“Dear Diary, …”
Sandor lifted his pen. After a few minutes, he continued writing.
''Someone finally told the Little Bird about Harry the cheating two-faced arse...''
How anyone could take Sansa Stark for granted was beyond him.
''LB came stomping to the cafeteria, her face as red as her hair. She stopped herself before the shit-tart and hit the stupid dick in the middle of the face.''
Sandor snickered at the memory of the falcon bleeding on the floor. Proper Sansa Stark walking away her head held high.
He ripped the written sheet and burned it with his lighter.
I couldn’t pick just one for the One Word Writing Prompt soo 🌀 😅
Thank you darling! I picked:
19. Fireworks
It takes Jacob three weeks to scrounge up enough cash, but somehow, he manages it. He settles his brothers into bed on a Saturday night, locks their bedroom door, and sneaks out the window as the stars flicker in the darkness of the sky.
The walk is long, hot, but eventually Jacob reaches the trailer in the supermarket parking lot. The sign out front is colourful, reds and whites and blues, proclaiming ‘FIREWORKS SOLD HERE’ in dark black lettering. He steps up to the window and hands over a pocketful of crumpled bills.
“Aren’t you a little young to be buying this stuff?” The guy in the trailer asks.
Jacob fixes him with a particularly scathing look.
“Mind your own fuckin’ business,” he advises, his voice a quiet rasp.
The man behind the window stares at him, and Jacob steels himself for a warning, for a threat to take his money and leave.
It doesn’t come. The man sighs heavily, and counts the bills Jacob’s shoved at him.
“You looking for anything in particular?”
Jacob shakes his head.
“No. Just wherever I can get for that.”
————
“Where are we going?” Joseph asks the next day as Jacob leads them down the empty street.
It’s a sweltering evening, even as the sun inches below the horizon and the moon slides up to illuminate the sky. Jacob wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.
“Shut up,” Jacob says with little real venom, shifting the duffle bag to his other shoulder. “We’re almost there.”
He looks over to find his brother eyeing him warily, his backpack strapped to his shoulders and John’s tiny hand clasped in his own.
“Relax,” Jacob assures him. His voice is soft this time, kindness that is reserved for his brothers alone. “You good, John?”
John makes a face, and Jacob has to fight back a smile. He’s a cute kid, a good kid, somehow always happy despite the chaos in their lives.
“I don’t wanna walk,” John says adamantly, making a show of dragging his legs like he’s physically exhausted. “Will you carry me?”
He’s four, and Jacob’s been trying to force him to be a little more independent, but he’s always had a hard time saying no to him.
“I’ll carry you on the way home. C’mon, we’re almost there.”
The walk a couple hundred feet more in silence, the world settling down around them as the last dregs of daylight fade away, until they’ve suddenly reached a clearing. It’s an open field, one Jacob has brought his brothers to before on a hazy summer afternoons. He stops walking and drops the duffle bag, fumbling the zipper open.
“Are those fireworks?” Joseph asks curiously, tilting his head to the side.
“Yeah,” Jacob reaches into the bag and pulls a few of them up. There’s not a lot, but it’ll do. “For the Fourth of July.”
“Fireworks!” John shouts. He tears his hand out of Joseph’s grasp and claps his hands together to a chant of “fireworks, fireworks, fireworks!”.
Joseph unzips his backpacks and grabs the blankets Jacob made him pack, splaying them across the ground while Jacob sets the fireworks up a safe distance away.
“You guys ready?” he calls.
There’s a lighter in his hand, and the flame flickers to life as Joseph gives him a thumbs up. Jacob leans down, lights the fuse, then jogs over to the two of them to watch the sparks fly.
The first firework crackles, and a split second later bursts of colour shoot into the sky, one at a time, each one accompanied by a loud pop that Jacob feels in his chest. John squeals, the smile on his face so wide Jacob thinks it might get stuck there permanently.
He reaches down to scoop John up into his arms. Jacob cradles him against his hip and spins them around as the coloured sparks explode across the night sky. Next to them, Joseph laughs.
It’s been so long since Jacob has seen his brothers so happy. It breaks his heart. He wishes he could give them this every day.
Purple paints the darkness. Without warning, something knocks the wind out of him, and Jacob looks down to find that Joseph has wrapped his arms tight around his middle. He’s holding onto him like his life depends on it.
“Thank you,” Joseph says, just loud enough to be heard over the popping of the fireworks. “Thank you, Jake. This is great.”
Jacob reaches a hand up to ruffle his hair, and tucks Joseph a little further into his side.
The fluorescent light in the bathroom hums loudly. The buzz is constant, grating, and as Rook closes her eyes and tilts her head back against the wall of the locked stall, it’s the only thing she can focus on.
She’s perched precariously on the closed toilet seat, curled up and hugging her knees close to her chest. Without her permission, her stomach flips, and she has to breathe deep to keep herself together.
In through the nose, out through the mouth. Repeat.
Her nerves are scraped raw. She doesn’t know how many minutes she’s spent in this tiny bathroom, but it’s been long enough that someone is going to come looking for her sooner rather than later if she doesn’t get back to her desk.
She should go, but she doesn’t move.
Memories she doesn’t want back filter through her head — the routine traffic stop, the man with the gun, her instinctive reaction to draw her own weapon and shoot to kill. The lack of hesitation as she pulled the trigger.
It’s been a week, and Rook still thinks she can smell the blood in the air. At night, in the quiet of her apartment, she’s sure she can hear the crackle of blood-filled lungs aching for breath.
