narrative: mourning prayer (andrew wells)
character: Andrew Wells (guest starring Jonathan, Warren, Mukuro, Faith and a few mentions of other characters.)
rating: R? I tried not to get too detailed with the gore.
summary: January 19th, Andrew wakes up. 2000+ words. This is really more fic than narritive, I just wanted to detail what is going on with him for the next month or so, until I can start playing him again. Dialogue that isn't Andrew is pretty much written or approved by that character's player, but if you'd like to log someone else visiting him in that time, let me know.
Yitgadal v’yitkadash, sh’mei raba.
B’alma divra chirutei
Swimming up from a hungry, howling darkness, Andrew cracks open his eyes and--
No.
Andrew opens his eye, singular.
The pain is more the awareness that there should be pain, numb spots where his body just isn’t there anymore, the limited vision like looking at everything through a window. The drugs make the window real, build a house of fog inside his head where he can curl up and hide.
He keeps his mind away from the world, the morphine sending euphoria through his veins. He doesn’t speak to anyone unless he has to, and even then it’s just yes and no and nameless sounds of pain.
Swooping like a bat, the heavy feeling of something being in him, through him, metal where metal shouldn’t be. The sticky warm-wet unclean feel of his own blood on his legs and back and arms and cheeks (he has to shower carefully when all he wants to do is scrub and scrub.) Pain like fire in his brain and then the cooler wasabi burn of guilt.
“Please talk to us,” he hears Jonathan murmur when he thinks Andrew is asleep, but Andrew doesn’t think he has the words. No-one’s making him talk yet, using words like shock and post-traumatic stress. His nurse says they’re going to book him in to see a psychiatrist, but he shakes his head; no. This has to be kept inside of him, in the dark places where it belongs.
Jonathan can’t hold his hand, so he strokes gentle fingers through Andrew’s hair, comforting in a way he imagines his real mother would have been, once. But when the urgency strikes him, Andrew twists slightly so his breath is hot and fluttering against Jonathan’s wrist. “Don’t let her fight him,” he whispers, right eye stinging with more than just tears. “He wants her to fight him, don’t let them.” And then he sighs, relaxing back into the bed and drifting back into the vivid underworld of his mind.
V’yamlich malchutei
b’chayeichon uvyomeichon uvchayei d’chal beit yisrael
ba’agala uvizman kariv, v’imru amen.
“Warren…”
It’s the first word he’s spoken in days - maybe because it’s the first time he’s woken up without nurses or well-wishers around his bed. His eye darts to the familiar space where Jonathan is, sees nothing, and a beat of panic flashes through him. Don’t say his name.
“They made him go for a walk,” Warren says, and the way he looks scares Andrew a little. Tired - like the only thing keeping him going is caffeine and anger. Maybe it is.
“Am I,” he tries, and then sucks in air as though he can’t get enough - the thought dangles, incomplete. It’s a few minutes later before he can speak again. “Am I going to be okay?”
Warren’s expression is unreadable - he hesitates, for a flicker, and then his smooth assurance washes over Andrew (as it always does.) “Hey. If you strike me down…”
“…I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine,” Andrew manages to get out. He laughs weakly, each tiny hiccup burning through this stomach and dry throat. It’s funny because Warren doesn’t get it, Warren wasn’t really there the last time he said that to Andrew. “Of course.”
Y’hei shmei raba m’varach
l’alam ul’almei almaya.
B’rich Hu.
"I have never intended to rule," Mukuro says with a smirk before sliding the knife into Andrew's hand. "There will always be someone better intended for positions of power. I have always thought it best to be close to people with power. I serve Sawada Tsunayoshi now."
The first time he’d woken up he had forgotten.
It hadn’t taken him long for him to remember; his reminder was in the way Jonathan sat up straighter and took his hand, in the nurses coming to bustle about him.
Sometimes he wakes up from a normal dream and he’s back in that apartment, Mukuro speaking of kings and empires - “I was alive when Jesus was alive, in a manner of speaking; I have lived many lives since then.”
Rhode Camelot is sometimes there too; she flicks the tips of the knives in his hands and giggles, feeds him lollipops which taste like his own blood.
When Andrew screams and someone shakes him back to true wakefulness, the stigmata on his hands crawls like insects.
