AnCatKatie
Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
Sorry I've been offline so much; I'm on vacation right now without internet, so I'm grabbing my 5 minutes of internet right now to post this...
Isaac's scaring me...
and I'll have a good '86 one soon, I promise! Sorry about all the '78.
***
The darkness of unconsciousness clutched at Isaac with bloodred hands. He was aware, as if looking at himself from very far away, of the bartender, Seamus Fairleigh, hauling him somewhere. He opened his eyes a little, a powerful nausea gripping behind his ribs, his head pounding with the vertigo of seeing the ground. A steady sharp kernel of pain radiated down to his legs.
"Fucking hell," Seamus had said when Isaac stumbled into the bar collapsing before he could even sit down, and slammed the keys onto the bar with the harsh ring of metal. Someone else would have to close up. He swung his head sharply to look out the rain-fogged window and saw the door of the Black Cat swing open, sharp footsteps coming from the girl who entered. Oh, good, someone who wasn't drunk.
He handed his daughter the keys and she glared stubbornly at him, stating loudly in Gaelic that she hadn't come in to do his job for him, but she caught the keys with a fast reflex and pocketed them, crossing her skinny arms and glaring hell at anyone else in the bar who so much as looked at her. Cath ducked her head and looked out of the corner of her eye, confused, at the man who had just collapsed. That was the first she saw of Isaac.
He was aware again of Seamus slamming him down none too gently so that he sat. "What the hell happened to you?" the man asked, crossing his arms. He was distinctive as a thumbprint, thick-faced and calm-eyed and quick-tempered, and drained in and out of Isaac's sight.
"I got...shot..." Isaac choked out in shock, his head and chest slumping against his knees. His skull pounded with the pain from the wound, as if it ripped and buckled like the ground during an earthquake. He clenched his fingers around his leg-the bleeding and shattering pain came from somewhere above, but this helped a little-and saw little numb spots in his vision before the blood came back to his head.
Seamus breathed out sharply in irritation and in one motion slung Isaac over his shoulder, and so Isaac was spared the look he would, of course, get from the other man because he was shot: wondering what Isaac had done that caused that, guessing quite a few probable explanations, none of them on this side of the law.
Every footstep of his jolted a screeching, ripping feeling through Isaac's head and body until that faded into a dull roar.
Why did Ruth...
...want to leave me...
If he wasn't drained of all strength, it would have flooded back to him in anger. The thought of that was too much already, however, and dragged the consciousness out of him.
*
Larry kissed Eve awake. It had been a week since Ruth was gone and they went looking for her and eventually wandered home tired, their hopes she was all right dwindling sparks. Eve turned over and sighed, unwilling to open her eyes yet. She had been caught in a sort of silence for the past few days, out of worry, the world rushing around her while she was still. Or at least, in the few moments when the world wasn't encompassed by Larry; for the most part, her troubles were sucked away by his presence, shadows erased by the sun.
She opened her eyes finally, slowly, her gaze trailing over him like water. He was smiling, and trying hard not to laugh.
"What is it, Lar?"
"I was assuming you'd sleep later, since we stayed up til...a while..."
She shoved him, rolling her eyes, and snickered when they both fell out of bed. The sun warmed their skin.
It was so easy to just forget about everything, around him. She had occasional lapses of returning to her normal life, when he had to go to school-"I'm dropping out," he told her seriously, coming home one day-"I mean, I'm a drummer in a band, and school isn't getting me anywhere..." She went with him occasionally, which was interesting; she laughed that she was still sort of an unnoticed shadow even in the presence of others, although they had grown together like two trees. Larry was just as silent at times. They didn't always need to speak around each other: there was a heavy, exhilarating sense of what the other felt from minute changes in expression, in the way they looked in the light, in the temperature of their skin. Eve realized, today when she woke, that from that absence that was Ruth, Larry had taken root: she was starting to feel like she knew him better sometimes than she knew herself.
