My Bloody Valentine fic: Till Eternity Passes Away
Title: Till Eternity Passes Away
Fandom(s): My Bloody Valentine
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,300
Summary: “Damn it, Sarah, I need you to understand! I need somebody to understand. You’re the only one I can trust.”
Author’s Notes: This was written for the lovely bhoney who generously donated to the Support Stacie Author Auction.
Till Eternity Passes Away
Damn it, Sarah, I need you to understand! I need somebody to understand.
You’re the only one I can trust.
It’s pouring, and she’s cut and bruised, and Tom’s shot and bleeding and bruised, and dozens of people are dead, and the mine is collapsed, and her son’s fatherless, but right now, Sarah can’t be bothered to give much of a damn.
Doctors and psychologists would call it posttraumatic stress disorder, she’s sure of that-and why wouldn’t it be? She’s pretty sure what she went through counts as “trauma”-but, thing is, she doesn’t feel particularly abnormal. Oh, sure, her mind can’t focus on one thought for any longer than a second or two, and she’s reasonably positive that her hands haven’t always been shaking and that there aren’t four ambulances, but she’s seen all the war movies Noah’s so fond of. She’s seen the broken soldiers’ reactions and mentalities, and she doesn’t feel like they had.
In fact, if she pretends that all the crap that had just happened didn’t happen, then she might as well have just been out for a hike with her family.
Family.
She’s hit with a sudden, overwhelming urge to pick up Noah in her arms and hold him there forever, even though she’s just gotten off the phone with one of the officers who found him hidden in the linen closet. Fine, but scared. She’d requested they don’t bring him here. Don’t bring him to see her yet. She doesn’t want her son to see her like this. She wants him to see her as his stalwart mother, to still hero-worship his father, to be naïve enough to where he doesn’t really realize what’s happened, or what will happen.
He’s ten, he’s ten and she knows he’s old enough to comprehend everything, because he inherited her intuition and Axel’s perseverance. She knows she won’t be able to hold him off forever.
And she knows that she doesn’t have a lot of time in which to come up with an explanation. The way she sees it, she’s got two options:
Tell Noah the truth, tell him everything, risk his hatred of her and nights spent crying himself to sleep.
Or don’t tell him the truth, tell him that everything’ll be okay, that Daddy’s just gone away for a while. That don’t worry, sweetheart, Mommy loves you, and hope he takes that as an answer.
But, thing is, it isn’t just Noah she has to deal with. She looks down at the injured but handsome face of her former lover, the caked blood slowly sliding down his cheek with the rain, the dirt clinging to his eyelashes. She knows his brain had fallen into unconsciousness to stave off pain, and she’s sure that she doesn’t like him looking like this, wishes it were different. When she remembered him-at least before the mining accident-she saw genuine smiles, and eyes full of adoration for her, only for her. But then he returned, and he was different.
Tense.
Frightened.
Jaded.
Lost.
He wasn’t the Tom Hanniger she knew. He was a man who had been dealt a lousy hand, and hadn’t been able to bluff his way out of it. He’d been hit with tidal wave after tidal wave of Heaven knows what, and hadn’t been able to pull himself out of the current. He’d descended into…something, something she doesn’t know, and she wonders if she’ll ever figure out what it was.
Somehow, she knows she’ll be okay (well, okay being a relative term), if nothing else than because she still has her son. But Tom…she sees his face taut even in sleep, and hates that she sees it. He’s not the same man she once knew, and she doesn’t know if he’ll ever completely return.
“Ma’am,” says one of the paramedics, coming up to her with a hat drawn low over his face. “Ma’am, we need to check you out.”
“I’m all right,” she says flatly, looking but not seeing. “Just…just give me another minute.”
The man stares at her tersely for a few moments, but she’s not bleeding and her body’s not broken, so he leaves her. She lowers a trembling hand down to Tom’s face, brushes his hair from his forehead. Her fingers linger a trail down his jaw, over his lips, tracing a path that’s harder and yet the same from ten years ago. She leaves her hand there, careful to avoid the lacerations and purpling bruises, and closes her eyes. For just a second, her mind allows her a reprieve from its maelstrom of thoughts, and in that one second, she’s at peace.
Before, of course, a bright, blue-white light flashes over her eyelids, soon accompanied by a thick roll of thunder.
She counts.
One…two…
Three…four…
Five…Six…
Seven…Eight…
Nine…Ten…
Eleven…
She loses count, doubts she was counting right anyway, but it doesn’t matter. The lightning is far away, and a not-so-small part of her wishes she were, too.
“I’ve been working the past seventy-two hours! When would I have had time to play psycho?”
She stalls. The gun’s heavy in her hands, the weight unfamiliar and unwanted. It’s pointed at her husband, and if she should press the trigger, it would go straight to his heart. Stop it forever. The gun wavers. She wavers.
“You’re the sheriff, Axel. I mean, you come and go as you please.”
It’s only for a half-second, and her memory would later try to erase it, but for that half-second, she’s relieved at that voice. That voice that’s now gravelly and forced instead of smooth and confident, but the one that’s always been reassuring. The heavy footfalls in boots with thick leather, and that same stupid green jacket she gave him senior year. He’s wired, she can feel it in the air, but he’s assuring to her.
For a half-second.
Before her surroundings and situation assault her again, and she’s stuck in between two men that she loves (Do you?), and her mutinous hands wildly swing the pistol over to him, the flinch in his jaw causing her guilt.
