Trigger Warning: a lot of blood, no surprises there
You couldn't breathe. The fault of the shock, but only a little. Mostly, it was because you were being drowned.
You couldn't push his body off of you, from where he crushed your own form. Blood was gushing out of his wound and yours, a grotesque cocktail flooding into your mouth and nose. His head was on top of yours, matted hair tickling your forehead. He hadn't been breathing for at least thirty seconds, while you lay there immobilised and choking on the hot streams of red.
As poetic as it would have been to drown in your own kin's blood, you felt like your lungs had been set on fire. You didn't have the resolve to lie there complacently, couldn't let unconsciousness take you as blood loss and lack of oxygen fought to kill you first. You loved him and hated him, this was both of your faults and neither. And you wanted out from under him, the heavy bastard.
It took all your effort to form a scream, blood gargling in the back of your throat. It was Harry's, gushing down your windpipe, a punishment for what you had just done. Though you felt it may as well have been your own; what difference was there at the end of the day? Blood of my blood, as they say. You heaved, screaming pathetically, wriggling your lower body in violent jolts as you felt yourself going under.
Not. Like. This.
The weight was suddenly lifted from you, a strong pair of hands hauling Harry's corpse off and away. You couldn't see which one of them it was, your eyes tearing up and blurry from the hot, dark liquid that had splattered your irises as you had driven the knife into him. Rolling onto your front, you coughed and coughed and heaved blindly. It took a few rounds, but you eventually managed to haul in one heaving breath of oxygen. It wasn't enough. The scent of blood and musty carpet flooded your nose.
"Is she conscious?"
Hands were on the back of your shirt then, tugging you backwards across the soggy floor. You could only groan, struggling to breathe with yet more blood and spit trickling from the corner of your mouth. The carpet grated your exposed skin, digging fiery hot into the wounds on your shoulder and knee, both bleeding profusely.
"Yes."
Strong arms were wrapped around your rib cage and shoulders from above then, holding your limp torso inches from the ground.
"Cough, (y/n)."
A voice in your ear, calm and commanding. You complied, body already urging you along. Eyes beginning to clear, you watched in detachment as more blood splattered patchily onto the carpet before your eyes, fresh from your lungs and mouth.
"Good. Again."
You just barely recognised the voice that spoke, the arms that held you up, as E.J.'s. It felt like your throat was being fed into a paper shredder, but you did as he said. Another spurt of liquid hit the floor beneath you, and you at last took a shaking inhale, a proper one, with your windpipe cleared. The arms brought you up and backwards, movements filling you with vertigo until you felt your back being pushed against a wall, legs firmly on the ground in front of you; a dry patch of carpet at last.
"Hoodie, bag."
E.J. crouched before you, a gloved hand moving up to place painfully strong pressure to your shoulder. You let your head fall back against the wall behind you, room spinning violently and head pounding with such force you felt you'd throw up any second now. The spots were encroaching your vision again, you felt your eyelids growing droopy until your cheek was met with a firm tap.
"Stay awake."
You could only gaze dazedly up at E.J.'s nightmarish blue mask. You really didn't want to be awake right now. He should just let you sleep. Let you fall into the blackness; you didn't want to know what came after.
Another figure moved into your blurry sight, duffel bag in hand. He crouched before you, too, setting the bag down next to E.J. and giving the other man space to lean over you. He reached a gloved hand in front of your dazed face, snapping his fingers twice.
Fuck off. You were so fucking tired.
"Keep her awake, please." E.J. continued to press agonisingly on your shoulder, pain searing through the entire left side of your chest.
Hoodie, seeing your head begin to drop forward, reached out a bloodstained glove to your forehead. Gently, he pushed your face back to where E.J. had originally guided it against the wall. He kept his hand there as he asked, "What's your name?"
You blinked. You knew, vaguely, what he was doing; trying to distract your exhausted mind from the pain and fatigue with simple questions. You'd taken a first aid course in high school, and at the time you'd laughed at the idea of giving someone you already knew a stupid-ass questionnaire about themselves while they bled the fuck out. Not a very graceful way to die. Yet here you fucking were.
"(Y-y/n)". Your voice came out slurred. You vaguely registered E.J. moving his hands off of you briefly, a sigh of relief reaching your lips as the painful pressure was momentarily alleviated.
"That's right. What's your last name?"
"(L/n)." You sighed the word out, seeing double. So. Tired.
E.J. shed his leather gloves while Hoodie continued to ask you dumb fucking questions - 'What was your first pet?'. As the lanky dude reached for a pack of disposable plastic gloves, you realised that you were going fucking delirious. His bare hands looked gray. And had claws.
Come on, (y/n). You're hallucinating. Snap the hell out of it.
