AnCatKatie
Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
Do not own, not even Edgy, sorry. It's not true except that stuff like this does happen.
So that's what Paul Hewson does when he's angry.
There's a lack of spaces in Edge's thoughts, at brief points in this. Just bear with it; it's necessary to get the point across.
I like this chapter a lot more than Chapter 15; I managed to write what I set out to write for today. Ramones...and Edge...made it much much easier than last night's writing.
***
What seemed like ages after the set had ended, Paul climbed down from the stage, the tension building in his limbs perfect for parting the crowd before him. He didn’t know that Cath was gone; a jagged anger had burned through him at what he saw…
Just a boy walking to school, that day, if it had been any other day. He looked up at the yawning windows and turned down a narrow street on his way, flattening against the wall when the door ahead of him, the paint cracked, shot open and a girl glared inside then tensed as if about to run, before a man inside shouted, leaning solidly out the doorway threatening, face turning red as a baby’s. She sprang and ran anyway, hurling something back in response that was unintelligible to Paul.
For some reason, he remembered her widened eyes as she paused in running and saw him. They had latched into his subconscious and held her tightly in his thoughts.
He didn’t realize, the night he met Cath, that he had seen her before. She had seemed much younger, that first time they laid eyes on each other, and looked like she would bolt away from him, or anyone. The Cath he knew had gained rough edges and a sort of challenging sadness in her eyes…
It was enough that the other man was heading for where Cath had gone. Bono had noticed in a sort of unconscious physical instant that Cath had gone that way, the rest of his awareness calculating the strength of his body and focused on the near distance.
Adrenaline and fear sharpened Bono’s sight. He clenched his fist. Grabbing the back of the man’s dirty jacket, he turned him around and grinned exultantly as he swung his fist forward.
The light tore at Cath’s eyes when she awoke, though it was only moonlight filtering in dimly from the window. There was a tightness in the back of her neck and her shoulderblades, needle-sharp, as if anchored to her bones. If she didn’t move, it subsided to a slight ache.
With awareness of the rest of her body, she noticed also her bare feet, the coat around her shoulders, and the faint warmth at her back. She turned her head, wincing, and her pillow shifted: Edge shook his head and opened his eyes from a light sleep, and that they were on a couch she didn’t really recognize, in a room she faintly did.
“Why are we at your house?” Cath asked.
Edge tore his mind away from staring at her: the Cath he was used to, the healthy, comfortable Cath, was a shell around Cath now: her eyes burned brightly though she held her head gingerly and the edges of her expression hinted at pain. She was very pale, and made no move to move her hair out of her face.
“It’s 2 AM,” Edge said. Cath noticed suddenly how tired he looked. “I waited with you for Bono to come back, but he hasn’t yet. I had no way of dropping you off at his place—and I wanted to be sure nothing went wrong, just in case.”
Her eyes rested on him. “Thank you,” she said seriously, then winced again and pillowed her head against his chest and arm again: it felt like the world was spinning around her, holding her in a strange grip, viselike around her head. Her breathing grew deeper and she dropped off into sleep.
Edge’s thoughts kept wandering back to her with the rise and fall of her breath pushing against him. She had been very light, he’d noticed when carrying her. He tried to decipher the hints of old Cath in her sleeping expression, and had a sudden odd thought. What if things had happened differently? What if Edge, walking back to his house four months ago after the band played in the bar, exhilarated, had happened upon Cath instead? And…<i>nothing bad would have happened...and there would be no problems and nothing wrong...</i>
He blinked, Cath’s forehead digging into his arm making his mind fall away gradually from this odd dual universe: it hadn’t happened that way.
He stayed awake for a while, wondering where the hell Bono was, no longer secretly pleased the singer was occupied, the worry about Cath too great.
He realized he had drifted off to sleep when in the dead of night, everything silent in the muffled late hour, he felt a pressure around his wrist that he couldn’t shake off. His heart pounded and his eyes shot open. He could make out in the faint light that just barely revealed Cath’s face that she was looking at him, eyes wide open. Her hand gripped his arm tightly, the light flashed across her eyes, and all at once she nearly fell off the couch, her head knocking hard against his side like a fist. Edge winced, his heart hammering.
