RUPTURED
By: azure7539
Pairing: William/Rita, William/OC
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Romance, Family
Rating:M
Summary: Life didn't exactly turn out the way he had expected it to.
Warning: This is an AU and a SLASH as well, which contains an intimate relationship between men(mostly)... you'll see why this warning is here later on. So beware, people, those who aren't comfortable with this should leave before you read something you dislike/hate. And this will get DARK because, apparently, I cannot write anything else other than that.
You have been warned!
Disclaimer: I have not and will never own any of the characters in here. They are all borrowed from the movie "Edge of Tomorrow".
This story is based on the theory of William Cage absorbing the Omega's blood during the final battle before resetting once more back to the helicopter.
Additional author's note: Because I have seen the movie once about a long month ago, some details are a little fuzzy, so the characters may be slightly OOC, and I apologize in advance for that. Message me if you find any obvious mistake regarding the movie verse, I'll do my best to fix it.
And I don't have a beta and am looking for one. If anyone is interested, please message me. I will highly appreciate it.
Now, enjoy!
2. Loneliness
She was screaming. The high-pitched, scratchy sound emitting from her throat was deafening. He squeezed his eyes shut before opening them again, so see if this was real or not.
She was screaming his name. Each time it resounded in the confined space, he felt as though the invisible hands around his neck was slowly tightening, suffocating him.
"Bill! BILL!" she screamed, the syllables choked and broken as fresh tears rolled down from her eyes. "It hurts so much, Bill!"
He stared at the twisted figure on the bed, hidden underneath the thin layers of blanket, seeing but not seeing at the same time... then took a step backward. And another. And another.
His back touched the cold hard wood of the door, the metal poking into his side almost painfully, then suddenly, he remembered how to turn the knob, fling the door open and escape.
"Hey," a low voice rumbled through the thick and heavy air. From the brightly shining window on his right, he could tell it couldn't be anything more than noon, yet in here everything was so cold and chilling, and he had to suppress a shiver.
At the small, uneven table in the middle of the room sat a man, all beat up and stank of liquor, disheveled hair and tousled clothing. His head was buried in the crooks of his folded arms on the wood surface of the table, but a small blue eye was peeking out, staring at him from within the darkness.
Everything went quiet for a moment there, the screaming in the room next door ceased to exist also, but he couldn't tell whether he should feel relieved about it or not.
In a fraction of a second, the chair tumbled back with a screech before falling harshly down to the floor, the screaming began again, all sound came back crashing over him like waves of a stormy sea. The man was up staggering on his feet, heading straight toward him with an intense look in those eyes that were partially hidden behind the curtain of dirty dark hair, footsteps heavy and loud on the old, creaking floorboards.
And he foolishly stood there while holding back his breath. He honestly didn't know what to do.
Paralyzed.
There was a soft whimper in the background. His eyes widened as he turned around, a child was sitting there in the corner of the darkened room, crying with fat tears trickling down his cheeks.
The man swept over him like a storm, entirely unaware of his existence at all, and instead approached that child and crouched down in front of him, frightfully close.
He was murmuring something, that man, but he couldn't pick it up from where he was standing, the screaming beyond the wall was overriding every other sound. With a swallow, he finally moved forward, edging nearer and nearer until he was only one for two paces away from the pair on the floor. Just close enough for the last sentence to stream into his ears.
"Listen to me well, Bill. Never be brave in life, you hear me, son? Never be brave. Be blind if you have to. You'll live better that you, you understand me? Do you understand me? Don't be brave, you'll get yourself killed. Be a coward, Bill. Be a coward..." the words came out of that mouth in a steady, unending flow, almost like a chant. "Do you hear me?!" those worn blue eyes were glittering as well, the hands on the child's shoulders trembled in the exact helplessness that rang in his voice.
"Y-yes," the child replied, cracked and wavering.
"Good," that large hand ruffled the child's hair. And suddenly, he could feel the warmth of that hand spreading on his head. His perspective of the whole room changed in a single second, and he found himself curled up in the corner, small and vulnerable as he looked at that man with teary eyes, watching as he got up from the floor and left.
"D-Dad..." he croaked, but it didn't at all sound like him.
The man stopped and turned to look at him again. And for the first time, a soft smile bloomed on his chapped and split lips, making the lines on his face more visible than ever before. He looked dead tired and weary. The smile was so sad and sorrowful that it hurt him right down to the core.
