Inception/Mysterious Skin - Every Me and Every You (23/30)
Title: Every Me and Every You (23/30)
Author: osaki_nana_707
Fandom: Inception/Mysterious Skin fusion
Word count: 2,878
Pairing: Neil/Eames
Rating: R
Warnings: language, allusions to rape,child molestation, and prostitution
Summary: Neil McCormick is fraying at the seams. Then he meets Eames, professional dreamer.
Time had stopped. Neil was sure of it.
Time stopped, and everyone was frozen, and then the room dimmed at the edges. Neil realized that he had nearly passed out.
Wendy didn't move, still slumped over, her face not visible to Neil. He crawled over to her, turning her over in his arms. What he saw nearly caused him to drop her and leap back like he'd touched a hot stove.
Wendy's beautiful mouth had blood seeping from the corners, and there was a blossom of blood on the chest of her shirt, the chest he had slept against many nights in the past. Her skin was pale and milky like it always had been, unblemished. Her hair was still tangled from sleep, and she was still in her pajamas, a pair of pajamas that Neil realized had been given to her by his mother three Christmases ago. Her eyes were staring back at him, but they were milky and didn't see.
Her mouth opened, and she croaked, "Neil?" and then the small amount of tension still in her body faded away. She went completely limp in Neil's arms.
Neil stared down at her, at his Wendy, his beautiful Wendy and at how her blood now caked his hands. "Wendy?" he called out, voice tiny and far away. "Wendy…?"
The next thing Neil recalled was a rushing sound in his ears and the room going sort of white, like someone had just turned on a hideously bright light. He couldn't much see or hear anything, and for a moment he thought that he must have died or something. Maybe this was purgatory or heaven or some shit.
"I wish there was a movie showing right now."
Neil blinked to try and clear his vision, but he still saw no one. It was as though the voice was projecting over the ringing in his ears. "Me too…" he mumbled softly, knowing he'd been here before, that he'd had this conversation before.
"A film about our lives. Everything that's happened so far. And the last scene would just be us standing right here."
Neil turned, suddenly finding himself in the Hutchinson drive-in's parking lot, darkness enshrouding them, and Wendy standing next to him with her hair still in pigtails. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but he didn't move.
"Just you and me," she said.
"Yeah," Neil replied, his voice just a breath on his lips.
Slowly, she reached over and picked up the speaker, the one that was supposed to be hooked into the car, and she said softly, "I hear something." Her ear was pressed to the side of it, her eyelashes fluttering closed. She looked beautiful. It started to snow. "It's the voice of God."
Neil took the speaker from her, held it up to his own ear, and he smiled a little, "I hear him," he said, even though he didn't know for sure. He wanted to pretend. The thrill of the moment was too lovely to miss. "I hear him."
The sound was drowned out by the return of the ringing, louder and louder and louder and louder and louder and-
"You'd trick with the wrong guy and I'd find pieces of you everywhere."
"Neil-"
"You have got to be so careful."
"Neil!"
"Don't 'I know' me, Neil McCormick. You do the wrong thing with the wrong person and you die."
"Neil! Oh, God-"
"Period."
"Neil, stop!"
"End of story."
Neil gasped, vision suddenly coming back in a rush so fast that he was nearly dizzy with it. Someone was desperately pulling on him, maybe more than one person, but he didn't know who. He looked down at his hands to find them wrapped tightly around the neck of Seymour Bell, whose face had already turned blue. It was an interesting color against the red and white of Neil's hands, and he thought for a moment that it looked almost patriotic. Still, the man's ugly face was contorted, tongue sticking out, his eyes rolled back in his head. Neil was still straddling his chest, pressing down on the man's throat with all of his might, but it was almost like someone else had control of his hands.
He couldn't stop it.
…but then, he wasn't really sure that he wanted to.
