Chapter 12: Regret
Evening light was steadily creeping over the sheets of the bed, like encroaching ocean waves over the sand at high tide. O'Malley scrunched his eyes against the intrusive light and shifted his head to the side to face the wall. He buried his face into his pillow, which was warm and smooth and satiny to the touch. He shifted his face again, groggily, and suddenly his pillow disappeared, slid suddenly from beneath him, leaving his face planted firmly in the harsh surface of the mattress.
"I'm going now," said a deep voice from above him.
O'Malley's eyes snapped open, and reality began to reassert itself. His pillow wasn't a pillow, but a living, breathing person. He heard the nearby whisper of heavy fabric, the clink of a metal belt buckle. He turned his head to squint at the man standing by the bed, the man who bent to snap up a fallen shirt from the floor. His bare torso was tiger-striped with all sorts of tribal tattoos and works of art and various dark, inked-on symbols. In the orange blaze of the evening sun, they looked spot-lit, like a moving tapestry of art come to life.
"You made me face plant into the mattress," O'Malley muttered sullenly.
"I'm sure you're used to it," said the man, in an unusually bitter tone of voice. This got O'Malley's attention and he said:
"Hey, who pissed in your cheerios?"
The man yanked his shirt over his head with rough, angry movements. He stopped to glare at O'Malley, who lay half-covered in the sheet, his eyes piercing him in a laser-like way that made O'Malley positively squirm. Then the man's shoulders visibly slumped, and he said, in a defeated voice:
"You. You're the one who 'pissed in my cheerios,' as you so eloquently put it."
"What? What did I do?"
"It's not what you do. It's what you don't do. You don't tell me things, Mal. In fact, you tell me absolutely nothing at all."
"What?"
"And you know absolutely everything about me. Everything. But I don't know jack shit about you. It's not fair-"
"Demo, what the fuck does it matter?"
The man grabbed up his jacket and started for the door. "I can't keep doing this with you. I can't. It's been almost a year. I can't keep coming up here to see you like this."
"Fine. So don't come anymore. Go home to your fucking boyfriend," said O'Malley coldly, harshly. It was the wrong thing to say, because suddenly the other man was striding back to the bed, was suddenly up in his face.
"Because...because I don't really want to do that. But goddam it, you leave me no choice. I ask you things about yourself, and you either lie, or you avoid answering entirely." The man reached out to gently touch the puckered, silvery patch of skin over his bare shoulder, the exit wound from the bullet he'd taken all those years ago. "Like the story behind this, for instance."
O'Malley slapped his hand away. "Don't fucking touch me."
The man glared. "I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd never laid eyes on you. If I'd known the kind of person I was going to get when I hired you as a photographer to do a book about my work, about my tattoos, then I would have gone running, screaming, in the other direction." The man paused then, and despite all the ink and the fierceness of his imposing appearance, he looked vulnerable, like a man who was almost ready to break down and cry. "God, if you would only give me something, tell me anything about yourself. Anything-"
"-I can't fucking do that," O'Malley whispered, almost regretfully. It was as close to speaking the truth as he would ever get.
Anger blazed like a roaring fire in the other man's eyes. Blazed, then suddenly went out, leaving only a sad, desperate longing in his face. O'Malley began to internally panic; he knew that look. He'd seen it before. It was the same look that Arthur had on his face all those years ago, when he was standing in the doorway of the dark room. The moment where he had been about to tell O'Malley that he loved him, that he was going to leave his lover for him-
No! screamed the voice of self-preservation in his head, Don't let him say it!
"Go home to your fucking boyfriend!" O'Malley suddenly yelled. "Go on, and I don't care if I ever see your lousy face again!"
The man staggered back as if he'd been punched. Hurt and anger mixed in a soupy, malicious gumbo over his features. "Fine. I'm going. And for the record, you can go fuck yourself..."
O'Malley watched the other man stomp his way out the front door, slamming it so hard that the photo frames shook on the walls. O'Malley dropped his head back into the sheets and pounded the mattress with his fist in frustration. Goddam Adrian Demosthenes. Fucking Demo. Fucking bastard. I hate him, and I hate his tattoos. I wish I'd never fucking laid eyes on him.
Yet even as O'Malley cursed the other man with every fiber of his being, even as he ranted and raved inside his own head, he was struck, out of nowhere, by a sudden overwhelming sense of loss, by an alien feeling of loneliness. And Truth, being the fucking ugly bitch that O'Malley said she was, made the reality of the situation known...
The reality was this: he hadn't really wanted to drive Demo away. Not really. Not like this. And for once, the secret burden of his past felt unbearable, felt impossible for him to carry. It felt too heavy, like a weight that was crushing him, like a stone grinding him into dust. He felt too drained, too weak to manage it; he felt the years of denial settling across his back like a perching, immovable beast, like a vulture of entropy.
And so, sitting alone in the middle of his bed, O'Malley began to cry-really cry-shedding silent, pent up tears of regret...
