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Title: Going Under
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laguera25
Fandom: CSI: NY
Character(s): Don Flack
Rating: FRM
Summary: Donald Flack knows about darkness, and once a year, he goes home to his own.
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Jerry Bruckheimer and CBS. No copyright infringement is intended. For entertainment only. Diana Flack is my own creation.
A/N: Inspired by "The Fall" and the brief, terse conversation between Flack and his mentor, Moran, about Flack the Elder.
It was just your imagination and your guilt talking. It always cuts the deepest this time of year, when families without gaping holes in their midsts wander the streets with joy shining in their faces and their mittened hands filled with jolly old Christmas consumerism. A girl in a parka will pass you on the street, and you'll see Diana in her face and long to touch her just for a moment. You wanted to see her there, so she was, and she will be as long as you keep looking for her.
"She was real, Pops, you son of a bitch, and she was here," he said to his pinched reflection in the rearview mirror.
"I still am."
She was in the passenger seat again, eyes solemn and owlish inside her face. He blinked in surprise and retreated a step.
"How the hell did you do that, and where did you go?" he demanded.
"You needed a minute. You're stepping in the puke again." She pointed at the rapidly hardening pool of vomit at his feet.
"To hell with the puke, all right? I'm a detective. I've stepped in worse."
"Do you want me to go?" It was soft, plaintive.
(why you always gotta ruin everything)
(stop it donnie stop it please)
"No," he answered abruptly. Then, more calmly. "No. I-I'm glad to see you. It's just-," He trailed off and threw up his hands in consternation. "Why are you here? Why now? I've been comin' here since you-," He fell silent, reluctant to finish the thought.
"Died?" she supplied helpfully. "I know. I've seen you."
"Yes, died," he snapped. "Don't say that."
"Why not? It's true, and the truth is seldom pretty."
He snorted. "What are you now, a damn fortune cookie?"
"I'll answer all your questions, but you've got to get in the car and shut the door. The air is bad out there."
His brow furrowed in confusion. "What do you mean it's 'bad'?"
"You know what I mean," she answered flatly, and her eyes darted to the façade of the house.
She's afraid, he thought suddenly, and the realization raised hard knots of gooseflesh on his forearms.
As a ghost, the world of the living should have held no more fears for her, and yet, there she sat, rigid as a tentpeg and sparing the house wary, sidelong glances. Her hands kneaded compulsively at the raggedy hem of her skirt, and she chewed her lower lip, a dreamy, undulating saw of her two front teeth that made him wince.
]He jerked his head in the direction of the house. "What is it? What's in there that bothers you?"
"Hurry," she hissed, and beckoned frantically for him to get into the car. "It's tainted."
He opened his mouth to ask her what she meant, then closed it again with a snap.
No need to ask. You feel it, that same diseased, oppressive air that you felt as a ten-year-old, the cancerous heat that radiated from a stone and made you scrub your hand in the bathroom sink until it was red and raw and the nerve endings tingled and prickled in protest. The same festering swamp heat that at sixteen warned you to run as quickly as you could from this place and brush its dust from your feet.
It's cold out here beyond the borders of the lawn, but it might not be for much longer. The poison is waiting, lapping at the edges of the scrub grass and the leprous patches of dirt with an eager tongue, and if it gets the chance, it will gladly extend its pestilent reach to the pavement and your ankles. It will coil around your legs and wend its unseen, noisome tendrils around your thighs in a lover's embrace. It will find its way into your skin and your mouth and your nose, and once inside, you will never be rid of it. It's already started.
His mouth filled with the taste of ozone and greenbark, acrid and noxious, and he scrambled for the car as quickly as he could. His heart triphammered inside his chest, and hackles rose like minute quills on his nape. He slid into the driver's seat and pulled the door closed with an authoritative clunk. When that was done, he sagged bonelessly in his seat and licked dry lips.