His vision went in and out in flashed, the ringing still so loud in his ears that he couldn't think. He was pulled off of Seymour. He broke free. He dove back in, this time beating him on his chest. He felt ribs crack. He was pulled off of him again. He broke free again. He started kicking the man in the head until blood was coming out of his nose, mouth and ear.
Another harsh kick, a snap, and then the ringing stopped.
Someone was screaming.
Well, two people were screaming and someone was roaring.
It took several seconds for Neil to realize that he was the one making that beastly sound… the two people screaming appeared to be Eames and Sasha. Oh.
"Neil, Jesus Christ-"
Eames voice. Neil recognized Eames's voice and then Eames's face in front of his own. He recognized Eames's hands on his face, holding his head still, and then he realized he was swinging and kicking at Eames too.
No, he didn't want to do that to Eames.
"Calm down, bloody-Look at me-Neil-"
Neil finally stopped shouting, his fists and feet slowing, and he realized that Eames had thrown him onto the bed and was basically holding him down with his body weight. There were bruises on Eames's arms and chest, places where Neil had punched him or grabbed him. There were bloody prints on his shirt and skin. Eames was breathing raggedly, eyes wide like a cornered animal. It was as though he'd just witnessed something horrible.
The expression was entirely too similar to Brian's.
The room fell silent except for shaky inhales and exhales. Neil could just see the top of Sasha's head, crouched down near the end of the bed where Wendy…
Neil made a sound that was somewhere between a whine and a sob. Eames immediately started shushing him, and that pissed Neil off, so this time he did shove him and beat him with purpose. "Get the fuck-Get the fuck off of me!" Neil wailed, and Eames did.
Neil sat up and crawled to the end of the bed, finding Wendy still laying there, looking almost like she was asleep except for the ruby droplets of blood on her lips. Sasha or someone had gone to the liberty to close her eyes.
Neil let out a choked sound, sniffed, felt blood running down the back of his throat. He ran his hand over his upper lip and found a fresh smear of blood there, his own blood, mixed with the drying blood that was Wendy's.
Wendy was dead.
All the strength seemed to slide out of Neil's body, and he toppled off the edge of the bed as he fainted, the last image in his mind being the side of Wendy's perfect face.
Neil woke up to discover he could barely open his eyes. He sat up slowly to find himself in an unfamiliar room, though the decorations seemed familiar. His sluggish brain came up with Mal, and figured that he must have been at her apartment.
He crawled out of bed, finding that someone had stripped him down to his boxers and a t-shirt, and he trudged over to the window. The sun was setting. He'd been sleeping all day. He looked around the room again and found a glass of water and some pills sitting on the bedside table. Figuring they were for him, he swallowed them and then drained the glass before hunting down a bathroom. He was aching what seemed to be everywhere, but he couldn't remember why.
His reflection in the mirror horrified him, mostly because he hadn't been expecting it. At some point his lip had been split, and it appeared his nose had been broken, causing bruising and swelling under both of his eyes (well, that explained why he could barely open them). Someone had taped gauze over the bridge of his nose, but it still looked pretty ugly. Neil's hands weren't in much better shape, he quickly discovered, as he found that his knuckles were bruised as badly as his face and that the middle one on his left hand had even split open. There were bruises on his wrists that looked like someone's hands, like someone had grabbed him harshly. He found more bruising and a couple of scratches on his chest, his knees.
Where had all of this come from?
He looked back into the mirror, and suddenly it all came flooding back.
Seymour Bell.
A fight.
Wendy.
All of Neil's air rushed out of him, and he found himself crumpling to the floor with the weight of it. He knew he started crying at some point, but he didn't realize how loud it was until the bathroom door was opening and Eames was crouching down next to him, pulling him into his arms. Neil was barely aware that Eames was even there, even after the man started gently rocking him back and forth.
He had never cried like this.
