lost in the fire

Shreds of paper fluttered in the air. There wasn’t enough celebratory noise to have it feeling like New Year’s Eve in Time’s Square (overrated if you would’ve asked him on a day where he was capable of doing more than snarling). A split second after the stack of newspapers had seemed to explode in his white knuckled grip the entire world seemed to have gone silent. As though there really had been an explosion and his ears were ringing from the violence of it, not the sudden vacuum of what had remained of the life he’d built one brick at a time on a shaky foundation.

Grey didn’t so much as shift his weight but his eyes lifted from the fingers now curled into fists around nothing but air. The handful of clients in the reception area, thankfully none of whom had been close enough to see the incendiary headline, let alone read the story, stared back at him. Usually he’d have felt the prickle of that much scrutiny like ozone charged air lifting the hair on his arms, the back of his neck, but now it was all numb, like every ounce of sensation had been blown away with the newspaper.

Destiny’s newspaper.

For months she’d left it in the hands of her staff – the people she’d trusted enough to go back to today – supervising remotely, as he’d done from their nest upstairs. Hands barely on the wheel, the grip not tight enough to stop his sister from wrenching out of their hands again.

Jaw bunched as the first voice sounded again, he’d started to scoop the rain of destroyed newspaper together. A pile on the top of the reception desk, more swept up as he’d grabbed the broom from Catia’s hands as she’d walked in the door and had automatically rushed into the fray. The ”please,” that had hissed out of him through lips pinched white had her backing off, but he’d known it was temporary. The stack of newspapers delivered to the hotel this afternoon were just a small portion of those circulating through town already, each bearing the bloody tale of his survival across the front page. In hours it would be echoed on every set of lips, splashed across every phone screen. The ripples would spread until another bomb was dropped and it would be some other sucker’s life exploding bloodily in the town’s newsrooms. Too little, too late.

Ignoring Catia’s calls after him, he’d gathered up all of that paper shrapnel in a box and had carried it upstairs. His fingers had fluttered through it, spreading those pieces out into something approaching a scattered jigsaw of the story – a J.J. Hart listed as the author beneath one of the publicity photos from the hotel’s website, the ones that barely revealed his face. It didn’t matter, he could practically smell his sister’s touch all over it.

In another flare of heat he’d set the entire lot alight, the smoke filling the work-room, the one still stacked with the boxes he’d scooped chunks of his life into anticipating its transformation before Petyr’s loss had left a crater there instead. A black pall hanging below the ceiling. Taking that future hadn’t been enough for her. Destiny had fought her then, for every possible future they would’ve had with their son, but this? Had she tried to get her hand back on the wheel or had this slipped through in a moment of apathy, trusting that some sort of glamour on his life would let all of this roll away like water off a duck’s back. Not this time.

The acid of that story burned its way through his flesh, his ribs, his heart, as Grey had pulled up the story on his phone. Not just on the front page, although surely that was easier to pull, as easy as picking up a phone with some sort of warning that the ground was going to open beneath his feet for a second time. Still feeling that sick, burning, hollow in the centre of him he stalked out to the kitchen. Hands dragged down his face, every muscle and nerve in his body pulled taught as wires, ready to snap and explode like power cables at the slightest provocation. Fingers that still white knuckled shoved a cop into the coffee machine, then erupted with scarlet speckles as the wall holding it all back inside of him cracked for a moment and he crushed the delicate little cup in his hand.

Opening it over the sink, he watched the white shards rain down just like the paper, followed by the patter of scarlet drops. Numbly, he plucked the rest of the shards free, propped the heels of his hands against the edge of the sink. Grey closed his eyes, willing that light through him, a tinkle of more expelled ceramic before he was done. He was still there when he heard the elevator approaching – Catia, giving up on phoning through the intercom from downstairs every two minutes, Leah, come to finish the job, Destiny. There was a twist in his chest at that. Leah’s hand had been there from the moment she’d throttled Destiny, fingerprints left in bruises instead of sooty smudges on his life.

He straightened up slowly as he heard his name croaked, muffled by the doors slowly opening behind him. There was the skitter of claws on the floor, the dog, from wherever Berlioz had retreated when that ball of restrained violence had entered the apartment. ”Right here,” Grey said tightly. He turned, leaning back against the countertop behind him. It still felt as though there was only a thin shell holding everything inside, as there had been the day Destiny had arrived with those bruises on her throat. Ready t0 crack, the walls surely not thick enough to keep it all inside. Razor sharp edges of what had been slowly slicing away at it.