She pushed herself lazily off the floor, swatting Larry again playfully-he yelped and tackled her and somehow they managed to get clothes on despite it- In that moment before she had woken, she remembered when they separated again so she could pull her shirt over her head, she had sensed something different pulling at her thoughts from inside her body or her head and somewhere distant at once, a little emptiness, the darkness behind her closed eyes briefly a dirty street jolting by like she was running. And a panic that was definitely Ruth's.
Help, that panic said without words, with a fist pulling around Eve's ribs,
HelpstayawayI'vedonesomethingIshouldn'thave
HelpwhatwillIdo...what will...
See, this was probably why Eve didn't go to school most of the time. She would inevitably reveal something vaguely odd like this, or write down something Ruth was thinking about on a test, and everything would go downhill from there.
"Well, Lar," Eve yawned, pulling her hair out from where it had been trapped under her shirt and feeling the cold floor beneath her bare feet, "I have this strange feeling Ruth is looking for me."
"She might be," Larry said, "but Eve, we haven't been able to find her. She's probably either run away with or escaped this Aodan bugger."
"Mm," Eve commented, distracted by the fluid darkness evaporating from her mind. She couldn't remember what the street she'd seen looked like, only that it looked familiar. Larry pressed himself against her and strangely enough, a flash of the image of that frantically seen street came back with total clarity before it disappeared again.
Must have been because I closed my eyes...?
She kissed him hard, that fear that wasn't hers dissipating. They wandered outside with a cup of tea Larry spilled all over the doorstep when he looked at her, and lay down with the grass making tall buildings around them, the whisper of the wind carrying no hint of Ruth's whereabouts.
Larry went inside, after a long charged silence where the sounds of the wind and the grass dissipated into background noise, probably to go to the bathroom or something. So Eve thought she was dozing off into a dream when she heard footsteps. Her heart thudded and the hairs on her neck rose and settled back down. She sat bolt straight up, standing wide-eyed and frozen in the grass, and then waded through it until the brick of the porch scraped against her feet. She wasn't imagining it. She wouldn't have given that tiredness to the Ruth in her mind, or that spark of leftover fear from whatever had happened to her. Ruth's eyes were bright, her clothes disheveled. Eve had imagined her, at least, with a backpack or a suitcase or something. But her hands were empty.
Ruth hugged her hard. When Eve could see her again, she was amazed at the immediacy in her sister's eyes. It was a look like the world had ended.
Without a word, Ruth began to charge past her into the house, before Eve caught her with a hand on her shoulder and drew her against the wall.
"Ruth! What the hell happened? Where were you? What happened to your clothes?"
Ruth just began to laugh with disbelief, before that laughter shattered and became a frantic silence again.
She told her sister, unspeakably glad at least someone would know what was going on, what had happened.
"What are you going to do?" Eve asked quietly, overwhelmed. Of all things, she didn't seem worried about Isaac. She didn't want to be the one who said, I knew it about him. I knew he was like that, maybe before I knew him. She just glanced down at Ruth's belly sadly.
"You know that money our parents set aside in case anything happened?"
Eve nodded numbly.
"There might be enough for me to be able to go somewhere. Anywhere." She laughed. "I've always wanted to go to America..." Ruth bit her lip, seeing Eve again like they had never grown apart, like nothing bad had ever happened. She felt suddenly weak. She didn't want to leave. If none of this had happened...if Isaac had never been there in the rain when Ruth was passing by, if she had never seen him...but it was like a brush with gunsmoke, unchangeable. Like death: you couldn't go back.
"Don't leave, Ruth," Eve pleaded, standing forlorn with one foot in the grass, one on the porch, gripping the wall hard like it had replaced one of her legs as support. All those years when nothing had been confusing came back, and Ruth felt torn.
The next moment weighed heavily on her. She felt a sudden longing for this house, for the sunlight dripping between the trees too close to the neighbors' yard, for the cramped kitchen and the bedroom she avoided. And a sudden all-encompassing need to stay where she was slammed into her senses. She unclenched the fingers of her mind from that thought and let it dissipate painfully into the wind.
"Don't tell Lar," Ruth asked. Eve, startled, could see what she thought-well, she certainly wasn't surprised at the truth about Isaac, this was just worse than she expected. And a little bit of Ruth seemed happy when she said Larry's name. Eve smiled sideways, an odd confused bittersweet smile. A bird called, trapped in the beams of the neighbors' roof. There was the sound of Larry walking to the front door. Their thoughts were the same, briefly, Ruth and Eve's...