He had never, ever sobbed this way, not even after Brighton Beach. It didn't even sound like him, these pathetic little whimpers and hiccups. He was sure his face had contorted into something terrible, something like Brian's that night on Coach's couch, and of all the mental pictures to come to mind at that moment he really wished that hadn't been the one.
"Eames…" he whined. "Eames…"
Eames shushed him gently, just like before, right after it had happened, but Neil didn't have the strength to push him away this time. He just cried in the man's arms until he ran out of tears, both of them curled up on the bathroom floor, and Neil was sure they had to have been there for hours, hadn't they?
Eames thumbed a tear away from the corner of Neil's eye, and Neil just stayed slumped in his lap, feeling an overwhelming numbness. "What happened to her?" he croaked, voice hoarse from crying and screaming. "What happened to…"
"She's with the coroner," Eames said.
A fresh wave of tears overcame Neil, and Eames had to ride out the second storm before speaking some more. This one at least was shorter.
"I'm so sorry," Eames whispered, burying his face into the top of Neil's head. He sounded so guilty and lost, like he didn't know what to do with himself now, and Neil couldn't help but thing that Eames sounded a lot like how he himself felt. "Neil, I… I'm so sorry. I don't even know what to say right now."
"What am I going to tell her mom?" Neil asked the air. "Fuck… her mom and her dad and her little brother… My mom… Eric… How can I tell them that…? Eames, how can I tell them? What the fuck do I say?"
"Don't worry about that right now," Eames said softly, and he was petting Neil's hair. Neil wasn't sure when he started doing that.
"What happened to my face?" Neil asked then, feeling nearly on the point of vomiting or passing out.
"When you attacked Bell, he got a few good hits in on you. You probably don't remember. You weren't all there for most of it."
After a few minutes where neither of them said anything, Eames lifted Neil into his arms and carried him back into the bedroom, settling him down on the bed. They'd given him extra pillows to keep his head elevated so that his nose wouldn't swell anymore.
"So…" Neil said softly as Eames lay down next to him, still holding him close. "Did I kill him?"
Eames was hesitant before he replied with, "Yes. You kicked him hard enough in the head that you broke his skull. I don't know the details. I cleaned up the scene and got you out of it before the police arrived though, so you won't be charged… Sasha and I were very thorough about it. The police just assume he was crazed and high when he broke in. He has a criminal record after all."
"So who do they think beat him to death?" Neil asked.
"It is, as of right now, unresolved," Eames replied, sighing. Eames looked as though he had aged ten years in an afternoon. Neil wondered if he himself looked the same way.
"So… what now…?" Neil asked.
"After they confirm cause of death, I suppose they'll give her body back to her family… They already know, Neil."
Neil blinked, feeling another tear slide down the side of his face. "She was my soul mate, Eames…"
"I know, love…" Eames said, pressing a kiss to Neil's forehead. "I know…"
Neil woke up again to find that the room had gone dark. Eames was still next to him, snoring softly. For a long time, Neil just laid there, listening to the man.
Wendy was dead.
The thought made Neil nauseous. He could still feel her blood on his hands.
Wendy was dead.
It was all his fault. He had brought her to Paris because he'd wanted her close, had promised her the high life full of adventure and entertainment. Eames had warned him that it wasn't safe to keep people he cared about so close, and Neil had been so stupid for not listening. Neil had lived by that sort of code his whole life, but with Wendy it had been different… and now…
Wendy was dead.
Neil's Wendy.
Neil's soul mate, Wendy. His true partner in crime. The one person he could trust with anything, that knew his secrets (save for one), that always did whatever she could to help him even when he was an asshole.
Wendy was dead, and there was no bringing her back.
Neil had set her up for it, and that was just as bad as if he had shot her himself.
He got out of the bed, careful not to jostle the mattress and wake Eames. He found his suitcase on the floor and pulled some clothes out of it, throwing them on. He checked on Eames to make sure he was still asleep, and he was.
