Heroes or Ghosts?
Title:Heroes or Ghosts?
Author: dropsonroses
Rating: R overall
Pairing: Ryan/Brendon
POV: 3rd, Ryan centric
Summary: What do you do when you're the only one left standing? What happens when the crimes of a hundred are all laid on your head?
Disclaimer: This is impossible. Not true in any way.
Beta: in progress, none yet!
Author Notes: this is the first of a series! Enjoy!
Ryan is standing in the midst of a broken city. The sky is stained crimson from the reflection of the blood of the many spilling out onto cracked streets, terrifying fires rage behind him.
This is the scene after a riot. This is the calm before the storm. Because he’s the only one left. Everyone else has places to go, places to hide, money to pay off the witnesses. But him? Nothing.
“Where did all the bastards go?” he mutters, shoving his stained hands into his hoodie, singed from Molotov cocktails aimed a little too close for comfort.
The loud echo of tin on concrete rings out in the deathly silence. Beer cans litter the ground, lying forlorn and forgotten amongst the debris.
“Ryan!” screams a horrified voice, unmistakeably female, screaming for her life. “Ryan!” Her screams are heart wrenching. Enough to pull on the strings of his heart.
“Ryan!” She’s ripped her way out of a burning apartment. She’s bending over from exertion and smoke inhalation, clutching her stomach, wheezing for breath. Not that the air in this poisoned city would do her much good, but whatever. She breathes in vain.
Don’t we all?
She straightens up, eyes fixating on the lonely figure standing in the middle of the evidence, revelling in the glory of it all.
“What the fuck happened?” she wails, stepping gingerly over a motionless corpse laid out across the road.
She stumbles over a discarded traffic cone, looks up at him beseechingly. Stupid girl, he thinks bitterly. Doesn’t she know me at all?
She heaves an over dramatic sigh and helps herself up, dragging the heels of her hands across the ground. She dusts them off, ignoring the blood and orange dust still caked to her hands.
“The fuck happened?” she repeats, widening her eyes in innocence. Innocence. Like she didn’t help plan any of this. Like she didn’t draw up the plans for Navarro.
Ryan just raises his eyebrows at her again in disbelief, although the move stopped having much effect when he started covering his face in hair.
“Look at this place!” She waves an arm around the destroyed street. Ryan can’t contain a grin. She takes a tentative step back, suddenly wary. “Wait… you’re glad?”
“Don’t you see? This is what we’ve been waiting for! This, this right here, is it! We’ve shown them that we won’t put up with their bullshit!”
She nods slowly. “So this all went to plan?”
He nods impatiently. Her lips curl in disdain. "Disdain for what?" Ryan wonders. She wheels around on the spot and starts to take ginger steps across the gutted street.
“Where you goin’?” he asks nonchalantly. Like he cares. She bites down on her plump lower lip, looking over the abandoned city.
“I can’t take this place anymore. Not now. I’m leaving it behind. Tonight.” Her voice shakes as she tells Ryan that he’s totally and completely alone now.
Ryan laughs, short and mirthlessly. “You can’t leave me,” he says, a twisted grin covering his lips.
She stabs a finger at the alight 7/11 not thirty feet from them, at the blazing apartment that held all of their lives. “This city’s burning. It’s not my burden to bear.”
The orange light from the burning buildings lights up her face. It shows the pre-mature wrinkles etched on her face from stress. Each wrinkle, each crease on her face like those on an unmade bed, seems to tell a story. Each one of those stories is Ryan-related.
A sudden wind kicks up. Her hair whips around her face, like a frantic halo.
“They’re coming, Ryan. Just face it and move on. Face that you’ve lost. You can’t just- do something like this and get the fuck away with it, okay?”
Ryan cocks an eyebrow at her. She sighs. She seems to visibly deflate right before his very eyes. “You just can’t.”
Ryan knows she always gets like this. Sure, rebellion is fine, and showing the government you don’t like their ideas is fine, but when the screech of the police sirens nears and people cry, she’s outta there.
She might not believe in God, Allah, or Yahweh or anything like that. She might not believe in the government. Hell, she doesn’t even believe in herself. But she believes in the power of the police and the scathing eyes of her family, and she’s too scared to upset the balance.
Coward, he thinks scathingly.
She’s just lifted a foot when Ryan shrieks, “Is this it?”
A sadistic smile settles on her lips. “Yeah. Yeah, I think it is.”
Ryan flings his arms over his head. “So you’re just going to leave me here, in this mess?” He’s pissed. She knows. She feels it. She should, after all the time they've spent together.
Which is why she’s backing away, putting more distance between the two of them.
“It’s not my battle. Why should I be the clean-up crew?” she says softly, holding a strand of golden hair tight to her head. How materialistic. Still worried about the state of her hair, when the world they built up together has been swallowed up and decimated.
“Because you love me?” he tries, not too hopefully.
A mirthless laugh spills from her lips, magnified in the silence of the fallen city all around them. “This was never about love,” she spits, and wheels around. Ducking down a shady side street where it’s ever so easy to get your preferred drug of choice, she shoots a last look over her shoulder and she’s gone.
