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Second to last part! :)
Title: Dangerous Game (12/13)
Author: Juno
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Still not mine.
Timeline: S1 Sundays in the Park with George
Bree felt her stomach plummet through the floor and opened her mouth to protest, but the words caught in her throat and all she was able to get out was a wordless, anguished cry. She ordered her muscles to work, to move, to let her stand and fight, but her silent commands were to no avail, and she remained on the ground as the two of them, Rex and George, stared at each other.
George, please, she wanted to beg and plead, but the words were stillborn on her lips. She wanted to protect her husband. She wanted to ask his forgiveness. She wanted to turn back time and never leave Fairview. Ideally, she wanted to wake up and realize that this was all some hideous nightmare, that she had dreamt the last few weeks, or better yet, she had dreamt the last year. There was no affair and no heart attack and no children who hated her or husband who probably hated her at this point. She wouldn’t blame him. She was almost certain that at this moment, she hated herself, too.
Rex’s eyes were steady, looking at the barrel of the gun with almost mild disinterest, and Bree wanted to scream at his indifference. Did he care so little about whether he lived or died?
He spoke. “You won’t shoot me,” Rex said, his voice cold but not afraid. It wasn’t a plea, it was a statement of fact. “You don’t have the nerve,” he added, and his voice was almost taunting now, goading George on, and Bree let out a soft cry in protest. His eyes flickered briefly down to her on the ground and she thought she saw, for a brief moment, a hint of uncertainty before he brought his eyes back to George. George and the gun.
“If you had the guts to shoot me, you wouldn’t have wasted all that time tampering with my pills,” Rex said, and Bree’s eyes widened at the word ‘tampering’. She had almost convinced herself that Rex was being melodramatic until she saw George visibly recoil at the words and she felt that first twinge of doubt.
“Shut up,” George said, his lips barely moving, the sound clenched and forced, and Bree wanted to plead with Rex to listen to him, to listen to whatever he said, because she didn’t know how she could go on if after all this she were to lose her husband now.
“Don’t you think she deserves to know?” Rex taunted, and Bree wanted to hit him for his stupid ego which would probably end up getting him killed. And Bree thought for a moment, allowed herself to imagine, what it would be like seeing a bullet bite through his clothes and flesh and muscle and bone and blood, to see the life drain from his face, and she was fairly certain that she would die, too, that she would fly apart in a million directions, that she would cry and vomit until she disappeared, that without Rex, there would be no Bree, that without him, there could be no future. And she thought perhaps it would be better to disappear in that one moment than to slowly die along with him as she had been doing all these months past, and she again longed for the time when things were simple.
“Rex,” she begged, but he paid her no attention, his eyes still fixed on George.
“I refilled my prescription and had to call my doctor because the pills I received weren’t the ones I’d been taking for the last few months. You’ve been switching my medicine with potassium tablets,” and the way he said it, Bree noticed, it wasn’t so much an accusation as almost simply passing on commonly known knowledge. She looked back and forth between Rex and George, each staring stonily at each other.
“George…” Bree said, a hint of pleading in her voice. Rex couldn’t be right. She couldn’t have been so completely and horribly wrong about George to the point where she had put her family in danger. George couldn’t have listened to her worry and weep over her husband’s health and console her in that comforting way that he had, and at the same time be poisoning him all along.
She looked up at George, waiting for his denial, hoping for it, because even if she was obligated at this moment to believe whatever Rex said, if he denied it there was a slight change that Rex was mistaken and that Bree hadn’t betrayed him beyond what she already knew.
“Go ahead,” Rex goaded him. “Tell her. Enlighten us. I’d love to hear how you can poison me and still judge yourself to be the better person.”
“Shut up!” George yelped in response, his eyes wild and feral, like a trapped animal. He wielded the gun like a wild creature would wield their claws, desperately and dangerously. “Shut up,” he repeated, his voice trembling.
At some point she stood up. She wasn’t aware of her feet touching the ground, only the rush of blood in her ears and the unsteady beating of her heart as she looked at the man holding the gun, the man who may have already tried to kill her husband, the man who could have shattered her life while patting her back and telling her it would all be all right. It wasn’t until she felt Rex roughly grabbing her arm and pulling her back towards him that she realized that not was she no longer lying on the ground, but she had taken several unconscious steps towards George.
“George,” she repeated, and when he didn’t reply, she shook her head, horrified. “How could you?” she asked weakly. It seemed to be the appropriate question to ask of a man she had once considered a friend, a good friend, and yet it couldn’t properly express her anger and heartache. Someone she had trusted and confided in. Someone who knew that although he had broken her heart and they had come to the very door of divorce, she loved her husband. Someone who knew she would not be able to survive if all that were to slip through her fingers.
