onlythebranch | (no subject)

The worse Mad Sweeney's luck gets, the more he thinks about Laura fucking Moon.

It's fucked up, he's very aware of it, because when he thinks about her, he's not just thinking about how badly he wants his bloody coin back. He's thinking of that moment after the second accident, when he'd stood on that highway with his blessed coin between his fingers and just stared at her and known. He's thinking about that creeping insistence inside him that he do the right thing, whatever the fuck that means, and he's thinking about how angry he'd been, how badly he'd wanted to turn and walk away and leave her rotting there on the asphalt.

He's thinking of how gently he'd placed the coin back on her chest, how her dead, skinned muscles had felt under his fingertips.

She didn't deserve the gift he'd given her, but then, he knows he had never deserved it either.

These days he's drinking more than he usually does, which is saying something. Chances are nobody really notices, he's drunk more often than not even when times are good. It's just that drinking makes the rest of it sort of blend into the background and he can forget all this shit he keeps thinking about. It starts with the coin, but it ends up at Laura, and over and over he finds himself wandering back to the idea that it's not the coin he wants to see again, but her.

And that idea can go fuck itself.

He drinks straight from the bottle, Southern Comfort minus the fucking coke, drinks enough that he's stumbling when he moves from the kitchen to the living room. There's a moment's consideration when he thinks he ought to call someone, but then he just collapses on the couch with the bottle resting against his thigh and he turns on the TV. What he gets is some reality show about body painting, which is fine, which is good enough for him. It's brainless and he doesn't have to think, he can just get lost in the alcohol and the colours and when he finds himself drifting off, he thinks he's never been so thankful for a little bit of sleep.

The last thought he has before he slips into a dreamless black is that he wishes he could see her.

It's late when he wakes again. The TV is still on, but it's a different show now, some late night bullshit that never quite makes any sense and it's made worse by the fact that he's still drunk. The lights are off, the room is dark, but all at once he's aware of some change. There's pressure against his thigh other than the bottle of whiskey, something cool and slightly damp.

The air smells like blood.

Carefully, he sits up and sets the bottle aside, then reaches for the lamp he knows is beside the couch. The room floods with warm, yellow light and he looks down into the pretty, dead eyes of Laura Moon.

She's wearing the same clothes she was the night of the accident. The one that killed her. The one he caused. She's lying on the couch beside him, her head propped up against his thigh at a perfect angle that he's staring down into her face. There's blood on her lips, dripping gently onto his jeans, leaving a dark red smear he can feel against his skin.

This isn't Laura with his coin. This is Laura quivering in her death throes on the side of a highway. This is Laura after deciding to suck Robbie's cock one last time, after Sweeney had swerved his truck into their lane on Wednesday's instructions. This is Laura before the coin, the Laura who should have been left to rot in her grave, but instead she's here. On his fucking couch.

He can't stop looking at her. He takes his phone out of his pocket and dials the first person he thinks might be able to help. It's late, he's not sure they'll answer, but when they do -- or maybe it's their voicemail, he's too drunk and too fucked up to think about it -- he just says, "I'm at home. I need help."

Then he hangs up again. Hangs up and stares at Laura staring back at him.

"Fuck," he whispers.

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Sweeney wants to tell Rowan not to fucking look at him like that, but he keeps his mouth shut for once in his life, scowling deeply instead, as if that will make it less obvious how fucked up he is over this. He shouldn't be. He's annoyed that he is.

"No," he answers when Rowan asks if he has a car. "But I can hotwire one no problem."

Maybe a bit of a problem, given the state of his luck, but he'll try anyway. Probably get his dumb ass electrocuted in the meantime and leave Rowan with a car accident victim and a fried up leprechaun. That wouldn't be so bad. Then it wouldn't be his problem anymore.

He goes to a closet, takes out a sheet. Plain white. Nothing fancy. He thinks Laura would approve.

Familiar as Rowan was with the weight of a dead body, he lifted her up so Sweeney could spread out the sheet below her. With something like reverence, he laid her down on the clean sheet before beginning the unceremonious work of rolling her up in the cloth like a burrito. Death meant a lot to him, but there was little time or space for deference here.

"At least she's not too heavy," Rowan grunted as he lifted her again. She weighed on his arms, but both he and Sweeney were more than strong enough to manage a tiny woman like this.

"We'll need shovels, too. Any ideas?"

"No, she's a scrawny little bitch," Mad Sweeney agrees, but his voice isn't as hard as it would normally be while discussing Laura. He appreciates the way Rowan treats her as he wraps the blanket around her body and he's caught in the middle of this confusing state. He wants to be pissed, both that he cares so much and that she's here at all, but he just feels shitty and sad.