And the stillness was shattered and the same, for Ruth was gone as soon as she had come, disappearing into the house when Larry came out and Eve distracted him. She did not see Ruth leave, she just hoped the money was enough for it all to work out.
Larry did not wonder at that look in Eve's eyes, like she had just seen a ghost or a death. He brushed his thumb across her cheek and she buried her head against his shoulder so she wouldn't cry. When she looked up again, pressing her lips to his, the light reflected momentarily in her eyes to become an ocean that would separate her and Ruth, light on the water somewhere on the shores of America.
*
"I don't like that man," Ali had said seriously to Bono Vox a few days after that fight in the bar. He knew who she was talking about.
"I don't know if Ruth likes him either," she pressed, turning the spiky-haired boy around and looking at him pointedly in that way she had. He sighed. Ali, Ali, Ali, why did she always think the worst, of late?
"She can choose who she's with, love," he rolled his eyes. Ali raised her eyebrows. "It's not about that. She didn't look very happy with him."
"Okay, what the hell are you trying to say?" he asked quietly, shoving his hands in his pockets. The air, still cool for April, was icy fists between them, freezing the hurt in his eyes. "Is this a roundabout way of saying you're not happy with me? I can't be around for you all the time, Ali. I have to be there for the band too, you know that," he said seriously.
I love you, Alison Stewart, his mind played over and over brokenly. Why did it seem like something was going between them, like their relationship was ending before it began? He loved her more than air in his lungs...or he had. He wasn't sure sometimes, and that scared him. She'd filled that God-shaped hole his mother's death had punched through him. Maybe things weren't supposed to start that quickly, try as he might to convince himself otherwise.
"No," she protested, "that's not what I meant at all. I'd give you to the band if that's what would make everything work out."
I already have, she thought. You're slipping away. While she tried to hold onto him so tight it hurt.
"Ruth'll be fine," Bono reassured her softly. They both looked down as if they had forgotten, at his hand in hers. His hand bringing warmth back to her fingers against the still stinging chill of the air.
And we'll be fine...
won't we? We will...
**
Seamus tried to pull out the bullet, first, and Isaac yelled at him, white-faced, seeing his blood in front of him and little else, and the sharp tugging that wasn't very conclusive, before he passed out again with the sickly, salty sting of blood connecting him to the waking world, pounding inside of his head.
He was locked with very little strength, by the time they got to the hospital, and unable to correct Seamus when the man said Isaac's name was Oisín, although he did look at him confusedly.
"Oh, make no mistake, I know you do not want the authorities to know who got shot and why. You look enough like my son that I can pass you off as him well enough in this tiny place."
It wasn't much of a hospital, it sounded like; Isaac could hear passing cars tearing over the street outside, and the anesthetic didn't really do its job, only numbed his mind as he saw from a great distance little shards of metal being pulled out from the bleached whiteness of his hip. That there was bone and that was skin...that was a fragment of a bullet...even the sight stung after a while, and the shards of it mixed in his mind from the occasional sharp questions from Seamus Fairleigh.
"When did that bomb go off, Isaac?" The nurses were out of earshot. Or perhaps this was days afterwards, when the waves of the painkillers confused his perception and time and place wavered in and out with the pain. He stared up, agitated, at Seamus, everything beyond the man's hard face wavering nauseatingly in and out of focus.
"What bomb?" He coughed. Maybe it was days later; his ribs hurt when he coughed from the thick bandage that reached from his chest to his hip. Or that might be the anesthesia...even the air weighed down on him until he felt practically drunk, confused...
"That single one, from last year. It was in Belfast. It..."
Seamus' disapproving face became blank as it swam out of Isaac's sight. He could feel the sting of sharp heat at his back and the concussing thud of the air...he was being hurled again into a wall far away from the target...a nurse telling him it was a pity the bastard who had set off the bomb wasn't among the injured or dead, and fate was cruel...
