Driveway, Side Door: 7/J
It didn’t even feel like rage anymore. He didn’t know if rage was supposed to be the absence of emotion or the collective; was it stark white or all black and ugly brown, muddled together? It was probably telling that his heartbeat was thrumming too hard against the underside of his jaw, pushing the snarky fucking inner monologue into such high gear that there was no room to even wrap his mind’s articulation around the thought - but again, that would have required some cognizant self-awareness to recognize and to parse into neat little lines, ready for consumption. Instead, all of Seven’s shit felt like a hand had splayed fingers against the slick surface of a table and dragged through the tidy rows of powder, kicking talc and ethanol up into the air. Leaving only prints and that sick fucking look on her expression in his wake.
He didn’t know how, exactly, but in his exit he’d found his way to the side door and slammed through it. Mercifully, the glass in the windows was that cheap, sturdy, doubled-paned shit used in houses in climates where it got cold in the winter, and it didn’t shatter behind him even though the clapboard siding rattled with the force in his wake. Seven made it past the tidy little strip of green that bisected the driveway between the house and its neighbour, and he kept going until the toes of his leather loafers butted up against the siding where it didn’t belong. After that he turned back, and yeah, okay - his anger was so real, something hot and sour at the back of his throat, curling against his soft palate, and he felt fucking dizzy with the weight of it.
No pacing, but once he’d hit the opposite wall he turned back the way he’d come and he stood there in the driveway, straddling the strip of green like it was no man’s land riddled with artillery and he pressed his chin against his chest, bone digging into bone, jaw to collarbone. It hurt, and he didn’t care, and he felt dizzy because his vision swam and he wanted to vomit and he wanted to fucking punch something inanimate that didn’t remind him even remotely of Marta because he just wanted violence and he didn’t want to let her be the fucking martyr anymore. The adhesive of his name tag was peeling so that the sticker curled at the edges and he didn’t care. He didn’t see it.
He didn’t see much of anything, really. He saw the white house, and he imagined that he saw the glowing outline of Marta’s presence somewhere around, inside, outside of it. He saw the weight of his anger, how it’d pooled in his gut like some molten metal that dripped and maneuvered and melted and manipulated his insides until they fucking hurt. He ripped open the tweed of his blazer and pulled a pack of Pall Malls out of the inner breast pocket, shoving one between his lips with hands that trembled. Lifted a lighter up, an old Zippo that he had to click repeatedly. Over and over until the spark caught the old cotton and the flame jumped up to lick at the end of his smoke and sizzle against the paper and tobacco.