lost in my mind

The screen was going dim as he set the phone down on his desk, catching his eye just a moment longer before Frank nudged it aside with his wrist. He could’ve thumbed it off after he’d shot the text message back to Theo but even with Theo back - miraculously, beautifully right back where he’d always been – it was hard to do anything that cut contact. The cord had stretched half way across the world at times, strong even at that distant but with the snap, it’s reforging when he’d opened the door to find Theo standing there, he’d found himself unable to trust its strength. Hands wrapped as tight around that spot when it had been cut like he’d hold it together even if it started to fray. A touch of insanity clinging like soot maybe but … how could it not?

Frank let out a long breath, tipped his head forward to let the weight of it hang. His own brother had been killed in the woods by a man who had seen him as something evil for not interceding in a horrific situation. He’d been brought back, somehow, because it hadn’t been his time. In a heartbeat the world he thought he could already see for its sheer expanse after years of fighting his way across it to help save lives and create some sort of peace had blown wide open.

It was still like it – a popcorn kernel suddenly popping, revealing that hidden core that had been compressed and out of sight all this time.

Sighing, Frank sagged back in his chair. Eyes drifting to the window. Night had fallen, stars beginning to wink beyond the trees that crowded around the house. Not the polluted sky over campus, where the flood lights drowned out the diamond splinters in that black velvet sky, home. Surrounded by the woods that had felt ominous since he’d stumbled into the ones around campus and had shrieked over Theo’s body.

He swallowed, felt that constriction around his throat, the ache again that came at the thought of what had happened. The urge to scream feeling like it always lurked beneath the surface now but that was grief wasn’t it? Even if the person you were grieving had been given back by the universe.

Hie eyes drifted from the window, settled uneasily on the photo of their unit that graced a shelf on the bookcase for just a moment before he was pushing to his feet and walking unsteadily out. All of them whole again. Theo alive without these mental scars of his death cut deep, before he’d met Freyja and had managed to make him an uncle. Before his body had shattered and Kit’s mind had been incised deep with the PTSD that had driven him to kill his own brother.

Kace, not back. Even though, surely, he deserved it just as much. Cain had killed Able but this wasn’t it. It had been an accident. Kit hadn’t deserved to …

Hand on the fridge door, no real clue of how he’d gotten that far at least, Frank stared at the back of his hand. The world was pressing in again. That high whine in his ears that sounded like it would erupt into voices or the room around him would explode with that blinding white light, tearing him apart again. Pressure. Building until he was closing his eyes to block out the sight.

Until he was opening them again. Dark around him now. No plume of breath on the cold air as it had done then.

Frank stumbled through the undergrowth a moment more, backs of his hands stinging with the whip of fresh summer growth against them, feet slipping as he sank down again. Another body, another jabber of denial and fear babbling from his lips as he put his hands on the woman and tried to roll her.

Blood on her torn throat, speckled like scarlet freckles on her face. Brown eyes even seeming to hold a faintly red tint to the irises.

The scream raw in his throat. Hands tearing at the ground, pushing him up as tears burned in his eyes and sweat burst slick and sour from his pores, Frank tried to hold himself together through it. Voices as loud as they had been that day, echoing even after the scream tailed off and he was left over the woman, tears and sweat pattering slowly from him like they were for her. Someone to mourn and grieve and look up robotically as he heard the voice in the dark.

Maybe he should’ve heard and run but the fight and flight instinct was buried under the noise in his head. Frank frowned, hazel eyes staring at the man in front of him, frowning just as deep. His mouth moved silently for a moment before the words croaked out. ”She’s dead.” The obvious but he was already sinking down to his knees, shaking hands dragging over his face, even though he didn’t implode with the sobs this time. Not Theo. A girl dead but not Theo. He could hold.