"What the fuck was that?" he asked conversationally and turned his head to study Diana's gaunt profile in the dark.
Diana made no answer.
"Do you mind if we talk somewhere else, then?" He reached for the ignition.
Her wooden, textureless hand stayed his. "I can't. I am bound here."
He straightened abruptly. "What? Are you telling me there is no heaven?"
A thin, mirthless smile, and she shook her head. "Oh, there is, but not for me. That was part of the agreement.
"Agreement?" he repeated blankly.
"Yes. Between me and the Creator."
"Creator? God?" He twisted in his seat to study her. "God refused you entry?"
"God is one name for Him, yes," she acknowledged. "And no, He did not refuse. I forfeited it."
He was hopelessly lost. He had always assumed his sister had gone to her reward or succumbed to the sleep of ages. It seemed the only right and just end for her. After all, she had been little more than a child, and whatever sins she might have committed in the naivete of youth, he was certain none of them had been cardinal. That she was doomed to wander the rooms of an accursed house so foul that the junkies avoided it staggered and horrified him.
"How could you forfeit your right to heaven?" he asked, and the fulcrum of the universe as he understood it shifted beneath his feet.
"Those were the terms of the covenant. I agreed to remain here, bound to this house and one other place."
"Why?"
She turned her gaze on him, and in the dim light, she was at once ancient and perpetually young, a changeling child playing with his sister's face. There was love in her face, and pity, and a dreadful, secret knowledge that burned in her belly like a candle flame.
"Why do you come here, Donnie?" It was a whisper, lace against his skin.
To revisit my unexpiated sin, to confess without speaking the truth that I could not-and still cannot-tell to the white-collared priest in his Pandora's Box of vicarious vice. To remind myself that you are not here and never will be again. To sit here in this Ford Taurus and play a forlorn game of what-if until I can't stand it anymore and the beat cops on patrol are giving me the stinkeye because my car hasn't moved in three hours. What if I had caught you on the stairs? What if I had listened to my fabled gut and fled when I laid eyes on this place? What if I had stayed home with you and played Parcheesi?
He shifted uncomfortably. "I don't know," he said diffidently. "This is the last place you were."
She gave a sardonic huff. "You come because you think it's your fault."
"It was."
"No."
"Don't bullshit me, Diana," he snapped. "It was my fault. Everybody knows it. Even dear old Pops. I should never have brought you here. I knew better. I knew, and I brought you anyway. That makes it my fucking fault."
"You brought me anyway because that was the way it had to be." She was silent for a moment. "And Pops is an asshole," she added cheerfully.
The profanity startled laughter from his throat, and he suddenly found himself on the verge of tears again. He turned away from her searching gaze and studied the twinkling, pinprick lights of the skyscrapers on the distant horizon.
"Like father, like son," he murmured without looking at her.
Her hands were on his cheeks, turning him inexorably towards her. "No," she said implacably. "No. Do you know why they call it the Whisper House? It's because I am not the first to walk there, and I won't be the last. This house is a bad house, a tainted house. It claims people. It meant to have one of us; the only thing the Creator left open was which of us it would be."
"What does God have to do with this place?"
She shrugged, her face still captured between her hands. "It is a tool of His will, just like everything else."
He did not find that a particularly comforting thought. "So it chose you?"
"No."
He did not understand. And then he did. Comprehension came in a roundhouse slap that drove the breath from his chest, and for one spasming heartbeat, he was certain he was having a heart attack. A passing patrol would find him slumped over the steering wheel, gape-mouthed and blue-lipped, and after they shook their heads and speculated about the drugs that must have flowed through his veins to have caused a heart attack in one so young, they would bury him with full honors in beside his sister.
No need for that. She's right there.
"You chose, didn't you?" he managed weakly, and drew the back of his hand over chapped lips. "You chose to go. That's what you were doing up in that room when I came looking for you. Sealing the deal."
A single, dreamy nod.