Eventually Rhode stops coming; he’s dreaming the same dream over and over again. Sometimes it’s Mukuro, sometimes it’s Warren; the knife is always too close and he can’t flinch his eye away. "You may remember that Chrome Dukuro has an eyepatch." Andrew’s screaming and begging bubbling through the blood in his throat can’t drown out Mukuro’s voice, not even so close to the end. Andrew has already promised Mukuro thousands of things that night, ridiculous things. "This will ensure that you never forget her name again, Andrew Wells. Never forget the name of Chrome Dukuro."
He never will. He wakes up with flavourless chromium on the tip of his tongue and he thinks; if I speak, it will be her name. Instead he whispers words that don’t mean anything to him, the movement hurting his jaw and calming his heart.
“Shalom,” Andrew whispers. “Oseh shalom bimromav.” Jonathan and Warren both look over, but he’s staring at the ceiling. Warren rolls his eyes: not you, too. “What does it mean?”
“It’s um, Hebrew. The Mourning Kaddish,” Jonathan says before he can stop himself, but Andrew doesn’t even glance over, just keeps mouthing through it, mourning everyone else who Mukuro has killed, everyone in Babylon who will fall to his powers and his trident and his terrifying mismatched gaze.
y’hei shlama raba min shamaya
v’chayim aleinu v’al kal yisrael
Andrew had always kept his teeth in perfect condition, mostly because he was terrified of the dentist. He can’t stop tracing the empty spaces in his gums, his tongue tugging the strange-feeling stitches at the back of his mouth. With Mukuro plucking them one by one, it hadn’t taken him long to talk. Now they’re in a little jar by his bedside - people probably think it’s sick, but Andrew likes having them there. It comforts him.
Maybe he can have gold teeth. Like a pirate. Gold teeth and an eyepatch. He wants implants - it’s a vanity, despite the price. He likes to worry about money; it stops him worrying about important things. He lets himself imagine sending the hospital bills to Mukuro in his prison cell, or to Chrome… wherever she may be.
But the empty socket of his eye, the gentle sag of his eyelid under the soft press of cotton, it terrifies Andrew. The doctor talks about donors and transplants and the chance that he might never see again, but all Andrew wants is to close the gaping hole in his face.
“They can rebuild you,” Jonathan whispers to him before the surgery, and Andrew pretends he doesn’t hear the catch in his voice or see the tears in his eyes because he’s trying so hard to hide them. “They have the technology.”
Under anaesthetic, Andrew dreams that he wakes up during the operation and it’s Mukuro working on him, the surgeon’s mask hiding his smile. “You killed your best friend,” he says. The knife flashes like a scalpel, then plunges down and removes the other eye.
v’imru amen.
“Yo, camera-man.”
Two of Andrew’s bound and bandaged fingers twitch at the word camera; two others lay still and immovable. Nerve damage in his right hand. “Don’t call me that,” he says.
“Whatever.” Faith slides onto the bedside seat like it’s a motorbike, tilts her head to survey the hills and valleys of the starched white sheets. “I’m not staying long, I fucking hate hospitals. But I just wanted to say congrats.”
This catches Andrew’s attention. “Huh?” Congratulations. His lips twist and he slowly turns his gaze away from her (fast glances still hurt.) Every inch of his face is self-hatred. “What for.”
“You lived, right?” He can hear the creak of her leather pants as she leans forward. “Yeah, you’re a little beat up, but it could have been worse. So congratufuckinglations.”
“I want to die,” he says. He’s never been able to vocalise it before. There’s not even bitterness in his voice, not a hint of whine, just flat resignation.
“You’ll get past that,” Faith says, and she sounds serious and weary. “It’s a hard fucking struggle, but you will. And hey, if you can survive the Hellmouth going ‘splodey, you can survive anything, right?”
It doesn’t cheer him up, but it calms him a little; something in the distance to look out for. “Right,” he says sharply, and murmurs in pain when the back of his jaw protests.
Faith knocks him on the arm, gentle for a Slayer, and grins down into the vision of his good eye. “Five by five,” she whispers, and leaves.
Oseh Shalom bimromav
Hu Ya-aseh shalom Aleinu
Andrew’s sick of this hospital bed.
