Author's Note: Since I've went ahead and started another plot-filled multi-chap fic., this one has sort of taken a back seat. I fear I may have tarried too long in this fandom. Anyhow, I don't like to leave things unfinished, so I will work on this one when I have the time (or I need a break from my other story). So, to the 8 people who are reading this, I apologize-updates will be erratic, and few.

Chapter 9: Fire

Death didn't come for them right away.

No, the two of them were shoved into the back of a car-a big Impala with windows tinted the color of night-and driven off to some dive bar on the very edge of Hell's Kitchen, a dirty place with a shady back room, the kind where folks liked to come to do illicit business...

...or where you went if you wanted to knock someone off.

And underneath the glare of a sickly yellow light, they had strapped his brother to a high-backed dining chair with some bungee cord, an oak chair so large that it almost resembled a throne, and some big guy-ironically named Sally-was pacing back and forth in front of him, screaming and gesticulating with his hands. And his brother, as usual, was all steely blue eyes and prolific swear words...

But even steel could be melted down...

Rohan flinched as he watched Sally delivered another hard right to Callum's jaw. His head snapped to the side and blood arced across the floor. Rohan was being held by two thugs on either arm, and every time he tried to move, he got a whack of a gun butt to the back of his head. Still, that didn't stop him from reacting to his brother's predicament, despite the amount of pain it was causing him.

"Admit it! You did it! And under your spud-sucking uncle's orders, too! You torched that place, didn't you?"

"I didn't do shit!"

"Admit it! You and your scum relative plotted it. There were people inside that building, you know-"

"-oh, fuck you and fuck your mother!" Callum sneered as he spat out his favorite offensive epitaph, earning him another right hook. This time when his head snapped to the side, Rohan thought he saw him spit out a tooth.

Sally got right up in his brother's face. He looked like a hawk that was about to take down his prey. "Listen, you no-good Mick. Whether you want to admit it or not, you're dead in the water. You got that? Dead. In. The. Water..." the man's words were little more than a threatening whisper. "However, you spit out the details, give us over some names, and I may be more inclined to make your exit out of this world a little more...easy."

Callum laughed mirthlessly, showing teeth stained red with blood. "You expect me to believe that, you lying sack of shit dago? Do you?"

Wham!

Sally hit him so hard that the chair teetered back and crashed to the floor. Rohan looked at his brother's upside down, bloodied face. His face, which had remained resiliently, stoically blank up until now. Until the moment they both locked eyes. Then, without a sound, he saw his brother mouth the words:

I'm so sorry...

"I've had enough of dealing with this piece of shit," spat Sally. "George, Mickey-go out to the car and get that can of gas out of the trunk-"

Rohan's eyes went wide, and he started struggling again. And again, he was hit in the back of the head. The world tilted precariously with his swirling, blurry vision...

"-is this place covered?"

"Yey, boss. I got that Mello guy up on the roof with a sniper's rifle. We're cool."

"Good. I don't want any interruptions. Ah, George...the can."

The dread-locked man named George handed over an innocent looking plastic drum of back-up fuel. Rohan watched as the other man with him, Mickey, pushed the chair with Callum in it back into an upright position. Then he said:

"You sure you wanna do this here, boss?" As if this were a questionable idea.

"Fuck yey. Why not?" Then: "You ready to die, you stupid Mick?" Callum's face was pure stone as Sally began to twist the top off the container.

At this, Rohan went nuts. He was hit in the back of the head repeatedly, but to no avail. And then, as if noticing his presence for the first time, Sally stormed over to him and grabbed him by the hair, tilting his head back.

"Stop your squirming junior. Or I'll get a second can just for you. You got that? For now, you can just watch."

Sally tossed away the cap and he began circling Callum, systematically dousing him with gasoline. The smell was overwhelming. It was the kind of pungent, distinctive scent that curled up and took up residence within the psyche, made it impossible for one to forget. Ever. Even five years on, five years after the fact, Rohan still couldn't bear the scent of gasoline; it literally made him violently, physically ill. It was one of the reasons he could never own a car...

Sally tossed the now empty gas can aside. The other four men in the room had gone deathly, expectantly silent. There was only a single keening sound, a single high-pitched whimper. And this, Rohan realized, was coming, unbidden, from his very own throat.

"Say your prayers, asshole." And Sally reached into his blazer, took out a silver zeppo lighter...

Callum was indeed praying. A steady stream of ancient Gaelic, a prayer which had belonged to their mother. The old tongue, the tongue of the mother country. Rohan was shaking, shaking uncontrollably beneath the grip of his captors.

"Don't do this," he whispered at last. Whispered beseechingly, uselessly...

And then Sally snapped the zeppo alight, and threw it in his brother's face.

Sometimes you wake up...

Sometimes you wake up, when you really wish that you were dead...

And not only are you not dead, but you are also not dreaming. Everything...everything is fantastically, fatally real.

Memory is just a grim reaper walking neatly through the corridors of your past with a scythe, cutting down everyone you've ever known, everyone you've ever loved. And suddenly, the consequences of your normal, everyday life are vividly, irrevocably real. Disturbingly, painfully real. And in your unwavering, unswerving loyalty to family-a fealty that was both innocently and naively given-you finally realize something: that your life is not a normal way of life. That your life-a life of stealing, violence, blackmail, and murder-is not the way that most people live. No, it only seemed that way at the time, only seemed normal within the tiny incubation chamber of your own family's insulated, unapologetic way of being. And your life, as it turns out, comes filled, loaded, with unexpected, dangerous, and unendurable consequences. Irreversible consequences.