It was dark in that room, dark as pitch. You'd never seen darkness like that before, and you haven't since. It was malignant and foul, rancid molasses on your tongue, and as it slipped down your throat and coated your tongue like ash, you were sure it carried with it the killing spore of tumors. It clung to your pores in sticky tendrils and was treacle on the soles of your shoes. You wanted to turn back, knew you should turn tail and flee, but every time your ankles and calves twitched with the impulse to run, you saw Diana in her red parka and lavender socks, small and helpless in a landscape of concrete and leaden sky, and you kept going. You would not be a coward a second time.
It must have been an old bedroom once. There was a metal bedframe leaning drunkenly against the far wall, and everywhere was the septic stench of mildew and dry rot and moldy goosedown. She was in the middle of the room, a wraith-limbed outline amid the seething blackness, and she was staring at something you could not see. Her head was cocked askance as though she were listening, and she swayed in place, a barely perceptible stiltwalker's sidle that fascinated and unnerved you.
You called her name as you waded through the shadows toward her, but there was no turning of her head, no startled flinch as she was pulled from her reverie. Her gaze remained fixed on a point to which your straining eyes were not privy. The stiff-legged rocking continued, relentless and alien as the beat of a mechanical heart, and as you drew to within arm's reach, you realized that you could see the breath in front of her face, quicksilver and ghost whispers on her lips. Her nail beds were blue.
You screamed her name then, a panicked, quavering bellow, because you were sure that while you had been sitting downstairs with your three buddies and laughing around sips of the beer you had stolen from your father's refrigerator, Diana had frozen to death in the dark, rooted to the floorboards by the darkness. That impression was only bolstered when you seized her wrist. It was cold as frozen beef and hard as marble, a corpse in full rigor, and your still-living hand recoiled. But you could not accept that she was dead, and so you tugged and pulled and swore at her to come with you, and the muscles in your back and shoulders twanged dangerously.
Then, she finally looked at you, and that was when you wet your pants. Her eyes, normally as bright and vivacious as yours, were dull and opaque as whitewashed windows, all iris and pinpoint pupil. There was nothing in them, no Divine animus that marked her as a child of God, born and baptized in the Holy Mother Church. The windows were intact, but the soul had long fled, and the emptiness in them dizzied you.
Then the moment passed, and she was there again, bewildered and woozy, but undeniably present. She blinked and hiccoughed, and the scissoring paralysis broke. Her knees buckled with an audible creak, and she stumbled into you, all elbows and chin and bony pelvis and small, rounded breasts. She was dainty and fragile inside her clothes, china and dust and straw, as though she had been scooped hollow, but you were so relieved that she was whole that you were laughing, laughing as you half-carried, half-dragged her from the room.
Put me down, she mumbled against your shoulder, and then she muttered again, low and indistinct, muffled by the cotton of your clothes. You never understood it, and you never stopped to asked because all you wanted was to get the hell out of there. There would be time for questions later, you told yourself as you lurched from the room with her in tow.
But there never was time for questions. Thirty paces from that room, the world upended with a snap of bones, and you never knew what she muttered with the last breaths of her life. You've wondered ever since, turned it over in your groping fingers on the hot summer nights when sleep won't come and the sheets stick to your body even with the bedroom window cracked to let the night air inside. It was the mystery of mysteries, and if you could decipher it, everything else would fall into place.
Now he knew. It's too late.
Suddenly, he was furious with her, more furious than he had ever been in his life. He rounded on her and seized her scrawny forearms in both hands.
"Why did you do that?" he shouted, and with each word, he shook her, pressing his fingers into that queer, waxen flesh until they found the hard online of bone. "You had no right to do that. I'm your older brother. I was supposed to take care of you."
He was dimly aware that the arms between his hands held no weight, and that there was no creaking of tendon or rattle of teeth as her head whipsawed to and fro. It was silent except for the creak of vinyl as he shook her and the ragged rasp of his breath. He released her with a final shake and collapsed against the driver's side door, bowed and exhausted.
