Fic: Grace - Chapter 12
Title: Grace - Chapter 12 (Part 1)
Rating: M
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
There are thirteen television screens flickering in front of me.
They’re not new televisions either, none of that Sony-plasma-a-billion-inch-screen-bullshit. No new laser technology, no surround sound, no DVD, or even a fucking VCR. They’re old; ancient, dials instead of remote controls, wooden frames and antenna that stick out of the head like snail eyes.
Flick! goes the television screen, the one in the far right corner. Flick it goes, and suddenly it’s alive.
A sputter of grey haze evolves, and suddenly, suddenly I’m eight years old again, sitting in my grandmother’s living room, watching Alice in Wonderland.
“That’s it, Dinah!” Alice cries. “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
Dinah mews, “Meow,” and Alice might sorta roll her eyes as she picks the cat up.
“In my world,” Alice says, “you wouldn’t say ‘meow’. You’d say ‘Yes, Miss Alice.’”
And, and flick goes the television screen, flick.
“Oh, Dinah.” It’s Alice’s voice again, but the screen is still hazy, Alice is invisible. “It’s just a rabbit with a waistcoat…and a watch.”
The screen lights up, but it isn’t Alice, and there isn’t any fucking rabbit, it’s Catherine on the screen, her giggling and high and in the trashy apartment I left her in.
“Twas brillig,” says a voice. Catherine’s gone and all that’s there is a set of lips on the screen in front of me. “And the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogroves, and the momeraths outgrabe.”
It’s the rhyme that the Cheshire cat says in the film, only it’s not him saying it, isn’t his voice, isn’t his lips.
“Brendon,” the lips say, “Brendon.”
“What?” I ask the lips.
“Brendon, wake up.”
The screen blurs together, and so does my grandmother’s living room. The wallpaper and the curtains and the old sofa run together like paint, turn into the brown swirling mass that all colours turn into when mixed, everything is beyond recognition apart from the colour, the shape, the size of Ryan’s lips.
“Brendon,” Ryan says, and I can see his eyes as well now, his nose and his cheeks and his hair. He’s sitting next to me on the floor in the kitchen, and Christ, how long have I been out?
“Brendon,” Ryan says, and his voice is tinged with something I can’t quite place, something between worry and anger and that thing in his tone that makes him Ryan.
“I need to go to Las Vegas,” I say, because it’s all that I can say, even if I can’t quite recall what’s happening. “I need to go right now.”
Ryan stares at me a few seconds longer, places his fingertips to my forehead. “I’ll drive,” he says, and that’s all there is to it.
*
The road to Las Vegas isn’t as quick as I remembered, at least, not with Ryan driving, not with his gentle fingers on the wheel, or his light foot on the accelerator.
“Can we pick up the pace?” I ask, and Ryan doesn’t look at me, just casts me a wayward glance through the mirror.
“I’m already over the speed limit.”
It’s in these hours that I feel most like Alice, most like I’m falling down the rabbit hole. Parachute dress exploding on me, hindering any efforts at speed. I’m Alice, and I’m fucking floating, and I can’t catch up, can’t catch up to Catherine, to the white rabbit whose life-clock is ticktickticking away. “Can’t be late.” The voice says, “Can’t be too late.”
“Brendon,” Ryan says, and his fingers are curving over the steering wheel, tightening enough that bleach pours over his knuckles, makes them ghost-white. “Brendon, we’ll get there, okay?”
I don’t say anything straight away, wrap my fingers tight around the head of my tie, pull it looser still. “Why,” I ask, heart thick in my throat, valves clogging the tissue, “why did your nametag say ‘George’?”
“What?” Ryan asks, and I can see his forehead furrow, his eyelids pull down, straining over light bulb eyes.
“At the diner, your nametag said ‘George’.” And I have no idea why I remember this, why I’m saying it, but maybe it’s a distraction that I’m welcoming with a little too much enthusiasm.
Ryan pauses a little, sighs too long and too deep. “George was my father’s name.”
“Then why were you wearing his nametag?”
“Maybe,” Ryan starts, blinks, “maybe George is my name too.”
“Okay,” I say, but only because my throat is so tight now, so pressed, that I don’t think I’m physically capable of saying anything else.
*
We’re driving in circles, because we may have reached Las Vegas, but I have no fucking idea where Catherine is.
“Where does she live then?” Ryan asks, fingers tapping the wheel at the first set of red traffic lights we come across.
“She won’t be there, I know she won’t be there.”
Ryan sighs, taps his fingers a little harder, a little quicker on the wheel. “Where does she hang out then? Where does she go when she isn’t home?”
And seriously, how long have I been away from Vegas? I’ve never known where Catherine’s gone to hang out, or to fuck around or anything, just…
“She used to work at the Aladdin Resort and Casino.”
“Yeah?” Ryan asks, and “Yeah,” is all I can manage to choke back.
*
“Immogen,” I call, because it’s the first face I recognise, because it’s the first set of fists I know aren’t going to deck me. “Immogen!” I call again, because she’s working, but I need help right now.
“Yeah?” She turns around too quickly, a flurry of yellow hair and fake-tanned skin. “Brendon?”
“Where’s Catherine?”
“Huh, oh, I dunno. She came in last night for work…she shouldn’t get off till eight this morning, but I haven’t seen her.” Immogen scratches her head, evens out the hem of her shirt a little. “But what are you doing back?” she asks, grin too wide to be real. “Thought you were off being famous.”
“I am,” I say. “Extraneous circumstances.”
“Oh.” She says, frowns a little. “I last saw Catherine heading out on her break, but that was like, hours ago.”
“Thanks,” I say, kissing her on the cheek, and heading to the back of the building. I’m out the door before I can stop myself, too fast, too impulsive, following the ticktickticking of bunny’s clock. There’s no one there though, just some half-broken fence and a filthy, concrete slab.
Just loose rays of milky moon, the sparklesparkle of dying stars, the distinct smell of mouldy wood and dirt and trash and…and the metallic smell of old blood.
My fingers scar against the bricks. I’m holding on too tight as I turn the corner of the alley, the ‘outback’ of the casino - that deserted wasteland, the breeding ground of mildew. Turn the corner, turn the page, turn the next fucking chapter.
Watch as I draw breath too quickly, as my eyes haze over with gravity and the reflection of blood. This must be what it’s like to be Alice, chasing after this tiny white rabbit, only to discover that hey, this is fucking hunting season. Bang! And bunny’s guts are on the grass, on the trees, on the teeth of the hounds. White fur is stained with this blood, this red wine. It won’t come out in the wash.
Catherine’s arms and legs and head, it doesn’t belong on this body. She’s not broken beauty here, she’s ugly and she’s dark and she’s bleeding. It’s nothing like the movies. Blood isn’t bright red; it’s brown, nearly black, as it oozes from her head, from her stomach, from her arms and her thighs.
Not broken beauty, but maybe definitely broken.
Ryan’s waiting out in the front with the car, so I rip off my blazer - the one that cost more money than Catherine probably did when she whored herself off for ecstasy - wrap it around her bleeding, wrecked body, and I carry her out of the casino.
*
Continue to part 2 of the chapter.