I got injured in Belfast, Seamus. I might be injured again. I'm not going to tell you shit.
He blinked, shaking, looked up and saw Seamus again. "That wasn't me. I was carrying it for..."
His voice faded out from his hearing.
About two days later, he had the thick bandage wound around his ribs and another around his hip, which couldn't sting because of all the pressure but still did, and Seamus was still convinced that maybe the IRA had something to do with the bullet that had been in Isaac's side. Whatever. He was too exhausted to correct him. He wasn't entirely sure about what had transpired; the lines of perception and reality had blurred uncomfortably in the past few days.
"Stop asking me, Seamus!" he yelled, slamming his fist down on the bar. It was empty, since it was early morning and the Black Cat, without its bartender temporarily, closed for a brief holiday. Well, empty save for the two of them, as far as Isaac could tell. He'd tried to push away and head back towards the home he wasn't allowed in anymore, but collapsed and had to make due with staying with this man who asked too many questions.
His ears rang, his ribs hurt, his face felt numb and his hip still felt an echo of shattering pain. The darkness around felt like a vast tunnel he sank into, the lights from outside screaming across his vision. He reached past Seamus, and, still shaking a little, uncapped a bottle of liquor and sucked the life out of it, trembling and letting the bottle fall onto the bar he slumped his head and shoulders upon.
He coughed, and when he coughed, there was a little speck of blood, though he hid it. It stopped being a problem. He regained some of his strength after falling into a stupor for the next few days. He was aware of someone taking him into a house, and yelled that he wasn't supposed to be there, his da would kill him, maybe he could kill him first, and heard Seamus telling him to shut up.
It was a surfacing almost thought: Ruth...
Cath looked warily at this man and accepted as best she could whatever her father's lies about him were. She stayed where she was, on the couch, but she had to move eventually so he-Isaac-could sleep there. When her father had fallen into a muttering sleep, she approached the huddled, pale, tortured-looking man. His eyes reflected the headlights. She stepped back even more warily.
"I don't know why you're here, but it's probably not for any good reason," she told him, crossing her arms. He just tilted her head and looked at her. His fist clenched and unclenched.
She went upstairs and turned on a record to drown out his occasional pained cries: his painkillers were wearing off, and he still had the ghost of the shock from before. Her heart thudded. There was something very, very wrong about the way he had looked at her. Had he seen her before?
Ruth, swirled in and out of his head.
A short glimpse of a day fresh with fallen leaves, the puddles on the ground sky mirrors footsteps obliterated. Curious, Isaac had wandered with Ruth to her school briefly, feeling out of place in his worn clothes, out of place and cold. She smiled and laughed when he jokingly pointed out what was likely the most pressing secret of people passing by. "And yours?" she'd asked, amusement in her eyes. He'd shrugged, become cautious, and found the opportunity to escape because her classes were starting.
He thought the schoolday was over in midday; he'd been to school a couple times, not many. He'd spent more time in the bare boards of his house, in forced silence while his father meddled with gunpowder and fuse. He ended up waiting outside for a few hours, pulling his hat over about half his face in case anyone recognized him. The tiny pool of water a few feet away from his feet was shattered into fragments of sky and then mud, as Ruth finally came over. He looked up, surprised: she waved to someone else, who laughed and called out something in rapid Gaelic.
"Who was that?" he asked curiously.
"My friend Cathlin..."
The idea was less dangerous than explosives. It sent hardly even a warning across his mind. Beneath the faint pain of his hip-nearly gone now-there was an even deeper residual pain of Ruth deciding to be wrenched away from him. Choosing to leave him. He still felt like he stood staring in shock after her as the gun dropped from her equally shocked fingers and she ran.
That pain was a deeper ache, beyond his ribs, that cracked him open to senselessness. Calculated, though he drifted somewhere in the darkness that hurt. It stung and it healed: the beginnings of the idea punched into his mind like flowers of red, blood dripping from him.
Ruth had shattered the sky. Ruth had put the world into pieces that stared at him and accused him of things he had done.
He could trace his way back...not through her but through someone else...and he could hurt her back. Indirectly. And he wouldn't be stopped.