He doesn’t deserve this, her heart commands. He’s him. The hell’re you doing?
He isn’t your husband, her mind says. He isn’t. He left. Axel stayed. End of story.
“All right, Tom, stay back!” she finds herself shouting, marveling at how distant her voice sounds. Though maybe it’s the echo in the mine. Maybe both. She doesn’t know. Can’t keep herself focused enough to figure it out.
“It’s okay, Sarah.”
I know, she wants to say. I know it is. Now.
But she doesn’t.
“The both of you, stop fucking moving!” she screams, the two men doing exactly the opposite, and she awkwardly maneuvers the firearm between them, wondering how in the world her life had been turned so upside down. Why her? Why now? Why this?
“Sarah. Look at me. Shoot him, and he won’t move.”
He’s her husband, and she trusts him. Should trust him. Has every reason in the world to trust him. (When it comes down to her life, she has to amend. Maybe not in her love life, but her survival, she trusts him.) She has no reason to trust Tom, not after all this time.
But her finger stays off the trigger, and for the first time in a long time, she doesn’t know what to do. She stares at Tom, can’t manage to look anywhere else.
“Axel, we’re gonna get you help.”
“You are so full of shit!”
Shut up! Shut up, shut up, her brain screams, the order not quite making it to her mouth. Don’t speak to him like he’s-
A murderer.
Don’t speak to him like he’s a murderer.
“Come on, Sarah, let’s get you home,” someone-a paramedic? Policeman? She doesn’t know-is telling her, gently moving her towards a car. “Your little boy’s asking for his mom.”
She wants to object, she doesn’t want Noah to see her like this, she doesn’t, but her brain isn’t working right, her thoughts aren’t working right, and she lets the man guide her into the backseat as he takes the front. Harmony isn’t exactly a large town, hardly a pinprick on the Pennsylvania map, and so getting to her home doesn’t take long.
Her mind rather on the fritz right now, she doesn’t notice the blood stained on the hardwood, the paramedic glancing nervously at it before relaxing, seeing that she doesn’t. He makes a note to tell someone to clean it thoroughly before Sarah catches sight of it. Also to keep her in as calm a mindset as possible. He nearly snorts at himself for thinking the situation is anything but normal, but just the same…
Noah’s sitting on the couch uncertainly watching cartoons next to a policewoman, who puts on an air of nonchalance for the his sake, but is obviously on high alert, her right hand resting on the butt of her .45.
When Sarah walks into the room, Noah immediately runs over to her, throwing his arms around her waist. She picks him up and hugs him to her, tight enough that he complains she’s suffocating him.
The policewoman says something to her, and Sarah feels herself replying, and she must have said convincingly that she was okay, because the woman departs, though she does leave her piece on the end table. Sarah loosens her grip on Noah a little, but doesn’t release him. She can’t.
“Shoot him, Sarah! He’s right there-shoot him!”
Some piece of her says Tom’s just trying to distract her, but she ignores it. This look on Tom’s face…it’s not a lie. She turns, and jerks backward just in time to feel the air in front of her jostle with the metal of a pickaxe, and scrambles away to get as far from the threat as possible. She needn’t have worried on that last count-he’s paused. He’s fuckin’ huge and fuckin’ deadly and a fuckin’ killer, but he’s paused.
She looks behind her to see Tom similarly paused. Only, this time it’s in unadulterated fury. It’s written in all the lines that shouldn’t be on his young face, and in the set of his shoulders that show his muscles are wound tight as a tripwire.
But Tom’s not looking at what almost killed her. He’s looking at something else-someone else. With dread in the pit of her stomach, she follows his line of sight and sees Axel standing there just as he had before. Except, now, his face is not that of anger and exhaustion, but an odd type of…equanimity. His hand lowers from the stock of the axe, the action having been a preventative measure for Harry’s killing blow. This time.
“A-Axel?” she finds herself saying, the gun somewhere off to her right. She looks up at the man dressed in a miner suit and holding a huge-ass weapon, his heavy breathing echoing throughout the mine. “What’s-?”
She can’t finish the sentence.
“I knew it,” says Tom, tearing his eyes from his rival to that of the face-the mask-that had haunted him for going on eleven years now. “I knew you weren’t dead.”
If the miner, if Harry, is smiling or smirking or sneering under the mask, no one can tell. He just keeps on breathing, keeps on adjusting his lethal grip on the axe. “Why?” Sarah pleads, wondering when the hell everything had gone so wrong. When Axel had gone wrong. The wedding ring on her finger feels suddenly heavy, for a reason she can’t explain.
“Oh, trust me, Sarah,” says Axel calmly, “I nearly killed this bastard myself when I found out he was staying up on Dad’s property. But I didn’t. And you want to know why?”
Tom glares. Sarah stares. (This isn’t her husband, she’s dreaming, she is, she is.)
Axel points at Tom, and gives a smile that is entirely alien upon his face. “You, Tom,” he says. Harry takes a step forward, but Axel holds out a hand and, like a Great White on a chain, he halts. “You came back into town after all this time, and set your sights on my wife. You really expected me to allow that to happen?”
“Axel, you always were a sneaky son of a bitch, but I never thought you’d turn to a serial killer, this killer,” Tom spits, face tight. “I mean, all you had to do was say ‘please’ and I woulda left.”
Sarah wants to yell at Tom to stop fucking antagonizing Axel when there’s a fucking axe murderer, the axe murderer not but fifteen feet from him. But her brain and her mouth seem to be taking separate vacations at the moment.