And he hates that.

"The maintenance closet in the basement," he says. "Has to be somethin' in there, has to be-" He stops himself short for a second, then his jaw tenses for a moment, his teeth clenched together. When it releases, he seems a bit more in control. "I'll look. I know where it is."

Rowan's mouth tightened. There was something to be said for respect for the dead, in his mind, as so few people actually made it to the point of being truly dead in his experience. But Sweeney's tongue ran filthy even in the best of moments. He tried not to take anything by it or say anything against it. This was a stressful moment, strange and uncanny.

"Go," Rowan directed as he tucked in the sheet around the body and moved to lift her up again. "I'll follow. Meet you down there."

And then, when they were in the relative safety of a car, he would ask more questions.

For a moment Mad Sweeney doesn't move. His gaze is steady on Laura in Rowan's arms, as if even wrapped in a blanket he can feel her looking at him. She can't possibly be, he'd closed her eyes, but he can still feel it and it burns uncomfortably through him.

Then he nods once, as if he's convinced himself of something, and opens the door. Once Rowan is out, he locks the apartment door, knowing he'll have to deal with the bits of blood and hair she might have left behind.

"It's my fault," he says quietly, moving toward the stairwell. "Laura. It's my fuckin' fault. Car accident, but still my fault."

Edited 2018-07-11 14:43 (UTC)

Oh, okay. Apparently they were going to have this conversation now.

Rowan couldn't fault Sweeney. He understood that death was a lot to handle, especially the death of someone you knew. That was in normal circumstances. To suddenly have a dead body next to you would shake anybody. But Rowan had simply figured that someone who had seen as much death as Sweeney would be somewhat inured to it by now.

It was good that he wasn't. Rowan wondered at himself for a second, shouldering all that weight. He still wanted to know. He wanted to know who she was, her story and Sweeney's feelings. But he had prioritized this differently. What did that say about him?

"You were driving the car?" Rowan grunted as he followed. There might have been a touch of judgment. He didn't think he had ever known Sweeney wholly sober, both literally and metaphorically, so him behind a car wheel was destined to end badly at some point.

"Not the one she was in," he answers. "And I wasn't drunk."

He has no way of knowing if Rowan is thinking that or not, but he suspects he might be. It'd be fair. These days, he's drunk more often than he isn't, needing it to get through the long days in ways he hasn't in some time. Without his coin, though, everything feels so much more difficult.

"She was fucking around on her husband. Blowing his best friend in the car. They crossed over the line." Not a lie, really. He's just not mentioning the fact that Wednesday had orchestrated it all, down to the last little detail.

Drunk driving accounted for hundreds more deaths than simple car accidents in the Age of Mortality. Rowan knew the statistics by heart. It was natural to assume, but he was somewhat grateful to hear that that wasn't the case, all the same.

"Then it wasn't your fault," Rowan reasoned. "They crossed the line. They made the mistake. You could have swerved, maybe, but it wasn't your fault."

All this was said with a dead body weighing heavily on Rowan's shoulder, so his tone wasn't particularly sympathetic, just straightforward.

Christ, how he wishes that were true. There might be a kernel of truth in it, hidden somewhere in the reality of it all being orchestrated by a god, but it was a god he worked for.

They're in the basement now and Sweeney shifts past Rowan, his big hands laying on Rowan's shoulders for a moment, the touch gentle, but whether it's due to Laura being in his arms or Rowan himself, Sweeney can't decide. Figures it doesn't really matter.

"Maybe," he settles on saying as he breaks into the maintenance closet and grabs a pair of shovels. "I spent years on the fuckin' battlefield. Killed countless. Dunno why one dead asshole bothers me this much more than they do."

"Did you even know her?" Rowan asked, interested now in that way in which some people are when confronted with a puzzle. He truly didn't understand Sweeney's guilt especially in that context of so many dead. Dead was dead, whether on a battlefield or on a highway.

"And, I mean, there is the fact that none of the other dead assholes ever showed up on your couch," Rowan had to admit.

"Not before she died," he says. "But after. When she came back."

It's a shitty statement to make without following it up with anything else, but even so, he needs a second. He looks at the shovels for a second, then nods toward the back door leading out of the basement. It should take them into the quiet courtyard and then they can slip into the shadows without much difficulty he thinks.

"My coin. My lucky coin. I gave it to her husband by accident and he tossed it into her grave," he explains. "It brought her back somehow and when I tracked it to her..." He shrugs. "Who'd give that back willingly? A second chance at life, even if she was only really half there to begin with."