"I couldn't watch you die. Not when I could do something about it." Despite his outburst, she was unrumpled.
"Oh, and you think I could? You think I could just go on, knowing you died because of me?" he retorted hotly.
She shrugged. "It made sense."
"Wh-," he began.
(dammit diana why you gotta be so stupid)
(stop it donnie please stop it)
"Oh." It was a guttural moan, pulled from the soles of his feet, long and scouring as steel wool against his throat and tongue. "Oh, oh, oh." It was the only sound he could make in the face of his epiphany.
Now it was his turn to cup her face in hands numb as stone. Her face was as cold and brittle as the rest of her, and the sparse strands of hair beneath his fingertips were harsh as straw. He swallowed against a lump of regret and nearly vomited.
"Oh, Diana," he said. "Oh-I-you know I never meant-," he trailed off. "Shit." He pulled away and faced the windshield, fingers curled in a white-knuckled grip around the steering wheel.
His soul was being harrowed, and all the bones he had buried in the uneasy soil of his conscience were being exposed without pity. It hurt, this unanesthetized lancing. It was ruthless and cruel and agonizing, and he twisted within its flaying grip. He wanted to bolt, to escape this truth and the blue eyes that held them, but he was too tired to move, and even if he could have run, there was nowhere to go.
"I took you with me that night because I was trying to make it up to you for what I did in Pitkin Park," he said to the windshield.
That was the bitch of it. He had brought her here as an act of atonement for that day in the park, and for a while, it had worked. She had been lighter, livelier than she had been in months. She had chattered and giggled like she had before his adolescent rage had scored wounds long and deep, and just before she had slipped up the stairs to bargain her soul on his behalf-just after he had threatened to relieve Mike Flannagan of his teeth for leering none-too-subtly at her budding breasts, in fact-the light of hero worship had rekindled in her eyes.
And then she was gone.
"I know," she said.
They sat in silence for a long time after that. When he spoke again, it was quiet, despairing. "How am I supposed to live with this?"
"Live well," she replied. "Get married, have babies, become a cantankerous pensioner who bores the young recruits with your war stories."
He shook his head. "I'm not getting married.
"I wouldn't be so sure."
"Oh, yeah? To who? When?" he demanded.
"I'm not at liberty to say. Besides, you wouldn't believe me if I told you." She reached for the door handle.
"Where are you going?"
A wistful smile. "It's time for me to go, Donnie."
"Go where?"
She jerked her head in the direction of the house.
"You can't be serious."
"I told you," she said patiently, "I'm bound here."
He reached for her hand. "Stay. Come home with me."
She shook her head and gently extricated her hand from his grasp. "A ghost in your apartment would put a serious crimp in your sex life. Besides, I'm already there."
He blinked at her. "But you said-,"
"Here and one other place."
"I don't get it."
"The rosary, Donnie."
Then she was getting out of the car, gangly legs twisting away from him and disappearing through the rocker panels. One moment, she was in his passenger seat, and the next, she was outside the car and moving away, shoulders hunched inside her parka and hands stuffed into the threadbare pockets.
"Wait," he called, but she neither slowed nor looked back.
"It'll be all right, Donnie. I promise."
Then she was gone.
He had no conscious memory of driving home, and yet somehow he had, because an hour later, he found himself sitting on his bed in his cramped apartment, his sister's rosary twined in his fingers.
The rosary, Donnie.
He slipped the rosary around his neck, and on the periphery of his vision, he thought he saw a flash of red in the bedroom mirror, but when he turned to look, he saw only his reflection.
"Are you here, Di?" he asked.
There was a furtive rustle of curtain, as though unseen fingers had brushed the fabric, but that was all. He lay down on the bed with his hand curled around the crucifix and watched dawn bleed into the sky.
Just like Diana's parka, he thought, and let sleep take him.
