Alright, I know I said updates would be few, but-hey! Surprise! Here's another chapter! Work's been super-stressful for me and I've been channeling my angst into this fic. This was written at 4:30 a.m. 3 chapters in 5 days...not bad, eh? Especially on a 10 day work stretch (gah!)...
Chapter 10: Falling
It really couldn't get much worse, he reflected.
His whole family was most likely dead…
His brother had been torched right in front of him…
And now he was trapped in a room with the dead body of a wanna-be rapist laying half on top of him…
Rohan scooted out from under the dead man; he could no longer abide his touch, even in his near-comatose state of apathy. Blood was drying to a deep earthy brown across his t-shirt and he could only imagine what the rest of him looked like. A sinister wine-colored stain was spreading across the quilt like the blackest of crude. George's body was face-down and eerily still. And yet, like a cheap shot in a horror movie, Rohan half expected him to reach out and make a grab for him again.
But nothing happened. There was only dark, dreadful silence.
If you just sit here, they will come for you, said a voice inside his head, a voice that sounded remarkably like that of his brother's. Then:
They will come for you, and once they've seen what you've done, you'll be in a world of pain…
I'm already in a world of pain, countered a second voice, sounding very much like his own.
You say that now—
I want to die!
No, you don't, countered that other, oh-so-familiar voice.
Silence. Rohan closed his eyes. He could feel the tears welling up, tears which he valiantly tried to fight down…
Please...
Try...
Rohan swallowed and opened his eyes. He looked down at the holster with the two guns slung around the bottom of the bed post.
Just try.
Then he slowly, and painfully, began to scrunch down toward the edge of the bed, moving as far as the cuff would allow.
Almost there...
He could reach the base of the post okay with his foot. Now, if he could just hook his boot under the straps, pull the holster up and over the small post. He could probably get it just over the top, if he stretched far enough, if he strained—
Just don't drop it.
Focus…
He pulled against the cuff, stretched himself as far as he could go. Then slowly, carefully, he inched the toe of his boot beneath the holster. Once it was in place, he began to inch it up the post. Slowly, and carefully—
Don't drop it.
Little by little, inch by inch—
If you drop it, you are dead in the water. Dead. In. The. Water.
It was almost to the top. Rohan hesitated. Because if he screwed this up, if it fell off and onto the floor, then—
Don't think about it.
Focus…
His leg muscles were trembling. His body couldn't stretch any farther. He had to pull it over fast, rip it off like an old band-aid, but keep it hooked over his shoe—
Now.
He pulled upwards and watched-with his heart pounding out a rapid tattoo of fear and trepidation and stress, stress, stress-as the holster flipped idly over the edge of the post. Flipped and remained precariously balanced on the toe of his shoe.
Yes!
Rohan blinked in disbelief as the holster slid down over his ankle. He couldn't believe he had it. He actually had it! He couldn't believe he had done it. He began to slowly ease his way back up the bed, pulling the guns with him, keeping the holster hooked around his ankle.
What are you going to do once you get your hands on them? Hmm?
Silence.
Rohan? The distinctive sound of his brother's voice filled his head. Loud and achingly clear, as if he were standing right next to him.
As if he were shouting in his ear…
Don't you dare, Rohan…
No response.
Rohan, you put that gun to your head, and I'll never forgive you…
Still no response.
Rohan slid into a sitting position. He had managed to drag the holster half way up the bed, and now he could easily grab one of the pistols with his free hand. The feel of that cold, hard metal was almost as comforting as his mother's arms…
Rohan!
Don't!
He hefted the gun in his hand, and stared at it. And paused. And considered…
Don't!
God will never forgive you.
I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT GOD!
Finally, a response.
Rohan considered the gun in his hand, considered all his options.
Rohan!
He considered everything, then he raised the gun—
Don't…
-and fired two shots at the two-inch wooden slat that the cuff was attached to.
The sound was jarring in close quarters. He waited to see if a battalion of armed men would come bursting into the room. But no one came. It was just as silent, as dead as before. And then he realized that it was probably because they expected to hear shots coming from inside the room—they expected him to die.
But he wasn't dead. No. And not only was he not dead, he was now free. He pulled the cuff through the splintered remains of the headboard slat. And then he laughed.
He laughed, but it wasn't a pleasant sound. Not a happy, amused, or mirthful sound. No, it was the sound of a man who was very close to losing his shit…
…or who already had.
Rohan looked down at George's lifeless body. Out of the blue, he felt an embittered rage begin to well up inside of him, and he kicked the dead man, kicked him until he rolled off the edge of the bed, until he fell to the floor with a heavy thud!
Bastard!
Rohan checked the clips of the guns, to see how much ammo he had. Both were nearly full. And, still bloodied, with reddened streaks drying across his cheeks and chin like impromptu war paint, he got off the bed, pulled on the dead man's holster, and headed for the door.
Not that way…
Rohan froze with his hand poised above the door knob.
Too hard.
He considered the room he was in, the situation he was in, and then he turned away from the door. Instead, he walked over to the window and pulled back the heavy dark curtains. He flipped the latch and pushed it up. Outside, night greeted him. Night pierced by sheets of pouring rain.
There.