Was going to call. For weeks, every time one of them had stepped out of the apartment they’d kept that tether alive over the phone, practically on the line every moment they were gone. Now she couldn’t have picked up it to say that sorry when she found out about it – obviously long before now. Grey’s lips curled slowly at the corners, the expression cold in spite of all that heat – undeservedly so. ”You shouldn’t have bothered. You’re too late. It’s all out there now. Your newspaper, my life, Destiny. My life all out there for everybody to see. You think anybody’s going to hear you apologise for it?” He did. He heard it and it just made it worse, balm for wounds that were far too big for it. Drops in the ocean that had spread under his sister’s – and this JJ asshole’s – touch.

”You’re telling me you didn’t this was coming? Are things that bad there that nobody bothers to run anything by you anymore?” Again undeserved. He’d encouraged her to step up and take the newspaper on, his faith in her so big that he’d known she could handle it. His faith in everybody else so withered that he should’ve known that some snake in the grass would try and take a bite at him, because Leah wasn’t done. She wasn’t going to be done until she’d taken everything else along with their son.

Tagged: DESTINY BACCARI * Word Count: 1225

Thou shalt not kill.

It was meant to be one of the worst sins, wasn’t it? You murdered someone and there was only one place for you to end up. Hell. An eternity spent burning, tortured by the crimes you’d committed during life. He hadn’t had one of those fire and brimstone childhoods. Even though the church in the village was close enough to the house that he could feel the vibrations of the ringing bells through the walls, religion hadn’t penetrated. Maybe his mother had prayed for some sort of reprieve from Malcolm’s madness, or for a release when she’d finally left him. Maybe Malcolm had cast what faith he did have aside when that loss had stripped the last of his sanity from him. Either way Grey hadn’t suffered through Sunday sermons and the driving home of the deadly sins. The Maddoxes had enough of their own.

How many did you have to commit for your whole existence to become a living Hell? Did they add up cumulatively? The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. Generations of it, layers of it building until you reached the point where your own sins choked everything.

Grey’s fingers curled like his icy smile hand, fingertips pressed hard enough against the underside of the counter for themt o start to go numb. For a short time things had seemed to lighten, the sun breaking through those choking layers, thinning them so he could thrust a hand through and feel something more. Destiny’s fingers had curled around his, gripping, trusting. His hands hadn’t been the ones laid upon her while they’d swayed, bare and vulnerable in that fresh stage of what he’d hoped was a new life, but they’d been there because of him. Petyr had died because of him. The sins of the fathers.

The words echoed through his head, ricocheting off of those walls of heat, the ragged nerves that wanted to burst into life with a rage he wouldn’t let touch a woman who’d already been scarred by the temper of someone he wanted to kill for it. She wasn’t the Destiny who’d cringed away from him before, the one who’d allow herself to bend and break in the face of all of that rather than stand against him. She frowned at his words, the only sign that his words had bloodied her the glassiness in her eyes. Grey huffed out a breath, his throat tightening. Leah’s was the finger on the dominoes, tipping them down in that never ending run that he couldn’t escape. ”But what?” he asked hoarsely. How could there be anything that would change this now?

His eyes ticked to the elevator behind her. Maybe he was lucky it was her and not Mystic Falls’ finest showing up at his door. What was he going to be able to do to protect her from a prison cell? Leah would be free then to cut out what remained of his heart, grinding his life to dog food.

For months they’d hidden away here, trying to gather up the pieces of them that were left after Leah had torn out the best of them. Hands tender, hearts aching, trying to find some way to keep themselves and them together. They’d left the rest of it to handle themselves. Cat practically running the hotel and … oh, Destiny didn’t have a Catia, someone who knew, someone who was loyal.

Teeth raking over his lower lip, Grey shook his head. Someone had taken the time to slip the choke chain while she was away, digging into the boss’ life, clawing through it, maybe with those painted lips of his sister pressed to their ear. Spitting poison, like he was now. Fuck. He straightened up at Destiny’s croak, his hands finding his face to scrub again. ”You’re meant to know. You’re meant to see what they’re doing. They’re meant to respect your authority, Destiny.” Had they looked at her and seen just what Leah had? Someone small and weak, too small and weak to put a stop to them? They were blind. He’d seen the strength in Destiny, and this wasn’t it.

The snap in her voice had his hands dropping away, his face settling into those granite like lines as she stuttered through a half explanation again. He took a step towards her, his stomach twisting with it. It was too easy to see someone following the trail he thought he’d hidden well enough, cops, the pack, someone coming to mete out the justice that should’ve been found centuries ago for what had been done to his family. ”You just what? Didn’t see that they wanted to tear my life apart?” No, neither of them had.