Axel doesn’t rise to the bait. “Here’s how this is all gonna go down,” he says, like he’s giving a speech for Vice Parliamentarian. “My buddy Harry here is going to get some face time with his favorite colleague, and you and me, Sarah, we’re gonna go on like none of this ever happened. Sounds like a plan, don’t it?”
Sarah gapes in horror at Axel. “What happened to you?” she gasps. “When did you turn-”
“What, crazy?” asks Axel. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m not crazy. For that, you might want to look at Tom over here.”
A muscle in Tom’s jaw spasms, but apart from that, he gives no reaction. Sarah’s too petrified to even consider reacting. “Sarah,” says Tom lowly, the tone one she’s never heard before, and is certain she’d never wanted to, “run.”
“What?” she sputters, caught off-guard. “I’m not leaving you.”
Axel’s mouth twitches in anger, but apparently he’s complacent enough with the situation to not remark on Sarah’s declaration. “No, Tom’s right, Sarah,” Axel says. “You really should go. Let us sort this out.”
Tom glances upwards for a split second, and then slowly bends down, picking up Axel’s gun from the ground. Sarah watches him in fear and confusion and prayer. He points it at Axel, finger firmly on the trigger. The Tom she knew wouldn’t kill anyone, but the look in his eyes now says he’s all too ready to send a bullet right through Axel’s chest.
“Shoot me if you want,” says Axel, before pointing to Harry. “But he’ll still want a sit-down with you.”
“I ain’t shooting you,” says Tom. Before anyone can make sense of his words, he points the gun above Axel and Harry’s heads and fires. The round embeds itself in the ceiling, and, as Tom had expected (okay, hoped), sounds of rock breaking resounds throughout the mine. Making use of his distraction, Tom leans down to grab Sarah.
“Go!” he commands to her.
She can’t move, the sound in the mine deafening. Tom’s half-dragging, half-carrying her through the tunnels with practiced efficiency, hands warm and safe on her back. She hears a crack that’s entirely different from the splintering rock and entirely identical to when Tom pulled the trigger, and suddenly he falters, a grunt escaping his lips. She turns around, but he’s still pushing her, preventing her from looking anywhere but his face and then the mine shaft.
“Please.” Her legs begin to betray her desire to remain behind, leave Tom to do something she fears, but a voice stops her.
“Sarah!”
It’s Axel’s, and his tone is of normal chord, the same tone he’d used when he tried to console her after Tom vanished, the same tone he’d used when he swore his vows to her.
She looks at him from across the mine, and then to Tom, and then back again. Tom has no such reservations and, evidently giving up on trying to persuade Sarah to get the hell out of the mine, runs farther in, to where Axel and Harry are still present. Well, Axel anyway.
Harry’s nowhere to be found.
Tom raises the firearm, this time with the intent to legitimately kill. Axel’s face is so similar to that of when Tom knew him a decade ago that he hesitates for just a moment. And then Axel smiles, bringing out a gun that had been strapped to his ankle. His eyes drift the slightest bit to something over Tom’s shoulder, and Tom, despite his red haze of fury and homicide, notices it. He hits the ground with an exclamation of pain, drops of blood from the gunshot wound in his abdomen that Axel had inflicted decorating the rock crimson.
A beat later, he hears another grunt, this one not his own. He looks up to see Axel standing stunned for a few seconds, before dropping to his knees, and then onto his back. There’s a very familiar pickaxe stuck dead center in his stomach, rivers of red pouring from the wound, his brown eyes dark as the blood.
Tom then twists around, ignoring the agony in his side, to see Harry standing there, his expression somehow maniacal even though Tom can’t see it for the mask. He takes striding steps towards Tom, his sole objective to kill him barehanded if he has to. But, even though Tom is starting to see spots and knows unconsciousness is near, he manages to control his shaking, slippery hands enough to raise the .45. With murder in his face, Tom squeezes the trigger until the chamber empties. Five bullets sink into his forehead.
Tom’s shots are dead on, even through the plastic of the mask, and Harry is struck back a couple steps, seemingly as shocked as Axel had been. He falls back against the rock, sliding down the wall and leaving a trail of blood behind.
He’s dead, Tom knows he’s dead, but he’s got ten years of hatred and cowardice bottled up, and this is his last chance to get rid of it, or at least be a start, he can feel it. Standing up unsteadily, he walks over to Axel’s body and yanks out the pickaxe with a squelch. Mustering the remaining strength he has, he slams it into Harry’s heart.
“Go…to hell,” Tom growls shakily, “y-you fucker.”
His body giving up on him, he falls to the ground, too, vision black and consciousness mercifully gone even before he slices his temple on one of the fallen rocks.
Sarah, frozen at watching the entire scene becomes animated when she sees Tom collapse. Sliding on the mine’s uneven terrain, she hurries to Tom’s side, hiccupping once at seeing her dead husband. Her stomach gives a roll of both despair and revulsion, but her conscience staves it off, and she instead focuses her attention on the sole other person alive.
“Tom!” she shouts, holding her hands on either side of his face. “Tom! Wake up!”
He doesn’t, and she’s not sure if he’s even breathing. Ripping out her cell phone and thanking no one in particular that it gets signal, her fingers scrabble over the numbers and she dials 911, somehow relaying their location to the dispatcher. They try and glean the schematics from her, but telling them she’s in the mine was all she has the mental concentration for. Gathering this, they promise units and paramedics within two minutes.