A few feet over was a beat-up looking fire escape, bent and twisted, trailing down the side of the building like a ladder sent down from heaven…
…or perhaps it was a stairway to hell.
Either way, Rohan ducked his head and slung his leg over the sill, determined to make the attempt. The landing was quite a ways over, but he thought he could jump it. It was possible he might make it…
…or, he could fall to his death.
And he was strangely okay with that.
He was hanging precariously from the windowsill. Rain beat down over him, drenched him to the skin, plastering his bloodied t-shirt to his frame. He shivered in the dark, and waited. Waited for the courage or numbing apathy or a sign from a useless God—
-then he jumped.
He hit the side of the fire escape with a reverberating clang!, his body and his boots and his holster connecting noisily with the wet metal. He clung fiercely to the iron railing, the wind nearly completely knocked out of him, a spreading ache in his rib cage, alive and throbbing, a twin to the ache from the lump on the back of his head. Everything on his body hurt. Finally, gasping like an asthmatic for breath, he began to haul himself up. Hauled himself up and onto the metal landing, clawing, reaching sightlessly in the rain-drenched dark for a hand-hold.
And nearby, a bullet pinged off the metal landing.
Rohan rolled over and clambered back against the building, just as a second shot whizzed by a couple of feet in front of him. Shit! Then he remembered, vaguely, something the Italians had said about having a sniper up on the roof…
Goddam motherfucking piece of shit asshole…
Gone were the thoughts of apathy and despair. Gone was the earlier wish to just lie down and die. There was nothing in him now but a pure, white rage, blinding in its intensity. Instead of trying to make his way down the fire escape, away from his unknown assailant, Rohan began to climb upward. He drew his own gun, and fired back at the roof.
He was beyond all logic by now. Beyond all fear of death.
He was going to kill the son-of-a-bitch who was shooting at him. Or he was going to die trying…
Utter blackness and icy sheets of unforgiving rain made visibility next to nothing. Shots were fired blindly, into the void. Rohan drew closer to the roof, closer to his unseen target. He had almost emptied one of the clips returning fire.
It did not matter.
Like a drowned man crawling onto the shore, Rohan slowly pulled himself over the edge of the roof. He could hear nothing, could see no one. Perhaps the bastard had left. Perhaps he had retreated inside, had gone to alert his piece-of-shit cronies. Perhaps—
-a punch landed straight in his eye, the eye that had been blackened in the bar fight from last week. Blindly, he stumbled, flailed on the edge of the rooftop. He reached out, and he caught something—a flash of metal, something silver. He grabbed onto it, but then it gave, snapped. Pieces of it scattered everywhere, winking like fireflies in the dark. A rosary. Rohan couldn't believe his eyes. Couldn't believe the shiny beads falling from his hand. Couldn't—
Another shot rang out. He felt a fire begin to spread through his chest, like someone had lit a match and thrown it there, and now there was pain, bright and new, like the lick of a candle flame singeing all along his nerves. The world began to waver. The rooftop tilted. And blood, like red rain, was falling to the ground. Falling like beads of broken glass. He felt fire, nothing but fire; the world tilted, and suddenly he was looking straight up into the blackened sky, looking into nothingness. The ground had completely fallen away. And that's when he realized: he was falling, falling…
Falling into the void…
And then…
And then, almost two whole days passed.
Two days passed, before the sanitation department came by to empty the dumpster that Rohan had fallen into. The dumpster where he would lay, unconscious and bleeding, for two days, balanced on the knife's edge of life and death.
Two days before he was taken to a hospital.
But he survived. It was what many would call a miracle. An act of God. But Rohan, upon waking, did not think it a miracle. And he no longer cared about God.
He was sorry.
So very sorry.
He was sorry he was still alive.
He was sorry he had managed to live through all the bullshit that had happened to him.
He was sorry he was left in excruciating pain, with only the horror of his own memories for company.
He was sorry that, when he was finally well enough to leave the hospital, he was collected by a pair of his distant cousins, who had come all the way from Cork City, Ireland. He also was sorry that, out of his entire Hell's Kitchen family, only his father had managed to survive, now bound to a wheel chair. And that he, too, was going back to Cork City with his cousins.
And Rohan's father blamed him for everything.
All of it.
His father blamed him, because there was no one left to blame.
No one left alive to accept blame, anyway.
And father and son could not abide one another's company. Could not tolerate each other, as each stood as a reminder to the other of all the ugly memories which surrounded them both. And so, when the day finally came that Rohan was able to walk the entirety of his cousins' field on his own two feet without pausing-without gasping for breath-that was the day Rohan announced his intention to leave. To leave and go to London. To go to his other uncle, Franklin, who had been disowned by the family years ago for being gay, and who now lived in London, successfully running an art gallery with his long-time, live-in lover. And that was also the day that Rohan announced to own his father that he too was gay. Which was the final straw on his father's overly sanctimonious, embittered back.
That was the day his father disowned him for good.
Which, in a strange, subconscious bid for self-punishment-an act motivated by both grief and despair-was exactly what Rohan wanted.
He wanted to forget about everything.
He wanted to forget his family.
He wanted to forget his father and his accusations.
And he wanted, most of all, to forget about himself, the self he had once been.
What he wanted, in the end, was to become someone else, a different person entirely…
End Chapter 10.