Discover Top Posts Tagged with #david hewitt

[ 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐀𝐍𝐘 ] 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲’𝐫𝐞 𝐮𝐩𝐬𝐞𝐭.

His right eardrum never healed right after his old man shattered it—slammed his skull right into the floor so hard the ringing never stopped. Since then, the world had always felt a little lopsided, sounds bleeding in warped and fractured. No wonder he hadn’t heard her climb the creaking ladder. But he’d felt it. The crow’s nest gave a twitch, subtle but sharp enough to send a shiver crawling down his spine. The sway was slight—blink and you’d miss it, but it never failed to raise the hairs on his arms. His stomach was already twisted—nerves, guilt mostly, maybe last night’s kitchen slop still crawling its way through him... but the gentle rocking wasn’t helping.

Dave didn't raid. It was a known fact to all who knew him. It didn't sit well with his fragile constitution. Cash had tried to force him when he'd first shown up here, only once or twice, but quickly learned that his brand of violence was not a universal language. Dave certainly had his own dialect, and he spoke it fluently. But he was not indiscriminate in his wrath. He couldn't steal blankets from the arms of women and babies. They'd come to an understanding. Dave had other uses, and Cash had more willing accomplices. Without that, he was sure he’d be rotting in the graveyard with all the other obsolete things. But Grayson wasn’t Cash—he had no respect for those quiet deals. Grayson wanted every able man present, gun in hand.

She didn't greet him aloud, but then, she never did. Only crept in beside him with soft patters, sudden and predictable like the tide rising to meet the shore. Hiro's dark eyes were taut with wary interest, investigating the somber lines of his body like she might solve the problem without confession. He chewed the nail of his thumb mercilessly raw; the point of no return lay miles behind him. There was blood on his tongue, skin between his teeth, and a dull ache that kept him tethered to the ground.

The gun that always rested across his thighs lay discarded by the hatch floor opening. He hadn’t even reloaded since morning—only parted with his clip during the hospital chaos, but not a bullet more. His eagle eyes, sharp enough to spot a snake in the grass at a hundred yards, were now listless and unmoored, unable to force himself to care if someone climbed the walls to bring ruin. They’d earned it all, and then some. Nevertheless, the horizon was dark and unyielding, only a spray of luminescent freckles dashed across the skyline.

She nudged him in greeting, content to pretend he hadn't noticed her intrusion rather than ignored. He managed a terse nod before his teeth sank into the corner of a cuticle with just a little more give. For once, he was uncertain who would like to speak least between them. Their typical comfortable silence had been enveloped by his gloom, leaving the air thick with static and trepidation.

"You don't have watch until three," He muttered, still staring nowhere in particular. "You should sleep."

She shot him a skeptical look, both of them keenly aware of how many nights she’d spent up here beside him—watch or no watch. The problem wasn’t the hour. It was his mood. She had to know. All of them had come back drenched in blood. She had to know at least that he’d done something awful. He hadn’t meant to. He’d tried to focus on the men fighting — it wasn’t supposed to be a slaughter. But it ended like one all the same.

His stomach twisted again, a bitter knot tightening like a noose. He tried chanting purple elephants in his head, any damn thing that might drown out the images clawing their way back. But the claws only sank deeper, dragging him back to watch it all unfold. A girl had tried to wrestle his gun from his hands, so terrified, driven by pure adrenaline. If he’d been in his right mind, he’d have dropped it without a second thought. But it wasn’t a girl for a moment. It was his mother— yanking with all the force of a hurricane, her screams splitting his ears with peals of raw terror. He shouldn't have pulled the trigger. He shouldn't have pulled the trigger. He shouldn't have...

Dave buried his head in his hands shamefully, the wound the feeling left was raw and weeping. She nudged him again, tapping her notebook insistently until he dragged his eyes down to her scrawl.

'Can I do anything?'

He shook his head, tentative and hollow. "No. I don’t think you can."

He wished it wasn’t true. For the millionth time, he wished he was like the rest of them. Wished he could fall into a woman’s arms and be one of those men who let her coil her hands around him, wringing out the hurt like he was some old sponge. That she could pour it all out on the lawn while he just focused on her touch—the quiet promise of comfort.

But women offered him no solace. Men even less.

He didn’t know where to fall, who to fall into. The world he’d been handed was too sharp, too unyielding. And here he was—adrift, caught in a storm that no one else seemed to weather quite like him.

She didn’t push. They sat in the kind of silence that wasn’t peace, but not quite tension either. Just the distant hollering from inside, punctuated by the occasional sharp cry of a lone coyote on the wind. It wasn’t soothing, but it didn’t make the air heavier, either.

His eyes flicked to her, catching that same sullen twist at the corners of her mouth—a mirror of his own worn-down resignation. This place, if it wasn’t hell itself, was the closest damn thing—a freight ride straight into the belly of the beast. Cruel. Unforgiving. And it was swallowing them whole.

She didn’t have to say it. Not tonight. He already knew. She hated it here as much as he did. But before Hiro, before any of this, he’d never dared to imagine there was anything else. He was supposed to be in his cell until the day he died. How could he picture anything else, let alone a world beyond the endless grind, beyond the blood and the bones and the sharp edges of survival.

Now, the thought lingered, fragile as a whispered secret: maybe there was something else waiting— or maybe just a moral panic that it was better to die trying than stay here and fester.

"Do you trust me?" His voice cracked the stillness like a gunshot. She turned, startled, but offered a faint nod. "Like you really trust me?" His eyes strafed between hers desperately, catching the flicker of doubt that danced across her brow as she carefully weighed the implication loaded behind his words.

"Because I trust you. Only you." The words slipped out like a confession, quiet, raw—torn from somewhere deep. It had been years since he’d let himself feel anything close to love. Years since he’d cared enough to bleed for someone else.

Family—that word had long since rotted in the corners of David’s mind, something bitter and broken. A joke. A curse. He’d buried it so deep he forgot what it ever meant.

But not now. Not with her. She mattered, in what was left of this tiny broken world, she was all that mattered to him. He couldn’t stay. Not to watch them gut her spirit piece by piece.

“Hiro,” he said, voice low, eyes sharp. “We should go. You and me. Before this place kills what’s left of us. I could keep you safe.”

#chihiro x david #meme #david hewitt #meme: david #david: year 3 #year 3

Notes on hospice, six of ten. Today I sat with a woman named Catherine for an hour. She was unconscious and/or sleeping. I can never really tell. Her papers said she was here for “end of life care” and Alzheimer's. Again, I'm not quite sure of the benefit my being here brings to unconscious patients, or any patients for that matter. What is successful volunteering? What does it mean if I sit with this woman for an hour if she doesn't know I'm there? I said hello briefly to a patient’s family member who didn't speak english. She smiled, and I touched her arm and without speaking she gently put her hands on my arms. How are you of service when you don't speak the language? How do we communicate across difference? Lenora died yesterday. * Sketch, David Hewitt.

#notes on hospice #David Hewitt

David Hewitt

A6 biro sketch

http://davidhewittartist.com/tagged/Sketchbooks

#David Hewitt