He shook his head, eyes rising to Kit as they brimmed with tears for her. ”I was … I was home … and then I was here … I found her and … h-how? Where did you …” He glanced around like there’d be some explanation of how Kit had arrived out of the blue, just when he needed him. Faster this time. No police call, now wait in the back of a cop car. Just Kit, right here when he’d needed him – when he’d screamed.

Tagged: KIT CLARKE * Word Count: 938

Theo’s hadn’t been the first body he’d ever seen. He’d served his country for more than a decade – had seen members of his own forces cut down in front of him, their blood still staining his hands from his attempts to help by the time they reached the safety of the base again. Hundreds of the opposing forces and people just caught up in the middle of situations innocents shouldn’t have been anywhere near. His own team at the last, eyes slitted, clouded with the morphine pumped into him as he was carried away. It wasn’t something he’d been afraid of until then but stumbling into that clearing – not so unlike this one – to find that mirror of himself on the ground, had changed his view of all of this.

The world had shifted again. Like he was a chess piece, suddenly leaping square without any awareness of it. Coming to here when he’d been in his office, his home. The echoes to it left him shaking just as hard as he had that first time, not Theo, not again, but it felt as though he could blink and he would be back there in an instant. Theo’s blood on that pale, almost blue skin, the mirror image of his own face looking back at him. Frank could almost see it in Kit’s eyes when he was right there, the way it had been. The silvery flash of the blanket that hadn’t done a thing to warm him, the flashing blue lights, those amorphous faces looking at him in sick interest and concern in his peripheral vision.

On his feet, Kit in front of him, Frank swayed slightly as that simple truth fell from his lips. Not there. This wasn’t Theo, the woman hadn’t even been killed in the same way but trying to separate out those jagged pieces that had overlain one of another felt impossible. Brow furrowing he sank down to his knees on the ground. Dead and he’d been drawn here to her somehow. Had …

Frank looked up at Kit, confusion still thick enough to cloud his eyes. He knew how to deal with stress … in war. Slow your breathing, slow your thinking. Look, listen. ”She was right here when I s-stopped walking, I think … I had to be walking. I was home. I saw her, K-kit, I knew she was dead. I …” The frown cut deep lines in his face as he spread his hand flat on the floor in front of him, between the two of them. The tears started to blur his vision. Snatching his hand back Frank dashed them away. ”I saw her and I screamed, then you were ... and your eyes were...” Some part of him could see it rationally. A normal human reaction, that cry for help when you came across someone hurt. Fright, anger, desperation. It could all ring out but it had felt more than that.

It all snapped back into sharp focus, the burn of the tears backing off as he rocked back on the ground. Frank stared up at the man he considered a brother in horror. He hadn’t touched her, couldn’t. ”You think I could’ve done this?” Just a trace of doubt working its way through his voice. No. No matter how bad his brain had been rattled or how fucked in the head he’d been by what had happened to Theo, he never would’ve done this.

His eyes flicked away. Kit had done something like this once, to someone he loved. Caught in the middle of a PTSD episode. It could’ve been him but he couldn’t remember a moment of it, didn’t have blood on his hands or clothes, not the way he would’ve done if he’d done that. His eyes skittered away from Kit’s, the wheels in his head whirring hard enough that smoke should’ve been rising from his ears. Not him, it wasn’t there. ”It happened then. When I saw him … when I saw her now. That was what got you here? We’ve gotta be more than a mile from … you honestly heard that and came? You were walking out here … but something…” His hand went to his throat, fingers closing around it like he could stifle the echoes of that feeling. Voices buzzing in his head, radio static of some sort he’d never heard in his head. He slid his palms up over his ears now, pressing hard as that static popped again. No. No no no. He wasn’t gonna do it again, not here with Kit … not for Kit. He couldn’t.

Tagged: KIT CLARKE * Word Count: 938

The film roll in his head had run again and again in the days after he’d stumbled into the clearing on campus and had found Theo. Stuttered images playing behind his eyes, flickering, fading out, drifting back in again with no real idea of how any of it fitted together. Frank stared down at the body on the ground, trying to stitch those images back together to create some sort of narrative but they refused to go.

