grady barrett (ashadowgrows) wrote in shadows_rpg, @ 2019-03-14 10:33:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | #december 2017, aaron, aaron x grady, grady |
Who: Grady and Aaron
Where: the hospital
When: Afternoon, Thursday, December 7
Status: Complete
Though he came out of his surgery all right, Grady knew it would be at least a day before he could speak to Aaron Lucas. So rather than hover around the hospital, Grady went back to work, notifying the surrounding towns and hospitals to be on the lookout for Mila. His gut told him that she wouldn’t be found, but he wasn’t in the habit of listening to his gut anymore. It was too depressing. Mila’s parents were distraught, demanding answers. Grady was letting Aaron’s brothers deal with their own family.
He was honestly hoping not to run into any of them today as he made his way down the hospital hallway to the proper room. Aaron’s door was open but there didn’t seem to be any visitors at the moment, so Grady rapped his knuckles against the door frame before stepping inside. Aaron was awake, but he looked tired and worn out, so Grady was hoping this wouldn’t take very long.
“Hey Aaron,” he greeted, coming over to stand near the bed. “How are you feeling?”
Aaron felt more than worn out. The places in him that weren’t full of despair felt hollow. He’d been sleeping a lot, though it was a crapshoot as to whether he had nightmares or just didn’t dream at all. All that silent dark and not knowing anything was vaguely comforting, and the temptation to just stay there somehow lingered in the back of his mind. Aaron believed too firmly in Hell to commit suicide, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to just let go and sink into nothingness. Being alive hurt too bad right now, in several ways.
The visit from Kat that morning had helped slightly, and the family hadn’t left him alone much or for long. But he’d had another round of tests after lunch -- Jell-O again, lime this time -- and he’d had a very painful assisted shuffle to the bathroom to piss without the catheter, so nobody was around at the moment. His whole torso burned like fire and he’d gotten out of breath, but he’d done it. They said they couldn’t let him go home until he’d had a “successful bowel movement” and who knew when that would be. The doctors were worried about his gut. Aaron wasn’t. If he died, he would deserve it.
Aaron had gone back to staring dully out the window, idly fingering his rosary though he was too tired to pray. When he heard someone coming into the room and looked over, his eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, but he perked up a little to see the sheriff. Aaron moved to sit up more, winced, and laid back again. “Hey ... did you find her?” he asked urgently, ignoring the question for the moment. He felt like shit, it was obvious and nobody wanted to hear it.
Grady began to lift his hand to instruct Aaron to lay back down, but it didn't seem as though the encouragement was necessary. "Not yet," he said apologetically. "But we've got people looking for her. I was hoping you could tell me what happened, if you know where she could have gone, if she's with someone, or maybe someone took her?" He still had no idea what had truly happened. He only had theories, and what people thought. What Roxy thought, what Mila's mother thought, what his deputies thought. They had evidence, but he needed to be able to put it together.
Aaron had known he would have to talk to the cops eventually, and he’d waffled over what to tell them. If he should try to spin a lie or just tell the truth. Now that the decision was in front of him, Aaron knew he didn’t have the brainpower to tell a convincing lie. He was too stupid for that, just like he’d been too stupid to help Mila before it was too late. He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath or two, then looked at Grady again, his blue eyes dark and troubled. “Something took her, but it wasn’t a person,” he murmured. “It was some ... evil spirit or demon or something, I don’t really know. She was possessed, and she stabbed me and left. She probably went to the Cooperdale tunnel again.” Aaron doubted Grady would believe him, but he didn’t know what else to do.
That old familiar skepticism that refused to die began to surface as Aaron spoke but Grady let him finish. It was insanity that Grady had experienced the unexplainable himself and yet continually wanted to shut down any belief that something like an evil spirit could possibly exist. He knew they could. Maybe that desire to deny it stemmed from so desperately not wanting it to be true. He couldn't arrest evil spirits. He couldn’t save people taken by them. He pulled out his phone. "Do you remember what Mila was wearing before she left?" Grady asked, not wanting to show Aaron the shirt they found by the tunnel unless he couldn't remember her clothes. He didn't want to upset the guy, but he had to do his job. He was just trying to alleviate some of the rougher aspects of it.
