Pacifier

💔Isabelle🍒

It wasnt any kind of pain I'd ever felt before. Nothing could have prepared me for it. The way it had stolen the air from my lungs and dizzied me.

Pain which seperates you from yourself, strips you of any sense of yourself.

Lying there in backroom of that club I'd felt everything leave me. The oxygen in my lungs, the blood in my veins. The fear.

It had drained from me through those open wounds which burnt with white light. My eyes were closed and I could feel myself slipping, but i couldnt slip.

It wasn't painful enough to knock me unconscious, not quite, but it was too much for me to think, for me to open my eyes, for me to breath steady the way I knew I needed to.

And then when I heard my brothers voice, when I saw Van in the doorway, hollowed by the sight of me, I felt a new pain wash over me.

The kind of ache in your heart you know you'll never really recover from.

The kind of pain whicb heals with time but not quite.

I gazed back at him, glazed eyes, almost lifeless, and when my eyes fluttered shut I heard their voices as if they were somewhere else entirely.

My brother had been gentle when he'd picked me up, cradled me to his chest. I'd felt my weight roll into him, the smell from his shirt familiar and homely. The kind of smell that could lull you to sleep. Sleep which seemed more appealing to me, more inevitable by the second.

But then he'd started trying to give me to Van and his movements had tensed, erratic, less careful, and Van wasn't moving.

Wasn't even speaking. Just refusing.

Refusing to look at me, refusing to touch me.

And of all the pain I felt that night, it was this that hurt the most.

"Get her out of here!" Johnny had growled at him, a ferral despair in his voice I'd never heard before. A side to him I'd heard about but never witnessed myself.

It was as brutal, as restless and reckless as I'd been told. And it hurt, feeling him force me into his friends arms, feeling him give me up and his friend give me up. Feeling Van give me up.

I wanted to move, throw myself away from them both, leave of my own accord but I couldn't. The bullets had nestled into my flesh and I could feel them. Intrusive and poisonous and sucking the life out of me.

One nestled into my thigh, the other in my shoulder. The blood warm and sticky and in the wrong place.

Just like i was in the wrong place.

I could feel the tension between them when my brother gave in and left with Van, his grip on my tight until he looked down at me. Every time he looked down at me he relaxed, holding me gently, carefully.

His arms were a comfort, knowing he had hold of me, feeling close to him. It eased my mind because he'd never let me down before and I knew that as long as he had a hold of me nothing could happen to me.

Still, when I realised Van had disappeared I felt a fear grip me in his absence, panic swirling a nausea inside me, suddenly my focus crystal, but only in fleeting momements. It came in waves, the pain and then the clarity. Washing over one another like the tide. I was dizzy and sick and growing more tired by the second so that by the time a car pulled up and i was bundled up inside it with my brother, i hardly recognised the driver.

It was Van but he didn't say anything the whole drive home and neither did my brother, the two of them on the verge of killing one another.

The two of them so strained with emotion I wasn't sure we'd make it home.