Isaac's scaring me...
and I'll have a good '86 one soon, I promise! Sorry about all the '78.
***
1978
The darkness of unconsciousness clutched at Isaac with bloodred hands. He was aware, as if looking at himself from very far away, of the bartender, Seamus Fairleigh, hauling him somewhere. He opened his eyes a little, a powerful nausea gripping behind his ribs, his head pounding with the vertigo of seeing the ground. A steady sharp kernel of pain radiated down to his legs.
"Fucking hell," Seamus had said when Isaac stumbled into the bar collapsing before he could even sit down, and slammed the keys onto the bar with the harsh ring of metal. Someone else would have to close up. He swung his head sharply to look out the rain-fogged window and saw the door of the Black Cat swing open, sharp footsteps coming from the girl who entered. Oh, good, someone who wasn't drunk.
He handed his daughter the keys and she glared stubbornly at him, stating loudly in Gaelic that she hadn't come in to do his job for him, but she caught the keys with a fast reflex and pocketed them, crossing her skinny arms and glaring hell at anyone else in the bar who so much as looked at her. Cath ducked her head and looked out of the corner of her eye, confused, at the man who had just collapsed. That was the first she saw of Isaac.
He was aware again of Seamus slamming him down none too gently so that he sat. "What the hell happened to you?" the man asked, crossing his arms. He was distinctive as a thumbprint, thick-faced and calm-eyed and quick-tempered, and drained in and out of Isaac's sight.
"I got...shot..." Isaac choked out in shock, his head and chest slumping against his knees. His skull pounded with the pain from the wound, as if it ripped and buckled like the ground during an earthquake. He clenched his fingers around his leg-the bleeding and shattering pain came from somewhere above, but this helped a little-and saw little numb spots in his vision before the blood came back to his head.
Seamus breathed out sharply in irritation and in one motion slung Isaac over his shoulder, and so Isaac was spared the look he would, of course, get from the other man because he was shot: wondering what Isaac had done that caused that, guessing quite a few probable explanations, none of them on this side of the law.
Every footstep of his jolted a screeching, ripping feeling through Isaac's head and body until that faded into a dull roar.
Why did Ruth...
...want to leave me...
If he wasn't drained of all strength, it would have flooded back to him in anger. The thought of that was too much already, however, and dragged the consciousness out of him.
*
Larry kissed Eve awake. It had been a week since Ruth was gone and they went looking for her and eventually wandered home tired, their hopes she was all right dwindling sparks. Eve turned over and sighed, unwilling to open her eyes yet. She had been caught in a sort of silence for the past few days, out of worry, the world rushing around her while she was still. Or at least, in the few moments when the world wasn't encompassed by Larry; for the most part, her troubles were sucked away by his presence, shadows erased by the sun.
She opened her eyes finally, slowly, her gaze trailing over him like water. He was smiling, and trying hard not to laugh.
"What is it, Lar?"
"I was assuming you'd sleep later, since we stayed up til...a while..."
She shoved him, rolling her eyes, and snickered when they both fell out of bed. The sun warmed their skin.
It was so easy to just forget about everything, around him. She had occasional lapses of returning to her normal life, when he had to go to school-"I'm dropping out," he told her seriously, coming home one day-"I mean, I'm a drummer in a band, and school isn't getting me anywhere..." She went with him occasionally, which was interesting; she laughed that she was still sort of an unnoticed shadow even in the presence of others, although they had grown together like two trees. Larry was just as silent at times. They didn't always need to speak around each other: there was a heavy, exhilarating sense of what the other felt from minute changes in expression, in the way they looked in the light, in the temperature of their skin. Eve realized, today when she woke, that from that absence that was Ruth, Larry had taken root: she was starting to feel like she knew him better sometimes than she knew herself.
She pushed herself lazily off the floor, swatting Larry again playfully-he yelped and tackled her and somehow they managed to get clothes on despite it- In that moment before she had woken, she remembered when they separated again so she could pull her shirt over her head, she had sensed something different pulling at her thoughts from inside her body or her head and somewhere distant at once, a little emptiness, the darkness behind her closed eyes briefly a dirty street jolting by like she was running. And a panic that was definitely Ruth's.