That’s probably a good sign.
He’s reached the point where his morphine tolerance is becoming dangerous - he hurts all the time because they won’t give him enough. He talks more now, and they have him doing careful hand exercises. Soon, they say, the eyepatch can come off and he’ll have fifty percent vision in his new eye. Maybe eventually, they say, he’ll be able to go home.
As though he has a home in Babylon. As though he won’t be watching, out of the corner of his eye - prison or not, Mukuro is dangerous, he knows that now. He’d tried to tell the police; “He’s not just a fifteen year old,” in an echo of Mukuro’s words, but they acted like they already knew, or like he was just being paranoid.
Maybe he is. Andrew thinks back on other brushes with strangers and shudders. He’s been so stupid, so damn naïve.
As boring as being in hospital is, watching the news or the weather; reading the comics Jonathan brings him; talking quietly with Aya; Andrew’s not sure he’s ready for the real world. Not ready to play out conversations he’s had a thousand times in his head. He still hasn’t opened his laptop.
Jonathan keeps him informed: “Cordelia’s here,” he said, one of the first times Andrew was lucid, and later: “You have the coolest next-door-neighbour ever.”
Having Jonathan around is good; he’s been like a rock-solid presence throughout the entire thing, or Andrew thinks he has (his brain is opium-fuzzy still and dreams mix with reality and make everything he remembers fragmented.) Jonathan knows not to make startling movements, and that Andrew wants to be distracted but not so much that he starts laughing so the holes in his stomach open up again and they have to call a nurse. Twice Jonathan just crawls into the bed and the barely touch but they both feel like it’s the best sleep they’ve had in forever (fuck the doctors, fuck the visitors, fuck the other patients and fuck Warren.)
Warren’s less gentle, and that can be good, too. But nobody knows when he’s going to be there, maybe not even Warren himself. “I’m busy,” he snaps, and Andrew doesn’t have the courage to ask with what.
“Still got the power, kid,” Rube points out. Andrew doesn’t even know why he’s here, but he’d brought waffles and a big spiel about life and death which Andrew had mostly tuned out. “Half the population of Babylon fighting over you, that’s pretty fucking impressive, if you ask me.”
“I guess,” says Andrew. He thinks of Jennifer Connelly and giggles.
V’al kol Yisrael
“I don’t hate him.”
“What?” Jonathan hits a key on his laptop and freezes a tiny Anakin Skywalker racing his first pod. Then he turns to watch Andrew’s face, which is shadowed in the dim night lights of the hospital, expression unreadable.
“Do you hate me?” he asks. “For…” he makes a stabbing motion.
Jonathan’s face is a mask of horror. “No, Andrew, of course not, of course I-but it’s not the same thing at all, he doesn’t even know you, it um, it wasn’t about the same things, no matter what he told you…”
“It’s okay, I didn’t think you’d get it,” Andrew murmurs, hits play on the keyboard and reaches (carefully, carefully) for his plastic cup of water. Jonathan goes to help but Andrew brushes him away.
Andrew still has a lot of hate left in him, though. He tries to tell himself hate leads to anger (etc, etc) and that he’s done with the Dark Side of the Force, but when he looks in the mirror and one eye is green and ringed with bruises he can’t stop his fists from clenching, some fingers pushing against the bandages on his palm and some remaining impotently useless.
(But we’re getting too far ahead of ourselves.)
Rewind: back, right back to January 19th. Swimming up, out, breaking the surface of consciousness and into the morphine-coloured room, his mind barely processing anything but the fact that he’s here. He goes to scream, forgets about it as the nurse takes his wrist and pain jolts through him; just sort of gasps helplessly, the air too cold in his lungs, barely filling them, he can’t. breathe.
“Hi,” Jonathan says dumbly, hope and guilt and desperation all shining so obvious in his eyes. When Andrew tries to flinch away into the covers Jonathan touches his shoulder lightly, his voice soft and soothing; “Hey. Hey, Andrew, it’s just me.”