She waits in the cold, hands clenched tightly around Tom’s shoulders, taking in his cut face and bullet hole in his side, both bleeding profusely. She thinks she vaguely hears sirens from outside, but at this point, she’s surprised she’s even capable of stringing two thoughts together.
She does know one thing, though: there’s no way in hell she’s letting Tom die. Not him. Not him.
Sarah’s jerked from her anguished stasis when she hears a thump and then a subdued curse from the dining room. Getting up from the couch where Noah’d fallen asleep and grabs the gun that the policewoman had left. She cautiously makes her way into the room and trains the weapon on the shadow by the window. With her left hand, she flicks on the light, immediately moving back to the weapon to steady it.
The aim wavers, however, when she sees who’d just invaded her home. His eyes squinting briefly against the sudden light, Tom looks up at her, stitches running along his temple, a nice bruise covering the same side, his full bottom lip swollen and cut, and his hand clutching his stomach. He looks a mess, and yet all she can do is stare.
“Sarah,” Tom breathes, standing up as straight as his injuries allow.
Not altogether sure that she’s not in danger-give her a break: she’s had a trying few days-she keeps the gun pointed in Tom’s general direction, watching as he moves towards her.
“Why did you break into my house, Tom?” she asks firmly, feeling any resolve she may have had crumble at his earnest green eyes and beaten physique. “You’re hurt.”
Tom tries a chuckle, but immediately presses his hand into his side harder, grinding his teeth against the injury. “I’ve had worse,” he proposes.
She knows he hasn’t, knows this is by far the worst, but forgoes her objecting comment because for some stupid, masculine reason, he wants to pretend his injuries aren’t incredibly debilitating. “Why did you break into my house?” she asks again, her grip on the gun now nothing more than pathetic.
“You really should lock your windows,” Tom suggests airily, glancing back at the offending opening. Then he sobers, and with an odd note of humility, continues, “I had to see you. I had to talk to you.”
“About?” she asks.
“I just wanted to say that…that I’m staying,” he says, eyes sliding up to meet hers. He’s lied before, and he’s a damn good actor, but now, she can see he’s so far from lying it hurts. “I’m not going to just disappear again.”
Now, Sarah fully lowers the gun, setting it on the table and choosing instead to cross her arms around herself. “Why? Why this time?” she inquires, giving Tom a once-over, as if from his clothes she can decipher his reasoning.
Tom hesitates for a mere second, before answering solidly, “This time…this time I have somethin’ to prove.”
“Prove what?”
He smiles, just a little. There’s a wince in there, too, as the gesture tugs at his split lip, but it’s well-veiled. “Myself,” he answers in a husky whisper. “To you, Sarah.”
She doesn’t know what to say. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You trusted me, and you shouldn’t’ve. That’s more’n enough.”
“Tom, I-”
“Sarah,” Tom interrupts with another tiny grin, and another tiny wince. “Shh.”
It’s not in her nature to “shh,” and so she begins to say something else, but Tom walks up to her and puts a hand on her forearm. That, more than a finger to the lips, stifles her mid-word. “Why don’t we just put this off until morning. I don’t think it’s completely out of the question to say that we’ve had a hard couple of days.”
Sarah laughs darkly, wishing rather a lot not to remember. “Let me just move him-” she says, gesturing and slowly making her way towards Noah asleep on the couch.
Tom shakes his head, fighting against the blackness once more in his peripheral (maybe he shouldn’t have snuck out of the hospital…), and turns her in the direction of her bedroom. “I got him,” he says.
Her rational mind tells her not to let anyone but her touch her son, but the irrational trusting part of her says nothing, and instead of its own volition makes her walk away Tom and her son. At her door, she stops and turns, looking back into the living room. Tom has Noah in his arms, looking down at him curiously, like he’d never before seen a child. It’s as if his wounds have been all but forgotten, even though a thin line of red has started to seep from his temple, and his breathing is abnormal. Sarah’s heart skips a beat.
He shrugs and shoots her a soft smile, walking with Noah into his room and placing him under the covers. He smoothes Noah’s hair out of his eyes, lingers a second, and then treads heavily back out. “You do trust me, right?” he asks her quietly, eyes as intense as if his entire world depends on her answer.
Isn’t that the question of the ages.
She doesn’t answer, and Tom sighs, shutting out the light and gingerly taking Noah’s place on the couch, stature just tall enough so his feet hang out onto the cushions. He cringes as he lies down, putting a hand to his head to ward off vertigo, and carefully shifts to his left side in order to keep pressure off his abdomen. Sarah stares at the carpet for a moment and then goes into her own room, sitting on the edge of her bed.
Against her will, she flashes back, seeing Tom shoot lead into Harry’s skull with no look of trepidation over murder-not that Harry was deserving of trepidation, but she hates the heartless expression she’d caught on Tom’s face-and then, with the same amount of rage, sink the pickaxe into Harry’s heart. She should be calling the cops on him, at least make sure a psychologist checks him out or something.
But then she sees him with her son again, the confounded but gentle look in his eyes as he picked up Noah and put him to bed, how identical their features were in the light. His secure hands at her back, telling her to run and abandon him to his fate.
It’ll take a hell of a long time to sort through everything, through Axel’s betrayal and corruption, through the fact that Tom had killed a person-for her-but if Tom, Tom, is willing to stay, then it’s a no-brainer. Should have been a no-brainer when he asked, but better late than never.
“Yeah, Tom,” she says softly to herself. “I think I do.”