Help, that panic said without words, with a fist pulling around Eve's ribs,
HelpstayawayI'vedonesomethingIshouldn'thave
HelpwhatwillIdo...what will...
See, this was probably why Eve didn't go to school most of the time. She would inevitably reveal something vaguely odd like this, or write down something Ruth was thinking about on a test, and everything would go downhill from there.
"Well, Lar," Eve yawned, pulling her hair out from where it had been trapped under her shirt and feeling the cold floor beneath her bare feet, "I have this strange feeling Ruth is looking for me."
"She might be," Larry said, "but Eve, we haven't been able to find her. She's probably either run away with or escaped this Aodan bugger."
"Mm," Eve commented, distracted by the fluid darkness evaporating from her mind. She couldn't remember what the street she'd seen looked like, only that it looked familiar. Larry pressed himself against her and strangely enough, a flash of the image of that frantically seen street came back with total clarity before it disappeared again.
Must have been because I closed my eyes...?
She kissed him hard, that fear that wasn't hers dissipating. They wandered outside with a cup of tea Larry spilled all over the doorstep when he looked at her, and lay down with the grass making tall buildings around them, the whisper of the wind carrying no hint of Ruth's whereabouts.
Larry went inside, after a long charged silence where the sounds of the wind and the grass dissipated into background noise, probably to go to the bathroom or something. So Eve thought she was dozing off into a dream when she heard footsteps. Her heart thudded and the hairs on her neck rose and settled back down. She sat bolt straight up, standing wide-eyed and frozen in the grass, and then waded through it until the brick of the porch scraped against her feet. She wasn't imagining it. She wouldn't have given that tiredness to the Ruth in her mind, or that spark of leftover fear from whatever had happened to her. Ruth's eyes were bright, her clothes disheveled. Eve had imagined her, at least, with a backpack or a suitcase or something. But her hands were empty.
Ruth hugged her hard. When Eve could see her again, she was amazed at the immediacy in her sister's eyes. It was a look like the world had ended.
Without a word, Ruth began to charge past her into the house, before Eve caught her with a hand on her shoulder and drew her against the wall.
"Ruth! What the hell happened? Where were you? What happened to your clothes?"
Ruth just began to laugh with disbelief, before that laughter shattered and became a frantic silence again.
She told her sister, unspeakably glad at least someone would know what was going on, what had happened.
"What are you going to do?" Eve asked quietly, overwhelmed. Of all things, she didn't seem worried about Isaac. She didn't want to be the one who said, I knew it about him. I knew he was like that, maybe before I knew him. She just glanced down at Ruth's belly sadly.
"You know that money our parents set aside in case anything happened?"
Eve nodded numbly.
"There might be enough for me to be able to go somewhere. Anywhere." She laughed. "I've always wanted to go to America..." Ruth bit her lip, seeing Eve again like they had never grown apart, like nothing bad had ever happened. She felt suddenly weak. She didn't want to leave. If none of this had happened...if Isaac had never been there in the rain when Ruth was passing by, if she had never seen him...but it was like a brush with gunsmoke, unchangeable. Like death: you couldn't go back.
"Don't leave, Ruth," Eve pleaded, standing forlorn with one foot in the grass, one on the porch, gripping the wall hard like it had replaced one of her legs as support. All those years when nothing had been confusing came back, and Ruth felt torn.
The next moment weighed heavily on her. She felt a sudden longing for this house, for the sunlight dripping between the trees too close to the neighbors' yard, for the cramped kitchen and the bedroom she avoided. And a sudden all-encompassing need to stay where she was slammed into her senses. She unclenched the fingers of her mind from that thought and let it dissipate painfully into the wind.
"Don't tell Lar," Ruth asked. Eve, startled, could see what she thought-well, she certainly wasn't surprised at the truth about Isaac, this was just worse than she expected. And a little bit of Ruth seemed happy when she said Larry's name. Eve smiled sideways, an odd confused bittersweet smile. A bird called, trapped in the beams of the neighbors' roof. There was the sound of Larry walking to the front door. Their thoughts were the same, briefly, Ruth and Eve's...