“I did it for you, Bree,” he said, his voice raw with honesty, and Bree flinched. “Don’t you see I did it for you?”
It was a confession and yet it did nothing to ease Bree’s guilt-he had done it for her and again it was her fault, her fault that Rex was hurting, in pain, in trouble. And although she had told him at the time that she wanted revenge, she didn’t, not this way, because it hurt her, too, when he was hurting.
She heard the unmistakable click of the safety of a gun being removed, and she gripped Rex’s sleeve as George smiled at her sadly, his hands still trembling as he pointed the gun at them. “I did everything for you,” he said softly. “I love you.”
Denials should have rushed to her lips-if he loved her, he would never want to hurt her so badly, if he loved her, he would let her go, if he loved her, they wouldn’t be standing here, like this, only a few inches between them, inches that determined the difference of whether they lived or died. But words failed her once more, and she was only able to stare, wide-eyed and with legs that refused to move her one way or the other, as George steadied his hand.
She could just barely see his index finger start to squeeze the trigger before she felt Rex’s hands close around her waist, and her feet briefly left the ground before she felt him force her to the floor. She gasped in surprise as she landed hard but had no time to recover as Rex immediately landed next to her and his hand went to the back of her head, which she had started to instinctively raise, forcing it down on the carpet at the same moment she heard the sound of a gunshot.
She could vaguely hear a cry, a shout that sounded like her own, but it seemed so far away and distant that she was certain it must have come from someone else. Rex’s breath was heavy and unsteady next to her ear, and she felt a deep pang of a different kind of fear in her stomach as she instinctively reached for his free hand. But then he was gone, his hand giving her head a final press to the ground, like a warning, and he was getting back up to his feet and Bree heard that disembodied voice that couldn’t possibly belong to her call out again, call his name this time, because she had wanted Rex to fight for her but not like this.
She twisted her head back because she couldn’t bear to stay there, her face pressed to the carpet like some coward. And yet, a voice taunted her, it would be appropriate. Hadn’t that been exactly what she had been doing for the last few months? Pressing her face to the carpet like a coward. Don’t look at the danger, don’t look at the pain, hide your face and it’ll go away. Her husband had hurt her and he was sick, very sick, and George had been kind and healthy and it had been easier. She had been a coward but she was finished with that and so she had to look.
George’s breathing was heavy and Rex’s eyes seemed to have taken on a sort of sullen acceptance as George raised the gun again, his hands trembling worse this time. And Rex, who had been so stupidly cocky and who had stared George down without a fear or a care, Rex looked away and he looked at her. There was no accusation in his eyes, although she thought if there was, she certainly would have deserved it. She couldn’t read the expression there, although she had once been able to read him so easily and completely. It was anger, although she wasn’t sure whether it was anger at her, anger at George, or anger at himself, and it was love, regret and yet no regret, and suddenly she was moving.
Still on her hands and knees, vaguely aware of how unlady-like she must look at that moment, Bree crawled over to where she had left the metal rod that had once held up the curtains after she had used it to knock the door out of position. Her fingers curled around it and she scrambled to her feet.
“This is the best way,” George said, and his hands seemed to steady as he convinced himself. He repeated it, like a mantra thisisthebestwaythisisthebestwaythisisthebestway, under his breath and almost intelligable, and Bree watched as Rex smiled ruefully because he had been cocky and he had been wrong, and now he was going to die for it.
“No!” Bree instinctively swung as hard as she could, blood roaring in her eyes as sudden terror-born adrenaline pulsed through her body. Rex dunked at the last minute and Bree watched as the metal rod brushed the top of his hair before connecting soundly with George’s temple with a sickening crack.
Time balanced on that moment for what felt like a lifetime. She felt as though she was watching from outside of her body and everything seemed to move in slow-motion as Rex straightened up, and George’s eyes rolled to the back of his head before he hit the floor hard while Bree watched in abject horror.
The clock on the mantle ticked loudly, echoing in the sudden silence, as Bree stared first at her husband and then lowered her eyes slowly, reluctantly, fearfully to the figure on the ground. She drew a deep breath that sounded more like a gasp as she desperately sucked in air, her head and the room spinning.
“Is he…he’s not…I…I didn’t…” Bree whispered, a trembling hand fluttering up to her lips as she looked down at George’s prone form.
Rex cautiously knelt down next to him, pressing his fingers briefly against George’s neck. For a moment his face was passive, disconnected, professional-a doctor and not a husband. “No,” he said after a moment that felt too long to Bree. “You just knocked him out. He’ll be fine.”
