees Lawrence but that he's never let him know.
Jigsaw smiles. He smiles and turns into a skull again, the sick bastard. And he keeps talking like nothing happened.
"Let's hope doctor Gordon makes it through this. I really want him to know that you love him."
Pause.
"What would you do if he were here right now?"
"What time is it?" Adam asks.
His reflexes have taken over now. His body has broken down and so has his brain, it's only his impulses that manage to get past the pain, the cold, the fear.
Jigsaw looks at his watch. Like he was a real person.
"Seven thirty."
Adam nods.
"I… I've bought tickets. We were going to see a movie tonight. It starts right now."
"What were you going to see?"
"'Funny Games.' Have you seen it?"
Jigsaw shakes his head. Adam nods again. He has no idea why he keeps doing that.
"It's… With Naomi Watts," he goes on. "Damn, why couldn't you have kidnapped me tomorrow, I really wanted to see her… Naomi Watts is probably kicking ass in this movie. She's good at this stuff."
"Do you like her?"
Adam nods.
"Not… Not just because she's beautiful. She's just so fucking good, at least in roles like these… She's kind of good at playing… Sad, you know?"
Jigsaw smiles thinly.
"Like your mom?"
"Yeah."
"You like horror movies, don't you?"
"Mm," Adam mumbles.
The blood drops down on the floor. He sees himself moving, hears himself saying things, and he doesn't get why he does them, how he can possibly do it.
How can his body function normally when he's so frightened that he can't even feel his heart beating?
How can he talk about things he could talk to Lawrence about, something that could've been topic in front of the TV with pizza box in each of their laps, something he could tell someone he loves, with someone who's responsible for the scar around Lawrence's ankle and the stiffness in Adam's right shoulder, someone who's fault it is that Lawrence walks around on the screen in front of him?
Adam doesn't know. It probably something that goes right along with that 'once you're in the game, you're going to have to deal with the rules'-crap.
Even if you were forced into the game. Even if you've thought about ending the game, just take your jar of sleeping pills and end the damn thing, you're still in there. The game doesn't care if you like it or not. It just plays on.
Adam is in life. And even though he hated it for a while, even though he honestly, sincerely and truly wanted it to end so he could sleep, he'd never been able to sleep, you can't sleep to the sounds of your mom screaming, he's in it. And his body has gotten used to being in it, doing what it hates and what it loves.
What it loves, like standing with its arms around Lawrence's neck, feeling him breathing into Adam's mouth, feeling the heart that beats in unison with his own.
What it hates.
Like watching Lawrence cutting his ex-wife open, like hurling Fruit Loops over his t-shirt, like chattering his teeth and staring pleadingly at Jigsaw.
It's going to keep doing that. Even though Adam wants to lie down and cry, his body is going to go on, without his accord.
"Why am I telling you this?" Adam asks suddenly.
"Because you're scared," Jigsaw answers simply, but Adam shakes his head.
"No, that's not why."
He knows what he's like when he's scared. Hell, he's been scared all his life, of course he recognizes it. When he's scared, he doesn't want people to know it, so he pretends to be angry, he yells and curses, he tugs helplessly at the chain around his ankle, weather it's a real one or a figurative one. And he's scared now, but that's not why he's sitting with his tormenter and tells him about his favorite actress.
Jigsaw says nothing. The minutes go by, and when Adam starts to think that he's not going to answer at all, he says:
"You wish I was Lawrence."
Adam nods.
"Yeah. You're right."
He doesn't even think about the fact that Jigsaw didn't call Lawrence 'doctor Gordon.'
Maybe he finally sees the difference between these two sides of Lawrence.
Maybe he finally understands that if doctor Gordon were here, Adam would be even more afraid.
"Oh," Jigsaw says suddenly and looks at the screen. "I believe it's time for our second test."
A light has been switched on in his voice, like something interesting finally happens after listening to Adam's whining for forty-five minutes, and Adam would be filled with his usual urge to strangle him if all of his attention hadn't been turned to the TV in front of him, to Lawrence who's walking, with flickering eyes and blood on his hands, with Amanda next to him.