Pacifier

🕯️ Van 🥀

She shouldn't have been there. She shouldn't have been there and yet there she lay, body strewn where it had fallen. Her eyes fluttered shut, her arm pale and limp dangling over the table edge, hand lax with her fingers limp as though she were only sleeping. As though she had drifted off in the wrong place. Rivulettes of blood from her shoulder trickling into one current which flowed, the way streams babble over earth, to the tip of her finger, to drip drip drip onto the black glittered floor. As if she were hovering on the brink, bleeding into out of space.

She shouldn't have been there but those were my bullets littering the floor. My bullets which had ripped through the flesh of several men who had not escaped in time. Chairs tipped, bottles and glasses smashed and abandoned. The room toppled and rampaged through, the wild panic of wild animals making a break for their lives.

She shouldn't have been there and yet she was the only one left. Collapses on a poker table in the center of the room, the pretty little slip dress she had been wearing stained now with her blood. Blood which I was certain I had spilled.

She shouldn't have been there. This should have been a room fled, disturbed only with the death of my enemies and not with her. Not with her chest rising and falling ragged, pained and strained. Her eyes shut and yet wide, tortured beneath her heavy eyelids.

She shouldn't have been there and yet there she was, laying half dead before her brother who was shouting too loud for me too hear.

I couldn't hear anything, only the the ringing in my ears from the gunshots. Only the scream of overexposure.

Bondy had dropped his weapon, i watched it fall to the floor but where there should have been a clatter i heard nothing. Only that relentless ringing. Haunted.

I couldn't quite believe it was her but when Bondy hauled her up into his arms, her body cradled to his chest as he looked down at her, so quietly distraught, i knew it was her.

I recognised her features. Ethereal even now. Even in the most painful of moments.

I recognised her eyelids fluttering, recognised her coming round and when I did, when I watched her open her eyes, all the feeling came flooding back, the world returning to me like a double decker bus, overwhelming, chaotic, almost too much.

"Get her out of here!" Bondy shoved her into my arms, "get her the fuck out of here!" he tried again to give her to me but I wouldn't take her.

Something between self loathing and cunning stopping me. Leaving me starring cold and blank at my best friend.

"What the fuck are you playing at Van take her for fuck sake! Get her out of here!" John was ragged, rabid. I could see the bloodlust in his eyes.

If I took her from him now nobody would leave that building alive.

"Bond come on we need to leave," i said, no life behind my voice, dead expression, the glaze washing over me, the one I had learnt by heart. The one I could switch on and off as I chose thanks to my father who had broken me to teach me.

"You take her i want to find whoever did this and..."

"Youre not gonna find them here, let's go," i said again, raising my voice a little now, shoving him forward a pace as if I didn't care for the girl in his arms who's limp body jostled by my force. Who's whimper was hardly heard over the screams and the ruckus downstairs. "Come on Bonds shift it!" i said again a little firmer, picking his gun up from the floor digging it into his shoulder to bring him to his senses.

And when i did he picked up the pace, cradled her close and ran till his breaths were as ragged as his shredded heart. We met Bob and Dylan at the fire escape and when they saw the girl in John's arms their faces paled and their frowns etched, accusatory. As if they knew.