Work Text:
Let me live
Through your vice
Mass appeal
I feel in ten breaths it's a miracle if we're still alive
- Figure 8, FKA Twigs
That day at the carousel, when his wife, his son, his little girl, had been murdered, something came undone in him. A stitch pulled loose and he’d been nothing but a hemorrhaging, open wound, flayed open and left to die.
He didn’t though. No, what he instead did, was find a tourniquet in violence, and rage, and death. He found that calm in the chaos, and it had kept him from bleeding out and dissolving into fear and grief. After Schoonover, after wiping out all those shitbag maggots, the Irish, the Cartel and anyone else that had the audacity to breath after snuffing the air from his family's lungs, he felt a little bit better. Like he’d tightened that loose stitch, and he wasn’t on the verge of bleeding out anymore.
But fucking Billy Russo just ripped it all out.
Fuck. Fuck,
Did you hear Uncle Billy Dad?
They had loved him. Maria, the kids, they had loved him and-
Maria kissing Billy’s cheek, “This is all the family you need, right here.”
And...and he couldn’t...he-
The only crime in war is to lose.
Karen leaned close and bit the last stitch, her face a shadow in his peripheral, her warm breath drifting across his skin. He still had the needle and thread between his fingers, ready to stitch of the gash where he’d ripped out the shrapnel. They had worked as a team, or at least tried too, Karen got her purple scissors and helped cut him out of his henley. Then without really saying much they focused on the more critical injuries, Karen took to stitching his head, he had ripped out that piece of shrapnel. She had assumed he would try to stitch that.
Instead she glanced down when he’d briefly lifted his blood covered arm, needle and thread between his fingers, before simply lowering it back down in the sink. Her eyes darted nervously to his in the mirror. His eyes were red and glassy and a thousand miles away. He looked traumatized.
When she finished the graze on his head, she gently touched his hand to take the needle and thread for his arm. His eyes snapped from where he’d been vacantly staring at his reflection to her, eyes so wide and wet and focused on only her her breath caught.
“It’s okay,” She said so softly all he could do was blink. “I got it.” And he looked down as she gently took the stitching out of his blood caked hand.
In the elevator, before she told him to go, before he pressed his feverishly hot forehead to her clammy, chilled one, she told him to find her after. He was so hurt, it broke her heart. She hated seeing him like this, and had felt a rush of fierce protectiveness, she wanted to wrap her arms around him to block him from the world, even if just for a minute, so he could breath safely.
What really broke her though, was how he didn’t even seem to care when she touched his arm with shrapnel sticking out, only giving it a quick glance, before returning his gaze to her. He could be down to his last ten breaths, and he’d use each one to look at her.
She didn’t think it was love, but it was something just as powerful. He looked at her like she was the only thing keeping him rooted to the earth, and if he lost sight of her for even a second, he’d be flung into space.
You find me, she had hissed. You find me after this.
After, when he went to leave, wearing a borrowed grey shirt from a past boyfriend, she caught him in a hug. He tensed and she released, but then gently touched his bruised face.
"Stay." She whispered. "Just for tonight, so I know you're okay." She knew she had to make it about her in order to get him to listen. She hated him for being so careless, and she hated herself for plying it. He was looking at her with that wounded, feral look again. "Please." She whispered again.
After a moment he nodded, grunting something low instead of speaking. She sighed in relief and pressed her face against his cheek, her eyelashes brushing his skin when she closed her eyes and she wrapped her arms around his neck and fisted his shirt in shaking hands. She gripped him so hard, like she'd never let go, and she felt his shoulders drop, before he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her just as tight. She felt him press his face into her neck, her hair, the roughness of his stubble against her soft skin and she felt him take a deep, shaky breath.
"Okay." He said so softly, she barely her heard him.
"Okay." She murmured, just as soft.
They stayed on her couch, side by side, her thin frame pressed into his.
He had planned for her to fall asleep first, then leave, but as two rolled around, exhausted beyond comprehension, he felt himself lay down, pillowing his head on her thigh. She slowly, gently, carded her finger tips though his hair, and as his eyes fluttered shut, for a moment, all his hurt, all his rage, bled out.
“Lost in Hell,-Persephone,
Take her head upon your knee;
Say to her, "My dear, my dear,
It is not so dreadful here.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay