No Love Lost, Chapter 14

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

AnCatKatie

Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
Joined
Nov 27, 2010
Messages
6,813
Location
pearl jammin'
Bad Lieutenant's a band. I couldn't resist the pun-ness.

This is kind of a...weird chapter. And we're almost full circle.

***

Chapter Fourteen. Blindness.


"Wear your guilt like skin
And keep your sins disguised...

I walked back inside of me
I'd gone back for my youth
As I came down the fire escape
It must have stayed up on the roof
They say you just know
And that knowing is the proof
"

—Ian McCulloch, "Candleland"​

Ciarán did not wake up afraid. He felt a faint ache where London had twisted his arms around his back, and his side throbbed.

It had seemed too easy, that his mother was alive, that he was still alive, that he’d heard just about everything put straight. Except. Except what London was afraid of. Ciarán wasn’t afraid.

But he was very, very hollow. The ship’s hull of his ribs was supported in its shape by nothing. It must be nothing. Some trick or anomaly, that he could be breathing, his bones rising and falling, yet he could feel a shivery absence. Like with one nudge he would collapse. Something (someone) he hadn’t known before it (she) was gone. He breathed out and let his eyelids blind him in hints of memory. There were traces there. Glimpses. Instants. He thought without pain of the only other girl he’d been in love with (and lost), because…he couldn’t remember her.

Somehow he’d already accepted it. He turned over and looked into startled grey.

“Not you, too,” Ciarán exclaimed.

“Afraid so,” Lou replied, then hauled himself to his feet, discarding a red pencil and a scrap of paper.

Ciarán looked around, afterimages of unhappy Lieutenant fading fast. Small room, little light, patch of something odd on one wall. He walked over to it and pulled his fingers over the oddness. It was rough and had little cracks of cold. Someone had boarded up the window. He knew where he was.

“So this is it. Second stairway room.”

“Yeah,” Lou replied.

“This is where Tommy died,” Ciarán said after a while. His hand was still on the boards across the window.

“Yeah,” a lot quieter.

Ciarán remained where he was. Eventually he drew his jacket around himself and tried opening the door. He tried putting his nail through the lock. He cut his finger. Knew there was no way. There was a timeworn peace in him, turning around and sitting again by the window. He tried looking out to see if it was any use. The cracks weren’t large enough. He laughed, remembering cracks in another wall, somewhere else he couldn’t escape from. Ran his hands over them nonetheless. The cold was like a river. He couldn’t grasp it. She slipped through his fingers in his mind.

The light outside was red. The day was fading. Or starting. He looked back up and once again met Lou’s eyes. He let the little reflections stay for a moment before a ghost of nothing dissipated. Sunset…sunrise? came around bloody red into the room. Lou remembered Ciarán was human, not image, after that pause. When he was asked, “how did she die?”

“I actually…I don’t know,” Lou said. “I wasn’t there.”

Ciarán looked away angrily.

“She was the second one,” he said. “The second one to die. It keeps happening.”

“I’m sorry…”

“It had nothing to do with you. …I don’t think.”

“You’re right it didn’t.”

Ciarán lowered his eyebrows. Something pushed out of him. He whirled around his hand shot out to grab Lou’s shoulder forcefully. Large head, wide eyes, shoulder tensing.

“Yeah, well how do I know?” Ciarán asked, his eyes narrowed. There was something beating, beating, beating its way inside of him, wanting a way out. Lou tried to duck away, looking at him in bewildered horror.

“Because I wouldn’t do that,” the other kid spat, shaking. He was cold (there were bruises on his bare chest). Even his head was cold. Cooly he tried to explain but there was nothing. As far as Ciarán knew it could have been anyone. “I wouldn’t,” Lieutenant was left with. Hair standing up (cold). Could have moved away but he let Ciarán’s grip dig into him. He tried to look him in the eye but Ciarán was just left with…something about the other boy standing there. Just standing there. Bruises under his skin. Finally Lou shoved him away hard. Ciarán’s eyes snapped wide. He couldn’t hear whatever explanation.

“Just get the fuck away from me, alright?” one of them said.

“Alright.”