The covers shift; Andrew turns back. Hospital. He’s safe, he’s safe, he’s safe. He can see Warren, but that’s probably just a mirage, and Jonathan trying to smile through his tears and still mouthing his Hebrew. It’s too much, and he can only smile a little (just that one relieved smile, the first time) and sink back into the pillow and sleep, his eye fluttering closed.
v’imru amen.
rating: R? I tried not to get too detailed with the gore.
summary: January 19th, Andrew wakes up. 2000+ words. This is really more fic than narritive, I just wanted to detail what is going on with him for the next month or so, until I can start playing him again. Dialogue that isn't Andrew is pretty much written or approved by that character's player, but if you'd like to log someone else visiting him in that time, let me know.
Yitgadal v’yitkadash, sh’mei raba.
B’alma divra chirutei
Swimming up from a hungry, howling darkness, Andrew cracks open his eyes and--
No.
Andrew opens his eye, singular.
The pain is more the awareness that there should be pain, numb spots where his body just isn’t there anymore, the limited vision like looking at everything through a window. The drugs make the window real, build a house of fog inside his head where he can curl up and hide.
He keeps his mind away from the world, the morphine sending euphoria through his veins. He doesn’t speak to anyone unless he has to, and even then it’s just yes and no and nameless sounds of pain.
Swooping like a bat, the heavy feeling of something being in him, through him, metal where metal shouldn’t be. The sticky warm-wet unclean feel of his own blood on his legs and back and arms and cheeks (he has to shower carefully when all he wants to do is scrub and scrub.) Pain like fire in his brain and then the cooler wasabi burn of guilt.
“Please talk to us,” he hears Jonathan murmur when he thinks Andrew is asleep, but Andrew doesn’t think he has the words. No-one’s making him talk yet, using words like shock and post-traumatic stress. His nurse says they’re going to book him in to see a psychiatrist, but he shakes his head; no. This has to be kept inside of him, in the dark places where it belongs.
Jonathan can’t hold his hand, so he strokes gentle fingers through Andrew’s hair, comforting in a way he imagines his real mother would have been, once. But when the urgency strikes him, Andrew twists slightly so his breath is hot and fluttering against Jonathan’s wrist. “Don’t let her fight him,” he whispers, right eye stinging with more than just tears. “He wants her to fight him, don’t let them.” And then he sighs, relaxing back into the bed and drifting back into the vivid underworld of his mind.
V’yamlich malchutei
b’chayeichon uvyomeichon uvchayei d’chal beit yisrael
ba’agala uvizman kariv, v’imru amen.
“Warren…”
It’s the first word he’s spoken in days - maybe because it’s the first time he’s woken up without nurses or well-wishers around his bed. His eye darts to the familiar space where Jonathan is, sees nothing, and a beat of panic flashes through him. Don’t say his name.
“They made him go for a walk,” Warren says, and the way he looks scares Andrew a little. Tired - like the only thing keeping him going is caffeine and anger. Maybe it is.
“Am I,” he tries, and then sucks in air as though he can’t get enough - the thought dangles, incomplete. It’s a few minutes later before he can speak again. “Am I going to be okay?”
Warren’s expression is unreadable - he hesitates, for a flicker, and then his smooth assurance washes over Andrew (as it always does.) “Hey. If you strike me down…”
“…I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine,” Andrew manages to get out. He laughs weakly, each tiny hiccup burning through this stomach and dry throat. It’s funny because Warren doesn’t get it, Warren wasn’t really there the last time he said that to Andrew. “Of course.”
Y’hei shmei raba m’varach
l’alam ul’almei almaya.
B’rich Hu.
"I have never intended to rule," Mukuro says with a smirk before sliding the knife into Andrew's hand. "There will always be someone better intended for positions of power. I have always thought it best to be close to people with power. I serve Sawada Tsunayoshi now."
The first time he’d woken up he had forgotten.
It hadn’t taken him long for him to remember; his reminder was in the way Jonathan sat up straighter and took his hand, in the nurses coming to bustle about him.
Sometimes he wakes up from a normal dream and he’s back in that apartment, Mukuro speaking of kings and empires - “I was alive when Jesus was alive, in a manner of speaking; I have lived many lives since then.”
Rhode Camelot is sometimes there too; she flicks the tips of the knives in his hands and giggles, feeds him lollipops which taste like his own blood.
When Andrew screams and someone shakes him back to true wakefulness, the stigmata on his hands crawls like insects.