Neil went into the bathroom and ran his hair under the faucet, cleaning out the pomade from the day before, and then he rubbed it with the hand towel until it was just a bit damp. At least with his hair hanging over his forehead the bruising on his face wasn't quite as obvious (though it as still terribly obvious).
He turned away from the mirror in disgust and returned to the bedroom. Eames hadn't moved. The man was likely pretty tired out after the day he'd had.
Neil shoved his feet into his shoes and picked up his bag, then knelt before Eames's bag and dug in it until he found the man's wallet. He took all of the cash out of it and crammed it into his own front pocket, and he snagged a couple of his credit cards too.
He spared another glance at Eames, Eames who had told him that he loved him, and then he left the room, shutting the door softly behind him.
All of the rooms were dark and quiet, eerily peaceful. Neil found himself passing by pictures on the walls of Mal and her family, all of them smiling out of their frames like nothing had ever gone astray in the world. He wanted to smash each one of them, but he didn't.
He stopped at Mal's fridge and grabbed a bottle of water, and then slipped out the front door, down the steps, and out onto the Parisian street. It was almost dawn if the purplish-blue line at the edge of the sky was any indication, but Neil found no beauty in it. The color looked too much like Seymour Bell's face after Neil had choked him into unconsciousness. He was glad the bastard was dead… but he'd never killed anyone before.
He wondered if Seymour Bell's family would miss him. They had never been fond of him, if his research had been correct (and he knew it was), but Neil still thought that perhaps he'd be mourned. Neil wondered if, had he died with Wendy, he would have been mourned.
His mother would, probably. Maybe Eric. Brian might take it as an opportunity to end his own life…
There really weren't many people, were there?
Coach would never show up, probably didn't even really remember Neil now. Hell, Coach might have been dead.
Eames…
Neil didn't want to think about how Eames would react, not now.
He called on a taxi and asked to be driven to the airport. When he arrived he ignored the strange looks people gave him over the state of his face and purchased the first ticket to New York he could get his hands on.
By the time the sun had risen, Neil was on a plane, and he was alone.
He was more alone than he'd ever been.
Author: osaki_nana_707
Fandom: Inception/Mysterious Skin fusion
Word count: 2,878
Pairing: Neil/Eames
Rating: R
Warnings: language, allusions to rape,child molestation, and prostitution
Summary: Neil McCormick is fraying at the seams. Then he meets Eames, professional dreamer.
Time had stopped. Neil was sure of it.
Time stopped, and everyone was frozen, and then the room dimmed at the edges. Neil realized that he had nearly passed out.
Wendy didn't move, still slumped over, her face not visible to Neil. He crawled over to her, turning her over in his arms. What he saw nearly caused him to drop her and leap back like he'd touched a hot stove.
Wendy's beautiful mouth had blood seeping from the corners, and there was a blossom of blood on the chest of her shirt, the chest he had slept against many nights in the past. Her skin was pale and milky like it always had been, unblemished. Her hair was still tangled from sleep, and she was still in her pajamas, a pair of pajamas that Neil realized had been given to her by his mother three Christmases ago. Her eyes were staring back at him, but they were milky and didn't see.
Her mouth opened, and she croaked, "Neil?" and then the small amount of tension still in her body faded away. She went completely limp in Neil's arms.
Neil stared down at her, at his Wendy, his beautiful Wendy and at how her blood now caked his hands. "Wendy?" he called out, voice tiny and far away. "Wendy…?"
The next thing Neil recalled was a rushing sound in his ears and the room going sort of white, like someone had just turned on a hideously bright light. He couldn't much see or hear anything, and for a moment he thought that he must have died or something. Maybe this was purgatory or heaven or some shit.
"I wish there was a movie showing right now."
Neil blinked to try and clear his vision, but he still saw no one. It was as though the voice was projecting over the ringing in his ears. "Me too…" he mumbled softly, knowing he'd been here before, that he'd had this conversation before.
"A film about our lives. Everything that's happened so far. And the last scene would just be us standing right here."