Author:
laguera25Fandom: CSI: NY
Character(s): Don Flack
Rating: FRM
Summary: Donald Flack knows about darkness, and once a year, he goes home to his own.
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Jerry Bruckheimer and CBS. No copyright infringement is intended. For entertainment only. Diana Flack is my own creation.
A/N: Inspired by "The Fall" and the brief, terse conversation between Flack and his mentor, Moran, about Flack the Elder.
It was just your imagination and your guilt talking. It always cuts the deepest this time of year, when families without gaping holes in their midsts wander the streets with joy shining in their faces and their mittened hands filled with jolly old Christmas consumerism. A girl in a parka will pass you on the street, and you'll see Diana in her face and long to touch her just for a moment. You wanted to see her there, so she was, and she will be as long as you keep looking for her.
"She was real, Pops, you son of a bitch, and she was here," he said to his pinched reflection in the rearview mirror.
"I still am."
She was in the passenger seat again, eyes solemn and owlish inside her face. He blinked in surprise and retreated a step.
"How the hell did you do that, and where did you go?" he demanded.
"You needed a minute. You're stepping in the puke again." She pointed at the rapidly hardening pool of vomit at his feet.
"To hell with the puke, all right? I'm a detective. I've stepped in worse."
"Do you want me to go?" It was soft, plaintive.
(why you always gotta ruin everything)
(stop it donnie stop it please)
"No," he answered abruptly. Then, more calmly. "No. I-I'm glad to see you. It's just-," He trailed off and threw up his hands in consternation. "Why are you here? Why now? I've been comin' here since you-," He fell silent, reluctant to finish the thought.
"Died?" she supplied helpfully. "I know. I've seen you."
"Yes, died," he snapped. "Don't say that."
"Why not? It's true, and the truth is seldom pretty."
He snorted. "What are you now, a damn fortune cookie?"
"I'll answer all your questions, but you've got to get in the car and shut the door. The air is bad out there."
His brow furrowed in confusion. "What do you mean it's 'bad'?"
"You know what I mean," she answered flatly, and her eyes darted to the façade of the house.
She's afraid, he thought suddenly, and the realization raised hard knots of gooseflesh on his forearms.
As a ghost, the world of the living should have held no more fears for her, and yet, there she sat, rigid as a tentpeg and sparing the house wary, sidelong glances. Her hands kneaded compulsively at the raggedy hem of her skirt, and she chewed her lower lip, a dreamy, undulating saw of her two front teeth that made him wince.
]He jerked his head in the direction of the house. "What is it? What's in there that bothers you?"
"Hurry," she hissed, and beckoned frantically for him to get into the car. "It's tainted."
He opened his mouth to ask her what she meant, then closed it again with a snap.
No need to ask. You feel it, that same diseased, oppressive air that you felt as a ten-year-old, the cancerous heat that radiated from a stone and made you scrub your hand in the bathroom sink until it was red and raw and the nerve endings tingled and prickled in protest. The same festering swamp heat that at sixteen warned you to run as quickly as you could from this place and brush its dust from your feet.
It's cold out here beyond the borders of the lawn, but it might not be for much longer. The poison is waiting, lapping at the edges of the scrub grass and the leprous patches of dirt with an eager tongue, and if it gets the chance, it will gladly extend its pestilent reach to the pavement and your ankles. It will coil around your legs and wend its unseen, noisome tendrils around your thighs in a lover's embrace. It will find its way into your skin and your mouth and your nose, and once inside, you will never be rid of it. It's already started.
His mouth filled with the taste of ozone and greenbark, acrid and noxious, and he scrambled for the car as quickly as he could. His heart triphammered inside his chest, and hackles rose like minute quills on his nape. He slid into the driver's seat and pulled the door closed with an authoritative clunk. When that was done, he sagged bonelessly in his seat and licked dry lips.