"Shh..." the gentle breath rushed from his mouth as he placed a finger onto those lips, signaling him to stay quiet. And he watched, watched as his Dad opened the door to the room where his Mum was writhing in pain, screaming and dying as cancer ate her up from the inside out.
He snapped his head away as the door clicked close, and resumed staring at the toy car with one of its wheels broken that he had picked up from the street the other day after seeing another kid throwing it away.
Bringing his tiny hands up to cover his ears tightly, he rocked back and forth and started whispering all the things that accidentally popped up in his mind: a long forgotten song, a story his Mum and Dad used to tell him... anything, anything at all.
Don't be brave... he told himself. Life didn't take well to people being brave. You'll get killed.
Just be a coward, and you'll be fine.
Be blind, be a coward.
Be blind, be a coward.
Be blind, be a coward.
And the screaming continued.
Will gasped awake. Everything in the room was blurry and out of focus, his head swam and slightly disoriented as he fell back to the pillow upon recognizing his room. Chest moving up and down, he tried to regulate his breathing to get himself back to the state of normal awareness as soon as possible.
Sometimes, it still felt like rousing from a reset. Sometimes, his head sang as though there was a bullet lodged deep inside his brain, twisting up his nervous system. Sometimes, he could still hear that haunting scream and the smell of liquor ghosting over his senses, overlapping even reality. Sometimes, he could still see Rita dead and lifeless behind his eyelids. And whenever that happened, he was bound to have a long and terrible day while sporting a pulsing headache that would not cease its vicious grip no matter what kind of medicine he used.
God, he groaned and stretched, rolling over to unsurprisingly find the right side of his bed cold and empty. Rita didn't come back last night, he knew, but it had become sort of a habit for him to check after waking up from sleep. Blindly reaching for a pillow, Will pulled it to his face and took in a lungful of her familiar scent and soft perfume to ease the heaviness in his body. The scent was almost gone, she hadn't been back too often recently, there was a case that she needed to work on.
A sigh escaped his nostrils as William finally pushed that disturbing dream away from his mind and loosened up his body muscles enough to actually enjoy the soft of the bed and the pillow pressing against his face. For a moment there, his mind was blank, no thoughts running, no gears turning or shifting, nothing. But slowly, as if on cue or something, a list of important stuff what needed to be done mentally appear in his mind one by one like a slideshow.
Groceries. Will tapped his right forefinger onto the mattress after each thing that was popping up... like doing a weird head-count of sort.
Laundry. The weekly visit to George- Rita's father... And Luke's soccer game.
Will smiled fondly at the thought. Luke was going to have his first soccer game. His son was going to have his first soccer game! It was just a small friendly game between elementary kids, but God damn, the excitement was still that hard to bear, especially when Rita was officially taking a day off work for it. How could he not grin at that anyways? Then, another list he had been musing over turned up as well.
A camera was a must. Sandwiches and juice as well, George- and maybe Aaron, too- was coming along with him and Rita after all... What else...?
The alarm went off, snapping Will out of his daze as he quickly got up and turned it off with a mildly irritated frown before hopping down to the floor, making up the bed and swiftly made his way to the bathroom.
A new day was here.
"Good morning, Papa!" Luke hopped down from the stairs and dashed into the kitchen.
"Hey, kiddo," Will stirred the eggs some more before scooping all of it into the waiting plate. "Scramble eggs with sausages and toast."
"Yum!" the child exclaimed, settling himself down to his usual seat. Will chuckled and ruffled his hair as he pushed Luke's breakfast along with a glass of orange juice over to him.
"Eat up, Luke. Then I'll take you to school," the tap was turned on and clear water started flowing out from it in a steady stream as William began washing up the dishes from the previous night when he was too tired and lazy to clean them.
Since Luke was found conceived, William and Rita had talked it over and came to an agreement that it would be impossible to take care of a child when both of them were on active duty in the CO19. So Will- being the person who had had a real job other than serving in the military- had to drop out and started applying for one of those advertisement firms that had been springing back to life after the world had relatively begun to stabilize once more, when the cleaning up was mostly done and the UDF had been disbanded.
"Papa, where's mum? Is she at work again?" Luke piped up from the table behind him.
"Yeah. But don't worry, she'll be back soon, okay?" Will turned around to wink at his son with a smile.
"Okay," Luke giggled and resumed enjoying his food.
The phone was ringing, and Will had had half a hope of Rita picking it up until it got redirected to the voice-mail box. He sighed and waited for the familiar 'beep'.