He reached for the gun, tugging it out of George’s now slackened fingers. He opened the barrel and emptied a bullet into his hand.
Two bullets. There had been two bullets. The one that George had fired, and the one in Rex’s hand. George had had a gun with two bullets in it. He had had it with him all along. He had had a gun. What did he need a gun for? For when he tired of trying to get her to speak to him?
Bree sank weakly onto the couch, pulling her legs in tightly against it so that she was as far as she could get from George. Her eyes watched him carefully, searching for any sign of his regaining consciousness, and she tried to calm her breathing as Rex pocketed the bullet and the gun, the slight tremor of his fingers contradicting the detached expression on his face.
He glanced over at her.
“You know, George wasn’t expecting me.”
“…I know,” she replied weakly, looking at him blearily as he rose to his feet. They looked at each other for a long moment, looked at each other and not at George on the ground, and Bree was torn between wanting to hurl herself into his arms and wanting to run as far and as fast as she could in the opposite direction.
But she had already tried running and she had found it far less rewarding than she had expected and hoped.
She wanted his comfort, all along she had wanted his comfort and love and the strength of his embrace, and it was so close that it was almost tangible, she could almost reach out and grasp out.
Her fingers twitched against her wishes. Rex was still watching her with those eyes that were both so angry and so forgiving, so intense and yet gentle. And there was fear, because he had almost been killed and so had she, and she had knew that she would never forget that Rex had cheated on her and betrayed her and broken her heart, but neither, now, would she ever forget that staring down a loaded gun, he had pushed her down first before hitting the ground.
She only had to reach for him. She only had to move to him. And suddenly there was no George at all, there was only Rex and Bree, and all she needed to do was take that first step into his arms.
She felt herself begin to rise, and then suddenly Rex shoved his hands in his pockets and looked away and the moment was gone, and Bree, instead of reaching for him, smoothed her skirt, her eyes lowered again, and she clasped them nervously when she was proper and perfect again.
“Come on,” Rex said, picking up her suitcase as though nothing had changed, as if George had never come through the door. “We’re leaving.”
Thanks for reading. :) Only one more part to go! Hopefully that'll come soon. :) Please leave comments! They make me happy!
Title: Dangerous Game (12/13)
Author: Juno
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Still not mine.
Timeline: S1 Sundays in the Park with George
Bree felt her stomach plummet through the floor and opened her mouth to protest, but the words caught in her throat and all she was able to get out was a wordless, anguished cry. She ordered her muscles to work, to move, to let her stand and fight, but her silent commands were to no avail, and she remained on the ground as the two of them, Rex and George, stared at each other.
George, please, she wanted to beg and plead, but the words were stillborn on her lips. She wanted to protect her husband. She wanted to ask his forgiveness. She wanted to turn back time and never leave Fairview. Ideally, she wanted to wake up and realize that this was all some hideous nightmare, that she had dreamt the last few weeks, or better yet, she had dreamt the last year. There was no affair and no heart attack and no children who hated her or husband who probably hated her at this point. She wouldn’t blame him. She was almost certain that at this moment, she hated herself, too.
Rex’s eyes were steady, looking at the barrel of the gun with almost mild disinterest, and Bree wanted to scream at his indifference. Did he care so little about whether he lived or died?
He spoke. “You won’t shoot me,” Rex said, his voice cold but not afraid. It wasn’t a plea, it was a statement of fact. “You don’t have the nerve,” he added, and his voice was almost taunting now, goading George on, and Bree let out a soft cry in protest. His eyes flickered briefly down to her on the ground and she thought she saw, for a brief moment, a hint of uncertainty before he brought his eyes back to George. George and the gun.
“If you had the guts to shoot me, you wouldn’t have wasted all that time tampering with my pills,” Rex said, and Bree’s eyes widened at the word ‘tampering’. She had almost convinced herself that Rex was being melodramatic until she saw George visibly recoil at the words and she felt that first twinge of doubt.
“Shut up,” George said, his lips barely moving, the sound clenched and forced, and Bree wanted to plead with Rex to listen to him, to listen to whatever he said, because she didn’t know how she could go on if after all this she were to lose her husband now.
“Don’t you think she deserves to know?” Rex taunted, and Bree wanted to hit him for his stupid ego which would probably end up getting him killed. And Bree thought for a moment, allowed herself to imagine, what it would be like seeing a bullet bite through his clothes and flesh and muscle and bone and blood, to see the life drain from his face, and she was fairly certain that she would die, too, that she would fly apart in a million directions, that she would cry and vomit until she disappeared, that without Rex, there would be no Bree, that without him, there could be no future. And she thought perhaps it would be better to disappear in that one moment than to slowly die along with him as she had been doing all these months past, and she again longed for the time when things were simple.