And for the first time in the last four days-maybe the last ten years-she sleeps soundly.
Fandom(s): My Bloody Valentine
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,300
Summary: “Damn it, Sarah, I need you to understand! I need somebody to understand. You’re the only one I can trust.”
Author’s Notes: This was written for the lovely bhoney who generously donated to the Support Stacie Author Auction.
Till Eternity Passes Away
Damn it, Sarah, I need you to understand! I need somebody to understand.
You’re the only one I can trust.
It’s pouring, and she’s cut and bruised, and Tom’s shot and bleeding and bruised, and dozens of people are dead, and the mine is collapsed, and her son’s fatherless, but right now, Sarah can’t be bothered to give much of a damn.
Doctors and psychologists would call it posttraumatic stress disorder, she’s sure of that-and why wouldn’t it be? She’s pretty sure what she went through counts as “trauma”-but, thing is, she doesn’t feel particularly abnormal. Oh, sure, her mind can’t focus on one thought for any longer than a second or two, and she’s reasonably positive that her hands haven’t always been shaking and that there aren’t four ambulances, but she’s seen all the war movies Noah’s so fond of. She’s seen the broken soldiers’ reactions and mentalities, and she doesn’t feel like they had.
In fact, if she pretends that all the crap that had just happened didn’t happen, then she might as well have just been out for a hike with her family.
Family.
She’s hit with a sudden, overwhelming urge to pick up Noah in her arms and hold him there forever, even though she’s just gotten off the phone with one of the officers who found him hidden in the linen closet. Fine, but scared. She’d requested they don’t bring him here. Don’t bring him to see her yet. She doesn’t want her son to see her like this. She wants him to see her as his stalwart mother, to still hero-worship his father, to be naïve enough to where he doesn’t really realize what’s happened, or what will happen.
He’s ten, he’s ten and she knows he’s old enough to comprehend everything, because he inherited her intuition and Axel’s perseverance. She knows she won’t be able to hold him off forever.
And she knows that she doesn’t have a lot of time in which to come up with an explanation. The way she sees it, she’s got two options:
Tell Noah the truth, tell him everything, risk his hatred of her and nights spent crying himself to sleep.
Or don’t tell him the truth, tell him that everything’ll be okay, that Daddy’s just gone away for a while. That don’t worry, sweetheart, Mommy loves you, and hope he takes that as an answer.
But, thing is, it isn’t just Noah she has to deal with. She looks down at the injured but handsome face of her former lover, the caked blood slowly sliding down his cheek with the rain, the dirt clinging to his eyelashes. She knows his brain had fallen into unconsciousness to stave off pain, and she’s sure that she doesn’t like him looking like this, wishes it were different. When she remembered him-at least before the mining accident-she saw genuine smiles, and eyes full of adoration for her, only for her. But then he returned, and he was different.
Tense.
Frightened.
Jaded.
Lost.
He wasn’t the Tom Hanniger she knew. He was a man who had been dealt a lousy hand, and hadn’t been able to bluff his way out of it. He’d been hit with tidal wave after tidal wave of Heaven knows what, and hadn’t been able to pull himself out of the current. He’d descended into…something, something she doesn’t know, and she wonders if she’ll ever figure out what it was.
Somehow, she knows she’ll be okay (well, okay being a relative term), if nothing else than because she still has her son. But Tom…she sees his face taut even in sleep, and hates that she sees it. He’s not the same man she once knew, and she doesn’t know if he’ll ever completely return.
“Ma’am,” says one of the paramedics, coming up to her with a hat drawn low over his face. “Ma’am, we need to check you out.”
“I’m all right,” she says flatly, looking but not seeing. “Just…just give me another minute.”
The man stares at her tersely for a few moments, but she’s not bleeding and her body’s not broken, so he leaves her. She lowers a trembling hand down to Tom’s face, brushes his hair from his forehead. Her fingers linger a trail down his jaw, over his lips, tracing a path that’s harder and yet the same from ten years ago. She leaves her hand there, careful to avoid the lacerations and purpling bruises, and closes her eyes. For just a second, her mind allows her a reprieve from its maelstrom of thoughts, and in that one second, she’s at peace.
Before, of course, a bright, blue-white light flashes over her eyelids, soon accompanied by a thick roll of thunder.
She counts.
One…two…
Three…four…
Five…Six…
Seven…Eight…
Nine…Ten…
Eleven…
She loses count, doubts she was counting right anyway, but it doesn’t matter. The lightning is far away, and a not-so-small part of her wishes she were, too.
“I’ve been working the past seventy-two hours! When would I have had time to play psycho?”
She stalls. The gun’s heavy in her hands, the weight unfamiliar and unwanted. It’s pointed at her husband, and if she should press the trigger, it would go straight to his heart. Stop it forever. The gun wavers. She wavers.
“You’re the sheriff, Axel. I mean, you come and go as you please.”
It’s only for a half-second, and her memory would later try to erase it, but for that half-second, she’s relieved at that voice. That voice that’s now gravelly and forced instead of smooth and confident, but the one that’s always been reassuring. The heavy footfalls in boots with thick leather, and that same stupid green jacket she gave him senior year. He’s wired, she can feel it in the air, but he’s assuring to her.
For a half-second.
Before her surroundings and situation assault her again, and she’s stuck in between two men that she loves (Do you?), and her mutinous hands wildly swing the pistol over to him, the flinch in his jaw causing her guilt.
He doesn’t deserve this, her heart commands. He’s him. The hell’re you doing?