“It hurts, Edge,” Cath whispered tightly, her eyes luminous. Very gently, he stood up and gripped her arms. “It’s okay,” he willed it to be. “Shh.” He held her and wrapped his coat back around her, hoping to dear God she hadn’t had a miscarriage. He assumed not, but he felt suddenly young and unsure.
Cath’s finger dug into his skin. “Edge,” she half-yelled tiredly, tears glinting across her face, “stop the pain.” Her voice was ragged and scared Edge to death. She buried her head into his neck and sobbed, the tears running down Edge’s shirt. He extricated her from him and looked at her wildly. His body ached from the various small wounds or bruises she had inadvertently inflicted on him.
“Cath, there’s not that much I…” His sleepless mind screamed at him, tightening around his heart further. Something broke within him, in the light on the tears smudged on her face, her broken expression. With an edge of frantic worry, his arms coming around her tightly as if she would slip away into nothing, he looked terrified at her face and without realizing it was kissing her.
Oh, god. His senses exploded as his mind stood back. Fire shot through his lips down his body and electrified his nerves that were already overloaded with fear for Cath. Even that fell away for a glorious instant as he tried to pull away, the kiss softening, his lips brushing against hers gently.
What the hell was he doing?
All he could think was whatifshedieswhatifshe—the barriers he had unconsciously put around his emotions hours before had been swept away into a tumultuous uproar, letting the crippling fear back in, making his body shake.
He tried to extricate himself but could not: his teenage instinct and repressed longing had kicked in. At last he violently came to his senses when Cath inadvertently bit his lip. Pain seared briefly across his awareness: he jumped back, trembling, then fell forward to catch Cath, who was falling. In doing so, her forehead came into contact with the back of his arm. It was hot as a burning brand.
“Oh, shit,” Edge whispered, voice breaking, as he steadied Cath. He stood where he was, in shock, then cradling the woman in his arms, grabbed his coat with his free hand and ran to the car.
Bono was somewhere unknown, doing who the hell knows what. It was Bono who should be dealing with this, though Edge realized the other boy would probably be even more scared than he was.
He ran a red light on the way to the hospital, thinking why do ambulances do that when normal cars might also have people dying in them? Fortunately no other cars were around. He didn’t much care at this point, however.
He once again was shut out into the waiting room, drumming his fingers anxiously against the plastic orange chairs, too much energy trapped inside of him. The concept of sleep was a joke, after the events of the last few hours. His mind was stuck on two different tracks, the first the constant whatifshedies, pausing briefly to rail at Bono, then continuing and going to the back of his mind but keeping him awake. Those thoughts were, if anything, more frantic than they ever had been before; his burning desire had burst through him like an avalanche, leaving Edge in shock, deeply attached to Cath. He wanted all at once to finish the kiss he had started, explain everything, and was gripped too by a desire to punch Paul in the face—though that urge had lessened; Edge felt oddly forgiving.
We kissed.
Whatifshe’sdyingwhatifit’samiscarriageIcan’tletBonotakeherfrommenow
All this frantic confusion became a fast-paced song inside Edge’s head, illuminating the short hours of the morning with stagelights and the roar of his thoughts.
He had fallen asleep against the hard unforgiving plastic chairs, despite himself, the lighting less fierce against his eyes. A hand hesitantly shook his shoulder. He looked up to see the nurse.
“Sorry, my shift hadn’t started and there’s a policy that we don’t let people who aren’t patients into the hospital rooms.” She seemed like she wished that wasn’t the policy.
Edge yawned faintly, straightening his shirt and stretching. He then caught the look in the nurse’s eye and his hands fell dead to his sides, the crippling fear rising in him again. …he hadn’t known he could care about someone more than himself…that it could overtake everything…
“Is there something I should know?”
She hesitated, fidgeting with her nails.
“Why don’t you come outside her room? It might make it—“
…easier? Yeah, likely. He suddenly dismissed the thought that the nurse thought he was Cath’s boyfriend: really, caring about that all meant nothing, in the face of—
Edge was already heading there, desperate to know what was going on.