"What the fuck was that?" he asked conversationally and turned his head to study Diana's gaunt profile in the dark.
Diana made no answer.
"Do you mind if we talk somewhere else, then?" He reached for the ignition.
Her wooden, textureless hand stayed his. "I can't. I am bound here."
He straightened abruptly. "What? Are you telling me there is no heaven?"
A thin, mirthless smile, and she shook her head. "Oh, there is, but not for me. That was part of the agreement.
"Agreement?" he repeated blankly.
"Yes. Between me and the Creator."
"Creator? God?" He twisted in his seat to study her. "God refused you entry?"
"God is one name for Him, yes," she acknowledged. "And no, He did not refuse. I forfeited it."
He was hopelessly lost. He had always assumed his sister had gone to her reward or succumbed to the sleep of ages. It seemed the only right and just end for her. After all, she had been little more than a child, and whatever sins she might have committed in the naivete of youth, he was certain none of them had been cardinal. That she was doomed to wander the rooms of an accursed house so foul that the junkies avoided it staggered and horrified him.
"How could you forfeit your right to heaven?" he asked, and the fulcrum of the universe as he understood it shifted beneath his feet.
"Those were the terms of the covenant. I agreed to remain here, bound to this house and one other place."
"Why?"
She turned her gaze on him, and in the dim light, she was at once ancient and perpetually young, a changeling child playing with his sister's face. There was love in her face, and pity, and a dreadful, secret knowledge that burned in her belly like a candle flame.
"Why do you come here, Donnie?" It was a whisper, lace against his skin.
To revisit my unexpiated sin, to confess without speaking the truth that I could not-and still cannot-tell to the white-collared priest in his Pandora's Box of vicarious vice. To remind myself that you are not here and never will be again. To sit here in this Ford Taurus and play a forlorn game of what-if until I can't stand it anymore and the beat cops on patrol are giving me the stinkeye because my car hasn't moved in three hours. What if I had caught you on the stairs? What if I had listened to my fabled gut and fled when I laid eyes on this place? What if I had stayed home with you and played Parcheesi?
He shifted uncomfortably. "I don't know," he said diffidently. "This is the last place you were."
She gave a sardonic huff. "You come because you think it's your fault."
"It was."
"No."
"Don't bullshit me, Diana," he snapped. "It was my fault. Everybody knows it. Even dear old Pops. I should never have brought you here. I knew better. I knew, and I brought you anyway. That makes it my fucking fault."
"You brought me anyway because that was the way it had to be." She was silent for a moment. "And Pops is an asshole," she added cheerfully.
The profanity startled laughter from his throat, and he suddenly found himself on the verge of tears again. He turned away from her searching gaze and studied the twinkling, pinprick lights of the skyscrapers on the distant horizon.
"Like father, like son," he murmured without looking at her.
Her hands were on his cheeks, turning him inexorably towards her. "No," she said implacably. "No. Do you know why they call it the Whisper House? It's because I am not the first to walk there, and I won't be the last. This house is a bad house, a tainted house. It claims people. It meant to have one of us; the only thing the Creator left open was which of us it would be."
"What does God have to do with this place?"
She shrugged, her face still captured between her hands. "It is a tool of His will, just like everything else."
He did not find that a particularly comforting thought. "So it chose you?"
"No."
He did not understand. And then he did. Comprehension came in a roundhouse slap that drove the breath from his chest, and for one spasming heartbeat, he was certain he was having a heart attack. A passing patrol would find him slumped over the steering wheel, gape-mouthed and blue-lipped, and after they shook their heads and speculated about the drugs that must have flowed through his veins to have caused a heart attack in one so young, they would bury him with full honors in beside his sister.
No need for that. She's right there.
"You chose, didn't you?" he managed weakly, and drew the back of his hand over chapped lips. "You chose to go. That's what you were doing up in that room when I came looking for you. Sealing the deal."
A single, dreamy nod.