E.J. reached for some kind of liquid and a cotton swab and began to sterilise the wound. You whined, reeling from the intense, stinging pain as the cotton glazed over the puncture in your delicate skin. He wasn't being gentle whatsoever, but you supposed desperate times called for vigorous wound cleaning. Or he just didn't care that much.
"What's your mom's name?"
You wheezed, blurting out the answer and glancing back up from E.J. to Hoodie. You noticed, numbly, that he was holding a small object in the hand that wasn't holding your face to the wall. He held his gun in the crook of his knee as he crouched, reloading it with one hand. Skill. You couldn't quite process why he was doing that - was there more danger, or was he just being paranoid? Maybe he was just showing off. You couldn't bring yourself to care, the pain too intense.
"I don't have time for anaesthetic. This is going to hurt, (Y/n)." You looked back to E.J., who was once again rifling through his duffel bag.
Oh. Good.
Your eyes flickered over to the body on the floor. In all your pain and adrenaline, you were detached from what you had just done. You couldn't bring yourself to weep as you stared into Harry's lifeless eyes, observed the knife half pulled from his throat, still oozing. You knew guilt would catch up to you, probably ruin your psyche forever. To hell with it - whatever E.J. was about to do, you probably fucking deserved it.
BANG BANG BANG
Hoodie perked up at the (now painfully familiar) sound of someone at the front door, as if he'd been expecting it.
An angry voice yelled out, so distant to your tired ears. "POLICE! OPEN UP!"
Hoodie smoothed a piece of bloodied hair away from your temple as he stood, an oddly comforting action for someone who was now flicking the safety off of his gun. He exited the room without another word. If you'd been less delirious, you'd have called out to try and get him to stop - you had no doubt that he was marching off into a fucking massacre, again. He really didn't seem to like cops, and you doubted he could blackmail them at such short notice.
You glanced to E.J., who was now holding up a fucking surgical needle. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.
You couldn't look at the pointy fucking thing, instead staring right ahead at the opposite wall, fighting to stay awake.
BANG!
The needle pierced your red flesh, guided by E.J.'s hand. At the same time, the sound of gunshots racked the apartment, walls seeming to shake. Your eyes fell to those of Harry's corpse, boring right into yours as blood trickled slowly from his neck.
BANG!
You couldn't help it.
BANG!
Everything went black.
—
Four hours of blissful unconsciousness had lead to two awful hours of panic attacks. You'd woken up alone in your bed, with freezing chills racking through your body. You felt that you were dying from grief and panic, unable to thrash around beneath the covers, but unable also to withhold or cease the cathartic screams as you recalled what you'd done.
You didn't know where the men were, not that you wanted to see them in particular. You didn't care, either, if they'd been listening in on your wailing for the last few hours. Though your shoulder felt blissfully pain-free, nothing could compare to the pain of the memories. Harry, lunging at you, stabbing you above the heart. You, stabbing him back, selfishly, instead of letting him kill you. Your survival instincts had, in the moment, trumped your love - a thing which you had thought was unbreakable.
What a monster you were.
You didn't know where Harry's corpse had gone. There was still a shit ton of blood on the floor, both yours and his. You could smell it so strongly, metallic and overpowering. It only sent your grief into overdrive - every time you almost calmed down, you'd catch a whiff and start screaming again.
You went through the events over and over in your head, a tragic broken record. Harry's words, screaming about how he wanted to kill you. The man who had crashed in through the window, sending everything to shit. The way the knife had felt as it dug deep into your skin. The confusing amount of relief you'd felt, when Hoodie had risen. The pain you had felt, through and through, as you had yanked the knife out of your own flesh and sunk it into Harry's. The taste of blood as it simmered in your throat. The last thing you could recall was the sound of gunshots ripping through the apartment as E.J. had taken that needle to your burning skin. As you recalled each sensation over and over and over, you couldn't help the sheer volume of the sorrowful screams that ripped through your lungs.
The sky was light through the window when Hoodie walked in. He was free of blood, hoodie, and mask. You were thankful, you didn't think you could take any more frights. He hadn't knocked, you wouldn't have heard him through your helpless wailing anyway. You quietened down only a little as he approached the bed, surprising you slightly as he sat down on the edge of the mattress. Through tears and whiny sobs, you glanced up at the man.
He didn't look at you for the longest time, greenish eyes on the window. He seemed deep in thought as he listened to you cry, though about what exactly you couldn't be sure - nor did you care right now. Perhaps he was thinking about the cops he'd fucking shot. You just wished he, along with everyone else, would go away.
After a while, his eyes finally met yours.
"I need you to do something for me. Now."
