Falling / Michael Gray x Reader

XI - Fleeing - Angst

A/N: First things first, I want to express my most sincere condolences for Helen McCrory's passing. She carried the show with so much strength. Also, what is next is following Jxlix0113's idea (thank you) (if you have ideas / prompts, feel free to send them to me)

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How? How could I be so dumb, falling for the first comer. Of course, he had to be a criminal. Princes don't exist. Well, they do but only in the books Finn would read out loud for me. In the reality of things, they don't ride a horse and they don't save the damsel in distress. No, they make orphans out of merry kids and widows out of hopeful women.

How could I be so dumb to take Michael for the reincarnation of Heathcliff? Books do not prepare anyone to anything of the sort. I had not thought that in my life, I would see death first-hand. By the hand of the man I had given my body and soul too. On the day that should have counted as one of the best in my lifetime.

It had been two weeks. Two weeks that I did not show up at work, for fear of seeing him there. Besides, I refused to take money from murderers and disgusted myself that I had done so in the past. Had I known...

Of course, there soon were letters but those were just words to me. It had no feelings behind them, I didn't want them to have feelings so I stopped reading them when the fourth came along, at the pace of one a day. Of course, there were hands knocking on the door and me pretending not to be there or to be fast asleep.

I had come to the point that I was wandering in my room for hours on end, gazing at the dress he had offered me, wishing to burn it up or to give it to charity. Not doing anything about it until the next day when I would have those same thoughts all over again.

Two weeks felt like a hundred years. I wanted to see him, to talk to him, to feel his skin against mine but at the same time, I tried my best to repress those thoughts. I hated myself even more by each erotic dream that I was having. One thing for sure, I would have been a strange case to study for Freud.

By the end of that delirium that spread out over a fortnight, a thing even more bizarre occurred. 

I heard Michael approaching on the pavement, like I did the days before. Though flawed, he was a punctual man. The last drink he could drink before collapsing as bearings. You would have thought that like his cousins, he was handling booze with panache but no, he could never overcome that one drink. He started drinking at the same time every day, only to finish drinking at the same time every night.

This time around, he did not knock. In fourteen days, the man had learnt that there was no use. He was too drunk to notice me standing behind the window.

After a while, he would take his sleepy eyes and his limping legs to his place but not tonight. He started mumbling in a singsong voice, more to the pavement than to anyone else. It was as though he was singing a lullaby to the grim concrete.

I had to get closer to hear.

"I'm sor-sorry. I meant to tell- I meant to tell you is what we do- the Shelby Bloody Limited- Ah! Great family we got there, innit?  Yeah- is great business goin' on. I'm sorry"

After that came a whole bunch of incomprehensible words amongst a litany of jeers. He could not be stopped. And I could not let him on the pavement, emptying himself of all his vocabulary like that.

"Come in, now!" I practically ordered on the threshold, dragging the dead weight into my house.

"You! It's you, huh?"

I did not have any time to answer that he was already slumping on my bed. So much for the nice smell of clean sheets, I thought by lying down next to him. I fell asleep in spite of his snoring, reassured by the familiar sound of his heart beating next to mine.

The next day, I could not believe that I had been weak enough to let him in. What would he think when he would wake up?

Which he eventually did.

"Hi"

"Hi, my voice echoed his. We should talk"

"This early?"

"Yes"

"Alright, let me get coffee before we start"

He poured coffee that he made in two shakes of a lamb's tail with a pittance. I began.

"I want you to know that I thought of what I would do over the past few days. It is better if I leave. This, your family, is not for me. I think I deserve better than to be in love with a criminal of your kind"

"You were in love with me?"

"I could have been, yes"

"I could have been too. We could still be in love with one another"

"Do you even listen to me, Michael?"

"I do but I think it's a bunch of crap"

"Excuse me?"

He had gotten close to me. So close in fact that I could smell the stains of alcohol that had marked his clothes the night before.

"Yeah, the whole I-deserve-better crap. You deserve me and I deserve you. We're good together, you can't deny it"

"You killed a man in front of me, Michael! But it wasn't your first, was it? Tell me: did you kill more of 'em since that night?"

He scoffed. I knew I was going too far but I could not apologise and alleviate the situation now. So I carried on.

"I bet you have a blast doing it too, huh?"

He scoffed once more. Which infuriated me even more. "You talk big but the way you talk makes me think that you're no better than us! We're just frank about it!"

It was my turn to laugh. "The main difference there being that I don't kill people"

"For the love of God, the man was no saint! If anything, I did the world a favour"

"Shut up, Michael just shut up!"

"This is my family, Y/N. I can't fucking turn my back on them. What did you want me to tell you? I just wanted for you to like me, it's not something you just say like that between two drinks. Now, I hate that you had to see that, I wish you had discovered about it through my lips"

"Shut up"

"I'm so sorry. This is the life I've chosen, I had thought you could be a part of it"

He had barely finished his sentence that I was already out, leaving him alone in my house.

The morning was crude, the sun was veiled as though an eclipse was on the horizon. The temperature too was strange, warm but the atmosphere was moist. Nothing could be seen from a large distance and it was almost ipossible for me to walk through the noise of dockers unloading their trawlers on the pavement and the putrid smell of a night that had lasted for too long.

The last memory I have of that day was the smell of tobacco that was coming from behind me. After that, I remember nothing.