The walls into patients’ rooms were glass, for some reason, and hers shone faintly with the hospital lights. The blinds had been drawn aside. Edge could make out Cath huddled or curled up on the hospital bed, the sheets tucked over her, her back to him. It really didn’t reveal anything—though the relief that she was alive bubbled giddily through his mind—and only made him more anxious.
Resultingly, he was a little less than patient. “What happened?” he asked the nurse tersely.
“Well, there’s good news and bad news.”
“I’ll take the good news first,” Edge said, unable to breathe. Bad news, he thought with dread…how in hell could there be good news if there was bad?
The nurse smiled. “The baby’s fine.”
Edge could breathe again, then couldn’t, catching how she’d stressed slightly the first two words.
“And—Cath?” he asked weakly.
The nurse shook her head and bit her lip. How many times had she had to deliver bad news? Edge wondered suddenly, feeling terrible.
“We don’t know what’s wrong with her,” she said straight out. “The fever may have been like the earlier one; it’s difficult to tell without injecting her with anything what the cause was, and she needs her blood, so we can’t do blood tests. The most I could do without harming the baby was give her a painkiller.”
The tension stayed with Edge, rooting itself in a little niche in his body somewhere between his ribs and radiating faintly.
“You can go in and see her, if you want,” the nurse said as if that was some consolation. Her hand caught out and stilled Edge before he opened the door, however. “Just—be careful. She was about to go into early labor when she arrived. She was lucky not to miscarry.”
Lucky, Edge thought, not sure how to take that and the implications of the rest of the nurse’s statement. He swung the glass door open and as quietly as he could, came over to Cath’s bedside, slipped off his shoes, and gently gathered Cath into his arms, kissing the back of her neck. She stirred a little but didn’t wake.
He forgot his reasons for hating Bono. The man would probably react the same way, if not even more out of control.
Songs made their way through the back of Edge’s mind, and inwardly laughed, thinking of how silly the record seemed suddenly. An album about their childhood and their fears and desires, when really all he wanted was here, in his arms, and the life inside of her held more thrall over him than lyrics.
It’d be interesting if she had a boy, Edge thought sleepily. What an ironic album we’re producing...
So that's what Paul Hewson does when he's angry.
There's a lack of spaces in Edge's thoughts, at brief points in this. Just bear with it; it's necessary to get the point across.
I like this chapter a lot more than Chapter 15; I managed to write what I set out to write for today. Ramones...and Edge...made it much much easier than last night's writing.
***
What seemed like ages after the set had ended, Paul climbed down from the stage, the tension building in his limbs perfect for parting the crowd before him. He didn’t know that Cath was gone; a jagged anger had burned through him at what he saw…
Just a boy walking to school, that day, if it had been any other day. He looked up at the yawning windows and turned down a narrow street on his way, flattening against the wall when the door ahead of him, the paint cracked, shot open and a girl glared inside then tensed as if about to run, before a man inside shouted, leaning solidly out the doorway threatening, face turning red as a baby’s. She sprang and ran anyway, hurling something back in response that was unintelligible to Paul.
For some reason, he remembered her widened eyes as she paused in running and saw him. They had latched into his subconscious and held her tightly in his thoughts.
He didn’t realize, the night he met Cath, that he had seen her before. She had seemed much younger, that first time they laid eyes on each other, and looked like she would bolt away from him, or anyone. The Cath he knew had gained rough edges and a sort of challenging sadness in her eyes…
It was enough that the other man was heading for where Cath had gone. Bono had noticed in a sort of unconscious physical instant that Cath had gone that way, the rest of his awareness calculating the strength of his body and focused on the near distance.
Adrenaline and fear sharpened Bono’s sight. He clenched his fist. Grabbing the back of the man’s dirty jacket, he turned him around and grinned exultantly as he swung his fist forward.
The light tore at Cath’s eyes when she awoke, though it was only moonlight filtering in dimly from the window. There was a tightness in the back of her neck and her shoulderblades, needle-sharp, as if anchored to her bones. If she didn’t move, it subsided to a slight ache.
