Re: Great Gatsby: Jude/Clem/Shane/Graham
Shane knew the careful cradle of sanity intimately, the fragile hugging of self to the heart, as the fissure had opened inside of Graham years ago, and he hadn't been whole since. Shane had watched it start off like a crack, where the shovel blade of Constantos' cruelty bit into dirt until the collapse and chaos spread into an all-consuming change, a haunting. Shane had never split, his mind and body too mired in granite and earth and vulnerable only to time and the erosion of water over roughness as it sluiced to rocks below—the frettings of it he'd felt only once, in the hotel, when he put a bullet through the borrowed brain to shut it down before it bled into him.
He recognized the hollowness in Clementine, the same carving out of Before, with nothing put in its place to make up for the loss. Of course, she had every reason to lose her fucking mind after what happened. It was coping of the most desperate make, but those nights in the storage unit had been nothing else but desperate. And as the Murphy boy's soul was sucked out of him in the explosion of pupils, Shane's fraternal protectiveness kicked in hard.—They were going to leave, Graham had his hand out, and the door was right fucking there, when whatever the fuck happened happened.
Clementine's heart broke along with her mind after the supernatural screech, and that glittering piece of glass met the meat of her brother's throat. Shane didn't move a fucking muscle. He wasn't afraid—not even of the... horse, because he didn't have much fear left in him anymore, but he was angry he'd just pushed the girl he claimed to care about to that point. It was clear she was china cracked and fitted together again by willpower alone—but now? She was that bottle at her feet, the jagged tooth of glass in her hand.
Shane didn't give a fuck about he-said-she-said. Sam was better now, yeah? He'd gone through hell and back with Clementine, and none of that fucking mattered anymore after everything. The scales fell from her eyes and before Shane could look at Graham, before he could express how much all this fucking talking bored him, Jude Murphy flung his sister down the stairs. His mind careened backwards to the steel door dropped and the bootlicking pussy on his hands and knees, begging for his life, offering the others as sacrifice.
There at the bottom of the stairs, she was mottled skin and the bright beading red of blood, and Shane was actually frozen for a moment, as his mind tried to catch up.
"Shut the fuck up, Peaches," was all he said to Clementine, and even that was hoarse in a whisper, not harsh. The Murphy boy had gone. Nothing, not even fucking rage, mattered as much right now as getting Clementine fucking off the floor. Shane couldn't look at Graham, didn't want to, but he did it. He knew what he'd see: the same fucking lifelessness, fish-belly white, he'd seen the day Lorelei was murdered, the siphoning of soul and complete and fucking utter loss. But Clementine wasn't going to go like Lore. And he didn't want to do it, but he did, and he pressed his lips into a firm line, jaw clenched, as he moved to help his friend lift his sister-in-law from the ground, the waterfall of blood-sticky fur tickling their skin.