Pacifier

🍓Van🌹

It was a long drive, afternoon into the briefest of evenings, a winter sunset that dissolved into black night sky.

Shed been alright for awhile, every couple seconds I couldn't help but glance over at her just to make sure she was okay. To make sure she wasn't getting any worse.

That afternoon I'd watched her smiling softly, her lips moving along, singing softly under her breath to Bruce Springsteen. She had her head resting against the window watching the roads as we drove.
She'd been tired but she was trying not to show me that, she was suffering but she was trying to hide that too.

She was more one of our girls than she gave herself credit for and looking at her then it had hurt me so much to see it on her face. In her vacant expression as she tried to zone out of her pain. It ached in my chest to know that it was that very reason that had lead her into Oxygen that night.

Now in the dark she slept peacefully, a fine layer of sweat on her forehead, he hair a little damp with it. She was suffering and I knew the blame lay with me.

With my eyes on the road the lights ahead blurred, the rain on the road blurred with them. It was hard to keep my eyes on the road, hard to keep my mind focused when I knew what we were driving away from. When the memory of that morning was as harsh and blinding as the fog beams which came towards me in the other side of the road.

Her brothers last words to me repeated and repeated on my mind and when I turned the radio down the muffled white noise of the news did little to drown it out or distract me. I couldn't be distracted anymore.

"They've got Camille,"

Blakes stood in the door frame, eyes white with panic, face pale, all the blood drained from him.

I couldn't see anger I couldn't see pain. It was strange. This vacancy like shock had drowned him and he was the walking dead.

I couldn't take my eyes off him. Waiting for the moment the shock would fade away and I would see the Benji I expected to see again. The cold, sharp man set on saving her.

But it didn't fade.

I felt John's grip on my collar relax, felt the barrel of his gun fall from where it had been digging into my throat.

I felt the breath return to me in a wave of mired relief.

I dared glance at my friend, saw him swallow a lump in his throat, eerily calm as he stepped back.

He was still, quiet. Controlled.

He shouldn't have been.

I watched, breath shallow, as he walked to Blakes, took Camille chain from his slack hand and clutched it in his own.

He admired the break, saw how it had been snapped in the moment it had been ripped from round her neck.

And then he turned back to me, sinister in the stillness of his nerves.

"Van," he said, beckoning me over to him so that when I shook myself up and stood straight, stood opposite him, I saw the shadows in his eyes, the darkness which gathered around him.

He was the calm of grey clouds before heavy rain.

The moment the sky clouds over before a storm. The humidity, the slow gathering heat which builds to the first flash of lightning.

And I saw the first flash of lightning when he spoke. His voice was low and serious and he held my eyes fearlessly.

"Van you need to get Izzy out of here, take her somewhere safe for me alright..." he started and though I tried to cut him off, I only tried once.