Re: Ocean's Eleven - Seven Hills: Neil, Cris & Sam
[It was hard—to see Sam like this. Loss, Cris got loss. Sudden, jarring, guilty, gut-wrenching loss that left you feeling so alone, abandoned, all that. But even when he was sprayed down the front in bright, burnt red, Sofia gone and a train screaming by, he hadn't had a heart in a box, a piece someone sent to drive everything home and down to a point: this is on you. There was something almost suspicious about the setup, though Cris knew it was nothing. Her brother had been campaigning so hard, pushing the guilt on thick, to end up dead? At the hands of someone after Sam? It felt orchestrated. It wasn't, but it felt like it was. He couldn't say he understood her brother, or why anyone would say what he said if he really cared about his little sister—he wanted to bring her drugs, and it was Cris and his kid he'd dropped off on Sam, that made her have to say no.
He didn't feel too bad about that, because how could he? It was what needed doing at the time and, ultimately, it had been good, if only in the sense that the boy didn't get to bring Sam shit to knock her off the wagon and into a pothole. There was some guilt, sí, but it was retrospective—it was there only because this had happened. Because she was in the white grip of the straightjacket, pupils dwindled to nothing, repeating words like a prayer, like a series of Hail Marys while she choked on the rosary beads.
Cris' touch, when it came, was soft. Fingertips like feathers. He pushed hair back from the mottled purple of her jaw, careful, listening as she kept going, babbling under sedation, eyes the dry bed of a salt sea.] You loved him. He knew it. Él sabía. [He knew it was useless reassurance. But he said it anyway. Cris wanted to comfort her better, to be able to wrap his arms around her, but he couldn't.] Lo siento. Lo siento mucho.