Couldn't he see that you weren't in the fucking mood? You wanted to fall asleep and never fucking wake up again, you didn't have the energy for anything else.
When you didn't respond, he continued. "We're going to play off Harry's death as a suicide."
What the fuck did he mean, 'we'? You didn't like the sound of that. You deserved life in fucking prison, anyway. You could still taste the tang of your brother's blood.
"No." You forced the word from your lips, croaky but not meek. That seemed a disservice to your poor brother's memory. Why the fuck would you do what he wanted?
Hoodie blinked at you. "Please, (Y/n). It will only take a phone call."
You shook your head at him, shoulder aching slightly with the movement. "Why would they believe that?"
He sighed, looking down at you tiredly. "Because he's already wanted for killing Jade." His eyes flicked between yours uneasily. "And two police officers."
Your mouth hung open. What cops? "Harry wouldn't do tha..."
Hold on. Cops had come knocking at your apartment door a few hours ago, had they not? You'd heard the fucking gunshots. Hoodie had killed them.
Your eyes narrowed. "You want to pin that on Harry. Really?"
You only felt one emotion; disgust. With Hoodie, for trying to blame his own murders on Harry. With yourself, for obvious reasons.
Hoodie brought a hand up to his hair, running it through the light brown locks. "Do you understand why I shot those cops?"
You shrugged. "You didn't want them to see you and E.J." It seemed simple. Two masked, armed men in an apartment covered in blood would have seemed pretty fucking suspicious.
Hoodie shook his head. "We're used to evading police." Disturbing. "If that were the case, we would both have just left through the window."
You blinked. Seemed cocky, but okay.
His eyes bore into yours. "But if we had done that, where would that have left you?"
You seethed. "Bleeding out on the fucking floor." You wished they'd just fucking left you.
Hoodie nodded. "You would have died." No shit, Sherlock. "I killed them so that E.J. had enough time to stop you from bleeding out."
Was he trying to play the fucking hero? He'd just killed two fucking people.
"What?" You shot the man a hate-filled glare. "Am I supposed to be fucking grateful?"
"Yes."
You seethed, staring into his stupid fucking eyes. Adding insult to injury, Harry wasn't a fucking murderer.
Hoodie cleared his throat, voice hardening. "What you're going to do now is call in and report Harry's suicide. You're going to tell them that he killed Jade and the cops, and that he tried to kill you, too."
You shook your head at him indignantly. Was he an honest to god moron? "Why the fuck would they believe me?" There was too much evidence to suggest otherwise.
"E.J. and I have already set it all up. They won't find out the truth."
The truth. The truth, that you had killed Harry.
"But what if they do?" Surely, the police were smarter than that.
"Harry was going to kill you, wasn't he?" Hoodie's tone softened with the question. You both already knew the answer was yes, but you felt hot tears prick at your eyes as he said the words.
"It was self defence, (y/n). You wouldn't be charged."
You blinked in shock, dread setting in. You felt like the world's dirtiest fucking criminal. You didn't feel like you deserved to live, you'd hand yourself in right fucking now if you had the chance.
You realised, awfully, though, that he was right. Killing in self defence wasn't a crime. Even if the person you killed was your own fucking brother.
You frowned. Even if you did go along, there was still a loose end.
"What about that Masky guy? Is he dead, too?" You remembered that he had been the one to hurtle in through the living room window, tackling Hoodie. Which was surprising, considering you had believed him to still be nursing a gunshot wound from that very same morning. Yet you knew what you had seen.
Hoodie seemed peeved by your sudden change of subject, but he gave you a tired answer all the same. "Masky's only objective was to see Harry dead. He won't be giving you any more trouble."
You clocked the man for a second. He seemed way too confident in his own ability to cover up a fucking triple homicide. It made you sick to your stomach. It was all too much, too soon.
"Fuck off." You spat the words out hatefully, but you couldn't help tears from springing to your eyes. He couldn't make you do this. You wouldn't. Not for him, and not for yourself. Harry hadn't killed anyone, he didn't deserve this.
You inhaled shakily, voice beginning to break. "Just please, fuck off!"
Hoodie shook his head firmly. You thought you saw an ounce of pity in his eyes, making yourself feel so disgusting. You didn't deserve anyone's sympathy, you were the worst fucking person alive.
"I can't. Not until you do this."
You shook your head, sobbing, too weak to physically fight him, though you wished you could punch his dumb fucking face. How dare he. He could threaten you with violence, threaten to kill you, even threaten your few remaining friends - you didn't give a single fuck anymore. Not with Harry gone.
"Give me one good fucking reason, asshole."
He gave you a hard look, taking the longest time to answer.
"If you do as I say, (y/n),"
You were expecting a threat, but his next words stilled your sobs.
"I'll explain everything."