“Rex,” she begged, but he paid her no attention, his eyes still fixed on George.
“I refilled my prescription and had to call my doctor because the pills I received weren’t the ones I’d been taking for the last few months. You’ve been switching my medicine with potassium tablets,” and the way he said it, Bree noticed, it wasn’t so much an accusation as almost simply passing on commonly known knowledge. She looked back and forth between Rex and George, each staring stonily at each other.
“George…” Bree said, a hint of pleading in her voice. Rex couldn’t be right. She couldn’t have been so completely and horribly wrong about George to the point where she had put her family in danger. George couldn’t have listened to her worry and weep over her husband’s health and console her in that comforting way that he had, and at the same time be poisoning him all along.
She looked up at George, waiting for his denial, hoping for it, because even if she was obligated at this moment to believe whatever Rex said, if he denied it there was a slight change that Rex was mistaken and that Bree hadn’t betrayed him beyond what she already knew.
“Go ahead,” Rex goaded him. “Tell her. Enlighten us. I’d love to hear how you can poison me and still judge yourself to be the better person.”
“Shut up!” George yelped in response, his eyes wild and feral, like a trapped animal. He wielded the gun like a wild creature would wield their claws, desperately and dangerously. “Shut up,” he repeated, his voice trembling.
At some point she stood up. She wasn’t aware of her feet touching the ground, only the rush of blood in her ears and the unsteady beating of her heart as she looked at the man holding the gun, the man who may have already tried to kill her husband, the man who could have shattered her life while patting her back and telling her it would all be all right. It wasn’t until she felt Rex roughly grabbing her arm and pulling her back towards him that she realized that not was she no longer lying on the ground, but she had taken several unconscious steps towards George.
“George,” she repeated, and when he didn’t reply, she shook her head, horrified. “How could you?” she asked weakly. It seemed to be the appropriate question to ask of a man she had once considered a friend, a good friend, and yet it couldn’t properly express her anger and heartache. Someone she had trusted and confided in. Someone who knew that although he had broken her heart and they had come to the very door of divorce, she loved her husband. Someone who knew she would not be able to survive if all that were to slip through her fingers.
“I did it for you, Bree,” he said, his voice raw with honesty, and Bree flinched. “Don’t you see I did it for you?”
It was a confession and yet it did nothing to ease Bree’s guilt-he had done it for her and again it was her fault, her fault that Rex was hurting, in pain, in trouble. And although she had told him at the time that she wanted revenge, she didn’t, not this way, because it hurt her, too, when he was hurting.
She heard the unmistakable click of the safety of a gun being removed, and she gripped Rex’s sleeve as George smiled at her sadly, his hands still trembling as he pointed the gun at them. “I did everything for you,” he said softly. “I love you.”
Denials should have rushed to her lips-if he loved her, he would never want to hurt her so badly, if he loved her, he would let her go, if he loved her, they wouldn’t be standing here, like this, only a few inches between them, inches that determined the difference of whether they lived or died. But words failed her once more, and she was only able to stare, wide-eyed and with legs that refused to move her one way or the other, as George steadied his hand.
She could just barely see his index finger start to squeeze the trigger before she felt Rex’s hands close around her waist, and her feet briefly left the ground before she felt him force her to the floor. She gasped in surprise as she landed hard but had no time to recover as Rex immediately landed next to her and his hand went to the back of her head, which she had started to instinctively raise, forcing it down on the carpet at the same moment she heard the sound of a gunshot.
She could vaguely hear a cry, a shout that sounded like her own, but it seemed so far away and distant that she was certain it must have come from someone else. Rex’s breath was heavy and unsteady next to her ear, and she felt a deep pang of a different kind of fear in her stomach as she instinctively reached for his free hand. But then he was gone, his hand giving her head a final press to the ground, like a warning, and he was getting back up to his feet and Bree heard that disembodied voice that couldn’t possibly belong to her call out again, call his name this time, because she had wanted Rex to fight for her but not like this.
She twisted her head back because she couldn’t bear to stay there, her face pressed to the carpet like some coward. And yet, a voice taunted her, it would be appropriate. Hadn’t that been exactly what she had been doing for the last few months? Pressing her face to the carpet like a coward. Don’t look at the danger, don’t look at the pain, hide your face and it’ll go away. Her husband had hurt her and he was sick, very sick, and George had been kind and healthy and it had been easier. She had been a coward but she was finished with that and so she had to look.