Neil turned, suddenly finding himself in the Hutchinson drive-in's parking lot, darkness enshrouding them, and Wendy standing next to him with her hair still in pigtails. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but he didn't move.
"Just you and me," she said.
"Yeah," Neil replied, his voice just a breath on his lips.
Slowly, she reached over and picked up the speaker, the one that was supposed to be hooked into the car, and she said softly, "I hear something." Her ear was pressed to the side of it, her eyelashes fluttering closed. She looked beautiful. It started to snow. "It's the voice of God."
Neil took the speaker from her, held it up to his own ear, and he smiled a little, "I hear him," he said, even though he didn't know for sure. He wanted to pretend. The thrill of the moment was too lovely to miss. "I hear him."
The sound was drowned out by the return of the ringing, louder and louder and louder and louder and louder and-
"You'd trick with the wrong guy and I'd find pieces of you everywhere."
"Neil-"
"You have got to be so careful."
"Neil!"
"Don't 'I know' me, Neil McCormick. You do the wrong thing with the wrong person and you die."
"Neil! Oh, God-"
"Period."
"Neil, stop!"
"End of story."
Neil gasped, vision suddenly coming back in a rush so fast that he was nearly dizzy with it. Someone was desperately pulling on him, maybe more than one person, but he didn't know who. He looked down at his hands to find them wrapped tightly around the neck of Seymour Bell, whose face had already turned blue. It was an interesting color against the red and white of Neil's hands, and he thought for a moment that it looked almost patriotic. Still, the man's ugly face was contorted, tongue sticking out, his eyes rolled back in his head. Neil was still straddling his chest, pressing down on the man's throat with all of his might, but it was almost like someone else had control of his hands.
He couldn't stop it.
…but then, he wasn't really sure that he wanted to.
His vision went in and out in flashed, the ringing still so loud in his ears that he couldn't think. He was pulled off of Seymour. He broke free. He dove back in, this time beating him on his chest. He felt ribs crack. He was pulled off of him again. He broke free again. He started kicking the man in the head until blood was coming out of his nose, mouth and ear.
Another harsh kick, a snap, and then the ringing stopped.
Someone was screaming.
Well, two people were screaming and someone was roaring.
It took several seconds for Neil to realize that he was the one making that beastly sound… the two people screaming appeared to be Eames and Sasha. Oh.
"Neil, Jesus Christ-"
Eames voice. Neil recognized Eames's voice and then Eames's face in front of his own. He recognized Eames's hands on his face, holding his head still, and then he realized he was swinging and kicking at Eames too.
No, he didn't want to do that to Eames.
"Calm down, bloody-Look at me-Neil-"
Neil finally stopped shouting, his fists and feet slowing, and he realized that Eames had thrown him onto the bed and was basically holding him down with his body weight. There were bruises on Eames's arms and chest, places where Neil had punched him or grabbed him. There were bloody prints on his shirt and skin. Eames was breathing raggedly, eyes wide like a cornered animal. It was as though he'd just witnessed something horrible.
The expression was entirely too similar to Brian's.
The room fell silent except for shaky inhales and exhales. Neil could just see the top of Sasha's head, crouched down near the end of the bed where Wendy…
Neil made a sound that was somewhere between a whine and a sob. Eames immediately started shushing him, and that pissed Neil off, so this time he did shove him and beat him with purpose. "Get the fuck-Get the fuck off of me!" Neil wailed, and Eames did.
Neil sat up and crawled to the end of the bed, finding Wendy still laying there, looking almost like she was asleep except for the ruby droplets of blood on her lips. Sasha or someone had gone to the liberty to close her eyes.
Neil let out a choked sound, sniffed, felt blood running down the back of his throat. He ran his hand over his upper lip and found a fresh smear of blood there, his own blood, mixed with the drying blood that was Wendy's.
Wendy was dead.
