Saviour of the Broken

[You'll Never Be Forgiven 'Til Your Boy is Too]

There was once, and only once, that I truly feared for Gerard's safety, but he completely wiped those fears from my brain that day.

The smell hit me as soon as we rolled open the hinged, metal door of the storage warehouse. The room was far larger than I initially thought and looked as if someone had renovated, if you can even call it that, the space to serve only one purpose: torture. Now, I know that I have a space back home similar to this, but mine was clean and white and pristine. I took pride in the cleanliness of the space in which I worked. All of my instruments were cleaned and disinfected to medical standards. There wasn't even an inkling of infection lurking anywhere in the Room. But here. Here it was a total shit show. I could basically feel myself contracting every blood borne disease this Earth ever created. There was blood staining every surface from years and years of arterial spray and mangled corpses. That thick, salty, iron smell that I had grown so fond of was now corrupted and perverted into a rotten stench that made me sick to breathe in. I tried to breath in through my mouth, but the thickness blanketed my tongue and only made me taste the putridity. As my eyes adjusted I realized why the stench was so foul. We were all standing in the gooey muck that coated the walls and floor. Someone had their own private hell and had never bothered to clean up at any point. I felt the sole of my Doc Marten's slipping against the concrete floors as I tried to move forward. The squelch of my shoe finding the ground again was something foul and awful. A sudden wave of pain found itself coursing through my veins and into the very marrow of my bones. If where I was standing was where my precious boy was supposed to be held captive, how, on this god-forsaken planet, did I expect to find even a sliver of him left. I stopped in tracks, trying hard not to fall as my feet threatened to slip out from under me again. The boys stopped their movements as well, and all turned to look at me. For once I couldn't find some quirky, sarcastic remark to spout off at them. I just stood there staring off ahead of me into the dark abyss that awaited.

"Find. Him." It came out as almost a whisper. I had to speak slow and punctuate harshly to keep my voice from breaking and showing just how upset the whole situation had me. I wasn't supposed to feel emotions like this. I wasn't supposed to care about people. I wasn't supposed to be the one on the verge of hysterical sobbing. That was Gee's thing. He was the emotional one, he was the melodramatic one. I had no clue how to handle this shit. And at the moment, it was teetering on the edge of not being handled at all.

We started moving once again. I think the boys realized how serious it was at this point. None of them spoke so much as a hushed whisper between themselves and everyone took it on their own to spilt up and search around the building. I was just getting a lid back on everything that I was feeling when Benny's flashlight illuminated a clothed lump on the repulsive looking floor. I held my breath as he wasted no time flipping the lump over on its back to check their identity. It wasn't Gerard. I let out an audible sigh as I could finally breathe a tad easier again. But this poor bloke lying in front of me had seen more damage than I could ever imagine necessary, or useful for that matter. His skin had been filleted from his muscles on his arms and chest. His rib-cage had been cut clean through, with what I can only assume was a bone saw, and was nowhere to be found. His organs lay in the a pool of gelled up blood beside him, having nothing left to hold them in. I needed some little something to tell me that Gerard was still alive, and fucking please, still in one piece, but this was not helping. This was savage. Whoever had done this did it while the man was still alive. There was so much anger and force and effort put into killing this man. This wasn't an interrogation room. This was a torture shack. We were about begin further exploration when I heard heavy footsteps and felt a heavy hand grip my shoulder.

"Sir, you're going to want to see this."

"Tell me right now. Is he dead or alive?"

"Oh. He's very much alive, sir." But the way Tony's voice shook when he said it had me feeling all kinds of worries.