He isn’t your husband, her mind says. He isn’t. He left. Axel stayed. End of story.
“All right, Tom, stay back!” she finds herself shouting, marveling at how distant her voice sounds. Though maybe it’s the echo in the mine. Maybe both. She doesn’t know. Can’t keep herself focused enough to figure it out.
“It’s okay, Sarah.”
I know, she wants to say. I know it is. Now.
But she doesn’t.
“The both of you, stop fucking moving!” she screams, the two men doing exactly the opposite, and she awkwardly maneuvers the firearm between them, wondering how in the world her life had been turned so upside down. Why her? Why now? Why this?
“Sarah. Look at me. Shoot him, and he won’t move.”
He’s her husband, and she trusts him. Should trust him. Has every reason in the world to trust him. (When it comes down to her life, she has to amend. Maybe not in her love life, but her survival, she trusts him.) She has no reason to trust Tom, not after all this time.
But her finger stays off the trigger, and for the first time in a long time, she doesn’t know what to do. She stares at Tom, can’t manage to look anywhere else.
“Axel, we’re gonna get you help.”
“You are so full of shit!”
Shut up! Shut up, shut up, her brain screams, the order not quite making it to her mouth. Don’t speak to him like he’s-
A murderer.
Don’t speak to him like he’s a murderer.
“Come on, Sarah, let’s get you home,” someone-a paramedic? Policeman? She doesn’t know-is telling her, gently moving her towards a car. “Your little boy’s asking for his mom.”
She wants to object, she doesn’t want Noah to see her like this, she doesn’t, but her brain isn’t working right, her thoughts aren’t working right, and she lets the man guide her into the backseat as he takes the front. Harmony isn’t exactly a large town, hardly a pinprick on the Pennsylvania map, and so getting to her home doesn’t take long.
Her mind rather on the fritz right now, she doesn’t notice the blood stained on the hardwood, the paramedic glancing nervously at it before relaxing, seeing that she doesn’t. He makes a note to tell someone to clean it thoroughly before Sarah catches sight of it. Also to keep her in as calm a mindset as possible. He nearly snorts at himself for thinking the situation is anything but normal, but just the same…
Noah’s sitting on the couch uncertainly watching cartoons next to a policewoman, who puts on an air of nonchalance for the his sake, but is obviously on high alert, her right hand resting on the butt of her .45.
When Sarah walks into the room, Noah immediately runs over to her, throwing his arms around her waist. She picks him up and hugs him to her, tight enough that he complains she’s suffocating him.
The policewoman says something to her, and Sarah feels herself replying, and she must have said convincingly that she was okay, because the woman departs, though she does leave her piece on the end table. Sarah loosens her grip on Noah a little, but doesn’t release him. She can’t.
“Shoot him, Sarah! He’s right there-shoot him!”
Some piece of her says Tom’s just trying to distract her, but she ignores it. This look on Tom’s face…it’s not a lie. She turns, and jerks backward just in time to feel the air in front of her jostle with the metal of a pickaxe, and scrambles away to get as far from the threat as possible. She needn’t have worried on that last count-he’s paused. He’s fuckin’ huge and fuckin’ deadly and a fuckin’ killer, but he’s paused.
She looks behind her to see Tom similarly paused. Only, this time it’s in unadulterated fury. It’s written in all the lines that shouldn’t be on his young face, and in the set of his shoulders that show his muscles are wound tight as a tripwire.
But Tom’s not looking at what almost killed her. He’s looking at something else-someone else. With dread in the pit of her stomach, she follows his line of sight and sees Axel standing there just as he had before. Except, now, his face is not that of anger and exhaustion, but an odd type of…equanimity. His hand lowers from the stock of the axe, the action having been a preventative measure for Harry’s killing blow. This time.
“A-Axel?” she finds herself saying, the gun somewhere off to her right. She looks up at the man dressed in a miner suit and holding a huge-ass weapon, his heavy breathing echoing throughout the mine. “What’s-?”
She can’t finish the sentence.
“I knew it,” says Tom, tearing his eyes from his rival to that of the face-the mask-that had haunted him for going on eleven years now. “I knew you weren’t dead.”
If the miner, if Harry, is smiling or smirking or sneering under the mask, no one can tell. He just keeps on breathing, keeps on adjusting his lethal grip on the axe. “Why?” Sarah pleads, wondering when the hell everything had gone so wrong. When Axel had gone wrong. The wedding ring on her finger feels suddenly heavy, for a reason she can’t explain.
“Oh, trust me, Sarah,” says Axel calmly, “I nearly killed this bastard myself when I found out he was staying up on Dad’s property. But I didn’t. And you want to know why?”
Tom glares. Sarah stares. (This isn’t her husband, she’s dreaming, she is, she is.)
Axel points at Tom, and gives a smile that is entirely alien upon his face. “You, Tom,” he says. Harry takes a step forward, but Axel holds out a hand and, like a Great White on a chain, he halts. “You came back into town after all this time, and set your sights on my wife. You really expected me to allow that to happen?”
“Axel, you always were a sneaky son of a bitch, but I never thought you’d turn to a serial killer, this killer,” Tom spits, face tight. “I mean, all you had to do was say ‘please’ and I woulda left.”
Sarah wants to yell at Tom to stop fucking antagonizing Axel when there’s a fucking axe murderer, the axe murderer not but fifteen feet from him. But her brain and her mouth seem to be taking separate vacations at the moment.