But this realization comes far too late for you. It is a knowledge that saves no one, redeems nothing…

And in the end, you are still alive, alive and awake, and left to wallow in your own quagmire of misery, of guilt and regret…

Rohan lay, twitching, on the very razor's edge of consciousness. A turn of his head, and he felt his insides immediately quiver in protest, balk at that tiny fraction of a movement. He could feel the plum-sized lump nesting on the back of his head, all ripe and swollen, tender to the touch. He couldn't remember how it came to be there, could not remember whether he was simply beaten into unconsciousness, beaten into oblivion. Or perhaps his mind had just slipped away on its own accord, curled itself into a welcoming blanket of pure black, far away from the horrors that had taken place right in front of him.

Do not think of it…

But there was no escaping it. Memory was an ill-favored, malicious bitch who was making it a point to torture him, taunting him with the garish, techni-colored images of pure evil which he could neither change nor forget nor escape. He literally wanted to curl up and die. If he could have willed it, he would have. But he wasn't so lucky. He was alive. Alive and awake. A miserable situation to be in, when all he wanted to do was die, die, die. When all he wanted was oblivion.

Please let me die. Don't make me live too long.

Rohan opened his eyes and stared at the checkered cover beneath him: a cover stained with dried blood-from the back of his own throbbing head, no doubt. He was surprised to find himself lying on a bed, a small affair with a wooden country frame, on top of a faded old quilt. It was strange. Why didn't they just kill me? Why am I here? Rohan shifted his weight, encountered resistance. That's when he realized his right arm was cuffed to one of the slats in the headboard.

No escape.

But he didn't want to escape. What he wanted was to die.

In the silent gloom, memory assailed him. There were phantom screams in his ear, high-pitched and inhuman. And the smell—oh god, the smell—

Stop this!

But it was hard. Too hard to stop the continuous parade of black images, when he was all alone in a darkened room with only his own traitorous thoughts for company. The waiting was unbearable. The silence was unbearable. His own thoughts were unbearable. He longed, like a lover, for the comfort of a loaded gun…

Eventually, there came the sound of heavy foot steps outside the door.

The click of a lock being turned; the creak of a door pushed inward. Rohan blinked impassively as the man with the dread locks—George—entered the room. He had his jacket off and he was wearing a holster, a holster which held two guns. Rohan's eyes latched onto those, watched those pistols longingly as the man took off the holster and draped it over the short wooden post at the foot of the bed. Like a man coming home and hanging up his hat.

Rohan watched him in apathetic silence.

George also had a bottle of tequila in hand, the contents of which was fueling the glittery, feverishly manic look in his eyes. Dark eyes which watched Rohan like a predator in the brush. And Rohan simply stared back. There was a blankness in his stare, an absence of fear. It caused the man named George to hesitate, to open his mouth to speak:

"What's wrong with you, Mick? You gone deaf and dumb or something?"

Silence.

George skirted around the edge of the bed, placed the bottle of tequila down on the little bedside table with a heavy clank! He was looking Rohan up and down, and Rohan might have been tipped off to the danger in that gaze, if he wasn't so completely enveloped in his own private world of pain. As it was, he barely noticed George at all. His eyes were still on the guns slung around the bed-post, those two instruments like shiny brass keys that would allow him to unlock the door to his own salvation.

He wanted to die…

"Listen Mick-I've been following you. For the past three days. Trailing your sorry ass everywhere-"

Rohan glanced over at George, looking at him as if seeing him for the first time.

"-uninteresting work, that. Following someone. But you know what? I learned something interesting about you, Mick-"

-and a sense of foreboding, like fire, began to spread across his skin.

"-that you're a faggot and you've got a faggot boyfriend you like to go and visit on the sly. So, what do you do with him faggot? You suck his cock? Like to take it up the ass? Well, I've got something you're gonna looove, pretty boy-"

George attacked him. Rohan began to struggle as George sought to pin him to the bed. The smell of liquor, the rough brush of dreads, assaulted his senses. George continued to spout obscenities as he lay on top of him, as he felt his hair being ripped back. And suddenly, the desire to live came back to him full-force; the self-preservation instinct was there, alive and kicking. Rohan flailed. And, straining across the bed, he reached out to snag the tequila bottle that was left on the table with his left hand. George, unaware, was busy trying to get his hands down his pants. Rohan broke the bottle over the back of the head board, gripped the jagged neck in his hand-

-and raked the broken edge, like a knife, over George's throat, cutting him open.

Blood poured from the wound like a waterfall. It covered Rohan's shirt and face. George clawed helplessly at his throat, at the open gash that was leaking out his life's blood. He tried to rise up on his knees, tried to sit up, but there was too much of it. The effort was futile. After a few seconds-or perhaps minutes-there was a final, gutteral, gurgling sound, a single roll of the eyes, and then he simply collapsed in a bloodied heap on top of Rohan's handcuffed form.

He was dead.

Rohan dropped the bottle neck with an apathetic ping! And, completely drenched in another man's blood, returned to staring off dazedly into space.

He was dead, but there was still no escape...

End Chapter 9.

So...this chapter was actually supposed to be longer than this, but an unexpected change in my work schedule ruined those plans, and sucked away my writing time. So I hope this will suffice for now...

Thanks for reading (and being patient)!