With awareness of the rest of her body, she noticed also her bare feet, the coat around her shoulders, and the faint warmth at her back. She turned her head, wincing, and her pillow shifted: Edge shook his head and opened his eyes from a light sleep, and that they were on a couch she didn’t really recognize, in a room she faintly did.
“Why are we at your house?” Cath asked.
Edge tore his mind away from staring at her: the Cath he was used to, the healthy, comfortable Cath, was a shell around Cath now: her eyes burned brightly though she held her head gingerly and the edges of her expression hinted at pain. She was very pale, and made no move to move her hair out of her face.
“It’s 2 AM,” Edge said. Cath noticed suddenly how tired he looked. “I waited with you for Bono to come back, but he hasn’t yet. I had no way of dropping you off at his place—and I wanted to be sure nothing went wrong, just in case.”
Her eyes rested on him. “Thank you,” she said seriously, then winced again and pillowed her head against his chest and arm again: it felt like the world was spinning around her, holding her in a strange grip, viselike around her head. Her breathing grew deeper and she dropped off into sleep.
Edge’s thoughts kept wandering back to her with the rise and fall of her breath pushing against him. She had been very light, he’d noticed when carrying her. He tried to decipher the hints of old Cath in her sleeping expression, and had a sudden odd thought. What if things had happened differently? What if Edge, walking back to his house four months ago after the band played in the bar, exhilarated, had happened upon Cath instead? And…<i>nothing bad would have happened...and there would be no problems and nothing wrong...</i>
He blinked, Cath’s forehead digging into his arm making his mind fall away gradually from this odd dual universe: it hadn’t happened that way.
He stayed awake for a while, wondering where the hell Bono was, no longer secretly pleased the singer was occupied, the worry about Cath too great.
He realized he had drifted off to sleep when in the dead of night, everything silent in the muffled late hour, he felt a pressure around his wrist that he couldn’t shake off. His heart pounded and his eyes shot open. He could make out in the faint light that just barely revealed Cath’s face that she was looking at him, eyes wide open. Her hand gripped his arm tightly, the light flashed across her eyes, and all at once she nearly fell off the couch, her head knocking hard against his side like a fist. Edge winced, his heart hammering.
“It hurts, Edge,” Cath whispered tightly, her eyes luminous. Very gently, he stood up and gripped her arms. “It’s okay,” he willed it to be. “Shh.” He held her and wrapped his coat back around her, hoping to dear God she hadn’t had a miscarriage. He assumed not, but he felt suddenly young and unsure.
Cath’s finger dug into his skin. “Edge,” she half-yelled tiredly, tears glinting across her face, “stop the pain.” Her voice was ragged and scared Edge to death. She buried her head into his neck and sobbed, the tears running down Edge’s shirt. He extricated her from him and looked at her wildly. His body ached from the various small wounds or bruises she had inadvertently inflicted on him.
“Cath, there’s not that much I…” His sleepless mind screamed at him, tightening around his heart further. Something broke within him, in the light on the tears smudged on her face, her broken expression. With an edge of frantic worry, his arms coming around her tightly as if she would slip away into nothing, he looked terrified at her face and without realizing it was kissing her.
Oh, god. His senses exploded as his mind stood back. Fire shot through his lips down his body and electrified his nerves that were already overloaded with fear for Cath. Even that fell away for a glorious instant as he tried to pull away, the kiss softening, his lips brushing against hers gently.
What the hell was he doing?
All he could think was whatifshedieswhatifshe—the barriers he had unconsciously put around his emotions hours before had been swept away into a tumultuous uproar, letting the crippling fear back in, making his body shake.
He tried to extricate himself but could not: his teenage instinct and repressed longing had kicked in. At last he violently came to his senses when Cath inadvertently bit his lip. Pain seared briefly across his awareness: he jumped back, trembling, then fell forward to catch Cath, who was falling. In doing so, her forehead came into contact with the back of his arm. It was hot as a burning brand.
“Oh, shit,” Edge whispered, voice breaking, as he steadied Cath. He stood where he was, in shock, then cradling the woman in his arms, grabbed his coat with his free hand and ran to the car.
Bono was somewhere unknown, doing who the hell knows what. It was Bono who should be dealing with this, though Edge realized the other boy would probably be even more scared than he was.