His palms itched like the shards of ceramic were still buried in them. That need to direct all this anger out at something and not her built under his skin. If the cup had been right there again he’d have flung it again instead of cramming that need back down inside to strain at the locks of the box he crammed it into. The whine from Berlioz had the guilt weighing atop it. Was this how it had started with Tanner?

Destiny’s voice cracked through the air like lightning, searing his thoughts out of his mind, leaving nothing but the sickness behind. Grey stopped, staring at her, the high colour rapidly starting to drain from his face. ”And I wasn’t?” he asked hoarsely. He’d put everything on pause, his life shrinking down around the guilt and grief they’d shared. It shrunk further now, a dying star folding in on itself before it exploded.

He wanted to wrap his fingers around her wrist, to draw her hand down as he smoothed away the tears he’d wrung out of her again. Grey stepped forward slowly instead, watching Destiny skirt around the counter, the space eroding between them as the first heat of his temper began to boil away to something ice cold again. ”You’ve known for months that someone wanted to tear my life apart? You think it honestly hurts any less now? You could have shut him down, Destiny, you could’ve fired him.” She’d buried her head in the sand instead, right up until the moment those claws had torn through his life again, gutting him in a different way.

One step, two – he was at the corner of the counter, reaching for her so slowly that she’d have what felt a lifetime to bolt from him again. She’d shrunk away before, before Petyr’s death had hollowed them out. ”What do you think’s going to happen to all of this now? I ran once from what I did and I’m lucky the only people who came after me were the pack.” Without proof the cops couldn’t put him behind bars for life, but they could start their enquiries, painting him as guilty before any evidence landed on their laps, carried in Leah’s claws. ”Are you gonna visit me in jail too?” That was cruel, unnecessarily so. The minute it was out of his mouth he was shaking his head. Grey dropped his chin, his jaw bunching as his fingers settled around her wrist. ”I’m sorry,” he managed hoarsely. Tugging like he could draw her in, forcing himself to gentle his touch so he didn’t shatter her like that cup. The shards of his heart wouldn’t drop from his torn flesh as easily as the ceramic had.

Tagged: DESTINY BACCARI * Word Count: 1244

Were parents meant to install some sort of dam in their kids? A lock even, like he’d seen on the canals when they’d gone on one of those rare school trips. They’d stood, mouths open, watching the lock gates open and the brackish water pouring from one bit of the River Medway to another. Emotions backed up inside of you the same way – his were as brackish as that water, filled with the detritus of a life that had been swept away time and time again with those storms that rolled in – rushing towards the lock in the end, if you had one. Grey could picture the gates slamming shut for some, their hands on the controls that let you open them a bit at a time. All the pain and joy trickling out a bit of the time, keeping that detritus held back. Controlled.

He held back a laugh that wanted to roll out of him as his hands covered his face, trying to wipe away the anger that set that water to boiling. Parents were meant to teach their kids how to handle the world, coping mechanisms, demonstrating the way you worked those controls. All Malcolm had shown him was how to leave that lock wide open, how to feed the waters with booze and madness until they were a tidal wave that threatened to drown everybody around him.

Destiny stood in front of them now, like she could withstand the flood. Small jets, sharp as needles, firing at her, drawing blood he never would’ve drawn if he’d had any real control over it. His fingers curled against the bony curve of his forehead like they were curling over the key to the lock, desperately wanting to crank it back and close those gates again. No healthier than letting it all flood out, there had to be some release of the pressure, but how the fuck did you do that without hurting someone? Between his fingers he saw her shake her head and knew that Destiny wouldn’t survive the full torrent of this. What they’d gone through had eroded the ground under them, leaving it boggy, ready to swallow them hole the minute they were off balance.

It wasn’t like she’d just been neglecting the work for no reason. They’d been here together, both wallowing in the grief that had hit harder than his flood waters would. The two of them only standing here now because they’d held each other up. That headline had torn the grip they’d had on each other apart, leaving them all the weaker for it, leaving him all the colder for it. His throat worked as he looked into those tear filled eyes, the fist around it not loosening despite his knowing better than this. ”Not hard enough,” Grey whispered, ignoring the apology that parroted out again, the one he should’ve reached out and accepted.