Eventually Rhode stops coming; he’s dreaming the same dream over and over again. Sometimes it’s Mukuro, sometimes it’s Warren; the knife is always too close and he can’t flinch his eye away. "You may remember that Chrome Dukuro has an eyepatch." Andrew’s screaming and begging bubbling through the blood in his throat can’t drown out Mukuro’s voice, not even so close to the end. Andrew has already promised Mukuro thousands of things that night, ridiculous things. "This will ensure that you never forget her name again, Andrew Wells. Never forget the name of Chrome Dukuro."
He never will. He wakes up with flavourless chromium on the tip of his tongue and he thinks; if I speak, it will be her name. Instead he whispers words that don’t mean anything to him, the movement hurting his jaw and calming his heart.
“Shalom,” Andrew whispers. “Oseh shalom bimromav.” Jonathan and Warren both look over, but he’s staring at the ceiling. Warren rolls his eyes: not you, too. “What does it mean?”
“It’s um, Hebrew. The Mourning Kaddish,” Jonathan says before he can stop himself, but Andrew doesn’t even glance over, just keeps mouthing through it, mourning everyone else who Mukuro has killed, everyone in Babylon who will fall to his powers and his trident and his terrifying mismatched gaze.
y’hei shlama raba min shamaya
v’chayim aleinu v’al kal yisrael
Andrew had always kept his teeth in perfect condition, mostly because he was terrified of the dentist. He can’t stop tracing the empty spaces in his gums, his tongue tugging the strange-feeling stitches at the back of his mouth. With Mukuro plucking them one by one, it hadn’t taken him long to talk. Now they’re in a little jar by his bedside - people probably think it’s sick, but Andrew likes having them there. It comforts him.
Maybe he can have gold teeth. Like a pirate. Gold teeth and an eyepatch. He wants implants - it’s a vanity, despite the price. He likes to worry about money; it stops him worrying about important things. He lets himself imagine sending the hospital bills to Mukuro in his prison cell, or to Chrome… wherever she may be.
But the empty socket of his eye, the gentle sag of his eyelid under the soft press of cotton, it terrifies Andrew. The doctor talks about donors and transplants and the chance that he might never see again, but all Andrew wants is to close the gaping hole in his face.
“They can rebuild you,” Jonathan whispers to him before the surgery, and Andrew pretends he doesn’t hear the catch in his voice or see the tears in his eyes because he’s trying so hard to hide them. “They have the technology.”
Under anaesthetic, Andrew dreams that he wakes up during the operation and it’s Mukuro working on him, the surgeon’s mask hiding his smile. “You killed your best friend,” he says. The knife flashes like a scalpel, then plunges down and removes the other eye.
v’imru amen.
“Yo, camera-man.”
Two of Andrew’s bound and bandaged fingers twitch at the word camera; two others lay still and immovable. Nerve damage in his right hand. “Don’t call me that,” he says.
“Whatever.” Faith slides onto the bedside seat like it’s a motorbike, tilts her head to survey the hills and valleys of the starched white sheets. “I’m not staying long, I fucking hate hospitals. But I just wanted to say congrats.”
This catches Andrew’s attention. “Huh?” Congratulations. His lips twist and he slowly turns his gaze away from her (fast glances still hurt.) Every inch of his face is self-hatred. “What for.”
“You lived, right?” He can hear the creak of her leather pants as she leans forward. “Yeah, you’re a little beat up, but it could have been worse. So congratufuckinglations.”
“I want to die,” he says. He’s never been able to vocalise it before. There’s not even bitterness in his voice, not a hint of whine, just flat resignation.
“You’ll get past that,” Faith says, and she sounds serious and weary. “It’s a hard fucking struggle, but you will. And hey, if you can survive the Hellmouth going ‘splodey, you can survive anything, right?”
It doesn’t cheer him up, but it calms him a little; something in the distance to look out for. “Right,” he says sharply, and murmurs in pain when the back of his jaw protests.
Faith knocks him on the arm, gentle for a Slayer, and grins down into the vision of his good eye. “Five by five,” she whispers, and leaves.
Oseh Shalom bimromav
Hu Ya-aseh shalom Aleinu
Andrew’s sick of this hospital bed.
That’s probably a good sign.
