saints and soldiers » klance

11: Prevent This Tragedy

Nothing to hold, all hope deleted
Our demise has been completed now
Nowhere left to go but down

No one bothered Keith the rest of the night. He slept fitfully, waking up every few minutes from nightmares or noise. He'd always been a light sleeper, but tonight was especially bad. By the time the early-morning commuters started flooding the streets, he didn't think he'd gotten more than half an hour of sleep at a time.

He gave up trying to sleep around five in the morning. Frost had collected on both windows, cold air seeping in through the windows to illuminate the single tally mark scratched into the faded paint on the wall.

Scores of them were scratched into the walls of the garage that had been his whole world for six years. He had always counted, but he never used to mark them- until one morning in particular.

It had been five hundred sixty-seven days. He had woken up to the sound of glass shattering and a shout of, "Get your ass in here, you worthless little shit!" The old bastard had thrown a glass bottle at the door to the garage.

Keith had laid still for another moment, staring at the ceiling of the garage. Day five hundred sixty-seven. Wait, no. He furrowed his brow. Sixty-six?

His fingers started tapping at four times their normal pace. He couldn't remember how long it had been. He had to remember, he had to remember-

Sixty-seven. He was sure. The memory came flooding back of the morning before, lying in this exact same place in this exact same way, thinking sixty-six.

Something else shattered, something that sounded far more substantial than a bottle. Keith got up and slid on his tattered shoes, prepping for the mess that was sure to be waiting for him in the house.

That night, when he finally got back to the garage, he spent the entire night scratching tally marks into the garage wall.

He never missed a single day.

He wasn't really sure why he had done it tonight. Maybe it was habit, or maybe he was still subconsciously counting away, but there was a tally nonetheless.

He was listening when people started to get up. And when people started arriving in their offices upstairs. When the dining hall opened for breakfast below. When morning volunteers started leaving. When the residents followed.

Not a single person came to his room all day, and he was glad. He'd fucked up already with the volunteers that had tried to talk to him last night, and with everyone else who had ever come into contact with him. It was better that people just stayed away- he was sick of screwing everything up. And really, what was there to screw up if he was never in the presence of other people?

After hours of lying there motionless, near-comatose, he finally stood. He went to the window and looked down. The street wasn't so very far away, not from four stories up. He could see people hurrying down the streets toward something important they'd forgotten or strolling casually side-by-side with their friends, enjoying their lunch breaks. Normal people having normal days with their normal friends in their normal lives.

He could be one of them.

He pressed a hand to the screen, then let it fall away. What-ifs were a waste of time.

He wondered, then, why they were always on his mind.

He paced back and forth for hours, lost in thought. He added a tally mark to the wall. He unmade and remade both beds twice. He sat on the bed and tried to recall old songs he only remembered fragments of. He laid down and tried to sleep. He gave up on sleep and let himself get lost in his thoughts again.

No one came.

Maybe soon he would start to fade.

Second Chance didn't serve lunch, he was sure enough. They did, however, serve dinner to a fairly large group, which he could hear coming through the doors several stories below. Not subtle at all. The ghost of a smile made the corner of his lips twitch. He wondered what that was like. His entire life was a practice in subtlety.

The window frame was broad enough that he had discovered he could sit in it. He went there now, dropping down and turning his eyes to the streets below. Everyone was still so busy, but the air had a feeling of winding down as people went home for the day. He knew that the energy would return soon, though; people only stayed calm for so long before the nightlife bubbled back up to fill the silence.

Dinner came and went, and silence reigned again as workers went home, the smaller, quieter night shift took over, and people using rooms went to sleep. Keith stayed in the windowsill, watching club-goers and college kids stumble drunkenly through the streets below or race giddily down the sidewalk with friends in tow. He closed his eyes and imagined himself among them.

He didn't try to sleep again that night, because every time he laid down his eyes sprang open wider than they had been before. So he sat in that windowsill and watched, or he paced in front of the pane and watched, or he stood as still as he could and looked down and watched. It was interesting, to him, the way people interacted with each other, with their surroundings.

He had considered it, again and again, if he wished he was one of them, some blissfully ignorant, hopelessly carefree college student moving with a pack of people who cared about him and wandering about the city just to find something fun to do. He'd decided that he didn't.

He knew that his life wasn't good, was bad, even. But he didn't want to... replace it. Wish it away like experiences were nothing. He'd seen the good and the bad in people, and he'd seen sides of himself that maybe... maybe he never would have found otherwise. He didn't pity himself, really. That was all that mattered, wasn't it?

Someday, he could have a normal life if that was what he wanted. He could have all the experiences the people below him were having, have friends and a job and a house. Someday, he could be... something, maybe.

For now, he was content to sit and watch.

Nobody came for three days.