He ran a red light on the way to the hospital, thinking why do ambulances do that when normal cars might also have people dying in them? Fortunately no other cars were around. He didn’t much care at this point, however.
He once again was shut out into the waiting room, drumming his fingers anxiously against the plastic orange chairs, too much energy trapped inside of him. The concept of sleep was a joke, after the events of the last few hours. His mind was stuck on two different tracks, the first the constant whatifshedies, pausing briefly to rail at Bono, then continuing and going to the back of his mind but keeping him awake. Those thoughts were, if anything, more frantic than they ever had been before; his burning desire had burst through him like an avalanche, leaving Edge in shock, deeply attached to Cath. He wanted all at once to finish the kiss he had started, explain everything, and was gripped too by a desire to punch Paul in the face—though that urge had lessened; Edge felt oddly forgiving.
We kissed.
Whatifshe’sdyingwhatifit’samiscarriageIcan’tletBonotakeherfrommenow
All this frantic confusion became a fast-paced song inside Edge’s head, illuminating the short hours of the morning with stagelights and the roar of his thoughts.
He had fallen asleep against the hard unforgiving plastic chairs, despite himself, the lighting less fierce against his eyes. A hand hesitantly shook his shoulder. He looked up to see the nurse.
“Sorry, my shift hadn’t started and there’s a policy that we don’t let people who aren’t patients into the hospital rooms.” She seemed like she wished that wasn’t the policy.
Edge yawned faintly, straightening his shirt and stretching. He then caught the look in the nurse’s eye and his hands fell dead to his sides, the crippling fear rising in him again. …he hadn’t known he could care about someone more than himself…that it could overtake everything…
“Is there something I should know?”
She hesitated, fidgeting with her nails.
“Why don’t you come outside her room? It might make it—“
…easier? Yeah, likely. He suddenly dismissed the thought that the nurse thought he was Cath’s boyfriend: really, caring about that all meant nothing, in the face of—
Edge was already heading there, desperate to know what was going on.
The walls into patients’ rooms were glass, for some reason, and hers shone faintly with the hospital lights. The blinds had been drawn aside. Edge could make out Cath huddled or curled up on the hospital bed, the sheets tucked over her, her back to him. It really didn’t reveal anything—though the relief that she was alive bubbled giddily through his mind—and only made him more anxious.
Resultingly, he was a little less than patient. “What happened?” he asked the nurse tersely.
“Well, there’s good news and bad news.”
“I’ll take the good news first,” Edge said, unable to breathe. Bad news, he thought with dread…how in hell could there be good news if there was bad?
The nurse smiled. “The baby’s fine.”
Edge could breathe again, then couldn’t, catching how she’d stressed slightly the first two words.
“And—Cath?” he asked weakly.
The nurse shook her head and bit her lip. How many times had she had to deliver bad news? Edge wondered suddenly, feeling terrible.
“We don’t know what’s wrong with her,” she said straight out. “The fever may have been like the earlier one; it’s difficult to tell without injecting her with anything what the cause was, and she needs her blood, so we can’t do blood tests. The most I could do without harming the baby was give her a painkiller.”
The tension stayed with Edge, rooting itself in a little niche in his body somewhere between his ribs and radiating faintly.
“You can go in and see her, if you want,” the nurse said as if that was some consolation. Her hand caught out and stilled Edge before he opened the door, however. “Just—be careful. She was about to go into early labor when she arrived. She was lucky not to miscarry.”
Lucky, Edge thought, not sure how to take that and the implications of the rest of the nurse’s statement. He swung the glass door open and as quietly as he could, came over to Cath’s bedside, slipped off his shoes, and gently gathered Cath into his arms, kissing the back of her neck. She stirred a little but didn’t wake.
He forgot his reasons for hating Bono. The man would probably react the same way, if not even more out of control.
Songs made their way through the back of Edge’s mind, and inwardly laughed, thinking of how silly the record seemed suddenly. An album about their childhood and their fears and desires, when really all he wanted was here, in his arms, and the life inside of her held more thrall over him than lyrics.
It’d be interesting if she had a boy, Edge thought sleepily. What an ironic album we’re producing...
