Work Text:
He's never heard a gunshot before.
This simple fact he is certain of, but it's just one of those sounds you recognise. Like an instinct.
He goes back over the events in his mind.
It was a long walk home, made worse by the excruciating headache that had been building up all morning. Adrian wished he could've taken the car. But his dad had insisted that he needed it, so Adrian had relented and simply left forty minutes earlier than he normally would to walk Rayne and Zarah to school, before going himself. It was hot, and exhaustion nearly set in by the time he got there, but for once he decided to try cautious optimism, and hoped the headache would clear up.
It was not that merciful.
Somewhere around fourth period, the overhead lights in advanced calc had started feeling like tiny daggers being stabbed into his eyes, and Adrian had sunk deeper into his seat by the far wall of the room, biting down on one of the metal buttons of his denim jacket to distract himself. It didn't work. Pressure on his teeth only sent waves of pain up through his jaw bone, which the migraine pounced on in moments. He held out until the end of class, until the bell overhead rang so loudly it felt like his eyeballs were shaking, and he'd stumbled out after everyone else. Autopilot got him through swarms of his peers to the nurse's office, which was blissfully empty and air conditioned. She'd offered him aspirin and water, and finally, after his mumbled explanation had gone on for too long, she'd let him go.
Sunlight proved to be no less kind than the white bulbs of his math classroom, but Adrian jammed his baseball cap low on his head and stared intently down at the ground. He was halfway through the arduous walk home before he remembered he'd left his headphones and cigarette case in his locker. He pushed disappointment from his mind, tried to suffocate it with cautious optimism, and tried not to think too hard about the fact that he'd have to come all the way back out to pick his sisters up. Maybe the car would be free by then.
He identified his house by the shadow it cast on the sidewalk, the garage door closed and the car gone from the driveway. His dad must have taken it inside. It was a good idea. It was black, it'd absorb all the heat from the sun.
His dad usually parked in the driveway.
The front door was unlocked, the lights in the hallway off, but the air conditioning was on. Adrian untied his jacket from around his waist, where he'd transferred it to halfway home to combat the heat, and then he hears it.
He's never heard a gunshot before. This simple fact he is certain of, but it's just one of those sounds you recognise. Like an instinct.
Sharp and loud. Then a thud, muffled.
It's close. Inside the house.
The jacket slips out of his hands.
Adrian starts moving toward the garage door before he really has a chance to think about it. It has a lock on it that they'd only used when Rayne was little, because she had a habit of breaking into things, and his mother kept a blowtorch in the garage. His youngest sister had mostly grown out of it now. They don't need to use the lock anymore, so the door is't locked.
The Mercedes is parked inside, sleek black body shining under the automatic light. The light is already on when Adrian opens the door.
He's halfway down the four wooden steps that lead from the house to the concrete when the room starts to smell like blood.
Christian Steele's body is on the other side of the car. At the bottom of the steps, Adrian can only see his hand, his dad's left hand, with a silver wedding ring on his fourth finger. There's blood on that, too.
His mind doesn't want him to move, but his body does it anyway. He takes another step toward the car. Now he can see the pool of red spreading out toward the front wheels of the car, see the same color soaking into white fabric, the T-shirt his dad was wearing. He'd been wearing it that morning when they left for school. He'd waved goodbye with his left hand.
Adrian only catches a glimpse of what's left of his dad's head when his mind regains control over his body and wrenches him away. He trips himself back toward the stairs, hits the floor hard enough to bruise his hands. He's about eye level with the tyre of the car now. The blood has reached it, and it's drawing a line on the rubber. Adrian stands up.
The phone in the hall doesn't get used as often as the one in the kitchen, because the kitchen is closer to the middle of the house and there's not a lot of reason to make a call from the hallway. While it rings, Adrian notices he didn't shut the front door all the way. He doesn't move to fix it.
"911, what is your emergency?"
The voice on the other end sounds calm. Someone's day job. They have to be calm, because people call every day with horrible emergencies. People call and they're terrified. They need to speak to someone calm.
"I need an ambulance," Adrian says.
"What's happened?"
He would tell her, if he could piece it together in his mind. He puts the image of the garage back into his head. He hadn't been looking at his dad's right hand, but there had been something in it. Something silver, specked with blood.
No, that was the ring. The ring was silver. The object in his dad's right hand was black metal. Just like the car.