She was trained for this, but she never knew it would be so hard.
Someone’s fist raps against the door to the women’s washroom. Rook has a feeling she knows who it is even before they speak, but she lets them announce themselves anyway.
“Hey, Rookie,” Staci says, his voice tentative. Rook can barely hear him over the humming of the light bulb. “Can I come in?”
She doesn’t say anything, so naturally Staci opens the bathroom door and lets it shut heavily behind him. Not for the first time, she wishes that the door locked – she doesn’t need anyone else to walk in and see her hiding, even if she is hiding behind a closed stall.
His footsteps echo of the tile walls and high ceiling. She watches the space between the stall door and the floor, and a few seconds later Staci’s boots appear in front of her.
Neither of them move for a moment. Rook stays put, her chin resting on her knees, and Staci doesn’t move from in front of the locked door.
“You okay?” Staci asks eventually, once enough time has passed without either of them saying anything. Rook keeps her mouth shut. She doesn’t know if anything would come out, even if she wanted it to.
She’s only known him a few months, but Rook has discovered that Staci is a creature of habit. She’s learned so many of his mannerisms: the way he bites the inside of his cheek to keep from arguing with Joey, how he chews his bottom lip unconsciously when he’s lost in thought.
Rook can’t see him right now, but she knows he’s pinching the bridge of his nose. He’ll trail his hand down his face next, will run his palm over the stubble of his jaw until his fingers rest against his lips. It’s what he does whenever he doesn’t know where to begin.
“Look, I—I get it, you know?” Staci says quietly. “It’s not easy to kill someone.”
A laugh startles its way out of her. To her own ears, it sounds a little hysterical. Rook can only imagine what it must sound like to him.
“That’s putting it mildly,” she says. They’re the first four words she’s spoken in as many hours, and her throat is so dry it feels like she’s swallowing sandpaper. She lets go of her knees and grips the denim of her jeans so her hands don’t shake.
“Yeah, well,” Staci sounds resigned. “Hiding in the bathroom isn’t going to make it any easier. At least in my experience.”
Rook scrubs her hands down her face. Her eyes are burning. She’s not sure how much longer she can go without actual, restful sleep.
“Then what does?” she asks quietly. Rook sets her feet on the ground and stretches out the muscles behind her knees. She’s been sitting in the same position too long. “I can’t sleep, Staci. I keep having—“
“Nightmares,” Staci finishes for her. There’s a thud against the door, like he’s pressed the palm of his hand up against it. “Yeah. I know.”
A familiar tingling has been creeping up the bridge of her nose ever since he walked into the bathroom. Now it spreads lower, moves from her nostrils to the corners of her eyes. Tears blur the edges of her vision, and Rook realizes with an embarrassed sort of surprise that she’s going to cry.
“Fuck,” she hisses under her breath, reaching up to swipe at the first wave of traitorous tears with the back of her hand.
Rook has to wonder — was this what it was like the first time he killed someone? Did he retreat to the bathroom with his hands shaking and his stomach in knots?
How long did the nightmares last?
She sniffs, squeezing her eyes shut tight to stop the flow of tears, but the memories she’s been trying so hard to fight off are burned into the space behind her eyelids.
“Do they ever go away?” Rook asks quietly.
Staci pauses. Eventually, he sighs, and Rook can see the way he shifts his weight from foot to foot.
“No. Not completely,” he says. Rook’s heart twists painfully in her chest. “But they get better. I know that’s probably not what you wanna hear, but it’s the truth.”
“How long?”
If she could see him, Rook knows he would be hiking his shoulder up in a weak shrug.
“Depends.”
“On?”
“Whether or not you choose to get help when you need it.”
Rook is quiet for a moment. She opens her eyes, salty tracks running down her cheeks, and wipes her runny nose on the sleeve of her shirt. The beige paint on the door of the stall is starting to peel; she reaches forward and picks at it.
“I can’t stop wondering whether I did the right thing,” she says after a while. She’s not crying anymore, but her eyes sting. The skin underneath is red and swollen. “I didn’t have to shoot him.”
“It’s not that easy, Rookie,” Staci murmurs. “You did what you had to do to keep yourself safe. Tearing yourself up over it isn’t gonna help.”
He’s right, but that doesn’t mean she feels any better about the whole thing. Rook takes a shaky breath and leans forward to unlock the stall door. She was right about Staci having his hand on it — it swings open under the weight and slams against the wall with a thud.
Staci’s hands drop to his sides, and his expression softens considerably. In any other situation, Rook thinks she would give him shit for staring at her with such obvious pity in his eyes. Instead, she stands from her spot on the closed toilet lid and throws her arms around his neck in a tight hug. He’s warm and solid, and he falters for a moment with his arms at his sides before his hands settle on her back.
“You can always talk to me,” Staci says. Rook feels his breath against the crown of her head as he speaks. “We gotta have each other’s backs, you know? Part of the job.”
Moving all the way to Hope County was never first on Rook’s bucket list — she had planned to stay in the city, maybe settle down, start a family. Instead, she’d been hurtled into this small town with its tiny police station and odd inhabitants, trying desperately to make a home in a place she didn’t feel she belonged.
There are things about this place that she loves, and there are things about this place that she hates; Staci, she is learning, is thankfully the former. As she stands there tangled around him, tear tracks drying on her cheeks, something unfurls in her chest and grabs hold of her heart. She squeezes him tightly.
Unfortunately working in Toronto means I have to get up at hell o’clock in the morning — if you left a drabble request, I will absolutely get to you in the morning!