And the stillness was shattered and the same, for Ruth was gone as soon as she had come, disappearing into the house when Larry came out and Eve distracted him. She did not see Ruth leave, she just hoped the money was enough for it all to work out.
Larry did not wonder at that look in Eve's eyes, like she had just seen a ghost or a death. He brushed his thumb across her cheek and she buried her head against his shoulder so she wouldn't cry. When she looked up again, pressing her lips to his, the light reflected momentarily in her eyes to become an ocean that would separate her and Ruth, light on the water somewhere on the shores of America.
*
"I don't like that man," Ali had said seriously to Bono Vox a few days after that fight in the bar. He knew who she was talking about.
"I don't know if Ruth likes him either," she pressed, turning the spiky-haired boy around and looking at him pointedly in that way she had. He sighed. Ali, Ali, Ali, why did she always think the worst, of late?
"She can choose who she's with, love," he rolled his eyes. Ali raised her eyebrows. "It's not about that. She didn't look very happy with him."
"Okay, what the hell are you trying to say?" he asked quietly, shoving his hands in his pockets. The air, still cool for April, was icy fists between them, freezing the hurt in his eyes. "Is this a roundabout way of saying you're not happy with me? I can't be around for you all the time, Ali. I have to be there for the band too, you know that," he said seriously.
I love you, Alison Stewart, his mind played over and over brokenly. Why did it seem like something was going between them, like their relationship was ending before it began? He loved her more than air in his lungs...or he had. He wasn't sure sometimes, and that scared him. She'd filled that God-shaped hole his mother's death had punched through him. Maybe things weren't supposed to start that quickly, try as he might to convince himself otherwise.
"No," she protested, "that's not what I meant at all. I'd give you to the band if that's what would make everything work out."
I already have, she thought. You're slipping away. While she tried to hold onto him so tight it hurt.
"Ruth'll be fine," Bono reassured her softly. They both looked down as if they had forgotten, at his hand in hers. His hand bringing warmth back to her fingers against the still stinging chill of the air.
And we'll be fine...
won't we? We will...
**
Seamus tried to pull out the bullet, first, and Isaac yelled at him, white-faced, seeing his blood in front of him and little else, and the sharp tugging that wasn't very conclusive, before he passed out again with the sickly, salty sting of blood connecting him to the waking world, pounding inside of his head.
He was locked with very little strength, by the time they got to the hospital, and unable to correct Seamus when the man said Isaac's name was Oisín, although he did look at him confusedly.
"Oh, make no mistake, I know you do not want the authorities to know who got shot and why. You look enough like my son that I can pass you off as him well enough in this tiny place."
It wasn't much of a hospital, it sounded like; Isaac could hear passing cars tearing over the street outside, and the anesthetic didn't really do its job, only numbed his mind as he saw from a great distance little shards of metal being pulled out from the bleached whiteness of his hip. That there was bone and that was skin...that was a fragment of a bullet...even the sight stung after a while, and the shards of it mixed in his mind from the occasional sharp questions from Seamus Fairleigh.
"When did that bomb go off, Isaac?" The nurses were out of earshot. Or perhaps this was days afterwards, when the waves of the painkillers confused his perception and time and place wavered in and out with the pain. He stared up, agitated, at Seamus, everything beyond the man's hard face wavering nauseatingly in and out of focus.
"What bomb?" He coughed. Maybe it was days later; his ribs hurt when he coughed from the thick bandage that reached from his chest to his hip. Or that might be the anesthesia...even the air weighed down on him until he felt practically drunk, confused...
"That single one, from last year. It was in Belfast. It..."
Seamus' disapproving face became blank as it swam out of Isaac's sight. He could feel the sting of sharp heat at his back and the concussing thud of the air...he was being hurled again into a wall far away from the target...a nurse telling him it was a pity the bastard who had set off the bomb wasn't among the injured or dead, and fate was cruel...
I got injured in Belfast, Seamus. I might be injured again. I'm not going to tell you shit.
He blinked, shaking, looked up and saw Seamus again. "That wasn't me. I was carrying it for..."