Axel doesn’t rise to the bait. “Here’s how this is all gonna go down,” he says, like he’s giving a speech for Vice Parliamentarian. “My buddy Harry here is going to get some face time with his favorite colleague, and you and me, Sarah, we’re gonna go on like none of this ever happened. Sounds like a plan, don’t it?”
Sarah gapes in horror at Axel. “What happened to you?” she gasps. “When did you turn-”
“What, crazy?” asks Axel. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m not crazy. For that, you might want to look at Tom over here.”
A muscle in Tom’s jaw spasms, but apart from that, he gives no reaction. Sarah’s too petrified to even consider reacting. “Sarah,” says Tom lowly, the tone one she’s never heard before, and is certain she’d never wanted to, “run.”
“What?” she sputters, caught off-guard. “I’m not leaving you.”
Axel’s mouth twitches in anger, but apparently he’s complacent enough with the situation to not remark on Sarah’s declaration. “No, Tom’s right, Sarah,” Axel says. “You really should go. Let us sort this out.”
Tom glances upwards for a split second, and then slowly bends down, picking up Axel’s gun from the ground. Sarah watches him in fear and confusion and prayer. He points it at Axel, finger firmly on the trigger. The Tom she knew wouldn’t kill anyone, but the look in his eyes now says he’s all too ready to send a bullet right through Axel’s chest.
“Shoot me if you want,” says Axel, before pointing to Harry. “But he’ll still want a sit-down with you.”
“I ain’t shooting you,” says Tom. Before anyone can make sense of his words, he points the gun above Axel and Harry’s heads and fires. The round embeds itself in the ceiling, and, as Tom had expected (okay, hoped), sounds of rock breaking resounds throughout the mine. Making use of his distraction, Tom leans down to grab Sarah.
“Go!” he commands to her.
She can’t move, the sound in the mine deafening. Tom’s half-dragging, half-carrying her through the tunnels with practiced efficiency, hands warm and safe on her back. She hears a crack that’s entirely different from the splintering rock and entirely identical to when Tom pulled the trigger, and suddenly he falters, a grunt escaping his lips. She turns around, but he’s still pushing her, preventing her from looking anywhere but his face and then the mine shaft.
“Please.” Her legs begin to betray her desire to remain behind, leave Tom to do something she fears, but a voice stops her.
“Sarah!”
It’s Axel’s, and his tone is of normal chord, the same tone he’d used when he tried to console her after Tom vanished, the same tone he’d used when he swore his vows to her.
She looks at him from across the mine, and then to Tom, and then back again. Tom has no such reservations and, evidently giving up on trying to persuade Sarah to get the hell out of the mine, runs farther in, to where Axel and Harry are still present. Well, Axel anyway.
Harry’s nowhere to be found.
Tom raises the firearm, this time with the intent to legitimately kill. Axel’s face is so similar to that of when Tom knew him a decade ago that he hesitates for just a moment. And then Axel smiles, bringing out a gun that had been strapped to his ankle. His eyes drift the slightest bit to something over Tom’s shoulder, and Tom, despite his red haze of fury and homicide, notices it. He hits the ground with an exclamation of pain, drops of blood from the gunshot wound in his abdomen that Axel had inflicted decorating the rock crimson.
A beat later, he hears another grunt, this one not his own. He looks up to see Axel standing stunned for a few seconds, before dropping to his knees, and then onto his back. There’s a very familiar pickaxe stuck dead center in his stomach, rivers of red pouring from the wound, his brown eyes dark as the blood.
Tom then twists around, ignoring the agony in his side, to see Harry standing there, his expression somehow maniacal even though Tom can’t see it for the mask. He takes striding steps towards Tom, his sole objective to kill him barehanded if he has to. But, even though Tom is starting to see spots and knows unconsciousness is near, he manages to control his shaking, slippery hands enough to raise the .45. With murder in his face, Tom squeezes the trigger until the chamber empties. Five bullets sink into his forehead.
Tom’s shots are dead on, even through the plastic of the mask, and Harry is struck back a couple steps, seemingly as shocked as Axel had been. He falls back against the rock, sliding down the wall and leaving a trail of blood behind.
He’s dead, Tom knows he’s dead, but he’s got ten years of hatred and cowardice bottled up, and this is his last chance to get rid of it, or at least be a start, he can feel it. Standing up unsteadily, he walks over to Axel’s body and yanks out the pickaxe with a squelch. Mustering the remaining strength he has, he slams it into Harry’s heart.
“Go…to hell,” Tom growls shakily, “y-you fucker.”
His body giving up on him, he falls to the ground, too, vision black and consciousness mercifully gone even before he slices his temple on one of the fallen rocks.
Sarah, frozen at watching the entire scene becomes animated when she sees Tom collapse. Sliding on the mine’s uneven terrain, she hurries to Tom’s side, hiccupping once at seeing her dead husband. Her stomach gives a roll of both despair and revulsion, but her conscience staves it off, and she instead focuses her attention on the sole other person alive.
“Tom!” she shouts, holding her hands on either side of his face. “Tom! Wake up!”
He doesn’t, and she’s not sure if he’s even breathing. Ripping out her cell phone and thanking no one in particular that it gets signal, her fingers scrabble over the numbers and she dials 911, somehow relaying their location to the dispatcher. They try and glean the schematics from her, but telling them she’s in the mine was all she has the mental concentration for. Gathering this, they promise units and paramedics within two minutes.