The brass bell over the door of the Symposium jingled merrily as O'Malley trudged through it looking rumpled and out of sorts, his shades firmly in place and his camera bag slung over his shoulder. He headed for one of the tables in the little cafe beyond the spiral book columns, the cafe that he hadn't visited in several weeks. Sitting at a table was Danny, wearing his ever present red beanie cap and a new pair of tortoise shell framed glasses. He looked up from a magazine as O'Malley approached the table and said, without inflection:
"Dude, you look like shit. Hungover again?"
"No. I just had a really shitty day."
"Why shitty?"
"You know, people."
"What? All people? Does that include me?"
"No. Just people I'm currently fucking. Are we currently fucking?"
"Not the last time I checked."
"Good."
"Oh, and just so you know, I wouldn't sleep with you in a million years."
"Excellent." Then: "Hey, Miriam-can I get my usual?"
About an hour later and O'Malley was walking out of the Symposium, a welcome feeling of normalcy settling back over his life like a warm, fuzzy blanket. He was starting to feel good again. Whole again. Well, almost. Except for the small fact that all his relationships were complete bullshit, and he was pretty sure that the feds-led by that curly-haired kid-were now on to him, everything in his life was a-okay, the universe in perfect, total alignment. Such was the low bar that he set for his existence...
O'Malley cut down an alleyway beside one of the many identical brick buildings that lined the same street as the Symposium. It was fully dark now, and a distant street lamp threw his shadow out on the ground before him, outlining him, stretching him, doubling his length by degrees. O'Malley slumped a little under the weight of his bag; at least he'd finally been able to give Danny a set of shots from one of Jaded Sadie's concerts that he actually liked, that were almost decent. Surely that small deed had to get him a little bit of good karma? Didn't it? O'Malley continued on down the alley, lost in the labyrinth of his own thoughts...
Suddenly he noticed that there were several other shadows crowding around his own. O'Malley stopped, staring down at the ground before him. He swallowed once before turning around to face the three figures that had followed him down the alleyway.
He unzipped his bag, revealing his camera. "Look, if this is some kind of mugging, then this is all I got that's worth anything of value-"
"-this isn't a mugging," said the voice of a man, an unknown figure who slid forward, away from the rest. He was back lit by the distant light, his face encased in shadow.
O'Malley looked wide-eyed. "It's not? You sure? Because either way, I'm gonna have to replace the lens on this thing. Luckily, I already have a replacement back at my apartment-"
"-this isn't a mugging. And what the hell are you talking about-" said the man, who didn't get to finish his sentence, because-
-O'Malley surged forward and smashed the heavy black and chrome camera across the bridge of the man's nose. As he buckled and fell, O'Malley caught him, dragging a .38 from the holster inside the man's own jacket. He fired the gun over the fallen man's shoulder, shooting one of his other assailants point blank in the face. He shot the third man in the leg, aiming purposefully for his femoral artery. O'Malley watched him as he shrieked and fell, the gun he'd drawn clattering uselessly to the ground. O'Malley stood back up, allowing the body of the first man-his impromptu shield-to slide gracelessly to the ground with a muted thud. O'Malley had hit the bridge of his nose hard enough to send bone fragments flying back into the soft tissue of his brain. He wouldn't be getting up again.
O'Malley looked down at his camera. As predicted, the lens was broken. "Knew that was going to happen," he muttered distractedly to himself. He shoved the instrument back into its bag and stepped over the two dead bodies to the third man who was writhing in agony on the ground.
O'Malley kicked the man's gun away, sent it spiraling off into the darkness. O'Malley clamped his foot over the man's windpipe, pointed the .38 at his forehead, and said, "Hey, you. Stop squalling long enough to tell me who sent you..."
The man sputtered pathetically. "Don't. Don't kill me," he gasped. Meanwhile, a growing pool of inky black blood, black as a seal's coat, was spreading across the ground beneath him.
"You're as good as gone, so you might as well tell me." O'Malley put more weight on the man's windpipe. His face was a stony mask. "Was it that British kid with the curly hair? Huh? Because I'm telling you, you have the distinct look of the feds about you. That blazer of yours screams 'government issued'..."
The man said nothing, merely groaned in agony, clawing uselessly at O'Malley's boot. O'Malley lifted his foot, and the man rolled onto his side, grasping at his injured leg. "Fucking useless and as green as an ear of unripened corn," O'Malley muttered with disgust. Without a flicker of conscience, without hesitation, O'Malley plugged two shots into the back of the man's head. He went still, and the alleyway was once again completely silent.
O'Malley dropped the .38 into his bag with his camera. He then drew from inside it an artist's brush, it's dark sable hair as sleek and as shiny as the wet pool of blood on the ground. O'Malley bent and dipped the brush into the inky blackness, and began writing, his arm moving in sweeps and arcs across the pavement. As he painted with his gory material, he whispered angrily to no one at all:
"So you wanna play with me, little boy? Huh? Well, then, we will fucking play. And I'm going to make sure you regret ever trying to fuck with me..."
End chapter 12.
Well, I'm off to work on the chapter of my other fic., which should be up on my birthday. Yey! Happy birthday to me-I got stuff done on both my fic.s this week! Huzzah!