All the strength seemed to slide out of Neil's body, and he toppled off the edge of the bed as he fainted, the last image in his mind being the side of Wendy's perfect face.
Neil woke up to discover he could barely open his eyes. He sat up slowly to find himself in an unfamiliar room, though the decorations seemed familiar. His sluggish brain came up with Mal, and figured that he must have been at her apartment.
He crawled out of bed, finding that someone had stripped him down to his boxers and a t-shirt, and he trudged over to the window. The sun was setting. He'd been sleeping all day. He looked around the room again and found a glass of water and some pills sitting on the bedside table. Figuring they were for him, he swallowed them and then drained the glass before hunting down a bathroom. He was aching what seemed to be everywhere, but he couldn't remember why.
His reflection in the mirror horrified him, mostly because he hadn't been expecting it. At some point his lip had been split, and it appeared his nose had been broken, causing bruising and swelling under both of his eyes (well, that explained why he could barely open them). Someone had taped gauze over the bridge of his nose, but it still looked pretty ugly. Neil's hands weren't in much better shape, he quickly discovered, as he found that his knuckles were bruised as badly as his face and that the middle one on his left hand had even split open. There were bruises on his wrists that looked like someone's hands, like someone had grabbed him harshly. He found more bruising and a couple of scratches on his chest, his knees.
Where had all of this come from?
He looked back into the mirror, and suddenly it all came flooding back.
Seymour Bell.
A fight.
Wendy.
All of Neil's air rushed out of him, and he found himself crumpling to the floor with the weight of it. He knew he started crying at some point, but he didn't realize how loud it was until the bathroom door was opening and Eames was crouching down next to him, pulling him into his arms. Neil was barely aware that Eames was even there, even after the man started gently rocking him back and forth.
He had never cried like this.
He had never, ever sobbed this way, not even after Brighton Beach. It didn't even sound like him, these pathetic little whimpers and hiccups. He was sure his face had contorted into something terrible, something like Brian's that night on Coach's couch, and of all the mental pictures to come to mind at that moment he really wished that hadn't been the one.
"Eames…" he whined. "Eames…"
Eames shushed him gently, just like before, right after it had happened, but Neil didn't have the strength to push him away this time. He just cried in the man's arms until he ran out of tears, both of them curled up on the bathroom floor, and Neil was sure they had to have been there for hours, hadn't they?
Eames thumbed a tear away from the corner of Neil's eye, and Neil just stayed slumped in his lap, feeling an overwhelming numbness. "What happened to her?" he croaked, voice hoarse from crying and screaming. "What happened to…"
"She's with the coroner," Eames said.
A fresh wave of tears overcame Neil, and Eames had to ride out the second storm before speaking some more. This one at least was shorter.
"I'm so sorry," Eames whispered, burying his face into the top of Neil's head. He sounded so guilty and lost, like he didn't know what to do with himself now, and Neil couldn't help but thing that Eames sounded a lot like how he himself felt. "Neil, I… I'm so sorry. I don't even know what to say right now."
"What am I going to tell her mom?" Neil asked the air. "Fuck… her mom and her dad and her little brother… My mom… Eric… How can I tell them that…? Eames, how can I tell them? What the fuck do I say?"
"Don't worry about that right now," Eames said softly, and he was petting Neil's hair. Neil wasn't sure when he started doing that.
"What happened to my face?" Neil asked then, feeling nearly on the point of vomiting or passing out.
"When you attacked Bell, he got a few good hits in on you. You probably don't remember. You weren't all there for most of it."
After a few minutes where neither of them said anything, Eames lifted Neil into his arms and carried him back into the bedroom, settling him down on the bed. They'd given him extra pillows to keep his head elevated so that his nose wouldn't swell anymore.
"So…" Neil said softly as Eames lay down next to him, still holding him close. "Did I kill him?"
