Pacifier

// Van \\

"Bob..." i said, lingering on the word. Looking back at him from behind my desk. He was stood, hands gripping the chair in front of him a little too tightly. He was nervous and I almost felt guilty for pressing him on the matter.

I followed his flickering gaze to the office door that Bondy had slammed only a moment before and I waited, patient though it wouldn't last long, for his answer.

"Bob I need to know..."i started, saw him swallow the lump in his throat only aftwr he spoke and cut me off.

"My brother," he said, chewing his cheek, wringing his hands together as he sat down and leant forward suddenly whispering, suddenly spilling secrets I'd never expected him to let go of.

"Bob.." i started, my blood running cold at rhe mention of Bobs older brother.

"Will'll know Van," he said it with a voice so quiet and yet so self assured, "he's the only person left who will know," he said it again but it didn't make his statement any easier to digest.

Will had done a disappearing act after the war. He'd changed his name, gone into hiding, somewhere on the south coast though only Bob knew that now.
He was a wanted man see, by the Reids, by the Bottlemen, by the police and a hundred vigilantes who still remembered his name and his face.

"If we make contact with him mate, thats signin off an execution..." I said my mouth dry, bone dry. Spine stiff like my fingers which had ceased drumming on the table, ceased drumming on my jaw.

"We're at war Van, we don't get to make choices anymore," he said, eyes meeting mine from behind his glasses. For once he was unreadable. For once I couldn't tell whether he was hurting. Perhaps the intensity of our new world had done as it had to the rest of us, destroyed that little part of us left over from when we were kids. Crushed sentimentality.

"He's still your brother Bob,"

"In any other family you'd call him a deserter and kill him yourself," he smirked and shook his head and then he squeezed his eyes shut and leant back in his chair. He'd have been looking at the cieling, neck stretched but no. The weight of the worlds dragged even his eyelids down. I let us stay in silence, let us breath in and out through the tension. Waited for him to say something else. And when he opened his eyes he looked at me, world weary and his simmering smirk told me everything I needed to know. "He wasn't a good man."

"None of us are mate," i said carefully knowing that that wasn't what he meant.

Bobs older brother was the oldest of our generation and as children we had all feared him. The thought of his ruthlessness still left my skin cold.
Will Hall hadn't just been mean, he'd been inhumane. He'd been completely dead to the world. Nothing stirred him. It was as if someone had reached inside him the day he was born and ripped out his heart and his soul. He'd had dead eyes. Dead eyes that saw straight through your brave front. Dead eyes that saw your fear in every detail.

And Will had used our fears against us so many times. As if he got a kick out of it. There were few people i believed to be evil in this world, and I was selfaware. I had done evil things before, so had Bond, so had Blakes, so had Bob and Larry, Dylan and Jake. We'd all murdered, we'd all made plans which tore families apart.
But we weren't evil. We felt pain. We felt those human emotions that make you feel alive.

Will had been dead inside and outside.

"Bob," I said, "I know what he did to you," I could have meant anything with that line, there were numerous occasions Bob had come in from school battered and bloody, quiet, subdued, blaming a Reid for something Will had done, but Bob knew exactly what I was thinking of when I met his eyes.