AN: 3.9
Thousand
"The clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting." – Haruki Murakami
In this place of cement, steal, barbwire and solitude, regret brings them together.
…
Linden faces the man she'd put behind bars two years ago, the man whose case sent her to a psychiatric institute and almost cost her custody of her son.
For some reason, she still believes he's innocent.
It is eleven hours before Seward's execution. She holds up the plastic bag. "Do you recognize any of these rings?"
…
A week before his execution and it finally hits Seward. He's going to die. They're going to hang him by the neck with a rope and whatever happens to him after that, he won't know.
He's heard the noises from his cell; the machinery working day and night for his own custom-made gallows. Until then, he'd felt like a superstar. He'd been power-tripping over pissing off the other guards, inmates and that annoying woman who'd pleaded him to consent to her adoption of his son. He'd become known as the first man in, what was it, 27 years? Who'd chosen to hang. He'd confidently rejected all this chances to reduce his sentence, just to get the satisfaction of freaking them out. He got off on seeing people beg.
But with the weighing and re-weighing, that asshole next to him who keeps talking about the Bible and an afterlife and Becker who just loves to talk about what'll happen to his body after it's over, Seward caves. And he doesn't just cave, he crashes. All the desperation that his pride had so thoroughly suppressed falls on him all at once and all he sees is the need to live.
So then, he becomes the one who begs. Pride gone, he screams and yells and cries out for something that will save him. Over and over again, he's told he's too late. He's too late. He's too late.
…
The only thing stopping the thoughts that eat him up inside is getting piss-drunk.
Even then, the thoughts are still relentlessly loud. A thousand possibilities plague Holder's mind. A thousand things he could have done differently to save Bullet's life. A thousand chances he could have had to catch the sick son of a bitch who murdered those girls.
And he'd missed all of them.
So what's there to do now? Nothing will fix it; nothing will bring back the dead. Who can he apologize to but the sky or the wind or wherever he believes her spirit is headed.
Damn his pride!
He should have picked up that damn phone!
But he didn't and this is what he has to live with.
Time for another beer.
…
Linden has lost track of time. She doesn't know how long she'd been there, but if she wants to do something for Seward, she's stuck there.
She sustains herself from the vending machine and manages to take a 10-minute nap, upright in one of the waiting room chairs.
A scratch on a ring, that's all she has to request him a stay.
But she will fight for this. She has to fight for this she had been the one to put him away and she needs to know for her that he hadn't done it.
She needs to know so she can fix her mistakes.
-End-