Eames was hesitant before he replied with, "Yes. You kicked him hard enough in the head that you broke his skull. I don't know the details. I cleaned up the scene and got you out of it before the police arrived though, so you won't be charged… Sasha and I were very thorough about it. The police just assume he was crazed and high when he broke in. He has a criminal record after all."
"So who do they think beat him to death?" Neil asked.
"It is, as of right now, unresolved," Eames replied, sighing. Eames looked as though he had aged ten years in an afternoon. Neil wondered if he himself looked the same way.
"So… what now…?" Neil asked.
"After they confirm cause of death, I suppose they'll give her body back to her family… They already know, Neil."
Neil blinked, feeling another tear slide down the side of his face. "She was my soul mate, Eames…"
"I know, love…" Eames said, pressing a kiss to Neil's forehead. "I know…"
Neil woke up again to find that the room had gone dark. Eames was still next to him, snoring softly. For a long time, Neil just laid there, listening to the man.
Wendy was dead.
The thought made Neil nauseous. He could still feel her blood on his hands.
Wendy was dead.
It was all his fault. He had brought her to Paris because he'd wanted her close, had promised her the high life full of adventure and entertainment. Eames had warned him that it wasn't safe to keep people he cared about so close, and Neil had been so stupid for not listening. Neil had lived by that sort of code his whole life, but with Wendy it had been different… and now…
Wendy was dead.
Neil's Wendy.
Neil's soul mate, Wendy. His true partner in crime. The one person he could trust with anything, that knew his secrets (save for one), that always did whatever she could to help him even when he was an asshole.
Wendy was dead, and there was no bringing her back.
Neil had set her up for it, and that was just as bad as if he had shot her himself.
He got out of the bed, careful not to jostle the mattress and wake Eames. He found his suitcase on the floor and pulled some clothes out of it, throwing them on. He checked on Eames to make sure he was still asleep, and he was.
Neil went into the bathroom and ran his hair under the faucet, cleaning out the pomade from the day before, and then he rubbed it with the hand towel until it was just a bit damp. At least with his hair hanging over his forehead the bruising on his face wasn't quite as obvious (though it as still terribly obvious).
He turned away from the mirror in disgust and returned to the bedroom. Eames hadn't moved. The man was likely pretty tired out after the day he'd had.
Neil shoved his feet into his shoes and picked up his bag, then knelt before Eames's bag and dug in it until he found the man's wallet. He took all of the cash out of it and crammed it into his own front pocket, and he snagged a couple of his credit cards too.
He spared another glance at Eames, Eames who had told him that he loved him, and then he left the room, shutting the door softly behind him.
All of the rooms were dark and quiet, eerily peaceful. Neil found himself passing by pictures on the walls of Mal and her family, all of them smiling out of their frames like nothing had ever gone astray in the world. He wanted to smash each one of them, but he didn't.
He stopped at Mal's fridge and grabbed a bottle of water, and then slipped out the front door, down the steps, and out onto the Parisian street. It was almost dawn if the purplish-blue line at the edge of the sky was any indication, but Neil found no beauty in it. The color looked too much like Seymour Bell's face after Neil had choked him into unconsciousness. He was glad the bastard was dead… but he'd never killed anyone before.
He wondered if Seymour Bell's family would miss him. They had never been fond of him, if his research had been correct (and he knew it was), but Neil still thought that perhaps he'd be mourned. Neil wondered if, had he died with Wendy, he would have been mourned.
His mother would, probably. Maybe Eric. Brian might take it as an opportunity to end his own life…
There really weren't many people, were there?
Coach would never show up, probably didn't even really remember Neil now. Hell, Coach might have been dead.
Eames…
Neil didn't want to think about how Eames would react, not now.
He called on a taxi and asked to be driven to the airport. When he arrived he ignored the strange looks people gave him over the state of his face and purchased the first ticket to New York he could get his hands on.
By the time the sun had risen, Neil was on a plane, and he was alone.
He was more alone than he'd ever been.