His brow furrowed for a second as he tried to remember, and Aaron got a quick bright flash of Mila on the kitchen floor, Mila rolling and holding her arms up to him for help, blood leaking out of her mouth. That part was painfully vivid. “The stuff she wore to bed, um ... just a light blue t-shirt and these little gray cotton shorts,” he murmured. Both of them had been very lightweight and soft, and his throat felt a bit thicker as he imagined how cold she must have been. “That’s all she walked out in,” he added, a little hoarsely. “She didn’t even put on shoes, I don’t think.” Aaron gave Grady’s phone a wary glance, not sure he wanted to know what the man was looking at.
The color matched and the shirt hadn't been terribly dirty when they found it, but for a few dirt stains and the blood. But he knew how some people looked at light blue and saw gray, among other things. There were ridiculous internet memes about that shit. "A deputy and I searched some of the woods behind her house, near the tunnel. We found an article of clothing that we thought might be Mila's, but I need you to confirm, if you could." He pulled up the photo that was taken in the evidence room of the night shirt and offered Aaron the phone to look at. "Can you tell me if that's Mila's?"
Aaron took the phone, his heart starting to beat sickly hard in his chest. It was just a shirt, Grady had said so, but he still half-expected to see Mila’s dead face looking back at him when he looked at the screen. He’d already had dreams about that face, about what the thing riding Mila might have done to her. It was somehow worse, her shirt spread out on a table without her inside of it, a bit dirty and streaked with blood. Some of it was probably his, some of it hers, and the sight of it got him even more choked up. Aaron’s face crumpled halfway -- if she was missing her shirt, she was nearly naked somewhere awful and that meant she probably wasn’t alive anymore. Not in this weather. Nodding his head and covering his face with his free hand, Aaron thrust the phone back at Grady. “S’hers,” he managed to get out, and hitched in a breath.
Grady took the phone back and pocketed it quickly. "I'm sorry. I'm not trying to upset you. I'm just trying to figure this out. And just because we found this shirt doesn't mean we won't find her. It's possible she had an extra set of clothes stashed at the tunnel to change into. Or someone picked her up. We're going to keep looking until we find her." Like all the others, right? Grady's chest tightened for a moment before he studied Aaron. "Did you two have an argument before the incident? Has she ever been violent with you before?" He knew Aaron's family history with domestic violence but he had never had any complaints or heard any rumors about Aaron being abusive.
If Mila had just disappeared on her own, Aaron would’ve found more hope in those possibilities. He scrubbed at his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths and did his best to swallow the emotion down. He had plenty of time to wallow, he had to man up and talk to the authority figure now. “Uh,” Aaron cleared his throat. He dropped his hands to his lap to pick up the rosary and started feeding it through his fingers again. “No uh, no argument,” he said, his voice full or gravel. “She’d been waking up a lot at night, and ... and she did again. I heard her fall in the kitchen, I woke up ... went to her and uh, and her mouth was bleeding.” He gestured vaguely to his own face, looking at the rosary beads instead of Grady, every word coming out labored. “Not like it was busted or anything, like she’d coughed it up or something. So we were gonna go to the ER, I went back to get her some more clothes, came back, and she uh ... had the knife. She ... did this, then she left. But she wasn’t herself.”
That sounded familiar to what Roxy had said. Mila wasn't herself. But Grady didn't know Mila Moretti well enough to know what that meant. It was concerning that Mila had been coughing up blood, if that had actually happened and hadn't been some kind of trick to throw Aaron off guard. "Can you describe that for me?" he asked. "What was she doing that was out of character?" Other than the obvious, of course. Grady knew Aaron, and Roxy, thought Mila had been possessed by something, but couldn't that also be psychosis? Was he still trying to find some logical explanation in all of this? "I understand what you think happened to her, but do you think it's possible the miscarriage was just too much for her to handle mentally? That maybe she suffered some kind of psychotic break?"