She waits in the cold, hands clenched tightly around Tom’s shoulders, taking in his cut face and bullet hole in his side, both bleeding profusely. She thinks she vaguely hears sirens from outside, but at this point, she’s surprised she’s even capable of stringing two thoughts together.
She does know one thing, though: there’s no way in hell she’s letting Tom die. Not him. Not him.
Sarah’s jerked from her anguished stasis when she hears a thump and then a subdued curse from the dining room. Getting up from the couch where Noah’d fallen asleep and grabs the gun that the policewoman had left. She cautiously makes her way into the room and trains the weapon on the shadow by the window. With her left hand, she flicks on the light, immediately moving back to the weapon to steady it.
The aim wavers, however, when she sees who’d just invaded her home. His eyes squinting briefly against the sudden light, Tom looks up at her, stitches running along his temple, a nice bruise covering the same side, his full bottom lip swollen and cut, and his hand clutching his stomach. He looks a mess, and yet all she can do is stare.
“Sarah,” Tom breathes, standing up as straight as his injuries allow.
Not altogether sure that she’s not in danger-give her a break: she’s had a trying few days-she keeps the gun pointed in Tom’s general direction, watching as he moves towards her.
“Why did you break into my house, Tom?” she asks firmly, feeling any resolve she may have had crumble at his earnest green eyes and beaten physique. “You’re hurt.”
Tom tries a chuckle, but immediately presses his hand into his side harder, grinding his teeth against the injury. “I’ve had worse,” he proposes.
She knows he hasn’t, knows this is by far the worst, but forgoes her objecting comment because for some stupid, masculine reason, he wants to pretend his injuries aren’t incredibly debilitating. “Why did you break into my house?” she asks again, her grip on the gun now nothing more than pathetic.
“You really should lock your windows,” Tom suggests airily, glancing back at the offending opening. Then he sobers, and with an odd note of humility, continues, “I had to see you. I had to talk to you.”
“About?” she asks.
“I just wanted to say that…that I’m staying,” he says, eyes sliding up to meet hers. He’s lied before, and he’s a damn good actor, but now, she can see he’s so far from lying it hurts. “I’m not going to just disappear again.”
Now, Sarah fully lowers the gun, setting it on the table and choosing instead to cross her arms around herself. “Why? Why this time?” she inquires, giving Tom a once-over, as if from his clothes she can decipher his reasoning.
Tom hesitates for a mere second, before answering solidly, “This time…this time I have somethin’ to prove.”
“Prove what?”
He smiles, just a little. There’s a wince in there, too, as the gesture tugs at his split lip, but it’s well-veiled. “Myself,” he answers in a husky whisper. “To you, Sarah.”
She doesn’t know what to say. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You trusted me, and you shouldn’t’ve. That’s more’n enough.”
“Tom, I-”
“Sarah,” Tom interrupts with another tiny grin, and another tiny wince. “Shh.”
It’s not in her nature to “shh,” and so she begins to say something else, but Tom walks up to her and puts a hand on her forearm. That, more than a finger to the lips, stifles her mid-word. “Why don’t we just put this off until morning. I don’t think it’s completely out of the question to say that we’ve had a hard couple of days.”
Sarah laughs darkly, wishing rather a lot not to remember. “Let me just move him-” she says, gesturing and slowly making her way towards Noah asleep on the couch.
Tom shakes his head, fighting against the blackness once more in his peripheral (maybe he shouldn’t have snuck out of the hospital…), and turns her in the direction of her bedroom. “I got him,” he says.
Her rational mind tells her not to let anyone but her touch her son, but the irrational trusting part of her says nothing, and instead of its own volition makes her walk away Tom and her son. At her door, she stops and turns, looking back into the living room. Tom has Noah in his arms, looking down at him curiously, like he’d never before seen a child. It’s as if his wounds have been all but forgotten, even though a thin line of red has started to seep from his temple, and his breathing is abnormal. Sarah’s heart skips a beat.
He shrugs and shoots her a soft smile, walking with Noah into his room and placing him under the covers. He smoothes Noah’s hair out of his eyes, lingers a second, and then treads heavily back out. “You do trust me, right?” he asks her quietly, eyes as intense as if his entire world depends on her answer.
Isn’t that the question of the ages.
She doesn’t answer, and Tom sighs, shutting out the light and gingerly taking Noah’s place on the couch, stature just tall enough so his feet hang out onto the cushions. He cringes as he lies down, putting a hand to his head to ward off vertigo, and carefully shifts to his left side in order to keep pressure off his abdomen. Sarah stares at the carpet for a moment and then goes into her own room, sitting on the edge of her bed.
Against her will, she flashes back, seeing Tom shoot lead into Harry’s skull with no look of trepidation over murder-not that Harry was deserving of trepidation, but she hates the heartless expression she’d caught on Tom’s face-and then, with the same amount of rage, sink the pickaxe into Harry’s heart. She should be calling the cops on him, at least make sure a psychologist checks him out or something.
But then she sees him with her son again, the confounded but gentle look in his eyes as he picked up Noah and put him to bed, how identical their features were in the light. His secure hands at her back, telling her to run and abandon him to his fate.
It’ll take a hell of a long time to sort through everything, through Axel’s betrayal and corruption, through the fact that Tom had killed a person-for her-but if Tom, Tom, is willing to stay, then it’s a no-brainer. Should have been a no-brainer when he asked, but better late than never.
“Yeah, Tom,” she says softly to herself. “I think I do.”
And for the first time in the last four days-maybe the last ten years-she sleeps soundly.