"He shot himself," Adrian says, quietly. It makes sense once it's been said. The emergency operator is asking him more questions, and he thinks he might be answering them but he doesn't double check as he speaks.
His head still hurts.
Eventually there is no more talking coming from the phone. Adrian replaces it in the holder on the wall and looks back toward the garage door. For a moment, he thinks he hears it again. The gunshot. That sound you just recognise.
He goes back into the garage. This time, the room smells like blood from the top of the stairs, too. This time he doesn't put a hand on the rail as he descends the steps, this time he walks all the way around the car in one breath.
Adrian is about the same height as his dad. They didn't get particularly tall genes, but they weren't short either. Five foot eight point two five, if he's remembering correctly.
Christian looks taller on the ground somehow. Adrian isn't sure he's ever seen him this still. Even asleep, his dad was restless. Moving or mumbling, if he was sleeping at all. Sometimes he fell asleep with his eyes open, or he said he did. Sometimes he just stared at nothing and called it a nap.
His eyes are closed now. Adrian thought dead bodies had their eyes open, but maybe that was only if you didn't know you were about to die. Christian must have closed his eyes himself. There's blood splattered all over the inside of the garage door where it used to be white.
The automatic light flicks off. Adrian must have been standing too still for the sensor to think he was still in the room. He could lift an arm to fix it, but he doesn't.
His dad doesn't, either.
Somebody knocks on the front door after a long while. Adrian is sitting on the stairs by then, listening out for sirens, but they didn't come. Just a knock.
The paramedics talk a lot when they get in. They follow him to the garage door, then push past to get into the room ahead of him. Adrian nearly follows but somebody catches his arm. A man, a little taller than him, with a kind smile and brown hair. He asks Adrian to go to the kitchen. Tells him to sit down, so he does. They both do.
The man talks for a while. He asks about his dad. Asks about Adrian. How old is he, is he alone, did he touch the body, is there someone they should call.
"How about your mother? Will she be home soon?"
Adrian shakes his head, because there's no point trying to explain.
"Can I take the car?" he asks.
The man stops. He looks confused.
"The car?"
Adrian nods. "In the garage. I need it. My dad has the keys."
"Why do you need the car?"
Adrian stares at him.
"I need to pick up my sisters. They're at school."
The brown haired man with the paramedics returns later to tell him that the garage is off limits now, so Adrian has to call his grandparents. He thinks he tells them about Christian, but he doesn't remember. They just promise to pick the girls up from school. The brown haired man with the paramedics says he can come along in the ambulance, since they're going to the hospital. His grandparents will meet them there.
Adrian is familiar with waiting rooms.
When his mom was pregnant with Rayne, there'd been complications. She'd had to go in for more tests and scans than she had with Zarah, and had spent three nights in the hospital for observation. He remembers walking the extra hour to the hospital after school one day to bring her flowers. She'd said she missed him. Asked about his MP3 player, the one he was building in his dad's old cigarette case. The next day, he'd brought it along to show her.
He's been in the ER before, because once he broke his wrist after falling off his bike. He'd taken Rayne too, when she was five, for a bad cough that turned out to be a chest infection. That was a year ago, and that was the last time Adrian had been here.
It's busy, but he thinks it's probably always busy. It's an emergency room, and people have emergencies all the time. Besides, this is the only one for ten miles at least.
He still doesn't know why he's here. The paramedics had told him to wait, and here he'd waited, but bringing his dad to an emergency room felt like a waste of time. He'd shot himself in the face. The barrel had to have been either under his chin or in his mouth from the way the back of his head had ended up mostly on the floor. There's no fixing that.
Definitive, that was what it was. A foolproof method of suicide.
It's a strange word. Not etymologically, obviously. The suffix -cide always refers to death, like homicide or regicide, and the root 'sui' comes from a Latin that means 'self.'
It's strange because it seems so simple. Three syllables, su-i-cide. A quick explanation for what feels like a supernova.
Adrian tries saying it out loud, once or twice. Quietly. It doesn't change. It still feels strange.
Somebody called his name a moment ago, but he'd forgotten to look up. Now, there's a familiar tiny body pulling herself up toward him, crawling onto his lap. Rayne is about the same size Zarah was when she was five, but she's stronger than she looks. She buries her face in his shoulder, sniffling but not crying. Adrian wonders briefly if she even understands. Maybe she doesn't, but she wants comfort anyway because she can feel it. Whatever it is. He wraps one arm around her, supporting her back, and she clings on tight.
