When I Return || Perrentes

Chapter 24: Conversation With a Reliable Pup

Tony didn't ever remember driving along the backroads at a speed quite like this. In the dark of night the shrub filled, charcoal landscape, surrounded by rising mountains that drove up points into the sky, almost as though they were trying to touch God, black and ominous in the dead of the midnight hour, blurred as they hurtled along the deserted road, all of them sick with worry.

None so much as Vic. Vic sat in the back of the BMW with Sammy's head in his lap, petting him furiously. Occasionally, Tony heard a sob. Now and then, the plaintive whimper; "I couldn't stop them."

After perhaps the third time he said it, Mike reached a hand back and placed it on Vic's knee, squeezed, and then extended it further back, offering his hand. Vic took it, held it in both hands against his face like a pillow, distraught, fearful and alone. "We'll find him," Mike reiterated, over and over again.

Tony wasn't ashamed to admit that when they stopped for gas and he wandered around the service stop in a search of some kind of snack, his stomach suddenly turned, flooded with sudden adrenaline, and he had to run to the bathroom to throw up. So affrighted he was that he was rendered emotionless, his brain yanking his soul out of his body to remove him from the situation - but the physicality was there, and he found himself kneeling on the floor of the gas station bathroom, emptying an already empty stomach so that acid burned the back of his throat and his nose, and then shaking and staring into space once he had nothing left to throw up. He must have been there for a while, because Kellin had to come and fetch him. He flushed the toilet for him, gently wrapped an arm around his shoulders, asked him if he was okay to stand. Caring, pretending he wasn't scared, he told Tony to wash his mouth - he was about clued in enough to turn on the water tap and rinse the stomach acid out. When he looked up, he caught Kellin's reflection in the mirror as he stood a little way away; he was clutching the cross that he wore around his neck, eyes half closed, lips moving but no sound coming out. There they resided in the gas station bathroom, one so anxious it made him sick, one in silent prayer.

When they finally made it back out to the cars, there was muted and solemn conversation. Humour had died a death in San Francisco, and here they were in the wake. Tony heard Kellin say to Patty; "God keep him." Tony didn't believe in God - not one bit, not after God had abandoned him his entire life. But he did, that night, humbly request that in the eventuality he was (as Kellin had pointed out in Arizona), in the wrong about that, God would forgive his doubts and refrain from exacting punishment upon Jaime's soul, when he, out of all of them, probably, deserved it least.

No amount of contact would settle them that night. Tony was forced to ride with the windows down in an attempt to settle his stomach, which, now and then, surged with a new wave of adrenaline and threatened to cause another expulsion of acid. He made sure to drink water to replace the fluid he'd lost, but it settled strangely and felt just as liable to come back up. The sandwich he'd bought to snack on at the gas station remained uneaten. Vic barely showed a sign of life - he had turned grey, and every time Tony turned around in his seat to ask if he was okay he was staring, still in shock, at the back of the seat.

Tony couldn't imagine it. What it would have been like to have been caught, fist to fist and face to face with an enemy, your only thought being to stop yourself being killed in that moment, only to turn around and find that Jaime had not been so lucky - that he was being dragged away as he struggled, thrown into the van they came in - to see the last look of his eyes as the doors closed, to hear the thudding of his fists against the vehicle's metal, to hear the half strangled cries of help! from inside - to pull a gun, to try and shoot the tyres but be too frightened to hit them, to miss by a mile as the van sped away. To watch as the one he loved was snatched from his grasp.

Actually, Tony could imagine it quite well. Which is what made it worse.

He didn't know how long they drove for, in utter silence. He lost sight of the reason they were here - awfully, he briefly forgot Jason and Will, and then afterwards missed them twice as much and ached so much for their comfort his head began to split. He clutched the owl necklace around his neck, uncaring, the knowledge of Cassadee and Rian's imminent split no longer relevant. When Rian gave it to him all those years ago, he had called it lucky - and if it really was, Tony dared to wish on it over and over again.