Ciarán wrapped jacket-clad arms around himself, feeling miserable, his heart out of control. Life was catching up with him late. Starting to feel the effects of everything that had happened. Lou heard sounds, crying sounds, muffled by jacket. He came up and laid a cold hand on jacket clad arm.

“She’s dead. She’s not dead,” Ciarán exclaimed in muffled bewilderment and let himself be briefly enveloped in bruised cold.

He was minus a jacket in apology when the locked door opened and Ciarán forgot the weirdness of that argument. He lunged forward at London and knocked him down. He never got to hear the reason for whatever London had done. That would have meant a fatal pause.

“Hold him down,” Ciarán urged Lou while he thought. He stopped thinking. Found his fingers ripping a board from the window and the rest was a blur. Someone watched in the shadows with wide eyes. His were squeezed shut. He didn’t need to see that.

“He wasn’t dead, was he?” Ciarán asked, blowing on his freezing fingers. Lou looked down from the windowsill, his own fingers strained, before he jumped down as best he could. No shattering impact. It was a moment before he could construct an answer. A heart-pounding moment (he hadn’t fallen to his death).

(Yet there was a man up there with a little blood pooling around his light hair and a mouth open and eyes staring. Maybe gasping continued breaths, maybe not.)

“Does it matter?” Lou answered. He stuffed his own fingers into the pockets of a jacket that wasn’t his. There was something cold in there. Serpentine. A little loop, a ring. He reflexively handed it to Ciarán, who put it back on his thumb.

Must have been Corinne. Ciarán wouldn’t forget that easily, and the way he closed his eyes just then.

Bad Lieutenant. For keeping what little he didn’t know silent, as they picked their way through the city that flickered like afterimages. It was night, after all. In darkness the hollowness of eyes couldn’t be seen, or the painful rebirth. Very privately Ciarán let himself suffer for what had happened. He closed his eyes and remembered. Everything. When he opened them again, Lou was tapping his shoulder.

“Hey. C’mon. I found something else.”

Something crumpled and tight fell into Ciarán’s hand from a cold fist. Ciarán uncrumpled the huddled paper. He looked from the money to Lou’s face to the jacket and remembered he hadn’t had any money left.

“Spider must have…returned it,” Ciarán blinked.

“I think she knew,” came the reply.

“Knew what?”

Lieutenant had known Ciarán wouldn't stay. He could have ignored the postcard. He could have left the day and place uncircled. The knowledge of that hurt like a hand clamped over a bruise. Like fingers curling into skin. He just...cared too much.

“That you weren’t going to stick around.”

“I…I have somewhere to go, don’t I.”

The other boy hadn’t understood why Ciarán had stopped and stared at a particular poster. Just dates and places scrawled across it. Nothing special.

“You can come with me, if you want,” Ciarán said.

“No,” came the unexpected answer.

He didn’t understand. They’d just overcome evil, become evil, killed (or just harmed) a man. On the run or inseparable or something. And Ciarán still didn’t know what the stairwells, or London, or the drink or anything meant.

Or the look in Lieutenant’s eyes as he shook his head and pushed Ciarán in the direction of the airport. Ciarán wasn’t sure he heard it. One syllable.

“Her.” As an explanation.

One date and place had been circled on the poster, in red pencil, and a crumpled up postcard stared at the ceiling of the second stairwell’s room. An address that Lou had tried to decipher meaning of. Because how could she have gone that far? It seemed impossible, like something London would make up. Impossible hope that she’d be alive, and really, he almost wished she wasn’t. That he could run back after him and shout, “wait!” and the rest he wasn’t sure.

One word in Corinne’s handwriting: Where?
 
No worries. Rereading is good. I probably shoulda made a lot more obvious, I just...wasn't feeling it. Hence everything that happened.
 
I agree with Blue. That was weird. I remember who's who, so it's weird in a completely different way. :reject:

But it's really good.

(*gigglesnort* at Bad Lieutenant. Made me think of a Nicolas Cage movie....:reject:)
 
Yes, it is, isn't it? XD

I think it is a movie...that a certain already awesome band minus one thought was an awesome title and turned into a band :whistle:
 
Back
Top Bottom