Marcus Caravahlo (_caravahlo_) wrote in horror_story, @ 2013-05-13 10:44:00 |
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Entry tags: | complete, cycle002, marcus |
Who: Marcus Caravahlo
When: January 15th-17th
Where: His duplex.
What: Marcus is emo.
Warning: None.
Going from the hospital to his house was one of those hazy, rote actions that always seemed just below the surface of deliberate, conscious thought. Marcus couldn’t remember getting into his truck, let alone stopping at appropriate intersections and navigating the sparse, six am traffic back to his place. It happened, of course. Parking the truck, stomping up the icy porch steps to unlock his front door. All of it must have happened for him to be home again, but it was all a fucking blur. He was probably lucky he hadn’t hit someone. He might not know it if he had.
Home, as it turned out, held little in the way of comfort. Why had he ever let Bryant stay in his house? That had been such a remarkable mistake. Now Bryant was there, faintly, permeating throughout the place. In the living room, where Marcus had kissed him. In the kitchen, asking about the photographs. In the bed, which had barely been up to the challenge of supporting two men their size. Had Bryant lived, he would have invested in a bigger mattress. Had Bryant lived, it could just be a fucking house again. A place to sleep and eat and shit and fuck, that didn’t carry within the air of a memorial. Not that there was anything there to serve as a physical reminder. Bryant hadn’t left anything at the house the one night he’d stayed. There were pictures of Sophia in the bedroom. Pictures of strangers who happened to share a bloodline in the kitchen. Nothing of Bryant’s. The coroner might as well have been a ghost passing through, for all the physical impact he’d actually left.
Another thing to hate him for. Like not being able to conjure up a medical miracle when it was needed. Through the searing turmoil of emotions that served as the onset of grief, Marcus was compiling a long list of wrongs. It had been wrong of Bryant to waste so much fucking time, wrong of him not to realize that there wouldn’t be any. Wrong of him not to stay more than the one night. Wrong of him to be so hurt, so far beyond recovery, but not so much that he couldn’t just die in the fucking blast. No, he’d had to linger long enough for Marcus to see how badly he was hurt. Just long enough so that his death would carve itself into the younger man’s brain. A permanent image, like the tattoos that were marked into his flesh. Bryant waking, Bryant trying to speak, Bryant not just slipping away, but fleeing, leaving Marcus with the mess. Lifeless flesh, blood, and tears.
That had been wrong, too. And if there’d been anything of Bryant’s that was salvageable that had been on his person... A watch, a wallet, a charred fucking sock... there was no reason for the hospital to turn any belongings over to Marcus. He wasn’t family. He wasn’t anything. If he hadn’t gone in, himself, he never would have been notified. Bryant’s death would have been something he caught on the news.
Maybe that would have been preferable.
The half-eaten corpse of a salami and swiss sandwich was still sitting in the kitchen, limp and desiccated. Marcus stared at it for a long time, conducting a futile search for meaning in the breadcrumbs before dumping the plate in the trash. It felt good to effect some kind of change over his environment. Power over debris. He looked for other things to throw out. Mail. Leftovers in the fridge. Common household items stood helpless; innocent bystanders witnessing the domestic frenzy of Marcus deciding it was time to deep-clean the fucking stove. He used a kitchen towel to disinfect and wipe everything down, and then tossed the towel out, as well. When he emptied the dishwasher, he came across a glass that may or may not have been the glass Bryant had drunk out of the night he’d stayed over. It was part of a set of eight identical water glasses, indistinguishable from the others. Marcus threw them all away, satisfied by the the sound made as they broke against each other; tossed them into the bin one by one.
It wasn’t enough, and the bleach fumes just made his eyes water, triggering that bullshit again. Marcus wasn’t made to cry. There’d been tears when Sophia had left, even though he’d driven her off. But she’d just moved out of state. She was alive, healthy, hating him somewhere. This was a whole new level of loss. Marcus had seen people die, lots of times, in his line of work. He’d known people who’d died. A phone call had alerted him to the fact that his father had finally drunk himself to death, though. He hadn’t had to witness that. Bryant had been right fucking there, had practically died in his fucking arms, and Marcus hadn’t been able to do fuck all to stop it. Helplessness like that was humbling. Crushing.
That could go on the list of shit to hate himself for, right beneath letting Bryant stay the night. Letting Bryant get under his skin. Letting Bryant die. Marcus had let Bryant get away with a lot of shit, truth be told. At least that chapter was closed, definitively. No choice but to get over it, now. At least he still had a couple of bottles of booze to help. None of the decent tequila Bryant had bought him. That was all long gone, of course, because he hadn’t known it might be important later. But he’d picked up some swill last time he was out. Shit that could be drunk while sitting idly in front of the tv, not meant to be savored. He started pouring it into a coffee cup, but soon abandoned all pretense and just drank from the fucking bottle, carrying it around as he paced.
Fuck. Had the house always been this fucking quiet? This cold? It seemed uninhabitable. Hostile. It should be condemned. Nobody should have to live in a fucking tomb, and Marcus’s half of the duplex was suddenly feeling a lot less cozy than the autopsy room at the funeral home.
The funeral home was gone, too. Nothing left there but rubble. Cinders. Probably taped off, anyway, but even if he could go poking around, what would he expect to find? All of Bryant’s belongings... the books, the clothes... if it wasn’t flammable, it would have been warped by the heat. Ruined. There wouldn’t be anything recognizable there. Nothing worth saving. No trace of him left to keep.
