Guava and Blueberry Yoghurt
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Nothing (Part II)
Rating: PG/R (cursing, gore)
Challenge: Guava #11: the time has come, Blueberry Yoghurt #24: hold my hand
Toppings/Extras: none
Wordcount: 1,125
Summary: Charlie Buckett is stabbed, and suddenly nothing is fine.
Notes: Follows Part I, obviously!
The world was dizzying all of a sudden. They were just running and running, the plaster houses of London looming over them in the darkness as they did so. Their feet slapped the scummy puddles. Isaac Prowse had a hold of his best friend Charlie Buckett by the shoulder, although Charlie was trying to get out of his grasp.
“Get off,” he growled. “Yer bastard, get off!”
“You need help, Charlie,” Isaac replied, turning to face him with fire blazing in his dark eyes.
“I’m fine!” Charlie wrestled himself out of Isaac’s grasp and staggered aside, one arm held over his midsection. “I’m perfectly fine,” he continued stubbornly. “What’s wrong with ‘ee?”
Blood stained his hand red as it sank through his shirt and his jacket, as it stuck his clothing to him and created a large crimson smile across his belly. Charlie winced and tried to walk another step but found himself grasped by Isaac.
“You are not fine.”
“What’re you lookin’ so bleedin’ scared for? God’s wounds, ‘Zac... I’m...” He coughed; it was a hard, rattling, wrenching noise. “I’m all right. I’ve ‘ad worse. Can we just go ‘ome?”
At his claim to have had worse, Isaac nearly laughed-but he was far too frightened.
Isaac began to walk quickly again, dragging Charlie behind him. He needs to get to a hospice, a part of him was thinking; a dutiful, calm part of him that was in charge of his legs. The rest of his brain seemed to have disappeared into white screaming. This seemed to be the part that controlled his fingers because they kept quivering, and his stomach because it was churning and plunging and dropping away. He’s going to die, Charlie’s going to die...
“Christ’s sake, I’m fine...”
Not Charlie, please not Charlie...
His protestations grew weaker. Isaac picked up the pace. Charlie stumbled and suddenly he wasn’t running, his boots were slithering limply over the cobbles as Isaac dragged him. With a set jaw, Isaac set to the task patiently, but with Charlie sliding all over the road they weren’t making much progress. Isaac was big-but so was Charlie, and dragging him wasn’t easy.
After hesitating, he risked a look at his best friend. A long string of drool and blood was hanging from between his lips, and as he watched it snapped and dropped to the dark road below them. Charlie’s knees bucked and he sank downwards.
“Charlie!”
“Just restin’,” Charlie was muttering. “Fine, ‘Zac, I’m fine.”
Isaac knew then that Charlie Buckett would not be getting up again.
“You stupid bastard,” Isaac said in a voice thick with tears he refused to shed. He grabbed Charlie by the collar. “What’d you do this time? What’d you do?”
Charlie gave a deep, involuntary groan. Both of his hands were clasped to his stomach now, and more and more blood was seeping out. It looked black in the sparse light, and pooled across his trousers, his shirt, his jacket. It leaked onto the cobbles and trickled into the narrow spaces between each stone, following them like moats.
“Some ‘ard bastards thought it’d be a laugh to...” Charlie began, and then sputtered; he was talking, but whatever he said was illegible. More blood dribbled over his lower lip and chin. “But you were there fer me, weren’t you, eh? Good ol’ ‘Zac. Fair well saved my bacon.”
“Let me take a look at what they did,” Isaac said. Charlie didn’t move. “Let me look.”
It was awful. It wasn’t just a single stab wound like Isaac had thought: there were several. The biggest was a thick gash across his belly, a smirking pair of scarlet lips through the taut flesh there, dripping great oozing rolls of dark blood that were already forming ugly black clots. Charlie’s breathing rasped and rattled as he began to sink further down; Isaac’s fearsomely prideful friend couldn’t even sit up any more. It was shocking to see his violent lust for life so diminished.
“Charlie...”
“S’fine,” Charlie mumbled with red bubbles at the corners of his lips. His face had turned paler than Isaac had ever seen it. Every second seemed to be hurtling past and he couldn’t snatch them back however much he wanted to. These were Charlie’s last few minutes, he knew. His very last breaths struggling their way through the thick blood at the back of his throat.
“Don’t you dare die. Don’t you dare die, you absolute cunt!” Isaac grabbed Charlie by the shoulder and shook him a little. “Get up. Come on, get up. We’ll get you to a hospice. They’ll stitch you up.”
Charlie gurgled a moment, and then coughed a spray of blood.
“Don’t do this to me. What am I goin’ to do without you? What am I goin’ to do?” Isaac heard his own breathing becoming louder. “You’re the strong one ‘ere, Charlie. You’re the fighter. I’m just the kid that followed yer outta the orphanage!”
“I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Charlie rasped. Each word came out laborious, and icy sweat glistened on his skin. “What you worryin’ about? Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me.”
Obscenely, Isaac almost believed these words.
“Good,” he said. His voice was only a whisper. “Good.”
His hand found Charlie’s. Usually, such a feminine act would have brought forth nothing but fiery spurn and disgust from the other man, but now he did nothing but let his shaky fingers close a little over Isaac’s. It felt weaker than a butterfly’s wings.
“I’m fine. Jus’ fine. Don’t go thinkin’ I ain’t. All right?”
Those words were enough to make Isaac feel his soul tear in two, but somehow he managed a hollow facsimile of a smile, just a shadow at either corner of his lips. Charlie’s fierce blue eyes were becoming dimmer and dimmer.
“I won’t,” he replied, trying to sound soothing although he felt so cold and so sick and so very lost. London gave a lurch around him, his mind warping the walls. The sky disappeared upwards and the bloodied cobbles fell away and the houses were all rushing to the horizon, and it was just him and Charlie and Charlie was leaking his lifeblood into the street, into his clothes, into his very own hands and there was nothing...
“Charlie?”
There was no response. Isaac blankly let go of his friend, who fell heavily to the cobbles, lifeless. The loss punched a hole somewhere deep within him. All of the angry vitality that had streamed endlessly from the lively Charlie Buckett, all of his pride and all of his vigour, his incessant fight, had become nothing more than a husk. Six feet of bread dough, a sack of sand. A heap of damp clay in a pool of blood. Nothing.