Fic: Wait For The Ricochet 1/7
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This fire burns inside, turning things inside, there’s nowhere left to hide.
This fire burns inside, this fire burns inside, this rage can’t be denied.
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Images fluttered down, spinning through the shadows, offering up two men over and over; running, eating, fighting, playing; then snatching them away in a flash of white, brilliant in the gloom. They lay scattered on the ground, the same two men, sometimes alone, more often together and he stood there, just one more shadow, one more ghost among the years of memories, blood pooling in his hands and falling with his tears to paint the pictures in crimson streaks, diluted with salt and guilt and grief.
His sobs were silent, as they’d always been, his broad shoulders shaking with the force of the cries he would never give voice to, bruises flaring dark through the torn shirt that hung loosely from his shuddering frame. He stared down at his hands, at the blood coating them and choked on the name that stuttered to his lips, falling to his knees with a heavy thud that echoed dully in the worn room, the thin carpet barely muffling the noise and doing nothing to cushion the force of the blow. But he never even flinched, just stared and stared, broken and terrified; eyes locked on his own, trembling fingers, as if he knew that to even glimpse the deeper shadow in the corner of the room, the black stain slowly creeping thick across the floor towards him, knew that seeing it, seeing into it, would destroy him completely.
The photos still rained around him, spinning in a wind that didn’t exist, somehow stirred up into the air again and again; clinging to his back as he hunched forward, struggling to breathe through the tears that were drowning him. Slowly, they stilled, the last few drifting through the dark in an aching blizzard of times long past, memories lost but never forgotten, and the last one fell to land across his hands, freezing his body so completely that no breath fluttered the thin edges, and something already cracked in his eyes broke a little more as he gazed into it, lost and alone as he saw the two men striding through a narrow door, side by side, the neon signs bright against the night washing over their grins.
In the quiet, the dull, clotted splash of blood dripping from his hands into the pool that had finally spread from the corner to his knees was loud; and he flinched violently, dragging in a cold, shuddering breath as his fingers suddenly clenched into fists, the thick paper crumpling and tearing under his white knuckles, and he finally he cried aloud, voice ripped and shattered, and lost in the dark, unheard by the one his words were meant for, the only family he had left.
“I’m sorry. Oh god, I’m sorry.”
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