He’s reached the point where his morphine tolerance is becoming dangerous - he hurts all the time because they won’t give him enough. He talks more now, and they have him doing careful hand exercises. Soon, they say, the eyepatch can come off and he’ll have fifty percent vision in his new eye. Maybe eventually, they say, he’ll be able to go home.
As though he has a home in Babylon. As though he won’t be watching, out of the corner of his eye - prison or not, Mukuro is dangerous, he knows that now. He’d tried to tell the police; “He’s not just a fifteen year old,” in an echo of Mukuro’s words, but they acted like they already knew, or like he was just being paranoid.
Maybe he is. Andrew thinks back on other brushes with strangers and shudders. He’s been so stupid, so damn naïve.
As boring as being in hospital is, watching the news or the weather; reading the comics Jonathan brings him; talking quietly with Aya; Andrew’s not sure he’s ready for the real world. Not ready to play out conversations he’s had a thousand times in his head. He still hasn’t opened his laptop.
Jonathan keeps him informed: “Cordelia’s here,” he said, one of the first times Andrew was lucid, and later: “You have the coolest next-door-neighbour ever.”
Having Jonathan around is good; he’s been like a rock-solid presence throughout the entire thing, or Andrew thinks he has (his brain is opium-fuzzy still and dreams mix with reality and make everything he remembers fragmented.) Jonathan knows not to make startling movements, and that Andrew wants to be distracted but not so much that he starts laughing so the holes in his stomach open up again and they have to call a nurse. Twice Jonathan just crawls into the bed and the barely touch but they both feel like it’s the best sleep they’ve had in forever (fuck the doctors, fuck the visitors, fuck the other patients and fuck Warren.)
Warren’s less gentle, and that can be good, too. But nobody knows when he’s going to be there, maybe not even Warren himself. “I’m busy,” he snaps, and Andrew doesn’t have the courage to ask with what.
“Still got the power, kid,” Rube points out. Andrew doesn’t even know why he’s here, but he’d brought waffles and a big spiel about life and death which Andrew had mostly tuned out. “Half the population of Babylon fighting over you, that’s pretty fucking impressive, if you ask me.”
“I guess,” says Andrew. He thinks of Jennifer Connelly and giggles.
V’al kol Yisrael
“I don’t hate him.”
“What?” Jonathan hits a key on his laptop and freezes a tiny Anakin Skywalker racing his first pod. Then he turns to watch Andrew’s face, which is shadowed in the dim night lights of the hospital, expression unreadable.
“Do you hate me?” he asks. “For…” he makes a stabbing motion.
Jonathan’s face is a mask of horror. “No, Andrew, of course not, of course I-but it’s not the same thing at all, he doesn’t even know you, it um, it wasn’t about the same things, no matter what he told you…”
“It’s okay, I didn’t think you’d get it,” Andrew murmurs, hits play on the keyboard and reaches (carefully, carefully) for his plastic cup of water. Jonathan goes to help but Andrew brushes him away.
Andrew still has a lot of hate left in him, though. He tries to tell himself hate leads to anger (etc, etc) and that he’s done with the Dark Side of the Force, but when he looks in the mirror and one eye is green and ringed with bruises he can’t stop his fists from clenching, some fingers pushing against the bandages on his palm and some remaining impotently useless.
(But we’re getting too far ahead of ourselves.)
Rewind: back, right back to January 19th. Swimming up, out, breaking the surface of consciousness and into the morphine-coloured room, his mind barely processing anything but the fact that he’s here. He goes to scream, forgets about it as the nurse takes his wrist and pain jolts through him; just sort of gasps helplessly, the air too cold in his lungs, barely filling them, he can’t. breathe.
“Hi,” Jonathan says dumbly, hope and guilt and desperation all shining so obvious in his eyes. When Andrew tries to flinch away into the covers Jonathan touches his shoulder lightly, his voice soft and soothing; “Hey. Hey, Andrew, it’s just me.”
The covers shift; Andrew turns back. Hospital. He’s safe, he’s safe, he’s safe. He can see Warren, but that’s probably just a mirage, and Jonathan trying to smile through his tears and still mouthing his Hebrew. It’s too much, and he can only smile a little (just that one relieved smile, the first time) and sink back into the pillow and sleep, his eye fluttering closed.
v’imru amen.