Pacifier

🌹Camille🌙

The afternoon was hazy, sitting in the passenger seat of Johnny's car I felt heavy, the weight of Van's words lingering in the silence between me and John. He reached for my hand as he pulled away and felt his fingers graze my skin. I felt my hand held in his, his thumb finger drawing a slow circle around my palm as he concentrated on the road. 

I knew he could feel it too. The weight of our world stacked upon us, the way it grew heavier as it began to tremble. 

I knew where Van was going, who he was meeting. I knew he wasn't sure whether he would survive the night, though I believed he would. 

My faith in Van was unshakable. No matter the circumstances I was blind to his flaws, wilfully not ignorantly. I saw them all, knew him in great detail but I chose to ignore them with the kind of childish stubborn nature I had carried with me from youth to adulthood. To this strange age I was now when I felt older than my years and yet too young. But Van, Van had been capable even as a boy, he held that same determination as I did but he used it with less control, let it control him. Somehow that seemed to work better, somehow he seemed to cope better than me. And I knew the mutual respect which flowed between the two of us flowed because he thought the same as me. 

He had seen first hand the things I'd lived through and he had seen me learn to glaze over, learn to carry it all with me and behave, civilised, calm, untouched and unscathed. 

It was that which he admired in me and tonight I knew why. 

He loved her. He loved her and his determination now was centred around her, to love her, to protect her, to see her survive. 

My determination had always been invested in my own survival and though I had always believed the same of Van, believed the same of everybody in my typical cynical way, I was realising now that Van was different. 

He was obsessed with her survival and not his own and tonight he was, as he had been for a long time, an emotional liability, a man who had lost control, who was being held hostage by his own fatal flaw. A girl who had always seemed too sweet a threat to cause real harm. 

But there she was, our Izzy, at the centre of a conflict she couldn't even see. At the centre of the end of everything. 

"Was Van there?" asked Bondy, glancing at me in the glow of a red light as he changed gear and hovered over the accelerate for a moment. 

"I hit him," I said with a small smirk, Bondy smirked too, raised his brow. 

"Bout time I spose," he said, only grinning when I bit my lip and turned to gaze out of the mirror. 

"Twice," 

"Fuck sake doll," he chuckled, "youre in the shit for sure," 

"Uhuh," I said.

"You're the only one of us who could get away with that you know..." he said and for a moment I considered holding back, but I didn't. I could feel another weight that afternoon, the weight of an engagement ring on a chain around my neck. It was a weight which made an honest woman of me. One who couldn't hold anymore secrets in her chest, one who couldn't keep the secrets she had been, even though she knew it was life or death. 

"Not the only one..." I said softly, thinking of Izzy again. Wondering what those secrets were that Van was keeping. He had told me once that there were things I didn't know, couldn't know and wouldn't understand and I had asked him a question he wouldn't answer. 

Who is she?

Who she was was a girl about the change all our lives in irreversible ways, a girl who was the centre of more than one mans obsession, a whole war being fought over her and only her and for what? Why?