There was some stupid saying about trying to shut the stable door after the horse had bolted, this wasn’t so different. How did you take back what you already said when it rushed towards someone at tsunami speed, hitting before you could snatch it back? The two of them floated closer, although his movements felt more like a cutting through that water, decisive, purposeful, not that same slow drift Destiny did like she was approaching some safe harbour, calmer waters. In that torrent he touched her finally, the questions rolling out cold, closing around her ankles like he could take her down and drown Destiny in those waters he kicked so hard to get himself free of.

She reached for him, her fingers curling into his shirt. Grey felt the fabric stretch tighter around his chest, his back, like the hug he probably couldn’t have accepted, not yet, not without exploding out of his skin. Her chin came up like she was watching him for some sign of that explosion. Tears spilled harder, like her own flood gates were opening as he sliced into her. He should’ve reached up, smoothed those tears away like he’d done dozens of times in those months they’d been sealed up here together, in those barriered waters together.

The apology stuttered out, too late. He knew it the moment she let go of him and snatched herself back. His fingers closed on thin air as he sucked in a breath. Grey hung his head, the muscles in his throat and jaw working. The moment the pressure of Destiny’s hold on him eased he wanted it back. His first inhalation was ragged, his left hand, not the one still fisted between them, curled around the edge of the counter again, his one hand hold as Destiny’s old gates opened and the waters he hadn’t paused to look at poured back at him. ”But they weren’t lies,” he breathed, his voice quiet under hers. The leech that worked for her had waited for the moment she was out of her seat to go against her orders, the ones she’d issued to protect him. He’d waited until the heart had been cut out of both of them and he hadn’t known a thing about it because Destiny hadn’t wanted to add to the stress that already threatened Petyr with his prick move.

Grey’s hand dropped as she rubbed at her cheeks, those blue eyes he had willingly drowned in before rising to meet his, still shimmering with that lens of tears he’d helped put there. His lips curled faintly, almost wryly, the slowly falling waters still trapped behind them. ”A retraction’s not gonna do anything if the sheriff decides to start poking. I’m careful, Destiny, but if there’s something left here and they really want to find it, they will. Especially if he’s pushing from behind the scenes.” It’s … it was fucked. All of it was fucked, because he hadn’t been careful enough, more, because he hadn’t been able to rid himself of Leah and that druid for good.

Something trembled inside, like it was rattling against the lock gates, trying to break free still when he was doing everything inside of him to hold it back. Destiny was sorry, he was sorry, but no amount of apologising was gonna change the truth that was out there about him. ”If you would’ve told me then, we could’ve done something about it … taken care of the worry once and for all. We … can’t change it now, but I wish you would’ve.” And there was a hard edge of his voice at that, even if that edge was brittle enough to crumble as the words cleaved the air.

Destiny had probably already started to try and put together the words that would turn what was written into the lie it absolutely wasn’t. He was already trying to rationalise not sacrificing the arsehole behind this. More heat, it would only leave him boiling somewhere behind bars, because what was more suspicious than the guy blowing the top off of something like this just up and vanishing? The promises slipped out of her to do just that, little thuds of hope that dashed themselves against the walls he was holding up with every ounce of strength he had now. Grey pressed his lips together, shaking his head as his frown deepened. He wasn’t sure there was any better, no matter how much he wanted it.

She pressed into him again. Her arms around him this time, instead of the circle of straining cotton. Her head settling into that spot on his chest that had been hers since those first few nights they’d spent together when he’d had to tell her not to curl away from him, not if she wanted to be close. Slowly, like he was a mannequin coming to life, Grey brought his hands up to slip across her back, the loosening of those stiff muscles speeding with the warmth that leached in. A puppet becoming a real boy again as he shrugged those invisible strings held by others off of him. ”Leave?” The question was sharper than he intended, but filled with confusion. ”I’m not going anywhere, not when everything is here.” The good and the bad both mired in this spot … and Petyr … his son was taken from here, but this was the place he got to see him, where he got to hold him and there was an anchor in that, holding him in place despite those rushing waters.

There was still some small part of him that believed Destiny could’ve stopped this at some point before it had spilled out in ink, but it knew, he knew, she wasn’t the one to blame for it all. He was, the man who’d written it was, and that name was gonna be marked out in the ink just the same, but not Destiny. ”You didn’t hurt me, you didn’t ruin it. It’s always them and we’re not running from it. I’ll stand here until every one of them is dust.” Maybe there was a hint of Malcolm’s madness in his eyes as he said the words, but it was all him as he trailed one hand up to cradle Destiny’s jaw and he kissed her just as fiercely as he’d spoke. He’d stand at that delta, with her at his back and the only people who would drown were those coming for them.

Tagged: DESTINY BACCARI * Word Count: 1562