It was dark in that room, dark as pitch. You'd never seen darkness like that before, and you haven't since. It was malignant and foul, rancid molasses on your tongue, and as it slipped down your throat and coated your tongue like ash, you were sure it carried with it the killing spore of tumors. It clung to your pores in sticky tendrils and was treacle on the soles of your shoes. You wanted to turn back, knew you should turn tail and flee, but every time your ankles and calves twitched with the impulse to run, you saw Diana in her red parka and lavender socks, small and helpless in a landscape of concrete and leaden sky, and you kept going. You would not be a coward a second time.
It must have been an old bedroom once. There was a metal bedframe leaning drunkenly against the far wall, and everywhere was the septic stench of mildew and dry rot and moldy goosedown. She was in the middle of the room, a wraith-limbed outline amid the seething blackness, and she was staring at something you could not see. Her head was cocked askance as though she were listening, and she swayed in place, a barely perceptible stiltwalker's sidle that fascinated and unnerved you.
You called her name as you waded through the shadows toward her, but there was no turning of her head, no startled flinch as she was pulled from her reverie. Her gaze remained fixed on a point to which your straining eyes were not privy. The stiff-legged rocking continued, relentless and alien as the beat of a mechanical heart, and as you drew to within arm's reach, you realized that you could see the breath in front of her face, quicksilver and ghost whispers on her lips. Her nail beds were blue.
You screamed her name then, a panicked, quavering bellow, because you were sure that while you had been sitting downstairs with your three buddies and laughing around sips of the beer you had stolen from your father's refrigerator, Diana had frozen to death in the dark, rooted to the floorboards by the darkness. That impression was only bolstered when you seized her wrist. It was cold as frozen beef and hard as marble, a corpse in full rigor, and your still-living hand recoiled. But you could not accept that she was dead, and so you tugged and pulled and swore at her to come with you, and the muscles in your back and shoulders twanged dangerously.
Then, she finally looked at you, and that was when you wet your pants. Her eyes, normally as bright and vivacious as yours, were dull and opaque as whitewashed windows, all iris and pinpoint pupil. There was nothing in them, no Divine animus that marked her as a child of God, born and baptized in the Holy Mother Church. The windows were intact, but the soul had long fled, and the emptiness in them dizzied you.
Then the moment passed, and she was there again, bewildered and woozy, but undeniably present. She blinked and hiccoughed, and the scissoring paralysis broke. Her knees buckled with an audible creak, and she stumbled into you, all elbows and chin and bony pelvis and small, rounded breasts. She was dainty and fragile inside her clothes, china and dust and straw, as though she had been scooped hollow, but you were so relieved that she was whole that you were laughing, laughing as you half-carried, half-dragged her from the room.
Put me down, she mumbled against your shoulder, and then she muttered again, low and indistinct, muffled by the cotton of your clothes. You never understood it, and you never stopped to asked because all you wanted was to get the hell out of there. There would be time for questions later, you told yourself as you lurched from the room with her in tow.
But there never was time for questions. Thirty paces from that room, the world upended with a snap of bones, and you never knew what she muttered with the last breaths of her life. You've wondered ever since, turned it over in your groping fingers on the hot summer nights when sleep won't come and the sheets stick to your body even with the bedroom window cracked to let the night air inside. It was the mystery of mysteries, and if you could decipher it, everything else would fall into place.
Now he knew. It's too late.
Suddenly, he was furious with her, more furious than he had ever been in his life. He rounded on her and seized her scrawny forearms in both hands.
"Why did you do that?" he shouted, and with each word, he shook her, pressing his fingers into that queer, waxen flesh until they found the hard online of bone. "You had no right to do that. I'm your older brother. I was supposed to take care of you."
He was dimly aware that the arms between his hands held no weight, and that there was no creaking of tendon or rattle of teeth as her head whipsawed to and fro. It was silent except for the creak of vinyl as he shook her and the ragged rasp of his breath. He released her with a final shake and collapsed against the driver's side door, bowed and exhausted.