Aaron bit his tongue on saying that trying to kill him was very out of character. That was probably obvious. He understood why the sheriff was asking these questions -- he was trying to figure out the most logical and realistic explanation. Aaron had tried to do that too. He’d worried about Mila’s mental state. But there had been too much weird shit around it. Aaron was sure this hadn’t just been his girlfriend going crazy. He sighed a bit and leaned his head back against the raised bed and pillow.
“I would agree with you,” he told Grady. “But when it really started ... okay, so we were in a search party when Amelia was missing? And we went to Cooperdale to look and call for her. And we both heard a baby crying. Yeah, it was right after the miscarriage, but I heard it too, I know I did. We followed it for a while, but I started ... I dunno, feeling real bad in there. Scared. The sound just kept moving, we weren’t finding anything. Mila didn’t want to turn back, I had to carry her out of there kickin’ and screamin’, you know? After that ... she seemed real distracted. Like she forgot where she was a lot. She let food burn, she just sat in the dark. It went on like that, and I think ... I think she was going back to the tunnel, more than I knew, like in the middle of the night. She tried to make Roxy go with her once. Last week she fell asleep in this scalding-hot bath, like she didn’t even feel it. She told me she had thoughts that didn’t feel like hers, she was scared. My brother, he’s got all these protective tattoos, and Mila said bein’ around him made her sick. I know it all sounds stupid, but ...” Aaron gave a helpless shake of his head. Maybe it was all crazy and Mila had just snapped and he just didn’t know anything about anything. Then he added, quieter, “I know I heard that baby, at least.”
It definitely sounded like this was a long time coming, but he made his notes anyway so he could share them with the others back at the station. Grady had no idea if they would help at all, but it couldn't hurt, especially if they found Mila. What they were going to do then, he had no idea. Attempted murder was hard to hand wave away, even if she wasn't herself like Aaron was claiming. "Did you talk to anyone about these problems? Besides your family?" Grady asked. If he could find someone else removed from Aaron's family to verify any of it, it would make his job a hell of a lot easier. Otherwise it would be far too easy to suggest Aaron and his family were making up this possession story to cover for her, for some ridiculous reason.
Aaron scrubbed his hand over his face again. His head was starting to hurt, and he wished a nurse would come by with one of those little paper cups with the good pills in it. He just wanted to sleep for years and years and let all this sort itself out, since he was useless to help anyway. They had talked to other people, Reagan Kelly and her husband, and Caius had even supposedly talked to the Bad Thing. But if he told Grady that, Grady would ask why them, and then Aaron would be stuck. He couldn’t outright say they were witches, he already sounded crazy enough. And he didn’t want to piss off witches by outing them. They would probably just deny it all anyway and say he was nuts. God, he should’ve taken Mila to a priest. “No,” he muttered miserably. “I didn’t know who could help her, so I just ... didn’t.” His eyes were burning again.
Lifting a brow, Grady studied Aaron for a moment before giving a small nod. He wasn't convinced Aaron was being entirely truthful with him, but the guy had just had major surgery and looked exhausted. "All right," he said, slipping his notebook back into the pocket of his coat. "I'll let you get some rest. We're going to keep looking for her and I'll keep you informed of any news." He would be by again if and when he had follow up questions, but Grady thought he had what he needed for now. "Is there anything I can do for you?" Grady asked, because it felt necessary and he knew how helpless the guy had to feel at the moment.
It was sickly tempted to ask Grady just to shoot him and put him out of his misery, but that was a fleeting thought. Mila could still be out there, alive somehow, and he had to be there when she came home. Even if it meant waiting the rest of his life. Aaron shook his head and murmured, “Just find her.” It came out thick and unsteady, and he cleared his throat and cut his eyes toward the big window in the room. It was one thing to cry in front of his family, it was another to do it in front of the sheriff.
"We're going to do everything we can," Grady promised. He knew better than to make guarantees, especially in this town, but they would try. If what he had been told by Roxy and Aaron was the truth, Mila was just as much a victim in all of this as Aaron. And because he was observant enough to know when he needed to step away, Grady turned to leave so Aaron had some time to himself. He was sure the rest of the Lucas family would be around soon so Aaron wouldn't be alone for long.