His office at the house, marking spread on the desk in front of him, the top page still only half littered with comments and corrections, the kitchen, the chill of the fridge washing over his skin almost like it did now. Goose flesh rising, the buzzing in his ears like a crowd of angry hornets growing along with it. No drifting away from it slowly like a scene fading out. A snap. Like shutters had immediately come down, hiding the world around him as somehow he’d moved through it. Blind, unaware, as deaf as his brother, until it all snapped back.

Frank curled his fingers in to his palms, trying to clutch those fragmented edges together and weld them back somehow. They refused to fit though, a jigsaw puzzle with chunks missing, no amount of force working to wedge them in. ”I don’t know, Kit, I don’t know. I was at the house, working, there were papers everywhere and I was checking my phone and then I was at the fridge … then I was here. I don’t know how, I don’t remember leaving the house. I don’t remember.” Nothing but the terminal ends of whatever the hell had happened to him today and months ago when it had been Theo’s body Kit was shielding him from.

Looking at Kit with barely concealed confusion Frank stared at Kit. The terminal end on both was Kit but this time he hadn’t been crouching at the side of a police car to pull him together. He’d been there in front of him eyes glowing a brighter blue than usual, unearthly but no less reassuring. Damp fingers came up, touched Kit’s jaw lightly like he’d lift his head until their eyes met again. Then it fell away, any sort of explanation tossed aside to stare point blank at the realisation that he might’ve done this.

Kit hadn’t meant to kill Kace but it had happened. Lost in a bloody and violent past, trying to stop the people he cared about getting hurt Kit had lashed out in the present and with one punch of the blade his brother was gone. His body shuddering from just drawing air in Frank started to shake his head again. The air huffed out of him, stuttering from lungs that wanted to freeze. ”I’m …” What was he gonna say? That he wasn’t because the sleepless nights, the nightmares, the emotional rollercoasters and the series of shitty occurrences in his life in this town that he tried to put behind him with waves of alcohol and any other way he could possible find to numb himself.

No. No, no, no. ”I don’t care how fucked up I am. I didn’t hurt her, I swear.” His fingers curled harder, nails cutting red moons into his palms as he glanced at the body and then away. Fierce swallows trying to hold that bile at bay. Something else had happened, he didn’t fucking understand any of it, not even after Theo had told him some, enough, of what had happened, but it wasn’t him tripping into that same nightmare Kit was still struggling his way out of.

Until Kit had arrived that scream had been the last stop on whatever road had brought him here. Like it had been with Theo. Throat still raw from it as he explained Frank raised his hand, squeezed like it would push something loose but there was nothing but that rising static again. Hands slid up as Kit began to talk, an explanation, something more, hidden suddenly with that flash of bright blue again. Shit.

Frank stared at Kit, his eyes desperate as his hands cupped tight over his ears. He welled up, something snapping as Kit grabbed for him, fingers gripping tight enough to knock that static back for a minute. His hands scrabbled, finding Kit’s forearms and biting as the sound popped like a bubble in his ears, taking the worst of the static with it. ”It’s there … I can hear it …” But somehow it easier with Kit there to cling to. His body still shuddered though, that burn rising in his eyes and throat like there was smoke in the air again and he was choking on it. ”No. No, I didn’t tell him anything. He doesn’t know … God, I don’t know. What’s happening? What’s wrong with me?” Desperation in that question as he tried to get his ragged breathing back under control. Maybe he should’ve asked what was wrong with Kit … what he was but all he could do was keep his gaze locked on those electric blue eyes and try to hold himself together again.