"I couldn't watch you die. Not when I could do something about it." Despite his outburst, she was unrumpled.
"Oh, and you think I could? You think I could just go on, knowing you died because of me?" he retorted hotly.
She shrugged. "It made sense."
"Wh-," he began.
(dammit diana why you gotta be so stupid)
(stop it donnie please stop it)
"Oh." It was a guttural moan, pulled from the soles of his feet, long and scouring as steel wool against his throat and tongue. "Oh, oh, oh." It was the only sound he could make in the face of his epiphany.
Now it was his turn to cup her face in hands numb as stone. Her face was as cold and brittle as the rest of her, and the sparse strands of hair beneath his fingertips were harsh as straw. He swallowed against a lump of regret and nearly vomited.
"Oh, Diana," he said. "Oh-I-you know I never meant-," he trailed off. "Shit." He pulled away and faced the windshield, fingers curled in a white-knuckled grip around the steering wheel.
His soul was being harrowed, and all the bones he had buried in the uneasy soil of his conscience were being exposed without pity. It hurt, this unanesthetized lancing. It was ruthless and cruel and agonizing, and he twisted within its flaying grip. He wanted to bolt, to escape this truth and the blue eyes that held them, but he was too tired to move, and even if he could have run, there was nowhere to go.
"I took you with me that night because I was trying to make it up to you for what I did in Pitkin Park," he said to the windshield.
That was the bitch of it. He had brought her here as an act of atonement for that day in the park, and for a while, it had worked. She had been lighter, livelier than she had been in months. She had chattered and giggled like she had before his adolescent rage had scored wounds long and deep, and just before she had slipped up the stairs to bargain her soul on his behalf-just after he had threatened to relieve Mike Flannagan of his teeth for leering none-too-subtly at her budding breasts, in fact-the light of hero worship had rekindled in her eyes.
And then she was gone.
"I know," she said.
They sat in silence for a long time after that. When he spoke again, it was quiet, despairing. "How am I supposed to live with this?"
"Live well," she replied. "Get married, have babies, become a cantankerous pensioner who bores the young recruits with your war stories."
He shook his head. "I'm not getting married.
"I wouldn't be so sure."
"Oh, yeah? To who? When?" he demanded.
"I'm not at liberty to say. Besides, you wouldn't believe me if I told you." She reached for the door handle.
"Where are you going?"
A wistful smile. "It's time for me to go, Donnie."
"Go where?"
She jerked her head in the direction of the house.
"You can't be serious."
"I told you," she said patiently, "I'm bound here."
He reached for her hand. "Stay. Come home with me."
She shook her head and gently extricated her hand from his grasp. "A ghost in your apartment would put a serious crimp in your sex life. Besides, I'm already there."
He blinked at her. "But you said-,"
"Here and one other place."
"I don't get it."
"The rosary, Donnie."
Then she was getting out of the car, gangly legs twisting away from him and disappearing through the rocker panels. One moment, she was in his passenger seat, and the next, she was outside the car and moving away, shoulders hunched inside her parka and hands stuffed into the threadbare pockets.
"Wait," he called, but she neither slowed nor looked back.
"It'll be all right, Donnie. I promise."
Then she was gone.
He had no conscious memory of driving home, and yet somehow he had, because an hour later, he found himself sitting on his bed in his cramped apartment, his sister's rosary twined in his fingers.
The rosary, Donnie.
He slipped the rosary around his neck, and on the periphery of his vision, he thought he saw a flash of red in the bedroom mirror, but when he turned to look, he saw only his reflection.
"Are you here, Di?" he asked.
There was a furtive rustle of curtain, as though unseen fingers had brushed the fabric, but that was all. He lay down on the bed with his hand curled around the crucifix and watched dawn bleed into the sky.
Just like Diana's parka, he thought, and let sleep take him.
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