"Hey, Rita. It's me," he said jokingly and laughed. "Uh... you didn't come home last night, everything okay? Just checking up on you is all... What do you want for dinner tonight?" he chewed on his lips, running out of things to say. "So... call me when you get this. Love you."
With that, he hung up.
Peter- his co-worker- kept going on and on about a plan that didn't seem the least bit plausible and appropriate, and Will resisted the urge to sigh and roll his eyes tiredly, reaching up to rub his temple for a little bit.
It had been four hours already, and she hadn't called him back.
Late lunch with the customers, Will had been smiling and talking till his jaws turned stiff, and they still weren't agreeing on closing the deal. Greedy bastards, his mind substituted. But it couldn't be helped... it was the rebuilding phrase and all, and people were just striving to get back what they had lost.
Twirling the noodles with his fork while Amanda took over to relieve his over-working throat, Will wondered if Luke had eaten all his food including the small amount of vegetables in it... he should check on that later on... And there were the sandwiches he had prepared for himself as well, totally unsuspecting that the meeting would be re-scheduled. He should put them in the fridge and reheat them next morning... it would still be edible, right?
"Mr. Cage," he snapped up, a smile not too wide or toothy automatically slipped onto his lips.
"Yes?"
The phone remained still in his pocket.
"Anything is fine, Will," Rita's voice replied from the other side of the line. Will grinned.
"You sure about that?" he asked, a cheerful note ringing in his voice despite the dull ache in his stiff back and shoulders. His wife finally called back before four, what more could he ask for?
"Yes, I'm sure," she made a fake exasperated tone, he could vividly see the way her lips would curl up at this.
"All right," his head was turning and tossing all the options he had at hand that moment. "How's work?"
"Busy," Rita sighed softly. "There's been a couple of disturbances lately, nothing too serious, though. Many people have been triggering false alarm because they hear loud noises and such at night out in their yard... I think there're pranksters at large here, targeting random victims just to get the kicks of it."
Targeting people's still ever present fear of another alien attack now that it had become painfully obvious that we were as alone in the universe as we were in a house full of children. Sometimes, it amazed Will how sick bastards like those could still continue to be sick bastards after that horrific war.
And a sigh escaped his lips, too. "Well, there'll be a slip up one way or another, and you'll be there to catch them..."
"Yeah," there was a noise in the background that sounded like a door opening and closing or something. "I have to go now, I'll see you later, okay?"
"Sure, see you later then, honey."
The night air was cool against his skin as Will focused his vision out into the darkness that was enveloping the entire neighborhood, searching for any signs, any sound at all that remotely resembled the sound of his wife's sedan pulling up.
Shifting on his feet with arms folded in front of his chest to keep his hands warm, Will turned around to look at the clock hanging on the wall inside his house. It was ten thirteen in the evening, and he had received not a call or anything to indicate that Rita was going to make it home or not. The bone-deep weariness that had started out with the awful nightmare that morning, accompanied with the stress from work and all of that was eating him up from the inside out.
"Guess the roast beef is joining the sandwiches then," he murmured to himself, lingering for a while longer before giving up and going back into the house, locking the door behind him.
Pushing everything into the freezer, Will eyed the stack of neatly arranged ham sandwiches and made a quick decision of taking one and shoving it down his mouth.
Crispy blanket settled down onto his person as Will closed his eyes and shivered, though he had just taken a warm shower, it didn't make it any less cold. The wind was blowing outside, and the gentle rustling of tree branches and their leaves filled in the empty silence. With Luke sound asleep and no one else to talk to, the house to him seemed painfully quiet and eerily dark. And... well, Will didn't like the darkness, not really... but since Rita could only sleep when the lights were out, he had learnt to get used to it a long time ago now, so it didn't bother him as much as it had before.
The lull of sleep was already dragging him under as Will stared at the vacant space next to him with heavy-lidded eyes, slowly drifting with a dull sense of loneliness that had been accumulating for a long, long time. But he flung it away into the furthest corner of his mind as he had always done and finally fell asleep. He didn't need that sort of negativity in his life, and especially in his line of work, that was for certain.
And with eight years of running around and working his way back into the real world, of looking after a child, raising him, feeding him and everything else... Will couldn't possibly have noticed the pair of eyes that burnt with the orange color of ranging flames quietly watching him from beyond the glass window that led out into the open balcony.
To be continued...