BOND

57.

I was dreamin' you were standin' there wearin' my t-shirt

Wishin' that you could still be here

How can I forget?

~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.

SHOOTOUT IN POSH NEIGHBOURHOOD, ONE DEAD: SUSPECTED UNDERWORLD CONNECTIONS

Joey made it to the fourth line before he left bile rising up in his throat and shoved the newspaper away hurriedly.

Two dead, he thought.

It was everywhere. In every possible variation of the same headline. Or so he, correctly, thought. He couldn't bear to read or actually manage to do it either. He couldn't still his mind long enough to get the words in.

Normally the focus of the public and the authorities would have been on the underworld part of the story. But the death and the huge wave of utter and desolate grief that had come with it, had taken away all bits of anybody's attention.

Exactly like he had done for the past three days, he buried everything, every thought, every unshed tear, every soul wrecking sob that was tearing him up inside, in a box and shoved it to the farthest corner of his mind.

There was a faint ringing from the pocket of his dress pants. After it was halfway over, he realized it was an alarm.

Time to go.

Taylor had put it in for him after he had confessed that he could not focus on anything without his mind drifting back to the horrors.

Not that she had not taken a huge chunk of time in putting the alarm in. She was just as bad as he was.

Maybe more since she was crying instead of pushing back her emotions, which was his preferred way of coping.

He had not cried since the first few minutes. The medics had told him it was because of the shock of it all. He had not bothered to tell them that crying hurt more because it meant actually accepting the death. Envisioning it.

Taylor though, her screams had put all of them to shame. She had cried nonstop, right along with Ben.

He had been one of the unfortunate enough ones to see the crime scene before the police had had it scraped clean, so Joey did not really fault him for the uncontrolled wailing.

The one break, that he knew of, Taylor had taken was when he had been over at her house and put her to sleep himself.

Nobody else had been able to.

Daniel had been in the hospital, recovering from his concussion. Courtesy of fainting and hitting his head on the floor.

Another thing the doctors had blamed on shock. 

And Alex could not choke out any words let alone comforting ones without tearing up. He had been with Ben when he had barged into Elena's house three days ago.

Three days ago when the world had been different. When merely looking at things had not felt like somebody was reaching into your chest and twisting your heart out.

Three days ago when anything you touched did not turn you into a crying mess because all you could think about was how that one person would never be touching it again.

Joey had already been pushing his emotions away for a long time by then to manage to console others. However hollow or halfheartedly.

So when Alex had called him, begging him for help, on the first or second day, he could not really remember, he had ran over to Taylor's house.