George’s breathing was heavy and Rex’s eyes seemed to have taken on a sort of sullen acceptance as George raised the gun again, his hands trembling worse this time. And Rex, who had been so stupidly cocky and who had stared George down without a fear or a care, Rex looked away and he looked at her. There was no accusation in his eyes, although she thought if there was, she certainly would have deserved it. She couldn’t read the expression there, although she had once been able to read him so easily and completely. It was anger, although she wasn’t sure whether it was anger at her, anger at George, or anger at himself, and it was love, regret and yet no regret, and suddenly she was moving.
Still on her hands and knees, vaguely aware of how unlady-like she must look at that moment, Bree crawled over to where she had left the metal rod that had once held up the curtains after she had used it to knock the door out of position. Her fingers curled around it and she scrambled to her feet.
“This is the best way,” George said, and his hands seemed to steady as he convinced himself. He repeated it, like a mantra thisisthebestwaythisisthebestwaythisisthebestway, under his breath and almost intelligable, and Bree watched as Rex smiled ruefully because he had been cocky and he had been wrong, and now he was going to die for it.
“No!” Bree instinctively swung as hard as she could, blood roaring in her eyes as sudden terror-born adrenaline pulsed through her body. Rex dunked at the last minute and Bree watched as the metal rod brushed the top of his hair before connecting soundly with George’s temple with a sickening crack.
Time balanced on that moment for what felt like a lifetime. She felt as though she was watching from outside of her body and everything seemed to move in slow-motion as Rex straightened up, and George’s eyes rolled to the back of his head before he hit the floor hard while Bree watched in abject horror.
The clock on the mantle ticked loudly, echoing in the sudden silence, as Bree stared first at her husband and then lowered her eyes slowly, reluctantly, fearfully to the figure on the ground. She drew a deep breath that sounded more like a gasp as she desperately sucked in air, her head and the room spinning.
“Is he…he’s not…I…I didn’t…” Bree whispered, a trembling hand fluttering up to her lips as she looked down at George’s prone form.
Rex cautiously knelt down next to him, pressing his fingers briefly against George’s neck. For a moment his face was passive, disconnected, professional-a doctor and not a husband. “No,” he said after a moment that felt too long to Bree. “You just knocked him out. He’ll be fine.”
He reached for the gun, tugging it out of George’s now slackened fingers. He opened the barrel and emptied a bullet into his hand.
Two bullets. There had been two bullets. The one that George had fired, and the one in Rex’s hand. George had had a gun with two bullets in it. He had had it with him all along. He had had a gun. What did he need a gun for? For when he tired of trying to get her to speak to him?
Bree sank weakly onto the couch, pulling her legs in tightly against it so that she was as far as she could get from George. Her eyes watched him carefully, searching for any sign of his regaining consciousness, and she tried to calm her breathing as Rex pocketed the bullet and the gun, the slight tremor of his fingers contradicting the detached expression on his face.
He glanced over at her.
“You know, George wasn’t expecting me.”
“…I know,” she replied weakly, looking at him blearily as he rose to his feet. They looked at each other for a long moment, looked at each other and not at George on the ground, and Bree was torn between wanting to hurl herself into his arms and wanting to run as far and as fast as she could in the opposite direction.
But she had already tried running and she had found it far less rewarding than she had expected and hoped.
She wanted his comfort, all along she had wanted his comfort and love and the strength of his embrace, and it was so close that it was almost tangible, she could almost reach out and grasp out.
Her fingers twitched against her wishes. Rex was still watching her with those eyes that were both so angry and so forgiving, so intense and yet gentle. And there was fear, because he had almost been killed and so had she, and she had knew that she would never forget that Rex had cheated on her and betrayed her and broken her heart, but neither, now, would she ever forget that staring down a loaded gun, he had pushed her down first before hitting the ground.
She only had to reach for him. She only had to move to him. And suddenly there was no George at all, there was only Rex and Bree, and all she needed to do was take that first step into his arms.
She felt herself begin to rise, and then suddenly Rex shoved his hands in his pockets and looked away and the moment was gone, and Bree, instead of reaching for him, smoothed her skirt, her eyes lowered again, and she clasped them nervously when she was proper and perfect again.
“Come on,” Rex said, picking up her suitcase as though nothing had changed, as if George had never come through the door. “We’re leaving.”
Thanks for reading. :) Only one more part to go! Hopefully that'll come soon. :) Please leave comments! They make me happy!