Tagged: KIT CLARKE * Word Count: 856

A thin skin of control slapped over the pressure inside. Like a band aid on a severed femoral artery, it was only a matter of time before that dam blew and everything stoppered up came pouring out. Frank could feel it in his head, the static pressing, growing, the only thing stopping it from exploding out right now was the man in front of him. Kit always there with his hand over the wound, that one voice pulling him through, keeping him holding on. On the dusty blood soaked road half a world away, in woods not a mile from here, holding him as his body had come close to shaking itself to pieces. Now, talking him through it as though the right word would cut that pressure off - a kettle yanked from the flames. Letting him hold on tight enough that it made his fingers ache.

A ragged breath in and finally that pop came. Not the devastating shock wave of an IED buried in his head, a quiet release that had relief shuddering out of him. Frank blinked tears back, the muscles in his chest feeling as though they were fluttering just as hard as his eyelids. Breathing easier but shallow still. ”In my head. At the house … they started … with Theo too. S-still here…” He peeled a hand away, aiming trembling fingers at his head.

Insanity. At his lowest in the hospital they’d questioned him like it was a foregone conclusion. A guy drained of all fight slipping somewhere deeper down than he could fight his way out without help. A shrink, meds, they could provide him with both. He’d fought it then, knowing that the explosion hadn’t taken that from him at least. Cracks had run through his sanity but they’d been held together until this pressure had started to build and now he wasn’t sure.

Lungs kicking hard again at the thought, he clung on. Stared as the question tripped out of him. Like Kit was the one with all the answers. Tear filled hazel eyes met blue, held as a breath shuddered out of him. He didn’t know. The answers had to be locked inside his own head, in the voices he’d never heard clear but none of them wanted to leak out. Frank let out a low, almost hysterical laugh, fingers slipping as he shook his head. ”Voices. It sounds like voices.” As Kit brought up the scream he shook his head vehemently, pulling a hand back to swipe it over his mouth. ”Both times. Voices, quiet, like they’re in another room. Nothing … nothing’s clear.” Just that muddy swirl of sound and then he was under like someone had thrown a switch. Then he was here – Frank looked around the clear, still shaking his head like it would rattle something loose – the voices back, louder, shrieking until his own scream was torn out and then … then it was gone.

Frank pressed his lips together, his gaze ticking back, watching Kit look down at the body – the girl. All those years of reading, studying the past like it was some big reveal for the present, the future, if you could read it the right way. ”Same. Exactly the same.” Pieces ticking in his head like tiny cogs, teeth finally beginning to interlock after grinding against one another and producing that camouflaging smoke for so long. The word stuck fast though, frustratingly just beyond reach of probing fingers.

Kit was stretching out a hand to the girl, the loss of the grip on him leaving him clutching at his friend’s arm as he did it. His jaw tightened, no urge to scream building though, just a grief bubbling up now. He’d held Theo when he’d been like this, hadn’t left his brother alone to go cold in a place like this. Couldn’t do that with her. Kit couldn’t even … God she looked so young. Mutely, he nodded, swallowed hard like it would break the lock on his throat. ”N-no one else was there. I was walking suddenly and he was right there in front of me. I screamed and then they …” It’d been people from campus then. A half dozen of them rushing into that space, voices rising before the whole world had exploded with light and sound.

”People … what?” Frank’s hands scrabbled again. Not with the same desperation before but one gripping Kit’s jaw now, his own eyes searching the ones that had changed colour – chambray blue to something close to neon, bright a moment before. ”What are you talking about … people aren’t …” It was horror movie bullshit. The kind of thing they’d groan about when someone would set up the projector in the mess tent, whatever crap they could get their hands on played out on that fluttering white sheet. ”Banshee,” Frank blurted suddenly, scrambling his way to his feet to drag his hands over his face. ”They … they call them banshees but it can’t be … they’re always women. Every single legend it’s a woman. All of this, it’s crazy.” The girl was still dead though, Theo had died, he’d been brought back. A miracle he hadn’t wanted to look at too closely … that Theo hadn’t … For his own good. The words rolled through his head, drawing a strained laugh with them. How blind had he been? Or how desperate?

Tagged: KIT CLARKE * Word Count: 901