His voice faded out from his hearing.
About two days later, he had the thick bandage wound around his ribs and another around his hip, which couldn't sting because of all the pressure but still did, and Seamus was still convinced that maybe the IRA had something to do with the bullet that had been in Isaac's side. Whatever. He was too exhausted to correct him. He wasn't entirely sure about what had transpired; the lines of perception and reality had blurred uncomfortably in the past few days.
"Stop asking me, Seamus!" he yelled, slamming his fist down on the bar. It was empty, since it was early morning and the Black Cat, without its bartender temporarily, closed for a brief holiday. Well, empty save for the two of them, as far as Isaac could tell. He'd tried to push away and head back towards the home he wasn't allowed in anymore, but collapsed and had to make due with staying with this man who asked too many questions.
His ears rang, his ribs hurt, his face felt numb and his hip still felt an echo of shattering pain. The darkness around felt like a vast tunnel he sank into, the lights from outside screaming across his vision. He reached past Seamus, and, still shaking a little, uncapped a bottle of liquor and sucked the life out of it, trembling and letting the bottle fall onto the bar he slumped his head and shoulders upon.
He coughed, and when he coughed, there was a little speck of blood, though he hid it. It stopped being a problem. He regained some of his strength after falling into a stupor for the next few days. He was aware of someone taking him into a house, and yelled that he wasn't supposed to be there, his da would kill him, maybe he could kill him first, and heard Seamus telling him to shut up.
It was a surfacing almost thought: Ruth...
Cath looked warily at this man and accepted as best she could whatever her father's lies about him were. She stayed where she was, on the couch, but she had to move eventually so he-Isaac-could sleep there. When her father had fallen into a muttering sleep, she approached the huddled, pale, tortured-looking man. His eyes reflected the headlights. She stepped back even more warily.
"I don't know why you're here, but it's probably not for any good reason," she told him, crossing her arms. He just tilted her head and looked at her. His fist clenched and unclenched.
She went upstairs and turned on a record to drown out his occasional pained cries: his painkillers were wearing off, and he still had the ghost of the shock from before. Her heart thudded. There was something very, very wrong about the way he had looked at her. Had he seen her before?
Ruth, swirled in and out of his head.
A short glimpse of a day fresh with fallen leaves, the puddles on the ground sky mirrors footsteps obliterated. Curious, Isaac had wandered with Ruth to her school briefly, feeling out of place in his worn clothes, out of place and cold. She smiled and laughed when he jokingly pointed out what was likely the most pressing secret of people passing by. "And yours?" she'd asked, amusement in her eyes. He'd shrugged, become cautious, and found the opportunity to escape because her classes were starting.
He thought the schoolday was over in midday; he'd been to school a couple times, not many. He'd spent more time in the bare boards of his house, in forced silence while his father meddled with gunpowder and fuse. He ended up waiting outside for a few hours, pulling his hat over about half his face in case anyone recognized him. The tiny pool of water a few feet away from his feet was shattered into fragments of sky and then mud, as Ruth finally came over. He looked up, surprised: she waved to someone else, who laughed and called out something in rapid Gaelic.
"Who was that?" he asked curiously.
"My friend Cathlin..."
The idea was less dangerous than explosives. It sent hardly even a warning across his mind. Beneath the faint pain of his hip-nearly gone now-there was an even deeper residual pain of Ruth deciding to be wrenched away from him. Choosing to leave him. He still felt like he stood staring in shock after her as the gun dropped from her equally shocked fingers and she ran.
That pain was a deeper ache, beyond his ribs, that cracked him open to senselessness. Calculated, though he drifted somewhere in the darkness that hurt. It stung and it healed: the beginnings of the idea punched into his mind like flowers of red, blood dripping from him.
Ruth had shattered the sky. Ruth had put the world into pieces that stared at him and accused him of things he had done.
He could trace his way back...not through her but through someone else...and he could hurt her back. Indirectly. And he wouldn't be stopped.
I have a bit left to write, but the story's probably ending in a couple chapters...weird how it's so much shorter than An Cat Dubh...
