Authors note: Hello friends! I’ve had this fanfiction written in bits and pieces for a while and now have finally decided to get around to polishing it off and publishing! Hope you enjoy, reminder, this is just the prologue but chapter one will be coming soon :)
Tags: religious themes used loosely • graphic detail of injury • blood • car crash • death • sad to start on but hey ho • minors DNI
‘How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?’
Blue and red flashes in the night sky. The crowded road, filled with muffled radio waves and gasps from the unwarranted, rise heavy, overlooking the city’s neat skyline as window lights flicker in the dark, silhouettes too far to copy and gape at the scene, man-kind’s version of stars on Earth.
Two officers hover over a body. A young woman, a young girl, a person whom not twenty minutes ago was belting her heart out to the lyrics singing out from the car radio. Occasionally swishing her head, blonde highlights streaking over her eyes before she would messily brush them off. Where was she going? A destination? A solo nights drive? A swipe of the mind? None of it mattered. The dashboard had been bashed in where her forehead met it in the collision. The radio would not sing anymore. Neither would she.
Laddered hands pressing through the officer’s bones, a beat thumping in their ears. One stays bent over her, two hands pressing rhythmically into her chest. Another drags a finger along her neck. They wait. They pump whistles and stream. They try. They wait. More whistling. They try again. Clouds of smoke rise from behind them. Two vehicles, now ruined and immobile, sit a few feet away from one another, a gaggle of strapped belts and shining their torches, patting down the puffy remains of the airbags deployed to help work against tragedies like this.
Can an airbag save someone thrown from the windshield? Can an airbag prevent this loss?
Riley Flynn, who sits still in handcuffs, perched on the side of the road, blood trailing his cheek, drunk out of his mind, will foolishly think to himself that it can.
“Is she…” He slurs, head wobbling on top of his leather clad shoulders. “Is… okay…?”
Even with the world spinning, his swimming eyes lay on the unconscious body of the girl laid out in the middle of the road. Her body flat, her face turned to look at him, no wet tears or rough breaths to imply survival. Her gashes, her open bloodied wounds creating imperfect dents in her skin, deformed while the flashes of police car lights bleed through her piercings, making her almost look half-robot. Techno. Technically. Technical. He struggles to think of the word. Technicolour. She looks technicolour.
Who is he asking? No one that isn’t focused on reviving her is hearing him. The same officer continues the first basic step of medical training, the other bending an ear to her mouth for signs of mumbled speech, a sudden gasp, a hint that this is all worth it for the ten minutes it’s taken to try. Nothing comes. Ears are bent and hands are flat and nothing comes. They share a knowledgeable look. They stop. They lift themselves up off of the gravel. A spectacle to the swarming crowd. A tragedy to the men on the scene. A day on the job to those who have been here before. A drunken choice.
-Drink won’t shield him from this.
It hits him like a cool glass of water. Like Life has tipped a bucket over his head and forced him to be chained down and endure it. But there is no need for chains. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t attempt to run, to cower his face or even retch. He stays still, deflating as an officer releases the air from one of the girl’s car tires.
Riley shakily looks into the nearby distance, almost having forgotten all about this.
He watches as a half dozen men begin pawing their fingers underneath his car, digits slipped between mechanisms and burnt metal, gritting teeth on lips.
Someone’s under the wheel. The same someone protesting against it. Weak screams from a weak someone. Riley squints. Please don’t.
In unison, they ignore her, lifting through groans and red cheeks, a piercing scream filling the night air as the moist sound of clamped skin unsticks itself from the rubber, leaving behind sticky plasma and blood. All that’s left is an arm half-severed from its tendons, dough being spread across air and fingers. If you preferred to awe at the injury, you’d see slight holes in the skin. They roll her out from underneath the car and attempt to pick her up despite her good arm flailing to stop them causing her pain, despite them doing it for her own good. The drunken fool keeps squinting, only half-recognising her for who she is. And the heavy turmoil of it washes over the alcohol in his system, destroying ignorance and replacing it with cold, bitter fact.
What the hell has he done?
“Our Father…” He begins. For it’s all he can do now. If the drinks he’s swallowed won’t free him, perhaps the young memory of being an altar boy, clinging bells and practising scripture, will. “Who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. On Earth as-“
Another officer interrupts, kneeling down beside him with a medical kit in hand, tone sarcastic and far less amused.
“Ask him why he always takes the kids while the drunk fucks walk away with scratches.”
The rough and calloused hand of Life would eventually come reigning down to slap the boy, the man, into reality. But did it have to take someone‘s soul in the process?