A sob tore through Marcus, echoing off the walls in his hallway. He must not have cared for the lack of sympathy the walls offered, because he found himself driving his hands into one over and over... what was left of the Sauza spilled out onto the carpet when he’d dropped the bottle to form a proper fist. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The pain of bruised and bloodied knuckles didn’t help any more than the tequila had.
Marcus tried, but couldn’t bring himself to go into the bedroom. Not just yet. There was nothing of Bryant there, either. Just shreds of memory, faulty at best. He’d been too drunk that night to catalogue everything in detail. Why would he? He hadn’t committed the precious few nights he’d spent at Bryant’s to memory, either. It was all he was left with and he couldn’t even trust it to be accurate. How long before it faded, obscured over time into a sad story he could use to get into someone else’s pants? Maybe he could speed up the fucking process. Help it along.
Ultimately, he retreated into the bathroom. It was stupid, but there were no fleeting images of Bryant in there. He took a six pack of beer from the fridge, ran himself a hot bath, and proceeded to drink himself into a proper stupor. The heat and alcohol combined with emotional exhaust, and he passed out halfway through the third beer.
When he woke, hours later, the water in the bath had long gone cold and had partially evaporated, leaving him naked and shivering with a horrible taste in his mouth. Standing up was a trial; the muscles in his back and legs ached from being locked into an uncomfortable position, and everything wanted to cramp at once. A wave of nausea and dizziness hit him, and he stumbled more than he walked to his bed, leaving the bottles in his wake. He was too focused on not falling or throwing up to wonder why he’d been drinking in the bathtub, or question the pain in his hands.
Once in his bed, Marcus did sleep. Soundly at first, but more fitfully as the day wore on. His dreams were disjointed and terrifying, but far preferable to the silence in the house. The pain of grief, of knowing that the loss was permanent. All-encompassing. Bryant hadn’t even managed any last words. He’d left Marcus with nothing, and it killed to know that.
So he slept, instead. Slept until hunger or his bladder or some other petty biological function forced him out of bed to attend to himself, so that he could justify sleeping more. The days bled together, until Marcus couldn’t even be sure of the date, let alone the time.
His cell phone ran at some point. He ignored it until it stopped, but once it did stop he got the idea in his head that it might have been Bryant calling. A ridiculous notion that was probably influenced by booze and dreams, but it stuck nonetheless. Marcus checked his voicemail, but it wasn’t Bryant’s number. The last text between them had been from him. u hear that, mijo? know what it fucking was? Bryant had heard, all right. Bryant had known what it was. Couldn’t exactly blame the guy for not texting back, though. He was losing his legs at the time, after all. Rearranging his internals a bit. Lung full of bone shards.
Marcus growled and smashed the phone down, reveling in the cracking sound, the feeling of shards of plastic digging into the flesh of his palm. That was therapeutic. Until he realized that he’d just broken his phone.
“Shit,” he hissed, trying to snap it back together and get it to power back on. “Fuck... come on...”
No use. A hundred pounds of pressure in one blow had rendered the phone into a paperweight. He’d had other texts from Bryant on there. Could have read them, at least, before destroying the damn thing. Could have relived at least one conversation. Even a simple, meaningless one. Something. Bryant’s phone probably hadn’t survived the blast. So now there wasn’t even proof that they’d happened at all. They might as well not have.
Except they had. They had. It had almost been something really good, too. There’d been potential there. Marcus had felt at peace with Bryant. Worth something. And Bryant had been willing to try. Inexperienced, but a quick learner. They might have gotten somewhere, if Bryant hadn’t left.
No. If Bryant hadn’t been killed. He hadn’t blown himself up. Maybe Bryant could be blamed for not having a miraculous recovery. Blamed for not leaving Marcus anything to concrete or lasting to remember him by. But Bryant hadn’t left willingly. And he was careful. He wouldn’t leave the oven on overnight and light a match. He wasn’t wired like that. So he’d been taken. Murdered by someone who thought that they could get away with something like that. Thought that nobody would care if a skittish, old mortician was scrubbed off the planet. Marcus was no idiot. He couldn’t fathom Bryant having enemies. Being inoffensive and unassuming was core to the man’s character. Nobody who knew Bryant would deliberately want to harm him. If Marcus believed anything, it would have to be that. So the older man was a casualty of something else. Someone had wanted to hurt Marcus... No, that didn’t make sense. Max was the only one who knew about them, and Max wouldn’t hurt a fucking fly.
But someone had been doing a lot more than hurting flies, lately. Someone had stabbed a little kid, and hadn’t they found a few more bodies out in Pine Bottom? Bryant hadn’t mentioned any details, but Marcus wouldn’t be surprised if those bodies had belonged to Dahlia Palmer and Jenny Parry. Maybe someone had wanted to make sure Bryant couldn’t do any autopsies, that there’d be nothing left to autopsy.
Suddenly it all clicked into place, every piece fitting so smoothly into one another that Marcus didn’t pause to question the big, gaping holes in the middle of the puzzle. He thought he could guess what the picture was. He let the remains of his phone fall to the carpet, pushed his hair out of his face and began lumbering towards the shower. He had to wake up. Get clean. Get focused. This shit had gone way too far. It was time he paid Rob York a visit.