Zarah sits on the plastic chair beside them. There's tear tracks on her face. She understands. She knows what guns do, she knows what suicide means. She's smart. She's always been smart. She's shaking but she's tentative to reach out, like she isn't sure what or how much space to take up. She's wearing the white cardigan she knitted last winter. She was so proud of it, and now parts of the wool are damp from tears. Adrian holds Rayne against his chest and reaches his other arm out to her, winding around her shoulders as she leans in. He presses his cheek to the curls of her hair, kisses her forehead lightly. Maybe now would be the time to speak, to test his voice for the first time since the kitchen with that paramedic. But there's nothing to say. Every beginning that starts to form in his mind falls short. None of the typical things seem truthful enough. He can't promise everything will be alright, and he can't say that they'll see their dad again. There's no logical answer to this question. Adrian isn't even sure he knows what the question is.
Two years ago, a man who lived on their street died. Mr Hobbs, who smoked a pipe and sometimes mowed his lawn in just his robe. There was an ambulance and a white sheet and Rayne was throwing wooden blocks around in the living room while Zarah read by the window. It was Zarah who'd heard the ambulance first. Adrian had followed his mom out to see what was happening. Zarah had asked him that night before bed what aneurysm meant. Adrian found an encyclopedia and read her the answer. Rayne had slept in her playpen and probably didn't remember a minute of it.
Mr Hobbs had been nice, but they didn't know him well. Zarah hadn't asked about aneurysms again. Adrian had understood it as a data point, something that filled in a gap in his world labeled 'Death.' It replaced his old understanding from movies. It happened very suddenly and people in the neighborhood stood outside their homes to watch you get taken away.
Adrian didn't know if anyone had watched Christian be taken away. He'd been inside with the paramedics.
"I've got you," is what finally slips out. It's a whisper, almost, only loud enough for his sisters to hear. It's all he can think of that's true.
He speaks again, later, to ask when they can go home. It's past dinner time. Rayne has tried to sneak away to the vending machine twice already. The brown-haired man with the paramedics speaks to their grandparents, and it comes out that no, they can't go home.
"It's best if you stay with your grandparents tonight," he says kindly, more to the girls than to Adrian. Rayne asks why, and no one answers.
Adrian thinks about the blood spattered across the garage door, and nods when Zarah looks at him in question. Rayne tugs at his hand– she doesn't want to walk anymore, so he picks her up. She wraps a little arm around his shoulder and lightly bumps her head against his. Zarah catches her sister's bag before it slides out of her hands, and carries it alongside her own.
Adrian thinks he might make a good 911 operator. They have to be calm, and he has been. Calm on the phone, and in the house, calm in the ambulance and the waiting room, calm with his sisters and his grandparents, calmly walked outside and calmly helped Rayne into her carseat, calmly held Zarah's hand and promised to get some of her books from the house tomorrow if they had to stay with their grandparents longer than a night. He was calm through making dinner, calmly set the table, calmly produced an answer when Rayne asked why Daddy wasn't with them.
He'd calmly cleared plates and calmly put the girls to bed and and calmly said goodnight and calmly gone to his own room and calmly shut the door behind him.
He'd been so fucking calm.
The roof above the guest bedroom window had become something of a sanctuary. It faced the garden behind the house, so nobody would see him from the street, and it was on away from the other bedrooms so nobody would hear him climb up.
It wasn't until he was up there that Adrian felt like he actually breathed all the way in. He sat with his back to the roof, toes of his shoes a few inches from the edge and his forearms resting on his knees, hands out in front of him. They shook. No matter how hard he concentrated and gritted his teeth and focused, he couldn't make them stop. He took the black band from around his wrist and wrangled his hair back, ripping out a couple stray pieces that brushed his face.
The roof was quiet, but his head wasn't. Even as the evening slowly melted into night, the sun set in the west and stars began to appear through thin clouds, he couldn't think about it. A too-black patch of sky was the hood of a car, the star specks were blood on a white garage door, Orion's bow was a gun in his father's motionless hand.
He'd left his headphones and his MP3 player in his locker. There was nothing to drown out his own racing thoughts, so he just covered his ears with his shaking hands and stared up at the sky.