Just gone. Like everyone else in his life. Just… gone.
“Shit!” he screams. Shit. Just shit.
He’s all alone. All alone, with not even a rat for company. His eyeliner is steadily melting from around his eyes, dripping down his cheeks like pitch black tears. His hair is coming undone from its rebellious pose on top of his head and his clothes are splattered with red and singed.
He tries not to think about the red stains.
It’s over. He’s over. He’s “it” and it’s “him”. He turns on the spot, debating whether it’d be easier, quicker to just seize a shard of glass and shove it through his chest. Or should he just wait and face his punishment?
He almost laughs at that one. Almost. There’s just something that feels wrong about laughing when the only people to hear it are, well. Dead.
He starts to walk. Where, he doesn’t know. It just feels more active to do something rather than just stand there. It’s not like anyone will recognise him, anyways. No-one knows that it’s him at the centre of all this.
There’s not a soul on the streets. Frightened eyes look out from behind dirty curtains covering fractured windows, gazing at the lonely figure stalking the streets.
“Mama, why is that man out there?” whispers a terrified young girl, clutching an obnoxious pink teddy bear and clinging to her mother’s leg. Her mother peeps out though a sizeable crack in their window. “I wish I knew, sweetie,” she murmurs back, a frown playing on her friendly face.
Some shout belligerently at him to “get the fuck back inside, bastard!” But he just ignores them, because who is going to do anything to him?
But he gets caught. Eventually. Pantomines and children’s tales, designed to build morals, would call this “getting his comeuppance.”
He feels them before he sees them. He feels the gazes of many on his back, the ticklish sensation of knowing that you’re being watched creeping across his back.
He turns around slowly, raising a hand to his face to shield himself from the blinding glare of the headlights…
And is tackled to the ground. Handcuffs are forced onto his wrists and he can’t help but grin, because the last time he had handcuffs on he had an awesome time with Stevie’s mom, and hey, this police officer looked like she had a great rack.
“Fuck my teenage hormones,” he mutters to himself as she hauls him up off the ground.
“What was that?” she barks at him, hissing in his ear, shaking his small frame before pushing him into the back seat.
The door slams shut. The front doors open again as the two officers climb into the front seats. A male voice crows, "Navarro won't be happy when he hears we've got one!"
The woman grins. Ryan sees it reflected in the rear-view mirror as she glares at him disdainfully.
Ryan pipes up, “You forgot to read me my rights.”
Author: dropsonroses
Rating: R overall
Pairing: Ryan/Brendon
POV: 3rd, Ryan centric
Summary: What do you do when you're the only one left standing? What happens when the crimes of a hundred are all laid on your head?
Disclaimer: This is impossible. Not true in any way.
Beta: in progress, none yet!
Author Notes: this is the first of a series! Enjoy!
Ryan is standing in the midst of a broken city. The sky is stained crimson from the reflection of the blood of the many spilling out onto cracked streets, terrifying fires rage behind him.
This is the scene after a riot. This is the calm before the storm. Because he’s the only one left. Everyone else has places to go, places to hide, money to pay off the witnesses. But him? Nothing.
“Where did all the bastards go?” he mutters, shoving his stained hands into his hoodie, singed from Molotov cocktails aimed a little too close for comfort.
The loud echo of tin on concrete rings out in the deathly silence. Beer cans litter the ground, lying forlorn and forgotten amongst the debris.
“Ryan!” screams a horrified voice, unmistakeably female, screaming for her life. “Ryan!” Her screams are heart wrenching. Enough to pull on the strings of his heart.
“Ryan!” She’s ripped her way out of a burning apartment. She’s bending over from exertion and smoke inhalation, clutching her stomach, wheezing for breath. Not that the air in this poisoned city would do her much good, but whatever. She breathes in vain.
Don’t we all?
She straightens up, eyes fixating on the lonely figure standing in the middle of the evidence, revelling in the glory of it all.
“What the fuck happened?” she wails, stepping gingerly over a motionless corpse laid out across the road.
She stumbles over a discarded traffic cone, looks up at him beseechingly. Stupid girl, he thinks bitterly. Doesn’t she know me at all?
She heaves an over dramatic sigh and helps herself up, dragging the heels of her hands across the ground. She dusts them off, ignoring the blood and orange dust still caked to her hands.
“The fuck happened?” she repeats, widening her eyes in innocence. Innocence. Like she didn’t help plan any of this. Like she didn’t draw up the plans for Navarro.
Ryan just raises his eyebrows at her again in disbelief, although the move stopped having much effect when he started covering his face in hair.
“Look at this place!” She waves an arm around the destroyed street. Ryan can’t contain a grin. She takes a tentative step back, suddenly wary. “Wait… you’re glad?”
“Don’t you see? This is what we’ve been waiting for! This, this right here, is it! We’ve shown them that we won’t put up with their bullshit!”
She nods slowly. “So this all went to plan?”
He nods impatiently. Her lips curl in disdain. "Disdain for what?" Ryan wonders. She wheels around on the spot and starts to take ginger steps across the gutted street.
“Where you goin’?” he asks nonchalantly. Like he cares. She bites down on her plump lower lip, looking over the abandoned city.
“I can’t take this place anymore. Not now. I’m leaving it behind. Tonight.” Her voice shakes as she tells Ryan that he’s totally and completely alone now.
Ryan laughs, short and mirthlessly. “You can’t leave me,” he says, a twisted grin covering his lips.
She stabs a finger at the alight 7/11 not thirty feet from them, at the blazing apartment that held all of their lives. “This city’s burning. It’s not my burden to bear.”
The orange light from the burning buildings lights up her face. It shows the pre-mature wrinkles etched on her face from stress. Each wrinkle, each crease on her face like those on an unmade bed, seems to tell a story. Each one of those stories is Ryan-related.
A sudden wind kicks up. Her hair whips around her face, like a frantic halo.
“They’re coming, Ryan. Just face it and move on. Face that you’ve lost. You can’t just- do something like this and get the fuck away with it, okay?”
Ryan cocks an eyebrow at her. She sighs. She seems to visibly deflate right before his very eyes. “You just can’t.”
Ryan knows she always gets like this. Sure, rebellion is fine, and showing the government you don’t like their ideas is fine, but when the screech of the police sirens nears and people cry, she’s outta there.
She might not believe in God, Allah, or Yahweh or anything like that. She might not believe in the government. Hell, she doesn’t even believe in herself. But she believes in the power of the police and the scathing eyes of her family, and she’s too scared to upset the balance.
Coward, he thinks scathingly.
She’s just lifted a foot when Ryan shrieks, “Is this it?”
A sadistic smile settles on her lips. “Yeah. Yeah, I think it is.”
Ryan flings his arms over his head. “So you’re just going to leave me here, in this mess?” He’s pissed. She knows. She feels it. She should, after all the time they've spent together.
Which is why she’s backing away, putting more distance between the two of them.
“It’s not my battle. Why should I be the clean-up crew?” she says softly, holding a strand of golden hair tight to her head. How materialistic. Still worried about the state of her hair, when the world they built up together has been swallowed up and decimated.
“Because you love me?” he tries, not too hopefully.
A mirthless laugh spills from her lips, magnified in the silence of the fallen city all around them. “This was never about love,” she spits, and wheels around. Ducking down a shady side street where it’s ever so easy to get your preferred drug of choice, she shoots a last look over her shoulder and she’s gone.
Just gone. Like everyone else in his life. Just… gone.
“Shit!” he screams. Shit. Just shit.
He’s all alone. All alone, with not even a rat for company. His eyeliner is steadily melting from around his eyes, dripping down his cheeks like pitch black tears. His hair is coming undone from its rebellious pose on top of his head and his clothes are splattered with red and singed.
He tries not to think about the red stains.
It’s over. He’s over. He’s “it” and it’s “him”. He turns on the spot, debating whether it’d be easier, quicker to just seize a shard of glass and shove it through his chest. Or should he just wait and face his punishment?
He almost laughs at that one. Almost. There’s just something that feels wrong about laughing when the only people to hear it are, well. Dead.
He starts to walk. Where, he doesn’t know. It just feels more active to do something rather than just stand there. It’s not like anyone will recognise him, anyways. No-one knows that it’s him at the centre of all this.
There’s not a soul on the streets. Frightened eyes look out from behind dirty curtains covering fractured windows, gazing at the lonely figure stalking the streets.
“Mama, why is that man out there?” whispers a terrified young girl, clutching an obnoxious pink teddy bear and clinging to her mother’s leg. Her mother peeps out though a sizeable crack in their window. “I wish I knew, sweetie,” she murmurs back, a frown playing on her friendly face.
Some shout belligerently at him to “get the fuck back inside, bastard!” But he just ignores them, because who is going to do anything to him?
But he gets caught. Eventually. Pantomines and children’s tales, designed to build morals, would call this “getting his comeuppance.”
He feels them before he sees them. He feels the gazes of many on his back, the ticklish sensation of knowing that you’re being watched creeping across his back.
He turns around slowly, raising a hand to his face to shield himself from the blinding glare of the headlights…
And is tackled to the ground. Handcuffs are forced onto his wrists and he can’t help but grin, because the last time he had handcuffs on he had an awesome time with Stevie’s mom, and hey, this police officer looked like she had a great rack.
“Fuck my teenage hormones,” he mutters to himself as she hauls him up off the ground.
“What was that?” she barks at him, hissing in his ear, shaking his small frame before pushing him into the back seat.
The door slams shut. The front doors open again as the two officers climb into the front seats. A male voice crows, "Navarro won't be happy when he hears we've got one!"
The woman grins. Ryan sees it reflected in the rear-view mirror as she glares at him disdainfully.
Ryan pipes up, “You forgot to read me my rights.”